It is undeniable that Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gaming service is regarded as pretty damn good – it has something like 17 million members, and all games on the Xbox 360 integrate into with it.
In the PC world, the bastard cousin of Xbox Live, Games For Windows Live (GFWL), has not fared so well. Only a handful of games make use of the service, and those that do usually suffer because of it. Original adoption of GFWL was always going to be poor – the service launched as a paid subscription service for both the developers and the end user – and in the PC world known for free gaming, that just wasn’t going to cut it. Thankfully late last year with the release of GFW v2, it was made free for both developers and end users – who now get access to all features (like the theoretical-but-in-reality-non-existent Xbox360 <-> PC gaming).
So why has GFWL still fared so poorly despite now being free? Because there is no value to it. I should clarify that. There are features offered by GFWL, but they don’t equate to much because of how poorly implemented or supported they are. The features offered by GFWL are:
In the few games that support GFWL, you can talk to your “LIVE” friends. Don’t confuse these with the same friends on Live Messenger, that is a completely separate and isolated service.
Achievement tracking
Marketplace
In the desktop (or "out of game") client all you can do is connect to the marketplace – it is a glorified web browser. However there is so little content there is no reason you’d use the GFWL marketplace – seven demos, videos of games, and a few addons (although five of those are for Fallout!) You can’t purchase full games – there is no reason to use this over Steam!
The above screenshot is the login screen for the desktop GFWL client – look familiar? It should, it looks like the Windows Live Mesesnger login screen with a different skin applied to it. Surely this desktop client lets you talk to your LIVE friends? Nope! What about at least add/remove friends? Nope! The only way you can manage your friends is through a webpage (www.xbox.com) or through an XBox or XBox 360.
The isolated nature of LIVE friends and Live Messenger contacts lets far inferior chat networks/clients such as Steam or Xfire take over (inferior in terms of people on the networks and chat client features such as logging and less uglyness)
What Microsoft needs to do so that this is no longer taken as a joke is
Turn the desktop client into more than a glorified browser – make it a chat client too. Until you can talk to your LIVE friends at the desktop, the benefits of GFWL in game are also reduced.
Make the desktop client also talk to Messenger network and Messenger network talk to the "LIVE" network If the two clients talked to the same networks, you could choose what IM client you wanted to use (ie, a gamer-centric client, or a general chat client). Perhaps the gamer-centric client could do in game overlays ala XFire/Steam (but not require them to be GFW/GFWL titles)
Get some content Chicken and egg situation – not going to get the content there until it has the userbase, but the userbase is never going to move from Steam or other systems unless the content is there (which is why Steam had such a hard time when it started up).
From the demo, Wet looks an interesting game perhaps not for the game play but the fantastic combination of visual and audio art style. The sound track at every stage in the demo fitted in perfectly with whatever was happening at the time – the visuals were beautiful and fitting for a game trying to be like honk-kong kungfu flicks. The "berserk/blood lust/rage mode" mode (no name was actually given to it in the demo?) which was triggered when blood was splattered over the heroines face, switches the visuals to a cel-shaded like mode, which while simplistic was also beautiful.
Art style aside, the game plays like you’re in a Tarentino film. And like any Tarentino film, this has its ups and downs – the action is great, but apart from fight scenes there isn’t a whole heap actually going on. The story somewhat gets in the way of the killing. I think there was something about revenge.
Back to the game play, you can seamlessly switch from guns or a katana (in the demo you had just akimbo pistols or your sword) and jump around like crazy. Most of the gun play occurs while you’re in the air, sliding on your knees, running along a wall, or sliding down a ladder (holding on with your legs).
There are some quick time events, which are always a negative in my book.. but they seem to be fairly limited and were fairly forgiving too.
I want to buy the game – but I have a feeling it’ll be incredibly repetitive, albeit beautiful, so I think I’ll wait till it is on sale.
If you enjoy (almost) mindless killing of people over and over, with some bullet time thrown in, I think you’ll love this game.
