Check it out now at the link below. Still under construction, but feel free to flood the initial post with comments to show your continued support.
ALSO: I put up another blog called “Ascetic Philosophy” for the purpose of talking about all the oddball topics that enter my mind. From psychology to sociology to chemistry, if it interests me and isn’t about technology, games or Armor, you’ll find it there.
I’m not taking credit for these theories. A lot of the ideas are mine or were from threads I posted in a lot, but many other users of many forums contributed to these. Just a few of my favorite fan theories about what future entries in popular game series will be.
Big Red War (next Red Dead game)
Since the epilogue of Red Dead Redemption finishes at the outset of World War I, with Jack Marston of the perfect age to be drafted, this one is a no brainer. Although Redemption is not a direct followup to Revolver, it would still be a great way to go. I imagine the best way to make the game work is if Jack was a courier or a spy (think Young Indiana Jones). This would give you the freedom to travel the open world and take part in all of the major events of the war without wrecking the plot. Think The Saboteur meets Assassin’s Creed III. Also, the arbitrary change of scenery to Europe would give Rockstar a new sandbox to work with, without the need to create a new protagonist and plot from scratch. Finally, in the same way that Redemption was “the late Wild West in a nutshell,” being able to hit the highlights (so to speak) of another dynamic time and place in human history would be an easy fit. Jack Marston, being the perfect example of a rural American thrust into world events, would be as excellent a fit as John Marston’s “man out of time and place” character.
Lunarshock or Bioshock Darkside
Where else could Bioshock really go next besides the moon? I envision it as a secret Russian city on the dark side of the moon, taking place in the 70s or 80s. Some forward thinking cosmonauts and scientists didn’t like the way things were going in the Kremlin, so just like Ryan and ol’ Comstock, they went their separate way. Of course, as always happens, something (or a lot of things) goes awry and you are the person who arrives at the worst (or best) possible time. The Shock series got it’s roots is space, but while many fans have been clamoring for Irrational to do a remake of System Shock next, I disagree. Always the novel if there is novelty to be made. I think something that really brings out the 70s and 80s idea of “future-tech” (like Alien and 2001) would be awesome. Big colored plastic buttons and old computer noises galore. It could be a spiritual return to System Shock and even have many references, while still being a new game. Also, it would be really cool if it was Russians, making it the first time the series explored a completely foreign concept of Utopia/Dystopia. Since many of the great innovators in that genre were in fact Russian, total home run.
The Eventual Assassin’s Creed Game Set in the Present/Near Future That Everyone Has Been Expecting for Years.
So, was I the only one that thought there would eventually be an AC game where you play as Desmond the entire time? Because apparently the devs were totally not thinking that as the main AC trilogy wrapped up with you still mostly playing inside the Animus. Assassin’s Creed 4 apparently has you playing not as Desmond, but still playing one of his ancestors. So unless there is a huge outcry of some kind, looks like things are not headed in that direction. There should be though! I mean, not just because I was disappointed that Desmond’s long, drawn out coming-of-age did not in fact lead to him getting his own game. I could live without that because I was only moderately attached to him vs. his ancestors. I just love games like MGS and Deus Ex that have stealth gameplay in a present or near future environment. I love it when series throw you at the world you know and tell you to infiltrate it. Because you know you think about it all the time.
The Legend of Zelda “Gritty Reboot”
I know that every Legend of Zelda game fits that description in some way as they often go in a crazy direction. What I mean is the game where they hire a whole new team, design a new engine from scratch and rethink what it means to be a Zelda game. I’m not saying this will necessarily be a good game, just that it is inevitable. There have now been so many Zelda games, going in so many directions, the only thing any corporation holding a valuable license can possibly do is reboot it to be accessible to new fans. It’s just a market law, trust me. So basically, regardless of if they have made sense of the convoluted Zelda timeline or not, it probably won’t matter a few games from now. There is bound to be a totally audacious reboot Zelda in the next few years. Who knows, we may even see black Link. I would play it.
Best case scenario and I know this sounds like an ethnocentrist thing to say, but let an American studio take a hand at it. A whole generation of American developers grew up with LoZ games too and I’m sure they would love to get a crack at making one. As long as Nintendo was very choosy about who, rather than just handing it to a big company like Bioware or Bethesda, I think it could turn out really good.
That’s all for now. Feel free to suggest your own.
Oh wait, no it’s not. Also, this one is totally my idea from my own sick mind.
Sonic Online (aka Furries Online)
Most of you will be shocked by what you are about to read. No explanation on how I know this,besides that I am not myself a Furry. So back in them early 90s, Archie Comics started this comic series based on Sonic the Hedgehog. One of the worst kept secrets in videogame nerddom is that this comic has enjoyed nearly two decades of success, not because of it’s affiliation with the beloved video game mascot, but because it is the unofficial comic book of the people that dress up in plush costumes. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please don’t ask me, google it. Anywho, the comic book has it’s own entire universe of anthropomorphized characters with little relation to the Sonic games. It bears more resemblance to the Disney Princess franchise mixed with My Little Pony (also a big Furry deal) than Sonic’s save the animals from the robot fat guy story. If this subculture can support now half a dozen or so monthly comics and oodles of merchandise and let’s face it, Archie Comics period, then it can support an MMO.
You heard me right. Furries are people too. Give them their MMO, let them make their fantasy anthro selves and let them RP. The rest of the world doesn’t have to watch and everyone deserves to be happy.
You’re a… heartbreaker… dream maker… love taker don’t you mess around-NoNoNo!
Defiance is totally not as bad as a lot of people would tell you it is. It all depends what you compare it to and whether you write your review right after the servers go down in the middle of a major Arkfall. On the other hand, some of the complaints against it are valid, but probably drummed up in the earlier mentioned scenario by people looking for reasons to knock it. The fact is that Defiance launched with about the same amount of grace as any new form of MMO. No more, no less. Whether or not it meets your personal expectations however, depends a lot on what console you mostly play on and what similar games you have played in the past.
I’ll try to give it to you in a nutshell in the first paragraph to save you time. If you own a PC, don’t buy this game unless you really love shooters and have a giant pile of extra money. Not that it isn’t fun, just that this game cannot compete under any terms with it’s competition on that platform. Games like Warframe, Planetside 2, Guild Wars 2 and Trion’s own Rift offer every single concept in this game (although not all together in the same game), at a higher level of polish and with less server issues. True, Defiance is a new gameplay design with ideas you’ve seen before, but it still has to compete with games that are more similar. If you are a console gamer and have not already played all of the greatest MMOs of the last 2 decades, this is where you need to be. If Borderlands was your first introduction to co-op grinding, you need to be playing this game RIGHT NOW. To a console gamer not already desensitized by years of the same thing, Defiance will be a new experience you have never seen on your Xbox 360 or PS3. I would liken it best to when Phantasy Star Online hit consoles in early 2001. Sure, in the PC space, two Diablo games, one expansion and a million clones had already released. On consoles, the best people had ever seen of this type of game was the exceedingly poor port of Diablo on PSX and Gauntlet Legends. So to a PC gamer it would just be ”Oh, it’s just Diablo in a scifi world, in third-person.” To people who had never played the like though, it was an all-consuming obsession, just like the first 2 Diablo games were when released on PC. This parallel holds up really well, because the closest Xbox 360 players have been to an MMO is the sub-par port of FFXI that quietly gathers dust on the Live servers.
