Above is a cast photo for the Plants vs. Zombies video I shot with some good friends recently. Stay tuned to this blog to see the fan-created homage go up in all its videographic splendour.
Shooting it was lots of fun. And it ties nicely in with what I threatened to talk about in more detail a few weeks ago, the brilliant Typing of the Dead. Now I was going to crack my writing knuckles and really get stuck into some praising the bizzare Mavis-Beacon-meets-Resident-Evil game, but I happened across this article a in the meantime over at Offworld. The article stopped me in my tracks beacuse I think Margaret Robinson has really said all I wanted to say about the game, and probably more succinctly than I would have managed.
Bottom line, it is fun AND extremely educational. So track it down. Play it. Master touch typing and revel in the horrors of the polygonical living dead all at the same time. (The system requirements are extremely meagre so maybe you could run it the old laptop that won’t manage anything else, get some use out if it!)
I’ve also been playing another of my game loot titles, “Titan Quest,” so I may talk about that a bit more about that click-fest in a subsequent post. For the moment I have to get to editing and uploading some video!
“Okay, just keep flying and hope no-one notices we broke the citadel.”
Gaming update.
Well I finally got a World of Warcraft character to level 60. Which was the orginal level-cap for those who are interested in such things. (It goes up to 80 right now, and as Blizzard have announced a THIRD expansion “Cataclysm” is on its way then there will be level 90’s running around soon enough.) Anyway, just because I am 5 or so years behind the curve, doesn’t lesson my personal sense of achievement. (See one of my favourite comic artists deal with this very topic at http://www.xkcd.com/606/)
Must say I didn’t spend a great deal of time with Rollercoaster Tycoon. For one thing the graphics were… not good. Did things really look that bad in 1999? I guess they did. I started off with the easiest scenario, running a themepark in Sherwood Forest during the Dark Ages, which is a nice idea and had me raising an eybrow at least. But unfortunately the gameplay was just not my cup of tea. I’ve never really been a simulation gamer. My father could (and has) happily spent hours building up infrastructure and micro-managing all manner of stuff in games like these - I just can’t get in to them. I played the original Civilisation a bit, and SimCity too, but my heart was never really in it. (In SimCity’s case I would usually have only played for an hour or so before I got bored, eventually a message would pop up telling me that there was traffic congestion some-where-another and I would call down a couple of hurricanes and earthquakes as vengeance for my city’s population whining about traffic.)
I was just as bored with Rollercoaster Tycoon. I’m not saying the game doesn’t have an amazing amount of detail and depth, but frankly for me its detail I could do without. I don’t want to click on a punter and examine his hunger, nausea or need-to-go-the-toilet stats. I don’t want to make decisions about the lift-hill chain speed or the lateral g’s of one of my rides. Essentially playing Rollercoaster Tycoon well means balancing the books – earning enough money from a smoothly running theme-park – and I find that about as enjoyable as an excel spreadsheet.
End verdict – All the fun of a theme park with way more responsibility and no actual fun!
