Go to hell

I completed Doom 3 today... or, well, more like skipped a third of the game to get to the end and experience the (hardly surprisingly) crappy ending. I was excited when I started out playing Doom 3 since the graphics are, as you most likely know, jaw dropping gorgeous. All in all Doom 3 is one hell (pun intended) of a technological achievement, but... and I stress the BUT... that is all it is. With its boring game architecture, poor AI and over-use of spawning enemies Doom 3 is one of the most boring games I've played in years.

There are high points as well of course. With the eye candy you also get some effects that manage to scare the crap out of most players, and if you're one of those people who like horror movies I guess this is right down your alley. I just don't happen to be one of those people. I prefer open outdoor spaces over tight indoor areas and realism over fantasy.

So don't play games like Doom 3 then, I guess you're saying. Sure, it wasn't like I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I started playing Doom 3 anyway. I very well knew what kind of a game it was. I just felt it was my duty, as a gamer, to take it for a spin. The original Doom is a major classic after all.

Doom 3 not being my cup of tea is beside the point though. There was a time when I would have been rather satisfied by the gameplay Doom 3 provides, but those days are gone and never coming back. Doom 3 is meant as a remake of the original Doom from 1993 and although it's hardly the same game as the original classic it's light years behind some of the other titles out there these days. As I see it id Software saw a remake as an easy excuse to make an outdated and poor game.

They could have made a fresh game with new ideas, that still would have bared resemblance to its predecessor, but instead they chose to take the easy road and focus on graphics and mostly forgetting the rest. Well, I guess that's typical for id Software these days (have been for years really).

I think this would be a good point to make one seem cultivated and smart and mention an article in the excellent magazine, The Escapist, titled A Word Is Worth A Thousand Pictures:

Far Cry didn't have anything to say.

Exactly how I feel about Doom 3...

Call of Duty mini-review

After a long hiatus I’m back and, once again, criticizing games it seems. Right now this blog seems to be nothing more than a space where I can comment games. I’ve become somewhat active on a Swedish community and I’m running a diary there, so that doesn’t leave much room for this blog. At the same time I don’t want to stop writing here, so most likely this blog will cover more or less only games from now on, because I don’t cover that at all in my Swedish net-diary. If you want more personal info about what’s going on in my life I suggest you either learn Swedish ;) or just stay in touch through mail or chat (or both).

But, enough about that and onwards to the topic and reason for this post. I recently finished Call of Duty (yes, the original, almost three-year-old, game) and feel that I should write down my thoughts on the game, the FPS genre and my problems in enjoying games these days.

A Dreamfall mini-review is on the horizon btw. I finished the game some weeks ago and I know I should have written it already, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. It’s coming though, and it’s such an awesome game that the review will most likely be more of a full-scale review than a mini-review.

But now, finally, on to the Call of Duty mini-review promised above…

A bumpy and buggy ride

Firstly you of course have to acknowledge that Call of Duty is an almost three-year-old game by now and have to take that into consideration when reviewing the game. At the same time it’s not easy to look at Call of Duty’s graphics when you have just played through Half-Life 2 with its awesome graphics. That said the graphics in Call of Duty was by no means bad when it was released, but not top notch either, because it was based on the, even then somewhat old, Quake III engine. Rag doll physics was something I obviously missed in this game after playing Half-Life 2, but it wasn’t a norm then as it is now.

The nice score and especially the earth shattering sound effects the game throws at you, cover quite nicely for the sometimes below par graphics. My quite new Creative X-Fi sound card makes this an amazing audio experience and when I started playing the game in the first mission (surprisingly enough) and the machine guns and anti-aircraft defences started pounding out their load both near and far I was genuinely scared and felt like I had just entered a real war. So kudos for that feeling.

Unfortunately the missions aren’t as well put together as the sound effects. At times you feel like you really are in a real war when you have your NPC’s helping you out or when soldiers are mowed down by the machine gun fire or blown to pieces by the air strikes at both sides of you during an offensive strike. Some memorable moments in other words. Unfortunately not all missions are like that and somehow you get the feeling that the developers haven’t had enough time or ideas when making the missions. Some missions are just your standard Quake level where you thrust on alone, shooting everything that moves.

I was playing the 1.0 version and I know that games getting released buggy is more the norm than exception these days, but this was quite frankly horrible. Almost in every mission the scripted events, that are everywhere in the game, didn’t commence and hence you couldn’t move on. At these times it was more evident than ever that the game is great as long as you stick to the script. If you try to move away from the path set up by the developers, be prepared to suffer for it.

I played Medal of Honour: Allied Assault when it first came out in 2002 and it was revolutionary for its time. Call of Duty, which was released almost two years later, however doesn’t bring a lot of new ideas to the table, hardly any quite frankly. On the other hand there was a crapload of below par clone WWII shooters coming out after the success of Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, and of all those Call of Duty is definitely one of the best.

