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Gaming

Come play Absolute Zero

Over the past cou­ple months, a friend of mine has been cre­at­ing a fun Left 4 Dead cam­paign called Ab­solute Zero. The first map is done, and the sec­ond map is com­ing along nicely. We cre­ated some nice HD videos to show it off to every­body:

• Map 1—Mil­i­tary Base Walk­through Part 1
• Map 1—Mil­i­tary Base Walk­through Part 2
• Map 2—Ice Cav­erns Progress Up­date

If you want to playtest map 1 with us, down­load the beta and come join the cam­paign's Steam group.

More Ice Caverns updates

A new pair of videos is out, this time show­cas­ing an an­cient tomb in Soul's Ab­solute Zero cam­paign for Left 4 Dead. The area's de­sign draws from a lot of an­cient civ­i­liza­tions to cre­ate a unique yet fa­mil­iar look that makes you imag­ine what it was like in its orig­i­nal state. Even though it's not done yet, the ar­chi­tec­ture still looks pretty awe­some!

Dur­ing the mak­ing of the video we couldn't stop play­ing around as hunters. The area quickly re­minded me of some of the freestyle trick maps for Quake where there is no par­tic­u­lar goal, only at lot of stuff to play with. We began mak­ing tricks more and more com­plex and were hav­ing so much fun that I recorded a few of them for the start of the video. De­spite con­sist­ing of a mere three pounces, the mid­dle jump was by far the hard­est to pull off, re­quir­ing snap aim, tim­ing, and air con­trol all within a quick few sec­onds.

Valve's orig­i­nal idea for Left 4 Dead was to make it a game of who sur­vived the longest, not who sur­vived. They didn't go through with that idea, but it's one that we've al­ways liked. One of the first de­ci­sions Soul made when cre­at­ing this cam­paign is that it would be much harder than Valve's cam­paigns. Even ex­pe­ri­enced teams shouldn't ex­pect to sur­vive with­out some re­ally ex­cel­lent strat­egy and team­work. I know a lot of play­ers seem to think that fun means win­ning and win­ning means never dying and fin­ish­ing with a score of 8000 to 300, so this map might not ap­peal to all crowds. For peo­ple who enjoy a real chal­lenge, I think this cam­paign will have a lot to offer.

If any map­pers, mod­el­ers, or tex­ture artists are out there, Soul could use your help! He's cho­sen such a dif­fer­ent art de­sign that most of Left 4 Dead's pre-made stuff isn't going to work.

The first level of the map can cur­rently be down­loaded from L4Dmaps. This sec­ond level is about 80% of the way to­ward a basic beta ver­sion.

Playing a lot of Section 8

A month or so ago, I learned that an ac­quain­tance of mine from a few years ago had got a job at TimeGate Stu­dios mak­ing maps for their new title, Sec­tion 8. I missed the closed beta, but had enough fun with the open one to make me want to ac­quire the full game when it came out.

Ap­par­ently about half of their dev team are hard­core Tribes play­ers, and to a de­gree it shows. The maps, while not as big as the ones in Tribes, are vast and open com­pared to most mod­ern games. Play­ers are able to cus­tomize their sol­dier with two guns, two sec­ondary util­i­ties, and ten points to dis­trib­ute across a num­ber of pas­sive powerups. Play­ers also get a shield, a jet pack, su­per-sprint­ing, and lock-on.

Sec­tion 8 is a cap­ture-the-point game with a twist—as play­ers start to earn points for var­i­ous achieve­ments, the game au­to­mat­i­cally starts up mini-ob­jec­tives to com­plete. This turns out to be a great way to keep things chal­leng­ing and fresh, while giv­ing play­ers a good rea­son to come out of their bases. If you tur­tle in a base and don't com­plete your ob­jec­tives, the other team will win. This gives the game a higher learn­ing curve than most other games, but most should only take a few days to get it down.

Sec­tion 8 is a mul­ti­player game, so I'd cau­tion you against buy­ing it if you're ex­pect­ing a good sin­gle-player story. Some sites men­tions that it has a sin­gle-player cam­paign, but it re­ally only con­sists of mul­ti­player with bots tied to­gether in an hour long tu­to­r­ial story where an un­seen gen­eral is yelling rea­sons to com­plete all the ob­jec­tives you'd nor­mally com­plete in mul­ti­player. But that's okay—the real fun is in the mul­ti­player.

