(Disclaimer 1: All percentages in the below analysis were made up completely on the spot for the sake of illustrating my example)

Darkstar one is a game that fills a unique niche in the space combat genre in that it, unlike all the space combat games of the last ten years, exists.

There has been a depressing lack of space games over the last decade, which is something that depresses me in particular because firstly its a genre I am very fond of, and secondly because the last ten years is almost my entire living memory. Darkstar one is a space sim, and it exists, so it gets a +2 circumstance bonus to the “get a good review” skill (obscure nerd joke). On the other hand, there’s not much else going for it.

One could be forgiven for assuming that, being a bold return to an abandoned genre, Darkstar one would bring something new to the playing field. This is not so. In fact, the sentence “Freelancer with joystick support and a narrative thats made out of ass” describes darkstar one so perfectly that i’m almost considering aborting my review at this point and not looking at it in further detail. But alas, marks compel that I do the right thing and give it a fair dissection.

Darkstar one is, at its core, a good game. The space combat controls well, even if the auto-aiming thing does make it a tad too easy. Now, this appears to be what the rest of the page is about. Its a fairly deep concept which has ended up using all of my words and more, but it is interesting enough from a game design perspective that I believe its warranted.

About the auto-aiming: I’m not saying that the GAME is too easy, there are always bigger battles and harder difficulty settings to take on – I’m simply saying that aiming in itself is meant to be the dividing line that if done perfectly can make an unwinnable battle winnable, and if screwed up can make the smallest threat a potential source of death. There has to be room for a fluke to bring success, or for more skill to bring success, or a skilled player compounded with a fluke to bring success. When auto-aim is in a game, it brings all players, skilled and unskilled, a lot closer to the “ceiling” of 100% accuracy. It will also be taken into account when balancing, leading to a high expectation of accuracy. While the players performance and the games expectations of the players might remain perfectly congruent, there is still far less room to EXCEED the expectations, which not only takes the fun out of it, but it means that the player can’t be met with a challenge that is greater than them and then accidentally succeed after a few tries, because that room to improve has been removed.

This stops just being “an interesting game design concern” and starts being “a crippling error” when you consider the case of the exceptionally skilled player. With auto-aim enabled the skilled player will probably be able to achieve 75% accuracy, and if they get stuck when playing on hard, even 100% accuracy might not save them; 100% accuracy is only a 1/3 increase after all, and for it to be a challenge for our example player, it has to be difficult at 75% accuracy.

The darkstar one team may have been trying to soften the learning curve by including aiming assistance, but in doing so, they have turned aiming into a mini-game that cannot be won, only lost. There is no “Hurrah, I am a skilled player!” when you score several consecutive hits, only a “Damn, i suck” when you MISS several consecutive hits.

I’ve sorely exceeded my word limit so let me close by saying this:

One must ensure that there is adequate room for extra skill, flukes, and flukes by people with extra skill to happen. There is satisfaction in the crunch of a successful hit when a game has made playing it difficult. There is no satisfaction in the slow ticking down of hit points where a game has made playing it easy.

Finally, if you still think that “how difficult a game is to win”, and “how difficult a game is to play” are the same thing, you have completely misunderstood every word of this analysis and should probably ask somebody to explain it to you, so that I don’t lose marks.

(Disclaimer 2: I wanted to email one of the tutors about the fact i’ve exceeded the word limit here, but theres no contact details on QUT blackboard, so looks like they’re going to have to live with it)

Yes, that’s right, it’s now September. Don’t ask me where on earth August went, I tried asking it but I was told I’d have to wait until next year. What does this mean? It means summer approaches. Yes, that’s right, summer. Not winter. The southern hemisphere rocks!

And as such, I’m finally able to don the good old flip-flops. I hate myself for calling them that, but if I say thongs, I’ll probably get owned by half of America. Did I just make a judgement call based on a stereotype? No, you’re just imagining it. Move along now.

Now, summer brings with it two things. First: heat. Second: more heat. I dunno about anyone else, but I like the heat. If it gets too much, I just turn on a fan or jump in the pool. None of this “wear more jumpers” business (it never works!)… This summer is extra special because for the first time ever I haven’t been at high school all year. So I get even more time to relax, enjoy the heat, and generally just do awesome things.

