I randomly* came across the above video from OMY (quaint, out of date website), “Oriental Magnetic Yellow”, yesterday. The mid 90s homage-band, if there is such a term, to YMO, “Yellow Magic Orchestra”, is interesting because it consisted entirely of Japanese videogame music veterans, all of whom worked at Namco: Nobuyoshi Sano, Hiroto Sasaki, Takayuki Aihara, and Shinji Hosoe. Most of these guys contributed to the music of Tekken and Ridge Racer.
After discovering the existence of this markedly obscure band, I thought back to my YMO related post on Offworld. Specifically, my little context adding paragraph at the bottom with the lazy researched (I just Googled for the most obvious cited “influences”.)
Knowing of YMO’s mid-70s electronic and computer game influences and their subsequent influences on videogame music composers like Hitoshi Sakimoto, there’s something genuinely fitting about seeing their classic tunes played on a Nintendo DS.
Despite my earlier negative experiences (which I put into an unresearched from-memory historical context), I eventually did buy Battlefield 1943 and I did, and continue to, enjoy it. It won’t have legs unless there is serious post-launch support (new maps), because the three included maps will get tired after a while, but for an affordable download-only release it is super solid and enjoyable. But this is not a review of the game.
What I do want to talk about is the overall experience around the application.
As games are increasingly communicate with internet services and accounts and APIs and social networks and other things outside of the scope of the game itself, the user experience around these features becomes increasingly important. As user interaction grows in complexity the number of possible points of failure rises. I hate that this is an issue and I hate referring to an interactive game by its more workman-like nature, as an application, but if your first moments with a game are nothing but forms and errors and emails then your first impressions will be clouded by this. It will influence your opinion of a release despite its actual in-game merits.
After my initial failures I resorted to Google and surmised that my problems with Battlefield 1943 related to it not syncing with an EA account. I thought this was weird as I’ve long since had an account because of Burnout Paradise and Mirror’s Edge, amongst others. I went to EA.com and tried to login. I failed.
I tried multiple passwords and multiple possible account names and nothing worked. I tried the “forgot your password” feature and still got nothing. Frustrated, I said “fuck it” and created a new account. First, before I was to give EA yet another email address, I went to my domain’s web admin and created a new alias just for them: EA_you_fucks@the-…. I registered, with the system not giving me any guff for my colourful address, and waited for the confirmation email to arrive. I verified it and then went to “add a persona” to link the account with my XBox username.
Failure. I knew I had linked it before. Wondering what the fuck was going on I realized that it was probably linked to that “EA Classic Screen Name” option. So I went for that and it asked me for my classic username and password; like I remembered that shit.
It took me a number of attempts before I deduced that my actual Classic login was nowakEA. I submitted it and waited for my password change confirmation email. I thought about the ridiculousness of EA’s system: I just created a login n0wak_ea so that I could access my old n0wakEA login which links to my XBox Live n0wak login. EA’s system guys need to do some research into Windows Live ID or OpenID or anything better than this.
The email came, I changed my password, I linked the classic EA account and linked my XBox Live account. All these hoops just so I can play a game? I searched around online for other experiences and saw all sorts of other issues, many being resolved by downloading a completely unrelated EA game’s demo because it syncs accounts better than Battlefield 1943. The lesson here is that dedicated gamers are a tolerant and persistent bunch willing to go through this hassle to get their fix. They have decades of experience with lousy interfaces.
That’s why, having been playing Halo 3 again, I really have to give Bungie my highest praise. They do everything EA wants to do and a shit-ton more, but they make sure that it’s all transparent. You can jump in and play the game without worrying about anything, but if you want to see your stats and records and file share and everything else on the Bungie site, you can. You’re not forced into it, and you’re not blocked from playing the game unless you create a Bungie account.
That’s the way to do it. Don’t force people to fuss around poorly thought-out web registration systems just so they can play a game on a completely separate platform. Gamers might be tolerant but don’t push your luck, not after other developers, like Bungie, are showing people the light.
