Google is a Better Windows Help Than Windows Help Itself

I got an error when trying to install a network adapter driver that windows recommended to me (the LAN was having problems and I was in desperate need of a solution) and Windows was kind enough to give me an error code to look up in their Help & Support program, but lo and behold it said back to me "lol wut I don't know taht error lol". So I googled the code and on the first hit I got an answer. You would think that every time a programmer entered an error code they would put the meaning of it in their help program, or, get this: they could say what the error is right there when you get it! WOW! I am such a genius!

Ricochet: Lost Worlds Review

Hello again, I know I have been posting a lot recently, but that is a good thing, isn't it?

I want to do a short review of the new-ish breakout game Rocochet: Lost Worlds. I only have played through the demo, but it gave me a pretty good idea of how the whole game is, and I have played through the entire previous game in the series as well.

Reflexive Entertainment is very good at dreaming up new ideas for this game. The Ricochet games I would say are probably my favorite breakout titles, and I have played a lot of breakout games, surprisingly enough. This one, being a sequel, has to include entirely new ideas or else it would become just a hogepoge of the same old stuff. This game, however, really lays out the ideas left and right and when coupled with the new and interesting level design, a good game make it does. I do not know how they do it, but they included all of the best powerups from the first game and added more of them, and every time I see a new powerup or brick it is always a new and interesting idea that mixes the gameplay up a bit. For example, one of the new powerups is the laser ball. When picked up, the ball becomes purple and randomly fires lasers all over the place. One of the new bricks, well, every environment includes new brick art and physics, but one of the new brick types is the magnet brick. These are first seen in the space/alien environment shown above. When two magnets of the same color are activated at the same time, the blocks attract each other, sliding across the screen to meet each other in a small explosion, destroying other bricks along the way. If two magnets of different colors are both activated, they repel each other, blowing up individually on each side of the screen, destroying anything in their path of course. It's ideas like these that make the game constantly new and entertaining. It still can get old after a while of playing, especially after you go through all of the environments once, but for the most part it is a good time.

One more thing: The level design in this game is just fantastic. All the bricks are moving all the time, some more than others. The backgrounds are all animated. The positioning and tracking of the bricks is very well done, and makes each level feel almost completely different. Without such great level designers, this game would fall flat on its face.

TF2 Uber Scout Batting Practice

This doesn't have anything to do with anything, but I was playing TF2 this morning and I decided to randomly go scout and try to get as many bat kills as I can. Nothing intelligent to say about it, but here are some screenshots:

Thoughts on Online FPSs

I haven't gotten a new game yet, so I have been amusing myself playing various first person shooters online. I played a bit of Crysis, CounterStrike Source, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 Deathmatch, Unreal Tournament 2004, and even Zombie Panic Source (Sorry I still don't have Call of Duty 4 yet, and Battlefield 2142 isn't working anymore). I have been thinking about online multiplayer FPS design, and I wanted to just kinda open up the can and spill out some random ideas here, for both of my loyal readers to enjoy. I will just roll out the random screenshots while explaining my ideas in no particular order. Steam is Good for Multiplayer

Ah, Steam. Without Steam, PC gaming would probably be on its way out by now. It truly is a great thing. I thank Valve for making Steam and making it right. Yeah, EA has their downloader thing that no one uses if they don't have to (I have that to thank for my broken copy of BF2142NS), but Steam really is the thing that caught on. I will say right now that EA really should just stop even trying with whatever they are doing and go straight to Valve right now to join the Steam community. It would definitely improve their sales. Every time I see that another company has joined Steam I feel happy for Valve and thank the company in my mind (Thanks go out to Epic, the most recent company to join; their Unreal Tournament series is already on the bestseller list on Steam). I also think that more games should use the Valve server system, but that isn't as pressing of an issue. It truly would be a glorious day when every major game company joins Steam, but I doubt with all of my pessimism that that day will ever come.

Weapons, and Overall Balance of the FPS

This is a big one. I will try not to ramble too much here... There have been many, many online FPSs now that have come and gone, and many more that are still running strong (What? Quake 3? Half Life 1?). When a developer starts writing a multiplayer portion of a game, they are faced with many options and decisions to make. Do we include classes? How many weapons should there be? What kinds of rewards do the players get, if any, and how? Are there unlockables? How fast should the game run? Their answers to these questions determine the shape of the game, and if they make the right decisions, their game could still be played 5+ years after release. There are games like UT which are more based on blowing the hell out of the enemy, no matter how unrealistic (Unreal is in the title, after all) or how little brain power it takes. A game like BF2142 takes more smarts, and requires much more teamwork. With that, I would like to go right into my next topic,

Hardcoreness

How good does a new player have to be to be able to compete with the people who have been playing your game for a year? This is a hard one. You don't want to make your hardcore players feel like they have not grown at all in their months of play time, but you do not want to make the barrier to entry so high that the newcomers will just get mad and leave. This does have a bit to do with the community (more on that later), but most of it is based on the balance and weapon usage. More twitchy games have proven to be more newcomer-harsh. CSS, for example, is impossible to do well in without a good, fast hand. It took me a lot of learning to really get down having to stare at my minimap for teammates and known enemies while simultaneously watching for terrorist heads to fire at. I also had to learn the proper use of every weapon in the game, which can take a while as well. On the contrary, a game like TF2 has a fairly short barrier to entry. A new player doesn't even have to learn all the classes. Valve has successfully reduced the barrier to just a small brick step for every class. If you are really slow at learning a new class, you could just learn one and stick to it. While everyone will want to learn all the classes eventually, these small steps make it very easy for a newcomer to get right into the fight without feeling completely lost.

