Posts Tagged ‘review’

Thoughts For Torchlight

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

torchlight_logo

Torchlight is another HACK-n-SLASH ACTION rpg game. Here, I’ve feebly attempting to highlight the point of the game by embiggening the correct words in that genre. To call it an RPG is like calling a boxing match a gentlemanly sport. It’s called such just to be appropriate, but we both know that indulging in it is to watch sh*t get beaten and blown off.

torchlight_myChars

Satisfying our primal lust to find material wealth in this world is echoed in Torchlight, where playing it is a never-ending cycle of finding loot, use it to kill stuff with, in order to find more loot. All else is secondary: the plot, the quest, the characters, the skills. It offers so little, yet its charm lies in its simplicity.

The gameplay is similar to almost every game in this genre: left-click to move and attack, right-click to use skills, keyboard shortcuts use/activate items/skills on an action bar. The nice touch is that clicking is mappable and Tab will rotate between 2 skills mapped to the right-click. You can also use the function keys to create shortcuts to all your skills, but I later found out, to my detriment, that pressing a function key did not use the skill in question, rather it maps the skill to the right-click, which is odd. In the heat of battle, and you will get a spectacular number of enemies for you to kill, having to press two keys to use a skill is a millisecond too slow for my aged brain. I guess I’m not as nimble as I once were. (Almost dead in screenshot below! :P )

torchlight_01

For a game that is trying very hard to super-motivate you to go and find loot, I find the loot system to be a bit broken simply by the addition of a vendor: the enchanter. Once I found a semi-powerful rare item for my character, all other loot I found became vendor trash. Even uniques! All I did was to keep enchanting the item, which grants a bonus or two each time. Sure, the odds seem to taper off after you have that many stats on your item, but enchanting a rare item to gigantulous awesomeness proportions do take the fun out of finding unique items, which to be honest, isn’t that rare at all. Uniques can also be enchanted, but the cost of doing so is dozens of times more expensive than enchanting a rare, so why bother?

Comparisons to Diablo 2 is evitable. However, it is nowhere in the same league. Diablo 2 is much more challenging, in terms of loot and enemies. It is somehow this challenge that drives me onwards, to go on boss runs again and again, so that my character will be more prepared to face the next dungeon level. Compared to Torchlight, I never really need to grind for loot or levels. Enemies are quite easy to dispatch, and I was playing on Hard. I probably need to start playing on the most difficult setting then. But then, even so, I don’t think it will ever be as challenging as what I faced in D2, where you can only unlock a harder difficulty setting if you complete the previous one. And completing one is by no means an easy feat. I struggled my ass off to get to Hell difficulty. And once there, I got it handed back to me. Again. And again. Until I was scared I would get into negative experience.

(I’m not much of a Titan Quest fan, so I won’t comment against that game. Which I did not really favour anyway.)

torchlight_02

Torchlight is a nice enough game for me, but it gets old too fast. The initial nostalgia of an action RPG combined with the cool is very, very fun for the first 20 odd levels or so, which lasts the odd 1-2 hours or so, but after that, repetition sets in. Deja vu kicks in and soon, I was asking myself why I am going through this dungeon which I purchased from the vendor. Just to get loot? Just to grind? If I wanted to do both, wouldn’t these two activities be more worth it to my LoTRO character?

Of course, I guess all these qualms can be resolved with the promised release of the editor. The community is undoubtedly excellent at providing a fresh playing game. Just like how fans of Oblivion fixed the “auto-leveling world” for me, I expect the Torchlight community will spring up some excellent mods that will fundamentally change the game. Of course, this will take time. I’m just hoping here.

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This game is a fun diversion if you crave a 15-30 minute rush. But like any other drug, once you get used to it, the initial rush becomes shorter and shorter, and you’ll want something stronger soon.

