Ludology - Final Impressions

So here we are, half way through official classes of my masters degree, and it is time to say farewell to this most interesting of subjects.

We have covered a lot in just 3 short months and the workload has been high. However, being a Masters, this was to be expected and I found the work challenging and enjoyable. This module is also the only really game related subject we have done so far so I wanted to get my head stuck in as much as possible. I found much of the content very interesting and I do feel I've picked up a lot in terms of how games are developed as well as some of the theory behind gameplay. Getting to sit around in college for 4 hours a week with a class and lecturer who all up on the nerdometer like me was very gratifying. Having a lecture where we watch and discuss a post mortem of Dead Space (one of my all time favourite games) is one of the greatest moments of my long and so far relatively fruitless education. My new love of blogging was also something begun for this class so even if I was to leave college tomorrow, I feel I will have gained much from Ludology.

We've had a lot of different assignments that people either loved or hated, but in the end, no matter how small or seemingly forgotten these occasionally were, they are all by far the most interesting projects I have ever worked on. I can honestly say Ive never attacked anything with the intensity and glee as I have some of these. Fair to be said several I found very frustrating and stressful, but with a nice slab of hindsight and Christmas on the horizon, I can only look back with satisfaction.

While many of the projects were small and unmarked, more to get us thinking in the right way, several are worthy of note. Our biggest project so far was creating a board game. Me and three other learned fellows developed Dominion, and epic space opera strategy game aimed at übernerds and board game enthusiasts. This is involved a lot of planning and working out of rules. This project really showed me the incredible amount of work and testing that goes into even the most simple of board games. For more on this there is a development blog on the following link.
http://dominiongameblog.blogspot.com/

Another interesting but rather frustrating one was the Digital Prototype project. Here we literally had to create a game from scratch using a fiddly bastard called Gamemaker. One of the more interesting aspects of the this project was the theme. Our theme was William Shakespeare, where we had to base our game on an aspect of his work. Regardless of my actual project, and overlooking the flaws and difficulties associated with Gamemaker, this was another project that really gave me a great knowledge of how games like platformers are put together. I will never look at another 2D platformer like Mario again, now knowing how such games are logically structured and assembled.

Some screens of my Macbeth based platform game

There were several other smaller week long exercises or workshops that were also fun, like the forgotten puzzle exercise or else where we had to describe our life as a game. A short review project involving some online games was also interesting and I learned a lot about reviewing in general and presenting. Currently we are working on our video review that has a lot more depth than I initially thought as well as an interesting theme that will be fun to explore. I will be glad to be finished this project, but looking forward to more as we move into semester 2 and much more specific game related work.

Clockwise from top left: College Game, Attention Seekers, Distraction!

So overall Iv taken much from Ludology. We've had lots of challenging and interesting projects, cool lecture discussions and presentations. It is truly excellent to have to play video games as official research for class. Never before have I had to do anything that I have such an interest in. I think I am an even greater geek now than I was before I started this course and I am eternally grateful for that. Looking forward to semester 2!

The Flight of Fleance - Beta Completed

So at last, after anuver busy day, I have finished the beta of Flight of Fleance. As I had mentioned in my character presentation, Macbeth is a dark and violent tale. There is frequent murder and cruelty throughout the play. There is also an overall sense of evil and of supernatural forces thanks to the witches and various ghosts and visions. So with this in mind, I tried to give the whole game a more dark and ominous look. Implements of torture and death are everywhere as well as the remains of those who displeased the new king. Iv also added some background music, although its not that evil, i think it works well for this project.

I am overall happy with my game, even though there are still some issues. For some reason, my character has a tendency to get stuck on corners of objects, requiring maniacal jumping to dislodge. I have tried all of the different masking options and messed with the collision detection both to no avail. Also, Gamemaker is a bit strange when it comes to using the correct sprites, especially when the character is running. So get ready to see your character occasionally remain motionless while running. Other than that, I think its a reasonable first effort with Gamemaker. Please have a go and let me know what you think.

Remember, try to avoid corners, tap the arrow keys if your character remains motionless and watch out for the swords. The levels increase in difficulty as the game progresses and apples give you some much needed health. Thats it! Enjoy

Flight of Fleance
Added: 13 December 2010
By: Teknocrat

Smokers

Smokers look so cool

Space Hulk

Way back in 1989, Games Workshop released Space Hulk, an interesting board game quite different to anything else out at the time. This 2 player game pits a force of space marine terminators against a force of nasty aliens known as genestealers. The space marine terminators are much more deadly version of the iconic space marines from Warhammer 40K lore. The genestealers are fearsome monstrosities similar to Geigers Alien, albeit with extra limbs and an even more unfriendly disposition.

The original boardgame is out of print and is no longer supported by Game Workshop. Unfortunately I never got a chance to play it and its rather hard to find these days, occasionally popping up on eBay for outrageous prices. What I do know is that the each player takes a turn playing as either the marines or aliens. The game is played on a board like a jigsaw, made up of corridor, room and intersection tiles. That can be arranged into a series of rooms and corridors. The marines have to complete certain objectives, like search for an artifact, immolate a section of the map or simply to get to a certain location. The space marine player has a strict time limit for his turn, so has to make their decisions quickly, adding a new dynamic to the game. The player controlling the genestealers has a comparatively simple job, to stop and kill the marines before they complete their objectives. The time limit for the marine player enforced a rather quick game time, meaning it was recommended for the game to be played twice, with each player swapping roles. I loved this idea, and it pains me to this day that I have never gotten a chance to play this first hand.

Space Hulk 2009 Edition

The main reason I'm talking about this, is that Space Hulk spawned two rather good videogames, Space Hulk, released in 1993 for the PC & Amiga, and Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels, released in 1995 for the PC, PlayStation & Saturn. They were both developed by an earlier incarnation of EA. I have both games and at the time were my favourites due to their interesting combination of FPS and strategy elements. I think it is very strange that this excellent concept has not been pursued in recent years as I can only imagine how amazing a new version of this game could be considering the advances in game technology and design in the 15 years since the last release. The two games are very similar in gameplay with the graphics and some minor improvements in gameplay being the main differences. Like many of my posts on older games I will discuss both here.

EAs logo from '93 reminds us of a simpler time in videogames..

