Survival in numbers

I just started falling back into S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat. This past year has been a wonderful kicker of amazing open world gaming for me. I finished last year with Clear Sky (the prequel of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series), played through half of Hitman: Blood Money, moved into Far Cry 2 via recommendation of the Idle Thumbs podcast, and most recently laughed myself sore with my friends in Dead Rising 2 co-op.

I find games like these are rare. They’re free-form, unforgiving in a sense, and do very little in explaining how to tackle a particular situation. More importantly, they have a sense of discovery that requires an open mind to progress through the game at the cost of a high barrier of entry. I think it comes from requiring a quick mastery of fundamental mechanics while expecting the player to understand a level of the depth presented to them through the game’s mechanics by leaving him/her to their own imagination to approach a given scenario. A person who has never played game before is very unlikely to achieve all of the above, especially when focus testing reveals someone can screw up driving a tank out of a garage when all it required was hitting the accelerator. With games getting more expensive, companies can’t rely on just the hardcore. They need to reach out past us “old timers” and cater to the new comers are what’s going to make a game profitable.

That said, these games I mentioned were not cash cows. The majority of them have a cult following at best. On a level it makes sense, because all of them are flawed in a major way, but offer experiences that a gamer like me, someone that has played a thousand-plus games over the course of twenty years, could consider new and exciting. That feeling is my drug and I am in constant withdrawal. When playing mainstream titles these days, I feel like a literary scholar cursing over the success of the Twilight series. I share less and less excitement for upcoming titles, because everything is starting to feel the same. I foresee this No Country For Old Gamers plot living itself out because I’m going to become obsolete to developers, and with good reason because my “kind” make up such a small number of the market share.

It’s reassuring, I guess, to know I’m not alone in this thought. A college professor by the name of Michael Abbott, wrote a wonderful article about his student’s experiences when they were assigned to play Ultima IV. (http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2010/09/unplayable.html) I’ve never played it myself (new to PC gaming since 2008), but I know it’s heralded as one of the greatest games ever made because of the ground it broke by providing the player with an extreme depth of choice you have in each action. His class had to play the game over the course of a few days, using provided PDFs and game manuals as source materials. Abbott found the majority of his students deemed the game unplayable. Their reason: it did not teach them how to play. They had ignored the reading material, and relied on the game to log all the information given to them. One student assumed the manuals as, “... stuff [the developers] put in the box” said, “I’d say for gamers of our generation, an RPG like Ultima IV is boring and pretty much unplayable.” Abbott concluded that his students didn’t want a game that felt like work.

In the right environment, that “work” often underlines my love for a game. The idea of entering a world that doesn’t ham fist a direction, a specific way to play the game, or reveal it’s main storyline is not obvious from the start is exciting to me. That level of complexity applied well-thought mechanics allows me to create personal adventures within the world I invest my time with. In an industry focused on making the experience of a game equally exciting for everyone, something important to gaming is lost. To draw a comparison, games today feel like an overproduced album versus the energetic, raw, or inventive indie music I seek.

This quest of mine has been best served by the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. Its setting, “The Zone” is a mysterious dystopia filled with paranormal activity, mutated animals, and mercenaries that are one bullet away from becoming hostile. My first experience in Shadow of Chernobyl, the flagship title of the series, thrust me into this world with little to no knowledge of the dangers that awaited. The uncertainty, unease, safety, and achievement I experienced allowed me to attach emotions to my avatar to the point where I’m looking out for his well being past the disappointment of having to reload a previous save. It was as if I were playing a survival simulator for an alternate reality. I was hooked.

The concept of being weak doesn’t make its way into a lot of first person shooters. Typically, I am a one-man army blasting through hundreds, sometimes thousands of antagonists. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I feel like I’m barely surviving each encounter. When I kill a group of mercenaries or a rare mutant, I feel lucky. When I first started, I dreamed of exiting encounters unscathed. Instead, I found myself limping my way back to a safe area, conserving ammo, and tying to sneak past the random dangers that populated the landscape. Most of my anxienty came from my inexperience within the world. However, with enough time, I became a seasoned stalker by using my gained knowledge to traverse past anomalies mapped to memory, identify the various territories of the armed and dangerous, choose the proper travel gear for a particular excursion, and avoid danger when I could. The “learn by doing” approach allowed me to fail, and identify why I failed, which made my victories that much sweeter.

