demodulated

Epic (née Megagames) superstar level designer (!?) Cliff Bleszinski (gesundheit!), aka CliffyB, laments to Gamasutra about the poor sales of his (proclaimed) acclaimed Xbox hit, Gears of War. Says Bleszinski:

“I think people would rather make a game that sells 4.5 million copies than a million and Gears is at 4.5 million right now on the 360.”

Such commendable objectivity. Let’s look at the facts behind this blanket statement.

• Gears of War was released on PC, at full price, one year after the Xbox360 premiere.
• Thousands complained about the game’s inexplicably high system requirements.
• Needless integration with Windows Live requires you to create an account and be logged in to save your single player game.
• You’re stuck with console-style continue points and can’t save anywhere.

Not only does Cliffy assume that no PC gamer owns an Xbox 360, the game is crippled with needless online integration and obviously overlooks many of the PC platform’s strengths. As is the case with all console ports the game looks dated on PC and does not warrant the full price of admission.

Epic is recoiling from unimpressive holiday sales, but this comes as little surprise on the PC side. Their two major offerings last quarter were the ageing Gears of War as well as the universally snubbed Unreal Tournament 3. The reasons for the failure of the latter title are quite obvious to me:

• Epic’s insistence to synchronize its launch with Valve’s Orange Box and EA’s Crysis.
• The game is marginally different from Unreal Tournament 2004.
• The mod scene for UT2k4 is huge, so starting over with a blank slate is mundane.

And Gears of War?

• Very awkward WASD controls.
• The level design is sub par - every map is a square with debris.
• You fight baddies called “wrenches” (Get it? Gears? Wrenches? Neither do I.) and the rest of the writing resorts to sub-Stallone gravelly machismo.
• A more apt name would have been “Run and Hide” since that’s all you ever do.

Reality aside, Cliffy’s assertions of the PC market being in “disarray” are unfounded. These fraudulent allegations combined with his sloppy port of Gears proves he wouldn’t know a personal computer if it slapped him on the rump.

“I think the PC is just in disarray,” he stated. “What’s driving the PC right now is Sims-type games and World of WarCraft and a lot of stuff that’s in a Web-based interface. You just click on it and play it. That’s the direction PC is evolving into so for me, the PC is kind of the secondary part of what we’re doing.”

His examples are way out of left field and he ignores not only the enormous variety of the PC market that can’t be found anywhere else, but also the phenomenal titles on the horizon (Spore, Conan and Warhammer Online, the Sam and Max series, Postal 3, Fallout 3, Starcraft 2, to name a piddling few).

What irks me most of all is Cliffy’s dismissal of the platform that made Epic the company it is. Longtime fans of the company will remember Epic Megagames as a marginally above average purveyor of shareware PC titles sporting charismatic protagonists like Jazz Jackrabbit and Jill of the Jungle. These were games whose first few levels were free and continued play warranted incremental payments for subsequent stages. Even their later, more polished titles kept the grassroots image by employing, for example, MOD music legend CC Catch (Kenny Chou) to score the awesome robot fighting game One Must Fall 2097. This company was the very definition of humility and the goodwill and support of the PC gaming community bolstered it into the powerhouse it is today.

So bye bye, Cliffy. Go seek out your fortune in the wild, untamed mainstream. Leave the most powerful gaming platform in your wake as you squeeze the last ounce out of yesterday’s technology. Obviously you know your company better than those of us who spent our childhood playing the likes of Kiloblaster and Dare to Dream on Windows 3.1. Your army of Xbots sweats with prepubescent anticipation, calling your name in their collective prepubescent tenor, itching to wrap their monkey mitts around the most imprecise controllers on Earth to nudge and fidget their way through your next square room full of boxy debris. Count me out.

What is love? Cliffy, don’t hurt me!

I’m playing Crysis but I’m thinking of Wing Commander. How I wish a more unique or other less popular genre of game were the one to premiere Cry Engine 2 instead of this merely adequate shooter.

The game engine is damn fine, and this little Google Video clip can’t do it justice. Click here to see the half-resolution 170MB AVI. Pretty nice frame rate for all High detail settings with AA and AF while recording with Fraps, eh?

This entry is a guest article written by Bianca of The Weasel Soap Box.

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First person shooters have the reputation of being the cause for seemingly violent behaviour amongst teens and young people, or at least that’s what come anti-game politicians and inept lawyers (and I use that word loosely) like Jack Thompson would like you to think. After all, all the ammo is there. The gratuitous blood, mounds of mowed down, bullet ridden corpses and the protagonist’s supposed raison d’etre, often stemming from either something traumatising or years of pent up anger, that can only be released with the pull of a rapid fire gun.

Games that might fit in this framework include and not limited to, Postal and its bloody-ridden sequels, Man Hunt and its less-than-impressive follow up, Grand Theft Auto (though more of a third person shooter) and its many incarnations, including San Andreas, Max Payne, the Call of Duty series (thought just as violent, the violence is based on something other than being purely the quest to inflict pain unto others) and many others, which don’t need naming because it would take all day. But, point aside, there are plenty of them and they contain the same basic elements needed to make for a mindless first person shooter, a good place in which a person can vent their anger at some sexy, enhanced pixels that may even seem life-like at times.

