Category: Games

Saints Row

On Oct 23, 2006 7:40 pm, by NeutralX2

Welcome to Stillwater, a modern American city full of great food, commerce, and unrestricted gang warfare. With the 3rd Street Saints, Vice Kings and the Carnales waging a city wide turf war for supremacy, there has never been a better time to visit.

The game opens up with your customized character getting caught in the crossfire of a gang war. You are saved by Julius, the leader of the 3rd Street Saints, and are recruited into his gang in an effort to clean up the streets. The first couple of missions serve as a sort of introductory sequence that teaches you the mission structure of the game and introduces you to some core characters. The game has three different story arcs, one for each rival gang, for you to tackle in whatever order you would like.

After each story mission you must build your respect before you will be offered the next one. There are numerous ways to build your respect, but the easiest way to do it is to take on various side missions located throughout the city. These missions range from drug trafficking to street racing. The activities get harder as you complete them, maxing out at level 8 and awarding you a prize such as unlimited shotgun ammo at your crib or taking less damage in car crashes.

Almost all of activities are pretty fun, but the two most enjoyable are probably mayhem and insurance fraud. In mayhem, you are tasked with going to a certain area of the city and causing as much damage as you can within a certain amount of time. You are always given a few weapons with unlimited ammo and bonuses for destroying certain targets. Destroying everything in sight with a rocket launcher on mayhem’s level 8 is one of the most enjoyable moments of the game. In insurance fraud, you attempt to throw yourself in front of traffic to collect money from lawsuits. You earn bonuses based on things like air time, hitting police cars, and the number of witnesses.

Besides those side missions, there are a few other ways of gaining respect. Robbing any store you want will give you a small amount of respect. Tagging over other gang’s graffiti will also net you some respect. To help you speed up the time it takes to earn respect, you can spend your money on clothes, jewelry, and tattoos for your character. These items give you respect bonuses when you complete missions. Overall, the side mission system works pretty well. It creates a good pacing for the game, preventing you from blowing through the missions in just a few hours.

Besides allowing you to unlock new missions, as you gain more respect you will be able to recruit more “homies” (up to three at one time). “Homies” are friendly gang members which will help protect you by shooting out of car windows while you drive and following you around on foot. They do a pretty good job of helping you kill whoever is attacking you and hardly ever get stuck on objects such as trees. When they die, you have thirty seconds to revive them before they are permanently dead. At first this sounds like it would make the game too easy, but the “homies” are not overly effective, and don’t take too much to kill. If you had to go find new ones every time one of them died, it would become pretty frustrating. So having 30 seconds to revive those that died turns out to be pretty convenient.

When you are not building up respect, you will literally be taking back the city block by block. Completing a story mission in a certain area of the city will put that area under the control of your gang. Controlling areas of the city actually has some impact on the gameplay. You will see friendly gang members patrolling the streets, providing you a safe area to run to if you are being chased by police or enemy gang members. Controlling different districts also gives you money every day that you can get from your safe back at your crib. The more territory you control, the faster you gain money. You also get new save points as well. The game allows you to save whenever you want, placing you at the closest save point from where you saved when you reload the game. So controlling more save points is definitely nice. Sometimes rival gangs will attack territory that you control, at which point you need to stop whatever you are doing and rush there to help push back the attack. If you wait too long, you risk losing your territory. This is a nice touch, and makes you feel like you are just one small part of a larger turf war.

The story missions themselves are pretty well designed and not overly difficult or annoying. There were many missions in Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas that I personally found extremely annoying and simply not fun to play. While the missions in Saints Row are challenging, I didn’t run across any annoying missions like those in the GTA games. I always felt like I was making progress. The cinematic sequences for each of the missions are pretty well directed. The voice acting is great as well. The storyline turns out to be memorable and one of the highlights of the game.

While playing the game, it’s safe to say that you will be doing a lot of driving and shooting. The game features tons of cars, all with rock solid control. While none of them are real licensed cars, they all look different from each other and handle differently as well.

