All posts from category Gameage

Thoughts on Mass Effect

 Martin · 3 years

Last night, I finished the first Mass Effect, as part of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remastered re-release of all three of the original games. I'm sort of an opportunistic completionist, so I made sure to do all the achievements. It all took me around 46 hours.

I've played the original game from start to finish a few other times before, but it has been a while, so I didn't remember much outside of the main story beats. I had a lot of fun re-experiencing it, and there were still a few things that I found surprising and noteworthy as I replayed the game.

My biggest surprise was how few mainline missions there are. The number of missions that advance the story and lead you to the end of the game is surprisingly low. They ran longer than I remembered, though, so that was nice. One early mission took me around 2-3 hours as I explored the entirety of the map and completed all the objectives. As I get older, I find it harder to devote that kind of time to games - at least, not without interruptions - so some of the missions took me multiple sessions to finish.

I was also a bit stunned at how clunky - and in the early game, strangely challenging - the combat is. If there is any part of this remastered Mass Effect that cannot hide its age well, it's the combat. Enemies are extremely basic, sliding into cover by just running into it feels weird, and the balance is off; your AI-controlled teammates either require constant babysitting or are an unstoppable force of combat and biotic abilities.

A good portion of the game is the combat, so luckily it doesn't take much time to get used to its eccentricities. But at times I wondered how this game was able to overcome how weird the combat is and become the beloved property that it is today.

If you've played the game using the default male Shephard, or you're familiar with the various promotional materials, you might be wondering who that odd-looking bald man is in the screenshot at the top of this post. Well, I was delighted that BioWare added the option to use a character code to import your old characters from previous play-throughs, and so that's how the game's hero, Shepard, looks in my game.

He is the result of me firing the game up when it first arrived 14 years ago, and in my rush to play, anxiously mashing through the character creator. I figured, once I got a taste of the game, I'd start over with a proper character that looked a bit more like me. But the game was so engrossing, I ended up not wanting to start over, and got used to the way he looked. Now I cannot hear male Shepard's voice without automatically thinking of this weird dude. I like him!

It was nice that BioWare added the option to use a custom character code at the beginning of the first game, so I could easily import this guy from my original play-throughs. It had one odd quirk, in that the skin color was wrong when I entered it the first time, but that was easily sorted out.

My experience with the Legendary Edition is limited to the first game so far, but it's been a good one. The game looks and runs great on my Xbox Series X, and was a joy to experience once more. There were certainly parts that I wish could have been touched a little more heavily by the remaster team, and a few bugs here and there, but despite all that, it's quite easy to get caught up in the sci-fi world of Mass Effect BioWare created.

On to Mass Effect 2 now, I suppose!

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Forza Horizon 5

 Martin · 3 years

After you've played one or two Forza Horizon games, the experiences all sort of just meld together. They all follow the same general formula, so you know what expect - but they're fun games with lots to do, so I'm still looking forward to the fifth game in the series, which was announced at E3 this year. It looks incredible!

Taking up the wheel in Mexico is going to be a blast!

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Advance Wars!

 Martin · 3 years

2021 marks another virtual E3 with a week of exciting-ish announcements for the world of video games. I do my gaming on Xbox, PC, and occasionally Switch, so that's the news I've been taking a very passive approach to following. So what am I excited about?

Not much that's out soon, it turns out. But one game I'll be blowing the dust off my Switch for is Advance Wars 1+2: Re-boot Camp.

I'm a little sad the cartoon sprites from the original game are going away, but the 3D models look alright, and that music - man, I hope it makes it into the final games!

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Red Ringer

 Martin · 3 years

On this day, back in 2007, this happened:

I was in the middle of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas and about to start the original Saints Row. My Xbox 360 was only about 6 months old!

I've been a fan of Xbox for a while now. I bought a copy of Gears of War on Xbox 360 for my brother, for his birthday - a game I thought looked pretty amazing.