Community

The community of an online game can make or break the game for a lot of people. This is one area that I have seen almost every online FPS fail at, and it is sad because it is not entirely the developer's fault. They could have made a great game, but just because they didn't include a good enough anticheat program or enough ways for people to help each other out their game becomes a trip to the park for younger players to learn new vocabulary words (and not good vocabulary either). "Mommy, what is a @%$*#%*!#?" I can see it now... In CSS, although the community is very hardcore, if you search a bit you can still find servers that advertise themselves as being newbie-friendly. You don't know if this is a trap, but meh. There are few ways that publishers can heal this burning hole in online game design, and I have a few tips. Players tend to get more personal if they can freely talk to everyone at once, and if no one is on their team (meaning that they can offend someone without consequences). There is a lot more flaming in an every-man-for-themself deathmatch than in a CTF match. Players also get more mad when they feel they are camped and they are quicker to point fingers at good players when their death count is on display for them to see. Especially when they also get a running overall kill/death (KD) ratio, this makes the game much more intense due to the player knowing that each death results in a permanent scar in their record. One more thing: an easy way to get a player mad is to have a feature that when someone humiliates them (a knife in the back, perhaps) on top of that you take something away from them that is of value. On the surface it sounds fun, but in practice it seems to cause more trouble than it is worth.

Closing Thoughts

A lot of people say that the multiplayer on COD4 is awesome, but I haven't had the good fortune to be able to try it at all yet. All I have is the demo, which people say is not a good representation of the game itself. I will get COD4 soon, I will. Can't really decide if I should get that or Assassin's Creed (PC) first. Anyway, I will continue to play online shooters, and I may post more on this blog about this topic if I think of something to say. Feel free to post comments, I haven't yet gotten any from someone I do not know. What? You want another picture? Ok, fine, here you go.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl

This isn't really a review, but more of a mini/first impressions/review-just-so-that-I-dont-have-to-break-my-promise review. I actually havent played much of stalker, just the first few quests, and I havent yet gotten to the bigger towns. This is one of those games that is really hard to review. I don't dislike it, but I don't really think that it is designed that well. It is merely ok. The problem is that for whatever reason the replay value is so low that I rarely feel like going into the game to play through the next part. Maybe it is the engine, being kind of old (the graphics are not exactly new) and that there is just no sun in the game at all. Seriously, the engine doesn't support a sun. The whole game is very dark and gloomy, with nice rain and storm effects. Maybe it is because I am spoiled from Oblivion where you get a really nice GUI and don't have to read everything the NPC's are saying. I can't pinpoint the problem, but it's there. The greatest thing this game has given me in my opinion is the music playing on the radio at the start. You can see the radio in that first picture. That music... I have no idea what it is let alone what language it is in, but it is awesome. It truely fits the gloomy atmosphere of the game, and sometimes I just stick around in that room listening to the song play on infinite repeat while that guy changes his animations from time to time. Anyway, I am rambling. Basically, I do not feel like I can complete the game in the next... year, so I am putting this first impressions review out there just to forfill my promise, and to tell people about that music, lol... I wonder where I can get that in mp3...Side note: I am not saying that the lighting engine is bad. Just look at the image above. The lighting there is amazing. Also note the (lame) weapon model there. I tried to install a mod to improve the weapon models, but it didn't work no matter what I tried. =(

Oblivion Update

Well, I have progressed quickly up the rather short Oblivion ladder. I am doing everything so quickly it seems to just be a blur.I am already at level 28, and had probably the best armor in the game (which quickly got replaced by the armor from the mod "Lost Paladins of the Divines"). Just to keep things interesting, I have been installing several mods as I play. I usually only get the more subtle ones, as in "not the total conversion ones". I also avoid Uber mods, just to keep the game balanced and fun. But some of them are just too hard to resist:

Between quests, I like to practice photography. There are plenty of places and opportunities to do this, thanks to Bethesda's most masterful level designers and graphics artists. One mod that really helps this is the Beaming Sunglare Mod by Sonic Ether. You can see the effect of this one in the last picture.

Somehow, though, I feel that there is something missing from this game. Something deep in the game's storyline is missing. It seems that there should be a way to make the game much more immersive... something to make doing the usual stuff really fun. I know that the quest storylines are some of the best in RPGs, with completely spoken dialog and no feeling of the quests being "mass-produced", but maybe they should have done something different... with the main quest. The main quest has the usual stuff, a big bad dude, a cult, destruction, etc. but it lacked a very immersive storyline. All you really do is just stuff you could find in other quests around the world. Along with more different stuff, it also needs better characters. You really never grow to like Martin that much, let alone others like Steffan and Jaffre. One more thing: the whole game needs more voices! I get tired of hearing the same 20 or so voice actors do 400+ characters. At least let all the main characters all get completely different voices, like the Emperor and Martin. It shouldn't be that hard to get every staff member go through the usual voice-acting stuff. All it really takes is time and disk space.

Update 03022008

Ok, A few things this time:

1. Today is my Birthday! W00t!

2. I am still trying to master the Source SDK (made a small portal map today)

3. I am still playing Oblivion (see next post)

4. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl review that I promised will probably not come out for a while, due to the game being long and me being lazy.

That is all for now. I will do a follow-up post after this.