I’ve just gotten the new game Borderlands and having a couple days before the start of one of my never ending classes I decided to give it a spin. I’m still a newbie when it comes to PC gaming and so don’t have a huge amount of experience to draw on in order to compare this with other. My experience with first person shooters is limited, in fact, to Left4Dead and Team Fortress2.
Borderlands has a larger universe than either of those taking place on a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max style world. The gameplay is pretty straightforward. You get missions (almost always involving killing a bunch of mutant psychos, bandits, or local wildlife that’s looking to make you into a meal) and, if you survive them, you get rewarded. I don’t think they’re breaking any molds here, yet the game is very addicting for a few reasons:
Visuals: The game is really quite stunning to look at. It’s not overly realistic in its appearance and yet not too cartoonish either. The landscapes are fantastic…so good in fact that after one mission in which I was surveying a sun scorched desert seeing nothing moving and only the corpses of a dozen or so skags I had just slaughtered littering the landscape I was overtaken by a sense of dispair. I had, indeed, become death, destroyer of worlds.
B.F. Skinner: They totally figured out how to tickle that reward seeking part of your brain. They advertise having ‘87 bazillion guns’ that you can win/find/buy/loot and I think they’re right. You always want to see what’s next and before you know it, it’s 2 a.m. Intermittent reinforcement, my boy. That’s the name of the game.
A kick-ass soundtrack. The sounds are great in this game. From the voice work to the mood music to the theme music.
Sven’s very good post about the characteristics that make the difference between success and failure of units in battle that appear to be qualified while in garrison.
Another modder is planning to release a Left 4 Dead campaign on Halloween. Might as well wait for L4D2 to get all the bugs worked out and go on sale before buying it.
Check out this focus group report about conservative perceptions. Yes, it’s by a democratic consulting group but it’s got some very interesting insights. I only wish it looked at other (i.e. younger) age groups.
Part of the reason I was silent on the blogging front last week was because I just got a new laptop and was transferring my files and programs to the new computer. I probably did it the hard way but I’m just about finished now.
The good news is my new computer (another Toshiba Satellite) may not be top of the line but is powerful enough to do things I couldn’t. Most importantly (at this time of year, at least) is I can play Left4Dead in the versus and cooperative mode which I wasn’t able to do before.
Now, Valve is announcing they’ll be releasing Left4Dead 2 in a few weeks. While it looks pretty cool, I’ll probably wait for awhile. No need to spend the bucks when on Halloween…
Some modders are planning on releasing a new campaign for the original Left4Dead called ‘Dead Before Dawn‘ and based upon the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead. Check out the trailer:
It’s nice to see that Valve and fans will continue to support the first Left4Dead keeping the game alive (so to speak) like Team Fortress2.
Since I’ve taken the plunge back into the world of D&D, I’ve decided to start constructing a campaign for the group I game with. Figuring that I’d take advantage of this opportunity to brush up on some history, I’ve decided to use as my inspiration the 2nd Punic War and the story of Beowulf in a (hopefully) entertaining mashup. I’ll explain the campaign in more detail over the coming weeks but I wanted to share a cool resource that may have a wider applicability.
Note: This post is about D&D and so you should only consider reading it if you have a passing interest in that subject and are in a place your co-workers, spouse(s)?, and others won’t mock you for reading it. You’ve been warned.
After a 23 year hiatus, about a year ago I started playing D&D again (fate conspired to move a gamer cousin within about 15 minutes of me and that sealed the deal). The game in its current 4th edition incarnation is a long, long way from when I played it originally and I have to say the changes are all for the better. The game adds structure to the administrative parts and allows much more freedom for the fun (roleplaying) parts. Of course, it could just be that I enjoy it more now that I’m older and so have some real world experiences to add to my imagination (really, is negotiating with an ogre that different from dealing with that pinhead from headquarters who may not have much in the way of brains but could crush your career with a flick of his wrist (either by club or evaluation report)?
If there’s a fault with the new game system is that there are too many options for any player to fully explore. Gaming (at least for those of us with jobs, spouses and other interests) is an occasional pastime at best requiring calendar synching with 5 or 6 others and yet Wizards of the Coast seems intent on publishing new material so fast you barely have a chance to digest it before you see another heaping plate coming towards you.
So, I was thinking it might be interesting to change to focus of a campaign away from characters and instead, put the focus on an item and have the players interact with it over time in various guises. Perhaps an example would make things a bit clearer.
Imagine a group of characters starting out at 1st level. They’re given a quest (defeat an enemy, make a treaty, protect a caravan, etc) and given a magical item to start them off. The whole campaign will focus around this item so if the party is killed by a band of raiders, no problem. If it’s stolen by some pesky kobolds, ok. As soon as the item is out of the hands of the party the players will generate new characters to represent the new owners of the magic item. Maybe they have a reason for having the item and maybe they don’t but the central theme of the campaign remains with the item.
