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23 Jul 04
Ah, Friday, how I've missed you. So far it's been an interesting week. I'm going to try to finish this quickly before the large lightning storm arrives here. If things seem a little abbreviated at the end, that's why. Better an update shortened than nothing.
It's highlights time again. This time I think I'll go back to gaming rather than pick another cable channel. In fact, I'm going with one of my wife's favorite games. It might be one of my favorites as well, but if she ever sees me playing it she kicks me off the computer and takes over. It's really that good of a game. It's Majesty from Cyberlore studios, yes the people bringing you Playboy, the mansion.
So what does Majesty do right? Well, surprisingly the best thing it does is take control away from you. Majesty calls itself the fantasy kingdom simulator. It starts off like any other fantasy RTS until you start playing. You have a castle and can build structures that produce units or upgrades. The difference comes once the units arrive. Then you notice that you don't have any direct control over them. Want them to explore? Well, you can either just hope they do it (rangers for instance tend to wander a lot), or you can set an exploration bounty. Yes, you bribe your characters to do anything specific. That's not to say they don't generally try to be heroic. They do. The go off on their own fighting monsters. It's just they go after anything they feel like, and it may not be at all related to the goal of your scenario.
Want that castle destroyed? Better put a bounty on it. Is it surrounded by powerful monsters? Better put a really big bounty on it. Otherwise most heroes will go off in search of easier prey. That's the great thing about the game. The heroes do what they want. You can provide them access to magical enchantments, potions, spells or weapons, but they'll only buy them if they have the money and the inclination. By letting the heroes run free, it places a premium on you, as the leader, actually setting up a good kingdom and setting your priorities well.
So where do you get the money for all this? Well, like any government, through taxes. Every building in the game is taxed by the king. You have tax collectors running around collecting it for you. Of course, these humble civil servants carrying lots of money are often waylaid by monsters or agents of opposing kingdoms. Again a premium is placed on good planning and prioritization for the money to keep flowing to your coffers.
Are you catching a theme here? There's another way that Majesty encourages good planning. Different religious factions bring different skills to the table. Barbarians are powerful servants of Krolm, but Krolm doesn't tolerate other gods being worshipped. So you have to choose early if you want barbarians. Other religions have similar internal disputes. You can't just put them all down. You have to choose which skills you need based on the requirements of the scenario. The same is true with demihumans. Some just can't tolerate some of the others. Again, you have to choose early. If you need to build very quickly, gnomes can help, but if you bring them in, you'll never see the powerful dwarves. Since these various factions have skills useful against one another, sometimes you have to choose in opposition of your enemy. None of the choices lead to dead ends, but you have to figure out what you really want or need.
So wrapping back to the first strength, by taking away direct control, Majesty opens up many different interesting choices. You're always choosing between one priority or another. That makes for some excellent gameplay. Since you can find both the original and the expansion in some cheap game bundles, I'd suggest you keep an eye out for them.
Today's game is the last new outside game in the Total Gaming.net stable. It's ORB (official site) from Strategy First. ORB is a RTS set in space. You play one of two races in a war over resources. Each tries to expand their empire at the expense of the other. Or is there an even worse threat out there?
Jason
Comments?
22 Jul 04
Steel Battalion. It's a good name. It conveys machines at war. It was also quite a gamble. People forget that too easily, especially the "true fans." It was designed to be a small niche game with a small installed base. That's exactly what it has become. That means a few things. Things like limited testing and support. Nobody complained too much about it when released because it was so unique.
To refresh everyone's mind, Steel Battalion is a mech simulator for the Xbox. It has a huge three panel controller and foot pedals. It is the very definition of an immersive game, even to the point of death in the campaign means losing your progress and starting over. Sure, there were bugs, but they were minor and didn't interfere with the game. The niche community got excited and grew when the announcement of the online only sequel, Line of Contact, came out. That meant you could actually play head to head against others (and with them on your team). It would be a new form of war simulator.
