Posts Tagged ‘games’
Refreshing an old idea
I have long been a fan of the saying to the effect that it is entirely fruitless to cry over spilt milk, meaning that if one has no control over something then there is no point in worrying about it. This seems at first thought entirely obvious and I imagine most try to follow it, but very often fail: psychologically it is very easy to worry or to fool oneself into thinking that one has some modicum of control over something enough to justify said worrying, or maybe that by worrying one creates some kind of control. I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist, but the saying in itself seems to hold a fair amount of merit. This week I’ve decided to try to make a renewed push in my own life to follow it. While this is all too easy to say and far more difficult to follow, I think I’ve been succeeding in it lately. This half term holiday has not been brilliant in several ways so far, and yet I have managed to remain very positive and rational. Firstly, it is already Thursday and the amount of work I have got done is not fantastic. More importantly, I have completed a large integration exercise over several days and yet did not achieve a fantastic score (since improved upon by fixing silly mistakes). Crucially, I found myself starting at certain problems for an hour, requiring help from a friend for one and being forced to work backwards from a computer-generated answer for another, and also being unable to see how my numerically identical answer can be rearranged into the form in the answers in the back of the textbook for another of the seventy-eight questions. So I’ve been dissapointed: I imagine others in the class will not have spent so many hours (I reckon about fifteen but several of those were with heavy IM distractions. Still far too long) on it and will not have found certain ones so hard, and may have even done the one I had to work backwards on. However, I am not letting this bother me. As I have written about many times before, I have a constant tendency to be unhappy with my academic performance unless everyone else is doing far worse than me, something I am ashamed of. But this is just an irrational circular argument. So I intend to ignore it, for there is no use metaphorically crying over it. So far I am succeeding. Now I merely have to reconcile my usual cynicism with such a policy.
Another multiply dissapointing thing that has occured this holiday is repeated crashes from various causes of Warcraft III roleplaying games, run over a VPN with a few friends. Warcraft III, as many will know, is a strategy game at heart involving various traditional fantasy races battling it out. It’s an old game but is still incredibly popular despite there now being many more fantasy games out there without the limitations of the engine. This is primarily because of the huge number of custom Warcraft III maps/levels available, since the game’s included world editor is supremely flexible; these then get distributed through playing online. There is Defence of the Ancients or DotA, with a massive cult following, that is used in international tournaments. One struggles to find a game of DotA where you don’t find yourself being automatically kicked for not being on their list of safe players (these are people who won’t disconnect and ruin a game since there is no way for players to take the slots of those who leave). There are various other quick-fire games of some skill: in Sheep Tag, some players as sheep construct farms with narrow passages between them that the other players, the wolves, attempt to destroy in order to catch the sheep. If the sheep survive for a certain length of time (as long as they are not all captured, captured sheep can be released by teammates) then they win.
Then there are the roleplaying maps, my favourites. There are some fixed maps with clever methods for saving heroes so that games can be continued, featuring the usual simple quests and collectable equipment and skills. But it is the entirely flexible RP maps that I most enjoy. These have gone through several generations of names and improvements but the most commonly played at the moment seems to be Secrets of the Depths RP, or SotDRP, though they all work pretty much the same and in fact use much the same terrain or actual playing environment. In an RP game, the player uses various commands to create cities, towns, camps, armies, navies and heroic adventurers with no limits on resources. The game then has two clear aspects. The first, which is probably the one I prefer, is constructing bases and camps and other such niceties to set a backdrop for the story. By rotating, resizing and making invisible structures, intricate and attractive creations can be wrought. Then the actual roleplaying begins, which is effectively like DnD or Exalted with props and effects. The system allows you to name and speak as characters, and while it may seem like an odd way of telling a story it actually turns out to be a great deal of fun, especially when it is with people you couldn’t conveniently meet up with otherwise. The crashes, then, stem from the limitations of Warcraft III as a game. Because RP maps are such a massive hack, Warcraft III’s saving of multiplayer games (a feature absent from many other games which is a shame) doesn’t work fantastically well. And if someone disconnects, that is it: there is no way to get them back in. So the dissapointment stems from losing all the building done, which can take several hours. But I intend to push on with the recurring plot a friend and I have established.
