Pumping Irony

I recently finished Pandemic Studios‘ swan song title, The Saboteur and thought I’d write a bit on my experiences. As usual with me, don’t treat this as an official “review.” There are plenty of those out there already; hit up Metacritic. As a disclaimer, any screenshots I include were obtained from the game’s website; I do not have the capability of taking my own screenshots from my Xbox 360.

It’s no secret that Pandemic Studios hasn’t been their usual selves the past few years. Their recent games have been a bit on the sub-par, glitchy, and unpolished side of things, and in the case of The Lord of the Rings: Conquest utter trash. It’s also no secret that all their games with the aforementioned reputation are games released since their acquisition by EA. Coincidence? I’ll leave that for you to decide. The Saboteur does show a lack of polish in certain areas but overall it’s minor and I’d have to guess a good portion of it could have been worked out if EA hadn’t shuttered the studio and forced an early launch.

Before launch I was undecided on the game. I loved the film noir visuals but I was concerned about two issues. First, support. EA announced they were closing Pandemic three weeks prior to launch. I wasn’t sure at the time if there would be any post-launch patches (they call them Title Updates on consoles) or additional DLC. Since then, EA has kept a team of former Pandemic members attached to the project, already working on patches for the PC edition, etc. No idea if the game will see additional content in form of DLC however. Second, I was concerned that an open-world single-player game would not hold my attention. I never finished any of the GTA3 series; I haven’t finished GTA4 yet (I’m on the last mission, which kicks my ass every time); I own GTA4: The Lost and Damned but haven’t even started playing it yet; I find myself getting frustrated (this is putting it nicely) and quitting because I die so often in Red Faction: Guerilla that I don’t know I’ll ever manage to finish it. But take an open-world game like Crackdown, Mercenaries 2, or Saint’s Row 2 that allows co-op and now we’re talking! Aaron and I have done a bit of Crackdown and quite a bit of Mercenaries 2 in co-op and those sessions are enormously fun with crazy moments of mindless, wanton destruction accented by our own pitched laughter. From a difficulty standpoint, I feel RFG could use a co-op mode, though I won’t completely dismiss the notion that maybe I simply suck at the game. Nah, couldn’t be that. But when thinking of The Saboteur, there are two things in gaming that we just never tire of killing: Nazis and Zombies. The Left 4 Dead series and Borderlands‘ first DLC “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” have the co-op zombie killing covered quite well. I was hoping for some co-op Nazi slaying adventures but it’s not happening here — The Saboteur has a story crafted around a specific character, and those types of games only work in single-player. In the end, after reading tweets and forum posts from Pandemic developers who worked on The Saboteur, combined with my fond remembrance of their pre-EA products, I felt I owed it to myself to get the last “real” Pandemic game. Turns out, it’s a great game, so I’m doubly glad that I did!

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I think I finally “get” Twitter. After continually being accused of “arguing” over Twitter I took a step back and scrolled as far as my history would allow me and what I discovered is that everyone I follow tweets random, opinionless “stuff.” Just little mini-headlines or newsbytes, at best a 140-character equivalent of a “Now Playing” status on a media player or IM client. The only “social” interaction is perhaps asking for brief advice and getting a few replies, or someone making a completely opinionless tweet acknowledging someone else’s completely opinionless tweet. Obviously I had never noticed that before; that type of “interaction” is foreign to me.

After so many years on BBS’ back in the day, then GEnie, then years on IRC having discussions and sharing opinions, now we all have blogs which by their very definition are there for us to write our opinions and for commenters to also share their opinions on what we just wrote our opinion on, I find it tragically sad that apparently Twitter is most assuredly not for having any opinion on. I didn’t get the memo on that, but everyone can rest assured that “get it” now.

From now on, I’ll just let Raptr, GamerDNA or whatever handle the bulk of my tweets since they are all automated by a script and therefore do not have a person with feelings behind them who may be tempted to share his opinion in a, you know, “social” medium. If I dare make a manual tweet, I shall endeavor to remove any trace of emotion or opinion behind it so that it remains “random stuff” and is therefore acceptable to the delicate Twittersphere.

In other news, as we get closer and closer to my deadline for keeping this server up (4 days to decide), behavior like this from the bloggers I respect the most just brings me closer and closer to shutting this whole thing down. This is all supposed to be enjoyable, not something that brings me stress or leaves me with hurt feelings.

