Rorschach.net

Here’s some thoughts on the games I’ve played in 2009 in executive-bullet-point style. Lists are in no particular order.

There’s some big games missing from this list. As you probably know my birthday is 12/24 and I have a reasonable amount of disposable income. So it’s around this time of year when all the holiday game releases come out that I’m banned from the store or else I ruin gift giving opportunities.

The Great - Highly recommended

• Warhammer 40k, Dawn of War II – Impressive twist on RTS conventions.
• Plants vs. Zombies – Tower defense with Popcap style. Fun casual game.
• Section 8 – Great take on class based multiplayer FPS. The next Tribes.
• Red Faction: Guerilla – One of my two most favorite games this year. Everything should blow up this good. Takes the crown of open world destruction from Mercenaries.
• Brutal Legend – Other favorite game. Don’t let Jack Black, Metal, or the RTS scare you. Great story, great gameplay. Try something different instead of Call of Duty 6 or Madden 10.
• Forza Motorsport 3 – If you’re a car nut, get this game. If you like Top Gear, get this game. If not, then get this game anyway and you will be.
• Sword of the Stars: Argos Naval Yard – My friends made the perfect send off for 3 years of expanding and tweaking a great game.

The Good - Not bad, worth your time

• Left for Dead 2 – New maps, new weapons, new special infected. $50 for something that could have been dribbled out through DLC.
• Shadow Complex – Metroidvania in 2009. If you like that kind of thing.
• Splosion Man – Silly puzzle platformer. Chuck Jones kinda style.
• The Beatles: Rock Band – Beautiful tribute to an amazing band. Refines the Rock Band experience even further.
• Torchlight – Methadone for WoW addicts, something to tide you over until Diablo III.

The Meh - Dissapointing, some redeeming qualities

• Puzzle Quest: Galatrix – None of the charm of the previous Puzzle Quest.
• Arma 2 – Massively ambitious, too bad it’s broken in many ways.
• Hearts of Iron III – See Arma 2.
• Empire: Total War – Big leap forward for the Total War series. Too bad the AI doesn’t know what to do with water among other problems.

Here’s a demo video of a group of D&D-ers playing a game on one of those touch screen MS Surface thingies. This is more impressive to me than the expensive custom made gaming tables.

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.

No I’m not talking about crazy military people or low income housing. Since it’s me you should have guessed that Section 8 is the name for a video game. (Some gagdet would also have been an acceptable, but incorrect, answer.) I like all kinds of video games. About the only genres I don’t get into are sports and Japanese-RPGs. Probably the most popular genre is the First Person Shooter (FPS). Call of Duty and Halo are the two most well-known series in that genre.

As a mature genre (all the way back to DOOM and beyond 16 years ago) FPSs have a wide variety of subgenres. For me, I like a little strategy and thinking in my FPS and not so much of a reliance on reflexes. So Section 8’s gameplay is something I can really see interesting me.

Section 8 takes the standard team based and class based multiplayer subgenre and adds some new mechanics to streamline the experience. There’s perhaps to many to explain in detail so I’ll sum up:

• The role you play in battle is defined by your loadout. The combination of weapons, gear, and passive powerups makes for a wide variety of customization.
• Instead of spawning in to predetermined locations you “burn in” dropping onto most anywhere on the playing field from 15,000 feet up. Anti-air turrets block off areas, but it’s quite fun landing on the head of an enemy.
• Dynamic combat missions are semi-random missions that break away from the defend/attack the waypoints style.
• Deployable support allows you to set up defenses anywhere on the map.
• All players can move at vehicle speeds, which means no more camping the plane ala Battlefield.

If all that sounds interesting to you I’d recommend getting the demo from Xbox Live (no PC demo) or reading the interview on Tom Chick’s gaming blog. I prefer mouse and keyboard so I’m playing the PC not the X360 version. Perhaps I’ll see you online?