Review: Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
A squad of elite GDI Mammoth Tanks assaults a Scrin base.
The first violent game I got was Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and I’ve always been a fan of the series. When you talk about top-down RTS (real time strategy games) you can’t do so without bringing the behemoth of a series that is C&C that really does define the genre. It’s fast-paced, generally balanced, and easy to get into and out of. And the series distinguishes itself by continuing to have proper filmed cutscenes with real actors, which is something that I definately appreciate. It really enhances the story of the games which is very reasonable (can be surprising at times). The series has had several story lines going simultaneously (explained very well at the Wikipedia article); some are related to each other and others are entirely independent. The main tiberium plot started in the original C&C, continued in Tiberian Sun and its expansion pack, and I was excited to hear of its continuation in this latest adventure. In the immortal words of the GDI computer, EVA, ‘welcome back, Commander’. That line is quite possibly the best line in any video game I’ve ever played, when timed correctly and said in EVA’s computerised voice.
Story/Plot/Characters
The basic plot is that a crystalline alien substance, toxic to humans, arrived on an asteroid on earth in the 20th Century and has been spreading ever since, by converting normal matter across the planet into more tiberium. It turns out that because it draws valuable minerals out of the ground in doing this, tiberium is an extremely valuable source of energy and cash. It is the main resource of the games. The Global Defence Initiative (GDI), originally something set up by the UN that has become a global superstate, aims to research and understand tiberium to the extent that its infection of the world can be reversed, while the Brotherhood of Nod led by the enigmatic Kane (who appears to die at the end of every game and always resurfaces) believe that tiberium is a wonderous gift that heralds the next stage of man’s evolution, and so aims to spread it. By Tiberian Sun‘s expansion pack Firestorm, various forms of tiberian flora and fauna have developed, and by Tiberium Wars whole swaths of the planet have become uninhabitable. Then half way through the campaigns (there is one for each side) in this game an alien race arrives and begins a takeover of the planet. Maybe the theories of GDI scientists about tiberium being a terraforming substance for an alien invasion were right.
While the atmosphere of a world slowly suffocating under the tiberium menace is well portrayed in Tiberium Wars, there are elements missing. Tiberium only comes in simple crystalline forms rather than things such as tiberium veins, and tiberium lifeforms only put in a minor appearance. The Forgotten, a group of mutants that are the results of failed Nod experiments to create tiberian super-soldiers, only have a token involvement as well. To me this harms the games continuity and doesn’t allow it to follow on so well in the slow degradation of the planet.
The characters in Tiberium Wars are as forceful as ever, but I feel it is a shame that few have been carried through from the prequel. Granted, many were killed off per the story (although I suspect this was mainly because getting the actors back for the expansion pack wasn’t easy), but it’s not quite the same without the character representing the player, Commander McNeil, and the overall GDI leader, General Solomon. On the Nod side, while the charismatic Kane is back and is as fanatical about his crazed religion as ever, the classic Commander Slavik isn’t present (I don’t know if he is killed in Firestorm; I never completed the campaign). On the AI side, GDI’s EVA unit doesn’t make as big an appearance. Its cool and collected tactical analysis has been replaced by an energetic intelligence officer, which I don’t think is as effective. The lack of Nod’s famous CABAL computer is adequately explained by events in Firestorm. Overall the characters just haven’t been as memorable as in the prequel.
Gameplay
The gameplay in Tiberium Wars is very much more of the same, but that isn’t a bad thing: classic C&C RTS gameplay is of an excellent pace, is very accessible and has a good depth of strategy. You build up a base and get a steady economy of tiberium mining, you construct your units and you launch an attack. However, I felt in the campaigns of this game there was less variety in the missions: almost all involved this basic procedure of building up a base and large squad and then pushing forward. This is in contrast to the prequel in which there were many missions without a base at all, when you would lead a small squad deep into enemy territory to achieve various objectives. To me this seemed to present a greater challenge because once you have established a foothold, as the RTS genre doesn’t seem to be able to escape from, a tank rush will pretty much guarantee victory. This is particularly apparent when playing GDI because their Mammoth Tank is in my experience very much overpowered. You can find your tiny base being overwhelmed by enemy assaults, but once you have a tech centre and war factory and have enough cash to build a few mammoths and build their railgun upgrade to make their weapons more powerful, you’re pretty much safe because you can just place a mammoth at each point the enemy is attacking you from and little gets through.
