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14 Jul 06
I don't think there's a good way to explain this beyond pressing forward, so here I go. Today I'm reviewing Stubbs the Zombie in 'Rebel without a Pulse.' Why? That's a good question. It all has to do with hope. I'm one of those people who remembers that Halo started out as a RTS/RTT game. Then it morphed into a shooter. Yes, I'm talking about back in the prototype stage I was talking about previously. They decided to follow the fun and it worked out well for them.
So I hear about Stubbs and that it's made with the Halo engine by one of Bungie's founders. I hear about managing your zombie horde. I think that maybe they've gone back and made a hybrid strategy game with some action window dressing. Then I realize how irrational that hope is so I think that maybe they made some of the strategic options as deep as you might want them.
Let's start with the positives. I played the game on the Xbox. It looked pretty sharp and had solid controls. The only time you really felt out of control was leaping on a victim or when controlling your disembodied hand. The game was very stylized and used a film grain and scratch filter to give it the 1950's horror movie look. The art style was consistent and well done throughout.
Easily the best part of the game was the soundtrack. That would be a deathly insult to most games, but the Stubb's soundtrack really soars with an alternative take on Fifties classics. The only downside to the soundtrack was the developers decided to go with a realistic model where you only heard the soundtrack when it was appropriate in game. That was a waste and unnecessary in a horror/parody game where you play the living dead.
Not much for positives, eh? I think the problems was with the premise. It's such a simple idea, turn the horror game around and make it a comedy. It's been done in movies so why not games? I think Stubbs is the answer. The gameplay is either too easy or not fun.
Let me explain. If you're tough undead with a large unstoppable horde, you sweep through the unarmed and lightly armed swelling your ranks. It's fun. Herding the zombies is like herding cats, but the reward is higher. However, that's the only challenge.
Then the game ramps up the difficulty. You face tougher opponents with heavier weapons. Some opponents have helmets which mean no brain sucking. That means your special abilities don't recharge. Your horde is killed off faster than you can replenish it. You go from hunter to hunted with a character that's slow and awkward. One bad move and you're dead over and over again. You've gained most of your powers at the beginning of the game. Your zombies don't get any smarter. The game becomes a grind.
The developers tried to shake things up with some mini games and vehicle sections. There are some boss battles. The dance contest would have been just silly if it hadn't been one of the times they actually showcased the soundtrack.
Let's go through the tools you have at your disposal to give you a sense of the game. You have your basic zombie strength and stamina. You hit hard and heal when not taking damage. You can combo basic attacks to take down tougher foes. Don't over do it though. Then you won't have an opportunity to take their brains to power yourself up.
So what weapons do you get from your brain diet? Your first is the gas emission. You emit a choking cloud all around you. You then can chomp on the incapacitated victims. The only problem with this is the slow recharge (more brains) and the small radius. Tougher enemies tend to back away quickly from you so it's unlikely you'll be able to get the whole group. In other words, it's fun and useful early in the game and gets less so later on.
The next is your gut grenade. This has a short range arc. It will stick to enemies and can be detonated at will or after a period of time. The problem here is that tougher enemies shrug off anything short of a direct hit. They take damage, but barely pause with the heavy weapons fire. The other problem is enemy weapons fire often well exceeds the range of your grenades. The grenades are surprisingly useful against vehicles. Even tanks can be stopped with a hit or two. Except for vehicles, they're fun and useful early on but get less so later.
Next up is your head bowling ball attack. Yes, you take off your head and roll it at your enemies. You will spit at anyone you go near with a chance of turning them instantly into a zombie. Then, at the end of the run, your head explodes in a more powerful explosion than a grenade. That's incredibly useful. So, of course, it takes a ton of brains to charge it. You can't use it anywhere near as often as you'd like especially later in the game.
Finally, you have your disembodied hand. You can rip off your hand and control it around the game world. If you find an enemy without a helmet, you can take control of them and any weapons they possess. That becomes the best way to get through many sections of the game since the best way to deal with powerful weapons is to wield them yourself. The problem is that any enemies you kill with weapons won't become zombies and you can't eat their brains. So you end up playing a pretty generic action game. To me that wasn't nearly as fun as controlling a zombie horde.
There were a few other minor problems. Some areas were amazingly dark. There was no gamma adjustment in the game. Some checkpoints saved at hopeless situations. Your other option was to restart the chapter. The story was at times funny, but the total narrative, beyond site gags, seemed to only take a few minutes of cut scenes.
