Francis Clarke's Blog

Gamestyle: Fable II (360)

2008-11-06T16:31:00.002Z

Reviewing RPGs can take some time, but luckily Fable 2 is a rather excellent game.

"Graphically, Albion looks stunning and the visual effects and changes in your main character add an extra dimension to the world. It would have been nice to see some more variety in the environment, especially in the indoor areas, but the day/night cycle originally promised in the original game has finally been realised to beautiful effect, and the lush woodlands and bustling cities really stand out. The game does suffer some very occasional pop-up and frame-rate issues during heavy combat, but in general it's smooth sailing. The rather unique voice acting has also returned, with Zoe Wanamaker doing just as much, if not more, for immersion and character than Patrick Stewart did in Oblivion."

You can read the review in full at Gamestyle.

Gamestyle: Golden Axe: Beast Rider (360)

2008-10-26T13:09:00.005Z

My first review in a while and the start of what will probably turn out to be quite a long stint of 360 reviews. This game was a real let down, which isn't exactly suprising from modern sega.

"Wreaking havoc on the beasts was the main point of the entire game, and it could have saved it from oblivion as just another boring hack and slash starring a big breasted female lead with a ridiculous sword. Even more criminal is the lack of any co-op or multiplayer play, the whole reason Golden Axe was created for in the first place. If you need a Golden Axe fix you can get the original game with co-op on XBLA for 400 points, and we guarantee it’ll be a more enjoyable experience than Beast Rider, which has only served to put another nail in the coffin of one of Sega’s biggest hits."

You can read the full review over at Gamestyle.

Freelance Work - October 2008

2008-10-12T16:57:00.003+01:00

Resonance Gaming
Set up by myself and Daniel Clarke of mse360.com, I was responsible for most of the content on the site during its run from January - June 2008, when it was sold. Since selling the site there have been some major database issues, so you can find my work replicated in full on this blog. When the site is stable again, these pieces will be removed in favour of linking back to the site.

Galactic Civilisation 2 Twilight of Arnor
Turtix Rescue Adventure
Elements of Destruction
Frontlines: Fuel of War
Democracy
Escape From Paradise City
Sims Carnival
Conflict Denied Ops
Sunage
Universe at War
Spaceforce Captains
Sins of a Solar Empire
Imperium Romanum

Five Hours of Anarchy [article]
Urban Legends [article]
Top 10 Most Underrated PC Games [article]

Elite [retro article]
Jones in the Fast Lane [retro article]
Alter Ego [retro article]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Acegamez
Acegamez are a very long running UK review site that run many competitions and cover all formats, although I did most of my work for them in PC reviews.

Fantasy Wars
Crash Time
Buzz! Junior - Dino Den
Golden Horde

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gamezine
Gamezine are a reasonably new and upcoming multiformat site based in the UK. Their design doesn't lend itself well for looking at old content, so it's hard to find my work without direct links, unfortunately.

Stalker: Clear Sky [preview]
Leaning Back: The problem with PC sports games [article]
1942: Joint Strike

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Strategy Informer
I've so far only done one XBLA review for these guys, b

Sealife Safari

Gamezine: 1942 Joint Strike Review

2008-10-12T16:55:00.002+01:00

Another XBLA title in the form of an updated version of a classic Capcom arcade game.

It’s worth noting that Joint Strike is set in an ‘alternative’ World War 2. This seems to be an excuse to keep the game’s 1942 title, while adding in all sorts of lasers and weird science fiction elements. It’s a bit of a cheap shot, as the game ends up looking more like World War 3 towards the end levels, and purists might feel let down by this. Multiplayer co-op mode is a welcome addition to any game, and Joint Strike offers it both locally and over the internet, with planes able to combine powers to launch devastating attacks, as per the games title.

You can read the full review at Gamezine.

Gamezine: Stalker - Clear Sky Preview

2008-10-12T16:52:00.002+01:00

One of my first previews for the expansion to Stalker, taking a look at the new environments and how the game will work the 'prequel' aspect.

If Clear Sky can show us clear and impressive evidence that our choice of faction affects the overall zone, it has the potential to be a very impressive part of the game. Unfortunately, two big requests from fans – vehicles and a co-op mode – will not appear in Clear Sky’s main game, although the inclusion of vehicles in multiplayer is currently being considered by GSC. Stalker is released worldwide on August 29th, 2008. We hope.

You can read the full preview at Gamezine.

Gamezine: Leaning Back - The problem with PC sports games

2008-10-12T16:48:00.004+01:00

This was more of an editorial piece than an article or news story, based around news that the head of EA sports has mentioned the market for PC sports game was in decline.

I don’t want to be sitting back on my sofa while trying to play the latest RTS game with a controller when I have a perfectly good desk and mouse that allows me to control armies at whatever speed I choose. I don’t want to play in a massive online world filled with thousands of real people if my only method of communicating is a keyboard half the size of my hand. I want to be able to talk to people quickly and get my point across without having to hear ten years old swearing at me through a headset.

You can read the full article at Gamezine.

Strategy Informer: Sealife Safari Review

2008-10-12T16:45:00.001+01:00

My first XBLA review which was a one off for the popular site Strategy Informer.

Ultimately, Sea Life captures the feel of the ocean and combines it with a very casual, softcore gaming experience that’s more “Free Willy” than “Jaws”. Arcade is in desperate need of variety and originality, and Sea Life satisfies both criteria providing a detailed and peaceful experience that stands out amongst a marketplace full of generic shooters and ports, but the relative length of the game makes it hard to justify the price of 800 points, and the lack of any real challenge or competition will turn off most gamers.

You can read the full review at Strategy Informer.

Acegamez: Fantasy Wars Review

2008-10-12T16:40:00.002+01:00

Here is the beginning of my post.

Fantasy Wars is an involving and satisfying game. Each side feels balanced if not dramatically different, the levelling system for every unit makes the game more addictive than it has any right to be and it hits the difficulty curve perfectly, being very easy to learn and incredibly difficult to master, especially at higher levels. It's only the lack of a good plot to bring all these individual aspects together that stops Fantasy Wars just a little short of being a true classic. If you like your turn-based games to involve diplomacy, management and story, then stick to Heroes of Might & Magic, but if you care more about accessibility and tactical combat without all the fuss then you're in for a solid and thoroughly addictive Orc-bashing experience.

You can read the full review at Acegamez

Acegamez: The Golden Horde Review

2008-10-12T16:00:00.003+01:00

Another review of a Jowood game with some potential ultimately and quickly squashed by a lack of quality control.

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Golden Horde is far simpler, however. It does have some nice touches; looting weapons from your dead enemies brings a new element to the field and the experience system expands as far as the units who craft your weapons, so it's not just about making sure that you outnumber your enemy. The problem is that for every tentative, stumbling step that Golden Horde makes towards originality, it fails on something crucial. Introducing new gameplay elements is important if you want to stand out, but it's far more important to make sure that you get the basics right. People who are particularly interested in this era of history might find the setting is just enough to see them through to the end, but for the rest of us there are just too many better options out there.

You can read the full review at Acegamez.

Acegamez: Buzz! Junior Dino Den Review

2008-10-12T15:58:00.003+01:00

Buzz! Junior is so far the only game aimed at kids that I've ever reviewed.

Recommending Buzz! Junior: Dino Den is difficult. Ultimately it all depends on the age and tastes of your children. The Wii remains king of the party games and if you're used to having games of Mario Party 8 or Wii Sports with your family then Dino Den might feel a little flat. However, if this isn't an option to you and you're looking for something fun and accessible that you can enjoy playing with your young ones, then Dino Den is good, clean fun and if you've already purchased the buzzers for another Buzz! game then it's good value to boot. However, if you already own one or more of the previous Buzz! Junior titles then (unless your kids are absolutely nuts for dinosaurs) there's not really enough new content to justify a purchase; there's only so much you can do with four colours and a big red buzzer.

You can read the full review at Acegamez.

Acegamez: Crash Time Review

2008-10-12T15:47:00.003+01:00

Crash Time is a budget racing/arcade style offering from Germany, and my first review for long running UK site, Acegamez.

Scanning through the manual and the box while Crash Time was installing didn't fill me with a lot of hope. Any game where jumping over trucks is listed on the back as a 'feature' really worries me. Combined with the random shots of explosions and police cars, the box does a great job of making Crash Time look like a budget Eighties action film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. In all honesty, I wouldn't give it a second glance in a game store.

You can read the full review at Acegamez.

Resonance Gaming: Alter Ego Retro Article

2008-10-12T15:39:00.001+01:00

One of the first gaming pieces I ever wrote, for one of my favourite games of all time. This was originally intended for Eurogamers retro section but they never really got around to sorting it out once I had finished the piece so I uploaded it to Resonance instead.

I’ll get the greatest thing about Alter Ego out of the way first: It has stood the test of time. That may not seem like a huge achievement, but Alter Ego is not only as enjoyable to pick up and play today as it was over two decades ago, but nothing has ever trumped it. Even most diehard retro fans believe that sequels of huge classics like Doom and SimCity brought at least something the table. Alter Ego has never had a sequel, a spiritual successor, or a clone. It’s very easy to compare it with the Sims, but in terms of depth, Alter Ego makes EA’s blockbuster look like a paddling pool. And all this when most games where still mostly dodgy arcade ports.

The game allows you to play through an entire “life”, from birth to death, and everything in-between. This sounds like a rather massive undertaking, but Alter Ego is deceptively simple, at least on the surface. The game presents you with a scenario based on a various aspect of your life, and then lets you choose how you would react to that situation. These situations vary wildly, mostly depending on your age. You could be experiencing your first interaction with another child, dealing with teenage peer pressure or finding solutions to problems you are having with your own children. On the other hand you could be worrying about what practical joke to play on your parents, Alter Ego has a tongue in cheek attitude that contrasts well with its seriousness.

Most of the time you get to choose an emotion, and then an action. The game then shows you the effects of your choice. If the choice was important, it will affect your physical or mental attributes which makes up exactly who you are. The game is text based, and admittedly the interaction is very limited, but the lack of graphics in Alter Ego gives it the ability to provide a choice and freedom that it wouldn’t otherwise have achieved at the time. If there’s one game I wouldn’t have to get a graphical overhaul, it’s Alter Ego.

Much like real life, the scenarios get more complicated and have greater ramifications the older you get. One of the very first choices you make is still in your mother’s womb – do you come out quietly or do you make a fuss? It’s an interesting decision to have to make, but it’s hardly a dramatic one. Things quickly become more serious, and the game is always throwing different things at you and forcing you to think on your feet. While in a childhood stage it will describe things a child might see or experience them, which can totally throw your superior adult brain. While still in the childhood stage there is a chance of being abducted by a pervert - which leads to your thankfully vague death - if you make the wrong choices. If you make the right choices however, you can end up assisting in his capture and gaining an intelligence bonus. The game presents real life problems and solutions, so you start to think in a real life way. Alter Ego’s questions and reactions are nearly all logical and fair, but it has a certain retro harshness about it, and it won’t babysit you.

Although the above example does present an obvious wrong and right way to answer certain questions, the true excellence of Alter Ego is that most questions don’t have harsh penalties or great rewards. Much like in real life very few individual decisions majorly affect you as a person, but your attitude to each event as a whole builds your personality and how others see and react to you. Make more honest decisions as a child and your parents will trust you more as a teenager. The same systems stops you from doing something incredibly out of character, so you can’t spend your entire life being selfish and deceitful and then expect to be allowed to give all your money to charity. It may sound restricting, but it works better than simply being able to change who are every single event.

Alter Ego gives you a freedom of expression and self that modern RPGs have been trying to reclaim for years. Somehow, a game created the year IBM released the first laptop computer has been able to find that middle ground between ‘pure evil’ and ‘pure good’ that cutting edge RPGs today still struggle with. Sure you can certainly attempt to become good or evil in Alter Ego, but just like in real life, these ideals are much harder to achieve then they at first appear. Few people are genuinely evil in every way, and even fewer are totally perfect.

It’s hard to put into words why Alter Ego can engage on such an emotional level without any of the graphics or sound we rely on to enforce immersion in the industry today. There’s just something about reading of your death in the final stage of the game (if you get that far) after playing through a lifetime of different experiences that makes you feel so much more connected to your Alter Ego than you could ever be to any enforced RPG persona. It’s here where you really see how poorly modern games have compared. The Sims has enforced a memory system that lets you keep track of all the experiences your Sims have had in their lives, but in Alter Ego it’s simply not necessary; you remember them by yourself. Your first virtual party, your first virtual kiss, the first time your virtual kids say virtual words. Providing you invest your time and some amount of imagination, watching your Sims dance about in a nightclub or bake a cake doesn’t really compare.

The game is so simple on the surface that the only big issues with the game aren’t to do with what’s already included, but with what isn’t. Both male and female versions of the game are available, with different varying scenarios, but girls have to marry guys and guys have to marry girls, there’s no opportunity for same sex experiences. In fact, most of life’s ‘extremes’ are missing from the game. You can’t become a murderer; you can’t become addicted to drugs, and so on.

These would have been welcome additions, but it may be a little unfair to criticise Alter Ego for not including every scenario available in the real word. Perhaps the only genuine criticism you can level at the game goes back to my introduction; living life may be timeless, but 80s American pop culture references are not. Most annoyingly, occasional ‘general knowledge’ rounds to improve your intelligence rating are almost unanimously about America. I’m not particularly concerned who the 23rd president of the United States was, and it’s annoying having my game stats affected by my lack of knowledge about a country I don’t live in.

Still, these are minor issues that don’t have any great effect on game play, and even those intelligent sections can be beaten by a five second stint on Wikipedia. Ignore the occasional Americanism and understand that the game has its limits and you will experience one of the emotionally connected and replayable games ever made. I’ve come back to Alter Ego time and time again since I first played it, and every time has been a different and interesting experience. What’s more, it’s now available in an updated and improved version for free on the internet, so there’s no reason not to give it a go.

Resonance Gaming: Jones in the Fast Lane Retro Article

2008-10-12T15:36:00.002+01:00

Another retro piece for the ancient but excellent Sierra board game/PC hybrid, Jones in the Fast Lane.

Jones, created by Sierra in 1991, is an odd beast. Board to computer game conversions were very common when the industry was young – one of the first games ever available on the PC was chess after all – but using computer gaming as a medium to make new board games was a newer concept. Many companies started to experiment with the idea and quite a few games got released. However, by the mid nineties most people realised that while solo card games worked very well on computers, board games, which are predominantly a ‘group’ experience, didn’t fair quite so well.

Jones was one such attempt. The basic gameplay works a bit like that of the Game of Life. You select one of four characters to play as – the choice being entirely superficial, they’ve all aged far worse than the game itself – and take turns to move around the game board, which is set out in the form of a simple town. Instead of rolling a dice to determine how far you move, you receive a set amount of time every day in which to complete tasks and then find your way back to your apartment. Each turn leaves you a lot of freedom to decide exactly how to approach your virtual life, although if some tasks like buying food or not returning to your apartment are skipped, you’ll lose valuable time next turn due to fatigue or sickness.

