Dusty Gamer

Some initial thoughts on Rock Band, after a couple of nights of playing with friends at home, instead of special occasions.

The Marshmallow Mod works. It doesn’t make the drums quiet, but the mechanical volume is now in line with the clickety-click of the Guitar Hero III wireless Les Pauls and the singing. I had to add some more tape to hold the cushions in place over the ends of the drum sticks. I do consider making the cushions even thicker once it’s time to replace the current ones.

I’m still left wanting for a microphone stand and a drum throne. Both of these cost around 30 USD, so I’m probably going to shell out for them. Especially the drum throne would be useful, and the mic stand is just essential for the feel.

The game’s frontend design has issues. While the game did mention it, I didn’t realize that the band leader was both permanent and actually tied to a single, role-specific character. I thought it meant just the gamer profile! So once I accidentally became the band leader on the drums, we couldn’t play without the drums. The second time, we accidentally created a band with a fronting vocalist - again, no playing without someone on the mic. Last night, we erased the non-functional bands and took pains to create new ones, with only guitarists leading, as we think we’ll always be playing at least one guitar when putting the bad together for a session. Not being able to shift the band leader status to another instrument or character feels like bad design to me. Based on the amount of online writing about this, I’m not the only one who’s learned about this the hard way - wasting a couple of nights’ worth of playing time.

It also looks like you need to create a separate character for every instrument you want to play with one gamer profile. That’s just dumb. Why can’t you use the character you’ve already designed for another role?

All that said, major respect to Harmonix for creating a frontend with easily legible typefaces, even on a small SDTV display.

I’ve played through most of the single player side of Battlefield: Bad Company over the weekend.

Once again I am reminded of the inadequacy of the PlayStation controls (be it Dualshock or Sixaxis or whatever) in first-person shooters. The dead zone in the sticks is too large for precise control. Getting your sights lined with faraway targets is harder than it should be, the pixel-precise movements being too much for the pad. I would’ve appreciated better automatic targeting to help with the control issue. I doubt this is a problem on the Xbox 360, but I haven’t seen that version yet. It’s nothing game-breaking, but an annoyance nevertheless.

Overall, the single player story is a major step up from the rudimentary solo mode of previous Battlefields. The writing is solid and I’m actually looking forward to how it all plays out, in the end. The characters are one-dimensional cardboard cutouts, but the dialogue is mostly entertaining, once you get past the thoroughly cliched military jargon.

The gameplay is solid, with a few gripes. The sandboxy feel of Battlefield, complete with heavy armor, aircraft and artillery is all there, bound together by a minimal amount of scripting. It lends a wonderful feel of letting the player find his own approach. Should you take that APC or run through the enemy, one building at a time? Or make a run for that fortified position and use their grenade launcher against them? It’s full of moments where you’re hiding in a bush, armed with nothing but a sniper rifle and a grenade, wondering what you’ll do about the heavy tank hunting you. Or deciding between carrying a laser-guidance system for air support and a bazooka. The levels are open wide, leaving you to find your own path, with one pretty clear objective at a time to keep it from becoming overwhelming. Overall, I like the structure.

There are two problems. First, most of the time your three invincible squadmates are incapable of approaching situations in a useful way. Like using that bazooka they’re always carrying to take out the tank that’s bearing down on you. Second, it doesn’t much matter where you come into a situation, because the intensity is always cranked up to eleven.

Now, the mostly entirely destructible environment is a great thing. One second you’re reloading behind a stone wall, the next you can’t hear anything and turn around to see that the wall is no longer there. The problem is that because of all the very heavy weapons used and the ridiculous amounts of exploding objects scattered everywhere, everything is blowing up all the time. You don’t get any highs or lows - it’s a glorious mess, all the time.

Which is fine, in itself. With the amount of vehicles at your disposal, it doesn’t really get old. There’s always something else to do right around the corner. But the best moments can get lost in the chaos. There is a great scene played out with tanks on a golf course, and an infantry assault through a palace garden, and an escape in a pimped-out HIND… It’s stuff that could’ve made a much stronger game, had the designers eased up on the throttle a bit.

The amount of destruction leads you to injecting yourself with adrenaline about once a minute to top up your health. It’s a little ridiculous, and I feel they should’ve been able to think of something else. The way checkpoints are used doesn’t really gel with me, either. Once you’ve messed up your approach, you’ll restart from the checkpoint - only the mess you made in your previous attempt is still there. I would’ve rather started over and tried something else.

