Old News: Page Eight

So we've been on hiatus for a few months as we all play World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. There's a triumphant comeback in the works, though, with a new episode of The Dariencast discussing all the things we've learned and not shared with you.

In the meantime, let's talk about a few things. Specifically, let's talk about this quote:

"But Metroid Prime didn't escape the trend of tedium that's going around games these days. The game requires the player to trek across already explored areas of its huge game world time after time after time on the way to new areas. Interestingly, Metroid uses the exact same formula as another game: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which avoided this problem. That game featured a large number of teleporter rooms throughout the world, allowing the player to skip past areas he's already explored. (Actually, Castlevania borrowed the formula from the original Metroid and Super Metroid.)"

I got that from a relatively old article here, and I mention it because it's a perfect illustration of how I'm evidently the world's worst gamer. Despite having played both Metroid and Super Metroid countless times, I've evidently never found the fabled teleporter rooms they contain. That or perhaps this is yet another example of someone comparing Castlevania: Symhpony of the Night to Super Metroid because the map screens are fairly similar.

In other news, the GDC did its thing lately, and Peter Molyneux is still a colossal queer. Watch that interview, it's teriffic. Note that they let him ramble for two solid minutes before they finally cut and we think we're getting the answer to the question, but then he continues rambling, managing to praise the ending of Final Fantasy VII as one of the great moments in gaming. Now, even people who liked that steaming heap tend to be of the opinion that the ending was terrible. But here's Molyneux telling us with a straight face that they wanted to include elements in Fable 2 that were as good as Final Fantasy VII's ending. For fuck's sake, Peter, I don't know what to say to that. Maybe you could aim a little higher for Fable 3 and try to include something as good as the DK Rap.

More to the point, after about three minutes of babbling, he finally says that the big thing they wanted for Fable 2 was for the player to experience "being loved." Now, while that's fairly gay all by itself (he uses the phrase "rumpy-pumpy" to describe what he didn't want, which I think does win him the official award for Stupidest Thing To Come Out Of A Developer's Mouth for 2007), I haven't gotten to the real punchline yet. The big shocker that Molyneux has in store for Fable 2 - the major revolutionary idea that sets it apart from all other games - is that you get to train a dog. I'm serious. You get a dog sidekick. This is something Peter Molyneux has "never seen in a game before,", also. Perhaps someone should introduce this man to that other game with the dogs, which I can totally understand his not ever having heard of, since it's totally obscure and hardly sold any copies.

The best part of the interview is that he doesn't actually answer the question for almost five minutes, and that's with a cut in the middle. You really should see this.

So I'm a few days late. I was, um, sick. But as your present this year, I've brought you a brand new episode of everybody's favourite podcast. Make sure you listen to it and tell all your friends to listen to it too. They'll be way cooler afterward. Trust me.

Hey hey, new feature! It's big and bad and bold and it's The Dariencast, where two of the internet's premier opinionmakers sit around and joke about video games for a length of time. If you like video games, or jokes, or frankly if you have a passing fondness for excellence, then you need to check this out.

So I've played and reviewed Kingdom Hearts 2 these days. I'm not going to spoil on the front page what I thought of the game, but here's a special note: I never once degraded myself in the review by drawing any attention to Square Enix's ridiculous "buy this game we put cloud in it!!!!!!!" antics, even though it did wear severely on my patience the way they kept interrupting the actual game to show me cutscenes of what would have happened in Final Fantasy VII had they thought of it at the time.

Just as a note for Square Enix: we've already played Final Fantasy VII. It sucked. Try not to remind us of how we paid you for a shitty game you didn't even fucking finish while we're in the middle of playing one of your other games. You don't really need to rub our noses in it.

Nothing makes me smile with sinister joy quite like watching the PS3 collapse in on itself over and over and over. First, Sony can't get the production costs down, and it has to launch at an absurd price point. Then they can't get it made consistently, and it launches with only a miniscule little number in the retail channels. Then there's violence and looting at the launch, and it doesn't seem like anybody bought it to play - they're all on eBay. Those poor saps who did play it found lots of interesting things - it can't upscale to 1080i like it should, so old HTDV owners take it in the shorts. It doesn't play PSX or PS2 games near as well as it theoretically should. How does Sony respond? By lying about the competition. Classic.

