Category Archives: Games

Games

Racism and Nationalism in Medieval 2

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I’ve been playing Medieval 2 Total War for a while now. I’d passed on it when it was first released in late 2006 and only bought the Gold edition including the Kingdoms expansion earlier this year. Easily the most popular choice of nation when playing the Medieval games is England, partly due to a combination of cultural familiarity, its easily defensible starting location and the excellence of English longbowmen. I tried my first game with the Venetians who start out with a great navy but whose provinces are actually separated from one another but couldn’t make much progress. Venetians get hemmed in too much by their Italian cousins, the Milanese and the Sicilians, as well as the powerful Holy Roman Empire to the northwest and the Byzantine Empire to the east, so I ended up having to restart my game as the English in which I’m handily conquering the whole map.

One of my favourite things about this new version of Medieval are the pre-battle speeches that your generals make. The speeches made their debut in Creative Assembly’s previous game Rome Total War, but they’ve been greatly expanded here. Each major nation now has a different way of insulting each other and the personality traits of the general making the speech also influences what gets said. Check out the YouTube video I linked to for a great selection of these speeches. Playing as the English, my generals have called the French wine-sodden and arrogant, the Germans pox-ridden, the Sicilians sons of Satan and the Danish “scrofulous”, whatever that means. It’s awesome and doubly hilarious when a drunken or even outright insane general spouts off some utterly nonsensical stuff.

On a vaguely related note, here’s an Ebay listing for what must be the coolest auction ever. For the princely sum of least twenty five thousand British pounds, you can own a full size replica of a Roman siege catapult. It was built for a television show and now doesn’t fire, but it would be the perfect lawn ornament if you happen to live in a castle!

Games

Awesome Lego Sentry

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I’ve reinstalled Team Fortress 2 and I’ve been playing it on and off, mostly on the Malaysian Bolehnet server and some Singaporean servers. It’s especially funny to play on the Malaysian servers and hear people trash talk while joking about Anwar being online playing.

The above picture appears to be a TF2 engineer sentry made entirely out of Lego. I shamelessly stole it from the Lowyat forums.

Games

Mass Effect Tips

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As good as Mass Effect is, there are a number of things about it that aren’t documented properly in the manual and that I wished I knew when I started playing it. Here are some tips in case anyone is still making their way through the game.

  • Asteroid belts can contain resource deposits that can be surveyed. In fact, I believe that the only way to complete the survey mission is to survey asteroid belts. This is tedious to do since you basically have to mouse over the entire length of the belt to find if there is any object that you can interact with, just like the old point and click adventure games.

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Games

A Game: Mass Effect (PC)

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By all reasonable metrics, Mass Effect should be a thoroughly average game. Its FPS mechanics are mediocre at best, the vehicle portion of the game features a tank with laughably bouncy and unrealistic handling, many aspects of its interface are an exercise in frustration and its idea of a massive space station holding millions of inhabitants is a handful of sparsely populated rooms connected by elevators and corridors. Yet for all that it is still easily the best 2008 game that I’ve played so far this year and that’s because it’s a game that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Bioware’s latest and greatest RPG that was released for the PC only this year is a mishmash of game types. Superficially it bears a striking resemblance to its celebrated predecessor, Knights of the Old Republic, and indeed you can think of it as Bioware’s attempt to make another Star Wars RPG without actually having the rights to the license. However, instead of KOTOR’s turn-based combat mechanics that looked and felt real-time but were really determined by behind-the-scenes hit ratings and die rolls, Mass Effect is a fully-fledged, hit-box based FPS. In addition, certain segments of the game put you in control of the Mako, a sort of all-terrain wheeled tank armed with a cannon and a machinegun. At the same time, it’s also an RPG with a well developed story, nearly enough sidequests to rival Oblivion and a large amount of dialogue, all of which is wonderfully voice acted. Finally, you are given control of a starship with which to explore the galaxy and one of the many ways to earn money is to survey uncharted planets for resources. To long-time computer gamers, all of this is reminiscent of the classic game Starflight which is already sufficient reason to forgive many of the game’s flaws.

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Games

A Game: Assassin’s Creed (PC)

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For a game that got into the news so often for all the wrong reasons, beginning with the torrid Jade Raymond affair, to complaints about the unfamiliar controls to the early leak of the PC version and Ubisoft’s subsequent decision to sue the source of the leak for a ridiculous sum of damages, Assassin’s Creed turned out for me to a surprisingly good game. After all, the basic premise of the game sounds fantastic: play as a member of the Hashahin, the original brotherhood of assassins from which the English word “assassin” is itself derived, in the sand-box environment of the Holy Land while the Crusades are raging. There is plenty to be impressed with by this game, so it’s all the more disappointing that it gets so many basic elements so wrong.

