Archive for the 'Games' Category

From time to time I feel compelled to preface a posting here by a reminder of what sort of person I am.  I’ve been playing computer and console games for over a quarter of a century, heavily biased towards the computer “role playing” game, fantasy, and first person shooter genres.  I’m more prone to like something like Deus Ex or Oblivion than Doom 3, although I enjoy both types of games.  And Mario Kart or Katamari Damacy are right out. 

In a nutshell, I like games with a strong narrative: something that could make a decent fantasy or science fiction book.  Although I enjoy some twitch/combat games, that isn’t my forte.  “Childlike” games with bubblegum graphics and mostly mindless plots do not amuse me very much.

Now I’ve set the stage for my rant, the basic thesis of which is: Checkpoint saves and their cousins, single copy saves, are evil.  They suck.  They drain all of the joy out of otherwise good games.

This requires a bit of explaining if you aren’t a computer gamer…

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I’ve been playing Supreme Commander for several weeks now. I agree with most of the reviews- this real time strategy game deserves a 9 out of 10, or 95%, or whatever high rating various game reviewers have given it.

SupComm (as Supreme Commander is often abbreviated) has most of the standard real time strategy features: a technology tree, some basic resources (you harvest mass, and you need to build energy generators), and three different sides to play. Set in a distant future, the three sides you have to choose from are all variations of humanity. The United Earth Federation is “old style” earth, the Cybrans are humans who have merged with technology, and the Aeon Illuminate are religious fanatics. Apparently, humans wiped out the only true aliens we encountered: peaceful people who taught “the Way”. The Aeon Illuminate are converts to the Way…but they are humans, so they aren’t very peaceful

Replay value should be pretty good- I played as the UEF, but I think I’m more sympathetic towards both the Aeon and the Cybrans, so I’m interested in trying things from their side. Total play time for me was about 25 hours…maybe more like 30, but I had a tough time with the final battle and had to replay it at least four times before I was victorious. I was playing on “Easy”, and the last battle was the only one I had to replay.

The main things I enjoyed about Supreme Commander

• The graphics are fantastic. The unit detail is great for close in views, and switches smoothly to unit icons as you zoom out. Close in, you can see the tracks left by heavy vehicles. Tanks and so forth crush trees. The craters left by nuclear blasts make it so you can almost feel the radiation burns. Watch some of the movies at the Supreme Commander site under “Game Info” to see what I mean
• Unit control features are very good: the UI incorporates a zoom and pan feature- hover your mouse anywhere on the map, spin the scroll wheel, and you can zoom down to ground level at that point. Note that if you don’t have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you’ll want to get one to play Supreme Commander. When zoomed fully out, you are viewing things from something akin to near earth orbit. Units can be selected and grouped to hotkeys. You can also issue orders for coordinated attacks, which will make faster units wait for slower ones before they begin their assault. One of my favorite aspects of the game are all the options for moving units. There are several transport aircraft that can can establish ferry “routes”: any units that you direct to the ferry icon will automatically be picked up and moved to the designated destination. You can also link these transports to your factories and have units automatically delivered to a distant target…group transports together so they’ll work jointly to move units…and so on. The one thing I missed, and it could be just a lack of knowledge on my part, was a quick way to select all units of a particular type (E.G.: all gunships). There is a way to do this for engineers (the construction units), but not for other types
• The “expanding map of war” feature: Each “chapter” in the campaign starts with a relatively small map. As you progress past certain objectives, the map expands, sometimes two or three times, introducing new areas and new enemies. For me, at least, this makes getting started on a new map a little less overwhelming
• The battles are huge: in my final battle, I hit the unit cap: 500 active units on my side alone. You can imagine how complex managing that gets: the UI makes it feasible, but the action is frenetic. In single player/campaign, pause is your friend
• the Digital Download works perfectly on Vista x64: This is the way games should work on Vista. I wasn’t feeling too optimistic when about installing SupComm after my experiences with two Electronic Arts releases (BF2, and BF2142) on Vista. But unlike the EA mess, Supreme Commander worked perfectly: almost certainly because it doesn’t use some craptastic anti-piracy system like Pace or StarForce. I know Electronic Arts wants to protect their profits, but none of these “anti-piracy” solutions stop real pirates: all they do is screw people like me who want to play their games. Hurray for Gas Powered Games: your stuff works.

