Category Archives: Games

Games

A Game: Empire Total War

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In a way, Empire is what Creative Assembly’s Total War series has always been building towards. Epic doesn’t even begin to describe its scope. Three distinct theatres, a dizzying multitude of major and minor factions, a greatly expanded strategic layer involving tech trees and multiple towns in each region, the ability to play naval battles in real-time mode for the first time and last but far from least, a spiffy new graphics engine so detailed and shiny that you can see the guns and buttons of your each of your soldiers gleaming in full HDR bloom.

Empire covers a relatively thin slice of history, but what glorious history it is! The French and American Revolutions, the rise of gunpowder and the apogee of the Age of Sail, the Age of Enlightenment and the beginnings of the globalized world. No one is ever going to mistake the Total War series as a replacement for a real history textbook, but this is as close as you’re going to get in a mass market video game. Total War fans already know the drill, but here it is anyway for those who have managed to miss out on it for the past 10 years.

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Games

Potholes on the Road to Independence

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In a moment of weakness, I decided that my next big game after finishing Far Cry 2 would be Empire: Total War. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved the Total War series ever since the first Medieval and I’m the guy who’d once wrote that I’d buy Total War set in just about any genre. Still, I have to admit that I start way more Total War campaigns than I actually get around to finishing and the standard formula might just be wearing a bit too thin for me. Plus, there’s the fact that the initial releases have always been buggy messes. I knew there was a good reason why I waited for the Gold Edition before buying Medieval 2.

Empire turned out to be far more of a mess than any of the previous releases. I’d had intermittent sound problems, multiple crashes to the desktop within a single play session and even out of memory errors. Some folks have reported corrupted savegames and campaigns that had to be abandoned due to irrecoverable crashes. Granted, the 30 March patch seems to have fixed most of these technical problems, but my first impressions have been irredeemably soured by all this.

Partly due to all the crashes, I’m still playing the “tutorial campaign” called the Road to Independence in which the player guides a fledgling America towards indepedence from the British Empire. One thing that has to be said is that the game is gorgeous. The naval battle portion in particular features ships so richly detailed it’s silly, because you’re unlikely to actually go in for such close-up views more than a handful of times. The strategic portion has been significantly revamped, apparently to make it play more like the Civilization games, a change that I have mixed feelings about and will go into more detail about later. As for the land battles, while it’s cool to see ranks of infantry firing guns at each other and seeing just how far your artillery can hit, the fact that all infantry can now fire missile weapons makes all of the factions a bit too similar to one another.

Anyway, I’m well on my way towards clearing the Brits out of North America completely and then we’ll see how much I like the real meat of the game, the Grand Campaign. Now, which nation should I play first?

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Games

The Path. Art or game?

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I suppose the constant stream of discounts on Steam is having the intended effect because I bought and played through The Path over the weekend. I have to admit that I’d never have bought the game if it weren’t for Tom Chick’s comments on it on Fidgit and the discussion thread on QT3. This is because The Path is as atypical a game as you can think of. In fact, it’s barely a game at all. Its website boasts it was designed for accessibility, meaning that there’s no combat, or hard puzzles or any of the other challenges you’d expect to find in a typical game.

Instead, it’s something that you experience rather than play. The game draws on the familiar story of Little Red Riding Hood (which like many other fairy tales is really quite horrific if you think through it). Six different girls, each with different personalities and dreams, need to walk through a forest to reach their grandmother’s house. Your job is to guide them there and you’re admonished to always stay on The Path! But can the girls (and you, the player) resist the temptation of wandering through the forest?

I probably shouldn’t post too much about it because a big part of the “gameplay” is actually about realizing what the “rules” are and how the “world” in this game works. The end result isn’t quite horror, but it is most certainly an extremely disturbing experience that will leave you wondering, in true David Lynch fashion, what the various elements mean. Do note that as the developers claim, while there’s no graphic violence or sexuality portrayed in game, there are plenty of allusions to it, and in many ways this is far more psychologically effective, making this one a game strictly for adults only.

One reason why I was drawn into the game in the first place was because I was intrigued by Tom Chick’s comments on how rare it is to have horror done well in games. In something like, for example, F.E.A.R. which touts itself as a horror game, the horror element doesn’t really work because the monsters are just another type of enemy to deal with. In order to really scare the player, a game needs to make the player feel truly helpless but this isn’t really possible in an action-based game. Adventure games like The Path is probably the best way to convey horror, but they end up being a sort of tightly directed experience with interactive elements. Still, I’d certainly recommend this one just because it’s so different and, yes, even genuinely scary. And hey, it only costs US$9 and takes about a couple of evenings to play through.