In the end I figured that if EA‘s system was giving me so much grief I might as well go ahead and get the Playstation network id linked while I still had my browser open. I went to “Add Persona” again, put in my Playstation id, and…
Back in the halcyon days of XBox Live, when it was still new and fresh, EA was not on board. Microsoft was providing a, mostly, peer-to-peer distributed online network with centralized, on Microsoft’s servers, messaging and match-making and friend management and this did not suit EA. A decentralized network meant that they could not gather the proper metrics or control their own online experiences to the degree that a large corporation as EA wanted. So for a while, in the early days, EA did not support XBox Live and many thought it doomed because of it (akin to their lack of support for the Dreamcast.)
Xbox Live, however, did not fail. As it grew in importance, EA’s lack of support became a hindrance to them as their biggest sports competitor at the time, 2K, was implementing online features that EA simply couldn’t do. So a deal was struck: third party servers and accounts were allowed on XBox Live, to a degree, and EA was on board. They could now allow people to play their games online (and sell them stuff directly) while still authenticating through a centralized EA account. Both parties were happy.
Customers, however, were a different story. Enter Battlefield 1943.
Having played Battlefield 2 a fair bit, and with my recent shooter binge (Team Fortress 2, occasional Halo 3 again), I was looking forward 1943. A new, but relatively light tactical shooter experience on XBox Live? And one that I can just download at home for a few dollars without having to deal with snooty EB Games employees? I was sold. So when I saw that it was available on Wednesday, I immediately logged in to XBox Live with the intention of buying it. EA had my money. It was theirs to lose.
And lose they did! As I checked the XBox Marketplace, I noticed that the game wasn’t showing up. Not in new arrivals, not in the directory, not anywhere. I checked back on Shacknews and, indeed, I did have the correct date. It was out. People were playing it. Where was it?
I checked XBox.com and noticed that it was there and available and the web interface allowed me the option to queue the download without having to turn on the XBox. I did that and turned on my XBox 360 and it was downloading. Weird, as it still wasn’t showing up in the Marketplace, but successful. I attributed it to a regional bug.
I launched it, sat through the barrage of logos, and upon hitting the main menu was greeted with a wonderful Failed to connect to EA servers message. Oh. Try again: same result. And another time. So even though I was connected to XBox Live and online and even though I had the game and was ready to play (and pay for) it, I could not do anything because I couldn’t connect with EA’s third-party servers.
I tried again on Thursday afternoon, after the intial hub-bub died down, and was greeted with the exact same result. Though XBox Live was working flawlessly and pretty much every other game released on the console was online, I couldn’t play Battlefield 1943 because EA’s servers were overloaded.
So I remember those halcyon XBox Live days when third party servers were not allowed and I think: maybe they were on to something! But money changed that and along came EA introducing a new point of failure. My motivation to play Battlefield 1943 has now subsided.
And even if it is fixed, the blunt EA MAY RETIRE THIS GAME AFTER 30 DAYS NOTICE POSTED ON www.ea.com warning that comes with Battlefield 1943 isn’t helping. Team Fortress 2 it is, then.
Right from the start, Reiner Kniza’s “Knights of Charlemagne” is in my good graces. It does something that all apps in the App Store should do: it doesn’t mute my music on start. I have an iPod Touch and an iPod is primarily, above all else, a music player. If it’s on, chances are it’s playing music. Any app that mutes it without my consent makes too many suppositions about its place and role on the device it’s on. “Knights of Charlemagne” isn’t so presumptuous.
Much like “Poison,” the game is mechanically simple. There are ten estates, 5 uncoloured ones numbered 1 to 5 and five unnumbered representing five colours, in the middle of the playing field that two players vie for. Each player is dealt eight knight tokens, each one representing a colour and a number. Every turn, the active player has to place one of his knight tokens on a matching estate (either colour or number.) A new knight is then drawn and the game continues until the last one has been placed.
At the end, players score one point for every estate in which they have a presence, no matter how many the opponent has there too. The real scoring benefits come from every estate in which you have more knights than your opponent. Each coloured estate is worth five points and each numbered estate is worth its value. Additionally, the first player to control two estates, counting up, gets a crown worth five points. It’s an important game balancer that makes ignoring the least valuable estates a perilous choice.
