Kireatic

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.

Part of the One Hundred Plus Games Review.

BioShock. Said to be one of the best games of recent times, but wasn’t a game I had ever actually played, despite it’s high rating among most gamers. So, when I was gifted a copy, it gave me the chance to have some proper quality time with the game.

What I discovered may well shock some of you. BioShock is…okay.

I’ll quickly back-pedal by saying that the storyline is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a game, and has the most stunning plot-twist since when that platform went round the corner in Portal and I saw a fire pit. Would you kindly…? The little sisters, and the journal entries scattered about the game slowly increase the back story, until every new piece of Rapture makes you think “Ah, this is what such-and-such was talking about…”. It’s masterfully done, and really helps you feel immersed in a game, something that doesn’t happen every day. You even have the choice of harvesting or saving the little sisters each time, which in essence is a form of good or evil. A man chooses, a slave obeys…

Graphics are on the whole pretty good, with plenty of detail in the scenery, and water acts like it should when it’s part of said scenery, which is nice. It doesn’t interact with objects otherwise, other than to obscure your view, which is a shame, but understandable given the tremendous increase in power that is required from the engine and the computer to do that. PhysX would be nice in BioShock 2 for that, but I digress. My biggest complaint on the graphics would be on the enemies and people you see around the place. Unless in a cut-scene, their mouths don’t move when they talk. That really annoyed me. How are they talking when their mouths aren’t moving! A real shame, but there you go. Some variation in the little sisters other than dress and hair colour would be appreciated as well.

Gameplay is where the game actually suffers. There is a tremendous amount of customization that you can do, swapping out how your plasmids work, how much damage you take, how fast you move, even how objects in the game react to you, which is fantastic. But that all comes to nothing once you realize that the lighting plasmid and the wrench is all you need. I killed the final boss with the lightning plasmid and the wrench. I’m sorry, 2k, but giving the player everything they need at the start, while technically sound, is boring. I had over 700 Adam before I took on the last boss purely because I didn’t want to spend it on any abilities that I wasn’t going to use. Although let it not be said whacking everything with your wrench isn’t fun, and you can always vary it if you like at your whims, it’s just a shame that you are never actually forced to change weapons unless taking on a Big Daddy – and even then it’s not required to do so.
Other than the whole zap and smack issue, the game plays rather well, and is never too slow a pace with once exception, near the end – trying not to spoil it, but the escort segment is extremely slow and agonizing. But other than that, no complaints. The game took me 10 hours to complete, 6.6 hours of which were in a row, so it has holding power at the very least.

The UI is good, easy to read and the game is easy to control. Default plasmids using the F-keys is a bit annoying, as those keys are just out of reach during normal gameplay, and I don’t like having to move my hand away from the WASD keys to quick-change to a plasmid, so I was mostly using the mouse and scroll – less speedy, but easier. I’d recommend re-binding that particular setup, but otherwise worked great.

BioShock gets:

Gameplay: 7/10
Graphics: 9/10
Difficulty: 8/10
Storyline: 10/10

Overall Score: 8.5/10! Hoping that BioShock 2 fixes the gameplay aspects, and then we’ll be away!