I meant to post this earlier but this trip started off a bit wonky and we ended up at bare minimum rest time last night, so here we go!

Thanks to James Egan over at Massively for catching this two-article interview at Edge Online (a site I don’t read which is why I rely on Massively to do it for me) with CCP Shanghai about DUST 514! Great information and I’m really looking forward to the game. Oh, and I’ve discovered that it’s officially DUST 514 (all capitalized like EVE) not Dust 514…

Part One: Core concepts and mechanics behind the game.
Part Two: How EVE and DUST 514 will (hopefully) interact.

I’ll do my usual bullet-point thing of bits I found interesting.

• The map size has been revealed to be 5 square kilometers. That’s roughly 3.1 square miles for us metric-impaired Americans. Anyone who plays shooters with me knows that I love huge maps, as it provides more real estate for the developers to create multiple objectives.
• The Commander will be located in the Mobile Command Center (MCC) which flies above the map, similar to the Titans in Battlefield 2142. The Commander can issue orders to the mercenaries on his team in an RTS-like fashion, again similar to Battlefield 2142. The Commander also has a full 3D voyeur mode to see the action from a closer perspective. Players have to earn the right (presumably from ranking up via XP like in the Battlefield or Call of Duty games) to be Commander, and if no one is eligible an AI Commander will be assigned. I do hope CCP includes a voting system to oust ineffective Commanders, however; no one likes getting stuck with an incompetent leader who earned the spot simply by playing long enough rather than knowing what he’s doing.
• Prior to the match, the Commander chooses his team’s vehicle and installation loadouts, as well as placing preliminary spawn points. There are ten vehicles and fifteen installations in DUST 514 but a Commander can only choose five of each per map. CCP compared it to Magic: the Gathering where you prepare your deck ahead of time, not knowing precisely what your opponent will be bringing to the battle.
• Once the mercenary infantry has brought down the shields of the enemy MCC, the Commander has missiles, etc. to destroy it; another similarity to Battlefield 2142’s Titan mode that DUST 514 looks to improve upon.
• CCP is still fiddling with the number of players per map but Edge says it’s unlikely to go as high as 256, like MAG is doing, because of the “elaborate firepower” available to each team. Regardless, it’s still being billed as an MMOFPS so they’ll have to exceed 64 players per map to earn that acronym.
• During play, mercenaries earn War Points which can be used to purchase vehicles on-the-fly. Literally, as the vehicles are flown to your location via dropship. This aspect is similar to Section 8 where you earn points to spend in the purchasing menu to have custom items such as turrets, tanks, or mech-like heavy armor dropped to a location you specify.
• Each battle is obviously instanced with a population cap, but it sounds like the pre/post game lobby is a “single shard” setup like EVE where players can chat, etc.
• The final sentence in Part One implies (at least it does to me) that DUST 514 will ship with clan support in the form of Mercenary Outfits. This will be a huge boon for the game, as the only console shooter I can think of that has actual clan support is Section 8.
• CCP plans on two updates per year. Since DUST 514 will be using a microtransaction model rather than subscription, I suspect each update or expansion will be marketed as premium DLC as well but we’ll see what type of deal CCP makes with Microsoft and Sony.
• Player progression will be achieved through an “achievement matrix” unlock system which sounds like an expanded version of the Battlefield unlock scheme. (Possibly like COD too; I’ve never managed to have enough fun in COD multi-player to see any unlocks.) Some of the combo unlocks will provide persistent attribute enhancements for weapons and vehicles, which is certainly an intriguing twist.
• EVE provides DUST 514 with persistent, dynamic battlefields. The example given was that one time you fight on a certain planet it may be lush and green. Then in an EVE space battle, someone nukes the planet from orbit. The next time DUST 514 mercs fight on that planet, it will visually show the devastation from the EVE battle.

A primary concern I have for DUST 514 is how CCP integrates microtransactions. Shooters are player-skill-based games and I strongly oppose the ability to buy better weapons which hand spending players an “I Win!” button. There was already quite the upset over Battlefield Heroes raising prices and adding new weapons that have the potential to tip the balance in favor of premium players. All I’ve read so far is that they plan to sell blueprints for weapons, etc. While it is true that console players are far more accustomed to, and accepting of, microtransactions than PC players are, if the “item shop” isn’t balanced properly the console crowd may unleash an unholy Jihad of a shitstorm if they feel forced to constantly spend cash to be competitive.