Last Friday (18th) the Deakin MSPs held the first (of hopefully many) annual inter-Uni Xbox 360 Tournament at Deakin Uni (Burwood). 10 teams competed in Halo 3, fighting over 4 x Halo 3 Legendary Edition + Gears of War 2 + Ninja Gaiden 2 + Forza 2 (that was just for first place other games were awarded for the other 3 places)
Several of the teams were very evenly matched, with four of the games ending up at 50-to-49!
With about 50 people show up, it was a great night. Thanks to the guys who helped out setting up and packing up, without their help I don’t think we would have been able to successfully pull of the night!
Congratulations to Cobra Commanders (from Deakin!), who took out first place. Sabo, Camberwell Clowns and Silhouette took out second, third and fourth respectively.
[PROTOTYPE] launched earlier this year on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, developed by Radical Entertainment. Released during June 2009, it was part of several largely hyped, third person, sandbox games launching this year, including inFAMOUS and Red Faction: Guerrilla. I’m late on my review, I know.
This genre has really been defined and refined by the Grand Theft Auto series – the only true standout in the genre thus far, so there are some unavoidable comparisons.
Story
The story goes something like: You’re Alex Mercer, you wake up in a morgue remembering little other than your name, and discover you’ve got two problems: one, you’ve got super powers, two you’re being hunted because you’re infected/have super powers. These super powers give you the ability to shape shift your body into various weapons and armour, as well as take the form and memories of other people by consuming them.
Given the game is of the sandbox genre, it would be fair to expect [PROTOTYPE] to suffers the same as all sandbox games when it comes to pacing. It’s hard/impossible for the developers to set the pace of the game and story when the player is the one who is ultimately calling the shots. It also makes it harder to tell the story as its being interrupted by the pesky player going off and doing side missions. Unfortunately, Radical took it upon themselves to make it even more difficult on themselves by not revealing all of the story unless you “consume” certain VIPs – who are weak and fleshy and will die if you run into them a little too fast.
Gameplay
Like the majority of the Grand Theft Auto series, [PROTOTYPE] is 3D, but unlike GTA, that really does mean every possible direction and dimension – half the game is played on the rooftops or climbing skyscrapers. While it looks and feels awesome to be gliding or scaling huge buildings at first, it becomes tedious as its a rather slow way to move around a rather large city. Red Faction: Guerrilla suffered from the same problem where transport (cars) was the weakest element in the game.
For the most part the difficulty curve is… absolutely broken. The first level is “somewhat towards the end” of the game, a psuedo-tutorial if you like, where you have all your powers/abilities at your disposal. When the level ends, you go back to retell your story to a shadowy figure, losing all your abilities. Assassins Creed did the same thing, and frankly I find it more frustrating than anything. However, this isn’t what breaks the difficulty curve. The game flipflops between being stupidly easy, and setting you up against boss fights or the like which require 10-30minutes because the opponent has so much health/armour that your weaponry – which carves through tanks – is ineffective. Then throw in a section where you lose your abilities? Yeah. Great.
The control system wasn’t exactly intuitive either, which didn’t help the combat system. The combat system lets you activate a variety of powers, the more powerful “moves” resembling more of a Street Fighter/Tekken combo system which (at least on PC) lead me to do one thing – spam light attacks. It was far too easier just to use the “Blade” and just a general “attack” rather than the “twenty five button combo that cuts everything down, but takes three minutes”.
Overall
There are some genuine highlights in this game that you are very unlikely to see in other games, such as the ability to kick a chopper and make it explode. The novelty of these sort of features runs out quickly as the game shows its a little too repetitive.
Overall the game isn’t bad, I’m happy saying that it is good – but it is not great. The poor story, repetitive gameplay and dull graphics (again, they weren’t poor, but they were certainly not great, and the repetitive scenery did not help) are the main detractors, while sense of freedom, encouragement to destroy everything, and some unique gameplay movements are the attractors.
Crysis Wars is now “free to play”…. from yesterday through to the 17th of April (what time zone, I’m not sure). Crysis Wars is the multiplayer component to Crysis Warhead, the standalone expansion to Crysis. It adds several new game play modes which make the game have a Battlefield 2142 or Quake Wars feel to them.
