Today I got my grubby mits on a copy of Stalker: Clear Sky and showing an uncharacteristic amount of self restraint, didn’t rush home to play it immediately. When I did fire it up I was initially left with mixed feelings. However, I have now played about three hours on the hardest difficulty setting and thus far quite enjoyed the experience.
Clear Sky is a prequel to Shadow of Chernobyl, set in a larger Zone around the NPP. There is a fair amount of new content and a lot of the original terrain has been rejigged which adds greatly to the excitement. You wake up as an anonymous loner who has *just* survived a massive blow out which cooked the other members of your party. The similarity to the original title ends there though, and players are immediately put to work as a member of the Clear Sky faction – a group of scientists who are studying the Zone. The game starts quickly, throwing the player into the nearby swamp and introducing them to a lot of the ’strategy’ concepts early on.
Do not get too excited about the strategy side of things – I was of the mistaken impression that it would involve a game play cross between the original Stalker and a Battlefield style with resources and areas of influence. Unfortunately it is a lot more basic than that and really just expands the completely superfluous Stalker ranking system of the original game. To those of you wondering what I am talking about.. you have made my point for me. The feature was completely superfluous and merely tracked the player’s progress through the game based on how many people they had killed. Fast forward 18 months and Clear Sky expands this concept by formalising the factions in the PDA and providing nifty bars showing faction influence, disposition to the player and ‘resources.’ Any hope of any deep strategy is wiped out here as the stats can so far simply be interpreted by: powerful faction – lots of pointless side quests, otherwise ignore. The side quests are the biggest disappointment thus far for me as they seems to be generated from the template : “Go 5 to 10 mins out of your way and kill something” which gets very old very quickly. Scripted side quests are however interesting and having met a deserting Russian Army driver who promptly tried to double cross me I am cautiously optimistic about the rest of the game. Let this be a warning to you – don’t trust people you meet hiding under a bridge. :p
Despite the use of the original locations, models and textures Clear Sky is a very different game. The story is just as engaging as the original, if not more so, as it makes full use of the fact it is a prequel to interweave some of the key characters from Shadow of Chernobyl into the plot. Who knows, maybe even Strelok will make an appearance later? The engine has been greatly upgraded and now includes a lot of beautiful weather and lighting effects coupled with a day night transition system which turn a game already dripping in atmosphere into something almost surreal in places. The atmosphere is largely thanks to the authenticity of having a development team from the Ukraine. The moody, functional architecture from a post Soviet era comes accross naturally and is sufficiently alien to many Western players to really add intrigue to this already very different world. Greatly improved textures and sounds coupled with the graphical enhancements and interesting developments to the AI really make the game stand out for me, and although it will never have the same level of graphical polish as something like Call of Duty 4, there have been moments already which have left me in awe. Sadly players who played the original will be frustrated that some of glitches still present in Clear Sky. Randomly disappearing NPCs, occasional clipping bugs, annoying side quest spawning (and timing) all remain, although many bugs have been fixed.
Bugs not-with-standing, I have only played this game for a very short duration and even by my overly critical standards the game is, so far, highly enjoyable and definitely worth buying. I will write more when I have had a chance to get deeper into the Zone.
Just wanted to briefly mention a free video editing program I am playing with at the moment. It is a free but slightly feature poor program that I guess can be thought of as Pinnacle Studio’s smaller brother. Despite this, it is a fantastic and simple application for editing all manner of video files and exporting in a variety of formats. Whilst I have only been encoding into DVD (i.e. MPEG-2) there are also options for iPods and the Sony PSP. The best thing about the program is the way it automatically breaks up video streams into segments based on scene changes. This makes editing out commercials from recordings or clean cut editing (i.e. without manually going frame by frame) child’s play.
The only downside it the processing and encoding appears to be single threaded which is a massive let down and there is no direct option to make DVD compliant data structures. Despite this, if you need to casually edit video files and have been wading through pages of useless google results looking for the right program – give VideoSpin a try.