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Games

Far Cry 2 Tips

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I haven’t spent enough actual time in Far Cry 2 to call myself any kind of expert on it. Still, from my one play through of the game and miscellaneous advice I’ve gleaned from various forums, here are some tips that someone playing for the first time might find useful:

  • Buying a weapon provides an infinite supply of that weapon from any armoury. Also inside the armoury and each safe house are storage cases for each of the three weapons slots. Whatever weapon you put into a storage case will stay there regardless of where you access the case from. This allows you to arm yourself with a particular weapon while travelling to a mission location and then switch to another weapon at a nearby safe house once you get close to actually do the mission. You do have to purchase the cases as separate upgrades before you can use them.
  • Buying the vehicle upgrades increases the damage it can take while you’re driving it and greatly reduces the time it takes to repair it.
  • Stealth is a completely viable option, especially once you’ve purchased the camouflage suit upgrade. Do note that contrary to what you might expect, sneaking up to an enemy from behind and killing him with the machete is not stealthy because he will invariably cry out before he dies. You need to use a silenced weapon to headshot the enemy for him to die silently. Also note that if you leave the body when other enemies can see it, they will raise the alarm, ruining the stealth option.

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Games

A Game: Far Cry 2

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Out of all the things that have been said of Far Cry 2, one single line by Kieron Gillen resonates most with me: this is one awfully brave game. Consider, for example, that you likely spend more time driving around dirt paths than shooting at enemies. Or that in a game that is supposed to present you with a realistic recreation of Africa, the only people who populate it are invariably and implacably hostile to you. Or that instead of drawing inspiration from Hollywood action movies like so many shooters do, the source material here is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

All this is brave because Far Cry 2 is unashamedly and undoubtedly a shooter. Given the goals it tries to accomplish and the design elements it tries to incorporate, one would think that it would make more sense for it to be a role-playing game or an action adventure game. But it’s not only a shooter but a first-person shooter with all of the conventions and controls of the genre. You move around with the familiar WASD, right-clicking zooms in on an enemy, use number keys to select weapons and generally try to kill everyone in sight. There is no Gears of Wars style cover system. If you want to take cover from enemy fire, you manually move to put an object between you and the enemy just as you did back in Doom.

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Games

Making mazes in Defense Grid

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I’ve been slowly making my way through Defense Grid, the tower defense game that I posted about a while back. I’m down to the last two maps, but I’m holding off finishing them until I go back through every single previous map and get at least a Silver Medal on all of them. My wife loves watching me play this game and both of us enjoy figuring out the best way to build a maze on each of the maps. Most of the time though we’d come up with a pretty good maze for a map, then go search on YouTube for a video on how the real experts do it, and then kick ourselves for missing something that seems so obvious in retrospect.

Then when I go look at the leaderboards, I get absolutely blown away by the top scorers. Someone tell how is it possible to get more than 200,000 points and to place nearly 300 towers on a map? Cheats?

Games

The Dark Heart of Africa

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I’ve been looking to play something a little more actioney and a little less cerebral after finishing Space Rangers 2 earlier this month. Ideally, I’d be playing either Grand Theft Auto IV or Saint’s Row 2 right about now, but the PC ports of both of these games turned out to be nothing short of awful. I’ll probably break down and get one or both one of these days anyway, but not right now. Far Cry 2 wasn’t a game that was originally on my must-buy radar at all, but it generated some very interesting and conflicted discussion on QT3 and Tom Chick named it as his best game of 2008, so that’s how I found myself in the dark heart of Africa.

My first impressions of the game after its version of the introductory tram ride: man, is this game hard or am I just getting old? As per standard procedure when playing any type of shooter, I’d turned the difficulty level up one notch from normal. This is a habit I’d developed as shooters have become more and more mainstream and consequently easier. But at hardcore difficulty Far Cry 2 was kicking my ass without breaking a sweat. I’d be minding my own business in the jungle, come under fire and end up dying in short order while I’m running around like a headless chicken trying to see where the hell the bullets are coming from. I’m not ashamed to say that I quickly dropped back to normal difficulty. Things are much more manageable now, but still challenging enough that  get killed regularly if I’m just a little too reckless.

Other than being difficult, the game is also incredibly immersive. I’d followed the prevailing advice on QT3 and turned off music in the game to enhance the effects. I’ve actually been in Africa before, and I agree that this game nails it. Claustrophobic jungle trails that force you to rely on audio cues to know if any enemies are nearby. The overwhelming hugeness and openness of the savannah, so vast that it seems land and sky are joined and the world is a bubble around you. The graphics are quite Crysis level quality, but the fantastic environmental effects, day-night cycles and far greater variety in landscapes more than make up for that. So far, it also seems like it’s going to be quite a bit longer than Crysis or most shooters, so it’s looks like I’m going to be stuck in Africa for a while.

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