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This just arrived

7:46 AM / Games / 5 Comments

The game is online-only and the servers don't go live until 11 PM BST on Monday, but I've waited nearly ten years for this game, so what's a couple more days?

DIABLO III beta impressions

4:26 PM / Games / No Comments

Note: I originally posted this article in the diablo.incgamers.com forums. As such, it's written in such a way as to be geared towards those who already have a reasonable understanding of the game's mechanics and recent developments in the ongoing beta.

Last night, a friend gave me the use of his account for a few hours to let me try out the DIABLO III beta. I just thought I'd share a few impressions while they're still reasonably fresh in my mind.

A bit about me

Played Blizzard games since THE LOST VIKINGS and became what I'd consider a fan after the original WARCRAFT. Loved every subsequent Blizzard game with the exception of WOW, which I've tried to get into a few times but just find to be boring as hell and a sad bastardisation of a once brilliant RTS series. Played DIABLO and DIABLO II extensively, racking up more hours with D2 but probably having a slight preference for D1, which I thought was a more impressive achievement in terms of its atmosphere and singularity of focus. D2 always struck me as a bit more sloppy, lacking that bleak gothic atmosphere and at times suffering slightly from "ice cream on the hotdogs" syndrome - i.e. so all-encompassing in its scope that you had elements that didn't fit rubbing shoulders.

The interface

I'm adding my voice for the calls for a class selection screen more like D2, with all classes visible on the same screen. Funnily enough, they had a screen like this implemented for the various previews at Blizzcon etc.

I agree that the skills panel needs work. I actually don't have too much of a problem with the current implementation of skills and runes (more on that later), but the huge panel that takes up most of the screen needs to go. It's clunky, and it doesn't fit with the interface as a whole (the quest, lore and inventory panels are positioned on either the right or left and take up less than half the screen). I do think we need to be able to see, on a single screen, all our skills, including the ones we haven't unlocked yet.

PLEASE Blizzard, add an option to toggle the minimap on and off, as well as the chat window at the bottom left corner.

I'd also like to see the return of the dedicated character screen. This is admittedly more for nostalgic than functional reasons, but for some reason it just doesn't feel right having your stats share the same screen as the inventory. And while we're at it, I'd like to have a way of seeing my hit point and mana/fury/whatever numbers at a glance without having to mouse over the health or resource orbs.

One other thing: please, Blizzard, standardise the fonts. I've counted at least four: the standard "Diablo" font with the crosses through the Os, Arial, a serif font, and that vaguely Arabic-looking one that also showed up in D2. It just looks sloppy having so many different typefaces in play.

Other than that, I'm happy with the interface. It's polished, functional, and instantly reminiscent of the previous games while also making improvements.

The classes

I played for about five hours and in that time took three characters from scratch through to killing Leoric: the Barbarian, the Wizard and the Demon Hunter. I didn't have time to try out the Monk or Witch Doctor. If I get a chance to play again, I'll definitely be checking them out.

I played the Barb first and took him on more or less a full clear, going pretty methodically through each area and listening to every bit of dialogue in full. He's certainly a visceral class and I found it fun to wade into large groups of enemies and get stuck in, although he did start to feel a bit repetitive after a while. Things perked up when I unlocked Leap Attack, which allowed me to be a bit more mobile and mix up my strategy a bit. Overall the Barb feels tough, no-nonsense and fairly straightforward - a lot like his D2 counterpart but with more damage dealing options available from an earlier stage.

Next I rolled a Wizard and blasted through the whole thing in about an hour. This was partly because I was anxious to see as much of the game as possible and partly because this seems to be the sort of gameplay the Wizard encourages. Whereas with the Barb I found myself feeling compelled to fairly methodically clear out each area, with the Wizard I often found myself simply running past stray zombies or skeletons and not worrying too much about them (they all move so slowly there was no chance of them catching up with me). With AoE skills like Arcane Orb, the Wizard dispatches enemies considerably more quickly than the Barb. Add to that the insane regeneration speed of her arcane power, and you almost never find yourself stopping blasting enemies for more than a couple of seconds. If the Barb was a fairly straightforward class to play (more on difficulty later), the Wizard was an absolute breeze. She feels different from the D2 Sorceress, and I think that's down to two things: the lack of fire skills (at least at this stage in the game) and the abundance of arcane power. In the D1 and D2 days, my Sorcs were constantly hungry for mana. Here, there almost seems to be too much of it. I very rarely ran my arcane power orb down, and if I did, I could simply switch back to Magic Missile, which, when socketed with its first rune, became ridiculously powerful for a skill with no arcane power costs attached to it.

My last class was the Demon Hunter. I slowed down a bit for him, still skipping over the dialogue I'd already heard but generally taking my time to do a full clear. Occasionally, if I came to the end of a dungeon and knew there was a corridor back near the beginning that I hadn't explored, I'd just leave it and move on to the next level, but by and large I was pretty thorough. This playthrough took me under two hours. I immediately noticed that he dealt less damage per second than the previous two classes. I understand he's been beefed up with this patch, but he still found myself doing a lot more clicking to achieve the same results than I did with the Barb or Wizard. The DH, dare I say it, plays more like I would expect a class in a Diablo game to play. That's not to say that the game was any more of a challenge with him (the beta is, on the whole, ridiculously easy), but I no longer felt like I was simply steamrolling through everything. I occasionally had to actually back up and thin a horde of monsters out from a distance, which made this class feel more tactical than the other two.

Back when D3 was originally unveiled, with that original gameplay trailer showcasing the Barb and Witch Doctor, I immediately knew the first character I'd roll would be a Barb due to the sheer visceral nature of his combat. I kept my promise to myself and wasn't disappointed, but having taken a Barb through to completion of the beta, I'm no longer so sure I'll be playing him first in the retail version. It's not that I didn't have fun, but the other two classes I played simply seemed to have a far more interesting arsenal at their disposal.

If I have a favourite at the moment, it's probably the DH, because he actually forced me to take a step back from the carnage and think about what I was doing. That's not to say I ever felt I was in any significant danger of being overwhelmed, but as a ranged fighter you can't simply run up to a summoner and one-shot or two-shot them, meaning that you actually have to position yourself in such a way as to pick them off from afar, otherwise you face an endless stream of minions soaking up all your arrows.

Graphics

Unlike some people, I've always been reasonably happy with the art direction. True, some of the armour and helmets look a tad ridiculous (I hate, hate, HATE the pointy wizard hat), put overall I like the painterly approach they've gone for in terms of the backgrounds. The initial outdoor zones, with their blue tint and twisted, gnarled trees are among the most graphically atmospheric work Blizzard has ever done. I love the way the individual blades of grass move in reaction to you walking through them, or how tapestries hanging on the walls of the cathedral billow if you swing your weapon near them. This is definitely one of those games where static screen captures can't convey what it looks and feels like in motion. Even the various HD gameplay movies on the likes of YouTube don't do the game justice due to how compressed the visuals are.

With all that said, the game definitely lacks that old "hairs standing up on the back of your neck" feeling of the original DIABLO... but then again, D2 lacked that as well and I didn't hear too many complaints about it. D3 definitely has oodles more atmosphere than D2, and there are several areas where you'll actually want to break off from combat for a bit to stare at the scenery. I'm thinking of the glowing blue crater in the cathedral where the Fallen Star fell, and the chasm in Leoric's chamber where the carpet on the floor dangles off the precipice.

My system is fairly high end - Intel Core i7 930 clocked at 3.36 GHz, 6 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD (with D3 installed on it), overclocked AMD Radeon 7950 video card, Hazro HZ27WB 27" monitor. I mention this because I played at 2560x1440 with all settings maxed (including anti-aliasing) and had no complaints about performance, but am aware that my system is quite a bit more powerful than the norm. It definitely performs better than STARCRAFT II, which still drops below 60 fps for me on certain story mode maps (e.g. the "zombie hordes" one) even with a near state of the art GPU.

I also have no complaints about lag. I live in Scotland and the servers are obviously all US-based at the moment. I was averaging a ping between the high 100s and low 200s throughout but was never aware of any latency. Whatever model they're using for combat (and I know there's been a lot of back and forth about this), it certainly works, and this is coming from someone who only ever played D2 offline because I found a ping of 80 to be unplayable. I'd rather the online-only restriction wasn't there (for a multitude of reasons, not least an occasionally flaky internet connection), and find it quite bizarre that Blizzard has gone down this online-only route but then sets the default game setting to private, meaning you're essentially being encouraged to play a single player game that requires a broadband internet connection, but that's an argument for another time.

Skill system/customisation

Let's get something out of the way first: I really dislike the removal of manual stat and skill point allocation. I'm not one of those people who thinks this game should be DIABLO 2.5, but when the changes to automatic stat points and the removal of skill points were announced, I'd be lying if I said I didn't have concerns. Having now actually sat down and playing around with the game for a few hours, these concerns haven't been allayed. On a first playthrough, when you're getting access to a new active/passive skill or rune at every level, there's plenty to look forward to as you level up because you're constantly getting new toys to play with. On a second playthrough, though, I get the feeling that a lot of the excitement will be gone. Sure, you can decide whether you want to use skill X or socket it with rune Y that becomes available at level Z, but apart from that I do worry that the leveling up process will feel a bit hollow and uneventful. And because they've removed stat requirements on items, I found myself more or less ignoring my STR/DEX/VIT/WIS numbers, even though they were staring me in the face every time I opened the inventory. To an extent it felt like they were just arbitrary numbers that could have been replaced with anything.

That said, I for one am actually glad that runes are now unlocked rather than being items. Previously, it looked as if the only form of character customisation in the game was going to be itemisation; now at least it feels like there is more of a semblance of skill choice, even if the actual change is 99% interface-related. I basically like the idea of the skill system in its present state, and I PARTICULARLY like that they seem to have solved the clvl 30-60 dead zone problem by constantly unlocking new runes right up to clvl 60.

The skill interface needs work, though. Visually it's as polished as anything else in the game, but functionally it's incredibly clunky. This is especially true in elective mode, where you have a great deal more freedom of choice but that freedom feels as if it's been hacked in. At the very least they need to get rid of the skill slot names when you're playing in elective mode and sort the skills in a way that makes sense. Having Arcane Orb not show up in the Arcane list is frankly just confusing - ironic, considering Blizzard's push for simplification that grandma can understand.

(NOTE: I actually played the Barb with elective mode turned off purely to see what it felt like. Restrictive is the answer, particularly early on in the game when you have limited skill slots available and are restricted to a single primary skill.)

Health globes

The globes work. I'm fine with them, and they give a very satisfying "clunk-glug" sound effect when you pick them up. At the moment, I'd say they drop way more than are actually necessary, but I expect this will change as the difficulty ramps up further into the game. In my six hours or so of playing, I only used a single health potion - when my Barb dropped into the red after I let myself get surrounded by a mobs of skeletons that suddenly emerged from the ground in one of the outdoor locations. In fact, when I rolled my Wizard, I actually made a point of leaving the potions I started with in my stash and not picking up any that dropped, purely to see if it was possible to play through the beta without them. It was.

