No Game New Year: XCOM Enemy Within. Or not...

Because I'm behind in my posts, this one will take me up to probably last Wednesday...

For the last week and a half I've been having a few runs at XCOM: Enemy Within. I say a few runs because this game is HARD. I would like to say, by way of introductory remarks, that I love this game; I was so glad XCOM was re-made for the current generation and I am even happier that it found its way onto the Xbox 360. So if what I write here comes across as negative, it comes from the frustration of it being an incredibly hard game to beat.

For those of you who don't remember, XCOM was originally a series of games by MicroProse that came out in the mid-late 90's. The premise was simple: Aliens invade Earth, and as the paramilitary global organisation XCOM, you have to defend it. What wasn't so common for the time were strategy games. The idea was that you commanded the entire war, from the building of your base and its location, to the deployment of your troops and interceptors. And then when you'd done all that, you got to command your troops in a turn-based strategy game. I remember the game being very hard, and not getting all that far with it, but it was a lot of fun and very well put together for the time(1994!).

This was the case for the first XCOM game, which was actually called UFO: Enemy Unknown. I played this one a lot when I was thirteen, and for a long time after! I understand XCOM: Terror from the Deep, released in a similar manner, worked in a similar manner, though I never played it. Then in 1997 we got XCOM: Apocalypse, which was set much further ahead into the future and involved the use of different aliens, an enemy Human faction which was interesting, and for the first time a real-time strategy game. Without wishing to go off on one too heavily about the history of gaming, at that time there were A LOT of Real Time Strategy games being published and this was MicroProse's attempt at keeping with the times. I don't know why but I never really got in to this one all that much. Maybe it's my almost OCD-like need to play the games through in order, but I always found myself wishing I was playing something else whenever I gave it a go.

Then we got my personal favourite of the original series: XCOM Interceptor. This took the battle to Space, where you would build space stations and star-fighters to combat the aliens. All the trademark XCOM features were there - base management, research, defence, strategic deployment - but with one difference. Instead of the combat section of the game being a strategy game, Interceptor put you in control of one of your fighters in a space-combat simulator. While there were other games that did this particular mechanic better, it was nice to be a part of the action rather than just controlling it, and I had a lot of fun blowing up aliens and their bases - though I did find that, contrary to what I'd come to expect from XCOM games, the combat section of the game was very easy, with only the last mission of the game proving to be an insurmountable challenge. Then again, I did set the difficulty to Very Easy. I wasn't very good at games back then. I'm still not, as a matter of fact.

Sadly, Interceptor suffered three major flaws that I will now reveal to you in ascending order:

1. There were only three fighters on the XCOM side and only about five for the Aliens. Apparently this was due to time constraints, but when at the same time I also played X-Wing and TIE Fighter, which were much older games and managed more ships than that for both of their factions, it was a little disappointing.
2. There was no way to skip the battles. This isn't really a problem when you're at the start of the game and you're thinking, 'oh wow, I'm fighting Aliens!' but late-game when you've got eight bases and your scanners keep picking up small patrols, you find yourself wishing that you could let the AI handle small skirmishes like this so you could concentrate on the bigger picture. It doesn't break the game at the lowest difficulty level, which is how I played it, but it would have been nice to have had the option.
3. The Curse of Windows 98. A lot of older games have some version of this, relevant to the operating system of the time. But for those of us who don't play games on PC, let me tell you what this meant for Interceptor: It wasn't that it wouldn't work on Windows 98. On the contrary, it worked perfectly fine on Windows 98. It's just that it absolutely refuses to work on anything else. And what is really a kick in the teeth for this game is that the problems start to occur later on in the game. It pretends to work, but then when the Aliens start sending jammer probes to block your research, you can't do anything about it. You can send your interceptors, but when you launch the mission, the probe is not there, and you can do nothing to destroy it. But I thought I'd try to live with that and manage to play through the game with this added challenge (The probes disappear by themselves after a while.) But no. At some point, you start being attacked by space pirates, and when you finally uncover their base, you find the same impossible thing happens - it doesn't appear in the mission. This one is game breaking, and the reason I haven't played it since I discovered this in 2005.

As you can see, I'm rather bitter about that last point. MicroProse went out of business in 2000, and there was no development team to patch the game to stop this from happening. Some modders have now fixed this but I don't know enough about configuring PC files to implement these changes. It looked like XCOM was gone forever... (at least, officially. There were some 'spiritual successors' out on the indie market at some point. But apart from watching TotalBiscuit videos, I don't pay much attention to that either.)

Then in 2012, Firaxis and 2K Games released XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This was a re-make of the original title and by GOD, this was good...

The basic premise of the game was exactly the same. Aliens come down, you have to defend the Earth. However, the new game did a lot to bring the game in line with the current generation. There was a graphical overhaul with the inclusion of actual characters who would talk to you in an advisory capacity. A lot of the tedious micro-management from the old games - supplies, low-level staff etc - was taken out, allowing you to focus on the game. The missions from the old game were there, but there were also some new ones - Abduction missions, Escort missons, and Bomb Disposal. And the tactical section of the game was even more streamlined.

