In Space No One Can Hear You Deathmatch.

By jon_hill987 & AJB123644

AJB123644-
I was given the opportunity to play Shattered Horizon when a friend of mine on Steam sent me a guest pass so I decided to accept and see what the game is all about. I had not really seen much on this game other than I knew it was based in space and revolved around weightlessness shooting.

The First Person Shooter has not had much innovation recently, even the single player FPS has hardly changed, with a few exceptions like Mirrors Edge (which didn’t go quite far enough as it didn’t do away with combat altogether) and Portal. Apart from a few they all stick to the same formula, sure the setting is different, but the game remains the same. Half-Life 1 and Deus Ex were the last I remember to make a huge leap forward in anything other than graphics. Multiplayer games are worse, they are all the same, some a faster, some have stylised graphics, some have vehicles and some don’t… Shattered Horizon however, dares to be different.

Happy New Year! (and a look at PC gaming in 2010)

Happy New Year Everyone!

2010 Sounds like the future doesn’t it? the sort of date that you expect to be in a Sci-Fi film rather than on your calender, particularly when you say Twenty-Ten instead of the much less futuristic sounding Two Thousand and Ten. Well we may not have the hover cars and household androids predicted in 50’s fiction but there must be some good games to look forward to this coming year, particularly as so many got delayed during 2009. So what do I think is worth looking out for? Read on and find out.

Digging In

I finally got round to getting the entrenchment micro expansion for Sins of a Solar Empire. If you thought the game was good before you will love this. No longer do you have to spread your fleet out between your planets so thinly, with the introduction of star-bases and minefields you can hold off all but the largest of attacks until your fleet has time to arrive. This has the benefit of freeing a lot of ships (and more importantly crew points) from the guard duty they used to have to be assigned to.

Star-bases can be built in any gravity well including ones like Stars and Wormholes which before could not have any structures built in. As Stars and Wormholes are important strategically as they are choke points on most maps (as they are used for travel), being able to place a powerful defence in one before the other player gives you a distinct advantage. Think of star-bases as something between a capital ship and a planet, they are upgraded like planets and can’t move, they also take a lot of killing like planets, where they differ is that the upgrades give them abilities like hangar bays and powerful weapons that would normally be found on capital ships. You can’t upgrade everything on the Star-base however and as you are limited to one per system you will need to make the decision as to which modules to install carefully.

The other immediately noticeable feature that has been added is the ability to place mines. Each race does this slightly differently but the result is the same, a gravity well that has to be carefully navigated or a large enough fleet that you don’t care if those at the front of the formation get blown up (mines do not concern me admiral), These do have to be placed around a coloniseable planet as they are produced by the hangar bays (and not from the ones on star-bases).

There are a lot of more subtle features as well, the tech tree has been divided into three, (aggression, defence and economics, though the names change depending on the race being played) and more has been added, mainly to the new defence section (though a lot of the defence tech was previously in the general military category of the standard game).

All of this together adds a lot to the game, with the AI improvements (I actually had an enemy surrender!) as well if feels like a much more complete game, the diplomacy options are still very limited but it looks like that will soon be taken care of in the aptly named Diplomacy expansion. If you are thinking of getting Sins of a Solar Empire I would definitely recommend you buy the bundle that includes entrenchment and bypass the vanilla game altogether and if you already have the vanilla game and enjoy it then I am sure you will find Entrenchment a worthwhile update.

Now, if you will excuse me I have to go and pre-order the diplomacy expansion…

Mapping: How Hard Can It Be?

Some time ago I decided to have a go at mapping. I had some experience with 3D CAD from my job and thought that the skills I had learned there would transfer quite quickly. I decided to use UT2004 as it was a game I was playing at the time (I don’t even have it installed these days) and to make things simpler for myself I decided to base my map on an existing one, that way I am learning how to use the editor rather than trying to do that while designing a completely new map. I figured if I was any good at it a new map could come later. The map was going to have to be one I knew well, and one I enjoyed playing enough that I knew my way around it really well so I picked a map from the original quake (though I normally played it in Deathmatch Classic. Thanks Valve!), DM4 by American McGee.

What Happened to the Demo?

There was a time when games really did offer you the opportunity to try before you buy, Doom gave you a full third, and by no means the worst third [1], of the game for free. When ID made the next big change to their games and released Quake they used the same model, giving away the first episode (of four this time) away for free and many other games developers of the time followed the same model. Today this practice has died out (small independent developers still keep it up, but mostly for casual games) as it wasn’t long before rather than releasing a large chunk of the game they released a single level and the demo was born.

Angels are never idle

Wow, what a shitstorm Valve have brewed up this time, and over something so stupid as virtual hats.