Jones had several different ‘goals’ to achieve in order to the win the game, and the game continued until a player reached all of these to a certain level, which can be set at the start of the game. Really, everything revolved around money, as any of your goals in the shallow world of Jones revolved around money. Even happiness would solely be achieved via a bigger apartment or more modern appliances. The emphasis on money means you need a proper education to get a high paying job. The first stage of the game is normally spent trying to keep a balance between going putting yourself through your academic study while making sure you work just enough to pay for your food and rent.

Depending on the degree you take ( and you can take as many as you like ), you can then get a higher paying job at one of the many buildings on the board – most of the buildings you’ll use such as the bank, shops and even the university double up as places you can also work. Where you work doesn’t matter too much although obviously some jobs pay better than others, and the ones that pay out the most generally take the longest to study; although this isn’t always the case. The game also has a touch of random luck. You’ll occasionally end up spending or gaining money on random events that the game reports you ‘did at the weekend’, you can play the lottery or you can get robbed, which is where the bank comes in handy. The most powerful random occurrence is also the most frustrating; the game will report a surprise ‘recession’, and all players will either lose their jobs or start earning far less money for an unspecified period of time.

Jones is one of the few computerised board games that actually understands what it’s trying to achieve. A computer board game might not be as tangible or nice looking as a real life counterpart, but what you can do is use the power of a computer to do things that would otherwise be impractical without them. For example, the computer can do random events far better than a card system can, it can add up money and divide time quicker and in the background, and it can keep accurate records of exactly how much each player has achieved. Nowadays of course many board games also incorporate electronics into their systems to do these things, but this was virtually unheard of in the early nineties. Jones proved that board games could deal with more data – and therefore become deeper experiences – while still remaining fun and ultimately simple for the gamer.

After all that though, the real genius of Jones isn’t really down to any technical flare at all. Jones is playable solo and the AI is functional enough, but much like normal board games and popular modern video board games like Mario Party, the real fun is experiencing the game with other people, not the computer. The game uses a ‘hotseat’ system where a number of players all use the same computer and simply move out of the way when it’s the next players turn. Hotseat games existed before Jones, and continue to exist long after, even today. However, being able to see your opponent’s screens and having to move every few minutes isn’t exactly the best way to play games. Somehow though, Jones makes it fun. It’s even better if you can sit around a table with a laptop.

It’s because of the simple and fun multiplayer aspect in Jones that I’d rate Jones one of the most instantly accessible games ever. You can fire it up and be playing with three friends in minutes and importantly, in the same place. In many respects, multiplayer gaming has moved on. Games like battlefield allow huge, varied battles along large stretches of land, and there are nine million people subscribing to World of Warcraft. It’s in this huge expansion that multiplayer games have found a whole new market for themselves, but nothing has been released since Jones that comes close to the personality and simplicity of a quick game of Jones.

Resonance Gaming: Elite Retro Article

2008-10-11T17:28:00.002+01:00

Retrospective was a small feature on Resonance that focused on retro gaming by looking back at some of the most famous PC games. These are less reviews and more opinion pieces looking back on old classics, and as such they don't come with a score.

Elite began on the BBC micro and Acorn computers in 1986. Primarily a space ‘trading’ game, the start of the original begins with something that becomes a running theme in the series; you’re dropped into the middle of an entire universe with nothing but a few credits and basic ship to your name, and it’s up to you to make a name for yourself. The original has no real in-game plot, although it did come packaged with a whole novella based in the universe, so it’s not exactly lacking in backstory, providing you’re willing to read a book to get it. The real idea of Elite didn’t rely on plot though. The game designed from stage one to be played the way the player wanted.

In 2008, we’re spoiled by the amount of games that want us to play them ’how we want’. Huge Sprawling RPGs and games like GTA and even the next generation of Elite clones themselves give us an almost overwhelming amount of freedom. Freedom doesn’t always mean quality of course, but it’s certainly a common place idea here in the 21st century. In the mid eighties, it was nearly unheard of. Without the internet and gamefaqs to strip all the major components of the game, the huge universe remained an incredibly appealing mystery to most players.

It’s not just in gameplay that Elite was innovative either; everything about the game is ahead of its time, a remarkably accurate portent of the things to come for the games industry. From the 150,000 copies sold to the BBC news coverage and the launch party at a UK theme park, Elite took everything to a whole new level. Oh, and it virtually invented an entire genre while it was at it. Not bad for a team of two guys.

The real goal of Elite - if you can ever really say there was any goal at all – is to amass credits. This can be done through running missions, piracy, mining or bounty hunting but all of these are really secondary jobs compared to trading. Most of many, many hours gameplay elite can offer is spent trading between the games different systems. And there are a lot of systems. Ok, so they were procedurally generated and so had very little true personality, but it’s the scope of the game that really provides the atmosphere rather than the details. Later games in the series would create a more detailed and rich universe with living economies and planets you could land on, but Elite captured the emptiness and isolation of space like no other game ever made.

Only a certain type of gamer is really going to appreciate space trading games. After all, when you demote the game to its most basic form, all you are really doing is clicking on dots, reading spreadsheets and moving to another dot to view at another spreadsheet. It’s more about imagination than graphics or even gameplay. Perhaps the biggest point for criticism is the same often levelled at simulation games; lack of design, lack of goals and lack of direction in gameplay. It’s true that Elite has really only ever appealed to a very certain type of gamer, patient enough to find trading enjoyable, but trigger happy enough to enjoy the large section of the game dedicated to action.

One eighties tradition Elite didn’t manage to break was difficulty. The game was at best tricky and at worst, utterly unforgiving and genuinely unfair. One of its best tricks is when the Thargoid - the main enemy force of the game - will pull you out of hyperspace to fight. Having to fight off the attackers is fair enough, although difficult, but gaining a victory only to realise you didn’t have enough fuel to get to the nearest system and are stranded in space felt a bit cheap. Even tasks that became far easier in later games were quite difficult in the original; just docking your ship with the space stations required skill, as you have to match up your ship not only to aim towards the stations docking port, but also rotate your ship at the exact same speed and direction of the station. One hit can result in the destruction of your vessel.

There’s little denying Elite hasn’t aged all that well. The graphics are obviously very primitive and the combat would have been archaic even ten years ago. The ‘Elite+’ and ‘EliteA’ versions of the game certainly improve on the original game without changing the core gameplay. And both are available to download for free from Ian bells site. The games later sequels are controversial; while they do wonders for the games graphics and economy, they are buggy and have a ‘realistic’ combat model that makes fighting in the game frustrating and drawn out.

Even though Elite has many flaws, it deserves a huge amount of praise simply for doing something nobody else had even dreamed of doing back when it was released. Its scale and gameplay were unmatched for many years, and the game was one of the first to be ported over to nearly every system capable of running it, including the NES. Without Elite, it’s difficult to believe that games like Eve Online of the X: beyond the frontier could have been created without the incredible vision of Elite’s designers.

Resonance Gaming: Urban Legends Article

2008-10-11T17:21:00.002+01:00

Urban Legends was a one off, original article comparing the most recent and popular city building games from the perspective of Value, Presentation, Features and Gameplay. Another 3,000+ word article.

Unfortunately the formatting on the blog isn't great, so I urge you to try and see if Resonance is functioning and read the article there before attempting to read it here.

And here is the rest of it.

Resonance Gaming: Five Hours of Anarchy Article

2008-10-11T17:15:00.003+01:00

This was a prototype of a feature I wanted to run on Resonance called Freeplay, which would explore free online games as an alternative to pay monthly games like Warcraft and Everquest. This was the only article written for that feature however.

Unfortunately the formatting on the blog isn't great, so I urge you to try and see if Resonance is functioning and read the article there before attempting to read it here.

Freeplay is a new irregular feature on Resonance Gaming, looking into the different experiences available in the ever increasing market of free online gaming. Freeplay is not a review. Five hours is far too short a time to experience enough of these games to say for cover everything. Team experiences and PVP are two of the most notable things that won’t be covered at all, and other parts might only be touched upon. Although opinionated, Freeplay is simply a log of my experiences playing the first few hours of game, the ideas behind it, and how it feels for someone that’s used to paying for their MMORPGs. In short, don’t expect miracles.

I decided to kick off with Anarchy Online because unlike most other Freeplay MMORPGs, Anarchy has had a very long and somewhat patchy history with its players. It was initially released as a pay monthly game in 2001, when Everquest was still dominating the market, and the older 2D Ultima Online was still a very popular alternative. The idea of 3D, Everquest style gaming with a science fiction setting turned on a whole new group of gamers to the idea of MMORPGs; those uninterested with the fantasy based settings that had been offered previously. Unfortunately, many of those early adopters were very disappointed with the reality.

Unlike the near perfect gameplay offered up by Everquest, Anarchy was an incredibly buggy release. From the patching system to the end game, Anarchy had problems included but not limited to issues with equipment, clipping, frame rate, lag and many more minor bugs that alienated a community that had to pay for the privilege of not being able to play their game. Although Funcom worked hard on fixing these problems, the damage had been quite severe, and Anarchy had made somewhat of a name for itself as the “buggy” MMORPG, despite many reviews at the time noting its incredible potential. The game continued on regardless however, releasing very competent expansion packs, increasing content and refining gameplay. Eventually, newer, better looking games entered the marketplace, and Anarchy Online could easily have ended there, a small and somewhat jaded footnote in the history of MMORPGs.

Rather than watching the game slowly die out, Funcom announced a Freeplay program in 2004, which allowed users to play the original game minus all of the expansion packs for one year without any cost at all. People flocked to the game, and its success has prompted a renewal of the system every year, so far. The game remains free today, packaged with the Notum Wars expansion pack. Gamers who enjoy the content can then pay monthly for the additional Shadowlands, Alien Invasion and most recently, Lost Eden expansion packs which add a significant amount to the game.
Hour 1

hour1b_400 Downloading Anarchy is totally painless process, with plenty of mirrors available that don’t require registration or queues. I actually left the download on overnight, but it only took around an hour. Installing is also very quick and easy. Registration is no harder than registering for anything else on the internet, and requires no credit card or any financial details, although it does ask for your address.

It’s a shame that patching was much more frustrating process. The actual downloading was very quick, but the patch system seems antiquated and buggy. During the first half of the patching, it asks you to confirm every time it wants to restart, which it does very often, so you can’t just wonder off and watch TV while it gets on with the boring business of updating files. At some point the client seems to update so that it doesn’t ask you anymore, but it then has a habit of not closing down (or loading two patching clients up at the same time, I’m not sure) so that patching results in a permission error and you have to restart it and try again from the last point. On top of all this, the progress bar only shows the progress of whatever file it’s patching at the time, so you have no idea on any sort of time frame for when it will be done, short of finding out what the latest patch is and figuring out what patch it’s currently working on yourself. Not exactly user friendly, but you should have plenty of time to do that.

Overall the patching process was still faster than Warcraft and many other MMORPGs, but its constant babysitting was a frustrating experience. Luckily after patching I was playing the game within seconds, and I shouldn’t have to go through it to that extent ever again. Interestingly a minor update patch actually occurred been sessions, and it both downloaded and installed within seconds.

Character creation begins as soon as you log on to the server for the first time. There’s fair amount of races to choose from, but limited information. Because you are introduced to the races before the classes, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to be, so I choose the human looking race, who according to the game are good at everything in equal measure. After moving through the very limited aesthetic customisation (choose your head, are you thin, are you tall?) the class selection screen presented itself. After deciding upon the nanotechniacian (I’m reminded of the b5 technomages), I went back to the starting screen to choose nanomage as my race, as they appear to have some advantages in the field. It wasn’t a big frustration, but it would be having been far nicer to have all these options on one screen. Still, I was quite impressed with the amount of classes available. How differently they play from each other is a subject for a far more in depth review.

hour1a_400I let the random name generator choose a nickname, and after a few duplicate name errors, I was thrown into the world of Anarchy Online. My first thoughts were that of being utterly overwhelmed by a confusing interface heavily reliant on multiple small windows, and no immediate access to a proper tutorial. Visually, the game looks as good as you’ll ever expect a game that’s nearly 7 years old to look, but after maxing out the view distance and visual settings, it actually isn’t anywhere near as bad as I was expecting. Everything is sharp and the animation is choppy at best and comical at worst, but in general, the world looked alive and detailed enough for its purposes. Spaceships flew overhead, and animals wandered around on simple but not entirely flat beech landscape.

The game starts you out on a ‘newbie island’ separate from most of the game world. My first hour was spent trying to get my head around the different features of the game. The Interface, which after an hour I was still trying to get my head around. The control system, which while not bad is very different from what I’m used to in more modern mmorpgs, and the game itself, which seems like an awfully complicated place. The game uses a ‘nanotechnology’ system that works very similar to magic in fantasy games. Different classes appear to use them for a variety of tasks, but as a Nanotechniacian, I use them as my primary means of attack and defence, and just about everything else as well. It’s very interesting and as easy to use as clicking a button, but the ideas behind it seem a little bit more involved than simply gaining a new spell every couple of levels.

It’s not long spent doing newbie missions when I level for the first time and am giving a huge number of ‘points’ to be spend on the games skill system. This is quite daunting as an entirely new player, so I run through some of the different skills. Many are immediately understandable, while others I have no clue about quite yet. The main attribute skills that are common to many RPGs work slightly differently in Anarchy. You can spend as many points on these skills as you like, but instead of strength adding directly effecting your character (i.e. increasing your HP) it becomes a factor in many of your other skills, so when you train skills that might require strength, your strength attribute determines how dramatically your stats change. This system seems quite intelligent, and it seems there plenty of different skills to choose from. Even better, the game offers automatic levelling and a colour coded system to point you in direction of the most useful skills for your class.

As I venture further afield in search of a new NPC I’m directed towards, I take a wrong turn and end up running around with these passive but interesting looking tripod type enemies. One of the striking things about Anarchy visually is that what it lacks in graphical ability, it makes up for in design and imagination. Evehour2b_400_01n on the starting island, you face some very unique looking opponents. It’s certainly the same old idea of starting the game killing local wildlife, but the alien world of Rubi-Ka seems to offer some strange definitions of both the words ‘local’ and ‘wildlife’. Intrigued and a little trigger happy, I target one of these tripod guys and seconds later realise that my nano energy (think mana) has been depleted, and I can’t actually put up much of a fight. I desperately try to shoot at the thing with my newbie pistol, and then I die.

It’s what happened after I died that Anarchy Online players should be more proud of than anything in the rest of this article. A player by the name of Adriun came up to me as I returned to the area of my demise. He told me not to fight with a pistol which I assured him I only did as a last resort. After introductions, he then proceeded not only to give me an overview of my class, but also offered to take me to my intended NPC, showed me shops, explained a few questions I had, and then told me to send him a private message If I needed any further help. It wasn’t a lot, and whole exchange lasted no more than twenty minutes, but to see someone so willing to help a new player – a non female player, no less – is a very good sign that Anarchy Online has a strong community spirit. To see someone suddenly just offer help without asking you to join a guild or group with them for hours is a very refreshing experience. After being introduced to some of those things that overwhelmed be earlier, I set out to complete some of the other missions on the Newbie Island.