There were a lot of changes here that fans of the originals weren't happy with. For example, the previous games had an 'action points' system, where your troops had a certain number of points to spend on their actions for that turn, and you could squeeze maximum efficiency out of your troops depending on how much their actions cost. In the new game, your troops have a maximum of two actions - you can move, THEN shoot or use an item. It has to be in that order. If you try doing it the other way around, you'll find that your shoot or item ends your turn. Your troops evolve and get more skills as you're going along - and you're going to need those extra skills and abilities, because some of the enemies you come across are incredibly hard to deal with.

I managed to finished the game on Normal difficulty after a few false starts in about a month. And ever since then I've been trying to beat it on Classic (Hard) difficulty. And I usually fall flat on my face after a few months in game time. The game is very brittle to the point where if you make a mistake and your soldiers die, it is incredibly hard to pull it back after that. Permadeath is in action here; if your most experienced soldiers get killed and you've got no one to replace them, you've got nothing but rookies to fill in those gaps, and you find yourself missing the shotguns and rocket launchers that your veterans bring to the battle. Battles become stupidly hard, and more often than not you'll find it impossible to pull a campaign victory.

Ultimately the greatest strength of the game is also its most frustrating feature: You can lose. In this Call-of-Duty-era of gaming, this is not actually all that common. In a great many shooters for example, you can play the game for 10 hours and probably win because there is no penalty for dying other than having to start the level again. It's the same for open-world titles like Grand Theft Auto; there's rarely a penalty for dying that can't be solved by buying all your weapons etc back. In XCOM, I have definitely lost the game more often than I have won it, or even done reasonably well. If you run out of money, you can't hire more soldiers. If you can't hire more soldiers, you can't fight battles. If you don't hire engineers, you can't build satellites that stop the world going mad (usually how you end up losing.) If you don't hire Researchers, you will fall behind in the technology stakes. Get even one of these things wrong and you could potentially de-rail the whole game. Do this enough times and it does get quite frustrating, and that is why sometimes I put the game away for a couple of months - I'm just not getting anywhere!

That having been said, I would normally come back to it after a few months. Just one more go! Until XCOM: Enemy Within came out...

So the game I'm playing at the moment is Oblivion and this one is going to take me ages. I've always got things to say about XCOM so I'm going to leave Enemy Within until next week. I'll see you then!

No Game New Year part 11: Fallout Brotherood of Steel and Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection

I think I’m going to have to admit defeat and call it a day with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. It was getting to the point where I wouldn’t even want to put my PS2 on for thought of having to deal with that asinine game, and I found myself thinking: Time to move on. Play something else. And get rid of that game.

(If and when I get rid of my games that I don’t play anymore, it will probably be all at the same time. In the UK there is a service called Music Magpie that will take some old games and CDs etc off your hands for a relatively small amount of money – but they will take them, and if there’s more than 20 items, the delivery is free. That’s how I’ll probably sell my games when the time comes. That’s also why I’ll hang on to the game long enough for me to give it another go if the mood takes me.)

So here are just a few things that are wrong with it:

The biggest problem I’ve had so far has been with the health recovery system. You either use Stim Packs, which will restore roughly ¼ of your health, or you can stand still for about 5 minutes and your health will recover automatically. The former is by far the quicker option, but if you do this, you will burn though your health packs very quickly and they need to be saved for the bosses. The latter sounds great until you start doing it after every 5 enemies or so. They drain a lot of your health if they hit you, which of course they will. I spent ages standing around waiting for my health to recover, and it would have been incredibly boring had I not had my laptop on at the same time and spent the downtime watching videos on Youtube. What I did before Youtube I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to play this game and have nothing else to do!

Also, some of the set-pieces are very lazy. Quite early on in the game you have to escape from a cave that is crumbling around you and rocks are falling down on to you from overhead. The idea is to get you to hurry up while you’re leaving, which you do, until you realise that not a single one of these rock falls – which occur once every six seconds or so with EXACTLY THE SAME ANIMATION – has even the remotest chance of hitting you. All it’s actually doing is getting in the way of your field of view. Granted, given the size of the level, having any of them hit you would have made escape almost impossible, but it could and should have been handled a lot better than this.

Aside from this, the game is just outright dull. Other than the main questline, the quests are absolutely ridiculous (I can’t imagine that a prostitute in post-apocalyptic America is going to be too worried about the whereabouts of her cat, even if it is called Mr Pussy,) the characters aren’t likeable by any stretch of the imagination and the combat is repetitive and boring. I imagine the game would be more fun played in 2-player co-op,[1] but what isn’t? I bought it on the strength of the Fallout games – which up until then had been very good – but in hindsight; I’d have done better leaving this one alone.

 

Time for some fun...

