Chimps in Space

As M'collegue mentioned on our last show he's been playing A Tale in the Desert and quite enjoying the experience. Never one to let him have fun, the other day I decided to jump in to mock his choices and find out what the game was really like.

If I had to say the game reminded me of anything I'd say it was Star Wars Galaxies. Graphically they're similar (Galaxies being better) and there's an awful lot of building sculptures using dropped objects in the same way as you decorated your house in Galaxies. But this isn't a game about graphics. It's a game about crafting as that's all there is. There's killing but only to slaughter animals for their innards so that you can make more things from them.

The PvP is possibly going to be the harshest of any game I suspect. I'm currently devoting most of my time to ruining Van Hemlock's view buy building the ugliest house you ever saw next to his house. Tonight I'm also going to drop shovels outside his house to show off that I've figured out how to make them before he has. I suspect I may be getting all competitive over this...

We have decided to hamstring ourselves though and not look up spoilers. We have to figure out things ourselves so I'm working out the tech tree on pages of scribbled notes on my desk. We guessed that Leather came from sheep, and were happy to discover that oil does too. Now I have a shovel I suspect I can make some progress on our next two goals: stone and metal.

I think that this is the game that I've been needing for a long time. The 1 to whatever level grind games are all starting to look the same to me and so I think I need a break in the desert (which does actually have it's own level grind, but with more crafting) before I can actually get into Warhammer properly so I think I'll be hanging that one up for a few months with one of those "It's not you, it's me. I'm just not in the right space right now" letters.

I suspect one day I will look at my next construction project, see 12million bricks as a requirement, and then go log into WAR without ever going back but until that time if you need me I'm working on my tan in ancient Egypt.

We've released our 20th show, which has some rambling about news and cutting edge reviews of Warhammer Online and A Tale in the Desert. I suspect one of us didn't read the brief again.

You can grab it from the usual place, Virginworlds.com.

It's a bit early on in the life of Warhammer for me to have alt-itis isn't it? One population inspired alt later and I have an order character on another server, a rather unoriginal Dwarf Engineer because I never play ranged characters in these games. I'm on an RP server but you'd never tell from the utter lack of chatter that I've encountered so far.

One reason for starting a Dwarf was to see the areas I've seen from the other point of view, and beating up the Orks who I'd previously been helping attack has shown that this particular starting area for these two sides is very nicely designed and you really do feel like there's reason for both sides to be there. It still feels funny that there are so many people milling around away from the front lines avoiding having to actually fight and instead dishing out endless trinkets to anybody who will fight instead of them. Maybe they have a note from their mothers excusing them from war that day, but it seems a little unfair to me.

The first little niggle I found was a bugged public quest. As usual you end up battering some really tough guy at the end, but he disappeared through the floor and was unhittable far too much for my comfort. He could still hit back of course. There was also the problem where he'd move slightly outside his allowable range and instantly have all his hit points returned. After the 5th time that happened we all gave up and went off to do things that weren't public quests. I, for instance, clicked my heels together three times and magically transported over to the local scenario. Being order is great, I was started in minutes.

To start with we all zerged forwards towards the gate cog thing and us engineers set up a firing position up on the ledge and started blasting all those nasty bad people who were trying to do whatever the hell it was we were fighting for. Lots of shooting later the sneaky gits had set up position underneath us so we couldn't shoot them. Our tactics for this were simple, wish we had some kind of healer and a few more tanks while getting slaughtered repeatedly trying to get any more kills on them and reclaim the whatever it was we were meant to be doing.

I had fun, but I'm still not sure I could fight on that map again and again without getting bored. Still, I'll soon have out levelled it and be onto the next one.

My last post was rather positive about WAR, but this one will be less so.

I spent a large chunk of the evening with RvR as my primary goal, which means sitting in long waiting lists and trying to take a very stubborn cannon away from those stunties to push back and throw that balance back into favour of the much more appropriate red colour. Tenacious little stunties made that rather hard without a larger organised force, which wasn't forthcoming and so got rather dull rather quickly.

This meant I spent a lot of time in a waiting list for a scenario. And I mean a LOT of time. So long in fact that I'd caught up on my few hundred outstanding items in Google reader, finished painting a few more Orks and decided that I should throw myself into the harsh world of Call of Duty 4 multiplayer, home of insta kill headshots and kiddies who have nothing better to do all day than play. You may be able to guess that I'm scared of FPSs online. Still, I thought I should try the number one online game on XBox live to see what the more normal onlne console gamers play, rather than my usual staple of driving games.

I'm glad to say that I was wrong about COD4, and I can see why it's more popular than Halo 3 online. Sure I died lots but it's a lot of fun. I got my fair share of kills, levelled up and unlocked more goodies to play with and encountered zero smack. Well there was one guy on voice who sounded like he was snoring if that counts, but who am I to criticise weird breathing with the wreak that is the result of breaking my nose about 10 times too many and not bothering to get it fixed.