It’s always dangerous because the AI is competent enough to punish you. The easiest difficulty, squire, which acts as a tutorial, is a pushover, but the other two, knight and king, locked until you beat the preceding level, provide a heady challenge. It’s not much, but the limited progression towards beating the king level adds to the replayability of Knights of Charlemagne. Although equally portable, in the best of ways, as Poison, Knights feels more rewarding because of this design. When you don’t have human opponents to play against, or even physical cards, these little additions are essential to keep a game engaging.
Best of all, the level of strategic thought and planning that Knights of Charlemagne requires is engrossing enough to be fun but simple enough to never be frustrating during brain addled morning commutes on the train. For $2, it’s a great little strategy game to have in your pocket.
There’s a pair of Rainer Knizia games currently available in the App Store. Both are based on already existing physical games, neither of which I’ve ever played, but seeing Knizia’s name attached to anything is enough to pique my interest. Add to that instant availability, portability, a low price, and remove the need for another physical human opponent and the purchase becomes a no-brainer. I bought both games, Poison (iTunes link) and Knights of Charlemagne (iTunes link), and have been playing them over the course of the last week. Some impressions follow.
Poison was made by Griptonite Games and at $2.99 is the more expensive of the two (as opposed to $1.99) if you consider three dollars “expensive.” It’s also the more polished overall since it’s produced by a full-on game studio (Griptonite is a part of Foundation 9, which also has the fantastic Backbone Entertainment) and not by one guy.
Poison‘s premise is simple. Four to six players are dealt specially designed cards spanning three colours and covering the values 1,2,3,5,7. There’s also a green “wild” card that is valued at 4, but I’ll get to that later. During each turn you are required to play a card into one of the matching coloured cauldrons. If, after placement, the total value of the cards in that cauldron is greater than 13 that player claims all cards from it save for the one they just played. These cards are removed from play and counted, each is worth one point. The goal is to have the lowest score at game’s end, after the last card has been played.
Having the lowest score does not, however, mean having the fewest cards. There are two special conditions: first, the player with the most cards of a specific colour negates that score. In other words, if you have 8 blue cards and everyone else has 2 or 3, you score 0 while everyone else scores 2 and 3, respectively; secondly, each green “poison” card, which can be played into any coloured cauldron, counts as two points. You definitely do not want to be stuck with these.
That’s where the give and take of the game happens. Depending on your hand, you can either try to take nothing or try to take the most of one colour (maybe two if you’re ambitious, but this too is harder) since neither of these scores you points. But if you try to focus on one colour, and if anyone else was eyeing it, chances are the other players are going to poison that cauldron. Each turn you have to decide what high or low card to play and which to hold on to (you don’t want to get stuck in a situation where you have to take something you don’t want; always try to keep safe outs), and manage the risk and reward of the poison cards. It’s a fairly simple game but a very well balanced one and one that has a decent amount of strategic thought. In some ways, it’s reminiscent to Hearts.
The iPod version does a good job with the actual card playing, and the drag card to a cauldron interface feels fine, but it offers very little on top of that. The only available options are a mute button and the choice of how many computer controlled opponents to play against. That’s it. The AI is competent and puts up a good fight, but with only one difficulty level it does start to feel a bit same-y after a few games. The absence of any multiplayer, local or otherwise, further adds to the repetitious nature of Poison. I believe that games like this would benefit greatly from even a basic goal, aka. achievement, structure. The added incentives those provide might be minor but they do encourage a little more play variety.
Poison feels very temporary. It doesn’t keep a record of past games, or any play history, so it feels a great deal like a quick distraction. At $3 that’s not a problem, but you can’t help but wish that there was more to it.
Knights of Charlemagne pseudo-review to come, but it’s worth saying, slight spoiler, that it is the game that I return to more often.
The last of those is the most notable as I’ve been fascinated by what people can get out of the Korg DS-10. Apparently, it’s quite a lot. For example, there’s this album (“Aliasing”) by Russian sound production firm The Sands and, from a ways back, two releases from Receptors. I received a nod for the latter on Offworld back in January and, through a confluence of events, including the above mentioned Tumblr, I am now an occassional contributor to Offworld.
