RPG Articles

I was taunted by the videos showing off travel powers. Taunted I say! Since it’s only $20 to begin I decided to hell with it, may as well go in for a pound.

Made two characters thus far- Fex and Rivet. Each with wildly different senses of style, powers, and whatnot. Fex is level 9.

So. Let me start off by saying that my previous review largely still stands, in that the intro area is sort of terrible. It feels mashed together and does nothing much to actually get you into the game, at least not for me. One thing I have to go back on is the block function. Turns out you can hold shift to maintain that, as I finally noticed after seeing the tiny sh in the corner of that ability. It also works rather well, which is nice. You can also dick around more with the controls and graphics, and for me it was critical to dick with the graphics since apparently the game assumed I’m running on a six year old computer or somesuch. I may try fiddling with the controls some more, because having mouselook always on would be wunderbahr, but since the rest of the game makes a different assumption about the interface it can be a bit bothersome. I also don’t care for the way you interact with things, like picking up a big rock to throw, because you either have to hit a key or click a little onscreen button. It’d be nice if, say, double clicking would make me pick it up, then click to throw, as opposed to again having to click the little button or hit a key.

Onward. Time to eat some crow. Holy fuck is this game deeper and better than City of Heroes. I would still love to see some better initial stat control, and explanatory text, when building a character, and I still don’t really grasp all of the underlying fundamentals, but I love that they’re there. The best thing, however, is the “builds” system.

A build is, essentially, a game role and determines things like how your offense and defense work. In CoH you picked one when you made a character, and that character was always that way. In Champions you can save various builds for each of the roles, including your various accessories that buff your stats, then switch between them on the fly.

The travel powers. These are the things  that got me into this mess. Why? Because they actually have some variety. Like there’s at least four ways to fly and three of them do it with unique speed and maneuvering and general feel. The other is Fire Flight, which is identical to regular flight but, well, you’re on fire, so that’s fair enough.

The power stuff is all very cool, and has surprising depth. You level up at The Powerhouse (which sadly makes it feel sort of generic, like a K-Mart) but you can buy new powers, try them out, then undo that expenditure if you don’t like it. You also aren’t stuck in one specific power path. While powers may have pre-requisites, they’re fairly easy to fill and you’re otherwise free to pluck from the tree of ass-kickery. You can also go into your powers menu (also never described or pointed out to you) to adjust effect colors and, at least for some powers, where they emit from, such as palm, fist, eyes, so on.

I’m a slave to concepts, I have to admit. Fex is a person turned demonic by the black flames he was forced to feed souls to while enslaved in some hell dimension. His abilities are all based off his flesh and spirit being saturated by the flames and the shadows they cast. So when it came time to pick a travel power I knew it had to be either something very spry and athletic or teleportation. I really enjoyed teleporting (which is awesome in this game), but acrobatics just felt like a better fit, so I went with it. I could have bought one of many different powers, but so far all he’s gained is a shield made of shadow (to replace the standard block) which can be upgraded to do some really interesting things, a new level of his basic shadow blast, and a passive power called “shadow form” which kicks in to make me hard to see and take less damage. I figure, should I play that long, his second travel power will be teleport because by then he’ll be powerful enough for it to make sense. See what I mean? I choose to run around and hop like a retard instead of the safer, cooler power because it fits. Now Rivet is a dude in power armor, inspired by Megas XLR actually, and I am so glad that I can assign him a number of abilities, because dude does he beg for an array of small attacks and the like.

Rivet has jetboots, which is sort of tough to control but goes like a bat out of hell.

The fighting and missions are fairly nice, though also pretty standard.

We’ll see how it goes. I tend to lose interest in these things fairly quickly.

I saw that they have some free play for this, whilst perusing the offerings from Steam, and figured what the hell.

Character creation is ok in general, and good for an MMO, at least within my experience of the genre thus far.

Obviously there’s the cosmetics, which I’ll spare you the details of, and then you select your powers. There is virtually no information on the power selection screen. You can pick a package of powers or customize. Since you only get two powers I figured what was the point and just went with “Darkness”, which seems more like a melanin condition, but whatever. It startled me to see that there are attributes to the character, yet they were totally untouchable by the player, again leaving me to wonder what the fucking point is.

