Kireatic

Part of the One Hundred Plus Games Review.

So, after my non-review of NeoTokyo, I went back over to the listings to see what my next game was. Regrettably it turned out to be Peggle Extreme. So, this looks to be a very short review, yet again.

Peggle Extreme is the free edition of Peggle, given out with Nvidia graphics cards along with a Portal demo, Half Life 2: Deathmatch and Half Life 2: Lost Coast. It’s a casual game, basically revolving around you trying to hit all the orange blocks and pegs on a board before you run out of pinballs to do it with.

It’s oddly fun, as casual games are, and seeing how the game is free, I would recommend at least trying it out to see if you want to purchase the actual version. The ‘extreme’ version has Half Life, TF2 and Portal themes throughout, with a brief bit of CS:S, but is terribly short which is a shame.

Graphics are terrible, as Popcap don’t ‘do’ high resolution games. Best played in windowed mode. Provided you aren’t trying to full screen it, it looks okay.

Gameplay is addictive, but thankfully in this version, short, as I don’t want to be stuck playing Peggle all day, to be quite honest. Re-playability is quite high, as while the layout doesn’t change, the position of the orange blocks does.

What else can I say? There’s an attempt at some sort of story involving headcrabs, but…you know. It’s Peggle.

Peggle gets:

Gameplay: 6/10
Graphics: 4/10
Addictiveness: 8/10

Overall score for Peggle…6/10. Well, what did you expect? It’s Peggle.

Part of the One Hundred Plus Games Review.

NeoTokyo is one of my favourite SourceMods; a game that runs off of Valve’s HL2 engine, the Source Engine, but I haven’t played it since release due to a lack of interest in the game past the first week. So, I was quite excited to play the game again after all this time, so I dusted it off and set off to get some hours in.

...

Oh. Well, there are two public servers with people, let’s try the first!

Sweet, at least I can play somewhere.

Uh…

Right. How about the other server?

…

Alright…I get it. How about an empty server, I’ll invite some people I know have the game installed!

Server not updated I see. And the others?

*Alt-F4*

I’ve recently had the pleasure of playing in the Star Trek Online open beta, thanks to a pre-order I’ve got on the game. I wasn’t aware before the pre-order if the game was subscription or not (it is), something most MMO’s are. I however find myself wondering if it has the right to ask for a subscription as the gameplay stands at the moment.

Me in Star Trek Online. Feeling a little lonely in my instanced mission.

My main MMO is is EVE Online, a space sandbox more commonly referred to by its players as ‘Spreadsheets in Space’. EVE is what I imagine in an MMO, a large, persistent universe which is truly massive, with all its players operating in one version of reality, where your actions are permanent, and there is a loss to your actions. In essence, a massively multi-player game in which what you do actually affects the game. This is only possible with persistence.

However, most MMO’s, most notably World of Warcraft, instance most regions of the game. An instance is a sealed bubble of the game which a small number of players go to do a mission or dungeon, and the what you do in the instance is kept inside that little sealed bubble – a new group of players won’t see anything you’ve done, and they’ll have exactly the same experience of the game whether you were there or not. Now, this is understandable for games like WoW, as they wouldn’t function very well without it.

With Star Trek Online, however, I find myself automatically drawing comparisons to EVE, and finding STO failing. STO isn’t an MMO – there’s nothing massive about it. You can only be interacting with around 50 players at once with the current instance system, and that is an upper limit. That’s not massive, I know two or three FPS games that have larger player counts in a round than that. I can understand that there are lag issues, god knows STO is laggy enough at the moment during beta, but EVE proves that this doesn’t need to be an issue, it just needs planning.

I say avoid instances where you can, MMO designers. Otherwise you’ll be less of an MMO and more of a single-player game with optional co-op mode.