Five game mini-reviews
Jan. 7th, 2007 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayThis weekend, I did some homework, which involved taking home the loaner Xbox360, a pile of shooter titles, and evaluating the ways in which they train players. What follows should not be considered comprehensive reviews of the game as a whole, though I did write down my early impressions.
First up was Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, or GRAW for short. It opens with an explicit tutorial, ensuring that you know all the important game functions. Each game function got introduced by on-screen pop-up text, and you needed to succeed at each task before moving on. You couldn’t actually die, but the trainer would occasionally scold you that you *would* have been killed if this wasn’t a training exercise. The first mission included a few more tutorial elements, but then they seemed to be done. The on-screen feedback also tied into the control scheme in helpful ways, by indicating a great deal about both the current state of your squad, and what actions on the D-Pad would do in the current situiation.
GRAW was the game I expected to like least (so I meant to get it out of the way first). In fact, I found it the most fun of any of the games I evaluated this weekend. This was due to the way it really functioned as a tactical game. I generally suck at shooters, so being able to concentrate on ordering my (much more accurate than me) teammates around allowed me to progress very effectively. The teammates are also far more durable than I am; if one of them gets badly wounded, he can be revived by me (or another teammate), and as long as you don’t ignore them too long, they can never actually die. You are not so lucky, and will not get revived; if you die, it’s time to reload from the last checkpoint. Happily the checkpoints are reasonably close together. It felt strangely like a game-within-a-game at times; while there were state-of-the-art realistic animations for all the combat, I actually spent most of my time watching small red diamonds with numbers attached to them on an abstract tactical map.
Next up, Call of Duty 3, yet another WWII shooter. The tutorial was fairly brief, and also very hand-holding. Each individual step of a task was trained, including such basic things like “pick up the weapon”. Whenever you need to do something context-sensitive during the game (crouch under a blockage, use an emplaced machine gun, grab an enemy grenade to throw back), there is *always* an on-screen prompt to tell you which button to press.
The gameplay is relentlessly linear. No branches, and precious few places where there’s even a real tactical choice. On the plus side, this does allow them to do lots of cool scripted sequences. They seem to be going more for “interactive WWII movie” than “game”, per se.
There are no health bars at all. Apparently, your character regenerates damage quickly – you can only get killed by sustained bullet damage or a really close grenade. Duck into cover for a few seconds, and you’re apparently fine.
I find that WWII mass infantry combat to have inherently bad game design. The battlefield is swarming with both friends and foes, and they’re quite difficult to tell apart at any distance. And since most combat is with decently ranged guns, people generally *are* at a distance.
Next in line, the much-hyped Gears of War. There’s an optional tutorial, which is very perfunctory, but does introduce some (not nearly all) of the basic mechanics. Throughout the actual game, they use both pop-up icons to tell you whenever you can interact with an object, as well as more lengthy text boxes that appear to be driven by something very like the Adaptive Training system I am working on for BioShock. That is, the game attempts to detect when you don’t know something that it thinks you *should* know, and then tells you about it.
This is an SF, post-invasion setting, with little explanation of the background; you’re just thrust in media res. It’s a grim, gritty, mostly grey world. Beautiful rendering technology wasted on war-torn ruins.
The primary “new idea” in Gears of War seems to be use of cover. You can fire from behind cover, and do special moves to get from one covered spot to another. Unfortunately, it’s *extremely* hard to aim from behind cover. But if you don’t, you quickly die.
Like GRAW, you have a team fighting alongside you, who can be wounded but not killed, and who you can heal, but who won’t heal you. Like CoD3, there are no health bars, and you heal quickly when not taking damage. Also like CoD3, the aliens are very hard to visually distinguish from your teammates, being both “humanoids wearing high tech armor”. There’s really no excuse for this when you’re in a totally invented setting.
