Look at this stuff, isn't it neat?
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Take Two’s Approach
When you gain the rights to a dormant but extremely well loved franchise what is the first thing you do with it? Take Two throws it in the bin and starts again. So Take Two, what is your excuse for this? I mean what did you think would happen? This has NOTHING to do with Xcom. Genre changed, Aliens changed, Story changed, Look changed, so what exactly does this have to do with Xcom apart from the name? The Theme, that theme being angry aliens.
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I love age of empires online! I’ve been playing since the closed beta, not every day but enough to know its a good solid RTS with a good sprinkling of MMO elements. The core gameplay is very similar to previous Age of Empires games but with a few twists.
Firstly you have a persistent home city, think of this as your MMO housing where you have all of your belongings. This acts as a quest hub, glorified menu and crafting centre. You can shuffle around all of the buildings to your heart’s content, buy or build vanity items using in-game coin and materials. This gives you the chance to customise your city to make it feel unique. Some of the buildings you put down where will act as quest hubs, for example when you unlock the Temple and build it a priest there will offer you priestly related quests. There are also rare buildings later that offer you rare quests and rewards. I haven’t been playing enough to get any of these but I’m well aware that they exist due to the spamming in trade chat. Buildings also serve the purpose of acting as a menu, clicking on the advisors hall for example allows you to select advisors which grant a buff for each Age. For example you might have the choice between your villagers gathering food 10% faster or buildings costing 10% less. They seem like valid choices which you can tailor to your desires. There is also a talent like system, my only grudge with this is that i seems rather shallow at the earlier levels and fans out later in the game. I suspect this is done on purpose to make sure that everyone covers certain bases. Finally this is where crafting takes place. You can create materials over time using buildings like saw mills which might produce one unit of wood every 30 minutes, these continue to work while you are offline but have a cap to the amount they can hold, a subtle way to get you online every day to harvest them. You can then create one-shot items that will give you a temporary buff or armor and gear to equip your units with. This is one of my favourite parts of the game, all of your units and buildings have various weapon, armor and special item slots which you can fill buffing the unit as you do. To top this off when you play with the units in-game they will actually wear the items you have equipped. For example as default most of the units wear little to no armor and have weedy little wooden weapons, it is very satisfying to see these little guys running around with huge tower shields and broadswords.
Missions are broken down in to a few types. General missions, challenge missions, non-travel missions and PvP: General missions are typical one-off missions to progress the story or to teach you to use new units at your command, typical RTS fair although some of the tougher ones later in the game do require co-op. Challenge missions are repeatable quests which get harder each time you do them, for example you might have to play a tower defence game with guard towers to protect a base, each time you replay the mission the time you have to survive for will be extended. Non-travel missions are like bonus missions which you complete whilst doing other quests, they might be to kill 50 wolves or 25 elite units. Finally you have the PvP missions which are give you bonuses for winning a PvP match. Whenever you complete any quests you get experience points, coin, rep tokens and a chest. Experience does exactly as you would expect, you collect it to level up. Coin is the general in-game currency, you spend this trading with other players or for low-level items. Rep tokens can be redeemed to buy level appropriate gear from whichever quest city you got the quest. Chests give you random items, gear, advisors or craft materials. Chests can also be found on every mission map protected by guardians, these are normally well worth hunting out after you have completed the mission itself.
Age of Empire itself is free to play, all of the basic content is there for you to play without spending a penny. You could happily play the game like this and never get bothered by someone trying to sell you things. You can however spend money and buy extra civilisations and bonus units. This model seems to be channelling the spirit of Shareware. You get a good full chapter of the game for free which everyone can try, if you like it you buy more content. This is exactly how the Free-to-play premium model should be done. I hope Robot Entertainment and Gas Powered games the best of luck with this project as it deserves to do well.
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A colleague raved to me about Yazuka 3 last year, when I saw Yakuza 4 available for £25 a few weeks after its release I snapped it up. It did take a few hours to get to grips with but I’m very glad I stuck with it.
The Yakuza series is set around the fictional setting of Kamurocho, and is very similar to the game world used in Yaukza 3 with the addition of some underground and rooftop areas. Like most of the major cities in Japan most people get around on foot, there is no GTA style car jacking to be had here but it isn’t needed. If you just want to detour from the main story there is plenty here to keep you busy. There are large amount of shops, attractions and mini-games, roughly one per street. These are normally coloured on your map so you know where to go when you just want to wonder around. You can also look them up in an index but its not that intuitive.
