Rezzed: The Show Floor (Part Two)

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Nick Keirle

Here comes part two of my look at the games on the Rezzed show floor. It’s below. Yep, right there.

Antichamber:

Antichamber‘s been around for a long time, and apparently it’s finally getting a proper release this year. It’s a first-person puzzle game where things don’t really work as you’d expect them to. Walk round a corner, then retrace your steps and you’re likely to find yourself in a completely new location. All kinds of objects in the world operate according to their own bizarre, unknowable logic.

Placards found throughout the game give you deliberately obtuse hints about how to progress in that area, and if something is stumping you it’s always easy to retreat to the hub and try your luck at another puzzle. It’s interesting stuff, certainly, and some of the puzzle solutions are very clever, requiring you to actively reject what the game says it wants you to do in order to succeed. But the problem I kept running up against was that the crazy dream logic of  Antichamber often clashed harshly with the puzzle-solving nature of the game. It must be extremely hard to make puzzles that play around with non-Euclidean space and standard ways of thinking without those puzzles becoming frustrating and non-arbitrary. Sometimes in Antichamber I only managed to progress through trial-and-error random actions and movements, and often I became completely stuck, quite confident that no amount of real-world logic could make me understand the odd system I was grappling with.

Hopefully the finished game overcomes this problem, but even if not this is definitely a very clever game. It just might be clever more for its ideas than for its execution. And it might be too clever for its own good at times.

Borderlands 2:

I enjoyed Borderlands, but when I looked back on it I wasn’t sure what, if anything, was so special about it all along. Sure, it had shooting, driving, and a deep, varied loot system, but I’m not sure it all came together into a good, coherent final product. So I’ve been sceptical about Borderlands 2, and after playing the demo for a minute or two I realised I wasn’t going to have a Far Cry 3-style conversion. After leaving the demo booth after around fifteen minutes I felt like I did after finishing the original Borderlands years ago: “I’m pretty sure that was fun.” Admittedly I was only given a relatively small chunk of content to play around with – a single map with some simple ‘go here and kill/find/fix this’ missions, but despite the numerous ideas and mechanics on show nothing about it stood out as particularly special.

It was fun. It was fun playing co-op with random strangers. It was fun shooting people and avoiding getting shot. I didn’t get a chance to see the inventory, skill, or loot systems but I imagine they’re pretty fun too. But it didn’t grab me at all, even if there was nothing about the game that I could point to and say “There! There’s the problem.”

McPixel:

Of all the games at Rezzed this one was the hardest to pigeonhole, despite there also being a game called Drunken Robot Pornography playable on the show floor. In McPixel you’re placed in a small stage with twenty seconds to stop a bomb from exploding. Clicking on things in the environment will make you interact with them, and it’s impossible to know what will happen when you do so. You might cover a bomb in ketchup and swallow it or attach giant dentures to a man’s leg. If you fail to stop the bomb the whole stage explodes and you’re moved onto the next.

There really is no logic to McPixel’s puzzles, and for the first few minutes with the game I was just confused, eventually stumbling across the solution to each stage by chance alone. Initially I thought this was all a problem. But no, it’s why McPixel is great. The game quickly becomes an experience of joyfully clicking around, watching something insane and unexpected occur, seeing the bomb explode, and moving on. And there’s no frustration when you keep failing to figure out a way to defuse a bomb, because every way of failing (and there are many in each stage) is genuinely hilarious. As I played a crowd of people built up around me, every one of us laughing as I threw a man out of a moving train or jumped into an active volcano. The game’s out now, so I’m going to buy it and have a longer look as soon as possible.

I’m calling it now – McPixel is the RUNNER UP FOR GAME OF THE SHOW

Hotline Miami:

This is it. The kind of game that you don’t know exists, then you see it flashing like a seizure on a screen in the corner of your eye. Then you look at it and can’t look away again. It’s the first commercial game from indie developer Jonatan Söderström (known as Cactus), maker of fascinating weird, alienating games like Mondo Agency, Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf, and the horrific, incredible Norrland. 

It’s a brutal, surrealistic top-down shooter set in 1980s Miami, and from its first moments the game is less an assault on than a indiscriminate carpet bombing of the senses. Powerful, hypnotic music blares into your headphones and garish colours flood the screen. Your task in each stage is to clear the building of its mobster inhabitants while avoiding your own death – something that comes easily and fast and without warning. The first time I beat a man to the floor and slowly worked about stoving in his head I felt extremely uncomfortable, and the game continues to ratchet up the violence, and this uncomfortable feeling, throughout.