 

Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection

This is a collection of games I’ve got on an Xbox360 disc of about 40 games for the Sega Mega Drive, better known in the rest of the world as the Sega Genesis. I owned a Mega Drive years ago – and some of these games - , from when I was eight up until about nineteen, when I traded it in for an Xbox. (This was 2005 and retro gaming was HUGE in the UK at this point.) I figured, in the spirit of the challenge, that it would be a good idea to play through some of these.

Now, some of these old Mega Drive games are very hard to complete. On at least one of them, it actually can’t be done (because it is a Tetris-style puzzle game and will carry on indefinitely until you lose.) Some of them are astonishingly difficult to manage. And some of them are simply better games than others. While I like enough of the games to want to keep the actual disk, in some cases all I will be looking for is the Achievement Points for it.

Here are the games I’ve won achievement points on so far, and what I had to do to get them:

• Alex Kidd: Collect 1,000 in currency
• Altered Beast: Collect 100,000 points or higher on the first level
• Bonanza Brothers: Reach 40,000 points on the first level
• Columns: Get 20,000 on Easy mode
• Comix Zone: Complete the first episode
• Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine: Complete the game
• Ecco: Talk to another dolphin
• Fatal Labyrinth: Progress to the 5^th level of the labyrinth
• Golden Axe: Collect 20 magic power-ups
• Kid Chameleon: Collect Maniaxe
• Shinobi III: Complete the 1^st level without using continues
• Sonic Spinball: Get 10,000,000 points on the first level
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Obtain a Chaos Emerald
• Streets of Rage: Complete 1^st level using all 3 characters.
• Super Thunder Blade: Score over 1,500,000 points on the first level

So, without further ado, here are the games I’ve been playing and how I managed with them:

 

Streets of Rage

I’d actually already got the achievement for this, as playing through the first level with all three characters isn’t actually all that hard. However, as far as brawlers are concerned, the Streets of Rage series was as good as they ever were or ever would be. In fact the second game is my favourite game of all time. I hadn’t completed it though, (at least, not on normal difficulty) and I’ve got this thing where I have to play through all the games in the series in order, so I thought I’d start with this one.

Streets of Rage, while not superbly balanced, includes a surprising amount of strategy for a brawler. But I guess that’s what games were like back in the early 90s. In order for it to be a challenge, the game was designed in such a way that you couldn’t just button-mash. You had to think about what you were doing, and how you’d tackle the various different enemies, particularly the bosses.

For example, at the end of level 2, you come across a guy with Wolverine-style claws. The way to deal with him is NEVER to jump, because as soon as you do he rushes at you with a slash and knocks you out of the air. Instead, approach him from above if you can, and get him in a hold. To maximise the damage output, flip over him while holding him, do the first couple of moves of the hold combo then throw him.

To deal with the big fat guy who breathes fire on level 4, you have to make sure you’re at the opposite height of the screen to where he is (i.e. if he’s low, be at the high end,) intercept him from behind as he’s breathing fire and do the hold combo. But whatever you do, don’t try to throw him or he’ll fall on top of you and you’ll damage yourself.

By far the hardest enemy in the game is Mona and Lisa, two fighters who in this version are re-skins of the playable character Blaze. If these two hit you, it will hurt – more than a third of your health bar will disappear – and the only way to hit them is to use your back attack. If you try to attack them head on, they will simply jump away from you. This requires a lot of skill to manage, and a character with a good back attack.

And then there are the characters themselves: Adam, Axel and Blaze, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game purports to help you out with this on the selection screen; Adam is strong and has a good jump attack but is not very quick, Axel is strong and quick but doesn’t have very good jump attacks, and Blaze is quick and has jump attacks but is not very strong. But they all have different things about them that you can only discover through playing the game yourself – or reading a wiki. In my case it was a mixture of the two.

My favourite character is Adam, but I think this has a lot to do with the fact that he doesn’t appear as a playable character in Streets of Rage 2 which I owned years ago. I always enjoyed playing the different character. He’s good enough to take out most of the enemies in the game, but sadly not quite quick enough to get out of their way when they’re doing their fast attacks, and I tend to die before I get to the end of the game.

Axel is quite average and was great in the second game but in this one he’s lacking in ranged attacks. He has to be right up close before he can do any significant amount of damage, and this is the case for his jump attack and back attack as well, making him almost useless for some of the later bosses. It’s kind of ironic that the character that was the face of the game was also the least useful.

I actually finished the game with Blaze, in the end. She’s quick enough to dodge most attacks and she’s got good jump and back attacks as well. Her regular attacks are less powerful but this is a small price to pay because you just need to do more of them. Also – and this is where some balance issues come in to it – she has the best throws out of the three of them as well. So she’s fast; useful; and if you get close enough she can do a huge amount of damage. She’s actually therefore the best character in the game.

