Odds! Ends! Osu!

This will be a shorter post than some of my recent epics and really serves to just give a quick update on some things.

Firstly, following yesterday’s post I recieved some criticism of the final point about using the mentality of “great sales = great game”. It was pointed out to me that this was a twisting of the original message. The correct message would have been to state that, had the games under discussion not been great games then they wouldn’t have sold like they did (we’re primarily talking about Halo here). Which, whilst an easier to swallow mentality is just as flawed as the sales=greatness one. A good game should sell well. However the suggestion that its quality is the driving factor for it’s sales is far too idealistic to be taken seriously – particularly of a game like Halo. This notion is further disproved when you look at the current game charts and see a game that’s scored very average reviews dominating the charts in the way that the Spiderman 3 game is. At the end of this week the poorly reviewed Pirates of the Carribbean 3 tie-in game will be released and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it mimic Spiderman 3’s performance. We have Shrek 3 to look forward to next. A game like Halo benefits precisely from the same status as a film-tie in – it’s profile has been manufactured to be very high indeed. Far higher than the quality of its content. Halo 2 and, of course Halo 3, will sell because they’re called Halo more than anything else.

Quality should sell a product – but it doesn’t. It’s a factor but it’s not going to make a difference if the carefully calculated positioning of media, tie-ins, promotions, publicity, and sheer might that some companies wield. Sorry, but that’s a fact and examples are everywhere. Now, it’s nice when that works in your favour and you’re a Halo fan. But gamers will argue the exact same things when they feel a game they like isn’t getting sales it ‘deserves’ due to a game they don’t like dominating the charts. Remove your emotional attachment to the game and look objectively at the product, the market and the economics and you’ll see how it works. Choosing examples selectively isn’t really a watertight argument.

On a less controversial note I’d like to let regular readers of Koffdrop.com know that the site will soon be publishing it’s first guest-written piece. At this time I have absolutely no information to share with you as to the tone or content. All I can say is that I know the author very well and have always appreciated his input into topics we discuss. Look out for it!

Finally, the Ouendan 2 soundtrack is available to you via the Koffdrop.com files area. This isn’t an official soundtrack but a collection of all the individual songs that feature in the game (yes, there’s a difference between the two). I’m enjoying this soundtrack as much as the original and favour tracks 19 and 16 in particular. 16 is an especially good example of some absolutely batshit bonkers over-the-top j-pop-screaming. The game’s not bad either. Enjoy.

Beaten – Psychonauts

I guess, strictly speaking, I’ve also beaten Crackdown on the 360 as I’ve got through the core game. However, beating a 360 game isn’t like beating most videogames as there’s a sense of dissatisfaction in knowing there’s gamerpoints out there you haven’t earned. Does beating the core game equal beating the game or do you only qualify if you’ve maxed out your points? Either way, I’d gorged on Crackdown and decided to lend it out to a work colleague ahead of the Halol 3 Beta last week. IN YOUR FACE BUNGIE! HA!

I felt like I shouldn’t forget my older consoles – partly because they’re still great machines and partly because I’ve still got dozens of unstarted/unfinished games on them. I’d made a shortlist of titles I’d really wanted to spend some serious time with and Psychonauts found it’s way into my console and free time.

I’ve known of the pedigree of this game for quite some time. I, like many, am a big fan of Grim Fandango so I expected good things from the same creative minds. I knew of the game’s critical acclaim and limited commercial success. I was expecting something special.

Psychonauts, if you’re unfamiliar, is a platform game with a strong accent on item collection. The game mechanics are not that remarkable – your character runs, jumps, climbs, collects, double-jumps and so forth but he’s no Prince of Persia. Initially you’ll be doing your thing around a pretty safe woodland camp environment. The setting for the game is that you are Ras, a youngster at a woodland summer camp for psychicly gifted youngsters. You dream of being a Psychonaut – a sort of psychic ambassador, a righter of wrongs. The game sends you off on your first mission (Basic Braining) to show you some of the ropes. Whilst the run, jump, collect stuff is pretty basic fayre it’s the setting that makes the difference. All the plot-driving levels in Psychonauts take place within the mind of the protagonists. In this training level you’re in the mind of an over-zealous army captain. Bombs, scarred landscapes, planes, guns, and all the other iconic imagery of battle is present. Guidance and orders come in the form of black-and-white newsreel style projections against the landscape rather than some text at the bottom of the screen. Amongst all of this you have collectable items (figments of imagination) that will advance your character’s skills once certain targets are met. Other special collectables include cobwebs of old memories that you can only clean away with an item purchased later in the game. There is also emotional baggage that needs to be paired up with the appropriate luggage tag in order to be collected. Collection completists will have fun here – none of the collectables are essential (the closest to an essential are the figments and they are in abundance) and everything can be tracked on a helpful status page. Collecting all of a certain item will yield a reward in the form of extra information or advancements to your character. In my experience of the game none of these extras are necessary but getting them enhances the stories and characters.

As the game progresses you spend time with other trainers – each with distinctive mentalities – that arm you with extra skills such as shooting a mind-blast against distant foes or learning the incredibly useful skill of levitating which enhances running and jumping abilities and can significantly speed up navigation. Other skills involve telekenisis, shields and invisibility.

To the game’s credit, none of these abilities is wasted and in the later levels there is a strong problem-solving element that comes to play and you will call upon your arsenal of psychic powers to get the better of these challenges. Telekenisis, for example, can be very useful – allowing you to see what others are seeing. At one stage of the game you enter a totally pitch black area but you can hear camera lenses refocusing. If you engage your TK power you see what the cameras see (in all their green-screen, interlaced glory) and you can then navigate the room with relative ease.

