Category Archives: Games

Games

Massacring natives for fun and profit in the New World

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Since I’ve bought the Medieval 2 Gold Edition which includes the Kingdoms expansion, I thought it’d be a waste if I didn’t play any of it at all. The expansion consists of four additional campaigns, each of which is actually a separate installation and executable. The campaigns are the Americas, covering the arrival of the Europeans at the Americas in the 16th century; the Britannia campaign, set in the 13th century during which various factions fought for control of the British Isles; the Crusades campaign covering the Third Crusade in the 12th century and the Teutonic campaign covering the struggle between Christian and pagan forces for control of what is now Germany.

I chose to play the Americas campaign first because it’s easily the one that’s most different from regular Medieval 2. Basically you can choose to either play as New Spain, representing the newly arrived Spanish forces, or one of the established nations in the Americas, mostly meaning Mayans or the Aztecs in the south or the Appacheans in the north. It’s pretty obvious that playing as New Spain is where most of the fun lies, what with the special mechanics and scripted events in place for that faction, so that’s what I chose.

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Games

Playing GRID

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Now I’m not much of a driver, whether in games or in real life. I’m dabbled in my fair share of racing games over the years, but I’ve never been a particularly enthusiastic fan of them until I tried GRID. Now I realize that GRID is really somewhere between an arcade racer and a true simulator, and until now I’m been playing with the realism dial turned “low”, but, damn, this game still beats every other racing game I’ve ever tried hands down. If the only racing games you’ve ever played are the Need for Speed series and its ilk, you really owe it to yourself to check out real racing feels like. You can just feel the wheels burning rubber on the asphalt.

The highest praise that I can give it is that whenever something goes wrong in a race, I know that it’s my fault and I know what exactly I should do to fix it. Constrast that with the NFS games’ tendency to up the difficulty level by randomly having traffic pop up at suspiciously convenient times for you to crash into. There’s no silly rubber-banding as well. If you’re that good, you are free to leave your AI opponents in the dust. Plus the replay that you get after winning a race is probably better than 90% of the car chases you see in movies.

Read Tom Chick’s list of 10 reason why you should be playing GRID if you’re still not convinced.

Games, News & Politics

China Taxes MMO Gold Farmers

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Anyone who plays MMOs will know how insistently gold sellers spam their services. Many of these outfits get their gold (or equivalent virtual goods) from legions of Chinese players for whom farming the virtual currency and selling it to more affluent players mostly from western countries at a mark-up has become their primary occupation.

Now The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese government is getting in on the action by imposing taxes, now set at 20%, on profits earned from such sales. I’d imagine that the move is less as an effort for the state to gain tax revenues from the growing industry than to dampen it and keep it under surveillance. If virtual currency can be freely convertible into Chinese yuan, it’s easy to imagine that it might one day cause problems in the greater financial system, given how tightly the yuan is regulated.

What will be interesting, as the article notes, are the implication this has for the legal rights of owners of virtual goods. If the Chinese government legitimizes the trade of virtual goods, does that mean that the players own the goods as opposed to the MMO companies?

Games

A Game: The Witcher (Enhanced Edition)

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If you’ve ever felt that every fantasy RPG always rehashes the same generic tropes over and over again, then you might want to check out The Witcher. The first release of the game last year by its Polish makers at CD Projeckt suffered from numerous technical hitches and a Polish-to-English translation that sometimes left players scratching their heads. Thankfully, the newly released Enhanced Edition of the game, available as free download for customers who had bought the original, fixes many of these problems and includes extended and fully voiced translations, so RPG fans have no excuse to put off buying this gem, even if it is still a bit unpolished.

The game is based on the Polish book series of the same name by Andrzej Sapkowski and as such is set in a medieval fantasy world with a distinctively eastern European twist. It is a grim and dangerous place where at night simple folk bar their doors and huddle safe in their houses while monsters roam at will. The player takes on the role of one Geralt of Rivia, the most famous of the few remaining witchers in the world who are tasked with defending humanity from these monsters, for a fee of course. As the game explicity states, witchers aren’t noble knights in shining armour, and as you’ll soon learn over the course of this game, there’s no unalloyed good in the world since everyone, and I mean everyone, has an angle.

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Games

Shout-out in The Witcher

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I noticed a sarcastic shout-out to a popular novel while playing The Witcher the other day, so I saved a screenshot of it. The full text as follows:

This was popularized by Bronze Dan and begins with a convoluted theory about the derivation of the word Grail. A few tortuous pages in, we learn the Holy Grail is actually Sang-Real, which in the elder tongue denotes royal, “hallowed blood.”

I’ll leave it to the reader to notice which book is being alluded to.

I’ve just finished the game last night. The ending was a real shocker. Dramatically powerful, yes, but also painfully cruel to the player. Look out for a full write-up soon. In the meantime, I’m playing the two downloadable adventures for it, The Price of Neutrality and Side Effects, available from the official site of the game.

Games

Sex Cards in The Witcher

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I’m now playing the recently released Enhanced Edition of The Witcher. I’d originally bought the game at the beginning of year but put off playing it after reports came in about its lack of polish, garbly translation from the original Polish, frequent crashes and extremely long loading times. The Enhanced Edition of the game, which was made available as a free download to customers who had already purchased the original, fixes many of those problems, and I’m happy to say that even though there are still too many crashes for my comfort, I’m very happy with the game. I’ll write a full review when I’m finished with it, but so far, the game easily matches Mass Effect.

One of the most controversial aspect of The Witcher are the infamous sex cards. As an M-rated game, it presents plenty of opportunities for sexual activities, and it’s fair to say that the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia, is more than a bit of a ladies’ man. Each time you manage to bed a lady in the game, an entry is recorded in your journal together with a “sex card” of the lady in question, something like a collectible card. I was leery of this aspect of the game at first, but after having played the game for over a week now, I have to say that it’s damn refreshing to play a no-holds-barred, mature RPG that doesn’t skirt around sex and morality for once.

I note however that the copy of the game I purchased in Malaysia turns out to be the U.S. version, which is censored. The original Polish and European versions of the game had uncensored sex cards and in-game textures. Of course, this being the Internet age and all, it’s easy enough to get a look at the uncensored versions if you know where to look.

Games

A Game: Medieval 2

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I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with Creative Assembly’s Total War series. On the love side of the equation, the basic formula of a turn-based strategic game coupled with real-time combat, unchanged since Shogun: Total War was released in 2000, is supremely satisfying. The combination of deep decision-making played out on the grand stage of history with a graphically rich and detailed tactical combat phase just scratches all the right strategy itches. At this point, I’d play total war anything. Robotech: Total War? Warhammer Fantasy: Total War? Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Total War? If they’ll make it I’ll buy it.

On the other hand, CA’s failure to update the interface for the strategic portion of the game is an endless source of frustration. It is wholly unacceptable that the Total War games still don’t have the basic tools to streamline gameplay, such as the ability to quickly check which units still have unused movement points, that the Civilization series has had since its inception. This means that actually playing through an epic campaign is unnecessarily daunting and time consuming. Medieval 2 continues this trend and actually adds to it by making the strategic portion more complex compared to previous games. This means that the latest game in the series is epic, beautiful and grand, but, boy, but does it take a long time to actually get through a campaign.

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