Things I didn’t like about Supreme Commander

• I never did figure out how to get my Tier 3 nuke-missile capable submarines to build and launch a nuke. They were still useful: they also have basic tactical missiles and of course torpedoes, but the nukes would have been handy
• There were a couple of instances in the final battle where some units refused to follow my orders. I had a transport with 3 engineers that would land anywhere except on the island where I told it to. I had been able to successfully drop units on that island previously…maybe something to do with hitting the unit cap? I’m not sure, but it was frustrating
• The Armoured Command Units seem weak to me. If your ACU gets destroyed, its game over, and they seem very easy to destroy. It could be because I didn’t upgrade mine enough…but the strategy that worked for me was to get my ACU as far away from the action as possible. In fact, that’s how I finally won the final battle
• The UEF’s experimental units seem weak to me. A rolling factory? A submarine aircraft carrier? Compare this to the bloody Cybran Monkey Lord, which has some kind of Uber-powerful energy cannon that rips through my units like a warm knife through butter. I finally figured out towards the end how to kill the Monkey Lord (other than nuking it)…but I never built a single one of the UEF experimental units. They just sound lame to me. But maybe they are amazing, and I just should have skipped over the “A big fat incredibly slow target…er, factory” descriptions

The things I didn’t like were minor, for me at least. I would give Supreme Commander a 9 out of 10 on the Kelly scale.

Lionhead games released a game called “Fable” (note: site uses Flash plugin) a few years ago. I dismissed it because a few folks who liked “goofy/cartoonish” style games thought it was a great thing.

I picked up a discounted XBox version of Fable over the weekend. Not XBox 360, but XBox- it runs under emulation mode in my XBox 360, though. This means that the graphics aren’t great. But after playing the game for (according to it’s in-game stats) a bit over 7 hours, I can say I truly regret not trying it sooner.

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I’ve spent another fun day banging my head against a brick wall.  The light I’m starting to see is from the cracks in my skull…

I downloaded Battlefield 2142 via EA Link yesterday.  Being a good little user, I also downloaded and installed the v1.20 patch before even trying the game.  I figured that one of the main reasons for a patch on a game that was released late in 2006 would be to improve Vista compatibility, so why bother even trying the unpatched game.

After three or four hours of downloading, I started the game up.  The usual intro movie played, and the game menus appeared.  I selected single player game, instant action.  The screen went dramatically black, then popped back to the desktop with this error:

Some digging through forums (forii?) revealed many, many people complaining of this problem.  Most of them seemed to have Vista, and the general response from the happy-fun forum denizens: BF2142 isn’t Vista compatible, so install Windows XP. 

Well, that’s not going to happen here.  So I went digging deeper.  Many theories focused around the PACE anti-piracy features of BF2142, and involved removing the offending code in various ways.  I tried all the legitimate ways: removing registry entries and code folders, but BF2142 would consistently re-create them and presumably re-install PACE.  Other theories were related to various rights issues (I.E.: assigning the program admin rights).  None of these seemed to work either. 

The last thing I tried was based on this post in a GameServers.net BF2142 forum.  The excerpt that caught my attention (original spelling/formatting errors included for free):

EA Link
Cannot install 2 thing ather eatsother, if you have installd something, you must EXIT the programm and re-login to install the next thing.

…

Battlefield 2142
runs in 32 and 64 bit mode

So, BF2142 works, but EA Link has a problem installing 2 things one after the other, at least according to this fellow.  I uninstalled, and re-did my install just of BF2142.  It worked!  Then I rebooted, and carefully installed the 1.20 patch.  After installing the patch, BF2142 failed as before.