It’s an amoral, gruesome world and it’s handled with stunning finesse.  This isn’t videogame violence to get up in arms about. It’s not even Saw or Hostel – it’s A Clockwork Orange or American Psycho. In full knowledge that I’m going to sound like a bit of a twat here, it’s artful violence. And though it’s married to a tense, tactical shooting game it never feels unsettling in a way it shouldn’t. And the brutal combat, moving from room to room and trying to work out the order in which you’re going to take people out, is effortlessly compelling in its own right. But the detached, almost misanthropic atmosphere of the game makes it something more than just compelling action.

It was clear to me as soon as I played Hotline Miami, on day one near the start of the day, that it’d take a lot to topple it as my game of the show. And by the end of the weekend it was clear that nothing had even come close. I’m delighted that so many sites, Rock Paper Shotgun and Eurogamer included, named it game of the show. And there’s really no doubt that I agree: Hotline Miami is, almost without competition, the HARUSPEX GAMES OFFICIAL GAME OF THE SHOW.

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Rezzed: The Show Floor (Part One)

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Nick Keirle

Though nearly two weeks late due to a mixture of work, illness, and a lackadaisical attitude to deadlines, I’ve brought you some observations from my time at Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Eurogamer’s inaugural PC and Indie Games show. Is Proteus a real game? Was Hotline Miami the best thing there? Did the press pass I managed to wrangle achieve anything other than making me feel an unjustified sense of importance? Find out below in the first of four articles on the show.

Rezzed was full of games, it may not surprise you to hear, and I managed to get my hands on pretty much every single one of them. The only ones I didn’t take a look at were those with lines longer than I could bear (the consistently amazing-looking Prison Architect among them) or those I ignored out of a (perhaps indefensible) prejudice against fantasy MMOs that try to catch people’s attention with chain-mail bikinis. The following is a collection of my (often tentative) thoughts on a few of the (often unfinished) games I saw.

Proteus:

I was sceptical of Proteus – a lo-fi game where you explore a pastoral world without direction or goal. But I had to eat my vaguely sceptical words, because the five or so minutes I spent with Proteus was extremely compelling stuff. The fields, woods, and hilltops were wonders to explore, filled as they were with constantly little surprises. For a while I followed a frog as it bounced musically along, then I got distracted by the ruins of a man-made tower. Towards the end of my session I saw a circle of odd animalistic sculptures cresting a steep hill in the distance. The sun was setting as I climbed, and as I reached the summit everything turned dark. Turning round, I saw clouds rolling in and cutting off the hilltop from the world below. All around I could only see the sky above and a carpet of clouds below. The stars started to expand and contract overhead dreamily, and comforting, ethereal music faded in. It was kind of a magical experience, and I left with a sense of peace and optimism that was later ruined by the sight of a man shooting a tiger repeatedly in the face at the Far Cry 3 booth.

A fair number of people have played Proteus and asked if it’s really a game, considering its lack of goals and clear-cut rules. Is Proteus a ‘real’ game? My answer is ‘yes’, followed by ‘obviously’. In fact, Proteus was one of my favourite games of the show. It’s a triumph of atmosphere and free-form exploration. More of this please.

 qrth-phyl:

hermitgame’s newest project can be summed up as follows: it’s 3D snake. But that simple description doesn’t really hold up when you start playing. The game flips between levels where you move along the outer surface of a cube and levels where you fly freely within the hollow space inside a cube. It takes a little getting used to, and its workings are kind of needlessly opaque, but there’s something extremely compelling to it. Having to keep track of where your ever-growing tail can be found along six sides of the cube, while picking up power-ups and avoiding other dangers, quickly becomes challenging. There are a few little annoyances that interrupt the flow of things, but a little testing and fixes should do a great deal before release.

I’m not sure how much there really is to qrth-phyl, and though it looks and feels absolutely great I’m guessing it might blow through its bag of tricks pretty quickly, leaving the player with nothing more than a fairly interesting 3D interpretation of snake to fall back on. Still, I can’t say for sure until I get the finished game and play around with it for longer than ten minutes.

Far Cry 3:

The demo started with a top-naked tribal woman mounting me. If I had been playing in the privacy of my home this unnecessary and childish flaunting of  lady-pieces would have made me feel silly enough. But playing with tens of people standing there watching my screen was something else entirely. Fortunately, after all the sex and white-man-becoming-the-saviour-of-a-tribe-of-simple-natives, the game saw fit to actually let me play the damn thing.

