A glorious year for gaming ended ... and another promising one started. Despite all the good titles available so far i decided to give replay a classical : Fallout, Fallout 2 to be precise, but this time with the Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck.... (SPECIAL- lol). For example when i maxed out the luck stat, at a point I encountered a crashed UFO with a picture of Elvis in it and a nice laser gun. Next to the stats there are of course the skills : Small Guns, Big Guns, Energy Weapons, Unarmed, Melee Weapons, Throwing, First Aid, Doctor, Sneak, Lockpick, Steal, Traps, Science, Repair, Speech, Barter, Gambling, Outdoorsman, one for every taste :). But it`s not over here ... The Fallout character also has traits ( 2 selectable ) , perks ( one every 3 or 4 levels ) and ... the best of all : KARMA, ooo yes ... you`ll be regretting the click on that kid`s head when you gain the child killer perk, or gain bonuses, discounts and so on for the good deeds you did. The great number of possibilities when it comes to character creation and the fact that most of the choices have their own effect makes the game replayable.
Despite the fact that Black Isle managed to create the perfect postnuclear experience, the game is poor when it comes to graphics and a few troublesome bugs. Though the game is 2d and the player can barely distinguish an item on the floor from the floor itself it compensates with the nice feeling you have while playing it, the sounds are good , the combat system is easy and enjoyable making the game .. simply great!
On the other hand the bugs or lack of features can be really troublesome. A party member will cause a lot of trouble mostly because you can`t trade with him ( if you want to give him/her a better weapon/armor), also .. he will often block the exit if you enter a small room/house/tent/etc. But the most annoying part was for me at least was the fact that, during combat, if a party member got zerged by the enemy or crowded i couldn`t distinguish him from the enemy.
After saving the your vault and probably human kind you`ll enjoy a quite original ending, but hey ... life goes on.
A few years later gamers all over the world enjoyed a new Fallout, the sequel to Fallout 1, Fallout 2 to be more precise :)
Not surprisingly the story goes on, but this time your character is a "tribal", one of the members from a village the Vault Dweller had created. This time the game was perfected, less bugs, more weapons/armors/perks/traits/locations/encounters/etc. Following the storyline you have to find a technological artifact ... the G.E.C.K. also knows as the Garden of Eden Creation Kit. You don`t get guns and ammo from the start and also, you can enjoy a somewhat boring test ( Temple of Trials ). I did say that the game has been perfected but, it`s still the same game, same graphics, same music, but still, perfected.
As you explore the wasteland you can find some of the old locations and even an old NPC, the little Shady Sands turned into New California Republic and even Vault 15 turned out to be populated ^^
But here is where the Restoration Patch came in handy, changing the game, completing it.
Simple words can`t describe perfection, so ... if you didn`t play this game it, shame on YOU !
Friday, January 25, 2008
Gaming Masterpieces: Fallout
Monday, December 3, 2007
Gaming Masterpieces: Deus Ex
This is the first in a long series of re-reviews dedicated to some games who deserve the title of "masterpiece". Games that occupied our childhood spare time, made us think about them at school, made us waste countless hours of our lives with good, quality enternainment. These games serve as examples of what the simple human mind is truly capable of, and in my opinion, are as worthy of being called "works of art" as any Rembrandt or Van Gogh painting.
The idea came to me after i saw the recent teaser trailer for Deus Ex 3, and somehow ended up listening to the old Wan Chai theme of the first game. It's funny how much nostalgia came to me while i listened.
Deus Ex (literally translated "God From") is the first game in a series of two, with the third coming up somewhere in 2009, and unlike its sequel, it features impressive bits of philosophy about life, ideas and society, while maintaining a "corporate" atmosphere which is felt about everywhere. I've finished this game nine times (the last try was on the hardest difficulty), not counting the times when i just started it without finishing, and to this day, i still want to pop my CD in and reinstall it to play it some more, at times. Because it's not about the graphics, the gameplay or even the soundtracks: it's about the FEELING. That little tingle you get when you really feel like you're there, like the world transcends into the game and you take the role of the main character, "living" the game as nothing you've ever felt before. Deus Ex can do that.