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Getting Hooked On inFamous

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

infamous-ps3cover

inFamous is a 3rd person platformer shooter. I think. I have no idea how to properly categorize it into a particular genre. It features sandbox-style gameplay (yay!) where you play this loner rough-talking guy who suddenly develops the superhero ability to control electricity after a massive electrical explosion in your town. The protagonist in this particular cliche is Cole MacGrath, some random bike messenger who was tasked with delivering a package which turns out to be a bomb and it…zzz…

OK, inFamous isn’t big on the whole story thing. It starts out by giving you a 5 minute boring lecture on the backstory and how you got your powers. And proceeded to start you off in the middle of the city, where you somehow bunk in with your best (and only?) friend at the top of some building. At least, the action starts out bright and early, and the controls are very easy to get into. Cole’s superpowers gives him some sort of ability to not break bones (how does electrical powers translate to unbreakable bones anyway?) when you jump off high buildings. Couple that with his background hobby of “urban exploration“, you have one badass MF who can parkour his way all over the city. I feel like the game handles this particular aspect of the game real well. You can easily climb pillars, swing from girders, jump from building top to building top, etc. There are some side missions that require you to do this particularly well (spying on enemy couriers) or fast (disabling radar towers, or is it enabling, with timers). Soon you will gain the ability to glide on the air and slide on electrical lines or train tracks which will give you additional options to move about.

However, I’m appalled that with all Cole’s amazing parkour abilities, he is still unable to climb over chain-linked fences. I’m not sure why the designers made it that way. Is it because the city that Cole is in is surrounded by fences, so as a way to limit Cole’s movements, they made fences insurmountable? Ok, I’m fine with the constraints of a game. I understand that a game cannot be truly open-world. There has to be some sort of boundary for the game world, which in this case, happens to be a chain-linked fence. It’s not waist height, but high enough the Cole can’t jump over it. But why can’t I climb over chain-linked fences within the city? This seems to be a huge oversight, and it really kills the mood. Somehow, if the designers want me to go to a particular direction, they use chain-linked fences. I dread seeing them when I’m doing missions within the city. It’s like all the options I had considered for the mission gets ripped out of my head, just because of the presence of the chain-linked fence. You suck!

Cole’s electrical powers also means that he is somehow vulnerable to large bodies of water. Which I don’t really get. Does he get short-circuited or something? Why does his health go down (and subsequently die) when he falls into water, but it’s OK for him to stick both his arms into huge electrical inlets to restore the electrical generator? OK, maybe I’m just nitpicking here, but if he can stick both arms into some sort of giant generator to “complete the circuit”, then isn’t water the same?

The main missions are quite the standard kill-the-bad-guys-save-the-city fare, with some variation. I’m not complaining much, it’s not an RPG anyway. Action games == kill everything that shoots you. These move the plot along. The side missions is just a distraction; for every side mission you complete, you get a portion of the city under control, which means enemies won’t respawn or something. There are a few types of side missions, each with its own level of fun, stupidity and insanity. I love it when a side mission requires you to kill all enemies or deactivate (or reactivate) satelites (which is just a time-limited parkour run, which I love). But other irritating ones are the supposedly follow a courier stealthily and find surveillance equipment to zap (which you can’t zap from afar for some reason). One also requires me to perform certain actions or stunts so some random guy I don’t care about can snap pictures of me. That one’s fine, just mildly irritating. The missions are also based on DIAS (acronym for “Do It Again, Stupid!” invented by Shamus). However, if you die or fail to perform the required action, you just re-spawn at the latest checkpoint in that mission. It’s not like GTA where a death or failure requires you to get back to the mission start and redo it all over again. I can live with this.

There are also moral-specific missions, or sequences within a missions that tells you which action you take will determine your moral compass. The thing is, you can either do an action that says you’re good OR evil, but there’s none of those morally ambiguous choices. You cannot flip-flop doing some good and some evil stuff. This is because the most awesome power unlocks are only available to one or the other end. I started out doing “good” stuff, because it seems like the sensible thing to do at the time (and I’m basically Mr. Nice Guy). It was only then that I realised that the best abilities are locked by your karma. Because of that, I am tied to being Mr Nice Guy all the way! Sigh. Oh look, another person needs rescuing…

Being a PC guy, it took me quite some time before I can get used to aiming with the right-analog stick. I’m getting better, but it’s still very counter-intuitive. Aiming with a mouse is vastly different, totally on a different scale altogether. I can easily imagine the controls to be much better on the PC

But if you can overlook the flaws, inFamous is a very accessible game. If someone whose dexterity and hand-eye coordination is deteriorating by the minute can enjoy it, I’m sure the money you will inevitably splurge for this is well spent.