Keeping with that theme, I posted two DS-10 YMO covers on Offworld. That seemed to mesh well with the kind of content they’re typically going for there. But when I came across another DS-10 related musical work on YouTube I didn’t know where to put it. It was not musical enough for the Tumblr and probably too ironic for Offworld. Then I remembered I have this thing, here, so I might as well use it more:
As I plunge deeper into the world of (mostly German) boardgames I develop a new perspective on my long entrenchment in the videogame world. Their game designs and themes are a breath of fresh air relative to the constant frustrations and repetitiveness that competitive videogames are providing. The highest rated and most popular of these games (according to BoardgameGeek), Puerto Rico and Agricola, are especially profound because they are highly competitive without ever having direct conflict.
Take Agricola for example. This is a game about growing a seventeeth-or-so century farm by planting grain, breeding livestock, having kids, and taking on side jobs. This is a solitary job. You mind your own business. The closest there is to any interaction with any other farmers is when each of your family members does an “action” that claims a resource or ability from a shared, global supply (basically, the town.) Once something is claimed no other player can take it for that turn, but they can do anything else that is available. This is what I mean by a lack of conflict. You can’t go into the other player’s farm and burn their crops, or poison their cows, or have sex with their wife. Their farm is theirs alone and whatever they build or do there, with those common resources, is theirs and theirs alone. This might sound like a boring rule-set for a multiplayer game, but it is surprisingly competitive, strategic, and fun.
While there is no direct interaction between players, everyone is competing to create the best farm in the allotted number of turns. The challenge, and all the strategy, emerges from how you use the shared, and limited, global supply. As an Agricola player you need to be aware of what everyone else is doing, what you think they are trying to do, and, more importantly, how this might affect what you need to accomplish your goals. If everyone is constantly accumulating wood to build pastures and stables and new rooms for their house, it might be more beneficial to change your plans towards growing grain and gathering the clay that everyone else is busy ignoring. Of course the nuances of Agricola are far more complex than this and require a lot more writing to properly explain, but the basic idea is just that: manage the resources you need to grow your farm and feed your family amidst a dynamic market, trying to anticipate other player’s needs and the demands they create. It’s, basically, an economic game without the money. It’s also really fun.
I try to think of equivalent designs in the modern videogame world, especially in the commercial spectrum, and I can’t think of one popular, competitive multiplayer game that is strategic with no direct conflict. Not a one[1]. The genre is dominated by shooters (war, violence), fighting games (violence), real time strategy games (war, violence), and turn based strategy games that, too, are often war based. If there are equivalents, they are obscure. It’s a single-minded market.
Amongst some people, there is talk of so-called Ludonarrative Dissonance, about how videogames have a hard time conflating the mechanics of a system with the narrative elements behind the motivations in it. It’s a fine challenge to tackle, but it seems to me to be a lesser issue than the overall thematic bankruptcy that is present. As technology advances, allowing for improved dynamic situations and presentation and control, the vocabulary developers have at their disposal increases. But if it’s applied to nothing but more elaborate ways to shoot people in the face, what’s the point? You are still using the exact same metaphors as one of the oldest videogames: SpaceWar!
This is why boardgames are so fascinating. Free of those technological advances they’re forced to explore mechanics and rule-sets and player interactions rather than new ways to present the same thing. Granted, it’s a specialized market with an audience (and publishers) that’s seemingly willing to try new things. From the boardgamers I’ve met, it’s also generally an older market, one that’s not obsessed with the blockbuster fly-by-wire explode everything attitude that permeates every pore of the videogame biz[3]. That’s not to say that boardgames are without their own set of problems, but not having billions of dollars at stake every year certainly minimizes them.
Market demands and audience considerations are good excuses for a little while, but videogames already are big enough to allow for diversity. There are developers, and scenes, that focus on niche markets and do so with success. So why is it that even they, when creating multiplayer games, stick to the same metaphors of conflict?