In short, the best part of the game ended too quickly. Then you're left doing less fun things against tougher odds. It's not that it's too hard. You can adjust the difficulty for each chapter. It just feels less rewarding to get through each section later on. Some have complained about the length of the game, but since it ended up pretty solidly on the action end of the scale, that didn't bother me.
Overall, 70/100.
Jason
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13 Jul 06
I remember reading that Firaxis and Epic Games work on getting a version of their new games playable as soon as possible. They don't care about graphics or all the features. They just want to see if their ideas play well. It's all part of that elusive chase for the thing called fun.
While playing through games on the bubble of the backlog purge, I've noticed a number of games have a great premise. Some just have a great twist on a standard theme. The problem is that a lot of these games are bogged down with areas that just aren't fun.
I should step back for a moment. I don't mean great games that have a few areas that suck. God of War for the PS2 was like that. The base play mechanics were great fun. Combat had some great twists. Then there were some platforming areas that just didn't seem to belong in the game. There's a whole section late in the game that sounds good on paper, but is agonizing to play. Even those dips in quality didn't affect the overall game. No, I'm not talking about that.
I've noticed two areas that bother me. The first is where developers have a cool idea for a game, but the base play mechanics aren't fun. This happens more often than I like to think. In fact, it's what got me started reading reviews before purchases. Yes, I am all powerful uber guy, but I can't hop over a small stone fence. Or I have an super kill move that eliminates enemies all around me but can only be accessed by an arcane combination of commands that can't possibly be completed in the allotted time. Then there's misuse of poison. Did I mention cheap game stealing tactics that always work? What about robotic mosquitoes?
The second area is poor play balance. The mechanics might be fine, but you can never get in a playing groove. It might be because of poor level design. It might be unbalanced sides. It might be certain enemies have an unfair advantage. It might be a string of very tough enemies without any opportunity to recover or save. It might be a money play that can't be stopped. It might be the lack of any real challenge. It doesn't really matter once you stop having fun.
Back to my original point, the solution to these problems is already out there. Early prototyping and play testing shows which parts are fun. Focus on those and build the game around them. Who cares if you throw out part of the early design. If a game is fun, people will buy, play it and get their friends to buy it. If you can't simplify your gameplay to test these things, that should tell you something as well.
I'm not saying any of this as an expert designer. I'm just pointing to the designers who keep putting out quality products and saying, "be like them."
Jason
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12 Jul 06
It's weird. I have more information about games today. I have access to more reviews. I can avoid surprise stinkers. I even have a pretty good feel for finding hidden gems. The problem these days is that I don't have as much time to game. I have a toddler. We are expecting another baby in the late fall. I wouldn't trade parenting for anything. I just recognize that my gaming time is paralleling what happened to my golfing time. I don't golf any more. I don't think I'll get to that point in gaming, but it will be a while before gaming time goes back up.
That realization made me look at my backlog. It's huge. Admittedly clearance sales had bulged it somewhat. GoGamer madness had played a hand. Mostly it was lack of time. Some of it was lack of energy. I love strategy games, but they're not fun if you're too frazzled to focus. I looked at the changing console generations. I looked at my dwindling storage space. I looked at the games that had survived previous generational shifts. I knew I had too many games.
I took the hard pill and decided to get rid of some. I put a bunch of games out there on some of the gaming forums I visit. I'm selling a bunch. It goes completely against my hoarding instinct. I already have twinges of regret. It's the right thing though. I have a lot of M rated games that just aren't suitable to be played in front of kids. I have others that will just be outdated by the time my kids will be ready for them. Then there are some that deserve better than just sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
I think part of what makes it hard is that I'm finally giving up on some of those games. I'm admitting I'll never finish them. I suppose that feels a bit like failure. However, I like to think I've experienced more great games rather than maximized the play time of each game. I mean games like Rome: Total War and Civilization IV (neither is on the sales block) could last me years. That doesn't mean I should miss out on games like Paraworld, Sword of the Stars or Okami.
Hmm. This is rambling a bit. I must be out of practice. Don't worry. I'll try to get back in the swing of things.