There is a pretty good selection of weapons in the game as well. Most of what you would expect to see is here, including pistols, machine guns, rifles, rocket launchers, grenades and more are present. The shooting controls are vastly improved over those of Grand Theft Auto, allowing you to control the player like you would in a first person shooter. You won’t find any lock on targeting here. This goes a long way in making the firefights much more intense and fun then those in GTA.

The game features other big enhancements over Grand Theft Auto, the most important of which is the map system. At any point during the game you can bring up the map to set waypoints and locate new activities and missions. You can sort the map by stores, activities, missions, strongholds, and cribs to make finding locations very easy. The on screen minimap will show you the most efficient route to your waypoint or next objective, which makes navigating around the city a breeze. This is especially helpful during fast car chases.

Another small but significant improvement is the ability to shoot enemies in cars through the windshield. So instead of having to fill the car full of lead to get it to stop, you can instead take out the driver with one well placed shot to the head. This is extremely useful while in car chases. Since you can drive and shoot at the same time, it’s not that difficult to shoot the driver of the car chasing you through his windshield.

Besides those gamplay enhancements, Saints Row is also packing some amazing visuals. The entire city of Stillwater is rendered in glorious high definition. Everything in the world is extremely detailed. The game also features pretty good looking lighting and real time weather effects. The cars in the game look excellent, especially the way they crumple on impact. When cars explode, they send pieces of metal and tires flying everywhere. The frame rate is mostly pretty solid, though it can take a dive at times when there is a ton going on. However, this never hindered my enjoyment of the game.

The biggest criticism that you could have against the game is its lack of originality. In my opinion, there is nothing inherently wrong with a game copying another, especially when it manages to improve on its inspiration. The fact that Saints Row sticks pretty close to the Grand Theft Auto formula means that inherits many of the good qualities of the GTA series, making Saints Row a pretty good game in the process. Since it does manage improve upon GTA in many aspects, it’s worth while for fans of the GTA series to play it. It’s probably fair to say that if you liked Grand Theft Auto then you will enjoy Saints Row. If you found some aspects of GTA annoying, as I did, then it may turn out that you like Saints Row even more. In my opinion, Saints Row is the best game of its kind to be released. When GTA 4 comes out later on it may vary well topple Saints Row, but until then, Saints Row is the king of free roaming action games.

Games 3

Gears of War

On Oct 22, 2006 12:21 am, by NeutralX2

Is anyone else dying to play this game? When the first trailer was shown over a year ago my reaction was, “That’s pretty cool, I might have to get that”. But recently, Epic Games has been releasing a ton of gameplay footage (both single and multi-player) and it looks extremely amazing. Not only are the graphics awesome, but it looks like the gameplay kick ass as well. After watching all of the recent videos, I actually went and pre-ordered the game. I have only pre-ordered three other games: Tribes 2, Doom 3 and Halo 2. So the fact that I pre-ordered this shows just how much I am looking forward to it. The game will be released in only a few weeks. So until then, enjoy these 14 minutes of narrated single player gameplay.

Part 1 (136.9 MB)
Part 2 (114.5 MB)
Part 3 (74.5 MB)

Games Tech 2

DVD9 is Fine

On Oct 17, 2006 5:44 pm, by NeutralX2

As many of you know, many people have been setting forth the notion that the Xbox 360 DVD9 storage format will not be enough for next generation games. This claim is pretty ridiculous for a number of reasons, and I feel like pointing them out. Check out this statement from Sony’s Kaz Hirai when he answers a question about being concerned about having higher console costs than other manufacturers.

“This console is going to do much more. We have made sure this is a console for the long haul. If you look at the lack of Blu-ray on Microsoft, what do you do if the game requires 40 to 50 gigabytes? Put it on three disks? Let’s look under the hood and see total value we are delivering to consumers. At five to 10 years, you see the lasting power of the PS2. If you go out there now, there is a lot of PS2 software out there. From a consumer’s view, who got the better value? If you look at which console is giving the publishers more time to amortize their development costs, the answer is pretty obvious.”

