Tag Archives: PC

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Dragon Age Inquisition Preview

Leave a comment

A day before PAX Aus, Xboxworld was invited to a preview of Dragon Age Inquisition at the very cool venue of Rutherglen House in Melbourne, down one of the city’s many laneways. Decked out like a hunting lodge with wood panelling walls and paintings covering every available surface and toilets and other rooms hidden behind seemingly innocuous panels, the portraits of the characters of the game blended in well with the surrounds.

My first shock was there wasn’t an Xbox One version of Dragon Age Inquisition playable. So this preview is based on the PS 4 / PC version. My second shock was just how nice the Playstation 4 controller was to use. This is why I don’t have either incidentally – every time I make up my mind to buy one or the other another reason crops up to change my mind. I’ll probably save up and get both during the inevitable Boxing Day stocktake sales.

Diving into the game, I was impressed by the depth of the character creator. I could have spent hours sculpting my Qunari Warrior, but instead I just pressed random because I wanted to jump straight into the game. And starting the game, it felt instantly familiar. The familiar ancillary characters from other games look better than ever thanks to the Frostbyte Engine, the sweeping orchestral sound track, and the wonderful environments took me to a place I have wanted to explore and learn more about since first setting foot many years ago.

But Dragon Age Inquisition didn’t grab me like it should have. Nothing immediately leapt out at me, shook me by the shoulders and said “you must rush out and pre-order this game”! Maybe I’ve spent too long in the mobile /indie space, where the market is so competitive you need to be grabbed by the balls right from the get go, otherwise you’re likely to wander off.

Maybe it’s because I chose to play a warrior, when my usual class is mage. I did this to get through the preview tutorial as quickly as possible, but now I kind of regret it. Don’t get me wrong, the combat felt nice, and I loved switching between real time and tactical battles so smoothly, but I found that I was sticking with my party caster more than my main character, with the melee combat not feeling as visceral as I would have liked. Magic has always been a far better mechanism in these games, and I’m definitely going to roll a mage when the game comes out.

And maybe it’s because I’m tired of the “Misunderstood Hero Trope” fantasy games so often use to tell their stories. Not giving too much away, you start out as a prisoner with a mystical ability and at the end of the tutorial wind up a hero, but then have to continue to prove yourself again and again and again. You know, just once I’d like to play a fantasy game where everyone realises, after I do something bloody awesome that no one else has been able to do, that I am actually bloody awesome, and everyone should love me, and stop double guessing me.

However, this criticism was short lived, because after the tutorial portion, the game opens up immensely and I got a glimpse of the variety of missions available, the fairly comprehensive crafting system, and a small hint at something darker within the storyline through some of the characters I met. It feels like there is great depth to the game, and it’s clear with the slow start this is a slow burn kind of game, as I do keep thinking about things I experienced during my brief time with the game, and I’m keen to get back to it.

I absolutely loved Dragon Age Origins. I’m one of the few people who enjoyed Dragon Age 2 for what it was. Hell, I even liked the Facebook game Dragon Age Legends! And from the small amount of time I spent with Dragon Age Inquisition, I know I’m going to be spending a lot of time with the game.

24Seven, Review, Video Games, Writing

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3

Leave a comment

Could anyone possibly dislike a game that has Frankenfurter travel back in time and kill Einstein, then return to his time to find his Russia gloriously populated by hot, busty women in tight plastic outfits, only to be thwarted by an ex-MTV soft porn star, a host of psionic school girls and the Hoff? No, I thought not.

This is Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, the third sequel to the prequel of the Command and Conquer franchise… Errr, yes, it’s rather confusing if you don’t know the history of the games, but the basic premise is the Nazi’s never rose to power in Germany, allowing Russia to dominate Europe, much to the dismay of the Allies. In the future, the Russians become the Brotherhood of Nod, and the Allies the GDF which is what Command and Conquer deals with. The Red Alert series deals with the Russians and the Allies. Simple, right? Well, to make things a bit more complicated, Red Alert 3 introduces a new faction, the Japanese, who have mech robots and the aforementioned psionic schoolgirls.

But it doesn’t really matter if you don’t know the history of the franchise, as the premise of this edition is explained in glorious full action cutscenes throughout the game. Featuring real actors including J. K Simmons, Jenny McCarthy, Gerge Takei, David Hasslehoff and Tim Curry, these are worth the price of entry alone. Sure, it’s B-Grade, but it’s the best kind of B-Grade, being funny and entertaining, and they really set the vibe of the game incredibly well.

