I’m a massive fantasy nerd. In my lifetime, I’ve absorbed huge swathes of swashbuckling elves and evil wizards, I’ve painted little mages and sent them into battle, and I’ve even dressed up as a mythic fantasy warrior and charged around for a weekend smacking people around with a fake sword. In short, I absolutely love fantasy, though I’ll say now (naysayers can moan, but it’s true), that Lord of the Rings is not really what you’re going to get from mainstream fantasy, in the same sense Harry Potter isn’t really a true fantasy wizard.

There are a few tenets of fantasy that are vital to creating a successful legion of fans who will, often, put overweight people in leather armour whenever you’re signing their novels:

• A back-story stretching thousands of years, preferably with at least one race who was “there when the (insert creator-race here) were first beginning their work.” I’m talking races, politics, great wars you’ll only hear about in whispered discussions in dark taverns over a mug of ale from a dwarf with more scars than skin.
• A world in which everything is possible, geographically. I’m talking about dwarven mine-fortresses, lava and daemon-filled wastelands, lush, verdant forests and tiring, endless desert. Everything must be covered, and at great length, though you’re welcome to take the time, as most fantasy novels barely leave the starting town for eight hundred pages.
• A strong sense of factions – I’ll give an example. Dwarves are not all linked, generally, by the fact they’re all small, hyper-masculine and extremely pissed off. There are many different types of dwarf, and it’s important to establish that not everyone in your novel/fan-fiction/game/film/glue-and-macaroni sculpture is simply a cookie-cutter stereotype with nothing to individualise them whatsoever. Strong characters need to break the mould, and rebel against the constraints set upon them by men like Tolkien, in which every dwarf is angry, ridiculously noble and hiding some kind of secret pain. That’s not fantasy, that’s a Hatebreed concert.
• I like dwarves, have you noticed?

Now, to look at Dragon Age’s character creation screen, we’re presented with a wealth of options, but not so many as to spoil the idea of fun and logically-contained originality for the player. Dwarves (hah!) can be commoners or nobles, humans can be of similar varying backgrounds, and most interestingly, elves are either rebels or slaves. Chew on that, Legolas.

I think this is an important idea, and one they’ve built on since Mass Effect. In ME you were given the ability to give your Commander Shepherd one of three different backgrounds, and within that one of three defining moments in his military career. The six bases for the avatar you’d be playing for a long time (and at my girlfriend’s last count, over 100 hours) are simple. The son of a Navy couple, bathed in blood defending a strategic objective from a horde of oncoming foes whilst his friends lay dead and wounded. An Earth-born urchin with no future save enlisting, earning his recognition in the galaxy as a ruthless war-hero who would ignore civilian casualties to take out the enemy. Many options, and they all contribute to certain missions cropping up, certain reactions from those aware of Shepherd’s reputation.

Bioware have built on this idea in DA by not only giving you six different choices, but ensuring the first two hours or more are completely based on whose mind you choose to immerse yourself in for the next fifty-plus hours. I think it’s a great step forward for the RPG genre – remember, WoW fans, how you’d start a new character simply to immerse yourself in the one-to-ten starting zones? It’s essentially a very similar thing with DA, and I think it’ll be a massive success.

I will nitpick about the graphics, and that’s simply because I don’t think it fits the genre. Good science fiction, or in the case of ME, amazing science fiction, is all about believable, mature conversation about topics NASA would kill children to put into active use. The animation for these conversations in-game are what make them so effective, as no one is in any way being melodramatic or putting too much physical emphasis on their lines and more lines of dialogue.

In fantasy, I’m not so sure I can see this working. Fantasy is William Shakespeare to science fiction’s August Strindberg – the melodrama serves the universe in which the fiction is set. Dwarves are angry, Elves are arrogant, and humans are, generally, bumbling idiots but hold a few exceptions that amount to either suave anti-heroes or comedic relief. However, the conversations in the trailer still look fairly Bioware-static, and I’m worried they won’t be able to convey the stage-presence style of the dialogue that, by the look of it, remains very true to the genre in which the title is set.

As for the skill system? It’s WoW meets Mass Effect, and I couldn’t be happier with it. Specialise in one or two handed weapons, blocking, agility, tanking… and this is just for the Warrior class. Obviously, this is never going to become a multiplayer game, and it’s always a shame to see a three-man RPG suffer like this, especially if it’s on the PC as well. However, we said this initially about Too Human, and the eventual multiplayer in that case was abysmal.

The squad system has taken some seriously clever cues from the best RPG combat mechanic, in my opinion, of all time: the gambit system from FFXII. The gambit system, for those who never played FFXII, was a simple set of instructions for your allies that were all conditional: use potions when low on health, use magic until out of mana, then use a mana pot and keep on blastin’, and so on. The only major difference between the two was you had to unlock gambit options in Square’s epic RPG, and here it’s all up to you from the word go. This works very well in a game where you’d really not feel like managing the minutiae of your squadmate’s spells if you’ve chosen a physically-focused character for a reason.

*

The game comes out on November 6th in Europe, and I can’t wait to stick up an in-depth review here on FTGG, though you’re looking at Christmas, earliest: if it’s being done for my enjoyment, you’ll know I’ll have only touched the review once I’ve geeked out and done every single possible thing in the game. Most reviewers will be skipping a fair bit of content, as it’s ridiculous for someone to have to write a thousand words while compressing down fifty-plus hours of gameplay, especially in the space of a week before the article due date. There are some games I’m so glad I played, rather than reviewed. This will be one of them.

Call "shopped!" all you want. I played a build that looked even nicer than this, if that's even possible.