I’ve played around 30 first-person shooters up to this day, but unfortunately not any of the new ones, except for Half-Life 2 (okay, fairly new), because I had such an old computer for such a long time. Now, however, I’m getting back into the game, literally speaking. My list is long, but such amazing classics as System Shock 2 and Half-Life 2 managed to partly disappoint me somehow, so I’m not sure what to expect from my upcoming gaming experiences.

I’m not sure what it is that makes me feel unsatisfied with FPS games these days. An easy explanation would be that I’ve simply played so many games over the years that my quota has become full. On the other hand you would then expect the developers to bring enough new things to the table so that it would feel fresh to me and hence satisfy the need for playing great games I still feel I have. Then again it’s no secret that most games today are sequels and often sequels with just a few new simple aspects that the PR people can use to brag about. I will refrain from totally bashing the FPS genre until I’ve played more of the new titles out there, but at least so far it doesn’t look too good.

But that’s it for now people. This was probably the worst, most incoherent, review in the history of mankind, but then again it’s my blog so I can post whatever crap I want here. :D A Dreamfall review, of hopefully much higher quality, is on the horizon though so stay tuned for that.

Until next time…

Changes

I think I'm in some kind of transitional stage of my life right now and I'm not too sure where I'm headed. I'm going to start of by saying that I’ve just completed Half-Life 2 (HL2). Yes, it took me almost two months to complete, so I guess part of the problem can be read from that. I still love games a lot; my memories of playing the adventure game classics back in the day are still strong and highly cherished. I doubt I'll ever completely leave game playing, but I've been playing very seldom and irregularly ever since I came back from the army almost a year ago.

It's been clear for a while now that I won't be going to the Games Convention in Leipzig this August as I first had planned. At first it was an issue of money and finding a suitable friend to come along, but now it's more than that. I'm not sure if the interest is really there anymore. A big part of me loosing interest is because I got stuck with a small role at Adventure Gamers earlier this year and then becoming gradually more active in politics. Those two things kind of worked together. Being active in politics is taking more and more time away from other stuff and since I'm really starting to enjoy it, I can only expect the trend to continue.

HL2 was a big disappointment. At first I was drooling at the graphics and everything else the Source engine makes possible in the game. The longer I played though, the more disappointed I got by the non-existent story. At the end of the day HL2 is pretty much just a graphics and physics demo you walk through, and were it not for the short length of the game I would have gotten seriously bored with it. The ending was one of the worst ever and was more or less a big WTF?! moment for me (and most people out there it seems).

Don’t get me wrong, HL2 definitely had its moments and I’m glad I played it. I think I’m just a bit worried that I’m drifting away from games, because HL2 is after all considered to be one of the biggest games out there since… well HL1 really, and still I didn’t enjoy it very much. Size isn’t everything, I know, but I still feel that this might be the beginning of the end for my active game playing “career”. Some would say that it’s just a good thing and they may be right, games aren’t everything after all. It’s just that it has been such a big part of me for such a long time it feels weird now. Well, we’ll see. I’m going to start playing Dreamfall: The Longest Journey now and see how that feels. Definitely more story there after all, and The Longest Journey is one of my top three games ever, so I’m confident it will be more pleasant than HL2. Looking forward to playing it and then taking it from there.

Finally an upgrade

As I may or may not have mentioned earlier I have been waiting for my new PC since sometime late November last year. Back then I ordered the parts from the biggest web store in Finland, Verkkokauppa.com (which simply means Webstore.com), and although they didn't have all the parts right away I got them quite soon. Or rather my brother, who sits on most of the PC knowledge in our family, got them home to his place.

The problem was that the monitor got no signal from the graphics card. After some testing my brother concluded that the problem is in the graphics card, the mother board or the power source. The most likely problem source is of course the graphics card so we sent that back to the store. They didn't find anything wrong with it, but gave us the money back and told us to buy another card, because it could be a compatibility issue with the mother board. So we bought another card, but it didn't work either! Bleh.

After a lot of testing by my brother we sent the whole PC back to the store, so they could check it out and of course they didn't find anything wrong with it! Bloody hell! Anyway, my brother has this monitor/mouse/keyboard switch between his regular PC and his server PC, which he had forgot to remove when testing. Until a few weeks ago that is. And yes, you guessed it, the PC worked when the switch wasn't there. Amazing, I know.

He had tested the PC without the switch back when we had the other graphics card though, but apparently he had forgotten about it now. So basically I've been waiting since maybe sometime in January (can't remember exactly) for no reason. Let's just say that when he told me this it was a good thing he doesn't live close to me.