As characters increase in level (perhaps each change of owners would be reflected in a higher level) a new aspect of the item could be revealed (maybe uncovering enchantments would become quests in themselves). At some point it becomes clear that this isn’t a regular magical item but some sort of all artifact (with innate intelligence driving the characters to some end?). By the time the characters reach the end of the campaign the full powers of the artifact could be revealed or maybe the item is actually a bound demon/demi-god which is finally released (for good or ill) upon the earth.
Thing about the Lord of the Rings but not focusing on the trilogy but rather taking a longer view of the history of the ring and allowing players to play the various owners of the ring throughout generations.
Players would have to change characters with much more regularity than normally occurs which might be a bit dissapointing but, on the other hand, they get to play an incredible amount of races, classes and even occasionally monsters. It might be a great introductory campaign after which players would have a better idea of what kind of characters they’d like to play.
And now that you’ve made it this far, here’s a movie clip…if you get the references and think it’s funny (or suspect someone stole your character notes from when you were a kid, check out the whole movie, it’s quite good.
Last week, Creative Assembly released their demo for the new installment of the Total War franchise, Empire, which covers combat in the 18th century. Here’s the trailer:
I downloaded it and gave it a go. My poor laptop was straining to cope and it did a pretty pitiful job at it but the game was still pretty impressive. Now I have to admit that I’m a sucker for the Total War series so I’m likely to give anything they do a positive review. Still, the graphics are (as always) very nice, it sounds good and it looks like they packed this game with some nice improvements over the earlier games.
The naval warfare aspect is totally new, being an upgrade from the old system where naval combat was just done out of sight and the computer would just spit out the results. Now, you have to maneuver your forces, pick your shot type and decide if you want to board the enemy ships.
Of course, all this realism and cool graphics comes at a cost and that cost is (for me) unachievable processing speeds meaning this game will have to wait until I can justify a new computer.
Armor games has a neat little game called Warfare 1917. It lets you play as either the Germans or Brits over several battles. You gain experience points based on how well you do in each battle and can spend the points on improvements like more accurate artillery fire or better troop morale. It’ll also save your progress if you can’t finish a whole campaign in one sitting.
I got the new zombie game Left 4 Dead from a friend for Christmas (thereby assuring his place in the bunker when the actual zombie apocolypse occurs) and it’s a lot of fun. I could write a review but it’ll just be the same gushing praise that othershavealready given it. I would just add one thing: Most of the reviews poo-poo the single player version of the game. While I agree that multiplayer adds a definate ‘umph’ factor, I have a great deal of fun playing single player. Perhaps that’s just making a virtue out of necessity since some unknown glitch (perhaps a microphone issue) has made the multiplayer experience frustrating for me with frequent instances of getting signed off at the most crucial times.
What I’d really like to see, however, is a mashup between this game and Team Fortress 2. Just imagine the heavy vs. the tank…the smoker vs. the sniper…the hunter vs. the scout…and the pyro vs. the horde….
mmmmmm…..massive zombie destruction….mmmmmm
Speaking of zombies, I was able to catch the British miniseries Dead Set. Pretty good zombie apocalypse horror along the lines of Dawn of the Dead/28 Days Later. The zombies are fast…and hungry. The twist is that the series follows contestants of the reality show Big Brother. While they’re on the show, isolated from the outside world, the zombie apocalypse takes place.
If you enjoyed Dawn of the Dead, you could even consider this to be another story within that universe, which would make it similar to the concept behind World War Z. Now, they’re planning on making a film version of the book but I think that’s the wrong vehicle for it. Given that the book is really a collection of vignettes that take place all over the world, World War Z is much better suited for TV (probably cable given the necessary violence). The show could then spend one or a few episodes following people and story lines around the globe during the zombie uprising.
Ok…I’m getting waaay too into this whole zombie thing. Maybe I’ll go see Twilight…
I just played the demo of Left 4 Dead which is a first person shooter with a ‘28 Days Later’/Zombie feel to it. This is one of those games that makes me wish I had a 60 inch monitor and home theater set up but even on my puny 17 inch laptop screen it conveys a creepy feel.
The controls are easy enough even for a klutz like me (none of this ‘backspace twice, right mouse, left mouse and F1 all at the same time to move forward’ nonsense) and the game can be played in either single or multiplayer mode. Of course, multiplayer mode is where the game makes its money because cooperation is the key to success, both as the humans and the zombies (yes, you can play as zombies as well).
The game is made by Valve and so if you’ve player Team Fortress 2, you’ll be pretty familiar with the control gameplay but the atmosphere makes it a totally different game.
