City 16

I’m pretty sure the changelog for Valve’s new user interface didn’t mention clairvoyance as one of its features.

I’ll have more to say about Mass Effect 2′s Paragon/Renegade system soon. In the meantime it’s worth mentioning that the new Renegade ‘Interrupt’ actions are making it very difficult for my Shepherd to remain diplomatic.

Non trovo alcuna gioia in questo, ma non c’e altro modo.

Assassin’s Creed 2 is, undoubtedly, a much better game than its predecessor. That’s not to say it doesn’t have problems of its own. Essentially I’m nitpicking here, holding the game accountable for things that, truth be told, are part and parcel of its genre. The difference is that AC2 was so much the game I’d hoped for, and not the game I’d expected, that the few things that didn’t quite work bothered me far more than the collective mess of problems that usually plague open world games (hi Mercenaries 2). These, then, are those.

Tutorials

As someone who almost never RTFMs I have no desire to criticise tutorials in general. A quick overview of the controls and basic mechanics during the first mission is pretty much essential as games become increasingly convoluted. AC2 gives you a quick run down of the controls and basic mechanics during its first mission. It then continues to do so for what seems like the first half of the fucking game. Every single thing you can do in the game, from collecting feathers to beating up cheating husbands to using prostitutes (not in that way), has a main story mission attached to introduce it. The ceaseless parade of engineered scenarios explaining the use of these mechanics soon becomes tiring as you long to be let free to cause havoc your own way.

Late in the game you’re given a pistol-like attachment to your hidden blade and the subsequent mission, an actual main target assassination, is set up in such a way as to force you to use it. When you’re wasting a proper story-based assassination, the whole point of the game let’s not forget, to introduce (and perhaps justify) a weapon you’ll probably never use again then you’ve got a problem.

The truly egregious aspect of all this is how simple the solution is:

1. Display a text box showing what button activates your new weapon or move, or give a brief description of the mechanic. The game does this already.
2. Create an Animus based tutorial that the player can access to practice outside of the main game-world. Given that the game’s plot is centred around a man experiencing his ancestor’s life through a computer simulation there is a ready-made logical excuse for this. Even the first game did it in its opening tutorial.
3. Make it fucking optional.

The 'How to chase things' level. I'm not kidding.

Combat

Last post I praised the improved assassinating. This post I’m going to criticise the general combat. I’m even going to overlook how ridiculous it is that a game made in this day and age still feels the need to surround the character with enemies and only have them attack one at a time. The real problem with the combat is, ironically given the plot, how artificial it feels.

Of course the same can be said for the freerunning mechanic in which you just press the run button and let the magic happen. The difference is that when freerunning you’re constantly course correcting, looking for viable paths over rooftops, jumping, grabbing and stabbing the occasional archer, all at speed. Your own actions may only basically respond to what’s happening on screen, and there are definitely moments when it all breaks down and Ezio’s left stuck at a ledge, but the rate at which you process and enact on the visual information gives a feeling of fluidity that, mostly, matches what happens on screen.

The problem with the combat is not that its frustrating, it’s actually so easy as to be laughable, but that it’s just sterile. Every attack has a one button counter. Most enemies are taken down with a simple press of the counter-attack button at the right moment (and the margin of error for the counter-attack timing seems a lot more forgiving than the first game). For a while the heavily armoured enemies look like a problem until you realise you can just switch to unarmed combat and counter them to take their weapon and, usually, kill them in one move. The attacks from each enemy are so spaced out within a fight that there’s no sense of panic or frantic tactical assessment, just pressing the right button at the right time until, eventually, everyone’s dead. It’s not a battle, it’s fucking Parappa the Rapper with fancy visuals.

You gotta believe!

Also, it’s fucking ridiculous that a game made in this day and age still feels the need to surround the character with enemies and only have them attack one at a time.

Collectible Execution

To be fair most of the collectibles, the glyphs for example, are no problem and, as I said previously, there’s actually a fairly compelling reason to go after them. The feathers, though… Those stupid bloody feathers. You know what, the feathers are actually worse than the collectibles in most games because of the fact there’s a story related reason to find them. It means you might actually be tempted to go looking for the blasted things. Every other group of collectibles has a system attached that tells you where they are. Buildings that contain glyphs, for instance, are marked on your database which means your search of each one is limited to one small area. Not so with the feathers, which could be anywhere in the game world. You’re told how many are in each district but the districts are pretty large and the feathers, unsurprisingly, are quite small.