That said, I’ll go into discussing the game overall across all versions. First and foremost, Defiance is an MMORPS, which is not technically a genre that exists. Imagine Trion’s previous game Rift (or Guild Wars 2 if you’ve played that instead), with most of the successful elements of Borderlands incorporated. So while there are other games which are somewhat similar, this is a new concept that has not been tested. People comparing this game to traditional MMO roleplaying games are being just plain unfair, as that model has now existed for nearly two decades. If you want to bash Defiance objectively, name for me one other game that is exactly similar to compare it to. No, I don’t mean a game where you shoot dudes with other dudes online. That would be like saying it’s fair to compare Dishonored to Halo 4 because both are technically shooters. Okay, by that comparison Dishonored is a -212 on a fair rating scale as Halo 4 is better designed, has 100x the budget, is a sequel on a familiar engine, oh and will entertain you for about two months longer than Dishonored’s 6 hour campaign. Sound a little skewed? Yeah, that’s about how scientific it is to compare Defiance to Guild Wars 2. Considering that Defiance is actually pretty ambitious and that it’s launch should be compared to an early example in other MMO genres, not 10 year veterans, most of the arguments you have heard against this game are now invalid under my terms. People hate the scientific method and fairness even more than they hate reading real books though, so I’m not really expecting a Vulcan-esque revolution of logical thought in our society.
The plus column of this game is basically that it’s similar to Borderlands and you can play it with lots of other people in an open world. If you’ve never played Guild Wars 2 or Rift, you are going to love the concept of dynamic events. Instead of going to a pre-set area where the enemies always respawn after a set period of time, the concept is that encounters pop up at random around you while you play. While I found this to be somewhat annoying after a while in Guild Wars 2 and Rift, it works a lot better in a shooter game. Shooters cater very well to bite-sized encounters, so a constant stream of them to distract you from the main content just adds to the flavor. It’s a ton of fun to be in the middle of shooting mooks with your party, when suddenly an Arkfall pops up. You then form your little Mad Max style ATV gang and trek across the map with all of the other players to converge on one big battle. These battles tend to get a bit chaotic and at times you can really see your console struggling with it’s lack of RAM if you are playing on those versions. This is something many of us have lived with for years on other MMOs though (looking at you with your 15fps crappy PC and your bad connection back in the day, Laguna), so this should by no means discourage you from diving in. The biggest downfall of the Arkfalls is that you do them so much they quickly become repetitive. Trion is doing a fine job of getting content up as fast as possible, but the small amount of different Arkfalls in the initial release is a fault I’ll talk more about later.
The shooter gameplay isn’t top of it’s class, but definitely well-polished for a cross-genre game. Think Tribes or Planetside, where it’s an online game that is competent enough as a shooter that it won’t bother you. The vehicle controls would be excellent, if not for the bad collision that sabotages them at every opportunity. Flying along at high speed with a huge grin on your face is regularly interrupted by a tiny rock or lip that your tires rebound from as if from a force field. That won’t stop you from getting that huge grin back a couple of seconds later, but it definitely mars an otherwise very fun part of the gameplay. Overall though, I would say the driving and shooting works almost as well as Borderlands, which similarly smooths over all of it’s rough edges with it’s very fun gameplay. And oh is the gameplay fun. Sure, all of the complaints people have are true in a sense, but they’re only making them in the bits of server downtime because they are really just pissed they can’t be playing. That is pretty much the best pro I can give to any online game: That most of the bitching is caused by people wishing they were playing because they are having so much fun.
Now for the cons. As an MMO, Defiance is not nearly as good as it is an action/shooter. The quests are often fun, but only because of you and your buddies’ actions and strategy. Much like Rift, you are basically going to see the same thinking that has gone into every single fetch quest ever since Balder’s Gate, over and over again. While I definitely consider this a con as a few games have gotten past it, this is still the state of norm for about 99% of all MMOs, so I don’t fault the game too hard. Same could be said for the server issues. Sure, you get booted from time to time and the server is down for an hour or so during peak hours more often than I would like. Which pretty much describes every online game launch ever. I remember when Diablo 3 launched and Laguna had it preloaded by midnight. We just logged in to confirm what we expected, that the servers would be broken, laughed and went to sleep. Considering that game had, as I’ve said before: “an army, a fortune and an eternity to develop,” expecting better out of a licensed game is just plain silly. Defiance’s launch has been exactly like all of the MMO launches in my memory, no better, no worse. The only difference is that compared to companies like Blizzard, Trion’s response has been vastly better. When most games have bugs the first week, the devs hide from the forums and give no apology. In the last week, I have gotten constant updates from Trion on bug progress and yesterday all players received a pretty hefty in-game perk for their patience. How is that in any way, shape or form not infinitely superior to any MMO launch ever? Really, please tell me about the time when Blizzard has ever been such a good company, because my past dealings with them over 17 years have been the opposite. It still must be said against the game though, that it does not work well at all times yet.
The second big con is the lack of initial content. True, compared to a normal single-player console game, Defiance is enormous. But Defiance is an MMO, meaning it should be compared to games like Final Fantasy XI and DC Universe Online, which also exist on consoles in some form. By that comparison, Defiance is pretty skimpy on day 1 content. Sure, you can easily play it for weeks, but most of that is repeating the dynamic events and instances. To actually do everything the game has to offer once or twice could be easily done in less than 20 hours of gameplay. Compared to a game like SWTOR, which launched with several full 40+ hour campaigns as well as a ton of instanced content, Defiance is pretty skinny. Like I mentioned above, this is mostly only a concern to PC players who could buy many other great online games for the same price. On consoles, games that entertain for more than 20 hours are few and far between, so I don’t see this as an issue. Console gamers are used to playing a game for a week or two and then trading it in to Gamestop for a new one.
Finally, you have the completely half-assed plot. I’m not saying the show has a half-assed concept, I’m still reserving judgment on that. What I mean is maybe they should have borrowed some of the writers from the show for the game. I know Trion has decent writers somewhere in their building, but clearly those people are already spread too thin on Rift. Not only is the dialogue and plot in this game some of the most ill-conceived drivel I have ever digested, it has the grammar of an 8 year old child. I often find myself yelling at my stupid AI companion that it should be “come” and not “comes” in that sentence, or that you can’t change tense midsentence with no alteration in wording. Granted, I’m a journalism major and a grammar Nazi, but this is just plain pathetic for a game that has received any kind of playtesting. Actually, that’s probably the issue. We must have reached a level of idiocracy where an entire company and hundreds of playtesters can read something and it is statistically possible that none of them are educated in their native language enough to notice obvious errors. Scary, but probably true. Once again, this could be said for most MMOs in the history of ever, so I’m not going to tank the score for it. It would just be nice to see improvement in this area and when I saw the writers attached to the show, I hoped a little would cross over.
In conclusion, I think Defiance is going to be a very split product in it’s success and failure. I see it completely tanking on PC unless Trion is able to catch up to an established curve they are already behind. On consoles on the other hand, this is going to be huge. I can’t even count how many times I have heard other players mention how they’ve never done anything like this before and they love it. It may seem inconceivable to PC gamers that someone could have never played Everquest, WoW or Planetside, but this is a fact. Many people only ever game on consoles and there have just never been many MMOs on consoles. The ones that have released were either so bad that they would turn more people off it than on or they were such bad ports that any player would rush out and buy a PC if they liked it. I think Defiance will be for many people their first “big open grind” and it will suck them in just as much as it did the PC gaming world a decade ago. So by that reasoning, I’m giving the game a split score on consoles/PC. While the PC version has better graphics and significantly less server issues, it just isn’t as good compared to it’s well-established competition.
PC: 7/10 - Xbox360/PS3: 9/10
I could have named this article a dozen things. I could have substituted L.A. Noire or any number of other bad console to PC ports. I could have called it “Why multiplatform development is essential from the start.” It’s the same explanation in all cases. This article will be a tiny bit technical, but as always I’ll try to put in as clear of laymen’s terms as possible.
