The Field Marshal's New Year Honours List

Another year chalked up, and with it another batch of games. It must be pointed out that I haven't awarded a Bennett Medal this year because try as I might, I've been unable to think of a third game which has rocked my world in 2009. There have been some near-misses, but it has been a fallow year for AAA titles it seems.



The Bennett Cross
"... most conspicuous gameplay, or some daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice, or extreme devotion to entertainment in the presence of the enemy"

The Hunter

A game of which many gamers are probably unaware, and some of those who do know it may well be inclined to steer clear on the grounds that killing small, defenseless fluffy animals is mean and nasty, or something like that.
Brand awareness certainly hasn't been helped by financial troubles faced by the developers this year which apparently led them into a period of administration. Fortunately it's still running, and we can only hope that work continues to fully realise the game's potential.
But what about the game itself? Well, it's a relatively straightforward hunting game. You pick a weapon, you set out into a completely open and satisfyingly large island game reserve, and then you track and (hopefully) kill either deer, turkey, elk or coyote. Sounds simple, and it is, but that doesn't do justice to the amazing atmosphere of the game. The reserve itself is beautifully rendered, especially in the early morning as you trek across misty hillsides with the sun peaking through the trees. Despite the number of species available, game is few and far between and you can spend a large amount of time starting to wonder if there's anything there at all, until you hear the grunt of a big buck, or the startling whine of an elk bull, and then you're into the tracking stage. Some of the animals are very, very sensitive and getting close is the biggest challenge, which makes a kill even more nerve-wracking. Much as I like Serious Sam, The Hunter is no mindless run-and-gun. There are no airports full of civilians to mow down with your machine gun, no grenades or gunships or demons or waves of undead to fend off. It's not for everyone, but if you don't have any moral objections to the game, and can stand something a bit more laid-back which rewards patience over twitch skills, there's nothing better that I'm aware of.



The Bennett Service Order
"... acts of the greatest gameplay or of the most conspicuous entertainment in circumstances of extreme danger"

Dragon Age: Origins

I've put about 20 hours into this game so far, and it's telling me I'm 15% of the way through. I'm sure some twat power-leveler could have finished it by now but the point is there's so much to appreciate in Dragon Age that I'm really in no hurry to finish it. There are flaws, notably the combat which is awkward and old-fashioned, and I spend a lot of time wishing I could skip the dungeon crawls and get back to the story. And I could do without having to micro-manage all the party members. And your hero really ought to have recorded dialogue instead of standing there like a statue in every cutscene. But ultimately Bioware have taken the excellent story-telling mechanics of Mass Effect and fitted them to a dungeons and dragons adventure. The result is an enormously satisfying game, and it wouldn't do it justice to say it's a good way to pass the time until Mass Effect 2 appears.

Honourable Mentions
Aion was perhaps the biggest launch for me this year, so why isn't it in the big 3? It's fairly pretty, and flying is an interesting, if not particularly well-implemented gimmick, but really there's not much else to even say about it. It's the same old mechanics, a whole shit-load of grind, and the usual deluge of moronic cunts who show up wherever PvP rears its ugly head. It's not really bad, it's just not great.
Having just picked up Torchlight in the Steam winter sale, I'm enjoying it a lot as a sort of gentle alternative to Diablo. The pet is a nice touch, especially being able to send it back to town to sell all the crap while you're in a dungeon.
Overlord II was more of the same, and no worse for that. Burnout Paradise was ok, although much more arcade-orientated than the superior Test Drive Unlimited.

Dishonourable Mentions
Dead Space came out in 2008 I think, but since I only just got around to playing it, it's included here. Awful, awful, AWFUL controls, stupid third-person view and insipid story. HAWX could have been Strike Commander for 2009, but instead managed to be tedious shit with an awful external view mechanic that could have been designed by the Dead Space devs. FEAR 2 was a borderline good game, except that Monolith managed to make the same mistakes as the developers of the FEAR expansions and as a result Project Origin's story is shit. The action often misfires and the game ends up being a pale imitation of the original.

Thought for the Day: Bianca Beauchamp

Big old wonky fake boobs, and a penchant for wearing full-body condoms. Nice!

On the Subject of Dead Space

Keely Hazell. Yes, again.

Another day, another Steam sale. I picked up Dead Space because I've read a lot of glowing reviews, despite some early control issues. Not so many that I was convinced to buy it at full price, mind you.