First, the idea that games will suddenly start taking up 40 to 50 gigabytes is humorous. What’s sad is that people believe this. Most people that believe this believe it because they see a huge leap in processing power between last generation consoles and next generation consoles and assume that this will cause us to use more storage because we now “suddenly” have so much more processing power to take advantage of. These people fail to realize that while console technology stands still for years, PC technology is constantly advancing. In fact, top of the line PCs are already more powerful then the new consoles. And when you look to the storage medium for PC games, only recently have they started to appear on DVDs. Some games are still released on CDs. So the idea that we will suddenly need 40+ GB of space is ridiculous. And as far as games requiring 2-3 discs, just look around. There is lots of next-generation games out right now that are doing great on one disc. I am not quite sure where Kaz Hirai has been shopping, but its certainly not his local GameStop.

But these same people then insist that if the space is there then it will be used. This is despite the fact that over 90% of Xbox 1 games fit on a single layer of a DVD9 disc. Earlier this year Gamesfirst did a great survey of Xbox titles and found that the average size of Xbox games in 2001 was 1.81 gigabytes, rising to 3.2 gigabytes by 2005. That alone shows that having the space does not mean it will be used. In addition, they listed the size of four Xbox 360 launch titles:

Condemned: 3.9 GB
Madden 06 NFL: 3.3 GB
Dead or Alive 4: 5 GB
NBA 06: 4.5 GB

Check out this quote from the article:

“Over the course of its life, the size of the average Xbox title increased by 77%. If the Xbox 360 size increases at the same rate, and the four 360 titles are representative of the whole, we can expect the average Xbox 360 title in 4 or 5 years to be around 7.40 gigs, and to occupy about 87% of the disc’s capacity. If the largest game deviation is the same as the Xbox, with the largest game being 3 gigabytes larger than the 2005 average, then games will be exceeding the upper limit of what the medium is capable of.

However, if the proportions hold true between systems, such limitations will only affect about 3% of games made for the Xbox 360. Additionally, we’d guess that if you look at those 26 titles that exceed average size on the Xbox, you’d find that size is not an indicator of quality, either in graphical quality or storyline. No one would accuse Doom 3 of being worse looking than Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but it’s almost 3 gigabytes smaller (Terminator 3: 5.67 gigs; Doom 3: 2.957 gigs). Half-life 2, for example, is only 2 gigabytes.”

I’m willing to bet that there will be some games this generation that won’t fit on a standard 8.5 GB DVD-9. But I think we’re still a few years away from seeing many of them hit the market, and when I see games on the scale of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls: Oblivion come out, I just don’t see the concern. Frankly, even if we look ahead to a future when there are some games that don’t fit on a single disc, I personally don’t see why it’s such a big deal to get up for one out of every twenty (fifty? hundred?) games and swap the disc once every few hours. We do this today every single time we watch a new movie, right?

Now let’s think about this in a practical way. It would cost more then its worth to fill up a Blu-Ray disc with content. Think of how long and costly development already was on Oblivion. I very much doubt that if they were making that game on a disc with more capacity that they would have made the world larger. They didn’t even use up the entire DVD9. Oblivion is already a 100+ hour game with beautiful graphics, and it easily fits on a single disc.

So we have established that developers are not going to take the extra months and years to create enough game content to fill up Blu-Ray discs. So what about high resolution textures? At first it sounds like they could just use extremely large uncompressed textures in their games. That would certainly take up large amounts of space. After all, the majority of a games size is in textures. But people fail to realize that the Playstaion 3 only has 512mb total memory. 256mb of that can be used for textures. There is simply not enough memory to use uncompressed textures. Not to mention developers have to compress textures to avoid long level load times, which people already expect to be long for PS3 games.

Microsoft knows this, and since the very beginning they have been pushing advanced compression techniques. Whenever critics attacked the storage of DVD9, Microsoft has said time and time again that with advanced texture compression it won’t be an issue. We have started to see some of this just recently.

A few weeks ago at London’s Game Developers Conference (GDC), a company called Allegorithmic, claimed that they will be able to reduce texture file sizes in games by up to 70%. Bit-tech.net had an opportunity to check it out first hand.

