When Michel Ancel announced that he was working on a sequel to what may be my favorite game of all time, I was ecstatic. But upon seeing the hyperrealistic look of the teaser trailer, I became a bit uncertain. This game might have been a better fit for the Wii than for the XBox 360 and Playstation 3. But I’ve already touched on my thoughts on photorealism in games, and now I’d like to discuss my feelings about Beyond Good and Evil 2 specifically.

I acknowledge that there’s a very real possibility that this game will fall drastically short of my very high expectations, especially given the fact that Ubisoft has announced its intent to make the sequel easier in an attempt to appeal to more casual gamers. My fear is that in doing this they’ll lose the core gamer crowd, and not actually pick up as many of the casual gamers as they want. Beyond Good and Evil was a fantastic game, and the demographic for any sequel should be those people who were fans of the original. If Ubisoft abandons the factors that made Beyond Good and Evil great, they might as well start up a new IP.

Beyond Good and Evil was originally intended to be the first in a trilogy of games. Hopefully that can continue – I’d love to see a continuation and conclusion to the story, as long as it’s done right. That’s the key.

Read the rest of “Thoughts on Beyond Good and Evil 2” »

Hexaggon is a kind of Othello remake. It’s incredibly addictive, and the AI on the computer player is very well done. I’ve been playing this game on Neave for many years, and I’m glad to bring you such a solid recommendation.

Play Hexxagon

I happened across this recently: Traditional Christmas music done in the style of old 8-bit video games. They’ve actually combined Christmas music with specific game tunes. “Super Jingle Bros.” is a great example. Starts off sounding very much like the Mario Brothers tune, and then you realize it’s “Jingle Bells”. But it all sounds like it’s coming out of a Commodore 64’s SID chip. Good stuff.

8-Bit Jesus

Starcraft 2 is one of the games I’m looking forward to most. This is a fantastic preview – a 20-minute long battle with commentary. Check it out.

Valve has just repriced Popcap’s wildly popular Peggle Extreme. The new price: Free. You’ll have to download Steam in order to play, but if you don’t already have Steam, I mean, what are you thinking?

Install Peggle Extreme

I finally finished Mercenaries 2 this morning.  Technically, I finished it last night, but I had one achievement left which I knocked out this morning while riding the exercise bike.  Oh yeah, I can snipe vehicle drivers while working out. I am just that good.  On second thought, that explains why I haven’t lost any weight.

Any way, Mercenaries 2 had to be one of the most infuriating games I’ve played in some time.  It’s not a bad game, it just requires a tremendous amount of patience to play due to the various bugs.  What kind of bugs you say?  Well, allow me to explain.  During the game, you’ll work for various factions and one of the things they’ll want you to do is to verify these High Value Targets or HVT’s.  The way that you verify said target is to either kill them and take their picture, or go and capture them and have the faction who hired you spirit them away in a helicopter.  There is one achievement for verifying all of the HVT’s (kill or capture) and one for capturing all of the HVT’s.  Capturing them all is a tremendous pain in the ass, which we’ll get into later, but seeing how the achievement is 50 points, it’s worth it.  So, last night, I finish up the final mission which ends with me capturing the final HVT, the game’s villain, and as all of the end of game achievements start pouring in, I’m missing the one for capturing all of the HVT’s.  Crap.

Now, there is no way that you can accidentally kill an HVT and have the mission end.  The mission doesn’t end until you photograph the corpse, so there was no way that I could have accidentally killed an HVT as far as the verification count was concerned.  I certainly killed plenty of HVT’s, believe you me, one poor fellow several times actually, but as I never photographed any of them, I knew that it didn’t count.  Also, because I captured the villain at the end instead of killing him, the game also knew that I captured all of them as killing any of the previous HVT’s has your character kill the villain in the end.  The problem was that while the game knew that I had captured them all, it must not have told the achievement system that this was the case.  Luckily, I remembered something a co-worker had told me about the exact same problem, so after signing my profile out, disconnecting the Ethernet cable from the back of the box, signing in, booting the game back up and doing the final mission all over again, the achievement finally popped.  Am I glad that I finally got the achievement?  Of course.  Was I irritated that I had to go through all of that crap to get something that I had already worked so hard for?  You’re damn right I was.