The Battlefield feel is weakened by the player’s four-man squad always going at it alone. You’d like a proper fighting force to tag along with every once in a while. Regardless, it’s a step up for Battlefield, and I can’t wait to see how the multiplayer holds up.

Bad Company is out this Thursday in Europe.

We ordered Guitar Hero II along with Rock Band, as long as it’s still available. Besides, III’s about done and dusted by now. I’m taking my first steps on Hard, and it’s so much hard, frustrating work that I don’t think I’m going to bother.

I have played Guitar Hero II previously, but not in the peace of my own home. I’m surprised by a couple of things. First are the songs: I’ve been pampered by the many original recordings featured in GH III and especially Rock Band that a game full of covers of dubious quality is not very pleasing. Wolfmother’s “Woman” was not the ride it should be. I’m only halfway through the game, but it does feel that they’ve really stepped up their game with the songlists in the successing titles. It’s not bad by any means, but highpoints are few and far between. I downloaded the Guitar Hero I song packs to get some of the best tunes in the series to boost the setlist, though.

The second surprising thing are the graphics. Obviously they’re of a lower quality, having been ported from the Playstation 2 original and having not had the budget of the later titles, but I feel that functionally they’re weaker than GH III. I find it hard to read the colors and it took some time before I learned how to spot the hammer-ons and pull-offs. It could do with a lot more contrast, which is exactly what GH III did with the visuals. The Star Power effect is rather jarring as well, whereas in GH III it does not hinder your play. Stylistically, it’s great, no gripes there.

Finally comes the notation, the way the “notes” are arranged to the music. This is the one thing I’ve heard a lot of criticism about in regards to GH III and upon playing GH II, the difference is immediately apparent. Since I’m no musician, I can’t even tell whether it follows the music more closely, or what, but it just feels better. It’s more fun to play GH II, even though I’ve played GH III a lot. Especially playing on Hard is a whole different world. It feels manageable, not a full-on slaughter of the hapless player who wanted to see if he would be up to handling the dreaded, coveted, fifth, orange fret. Sure, you miss notes while learning, but it feels like you could make it with a little practice.

And what of Rock Band? We ordered the instrument edition from Amazon UK, which was delivered in less than a day, and the game DVD from Play UK, which has now taken too much time (four days) to make it here in time for our Midsummer’s Eve celebration tomorrow. I’d swear, if it wasn’t in poor taste.

I did spend one night during the week to put together my version of the marshmallow mod. I couldn’t find any self-adhesive weather stripping - I just used foam plastic, cut into a strip from a seat covering and put it together into a pretty tight package with some canvas tape, the kind you’d use on tools and ice hockey sticks to get a better grip. I thought that masking tape wouldn’t be strong enough and it might leave a sticky film on the drums. Plus the canvas tape is a cool black color! I don’t yet know if it’s quiet enough or durable enough, but they look pretty spiffy.

I first played Enemy Territory: Quake Wars back when the PC version launched, but it failed to grasp my attention. I was probably too much into Call Of Duty 4 at the time. Now that the console versions have arrived, I took another dip in it.

Initial impressions are not too good. The controls are fine, but the overall feel is a bit… unconnected. The physics are floaty, the vehicles don’t handle too well, most of the weapons lack punch, your shots don’t really seem to connect, the explosions look lame, the voice acting is from an altogether different game (Tribes 2 comes to mind), the animation especially looks like it belongs in a bygone age.

I gave it the single-player campaign’s (if you can call twelve bot matches “a campaign”) worth of time and what do you know - after some ten or so rounds, amounting to maybe three hours in total, things clicked.

The premise is strong. I don’t know about the Strogg as an enemy, they seem like rejected concept art for Star Trek’s Borg, but kicking alien butt off-Earth has always been a sound base for entertainment. I also like the way the game is set in modern Earth, albeit with a scifi take. Again, kicking alien butt on contemporary Earth is where it’s at. The looks veer a bit too much on the brown side, but there is a better variety of brown than in many other modern shooters. They could’ve gone to town with some lush woods or something, though. The very well-designed props help matters quite a bit. The human side has a cool Aliens vibe to it, with functional look and feel.

Once you get your head around the multi-staged levels and the various classes, tactics come together at a rapid pace, following the distinct rhythm of the missions, with a build-up followed by a strong push taking place over usually three steps. (That is, unless the defenders fight back.) You’ll be placing turrets, ambushing enemy patrols and staging raids in no time. One thing I like is the way it tells you whether your current class can complete the current objective and whether your team already has the required class deployed (and if so, how many).

