I got a Wii this weekend (finally).  I also bought Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess yesterday, and have spent the better part of this afternoon exploring Hyrule – or, well, the tiny bit of Hyrule I’ve managed to see so far.  (I was informed by my friend Mark that TP is probably the longest Zelda game in the series – and boy howdy, considering I”ve essentially just spent the last 4 hours revisiting the same three or four areas, I can more or less guarantee that’s right.)

The game itself is fun.  It has that undeniable Zelda feel – enemies are a little quirky, the quests are a little oddball without being goofy, and there’s some nice puzzles along the way. One thing that’s bothered me so far (and I have no idea if this is the case) is the linear feel of the game – it lacks that expansive overworld that’s been signature of the series since the beginning.  Perhaps the exploration comes later, once I finally get out of the forest… I sure hope so.  So far, moving from one dungeon-like area (even the village feels a little like a constrained dungeon) to another begins to wear and get repetitive.  I recall having fun just riding Epona across the landscape in Ocarina of Time and having a blast finding stuff to do.  This just feels cramped.

The controls are a little… frenetic.  You wiggle your controller to swing the sword, and use various button combinations for different types of attacks.  During pitched battles I feel like I’m just flailing around aimlessly.  This is the Wii equivalent of button mashing.  However, unlike button mashing, which to the untrained eye might look like skill, this just looks like someone having a seizure.  Still, the controls are fairly responsive, and auto-targeting is a great boon.  So, ultimately, it doesn’t distract too much from the fun.

Overall, the experience has been enjoyable.  It’s still a little too early (er… for me) to tell if this is a great game, but I haven’t been discouraged from going forward.  So good times.

I read something today that made me really, really sad, in that pitying way one gets sad when you see and know something great, and someone just fails utterly to observe it.  Jared sent me a link to a retrospective review of Planescape: Torment, and (while I’ll link to the article later when I get home) I read something in the comments to the article that made my heart break.

The comment went something along the lines of: “Even when it came out the game camera was very claustrophobic, and [in the process of the game engine's aging] it hasn’t gotten much better…” and then went on to suggest that a fan come up with a resolution “fix.”

I’ll let that sink in for a moment.

Ok.  You, sir, are an idiot.

No.  No.  You, sir, are an idiot.

Claustrophobia?  It’s the point.  It’s Sigil, for Chrissakes.  Imagine New York City on steroids and LSD.  It’s a tiny cramped space filled with every odd nick nack in the universe, jam packed with people trying ot scrape a living off of each other, places packed so tight with the effluvia of everyday (and supernatural…) life that a tiny closet is often used to house a family of three.

The visual depictions of Sigil in Torment?  Probably the most faithful reimagination that a video game could ever possibly achieve of a pen and paper setting!  Those vistas are beautiful, the way that the building protrude from nauseatingly sharp angles, bars and wires and powers know what else jut out from every surface, making you feel small and insignificant and lost in this chaotic maelstrom.

And the claustrophobia lightens up a lot once you get out of Sigil’s oppressive atmosphere.  Baator is a hellish, sweeping desert; the buildings in Curst are spaced out and as large as they should be; the Mazes (both the hag’s and the Nameless One’s)  and other dungeons are built more or less like the dungeons of other similar CRPGs…

Ugh.  Claustrophobia was the point, you moron.  To suggest you fix it is akin to asking someone to clearly put dimples on the Mona Lisa’s smile.

Game: Hitman: Blood Money
Platform: PS2 (Also available for the PC, XBox 360, others)

The fourth installment of the Hitman series, Blood Money continues to build upon a great premise: A man, a garrote, a target, and a mission. Once again, you step into the shoes of Agent 47, a genetically engineered assassin working for the mysterious Agency (although now we learn it is actually the International Contracts Agency.) Alongside your Moneypennyesque contact Diana, you reign unholy vengeance upon a string of lowlifes, porn kings, drug lords and murderers.

Insofar as controls and gameplay goes, little has changed. You still control 47 from the typical sneaker camera angles, with an option to go first person for the First Person Shooter experience. You sneak, climb and run across the maps of your various missions in order to get to and eliminate your target, using a variety of weapons and tools to help you on your way. Graphics have gotten slightly better, but (at least on my machine) not by a terrible amount. There does seem to be a decided increase in the amount of skin shown (no actual nudity, despite some suggestive sexual content, but some costumes might as well be totally nude – then again, I also say this about certain items of real world clothing, so there you have your bias.)