What it basically comes down to is that every program has to be specifically designed to use instruction sets (tells CPU to do stuff) for every type of CPU. In normal PC development, Intel sets the standard for CPU instruction sets (though they owe it originally to IBM, but that’s another long story). You’ve probably seen “SSE 1, 2, 3, etc. etc.” on descriptions of CPUs before. All consumer PC CPUs use these instruction sets. So although an AMD CPU may be forced to run in less optimized sets because obviously Intel favors their own parts, they save a boatload of money and research by using them. IBM CPUs however, like the ones in the three current generation video game consoles, have long ago departed from the blueprint they once created for CPU design. So basically this means that nowhere in the design of normal PC instruction sets are there ones for IBM and vice versa. So if you say, drop a program designed for an IBM Power CPU into an Intel or AMD system without having designed it to use their instruction sets, it’s not happy.
The long technical version of not happy is that it defaults to something they have in common which is going to be something ancient and 32-bit. So it will only run on one of your cores without anything telling it to do otherwise, which is a huge bummer since most CPUs these days are not meant to stand on one core alone for gaming. If the developers at least take the step of adding DirectX 10 support, as in the case of L.A. Noire, you can at least force the CPU to spread it evenly across all the cores. Still not true multi-threading, but this is what any DirectX 10 game, such as Skyrim, does anyway. In the case of Assassin’s Creed III, the game is DirectX 9 native, like many raw ports. So it uses one CPU core to 100% and occasionally touches another for PhysX if you have an AMD GPU, or if you have a weak nVidia card. Even this is a huge drag as PhysX on your CPU sucks and even more so if it has just been sitting there doing nothing between intermittent bursts of PhysX. What this results in is the giant clusterfuck that is any crowded area in AC3, even on top of the line hardware much more powerful than a console. Normally for gaming, an i7 or high end i5 quad core is a fantastic performer. When it’s only running one core, even in turbo, it’s really not much more than a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.
So before you nerd rage your monitor in half, hear this. The developers are not so inept and backwards they don’t realize this. They probably tried to explain it to the publishers at the start. I’m sure it went something like this:
Devs: If we don’t do this from the beginning, we will catch mad hell on the PC version. Think Dark Souls.
Pubs: So what you’re saying is that you want to do something that will take extra time and money, even though the game will actually run anyway.
Devs: Yeah but it will run terrible! The GPU manufacturers will be pissed too! Also we can’t easily fix this later, if at all.
Pubs: We don’t really care. Most of our revenue is in boxed copies on console anyway. Steam copies don’t cost us shit, so we don’t really care how many we sell. Most people will just pirate it anyway.
The End.
You may say to yourself “Where’s the craftsmanship and pride?” Well, I hate to say it but everything the publishers said is true. If you want a lesson on the realities of life, go on youtube and look for Alec Baldwin’s scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. They play it at West Point and they play it at Harvard. That’s usually a pretty good indicator that it’s good advice if you want to conquer your enemies physical or financial, which is of course the drive of capitalism and the military. Ubisoft is a competitive company holding a very tenuous #3 spot as an independent publisher. In a market where numbers one and two are EA and Activision, there’s not much margin for error.
They’re right. The large majority of their sales will be on consoles. Especially with a game like Assassin’s Creed that is very console friendly and heavily leans toward being played on a controller. We’re not talking about an FPS or a Bioware game, something that people demand to be cross-platform. We’re talking about a game that has had far worse problems, yet even less uproar than Dark Souls. Considering most PC players laugh at Dark Souls and few people play it on PC, that doesn’t really make for a PR nightmare by comparison. The fact is most people have already just headbutted their way through the game, suffering the bad framerates and jumps in the crowded cities. Only a few people who are crusading on principle are even bugging Ubi for a patch anymore. All in all, a pretty justifiable strategic loss.
Now get this, this is the part that hurts and is totally the fault of the developers. The solution already exists. All about the place there are game engines and middleware that make cross-platf0rm development almost effortless. Fortunately the one used for Dark Souls was such, so despite the developers, a community user had already created a simple fix before the game’s launch and just waited to confirm final code before releasing it…. 12 minutes after game launch. I don’t mean that as a jab at From Software. Although their lack of knowledge of their own tools is almost comical, they at least had the foresight to pick an engine that will run on damn near anything. Other developers however, like to stick with what they are comfortable with. They cling to either popular tools of the recent past or their own proprietary engines which they have invested time and money in. Folly either way. I don’t care how much you’ve spent on something, if it is inferior to available products, dump it.
The studios who develop on “friendly” tools, reap the benefits for years to come. Not only is it easy to port the game to other systems in the future, it’s far more likely that the software can be accessed or emulated by future hardware. You can easily see this with older PC games being playable on new hardware. I don’t know if you’ve ever run an old Bethesda game on a high-end modern PC, but it’s a pain in the ass. It’s honestly easier to run Outcast (look this game up if you love game design, 1999 Infogrames) than many popular older games with unique game engines.
I hate to be like some gaming Karl Marx or Ayn Rand, saying: ”Why aren’t you better than you are!?” That is sadly the case though. It’s just plain bad business to do things on the short term. Unfortunately international business runs on the fiscal quarter, which let me just say is not a lot of time when developing a game. You’re lucky to get like, a level finished in that time. Games just plain can’t be developed like movies or albums. You can’t bank on it in the shortest time possible. It’s not just some short-term fan backlash you need to worry about, it’s the long-term value of what has been programmed. If the developers basically need to throw out everything they do, as they will surely have to do for AC4 if it’s going to run on new AMD based consoles, a lot of time and money is wasted. First party titles are so successful because Microsoft or Sony can have their devs just make one engine, keep improving it on the same hardware and keep cranking out games. The result is more games of higher quality at a fraction of the cost. That’s why Naughty Dog can crank out three great Uncharted games in a row and Tomb Raider needs to take mulligans.
To start this paragraph as fun as the last one, I don’t want to turn this into an “I have a dream…” speech. I’ve just seen message boards filled with people raging at various games over the years. In the end they just want to understand why nobody can help them and if they took the time to read the bazillion words I just typed in the last few minutes, now they know. And knowing is half the battle. The other half is fighting it, I presume, so feel free to go out armed with this knowledge and give those developers some constructive criticism.
Do you love the hymns they taught you, or are songs of Earth your choice?
I’m going to keep this one short as there are no shortage of other reviews available and my recent reviews have been getting a bit long. In fact, I’m going to leave the gameplay mostly alone as it’s nearly flawless and pretty much in line with what you expect from a Bioshock game. Rating the gameplay point for point would just be an exercise in wasting hot air (pun of the day!). So what I’m going to do instead is talk about this game as a piece of interactive art as well as it’s meaning to the industry.
The first and foremost thing that I can say about Bioshock Infinite is that it cements the Bioshock series as a new flagship series of video games, much like the Zelda or Mario games. There was a lot of hubbub from the usual industry pessimists about how staff changes and difficulties in development spelled likely storm clouds for this game. That is in no way the case as Ken Levine and his team have proved that Irrational Studios and the Bioshock franchise are going to maintain a high grade of quality, regardless of the challenges faced. They had to cut huge sections, rework the plot and drastically change the final product in order to get it to store shelves. You know what? They succeeded in every possible way. Much like we see from Nintendo’s games (and pretty much nobody else), Irrational is showing us that the show will always go on and they take pride in releasing a polished final product regardless. Bioshock Infinite definitely rolled with the changes and as it’s such an amazing game, I can only imagine it was better for it in the end.
As visual art goes, Bioshock Infinite is at the top of it’s class. I’m going to restate something I said about Tomb Raider that is even more true here: “Playing this game feels like playing concept art come to life.” I don’t know how better to put it. The artists and designers worked with such amazing synergy on this one that you really get the feeling of playing art. Not just visual art either. It’s obvious that the writers, actors and even the level designers have a love of music. Great songs of the last century are actually part of the plot and collectibles in a very interesting way. Beyond even that, music permeates the entire game and design. I have to admit, I never liked “Will the Circle be Unbroken” until I played this game. That’s a powerful statement considering my mother is a very talented Lutheran folk musician. Much like “Dominique” from “The Singing Nun” being featured in s2 of American Horror Story, the song ends up being permanently linked to your memories of the experience. There are actually two amazing versions of the song in the game, one performed by Booker and Elizabeth’s respective voice actors. I don’t think I’ll honestly ever hear the song again without thinking of a literal city in the clouds.
