Author name: Kelly

Game reviews

Star Wars: The Old Republic

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Title Star Wars: the Old Republic
Developer Bioware
Type Massively Multi-player RPG
Platform(s) PC
Kelly Score ™ 95 / 100

Massively multi-player role playing games have, with very few exceptions, a standard motif.  You create a character, complete a few “orientation” or introductory quests, and are then left to your own devices.  Thousands of boring and repetitive quests combine with your character having complete lack of any perceivable impact or even place within the background story to encourage a kind of hamster like behaviour.  You run in your little questing “wheel”, seeking levels or gear to help you continue to run in that wheel.   Your long term goal: running in the wheel long enough and fast enough to eventually jump to the big, shiny end game hamster wheel of raid content.  Raiding is where you get to spend all of your time staring at a wall, or the back end of some other person’s character, for hours on end as you beat some giant monster to get more shiny gear so you can do the next bigger raid.  Most people don’t even read the story associated with each quest, and in many MMOGs that is a blessing: the stories are vanishingly thin and comically trivial.  They have to be, since your character has no impact on the world whatsoever.

Star Wars: the Old Republic (SWtOR) breaks out of that motif.  It plays more like a single player RPG, where your character is the hero of his or her own story.  Other players and “group” dungeons (flash points, operations, and Heroics in SWtOR parlance) certainly exist, but the personal story your character is playing through is paramount.  It is a refreshing and welcome change, even though the basic mechanics of the game are otherwise pretty traditional.

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Game reviews

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

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Title The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Developer Bethesda
Type RPG
Platform(s) XBox 360, PC (reviewed on XBox)
Kelly Score ™ 98 / 100

I have played a few games in the Elder Scrolls series, and each successive one seems to be a little bit better- at least in my opinion.  I played Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and now Skyrim.  And, with a few caveats, Skyrim is basically the best computer RPG I’ve played to date.

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Game reviews

Risen: Spiritual successor to Gothic 3

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Title Risen
Developer Piranha Bytes
Type RPG
Platform(s) XBox 360, PC (reviewed on PC)
Kelly Score ™ 75 / 100

Risen is an old-school role playing game that does very little to make itself appealing to the more “casual” gamer. In terms of overall characteristics, Risen is similar to games like Oblivion- but whereas Oblivion tries to make it easy to progress and overcome your mistakes, Risen makes no such allowances. Interestingly enough, although I generally like “easier” games, I’m actually really enjoying Risen… on the PC. From what I’ve seen and heard, the XBox version should be avoided.
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Game reviews

Bayonetta: Everything that is wrong with this type of game

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Title Bayonetta
Developer Platinum Games
Type Action/Fighting
Platform(s) XBox360, PS3
Kelly Score ™ 40 / 100

Action games are a genre that I really didn’t understand until I played Bayonetta. I could therefore say that the $60 I spent on this game was educational: I have been taught that I should not buy this kind of game. The kindest things I can really say about Bayonetta from my perspective are that the graphics are impressive, and the main character has one of the finest digital rumps in computer history.

bayonetta_butt.jpg

If you generally agree with everything I say, you have no need to read further.

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Game reviews

Wet: definition of a wasted opportunity

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Title Wet
Developer Artificial Mind and Movement (published by Bethesda)
Type Action / Shooter
Platform(s) XBox 360, Playstation 3
Kelly Score ™ 55 / 100

The title “Wet” supposedly refers to the term “wetwork”, a word commonly attributed to cold-war era secret agencies and referring to assignments involving killing so intense that the workers hands become literally wet with blood. The game definitely has death and blood galore, with kill counts in the hundreds per chapter as the game’s female protagonist, Rubi Malone, slices, jumps, and shoots her way through room after room of “bad people”.   

I’m all for a bit of mindless violence in my games, particularly when the main character is a sexy but psychopathic woman, but somewhere along the line Wet becomes… boring, and worse: irritating. It is telling that I had to force myself to finish the game- I wanted to call it quits several times after the midway point of the twelve to fourteen hours of playtime I got for my money. This is unfortunate, as there are a number of good ideas in Wet- sadly, it feels a bit like there were one or two hours of good ideas cut and pasted a dozen times to fill out the game.