The game is all about conspiracies: the intro presents 2 obscure characters talking about a new world order, and their role in it. The game takes place somewhere in the future, where the internet (most likely wireless internet) has covered the globe and everything is now much more dependant on it. It is a more technological era, but not much different from what it is now: an unbalanced urban-centered society slowly becoming a dystopia, while anti-terrorist forces struggle continuously to maintain law and order. You arrive in this landscape as the new special agent of the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO), and know yourself as having had several bionic implants and "upgrades" to your internal structure to support the use of what the game calls "augmentations", special upgrades which can be used to increase your effectiveness in the field. You have 3 at the start (though 2 of them are passive and always turned on), and will aquire more as the game progresses. The storyline focuses at first on you and the other operatives trying to put a stop to a terrorist movement called the NCR (New California Republic) but the game's many plot twists eventually put you through world-wide conspiracies, secret governments and world domination schemes, through places such as NYC, Hong Kong, and evenntually arriving at Area 51 where you will have a choice of 3 endings, neither of which is good or bad: they only depend on how you view them.
The depth of the storyline is amazing, there are several characters which you can choose to help or not, this will have no overall effect on how the game ends (i.e. the story is linear), but they are your choices, and will eventually leave a mark as you finish the game. The game's storyline vaguely reminds me of the general idea behind V for Vendetta (in it: "ideas are bulletproof"; in Deus Ex: "you can't fight ideas with bullets"), which in spite of having a different storyline entirely, focuses on the same general aspects: government, society, and one man making a difference.
Onward to the game mechanics: the game is a crossover between FPS and RPG, with a lot of elements previously found in System Shock 2: the brackets around objects which you can interact with, move around, or blow up, the general idea of having special "powers" which you can use with your special "energy", which once depleted needs to be recharged through special powerups that you can hold in your inventory. About the inventory, it also looks like system shock, meaning you can hold almost everything in it (even cigars and drinks), the size of an object requiring more or less space. There's also a skill point system which you can spend on general abilities (hacking proficiency, lockpicking, and increasing effectiveness with light weapons, to name a few). Once you have enough skill points, you can spend them immediately and without any requirements. Skill points come from exploring new areas, completing main and secondary objectives, or obtaining information. Speaking of information, the game is also heavily centered on dialogues between the main character and others, some of which require you to make choices in what to say (which affects the immediate future). The main character is JC Denton (the game lets you customise your nickname, with which you will be adressed in several e-mails and documents, and also lets you choose between a small variety of male skin and hair colors) the second of a new line of special "nano-augmented" agents (the first being your brother, Paul). The augmentations are special powers which you can aquire as the game progresses (they are also optional, the game never forces you to take one, and some are even hidden) and consume your bioelectrical energy when activated, letting you do things such as swim longer, become more resistant, regenerate, see enemies through walls or become invisible for a short time. For each augmentation canister you aquire, you are forced to choose between 2 augs (you may find them at more than one point in the game, but they're useless if you already made your choice) when you install it at a medical bot. You can upgrade the augs up to level 4 once you've installed them using special upgrade canisters, but they're rare so keep an eye out.
The game has a ton of secret areas, some being easy to spot, others not - i was surprised to find something new even on the 8th time i finished the game. I can very well say that i found them all, but... who knows.
Deus Ex holds a special place for me, being the first serious game i completed entirely without using cheat codes: after trying to finish it twice by using cheats, i found that i couldn't do it. The third time, i tried without cheats... it was much more fun, challenging and also, by the time i got to the area where i couldn't pass before, i was so used to searching dark corners and finding exits that i immediately knew where to go. As ironic as it sounds, this game is harder to beat by cheating than by normal means. Since then, i never used cheats in a game again.
I won't say anything about the graphics, those aren't the point of this article. The soundtrack is awesome however, and helps maintain that elitist "corporate" feel of the game.
So if you don't mind old graphics and haven't played this yet, go ahead and honor it by giving it some hours of your life. It certainly deserves it.
Monday, November 26, 2007
The MMORPGs' involvement in gaming and my life
I know this has probably been reviewed, considered and thought of a thousand times over, but i have no intention of being 100% original. This is just my opinion; my little perspective upon MMOs and how they affect your gaming life.
As a kid, i've always been a fan of a type of game called RPG: those little adventures where you could create your own customised character, start small, and grow into something powerful.
It was later, when i got access to the internet, that i came in contact with a new, evolving (at the time) breed of RPGs. Not to say that i didn't hear of them before: i've been reading reviews of Asheron's Call and the like long before i had any internet access. Back then, these games were basically a lower graphical quality, larger world - version of normal RPGs. I didn't know, or had any interest in the phenomenon which keeps many gamers playing: human interaction.
But my time for facing the world came with the introduction of internet access and a nice little game which seemed too much like a Diablo 2 copy (not to say rip-off): Mu Online. I first saw it at an internet cafe and the first thing that came into my head was "hey, a new Diablo 2! Great, i was getting bored of the old one". Not to say it looked that much like diablo 2: everything was a lot more "shiny" than your regular game, with impressive spell effects designed to astound and amaze. Hesitantly, i began a new life in that game while searching for something to fill my time with. It was then when i first came face-to-face with today's MMO's most common concepts: grind. MU is a grind-filled game, so much that you can leave your character grinding while AFK and still acheive one of the best times to a certain level.
