Falling Away From WoW

Lately I've found myself spending less and less time with World of Warcraft, and time I do spend has the feel of being with a girlfriend in the twilight of your relationship. Comforting, but clearly lacking the spark that it once had.

Of Ninjas and their Blades

had a bunch of Best Buy coupons burning a hole in my pocket, a lot of respect for From Software's Otogi team, and an unhealthy affection for Shinjuku, so I picked up their inaugural “Next Gen” effort, Ninja Blade. The idea is straightforward enough, you're some sort of superninja, there are fucked up mutant zombies all over downtown Shinjuku, you have to chop them up into little pieces. The general combat mechanics feel pretty good and the game is pretty enough to get by, but there are just some really questionable design decisions being made here.

It's like the design team played some God of War and decided that massive boss fights featuring tons of quicktime events was the way of the future, and it was time to invest!

Something must have gotten lost in translation somewhere along the line, because it seems the major things they got out of GoW were red orbs that you spend to power up your weapons, and an absolutely insane number of quicktime events... I mean really, I know i mentioned it already, but it's staggering.

Another lovely thing that ive already encountered twice in two levels is the whole, Raiders Run, AKA: “running towards the camera to outrun something that's chasing you while you're navigating obstacles that you can't even see yet” thing, which is on page 2 of the “How to piss off your players as quickly as possible” guidebook.

I know i'm bagging on this game an awful lot, but there's also a lot to like, each stage is essentially an hour long boss encounter, normally featuring massive set pieces and cool minibosses that frequently get in your way as your chasing down (or being chased by) the boss.

That's all for now, more later

Quick Impressions

I've been catching up on not quite new games lately, including:

Sins of a Solar Empire: It's basically Master of Orion in real time, i'm having a blast with it, the only problems are the total lack of a campaign mode and the fact that games take upwards of 3 hours to play.

Prince of Persia: Action platforming in easy mode. The game has a flow to it that i find strangely relaxing.

The World Ends With You: quirky DS RPG with loads of personality, i'll go into this a bit more at a later date.

FEAR 2 Thoughts

I finished up Fear 2 this past weekend and while the action was a blast and i really loved the atmosphere, it did something that left me completely cold.

They pulled a Halo 2.

Allow me to explain. Halo 2's single player narrative was a blast, told a decent story that was very easy to get wrapped up in, and then, just as the game was reaching its climax, just as everything that had transpired was about to pay off...

It stopped.

You've been playing a game for hours, working your way towards a specific goal, and then when you finally get to the point where the big reveal should happen... Credits.

I could make a crude sexual reference to illustrate my point, but I think that by even mentioning it, I no longer have to.

Flawed Gems: Starlancer

It's rare to see a game that in one respect is so far ahead of its time and in another respect, was so left behind, but when I consider Starlancer, that's exactly what I think.

Starlancer was a space combat game in the same vein as classics such as Wing Commander, it was even developed by many of the same people. Unlike many of the space combat games of that era, Starlancer was not about humanity's battle to survive against some seemingly unbeatable enemy in the dark reaches of space, in fact, in this world, Humanity still hasnt discovered faster then light travel and is still shackled to our solar system, the big enemy? Ourselves.

Starlancer eschews the Roddenberrian idea that once you stick humanity in spaceships, the nations of the world will suddenly put aside thousands of years of differences and unite under a common banner. Instead, Starlancer depicts a solar system on the brink of all out war, the battle lines are drawn and the powder keg is about to explode, the combatants arent some bizzare planets that have no meaning to you, they are countries you know, lands you may have even visited. You start the game as a pilot for the US and are there when the first shots are fired that spark humanity's first stellar war.

Storytelling is done almost entirely though the first person, as your character walks through the corridors of the ship he calls home, you stay in this perspective at all times, heading to the flight deck, receiving your mission briefings, or conversing with your crewmates. You're treated like just another pilot, an notable pilot, to be sure, but in no way are you any sort of “chosen one,” you're part of team, a crew of people on a ship who are depending on one another to survive a horrible conflict. You hear about the heroics of other pilots and crews on the news, you feel like you're a small part of a much larger war effort.

As the story goes on, you find yourself fighting alongside crews from other cultures like the UK and Japan, and while you are all on the same side, you can see subtle cultural differences there, the ship designs lend themselves wonderfully to this, giving a distinct feel to each nation.

Unfortunately, the gameplay itself is Starlancer's downfall. As I mentioned earlier, this game was cut from the same cloth as Wing Commander, which often put its lead character in a nigh-godlike position, You're always the only pilot capable of performing any important deed, you easily score nearly every kill, you are the one completing every objective.

Out of combat, the game is like Band of Brothers, in battle, It's Rambo.

For fans of space combat, who have been weened on Wing Commander, a series which literally had the protagonist singlehandedly destroy the enemy's entire planet, this may not have been a problem, but in the time between the height of wing commander's popularity and the release of Starlancer, a little game called Freespace happened.

Freespace was a revolution in a genre that had been largely stagnant for years, it brought with it unrivaled scale, capital ships which were truly to be feared, friendly AI that was truly capable, and mission design that remains unrivaled to this day. If you played Freespace like you played other space combat games, you were in for a rough ride. Trying to take down a capital ship with your little fighter felt like trying to destroy a skyscraper with a handgun. In practice, you were a small part of a very large battle. Its play experience was everything that Starlancer's storytelling told you that it wanted to be.

Been a while

I'm trying to make a resolution to post SOMETHING here at least once a day, after all, I know people who post to three separate blogs more then twice a day, i should be able to do at least one ONCE per day!

I snagged FEAR 2 this week from gamefly since i was in the mood for a shooter and i recall Garnet Lee and Sean Andrich both discussing how much they enjoyed it on their respective podcasts back when this game was actually in the news.

I was not at all a fan of the original FEAR, i gave up within two play sessions due to how unrelentingly generic the whole experience was. I'm only a few hours in, but i'm digging this game so much more then its predecessor.

Why is that?

In a word, "atmosphere"

FEAR tried to have it, but really it only ended up having a game that was rigidly generic 90% of the time, and then once in a while, the room would change colors and the ceiling would bleed... meh. The two experiences that they were trying to meld felt very segregated. This time around, they seem to have unified the combat experience with the "this shit's creepy" experience.

So far, so good