Games, Impressions, Xbox

Splinter Cell: Conviction

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It’s rare to find a game that’s gone through as many delays, redesigns and overhauls as Splinter Cell: Conviction has and still turns out to be any good – it’s not called ‘development hell’ for nothing – so imagine my surprise to find out just how good this game is. My main complaint is that it’s not Chaos Theory, which remains one of my favourite games ever – I lost an evening to it just the other day – and while I can forgive that because very few games are that good, the fact that it doesn’t try to be is my problem.

I guess it’s the same thing that has happened to Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, both once unflinchingly realistic and now barely recognisable near-future Hollywood blockbusters of games. I’m still waiting for a ‘proper’ Splinter Cell in the vein of the Xbox games, because both Double Agent and Conviction have tried to do something new. Sam Fisher has slowly changed from a Solid Snake knock-off to his current form as an amalgam of Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer. Not the most original character, I’m slowly realising as I type this, but regardless, the series has always been a favourite of mine and now it’s barely recognisable.

But taken on its own merits, I had a brilliant time with Conviction. It was a short time, admittedly – seven hours or so by my estimation, without starting on the co-op campaign – but I stand by my conviction (sorry) that I’d prefer a great 6-7 hours to the same thing stretched out to fill 12 or more. I was satisfied by the end of it.

So it’s not bad; it’s just different. There’s no non-lethal option here beyond avoiding encounters entirely, so it’s far more of an action game, and indeed some sequences, whether a foot chase through Washington DC in broad daylight or a straight shooting sequence in Iraq, simply would not work within the framework of the original trilogy. As long as you can forgive the fact that this is not your usual Splinter Cell, but rather a new take on the same story that’s a good game in its own right, you’ll find an interesting experience. Really there’s nothing, least of all the official Bourne or 24 games, that makes you feel like such a hard bastard.

Regardless of your opinion of Splinter Cell old or new, I guarantee that you will crack a smile when you get the drop on a room of five enemies, mark four of them, and then quickly follow a headshot on the fifth with a tap of the ‘execute’ button to take down the others before they can react. It’s incredibly satisfying when it works like that, and even without the impetus to push for perfection in your playthrough that always pushed me through the previous games and the best in the genre, it’s good to finally have Fisher back.

Now let’s just have a proper new one, okay, Ubisoft?

Editorials, Games, PC games, Xbox

Game Room

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It occurred to me recently how hard it is to legally obtain old games. Whereas almost any film from any year is probably readily available on DVD within a few clicks, and the same goes for music, the way that a previous generation of games is almost discarded every few years means that the only way to play, say, an old favourite from the Amiga is either to get lucky on eBay or a car boot, or to just go the illegal route and download the ROM. For all the bad that piracy does in this industry – and it does, no matter how overblown the claims may sometimes be – it’s doing an infinitely superior job of preserving gaming history than anyone with the publishers’ blessing.

Microsoft’s new Game Room is far from exhaustive, of course, but the plan is to grow it rapidly with games that are often otherwise unavailable elsewhere. To be honest, the vast majority simply serve to remind you of how far we’ve come and that it wasn’t any better back in the day, but they’re all available for a free play and there are some classics to be (re)discovered. Personally I’m a fan of Tempest and Crystal Castles, and I think that a quid or two is a reasonable price for them in this context.

It’s certainly a cool implementation of retro gaming with modern technology, and I think that if we can get some other big names like Capcom, Sega, Midway and Konami in there – somehow I don’t think even the biggest optimist expects to see Donkey Kong – and expand the selection up to the 16-bit era, it could be a big hit. I already enjoy visiting my friends’ arcades, but let me do it with games that I actually remember playing with them – the likes of Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Golden Axe, etc – and the nostalgia factor is broadened beyond that 40-year-old creepy guy who hangs around in Gamestation. Although I can appreciate the historical value of Adventure and Asteroids, I would argue that I’m not the typical under-30 gamer.

But even so, I love how clearly Game Room is designed for fans. It’s so cool to wander into your friend’s arcade and see 80s gaming decor and a Bentley Bear sprite walking around in three dimensions, Paper Mario-style, and then to have a crack at their high scores. Everything from the way that rival high scores attack your pride with red neon to how the rewind function maintains the retro theme with a VHS rewinding effect is made to provoke a smile, and it usually does.

