61 Frames Per Second : far cry 2

Returning to the Return of the Castle Wolfenstein Returned: This Time It’s Just Plain Ol’ Wolfenstein

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:30:00 GMT

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

There must be a considerable amount of tension around Raven Software’s offices as they prepare Wolfenstein, the latest sequel to the id Software’s grand-pappy of all first-person shooters. After all, the once-cool practice of gunning down Nazis with a beefy chain gun isn’t the uncommon gaming experience it once was. Then there’s Raven, whose talent is eclipsed not only by their recent history of releasing numerous interchangeable genre titles, but also living in the shadow of id themselves. That isn’t necessarily bad news for Wolfenstein, but it does have the effect of keeping expectations firmly in check. Seeing it at Activision’s New York City preview party certainly didn’t raise those expectations. A few minutes of watching Wolfenstein gave a bad impression: another generic World War II shooter with less-than-stellar graphics and straightforward action.

It’s when I stuck around for a few more minutes that things started to get odd. For example, there were suddenly Nazis flying through the air in slow motion. Turned out to be anti-gravity. That’s kind of weird. Then there was B.J. Blazkowicz using a magical amulet to “see” Nazis on the other side of a wall. And then shoot them. Not so conventional anymore. And that’s when the Veil descended. Apparently, B.J.’s fancy new amulet — picked up early in the game — allows BJ to slip into an “otherworld” at will, a place/state-of-being called the Veil. The makeup of the world remains roughly the same within the Veil, though everything is cast in aqua-green hues and spectral bee-like insects fly around lazily, gathering energy. The Veil is ethereal. Other. (Think Tron.) When inside the Veil, weak points are highlighted on enemies, an essential feature when dealing with larger, armored soldiers. The single heavy I saw during the demo was a sort Brotherhood of Steel/Imperial Stormtrooper amalgam armed with a weapon shooting blasts of the green energy blanketing the Veil. BJ will also need to slip into the Veil to access the amulet’s magical abilities; a time-slowing power was shown, but the on-screen amulet’s four slots suggest more Nazi-killin’ powers.

Put aside BJ’s supernatural powers and you’re still left with rote Nazi-killin’, right? Wrong. Wolfenstein is set in the city of Eisenstadt, an open environment situated around a central hub, with new areas opening as the game progresses. What’s more, there are three non-Nazi factions populating the city: Nazi resistance fighters, scholars who harbor an interest in the amulet and a shadowy black market. Players will be able to pick up optional missions to earn money, which can then be spent on the black market to upgrade or buy weapons. But the open world and non-linear play is not enough to justify the game’s existence. There needs to be an immersive experience attached to it, one that leaves room for player-tailoring to co-exist with a scripted storyline. This is what made Far Cry 2 stand-out from the over-crowded FPS field. It is, however, encouraging to see Raven stepping away from the generic corridor shooter towards the faux-RPG trappings of their Jedi Knight series. Time – and additional previews and hands-on sessions – will tell, but first impressions at least point to a new direction for the Wolfenstein series. That’s saying something for a series that created its genre.

Related links:

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John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Open World

Whatcha Playing: Far Cry 2

Joe Keiser — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

I know, I know. This is a week of enormous wallet-destroying power, and I should probably be playing Street Fighter IV or something. I’m saving myself for tonight’s release of Noby Noby Boy, actually, but in the meantime I’ll be enjoying something a little bit more mainstream. Surely you won’t deny me the pleasure.

And besides, Far Cry 2 is about the best the industry is currently offering to the typical testosterone-filled gaming male at the moment. It’s a confident and meticulously designed work that is happy to eschew the status quo for a better way. Here’s why I think Far Cry 2 is the future of the shooter.*

*: Note that I am talking about the single player elements of first-person shooters only. The internet would have you believe that most people play their shooters online these days. This is a lie. The internet is where people play online shooters, so it’s not exactly an unbiased sample.

Almost every major single FPS built in the last decade is based on the scripted linear rollercoaster design of Half-Life. By my estimate this style of game played itself out in, oh, 2007 or so. It will probably take the industry another five years to realize this. Far Cry 2 realizes this right now (okay, four months ago) and finds a strong solution in open-world design.