I won’t spoil anything if I can avoid it, but to say the very least this is one of the best plots ever in a video game. That list is shared with several other Shock titles and a number of other games so good they defy rating, but safe to say it’s somewhere in the top 5-10. I went in trying to manage my expectations, as I thought of the first Bioshock as being almost impossible to match. It may just be afterglow, but by Job I think they did it. After finishing this game, I felt so many emotions, all of them good. Every possible expectation you have of this plot will be met and exceeded. The one thing you may doubt is that the game will tie back to the first. It does, but you’ll really have to pay attention. In fact it goes farther than that by establishing a universe(s) in which both games can take place, as well as many more. Infinite goes past just proving that Irrational can make another grade A game. It proves that they are only getting started and have an infinite (puns!) number of stories to tell. Whether the series goes back to space next (Levine got his start on System Shock with Warren Specter), or to parts unknown, I for one am rabidly awaiting another sequel after the end of Infinite.
In conclusion I can only say that Bioshock Infinite is more than the other games I’ve given perfect scores to. Those were also perfect games as far as the actual software functionality goes. Infinite, like it’s predecessor, is more than just a perfect game. It’s a perfect game that defies any other medium to claim they can top it in any way. There is simply no better way to communicate this experience. Even the best novelization would seem flat without the amazing art and music that combine to make a truly medium-transcendent work. Bioshock Infinite once again boldly states that games can be art and like any other medium, can produce timeless, unmatchable masterpieces.
10/10
In the past, I’ve made statements that I am not biased toward AMD, they just happen to meet the budget and performance for every build I recommend. I’m going to change that statement. Since the majority of the PC gaming press seems content to be completely Intel and nVidia biased and bald-faced lie about it, I’m just going to play devil’s advocate and give the red team the props they deserve. What set me off on this most recent tangent is the disturbing trend in the PC press to take unreasonable measures to undermine AMD optimized games. The most recent example is Bioshock Infinite. Probably the biggest win for AMD so far in their effort to have games developed and optimized for AMD hardware on the heels of nVidia’s similar ”The Way it’s Meant to be Played” campaign. In my personal experience, AMD delivers as promised. Bioshock runs fantastic on my 2 year old, midrange AMD laptop, the K53TA. From what I’ve seen from actual users, this is true across the board. AMD users are booting the game up, with whatever drivers they may have and getting great performance. NVidia users are booting up and getting bad performance, stuttering and glitches.
Now let’s contrast this with what the press is saying. According to many outlets, facts aren’t important. The little colored bars show that NVidia always wins and AMD always loses. You just have to stack it so the bars say what you want them to. I’m just going to use NotebookTechCheck’s benchmark since it makes my post the clearest. The story is the same everywhere, they just made the least effort to hide the lack of scientific method in their tests. See below.
Now what the paragraph following this graph says is that AMD fails to make good on their “optimized for AMD” claims. Huh, that’s funny. To me it looks like it says that an AMD A10 keeps up with an i7/630M combo with it’s INTEGRATED FUCKING GRAPHICS. Considering a laptop with that chipset costs, oh I don’t know, half of what the Intel/NVidia combo does, I’d say that’s an obvious win. The same hardware in a desktop combo would be a similar figure. If you go up the chart you’ll see that in almost all cases the NVidia GPUs are combined with higher end CPUs and in the case of the equal ones, the AMD parts win out. Finally, when we get to the top of the chart, we see the NVidia cards actually winning by a bit. In the case of the 660 Ti OC, that’s fair. That GPU is honestly the best bang for the buck on the market right now if you’re in that price range. That said, the rest is outright crap. The two systems being compared in the mobile versions of the GTX 680 and the HD 7970 are not at all equal when the versions are considered. The desktop comparison is accurate with the HD 7970 edging out the 680 as it’s been pretty well documented that it is in fact a slightly better card. What I’m getting at is that this chart is pretty much the anti-data. The systems being compared are not equal in price and the versions of the GPUs in those systems are not equal. Since it really, really appears that this was done intentionally in this chart to favor NVidia, I’m calling it a bias. Sue me. So all in all, this is a stacked chart and it’s still hard not to read it as AMD outright owning the price/performance ratio as the AMD systems on it cost far less than the comparable nVidia based ones.
Another thing that stacks benchmarks against AMD is the fact that the PC press just will not include games that bench well for AMD in reviews. Or if they do, they find ways to sabotage the settings to hurt AMD systems. For example, you will often see benchmarks of the AMD optimized Shogun 2. What you won’t see is one where the game is both running in DX11 and at settings proper for the hardware being tested. That’s because in that scenario, AMD owns NVidia. I have personally tweaked this game on a dozen systems. I can tell you 100% no bullshit that it runs fantastic on AMD APUs at mid settings. The same can be said for Battlefield 3 and even Batman: Arkham City which is actually developed on and optimized for NVidia. Look at mainstream benches however and you’ll see them bench it in the multi-core and many-shader weak DX9 until they get into higher resolutions (where NVidia shines). Then they suddenly pull a switcheroo and show you how crappy a $100 AMD part is compared to a bunch of more expensive NVidia ones in DX11 since it’s competition in price in that range either don’t run DX11 or are strictly “non-gaming” cards. Wow, objective.
I can’t even count the times that I have read a pro benchmark of a game or new hardware and thought: “Huh, that’s weird, those are waaaaaaay lower than my benches with the same or weaker hardware.” I don’t know if NVidia is paying people to lie, sending them mountains of free stuff or what’s going on, but I can absolutely, scientifically and irrefutably show that it’s happening. I don’t need to link one article vs. another. I’m a PC builder. I build and test dozens of systems every year and put hands on 90% of the new hardware that comes out. Nobody pays me. I put my own money and my own skills on the line to make a profit, so obviously I don’t have time for bullshit. If my systems don’t perform to customer expectations, they find out immediately and get pissed off. So when I tell you I have built systems with AMD APUs, CPUs and GPUs and they all ran those games fantastic, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can ask any of my customers who are sitting at those systems right now, very happy, getting the framerates I promised them at an affordable price. Hell, you can look at all of the comments right here on this blog of the dozens of people who were skeptical of my performance claims based on mainstream reviews and were later very happy they trusted me instead of Anandtech or those tripe-noggins over at Overclockers.
You know what? I am an AMD fanboy. They continue to make competitive, affordable products and increase the fidelity of their inexpensive products to get budget users in the game. That’s what I believe in and AMD is the company that delivers. NVidia on the other hand is the company who sold me the GTX 470. Oh yeah and the company that released the POS 550Ti because they are unable to make a real midrange GPU. Oh yeah and the company that sent out the g92 series before they were ready, just to be competitive and that resulted in a lot of very angry people with fried 8800GTSs. That’s the NVidia I know and the one I seldom buy parts from anymore. Regardless of how they managed to get the PC press to drink their sewage and call it Pepsi, they aren’t fooling me and they aren’t fooling manufacturers anymore. You won’t find a lot of gaming PCs under $1000 not featuring AMD hardware. That includes the new gaming consoles too as the PS4 is confirmed to be 100% AMD and the new Xbox is strongly rumored to be.