There are some welcome improvements however. Units can now, for a price, call in a transport to take them to another location on the battlefield which is very convenient. Bases can be expanded by sending out small vehicles that establish outposts, rather than simply building a line of power plants or constructing an expensive mobile construction vehicle that deploys into a construction yard. Superweapons are at last genuinely super and are something to be afraid of, rather than a minor annoyance when the same building keeps being destroyed.
While GDI remains a side with a strong, continuous and unique character, and the new Scrin faction is effective and follows the hints dropped in the prequel, I am dissapointed by how Nod is portrayed. It has become at least partially a terrorist organisation instead of an elite religion which relied on high technology. While it retains these elements, it also introduces suicide units and cheap, numerous militants and I don’t think this is what Nod should be in terms of its place in the C&C Universe. Carry-throughs such as the classic sound of a charging Obilisk of Light (which still scares me, I was young when I played the prequel) are very welcome however.
Presentation
The graphics in Tiberium Wars are superb: when two armies come crashing together and start firing their high tech weapons, everything looks fantastic. I only really care about graphics when they are either exceptional or are spoiling the game because they are so poor, and both of these situations are rare for me: I don’t mind very much what a game looks like. But in C&C 3 they are very well done.
The music in the game is also very good, with good sound effects for weapons. The way a lot of these have undertones of the previous game helps to enhance the feeling of the tiberium-infested planet.
Conclusion
Not as good as the prequel as a complete package, but a very good sequel and continuation of the series. Well worth buying.
Constructing Zephyr
For many months I have been complaining about the slowness of my main computer, which was improved when njan kindly sent me 256MB of ram, improving things to 512MB in all, a few months ago. But despite this things were still not brilliant and additionally my video card did not have the capabilities necessary to play any recent games at all, even on the lowest graphics settings. Specifically, I waited for and bought Oblivion very shortly after it came out at full price (in fact, I pre-ordered it on Amazon with vouchers I’d got for Christmas) and have never actually been able to use it. I have lent it to friends to make use of over the years but this and the general slowness of things have encouraged me to finally save up and build a new one. After several birthdays of receiving funds to add to my account, I finally decided that I had enough to build over this half-term, a couple of weeks ago. Ordering on the Wednesday before the week off, I was confident that I would have sufficient time to build over the week. Fat chance.
I put my components list together with the help of PhilKC from freenode but as I left it in an online shopping basket over several days, several items went in and out of stock. Eventually when I ordered both the motherboard and graphics card were out of stock and so the wait began. I will spare you the details of having the expected dates changing around and e-mails contradicting my order details view, but in the end I ended up ordering my motherboard and a nice new keyboard elsewhere. So I ended up building during an incredibly busy school time, which is far from ideal. In addition to these purchases I got a 21″ CRT monitor off eBay for just ~£23 bringing my total to around £720. I am still at this point trying to work out how I am going to get this monitor home from its location in a nearby town.
The actual physical building of things went pretty much trouble free. The most difficult parts for me were attaching the CPU to the motherboard and applying the heat-conducting grease which is a fiddly task, and I was concerned that things were getting too hot and that I had done it wrong. Phil was a great help over IRC and we decided that it was sufficiently safe. I soon found however that my case really doesn’t have enough space for wires and wiring up my floppy drive (which I left disconnected until after I had stress-tested my memory) and hard drive was incredibly difficult. I got the floppy cables the wrong way at first and so this had to be fixed. Fortunately, I only needed to rotate the end that was easier to rotate… At this point, everything physical is done except for the power LED and USB ports on the front, which don’t seem to be working. Annoyingly, my motherboard doesn’t have the capability to have a system/case speaker, which is something I was very used to using for beeping at me when I received messages on IRC.
