Chimps in Space

For ages you’ve been able to access this blog through www.chimpsinspace.com, but I don’t know how many people knew that. Well it’s a nice URL so I’m now using it for the blog properly, but in doing so I’ve moved to a new location. This content will stay in place of course but from now on you can follow my ramblings over at www.chimpsinspace.com. Please update your bookmarks accordingly. Or don’t if you don’t want to.

I’m a day into inFamous and I think I’m in a position to give some impressions about the game. Firstly I have to say that I’m really enjoying the game. It has a nice visual style and once you get some powers under your belt, the ability to power slide along wires for example, it’s really enjoyable to just travel around the city.

The bad so far

Character Animation
The character animation in the game is slightly old school. Linear progression between animation frames looks, to be frank, really awful nowadays and the running animations are rather comical. This is most apparent at the start where you’re running along to a food drop with your buddy.

Repetition
The bane of all games of this type is repetition in the side missions. inFamous is no different, but it’s a lot better than something like Assassin's Creed. Still, I’m finding it quite repetitive far earlier than I would like, and don’t get me started on how many times can they repeat the same looking jumpy puzzle down in the sewers to unlock new areas.

Combat
Combat doesn’t feel directed. It feels more like you’re just throwing attacks towards enemies and hoping some hit. It lacks satisfaction in combat.

The Karma system
Whatever you’ve heard about the karma system doesn’t prepare you for how bad it really is. It lacks even a hint of subtlety with a big icon telling you when you can make a choice, and the option is always rammed down you throat each time it comes up. To be utterly honest it adds zero to the game, which would survive perfectly well without it so far.

The amazing so far

Collecting shards.
One of the things that brings me into sandbox games is the collection tasks. In this case you’re collecting shards of a thing and snippets of audio. The way that these have been integrated into the map on your hud is really nice. The information isn’t there all the time, you have to click L3 to get it, but it does a really good job of not letting you miss a really well hidden item.

Flying and sliding
I was quite anxious about if the gliding around the city would work, but work it does. Between that and the ability you get to slide along wires between buildings and you get a great fluid movement across the city

Atmosphere
The key to any sandbox game is whether you feel that the city is alive. There's no worries here, with the civilians reacting to you depending on how they feel about you working really well.

All things considered I’m really enjoying the game so far but I do have a big worry, and that’s length. After a few hours I think I’m further in than I’d expect and I fear that it might be more of a Godfather 2 in length than a GTA4. There also doesn’t seem to be that much to do outside of the main plot and collection so it’s quite like Godfather in that aspect as well. I don’t know what this will do to long term playability after the plot is completed, but so far I’m not too optimistic.

To sum it up it's a fun game, one of the best PS3 exclusives I've played. If it is as short as I think then it's going to be a big point against it, but it'll be a fun journey to get there. It's no GTA or Crackdown, but that doesn't mean it's not a good game.

It must be another week as there’s a new episode of the Van Hemlock podcast up. This week we have a very special guest. Well we have a guest. Well Matt from Limited Edition joins us. You can find the show at virginworlds, but if your oppressive internet regime doesn’t let you see that you can also listen to it here. But listen to it there if you can. And then go listen to the rest of the shows hosted there as they’re all good. Especially Limited Edition.

Time for the Melvyn Bragg style after show commentary.

We don’t have guests on the show very often, but when we do we like to chose people who will go on to positions of power in the games industry. Michael Zenke was a good guest for that reason as he’s now a designer on DC Universe Online. As Matt has just finished a game programming related degree I have high hopes that we can abuse him as a contact in the future. It helps that he’s actually played every single MMO released as he managed to throw in some interesting information along the way. He’s also very low maintenance edit wise, despite the rumours.

I did end up editing out a rather ranty Darkfall rant from the show where I called out Aventurine on their management decisions for Darkfall. Only they then went and were really annoying by addressed every point just as we recorded so I decided to drop it. I’ll save it for the DVD extras when we do the box set in a few years time.

It’s that time of week again, we’ve released the Van Hemlock Podcast Episode 52.