The problem with racing games is they’ve slowly begun to split into two different categories over the years: the MarioKart conglomerate, and the Gran Turismo bunch. However, there’s a smaller, third genre, and it’s a franchise all on its own: Need for Speed.

The first thing you’ll notice about the car above what I’m writing now, is that it looks realistic to the point where you’re calling the angry mob to proclaim it as pre-rendered. It’s also lacking crazy vinyls of green flames over gloss purple paint, lights under the chassis and fuel injectors coming out of every window. So, in that sense, you could say this game is as big as a departure from the normal vein of Need for Speed as it’s possible to get, if you consider the timid realism of Pro Street.

Today, I went to visit Slightly Mad Studios, the developer of Shift, and after hearty meal at the local Italian, with guests to the event that consisted of Eurogamer forumites, professional Need for Speed players, and a few journalists, we settled down to preview the game itself. I’ve got to admit, I just wasn’t prepared for how nice this game looks, and that’s considering the release isn’t even until September. The sun glints off every vehicle, and before you moan and claim Gran Turismo was doing the same thing more than half a decade ago, consider this: when was the last time you saw light glint off the accelleration pedal inside the car?

The “cockpit view” is, undoubtedly, the main selling point of Shift. Hyper-realistic to the point of disbelief, you’ll notice everything from air-conditioning vents to the seams on the leather upholstery. The game does indeed come with at least three other camera settings (in the current build) that range from bonnet view to the wonderfully accessible chase-cam. Honestly, I’m not a fan of cockpit cameras, but after playing around with Shift this afternoon, I don’t think I’m ever going to use anything else. If you crash, your camera pitches forward: you are the driver inside the car, and you see everything from inside their helmet. As the car slowly rolls away from the collision with the track wall, he pants, catching his breath, his vision blurring, his hands tightening on the wheel. This is racing immersion to the point of a cinematic experience.

Cockpit view: your new best friend.

Although cinematic, the racing experience itself is no less because of it. Soaring around the track (or if you’re me, soaring only on my third try, trying to forget a lifetime of experience in the Nintendo school of driving) feels so natural. I told the developers today that my own personal acid test for racing-sim games was to see whether I wanted to drive after playing, as I currently haven’t even got a licence. But it feels so real, even to me, that I’d absolutely love to tear around a track in real life after feeling the exhilaration of a hyper-realistic game like Shift.

The thing with hyper-realism is, that no matter how immersive or good the title is, someone’s always going to complain it’s not for the casuals. This is no Microsoft Flight Simulator, it requires no complex or hardcore approach to driving. Admittedly, a fair few of the development team actually race cars in their spare time, so it comes more naturally to them, but as someone who’s not the best in the business but competent, I got the hang of it fairly quickly. You may find some aspects of Slightly Mad’s efforts at realistic gameplay slightly confusing, such as the rather long delay between neutral gear and reverse when you’re sitting against a wall, but it made me frantic, worried that I wasn’t going to win. I’ve found, over the years, that any game that makes me want to accost my screen with pleas for help and various profanity-laden
comments along the vein of “oh, come on! I’m so f$&%ing close!” are usually
the best games in the business.

Even so, EA faces a hard sell with this title. Nitro, their arcade racing game that’s far more Need for Speed in terms of similarity to the underground modkit-racer than Shift, is only going to debut on the Wii, which may come as extremely frustrating for those missing the intense fun of chemically induced boosts and pimped-out automobiles. But rest assured, Shift isn’t just another PGR or Forza. It brings the Need for Speed arcade-esque feel to the title in its own individual way, and for once, it’s not through relying on the fact that flames and lights will make someone shell out just shy of fifty quid during the recession.

I’m referring to the AI in this title. Everyone who’s played the Need for Speed titles over the years remembers the entertainingly competitive AI of the other drivers on the track, who would try to shunt you subtly out of the way, who’d fight back when you knocked them off the track, but not to the tiresomely aggressive degree of Burnout Paradise. In Shift, the AI relies on a “grudge” system: you shunt someone into a wall, they’re going to remember it, and you’d better watch your rear-view mirror if they’re behind you the next time you enter the same chicane you slammed them against. They lack outright aggression, but they do respond to pressure. If things are too intense and too fast, AI players will actually lose their cool and crash, occasionally. You can, of course, cause pile-ups yourself, but it’s interesting to hit a sharp turn at 60+ mp/h and have to slide out of the way of three cars who have careened into each other without any interference from you.

Multiplayer, for those not too entertained by whiling away the hours against a computer, is also intended, and although nothing is concrete yet, production has gone on record to confirm an ambitious sixteen-player multiplayer. That’s a lot of people on one track, and let me tell you, the tracks are more than big enough.

You’ve got two varieties of track: “indie”, and “pro”, and depending on which class of car you pick, you’ll get one or the other. Think of them as “shorter” and “longer”, respectively, and you’ve got a rough idea. This makes a lot of sense, as with a track that never changes in length, but is geared towards slower cars, powering through in a Zonda can sometimes feel disappointingly short. The versions of the tracks are both entertaining, and although all the matches played on the current build were only two laps apiece, I can imagine laps can be increased for custom races.

The HUD also features an ingenious little addition: a racing line. A stream of arrows overlaid onto the track, that will help guide your racing line, changing colour to give you an indication of what to do next: blue? Faster, damn you! Green? Keep it up, and stick the pedal to the metal. Yellow is a warning to slow, and I’ll let you guess what red is. It comes intuitively, and although you’ll want to turn it off for a more immersive experience, it becomes a fantastic tool for learning the tracks. In my experience, it helped me learn the handling of my car.

The graphics are stunning, and in motion, only even more so.