I've just completed my gigantuan review of Baten Kaitos Origins, and I have to say that it does appear that I was totally right when I said it was the most exciting thing that showed at E3 this year. What happened to this noise about a DS release I could not tell you, but, hell, the GCN version's plenty good and looks better besides. So whaddaya gonna do? You're gonna go read the damn review, that's what. Don't make me come over there.

I don't get you people. Are you all really a bunch of retarded hamsters? Here is what I want out of any Star Wars RPG or FPS type game:

1. Lightsabers
2. Stuff to kill with my lightsaber

It's really that simple. Sure, it might be fun to play a smuggler like Han, or a bounty hunter like Boba, but when it comes down to it, you don't need the Star Wars license to make a game about sci-fi smugglers or bounty hunters. If you're spending all that money to secure the coveted Star Wars license, why the HELL would you ruin it by making me hit things with a friggin club for the first fifteen hours of the damn game?

Jedi Knight 2 was two completely different games. The first game was some sort of weird Star Wars themed FPS, where I used blaster rifles and wookie bowcasters to kill Imperial Storm Troopers. Storm Troopers were scary opponents, because two or three of them at once would completely overwhelm me, so I had to duck and run whenever I saw a group of them.

The second game (which starts after about the first six levels) was me mowing shit down with my lightsaber. It was totally badass. I loved it. Suddenly a group of two or three Storm Troopers wasn't such a bad thing. In fact, a whole battalion of Storm Troopers didn't do much more than make me smile. I got to do some classic Jedi tricks, like Force Choking the living hell out of people, then Force Jumping high into the air then letting them go to plummet to their deaths. Ok, so that's more of a Sith trick I guess, but since the game didn't penalize me for being a complete dick, I just went with it. Plus, I got to duel Dark Jedi once I got my lightsaber, and even though those encounters boiled down to "left-click really really fast", somehow they were totally awesome. I actually saved my game right before the first such duel, and replayed it about five times.

I figured you guys had learned your lesson there, and sure enough, in Jedi Academy you actually START THE GAME with a lightsaber. What a friggin novel concept! A JEDI with a LIGHTSABER! Who would have thought?

Unfortunately, you guys also ratcheted up the difficulty on the lightsaber fights to the point where my slow mammalian brain couldn't handle it. I guess I was supposed to be mashing fixteen buttons at once and bouncing off walls like Yoda on crack or something, but seriously guys, if I wanted to play Mortal Kombat I would. There's like seven thousand fighting games out there to choose from. I bet there's even one with a Star Wars theme! But I'm not interested in figuring out all the magical combos that'll net me serious points and allow me to do my forty-seven button fatality move. Somehow you guys were able to make "left-click really fast" fun, but you couldn't just leave well enough alone. You got me hooked with the whole "start with lightsaber" concept, then you just pissed on my head and laughed as I got murdered by the bad guys because I was busy trying to figure out if the flip thingy was jump-->strafe-->attack or jump-->forward-->attack. Not that it mattered anyway, because it was all completely random anyway as to whether any of my moves actually hit or not.

So you guys can't do FPS right. What about RPG?

You know what pissed me off the most about Knights of the Old Republic? You shitdicks actually made me pick a FAKE CLASS for my character to start. Oh yeah, I'm totally going to play through this whole Star Wars game as a "Scoundrel". WTF? Seriously guys, you're not hiding anything from me. You can't really spring this whole "Jedi" thing on me--I sort of see it coming, what with this being a STAR WARS GAME. So I gotta play the whole first level as a Scoundrel or a Scout or some shit. Guys, I didn't come here to shoot stuff with a blaster or hit stuff with a damn Vibrosword. Especially considering how ridiculously awful the ranged combat is in the game (I'm not sure I hit *anything* with a blaster during the course of the entire game). At least you had the decency to make it fairly short. I get my saber and my "new" Jedi class a few hours into the game, and everything is cool after that.

But once again, you guys all decided to have a huge crack party right before you developed Knights of the Old Republic 2, and one of you junkies actually said something like "You know what would be cool? If we made the guy a Jedi right from the start, but then didn't give him a lightsaber until like 15 hours into the game!"

Let's do a little thinking about this. Exactly what is it that differentiates a Jedi from, say, a lunatic in a brown robe? Is it the constant moralizing? Nah, lunatics will talk your ear off about good vs. evil, especially as it pertains to the demons in their head that they need to silence with single malt whiskey. Is it the interminable discussions of nature and the natural order of things? No, see, lots of crazy eco-terrorist types talk that same jive. Oh, I know what it is! It's the GOD DAMNED LIGHTSABER!