Perhaps the general consensus amongst videogame publishers is that non-violent multiplayer games can’t be as exciting, and can’t sell as well[3], as their war-mongering counterparts. Maybe they think there could never be enough competition, excitement, betrayal, surprise, defeat, skull-daggery, and general griefer-worthy assholeishness in a game without direct conflict. But the last year’s worth of news out of Wall Street tells a different story. It’s a tale of a system corrupted from the inside by the scheming, cheating, gaming of a few powerful and greedy individuals. If this is not prime material for a videogame, I don’t know what is.
So all this might have been the build-up for a self-serving question, because this is something that I want to play, but I have to wonder: in this economic climate, where are all the economic games?[4]
Not counting things like global leaderboards and indirect competition like that. I’m talking specifically about multiplayer games based on such mechanics.
There’s a culture of one-upmanship that occurs in the battle for those dollars: every big million seller needs to be topped by an even bigger one.
Settlers of Catan has sold over 15 million units over its life. Suck on that Killzone.
This is why I’m curious and excited about Cities XL.
The 1 vs 100 Live beta took place in Canada yesterday and I was one of the lucky not-so-few (at one point I saw that 12000 people were playing along) to have a go at it. I’m saving my full opinion for later, but in the meantime the following video summarizes my experience:
“Pffffttt”
Connection problems, though most had less amusing timing than the above, were frequent. I managed to get a few full games in and I did well in those, but I think I spent as much time clicking through error messages as I did making my avatar dance.
It seems as though some enterprising individuals have managed to rip the music tracks from Rock Band. This might seem unremarkable at first until you remember that most of the in-game songs were based on the masters and were stored as multitracked audio, with isolated guitars, drums, vocals, etc. The files, which are saved as multitrack ogg files, can be easily opened in Audacity and easily manipulated. This is prime mash-up material.
This, on its own, isn’t that big of a deal. Multitrack audio like this is heavy and bloated and not really of interest to the average listener. These are of interest to obsessive completists, fellow musicians, and/or mash-up artists. For them, there already exists a shady underground network trading original master recordings (this is how those SongSmith versions of popular songs were created) so, for them, the Rock Band rips are actually low quality. The only thing of interest is new multi-tracks for songs that might not have had masters leaked, but I don’t know if this is the case here. That’s a community I don’t know much about.
Imagine this scenario. You are playing your favourite multiplayer first person shooter war killing game. It doesn’t matter what the game is as long as it has guns and shooting and explosions and scoring based on these things. You’re in a team deathmatch and time is running out. Your team, the red team, is down by a single kill and there’s only a few seconds left. You are entrenched behind a barrier, short on ammo. That’s when you notice three members from the blue team coming your way. They don’t know you’re hiding there; you are in a perfect ambush situation. Unfortunately, you don’t have enough ammo to take them all out and you know that if you were to jump up and start shooting you’d be shot down in an instant. If you get lucky you might get one of them, but the net result — one kill and one death — won’t help your team’s score much. You’d still lose.
You do, however, have a grenade. Better still, the blue team members walking towards your position are nearing an explosive barrel. Games such as these tend to feature such contrivances. You know that if you cook the grenade nicely and get a quick, accurate throw the explosion that you can create will take out two — if not all three — of the blue soldiers and/or aliens. That will be enough for a victory. Time is running out. It’s now or never.
You prepare for your moment of triumph, tightening your grip on your controller, and throw. Or, more literally, you press the input command that lets your on-screen character throw a grenade. However, unlike most games of the genre where it’s as simple as hitting a trigger button, this game requires a complex scheme of inputs. To throw a grenade, you need to press down, down-forward, forward, down, down-forward, forward, then X and Y and RB at the same time. You input the command, your heart starts beating, adrenaline starts pumping, you are ready and primed to jump out of your seat in victorious celebration!
But instead of throwing the grenade, your avatar jumps up, revealing his position, and starts screaming obscenities at the blue team, flailing his arms profusely. In an instant all three of the enemy players open fire filling your with more lead than a Chinese made toy. You die. You watch as the camera rotates around your corpse giving you a prime view of one of the blue team survivors crouching over your face, as players of such games tend to do. The time runs out. Your team loses by two kills. The switch on your microphone is set to mute as you loudly question the actions of the game to yourself with the always apt “WHAT THE FUCK?”
