steve kwan user experience designer

Review: Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

(August 26th, 2007 - 3:45PM)

(4 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: So pretty that it's difficult to notice its shortcomings.

Things I liked about Lost Planet: Extreme Condition:

• The graphics.

  This game is beautiful. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. The effects, such as snow, explosions, and lighting, are unbelievable. There have been times while playing this game where I thought it looked real.

  The graphics are so good that they might distract you from many of the numerous flaws in Lost Planet.

• The boss fights.

  One thing Capcom's always done well in their games is boss fights. (Megaman, anyone?) The boss fights in Lost Planet are epic. Some of the massive insects you fight at the end of levels are so intimidating that you'll surely be on the edge of your seat.

  The bosses are also quite challenging, which is nice for a change. If you get attacked by a 100 foot tall spider, shouldn't that spider be tough? Too many games have massive bosses that turns out to be too easy. Not this game.

• The combat.

  The gunfights are a lot of fun, mainly because they just look so good.

Things I disliked about Lost Planet: Extreme Condition:

• The plot.

  I always watch in-game cutscenes, but Lost Planet is the first game I've encountered where I'd really recommend you don't. As is typical of Capcom games, the cutscenes and plot are laughably bad. Since the cutscenes actually have nearly nothing to do with the missions themselves, you really should skip past them to maximize enjoyment of the game.

• The gameplay mechanics.

  I had a hard time with the first few levels of Lost Planet, and it turns out my difficulties were mainly because I didn't know some of the tricks that make the game easier.

  For example, there are massive cylindrical containers all over the game, which yield large amounts of thermal energy when you blow them up. I didn't know this. I thought those containers were just part of the background. So I spent much of the early stages short on thermal energy, an important resource in the game, because I didn't know about the containers. As far as I can remember, the game never told me about them.

  Also, there are beacons throughout each level that save your progress and give you more thermal energy. The game does a poor job of notifying you about them, so I just ignored them for about half of the game.

  Lost Planet could have done a much better job of explaining gameplay to the user.

• The controls.

  Capcom's PC portings are always half-assed. Although Lost Planet isn't nearly as bad as Resident Evil 4 (or from what I hear, Devil May Cry 3), all of the in-game references to controls refer to the Xbox 360 controller. At many points in the game, a diagram of the 360 controller will pop up telling you what options you have available. This doesn't help much if you're using a PC, and you have to figure out which buttons map to which controls. It's especially painful because the controls in Lost Planet can be quite complicated.

• The system requirements.

  Any game with graphics like this is sure to be a system hog. I've got a GeForce 8800GTX, and with all the settings cranked Lost Planet barely squeaks by at 30FPS. But even with the settings turned down, this is a beautiful game.

Review: BioShock

(August 24th, 2007 - 2:24PM)

(3.5 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: Succeeds as art, but fails as a shooter.

Things I liked about BioShock:

• The environment.

  The underwater city of Rapture, and particularly the water effects, are positively stunning.

  Although the environments are beautiful, the visual effects are a bit lacking. I've been playing Lost Planet recently, and that game blows BioShock away in terms of visuals. However, that doesn't detract from BioShock's brilliant art design.

• The premise.

  The game takes place inside Rapture, an underwater city. It was built by objectivists looking to create a pinnacle of human perfection, and went horribly wrong. I like games that propose an interesting story, and BioShock's is intriguing.

• The ambient sound.

  The ambient noises, such as the flowing of water and whispering in the background, create great atmosphere.

• The voice acting.

  The dialogue is incredibly well written and spoken. Even the dialogue from the Splicers, your recurring enemies, is rarely repeated.

• The Big Daddies.

  Big Daddies, big lumbering freaks in scuba suits, are the staple enemies in BioShock. They're brilliantly conceived, gorgeously rendered, and fun to fight. Every game should have an enemy like the Big Daddies.

• The tapes.

  The story of Rapture is told by taped recordings. This mechanic worked in Doom 3, and it works here.

Things I disliked about BioShock:

• Installation issues.

  I've taken off a half star from my rating because of BioShock's installation issues alone. A quick Google will reveal all sorts of technical problems with BioShock.

  I bought BioShock on Steam. The first time I tried installing, it would bring up a black screen and go no further. I reinstalled and started getting an invalid key error. After consulting the forums I was able to get it working.

