Right, i read a thread on OOTs about how everybody hates kender. Now I've only played one once, and i had alot of fun. I based him after Tom Reagen from Miller's Crossing, a small little man who has a smart mouth, isn't that honest, and is totally fearless. IS that just me?
from
EE
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
You're in the ArmA Now: Part 1
In which I actually play the game past the tutorials.
I'm in the passenger seat of a Humvee, moving into the outskirts of a vaguely middle eastern looking city as part of a two vehicle convoy sent to investigate gunfire. This city is part of the US allied half of the island. Opposite it is a bunch of communists, who, being communists, can be shot without feeling guilty. I'm playing a US soldier sent here to train the non-communist monarchy in communist-shooting. The mission's been a snoozefest and is almost over, with my company the last to leave.
I dismount the Humvee, and, along with the rest of the squad, press onwards into the city. The radio suddenly comes alive with stilted military reports of enemy activity:
"Enemy. Missile soldier. Twelve. O'Clock."
"Enemy Machine Gunner. Is history."
"Move. tothat. House. At. Twelve. O'Clock."
Hey, it's me. When I'm writing in italics, I'm discussing the game itself without any attempt to maintain a narrative. This is actually how people in ArmA talk. Unlike most games which just have some stock phrases like 'enemy sighted,' ArmA will actually give you a description, heading and distance to target on contacts. This can be very helpful, the downside is that these are made from pasted together sentence fragments, and thus sound absolutely dreadful. In a surreal touch, the person you are playing as will radio in contacts without being told, or even telling you that he's doing it. This leads to a weird condition wherein my soldier dude know the location of somebody I haven't even seen yet, or me shooting at somebody my soldier dude doesn't know exists. It's rather like having split personalities. One of them is eerily professional, giving precise reports on enemy movement with the diction and emotion of an automated phone system , the other (me) is vaguely incompetant, keeps walking off of rooftops, wondering how I get into a vehicle, and missing things with the M203 grenade launcher.
We run move tensely around the city for a while, but it's very confusing, very brown and bullets keep flying past me coming from God knows where. They've obviously got RPGs somewhere, because the Humvee that moved into the city with us is destroyed, killing No. 4. Finally, desperate to see what's going on, I climb a rooftop, and find myself face to face with a Communist Special forces soldier, lying prone and taking pot shots with an AK-47 at my buddies in the street below.
I think it took both of us by surprise. I hadn't expected anybody to be on the roof, and he had clearly thought all of us would be too busy trying not to get shot down in the street to come up here. We both freeze for an instant, but I'm a bit faster, and get the first shot off. My three shot burst tears through him. In an instant he's covered in blood. He rolls over and goes limp. I watch him for another few seconds, part of me horrified that I just killed him, part of me elated that he didn't kill me, part of me wanting make sure he really is dead and not faking.
This encounter happened more or less like I wrote, except the first time I went up on that rooftop I was so shocked to actually see an enemy, I think I forgot how the mouse worked, and was promptly shot. Fortunately the incompetant side of my personality has the ability to rewind time to a 'save point' and thus avoid death. It goes a long way towards getting through those little inconviences like multiple bullet wounds.
No sooner have I decided he really is dead than the order comes for us to get out of this street and fall back to a yard about two hundred meters away. I make it there in a panicked dash, flaming green tracers licking my heels, and crouch behind the rock wall with the rest of my group of soldiers. We see a tank, whoever is in charge radios for extraction, and we jog another 300 meters or so to an APC without encountering any more resistance.
So it looks like the commies have waited until almost all of us were out of here before attacking in earnest. Our friends the Royals are doing pissall to form an effective resistance, so it's just up to us now.
Thus ends my report on the first mission of ArmA's campaign. I actually died about five times during this section, once because I stood too close the Humvee when it blew up, a couple of times from enemy fire, the rest from accidentally walking off rooftops. One of ArmA's weirder features is no jump button. If you can't walk over it, you can't get over it. If you can walk over it, it really doesn't slow you down at all, which, combined with the inertial movement, makes those little ledges at the edges of roofs completely worthless for actually stopping idiots like me from plunging to their deaths.
I should also spend a moment talking about the various bugs one will encounter in ArmA, because there are a lot of the things. They come in two sorts- mildly amusing in a surrealist way, and completely show stopping.
The first happen more or less constantly. They range from the interiors of APCs forgetting to draw themselves, to my personal favorite, the muzzle flash of my rifle undrawing any nearby walls. Essentially I fire my gun, and get XRay vision for a quarter of a second. I've also had sniper rifles spontaneously fire themselves, and various trees randomly decide to fall over without any obvious reason. If it was a part of the level design, that'd be one thing, but I really doubt the designers intended to block the main road through a town with a big old pile of branches like that.
The second also happen consistantly. I'm unable to complete the helicopter training mission, because the script that causes the copilot to board the Blackhawk is broken, so he won't get in and I fail as soon as I take off. I had one mission that occurs later where I'm supposed to blow up a bridge, but cannot plant explosives. So basically it's just like the real military, except with a touch of Lovecraftian madness. It's a heady combination.
I'm in the passenger seat of a Humvee, moving into the outskirts of a vaguely middle eastern looking city as part of a two vehicle convoy sent to investigate gunfire. This city is part of the US allied half of the island. Opposite it is a bunch of communists, who, being communists, can be shot without feeling guilty. I'm playing a US soldier sent here to train the non-communist monarchy in communist-shooting. The mission's been a snoozefest and is almost over, with my company the last to leave.
