For the last couple of years there has been a gaming conference here in the Triangle area (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) aptly named the Triangle Game Conference. It's put on by my school Wake Technical Community College (where I'm studying game design) and some of the local game companies like Insomniac and Epic. Not many people know this but this area of North Carolina is home to more than 40 game or simulation companies.
I meant to go in previous years but was to busy. This year however I had a chance to go. I was impressed with the size of the conference. It's no E3 or GDC by any means but for only being around for 3 years I think it's doing quite well. I think what sets this conference apart is its focus on students. All of the seminars held throughout the two days were aimed at the burgeoning designer/programmer/artist. Most of the attendees were students which initially surprised me but makes sense since its put on by Wake Tech and there are a lot of colleges in the area (NC State has a top rate computer science department, so I've heard).
I only went for the second day but I had a lot of fun and learned a lot as well. The best seminars I attended were given by writers. Writing is one of the avenues I'm looking at for getting into the industry so they were relevant to me. But I found that writers also make the most engrossing speakers (duh). On the other hand I should have known better than to expect to get anything out of a 50 minute seminar on advanced physics engines.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
The Suck of Anchorage
So I finished Operation: Anchorage. It started off as a fast moving diversion, but the ride was too short and the scenery along the way wasn't that great. Things went down hill when I realized I had missed one of the intel items and upon walking all the way back to get it I realized it was in a section of the map I couldn't get back to. It let me go back to the long section right after it so that I wasted 10 min walking through it, but no, not the section I needed to get to. Why didn't they block off all the past sections so I wouldn't waste my time? Or better yet, not block off sections at all? There was no reason to do it in the first place. Anyway, being the tight-ass completionist that I am, I had to revert to a previous save and wasted yet another hour.
After the opening part of the Anchorage simulation you have all your guns taken from you and you have to requisition equipment kits as if you were playing Battlefield or something. Why??? Carrying a variety of weapons is one of the things that makes Fallout such a fun game! None of the loadouts includes the coolest weapon in O:A, the Gauss rifle. You can get the rifle but only if you pass a speech test which I failed because I was only level 4. Why would you make an expansion with only one interesting new weapon, and then make it really hard to get? I should get to play with it the whole time! That's what I paid five dollars for!!! Stupid.
The coolest part is that you put together a squad of AI companions from a list of the usual soldier archetypes, a mister gutsy, or a sentry bot. I picked the sentry bot. This is cool until you realize that Fallout 3's weakest point is its piss-poor companion AI. You have no control over your team. You tell them when to attack and they do it until the mission is done. They kill things well enough, almost too well. The game is so easy I could have gone without them; there are health and ammo refills all over the place.
It didn't actually get hard until the end when you fight the Chinese general.
**Kinda Spoiler Alert**
The last part of the simulation is a raid against the Chinese stronghold. You run in to this last area together with a few U.S. soldiers in power armor (who's presence makes the game even easier) and in front of you is this general and some elite Chinese soldiers. You exchange some meaningless dialog and then the general attacks you, head on, with a sword. Well hes going to have a hard time against my gun! No, it turns out he's got more hit points than a whole pack of deathclaws. So I start shooting him but I don't have a lot of action points so I'm forced to fire outside of V.A.T.S.. I realize I'm taking a lot of damage but it doesn't look like he's hitting me. Suddenly I'm dead. I figure that maybe the Chinese soldiers are shooting me but when I target them they are green (friendly). I finally realize that it's my own fucking men shooting me! As I attempt to shoot the general they keep running through my line of fire, and when they get hit they turn on me! What kind of STUPIDMOTHERFUCKINGSHIT is that!? WHY ARE THEY EVEN THERE!?!? The Chinese soldiers aren't shooting at me so its not like they are protecting me. The whole thing is just to create the illusion of a battle. Sorry, but the illusion was shattered when a hand full of frag grenades failed to scratch the tiny oriental man who's only protection was a cotton uniform!! In order to beat it I had to run in circles around the battlefield so that the general couldn't hit me, waiting for my AP to recover so I could shoot him in V.A.T.S., so as not to accidentally hit any of my own men. If I were to summarize the experience it would be: Not. Fun. At. All.
Basically Operation: Anchorage takes all the things that makes Fallout 3 great and trows them out while accentuating the few crappy parts. If you think about it, an expansion where you get to go back and fight one of the pivotal battles of the war that destroyed the world should have been Amazing! Instead it's just a big disappointment. Just to make up for it I blew up Megaton three or four times. Awesome. Every. Time.
