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Update History
05-29-2007 Update #38 Now that Memorial Day weekend is over, my summer schedule is starting to hit its stride. I dropped out of summer school, because the tuition markups were extortionate (I'm still going in the fall, of course), and since I am salaried at 40 hours per pay period, I have a lot of free time. That's only 20 hours of work per week! I really needed a break and I'm loving it like hell. I really need to become a teacher and have summers off for the rest of my life! I've been spending more time at the piano, and with my next update, I should have more music ready. That's good news for all of you that pay attention to it. The soundtrack for Dragoon Legends is turning out fairly nicely, with a lot of simple, atmospheric piano-playing and a good positive vibe to it. I'm really going to crack down on it in the following weeks, and I hope to be finished before July. I have a lot of projects on my plate for the summer, and who knows if I'll get finished with all of them, but it's pretty encouraging to be so much in demand! GOODIES: I received a few emails about my music asking that I post some new material, so here you are: Dragoon Legends Official Soundtrack preview:
A Mysterious Place (mp3) - outdoor theme Neither track is finished, so I won't be putting them in the music section of my website yet. They are a little rough around the edges, but worth listening to. They are about 3:00 minutes in length each. I'll put up more tracks for preview as I finish them, and hopefully, I'll have the entire finished soundtrack in two months. The tracks will also be available on the pane to the right if you want to download them again in the future. As always, if you want to add these pieces to your music collection, right-click (or alternate click if you're using a one-button), choose "Save Target As . . .", and navigate to your music folder. One of the coolest feelings in the world is the thought that there are people that regularly listen to my music on their mp3 players, so I really do encourage you to add them to your collection. Let me know if you do! I've been looking for some new soundfonts and generator plugins (I prefer VST) for this new project, and if anyone reading my site has recommendations, be sure to let me know. I'd like to get my hands on some ethnic percussion samples for a potential comission on an indie game (though I think the director hired Harmonic instead), and otherwise I just want to fill out my available canvas. I'm willing to actually spend money and -- surprise -- BUY software. If any of you are composers and have a recommendation for something I should try out, please send me an email. WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO: For the last two weeks I've been trying to catch up on sleep and video games, and have been celebrating over the long Memorial Day weekend. I've played a bit of Disgaea 2 and Etrian Odyssey over the weeks, which I wrote about with my last update. I picked up Hitman: Blood Money, and I bought Megaman ZX for the many road trips I was on between Friday and Monday. I haven't played Disgaea 2 much because Kyrsten hates the music, and I have been playing a lot of Hitman because Kyrsten likes to watch and tell me why I'm a horrible assassin. I am well into Etrian Odyssey, but I haven't been in the mood for something so hardcore, have put it off until later. Since Megaman ZX is probably pretty short, I'm sure I'll migrate back to Etrian Odyssey after finishing ZX. I had entirely too much alcohol last night, and right now I feel like I am about to collapse. It's the third time that I've been drunk, and I can't say that I want to make a habit of it; hangovers are the worst feeling in the world! I find it pretty stunning that there are people out there who do this multiple times every weekend. I think that my body would give up and die after a few weeks of a lifestyle like this. The worst part of it is that it's pretty much impossible to play Megaman while drunk and in a car. When you've just bought the game hours prior, it's maddening to sit there bored with an awesome and useless game experience in your lap. I've been practicing piano here and there, and starting this week it'll be much more frequent. I'm working on a Schumann and a Debussy piece, and plan to have them ready before I start lessons again in the fall. They're way beyond anything I've ever played before (pretty embarassing that I can barely play Schumann!), and I think my instructor will be very pleased to hear them. I've thought about picking up Bartok's Mikrokosmos, but his music is so strange that I can't decide whether I absolutely must study his music or if I don't want anything to with it at all. I've played a little bit of volume 2, and while I don't think the first two books would be of much use to me, the last four in the series might do a lot to whip my piano-playing into shape. I installed a new stereo in Kyrsten's car, but because of issues with the Geo Metro having nonstandard speaker sizes (headphones), I was only able to put in the back speakers. They're improperly mounted and sound awful. I hope I can get my hands on a saws-all tonight and modify her car to accept the speakers. I've invested way more time in this project than I probably should have, and at this point it's a matter of pride to get it done correctly. In other news, the speaker cover of a Geo Metro is not supposed to be pried off with a screwdriver, so you probably shouldn't do it. =[ WHAT I HAVE BEEN PLAYING:
I have been playing a bit of Megaman ZX for the past couple of days. For the unfamiliar, Megaman ZX is a new series that's part of the ubiquitous Megaman series. If you've ever played videogames with any consistency, you have almost assuredly played a Megaman game at some point. As far as side-scrolling shoot-em-up platformers, you really can't get much better than Megaman. The key innovation in ZX is that the game world is a continuous one. Rather than being broken up into stages, ZX is modelled after recent Castlevania games or, more directly, Metroid. For various reasons that I'll explain later, it plays almost identically the cult SNES hit, Demon's Crest. This is an important change to the Megaman franchise. Starting with Megaman X, the series started to focus more heavily on exploration and on acquiring abilities to let you get to new areas. While this had a lot of potential, because Megaman was a level-based platformer at its core, the designers were pretty limited in how much exploration they could make possible. Because ZX has a continuous world, there is a great deal more area to explore, and since the continuous world model forces you to backtrack from time to time, you're more likely to find power-ups. In classic Megaman games, you'd have to repeat the stage to even have the opportunity to find powerups, and there was very little incentive to do this. This game compares more to Metroid and not Castlevania for a very important reasons: for better or for worse, the game is much less of an RPG. While there is a continuous world, the number of powerups that you collect is fairly low compared to the arsenal of medieval weaponry in Castlevania, and you do not gain experience levels or anything like that. You do collect money crystals, which you can use to increase the "Skill points" of each form and use your power attacks a larger number of times, but that doesn't affect your overall power the way that experience levels in Castlevania do. While this makes the game seem smaller and have less depth, it also greatly tightens gameplay design. If you cannot beat a boss in Castlevania, you level up or buy a new weapon. If you cannot beat a boss in Metroid or Megaman ZX, your only option is to either get better at the game or explore for a health powerup. Whether you prefer more or fewer RPG elements in your Metroidvania is up to you, but ZX is definitely in the "fewer" category. Also changed in ZX is the way that different Megaman powers are handled. In every other Megaman game, the only real difference between different powers is that you would shoot a different type of projectile. There was rarely any reason to use these abilities expect during boss fights, because bosses had elemental weaknesses. In ZX, you character actually changes form entirely, and controls much differently. Certain forms will change your navigational abilities by making you faster, letting you jump higher, or giving you the ability to glide. Every form has a completely different type of attack; in one form you will have the classic X-buster, and in another form you will have dual laser swords, and in another form you will rapidly throw hundreds of daggers at the enemy. Since your attacks do not have an elemental affinity like in RPGs, the focus is on how differently each form feels, rather than which attack a boss is weak against. The way that form system plays out is exactly like Demon's Crest on SNES, except with robots. The form system plays into the gameplay balance. Most Megaman games have a backwards difficulty curve. In them, it is very difficult to beat a boss without the special weapon to which he is vulnerable, and the levels are much harder to get through before you have collected health and navigational power-ups. Since new forms will actually unlock entirely new areas of game, ZX has a very slightly more linear progression, and as a result is much more balanced. It certainly isn't on-rails, but it's greatly more structured. Furthermore, since bosses are not weak to a specific form like they were in old Megaman games, the boss fights are a test of your ability and not your ability to run a FameFAQs query. In prior titles, you would win a boss fight if you had the power he was weak against, and you would lose if you did not. As you got closer to the end, you would almost assuredly have the requisite power for any boss you would face, and would destroy them effortlessly. Even the final bosses would be beaten this way, which is pretty disappointing if you think about it.