The game could use more players, as eight per side isn’t quite enough for the kind of warfare the game depicts. Regardless, the scale is pretty much spot on, leaving just enough room for vehicle maneuvering and blindsiding, yet keeping the approaches clear enough to be confident in staging your defenses. Vehicles and air drops keep the action feeling dynamic and bombastic enough.

I have rarely played a game with so much slow-burning appeal. After the very underwhelming first steps, I’m now looking forward to taking it online, as for up to now I’ve been learning the ropes with just bots. I don’t know about the online popularity though, as the game really requires you to put in some time before it connects.

The dead guys in Ninja Gaiden II hang around. It felt so natural, I didn’t think to mention it when discussing the game, but I feel this is the way it should be. It’s not just the bodies, either - it’s the blood stains and stray body parts as well. It can get a little grisly.

Someone really needs to remake Nemesis The Warlock. In this classic C64 game with an immortal soundtrack (o2 remix here), you built platforms out of the dead bodies of your enemies to get around. It was surreal. I’m not sure I could stomach it with Ninja Gaiden level graphics, mind, but I’d sure like to see it.

Ninja Gaiden II is out and I’ve played the part for three chapters’ worth, all the way up to the first “Game Over” screen I got. I am not sure I want to continue.

I played the original a lot, completing it on all difficulty levels and I think twice on the hardest. It was one of the defining games of the last console generation for me. It had three problems: the art direction was at times uninspired and juvenile, the difficulty level was too much for some, although it was always fair, and the camera should have been better. I never found the original’s camera that much of a problem, but it was critiqued en masse regardless.

The much-awaited sequel ups the ante across the board, and unfortunately that goes for all of the problems, as well. Bizarrely, the game has become more accessible to less dedicated gamers by rethinking its checkpoint and health system to a far more forgiving model, yet it’s more difficult than it ever was.

The health system is great, actually: if you survive a fight, you get back to full health quickly, except if you’ve really taken a beating, when some of your health goes away for good. It doesn’t feel cheap, because most fights are very big and intense. You’ll be glad to survive.

The problem with the difficulty is two-fold. For one thing, the game relies on bombarding you with constant missile fire. These are hard to block and very hard to dodge, which becomes frustrating in no time. The missiles tend to come in salvos, where the first one breaks your block, the next one hurts you and the third one throws you back, leaving you wide open for attack by the group of enemies in melee range. In a game with a supremely fine-tuned melee combat system, this reliance on its frankly broken ranged combat is, well, foolish.

The other problem with the difficulty ties into the larger issue of the camera. It’s broken beyond repair. Whereas the original’s camera sometimes left you without a clear view of the enemy, the sequel’s camera cannot follow you at all. Most of the time, you’re not actually seeing the fight. In a game requiring very precise combat control and timing, this is unforgivable. You can control the camera with the right stick and center it with the right trigger, but it swings into a useless angle within the next move you make, and besides, you need your right thumb on the face buttons all the time to attack. You might be alright in an open space, but you’ll be doing a lot of close quarters slashing in cramped corridors. You might be alright if all you do is block, but most of your moves zoom you off, way off-screen, in the blink of an eye.

The art direction is better than it used to be, the characters aren’t quite as ridiculous as they were, but we’re not out of the woods yet. This is a “CIA agent” (via Costume GET!). Overall, I’m not getting that “next-gen/current-gen” vibe when comparing it to the very accomplisehd last-gen version, obviously apart from the HD makeover. The cutscenes are not good at all, the animation and characters don’t work in closeups and the lighting is flat. It looks great in action, not so much when standing still.

The locations are more engaging and I appreciate the old-school approach in the first level. Some of the weird, entirely unrealistic settings remind me of the series’ 8-bit origins. It’s great, especially because the fights are huge and much faster than the original’s.

This time Europe is not getting a censored version, which would’ve been impossible, anyway, due to the amount of flying limbs and heads on-screen at any time. Finishing off de-limbed enemies becomes a priority, as they can execute a very nasty suicide attack, if they can creep up to you without legs, that is. It might look nasty, but possibly because of the insane speed and overall clinical properties of the visuals, it just feels like a ninja title should. The gore doesn’t bother me here.