These games are scapegoats when someone decides to pick up a gun and take out their anger on soft, supple human targets. Many of the people to pick up arms in the end were shown to have no connection to these types of games, nor were active players.

What’s my point? I guess its that you don’t need a first person shooter to go on a rampage and kill everything in plain sight. Guns are merely one of many instruments that can be used when mowing down swaths of innocent bystanders who stand in your path, only able to scream, “Help, someone’s been murdered!” before you come along and slice them in half with your sword, axe or hammer. Or maybe that’s not your style, maybe you prefer something more fantastical like a fireball spell or the magical properties of a staff.

If you’re into the mystical or you’re just a person who would prefer to go on a murderous rampage using something other than a rapid fire, lethal arm, the weapon assortment in Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls may be more up your ally.

Please note that at this point, this is not a game review, it’s merely an opinion piece regarding an element of the game that allows the player to move away from the more linear aspects of the game and go take out their anger on humanity with graphically rendered models that happen to look like something we call “humans”. Of course, not all your potential targets are human. In addition to the human races, there are orcs, elves, khajit (cat-like creatures) and argonians (lizard-like creatures), who exist be side the human population of Cyrodiil.

While there are repercussions in the form of fine or jail time from the different groups of guards, you can ignore the consequences if you want to cause chaos and mayhem. It’s easy enough to kill people out of view of the rest of the society, making it easy to literally get away with murder. But, it’s not satisfying unless you’re doing it for a quest or something with a reward on the end. There is something missing…

I guess, one might call it carnage. There is no point in killing unless you can’t take everyone down with you. Carnage is the whole point of rampaging. To take out them before they can take out you. For this, you don’t need a first person shooter. You just need the game to be open-ended, like Oblivion, and the ability to freely be a jackass.

Perhaps a practical demonstration is required at this point.

For this article, I have decided that I should go on a nice little rampage before I write this so that the experience is fresh in my finger tips. Let’s just call it, field reporting.

For this, I decided to bring my sword-wielding Redguard to Chorrol.

So, as you can see from the above, I’m near one of the gates in Chorrol. I have my sword out. It’s a nice little weapon. It’s got a glass skin but it’s enchanted and does frost damage on my target. I also have a shield, but it’s not used for blocking. So, with my sword and very study heavy armour, I’m a real tank, able to just go in and take a beating from the guards and not break into a sweat.

So, I killed the nearby beggar first. No one’s going to notice one less mooch on the fragile welfare system. However, this guard took exception to it. He wasted no time in approaching me and interrupting my rampage. This was quite rude of him, despite giving me a change to get off the hook.

My bounty by the time the guard caught me was already 1,000 gold, but he was going to be nice and either let me pay the fine, or go to jail. Though, as you can guess from what’s highlighted here, I was going to resist arrest. What’s the point in rampaging if you can’t bring down a few guards in a violent blood bath as you resist arrest?

As you can see, however, the guards were no match for me. They tried to charge at me, but they come at intervals, giving me a chance to prepare for the attack. The AI is stupid in this respect. It had the guards attack me without back up. Though I don’t think the AI was programmed to handle this kind of stupidity.

There are a few guards but not as many as I would have liked. They are badly organised, which heavily takes away from rampaging time as I go in search of more in this town. I didn’t get many guards charging toward me at once. Then again, I’m just one lone psychopath going on a murderous rampage through this quiet town.

I had to patrol to find more to kill, but it eventually paid off and I found a few more innocent civilians to hack and slice into itty-bitty pieces of worm chow. I slew them I did. With a swing of my mighty sword I cut their life line short and sent them on the Midnight Express to see the Nine Divines.

No one escaped from my grasp. Neither the rich nor the poor. They were all pawns in my way. They would all suffer equally before the hand that belonged to the Listener; The Messenger of Death. I spared none. When death comes calling, death does not discriminate.

And as if the violent rampage itself isn’t enough, with Oblivion, you can also loot the corpses of those you kill and remove the armour and clothing that they are wearing. Take a glance at the image above the image here. In it, the guard is wearing his armour and in the image directly above this paragraph, the guard has no armour on. In addition to the clothing and armour, I can loot any number of things from the corpses as I kill them, including and not limited to gold, jewellery, weapons, potions, scrolls, keys, gems, alchemy ingredients, et cetera.

So, while I rampage, I often check the corpses for good, useful items like keys. More often than not, I just find garbage, pure garbage.

I couldn’t get a good screen shot for this, but if I did, I would have inserted it here. During my rampages, I’ve seen the guards themselves stop to loot the bodies of the slain, including their fallen comrades, instead of coming right for me as I stand there waiting for them to finish inspecting the corpses for something of use.