Speaking of the bosses, they are much more creative in this title than in the many prequels that have preceded it. In prior games, every boss was exactly the same -- a robot much like yourself, that shot a different type of projectile that you were trying to steal. ZX has many more sub-bosses than other titles, ranging from large attack aircraft to giant robot snakes. One of the coolest things about platformers are the larger-than-life bosses that are several screens large, and the Megaman series has finally caught onto this with ZX. Though there are occassional robot lords that are like classic Megaman bosses (these are the ones from which you steal different robot forms from), they tend to have more sophisticated attack patterns than previous ones and are much more fun to fight. They might seem better for no reason other than that there is more variety, but that isn't exactly saying anything negative. I've made it sound like this is much different from other Megaman titles -- it absolutely isn't. It controls, looks, and feels like every other Megaman game you have played. Except to jump over pits, charge up your X-cannon, find sub-tanks, and collect the same little health pellets you have been collection for 20 years (20 years!). Specifically, it plays like the Megaman X series on SNES. The character is extremely agile, and moves very quickly. Every Megaman X game has played very well specifically because of how agile your character is, and this game follows suit. The graphics aren't technologically advanced, but they are colorful and well-animated. This is one of the better-looking 2D Megaman games. One thing that I appreciate is that some areas don't use very many tiles, but rather have the entire board drawn as a single continuous piece of art. So while it looks like an SNES game at first glace, once you get into it, you realize that there's a lot of detail and variety in the environments.
Megaman ZX is an excellent game, but it has some serious problems. The game has a completely fucking useless map system, and you're actually more likely to get lost if you use it than if you pretend it does not exist at all (I'm not kidding). This can cause you to get hopelessly lost for long periods of time. I couldn't find a screenshot of it, but basically, the game splits the world into zones (of differing sizes), and the map connects them with an alphanumeric label by 45 degree angles. There's really no consistency as to which zones lead to which other zones, because sometimes I will skip zones and move to a zone several spaces away. Making it worse is that the world is not completely flat; while most doors are entered sideways, you enter some doors by pressing up in front of them. This makes it even more confusing to try and draw a map in your head -- not to mention that these doors often blend into the background and are easy to miss. Also, while I could care less and do not really consider the following a flaw (like many did with Final Fantasy III DS), the bottom screen is rarely used for anything at all. I have read that one of the robot forms can utilize a custom flight path, drawn by the stylus, for the projectiles it fires, but that's about it. The bottom screen either shows M.E.G.A. SYSTEM (see above), or some interpretation of what you already are looking at on the top screen. I'm not even kidding. One form shows the hit points of the enemy you are fighting, which is useless (1)because the form with this ability is the sword-wielding form that kills everything in one hit and (2)because bosses have life meters on-screen, anyway. It would have been nice to have a map system that wasn't completely useless, and to be able to see the map on the bottom screen. Many games do this. While it's not exactly innovative, it's probably the single best use of the second screen for nearly every genre of game; this is doubly true when it is a large, open adventure game. Capcom has said that they will do this with the sequel, which is good news! Also, the game is pretty chatty, and if you've ever played a recent Megaman X game, you know that this is a bad thing. The story in ZX is cheesy, badly written, and poorly told, and it's made worse because some scenes have dozens of text boxes to click through. This hardly impacts the quality of the overall product and is what you expect from the genre, but it's worth saying. The Megaman franchise is an interesting one, because it's been running for so long, and has so many different series of games in it. It started with Mega Man on NES, and there have also been Megaman X, Megaman Legends, Megaman Soccer, Megaman Battle Network, Megaman X Command Mission, and various other spinoffs. They range the gamut from platformers to racers and sports games, Zelda clones and a pure RPGs. But every series in the Megaman franchise shares one thing in common: The first game is not as good as the ones immediately following it. It's almost like the first game in a Megaman series is a proof-of-concept demo, and the second game is the first real game. This is true of Mega Man, Megaman X, Megaman Battle Network, and doubly true of Megaman Legends; Megaman Legends 1 was garbage, and Megaman Legends 2 was very widely critcally acclaimed. Since Megaman ZX is so good, I am excited for what Megaman ZX 2 will play like. Hopefully, it will have a map system like Castlevania's.