Some of the platform challenges are pretty original. Part of this is as a result of the game’s disregard for the law of gravity in some stages. It’s a good example of taking the scenario of being in someone’s mind and taking full creative licence with it. There is one level set in a quaint, white-picket fence american style neighbourhood – except the layout of the level is like something from an Escher painting with a splash of Dali thrown in for good measure. Up equals up in many places but not all. An earlier stage is set on a large cube. Run off the edge and the cube simply rotates around so that its side becomes the floor. Shenanigans ensue.

This sense of cheeky creativity is what elevates this game from satisfyingly competent platform adventure to something in a class of its own.

Firstly, the structure of the game levels and story allows a degree of creative freedom. Each mind that you enter is it’s own story and doesn’t need to relate to a previous level. You spend time in the ‘real’ world, of course but that seem quite pedestrian by comparison. Secondly, the human psyche is a rich environment to draw inspiration from. As mentioned before, there are stages set in the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic but also others set in the mind of a traumatised fallen-from-grace actress, a delude, broken hearted artist, a character plagued by the weight of expectation due to the heritage of his family name and even the mind of a mistreated, malformed fish. This fish level is more fun that it rightly deserves to be as, in the mind of the character, you are a Godzilla-like giant rampaging across his homeland. The scale of the environment changes accordingly and there’s cute narrative jibes at the cliches you might see in a japanese monster movie in addition to anything directly relevent to the game and characters themselves.

It’s fair to say that every mind you enter is a small game in itself and there’s tangible excitement when entering a new mind as you really have no idea what you’re in for other than it should be inventive, contextually correct and very entertaining. Rarely have I seen such fun and cleverness combined to such degree for the pleasure of the end user – typically the most memorable examples tend to be from those legendary Lucasfilm adventures and, of course, that makes perfect sense given the heritage of the team behind Psychonauts.

There’s a startling number of distinctive characters in the game. Starting out in the summer camp you’ll encounter over a dozen fellow campers (complete with camp bully and sidekick) who have plenty to say and do. Your trainers are great characters and Milla Vodello, the woman who teaches Levitation class is a wonderfully accented 60’s plaything and easily a match for Austin Powers. You’ll meet a number of plot-pushing characters and, nearer then end of the game, spend some time in a lunatic asylum whose inmate are pretty interesting characters. There’s lots to see and do around these folk and everything works as a cohesive whole. None of the characters are fleshed out in epic war-and-piece detail but there’s more than enough going on to put plenty of flesh on the narrative bones. There’s even a bit of love-interest for our hero that isn’t as cringe-worthy as it might sound.

Visually this game is pretty different. The art style is consistently imaginative and unconventional (for videogames) with a splash of a saturday morning kids show appeal to it. It’s crude in some areas but always effective at communicating precisely what is required without limiting the game’s sense of fun or cleverness. I’d go as far to say the visual style of the game is as distinctive as that of a game like Shadow of the Colossus and works brilliantly. It may not be to everyone’s tastes but I truly feel it would be a shame to let a disagreement about style turn you away from such a rewarding experience. The game is as accomplished aurally as it is visually and narratively. Great music accompanies every area adding precisely the right mood for each. There’s some superb voice acting going on here too – there really is nothing to complain about!

Psychonauts is a game full of moments and observations. All of them positive. It would be very easy to have a long conversation about ‘favourite moments’ throughout the game as it’s endlessly charming and amusing. Hell, even the method you start the game outshines most others! It’s truly a game I’ve enjoyed from start to finish and my only regret is that I didn’t play it sooner.

If you want to learn a lot more about it, check out it’s Wikipedia page. Psychonauts is available for PS2, Xbox (backwardly compatible via 360) and PC. The PC version can be purchased through Valve’s STEAM service. You’ve no excuse!

Fore!

As the eagle-eyed amongst will have already spotted, the Koffdrop.com sidebar now houses a ‘Currently Enjoying’ section. No prizes for guessing the nature of the content in that little area!

The two games I’ve been playing the most in recent times have been EA’s Tiger Woods 07 on the 360 and also Psychonauts on the PS2. Going from an HD 360 game to a PS2 game that, even on it’s release, was a little weak graphically and ran below 30 frames per second is a little unwieldy but I think it’s worth it.

Anyway, I’m a sucker for golf games. I don’t know why. I don’t watch or play the sport. I’ve enjoyed the games since before Leaderboard on the good old C64 with highlights being the original EA PGA games on PC and the Jack Nicklaus games. There’s a lot about Tiger Woods 07 that I like. I think the core golfing game is rock solid and, although it trips me up a lot, the swinging and aiming motion are a lot more appropriate the the 3-click method that used to be the staple control for golf games for aeons.

And whilst I believe EA’s effort plays a great game of golf there’s some really major blunders in some of the game’s interface and communications that leave me wondering what went on.

Now, I’m no EA hater. I don’t begrudge a company making heaps of cash (no, not even Nintendo). I respect a company that is smart and shrewd enough to know how to play the business game to maximum effect and I totally believe EA deserve to be where they are. I think they’re bloody great at what they do and receive an incredible amount of flak from people who neither understand games or the business of games. So I’m not going to rant and say EA suck, I’m going to detail the poorer aspects they’ve made in an otherwise very enjoyable and compelling golf game.

Menus are a bit of a pain to navigate. This is mainly as a result of the lack of wrap-around in them. You know the bit where you’re at the topmost item and tap UP on the controller and you expect the highlight to move to the bottom-most item? Doesn’t happen.

Having said that, the way you a sort of preview of the sub-menu before you select it can be useful and save a bit of to-ing and fro-ing.

Shopping is definitely something that is more trouble than it may be worth. You play the game, you earn winnings. You spend winnings on numerous items of clothing and accessories. You can choose clothing for it’s superficial qualities but many of the items you can buy modify your stats to some degree. When you’re looking through the catalogue you are shown what stat(s) may be modified and by what degree. So far, so good. The problem arises in that, if you are already using an item that modifies your stats the game doesn’t compare that item to the one you’re considering purchasing automatically. If you want to check this you have to navigate to the item you’re using, mentally note it’s qualities, go back to the new item and make a mental comparison.