I dismount the Humvee, and, along with the rest of the squad, press onwards into the city. The radio suddenly comes alive with stilted military reports of enemy activity:
"Enemy. Missile soldier. Twelve. O'Clock."
"Enemy Machine Gunner. Is history."
"Move. tothat. House. At. Twelve. O'Clock."
Hey, it's me. When I'm writing in italics, I'm discussing the game itself without any attempt to maintain a narrative. This is actually how people in ArmA talk. Unlike most games which just have some stock phrases like 'enemy sighted,' ArmA will actually give you a description, heading and distance to target on contacts. This can be very helpful, the downside is that these are made from pasted together sentence fragments, and thus sound absolutely dreadful. In a surreal touch, the person you are playing as will radio in contacts without being told, or even telling you that he's doing it. This leads to a weird condition wherein my soldier dude know the location of somebody I haven't even seen yet, or me shooting at somebody my soldier dude doesn't know exists. It's rather like having split personalities. One of them is eerily professional, giving precise reports on enemy movement with the diction and emotion of an automated phone system , the other (me) is vaguely incompetant, keeps walking off of rooftops, wondering how I get into a vehicle, and missing things with the M203 grenade launcher.
We run move tensely around the city for a while, but it's very confusing, very brown and bullets keep flying past me coming from God knows where. They've obviously got RPGs somewhere, because the Humvee that moved into the city with us is destroyed, killing No. 4. Finally, desperate to see what's going on, I climb a rooftop, and find myself face to face with a Communist Special forces soldier, lying prone and taking pot shots with an AK-47 at my buddies in the street below.
I think it took both of us by surprise. I hadn't expected anybody to be on the roof, and he had clearly thought all of us would be too busy trying not to get shot down in the street to come up here. We both freeze for an instant, but I'm a bit faster, and get the first shot off. My three shot burst tears through him. In an instant he's covered in blood. He rolls over and goes limp. I watch him for another few seconds, part of me horrified that I just killed him, part of me elated that he didn't kill me, part of me wanting make sure he really is dead and not faking.
This encounter happened more or less like I wrote, except the first time I went up on that rooftop I was so shocked to actually see an enemy, I think I forgot how the mouse worked, and was promptly shot. Fortunately the incompetant side of my personality has the ability to rewind time to a 'save point' and thus avoid death. It goes a long way towards getting through those little inconviences like multiple bullet wounds.
No sooner have I decided he really is dead than the order comes for us to get out of this street and fall back to a yard about two hundred meters away. I make it there in a panicked dash, flaming green tracers licking my heels, and crouch behind the rock wall with the rest of my group of soldiers. We see a tank, whoever is in charge radios for extraction, and we jog another 300 meters or so to an APC without encountering any more resistance.
So it looks like the commies have waited until almost all of us were out of here before attacking in earnest. Our friends the Royals are doing pissall to form an effective resistance, so it's just up to us now.
Thus ends my report on the first mission of ArmA's campaign. I actually died about five times during this section, once because I stood too close the Humvee when it blew up, a couple of times from enemy fire, the rest from accidentally walking off rooftops. One of ArmA's weirder features is no jump button. If you can't walk over it, you can't get over it. If you can walk over it, it really doesn't slow you down at all, which, combined with the inertial movement, makes those little ledges at the edges of roofs completely worthless for actually stopping idiots like me from plunging to their deaths.
I should also spend a moment talking about the various bugs one will encounter in ArmA, because there are a lot of the things. They come in two sorts- mildly amusing in a surrealist way, and completely show stopping.
The first happen more or less constantly. They range from the interiors of APCs forgetting to draw themselves, to my personal favorite, the muzzle flash of my rifle undrawing any nearby walls. Essentially I fire my gun, and get XRay vision for a quarter of a second. I've also had sniper rifles spontaneously fire themselves, and various trees randomly decide to fall over without any obvious reason. If it was a part of the level design, that'd be one thing, but I really doubt the designers intended to block the main road through a town with a big old pile of branches like that.
The second also happen consistantly. I'm unable to complete the helicopter training mission, because the script that causes the copilot to board the Blackhawk is broken, so he won't get in and I fail as soon as I take off. I had one mission that occurs later where I'm supposed to blow up a bridge, but cannot plant explosives. So basically it's just like the real military, except with a touch of Lovecraftian madness. It's a heady combination.
Monday, October 12, 2009
You're in the ArmA Now, Introduction
I bought ArmA: Armed Assault.
I suspect the audience just divided itself into four neat groups.
In right corner we have group 1, milling about clutching Wiimotes and wondering what on earth an 'ArmA' is, and whether it supports Friend Codes.
In the middle we have the second group. They're mostly apathetic, expressing how they heard of that game once, but got Call of Duty instead. Then they talk about Prestiging for five hours. Expect high incidence of the phrase 'so awesome.'
To the left a number of people have thrown themselves to the ground and put their hands over their heads. Some of them have started talking to their invisible friend Ralph, or else are frantically clicking through their cellphones for their therapist's number. The more lucid among them are looking at me and going 'you poor bastard.' before walking away shaking their heads.