Although I had selected the “Casual” difficulty setting, I found Gears to be brutally punishing. In the half-dozen levels I played, there’s not a single one in which I didn’t die at least three times, often many more. Since the AI is somewhat emergent, you can’t even “learn the safe path” that other games often allow; you have to actually become skilled (or extremely lucky) at the game in order to proceed. This requires grasping some fairly complex tactics that are not trained at *all*. If I sucked so badly, I can’t imagine an actual casual gamer enjoying this. I actually gave it up in disgust on Saturday during the second level, and only played further on Sunday out of a sense of duty. As I got better, it became... less awful, though hardly what I’d call “fun”
Fourth in line: Condemned: Criminal Origins. This one wants to be extremely immersive, so there is no explicit tutorial. The opening levels of the game are designed to put you in situations where you need to know things to progress, and they do just-in-time training via pop-up text. These are spread out, so there’s a decent alternation of combat, exploration, story, and training. Whenever you are near an interactive object, you get an onscreen prompt of what button(s) to use.
The gameplay is very simple, and there was some tactical advice on advanced combat ideas as I progressed into the second level. I didn’t actually play very much, however, as this turns out to be one of those games that make me nauseous to play. (I hope BioShock doesn’t turn out to be one of those. That sort of thing is a subtle, but potentially significant limiter on market penetration.)
The story is (at least at the beginning) a goth-y police procedural. “Psycho serial killer, protagonist is a cop framed for a crime he didn’t commit, yadda yadda yadda. Been there, done that. Voice acting is quite good. (I think the protagonist’s voice Is done by the actor who is now playing a cop on Heroes.) Well done, atmospheric cutscenes, but the actual levels are Way Too Dark.
There’s a patina of CSI in the game, but it’s pretty trivial. You have a “Forensic Examination Tool”, but you are always prompted not only exactly how to use it, but even *when* to do so. It’s more of a storytelling device than a gameplay one.
Last (but not least): Prey. This is another game that doesn’t do explicit tutorials, but blends the learning in with the rest of the game, strongly favoring immersion over ease-of-use. It’s very old-school and minimalist in its attitude towards training. There are some pop-up tips in the very early stages of the game, but they are one-time tips, not systemic as many other modern games do. Many basic concepts aren’t introduced at *all*. Prey features lots of wacky games with gravity, space warps, and tools to manipulate them, but these tools are never explicitly trained. The game just puts you in situations where, if you don’t figure them out, you don’t progress. I found them easy to figure out, myself, but I worry that lots of their (potential) audience may not have. Many of the weapons are weird alien things that have atypical properties; again, not taught. Even as basic a concept as “switching weapons” was untaught, I just happened to stumble upon it.
Prey’s story is fairly cliché. Protagonist is an Indian who wants to deny his heritage, but must eventually embrace it, in order to rescue his girlfriend (and the Earth) from invading aliens. As with most heavily story-based games, it’s extremely linear.
There’s a nifty-on-the-surface feature called “Ghostwalk”. When you die, you go briefly to a mystic Indian spirit-realm, where you can charge up your health and spirit before re-emerging exactly where you were. On the one hand, this really keeps you “in the game” – I kept playing long after I really should have stopped, because this made it so easy to do “just one more level”. On the down side, it means that there is very little challenge and you eat through the content *fast*. I’ve heard that this game can be finished in less than a day, and I believe it. If you’ve read my Evergreens paper, you’ll not be surprised to find that this game decidedly was not one. That kind of forgiving gameplay only works well when coupled with optional, challenging content, that is also enticing (Lego Star Wars 2 being my current poster child for this). Prey doesn’t seem to have any unlockables except for the Xbox360 Achievements, and all the interesting achievements for this game seemed to be based on the multiplayer component.
First up was Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, or GRAW for short. It opens with an explicit tutorial, ensuring that you know all the important game functions. Each game function got introduced by on-screen pop-up text, and you needed to succeed at each task before moving on. You couldn’t actually die, but the trainer would occasionally scold you that you *would* have been killed if this wasn’t a training exercise. The first mission included a few more tutorial elements, but then they seemed to be done. The on-screen feedback also tied into the control scheme in helpful ways, by indicating a great deal about both the current state of your squad, and what actions on the D-Pad would do in the current situiation.