Tip: it is actually possible to do this in the game. What I usually do is that I will melee a passer-by, knocking him down, but not killing him, and then heal to get 3 XP (good). Repeating it does not net me additional XP, so bummer. I’m not sure if knocking a passer-by will lower your karma though, but I don’t think so, as only if you drain a knocked-down person will you get evil XP.

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GTA 4 PC Review – Part 2

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

This is a continuation from the previous post “GTA 4 PC Review – Part 1“.

4) Story

I can’t comment very much on it, since I have yet to complete the game. Niko Bellic seems to be a gun-for-hire with loose morals but loves his family very much. As with all mob stories, there are betrayals after betrayals, and you also have your veritable mob-cliché cast, from the undercover agent to steroid-pumping flashy I-suspect-he-must-be-gay dude.

You have to get to the top, doing odd jobs for these over-the-top portrayal of characters, pretty much your standard GTA fare. A new addition is going on dates or just hanging out with some of your new-found friends, which may or may not be a good addition, depending on how you look at it. On some missions, you also get to decide to kill or allow some people to live, and you may even decide which NPC to kill off. So far, I haven’t really felt the repercussions of my choice. It seems like a pseudo-adventure-RPG and the story choices is definitely a good improvement to the GTA series.

Typical mob boss story with a lot of drama and betrayals. What’s there not to like?

5) The Game Experience

The game world is huge but I find it not too overwhelming. I do occasionally feel lazy to travel all the way to my safe house, just so I could save after purchasing ammo, body armour or that cool new rifle. However, although you may need to do a lot of driving from one place to the other, like all GTA games, it is a lot of fun to do so, plowing through people and traffic, trying hard not to crash.

I find that the car handling has become a bit more loose from earlier games, which means that handbrake turns are not as easy to do anymore. Ripping up that handbrake will definitely cause your vehicle to turn wildly around and become uncontrollable. However, if you do manage to pull it off, timing the turn nicely while tapping on the handbrake, it is unbelievably cool! However, the brakes for every car seem to be missing a few pads as the stopping distance is quite far. There’s no such thing as an e-brake in the GTA world.

Another cool thing is the new combat mechanics. I still prefer the keyboard-mouse setup for shooters, and GTA 4 is no different. I have tried shooters on the X360 before, and I never really liked the feel of controlling your character using a gamepad. The cover feature is pretty nice if you know your enemies are all on the other side.

You could even surf the internet or watch some TV while you’re at it. Like how Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw have put it, “Hang on, am I playing Grand Theft Auto or Grand Theft Normal Boring Life?” Granted, the internet portion does see some use in some missions, but the TV is probably too much. Would you want to watch TV in a game? The radio stations are a great touch and at least adds some depth to the game. You appreciate the radio much more because a bulk of the time is spent driving on cars or motorcycles (modified with a radio apparently), and you’ll invariably listen to them. One nice thing is that sometimes after a mission, there will be a breaking news about the explosion you have caused, probably done by terrorists. It makes the game world feel more alive, like your actions do have a great impact on it.

Economics-wise, it’s pretty easy. It’s actually quite easy to acquire the dollars: just do missions. At the start, you’ll probably be scrimping for awhile, but once you reach to the second safehouse, you’ll pretty much be rolling in dough. By the time I unlocked the third island, I had more than a quarter-million in cash. A lot of the things in the game costs money, but I rarely do stop to pay for them. The only two items that I pay for are body armour and food; the former being hard to find and the latter being unable to steal from the hotdog and hamburger carts in the game. I also buy ammo sometimes, but it’s usually quite plentiful as you engage in a lot of firefights and every enemy drops ammo when killed.