Users who are fans of either can go on for pages about how this benchmark or this spec shows one to be superior to the other. The fact is I’ve been building cheap AMD gaming PCs for the last 3-4 years and I have yet to have a complaint. The opposite actually. I’ve had many people say they are amazed at the performance they get, since they had read elsewhere that AMD hardware was so much weaker than NVidia or Intel. I know that my opinion seems to often fly in the face of what major magazines, websites, stock analysts and others say when describing AMD. All I can say is that my opinions are based on buying the hardware with my own money, building it with my own hands and tweaking it with my own first-hand research. I have been 100% satisfied to the point that my personal systems run on AMD CPUs, chipsets and graphics, even though I have the ability to buy and use whatever I want. I have posted my benchmarks and played my games fluently, so I don’t really need someone else to tell me my hardware is crap.
So I’m just going to put forward the same challenge as always: Name your price, name your performance goal. I will build an AMD system that no Intel/NVidia one can match at the same price. Guaranteed. You agree with the press that says NVidia outperforms? Prove it with dollars on the line. My K53TA runs Arkham City at 60fps on high all day long. Same with many, many other games. Bought it for $450 2 years ago. Hell, I run Guild Wars 2 and SWTOR so well that my buddies with their Intel/NVidia desktops cry at the loss of their dollars. Is there really anything else to discuss?
A Walk down memory lane is more like it. Good or bad memories is subjective.
So I just got done reading the Penny Arcade Report after playing this game for so long last night that I almost passed out from starvation (in my papasan, not in the game). To be fair, there were some valid points there. Especially if you only play the game for 30-45 minutes. I guess in order to call yourself a game journalist, you don’t actually have to play the whole game the same way film and music critics do before they review products. That would be like a real, professional industry and we all know that gaming is just a lark for little kids. All satirical sarcasm aside, this is not the best zed-hunting game around. What it is, is the newest version of a product that’s been trying to emerge for over a decade.
So if you’re anything similar to the zombie game nuts that Brice and I are, just like us, you were playing the crap out of Killing Floor back in ’05 as it was the pre-Left 4 Dead-Left 4 Dead (aka the people who deserve credit for the idea). Somewhere around this time, the severely flawed Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green came out and created the Zombie-Sim-Shooter genre in a very crude fashion. While the game was definitely something only a mother or extremely loyal zombie gamer could love, apparently enough people fell into the latter category to lead to one of the biggest fan total conversions in history. If you “were there man” you know what’s in this next sentence: this was the cult megahit Day of the Zombie. Day of the Zombie took the basic clunky engine of Fiddler’s Green and tried to streamline the good zombie sim parts, while replacing the bad level design with user created, objective-based mini sandboxes. It was actually based partially on the original, license-less form of the game which was going to be released under the same name. Hundreds of maps were made and a huge number of already existing maps for Killing Floor that tried to do this kind of gameplay were ported over to this more fitting design. Sure, even with thousands of lines of user improvements to the code, it was still a damn crude game, but we were playing what many of us had dreamed of since first seeing Night of the Living Dead and we were willing to view it though some seriously tinted glasses given that this was before the first L4D had even released.
Fast forward 8 years and we STILL haven’t seen a truly good game in this unexplored sub-genre. Sure, Dead Island has a tiny, tiny bit of sim and realism aspects, but fails on 3X as many more that were removed or not fully implemented. ZombieU comes the closest in concept, but is a worse game than Survival Instinct and probably even Fiddler’s Green. Two very popular independent projects, Day Z and The War Z are both going in the sim direction. Unfortunately, The War Z will likely never recover from it’s PR clusterpoke and Day Z is much more of a Shooter-Sim like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. than a zombie sim. The zombie gameplay is done very well, but the ultra-realistic military shooter DNA from the original Arma 2 game shines through during the majority of gameplay, making it a shooter first. So now, 3 paragraphs in, we’re up to speed on where you need to be to approach this game so that you can enjoy it.
If this is not your first Zombie-Sim-Shooter, I can make the rest of this very brief. This is the best one yet, definitely play this over ZombieU unless The War Z actually resurfaces by the time you read this. The whole Walking Dead franchise part is actually the smallest part of the game. Sad to say, as just like Fiddler’s Green, the marketing will entirely fail to put it in the hands of people who will like it and mostly in the hands of people who will hate it. It’s awesome running around as Daryl for about the first hour. Then you will completely forget you are playing a licensed game, because you will be much more concerned with the sim elements of the game.
What you should really expect is about a 50/50 mix of Day of the Zombie and Fallout 2. Yes, by that I mean that this game is at least as much old-school RPG as shooter. You manage a party, resources and deal with random encounters far more often than you blow anything up. Penny Arcade clearly didn’t have the patience to realize that what they were complaining about was a gameplay system within an RPG, not a glitch. This game has RANDOM ENCOUNTERS. These are based on rules and math. If for example, you are inept, as that journalist, it is possible to plan so badly that you run out of fuel, break down and stop for supplies all in one of the shortest routes that only has one possible encounter. Granted, you have to completely ignore the text and hints of the menu to do this, but clearly that is possible. The result is you will get stuck in the same random encounter, or two of them, over and over again until you successfully complete one of the game’s simplest tasks; driving (that’s how you use a semi-colon btw, PA) from point A to point B. If you pay attention to your fuel, the type of road you are taking and your vehicle, this will seldom or never happen. On an average trip between towns later in the game, you will encounter 0-3 random diners, truck stops, motels etc. that are randomly generated versions of similar templates. If that immediately reminded you of the Fallout series, yep you’re right on track. Just as you will encounter similar bands of outlaws or little detours with slight variation over and over in those games, the same is true for Survival Instinct. If you hate Final Fantasy just because you fight the same Giant 300 times in different color variations, then RPGs and similarly this game are just not for you. If you are used to managing stats and ignoring what’s visually happening on the screen as you focus on number-munching for hours on end, come on in, there is a ton of fun to be had.
The next RPG element that other “journalists” seem to be missing is that the other survivors and vehicles are a managed resource. Think mercs in Final Fantasy Tactics. There are actually at least half a dozen types of cars, with different stats and number of seats. Survivors also have different stats and skills, so managing your fuel-economy, seating and luggage capacity is another of the game’s systems. There isn’t a freaking cinema scene every time you add or drop someone because you do it about as often as you change party members in the aforementioned FFT. If you want to bash a game for not being a shallow franchise action game, be my guest. Each to his own. The slew of reviews I see that completely fail to grasp the game and immediately pan it on the other hand, is just unacceptable journalism. If you didn’t want a Shooter-Sim-RPG, sorry, there’s another fantastic Walking Dead game and the action packed Day Z, right there for you to play on Steam already. If you have been wanting the perfect Zombie sim game for a decade, no it isn’t here yet, but this one is closer.
I would just like to close by saying: How many games could you have enjoyed had you not listened to an article by someone who has barely played them? If you are trusting Game Informer, Penny Arcade or Gamespot for your gaming opinions, the count could be pretty high. I’ve caught them repeatedly and blasted them on their blogs and comments sections. If you can remember Gamespot’s Zelda Skyward Sword review (just FYI, read the instructions for your sensor bar, or understand the concept of IR if you want it to work), you know they never admit it. They come up with excuses and blame preview copies and won’t just admit they are too lazy to do what I do on my own time and money with their comfortable salaries. I know that this is sort of a combined article, bashing bad journalism and promoting a mediocre game to the few that will like it, but that’s what’s great about being independent. I can rant, ramble, review and detail, all in the same article if I feel like it.
EDIT: So one of these reviewers (let’s not name names, but it was one of the sites I mention above) tried to defend themselves in their comments by saying I didn’t actually go tit-for-tat with them and debunk all of their criticisms. OKAY! Let’s be juvenile and do this then.
The Grapple AKA Stab-a-thon mini game: Unlike PA and Gamespot said, you cannot just infinitely stab all of the zombies and other zombies will in fact attack you while you grapple. Once again, this is just toned down in the first two areas. Later in the game, rushing into a crowd of walkers will just get you dead in about 20 seconds. They aren’t exactly GOOD at hitting or biting you, but they do in fact do so and a crowd of 10 or more will quickly wear you down even if you get each stab on the first pass. Also, as the game clearly tells you over and over in the loading screns QUICKLY SHOVE TO BREAK GRAPPLE. This is what I’m talking about asswipes, READ THE SCREEN BEFORE RANTING. If you actually pay attention and use all of the buttons on the controller, this game is still mediocre, but not for most of the reasons in your half-assed articles.