Open-world shooters, like everything under the sun, aren’t new. 2007’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl nailed down a great formula for the genre, and 2001’s Operation Flashpoint also played with option-filled environments and non-linear mission structure. The legacy almost certainly goes back further, but Far Cry 2 is the first one that ranks as anything more than a fringe success and really paves a way forward for the genre.

It’s not a sandbox game. Instead of giving the player a great variety of things to do, Far Cry 2 relies on the visceral nature of handling weapons from a first-person viewpoint to keep the player involved: it’s actually a purer shooter than STALKER, which also had an ever-present inventory management system. Far Cry 2 does know one thing that STALKER also knew, however: that the best way to keep an open world interesting is not to fill it with varied activity, but to make the world itself cohesive and believable, with a long and relevant history and a real sense of place. Build a place players actually want to explore, and you barely need anything else.

Which isn’t to say it’s easy to give a player that, but Far Cry 2 manages it. The fictional African nation it takes place in feels endlessly exotic or ugly, lived in or untouched—every part of it gives you a sense of being in a real place. The game draws a linear story through this vast world, but experiencing it as a player is a more meandering experience as the war or your radar pulls you off the road and towards your next genuinely valuable conflict diamond. It feels completely different from and far fresher than something in the Half-Life vein, where you walk down a corridor while an action movie plays out around you.

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John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Open World

John Constantine — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The strange thing about the way we delineate time is that repetition — twelve hours, seven days, twelve months, rinse, wash, repeat — tends to make everything feel cyclical. Come January, we stare forward, looking at the flow of hours to weeks like a one-way street full of fresh landmarks, memories, and conversations. But when we end up back at December, there’s a collective and pervasive sense of déjà vu, an overwhelming feeling that we’re suddenly back in the exact same shoes we were the last time it was December, and we take stock of everything we saw upon that fresh stretch of road as though we’ve come back to the start. We weigh the fruits of time’s passage and immediately compare them to what came before. Maybe that’s why those of us so obsessed with pop culture, who worship at the altar of creation and consumption, gravitate towards retrospective lists; we just can’t seem to help looking back right before we look forward again.

I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out just how to quantify the videogames of 2008, wrestling back and forth with just what to say. There are games that, by the end of my time with them, I downright loathed, that I never wanted to play again, but that I couldn’t shake out of my brain thanks to one aspect of their design. I never managed to finish Grand Theft Auto IV because I was so repulsed by its schizophrenic depiction of character when it put so much emphasis on story (and more on that later.) GTAIV’s Liberty City, though, is something I still think about on an almost daily basis. It is one of the most beautiful and strange creations I’ve ever seen, something more than a photograph, sculpture or film thanks to the way you are allowed to inhabit it. The game’s goals are frustrating to achieve, its characters more personality than people, and its story is at odds with its interactivity. But its world is astounding, just real enough to be familiar, and just other enough to warrant exploring it when its real world inspiration is right outside your door.

I hated Grand Theft Auto IV by the time I stopped playing it, but I have to bring it up here because 2008 was the year of the Open World for me. The GTA model – providing the player with an interactive space they’re free to move about, choosing traditionally structured tasks at their leisure to “win” the game – is a staple of 21st century gaming that finally came of age. Before this year, the sandbox game was the domain of action-shooters (Crackdown, Mercenaries) and Western RPGs (Elder Scrolls) exclusively, but the past twelve months were nicely bookended by games that broadened the sandbox horizon. In January, Burnout Paradise took GTA’s driving and insane stunts into the world of pure racing in a lush fantasy cityscape and No More Heroes had you play around in a maddening post-modern commentary on the form, stripping mundane side-missions of their artifice and transforming them into chores. This fall, Far Cry 2 finally nailed the open-world in first-person and, for the first time since Half-Life, raised the bar for immersion in both of the genres it’s founded on.

Grand Theft Auto IV, No More Heroes, Far Cry 2 and Burnout Paradise all share more than an open world structure and driving mechanics; they’re all incredible games in spite of their actual goals. Open world games of the past bored me because their spaces were never gripping enough to be engaging beyond their concrete missions/levels, but these games are all worth playing just to be inside of them. Rainy-days along the river in GTAIV, going faster and faster down a highway in Burnout, spotting some gazelles on the edge of the desert in Far Cry, and realizing that Goichi Suda is actually fucking with you when you wipeout after a hard turn on your motorcycle in No More Heroes’ Santa Destroy. These are the moments that will stick with me by the time I come full-circle again in December of 2009.