In the far right the last segment of the audience has instantly put on strange looking hats adorned with motion sensors, split into four man fireteams and established a perimeter. As I finish typing this, three of them have finished setting up a casualty clearing station. A couple of guys with sniper rifles are doing overwatch.
These four groups are, in reverse order: The fans of Arma, the broken husks of people who tried the game, those who don't care, and those without a clue. Since I see the fans are setting up a spotting position for close air support, I feel I should make a statement before things escalate.
To the fans: Weapons are not free. Repeat, weapons are not free. Stand down, you do not have permission to engage.
To the broken husks: Try some deep breathing, and maybe some drugs.
To those who don't give a damn: We know your golden Deagle is like, so cool.
To everyone else: I'll tell the fans to 'neutralize' the next person who mentions Mario Party. Now shaddup and listen up, and I'll explain before anybody gets hurt.
ArmA: Armed Assault is a very, very hardcore FPS for the PC. So hardcore it is perhaps more simulation than game. Specifically it is a simulation of being a soldier, but because it is a sim, it takes away most of the props you usually get in an FPS. Bullets will kill you very, very fast, and there's no health packs or magical regeneration. You get shot, and if you're lucky enough to still have a pulse, you're stuck with a wound for the rest of the mission. Get shot in the arms, you can't shoot as accurately, get shot in the legs and you can't sprint. Or so I've read, I'm not far enough in the game to have actually been shot yet.
Even more than the health though, the guns are hardcore. I'm a pretty good shot in most FPS games, able to reliably put lead into people's brains with assault rifle and sniper rifle alike in games ranging from Half-Life 2 to Crysis and even S.T.A.L.K.E.R. After a few tries I can't beat Arma's training range. Nor is it because I have some super exotic weapon with funky sights. It's an M16A2, a rifle any self respecting gamer has fired hundreds of times.
In Arma you have to control your breathing, account for bullet drop, and lead targets if they are moving. There's even a sizable 'dead zone' in the center of the screen where you can change your aiming point without changing your body's orientation. That's right, your gun isn't bolted to the center of the screen, which takes a bit of getting used to.
This will be my journal of sorts as I play through the game. It will chronicle the good, the bad, and the bugs. Also the ugly, the boring, the thrilling, the heroic, the touching, and the slightly mental.
I suspect the audience just divided itself into four neat groups.
In right corner we have group 1, milling about clutching Wiimotes and wondering what on earth an 'ArmA' is, and whether it supports Friend Codes.
In the middle we have the second group. They're mostly apathetic, expressing how they heard of that game once, but got Call of Duty instead. Then they talk about Prestiging for five hours. Expect high incidence of the phrase 'so awesome.'
To the left a number of people have thrown themselves to the ground and put their hands over their heads. Some of them have started talking to their invisible friend Ralph, or else are frantically clicking through their cellphones for their therapist's number. The more lucid among them are looking at me and going 'you poor bastard.' before walking away shaking their heads.
In the far right the last segment of the audience has instantly put on strange looking hats adorned with motion sensors, split into four man fireteams and established a perimeter. As I finish typing this, three of them have finished setting up a casualty clearing station. A couple of guys with sniper rifles are doing overwatch.
These four groups are, in reverse order: The fans of Arma, the broken husks of people who tried the game, those who don't care, and those without a clue. Since I see the fans are setting up a spotting position for close air support, I feel I should make a statement before things escalate.
To the fans: Weapons are not free. Repeat, weapons are not free. Stand down, you do not have permission to engage.
To the broken husks: Try some deep breathing, and maybe some drugs.
To those who don't give a damn: We know your golden Deagle is like, so cool.
To everyone else: I'll tell the fans to 'neutralize' the next person who mentions Mario Party. Now shaddup and listen up, and I'll explain before anybody gets hurt.
ArmA: Armed Assault is a very, very hardcore FPS for the PC. So hardcore it is perhaps more simulation than game. Specifically it is a simulation of being a soldier, but because it is a sim, it takes away most of the props you usually get in an FPS. Bullets will kill you very, very fast, and there's no health packs or magical regeneration. You get shot, and if you're lucky enough to still have a pulse, you're stuck with a wound for the rest of the mission. Get shot in the arms, you can't shoot as accurately, get shot in the legs and you can't sprint. Or so I've read, I'm not far enough in the game to have actually been shot yet.
Even more than the health though, the guns are hardcore. I'm a pretty good shot in most FPS games, able to reliably put lead into people's brains with assault rifle and sniper rifle alike in games ranging from Half-Life 2 to Crysis and even S.T.A.L.K.E.R. After a few tries I can't beat Arma's training range. Nor is it because I have some super exotic weapon with funky sights. It's an M16A2, a rifle any self respecting gamer has fired hundreds of times.
In Arma you have to control your breathing, account for bullet drop, and lead targets if they are moving. There's even a sizable 'dead zone' in the center of the screen where you can change your aiming point without changing your body's orientation. That's right, your gun isn't bolted to the center of the screen, which takes a bit of getting used to.