In this weeks slightly longer episode (somebody ignored my frantic “Stop talking now!” gesturing for a good half hour) we cover some news then go mad with a nice long talk about what we’re playing. I’m doing badly on the old “actually playing anything” stakes again I’m afraid, but Van Hemlock more than makes up with it for not playing Free Realms. Constantly. Night and day.

This week the twitter question was "L44 in CoH and the end is in sight! Which MMOs, if any, have you level capped in and what happened next?". The conclusion? Raider types don’t use twitter to comment on podcast questions.

You can check out the show on iTunes, the rss feed,  Virginworlds.com (should be up soon), or you can even listen to it here now.

Too busy to blog is, I think, an excuse and not a valid reason.I don't even need to think of a topic as the weekly podcast is reason enough to post. So here is last weeks show, Episode 51, which ia another live broadcast (why do I say live, it's just as recorded as the other episodes but just has worse sound), this time with the guys from Killed in a Smilling Accident.

And now, in Melvyn Bragg style after hhe records In Our Time, I shall comment on what I think we missed in the episode.

We avoided the chance to wind up Darkfall players in the episode, which is a shame as it's so fun. You don't really need to hate the game (I don't, I just dissagree with its management and how the hype cycle was used) and I certainly don't hate the players. I do think it's very funny whenever fanboys get too rabid over any game and it's the easiest target at the moment. They're just games people and EVERYBODY has their own valid opinion about what they're playing. You don't have to defend yourself that much. Yeah, fanboys are really getting to me nowadays.

Join us later in the week for our next show and see if my Eurovision prediction was true. Unless I re-record it because I got it wrong.

I recently grabbed myself a new PC to play games on (nothing special spec wise, it’s just an iMac isn’t exactly a monster games machine) and so I’ve been spending a lot of time installing games. This has been annoying me no end because I’ve decided that most installers are really nasty.

For a start if I need to use a CD then I just know that I’m going to have to replace most of the installed files with changed downloaded versions anyway; some of these MMOs require gigabytes of patches from their base CDs nowadays so I’m looking at downloads very favourably. Eve was an easy one, Gigabyte and a bit for the whole installer and a clean install (It was just after the latest patch so it was easier). A look at my DVD shelf later and I’ve rejected Conan on size of the patch alone, I only get 50Gb of downloads per month and that’ll take a sizable chunk that’s worth more to me than trying the game again. Lord of the rings online was a clean install from my Mines of Moria disks so wasn’t that bad, but if I’d done it a few months earlier that would have hurt. Warhammer is installed but not patched, they want (for maybe obvious reasons) cash before they’ll give me the patches but I’m not quite ready to go back there yet. I’d prefer to have a fully patched client for that moment I decide I want to take a look, but as it is I’ll miss the first few of those moments because the patching would take too long for that nights play so I’ll just not do it.

The game that outright wins for patching though is Guild Wars. I download the initial bootstrapper and it downloads the basics of the game. From then on whenever I want to enter a new area it downloads a bit more and generally goes out of it’s way to prevent me seeing an installer progress bar for more than I need to.

Installing games is a pain, which is why I’m in Guild Wars if anybody needs me.

I keep forgetting to pimp my own podcast, which probably says something about me that I really don't want to know. This week we're trying something new and as well as recapping the news we're poking at the bee hive that is the internet and wading in with opinion on a few blogs posts.

Van Hemlock Episode 38

If you care about BoB being destroyed, how successful Warhammer is or if boobies are a good thing then this is the episode for you. Or not.

Posts we talk about:

• http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/mega-griefing.html
• http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/02/04/rituals-of-the-betrayed/
• http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/game-company-layoffs.html
• http://syncaine.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/storms-tourist-and-failure-the-mmo-market/
• http://tagn.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/players-as-excuse/
• http://www.mmognation.com/2009/01/29/what-is-it-with-the-naked-chicks/

Computer games used to be easy. When I was a kid with my Spectrum I’d think nothing of throwing myself against the same problem again and again until I learnt how to get past and encounter the next, probably more obscure, problem. I learnt how to get and what to do with a babelfish. I found out that using the pulley with the rubber chicken was rather useful. I’d worked out the foolproof method for docking in Elite 100% of the time! I’d even be able to get more than a few levels into R-Type.