If that had been the only glitch, I would have been OK, but this game is rife with glitches.  Bombing targets show up as being taken out when they haven’t been, or they move to areas of the map that have no targets.  Ordering up vehicle deliveries would routinely have the fuel cost deducted from your stockpiles, but no vehicle was delivered.  Achievements such as “do x thing y number of times” either took much longer, or much shorter than stated to pop, if they popped at all.  The same guy who told me about the trick to getting my glitchy achievement still doesn’t have his achievement for destroying 50 objects with grenades despite having leveled most of Venezuela with nothing but pineapples.

Perhaps the biggest glitches in the game come from how incredibly unbalanced it is.  In a sandbox game, balance is essential as you’re basically telling the player that they can do whatever they want.  In such a situation, you have to make sure that there’s the proper give and take between things.  Take, for example, Saints Row 2.  The best weapon in the game, the Pimp Cane, isn’t available until the end, meaning that you can only use it for the final mission, where it’s pretty much useless.  Had it been available earlier, it would have made things way too easy.  As it was, the Kobra pistols you get were pretty damn powerful, and a smidge unbalancing, however you did have to go out of your way to get them, so it falls into a reward situation.

In Mercenaries 2, you can tell that the intent of the designers was to provide a game where the player is constantly balancing the contrary goals of the various factions, while at the same time, keeping an eye on your two resources: money, used to buy vehicles, supply drops and airstrikes, and fuel, used to deploy said vehicles, supply drops and airstrikes.  In a perfect world, the player would walk a tightrope where they had to be careful about which jobs to take so that they don’t piss off the wrong people while having to complete missions with the limited resources at hand.

In reality?  Yeah, not so much.

Through various code glitches and game balancing issues, this tightrope became a ten lane freeway.  To beat the metaphor even further, let’s go for a ride.

Mo Money, No Problems
As you progress in the game you get paid more and more for your talents however if you’re willing to spend the time, early on you can complete a Winching Challenge provided from your helicopter pilot over and over again to win money.  The fact that he provides the challenge over and over isn’t busted.  What appears to be broken is how the maximum bet will cap at 5 million, but the minimum bet remains a percentage of your total balance, meaning that as long as you never attempted to change the amount of the bet, he’d keep betting you more and more money.  If you didn’t mind doing the same challenge over and over again, you could easily make a billion dollars in a (relatively) short amount of time.  I should know, because I did.  Now, even without doing this, the amount of money you get paid as the contracts increase means that even when properly outfitting yourself, you’ll never go below a hundred million of your current balance.  I got to a billion dollars about a third of the way into the game and never dropped below 900 million, finishing out at around $910 million.

Oil, Or Why We’re Here
Oil, or fuel, is the other resource to keep an eye on.  You can have purchased an entire fleet of attack choppers, but if you don’t have any fuel, they ain’t going no where.  Fuel can only be found out in the field, and usually is under the watching eye of a particular faction.  It also blows up real good, so when it’s not with a faction, and instead is with the Venezuelan army, the game’s only persistent enemy faction, they will usually blow up their oil in trying to get to you.

So, how do you keep your stockpiles of fuel topped off while not brazenly stealing from factions that you’re working for?  Take this moment to look down at the floor, at those vaguely hand-like appendages on the end of your legs.  My people call them feet. That’s how.  Basically, as long as no one in the faction sees you milling about while your chopper pilot comes in to take the fuel they won’t get mad at you, despite the fact that your chopper pilot pilots a very distinctive helicopter, the same helicopter that he regularly uses to transport your ass to the faction that you’re currently stealing from.  So, to easily get fuel, you 1.) Tag the fuel to be picked up.  2.) Pop a smoke grenade signifying that you want to take the fuel.  3.) Run like hell.  Not very hard.  If you still want to go the brazen stealing route, just get in a helicopter of your own and using the winch that comes on every helicopter, even state of the art attack choppers, hover over the fuel, winch it up and fly it away.  Even if the faction knows that it’s you taking the fuel, rather than thinking that it’s one of their own birds, they don’t care.  So, them seeing you stand around while your pilot takes fuel?  Bad.  You flying the fuel away yourself as they watch and wave goodbye?  Not so bad.