While I waited to give it to him, I became more and more tempted to play it myself. After a few days I caved, bought an Xbox 360, and ripped that copy of the game open for myself. I bought him another copy later.

Overall I think I had two Xbox 360's "red ring" on me. I still have the third one, an Xbox 360 S, sitting under my TV, but it doesn't get much use - virtually all the games I own for it work on my Xbox Series X.

It's a little crazy that the Xbox 360 did so well for its generation, considering the technical issues it had. But the PlayStation 3 had a number of problems as well, and the Wii was almost in a class by itself.

I'm glad the latest slew of consoles are so much better, in any case. Having constant dread over the "red ring of death" was not a good way to be.

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Mafia: Definitive Edition is great

 Martin · 3 years
Tommy Angelo

I played the original Mafia a lot when I was in college. The game had many faults: it was brutally difficult, driving around was tedious, and it was sort of a technical mess. But it was Grand Theft Auto in the 1930's, and when it all clicked, it was still fun.

So when Mafia: Definitive Edition was announced last year, I was excited. I still have the original PC game discs, and I'd tried to get them to run on my modern machines, but it would never work. Finally, I'd get to relive one of my favorite games of old!

I finally got around to playing it in 2021, and honestly, the game is just great. Even though the game has been rebuilt and changed around a bit, it has all the missions I remember from the original - and everything is much more polished and thoughtful.

Mid-mission save points take a lot of the frustration out of the more difficult sequences, so one mistake doesn't mean you have to carefully redo the entire level. The game physics are also a lot more forgiving - to the point that, if you accidentally flip your car over, you can press a button to right it. Sure, that can break the immersion a bit, but I don't mind. It's too convenient for me to get mad.

This particular game engine seems a lot more robust than the original as well - I played the entire game, from start to finish, without one problem. I even left the game running over multiple days, using my Xbox's quick resume feature to continue from the same point each day.

The game is beautiful as well; the city of Lost Heaven (and its inhabitants) never looked so good! Everywhere you go, there is careful detail to be found - I could go on and on about how much care seems to have gone into this game world. Even though the scope is a bit smaller, it's on par with games like Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption 2, in my opinion - and the team who made it should be proud.

The cinematic cut scenes are particularly great. I never found myself wanting to skip them because they are so well done.

I have a few minor gripes, of course. The music, though good, is one of the only parts of the game that seems to have been completely changed from the original. I miss the original music, even though it was quite repetitive.

I also miss the original voice acting - but not nearly as much as the music. The new acting is actually really well done, and by the end of the game I didn't miss the original voice work at all, but if you played a lot of the original (and you remember it), the new voice acting might take some getting used to.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this game, and I'm glad that, thanks to this remaster, it wasn't lost to time.

Now I need to get on Mafia 2 and 3 - both of which I've never really played before!

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You Still Won’t Make It Screenshots

 Martin · 12 years

I just wanted to take a moment to share some screens of the game You Still Won't Make It, which I am working on with Vetra Games (Uriel Griffin, Jake Almond, and Jesse Venbrux). Development has been slow at times and fast at others, but it's coming together, and we will hopefully have the game out later this year.

In case you haven't played the original game (You Probably Won't Make It), YSWMI is more or less the same type of game: a skill-based platformer where the player simply needs to navigate the character from start to the finish, through a series of increasingly challenging rooms.

Naturally, I'm in charge of the graphics. And though the project is, graphically, a large departure from the original game, I'm happy to say that it's also a vast improvement. That's not to say the original graphics were bad - they got the job done - but there was a lot of room for some creativity on that front, and so far, I'm very pleased with how it's looking.

This is essentially what the game looked like when I got my hands on it some months ago:

And here are a few screenshots from our sequel, which is a work in progress at this point:

Quite different, eh? But still the same (brutal, fun) game underneath all of that.