Account-wide artisans

Not crazy about this. Personally I like the feeling of rolling a brand new character and having to start from scratch. If your blacksmith is already leveled up, you can craft high-end equipment right from the get go, which leaves me feeling that the game is steering you towards twinking your characters, which personally speaking goes against my whole Diablo playing philosophy. Ditto for shared gold. It would be nice if an option was provided to roll a character not tied to your account-wide artisans, but I'm not holding my breath.

TL;DR

Interface needs to be tweaked a bit and I'm still concerned about the limited character customisation, but overall great game, extremely fun and showing a lot of promise. Now hurry the hell up and release it!

Dragon Age II post-mortem... and play Mass Effect 2 for free

7:41 PM / Games / 2 Comments

I'm currently making my way through Bioware's recent DRAGON AGE II for the second time and am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it lacks anything in the way of replay value, even when playing a different character class and going out of my way to make different decisions regarding quests and storyline progression. If, like me, you played the game and are feeling rather let down by the whole thing, you might be interested in John Walker's "what went wrong" post-mortem over at Rock Paper Shotgun, where he does a great job of picking apart the game's myriad flaws and highlighting precisely where the biggest mistakes were made (not always an easy task when you have 25-40 hours of playable content).

In happier news, if you own a copy of DRAGON AGE II, you can now download the PC version of Bioware's previous game, MASS EFFECT 2, absolutely free. This strikes me as an absurdly good deal. Not only is the PC version the best available - in terms of graphics, controls and, if your machine has moderately decent specs, frame rate (a flat cap of 30 FPS on consoles vs. uncapped on the PC) - MASS EFFECT 2 is also a vastly superior game to DRAGON AGE II. In fact, I'd be inclined to suggest that both games started out with their respective development teams trying to accomplish the same goals - to deliver a character-driven, action-oriented RPG with a cinematic quality and meaningful decisions to be made - but where one got almost everything right, the other fell flat on its face. Obviously one is an epic space opera while the other is medieval fantasy, but comparisons are valid, not least because they show that the unpopular changes Bioware made between the original DRAGON AGE and DRAGON AGE II didn't necessarily have to be a damaging as they ended up being.

My review of DRAGON AGE II is here, by the way.

A few thoughts on Dragon Age II

8:51 PM / Games / 3 Comments

Released in late 2009, the initial instalment in Bioware's "Dragon Age" series, DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS, was a welcome callback to their old Dungeons & Dragons BALDUR'S GATE series from earlier in the decade, focusing more on questing, character development and dialogue than the wave of more action-inspired role-playing games that had appeared in the interim. At least in its PC incarnation, which featured the ability to pull the camera back to a top-down, quasi-isometric viewpoint (reminiscent of BALDUR'S GATE), the game's combat proved to be an enjoyably tactical affair, and the limp voice acting, stilted animation and generally derivative nature of the game's world were to an extent forgiveable given the sheer amount of content and player choice that was packed on to the game DVD. (For more information, see my original review.)

When DRAGON AGE II was announced so soon after the release of the first game, many people - myself included - were a little sceptical. Rushing out a follow-up less than 18 months later screamed "cash-in", and news that the game was going to appropriate certain aspects from Bioware's sci-fi MASS EFFECT series did little to assuage players' concerns. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I think the MASS EFFECT series is excellent, with MASS EFFECT 2 in particular achieving near-masterpiece status and being one of the few games I've ever come across for which the description "cinematic" was actually justified (review here). Concern about the move from a silent, user-nameable protagonist hailing from one of three races and one of six different back-stories to a MASS EFFECT-esque fully voiced hero whose only adjustable characteristics were his/her gender and appearance didn't even worry me unduly, and indeed last summer I wrote about the potential benefits of having a more rigidly defined protagonist to work with. To put it simply, I was more than willing to accept change in DRAGON AGE II if it led to genuine improvement.

Unfortunately, having completed my first playthrough of the new game, it's hard to shake the feeling that more has been lost than gained. While the original was a PC game through and through, wearing its BALDUR'S GATE/ICEWIND DALE pedigree on its sleeve, the sequel seems to have been designed with consoles in mind first and foremost. Gone is the overhead camera in favour of an over-the-shoulder viewpoint that makes tactical gameplay frustrating if not near-impossible. Combat is sped up to the point that it feels as if it's running in fast-forward and threatens to degenerate into mere button-mashing. Inventory management has been streamlined to the extent that you can no longer choose which armour or, in some cases, weapons your companions wear. The game is much smaller in scale, with the bulk of the plot unfolding within the confines of a single city and three or four locations beyond its walls. Whereas some particularly dedicated players took upwards of 100 hours to complete the original, I finished the sequel in just over 26 hours, having made sure to complete every single quest I came across (with the exception of a few so-called "side quests", essentially fetch-and-carry missions with no real purpose other than to serve as filler and an easy means of earning a few additional experience points). Perhaps worst of all, the designers lazily regurgitate the same dungeon layouts multiple times, adding a rockfall here and opening up a door there in a cynical attempt to trick the player into believing they're in a different area.

Combat in DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS.

Combat in DRAGON AGE II.

None of this does anything to counter the notion that the game was rushed out to make a quick buck and capitalise on the success of the MASS EFFECT games (despite the fact that ORIGINS actually outsold MASS EFFECT 2). It's not all bad, though. In fact, it's often rather good, and the fact that I blazed through it so quickly (it was released on Friday in Europe, a few days later than its North American launch) should be testament to its strengths. The plot, while less grand in its scope than that of its predecessor, is engaging, the characters are memorable and often a great deal of fun just to talk to, and the gameplay mechanics, while unquestionably dumbed down, remain enjoyable, even if scarcely a single combat encounter would pass without me wishing I could pull the camera back to a more sensible viewpoint. And the move from an anonymous protagonist to one with a fixed back-story and an actual voice does work wonders in making them come alive. The character art and animation, while still not a patch on that of MASS EFFECT 2, is a step up from ORIGINS, and this, coupled by some decent voice acting that injects genuine emotion into these at times crude-looking bundles of polygons (Eve Myles as elven mage Merrill, Victoria Kruger as saucy pirate Isabela and Gideon Emery as former slave Fenris are particularly impressive), means that you do actually end up caring about the various people who end up joining your party. As with Bioware's previous games, various romance options are included and, in an impressive blow for equality in the video gaming world, can be embarked upon regardless of gender. (My randy protagonist ended up shagging three of her party members - two female and one male.)

That said, while the characters have certainly improved, the environments seem to have taken a step back. While the architecture of the city of Kirkwall, in which most of the game takes place, is impressive, the textures tend to be fairly blurry (even after installing the optional high resolution texture pack made available for PC and Mac users to download at the time of the game's release), the colour palette is comprised mostly of grey and brown, and the lack of variety in terms of environments makes it all feel very repetitive. You do come across the occasional striking vista...

...but on the whole the game looks inferior to its predecessor, which offered far more variety and colour. It doesn't help that, at the two highest graphical settings, the game runs like a dog, even on a Core i7 with a Radeon 5850 video card (not state of the art, I know, but way beyond the game's recommended specifications). To be fair, the higher settings don't add any additional detail - they instead concentrate on things like real-time lighting and depth of field blur - so I didn't feel I was missing out on anything by playing with the slider at Medium, at which I was able to maintain a constant 60 fps with 4x anti-aliasing. It's not a visually stunning game by any stretch of the imagination, and at times looks positively dated in terms of its presentation. Even the user interface looks like it was thrown together as a placeholder and never replaced - which is bizarre, because they could easily have reused the perfectly serviceable ORIGINS interface art.

There's something annoyingly, well, slight about DRAGON AGE II. While the more personal, less grandiose nature of the storyline is not necessarily a bad thing this, coupled with the lack of environments and significantly shorter campaign than ORIGINS, plus the removal of gameplay mechanics and (for lack of a less pejorative word) consolisation of a series that previously wore its PC pedigree on its sleeve, makes it feel less like a full-blown sequel and more of a minor spin-off - albeit one sold at full price (around £30 for PCs and a truly shocking £50 for Xbox 360 and PS3 owners). It's fun while it lasts, but it left me feeling a trifle short-changed and hoping that, if and when Bioware gets round to DRAGON AGE III, they'll take more time to get it right and be less eager to reject their roots.

Man, Guild Wars 2 looks amazing

2:55 PM / Games / 4 Comments

Great in-game footage over at Gamespot of a tutorial area, which looks more action-packed and filled with impressive pyrotechnics than the endgame content of a lot of titles I could mention.

It looks very much like Arena.net are intent on retaining the hallmarks of the original GUILD WARS - free online play, lack of grinding, distinctive art style, MAGIC: THE GATHERING inspired "card" system for magical abilities - while expanding the world and making it more free-form and persistent. GUILD WARS is the only MMO I've ever really enjoyed, and if you read their design manifesto, it's pretty clear that they're intent on turning the genre on its head and doing something truly inventive rather than just ushering out another WORLD OF WARCRAFT clone. If they can do this while retaining what made the original so distinctive and appealing, they really should be on to a winner.

If anyone's playing Starcraft II on EU Battle.net...

1:14 PM / Games / 2 Comments

...feel free to add me as a friend: mrmackenzietemp[at]gmail[dot]com

Well worth the wait

8:26 PM / Games / 6 Comments

So, STARCRAFT II, huh? Would you believe it's great?

The last time I waited for a sequel that took forever to materialise, it was Dario Argento's MOTHER OF TEARS, a film which bore little resemblance to its predecessors, SUSPIRIA and INFERNO and, despite not being wholly without merit, was something of a disappointment. STARCRAFT II's twelve-year gestation period is small fry compared to MOTHER OF TEARS' twenty-seven, but in the world of computer games, where yearly sequels are all too common (Electronic Arts, I'm lookin' at you), over a decade is practically unheard of. The original STARCRAFT is justifiably regarded as one of the best of its class, if not THE best, and it's basically the unofficial national sport of South Korea, so developer Blizzard Entertainment obviously had a lot riding on it. If they screwed it up, I doubt they'd ever have heard the end of it.

Not that that was ever seriously going to happen. Blizzard is a developer with the luxury of being able to spend almost infinite time and resources on its games, and in the past has been more than willing to pull the plug on a title completely rather than release a subpar product (see WARCRAFT ADVENTURES and STARCRAFT: GHOST). In that regard I liken them to the Pixar of the computer games business (which presumably makes their bedfellows at Activision the equivalent of DreamWorks). STARCRAFT II has taken this long to arrive primarily because of the developer's commitment to quality: with so much riding on it, there was no way they were going to release anything short of perfection.