Every so often I'd break off from my xbox and turn back to the PC because my time had come around to jump into a scenario. Now I'm an Eve player, I understand open PvP but this whole battleground thing is a little new to me and I'm assuming that they're meant to be comparable to the console experience. The first few matches I've had over the weekend have been enjoyable, but the more times I play the games seem to be getting a little repetative. Most times we're mostly zerging with lots of orks just chopping our way through anybody who gets close. It's really putting me off jumping into these things, especially as it takes hours to get into one! At the moment I'm really thinking that the PvE content of the game exists to keep you busy while waiting to play the PvP game, which is just a bad view for me to have I think.

In the end I gave up on WAR because I was having more fun in COD4 while waiting to play. It just felt that luck played a greater role, as did skill. Getting a kill on the insanely good player was far easier without needing to resort to ganking him when he's damaged. It's hard to sneak up behind somebody in a 3rd party game...

I know some of you are thinking "he just doesn't understand! He's doing it wrong!" and I think you're right. I admit that I didn't get COD4 until tonight, and I think that's a direct result of me having played WAR and tried that kind of gameplay. Maybe I'm trying to compare two vastly different things unfairly, maybe the fact that I can't just drop in whenever I want in WAR is colouring my view. Either way I think I may be coming to the end of my time in WAR very quickly if I don't like the PvP in it as by all accounts the PvE content doesn't stretch to fill all the levels. I like it as a PvE game, but does that mean I'll be missing the point? But then again do I have time to hang around for a fight all the time?

I'm not giving up on WAR just yet, I'm going to keep trying to see if I can't crack what it is I don't understand. I'll expand on how I'm feeling on the podcast

Yes, it's official. I'm claiming that warhammer has had the worse launch ever. Conan had a brilliant launch following an outstanding public beta, and I'm still milking Anarchy Online for it's best launch of any game ever. They've kept us, as a community, supplied with material to complain about for years!

What am I meant to moan about as warhammer didn't have any major problems. Servers filling up? Can't really fault them for that as it's the players all going to the same servers. Long waits for RvR scenarios? Players again as there are too many destruction.

How am I meant to be all angry on my Podcast if Mythic don't even have the courtesy to screw up.

In other news I might quite like Warhammer.

With the release of Warhammer Online it's becoming obvious that a lot of people also have a love for the IP and still play (or are being drawn to) Warhammer as a tabletop game. I don't believe in mixing topics on a blog so I've branched out to a parallel blog to cover my warhammer tabletop adventures. You can find it over here.

I'll be updating it with pictures of my painting, battle reports and the usual ramblings that surround the hobby as I start off rebuilding my Ork army for 40k. My Dwarf army for fantasy will have to wait a while, which isn't a problem as it's been waiting for years now already :)

I've not announced a new podcast here for a while, but I can rectify that now. Van Hemlock Episode 19 is now posted, and we talk about PvP. Everybody please tell us why we're wrong and what we've missed :)

Bioshock will need an install on the PS3 it seems:

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/10/bioshock-ps3-install-takes-10-minutes-4.98gb/

Now let me get this straight. In order to play you need to install a DVD worth of content onto the HD. The game also looks 100% the same as the 360 version and doesn't contain any new content that will take up any considerable extra space.

So what they're saying is that they're putting the whole game on the HD because blu-ray is too slow.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't just a knock on the PS3, I think that the 360 DVDs are too small and the PS3 blu-rays are too slow. I also think both consoles need to have a lot more memory and speed so that they can render full 1080p graphics with the fancy effects people expect instead of 720p or, as a lot of games do, lower vertical resolution and then upscaling.

My point I think is that we need a next gen of consoles soon. HD graphics take up a lot of memory and neither are really up to the it so there's room for a lot of improvements. This time next year we need a new XBox announced really, PS3 can last longer as it has more room to grow but since the other physical limit is probably the memory and not horsepower it's going to take new hardware to make the next step, even if it's just enough to do x more rendering passes an 1080p. The reason for Halo 3 rendering at less that 720p was given that they needed to do more passes on the bloom rendering and didn't have the memory to do it, the next gen of hardware needs to at least be able to do what that wanted at full HD before we can really consider these games HD.

Oh yes, blog. I keep forgetting about that, I'm far too busy to think nowadays. It's something to do with Eve and weekly podcasts I think.

Episode 15 of the podcast is here. It's a bit different this week as we go all chatty and discuss guilds, corps and cities in online games, with stops in Guildwars, Eve and SWG.

And I'm King not Queen, OK?

One of the big things I love about achievements/trophies/whatever a game wants to call them is that they encourage you to play the game more, whether it be to get through to the end of the game, go back and play content you missed, or even to encourage you to try different play styles.