So, the simple solution is to *not* install the 1.20 patch if you have Vista.  Unfortunately, without the 1.20 patch, you almost certainly won’t be playing online games with anyone.  Most multiplayer games require all players to have exactly the same version. 

Ah well, at least I can play single player…once I uninstall and install it all over again.

Update: The version 1.25 patch also causes Battlefield 2142 to fail as noted above.   It appears this problem occurs under the following conditions:

• EA Link is used to download/install BF2142
  • If you use EA Link Battlefield 2142 uses different copy protection than if you install from a CD/DVD.  Instead of reading encoded information off of the physical media, the EA Link install “phones home” over the Internet
  • If you have the CD/DVD version of Battlefield, your main executable is named BF2142.exe; the EA Link version is BF2142Pace.exe
• Windows Vista 64 bit (the same problem might occur with 32 bit Vista, but seems to be less common)
• > 2 GB of RAM (I have 4 GB)
• may be related to video card, although I doubt it
  • I have an ATI X1950XTX; I’ve read of folks with NVidia 8800’s getting exactly the same error

If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that this is yet another instance where legitimate purchasers of licensed games get shafted by broken/disruptive copy protection schemes.  I suspect that, if I downloaded a warez version of BF2142, it would work just fine.

[tags]battlefield, battlefield 2142, BF2142, Vista x64, Vista[/tags]

This can be filed under the category of “Very Old News”, but sometimes being late is stylish, no?

I’m playing Tomb Raider: Legend on my 360 and am very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the game. The last time I looked at a Lara Croft title, it was a poorly controlled mish-mash: basically, nothing I could recommend playing, so much so I can’t even remember which release it was.

This latest release (about a year old now), however, is brilliantly done. The puzzles seem very “real” to me: physics tricks, using realistic mechanisms and objects that belong where they are found. Some of them take me a while to solve, but thus far (about 40% of the way through the game), I haven’t found any that have made me too frustrated. Lara’s climbing and gymnastics are first rate, and one thing I rather like is the fact that each puzzle is quite solvable: if you look around carefully, you can see logical paths to follow that make sense.

The control mechanisms are great, at least with the XBox version. Camera control is nearly complete, which is nice, and there is a cinematic feel to all of the locales. One of my favorite “technical” features is the fact that you can have multiple save games. The graphics are all near the top of the art form: beautifully rendered, without attempting to go too far to realism. There are also some very nice visual effects: blurs and lighting, things like that, that make the world more like a movie at times.

Speaking of movie effects, the voice acting is great: Lara herself is nicely voiced, and Lara is in nearly continuous contact over her headset radio with her support team. Zip and Alistair add comical comments without being too goofy: although they never really directly participate in the plot, I found myself looking forward to their interjections.

Lara herself…well, as always it is obvious that the game’s visual artists invest a ton of time perfecting her. Of course her proportions are unrealistic, but the way she moves, how she shifts weight when swinging from a bar or hanging by her fingertips, the occasional “twitch” (random motion) as she’s standing…I particularly like it when she swats at a fly or decides to re-tie her boots. I also got a chuckle out of one scene where she is at a party in a very slinky black dress, which she subsequently splits open at the sides to accommodate her guns. I still don’t know where she hid her huge 9mm sidearms…. A few minutes later, with an automatic rifle strapped on her back and several hand-grenades hanging at her waist…the little black dress reborn as combat wear

If you liked the old Lara Croft games, I think I can reliably say you’ll enjoy this episode as well. It’s available on almost every platform, and probably is on for a special price- I got the XBox version for $20. Best of all: I get to tell my wife “I’m going now to stare at Lara’s butt” without getting yelled at…

I’ve been playing with my XBox 360 quite a bit lately.  One of the features I enjoy is it’s online match up, content, and “game tracking” service, XBox Live. 