So on to another game from my game-loot for me then. I’ve started playing “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare”, I’ll report back when done. Or bored. Or horrified with 1st person shooting actual people in realistic real-world looking situations…
Oh I almost forgot, here’s what guest contributor Lizbt had to say on her Horsez experience -
“Picking up a horse simulation game that pluralises with a ‘z’, I expected silliness, coat-brushing and a fair bit of canter. What I did not expect was for it to be hard. This game was hard. Well, not hard. Difficult by design, in that I had no idea how to complete many of the set tasks. The very first mission, your introduction to the game, involved you (as the horse) saving a young girl clinging to a cliff face. Realistic, I hear you say. Also, nearly impossible. The poor girl plunged to her death 3 times before I googled the damn thing. Ah, yes, press spacebar when you pass her incredibly camouflaged hand reaching up the side of the path. Of course. My hoofy rescue complete, I settled in for some good brushing. That was the ticket. I even got to use that hook thing to clean the pebbles out of the horse’s shoes. This increased my horse’s moral, which had presumedly taken a dip after the glow of the daring cliffside rescue had worn off. Then followed some sort of dressage / DDR combo, where I pressed the arrow keys in time to complete awesome galloping moves. I could dig it, I’d played my fair share of Shrek Super Party. But then, once again, it was fail-city time, as my horse just would not jump it’s little jumping gate, not matter how many times I clicked the button as it turned green. This all culminated in a cross-country race in which I had to collect a statue from inside a country church with an hours time or a pawn-shop owner would not sell me a pack of cards. I really needed those cards. I’d thrown the last deck in the fire in a fit of teenage hormanal rage over not winning an undisclosed card game (plot!). But the “map”, it no show me where I was. Or where I was going. Or how long I had left to complete the mission. So, I did the only possible thing I could. I rage-quit out of that mother, and played some Fairway Solitaire. Birdie!”
I finally finished the main quest in Fallout 3. The ending was okay, in a not-entirely-thrown together-montage-of-still-images-with-voiceover kind of way. I mean to say, it didn’t feel like enough of a payoff for all the hours and effort, but the endings of RPG’s rarely feel satifyingly epic . It was no KOTOR 2 a least. (For the uninitiated KOTOR 2 “Knights of the Old Republic 2″, was an otherwise brilliant Star Wars action/rpg that due to a rushed development deadline, – ie we are releasing this sucker come Christmas time and We Don’t Give a Stuff If It Is Finished or Not – had a whole bunch of brilliant plot twists and character development and player choice that all ended in a 8 second clip of a starship flying away from a planet as it fell apart. I was so outraged I actually stood up, I remember it well. )
So that’s one game off my unfeasably large ‘To Play list’. I also *finally* finished Bioshock. I mean I only started playing it 1 year ago, what do you expect? Bioshock was always gloriously pretty in design and pleasingly dark in concept with its Ayn Rand-inspired philisophising, but I became bored with the kill Big Daddy then harvest/rescue a little girl gameplay about halfway through. I am easily bored. Also, I got lost a few times, so I punished the game for this design flaw by not playing it for 10 months. (I really, really, dislike mazes. I had enough 1st person maze navigating for one lifetime in 1990 with the brilliant Eye of the Beholder.) Anyway, I have finished finally, the story was actually very good, even if the end boss fight was comically easy.
So I’m going to tear the shrinkwrap off another of my competition-booty-games and take it for a spin. I’m going to venture into the world of another neglected game genre (for me at least) ; the simulation. Time to try my hand at “Rollercoaster Tycoon 2: Triple Thrill Pack”. Wish me luck.
N.B. Lizbt of the Project Life-ness has unwrapped and loaded up “Horsez” on her computer. This was one of the games I won that languish in the “sell give away or otherwise destroy” pile. Along with “Hell’s Kitchen: The Game.” *shudder*
Lizbt is presently stuck on the first mission, rescuing some girl from a gully. The girl keeps dying because she isn’t fast enough and Lizbt can’t find the gully. Teach those kids life lessons Mr Developer! This is actually a re-start for her as the first time Lizbt began the game she didn’t get the name quite right. Which meant she spent a few minutes bashing the escape key and trying to stop the baffling ‘death of a girl’s father, save the Horse Academy’ cutscene so she could rename her horse. I quote -
“I want to be Sparklez with a zed!”
We’ll get back to you with the verdicts. I’m sure you’ll be dying to know if the poor girl ever gets saved from the gully and if I end up being virtually sued for neglicence leading to the death of several people on a poorly constructed and maintained theme park ride…
Well, I finished the novel. At the moment it retains the catchy working title of “Untitled Second Novel”. Needless to say the name of the book isn’t the only thing that needs work, but I did reach the 50,000 word goal and I did so before the month was out. So that’s something. Unlike last year though, I only just made it, completing something like 15,000 words over one loooong day that stretched out to become two days right at the end. I found writing non-fantasy fiction a lot harder, or maybe it was just ‘difficult second novel’ syndrome. Either way it was hard work.