The game never takes itself too seriously, and gameplay wise is pretty much a traditional Real Time Strategy – it’s faster paced and relies a more on the rock/paper/scissor dynamic than being a matter of building your forces and “zerg” rushing your opponent. The xbox controller does it’s best to match a mouse and keyboard, although I did find myself wishing for them on more than a few occasions, but the online play is smoother than PC could ever be.

If you’ve liked the previous Red Alert games, then this is pretty much the same, just with more to see and do. If you’ve never played these games, you’re missing out on some of the best B-Grade action this side of the 90s.

3.5 Stars

inthemix.com.au, Review, Video Games, Writing

Vietcong – Purple Haze

Leave a comment

The Vietnam War has been the focus of countless movies, but until recently not many video games. Maybe it was the fact that it was still fresh in our memories, maybe it was the fact that the processing power of early PCs couldn’t accurately represent the strategy and locations that needed to be included, or maybe it the fact that the Americans didn’t win the war outright, so how could they make a game where ultimately you were a loser? Whatever reason, with the slew of World War II First Person Shooters, the premise of setting a game in another war seemed quaint, and Illusion and Pterodon were one of the first game companies to take advantage of this setting.

Vietcong: Purple Haze is two games in one – the original game released in 2003 and Fist Alpha, the add-on pack released early this year. In both games, you play as a squad member in a small outfit thrust into the middle of this mad war. Vietcong places us in the position of Sergeant First Class Steve Hawkins, who is transferred to Nui Pek camp, and he and his Special Forces comrades must face the enemy in unfamiliar territory while accomplishing various objectives in the process. These missions involve reconnaissance, extraction, and elimination… the standard FPS fair. Whist there’s a little variety, it all comes a bit too samey after a few missions. The add-on pack puts you in the shoes of another Special Forces officer Warren Douglas, and it’s set a few months before the original game, and whilst a little more difficult, doesn’t add too much more variety to the action.

Speaking of gameplay, although you’ve got teammates, and each member has their own abilities, style, and their own history, they’re fairly 2 dimensional. You can order them around to do things, and you can talk to them, but on the whole the experience is a little dry. They’re invaluable in a firefight though. The hardest part of the game is seeing the enemy. It creates a sense of being there as you have to creep along looking for movement, but sometimes it seems like it’s just damn well cheating. Once you do see the enemy, they are rather easy to kill because they aren’t all that bright. You can easily outflank them, and sometimes even run straight for you!

Although the backdrops of the mountains look great, and the fog and lighting effects are used to create an eerie feeling of being in the jungle, the rest of the graphics are really sub-par and dated. The character models look awful, and objects in the foreground look blocky and badly rendered. The framerate is quite abominable when all the whiz bang effects are turned on, even on high end machines, and the game actually looks better with effects such as grass turned off.

The soundtrack is one saving grace, being full of realistic sounding jungles and swamps, with crickets chirping, frogs croaking, and the sounds of gunfire and helicopters echoing through the valleys. There’s a great number of authentic 60’s and 70’s rock throughout the game, and when in camp you can tune into American Forces Vietnam Network to listen to ‘Double J’ broadcasting to the troops. The voice acting is OK, but be warned – it’s rather mature and of the time. Lots of swearing, and use of the word “gook” in a demeaning way. Sure, it’s keeping in with the time and feel, but is it really necessary?

Online play is another saving grace, if you ignore the visuals of course. It becomes quite intense as you creep through the jungles, trying to capture the flag, or just kill as many people as possible. The maps are pretty big, and you can go some games without seeing an enemy, but again, the problem here is that after a few games, it’s just another First Person Shooter. Sure, there’s a little more stealth involved, a little more tactics and hiding, but it’s been done better in lots of other games.

While Vietcong: Purple Haze is does immerse you in the Vietnam conflict rather well, the other aspects of the game let it down. The questionable AI and sub-par graphics really hamper the enjoyment of the game. It’s a refreshing change from all the sci-fi and WWII shooters, but doesn’t really excell in enough areas to make this a “must buy” purchase.

inthemix.com.au, Review, Video Games, Writing

Dungeon Siege: Legends or Aranna

Leave a comment

Now, I have to admit right off the bat I didn’t play much of Dungeon Siege when it first cam out. It never worked on my old PC that was pretty old anyway, and since upgrading I lost interest in hack and slash style games. But people always raved about Dungeon Siege, and I felt out of the loop, as it were. So, luckily for me, and anyone else who missed out on the original, Dungeon Siege: Legends or Aranna comes with the complete version of the first game.