It seemed everyone forgot about it being a niche game, limited market and budget. The game was designed and tested in Japan. It worked well there. There were limited fund so it was a bare bones translation. There was perhaps the smallest beta test ever. Apparently there were no changes between the beta and the release. It was an ugly release with servers crashing and the campaign not working. Still people got to try out a little head to head deathmatch action and found bliss.
The campaign got on its feet and the problems started. To count as a campaign match, it had to be at least 3 on 3. Suddenly large numbers of people found out they couldn't play 3 on 3. The connections just weren't good enough. Of course, the game was really designed for 5 on 5, but almost nobody could play that. Some college students with ethernet in their dorms could, but not many others. Complaints started rolling in, but Capcom didn't have much money to look into them. In fact, it was the fan community that dug in and found most of the problems.
Line of Contact used the Xbox dashboard speed test to determine line quality. Well, it turns out there are some flaws in the test. Since poor connections degraded the game performance for everyone, the game was designed to kick out anyone whose connection fell below the required level. Of course, if it was a campaign mission 3 on 3 and someone was kicked before the action started, the match was terminated as not qualifying. That's when people noticed the bug where they lose their mechs if a match is cancelled.
Some people didn't have connections that could ever support a 3 on 3 game. That meant that even though their connection met the minimum specs for the game, they couldn't play in the campaign. Well, the problem is that you unlock all the mechs for the free mode by playing the campaign. So these poor people were stuck playing four person deathmatch, but they also were saddled with the weakest mechs, the starting ones. Needless to say, many of them left quickly to get a refund or trade in. It turns out the differences in the Japanese internet infrastructure and that of the rest of the world caused the problems.
There were more problems and the community steadily dwindled. Recently, "everyone" figured out how to duplicate parts and items. These were supposed to be the rare perks for dedicated playing. Suddenly all of the best ones were everywhere free for the taking. Since one of these removed the penalty for losing your top of the line mechs in battle, suddenly everyone was sporting only the best mechs. Some reports state that after this about half the remaining American and European players left the game.
Most people would look at that as a complete failure. Some people have sworn off Capcom products for the rest of their lives. I'm sorry, I'm not with them. Capcom took a chance on a wild idea. Sure they took steps to limit their risk. Those steps had unfortunate consequences. None of that wipes out that they offered a completely unique play experience. If you've ever played Steel Battalion or completed a tense round in Line of Combat, you know it's like nothing else out there. It's crazy fun. A couple of LOC games probably will stand for a while as the best online experiences I've ever had. Yeah, it's sad I never got to see it in all its 5 on 5 glory, but the glory I did see was darn impressive. I'd rather thank Capcom for that than condemn them for not throwing huge amounts of money to fix a problem that might not be able to be solved. So thanks, Capcom, for taking the chance and bringing me that experience.
For today's game we're continuing with the offerings from Total Gaming.net. Today we have Celtic Kings (official site) from Haemimont Games. It's a RTS pitting the Romans vs. the Gauls. You lead your armies with heroes. Both will gain experience and improve in abilities. Who will dominate in the battle for Western Europe?
Jason
Comments?
21 Jul 04
Wow. Lots of interesting things going on today. I usually try not to steal links from others, but Penny Arcade pointed me to this article. Nesting along there is a link in that article by Elf Inside. Taken together the two could be seen as a guerilla marketing campaign for the revamped Drengin.net called Total Gaming.net. Strangely, whether it is or not isn't really that important. The important thing is that developers are going directly to customers so neither can be screwed by publishers. That's a worthy goal.
If you were thinking, I love PC gaming, but hate that copy protection, this could be your answer. None of these games have any. You can download something like seven games right now and they are going to add a new one each month. These are full games and they're not time limited. You can only download new games for the term of your subscription. One year is $89, but if you already have Galciv, you can upgrade for only $50. Some of the games right now are ORB, Galciv + expansion, Disciples 2 complete, and Celtic Kings. If the new games are at that level, the subscription looks like quite a deal.