The cars are really varied, and I mean so wildly that it’s almost like learning all over again when moving from a Zonda to a Shelby GT. The cockpit view changes with every single car, and you’ll notice that even the dials inside the cars change: they’ve mapped the innards of every playable vehicle in the game, and if you’re seeking that anal satisfaction from minute details that car nuts undoubtedly will, you’ll get shed-loads just peering around inside. I was worried I’d be looking at the inside of my car so much I’d not notice the wall rapidly approaching the outside of it, but as your velocity increases, your vision will blur everything bar the windscreen ever so slightly, and it assists with your focus being in the right place when hurtling round the track.

The sense of speed in games is always communicated via a variety of techniques, from the trademark “blur everything to hell bar the vehicle” Need for Speed approach, to the use of small objects that will whip past so fast you’ll realise how quick you’re moving, a la Star Wars: Episode One Racer (it’s still one of my racing favourites). Here, it’s a slight use of blurring, but the most impressive way in which Shift conveys its feeling of dangerous velocity is through the use of the helmet-perspective camera while in cockpit view. Your driver will actually shift back in his seat the faster you go, almost pressed against the headrest by the sudden G-forces when you slam the pedal to the floor, and his head will jerk forwards at any sudden deceleration your vehicle experiences.

The vehicles are still as stunningly well-rendered as they were in Pro Street, but here, they’ve taken things to a higher level of detail that becomes a sheer joy to behold. Dynamic lighting for all times of day means you’re going to have some amazing glints of shimmers across the bonnets, dashboard, and even the brake pedal, if you’re that interested (which it’s hard not to be, Shift really is ground-breakingly well detailed). I had the chance to play around with far more cars than the last round of previews you’ll have seen on the web, as they only got to toy around with a Pagani Zonda. Today, I got to drive, race, and trash a variety of vehicles, from said Zonda, to a Porsche, to a Shelby GT, and all six or seven of the current build’s available cars were unique in their handling, speed, and interiors.

Don’t be too worried about smashing the pretty paintwork off it, though don’t expect the absurd lack of damage representation present in far too many racing titles as of late. Tires will come off, bonnets will tear away into the slipstream of your car, and your windscreen will crack, though thankfully it never obstructs your view, all the while reminding you to treat your car a little better lest it not actually arrive at the finish line without a tow-truck present. In the build I played today, the developers had yet to implement performance-related implications of trashing your zoom-buggy, but they intend to have engine performance, handling and other variables you’ll rely on to win decrease in their performance as your car suffers more and more punishing hits, courtesy of a wall or another driver.

Speaking of engines, let’s take a minute to cheer for Slightly Mad Studios in creating their own engine for the title. Everyone who can use a computer these days relies on pre-existing engines and SDKs from other developers to the point where the second I see Havok’s logo on a box, I know that if anything moves on a table, the “float bug” will be in effect and I’ll lose my sense of immersion. Development, however, on Shift started last April, but they’ve been working on the engine itself for an astonishing two years, and it shows. The physics are spot on, in fact, if you drive into or over tires, don’t expect them to ping away, or despawn: they’ll stick on your wheels, or in my experience, break your bonnet by getting wedged in between it and the engine.

Shift is a title in progress, and will be in progress until September, but it’s baffling to think about what else they’ve still got to do, outside of multiplayer. I’ve pressed them about whether the PS3′s Home will be getting any Shift related content, but they’re undecided, though they agree it’s a medium definitely worth investigating. This is shaping up to be a great title, and as someone who went in having no attraction to racing sim titles whatsoever to someone who came out excited about when they’d start sending out review code, I’d say it’s a fantastic title so far. It’s going to have a tough sell, convincing the Xbox and PS3 NFS fans that it’s worth their cash, having deviated so much from the standard format, with the classic NFS-style Nitro outside the reach of their demographic. But it’ll do well if people are willing to commit to a brand that’s clearly trying to break out of the street-racing label it’s had attached. God speed.

GameInformer's world exclusive. Lucky sods.

Yes. It’s not a fake. That, my friends, is a Big Sister. Big Daddies were huge, ponderous, and very scary, but ultimately fairly stupid and easy to kill. This thing looks like a cross between them, Terminator, and a Spider-Splicer (the ceiling-scuttling things from the first game).

There’s been a ton of new information over at the viral website, so let’s delve into everything and come up with what we know so far in total, as there’s fifty different sites, each with ten different articles, and this seems like a waste of time to analyse it bit by bit when we know it’s going to be one huge article eventually.

The viral site lists some interesting facts.

The Pattern

Every time a girl goes missing, the following criteria are in evidence:

• The girl is aged between five and seven. This is the approximate physical age of the Little Sisters who resided in Rapture, up until the point they were either killed by your character in the first game, or saved and taken out into normal society.
• There are “red ghost lights” spotted in the docks near every incident site, which we can now identify, and even back then as it was bloody obvious to Bioshock players, as a Big Sister.
• The girls are being abducted in a circle, and presumably being taken back to Rapture.
• They all look extremely similar, much like the little girls used in the first title. So, not just lazy character design, then.

The Reasons

There are a variety of reasons the Big Sisters could be dragging the girls down into the deep-sea world of Rapture:

• Fontaine/Atlas never actually died, or if he has, there are surviving humans down there trying to restore the status quo.
• Bear in mind this is set seven years after the events of Bioshock, so enough time has elapsed for Big Sisters to evolve and go hunting.
• We know that the character from the first title, in the “good” ending, is seen to live out his days. Now, bear in mind, he is surrounded by Little Sisters all grown up, but this is tens of years in the future, possibly even the present day. If so, you could be playing the same character, simply seven years on.