Though I'm continuing to develop and add new graphics to it, I just recently finished enough to actually have the game play without a bunch of ugly placeholders everywhere, and that's a great milestone to achieve. We're looking forward to getting this game out later this year, and hopefully many people out there are looking forward to playing it, too!

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Mario Kart 7 Is Broken

 Martin · 12 years

After spending some time trying to work my way through the various tracks of Mario Kart 7 on 150cc mode (the highest difficulty), I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that the game is broken. In all other aspects, I love Mario Kart 7. I think it's a great game. But the outcome of the races are too random at the 150cc level, and at that level, the game simply just isn't fun.

I remember, many years ago, reading an interview with Valve about the making of Half-Life, on why that game was such a great step forward for the medium. One bit that always stuck with me was about how they made the game more fun by helping warn the player about upcoming threats and obstacles.

I don't remember the exact example they gave of this, but it amounted to showing cracks on the floor and having the player observe little bits falling off into the abyss before the player actually encountered a portion of the game where the floor would break under their weight, and they could fall and die. Something like that, anyway.

This struck me because it was such an obvious concept. Half-Life is more fun because the observant player could avoid random death. Obviously, random death is not fun. It teaches the player nothing, and it feels cheap.

And that's why Mario Kart 7's 150cc mode seems so broken to me. It doesn't matter how well I take the corners or how lucky I am at drawing weapons. The randomness of the largely unavoidable arsenal of weapons the enemies are constantly throwing at me negates any skill I might have. It feels cheap to get hit by a blue shell at the end of an otherwise perfect race, especially when it's lobbed into play by a computer-controlled player.

Because of this, each time I attempt to play the game on 150cc mode, no matter how relaxed or passive I'm feeling at the outset, I am a total, utter, frantic lunatic by the time it's over. My heat is racing. I'm upset. And most of the time I don't come in first.

That isn't fun for me. I really want it to be, but it just isn't. It's not worth the frustration.

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Costume Quest

 Martin · 13 years

Back in 2010, a week or so before Halloween, Double Fine Productions released Costume Quest. Somewhere between then and a month or two ago, I bought it on XBLA, and I finally got around to actually playing it about a week ago. It's a cute, fun little game, and I enjoyed it.

It's basically a light RPG-type game, where you run around neighborhoods trick-or-treating houses, collecting candy, costumes, and battle stamps (which improve your abilities in combat). Encounters with monsters are the meat of the game and trigger a sequence where the cute cartoon children and silly monsters morph into giants who do battle over the town in a turn-based RPG style. It kind of reminds me of that episode of South Park where the kids morph into anime characters and battle each other.

The cartoon graphics are crisp and colorful, and the sound design is simple, but does all the appropriate things. Controls are easy. Overall, it's a shorter, but quality title - the quality of which I've come to expect from Double Fine.

If you haven't played Costume Quest yet, I'd recommend it. Maybe save it as a little Halloween treat for later this year.

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Diablo 3

 Martin · 13 years

Like many people out there, I've been playing Diablo 3 over the last week or so. And while I did participate in the beta, I mostly did that just to see how the game would run on my machine; I didn't really dig into the game until now. Here are a few things I've been thinking lately as I've played:

  • The mouse clicking is intense, and while the case could be made that it's a pure control concept or that it's a nice throwback, sometimes it can feel a little stale. I just hope I don't end up accidentally breaking my mouse.
  • I'm really happy Blizzard decided to get rid of town portal scrolls. Using up inventory slots for something you almost always had to have was stupid.
  • The cinematic scenes are epic. I'm honestly kind of surprised Blizzard hasn't begun developing its own in-house game-to-movie crossovers. They obviously have the talent.
  • The graphics are good, even at the lowest settings. It also runs on my years-old laptop, which is pretty neat. I'm afraid of overheating it though, so I don't play on that machine much.
  • It's hard to really nail down why, but the game feels (or rather, maybe it just looks) a bit like World of Warcraft. It just seems oddly familiar, which isn't really a bad thing I suppose.
  • The required internet connection is a little weird, especially at first. Playing a single player game with a latency indicator on the HUD is strange. I understand why they did all this, but for people with spotty internet connections / networking hardware, it's kind of a drag.
  • It's a bummer that Blizzard couldn't get the launch right. After spending a few days just looking at my shiny new pre-loaded game, I finally installed and then spent the first hour of launch trying to log in, but the game's servers were borked- no doubt totally crushed by thousands of people trying to log in at once. It's disappointing to me that Blizzard, proprietor or the world's most successful MMORPG, can't nail a launch that involves heavy server load yet.
  • Co-op play is seamless and easy to do, thanks to Battle.net.