Such as walk on stinking hot roads without shoes, run across stinking hot sand at beaches, swim in the ocean, swim in a swimming pool that’s warm from nothing more than the sun’s heat, enjoy a barbeque on the deck, and most importantly, eat pie.

Welcome to Australia.

-Matt

In this particular entry i’m going to be reviewing not one but TWO games, with the same theme but very different approaches to it. Welcome to the post-apocalyptic  S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky vs Fallout 3 show-down.

Lets start with S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky.

Now, when I first played stalker, i thought it was a good game, despite the fact it made a few serious breaches of some very simple game design rules. Its atmosphere got the job done, for starters. You knew full well you were in an environment that could kill you with a thought, and that was something that you learnt foremost from experience than any other source. As I said, it broke a lot of rules. After some talking to NPC’s and getting a kit of basic equipment, I got dumped into a swamp with a shotgun and a vague sense of where i was going. This is where the fun begins, normally.

So, I take my first bold steps out towards the little dot on my minimap, taking the most direct path, through the shallow water. I hear the familiar clicking of a geiger counter, something i’d grown accustomed to during the half-life games. Apparently the water was bad.

Fair enough.

So i walk to shore, and then theres a gust of wind and i EXPLODE.

NOT fair enough.

I’d just BEEN through the intro sequence, and “anomalies” were mentioned briefly, but apparently the only way to learn to spot them was to die in them a few times. Whats more, when i brushed past them and took some damage, my health started ticking down from “bleeding”, but it doesn’t do so in a conspicuous manner. More often than not i would just start heavy-breathing and drop dead without knowing what was going on. The radiation had a very similar effect to bleeding, so the overall effect of this was that there were a lot of ways to die without being in direct danger. I found myself to have died about five times before i had even encountered my first enemy.

Now, to somebody who hasn’t played stalker, you’re probably thinking “Wow, this guy must really suck at computer games”. But you know those people, those endlessly irritating people, who probably have no lives and probably hack as well, and probably have no girlfriend, because they’re always beating you at team fortress 2? I am one of those people. The only time I play a game on something other than “Hard” is when theres a setting even more difficult than “Hard”. I can shoot the balls off an unladen swallow, so to speak, but stalker presents to me a great challenge, for all the wrong reasons.

Each weapon has a well-enforced range limit, meaning that one often finds themselves in ridiculous situations where they’ve emptied two clips into an enemy to no avail, and then take an extra few steps towards them and try again, and kill them with their first bullet.

The time that stalker really SHONE for me was when i, the player, partook in inter-faction warfare. Lets say a faction has 400 people, and then you kill one. Now its got 399. Its a simple thing, thats easy to do, but no other game really does it. Many games allow the player to play the part of an empire-destroying superman, but very few of them let the player see the fruits of their efforts. Maybe this is an experience thats entirely unique to me, because i am not speaking from any game design theory when i say this, but theres something immensely satisfying about knowing that every enemy you kill now is one less enemy that’ll be shooting at you later. An enemy is no longer a “spawn”, its a “presence”, which you can remove from the world by putting a bullet to its forehead. Admittedly the number of living members of each faction ticks up over time, but if you get them on the back foot, normally they will be kept under control by the surrounding factions.

Stalker has a really good premise, and in a lot of ways it could’ve been a great game, but its downfall is that absolutely no consideration was given to the learning curve, and the thing is absolutely ridden with bugs. Allow me to relay an amusing anecdote, at the risk of surpassing my word limit:

The short version is that you enter a factions headquarters, it takes away your weapons, so you can’t go brutus/rambo on their asses from the inside. The obvious problem with this, which seemed obvious to ME, is that when i was single-handedly invading the enemy headquarters, i’d cleared the surrounding area, and went inside to finish the job, and all of a sudden it TAKES MY WEAPONS AWAY. So now i’m in this absolutely ludicrous situation where i have more guns than limbs, and yet i’m running terrified and unarmed from the last surviving member of the bandits faction, whose identical comerades i had just slaughtered en masse.