Plot Theories

Call me a crackpot, but I think any of these make sense, given what we know so far:

• The Big Sisters are, in fact, fully-grown Little Sisters who have returned to Rapture to rebuild it, using the armour of their possibly now-dead guardians in order to give them the strength and underwater abilities of their bulkier relatives.
• Rapture is being rebuilt from the ground up (well, sea-bed up) in order to start again as a haven, but there’s been one vital flaw: they’re missing the various people to do it with, this time. Andrew Ryan is dead, Fontaine/Atlas is presumably dead, and Rapture is leaking and broken, but, and it is important to note, not destroyed.
• The person tracking all of these discoveries is one Jeremiah Lynch, a name that is, as yet, unconnected, but I’m getting the feeling this guy’s going to end up being our protagonist, as he’s the only person that isn’t completely stupid. I’m sorry, but even in the sixties and seventies people would notice little girls going missing all over the world, on the same night that red lights are seen underwater, heading out into the sea in a direction that puts their destination smack-bang in the middle of the Atlantic.
• Interesting really, as it then basically means Rapture is sitting on top of, or at least near to, the location Atlantis was presumed to have existed.

Analysis of the Big Sister

Well, well, well. What do we have here?

• The armour is a lot tighter, and we know the Big Daddy armour didn’t contain a huge, fat man, because our protagonist, the skinny little man we controlled in the first game was able to put it on and wear it easily enough prior to the final battle.
• It seems to come equipped with a harpoon gun, and a cage to contain the Little Sister in. I’m thinking if you’re wanting to kill, harvest or free the little tyke, you’re going to have to wait until she leaves the protective safety of that metal net before you can get anywhere near her.
• Apparently, the viral site tells us Big Sisters have the ability to cut “perfect holes” in glass, and scale buildings easily, which to me indicates the abilities of a Spider Splicer inside a Big Daddy-esque suit, which has to be the most difficult-to-kill combination I could have come up with while playing through the franchise’s first title.
• She’s also standing inside an underwater dome, much like many of the rooftops in Rapture that contained town squares and more open areas of the artificial cityscape. She stands next to what looks like the foot of a statue, but we’re not sure what this is yet, though with the only major statues being of Ryan, it’s probably likely to be simply a ruin instead.

In the mean time, we’ll have to wait for more information, but it looks like American kidnappings are next on the list if we follow the geographical pattern playing out on the world map on the viral site. I await with baited (held, more like) breath.

"Note to self: next time, a scene where I bought an M16."

 

Alan Wake is a title people have been waiting for for yonks. It’s been delayed more times than I’ve had hot dinners, and today, we get our first piece of the puzzle, in the form of a note from the protagonist himself. Consider this an article along the lines of a literary deconstruction, as I think it’s an intruiging enough note to warrant such a journalistic approach. (Apologies for the lack of a post yesterday, lost track of time.)

The note is as follows:

The amount of pages keeps growing each night. There are also new edits on the old pages. They keep getting more aggressive. The story is rewriting itself. The protagonist is now my namesake, and his wife is called Alice. The most worrying aspect: the genre seems to be shifting. It’s turning into a horror story. I can no loner be certain whether the hero can succeed or even survive. Apart for the jumbled fragments of bad dreams and oppressive feeling, I can remember none of the process when I wake up. But this morning, a breakthrough! When I came to my senses, I could smell her perfume on my shirt. I am close. I know it. I must push on.

- Alan Wake

Alan Wake’s a novelist, in case you’ve not noticed by the collosal amount of writer’s metaphors for various experiences he’s detailing here. What you’ll probably wonder before anything else, is how a novelist can make spelling mistakes like “loner” instead of “longer”, and “for” instead of “from”, the latter being more glaringly obvious than the former.

The thing is, the text isn’t translated from a Japanese counterpart; this is raw, written-in-English text. The mistakes indicate a frantic pace of thought, when you put yourself in the mindset of someone who’s living in a small town based on a novel he wrote, that’s coming to life around him. If I was him, I wouldn’t be pressing my mental F7 button either. “Loner” seems more like a suggestive than an accidental typo, perhaps reinforcing the feeling of loneliness and the inevitable feeling of vulnerability that goes along with it, more intended for the mind of the reader than the writer.

His antagonists come in the form of editors, more than enemies, monsters or creatures of the night. Whilst I personally think the idea of editors being portrayed in a game as killable mobs is hilarious, we must take into account that all of these uses of writer terminology are symbolic. His work is being edited, becoming a horror novel. The genres are changing. Though his novel came to life, it wasn’t the pleasant tale he penned himself. It’s become something else, and it’s coming for the person who would make it calm and “normal”.

As for the similarities between the name of the protagonist’s (in the novel) wife and his own. Not to mention the fact the protagonist he named himself has now had his name changed to something far more epynonymous. This being said, we have to bear the follwing in mind: at this point, Alan has no idea whatsoever where he is, or what he has to do for his reality to return to a natural equilibrium. Therefore, the conclusion this novel is becoming a warped reliquary of his own personal experiences makes him desperately cling to the un-edited parts as he percieves them to be factual information on his own life, lost to him through the warping of reality around him.

At the time of the game’s narrative beginning, Alan was working on a new novel. Suddenly, new pages started appearing out of nowhere, and the old, quaint pages started editing themselves into something more along the lines of Hitchcock than Austen. This suggests that we’ll be seeing some fairly odd setpieces and possibly people in the title, very much akin to Silent Hill. I’m also assuming the game is playing on a theme no other game has ever thought of; what happens to a protagonist when he’s been up for four days straight, even in a video game?

