Liquid gold.
And this is where you begin to drool.
Rub it well.
“That, young man, is how babies are made.”
–Will Ferrell
It’s finally here! Well, twenty-ish minutes of it is, and here is what I thought.
What do you want from a superhero, action hero, or guitar hero game? You want to feel like the hero, and the team at Rocksteady Studios did an amazing job executing this. Batman is the ultimate detective, so what do they do? They give you an x-ray Metroid Prime-like vision mode, dubbed “detective mode”. Your cowl’s eyes turn white and enemy’s skeletons, guns, and heartbeats per minute are outlined for you as well as points of interest on screen (accessible vents, special grapple-points, electrical wiring, etc).
You heard him!
The Batman is in perfect physical condition, and is trained in almost every form of martial arts, so what did Rocksteady do? Well, they made a combat system that allows you to take on six goons at once without breaking a sweat. Some gamers might grumble that it’s simply button mashing, and well, it is. Or in my case, left and right clicking. To defend the development team, I will say that in order to make it look effortless, it has to be effortless. The Caped Crusader shouldn’t have to struggle to take down a tattooed thug when he’s got gloves with lead knuckles.
The Dark Knight is also a master at stealth and escape. So what do we get? We get the Silent Predator mode. Remember watching the comics as a kid, and seeing Batman swoop down and hang a goon by his feet from the ceiling? Or one second he’s being shot at, and the next he’s coming from behind and disarming the gunner while breaking his neck? Well, I never really understood how he did that, and the team did and amazing job at helping the average Joe Sixpack realize this. You can grapple to just about any ledge within reason, use your cape to swoop down on unsuspecting baddy #84, and hang from gargoyles like a bat.
No, the story isn’t based off the graphic novel, but I thought it’d be a clever heading.
I really can’t judge much on the story of the game, seeing as all we know is that The Joker is running the Asylum, but I can give you my opinion on what I think is in store. After all, this is the Internet. After watching the Joker escape into the depths of Arkham, and after punching Zsasz in the head, something happens to let us know that this will not be The Animated Series Christmas Special. You’re crawling through a vent, and through the grates you see three of Joker’s goons gun down two guards. And not just that, but you hear one of the guards beg for mercy, and tell the thugs he has kid while he tries to talk him down before he gets blasted back. The guard responds, “You’re right, I don’t have to, I just want to. Hahaha.”
This really gets me excited to see just how dark The Joker’s ploys are later on in the game, I’m always in favor of chaotic evil over silly Jack-in-the-box jokes.
Too many games come out for the PC nowadays that are shoddy ports of Xbox 360 games. This is something I was worried about from Rocksteady Studios, since they have never done a PC game before. Then when I saw the PS3 exclusivity deal, I became even less optimistic. But after playing the demo, I can say I will have no problem dishing out $50 for the game on release day. Here’s what I mean:
Just to name a few.
The PC version got delayed until September 15th, and at first I was a little disgruntled. After playing this short demo, and seeing how much they’ve worked to make this a true PC title, I’m definitely willing to wait another twenty days after the console version gets released on the 25th. I’ll just have to avoid the Internet to keep from getting anything spoiled!
Since I first started playing Duke Nukem when I was old enough to sit in a desk chair, I have been playing video games. I have managed FPS clans, I have waited overnight in parking lots for console releases, and I have lost many many hours of sleep in front of a glowing LCD display. As a matter of fact, I’m doing it right now.
A few days ago, Blizzard Entertainment confirmed that they will not be offering LAN support for StarCraft II (Wings of Liberty). If I can remember correctly, the first time I ever played StarCraft was over a LAN at a friend’s house. Before StarCraft, I had never played a game over the Internet. That’s about the same time my school work became my second priority, and cursing out some Korean in StarCraft rose to the top of the que. About the same time “construct additional Pylons” became my quote of choice whenever anything from the cold cuts in my fridge to the gas in my car was in need of a refill.
Now I’m nineteen, and from time to time can still be found sitting at someone elses house, a friend on his PC and me in the corner on a laptop; a blue Cat5 cable snaking across the ground between us. Why don’t we connect through Battle.Net? Well, because we’re ten feet away from each other, that’s why. There is absolutely no reason why we would have to open Battle.Net, sign in, host a game with a password, then have the other one of us find it in the server list, give it the password, and finally we’re playing together.
This new DRM will make LAN parties impossible. Anyone attending will have to have a working product key, and the location will need a very powerful Internet connection for parties with more than a few people. With the original game, you could install spawn copies to other people’s machines, so you could all play together whether or not someone owned the game.
DreamHack '04
That might make you think, if Blizzard allows this in StarCraft II, everyone will just use spawn copies and not buy the game! Well, the original sold over ten million copies, and I bet not only the old fans will buy the sequal, but millions of new gamers will get their hands on it as well.
Not including LAN support will probably not put a big hit on the sales, but hundred-person LAN parties dedicated to the game will seise to exist, that is for sure.
It’s completely obvious that the only reason Blizzard is doing this is to use Battle.Net as a form of DRM. To this day, I will never understand DRM in any of its ridiculous forms. DRM does NOT boost sales and does NOT prevent piracy. Ninety-nine percent of the time, if someone didn’t plan on buying a game and pirated it, playing the game is not going to do anything but change their mind into buying it. And let’s be serious, most of the games released nowadays are shit anyway that don’t deserve a penny from our pockets.