Their new programs, that they hope development artists will soon be using as an industry standard, are called ProFX and MaP Zone 2. Their ambition is to keep the graphical quality of game textures at the same standards as current games, whilst dramatically reducing the amount of data required for the game to work.

The implications of such a technology would be far reaching. As the current trend of digital distribution gains momentum a huge emphasis is being placed on games being made smaller and thus downloadable quicker. Their claim is that the current tool of choice for most games artists, Adobe Photoshop, is not ideally suited to making textures for games.

I was doubtful of this technology; however the company ran a demo that persuaded me otherwise. In the demo they had a bathroom full of beautiful textures, then with the flick of a button the bathroom took a more hellish look – all the while the textures looked the equal of Half Life 2.

The next demo was of a game that is due to come out for the XBOX Live Arcade called ‘Roboblitz’. Due to the requirement to get the game under 50MB, the developers needed to keep the textures as small in filesize as possible. Using the new texture system the overall size for all the textures was less than 280KB – watching the game (which runs on the Unreal 3 engine) I was amazed.

Confused by the fact that I hadn’t heard about this technology before, I spoke to one of the men behind it directly – Dr Sébastien Deguy. He assured me that there were no catches with his system, that if a game contained 1GB of textures he would be able to reduce that to 300MB and lose no quality. When I asked why everyone wasn’t using the program at the moment he explained it was due to people needing to be retrained in learning a new system. He was optimistic however, that soon all games companies will be using their new texture tools.

And Allegorithmic is not the only company out there working on compression technology. There are quite a few out there that are doing some impressive work. Also, a few days ago Frank O’Connor, a staff member at Bungie Studios, had this to say about texture compression:

Everyone does and should use compression of some sort, not to save space, but to speed loading and smooth out the gamer’s experience. Compression techniques have advanced enough now that the resulting textures should and do look completely uncompressed to the average viewer.

Here is another thing to keep in mind. In an interview with Jim Cardwell, president of Warner’s home video division, he had this to say about the Blu-ray specification:

“We wanted the player to be capable of playing back a [9GB] high-definition red-laser disc, which we call BD-9,” says Cardwell. “[The disc] would have a high enough capacity for our movies, and it would have a lower cost than the [25GB] BD-25. The advantage would be lower costs to manufacture the disc, because it could be manufactured on existing [DVD production] lines. Certainly, most of our movies will fit on a BD-9. The issue will be how much enhanced content will we put on there. For basic movies, most will fit on BD-9.

Although the Blu-ray Disc Association has not formally announced the format, Cardwell reports that it has “been proposed and accepted by the BDA.”

So, a BD-9 disc is nothing more than a dual-layer DVD with roughly 9 GB of capacity, manufactured on the same processes, and read by a red laser… but still called a Blu-ray disc (thanks to using a different codec to decode the content). Capacity-wise, the disc is basically the same as a dual-layer DVD-9 (at 8.5 GB), but is cheaper to manufacture thanks to being made on a well-known and tested manufacturing process.

It’ll be very interesting to look back at the game discs from the PS3 launch and see just how many actually were “real” Blu-ray discs (25 GB+), and how many are BD-9 discs (~8.5-9 GB, or basically identical in size to dual-layer DVD-9). I would be willing to bet that most of them will be BD-9.

The only game that I can think of that has been reported to take up a lot of space (22 GB) is Resistance. But in an interview with Un-official Playstation Magazine, the developer stated that the 22 GB “game” size was made up of localized content. So instead of having an English version of the game, a French version, a Japanese version, and so on stored on separate discs, all of that localized content is simply being bundled on one disc. So, the disc capacity isn’t being used in any meaningful way to improve the game. I am willing to bet that after the game is released, and people are poking around the file system, they will find that there isn’t any reason the game couldn’t have shipped on a DVD9.