Onward. I made my character, he looked ok, then entered the game proper. Everything looked like ass and for a bit I was concerned my vision or display was going. Looking in the options I see a “use half resolution” checkbox. So my options are fuzzy detail lacking hell or full throttle quality. Thankfully(?) full throttle quality wasn’t anything special and even my little laptop was up to the task. Still, why not give me some real options here, like a real game?

Forgot to mention, you’re asked if you’d like to use a control layout like a fantasy game, a something else game, or the one made for Champions. What kind of burnouts are they trying to get to play this thing?

Upon entering the game proper you’re dropped into a bullshit scenario, which is the norm but is always still retarded and ham brained. Some aliens have blocked off a chunk of city and are doing something something. Everything is weirdly static. Literally there’s a bunch of schmoe npcs just standing around while a hundred feet away monsters from the beyond idly ignore the fleshy bits and sort of halfheartedly attack you whenever you wander over.

Terminal boredom set in so I deleted the game. City of Heroes was actually better than this, in almost every way, even in the patch crazed days when I finally got fed up and left. No, wait, it was better in every single way aside from some of the character cosmetic options, leaving Champions to look like the unattractive, kind of stupid kid brother.

There are a few things that this experience led me to consider though.

Control idioms.

Why are these asshole controls the norm in MMOs? Is there some technical reason that I have to do weird shit to look around with my mouse? It’s not like there’s ever anytime where you have to click on something that you can’t look at, and walking around would be a lot easier.

Why do I have to click on the douchebag that’s weaving me a new scrotum from the bits of penis I have left before attacking it? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s important to stop that kind of thing.

What is with the shit all over the screen? Find a more elegant way people. Stacks of fucking menus, maps, pointers, shit over people’s heads, target boxes around things and whatnot all serve to take me out of the game.

If you’re going to have a “block” or “defend” style action, make that shit something that can be toggled or held down. This is a fucking MMO. Fine tuning the timing of shit is not your forte, so don’t make me try and guess when I need to block for exactly one second.

Artwork.

Why are MMOs ugly? You always hear it’s so as to run on as many machines as possible, but what the fuck does that have to do with it? You can set the detail for different machines just fine, just like a real game. I don’t expect it to be pushing the envelope, but it should at least look stylish.

Culture clash. Instead of having a number of different “origins” or “types” of hero, how about stem it all from a single event? Like the mutant gene in X-Men or the White Event in that weird spin-off reality or the mutagen from Static Shock.

Don’t mock me. Static Shock had some good times.

If you are going to have multiple origins for these guys, then make it count. Make the way things work different, instead of just “I fire a bunch of small, yet somewhat differently colored than my compatriot’s, projectiles”.

Anyway, in a nutshell, if you got bored with City of Heroes don’t come to Champions looking for a better time.

Edit: I decided to give it another shot, see what it was like with travel powers and beyond the intro area. Turns out that while you can muck about until level 15 in the intro area, you can’t actually leave the fucking thing. This is insane. I wasn’t expecting unlimited access, but wow man.

Now, the reason this really irks me are twofold.
1) You can gain levels in the intro zone but cannot actually level up, meaning upgrade yourself, see how new powers work, and so on.
2) Instead of a message saying “Sorry dude, this is the end of the line for free accounts” you just stand there like a jackass pressing the “Travel to <Canada or The Desert>” while nothing happens.

We’ll see if I feel like paying to experience this thing more fully. Not today though.

Edit 2: Fine. I’ll fucking buy it. Stupid videos tantalizing me with the larger world.

I was recently convinced to try out C&C3:KW (what a long fucking title) by a friend of mine.

Those of you who enjoy RTS games may be familiar with Emperor, which was the predecessor, technically, of all the 3d games in the C&C line. This particular episode strikes me as the most like that old, yet amazing, game, only lacking certain features and generally not advancing the game in any meaningful way.

New features (to me anyway) of note: The ability to take over husks left by certain fallen units. Also the whole unit integration with a supertank called MARV. Very cool.

Yeah, really that’s kind of it. They also lifted the shift click command queue from Supreme Commander, but it’s not there by default.

Old garbage: Special unit abilities that you have activate in a very fiddly manner. Not quite as bad as Starcraft, but still irritating. You still can’t queue up structure build orders, only units, for reasons that I’m sure would boggle the mind if anyone asked the developers. As far as I can tell there’s no way to group units together on the march, unlike SupCom, so you’re left with a bunch of weak units running off into the fight all on their lonesome.You’d also think that in the tiberium infused future we wouldn’t need ten powerplants to run six buildings.

