Archive for category games
Mass Effect 2: a few steps forward, and a few steps back.
Posted by The Management in games on February 19, 2010
Mass Effect 2 has been out for a few weeks now, and everyone seems to be raving about its improvements over the original. The framerate is smoother, the graphics have received an overall upgrade, loading times have been reduced, dialogues can be interrupted with paragon/renegade actions, the combat is better, etc. Most of these claims are undeniably true, although some are a bit subjective.
At least one of the female characters got a hair-upgrade.
For example, I enjoyed the first game’s combat quite a bit. Its weapons contained unlimited ammo but were always in danger of overheating, giving the action a certain sense of rhythm. The characters’ powers/abilities such as Lift and Stasis also provided tactical options and visual “oomph” that’s a bit lacking in the sequel. Of course they’ve been offset by other additions to the gameplay, so it’s not a simple downgrade.
The game actually feels closer to Gears of War now — not as many variables to juggle, manual cover, more visceral feedback, etc. Both systems are good, though, just different, so arguing about them is a bit of a moot point.
The creepy husks are back! I always thought that they were underused in the original, both gameplay and story-wise.
There are other, smaller changes that didn’t sit well with me (such as controlling the dinky spaceship model on the otherwise impressive galaxy map), but what I see as ME2’s major failings — especially when compared to its predecessor — are its story and narrative, and the overall homogenization of its gameplay.
The actual story of ME2 is composed of three main points: bad aliens show up, a MacGuffin is retrieved to combat the aliens, the aliens get blown up. That’s it. There’s very few revelations, very little progression, and the aliens’ motives — and the end battle — are pretty ludicrous. There’s just not enough meat on the bones here, especially for a game that’s 20+ hours long.
The main reason for this is that ME2 is structured around a “suicide mission” akin to that of The Dirty Dozen. This premise works well for the movie as a concrete plan is hatched and the recruits have a clear motive for signing up: they’re all convicts fighting for their freedom. ME2 follows a similar structure, but only one of the characters — a scientist who can research the aliens’ technology — has a logical connection to the story. The other 10 (or 11, depending on how you look at it) are mostly badasses who sort of tag along.
Maybe it’s because they somehow know that the player will spend the majority of the game running around solving their personal problems (usually with guns) while awaiting the go-ahead to save the galaxy?
Of course there's still sex in the game, but now with even more clothes on.
Either way, the mission itself is vague, revolving around a harebrained scheme to somehow strike at the enemy’s homeworld. There’s quite a few logical plot-holes here, and the whole thing comes across a little forced.
ME2 also lacks the interesting NPCs of the original. The Council and Captain Anderson don’t seem too concerned that their privileged commando is not dead and has actually joined a terrorist group, and there’s no equivalent to Saren and his villainous cronies. Instead, the galaxy turns out to be a very small place where numerous characters from ME1 make perfunctory appearances. It’s neat at first, but eventually wears thin as the player wades through a perpetual stream of serendipitous run-ins.
Commander Shepard's return to the Citadel proves very anti-climactic.
The gameplay changes fare better for the most part.
A large portion of ME1 has been been cut down and streamlined, and there are plenty of general improvements (although the UI is still pretty bad). The new approach to missions and progression is so consistently predictable, though, that it gives off a vibe of exploring a game rather than a world.
Each major location has a safe, single-map hub from which the combat missions are accessed. The player is never in any danger while exploring these areas, and the missions themselves are generally shorter and even more linear than in the original. For the most part they also revolve around recruiting new characters and gaining their loyalty, but lack the gameplay and aesthetic variety found in the story-centric quests.
Mass Effect 2 focuses more on the legally dubious areas of the galaxy. They look pretty enough, but generally lack the aesthetic variety of the original.
The completely optional side-quests have replaced the Mako-exploration, and are even shorter. They usually involve some rudimentary puzzle-solving and provide extra variety, but are very hit and miss. The bigger problem is that they’re all the same length and don’t offer anything special. The Mako-exploration from the first game was flawed, but at least it created a great sense of scope and exploration that’s missing in the sequel.
ME2’s side-quests contain no hidden characters, no special weapons, and no significant surprises of any kind. Just like with the game’s other missions, you soon learn exactly what to expect instead of being awed by the wonders of alien worlds.
Although Shepard now has many more customization options, the other characters' outfits no longer change based on their equipment.
Of course there are other things to harp on, but the overall game is quite good. It’s just a shame that during BioWare’s sprint to fix the complaints of the original game, the company forgot some of the things that made it notable in the first place.
