I bought Halo 3 the other day: count me as number 5,000,001.  I’ve been enjoying it: the story is intriguing.  I’d say the third installment of Halo is, thus far at least, better than its predecessors.

I selected “Easy” mode when I started.  I like easy, as I’ve explained in previous posts.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of XBox Live achievements for Halo 3 require you to at least be playing on “Normal”.  That’s okay…or it would have been if I’d known it before I got halfway (2/3rds of the way?) through the game.

Strangely, I find that I sort of want those darn achievements.  But I really don’t like playing the same content over and over again: that is at least part of the reason I play on the easy setting to begin with.  That leaves me with a frustrating choice to make: start all over again, potentially finding the more difficult “normal” mode to be as irritating as I expect it to be.  Or forego any achievements. 

I’ll make my choice.  But perhaps by posting this, someone else who might otherwise choose the easy setting will avoid the same trap I’m in

I like the Halo series: it’s a decent first person shooter game with a better than average story.  I played the original Halo on the PC and Halo 2 on the XBox.  I haven’t bought Halo 3 for the XBox 360, but I probably will someday soon.  I’d probably rate both of the first two Halos at somewhere between 7 and 8 out of 10.  Good solid games, nothing earth-shattering, but fun.

But I just have to shake my head in stunned disbelief at the sales stats for Halo 3.  It was released on September 25th.  Over $170 million dollars in Halo 3 sales were racked up in the first 24 hours…over $300 million in the first week.  Over three million Halo 3 players are logging in to play the game on line each day. 

Those numbers are pretty staggering to me.  I remember when computer games were considered a niche industry: now we have single games that generate more revenue in a single day than triple A movies.   I’m guessing that Halo 3 might top a billion in sales over the next year…for a single game, on a single platform (Halo 3 is currently an XBox 360 exclusive). 

I was doubtful when I first heard that Halo 3 was expected by some to push huge volumes of XBox 360 sales.  Now I’m not so sure- if 5 million people bought Halo 3 in the first week, some of those have to be buying the game console to go with it.  Heck, there were only 11 million or so XBox 360s out there before Halo 3 shipped. 

An interesting side note: the company that developed Halo 3, Bungee, has parted ways with Microsoft.  They were a wholly-owned subsidiary of MS since 2000.  Apparently, the separation was on good terms, Microsoft retains an equity stake in Bungee as well as rights both to future Halo releases and right of first refusal for any new titles Bungee may develop.  Some folks even believe this split is good news for both Microsoft and Bungee.   Bungee apparently wanted more creative freedom, and the rumour is that Halo 3 is the last Halo they want to make.

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.

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 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]

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.