So I have celebrated my hard work by doing very little of anything since. Well, I’ve done a few things, here and there. Spent a weekend in Brisbane, cleaned a shelf, and the most impressive of all, I FINALLY HAVE A DEATH KNIGHT. That’s right. It took me long enough – I won the Wrath of the Lich King as part of the Christmas competition frequently mentioned on this blog, but unfortunately did not have the Level 55 or higher character necessary to create one of the new Hero-Class undead melee-masters. Here he is.
His name is Underneath, and I am a proud virtual father to my unhallowed avatar. It is amazing how fast you go up levels during the starting area quests. And you get given a mount within an hour or so of playing, and a speedy one it that, which is fantastic. All the travel time at walking speed pre-mount in WOW I found to be quite tedious. Also – the gear is brilliant. I’ve spent most of my time swearing and ranting about how much hard work it was starting out with my other characters compared to this one. It’s also been a guilty pleasure being so EVIL playing as a Death Knight, watching hapless humans run in terror from the Scourge and even being given quests to kill a certain number of the poor terrified blighters. Hopefully I’m not doing any irreparable damage to my sense of morality – being bad is quite cathartic I’ll admit.
In addition to burning villages and slaughtering innocents for fun and profit in Azeroth I have been exploring the post-apocalyptic wasteland in Fallout 3. I’ll talk about this in more detail after I’ve finished the main quest arc, but I have had some solid fun already, it really is quite an impressive title. (As well as being extremely violent with some black, black humour.) Pictured below is me with Dogmeat.
Wandering overland through Post-Apocalyptia is so much more enjoyable with a canine companion and Cole Porter playing from my Pip-boy…
Working on the novel just makes the lure of distracting things even more lur-iffic.
So in the spirit of self-torment I have been breaking up writing sessions by playing Popcap’s addictive, Plants vs. Zombies. I’m not really in the ‘casual games’ demographic, but Popcap’s Peggle was the crack-cocaine-like exception to this rule for me, and PvZ turns out to be a very entertaining little tower defense game. I am hooked.
My other zombie distraction of choice is the copy of Left 4 Dead that arrived in the mail the other day. A surprise addition to my gaming swag. I had almost bought this game, having heard good things and read glowing reviews. What stopped me were the reports that it was purely multiplayer. I’ve never really been a multiplayer kind of gamer. LAN, yes, as I enjoy playing with actual real-life associates, but being shot over and over again by faceless 1337 14-year olds playing Counter-Strike never really caught on for me. (I have extremely warm memories of private Quake deathmatch sessions at a friend’s family-owned computer training business in the mid 90’s, though…)
Anyway I’ve been playing the Left 4 Dead single player (multiplayer with bots) campaign and I can see what’s to like. It does feel like a Zombie movie, (the film grain effect is nice) and I have been genuinely startled once or twice by a horde of ‘infected’ rushing at me. The ‘AI controller’ sounds like an innovative game mechanic, though not sure exactly how it effects the in-game enemies behaviour. The whole thing is a tad repetitive though. Shoot zombie, turn corner, shoot zombie, go up stairs, shoot more zombies, make it to safe room, start new level, shoot zombies, repeat. I’ve tried to play online through steam once or twice, but couldn’t seem to find any active games. I’m probably doing something wrong, I know.
In the spirit of not writing and all things zombie I watched ‘28 Days Later’ at midnight last night, the first viewing surprisingly enough. (I know, I know, everyone else saw it 7 years ago when it came out. What can I say? I was waiting for just the right time…) So I know now where pretty much the whole Left 4 Dead concept came from, down to the graffiti on the walls and the behaviour of the ‘infected’. And yes, to concur with what the rest of the world was thinking 7 years ago, its a pretty solid film.
