Age of Empires Online

I used to play a lot of Age of Empires with Tim, years and years ago, mostly co-op against the AI as neither of us wanted to kill each other.  My dad also played, though lacking the internet, we weren’t able to play together.

I tried multiplayer when I first got the internet, via some Microsoft service.. and was almost immediately yelled at by randoms who determined any new player to be unworthy of joining a game.  Eventually I found a game, only to realise there was some cheating going on when my opponents appeared with cars.  Yeah.. right.  Back to the AI, then 😉

Age of Empires Online is free to play, although there is “premium content” available, adding new civilizations as well as less useful decorative items.

Each player starts off with their own Capital City, to which buildings can be added to gain new technologies and units.  You can also pick up new quests here, the first of which are all about teaching the basics of killing enemies, gathering food and building units.. this all works the same as the original Age of Empires gameplay.

The “online” part of the game consists of co-operative questing and PvP.. you can team up with other players to complete quests, though it isn’t required.

I think that it’ll be fairly difficult for people to cheat, though I don’t know what advantages the premium content will give people.. I guess we’ll have to see whether multiplayer with randoms will be worth playing.

Star Wars – Battlefront II

A friend bought me this during the recent Steam sale, but up till now I’d only looked at the tutorial.  We finally went for a multiplayer session on a nice private server..  I was very glad of bots as it allowed me to go on the same team as my friends, though this then meant a few team-kills while figuring out what was going on 😉

It’s been far too long since I saw the Star Wars films, so actually reading the player models in a large scrap wasn’t too easy to start with, meaning more friendly fire than usual.

Although all the maps are included on the server rotation, we didn’t manage to see a Space level.. I believe this involves flying, so it might have been for the best.. but we had a run through capture the flag and a control point mode .  I found a rather nice sniper while on one of the control point maps, and took out plenty of unsuspecting AI..  I think the AI work on quantity rather than quality, but I like feeling a bit overpowered 😉

The Heroes only become available at intervals through the game, but are powerful and therefore fun to use.. I think I liked Darth Maul best, with his two-handed lightsabre 🙂

I only took a few screenshots while playing, but I took one of this.. a rather disturbing android torture thing in the corner of one map..

I’m not sure what to make of this.. possibly something based in the Star Wars films that I’m just missing.

Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem Forever, long thought of as the ultimate vapourware, is finally on the way, and a demo is available via Duke’s First Access Club.. I got a key thanks to my copy of Borderlands 🙂

I played Duke Nukem 3D back when that was new, when my access to multiplayer back then was via LAN.. which meant very few people to play against.  This led to frustration, as I knew nobody else who wanted to play as often or for as long as I did, especially if I did too well.  There was a good selection of weapons, steroids for speed boosts, multiple routes around the map and little secret areas.. and the jet pack and a hologram device used to pop out a hologram of Duke as a distraction were fun and great for getting the jump on a rival, and usually the reason for me doing so well.

The game had very little in terms of story.. aliens invading, humans being mutated, Duke being the only one able to save the world..  so the single-player was about shooting aliens and mutated pig-cops, with Duke’s random comments and references to popular films here and there too.

So.. the demo.. starting off, I find myself being taught how to use a urinal..
Done with “pissing around”, as the first joke has it, I decided to try interacting with everything else I came across.. a little indiscriminately.. which is how I found myself flinging poo in the shower room.  Duke wasn’t too happy.. “What am I, a chimpanzee?”!

The graphics are better than I expected, though I guess they’ll have been undergoing tweaks throughout development, and the sounds are pretty good too.. but the jump animation.. uh, wow.  Disappointingly bad. 🙁

Outside of the shower block there were soldiers preparing themselves for the enemy.. they ran off as I headed towards them, leaving me to discover that I could draw on the tactics whiteboard while the remaining Marine cheered me on.

I left this room and headed out down the tunnel, where I got a glimpse of the enemy before he fired a rocket into the tunnel and collapsed it.  In the next corridors I met more marines and was given a dual-rocket gun before being let out onto the field to face the Cycloid, a one-eyed rocket-firing beast which is meant to represent the final boss from Duke Nukem 3D.