Don’t Be Moody
Faction mood is the final “resource” that you have to be aware of.  If a faction is neutral or friendly towards you, you can buy things from them, they won’t shoot you on sight and they will come to extract your HVT’s provided that they’re the ones who want the guy gone in the first place.  Piss off a faction enough so that they become hostile and you either have to kill members of rival factions, blow up some of the angry faction’s targets or bribe them 20% of your bank account to get them back to neutral.

Now, they will get pissed at you for things like killing members of their faction in view of other faction members, blowing up their buildings in view of faction members or if they see you steal fuel as mentioned before.  Once they get mad at you, one of the faction members will start radioing in to their boss.  At this point, you have about ten seconds to kill the radio operator.  If he finishes his message before you take him out, you’ll take a hit on faction mood.

I’m not sure if it was intended to be this way, or if this is a bug, but another way to avoid taking a mood hit is to get out of the area before the radio operator finished his report.  Running usually won’t cut it, however if you’re in a helicopter, you can always fly away quickly enough to cut off the report.  My own thoughts on this is that because this is an open world game, the game doesn’t populate the landscape with people until you get close enough to be able to see them.  If someone is calling in a report, flying away from the site causes the game to shove the people back in to whatever hellish pocket dimension they reside in, and the radio report stops.

Whatever the reason, the ability to make people, and radio reports appear and disappear, pretty much at will, forms the basis of completing the capturing of HVT’s, arguably the activity with the highest risk of pissing off factions.  Again, I’ll explain.  Every faction has HVT’s, half of which are usually members of factions you’re already friends with.  If you run in to a camp guns a blazing, the faction will call in your transgression, you’ll lose mood points with them and may have to end up bribing them.  Not to mention that the soldiers themselves seem to be just as eager to kill the HVT as you are and will regularly shoot you with an RPG even with the HVT right next to you.  If you’re trying to capture, and not kill, this can be a problem.

So, what you do is get a helicopter.  If the HVT is not in the Venezuelan army, get whatever chopper you want.  If they’re VZ, get a VZ chopper.  Fly to the site and get close enough to see the lay of the land, as well as any SAM sites, or tanks or whatever.   When you get close enough, you’ll see the indicator for the HVT.  At this point, he exists, and can be killed.  It’s all very quantum.  You don’t want him killed, so you back away in your chopper until the indicator disappears.  He is now stuffed back in his pocket dimension, protected from harm.  At this point, you use all of your ordinance to level the fucking place. I mean, just wipe everything out.  Once you’ve done that, you can then switch to your mini gun, move in and start tagging individual soldiers.  If they start radioing in, just fly away until they stop.  Then come back and kill some more.  Does it take time?  Well, yeah, but honestly, you have to do about this much work to capture the HVT rather than kill them due to the aforementioned soldier incompetence in the face of HVT bodily harm, so it’s not that big of a deal.

When blowing up faction targets, the method of preventing a loss of faction mood is even more laughably easy.  When you get shot all to hell, you can pause the game and choose the “Medevac” option from the main menu.  This will transport you back to your base for a fee of $10,000 and the current contract is canceled.  What’s also canceled is any radio report of your naughty behaviour. When you blow up a faction target, the contract is considered complete the second that the building is destroyed, usually right when the bomb falls.  The method for blowing up targets becomes: get to the target, blow up the target, medevac out while your friendly faction member calls in your misdeeds.  Sure, the cost is 10,000 bucks, but as you progress through the game you’ll get paid millions per target.  At that point, is 10,000 dollars really going to make a difference?  It’d be like getting pulled over for speeding and having to pay a fine of a nickel.  It just doesn’t matter.

Take all of this together and you have a way of playing the game so that you never run out of money, you only have to work minimally for fuel and everyone loves you.  Hardly the high tension rope walk that the game designers intended.  The main draw of Mercenaries has always been to blow things up but good, so one wonders if the tightrope walk was really that important, but seeing how much work they put into the system, it seems important, even if they made it so deliriously easy to circumvent said system.