The story telling is done in typical Japanese fashion, the story happens, new character appear and disappear. There is no western style handholding, nothing is spoon fed to you which can be a little difficult at first but is quite rewarding by the end. If like me you aren’t familar with works of the Yakuza the first hour or so can be quite difficult to understand as there are quite long cutscenes which throw you in at the deepend with talk of Clans, Familys and Brothers. The cutscenes are usually split about 50% prerendered voice work and 50% text although there doesn’t seem to be any rules defining what sort of content each one contains. Over the course of the game you switch between four different characters and by the end of the game you have a rich tapastry of history, double crossing, lying and deceit. As long as you stick with it for the first few hours there are enough twists and turns to keep you interested until the end when all the story threads are pulled together.
The real suprising joy of the game is the combat. It seems extremely simple at first but has enough depth to keep you wanting more. Best of all are the heat moves which can be used once your heat bar fills up, these are often extremely brutal and more often than not envolve breaking some faces. Dispite never killing anyone in combat this is somehow much for disturbingly violent then anything you would see in GTA. Despite being more comic book like the fighting is much more bone crunching.
Yakuza 4 is very quirky and very Japanese in its nature, almost every fight ends in an apology, every street has a hostess bar and it is all of its stories have a strong moral backbone. This is a game that ticks all of the boxes, it might not be to everyone’s tastes, just like some of items on sale in restaurants.
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It has been over a month since i stopped playing World of Warcraft and frankly I’m not missing it. I miss playing with other people but the game itself wasn’t fun anymore, for me anyway. What is odd is that technically the game is now the best it has ever been, however over the years it has lost its charm and spirit, in my eyes at least.
Since its launch the game has slowly been refined and brood down and streamlined. Each of these changes on paper was a step forward but together they have done damage. In essence they have stripped back the world and now the mechanics of the game itself are too visible to me and the majority of players. It’s hardly surprising that a large fan base the size of WoW’s rips every little detail apart to see what makes it tick . I liken this to Morrowind and Oblivion, Autoleveling and Fast Travel are great ideas on paper but they end up killing the feeling of a living world. Something which the Blizzard is well aware of and they have been fighting against this for a long time.
I am not done with MMORPGs in general, well at least not with ones that work outside the WoW formula. I couldn’t give a fig about Starwars Republic of the doodad , like Rift it is a WoW style mmo refined to the N’th degree. I’ve had enough of that thanks, I want something fresher.
I’ve been playing Age of Empires Online since closed beta which is very good blend of traditional RTS gameplay and MMO style gear collecting. It can get a bit repetitive if you play it for several hours at a time but to is good for a few hours a day. I cannot say how it will cope in the long run however as there isn’t much in the way of end game content at the moment but we shall soon see. It’s also free to play so you have no excuses not to play!
My point of light somewhere off in the distance is Guild Wars 2. It promises several features that aren’t currently being done to death in other MMORPGs. They are saying there will be very little in the way of leveling quests, most of the game will revolve around events which randomly spark up around the world, these will of course will repeat eventually but it will definitely be more dynamic. You would never know what was ahead of you each time you log in. Combat should be fresh due to the lack of tanks and healers, everyone has to look after themselves. There are no tanks, everyone has to avoid taking damage, if you do take damage you are the only one who can effectively heal yourself. There are other heals but none of them allow you to target a friendly party member. We will see over the coming months if this pans out according to plan or ends up being a pile of broken dreams. These guys have been ambitions, but that comes with big risks.
I’ve enjoyed my time playing world of Warcraft and I’m not going to start being bitter about it. I still have very high regard for blizzard and await more details on project titan. Whatever it may be I know that they know they cannot create a WoW killer. They have to cut a new niche just like Guild Wars 2 is trying to do.
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I’m not good enough at Cities in Motion, this is a hard game even on the easy setting. Currently with 15 hours played I’m on the 3rd level yet, but I’m not frustrated. Cities in Motion plays rides the line between a more classic transport game like Transport Tycoon and a puzzle game. You are given a city to which you must apply your commuting magic through a mix of Buses, Trams, Metro trains, Water Buses and Helicopters. The puzzle element comes in to play in how you links these together around the existing city whilst at the same time avoiding gridlock. I’m amazed by the passengers who are extremely clever and will happily chain together multiple forms of transport to get to their destinations. In the unlikely event that students want to get to college you can have small bus systems feeding underground systems or trams. I quickly learnt the fewer stops a single transport line serves the better as passengers will only get off and make room for more passengers at their destination. The mechanics of the little peeps you are carting around is really clever, everyone in the simulation is persist, some days they will go to work, some days they will go to the shops. You really can have a mixed system of lines which feed off of each other, once i realised this the game really came alive and is a huge improvement over the old Transport Tycoon style system.