I felt like I ran out of ammo a little too fast during the fight, and although more ammo was available via airdrop onto the pitch, I felt like I spent too long running.

After knocking the Cycloid down I was able to climb up onto him and pull out some tubing from the back of his head.. killing him resulted in a slightly gruesome opportunity for a goal kick with the eye..

This led to a short cutscene which slightly irritated me as it featured a pair of bimbos kneeling before Duke, wiping their mouths.
This was a bit too gratuitous for my liking..

Back in Duke Nukem 3D there was a bit of a controversy over the “exploitation” of women.  There were strippers in various locations in the game.. 2d sprites if I recall correctly.. which if shot would be replaced by falling money, or in one case, by an enemy.  There were also a few XXX posters and porno shops, and Duke was supposed to be some kind of babe-magnet.. but it certainly wasn’t anything to take seriously.

With Duke Nukem Forever, it seems they’re using the strippers and seedy side of the game as a selling point.  I’m not overly bothered if there is sex or prostitution in my games, but being put in the role of a man receiving a BJ.. I feel more like I’m being forced to watch some guy’s fantasy than playing a video game.

Next up was a driving segment with a monster-truck and a turbo button.  Pressing space allowed four-wheel driving, and tight turns..

Running the pig-men down may or may not have been the intended way of getting through the level, but it was fun and fast.  Once I ran out of gas for the truck though, I hit the two-gun system.  There were plenty of weapons laying around, but aside from my pistol I was only able to have one of those at a time, meaning more running around if I wanted to play with a different gun.

The shrink-ray was pretty cool, and I liked being able to stomp on the shrunken enemies.. however, when it came to the explosives I got annoyed with having to press ‘3’ to throw the pipe bomb.. perhaps this is something that can be mapped to another key.

A ship was the boss for this section, and again I found myself having to run around more than I wanted, looking for pipe bombs and hiding behind rocks when the EGO (health) meter got too low.

Overall, I felt a bit disappointed with the demo.  It lacked excitement.  If this demo is representative of the full game, then it’s basically going to be Serious Sam without the hectic fun of swarms of enemies.. in that case I’d stick to Serious Sam..

HOARD

A friend bought us all HOARD this weekend, as a 4-pack on Steam.  Yay! 🙂

HOARD is a mix of action and strategy, developed by indie team Big Sandwich Games, where each player takes on the role of a dragon in a table-top style medieval kingdom with farms, towns, princesses and knights..

Every dragon needs treasure, and this is obtained through burning down farms or towns, intercepting wagons full of tithes, and capturing and ransoming princesses.

The game has a co-op mode, which allows friends to work together to gather as much treasure as possible in one shared hoard, but you can also play competitively.. this can mean racing them to the treasure, or actively trying to get in their way or kill them!  Killing another dragon forces them to drop their treasure and flee straight back to their hoard, where they are unable to move while they regenerate health.. a great opportunity to steal the dropped treasure 😉

At the beginning of each game, your dragon only has weak abilities, but as you gather more treasure you are able to spend points and upgrade your dragon’s speed, fire-breathing capability, carrying capacity and damage resistance.  I prefer to improve the speed of my dragon, as well as fire-breathing, but I think this could change depending on the map and game mode.

Upgrades cost more at each level, so you need to gather more and more gold to keep upgrading.  The kingdom also improves over time, with towns becoming larger and producing archers, who will fire on you.  If you do enough damage to a town you can scare them enough that they ‘belong’ to you, and send you tithes.. a nice way of gathering money automatically 🙂

During a competitive game, you will need to keep an eye on ‘your’ towns, as other dragons will want to take them over.. either by damaging the town enough to turn its loyalty to them, or by destroying the town centre and resetting the town’s loyalty.  Giants also appear in the kingdom.. they will attack towns they come across unless suitably distracted.. say with some fiery breath.. 😉

There are also small towers around the map, which spawn knights.  The knights will attack you if you pass by, and if you capture a princess, all the knights in the vicinity will come to try and rescue her!  I found the knights were best avoided until you had levelled up a little, as they are rather strong and can kill you easily if you stray too close.  As the kingdom grows, the towers become keeps, with more knights being spawned.. increasing the danger but also the reward, as the ransom value goes up with the level of the keep!

