I finished BioShock last night.  I won’t spoil the game by revealing its secrets, but the ending was…a let down.

Don’t get me wrong: BioShock still has my strongest recommendation- I really enjoyed the game, and my rating is unchanged.  But endings are always hard, and it seems that the better an entertainment is, the harder it is to end well. 

This is true with computer games, books, movies…but I’d say that the art of “completion” is the most poorly developed with computer/video games.  In BioShock, I think what left me feeling deflated was the fact that, ultimately, the choices I made in the game really boiled down to just one thing having an impact on the ending.  Make that singular choice differently, and you get one of (basically) two endings.  Either your character becomes an evil SOB, or not, based on that choice.

So, BioShock’s graphics and sound were great, the gameplay fantastically well realized, the narrative stunningly well done for a computer game- this was true right through until the ending credits.  What undid the ending for me was being given the sense that the choices I made would make a difference to the story, then discovering that those differences were, in fact, very constrained. 

Could a game this tightly written have given more variability in the ending?  Made my choices as a character have more meaning?  Would that have really made the ending more satisfying?  I’m not sure.  But it is an interesting challenge for game developers.

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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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 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 have been spending some time playing Sigil’s Vanguard lately. It is important to note that I’ve only played my character to about 15th level (and three characters during final beta to about 10th level). A well-rounded review of the game would, in my opinion, require playing at least two or three different classes to mid-levels, and at least one character to nearly maximum level. Since I will likely never do either of these things, I am not going to give an in-depth review here. Instead, these are just some preliminary opinions based on a couple dozen hours of play time.

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Okay, so I’ve had a few too many “Second Life” posts lately. I’ll do my best to make this the last one for at least a few days.

The other day I bought my land- yesterday I put the finishing touches on my house.

I like the “rustic” look as opposed to the modern appearance many favour. The house itself is something I purchased at a shop.

I’ve also been working on the interior…

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In real life, I own a home. Well, actually, the bank owns most of it. But in Second Life, I now actually own a piece of property.

This is a view from 30 metres or so in the air- my view of the ocean is not so good at ground level, but I like the area. I didn’t pick this area using a great deal of logic- I was looking for land, flying around looking at lots, and in the game saw me flying by and called me over. Jessica spent about an hour chatting with me about land ownership. She invited me into her home and let me wander around to get some ideas regarding how many primatives (”prims“) a lot of a certain size can support. She also pointed me in the direction of some lots a friend of hers was selling. I decided to buy my property more or less based on a snap decision.

So why own virtual land? One reason- if you want a place to “put” your stuff in Second Life so other people can see it, you want land. Every object consists of primatives, and land is what is required for those primitives. Another reason, and the main one for me, is that its “neat” or “fun”: sort of like having a virtual house construction kit. You can change the topology of the land you buy, construct your house (which you can buy in prebuilt modules if you like), and then you get to furnish the place. I spent four or five hours just assembling my house- I’ll have pictures of that later, once I figure out how to get that pesky tree out of my living room

There is a lot of buzz in the on-line community lately about a “game” called Second Life. And not just amongst traditional gamers- there are folks within many big companies that are experimenting with this world which relies almost entirely on user created content. What’s the big deal?

I “get” the concept behind Second Life. Firstly, in essence it’s like a big playground. There are some basic physical laws, but no real “game”- instead, users can create their own content. Objects like a table, a chair…or even a pair of ears or a new face…heck, even an entire new body for their character to wear: all of these things can be created by any user. Objects a user creates can have scripted behaviors- a table could have a fold out extension, or those ears I mentioned could wiggle. Even more intriguing, an objects behavior could be based on something outside the game: virtual weather in an area could be based on real-world weather reports, for example- or a soccer ball could move based on telemetry from a real-world soccer ball.

Secondly, anything a user creates in Second Life is “theirs”. Unlike other games like EverQuest or World of Warcraft, anything new a user creates actually “belongs” to them, not to the folks who run Second Life. The user can copy, buy, or sell items as much as they want. Add to this the fact that in game money (Lindon dollars, or L$) can be bought for real world money via an official money exchange. So…if you are artistic, you could create a new painting for someone to hang on a wall in their virtual Second Life house (assuming they have a house…that costs money too), and you could earn a real-world living from it. Basically everything is for sale. People have bought Second Life “land”, subdivided it, and sold it out at a real world profit. Thousands of dollars of profit, actually.