A good start, then, to a promising new system. I really hope that Microsoft can expand it and resist the urge to nickel and dime us too much on ultimately pointless tat like the decorations, but hey, I want to be an astronaut too. Let’s just hope that it can do the former.

Editorials, Life

Busy Times…

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Just a quick post, really, to say that I’m still around and this site isn’t dead, and with any luck I should be back to business as usual before too long. A mixture of moving house and having to get Internet access sorted, deadlines at work, and not actually playing that many games for a combination of the aforementioned reasons has conspired to keep me away, and the relative dearth of news hasn’t helped. But with a return for a series that I have an affinity for next week – I’ve already been through the demo several times, and I’m chomping at the bit to get my hands on the full thing – as well as some potentially interesting developments, I foresee plenty to talk about.

In other words, reports of my disappearance were an exaggeration. More soon.

Editorials, Games, PC games

Mac Steam is a Great Thing

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There are a lot of myths about the Mac, and a lot of them are pretty much bollocks, but if there’s one that I, as a Mac-only user, find it hard to argue with, it’s that the platform is rubbish for games. Warcraft III, Tales of Monkey Island, World of Goo, DEFCON, and a large ScummVM library is as far as my Mac’s current selection goes, and all but one of those was either long after its Windows counterpart or emulated.

It’s not something I miss, to be honest, because I consider myself predominantly a console gamer, but the announcement of the Mac version of Steam is a great thing, and the biggest shot in the arm for Mac gaming since… well, ever.

Valve has a deserved reputation for going above and beyond for fans, with seemingly endless support and free updates for its games, but what has been announced for the Mac version is a phenomenal move. Not only will the Steam Cloud allow settings and saves to be continued across different computers running different operating systems, but Steam Play means that if you own the Windows version, you own the Mac one too. Blizzard’s done this on disc for years, and Telltale allows you to download either version of Tales of Monkey Island once you’ve bought it, but I can’t remember it being done retrospectively on such a scale before.

It’s also an extremely astute business move for Valve. The Mac gaming scene has been moribund for a while now, but OS X has been gaining market share, particularly among groups like students – not many gamers there, obviously – and, with Steam, Valve will not only encourage growth but be in on the ground floor to take a huge chunk of the market as it expands. Steam is already the de facto standard for digital distribution of gaming on Windows, and that’s with competition from the likes of Direct2Drive. With Steam Play, Valve will go from a Windows-only studio to the most prolific developer on my Mac, at no cost to me and with no real competition, and that’s smart.

Steam genuinely is a gaming platform in itself now. It bridges two separate operating systems and allows complete integration between them: stop playing Half-Life 2 on your Windows PC and pick it up where you left off on your MacBook, with all your saves just there; do the same with Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike and your custom key bindings will make the transition transparently.

That sort of interoperability has been promised for years, such as between the GameCube and GBA or PS3 and PSP, and now it’s available on two rival computer platforms. Not every publisher is Valve, admittedly – I woudn’t expect to see ‘free’ other versions of Activision games, for example – but Newell’s company has shown the way. It’s down to the others to follow it.

One console future? Could this be how it happens? How long before we get a Steam box under the TV? I’m intrigued already…

DVD & Blu-ray, Editorials, Tech

The Quest for Multiregion Blu-ray

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Oh, for the good old days when I could just buy the DVD and know that it would work on my multiregion player…

The biggest thing that still hurts about the death of HD DVD has to be the fact that the market collectively eschewed a format that completely did away with the ubiquitous region codes of DVD. Thankfully it’s less of an issue on Blu-ray, but it’s still annoying that faithful UK film fans have to miss out on stuff like the Criterion Collection or are just now getting films that came out Stateside in November. I’ve got around it by combining a UK region B standalone player with my US PS3, but it was far from ideal, and coupled with some issues with my Samsung, I dove in to see what multiregion options we’ve got.

Given the more stringent licensing terms on Blu-ray, the current state of multiregion BD is a bit messy, either involving hardware mods or questionable firmware, and none are as simple as a multiregion DVD player. If you’re like me, with a large collection of films from all regions, it’s quickly apparent how spoilt you can become with that situation, not having to think about it at all when dropping a disc into the player.

I ultimately went for a modded Oppo BDP-80, which is a slightly cut-down version of the BDP-83 – generally considered one of the best Blu-ray players on the market.