Go to www.mycrysis.com and sign up for a forum account, then hit the key generator to get your key (which you enter inside the game, no during installer).
You’ll need to grab the client download – which weighs in at about 5.5gb – as well as the Crysis Wars 1.4 patch – another 500mb or so. Since I’m Australian, here’s a list of Australian mirrors to download the rather hefty 6gb client – hopefully this will be ‘quota free’ for some of you – I’m with iiNet so I grabbed it from 3FL.
The demo is pretty short for Wanted, you play several uhh.. "zones" inside an airplane which equate to "one level". The problem with this level is that there is so much cover that its impossible or just plain impractical to use the only unique feature of the game/movie – bending the path of a bullet.
Wanted is your generic third person shooter with bullet ‘Assassin Time’ and it has a cover system similar to Gears of War. Unfortunately for Wanted they neglected one particularly important part of the gameplay – the actual shooting. For an apparently ultimate weapon, there is absolutely no accuracy to the way bullets are fired.
OnLive has been making a big stir at GDC2009, but I think it will be a flop. The idea behind OnLive is being able to play your game whereever you are, with whatever devices you have, even if they’re not powerful enough to run said game (Crysis on a netbook would be a good example of this). OnLive achieves this by running the games on their servers ‘in the cloud’, and streaming it to you as a video.
Why it will fail in Australia/other countries
Bandwidth For 800×600, 1.5Mbit/second (1500kbit/second) or 187KB/s is needed. For 1280×720 ("720p"), 4.5Mbit/second or 562.6KB/s is needed turns out its 5MBit/s or 640KB/s. On my previous 1.5Mbit ADSL1 connection, and with the ADSL/TCP overheads, I’m lucky to get 160KB/s. With larger monitors becoming the norm, I can’t see too many people wanting to revert back to lower resolution and lower detail.
Quality As mentioned above, a fairly insane amount of is needed to go to 720p. My monitor runs at 1680×1050 (it’s a 20" but 22" monitors also run at this resolution) – just under twice the amount of pixels. Stretching the image to almost twice its size isn’t going to look good, particularly when you factor in any ‘blocks’ generated by the encoding process. If it has the option to choose your resolution, my monitors native resolution has twice as many pixels as the 720p option, meaning I’d need 1MB/s to play!
Data allowance Australia is known for slower speeds and smaller download quotas, and bandwidth intensive applications can be rather expensive For an hour of gameplay in 720p, I’d churn through just under two gigabytes*. If I was to play an hour a week, that’d be around 8GB/month. What if I’m not the only gamer in the house (and I’m not)? 16GB! On Telstra (not the cheapest, but biggest), that’d set you back a minimum of INSERT NUMBER
(by comparison, currently playing a game online usually doesn’t consume more than 100MB/hour, or 800MB/month in this usage scenario)
* 562.6 (rate per second) * 60 (per minute) * 60 (per hour) / 1024 (making it megabytes instead of kilobytes )= 1977MB.
Latency The biggest problem with gaming with international people is the lag, which is why there are lots of Australian based servers. When the game itself is being served from the US, that’s about a minimum of 250ms delay (make that 500ms – 250ms for you to send a keystroke/mouse movement, 250ms for the results to be sent back to you)
The obvious solution is to have local (at least "continent" level) servers. The downside to this is that it would likely drive up the subscription cost (I presume there will be a subscription to the OnLive service) to regions other than US.
Cost At the end of the day, its going to cost them money to be running the games, and that is going to hit users of the service in the form of subscription fees. Too low isn’t going to make them successful, too high and it’d really be a debate as to if its worth it when you consider the other problems with the server (mentioned above). There has been no information released about price
So if it’s going to fail, why are publishers on board?
The biggest defence of the OnLive system has been "this is the next big thing becausebig name publishers are supporting it’. The market for this type of system is people who can’t afford (or refuse) to buy a computer capable of playing all the games they want. From a publishers perspective, even if OnLive goes bust after a month of operation, that is a market they wouldn’t have tapped even if they gave the game away for free.