This just makes the experience more longwinded and less helpful than it really needs to be. For example, you may have decided to push a specific stat up. Well, if you’re going to make the most of it you need to check all your in-use items to determine which ones affect the particular stat you’re interested in and then work through the items in other areas to see what works best.

This situation is actually made more unhelpful in that many items affect more than one type of statistic. Sure, this is common for games where you equip your character with stat-modifying items but, in nearly every game I’ve seen, you can see the effects on all your stats before you commit to any change. In Tiger Woods ’07 there is one screen to view each item’s stats (one at a time) and a totally seperate screen to display your stats. The bulk of the item select screen is occupied with your game avatar which displays and animates in accordance to the accessories you happen equipped with or previewing. This is completely superficial and, I imagine, could have been swapped with a stats display. The simplest way of having the best of both worlds would have been to add a button to change this area between stats and graphical avatar.
It’s kind of odd that there’s a very useful filtering option in the catalogue that allows you to display items that fit a certain criteria (own/don’t own, locked/unlocked, level 1/2/3/4 etc). I’m no stranger to the amount of work and thought that goes into a game’s interface design but it is almost immediately apparant that this is a far more uncomfortable experience than it needed to be. I’m led to wondering if this was made deliberately obtuse so as to make it a little less likely that players would modify their stats too easily. If that was the case then deliberately clunking up the interface is as graceful a way of controlling that situation as games using invisible walls to pen you in was.

All in all, the shopping experience is where you spend your prize money. You pick and choose your rewards. This should be simple and satisfying. It’s a shame that it’s not either of those things.

EA Trax – No. I’m not going to bemoan EA’s choice of muzak in their games. I totally understand their branding and efforts here. My TV has a volume control and the game has enough options to make this as unobtrusive as anyone wishes. Music is so ridiculously subjective that nobody will ever be totally satisfied with someone elses choice of playlist anyway so, really, bitching about music in EA Trax playlists is just a waste of time.

There is a reason I need to turn EA Trax off though.

When playing a round of golf in Tiger Woods ’97 the bottom left of the screen neatly and concisely displays information about your shot. The club, the distance from the pin, the lie of the ball, percentages and (I think) wind speed and direction. It’s all there. (although par and yardage wouldn’t have hurt either). It’s neat, it’s functional, it works.

Thing is, when a new track starts playing, this information panel is entirely obscured by the pop-up EA Trax information panel showing song, band and label information. This panel stays on screen for about 5 seconds before sliding away again.
When I say the shot area is obscured I don’t meant partially or that it becomes semi-transparent. The entire area, pixel for pixel, is replaced by the EA Trax panel. Now, considering there’s three other corners of the screen the game could be using its amazingly strange and inconvenient that EA chose to use the exact size, shape and placement of the essential shot information area to display their EA Trax information. The solution would be simple – use another corner!

Now, I’m absolutely certain that EA have to show the EA Trax information if they’re playing licenced music. That’s all probably detailed in a long and boring contract. That’s fine, I accept that. It’s also very possible that, since many EA games use the EA Trax thing that, development wise, there’s chunk of code that deals with this that’s simply plugged into varios EA games. It would make sense – why write the same code to do the same function over and over again – write it once, use it many times. So, maybe that’s what they do and maybe I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the placement of the EA Trax panel is hard-coded and simply has to occupy that area of the screen. OK then – you’ve still got three other corners – move the shot information panel to one of those!

Admittedly, five seconds of having the shot information panel being obscured by the EA Trax panel is not the end of the world. But when you’re playing a mode in the game with a time-limit per shot (such as online games or timed challenges) it really becomes an annoyance.

What’s next?

‘In The Cup!’ is a slogan that slides by in certain game modes when you get the ball in the hole (or cup). It’s presented nicely, scrolls for a few seconds and then fades out – giving you a sense of achievement. Great.

However, there’s some game modes where you attempt to complete three or four holes in a pretty tight time limit. You work fast, get your first hole and watch the ‘In The Cup!’ slogan do its thing. Then you realise that timer is still counting down while this is going on and you’ve lost three seconds out of your 60 and you’ve still another two cups to go (meaning you’ll lose another three seconds at the very least). Great. Another poor choice! Showing the message is fine – but it’s meant to convey achievement. In these timed game modes it actually serves as a penalty because you’re losing precious seconds as the game slaps you on the back. Another example of something good becoming something bad through a poor decision.

Online lag is somehow present. Now, I’ve only played a few games online and I’ve never hosted. I have a 4mb connection which I’m perfectly happy with. I’ve played Gears of War online and not seen any noticeable lag. Now, I’m guessing that Gears of War is a more demanding game with more to keep track of per-cycle (what with it’s faster pace and up 8 players running around at once) than Tiger Woods ’07. After all, golf is, by it’s nature, a turn-based game. Only one thing is going on at a time and, typically, it’s all done in the instant your shot is made. The rest of the turn is spent watching the shot played out. This part will certainly be handled locally – the calculations will have been taken from whichever player took the shot and then just played out on each 360 connected to the game. Sure, there may still be considering information to take care of but nothing along the lines of a more frenetic game.

So why is there lag? Why do I sometime fail to see a play swing or the ball move but see a spray of earth and then the shot change to view the ball flying through the air? Why does a friend’s ball come to the end of it’s roll and then disappear and reappear about a foot away? I suspect I know why, these are rhetorical questions.

Being silenced at the end of an online game is the final issue I want to mention. When joining an online game there is a simple lobby area. You can text-chat and voice chat. When the game and players are set you go and play. So far, so good. At the end of the game, after the last hole has been sunk you get thrown back to a result screen and then to the main menu. In doing so you are instantly cut off from the people you’ve been playing. No warnings, no second chances just dumped.

This can be worked around to some degree if you start a voice chat via the 360 dashboard instead of through the game’s lobby system. Even so, it’s a pretty abrupt way to end a game.