One new change that has come to play is that you can now buy local intelligence which serves as hints towards accomplishing your mission, usually pointing out important clues that you would otherwise not think of (your target’s habits, for example, or ways you can access particular parts of the map.) The hints aren’t terribly expensive, which is good because more often than not they won’t be as useful as you’d like them to be.

The game also features a new notoriety system: basically, the more witnesses you leave behind, or if you’re caught on camera (at any time) the easier you will be to recognize in later missions. This is reflected in your Notoriety score, which ranges from 0 – 100. (Mine went as far as the 40s after I particularly bungled a mission in New Orleans by accidentally pulling out a remote mine in the middle of a dance club. I was still getting used to the PS2 controls, having only played the previous titles only on the PC. At that point, I had already finished the mission, more or less Boondock Saints style [read: lots of bodies, no witnesses], and I wasn’t going to restart the mission, so I ran to the extraction point while being fired upon by the coppers. Considering my score before that mission was, I think, 7, you can see how seriously you can flub up the rest of the game with a careless deed.) Luckily, you also get paid for each mission you do, and can use that money to pay off witnesses, bribe the local police, and even buy yourself a new identity (if you really messed up a mission.) These bribes can get expensive, and you can only buy them once per mission, so some amount of discretion is still necessary.

You can also use the money you earn from missions to upgrade your equipment, from your customized signature Silverballers, to your trusty sniper rifle, to a silent and deadly MP5.

Mission difficulty seems to actually have quite the range in this game. I actually found the missions got easier as I went along (except for the final mission, which I had to redo seven or eight times.) I’m not sure if this is because I was getting better at infiltrating and assassinating (which I was – by this point I was using only the standard mission equipment, not bothering to pack even my trusty silenced twin Silverballers) or if the missions were just, in and of themselves, getting easier. Meanwhile, some of the earlier missions were just baffling in their complexity – I remember almost tossing the controller at the TV in frustration during the second and third missions. Perhaps this was because I wasn’t used to the controllers, which at times can be a tad counterintuitive.

The story is also pretty well crafted. 47 is back to working with the Agency after his retirement in Italy (Hitman 2: Silent Assassin), taking on fairly high profile cases. This catches the eye of… well, a guy in a wheelchair whom I never went back to find out what he was publically. The story unfolds a bit like it did in Hitman: Contracts, with a present day story and several “flash backs” to some prominent missions (which is where you take over.) The present day storyline revolves around the dude in the wheelchair being interviewed by a reporter. The president, apparently, is pro-cloning (a heated political issue,) and the wheelchair dude is convinced cloning is… well, to put it in his words “a terrorist’s wet dream.” Moreover, he seems to know too much about 47, specifically that he’s a clone, and that he’s the pinnacle of a cloning project to create the perfect assassin (see Hitman: Codename 47.) With each passing mission, a conspiracy begins to unfold: moles within the Agency, everything falling apart, betrayal, all that good spy stuff.

At first, trying to figure out precisely what was going on was kind of interesting. My original belief was that someone, Mr. Wheelchair probably but not necessarily, had gained access to some of 47’s bretheren clones and was using them to set up 47 to take the fall. This was largely backed up by Mr. Wheelchair’s repeated assertions to the reporter that he had, indeed, killed 47. (He also kept saying “we have evidence” or “we have video tape”, which stretches the game’s sense of reality especially since in any mission where I was caught on cameras I specifically made it a point to recover all evidence of my presence.)

It turns out I was quite wrong.

But I won’t spoil it, because the moment I realized what was going on was one of those “Holy Shit, That’s Awesome!” moments that are so incredibly rare in video games these days. Let me just say the final mission is you, locked in a church, with your dual Silverballers, and the bastards who set you up for a fall. I’d say it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, except it was much more like shooting barracuda/piranha cross-hybrids in a barrel while you’re in the barrel, naked, with them. The analogy is similar, but it’s not as easy as it would appear. (More enjoyable, however.)

The missions themselves are all more or less standard assassination plots. Disappointingly, you only get to use the sniper rifle, once, during the training mission. (It’s possible to use it in other missions, but I didn’t find a single one where it was actually useful.) The other missions can be accomplished with either your garrote, a poisoned syringe, or your remote controlled undetectable mines. (They’re about the size of a hockey puck.) You do now have the ability to push people off railings and windows, which is fairly viscerally appealing. If none of these options are available, you can typically arrange accidents.