This first person shooter doesn’t exist. Can you imagine the backlash if it did? Controls like this in such a competitive and highly reactive genre would be dismissed in an instant. No one wants such a vast roadblock between intent and action in a game. It adds nothing but an added level of obfuscation, complicating what is, already, a tactical and twitchy genre.
So if this would be so unacceptable in a shooter, why is this tolerated — and accepted — in Street Fighter IV?
If you answer: “because it’s part of the skill of the game” or “it’s always been this way and it doesn’t make sense to change it”, you are wrong. There has to be a better a way.
The last two weeks of February had an unusual number of high quality game releases. It was the kind of games barrage that you only see during the holiday months, so to be flooded during what is normally a dry period was odd. Very welcome, but still odd. Unfortunately for me, various work commitments, including a return to the nine to five routine and the one hour commutes have left me with little time for any of it. Well, apart from Street Fighter IV.
What I had been looking forward to the most was the Grand Theft Auto IV expansion The Lost and the Damned. I purchased and downloaded it on the day of release, and then never touched it. There was a rationale for this. Lost and the Damned was story driven, full of long missions, treks across the city, and lots of exposition, and thus required a proper time investment. On the other hand, Street Fighter IV was all about of instant gratification. Sign in, have few bouts and move on. It allows for very piecemeal gaming which, with my schedule over the last few weeks, was essential for me.
So it’s kind of funny to see “time played” well in excess of forty hours. And that’s despite barely touching the game in a week! Forty. In that time, I probably could have finished Lost and the Damned twice. It seemed like a logical rationalization at the time.
I like Street Fighter IV a lot but I feel as though I’m already reaching my limits with the game. It might persist as an occasional pick-up-and-play title for years (Street Fighter II always had such history with me), but I can’t see involved competitive play, multiplayer and otherwise, lasting. The reasons are many, from a really unbalanced difficulty curve (for single player), to serious control issues, to the complete clusterfuck that is ranked play. The latter has the greatest chance for a proper fix, but the other issues — and I might get into them later — are inherent to the game design. It’s a shame. I really love the core of Street Fighter IV, but a lot of these are intractable and really off-putting.
Sirlin covers a lot of these better than I could, along with a bunch of extra high-level gripes (but a dedicated run and block button? I don’t know if I can get behind that, even if I own runbutton.com)
SFIV has brought me the closest to physically destroying a controller since, maybe, F-Zero GX. The kind of profanities this game gets out of me are obscene. So no matter how much I might love it, the frustration it elicits is just too much to handle. I should get out while I’m ahead (and holding on to a thousand battle points;) this game stresses me out more than work deadlines.
It’s not in our nature to think backwards in time[1]. There are so many different permutations to playing through a Mario stage that it would be highly difficult, without aimless trial and error, for a player to figure how it was properly played through the first time over. It’d be great to see this more fleshed-out, but I imagine that some of the time-paradox logic problems would be a nightmare to properly implement. Or something. Like Retrograde, it happens entirely in reverse and the player is left with making the present happen as it already did. Jump On Mushrooms will draw the inevitable comparison to Braid, in that it’s a time bending platformer, but it’s more akin to another backwards-in-time indie game, Retrograde. As the TIGSource thread points out, it’s kinda buggy with many logic issues — other seemingly normal situations do get counted as fails — but it’s a short experience and it’s worth the trouble.
It takes a while for it to click and for you to realize why you are being fast-forwaded (press ESC to skip) in seemingly normal situations, but once it does it’s pretty awesome. It’s hard to describe, since we’re not tuned to thinking this way, so just go and try it yourself (if you have a PC.) In this sense, you can’t die (because Mario already succeded) but you do “fail” by creating, essentially, time paradoxes — impossible situations that couldn’t have happened. Mario has succeeded and reached his goal without dieing, and now it’s up to the player to recreate that backwards. Excuse me for pointing to another indie platformer game, but the concept was too good to not mention: a Super Mario Bros. game that you play in reverse.
Jesse Venbrux’s latest, “You Probably Won’t Make It,” almost lives up to the title. It would be more appropriate if it was called “You Definitely Won’t Make It.” In this ultra-hard platformer, I managed to reach level 14 of 20 before I called it quits.