I give Megaman ZX my enthusiastic recommendation. It has replaced Etrian Odyssey as my portable game of choice. It is an excellent platformer in classic Megaman fashion, but with a number of key gameplay innovations that take everything to the next level. This is possibly the best Megaman game yet, and despite its very conspicuous flaws, you can't get much better for portable platforming action. Even better, it has much better longevity than most Megaman titles; I'm over six hours in, and I'm not certain I'm halfway through the game yet! With multiple difficulty levels ("Hard" will kick your ass the way that Ninja Gaiden and Devil may Cry kick your ass), a variety of forms that significantly change your gameplay style, and a lot of real estate to explore, you'll get a good time vs. investment ratio. And, since it's published by Capcom, who overprints everything, it's a few months old, and it's for DS, it isn't very expensive. I paid only $20 for it, and I suspect that you'd find it at a game shop for even less. HYPEWAGON: The excellent Cheap Ass Gamer podcast used to have a weekly feature called "hypewagon," which is exactly what it sounds like. Because they have abandoned the tradition and because it's an excellent idea, I will use their model. Basically, I choose a game I am excited for, and explain why. This week, I am excited about Half Life 2: Orange Box on XBox 360.
Since I am a laptop sort of guy, my computer does not even have a graphics card. It has graphics technology linked with the processor and sharing the system's primary RAM, so while my laptop can do things like music very well, I can't run computer games that require hardware transform and lighting (nearly all of them do as of about 2004). I do, however, keep up with the latest consoles. Half-Life 2 is one of those excellent games that I was never able to play, and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to try it on XBox360. On top of that, the Orange Box has a ridiculous amount of value; for the price of one video game, I get Half-Life 2, several expansion packs to the single-player game, the much-anticipated Portal, Team Fortress 2, and probably a few other things that I can't recall. Basically, it's a gigantic amount of gaming that would have cost much more than $100 were I to buy each component individually. It's like Sega Genesis Collection on PSP, except it's an awesome, brand-new game packed-in with a bunch of awesome, brand-new games -- and not 23 awful games + the hardly-compelling-anymore Phantasy Star IV. I'd buy Half-Life 2 on 360, by itself, for full price, on release date. It's just way too awesome that I get a bunch of extra things on top of it.
That's all I've got for this update. Hopefully, I'll have some new music next time. I'm definitely going to be working on it tonight, at the very least, so if you guys are really lucky, I might even sneak a new track up here before the next article! There are some awesome games coming out in the following weeks, specifically Dungeons and Dragons: Tactics, so you can look forward to a release-date impression on something or another. If you have any questions, comments, criticisms or praise, please send me an email. I don't always reply, because I am kind of an ass (no kidding), but I love reading them. Regards, |
| 05-18-2007 Update #37 I can't believe that the last time I updated my site was when I was playing Final Fantasy XII. Man. What memories. Is anyone else looking forward to importing the upgraded version as long as it has English text? Anyway, School's out and it is summer time! I have been thinking about my website a lot, lately, and I think it's time to start updating it again regularly. If you were wondering why I haven't updated in months, here's a brief list of reasons why: 1) School, school, school. I had my eighth semester of college, and it was brutal. It wasn't so much that the semester was too tough, but my living situation was. I was driving up to four hours every day, and that seriously ate up a lot of my free time. I've recently moved to the city in which I go to school (during finals week . . . blegh), and from now on I'll have more time. I now drive about 8 hours per week, which is a big step down from up to 20. 2) I've been phenomenally depressed, and thus have had no motivation to do anything. What else is new? I suffered a number of losses, broke up with my girlfriend several times, failed composition classes at college (I am not even kidding), et cetera. Also, I'd been driving way too much. I had to fill up my 14 gallon tank of gasoline every two days, if that is any indication. Do to my busy schedule, I had been sleeping an average of 4-5 hours per night, and had no desire whatsoever to do anything. To make myself happier, I spent thousands of dollars on electronics, and you know what? It worked. 