Monday, December 22, 2008

You're not the boss of me:Gears Of War 2, Rise of the Argonauts & Brothers in Arms 3

When did boss battles go from being a means of ramping up the players experience to culminate in a hopefully satisfying use of the skills learned, to being game-breaking punishments?

Boss battles come in a gazillion different forms ranging from escaping ever-increasing hordes of enemies in a ever-decreasing area (COD 4), to a big alien dude you shoot stuff at its weak spots to make it roll over and die (Lost Planet). Shadows of the Colossus is an example of a game made of nothing but boss battles as the player finds way to attack an kill massive creatures, all with unique weaknesses and behaviors. All of these games create these battles organically withing the story, using them as storytelling elements to drive to plot as well as engage the player.

Gears of War 2 has one of the worst boss battles I have ever played, to the point that I actually quit playing. The battle is not only achingly repetitive and tiresome, it actually breaks the immersiveness of the game and violates the physics engine. Facing the locust villian Skorge, the player has to avoid grenades, falling rocks, explosive "tickers" and finally, massive wood columns that Skorge chainsaws through, causing them to topple.

Directly on the player.

Even if they are behind the column when it starts to fall.

I screamed cheap at the screen more than once because the developers were so unrelentingly lazy making this game that they broke the gameplay in order to make the battle more difficult. This is unacceptable. Gears 2 is a mediocre rehash of the first game at best and its makers are clearly resting on their laurels.

Rise of the Argonauts uses the same engine, as does Brothers in Arms as Gears 2, the Unreal 3 engine. Epic has often been labeled as the only developer capable of manipulating the engine to its fullest (including a lawsuit from Silicon Knights) and I am starting to get an inkling why. They are the only ones who don't try to make the engine do something its not good at. Of the the three Epic games made on the engine, they are rely on tightly controlled, small,linear environments surrounded by lush, but unreachable, visuals. Rise, Brothers, Mass Effect, etc etc, use the engine to create massive environments where you can usually go to what you can see. This engine is not made to do this, resulting is massive amounts of texture pop-in, frame-rate issues and general glitches. It makes one wonder if other developers were sold a bill of goods on the capabilities of the engine, specs that Epic itself does not have the engine do, only to have it fall short.

Rise of the Argonauts, in direct comparison to Gears 2, is receiving an entirely unfair critical drubbing compared to Gears, which I consider to be an inferior single-player game. Rise has a compelling emotional plot that drives the player forward. It does exhibit a lack of final polish in its animations, voice work and gameplay, but overall the game is fun and tells a great story. It seeks to engage the player emotionally rather than viscerally, using Mass Effect inspired dialogue trees and some very clever writing. Any fan of Greek myth should rent this game. It too has a boss battle that frustrated the snot out of me but I finally beat it, because I wanted to see what happened next. I didn't care with Gears 2. Argonauts also has babes in it, which is nice. I beat Rise of the Argonauts in 2 days of non-stop play, I liked the game that much.

Brothers In Arms 3 also draws the player in emotionally, asking us to invest in the characters, including a "Previously on..." cutscene that shows the first two games. Using a linear layout, like Gears, BIA drives the player and their squad forward against the German defenses.Reasonably smart AI (other than when it runs down the middle of the street rather than following you through back yards) drives the squads and they follow commands well. The control scheme is smart and intuitive and the cover system allows the player slightly more protection from the hail of bullets.

Satisfying and challenging without being stupidly difficult, BIA 3 is fine game that deserves more attention than it is getting from consumers. I am looking forward to beating it soon.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Secur-bomb

DRM (digital rights management) has been a growing concern for years now as publishers of any and all media try to find new and different ways of controlling the release and prorogation of that media to consumers.

Unfortunately, last century paradigms are still being applied to 21st century media, and industry by industry try and fail, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Napster lead the way in the 1990's in regards to music and the internet. Consumers came to like and more importantly desire portability of music in manner never before scene. Mix-tapes and CD's become irrelevant in an era where hundreds and eventually thousands of songs could be shuttled around in smaller and smaller devices. Relatively small file sizes allowed consumers to transfer and share their music with others over email, the internet and peer to peer.

The music industry slow response was first to litigate everyone in sight to try and prevent music sharing, then misguided attempts of DRM were implemented (Sony rootkits, magic marker workarounds). Only Apple's monolithic hardware allowed them to leverage the music industry to become the single success story in monetizing digital delivery of music with Itunes, and even they have DRM laden product, though workarounds are easy to find.

As broadband internet has become ubiquitous, fast and cheap (relatively) the film industry has fallen into the same trap. By not adapting to the media rather than trying to force the media to adapt to an outdated business plan, movies are now traded on the net through P2P almost as frequently as music. Blockbuster hits can be found, in varying quality, on the net within days or hours of the films release to theaters. Like the mistakes made by the music industry, the RIAA have tried to litigate everyone they can find, while forcing different forms of DRM into their product. Unfortunately, each new encryption program is cracked within its first year of existence up to and including blu-ray. In a war of mutual assured destruction the music biz has shown they cannot win, because the courts and governments move exponentially slower than technology. Laws will always be far behind the ability to circumvent those laws. The only reasonable solution is to create a new paradigm for a new form of business.

Piracy and DRM have always been a bone of contention in the games industry with many early PC developers growing their fanbase and bank accounts by giving aware portions of the games as "shareware". The advent of consoles made piracy more difficult but like any encryption eventually beatable given time and a world of hackers who will do it just to prove they can. This has lead to a dichotomous approach to protecting and monetizing the intellectual property of the company while also trying not to alienate an increasingly well-informed and pro-active audience.

Various forms of DRM have begun to plague the releases of major companies, the latest and most prevalent being Secur-rom. Once a simple disc-check to ensure the game is in the computers drive when the game is started, secur-rom is now an invasive and often invisible piece of spyware that sits on the user's harddrive long after the game has been uninstalled. Lawsuits have sprung up regarding this as have virtual attacks against the bottom line of companies like EA with hundreds if not thousands of users spamming consumer review sites like Amazon with bad reviews on product because of the restrictive DRM.

Most disappointly my beloved Fallout 3 uses securom, but as quoted by the developers, "only as a disc check" which is fine, except that if I try to have a process explorer running (showing me what is running on my system and eating up resources) when I try to start the game, securom crashes out. Apparently it doesn't want you to know what it is doing on your computer, which to me is unacceptable and the behaviour of spyware or a virus.

It appears the game industry is now heading down the same path as music and film before it, the question is only whether there are lessons to be learned.