Help, I need somebody,
Help, not just anybody,
Help, you know I need someone, help.

Couldn’t resist throwing a little Beatles in there, especially since Tipa has been on a recent anti-Beatles rampage.

I’m in need of advice from any networking gurus out there.

For quite some time I’ve been experiencing random disconnects from my ISP, Comcast. Sometimes it’s a quick disconnect but resynch’s fairly quickly and I’ll only see a brief error trying to view a website or a brief period of lag in an online game. More frequently, however, even if the cable modem itself resynch’s quickly I still have no internet — DNS error — until I reboot my cable modem and router.

Frequent disconnects while gaming affects not only me, but everyone in the game with me, and it only takes a couple forced resets due to a disconnect to get tempers flaring.

I replaced my aging Linksys DOCSIS 1.0 modem last week with a Motorola SB6120 DOCSIS 3.0 modem. I also replaced my Linksys WRT54G router with a Netgear Rangemax Dual-Band N router. Still the disconnects, loss of DNS, whatever is going on, is occuring.

At this point I’m inclined to think it’s Comcast. Anyone have experience with Comcast to have an idea what I should be asking for help with? I’ve heard they have different tiers of tech support; if that’s true, any suggestions for getting to the top tier guys immediately? I don’t have much time at home this month to be sitting on hold and wasting time with scripted “Is the computer plugged into the wall?” type questions.

Horrible pun. HORRIBLE! But it’s staying anyway.

gPotato has their new F2P MMORPG, Allods Online, entering Phase 2 of Closed Beta. Graphically, it looks appealing enough though I’m wary of gPotato’s item shops from past experience but I’m willing to install the full game just to check it out once it’s launched.

Still, is it completely wrong that I have an automatic bias against Allods simply because of two bloggers?

Heartless_ has been raving about Allods but I fear I haven’t quite gotten over his stint as a pre-launch WAR fanboy. I know I should give him the benefit of the doubt “live and learn” thing, but the WAR fanboy effect is still there in the back of my mind.

Second, Keen of Keen and Graev’s has also been raving about Allods. It’s difficult to give Keen the benefit of the doubt because I have yet to ever read that he has “lived and learned.” Keen is notorious for “this next game that isn’t out [AoC/WAR/Darkfall/Mortal Online/whatever] will be the most awesome MMO EVAR!!!” yet within a month he’s canceled, writing how much the game sucks then immediately jumping onto the fanboy bandwagon of whatever other new shiny MMO looms on the horizon.

As I said, I’ll likely check out the final game but it’s nothing I’d stick with. It’s just another F2P DIKU-based MMORPG with two factions, the same ol’ leveling and questing and classes as every other DIKU-based MMORPG. Runes of Magic has possibly the least offensive of the Asian-style item shops, while DDO possibly has the most appealing overall for us Western players. I’m not entirely trusting of gPotato’s mentality of item shops but we’ll see what, if anything, they’ve learned in the past year or two of a handful of AAA-quality F2P titles seeing a measure of success outside the Asian market.

This month’s GameInformer magazine has an interview with Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame, where he talks a bit about videogame violence.

My favorite snippet (since Syp already has dibs on “Quote of the Day”) is:

The truth of the matter is there have been so many popular songs that have been about peace and love, and they haven’t turned the world into complete peace and love. Violence still happens. So the bad news is, you can’t just put out “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles and get world peace, and the good news is that first-person shooters don’t turn people into killers.

The topic of violence in games and society continues for three paragraphs. Good stuff, and similar arguments to what gamers and anyone who knows what they’re actually talking about uses to counter the media and clueless conservatives who think all gamers are sociopaths in the making, but it’s nice to hear it coming from a celebrity and non-gamer too.

Sorry, this is not a post discussing the life-lessons of the 1986 Ralph Machio movie of the same name, although I will freely admit to owning the MP3 of the “Head-cuttin’ Duel” by Steve Vai and Ry Cooder from the movie. Good stuff there!

No, my lease is nearly up at Lunarpages.com for this site. I’m looking at how much I blog these days, the likelihood that will pick up next year, since I only plan on playing LOTRO and maybe a scant handful of other MMOG’s. I can transfer the LOTRO-specific blogging over to My.LOTRO if I want to. I’ll keep my domain name because I like it, but I’m very much undecided if I want to continue paying over $100 per year for this server space when I’m not using it as much anymore. I can easily save the money and move the blog over to Wordpress or Blogger and transfer the domain name.