As I mentioned earlier, the video game adaptations combine elements of FPS and strategy. While this has been done a few times since (Battlezone,1998, is a good example of a decent effort), I feel that no other game has done it quite as well as Space Hulk. Bear in mind that when the PC version came out, the world had yet to experience Doom, which was still a few months away from release. It would be an interesting world if Space Hulk's flavour of FPS had become as popular as the likes of doom and we would all be playing strategic shooters today. The game is split into two modes, a top down view where the player can issue orders, and a first person view where the player can move around directly controlling the space marine selected. The player can jump between marines and control them personally if the player chooses. In the FPS mode, the marines are slow and cumbersome, awkwardly moving through the levels towards their objectives. They do not move smoothly as a player would expect having played the descendants of Wolfenstein and Doom their whole lives and seems to reflect an earlier attempt at FPS control. This is especially true in the first game where the player must specifically tell a marine which direction to face. So this means a marine standing in a corridor intersection will only fire in one direction, and can easily be killed by a genestealer approaching from the opposite side as he will not turn and face his attacker. This issue was thankfully rectified in the second game with your terminators turning and attacking anything that moves automatically.

The two screens from the original, strategy & FPS

The strategy element is very interesting. Here the player is presented with a top down view of the whole level and can issue orders to the marines. The game has a feature known as 'Freeze Time'. When this is activated, the player can pause the action for a limited time to issue orders. Once the time limit is up, the game restarts in real time and the freeze time meter slowly recharges. The time limit is usually fine in the earlier missions when the player is only controlling a few marines. As the game progresses, however, the size of your forces increase. When you have two full squads to control and issue orders, it can become quite complicated, greatly increasing the difficulty. It was often necessary to split your forces according to their weapon load out and objectives, with fire teams covering approaches to your squads position while other members get busy completing objectives. Once the task was done you would need to withdraw, covering your retreat trying to keep every member alive until you managed to escape. Losing a marine can cause chaos as you frantically try to kill the offending genestealer and rearrange your forces to plug the newly created gap in your defenses.

This feature works very well, with the move, pause, move pattern giving the game a different, but no less hectic and violent pace. It can be easy to get into a pattern of bogging down with some marines covering approaches to your squad and simply sitting still. However despite the slow movement of your troops, the game is all about speed. You need to move fast to avoid being overwhelmed as the genestealers are limitless and will continue to pour onto the map in increasing numbers until you are dead. It is immensely satisfying to successfully complete a mission. Getting your squads across a map while simultaneously completing objectives is a lot of fun. You need identify choke points, work out the safest and quickest way to your objective, always have marines covering your rear and at all costs do not delay. The later missions in both games are very tough and there is a tangeable sense of desperation as your try to coordinate your 10 marines as they fight their way through the infested space hulk.

The games were also very difficult, this is also probably due to many inexperienced players getting bogged down early on in the mission. However the difficulty increases very fast with the number of objectives, distance to travel and sheer number of enemies getting larger as the missions progress. Being a squad based game you will lose a lot of soldiers over the overall game. With you being able to witness their demise from a first person perspective, get ready to die a lot as it is quite possible to be personally killed 10 times in a single mission.

The PC game borrowed heavily from the Alien films, right down to the look of the genestealers. Another notable similarity is in the first games first person mode. The centre of the screen is the marine your currently controls line of sight, while dotted around the top of the screen are mini cams displaying what each of the squads terminators can see, very like the set up in Aliens.

The games were also very violent and gruesome, not to mention atmospheric. Despite their old graphics, the games were very spooky. The hulks were dark and mysterious, with bangs and clanks echoing through the corridors. I was only 8 years old when I saw the first one and I must say the intro terrified me. While today its pixelated graphics look primitive, in their day were very scary and really protrayed the spacehulks in their eerie glory. The second game really did wonders with the introduction 3D graphics. The genestealers were now much more fearsome and the environments much more detailed. The blood factor should also not be overlooked. Say for example, you manage to close some doors and seal off an area of the map. You could now move through an area you have been supressing at long range safely. As you approach the choke points, the ruination you had just wrought on the genestealer population becomes evident. The section would resemble a charnel house with blood and gore sprayed all over the walls roof, and floor. Mangled body parts are everywhere as your marines wade through the carnage to get to safety. This is another very satisfying aspect of the games.

The game benefited immensely from the introduction of glorious 3D

There were a few minor issues though. While the graphics were good in certain situations, the textures could get very pixelated if studied up close. Another major point of frustration in the first game was the inability of the marines to even remotely defend themselves in hand to hand combat. Now I know its true that a creature bred for combat with 6 limbs, claws that can tear through steel and an attitude to match its fearsome cutlery would be a pretty hardy foe in melee, it was still annoying that as soon as one got into close combat you were dead. While on some very rare occasions they could fight fight back, a single genestealer could quite possibly kill your entire squad on its own if your marines were too close together to get a shot off. The second game made hand to hand a little fairer giving the player the ability to block blows and fight back, but close combat was still very dangerous.

Die alien scum! A successful melee defence!

One point about the older version is that many of the ranged weapons systems were pretty useless. Your standard stormbolter had infinite ammo, but a tendency to jam, especially after prolonged use. Despite this is probably the most useful weapon of all. The other weapons, assault cannons, flamers and some interesting melee weapons usually had an ammo supply, but would never jam and be far more deadly. Unfortunately this didn't work as well as it should. While it would seem like an excellent idea to equip the monstrous terminator assault cannon (a vicious chain gun shooting shells as thick as your forearm) on a few of your troops, the weapons paltry ammo supply made it totally unusable. A mere 10 shots. While this would be stupendously powerful, being capable of clearing a long corridor full of aliens with one shot, being in situation like that would not come up very often. The basic AI of the day meant the and the marine equipped with the weapon would empty his ammo box after about 2 enemy encounters. Once the ammo was gone, there were no refills, so the marine now had absolutely no function. The aforementioned inability to fight effectively in hand to hand resulted in a soldier whose primary purpose would be to act as bait or slow down a genestealer (only by a few seconds). So this whole situation led me to equipping all the marines I could with storm bolters in every mission all the way to the end of the game. The later game remedied this somewhat with vastly improved ammo capacity, but there was still a chronic lack of ammo pick ups again resulting in the bolter being picked over every other weapons in most levels.