The game also lets you choose a ‘Bad’ ending. The idea of different endings wasn’t unknown for the time, and you’d usually have to do something extra to get the good one – play on a higher difficulty level, collect all the Chaos Emeralds and such – but in Streets of Rage, you actually have to work harder for the bad one. At the end of the game, you have to choose whether you want to become Mr X’s right hand man, and if you decide that you do, he drops you down and you have to play the last I think three levels again. You then have to beat the last boss anyway, which is surprisingly easy. I’ve seen both endings; I completed the game years ago and got the bad ending on Easy mode, but for this play-through I wanted to play it on normal and get the good ending. It was satisfying to beat it again after so long!

 

Bonanza Brothers

This game appears to be about two brothers who steal things from various guarded locations, and what has to be one of the first games with a ‘Stealth’ mechanic. You could hide from your enemies, or shoot them, which in actual fact would stun them for around 5 seconds. The levels were timed and there would be a bonus in your score for beating the level quickly. Time-based scoring like this was quite common in those days, I think.

I never owned this game on the Mega Drive and to be honest, I’m not enjoying it too much now. The controls are quite clunky and the theme is something I’m struggling to care about. I might give it another go at some point, but now that I’ve got the achievement for it, it won’t be any time soon.

 

Alien Storm

Another brawler. Don’t be fooled by the fact that all the characters have guns; they are short ranged energy blasters that don’t go more than a few feet. The idea behind the game is that aliens have descended on to earth and are disguising themselves as bins and post boxes, and you have to kill them all with your weapons. Or, as is commonly the case with Mega Drive games, mash the B button. The A button does the usual super-attack, but the C button is what sets this one apart from regular brawlers. Rather than jumping up, this one actually makes jump forward, which you can combine into a quick attack in the form of a forward roll. It’s useful, provided you understand where you’ll end up and make sure there are no enemies there, and quite a bit different from the usual jump attacks. But you do find yourself missing the notion of a jump keeping you out of harms way for a valuable second while you decide what to do next. The game also has ‘first person’ sections, where you control a crosshair to aim at various different aliens coming at you and shoot crates to get power-ups.

 

This game is OK but not as good as Streets of Rage. For one thing, the things that are supposed hide alien life – bins, etc – are things that in any other game you’d smash to get an item; trying to do so in this game almost always results in an alien appearing out of it, taking away any element of surprise. You also need to collect energy for your guns, which is a peculiar thing to put in a brawler because that potentially means you could derail the whole game by running out of ammo. It is also very hard. I can’t actually get the achievement – I have to make it to the end of the third level without dying even once. Something always manages to kill me, either by ganging up on me to the point where I can do nothing but use a super-attack to deal with it, or by being a horribly hard boss fight.

But, for a game that was obviously designed for arcade, this is not too bad at all. It is fun, if a little frustrating, and it’s nice to have a slightly different take on what you would normally expect from a brawler. I’ll keep going at it until I get that achievement, but whether I’ll make it to the end I don’t know.

 

Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine

This is an absurd but surprisingly fun game using characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. (For those of you who don’t know, Dr Eggman was originally called Dr Robotnik. I don’t know why it was changed for the later games!) In fact, some of the characters who appear in the game were also from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog TV series, which I used to love when I was about 8 or 9 and for quite a long time afterwards! It is a tetris-like puzzle game, where you have to group four or more ‘Beans’ of the same colour in order to ‘free’ them.

What makes this game different is the adversarial nature of the game. The Scenario Mode pits you against a ladder of 12 different robots that are also playing the game, and the idea is to make them fill their playing field before they do. As soon as that happens, it’s game over, but there’s a twist: Each time you free a group of coloured beans, it creates a group of colourless “refugee” beans that drops on your opponent. These cannot be grouped in the usual way, and the only way to get rid of them is if they are next to a group that they are freeing. The more beans you get rid of in one shot – or the higher your combo – the more refugees are dropped on your opponent. Drop enough of them and you can knock them out straight away, though more likely you’ll be very disruptive to the combos they were planning. Of course, they can do the same to you, and trust me, they will…

The robots you fight are a colourful bunch, and feature Scratch, Grounder and Coconuts from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog amongst others. All the robots say something to you in a text-based format before their level begins, and I can’t help but wonder if the script-writer ever actually watched the show; most of the characters that feature here are devoid of their usual personalities in the game. They are all supposed to have different strategies and tactics in order to make life difficult for you, but to be honest, the only ones that gave me any significant amount of trouble were Dynamight (Level 7,) and Spike (Level 9.) The rest of them… well it wasn’t exactly easy, but when I won, I felt it was more to do with luck of the draw than skill. I actually beat Dr Robotnik on my first go.

The game also features a 2-player versus mode, which caused some horrific rows between me, my brother and some of my friends in my younger days! (Dropping a load of refugees on each other was never taken in good grace, and even now seems something of a ‘dick’ move.) I guess that can be fun if played in the spirit it was intended. There is also a training, or ‘free’ mode, which can be one or two players and does not feature refugees. I guess that could be fun too, but with Columns on the same disk, there’s not much point…

I had a lot of fun with this, but now that I’ve got the achievement (Complete the game,) I doubt I’ll be coming back to it any time soon.

