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Tag Archives: gaming

DayZ Review (feat. Diablo III)

The quintessential DayZ experience: three guys in a field, about to loot through a town, with a single zombie in between them and beans.

Another exam period finished, another game thoroughly played.

For a long time, I’ve always wanted a realistic zombie apocalypse game that was more military simulation than arcade first-person shooter, and in terms of realism, DayZ — the mod for ARMA 2: Combined Operations that’s perhaps the most realistic zombie apocalypse game I’ve ever seen — delivers in spades.

It would be unfair to describe Arma 2 as anything other than a military simulation, as there’s so many aspects to the game itself — radios, ranging, realistic bullet physics, real weather, and so on. DayZ builds upon that, with a few custom weapons and, of course, zombies.

The way it begins is this: you’re dropped into a post-apocalyptic world, filled with zombies. You spawn on the beach, and what you do from that point on is entirely up to you, with the overall goal being to survive as long as you possibly can. Everything is out to get you (zombies, the environment, other players), and you start with basically nothing; I remember the days when you spawned with basic gear — a small pistol, a few bandages, ammo, and enough food and water to get you started. But a few weeks ago, the developer (Rocket) changed the spawning gear to be just a flashlight, a single bandage, and painkillers. Lest you starve or die of dehydration, your first task as a new Survivor  should be to find a few rations — perhaps a water bottle that can be refilled from fresh water sources, or a can of lovely mountain dew.

What you do from that point on is up to you.

Do you lone-wolf it and try and find some kind of weapon to defend yourself from the zombies? Do you continually roam around the cities in your never-ending search for supplies? Or do you gear up and see what the wide open world of Chernarus has to offer?

It’s this combination of military simulation, zombie apocalypse, and open sandbox that means DayZ is so compelling to play. There’s so many things to do — if you’re geared up well enough, do you start setting up camp (provided you can find a tent)? Or do you start looking for a better mode of transportation? And if you run into another player, what then? Shoot on sight, or let them live? There’s so many questions that are asked of you during your time playing DayZ, and you’ll have to make all the choices. Will you explore the big bad world beyond the two or three main coastal towns?

Some choices are easier to answer than others: if you’re temperature falls below a certain amount, you better find yourself a heatpack, or stay indoors until you warm up. If you catch a cold, you better hope you can find antibiotics in a hospital, lest you attract zombies with your coughing and spluttering, along with the gradual decrease in your blood level to half what it normally is. If you’re thirsty, you should drink, and so on, and so forth.

Some of your actions even have consequences: if you’re hungry, you should eat. Consuming an easily-found can of beans only replinishes around 200 blood, but if you happen to come across an animal that can be killed, gutted, and the raw meat cooked, you’ll find that replenishes much more blood (800), but requires many more tools. You’ll need to find an animal, for one, then you’ll need a hunting knife to gut it, a hatchet to cut wood for the fire you need to cook the raw meat, matches to make a fireplace, at which point you can finally cook the meat you found on the cow’s dead body. Enjoying your steak raw, sadly, is not an option when you need the blood.

There’s so many ways to accomplish the same thing in DayZ. You can, for example, light a fire to warm up, instead of going indoors or finding a heatpack. There are many ways to replenish your blood, too: you can eat (beans or cooked meat), or you can get a blood transfusion, with the latter option requiring another player and a blood pack — an item only found in one of the four hospitals in Chernarus.

You'll do a bit of running in DayZ. Did I say a bit? I meant a lot.

It wouldn’t be a military sim without weapons, and DayZ is the perfect blend, weapons-wise, between realistic and military. Common weapons you can find include crossbows, double-barrelled shotguns, winchesters, Lee Enfield rifles, and a whole assortment of sidearms, from the humble Makarov (the previous starting sidearm), to the trusty M1911, revolver, M9, and many more. It isn’t until you start looking for higher-tier weapons that the real fun begins: you can find scoped hunting rifles like the CZ500, and then you get into the true military weapons: M16 and M4 variants, AK and variants, light machine guns like the M249, silenced sub-machine guns, and even massively overpowered sniper rifles like the M24, DMR, and 50-cal M107. All guns make a distinctive sound when fired, so you can tell whether a player is firing an M1911, or whether you should be running for your life any second now because he’s got the gun with the biggest range in the game.