Jason
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11 Jul 06
Wow, I actually get to answer some email. A reader writes, "Could you put up the stats from your Hiver game like you did the last game?" Sure thing. I lost 93 of the 399 destroyers I built while killing 912 enemy destroyers. I lost 37 of the 224 cruisers I built while killing 254 enemy cruisers. I lost one dreadnought of the 19 I built while killing five. All five fell into the 'mysterious space monster' category so I didn't actually kill any enemy civilization dreadnoughts.
Next up: Did you see this thread at Kerberos http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=469? I presume they're pointing me to the questions at the end. However, I would like to say thank you to everyone who said nice things about the story in that thread. On to the questions in question, Kaorti asks, "He said that he'd played all the races sucessfully, do you think that means that he'll give us writeups on his campaigns with the other two races?" You mean going back to old games and trying to reconstruct what happened and turn it into a story? No. I don't have the notes on my early games to do that. The game logs are helpful, but not enough to do that. Besides, there was a lot of me floundering around trying to learn things. That doesn't make for good reading. I'm not adverse to a new story and game against the updated AI. I'm open to suggestions.
Then we have Mecron saying, "reinforcements are not random unless he was missing a command ship." What an interesting statement. There's the clear implication that I'm wrong without pointing to anything specific that I might be wrong about. I was talking about a number of situations that were brought about by gate tech. Situation one, you get the gate deployed and it survives but your command ship doesn't. You send in a new command ship via the gate, but you fight the battle with random ships. Situation two, the gate is deployed, the command ship survives, but you don't have enough ships left to fill out your command points. You might send in multiple reinforcements from different systems, but I never found a way to tell them how to deploy on arrival. That might not be truly random but the effect is the same. Situation three, you have a small defense force with a command ship at a planet. You detect a threat one turn out. You send a more powerful defense fleet from another system with a bigger command ship. Somehow I always ended up with a mix and match defense fleet. I suppose I could have pulled out the smaller fleet. The point is that these were problems I didn't notice with the other races, but had to be considered with the Hivers. It's not a flaw; it just encourages thoughtful planning and deployment.
That's it for today. Feel free to ask me any questions directly either through email or comments. I'm happy to respond. If there is specific content you'd like to see on the site, please let me know that as well.
Jason
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10 Jul 06
I thought I'd wrap up my thoughts on the last story. I do like the Hivers much more than I did when I started. Their beginning game is almost tedious. However, once you get a couple of gates up and running and a few new colonies, it quickly falls into the pleasant rhythm of a Sword of the Stars game.
The Hiver ships pack a ton of firepower. You can actually have less ships and still out gun your enemy. They're also quite tough. I was amazed at how much damage some of my gate ship destroyers were able to withstand. They're fun ships to take into battle.
You really don't want to have the Hivers get ahead toward the end of the game. They're such great defenders. They reinforce so well. Extra guns with more advanced technology mean they inflict a lot of damage. Then those top level gates change the dynamic of the galaxy.
I don't know that I saw too many Hiver weaknesses. They're vulnerable early and vulnerable longer than the other races. If you have the ships, their fleets can be intercepted before they reach the target quite easily. Gate movement limits are quite important. If you attack enough targets simultaneously, you can limit their response. Clearly anti gate strike fleets will be important late in the game to disrupt the Hiver network and reduce their response. High speed fleets will negate the Hivers advance notice of an attack and their ability to preposition defensive forces. That means the Hivers will either have to gamble or spread themselves a little thin.
Gate ship design is interesting. Do you go defensive with shields, point defense and armor? Do you go for more guns to protect the gate? Do you go with deep scan command sections to limit the risk from cloaked fleets? Do you want long range weapons to hold back enemies or higher impact short range weapons to punish anyone who gets close? I generally went defensive with some medium range weapons, but I can think of several counters to that. As with most ship design in SotS, you don't want to fall into a rut.
The gate system changes your ship building philosophy. My big worlds were often ship factories. Since distance didn't matter, I could use the big worlds to pump out ships faster then gate them right to the front. With a few big worlds working on it, I could have a dangerous cruiser fleet assembled in a turn or two. I could then put the fleet together right where it was needed.
I found the random nature of ship selection more frustrating with the Hivers. There were many times where I was gating in reinforcements into a heated battle. I would have my prearranged defenders that were left, but the gaps filled by the reinforcements were random. They were rarely the ships I would have chosen. Mostly that meant that I should have planned better before the battle.
I've played all the races successfully now. At times they feel completely different, and it feels like you're playing a new game, but most of the time, it's just fun. Don't underestimate the Hive.
Jason
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