Archive for the 'Gaming' Category

Last weekend I finally finished Metroid Prime 3. Here are some quick thoughts I had on the game:

What I Liked

• The “Morph Ball” mode is incredibly fun. In essence, you become a pinball and get to roll through a number of tracks. There were plenty of puzzles that used this gameplay, and it ended up being my favorite part of the game.
• The Wii-mote and Nunchuck controls work surprisingly well. This is the first FPS experience I’ve had with the Wii, and I was quite pleased.
• Backtracking is well used in the game. There are plenty of areas that are inaccessible until you get certain powerups, forcing you to really explore every nook and cranny of every map.

What I Didn’t Like

• Loading times aren’t what they should be. Levels are loaded in an on-demand fashion, and there are some times when the delay gets in the way.
• The game feels a little too easy. Firefights end up being “how fast can you pull the trigger.” Weapon powerups are obtained in a few places, but they never feel more powerful.

All in all, I highly recommend this game; it’s a strong A in my book.

PC Gamer apparently got a sneak peek at the updates coming for Team Fortress 2. Not too long ago, Valve teased the community with a somewhat cryptic message, saying that a ‘large scale modification’ was planned for the game.

According to the article, this large scale modification includes unlockable weapons for each class, which will be selectable from a load out screen. These changes will be rolled out to the Medic class first. The first weapon described is a new medi-gun that will permanently boost your teammates’ health to 200% their normal values (instead of the temporary 150% boost that the current medi-gun supplies). There are no details yet on the second weapon, but it will be another medi-gun that will alter the class in a different way. It sounds like the first gun will be unlockable by acquiring half of the 35 new achievements coming for the Medic class, while the second update will be unlocked after acquiring them all. It should be interesting to see how this new feature pans out.

Another announcement is the new game type being planned, in which the attacking team will have to accompany a mine cart from one end of a map to the other. The article linked above goes into more depth about this game type, and it sounds super fun. In short, I can’t wait for these updates!

One of the things I got for Christmas this year was The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the Nintendo DS. I’ve played the game for several hours now, and I wanted to discuss Nintendo’s usage of the DS hardware in the game. Never before have I seen a video game make such good use of the hardware it has access to. Link is controlled entirely through the use of the touch screen (the D-pad and buttons are hardly, if ever, used), which isn’t entirely a new idea; see Kirby: Canvas Curse for a previous touch-screen-only title.

What really blew me away (almost literally) was the usage of the microphone in the game. There are a number of places where the player has to take some action: call out to a character trapped behind a steel door, blow out a few candles, etc. The neat thing is that all of these actions require you to physically do something. When you are told to cry out, you have to literally cry out. When you are asked to blow out the candles, you have to literally blow onto your DS! Is this a genius idea or what? I know that Donkey Konga for the Gamecube used a microphone (where the player clapped their hands), but this is the first game I’ve personally played that makes use of this kind of hardware.

The game also uses one other hardware feature that helps to advance the storyline (I’ll do my best to avoid any spoilers here). At one point, you are asked to perform a specific task to help locate a hidden item in the game world. In order to do this, you literally have to close the lid of the DS, and open it back up. What?!? Unfortunately, the game didn’t give me enough hints to figure this out on my own (or I was too dense to make sense of the clues it was giving me). As a result, I got stuck at this particular point and ended up reading about how to advance forward (and I hate having to do that kind of thing). But this hardware hack really impressed me! It will be interesting to see if any other games make use of this technology; here’s hoping that they will!

Valve recently released some statistics on Team Fortress 2. Like their recent hardware survey, some interesting items come to light:

• Scout, Engineer, and Soldier are the three most popular classes by far (with a combined 49% of the total time played)
• Medic is by far the least favorite class (only 5% play time)
• Several melee weapons (the Medic’s bonesaw, the Demoman’s bottle, etc.) get surprisingly high critical damage percentages
• The two most popular maps are cp_gravelpit and ctf_2fort
• The least popular map is cp_granary
• Red team wins 70% of the matches on cp_dustbowl

Lots of other interesting data is available for those interested. Some of the items I point out above are nearly opposite my own experiences. My least favorite class is the Scout, and one of my favorites is the Medic (I guess that makes me a more defensive player than most). I never use the melee weapons, and I really like cp_granary.

I’m hoping that Valve will rebalance the cp_dustbowl map, because I have noticed that the attacking team (blue) rarely makes it through all 3 stages. Seeing that red team wins 70% of the time is a clear indication that something needs to be done. As I’ve said before, this kind of statistics tracking is really great for solving these kinds of problems.

There’s an interesting op-ed article that contrasts Call of Duty 4 and Crysis. The author argues that emergent gaming (player-oriented, as in Crysis) is the future. Scripted gaming (like CoD4) is the current norm, but it limits the player in a number of ways. Unscripted gaming opens up a world of additional possibilities, at the cost of a much more challenging development paradigm. I certainly hope that games become more unscripted over time; I had a lot of fun with the Crysis demo, and the unscripted work going into the Half-Life 2 world seems to really be paying off.

I recently purchased Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat, and having finished the game, I thought I’d write a short review. I have to admit that I’ve only tried out the single-player campaign, though I hear very positive things about the multiplayer experience. Team Fortress 2 is eating up all of my online gaming time right now, so I doubt I’ll give the CoD4 multiplayer any attention in the near future.

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I recently posted a few thoughts on Team Fortress 2, but I thought I should write a full review now that I’ve spent more time with the game. Let me start off by saying that when I purchased The Orange Box, I was not in the least interested in Team Fortress 2. Portal and Episode 2 were the only titles I anticipated playing, and I even considered buying them separately. I’m very glad that I went for the better deal, as I hope this review will indicate.

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