The stars mechanic has also changed. In the previous games, the only way to lose your star rating is to visit a Pay-N-Spray shop. Now, it is entirely possible for you to outrun the police. Each star rating is correlated to the search radius the police will conduct. As long as you remain within the search radius, your star rating will remain. Each time you encounter the police, the radius will re-centre to your last known position. This makes it possible for you to actually outrun your star rating, no matter how high it is. The good thing is it adds a nice variety for you to strip your star-rating. And at 4 stars, the circle gets quite big that it is quite impossible to simply out-run it. The bad thing is that I feel wierd when at one moment, the whole of LCPD (Liberty City Police Dept) is searching for me, and the next, I’m a free man! Cool! Of course, at 1-star, outrunning the cops is so easy that it’s more of an annoyance. This only gets challenging if you manage to raise your star-rating to 3 or above. The radius gets quite large at that point and you must make clever turns in order to escape and not encounter any police, which is shown on your mini-map. So it is particularly gratifying if you manage to escape the police at higher ratings. Thus, this gameplay mechanic is particularly split for me. It gets annoying when you commit petty crime, but becomes a nice challenge if you manage to raise it high enough.

The GPS system is another mechanic that I’m split for and against. For one thing, it’s a great guidance system. In some of the more luxurious cars, there is even a turn-by-turn voice navigation system. However, in most cars, it will just be your mini-map, showing you the exact route where to go and where to make that turn. I find that now, I will always create a checkpoint on my main map and the GPS system will automatically map the route there. In the previous games, I would have to periodically check my main map and remember which turns to take. Now that challenge has been totally diminished by this system. I am tempted to turn it off, but I find myself getting lazier each time I play. Less challenge and instant route gratification, today’s GTA players are really getting pampered!

6) Realism

This is one aspect of the game I have my doubts on. Real-life isn’t always fun. That’s why I play games, as a form of escape. So it is quite disconcerting having real-life elements in the game. Half the time, one of your friends will call you, asking you to go bowling, play darts or go to a club. If you turn them down, your standing with them will go down. Occasionally, I do get called while on a mission, but Niko will automatically say he’s busy. If you do want to stay friendly with these chaps, for some reason or another, you will have to call them up, pick them, go to some place, and then drive them back. A game mechanic that I am certainly not fond of.

Also, it seems weird that your girlfriend might reprove you to stop hanging with drug dealers, but wouldn’t bat an eyelid if each time you pick her up in a new car, steal a car while on a date or run someone over.

There are toll booths in the game and you encounter one early on when you frequently travel between the first two islands. This is quite a pointless aspect on the game. I have no motivation at all to pay the toll, and since outrunning the police is quite easy, I almost always just ram the toll gate. The only times when I do pay is when I’m on a mission, as I do not want to add the annoyance of the police while doing my errands.

GTA has always been an over-the-top portrayal of a great freeform game world. Which is why to me, GTA 3 is still the best one that I have played so far. It still amazes me that I have completely memorized the whole map of the first island of GTA 3. That game simply has the right balance of size, humour, missions, the whole nine yards. Subsequent GTA games have failed to impress me the way GTA 3 did. Vice City was still wacky, but too big for me. San Andreas added more game mechanics (and a whole lot of stereotypes), which I feel was a tad unnecessary. GTA 4 seemed to focus more on the realism part, which again, I feel is unnecessary and doesn’t really contribute much to the fun factor. Instead, it’s more of an annoyance and just gives you more things to do.

And quantity is never linearly correlated with quality.

7) Overall

I really loved the game, despite its asinine copy-protection scheme. It is nice successor to the GTA series, and to me, the second best GTA game after GTA 3. I would like to say the third, after GTA 3 and GTA, but I guess I really shouldn’t count the original GTA. That game is already bronzed on my Hall Of Fame list, the one that started it all, so it belongs in another world altogether.

I would say the game is really worth the cost, considering the sheer size and scope of it. However, it is quite a shame for a game this good to be marred by the draconian DRM system and performance issues. Some may be turned off by this, but I’m sure a savvy gamer like yourself will know where to get “insurance”, in case 10 years from now, the online activation scheme remains yet the servers have been taken down.