Another slight issue, especially in the second game, was the voice overs. Your marines would constantly chatter to each other through the missions, with the dynamic dialog changing to reflect specific things about that mission or things that were happening in real time. It was done reasonably well, will the game making sure the what the marines were saying was accurate, eg "They're behind....... Gideon!" or else something like "They coming from the.......East!". Unfortunately the little delay between the various pre-recorded segments of speech was always noticeable as the game stitched them together so they dialog made sense. It was a reasonable effort, but could have been a bit better. My main complaint about this was that your marines would never shut up. Their constant talking got old pretty fast, with the same things being said over and over again. There was probably only about 5 different voice actors and they all sounded like pompous English noblemen rather than the battle hardened warrior monks from 40,000 years in the future. Thankfully you could turn off this feature which is essential if one intended to play the game for any length of time, which was a lot for me.

Overall, the Space Hulk games are lots of fun, offering a unique take on the shooter genre and are a tribute to the Warhammer 40K genre. To this date, and for reasons I cannot fathom, no further offiical Space Hulk games have been made. This seems to be an awful shame as there is soo much potenrtial here for a scary and gripping strategic shooter. The first game was a milestone and was released in a world that had yet to experience many genre defining games that we all take for granted today. No Doom, Dune 2 was still going strong and the Playstation was just a thought. While there were a few small issues, the games robust and addictive gameplay and great atmosphere means that even today it could surpass many modern games. The second game improved on a few points while leaving the core gameplay alone and giving the game a great graphical overhaul. To conclude, both of these games are a fantastic addition to anyones game collection and should not be missed on the account of their dated graphics. 5 thumbs up.

Stupendous Vector Art

Couple more illustrator lessons before we're here i think..

Amazing

by onewayprophet

http://coolvibe.com/2010/goldfish-turn-on/

Video Game Movies

One of the best things I find about games is their ability to suck in the player and engage them in a fictional setting like no other. Interactive fiction is an incredible new addition to that most ancient of magical of human art of story telling. So why is it time and time again the fantastic opportunities presented with the incredibly rich and imaginative settings of computer game universes are squandered. It has to be agreed that the majority of video game movies suck balls. Every time the licenses are handed over to people who produce cheesy, childish movies that have no place in any gamers movie library over the age of 14. Convoluted plots, ridiculous attempts to portray gameplay in live action (Doom), awful casting (Doom), cringy dialog (oh, I know, Doom) and an tendency to miss capturing the es sense of the game.

Get your tongue out of my arsehole Koopa..

Clearly much of the green lights behind most of these films is driven by the want to capitalise on a games success. Movies such as Mario Brothers, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat try hard to cling to concepts conceived to be played on an 8 Bit machine. The poorly conceived plots struggle to make any sense and seemed to be more concerned with including all of the games characters, unconcerned with how flat and ill conceived they were (Mortal Kombat Annihilation is the worst offender). I would not have been surprised to have seen a tofu character in the Resident Evil films. So far, the majority of movies based on beat 'em up games like street fighter were clearly a shameless attempt to cash in on the success of the games. The most despicable example of this is following the 1994 release of Street Fighter came the unimaginatively titled; 'Street Fighter The Move The Game'. Seriously. Capcom went too far on this one. It is an awful shame the great Raul Julia's final time on screen was this shambolic effort.

Oh Look, its Mario Mario...You asshole

I feel I must also elaborate some more on the Mario Brothers movie. Apart from being based on a game where realism and believable characters were the last thing on Shigeru Miyamoto's mind, the fact that such a film could even be made boggles the mind. I mean how could they even attempt such a thing? One of the most infamous moments is where we finally find out what Mario & Luigi's second names are.. Mario. Yes that's right, so Mario Mario and Luigi Mario.. for fuck sake that is below contempt. Trying to have a serious plot about such a game missed the whole point of the original and why it was so awesome. Both Bob Hoskins and the late Dennis Hopper agreed it was the worst project they had ever worked on and I have no sympathy for either of them.

Yeah thanks Uwe..

Another menace to the video game world is the German director Uwe Boll. This person is responsible for the some of the worst films of all time, including Alone in the Dark, Blood Rayne and House of the Dead. ALone in the Dark and House of the Dead are notoriously bad films. Terrible editing, uninspired acting are the hall marks of his films. It seems that he really doesnt think much of gamers as he continually tries to force feed us his uninspired crap. Alone in the Dark is an epic fail. The film begins with a 5 minute text intro where the writing is hard to read and story difficult to follow. From this point on you know this is going to be painful. Tara Reid was cast as a scientist character in Alone in the Dark. How do we know she is a scientist? Her smart dialog, convincing portrayal of as an intellectual maybe? No, because shes wearing glasses of course. Other moments include people who were killed then getting up too early before the camera had moved passed them and the scene making it into the final edit of the movie.. Concentrate Uwe.. He is also well know for challenging his critics to boxing matches and beating the living man shit out of them. While this may be an admirable trait, his efforts have destroyed public confidence in video game movies. Its hard to find people who would even consider video game films seriously and frankly I have nothing to say to them as it is mostly true.

Look out puny critic

However there are very rare example of good films. Unfortunately, they are usually either very short, obscure and never fully or properly realised. One of my favourite games is Dead Space. This atmospheric survival horror has great plot and interesting setting. A little known but rather good animated film is Deadspace: Downfall. The film is a prequel to the game and describes the intial infection aboard the Ishimura. Its dark violent and atmospheric. However, as an animated film, it is unlikely to be seen by most people and so a rather good video game adaptation is likely to disappear into obscurity. The absolutely excellent short film, 'Escape from City 17' set during the events of Half Life 2: Episode One, is how I feel most video game films should be done. Admittedly it would be impossible to make a film as serious and realisitic as this about the likes of Mario, but that's the whole point. That mess should never have been made in the first place. Another teaser is the short trailer of a remake of Mortal Kombat released by Kevin Tancharoen. While this could again fall on its face, it was nice to see an effort that took the subject matter a bit more seriously, with the added bonus of 7of 9 as Sonia Blade!

Deadspace saves the day once again

Thankfully, there are many games that have escaped the attention of the profit hungry execs. Mass Effect, Bioshock, Assassins Creed are a few of the good games that have so far survived with their dignity intact. However it is only a matter of time before their growing success is noticed by the cash hungry executives who need that new yacht and another storey on their house. We can only pray that if such projects are ever pursued, the producers will show the level of respect and reverence they deserve.