Spawn­ing is a unique ex­pe­ri­ence in this game. You get hurled out of ships in orbit and are able to break mid-air to ad­just your land­ing po­si­tion. With a bit of skill and luck, you can ac­tu­ally land on en­e­mies for a very sat­is­fy­ing in­stant kill. To com­bat you land­ing in enemy ter­ri­tory, anti-air comes stan­dard in all bases and play­ers can de­ploy more if they choose. Anti-air be­comes cru­cial to game­play—if yours gets taken down, the en­e­mies will start to swarm in right on top of you. Play­ers drop­ping down within an anti-air ra­dius will ei­ther be shot down or take heavy dam­age be­fore ever see­ing an­other player.

The maps will re­mind you a lot of Tribes. They are big and open, with 2-4 bases scat­tered around them. They all fea­ture dead zones defin­ing their bound­aries, which can change de­pend­ing on the max­i­mum num­ber of play­ers. The bases are pretty good, with an in­tri­cate fu­tur­is­tic de­sign. De­spite the large maps, the area in be­tween the bases are for the most part also well very de­tailed. The mini-ob­jec­tives will usu­ally take place in these areas, so you may end up spend­ing more time out­side of a base than in one.

Char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion is one of the cru­cial areas of the game. You get ten points to spread across var­i­ous pas­sive power-ups mod­i­fy­ing your armor, shield, at­tack strength, lock-on du­ra­tion and re­sis­tance, ac­cu­racy, and a lot of other things. This is prob­a­bly the biggest area to mas­ter—even after three weeks play­ing (two in the beta, one in final), I am still tweak­ing my pas­sives to bet­ter sup­port my play style. Sev­eral of them are very ob­vi­ous in their use­ful­ness, but oth­ers take a bit of play time to fully grasp.

Part of your load-out is two weapons. Un­like most games, Sec­tion 8 makes no dis­tinc­tion be­tween pri­mary and sec­ondary weapons—it lets you choose what­ever com­bi­na­tion you want, be it a pis­tol and knife or a ma­chine gun and mis­sile launcher. There are sev­eral weapons to choose from, but un­for­tu­nately there isn't much di­ver­sity be­tween them. If there is one area this game doesn't shine in, it's this. What we have now are ba­si­cally all your bor­ing stan­dard bul­let-based fu­tur­is­tic army weapons. Each varies in ac­cu­racy, shield pierc­ing abil­ity, and armor dam­age, but they're all just bor­ing stuff we've seen a thou­sand times be­fore. I would have liked to have seen some Tribes-in­spired en­ergy weapons.

One thing the game's weaponry took from Tribes is the pro­jec­tile-based guns, com­pared to games like Quake where the shot­gun was hitscan (in­stant-hit). Ask any Quake Cus­tom-TF player, and they will con­firm the $25 shot­gun can often be for­mi­da­ble against the $3000 rocket launcher if the wielder has good enough aim. In Sec­tion 8, all of the bul­lets fired are ac­tual pro­jec­tile tracer rounds that take some small time to reach their tar­get. This is one of my fa­vorite fea­tures, and I'm often dis­ap­pointed that more games don't use it. Forc­ing play­ers to lead their shots in­tro­duces a whole new di­men­sion of skill to the game.

The two util­i­ties you pick for your class are also pretty im­por­tant. These in­clude grenades, mor­tars, sen­sors, re­pair kits, and some oth­ers. Some of these pro­vide a ser­vice to your whole team, so with some good or­ga­ni­za­tion you could get a re­ally un­stop­pable squad. The grenades are ba­si­cally proxy mines that you throw. They stick to walls, ve­hi­cles, and blow up if they get near an enemy. The mor­tars are like pre­ci­sion MIRVs, let­ting you drop con­cen­trated groups of ex­plo­sions that are great against pretty much every­thing.

There are a few things all play­ers get. The first is a su­per-sprint, let­ting you fairly quickly travel the long dis­tances of the map. You can use it to ram en­e­mies, tak­ing off their shield. The sec­ond is a jet pack with about five sec­onds of use be­fore recharg­ing. It is ba­si­cally only use­ful for jump­ing small hur­dles, or a quick large jump onto build­ings in con­junc­tion with sprint.