This will be my journal of sorts as I play through the game. It will chronicle the good, the bad, and the bugs. Also the ugly, the boring, the thrilling, the heroic, the touching, and the slightly mental.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Shameless sell out
http://notanotherteenadvicesite.blogspot.com/
Hey, can you imagine if i did an advice sight? Well i can't, and in fact, the thought horrifies me greatly. But imagine if somebody who is you know, not me, but has actual empathy and compassion did it, not to mention being SOOOOOO much smarter than I am ran one. Well, luckily there is. Now its kinda hard to advertise an advice sight, especially since i'm too well adjusted and personable that i don't need any advice (mom says I could be a dentist), because you know....its personal, and its some person on the internet. but, i will tell you, its from somebody who is a better writer than i am, funnier than i am, and smarter than i am, not to mention empathy (i am taller at least.....), and so it is worth checking out at least
from
EE
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Why I will not be buying Dragon Age: Origins
Warty Goblin is back. I hope you didn't miss me overmuch.
No, this does not have to do with the DLC. That's annoying, but not lethal. I'm not going to buy DA:O. I referred to it earlier as a Witcher wannabe, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. Not perhaps in the sense that Bioware looked at the Witcher, and decided to copy it, but it seems to be aiming for the same gritty, dark fantasy feel. I just don't think Bioware has the talent to pull it off.
The first problem is that Bioware insists on making you play a super important person tasked with saving the world. That's usually the point where my brain checks into the Cliche Hotel and gets the Three Week Deal on a luxery suite. This is not to say that you can't have good games based around this concept, but unless your name is J.R.R. Tolkien, it's probably not going to make me do any deep thinking.
The Witcher's Geralt is certainly well known, and a bit super human, but he's not tasked with saving the world. That alone buys a lot of my respect. Instead, while Geralt certainly has goals, none of them are as large and all consuming as Saving Everything. This both makes the side quests seem like more reasonable ways to spend time, and roots him as a member of the world. Saving a world almost always pulls me out of it, the job is so large, the stakes so high they could be used to justify nearly anything. It also automatically renders all the characters either well meaning and helpful, well meaning and obnoxious, or some combination of ignorant and downright malign in an insane laughter sort of way. People who oppose you with worldsized stakes don't just occupy rival points of view, they are actively and totally evil. This does nothing to engage me with the material.
The second problem is that you are tasked with saving the world from a bunch of really ugly, semi-humanoid monsters. This is boring. They are by construction beings I can kill without remorse, anybody who sides with them is automatically just as bad. It in short is another method of polarizing the world into a manachian wet dream of black and white, and I don't like it.
This is not to say that you cannot get away with inhuman monsters. The Witcher has plenty of those. They are not however the real focus of the story, but rather simple facts of life. You don't go to the lake at night because the drowners will get you, just like hanging out in a gully after a large rainstorm is likely to get you drowned. CD Project realized that mindless monsters bent on indescriminate murder are boring, and assigns them to the proper role of background radiation. They pop up every now and again, you kill them and collect the reward. The real enemies of interest are human, and figuring out what they are doing, and why they are doing it is a lot of the joy of the game. Nor is it even a forgone conclusion that they are wrong. Bioware puts the inhuman monsters front and center. Anybody who sides with the speciescidal monsterous horde is by construction either a fool or hopelessly malignant. CD Project's seperation of the two is a very savvy move, and one of the reasons I think they are fundamentally better developers than Bioware.
The third reason is the use of deception. I have never, ever been decieved in a Bioware game. Everybody is either telling the truth because they understand that I'm the world's last best hope for a happy ending, or else obviously lying through their teeth. This further polarizes the world, and I don't like it. But deception, I think is key to making a dark, gritty sort of world. A place where everybody's intent is fundamentally judgeable at a glance is not a place where you have to worry overmuch, and it keeps me from fully engaging with it.
I didn't pay enough attention in one or two sections of the Witcher, and as a result I got played like a fiddle for pretty much the entire second act. That, more than anything else made me buy into the Witcher's world as a place where people actually had their own motivations, and were capable of carrying them out. It also means that you really have to pay attention, and even sometimes that isn't enough. At one point I ended up performing a quest for one of the most despicable characters I have ever encountered in a game, but he was competant enough to conceal his socially frowned upon and unacceptable dietary habits. Thus when I was helping him he gave no indication of his tastes. Only later did I realize what he really was. The game in short realized that other people besides the player were capable, and that trust was something of which you should be a jealous guardian.
The fourth is graphics design. Bioware has never, in any of its games, made a really, truly good looking game world. They might check boxes, but the landscapes alway feel somehow empty and sterile, and the characters tend to move like animatronic ducks. They are, to me at least, things I will look because they are gateways to the story, but I have no fondness for them. Mass Effect was better this way, because Bioware does know how to direct a cutscene, and they had the budget to make the Unreal Engine look good, but their self coded efforts fail miserably, and also tend to run like animatronic ducks. Simply put, there are other worlds I find more attractive, so all other things being equal, I'd rather spend my time there.
The fifth is combat. I really do not like party control RPGs. They're too big to make me really latch on to one character, and too small to make me flex any more than the most rudimentory of tactical muscles. Their interfaces also usually seem like a beta release of the version of Powerpoint used in Hell. On top of that, the combat in DA:O looks, from trailers hideously fake. It is 2009, we can do better than a couple of guys in impractical armor standing next to each other and whacking away like uncordinated lumberjacks, each 'hit' accompanied by a pint of blood spraying in all directsion, until at last one combatant or the other's health bar empties and they keel over. The Total War games have better looking combat than this, and they put hundreds of units on screen at a time. A game with perhaps a dozen has no excuse.
