Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning – Demo

I played through the Amalur demo on PS3 and it’s well worth a download if you’re curious about the game. I liked it, but it’s a mixed experience overall. I think this game shows a lot of potential, but I doubt it will become one of my all-time favourites. Both Dragon Age and Skyrim are better RPGs, but Amalur is different enough from either to demand attention nonetheless.

Diablo 3? Maybe 4?

By now there’s been plenty of talk about the Diablo 3 delay, a lot of it putting the spin out there that this is for the best. Blizzard is making what sounds like some pretty significant changes, akin to going back to the drawing board on major areas of the game.

From the 1-Up article,

“While working on Diablo III we’ve been called out for messing around with systems too much, that the game is good as-is and we should just release it,” Wilson wrote. “I think that’s a fair argument to make, but I also think it’s incorrect. Our job isn’t just to put out a game, it’s to release the next Diablo game. No one will remember if the game is late, only if it’s great. We trust in our ability to put out a great game, but we’re not quite there yet. In addition to finishing and polishing the content of the game we’re continuing to iterate on some of the core game systems.”

I’m skeptical about this position. Diablo III was first announced all of the way back in 2008, and at that point it already looked like near-beta quality. The game currently is in beta, in fact, and still they’re planning to make these major changes. It’s admirable that they want the launch to go as smoothly as possible, but the scope of the changes they’re talking about sounds, on its face, counter-productive.

There’s another way of looking at this, which is the way that I feel is perhaps most accurate: the “real” Diablo III is a game that was never shipped (it should have shipped in 2010) and which was only glimpsed in the public beta. The game that Blizzard is now working on is Diablo IV, some version of which will be released under the title of “Diablo III.” I realize that it’s foolish to question the unassailable wisdom of Blizzard, but that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Hitbox – Hour 2

I bought a second-hand Hitbox arcade stick off of a co-worker, with the option to resell it to another interested co-worker if I decide that I don’t like it. So far it has stayed at work where I’ve used it to play Street Fighter IV on PC, but I intend to take it home and try it out on KoF XIII. I’ll refer to it as a “stick” here, but obviously there’s no actual stick–it’s just beautiful Sanwa buttons, and nothing else.

Hitbox has been pretty good for me so far. I find it easier to execute special moves and some combos on Hitbox than with a conventional arcade stick. Doing so under pressure is a different story, but I think that once I develop the proper muscle memory, Hitbox could be a very powerful tool. Movement takes some getting used to; I still have a tendency to mix-up the crouch and jump buttons, especially under pressure. That’s by far the biggest hurdle facing me at the moment.

The stick is very nicely constructed, although I do have a few minor gripes: the cover is cracked in the bottom-right corner, which I’ve been told is a common fault with these sticks due to how they’re assembled. Also the start button(s) on the top edge are not sunken into the case, so it’s easy to brush up against them accidentally (perhaps with your pant leg or some such) and trigger them, causing an instant disqualification according to typical tournament rules. (I don’t see myself enrolling in a tournament any time soon anyway.) Finally, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to disassemble the stick, whether to do repairs or to install custom face art.

The pros definitely outweigh the cons, however. The button layout is both pleasantly ergonomic and accommodates a number of different hand placements for varying control layouts. It’s a very compact unit–easy to store–but also with some heft to it so it won’t slide around in your lap. I could see this arcade stick working well for games other than fighting games, such as shmpus or rhythm games; it would be a lot of fun to design a game specifically to be played on the Hitbox.

I’m probably going to keep the stick at this point, but the novelty factor still hasn’t worn off at this point, so who knows.

Weekly Kusoge – Academy of Champions, TMNT Smash-Up, Rooms: The Main Building

This post goes out to the underdogs of the games industry. Ubisoft Vancouver, formerly Action Pants studio, has been shuttered, but not before bringing us one of the better soccer titles for the Wii. GameArts, the once-giant JRPG developer who brought us Lunar and Grandia, has in recent years been reduced to doing contract work on Super Smash Bros. Brawl and hacking together a Smash Bros. style TMNT brawler, also for Ubisoft. Hudson, the developer behind the classics Bomberman and Wonder Boy, is being absorbed into Konami and will only continue to live on as a brand. I tried out one of their last gasps for the Wii, a shovelware puzzle game.

Asura’s Wrath Demo

If you’re any kind of anime/manga fan, I’d recommend giving the Asura’s Wrath demo a try. It’s less than 800 MB (at least on PSN), so it’s not even that much of a pain to download.

In terms of gameplay, Asura’s Wrath is roughly the worst combination of mechanics I’ve ever encountered: a balance between on-rail shooter sections and quick time event boss fights. On-rail shooters can be fun, as evidenced by Panzer Dragoon and Sin & Punishment, but far more often than not they’re terrible. Similarly, QTEs are sometimes effective when used properly (eg. God of War), but typically they’re abused and serve only to detract from my enjoyment of the game (eg. roughly a third of all next-gen games that I’ve played in the last five years). The Asura’s Wrath demo doesn’t do a very good job with the on-rail shooter parts, at least from what I saw, and relies heavily on QTEs for the rest. I find myself waiting for it to open up into a brawler style game, but my waiting is in vain.