And what perfection it is! In terms of overall presentation, I don't think I've ever seen this much polish in a game before. Every single element - from the intricate, stage by stage construction of the Terran's mechanical structures to the rivets on the intricately designed main menu screen - looks like hundreds of man hours went into its making. Even if the underlying gameplay mechanics weren't so thoroughly awesome, the game would at least deserve some sort of award for its surface gloss. This truly represents big budget game development at its very best.

I've already discussed the core game mechanics at length in my earlier posts on the beta, so I won't delve into them too much today. Instead, I want to talk about the elements that weren't included in the beta - namely the single player campaign and of course the obligatory Collector's Edition. I ordered the US version of the latter, although given the game's current region-locked status (a sticking point that has been promised to be remedied within the next few months) and my desire to get the thing up and running on Day 1, I ended up also ordering the EU digital download version direct from Blizzard's online store (they were all sold out of analogue downloads, unfortunately ;)).

Contents: behind the scenes DVD, soundtrack CD, hardcover art book, STARCRAFT comic issue #0, exclusive avatars and in-game skin for the "Thor" unit, exclusive WORLD OF WARCRAFT pet, the original STARCRAFT and BROOD WAR expansion on a dog-tag style USB stick... and, of course, the game itself. Personally, I think that's a heck of a lot of material for £70, although if none of that takes your fancy, there's also the standard game for around half the price.

So, on to the game. Once I'd activated my copy (which basically means tying the provided game key to your Battle.net account), my first step was to dive straight into the single player campaign. STARCRAFT II is very much a game of two halves, and while the multiplayer component was thoroughly tested and reported on over the course of the online beta, considerably less information was available about the campaign, which wasn't available for testing. Blizzard were on the receiving end of no small amount of flak when they announced, a couple of years ago, that rather than continue with the regular STARCRAFT format of including around ten missions for each race for a total of 30, they would be splitting STARCRAFT II into three instalments, with the first focusing exclusively on the Terrans and the two expansion sets (currently in the pipeline) dealing with the Zerg and Protoss respectively. A lot of people cried "rip-off", claiming that Blizzard was charging people three times for a single game. Not so. Having completed the single player campaign over the course of a couple of day-long marathon sessions, I never felt like I'd been sold an incomplete product. WINGS OF LIBERTY is undoubtedly a fully-featured stand-alone game, and I don't doubt that the next two chapters will simply slot in in much the same manner as BROOD WAR did for the original STARCRAFT. All three races are fully playable in both the single and multiplayer skirmish modes, while restricting the focus to a single faction for the campaign allows for a far more coherent story to be told. (The Protoss, incidentally, do get a look-in in the form of a four-mission mini-story within the main Terran campaign.)

The hero of the campaign is one Jim Raynor, freedom fighter, outlaw and alcoholic. Raynor appeared extensively in the first STACRAFT, albeit in the form of a tiny 40x40 pixels talking head, and it's nice to see him again, even if his appearance has changed dramatically. On that note, it's a very good thing indeed that common sense ultimately prevailed and the original voice actor, Robert Clotworthy, was rehired. It lends the character a sense of continuity not present in his visual depiction. I've come across some degree of criticism of both the character and the manner in which he is written, most notably at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where the cut-scenes, dialogue and characters are described as "bloody awful", but personally I'm not convinced. Raynor is admittedly an archetype, packaging virtually every sci-fi and western cliché known to man into one character, but in my opinion that's simply how Blizzard approaches its storytelling, and anyone claiming their previous games to have offered anything different is guilty of looking at them through rose-tinted glasses. STARCRAFT II's narrative and characterisation aren't exactly subtle, but they get the point across, and the voice acting and animation are, on the whole, pretty damn good for a computer game. True, put them beside MASS EFFECT 2 and they begin to look a little clunky, but that's hardly a fair comparison since MASS EFFECT 2 pretty much represents the pinnacle of animated acting in a video game. STARCRAFT II's numerous in-game FMVs (referred to by Blizzard as "cinematics", a word which sets my teeth on edge almost as much as "animations") are nicely staged, lit and acted, and go a long way towards bridging the massive gulf between Blizzard's infamous near-photo-realistic pre-rendered FMVs and the deliberately colourful, exaggerated nature of the in-game, top-down graphics.

Above: in-game FMV. Below: pre-rendered FMV.

Storytelling may be Bioware's forte, but Blizzard have come a long way since the basic "scrolling text with narration" delivery of the first two WARCRAFT games and indeed the "talking heads" mission briefings of the original STARCRAFT. Through the in-game FMVs and the point-and-click adventure stylings of the inter-mission segments, set aboard Raynor's battleship, the Hyperion, they convey a world rich with elaborate detail and allow the players to get as much or as little out of the story as they want. Those who want to explore every nook and cranny and click till the sun comes up, while those who just want to get on with the next mission are equally well-served. Of course, taking your time and examining every possible avenue provides a much richer experience than simply barrelling through the missions and skipping all the dialogue, but each to their own. Still, it's clear that the campaign is designed provide a vastly different experience to the multiplayer component - one in which the player is rewarded for taking his or her time and becoming immersed in the game world rather than cranking out units and steamrolling the opposition as quickly as possible. It ultimately pays off, and even if the characters remain broad archetypes rather than fully-fledged, believable individuals, and I was able to invest in the key characters of Raynor and Kerrigan to the extent that the ending (which I'm not going to give away here) manages to be genuinely emotionally affecting in a way that I don't recall any of Blizzard's previous games being.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Hyperion segments, however, is the possibilities it affords players to customise their army and the technology at their disposal. By collecting Protoss and Zerg artefacts in the missions, the player adds points to two separate upgrade paths, each of which provides an either/or choice of which technology to purchase every five points. For instance, after obtaining 15 points in Zerg technology, you can choose to either unlock the Predator, an anti-infantry unit, or the Hercules, a massive transport unit. Credits earned by completing missions, meanwhile, allow you to outfit your units with a variety of upgrades. You won't earn enough credits to unlock every single upgrade during the course of a single game, however, so some difficult decisions have to be made. Credits can also be used to hire various mercenary groups - more powerful versions of regular units who can be called down instantaneously 2-3 times per mission. Finally, on three separate occasions the player is provided with a choice between two different missions, the results of which directly affect your future progress (i.e. by providing you with access to one piece of technology rather than another, or ensuring that you face a different line-up of enemies in a subsequent mission). The ramifications of these choices are far from world-changing, but they do a good job of adding a bit of variety, and I found myself wishing more use had been made of this feature.

Above: point-and-click adventure fun aboard the Hyperion.

Ultimately, though, all this detail is merely in service to the gameplay, which doesn't disappoint. In recent years, Blizzard have placed a far greater emphasis on technology than they did in the past (when DIABLO II was released in 2000, its 640x480 2D graphics were seen as positively archaic), but they haven't done so at the expense of what really matters: whether or not it's fun to play. And it's been well worth the wait.

PS: It's also worth pointing out that, although an internet connection is required to activate the game (something I generally don't approve of), this is a one-off and it is completely feasible for solo players who don't have a persistent internet connection to play the game's offline mode (called "guest mode"). This of course denies you access to any form of multiplayer mode given Blizzard's decision to remove LAN support (boo, hiss). It also means that you won't be able to earn achievements, but beyond being denied the bragging rights of collecting these shiny medals for killing a thousand Zerglings and so on, you still get the fully functional single player experience. Myself, I decided to play online to test the waters (and because I'm slowly becoming addicted to the pursuit of achievements), and I'm happy to report that I haven't had any problems. Unlike the problematic launches of DIABLO II and WORLD OF WARCRAFT, Blizzard's server infrastructure this time round seems to have been up to snuff, and I've yet to encounter a disconnect. (Either that, or I've just been uncharacteristically lucky.) Additionally, if you're playing a single player mission and your connection drops, you won't be kicked out of the game à la COMMAND & CONQUER 4 or ASSASSIN'S CREED 2. You can continue to play, with your progress being saved to your hard drive and resynced with your online profile the next time you connect.

Can't talk...

8:23 PM / Games / No Comments

...playing STARCRAFT II.

Not long to go...

1:27 PM / Games / 1 Comment

I've waited twelve years for this. I think I'll be able to handle another twelve hours.

Mass Dragon Age Effect

6:13 PM / Games / No Comments

The other day I finished the DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS expansion that I got for my birthday, DRAGON AGE: AWAKENING. I had fun with it, but wouldn't call it particularly in-depth or eye-opening. It felt more like a postscript to the original game rather than an actual continuation of its story. Barring the fact that you could choose to import an existing DRAGON AGE character (or alternatively create a new level 20 one from scratch), it might as well have been a stand-alone product.

Still, imagine my excitement when I quit the game only to discover that DRAGON AGE II had just been announced. Talk about percipient timing! There's not a massive amount of information available about DRAGON AGE II yet, barring a rundown of a few of the key features, some artwork and a handful of off-the-cuff comments from Bioware employees on the official forums, but it seems pretty clear that the developers are intent on shaking things up with the sequel. Or, as Rock, Paper, Shotgun puts it, "Mass-Effectification". In other words, DRAGON AGE II is appropriating a number of key features from Bioware's concurrent MASS EFFECT series of games, perhaps most notably a fixed protagonist, whose appearance, class and gender can be altered but who has a fixed back-story, voice and personality.

Bioware's reasoning behind this is clear: to enable them to deliver a more "cinematic" gameplay experience. "Cinematic" is a word that tends to be overused in relation to describing computer games (also overused are various stylistic techniques that the designers assume are cinematic but in reality are nothing more than third-rate, third-generation knock-offs of shots or moments they liked in the latest summer blockbuster), but it absolutely applies to the MASS EFFECT games. At times they do genuinely feel like interactive movies with their dramatic camera angles, fully vocalised dialogue and even the occasional subtle facial gesture. They succeed in doing this primarily because of their limited cast of characters and, just as significantly, the limited options for the customisation of said characters. Yes, you can give your Commander Shepard a snazzy haircut and you can choose which set of genitals are concealed under that spacesuit, and you can choose how to respond to certain situations, but you're ultimately playing a prefabricated character that you get to tweak rather than define.

The original DRAGON AGE took an entirely different approach. Although your character came from one of a selection of pre-determined "origins", they were essentially a blank slate that you could define as you saw fit. Male, female, human, dwarf, elf, noble, commoner, warrior, mage... the number of combinations was impressive, and there were plenty of opportunities for you to shape the character, his/her relationships and the world at large. All this, however, came at the cost of immersion. Because the world of DRAGON AGE is so large and densely populated, there is a considerable amount of repetition among its inhabitants. You'll see the same generic haircuts, outfits and animation cycles being repeated constantly, and if you're not careful it's possible to design a player character who is virtually indistinguishable from one of your sidekicks (my first PC, a female elven mage, unintentionally turned out to be a dead ringer for the human rogue Leliana). NPC dialogue is fully voiced but, because of the quantity of different responses at your disposal, your own character's voice is never heard during cut-scenes or conversations. Hell, no-one even refers to your character by name due to the fact that you create that for yourself. The characters of MASS EFFECT actually do a passable job of resembling real people. The characters in DRAGON AGE talk, move and look like mannequins.