In true DayZ fashion, the zombies are affected by pretty much everything. If you run, you’ll attract zombies. If you crouch-run, you’ll attract zombies. If you crawl, you might attract zombies. If you fire a gun that makes a sound, you can expect all the zombies within a 50-meter radius to hear it, and if you’re firing a weapon in town, you better hope that there aren’t any curious players who come to investigate. That’s kind of the beauty of DayZ: there’s always another way. If you want to kill a zombie that’s between you and an objective, you can — either use a silenced gun, or even melee using the hatchet or crowbar. Flares attract zombies. Smoke grenades attract zombies.

And the zombies in DayZ? The zombies in DayZ hurt. If you’ve got aggro, they come at you at a frantic pace, hurt when they hit you, and can cause you to start bleeding out, or even break your bones. Thankfully, you can outrun zombies if you’re standing up and running — you can lose the zombies if you break line-of-sight and they don’t see (or hear) you again, but you can usually expect your running to attract even more zombies, especially if you’re running through a town. The line-of-sight thing is pretty interesting, and makes zombies fairly easy to evade if you’re running through a town — harder to lose if you’re out in an open field, but still possible. The line-of-sight is an interesting game mechanic anyway, and means even that newer players have a chance to survive (or they’ll learn stealth, which will help them out in the long run).

Health in DayZ matters. You have a blood meter, and if you’ve been in battle and taken a hit, sometimes you’ll start shaking from the pain, making accurate gunfire impossible. Thankfully, you can take painkillers to numb the pain. If a zombie breaks your bones, or if someone opens a door on you and you break a bone (it’s still an alpha, remember), you can fix yourself up with morphine. If you start bleeding out, you can bandage yourself up.

Yes, there’s quite a lot to DayZ — and we haven’t even discussed looting, vehicles, other players, playing in a group, or even death. But the reason DayZ works so damned well — even in its current alpha state — is that it’s just fun to play.

Diablo III isn’t quite the opposite in that it’s still fun to play, but it’s just not as compelling when compared to DayZ or even its predecessor, Diablo II. Diablo II was much, much darker than its successor, and Diablo III just feels as though it’s been given an overhaul for the worse. I know they’re essentially the same game, but it doesn’t feel as foreboding. It tries to be, what with the grotesque models and overall evil themes, but it just falls short of the level set by Diablo 2, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part the graphical upgrades are more than welcomed (gaming at 800×600 isn’t my idea of fun these days), but instead of using those fancy new animations and graphics to make a better, gritter game, all Blizzard have done is put a few new colours in here and there, made gameplay simpler along the way, instead of making it darker, like a true sequel to Diablo II should be. I enjoyed Diablo II because it was exactly the kind of game I wanted to play — a dark and gritty game, filled with unknown terrors and semi-RPG elements.

Now, Diablo III feels like it just doesn’t have that special spark, and all because they’ve added a few new colours into the palette. The core gameplay hasn’t been changed all that much — Diablo III is still a dungeon crawler at heart — but it has been made to seem more attractive to newer players. The typeface is different, more inviting, which contributes a lot to the overall look and feel of the game. It’s a beautiful game, but there’s no compelling reason to play it besides the continuation of the storyline, and I’m honestly not sure if I would have played it at all if I wasn’t such a huge fan of the second Diablo game. For those that actually want a “nicer” dungeon-crawling game with a more upbeat tempo, there’s always Torchlight. Diablo was supposed to be the go-to game for dark and gritty, and the third one in the series just doesn’t deliver.

Which is a real shame.