Presentation: 8/10 – Great, everything is clearly and intuitively laid out.
Features: 6/10 – Nice range of export formats, but some are lacking. Feature poor compared to commercial version.
Power: 6/10 – Fast, but annoyingly only single threaded, Dual and Quad cores will be left underutilised.
Overal: 8/10 – Great program, shame about the limitations.
The game I briefly want to talk about was released over 15 years ago on the SNES, I played it back then and found it thoroughly enjoyable. I recently picked it back up and thought I would give it a whirl, given that my media center has a SNES emulator – and I must say I very pleasantly surprised. It is very easy to be carried away by simply drooling over improved graphics in new game releases. This can save all but the poorest modern releases, however, games like Portal on the other hand, bring us crashing back down to earth showing us that the way the game plays can (and normally is) far more important than any visual polish the game studio applies with a trowel afterwards.
I didn’t realise until I did a bit of background research for this post, but the Choplifter ‘franchise’ began way back in 1982 on the Apple II and has enjoyed a release on the gameboy as well prior to the final version on the SNES. The gameplay elements do not appear to have changed much, the game is still a sideways scrolling action shooter, but they have been perfected in Choplifter III.
So, what’s the story? Simply, you are a helicopter pilot who is tasked with rescuing a quota of downed pilots or hostages in each mission. This sounds simpler than it is, as the game throws you from Jungle to Naval encounters, culminating in a vicious city fight followed by an intense and unexpected setting for the final ‘world’. You pick up a variety of special weapons along the way and the enemies get progressively tougher as you go along. For those who find the game too easy, there is a non-’practice’ difficulty setting which is a lot less forgiving.
Below is a video of some of the early action made by someone else.
All in all, the game is a little short – taking between 3 and 4 hours depending on player ability, but it is varied enough to be a lot of fun. I get the impression that it was not one of the major releases back when it came out and as such may have been overlooked by many gamers which is a shame.
Graphics: 8/10 – Nothing special, but fairly detailed and pleasing to the eye.
Sound : 4/10 – Unimaginative, the main let down of the game.
Gameplay: 7.5/10 – Simple premise, not enough reward for rescuing extra hostages.
Overall: 8/10 A classic, casual game that is worth picking up and trying.
I was surprised to hear of a LAN gaming center in Trocadero, but a few of my friends had been extolling it’s virtues for a little while so I decided to give it a try. It is run by Gamerbase and houses 80+ extremely high end Dell systems with 24″ Monitors and looks absolutely stunning. I went there on Friday and had such a great time I went again yesterday. The only downside is it tends to be a bit quiet when they are not running tournaments so bring a group of friends down with you! Pictured below is the 18+ section where I do my gaming.
This weekend you can play Day of Defeat Source for free via Steam, it corresponds to the launch of the Palermo services across steam which greatly adds to the platform by adding unlock-able achievements for each game. So what is Day of Defeat I hear you ask? It started out as a FPS mod using the original half life engine and was set in the second world war era. What initially distinguished this game from other stand-alone games and mods of the same and similar genres at the time was how thought out it was. Rather then blindly killing the enemy, to win the round you had to capture (or destroy) strategic points as well as blindly killing the enemy. In essence, it was a slower paced Counter Strike with a lot more emphasis on teamwork and strategy.
I have not played DoD for a number of years which is surprising given the fact I have been playing it since Beta 2 and had a waypointing site dedicated to the mod. Back then it was a damn good ‘rough round the edges’ community mod with a lots of promise and bags of potential.