3) I haven't had regular or reliable access to the internet. There are a number of factors relating to this, but now everything is sorted out. Not having access to the internet was actually pretty awesome in many ways, because I found myself wasting a lot less time, but it also meant that I couldn't update my website whenever I wanted to. 4) I briefly (for a few months) did some work on the side at Kyrsten's dad's recording studio, and was putting in up to 30 hours per week in addition to the rest of my schedule. That's all over now, and I'm not sure if it's because I'm not needed any more or if I was just incompetent (our work styles were very different and we butted heads constantly, and on top of that, I have no experience whatsoever recording folk music). I earned some cash and scored a few microphones from the deal, anyway. So, welcome back to my site. Here is what I am up to: 1) Several soundtracks. One or two commissions are paid and will probably dry up like every other prospect -- I really need to get in touch with people who are serious about making games and paying staff, rather than working with young guys with big dreams who don't have the time or commitment to finish a project. The other soundtracks are purely for my intellectual satisfaction. Lots of music on the way if everything works out! 2) I am still making a game -- the same game that I announced around Christmas. I have partnered up with WIP, who is by all respects a genius, and we have an awesome game in the works. Nobody knows how far we'll get, but since he actually has most of the game engine code laying around finished from an old project, we might get pretty far! It will be put together in a custom game engine built in the ika development environment. I think that he is using Python to program, but since I don't have a copy of the engine in my hands yet, I am not certain. I am considering hiring others for resources, but that's probably not going to happen for a few years, when I drop out of school, quit my job, and go indie. As for the style of game, it will be a Dragon Quest clone with a lot of heavy influences from adventure games like Zelda. I suspect it will turn out like Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, but with substantially more awesome core RPG qualities. Either way, it's exciting and very promising. 3) I am writing for the localization for someone else's game. He and I are not in regular contact, really, but if he is reading this I promise I haven't forgotten about you. He understands how busy I am, so maybe he doesn't mind. He's Polish, and his game is smashing as hell, but his English is regrettably not as good as a native speaker's. It's way better than my Polish, though. :) I am also working on the soundtrack for that game, and have three tracks so far. If anyone wants a preview, send me an email so that I know there is interest, and I'll publish them on my site. I'll give you guys more information on the game when it's closer to release. I will tell you that it's an RPG, that it's made in a unique engine in Macromedia Game Studio something or other, and that the art is very very competent. Also, the dialoge kicks ass. 4) I have been playing video games. No matter how busy I am, there is always time for video games. More on that later. 5) I have been secretly working on the site. I wanted to delay the new content for the new layout and everything, but whatever. That will come later! From now on, I'll be following a new format. Whenever I update, which at least until next September I promise will be more than once per month, I'll tell you guys what I've been playing and what I am looking forward to. This is a format that is inspired primarily from the podcasts that I listen to, chiefly the awesome Cheap Ass Gamer CAGcast and also the Player One Podcast. I really love both podcasts, and recommend them enthusiastically. The Cheap Ass Gamer podcast is so awesome, actually, that my girlfriend loves it -- and while she plays a fair amount of video games, she's hardly interested in industry gossip beyond release dates for the next Guitar Hero or Sims title. She also loves Romancing Saga for PS2, but I have no idea why (she played for over 50 hours and go all the way through, for those of you that were wondering). In any case, I'll be writing about video games quite a bit, because everyone knows that the internet needs yet another video game blog. Also, since I love video games, and love writing, it only makes sense that I should write about video games. PLAYING: Etrian Odyssey
- What it is - This is the game that, once and for all, got me to consistently spell "Odyssey" correctly. Etrian Odyssey is a throwback dungeon crawler for Nintendo DS and is often compared to games like Wizardry or A Bard's Tale (Apple PC edition -- not the awful 2005 remake). Don't be fooled, though -- it's not half as unforgiving or difficult as those older games. It's actually fun! - How it Plays - It plays like the old first-person 2D dungeon crawlers, but it runs in a 3D engine. It doesn't control like a later Ultima game like Ultima Underworld, but more like Eye of the Beholder or Wizardry (short aside -- when I played Eye of the Beholder as a kid, I was sick home from school, and eating a back of those greasy plain potato chips that come three bags to a box; I ate so many of that I became extremely ill, and now every time the game is mentioned I get naseous!). That means that the environments are tile-based, and everything is built in right angles. This is essential for how the game is designed, particularly the map making feature-more on that below. Interfacing with the game is much faster than you'd think with it being compared to something like Wizardry. The 3D engine runs smoothly on the Nintendo DS, and you zoom through the dungeons at something like a simulated 20 miles per hour. The menus are flashy and full of easy to read fonts, and there is a lot of information packed onto the screen. Battles go at about the pace of a Dragon Quest game set to its fastest setting, which is actually pretty fast. It's certainly not as slow as a game like Pokemon.