The area isn’t actually all that large once you’ve been wandering around for a while. Wandering around is something I managed to do quite a lot of on the newbie island while running various quests. Initially at least, you don’t run all that fast, and the map is nearly entirely useless in locating mission objectives. As you leave the island, you receive better instructions on the map system and you learn that mission waypoints can be uploaded into your map system. Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time, and it’s a little bit disablinghour2a_400 to only have vague directions to rely on. Plenty of requests for directions in local chat only served to prove I wasn’t the only one having a spot of trouble with navigation.

It’s around this point that I finally got used to the camera and control system, although there’s still a lot of Warcraft to shake out of me, Anarchy seems to be reasonably configurable and I’ve messed about with the various windows and menus to get them a little more to my liking. It doesn’t remove the rather antiquated and boring interface, but it does disguise it. The control system and camera seem to be growing on me more though. One of my favourite camera features is just how far it zooms out while still looking very impressive for a 7 year old game. Minor graphical glitches are quite common, especially in tight environments like the islands tunnel to the upper levels, but they haven’t so far ruined the experience or contributed to my death.

I managed to reach level 8 before I decided enough was enough and the Newbie Island felt a little small. As an experience, it was generally positive, although the game system of popping up ‘hints’ whenever you do something for the first time isn’t very interactive, and not a fun way to the learn various features of what is turning out to be a surprisingly complex game. Aduins advice and help was certainly more useful than anything offered by the game, so if you are lucky enough to find a helpful member of the community to answer your questions, I’d certainly recommend it. And so, after two hours, I set off to leave the Newbie Island.
Hour 3

As I try to leave, I’m told I need an access card. To get one of these I have to sign up to one of the games two major factions. As with most MMORPGS, Anarchy Online hahour3a_400s more of a ‘setting’ than a plot that progresses at any great speed, but it does the job as well or better than many fantasy games, free or otherwise. The two main factions in the game are the hypercorporation Omni-Tek who control the entire planet- cyberpunk style - and the rebel clan who are angry at Omni. The game itself doesn’t seem to go into great detail on this point, but it does say that Omni started with good intentions but over hundreds of years turned a bit more fascist on its workforce – there’s plenty of reading material available on this outside of the game). Centuries ago, Rubi-Ka was a wasteland, until it was discovered to be the only source in the universe of Noctum (think spice) a substance that eventually creates the nano technology that is used in the game.

Basically then, you’ve got ‘the man’, and you’ve got the people fighting against ‘the man’. You can also choose to be neutral. I’m not qualified to talk about the exact differences between the factions, but I know that they are used in the games main PVP element, as well as determining your starting location and which equipment you can use. During the course of my stay on the Newbie Island, the choice between the two seemed just as much a source of argument and debate as the choice between alliance and horde normally turns out to be on Warcraft forums. The game stays in characters when talking about both sides, so other players are your only real indication of how choice will affect gameplay. Ignoring what felt like a somewhat subjective argument, I sold out, signed the Omni forms and left the Newbie Island behind on a one way trip to “Rome”.

Arriving on a large road just outside the city, I’m greeted by a few carry and fetch quests which actually explain more about the intricacies of the game than any of those on the Newbie Island did. There’s plenty of wondering about involved here ahour3b_400s well, but 3 hours too late I’m introduced to a proper map system and some very useful shortcuts. There’s not a lot of quests available though, and reasonably soon I’m directed to the ‘subway’, which appears to be a major area for leveling at reasonably low levels.

It’s at this point I first start feeling the grind, and it’s about as enjoyable as it can ever be in an MMORPG. Something a 5 hour article is never going to be able to cover is exactly how well the game deals with grind. It has a lot to do with how interesting levellng is, how many different environments there are, and perhaps most importantly, the type of people that you meet and interact with in your travels. I’m a little disappointed in a rather dull subway area being the first place I’m going to be leveling in, especially considering the much prettier and interesting environments of the city and it’s outskirts above.

After leveling again, I wander around the main part of Rome in search of nothing in particular. It’s a little large and that overwhelming feeling returns somewhat, but there are plenty of guides spotted around that can give you advice, and often floating cubes which can be clicked to explain different machines. You’ve really got to put the effort in order to understand many of the finer details, but once you do, it seems to fit into place quite well, and if you do get stuck, asking in the game chat normally results in a fast answers.

While spending some time in the subway killing a variety of shady looking people and creatures, collecting loot and gaining experience, I’ve had plenty of time to read the games main chat channels. One of the arguments I’ve noticed several times in my short time tends to revolve around new people who are playing the free game, and veterans who are paying to play the game. Honestly, most people seem perfectly happy to play alongside ‘fr00bs’ (If you haven’t guessed, it’s the Anarchy word used to describe ‘n00b’ players on ‘free’ system), but some seem to be angry that they havehour4a_400 to pay for a server that is inhabited by people who pay nothing.

Although I avoided contributing to any of these arguments, I can’t really understand where these people are coming from; without fr00bs the game would lose a good portion of its user base, and surely it’s better to have server full of people playing for free than one that is nearly empty. Paying for the game gets you more than the right the gloat anyhow; the expansions packs that your money buy offer huge new play areas devoid of any free players at all. Honestly though, if people need find a scapegoat when the server lags, that’s their choice. The main chat and individual players are easy to ignore.

The lag isn’t actually all that bad, although I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t noticeable. Swapping equipment and dealing with transfer of items in general is where it seems to show the most, but there’s also a rather frustrating wait between killing a mob and being able to loot it. However, I played these five hours on different days and different times, and at no point did the lag get bad enough to put me off playing. Considering the very active presence of GMs and Funcom’s obvious continued support,hour4b_400 it’s very likely that any large issues with lag would be sorted out quite quickly.

Although I haven’t had any more direct experiences with other plays besides a few quick heals, the community in general is quite mature and intelligent. Warcraft players know how bad general chat can get, but Anarchy’s chat was friendly and open the vast majority of the time, with only a few people occasionally causing trouble. Perhaps Anarchy’s more ‘adult’ setting attracts an older crowd, or perhaps the lack of the latest graphics has lead to less trolls paying attention to the game. In all honesty, the biggest contribution here is probably the games GMs, called arks, which seemed to be high in number and very visible presence in the game. I even saw a few notices for ‘tours’ conducted by these guys, a level of interaction with the community you rarely see in MMORPGs that don’t have any particular emphasis on role-play.

As my time in Anarchy draws to a close, I’m left feeling like I’ve barely even touched upon most of the game, yet I still feel a certain affinity with it. Even through the weak graphics, menus that drown you in windows and can’t decide if you need to click or drag and occasional graphical hiccups, I find myself growing more fond of the game by the hour, and a quick final run around Rome and the surrounding area after leaving the subway for the last time only confirms what I already knew; that Anarchy is a big world full of big ideas that in the most part it seems to pull of brilliantly.
Conclusion

The best thing about playing Anarchy Online is that you never actually feel like you’re playing a free game. Certainly, the game shows plenty of signs of its age, but unlike most free games, it doesn’t waste any of your time reminding you that you should be paying for the privilege. You forget because the experience is right up there with what you’d expect to have to pay money for, and that’s really something. Obviously, Anarchy Online’s past as a game designed for subscription plays a big part in this, but I had a go at Anarchy when it first came out, and the game is thankfully entirely unrecognisable now.

The games root do remain though and an important thing about Anarchy is that despite many years of patches sorting glitches, balance, PVP and expanding the game world, Anarchy Online is still a game created in 2001, when the MMORPG idea was infinitely beardier than it is today. A generation that has grown up with a far more accessible, far more mainstream market is going to experience a fair amount of culture shock in the first few hours of the game. Those willing to put in a bit of work and time are going to find something that’s potentially deeper than anything we’ve seen even in recent times. Anarchy Online is a dirty and gritty as the world it’s set in, and if you’re looking for something that’s going to hold your hand, you should look elsewhere.

It’s easy to recommend Anarchy Online to just about everyone else, though. It feels even more complete than some pay monthly MMORPGs we’ve seen following Warcraft’s success. As mentioned, I’ve not been able to cover the long term effects of the grind nor the games PVP system, but I have seen a quality of gameplay and support that other games are charging considerable amounts of money for. There are no huge real-world advertisements, no lasting problems with lag and no players able to buy the best equipment with their own real-world money, a satisfying thing to see for people interested in free games that are totally fair for everyone.

Anarchy might not be enough to convince most people to cancel their current subscriptions to higher budget, modern MMORPGS, but any game that not only survives but thrives after seven years in such a volatile and changing market is worth paying some serious attention to.

Resonance Gaming: Top 10 Most Underrated PC Games Article

2008-10-11T17:11:00.004+01:00

This is a very large 3,000 word article on some of the less played PC games, in top 10 format. The games are: Lemmings 3D, Urban Chaos, Startopia, Ascendency, Vampire the Masquerade, ZZT, The Last Express, Outcast, LBA2 and Beyond Good and Evil.
Unfortunately the formatting on the blog isn't great, so I urge you to try and see if Resonance is functioning and read the article there before attempting to read it here.

In the game industry, things normally work out as they should, at least in the long run. Poor games get poor reviews and poor sales, and good games get acclaim and success. True classics get remembered and revered, and the many mediocre offerings that attempt to drown them simply get forgotten. Sometimes though, it doesn’t work out like that. Terrible games get great sales on the strength of a licence or huge marketing budget, and great games can simply be ignored for any number of reasons. In an attempt to be as positive as possible, it’s these hidden diamonds that this list focuses on.

The ten games here all share one thing in common. They are all A+ titles, but have never really enjoyed great success. Some got great reviews only to find their sales figures didn’t quite match the enthusiasm of the press, and some were near perfect games ruined at the time of release by major bugs and technical flaws that have since been fixed. Here, we pay homage to some amazing games of the last 15 years that just might have flown under your radar.

Lemmings 3D -
Lemmings 3D was released at a difficult time. It was the mid nineties, and the transition from 2D to 3D was in full swing. The Playstation had shown the world just how good games could look, and the PC was left in the dust. At the same time, many games that had been strictly 2D franchises in the past where jumping into the world of 3D head first - often without real consideration of the format - which usually resulted in very poor games. Lemmings 3D broke the mould in two ways.

Firstly, rather than detracting from the experience and diluting the gameplay, lemmings switchover to 3D actually gave the game back something it had been missing for years; a sense of freshness. It was also one of the first puzzle games to use 3D to its advantage rather than as something that was simply added on without much thought. The levels were bright and varied, and the attention to detail was impressive and not matched by many games at the time. Along a surprisingly easy to use interface, the game included an intuitive ‘replay’ feature that allowed you to watch as the game replayed your last set of moves, only to step in at the point before you made your last critical mistake. Purists will argue the controls were difficult to grasp, and the soundtrack doesn’t compare to those of the original games, but there are a select few that believe lemmings 3D to be the best version of lemmings available on any format, and it’s easy to see why.

Urban Chaos-
Urban chaos was release around the end of the century on the Dreamcast, Playstation and PC. Both of the console iterations of the game were playable to an extent, but the poor graphics and technical problems of the Playstation port, which oddly enough received the most marketing, turned a lot of people off the game. Urban Chaos put you in the shoes of a female ‘rookie’ officer in a dystopian future. The game was ahead of its time in many respects. The city wasn’t totally open-ended but each level was huge and had plenty of hidden content, and it gave the game a non-linear, ‘big city’ feel that gamers wouldn’t experience again until GTA 3.

Urban Chaos’ gameplay was a refreshing mix of the older action arcade games like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, and more modern action/adventure gameplay. The fighting in the game was more tactical and varied than people expected from an arcade fighter, and the platforming sections were well designed and enjoyable; minus the occasional frustrating missed jump. The game received mixed reviews, the more negative pointing to games less than perfect driving sections and the hefty amount of system resources needed to run it. However, the driving sections contribute to only a small part of the game, and nobody should have any problems with the game hogging their systems now, so there’s little reason not to give Urban Chaos a spin.

Startopia-
Nearly every magazine and website around in the summer of 2001 gave Startopia an incredibly positive score, and the game even achieved over 90% in some publications. Almost everyone that had a chance to play it at launch recognised Startopia as a title of huge quality, so it’s such a shame that when people make lists of their favourite simulation games, Startopia is normally nowhere to be seen.

Developed by the same company as the previously mentioned Urban Chaos, Startopia was a mix of Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital, set in a rotating, donut shaped space station. The gameplay was instantly familiar, as the player spent their trying to keep the various alien species that visited the station happy and safe, while making enough money to continue to build and improve the station. It also included some limited ‘action’, where you would need to build up your security forces to take over new sections of the station, or keep rogue aliens from making a scene.

Each of the different parts of Startopia by themselves aren’t all that impressive, but when brought together, they’ve made more than the sum of their parts. On the surface, Startopia did nothing more than take two popular bullfrog games and throw them into space, but if you dig deeper you’ll find a game that’s original in its own right, and one that certainly deserves consideration right up there along with Rollercoaster Tycoon and Theme Park on your next top list.

Ascendency-
Ascendency is one of the best examples ever of a game being ruined by technical problems. A 4X game in the same vein as Master of Orion, Ascendency in was in many ways superior to its infinitely more popular counterpart. Superior graphics, amazing balance and a high level of customisation all made Ascendency look great on paper. It even received quite a high amount of popular reviews. So what went wrong?

Ascendency had one major flaw; The AI was nearly nonexistent. In other games and other genres, or with an incredibly strong multiplayer option, it may have been possible to cover this huge oversight, but 4X games rely on AI perhaps even more than graphics or design. There was no way to excuse the enemy AIs seemingly totally random reactions to situations or its complete lack of ambition to actually bother to conquer anything. The game flopped, and bigger and better 4X games have come along and scavenged all of what was unique about it.

Thankfully, there is an AI patch available now that fixes most of the above problems, even if it is ten years too late for any retail success. Although it’s a little heavy on the micromanagement and nowhere near as solid as Galactic Civilisation, it is still an excellent game and quite worthy of replacing Master of Orion 2 (or 3) the next time you want to conquer the final frontier.

Vampire-
Bloodlines followed a fate similar to Startopia. It got some brilliant reviews in the press on its release, and had quite a nice run in terms of sales, but it was simply forgotten very quickly, and it never quite crossed over to becoming a ‘classic’ of the genre due to a lack of polish, a few rather glaring bugs and an arguably poor use of the source engine.

I remember friends of mine at the time of Bloodlines release had gotten really into the whole pen and paper RPG deal, and were incredibly excited about the game. One particular friend was very eager to talk endlessly about how good the game was, and watching him play, I had to agree. Here was a PC RPG that not only managed to tackle a modern setting with some degree of maturity, but where you could really feel the actions you choose and the paths you went down really made a difference to the gameplay, beyond the typical ‘dark side/light side’ options for which KOTOR received much acclaim for less than a year before.

It was only when I was considering firing up the game for the first time that my friend turned on it. He started to point out these incredibly frustrating bugs. He’d manage to put up with the myriad odd graphical glitches and the clunky combat, but after spending two hours running around trying to figure out exactly where he was meant to be going only to realise the game hadn’t set a certain trigger when it should have done and he would have to replay a save from nearly three hours back, he gave up. This scared me away as well, and it was nearly a year later before I properly played the game.