DayZ is different in every way. Because it’s based on a military sim, it’s so much more different than your typical zombie apocalypse shooter. There’s not much actual gameplay, to be sure, but that’s half the fun: when you’re given no strict instructions and no real goal apart from just survival, you make do with what you have. At first, you’ll loot cities for all the beans you can get your hands on. You find a weapon to defend youself with. You kill any zombies that cross your path.  You make your own decisions when it comes to killing other players, or letting them live. You team up with other players with the goal of survival, and maybe you’ll abandon them to save yourself from the horde of zombies, maybe you won’t.

But that’s just where the fun begins.

Sometimes you're killing zombies, or repairing cars — other times, you're attaching scrap metal to houses.

Mass Effect 3

Now that I’ve finished my first playthrough of ME3 and grinded my way through some multiplayer, I’ve been sitting on a second playthrough for about a week now.

That is to say, I’ve started my second playthrough, but haven’t actually played any of it yet. A FemShep, Vanguard, Paragon, if you must know.

The way I’ve played all three Mass Effect games thus far is that the first play through is always using the default male Shepard, with all choices made as I would make them. Usually this falls on the Paragon side of things, with decisions made as I would make them (with perhaps a bit of divination as to what might happen in the future). Many people play Mass Effect like this, as it is, after all, a role-playing game.

The second play through is a little more relaxed in terms of choice. It’s the play through that lets me experiment with different choices, as well as allowing me to be a hard-ass Renegade where I believe it’s required. The second play trough is usually played as a female Shepard, too, just so I can experience another level of voice acting and see the difference between the two Shepards.

Then the play throughs get a little murky. I only completed the above two play throughs on Mass Effect 1, but for Mass Effect 2 I started a third play-through, a pure Renegade FemShep. Never got around to finishing that, because my interest at that point waned (not too unexpected when you’ve already completed the 30-hour storyline… twice).

Now that the background is all out of the way, I can tell you why I haven’t brought myself to continue my second play through of ME3 beyond the first priority mission.

It’s about choice.

You see, dear reader, Mass Effect is all about choice. The Mass Effect series has always been about the choices you make as a player, as male or female Commander Shepard. And that’s why I can’t bring myself to play Mass Effect 3 any more than once.

Let me explain: in the first two Mass Effect games, you have lots of choices to deal with. Some of those choices carry across to the second Mass Effect game, and some of the decisions you make in ME2 carry across to ME3, and so on. Lots of choices, like, literally, quite a few — so many that it’s reported over 100 variables are carried across from Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3. As an aside, the whole concept of continuing the same character across games is a brilliant, ingenious concept that I really think more games should adapt: rewarding players for hanging onto their save files so they can continue the story in future titles is nothing short of brilliant, and doubly so in a role-playing game centred around the story. There are small issues with this approach, one being that there isn’t a way to “confirm” your choices in later games (in case you lose your save file); what I’d love to see is some kind of prologue to each game that makes you make those decisions again, but I can see how that would potentially sour the game for many. Tough call, but I digress.

Okay, so back on track: Mass Effect forces you to make choices. Not necessarily decisions between good and evil, but more subtle decisions: sometimes the decision between being a nice guy and a ruthless hard-ass isn’t as clear as some of us would like it to be. Like whether to free the Rachni queen. Or whether to keep a mad Salarian scientist’s work on curing the Genophage. Or killing Urdnot Wrex on Virmire. And so on and so forth; as a player you’re never sure how the outcome of your decisions will turn out. It keeps you guessing throughout the series, and it’s great.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting: for the most part, you had no idea how these decisions were going to affect future games. Maybe your act of goodwill in letting the Rachni queen live will come back to bite you in the arse in a future title. Maybe Urdnot Wrex turns out to be indoctrinated, I don’t know. The thing is, in the first two titles of the Mass Effect trilogy, you pretty much can do whatever you want without there being too drastic consequences (at least, not consequences you care about, not consequences you actually know about).