Not adding LAN support will not keep me from buying the game, I’m sure it will be great. Although, omitting this feature will keep me off multiplayer, I’ve grown up playing StarCraft with my friends in the same room, and it would just feel weird to do it any other way.
The petition (currently 42,000 zealots strong).
As far as PC gaming goes, Valve has one of the most dedicated, and the most talented followings. Perhaps not as many fans as Blizzard in terms of quantity, but Blizzard is more like a chicken coop. Thousands of dumb birds stuffed in cage after cage, row after row, walking in their own shit, plopping out fifteen dollars a month. Valve fans are more like Kobe cattle. Massaged with sake, fed beer daily, and let down in the most humane and painless methods possible.
Valve gives us SDKs and free updates. Valve gives us ridiculously cheap prices. Valve, until now, has given us every reason to trust them with our money. I spent thirty dollars on the Orange Box, and got FIVE games. One of which, after a few months short of two years, is still receiving updates. I pre-ordered Left 4 Dead, and paid forty-five dollars for it. The game, when I got it, shipped with four campaigns, each roughly an hour long. And two of the campaigns could also be played in a versus mode. Really, there wasn’t much too all of it, and I quickly had every warehouse and hallway memorised down to which witty messages were sprayed onto the different safe-rooms’ walls. Then, in April, the rest of the campaigns were added to the versus map choices, and we were given survival mode. For free!
Now, I could care less about survival mode, and the extra versus levels have been playable almost instantly after release on “modded” servers, but it was nice that everyone can play without renaming map files. Now, why this took nearly five months, I do not know. I’m guessing it was so they could release a GOTY edition. As IGN put it:
“This Game of the Year Edition is basically aimed at those who haven’t bought the game yet, and it lets Valve plaster the box with the many accolades that the game earned.”
– IGN
Everyone knows that EA is into releasing the same games year after year. Madden ‘09, ‘08, ‘07, ‘06… NBA Live ‘10, ‘09′ ‘08 ‘07 ‘06… The Sims’ three games, and their some-twenty expansions. They even had the balls to buy the rights to being the only company permitted to sell a game with the “NFL” label on it; want to play with your favorite professional football team? Well, then you’re playing whatever EA decides to give you, and nothing more.
We can’t know for certain whether EA is holding a gun to Valve’s head or not, but we can look at Valve’s track record before and after their partnership with EA, and do what gamers do: speculate and wait. Some things to think about:
When I first saw the Left 4 Dead 2 trailer, I honestly thought it was a sick joke of some kind, and after checking my calendar, I thought it must be the first of April. It just didn’t “feel” like a piece of Valve software. All the engine upgrades they had made to the dynamic lighting system and cinematic effects weren’t present. The characters weren’t at all likable; unlike the first time I saw a Left 4 Dead, when I could instantly tell these characters had a lot of heart and work put into them.
Thirty thousand people not paying for a game, versus the three million that do, isn’t a lot of money, relatively speaking. From a money standpoint, Valve has no reason to listen to a word the group says. Or do they?
The people that are a part of this group aren’t the normal consumer with a 360 controller up their butt, they are the real reason Valve is so successful. Why? Because they are the community, they are the ones that build new maps so you don’t have to, they are the ones that submit bug reports, they are the ones that are on the forums solving technical problems so you don’t have to. The fact that they do all these things, free of charge, and still pay you, Valve, is saving you more money than you realize. They are essentially thirty thousand unpaid employees. They are the reason why Valve can sell twenty-one PC games for the price of two console games.
“Some in the community are concerned that the announcement of L4D2 implied a change in our plans for L4D1. We aren’t changing our plans for L4D1.”
– Gabe Newell
This is leading us to believe that L4D2 isn’t a sequel at all, it is an expansion. EA, what? Then that leads me to ask another question, why give it the label “2″? Why not “Left 4 Dead: Not Dark OR Scary Anymore!”, or maybe “Left 4 Dead: Valve’s Sprung a Leak”. Comparing to zombie movies, L4D was Dawn of the Dead, and L4D2 is Shaun of the Dead. Not to knock Shaun of the dead, it’s an awesome movie, but it provided us with laughs, not frights. Now, what if Shaun of the Dead was actually titled Dawn of the Dead 2. That wouldn’t really make sense, would it?
“Oh, how the turntables…”
– Michael Scott of Dunder Mifflin
It would be unfair to come to any conclusions when the game’s release is five months away, that’s why I wouldn’t classify this a rant, just merely an observation. With Valve being one of the last community-oriented game developers, it would be a shame to see them turn into just another company that shits out a new game every year, instead of working long hard at what they do, like we’ve seen in the past. I know that we, as Valve fans, like to bitch about the time it takes to release sequels (*cough* Episode 3 *cough*), but in the end we always forgive them. This is a new case, and quite the opposite situation. Valve is releasing a game extremely soon in relativity, and we’re afraid it will be a heavy flow of diarrhea dump into our ear, and that we haven’t gotten our full fifty dollars from our original purchase.
To be continued…
The blog’s back up! No, I’m not going to bring all of my old posts back, they sucked. Here is a brief outline of what this site will be used for:
More to come…
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