Last week Uncharted: Drake's Progress was patched to support the trophy system on the PS3, the first full retail game to do so, and so I dropped in to have another look at the game.

The first time I played it was just after it came out. I really didn't get on with the controls, found the plot to be more ridiculous than usual and was bugged by the graphics. What's more if you replaced the main character with Lara Croft you'd find it impossible to tell it wasn't a Tomb Raider. Needless to say I didn't enjoy the game.

This time around I have exactly the same problems with the game, but I'm enjoying it a lot more. Before you say, no it's not because of the trophies. They just got me to play it again.

The controls, for a start, are annoying in a they move you in a direction and the camera keeps moving to new view points. More than a couple of times while doing some jumping I've had the camera move and then my next jump has been in totally the wrong direction. Can we move past this as an industry please? Also there are some quick time events (press X now!) which I think are cheap, lazy and wrong. They're not too bad in this game though as they aren't that frequent but they jar far too much still. What's more the last section is just quicktime events and running at the right time which means the ending really feels like a let down.

Then there is the plot, which makes National Treasure look like a history documentary. It's not Bonekickers bad, but "Sir Francis Drake fakes his own death (why?) in order to go find a big golden statue to make himself rich (although everybody thinks he's dead so he'll not be able to go to the sort of parties that being very wealthy usually provides) and an alleged descendent of his goes looking for the treasure". The plot is very shallow and simple of course as it is a computer game after all and so doesn't need much more, but it seems to have elements that are not clear all the way through as if it wasn't perfectly thought out. For instance are the monsters making the traps? There is nobody else around to do so, but they don't seem up to a bit of woodwork in the evening in order to fill the forest with traps. My experience of them was more along the lines of them running at me to rip my head off while I kept an eye on the ammunition level on my machine gun in an Aliens sentry gun kind of way.

Graphically the game suffers from some very common problems on consoles. The first is texture popup where the game doesn't manage to read the textures from the disc before it needs to display them (no HD install for this game), but there's also some distance based rendering issues with plants that mean as you walk along you'll sometimes see them pop into view as they get close enough. Minor things I know, but it's the impression that counts. More strangely the people do that annoying thing that people do nowadays in some games and glow internally, which I suspect is to make the teeth as white and pristine as possible. Or maybe not. It's really strange, you get weird highlights on places like the inside of the lips.

Gameplay is, as I've mentioned, tomb raider. You run, you jump and you hang below ledges as you move along cliffs and walls. There's a couple of vehicle sections which are OK but don't add much. The second water based one is actually very annoying, what with fast water currents, barrels that explode on touch being washed towards you from behind blind corners around rocks and helpful enemies lobbing bullets and explosives your way like they're going out of fashion.

Ah yes, the enemies. The ragged band of pirates who are there to stop you. By the time I had completed the game I had trophies for getting 100 head shots, having shot 50 people with the basic pistol and a few others for shooting slightly less people with other weapons. I must have killed 3-400 pirates at the least, plus more mutant creature things and mercenaries. In fact there's a line where the big bad guy asks why the leader of the pirates had been hired and the response was that they were cheap. Apparently you get an unbelievably large army for "cheap" nowadays. I hope they weren't planning on getting a share of the gold at the end because with the number of people involved in that little operation the profit wouldn't have been that high. And who made that many identical pirate outfits? And what about the logistics of having that many guns and all that ammo? And where did they sleep, I didn't see a small camp city. Was there a cruise liner moored off the other side of the island? They had lots of trucks and jeeps too. There must have been a transport ship too. I really should learn to ignore the plots and circumstances in games...

To be fair it wasn't all nicked from Tomb Raider. There was a Nazi U-Boat pen right out of Indiana Jones as well, which was getting a bit close to shark jumping for my tastes.

All mocking aside it's actually a very solid, albeit short game. The cutscenes are good and move the plot along at a fair whack and there's only a couple of places where you get really annoyed at difficulty spikes. The fact that it brings nothing new to the genre isn't necessarily a problem, just a missed opportunity and so I'd say it's probably a game worth playing.

As for the trophies they map directly onto the medals system that was in the game from the start. This is a direct copy of achievements from the 360 where you have 1000 points in the game and a bunch of medals for performing actions such as getting x number of headshots or completing the game on each difficulty level. A nice touch is that these points unlock various bonuses as you get towards the magic 1000, for instance when you hit 400 you get access to a cheat where you can just select some of the weapons to give to yourself. There's also other costumes for your character, the usual collection of concept art and making of videos to unlock as well so if you care about such things you have an incentive to collect the medals.

I'm currently at 750 points with two to go. 100points for completing the game on the hard difficulty level and then 150 for completing the rather harder mode that is unlocked after that. I believe the hardest one doesn't allow you to use cheats, which sounds like it'll be a tad harsh. I think I'll be back in 6 months to grab the first of those, it was an enjoyable enough time this play through to make me want to do it again someday.