“It is better to die for the Emperor than live for yourself.”: Warhammer 40K Dawn of War

These are the games I’m playing right now.

I’ve played Relic’s great real time strategy a long time ago, and I picked it up again only to be instantly hooked on its competitive multiplayer gameplay. In retrospect DoW is probably the best sci-fi RTS since Starcraft, with very diverse races to choose from (9 in total with all the expansions), good gameplay balance (as good as it can be with so many races), excellent soundtrack and unit responses and finally still very fresh graphics.

In the next paragraph I’ll outline the basics of DoW gameplay – if you are familiar with this – skip ahead)

Where DoW differs from other RTS is that instead of mining symbolic resources in DoW you capture territories which give you “requisition” which is used for buying fresh troops and upgrades (actually the idea is that in orbit above your battlefield there is a cruiser which holds your main force, and you are “requesting” units from it). There is also a power resource gathered by building power generators (duh!), used mostly for building vehicles. The territory capture system makes for very dynamic gameplay as its not possible to “turtle” (build up defensive structures) inside your base – since you’ll lack resources to keep fighting. Also every unit is precious as all troops come in a squad of 3-5 units and losing an entire squad is a large blow to your war effort.

The Dawn of War games:

• Warhammer 40K Dawn of War (full game. four basic races)
• -Linear story driven campaign. Mission structured.
• -Four basic races: the superhuman, elite soldiers of the Imperium – the Space Marines, the second most “tactical” race. The innumerable horde of Orks, focused on overwhelming numbers and great melee capabilities. The extremely swift and focused Eldar, with highly specialised units that require a lot of tactical micro-management. And finally the perverted, powerful and melee focused Chaos Space Marines.
• Warhammer 40K Winter Assault (first expansion)
• -Linear story driven campaign. Mission structured.
• -New race: the regular human soldiers of the Imperial Guard. What they lack in physical prowess they make up for in huge numbers and fearsome vehicles.
• Warhammer 40K Dark Crusade: (second, stand alone expansion)
• -Risk type campaign with territories and a world map.
• -New races: hi tech, anime like Tau - the best purely ranged army in the game, and the relentless, futuristic undead -Necrons.
• Warhammer 40K Soulstorm (third and final expansion)
• -Expanded risk type campaign.
• -New races: the purely female, fanatical Sisters of Battle and the skirmish oriented, wicked Dark Eldar.

Of the entire bunch the only thing I didn’t like was the last expansion. I felt that the two new races didn’t add much to the gameplay, and I also didn’t like the addition of aerial units. Another sore point with all the Dawn of War games is that their single player component is really lacking, with the first two campaigns being somewhat average and the second “risk” type, somewhat boring. All in all this is a game you buy to play with friends, and that’s where the incredibly diverse tactical options really become apparent. The campaigns are acutally just a warm up. Another issue is unit pathfinding, which has been somewhat rectified with the addition of larger, less cramped maps, but this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Dawn of War, with its expansions is easily one of the best strategy games I’ve ever played, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Failout 3: the pre-nuclear disaster Part 2

Taking up from where we left off – how does Fallout 3 fare in the story and character departments?

One word. Terribly. The story (main quest) is incoherent, full of plot holes you could drive a truck through, and ends in a completely unsatisfying manner. Also, its incredibly short – a days worth of playing at maximum after which you can’t continue exploring and solving side quests. The side quests range from interesting (wow, something positive has cropped up), to the standard fetch/kill quests which are unfortunately the majority.

The characters are another low point. Your father, who is more or less the most important character has zero personality, but that’s hardly surprising given that he speaks around ten badly written lines. This is where it all falls apart in fact. The writing is so horrible, so lame, that it kills any personality that the characters might have. Your dialog choices are abysmal – either they are pathetically good or absurdly evil. Its something you might find in a Saturday morning cartoon or a superhero comic.

Of the standard Fallout dark and mature world there is next to nothing, It boils down to abuse of the f*** word, and tons of spilled blood in VATS. No real cesspool of immorality (New Reno) to wander through, no prostitutes to sell themselves for the next fix of Jet, drug use is in fact degraded to combat powerups and on that note, people leave their drugs lying around everywhere (?!)… All in all Fallout 3 is about as dark and mature as a teenager might imagine it.