At the end of the mission you can review how you did by reading about the incident in the newspaper. If witnesses saw you, or if the police have clues as to your identity, you can read about it in the headlines. There’s also some information on the overall plot of the game, hidden among the various side stories if you want to sit through and read all of them.

So, overall, far less gunplay than the previous titles in the series. The game’s also fairly short: at only 12 missions, the game is only as long as Hitman: Contracts was (Codename 47 was a little longer, and Silent Assassin was the longest of the series, with well over 15 missions.) Still, replayability is pretty high, with at least two “acceptable” ways to kill each target in every mission (Two things: first, by acceptable I mean perfectly and silently, without mess or too many witnesses; second, each mission offers at least two targets, so that’s at least four different times you can replay a mission, not to mention increased difficulty ratings.) And if you get bored of being a silent assassin, there’s always Boondocks Style.

All in all, I say Hitman: Blood Money is a great time. It’s quite accurately rated M, for pretty much the obvious, and it shouldn’t be played by children below a certain age of maturity. Highly recommended 4 out of 5.

Game: Star Wars: Empire at War
Genre: Real Time Strategy

Something really strange is going on at Lucasarts. The last few Star Wars games have been, contrary to historical precedent, really good. I gave my review of Battlefront 2 a couple of months ago, and overall it was a good game, delivering fully on what it promised to deliver: Good shoot-em-up action in the Star Wars universe. Empire at War promises to deliver an RTS experience in the Star Wars universe.

And it fails in that regard. Which isnt’ to say that it’s a bad thing. In fact, I’d have to say that as far as failures go, this has to be one of the greatest ones in gaming history. It’s unfair to call the game a conquest/empire building game like Civilization. The game’s elements fall surprisingly flat at delivering this. Yet, it’s far better to call it an empire building game than it is to call it a real time strategy game. In fact, the best thing you can call it is a real time empire building game.

Thankfully, while the end result may not have been as advertised, it is surprisingly good fun. It has some bads – namely the graphical department and the difficulty/learning curve. But overall, it is really really good.

The Dark Side
First the bads. The graphics are reminiscent of Masters of Orion 3. Which doesn’t mean they’re bad. It means they’re old – about three or four years old. In effect, the graphics are mediocre. Which, in a game with so much eye-candy as Star Wars tends to have, it means a lot is lost in the translation. Again, not to imply the graphics are bad, they simply could have been better.

The game might have required a Cray supercomputer to run, but it could have looked better.

The learning curve is also something of a pain in the ass. The tutorial is there and it helps quite a bit. But it leaves you only with the basics, and there’s very little growth in the unit interactions. Most RTSes take you by stages – first you learn your infantry, fighting other infantry positions, then you move up to armored units, then heavier armors, then specialty units, etc. People who’ve played Star Craft or any RTS by Westwood know what I’m talking about. In EAW, you’re sort of thrown into the mix with a small series of light infantry and light armor, and are kind of expected to learn on your own what the best combination of each is. (Which is actually very easy to learn as the Rebels – they have the typical “one infantry’s great against infantry the other’s great against armor” and “one light armor’s good against armor the other against infantry.” But the Empire is a fucking pissjob at it. The only infantry unit they have is the Stormtrooper, which from what I’ve seen really and truly sucks against both infantry and armor.)

Space combat suffers the same learning curve disability, though it is surprisingly easier. Mostly because it’s easy to tell which ships are most effective against others (big ships = good against big ships/stations, small ships/fighters = good against small ships/fighters, bombers = good against big ships.)

A New Hope
However, the game overall is fun, once you get over the initial “How the fuck did a bunch of pirates kill four stormtrooper brigades?!” reaction. You learn to manage your numbers. (I’ve learned that the Empire works best under the Veer’s Doctrine: Victory through Overwhelming AT-ATs, whereas enough Rebel infantry in proper ratios can kill anything but your biggest challenges.) You learn not to assault planets without at least three capital ships and a bunch of fighters. You learn to separate your bombers and interceptors to get the best advantages. It takes some getting used to, but you get there.