It kills me to know games like these are numbered. I expect that they are going to disappear entirely, or at the very least dwindle to an audience that can only support a few releases per year. It’s a painful truth to not be the majority and thus, I expect to be neglected as time goes on. The idea of a triple-a game that requires players to go through the rigmarole of failure is stupid, because it’s unapproachable and unprofitable. At least in the US.

I should note: each title I mentioned was developed outside of the United States. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. team is out of Ukraine, IO Interactive is a Danish studio (please make another Hitman), and both Dead Rising 2 and Far Cry 2 were made by Canadian studios. There seems to be a huge Russian following behind the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. It’s my take that people look for that hardcore experience. With the amazing region support of services like Steam, I at the very least have a glimmer of hope telling me I’m not obsolete just yet. I will enjoy the hell out of it while it lasts.

BattleForge Hands-on Preview

BattleForge Hands-on Preview
By David Turner



When I first came across BattleForge at New York's second Comic-con, I didn't know what to make of it. It sported the familiar high, angled view over a section of a battle field with units to command like any run-of-the-mill RTS game. Yet, it had a few significant differences, the biggest of them all being that all spells, units, and supportive constructs are all card-based.
 

The cards themselves are very comparable to those from Magic the Gathering in both order and style. Each card is of four elements: Frost, Fire, Nature, and Shadow. The upper right corner shows the number of orbs needed to cast the card. Colored circles represent a specific elemental orb, and gray ones represent one of any element. A number in that same corner details the casting cost. And similarly, abilities, charges, attack attributes, health, and damage are listed on the bottom half.

These cards are used to construct your deck of twenty and personify your strategy. You create new decks in the game's main lobby. It's a practice field that lets you spawn any group of enemies in both open and protected situations without restrictions on card summoning. With two hundred cards promised in the final game, it's easy to spend a lot of time testing your latest strategy before it's used in battle. This of course doesn't include card upgrades that are earned through extended play. The lobby also offers a friend list, an auction house, a way to trade cards, and a store to buy booster packs. Details concerning the currency haven't yet been revealed.

The missions, single and multiplayer, are all linked by a central lore with a location on the map. I fired up a single player task to learn the ropes of battle and test my first deck. My first order of business was saving a company to the north from demise. It quickly moved on to me raiding an enemy encampment then choosing to hold a wall instead of extending the blitzkrieg further north. This situation was great because it allowed me to tackle the situation in a manner suitable to the deck I was using. After I held my defense I had a standoff against the end level boss. This was an extended battle reminiscent of an end of instance boss in WoW. From there I was excited to move onto multiplayer matches.

The two-player co-op missions I played with my roommate were the highlight of my experience with the game thus far. One scenario had us holding a front from the north while advancing to the south. The second game we played had us controlling a timed force field. We were given an object to activate that controlled enemy attack from one person to another. This forced one person to defend and gave the other a chance to advance to the north. Teamwork was important in order to successfully complete our objectives. The good news is that the battles never got congested. From the missions we played, we were mostly attacking from different fronts only to join together at the end.

Overall, the game feels good and not too daunting like other RTS games I've played in the past. Card summoning mechanics are balanced for hot-key experts and point-and-clickers, like me. After you select a card through your favorite method, you can click a valid location in the playing field for the card to spawn. Since the game focuses away from base-building, you must spawn near existing units or controlled resources. Once a card is played, a brief recovery time occurs before being able to play your next card. Anyone who has gotten his/her sorry behind handed to them in Starcraft can rejoice to this. It evens the playing field for anyone who can't summon ten units a second.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the implementation of squad support. Unit organization is key in games of the genre. Your squads are mapped to the number keys for easy access and can be managed through a few simple motions. Once a creature card is played, the user an click and drag it into a squad of his/her choice. If a card is played near or within a squad, it will be automatically included in that group. Everything else is pretty standard with the inclusion of a mini-map, camera controls to pan over the battlefield, and pretty graphics. The only thing I feel is lacking, is the ability to pan out to see the whole area a la Supreme Commander. In the game's defense, the developer on the floor of the BattleForge area at NYCC explained that the main focus was to make the system requirements for the game as inclusive as possible.