Beta 3.0 was released and everyone celebrated. It built on the strengths of the first betas- tweaking and balancing them as well as adding new features. For a while nothing happened, we all were content playing beta 3.0 and listening to rumours of the ever elusive beta 4.0. Then, in my opinion, it all started going wrong. The mod team struck a deal with Valve and the mod became a commercial game. Beta 4.0 was actually released as version 1.0. It was highly polished and improved, as one would expect from Valve’s backing. Unfortunately it also had a boat load of issues in particular 56k dial-up gamers (yes there still were a fair few back in 2002/2003) were hit hard with very poor gaming experiences for no tangible reason.
At this point I walked away from Day of Defeat, life was complicated at the time and I was about to start Uni so I didn’t have much time for gaming. So, today I eagerly launched DoD:Source which I had preloaded a few days earlier… and was sadly disappointed.
The game itself is largely unchanged apart from being Source-ified which is both good and bad. It was nice to know most of the maps already, despite their new and frighteningly stunning clarity, as well as the basic classes and the useful routes / camping spots etc. What irked me is that the game itself had been dumbed down somewhat. Features which, at the time, differentiated DoD from other Mods such as bleeding, slow paced objective based gameplay and side weapon differentiation were either dropped or drastically tweaked.
What I find inexcusable however is that many of the old problems still linger. Despite the servers I have played on today having between 4 and 16 players the game frequently juddered and lagged particularly during explosions. The hitbox issue, allegedly solved in Day of Defeat, also reappears with some rather odd damage and hit patterns which can be very frustrating. What is even more peculiar, the game designers have appeared to have focused on beautifying the graphical side of the game considerably, adding odd looking ‘film grain’ effects as well as a kill cam with ‘Press F5 for snapshot’ and other useless ‘features’. Some of these additions are almost pretentious in the flashy way they are implemented especially given how inconsistent the effort appears to have been across other aspects of the game.
This is not to say the game is not fun to play and you can currently buy it for $4.99 (half price until the free play period expires) which is an absolute bargain, but I still think beta Day of Defeat 3.0 was the best version to date. I may have to fire it up with some sturmbots at some stage.
Graphics : 6.5/10 – Good but mostly thanks to the engine and sloppy in places.
Sound : 6 / 10 - Reasonable, but not earth-shattering – somehow feels less meaty than before.
Gameplay : 7 / 10 – Same classic DoD, but a little dumbed down and sadly nothing to distinguish it from other modern games.
Difficulty : 7 / 10 – Shallow learning curve and a wide range of players out there.
Overall : 66/100
Worth playing, but won’t keep you occupied for long.
Those of you that play Call of Duty 4 online will recognise the name of this map – it is indeed a single player remake this fun map which is done rather well.
You play as a nameless agent in Al-Asaad’s private army trying to repulse an American invasion force. As such, your starting equipment is rather limited by game standard. You have an AKMS with an under-slung grenade launcher and a Beretta M92F pistol. The map immediately puts you in the midst of the action can gently directs you the specific route the map (re)author intends. (spoilers below)
As you work your way around the map clockwise you meet wave after wave of American reinforcements including rooftop snipers and LMG nests which are all well though out and placed. The only criticism I have here is that some of the ’snipers’ barely did anything and stood there like cannon fodder which was a bit disappointing.
As you make your way into the building with the documents you are trying to steal, enemy reinforcements arrive blocking you between a fortified position within the target building and your retreat down the stairs which is both fun and challenging. The briefcase / clipboard suffers from clipping problems but it is only a minor point. You also have a choice of picking up a sniper rifle here which, given your elevated position is not a bad idea.
Once you have seized the documents, you have to make your way around the edge of the map and into the central building. This is a bit of a nightmare as all the doors on the ground floor have all been blocked off so you literally have to go the long way round and jump through a window. Before you get there, in a excellent piece of scripting, you are ambushed by enemy reinforcements in the form of 5-6 troops and a armoured personnel carrier with a high caliber turret. Luckily (and a very worn and cliche way) you find an RPG and healthy supply of rockets right next to this ambush point so dealing with the vehicle is fairly easy.