And Bioware does provide some more graphically interesting special attacks, like an ogre picking up a dude and bashing him. But if anything, this makes the combat appear even more stilted and fake. If a twenty foot tall beast with teeth like a Ginsu Bargain Pack picks up a person, I personally feel that the individual should be looking for a new career in the pancake and toothpick industries because he should be flattened and then consumed. Having him get back up, sans a bit of their health bar simply takes the remains of my suspension of disbelief and chews them up like that ogre should have done. Finishing moves, they should finish a combat people. It's not that hard, indeed it is why they are called finishing moves. Plus, there's the fetishistic obsession with gallons of fake looking blood spraying everywhere. It was cheesy when Gears of War did it, but Gears of War was at least consistantly cheesy. In a game I'm supposed to take seriously, every character acting like a plasma pinata is simply stupid.
Thus I'm skipping Dragon Age: Origins. I've got enough of a backlog, and there's enough interesting looking titles coming up, that the loss will not be keenly felt. Anyway, there was that leaked Witcher 2 video, that'll sustain me just fine.
No, this does not have to do with the DLC. That's annoying, but not lethal. I'm not going to buy DA:O. I referred to it earlier as a Witcher wannabe, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. Not perhaps in the sense that Bioware looked at the Witcher, and decided to copy it, but it seems to be aiming for the same gritty, dark fantasy feel. I just don't think Bioware has the talent to pull it off.
The first problem is that Bioware insists on making you play a super important person tasked with saving the world. That's usually the point where my brain checks into the Cliche Hotel and gets the Three Week Deal on a luxery suite. This is not to say that you can't have good games based around this concept, but unless your name is J.R.R. Tolkien, it's probably not going to make me do any deep thinking.
The Witcher's Geralt is certainly well known, and a bit super human, but he's not tasked with saving the world. That alone buys a lot of my respect. Instead, while Geralt certainly has goals, none of them are as large and all consuming as Saving Everything. This both makes the side quests seem like more reasonable ways to spend time, and roots him as a member of the world. Saving a world almost always pulls me out of it, the job is so large, the stakes so high they could be used to justify nearly anything. It also automatically renders all the characters either well meaning and helpful, well meaning and obnoxious, or some combination of ignorant and downright malign in an insane laughter sort of way. People who oppose you with worldsized stakes don't just occupy rival points of view, they are actively and totally evil. This does nothing to engage me with the material.
The second problem is that you are tasked with saving the world from a bunch of really ugly, semi-humanoid monsters. This is boring. They are by construction beings I can kill without remorse, anybody who sides with them is automatically just as bad. It in short is another method of polarizing the world into a manachian wet dream of black and white, and I don't like it.
This is not to say that you cannot get away with inhuman monsters. The Witcher has plenty of those. They are not however the real focus of the story, but rather simple facts of life. You don't go to the lake at night because the drowners will get you, just like hanging out in a gully after a large rainstorm is likely to get you drowned. CD Project realized that mindless monsters bent on indescriminate murder are boring, and assigns them to the proper role of background radiation. They pop up every now and again, you kill them and collect the reward. The real enemies of interest are human, and figuring out what they are doing, and why they are doing it is a lot of the joy of the game. Nor is it even a forgone conclusion that they are wrong. Bioware puts the inhuman monsters front and center. Anybody who sides with the speciescidal monsterous horde is by construction either a fool or hopelessly malignant. CD Project's seperation of the two is a very savvy move, and one of the reasons I think they are fundamentally better developers than Bioware.
The third reason is the use of deception. I have never, ever been decieved in a Bioware game. Everybody is either telling the truth because they understand that I'm the world's last best hope for a happy ending, or else obviously lying through their teeth. This further polarizes the world, and I don't like it. But deception, I think is key to making a dark, gritty sort of world. A place where everybody's intent is fundamentally judgeable at a glance is not a place where you have to worry overmuch, and it keeps me from fully engaging with it.
I didn't pay enough attention in one or two sections of the Witcher, and as a result I got played like a fiddle for pretty much the entire second act. That, more than anything else made me buy into the Witcher's world as a place where people actually had their own motivations, and were capable of carrying them out. It also means that you really have to pay attention, and even sometimes that isn't enough. At one point I ended up performing a quest for one of the most despicable characters I have ever encountered in a game, but he was competant enough to conceal his socially frowned upon and unacceptable dietary habits. Thus when I was helping him he gave no indication of his tastes. Only later did I realize what he really was. The game in short realized that other people besides the player were capable, and that trust was something of which you should be a jealous guardian.
The fourth is graphics design. Bioware has never, in any of its games, made a really, truly good looking game world. They might check boxes, but the landscapes alway feel somehow empty and sterile, and the characters tend to move like animatronic ducks. They are, to me at least, things I will look because they are gateways to the story, but I have no fondness for them. Mass Effect was better this way, because Bioware does know how to direct a cutscene, and they had the budget to make the Unreal Engine look good, but their self coded efforts fail miserably, and also tend to run like animatronic ducks. Simply put, there are other worlds I find more attractive, so all other things being equal, I'd rather spend my time there.
