Teumessian Fox

So for the Mirror’s Edge review, I decided on how I’m going to ‘rate’ games. I don’t really like giving an arbitrary set of numbers, so I stuck to three categories. Of course, since this is me, I had to make it more difficult for everybody, so you might have to learn a tiny bit of Greek mythology, but it’s only three words, so it shouldn’t be that bad. Basically, it goes like this: Elysium was the equivalent of heaven, so that will be for really good games. Asphodel was kind of like purgatory, so all the decent to pretty good games will go in that category. Finally, Tartarus was a place of eternal suffering, so you should be able to guess what goes there. Wikipedia, as always, has more information.

Also wanted to note that once again, Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation and I seem to be of one mind about Mirror’s Edge. It’s almost uncanny how similarly we view games sometimes. Everybody else just tells me I’m crazy.

Mythology, News, Reviews Greece, Mirror's Edge, Zero Punctuation

I really want to like Mirror’s Edge. I really do. But it’s so hard. When it behaves, it can be a blast, but there are so many things that made me want to throw the controller into the TV while screaming incoherently that I frequently had to quit playing out of frustration. I’ll try to keep this a little shorter than my Fable rant, since even I don’t want to read that much bitching and moaning.

To start with, there seem to be more collision issues than one would expect of a game released in 2008. Attempts to climb over objects frequently resulted in jumping into the side of them. Trying to use the jump boosting pile of stuff would sometimes fail miserably and I would end up taking a step up onto the small box/chair without jumping at all. Largely it seemed to be caused by the game being overly picky about the angle of approach or not being perfectly aligned with the box you want to jump from. Invariably, this caused trouble at the worst times, leading directly to death.

And death was something that happened a lot in certain areas. Let me preface this by saying I was going for the “Test of Faith” trophy (Don’t shoot anyone), so I admittedly made things more difficult for myself. That is still no excuse for a designer to be a vindictive dick and put the heavy armored guys in a big open area next to the exit and lock them in place. Surround them with several other, lesser enemies, put the checkpoint before you encounter any of them and these guys become a large pain in the ass. Did I mention that the heavy armor guys can counter your jump kick with a wave of their hand? No? Or that, for whatever reason, you can’t disarm guys that you just kicked in the junk? I mean, come on, that is the classic martial arts lead in move… I crush your dangly bits, then I take your weapon and kill you with it.

While playing through the game, I kept getting the feeling that they made design decisions based on how it would look in the trailer video. Why, after the much-maligned jumping puzzle Xen world in Half Life, would you make an entire game based around pretty much the same principle first person? I never had much trouble with the Xen levels, but I think Mirror’s Edge would have been much less frustrating in some instances if it had been third person. I’ve seen several places remark about the ‘clean’ look of the game, which I also enjoyed, but it also caused me to run off the side of a building more than once because the edge of this building blended into the roof of the next building so well.

Overall, I thought the free-running aspect was generally entertaining, but the combat, which was initially somewhat enjoyable, became more frustrating the tougher and more numerous the enemies became. It really could have used a quick move to knock enemies down temporarily, without knocking them out and generally just some more play testing with a console controller to smooth out the movement issues. And don’t ever lock enemies in place!

Asphodel, Games, Playstation 3, Reviews Half Life, Mirror's Edge

I was planning on ranting about everything wrong with Fable 2 and why it is utter rubbish, when, lo and behold, I discovered that Zero Punctuation has already done it for me. So let’s all go watch it instead, while eating tea and crumpets.

Ok, I guess I can’t quite get away with being that lazy and I have a few other things I wanted to mention, anyways. My biggest complaint is the abortion of a coop mode that isn’t even worth playing. Normally what you would expect from coop would be two (or more) players with full control as if they were playing single player, except they are playing in the same game and can therefore ridicule each other for every tiny mistake like the socially inept cretins we are. Instead, you get two players who must both be on screen at all times (even over Live) and largely no control over the camera.

The camera is pointed at a fixed position between your two characters and neither player has any control over it with the right stick. Supposedly either player can reorient it with the left bumper, but neither my friend nor I cared to play long enough to figure that out. Both players are also confined to a space about the size of a college dorm room before you run into an invisible wall preventing either of you from making any further forward progress. It feels a good deal like trying to play football while chained at the neck to your partner with 4 feet of razor wire and wearing blinders. I supposed I should have expected something like this when I heard they needed a release day patch to get it to work at all.