What I like the most about You Probably Won’t Make It is the way it visualizes your failures. After every failure, the game shows a trail of your movement. It’s a kind of track that can help you through some tricky, double-jump situations, but it resets after every failure so its usefulness is diminished. It would be ideal if it saved your “best” run.
Games that have you running through the same level or track benefit from visualizations like this since they provide a simple to understand measure of your progress. Racing games are the most frequent users of such a technique, often showing you a “ghost” version of your best run to compare how you’re doing, but there’s no reason that they should be the only genre to do this. Mirror’s Edge does the same (but, really, it too is a racing game) and the ghosts left a temporary trail, in the form of glowing footprints, that fade away far too quick.
There is, however, a permanence to the red splatters of death in You Probably Won’t Make It. They persist not just for the session, but for every and all subsequent play-throughs (though there’s little reason to do so.) Each tricky section in the game, every choke point, gets thoroughly painted red. This design concept shares a lot in common with Jesse Venbrux’s earlier game Deaths, but in this case it’s solely single-player and not limited to the last fifty.
It’s a simple thing, but it gives the game an interesting aesthetic and a very personal feel: no single player’s game will end up looking like any other’s. The little red splatters distract you, if only for a while, from the realization that this is a very simple and very difficult game. It’s this nuance that makes the game better than it is and a fun little distraction for a few minutes (and a test of your patience.)
Oh, and supposedly level 18 is impossible. Spoilers! So, in that sense, it does mess with expectations and falls firmly into the “masocore” canon.
As many did, I downloaded the Killzone 2 demo before the weekend. Being a European exclusive for the time being, I had to go through the tedious Playstation network registration process so that I could create a UK-based profile. As far as Sony knows, I’m still living in NW2. The following are my impressions, based on stuff I wrote elsewhere:
I just played through the demo and I’m completely and amazingly underwhelmed. I was on the fence, only 80% underwhelmed, through most of the short (it took longer to download than play) demo sequence, but the final encounter bumped me up to 100% certainty. When my squadmate asked for cover while he “hacked” a locked door, there was no question. Is there anything more cliché at this point? The second he said “hold on” I knew music was going to swell and enemy soldiers were going to respawn behind me. Lo and behold, this game lived up to expectations for once.
The whole experience felt so rote. A pointless merger of one tired gaming cliché (World War II) with another (space marines.) What’s the point of this setting exactly? Why have the sci-fi element if everything else is going to play like it’s the 1940s? Having a personnel carrier fly you into battle isn’t any different from a beach landing on a boat. I know it provides a grounding for the combat, making it more person to person (or, Space Marine to Space Nazi,) but it makes the entire experience feel inconsistent.
It’s all very high polished and high-fidelity — a fine technical show-piece for the system — but it’s superficial. It plays fine, the controls are decent, the AI doesn’t seem completely stupid, but none of it is remarkable. These things are functional: they don’t deter from the overall experience, but they don’t add anything either. It’s like sticking a spoiler on a Hummer H2.
I wanted to give the game the benefit of the doubt, but as a demonstration of the final product it failed to win me over. Killzone 2 is less than the sum of its parts; a game that doesn’t do any one particular thing wrong, but feels off on the whole. It’s uninspired in setting and tone and art direction and everything except engineering.
Maybe I’ll give it a shot to see how the multiplayer holds-up. Call of Duty 4 provided much enjoyment despite my abhorring of its single player campaign. If any of the early comparisons are to be trusted (I remain suspicious), I might enjoy that aspect of Killzone 2. But, as with Call of Duty, I doubt I’ll ever “complete” the game. If the little scraps of plot and the character interactions in the demo are anything to go by, I won’t be missing anything.
The one thing that it does do exceptionally well, however, is support multiple languages. There is a choice of about ten languages, and they’re not just subtitled; they’re all dubbed. I played through the demo in Polish. This is one thing European devs, thanks to the nature of the European diaspora, get right. Insular American and Japanese developers should get on this. Localization shouldn’t be an issue in this day and age.
About
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