This week R-Type was released on XBox Live, and I no longer have the seemingly god-like abilities that I had when I was a kid. It has a new infinite-life mode, and boy do I need it. The classic retro mode with limited lives means I cannot clear stage one. I suck.

I think we’re all afraid of hard games nowadays. Nobody wants them, it’s always got to be pandering to the wimpish no-frustration crowd. Of which I am one.

I can’t stand it when a game doesn’t have regular auto-saves. I could explore a whole planet in Mass Effect and then die, which meant I had to explore it again. That bugged me. RPGs are awful for that, how many hours of my life have I lost to replaying content because I forgot to save?

One of my favourite early XBox 360 games is Dead Rising, the game that is not inspired by a certain zombie film set in a shopping mall. Honest. The thing with that game is that you get a single save, and you can only do it from certain places so that you can’t just throw down a backup save before a nasty fight in case you die, you need to be careful all the time. I honestly think that it adds to the game and if you had a more traditional save mechanism the game would suck. I suspect most people don’t agree.

This week Burnout Paradise finally got a restart option for races you fail. I never understood why people wanted that. Early on in the game if you fail an event you’d always be very near to another event to try of the same type, later on in the game when you’d completed one or two of them it was just an incentive to try harder and not waste time. There’s something about the harder games that I actually like it seems.

Fable 2 is an interesting game in that it’s just about impossible to die. If you get killed in a fight you lose some XP and that’s all, you’ll respawn very quickly and can finish it. I loved the game, but the lack of failure really detracted from the experience for me. The thing is I can see exactly why they did it and I think it was the right choice. The story was the most important thing, and a hardcore player or the most casual of casuals had to be able to see it. It was possible to just mash your way through the combat and win, or to express yourself through combining your three attacks if you want and by doing so the game didn’t punish you for not being that great, or by taking the easy route with the attacks. On the other hand you rewarded yourself by performing well in combat, and when you die you think that you really shouldn’t have and so the death penalty was provided by your own standards.

People don’t want games to be hard, but if they’re easy then people will play the easy path through because that’s just human nature. Mashing Fable 2 AOE fire spells to win all fights or autosaving before every fight in other games is unavoidable, people will do it if they can, and if they can’t you’ll just hear the complaints from your players because they want to be able to do that.

This saddens me in a way, if games have an easy path then very few people will ever take the hard path and I know full well that I won’t. Now should I go back to slogging through R-Type, or should I play something that doesn’t punish me for failure?

The days of hardcore difficulty games are dead if you want to sell to the masses I think, our best best is for games to have ultra-hard modes that use Trophies and Achievements to encourage players to try.

Then again, I think I’d rather have fun every time I play a game rather than frustration. The problem is that I know I’m weak and will go for the easy difficulty the moment things get a little tough.

We’re all (I assume) happy with audio podcasts. I’ve got one uploading as I write this for instance so I’m probably best considered to be on the “pro” side. I listen to a LOT of podcasts during any given week, but I also watch a couple of video ones as well.

The thing is that I watch far more TV during a week than I listen to radio. Why are my podcasts skewed the other way?

It’s not that I don’t like sitting in front of a computer to watch video as I watch a lot on the BBC iPlayer, their web based flash catchup service. I also watch a lot of stuff I probably shouldn’t mention that may take a little time to cross the pond and be on UK TV. Video from the internet is probably nearly half of what I watch now.

So why are most of my podcasts audio? The obvious answer is that I listen to them in the car, or while I’m working, or while I’m working out (I have really short ones for that). The other answer is that most podcasts aren’t video. Video is expensive for bandwidth, very time consuming and, to be brutally honest, unneeded for most of the time. Take my weekly ramblings with Van Hemlock. Watching us as we do that is really not a selling point. We sit there communicating via facial expressions and ambiguous hand gestures as we chat and don’t exactly present a riveting experience. We’re going for the radio 4 experience; we’re pretending that we’re channeling Melvyn Bragg. We believe in the fact that audio is a valid medium for what we’re trying to achieve.