Half Life 2 Movie

Despite the amature production values, this short film has mananged to surpass most other big budget game movies out so far.

 Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1UPMEmCqZo

Resident Evil

Ah Resident Evil, a series of games close to my corrupted heart. While I must admit I have not played any in many moons, they are still games that hold dear. I also have to admit that I have not played all of the games, the titles I have owned including the original on PS and DS, RE2 and then Code Veronica. Now I know I have not experienced many of the newer games, so I will keep this article about the ones I have.

Resident Evil is one of the best known video game franchises. Developed by Capcom, the Osaka based company behind other iconic gaming moments such as Street Fighter and Mega Man. RE's huge popularity is due to many reasons, mainly its scary atmosphere, well developed plots, excellent and innovative gameplay, great cinematics, exciting combat and a general love of the undead. In RE you usually play as a lone protagonist fighting their way through the recent apocalypse trying to stay alive and escape to some form of safety.

One of the first things to strike you about this game is its unusual name. RE has been in the collective psyche of gamers for nearly 15 years now, so most people don't stop to think about what a bizarre name for something this is. Resident. Evil. What the fuck does that even mean? I had heard a rumor that it was something to do with a direct translation from japanese, but I this sounded fairly dubious. Luckily, so dedicated am I to my new love of blogging, that I went to the trouble and researched the truth of the matter for this piece of material. As we all know, RE was to be called Biohazard (and still is in Japan), however, the guy in charge of marketing for Capcom in the US pointed out that it would be impossible to register that in America as it was already in use for a variety of IPs. So Capcom held a company wide competition to find a new name and the mysterious winner was a nameless developer who worked in their digital studios. So there you have it. Resident Evil is born. I wonder where that person is now....

In RE, the player must navigate through a series of locations, finding objects and clues that will enable them to progress through the game. You face many perils on your journey, including legions of undead, huge mutant monsters, treacherous team mates and malignant corporations. Combat is straight forward and fun, often requiring the player to sprint to safety as it can be easy for the inexperienced player to overwhelmed. The games puzzles have a steady difficulty curve and the player never really feels completely defeated by them. The gameworld is also richly detailed. There a big emphasis on exploring and the player can find lots of interesting information scattered throughout the games that build up the backstory. These can be very interesting and adds a lot of depth. Graphically, RE is a feast for the eyes. The pre-rendered backgrounds are very detailed and spooky, with the characters moving realistically and smoothly. The enemies look the part and there is lots of blood and violence to bask in.

Oh shit, did i disturb you??

The games most iconic baddies are the zombies. RE's particular flavour of zombies are dead humans who have been infected by a virus that can somehow reanimate their bodies and turn them into mindless shuffling monsters. The game came out in a time before the masses were introduced to the much more terrifying fast zombies (28 Days Later, Dawn of Dead etc) that are now so common in games. So in comparison with more modern games like Left4Dead, RE's zombies seem quite tame and its quite possible to simply walk around them as they dont pose much of a threat on their own. However, when RE came out, it was very scary. The zombies though slow, were tough and hard to kill and if the player wasnt careful, it was easy to get cornered. The atmosphere of these games is one of their strongest features. The music is creepy, the graphics were great and the cinematics were way ahead of anything else at the time. Who can forget that first zombie encounter where you interrupt one busily munching through the face of one of your missing comrades? Excellent stuff.

Despite all this greatness, there are a few points that have to be made. For a start, the voice acting is atrocious. Some of the dialog is mind numbingly awful and its almost as if some of the dialog was put in as a joke rather than as serious plot building elements. The RE has the dubious distinction of having one of the worst quotes from a video game as voted the IGN, "Jill, why don't you, the master of unlocking, take this lock pick." Yikes. Some of the characters are very cliched and unimaginative the overall story line of the games has numerous contradictions and continuity issues.

Hmmmmm

Another point is the main overall villain in the game, the Umbrella Corporation. Umbrella, hmm, not the most sinister inanimate object that could spring to mind. While this entity has all the usual hallmarks associated with big evil corporations, ie defence contractor, secret bioweapons research, control over the world economy and governments, something named after a rather useful and non threatening everyday object tends to suck much of the menace out of its presence. Names like Cyberdyne, Weyland-Yutani, Omni Corporation, Disney, LexCorp and EA all sound much more evil. The little umbrella logo is also something you would expect to see on a toilet seat, rather than a vial of a deadly zombification virus.

Duhhhhhhhh......

The movies also need a mention here. While not technically the game, the long curly turds that are the RE movies have in my opinion thrown a terrible shadow over the games franchise. Once again, another promising premise for a movie is ruined by putting the films creation in the shit covered hands of the producers behind the other aweful video game movies. The original RE movie was made by the asshole behind Mortal Kombat, the laughable Soldier and the other genre destroying shit storm Alien Vs Predator. So once again, we are subjected to cheesy, over the top crap that is an embarrassment to the franchise. Predictably, they fooled lots of interested gamers into watching them, thus generating lots of revenue for the execs and thus spawning several sequels all worse than the last. When will people learn...

I hate Tofu!

On the other hand, RE has some truly excellent moments. One of the best things I found about the different RE games Ive played is their high replayability. Being able to play as different characters whose stories intertwine with one another is great. Each characters game plays differently. The take different routes through the game and have many unique locations and items. In RE2 this is especially good with each character taking very different routes through the game with much more specific content. Depending on the speed and number of saves used in a game also gives the player different rankings when they complete the game. High rankings unlock cool extra features and game modes like unlocking different outfits or getting a Gatling gun with infinite ammo. There are also extra game modes where you play through a very tough section of the game as a heavily armed SWAT team member or as a large walking block of tofu. These extras make replaying the game much more appealing and interesting.

My personal favourites include the starting screen warning the player that this game 'contains scenes of extreme violence and gore'. Nuff said. Also, in the first game, the famous 'Keepers Diary' describe one persons personal experience as they slowly change into a zombie. If anyone has not read these I urge you to google it. The games spectacular cinematics were a great reward to finishing the games.

RE has had a long existence and have been updated nicely over the years. While I havent personally played any past Code Veronica, they look fantastic and have thankfully evolved past zombies as their primary enemies, with the Los Ganados & Majini in the last two games a cool new take on the franchise. While, like many of my peers, I am starting to get a little bored with the zombie franchise, I will never forget these games due to their excellent blend of engaging gameplay, encompassing plots, creepy atmosphere and a high replay value.