Though I've never been a big fan of RTS games in the past, this seems to have a great level of depth while being accessible to new-comers like me. That said, being a beta, the game isn't perfect. Specifically there were a few things that took away from the experience. During the second multiplayer game I played, my roommate and I experienced terrible slowdown that made the game unresponsive and barely playable. The symptom ceased itself for the host, but for me, it persisted until the end of the match. There were also some pathing problems where units would split from the squad, usually to hit dead ends. Finally, whenever I was using ranged attackers to get rid of a support tower, my close-combat characters within their vicinity would storm into a base automatically, in most cases, to their death. Again, this is a beta. These are problems that can be fixed by release, so I'm not too worried.

The time I've had with the game have been enjoyable even with the problems. To draw a comparison, this game has the chance to be the WoW of RTS games. It's accessible and hardcore all at once. The twelve player raids sound like fun, and I can say with confidence that they are likely to not disappoint. Expect the game to come out around March 23rd. It's going to offer forty maps, strong story, cooperative, and competitive play. All of these can be tried out in the open beta that you can register for at http://www.battleforge.com/.

Bangai-O Spirits Review

It's great to see another hardcore game move over to the DS. Bangai-O Spirits is the sequel of Treasure Games' manic shooter on the N64 and Dreamcast. To those not familiar with the predecessor, you fly a small robot through a series of 2D spaces with the objective of destroying some targets. The targets sometimes include some boss enemies, or a few easy to kill grunts.
Through the course of a level hundreds, yes hundreds, of bullets, missiles, and lasers can be aimed at you from dozens of on-screen enemies. Your arsenal against all of this includes two basic attacks of your choice that can fire in one direction at a time, or the EX blasts of your liking, that can launch up to a hundred missiles from your tiny frame in one or all directions. The EX blast also has the ability to combine the power of all the enemy missiles in your proximity and reflect it onto them with a damage multiplier. When this happens, all of your missiles increase in damage and size proportionally to the number. If done right, your giant missiles can tear through your enemies, that is if they don't reflect them back on you. Easy to say at any given time there is lot happening on the little screen. It can be a bit overwhelming at times. However, there is a very charming tutorial that walks you through the basics.
Once you finish the tutorial levels, the credits roll. Yup, this is score-based no-frills gaming at it's best. The only “story” you encounter is through the little episodes between the beginner levels. The rest of the game is divided into over a hundred and sixty stages in three categories: Treasure's Best, Puzzle Stages, and Other Stages. Some of these are expansive environments that take a minute to touch corners, others are the size of the DS screen. If you manage to become bored of the preset stages, there is a very functional level-editor that allows you to create almost any area already on the cartridge.
The game itself is directed at a very hardcore audience. That said, the difficulty ramps up rather fast. If you don't time an EX blast properly you can die within a second or two of starting a level. There are also cases where if you don't choose the right weapon set, it's impossible to complete a stage. It would have been nice to see a button in the game over screen that sent you back to weapon selection since this happens fairly often. Yet, with most of these cases, all the levels feel pretty fair.
Even though the game was ported miraculously to the DS, it's not perfect. Slowdown happens very frequently. Most of the time it's a blessing giving you extra time to plan your next move, but either way, it's there. There is also a problem with the EX blasts if too many objects are on the screen. In this case if you get maximum output from your EX blast, the game comes to a screeching halt, every missile you fired is not displayed on screen (meaning some enemies that should die, don't always do), and I have found the controls to be unresponsive unlike during normal slowdown.
Unfortunately, there are a few features I couldn't test: the level swapping system that uses sound to transfer customs levels from one DS to another, and the four player co-op, which in practice sounds like an enjoyable experience, but I would definitely try it before buying the game for that reason.
Overall the title has been a great pick-up-and-play experience that I've enjoyed thoroughly in short bursts. I find myself coming back to it despite it's flaws. It's not a triple-a title, but if you enjoy a good twitch-based game, you may want to check this out.

Grade: B