So when haven’t i finished the third level? Its quite hard to make a consistant profit. All my transport lines themselves are running a small profit but various other profits are dragging me down. Optimisation seems to be the name of the game here and each time i retry it i learn something new. When I do eventually get to the point where I’ve dug myself in to a unescapable money problem it hasn’t been a waste of time because I’ve learnt something in the process. You have to learn to pace yourself and make full use of the different methods of transport.
Two things suprised me about Cities in Motion, firstly was how polished it looked for a fairly small release for an unknown developer and secondly how small the installer is. The graphics are have a slightly grainy classic look to them which fits the game well and the engine is very slick and fast loading. The camera can be rotated round in 45 degree angles and zoomed anywhere between a birdseye view and a building top level.
Generally the laying out of track works very well however there are a few quirks when trying to lay tram lines on existing roads. For some reason you will often have to do small sections at a time, especially when going around corners. I suspect this is due to how the game over lays your tracks on the existing city layout. That said it does do an extremely good job of automatically working out things like high for you as you wind overground metros over buildings and under pipes.
This is 1st class stuff , if you are in anyway inclined to like business or transport genres I would urge you to at least give the demo a try
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What a volatile place the world is. In the space of a week we’ve seen Japan grind to a halt and most of the world calling time on Gaddafi.
Watching japan suffer is quite painful for me. I’ve been there, seen how polite and well mannered everyone is. It seems like a sweeping statement to talk about a whole country’s people like that but with Japan its really true. There social background means they never say boo to a goose, they bow at it instead.
After the disaster occurred the internet managed to stir up the usual sack of idiots who decided that it was vengeance for Pearl Harbour. Sadly these cretins weren’t joking, but I will humour them anyway. If some vengeance was needed for the pre-emptive strike on pearl harbour I’m sure roughly 200,000 innocent people who were killed with atomic weapons were more than enough. If you think your God is playing on your side against the Japanese you really are a cold-hearted husk of a human.
Libya is a bit more of a mixed bag, be it a bag of nuts. So we have a civil war where the state is seemingly “removing” the those causing a problem. We now have the UN trying to stop the state whenever it does so, or at least this is what we are told. We are played the story of the underdog rising up against the evil overload but it can quiet easily also viewed as a rebel group of terrorists trying overthrow the government, and we are on the side of the terrorists. It’s all a matter of perspective, not that I’m siding with Gaddafi on this one. If your people ask you to step down and you don’t what else can you expect, that said how many people do you need to oppose him as ruler before is justified to take action? These things are never as black and white as they would seem.
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Earlier generations of console offered something that wasn’t available else where. Hardware wasn’t as cheap and forthcoming as it is these days. Consoles offered a relatively cheap platform to make games on.
The modern world is heaving with easily accessible hardware. Handheld consoles which were once bespoke hardware now use the same hardware as their smartphone cousins. So if the hardware doesn’t make them unique, what does? Nintendo have become the masters of selling tried and tested electronics to the masses. While Microsoft and Sony battle it out with the powerhouse machines and lose money on hardware as they do Nintendo go about and do their own thing. The only way to win the hardware race is not to take part, there will always be something faster and better out shortly.
Sony have recently annouced their NGP, which looks very nice. Unfortunately it doesn’t really offer anything
new, there is no unique selling point here. You have a very generic experience for the user, if they have used any other console before they aren’t going to find anything new here. The 3DS on the other hand offers something very unique for many consumers, just like the DS and Wii did before it.
So if we are going to see familiar games on the NGP with its off the shelf hardware why does it need to exist?The tech world seems to be moving towards a more unified environment why not just develop the Playstation Portable as a platform rather than just a set bit of hardware? Sony announced with the Xperia Play that they would also be releasing the Playstation Suite which plays playstation one games on android handsets. Why not just create a new platform which takes full advance of the power instead?
The Unity games development platform is the perfect example. It is being used to create rich games that are usable on multiple platforms with just a small client install. Why not just have a “Playstation Mobile” platform that can be installed on Android, Apple or Windows Mobile handsets?
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I realise today that I was actually quite soft on HP yesterday and missed out a few bits.