And that’s it. All of these points happen consistently in the game and are immediately apparent to most people. On their own they don’t really detract from the enjoyment of what is a really good, challenging, satisfying and rewarding golf game. There’s no doubt about it that Tiger Woods ’07 is a great golf game. A little more serious than the chibi-golf games you see from Japan but, hey, it’s official so there you go. I recommend it to anyone who likes a detailed game of golf and it’s great fun online.

These individual issues can all rear their heads through a single play session though and I can’t imagine any QA technician not spotting them, they’re simply too obvious. It’s just a shame such consistent and obvious quirks were not dealt with and were left to detract from what I think is a fabulous golf game. I’ll still be playing it day in, day out for a long time yet and I’ll still be enjoying nearly every second of it.

If you have the game, look me up and we’ll play a few holes!

It’s like 8.8 all over again

Dear me.

What a bunch of immature, pathetic, impatient, selfish, rude, arrogant, ungrateful little shits.

The backlash over the Zelda Gamespot 8.8 review by rabid Nintendo fanboys was such a fantastic demonstration of idiocy and herd mentality that, frankly, it was amusing. Particularly as 8.8 was an over generous score.

But yesterday, May 16th 2007, the day of the Halo 3 beta – I think equals it. Microsoft and Halo fanboys (and, let’s face it, if you know your FPSs then you know Halo ain’t all that, just like you know Zelda ain’t all that if you know your adventure games) showed themselves to be just as horrible a breed of human beings as the Nintendo fanboys.

Comments, complaints, threats, talk of how gamers are “suffering” or Crackdown owners who bought the game to play the beta were “ripped off” because their little Halo 3 button didn’t light up the instant they wanted it to, arguments about how everyone at Microsoft, Bungie and even Real Time Worlds must suck and not know anything about development..

..all because the download was hours (not days, not weeks, not months, not cancelled, not broken) late.

So much hate, hurt and spite thrown around because babys didn’t get their instant, free gratification that they felt they were owed.

All this energy and angst just to play an unfinished game.

Gamers of the world – well done! you’ve proved you’re still a bunch of selfish crybabies that can’t be trusted to think before you open your mouths.

Me? I’d rather play Halflife again. I lent my copy of Crackdown to a colleague yesterday and really don’t want to spend any time exposed to the ranting of Halo fans based on their recent outburst.

Funniest day in gaming for some time!

What’s this??

Wow! This looks super-cool! What could it be??!?

If the shoe fits…

Okay, amidst all the recent games-playing that’s been going on at Chateaux Koffdrop there’s a few things happening in the culture that I want to get off my chest. Let’s begin:

Do games kill people? Well, the response to a question by the culture is typically “Don’t be daft, games don’t have that power!”. An argument tends to ensue about how games don’t have an influence in real life. I’ve no problem with this. However, when the same culture will pick up a piece of news from some science report stating that games have some positive effect on people’s reaction times or multi-tasking abilities my mood changes somewhat. You see, I believe the argument is that games either have some influence on people or they don’t. What I tend to see is very selective reasoning demonstrating a mentality that chooses to dismiss any negative influence but champions any positive influence. This is biased and hypocritical. It’s also an over-simplification – but that’s something the culture does too much of and is never going to change.

So, if you’re going to argue that games don’t have the power to influence then make sure you’re consistent and your view doesn’t suddenly change when it suits you to pimp games as some sort of science boon to the human race.

For what it’s worth, I’m very much in the camp that says games do influence. I know I’ve played long sessions of Burnout and then found myself in a car wondering why we’re not putting our foot down and just tearing up the traffic. Hell, I’ve been playing a lot of Crackdown recently and every time I see a multi-story building I see jumping and ledge-gripping potential. That’s influence. Now, I’m not about to go crashing cars or doing a Spiderman impression because other parts of my brain kick in before these idle thoughts take over my actions. What I’m saying is that games do influence. I believe that’s a constant. The influence can be good or it can be bad – but the influence is there. The difference, of course, is on an infinite number of other factors such as how balanced the person being influenced is in the first place or whether they have access to guns or not.

If you want to be listened to and taken seriously, it’s important not to come off as a knee-jerk reactionary. This is especially true if your view or stance is the one under scrutiny by popular opinion – regardless of how accurate or informed that opinion may be.

This little nugget of wisdom works in many ways – from being the switched-on gamer that understands what gaming is and how corrupting it may or may not be to being of the popular opinion that, hey, you’re a gamer so you know when people who make games are being lazy or not because, after all, you play games so you know everything about how they’re made. In that latter example, I’ve placed the gamer in the same spot as gamers view ‘the public’ in respect of the whole “games kill” argument. Gamers know that anyone who’ll spew that rhetoric at them clearly doesn’t understand the breadth of what they’re talking about. Yet, in an instant, they’ll immediately adopt that manner when it comes to deciding how a game is this or that or what Brand X is doing and how they should be running their global corporation.

Take, for example, some recent news that broke about how some new maps for Gears of War were going to be sold rather than given for free. Apart from the outcry by gamers over the idea of being charged real money for extra content (which is hardly the worlds greatest crime – unless you’re so used to getting things for free that you believe nobody other than you should earn money for what they do – even if it’s something regarded as the best of it’s kind – which rather makes rational people somewhat unsympathetic when you talk of the supposed selfishness of others) the culture generally decided that Epic were good and MS were bad. That MS were ‘evil’ for overruling Epic’s desire to give content away for free and, anyway, they already pay some bucks for xbox live in the first place so more stuff should be free and, besides, MS don’t need the revenue as they’re rich fatcats anyway. That’s pretty much the gist of what I read.