  Once you get the game going, it's a pretty seamless experience and doesn't seem to crash.

• Uninteresting combat.

  The gunfights are incredibly uninteresting. BioShock's supporters will defend it by saying that this game is about art and story, not about shooting. There may be some truth to that, but if I'm expected to spend 20 hours of my life playing a first-person game with guns, I'm going to expect the gunfights to be fun.

  Just because your game is artistic and story-driven doesn't mean the gunfights have to be boring. Half-Life 2 created a fantastic environment, had a great story, and the combat was still great.

• It's impossible to die.

  Much like Prey, in BioShock it's impossible to die. If you do run out of health, you'll respawn nearby with all your items. Any enemies that you've injured, however, remain injured.

  Once you get your head around this, it greatly changes the way you play the game. The developers of BioShock tout the game's openness and variety, and brag that there are many different ways to defeat an enemy. That may be true, but the most effective technique against hard enemies is running headlong into them, with total disregard for your health. Why should I bother setting up elaborate in-game traps to defeat my enemies when I can just wear them down by respawning every time they kill me?

  I know what the developers are trying to achieve. They're acknowledging that death in video games isn't really death, because you can always reload your last save point. So they're just trying to simplify the game and prevent load times by making it impossible to die. I appreciate the effort, but removing any threat of death takes any challenge out of the game and makes most of the cool combat strategies pointless.

• Widescreen problems.

  BioShock has a widely known widescreen limitation. Instead of rendering a true widescreen display, the game renders a 4:3 image and clips it to fit a widescreen display. This results in a claustrophobic close-up view.

• Plasmids.

  The whole Plasmid system, BioShock's equivalent of magic, is a disappointment. The developers have said that Plasmids provide many different methods to solve the same problem, but in reality these "methods" are repetitive.

  It reminds me a bit of Deus Ex. That game was touted as being totally open, with many different ways to solve the same problem. However, in reality, there were a few fixed routes you could take (head on combat, crawl through a pipe, hack a computer). Rather than being truly open, there were a variety of fixed routes to choose from.

  BioShock has the same problem. There are a handful of different tactics you can use - for example, electrocute a guy when he's standing in water - but all of these tactics feel programmed, and get repetitive.

  The only FPS I've played that felt truly open was FarCry. It felt that way because the developers didn't program a bunch of creative "options" for beating your enemies. Instead, they gave you some basic weapons, and generated a huge map for you to play in. It was up to you to find a way past your enemies. This, I think, is the right approach for openness.

• The stupid hacking minigame.

  Throughout the game, you can hack turrets, vending machines, and other electronics. First, let's put aside the problem of hacking in a game that takes place in the 1960s. The real problem is that the way you hack is stupid.

  When you try to hack a turret, the gameplay is paused while you play a little minigame of Pipe Dream. That's right: you have to set up a series of tubes so that water can flow through them. That's how you hack a mechanical turret in BioShock.

  In addition to breaking the action by pulling you out of the game (one of the FPS problems I mentioned in my 10 suggestions for making a first-person shooter), Pipe Dream is a totally inappropriate way to hack a system. It's entirely lame and I'm surprised that other reviewers weren't bothered by it.

10 suggestions for making a first-person shooter

(August 20th, 2007 - 10:21AM)

As a gamer, I'll play almost anything. But my favorite games are usually first-person shooters (FPS). I've been playing them since Wolfenstein 3D, all the way through to F.E.A.R. I'm addicted to the in-your-face action FPSes provide, and also, I'm too stupid to play strategy games.

FPSes have always been the best way to test the PC's graphical limits, and no other game genre puts you into the action like an FPS. That being said, although the graphics and sound of FPSes have evolved greatly in the last 10 years, the core gameplay of the genre has barely changed.

Don't get me wrong: I prefer my FPSes simple, and I think the formula generally works. But there are a few things about FPSes that bug me. They might seem like minor annoyances, but in the realm of the first-person shooter, you're supposed to be the protagonist, and anything that pulls you out of that mindset is a weakness in the game's design.

Here is a list of ten suggestions I'd make to future FPS developers.

1. No cutscenes.

   The problem with cutscenes is that they pull you out of the protagonist's head. You spend most of the game seeing through the eyes of the hero, and all of a sudden you're watching a cinematic video from someone else's perspective. The genius of the FPS genre is that you really are the protagonist, and anything that makes you forget that is bad.

   Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were both brilliant in this respect. In both games, the entire experience was through the eyes of Gordon Freeman, the protagonist. Not once does the game pull you out of his head.

2. Simplify controls and minimize the number of buttons required.

   This is a suggestion that should be applied to any game, actually.

   Minimize the number of buttons needed to play the game. Just because my keyboard has over 100 buttons doesn't mean your game needs to use every one of them. If a game requires too many different buttons, I'll be thinking less about the wonderful environment you've created, and more about which button I mapped "slow-mo" to. And that brings me to my next suggestion.

3. No slow motion.

   Slow-mo (being able to slow down time) is an idea that sounds really good in theory. Games have been using slow-mo liberally ever since The Matrix (or, depending on how you look at it, since Max Payne). It's a neat effect, but as I learned in F.E.A.R., it tends to introduce some gameplay problems.

   The main one is that slow-mo makes an FPS less frantic. I know that technically an FPS doesn't need to be frantic, but that's where most of the excitement comes from. Having godly powers such as the ability to slow down time (a la F.E.A.R.) really takes the edge off the game and makes it less exciting.

4. No HUD.

   In real life, I don't have a tiny little green box floating in the corner of my vision that tells me how much health and armour I have. Nor I see a crosshair. If the purpose of an FPS is to put me inside the protagonist's head, having all sorts of numbers and gauges floating around my field of vision is not going to help me suspend disbelief.

   These floating statistics that you see in FPSes are normally called the head-up display (HUD). Over the years, HUDs have been getting smaller and smaller, and in some games they're barely noticeable. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth took the bold step of eliminating the HUD completely, to great success.

5. No menus that pause the game.

   When you're in the middle of a firefight and you need to change weapons, there should be a way to do it without stopping the action. If you have to go into a menu that pauses the game when changing weapons, it breaks the flow of action and pulls you out of the protagonist's head. In other words, it causes the same problem that cutscenes do, except it can be more annoying.

6. Show me my feet!

   Why is it that in almost every FPS game, if you look down you can't see your feet? This is one of those little things that just bothers me.

7. No talking.

   FPSes are most immersive when you feel like you really are the protagonist. So when you hear someone else's voice coming out of your mouth, it breaks the illusion. Most FPSes have gravitated towards a silent hero, such as Doom 3, Half-Life 1 and 2, and F.E.A.R.

8. Don't let the protagonist carry too many weapons and items.

   FPSes are much more tense when you need to ration your ammunition. Also, if you can carry lots of weapons and items, the game usually needs a far more complex inventory management system. Half-Life 2, for instance, allows you to carry dozens of weapons, and has a somewhat convoluted menu for selecting them. This can be irritating when you want to pull out a grenade in a hurry.

   Besides, it's kind of hard to believe that a single person could carry a half-ton of munitions.

9. The protagonist should react to punishment.

   In a lot of FPSes, if you get shot, a red indicator appears on the screen and your health goes down a bit. That's it. Call me crazy, but if you get nailed by a shotgun, shouldn't it send you flying back? If someone whacks you across the head, shouldn't it send you reeling?

   Making your player more responsive to damage results in a much more immersive experience, and makes you hesitate before doing something stupid. Both Doom 3 and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay have great reactions when you get hit.

10. No squad controls.

    I don't think being able to control a squad of computer-controlled characters is necessarily a bad thing, but most games manage to screw it up. Most of the time, squad AI is so bad and squad controls are so clumsy that you have to focus on micro-managing your teammates, which ruins the game.

    Star Wars: Republic Commando is the only game I can think of where the squad controls actually enhanced the game. Most other games with squad controls, such as Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, have such clumsy implementations that they ruin the game.

    So although squad controls aren't inherently bad, I'd discourage developers from making such games unless they're sure they know what they're doing.

How I didn't get fired

(August 6th, 2007 - 11:19AM)

The other day, our office admin sent me this message on Facebook:

are the rumors true?

you aren't leaving, are you?

Of course, this made me think three things.

1. What rumours?
2. No, of course I'm not leaving, unless...
3. Oh, SHIT! Am I getting canned?

I then proceeded to interrogate her - "Who told you that? What did they say?" And the usual. Turns out she got me confused with Steven, the intern whose contract expires next month and is leaving.