Don’t get me wrong, blowing up stuff was fun, and I take great pride in my ability to capture, and not kill, every HVT as some of them were very difficult, even with all of my rigging of the system, but in the end the game was too buggy to love and too unbalanced to take seriously.  I started off playing the game because I wanted to play it and very quickly changed to playing the game to get my full thousand points.

It seems like it would have been pretty easy to address these balancing issues too, which is the sad part.  Maybe make it so that taking the medevac route doesn’t stop radio reports, nor does flying away.  If you piss off a faction, doing extra work for them doesn’t net you money and mood points, but just mood points.  Consider it working off a debt.  If you’re spotted in a chopper doing bad things, don’t make it so that simply flying away makes them forget what you did.  I mean, if a black, slightly damaged chopper just blew up a tank at the base and then flies away, chances are the black, slightly damaged chopper that comes back fifteen seconds later is the same one.  Make it so that you have to get an entirely new bird for them to not notice that it’s you again.  Maybe all of these ideas are in the game and just didn’t work right, I don’t know.  All I know is that the game ended up being difficult for reasons that seem very far removed from what was originally intended.

If you’re not playing it for achievements and just want to blow things up is it worth it?  Yeah, I’d say so, provided you can overlook the bugs.  Maybe not for 60 bucks, but certainly for 30.  Calling in an artillery strike, or dropping a satellite guided surgical strike on a target is a hoot to watch and there is an impressive array of vehicles to get in and tool around with.  Unfortunately, I just don’t think that the game is stable, or balanced enough to warrant a 60 dollar purchase.  Adding to this, I can’t see myself getting the next one, when inevitably it drops.  Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, well, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, “we won’t get fooled again.”

Next up for me is Fallout 3.   My achievement guide is prepped and loaded, I have a full list of spiffy weapons to look for and I’ll be taking notes so that once I’m done, I can come back with another mammoth “Final Thoughts” column.  I know I can’t wait.  I can only assume that the suspense is palpable on your end as well.

Despite my overall disappointment in Fallout 3, I’ve been playing a whole lot of it recently. But trying to figure out which weapons I liked best took a while. I’ve done a bunch of hunting around in an attempt to find the “best weapon” in Fallout 3, and while some are better than others, I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of it is personal preference. I’m going to present my own take on my favorite ten weapons in the game.

• Fragmentation Grenade: While not the most powerful weapon, they’re very common, and they’re useful as hell. Any time I see a group of enemies or I need to attack around corners, I’d better have a frag grenade or ten on me. Throw enough grenades and you’ll be taking down sentry bots like they’re radroaches.
• Chinese Assault Rifle: The best of the small guns, this will be a mainstay weapon throughout the game. The ammo is common enough that you don’t have to be overly conservative.
• Gatling Laser: The best of the big guns, I’m still not quite sure why the Gatling laser wasn’t categorized as an energy weapon, but unlike the minigun this one is actually useful and marginally accurate. Too bad ammo is so hard to come by.
• Bottlecap Mine: Who knew that if you put a cherry bomb in a lunchbox with a bunch of bottlecaps it would explode so violently as to create a small mushroom cloud? Anyway, the bottlecap mine is the biggest baddest landmine in the game, and I love to lay them out and lead enemies along a trail of them. Somehow, they never realize what I’m doing.
• The Alien Blaster: It almost feels like cheating to use the alien blaster. I suppose it’s good that ammo is so limited, because the weapon is way too ovepowered. But it is fun to use.
• The Terrible Shotgun: Not a big fan of the name, but it’s the game’s best shotgun. And it does lots and lots of damage. So I ended up using it quite a bit. I’ve always liked shotguns in games, and this one will take the head off a supermutant in one hit at close range, especially if you take it by surprise.
• Deathclaw Gauntlet: The deathclaw gauntlet isn’t much better than a regular power fist until you fight heavily armored opponents. I’m currently playing an unarmed character, and taking down Mirelurks and Super Mutants in melee is fun. I’ve been partial to the “Fisto!” and “Shocker” power fists, but I think the Deathclaw Gauntlet wins, since it ignores damage resistance. Watch out, Enclave.
• Shishkebab: My plan for my third character is to max out his strength and melee skills, give him the pyromaniac perk, and have him use the shishkebab exclusively. It’s a frelling flaming sword. What’s not to love?
• Plasma Rifle: The plasma rifle is the best energy weapon, and I’m currently playing an energy weapon focused character. But what makes it really cool is how the enemies melt into green puddles when you get a really good hit. It’s also got a phenomenal rate of fire. Zapzapzap.
• Dart Gun: What? Are you nuts, Greg? Your favorite weapon in the game is the dart gun? Yes. It is. And I’ll tell you why. Against some of the tougher melee-only enemies like mirelurks, deathclaws, and giant radscorpions, the dart gun makes fights cake. Just shoot them in the legs, and there’s no way they can catch you. Then you simply stay out of their reach and blast them with a shotgun. Easy. And the ammo is very easy to come by.

