Gaming Signal: October 2007 Archives

Friday October 19, 2007

Review: Portal

Portal isn't just the best game with cake ever, it's also an incredibly fun mind-bending puzzler as well. You start out as a test subject for Aperture Science, competitor to Black Mesa, and the friendly computer takes you through a series of tasks to measure your reaction time and spatial awareness. These increasingly difficult tasks make use of the Portal device: a gun that allows you to place portals on various surfaces and travel between them.

This is the heart of the game. Each 'room' is a puzzle that you must solve using the portal device. They start simple, with you moving between two openings, and ramp up from there to the cool puzzles that make use of inertia and have you 'falling' between portals to reach higher platforms. I can't say enough about how well designed these puzzles are. At the later levels, the puzzles are quite challenging without being ridiculously difficult. If you give each room a minute or two of thought, you can figure out what you need to do. There are also certain surfaces that a portal can fit on and finding these will help you on your way. These puzzles are what make Portal fun and addictive to play.

But there actual story isn't bad either. For a game that you can complete in under 4 hours total, the plot isn't very deep, but it makes up for that with it's twists. More is going on than you realize and the goal you are trying to reach through the first part of the game ends up being nearly the half-way point. Once you reach the cake, things take an unexpected turn.

The only characters you see throughout the game are you, and the computer. Thus, to make this game work, Valve imbued the computer with a ton of character and has it say some really funny lines. The computer is your basic passive aggressive 'AI', and she has some, um, quirks, that make her interesting. The dialog you hear is well done, and the voice acting is terrific. There were several times during the game where I laughed out loud. That doesn't happen very often during a game.

It's also amazing that, for an FPS, you don't actually shoot anybody. In fact, you don't even have any real weapons at all. Valve has taken what is essentially a series of physics puzzles and created an engrossing, entertaining and funny game out of them. And at around 4 hours, its just the right length. Of course, once you finish new 'advanced' levels are unlocked for you to play on. And speaking of finished, the end credits is possibly the best credits/song combo for a game. Ever. The song, written by Jonathn Coulton, is amazing and fits the theme of the game to a tee. The credits also fit into the game seamlessly and the combination is awesomely funny. If you want to spoil yourself because you won't be playing Portal in the near future (and just WTF is wrong with you???), then you can search on YouTube for 'Portal credits' and find one of the billion videos. And no, I won't supply you with a link. If you can't bothered to play the game, I can't be bothered to point you to a video...

As part of The Orange Box, Portal is a must play. In fact, that whole package is worth the money. But Portal is also available from Steam for $20. I'm undecided whether that is a decent price for a 4-hour game, but the presentation and the technical details are so polished and well done, $20 is a steal. You simply must play this game.

And for your entertainment, Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation reviews The Orange Box, including Portal:

Saturday October 13, 2007

Bioware / Pandemic sold to EA

Thursday, Electronic Arts announced it was buying the holding company that owns Bioware and Pandemic from Evolution Partners (the company that bought both of them previously) for $855 million. EA's stock was up 5% on Friday as a result. While this will result in a lot of money for the owners of Bioware and Pandemic (who all were owners of Evolution Partners) I have to wonder how good this will be ultimately. EA isn't exactly known for innovative games and I fear this will put pressure on the studios to churn out sequel after sequel rather than innovate. Put it this way - Mass Effect might not have gotten made in favor of a bunch of formula KOTOR and Battlefront rehash. Time will tell - I hope that Bioware has enough overall success to keep itself independent. But if you start to see Drs Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk taking a much reduced role in the company, look out.

Thursday October 11, 2007

Zero Punctuation Reviews: Tabula Rasa (Beta)

As a big SF fan, I was really looking forward to Tabula Rasa. It's definitely SF and the promise of breaking traditional MMO gameplay elements was intriguing. Then I played the beta and I discovered that TR is basically the same as every other MMO, only this time you're killing rats. In space. For faction. But don't let my lame attempts at describing TR dissuade you. I'll let Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation, via The Escapist, explain for me. (Caution: NSFW language. Very funny, but NSFW).

Sunday October 07, 2007

Sweet Han Solo In Carbonite, For Your PSP

So there I was, minding my own business, reading my email when LucasArts 'invites' me the the Tuesday launch of Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron. The catch is you have to be at the Playstation Store in San Francisco and be one of the first 200 people in line, but if you are, and you purchase the limited edition Star Wars Battlefront pack (and really, that PSP right there is almost worth it), then you will get a nice Han Solo in carbonite case for your PSP. So when you tell your PSP, "I love you", it can say, "I know", just before you encase it carbonite. What a complete Star Wars geek you are....

Too bad the last Battlefront game on the PSP had horrendously sucky controls.