Once you finally break into the middle building, your troops are not far behind. They kick down the doors as you walk down the stairs. At this point, the enemy forces launch an all out attack on the building and your new objective is to hold for a minute and a half whilst your reinforcements arrive. This is a great touch and there is plenty of fire to be traded with the enemy soldiers who are dropped by Blackhawk onto the neighbouring building. The only bad thing was the soldiers tended to just fire from the buildings they were dropped onto, they did not try to storm the central house the player has to hold.
Once your reinforcements arrive, you rendezvous with Al Asaad who, from somewhere seems to have picked up a prisoner and the mission ends. I was a bit confused by this and can only assume he was captured during the fighting.
It is enjoyable. The map layout is great with good use of obstacles and prefabs but you would expect that given the map was made by Infinity Ward. However, the scripting was excellent making good use of fixed positions and well as surprise attacks and several sections of the map were editing rather well in order to enable a single path to be followed by the player.
All in all, I would give this map 8/10. Had the author made the map himself, I would have given him(or her) a 8.5 or 9. More screenshots from the map can be found on my Xfire page.
I would highly recommend you try it yourself. Download.
UPDATE 17/06/08: It appears the website cod4-maps.com is in the middle of a redesign. The links at the moment are broken, when the resources appear on the new site I will update the links
UPDATE 06/07/08: cod4-maps.com still down, so I found another mirror.
So after putting in about ten hours into Medieval total war 2, I must say I have been left with slightly mixed feelings. There is no disputing that the game is a lot of fun to play but what disappointed me is that it is not a huge leap forward from Rome total war.
The updated engine looks great (almost oblivion like in battle view when zoomed in) and the individual details are nice to look at however the difference is not always that noticeable. However, the annoyingly poor path finding algorithms (especially around towns/cities) are still not fixed. This was what irked me the most about Rome total war , the fact that assigning any strategic move orders to your troops in settlements either resulted in them turning 180 degrees from the indented path or just ending up in a traffic jam with the rest of your rail road-ed troops. I don’t know how the allowed movable area is defined but surely it would not have been hard to expand it to allow two separate formations to move with autonomy? In Rome roads/dirt tracks all seemed to have a narrow rail road like behaviour and its sadly almost exactly duplicated in total war 2.
What has been improved is the placing/moving/engaging troops on city walls which is encouraging. The AI is more challenging even on medium settings which means campaigns are brutal affairs that can stretch to almost 15 hours. In the same was as Rome Total War, when you destroy a faction, the next time you start a campaign they become an option which leads to a really fulfilling experience and lots of replay-ability given how the different factions have different specialities.
The main difference in Medieval Total War (apart from the era) is the political angle. Whilst in Rome total war the SQPR or senate was in pseudo charge of your political actions it has really been taken to a new level in total was 2. The Pope (presumably if you play as a Muslim or Pagan then a different religious premier would apply) exerts a huge amount of power from religious crusades to threats of excommunication. If a war between your faction and another displeases His Holiness then you risk bringing the wrath of Christendom down if you continue with your hostilities.
The political angle runs deeper than this though and this is shown in the negotiation scroll when addressing foreign dignitaries. Your faction’s allies and friends all carefully scrutinise your actions and will become displeased if you start to ally your faction with their blood foes. Apart from its role in politics, each territory has its own religious distribution which if not converted to your faction’s religion (with priests /imams / Churches /mosques) could lead to a religious revolt. Its not just Christianity and Islam that are presented, period authentic Orthodox churches as well as Pagans are also present. It is entertaining to watch Papal inquisitors accuse characters of insufficient piety whilst witches wander the land looking to convert the populous.
This hints at the subtlety of the game. In Rome total war you could amass and army and annex the known universe without much in the way of broader considerations. In Medieval this Tank Rush style is not only discouraged but will lead to financial ruin. Consideration of settlement types (peaceful town or military fortresses) and attention to foreign operatives such as spies and assassins is essential. To give am example, in a particularly troublesome but militarily strong region I utilised a priest to sow the seeds of rebellion in the largely pagan population. When they began to riot I used assassins to destroy public services and assassinate the ruling noble. The riots became worse with the garrison coming under attack from their citizens. Amid the chaos my spy quietly slipped in and held the castle gates open for my approaching army.