I don’t recall if this was true in other C&C games, but you can’t repair units for a teammate either.

New garbage: There doesn’t seem to be a way to give units or resources to teammates, unlike Emperor, which is retarded. If you lose all of your harvesters that’s it, you just have to hope you can sell of enough stuff to build a new one. In Emperor, at least, you would always get one free harvester.

This is another good one. In RTS games repair units come in two flavors: those that run up to whatever you just ordered everything to attack, and those that don’t move at all when you issue the order. If anyone gives this more than a second of thought, it should be pretty apparent that what you’d like to have happen is for the repair unit to stay with the main clump of your units. The same thing frequently happens with anti-air units.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun, it just isn’t exactly new.

Edit:

So, what I thought was shift click mode is actually a way point mode. Similar though. Overall the various command options are, what’s the word, non-smooth? Wait, no, unrefined bullshit.

Allow me to start this review by saying Go Buy This Right Now. Or at least grab the demo.

The gist is you design ships from components and then unleash them in various challenge scenarios. That’s it. Actual combat is automated, with only your designs and the general orders you give your ships before deploying as input.

The developer, who has a great blog, seems to actually like games, which is something you start to wonder about in larger developers. For instance, thinking like this has lead to a fun game, whereas whatever passes for thought at Rockstar made GTA IV into an irritating cell phone and relationship simulation.

Anyway. Try it, because also unlike major studios there’s a demo.

It’s boring AND pointless, even beyond the norms of most MMO games. Maybe that’s an unfair comparison, since this isn’t a game in any way.

Imagine, if you will, that Yahoo’s dubious groups were vomited into a 3d… presentation I guess since it isn’t a game and realm sounds way too grandiose.

The first Vampire The Too Long Title game for the PC didn’t sit well with me. I’m sure it had something going for it, but it wasn’t anything going for me. So, this game went past me totally unnoticed. Lately I’ve seen some forum posts reminiscing about it, and thought, what the heck, let’s try it out.

The game is about 4 years old now, and is based on the Source Engine, the same engine behind Half Life 2. While HL2 looks amazing, this game… well… doesn’t. The models all look pretty good, and thanks to the engine the facial expressions are great, but the textures are all rather bad. The artists put a lot of work into the faces, probably because they had to, but generally every other texture in the game makes it feel more like Deus Ex or Half Life. This isn’t a deal breaker, but knowing what the engine can do, and knowing that White Wolf could afford more/better artists, it’s a little sad. I’m sure it’s a release time issue, especially considering the game is unstable as hell. Everyone has awful hair.

The voice acting is surprisingly good. You don’t get a voice, despite interacting with dialog, which is distracting but sort of par for the course. Options to seduce, intimidate, and… whatever… are denoted by a color and style scheme. It looks goofy, but it’s useful for knowing, at a glance, how that option is going to play. Still, if a player can’t tell the difference between seduction and intimidation, fire a writer.

You build your character very much as you do in the pen and paper game, though with a lot fewer points. Except for Disciplines, your powers, which you get an extra point for. It’s pretty flexible, and, to me at least, easy to grasp. So far the game gives you a lot of ways to solve problems, and plenty of opportunities to flex your array of skills. I’ve even intimidated passerby into giving me money, which was fun.

There’s two limiting factors to how brutal you can get. Humanity, and The Masquerade. You start with 7 points of Humanity. As that lowers, your character might freak out and randomly attack people on the street, leading us to The Masquerade. There are laws to vampire society to prevent you from causing human-kind to become too interested or knowledgeable about vampires, aka- The Masquerade. You start with 5 Masquerade points, and if you lose them all, it’s game over. Humanity can be gained by doing charitable things, such as saving a person, which is nice because you can then game the system to kill that bum, because you have some padding.

Combat isn’t super, but it’s not bad at all. All of my powers feel useful, even the stupid ones, and the combat pace is just right, so far, to let you manage them pretty easily. It could definitely benefit by lifting more ideas from Deus Ex, in that a paused screen for selecting active powers and equipment would be real handy, but so far it’s not an issue.

Anyway. I’m pleasantly surprised, and we’ll see if it keeps giving.

So, I picked up Chromehounds, since Aaron decided to get a 360, and I lust for mech combat.

I’ve completed all but the final single player mission, which I haven’t even looked at yet. More on that later.

It’s from… uhh… From Software, the guys behind the Armored Core line. There’s definitely some similarities, but it’s more of an underlying philosophy than anything specific.