Rockstar Games has released their first two Grand Theft Auto titles as freeware, and they can be downloaded directly from the Rockstar games site.

Download Grand Theft Auto

If you’ve never tried Raptr, now may be the time. The site actually seems to be improving. The gamercards I coded for Lungfishopolis are great in that I can add all games I’m playing on any platform, but the drawback is that everything’s manual – I have to add games myself rather than the card picking them up when I play. Raptr is the first site I’ve seen that attempts to grab games from multiple platforms automatically. I checked tonight and was pleased to see that it had grabbed games from PC, PS3, and the XBox Live account that I use on my PC when playing Fallout 3. It mistakenly lists that one as XBox 360, which is odd since I don’t own one, but the fact that it’s grabbing the game is great.

It’s certainly not perfect. Although it’s showing that I played Fallout 3 just 2 hours ago, it’s saying that I haven’t played Pixeljunk monsters since November 15th, which is wrong. And although it accepted my Wii code, it’s not showing any of the Wii games that I’ve played recently. Still, the site is much better than it was a couple months ago.

Here’s the card.

At this point of time, I think it’s safe to say that I’m done with Gears of War 2.

I’ve fought through the campaign multiple times, finished all 50 levels of Horde mode and ground out every achievement that I can reasonably expect myself to get.  I have no desire to play the game’s multiplayer mode, and if I did, the busted matchmaking would prevent it any way. The only achievement I have left to consider is “Seriously 2.0” with its 100,000 kills, and while I can do it, I probably won’t.  I would love those additional 50 points, but I just can’t justify the time needed to do it.

Now that I’m finished and have had time to reflect a little, I’m somewhat disappointed in the game.  The original Gears of War was one of my favorite games and, at the time, the only game I restarted to play on the highest difficulty level. The co-op was great, the combat was greatand even though the story was pretty slim, when it wasn’t nonexistant, it didn’t matter.  The gameplay made up for it.

Strangely, rather than build on the intensity of the first one, Epic chose to instead throw a lot more variety in to the sequel, and as a result you end up with a very unfocused game.  There are combat sections, platforming sections, parts where you ride on a weapons platform, parts where you drive a tank, parts where you ride Locust beasties.  See what I’m saying?  Sure, there was more of a story, and the new parts helped clear up things from the first time, while at the same time make the overall plot even murkier, but there were so many other new things as well, that the entire experience isn’t as focused as the first one.

If the original Gears of War could be described with one word, it would be “intensity”.  The game simply did not let you breathe, unless you physically stood still.  Clearing out an area and then moving on to the next area, which wasn’t that far along your linear path, would then bring on a new selection of things to kill.  The action never let up, and, when you were behind cover, fighting for your life, your enemies would not let you sit there, contentedly lining up shots.  They were brutally relentless, rushing you in a heartbeat, getting behind you and eviscerating you.  You had to be on your toes constantly and when playing on Insane, having a good partner was essential.