Anyway I'm not impressed. It's essentially a third-person Doom 3. With really, really shitty controls. Even when you turn off the in-game vsync (and force it through the video card driver instead) it's still shit. Floaty, laggy, nasty, shit mouse control which is a combination of a crap port from the console version, combined with the idiotic notion that making the controls as painful as possible will increase the sense of "suspense". "You're in a heavy space suit, you're supposed to move slowly". Bollocks. Fucking with the controls does nothing but get in the way of the sense of immersion, and makes the game frustrating not in a "difficulty" sense, but in a "this game was designed by monkeys" sense.

And that goes double for the third-person camera. I'm neither for nor against third person in principle, but I'm absolutely against Dead Space's implementation. They've zoomed you right in so half the fucking screen is taken up by the exciting view of your own back. Because of course by making it so you can't see anything because you're always in your own way, it makes the game more exciting and scary. Twats. But then they've realised that if you're staring at your own spine, you can't see anything at all, so rather than move the camera back to a more reasonable distance, they had the bright idea of shifting it way over to the right. So now it's only the left half of the screen which is hidden behind your own character. I honestly didn't realise that the character in the opening cut-scene was supposed to be me, I assumed it was another spaceman sitting next to me on the ship. It really is dumb, and gives the (correct) impression that they're desperate to show off their character design at the expense of the game play.

Despite the rather poor first impressions I thought I'd get stuck in and see if the game at least offered a bit of atmosphere, some decent scares or whatever. Sadly it really is just Doom 3 so far. It has the seriously annoying habit of showcasing new enemies when you first encounter them, usually from the safety of a neighbouring room through an unbreakable window. "Hello! Look at me! I'm a scary new creature! See me slaughter someone of no significance, and then come in here after I'm gone and a few more like me will pop up". It's the same thing FEAR 2 did with the assassin, even though FEAR 1's assassins were handled much more effectively. In Dead Space it happens right from the start of the game. There's no "Aliens"-style attempt to leave the worst to your imagination, keeping you on your toes because you don't even know what's stalking you in the shadows. From the moment they're introduced, all the enemies are just a series of tedious monster-closets. You can easily tell when, and usually where they're going to pop up. A corridor with no exits at the far end, but a tempting item on the floor? I wonder what will happen when I pick it up. An objective located in a large room with vents on the walls and floor? Whatever do you think is going to happen? At least in "aim" mode you get a torch, so that's one improvement over Doom 3. Except the game isn't very dark to start with so you don't really need one.

It's relatively good-looking I suppose. In a generic, industrial spaceship corridors sort of way. The monsters are pretty bland and forgettable. There's the obvious gimmick of needing to shoot their limbs off if you want to kill them efficiently. It's contrived and stupid but it's a damned sight more acceptable than messing with the controls in order to "enhance the game play experience".

So consider me particularly underwhelmed. I'm very glad I didn't pay 3 or 4 times as much for it. I feel like I still paid 3 or 4 times more than it's worth. But fear not (literally), there will undoubtedly be a slew of sequels as they try and wring all the commercial potential out of the franchise.

Thought for the Day: Eva Wyrwal

While I marshal my thoughts on Aion and Dragon Age: Origins, amuse yourself to the exceptional talents of the Polish hottie.

On the Subject of Nerfs

Keeley Hazell

My disdain for competitive PvP in MMOs is well-documented but the sad fact is that left unchecked, or rather when whining little PvP fanboys are pandered to by developers, the side-effects of PvP can spread like a cancer into all parts of a game.