I want to dedicate this review to an old friend who shared a passion for this game and spent many an afternoon in Limerick exploring Racoon city with me. Congrats dude.

Adobe Illustrator

Finally sat down with this beast to try to figure it out. I must admit my initial trials with this program led to endless frustration and a tendancy to jump back to photoshop that i love so much. But i feel now iv finally got my head around some major difficulties I had with it in the past (shout out to John for his excellent tutorial the other day) and threw together something i could have done in photoshop in about 15 minutes, this time taking a bit longer. Anyways, im glad i think i can now navigate my way around this most perplexing of programs to a reasonable degree. Now lets hope Gamemaker and all of Authoring Principles so far can be as easy...

Dungeon Keeper

Many games today, as interesting and exciting as they are, tend to recycle old concepts and ideas. Dungeon Keeper first came out back in 1997, developed by Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions. Its sequel, Dungeon Keeper 2, came out in 1999. The two games at the core are very similar, so I will discuss both in this article. Molyneux is famous for creating innovative and unique games that have unusual concepts and themes, most notably the ‘god-sim’ type games. Dungeon Keeper is no different and is hugely innovative game that has yet to have any real challengers to its own subgenre of real time strategy in the nearly 12 years since its release.

Dungeon Keeper is real time strategy game with a difference. You play as a Dungeon Keeper, an evil being whose sole purpose is to destroy the land of goodly hero’s in the world above. The games imagery, sound effects and atmosphere do much for the creepy overall feel. Despite the evil and dark setting, there is large amount of humour that works very well, with the second game in particular being one of the funniest I have played in all my years of being a nerd.

You play as a malignant incorporeal entity residing underground within a large construct called your Dungeon Heart. This is the epicentre of your domain, where you yourself reside within the gameworld. The standard strategy elements are here, resource gathering, base building, gathering up your army then sending it off to battle while you revel in the carnage. But there the similarities end. The whole game is located underground. You expand and build up your dungeon by tunnelling into the surrounding rock. As you go, you hollow out cavities which you then use to build rooms. The layout of your dungeon is only hampered by certain environmental obstacles, like water, natural caverns, lava lakes or impenetrable rock, the latter usually only there to mark the border of the game map. This give the player a huge amount of freedom in building their subterranean fortress, with every dungeon you build having a unique layout.

Each level is differnet, allowing the player literally limitless ways to build and design your dungeon

Now, as a Dungeon Keeper, you have a certain handicap. Being incorporeal you are unable to physically manipulate the world yourself. But the game has an excellent solution to your problem. When you start the game, you notice small creatures running around your dungeon heart. These are your Imps. These are your hands and tools within the world. With a simple click, they will run off to the designated area and begin excavating the tunnels and rooms you have designated with boundless enthusiasm. They never tire, grow hungry or complain, even when you slap them to make them work faster. When you have assigned them no tasks they will traverse you dungeon repairing walls, clear away corpses and generally maintain your fortress of evil. Truly model employees. However, they are small feeble things that cannot fight or cause much trouble on their own.

So in order to perpetrate some evil deeds, acts of violence and cause general disruption, you need some more powerful creatures. In order to recruit them, you must tunnel towards a portal. There are usually several scattered around a map, and once you’ve tunnelled to and claimed a portal, the gates of hell are now open, spewing forth a tide of horror that you can quickly get on the payroll. There is a large variety of foul monsters you can attract to your dungeon, from huge overgrown flies and other insects, demon spawn, dragons, trolls to leather bound S&M dominatrix with a taste for murder and foreplay. The number of different evil creatures is really expansive resulting in a large and hugely varied army as you advance through the levels. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, skills and abilities, that you will usually need to exploit as the game progresses.

Creatures are attracted to your dungeon depending on the combination of rooms you have constructed. There are many different rooms available that all perform different functions. Your creatures need to be sustained and nurtured, so rooms such as lairs to provide housing, and hatcheries to provide food are essential from the beginning. Other rooms are then required to attract specific monsters and allow certain tasks to be completed. The slovenly bile demon requires a vast hatchery, while a fully stocked library will attract the attention of warlocks. Workshops construct traps and doors, libraries research new spells while torture chambers allow you to extract information from prisoners. The different combinations of rooms you have doesn’t guarantee you’ll always get the creatures you want, so your army in each level will be different on every play through.


The games is played from a top down isometric view and move fast and smoothly. One of the most interesting and fun aspects is the ability to possess your creatures and control them like you would in a first person shooter. This is a cool feature, its lots of fun wandering around your dungeon from your creatures perspective. You can attack and cast spells as well as perform functions around your dungeon should you choose. Each creature type also has unique and interesting ways of viewing the world, but this never has any negative impact on the game play and adds greatly to the depth.

All of your rooms cost money, as does your army, with periodic paydays being announced where all of your minions stop what their doing and march off towards your treasury demanding their well earned coin. Money is provided by mining out gold seams, which you imps then dutifully carry back to your treasury. Most levels provide you with only a limited amount of gold, so it usually not wise to sit in your fortress for too long, as certain other tasks such as training creatures, building and a few others all cost money, putting a constant drain on your funds. In some levels, gem seams can be found. These can never be mined out and provide an infinite source of money, however they take longer to mine and are often located in hard to reach spots.

Your primary foes in the game the goodly heroes from the sunlit world above as well as rival dungeon keepers. Heroes are found as you tunnel through the level, or as they come tunnelling into your dungeon. Knights, fairies, wizards, barbarians and even samurai all seek your down fall. When entering combat, your creatures will charge towards their selected target firing spells and screaming. As they fight, a ‘health flower’ will appear above their head, with each petal disappearing as they take damage. You can pick up creatures and drop them into combat, or similarly pick them up out of combat if they are unlikely to survive the encounter. Each creature has its own variety of spells, some of which are quite humorous with bile demons farting a cloud of poisonous gas that harms both friend and foe.

As mentioned earlier, the two games are very similar.