As I suffered through this demo–because I really want Asura’s Wrath to be good–a funny thing happened: I started to like it. The QTE-driven gameplay is obnoxious, but there’s a consistency to it that makes it at least good quality QTE gameplay. It’s a huge improvement over the crap that Resident Evil 5 forced on me. The shonen manga style dialogue and presentation also appeals to me, and it’s hard not to notice how beautiful Asura’s Wrath often is. It puts on a great spectacle, and although I resent the lack of gameplay depth, that still counts for something.

I was surprised to find that although Asura’s Wrath is exactly the kind of game that I don’t want to see being made, it pushes the envelope of what it’s trying to be far enough that I find it interesting. It turns out to be a game that I want to play, even though on its face I expected to thoroughly despise it. Maybe I’m making a big mistake here, but I’ll take a chance on it–and I’ll write more if I discover that I don’t like the game after all. Either way, the demo is worth trying.

Holiday Gaming – Majesty Series

A mere month ago, I hadn’t played any of the Majesty games. Now I’ve sampled a thin cross-section of the series–an hour of Majesty on Android, two hours of Majesty on Steam, and two hours of Majesty 2 on Steam. It’s an ambitious concept for a game, and I’m far from finished exploring what the series has to offer, but it’s not too early to offer a brief write-up.

Holiday Gaming – Dungeon Siege III, Hard Reset

Just some quick updates on a couple of Steam games that I got around to sampling today.

Dungeon Siege III is a solid Diablo-like action RPG with a bit of emphasis on button mashing. Visually and stylistically, it exceeded my expectations–it could almost hold its own up against Dragon Age. But it does rely on twitch reflex gaming (such as dodging and blocking), which is bound to put RPG purists off.

I’ve been struggling a lot with the controls; although it does have the ability to remap keys, I get the impression that the control scheme was designed for console gamers foremost with the PC version created as an afterthought. I may try playing using a X360 wired controller next time to see how that feels. Although I was frustrated with a few of the tougher battles, I respect the fact that there’s some significant challenge to be found even early on in the campaign.

Hard Reset is a straight-up, old school FPS with a heavy cyberpunk theme. It is what it is–there are no RPG elements to be found here, no cover system to speak of, no regenerating health (although there are shields that regenerate, slowly), mostly linear levels, and an abundance of exploding barrels that can easily kill you in an instant. These are all good things, more or less; it’s refreshing to see a new FPS adhere to the old conventions.

For a budget-priced indie title, the art production and visual effects are impressive. The weapons are flashy, the enemies are nicely animated, and there are lots of nice touches showing a bit of extra polish everywhere you look. This game is well worth a try, so long as you aren’t expecting it to be more than a straightforward run-and-gun experience.

Holiday Gaming – Sonic Generations, Bulletstorm

Steam sale madness brought me a couple of new games yesterday, both of which I’d had my eye on for some time. Sonic Generations is a solid title by contemporary Sonic standards (well, by those low standards, it qualifies as an excellent game) and I’ll easily get my $10 worth out of it, I think. Similarly, Bulletstorm is alright, and worth $5, at least if you’re not already weighed down with more FPS games than you can find time for. It can’t hold a candle to Rage, let alone seriously good FPSes like Battlefield 3.

Holiday Gaming – 3DS Mario, Cobalt

The mad rush of awesome holiday gaming stuff is tough to keep up with, what with Steam’s big promotion, the huge flood of new blockbuster releases that has hit in the last few months, and so forth. A big deal in my circle of gaming coworkers–as for many gamers–has been one-two punch arrival of Mario Land 3DS and Mario Kart 7, which have noticeably elevated the desirability of the 3DS. The arrival of Monster Hunter 3G in Japan has also bolstered 3DS sales in that market, so overall the 3DS is a rising star at the moment.

Not this shit again

So I’m finally giving Orcs Must Die! a try on my freshly-upgraded gaming box.  Apparently, in order to be helpful, Robot Entertainment have included code to detect whether a game controller is plugged into the system, and if such a device is found, they assume it must be an Xbox 360 controller and I must want to use it to play the damn game.  This is what’s known as “good user interaction design”, as practiced by EA in Dead Space and even Valve in Portal 2.  After all, the only device anyone ever uses is a dual-stick controller, and it’s completely impossible that someone playing the game on a PC would have, say, a Logitech G25 connected to a USB port and might want to play a game (that isn’t a racing sim) with mouse and keyboard.  So now that we’ve detected that the player has (a) a mouse and keyboard and (b) a game controller, there’s no need to confuse him with such arcane things as options; we’ll just default to the controller.  Job’s done, off to the pub.

I hope your peckers rot off, Robot Entertainment.