I've been playing a bit of Champions Online recently. I didn't really intend to, and was lured into it by someone who was more enthusiastic, but I thought it would pass the time until Aion, if nothing else. As it turns out it has been reasonably fun. I've seen a lot of criticism of the visuals but I think in practice they're perfectly serviceable. They tend to look pretty bland and uninspired in screen shots, but in-game, with plenty of NPCs wondering around and a fairly decent graphic look it works ok. The main downside so far (by which I mean the mid-teens) is the lack of any central storyline, or really any central hook at all. It is all pretty random "go here, talk to this guy who will give you some standard-issue MMO quests before sending you on to the next hub". I've heard some talk about you designing a nemesis or something later on, but there's no sign of that yet. So it's ok to dip into now and again, but I have my doubts with regard to its long-term success.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. By far the best part of CO is the character design section, which offers an enormous amount of variety. Consequently I have put together a few different characters, some intended to duo, some just fanciful solo fodder. One of the latter category was designed around the "ice" archetype, and at this point anyone with a working knowledge of CO and the various powers probably has a pretty good idea where this is leading.
Essentially there was one ice power in particular which was broken. Or buggy. Or "not working as intended". Since I'm not that bothered about CO I haven't been frequenting the forums or keeping up with the current state of the game, but even I could see this power was over-powered and I even predicted its eventual nerfing. Sure enough, that eventuality came to pass today, and as I confidently waded into to some encounters I suddenly discovered that my trusty "3" key didn't seem to be doing anything. At all. Where previously any enemies foolish enough to get up close and personal were cut down in seconds, now it was me staring at the all-to-familiar "defeated" notice. Of course I had a pretty good idea what had happened, and a quick visit to the forums confirmed it. There was the usual flood of "WTF??" and the accompanying "haha, you deserved to be nerfed" crap.

I have come to the conclusion that I no longer have the patience for nerfs. Either get that shit right the first time (and this particular "bug" wasn't something obscure or difficult to reproduce, it was a blatantly obvious) or suck it down and put up with it. Let's not forget that CO has undergone the usual rounds of closed and open beta tests and is now fully open for business. I will happily accept skill adjustments and fixes during the beta period, because that's what beta testing is for. But now I'm paying to play a character, I'm getting into the swing of it and, dare I say it, enjoying myself, when some ham-fisted dev pulls out the nerf bat and starts swinging. The fact that I could solo that character was a large part of the appeal. The fact is I am no longer enjoying playing that character. To say I would quit the game because of that one nerf would be going too far, but on the other hand that one nerf is also symptomatic of a certain attitude on the part of the developers which doesn't bode well for the future.

The argument is, of course, that the power was broken and needed to be fixed. Even ignoring the fact they only just got around to "fixing" it today, why exactly did it need to be fixed at all? Because of fucking PvP, that's why. Some whiny little bitch took a beating at the hands of someone running an ice build and threw a hissy fit. In fact it was probably a lot of whiny little bitches.
Ignoring PvP, as every right-thinking individual would, why should skills be nerfed in PvE? There's no real reason. After all, despite what some retards claim, PvE is not a competition. What do you care if someone else's character has an easier time than yours? For one thing there's nothing stopping you from adopting their build, and for another it's not like that other person would have an easier time than you playing the build you chose. The notion that it's "not fair" that ice builds might have a super-power (a superhero with a superpower? whatever next?) is just fucking idiotic.

I'm well used to nerfs, having spent several years at the mercy of A-Net's relentless nerf bat. In that time I observed another downside to nerfing, which is that rather than creating a "level playing field" for all the classes, what really happens is the people who get in early enough take advantage of the "exploits" or unbalanced skills or whatever you want to call them and make out like bandits through farming or similar. Then the hammer comes down and suddenly no one else gets that same opportunity. At the height of Guild Wars' success, the super-rich players were the ones who had been around for the infamous farming runs which have long since perished at the over-zealous expense of "balance".

And it always does seem to be over-zealous. Developers never simply "tone down" unbalanced skills, leaving them with some usefulness but without being ridiculous. Instead they tend to crush them into worthless shadows of their former selves. This is what appears to have happened to Frozen Footsteps.

As I have probably pointed out in the past but have no fear of repeating, class balance isn't just a myth, it's something which shouldn't even be pursued. The whole point of having classes in the first place is to offer variety, so to go on to reduce that variety with the apparent aim of making any differences purely cosmetic is backward in the extreme. Of course the PvP brigade don't see it that way, but then you should simply have one and only one PvP class and be done with it. The notion of sharing game play mechanics between PvP and PvE is deeply flawed. Even A-Net approached that same conclusion when they eventually had the balls to give skills separate PvP and PvE descriptions.

Ultimately, after a customary period of loud mourning, players move on, work around the new, gaping holes in their skill bars (and in CO, filling up your skill bar seems to be a very slow process) and start whining about the next flavour-of-the-week build which is currently dominating PvP. I, on the other hand, am simply no longer interested in re-learning a character which I had developed around skills I was comfortable using and which have subsequently been pulled out from under me. So goodbye to my ice robot, and probably CO. It was an interesting diversion, but if you're going to continue to suck the cocks of PvP players at the expense of my game play, you'll be doing it without my subscription.