Bloodlines has now been patched up and everything major sorted out. Whether you’re into the world already or you just want a satisfyingly long and deep RPG to sink your teeth into (sorry), Bloodlines is a great option.

zzt-
With its 17th birthday coming up, ZZT is the oldest game on this list. It’s no surprise then that it also has some of the poorest graphics and sound capabilities. ZZT – so called so the game would appear to bottom off BBS download lists - received some minor attention on release, but few were really blown away by the game. In fact, everything about ZZT is forgettable and by all rights, the game would have been ignored by almost everyone had it not been for a factor that even developer Epic MegaGames hadn’t counted on; a community.

ZZT is a real story of gaming love. Originally sold as a puzzle game, it was ZZTs simple but infinitely adaptable editor that gave it a new lease of life, and a new genre as a Game Creation System, along the same lines as Click and Play, or RPG maker. Soon enough, people where spending more time messing with the editor than playing the original games. Years later it was the community, not the developer that learned how to give the game an expanded colour set, greatly improving the display of the 2D graphics.

Since then thousands of games have been released for ZZT. While the system has obvious technical limitations and many superior methods for creating games have come along to steal it’s crown, none have quite captured ZZTs simplicity. Anyone can make a game in ZZT with minimal effort, and people have twisted the rules of the simple programming language to make adventure games, RPGs, action games and more. The real bonus is that graphical limitations of ZZT have meant many games created in the system have had much larger focus on story and plot. Z2 has a huge archive of ZZT games and can recommend some of the best to have a go with.

last express-
Despite many believing the whole genre underrated, point and click games enjoyed nearly a decade of success on the PC, starting with Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, and continuing on towards the likes of Dreamfall and Fahrenheit. However, when graphics cards took over in the mid nineties, the market for adventure games dried up considerably. The Last Express was one of those few games that was released to late to enjoy that original golden age of the genre, and too early to be a part of the ‘new wave’ of adventure games. It got trapped in the middle of a gaming world just getting its head around 32 bit graphics and was ignored by almost everyone.

The game used a variety of different effects and animation styles that had never been used in a game before, and set the whole thing on the orient express in 1914. The game did everything it could to give players a unique experience, and it succeeded in absolutely every way. In doing this though, it alienated some adventure gamers with action sequences and some frustrating ‘timed’ sections. It ended up not being tame enough for adventure gamers but being far too dull for the action crowd to even think about playing it.

Once you’ve settled into the game though, it doesn’t take long to realise the Last Express has one of the best written and well crafted plots of any computer game ever written, far surpassing both The Longest Journey and Dreamfall in story, pacing and the logic of the puzzles. The game is long and has many different endings, so if you have the patience for a lengthy adventure, or are at all interested in the world famous train, track this one down (sorry, again!).

outcast-
Outcast was released in 1999 to a public that paid little attention. By this time, nearly everyone had a 3D card of some sort, and were enjoying the impressive graphical abilities those cards could display. People that otherwise had only mediocre systems could run games like Half Life purely on the power of their graphics cards, and it seemed the future was pretty much settled. It was a bit of a shock to the system then, when Outcast was released. Using a ‘voxel’ system which didn’t rely on graphics cards at all, the game required a powerful computer to run. This was more than enough to turn off many people who would otherwise have rushed out and purchased Outcast.

Beyond the rather odd decision not to use 3D acceleration though, Outcast is quite unlike anything else ever created on the PC. The voxel graphics only ever used in a handful of games before and after, give the game a very distinct style. And despite not using 3D cards, they did look great; long viewing distances, sharp textures and great weather effects. Few games could really compete, even if a comparison could be made at all. An incredibly impressive musical score only gave the game an even great sense of immersion.

The game basically played as an action/adventure hybrid. There’s a fair amount of jumping and shooting, but it also involved plenty of dialogue and general exploring. It was the large, open ended environments that felt genuinely alive that made Outcast so special, and the games owes a lot to the very high standard of acting that is consistent and powerful throughout. Outcast achieves a perfect balance of combat and dialogue, and does it all in a world that is still unique today. Modern PCs should laugh at the specs of the ‘powerful’ computers Outcast need nearly a decade ago, so don’t be afraid to try this one.

lba 2-
Both of the Little Big Adventure games where absolutely amazing, but where the first outing got quite a lot of press and positive reviews (not to mention a rather nice looking Playstation port in the UK), people didn’t take to the sequel quite as well, even though it received a great reception from fans. The game may not be quite as magical or gripping as the original, but few games are, and LBA2 is stunning in its own right.

Set after the events of the original, LBA 2 follows the exact same formula. It’s played primarily as an adventure and has plenty of well written scenes and intelligent - if simple - puzzles, married with a healthy amount of action and platforming. It’s the platforming that’s the easily the most frustrating part of the game, with some rather disconcerting difficulty spikes and sometimes awkward, isometric controls. Its cartoon graphics and somewhat childish storyline also put off more serious gamers who weren’t willing to the game a chance.

But LBA is all about discovery and character. Few adventure games can boast quite as much variety and, much like Outcast and The Last Express, nothing like LBA has ever been attempted since. Playing it back now, the game has aged surprisingly well, and while it has been left behind graphically, it’s rarely used isometric perspective and big, bold sprites make the eleven year old game look like a modern indie attempt.

If you haven’t already played the first game, rush out and try it right now, as it’s one of the best games ever made. If you have, but you never gave the sequel a chance, now is the time. There’s one thing you can always guarantee when you’re talking about Little Big Adventure – whether you like or not, you’ll never see anything like it again.

beyond good and evil-
Beyond Good and Evil nearly didn’t make this list. It’s had an odd history. Released in 2003 on all major formats including the PC, it’s hard to find a single critical review of this stunning adventure. And yet, so few people actually ever got to play it. I stumbled upon this game myself after being told it was a ‘fun RPG’ by someone on the net, and I’d have to say it was the one of the best, if not one of the most misguided, recommendations I’ve ever had. It would appear that nobody was very interested in advertising or talking about the game, especially in Europe.

The reason for worrying about if it deserved to be on the list or not is actually the odd mini-revival the game has had in recent years. Although it wasn’t totally appreciated at the time, you’ll find no end of forum posts and chat rooms forcing the game down your throat. The thing is, Beyond Good and Evil totally should be forced down the throat of everyone who has even a remote respect for modern day adventures. If this list can help Beyond Good and Evil gain any more publicity on its way to becoming a cult classic, who am I to argue?

BGE was released on the XBOX, PS2 and GC and yet is rarely ever listed on the top games on those systems, which is a huge travesty, especially considering the (arguable, I know) lack of A+ games for the XBOX and GC. For once, we see a multi-format title that not only fits into the adventure genre, but evolves it into something modern, exciting and meaningful with diluting anything about what made the format so great to begin with. It throws you headfirst into a land of talking pigs, fascism, stealth and hovercraft, and it does so without any need to break you in gently or explain itself in the slightest.

It feels so unfair that BGE and the other games on this list have offered shining examples of exactly how gaming should be, and have either been forgotten or simply overlooked. In a market where so many people criticise the banality of gaming and how nobody tries to be unique anymore, it’s worth remembering those games that were offered to us on a silver platter that where to quickly pushed aside because a publisher made a mistake, or the next big thing seemed more important. This is our history, after all.

Resonance Gaming: Sins of a Solar Empire Review

2008-10-11T16:54:00.001+01:00

This is one of my favourite PC games of recent years and I really enjoyed playing and reviewing it. This review made its way around the internet and was the first review on Resonance to really pick up serious links and get the site a decent reputation for well written reviews.

Impending doom on the horizon for 2008 as PC gamers are once again reminded that the end is nigh. We’re all going to be sitting around crying onto our keyboards and buying Macs because, let’s face it, the consoles have won and that expensive hardcore PC you’ve got in front of you is now nothing but an overpriced internet terminal. At least, that’s what they would have us believe. Sometimes, especially during those dark, cold, post Christmas nights, it’s not so hard to believe there might be just a little bit of truth in all that talk. And then, through all that gloom and pessimism comes Sins of a Solar Empire, bursting onto the market like a Rapture Battlecruiser phase jumping into your unsuspecting face, and reminding us of everything we love about PC gaming.

There are going to be two types of people reading this review, and I can save one group some time right now. If you’ve already played Galactic Civilisations, you’re going to have a reasonably good idea of what to expect. That doesn’t mean GalCiv players are all going to instantly love Sins, but it does mean you can skip the next paragraph while I explain the virtues of an underappreciated genre.

Now, for the rest of you, a little more detail might be required as Sins isn’t quite like anything we’ve seen before. Sins is half an RTS game, half 4X game. 4X is a name of a type of game that is in the simplest of terms, a “turn based strategy”. It means eXpand, eXplore, eXterminate and eXploit. Really, that’s just someone trying to be clever and it doesn’t tell you much, so try to imagine a 4X game as working mostly like an RTS in slowdown. Each player moves separately, you can only do a limited amount each turn and you’re going to be working on a much larger scale. Most of the common themes though; base building, annihilating your enemies and resource management remain. Doing everything slowly means the genre might not be quite as nail biting or as suited for multiplayer, but it also means you can take more control over different parts of the strategy, leading to much greater depth.

So try to imagine this. A 4X game is a slowed down, more in depth version of an RTS, and an RTS is a sped up, more vacuous but lively version of a 4X game. Sins is a 4XRTS game. How does that work? Well, I’ve been playing it nearly nonstop for an entirely disrespectful period of time, and I’m still not exactly sure. It doesn’t sacrifice depth, and it doesn’t slow anything down. It just expects you to work twice as hard to achieve what you want to achieve, and even though you’re not quite sure exactly how to do all of things it bugs you about, you’ll keep trying and trying because Sins demands that you do it, and you don’t want to let it down.

The games story is, well... it’s there. In some form, at least. There’s one 4X game with a good story and its called Alpha Centauri. Anyone who has read a few of my reviews knows I put a huge amount of emphasis on plot and writing, but in a 4X game, I’ve found that other than the above mentoned Sid Meier game, it’s best to leave the plot out of it. There’s just about enough story there to get involved with it if you really try, but this is no space opera, and 4X games no more need a complex and emotional storyline than Pro Evolution. If you don’t agree with this, you’re probably going to like this next part even less; there’s no story mode at all. The virtues of this have been a little trickier to decide this time around, because although I generally believe that 4X campaigns are not worth the space on the disc, RTS games can really benefit from a well laid out story. From the FMV the story didn’t look like anything special, and although I have no evidence I’d like to believe the developers simply decided to focus on making the game as balanced and polished as possible instead of worrying about a campaign that would be over a long, long time before most people are going to get bored of the game.

So, strip out the plot, and you are left with three reasonably different races that use roughly the same type of ships and your standard paperrocksccisors RTS model. There’s a little bit of a lack of identity here. The races all have their own little strategies that you can employ in both multiplayer and single player, but despite being statistically different they don’t bring anything particularly unique to the game in terms of design or personality. That’s not to say any of the weapons or ship designs are poor in any respect, they are just underwhelmingly similar, and coupled with the lack of a real plot; it’s difficult to see the races differences as anything but colours on a screen. In short, the races have plenty of technical ability but a noticeable lack of flair.

Graphics are... spacey. They’re the best we’ve seen from the developers so far and lean more towards Homeworld than Galciv, and they’ve come with a camera that seems instantly practical. Space itself thankfully colourful but not to the point of it looking like a celestial rainbow, and there’s been obvious effort to make it look like anything but an endless void. Explosions and weapon effects are all a little too similar and feel a little cheap, but everything is clean enough. The unfortunate effect of games that focus on scale so much means most of us play with the game zoomed out quite some distance further than the graphics will appear, and end up using different logos and text based information on our units rather than zooming in and messing around trying to set up good looking shots for the gaming press. It’s just not all that practical to play Sins or any other large-scale RTS from any other angle.

This brings me to my single biggest criticism of the game. No, it’s not the balance or the AI or anything that I think is probably going to be jumped on quickly and fixed by Stardock with their usual professionalism and speed. It’s the horrible dullness of the combat itself. Not from a ‘combat in this game isn’t enjoyable’ perspective, it’s absolutely amazing in fact. It’s more that combat in the game isn’t enjoyable to watch. Ok, so making sure that no ship larger than the smallest fighters really do any moving at all makes it quite a bit easier to see what’s going on and command the troops, but how about a switch that makes it look like there’s a real firefight going on? Sure, the game has the now obligatory ‘cinematic mode’, but all that does it take away part of the UI, it doesn’t make the combat look any more dynamic of exciting. Space is 3D guys, and although setting the game on a 2D plane was most certainly the correct decision, it’s a little cheap to strip us of any real glamour in our battles, especially in a game that’s otherwise so brilliantly designed.

You can choose to play the game either on a random map, or on a scenario map. Some of the scenarios make some significant changes to gameplay, others don’t. You can customise who will be playing with you at what level and on what team, but unfortunately gone is the in depth race customisation of GalCiv2, perhaps in fear of balancing issues. Whatever option you choose though, you’ll quickly (loading times are virtually nonexistent) be staring at your brand new home world. The main idea of the game is to conquer the other players, and quick expansion is normally the key to a later victory, so you’ll start building scouts, looking into research, building colony ships, starting to build up your defences, finding out where your opponents are, choosing a capital ship, and so on. All those decisions you can normally make at a snails pace on a usual 4X game now all have to be made at the same time as ten other decisions, all equally as important. The pace is utterly relentless from the first capital ship to the last orbital bombardment.

The technology tree (half unique to each race) and the capital ships which work on a RPG-type levelling system take up most of your time outside the usual base building and issuing orders. Each planet holds a finite and relatively small amount of buildings which are sorted into ‘Logistics’ and ‘Tactical’, and those limited slots mean you are constantly trying to expand so you can harvest more resources and research new technologies, which need a larger number of labs to build. This is not a game for those RTS gamers that like to build a base, put a wall around it and wait out the impending war; if you don’t push forward, you will die, sooner or later. The game AI is brutal and mostly intelligent. It’s scaled very well, newcomers should find a good level of challenge on easy, and hard should cause a problem even if you’ve been playing RTS games for years. Play for long enough and you’ll see the computer fall into the same traps over and over, but it mimics human behaviour well enough.

Once you’ve got over the difficult curve (the four sparse tutorials not enough for newcomers but sufficient enough for the rest of us) and played a few games, you’ll be able to worry more about killing your enemy than worrying exactly how to use the research tree, or effectively use some of the games more in depth features, like culture (which works a little like influence did in Galactic Civilisations). Sins somehow manages to marry the speed and tension of an RTS with the depth of a 4X game, which should tell you a lot about the UI and stunning design. Micromanagement other than build queues is really not the problem you might think it could become in larger games, and being able to control nearly everything in a system simply by clicking on the planet makes a huge difference. The game also uses a tabbed resource browser on the left of the screen to allow quick access to every single unit you have control over, although I never really used it much. If I had not been graced with a large widescreen monitor, I think it might have even have annoyed me a little.

I can explain the details of the game and its many, many positive features, but you won’t learn a lot. Everyone who has ever played an RTS or 4X game in their life should at least have a go with Sins, and anyone with a soul is likely to be physically unable to make that first ‘go’ last for less than three or four hours. The game is gripping and it should be a legal requirement to have a real time clock displayed in the corner so at least I’m fully aware of the hours that I’ve managed to sink into it without realising quite how easy is to just lose yourself in its charm.