Another danger comes from the mage towers, which fire bolts at nearby dragons: destroying one of these reveals a large gem which is worth a lot of gold, but slows the dragon and makes you vulnerable to attack while carrying it.  I found the upgraded towers harder to destroy, as one mistake in avoiding the bolts means death.. and as the bolts can travel a long way, I sometimes got killed by a bolt set off by another dragon!

On all the maps, there are a variety of power-ups, which appear at regular intervals.  These can give you stronger firebreath, icy breath, or allow you to shoot fireballs.. another increases your speed, while the last is maybe a little evil, allowing a player to steal from another dragon’s hoard.. aside from the obvious exchange of gold, this has the added advantage of resetting the victim’s score multiplier!

As well as the Treasure game modes, there is “Princess Rush”, where you need to capture the most princesses to win, and a survival mode, which I’ve not tried yet.

Are Games Too Short?

The subject of game length has come up again at work this week, with complaints about Homefront’s short single player campaign of four to five hours.  I got rather annoyed with the double-standards of some people whining about Homefront but being perfectly happy with the length of the single-player campaigns in the Call of Duty series.. they’re all about the same length!

Personally, I think five hours isn’t enough if that’s the entire game.. I really wasn’t happy when I completed Half Life 2: Episode 2 in just a few hours.
However, in most games there are extra modes, and for Homefront and the Call of Duty series, there is a lot of playability in the multiplayer part of the games.. though if you are only interested in single-player, that’s no consolation.

A short game with great action and really memorable sections should be considered far superior to a longer but less fun game.. but it seems that some people dismiss a short game as being poor value for money regardless.  I wonder where this leaves us for the future.. I hope it doesn’t lead to devs padding games with boring travel sections or pointless dialogue..

While talking about Call of Duty 4, we all agreed that the single-player was rather short, but overall the game was fantastic.. even months after playing, we remembered parts of the game we enjoyed.. such as the One Shot, One Kill mission, which stood out as a real highlight.

Another game I look at favourably is Half Life 2, which was a lot longer, but was also paced nicely so that you could stop and look around between the more action-based parts if you wanted to.. and when devs have gone to the effort of creating a good game environment, I’d feel I was wasting that to speed through as fast as possible.

As for pacing.. I recently had early access to a game with rather annoying, nagging NPCs which made me push on all the time and I found myself getting angry with it, especially since I knew the game was fairly short.  Sure, I could have ignored the NPCs, but their constant barked orders were irritating.. this just spoiled my enjoyment in looking around and made me want to get things over and done with just to shut them up.

That’s not the feeling I want in a game, if I’m honest.. so short and rushed rates badly in my books.

I saw an argument last year for games being too long.. since many gamers have unfinished games in their collection, they must be getting bored before finishing them: therefore games are too long.  Now, I have a horrible record for completion, but this is nothing to do with the length of the games in question.  The reasons I don’t complete my games are a lack of time after the grind of work, lots of cheap games (I’m looking at you, Steam sales!) leading to there being more in my collection, and the fact that when I do have time, my friends are around to play as well.. and I’m hardly going to tell them to sling it while I get on with a single-player campaign.  Recently I would also blame WoW, as it’s rather too easy to just pop on for half an hour, which turns into a few hours that could have been used to advance the story in another game.

Crysis 2 Demo

My interest in EA’s Crysis 2 demo comes more from friends’ excitement about the game than anything else, as I’ve not even played the original game.  I didn’t have any real idea of what to expect from the multiplayer, so I was glad of the intro on launch which gave a quick run through of the nanosuit and the objectives of the different game-modes.