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GTA 4 PC Review – Part 1

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

Image source: http://www.gamespot.com/users/Nicholai69/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25574435

First off, let me start by saying I have only played up til the 3rd safe house. I am, by no means, anywhere near completion. This is because of the huge time constraint in my life. Having a regular job and a fiancée does not bode well for playing such huge games (not that I’m complaining, of course).

Hence, this will not be a very good review, if you can call it that. I would rather much prefer “impressions” or “take”. Because, let’s face it, I’m not much of a writer, nor am I that good a reviewer. Attempting to give my opinion on a game of this magnitude is very overwhelming for a stooge like me.

Anyway, during the course of writing this review, which took me about a week, I realised that I may have been too verbose. I am definitely not willing to backspace all the nonsense I have spouted thus far, so I’m splitting this up into 2 parts.

(Wow! My first ever 2-part review!)

1) DRM

Image source: http://torrentfreak.com/anti-drm-t-shirt-design-contest-the-winners-are/

In order to play GTA 4, you will need to, at the very least, perform an online activation, sign up for a Games For Windows Live account and have the disc in the drive. Also, there is this Rockstar Games Social Club program which has to be pre-installed, ie. you must install it before installing the game. It acts as a launcher-cum-news-grabber-cum-multiplayer-thingmajig. It will lie in the background, doing God-knows-what, and is by default set to automatically run when Windows starts. I wonder which executive IDIOT came up with all these!?

Of course, you will need to sign up for this more-useless-than-useful service. If you choose not to, the game will nag and nag at you until in your exasperation, you will. Yes, it actually nags in-game. For me, I got tired of the nagging, so I set everything to automatic sign-in and my disc is permanently in the drive. Right now, I’m researching for ways on ripping it and mounting it on a
virtual drive. I should save up and get myself Daemon Tools Pro Advanced with the vIDE drive.

2) System Requirements

Take a look at the minimum, recommended and other requirements from the Rockstar GTA 4 PC support page. For the purposes of saving space and words, I am not going to quote them here.

I have absolutely no idea why Internet Explorer or Adobe Flash in required. The minimum specs seem to already be the recommended specs, or even exceed them, for a lot of the current crop of games. And forgive my ignorance, but this is the first time I am seeing a quad-core CPU making its appearance on the recommended specs. The amount of hard drive space needed is really asinine. I think only 1% of the people in the world can actually play this. Which is dumb from a marketing standpoint. Is it really impossible to make a game with nice graphics on a playable setting which runs on mainstream graphics cards?

3) Performance

The game is a mighty resource hog. My graphical settings are set quite low so I could run it properly on my gaming rig, which I consider to be semi-powerful: an Intel E6750, 4GB ram, ATI Radeon 4850 512MB and Vista 64 SP1. However, starting the game is still a slow and frustrating process, enough for me to fire up Bejeweled on my iPhone, so that I can be entertained while waiting for my game to actually load. On those specs, I am running the game semi-comfortably on these settings:

To me, these are fairly low graphical settings. Even then, while making quick turns, or if I jerk the mouse too much, the game screen will blank out parts in white, supposedly because it is unable to draw them on the screen. GTA 4 is obviously not optimized for the PC. The lame excuse that RockStar gave was that it was for “future-proofing”. Yup, this is a game that is so unbelievably advanced that no current generation hardware can run it at maximum settings. Which makes no business sense whatsoever to me. But hey, I’m no businessman. I don’t have an MBA or wear a suit to the office. So what do I know?

With such settings, I get a paltry 20-25 fps while driving. I may need to scale it down some more, since it does give me a bit of a headache sometimes when the screen stutters too much.

The Games For Windows Live client is built in directly into the game. I feel that it is quite amazingly done. The way it can be brought up and hidden away is very seamless. And because of it, I am curious. Did RockStar commit a lot of time and developers into doing that, so much so that the performance issues got sidelined? It wouldn’t surprise me, since I am working in the software industry. Managers and executives always love to see more features into their product, and some issues will certainly be moved into the backlog, almost certainly never to see the light of day again. In this case, I could really envision the GFWL client being a top priority for the executive management at RockStar. It has community features, allows RockStar to monitor their player habits, bring RockStar in bed with Microsoft and act as another copy-protection system. The opportunity cost? Getting the game to actually work on normal PC hardware.