The third is prob­a­bly the most con­tro­ver­sial fea­ture of the game: lock-on. While many mul­ti­player games have aim-bot cheats made for them, it's ac­tu­ally built into Sec­tion 8 as a slow charg­ing 5-10 sec­ond lock-on abil­ity. I've no­ticed a lot of mediocre play­ers have grown to de­pend on it, and all the good play­ers take ad­van­tage of this by de­vel­op­ing strate­gies to make oth­ers waste their lock-on be­fore jump­ing in with a good aim. They de­serve some major props for cre­at­ing a well bal­anced aim-bot that doesn't feel to­tally lame.

As you com­plete ob­jec­tives, frag en­e­mies, and cap­ture points, you will be awarded with money to spend on de­ploy­ables. You can buy sup­ply de­pots, tur­rets, mechs, tanks, and anti-air. All of these are very ef­fec­tive in their own ways, but for some rea­son many play­ers seem to for­get to de­ploy any­thing until the match is al­most over.

The game does have some flaws that will hope­fully be patched soon. Like sev­eral Games For Win­dows Live games be­fore it, Sec­tion 8 has plenty of peo­ple un­able to launch it due to out­dated GFWL in­stalls. The game pulls down servers from the mas­ter list very slowly over an XBox-en­crypted link. The in-game voice chat doesn't fea­ture au­to­matic gain, mak­ing most voices get drowned out by the ac­tion. The per­sis­tent stats sys­tem looks pretty cool but has been plagued with is­sues since the launch. Servers seem to be in­fre­quently un­sta­ble, some­times crash­ing or boot­ing play­ers. A few of the servers I've con­nected to seemed to lose sync, caus­ing jumps as every­thing cor­rected it­self every few sec­onds. Oddly enough none of these flaws ex­isted in the open beta, mak­ing me won­der if the GFWL in­te­gra­tion, which wasn't in the beta, had any­thing to do with it.

Flaws aside, I'm very happy with this game. There's a lot of fun to be had, and it de­liv­ers one of things I want most in a game: a large scale of skill that isn't reach­able after only a few weeks of play­ing. Is it worth $50? I'm not sure there's enough con­tent—8 maps—for me to say so. Maybe wait until it's $30 or $40. I'm hop­ing they re­lease the map ed­i­tor and en­able mods. It's got a lot of po­ten­tial for some good player-made con­tent.

What the L4D2 boycott means to me

With over 40,000 peo­ple in the Left 4 Dead 2boy­cott group, there are bound to be a lot of vary­ing rea­sons for why they're there. The pop­u­lar one is about past promises un­ful­filled, which I agree with whole­heart­edly. I've also got is­sues with the gen­eral qual­ity of sup­port we've got from Valve.

Lack of content

One major nit­pick I have with most of the boy­cott com­mu­nity is that a lot of peo­ple con­sider new con­tent to be "free up­dates". A lot of us paid $50 for a game with very lit­tle con­tent with the ex­pec­ta­tion, due to ex­plicit state­ments from Valve, that we would be get­ting more. To me, this means I have al­ready paid for this new con­tent with my ini­tial $50—it is not a free up­date. Con­sider it a pre-or­der.

Call­ing it free just gives the im­pres­sion that any new con­tent is a gift of good will from Valve, which makes a lot of peo­ple sound like whin­ers with silly ex­pec­ta­tions of get­ting every­thing for free. This is sup­ported by the way the media has been re­port­ing it—nearly all men­tions of the boy­cott has at­trib­uted it to whiny kids want­ing stuff for free.

So far, two minor up­dates have come out.

In the first up­date, we got the two old cam­paigns re­leased for ver­sus mul­ti­player. This amounted to adding in­vis­i­ble walls, very slightly re­struc­tur­ing some areas to be more bal­anced, and adding some climb spots for in­fected. The sec­ond up­date, called the "Sur­vival pack", added a Sur­vival mode where you see how long you can last against hoards of en­e­mies. This added a new sur­vival-only map and again very slightly mod­i­fied all the old ones. Un­for­tu­nately most of us have found Sur­vival to be a re­mark­able fail­ure with very mo­not­o­nous game­play, a very quick curve to mas­ter, and vir­tu­ally no re­playa­bil­ity.