I played through the original for a while, and thought, OK, so this is a traditional dungeon hack. The difference in this to other games was the lush graphics, and the intensity of the action, and the expansive locations, and these are added to by the expansion.

The graphics in this game are really good. The levels are very well designed, with trees that obscure the view, and have different elevations that allow you to have a strategic advantage over the masses of enemies. And there are plenty of enemies to deal with, and I was amazed that the game never seems to load the maps, and can have so many enemies on screen at one time.

The camera allows you to zoom right in, and while a little blocky on my machine (which is getting long in the tooth), the models look well made and quite detailed. They change appropriately when changing armour and weapons and so on. The spell effects, especially the larger area ones, look amazing. The sounds also add a lot to the game, and on occasion I’ve jumped as a monster bursts growling from the ground underneath my party’s feet. The ambient sounds are also great, form the jungle noises of the, err, jungle, to the haunted screams from the deep dungeons.

However, after playing both the original and expansion pack, I noticed that I was hardly playing the game, but rather just sitting there and watching as my men and ladies ran about killing things rather intelligently in the general area of where I clicked my mouse. It kind of felt like I was playing a version of the Sims, but with Swords and magic.

On the one hand this is a good thing, as it means there is no scouring the screen to find members of your team who may have got stuck trying to navigate their way through the maps, only to find them standing still whilst being attacked. But on the other hand, it kind of feels mindless. The story, or lack thereof, also adds to the mindless feel, as you never really become engaged in neither the original story, nor the new one.

While Dungeon Siege: Legends or Aranna is a good expansion pack to the game, it, like the original, doesn’t really add anything to the genre as a whole. It’s a good hack and slash, but there’s been countless of these style of games, right back to Gauntlet. The brief foray into the Multiplayer aspect of the game led me to the same conclusion – it’s good, it looks great and is easy to get into, but and without the fancy graphics and so on, it’s nothing but a clone of so many other games. If you’re after a few hours of mindless fun, then this game is for you, but if you’re after a little more depth, the expansion pack is not where you will find it.

inthemix.com.au, Review, Video Games, Writing

Runaway

Leave a comment

PC
In the tradition of Sam and Max Hit the Road and Monkey Island comes a point and click adventure featuring beautiful buxom babes, mafia goons, l33t hackers, drag queens in the desert, alien abductions and more!
Runaway – A Road Adventure tries to capture the magic of “point and click” adventure games like Lucasart’s Sam and Max Hit the Road and Monkey Island. It succeeds in providing an engaging story full of plot twists, amazing locations full of colour and energy and clever and funny characters. However, at times it seems more like an exercise in frustration than a computer game, with it’s incredibly linear storyline and hard to find objects.

The game starts with the main character Brian Basco telling the story of how bumped into Gina Timmins, a striking and quite buxom brunette; or rather how he accidentally ran her over in his car. Being the sensible physics geek he is, he takes her to hospital where she tells him a horrid story of the mafia, murder, and a strange crucifix. From here you find yourself on a wild ride of discovery across America as you try to outsmart the mafia and discover what the crucifix has to do with Gina, the Mafia, and Hopi Indians. Along the way you’ll meet a bunch of drag queens stuck in the desert *cough* Priscilla *cough*, archaeologists [I]sans[/I] whips and hat, freaky geeks obsessed with aliens, and pot smoking hippy hackers.

Using “cell shading”, the effect where 2D graphics are modelled in 3D, the game is given a real comic book feel. There’s also often a “box within a box” on screen, showing some kind of action and Brian’s reaction, also much like a comic book. The remarkable looking animated characters and gregarious backgrounds extend this comic book feel, with the dialogue often witty and cheesy, but also sometimes clever and wise. The story is told through the gameplay, as well as through animated cutscenes, and some of these cut scenes are very long, making this seem more like an interactive movie than a computer game, yet they’re engaging to watch.