This is pretty huge. Billboard has the details on the outsourcing of Rock Band tracks to any music copyright holders called Rock Band Network. In the next two months a service will be starting up that allows bands, studios, and labels to get their tracks into Rock Band without having to wait for the programmers at Harmonix to get you onto the schedule. Right now you get up to 10 tracks a week (every week since RB1 came out which means over 700 tracks!) but with RBN it could potentially go up to hundreds.

The copyright holders can take it all the way through the process if they’re willing to do some programming and become “certified” in creating RB note highways. If not you can outsource it to a certified community group and only worry about the music not the game. Quality Assurance of the track is done in a community as well, then once it’s approved it on the RBN marketplace for anywhere from $0.50 to $3. You get your cut of every download.

Looks great for indie bands but it also allows studios and labels to fast track their music into the game. Sub-Pop has committed to getting all their popular music from the last two years onto RBN.

So by the end of August we could be seeing an explosion of music in Rock Band, like iTunes or Amazon Music amounts and varieties of tracks. I can’t wait.

Wow, that’s pretty bad when the last two posts on this blog are the weekly Twitter summaries and only one tweet each. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say I’m just too lazy to type it up sometimes.

Anyway, I’m a sucker for the Warhammer universe. Add a little fatalism to your fantasy setting where the good guys are fascist and the bad guys will eat your soul. It got me to become that which has no life (i.e. joined an MMO) and the sci-fi Warhammer setting happens to be the best RTS out this year.

Warhammer didn’t start out with video games. As my brother can tell you it started out as a miniatures wargame. Well one of the little side games came about when some guys thought it would be fun to have the elves fight the orcs in a game of footbal and Blood Bowl was born.

Blood Bowl is a little more like rugby or Australian rules football than American. There’s no downs, you just run until you get to the endzone or fumble, or get killed. There’s a lot of violence when your center is a troll and your linebacker is a rat-man with spiked gloves. I find sports much more interesting when a legitimate tactic is to decimate the other team in order to score.

So a team in Europe took the board game with miniatures, squares, dice, and all and translated it to a videogame. This is my kind of Madden. Team budgets and management, seasons, divisions, tournaments, bribery, it’s all there. And the online leagues are a great way to get together a group of people for weekly trash talking and games.

Apologies in advance for the blatant advertising.

As readers know my friends at Kerberos Productions developed a space “4X” strategy game for the PC called Sword of the Stars back in 2006. Well amost three years later, after two expansions, numerous updates, and countless patches the swan song for SotS (the first) will be released next week. It’s a mini-expansion called SotS: Argos Naval Yard and it’s budget priced for $8.99.

You can’t really find SotS in stores anymore, but with their new publisher it’s out on all the major PC distribution sites like Steam, Direct 2 Drive, GamersGate and Impulse. In celebration of the final release of SotS (the original) multiple sites are offering some sales. As of this post you can get SotS:Ultimate Collection, which contains everything except for Argos Naval Yard, for $7.99 at GamersGate between now and the end of the weekend. Direct 2 Drive is offering a pre-order of SotS:UC and SotS:ANY for a sale price of $16.95. One can assume that Steam and Impulse will follow suit if you prefer those distributors.

SotS is a complex strategy game that I can’t recommend for everyone, but for less than a night out at the movies you can see for yourself what I’ve been doing as a hobby for the last few years. Let me know if you pick it up. I’d love to hear what you think and help out if you get stuck.

I got online with some friends for about three hours last night touring through the multiplayer for Red Faction: Guerrilla. The combination of destructability + backpack abilities + gameplay modes made for a unique experience. As an example the Vision backpack gives you the ability to see through walls a few seconds at a time. It’s great for coordinating your team as you call out enemy locations but it also works on offense.