I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do and lift a suggested improvement from the last Prince of Persia game and its light seeds. Instead of making the player comb the game world for hidden objects, make them blindingly obvious but hard to get to. The developers of AC2 clearly think the game would work as a platformer, as proven by the surprisingly enjoyable tomb missions. If they had made the feathers into mini platforming puzzles, asking the player to figure the route and series of moves required to reach them, then the whole affair would have been a lot less laborious.

There are 100 feathers in the game. What the fuck are Italians doing to the birds?

The Present Day

Yeah… Those sections in the present day (or near future, I can’t really remember) still don’t work for me.

You get to do more this time and I loved the fact that the platforming, and even fighting, in these segments happens completely without any on-screen display (completely logical outside of the Animus yet so many games would have chickened out) but the story is complete shit. This time it all goes a bit Mayan, which isn’t at all an overused plot device in the run up to 2012. Worse still, the ending actually detracts from any closure to Ezio’s storyline who, you may remember, was the character I was actually fucking invested in.

Desmond can't quite get past Lucy's uncanny valley.

Hmm, all that was far more of a tirade then I’d expected to make. Still, with expectations dutifully lowered hopefully you’ll enjoy the game a whole lot more. As I draw this somewhat unplanned Ubisoft mini-season to a close I leave with one final thought on Assassin’s Creed 2: The fact that the game shows the passage of time by giving Ezio a beard in later levels is hilarious.

In an effort to break up the giant walls of text that this blog is predominantly comprised of I’ll be throwing up the odd short and simple post to highlight something specific I want to mention. Think of these as casual posts, to use a gaming metaphor I’m sure to regret in about an hour or so.

Clearly one of the features of Audiosurf is that it would be impossible to see every ‘level’ that it had to offer. You work with the music you’ve got on your hard-drive and while a lot of songs may produce a memorable experience because of how much you love the music, instances of tracks that provides a truly excellent course to ride are few and far between. I’d originally intended to do a Match-3 feature on great Audiosurf courses but, honestly, I’m yet to find one that comes close to rivalling Monkey Bee from Damon Albarn’s Chinese opera side project Monkey: Journey to the West.

The three phases of the song sync up with Audiosurf’s different gradients impressively. The start of the course is uphill, a pretty relaxed affair offering no real challenge. In the second phase, which kicks in at 2:40 of the above video, you get a higher tempo flat surface that bounces along to the electronic drum hits. At this point the collectible notes are perfectly spaced to practically fill the grid. Around the 3:50 mark the guitar hits and the track goes mental (this is also the point my video capture software freaks out for a few seconds). Here you get a constant descent, littered with tricky to avoid greys and dangerous, but tempting, collectibles. It’s complete fluke that this was the run I finally managed to get the Stealth award, netting the high score by quite some margin.

Anyway, maybe you can suggest an even better course for the game. If so, let us know in the comments.

Hey, neat. Ubisoft’s announced an Online Services Platform to be added to its future PC games. Let’s disingenuously pretend to read it for the first time to see what great services they’ll be adding… Online… As a platform…

What are the key elements of this platform for PC gamers?
Although a permanent online connection is required, this means that a CD/DVD is not required to play the game after installation. The protected game can be installed as many times and on as many computers as you like. Saved games are also synchronized online so the user can continue playing from any location with the game installed.

Waitta minute! A permanent online connection is required? This sounds suspiciously like [pause for effect] Digital Rights Management.

Yeah, ok, so Ubisoft announced this days ago and half the PC gaming portion of the Internet has already exploded about it. Everyone agrees it’s a bad idea. The only person who doesn’t agree, Gerald from this Gamespy article, makes a point so vacuous and out of touch with reality that everyone who reads it should disagree with him on principle. Still, given that I’m half-way through my unexpectedly lengthy Assassin’s Creed II posts and that, if my stats page is to be believed, the majority of people who read this blog are interested in PC gaming, it seemed somewhat remiss of me to ignore the issue.

To briefly get my bias on the whole issue of DRM out of the way, I totally understand that companies feel the need to protect their intellectual properties. As far as I see it, the whole ‘copyright is theft’ argument is both unrealistic and hugely insulting to the developers who’ve taken the time and effort to create their game. That said, Ubisoft’s proposal is completely batshit insane.