Borderlands bits.
Posted by The Management in games on February 5, 2010
Borderlands became something of a media darling when it was released late last year, and it’s currently being supported with lots of downloadable content. I could never quite bring myself to finish it, though, but I got close, and I jotted down some of its pros and cons along the way.
Borderlands' relatively seamless character selection.
- The intro of Borderlands — complete with the song that accompanied the TV ads — is filled with personality. However, beyond its first 5 minutes, Borderlands quickly loses its ambiance and becomes a fairly sterile game. The cell shading is pretty enough, but the world is very repetitive and its denizens seem to be permanently nailed down to the ground. My guess is that this was a conscious decision to simplify NPC interactions a la Diablo, but it comes across a little drab and uninspired.
One of the game's more impressive boss battles.
- The character classes in Borderlands are all actual characters, i.e., playing the Sniper means playing as Mordecai, which is a clever way of instilling some immediate flavour to the roster.
- Each character possesses only a single ability that is activated with a dedicated button press. This actually works out quite well, with all the other skills being either passive, “always-on” on traits, or bonuses that are activated directly through the player’s actions, e.g., receiving a bonus to the rate of fire once a few enemies are killed in a short window of time.
- A few of the quests have some scripted events like a mining facility blowing up, but the majority are rather dull. For the most part, the quests involve killing individual targerts and collecting items, and come across almost randomly generated rather than designed.
- The stores found in the game all contain a special “sale” slot. The items in these slots are mid to high tier early on in the game, and are a nice bonus to the regular inventories. They’re also accompanied by timers that count down in real time, creating a pretty effective “get ‘em while they last!” feeling.
Stylized characters with stylized intros, definitely a far cry from the Borderlands' space marine like roots.
- Borderlands’ enemies are often susceptible to certain “elemental” modifiers (corrosive, incendiary, electric, etc.), and some even contain specific weak spots. These might not be immediately obvious as they’re not exactly glowing red spheres, but damage amounts clearly indicate that shooting an enemy from behind might yield better results than unloading into its armoured head.
- Much like in MMOs, enemies occupy distinct areas and are grouped together by their power levels. These levels are not tied to their appearance, though, so it’s not uncommon to encounter the same scrawny punk at level 5 and level 20.
- The health of the enemies, especially the bosses, can be bizarrely high. The only way to defeat some of the quest targets with my character build was to get them stuck on the map’s geometry so I could safely shoot ‘em for 10 minutes straight, often running out of ammo in the process.
- Ammo in general is plentiful, although inconsistently distributed. It’s pretty common to go for long stretches of time without any bullets for the character’s main weapons, something that made my comparatively weak but rechargeable alien weapon indisposable. Well, that is until I found an apparently cheap item that respawned ammo at a lightning fast pace.
The less said about the game's vehicles, the better...
- Randomly generated weapons are one of the game’s high points, consisting of multiple visual pieces, elemental modifiers, and even unique bullet behaviour, e.g., the shotgun fires multiple projectiles with each round, while the alien weaponary launches energy beams that travel in expanding sine waves.
Of course the weapons also contain various statistics such as base damage, rate of fire, clip size, range, and reload speed, but the game doesn’t visually indicate how these attributes are affected by the player’s own skills. This makes it very difficult to gauge a weapon’s usefulness just from its description, which is a pretty big issue considering how often new weapons are obtained.
- The “Save Your Life” mechanic kicks in whenever the character’s health if fully depleted. During these phases, the screen goes monochrome and the stationary player is given a few precious seconds to kill an enemy in order to be resurrected.
This works really well and makes intense firefights less frustrating, although it can also be a bit annoying when the character dies while killing the last enemy in the area. A simple timer that auto-resurrects the player if left unmolested for a few seconds would’ve solved the issue.
The elegance of Continuity.
Posted by The Management in design, games on December 12, 2009
Every once in a while, I check out a batch of interesting-looking Flash games. Most of them lose their charm after a few minutes, but here and there an occasional gem crops up. Continuity is one of these gems.
The game’s gotten plenty of publicity so it doesn’t really need my attention, but I did want to talk a bit about its execution. Combining platforming with a tile sliding puzzle is a clever genre-mashup, but it’s Continuity’s overall package that grabbed my attention.
The first level contains only closed off tiles, with one tile cleverly serving as the controls layout, and the other taking the role of filler to keep the tile sliding mechanic consistent.