I don’t know. December 25 is the day I have to pay Lunarpages if I decide to keep the site here. Guess I have some decisions to make in the meantime…

I’ve been bitching for a few months on Twitter about the extremely unstable state of my PC, but I haven’t been in the mood for any PC gaming at all, so I’ve just let it go. I’m slowly getting back in the mood to play a single MMOG — which will be LOTRO, naturally — and maybe a couple other normal games.

This all started awhile back when I first had the bright idea that maybe I’d upgrade my PC this fall, so I went ahead and bought an ATI 4890 card. Unable to resist temptation, I popped it into my existing system and all hell broke loose. RAM chips spontaneously flash-fried themselves and things in general just stopped working. I had to cut the power several times — while the PC was booted — just to get any control over the system. I eventually put the crusty ol’ 7950GT back in, which is still in today, but I can never trust the system to work correctly, even when it seems things are ok.

Random apps will crash; sometimes it’s a browser (or all browsers); sometimes apps simply won’t load; sometimes I’ll get a memory error or a .dll not found error; sometimes it decides during booting it’s discovered major errors on the hard drive so it runs CHKDSK. Despite saying quite plainly on the screen that the disk check can be canceled, this is a blatant lie, as it refuses to respond to any input whatsoever.

Yesterday I had an all-out battle when it rebooted itself for no apparent reason, then for over an hour decided that the 7950GT could only handle a maximum of 640×480, 4-bit color. It took several (yes, several) vanilla boots into Safe Mode and re-installing NVidia drivers before finally the thing booted back into native resolution, mere nanoseconds before my head would have physically exploded and my body would have alighted with hellfire as I summoned the minions of Satan himself as my black temper consumed the last vestiges of humanity — and, indeed, sanity — to utterly destroy the misbehaving electronics causing me such stress. Think I’m exaggerating, do you? Ha! You mortals…

Games can get interesting when the system otherwise appears to be “normal” for a change. I apparently lost (or failed to take) screenshots in Guild Wars where enemy 3D models were replaced with white 2D bitmaps. It was like fighting swarms of blind (they had no eyes, after all) Spongebob Squarepants. On the one hand, I could see those white squares from miles away so there was no hiding from my party’s wrath, but on the other hand it was quite immersion-breaking. Feel my QQ! Sorry, I just love poking fun at the Immersionites out there. :wink:

The one that truly scared the shit out of me was a few weeks ago I decided to check back into LOTRO to see if I was ready to start thinking about MMOG’s at all again. I logged in (it was one of those rare occasions that the unstable system didn’t crash the client), was happily chatting with a few friends and kin-mates then decided to hop on my horse and ride around to do a quest. The icon for my mount was missing. What the hell? My finger stretched up to click the ‘i’ key to bring up the inventory, where I would just click the mount icon itself, only to my horror the inventory was empty! I had nothing! Had my account been hacked? Amid my panic, a few neurons managed to fire and I realized that if my account had in fact been hacked, the password would have been changed and most likely the characters would have been deleted and totally naked. Arwellyn was still wearing her gear and not shaming the elves of Middle-earth by parading around in front of dwarves — dwarves! — in her unmentionables. A few reboots later to get apps (including the LOTRO client) to stop crashing, it was just a graphical glitch where no item icons would load.

I did manage to get two glitched LOTRO screenshots recently:

My client refused to load anyone’s mount graphics, but the mounts themselves worked fine. Everyone was just gliding bow-legged through the air. Amusing, but aggravating nonetheless.

Running around the Ettenmoors, none of the distance imposters in the entire zone worked, they just showed up as glitchy bitmaps. When I was in range of the model they were replacing, the imposter-to-model transition worked fine.

I’ve just about had it, though. Especially after fighting with it yesterday and my temper very nearly getting the best of me and unleashing a severe bout of violence upon the offending electronics, which as you know never accomplishes the desired effect. I was hoping to hold off until the holidays were over but I think I’m going to end up spending some money this week and ordering the remaining parts to build a new Windows 7 64-bit system…

One of the more memorable games of the past decade or so was Tomb Raider way back in the PlayStation / Saturn days of 1996. It was one of the first games to feature a strong female lead character (which, in addition to my tabletop RPG background, made me willing to play female characters when MMORPG’s came around) but also had some mind-wracking puzzles, some fun action sequences, and some fantastic locations, some of which meant climbing to dizzying heights. I still remember both myself and my then-wife getting a bit queasy watching my Lara climb and climb and climb then take a look around. Overall a very memorable experience that I’ve always cherished.