The fifth is combat. I really do not like party control RPGs. They're too big to make me really latch on to one character, and too small to make me flex any more than the most rudimentory of tactical muscles. Their interfaces also usually seem like a beta release of the version of Powerpoint used in Hell. On top of that, the combat in DA:O looks, from trailers hideously fake. It is 2009, we can do better than a couple of guys in impractical armor standing next to each other and whacking away like uncordinated lumberjacks, each 'hit' accompanied by a pint of blood spraying in all directsion, until at last one combatant or the other's health bar empties and they keel over. The Total War games have better looking combat than this, and they put hundreds of units on screen at a time. A game with perhaps a dozen has no excuse.
And Bioware does provide some more graphically interesting special attacks, like an ogre picking up a dude and bashing him. But if anything, this makes the combat appear even more stilted and fake. If a twenty foot tall beast with teeth like a Ginsu Bargain Pack picks up a person, I personally feel that the individual should be looking for a new career in the pancake and toothpick industries because he should be flattened and then consumed. Having him get back up, sans a bit of their health bar simply takes the remains of my suspension of disbelief and chews them up like that ogre should have done. Finishing moves, they should finish a combat people. It's not that hard, indeed it is why they are called finishing moves. Plus, there's the fetishistic obsession with gallons of fake looking blood spraying everywhere. It was cheesy when Gears of War did it, but Gears of War was at least consistantly cheesy. In a game I'm supposed to take seriously, every character acting like a plasma pinata is simply stupid.
Thus I'm skipping Dragon Age: Origins. I've got enough of a backlog, and there's enough interesting looking titles coming up, that the loss will not be keenly felt. Anyway, there was that leaked Witcher 2 video, that'll sustain me just fine.
DLC At Launch
Warty Goblin here, ya'll.
I was reading my usual round of gaming news the last day or so, and noticed that Bioware's Witcher wannabe, Dragon Age: Origins is getting a bunch of free DLC at launch. Well, free if you buy the game new anyways. Presumably the DLC will be tied to an account of some sort, and people you may sell the game to are simply SOL when it comes to their free goodies.
I'm generally in favor of free stuff, so I was a bit surprised at the degree of irritation I felt about this. It's not the blatant attempt to kill off the used games market. I really don't mind that, to my mind the secondary market-particularly when it is reselling relatively recently released games does the industry no favors.
No, what irritates me is the notion that the first thing I do after installing a game is download and install some more of the game. I just bought the damn game. Said game comes on a disc, which I just inserted into my computer and installed. Doing so should obtain for me the entire experience for which I paid $50. The only thing I want to be downloading right after installing is the Day 1 patch, and honestly I would prefer that not being neccessary either.
This is not to say that I have anything against ditigal distribution. Far from it, I think it is the future of the industry, but if I choose to buy a game in a store, I should be able to do that. Not whatever fragment of the game the publisher decided to entrust to DVD, the entire damn thing. It would be the equivilent of buying a game from a digital download service, and then being forced to drive to a Gamestop to pick up a disc with some 'free bonus missions' on it.
Also, I object to anything that comes pre produced and included with a product as free. It's not free, it's part of the thing I just paid for. Making me download it doesn't make that any less true. Oh sure, in DA:O's case, they charge you for it if you don't buy a new copy of the game, but the people who buy the game new are still buying the DLC. It's included, not free. I'll accept that DLC is free when it comes out fifteen months after the game, can be downloaded by anybody, and isn't tied to any sort of account. That's free.
Now I'm not the world's largest fan of DLC to begin with. See, back in the day we had these things called 'expansion packs.' Here's how they worked. You gave $30 to somebody or other, and they gave you a product. Not just any product however, this one went with a base game, and expanded it. That's why it was called an expansion pack.
There is, on the surface, something appealing about DLC. It's lots of cheap little bits of game! But that is just my problem. The expansion pack offered often quite sizable editions, entire new campaigns for shooters, factions for strategy games, and new storylines for RPGs. Maybe none of these would be as long as that of the original game, but they were often better polished, more focused, and provided the definitive version of the game. DLC seems to provide little bites of content, a quest here, some armor there, a new companion somewhere else. There are exceptions- Bring Down the Sky for Mass Effect was a sizable sort of quest, but the vast majority I've seen are just a random bunch of new things. There's none of the focus and refinement-let alone the scope- of a good expansion pack.
In conclusion, let's have more expansion packs, less DLC, even less marketing wank about 'free' and a return to things you buy in stores actually being in stores.
I was reading my usual round of gaming news the last day or so, and noticed that Bioware's Witcher wannabe, Dragon Age: Origins is getting a bunch of free DLC at launch. Well, free if you buy the game new anyways. Presumably the DLC will be tied to an account of some sort, and people you may sell the game to are simply SOL when it comes to their free goodies.
I'm generally in favor of free stuff, so I was a bit surprised at the degree of irritation I felt about this. It's not the blatant attempt to kill off the used games market. I really don't mind that, to my mind the secondary market-particularly when it is reselling relatively recently released games does the industry no favors.
No, what irritates me is the notion that the first thing I do after installing a game is download and install some more of the game. I just bought the damn game. Said game comes on a disc, which I just inserted into my computer and installed. Doing so should obtain for me the entire experience for which I paid $50. The only thing I want to be downloading right after installing is the Day 1 patch, and honestly I would prefer that not being neccessary either.
This is not to say that I have anything against ditigal distribution. Far from it, I think it is the future of the industry, but if I choose to buy a game in a store, I should be able to do that. Not whatever fragment of the game the publisher decided to entrust to DVD, the entire damn thing. It would be the equivilent of buying a game from a digital download service, and then being forced to drive to a Gamestop to pick up a disc with some 'free bonus missions' on it.