DK 2 in its 3D glory. Note the early lighting effects

Graphically, the original Dungeon Keeper uses a mix of 2D sprites for the creatures and certain objects, while the landscape is 3D. The game looked good when it came out and doesn’t look too bad today, but the graphics haven’t aged well. In Dungeon Keeper 2 however, there is a huge graphical leap, with the game looking great even today. The whole game has being moved to 3D, with all creatures and objects looking detailed and interesting. In the first instalment your Dungeon Heart is represented as a large glowing jewel, while in the second, it is an pulsating organic mass embedded in the earth. The game also uses early dynamic lighting effects well as well as rendered water and lava. The interface is slick and presented well, while the whole game moves fast and smoothly. The intro cinematic is also great as well as the numerous cut scenes played between most levels.

It is very clear from the second game that the developers learned a great deal from the first. The sequel is highly refined, most of the issues from the first game are remedied and there is much more attention focused on story telling and atmosphere. Several rooms have been removed and new ones added, such as the combat pit or casino. Gameplay has been left mostly untouched mainly because it worked so well. There have been some adjustment with the addition of an added resource known as mana, used for spells and to sustain your imps.

DK2 is one of the funniest games I have ever played. Your mentor/narrator, voiced by Richard Ridings, has a decidingly evil voice. He constantly informs the player of their tasks, gives helpful advice and the occasional humorous messages, like warning the player of an invasion of micro-piglets, or that your creatures demand cable. The game also uses your computers calendar to tell the date and time, telling the player to go to bed if its late or else relaying holiday specific messages, e.g. ‘Trick or Treat Keeper’. One of the most memorable moments is when a creature wins the jackpot in the casino. Over the evil ominous soundtrack can be heard the 1976 disco classic ‘Disco Inferno’, and all the creatures in the casino begin to dance to the music, with each species of creature possessing its own dance style. While these are small touches, they add a huge amount of fun to the game.

A helpful reminder of your need for central heating

There are some problems though. These mainly focus on the AI, which tends to be rather poor, especially when it comes to other dungeon keepers. They tend to just sit behind their walls and do nothing until you attack, or sometime allow you to take over much of their dungeon with minimal resistance. There isn’t much consistency in the difficulty of the later levels, mainly in the first game, which can be disappointingly easy. Some early levels can be very difficult, while some of the last missions are a breeze. An example would be where an AI keeper occasionally kills itself by digging right into the centre of a heroes fortress for no apparent reason and getting killed. You only find this out when you abruptly win the level having not even begun your attack. I had some stability issues with the second game, but nothing too serious.

So in conclusion, these are some of the best, most original and innovative games ever made. DK was a milestone in gaming with dark and interesting gameplay. DK2 lifted the bar considerably with its great graphics, atmosphere and hilarious writing. I still find myself playing this game on a regular basis despite its age, still feeling as fresh and fun as it did when I first played it at the tender age of 14. It is a tremendous shame we never got to see DK3 which was cancelled way back in 2000. Bullfrog was assimilated by the ever expanding Borg collective *cough* sorry, EA, in 2004. Due to a lack of any creativity in EA these days, they have announced they will be robbing the grave of Bullfrog to revisit some of their games. So maybe we might see another Dungeon Keeper in a few years. Whether this can live up to the originals only time will tell.

Only a fool would disturb the grave of such a terrifing beast

StarGuard Review

Starguard Review

Starguard is a basic flash based side scrolling platform game where you play a venusian spaceman, part of a large force of soldiers invading a wizards castle. The game is unrelated to the old miniature war game or the 1955 novel.

The story is told through a series of short paragraphs that appear on the wall behind the player. It is a simple affair where the people of Venus created the wizard to herald in a time of peace and prosperity. The wizard then rebelled, slaughtering billions with his monsters and taking over the planet, residing in a mighty fortress. So you play one of the lucky guys invading the castle, the last attempt by the people of Venus to kill the wizard.

The graphics and interface are very basic, making the game fun and easy to play. He game looks very much like an old game from the Atari 2600, and has similar sound effects. The game take the form of a castle that the player has to navigate, avoiding obstacles and shooting enemies. There are 9 levels where the player moves either left or right, while descending down into the castle. The levels steadily increase in difficulty with quicker moving obstacles as well as more numerous and tougher foes. There is a reliance on pattern recognition puzzles later in the game, with some becoming very tough indeed.

Many of the levels employ sections where large beams or projectile launchers are placed in a pattern or row on a wall, firing in a specific sequence. This means the player has to time their jumps and movements so they land by the gun that is not firing, then move along following the gap in the projectiles. This can be fun, but got a bit annoying during the final levels as I felt it was a bit overdone.

The games combat is frenetic and fun. The players weapon fires as quickly as you can tap the keyboard, so you can often fill the screen with a barrage of projectiles. The fast pace of much of the combat and jumping puzzles is very satisfying to complete, but really frustrating to fail. The enemies death animations are well done despite the primitive graphics.

Some enemies are easy to kill, usually dispatched with one or two hits, but there are several others that take a serious amount of punishment to kill, only to resurrect in a different even stronger form once you’ve walked past their remains. As the player moves through the level, checkpoints are uncovered allowing the player to respawn when you die.

While the graphics are obviously very basic, there is a certain charm to them. The simple colour scheme is consistent as is the gameplay. While the game will not win any awards for story telling or gripping atmosphere, there are lots of other little green pixelated men fighting and dying along side you, so at least there is the sense that you are part of a larger attack. The game is addictive and doesn’t let you go easily, meaning you will probably complete it on your first sitting. While the difficulty I played it on is by no means impossible, it can get quite hard later in the game, and the last boss is very difficult. However, there is enough of a challenge to make the game playable and not too easy at the same time. So overall, an addictive game that looks good, sounds good and will have me coming back next time Iv got half an hour to kill.

Assassin's Creed

I have finally gotten Assassin's Creed. Iv heard much but know little. I am eagerly awaiting installation so i can finally see what all the fuss is about. Watch this space for a review in a few weeks.

Chindogu

For our Design Practice class, we had to come up with a Chindogu, which is basically an ingenious everyday invention that is completely useless.

The convenience and comfort of a personal arm rest

Spore

A few years back, I heard a description of an upcoming game that allowed you to create and guide life in an unprecedented way and scope. You had complete control of your lifeform, from its humble beginnings as microbial life oozing through primordial goo, all the way up to a galactic civilisation. Now this is obviously caught my eye, so, once I was able, I dutifully went and bought Spore, for a bargain price thanks to some very friendly and infinitely dodgy game dealers in Bangkok.

