Category Archives: Games

Games

A Game: Midnight Club LA Remix (PSP)

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While I’m been away from my PC over the past week, I’ve been indulging my gaming habit with this gem of a game on my PSP. It’s essentially a shrunk down version of Midnight Club: Los Angeles for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 but it still packs an astonishing amount of content and will likely delight any racing fan for a good long while. It delivers seriously intense racing experiences, a very satisfying sense of progression over time and despite being somewhat repetitive and frustratingly difficult at times, a tremendous sense of achievement when you’ve finally won some of the harder races.

Midnight Club LA Remix is essentially an open world racer in which you drive around a complete and beautifully detailed city to find races to participate in, earning reputation, unlocking rewards and making money along the way. One of the things I liked best about the game is how much it felt like an RPG. Starting as a virtual unknown in a old and clunky car, you’ll painstakingly progress towards the flashiest and sleekest Mercedes and Lamborghinis. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto series, Remix uses actual cars and motorcycles from real world brands, so there’s that additional sense of realism.

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Games

A Quick Guide to the Ljosalfar

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Far from it for me to call myself any sort of expert on Fall from Heaven 2, but I thought there might be some interest in some simple guides for playing each of the factions in the game. They’ll include both stuff from my individual playing experiences and advice that I’ve read elsewhere on the net, most notably from the Civfanatics forums. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually complete playthroughs for each of the factions, but I’ll keep it up for as long as it holds my interest.

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Games

A Hero for a day

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The bad news is I’ve still yet to receive my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, so no new game for me. The good news is that since I’m leaving on holiday on Thursday anyway, I probably shouldn’t start a new game for real just yet, so I decided to download a free trial for yet another MMO. The game I picked was City of Heroes, one of the more unique MMOs out there and one that I’ve often wondered about.

Until Champions Online launches later this year, CoH is still the only MMO that lets you play as a superhero (or a supervillain if you so choose). This means that it has an extremely powerful and versatile character creation system and is set in a contemporary cityscape, the so-called Paragon City. Unusually for an MMO, it has no auto-attacks. All attacks are essentially powers that must be manually activated. Furthermore, characters in CoH can physically obstruct one another and a crude physics system allows characters to be knocked down or even blown away a fair distance when hit by the appropriate power.

A few things were apparent from the first moment I started up the game. This game is old and looks it. Not only is the graphics engine terribly dated by now, but its interface, user friendliness and general game design all mark it as very much a pre-World of Warcraft MMO. What’s surprising is that even though CoH launched only a few months earlier than WOW, it looks a lot older, with plain textures and blocky polygons and is far less polished.

The character creation system is indeed as powerful as advertised and to me was probably the most fun part of my short trial. While the combat system felt suitably visceral compared to other MMOs, I was bothered by the fact that although characters use their powers on each other, there’s next to nothing that they can do with their powers to the environment. This felt silly to me and detracted from the experience. You’re not superpowered unless you can throw cars around and blow buildings up in my book. I was annoyed that gameplay seemed to consist mostly of grinding on random mobs or running missions in buildings with the same layouts over and over again. It reminded me unpleasantly of my very first MMO experience with Anarchy Online.

One nice thing that I noticed was that players were generally serious about their character and took the time to design a cool costume and picking an appropriate name. People who are already used to the multitude of dumb and meaningless names in MMOs should know how significant this is. Unfortunately, this game is still too dated and too clunky to warrant any extended interest on my part. I am however looking forward to Champions Online.

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Games

A Game: Fall from Heaven 2

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One of the most important lessons any aspiring designer can learn is to heed Sid Meier’s dictum that a good game is a series of interesting decisions. This is precisely what the dark fantasy-themed Fall from Heaven 2 is all about. There is no point in the game where a particular path of action becomes so overbearingly obvious as to make the choice a non-decision. While the ultimate objective remains, as in any 4X game, to achieve complete dominance over the other factions, there are many different paths to this end and countless means within each path to advance along it.

Fall from Heaven 2 of course benefits from being a mod of Civilization 4 which provides it with a sound base to work on, but the new mechanics, factions, units, religions and events it adds makes it a worthy game more than capable of standing on its own. The cornucopia of choices begins with choosing one of a total of 21 available factions. Each faction generally has two different leaders available. Then there’s a total of 7 religions to pick from, each of which offers synergies different enough to drastically alter your playstyle. Next, you’ll want to think about which victory condition to shoot for. In addition to the ones already in Civilization 4, the Alpha Centauri victory is replaced by the Tower of Mastery victory inspired by the venerable Master of Magic game and there’s a religious Altar of Luonnatar victory condition.

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Games

Greatest strategy game ever?

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My copy of Grand Theft Auto IV still hasn’t arrived yet but I’m not unhappy because I’m fully occupied with Fall from Heaven 2 at the moment. This may have started life as a mere “mod” for Civilization 4, but it’s so complete and fully featured that I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a full game in its own right. Builds of it has been circulating since 2006 but the development team only announced it as being feature complete in December 2008 so I’m not feeling too guilty about waiting until now to invest time into it. Hey, if I’m going to put dozens of hours into it, I want the finished and polished package!