The learning curve is nothing short of brutal, possibly due to the fact that theres insufficient visual cues on the GUI as to what is killing you at that point in time, and it has an amount of bugs which can only be described as “debilitating”.  However if those two very-big-deal issues were fixed, it would actually be a brilliant game. As it stands, I do not recommend its purchase, and I will tell you why:

Fallout 3!

Fallout 3 is the best reason NOT to buy S.T.A.L.K.E.R, because it does everything that stalker tried to do and succeeds. It is easy (at times unreasonably easy, but lets not nitpick), it is atmospheric, even if the atmosphere is completely different, and most of all it WORKS.

The biggest point of hype for fallout 3 was the dynamic endings, with “300 permutations of ending cinematic based on the path the player took throughout the game, all voiced by <famous person here> <more hype here>”. Let me open by saying this was a load of crap. My personal ending cinematic had me with a dog, for some reason. A dog! Throughout my whole game, the height of player/dog interaction that had happened was when i ran out of ammo and had to cave in some dogs skulls in with a baseball bat. At no point during my game had i walked into the sunset with a peaceful dog at my side, and yet somehow somebody managed to get footage of it to put on the ending cinematic. Also i tried to hit on every woman that came along, but i guess thats the sort of thing people don’t talk about after you’re dead.

OOPS, WAS THAT A SPOILER?

But don’t worry, you have a choice to NOT die, meaning there is still mystery in the games ending. So i guess I have, through a technicality, circumvented the lynching i so deserve. The amount of choice you have in the game, apart from the ending (RAILROAD PLOT) is exemplary. I was given a mission where I had to rescue some children from the slave-trade capital of the wastelands, paradise falls. After following an elaborate plan for a few steps, I just decided it’d be easier to walk up to the leader of the slavers, put a .44 round in his skull, and then single handedly kill every single inhabitant of  the slaver village when they came to get me. It was quite enjoyable, I tell you, and I almost ran out of ammo. But the greatest thing is that it was actually a valid option, even if the game made absolutely no suggestion of the ludicrous possibility. Of course i still had to follow the kids instructions to open their cells, but when it came down to it, slaughtering the entire town had been so much more effective than distracting the guard by navigating through a tiresome conversation tree about beer.

But i digress.

You have a lot of choice in fallout 3, there are so many places to explore, and pillage. The characters are people you can actually identify with, and subsequently connect with and hit on. Nothing is set in concrete. I played my entire first game of fallout 3 wearing the hat i had looted from the bullet-riddled corpse of the tutorial character. That speaks volumes for the worlds malleability. One disconcerting misfeature I found was that no matter how many days passed, his naked corpse was still on the floor of the tavern in which he had been killed, which made me very uncomfortable. Don’t people in the future bury their dead? Or at least move them somewhere they won’t get stepped on?

However a bit of inconsistency comes with the territory when you’re playing a game with as much unbridled freedom as fallout 3 gives you. As it stands, it is a landmark game of our time.

Accidentally set the friday comic to update NEXT friday, fixed now and is up for your viewing pleasure.
Not too much, i hope, that’d be creepy.

Portal is a game that’s carved out a place in my heart forever.

Valve started with a very original and very interesting game mechanic, they introduced said mechanic to the player through an easily-understandable step-learning process, but it was still difficult enough that you felt like you were playing a PUZZLE game. Which you were, naturally, but it was easy to forget you were playing a puzzle game when you were running through a labyrinth of eerily deserted corridors, in possession of a piece of technology many would commit genocide for, listening to the ravings of a mad cake-obsessed artificial intelligence. The entire portal experience was, for the lack of a better word, deranged, but in a similar way to how when you are surrounded by mad people who all treat each other normally, you start to question whether it is you yourself who is mad. That, my friend, is MADE of immersion.

Although I wasn’t very clear about it, that paragraph was meant to say that portals atmosphere and character development are superb. I think somewhere along the way I got sidetracked by the opportunity to gush. Whats more is that the character development, atmosphere, and game-play (revolving around a single mechanic) are the only things to talk about in this game, because its a very short single-player experience which takes place in perfect isolation.

There isn’t very much to portal, but everything thats there has been polished to the point that one might impair their eyesight by looking at it too long. If you know anybody who hasn’t played it, feel free to leave me their address in the comments section.