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Game reviews

Old-style destruction- the return of MechWarrior

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There was a series of games I played many years ago. In these games, I was injected into a world where giant robotic machines cut lumbering, awe-inspiring paths of destruction through cities and each other. That was the universe of BattleTech and the MechWarrior game series, and it was good.

Unfortunately, the MechWarrior series came to an end some years ago- the last “real” MechWarrior game was MechWarrior 4, which came out in the 2002 timeframe. The good news: a new MechWarrior game is coming sometime in the next couple of years. And if the video (see below) is any indication, the makers of this “reboot” understand at least a little about what made MechWarrior fun.

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Console hardware

New XBox stuff announced at E3: Natal and full downloads

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E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) has suffered through some setbacks in the last few years. The industry show is basically a venue for the manufacturers of computer games and game related products to communicate with the media. Normal citizens like you and I are not allowed to attend. The big vendors like Microsoft and Nintendo decided a few years ago that the show was costing too much money for not enough return, and they withdrew en masse. E3 went through some gyrations to try to re-invent itself, but has basically come back identical to what it was, just a bit smaller. I’m not sure what has really changed, but the big vendors seem to be back.

This post isn’t about E3, though: instead, it is about a couple of interesting (to me) announcements that Microsoft made at the event. Project Natal, a full-body motion interface with no actual controller, and XBox Live full game downloads.

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Future games and rumours

Duke Nukem… now not ever

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It was confirmed today that the perpetual developer of Duke Nukem Forever, 3D Realms, is being shut down for financial reasons. If you’ve never heard of 3D Realms or Duke Nukem, this won’t mean much to you. But if you’ve been playing computer games since the early 90’s, you’ll almost certainly remember the iconic Duke Nukem 3D.

Unlike other early “3D” games, Duke Nukem’s greatest strength was its main character- a rough-talking, wise-assed musclebound guy as quick with a one-liner as with his shotgun. This was a game with a sense of humour, and an off the wall quirkiness: I recall the shrink ray which allowed you to shoot a monster or, in multi-player, another player, to reduce them to mouse size… then stomp on them. Or the remote control mines: set down four or five mines in various locations, then selectively detonate them using the remote control. Combine this with a “security station” containing monitors showing camera views of various places in the game, and you could remotely kill your enemies. Brilliant stuff!

Duke Nukem 3D was released in 1996. In 1997, 3D Realms announced their next installment in the series: Duke Nukem Forever. Originally, it was supposed to ship in 1999. 3D Realms was one of the original inventors of the term “it is ready when it’s ready”, and every year after 1999 there was another “not yet” from the developers when asked about DNF. The perpetual delays of Duke Nukem Forever became a long-running joke in the industry.

Today is the punchline, and it isn’t very satisfying. The employees of 3D Realms are, no doubt, even more disappointed than I am, and are stuck trying to get new jobs in a challenging economy. Will Duke Nukem ever reappear? Supposedly Take Two (the “when it’s ready” publisher of DNF) still owns the rights to the publication of the game, but all of the intellectual property (I.E.: the game in progress, the story, the artwork, etc) is locked up in the collapsed company. I suspect we’ll never see Duke Nukem as he was intended to be seen, although I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a never ending stream of cheap knockoff Dukes on various platforms like the the Game Boy and PSP.

Farewell, Duke: as you walk off into the sunset, may you always kick ass and chew bubble gum, and may you always be out of gum.

Game industry

SHOCK: Microsoft makes a good XBox video

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I like my XBox 360. It entertains me, and when I want to play a game it basically just works (ignoring that RROD incident a while back…). But Microsoft has, in my opinion, had trouble in the past coming up with good advertising that appeals to the mass market. This little Youtube video from Microsoft that plays off the avatars in the “New Xbox Experience” user interface changes the tone, and it seems to me that it has appeal that extends beyond the hard core gamer:

Here’s hoping that Microsoft can win over a few of the less hardcore who may be getting tired with their Wiis…

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