My feelings are if it didn’t have the support of at least one major publisher, it wouldn’t even get past the ‘this is a cool concept’ stage, and would end up being like the Phantom console.
Good idea, wrong era
If we fast forward ten, twenty, maybe thirty years time, when everybody has a minimum of a single fibre connection to their house, all the limitations will disappear, and then ‘dumb terminals’ doing all the processing on ‘the cloud’ will be the way to go.
Why is this a one hour in review? Honestly, it was slightly more than one hour, but nowhere near completion. After 16% of the game (the save game tells you how far you’re through the game), I couldn’t stomach the game and uninstalled it.
Far Cry 2 is a sequel to Far Cry in name only despite Ubisoft’s marketing – it features all new characters, vastly different gameplay style, a ‘realistic’ storyline compared to the originals sci-fi, a new engine created from scratch (CryEngine for Far Cry, Dunia Engine for Far Cry 2) and it is even developed by a different company (Crytek created the first, Ubisoft Montreal the ’sequel’).
Despite how little of the game I played, it does get a few things right. The graphics and physics systems combined are fantastic – the day/night cycle gives you a feeling of ‘being in reality’ compared to many games that are a constant day or night depending on the level, despite how many hours you may wait. Fire looks better than in any other game I’ve seen, and given the dry terrain often setting things on fire results in a hasty retreat before the flames consume you!
After you get over the initial ooo-ing and ahh-ing associated with the graphics, you’ll be in for a big disappointment.
While the story in the first Far Cry wasn’t brilliant, at least it was present. Oh, sure, in Far Cry 2 there is some Jackal guy you’re sent to kill, but you manage to mess that up by contracting malaria in your taxi ride from the airport to your hotel. From there on in, it becomes less of an assassination game and more of a mission based, Grand Theft Auto style game, just without the random fun, people, or general filling to the game. Each mission is basically the same, you’re sent to kill some bad guys, well, badder than the guys you’re currently working for, since you eventually switch sides. In each quest I accepted, I was always warned "nobody knows you’re out there, even our guys will shoot you", although apparently they stop giving you the warning in later missions.
Gameplay suffers too, the mechanics have taken a big dive from Far Cry. I remember the fun of being able to crawl under decking and shooting threw the wooden planks, or being able to drive a car that didn’t conk out the moment it went on a gravel road.
The overall world layout was very poorly designed, checkpoints of respawning bad guys (of evidently no affiliation other than "lets kill that guy") are dotted all over the map which makes driving around a real pain in the backside, breaking the flow of the game.
I tried to finish this, and I couldn’t, so even Call of Duty 5 and Spore rank better from me. They took a fun, crazy game and ruined its name by making a boring game, couldn’t come up with a title for it, so stuck Far Cry 2 on it in hopes it would sell.
½ / 5
(Yes, that’s right, half a star out of five, stark contrast to the perfect score some reviews have given it)
I’ve been holding off on putting thought to paper (well, keyboard to bits) for awhile because I wasn’t sure how to approach this.
Without a doubt, Fallout 3 is one of the biggest titles of the year, perhaps the game of the year. Unlike other big name titles it isn’t all about the graphics – but has gorgeous graphics and oozes style; it focuses on a familiar – but not overdone (here’s looking at you Call of Duty 5) post-apocalyptic world; a story driven game – rather than a series of “quests” that just happen to get in your way (Far Cry 2 anyone?); and it is in the style of role playing-first person hybrid which thanks to the V.A.T.S. (“Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System”) gives you the choice of manual or automated firing thus not requiring you to be a trigger-junkie.
For me the most enjoyable aspects were the sci-fi elements. It isn’t the first sci-fi RPG out there but the sheer number of fantasy RPG’s (quality or otherwise) eclipses those that spring to mind. There is something satisfying leveling up and being more efficient with a plasma rifle.
With advances in “gaming technology” its nice to see lots of games benefiting from it. In particular, Fallout 3 is big. I could phrase that better – its fucking big. To walk from one side to the other of the map without going indoors, you’d get no loading screens, but it would take a least half an hour (“real world” time) to do so – and that’s before factoring in combat, repairs, looting, quests, and all the things you’d actually do in the game itself. I really got a sense for how massive the game is.