After a while, the town wasn’t showing me any more golden slaying opportunities, so I set the Chorrol Castle in my sights and headed over to it to continue my rampage. My first stop was the castle barracks where I got into a good fight with three guards, two pictured here being all chummy in death.

Near the barracks was the dungeon. It was heavily guarded and well, providing me with a decent slaughter-fest as I cut mercilessly through the soft, supple bodies of the guards who charged me. These guards, like the others went down fast…

Considering they are supposed to be guards, I killed them a little too easily. I’d hate to think how easily a foreign invading force would trample over this town and others, if this is as strong as the local watch is. If they can’t stop me, a simple psychopathic lunatic, how will they ever defend their dear countess?

The countess who rules over Chorrol all by herself, with no one to defend her from the psychopath that now stands in front of her, ready to pounce, driven by the scent of blood.

Before moving in for the final kill, I take some time out of my busy, busy day to talk to this meddlesome guard who feels it’s important that he try and stop me. He can’t give me the opportunity to pay my fine, and I’m certainly not going to go to jail…

I’m also baffled that you expect me to pay 24,240 gold pieces to make this little offence go away.  If I didn’t pay the first thousand, why would I pay the subsequent thousands?  Explain that one to me, Mr Guard, I say, as resist being arrested and thrown into the dank, squalid Chorrol Dungeon.

“Then pay with your blood!” is the declaration heard upon resisting arrest. It’s the same line all the guards are known to cry as soon as you decide you don’t want to co-operate with them.

Though it looks like I’m not the one who paid with their blood…

While this was a short rampage, I feel that it’s a far superior environment to rampage in than a first person shooter because you have other weapons available to you. I am only good with the sword in my character, otherwise I would have used a spell, but my character doesn’t have enough magicka for me to cast a good looking spell, or a deadly one.

While not as gory as others, it still provides an excellent venue in which to vent one’s anger and irritation at the modern world that is slowly turning into a pseudo-nanny state, where the state thinks it knows best and that some how, if people play these games we’ll all turn into murderous lunatics who will enter a crowded market place and start killing on whim.

Too bad someone didn’t tell that that the art of rampaging like a psychopath comes from real life, and that video games are a harmless way of unleashing that anger…

I somehow came across the Kloonigames website yesterday and spent a good long while there. It’s the website of a student programmer who has written many games in a week or less. Pick a game from the square thumbnails on the right-hand side. My favourites are Humpsters, Bloody Zombies, and Crayon Physics.

Here’s a video of the sequel, Crayon Physics Deluxe, which looks totally stunning. Don’t let the sequel’s sophistication ruin your impression of the original game though - it’s brilliant and eerily calming.

Valve’s Orange Box was released yesterday and I was happily running Half Life 2: Epsiode Two after 10 minutes of decrypting the data since I’d already preloaded the data files (kudos to Valve for rolling out the whole download in one shot unlike the cascaded rollout with Episode One). I have a few quibbles with some features which I’ll state here, but I’ll give my full review after I’ve played through the whole thing. (here’s my review of Half Life 2: Episode One if you haven’t already read it)

I maxed out all the graphical and audio settings and prepared to jump right into the action. I was surprised to see a preliminary recap play immediately without any loading screens. It’s a prerendered video. I hate video. The resolution is super sharp but I can still tell. It feels even more out of place because this is the first time I can recall in the Half Life universe that the camera has left the first person view. The story recap isn’t really necessary since Episode One was so short. Bad vibes from the get go.

Skipping over the awe I felt from the incredible graphics and spectacular scenery, a second frustration popped up before long. I was given a taste of Steam’s new achievement system, akin to Xbox Live’s, while playing the fantastic Team Fortress 2 (the only multiplayer shooter I’ve enjoyed since Quake 1). After completing an arbitrary “achievement” in Episode Two I’m shown a cutesypoo little icon on a small popup at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen telling me I’ve unlocked this achievement. This absolutely sucks. Playing this game is enough of an achievement. I don’t give a shit that I’ve earned a turkey baster award for squishing 30 insects. This totally sucks me out of the game and for a universe as rich as Half Life this is the ultimate crime. I can find no way to turn off these alerts. I’m tempted to play the game poorly to avoid them. Very, very disappointing.

The last straw yesterday was when the game crashed. The Source engine is known for a few idiosyncrasies such as the screen freezing and audio looping for a couple of seconds when entering an area with new texture assets, but it’s incredibly rare that the game will actually crash to the desktop. Rarer still, everything became completely unresponsive, even to ctrl-alt-del and atrl-alt-esc. Since I couldn’t see what I was doing I had to use the force, pressing Windows-R to open a run dialog, typing “cmd[enter]” to open a command window, press alt-enter to make it fullscreen, and type “exit[enter]” to return me to the desktop where a crash dialog had been obscured behind the frozen Half Life window with an OK button to dismiss it.

This is like a gaggle of teenagers talking on cell phones during a movie. I was completely turned off by this point. I started playing Portal and didn’t stop for 3.5 hours.