DON’T USE GUNS IN THE OPEN YOU FUCKING RETARD: Have you ever say, read the comics or watched the show? There’s this whole zombie lore thing about how a single gunshot will just bring a neverending stream of undead from miles around. While I admit that this is just portrayed in the game by infinite spawning zombies once you fire out in an open area, the point is pretty clear. If the game, the show and the comics (not to mention 50 years of zombie lore) tell you to watch your noise and you go in Like Ellis “Kill all sonsa Bitches,” blame yourself. The game was trying to help you by telling you not to do that. The place for guns is either in a building where the sound is muffled or on top of a building where you can draw the undead and pick them off. Notice how people do that in zombie movies. Get it? Good.
The game’s lighting is fake and static: No it’s not, you blind, incompetent idiots. Don’t talk about graphics and tech unless you know what you’re talking about. What’s going on is that your character does not cast a shadow. Look down, see? Moving objects like zombies do in fact cast shadows and interfere with lightmaps. You the player just don’t for some reason. I’m not saying this isn’t half-assed design in it’s own right, just that if you want to talk all superior like you know the first thing about APIs and graphics tech, try to know what you’re criticising.
Do I really need to go on? I’m not saying it’s a great game. I’m saying if you want to create something that is designed to help consumers make informed decisions, at least put little effort into being objective and accurate.
A better title might have been Arrow Murderess, but it lacks the whole franchise backing and all.
Sometimes when I review a game, I start off by saying basically “let’s take off our gamer hats and be art critics.” Now we’re going to do the opposite. I’m going to drop any pretense of describing Tomb Raider like a piece of art because it is first and foremost a game that is made to be fun. What matters is I often forgot to pee for hours at a time while playing this game. My leg falling asleep because I hadn’t moved since I haphazardly sat down and reached for the Xbox controller was no more than a vague and distant concern. Every single second of this game is fun. Every time you do a fun thing, at least 2 other unexpected fun things present themselves along the way. While you’re doing this constant series of fun things, if you happen to look in any possible direction, there is something neat to explore. If you were a kid who loved to explore and climb on things and was no stranger to a bloody nose, this is your game. Actually, if you like video games at all in any way, this is your game. It may just be that A) I am that kid. B) I freaking love history and mythology and C) I loves me some killin’ folk in the woods, but this was one of my favorite games this generation. It also helps that Tomb Raider is one of the best looking, smoothest playing games I’ve seen in recent years. It’s really hard to find a flaw in this one. I found a few and I’ll go into that later, but by any reasonable comparison to other games, Tomb Raider is a masterpiece.
One thing I wanted to take care of right off the bat was to clear up some rumors that I’ve only seen briefly mentioned in pro reviews. A few features speculated about like a Snake Eater-esque healing system and enemies who try to deceive you are not in the game. That is just part of the opening tutorial level and I’m honestly glad. Lara does get totally brutalized throughout the game. In fact there is a part where she gets so violently worked over that I was seriously aghast. Me, sacrificer of grannies and puppies to Skorm and demolisher of Megaton. But fortunately for your gaming patience, she shrugs it off with John McClane-like stoicism and just gets progressively more scars. After the first mission, every single other person on the island but your buddies declares themselves as hostile, so I’m pretty sure enemies trying to fool you into trusting them was never an intended feature. One other pre-release comment I’ve seen a lot is that the game looks a lot like the movie The Descent. Yes it does! The devs clearly loved the movie, because they not only casually reference it, but directly pay a brief homage about halfway through the game. It’s very tastefully done and totally comes off as “yeah, we loved that movie too, so sue us.” So it’s not like they’re trying to pull it off like “Gritty Reboot Lara” draws no inspiration from The Descent’s axe-handy spelunkers.
As you would expect, Lara does of course borrow a lot from Indy, just as she always has. The difference is this is the first game from either the Tomb Raider or Uncharted series where I have liked the character as much as Indy. The part of the Indiana Jones movies Tomb Raider mimics is not the chases or the fist fights, but the discovery moments. You know, the parts where he holds up the torch and finds something, the John Williams soundtrack gets all emotional and Harrison Ford gets all dewy eyed about history. Lara Does Indy better than Indy at some points and I do not mean that as some sort of dirty joke. I almost want to bullwhip myself as an Indy fan for saying this, but this was the first Tomb Raider game I’ve played (of like, a zillion) where I didn’t think to myself “I wish there were more good Indiana Jones games…” I’m worried that the next time I watch Last Crusade I’m going to be thinking “I wish there was a Tomb Raider movie this good” the entire time.
One thing that you will appreciate immediately about the gameplay is the synergy of the different controls and systems. Lara transitions effortlessly from being extremely mobile to taking cover or using stealth. Whether it’s dropping off a zipline behind cover from guards or climbing over an edge and spotting an unaware enemy, Lara without fail lands where you want her to and crouches at the right moment. Normally I hate any kind of player hand-holding and “rubber band” style aim assists and handicaps, but it is pulled off so elegantly in this game I can’t complain. Lara just plain does what it seems like she should in every situation. She ducks when she senses danger, but gets up and runs when fire is imminent. Never once did I jump up and yell the frequent gaming exclamation “Why didn’t you ______!?” When I fell I was too slow and when I got shot it was because I dove out too soon. I think this was essential for this game since it isn’t actually the first Tomb Raider game and Lara does have very serious competition these days. Getting it right out the gate for this reboot was a necessary win that the devs pulled off with style. In general, Tomb Raider has an overall standard of watertight design and programming. It’s so rare these days to see a game without physics or lighting glitches, you don’t even notice them until a game comes along that is just plain perfect. This level of design and testing permeates the entire game. Weapons react and sound convincing, characters animate well, materials behave realistically in physics reactions, the game engine just works flawlessly all the time. It’s truly refreshing to play a game where I can just play the whole time without having to compensate for the game’s inadequacies in some way. The best thing about Tomb Raider’s gameplay is that it not only matches the Uncharted series’ high watermark, it does it on a grander scale. Lara’s levels have more to explore, bigger pitched battles and larger vistas. It’s not that Tomb Raider is necessarily better than Uncharted 2 or 3, but it’s definitely equal and larger.
The graphics and sound are top notch. The technology and design come together so well in this game, it almost feels like you are playing concept art come to life. Every inch looks like something hand designed. Every thingie makes a noise and every area and time of day has a soundtrack. The overall presentation is so top notch, it’s just difficult to look away or turn down the volume. Everything you see and hear is beautiful and filled with tiny details. It’s a frequent thing in this game to be just walking along or standing still and notice something significant hidden right out of sight from the beaten path. The environments are so well designed and realized that almost every corner is filled with something relevant to gameplay that also looks fantastic. Some of the areas are truly enormous and the game’s engine dutifully renders trees, water, textures and you name it to the edge of the visible play area. I’ve gotten so used to excuses from developers about the consoles’ lack of memory that I had forgotten what it was like to play a game on a console without pop-in. Overall it’s just a terrific looking and sounding game, no need to shower any more praise on the pretty girl.
Dear diary: Today I shot a guy off a ladder from 150 meters. It was so wizard.