Not since Warcraft 3 have I cared about individual units so much, not since Supreme Commander have we seen something with such impressive scale, not since Galactic Civilisation have we experienced so much depth and replayability and not since Homeworld 2 has space looked so good. Sin takes all of those games, ramps everything up to the extremes and demands that you play it until your loved ones forget who you are. Many gamers have been waiting for years for the 4x genre to meet the RTS genre and go out for drinks, and it’s worked better than even the most positive gamers could have hoped. Now all we need is for someone to make a Babylon 5 total conversion...

Resonance Gaming: Spaceforce Captains Review

2008-10-11T16:52:00.001+01:00

A reasonably capable and promising title that scored poorly due to an incredible amount of bugs and a weak story.

I want to get this out first as it's only going to come out sooner or later; Spaceforce is Heroes and Might and Magic in space. That's the most accurate and at the same time unfair description anyone will be able to give you of this game. Accurate, because it lifts most of the gameplay and design wholesale from Might and Magic, and inaccurate because SFC can’t hold a candle to the Heroes series and it feels a little wrong putting them both in the same league.

Let’s rewind a bit though, for those of you who haven't had the opportunity to play either game. Spaceforce is a turn based sci-fi strategy game. Not to be confused with a ‘4x game’ like Masters of Orion 3, the gameplay more closely resembles that of a slowed down RTS. You command units, gather resources, research technology, capture bases and fight enemies with similar objectives.

Gamers have tended to shy away from turn based gaming with only a few high profile titles making any sort of progress, but these offerings have leaned strongly towards the fantasy market, so the opportunity to play one in an altogether more sci-fi setting was alluring, to say the last.. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of reasons why SFC not only fails to move the genre forward but seem intent on moving everything backwards a few years, breaking it in the process.

Everything about SFC feels half finished and amateurish. The opening introduction feels like something more at home in a mid nineties FMV game, the menu is clunky and options limited, and even the tutorial doesn't seem to work properly. It will tell you how to control some parts of the game but it won’t actually tell you exactly what it wants you to do to reach the next section of the tutorial; I played it for nearly fifteen minutes before a box came up telling me how to control my ship.

It turns out however; I didn’t need the tutorial anyway. If you have played any game remotely like SFC in the last five years, you’ll notice there’s nothing new here at all, and it shows. You can change heroes to captains, orcs to battleships and towns to starbases, but really, you’re only changing graphics. Even then, SFCs graphics aren’t anything to get excited about. Generally, they are modern enough and serve the games purpose on an entirely functional level, but the design is so dull they might have well have created the whole game around star trek and star wars fan art. Sound has a similar problem; it does what it was designed to do to the bare minimum, and is instantly forgettable.

Many of these flaws would have been far less noticeable if the game had a decent plot to carry them. Unfortunately what little the action sequences showed of the plot made it clear it was about as generic as a science fiction story can be. I haven’t played the other games set in the same universe, and if I had, I might have understood what was going on in a little more depth, but I doubt it. Combined with a lack of any effort put into the AI or any attempt at variation of game play, SFC doesn’t make the cut on any level.

It’s not even just about the lack of imagination or excitement. Just because the game isn't innovating doesn't instantly make it a poor experience. After all, Might and Magic has survived on the same formula for many years, and if something isn't broke, why fix it? The real reason SFC has achieved such a low score rather than the middle of the road five out of ten it would otherwise have deserved is simply because of the most utterly broken games I've played in a long time. The first thing you’ll likely notice is the long load time, or the fact that your mid range PC will have quite a task simply keeping a frame rate up. Excusable perhaps for the latest DX10 shooters, but not for a mostly 2D budget experience.

Worse than that though, the whole game is bugged nearly to the point of being totally unplayable. The bugs range from the annoying, like your ship suddenly stopping its course for no readily apparent reason, to the completely game crushing. On one of the campaign maps I was playing, I failed a battle and lost my main hero, losing the game. I hadn’t saved in about twenty minutes, so I decided to load from the last autosave and give it another go. When the game loaded, my previous Armada of cruisers and destroyers had been replaced with 80 scout ships I’d never seen before. Further investigation on the player status screen caused the game to stop responding entirely.

This didn't happen once, and even the same save game can cause new and exciting errors each time you load. Sometimes my ships would simply swap captains, and once, my previously unequipped ship was loaded up to maximum with a single artifact that I'd never seen before in the game. Autosave seems entirely unusable. Jowood have gained somewhat a reputation in recent years for publishing games with a lack of proper testing and major bugs, but their flagship ‘problem child’, Gothic 3, at least has the excuse of being a massive non linear adventure that’s got some true depth beyond the bugs.

If the game was patched tomorrow and all the major issues fixed, I’d still only be able to recommend SFC to the most dedicated fans of the genre. In its current state, it would be unfair to recommend it to anyone at all. If you see it in the bargain bin for cheap, hunt around and find an old copy of Might and Magic instead. It might not have spaceships, but at least it’s a deep, enjoyable and infinitely replayable strategy game; everything that SFC is not.

Resonance Gaming: Universe at War Review

2008-10-11T16:31:00.002+01:00

Another of the launch reviews that weighed in at slightly shorter than I would have liked, but it covers the key points of this above average RTS well enough.

Petroglyph’s first major game was Star Wars, Empire at War. It was a genuinely fun RTS game based in the Star Wars universe that didn’t break any new ground or stun anyone with its technical ability. It’s really no shock then that the same studio have now released Universe at War, a genuinely fun RTS game that doesn’t break any new ground or stun anyone with its technical ability. But how well is this new game going to cope without the strength of the Star Wars licence?

The prelude for the single player campaign puts you in command of a hammy and downright camp ‘army guy’ around Washington DC trying to save the president from an unknown alien force. It’s all enjoyable e and predictable enough, and it also serves to introduce some of the games common themes. All of the games main characters are two dimensional people with frankly dull problems, horrible one liners and laughable moral dilemmas. The overall story feels someone gave the plot of transformers and the plot of command and conquer 3 to Uwe Boll and told him to make a movie. Everything is functional, but nothing really feels connected or very coherent.

It’s wise not to make too much of a fuss of the story though. It serves its limited purpose and honestly, some of the movies are quite enjoyable to watch, especially the parts where the different alien races are introduced. There’s another more immediate common theme of Universe at War in the prelude; it’s simply just fun to play. It changes little, but it doesn’t move backwards (minus the lack of a retreat button), and it’s this simple playability that means you can jump in and start enjoying yourself straight away, providing you don’t take anything too seriously. Universe at War is the World of Warcraft of the RTS genre; it’s bright, simple and easy to just play.

The main races all work really well together, and are visually distinctive. You quickly lose control of the humans and begin commanding the Novus, the ‘noble’ race of robots who are out to destroy the Hierarchy, a dark, ruthless warrior race. Towards the end, you play as the Masari, a mysterious and technologically advanced race, who are the alleged creators of the Hierarchy. Many of the buildings and units in the game have impressive and distinct designs, and there’s little that screams ‘by the book sci-fi’, save the rather obvious War of the Worlds type walking units of the Hierarchy. The attention to detail in the design doesn’t totally transfer to a unique experience with each of the races. To say they all have different play styles would be going too far, but to not point out the small, important differences in resource collection and unit production would be unfair. The Novus are a typical base building race.

You build buildings that create ground and air units, buildings that defend your base and buildings that enhance the technology of your race. However, most of the Novus units are painfully slow. Building flow conduits around the map and linking them together allow the units to travel across them quickly. This is a great way to balance out the game and give the Novus an extra bit of strategy. If you can get your building units close enough to the enemy base to build a conduit, and then provide a network back to your base, you can launch devastating attacks.

The Hierarchy has access to ‘walkers’, huge production factories that can also build units which can be customised by several ‘hardpoints’ on the design. We’ve seen giant units before in plenty of RTS games, but in Universe at War they come faster and cheaper and can be customised to err on the side of base building or warfare. No, it’s not revolutionary, but it is a welcome change in a game that seems to want to stay as close to possible to the expectations of the genre.

Each race has its own super weapon and they all work as expected. Expensive to build and slow to charge, firing one can turn the tide of a battle instantly. They are all visually impressive, so it’s a shame the campaign doesn’t really let you use them very often, and in a strange order. During the Novus part of the campaign, you fire your black hole weapon on the first map, and never really get a chance to build another until the last level.

Not that you really need super weapons at any point in the campaign. I played the entire single player game through on normal not restarting once, and I don’t consider myself a skilled RTS player. The only time that I ever got close to dying was on the levels where the game seems to pull everything out from under you for no reason at all, and the annoying ‘squad’ type missions where you have no base building facilities and just get sent ‘reinforcements’ as you complete specific objectives.

The end goal of most of the normal missions will involve rushing at the opponent, especially towards the later stages of the game. The only difficult part is deciding how long you can hold on building units before you get bored and charge head first at the enemy. The only time the enemy launched direct assaults on your base are the missions where you are told this will happen in advance. There’s no real strategy involved and little need for defences. Hard’ might make the game more of a challenge for some of us, but any hardcore RTS player is going to find the single player a walk in the park, which is quite a shame as an RTS can get easily dull if there’s no real risk involved.

The AI is functional enough to enjoy the single player, but it’s not going to knock you off your feet. The pathfinding is easily the most frustrating part; the Hierarchies walkers stomp over buildings, but in your own base when they don’t have the luxury, they get easily confused. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to give multiplayer a proper go, and this is where the real lasting appeal and balance of a strategy game will show itself. The game uses the rather abysmal ‘Games for Windows’ nonsense which certainly isn’t a bonus, but all the relevant options and modes are included. It remains to be seen how well UAW will stand up to in the multiplayer fields alongside ground breaking games like Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander. A lot will be down to how well 360 owners receive the game when it comes out in a few months time, as the system has far less in the way of serious competition for an RTS game. Universe at War has its problems. In fact, it has quite a few problems overall. If you’re looking for a game to restore your faith in real time strategy, this isn’t it. Luckily though, none of those problems stop the game being an enjoyable distraction while we wait for more substantial RTS games to come out. Don’t take it seriously, and you’ll have fun. Buy it expecting a deep and fresh gaming experience and you’ll leave disappointed.

Resonance Gaming: SunAge Review

2008-10-11T16:27:00.003+01:00

SunAge was an abymsal game that couldn't have been any more broken on release. The entire mutliplayer mode didn't work and it was impossible to finish the single player campaign and it remains the worst game I've ever reviewed even now those bugs are sorted. The 5/10 score on the site is actually incorrect, I gave this game 2/10 when I reviewed it.

I’ve just struggled though the main meat of the single player campaign of Sunage. Right now, all I can think about is grabbing a pen – the written word is more personal, after all – and writing a very disappointed letter to the small team that has been working on Sunage for over a decade. That’s more than ten years. Imagine what you could achieve in the next ten years. Ok, maybe you don’t have big plans, but you’ve got a long time to think about it, just like Vertex4 had a long time to think about Sunage.

A part of why you’ll find me being quite so harsh on the game is that it’s let the side down. Normally I’d be far less disappointed when a big budget game producer releases a bugged movie licence game or a rushed-to-release piece of nonsense you can’t take seriously. I wouldn’t be any happier, nor would it affect the final score I would give a game, but I wouldn’t be disappointed. You come to expect these games every now and again, and sometimes there’s something underneath that’s genuinely worth fighting for, and sometimes you just push them aside because even without their problems, they are nothing special. I just didn’t expect it from such an independent developer.

So, the game then. Sunage is an RTS. It’s a no more complicated than that, and that’s how the developers intended it. The idea of Sunage was that modern RTS’ had become to convoluted with glitzy graphics and particle effects and had lost their way while chasing polygons and adding features and gimmicks that a true blue RTS simply doesn’t need. Sunage was meant to be a low-tech epiphany for RTS players. That’s a sound idea. It was always going to turn some gamers off. The ones that are right up there with the big companies looking for the next game to max out their SLI rig were never going to give a second glance to Sunage, but who needed them anyway? If Sunage was really going to teach us a lesson we’d all forgotten, we can ignore those people, right?

The game opens promisingly enough. The cookie cutter sci-fi plot is portrayed – thankfully – in comic strip style with some nice looking art and one of the most generic action game voiceovers I’ve heard in my life, leaving me smiling half at the vague stupidity of the plot, and half simply in thanks that Vertex had opted for a nice, simple, comic style intro and not tried to make an FMV intro that they didn’t have the budget to make look good. As the game started, I remained very hopeful. The graphics were exactly what I had expected. Sharp, quality 2D images with excellent 3D effects. The game instantly achieved its desired effect of making me nostalgic for the ‘good old days’.

Now, if I had gone to review school, there probably would have been a class about making proper segues in your writing, and not turning your review into a long rant about the problem with the games developer, but luckily I never did attend that particular academic institution, so I can tell you without further delay: Sunage is broken. It’s really broken. It’s Battlecruiser 3000 broken. It’s ET on the ATARI lets-bury-it-in-the-desert broken. The unpatched, commercial release of this game hates you. It doesn’t want you to play it. The time I spent with Sunage felt more like talking to a technical helpdesk while smoking drugs than playing a fun retro style RTS game. From the very first bug – I couldn’t complete the first mission because a unit I needed to complete an objective was destroyed – to the slow infuriating battle through corrupt save games and crash to desktop errors, Sunage just wouldn’t go. Oh, and did I mention multiplayer doesn’t work at all unless you use Hamachi or another third party application to create a VPN.

I couldn’t even begin reviewing the game until I got the patch, and even that is no miracle cure. It manages to hold the game together just enough so it doesn’t fall apart around you, but even with the major bugs swept under the carpet, you’re left with a poor interface and some of the flakiest controls I’ve ever seen in an RTS, modern, retro themed or otherwise. I’m all for getting back to my roots the way Sunage intended, but not if that means struggling with a control scheme that would have seemed near archaic even ten years ago. Most importantly though, the removal of the major bugs allows you to play the game for long enough to realise it wouldn’t even be anything special if it was working perfectly. It certainly wouldn’t be a bad little attempt, but even at the games best it just made me want to play the old big budget RTS games again. At least they had some real style and flair, even if the world has moved on. Even in a perfect world, Sunage would have been a minor diversion.

This might seem like a particularly scathing review, and I’m aware that I haven’t gone into a lot of the detail I would usually talk about with a game, but what’s the point? If the game is broken, it doesn’t matter how good the sound is, or if the AI is intelligent or not. I’d like anyone reading this to know that I tried my hardest to give this game a chance. I let it into my home, I admired the box and the mission of the developer to bring something back to a genre that had lost its way, and even when the game started to falter, I propped it up on one leg and I continued to drag it back home, every step of the way. Sunage doesn’t care, though. Take a trip to Vertex’s forum and you’ll find two types of people. Firstly, those who are angry they paid hard earned money for an RTS that still – over a month after release – doesn’t have working multiplayer, a key component of the genre. Secondly, those who spend their time getting angry at the former group and telling them they need to have ‘patience’, and that Vertex are ‘only a small developer’.

These are incredibly poor excuses. They are still charging us money for this game, and no matter how quickly they try to fix all these bugs, they’ve already shown how much respect they have for their customers. Being a small company means you limit your scope and you work too sensible goals you know you can achieve. It doesn’t give you carte blanche to laugh in gamers faces.