One of the primary features of the game is that you draw your own maps. This is actually much more awesome than it sounds, because the interface for it is excellent, and it's actually a lot of fun. The bottom screen of the Nintendo DS is used to draw maps with the stylus, and the map is visible at all times. Because the game draws the floor tiles for you, it's not tedious at all, and actually all you are called on to do is put notes on the map. If you insist, you can also tell the game to not draw the floor tiles. My strategy is to draw in walls wherever there is an intersection, and insert notes whenever I find something -- like, Boss here, or Nectar in treasure chest (collected), or locked door with crystal emblem, or stairs down, or dead end. You get the idea. In that regard, drawing your maps is actually much more functional and useful in a game like this than it is in a game like Final Fantasy XII or Valhalla Knights or any other modern game, which draws maps for you, but since you can't put information on them, they aren't actually that useful. The battle system is identical to Dragon Quest, or for a more popular comparison, a faster and strategically more complex version of Pokemon's battle system. For the two of you that don't know, Pokemon is actually a Dragon Quest clone. If anyone reading this knows me personally, they probably know that Dragon Quest is my favorite series of games, so you know how I feel about how this game plays. If you haven't played Pokemon or Dragon Quest, the battle system is pretty simple. You select attack options for all of your characters each round, and then all enemies and all characters attack in an order determined by their agility. Otherwise, all RPG conventions like hit points, experience levels, et cetera are in place. The character customization in Etrian Odyssey is awesome. In short, it's the same as Diablo's system, except instead of one character, you have five characters to customize. You can choose from a number of character classes, and I won't bother detailing them all because they are exactly what you expect. Two notable exceptions are that there are three different warrior classes: offensive, defensive, and balanced, and that the rogue class' abilities are focused not on giving you an advantage in combat but in giving you an advantage in the dungeon crawl. You also have a healer, a supporter, a spellcast, and there are two secret classes. I presume that these secret classes are best warrior ever and best wizard ever. Every character class is awesome, and you'll want to have two of every one of them in your group. You can't, and this makes you want to hurry and finish the game and start over with a new party. Each level up, you get one skill point to invest in a skill area for the levelling character. Each character has about 15-30 skills to put their points into. To add to the game's interest, not only is every character class useful, but so is nearly every ability -- there are at least three different obvious ideal configurations for each character class. Mercifully, the game lets you respec your characters at higher levels. Abilities range from the mundane but necessary (such as extra attack power bonuses, weapon specializations, and stat bonuses) to the creative (the Dark Hunter has a set of three "binding" skills to lock out enemy actions, and a forth skill that does ridiculous amounts of damage to an enemy that has all three "bindings" placed on it; all four of these skills have a corny bondage sex theme and the character appearance is the whip-wielding dominatrix shown below).
- What I think - So far, I love Etrian Odyssey. I have had it for a day and a half, and have played it for several hours, which is pretty impressive considering that I bought Disgaea 2 the day before and have played Disgaea 2, which I also love, for at least 10 hours. I recommend the game!