DRAGON AGE: Is it just me or do these people seem kinda DEAD?

MASS EFFECT 2: which of the above seems more cinematic?

That in itself is not necessarily a huge problem. The two series had different goals. MASS EFFECT's was to tell an immersive cinematic story, and it did so at the expense of player freedom. DRAGON AGE's was to provide the player with a sprawling world in which they could affect real change, explore every nook and cranny and engage in conversation with hundreds of different characters. It, however, did so at the expense of both immersion and visual realism. Both have their strengths and weaknesses and I like both a great deal, but ultimately I'm one of those people who, despite a preference for the combat mechanics of DRAGON AGE, actually found myself drawn into the world of MASS EFFECT more and ended up caring far more about its characters than the lifeless puppets of DRAGON AGE and their limited array of shared animation cycles.

A lot of other people, however, are up in arms. They liked the fact that you could play a human, a dwarf or an elf in the original DRAGON AGE. They liked the fact that you could give them a name of their choosing. They liked the fact that they could select from a variety of origins and continue to define the character through their ensuing deeds. I liked it too, and I think Bioware were justifiably proud of the level of player choice they allowed - the "origins" system was, after all, one of the major selling points in their promotion of the game. To renege on all of this for the sequel, railroading players into a character with a fixed name, origin and race, might seem like a regression. As much as I liked the freedom DRAGON AGE provided, however, I can't help thinking it would have worked better if they'd kept the combat mechanics but taken a more MASS EFFECT-like approach to characterisation. It seems that I may well be getting my wish.

In case you're not convinced, allow me to remind you of the PC RPG scene's glory days in the late 90s/early 00s. Back then, Bioware and publishing/development partner Black Isle Studios created a variety of games based around the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules system and Bioware's Infinity engine: BALDUR'S GATE I and II, ICEWIND DALE I and II, and PLANESCAPE: TORMENT. Although using almost identical mechanics (and, in the case of BALDUR'S GATE and ICEWIND DALE, artwork), they covered a wide range of different play styles, from the no-nonsense dungeon crawling of ICEWIND DALE to the primarily dialogue-driven PLANESCAPE: TORMENT, with BALDUR'S GATE effectively occupying the middle ground. ICEWIND DALE allowed you to create a party of six "blank slate" characters from scratch. In BALDUR'S GATE, you created a "blank slate" player character, but everyone else you met was pre-fabricated and fully-fleshed out, à la DRAGON AGE. In ICEWIND DALE, everyone, including the PC, we pre-fabricated. Which of the above is widely considered to have provided the most satisfying, immersive narrative? (Clue: it wasn't ICEWIND DALE.)

PS: excellent summary of the currently known facts about DRAGON AGE II: http://greywardens.com/dragon-age-2-facts/

I know who you are

6:28 PM / Games / Web / 5 Comments

In the time since I last posted about STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY, my most anticipated game of the year, the beta has been taken offline and brought back for a final brief round of testing, an actual release date has been announced (July 27th), and developer Blizzard Entertainment has announced and swiftly retracted plans to force all users to display their real first and last name when posting on their forums. The whole thing seems rather moot now that Blizzard has climbed down in the face of an outpouring of public wrath, but I'd like to say a few words about it anyway since it touches on a pertinent subject that I don't believe I've ever brought up on this site: privacy.

As you've probably noticed, my real name is visible on this site, as is a picture of my face. Anyone who has met me in real life would have no trouble connecting the site to me if they came across it, and those who know me at all could probably do so even without the headshot, given that the site makes clear what my hobbies are. I personally don't have a problem with this: I could easily post anonymously, giving away nothing personal about myself, but I've chosen not to hide behind a veil of secrecy. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why, as I don't really have anything in particular to gain from letting the whole world know that I'm a heterosexual white male in my twenties from Glasgow with fairly left-leaning libertarian political views and an addiction to Pepsi Max. Then again, I don't really think I have anything to fear either. While I have clearly defined views that not everyone is going to agree with, I don't consider any of them to be particularly outrageous or likely to cause widespread offence. Dig into the past and you'll probably find that I was at one point a whole lot more blunt and antagonistic, but these days I prefer to take a stance of not saying anything to anyone that I wouldn't happily repeat to their face. (I have been guilty of lapses in the past. For instance, in my BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER reviews, I got pretty accusatory about who I personally held responsible for the episodes and creative decisions I didn't like. I doubt I would make the same mistake today.) Larger entitles, such as DVD and BD publishers, are a whole other matter: if I'm not happy about something, I'll make no bones about it, but I always do my best to stop short of blaming and/or attacking individuals.

Other people, however, are a lot more cagey about their identities - and rightly so. If, for example, you're a gay rights blogger living in Iran, chances are you don't want to broadcast your name, location and face for all to see. Other people, for whom the threat of their identity being discovered is far less life-threatening, can also have valid reasons for not revealing who they really are. Perhaps you don't want the teenagers on Xbox Live to know you're a screaming homosexual, or maybe you don't want the company you work for to know that you've bad-mouthing it online (see the Bastardstones scandal). Or perhaps you simply want to keep your online and offline personas separate, for no other reason than that's the way you like it. That's entirely right and proper. I personally have no problem telling people I run a web site that reviews the image quality of BD releases, but I understand that not only are there valid reasons for remaining anonymous online: you shouldn't NEED a reason.

Which brings us on to Blizzard's Battle.net forums and their plans to lift the veil of secrecy, revealing the real names of everyone posting there. Barring a couple of posts I've made in the STARCRAFT II beta technical support section, I haven't personally been active on the Battle.net forums for years. They were a hive of spam, insults and general stupidity when I last used them circa 2002, and while the situation has improved somewhat in recent years, they still have problems. The logic of the so-called "Real ID", according to Blizzard, was to facilitate better conduct. It might very well have worked. In the past, I've posted on a couple of forums that have required real names rather than nicknames, and have found them to be very civilised. However, that didn't stop one instance of a nasty little shit finding his way to this site and being very uncivilised to me via the comments function. (He never admitted it was him, but his distinctively dreadful grammar and punctuation gave him away.) He dicked around for a couple of days before I eventually blocked his IP address after he made some thinly veiled threat to the tune of knowing where I lived and that he wasn't a million miles away from me. I haven't heard from him since. However, I know from my hosting provider's log that, for a number of weeks, he continued to visit my site with a frequency that bordered on obsessiveness.

I suspect the individual in question was simply a dickhead and an attention-seeker with nothing better to do, but it serves as a good example of the sort of thing you're setting yourself up for when you create an online presence. You can understand, therefore, why so many people were up in arms over Blizzard's Real ID plans. I won't regurgitate all the arguments here, but one of the most persuasive demonstrations of how bad an idea this could be comes in the form of this screenshot of a forum discussion relating to the announcement. Fair enough if you create a forum that requires users to display their real name AND make this clear from the outset. That way, people who don't feel comfortable revealing their true identity can simply look elsewhere for their forum fix. However, to apply it retroactively to a board on which people were previously able to hide behind nicknames, and to essentially tell players "you won't get online technical support for our games unless you consent to your identity being broadcast to the whole world", is a step too far.

To Blizzard's credit, they climbed down pretty quickly when they realised just how negatively Real ID had been received. The company's president, Mike Morhaime, wrote a direct letter to the players. They didn't have to do this. In spite of the unprecedented backlash, they would have continued to rake in massive quantities of cash per month from WORLD OF WARCRAFT subscriptions. The fact that they actually paid attention to public feedback and reacted accordingly in my opinion puts them several steps above the likes of EA and UbiSoft, who have ridden roughshod over their customers with excessive and unpopular DRM schemes. The sinking of Real ID is people power at its finest and proof that not all rich corporations are completely deaf to their customers' concerns. (Of course, the fact that one forum member demonstrated the folly of the system by Googling the real name of one of Blizzard's forum representatives and, within a few minutes, providing links to his Facebook and Twitter accounts, home address, a satellite photo of said address, phone number and the names of some of his family members, may have been a contributing factor too. Because I'm not a fan of that sort of invasion of privacy, I won't be linking to any of it here.)

Still, though, the above may give you pause for thought next time you choose a user name when signing up to the official goat porn message board.

I WANT this game

4:43 PM / Games / 1 Comment

The facts:

• A new RAYMAN game is coming out.
   
• It's an actual RAYMAN game, not one of those infuriating "Rabbids" activity packs.
   
• It's a 2D sidescroller.

Can someone pinch me to make sure I'm not dreaming?

After RAYMAN 3: HOODLUM HAVOC turned the once-adorable platforming hero with no arms and legs into a snarky, 'tude-infested wise-ass and the "Rabbids" spin-off games on the Wii aimed at the so-called casual games market proceeded to urinate all over my once-cherished memories of the first two games, I was pretty much ready to give up on the whole series. Then, quite by chance, I stumbled across this post on Cartoon Brew, and the attached video was enough to cause the game to leap straight to the top of my most anticipated releases of 2010 (well, behind STARCRAFT II, that is...).

This stunning-looking game, developed by new start-up group UbiArt, is apparently the work of a mere five people, and if it plays have as well as the video suggests, then it should more than make up for all the indignities visited upon the Rayman character over the last few years. Billed as a prequel to the original RAYMAN, it looks set to take full advantage of its two-dimensional nature, embracing the fact that it is, ultimately, an interactive cartoon and giving us a taste of what highly polished, high resolution 2D can look like.

Yes, this is an actual in-game screenshot.

As for availability, from what I can gather it will be episodic in nature and released for download rather than on physical media (boo). It has been announced for release on Xbox Live Arcade, PSN and the Maxipad, and while IGN seems to think it will be coming out on the PC too, I haven't been able to find any confirmation of that elsewhere. You know, I might just have to break the habits of a lifetime and buy a console game... and a download-only one at that.

A few thoughts on Mass Effect 2

11:59 PM / Games / No Comments

I was very impressed by MASS EFFECT, BALDUR'S GATE creator Bioware's rabidly successful foray into the world of highfalutin space opera. I didn't think it was perfect, agreeing with those who accused the developers of railroading the player too much, presenting a limited set of choices rather than allowing the player to develop a truly unique character and experience an open world. On the whole, though, I thought Bioware had succeeded in creating an immersive, compelling action/RPG that, unusually for a computer game, took itself seriously and attempted a decidedly cinematic style without coming across as completely ridiculous.