Be strong; be fast; be invisible.. all possible thanks to the rather interesting nanosuit, a battlesuit which gives you improved armour, speed or invisibility depending on how you like to play.. speed is always fun, and I loved the idea of the ground stomp, though as yet I have to actually use it on a target.  I found the armour just didn’t seem to last very long or add much protection when in a direct confrontation with an enemy.  I preferred stealth as this allowed me to get out of trouble while on low health, as well as helping in attempts to sneak up behind enemies.  I also found via watching one of my deaths on kill-cam, that the enemy can still see you while stealthed thanks to your shadow, which still appears as normal!

There were two maps and game-modes to choose from: Skyline, an instant-action team game, and Pier 17, which had alien drop pods to capture.

I rather liked this mode as it added a bit more direction to the game.  If you were unable to secure the pod for your team and then defend it, all was not lost as a new pod would be dropped at another location on the map.

Of the two available maps, I preferred Skyline with its variety of  indoor and outdoor areas and accessible roofs.  I also liked how the greenhouses changed through the round.. you can climb up and run along the top of them at the start, until stray bullets smash the glass leaving gaping holes for you to fall through instead.

Despite the multiplayer being fun so far, I’m not sure whether I’ll pick this up or not..  I have plenty of shooters, and more than enough multiplayer games to keep myself and friends occupied for quite some time, so the singleplayer will really have to get my interest if I’m going to add this game to my collection 🙂

Civilization V

I won a copy of Civ V from a Twitter competition a while back, but until the weekend I hadn’t really taken the time to try it out properly.  This weekend, however, another friend picked up the game and had been playing, so a multiplayer game was suggested..

Four of us set out to conquer the world.. and I think I might have got the worst starting island I’ve ever been on.

This bit of the island was the best purely because there were a few hexagons of land in a clump.  Fortunately there are methods of getting some use out of the water, such as the fishing boats, so my people weren’t always starving, but that particular notification did pop up a few times.

Barbarians were a nice source of XP rather than a real threat to my city.. this may be down to the difficulty setting chosen.. and overall I’m finding this version a lot easier to pick up than Civ IV was.. though as yet I don’t know which technologies and Wonders I should aim for.

Two friends decided to pick a fight with Suleiman, and proceded to smash their way through his lands.  As I was passing by the destruction with my exploratory trireme I decided to join in.. partly because I wanted to see battle, but mainly to pick up a bit of XP.

Much more to learn about this version of the game.. I can see this particular multiplayer game taking a while to complete too, since it requires four people to be online together.

My first experience of the Civ series comes all the way from Civ 2, which I often played alongside my dad, discussing tactics and which the best Wonders were.. the Pyramids were essential as they counted as a granary in every city, meaning you only needed half the food to get your next citizen.

The Great Library was also fairly good as it automatically provides any tech discovered by two other civilizations from that point on, though only really profitable if you weren’t leading the tech race yourself.  I also liked Leonardo’s Workshop, for the free upgrades to all units, and Adam Smith’s Trading Company, which reduced your maintenance costs.

My Civ 2 games tended towards mass-expansion, with so many cities that the automatically-generated names started to come from other Civilizations after a while.. unless I chose to rename them all.  As far as dealing with other Civilizations.. I either rushed for the Spaceship, or if enemies were pressuring me.. I took spies to their cities with a lovely Nuclear present 🙂

A successfully built and launched Spaceship would eventually arrive at Alpha Centauri, and count as a win for your Civilization.

(Screen taken from CivFanatics)

More recently, I picked up Civ IV: Beyond the Sword, but found myself rather lost with the new concepts of Religion and Culture, as well as the changes to my well-used and well-known tactics.  Expanding to a new city suddenly became expensive as the cost increases further away from the Capital, so instead I had to focus on building one city up at a time.. and all my old favourite Wonders stopped doing as I expected.