The RPG system and gameplay is where Fallout 3 makes its last stand. Unfortunately the butchered version of SPECIAL is not going to give it any points. This attribute dependent skill based system, has been completely ripped apart.  The attributes don’t mean anything anymore as you gain a perk at every level that you can  use to raise any attribute. On top of that there is nothing dependent on a certain attribute level (like many conversation choices in Fallout 2), so it all boils down to pumping up your skills, and its a sad fact that you can top most of them.  Or all that matter anyway. This totally kills replayability since you’ll have all the options available to you on you first playthrough. The perks have also ended up as skill boosters, with only a few exceptions…

Finally, the gameplay. All of these bad points considered Fallout 3 can be interesting to play, albeit on an instant gratification level. Eye candy + incredibly easy combat and gameplay in general, make for a casual gamers paradise – the sort of people who are easily impressed and undemanding, and who definitely don’t know what Fallout 1&2 were.

It seems that those are the people for whom this game was intended. Now all that’s left is to pull the plug on Fallout 3, but before I’m branded as biased, I must state one thing – I’m not a fan of Fallout 1 & 2. I recommended them and praised them in my earlier post because, my preferences aside – they are great games. They were a high point in the RPG genre – but my personal favourites are mostly fantasy titles. So this isn’t the review of some furious Fallout fan, who can’t stand what Bethesda did with the series. The only thing I cant stand is rubbish portrayed as gaming perfection.

And that’s what Fallout 3 is – rubbish. It offers nothing new, it can’t compare to any high quality title from either FPS or RPG genres, its thoroughly bland, dumbed down so that a 7 year old could play it, immature (despite its ESRB rating) and ultimately mediocre. If this game hadn’t received the heaps of undeserved praise it did, and if the reviewers weren’t paid to rate it as they did – the tone of this article wouldn’t probably be so harsh. But its 92 average rating on Metacritic is unforgivable, simply because nothing could be further from the truth.

Don’t waste your money. Or your life.

*Thanks to zalibar for the pic

Failout 3: the pre-nuclear disaster Part 1

I have often given the idea of parallel universes serious thought. If I could choose one for myself it would probably be much like the present only with cheaper gaming hardware, fewer politicians, and minus gay pride parades. Also Fallout 3 wouldn’t happen.

Sigh.

Unfortunately- it did happen.

The title of this article says a lot how I feel about Bethesda’s attempt at making a Fallout game. Well actually that’s a wrong presumption. They were not making a Fallout game at all – judging by the end product. What we have is a another  TES game using Fallout’s setting.

Everything from the interface & controls to the gameplay is taken straight from Oblivon, and anybody who’s played it will feel right at home. Anybody who’s played Fallout 1 or 2 will be horrified however as these two role play concepts have very little to do with each other.

The Fallout games accentuated dialogue, moral choices between very grey options and good doses of humor. Also they were very flexible and offered a lot of replayability since your character could only progress so far in its skill system and that left a lot of different ways to play again. Fallout 2 had interesting characters, and both of them had reasonably well done plots. Above all they had the great atmosphere of post nuclear desolation.

Fallout 3 takes a completely different path.  Not really sure at what it wants to be: as a first person shooter it would fail miserably (lagging aim, unexciting combat), as an RPG it can’t compare to any reasonably well done contemporary game (Mass Effect for example). So what we are left with is a hybrid game, but unlike the exceptional Bioshock which blended genres into a functioning whole – Fallout 3 is a frankensteinian mess.

Worst of all it is marketed as a sequel of one of the most coveted RPG’s of all time. This manages two things for me: to ruin whatever good one might say about Fallout 3 because of inevitable comparisons and it makes me appreciate Fallout 2 even more.

What is exactly wrong with the game?

Technical side:

The graphics are fairly average, both in world and in character design. Especially in character design. Most characters have a very sterile, zombie like look (just like in Oblivion) as if they came out straight from the cloning vats in Red Alert 2. Also the two or three different colors that make up most of the world are hard to look at and incredibly dull. There are a few nice eye candy moments but they are too far and few in between to matter. Character animations are horrible, on par with Oblivion’s – but given the time Bethesda had to work on this, it just makes it look even worse

The soundtrack is an epic piece composed by Jeremy Soule. While it is quite good, it simply does not fit into the setting. There are some retro songs from the 50’s played by the PipBoy radio (integral part of the game’s interface) that double as the “other” soundtrack. There are very few tracks here and they also tend to get quite repetitive and borderline irritating.

Controls and interface. These are ripped straight from Oblivion with minor changes. The Pipboy is visually quite appealing but thoroughly cumbersome and irritating – as its essentially mapped and designed for a console gamepad. Why does a PC RPG have to have a list like inventory?  Absurd. Not to mention the rather useless maps (indoor).