Ok, maybe this first part is a tad depressing to read. Hopefully, the second part will perk you up a notch.

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Why Game Reviews Shouldn’t Be Trusted Too Much

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Football Manager 2009 (also somehow known as Worldwide Soccer Manager 2009) is the latest in the line of football management sims. The series has been hailed by fans of the beautiful game of being the best in its genre.

Thus, it seems perplexing to think that IGN, one of the most popular gaming review sites, to give it a meager 2.0 (out of 10) score.

RockPaperShotgun has responded to the review, where it points out that “it’s more productive to observe quite how much your preconceptions of a game can affect the experience you have when you play it”. I do agree with this. You perceive your world according to how bias you are, based on your experiences.

And it seems to show that IGN does not care about the quality of a review; it’s better to keep churning them out. So is IGN committed to providing responsible reviews?

I laughed when I saw this:

A 0.5 metacritic score on the game’s sound? Is this reviewer for real? Complaining that Football Manager 2009 has no sound is like penalizing The Sims 2 for not speaking in English. I do not disagree that FM2009’s audio is probably very very bad, or minimal, and the 0.5 score seem fitting. However, it has no bearing on its gameplay whatsoever. It just goes to show that scores are worthless in a review. Why they still persist is probably because of two things. First, game reviewers do not the the proper knowledge on how to properly articulate their thoughts on the game material into meaningful words. Or second, game reviewers know that people who read their reviews are generally lazy idiots who gets turned off the moment they see more than 2 sentenced in the whole site, preferring the page to be littered by irritating flash banners and colourful images. Personally, I think it’s both.

It’s very difficult to find good reviews of games these days, when all sites care about are churning out content to keep the visitors coming so that they can get more ad revenue. IGN has finally joined my list of websites with crap content.

Now, when is Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw going to release another review in his Zero Punctuation series?

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World Of Goo: First Impressions

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Two of my favourite blogs were gushing about World Of Goo in their respective posts, so I just had to check it out. Thus I decided to brave through FilePlanet for a demo and joined a download queue. But my impatience got the better of me, so I just googled around for a suitable mirror. 5 seconds later, I managed to get it from some funky site which google found for me; 5 minutes later, it was on my harddrive; 5 hours later, I remembered I got it on my harddrive and proceeded to install to try it out.

The Goos are damn cute, the ambient music is nice, the graphics are top-notch, and the physics effects are great! Perfect game, no? But alas, I wasn’t really that into the game. I think the demo allowed one to play the first chapter, but after 4 levels, I was already starting to get bored. It was fun figuring it out for a while or making your tower into funny little shapes until you run out of living goo balls, having which you just hit the restart button. The signs were also very humourously done, never failing to get a chuckle from me. I also liked the SimCity-ish startup texts; was half-expecting it to say “Reticulating Splines” for a minute there.

The gameplay seems to be just grabbing a living goo, mousing over where’s the furthest place you can place it, and then dropping it there, where it will presumably die (no more eyes.. :( ) and become part of the tower or bridge (depending whether it’s vertical or horizontal). I assume that on the levels get harder and more challenging on the next few chapters, but I have yet to buy it to try it out. Heck, I still haven’t completed the demo yet.

World Of Goo costs US$20, for both the PC and WiiWare versions. Sure, it’s a nice price and I have also bought Kudos 2 and Trials 2 at the same price point (Trials 2 has since reduced its price). However, for now, US$20 translates to SG$30 (if I use a generic US$1 = SG$1.50 exchange rate), and 30 bucks for me just feels a tad too high.

But really, I’m probably feeling that way because I’m a bit tight on cash right now. If I got some spare cash, I wouldn’t mind paying such an amount for a nice polished puzzle game, especially one that I can secretly install on my office laptop. One big plus point for me is that I am a huge fan of indie games that dare to push and challenge boundaries such as this. I would also love to support DRM-free games as much as possible! Not to mention, talented developers such as them should be supported and encouraged. Who knows, they could bring about the next gaming revolution.

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