Also, I object to anything that comes pre produced and included with a product as free. It's not free, it's part of the thing I just paid for. Making me download it doesn't make that any less true. Oh sure, in DA:O's case, they charge you for it if you don't buy a new copy of the game, but the people who buy the game new are still buying the DLC. It's included, not free. I'll accept that DLC is free when it comes out fifteen months after the game, can be downloaded by anybody, and isn't tied to any sort of account. That's free.
Now I'm not the world's largest fan of DLC to begin with. See, back in the day we had these things called 'expansion packs.' Here's how they worked. You gave $30 to somebody or other, and they gave you a product. Not just any product however, this one went with a base game, and expanded it. That's why it was called an expansion pack.
There is, on the surface, something appealing about DLC. It's lots of cheap little bits of game! But that is just my problem. The expansion pack offered often quite sizable editions, entire new campaigns for shooters, factions for strategy games, and new storylines for RPGs. Maybe none of these would be as long as that of the original game, but they were often better polished, more focused, and provided the definitive version of the game. DLC seems to provide little bites of content, a quest here, some armor there, a new companion somewhere else. There are exceptions- Bring Down the Sky for Mass Effect was a sizable sort of quest, but the vast majority I've seen are just a random bunch of new things. There's none of the focus and refinement-let alone the scope- of a good expansion pack.
In conclusion, let's have more expansion packs, less DLC, even less marketing wank about 'free' and a return to things you buy in stores actually being in stores.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Warty goblin vs. Terry Goodkind, also known as Warty Goblin is a damn genius
I just read this on a thread, and while i didn't ask his permission, i hope WG will forgive me for using this excellent summery of the series i hate so much
from
EE
"The thing to remember about Goodkind books is that their quality is inversely porportional to their series number. Wizards First Rule is a good book. The sex and violence might be a bit offensive for some, but it's not really perverse yet, the world is, if not startlingly original, at least competantly executed.
The second book is decent, but could be edited with a chainsaw. Seriously, you could beat somebody to death with the paperback. I'd be afraid to even own the hardback in case somebody tried to pick it up, broke their back and sued me. It's also here that the real rot sets in, although this doesn't become apparent until a few books later.
It's been a while since I read the series, so after that they all sort of start blur, which is more or less the problem. It takes detailed scientific analysis to tell them apart. Until Faith of the Fallen or thereabouts, the following algorithm gives a fairly good representation of a Sword of Truth book.
1) The Bad Guy, Jagang, tries to do something. Often this involves that harbinger of originality's death in fantasy: prophesy.
2) Richard, our strapping hero armed with powers of plot, a very large sword and enough homoerotic imagery to stop a gay pride parade in its tracks, finds out about this. Often he's also kidnapped at this step.
Fill out the next four or five hundred pages with the following, mixed to taste.
A) Jagang has Bad Guy Sex. You can tell because he's into S&M, among other things.
B) Richard Kills People. This always occurs in the written equivilent of slow motion. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that Goodkind only knows how to write about three fight scenes: Richard kills people with a sword, Richard kills people with an axe, and Richard kills people with his hands. All of these involve something that damages the brain, be it blood that apparently has the consistancy of hemp (it's always described as flying about in ropes), or ripping people's spines out through their stomach.
C) Kahlen, Richard's very powerful yet often useless Mandatory Love Interest With Absolutely Enormous Boobs, is almost raped. In the first books this was actually effective, because it showed a certain amount of grit and added tension to the narrative. After the fifteen time or so however one becomes aware that it's really just an excuse to talk about how Kahlen has Ladyparts again. Just in case we'd forgotten. Don't worry about Kahlen ever actually being raped in the SoT series, that only happens to Bad Women and your brain.
D) Something horrible happens to a lot of people. This gives Richard, Kahlen and the rest of the troup of 'good guys' a chance to appear good by figuring out who they need to kill next in order to stop the horrible thing.
E) Richard does something horrible to a lot of people. He then proceeds to explain, in mind violating detail, how he's got the moral clarity neccessary to understand why he had to kill everybody, or collect their ears or something like that, because it's for the Greater Good and Freedom and when the enemy does it it's Wrong and for Slavery. This coming from a guy who rules a kingdom where everybody has to pledge their lives to him every day.
F) Somebody else 'good' does horrible things to people for the Greater Good. This is supposed to make us realize how Absolute and Moral the conflict is, but in fact makes us wonder what the difference between the bad guys and the good guys is, since they both enslave and treat other people's bodies as fashion accessories. At one point an enemy is tortured to death over the course of night or more because he killed somebody one of the main characters liked. That's the sort of 'good guys' we're talking about here.
G) A Kahlen and Richard 'sex' scene. This almost never works out. Sometimes it's because the pair of them are neurotic as hell, sometimes it's because even though they are having sex with each other, neither recognizes the other and thinks its somebody else. Once they do manage to get it on, but it Doesn't Count because it happens on a different plane of existance, so Kahlen's still a virgin. Or something. Honestly that never made any sense to me, I mean either you've had sex or not, right? Or is Kahlen the new Bill Clinton?
At this point Goodkind notices that his word processor is on three or four suicide watch lists, and decides to wrap things up before the pain of containing his afront to the language becomes too much to bear.