I felt that the plot did a fantastic job of creating the Lara we want to play. In part it was an origin story about how she became the badass we’ve known before. In part it was a redemption story about how Lara was rebuilt as a game character to be likable. For me it hit 100% on both goals. I personally didn’t have a problem with her transition from pacifist Nancy to arrow murderess because, hey, I played the last 10 gazillion Tomb Raider games. I know what kind of Croft she is inside. She’s the kind of Croft who kills people with guns, giant rocks, her motorcycle and sometimes even tigers. I really enjoyed seeing Lara go full tribal over the course of the game. Think Arnold in Predator. At first he’s all guns and strategy, at the end it’s all screaming and giant log traps. That is you. By the end of this game, Lara is literally screaming in the face of death as she takes on dozens of angry men, point blank with her bow. I’ve seen a lot of reviews focus on whether Lara’s new style is a triumph of feminism or shameless objectification in a grittier form, and I say that’s nonsense either way. Lara is female Rambo. You put her on an island full of murderers and she’s going to rig up a bow and start killing people, just like male Rambo. It’s not some political statement, it’s simple chemistry. Her gender is a non-issue one way or the other. Lara Croft is a female video game action hero, just like Milla Jovovich is a female movie action hero. It’s a new era, these things exist already, stop talking about this game like it’s interracial marriage in the freaking ’60s.
The Length of the game is pretty solid at around 15 hours for just the main plot and maybe 20-25 for the average playthrough doing most of the tombs and optional content. The multiplayer I’m still undecided on it’s longevity as I haven’t played it enough. See below.
As far as flaws the biggest one I’ve found is really nitpicky and unusual. When you go through the plot missions, the time of day is set in each area along with the progression of the story. After you finish the game, the time of day in each area is random. The problem is that sometimes the different lighting brought on by sunrise, sunset or night to the colors and textures of a level make it hard to see the visual cues. By this I mean that there are for example the white paint leading you to tomb entrances, yet in some areas this is on gray rocks which become shining white in the moonlight. So this makes it harder to see when the time of day is changed. The same is true for the ledges and some areas that have all similar colored textures. It’s not in any way gamebreaking, it just made me regret not having found everything the first time through, because when I came back, suddenly some areas were twice as hard to navigate.
The other is that the treasure maps for the extra objectives are too easy to obtain. Usually you will get them for completing the tombs in an area or in a fairly obvious spot with a map hint. So basically you can just make a beeline for either the tombs or the map marker to find it and then easily mop up all the other collectibles. I guess maybe I would have found it tedious otherwise, combing every single inch, but it was just a little too easy. It also doesn’t help that the last document is recieved after finding all of the gps caches, which just arbitrarily links those two achievements so you have to get them together and therefore finish every task in the main game. Once again not a huge flaw and only something I noticed because I liked the game so much I did everything, which is rare for me.
The multiplayer is somewhat reminiscent of the recent Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed titles combined. I know that sounds like an odd match and I must say I am as yet unconvinced myself. Basically there are a few modes from team vs. to a mode that’s kind of like multi-flag ctf and they include things like traps and context actions from the single player game. So far what I’ve seen has been pretty chaotic and not actually that fun as most players try to run around and shoot each other like Halo and a few others experiment with random traps all over the place. I’ll post an update later if this Charley Foxtrot ever becomes something resembling entertainment. Since the game has such a fantastic and complete single-player game, I’m basically just counting this as a freebie and not holding it against the score. Especially because it may yet become awesome as people figure it out.
Overall Tomb Raider is the kind of fantastic journey that is very difficult to create for people over the age of 10. It’s a playground that is big enough, sophisticated enough and challenging enough to capture the adult mind the way Mario’s world does for a child’s. Playing through Tomb Raider is like a mandatory vacation where people abduct you and take you away from your life. From the second you put the disc in, until sometime after you’ve cleared the optional tombs, Lara’s world will become your own and you won’t notice anything else. This game is just so unrelentingly fun from start to finish and executes such a large majority of it’s elements so well that it’s hard to put down. As that is the primary goal for any piece of entertainment, to be completely arresting, I have to give it high marks.
9.5/10
So I thought I was done with this series as it looked like AMD was pretty content to dominate the low-end budget market and Intel the high-end market. It looked like there wouldn’t be any more game-changing developments in the CPU wars this generation. Then the new video game consoles started to release tidbits of information. It is now confirmed that the PS4 will use an AMD Jaguar CPU and the new Xbox will use an as yet unconfirmed AMD CPU. That means the Wii U is the only system continuing with an IBM PowerPC processor like all 3 used in the previous (7th) generation video game consoles. As all 3 new consoles feature ATi GPUs, this means that roughly 80% of the game console silicone will be shipped by AMD. That is one hell of a slick market position and really I worry the most about IBM as video game consoles were their big easy money since losing the Apple contract.
What this means is that gaming is likely to go strongly in AMD’s favor over the next 5-10 years as games will just obviously be optimized for AMD platforms. When all 3 consoles and at least half the PC market run on ATi graphics, what incentive is there for developers to develop on nVidia/Intel systems?
Industry analysts haven’t really made a big deal of this yet, but I guarantee you this development has just changed to fate of the Intel/AMD cold war. It no longer matters if Intel’s CPUs can beat AMD’s in a fair benchmark. There are about to be no fair benchmarks for Intel as everything is likely to be optimized for AMD’s “less power, more cores” philosophy. So while Intel has pretty much owned benchmarks for the last few years as they have catered to the good ol’ “two fast threads” design Intel excels at, we may be seeing a big shift. Since AMD’s processors emphasize multiple threads across all cores and full DirectX 11 and direct compute support, I think we’ll see AMD climbing the performance charts in the near future. Not because their chips are getting faster, just because the market will now be forced to cater to them by necessity.
For years now, the line by tech journalists has been “AMD’s multicore design may yet come into it’s day when highly threaded applications finally arrive.” Well, apparently the software industry was happy to keep re-iterating the same crap we invented in the 90s forever and it took console gaming to finally force some change. PC developers were happy to speculate about this grand future of full system utilization across various cores, but they weren’t really willing to risk any money on it. Thank you Microsoft and Sony for just realizing the obvious: Many low-powered cores used flexibly is the future of consumer devices like game consoles and AMD is the only company in mainstream hardware even trying to do it justice. I would not say that Intel has anything in it’s Atom or i3 line that really looks half as attractive for the price from a game console standpoint. Console manufacturer’s are already used to having to creatively use the systems resources to extend it’s lifespan. An Intel processor and dedicated card by either brand is now exactly what it will be five years from now. In an AMD/ATi system the chipset, CPU and graphics are all the same brand. So as we’ve seen with the greatly improved Dual-Graphics drivers, future updates could drastically improve the function of the hardware.
Finally the big way this affects you if you aren’t planning on just buying a console, regardless of what’s in it, is don’t rush out and buy a Steambox just yet. Although Valve and Gabe Newell have always toed the elitist PC gamer “go big or go home” Intel/nVidia line, they too will have to change their tune. The majority of PC games have all aimed for high cross-platform support in recent years and that is about to mean AMD compatibility. Valve would honestly be insane to think they could fight a console war against all the giants at once. If they went Intel/nVidia for their Steambox, they would literally be doing this. As the PC is the weakest selling platform for multiplatform games, it’s hard to imagine them being able to win over many publishers to develop games optimized for their one underdog platform. I’m not quite willing to bet on it, as Gabe Newell’s ego has led to not a few similar blunders, but I would be very surprised if the Steambox does not become AMD powered in the near future. If so, it will be a very serious blow to Intel’s market domination.
Pariah?
Unless you’re living in a cave, you’ve probably seen some of the bad press this game is getting. While some of it is well deserved, some of it confirms something I’ve accused professional journalists of before. I think what we have here is a plain example of people not finishing a game before they review it. While it’s true that Colonial Marines is not the game I had hoped for, it got better as I went through the single player campaign. This game unfortunately commits a sin seldom seen, where the beginning is the worst part of the game. The first three levels not only look like they were designed 6 or 7 years ago when this game started development, but they also showcase the worst of the game’s problems. If you want to enjoy this game as an Aliens fan and get to all the great fanservice, you unfortunately have to slog through 3 or 4 levels that suffer from worse “development hell” than even Duke Nukem Forever. I just wanted to get that out there as the very first thing you read and what appears in the blurb.