MASS EFFECT 2's plot picks up a few weeks after the end of that of its predecessor, and initially not a lot appears to have changed. The graphics look virtually identical, and while you have the option to create a new character from scratch, players are strongly encouraged to import an existing MASS EFFECT character, which allows for some continuity in the form of key events from the previous game (significant decisions, characters living or dying) being carried over into the new one. I already had a MASS EFFECT character who had completed the game, and chose to import. My experience of the game might, therefore, be somewhat different than for someone who either created a new character or imported one who had made choices other than the ones I made. (It's worth pointing out that this feature assumes that your copies of both games are on the same system. There's no way to import an Xbox 360 MASS EFFECT save file into the PC version of MASS EFFECT 2, or vice versa.)

Prior to the game's release, a big deal was made out of a trailer Bioware released showing the player character, Commander Shepard, being killed in action. Shepard does indeed die, and this occurs within the first five minutes of the game beginning. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Shepard doesn't remain dead for long. She (you can play as either sex, complete with an almost insane level of facial appearance customisation - I went with a female character, primarily because the female voice actor has considerably more personality than her male counterpart) is resurrected two years later by the shadowy Cerberus organisation and, thoroughly in their debt, becomes an unwilling gun for hire, investigating a series of alien attacks on human colonies.

This provides a good example of the sort of railroading I referred to in MASS EFFECT, which remains readily apparent in the sequel. All Shepard's instincts should be screaming at her not to trust Cerberus, a rabidly pro-human, anti-alien terrorist organisation. We met them in the previous game, and a thoroughly nasty bunch they were too. And yes, the dialogue choices allow you to have Shepard voice her suspicions or outright antagonism towards them. When it comes down to it, though, the game gives you no choice but to work for Cerberus, and all Shepard does to suggest that this doesn't sit well with her is make a few grouchy quips about the situation. A true open world game would allow you to flip the bird at Cerberus' shady goons or indeed slit all their throats, but MASS EFFECT 2 isn't that type of game. It's primarily concerned with telling a well-crafted story with strong visuals and full dialogue vocalisation, and in the process it sacrifices a lot of the freedom that earlier Bioware games like BALDUR'S GATE provided.

And it IS a well-crafted story. Shamus Young, a gaming blogger for whose opinions I have a lot of time, wrote a rather critical three-part analysis of the game's plot, but while I agree that his observations have merit, my overall impressions of it were considerably more favourable than his. My biggest complaint, personally, is the decision to kill Shepard off, bring her back to life and then promptly forget that either of these two events ever happened. Narrative-wise, you could cut the death and resurrection entirely and it would make little difference. It just seems a bit cheap to me. (Then again, perhaps I should be careful what I wish for. We could have ended up with Shepard indulging in navel-gazing and depression of Buffy Summers proportions.) The plot has something of a SEVEN SAMURAI feel to it, with Shepard traversing the galaxy, assembling a rag-tag team of fighters to embark on what is more than likely going to be a suicide mission. Every one of these prospective team members is interesting in some way (well, with the exception of Jacob, who fulfils the thankless role of "stolid military man"), and I actually found myself becoming genuinely emotionally attached to a couple of them. Some of the best characters, though, turn out to be the least likeable, particularly the volatile "Jack", who lends real depth to the overused "damaged, angry outcast chick" stereotype. (Special mention must go to the voice actress, Courtenay Taylor.) The game forces you to make some difficult decisions about who lives or dies, and during the final mission, I found myself doing everything I could to ensure that as many of them survived as possible.

You'll notice that, so far, I've talked about MASS EFFECT 2 primarily in terms of its plot and characters. That's because these elements are both the game's greatest strengths and the ones that leave the greatest lasting impressions. Remove them, and the cool sci-fi setting, and you would ultimately be left with a fairly generic third-person shooter. The ratio of narrative to action is roughly 50/50, but whereas the original MASS EFFECT applied a fairly conventional role-playing template to both components, the Item management is non-existent (not a bad thing at all, given how cumbersome the original's inventory system was), the skill system has been pared back to a handful of core abilities, and generally speaking the level design is fairly linear. While you'll find the odd hidden chamber with safes to crack or weapon blueprints to snag, by and large there is only a single path from beginning to end, meaning that the emphasis is on combat rather than exploration. The combat is fun, don't get me wrong, and at least on the PC it controls very nicely (the typical WASD keys and mouse combo), but you're never in any doubt that it's the narrative that's keeping you going: you find yourself anticipating the next dialogue exchange rather than the next boss encounter.

That's not necessarily a problem. Some of the greatest games of all time have been plot-driven - PLANESCAPE: TORMENT springs to mind. However, on some level I do lament the loss of some of the more RPG-like elements of the core gameplay. Compare this to Bioware's DRAGON AGE, released only a couple of months later, and it inevitably starts to look a bit lightweight. Perhaps, though, that's the wrong approach. Viewing MASS EFFECT 2 in these terms means viewing it as a simplistic RPG. Consider it an unusually complex, plot-based action game, though, and it suddenly starts to look a whole lot more impressive. I like RPGs a great deal, but I like action games too, and MASS EFFECT 2 actually manages the impressive feat of providing the player with around 30 hours of gameplay without it ever getting boring. Imagine playing UNREAL or QUAKE for 30 hours straight - it would be tedium personified. MASS EFFECT 2, though, despite adopting a fairly rigid formula of "plot, run and shot, plot," and so on, sucks you in purely because the story and characters give you a reason to care about the action component.

Anything more to be said? Well, it looks and sounds great. The Unreal Engine-powered graphics are excellent, and the game performs extremely well. The voice acting is probably the best I've ever heard in a computer game. That may not be saying much, and there are definitely weak moments (both the voice actor for the male Shepard, Mark Meer, and special celebrity guest Martin Sheen give spectacularly lifeless readings of their dialogue), but by and large the effect is impressive. It runs without a hitch, and I didn't experience any of the problems with getting multi-channel audio to work that plagued the previous game for me. I have a sneaking suspicion that STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY will end up being my Game of the Year 2010, but I wouldn't be surprised if MASS EFFECT 2 turns out to be my runner-up.

Starcraft II beta invites

9:38 PM / Games / 8 Comments

Today's your lucky day (potentially). I have two invites to the STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY beta test to give away to those whom I deem worthy. In order to participate, you must have a Battle.net account (don't worry, it's free).

For a chance to win one of these keys, reply to this post with a poem about why you deserve it. The two people who write what I deem to be the best poems by 8 PM on Friday night will be the proud recipients.

Good luck!

Starcraft II thoughts of the day

10:15 PM / Games / 1 Comment

I've been continuing to participate in the STARCRAFT II beta, generally getting in a few matches each day and playing with different strategies. After a lengthy stretch playing Protoss almost exclusively, I've found myself gravitating back towards Terran, who were my race of choice in the original STARCRAFT. The "human" races often have a reputation for being the least interesting in strategy games, and it's certainly true that the Terrans lack the mystique of the Protoss or the sheer "ick" factor of the Zerg. However, the redneck space cowboys have considerably more in the way of a unique personality than, say, the Allies in RED ALERT, with their southern drawl, hybrid country/techno soundtrack and mobile base mechanic. The latter separates them from the two other races, both of which are unable to move their buildings and are restricted to placing them in relatively pre-determined locations (Protoss buildings must be powered by a Pylon or Warp Prism; Zerg buildings must be constructed on the goo-like Creep). Constructing a new Command Center in the comfort of your existing base and then flying it out to its intended location is infinitely safer than building it in unsecured territory.

The Terrans also have what is arguably the coolest of the new units - a low level ranged unit called the Reaper, which moves very fast and can leap up and down cliffs. Perfect for staging early game hit and run attacks, there's nothing quite like running half a dozen Reapers into your enemy's base via the back door and decimating their line of workers while their combat units are busy guarding the front ramp. Of course, like all units in STARCRAFT II, Reapers have their shortcomings: they die extremely quickly to enemy fire, and if you're quick enough to pull off a surround on them, even worker units can dispatch them pretty quickly. In many respects, though, their volatility is what makes them so much fun to play.

A Reaper attack on a Zerg supply line.

Another really nice addition to the Terran army is the Medivac, which combines the roles of Medic and Dropship from the original game, both transporting units and automatically healing them. Again, this has major implications for back door attacks on enemy bases, and I just finished a very enjoyable game in which I loaded four Medivacs up with a combination of stim-packed Marines and Marauders (a heavy-hitting ground-only unit with an optional upgrade to slow enemy units with each hit) and flew around the map, performing hit and run tactics on my Zerg opponent's various bases until he/she was forced to concede defeat. This so-called MMM combo is extremely popular with Terran players, and rightly so: it appears to be very difficult for an unprepared opponent to counter.

An MMM hit and run attack on a Zerg base.

Another big factor is the change to how terrain works in STARCRAFT II, chiefly detection. In STARCRAFT, enemy units on higher ground were invisible to friendly units on lower ground until they actually attacked, at which point they became visible, allowing the player to retaliate, albeit with reduced damage. In STARCRAFT II, units on higher ground remain invisible and unassailable unless you can either bring in a flying unit or get one of your own units on to the higher ground. Once the enemy is visible, you can attack for full damage. Until then, though, you're basically a sitting duck, as my opponent found out in this game on the ever-popular Lost Temple map (first introduced in the original STACRAFT and remade for both WARCRAFT III and its expansion, and now STARCRAFT II), when I flew some Marines, Marauders and a couple of Siege Tanks on to the raised ground above his natural expansion and proceeded to lay waste to his mining operation, all the while with his large army of ground units simply standing there unable to do anything to stop me. With no flying or detecting units whatsoever, my opponent was completely powerless and simply had to admit defeat.

A Protoss player with no detection laid low thanks to my terrain advantage.

In case you couldn't tell, I like this game. A LOT. Is it the greatest strategy game ever created? I suppose only time will tell, but for the time being I have no interest in playing anything else.

A few words about Starcraft II graphics and performance

8:23 AM / Games / No Comments

The original STARCRAFT was locked to a resolution of 640x480 with a 256-colour palette and, if memory serves me correctly, the sole graphical option was a toggle for something called "colour cycling". In contrast, STARCRAFT II presents you with a dizzying array of options, controlling everything from voice chat functionality to the complexity of the physics for your units' death animation. The minimum resolution is 1024x768, and you can effectively run the game at any 4x3, 5x4, 16x9 or 16x10 resolution upwards of that. You can either tweak each graphical setting (shaders, terrain, etc.) individually or use one of four broad presets (Low, Medium, High and Ultra). I run it at my monitor's native 1920x1200, with anti-aliasing disabled and anisotropic filtering set to automatic, and generally speaking found that I got pretty pleasing performance with the settings at High (my one additional tweak was to enable reflections, which by default are disabled at High). Just to remind you of my current system specs:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, at 3.61 GHz
• RAM: 4 GB PC2-6400 DDR2-RAM, at 800 MHz
• Video card: ATI Radeon 3870 512 MB, at 860 MHz (GPU)/990 MHz (VRAM)

For me, "pleasing performance" is basically something in the region of 40-60 fps. Any higher doesn't count, as my monitor's refresh rate is 60 Hz and I have v-sync enabled to avoid tearing, while any lower feels a bit too choppy for my tastes. Your mileage may vary, but STARCRAFT II is such a fast-paced game that a smooth frame rate is, in my opinion, absolutely vital. (Thank Beelzebub that Blizzard didn't cap the frame rate to 30 fps like EA did with COMMAND & CONQUER 3 and RED ALERT 3.) On my system, things became a bit too choppy at Ultra, although to put things in perspective, I've seen my brother play plenty of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games that run considerably slower than STARCRAFT II with everything maxed out. If you can tolerate the current generation of consoles and their tendency to lock most games to 30 fps (I can't), you may be okay with the sort of performance I was seeing at Ultra. I should point out, though, that even the Medium settings look damn good, with the higher settings generally just adding a bit more gloss and shine.