Despite a few drawbacks, I'm enjoying my time with the game. This is definitely a more accessible Diablo, at least so far, and with achievements, weapon crafting, lots of rare items, and all sorts of stat combinations, there's no shortage of rewards for putting in time with the game.

It'll be interesting to see if that dynamic changes when Blizzard unleashes the cash-powered auction house in a few days; there's already one in operation that uses the in-game "gold" currency. Since the core of the game is still a single player experience though, the player remains well insulated from all the madness that comes with the auction house. And that's probably a good thing, lest Diablo 3 start feeling a little bit too much like World of Warcraft.

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Mass Effect 3… Multiplayer? Sigh.

 Martin · 13 years

When EA acquired BioWare in 2007, on the eve of its successful franchise launch with the original Mass Effect, I tried my hardest to reserve my criticisms until after they shipped a few more products, and we would start to see just how extensive the inevitable changes to the company would be. With BioWare's history of crafting superb games, it seemed like I owed it to them to at least wait for the dust to settle before making any judgments.

Three years later in 2010, I found myself generally happy with Mass Effect 2. The story was an interesting continuation of the epic set forth in the original game, and most of the conventions that made the first game fun were carried over successfully. Some things from the original game were shed away however, like the synth-heavy soundtrack from the previous game, and Mass Effect 2 definitely felt like a vision a little less realized (and a little more mainstream) for it. I found some other small changes annoying as well, like the end-of-level summary screens, and the (over) simplification of some of the RPG elements (weapons, armor).

I have no idea that these changes were planned additions by BioWare or the results of EA leaning on the team to try to make their game more appealing to the masses, but either way, they did nothing but dilute what would have otherwise been another grand RPG experience.

This week, it was announced that the upcoming Mass Effect 3 would feature a multiplayer element, and I find myself utterly disappointed. Why? Because this is just another step towards mediocrity for what started out as a really outstanding series of games. Instead of spending time working on improving the storytelling in the game engine, adding more side-quests and expanding, what I find to be, a very interesting universe for the upcoming game, EA / BioWare are squandering their time developing a multiplayer mode that will likely not fit within the canon of the story, or even be something that players want to buy the game for.

It's almost as if we've gone backwards a step. I really thought we'd mostly gotten past the days of executives trying to check off all the boxes, making developers create bolted-on, forgettable multiplayer experiences just so they'd have another item to highlight on the back of the game's box.

Maybe EA isn't to blame here; maybe this was BioWare's decision. Either way, I think it's a mistake, and is ignorant to all the things that made the series popular to begin with.

Mass Effect is a single player experience. If I buy the third game, it's going to be because I want to continue that experience. I want to play a game with a carefully crafted world, where story is king, and the game isn't interrupted by lag, idiots cursing at me over their mics, etc. I'm not going to buy Mass Effect 3 for multiplayer; I've got Gears of War, Halo, and Team Fortress 2 for that.

But hey, I could be wrong; Mass Effect 3's multiplayer could turn out to be just fine. From the outset however, it doesn't seem like a very fun idea to me.

Ultimately, I really just hope that Mass Effect 3 (the single player role-playing game) doesn't lose its edge because BioWare had to spend months tacking on a multiplayer component. It would be a real shame to end such a brilliant trilogy on such a sour note.

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