First the good stuff. Most of the player’s time is spent controlling Altair, who starts out as an accomplished but somewhat cocky member of the brotherhood. The brotherhood’s aim, as stated by its leader Al Mualim,  is to achieve peace in the Holy Land, and as such Altair is sent to assassinate critical targets from both sides of the war, Saracen and Crusader, in order to put an end to the fighting. And I’m not joking when I say that Altair is an accomplished assassin. He can navigate the environment so well, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, clambering up walls and barrelling through crowds that he’d put Lara Croft to shame. He can walk up to a target and effortlessly kill someone so quietly with a hidden blade that someone standing ten paces away won’t even notice. All of these feats are easy to accomplish with the controls, even if they are a bit esoteric and take some effort to learn. Some critics have complained that the near-automatic execution of the parkour-style moves, since Altair will always perform the move most appropriate to the context and the environment, sacrifices actual gameplay for cool visuals. I heartily applaud it however. If I’m supposed to be controlling a skilled assassin, I don’t want to fight the controls to do the cool moves, I want to just be able to tell Altair what I want to do, and he’ll do it.

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Games, Politics

Consumer’s Association of Penang calls for ban of GTA

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I recently learned that the President of the Consumer’s Association of Penang wrote a letter that was published in The Star calling for Malaysia to follow Thailand and ban the Grand Theft Auto games. Anyway, I sent off an e-mail in reply. Here’s the full text, though I doubt that the CAP will care much about what I write.

To:   S.M. MOHAMED IDRIS,
President,
Consumers Association of Penang.

I have writing in response to your letter published in The Star on the 8th August 2008 calling for a ban on a video game you call “Grand Theft Auto”. I disagree with your letter in its entirety and take issue especially with the implicit stance that it is necessary, even desirable, for a government to restrict the freedoms of its adult citizens for their own purpoted good. However, I realize that I am not going to win any arguments against you on this matter, and so I shall concentrate on the factual errors in your letter.

  1. You write that the said game has been banned in Thailand. To the best of my knowledge, the game has not in fact been banned by the government of Thailand, instead its distributor has voluntarily withdrawn it from being sold.
  2. You refer to the incident in Thailand as a copycat crime. After reading a report of the incident published in Thailand (http://www.bangkokpost.net/040808_News/04Aug2008_news002.php), it is evident that it is not a copycat crime. That article contains errors as well, referring to the game in question as an online game when it is not, but it is nevertheless clear that the game is merely being used by the criminal as an excuse to rob taxis for money. Apparently he mentioned needing the money to play GTA every day, which makes no sense because GTA is not an online game which requires an ongoing subscription to play.
  3. You write that violent video games have previously been linked to expressions of violence and aggression in young people. You have not cited specific research papers in support of this point but I concede that it is true that many research papers have noted correlation between real-world aggression and video game playing. However, correlation does not equal causation and the correlation may exist simply because people who are already aggressive naturally gravitate towards violent video games. Read this Wikipedia article for an overview (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_controversy).
  4. You write as if officially banning the game in Malaysia would have any effect at all. It would not, since the vast majority of games in Malaysia are pirated. Ironically, by writing about this in a local newspaper you have just raised the game’s profile and ensured that many more people will be inclined to check out a pirated copy of it.
  5. By citing by the game’s undue  influence on young people, you imply that young people are the target audience. The game carries a Mature rating by the ESRB in the United States. If no equivalent ratings system exists in Malaysia, then that is a failing that should be rectified, but this is does not amount to justification for banning the game entirely. In fact, like many other non-gamers, you seem to labour under the misconception that games are for the young and hence must be regulated in that manner. This is not true. For example, in the U.S., the average gamer is aged 35 (http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp). As an adult gamer, and being proud of it, I resent your suggestion that you have the right to determine what is or is not good for me.

Respectfully,

Wan Kong Yew

Games

A Game: NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer

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If any RPG fan is still wondering whether or not to get this expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2, I have one single irrefutable argument to offer: Chris Avellone. That’s right, the lead designer of the celebrated classic Planescape: Torment is on the design team of Mask of the Betrayer, and, boy, does it show. From some of the craziest, oddest companions you can meet in any RPG since the afore-mentioned PS:T, a story of personal redemption that’s more about saving your own soul rather than the world to the multitude of genuine choices with lasting consequences, this is one of the very few RPGs that actually deserves the moniker “role-playing”.

Mask of the Betrayer picks up directly after the ambiguous ending of Neverwinter Nights 2. Following the player’s climatic battle against the King of Shadows, the entire cavern collapses and buries the player and his whole party. You wake up in a cave, but a different one, far, far away from the Sword Coast, disoriented from the cave-in and with only vague memories of what happened. A female Red Wizard of Thay retrieves you from a binding circle within the cave and as you make your escape, you discover a dark hunger within you that consumes spirits and you must either find a way to end this curse or have it destroy you from within.

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