I didn't get far in Mu, because i interrupted my gameplay after reaching a high level (about 340) and joined one of my best friends in another, more promising online game called Lineage 2. Lineage 2 is a pay-to-play game, which means you have to pay a monthly fee to play it (a thing which i'm mildly opposed to), but this was a "private" server, a server hosted on another machine whose administrator didn't ask for any fee as a requirement to play. It was low-rate too, so the time needed to get to max level was pretty close to that of retail servers.
It wasn't as flashy, but it sure was more complex than the previous game. And this is where things started getting complicated: the game soon became a race rather than a thing to fill my spare time with, i was running through the game, slowly but surely becoming too impatient. I stopped reading quest logs, instructions, item descriptions, lore... the game suddenly turned into a race to match and overcome the top 25 of my class on that server. I can't say i wasn't getting bored: i was forced to kill a limited number of monsters (aka mobs) over and over again, using the same spell, seeing the same shitty animation a million times, and i had to do that faster than the others could. Needless to say, all was in vain because the server wiped its database and everyone started from zero again with the coming of a new expansion. I was disappointed; i wanted to get the game out of my head and quit it for good. After 2 weeks of sulking on high-rate servers, wanting to see everything there is to see about this game so that i could finally get it out of my system... i came back to the same server i started. This time, with even more will to play and reach the top. And so, my second ascent towards the server's hall of fame started, this time more vigurously and more aggressive than before. I played 14 hours per day, sometimes 16, sometimes standing awake for a full day and more, always trying to catch up those 2 weeks in which the others had risen to a higher level. The "no-lifer"ness didn't really bother me, nor does it bother me now; i chose a support class, and had a lot more fun than i had on my old DD back before the wipe. Overall, i have good memories of that time, and i can say i did something, however minor and irelevant in the long run, that benefited me as a gamer. Yet it didn't do good for my psyche. While before having access to the internet, i was exceedingly meticulous and patient (gaming-wise), now i could hardly play an RPG without zooming through all its content and crossing the finish line like a horse in a race. That's how i finished KoToR 1 and 2: i didn't have the patience to see all the areas, talk with all NPCs and so on. I spent the game like a speed-runner wanting to finish an FPS. I did notice the change, but it was too late to go back now. The server had a pause (a long, 5-month pause) in which i caught up to finishing other games and played on other servers, then i was back, and more willing to get to the top than ever. And i did... joined the biggest clan (aka guild) on the server, and soon became one of the the most popular support chars there (also the highest level support char). Soon, that guild led the server, and was even banned for making it unplayable for lower levels due to constant pk and monopoly. A second wipe was anticipated this time, and probably needed too: i had seen most high-end content, and now needed to study for my high-school graduation exams. It was then when i realised what the so-called gaming spree had done to me. Now i struggle to get my patience back, but i'm afraid i won't be needing it with games becoming less and less complex nowadays.
Why "so-called" gaming spree? Because i still consider MMOs to be cheap, simple clones of actually good games. Some of the pristine gaming elements which i expect to find in a game are missing: the feeling, the atmosphere, the well-thought storyline. The gameplay is a joke (the grind is something no game should have) but the gaping hole in it is somehow patched with what most people treasure more than actual gameplay: interaction between human beings, making friends and so forth.
As for Lineage 2, it wasn't long before i got GM status and i could see everything i wanted about the game, and once its content expired, so did my interest in it start to rapidly fall.
I didn't only play these 2 MMOs however, otherwise i couldn't have afforded to post this. I spent more or less time in many MMOs, including (but not limited to) RF Online, RYL Online, Anarchy Online and World of Warcraft. I seem to have taken a liking to the former, having found in it several aspects other MMOs lack (and also because i play freely on retail servers, courtesy of MisterDevil's budget). I guess this is what a well-made MMO looks like: it has at least a slight, passing resemblance to a good RPG, with the sacrifice of some human interactivity, but i don't mind, honestly. Needless to say, i play it casually now, stopping to take a breath and explore every content i can find, both high-end and low-end.
So to everyone who didn't yet start to play MMOs (i pray that there still are such people): don't consider starting them if you want to maintain a gaming carreer. Yes, you could live some of the nicest moments of your life, but you'll be disappointed when you probably find yourself not having any will to play single-player games anymore. And with singleplayer, you'll miss out on 60-90% of what a game was designed to be. Your call if you want to do that, but i wouldn't call myself a gamer if i did.
Later edit: still need to play eve online...