Personally, I’d bet heavily on a collosal amount of perceptory tricks and slips, illusions, false sounds and the ground looking more than a little unstable (and probably pretty darn comfortable, as well). The clue’s in the name; A. Wake. Hopefully the developers are going to release more of this, as it’s about damn time someone came up with something this original to explain the generic “stuck in an odd town, holy crap, monsters, oh my God, shadows, oh no, one bullet left, two zombies” tidal wave. Ironic that it’s compelled me to write around 750 words, too. Hopefully my work won’t start editing itself to say “Plot Wholes sucks.” That said, this kind of extract makes me glad my editors are all so nice. And they’re all going to give me a big raise. And world exclusives. And they won’t if I keep starting sentences with “and”. Damn.

Edit: Apparently it would seem the person who wrote the piece made the typo mistake of “loner” instead of “longer”, according to this thread. So we can ignore that part of the theory, I suppose, though I think he needs to take a closer look at the fact that neither my nor IGN’s article went on about this one small mistake for more than a few sentences, at most. I advise when typing out text that’s going to be heavily re-interpreted, you do your job slightly better, next time. Best of luck.

Had Gandalf brought his frost deck, I don't think the Balrog would have been a problem.

I love card games. From Munchkin Fu to Magic: The Gathering to Pokemon TGC, card games that involve little monsters atacking other little monsters is something I can find myself deeply enjoying, whether at home, or in this case, online. BattleForge is essentially Magic: The Gathering meets WarCraft 3, and attempts to mix the enjoyment of building decks, with the tactics and epic battles of an RTS. Normally I’d laugh and assume this is something no game could pull off, but after a night spent playing through the beta, I’m so very, very wrong.

BattleForge is, for the majority, a fantasy-realm RTS title. There are cards involved, but it’s easy to forget because you’re never once looking at an old wooden table with little laminated moneysinks laid out before you. In fact, the only time you will see your cards is by clicking them at the bottom of the screen to choose a unit to spawn. Units are varied as it’s possible to be, but I’ll get into that later, as there’s a ton of stuff to cover on such a complex game.

Your average user interface is fairly straightforward. At the bottom, you’ve got your deck, which can be any number of cards up to 20, though I’ve seen a few with a couple more than this, so it’s safe to assume the maximum is flexible. On the right, unit information, menus, and your generic minimap. However, when clicking the minimap I strongly advise you to make sure your game is running at the correct resolution. I was running the game at 1080 x 768 on a widescreen laptop, and the game wouldn’t register clicks past the 1080th pixel, yanking me back into the desktop in the middle of a match.

The UI is, for the most part, fairly standard, with smooth methods of bringing information to the player, though I’m baffled as to why exactly the developers decided to have tutorial text come up in your chat window, not to mention character dialogue. It seems un-needed, but serves as a useful way of reading it back over if you’ve managed to miss an important line of dialogue or an objective instruction. The chat window itself is the classic two tab mix between game and gamers, with people already spamming “WTS [Random Card]” in the little window, it’s a little irritating but thankfully, fully removable.

The cards themselves look something like the example I’ve stuck on the right here. Top right is your cost for fielding this particular fellow, who, for the record, looks something like a Halo Scarab crossed with a GreenPeace advert. He’s a “dominator”, which really has no other meaning bar “he’s the biggest thing you can field”. His ablities are listed below, and sadly the one thing I can’t do is show you is the information that will pop up as you scroll your mouse over his card. The three little orbs beneath the number 260 are the amount of orbs you need to field this card in the first place, orbs being a capturable resource along similar lines to the resource points in Dawn of War II.

Cards like this, in my opinion, make playing an RTS so much easier, so much so I wish I’d had a card of information every time I fielded a Zerg army in StarCraft. I know his damage, his health, what he’d be more weak to or strong against (following the logical Fire > Nature tradition), and an awesome picture of what he looks like. In fact, I’ll use this unit as my example for the rest of this article, as I can throw up screenshots and renders of him aswell.

Remember though, you can field him, but only near captured buildings, or other units. This is a brilliant gameplay aspect I’ve never really before seen; I could be playing against someone in PvP, run a tiny little ogre into his base, and then because I can spawn units next to an existing one such as the fat bloke with the club I just sent to his death, I can instantly field mister Razorleaf in the middle of my opponent’s base. It’s pure glee, and makes for some surprising sneak attacks.

Here’s the little fellow in all his three dimensional glory, and I’m not kidding when I say that’s how crisp
this game looks on a medium graphics setting. Crank it way up high and you’re in for a real visual treat, not to mention you could field 100 of these ponderous fellows, along with 500 little elves the height of his feet, and the game engine will render them all on high graphics without any slowdown. High spec PCs will handle this easily, but in all honesty I can’t think of any PC meeting the minimum spec requirements that won’t.

The graphics are fantastic, the worlds looking stunning with lush foilage, cartoony but well rendered water effects, and some really nice touches, like clouds that will slowly drift over the mountains on the map.

You’ll notice though, that this guy, although a walking killing machine, looks fairly friendly. Even Shadow deck creatures aren’t too scary, and this is because it’s not a scary game; something accessible to kids, for once.

There’s a basic storyline, and I’ll warn you know it’s not something comparable to Dostoyefsky, but a huge amount of writing and effort has gone into the lore of the world and it makes it that much more enjoyable for those seeking a single-player, fantasy-based experience. You never actually have to see another player’s army unless you choose to, and it’s for this reason that the game becomes more enjoyable. Though other online fantasy titles such as World of Warcraft would be droll as a single-player experience, the RTS genre has always excelled at fielding a decent level of AI opponents and campaigns to occupy those who would rather be without the stress, nervousness or pressure of playing against someone who, more often than not, will “LOL PWNT” them to the grave.