Whilst the backgrounds are full of colour and detail, and this eye candy is nice, it’s often distracting as the game often becomes a mere “pixel hunt”, scrolling the mouse over every part of the screen in order to find something important to the particular quest. Another annoying aspect of this is that there are containers have to be checked to find an item, then that item is used to solve a riddle, and then the container has to be checked again to find another item for another quest. Once this is realised, the game isn’t that bad, but until that point you’ll find yourself literally trapped in certain parts of the game wondering what the hell to do!

While most of the solutions to the puzzles can be gleaned logically by listening to the dialogue and watching the game closely, some are just so completely idiotic you want to scream. For example, there’s one part of the game where Brian needs oil or grease to fix a rusted machine gun. There’s a small pool of oil in another location, and a bucket elsewhere. Logic would lead to putting the bucket in the oil. However, Brian won’t do this. Instead, you have to put sunglasses in the oil, swap the sunglasses with those of a drag queen who is obsessive about her tan, then ask for her tanning oil! However, there are really only a few of these, and successfully figuring out what to do in parts does become really rewarding.

“Point and Click” adventures used to be all the rage in PC gaming, but that’s died off in more recent times. Although games like [I]Sam and Max Hit the Road[/I] and [I]Monkey Island[/I] are fondly remembered for their humour and fun, they don’t seem to live up to modern gaming values. Who wants to play a game you’re only ever going to play once? Where’s the reply value? Where’s multiplayer? These are some of the problems faced when looking to buy such games, because these values DO matter, especially when games cost nearly $100. If funny adventure games really float your boat, then go out and buy this game, otherwise give it a miss.

inthemix.com.au, Review, Video Games, Writing

Age of Wonders: Shadows of Magic

Leave a comment

PC

Shadow Magic is my first introduction to the “Age of Wonders” series, but if this title is anything to go buy I might have to seek the previous games out. I’m a huge fan of the “Civilisation” series of games, and AoWSM is quite similar in some ways, yet adds a role-playing element that makes it similar to Warcraft 3. Either way, it’s a damn addictive game. The game won’t appeal to those who like their games to be quick, but for those of us who are lucky enough to have a lot of time on our hands, this game will let you while away the hours gathering resources, building cities, and create armies to wipe out the opposition.

The Campaign explains that Merlin, head of the Wizards, is trapped on an alternative plane of existence, and you have to battle what are known as the Shadow Demons to save him and your planet. But not only is there the Demons to contend with, there’s Phobias, the Human Emperor who blames the Wizards, elves, dwarves, and other races for bringing the Shadow Demons into the world. The Single player campaign starts off with a simple 3 part tutorial that introduces you to the game mechanics, and teaches you how to move, construct cities and units, how to capture other cites and so forth. It will all be quite familiar to those who have played other Real Time Strategy games. The main aspect of the game is typical resource gathering – in this case it’s gold for your cities and armies, and mana for your magic.

There are 3 planes of fighting: the Land, Underground and the Shadow World. There are races better suited to fighting in each area, but what is really cool is there can be cities in all three of these planes. This makes the game much more tactical than other RTS games: Is it a matter of taking over one plane, and moving onto the next, or establish bases in each of the planes and attack from each?

The magic part is what makes this game really interesting. In each city, you have the option to make Wizard Towers, which amplify the wizards power and allow you to cast spells over the land. These can range from those that heal your armies, hide your cities, and hinder enemy movement. There are also Heroes, who rise in level and power as the game progresses, and as long as there is one city with a Wizard Tower under your control, you can cast spells whenever your hero goes into battle. When you go into battle, either against a city or against an army in the fields, the screen zooms in, and you get to control your units, directing them to attack and casting spells to devastating effect.

There are a few problems with this game. The graphics freak out where there are too many units moving on screen, particularly those with flapping wings. Whilst there is a zoom mode, the graphics do not scale well, unlike in Warcraft, and look bitty and fuzzy when you zoom in. Battles take far too long, and whilst there is the option of doing a “quick battle”, that often leaves the attacker at the mercy of the AI. Whilst the AI is not totally mindless, it is rather predictable and you can learn it’s patterns and defend yourself better against it.

Those faults do not make the game unplayable though. In fact, I had to drag myself away from the game to write this review. The gameplay is addictive and the story is quite enthralling. I’ve been playing nearly two weeks straight, and am only up to the third campaign, there’s meant to be five, plus there’s a whole host of single scenarios, plus a random map generator. Already there is enough to keep most gamers happy, but add to this the multiplayer aspect, then you have a lasting and fun game that’s well worth the money.