Alan’s Blog

I’m not going to apologise for the delay, because I’ve done it too many times Needless to say, I’ve been busy with things and haven’t had the time to update. I’m going to try and force myself to update at least once a week.

Defender was released on XBox Live Arcade the other day. I had a clone of that on my Amstrad CPC6128 called Defend or Die, and playing the original bought back a flood of nostalgia. It still holds up today in terms of gameplay and even graphically as far as I’m concerned (I don’t know whether it has been updated at all graphics-wise for release on XBLA); but then again I’ve always been a proponent of gameplay over graphics anyway.

I’m currently working my way through Splinter Cell Double Agent on the PC front, and I think I’m about half way through. I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto 3 again on my laptop when I haven’t been at my desktop machine; which I finished last night. I still really enjoy that one, but it can be frustrating at times given the things they added in Vice City and San Andreas (bikes, planes/helicopters, etc). I’ll probably move onto Vice City next, although there are issues with playing that one on a laptop keyboard due to the game not letting you redefine the flying controls (laptops don’t have a dedicated num-pad), which makes finishing some missions that involve flying impossible without an external keyboard.

Watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children for the first time the other night, as well as Boogie Nights (which I’d seen before). Final Fantasy was surprisingly good considering I never played FF VII the game. Paul gave me a quick run down on the story before we started, which helped. There was also a video run through of the game on the DVD of which my only comment would be, it was subtitled and they were playing too fast, so reading the subtitles was nigh-on impossible. Boogie Nights was fun as usual, but it was officially research anyway.

Ok, time for a mixed catch-up update.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance is awesome. We had a great time playing. Much better controls than X-Men Legends and the sheer variety in the characters is great. The story is campy in an awesome way. We only made it past the first ‘mission’ playing it with 3 people, but that was only due to time constraints.

I was off work Wednesday - Friday, managed to get the office flu that was going around. That kept me on my back for the most part - I only had the energy to reply to a few emails each day and then I was back to sleep.

Gears of War arrived on Friday. Amazing game, simply stunning looking. The controls are brilliant, apart from the A button causing problems being a ‘catch-all’ button for take cover and sprint (I’ve read CliffyB’s rant on Jump buttons and agree fully - I had more to say on the topic, but it seems I may have missed a section on jumping in the manual :/ ).

Otherwise I’ve found the game bloody brilliant so far. I’m a couple of checkpoints into Act 2 playing split screen co-op, and it’s just a blast. It has made my 28″ Widescreen TV feel too small though

Just picked up Marvel Ultimate Alliance for our gaming evening tomorrow night. I forgot to order it online in time for Saturday, so I had to go out and try and find it today. Ugh.. my local Game store had it in the preorder section with preorder boxing only. The game was released on the 3rd of November and yet my local Game store still thinks it’s coming soon… Anyway, as a last resort I tried HMV, and they had one copy. ONE COPY… I must have got the last copy on the entire Island…

Sound like an awesome game, should be a lot of fun hopefully.

Spent the entire weekend playing Neverwinter Nights 2. When I say the entire weekend, I actually mean just over half, as there were some issues we encountered before we could start playing.

Ultimately, it was a blast. It’s not too far away from the original Neverwinter Nights in terms of gameplay and such. It feels like what would happen if Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic 2 had children. I think it’s only out of love for the series that we didn’t just give up and wait for a few patches.

It’s got a ton of problems:

• Dragging an item onto another player opens the trade window with that item already on offer, however 3 times out of 5 it will add the item to the trade window but not show it.
• We had some weirdness with save games and remote characters progress sometimes not being saved if the remote character disconnected and reconnected.
• Timeouts whilst connecting to a LAN game. Defragging seemed to help this.
• The User Interface is not great. It seems they didn’t decide, “Lets take Neverwinters Interface and make it better or simply streamline it” but rather “Lets start again with our own interface and make it kind of look like Neverwinters”.
• Crashes. This mainly happened on one machine, and could be indicative of a problem with that machine.
• The pathfinding seems to be taken directly from Neverwinter. It’s still shit. In fact, it might even be worse.
• The Camera is terrible. It might be playable if you go into “Knights of the Old Republic driving camera” mode, but if you want to play it like Neverwinter Nights, then you’re screwed. It’s too fast/too slow/too jittery.
• The Map is crap. Utter crap. Why can’t I click on a point on the map and have my character try and run there (you know, if the pathfinding didn’t fuck it up too badly). Why can’t I leave markers, or do anything else apart from look at the map? WHERE THE HELL IS MY ON SCREEN COMPASS? How do you expect me to navigate? The best I came up with was using the visibility cone on the mini-map to kind of point in the general direction of a map point I wanted to get to, but with the camera setup, that’s pretty useless too. Why do the location markers on the mini-map not have tool tips?
• Loading times - ugh.  I ended up needing to run in a window due to some keyboard/focus problems I was having, which thankfully allowed me to check my email and browse the net and check email whilst it loaded.