If Sunage comes out in North America with multiplayer working and the problems still plaguing the game fixed, fire up the demo and see how you feel. It’s at that point you’ll probably see the big sites giving the game middle of the road review scores. We know different, though. Europe has not only been forced to pay money to beta test and fix someone else’s mistakes, but has been ripped off on the sale of features listed on the box and the website that the game simply doesn’t have. You waited over a decade guys; couldn’t you have waited just a little longer and given us something we could have played?

Resonance Gaming: Conflict Denied Ops Review

2008-10-11T16:07:00.002+01:00

I feel now like I should have given this game less marks considering it's only seven months later and I have no real recollection of playing it at all. All I remember is that it's one of the typical PC filler FPS that does nothing offensive or enjoyable.

I’d like to admit that Denied Ops is the first game in the Conflict series that I’ve ever played, despite the series being around some time, so I don’t have a lot of background to work with here. The games aren’t connected by plot or even gameplay though, so if you’re in the same boat as me, you don’t to worry about walking into the middle of a series and being utterly confused by what’s going on. The problem is, playing Denied Ops is going to leave you utterly confused (and perhaps a little bored) anyway.

Denied Ops has exactly the sort of attempt at a plot that you might expect from a game called ‘Denied Ops’. There’s a lot of talk about the Middle East and gruff people talking about covert intelligence and regimes other buzzwords that plague ‘real world’ FPS games that’ll make you feel like you’re watching the world’s most convoluted episode of 24. It might not have been a problem had it all ended at the mission screen, but the dull predictability and repetitiveness of the plot carries right over to into nearly every aspect of the game.

Denied Ops is reasonably lengthy for an FPS title, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anything particularly memorable within the game. It doesn’t feel lazy or incomplete, but it does suffer from a complete and utter lack of personality. You play as two different characters, switching between them as needed. Lang is a close combat action orientated fellow, and Graves has a sniper rifle and is obviously more suited for long range combat. You can control either character at any time, and you have some limited control over what the AI does with the character you are not directly controlling.

This all sounds like a nice way to break the monotony and produce something that’s more than just another FPS, but it ends up feeling a little clunky and disjointed. Instead of giving you the option of tackling situations using a different style depending on which character you’re playing with, it just means you have to swap characters just to access a different weapon every time you switch from a long range shootout to a close combat firefight. The nicest thing about playing as two characters is the gears of war style healing system which means if you die you can jump to your remaining character and heal yourself, although you do have to sit through a jerky ‘getting up’ animation every single time.

The biggest problem with this style of play is that the AI responsible for controlling whichever character you aren’t using isn’t very competent. Your control over your partner is limited to using the right mouse button to point where you want him to move. He’ll happily do this, but he’ll also have an annoying tendency to run headfirst into oncoming fire, refuse to take cover or, if you don’t press anything at all, happily remain standing still at the last location you were both together. Instead of giving the game an added dimension it ends up becoming a chore to make sure your partner is doing something vaguely similar to what he should be.

So you and your partner get sent off to some of those countries less fortunate than America to kill some people in hats that probably hate freedom, using either the gun that’s great at long range or the gun that is more designed for close combat. Once you’ve gotten used to babysitting your partner and given up any hope of caring about what it is you’re meant to be doing beyond closing the distance on whatever your objective arrow is pointing towards, Conflict Denied Ops is playable. It’s not a painful game. There are actually some very nice set pieces and impressive set ups in the game, although not nearly enough. Just when you think the pace of the game might be increasing and the game is going to finally get some direction, it lets you down with another dull scenario set in a generic Arabic town. There’s a feeling here that we’ve been given a huge amount of lovely barrels and crates that explode in a tower of flame and smoke, and expected to be entertained for 10 hours.

For an FPS, Denied Ops doesn’t do particularly well on the graphical side of things. The textures are detailed, but the graphics as whole - especially in the outdoor sections - seem sparse and boring. The models look like something that might have impressed two years ago, and the animation ranges from awkward to absurd, Grave’s gun moving around as if he has shaking it wildly around in a small circle while he runs. What’s more, you’ll need quite an impressive system to max everything out.

The game offers a Co-Op mode which removes the problem of poor AI; although it does pigeon hole you to playing the entire game in the specific and narrow roles the game has set out. There are no sections where you really feel like you’re working as a team like what we’ve seen recently in Gears of War, but with the right person, it works quite well. Denied Ops was never going to compete with Call of Duty 4 or Crysis, but it’s turned out to be a little disappointing in its own right. Most FPS fans will find some enjoyable moments here, but it’s hard to justify playing through the rest of the game to reach them.

Resonance Gaming: Sims Carnival Review

2008-10-11T16:00:00.004+01:00

Carnival was the first and shortest review I ever did for Resonance. It's not exactly my best work as the focus at the time was on getting the site up and running as quickly and cleanly as possible, but it's still a fair review of the spin off puzzle series.

As everyone even remotely interested in PC gaming knows, The Sims has been one of the best selling computer game franchises in history. Adored by many younger and female gamers, and often hated by members of the hardcore gaming community, no matter what you think about the game and EAs marketing strategy, The Sims has been a huge success, and will continue to be a success for a long time to come. The Sims Carnival piggybacks on the success of this licence, and SnapCity and Bumper Blast have been brought out under its name. As both games are casual and share some similar properties, I’ve decided to review them as one, and give them both a single score.

SnapCity is simultaneously the most original and playable of both games. The game is an interesting mixture of Tetris and SimCity. Instead of simply placing zones and buildings, the game drops different coloured blocks from the sky, which you can rotate and place down to complete a zone. When you’ve placed enough pieces the game will give you a ‘puzzle block’. When these puzzle blocks are completed, you can choose a variety of different buildings to place on them.

The games story mode gives you a series of ‘objectives’ to complete on each map. For example, completing a set number of zones without missing any blocks, or building a police station. Despite the large number of missions in the story mode, the pace of the game is incredibly slow. Most of the missions are near identical with the layout of the zones and the type of building the game requires you to build the only real change each time. The game starts slowly adding new buildings and different shaped blocks as you reach the higher levels, but it’s too little, too late.

Everything in the game is also far too easy. Even moving up the block speed to maximum doesn’t really make the game any harder. Casual games are known for being easier than their more in-depth counterparts, but SnapCity just didn’t offer any challenge at all. The different buildings are meant to affect your cities budget, happiness and density. You’re left feeling like it doesn’t really matter, though. You nearly always have enough money, and happiness and density seem to have no effect on gameplay whatsoever. The only buildings that actually seem to do anything are the Police, Fire and Health buildings, which make it easier to dispatch the various problems you’ll randomly encounter.

SnapCity also offers an open ended mode, much like the regular Simcity. However, the regular game had a lot of depth and strategy involved, and by SnapCity’s very nature, it has neither. SnapCity does offer a fair amount of entertainment though, even if it does miss the mark. The graphics are bright and bold, replacing the realistic urban graphics of The Sims with cartoon buildings and cars. The Sims-style, enthusiastic music is both annoying and addictive at the same time, and through it all, I can’t help being impressed by how two entirely different styles of game have been mixed together.

BumperBlast has less going for it. You control a ‘bumper’ that can shoot other bumpers to ‘tag’ them, and once all bumpers in a level have been tagged, you win. What do bumpers have to do with the Sims? They have faces of different Sims on them! In fairness, it plays better than it sounds. It’s a puzzle game at heart, and its entertaining and, thankfully, more challenging than SnapCity. It’s shame then that there is no originally here at all, and the links to The Sims is tenuous at best. Simply taking a game that has already been made several times before and slapping on a few Sims graphics isn’t very impressive.

Putting “The Sims” in front of anything is going to guarantee at least some retail success. As standalone items, they are polished and playable, and both should entertain for a while. However, at $20 each, they are expensive for casual games. If you’re willing to sacrifice the brand name you’ll find plenty of games just as good, if not better, than either of the games on offer here. They’ll be cheaper as well. Perhaps I’d be less critical of these games had they been $20 for both, or released as part of the content of a regular Sims expansion pack, but as they stand, I’m not convinced.

Resonance Gaming: Escape From Paradise City Review

2008-10-11T15:58:00.003+01:00

Paradise City was one of the first reviews that went up with the original launch of Resonance.

Escape from Paradise city is a dangerous game. Not because of its violence and ‘gangster’ themed setting, but because it does a great job of pulling you in to towards what initially feels like something that could be an enjoyable 20 hours of open ended role playing strategy. It’s dangerous because if you play the demo, you could easily be forgiven for thinking the full game would be worth a shot. It’s only when you suddenly reach the middle of the game and realise that the gameplay never really took off do you suddenly figure out that Paradise City has spent most of its time and budget trying to hide its utter lack of substance.

I’ve never been a huge fan of gangster themed games, so Paradise city and I got off to a bad start straight away. Escapism is one of the major reasons video games are so popular, but I’ve always felt a little fake pretending to be some gang banger in a dystopian city that’s always stabbing and shooting and vying for control of the ‘streets’. It’s really a personal thing, and I’m happy to be an eight foot tall space marine without problems, so perhaps I shouldn’t read into it so much. The thing is, if a game can pull it off properly, I don’t mind. The main character in San Andreas was probably the least like me anyone could ever be, but I didn’t feel silly or juvenile because even in a silly and juvenile world, there was obvious parody, genuinely funny jokes and a real sense of immersion. Paradise City grasps the silly and juvenile with both hands, but somehow walks straight past any pretense of satire or intelligent humour. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go entirely the other way into gritty realism, so it seems stuck unhealthily inbetween both worlds. The plot has the same identity crisis problem, when what felt like a comic violence gangster game gets flipped into some surreal science fiction/horror plot. The only reason I’m not convinced that the games writers didn’t get bored of the plot half way through and decided to spice it up a bit is the blurb on the box telling me all about a ‘virus’ the game refuses to introduce anywhere near soon enough.

The game plays as a mix between an action RPG and a strategy. During to the introduction, you are introduced to the three characters you are forced to play as; Nicholas Porter, Boris Chekov, and Angel Vargas. They each have their own cheap story attached to them, but the common theme is that they’ve all done something bad to someone, and are now being coerced into doing ‘missions’ for ‘the agency’. What the characters basically boil down to is ‘Ranged fighting’, ‘Melee fighting’ and ‘Group fighting’. They do all play slightly differently, but it’s a superficial difference.

The main idea behind the gameplay is taking over neighbourhoods in order to hire more and more AI controlled henchmen to help you fight the bigger bosses, and take more neighbourhoods. Once you have taken over a neighbourhood by defeating the neighbourhood boss, the boss will then – after needlessly running around the map for a few minutes while you defend him - relinquish control to you. Neighbourhoods under your control will give you a constant stream of income and extra slots for hiring allies to attack new neighbourhoods or defend ones you’ve already taken. Your allies different skills are varied enough to allow for a cheap sort of strategy, you can hire stronger, melee units and back them up with scouts and doctor units. You’ll also achieve special bonuses in different neighbourhoods that work like special powers. These range from the incredibly useful to the utterly pointless, but give the game a desperately needed extra level of strategy.

The game is set entirely in the confines of the city. For the first few hours of the game, this environment impressed me greatly. Although somewhat cartoony, it felt lifelike enough. Pedestrians muddle around on their business, cars drive through the dirty streets and every building seems different. The different view modes and the free camera allow you have to pretty much any view you want, and the graphics are crisp and smooth. At first glance, you really get the impression that the game is set in a dynamic and exciting world.

A few hours in though, and you’ll realise just how fake everything is. Buildings start recycling very quickly and the overall repetitive design of each neighbourhood seriously harms any hope of immersion. Many games recycle buildings when building large environments, but it becomes detrimental when you realise that there are no ‘clever parts’, no landmarks, no parts of the city you can instantly look at and identify without having to consult your map. It’s an easy trap to fall into when you’re entire game is set in an urban environment, but it feels a little lazy. The citizens only make things worse. Watch closely enough and you’ll notice ‘business women’ walk into dark alleyways near some thugs, bump into a wall, bump into another wall then walk back around and continue on her way. I wasn’t expecting a complicated citizen AI, but it would have been nice if they could have refrained from using walls as a means of transport. At least you can ignore this though, one thing that you can’t ignore are the five or six annoying phrases uttered by citizens throughout the entire game.

The gameplay is probably the best thing about Paradise City, but it’s really not up to all that much. It is honestly quite addictive, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy playing them game at all. Paradise City isn’t the type of game that you’ll play through hoping it will end as soon as possible. It’s the type of game that once you have played it through, you’re not left with anything but the feeling you probably could have been playing something better. It seems to shoot itself in the foot so often it’s hard to justify the purchase. Your AI allies are designed to work in tangent with each other, but are entirely uncontrollable, and tend to just charge into an enemy neighbourhood, split up, and either die horribly or win by sheer force of numbers. The leveling system is in depth and offers some enjoyable options, but the game limits your level all the way through, and having to use one of three characters whose ‘class’ has already been chosen for severely limits what you can achieve.

It’s easy to play the game and feel like had it been designed slightly differently, it could have worked. Give us more control and strategy, let us pick our own character and stick with them. Enhance the roleplaying with some open ended missions and an ability to have some sort of choice. Give the city some flavour and give the game a bit of life. Perhaps with those changes, Paradise City may have really been something to play. If you’re really into action RPGs and you aren’t afraid of repetition and a little bit of frustration, it’s still a game to consider. You can play it at face value and enjoy it to a certain extent, but the games repetition quickly forces you to look for something deeper, and it’s honestly not there.

Resonance Gaming: Democracy Review

2008-10-11T15:51:00.003+01:00

Democracy is a indie PC game that found a publisher in the UK for a boxed version of its previously internet only game, Democracy. I reviewed the boxed version which was a very capable game, if somewhat limited in its lifespan. Developers Positech offered more games to review, but at the time we didn't have the staff to run with any of them.

Writing any sort of review about Democracy compared to other recently released games seems somehow less worth it. Firstly, the game has been out for a long time in America and across the world in shareware form, and is only now recently available in the UK in a retail box format. Secondly, democracy is one of those games that feels such a defined niche that you probably already know if you like it or not by reading the back of the box. The game doesn’t mislead or try to be something that it’s not, and it’s unlikely it will ever stand out amongst PC games in the retail market unless it’s something you’re already looking for.

Democracy puts you in the shoes of the newly elected leader of a country of your choice. The retail box version includes the USA and the UK, as well as other European countries. In typical open ended simulation fashion, the only true goal the game will set you is to stay in power. Keeping popular with as many people as possible is the goal in democracy, as it often is in real life politics. The game allows you set policies which will affect different groups of people either positively or negatively, respond to ‘events’, and manage your countries economy.

What Democracy is really about though, is balance. Popularity revolves around pleasing the games large set of population groups, ranging from the obvious politically motivated “liberal” and “conservative” groups, through to environmentalists and patriots, and then into more defined groups, like commuters, and parents. The game will tell you what percentage of the population makes up each group, and all of the different political areas that will affect their mood. For example, the “drivers” group will be happy about more road investment and lower petrol tax, but unhappy about have their taxes subsidise public transport; pretty much the exact opposite of the commuters. At the end of your ‘term’, the country votes to keep you in power for another three years, or to remove you forcing the game to end.