MS as a platform holder and MS as a publisher are two different entities. Forgetting the indignant rage gamers feel whenever they’re reminded who’s actually in control of things in the games industry it’s worth remembering that, typically, the publisher calls the shots. They fund the developer to make the game. Both developer and publisher will be subject to some frighteningly detailed contract that stipulates god-knows-what-but-you-can-be-sure-that-YOU-don’t-know-what. Also, let’s get some perspective on things. Games cost the same $50 or £40 ten years ago as they do today. In some cases they cost more. In fact, factor in interest and inflation over a decade and it works out that, if anything, games are cheaper today than they were in the late 90s. So, actually, if you stop and think before complaining you’d realise that, these days, you’re getting more for less. In fact, if gamers stopped thinking about themselves for a brief moment and factored in the broader picture that involves, not just gamers, but publishers and developers too (because, hey, you wouldn’t have games without publishers and developers would you?) you’d realise that whilst the cost to the consumer has, if anything, gone down a little the cost to developers and publishers has shot up astronomically.

The whole deal with mircotransactions or in-game advertising is to earn revenue in, hopefully, non-intrusive or optional ways that mean the rising development costs can be offset in a way that avoids having to charge $120 or £100 per game at retail. Nobody wants that so here’s the alternatives that are being considered. Will this become the norm? Well, it depends if those methods are successful or not. That’s where consumers do have some power.

But, please, don’t sit there refusing to think of anything other than your explicit belief that you’re entitled to free digital entertainment whilst choosing to ignore anyone other than yourself in the equation and then brand others as selfish. Nobody who is presented with that argument or line of thought (and I use the term lightly) will give you the time of day – because presenting that to those who DO know what is going on and who DO understand how and why these decisions come about will simply regard gamers in precisely the same way that gamers regard those who make statements like “games kill”.

In all cases, you’d make a better argument and have a greater chance of being listened to if you stopped and thought things through first.

Try it sometime!

The post with no name

You know, my recent posts have been focusing on the past. So for a mild change of pace, I thought I’d tell you what I was playing in the present. I understand that your very lives revolve around the minutiae of my gaming preferences and I feel a responsibility to keep you fed on the digital plankton of my life. Aren’t I nice?

Having purchased one only last week, it’s understandable that I’m spending a good amount of my gaming time with my 360. I got a pretty reasonable deal on a machine – Play.com (no, I won’t link to the site because it’s lethal and sucks money from your wallet. I’m doing you a favour. Trust me.) were selling 360 Premium + PES6 + Gears of War + Crackdown for a smidge under 300 notes. Now, three games is roughly £120 which means the hardware matches Wii prices. Just soak that fact up for a moment or two.

Anyway, the goods turned up nice and promptly and after setting up and recovering my underused gamertag I was ready to check out Gears of War. As you may have read, that’s all behind me now but I’ve spent plenty of time using the controller and tended to find (on Gears at least) that the fourth and fifth fingers on my left hand tend to get uncomfortable after a while of constant aiming. Right now, I’m playing a game that uses the surface buttons a fair bit and, frankly, they’re pretty harsh on the thumbs – just like the original Xbox’s were. None of this is the end of the world, but I had heard a lot from people who claimed they found the controller to be the most comfortable ever and, for me, I’ve quickly found that to not be the case. And whilst wireless is nice, I’m not relishing dealing with replacing or recharging batteries all the time. Then again, my games room isn’t so big so wires were never a problem for me in the first place.

So, with a chunk of Gears behind me (yes, I will be playing again so as to unlock gamerpoints) I move on to the next game: Crackdown.

At the time of writing this post I’ve probably been playing it for about a week. An hour or two in the evenings and then pretty much all weekend. After my alarming addiction to GTA:SA I’ve realised I’m an absolute sucker for a moderately decent sandbox city style game. I’ve dipped my toe into the waters of Yakuza, Bully, Just Cause and Scarface but not made much progress in any of them. Crackdown, however, has my full attention and I’m really really enjoying it.

Firstly, there’s some things I really *don’t* like about it. The lack of narrative that the aforementioned games have is pretty absent in this game. It’s just you with a variety of goals but nothing linking yourself between each one. This isn’t a fatal omission but it is noticeable by its absence. Having said that, the voiceover guy who remarks on your actions and sends you bulletins hits the perfect pitch and delivers a sort of black-humoured Omni Consumer Products tone to events.

I’m enjoying the core game and the nature of the achievements so much that I intend to hunt down the stunts, car and rooftop races. However, this are needlessly fiddly to find and it’s not instantly clear which you’ve competed in or beaten and which you haven’t. Sure, you can review the in-game achievements list but a different colour marker or some sort of simple “WON/COMPLETED” flag would save some confusion. This is a device that the game uses to identify weapons dropped by gang members and their status as to whether these are in the Agency Supply points or not (and therefore whether it’s worth grabbing one and delivering it) – it seems odd that this thinking wasn’t extended.

Also, I really don’t get the character design. I once worked on a racing game where you had lots of over-the-top characters to choose from. Reviews questioned the choice of character design stating that none of them were appealing looking characters and they all looked twisted in an un-humourous way. I totally saw their point but was too used to the characters by that time to be objective on it. Crackdown, although no way near as severe, has a similar issue. It may only be from the neck up, but the character designs leave me cold. Dunno why, but there’s nothing there that makes me think I’d enjoy playing as that sort of character. From the neck down though, it’s cool. Liking the body design and love that exaggerated jumping animation with the flailing arms and legs. I also really like how the ground cracks when you land from a massive jump.

In fact, the whole jumping thing is great. I really like that the game isn’t played solely from the ground level like so many of these games tend to be. The fact that scaling heights and leaping across rooftops is integral to the game is really fun and I love doing impossibly long jumps from one rooftop to the other. However, it’s a real shame this isn’t exploited in your objectives as most of the kingpins seems to be based in one location and not really make use of their environment. I’m reminded of GTA and mission where you’d chase people on foot or in car or even both in some of the later missions. Maybe this happens later on in the game, I’ve only beaten the first of three gangs so, perhaps, the game will get more cunning rather than just harder through firepower.