I'm taking a Fallout break and going back to Final Fantasy 13 for a while.
After the opening part of the Anchorage simulation you have all your guns taken from you and you have to requisition equipment kits as if you were playing Battlefield or something. Why??? Carrying a variety of weapons is one of the things that makes Fallout such a fun game! None of the loadouts includes the coolest weapon in O:A, the Gauss rifle. You can get the rifle but only if you pass a speech test which I failed because I was only level 4. Why would you make an expansion with only one interesting new weapon, and then make it really hard to get? I should get to play with it the whole time! That's what I paid five dollars for!!! Stupid.
The coolest part is that you put together a squad of AI companions from a list of the usual soldier archetypes, a mister gutsy, or a sentry bot. I picked the sentry bot. This is cool until you realize that Fallout 3's weakest point is its piss-poor companion AI. You have no control over your team. You tell them when to attack and they do it until the mission is done. They kill things well enough, almost too well. The game is so easy I could have gone without them; there are health and ammo refills all over the place.
It didn't actually get hard until the end when you fight the Chinese general.
**Kinda Spoiler Alert**
The last part of the simulation is a raid against the Chinese stronghold. You run in to this last area together with a few U.S. soldiers in power armor (who's presence makes the game even easier) and in front of you is this general and some elite Chinese soldiers. You exchange some meaningless dialog and then the general attacks you, head on, with a sword. Well hes going to have a hard time against my gun! No, it turns out he's got more hit points than a whole pack of deathclaws. So I start shooting him but I don't have a lot of action points so I'm forced to fire outside of V.A.T.S.. I realize I'm taking a lot of damage but it doesn't look like he's hitting me. Suddenly I'm dead. I figure that maybe the Chinese soldiers are shooting me but when I target them they are green (friendly). I finally realize that it's my own fucking men shooting me! As I attempt to shoot the general they keep running through my line of fire, and when they get hit they turn on me! What kind of STUPIDMOTHERFUCKINGSHIT is that!? WHY ARE THEY EVEN THERE!?!? The Chinese soldiers aren't shooting at me so its not like they are protecting me. The whole thing is just to create the illusion of a battle. Sorry, but the illusion was shattered when a hand full of frag grenades failed to scratch the tiny oriental man who's only protection was a cotton uniform!! In order to beat it I had to run in circles around the battlefield so that the general couldn't hit me, waiting for my AP to recover so I could shoot him in V.A.T.S., so as not to accidentally hit any of my own men. If I were to summarize the experience it would be: Not. Fun. At. All.
Basically Operation: Anchorage takes all the things that makes Fallout 3 great and trows them out while accentuating the few crappy parts. If you think about it, an expansion where you get to go back and fight one of the pivotal battles of the war that destroyed the world should have been Amazing! Instead it's just a big disappointment. Just to make up for it I blew up Megaton three or four times. Awesome. Every. Time.
I'm taking a Fallout break and going back to Final Fantasy 13 for a while.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
The Guns of Anchorage
Don't remember if I mentioned this but I grabbed two of the expansion packs for Fallout 3; Broken Steel and Operation: Anchorage. It appeared as though all the expansions were part of the weekly discount on XBLA at %50 off. Believing the discount to be temporary I readily added 1000 MS points to my account and picked two. I think it may be a permanent thing though because I checked the next week and they were still at the discounted price. I hadn't yet beaten the main game (I still haven't) so I put in a few hours with my main character who I plan to use for Broken Steel. If you are not aware it is a continuation of the main game, letting you play past the ending and raising the level cap to 30. For Operation: Anchorage I chose to use my evil character, and go strait the the expanded content right away. Making it across the map to get there was challenging at level 2, especially since I was used to playing at level 20+. It was actually refreshing to have a lone raider with an assault rifle be a credible threat and gingerly negotiating such an obstacle was actually fun. I'm at a point with my main character where I'm more or less moving down a checklist tying up loose ends before the last mission. It can be tedious.
Anyway the little bit of Anchorage that I've played has been fun. The whole thing is a simulation, a game within a game. The mechanics are stripped down for a faster moving experience which again is refreshing. you don't have to mess around with item management as much because it's a "game" so you refill your ammo and health at stations along your path. There are intel items to find as well, and grabbing all ten before the end of the simulation grants you a special perk.