Also consider this comment made by Ozymandias:

Since then it appears that the drive has been upgraded to a 2x drive, which would enable transfer rates of 9 MB/s. Assuming a full 50 GB Blu-ray disc, at this speed you’d need just over 90 minutes to read the entire disc through memory. Of course, you can’t fit all of that data into system memory at the same time, so you’ll either be streaming a great deal (hard even with faster optical drives) and/or caching data to the hard drive. There’s a reason the PS3 is so expensive – once Sony committed to Blu-ray as a corporate strategy, they were also forced to bundle the hard drive in every box to help mitigate slow disc data transfer rates. PS3 games need that hard drive to load in any reasonable time – just look at the PSP for an example of the effects of a slow optical drive on game loading times.

One last thing to think about. Put yourself in the shoes of a game developer faced with loading game assets into memory from a slow optical drive. You’re going to have to be clever and find ways to try and make sure the data is laid out on the disc where it’s most quickly accessible. You might do things like burn chunks of data to the disc in multiple locations to cut down on seek times, or duplicate assets such as level textures in each level’s package so they can be read serially on level load. In other words, you might start storing data inefficiently and duplicatively to better conform to the drive’s poor speed characteristics. It’s not too hard to see how a game could quickly balloon in size while not adding any actual value or gameplay.

So, is Blu-Ray really big deal when it comes to games? Should you believe the hype Sony is putting out? Hopefully after reading this the answer is clearly “no”.

Games

Xbox Live Arcade Wish List

On Oct 09, 2006 7:33 pm, by NeutralX2

So, I have been trying to think of some games that I would love to see show up on Xbox Live Arcade. The first game that came to mind was Duke Nukem 3D. Ever since playing Doom on Live Arcade, I have been wishing for a port of Duke 3D. I have a copy of the game, but I am having a hard time getting it to run on Windows XP. Plus, Xbox Live gameplay for Duke 3D would completely rock. Unfortunately this has already been considered by 3D Realms, and the chances of it coming out are not too good. Joe Siegler, a staff member, had this to say about it on the 3D Realms forum:

“I talked about this yesterday with George, he’s all up for the idea, but we don’t have the time to do the port ourselves, plus there’s the issue of whether Microsoft would really want it. Don’t just assume they would, there’s a big submissions procedure to go through. Plus their release schedule is booked solid for quite awhile now, even if we delivered it to them today, I would imagine it wouldn’t come out for awhile anyway.” – Joe Siegler

But still, it looks like there is a chance. I will keep hoping for Duke 3D to come out, but I wont hold my breath.

The second game I would love to see on the Arcade is Raptor: Call of the Shadows. Most of you probably don’t know what this game is, but it’s a top down vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up. I don’t think there are any games of this style on Live Arcade (with the exception of Time Pilot, but that plays pretty different), so I think it would sell pretty well.

I also would not mind seeing Ikaruga on Live Arcade as well. I am not sure if they could manage to fit it within the space requirements, so perhaps an Ikaruga sequel made specifically for Live Arcade. That would be amazing if that happened.

There are quite a few others that I would want, like Hexen, but those three are the ones I would like to see the most. What games would you guys like to see?

Games Video 1

Red vs. Blue: Season 5

On Oct 06, 2006 8:32 pm, by NeutralX2

Red vs. Blue Season 5 started a few days ago. The first episode is pretty good. Season 4 had a great ending, so I have been waiting for Season 5 to start for a while. You can get the latest episode here.

If you have never heard of Red vs. Blue, the series chronicles the story of two opposing teams of soldiers fighting a civil war in the middle of a desolate box canyon, in a parody of first-person shooter games, military life, and science fiction films. According to Simmons, one of the Red Team soldiers, each team’s base exists only in response to the other team’s base. Although both teams generally dislike each other and have standing orders to defeat their opponents and capture their flag, neither team’s soldiers are usually motivated to fight each other. Teammates have an array of eccentric personalities and often create more problems for each other than for their enemies. Initially intended to be a short series of six to eight episodes, the project quickly and unexpectedly achieved significant popularity following its April 1, 2003 Internet premiere. Therefore, Rooster Teeth decided to extend the series.

If you missed the first four seasons, I uploaded them all to Google Video. You can find them here.