Bugs. Plenty. I encountered a game breaking bug where one door wouldn’t open and hence I couldn’t complete the main quest. I had to fix this using a console command . Fallout 3 is going to make me into a programmer apparently. This coupled with tons of scripting errors makes one think that Bethesda might have mixed up its customers and its beta testers.

Overall. With all its flaws – one thing must be said: it works. Barely, but it works. Very unimpressive so far though.

Lets move onto the meat of the game: the story, characters, RPG system and gameplay…

End of part 1.

Virtual Corsairs: the new heralds of digital freedom?

I never gave game piracy much thought to be frank. Developers were always complaining about it, various companies selling schemes to prevent it (which all failed in the end) – but in the long run the industry expands on a yearly basis, the profits multiply so – we all know its bullshit. I’ve heard of developers going bankrupt by making bad games, or disappearing on account of being gobbled up by behemoths like EA – but I’ve never heard of pirates actually ruining the success of any moderately well crafted game.
So what brought this up?

I went into a local game shop with the intent of buying Red Alert 3, since I wasn’t in a position to buy the second game when it was popular. It was just a wish on my part… Anyway, I was holding the box in my hands and then I noticed the small print: “Online activation required” – knowing that some games follow this ridiculous new policy of limited installs, I asked the shopkeeper if that was also the case with RA3. He didn’t know. So determined to get to the end of the matter, I googled it up and to my disappointment – that turned out to be the case.

RA3 can only be installed 5 times after which you have to pray at the altar of EA games, begging its godlike presence to let you run it a few more times. For all intents and purposes you are never the owner of the game, only renting it… a few times.

Investigating, I dug deeper into the SecuROM controversy, Digital Rights Management issues and the unpopular Starforce copy protection scheme. It all boils down to EA’s new master plan (though Half Life 2 started it) – make online activation mandatory so there will be less “piracy” (read: so our profits won’t be 20mil US$ but 23mil US$ instead), no matter how this affects regular users.

Obviously it backfired. Spore was also protected by this system which according to wikipedia made it the most pirated game ever. What happened? Pirates, and regular users, outraged by this new scheme encouraged each other to download it via torrents, and not buy the original. Very soon Spore downloads surpassed the 500000 mark, which left its developers losing a huge sum of otherwise guaranteed money just because of this unwise choice.

In the long run, for the first time developers/publishers were actually affected by piracy – ruining the balance that existed, just out of corporate greed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an advocate of piracy. Or at least I was not. Now I’m not so sure, as the idea of online activation and limited installs is unacceptable to me. I can’t say I blame anyone who gets the pirated version; they could just say that they wanted to actually own the game. And they would be right.

We had a fair game in the last decade or so. Some pay, some steal – but the wheels keep on turning – and everybody prospers. However if this becomes the industry standard I see no point in playing fair anymore, as its no sin to cheat the cheater and that’s what SecuROM is – a way to screw regular users out of their already existing privileges.

Farewell Red Alert 3. Seems I’ll be skipping on this one as well. Eh.

RPG’s finest: Fallout 1 & Fallout 2

Since I’ll be getting my hands on the currently popular Fallout 3 in a few days, I fired up the legendary Fallout and Fallout 2 again, to recall what playing those cult games towards the end of the 90’s was all about.

That’s not to say that Fallout is forgettable. In fact its one of the most unique games/series ever made, with its retro-post apocalyptic setting and open ended world. The story is set in the aftermath of WW III, which in a few hours of nuclear fire reduced the human civilization to cinders. The few that escaped the destruction lived in underground vaults – self sufficient shelters, stepping out to find a very different world on the outside. A desolate wasteland teeming with mutated creatures, raiders, slavers, and all sorts of horrors was all that remained of what was formerly California, US. In both games the PC’s set out on a quest to save their home, to explore and make a name for themselves in the new world.

The RPG system that formed the backbone of the game - S.P.E.C.I.A.L was extremely flexible allowing the creation of vastly different PC’s and a lot of different approaches to solving the challenges you faced. To talk or to fight? To invest in combat skills or technical ones? There was no right or wrong way to play, just different styles – and that’s what makes Fallout so appealing. Throw in clever dialogue, an engaging story, multiple ways to complete quests where your choice truly had an impact on the world and a brutal turn based combat with some of the best (and goriest) 2D animations ever seen and it becomes obvious why the series still has a legion of worshipping fans.