I'd really like to get all the achievements for this game but that puts me in a position to have to buy The Pitt. They did that thing that they sometimes do to games with DLC. They added the achievements to the game whether you have the content or not. So you could get all 1000 points from the normal game and still have an annoying 250 keeping you from %100 completion. I guess most people don't care but I'd like to see %100 for certain games and now I have to pay extra for it. I don't really want to play The Pitt either, out of all five of the expansions it seems to be the least interesting. I'm much more interested in Mothership Zeta since it's the most different, and Point Lookout looks cool because I grew up in roughly that geographic area so it would be like playing in my post-apocalyptic back yard. Whee.
Anyway the little bit of Anchorage that I've played has been fun. The whole thing is a simulation, a game within a game. The mechanics are stripped down for a faster moving experience which again is refreshing. you don't have to mess around with item management as much because it's a "game" so you refill your ammo and health at stations along your path. There are intel items to find as well, and grabbing all ten before the end of the simulation grants you a special perk.
I'd really like to get all the achievements for this game but that puts me in a position to have to buy The Pitt. They did that thing that they sometimes do to games with DLC. They added the achievements to the game whether you have the content or not. So you could get all 1000 points from the normal game and still have an annoying 250 keeping you from %100 completion. I guess most people don't care but I'd like to see %100 for certain games and now I have to pay extra for it. I don't really want to play The Pitt either, out of all five of the expansions it seems to be the least interesting. I'm much more interested in Mothership Zeta since it's the most different, and Point Lookout looks cool because I grew up in roughly that geographic area so it would be like playing in my post-apocalyptic back yard. Whee.
Monday, March 29, 2010
PAX East
So I missed the inaugural PAX EAST this weekend. It would have been nice to go but with all of the traveling and car repair lately it was just not financially feasible. I'm planing on going to PAX10 in the fall though. Hopefully I'll have a new job by then that isn't hourly so I don't feel each tick of my off-time like a stab to the wallet. No I don't get vacation time. No not sick leave either. >:-(
Anyway I am going to the Triangle Game Conference next week. I don't know what kind of people attend this thing but let me tell you, if you aren't a student be prepared to shell out for this one. I got a one day pass for $25 but that was with my student discount AND my IGDA discount. Without those I would have paid $120 for a one day pass! Well I wouldn't have paid that but that would have been the price.
Anyway I am going to the Triangle Game Conference next week. I don't know what kind of people attend this thing but let me tell you, if you aren't a student be prepared to shell out for this one. I got a one day pass for $25 but that was with my student discount AND my IGDA discount. Without those I would have paid $120 for a one day pass! Well I wouldn't have paid that but that would have been the price.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Stuff that's not Final Fantasy
Taking a break from Final Fantasy this week. I've been playing a few rounds of Modern Warfare 2 each morning when I get home from work. I feel like I'm getting better at it. I play mostly free for all deathmatch and I manage to get a "kill-cam" win about once a session now. It may sound noobish to get excited about such things but the feeling of improvement is one of the best feelings a human being can have and it's one that "1337" players seldom get to enjoy. I've found tremendous success with the care package and sentry gun kill counts. Using a care package as camping bait is an old strategy but I like the twist of planting a sentry gun and letting it do my camping for me. The 4 and 5 kills necessary to get these makes it easy to do.
I had to go to the doctor the other day which required me to drive to a part of town with a Play N Trade nearby. Proximity to a Play N Trade almost guarantees a purchase. I went in looking for SNES or PS1 games as usual but ended up with copies of KOTOR2 and Twilight Princess in my hands. KOTOR2 was less expensive but I've been eyeing the Zelda game for few years now. Damn Gamecube games are still hella expensive for their age but you know you're buying quality. Plus if they haven't gone down in price buy now they're not going to later, or get any easier to find. Although I'm not likely to play through the whole game (much like Metroid Prime) I'm glad I grabbed it and now I'm considering TLoZ: The Wind Waker and Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door to round out my GC collection.
...OK and Starfox Assault. But that's it!
So I had a scare the other day. I was tidying up and accidentally dropped my wife's 14 year old Game Boy Pocket. I guess the glue had worn out because the plastic shield over the LDC screen popped right off. There was a moment of panic but it turned on just fine. A light application of modeling glue and a few hours later the shield was back in place. My Spring cleaning endeavors also resulted in me moving my SNES and old 13" TV into the office. This opened up a lot of space on my dresser which is cool because I had some framed photos I needed to find a place for. I had to store all my modeling supplies to make room for the SNES and TV but I play way more video games than I do modeling.