The mod makes it completely region-free for DVD playback, and switching the Blu-ray region is as simple as putting it into standby, holding down the blue button on the remote, and pressing 1, 2 or 3 to flick between regions A-C. The majority of my BDs aren’t region coded and out of those that are, it’s about an 80/20 split in favour of region A, so I leave it set to A and flick it over before I go to watch a disc that’s locked to B. Again, not ideal, but it works and it works well, and it’s likely to be the best we’ll get until the budget Asian manufacturers start making multiregion players.

From what I’ve seen so far, I’m extremely impressed with its performance. It’s fast – this review of the 83 puts it on top of the PS3 in every test there, easily fitting my criteria of performing like a DVD player – and the picture is excellent, with lots of lovely options to fiddle with, and I particularly liked the ability to access the setup menu without quitting playback. I’ve left it on the defaults as far as picture tweaks go and it looks lovely, with some of my favourite demo discs – Apocalypto and Cars remain my go-tos – really shining.

Upscaling performance was something that concerned me, with the Oppo website recommending the 80 for “small or medium display screens”, but after being assured that my 42″ TV fell into that category – apparently you need to be in the 60″ and upwards bracket to qualify as a large screen these days – and testing it, my impressions are favourable. I’d put it ahead of my trusty old Pioneer DV-400V, which may now actually be retired given that its multiregion functionality has been matched. Oppo has quite a reputation for the quality of its upscaling – its first player, the OPDV971H, famously came out for $199 and proceeded to outperform a $3,500 Denon in objective tests – and this would seem to extend to efforts without the high-end hardware. I’d be interested to check out the 83 for myself, because I can only see so much that you can do with the limitations of DVD and would love to be proven wrong there.

So, then, it is possible to find a multiregion Blu-ray player, from the very good to the lower end, and the £50-odd premium on stock models is, in my opinion, worth it. I’m back to the good old days of DVD buying, getting new releases early and uncut from the States while simultaneously taking my pick from the cheap deals for UK catalogue titles that are available online. Now, if only somewhere had a version of Gladiator that wasn’t shit…

Games, Impressions, PC games, Xbox

Mass Effect 2: How You Do a Sequel

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My history with Mass Effect is fairly chequered, and although it had its bright spots, it took a fair bit of discipline on my part to force my way through it. I put together a post about it a couple of weeks back when I finally did it in preparation for the sequel.

Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, I had no such issues with. It’s a massive improvement in pretty much every area and a must-play.

Visually, it advances the series in both performance and overall quality. A few minor glitches aside, it runs relatively smoothly and still manages to throw around some impressive character models, all animated to an extremely high standard. Maybe it’s the West Wing influence now that Martin Sheen’s on board, but gone are the endless conversations between two characters who are rooted the spot, in favour of digital people who move around and emote, even walking from place to place during their chats. They act, in other words, and BioWare seems to realise that there’s more to this than good facial animation.

Mass Effect 2

Throw in an abundance of new background detail, from the often-amusing adverts and wandering civilians on the Citadel – be sure to check out the Salarian game seller, extolling the virtues of that new human game, Solitaire – to the vagrants on the Blade Runner-esque Omega, as well as wonderfully aggressive use of ambient sound that demands to be experienced in 5.1, and what was a vibrant world hamstrung by technical issues is able to fulfil its potential. The worlds look designed rather than generated now, and all look distinct – the planet with the supernova sun that forces you to fight in the shadows was a personal highlight.

It’s a lesson in streamlining when it comes to the gameplay, and although I’m sure that some, particularly in the PC community, will bemoan the ‘dumbing down’, it keeps stuff like inventory management and juggling upgrades – unwieldy in the first game, to say the least – from getting in the way. In fact, it’s almost been turned into a straightforward squad-based shooter, but it doesn’t bother me, because the important aspects like dialogue trees and exploration are largely untouched. The combat and micromanagement were obstacles and now they’re not, which makes it a net improvement. That’s not to say that I buy the kludgy explanation for why ammunition technology has regressed in the universe, though.

Ultimately, what best illustrates my feelings on Mass Effect 2 is that while I found my interest – or, rather, my patience – with the first game running out by the end of the 18 hours that it took me, I loved every minute of the 26 hours that I spent with Mass Effect 2, and will gladly pop back in for more when some substantial DLC arrives. It’s probably one of my favourite games of the generation so far and has set the bar incredibly high for any game that wants to be the best of 2010.