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Okay, new page is up. In case you missed it, I promised (rather rashly, in retrpsoect, but we'll see how it goes) to update every friday with something, be it a comic page or just random sketches from my sketchbook. Probably nothing that's going to interest a lot of people, but it's the best I can do at present. Anyway, you can find it here. Since part of the reason for the old month-long delay was that I was playing video games, I figured I'd post a few observations on them. If you really don't care about video games much, you'll probably want to skip the rest of this (and, in fact, just about everything I write here).
FABLE
This is a game I really have a hard time talking about... I mean, I was really looking forward to it, I preordered it and everything. I was waiting anxiously for months for this game. Hell, I'm still waiting. I suppose that's the biggest part of the problem; this game feels more like a tech demo than an actual retail product. Part of this is probably the length, which is like ten hours. Normally, I'm not someone who criticizes a game for being too easy (it's better than it being too hard), but with Fable, that ten hours is going to be, more or less, ten hours in real-time, because you're never going to die. Again, I've played enjoyable ten-hour games, but the feeling is that this game just seems very rushed. Characters pop in to deliver a line of dialogue or two and establish their personality like they're supposed to be a central plot character, and then vanish for the rest of the game, never to be seen again. Even the main villain is never really given a decent intro, and most of the characters seem like fairly empty plot throwaways. It's the kind of feeling you'd get if someone took the Lord of the Rings trilogy and tried to chop it down into an hour long made-for-TV special. Characters keep leaping in, delivering lines like you're supposed to already know or care about them, and then leaping away without engaging in anything unseemly like dialogue.
The main draw for me, though, wasn't the story, it was the whole "sandbox" concept of the game, and if the game did really well there, I could forgive the storyline. Unfortunately, it doesn't. A lot of the advertised features of Fable are in there, technically, but almost all of them are done in a way that makes them feel totally pointless. Your character can customize his stats, for example, but I'd bet money that ninety-nine percent of the players finish the game with very similar levels. Experience point costs for high level skills are brutally steep; so much so that raising every single one of your physical skills from level one to level four (for example) costs less than raising your magic capacity from level five to level six. Therefore, the path of least resistance is to develop a well-rounded character, rather than someone who specializes in one particular area. There are only three specializations a character can have, anyway (melee fighting, archery, or magic), which doesn't inspire much awe from where I'm sitting. Character appearance is much the same: since your appearance is detemined by your clothing, haircut, and tatoos (as well as your stats, to a degree), it seems like a bit of a cop-out to only include five basic outfits (albeit with alternative black and white colors for each), for example. There are just so many aspects of the game that seem like good ideas, but seem to have been added almost as afterthoughts. For example, your character can take a wife, but there's really no point in doing so. Only one marriable woman in the game has any personality; the other women have a conversation reprioitoire that consists entirely of them standing around saying how happy or unhappy they are with the amount of present's you've given them (and that one woman who does have personality, Lady Grey, looses it once you marry her, and falls into the same "stand around the house and accept gifts" role every other woman does). One would think that plot-central women, like Briar Rose and Whisper, would be marriable, since they at least have a line or two or exposition for the player to decide if he likes them or not, but no, they're plot characters, which apparently means that they just spout their lines and vanish into the ether when they're not being used. Even the whole "you can be good or evil" premise that the game touts as central to it's experience feels tacked on. First of all, it's the same retarded, thoughtless brand of "evil" that is championed by games like Neverwinter Nights and Black and White, where the designer thinks that "evil" is synonymous with "acts like a dick all the time." Second of all, you get a few good (or evil) points by doing good (or evil) deeds, but mainly by killing evil (or good) characters, which is baffling, especially for evil characters, who could fairly safely justify killing anyone as an evil deed. It's just wierd to go into a graveyard with horns growing out of your forehead, and then come out the other side wearing a halo because you killed some zombies in there.
Every time I think about this game, I'm just struck with a million "why the hell did they do it this way" kind of questions. I don't think they're idiots or anything, but there were a lot of design decisions made with this game that just genuinely puzzle me. Why can't you marry plot-critical women? When the game ends, your character can wander around the world, but there's nothing to do. Why aren't there some simple, repeatable guild quests for this? Why does the game force you to play through as basically the same guy every time through (you can't change your hair color, skin color, gender, face, etc.). Why did they decide to hyper-accelerate the aging process so that characters will all be sixty-five years old by the end of the game (at which point maybe two weeks or so of game time have passed)? Most of these questions don't really seem like they have a huge amount of obvious hard work involved in taking the other option, so why are they implemented the way they are? It just confuses me, and irritates me, because Fable has so many features that could make it breathtakingly awesome, but they're not realized, and they never will be. The game's done, locked down, and it'll never be able to span that final six-inch stretch that would make it a truly great game.