Games of 2008: No More Heroes, Far Cry 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Burnout Paradise

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Heading Home: Revisiting the Curious Case of Playstation Home

John Constantine — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Sony said it was coming before 2008 breathed its last and, hey, here it is. Playstation Home will finally be open to the public as of tomorrow, close to two years after it was announced and a full year after its original release window. But even though PS3 owners across the world will finally be able to download Home 1.0, it still isn’t abundantly clear what they’re going to be able to do in Home once they get there. Here are the things I am one-hundred percent certain you will be able to do in Home on Thursday:

- Make yourself an avatar. You will have proportions far more human than those of your Mii or Xbox Experience caricature, but your new digital proxy will be all the more terrifying, its face fresh from Uncanny Valley Farms. You will also be able to dress in the simple attire of a Diesel Jeans catalog model.

- You will, apparently, be able to drink Red Bull. Digital Red Bull. You will drink it on Red Bull Island where you can fly a Red Bull plane. Or something.

- You can hang out in a Far Cry 2 lounge. As to whether or not you can ruthlessly exploit the diamond trade or dig bullets out of your fashionable avatar while hanging out in said lounge, I cannot say. None of the other announced lounges will be available for digital chillin’ and/or illin’.

- You can open a club if you like. For money. How do you customize said club? Who knows. How much will it cost? Couldn’t say. What can you do there? Dance. Walk around. Stuff.

- You can play billiards and bowl with people, which is nice. Twenty years ago, you used to pay fifty dollars for videogame pool. As long as these games play better than they do in Grand Theft Auto IV, they will be nice diversions.

- You and a friend can meet up at a fake movie theater and watch a new trailer for Watchmen. Yay.

- Talk to people via text. I have no idea if it has voice support.

These are the things you can do in Home. Beyond the billiards and bowling, none of this sounds particularly fun or essential. In fact, since Playstation Home isn’t the default place you go to when you turn on the PS3, I’m skeptical as to whether or not people will even use it.

For the Playstation owners reading, are you going to download Home? What are your expectations?

Here’s hoping that, by the end of the day tomorrow, we actually know what the point of all this is.

Related links:

The Curious Case of Playstation Home
SCEE Playstation Day 2K8 Roundup: Killzone 2, Home, Little Big Planet Dated
This Week's Releases: Too Many Damned Games!

The Big, Scary Numbers of Piracy in 2008

Joe Keiser — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been looking at this list TorrentFreak created, the one of the top ten most pirated games of 2008 according to BitTorrent tracking. It is utterly fascinating, but not, as many people latched onto, because Spore is the number one most pirated game of the year. That’s an eye-rolling obvious thing to reveal, the same as if you were told The Dark Knight was the pirated movie of 2008 (Surprise! It is). So the most heavily marketed PC game of the year was the one the most people tried to get for free. So what?

No, what’s interesting is how gigantic some of these numbers are. I’m going to go ahead and say this list is almost certainly low-balling the number of people who pirated these games, as only taking into account a certain number of well-managed trackers, as TorrentFreak did, leaves out the private trackers and people who got lucky on bad trackers. And of course, there are the people who went to their local unmarked van for a clandestine exchange using unmarked bills, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s assume these numbers represent a conservative estimate.

It was predicted by people paid to predict such things that Spore would sell about 2 million copies in September, and while EA hasn’t released the actual numbers if that turns out to be true that would mean Spore is doing okay. In this case, we’ll define “okay” as “more copies are being sold than being stolen” because things are quickly about to get not okay.

The Sims 2, between its top three selling versions and expansions, sold about 1.2 million copies in 2007, about on par with the number of people that stole it in 2008.

The PC version of Assassin’s Creed was a known piracy debacle. It was pirated before the game hit shelves, but the pirated version was built by Ubisoft to crash. It was excessively downloaded anyway, of course, and was blasted in forums for being unreliable; sales were mutilated, to the tune of just 40,000 moved. That’s a 2675% piracy rate, people. On conservative numbers.

