ODST: The real sequel to Combat Evolved
There was palpable disappointment following the release of "Halo 2," and not just due to the 'well, I guess we'll stop here' ending. From the first teaser, the tone of the marketing campaign was that you (well, Master Chief) are the only guy who can defend Earth. Combine that with the "I Love Bees" alternate reality game, which concluded with the characters' lives being interrupted by air raid sirens, and you were ready to save humanity from the Covenant when you walked out of that store on November 9.
The fact that you end up playing as one of them for half of the game was quite a betrayal of expectations. But "Halo 3: ODST..." Well, if you squint and look at it hard enough you might see a version of "Halo 2."
After all, it takes place entirely on Earth, and the player is always fighting the Covenant invaders. You spend a lot more time defending New Mombasa than Master Chief does in the second game's opening levels. Additionally, the radio play you assemble through picking up collectibles really drives home the fact that this is a city on Earth that people used to live in. It also calls back to the excellent pre-"Halo 2" "I Love Bees" alternate reality game's radio drama, and for good reason - some of the same people are responsible.
The game's mechanics are also a callback to the original "Halo." The absurdly fun yet incredibly overpowered scoped pistol makes a silent return, and its balance is no longer a problem thanks to the lack of competitive multiplayer.
You also have a health bar again, and pick up refills for it, just like "Combat Evolved." ODSTs also take fall damage after a large enough drop, just like Master Chief did in his freshman outing.
Of course, there are many things about "ODST" that are the same as "Halo 3," or wholly new to the series. You don't fight elites, for instance, just brutes, and nearly all of "Halo 3's" weapons make an appearance alongside the reborn pistol and silenced "Halo 2" SMG. However, it is curious how many of "ODST's" changes are callbacks to Bungie's original breakout hit.
This post originally appeared at Bitmob.
Does Rock Band need a fail condition?
For myself, and people I usually play Rock Band alongside, score is a secondary concern. In fact, we don't really care at all. We just want to have fun pretending to play music we love with fake instruments. This is also the attitude of anyone playing Rock Band at a party casually. They just want to have fun.
Unfortunately, failing a song absolutely kills the mood at a party. If players couldn't completely fail a song, then the game would be much more friendly for social situations. Just letting the song limp along with some sort of "assisted help" mode once a player screws up bad enough would be a lot better than the usual "well, let's do something else!" result of people failing at a party.
But would lacking a fail condition make higher-level play worse, assuming that failure-free play wasn't relegated to being an option or just one mode? I know the feeling of just barely scraping by on a song but succeeding is great, but the awesome feeling of totally nailing a song would still remain.
Perhaps the star system could replace failure to some degree? In single player and band world tour mode, you might have to earn a certain number of stars in a set or on a song to pass, but the game never tells you that you suck so explicitly, just that you need to do better. The feeling of just barely scraping by could still be preserved, since you might've just barely gotten three stars, instead of just barely finishing the song.
Hopefully, for the inevitable follow-up to Rock Band, Harmonix addresses these concerns in some capacity. This is one of many design and interface changes that could be made to Rock Band without damaging the core band gameplay, and I feel that the gameplay can indeed rise to new heights if video game-centric design choices like failing a song are revised to fit in with the game's core, augmenting rather than hampering the enjoyment of the full band experience.
Thoughts on 2D and 3D game design
Lately, I've been playing Planescape: Torment on the PC. I really felt like a more slowly paced game after all the fast-paced action games from this fall. I greatly enjoyed Halo 3, Bioshock, and Mass Effect, and the like, but I felt like playing something a little more thoughtful. This 10-year-old RPG is doing the trick.
I can't imagine how hard it would be to make this game in 3D. The first two areas I've visited have been so lavishly detailed in 2D, but trying to get this amount of artistry in 3D would be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. The dialogue is another matter – every character or object has dialogue dripping with detail and emotion, fully drawing you into the world. Anything like this would be utterly impossible in the world of voice acting and polygonal graphics, which is a shame. At the same time, a world built in 3D with proper production values automatically gains just that much more in credibility and immersion with the player, thanks to the medium of delivery. It is abundantly clear, however, that the industry has not yet completed its move to 3D after playing this title again. Until art of this caliber (in 3D with voice acting) can be produced for a comparable price as its two-dimensional counterpart, we have a long way to go as an art form.
How to: Wii Controls
Here are two Wii games, both by Activision, who get Wii controls perfectly right and perfectly wrong. This can even occur in the same game. It's fascinating to look at this in what is the Wii's formative period, as developers that are not Nintendo, and even Nintendo itself, figure out how to wring the best performance out of the little console's scary new controls. (The same thing happened with the DS.)
The two games, "Marvel: Ultimate Alliance" and "Call of Duty 3" are both essentially their Gamecube versions with Wii controls strapped to the top, like many Wii games today.