TRIBES: VENGANCE
I was a huge fan of Tribes 2 (and the original Tribes, and Starsiege), but I wasn't really looking forward to Tribes: Vengance for some reason, so I didn't know a whole lot about it. Turns out it's got a pretty kickass single-player mode, to which I say "It's about time." Tribes is a game that's got a huge amount of backstory to it, it's got a lot of unique gameplay elements, and I'm surprised that it hasn't seen a lot more single-player attention than it has. While I can think of a few things I would have changed if I'd been writing the story, or a few potentially neat mission ideas I'd like to see explored, in general, it works real well. There do seem to be a few times when certain objectives seemed a lot easier or a lot harder than maybe they should have, but it's not going to really impact anyone's enjoyment of the game.
What might impact people's enjoyment of the game is the multiplayer portion of the game, which seems kind of weak. Not that it's badly done, but for every good decision it makes, it always seems to make another bad one. Graphically, the game is a lot more "chunky" than Tribes 2 (or the original), which is neat, and each Tribe has their own distinct style (both with armor and with their base layout), which is neat, but there are only three "Tribes" this time around (and one of them is the Imperials), and players can't choose which skin or model they want to use (the way they could in Tribes 2); it's automatically assigned according to the map. The gameplay, too, is very different from Tribes 2; if you took all three Tribes games and lined them up, Tribes 2 would be on one side, the original Tribes would be in the middle, and way off in the opposite direction would be Tribes: Vengance. The game is greatly simplified from Tribes or Tribes 2. There are fewer weapons, fewer vehicles (than Tribes 2, anyway), fewer packs, fewer accessories, the maps are less expansive, the bases are much smaller, vehicles and deployables spawn automatically, BF1942 style, and so on. It generally has a kind of "Tribes Lite" feeling, like it's a Tribes game for people who don't like Tribes. Not that this is a one hundred percent bad thing; I personally kind of like the increased speed a lot of the time (the way the new skiiing system works is convenient, too), but it definitely feels like the series is being wrenched in a hugely different direction to get it more in line with the mainstream FPS market. Again, I still get a kick out of it (the graphics are quite nice, and that means a lot to me, although the animations still need serious work), but I'll be a lot happier if Tribes 3 (or 4 or whatever) meanders back to the tactical, methodical gameplay that made the series stand out originally.
WORLD OF WARCRAFT
I'm not a big fan of MMORPGs. In fact, I like them even less than I like single player RPGs. It would take one hell of a game to change my mind on this, a game that really realized the massive, untapped potential that MMORPGs represent. I thought, maybe, that World of Warcraft would be this game. Looks like I was completely wrong. This game is supposed to go live in like, a month (November is what I'm hearing). The Stress Beta I was in ended in mid-September. They have a hell of a lot of work to burn through in two months to make this entertaining for more than a week after release. If there wasn't a monthly fee, I'd probably pick it up, but the fact that I can't play it without donating to the cause every month is probably going to keep me away.
The game's not horrible, but it's not mind-blowingly awesome, and for an extra two-hundred meseta a year, you'd damn well better give me a game that cures cancer or something. There's just too little in the way of really impressive innovation here for me to justify that investment. I mean, you roll up your character, grab your staff, and assault the local wildlife for a hundred hours. There's no story or anything, the graphics are stylistically nice, but the gameplay is shallow and extremely repetitive... there's just nothing here that really impresses, once you get over the "hey, that's neat" effect of the Warcraft style graphics.
ROBOTECH: INVASION
Okay, not exactly a mainstream title the way Tribes or Warcraft is, but since Robotech (the TV series, I mean, not this piece of crap) is arguably the single greatest achievement that humanity has ever... achieved, I guess, I feel the need to SCREAM WITH UNCONTROLLABLE RAGE every time a travesty like this is committed against the Robotech license. If you haven't played it, it's basically like Halo, except with kind of crappy controls and very dull graphics and even worse level design. Anything the last Robotech game (Battlecry, for those not keeping score) did wrong, this game also does wrong, and adds in a whole nest of new screw-ups on top of that. The nifty cel-shaded veritechs from Battlecry are replaced with crappy, drab, dirty looking cyclone models that animate horribly. Battlecry used voice actors and music from the series. Invasion dumps the original series music in favor of a rather generic score by some composer who the developers apparently thought was famous enough to merit mention on the back of the box and in the opening movie. This was a horrible idea. The music isn't bad, but whatever tenuous link this game had to an actual Robotech product is further obscured by the lack of the music (picture a Star Wars game set to a light pop soundtrack, if you're having trouble understanding this). It sure as hell wasn't worth ditching the series music (however remixed it was in Battlecry) to listen to yet another generic ambient score. The game just reeks of a hastily coded cash-grab licence game, rather than a product with actual thought put into the design. Just about everything that suggests that this game is, in fact, a Robotech title seems tacked on, or poorly implemented. For example, the cyclone can theoretically transform into a motorcycle for fast travel, but A) this removes all your armor, so you'll rarely want to do it, B) the cycle is both slow and awkward to control accurately, and you take huge damage for crashing it, so it's rarely worth it, and C) for some retarded reason, you can't change into cyce mode in an enclosed area (the game calls it a "safety feature"). Aside from the fact that I can point to a dozen times in the TV series when characters were racing their cycles down a corridor, there's also the fact that there are a lot of long, narrow indoor passages which your armor must now trudge slowly along. Who made this design decision, and why? Come to think of it, why the hell is any of this in here? There are no Alphas or Betas to fly or anything (at least, as far as I've found; the game employs a retarded "enter a secret password to unlock an item" option, so maybe they're in there somewhere, possibly), so the cyclone is pretty much it, as far as mecha go; why wasn't it polished a bit more?