Still, he has spent a lot of time on testing that PC and being as frustrated with it as I have been myself, so I can't really be angry about it. It's just nice to finally have upgraded to a new PC. I did this on Friday and have basically spent the whole weekend installing software, copying files from the old PC and testing stuff.

I must confess that I’m quite the tech freak, so getting this new PC feels like Christmas happens twice a year, or maybe even better than that. Now being able to set up conference calls on Skype without the PC running out of memory after a while, Outlook actually working as it should and overall not having to put up with a number of problems I had with the old PC.

It indeed feels nice going from an almost six-year-old PC to a (almost ;)) new one. I’ve already tried playing Call of Duty and Half-Life 2 and it’s amazing to look at all that graphical splendour that I haven’t been able to experience before.

Happy days are here again…

And because someone is bound to ask sooner or later, I'm going to include the most essential hardware parts in a list. It's quite the machine actually. :)

• Motherboard: Abit KN8-Ultra Socket 939
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
• Graphics card: Club 3D ATI Radeon X850XT 256Mb (The original card was a Sapphire Radeon X800XL Ultimate 256MB)
• Sound card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic
• Memory: Kingston 2048MB/2GB DDR 400MHz Kit
• Harddrive: Western Digital 250GB 7200rpm SATA II

The state of the genre

If you feel you have the strength to read yet another piece on the adventure genre, head to IGN and check out the article titled Digital Adventuring. As always in these articles there are some quotes by Tim Schafer in there.

"I just don't think people's appetites are being whetted." Says Schaffer, "I think every human being relates to a good story. If they got more good stories in games then they'd start to expect it."

"People get that art is important to games and they've pursued it as a very serious thing, and they just have not done that with writing. They haven't had enough examples of what happens when you have really great writing in a game. It makes everyone think [gamers] don't like story - when they just probably have never had a good story."

A piece of art

As usual, the latest issue of The Escapist contains some great articles. This week everyone has of course been talking about the article written by game developer extraordinaire Warren Spector, but I'm gonna be a bit more unique than that and link to this nice piece titled I Left My Heart in Rubacava. If Rubacava doesn't ring a bell I'm 100% certain that you haven't played Grim Fandango, because if you would have, you would remember. Trust me, you would.

As one of the persons that has left his heart in Rubacava I can relate to what N. Evan Van Zelfden writes about Grim Fandango. It is truly a great piece of art, a distinguished gaming experience and one can simply not praise it enough.

And that's the thing about Grim Fandango. The story, fiction and writing contain the whole human experience, but the game elements themselves: art, music, sound, design, location - they encompass the whole of great art.

Sloganize your life!

Or at least your forum nickname or something of that sort.

Some nice (and dirty) picks:

Just One Mattsius - Give It To Me! - Don't mind if I do...

You'll Look a Little Lovelier Each Day with Fabulous Pink Mattsius. - Pink?! Fabulous Pink?!!

There's More Than One Way To Eat A Mattsius. - Talking dirty now, are we?

Kills All Known Mattsius - Dead. - Should I be offended or?

Vorsprung Durch Mattsius. - Eh, okaaay...

Taste the Mattsius. - Okay, back to dirty. That's better.

Mattsius. It's What's For Dinner. - Sure hope not.

It's Mattsius Time. - Heh

You Deserve A Mattsius Today. - I think so too, so call me. *does that stupid "call me" sign with his hand*


Now this Mattsius deserves some sleep...

Games might be art after all

At least if you ask the director of the upcoming Silent Hill movie, Christophe Gans. In an article at Eurogamer Gans responds to US movie critic Roger Ebert's statement last year that video games can not be considered art with the subtle words "F*** him" and figured Ebert will "realise that he is wrong on his deathbed".

And this is the guy directing the Silent Hill movie?! Let's hope he's better at directing movies than talking to the press.

He continues:

Most people who despise a new medium are simply afraid to die, so they express their arrogance and fear like this... Human beings are stupid, and we often become assholes when we get old

Now the obvious question is, how old is Gans and if he's not over 200 years old, is there any hope for the rest of us?

Another small game

Here's yet another small game that you can play around with in your spare time.

My current record is 28.691 seconds.

PC gaming revival?

If Microsoft has a say in the matter - and it very much does - then PC gaming is heading for an upswing when Windows Vista is released later this year. Everyone will have to decide for themselves how much of all the fancy words used by Microsoft's VP Peter Moore when describing the personal computers future as a gaming platform they will want to believe. It should probably all be taken with a grain of salt, but then again I want to believe that at least half of it will come through.

Anyway, Rocky Mountain News.com has published a column describing the ins and outs of the subject.

Microsoft's push for its new operating system and PC gaming in general will include an attempt to standardize some of the aspects of the industry. From game packaging to online play and installation, the hope is that PC gaming will adapt some of the better traits of its console competition.

The Vista system will also streamline the way games are presented on your computer.