Windows installed easily enough, for playing games, except that I had to go find a USB keyboard as the installation didn’t like my PS/2 one, but it works fine now. I have strengthened Windows up with anti-virus and the like and got it fully up-to-date. However, my intention had long been to use Ubuntu as my main operating system and also leave some space free for another flavour of Linux. After battling to get the live cd to run, it was clear that all was not right. As I find with my NSLU2, my router does not provide nix systems with the right DNS servers so I have to reconfigure this on every startup. That is not a huge problem: what is is the huge effort required for my graphics card and Ubuntu to make friends, allowing me to use Ubuntu’s fantastic visual effects, provided by Compiz Fusion, which makes windows bounce around and fade and desktops rotate on a nice cube. My graphics card chipset, the nVidia 8800GT is specifically not supported by Ubuntu and so I had to use various workarounds. It was not particularly fun, and upgrading to the next major version of ubuntu is going to be a pain, but I am quite happy to have the pretty effects.
All that is left for me to do at this point before I can wire Zephyr (named due to my naming scheme of Greek gods, goddesses and letters) into my desk is to transfer the data from my old 80GB hard drive that I have had for about five and a half years. This is far, far easier said than done, and at this point everything across the network that I have tried has failed. It may be that the only way to successfully transfer the data is to physically move the HDD into my new computer, but I am loath to do that if it can be avoided. I need all my saved games, but data is held on my NSLU2, so there is no real rush to get this sorted.
The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess
I ordered this off a rather nice new website for ordering games at long last this week and got it yesterday. I’ve been waiting for it for several years and finally have started playing, and it’s brilliant. I wrote this e-mail to a friend about it and so I thought I’d use it as a blog entry as it’s quite nice.
So, I’m writing to you to get first impressions before we see each other at school and have a long conversation, probably in English. I’ve named Link Xyrael and Epona Athena – the goddess of war and wisdom is appropriate as it’s another classical allusion as Epona is, raising the status of the character 
It took me about forty minutes of scouring the net etc. to choose that one, as I knew I’d kick myself if I didn’t pick something nice. The cat is so cute!
Now, there are a few points so far that have frustrated me. Again, we have the usual annoying follower of Midna. I don’t like the servant idea at all. Also the fact that the enemy is that King of Shadows is cheesy and not Zelda. The series can get away with being a little cliched because it does it so well, but if he doesn’t turn out to be Ganon I’ll be dissapointed. I think it can be fairly said that the final battle on Wind Waker is the best Zelda boss battle ever, and I hope that this will live up to that.
There are many good points. I like the blending of Wind Waker style graphics with Ocarina realism – the curls and twists of Wind Waker work well but they are incorporated into the really nice colours. Now, it may just be that I’m using a pretty rubbish screen but right now, Wind Waker impressed me more by the beginning of the game for pure wow factor. Also, as per usual with me, I’m really pleased they’ve kept the old music but improved on it. For example, when I stepped inside Link’s house, it was great to hear the usual theme. The light spirits are a nice idea and the bit when you get dressed in the kokiri (SP?) tunic is very nice. /If only they’d mentioned the hero of time/, as the right theme was playing. I was very excited.
The whole shadow world idea is overall quite nice. I’m not keen on the ever visible blue earring, but the challenges that can be overcome as a wolf are fun. Here’s my prediction for the rest of the game: blast back twilight a bit further to reveal a dungeon, hack through as Link, switch back to wolf and blast twilight back a bit more etc. And the thing to collect, as in every RPG, will be the thing Midna is looking for (which I don’t really know about yet). And heh, I actually read the instruction manual before playing.
One thing that I’m extremely worried about is the lack thus far of a special item; e.g. Wind Waker, Ocarina, Harp of Ages etc. Something tells me it’s inside the first dungeon, that Dark Temple which I’ve just entered (I’m at grandparents now, don’t reveal beyond that point please!). I’m hoping that this will surface. So, what are your thoughts?