A Jedi without a lightsaber is like a gelded stud horse. What the hell is the point? Oh yeah, let's dress up in robes and use some spectacular force powers such as "make guy fall over" or "sometimes convince bad guy to give you some cash, but often just piss him off and make him attack you". And yet somehow I got to be a 13th level Jedi Guardian WITHOUT A LIGHTSABER.

And here's the real kicker. You gave me a quest like an hour or two into the game to build my own lightsaber. And I thought "Neat, this'll be some badass quest where I gotta journey around and find the parts I need and have a grand adventure." But NO. Instead, I find this stuff in random boxes laying around in the wilderness and such. There's no drama at all to it. There's no grand adventure involved. Instead, during the time I'm out hacking away at some strange scorpion creatures on the plains, I come across some RUBBLE with a "lightsaber emitter" in it. Oh cool, I'll just put that away for later. Finally some dude just GIVES me the rest of the shit I need out of the blue, and bam, I have a lightsaber. FIFTEEN HOURS into the game. And you don't even make it INTERESTING.

You guys seem to think I'm interested in experiencing the vast array of non-lightsaber Star Wars weaponry, but I assure you, I am not. If my character class has the word "Jedi" in it, I expect that my weapon of choice will be "lightsaber". The fact that instead I'm wandering around with a Gammorean War axe only serves to piss me the hell off. I have fixteen non-Jedi NPCs I can gear up with all that crazy Mandalorian armor and illegally modified holdout blasters. Just give me my brown robe and my FUCKING LIGHTSABER and I'll be on my way.

So, let's wrap this up. Here's what I want from you guys in the future:

1. Stop making games where I play as a Jedi but don't get a lightsaber. That's just retarded.
2. Remember that FPS games and Fighting games are different genres.
3. Stop trying to force me to use blasters. Nobody gives a shit about blasters.
4. No, Vibroswords are NOT just as good as lightsabers.
5. There are only three acceptable Star Wars professions: Jedi, X-Wing pilot, and Bounty Hunter. If you could work it so that I could be all three in one game, I'd forget about everything I just wrote.

Thanks for your time.

I've played the recently-released demo for the new Might and Magic game. I'd give you a more precise title, but there seems to be little agreement on what exactly it is; some sources call it "Dark Messiah: Might and Magic," some others (including the Steam listing) call it "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic," and Ubisoft rather perversely wants to call it "Dark Messiah Might and Magic," just like that, with no punctuation or preposition or anything. I'll just call it Dark Messiah and leave it at that. Though I will take another jab at Ubisoft and point out that "Sorry, your browser doesn't support Cookie. No Cookie for you today one time" is a goddamn bizarre error message for your web site to return, and I don't care what your native language is.

The first thing that struck me about this game was the unmitigated awfulness of the voice acting. And, no, this is not another episode of "Darien hates all voice acting: the animated series." I defy you to spend any length of time with this game and then come up with anything positive to say about the voice acting. Hell, the game doesn't even have any clue when to play the voice clips, and I've had as many as four all trying to play on top of each other at the same time. Ostensibly from the same character, mind. Also, much like with D&D Online, I'm annoyed when the voice actors don't pronounce the words correctly.

Visually, I'm given to wonder why fantasy games always have to be adventures in how many browns we can fit in the palette. You remember the beginning of Half-Life 2, how you enter City 17 and, even though it's a textbook example of urban decay, it's pretty much bright and colourful? Visually appealing, yes? Dark Messiah starts you in a dark, dank, brown hole with shadows that don't work quite right and conspicuously symmetrical clouds of fog all over. There's so little light that the game starts you with a goddamn see-in-the-dark spell. The easier - and preferable - solution, of course, would be to light the level properly in the first place. Then you could also get around the game's weird spell selection and usage system (the dark-seeing spell, unlike the Half-Life flashlight, isn't an ancillary toggle; it's selected from the weapons list and has a set duration despite consuming no resources to cast, and turns everything blue to boot). Once you get out of the dark ruins, you jump to the wacky mountain fortress level, where there's way too much light but still no colours other than brown for it to shine on.