Winzip
This would be great if it was the full version, but it is just a trial. So rather than just opening .zip files in explorer as is natively supported since XP you now want me to get nagged about registering a product that isn’t even needed? Uninstall , Thanks HP
Norton Online Backup
Your trying to sell a personal backup solution to Business users? Clever aren’t you. Uninstall. Thanks HP
McAfee Total Protection Service
I can understand them supplying an antivirus trial with the laptop. However they have mixed Norton and McAfee products, that goes down like a cold cup of sick. Uninstall. Thanks HP
Bing Bar
You would think the default bing search in Internet Explorer would be enough. Aparently you need a double thickness toolbar chomping up your view to do the same think. Uninstall. Thanks HP
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The latest generation of small business desktops we have had through our workshop are awful. I have had my differences with HP in the past but this really is the final straw.
The Hardware is itself is fine, no complaints here, you get what you pay for. What Isn’t fine is the huge amount of shovelware that comes on the machine by default, some of which have broken installers. Then to add salt to the wound they removed the some of the standard fonts so that most text is italic by default.
The best solution to this is just to wipe the machine clean, thanks for that added value admin overhead right there HP. Lets take a look at the list of exciting software that comes pre-installed:
Xobni
This is a plugin for outlook that enables you to do “lightning fast searches”. Guess what, Outlook 2010 already includes indexed searches that integrate with Windows 7. All this is doing is taking up a good chunk of screen space and performance. Worse than that, more often than not the built in uninstaller doesn’t actually remove it so you have to use a product like Revo Uninstaller to do it. Thanks HP
Huddle
A collaboration platform. Luckily this is just a shortcut so you can huddle it directly in to the recycle bin. Thanks HP
Kobo
Ebook Reader. We want people to work at work not to read books at work. The fact that it is an anagram of book makes me hate it even more. Uninstall. Thanks HP
Press Reader
Another Ebook Reader. This one specialises in newspapers. We want people to do their work not read page 3 of The Sun. Uninstall. Thanks HP
Zinio Reader
Yet another Ebook Reader. This one apparently is good for magazines like national geographic. We want people to do their work not look at Honey Badgers. Uninstall. Thanks HP
Wild Tangent
My mind boggles why this is on Business workstations, it even comes with over a dozens of games. I like Peggle as much as the next man but come this is just giving people a reason to slack. Uninstall and tick a check box for every game when you uninstall it. Thanks HP
PDF Complete Special Edition
Used for creating PDFs, that sounds ok doesn’t it? The Special Edition however does a watermark on all of the PDFs you create with it. Yeah that’s useful. Thanks HP
HP Advisor Dock
Dispite licensing the technology from Stardock this is a oversized pain in the arse. At best this tells you information that is already available to you in another form. Uninstall. Thanks HP
HP Protect Tools
A suite of tools for protecting. Mostly it just hangs around on your desktop making you despise it.
Missing Fonts
if everything is in italics it looks stylish doesn’t it? Well some %$£& at HP decided it did and so removed the regular versions of Arial and Verdana from the built-in windows fonts. By doing this it forces a lot of programs to go slanty. The major problem with this is that quite a few programs call on these, for example if you try to do a report from Sage Accounts it will try to call up Verdana Regular. As the font has been removed for the crimes it has committed against style the reports will fail. Copy the correct font files from another PC. Thanks HP
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I can’t say I use my PSPGo much, it is never on hand when i need it and i don’t want to tow it around constantly. I’m starting to warm to the idea of a phone being a gaming device that can play with the big boys. Given the rise in power of ARM and mobile graphics there isnt much in the way of a power difference between the two. In fact the two upcoming consoles from Nintendo and Sony both use ARM, the raw guts are not bespoke like they once were.
Up until now handheld consoles were they only way of getting of enjoying games on the move unless you had a unhealthy love of snake. With this barrier now all but evaporated is there any point in creating the handheld console as we know it today? The Xperia Play, the first in a range of phone handsets featuring Playstation Suite.
My biggest reservation about this isn’t the hardware or the playstation suite, It is Sony Ericsson themselves. They have managed to create quite a reputation for themselves for bad customer support, no official firmware updates but they still encrypt the bootloader to stop people updating the OS themselves.
So where does this leave me? Until Sony Ericsson change their ways and realise that selling Android phones comes with the responsibly of regular updates they won’t be getting any money from me.
Playstation Suite will be downloadable on any handset which run 2.3 Gingerbread or above which leaves me feeling I’m best off waiting for something to come out of the HTC camp. Even if they don’t bring out a handset with gaming controls Playstation Suite will use touch screen buttons instead.
Ludological 