The game plays like… well, in truth, it plays like Risk – the board game. You build units, and then you use those units to take over other territories, which increases your resources… etc. There are a few other special things (hero units that let you do special missions) but overall it feels a lot like Risk. Which, I liked Risk, so it’s a plus for me. It’s not an empire-building game because resource gathering and building works a lot like it would in an RTS. It’s not an RTS because unit building/deployment works exactly like it does in an empire-building game.

The overall result is a game that cuts through the boring bullshit of the empire building game, and through the brainless “build 100 units of X type and smash your enemy” of the typical RTS. It’s a game where you have to manage your available resources well. In order to conquer a planet, you first have to clear the space around it by use of space fleets. Once that’s done, you can then initiate a planetary assault and fight the ground battle. The catch is, you can only bring to the ground battle the units available in your fleet. If you have surviving bombers in your fleet above the planet, you can call bombing runs while on ground assault.

You can also bring your hero units into the ground battles. Boba Fett has an awesome flame-thrower attack that simply devastates infantry units.

What could have been better
Aside the graphics, there is one thing that could have been better. And I blame Star Wars: Rebellion entirely for this thought: Diplomacy. It somehow feels wrong for the Rebellion to simply subjugate the local population of a planet (and in the beginning of the game, you’ll likely be dealing with local pirates and smugglers, as opposed to Imperial forces) into submission. That’s the Empire’s Modus Operandi.

More heroes would have been fun, too. Again, I blame Rebellion entirely for this.

Another thing I thought – if they somehow managed to blend EAW with Battlegrounds. That would’ve been awesome. A difficult project, and I doubt it’d have too much appeal, but I think it would have been awesome.

Score: 4 out of 5.

Game: Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach
Genre: Mass Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game
Rating: 3/5

The latest entry into the world of Mass Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games is a fitting entry. It is an entry that fans of the genre have been waiting for since the inception of the MMORPG genre. The granddaddy of roleplaying games: Dungeons & Dragons.

And like the geriatric RPG it is, D&D makes its translation into the digitized world of the Intarweb. How does it hold up when compared to the other MMORPGs out there?

Ok. So the game is currently only at its Beta stage. Things may very well change between now and when the game ships. But from what I’ve seen… they have to do some pretty major changes to the leveling system in order for the game to be worth my while.

What’s wrong with it
I shall first begin with what is wrong with the game. I begin in this fashion because, frankly, there’s not a whole lot that is actually wrong with it. It is a good game, and it deserves to be played.

My major beef with the game is leveling. Standard (pen and paper) D&D has a 20 level system (supplemented by an infinity of “epic” levels after that.) Most MMORPGS have 60 or 100 levels before they cap out. This, you can see, is problematic. How did Turbine face this problem? They subleveled the levels, and raised the XP needed to reach a new level by… a lot. Now every 1/5ths of the way to your new level you get an “Action point”, which you can use to buy special bonuses to your currently existing abilities. For example, the wizard can choose Energy of the Scholar to cast 2 more spells (a handy bonus.) Nifty, huh? Well, yes and no.

See, leveling actually takes forever. I had to complete a dozen adventures and repeat them at least once before I could actually reach a new level. Decidedly NOT fun. The minor bonuses you get along the way, while neat, do not make up for the fact that your abilities, feats, skills, etc., are essentially all the same. And while this is fairly transparent the first half of the level, it’s only painfully obvious during the latter half, where you no longer care about reaching the next sublevel, you just want your damn 4,000 xps to get to level 2 (or whatever.)

And, of course, once you reach that precious level… you get nothing. That is, you get nothing that you wouldn’t get in regular D&D. You get skill points, and whatever your class abilities allow – which means my spells deal a little bit more damage, and I can memorize an extra 1st lvel spell. Don’t get me wrong, that extra spell slot is absolutely useful, but it’s not a brand new spell level. I’ve done every plausible quest in this first area of the game, and I feel I have nothing to show for it.

The leveling system, really, keeps me from giving the game a better score.

Ok, well, that kinda sucks… There anything good about it?
Actually, yes, there’s a lot of good things about it. First off, the graphics and effects are actually quite nice. I’m not sure which has better graphics – WoW or DDO. I think they’re about equal – which can be considered a bad thing, as WoW came out over a year ago, and DDO is, well, still in the experimental stage. It should look better than that, but as it looks great anyhow, we can’t exactly hold the graphics against the game.