What kinds of things can players make? Anything, really- cars, planes, helicoptors, horses. Houses, stadiums, entire islands. A mouth, an ear, different eyes, or sex organs. A tattoo, or a different hair style, or a dance animation. A completely new player avatar…it doesn’t have to be remotely humanoid- one I saw was a butterfly. A networkable vendor kiosk complete with financial management and automatic emails to the owner of sales status, or a security system complete with “repulsion fields” that can be attached to a home.
All of this is interesting enough, but is it a game? The game itself is free to download: you pay a subscription fee ($9.95 a month) if you want to own land, which at least to start is probably beyond most people. So I downloaded it and tried it out. My opinions? Well, I can see how people could get addicted to Second Life, even though I can’t really detect a “game” here in the traditional sense. Anyone who comes to Second Life expecting to go out and slay some monsters or something is in for a rude shock.

So what did I do in Second Life? Here’s a brief list:

• First, I went through an orientation that told me how to walk around and change my appearance

• I made an avatar that sort of looks like me: dumpy looking, skinny with a pot-belly, red hair. I couldn’t get the face quite right

• The clothing I’m wearing in the picture above came later: the default clothing you get is basically a pair of blue jeans and a white T-Shirt
• While experimenting with my appearance, I discovered that the method for changing your appearance is not only very flexible, but that you can have multiple appearance “packages”, including body shape, physical attachments, and scripted behaviors…and just drag and drop to switch between them
• then I “teleported” into the main part of the game world; I found a car dealership which offered to give me a free test drive. I spent five minutes driving around a car that really couldn’t be said to be much more than a dressed up roller skate: fun, but its not a simulator
• I wandered around near the car dealership, and stumbled through some private homes- some had “security systems” that kicked me away. Those that let me in varied in terms of furnishings and details radically
• I talked to another player who’s name indicated she was a “Trainer” from something called TeaZers University…at the time, I had no idea what this was, but I’ve later learned that TeaZers is a fairly well respected educational community within the game…I have no idea how or why this exists, but apparently they even pay their instructors. Anyway, this young lady gave me some guidance (including a landmark so I could find the University) while I admired her ears…yes, her ears. She was a normal human avatar, except for a pair of “cat” ears that were swivelling and and wiggling realistically- scripted objects attached to a person
• I wandered some more and found a shop selling complete new avatars- critter avatars (wolfs, felines, etc). I liked what I saw, so I made note of where the place was- they also had “freebies”- the T-Shirt I’m wearing in the above picture, which has an advertisement for their shop on the back
• Off I went to check out the location of TeaZers University- I found a bunch of people (instructors) playing with different body modifications and outfits, and also received some more free items- the pants and boots I’m wearing in the above picture plus many other odds and ends

Netting it out…I still really don’t know if Second Life would keep me interested over any really extended period. A lot would depend on the social network that you build in the game, and I’m generally anti-social. Another thing that might keep me interested would be if I got involved in creating things…but from what I’ve seen, this market is flooded with highly talented people with lots of spare time. Making something purely for my own amusement would become boring after a while, and I lack the artistic talent to make the visually appealing things people would want to buy.

Second Life is an intriguing place. It’s not for your “average” gamer…I’d say its more appealing for people who might like the Sims, or who want a graphical chat program they can customize. People who partake of more free-form MUDs and MUCKs would likely find much to appreciate here. And, from the large selection of “functional” sexual body parts and animations that can be acquired, I’d say Second Life would appeal to people who enjoy pixellated sex.

But then I’ve barely even skimmed the surface- I’m sure there are much greater depths to be found in Second Life. I know some schools are using the “restricted” (PG/teen) areas for on-line education. I could also see businesses using Second Life for informal presentations for the same reason they have streaming videos of conferences: it “personalizes” things. Thus far it seems like whatever it is Second Life offers has attracted enough participants to make it sustainable, and that in itself is intriguing.

The “new generation” game consoles are stacking up to be pretty impressive. All of them are based on variations of the IBM Cell processor technology. The first out was Microsoft’s XBox 360, soon to be followed by Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s entry which was, until a few days ago, code named “Revolution”.

But now Nintendo has announced their new game console’s official name. It will henceforce be called the “Wii”. Yes, that’s it- the whole name…pronounced “we”.

To me it sounds suspiciously like something a 4 year old needing to use the toilet says (”Mommy, I gotta go wee!”). What it doesn’t sound like is a name for a gaming console that I’d ever want to own. Please note that I am *not* commenting here on the merits of Nintendo’s technology or their game products- just the name.

Some marketing guy is laughing his head off right now as he rolls in a huge pile of money Nintendo paid him to come up with this total boner of a name. Wii…good gravy, that’s an embarrasing name.