Anyhow, I hope I'm not alone in expressing frustration that here, in the year two thousand and six, which is late enough that most of the people playing this game weren't even born yet when fantasy gaming first began, all game designers can think of for us to do is go fight orcs in the ruined spider temple so we can find a magic crystal. Here is a brief list of things we're all sick of:

1) Orcs
2) Spiders
3) Ruined temples
4) Magic Crystals

You see what I mean? There's also an intro cinematic featuring a dude in a big fiery cave conjuring up some big fire spirit thing which might have been exciting in 2004, but here in 2006 it takes more than Molten freaking Core to get me excited about a new game. Also, the game rants about its great skill system, but it doesn't seem to me that there are many skills at all, the method of learning them is nothing like as special as they want to make it seem (I buy these skills using "skill points?" Why, that's revolutionary!), and the skills themselves are totally derivative. You know what skills I managed to learn while playing the demo? Charge (rush at and stun a target), Disarm (knocks an opponent's weapon out of his hand), Stealth (makes me hard to find) and Backstab (does extra damage, but I have to be behind my target and using daggers). Those skills sound familiar? Like maybe you've seen those somewhere before? It is a mystery.

The game's also technically unsound. It's a demo, I realise, and so I shouldn't judge it as though it were a finished product, but why would you release a demo that doesn't run right? Upon learning stealth, I was told that the key I needed to press to sneak around was not bound. Okay, no problem, I go to key bindings and set it. Only I can't, because it's not on the list. So the skill's basically not usable, as near as I can tell. More problems? When you press a button - to attack or kick or use or whatever - you can't just tap it. You need to hold it down for a little while - not anything close to a second, I mean, but longer than I'm used to. This caused me to fail to attack a few times, and, most notably, to be unable to put down a crate I had picked up. The game's physics are just bizarre; kicking a dude in full armour sends him flying across the room, for example. Most interestingly, the game seems incapable of maintaining a consistent frame rate, and sometimes slows down into mud for no apparent reason. This happens pretty frequently, and quicksaving (of all things) generally causes it to clear right up.

Even if you can get the game to work right, you'll soon notice that combat is really weird. It's sort of an "enhanced" gore level, and the dudes you're fighting are extremely prone to having parts of their bodies lopped off entirely, with blood spurting everywhere. But they also tend not to die. In fact, they're so good at not dying that the game actually includes a mechanic for running your opponent through once he's down (the game calls it "impaling," though, as I believe I've already mentioned, it doesn't pronounce it quite correctly) which you need to do to finish him off. Even notwithstanding that, combat is really wacky, since there are about a ninjazillion different attacks that you can perform, depending on how long you hold the attack button and what directions you're going in at the time, plus you can kick and parry and, if you can manage to get them bound to keys somehow, you can use skills. There's also some business about charging an "adrenaline" meter and performing "fatalities," which are instant-kill attacks with even more gore and a really really annoying visual effect.

In all, this is shaping up to be to Half-Life 2 what Hexen was to Doom: several added layers of complexity that all boil down to dull, repetitive melee combat and hopelessly inorganic puzzles. What kind of puzzles do you think a fantasy FPS has?

What else? Same old find-the-key bullshit, only this time it's a spider key. Oh well.

"Less intense" my ass. All I know is my "storm" isn't that large.

Edit: Somebody was on the ball - eventually - and got that hilarious image replaced with a much tamer one. Fortunately for everyone, I was also on the ball and made a copy for all to enjoy. Don't thank me, it's all part of the job.

The Bad Day L.A. demo's out. I think I wouldn't be exaggerating if I came right out and called this game a tour-de-force; it's a tour-de-force of not shutting down properly and bodging my display adapter completely and irrevocably until I reboot. What, you wanted a serious review? It's a demo; it's free. You can check it out yourself at any of the finer online game download spots. And if you can't find any of those, there's always Fileplanet. You still want a better review? Fine, let's do this. But let's make a game of it; we'll play this like Name That Tune. I'll post my review here, and anybody who thinks he can review the demo using no more words than I did, feel free to send it to me. If I get any, and they're actually funny, I'll post them here and you'll become famous. So here we go. I can review that game in four words: American McGee's South Park. So remember, write a review of the Bad Day L.A. demo using no more than four words and mail it in for your chance to be the next American McGee Idol!