Disgaea 2
I think this game has some silly subtitle, but I can't remember what it is. Disgaea 2 is a tactical RPG for PS2. I won't talk about it much, because it's a pretty old game, but here's why I love it: I love the zany Japaneseness of the game. Notably, it doesn't seem to celebrate zany Japaneseness, but rather parody it. It's an incredibly irreverent game and is constantly hillarious. The gameplay is much more refined than the first Disgaea, which I really hated. The boards are better designed and everything is better overall. The best change for the better is that characters get experience for any successful action -- in the first game, characters only got experience for killing enemies. This made support characters useless. In this sequel, healers get experience for successfully healing or buffing, thieves get experience for stealing (and they can now steal the enemy's statistics, which is my favorite way to level up <3), and magic knights get experience for augmenting their weapons. It changes the focus of battles from simply killing enemies and setting up kills for your weak healers, towards actually being strategic and using all of the game's wide array of abilities to your advantage. In my opinion, the first game's useless support characters were a game-breaking flaw. The art is great and a lot better than in the first game. I like the way the characters look, where in the first game I did not like the way the characters look at all. It sounds trivial, or whatever, but it's pretty important to me that I find my party members nice to look at. Aside from small improvements, it's very similar to its prequel. I very much recommend Disgaea 2. This means a lot, because I haven't liked any of the Nippon Ichi titles in the past. Disgaea 2 is just a much better-designed game overall. Splinter Cell: Double Agent
I'd be surprised if anyone who played video games hadn't heard of Splinter Cell, because it's a pretty popular series and one of the top three best-selling XBox games (right after Halo and Fable, I believe). There are very few XBoxes out there that haven't run a copy of the original Splinter Cell or its sequels, and for good reason: they are generally awesome games, and the first one introduced the revolutionary idea of using a video game's lighting engine as a gameplay feature. But on the rare chance that you haven't heard of it, Splinter Cell: Double Agent is a stealth espionage game simulation available for most platforms. It is the fourth game in the Splinter Cell series. I played it on XBox360. First, let me be clear: My only experience with Splinter Cell is the training mission of the original and the first few levels of the terrible PS2 port of the second title. Because I have not played its prequels, I am probably giving Double Agent too much credit, and experienced Splinter Cell fans might want to take my praise with a hint of reservation. The graphics for Double Agent are really amazing on the 360 -- most of the time. It's really inconsistent, and I think that's because the 360 version is a port of a game designed for technologically inferior current-generation consoles like the original XBox and its contemporaries. I think, actually, it's available on literally every platform -- I even saw a spinoff for the Nintendo DS at Gamestop the other day. Anyway, Double Agent uses the powerful light-sourcing resources of the XBox 360 to great extent to make for a visual powerhouse of a game. You can see the shiny sweat collecting on Sam Fisher's body (gross!), which is of a different shininess than whichever new latex sneaking suit he happens to be wearing on that particular mission (he changes outfits between most missions). This game doesn't suffer from as much of the everything-is-covered-with-slime design that many recent games do. If you keep the brightness of contrast of your televeision at the correct levels, there's an enormous depth of lighting between light areas and dark areas, and it's really striking. It's a little exagerated and unrealistic, as the game world of Splinter Cell seems to completely disregard the phenomenon of ambient light, but it looks gorgeous and makes it easier to discern which parts of the level are dark enough to hide in. However, certain levels, particularly those that take place outside and during the day, as well the horrible-looking snowy stage, look embarassing. Generally, I think the game suffers when it takes place in environments without a lot of dynamic light. This is probably because the designers relied on it to make their environments look good. Overall you will probably be impressed by this game's graphics. The game design is where Double Agent really shines. The theme of the game is that you are a secret agent that has been implanted into a terrorist cell. This makes for some really interesting situations where you have to perform terrorist acts while simultaneously ensuring that no civilians get killed in the process. There is also an amount of freedom where you can decide