---

[1] The only person who’d play this sort of thing with me is my sister, who doesn’t live with me anymore so we don’t see much of each other. If she is around, we’ve got much better games than this to play together.

No Game New Year part 10: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, and some Temptations...

Right then, first thing's first, I've recently become aware three games that have brought me ever closer to failing the challenge. I haven't given in, but here they are, and the reasons why:

Temptation 2: South Park: The Stick of Truth

This one's a bit of a mystery to me. Am I a South Park fan? Not really; I kind of lost interest as it got ever-more ridiculous. Am I an RPG fan? Yes, and I've got plenty of those games and I know it. But everything I've seen on the new South Park game looks so good that I really wanted to give it a try. I've seen Angry Joe's review, and Total Biscuit's WTF is... video on it, and it really does look like a game I would enjoy playing. Apart from anything else, it's about time someone put out a decent South Park game!

Temptation 3: One Finger Death Punch

Another one from Total Biscuit, this simple-but-intricately-timed brawler looks like an absolutely amazing way to fill a few hours. I'd love to download it onto my Xbox, (there's no way it would happen on my laptop!) but I'm keeping it quiet for now.

Temptation 4: Final Fantasy VII.

An old friend put me on to this. I think this game is as good as Final Fantasy ever was or ever will be, and I've owned it on the PC and the Playstation. Sadly, there's no way on God's Green Earth that any computer we have in our house will run a game ported to PC in 1998, and I've lost my copy of the game for the Playstation (we suspect it was stolen.) Then my friend put on Facebook a picture of him playing the game on the PSVita, and if I ever get one of those, that will be the reason - so I can play Final Fantasy VII again. Trouble is, dropping at least a tonne on the Vita and buying a game I already own will come dangerously close to breaking the challenge, so in its spirit, I will wait until it is over before I do this.

And now on to what I've been up to this week...

Actually, not a lot. Apart from the fact that I've been busy most nights this week, I've also been quite ill with the back-end of a cold. I've had headaches, I've been dizzy, and I've been unable to regulate my body temperature - three things that are not conducive to having a particularly good time when I've been playing video games. Plus my girlfriend was up this weekend so my PS2 has remained off. So most of these notes actually cover what happened last week...

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

So I spent quite a lot of time last week talking about how I think we came to have such a game on the PS2, and why a relatively poor addition to the otherwise-excellent Fallout franchise came to exist at all. If you missed it and are wondering what Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is, here's a quick re-cap: The game is a top-down Dungeon-Crawler action title, with some very basic RPG elements based on the Fallout setting (post-apocalyptic 50s style.) The idea is that you are an initiate in the Brotherhood of Steel - about as near as the Fallout series gets to having a 'good' faction - sent on a quest to find some of the brotherhood. Naturally, things don't go to plan, and you end up fighting your way through Radscorpions, Raiders, Ghouls and Super Mutants.

There are quite a few aesthetic differences between this game and the other games in the Fallout series that are worth mentioning straight away. First, you do not 'create' your character in the usual sense; you choose from a choice of three (and later six:) Nadia, Cyrus and Cain. Nadia is the 'quick and nimble' archetype who moves slightly faster and has the ability to use dual weapons. Cyrus is a heavy-set man, tougher than Nadia who can't use dual weapons but can use heavy weapons. Cain is a Ghoul, neither tough nor particularly quick but can use all the weapons and also has the advantage of being immune to radiation. This difference will put off a lot of the more traditional Western RPG fans, but it does have the advantage of being able to put you in the action more or less straight away. These, by the way, are the only differences between the characters. The dialogue options and the way each character handles certain situations never changes in the slightest.

The other change of course is the music. The background music during the game, when present, evokes a feeling of hopeless defeat and laziness, synonymous I think with Fallout. We do have an ironic 1950s track that plays at the start (uncredited, but probably called 'Nuclear Blast.) Most significantly though are the inclusion of tracks from a number of notable Metal bands of the time, including Slipknot, Messhugha and Chimaira. These generally appear during boss battles, and there is nothing like shooting the shit out of the devious mayor of the local town while listening to a vocal-free mix of The Heretic Anthem. It is a little out of style with the usual music you might expect from a Fallout game, but as I mentioned last week, this game was to cater to a very different demographic.

The graphics aren't amazing, in fact for a 6th gen console game they're actually quite poor. The character models only look a little bit better than something you might find on the PS1. Generally, they didn't have to be much better than that, as most of the action is coming from the top-down so you wouldn't necessarily have the kind of view that would give rise to that kind of detail. But you really do notice when you talk to characters and the quality of their models and animations are... repetitive, to say the least. The voice acting is done well enough, but the script sounds like it was written by a teenager with a very limited vocabulary.