The title is fantastic, and I’ve really had to limit myself simply because if I didn’t I’d have to write for several hours, chalking up thousands of words just to explain to you how much content and gameplay there is. Mountable castle walls, AoE spells, a slick PvP interface, online shopping for new cards using an ingame currency, brilliant music… there’s too much to cover, and I think this is going to be a stupendously popular title, and I have every intention of heading back to it either for a review, or simply casual enjoyment. Though I would warn you now of the ingame currency idea, as it seems worryingly close to EA’s habit of charging slightly too much to have fun, the beta is changing and shaping itself, so we’ll never know what’s around the next corner until it goes gold. A cartoony, complex, complete triumph so far.

Now, which looks better, Forge mode, or this? I'd say the one with playable Scarabs.

Normally, when I boot up a demo, power my way through it then write it up on FTGG, I’m usually not majorly impressed, nor am I interested. However, when I saw Halo Wars up on the demo Marketplace, I giggled, then mashed the A button as fast as I could to start downloading. To combine three of my favourite things, those being the Halo universe, RTS games and amazing levels of units on screen at once, is a dream come true. Not to mention the fact that the heroic struggles in this title are probably fairly incomparable to the struggles Ensemble Studios faced trying to finish the damn game before Microsoft shut them down. Fear not, DLC is still indeed on the way, but as with Bungie before them, I think Ensemble will be better off out from under Bill Gates.

As with all demos, it comes with a tutorial to break you in on the controls and gameplay mechanics, and with a console-based strategy title, this is fairly necessary, as it’s no longer a simple point and click venture anymore. However, after playing this for a good solid while, I’d say I prefer this title without the mouse. Even though games as hectic as StarCraft and Dawn of War II require mice to keep up with the rapid selection, deployment, redeployment and organisation of troops, Halo Wars does it so swiftly it’s insulting to the other two titles. A click of the right bumper selects all units on screen at the present time, and the opposite button selects all units on the battlefield. Fantastic for convergence tactics, and if you’re after more specific groupings of your units, then bam, either hit A over one, or hold it down to drag-select.

Though I mourned the loss of the ability to set groups of units to the numbers one through nine on my keyboard for easy access in the heat of things, Halo Wars makes building everything a breeze, and the resource system couldn’t be more logical. I’ll run you through the last skirmish match I played to give you a better idea.

Stage One: I deploy my base, and with my one spare warthog, start collecting some supply crates, the only resource you’re ever going to need in the game.
Stage Two: I then slot some Supply buildings into two of the pre-allocated building areas around my base, to increase income, and begin working on some Power Plants to give me enough energy (one per plant) to upgrade my base to a fortress, aiming for a defense-based victory here.
Stage Three: Turrets are up next, and none too soon, as a Prophet of Truth and a few Elites make their way into my base and start smashing the lone warthog to bits before making tracks for my buildings and turrets, though they fall eventually to my defenses.
Stage Four: I then start with some Barracks building, before beginning to organise a production line of a few warthogs to keep my base defended. Upgrading them with a turret and then a grenadier marine in the passenger seat is two clicks of the A button away.
Stage Five: I am now on four Supply buildings, each simply upgraded to double their output, and I start amassing an army of Warthogs to crush the enemy, while ranking my turrets up.
Stage Six: I run my warthogs round a side route to the Covenant base, take out any unit production facilities to oppose any chance of Covenant reinforcements, and proceed to demolish everything they built. Who said the best defense was a good offense?
Stage Seven: I then slaughter the enemy units dotted around the map with the help of an Orbital MAC Cannon, two clicks of the gamepad away, and claim my victory.

This all took ten minutes. In ten minutes, I had eight warthogs gunning around the map, turrets taking out Ghosts from four hundred feet, and a battleship in orbit rearranging the geography of the Covenant base. Bearing in mind, no matter how many units were on screen at once, there was no slowdown, no lagging, and the enemy AI was seriously devious, even on Normal. They’ll flank you, retreat, attack in stages, waves, some will come in squadrons, some will use distraction tactics. It’s fantastic, like watching a match in Total War.

The storyline looks very creative, with a far more down-to-earth approach than Master-Chief’s superhuman antics would offer you, and I feel better for it. Though you can make Spartan soldiers, and they are seriously powerful in comparison to marines, don’t expect one of them to hijack a Scarab and take out the enemy force while chatting to a cyber-pal sitting in his suit interface. It’s raw, and you’ll lose a ton of troops, but backing them up with more though a linear reinforcement system devoid of any punishment for not saving enough resources makes it a lot easier on you, the player. Marines will actually organise themselves; lose enough of one squad, and the remaining marines will split up into existing ones to make managing them easier.

The game looks absolutely incredible, and if I can manage to slot myself into a review position anywhere, you’ll definitely hear a ton more about it from this particular journalist. It’s a shame Bungie aren’t doing any more Halo 3 DLC after the ODST expansion, but frankly, I’m more interested in pitting a Spartan against a Scarab and watching what happens. See how he likes it on Legendary.

Undead, or just angry? Who knows.

 

 

Resident Evil 5 is, by and large, from a series of games that don’t actually need improvements. The first three were solid shooters that complemented sound with visuals to bring a sense of the horrifying need for nothing but survival to its audience. It released a fourth that switched things up a lot, however; gone were the immovable camera angles and the odd shooting system, and in came an over the shoulder context-sensitive button masher that really brought the franchise back into the limelight.

The thing is, Capcom, innovation is only going to get you sales figures the first time you do it. The exact same formula doesn’t work as well the second time. Yes, it’ll work to some degree, no one came back to the Gears of War franchise expecting a farming sim, but there’s only so much copy and pasting you can do before the end user begins to wonder why they didn’t just keep playing the title’s predecessor.