Of course, given how long I've waited to play this game, I want nothing but the best for it. My goal, with the new system I'm putting together, is to be able to play the game with everything maxed out and a decent amount of anti-aliasing at a near-constant 60 fps. I have a feeling that this is going to be my go-to game for years to come (or at least until DIABLO III comes out), so it makes sense for me to build a system on which I can enjoy it to its fullest potential. Of course, I suspect that an overclocked Core i7 930/overclocked Radeon 5850 combination will give me performance to spare, meaning I can also enjoy considerably more demanding titles like never before. It's first and foremost about STARCRAFT II, though, and provided I can achieve my goal of full details and a consistently high frame rate on that title, then I'll be satisfied.

I've included screen captures of each of the various settings menus below.

Graphics options.

Sound options.

Voice options.

Gameplay options.

Social options.

Starcraft II beta first thoughts

11:11 PM / Games / No Comments

I think it's fairly safe to say that Blizzard Entertainment's STARCRAFT II is THE real time strategy game release of the year, if not the decade. It had better be, because we've waited more than twelve years for it.

Just under a month ago, the latest and purportedly final instalment in Electronic Arts' rival COMMAND & CONQUER series, COMMAND & CONQUER 4: TIBERIAN TWILIGHT, emerged as a damp squib rather than the glorious climax to the Tiberium storyline that many had hoped for, with the cost frequently voiced criticisms being excessive DRM and gameplay that deviated so far from the previous titles as to render it unrecognisable as a C&C game (I participated briefly in the open beta test and wasn't particularly impressed by what I saw). I doubt that even the most ambitious bean-counters at EA ever seriously considered going head to head with Blizzard's juggernaut, but it's hard not to suspect that releasing the retain version of TIBERIAN TWILIGHT at around the same time as STARCRAFT II's beta test was a seriously bad idea. After all, while beta keys have been given out in strictly limited quantities, the whole Internet seems to be abuzz with STARCRAFT II mania. Those who haven't received keys have been watching YouTube videos, reading commentary on gaming web sites and forums, and generally just gnashing their teeth at the thought of the lucky bastards who managed to get their hands on an invite. I should know - I was one of them. When I received the extremely pleasant surprise that was an email invite in my inbox this morning, part of me couldn't help feeling as if I already knew the game inside out.

Part of that is down to the sheer level of online chatter surrounding this game. Before even loading up the game, I already knew every unit, every counter... hell, I even knew the layout to every map. However, it's also because STARCRAFT II is very, VERY familiar. In terms of its design, this is easily the most conservative RTS I've seen in a long time, eschewing many of the features that have now become mainstays of the genre - squad formations, terrain advantages, etc. - and instead delivering what feels a lot like 1998's STARCRAFT with a new graphics engine, new units and a few interface tweaks. That's got to be a bad thing, right?

Are you kidding? STARCRAFT was arguably the greatest RTS ever created, refined to the point of perfection and still played religiously to this day... particularly in South Korea, where it's more or less the national sport, despite never having been officially released there. There's nothing wrong with a conservative approach to game design provided it's done well and the underlying concept is solid: to use a fairly predictable example, you don't hear many people calling chess outdated and demanding that it be spiced up with a bunch of newfangled gimmicks. STARCRAFT may not have been around for as long as chess, but as far as computer games are concerned, it's probably the closest thing you'll get in terms of its longevity. I've seen some people accusing Blizzard of taking the easy route with STARCRAFT II in adhering so closely to its predecessor's template, but I'm inclined to think they're missing the point. By foregoing all the distracting bells and whistles of modern RTSes in favour of what is ultimately a minor update to a rule-set that was already well established when its predecessor came out, Blizzard have left themselves with no option but to get it right. If it doesn't re-capture the pitch perfect synthesis of the original game, it has nothing to fall back on. And here's the thing: after spending most of the day playing it, I'm inclined to think they've gone and done it (again).

"Familiar but different" is how I'd describe STARCRAFT II. From the moment you're plonked down on the battlefield, with your top-down view of your Command Center/Hatchery/Nexus and SCVs/Drones/Probes, you immediately feel right at home. Sure, the new 3D graphics engine looks a lot shinier than the old 640x480, 256-colour visuals of the original, and ordering your units around has a noticeably slicker, smoother feel, but it's basically the STARCRAFT you know and love. The interface that occupies the bottom portion of the screen is virtually identical to its predecessor, and while a number of the hotkeys have changed, you can basically get up and running immediately. If you've played STARCRAFT (or any of the WARCRAFT RTSes), there should be no learning curve at all in terms of the basic mechanics. Harvest minerals and gas, create buildings, pump out units, mash enemy. Rinse and repeat. Blizzard's mantra, which they've repeated so many times I'm almost sick of hearing it, is "easy to learn, hard to master", and that sums up STARCRAFT II to a T - something I quickly learned as, over the course of the day, I proceeded to have seven shades knocked out of me by players considerably more skilled than myself.

Arguably more so than the original, STARCRAFT II is absolutely merciless when it comes to unit counters. The "rock-paper-scissors" framework has been present in pretty much every RTS since the beginning of time, but going by the twenty or so matches I played today (a handful against the ridiculously easy computer AI, but the vast majority against actual people) it is especially pronounced here. Immortals defeat Roaches defeat Zealots defeat Marauders defeat Stalkers defeat Reapers defeat Zealots defeat Immortals, and so on and so forth. (The game includes a handy help screen which specifically outlines what each unit is strongest against.) Bringing the right units into battle is, as far as I can see, has far more impact than what you do with them once the fight kicks off, immediately differentiating this from the more micro-intensive WARCRAFT III, Blizzard's previous RTS. That said, I don't want to give the impression that micro is irrelevant: it can certainly turn the tide in what would otherwise be a stalemate, and it goes without saying that, even if you successfully counter all your enemy's units, simply throwing your forces at him/her and putting your feet up is almost always a recipe for disaster. Still, though, it's very much a game of picking the right unit for each situation, and the ability to adapt to each new threat rather than being restricted to a single build/play style is absolutely essential.

As to the issue of race balance, it's early days at the moment. Just about everyone seems to be playing Protoss, and while I always tend to gravitate towards the most "human" race whenever I play an RTS (Human in WARCRAFT, GDI in COMMAND & CONQUER, Terran in STARCRAFT, etc.), I must admit that, having sampled all three to a more or less equal degree, I had the most fun with the Protoss. I'm not sure whether that's because they're currently more powerful than their Terran and Zerg counterparts, or simply because they're more fun to play, or a little of both (the two often go hand in hand), but something about them just "feels" right to me - which is surprising, as I wasn't all that crazy about them in the original STARCRAFT. All three races have greatly improved mobility options over the previous game, but the Protoss warp-in mechanic, which allows you to convert your Gateways to Warp Gates and instantly warp new units to any area where you have a building or a Phase Prism, is a lot of fun. There's something insanely satisfying about sneaking a Phase Prism behind your enemy's mineral line, then warping in a handful of Zealots and watching them decimate his/her workers in the blink of an eye.

That's about all for now. Time permitting, I'll post some more impressions at a later point, but for now I'll simply conclude by saying that STARCRAFT II seems very promising indeed. I wouldn't class myself as a hardcore gamer by any stretch, and I've not spent nearly enough time with the game yet to be able to make any profound judgements as to its ability to knock its predecessor from its position as the dominant RTS eSport, but so far my overriding impression is that the wait will be well and truly worth it. I certainly can't picture going back to the original STARCRAFT now, and if that's not a recommendation, then I don't know what is.

I can hardly hold my bladder!

8:36 AM / Games / 1 Comment

See you in the internet pipes!

UbiSoft's DRM faux-pas

11:17 PM / Games / 8 Comments

If you're a PC gamer, chances are you've heard about the fiasco surrounding the latest insidious digital rights management (DRM) system designed to screw legitimate customers... sorry, I mean't to say "designed to combat piracy". Funny now the two always seem to go hand in hand, isn't it?

Anyway, faced with the knowledge that, no matter what sort of copy protection or forced activation system they put on the game disc, the crackers will find a way of bypassing it, letting players get straight to the good stuff (often before the game is actually available on store shelves - SPORE, I'm looking at you), UbiSoft hit on an ingenious scheme: to force the player to authenticate and remain online at all times, connected to UbiSoft's servers and streaming a significant portion of the game data NOT stored on the physical disc. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Well, yes, until you break it down and figure out what it actually means. You have to remain connected to the internet the whole time. If your connection dies, for whatever reason, the game quits. Depending on which game it is, it might save your progress, but that's not a given. ASSASSIN'S CREED 2, for example, uses a checkpoint system, so if your connection dies, the game will only restore you back to the last checkpoint. As per Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

No matter what you're doing, no matter what the reason, the game will refuse to let you continue playing if it decides you're not online. You're dumped right back to a menu, losing any progress made since the last checkpoint. If you don't have a constant, uninterrupted internet connection, you can't play. Let's list some of the reasons you might drop your net connection, shall we? Router crash, ISP problems, cat playing with the cable, microwave muddling your wi-fi connection, train going into a tunnel when you're on 3G, Windows having a networking befuddlement, someone else in the house torrenting the bandwidth dry...

And let's get something straight here: we're talking about SINGLE PLAYER GAMES that require you to remain connected. That's a load of horse-hooey. A player's ability to run a single player game should not be dependent either on his/her web connection or the stability of UbiSoft's servers. It's ludicrous. It benefits no-one but the publisher. As Phill Cameron put it in his article at Gamasutra:

It's not there for our protection, it's there to stop people who aren't us (the paying customers), from getting their hands on the game.

[...]

Recently, PC Gamer managed to have a talk with Ubisoft about the technology. They claim that 'The real idea is that if you offer a game that is better when you buy it, then people will actually buy it. We wouldn't have built it if we thought that it was really going to piss off our customers.'

While it might be tempting to call them naive or blindly optimistic, the base theory there is sound; if you offer a better service than the pirates, you'll have more people buying the game. The problem is that here, with Assassin's Creed 2, we're not getting a better game when we buy.