whether to be more or less evil, which is a common theme in many games, but works particularly well here. There's more impact to a game that responds to your acts by changing a cutscene, rather than in Hitman where it will slightly alter the canned text in a post-mission newspaper screen. Here are a few examples of the fascinating decisions early in the game; I will mark them as spoilers for those of you that really care: SPOILERS During several points of the game, you are called by the terrorists to execute various people -- in some cases, the victim is tied and beaten in a blood-soaked interrogation room with a bag over his head. At this point, the screen switches to first person, aiming down the iron sights of the handgun. The screen gets shaky and blurry, and with the victim screaming for mercy, the whole experience is extremely disturbing. Whether or not you shoot the victim is up to you; someone else will kill him if you don't, but it will seriously decrease the terrorist's trust in you. In one mission, you are ordered by the terrorists to plant a bomb on a cruise ship. Depending on your success in earlier missions, you may or may not have a disarm code for the bomb, and may or may not have to collect a disarm code for that bomb after planting it. Before placing the bomb, you have the option of staging a fire on the ship in order to make sure everyone is evacuated before the explosion. During the next mission, you are in the terrorist headquarters, and you have the option of either remotely disarming the bomb or letting it explode. Because the terrorists are all gathered and watching the even on television, you will be very publically humiliated if you disable it. If you DO decide disarm the bomb, you have the option of either making it look like mechanical failure (which will be blamed on you), or using someone else's disarm code and blaming it on the other person. I won't spoil what happens if it turns out to be someone else's fault, but needless to say, I was pretty startled. END SPOILERS In general, the game's very serious ethical decisions are one of its primary features. Unfortunately, the game suffers from being far too short, which really cripples its possibilities. I guess that's what you expect from serialized Ubisoft games, because they rarely have more than a year of development time. The core Splinter Cell game style is in place here. It compares best to Metal Gear Solid, but it has a much smaller emphasis on action and a much larger emphasis on espionage. In Splinter Cell, you have a large variety really interesting gadgets; several different types of vision goggles, a device that shoots a sound-emitting beacon far away (this is used to trick guards into thinking they hear somebody from some empty far-off location so that you can sneak by), a rifle that shoots cameras that can either remotely release gas or detonate, motion-sensing gas and incindiary and concussion mines, a camera that slides under doors to let you see inside, and many others. You get the idea. Significantly, you have only a few tools actually used to kill enemies, and if you play carefully, it's very possible to never use a gun -- I rarely killed an enemy with anything other than my knife. Also, the aiming system is simply not set up to shoot quickly, which emphasizes the stealth aspect. You can aim very carefully, but the reticule moves slowly, and you are nearly immobile while aiming. It's definitely designed to be used only for carefully aimed stealth kill shots. You can only take one or two bullets before dying, and you cannot shoot from the hip, so it is impossible to play this as an action game. As in all Splinter Cell games, lighting is a crucial aspect of gameplay. This was really revolutionary in the first game, which not only had amazing lighting, but because the gameplay revolved around it, you really noticed. In Splinter Cell, you have an indicator that basically says whether or not you are visible -- yellow means visible, green means that it is dark enough that you cannot be seen. Much of the game revolves hiding in the shadows or tricking the enemy into walking into a dark corner and subsequently being stabbed in the heart. In dark areas, enemies carry flashlights, and it's exciting to try and sneak up on an enemy from directly in front of him just outside the beam of his flashlight. It's also helpful for knowing where the enemy is looking. Patrols in Splinter Cell are pretty smart, and will call by nearby guards to investigate suspicious sounds with them, making it much more challenging to trick and subdue them. They can see and hear very well also. Furthermore, if you mess with a patrol's head too much, he'll realize what is going on and sound an alarm. This is a stark contrast to Metal Gear Solid, which the game cannot help but be compared to, where the enemies are extremely stupid and easy to trick. In Metal Gear Solid, no matter how many times you knock on a corner, the guard will always circle around and investigate the |