This is essentially Resident Evil 4, with a side order of Army of Two, while trying to be Left 4 Dead. The problem is, as anyone who’s played the recent Valve team shooter will know, there isn’t actually a storyline in any of the four campaigns in L4D, but there’s supposed to be one in this title. This is where the game falls flat on its face a bit. You start out by edging your way into a compound, where a supposedly non-infected man is giving a speech to zombies on a loudhailer. So, from the outset it already seems like these aren’t zombies anymore, they’re just “crazed humans”. It seems Capcom has killed off, for want of a better, the one thing that made all of their undead truly scary; the fact that they’re actually dead.

The only intimidating mob I encountered was a rather scary fellow who stood at eight foot tall, dressed like an executioner who had an accident with a nail gun, and carries an axe more suited to the weapons scale of Final Fantasy than a title that’s actually supposed to promote a realistic sense of the laws of physics. Cloud Strife may be a soldier, but he’s not kidding anyone with the size of that blade. So this fellow will follow you around, and smash you into the floor with his axe. The speed and accuracy with which he does this is pretty intimidating, until you realise that by simply pressing B after he does so, you won’t die, and neither will your female compatriot.

This brings me to my next problem with this title; where did the sense of “holy crap, I’m completely alone against the horde” go? Left 4 Dead is frantic, but it’s not scary because you’ve got three other people with you. Three people the crazed flesh-eating hordes could gnaw on instead of you. the Resident Evil franchise had you, on your lonesome, with everyone around you infected with the T virus or about to be, regardless of how much you try to save them. Yet in this title, it not only seems completely impossible to die, it’s also impossible to run out of ammunition, as every time I did, my partner threw some at me, which I then had to pick up off the floor. I’m not sure why this is; he can cap a zombie at fifty yards, but he can’t catch a box the size of his fist at two meters. Worrying.

The demo finishes with you waiting for a helicopter. Not only is there no given indication of where the damn thing is, there’s also an infinite respawn of zombies, and the axe-man is unkillable, so you end up kiting the whole horde around the small market area you play in as you wait. This was so pointless I turned it off. Nuts to the helicopter. The only great helicopter wait was in the No Mercy campaign in L4D. There’s no sense of urgency any more, no sense of the undead, and no sense of punishment for injury or wasting ammunition. Well, wasting ammunition would be harder if the targeting system wasn’t as poor as this. The final code may be better, but this was just frustrating.

It's like Burnout Paradise, just without the car. Whoops.

 

 

Skate was a revolution in the games industry when it came to extreme sports titles. We’ve all played the Tony Hawk’s series to death, and I don’t know about you but I enjoyed every minute of it, finishing my time with the franchise around the point of Tony Hawk’s: Underground, the first title in which you could run around, and drive cars, like a Grand Theft Skater of sorts. However, the problem with Skate was it tried to go forwards whilst slipping backwards at the same time; it tried to take skating back to the streets, to those who had nothing, no KISS stadiums to put half pipes all over, and no celebrity pushing the title.

The problem with this, is, and brace yourselves, people do walk around on them. Skate 2  tries to remedy this somewhat, as it allows you to get off your board and walk around. Sadly, they’ve kept the control system from when you were on your deck, and this therefore means that you turn like the Titanic. It’s abysmal in how poorly thought out it was, and makes me wonder if anyone who skates, or even walks on a regular basis didn’t see the glaring errors in how poorly the movement comes across in this title when you’re on foot. The concept of being able to drag items around with your avatar is an ingenious one though, and one I give the developers some credit for.

The control system is, in my opinion, the best thing about the Skate titles. The Flickit system of control is actually fairly simple, though it seems complex at first; the left stick controls your movement, such as steering and leaning forward and back, while the right stick controls your feet. Flick the right stick down, then up, and your character will ollie. Flick it up, then right, and he’ll kickflip. It really feels like you’re controlling your toon so much more than you would in other skating titles, and although it then renders the tricks more realistically constrained than Tony Hawk’s 1080 degree melon spins, it gives a better sense of realism to the title. Something new, something more mature, and it works well.

However, the main failing of this title is the main failing of all titles relating to skateboarding, and for the sake of gamers everywhere, I’m calling you developers out on this farcical practise. Start actually thinking about your narrative and dialogue. It’s generic enough that my character just got out of prison and the only way he can get himself rich is skating, but the stoner dialogue and pointless amount of characters introduced is absurd. One. Focus more on his backstory. Get rid of the character customisation, give me an actual pre-made character, and write some dialogue for him. Give him a dark past. Perhaps he used to be a Tony Hawk’s developer who questioned what input the skater had on the title if any at all, and was thrown out. Give me something to work with here. I can accept silent characters; Gordon Freeman, Master Chief for the most part, Link – these all work, but they work because the rest of the story is so well written, not because they’re “silent and therefore cool, lulz”.

Skate 2 is beginning to make me wonder why games developers bother releasing demos that are basically tutorials. Start releasing levels that are around the middle of the game. Half Life 2‘s demo starts on the first level, then skips to Ravenholm, halfway through the game and just after you get the Gravity Gun. Not only does this then encourage me to get the gun by playing those first four chapters, it then gives me the sense of variety in the title, between being politically downtrodden and a victim of survival horror. Skate 2 does neither. It sits around looking petulant and bored, throwing pointless challenges for scores at me whenever I demand something more in depth. I don’t care how many different colours of wood I unlock. I care whether my character cares about unlocking new colours of wood.

Two demos, two disappointments. 2009 is going to be a year full of the opposite I’d hope.