Then we get to the gameplay itself. It is pretty standard stuff; running around, hacking and slashing and shooting at various enemies that will do nothing but try to kill you. You eventually pick up a balance of Ranged, Melee and Grenade-style weapons, and as you can equip up to three weapons I guess it's the best balanced option to pick all three types. With Melee weapons, there's usually not a lot of difference in how they handle; a Hammer is only marginally quicker than a Knife, for example, but does more damage. The difference, then, is that certain characters can't use the larger weapons. With ranged weapons, there's a little more variety between single-shot, automatic, shotguns and all sorts really, though certain characters can't wield two at the same time. The aiming is rubbish: you press R1 to aim a shot; sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Finally there are the grenades, and I have to wonder what on earth they were thinking when their functionality was designed. You have to hold down the button to throw them, and then a little glowing light moves steadily ahead from you to represent your shot power. You then let the button go and they're thrown in more often than not a random direction as it gets stuck on a piece of scenery. Cover is limited to being able to duck, which I wouldn't have notices at all if I hadn't bashed all the buttons to find out, and even then it's hard to tell.

To be fair, I think all this was before controls in shooters were really standardised, so there are some differences to the controls and functionality which may have just been ill-educated guesswork. And there is some fun to be had in gunning and slashing your way through hordes of enemies. Why do you think we play Dynasty Warriors? However it gets repetitive very quickly and, despite the inclusion of three characters, doesn't lend itself well to multiple play-throughs. This is about my fourth, though I've never reached the end of the game.

For this one, I chose Cyrus, and ramped up the difficulty to the maximum available, and here's where it starts to get interesting: You have to pick your spots carefully. Some enemies are better dealt with ranged weapons than others, but ammo is limited and so is your health, so you have to learn how each enemy attacks, how to avoid it and how to kill them as quickly as possible. You find yourself asking questions like: "Is it worth using a few rounds of ammo to deal with this Radscorpion who will poison me if I get too close?" "These raiders are pretty fierce and I'd love to shoot them but I know that some of them have got Flamethrowers, should I save my ammo for them?" "Is it worth taking a few hits to take down four guys at once with a grenade?" This is where the game comes in to its own, and almost becomes reminiscent of the old-school platform/run and gun style games where you'd have to memories enemy types and attack patterns to survive.

The problem is that the old games it emulates were generally over in an hour and a half. With this game, it takes about that to get through a single section of the game, and there is a LOT of it. The plot isn't particularly compelling either. Currently I'm at the end of the first chapter out of three. I'd love to get to the end of this title simply to say that I have, but I have a feeling I will be tired of the overly-repetitive gameplay long before the game is.

We'll see where I am with it next week, though if my eye doesn't stop twitching, I won't be playing much of anything...

No Game New Year Week 9: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and the history of the PS2

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

This Playstation 2 game is to the Fallout franchise kind of like the embarrassing relative that nobody talks about. It took a rich intellectual property like Fallout and did not do it justice with the version that came out on Console. Now, while not awful, this game is going to take me a LONG time to play all the way through, so this week’s entry will be more about the context of the game than the actual game.

So, when people talk about the Fallout franchise, they’ll think of one of two things:

• If they’ve been playing games for a while they might talk about the brilliant isometric role-playing game from Black Isle Studios, first released on PC in 1997 and a sequel released in 1998. Games like this weren’t exactly unknown but this game pushed a lot of boundaries in terms of its setting, combat and morally ambiguous content.
• Younger fans, or people who have been following the franchise for a while and have recognised its developments, would be more likely to talk about Fallout 3 and its sequel Fallout New Vegas. Bethesda created a game that was a massive departure from its predecessors in terms of its game play, but did a lot to bring sci-fi role-playing games into what is at the moment the current generation of gaming. It was also a fantastic game, and incidentally one of the few Xbox360 games I own that I’ve actually completed.

What they wouldn’t talk about is a top-down dungeon-crawling action game with the Fallout setting released on the PS2 and the Xbox in 2004, which is basically all Brotherhood of Steel was. At best, it was one of two spinoffs from the main series (the other being Fallout: Tactics, which I never played.) At worst, it was a cheap cash-in of a successful franchise to make a game that was shallow, flawed and if I’m honest, actually quite dull.

Which begs the question: Why wasn’t this game a role-playing game? Why such a drastic move away from the style of the previous games?

We may never know, but here’s my theory: I think it had a lot to do with the hardware limitations of the Playstation 2. And this is going to take a while to explain, so bear with me. And also bear in mind that I’m talking about what happened in the UK; the position might be a little different in America and the rest of the world:

Believe it or not, not everything about the PS2 went to plan. If you spool time back to 2001, you might remember that the old PS2s were massive and had an expansion bay in the back. It was supposed to be used for a Hard Disk Drive and an Online Adapter, and was a well-intentioned attempt to take console gaming online. Unfortunately for Sony, this was one of the few times they launched a product before the world was ready for it, and both the Hard Disk Drive and the Online Adapter fell flat on their faces in the UK when they were first released.