All in all the game is much better presented, superbly (and simply) put together and a lot of fun to play (and play again) its just a shame some old bugs linger. This is definitely one to play if you have not tried a total was game, for fans of the series, this game is fun but does not really innovate or bring much more to the party but is still worth playing.
I briefly talked about this mod over on my previous blog, however I had a chance to have a chat with one of the developers behind the project. This is a rough transcript of our conversation.
Briefly what inspired you to create this mod?
Nothing really, just the fun and challenge of turning Half-Life: 2 into a real-time strategy game.
Have you created any other mods before this and if so, for what games?
I made some maps for Half-Life 2: Capture the flag and Nightfall (which was a campaign for Guild Wars)
There has been talk on the forums that the UI was either lifted or heavily inspired by CoH. Whilst this is a great game in its own right, does it worry you in terms of potential legal difficulties further down the road?
I dont see why we as a project should be worried, it is unlikely that they have a patent on the UI. I chose it as it is a pretty standard but functional user interface which may be changed some time in the future.
The two categories RTS and FPS are very different. How are you planning to avoid making it just a simple 3rd person top-down HL2 game
Does it looks to you like a simple 3rd person top-down hl2 game currently?
The physics engine in HL 2 is quite impressive, even more so with the improvements with Episode 2. Are you planning on implementing destructible terrain / buildings/ cover etc?
Damage from environment (e.g. wall falling onto infantry)
Maybe, its something that we are considering.
Does the fact that it is chiefly a FPS engine limit you in terms of the potential tactical elements?
I dont see how it would. It is of course a lot of work to change things but that challenge is the reason I am on this project – its the fun part.
I see you have implemented Walkers already from the youtube video, are there any other vehicle you plan to implement like the drop ships? What rebel counter units are planned to balance the sides or are you relying on specialist infantry teams like rocket troops?
At this stage we have not decided.
What role do the sand lions play? Will it be a central role or more a territorial role i.e. just defending their terrain or actively being controlled by the player or a ‘third team CPU’ in skirmishes?
They will keep playing a territorial roll.
Are you planning a campaign or is this mod chiefly a multiplayer mod?
If I can bring an enthusiastic team together to create a large campaign, then at a later date there is no reason why this should not be the case. It is however a consideration for a later stage.
What is your next mile stone?
I don’t think in such terms. I don’t have a schedule.
How long before you anticipate a stable ‘fully featured’ release like a beta which would allow people to really get into this mod on a large scale?
It’s done when it’s done.
How are you planning on implementing buildings / structures?
Like what you would expect from a rts game.
What sets your mod apart from the others apart from the style of play?
Play and see.
Some interesting answers there, unfortunately either the Dev didn’t think much of me or didn’t want to disclose much about the project. It appears to be progressing and their new site can be found here. Lets hope they code better than they answer questions…
Today I got my grubby mits on a copy of Stalker: Clear Sky and showing an uncharacteristic amount of self restraint, didn’t rush home to play it immediately. When I did fire it up I was initially left with mixed feelings. However, I have now played about three hours on the hardest difficulty setting and thus far quite enjoyed the experience.