And then there is just the things they changed and we’re not happy with, such as:

• Any Co-op players just seem to be along for the ride. All players seem to be considered the same ‘character’ in the story. While this is to be somewhat expected, Neverwinter at least had some different dialog based on whether you were the player that did some action or not. For instance “hey, thanks for getting the badly needed item, we really appreciate it!” for the person who just dropped off the item, and “hey, did you hear what they/<character name> did? They found us the badly needed item”. Nothing like that has happened so far. Basically, you’re “the dude” depending on whether you got to the event first, or you are the party leader (the default decision as to who is in the story). A nice touch was the other players being in the cutscenes, but wasn’t really enough without some clever script writing.
• The Henchmen interaction isn’t great. Suffers from the same issue above, so getting ‘friendly’ with your henchmen is impossible, as there are two people being considered the same person. In the original game, each player could take 1 henchman each, and that player would be the only one who could get information or history out of the henchman. If you tried talking to someone elses henchman, they would say “sorry, I work for someone else.”. In the new game, you don’t have that level of involvement, especially if you aren’t the party leader.
• Related to the above. Conversations are group conversations now, whoever triggered it is in control, everyone else is locked watching the conversation until it is over. In the original you could have multiple conversations going at once. You could both be doing different quests. While this makes sure all the players are keeping track of the dialog, it used to be up to the player.
• Again, a similar problem. Players trigger level changes for all players. This means you cannot be in different stores. It makes little sense my talking to a blacksmith when I’m a Wizard, however I’m forced to go there when our Paladin character goes to get new equipment. In the original game, arriving at a city usually meant “I have to go buy some stuff, we’ll meet up at the Inn” and off everyone went.
• There are some other issues, but these are the main ones.

Some other changes I dislike, but aren’t major issues. For instance, my actions on behalf of the group have no bearing on the alignment of other players. So we’re the same character, but independant in terms of actions? If I tell an NPC I’m going to gut him and end up killing him, what does that say about the Paladin who must always be a beacon of good yet just stood by whilst I butchered the innocent NPC? (or even worse, helped?). It makes sense in certain instances. For instance, stealing some weapons is an unlawful action, but if I don’t care, I should be able to. But there should at least be some ‘group’ alignment decisions. In the original, it was only group alignment, So I would need to be careful I didn’t screw up a Paladin’s alignment when we were grouped. However, he could leave the group and not be affected.

There are some fairly big issues in the game, hopefully some of them get fixed eventually. The story itself is being a little reserved so far, but if I recall, the first chapter usually is (I think we’re still in the first chapter). We’ve been able to work around most of the problems so far.

In terms of the original game, it’s just more of the same. They’ve fucked some things, and improved some things, so it works out about the same.

That’s enough for now, might post more about it later.

Managed to finish the main story arc in Oblivion last night. I found it extremely entertaining although did feel it kind of ended abruptly.. well, not abruptly, but it just kind of ‘ended’. I don’t know, it felt like there should have been a touch more story inbetween some of the action. I guess that’s the price we pay for open ended gameplay; everyone is still trying to work out how to work story-telling into that kind of structure in a nice way. That is probably a topic for another post though.

Anyway, with that done, I’m ready to start on Neverwinter Nights 2. Planning on playing that one Co-operatively, as has been the case for all previous Neverwinter Nights stories (with the depressing exception of Hordes of the Underdark, where they decided “we wont flat out say the main story is not playable cooperatively, but you know - if you’re gonna make assumptions… It’s a shame you bought that many copies…“). Yes, you could play it certain ways if you were careful or had some helpful scripts running, but the experience was too trying on our patience.

My Neverwinter Nights 2 Lawful Good Collector’s Edition arrived today. For the price, I can’t complain. Nicely done. Not going to have a chance to play it until this weekend, fingers crossed I can finish Oblivion before then (hah). Looking forward to getting some Co-op action going on.

I took some pictures of the material, which you can see here.

I would probably have preferred Chaotic Evil, but couldn’t justify the extra price (Game were charging a lot more than Play, and when you’re buying two copies, that makes a lot of difference)

I’m still working my way through Oblivion. Really enjoying it. My only complaint so far is clearing the Spoiler ▶Oblivion Gates is really monotonous. I’m past the first big push of that now, so hopefully things get better.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is out today. Looking forward to that, loved the original. Splinter Cell Double Agent is also out today, which should be fun, I really enjoyed 3. 16 days until Gears of War, woo!

Friday I was at a friends place for a few drinks. Great fun. The evening ended with us all sitting around laughing at old Iron Man episodes. So unintentionally funny it was awesome.

Saturday night the same group of friends were around at my place for our usual Saturday night gaming. Unfortunately Bankshot Billiards 2 doesn’t support 4 players, so we had to cycle who was playing.

Thankfully the games for the most part didn’t drag out too long. Looking forward to Fuzion Frenzy 2 later this year. We’ve played the crap out of the demo.

We ended up playing 4 player Gauntlet until the wee hours. Going to pick up Marvel Ultimate Alliance for our next session. Sounds awesome.

Last night I watched The Usual Suspects. Excellent stuff. I thought I might have seen it before, or at least parts of it - but it turned out I hadn’t.

I got some bad news last night. Turns out my Great Grandmother passed away Saturday night (28th October 2006). Apparently it was painless and wasn’t really unexpected, she was 102 years old - so it was really a matter of time. I last saw her in May 2003 at her 99th birthday. It’s a shame I didn’t get a chance to visit her again. I’ll miss her