How much new con­tent is enough con­tent to ful­fill the oblig­a­tion from those promises? This is an­other point where peo­ple have dif­fer­ing ideas. I could per­son­ally care less about new char­ac­ters, sto­ries, or achieve­ments. New weapons can be cool to de­gree, but they would need to be a real game-changer, like the grav­ity gun was in Half-Life 2, for me to care much. For new con­tent in Left 4 Dead, I was mainly ex­pect­ing my $50 to pay for an­other two or three full-sized, full-fea­tured cam­paigns.

Valve re­cently an­nounced a "Crash Course" cam­paign for Left 4 Dead. I'm re­ally hop­ing they de­signed it with all the ex­pe­ri­ences and flaws of the cur­rent maps in mind. One in­ter­est­ing quote:

…the pri­mary goal of "Crash" is to de­liver a com­plete Ver­sus mode ex­pe­ri­ence in just 30 min­utes, re­sult­ing in a stream­lined ver­sion of the game's ex­ist­ing Ver­sus cam­paigns.

I can't help but feel this is mar­ket­ing-speak that means "We wanted to spend as lit­tle money as pos­si­ble con­sid­er­ing we've got a se­quel about to come out, so we built a small cam­paign that should re­lease us from our oblig­a­tions of more con­tent". Sigh.

Lack of support

Any­one who plays Left 4 Dead will be able to tell you how rid­dled with bugs it is, and how slow Valve is to fix them. The issue is com­pounded by Valve's veil of se­crecy around de­vel­op­ment, be­cause play­ers don't know if Valve is work­ing on a fix or has even ac­knowl­edged some­thing is hap­pen­ing. With how lit­tle sup­port the game has got to fix its flaws, I can't re­ally feel com­fort­able think­ing Valve will be any more com­pe­tent with Left 4 Dead 2.

One ex­am­ple that I see in nearly every sin­gle game is 1-4 play­ers are kicked from a game within a few min­utes of start­ing, get­ting a "No steam logon" error that no doubt has to do with poorly im­ple­mented DRM. This is a pretty glar­ing bug that has been around since the ini­tial re­lease, with no fix in sight. An­other is that games tend to get "lost" in Valve's mas­ter servers. In pretty much every game, new play­ers will ran­domly stop com­ing in to re­place old ones. Some­times it re­cov­ers in 10-15min, but usu­ally it doesn't.

A lot of maps have se­ri­ous ex­ploits. There are sev­eral areas that, with a lit­tle skill (or luck), an in­fected player can in­stantly kill a sur­vivor. There are ways for sur­vivors to skip or out-run crescendo events, which are sup­posed to be a major game­play el­e­ment in­tro­duc­ing a tem­po­rary chaotic chal­lenge. In areas you can't out­right skip, there is al­most al­ways a spot where sur­vivors can sit that makes it all but im­pos­si­ble for in­fected to deal any dam­age.

Left 4 Dead is in­cred­i­bly sen­si­tive to lag. Un­like most mod­ern games, and even old ones such as the nearly 13 year old Quake­world, Left 4 Dead has no sense of lag com­pen­sa­tion. When pounc­ing a sur­vivor, you need to ac­tu­ally make sure you land a lit­tle ahead of the player. Land­ing on the player will just re­sult in you slid­ing off as your client catches up to re­veal you didn't ac­tu­ally hit your tar­get. Other play­ers will just see some stu­pid hunter land­ing 10 feet off his mark. This isn't just some­thing that af­fects those of 200+ pings, ei­ther -- it is still stress­ful at pings lower than 100.

There are some gen­eral flaws with game­play too. "Rage­quit­ting" was cer­tainly not in­vented with Left 4 Dead, but it's the first time I've seen it be­come such a com­mon phrase. Los­ing in Left 4 Dead can be a very frus­trat­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, but there is noth­ing to bal­ance that out to keep peo­ple hav­ing fun. Be­cause there is no in­cen­tive to stay, the great ma­jor­ity of peo­ple will quit at the first sign of a loss. Some­times they will even "grief" the game by killing them­selves or their team­mates. Most days it takes two or three games of every­one quit­ting be­fore I find a de­cent one. Even then, the only prize for win­ning is often the enemy team quit­ting right be­fore you get to play your fun in­fected fi­nale round.