So, yeah, Crackdown is dominating my time right now. There’s nothing I’m really doing on the PC gaming-wise – DRoD is, of course, a constant distraction but that’s a given.

My PS2 has taken a well-earned rest for a while. I’m determined to get back into Final Fantasy 12 at some point but then, I’ve got Oblivion and Tiger Woods ’07 incoming on the 360 not to mention a U.S. import of Rogue Galaxy to get started. Rogue Galaxy looks to be the favourite here.

DS is going through a puzzle phase. Whilst puzzle games are nice and all, I’m waiting for something that looks a little more varied. I’m not a fan of Pokemon so, please, don’t suggest it. My DS time is usually spent on the bus and just before lights-out at Chateaux Koffdrop with time spent equally on Slitherlink, Puzzle Quest, Phoenix Wright 1 (getting bored with all that reading!) and Picross. I might talk about those later, I might not. I have to say, I saw trailer 9 for FF12 Revenant Wings on DS and it smells very strongly of Final Fantasy Tactics which, to me, is a good thing. It’ll be a while before a western release though.

Well, that’s it for this lengthy installment. Don’t be shy – especially if you’ve got Tiger Woods on 360, I’ll give you a pasting once my copy arrives!

Beaten – Round 5 – TKO

Well, yesterday’s post was a bit longer than I expected but, hey, that’s how I roll. Some times koffdrop.com is a barren wasteland with no updates for ages, other times, it’s an opinion fest with details, pictures and a host of typos. Damn, it’s good being me. Anyway, unless I start delving back into 2006 this will be the last Beaten post from me for a while as, right now, I’m at a point where I’m starting games instead of finishing them. So let’s end with a bang:

Gears of War (360)

Hang about! You know what this means don’t you? Koffdrop’s finally joined the next-gen. Yes, it’s true. I may have taken my time but I’m here now and I got a pretty sweet deal on a 360. Will I get other machines? Undoubtedly – when there’s sufficient content that appeals to me and the market has settled down a little. Some of you, I’m sure, will already have spotted the gamercard in my sidebar. Feel free to drop me a message or a friend request.

So, last Friday, my new toy arrived, I hooked it up to my last new toy (42″ HD LCD screen) and played nothing but Gears of War until I beat it. It was good!

I will, of course, talk about the visuals but first of all I want to talk about the dominant part of the gameplay – cover and shooting. It’s kind of odd that a week before I played Gears for the first time I should have worked my way through Second Sight which delivered a very satisfying mechanic of cover and shooting. In fact, had I not played Second Sight I’d be far more impressed with Gears. Now, I’m not going to start a fight between the two, I’m putting my experience down to coincidence, but it certainly casts a different light on things.

So, yeah, I totally sucked at Gears in the first chapter. Hell, I didn’t even manage to aim with crosshairs until way too late. However, I hit my stride and found the game really delivered some great action and made the most of the relatively limited mechanics it had to offer. Let’s not beat around the bush here, the game is a solid first/third person shooter with a cover mechanic worked into it (and a certain amount of vulnerability worked into the player so as to make it essential to successful gameplay) and a nifty active-reload doohickey. That’s the meat and potatoes. Co-op is gravy.

I don’t think I’m being overly critical on the core game. The cover mechanic is absolutely brilliantly implemented and, like the rest of the game, looks perfect. Heck, I was checking out the detail on the back of Marcus’s head and ear looking for some flaws and couldn’t really grumble! Thing is, as great as the cover system is, it’s a little contrived. For example, in Chapter 3 when you’re underground there’s a narrow passage you walk through and it just happens to have rocks and a structure that screams “Hello! These are really obvious cover points. I’m going to throw some bad guys at you in a second”. There’s other instances of such contrivances and it brought the game’s ultra-slick standards down a notch.

And whilst the game may not do loads of different things, what it does it does very well indeed and they get as much mileage from the mechanics as possible. The areas of gameplay where you have to stay in (or create) lit areas were a particular highlight. I thought the beserkers were great too, the game breaking it’s regular theme and having you act quietly and leading the enemy to an exposed spot was a good change of pace. Likewise, the driving section was decent. Thing is, I really don’t get the big deal with driving vehicles in games like this. OK, if vehicles are integral to the overall gameplay (Battlefield, for example) that’s one thing. But I don’t find this compulsion to play a half-assed driving section as some sort of ‘added dimension to gameplay’ particularly rewarding. It did hardly anything for me – but I’ll argue that it was as well executed as any other area of the game, just totally unnecessary. I also enjoyed the different qualities of the weapons. I tended to favour the Lancer because, lets face it, chainsawing is so wrong but it feels so right.

Of course, the visuals bring it all home. I’ve never seen anything quite like it and, more than anything, the human effort apparent in the game is what really impresses me. The principle characters are simply astonishing to look at and realise that this stuff is running in real time. Their appearance maybe highly stylised (particularly ‘Unreal’ stylised with their traditional big shoulders and big boots look) but it’s just gobsmackingly good. It’s more pronounced when you encounter some of the lesser NPCs in the game such as the Stranded where you can see the difference in design quality between them and the principle characters. Furthermore, the character animation is absolutely bang on. A particular highlight to me is when the player messes up an active reload and their character slams the barrel of the weapon a couple of times. But in pretty much all other areas the animation is so good you simply don’t question it or the impossibility of the armour and movement of the characters. There’s no question that the underlying technology is good stuff but, as expected of Epic, Gears of War makes it look

better than anything we’ve ever seen before. It’s Epic’s job to make their technology look peerless and, make no mistake, Gears of War sells Unreal technology. It sells it because it makes it look so good. Epic have clearly invested a massive amount of time and money into the appearance of Gears – not just to make an incredible looking game but to advertise their technology. I’d be willing to bet that they put a considerabaly higher percentage of their resources into their art budget than most games do because of how important it was to make the world go “Wow” and to sell Gears and generate incredible buzz for the technology. Once again, this isn’t a criticism it’s common sense and, like the rest of the package, it’s executed with style and precision. Good for them – they deserve the attention and the business.