And it was impressive. I wasn’t a fan of Far Cry 2 for a lot of reasons, and up until now I wasn’t particularly interested in playing the sequel. But Far Cry 3 looks like it could really be something, so long as it can keep from flashing breasts at me every twenty minutes. Abandoning the poorly-executed Heart of Darkness references of Far Cry 2, it seems to be focusing on a more surreal approach to things, with flashing, psychedelic tv screens and weird, twisted hallucinations. Plus, the constant, definitely-insane antagonist who appeared throughout was masterfully executed, both in terms of writing and voice-acting.

Some more observations: (1) Everything looked really pretty, even the sand. (2) Unlike the previous game stealth actually seemed like a viable tactic, though since the demo was so tightly scripted I don’t really want to make actual predictions about that. (3) At one point I killed two men with a bow and arrow while a tropical monkey sat there with a look of reproach. (4) As I waited for my turn I did watch someone playing the section of the demo where you have to escape from a burning building. And yes – instead of heeding the game’s warnings he slowly strolled up to a tiger trapped in a cage, aimed his gun at it for a good five seconds, then shot it repeatedly in the face.

Xenonauts:

Xenonauts is a top-down, turn-based strategy game that’s essentially an unofficial remake of the classic UFO: Enemy Unknown (known as X-COM: UFO Defense in the USA). It’s a matter of building bases, training soldiers, and fighting back against an alien invasion of earth. Like UFO, you’ll need to scan the planet for threats, research alien technology and biology, and be careful as all hell on the battlefield, since your soldiers are either this close to dying or are dead.

Unfortunately only a brief, early mission was available to play. Even so, what I saw impressed me greatly. UFO: Enemy Unknown is a truly great game broken up with lots of infuriating little design mistakes and user interface problems. And from what I saw of Xenonauts, it seems to be UFO without the bullshit. Everything seems clean, simple, and easy to understand. If the finished game can capture the greatness of UFO both on the battlefield and on the grander scale management, whilst avoid its big, stupid mistakes then it’ll make lots of people very happy, myself included.

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A Review of ‘Tribes: Ascend’

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Nick Keirle

Tribes: Ascend is a game about one thing: speed. Tribes: Ascend is also a game about one thing: precision. Shall we throw another one in there? Okay – it’s also about teamwork. If your team is missing one of these things you won’t get very far. And these three things – speed, precision, and teamwork – say a lot about the game, its successes, and even its problems.

To get the basics out of the way, Tribes: Ascend is a team-based online first-person shooter on the PC that is completely free to play. There are four game modes available – two varieties of team deathmatch, Capture & Hold (which is all about two teams competing to hold capture points), and good old reliable Capture the Flag. Each player has access to nine different classes (though only a select few are available at first), each with its different style of play, and a good team will field a balanced mix of offensive, defensive, and support classes to ensure victory.

Let’s talk about speed. What sets Tribes apart from other shooters is its emphasis on allowing the players to move very, very fast. Players have access to two things – a jetpack and a special friction-dampening  device that no one could fail to fall in love with. The first lets you quickly move up and the second let’s you move quickly down. Hold down the spacebar and, due to the removal of friction, any time you’re going down a slop you’ll pick up speed, as well as maintaining that speed on a flat plane. This is called skiing, and it’s fundamental to the playing of the game. What’s the jetpack useful for, then? Well, the giant, sprawling maps in Tribes: Ascend are cleverly designed labyrinths of gentle slopes, and jutting hills, and since gravity still applies anytime you go up a hill you’ll start to lose momentum. The jetpack, with its limited-use, slowly-recharging energy reserve, allows you to get up hills without sacrificing speed.

At first all this can be very confusing, but soon you’ll start to learn the lines of the maps – where to use the topography to build up speed, and how to climb the steep hills without slowing down. Eventually you’ll be skiing and jetpacking your way to speeds of kilometres an hours speeds on a regular basis. And unlike other games speed is vital in Tribes for several reasons. First, you’re harder to hit when you’re careering at two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour down the face of a cliff. Second, in capture the flag, the real meat of the game, you’ll need speed to take the enemy’s flag without getting torn to pieces in the attempt.