Let’s start with the Network Adapter. Why did that fail? Well, a lot of it was to do with the availability of Broadband in the UK at that time. The European version of the Online Adapter came with an Ethernet adapter to connect it to a broadband connection. It didn’t come with an option to connect it with a dial-up connection, (I understand the US model did,) and rightly so because the kind of data that would have to have been processed in order to make a PS2 game work on line would almost certainly have needed a broadband connection.

Unfortunately for a great many PS2 gamers in the UK, very few people actually had broadband at this point, and most internet users used a dial-up connection. This worked by using modems to convert the message from the computer into a telephone signal, sending it across to its destination modem. This would convert the telephone signal back into a computer message, the effect of which would then be displayed on the computer. No wonder connections were slow!

Broadband was no more clever than this. It basically cut out the ‘middle-man’ and connecting computers directly to each other using dedicated internet cables. This allowed the internet to work without all that tedious mucking about with phone lines,[1] but it also meant that a lot of work had to be done to create the infrastructure to allow it to do so. The technology existed and was available, but digging up every street in the UK in order to connect every home to broadband was no small task. We’re still in 2001 here, don’t forget. I don’t think Broadband was used domestically to any major extent until 2002, and I didn’t get it until 2003.

So when the online adapter was first built, it flopped in the UK simply because we didn’t have the infrastructure to make it work. Up until the Slimline PS2 was released in 2004 (which had an Ethernet adapter built in to it,) the only game I can think of that supported online games was Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3, also released in 2001 – and the online functionality didn’t work for obvious reasons. But what about the Hard Disk Drive?

Every console from the original Xbox now has a hard disk drive (HDD) built in to it. This was not the case with the PS2. The HDD was an optional extra that could, in theory, be bought separately and used with the PS2’s expansion bay. I don’t actually know whether this was ever released in the UK or not. It was talked about at the gaming shows, E3 being one of them. But I never heard anything about it being used in any games I read about in magazines, not least because one of its flaws was that no one seemed particularly sure what it was supposed to do.

We know what it does now, of course. Turn on your Xbox One or 360 and the interface you see, and everything you’re getting from Xbox Live, is all part of the infrastructure of the hard disk built in to the console. All your online content goes on to the HDD, and if you’re in to downloading games, they can go on the HDD as well. And there’s all sorts going on with the Next-Gen consoles that I haven’t got the faintest idea about yet.

However, it wasn’t all that clear to console gamers early last decade. Things like additional content and streaming were talked about, but all that made it sound like was a giant memory card. The HDD worked by streaming data from the game disk onto the hard drive. The idea behind it was that the PS2 could access data more quickly from a disk built into its infrastructure than from the disk. It could also be used in online play to download new content, and also have a substantial amount of memory to cope with the data coming in for online games.

It all sounded good in a ‘We’ll see what all that means when we get one’ kind of way, but at that time there were only two games that supported the HDD: Final Fantasy 10 and Final Fantasy 11.

FF11 was probably the first in what we now recognise as MMORPGs, and the first game that I was aware of that was exclusively online. So, if you didn’t have an internet connection, you couldn’t play it – and at that time, nobody did, because nobody in the UK had a broadband connection that would support online play with the PS2.

Final Fantasy 10 was not an online game, it was a large but somewhat linear RPG. It had a lot of data to access, and took advantage of streaming data from the game disk on to the HDD, where it could be read more quickly. What was the effect of this? Well, loading times decreased by about a second… and that was it.

So all in all, the situation with the HDD didn’t paint a picture of a piece of hardware you’d want to drop a couple of hundred pounds on.[2] Nobody bought it, and I think by the time the PS2 reached the end of its iteration, there were only 35 games that supported it. It was difficult, if not impossible, to attach it to the Slimline PS2, and its usefulness was overshadowed by the Xbox and the following generation of consoles.

What’s this got to do with Fallout? Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this…

Given the vast complexities of the requirements needed to create a sandbox/non-linear role-playing game, which is what people would have expected from Fallout, a hard disk drive would definitely be preferable, if not a requirement of a game like that. Any game with a morality-based system has to take into account all actions of the character in order to implement the effect of the world at large. It would also require a metric tonne of voice acting to account for all the possible conversations, and a whole host of other things I have not the technical savvy to describe right now. This kind of thing was possible on the 6^th-gen consoles; Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and Morrowind were all released on the Xbox, which had a HDD built in to it.

Put simply, it would have been impossible to put a role-playing game as complex as Fallout would have to have been on the PS2; the machine just didn’t have the hardware to deal with it. So Interplay had to come up with a different game entirely, and what they came up with was a dungeon-crawler: A functional action game with role-playing elements, but none of the depth or exploration that might have been expected for a game from the Fallout franchise.