Spore was developed by Maxis, who we all know are behind the various Sims games as well as the SimCity games. Love them or hate them, the Sim franchises are one of the most successful lines of computer software (not games) ever. While I despise the Sims, I did actually rather enjoy the various SimCity packages. So when I heard of a game that could mock the scope of the already very complicated and huge SimCity , I was very eager to get sucked into the vastness of it all.

Once I began the game, I knew I would be in for an interesting experience. The game starts with a galactic view, and you get to choose a planet on which to send your….spore shall we say. You get to decide on your lifeforms diet, be it carnivorous, herbivore or both. You are then treated to a nice little sequence where a meteor packed with microbial life impacts on a wet but sterile world. After the impact, all the meteoric fragments rain down into the sea, from which your cell emerges and begins life. You then must begin feeding in order to collect enough DNA to evolve. The primordial pool is a busy place, and you can eat on whatever or who ever passes by, its up to you.

I must say I really liked this part of the game. I have a particular soft spot for space opera, and I do firmly believe in the theory of Panspermia. So this was right down my alley. As you swim about eating on your chosen diet, you gather enough DNA until you can grow to the next stage. This is really cool, as you change size, the whole scale of everything around you changes too. When you first emerge from the meteor, you nibble on passing single cell plants and animals, but as you grow, they become too small to be worth the effort and you move onto bigger prey. There are many things that will eat you too, they are usually much bigger and faster so you really have to try to avoid them. As you swim about, you can see huge creatures moving around in the background, These are too big to even notice you, so the game really gives you a cool and well thought out view of the microscopic world.

As I mentioned above, as you gather more DNA, you get to grow and evolve. When this happens, you can call for a mate, and you go to the creature creation screen. Here you get to spend your DNA on upgrading your critter so it can be more effective at its chosen lifestyle. Extra wiggly bits to move faster, spines and poison emitters for defence, the list goes on. So once your happy with your creation, you can hatch from your egg and begin life with your new features. This is a cool little concept and I feel it works well. You can always go back and look at all the stages of evolution you have chosen, so you get a view of how your cell has evolved and improved since its first tentative wiggles out of the meteor.

After a while, you gain enough DNA for your creature to evolve a primitive brain. Once this happens, your critter can then take its first steps on land, and thus the Creature Stage of the game begins. You evolve legs and begin to explore this vast new world you find yourself on. As before, your choice of diet remains, so you move off into the surrounding jungle to see what you can find. You will inevitably come across some other creatures and you can either eat them or befriend them, both giving you different amounts of DNA depending on their size or stage of evolution. Again this is used to change and grow you creature as it steadily evolves towards sentience.

Unfortunately, the game begins to struggle a bit here. While it is fun to evolve you creature, running around eating fruit from trees isn’t quite as exciting as you would think. This stage is boring and repetitive. As I said there is some fun to be had, but it seems as if the designers ran out of ideas. All of the creatures are ground based. There is some limited flying but that’s it. You cant climb, swim, burrow or use most of the interesting things on the landscape. The fighting is crap, with a maximum of only 4 attacks that don’t really look that good. Some of the offensive weapons are useless and I found myself sticking to the same really powerful attack while ignoring the others. The befriending is even worse. There is nothing cool about watching you hulking armoured monster doing a gay dance to try befriend a randomly generated creature that looks like an orange baby with 4 legs, called a BeebleBee.. Bah!

The creature editor is fun I must say. There is a lot of potential for a near infinite array of critters. There is also endless possibility for abuse and making some strange and completely nonsensical ones like below. However this is not enough to save Spore as, like in the cell stage, you eventually get enough DNA to become sentient, and so begins the tribal stage. Once you reach this point, you can no longer edit your creature, so the game effectively locks out one of its most fun elements.

The Tribal Stage, like the creature stage, feels unfinished. The scale moves up again, now you are on a whole continent with other villages of recently intelligent creatures scattered about. There is nothing like what you can do in any other building simulator. The rules are somewhat confusing, your village is tiny and you only have a couple of different things you can do. Again it is a choice between good and bad, or force and diplomacy. It’s a bit annoying in one aspect as the physical strengths of your creatures are removed and all of the enemy tribes have the same health as you. So the before mentioned Beeblebees can now take down my brutes with a club or spear, whereas in the creature stage I could have taken out their whole nest with one critter.

Your village can be upgraded, as can your costume, but even when it is fully upgraded, your tribe can only have 12 members, 8 huts and one livestock creature. The costume aspect is pointless as has no impact on your creatures behaviour or strengths. You cant even add all of the buildings you unlock at once, as of the 10 or so buildings, there is only 8 permanent unmoveable spots in village you can build on. It seems the sentience has done little to improve the game. So once you’ve defeated or befriended the other tribes, the game moves to the City Stage…yay.

Again, it is cumbersome and irritating. The city stage brings the scale up to a planetary perspective. You have your home city and you have to either conquer or subsume the other cities on the world. There are a few different ways you can do this. By military conquest, religious conversion or economic means. You also have access to a navy and air force. Money is gathered by controlling Spice geysers (Maxis you have no shame) which gathers at a rate dependant on how many geysers you poses. Now I know your thinking this sounds a lot better, but believe me its not. The military conquest is too easy, but still manages to frustrate. Your units do nothing to defend themselves and will sit still while firing, making it impossible to avoid enemy fire, not that moving around makes any difference anyway. All of the weapon effects are identical regardless of what you have equipped. Their armour is weak, you can do nothing to upgrade them and all of your offensive units are the same design. It is similar with the religious conquest method. Its boring and easy. Economic victory is also fairly lacklustre, you simply set up a trade route and just wait until you have enough clout to buy an enemy city.

The one small decent part of city stage is the vehicle/building editor. This is cool I must say, you can design your buildings and vehicles in the same way as you could your creature. It would have been nice if the preset objects for building were a little mare varied, but there is enough there to come up with plenty of interesting ideas.

So once you take over the world, can you only guess whats next?? That’s right, the Space Stage. This is actually one of the better stages. You can colonise planets, make peace or war with other interstellar civilisations and even terraform worlds. You can fly to different solar systems and scan planets (I will not evoke the name of ME2 in this review), even abduct local lifeforms for study. This is a bit of fun, but I found some of the missions difficult to understand and complete, and honestly, after all the shit Iv had to go through to get to this stage, I wasnt that interested.