I attempted to play this version with a group of friends who knew the game, but quickly started to feel frustrated with my lack of knowledge, and rather uncomfortable with the banter that went on if somebody beat someone else to a Wonder, when trading with the AI, or when building cities where somebody else wanted to expand towards.  The others had been trading technologies from the start, so I quickly fell behind in tech as well.  With poor technology you don’t get access to the next level of resources, and your military units are weaker.  Then, not only do you have no technology or resources to trade, you can’t take anything by force either.  At this point, you probably need to get something from one player to use in trade with the next, and so on.. or wait to be picked off!

This is Magicka!

Magicka is an action-adventure game by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Paradox Interactive.  The game is set in a fantasy world with magic, goblins and trolls, a quest to help the King, a rogue wizard, and a heavy dose of parody.

In the single-player story mode, you put on your robe and wizard hat and combine elements to fire lasers, throw boulders and shoot lightning at your enemies!

There are eight elements to play with: water, life, shield, cold, lightning, arcane, earth and fire, and each of these can be directed straight at the enemy, applied to yourself, used as an area-of-effect spell, or even applied to your weapon.. doing this means you can use it on the enemies later, or just run around with a sparkly colourful sword 😉

One of my favourite defensive spells is a fire, earth and shield combination, applied as an AOE – this places a circle of fiery mountains around me which knock back and burning enemies.  Or friends, if they’re standing too close..

The game allows up to four-player multiplayer, in which you can play through the story or just blow your friends up.  Friendly fire is most certainly on in this game, and we ended up ignoring the story at the beginning of our session to just try and kill each other.

There is also challenge mode, which is survival mode with waves of increasingly difficult enemies.  On your own, you really don’t last long, but when playing with friends, so long as one person stays alive they can revive you with a quick spell.  I’ve not yet attempted Versus mode.. one for a little later maybe!

I think this would have been a good game without all the jokes, so the fact there are so many is a bonus.  Some of the achievements themselves are also jokes, such as the “This is Magicka!” achievement for pushing a soldier down a hole 😉

Sparta-Holes

Minecraft is now in beta, with working health and mobs in multiplayer!  Finally, we can kill creepers!

This meant a new map on our server, and new bases to build.  We quickly had a nice new starting area, but then came across a massive hole in the map which we dubbed the sparta-hole, after one we created ourselves back on our old map.  This one, however, was an unwanted hole where several chunks of the map had failed to render.  At first we blamed the newly created map, and started again.. but then others appeared on the new map too.

These holes don’t appear for everyone, so sometimes you get to see a friend walking around in the air, with no mind to the infinite hole beneath their feet..

Although weird, logging back in fixes it, so it’s not too much of a problem.  You can also use it to spot diamonds, but these forays into the depths have sometimes led to death by lava, maybe through taking too little care as you feel like you can see what you’re doing.

Aside from the Sparta-Holes, we have some rather nice bases going up.. our house has a rather nice fishing ledge and a dock, as well as underground mines.  I rather like our lounge, with the roaring fire 🙂

Pictures still don’t work in multiplayer.. despite the one on the wall here, which was only visible directly after placing it, and sadly only to me.  Portals to the Nether and associated fast-travel are also still not working in multiplayer..  I’m looking forward to them when they do arrive! 🙂

Surviving Survival

I thought WoW was meant to be addictive, but I’m finding Sol Survivor’s survival mode more so..

In singleplayer, I’m obsessively chasing the badges, with the current goal of getting the gold badge for each.. it took ages to get the Cwm map with a load of attempts coming in around 20 to 30 seconds short of the required 20 minutes.

A friend offered to help me get the badges, so there was more co-op multiplayer.

The Undoer’s “Wall of Death” was made of lasers in this game, and aside from being rather nice to look at, are quite effective.

We also tried out the versus mode; the map was split up with coloured sections to show where you could place turrets, and we each had a drop point and base.  The “Wall of Death” was more effective than my tactic of spreading out different types of tower along the path, and I lost. 🙁

We managed another three-player game during the week too.. now how’s this for a light-show? 😀