This could be par­tially solved by a bet­ter match­mak­ing sys­tem. The cur­rent one, when it ac­tu­ally works, makes no dis­tinc­tions be­tween skilled and new play­ers, good sports and quit­ters, and full ex­pe­ri­enced teams and ran­dom peo­ple. Valve has been promis­ing a new match­mak­ing sys­tem that solves at least that last point for a while now, but keeps push­ing it back. Even then, it wouldn't solve the prob­lem that the game just doesn't offer any rea­son for a los­ing team to stick around.

Street Fighter IV rocks on PC

Street Fighter IV came out a few days after I left to visit fam­ily and I've been chomp­ing at the bit to play it ever since. I came back home yes­ter­day, and it was the sec­ond thing I did after step­ping off the plane (the first being grab­bing some fish tacos at El Siete Mares).

Hav­ing played the ar­cade and 360 ver­sions, I knew what to ex­pect. You get a lot of your fa­vorite old char­ac­ters, in­clud­ing all the orig­i­nals from Street Fighter II and in­tro­duc­ing four new to this game. Game­play is a lot like Street Fighter III, with a big focus on strat­egy and the abil­ity to pull off dev­as­tat­ing but fin­ger-twist­ing com­bos. A new fea­ture I re­ally like is a chal­lenge mode that teaches you the spe­cial moves and com­bos your char­ac­ter can do, which re­ally helps when you're try­ing to learn how to use one of the new char­ac­ters or just re­fresh­ing your­self on an old one.

The only part still miss­ing is the World Tour mode of the home edi­tions of Street Fighter Alpha 3. As you fought through the ros­ter, the points you get would let you level up. This let you up­grade your char­ac­ter to shift be­tween a focus of power or de­fense, and let you se­lect power-ups that let you do longer and more com­plex com­bos. It cre­ated a more un­fair form of game­play com­pared to Ar­cade mode and prob­a­bly would have been too un­bal­anced for com­pet­i­tive game­play, but it was still a lot of fun and would have been great to have in IV.

One thing I was wor­ried about was how good the game would run on my sys­tem—from past ex­pe­ri­ence, games ported from con­sole to PC tend to run amaz­ingly slug­gish. With a sigh of re­lief, I put those wor­ries to rest when I saw the game not skip a beat when run with all the set­tings maxed out. The game even has a spe­cial PC-spe­cific set­tings screen with loads of ren­der­ing tweaks in­clud­ing the new Ink, Wa­ter­color, and Pos­ter­ize vi­sual styles.

I've been hav­ing a lot of fun in IV be­tween all the var­i­ous modes of play. It doesn't top Alpha 3 as my fa­vorite of the Street Fighter se­ries, but it's up above every­thing else!

Left 4 Dead…2?

Se­ri­ously—what the fuck?

De­spite promises to make enough new con­tent to make Left 4 Dead worth the $50 we paid for it, 8 months later it is still with­out con­tent, buggy as hell, full of map ex­ploits, and with ter­ri­ble match­mak­ing. Poor game de­sign has made being on a los­ing team in­cred­i­bly frus­trat­ing, mak­ing it so the only re­ward you get for win­ning is half or more of the other team ruins your game, ei­ther by quit­ting or by child­ishly killing them­selves to ruin your in­fected round— every sin­gle time.

Valve stopped car­ing about Left 4 Dead a while ago, and now we know why—Left 4 Dead 2 is com­ing out with all the con­tent that was promised for the first one. I don't think I'll be giv­ing them any money for this one.

Bear McCreary to score Capcom’s Dark Void

Bear Mc­Creary, com­poser of Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, let out the in­for­ma­tion today that he is scor­ing Cap­com’s new game, Dark Void. I re­mem­ber some videos of this com­ing out a while ago, from E3 maybe, and it looked like a pretty fun game but after so much time I had for­got­ten about it. These new videos make it look as awe­some as ever, though, and with Bear scor­ing it, you know the music will be amaz­ing!

If you like his music, con­sider post­ing at Cap­com where Bear is try­ing to get au­tho­riza­tion to re­lease a sound­track CD.