That’s also where precision comes in – in order to hit enemies with any reliability you’ll need to be precise. When you and your enemy are both jetpacking through the air at breakneck speed things becomes a little more complex. This can cause problems at times, since people who have practiced the game a great deal will become all but untouchable in open combat. But not only do you have to be precise during combat, but if you hope to take the enemy’s flag from right underneath them you’ll have to control your movements with utmost care. The only smart way to take an enemy flag is at hundreds of kilometres an hour, since at lower speeds you’ll be overtaken and killed with little effort. But inertia plays a big part in Tribes , and so you can’t hope to zoom into the enemy base, turn on a dime, and zoom out again. If you want to take the enemy flag you’ll have to be precise – you’ll need to hit that flag and get out without a hitch.

And when you do it’s an amazing feeling. Zipping past enemy defences, dodging gunfire all the while, before taking the flag and then getting the hell out of there before anyone can react is one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever done in a multiplayer game. And the sense of accomplishment for lining up everything perfectly is huge. It’s actually really astounding, and it’s only made better by the fact that getting the flag is extremely difficult. Players will have access to mines, auto-turrets, and forcefields to use to defend their flag stand. And the game’s defence classes are also formidable barriers when they’re played well. There are nine classes – three light classes, whose armour allows them to reach the highest speeds, three medium classes, and three classes with heavy armour and even heavier guns. Each plays differently, and can contribute to their team in various ways -from base defence and repairing auto-turrets and sensors, to flag-capturing and base-disruption.

The back and forth game here is perfectly balanced when everything works together well. When two teams are equally matched it leads to some of the most tense, exciting experiences I’ve had with a game in recent years. But it all tends to fall apart when one team outmatches the other. And since a huge number of players don’t put much effort into teamwork this actually happens a fair amount. And while you might think it’d be unfair to blame the game for bad, obnoxious players Tribes: Ascend has to take its share of the blame since it simply doesn’t do enough to encourage people to play the game as a team-player, which is absolutely vital. When a game has a bad community it can’t be ignored. Even if you’re a really great player you will lose games often, and badly, because your team is simply not helping. Tribes: Ascend is a very complex game, and in order for your team to do well everyone has to be helping out. But Tribes is full of badly behaved, obnoxious players in a way that many other multiplayer games are not. And this affects the experience of playing the game a great deal.

The issue of unbalanced matches is a real problem, and it needs to be addressed by Hi-Rez Studios, but my major hangup with Tribes: Ascend is actually far more removed from the minute to minute action. See, Tribes is free-to-play, and that means you can download it and play it as long as you like without paying anything. Instead, the game brings in revenue by charging players for optional in-game purchases of experience boosters and new gear. You can unlock all weapons and armour by spending the experience gained in the game, but the rate of experience gain is so glacially slow (especially for players who haven’t made any in-game purchases) that it could take weeks of serious daily play to unlock a single new weapon, even if you’re a pretty capable player. And this wouldn’t be a problem if the unlocks were simply fun alternatives to strong default weapons. But unfortunately many classes are at a marked disadvantage if they’re lacking certain premium equipment. It’s not exactly pay-to-win, but it’s certainly a problem.

And not only do you gain experience extremely slowly, but the cost of in-game gold is actually kind of insane. In order to unlock all the guns for a single one of the nine classes you could easily pay over thirty pounds. So you’re kind of stuck – if you want better gear you’ll either have to spend weeks grinding up experience, or you’ll have to take the plunge and spend great deals of cash. Neither is a particularly exciting thing to find yourself doing. Admittedly, in recent months Hi-Rez Studios have done much to reduce both the experience grind and the real-money cost of unlocks, but if you’re expecting a game you can play seriously without paying anything at all you’ll be disappointed.

But perhaps it’s unfair to hold this against Tribes: Ascend too much. The business model is questionable, and at its worst it can be extremely frustrating to regularly see two teams, one of Davids and one of Goliaths, come up against one another, especially when the Goliaths win over and over again. But all that aside, and as I said Hi-Rez Studios are making good, important strides to counter these issues, Tribes: Ascend is a wonderfully balanced, intense shooter that’s brimming over with intelligent ideas and fun mechanics. It’s Capture the Flag mode is, at the best of times, some of the most fun I’ve had in any game. And when you consider that this is completely free to play that kind of boggles the mind. Also, if you ever get tired of skiing and jetpacking around the map, picking up the enemy flag, and then returning it to your own base in a blaze of glory…then you’re tired of life. There’s nothing quite like it, and to be perfectly honest there’s nothing quite like Tribes: Ascend. 

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