Why? The simple reason is that requiring a persistant online connection would make any Ubisoft PC titles I buy henceforth the only games that would be, on occasion, completely impossible to play… I think… wait, hold on.

- 1 Hour Later -

Ok, so when I wrote that last sentence I realised I had no idea if any games would stop me playing them without an Internet connection. Mine is online pretty much constantly, so it seems like the sort of thing I might have missed. So as not to come across as totally ignorant I’ve spent the last hour starting up games and periodically ripping out my wireless USB hoojamaflip to see what happened. First up was Steam, as I knew it had an offline mode and for some reason I was under the impression you needed an online connection to activate it. Ripping out the Internet during a game of Half Life 2: Episode 2 had absolutely no effect which was unsurprising when I realised my firewall had blocked the hl2.exe application while it waited for me to confirm it, meaning it had never been online in the first place. Still in online mode with no connection present I tried to start Portal. It started. It was all proving to be rather anti-climactic. After a stroke of pure genius I restarted Steam and got this error message:

“Fuck You Valve for leaving me unable to play my… Oh, an option to start Steam offline.” Choosing that option started Steam up as normal and gave me access to all the games I subsequently tried.

Ah, but what about Fallout 3? That is inexplicably tied to my Games for Windows Live account, meaning I can only access my savegames by signing into the service. I started it up and was informed that GfW had signed into offline mode still giving me access to all my save data. So yeah, fuck Ubisoft.

You may be wondering what the hell my problem is given that I had to go to all that effort to even see if a lack of connection affected any of my existing games. Well, our area’s Internet connection can be somewhat sporadic. Only the other day I lost connection for a half hour or so while I was playing Fallout 3. The game went into offline mode and continued on. I wonder how a future Ubisoft title would handle that…

What will happen if I lose my Internet connection when I play the game?
If you lose your Internet connection the game will pause while it tries to reconnect. If the Internet connection is unable to resume, the server will have stored your last saved game and you will be able to continue from where you left off once your Internet connection is restored.

Oh good, the game’s completely disabled until connection returns. The Q&A page doesn’t even make clear if you can save your game if the connection is interrupted. Even with a connection certain bandwidth heavy programs, µTorrent for example, knock out all other online processes. If I have to choose between playing the latest Ubisoft titles and completing my back catalog of That’s So Raven episodes*, I know who’s losing out.

The services provided by this move in no way justify the cost. Cloud saving is great, sure, but I doubt Ubisoft has many games that would run smoothly enough on notebooks to warrant it. It works for, say, Torchlight (to the point that I re-bought the game on Steam to have the feature) but that’s because Torchlight runs fine on most hardware. The same can’t be said for AC2, which I doubt many people will be installing on multiple PCs. Even for Ubi’s casual games that notebook would need an online wi-fi connection when on the move, something not widely available for free in the UK. Also, the old ‘CD/DVD not required’ argument – am I the only person who has no fucking problem with putting a DVD in the disk tray? The top picture is a Fallout 3 disk check error, because it was the only piece of DRM I could find to give an error on my computer, and I had to take the bloody thing out of the tray to make it happen.

Ah, here’s a telling question:

Can I resell my game?
Not at this time.

Strikes me as a two-birds-one-stone situation, given how much publishers hate resales. The stupid thing is that, to my mind, EA have already solved this issue with Bioware’s last two releases. Both Dragon Age and Mass Effect give free DLC to people who buy new copies, and offer the same DLC in paid form to those who purchase second hand. That’s a perfectly fine solution as it at least offers the consumer a choice. It’s an encouragement to buy new not a barrier from buying used. In that small distinction is a world of difference.

Bottom line, for me at least, is that, when I said publishers had a right to protect their IPs, well that goes both ways. Consumers have rights too and surely one of those should be that the people who actually purchase the game aren’t punished with a restrictive system that won’t affect those that pirate the game. Because this system will be cracked, as they all are, and future Ubisoft titles will be pirated. I’d argue that people who would have otherwise purchased a title will seriously consider pirating it.

And so, I leave with this question: If the piracy does increase on future titles, is a major publisher going to look at the figures and realise it needs to dial back its DRM or is it going to withdraw from the PC market altogether?

*Because tone and humour don’t always translate well in text I want to make it categorically clear that I have never downloaded an episode of That’s So Raven. Have you ever actually watched that show? Beyond shit.