In 2006 Eidos released Tomb Raider Anniversary which was a re-imagining of the original game, in a similar vein to how Tim Burton re-imagined the Planet of the Apes and Sleepy Hollow stories. In Tomb Raider’s case, there was enough of the “old and busted” there to make me remember some of those Good Ol’ Days but it also had that re-imagined layer of “new hotness” that not only added the obvious graphical improvements of the Legends engine but also the new moves Lara has learned in the decade since her first appearance, which in turn meant the Anniversary game required all new content for her to use those moves.

Moving from the 5th generation consoles (PS1 and Saturn) to the 7th generation (Xbox 360) was a huge leap in technology, and I will concede that it’s a potential issue for my current wish list for Anniversary Editions of two games (actually, two series, each containing two games) that are less than ten years old. Only a single console generation has passed in that time and in the PC the only major difference would be that DX10/DX11 is around, as well as wide-screen and higher resolution displays being commonplace.

First, as much as I tend to bash the Halo games, I did sit down recently and complete the single-player campaigns (normal difficulty only) of both Halo 3: ODST and Halo Wars. I wouldn’t mind seeing the original two games get an Anniversary treatment, even if they both just used the existing Halo 3 engine. Update the graphics and textures, fix any glaring issues, fix any story and gameplay elements and we’re good to go. Fixing some of the story elements (Halo 2 in particular felt like the campaign wasn’t quite finished in favor of the multiplayer game) would be enough of a “re-imagining” for me.

Second, I’d love to see a Knights of the Old Republic (1 and 2) Anniversary Edition. This could be major! Not only include all the fixes and additional locations that were added after the fact but a “re-imagining” could also fix one of the most common criticisms of the original game: that it was a LOTRO clone, ie. way too much time wasted traveling back and forth. Turbine has been actively revamping (or “re-imagining”) the low-levels zones in LOTRO and working their way up to mid- and high-level zones eventually, making the leveling and quest story curve flow more naturally as well as eliminating a good deal of the traveling. BioWare has come a long way in the six years since KOTOR; I see no reason why a re-imagined game with modern tech, graphics and sound wouldn’t be equally successful, if not moreso, plus the original would still be around for those whiny purists. Sound would be a huge benefit to an update as well; I’d read Jeremy Soule saying how he had to construct the soundtrack to “fool” players into thinking there was a full orchestra playing the soundtrack because at the time, state of the art tech was 8mbps MIDI. Now everything’s on DVD and Blu-Ray, if not outright installed to a hard drive, so he could get a full orchestra to play his soundtrack so players could finally hear it the way it was intended to be heard.

Do you guys have favorite games you’d like to see updated? Would you rather a faithful remake, simply with newer eye candy, or would you rather enjoy a re-imagining so you could not only still remember the original fondly but also have a new experience at the same time?

It’s been years and years since I’ve liked this holiday in the slightest, mostly because of getting sick from eating too many olives and chocolate-covered raisins as a kid one Thanksgiving. But still, being thankful for various people and aspects in your life is a good notion. I wasn’t planning on writing anything like this at all when I clicked the link to my blog, but here is a quickie off-the-cuff (you have no idea how off-the-cuff this is!) list of what I am thankful for in 2009.

• My family and friends. I may not get to see you often in person (my mother raked me over the coals that I have to work both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year — same as every year, mom! — and haven’t been home in over 2 years) but I love you all very much!
• My girlfriend, (anonymous code name: L) who never ceases to be amazing and inspirational on so many levels. Love you, sweetie!
• In light of the high unemployment rate in the US, I am thankful that I have a decent-paying job at all, because many people unfortunately do not.
• My new subwoofer and I are thankful that the condo directly underneath mine is currently vacant! We’ve been enjoying that fact; oh yes we have!

Anyway, I wished all my friends, readers, fellow bloggers and tweeters a Happy Thanksgiving, but I wanted to have it here as well. Hope all of you had a great holiday and that you all have something to be thankful for this year.