GRAW was the game I expected to like least (so I meant to get it out of the way first). In fact, I found it the most fun of any of the games I evaluated this weekend. This was due to the way it really functioned as a tactical game. I generally suck at shooters, so being able to concentrate on ordering my (much more accurate than me) teammates around allowed me to progress very effectively. The teammates are also far more durable than I am; if one of them gets badly wounded, he can be revived by me (or another teammate), and as long as you don’t ignore them too long, they can never actually die. You are not so lucky, and will not get revived; if you die, it’s time to reload from the last checkpoint. Happily the checkpoints are reasonably close together. It felt strangely like a game-within-a-game at times; while there were state-of-the-art realistic animations for all the combat, I actually spent most of my time watching small red diamonds with numbers attached to them on an abstract tactical map.
Next up, Call of Duty 3, yet another WWII shooter. The tutorial was fairly brief, and also very hand-holding. Each individual step of a task was trained, including such basic things like “pick up the weapon”. Whenever you need to do something context-sensitive during the game (crouch under a blockage, use an emplaced machine gun, grab an enemy grenade to throw back), there is *always* an on-screen prompt to tell you which button to press.
The gameplay is relentlessly linear. No branches, and precious few places where there’s even a real tactical choice. On the plus side, this does allow them to do lots of cool scripted sequences. They seem to be going more for “interactive WWII movie” than “game”, per se.
There are no health bars at all. Apparently, your character regenerates damage quickly – you can only get killed by sustained bullet damage or a really close grenade. Duck into cover for a few seconds, and you’re apparently fine.
I find that WWII mass infantry combat to have inherently bad game design. The battlefield is swarming with both friends and foes, and they’re quite difficult to tell apart at any distance. And since most combat is with decently ranged guns, people generally *are* at a distance.
Next in line, the much-hyped Gears of War. There’s an optional tutorial, which is very perfunctory, but does introduce some (not nearly all) of the basic mechanics. Throughout the actual game, they use both pop-up icons to tell you whenever you can interact with an object, as well as more lengthy text boxes that appear to be driven by something very like the Adaptive Training system I am working on for BioShock. That is, the game attempts to detect when you don’t know something that it thinks you *should* know, and then tells you about it.
This is an SF, post-invasion setting, with little explanation of the background; you’re just thrust in media res. It’s a grim, gritty, mostly grey world. Beautiful rendering technology wasted on war-torn ruins.
The primary “new idea” in Gears of War seems to be use of cover. You can fire from behind cover, and do special moves to get from one covered spot to another. Unfortunately, it’s *extremely* hard to aim from behind cover. But if you don’t, you quickly die.
Like GRAW, you have a team fighting alongside you, who can be wounded but not killed, and who you can heal, but who won’t heal you. Like CoD3, there are no health bars, and you heal quickly when not taking damage. Also like CoD3, the aliens are very hard to visually distinguish from your teammates, being both “humanoids wearing high tech armor”. There’s really no excuse for this when you’re in a totally invented setting.
Although I had selected the “Casual” difficulty setting, I found Gears to be brutally punishing. In the half-dozen levels I played, there’s not a single one in which I didn’t die at least three times, often many more. Since the AI is somewhat emergent, you can’t even “learn the safe path” that other games often allow; you have to actually become skilled (or extremely lucky) at the game in order to proceed. This requires grasping some fairly complex tactics that are not trained at *all*. If I sucked so badly, I can’t imagine an actual casual gamer enjoying this. I actually gave it up in disgust on Saturday during the second level, and only played further on Sunday out of a sense of duty. As I got better, it became... less awful, though hardly what I’d call “fun”
Fourth in line: Condemned: Criminal Origins. This one wants to be extremely immersive, so there is no explicit tutorial. The opening levels of the game are designed to put you in situations where you need to know things to progress, and they do just-in-time training via pop-up text. These are spread out, so there’s a decent alternation of combat, exploration, story, and training. Whenever you are near an interactive object, you get an onscreen prompt of what button(s) to use.