And the shuriken are useless as ever. I don’t know. It should have been so much more, yet I think I’ll keep trying, because when it works, there’s nothing in action gaming that comes even close. It’s out next Friday in Europe.

I didn’t really believe I’d see this day.

Codemasters’ new entry to the driving simulator genre, crowded by the likes of Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo, feels like a very strong, bullish title. The presentation is top-notch. What really got my attention was the way they’ve made it feel like motorsports. The titular grid is a noisy, energetic place, with engine and crowd noise and great-looking smoke.

Going through my first few races, I was surprised by how difficult it was. I’ve played a lot of Project Gotham and some of the more direct competition, yet I had to restart two out of three races several times to get through in one piece. The difficulty is mostly a consequence of the damage modelling: it’s really quite easy to smash your car into a wreck or bang it up so much that you can’t really win anymore. The competition doesn’t drive badly, either. Not crashing is not enough to win the day, you need to be proficient in your racing.

They have tried to resolve the difficulty question with an instant replay feature. At any point in the game, you can pause and rewind for some 10 seconds or so and continue from a point you choose, hopefully clearing that corner in a balletic, not headbanging fashion. The feature helps the newbie and takes away most of the frustration often evident in the genre’s offerings, where one bad corner can cost you a long race. However, it’s too slow to engage and you can’t help but feel it’s a crutch to a problem they couldn’t quite resolve. Granted, I’m only a few races in, but the rewind doesn’t feel like it belongs. That’s not to say I wouldn’t use it, though.

We’re used to pretty graphics by now, but Grid did open my eyes. Gran Turismo’s or even Gotham’s slick cities have nothing on this beast. There’s grit and life here, all galloping along in a very smooth manner, with lots of cars and a good sense of speed. You can smell the burning rubber. They’ve gone overboard with post-processing, resulting in a sort of supra-realistic, better-than-life image. It’s very pleasing to watch.

The game is out tomorrow in Europe, I think, and I reckon I’ll be playing quite a bit of it over the summer.

Mike “Gabe” Krahulik and Jerry “Tycho” Holkins, the creators of the Penny Arcade comic, have worked on their own videogame for some time now. It is an odd proposition: a comic commenting/venting on videogames releases a videogame, based on itself. If you’re a PA fan, this may seem slightly less unfathomable, but even still, one wonders if they know what they’re getting into. They’ve been very vocal about their misgivings of the game industry, the media, the fans and all that is associated with the medium, and surely this is a great time to tear them a new one.

I was very interested in the game from the get-go. The guys’ taste in games is pretty close to mine and they are champions of things very dear to me, such as red d20s and the Cthulhu Mythos. They’ve explained that once they realized they could make a game (because of their considerable fanbase, almost guaranteed to buy it), they had to do it. What videogame fan wouldn’t jump on the chance? Thus I wasn’t looking forward to a Penny Arcade -themed game per se, but rather to Mike’s and Jerry’s attempt at creating a videogame.

It is a strange beast, this On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (episode one). You move around a sort of steampunkish, noir New York of 1920s, solve simple puzzles, fight Fruit Fuckers, hobos and mimes, and read lots of text. The PA element comes from the distinctive art and the style of the writing. Design-wise, it’s a kind of old-school point and click (advised by the mighty Ron Gilbert) meets Final Fantasy, albeit with more interesting combat. There’s a demo available for PC, Mac, Linux and the Xbox 360, go check it out.

The art is gorgeous and the limited in scope character generator works very well. Your character looks exactly like a Penny Arcade cartoon and he’s both 2D and 3D, as is all of the game world. The cut scenes are static comic panels, whereas the main game works in 3D. My brain doesn’t quite get around how it works, but it does look wonderful.

The combat is the main ingredient here and it takes a novel approach, stealing from all over the place, but bringing it all together in a new way. It’s basically classic Final Fantasy fare, with rows of combatants taking turns to hit each other. Except it never pauses. You’re waiting for your guys’ action gauges to fill to be able to use items, attack, or use special attacks, all the while watching the enemies closely, because you need to time a block attempt every time an enemy attacks. Initially it’s bewildering, but you soon get the hang of it. I quite like the system.

I’m not done with the game yet, but I’m happy with what I’ve had thus far. Good stuff, but probably only for fans of the comic. There isn’t so many in-jokes, but you either like their style or not. There’s a lot of swearing, animated gore and offensive themes, granting this a PEGI rating of 18+, effectively off-limits to minors.