Crysis sold 1.5 million copies, though odds are good that a fair percentage of that moved in 2007, again comparing unfavorably to the piracy rate. Far Cry 2 has sold a million copies as well, but it’s a certainty that the vast majority of those sold on console—again unfavorable.

It would be utterly foolish to imagine that this vast amount of piracy on PC is some kind of new event. It’s probably always been this bad. But there have never been independently sourced piracy estimates that could be compared to available sales data. Now there are, and doing the comparison is chilling.

Here are the numbers:

1. Spore - 1,700,000
2. The Sims 2 - 1,150,000
3. Assassins Creed - 1,070,000
4. Crysis - 940,000
5. Command & Conquer 3 - 860,000
6. Call of Duty 4 - 830,000
7. GTA San Andreas - 740,000
8. Fallout 3 - 645,000
9. Far Cry 2 - 585,000
10. Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 - 470,000

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Where is Prototype?

John Constantine — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:30:00 GMT

The open world game, or sandbox if you prefer, isn’t a genre any longer. At this point, it’s just another method of structuring other genres in a way that gives you more freedom in how to play the game. Open world games aren’t GTA clones anymore; they’re just games with a modern version of the ol’ Mega Man boss select screen. It’s been neat over the past couple of years to watch the open world platform branch out. Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed, Burnout Paradise, Far Cry 2, hell, Spider-Man; all very different games that let you do whatever the hell you please in their world (to a degree) on your way to completion.

One of 2008’s more promising games, Radical Entertainment’s Prototype, is a violent action game with a nice open world foundation. It looks gruesome and brutish but it also has some neat ideas behind it, particularly its brand of character customization. Alex Mercer, the genetically altered amnesiac protagonist with a spooky past, eats his felled foes and gains all of their characteristics, abilities, and memories. This lets you come up with all sorts of horrific, bombastic ways to destroy things but it also lets you blend in with crowds, a nice twist on the open world formula of manipulating hordes of NPCs. Sounds cool, no? As of last April, Prototype was all but done, ready to ship after one more coat of polish. Then, days after it was last previewed, Sierra announced that it was getting delayed until 2009. Then Activision killed almost all of Sierra’s upcoming line-up after their merger with Vivendi. Activision did decide to keep Prototype, but no one’s seen hide nor hair of it since.

Shane Bettenhausen has intimated on the 1UP Yours podcast that the game’s being dramatically altered in order to score a Teen rating from the ESRB. Of course, Activision laid off close to one-hundred Radical Entertainment employees back in August. Losing half your work force makes it hard to finish a game that’s undergoing a last minute redesign. Activison’s homepage for Prototype says it came out on September 15th. It didn’t. So where the hell is Prototype? Who knows!

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Not Quite 4D, But Close: The History of 3D Gaming

John Constantine — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Videogames were born into a flat, two-dimensional perspective and they are bound to an inherently two-dimensional delivery system, but, from their inception half a century ago, they have been trying their damndest to simulate a bonafide world of depth. For half their lifetime, games have let us move into a world instead of just on it and, today, the simulation can be almost unsettlingly real. The racing tracks of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, the jungles and glaciers of Crysis, not to mention Far Cry 2’s African savannah, all feel like our world, even when they don’t behave exactly like it. After all, cars tend to crumple when they run into other cars, and grass tends to bend and warp when you step on it. (Not to mention the lack of robots and aliens in real life. Oh, and getting shot will kill you, not force you to hunt for a medpack.) But even full fantasy landscapes like the lush solar-systems-in-miniature of Super Mario Galaxy create a familiar sense of space. It has been a long, difficult journey to get to this point, though. Edge Online is running a fascinating, densely technical, history of 3D in games and it’s an eye-opening read. The only thing missing from the overview is a footnote in gaming history, but is important all the same.

Rick Dyer, the designer behind Don Bluth’s lushly animated Dragon’s Lair, made Hologram Time Traveler in 1991. Time Traveler sucked. Its timed button presses meant to be gameplay were unforgiving to say the least. But the technology created some impressive three-dimensional illusions. An FMV game with actors playing cowboys, Indians, and all sorts of baddies, it was projected through a CRT television surrounded by an enormous half-dome mirror that turned the characters into mock-holographic objects. Why was this crappy little curiosity an important moment in 3D game design? Because if Miyamoto has his way, holograms will be back in a big way come Wii3.

Check out the article right here.

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