Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Or...cyborg dinosaurs
Tycho was right, the new OXM demo disc is fairly impressive. I'm really not sure what to make of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat; I know that they delayed the game a year to add a single-player mode, but at this point why not just go 360, at least on Xbox? It feels like a tech demo for a next-gen game anyways - the draw distance and textures are very impressive, especially while hanging out the side of a helicopter, but the animation for pretty much everything throws off the realism and preciseness of firefights. It's all a bit chaotic too, even with the simple goal of capturing various points of a map and holding them. I guess I can appreciate the relative balance they've achieved between the different vehicles you can commandeer and classes you can play as, but it just makes me yearn for the simpler pleasures of eight vs. eight on foot Socom battles.
Everyone keeps trying to go bigger with online games (see: Battlefield, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and PDZ), but I think the experience stands to lose a lot once you get past sixteen people. Feeling like you're a small part of a much larger war is always cool, but not when it diminishes the importance of the individual. You should be a small part, but you should also be the hero; you're rarely just a bystander in Halo - you're always a threat, and a single person or action can change the flow of a game. Those things can be true of Battlefield, but by and large you're not much of a threat unless co-operating fully with your team, with a plan on your hands. Most of the time you're just barreling towards a singular point, hoping you don't get shot or shrapnelled in the back for the eighth time in a row. Or maybe I'm just missing the beauty of it.
The Pirates! demo, though nothing more than a very simple boat battle, really makes me want to pick up the final game. I loved the original, and while it hasn't really changed in a decade it's still wonderfully charming and fun. Sailing about with no particular goal in mind was probably the first non-linear game experience I ever had, and from what I understand this new one maintains that open-endedness. And if there's one person I was to wander aimlessly, plunder and pick fights as, it's a Pirate.
As for Darkwatch, after playing three different demos I can officially say I'm not excited about the game. They do a lot of things right - the game looks great, massive floaty double-jumps are fun in an FPS, the environments are fairly destructible, and your vampiric powers are actually cool and useful. Coupled with what I understand to be partial cutscene nudity and horse riding (hopefully they're not one in the same), they theoretically have a good game on their hands. I have two big problems though - the enemies aren't fun, and the controls are badly mapped. Most of your opposition spawns right before your eyes, and keeps doing so until you've killed enough of them. They also do little beyond running right at you, a tactic that went out with Hitler. And when you've a vampire, a COWBOY vampire mind you, you don't want to be fighting zombies, you want to be fighting...samurai pirates, or some equally awesome amalgamation of badassery. And let's get something straight right here - Halo has one of the best control schemes ever, and it IS the standard for FPSes, like it or not. Snowblind gets this wrong too, which I've been playing. B is melee, X is reload, A is jump. Always. Why bother standardizing development with XNA when developers can't even stick to a simple control scheme that works? Clicking the left thumbstick in should not melee, ever. It doesn't feel natural, and it's hard to do when you're relying on it. Anyhow, back on track - there are lots of fun ingredients here, but the way they mix into the game doesn't flow as you'd hope for. I'd still love to review it if I can get my hands on a reviewable copy, but I'm afraid of how mediocre it's turning out. Unfortunate.
Oh, and there's a nice look at Elder Scrolls: Oblivion on the disc, which is currently my #1, I'd-kill-a-bag-of-puppies-to-play-it-now 360 game. Dead Rising looks like a ton of fun too, even if it's little more than a tech demo for fitting a ton of things on screen (though zombies are a good medium to work in).
Everyone keeps trying to go bigger with online games (see: Battlefield, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and PDZ), but I think the experience stands to lose a lot once you get past sixteen people. Feeling like you're a small part of a much larger war is always cool, but not when it diminishes the importance of the individual. You should be a small part, but you should also be the hero; you're rarely just a bystander in Halo - you're always a threat, and a single person or action can change the flow of a game. Those things can be true of Battlefield, but by and large you're not much of a threat unless co-operating fully with your team, with a plan on your hands. Most of the time you're just barreling towards a singular point, hoping you don't get shot or shrapnelled in the back for the eighth time in a row. Or maybe I'm just missing the beauty of it.
The Pirates! demo, though nothing more than a very simple boat battle, really makes me want to pick up the final game. I loved the original, and while it hasn't really changed in a decade it's still wonderfully charming and fun. Sailing about with no particular goal in mind was probably the first non-linear game experience I ever had, and from what I understand this new one maintains that open-endedness. And if there's one person I was to wander aimlessly, plunder and pick fights as, it's a Pirate.
As for Darkwatch, after playing three different demos I can officially say I'm not excited about the game. They do a lot of things right - the game looks great, massive floaty double-jumps are fun in an FPS, the environments are fairly destructible, and your vampiric powers are actually cool and useful. Coupled with what I understand to be partial cutscene nudity and horse riding (hopefully they're not one in the same), they theoretically have a good game on their hands. I have two big problems though - the enemies aren't fun, and the controls are badly mapped. Most of your opposition spawns right before your eyes, and keeps doing so until you've killed enough of them. They also do little beyond running right at you, a tactic that went out with Hitler. And when you've a vampire, a COWBOY vampire mind you, you don't want to be fighting zombies, you want to be fighting...samurai pirates, or some equally awesome amalgamation of badassery. And let's get something straight right here - Halo has one of the best control schemes ever, and it IS the standard for FPSes, like it or not. Snowblind gets this wrong too, which I've been playing. B is melee, X is reload, A is jump. Always. Why bother standardizing development with XNA when developers can't even stick to a simple control scheme that works? Clicking the left thumbstick in should not melee, ever. It doesn't feel natural, and it's hard to do when you're relying on it. Anyhow, back on track - there are lots of fun ingredients here, but the way they mix into the game doesn't flow as you'd hope for. I'd still love to review it if I can get my hands on a reviewable copy, but I'm afraid of how mediocre it's turning out. Unfortunate.
Oh, and there's a nice look at Elder Scrolls: Oblivion on the disc, which is currently my #1, I'd-kill-a-bag-of-puppies-to-play-it-now 360 game. Dead Rising looks like a ton of fun too, even if it's little more than a tech demo for fitting a ton of things on screen (though zombies are a good medium to work in).
// posted by Nick @ 10:27 AM 
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