I also watched Terminator : Salvation yesterday (See? Anything to avoid writing…) so I had that expensive piece of cinematic nothingness to compare it to. I had heard lots of complaints about various plot elements and other things from people, but no-one had mentioned to me how utterly boring, humourless and empty a film it was. It was like a Michael Bay eye-candy actioner trying to be a worthy and thoughtful piece of cinema with something profound to say. Only they didn’t seem to have two ideas to rub together and I couldn’t care less about any of the characters. *shrug*
Okay, back to writing. I mean writing the book and not this blog.
A Boomer from Left 4 Dead. Not to be confused with Boomer from Battlestar Galactica. (It is also a good representation of how I felt after having three servings of home-cooked curry followed by gourmet chocolate and ice-cream on Friday night. Thanks Warren and Julia…)
“Hello there. Do you have time to talk about how much you could be saving on local calls?”
Well, I eventually got F.E.A.R. 2 up and running. Don’t really know what the problem was. Somewhere in the various installs, re-installs and validations and verifications Steam decided it would let me play the game after all. How gracious.
My favourite part was the install when it ignored the DVD in the drive and decided for some arbitrary reason that I needed to download the entire game content. Needless to say I swiftly cancelled that plan. Nothing like an estimated download time of 6 hours when you already have the game on disc.
So was it really worth all the hassle?
The messing around certainly took the edge of my enthusiasm for the game, and then when I actually came to setting it up I ran headlong in to my pet hate.
Lack of fully customisable key bindings.
Now that is something to be truly frightened of.
How can any game get away with this? No really, I mean I have been playing FPS’s since Wolfenstein 3D and over that time I have come to settle on a particular configuration. It is altered obviously, game by game – Dark Messiah needed a lot of pressing of the Kick button so that gets a priority place, some games might have a flashlight, others don’t etc etc. But over time a comfortable basic control scheme evolves, so you can transfer habits and skills from one game to another instead of having to re-train your hand-eye coordination for each title. And though it might mark me as some kind of malformed freak of the gaming world it just so happens my particular configuration does not include having my left hand on the WASD side of the keyboard.
Unfortunately F.E.A.R. 2 refused to let me assign functions to many of the keys I would usually use. I won’t go on about this too much, though I could – at length. It really is unforgivable in my book. (Many a game I have abandoned playing all together because Quicksave and Quickload are locked to F6 and F9…)
Then I noticed controversial choice #2.
No save games – checkpoint autosave only.
This never bodes well. Aliens vs. Predator pulled this trick a while back, giving you only limited saves, citing the same “building tension, real consequences” reasons that the F.E.A.R 2 developers are trotting out, and I didn’t play that game until the power of mass bitching saw them add an unlimited savegame function.
Now I understand (I think) what they are trying to do with this. I am something of a compulsive quicksaver myself, so not having the ability to save my game every time I turn a corner does add a certain edge. But this positive is more than cancelled out by being forced into the frustrating situation of having to repeat combat situations I’ve already completed over and over to get to the bit that keeps killing me. If this kind of repetition appealed I’d dust off one of my consoles and play Prince of Persia, or maybe Abe’s Odyssey or even Pitfall on the Atari 2600. The other problem with lack of saving options is that one of the things I appreciate about PC games is being able to save them and shut them down the moment the real world intrudes. A phone call, a knock at the door, a grease fire, an alien craft landing on the roof and I can just press a button or two and then deal with the situation. Even if I’m not back to my computer for a week or so (the alien abduction one ) then I know my precious progress has been saved and I can get back to it as soon as the swelling goes down enough that I can sit on my computer chair again.