This could change PC gaming. Small developers banding together is a good thing. If they contribute their games to this, they could have a steady revenue stream to build their next project. If they can fund their own project, they don't have to churn out the cookie cutter projects that the large publishers often look for. They can release when the game is done rather than to meet some quarterly deadline. I'm not saying that the big players or big games are going anywhere, but for the niche enthusiast this could be a blessing. Of course, that's only if it works.
I know I've spent worse money on games that seemed good on impressions, but turned out to be bug ridden or just unplayable or not fun. Even with just the games available now, it doesn't seem like much of a risk to invest in gaming's future. I don't often encourage specific purchases, but this seems like a good one. I just put down my money.
Here's an interesting link I stole from Bill Harris' Blog. It's about the final mile of fiber optic cable. I may not have Bill's addiction to new video cards, but I would smite my way through some bureaucrats to get a high speed fiber connection to my computer. 30 Mbps down 2 or more up. Price wars. Ahh, the future is looking brighter.
Tomorrow, you can expect a farewell to Steel Battalion: Line of Contact.
Well, for today's game we might as well look at one of the Total Gaming offerings. It's Disciples II Ultimate (official site) from Game Factory and Strategy First. It's a turn based strategy game set in the sacred lands. You have to lead one of four factions to victory. Can you unite the war ravaged land through steel and magic?
Jason
Comments?
20 Jul 04
Ok, that was short. Innocence has fired up discussion in the forum (har har). Of course, the point is still valid. If it's just me putting up my rantings, this is less a community and more a blog. Have all of you read the stories in the forums? There's some good stuff there. Perhaps you'll be inspired to write one of your own. Even better you could contact someone else here and challenge them to a game you could both write up, fulfilling the vision of this place.
Interesting, EA Sports is refusing to blink. In spite of Sega moving up their ESPN NFL launch and the budget friendly pricing ($19.99), EA holds pat. They've added Live support for both NCAA and Madden this year. They are putting out a collector's edition for PS2 Madden with some of the classic versions of Madden for a $10 premium. They didn't move up the Madden release or adjust the price.
This could mean many things. One, they might not be able to afford to drop the price. Madden sales are almost automatically factored in to the annual EA budget. Even a modest $10 drop might not be seen as enough by concerned customers, but that's millions in lost revenue without any guarantee of increased sales. Matching the price never seemed a realistic possibility for the same reasons. When you dominate the market, it's hard to grow your share much. Market growth is hard to predict.
It could mean that ESPN isn't seriously regarded as a threat. Whether by market share or ratings, Madden has won consistently. There have been some close calls on the ratings side, but Madden never took the kind of beatings that forced EA to revamp Triple Play baseball. From what I've seen Madden seems to grow more new customers each year than it lost to Sega. Add to that the fact the reviewers out there aren't demanding that Madden catch up in any key areas, EA must feel pretty confident that they have the best football game out there.
Or it could mean that EA is simply trying to ignore the problem. If they don't recognize it as a problem, perhaps the fans won't as well. Unless game stores out there start pushing the price difference, that could happen. The other thing is that EA Sports as a line up generates a lot of money. It's not just a duty they have to put out a new version of each game each year. In many ways budget pricing makes sense for the sports market. The games themselves hold little to no value especially after the season. Major overhauls are at best every other year. Each season fans complain about little more than a roster update. EA has a vested interest in making sure that this pricing doesn't become a trend.
I should say that I don't begrudge EA for trying to maximize profits. That's their job. The more successful they are the more they have for game development. On the other hand, I think budget pricing for seasonal sports titles is the wave of the future, and I'm looking forward to it.
Today's game is a oldie for the PS2. It's Ring of Red (official site) from Konami. You must lead a team of primitive mechs in a alternate cold war clash set in Japan. Can you defeat the soviet threat?
Jason
Comments?
19 Jul 04
Let's see if I have any sway around here. I'm going to boycott front page updates until someone posts in the forums. The forums have been pretty dead lately. It'd be nice to see people visit them. If people really want me to shut up for a while, encourage everyone you know not to post in the forums. We'll see how long this lasts.
Until I'm back check out Dynasty Warriors Empires (official site) from KOEI. Let me know if you think it's a strategy game or not. Cheers.
Jason
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