There are basically two ways to approach this game: as a shooter fan or as an Aliens fan. If you are a shooter fan, everything you’ve heard about this game is basically true. Yes, it does get better as it goes and feature a great weekend or two worth of multiplayer content, but compared to say, Halo 4, it’s does not hold up under any comparison. So you can stop right here and not bother reading my independent review in addition to any more mainstream ones you have already read. If you are an Aliens fan, let me tell you the one thing you really want to know: Yes, you will get the series canon fanservice you so desperately want… eventually.
Because this is a review, professional or not, I have to at least describe the gameplay. Yes, you’ve probably heard it well put in every form of fecal metaphor at this point, but I’ll do my best to provide something new. This game actually isn’t that bad. It has two humongous flaws though, that immediately present themselves at their worst in the early missions. That is the AI of your companions and the pathfinding AI of the Aliens. Your marines behave pretty much like the ones in the movie; as in they leap into combat yelling at the top of their lungs, completely unlike real military personnel. In a video game, this means they spend most of their time gleefully leaping into your line of fire as the early levels take place in narrow corridors. The Aliens on the other hand, just cannot handle the bad level design of the Sulaco. They have this hilarious habit of leaping around to different perches in a circle or figure 8 pattern when confused. They also have a habit of standing there in a stupor for a few seconds when they pounce and the target steps out of range. They do this a lot in the horribly designed corridors and cargo bays of the Sulaco. Just to venture a guess, I would say that Gearbox was forced to retrofit the entire engine when they came back from the Borderlands games to finish this one. In the process the Alien AI didn’t work very well with the older levels and they just didn’t get around to fixing it. Just a guess, but when you see them leaping about LV-426 much like Skags in Skag Gully and it actually feels like a decent Gearbox game, it paints a clear picture. It just looks like there was little cohesion in the multiple stages and multiple developers of this game and at the end they just went smush and slapped them all together.
Another thing you may have heard is that Colonial Marines is pretty conservative in it’s gameplay features. Yep, that’s true. It’s the standard set of level-ups and customizable weapons. You shoot, sprint, crouch and zoom much like you do in the most popular shooters of the day. If Brice writes his own review, I’m sure he’ll complain that his beloved baseball slide is not in the game. If you didn’t pre-order the game, you will have to look around a bit for the Legendary Weapons belonging to the marines from the movie. Besides the audio logs, that’s about it besides killing Xenos and Wey-Yuts.
As the game progresses, not only the gameplay, but the plot improves as well. At first I was worried that this game was just going to be a retread of what Rebellion’s pretty darn good AVP series had already done before. Though in part that’s unavoidable as the AVP games have already taken their pick of the locations in which this game mostly takes place, this game has a few aces up it’s sleeve. The first of which is the participation of many of the original cast. Right from the start you see a mayday video recording by Hicks and another Bishop model voiced by Lance Henricksen, but many of the other characters appear or are referenced in some way. Another is a plot twist that (although a bit of a stretch) made that 8 year old Aliens fanboy inside me jump up and down and scream with glee (actually all of me did). This is the part which absolutely convinces me that certain journalists did not finish the game. When a certain scene happens, if you loved Aliens, this game just gained like 14 points on the 1-10 rating scale. If you hated the game anyway or were too jaded to accept it, then shame on you for letting your child self die. If you’ve ever seen the movie Sidekicks where the Seaquest dolphin kid is obsessed with Chuck Norris, there’s a scene where he has this epic daytime hallucination in class. The last 2 hours of this game were that for me on a constant basis. Not only do you get to walk around all the sets and climb all over them like you wanted to as a child, but you do it accompanied by the real actors from the movie. As a fan, I am incapable of giving this game the 4-5/10 that seems so popular. I dare any Aliens fan to play the single-player campaign from start to finish and do so.
That aside, it’s time to tackle the other snarling saber-toothed tiger in the room: the graphics. Once again, I think development hell is to blame here as well. While it’s true that (much more on consoles) this game looks nothing like the videos or tech demos, it gets better as it goes along. What I see is something that was never fully compiled and optimized while it was in it’s long development and had to be pretty much neutered to run on a wide range of PCs and consoles. Just like everything else in the game, it goes from about the quality of an early Xbox 360 shooter, to roughly comparable to other multiplatform games of the time by the time the credits roll. It still has the same basic DirectX 9 effects and low-resolution textures throughout, but clearly for the later levels. the developers working on it were much more familiar with recent multiplatform shooters (probably Gearbox). So what this means is that after you’ve gotten through those awful initial missions, there actually starts to be some eye candy too. I stopped several times, even on the Xbox version, to gawk at the beautifully recreated film sets later in the game. Not only did they have far better textures than early levels, but some areas were downright HUGE. I’m just going to spoil it since they’ve shown the interior in screenshots and say that you get to stand on the ground outside the derelict spacecraft. After you kill the baddies, you can just stand there and stare at it to your heart’s content, it is just as effing gigantic as it looked in the movies. Many other iconic scenes offer the same.
The music is just a giant remix of themes from the movies with a few added bridges and samples. ’Nuff said.
The multiplayer made one very shameful but strategically brilliant move. They tacked on a mode at the last minute that perfectly puts Left 4 Dead’s excellent formula around the Aliens franchise. It’s a match made in heaven. There are a couple of other modes which were clearly what they were going to offer before they came up with that bright idea, but the Escape mode is the star. As you would imagine, the marines are trying to evac and the aliens are trying to stop them. Just like good ol’ L-fer-D the aliens have different classes which specialize in different ways to halt the marine squad’s progress. Yeah, it’s a game you’ve played before, but it’s also arguably a game that the Alien franchise invented. It’s difficult to not see the influence of the hectic chase scenes in Aliens in many parts of the Left 4 Dead games. Regardless of who’s chicken is laying who’s egg, it fits like a glove. Alien players will have all sorts of interesting strategies to divide and conquer the marines. Marines will generally be forced to stick together and advance slowly if they are against players of any skill. The resulting gameplay dynamic is pretty much the scene in Aliens when they first enter the reactor. It’s glorious fun, but as there are only two maps available so far and neither is any where near as long as an L4D level, it’s mostly a lark.
The problem that confronts the more traditional, score-focused modes is the marine arsenal. Legendary weapons especially being available in multiplayer was a huge mistake that I hope has been patched out by the time you read this. Any level 1 player who has pre-ordered the game has Hick’s shotgun, which pretty much turns anything at very short range to oatmeal. Considering it takes the Aliens quite a few levels to unlock such an effortless 1-hit kill, this game effectively recreates the “n00b tube.” The multiplayer can still be a lot of fun as an alien, but it can be frustrating when low-level players on the opposite team have overpowered weapons without unlocking them and you have only a few short and midrange attacks. Once you get past the first few levels, no amount of weaponry makes the gameplay unfair as the aliens start to get some ridiculous abilities of their own. Assuming this game even has enough sales to have a high-ranked game, it will be pure madness and chaos, I guarantee. Like Unreal Tournament 04 madness and chaos.
I’ll conclude this review just how I started it. If you’re not an Aliens fan, steer your money away from this game. If you have spent every day since the first time you saw Aliens wanting a REAL sequel, you have just found your favorite teddy bear in the attic. This is sixty dollars you will never miss or wish you had back in your pocket. Any one of the fanboy watercooler moments in the last half of this game is worth the sticker price to a fan. Hell, if you have the PC version and the settings maxed, the guy who owns the original cast of the “space jockey” now has nothing you haven’t had. He spent millions and you still got to climb on it anyway. Since I fall in category number two, this once I am going to have to beat down every journalistic standard I normally adhere to. This game does not deserve this score by science, but this is how my heart felt.
8/10