During one of the many memorable moments of the evening I was defending the flag and knew there was an enemy nearby waiting for backup before rushing the flag. I turned on my Xray specs, picked him out on the other side of the wall, and smashed it an him with my trusty sledgehammer. This is also great as the counter to the Stealth backpack. I don’t know how many times I went mostly invisible, snuck up on an opponent, and took him out with the one-hit sledgehammer attack.

It’s even got an experience system for unlocks (ala CoD 4) that works for custom and ranked matches. Just as RFG puts a new twist on the open world genre, it brings something new to the standard multiplayer shooter as well.

Sandwiched in between the two high profile superhero-in-an-open-world releases of inFamous and Prototype is the excellent game of Red Faction: Guerrilla. I don’t own a PS3 so inFamous isn’t on my radar. Prototype is the team that made Hulk: Ultimate Destruction which is a great game. But RFG has been getting good reviews at my regular haunt and it’s from the devs of Saints Row 2 (which I played a LOT more than GTA IV last year) so I jumped in.

Wow. What a great game. I’ve only played a few hours of single and multiplayer but my initial impressions are very favorable. The mars/sci-fi setting really sets up the style and artwork. There’s a plethora of vehicles and weapons. The detail and draw distance is impressive and I like the mechanics of missions, actions, control and morale to progress in the game.

But the killer app is the destruction. Every single building, bridge, factory, whatever can be destroyed. Not just some, all of them. As an example there’s a rescue mission I was having a lot of trouble with. By the time I fought through the existing guards to the back of the building reinforcements made extraction very tough. So I drove my truck up to the back of the building and used my trusty sledgehammer to knock a hole in the  wall. Took out the guards in the room, left some detonating charges on the load bearing beams, loaded up the truck and sped off as the building collapsed on the reinforcements.

If you like open world games ala GTA IV, Saint’s Row 2, Mercenaries, and the like you really need to take a look at RFG. I’m scheduled to play some online with a group tonight, will probably post additional thoughts over the weekend.

Bad words are said in the embedded video so be careful who’s listening. NSFW.

I listed to the GiantBombcast on a regular basis. Their take on a part of the Nintendo press conference at E3 is frickin’ hilarious.

I played a new kind of videogame Monday night. In an era of time-shifting DVRs allowing you to watch TV when you want to, the Xbox Primetime initiative is a bit of a throwback. It’s a scheduled videogame, the “live” version only available in this case between 7:30 and 9:30. So I grabbed a few folks from the games forum I frequent and lined up to get in.

I’m not kidding when I say lined up. We were some of the lucky 40,000 people to get into the game. The live announcer kept saying over 50,000 but the in game stats said 40,456. Just like the Bob Saget hosted game 101 people actually got to play the game. The rest of us were in the crowd. We still competed against each other in our small group of up to 4 people and the leaderboards were contiually updated to show how well we did against the rest of the crowd. It kept me quite enthralled until the dog needed to go walkies.

So here’s the rules of 1 vs. 100. There’s a single contestant called the One (whoa) and 100 people in the Mob. A question is asked with three possible answers. If the One gets it right play moves on with everyone in the Mob who got it wrong knocked out. As the Mob thins out 10 people the prize money goes up. If the One beats the Mob he or she gets 10,000 Microsoft spacebucks ($125 value). If the One misses a question the remaining Mob splits the prize money. The One gets three lifelines, sorry “helps”, to bail him/her out with a tough question. Trust the Mob automatically takes the most common answer of the Mob. Trust the Crowd does likewise for the 40,000 other people playing the game. Trust the Brain takes the answer of the person with the highest score.

Since I never got into the Mob, let alone be the One (whoa) my measuring stick wasn’t how many spacebucks I won but my score. This is where 1 vs. 100 shows some bar trivia roots.  The answer period is quick to discourage google search answers and like a bar trivia game your score is increased the quicker you answer. You also get bonus points for streaking together correct answers and for how many of the Mob gets knocked out that question. There was a lot of challenge and trash talking in the game. Very fun with friends in the group of 4 or using one of the XBL parties.