So now that the main reason I paid money for this game has been cruelly denied me, let’s investigate the single player and see if there is anything we can salvage from the $60 I just wasted. Let’s start with the dog. The only real use he serves is to find treasure chests full of worthless junk and to find dig spots with, you guessed it, more worthless junk. They tried to work him into a quest or two, where the dog is supposed to track someone or something through a completely linear dungeon and they even still have the magical Golden Brick Road™ to show you where to go (except for the Archeology quests). In another case of pandering to casual gamers (read: drooling, mouthbreathing retards), every time the dog wants you to do something, it barks (which is good, since he can easily be off screen) and displays an accompanying bright, large icon over his head (Completely disrupting any sense of immersion you may have had. This is bad). God forbid you miss a few trinkets at the start while learning that when the dog barks and runs off someplace it wants you to follow it. I’m not trying to say that catering to casual gamers is inherently bad, but maybe you can use a slightly smaller hammer to bludgeon them with next time, Captain Obvious.

I also thought it strange that the main pursuit of Fable 2, combat, was so bland and boring (cast Time Control, charge up a big spell, kill everything), whereas the combat in a game like Assassin’s Creed, where the point was to avoid getting into fights, was so much deeper and more fulfilling. Eventually, they throw a few meager excuses for puzzles at you, but it seems as if they thought better of it after trying it once or twice and gave up. I guess those two elements are really just indicative of the game as a whole. Disappointing, half-assed and unpolished.

Games, Reviews, Tartarus, Xbox 360 Fable 2

Armed Assault screenshots

I was playing Armed Assault online with a friend a few days ago, calling out targets to each other over Teamspeak when somebody from Arsclan hopped in the channel and asked us how we were able to play it (Bohemia Interactive hasn’t found a publisher for the US yet). I told him the only way to get it right now is to import it from Germany, where it’s already been released, but there’s a patch that changes all the in game text to English, so you can actually, you know, play the game without fluency in German.

Armed Assault is the sequel to Operation Flashpoint, Bohemia Interactive’s previous military simulation. It takes place on an island, somewhere, where a new conflict erupts between two fictional nations and happens to involve US troops still stationed there for training. The story of the game is really just a backdrop to provide a loose motivation to go out on missions, taking out targets of the enemy military. I haven’t really played with the single player all that much since they seem to have continued the trend of making the single player campaign missions either devilishly difficult, or nigh impossible to fail. The AI has a habit of picking you off from beyond your visual range with small arms every once in a while, which tends to get really annoying. Other times, they’ll crawl around on the ground aimlessly, never seeing you while you empty half a magazine into the ground around them. So single player is a little spotty. Where the game really shines is multiplayer.

Like Operation Flashpoint, Armed Assault has a robust (although frequently frustrating) mission editor. Placing troops and getting them to move around where you want them to is fairly simple, but there are some things that you will want to do that don’t work without a lot more effort than should be involved. I tried making a mission where enemy soldiers would perform a beach landing with small rubber boats and cut the opposing force in half in the process, but the AI kept insisting on exiting their ships 50 yards from shore, which means they have to dump all their equipment in order to swim to the beach. I’m sure there’s a way to get it to work, but it probably involves a bunch of scripting that I don’t want to deal with for something that should be fairly simple. If you can bend the mission editor to your will, however, you will be able to make some incredibly entertaining scenarios to play with your friends. Which is why I let my friend make all the missions. Ha! We’ve just been playing the two of us against dozens of AI characters and having a blast, but I imagine filling out the ranks entirely with human players would be incredible.

The gear interface

My computer is nowhere close to being up to snuff to handle turning any of the graphics options above their lowest settings, but it still looks a good deal better than Operation Flashpoint. The player models are a lot more detailed and they’ve added a plethora of new effects to visually improve the game. Everything casts a shadow now and the smoke from a burning vehicle both looks much better, and adds a lot to immersion since you can see it in the distance on the other side of a city to let you know that things still exist outside of your current view. They’ve also done a better job of dealing with the interface this time around, with a real menu for picking armaments at ammo crates instead of the list of text options they had in Operation Flashpoint.

There’s still quite a few bugs that need to be worked out. I’ve been running afoul of a bug where all the textures around me get dumped and reloaded for no obvious reason, but my friend hasn’t complained about it at all, so maybe it’s just me. The AI doesn’t really seem to be improved much since Operation Flashpoint and most of the game-play is virtually the same, so it feels a lot like they spent most of their time making a new setting and working on the render engine, but if you liked Operation Flashpoint, Armed Assault will be a good fit for you.

Asphodel, Games, News, PC, Reviews Armed Assault