Looking at Fallout today, the only segment of the games that hasn’t aged well are the graphics. Only recently with the addition of a hi resolution hack (sadly, only for Fallout 2 at the moment)*, has this problem been somewhat alleviated. Of the hordes of bugs that plagued the series some are still present, but most have been taken care of by community patches.

This shouldn’t keep you from playing Fallout however. The heart and soul of Black Isle, the special RPG division of Interplay, was poured into these games and they were some of the most talented people in the industry. The appearance of Fallout marked the beginning of the best period of RPG games, though only with the release of Baldur’s Gate was the genre really resurrected. Today in 2008 Fallout remains as unique and as original as ever, and hopefully Fallout 3 will be a decent continuation of the series.

Now you’ll have to excuse me, I have to go and blow apart some raider scum – looking impossibly cool in my Mad Max style leather jacket. In the meanwhile, have a nuka cola on me – and I’ll see you… in the wasteland.

*Apparently there is also a hi res patch for Fallout 1 as zalibar was kind to note. I stand corrected.

Great things in unlikely places – Katauri Interactive’s: “King’s Bounty: The Legend”

Oh those Russians. Most of the time they flood the market with all sorts of crap trying to imitate what were (mostly) bad western games in the first place, but once in a while they release a game like this.

The original King’s Bounty was the forerunner to the famed Heroes of Might and Magic series, (made by the New World Computing), which reached its peak with the third installment. The fourth and fifth games in the series were showing a steady decline in quality, as the turn based strategy genre was slowly losing ground to its real time counterpart. Until now that is.

Some time ago the russian publisher 1C Company quietly purchased the rights to the KB name and attached it to a title that was already being made by a small company (Katauri) in Vladivodstok. The result? An infinitely improved Heroes III.

The core concept is simple, you travel around a huge world map in real time with your avatar, taking quests and slaughtering creep armies whilst following a relatively simple (but humorous) plot. The trick is that your avatar leads an army you have to recruit and commandon a separate “battle” screen which is where all the turn based tactical slaughter takes place (the meat of the game).

Everything that’s important to strategy buffs shines in this game: large variety of units, challenging and tactical gameplay, just enough micro-managment to keep the combat interesting. On top of it all there are RPG elements thrown in (in the form of character advancement, equipment and quests) to give the game the Heroes hybrid TBS/RPG flavor.

The graphics are vibrant and colorful, very pleasing to the eye. The music is a surprsingly good epic score that never seems to drag on, and the sound effects are passable. As for bugs, I encountered only one during forty (!) hours of play time. Talk about value for money, not to mention the random generation of opponent armies and items on the beginning of each new game! Coupled with three character classes to choose from (admittedly quite similar), you’ll be playing King’s Bounty for a long time.

The bad points are the somewhat uninspired plot, and the occasional dull moment when you’ve had your fill of constant combat. Quite a few reviewers are also complaining about the game being brutally difficult and unbalanced which is incorrect. The fact is that on every map there are a few high level creeps intended to be beat later when your character grows more powerful, which is quite satisfying and conveys a feeling of advancement.

Overall King’s Bounty is an excellent game with a few flaws. Challenging and never simplistic it was made with the hardcore gamer in mind. Hail to that.

Rockstar’s “Bully” – Or how to ruin a good game, through sheer negligence

Today I got Rockstar’s “Bully” for the PC. Bloody big mistake that was. The game caught my eye when it was released for the PS2. It got good reviews, and was quite praised at the time. It is basically a Grand  Theft Auto game in a school environment, where the main character is a kid with a troubled background on a quest to take control his of new school, the “Bullworth Academy”.

Unfortunately, you won’t even get there. The PC version is so riddled with bugs and flaws of a technical nature it can be considered broken: crashing, slowdowns, failing to even start… the last one being what happened to me.

A real pity, it did look like a good game, even with its dated graphics. For now, refrain from buying it until a major patch comes out, that’s all I can say.

On the bliss of playing a good game

Every true gamer has felt it. The thrill and bliss of playing a game where everything seems to fall together perfectly, completely enveloping you – the gamer in its inner world. True, there are very few such games. True, the feeling is subjective by nature. But nonetheless I like to recollect these moments and that’s what this blog is all about.  The finest moments in gaming – as seen by me.

Apart from the recollections I’ll comment  on what I’m playing at the moment, and how I feel about the game in question. On that note – my standards for games are pretty high, and I don’t happen to be on a publishers payroll (lol)  so the while the criticism may seem harsh, I’ll see to it that it is never undeserved.

Happy gaming!