I originally signed up with XBox Live when I bought my original XBox (I.E.: before I bought the 360).  It was really a poor investment- I played the old-style XBox for about three weeks, and bought (and renewed!) a full year subscription to XBox Live.  That’s two years of XBox Live, and I’m really only starting to use it now.  You  might be asking…what is XBox Live?  And why would I care unless I have an Xbox? 

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I decided to play a little bit of Lego Star Wars II tonight.   It’s a cute game, essentially a “platformer” with very prettily rendered 2.5d graphics.  That one sentence summary is doing the game a disservice- it’s quite large and reasonably faithfully reproduces the stories from the original three Star Wars movies, albeit with a humourous/comical twist. 

It is important to note that the primary target audience for this game is little kids, 10 years old or thereabouts.  I’d read about it and thought it would be a fun diversion now and then, so I bought it.  But here is the part where the wheels come off the truck: I’ve had to resort to a cheat / walkthrough (warning- spoilers at that link) in order to finish several of the levels.

I consider myself a moderately competent gamer- I’ve never claimed to be “elite”, but I do okay.  It is humbling to be reduced to “cheating” in order to figure out how to finish a level of…a kid’s game.  And not just one level- I’ve gone back to the above-linked walkthrough now three times.  Each time, I cleared out what I could see of the level and then spent another thirty to sixty minutes trying to figure out how to get further before “giving up”.

It is perhaps somewhat telling that I generally don’t have to resort to walkthroughs in order to finish a “big kids” game.  Halflife 2?  No problem.  Doom 3?  Easy stuff.  Gears of War?  I needed help with the very final battle with RAAM, but nothing else.  I am not too proud to resort to a Google search if I get stuck for more than an hour or so, but usually I can muddle my way through.

Yet a game designed for 10 year olds has stumped me repeatedly during the first few hours I’ve played it.   Worse yet, when I read the walkthrough I usually go “d’oh, why didn’t I see that?”.  You often have to use the abilities of the different characters in your party at a given point in time in a certain sequence (E.G.: R2D2 can hover a bit, Yoda is strong in the force, some characters are required to open certain doors, etc.).  The puzzles aren’t mind bending by any stretch, but for whatever reason I’m missing obvious things like spots where the afore-mentioned ability of R2D2 to hover can be used to get to a tricky spot. 

Of course, a lot of the time I’m getting hung up on things like not thinking to shoot flowers and wildlife on Dagobah in order to complete Yoda’s quests.  Who’d have thought destroying plantlife would make me One with the Force?

I mentioned previously that I’ve acquired an XBox 360. I’ve been having a blast with it, and I plan on putting together a little overview of my experiences to date. But for now I’ll talk briefly about one game in particular, Gears of War.

Gears of War is one of the run-away success stories on the XBox 360. Over 4 million copies have been sold so far, and everyone seems to think it’s fantastic. So what is all the fuss about? GoW is not a revolutionary game: at its core, it’s a first person shooter of the oldest traditions. It has a shallow “aliens invade Earth/bad-ass commando type with a big gun saves the day” story, tons of action, vast arrays of monsters to fight, and plenty of weapons to play with. But it isn’t all the same….

The biggest differences in terms of game play versus GoW and, say, Quake or Doom, can be summed up in two different catch phrases: “run and gun” versus “drop and pop”. Run and gun is what you do in Quake or Doom: run around, rocket jump, bunny hop, and generally behave like you are jumped up on crack or something in an effort to avoid being hit by your opponent. Drop and pop is what you do in Gears of War: dive behind cover, pop up and shoot, then jump/dive to the next bit of cover. You can also poke around corners and blind fire your weapon if you want to maximize your use of cover. It’s different, and personally I prefer this approach.