Do not get too excited about the strategy side of things – I was of the mistaken impression that it would involve a game play cross between the original Stalker and a Battlefield style with resources and areas of influence. Unfortunately it is a lot more basic than that and really just expands the completely superfluous Stalker ranking system of the original game. To those of you wondering what I am talking about.. you have made my point for me. The feature was completely superfluous and merely tracked the player’s progress through the game based on how many people they had killed. Fast forward 18 months and Clear Sky expands this concept by formalising the factions in the PDA and providing nifty bars showing faction influence, disposition to the player and ‘resources.’ Any hope of any deep strategy is wiped out here as the stats can so far simply be interpreted by: powerful faction – lots of pointless side quests, otherwise ignore. The side quests are the biggest disappointment thus far for me as they seems to be generated from the template : “Go 5 to 10 mins out of your way and kill something” which gets very old very quickly. Scripted side quests are however interesting and having met a deserting Russian Army driver who promptly tried to double cross me I am cautiously optimistic about the rest of the game. Let this be a warning to you – don’t trust people you meet hiding under a bridge. :p
Despite the use of the original locations, models and textures Clear Sky is a very different game. The story is just as engaging as the original, if not more so, as it makes full use of the fact it is a prequel to interweave some of the key characters from Shadow of Chernobyl into the plot. Who knows, maybe even Strelok will make an appearance later? The engine has been greatly upgraded and now includes a lot of beautiful weather and lighting effects coupled with a day night transition system which turn a game already dripping in atmosphere into something almost surreal in places. The atmosphere is largely thanks to the authenticity of having a development team from the Ukraine. The moody, functional architecture from a post Soviet era comes accross naturally and is sufficiently alien to many Western players to really add intrigue to this already very different world. Greatly improved textures and sounds coupled with the graphical enhancements and interesting developments to the AI really make the game stand out for me, and although it will never have the same level of graphical polish as something like Call of Duty 4, there have been moments already which have left me in awe. Sadly players who played the original will be frustrated that some of glitches still present in Clear Sky. Randomly disappearing NPCs, occasional clipping bugs, annoying side quest spawning (and timing) all remain, although many bugs have been fixed.
The game I briefly want to talk about was released over 15 years ago on the SNES, I played it back then and found it thoroughly enjoyable. I recently picked it back up and thought I would give it a whirl, given that my media center has a SNES emulator – and I must say I very pleasantly surprised. It is very easy to be carried away by simply drooling over improved graphics in new game releases. This can save all but the poorest modern releases, however, games like Portal on the other hand, bring us crashing back down to earth showing us that the way the game plays can (and normally is) far more important than any visual polish the game studio applies with a trowel afterwards.
Beta 3.0 was released and everyone celebrated. It built on the strengths of the first betas- tweaking and balancing them as well as adding new features. For a while nothing happened, we all were content playing beta 3.0 and listening to rumours of the ever elusive beta 4.0. Then, in my opinion, it all started going wrong. The mod team 
What I find inexcusable however is that many of the old problems still linger. Despite the servers I have played on today having between 4 and 16 players the game frequently juddered and lagged particularly during explosions. The hitbox issue, allegedly solved in Day of Defeat, also reappears with some rather odd damage and hit patterns which can be very frustrating. What is even more peculiar, the game designers have appeared to have focused on beautifying the graphical side of the game considerably, adding odd looking ‘film grain’ effects as well as a kill cam with ‘Press F5 for snapshot’ and other useless ‘features’. Some of these additions are almost pretentious in the flashy way they are implemented especially given how inconsistent the effort appears to have been across other aspects of the game.
Once you have seized the documents, you have to make your way around the edge of the map and into the central building. This is a bit of a nightmare as all the doors on the ground floor have all been blocked off so you literally have to go the long way round and jump through a window. Before you get there, in a excellent piece of scripting, you are ambushed by enemy reinforcements in the form of 5-6 troops and a armoured personnel carrier with a high caliber turret. Luckily (and a very worn and cliche way) you find an RPG and healthy supply of rockets right next to this ambush point so dealing with the vehicle is fairly easy.
It is enjoyable. The map layout is great with good use of obstacles and prefabs but you would expect that given the map was made by Infinity Ward. However, the scripting was excellent making good use of fixed positions and well as surprise attacks and several sections of the map were editing rather well in order to enable a single path to be followed by the player.