"Marvel" is a top-down Gauntlet-esque game that continues the "X-men Legends" line of games, only now with all kinds of Marvel characters. The standard controls are nothing special, but they get the job done and don't get in the way. Let me make this clear – this game is all about pushing buttons. Pushing buttons a lot. This is, spiritually, Diablo with superheroes and on a console. It's great fun with a couple friends – a spiritual successor to old school co-op arcade beat-'em-ups.
On the Wii, though, the controls are all motion-based. So, every time you need to do a basic punch, you have to move your wrist. Anything. This game is far too combat-intensive for this. Your arm is tired in five minutes. Additionally, ridiculously precise motions are required to do special moves.
This is an example of why Wii controls cannot be adapted to certain game designs created with standard controllers in mind. Developers and publishers of certain titles will need to realize that they pretty much cannot be adapted to motion control. The Gamecube controller and the classic controller exist, and developers will need to learn to require them, or at the least, allow their use so Wii owners who encounter terrible motion controls can at least run back to what they know works.
Not all games have terrible controls, however. Activision's own Call of Duty 3 is slightly flawed due to its relatively uninspired single player and lack of multiplayer. It's a decent game, don't get me wrong, but it's nothing special, aside from the controls, which adapt extremely well.
Obviously, the Wii's remote is used to aim by pointing at the screen. Various other motions are mapped to the remote and the nunchuck. My favorite would have to be tilting the remote to lean around corners. It feels so right.
I have a few issues with the controls. One is the silly motion scripted fights that have me pumping the remote and nunchuck asynchronously to fight off a Nazi. They're just tiring and don't really work. Essentially, the motion control equivalent of button mashing. The driving controls also leave a bit to be desired, but they're a rather tiny portion of the whole game.
Overall, though, these are two examples that should caution developers. You don't have to make everything in the game motion based, and if the motion controls you develop suck, don't be afraid to ditch them. We'll all thank you in the end.
South Park plus WOW
This week on “South Park,” the boys are addicted to “World of Warcraft.” The episode, animated in the game’s gorgeous engine and artwork, also quantifies the game’s problems, particularly at the endgame. I can only assume that Matt Stone and Trey Parker played the game over the summer.
In the show, the boys’ characters keep getting killed by a guy (in reality, a fat nerd with glasses and a neckbeard) who runs around dancing naked and is such a high level, he can kill anyone he wants. After becoming frustrated, the buys dedicate their lives to the game to become strong enough to kill him. How do they do this? They kill boars. Lots and lots of boars. There’s a boar-killing montage. It’s amusing. In the process, they become pimple-faced, pale and fat.
This exact scenario is impossible in “WOW,” but it quantifies the very real and very lame problems of “WOW’s” endgame. There is always someone better than you, and the reason they’re better than you is because they have no life outside of Azeroth.
To compete in the end of the game, you have to essentially make appointments to meet up with 39 other people and do the same few dungeons repeatedly. These raids can and do take six hours. The truly competitive endgame guilds do this five or more nights a week. This might be okay if it was actually fun, but any fun is quickly replaced with tedium.
The boss fights in these levels are well-put-together encounters, but you have to fight through room after room of enemies that require 40 people to kill for no other reason than they have a ton of health. When you finally do get to and kill the boss, you have him on “farm status,” which means that you and your guild do the series of fights once a week to get whatever crazy-awesome items they drop.
The episode also skewers the players of the game wonderfully. Cartman’s dwarf avatar walks up and announces to everyone, “I just took the biggest crap.” This happens in every online game ever. No one cares how high you are or that you just farted.
The episode also uses an excessive amount of “WOW” terminology, but it’s all real slang used in the game’s culture. To someone who hasn’t played the game, it’s a bunch of funny fantasy gobbledygook, but when Cartman berates Kyle about his character’s spec, it mirrors the same conversation that occurs between “WOW” players daily.
At the end, when the boys are using headsets to coordinate their fight against the naked guy, they speak in perfect monotone voices. They lack excitement and just sound BORED. This is the perfect imitation of actual people using Teamspeak. It’s uncanny. During the final battle, they sound completely uninterested, with Cartman monotonally giving orders to the others. Their enemy eats chips. What earlier was a relatively exciting fight with their avatars running around fighting becomes four fat guys in a basement surrounded by garbage speaking unexcitedly.
The best thing is, at the beginning, the boys are playing moderately and enjoying the game. Once they decide to get “serious” about playing, they begin to have no life, and the game loses its fun. If you play “WOW,” which is a good game, don’t let it dictate the rest of your life. Pretty much, once you hit level 60, you should quit. There’s nothing past that worth bothering with, unless you like showing up at 6 o’clock every evening to do the same thing as the last week for the next six hours, and hey, maybe you’ll get one piece of equipment out of it.