Points of similarity-
Customizable mechs
General control scheme is very similar
Overall look of the models

It diverges pretty wildly though. AC has always been a fast moving game, with a very ninja robot feel. Even the slow mechs could boost along at pretty high speeds. This game feels more like a conventional armored column. Combat is intense, but not terribly fast in any sense. Even the fast machines feel more like jeeps than, say, a spaceborne rocket. Pretty much everything is earthbound, though there’s a component to let you hover for a few seconds, it isn’t anything like the boosters in AC.

There’s a ton of intelligence gathering and disruption options. Mechs only get a radar image of very close targets that are on the move, except for the commander, who can see any unit positions within the network area you control. Missions can happen at night, and unlike most games that can mean damned near pitch black. You have a headlight you can turn on, but all that really does is mark you as desperate or retarded. To this end, you can equip a flare launching mortar, or nightvision.

The flares are awesome. Not only do they show off the studly lighting effects, but targets within the flare radius will show up on your radar, and the flares are up long enough to actually be useful.

The nightvision is also great, but obviously only helps out one guy. Also, like real nightvision, it isn’t really as useful as, say, a small sun illuminating the hostiles.

The maps have COMBAS towers, which create the network area. Units outside of the area lose communications, and towers are captured by standing next to them for 10 seconds. The commander equips a portable version, enabling them to keep the shit together. There are also jammers, so your scouts can play hell with the enemy line.

Blah blah blah, I fucking love the game. The single player is just training, and a way to get parts, before you go online and, presumably, get your ass handed to you over and over. The parts are what keeps me from that final mission. See, and S rank gives you more parts, so I’m redoing every mission I didn’t already get an S in.

More after I’ve drank enough to go online.

I was struck by an idea for a Castlevania game the other day. One set in the future, with a bunch of new set material and whatnot.

Naturally I talked to my buddy Art about this, since he lives console games of all sorts. He informed me that Aria of Sorrow is in the future.

I was taken aback. I’ve even played part of the game! What the hell? Surely he’s wrong!

No. So I dug further. The game adds a pistol, and in Boss Rush a rifle. That’s the only difference between it, and previous incarnations. This made me look even deeper. I suddenly realized, and it made me feel slow that it’s taken this long, that since Symphony of the Night, those bastards at Konami have just copied and pasted the game over and over. Sure, dialog changes, but it’s usually just the same crap you’d get from bad (aka most) anime. Some, precious few, weapons get redefined. Bosses change in one way or another. That’s it! The MAP hasn’t changed in like 7 years. It’s a magical castle, you can do what you want with it. The basic enemies don’t really change either, and, most importantly, neither does any significant gameplay.

So. I’m going to re-write my idea to not have anything to do with it.

I’ve played games that were longer.

Games that were more involving.

Games that had more variety.

But none of them were that disturbing and funny. And though I mention variety, I can’t properly express the sheer awesomeness of the game. It has the reverse problem of Shoot ‘em Up, in that no matter how I describe it, it sounds boring. A straight linear game where you don’t shoot anything. That’s an eye catcher.

The game is short. I’d say 3 hours is a fair estimate, though you could hone yourself into some kind of retard ninja and do it in 2. Yet, it is damned near worth the price, all by itself.

Here’s hoping for a sequel.

The cake is a lie.

I never expected it to be good, but I was still disappointed. We were promised fairly free and open gameplay, and instead I was directed everywhere and had, at most, the choice to follow the direction or look at areas with absolutely nothing worthwhile in them that led to absolutely nowhere else.

Sure, it looks good, but I even take some exception with that. In the first videos I saw, it seemed to me that you may as well be a generic magic user in some sort of twitch game. Like Oblivion. The character waves his hand around, and depending on what power is equipped different colored lights or fairy dust fly off his hand, causing some stuff to happen. No real physical change is perceived, but suddenly fire and lightning squirt from your limbs.

In the demo, you get your first power from a syringe you find laying around. Apparently you’re supposed to be the world’s most frightening junkie, because you just immediately cram this unknown thing from an obviously messed up place into your tender surfaceworlder flesh. Then bam, lightning fist, with nary a change in complexion.

I’d like to have seen some physical change, possibly with detrimental effects if I switch back and forth a lot. The option to carry a couple of things rather than immediately shoving them into my body would be nice too.

Ah well. It was to be expected.