Numerous other problems also crop up periodically. The storyline is incredibly rushed; your character is an amnesiac who is on a car, then someone says he should get some armor, then someone else says you need a cyclone if you're going to fight the Invid, then they tell you you'll have to fight your way through a canyon if you want to reach point L, and then some town is under attach, only there's no explaination anywhere as to why you're doing any of this, or what any of it means, or who any of the characters are. Then, halfway through the story, you leave your main character (and his "who the hell are these guys" team) and start over with another character (and her "who the hell are these ladies" team). The relationship between these two characters is extremely obscure; I think they're engaged or something, but since they never exchange dialogue or speak about themselves (they very rarely speak at all, in fact) it feels like a massive chunk of the game is missing. Anyone who's seen the series and the word "amnesiac" in the first sentence of this paragraph already knows most of the plot; anyone who hasn't seen the series is most likely going to be totally lost. Also: THE ENDING COMPLETELY SUCKS. A tip: if you're writing a story as weak as this, whatever plot threads you bring up, however insubstantial, are going to need some kind of closure at some point. If the game ends and we still don't know who any of the main villains are, or anything about the heroes aside from their names, what you have is an extremely crappy story. Seriously, if you suck at writing this bad, go online, download some ninth-grader's fan fiction, and plagarize the hell out of it. I'm serious. The game has a massive number of continuity problems, too. Aside from the surprising number of mecha they made up specifically for this game (which I have no real problem with, aside from the fact that they don't really seem to fill any sort of gameplay gap that the other units left), there are a number of wierd, wierd things that really don't fit in the universe. For example, Shadow Alphas can now apparently turn invisible, and so can one of the new Cyclone models. The Gallant is apparently hardwired into the Cyclone's configuration, so you can't drop it, nor can you launch missiles in armor mode (not even in the 052) or use any model specific weapons at all (the 041 and one of the new models has the CADS-1, but melee combat is awkward and very, very rare in this game), which kind of makes one question why there are so many models in the first place. They certainly don't look at all different, with the way the dark and indistinct graphics kludge everything together, it's difficult to tell even what color a cyclone is at any real distance. The Cyclone's jump pack is less of the jetpack that's depicted in the show and more a Metroid Prime-ish double jump. I'm going to cut short here. I could spend a few pages going over the half-assed-ness of this game, but I'm starting to foam at the mouth, which means I should probably take a break.
Anyway, no, I don't like it. It makes me want to bite the heads off kittens.
EVIL GENIUS
Once upon a time, there was a game called StarTopia, in which you built a little space station and worked your administrative butt off to get all the areas working and keep your residents happy. The big problem with this game was that the combat was horrible; fortunately, there wasn't a lot of it, and fights were generally pretty short.
Then, along comes Evil Genius, which is a StarTopia clone, but one in which you are constantly assaulted by unending waves of opponents. Frustration ensues.
The game suffers, I think, from two kind of big, related problems: pacing, and the fact that you can't really control your minions. I'm having trouble thinking of a way to describe this without going into huge and detailed descriptions of the gameplay mechanics, but basically the gist is this: the fact that your base runs on automatic makes it boring when nothing is going wrong, and extremely frustrating when any sort of problem crops up. Enemy soldiers will hand around outside your base and pick off your workers as they march out the door one at a time. Your minions will constantly open high security doors while enemy agents are right on the other side, waiting (apparently) for someone stupid enough to let them through. Advanced minions will refuse to train others, or will train until they collapse from exhaustion. Minions will get killed by booby traps as they attempt to dispose of the corpses of minions previously killed by that same trap. And, really, there's nothing you can do about it. Frustrating.
So, in general, not a great month for games. Still looking like there might be a few worth checking out next month, though (VtM: Bloodlines, I think, comes out in November, and I'll probably get it, even though I know they'll screw it up again).
Unless you regularly go through the archives with a fine-tooth comb, you probably won't have noticed that we've swapped the order of the newsposts, so they go from oldest -> newest descending rather than the other way around. Also, Kiv says "look" twice, which I'm not liking much, so I'll probably change it when I get time.
Okay: admin notice, the site will be down for a few hours tomorrow, starting at around 11 AM - 12 PM Australian time (12 - 1 AM GMT, 7 - 8 PM EST), and ending... hopefully 5 or 6 hours later, in which time the new site design will hopefully be implemented, assuming I don't hit any major snags. Hopefully.
Well, it's not close to done, but it works, which is important! Let me know in the forum if there're any glaring bugs I've missed.