Moving on to the game itself, as soon as I started playing I found myself trying to remember the plot details of the original F.E.A.R which I had vaguely enjoyed and certainly completed. What came to mind was that the title was a laughable and unconvincing backronym, that there was a little girl, that little girls are creepy( as evidenced by the last 25 years of horror films,) that there was a lot of blood, that for some reason you could go Matrix-style slow-mo and that you were some kind of super soldier killing some other kind of super soldier, conspiracy blah, unethical experiments blah, telepathy blah, picking up boring memo’s and reading them in breaks between killing blah blah…
Now I haven’t finished the game yet, probably only halfway through, but it seems to me that F.E.A.R 2 is more of the same. The slow mo gunfight action can be quite satisfying, wheeling out every horror cliche ever put on film breaks up the monotony of gun battles, and your companions are entirely useless and die a lot. Usually just up ahead of you, conveniently too far out of your reach to actually do anything to help them. So come to think of it you are pretty damn useless yourself.
Maybe I’m jaded, or expecting too much from what is still a medium in its infancy, but is this really the best a studio can dish up? Well actually, I know its not, because I have played Deus Ex, I have played Half-life 2, I have played a handful of other compelling titles that didn’t feel empty so I know they exist, that they are possible.
In terms of the story, the world of the game, it seems to me like the writers/developers of F.E.A.R. 2 are just re-hashing whatever they played in other successful titles. Nothing feels at all new, or even interesting, I certainly don’t care about a single character and I don’t need to keep hold of the plot to play the game, I just kill whatever is in front of me. Which is fine for an action title if that’s what you are going for, but then if that is the case why even bother with the lame story tying it all together? The emails/PDA notes you pick up in particular read like the developers fed a handful of better 1st person shooters, the scripts from a few late night B-grade action movies and a DVD box set of the X-files into a grinder and then typed up the mushy plot-slurry as it squelched out.
So that’s my verdict anyway. I might finish it eventually, I might not. For the moment its a resounding ‘meh’ and I’m moving on to the next game!
Posted: April 19, 2009 at 3:29 am | Tags: DRM, errors, steam
Well, it has been a few days now and I have not yet succeeded in getting my brand-spanking new copy of F.E.A.R 2 working – which makes a review rather challenging. Here’s the one thing I have ready to feedback on -
1.) Every time a developer makes you use Steam to install, activate and play a boxed, retail copy of a game the Divine Wildebeest of Gaming Justice cries.
There has been installing, and verifying and patching and deleting and much viewing of troubleshooting forums but what it gets down to is I can’t play a 100% legitimate copy of a single-player computer game because of insurmountable problems with an entirely unnecessary online DRM system.
I have previously had major problems with games purchased through Steam (HL2, Portal, etc) but they somehow seemed less heinous as I didn’t have a physical copy of the game in my hand. It is frustrating enough to have a games re-sellabilty destroyed through having to run it through Steam, without the game not working entirely because of it. I sometimes wonder if Valve’s platform might be more reliable if it actually ran on steam power…
Oh well, time to give up and move on to another game. I might try to revisit F.E.A.R 2 when my patience is renewed enough to try getting it working again.
I decided to play and review “Codemned: Criminal Origins” next, as I was avoiding buying it cheap at EB since November in the hope that I might win a copy, which I did.
Unfortunately the copy is damaged and does not actually work in any of the three DVD drives I have in my home. Witness…
Having learned through painful experience that “Cyclic Redundancy Check” is fancy code for “Your Disc is Buggered or Maybe Has Biscuit Crumbs On It You Slob” I cleaned the disc several times and re-tried to no avail. Well, that really does suck.
So I shall be forced to move on to F.E.AR. 2 for my dose of gory FPS action!
Another shot of the cast, looking much more glamorous now that they are famous on the internet…
“Okay, just keep flying and hope no-one notices we broke the citadel.”
“Aww…”
image via 
A Boomer from Left 4 Dead. Not to be confused with Boomer from Battlestar Galactica. (It is also a good representation of how I felt after having three servings of home-cooked curry followed by gourmet chocolate and ice-cream on Friday night. Thanks Warren and Julia…)
“Mmmm… 98% recycled material.”