Democracy deals with its epic scale with a very simple interface. Graphics are mostly non-existent, with the only real aesthetic qualities reserved for the different icons on each of the policies. There are no cuts to film footage or in game movies when an event occurs, just an explanation written in plain text. Sound also seems to work at a minimal level, Voice acting is completely avoided, and sound effects are reduced to a simple collective noise of approval or disapproval depending on the outcome of events. The music is stimulating but it feels a little disjointed and will happily burst into epic fanfare while you’re thinking about whether or not you should legalise prostitution. The most important quality in deciding if democracy is a game for you becomes imagination. Whereas most modern games serve as temporary replacement for the imagination, Democracy requires the player to make its simple graphics, explanations and poll numbers into a real country.

The actual gameplay is well defined and stimulating, at least in the short term. Although I’m sure real politicians would find instant flaw in the game, as a casual prime minister, I found everything to be set at just the right level of realism. Everything does what you’d imagine it to do, even if it has been reduced to the simplest of terms. There’s a lot of satisfaction when you can finally stop shouting at the news about the ridiculous way the government is spending your taxes and actually jump in and have a go. In my first time I legalised stem cell research, removed creationism from schools and legalised gambling. Within twenty minutes, members of my party were being assassinated by religious extremists, and I had to give up. My second go worked well until I spent too much money on welfare and started getting into serious debt. Both total failures, but both great fun. One of the most superb things about democracy is the interface, which is so intuitive that you never have to worry about how to do something or what policy you need, and all your time actually playing the game, worrying about how a policy will affect everyone or how you are going to get enough national income to implement it.

It’s when you play a few lengthy games that you realise democracy lacks something that is normally something simulations do very well; replayability. In a way, it’s a victim of its on realism. You have this huge sandbox but the limits are very obvious. In SimCity half the fun came from getting bored and just setting disasters lose on your creation, but in Democracy, you’re limited by exactly how much you can change, you can’t become a fascist dictator or an absolute hippy, and because it relies so heavily on the imagination as it is, even doing that wouldn’t really be all that worth it. Even from a realistic standpoint there are some large sections of politics missing. Considering the size of the subject, omissions can’t really be considered a crime, but there are also some large parts of governing a country that are totally avoided, like having a cabinet, or dealing with competitors, or running campaigns. You are judged solely on your own actions, and people will vote for or against you, not for various parties. Events are also a little on the sparse side, and offer only black and white solutions to problems. Luckily there is an active modding community working on more content often.

As I hinted at the start of this review, you’re probably already very interested or totally against the idea of giving democracy a try. Even though it’s a shining example of its genre, its subject and its limited graphical ability are going to turn off the vast majority of gamers. Of course, if you are interested in politics, you would really be missing out by not giving the game a go. The game doesn’t work at extremes, you won’t find a game that can mess around with anymore then you’ll find an incredibly deep political simulator, but you will find the very best middle ground between them, even if it won’t last forever.

Resonance Gaming: Imperium Romanum Review

2008-10-10T17:19:00.004+01:00

The thing I remember most about this review was a comment on the games official forums after we left our link there saying that my review had convinced this one guy to buy the game. You don't tend to get a lot of online feedback on reviews unless you really try hard to go out and push people for it, so hearing that even one guy had his opinion changed or at least informed by my writing gave me a strange sense of pride. Lame pride, perhaps, but pride nonetheless.

I’m not much of a history buff, and I’ve never really been into the Total War series as much as other people, but I did recently watch a BBC docudrama series on the Roman Empire. It hasn’t exactly left me with an encyclopaedic knowledge, but it did rekindle an interest in the Romans which I hadn’t paid much attention to since the days of playing the very first game in the Caesar series, in all its 2D DOS glory.

It’s the Caesar series that looks to be the closest comparison to Imperium Romanum, and indeed both fit neatly into the “historical city building simulation genre”. In fact if you just look at a few screenshots and read the feature list of both games, it would appear that Imperium has borrowed quite heavily from Caesar. Luckily for fans of both Roman History and City Building alike, for everything that Imperium seems to copy there’s something else that makes the entire game feel different. The only safe assumption for people who’ve been playing the Ceaser series for years is that you almost certainly love Imperium, but once you leave behind setting and genre, they couldn’t be less alike.

You don’t have to read much to realise the general idea, here. You take command of a town, and spend most of your time placing the right buildings in the right places, and watching over different groups of people to satisfy their needs while managing your budget and resources. If you manage everything correctly, more people will move in and you’ll have access to bigger houses, a higher class of citizen with their only higher expectations, more industry and a wider variety of choice in how to make and keep your citizens happy.

If you’ve not tried a city building sim outside of the modern day SimCity style games, you might be a little surprised to see exactly how differently Imperium works. Just as ancient Rome and New York are both large, prosperous cities that could both not be more different from each other, Imperium could not be more different from any number of modern city clones. The two big changes here are industry and basic need. Keeping your city running in Imperium is only as difficult as you can imagine running a 2000 year old settlement to be. Satisfying your citizens basic needs is not as simple as placing a grocery store or supermarket nearby. You need to build a pig farm, then a butcher, then optionally a marketplace to distribute the food, and sausages are not the only thing on the menu. Many of the buildings here don’t function independently, so when you’re building a city in Imperium; it really feels like a city rather than a collection of unconnected buildings only linked by their relative distance from each other.

Unfortunately, it’s also this mode that forces you to engage in a fair amount of combat. Combat is far and away the least appealing thing about Imperium. A small selection of military structures can be built, supported by several other military economy structures. Providing your military structures are well stocked, they automatically produce a constant stream of soldiers, up to a limit of 36. The only way to increase this limit is to build more buildings, which means you can find yourself building three or four of exactly the same building rather than simply being able to upgrade your older ones. Visually, this doesn’t look great, and from a gameplay angle, it’s frustrating having to control 4 small squads than one or two big armies.

The combat itself is very basic rock paper scissors style affair, and your only enemies are the barbarian hordes which reside in villages and will occasionally come to attack your town. You can deploy your squads, set them to attack or retreat, set a few different formations and that’s it. The most annoying part is that it’s all down by buttons in a sub menu rather than RTS style selection and movement, which makes it, feel even more automatic and removed from the rest of the game. It actually turns out that running the economy to keep your military running is more enjoyable than using them.

Luckily, there aren’t too many times when you need to focus on your military strength – in certain scenarios you can all but turn it off - and the combat section of the game seems much more forgiving of mistakes than the city building parts. The Roman Empire was obviously a pretty bloody time and warfare quite an essential part of that, but while it is by no means terrible in Imperium, it does hurt the games otherwise excellent pace and addictiveness to add a feature that other, non city building games can do far better. Imperium feels like it should either have given the option to turn combat off, or focus on it more, making it less about sheer numbers and more about strategy, with research options, terrain advantages and everything else we’re used to seeing in RTS games.

Outside of combat, there are very few criticisms that can be made of Imperium. Lack of originality perhaps, but the game is so aware of its genre and has such a refined sense of style that it would seem unfair to punish to for not adding features that it doesn’t need. The way the game displays information about your resources is initially a little confusing, and the interface which uses a radial system a little like that from Neverwinter Nights isn’t going to be too everyone’s taste, although it’s a good quick way to navigating once you’ve worked out where everything is. The games modes are different enough to offer more replay value than most of games of its type, but it would have been nice to see more customisation on the sandbox mode.

Perhaps the weakest part of the main game is the way it deals with emergencies. Items requiring your attention appear at the top left of the screen, and must be clicked on in order to bring up an information box. Worse, many of these want to tell a story instead of just immediately telling you what’s going wrong. These stories seem pointless and are very few in number, so you’ll end up hearing the same thing over and over again as you make the same mistake, especially while you are learning how to play the game. You can of course not click on them, but then you’re leaving yourself at a disadvantage. This is really such a small thing, and the fact I’m pointing it out as something that frustrated me probably does more to prove that Imperium has so very few problems.

Imperium’s graphics certainly aren’t a problem. Obviously the style has been set in part by history, but it’s in the detail and animation you can really enjoy. Zoom in outside a bakery and you’ll see your slaves bringing flour and leaving it in a pile of sacks outside, then your baker will come out take those sacks and turn them into bread. Zoom out, and you’ll see a varied and bustling town set into a dramatic landscape. These details come with a price however. The game offers plenty of graphical options but if you want to play the game on max settings, you’ll find one of the best looking city building games ever to also be one of the most system intensive.

If you’re interested in the Romans at all, this is an absolute must purchase, even if you haven’t played this type of game before. As well as of being incredibly solid as a simulation, Imperium is happy to include the historically accurate slaves and sexism in its canon, and there's any number of facts about the Romans that are interesting and unobtrusive. If you’re not so excited about history, Imperium obviously won’t be able to offer you quite as much, but it’s still a very complete game that seems to understand its players and its purpose far more than modern/futuristic setting of games like SimCity Societies. The only people who are going to be disappointed here are people looking for depth in combat and a proper fictional story, but even those people might be surprised just how good Imperium is.

Food is the simplest example and a basic need. Basic needs in Romanum are not simply things you need to look after or your city won’t grow as fast; fail to feed to poor or supply enough water to your fledgling town and your citizens will riot. Larger buildings even require a steady stream of materials to maintain their upkeep, and not supplying this increasing their chances of catching fire. The actual wants of your citizens are never that complex, but actually finding a cost effective and quick way to resolve them involves working out how everything feeds off everything else, and maintaining an economy. One missing link in your economy that’s ignored or not sorted out in time can totally cripple your game.

This might sound like enough micromanagement to scare anyone off, but actually it’s not about managing every building and every member of your population, it’s just a shift in focus that puts you more in charge of your industry and resources. There are plenty of resources to manage, however all of the different resources only require recognising a need and then constructing the right building in the right place. Workers are hired automatically and buildings convert resources in their own time, providing they are staffed and close enough together. It’s a satisfying return to old style RTS resource gathering without any of the worry about spending more time focusing on mining or farming then on actually running a city.

The game offers three modes of play. Rome, which puts you in charge of building some of cities more famous buildings, Scenarios, which despite the name are generally a freeform sandbox style game with certain settings to make things easier or harder, and History, which runs through various key points of Rome’s history. It’s this latter mode that is the strongest of the three and contains the most appealing gameplay, combining the satisfaction and structure found in objectives with the open ended decision making of the sandbox mode.

Timeline mode unlocks different stages as you progress through Rome’s history. You start with anything from a small to large settlement, and while maintaining and continuing to expand the settlement as you would in sandbox, victory is achieved by using the games tablet system to complete objectives. Tablets can contain compulsory orders (build a farm, make this much money), optional orders which will reward you if completed, and different chance scenarios, both negative and positive. This is a welcome change to simply being told exactly what you need to do in order to continue the game, and probably one of the games most unique factors.

Resonance Gaming: Frontlines: Fuel of War Review

2008-10-10T17:09:00.003+01:00

Frontlines was one of the earlier and wordier reviews I wrote for Resonance, and a game that I played all the way through quite quickly. This review was mentioned in various places including the Gamespot news page for the game and FPS games in general, which attracted a reasonable amount of links early on in the sites lifespan.

FPS fans have been spoilt on nearly every format for the past year, not least on the PC which thanks to a superior control system still does it best, no matter what a million Halo 3 players might think. Despite so many different entries in the market though, it’s easy to be forgotten if you don’t do something special, so many games try to distinguish themselves with different settings and features. Sometimes these features leave a serious and lasting impression, and sometimes they just seemed like tacked on extras and cheap marketing gimmicks.

It’s easy to expect a lot from high production shooters these days, especially while many gamers are on a come down from games like Stalker and Call of Duty 4 last year. Frontlines is set in the near future, in a world that has run out of oil, and in the midst of a global energy crisis. It’s neither epic or original, but it’s easy to be thankful simply to see a game that isn’t rehashing some terrible Middle Eastern terrorist scenario; it’s more thoughtful and relevant l than we’ve seen in recent FPS offerings and presented well in the games cut scenes between levels. You’re fighting against the Red Star alliance, a frighteningly realistic alliance between Russia and China, that want to keep all that juicy energy for themselves.

While the plot goes some way to setting the game apart from its peers, the first half-hour so do it absolutely no favours. You’re still playing a soldier in a unit of battle hardened veterans, you’re still fighting in dusty middle eastern towns whose names end in ‘askstan’, you’re still slowly advancing through a map following an objective arrow, closing distance as you take cover, shoot, take cover again. You’re still shooting handily coloured and oddly placed red barrels to cause large explosions in enemy encampments. It’s enough to make you start banging your head against your keyboard in a delirious fit induced by a lack of originality, or worse, to just give up on the game altogether. My advice? Don’t give up.

Frontlines doesn’t slap you in the face with its features from the start, and force you to take it seriously. Compared to games like Timeshift that latch on to one aspect of the gameplay and spend the rest of the game talking about how innovative and useful it is, Frontlines barely even takes any notice of these features, and in fact until you see your first vehicle or die for the first time, it’s very easy to mistake it for an entirely featureless clone. This more subtle approach to introducing the game is refreshing, but it does mean that it can take a while to become apparent the game is more than just an on the rails middle eastern shooter following on the back of Call of Duty’s success, which the very first section of the game seems so adamant to prove.

Frontlines introduces the point capture, deployment options, soldier setups and epic battlegrounds that have become so popular in multiplayer only games. None of these features are new or original per se, and none of them are done very differently to how you’ve seen them before. The real gimmick here is that the game takes these features that have previously been mostly multiplayer orientated ideas and brings them to single player, along with a story to hold them together. I’m pleased to say it does succeed in this goal without making it feel like a tacked on afterthought, or simply just the multiplayer with bots instead of human opponents.

Despite a few solo missions that feel a bit more like a regular FPS, the game is played with a small squad of soldiers, who generally simply get on with things around you; there’s no command of other members in your group at all. Level objectives tend to involve either capturing or destroying key strategic points on the map by holding them long enough, or using explosives to eliminate them. Upon capture, the namesake ‘Frontline’ moves to a new point and you’ll be given a new objective. When you die, instead of loading from a save, you can redeploy at any of the points you have captured and are given the option to change your initial equipment, although the best weapons are often picked up on the map, including the futuristic remote control ‘drones’, which are great fun to play around with.

While on paper it might seem a lot like Battlefield without the enjoyment of playing with others, or a battlefield style clone with singleplayer elements, like Star Wars Battleground. Luckily, Frontlines feels like an experience that’s far more tailored towards the single player. It sits in the middle, trying to providing the added choice and strategy or multiplayer while giving the player the power to sway the course of a battle alone, without the need for other human players. It’s a noble goal and the game’s biggest asset, but it’s not always a smooth ride. Frontlines biggest and most noticeable problem is that in trying to combine two separate elements around the same idea, it’s given itself a bit of an identity crisis.

Resonance Gaming: Elements of Destruction Review

2008-10-10T17:03:00.004+01:00

Elements of Destruction is a game that seemed to want to rest half way between the casual market and full price, and didn't seem to satisfy either. It's unique (as far as I'm aware) in that it's actually a XBLA -> PC port, as if normal 360 ports were not bad enough. This was another review released towards the end of the sites lifespan when university was looming and I had less free time to write.