Fortunately it has more or less blown over now (and I missed it due to a poor internet connection making me unable to play TF2) but it just goes to show that a huge number of TF2 players are arseholes. The hats were supposed to be rare, if you want to play dressing up dolls go and play Battlefield Heroes. I’m not saying Valve were right to give out the rare hats randomly, that was a bit stupid. I would have had strictly limited numbers given out as awards, are you in the first 10,000 players to get 1 million lifetime kills as a Pyro? Have the fireman’s hat. With an achievements like this for each of them the hats would be rare and actually mean something.

To be honest that isn’t the point, the point is people who cheated the system have been punished and are now saying that the were not told it was wrong to cheat in that way. Well they were, the subscriber agreement states that you must not use any third party program to gain an unfair advantage. You might say that as the hats are purely cosmetic there is no advantage. Wrong. The people using the idler program did have an advantage, an advantage in getting hats, they had extra tickets for the lottery if you will.

Valve could have simply banned everyone using the idler as they had broken the agreement, Blizzard do that to people using a bot in Word of Warcraft. Instead they were quite nice about it, simply removing only the items that had been earned using the idler. Their next decision was possibly dubious, giving everyone who didn’t use the idler a halo hat. They did this as a bit of a joke I think, to show that they saw the funny side of the whole thing. It backfired because they didn’t anticipate how many total idiots there are who think that having a hat in TF2 is the most important thing in the world, it is these idiots who decided to play medic and refuse to heal anyone with a halo, it was these idiots who started screaming bloody murder on the official TF2 forums, it was these idiots who, by putting a virtual hat above having fun, are ruining the game for the rest of us.

Be patient, you may get the hat you want, you may not, but there are a lot more important things in life than a virtual hat. If you still find you can’t have fun in TF2 without the hat then I suggest you go outside and get some fresh air and possibly visit your doctor.

Tomb Raider: Underworld

I bought this game shortly after it came out, I think it was the promo screen shots involving the Kraken that made me get it [1] the underwater temple looked amazing and I refused to be put off by my last experience (not a good experience) with Tomb Raider which was Chronicles on PC [2]. So, if I bought it nearly a year ago, why am I writing about it now? Well, as you may remember, last year Q4 was a bit packed with games, so even though I bought it back then I didn’t play it immediately (I was somewhat distracted by Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead). Before I got round to Starting on Underworld I had also bought the Eidos collectors pack on Steam which included the two prior Tomb Raider games, Legend and Anniversary. Earlier this year I played Tomb Raider: Legend (Comparisons to Underworld will be made later) but didn’t jump straight to the next one (you can have too much of a good thing). When I finally felt like playing another Tomb Raider game I decided to go with Underworld as the plot caries on where Legend left off (it even has a “Previously On” video to catch you up if you need it), as it turns out there are some also some references to events I believe are in Anniversary, so with hindsight I probably should have started that one first…

I have to kept spoilers very minimal (and are plot rather than puzzle spoilers) but I don’t want people complaining that I ruined the game. If you are bothered stop reading now

Have you Achieved Anything?

Trophies, Achievements, Gamerscore, call them what you will but should people really care about them? Is games development even being hampered by the inclusion of such features?
I believe it is, achievements (as they will be referred to for the rest of this article) are just an easy way for the developer to make the game seem a bit longer as after you have completed it there is still seemingly more left to do to get “100%”. “It took me weeks to complete that game” you say? No, it took 4 hours to complete, it took you repeating those 4 hours over and over again for a few weeks to get the trophies.

Look out Symantec, Microsoft are coming. (Updated)

I have been a user of AVG Free Anti-virus for years now but the latest version had started to irritate me. I found it unreliable and had to re-install several times in the last few months and this is before you get to the fact that the advert telling you to upgrade to the full version is not only bigger but pops up on the desktop on start-up every so often.

On Monday night it broke again and I decided I had had enough. I had heard that Microsoft are releasing a free anti-virus package this year and the beta is already available to download (though officially limited to certain countries there are download mirrors) and all it requires is that your copy of windows passes validation.

So what is Microsoft Security Essentials like? Is it a suitable replacement for AVG? Well I don’t have the technology to test if it can keep you safe, though early reviews suggest that it comes fairly high up the AV league table, but I can say what it is like for a user.

Shinkū Hadōken!

Street Fighter IV came out on PC just over a week ago and I have been playing almost nothing else since then. As a result I have taken a break from writing about BattleForge but will return to it and finish parts 4 and 5 at some point. In the meantime these are my thoughts on the most hotly anticipated fighting game on PC in a long time [1].

First I should probably say that this is my first Street Fighter game, I’m not one of those people that grew up on it [2] so this is Street Fighter IV from the perspective of one who is not going to complain that they nerfed Chun-Li’s spinning bird kick (or some such complaint).