For players already used to Civilization 4, a simple glance at the screen reveals how much work has gone into this project: new models and artwork for the different units and buildings of the 21 factions, new terrain types and effects with associated art and sound assets, a revamped UI to incorporate the additional gameplay elements and even a detailed card mini-game within the game! By far the greatest accomplishment however is that while a faction in Civilization 4 is differentiated from its peers only by its leader traits and a unique unit and building, all of the factions in Fall from Heaven 2 are so different that it’s like playing a new game with each of them.

Not only do each of the factions have numerous unique units and buildings, they also incorporate unique gameplay mechanics. The Grigori faction for example, can produce Adventurers as Great Persons, effectively powerful heroes that can be customized according to your needs. The Calabim faction stands out by being the only one able to field vampires, and, yes, these really are as powerful as one would imagine them to be and can feed on your cities’ excess population. In addition to all that, the choice of religion also opens up new units, buildings, spells and civics.

All of this makes for a combination of rich and interesting choices that I’ve never seen since Alpha Centauri. Plenty of people have already named Civilization 4 as one of the greatest strategy games of all time, but I can confidently say that Fall from Heaven 2 improves upon it in every conceivable way. Watch this blog for updates as I explore the myriad possibilities of this amazing game.

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Games

An interlude in Middle Earth

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Since I’m done with Empire for a while, I’ve been looking for something a bit more action-oriented. I’d already decided that it would either be Grand Theft Auto IV or Saint’s Row 2, and I’m slightly embarrassed that I ended up choosing GTA after having written this post. It seems that the PC ports of both of these games are awful, but Saint’s Row 2 is an order of magnitude worse, so GTA it is.

It’s going to take some time to get to me however because it’s backordered over at Pcgame.com.my so in the meantime, I thought I’d take advantage of the free trial of Lord of the Rings Online, one of the MMOs I’ve always been curious about. I’d always pictured LotRO as a sort of World of Warcraft 2.0 set in Middle Earth and I’ve heard good things about the Shire starting area for hobbits so I went ahead and downloaded the client and made myself a trial account.

No surprise that the game looks and feels a lot like WOW. Yes, instead of exclamation and question marks on top of the heads of quest givers, you have rings instead. Cute. What was surprising to me was that despite being able to copy so much from WOW, how unpolished it still is. Everything from the launcher, to the little icons for skills and abilities to how the UI doesn’t scale to your resolution, just reminds of how much better WOW does things. Of course, LotRO has a leg up on WOW in that its graphical engine is visibly superior, especially when looking at the landscape, but I found myself missing WOW‘s art direction.

As for world building, while I can agree that the Shire does indeed look superbly realized, I can’t help but roll my eyes at how the game breaks the lore in so many ways. Hobbits fighting men and even dwarves in the Shire? Traders in Michel Delving selling weapons to hobbits? I know that all this is pretty much necessary in an MMO, but it still induces severe nerd rage in me.

Anyway, I enjoyed my brief stay in Middle Earth and made it a point to visit some particular places of interest that I remember from the books, such as the Party Tree, but I don’t really see the long-term appeal in playing this. It actually made me WOW for a while. Still, it was free so I can’t complain too much and I got a good couple of days’ entertainment out of it.

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Games, Philosophy

What makes a game fun?

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As someone who has been a gamer since I first laid hands on the original IBM Personal Computer in primary school, the question of what actually makes a game “fun” is something that I often ponder. This recently popped on QT3 as a loosely related tangent in a discussion on whether or not gaming can be an addiction. One particular poster made an observation so insightful that I simply need to put it here:

What games actually do, imho, is give you sheer, unadulterated happiness.

How? The reason is simple. A psychologist called Mihaly Czikzhentmihalyi (sp?) discovered (I think in the 60s and 70s) through extensive questionnaires with statistically quite large samples, the secret of ordinary human happiness, and it’s laughably simple – basically, if you go through life setting measurable goals that are just outside your comfort zone to attain, and then attain those goals, and then move on to pick a new, slightly higher-level goal, etc., etc., etc., you will be happy.

It’s exactly this progression of increasing powers and ever-increasingly-difficult goals that games give you in a miniature, abstract form, and that make them so addictive – little jags of happiness as you set and attain mini-goals, constantly excelling yourself in skill, the attainment of lewt, the discovery of new stuff, etc., etc.

Of course, theoretically, we should all be getting that kind of happiness in real life, through our careers, family, etc., and most of us probably do, but sometimes life isn’t so forthcoming, things are difficult, and it’s nice to have a happiness-producing substitute.

In a response to a question from me, he posted a link to Wikipedia about the research he cited which is here. Pretty interesting stuff, no? I hope to expand on this later.