There’s also a thing where shows that should be podcasts aren’t because they’re just hosted as flash and don’t have a download option. Zero Punctuation is nice, but I have to remember to watch it once a week. Odds are I’ll remember sometime before the next one, but I’d much rather have it download to my iPod while I’m not looking and be available the next time I have a look to see what’s available. To me THAT is what a podcast is, and why I’ve started looking at iPlayer as a podcast directory (there’s a way to download TV shows and bypass DRM due to how the iPhone works). Give me an RSS feed for both and I’ll be happy. Of course the reason for flash based video is that you can offset the hosting costs by using youtube/vimeo or by ensuring that you’re driving viewers to your website.

So where do I stand on all this? What video podcasts do I watch?

Games Weasel (www.gamesweasel.com)
This is a very corporate/broadcast feeling show that offers 10 minutes of games reviews per week. He tends to like stuff he reviews (a problem with shorter shows, positive bias is unavoidable when choosing games) but it’s enjoyable. It’s very similar to Playr and so matches the best (um, only?) Games programming we have on TV here. Short enough to not get boring.

Kotaku Video (http://kotaku.com/tag/podcast/)
An interesting format this: Get a load of people into a game and record the voice. Works really well when they have interesting people playing (such as David Jaffe playing Gears of War 2). Audio quality can suck, but that’s the fault of the consoles. Fun to listen to but not to really pay attention to as it can’t grab my whole attention.

Cranky Geeks (http://www.crankygeeks.com/)
OK, not games this one. They do have a rotating set of interesting guests though and although some are idiots (please discount that they are more successful than me so I’m obviously wrong about that) there’s usually enough interesting things said to keep me occupied. It helps that their world is my world, which is why I include it. If it was about games it would be the same. In fact it reminds me of Gamesnight, a show that used to be produced by xleague.tv and shown on Pulse in the UK, which was another “just view as flash” show web wise. Of course Gamesnight is a copy of newsnight, but going down that road can’t end well as we collapse TV back down to being just a copy of the very first broadcast ever made.

Crash TV (www.criteriongames.com/podcast/)
This one is slightly biased as they’re the studio that made my favourite game of last year, Burnout Paradise. It’s 100% a marketing tool, but with short 10 minute shows it’s one that I watch weekly.

1up Show (http://www.1up.com/do/minisite?cId=3145462)
Now sadly cancelled the 1up guys had an interesting video show. I’d call it overproduced in places (some of the camera work) but generally an enjoyable experience. Now with a new independent show over at area5.tv that looks to be continuing the idea.

So that’s a selection of what I watch. Not all are easily copied onto my iPod automatically, which is a shame.

I think the best video podcasts work when the visuals add something to the experience (duh!). Crash TV can show the new features they’re talking about and it’s not 100% them sitting in a room chatting to camera. Games Weasel has no camera work and is fully game footage and generated titles. Kotaku uses the video as a way to carry the conversation, which is interesting. The game covers the gaps in conversation quite well and makes it an enjoyable experience.

I really don’t like the monologue delivered to camera shows though. I ask myself why I’m bothering to watch something that could be 100% expressed through audio without losing anything. A good example of a nice and easy video podcast (admittedly by a friend) that gets it right with camera work are some of the Limited Edition video shows such as http://www.yellowspandex.com/?p=184. It gives information through the video that would be harder through just audio, and that has to be the justification of video. There was an Eve video podcast a while back that collapsed due to being too much effort, and that's hard enough to deal with for "simple" audio.

So to sum it up I think video podcasts need to do the following:

• Bring something more than a pure audio show could. The video has to add something, whether it be shots of a game or a live event. People sitting around chatting tend to be dull.
• Be downloadable to my iPod so I remember to watch
• Not be too long, I need to fit the shows into my spare time. 10-30 minutes is probably it for my attention span.
• Be simple enough so that the can be produced without collapsing under the weight of itself.

Now I’ll open it up to discussion. What video shows do you like, and what do you want to see in the future?