So seemingly it does everything right? Yeah, well almost. According to my save games, it did take me roughly twenty hours to complete, but a lot of that involved dicking around to see how many ways I could tick certain people off or explode super mutants with mini-nukes. If you drilled down to the core story of the game, even venturing out for some of the side quests the main story would be abruptly over in under ten hours. By todays “standards”, ten hours certainly isn’t anything to scoff at (again, Call of Duty 5 proves that), but the majority of that time involves traversing the Wastelands on foot, and storyline does conclude very suddenly and unfortunately in a way that does not give credit to the rest of the game. Okay, I’ll stop beating around the bush, the ending was balls.
There are other problems too. The level cap is set to twenty, which does take some time to get to – I had finished the game at level 13 – but finishing a few more of the side quests wouldn’t have made it that hard to reach the cap. The real problem however, is that at level 13 I was indestructible. Armed with a heavily (self-repaired and thus self-upgraded) unique plasma rifle, and protected with Enclave Telsa Armour, nothing but several Deathclaws could take me down, and at that stage I had only ever seen one at a time. It wasn’t a matter of difficulty so much as I was single shot killing everything because of the mechanics of upgrading/repairing guns, combined with a high energy weapon proficiency.
Despite the flaws of the game, it was genuinely fun to play. I’ve spent many more hours going back to save games near the end and detouring to explore the rest of the Wastelands and to finish off side quests. I played it on PC so I can’t vouch how the experience is on a console (available on PS3/Xbox 360), but the overall game play should be so similar that I’ll give it a universal highly recommended – go out and get it, or at least find somebody who has it to take a look at it for yourself as there is no demo available.
Bottom line? If you like RPG’s, get it. If you like shooters, get it. If you like a good story, get it.
Which possible war could a shooter choose to focus on to become the next big success? You guessed right, World War II! This war certainly hasn’t been done to death in the movie, documentary, or gaming genres. World War II games have become like a lot of sports game franchises – a new one is released every year with upgraded graphics and new players licensed.
Call of Duty World at War (CoDWaW) marks the fourth (sixth if you include the United Offensive expansion and the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube exclusive Call of Duty 2: Big Red One) game in the Call of Duty (CoD) series to focus on World War II. I suppose by focusing on World War II the game becomes cheaper to produce as they certainly don’t need to employee any story writers. Sadly Treyarch also decided not to employee too people to focus on the single player either, which despite the fun of a limitless flame thrower, was still a woefully short three hours of wave after wave of either Nazi’s or screaming Japanese soldiers.
Treyarch seemingly thought to very little about growing the series leaving that up to Infinity Ward, who have made the only decent Call of Duty games (1, 2 & 4). CoDWaW is a modified version of the CoD4 engine – they’ve added up to four player co-op to parts of the campaign, but visually and game mechanic wise it feels like a step back. The game plays more like a “rails” shooter (ie Time Crisis or House of the Dead) with a lot of invisible walls restricting where you can or can’t go – I came across a few open doors that I simply couldn’t walk through – and I was propelled forward to my death on more than one occasion when my AI teammates decided to walk into me.
AI might be a little too kind, AS (Artificial Stupidity) might be more accurate. My main gripe with the first CoD game was that you single handedly had to do absolutely everything as your team mates couldn’t hit the side of a barn from point blank range. As the series as progressed, the AI has slowly learnt how to fire a gun and even better than that, not relied on you to do absolutely everything to win the war. Unfortunately, CoDWaW makes another step backwards here and the AI again requires every objective to be completed by the player, which seemingly extends to killing every opponent. In CoD4 I noticed my AI allies would at least throw back grenades if they were close enough – in CoDWaW my allied AI aimed their grenades at me, killing me on numerous occasions.
If you love the Call of Duty series I would still recommend CoD4 (price alone makes it better value, let alone the better gameplay and larger single player campaign), but if you prefer a WW2 shooter and have no interest in single player this might be for you.
WW2 Shooter + no visual improvements + incredibly short campaign = One and a half out of five from me.