The last point, which I emboldened, is in my opinion the most pertinent. From a shareholder's point of view, this new DRM system sounds wonderful in theory. After all, the bottom line is what counts, and what bigger bottom line is there than preventing the loss of sales due to piracy? (Let's, for a moment, run with the fallacy that every pirated copy directly equates to a lost sale.) Unfortunately, for the end user, it's meaningless. There's nothing to be gained by the gamer from this sort of content protection. The gamer is being asked to accept more stringent limitations being placed on their usage of the product in return for... nothing. Zilch. Nada.

The stupidity of this new system was laid bare for all to see when the aforementioned ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 was released on March 5th, and the servers were promptly brought to their knees due to the sheer demand placed on them, preventing legitimate customers from playing the game they'd just bought. That's right: people were unable to play a single player game because the servers couldn't cope with the number of connections. I hate to say "I told you so", but the sadist in me derives a considerable amount of schadenfreude from this whole affair. Rock, Paper, Shotgun again:

The DRM was clearly ludicrous from its first announcement, and Ubisoft could not have been sent a more clear message by a worldwide reaction of outrage. They persisted with it anyway (quashing some people's suspicions that this was a deliberately OTT announcement so they could appear to back down on it later), and despite repeated warnings that it was untenable continued to boast the "feature" as a bonus for gamers. This weekend people have not been gamers, because their game wouldn't run.

And don't forget that the game has currently only been released in Europe. Just imagine what's going to happen when it comes out in North America on the 9th...

This new DRM scheme is supposedly going to be employed for every subsequent UbiSoft PC game, including THE SETTLERS VII: PATHS TO A KINGDOM, which I was previously looking forward to playing but now won't be bothering with. Well, it'll be used until UbiSoft's managers cotton on to the fact that this is a major faux-pas and backtrack. That may take some time, given that all the evidence suggests that UbiSoft's managers are SPECTACULARLY stupid, but I'm confident that it will happen eventually. Electronic Arts, for example, eventually backed down on the ridiculous "three/five installs and you're out" scheme that they imposed on SPORE and RED ALERT 3, among others. It's a shame wary customers are going to have to miss out on the likes of ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 and THE SETTLERS 7, but them's the breaks, and I feel reasonably confident that the inevitable ASSASSIN'S CREED 3 and THE SETTLERS 8 will not be crippled to this extent. (That, or UbiSoft will devise something even worse, which I suppose is always a possibility...)

If nothing else, the ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 fiasco is a cause for celebration because it serves as a clear demonstration of just how dangerous this sort of DRM potentially is. If you bought the game, fully aware of the included restrictions, and found yourself unable to play it, then I sympathise, but maybe it will teach you not to be so trusting in future.

Some thoughts on Mirror's Edge

8:05 PM / Games / 3 Comments

I'm always slightly wary of any game that is flaunted by a major publisher as ground-breaking, particularly when that publisher is Electronic Arts. This is, after all, a company renowned for milking its intellectual properties to death, with an annual update to each of its most lucrative franchises coming along with the predictability of a regular bowel movement. It's refreshing, therefore, to see a game specifically marketed as bringing something new to the table actually living up to the hype. That's not to say Mirror's Edge is perfect - far from it, and I'll cover its multiple flaws in due course - but it has style, attitude and originality to spare, and it proves quirky and genuinely imaginative genre-busters are not the sole property of the independents.

The game takes the classic "dystopian totalitarian society" backdrop and uses it as a springboard to launch a first person action game that eschews the usual trappings of the genre. If you had to describe a typical game of this sort, I'm willing to bet it would be a about steroid-abusing, rough-talking muscle man slowly blasting his way through room after monochromatic room of cannon fodder. Mirror's Edge, however, places the player in control of a "runner" called Faith - a messenger of the resistance movement whose weapon is not a gun or even her fists but rather her feet. Enemy encounters are often best approached by avoiding them completely, as Faith can only ever withstand a handful of hits, and the pace at which she moves allows her to outrun all but the most persistent of foes.

In place of combat, the game emphasises fast movement and the stringing together of consecutive actions to build up momentum. Faith vaults across rooftops, swings from poles and runs along vertical surfaces, and the more successive moves you pull off, the faster you move and, in theory, the more accomplishment you'll feel. Successfully stringing together a run of moves is very satisfying, although the downside is that screwing up that last jump and having to repeat the whole thing is deeply frustrating. You can expect a lot of repetition, as the game seems to positively encourage a trial and error approach. The game's checkpoint system, while reasonably generous, is still considerably more punishing than the similar Prince of Persia revamp, which always took you back to the start of your last jump. When I reviewed that game, I criticised this approach for removing any challenge from the game, but Mirror's Edge demonstrates that maybe there's something to be said for the hand-holding approach after all. The biggest issue with this aspect of the game is the uneven difficulty levels: throughout the game, you'll find certain actions to be a breeze, only to come up against a brick wall with a single manoeuvre requiring a dozen or so attempts to get it right.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if, as the advertising suggested, Mirror's Edge was a true world without boundaries, with multiple paths to each goal, but in reality there are only ever a small handful of pre-determined routes. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that the game is in fact strictly linear. You progress through the ten commendably large levels in a predetermined order and are frequently railroaded from Point A to Point B, so it lacks the true "open world" feel of a game like Assassin's Creed. On the other hand, this minimises a lot of the frustration inherent in free exploration games, given that it's generally always clear where you need to go next, leaving the player to concentrate on how to get there.

While the developers do generally encourage the avoidance of combat encounters, there are occasions on which there is no choice but to fight, and it's here that the game's greatest shortcoming rears its head. The word "clunky" was clearly invented to describe these combat mechanics, which consist of a series of punches, kicks and slides that are executed in such a way as to leave little to no room for error. I often found myself repeating the same combat encounter multiple times, finally winning not because I'd mastered the moves but because I'd happened to punch the right random assortment of keys at the right time. Hand to hand combat is hard to pull off in the first person, and while the "slow time" option does help somewhat when it comes to timing punches or grabbing an opponent's weapon, it also adds to the frustration factor when you mistime a move, because it means you have to sit and watch your botched manoeuvre playing out in excruciatingly slow motion.

With all that said, what makes Mirror's Edge such a delight to play is, by and large, its clean and attractive visual style. Faith's world is bright and sun-drenched, which admittedly gets a little repetitive after a while but certainly makes for a nice change of pace from the unrelentingly dour, colourless look of most modern action games. The game uses a handy colour coding system in which objects that can be interacted with are painted red, immediately distinguishing them from their bleached white surroundings. While not without its flaws (occasionally, objects won't show up as red until you're almost touching them, at which point it becomes impossible to interact with them without breaking your momentum), this system provides a much-appreciated level of clarity and prevents the game from degenerating into a monotonous hunt for the grey-coloured lever that looks exactly the same as its surroundings until you're standing right in front of it. The voice acting is also unusually good for a computer game, and the various pre-rendered cut-scenes have an interesting visual style, somewhere between anime and Flash animation. Unfortunately the story is rather muddled, with fuzzy goals that leave you confused as to why precisely you're running across the rooftops and dodging the cops. We're told we're battling a totalitarian regime, but we're actually never shown what's so bad about said regime. Supposedly, crime has all but been eradicated and the city is free of pollution and poverty - sound pretty utopian if you ask me! It hinges on us simply accepting the notion of a police state being a bad thing without actually telling us what's so bad about it. If, like me, you hold freedom of speech to be one of our most basic human rights, then you'll probably be pretty irked by the fundamental idea, but it's all a bit too nebulous to give the narrative the drive it needs.

Mirror's Edge gets a definite thumbs-up from me. I doubt it will blow anyone away, and there are serious issues with which to contend regarding its combat mechanics and story, but it's a genuinely original and, once in a while, genuinely satisfying game with ambition to spare and a keen sense of style. 8/10

A few thoughts on Dragon Age: Origins

2:54 PM / Games / 2 Comments

In gaming, the phrase "spiritual successor" is tossed around a lot. Developers are always waiting to cash in on biggest greatest hit, whether it's the endless sea of first person shooters getting cranked out (usually populated by gruff-voiced, steroid-abusing muscle men and colour palettes whose values consist solely of grey and brown) or the plethora of MMOs all attempting to grab a slice of the World of Warcraft pie. Let's face it, the games industry is shockingly derivative, plagiarising to a degree that would make even your average Hollywood executive blush.

And yet I'm inclined to think that originality is overrated. Case in point would be the much-hyped control system Nintendo devised for their Wii console. Hyped as something that would revolutionise gaming, in reality the number of games that actually use that curious controller in anything approaching a creative way is small in the extreme... or so I'm told. Whenever I catch sight of the Wiimote, I always find myself wondering what's so wrong with the good old fashioned mouse and keyboard setup... or I suppose a gamepad if you insist on being so uncultured (joke, guys). There's no sense in reinventing the wheel, not when the original design works so well.

[Continue reading...]

A few thoughts on Torchlight

1:25 PM / Games / 1 Comment

For many people, the greatest casualty of the demise of Flagship Studios in 2008 was not its A-title, Hellgate: London, but rather Mythos, a side project headed by Fate designer Travis Baldree. Originally intended to test the servers that were later to be used for Hellgate, Mythos' following grew steadily, with many who felt disillusioned by the flagship (sorry) title's shortcomings turning to this colourful, charming, free-to-play MMO to satisfy their action-RPG cravings. The shuttering of Flagship was a bitter blow to those who had enjoyed seeing Mythos take shape and participating in the game's open beta test, for the title became lost in a squabble over copyright ownership. The result: all the hard work of the Mythos was essentially for nothing. The game will never see the light of day.

Well, not quite. After the shuttering of Flagship, the team behind Mythos hastily rebranded under the banner of a newly formed studio, Runic Games, and set about building a new game from scratch - one that followed the same basic philosophies of Mythos. Released on October 27, Torchlight, built from the ground up in under a year, looks set to satisfy the ARPG itch that many are feeling, particularly now that it has been confirmed that Blizzard Entertainment's juggernaut, Diablo III, will not be released until after 2010.

Costing a mere $20, Torchlight is a download-only, single player affair (a free-to-play, microtransaction-funded MMO version will follow at a later date), but if like me you normally play solo anyway, that won't matter. True, it may not have an original bone in its body, and there's no mistaking its pedigree - Max and Erich Schaefer, designers of Diablo and Diablo II, and Matt Uelmen, composer of those two games, are part of the team responsible - but the whole thing is polished to such perfection that its derivative nature is easy to overlook. Light on plot and heavy on action, Torchlight is a time sink in the best possible sense: it's incredibly easy to tell yourself that you'll only play five minutes, and next thing you know you're still clicking away hours later and promising you'll stop once you've cleared out the next dungeon/gained another level/completed the current quest.