Oh, it's actually not just a happy coincidence that the game reminds me of McGee; sure enough, he's responsible. What has the master of tilted doors brought to the table this time around? If you remember Alice, you'll recall that it was heavy on the creepy and light on the gameplay. Well, McGee is showing his versatility this time, since Bad Day is not at all creepy, but, rather, crude and inappropriate. I know, I know, you don't have to tell me; I'm the last man to be calling somebody else out for being inappropriate. And so I won't. But what I will call McGee out for is being inappropriate and not even bothering to be funny at the same time. By which I mean the whole game's littered with shit like this. That is actually the FIRST thing you see once you get through the endless line of company logos that all games mash you with, and, no, the jokes don't get any funnier. The caption on that - "Be good sheeple" - is the sort of thing you'd expect in a fourteen-year-old's Livejournal. So this is why I say "American McGee's South Park" is the perfect review for this game - American McGee's Alice was like a Mario game with all the gameplay swapped out for extra edginess, and Bad Day L.A. is like an episode of South Park with all the humour swapped out for extra shock value.

And one more jab before I'm done. American McGee keeps telling us we shouldn't pick on him for the hysterically pompous move of putting his name in the title of a game (I'm also looking at you here, Sid Meier) because EA made him do it. Well what do we see on the Bad Day L.A. title screen but this? That's exactly the same, McGee. You're not fooling anybody. Though you do get points for that image constantly fooling my eyes into thinking it's a damn trapezoid.

Got a couple new reviews over in the reviews for all y'all to read or not. If that's not enough excitement for one day, this update also marks the first time the Recent Updates have been entirely things from the current year. I'm a maniac - MANIAC! That's for sure.

I'm not going to beat around the bush on this one - the party is over. E3 as we all know and love it is no more, thereby roundly spoiling my plan to have my E3 coverage some year actually include going to E3. Well, you can't have everything, I guess. There's always this, but $120 per person? We'll see.

Due to global warming and aliens, it's about ten thousand degrees this week in my state-of-the-art robotic penthouse suite. So hot, in fact, that, while I wrote a whole bunch of new game reviews, all of them except for one melted. No, that's true. You know where to go to catch the scoop on Half-Life: Source.

According to this story I read on the UK edition of Yahoo! Games, gaming is about to be completely revised by the company that brought you such masterpieces as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and several licenced cartoon games. Edge of Reality's next opus will be a tactical shooter "offering new styles of gameplay and storytelling methods." Anyone care to bet on whether these revolutionary developments involve sneaking past guards and cameras, and perhaps receiving instructions on some type of portable radio? Genius.

Full story-or-quite-possibly-edited-press-release is here, but be sure you're sitting when you get a load of that awesome concept art.

In what would probably be considered "Christmas in July" except that it's so terrifying and clearly unholy that it would be better termed "Halloween in July" or perhaps just "WTF? in July" Prey was released this week. Prey, for those of you too young to remember, has been in development for the thick end of ten years. And now it's out and all society is doomed.

If you're too young to remember Ingmar Bergman, he once directed a film called The Seventh Seal. And if you're too young to remember God, he once wrote a book (actually ghostwritten by a friend of his called John the Revelator) laregly concerned with seven seals and what will happen when they're broken. What we don't learn from Revelation is what those seals actually are. Well, you may not remember this, but a few years back I wrote a doctoral thesis on the subject, and, drawing heavily on my knowledge of the Bible and Bergman's film along with my desire to connect both John Romero and George Broussard with the apocalypse, determined the exact order the end of the world would progress in:

1) Daikatana released! (2000)
2) Max Payne released! (2001)
3) Terrorists attack the United States! (2001)
4) Max Payne 2 released! (2003)
5) Oceans turn into boiling blood! (Unknown; probably already happened)
6) Prey released! (This fucking week)
7) Duke Nukem Forever released! (When it's done)

It should be clear by this point that the only thing standing between the Earth and disaster is George Broussard. Will he be able to hold off? I asked the perfectlydarien.com office oracle, the Magic 2 Ball, and it said this. Heaven help us all.

Can you believe I now have seven whole pages of old news? Damn, but I can write a lot of garbage over the course of a few years.

Did you see this? Seriously, did you see this? This is madness. How long, CBS? How long until we get flash ads on our eggs and need to fight the urge to shock the monkey while we make breakfast?

Questions, comments, suggestions, or insults? Send them right along to darien@perfectlydarien.com

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