The visuals are sparse and abstract, but also very clean. Two music tracks accompany the action, one in the platforming section and one in the tile sliding section, and a quite a few sound effects are used for feedback. Level progression follows a nice, gradual curve, and every time a new concept is introduced (e.g., switching tiles in mid-jump or using multiple keys), the complexity of the layout is scaled back.
And then there’s the interface.
When I first saw screenshots of Continuity, I was half-dreading switching from keyboard controls to mouse controls every time I wanted to move one of the tiles. I pictured dragging the cursor to the appropriate square, clicking the mouse button (or worse yet, holding it and physically sliding the tile), watching the tile glide to its destination, moving the cursor back to the tile with my character, once again clicking the mouse button, and finally going back to the keyboard-controlled platforming.
The empty spot is in the center, and any of its 4 adjacent tiles can be slid into its position at the touch of a button.
But no, Continuity surprised me with yet another elegant design decision. The spacebar toggles between the platforming and the tile sliding, while the arrow keys control all movement. This includes the player avatar during the platforming sections, and the tile sliding during the puzzle sections.
The platforming is fairly straightforward with the left and right arrows dictating direction, and the up arrow serving as the jump button. Keys and doors are also picked up/activated automatically, removing the need for any extra input.
The tile puzzle uses the arrow keys as well, but in a slightly different fashion. At any one time, there are a maximum of 4 tiles that can slide into the single empty slot. If the player wants to fill the gap with a tile that’s underneath it, he simply presses up and the tile slides into its position. This creates a new empty gap, and the arrow keys get re-mapped to its adjacent tiles.
Some of the later levels employ rather complex tile-edges that make for numerous valid combinations.
It’s an interface that’s custom made for the requirements of the puzzle section, and it’s very intuitive. The player never has to select the tile he wants to manipulate either, which speeds things up quite considerably. This is especially important since Continuity’s gameplay requires lots of tile sliding.
I don’t think a lot of people take notice of such things, but that’s the way it should be; if it works well, it shouldn’t really stick out. It did for me, though, and it made me spend a lot more time with the game than I do with typical Flash offerings.
Then again Continuity has the polish and depth that many similar titles lack, so that shouldn’t be too surprising.
Heroes of Might & Magic II bits.
Posted by The Management in games on December 7, 2009
It’s difficult listing all the notable parts of HoMM II as it’s a game that hearkens back to a design philosophy that’s rarely found these days: depth through complexity. It’s also not considered the best entry in the series — that vote usually goes to HoMM III — but that’s partly why I wanted to give the second game a quick overview.
The bits:
- HoMM II is a turn-based strategy game with 6 distinct factions. Each faction has its own town/castle type with a unique set of structures. Most of these serve the same purpose, namely purchasing creatures, but some buildings are unique to each faction.
Virtually every corner of every map is filled with lush scenery and useful hotspots.
- Gold and 6 different resources (wood, ore, mercury, sulfur, gems and crystals) are necessary to purchase and upgrade the various buildings and creatures.
- Heroes are recruited in towns/castles and are required to explore the overworld map and lead creatures into battle. Each hero starts off with a handful of creatures and the specializations of his faction, e.g., barbarians begin with a high attack rating and the pathfinding skill.
- Heroes can gain levels increasing their 4 basic stats, equip artifacts, learn magic spells, gain temporary bonuses and learn and master passive skills. Some of these can carry over through the game’s campaign(s), but even on small maps all these elements provide a steady stream of upgrades.
- Overworld maps contain a fog-of-war mechanic, come in a variety of sizes, and include an absolute plethora of objects. Some of these are purely aesthetic or used as collidable scenery, but others are integral to the gameplay.
There are collectible goods (artifacts and resources), single-use locations (witch’s huts that teach passive skills and tombs that can be plundered), mines (gold/mineral dispensers that provide a set amount of goods in each turn), multi-use locations (teleporters and marketplaces where minerals can be traded), reusable locations (wells that refill magic points and special hotspots that grant a boost to luck/morale for the next battle), and re-fillable locations (creature recruitment centers and mills that can provide random resources every 7 turns).
On top of these, terrain types also affect hero movement, and special-purpose locations such as password-protected gateways serve additional gameplay functions. All these objects provide an incentive for the player to explore as much land as possible, but — and maybe more importantly — also give him something to do in the areas he has already conquered.
- Obelisks that are scattered around the maps reveal a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Once fully exposed, this image shows the location of a secret and powerful artifact that can be dug out from the ground.