Friday October 05, 2007

Bungie, The "Independent" Development House

Today, Microsoft and Bungie announced that the relationship between the two is evolving. Basically, Bungie will be it's own company with Microsoft maintaining an equity interest (those are the words in the press release.) Furthermore, the release indicates that MS will still own the rights to all things Halo and there is some speculation that MS will also own any new properties created by Bungie. So ultimately, what does this announcement mean? I have no clue and it just sounds like a mechanism to garner more press for Microsoft and Halo, but the press release reads like this will somehow allow Bungie to be "more creative". I know the market is full of me-too products and the chances of having something truly unique show up is a risk many publishers are unwilling to take. I wish the new endeavor luck, but this smells much like the conversation I once had with an ex-girlfriend about our evolving relationship. She evolved to sleep with somebody else, and I evolved to be rid of her. But that is a different story - I would like to hope that this news would allow Bungie to build games for platforms like the DS and the PSP, and I believe that a DS title might be feasible given Microsoft's lenient view towards Nintendo. Only time will tell though...

Image courtesy of Joystiq since it is pretty good...

Thursday October 04, 2007

Best Game in 3 Years?

The glorified blog that is Gamespot just gave a rating of 9.5 to a PC game for the first time in 3 years. To provide a reference, here are the other games that have gotten a rating of 9.5 or higher according to Gamespot:

Rating	Game	Snarky Commentary
9.6	Diablo	OK hard to argue here, this game was excellent
9.5	World of Warcraft	I give it a 9.5 for MMOs, but I don't think it is fair to compare a game with a hefty subscription cost to other non-subscription-based games
9.5	Unreal Tournament	I was always more into Doom/Quake than UT, but I can understand how others loved it. The fact that it was multi-player only limits it to me.
9.5	Command & Conquer: Red Alert	This one rocked - very fun solo and multiplayer
9.5	Grand Prix II	A warning in the review notes you need a Pentium 133 to play at 640x480.

Take a good look at that list, now notice what is missing. Where is Half-Life or Quake? Where is a game from Bioware? Where is Battlefield 2, Grand Theft Auto, Warcraft or Starcraft? They all got rated less than these.

So what game has joined this illustrious group? A game I'd barely heard of titled World in Conflict from Swedish developer Massive Entertainment who had previously developed the Ground Control series of RTS games. You can check out the review on the site, but suffice it to say it is glowing. Can this game (which is also apparently available for the XBox 360) possibly hold a candle to some of the other great games it is rated above? We'll have to see! If you've played the game, let us know.

Best Halo 3 Review?

Zero Punctuation has reviewed the behemoth that is Halo 3 for The Escapist, and I think he hit my feelings pretty dead on. I played in the beta a bit and just could not get into it. I will warn you that there is some not safe language in it, but it is a great review. I just wish we had thought of it.

Monday October 01, 2007

Gamefly and Demo Downloads

Given that so many new-gen console games have downloadable demos, how useful are services like Gamefly? I used to subscribe to Gamefly to try out new console games before plunking down the major bucks to buy them. Now I can simply spend time with the demo. Maybe to test PSP games before buying...

The only other reason I used Gamefly was to get used games really cheap. But to pay $15/month to get games cheaper isn't, in itself, all that useful.

What do you think?

First Impressions: Hellgate: London Beta

This is a title I've been watching for a long time and was excited to get into the beta.

The Good:
The zones are created dynamically, like Diablo. Unlike Diablo, however, these zones are entirely 3D, and it is impossible to tell where one 'block' of landscape ends and another begins. In short, the maps look quite nice. I played on a 7900 GS at 1680x1050 resolution, and besides the load times, the game seemed to do a good job keeping up.

Character classes are varied, and there are a lot of them. I played a Summoner, who, among other things, summons elementals to fight the forces of evil. By the time I was fourth level I had 4 little fire elementals with me (I found some pants that gave me an extra level of Summon Elemental) and these little guys would go off ahead of me, often clearing out demons before I'd even see them.

The gameplay is very, very Diablo-esque, straight down to the dynamic-created and unidentified loot. And the loot, in my opinion is the whole reason to play these games.

The Bad:
I'm going to focus on things that I'm not sure they'll be able to fix before going live. There were plenty of other problems that I"m sure they'll be able to fix and that I will not mention here.

It's necessary to zone to each map, as opposed to other action RPG's where there are no load times between 'zones'. And the load times were horrendous. It never took less than a minute to load zones.

Pay-to-Play. I'm not sure about this model. Sure, at $10 it'll be cheaper than most MMO's (though not LOTRO, which I play) but at this point I think I'm out on paying yet another monthly fee to play a game.

The Ugly:
I have 2GB system memory plus a 512MB ReadyBoost flash drive, and with nothing else running on my Vista system I got frequent messages from Windows saying that the system was low on memory. The Task Manager showed that HG:L was consuming 1.8GB. Load times between zones are atrocious.

Summary:
While I see great potential for this game, it has a long ways to go before becoming a final product. I didn't mention any of the problems that they'll absolutely need to fix before going live - and there were LOTS of them. The game is supposed to be on store shelves for Halloween, which means they need to go GM in just a couple weeks! On the other hand, I was in the Star Wars: Galaxies beta, and that somehow miraculously came together in just a couple short weeks and was quite stable at release. I'm definitely going to shell out the bucks to pick this up, as I still had a positive experience even with all of the problems. Here's hoping they can fix them all before launch!