So why did Interplay make a PS2 game at all? Why not put a proper role-playing game on the Xbox, which had the system capabilities to do it? I would imagine the decision came somewhere between the following two reasons:

• They had done more or less the same thing for Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance in 2001, which pre-dates the Xbox. They’d taken a well-loved and deep intellectual property, and made it into a dungeon-crawler game. Few fans of the series thanked them for it, but the PS2 gamers now had a version of Baldur’s Gate they could play – and Interplay now had a workable engine they could use for games that followed, including Dark Alliance 2 and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. This could be cynically viewed as a lazy re-use of assets, when a new game would have been preferable, but it also meant they could produce the game reasonably quickly.
• Part of the reason for the PS2’s success is that it had a lot of developers and publishers contracted to make games for them. This was partly due to the Playstation being the first console to get CD-based gaming right, which is a different story altogether but a lot of those deals would have been made around that time, and partly because for about 6 months developers and publishers had little choice in the matter. Between Sega calling it a day with the Dreamcast, and Microsoft releasing the Xbox, there was no choice but to make console games on the PS2. Unless Microsoft bought those contracts out when the Xbox was released, (and in some cases they did,) it was very unlikely that a development contract would extend to being able to make a game for the Xbox but not the PS2.

Or to put it simply, Interplay had to make the game for both the PS2 and the Xbox, and with an engine already in place, there was no reason to put any more effort into designing a completely new game.

So that, I think, is how we ended up with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. I hope you’ve enjoyed my musings into the history of video games circa early 00’s. Next week I might actually start talking about the game; that would be good, wouldn’t it?

See you next time.

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[1] Anyone remember having an extendable phone line that you had to reel around the house to wherever your computer was in order to plug the internet cables in? We laugh about it now, but I wonder how many people actually tripped up over those wires and broke their necks, as my Mom was convinced she would do. She never did…

[2] Or however much it was. I never saw one for sale so I don’t know.

1/3/2014: X-Wing: A Massacre

Ado guys, it's been a while since I've played this...

I had a game of X-Wing today in Titan Games with Rich Bloomer and it was basically a massacre; I took three fighters to his five and was destroyed piecemeal. But as ever, I'm willing to learn from my mistakes.

My squadron was:

Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
X-Wing: Biggs Darklighter	25	28	100
R2-F2	3
X-Wing: Wedge Antilles	29	33
R2 Astromech	1
Marksmanship	3
Y-Wing: Horton Salm	25	39
Proton Torpedoes (2)	8
Ion Cannon Turret	5
R5 Astromech	1

The idea behind the squadron was that Biggs and Wedge - both in X-Wings - would fly in close formation. Wedge would use his offensive capabilities of reducing the defender's agility to do some damage, and Biggs' effect that forces the enemy to fire at him rather than another fighter would keep the heat off Wedge. It kind of worked, but I mis-interpreted Biggs' effect. I thought that if the target was within range 1 of the shooter then the effect would kick in, but in fact the target had to be within range 1 of Biggs. I'll have to be a bit more careful if I'm going to run that tactic again!

The Y-Wing was to provide long-range support and hopefully score a couple of kills early on to keep the heat off the X-Wings. Sadly this didn't happen, though it was astonishing how difficult it was to kill; Rich spent around 3 or 4 turns with that being the only model left! The Ion cannon proved surprisingly effective as well, though perhaps this is because I misread the rules. I thought if one of my attacks hit then it cancelled out all other dice, so Rich wouldn't have had to roll his - but I've read the relevant section on the Fantasy Flight Forums and apparently he would still have been able to roll his dice, but I wouldn't have done more than 1 damage no matter how well I rolled. The effect of forcing the enemy to do nothing but fly slowly in one direction for a turn can take someone out of the fight for a turn though, and it ignores the normal rules for arc of fire so it is not to be taken lightly.

Also, did you see the mistake in the army list? Yes, I put the R2 unit with Wedge and the R5 unit with Horton; it should have been the other way around.

The R2 unit allows all movements of 1-2 speed as green manoeuvres. This would have been invaluable for the Y-Wing, because it has more than the usual number of red manoeuvers to give it stress tokens, and very few greens. The R2 unit would have been great for counteracting this.

The R5 unit on the other hand allows you to turn over a Critical Hit card at the end phase so that it only counts as a hit rather than a Critical. Honestly, I only took this one to fill out the points, but it proved useful in the end so it's worth hanging on to until I find something better.

So what happened in the battle?

I deployed my fighters in a 'step' formation; Wedge, Biggs and Horton. The first turn was basically spent moving towards each other on a diagonal slant across the board. I had hoped to take the flank of the TIE squadron, but instead I ended up flinging Wedge headfirst in to Darth Vader. He lasted two turns. Biggs was next to go; after flipping around to face the other way, he fired off a couple of shots only to be shot down by the entire squadron facing him. Horton lasted a little longer, as his craft was a little more hard-wearing, but he just didn't have the firepower to hold his own against 5 TIEs and went down after a few turns.

What would I do differently? Well, apart from the aforementioned changes to the army list, I would consider using the Ion cannon a lot more as it was surprisingly useful and did a good job of taking at least some of the enemy out of the fight. I've got another game coming up tomorrow so we'll see...