This year promises to be the start of a big push to put MMOs onto consoles. Previously we’ve only had games such as Everquest Online Adventures and Final Fantasy XI Online which, to be fair, haven’t been massive successes on the consoles.

This year will see the first few games sneak onto consoles. It’s unclear at the moment which ones will make it, but games such as DC Universe Online, Freerealms and Age of Conan are all threatening to release on consoles sometime soon. The age of console MMOs is upon us, but what does that mean?

The benefits of putting MMOs onto consoles are clear; there are tens of million of each of the current generation consoles out in the wild and that’s a hard market to ignore. The only games that come close to World of Warcraft with their sales are console games such as Call of Duty. You’d be mad not to chase the market.

A successful console MMO has it’s problems. The most important being the problem of patching. If you need to fix a problem or add new content to a PC game you just need to run it through your internal quality control; if you want to patch a game that is on PC as well as a console then you also need to put the patch through the QA process of the console, which will be either Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft. Not only is this out of your control but it’s a separate stage of external testing that you really shouldn’t do before you’ve completed your own testing. This is a problem in MMOs, imagine a bug in Eve that could cause havoc on the market. CCP can test this as quickly as they need to by throwing resources at it and get a tentative patch out the next day that if not fixes the problem at least stops it getting worse. Having to put a patch through weeks of official testing could destroy a game’s economy...

The other problem is one of control, or at least controls. All the consoles will take a USB keyboard, but they’re really not the normal usage. A console game needs to be played from the sofa, and both the xbox and the PS3 have keyboards that clip onto their controllers. The 360 one is nice, but I haven’t yet received my PS3 one to review it. I’m assuming it works as well as you’d be dumb to release such a product that didn’t work. So that’s typing assumed to be OK for chat, but most MMOs are very heavily into the F1 through 10 model which really isn’t going to sit well with the console crowd. You can’t demand that they have the keypad add-ons because most people don’t, and so you need to reinvent your control method to use at most two analogue sticks, two analogue switches that have two buttons above them, a d-pad, four buttons labeled Y, B, A and X or Triangle, Circle, X and Square and finally a select or back button and one marked start. That’s not a lot of controls. D pads work well for selecting abilities (see games such as Oblivion). You can’t have the same control style between both games, which is where a project such as the 360 version of Age of Conan gets interesting. You can have 4 reliable or 8 dodgy directions on the d-pads (both suck for the diagonals) and a number of shift-key like alternatives based on which keys you sacrifice to the task. At this point I’m asking awkward questions about how I rearranged my basic 10 slots in LORTO tonight because of getting a few more levels and how much it really changes my play style. How much will console gamers put up with that?

The problem gets worse when you consider FPS games. On a console a game will help you aim somewhat in an attempt to get past the analogue stick not being as accurate as a keyboard and mouse. Imagine a cross platform game that lets you play with one set of people with assisted aim and one set with uber-accurate mouse control. To be fair this has been done before with games such as Shadowrun, but imagine it on a successful game.

This is where it gets nasty. We have patch problems, cross server problems and UI problems. I can’t see everybody getting along fine in a world that has to deal with all those issues and so can only think that there may be a gap between PC MMO players and console MMO players. If you can’t get the patches out at the same time, get the UIs to match or even create a level playing field when it comes to shooting each other.

I think the patch issue will prevent the others from getting in the way; we’re not going to get as far as shared servers in MMOs purely because patching will be a pain. You couldn’t run Eve, War, WoW or EQ2 that way and expect to fix bugs quickly enough.

I’m a big MMO fan, you can probably tell since I record a podcast on the subject each week. If you listen to the show you’ll also know I’m a fan of console games and want them to both be successful.

The problem is I’m not sure they will be. I fear that a split will arise from separate servers between the PC and the console crowds. If we can’t play on the same servers then what happens to game mechanics? If we split between the two conceptual platforms then who wins? PCs or Consoles? The answer is who has the most numbers at the end. We could really see a change in the market from slightly changing attitudes.

If console MMOs take off they have the potential to outnumber the PC crowd, but will the games be different enough to cause a problem?

I have no idea.