I really enjoyed playing Gears of War and seeing my new toys flex their muscles. Now I’ve beaten the game I’ll be indulging in a bit of online play (probably only with people on my friends list) to get the most out of the game and machine. I’ve no great compulsion to return to the single player campaign other than for achievement points but seeing as I have Crackdown, PES6 and Oblivion to check out I’d rather see new things on the new toy than take another look at something I’ve already played through – even though it’s very pretty.

So that’s the end of my posting splurge for a bit. I’ll let you know what I’m currently playing a little later on – along with feedback on it. Who knows, maybe I’ll see you on the other side of the screen?

Beaten – Round 4

The hits just keep on coming, don’t they? Three games down and we’re still not at the end of the list. I can tell you’re impressed. Let’s get this round underway then:

Second Sight (PS2)

When this game first came out it found itself being incessantly compared to another psychic-powered action adventure – namely Psi Ops : The Mindgate Conspiracy from Midway. Now, as it happens, I ended up buying, playing and enjoying and beating that game at the time of it’s initial release. However, beating that game leaves a sour taste in my mouth as it has one of the worst narrative endings in all of gaming. I am only saving you pain by telling you that the last thing you see before the credits roll is “To Be Continued…”. Awful. Fun whilst it lasted but cheesey as hell.

Now, understandably, I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Second Sight over the last year and it’s been my intention to check it out for a little while now. Glancing around the web I see a fair bit of love for this game and a solid appreciation of it’s method of storytelling. Having beaten the game I can confirm that it really is something quite special for a commercial console game to have achieved. In a nutshell, the story and the storytelling method manages to break linear structure, shift the player’s perspective, maintain interest and deliver a clever wallop at the end.

You are John Vattic: confused guy. The game starts as you wake on a surgical stretcher in a laboratory. You soon realise you have psychic powers allowing you to move objects from a distance and heal yourself. So begins your quest to discover who you are and how you got that nasty bruise on your head.

As the game progresses other powers are made available to you such as the ability to move unnoticed, to fire a wave of psychic energy and, later on, to posess others. Some of these powers become more powerful during the game.

The game plays as a third person action adventure using either a fixed or player-controlled camera. The targeting system is smart and allows for ease of use and for that all important headshot accuracy when you need it. One thing that works absolutely brilliantly is the use of cover. It may take a bit of time to get used to the controls but there’s some superb events in the game when you truly feel like you’re making the most of your environment and ducking out to take precise shots at your targets. They nailed the look and feel of this element absolutely brilliantly and my only gripe is that there weren’t too many areas in the game that really showed it off.

The game offers the player a choice of playing style in most situations. It is possible to run and gun but you will almost certainly want to use a bit of care and stealth (and psychic power) to make the best progress. The mechanics of the game sometimes feel a little contrived in that it’s quite possible to find yourself tripping an alarm and facing endlessly spawning bad guys with no real way out other than to return to an earlier checkpoint. Checkpoints are fairly frequent in the game so it’s not too much of a pain, just a little un-subtle.

The game keeps things fairly simple. You have health and psychic energy. That’s about it. Your psychic energy gets used as you use a power and refills of it’s own accord at a satisfyingly quick rate. There’s enough going on to keep you wanting to use your powers and the fact you can heal yourself to full health doesn’t mean the game is a pushover.

A good example of the game giving players options is a scenario where you’re in some tunnels. You could try to kill patrolling guards with ammo and psy-powers. You could try to sneak past using the psy-power that makes you invisible to others (but not CCTV cameras) or you may prefer to posess on guard and gun down the others.

Later in the game, although your options still remain fairly open, you’ll have probably got a preferred tactic you like to employ that works best for you. I mentioned earlier that the execution of firing from cover was brilliant but under-exploited, the game offers lots of scenarios where you get to flex your psychic muscles however you wish.

The celebrated storytelling takes the form of distinct chapters top and tailed with engine based cutscenes. The game tells two stories at the same time – the story from where the game opens with John Vattic searching for his identity and The Truth and, in every other chapter, the story of events taking place 6 months ago when John Vattic was assisting a military team in Russia. The present-day chapters tend to have a stronger sneaking gameplay in them whilst the 6-months-ago missions feel a little more brazen and action based.

Needless to say, just as you get a juicy morsel of information in one timeline that increases your interest in that part of the story further, you’ll be returned to the other timeline to pick up events from there. It’s not uncommon for the relevance of events in one area of the story to make you question some of the things that you learned elsewhere. In fact, there are some areas where the game appears to out-and-out contradict itself. This is the game narrative trying to mess with your head a little (which it succeeds with great effect in the final chapter) but the final series of revelations make sense of it all and give motivation to review the story all over again to see where the developers were being particularly clever.

If anything, I found my desire to want to know more of the story too strong as I binged on the game over a bank-holiday weekend and beat it in two sittings! Second Sight should be celebrated for making a very enjoyable playable and accessible action game without going down overly cliched routes or spoon-feeding everything to the player. In fact, you may get to the game and still have questions but, with a little bit of thought you’ll find all the answers are there.

For the age and the limits of the hardware, the game looks great. Everything moves at a smooth rate and many of the special effects are really eye-catching. The psychic effects are great and many of the incidental effects (such as when you’re dangerously low on psi-energy or when a camera spots you through your psychic cloaking) are really superb. I’ve also always been very fond of the stylised character designs in the TimeSplitters games and this continues in Second Sight delivering interesting looking, distinctive characters with some brilliant animation. The twitchiness of the main character really helps set the tone at the start of the game.