Mass Effect 3 changes all of that. Suddenly, you know what the end-game is. Suddenly, your decisions will weigh heavily on you, moreso if you made the “wrong” decision somewhere along the line.

Being the third title in a trilogy must be pretty hard. Even before you rip open the packaging, you know that this is it. After this, there’s not going to be any of a series you have some kind of a vested interest in, emotionally or otherwise. You know that after this, there will be no more. It’s the final countdown. The end of days. The beginning of the end.

Which is why, as you make your choices in Mass Effect 3, you make them damn carefully. Unless you’re some kind of sadist who doesn’t care about the story at all, you’re going to try and get the “best” ending possible. You’re going to try and make peace with everyone. You try to “do what’s right”, to play the hero Shepard everyone seems to think you are. So many times during Mass Effect 3, I sat there for minutes on end, staring at that little dialog choice circle, agonising over the choice I had to make. Because short of saving right before and reloading saves (a practice somewhat frowned upon), there’s no going back. What choice you make will either be the right one, or haunt you until the very end. There’s no sense in being a ruthless, at-all-costs Renegade, because even though you might get the job done, you’re not going to make many friends along the way. And that, ladies and gents, could affect how it all plays out in the end.

Which brings us, somewhat nicely, to the section wherein I talk briefly about the ending that everyone seems to be so upset over. People have petitioned Bioware over the ending in Mass Effect 3, and rightly so, in my opinion. Gaping plot holes and non-sensical cut-scene theatricals aside, the ending is so incredibly unsatisfying it’s an embarrassment. Unsatisfying is probably too light a word; if I’ve invested over a hundred hours into a series of three games spanning a number of years, I want the ending to be to my satisfaction. I’m all for leaving the reader guessing at the end, but the ending of Mass Effect 3 just doesn’t do the rest of the trilogy justice. It’s almost as if Bioware just ran out of time and/or money to put together something as stellar as the rest of the series, and now we have… The Ending That Shall Not Be Discussed. I mean, this is the culmination of everything you’ve been working towards ever since the first Mass Effect, and for what? I wish I could say something other than “a wholly unsatisfactory ending”, but I can’t.

Yes, it could probably be argued that the entirety of Mass Effect 3 is the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy, and in some respects you’d be absolutely correct. That’s not the point though, the point is that the climax of one of the most anticipated games this year, not to mention the entire series, feels like a complete and utter let-down by Bioware. They dropped the ball on this one; not just a small fumble, a complete and utter shambles.

Phew. The good news is Bioware has apparently caved and are planning to re-work things a little. Exactly what that means is still up in their air, but at this stage I’d be prepared to DLC my way to a better ending, whatever that might entail. Bioware, are you listening? I’ll gladly pay for a better ending, one that’s worthy of flying the Alliance flag.

But you know what? Mass Effect 3 is still a fantastic, triple-A title. As a whole, Mass Effect has evolved a little throughout the series, but only to culminate in what is easily the best game of the year thus far.

It’s a passable third-person shooter with quite a decent wave-based co-op multiplayer reminiscent of Left 4 Dead’s survival, or Horde mode in Gears of War, that also features objectives every few waves. The single campaign is where it’s at for the majority of players though, and that’s where Mass Effect shines. The storyline is unparalleled, the pacing, fantastic, and besides that ending that we really shouldn’t be talking about, it has very few, faults.

I’ll admit, there were many times during Mass Effect 3 that I felt something. Reunions with past squad mates in the previous game are particularly heartfelt, as is hilarious dialogue with likeable characters. Mass Effect 3 has managed to pull off one of the hardest hitting emotional aspects of any game I’ve played, and it does it so well. There were times during the game that I sat back and thought: hey, why don’t more games do this? Or, I love how this game manages to evoke some kind of response from the player. The down time between missions isn’t as frantic as the main storyline, and there are periods where you’ll be standing around on the Citadel trying to work out where you’re going/doing next, but it’s all good. All part of the package, if you will. Mass Effect 3 is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of gaming today, whether you think the ending sucked or not.

