After I had to go through 8 mandatory steps before I could start the game on my PC, I finally was allowed to play my purchase. Indeed, I had to do or sit through the following. 1. Wait for 11/11/11, 2. Install from DVD, 3. Download additional content from Steam, 4. Have Steam decrypt all those files, 5. Mandatory install of Visual C binaries, 6. Mandatory install of Direct X, 7. Mandatory install of .NET environment, 8. Mandatory Hardware Check.

Alright, so Bethesda don’t give a shit about PC owners, they force them to wait until 11/11 while console owners already can play, they force them to go through a ridiculous amount of steps to discourage them from ever buying a Bethesda product again. Fine, so much is clear. Do they add to the misery with the game, or is it worth it?

First impressions. Damn ugly, minimalistic, un-inspired console interface. Seriously, when I got into the game, I was stunned by the blantness, by the immediate console feel. It was off-putting. During the game I struggled to get to grips with the UI, as there is no intuitive keyboard selection. Usually, people are used to using TAB to get to a menu from where you can do stuf like inventory etc. Not so in Skyrim. Press ESC. Force the user to use J, I and M to get to inventory, Journal and map. Granted the map looks nice, but again, the controls in the map window are counter-intuitive, clearly designed for console controllers. As is everything in the whole UI. What about trading with merchants? That must be the most boring interface every to have surfaced this planet to carry out that function. Absolutely minimalistic to please the PS3/XBOX360 owner that is not used to interfaces that need more than one click of a button. But PC owners are used to have everything under their control, like cancelling a purchase, or selecting first a lot of items, before commiting to the transaction, carefully weighing the pros and cons against gold available. Nothing like that in Skyrim. Bethesda have done nothing to make this business pleasing to the eye, so while this type of thing is mandatory to progress in most RPGs, the interface seems to stop you from doing any of that. I can’t even see my character in the inventory dialog. And the Skills  interface? What is THAT?

Okay, so I’ve established the game interface is a crude port of the console interface, again with no respect to the PC owner, a boring tool you will have to use to do the things that need to be done. But wait? Is that really true? During the first half hour I encountered no resistance whatsoever from enemies, and could pick up all kinds of handy weapons. It felt like a hack-n-slash experience not unlike Diablo, and Dungeon Siege. I truly hope the game will get better as I go, and there is some challenge to be had. I understand that console owners have to have it easy, as the controllers are not really a match to the PC gamer’s keyboard+mouse agility, but if that means the PC gamer can race through the game, I quit.

What about the game itself? Well, it looks like a medieval Fallout: New Vegas. Up to the slow-motion when you hit an enemy with the final fatal strike. Of course, there is nothing wrong with using a succesful game engine again, so I will not talk about that too much. It’s just that, having played Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fall Out 3, Fall Out: New Vegas, the similarities to the last two in the list show. With Oblivion Bethesda moved to please everyone, especially the console owner. And from the looks of it, Skyrim doubles that effort. Not sufficiently yet to have me uninstall the game, I’ll give it more than an hour, as the story seems strong enough, but already now I long for the days of Morrowind.

While one side of the world was blinded by either money or saw Carmack as the second coming, in reality RAGE sucks. A simplistic show-case of Id’s new engine which bores the hell out of everyone and can in no way match any decent shooter to date. I would have expected much more from Bethesda who in their own right actually dominate the story-telling craft, with bloody awesome titles such as Morrowind,  Fallout, Oblivion and quite possibly the upcoming Skyrim. Whatever Bethesda did with Id Software, it wasn’t teach them how to create a convincing story, nor how to immerse the player in a game, and make the player feel it can relate to the character it plays. Of course, if you look back on Carmack’s history, he is a game engine nerd, with no affinity to gameplay, and although some have called for the return of Romero, I do not think the latter has kept up with the teachings of Gameplay University. And on top of that, Romero has shown he was overrated at the time as well. I wonder if console owners have ever played a really good, deep interactive shooter with an excellent story that PC owners have come to be used to.  Playing through a couple of impossibly texture-bugged levels on the PC, it was clear that the game has the depth of a brick. Talking about bricks, it seems to crash a lot too. “Update your drivers! Create a rageconfig.cfg and place all of these tweaks in! Wait for the patch! ” is what we are told, and even those options won’t help all bugs to go away (and even make some worse!). Look, the average player does not know how to do all this, nor should ever have to do that. Install and play. That is what should happen. Anything else is just crap. At the very least the game needs to check if all requirements are there, and if not, tell the user to go buy this or that and shut down. But if you look at the GFX tuning options in the game, there isn’t much you can do. That makes RAGE a definite corrupted port of a below-average console game. Avoid at all costs.

After getting hacked once again it was time to upgrade this old installation. You won’t notice many changes from the outside, but it’s the inside that counts (at least that’s what my mom told me). One difference though is that we’ve reopened comments with the Disqus comment system, which will enable you to comment on articles using your Twitter, Facebook, etc. account instead of having to register yet another account at some blog.

This month I started to post the tools created by users of the Game Research Forum at the Tools Blog of the same community. Although any registered member of the Forum can post it, hardly anyone does. So I will do it when I have the time. Check out the latest posts: http://forum.xentax.com/blog

There’s some discussion around the data I collected, so I added some more and updated the pivotal chart. You can also find the actual scoring data concerning the 117 reviews in here. Plus some links to the coverage, maybe.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s be completely honest here; Duke Nukem Forever is not what we waited for back in 1996. In fact, it is not great at all. Having said that, it is also definitely not crap as well. In this post I compare final scores from 100 reviews that we can find online. Not that feable metacritic or shallow worldscore bias like we see so often eh? Setting aside nostalgia and looking at the game objectively, it’s a fair game. There’s enough fun to be had, giggles here and there, and some good shooting scenes. Overall we would agree that the game deserves somewhere between 65% and 70% as a score, as it matches up with that range of other fair shooters of late. Some reviewers do not appear to know what objectiveness is though. No, they take this opportunity to attract hits on their petty sites. Having first over-hyped the game, now they have the chance to play the “cool reviewer” that slates it. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I completed a game of Lords of Midnight, using my Lomwrapper. For the second time in my history, and 20 years since the first. Check here for the charts that I created using the logs from Lomwrapper after my win.

There’s a new version of LOMWrapper. Now with a Replay option. You can also save the army and lord information of all turns into TAB delimited text files for later study. I created the splash music in Goattracker.

Get it here: lomwrapper0_2.zip

For nostalgic reasons I created the first version of a Lords of Midnight wrapper for CCS64. The Commodore 64 version of the classic and utterly bold and utterly invigorated Lords of Midnight by Mike Singleton (1984) runs well on the CCS64 v3.8 emulator. With my wrapper you can keep track of what is going on. When I completed the game as a teenager, I did not have these fancy minimaps and stats. I had to keep track of what was going on in a notebook. This tool should help you get the most out of the brilliant game. To use, get a copy of the game on a D64 file (to run in CCS64). When the game runs in CCS64, start the Lords of Midnight Wrapper.Thanks also to the Icemark.

I’ve completed MultiEx Commander 4.5 now featuring EasyMod! With EasyMod you can create stand-alone mods of the game you alter. If they are supported using MexScript for importation, this will work. Efforts will continue to define stuff that plugins will need to do to support EasyMod as well. But for now, there’s a number of additional important changes to the program you might be interested in. See the readme.txt. To see what the EasyMod is about, view my first tutorial on YouTube. I will complete more in time, and perhaps the community can create some as well.