The gameplay is very simple, and there was some tactical advice on advanced combat ideas as I progressed into the second level. I didn’t actually play very much, however, as this turns out to be one of those games that make me nauseous to play. (I hope BioShock doesn’t turn out to be one of those. That sort of thing is a subtle, but potentially significant limiter on market penetration.)
The story is (at least at the beginning) a goth-y police procedural. “Psycho serial killer, protagonist is a cop framed for a crime he didn’t commit, yadda yadda yadda. Been there, done that. Voice acting is quite good. (I think the protagonist’s voice Is done by the actor who is now playing a cop on Heroes.) Well done, atmospheric cutscenes, but the actual levels are Way Too Dark.
There’s a patina of CSI in the game, but it’s pretty trivial. You have a “Forensic Examination Tool”, but you are always prompted not only exactly how to use it, but even *when* to do so. It’s more of a storytelling device than a gameplay one.
Last (but not least): Prey. This is another game that doesn’t do explicit tutorials, but blends the learning in with the rest of the game, strongly favoring immersion over ease-of-use. It’s very old-school and minimalist in its attitude towards training. There are some pop-up tips in the very early stages of the game, but they are one-time tips, not systemic as many other modern games do. Many basic concepts aren’t introduced at *all*. Prey features lots of wacky games with gravity, space warps, and tools to manipulate them, but these tools are never explicitly trained. The game just puts you in situations where, if you don’t figure them out, you don’t progress. I found them easy to figure out, myself, but I worry that lots of their (potential) audience may not have. Many of the weapons are weird alien things that have atypical properties; again, not taught. Even as basic a concept as “switching weapons” was untaught, I just happened to stumble upon it.
Prey’s story is fairly cliché. Protagonist is an Indian who wants to deny his heritage, but must eventually embrace it, in order to rescue his girlfriend (and the Earth) from invading aliens. As with most heavily story-based games, it’s extremely linear.
There’s a nifty-on-the-surface feature called “Ghostwalk”. When you die, you go briefly to a mystic Indian spirit-realm, where you can charge up your health and spirit before re-emerging exactly where you were. On the one hand, this really keeps you “in the game” – I kept playing long after I really should have stopped, because this made it so easy to do “just one more level”. On the down side, it means that there is very little challenge and you eat through the content *fast*. I’ve heard that this game can be finished in less than a day, and I believe it. If you’ve read my Evergreens paper, you’ll not be surprised to find that this game decidedly was not one. That kind of forgiving gameplay only works well when coupled with optional, challenging content, that is also enticing (Lego Star Wars 2 being my current poster child for this). Prey doesn’t seem to have any unlockables except for the Xbox360 Achievements, and all the interesting achievements for this game seemed to be based on the multiplayer component.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-07 10:34 pm (UTC)The only thing that really game me motion sickness was whichever Doom or Wulfenstein had your weapons "bouncing" as you ran...realistic, but distracting...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-08 01:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-07 11:50 pm (UTC)I'm curious as to what you mean when you say "this turns out to be one of those games that make me nauseous to play." Is this due to the visceral content of the game or some amorality to the violence? Or do you mean it in terms of vertiginous rendering/motion?
Also, are the levels "Way Too Dark" literally--that is, they're not well-lit enough--or metaphorically? Though I don't play a lot of computer games (and basically no console games), I have an interest in horror-related titles. I haven't seen a lot of good ones, but I like to keep my peepers trained for when they appear, and for what's wrong with the rest of the releases.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-08 01:08 am (UTC)That would be the one. It completely bypasses anything close to the conscious level, just makes me carsick. (And I don't even get carsick any more...)
The darkness I complain of is literal, not metaphorical. When people try to make a scary game, darkness is the first thing they think of. But if you overdo it, the player has so much frustration at not being able to navigate properly that they don't have room left over for fright. Hm. That's actualy an important insight. It wasn't just that the levels were dark (though they were), it was that *combined* with the fact that, even when lit, they consisted of lots of very similar corridors and rooms, with few landmarks.
The game I'm working on started life in the horror genre, but has mutated somewhat. The emotional tone now is not so much one of fear or dread, but discomfort and disgust. We'll see how that works out...