Not so for Gears of War 2.  For one, there are long, and I mean long, sections of walking around with nothing to fight.  An entire chapter takes place in an area where aside from some small critters that are easily dispatched with melee attacks, there’s nothing to fight.  There are environmental hazards to avoid, but it’s fairly easy to do so.  When you did fight the Locust, they stayed put.  Rarely, if ever, are you rushed, with the exception of the Mauler Boomers, who only have a melee weapon, and the Flame Grenadiers with their flamethrowers.  All of the other enemies would just stay behind cover and light you up.  Or, if they did try to rush you, the size of the battlefield was so large, that it would have taken them forever to get to you.  I am the world’s worst video game sniper and I got to be pretty damn good with the Longshot (the game’s sniper rifle) because of the copious opportunities for long range kills.  These two changes, made for a considerably less intense experience.

That’s not to say that GoW2 didn’t have intense fights, because it did, but the intensity of those fights came from the game throwing more enemies or larger enemies at you rather than having more aggressive enemies.  I think that part of this is from the design of the enemies themselves.  The Grinders, basically a Boomer with a chain gun, can light you up from across the map, so he doesn’t need to get close.  The Reavers, a flying beastie, and the Brumaks, a huge, lizard like creature, also pack some pretty heavy armament, so they don’t need to be up close to do damage.  One note about those last two.  At different parts of the game, you and your team ride both the Reavers and the Brumaks, and the end result, for me, was to make me feel guilty about having killed both such creatures earlier in the game.  In the first game, you killed Reavers, but hey, they’re Locust and Locust are bad, so no sweat.  Riding them in this game, made me feel like I had spent a lot of aggression on a very ugly horse, and horses aren’t inherently evil.  They just do what their riders tell them to do.

Getting back to the firefights, when these large beasts show up, you know that you have to kill them, because they pack a real punch, but you also feel like as long as you stay behind cover, you’ll be ok, because they won’t ever rush you. The only real threat from rushing were the Bloodmounts, mini-Brumaks that had no problem getting up on you and tearing you a new one.  The fights with the Bloodmounts were intense, but those were few and far between.  Now, yes, tickers and wretches would come after you, but tickers could be picked off and exploded from a distance and wretches were easily taken out with one melee hit, even on Insane.

Even the boss battles lacked punch.  The boss battles in Gears where you fought Berserkes, the females of the Locust race, also strangely absent from the sequel, were pretty intense fights.  You couldn’t shoot them, well you could, it just didn’t do anything, so you had to lure them to a spot where you could use a satellite laser on them. Luring them places meant pissing them off until they charged at you and you dove out of the way, causing them to bust open a door.  The final confrontation with General Raam required you to whup his ass quickly, or get tore up for your troubles.  In the sequel, one fight is against a giant fish and involved a lot of waiting around, one is against the new baddie Skorge, and involves a lot of you running away from his various ranged attacks while waiting to get in a chainsaw duel and break his weapon, and the third was against a giant mutated Brumak, while safely protected from within a helicoptor.  None were intense, and the fight with Skorge wasn’t even a fight.  You can’t hurt him, so you run away until you break his stuff enough and then he runs away.

Where the intensity of the game comes out is in Horde mode, which is, I think, why fans of the first game were so enamored with it.  In Horde mode, enemies will rush you and you have to be quick and efficient about taking them down. You have to prioritize targets and communicate with your team or you’ll get slaughtered.  As much as I liked the intensity though, once you’ve gone from level 1 to 50 in one sitting, you’re pretty much done with Horde mode.  At least I was.

That’s not to say that Gears of War 2 is a bad game.   It’s a good to very good game.  It certainly looks pretty and runs well and the co-op is as enjoyable as ever.  They even made the achievements easier to get, which the whore in me greatly appreciates.  While there’s more to Gears of War 2, it’s not more of the right things from Gears of War, and that’s the problem.  I wanted more intensity and I got more running. I wanted more brutal fights and I got more vehicles.  I can only hope that for the third one, Epic goes back to what made the first one so great, that two minute loop of crazed intensity, repeated over and over until the inevitable, nail biting conclusion.  A coherent story would be nice too, but I’m not so naive as to expect the impossible.  After all, they make games, they’re not miracle workers.