Gameplay is also fairly intuitive – except the fact that the right mouse button is an attack button. May not seem wierd – or inconvenient – until you’re holding a crossbow loaded with (very expensive and VERY limited) magic +1 bolts and you accidentally hit the right mouse button while attempting to interact with an object. There’s a few things about object interaction that aren’t quite as intuitive as the rest of the interface. But you learn them with practice, something the game affords quite a bit of.

The quests are, also, very fun. It’s a very social game. Once you finish the first half dozen or so missions, you really can’t go any of them solo anymore. Luckily, finding a party is actually very easy. (I find it’s easier if you start your own party and start recruiting people instead of waiting to be recruited.) there’s a useful list of people looking to join groups, so all you need to do is open up that window and start recruiting folk. That also provides info on the quest or type of quest they want to do – useful if you both ahve to accomplish the same thing.

But on to the quests themselves. They’re not your typical MMO quests. I know what you’re thinking – like CoH, they only say they aren’t your typical MMO quest. But trust me, they’re not. There is very little emphasis on killing things. there are no “Go to X and kill 10 of Y” type quests (at least that I’ve run into.) They usually involve object oriented things – like Rescue some guy’s wife, get a miller to tell you where he hid some stolen goods, or disrupt a gambling arena for the local church. Combat isn’t exactly optional, but I wouldn’t say it’s necessary. I think you get more XP if you kill things, but you could – theoretically – accomplish most missions without killing a thing – presuming you have a high enough sneak ability. Like in good D&D, however, combat is just one of those things that sometimes can’t be avoided, so trying to solo things as a rogue – NOT a good idea.

Pack a cleric. Seriously. That healing magic of theirs doubles or triples your solo effectiveness.

Some might find the lacck of soloability a drag. But, well, two thigns. One, it is a MMORPG. And two, it’s actually pretty easy to group, and for the most part really fun. It’s hard to get a bad group. Though, I’m sure, once the game hits the mass market, like everything else, you’ll get the stupid aggro players who just go around aggroing every monster in the field and then running away. That, sad to say, is just the way MMOs go.

Also, some of the adventures are purely visually stunning. It’s not like CoH where the instances all look exactly the same. This isn’t to imply that the DDO ones all look exactly different. Simply to say that the environments you go to with each adventure are pretty varied, so one doesn’t feel like they’re going through the same hallway over and over (and over) again. Plus, the lighthouse library is the most awesome library I have ever seen.

As to those who might be worried with D&Ds spellcasting system – do not fret. The game uses spell points as well as spell memorization. So while you can’t cast ALL of your spells ALL of the time, you CAN cast SOME of your spells ALL of the time (at least, until you run out of the spell points – and sorcerers can cast ALL of their spells ALL of the time, since they don’t prepare spells anyhow.) I kind of wish they had handled the longer spell durations better. Mage Armor should last longer than 5 minutes, even though most adventures finish in 5 minutes (long ones can go 7+, which means I need to recast Mage Armor.) But that’s just a pet peeve of mine, and in no way does it actually detract from the experience.

Oh yeah, and the wizard/sorcerer spells do kick some major ass. Unlike in P&P D&D, wizards can actually stand to be a great part of a combat team. Burning Hands can mow down three or four enemies at once, and since you can cast two or three in succession, it’s like a hail of hellfire. Good times.

Overall, the game is fun. It deserves to be played. But… struggling for three days in order to reach a level where I don’t earn anything? Not my idea of a good time. I play original D&D regularly, so I don’t really need an RPG fix by way of MMOs. It simply didn’t hold me enough to push me into the 4/5 realm of a “Should Buy” game.

Final summation? Good game, and it’ll probably survive WoW’s massive onslaught. They did most of the things I wanted them to do right. But they didn’t handle the leveling right. To be honest, I knew they wouldn’t. You simply can’t port a good D&D level system into MMO. Well, you can, but it takes a lot of work. A lot more work than they gave it, IMO.

If you’re a fan of D&D and MMOs, I think you should buy this game and give it a shot. It’s well worth a month of your time. But I’m not into MMOs. I’m not into paying $14 a month. And this game didn’t convince me it was worth it to pay $14 a month (Editor’s Note: World of Warcraft didn’t convince me it was worth $14 a month. City of Heroes didn’t convince me it was worth $14 a month. No MMO has ever convinced me it was worth $14 a month. Am I the only one who feels this way?)