The ending will consist of Richard killing somebody, pulling some new powers out of his ass*, waxing moral, and then explaining how they didn't really win because the enemy still controls all this land and there needs to be a sequel so Goodkind can buy a private island, or possibly hire an editor.
*Not literally. Although given Richard, if he ever did need to kill anybody with poop, he'd do in slow motion and sickening detail.
Things change around a bit with Faith of the Fallen wherein Richard builds a statue so beautiful it causes riots and the overthrow of a government. Then things get really, really bad with Naked Empire wherein Richard kills peace protestors because they're filled with hate for Moral Clarity. Richard, of course, is driven by hatred of those who hate Moral Clarity, because Richard loves Moral Clarity, which lets him butcher unarmed people and feel good about it. I stopped reading the series when a major character was erased from existance, causing reality to unravel, because my brain can only take so much abuse."
from
EE
"The thing to remember about Goodkind books is that their quality is inversely porportional to their series number. Wizards First Rule is a good book. The sex and violence might be a bit offensive for some, but it's not really perverse yet, the world is, if not startlingly original, at least competantly executed.
The second book is decent, but could be edited with a chainsaw. Seriously, you could beat somebody to death with the paperback. I'd be afraid to even own the hardback in case somebody tried to pick it up, broke their back and sued me. It's also here that the real rot sets in, although this doesn't become apparent until a few books later.
It's been a while since I read the series, so after that they all sort of start blur, which is more or less the problem. It takes detailed scientific analysis to tell them apart. Until Faith of the Fallen or thereabouts, the following algorithm gives a fairly good representation of a Sword of Truth book.
1) The Bad Guy, Jagang, tries to do something. Often this involves that harbinger of originality's death in fantasy: prophesy.
2) Richard, our strapping hero armed with powers of plot, a very large sword and enough homoerotic imagery to stop a gay pride parade in its tracks, finds out about this. Often he's also kidnapped at this step.
Fill out the next four or five hundred pages with the following, mixed to taste.
A) Jagang has Bad Guy Sex. You can tell because he's into S&M, among other things.
B) Richard Kills People. This always occurs in the written equivilent of slow motion. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that Goodkind only knows how to write about three fight scenes: Richard kills people with a sword, Richard kills people with an axe, and Richard kills people with his hands. All of these involve something that damages the brain, be it blood that apparently has the consistancy of hemp (it's always described as flying about in ropes), or ripping people's spines out through their stomach.
C) Kahlen, Richard's very powerful yet often useless Mandatory Love Interest With Absolutely Enormous Boobs, is almost raped. In the first books this was actually effective, because it showed a certain amount of grit and added tension to the narrative. After the fifteen time or so however one becomes aware that it's really just an excuse to talk about how Kahlen has Ladyparts again. Just in case we'd forgotten. Don't worry about Kahlen ever actually being raped in the SoT series, that only happens to Bad Women and your brain.
D) Something horrible happens to a lot of people. This gives Richard, Kahlen and the rest of the troup of 'good guys' a chance to appear good by figuring out who they need to kill next in order to stop the horrible thing.
E) Richard does something horrible to a lot of people. He then proceeds to explain, in mind violating detail, how he's got the moral clarity neccessary to understand why he had to kill everybody, or collect their ears or something like that, because it's for the Greater Good and Freedom and when the enemy does it it's Wrong and for Slavery. This coming from a guy who rules a kingdom where everybody has to pledge their lives to him every day.
F) Somebody else 'good' does horrible things to people for the Greater Good. This is supposed to make us realize how Absolute and Moral the conflict is, but in fact makes us wonder what the difference between the bad guys and the good guys is, since they both enslave and treat other people's bodies as fashion accessories. At one point an enemy is tortured to death over the course of night or more because he killed somebody one of the main characters liked. That's the sort of 'good guys' we're talking about here.
G) A Kahlen and Richard 'sex' scene. This almost never works out. Sometimes it's because the pair of them are neurotic as hell, sometimes it's because even though they are having sex with each other, neither recognizes the other and thinks its somebody else. Once they do manage to get it on, but it Doesn't Count because it happens on a different plane of existance, so Kahlen's still a virgin. Or something. Honestly that never made any sense to me, I mean either you've had sex or not, right? Or is Kahlen the new Bill Clinton?
At this point Goodkind notices that his word processor is on three or four suicide watch lists, and decides to wrap things up before the pain of containing his afront to the language becomes too much to bear.
The ending will consist of Richard killing somebody, pulling some new powers out of his ass*, waxing moral, and then explaining how they didn't really win because the enemy still controls all this land and there needs to be a sequel so Goodkind can buy a private island, or possibly hire an editor.
*Not literally. Although given Richard, if he ever did need to kill anybody with poop, he'd do in slow motion and sickening detail.
Things change around a bit with Faith of the Fallen wherein Richard builds a statue so beautiful it causes riots and the overthrow of a government. Then things get really, really bad with Naked Empire wherein Richard kills peace protestors because they're filled with hate for Moral Clarity. Richard, of course, is driven by hatred of those who hate Moral Clarity, because Richard loves Moral Clarity, which lets him butcher unarmed people and feel good about it. I stopped reading the series when a major character was erased from existance, causing reality to unravel, because my brain can only take so much abuse."
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