You'd never mistake it for an "A" title (polished though it is, certain aspects, such as the presentation of the wafer-thin story, have an almost fan-made feel to them), but in much the same way that not every movie you watch is a billion dollar blockbuster, not every game needs to be a cinematic epic that features photo-realistic graphics that would choke a supercomputer and takes 100+ hours to complete. It's true that many people will simply use Torchlight to kill time until Diablo III comes along, but its makers seem to be fairly comfortable with their game filling this niche. It has superb replay value, thanks to the multiple potential character builds and randomly generated level layouts (a Diablo staple), not to mention an endless dungeon in which to lose yourself once you've completed the core game. Most importantly, it's relentlessly fun and deeply satisfying (it's hard to put my finger on why, but whumping half a dozen zombies with a single click has that inherently pleasing feeling that so many other action games lack), and gets a hearty recommendation from me. Now, please excuse me while I go off and wear out another mouse.

Two days of gaming goodness

4:49 PM / Games / 2 Comments

Over August 21 and 22, Blizzard Entertainment held its fourth annual BlizzCon convention in Anaheim, California, packing all the gaming fun and associated geekery one could wish for into a two day event. The convention, the 200,000 tickets for which apparently sold out in under a minute, allowed fans to play work-in-progress versions of the studio's three announced upcoming games - Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (yay), Diablo III (even more yay) and the just-unveiled World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion set (meh) - as well as ask the developers questions at Q&A panels, empty their wallets in exchange for an assortment of exclusive memorabilia, and embarrass themselves in the name of good fun. Oh, and apparently some up-and-comer called Ozzy Osbourne was singing some songs. I didn't attend myself, clearly, but I did pay my £24.95 to subscribe to the live feed provided by DirectTV, even if it did mean staggering into work on Saturday morning looking, for some unfathomable reason, like I'd only had three and a half hours' sleep.

It looks to have been a terrific event and, while watching a low resolution feed in a browser window can't exactly compete with actually being there in the flesh, a lot of the enthusiasm was certainly communicated to me and I got to hear most of the big announcements in real-time... although I did, for some reason, get it into my head that the event was on Saturday and Sunday, not Friday and Saturday, which meant that I missed the opening ceremony and, turning up late, found myself wondering "What's this Cataclysm thing everyone's talking about?" and "A Monk? Are they re-releasing Hellfire?"

In the past, the developer panels have always been my favourite aspects of BlizzCon, and this year proved to be no exception. Because, on numerous occasions, more than one panel was taking place at any given time, DirectTV had to be selective with their coverage, meaning that I missed out on the likes of the Diablo III lore and art panels and the cinematics department's panel, but I did get to witness all the most important stuff, such as the long-awaited preview of the new Battle.net platform and its rather disturbingly Big Brother-like ramifications, and the panel focusing on the design and gameplay of Diablo III's new playable character class, the Monk, which looks like ridiculously good fun.

I think the word "ownage" was invented for the Monk.

The Starcraft II lore panel brought some gladness and some sadness. It focused on the game's voice cast and brought out many of the key players, as well as its voice director, Andrea Romano, for an on-the-spot Q&A session chaired by Chris Metzen, the man responsible for dreaming up most of Blizzard's game worlds, storylines and character. While it was nice to see the original voices of key characters Jim Raynor and Arcturus Mengsk (Robert Clotworthy and James Harper, respectively) on stage and in person, the stunt casting of Battlestar Galactica star Tricia Helfer as Sarah Kerrigan, in place of original voice actor Glynnis Talken (who repeatedly expressed interest in returning to the role) did grate somewhat. I hate the notion of celebrity voice casting, particularly when said celebrity is brought in to replace an already perfectly good actor. And let's face it, Helfer, whose previous computer game experience consists of her role in the deliriously (and intentionally) bad live action FMV sequences in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, doesn't exactly have what I'd call the pedigree for a role like this. The cynic in me is inclined to think that she was cast for one reason and one reason only:

The ubiquitous Tricia Helfer pin-up shot, top, and the character she will be voicing, bottom.

Now, I can see the appeal, personally... until I remember that these, erm, assets won't actually be visible in the game. For Starcraft II, she's a voice, nothing more, and hers is far from distinctive.

Another issue for me is the new Xbox Live-styled Battle.net service, which I alluded to above. While many of the new features sound excellent, such as the tiered ladder system and increased ease of inter-game communication, not to mention the fact that, despite the numerous upgrades and improvements, it will remain free, I couldn't help finding Blizzard's desire to create such an overarching, all-encompassing, "always connected" system rather disturbing on some level. The fact that players must connect to Battle.net to activate the game even if they only intend to play single player mode is problematic enough; worse still is the cheerful admission by Rob Pardo, the company's Vice President of Game Design, that they will have the power to de-activate accounts completely, forcing players to buy new copies of the game in order to continue playing. Sure, the likelihood of them doing such a thing to anyone other than a hacker, pirate or rampant cheater is unlikely. However, the fact that they are able to wield such power is actually pretty scary. Whatever happened to the days when you could just hand over your money for a game and enjoy it with the knowledge that you "own" your personal copy? Yes, I know that technically you license the game rather than actually obtaining ownership of it. The point still stands, though, that my copies of the original Starcraft and countless other titles exist on my shelf and are mine to play for as long as I want without having to concern myself with forced online activations and the worry that the developers could, on a whim, decide that they don't like me playing their game and forbid me from doing so any more, despite having paid for it.

Starcraft II's main menu, with integrated Battle.net 2.0.

Am I being paranoid? Maybe so, but as you probably know by now I distrust DRM in all its forms and view with great suspicion any attempts at forced connectivity. While all these new features sound like a lot of fun, I suspect that a sizeable number of players don't really care about them and just want a way of being able to hook up with their friends and play a quick game, whether that be via a LAN connection or some sort of "open" online play similar to what currently exists for Diablo II. One thing's for sure, this post-World of Warcraft Blizzard is a very different animal.

Starcraft II: the good, the bad and the ugly

12:24 PM / Games / No Comments

Hot on the heels of news that the release of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty has been pushed back to 2010 (come on, is anyone even slightly surprised?) comes a wealth of new information to tide us over, pertaining mainly to the single player component.

IncGamers is hosting a video featuring clips from the solo campaign, and it looks like a hell of a lot of fun. Plus, I must say it's wonderful to once again hear Robert Clotworthy as the voice of central protagonist Jim Raynor. He voiced the character in the original Starcraft, but for a long time it looked as if developer Blizzard Entertainment was dead set on recasting the role for the sequel. A stand-in provided the character's voice in numerous previews, and it even got to the point that Clotworthy personally announced, with considerable regret, that he would not be returning. Fans responded with messages of support for Clotworthy, petitions and a flurry of angry emails to Blizzard. It's unclear whether these steps had any direct impact on the developers, but for one reason or another they changed their minds and Clotworthy was reinstated. While it's a little hard to reconcile his character design in the new game with that of the balding, egg-shaped head in the original, the voice certainly goes a long way towards bridging that gap.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Glynnis Talken, voice of Kerrigan, the other principle character in the series: it seems that her role has indeed been recast (or is in the process of being recast). This strikes me as being a case of one step forward, one step back. These two characters and their storyline are justly celebrated as one of the strongest and most memorable from a period where storytelling in PC gaming was still in something of a state of infancy. These two characters and their encounters are fondly remembered for a reason, and it surely wasn't their 50x50 pixel talking head animation. Rather, it was the script by Chris Metzen and its delivery by the two voice-over artists. I can only hope that Blizzard see sense as regards Kerrigan's voice before it's too late to do anything about it.

Starcraft II "rising lava" mission - come on, this is just cool.

A further blow, not long after the announcement that there would be no LAN multiplayer component for the game, is the news that online activation will be required in order to play the game, even single player mode. And yet, despite this, Blizzard claims that piracy is not a significant concern. Erm, then why, pray tell, force players to activate their copies? And why leave out LAN play citing piracy as the main reason? This sounds an awful lot like a case of one hand not knowing what the other's doing. At least there's no mention of limited activations and, in any event, most players will admittedly have access to an Internet connection regardless of whether or not they intend to actually play online, so this shouldn't be a big deal for most people. It just seems like an unnecessary step to add, particularly given that, as lead producer Chris Sigaty readily admitted in an interview with Gamespot, a significant portion of their consumer base never plays the multiplayer component of their games, whether online or offline.

Ah, well. With all that said, the game itself looks terrific, and I can't wait to get my hands on it. A number of sites have posted extensive previews, some of which I've catalogued below:

• Interview with Dustin Browder, Chris Metzen and Rob Pardo at IncGamers
• Single player gameplay video at IncGamers
• Video interview with Chris Sigaty and Andy Chambers at Gamespot
• Single player preview at Gamespot
• Single player screenshots at StarcraftWire
• Mission guide preview at StarcraftWire
• Single player preview at IGN

This is the way you'll play our game

3:15 PM / Games / No Comments

Blizzard Entertainment recently confirmed that their two upcoming games, Starcraft II and Diablo III, will not support local area network (LAN) games. Instead, players who want to play the games' multiplayer mode will have to connect to the company's Battle.net online gaming service, even if the person they want to play against is sitting right next to them - at, say, a LAN party or university halls of residence.

The reason? Apparently, it's that old chestnut, piracy. Blizzard is concerned that, in the unmoderated realm of LAN play, it will be easy to crack the games and for multiple individuals to then play together using a single copy, resulting in sales suffering. Permit me an eye roll. Yes, piracy is an issue, but it always will be, and the ability to play via LAN has not prevented the original Starcraft (whose only form of copy protection was a simple 13-digit CD key) from selling over 11 million copies worldwide and still being in the US Top 20 charts eleven years after its release. I bet most publishers wish their sales "suffered" this much.

Alas, these days piracy seems to be the grand old catch-all excuse used by developers to explain any unpopular decisions they make. It provided EA with justification for an insidious form of DRM that limited the number of times a player could install their games (and was ultimately abandoned in the wake of a sustained backlash), and now it seems Blizzard is using it to justify the removal of an extremely popular mode of play.

Starcraft II

It's not ultimately the end of the world - Battle.net is a free service and one that has had a considerable amount of money sunk into it in order to improve the service and play experience. Furthermore, if I had to choose between being forced to connect to Battle.net in order to play multiplayer games and having to put up with EA-style DRM, I'd choose the former any day of the week. And - or so say Blizzard's PR people - the new Battle.net 2.0 will be, like, super-amazing (although they remain tight-lipped on just what the amazing new features will consist of). That's all well and good, but people like choice. And not everyone has an internet connection good enough to ensure lag-free play. You want everyone to play on Battle.net? Fine - do so by making it the greatest, most amazing online gaming service anyone has ever seen, not by forcing people to use it by removing other legitimate forms of multiplayer.

Don't get me wrong. I'll still be first in line to pick up my copies of Starcraft II and Diablo III the day they are released. However, I have fond memories of playing these games' predecessors via LAN (legitimate copies, I might add), and, with that mode removed, I can't help feeling that an essential part of their DNA has been lost.

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