Mass Effect 3 is the very definition of Role Playing Game, with one of the most epic plots that’s as engaging as it is compelling — triple that if you’ve played the previous games; if you get sucked in, hang on and take a deep breath — you’re in for one crazy ride.

Medal of Honor (2010)

Sometimes, I play games. Mostly when I’m supposed to be doing something else, but I play games. For the past few years I’ve somehow managed to complete a single player game during the school/Uni study break period (swotvac). I think the first time this happened I was playing Fallout 3 GotY, but that’s for another time. What follows is my review of Medal of Honor (2010), which unfortunately didn’t get completed in the study period just gone by, but only just recently. There are a few spoilers, but I figure that if you haven’t played it by now you don’t likely care that much anyway. Enjoy!

When I first started playing Medal of Honor, it wasn’t very compelling. The main appeal of this particular triple-A shooter for me wasn’t that it was an alternative to the Call of Duty juggernaut, but that it featured guns. Like a druggie looking for his next hit, I was chasing the feeling of looking down the sights (preferably ACOG, but I’ll take whatever the developers choose to throw at me) and taking down some enemy combatant at range with a well-timed headshot. As cliche as that may sound, I was in it for the gunplay — how the guns “felt” within the context of the game, in different situations, and so on — and Medal of Honour (MoH) has that in spades.

In the beginning, it feels a little like you’re a nameless, faceless grunt fighting someone else’s war — because you are. It’s a little “go here, shoot those guys, rescue this dude”, and it feels like we’ve already been here before in every other big name, A-grade FPS — because we have. The enemies pop up at predictable locations, you advance through different scenarios with your squad in a predictable manner, and it’s all very predictable, even nice, but doesn’t make for very compelling gameplay (even the gunplay is average and just doesn’t feel good).

I don’t know whether it was because I had taken some mind-alterating substances that day or whether I was just in a different state of mind, but I recently re-visited the single player campaign, and, well, everything was different. The good different, not the bad kind. Somewhere between taking out snipers in a tower and lasing targets for laser-guided missile strikes or strafing runs I started to enjoy the game. I was no longer a nameless faceless soldier fighting someone else’s war, I was Rabbit, a Tier 1 Operator part of AFO Neptune, lasing targets with SOFLAM for Predator air strikes under the cover of darkness, or taking out the bad guys at 1000 meters with the Barrett. All I know is, at some point Medal of Honor started being compelling and sucked me right in.

The pacing of the game is fantastic. The action scenes are truly hectic at times, and yet there’s always parts where you never feel overwhelmed by enemies — unless that’s exactly what the developers intended, as they do in one particular scene. Like I said, the story starts out pretty slowly with you saving some guy and then just clearing out the same old enemies in the same old locations, but soon you’re on ATVs assaulting enemy compounds at night, or planting locator beacons on enemy transports, or blasting away at enemy RPG positions from the safety of the skies in an Apache. Some sections leave you truly exhausted, but you’re a SEAL; you just get back up and ask for more.

All that stuff is truly enjoyable, don’t get me wrong. It’s exciting, the gunplay at that point is incredible (oh selective fire, how I’ve missed you), and everything is as you would expect for a shooter of this calibre (pun not intended). It isn’t until about the last third or last quarter of the game that the whole story element comes into play and you start to feel that all this might actually be real. I won’t lie; I felt real relief after playing through one particular section where the position you’re holding for extraction is quickly becoming overrun by enemies who are almost constantly firing RPGs and all manner of rounds are whizzing past you, and just when you’re about to throw in the towel (your companion tech specialist even tells the brass to hold off the support troops he called in earlier), the calvary comes and saves the day. From the desperate calls over comms to having to put down guys left right and centre while running pretty low on ammo, that feels real.

And it only gets more real from that point on.