- Every 7 turns, towns/castles and creature dispensers get new recruits. However, once in a while a plague will strike and no new recruits will become available (worse yet, creatures that were previously available but were not purchased will shrink in numbers). Conversely, specific creatures can randomly experience a growth spurt. Whenever this happens, their base recruitment numbers will double, and stacks of these creatures will randomly appear on the overworld map.
- As a CD-based game, HoMM II includes a CD-Audio soundtrack, with an option to use a midi one. A third alternative also exists which uses the CD-Audio with operatic vocals layered on top, giving the game a very distinct score.
Those bone dragons are going down!
- The actual combat of HoMM II is also turn based, with each creature taking its turn based on its speed statistic. The heroes don’t attack directly (aside from casting spells), but their statistics are also appended to those of the creatures, effectively boosting their performance. A lot of the creatures also have unique abilities such as infinite counterattacks, recharging hit points, a chance to cancel magical attacks, etc. Unlike the sequels, HoMM II doesn’t clearly inform the player of these abilities and it takes a lot of practice to get familiar with them.
- Magic plays a crucial part in the overall gameplay, both in combat and on the overworld map. Being able to scout ahead and teleport around the playing field, or boosting your strongest units while damaging entrenched archers, is vital to the player’s success.
The branching paths of the main campaign.
Ah, the Necromancer's castle. One of my favourite tactics is to send out a scout with expert necromancy and a group of missile-throwing liches, and watch the defeated armies rise up as my new skeleton minions.
HoMM II has a very steep learning curve that’s practically unimaginable these days, but in many ways it’s this barrier and that makes it such an entertaining title. It might not be impeccably balanced for competitive play, but the sheer amount of variables that must be juggled at any given moment create an experience where the player is constantly adapting and strategizing.
With each move, an overabundance of options need to be weighed; immediate tactics have to be balanced with long term plans. The economy, map control, build orders, hero progression, proper use of units, etc., are all vital to coming out on the winning side, and each turn is different from the last.
The micromanagement of HoMM II gives Civilization a run for its money, but the upside to all these elements is that the game is practically filled with “emergent” gameplay. Creating map chokepoints, playing keepaway with AI heroes, slowly wearing down the opposition through superior use of resources, etc., all fall into a metagame that’s not immediately obvious — or even consciously designed — but one that’s created simply as a result of having so many ingredients in the pot.
It’s a methodology that’s largely avoided these days, but its end results are unique and very addictive.
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Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight bits.
Posted by The Management in games on November 9, 2009
Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight is difficult to pin down because it plays so much like a board game. It’s based on a hotseat model where each participant (whether AI or human) makes a single move before handing off the controls to the next player. This sort of multiplayer format has mostly been phased out in videogames, but asynchronous games are making a huge comeback on social sites like Facebook, so I figured it was worth a mention.
It might look bad, but you can actually survive one of these.
The bits:
- Moonstone can be played solo, but supports up to 4 individual players who start off with 5 lives each.
The world map, complete with a rather conspicuous location right in its center...
- The world map paths are entirely predefined, but the events at each stop are randomized.
- City stops and enchanted places provide the player with unique services. This encourages the player to explore them all in order to gain as many boons as possible. These boons include buying and selling magical items, gambling for gold, purchasing stats upgrades, and healing. Some of these stops can also curse the player creating a risk/reward system.
- Aside from the shops and unique story locations, most other stops initiate some sort of a real time battle. If the player is victorious, he receives a reward in the form of gold/items/magical keys.
- Fighting other players is automatically initiated when two players land on the same spot. The victor gains all of the loser’s inventory, including his key(s) which are necessary to complete the game, so quite a bit of back-’n'-forth naturally takes place between all the participants.
You can actually stab up at the enemy in the tree before succumbing to strangulation.
- Battles are split into one-on-one encounters, a series of one-on-one encounters, or group fights that force the player to simultaneously combat multiple opponents. All battles are quite gory and serve as a reward in themselves as they contain lots of unique animations and fatalities that predate Mortal Kombat’s (although other games like Barbarian also predate Moonstone on that end).
- Adding another random element to the game is a dragon that can appear on the world map. The dragon is a tough foe and will randomly swoop down to attack players regardless of their current location.
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About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I work as a videogame design consultant. I'm also the creative lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and write a lot of it down too, so I figured why not make it public?
If you'd like to contact me, drop me a line at themanagement@significant-bits.com.