One thing that I particularly liked throughout the game was the use of computer terminals. It would be very easy to just go to a screen showing the information. However, when you use a terminal in the game, the camera stays in the game engine and the texture on the computer screen depicts a basic windows, pointers and icons type interface (in truth there’s a variety of styles used throughout the game). You use your controller to use the mouse and, assuming you’ve used a PC in the last 15 years, the rest is pretty obvious. What’s really great is that you remain IN the game. You can pan left and right and you’ll see the area around the computer. Your suspension of disbelief isn’t broken and neither is the tension of you feeling you’re on borrowed time standing in one place using a computer terminal when someone might spot you. It could have been a very easy thing to just go to a separate screen or deliver the information through some menu-based PDA but it’s really great to see this choice being taken and I believe it really helps to keep the player ‘in’ the game. I’m not sure it’s something that everyone would care about on the surface but I think the game would have suffered somewhat without such a thoughtful means of delivering important information that was thematically correct and well executed.

I’d encourage everyone who cares about stories in games or appreciates those things that show off extra effort and attention to detail in their games rather than gaming-by-numbers to play through this game. It’ll be cheap as chips these days or, if you prefer, you can probably work your way through it in a single renting.

Unlike Psi Ops, the game delivers a satisfying and clever conclusion that really shows that games, although they may often be filled with death and carnage, can actually be really smart and thought-provoking. A theme I hope we see more of in the future.

Beaten – Round 3

Well, round 2 was satisfying (for me, at least) but time marches on and so, it seems, does my gaming progress. Here’s another one that I managed to cross off my ‘to do’ list:

Titan Quest (PC)

Titan Quest is a Diablo clone. Or, more accurately, it’s a Nethack clone. I don’t see why Blizzard should get the honours for a genre they merely polished. (For other examples, see Starcraft, WoW and their entire portfolio). Anyway, misplaced honour aside, I really enjoyed Titan Quest.

I like a tasty dungeon hack but the last one I made any headway in had it’s progress wiped during a hard-disk crash and I couldn’t get motivated to slog through the start of it again.

So, Titan Quest sees your anonymous character click’n’kill a myriad of mythological beasts in Greece, Egypt and China. It doesn’t re-write the rulebook in any way, it just does what it does solidly. Unlike more recent dungeon-hacks the viewing angle cannot be altered beyond zooming in and out. This makes the gameplay feel slightly more linear and initially felt compromising but it took no time at all to get used to it and to feel that I was always seeing the visuals as they were meant to be seen.

The quality of the graphics are superb. Like any good hack, your avatar wears his armour in accordance to how you’ve kitted him out. Your enemies also display any extra armour they may be wearing. The environments look fantastic too. Initially you start in greek farmlands and whole fields of swaying crops react to your movement. Although it must be, none of the envrionment graphics appear very modular. The changes in ground texture from larsh farmland to barren waste to marshes to snow is never too jarring. The exception to this tends to be caves which do tend to look a little formulaic in their appearance – then again, there’s only so much you can do with caves I guess.

There are six different disciplines of magic to choose from at the start of the game. You’re offered to choose one of them near the start and, later on, you can enroll in a second discipline also. Each discipline can be mastered in it’s own right and contains spells and sub-spells that can be levelled up too. To be honest, I didn’t really explore too much of that. I mastered the two disciplines (which makes spells more effective and also significantly boosts your health and mana stats for your character) and then maxed out two spells which saw me through pretty much all of the game. I won’t criticise the game for that as it let me play the game how I wanted to. I’m sure if I’d explored that side of it more I’d learn more of what it has to offer.

One of the most satisfying aspects of the game is the enemy deaths (and considering you’ll be seeing a lot of them, they should be good to look at). The moment an enemy dies, rag-doll physics take over. No big deal, right? Fair point. But if you’re a lot stronger than your enemy they get thrown back by your finishing blow. If you warp back to an earlier area where you’re many levels above those of your enemy then carving through them is great to watch as you’ll have bodies flying about all over the place. Nice touch!

There’s some other useful stuff in the game. Later on you can meet merchants in towns that will allow you to spend money and buy back character points that you spent on your spell development. This way, if you wish you hadn’t levelled up one spell because you want to boost another to beat a boss you can do so. Titan Quest also allows your avatar to have two weapon/armour configurations on the go at once. So you can swap your short-range sword-and-shield configuration to a long-range bow configuration with a key-tap during the action. This works well in many situations.

Dungeon hacks always tend to suffer from the problem of players grabbing all the loot around and then needing to go back to town to free up inventory space. Titan Quest is no different. Towns have warp portals. You can create a 2-way portal anywhere in the game so getting back to town, selling your loot and going back to where you just were is easy – but it’s still an annoyance. There’s huge amounts of loot and treasure in the game. You can hold down ALT to make it easier to collect the items (doing so brings up colour coded item labels – easier to click on). The colouring of the text helps you to know if an item is rare, enchanted or relatively worthless. Either way, you’ll still have loads of cash and loot by the end of the game.

The story, such as it is, is just the usual dungeon-hack mechanism of ‘go here’ type mission which sets you with a target and lots of meanies to kill along the way.

There’s a great variety of well produced bad guys too. Higher level versions of a particular speices are usually larger and more decorated than their more humble siblings. All of them look great and animate brilliantly. In the first chapter (Greece) the game seemed to be recycling the characters a little too much but the later chapters keep the variety going and the theme appropriate to the environment.

I found bosses looked great and were imaginative but were never much of a mental challenge to defeat. More often than not, a circling tactic punctuated with long range attacks and a bit of patience would see them off. Stocking up on potions helps too, of course.

Although I got to the end of the single player campaign I’ve not tried the level editing or online modes – nor the two higher difficulty campaigns that become unlocked. If anything I found the single-player campaign marginally too long for it’s own good and I just wanted the game to be over and my investment in my character not to have been wasted.

It’s not often I beat a game on the PC though – so I’m happy to have played through Titan Quest and may indulge in the addon pack (Immortal Throne) that is available. I’m not aware of any other recent, big production dungeon hacks other than the distinctly different flavoured Marvel Ultimate Alliance from Raven games. I’d certainly recommend the game if you’re a fan of the genre.