On a lighter note, the third Plot Wholes is up, you can check it out here.

She never could contain herself upon seeing the new Argos catalog.

The horror genre is, by and large, a complete and utter farce. The only good recent example of horror, or something resembling horror enough to neccessitate new undergarments, was Bioshock. Oddly enough, so far this game borrows from various sources, doing some things well, some things sychophantically, and somethings downright laughably. But I’ll dissect each as I come to it, as I’ve got steaming mounds of criticism and praise for different aspects.

The main issue with first person shooters when telling a story, is everything has to be very visually obvious. While this is disappointing to those seeking a David Lynch-esque plot device, this probably appeals more to those who don’t want to spend twenty years on the internet trying to find out why the ball was red. F.E.A.R. 2  is all about ghosts, psychic soldiers (somehow simultaneously psychic and unintelligent), and the hallucinations that follow on from these two premises. From the beginning of the single-player experience, you’re dumped into the shoes of a named male protagonist, which automatically indicated something very clear; plot elements of this title will be completely lost on you if you haven’t played the first incarnation of the series.

Blundering on, as I hadn’t played the first game, mainly because I don’t usually have a lot of time for titles like this, I discovered one thing to my complete and utter horror. Nothing, whatsoever, was destructible. I was wearing a reinforced suit of armour, covering a very muscular arm. I smash this arm into a thin bit of wood, twice. Nothing happens. Not even a dent. As a fan of Valve’s titles, I was bemused. For a soldier, I certainly didn’t feel very strong. However, it seems I’d just emerged from the wreckage of a helicopter, so I wasn’t about to judge yet. This, by the way, is shortly after a surreal scene in a devastated cityscape, where you follow the spirit of the creepy little girl on the cover into a big lava-like hole in the floor. Makes sense, doesn’t it.

Can I just stop for a minute? When did little girls suddenly become something to fear? I’ve read my Freud, I am at peace with the concept of das unheimlich and other Gothic and horror techniques; making something natural, unnatural scares us as human beings, because we’re not used to it, as opposed to actually being afraid of something rational, say, a lion. But little girls, for all it’s worth, aren’t scary anymore. Resident Evil tried it, Bioshock tried it, though their method was a lot more original; the Little Sisters and their Big Daddies were adorable in a macabre sense of the word, but nonetheless, videogame developers seem to be very much under the impression that after seeing Splicers run across a ceiling, in the pitch dark, laughing and crying at the same time, with nothing but a wrench to defend yourself with, that little Alice Jones from down the road is going to make you scream.

Back on topic; the actual focus of the title itself, the gunplay, lends itself marvellously to the experience, providing some very intense battles with, assumably at this point, evil soliders, and pulling off an old, old, old technique we’ve come to love since Max Payne and Neo; the slow-motion button. It works well; your bullets hit harder, for one, making it not just a “lower the stress” button, and all the soldiers begin to glow, telling you where they are and what they’re doing by the position of their anatomy silhouetted to you in gold-yellow. Though, how gold-yellow is supposed to stand out in an environment that seems primarily comprised of dirt brown and headteacher grey, is yet to be explained.

The last voice actor they used wasn't so enthusiastic about his lines.

Moving through the silent corridors, your character, psychic by the way (a better explanation for flashbacks and hallucinations than other titles working with such ideas), will encounter ghosts. Some are simply memories, and some will actively try to brain you with their ephemeral fists. This is, in theory, quite terrifying, as you wouldn’t expect bullets to be of much use, and you’re given no psychic powers or means of exorcism. However, I shot several and they went away. Admiteddly they came back repeatedly, but it just felt a little odd that they could splatter entrails up the walls and ceiling, drag people through foot-thick concrete floors, but one 9mm piece of metal and they suddenly become so weak.

The only thing I could name weaker than the average ghost mobs, is the storyline, and the dialogue. I can’t remember the last time I actually played a game alone, and ridiculed it out loud out of sheer incredulity at the horrible scriptwork. “I can see a girl, she looks like she’s crying” says the gormless soldier on your radio, not quite deciding whether he’s in F.E.A.R. 2 or Left 4 Dead. “I’m going to go and check her ou-OHMYGODWHATTHEFSSSSSS-*static*” Grow up. This is pathetic. I understand the need to increase caution around what seems to be the main evil lurking in this particular area of the game, but you don’t have to throw stupid soldiers at it. I walked through a corridor where a halogen strip bulb was swinging slowly from the ceiling, all but torn from its moorings, with blood coating every surface, and the odd bit of human here and there. That was effective, especially considering (credit to you for this, I’ll admit) the fantastic lighting present in the experience. What’s not terrifying is being midway through thinking “Jesus, what caused that?” only to be interrupted by another comms broadcast along the lines of “Oh look, a dangerous looking woman, I’m so glad I brought my poking stick”.

If it’s gunplay you want, you’ll get it. There’s even a section of the first level where you jump into a mech and stomp around for a while devastating everything in your path, only to face off against an equivalent evil mech nearer the end of that particular segment. It has nothing to do with the rest of the game, feels disconnected and pointless, but it was more fun than I had playing through any other part of the single-player demo level. It’s worth a try, to be honest, even if you just test the waters using the demo as your S.S.Hopeful. But don’t expect to be scared. This isn’t scary. Big Bird is scary. Clowns are scary. Fans of Steps are scary. But not this.

Odd. I’m stuck inside this blog post. I think I can see something in my screen. What’s that? Oh my God! Help! It’s a seven point five for a game that wants a ten! Hah. Good luck. Psychic soldiers. There’ll be a psychic summer camp next. Oh wait. That was good.