As a game, the model animations are as good as any. When you’re huddling with three other soldiers behind a wall talking about how you’re going to smoke the enemy position for an air strike, things seem real.

When you’re falling out of a friendly chopper, things seem real.

When you have to choose between bullets and broken bones, things seem real.

When you’re falling off a cliff (broken bones heal), things seem real.

While I have huge respect for people that serve I’ve never gotten into the whole military aspect of life that Americans seem to have. All that cliche gung-ho, trigger-happy, shoot now attitude just seemed too far fetched, a little too removed from reality to actually be. After playing Medal of Honor, I’m convinced that is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s games like this that demonstrate what war is like, how people like Rabbit live, and how they die.

Hoo-ah.

Medal of Honor is easily the best military FPS I have played in a while. While I do enjoy the sheer excitement and pure action of the Call of Duty series, there’s nothing quite like a good plot to keep the story going, and Medal of Honor delivers on all fronts. The multiplayer uses a different engine to the single player, but is still quite enjoyable (although perhaps not as much as Bad Company 2). Medal of Honor keeps it real while delivering everything a military shooter enthusaist would want, which means it’s a pretty damn good game indeed.

The Enthusiast Gamer

As part of the application process for Rock Paper Shotgun (which I didn’t end up applying for), you had to write a 500-word piece on a gaming topic. What follows is what I wrote, sort of a follow-up to The On-Again, Off-Again Gamer post I wrote about two weeks ago. Enjoy!

Enthusiast gamers are a peculiar bunch. Shunned from society for owning and regularly using all the major game platforms, enthusiast gamers possess every console platform if only to play the largest variety of games possible.  Enthusiast gamers prefer PC; some say the keyboard and mouse combo feels more natural, others still channel Steve Jobs and say “it just works”.

Enthusiast gamers — not to be confused with euthanasiast gamers —  are currently an endangered species. Their highly coveted skills in all forms of video games are desired by many a casual gamer, but what separates an enthusiast gamer from the rest of their gaming brethren is the fact that they innately understand games. They understand how the graphics of any game are supposed to complement and add to the overall gameplay, and they understand how the game mechanics in good games make the game balanced for all players. Above all, enthusiast gamers enjoy games in a way that sets them apart from others who also game.

Enthusiast gamers can usually be found holed up in the corner of your nearest LAN gathering, or doing the odd job here and there; most enthusiast gamers are familiar with many technical aspects of computers, and that comes in handy when new games have to be purchased. New games don’t grow on trees, you know. Enthusiast gamers are usually aged between 17 an 28; old enough to play and really enjoy games, mature enough not to care about real world things like full time jobs or other meagre things. Indeed, the amount of time spent refining twitch reflexes in a first-person shooter or levelling their chaos blood mage in the latest massively multiplayer online role playing game means that enthusiast gamers really don’t have time for such things.

Enthusiast gamers are strongly opinionated. If prompted, they won’t hesitate to speak about games they’re currently playing, but be warned — some enthusiast gamers take such opportunities too far and launch into epic tirades on the state of the gaming industry today, occasionally slipping into “bitter old man” mode and lamenting how game development studios don’t cater to their niche; indeed, it is for this very reason that game developers see enthusiast gamers as the loyal manservant — they’ll happily buy whatever the game development studios are selling, but might post a ranty blog post about it later. However, most enthusiast gamers are kind, gentle folk, provided you don’t knife them in the back in Bad Company 2.

Enthusiast gamers don’t necessarily live and breathe games, but when they’re not playing games, they’re reading about games, and when they’re not reading about games, they’re thinking about how they would improve existing games, or even dreaming up new and exciting games. Enthusiast gamers read gaming literature from a variety of sources, and aren’t particularly swayed by any opinion — if a game receives bad reviews, enthusiast gamers usually play the game and decide for themselves rather than letting someone else tell them what any given game is like.

Gamerscore: somewhere in the vicinity of 55,000