The graphics were hit and miss and could have been better, especially compared to other games out the same year, but were colourful and interesting. The cell stage looked great. Sound wise, there were some nice ambient sound effects, music nice, especially in the opening intro and in the primeval soup. Animal sounds were cool and realistic, but again a bit repetitive with the same sounds being recycled for most of the creatures. The usual Maxis gibberish found in their Sims series makes a return once your creatures have evolved to sentience.

Overall Spore was an awful disappointment. The cell stage was excellent, some really good visuals and very clever ideas regarding evolution and the concept of scale. Creature maker is lot of fun, as was vehicle/building designing, if a little restrictive. There are no major differences in the types of creatures available, i.e. insects, fish, reptiles etc, this would have been really cool if it had been included.

Creature stage was interesting but repetitive and ignored many survival strategies, swimming, climbing, which would have added much to the game. The fight/friend system was very basic and felt unfinished. The game should have been longer while making better use of the creature editor, it was too easy and quick to advance to the other stages. Once the tribal stage happens the game goes downhill. City building is crap, as is combat. The Space Stage was a bit better, but still felt lacking. So while Spore has some excellent ideas, it ultimately falls far short of the mark and squandered an excellent chance to be one of the greatest games (if it could be called a game) ever.

Metro 2033

Its not often that a game comes out based on an overused and clichéd setting that leaves the player feeling rewarded and refreshed. Metro 2033 is another game based on the tired setting of post nuclear annihilation. The list of post apocalyptic games is extensive, Fallout, Gears of War, Hellgate, Resistance: Fall of Man, Stalker and pretty much ever zombie game ever made. Metro 2033 tells the tale of Artyom, a young man who grew up in a surviving human enclave known as Exhibition Station, in the ruins of the Moscow Metro. This has become one of the last habitable places in the city after nuclear holocaust devastated much of the surface of the world. Artyom is on a mission after Hunter, an elite Ranger, comes to warn the station of a new threat to humanities tenuous hold on existence. The story is loosely based on a best selling russian novel, by one Dmitry Glukhovsky. There are frequent visual references to the book in the game, although the story is slightly altered.

And so the game begins. The first thing that struck me were the graphics. I am one of the lucky gamers who owns a bad ass PC, so I was able to enjoy Metro 2033 on maximum settings. It was beautiful. The effects and lighting, facial animations and more subtle effects are top notch and add a huge amount of depth to the game. There is a serious level of detail, from the way the levels and especially the human settlements are constructed. There is lots of opportunities to explore the various stations that you come across, and this should not be missed. Each station is a self contained town, heavily fortified agains the horrors of the metro and outside world. The designers really went all out in their attempts the portray the dark and dirty existence that humanity finds itself in, and it really pays off as the stations put much of the towns from Fallout 3 to shame, albeit in a more linear and less interactive way.

The great presentation leads to a very believable and scary atmosphere. This is certainly one of those games that needs to be played in the dark as much of the finer detail can be hard to see. The sound effects are also very good, with spooky bangs and clanks ringing out through the crumbling tumbles. Weapons sound realistic as well as all of your equipment. When there are beasties about, they also lend their menacing voices to the atmosphere making it hard to know when precisely they will pounce.

The gameplay is standard FPS format. Artyom is equipped with an array of weapons, usual stuff, lamp, map and various other items to help you along. The items requiring power can be charged up with a charging device that is carried around throughout the game, so should your light look as if its losing its brightness, it probably is, so time to charge it up. While it can be a bit annoying to have to do this, it does add a level of realism to the game that doesn't take away from the gameplay. The game map is a physical thing that Artyom must take out of his pocket to view, with objectives written on it and Artyom using a lighter to illuminate it should he find himself in a dark spot. This again adds a level of realism to the game, as when the map is pulled out, it is done in real time, so you must be careful when and where you check it.

The game is also challenging, but not impossibly so. I played through on hard mode and found this to be perfect. Ammo is often hard to come by, so there were many situations where I was moving alone through the darkened tunnels, with just a single clip in my AK, and nothing else but a knife. The sense of desperation is very tangible. Ammo is found on bodies, scattered in realistic map locations or can be picked up in the stations. The game uses a form of ammo as currency. Bullets manufactured before the holocaust are highly valued and can be used to exchange for inferior post holocaust manufactured weapons and ammo. The player can choose to load their pre-fall bullets if they wish, significantly increasing their firepower. However these rounds are hard to come by, so they player needs to be careful about how they are used.

The games enemies suit their environment perfectly, ranging from small dog sized mutants, to huge brutes that are fast and tough, usually moving in packs. It can often take a whole clip of well placed shots to bring the bigger foes down, meaning your already precious ammo reserves usually don't last much more than a few encounters with the metro's resident nasties. Thankfully the game usually provides you with enough to get through, you just have to be careful not to waste it.

Artyom is the standard silent protagonist, not uttering a word during the game. However, and thankfully, we are treated to a short monologue between each level as Artyom tells his story. Though these are short, they do give him a voice and the player can connect a little better to their character.

The levels are based in two locations. The metro, where most of the game will take place and on the surface. The player must make several forays up to the surface during the game. The frozen ruins of Moscow are eerie and silent, inhabited by some of the more fearsome mutants that plague the city. Due to the surface being poisoned since the fall, a gas mask must be worn or the player will choke to death. The gas masks require filters that must be regularly replaced. These can be bought in the stations or scavenged from the remains of less fortunate people found all over the surface and tunnels alike. The masks can also suffer damage from attacks, so the player must be extra quick and careful to protect it.

Throughout the game, the player is usually accompanied by a few NPCs. This is usually welcome as the prospects of traversing alone through the spooky metro is not a very appealing one. The voice acting is good and the scripted sequences are realistic and enjoyable to watch. The story of the game also moves along nicely, with the player never losing sight as to what they are doing. The game also has two different outcomes, depending on certain decisions made through the game, like whether to use stealth or brawn, or helping or ignoring certain NPCs. While there is no different content and the difference is only in the ending sequence, there is a surprising outcome for one of them so its definitely worth playing the game again differently to see this.

So overall, I found Metro 2033 a very enjoyable experience. The story is interesting and is well paced, the atmosphere and graphics are some of the best iv seen despite the overused post apocalyptic setting. Metro 2033 is a very memorable game that I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a compelling and genuinely scary experience.