Microsoft has found great success in porting of over old arcade and PC classics – including the infamous doom –to its XBOX live arcade service, the 360’s answer to low cost, casual gaming. There have been few games, however, that have made the opposite jump and moved in quite a few strange platforms as Elements, appearing on the PC as both a downloadable and a full CD release, the marketplace as a download and the even the Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, in this weird collection of formats the PC version appears to have been placed last on the list for quality.

One of the biggest words of praise I can give to elements is that it’s original. There’s no denying that there are few games that do what Elements does, even if its general b-movie style theme is nothing new. You play as disgruntled mad scientist Dr. Edgar Herbert, who has been recently fired from his long term job at a company called AIC, and is looking for payback. To exact revenge, Herbert invents a way to control the weather, and decides to reap destruction upon the buildings of his ex-employer.

This all sounds very hi-tech, but the gameplay is deceptively simple. You control a glowing orb which serves as a pointer in its neutral state, zipping around each location and hovering over targets. You can then choose to use any of the three natural elements under your control - lightning, earthquakes and tornados – to destroy your targets. Stopping you while you try to accomplish this are various installations that disable different powers, and AIC units and defences themselves, who deplete your energy level, brought back up by recharge stations around the map. Your powers grow in strength as you upgrade them using a somewhat arbitrary points system throughout the game.

And that paragraph pretty much sums up the entire game. Each of the levels has different objectives and you earn ‘medals of destruction’ based on your overall score. Even on the higher levels it’s much likelier that you’ll run out of time instead of ever actually being killed by the units, and although the game takes a few tries to get used to, it’s quickly mastered and once you’ve got the basics down, it’s a pretty clear path to the end of the game, which can be completed in an afternoon. For some reason, the achievements have been taken out of the PC version, so you don’t even have anything to work towards once you’ve completed the main campaign.

Each town you play in has various important landmarks but are mostly populated by similar looking sets of buildings and houses, and by the time you reach the third level you’ll notice that there isn’t anything in the way of visual variety. Graphics are capable enough for a budget offering and there are some reasonably nice scenes to be created if you manage to destroy lots of buildings at once, but each power’s graphical effect on a building are identical. There are no physics in the game at all, and trees will quite happily explode if you move a tornado in them just the same way as cars and guns and tanks and houses do. It would have been excellent to see everything in the town ripped up and being flung around by the tornado, Katamari style.

Worse still though, towns seem utterly devoid of life. One of the main attractions to Elements is the visceral human desire to just blow things up for fun, but it’s so much less enjoyable when the environments you’re blowing up already seem utterly lifeless. You feel more like a demolitions officer than a mad scientist as you watch the same uninspired buildings get destroyed in exactly the same way over and over again. There’s fun to be had in pointless destruction, but for the illusion to work, you have to believe you’re destroying something worthwhile. Elements is like kicking over a two year olds sandcastle; it’s mildly enjoyable for a second, but it’s not satisfying, nor will it hold your attention. To become bored in a game as short as Elements would normally be quite a feat, but here, it’s easily accomplished.

Shortness and repetition aside; Elements could still pull of being a reasonably fun distraction from greater things, and a reasonable entry into the casual gaming market. That is, it could if the controls worked at all. When I first played, I figured the mouse sluggishness was simply part of the game designed to enforce some level of difficulty, and although it was often annoying, I put up with it. It was only when I plugged in my 360 controller the controls became absolutely perfect and a joy to use. That’s all great, except this is meant to be a PC game, and not everybody has the luxury of having a 360 controller on hand to remedy developer laziness.

There’s a keyboard mode that lets you use WASD to control while still using the mouse to attack, and although this is far more responsive than mouse only movement, it’s very difficult to quickly move along in the diagonal motion that the level design demands. Even when you do use the controller, the game still offers control advice based for the mouse only, and there’s no configuration setup at all. This incredibly poor use of the mouse could have given the PC version considerable edge, but instead it’s the biggest barrier to having any fun with this game.

Multiplayer is included in both internet and split screen modes, although curiously there is no LAN play. Split Screen co-operative play is a nice little addition that PC games very rarely include these days, but playing with a friend isn’t going to make this game any more exciting, and you can’t both play on keyboard; again, you need a controller. The competitive mode simply involves seeing who can do the most damage in a certain time period, and you can be sure if you’re playing with your mouse against someone with a 360 controller, you’ve probably already lost. None of this is particularly important however, as no multiplayer games were being played at all at the time of writing. Considering the PC has a huge catalogue of multiplayer games far more entertaining than Elements, that’s hardly surprising.

It’s nearly impossible to justify this purchase. At best, it’s an average and very short casual attempt with no replay value. Even with perfect controls, it wouldn’t score that high. I would suggest that if you have a 360 controller it’s worth a try simply because it’s original and fun in places for a short time, but if you have a 360 controller, you’ve probably got a 360 and can therefore get the Live Arcade version for about half the price of the PC version with good controls and functional multiplayer. Even if you don’t, the DS version is a least portable and the games timed missions are suited to quick plays on the way to work, so I’m at a loss as to where the poor PC port fits in.

Resonance Gaming: Turtix Rescue Adventure Review

2008-10-10T16:58:00.007+01:00

Turtix was one of the only casual gaming reviews I've written. I'm not a massive fan of casual gaming as a rule as I find a little watered down and repetetive when you're dealing with anything beyond the basic puzzle games, but I'm quite happy with this review, although we never really made any effort to promote this one as it was written towards the end of the sites lifespan.

Turtix Rescue Adventure is the sequel to Alawar Entertainments recent puzzle release, Turtix. The game is a platformer at heart, although the usual collection and exploration typical of the genre has been mostly removed in favour of a strong puzzle element, somewhat similar to the style of Lost Vikings or Rainbow Island. Puzzle gaming may well be the most popular genre in the casual gaming world, so can Turtix stand to its multitude of competition?

The short answer? Yes, providing you enter play in Turtix knowing exactly what type of game you’ll be playing. The original Turtix was a true arcade platformer, but Rescue Adventures has moved in a slight different direction and is not a Mario clone by any respect, and those looking for fast paced action style gameplay will be disappointed. Take away the occasional difficult jump or frustratingly well placed enemy and you’re left with a game that has far more in common with Lemmings than with Nintendo’s diminutive plumber. Interestingly, if you want a more platform styled turtle game one does exist; Turtle Odyssey by Realore Studios.

Turtix’s forgivably simple plot involves a spell casting lesson gone awry, as the sorcerer miscasts a spell, trapping all the students in bubbles. For some reason unknown, Turtix manages to escape the spell and is sent out to rescue his friends. It’s presented in a bold opening cinematic that sets the stage more for the games excellent visuals than the story.

Gameplay in Turtix is simple to learn and introduced over the games first few levels. Jumping on your friends may rescue them from their bubble, but devoid of intelligent thought they’ll then run mindlessly forwards, bouncing off walls and other barriers and falling into pits and various dangers set throughout the levels. Your job is to make sure that those dangers are avoided, either by blocking the turtle from moving down the path at all, or by destroying the danger. For example, pushing crates into a very genre-typical pit of spikes that will kill your friend.

Turtix doesn’t get much more complicated than that, although despite a simple idea, the game actually gets quite difficult in the third world, and should provide even seasoned puzzle fans with some entertainment, especially on the hard mode. Despite some occasional spikes in difficulty – boss battles are included for each of the games worlds - most of the time Turtix does a good job of keeping everything paced just enough that it doesn’t get too boring.

That said it would probably have been all too easy to get bored with Turtix if the graphics and controls weren’t so spot on. Turtix’s world isn’t a particularly large one, with only three different environment spread across 60 levels, and as the first world serves largely as an introduction with no real difficult puzzles, you’ll expect to be spending the vast majority of the time on the last two. However, what graphics Turtix does possess it pulls off incredibly well. Bold, bright cartoon graphics and incredibly smooth animations and little details bring everything to life and play a big part in the role of keeping you interested once you’ve mastered everything the game has to offer.

Resonance Gaming: Galactic Civilisations II Arnor Review

2008-10-10T16:51:00.004+01:00

After the break is the first of many reviews and articles I've written for my old website. Resonance Gaming. It ran from January 2008 - June 2008 and was sold in June for £1,000. I co-owned it with the designer and coder Daniel Clarke. The site has a lot of my most recent work in the gaming industry which I'm repeating here in full in case the site ever goes down.

I've always wondered if I can use the work again on other sites if the main RG ever goes offline? The guy that purchased the site never did anything with it and the site remains the same as it was in June. A real waste, really.

Note that the formatting on these isn't great as they were designed for a site that looks quite different from Blogger. I've done what I can with the major parts to make it a little more readable, though.

When Galactic Civilizations 2 came out over two years ago, it was clear Stardock had done something really amazing. It actually managed to improve on just about every single aspect of the already incredibly well made original game, while overhauling the graphics engine completely and adding even more features and tactics. In 2007 the game was expanded once more with the Dark Avatar expansion, adding new races, the ability to create custom opponents and a new campaign, while increasing the options available to people using espionage and spy tactics.

And so, in 2008, we face good news and bad. The bad news is, Twilight is the last expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations 2. The good news? The series goes out with a bang, and this has to be one of the most fully realised expansion packs the PC has ever seen.

For the rest of the review, I’m going to assume you’ve already played Galactic Civilizations and its expansion quite extensively. Most of what make Twilight great is the small additions it makes to an already deep game. If you’re yet to play the game, now is a great time to purchase the original with both expansion packs, but I won’t waste any time describing the original gameplay. Suffice it to say, it’s everything Master of Orion 3 should have been.

Expanding on GalCiv was never going to be easy. The trick is to add new content, challenges and strategy without flooding the game with so much content it becomes impossible to keep track of everything or unbalances the game. It’s all too easy to throw an expansion together with a new race or some units and a few maps, but Twilight instead focuses on improving its original content, fleshing out the games existing races and offering new ways to play.

One of the major ways it does this - and certainly the biggest noticeable difference in gameplay over Dark Avatar- is that each race now has its own technology tree. This has been expanded beyond simply having different starting technologies and racial traits and gives each race a unique flavour that the game was lacking on a strategic level. The already technologically advanced Thalan now have a much more limited tree than say, the aggressive Drengin, and the Drengin now have a technology tree that focuses more on war and weaponry.

It’s all been balanced to near perfection and with research already being such a fundamental part of the game, it has a large effect on the gameplay and the style of gameplay encountered in each race. Unique buildings also add flavour to each race. These well designed and novel additions that don’t feel forced into the game (loving the slave pits!) although these seem to have as much obvious affect the general game as much as the tech tree.

Twilight also incorporates a new victory path: Ascension. This was a popular route to victory in older 4X games, and it’s nice to see it return, albeit in a rather different form. Players capture ascension crystals using starbases, which then countdown “time to ascension” from 1,000 turns. Each additional crystal you capture halves the time required to ascend. In practice, this appears to be a very difficult path to victory, especially when playing in games with a large amount of AI players, who seem to find even one crystal a long way from ascension to be a major reason to get very angry at you very quickly. It’s realistic enough but while I’d expect to be under fire with perhaps, 500 turns left and two crystals held, the AI does seem rather overzealous. It doesn’t react as badly if you build a huge army or have massive amounts of other resources, so why get so angry about the crystals? Of course, as with just about everything else in GalCiv you can turn it off if you don’t like the idea.

Which brings up neatly to the new options outside of the main game mode. The immense galaxy is far larger than the previous largest galaxy and lends itself to the true hardcore who prefer their games to play out over weeks instead of days or hours. The editing options for the game have been made far more extensive following the basic race editing that was available in Dark Avatar. Hopefully these new additions should help facilitate new mods to be created for the game which could add years to if lifespan; useful now Stardock have stopped realising expansions.

Graphical overhauls are mostly on the optimisation side, although new textures and general improvements are noticeable if you zoom in far enough. Many Galciv players, myself included, tend to play zoomed out anyway, but it’s nice to occasionally be able to zoom right in to a planet and see it slowly spinning around. Ship battles look slightly more impressive now (although they still sound rather poor thanks to no major updates to the rather weak generic sound effects). The planetary Invasion screen has also had an overhaul, which is worth mentioning as it always looked a little limp before.

I’m nearly 1,000 words into this review and I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of this expansion, so rather than going on listing it’s new features and how good they are, I’ll tell you that Twilight does everything right and nothing wrong. If you’re a GalCiv junkie, the added strategy is going to add years on a game you probably already seeing yourself playing for a long time to come. If you weren’t impressed by the level of changes in Dark Avatar, Twilight will change your mind.

About the only people who shouldn’t get this are people that already don’t enjoy GalCiv anyway, and that’s really their loss. If you like your strategy beardy and epic but you don’t want to get bogged down in spreadsheets and numbers, GalCiv was always one of the best options around. This isn’t an optional amalgamation of features that could have just as easily been added to a patch. After playing with Twilight, vanilla Galciv 2 just doesn’t feel the same, and many of the things the expansion has that you might not agree with or want to use every game, you can turn off.

With Twilight completing the games legacy and all three games available for a generous price, it’s a great time to pick up one of the deepest games around. When the biggest addition I can think to the game is a ‘real time’ clock somewhere on the UI so I can keep track of how much of my life the game is stealing, that’s saying something.

Warsash Assignment

2008-10-10T16:17:00.002+01:00

Warsash is a very strange name for a place. It's where we did our first real 'journalistic' work on the course, and despite my reservation it turned out to be quite a lot of fun. This is the first of what will probably be many 'unofficial' assingments given by our lecturer in the main print segment of the course; 200 words on the day itself with the emphasis on skills used rather than critical feedback."Warsash Breaking News Day

In an event such as the Breaking News Day – staged or otherwise – a journalist needs a large number of skills in order to achieve their goals of both gathering information and digesting and translating that information into a written article.

I found that while I felt reasonably prepared for the experience, there were a few things that I struggled with from a journalistic standpoint. Perhaps the most important was the note taking; although I felt like I was quite eloquent and thorough in my questioning, having to take multiple notes and develop a working timeline while on the site meant that my notes were disorganised. I didn’t always get down everything that I had asked.

Similarly although I felt like I asked the right questions to the right people and took down all I need to produce a cohesive story, I also felt that there were some interviewees that I didn’t spend enough time with, and some which I spent too much. I’m not sure how I could remedy that on a personal level, as a lot of the problem was that the moving between areas and people was rather regimented.

As such, I’ve learned that a journalist requires a large amount of organisation and ad-hoc planning skills alongside the ability to sort through that information. The thing that really surprised me – although now it seems rather obvious – was the pace of the event itself, and then getting back and having to get a grammatically correct and factually interesting and accurate story up when we got back to the news rooms.

Overall, the day was an enjoyable and eye opening experience and I hope to build on a lot of the things I felt I lacked while in field, as well as develop the things I believe I did well."

General feedback from Andy on this was quite good. Andy pointed towards my 'thoroughness and open self-analysis', which can't be a bad thing. I'm also 'honestly assessing [my] weaknesses' which is typical, though I wish I was nearly strong at assesing my strengths without sounding arrogant or doubting myself. Didn't quite keep this to 200 words, and that's something I really need to work on.