Lastly I mentioned Brink in a previous post after seeing it at PAX last year. I saw the most recent videos for it yesterday and it looks like it's going to be a fantastic game. I have a feeling I'll be doing some campaigning among my friends come fall to get them to buy it.
I had to go to the doctor the other day which required me to drive to a part of town with a Play N Trade nearby. Proximity to a Play N Trade almost guarantees a purchase. I went in looking for SNES or PS1 games as usual but ended up with copies of KOTOR2 and Twilight Princess in my hands. KOTOR2 was less expensive but I've been eyeing the Zelda game for few years now. Damn Gamecube games are still hella expensive for their age but you know you're buying quality. Plus if they haven't gone down in price buy now they're not going to later, or get any easier to find. Although I'm not likely to play through the whole game (much like Metroid Prime) I'm glad I grabbed it and now I'm considering TLoZ: The Wind Waker and Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door to round out my GC collection.
...OK and Starfox Assault. But that's it!
So I had a scare the other day. I was tidying up and accidentally dropped my wife's 14 year old Game Boy Pocket. I guess the glue had worn out because the plastic shield over the LDC screen popped right off. There was a moment of panic but it turned on just fine. A light application of modeling glue and a few hours later the shield was back in place. My Spring cleaning endeavors also resulted in me moving my SNES and old 13" TV into the office. This opened up a lot of space on my dresser which is cool because I had some framed photos I needed to find a place for. I had to store all my modeling supplies to make room for the SNES and TV but I play way more video games than I do modeling.
Lastly I mentioned Brink in a previous post after seeing it at PAX last year. I saw the most recent videos for it yesterday and it looks like it's going to be a fantastic game. I have a feeling I'll be doing some campaigning among my friends come fall to get them to buy it.
Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 3
Warning, minor story spoilers!
40+ hours in:
So I've reached the part of the game where things branch out a bit. I'm on chapter 11 where the party has finally arrived on Pulse, the giant world that the much smaller Cocoon floats above. There is a very nice cut scene involving an airship just before the party gets there, and then another impressive one right after that. The second is a montage of Pulse with some voice-over exposition that showcases some of the world's more fantastic features. So that was fun. Pretty soon after getting to Pulse you get to the first real open area in the game. There are some monsters here that are gargantuan and are not meant to be taken on at this point in the game. It's cool to see what you have to aspire to in the late game. This area is also the first opportunity to take on a sidequest and go somewhere other than the next checkpoint. The game has missions that are a lot like XII's hunts. You track down a specific beastie, subdue it, and receive some high quality rewards. You can do the missions more than once but you'll only get the reward once.
In my last addendum I mentioned that at the beginning of chapter 10 you get to choose your party. Well right after I posted that I got a little further and the "crystarium" opened up so that all characters can learn all job rolls. This diminishes my earlier criticism of the linearity of the progression system but only a little. First it sucks that it took 30+ hours of play before I get to choose who does what. Second it's still pretty linear, you're just choosing between 6 lines now instead of three. Third the three extra rolls each character has are much more expensive to develop that their primary rolls, encouraging you to stick to the primaries. Finally each character's primary rolls offer a much better spread of abilities. For example, Snow is designed to be the best sentinel as he gets great stats and all of the sentinel abilities. However if you wanted to make him a healer and developed his medic roll you would find that he gets much fewer abilities than Hope does. The characters are designed to be specific things, so there isn't much point to developing their extra rolls until you've completed the primaries. So mad about that.
Also a little irritated by the eidolons. In order to get them you have to fight them. Nothing new there, it's a standard of the series. Only now you're not so much fighting them as you are auditioning for them. It's like a summoning tryout. You have to figure out which abilities they like and then use those abilities in the battle to fill a Gestalt gauge (this game is big on gauges). Fill the gauge and hit the X button and it transforms into these awkward "vehicles" that look like they were made from K'nex, and you get to ride them. That's a cool idea in theory but there's nothing I hate more in a game than not knowing what to do. Maybe it's just my personal psychology but I don't want to fight a battle AND solve a puzzle, that's not fun for me. I realized that the whole thing is kind of like a mating dance. You're trying to discover how to attract this strange and wondrous creature to you before it bites your head off. Of course I was never good at that sort of thing... WHICH IS WHY I PLAY VIDEO GAMES. Or maybe it's the other way around. My failings at social interaction aside I like the idea but it still feels a little to trail-and-error-ish to me. The last one I fought I more or less knew what I had to do, but finding the perfect paradigm to fill the gauge in time (did I mention there was a time limit?) took me about seven tries. I was at the controller throwing stage by the end of it.