The remainder of what makes Gears of War stand out can be be boiled down to production quality. The sound, the textures, and the graphical details are first rate. The control scheme is easy to learn but tough to master, with an innovative “action reload” mechanic that makes putting bullets in your gun interesting in itself. I liked my “squad” of computer-controlled buddies: often, they were actually helpful and required essentially zero handholding. Similarly, monster AI seemed first-rate, although a couple of glitches now and then, with monsters getting “stuck” or the like, marred the perfection.

In summary, I’d rate Gears of War as between an 8.5 and 9 out of 10 on the “Kelly” scale. The biggest frustration in the entire game, and what (for me) probably reduced my overall happiness the most, was the very end scene. Killing that final monster took me a couple dozen tries and several hours…not as much fun as frustration. Since talking about the final battle would be a spoiler, I’ll hedge things a bit by forcing you to click a link if you don’t mind spoiling the ending. If you want to know how I finally got past the last monster, see this strategy video.

I’ve posted before before about the fact that I can’t play Second Life since I upgraded to Vista. I was pretty certain that the problem related to the ATI video drivers. ATI added OpenGL support in the 7.1 release of the drivers and updated that support in the 7.2 release, but Second Life still doesn’t work.  I haven’t been logging into SL recently: I decided to cut back and focus more on other things, but I would like to be able to log in once in a while…and the lack of support for Vista and ATI has been a major inhibitor.

Linden Lab has announced that the problem has been isolated, and that ATI will be correcting the defect in the next (7.3) release of their drivers. Apparently this update is expected by the end of March/beginning of April.  I’ll believe it when I see it, but I’m optimistic: I’ll post here on my blog once the drivers are released and I’ve tested them.

I have a somewhat mixed history with regards to console games.  Looking back in history, I believe the first console I had was some kind of pong-type thing…back in the days before console games had cartridges, so about 1977…30 years ago.  Yowsa, I’m old!  The first console I had that I have a clear memory of was a Colecovision: I had Donkey Kong, plus some kind of adventure game where your “character” was a little ball with a bow going through a 2D maze.  After that I went through a succession of Sega systems, culminating in a Sega Genesis “portable”.  That was about when online PC games started showing up (1996), which somewhat coincidentally was the last time I played a console game for about a decade.

A bit over a year ago my interest was piqued by a game on the XBox.  The price had dropped due to the then-future release of the XBox 360, and so I bought a console.   I enjoyed it, but after about three months I pretty much stopped playing games on the machine.  I discovered one main problem with this: the same TV I wanted to use for gaming was primarily used by Irene for watching TV.   I tried sneaking in a bit of playing time when Irene was out of the house, but ultimate it didn’t work out.

I decided a couple of months ago that I’d like to build myself a dedicated station for playing console games.  I’m talking here about XBox/Playstation/etc type games, and by “station” I mean deskspace, display, speakers and so forth.  I re-organized my office a few weeks ago to create the space for it, and I’ve been buying the components to assemble it during the past week.  Here is what it looks like now:

The monitor and speaker system are sort of a bit “super-sized”.  The display is a 32″ HDTV LCD set, which has HDMI and composite HDTV inputs.  I initially planned on getting a 26″ display, but…the prices kept coming down.  Instead of saving money, I bought a bigger display.  Does this surprise you?  I didn’t think so. 

The speakers…well, that’s entirely my fault.  I bought a nice little set of speakers, Logitech X-340 “5.1″ speakers.  Unfortunately, they weren’t really surround sound speakers unless you were hooking them up to a PC: connected to a console, they were stereo speakers with “fake” surround using what Logitechcalls “matrix mode”.   This just wouldn’t do, since the XBox 360 supports true 5.1 surround sound using optical audio connectors.  I took the X-340 set back to Best Buy and came home with a set of Z-5500 speakers that *do* support optical audio connections and full 5.1 surround.  The sub-woofer in this set is about the size of a small refrigerator…or at least three cats.  Perhaps a bit of overkill?  Nah…

For the curious, I’ve added my XBox 360 gamer tag to the right navigation of my blog here.  You can see what I’ve been playing recently, and how many achievement points (whatever those are) I have.