Did I mention this game is hard? It's freaking hard.
40+ hours in:
So I've reached the part of the game where things branch out a bit. I'm on chapter 11 where the party has finally arrived on Pulse, the giant world that the much smaller Cocoon floats above. There is a very nice cut scene involving an airship just before the party gets there, and then another impressive one right after that. The second is a montage of Pulse with some voice-over exposition that showcases some of the world's more fantastic features. So that was fun. Pretty soon after getting to Pulse you get to the first real open area in the game. There are some monsters here that are gargantuan and are not meant to be taken on at this point in the game. It's cool to see what you have to aspire to in the late game. This area is also the first opportunity to take on a sidequest and go somewhere other than the next checkpoint. The game has missions that are a lot like XII's hunts. You track down a specific beastie, subdue it, and receive some high quality rewards. You can do the missions more than once but you'll only get the reward once.
In my last addendum I mentioned that at the beginning of chapter 10 you get to choose your party. Well right after I posted that I got a little further and the "crystarium" opened up so that all characters can learn all job rolls. This diminishes my earlier criticism of the linearity of the progression system but only a little. First it sucks that it took 30+ hours of play before I get to choose who does what. Second it's still pretty linear, you're just choosing between 6 lines now instead of three. Third the three extra rolls each character has are much more expensive to develop that their primary rolls, encouraging you to stick to the primaries. Finally each character's primary rolls offer a much better spread of abilities. For example, Snow is designed to be the best sentinel as he gets great stats and all of the sentinel abilities. However if you wanted to make him a healer and developed his medic roll you would find that he gets much fewer abilities than Hope does. The characters are designed to be specific things, so there isn't much point to developing their extra rolls until you've completed the primaries. So mad about that.
Also a little irritated by the eidolons. In order to get them you have to fight them. Nothing new there, it's a standard of the series. Only now you're not so much fighting them as you are auditioning for them. It's like a summoning tryout. You have to figure out which abilities they like and then use those abilities in the battle to fill a Gestalt gauge (this game is big on gauges). Fill the gauge and hit the X button and it transforms into these awkward "vehicles" that look like they were made from K'nex, and you get to ride them. That's a cool idea in theory but there's nothing I hate more in a game than not knowing what to do. Maybe it's just my personal psychology but I don't want to fight a battle AND solve a puzzle, that's not fun for me. I realized that the whole thing is kind of like a mating dance. You're trying to discover how to attract this strange and wondrous creature to you before it bites your head off. Of course I was never good at that sort of thing... WHICH IS WHY I PLAY VIDEO GAMES. Or maybe it's the other way around. My failings at social interaction aside I like the idea but it still feels a little to trail-and-error-ish to me. The last one I fought I more or less knew what I had to do, but finding the perfect paradigm to fill the gauge in time (did I mention there was a time limit?) took me about seven tries. I was at the controller throwing stage by the end of it.
Did I mention this game is hard? It's freaking hard.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 2
I'm at 30+ hours now, and at the beginning of chapter 10. Just got to the point where I have everyone together and I can choose who is in my party, so I'm excited about that. Got to pick who I wanted for the boss fight at the end of chapter 9. I decided I wanted to switch out Fang and bring in Sazh to join Lightning and Hope. This allows me to have a Commando and two Synergists for the openings, a Commando and two Ravagers for offensive chaining, Two medics and a Synergist for when I get in trouble, and two Commandos and a Ravager to finish things off. It's worked out pretty well so far.
In my review I don't think I made it clear just how gorgeous this game is. I don't usually care to much about graphics but it's hard not to be impressed by every environment and model. The battles are really spectacular. They did a great job with the spells, which are flying around constantly. The fights are chaotic and because of the speed at which they progress and the prevalence of flashy spells and attacks they are a joy to watch.
In my review I don't think I made it clear just how gorgeous this game is. I don't usually care to much about graphics but it's hard not to be impressed by every environment and model. The battles are really spectacular. They did a great job with the spells, which are flying around constantly. The fights are chaotic and because of the speed at which they progress and the prevalence of flashy spells and attacks they are a joy to watch.
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