rebootied

EA MMA's AI is not up to the task of exposing the depth of the gameplay. I guess that's true of any fighting game. EA MMA has a fundamentally different model of the sport than the UFC game. I'm not ready to say better or worse, but I will say the game deserves to sell better than it has. I've played 30 career matches, and an online 4-fight card today versus a friend in Enn Zedland who has also played a mess of UFC with me. He took the time to school me on some of the subtleties, and I'm newly appreciative of its systems.

There is a clear rock-paper-scissors structure to the choices made between striking or improving position (including initiating a submission). There's a need for managing Stamina, because a fighter's current energy level directly affects striking power and likelihood of success during transition/submission attempts. No energy means -no- chance of transition or denying a transition. Or a sub, I guess, since they work to make them consistent.

So on the ground, when a fighter strikes for damage the targeted player can either defend the strike straight or with a directional parry which saps the attacker's Stamina. (Alternately the defender may interrupt the strike with a transition attempt, which seems identical to UFC).

Transition attempts are preceded by some telltale vibration in the defender's controller; it's pretty easy to deny a transition if it's just thrown without preamble. However, strikes landing also cause vibration feedback in the defender's controller. The attacker can use strikes to mask transition or sub attempts. It's possible to block a strike or deny a transition, but if you're denying a transition, a strike will get through. If you block a strike, a transition can get through.

And strikes seem to be a more strategically used element. It's pretty common to rock someone out of the gate with a single high-powered strike, and flash KOs from counterstriking are also standard. There doesn't seem to be a "wearing down" of the HP like there is in UFC. You can create momentary weaknesses in the stat pretty quickly, which can be overwhelmed, but if the defender gets to safety for any length of time, it appears to reset the value entirely. So individually landed strikes may count toward the final score if it goes to the judges, but it seems like there's no building up a weak spot for the duration of a fight.

Things I still don't like:
- Tiburon said "no button-mashing!" but the recovery from being rocked is a straight button-mash.
- Choke submissions are unfathomable. I'm never sure where I'm supposed to be pointing my stick. The sweet spot probably has some kind of behavior of its own which is further influenced by either fighter locating it, but I'm unable to discern its pattern.
- Presentation elements like non-interactive cutscene visuals and sound design are very limited, and what they do have seems sub-quality for an EA effort.
- Career mode gets boring after the top-tier championship is taken. It's less than halfway through the 40 fight run, if you're undefeated (and those first 10 fights are exceedingly easy), and from that point forward, there are no more big fights, no Special Moves to be learned if you're trained up. There isn't much to do.

I've played too damned much Red Dead Redemption multiplayer, and felt like checking out the widespread claim that the controls and animation simply make RDR a "Grand Theft Old West." -- so I went back and played a couple hours of GTA IV multiplayer. TLDR version: a number of marginal differences add up to make GTA IV un-fun.

Anyone complaining that the RDR controls and responsiveness are identical to GTA IV, just shut your bitch mouth now. Anyone who claims the engine is the same, shut your pie hole.

The first thing I noticed is the default camera is way, way pulled back from the character, making him a smaller part of the overall scene, and coupled with Euphoria or whatever the "leaning middleware" is, making it harder to navigate obstacles. Immediately after that, I noticed F R A M E R A T E. Fraaaaaaaaaame-raaaaaaaaaaaaaaate. Oh, it's rough. I spent a good portion of time just trying to get used to predicting where my camera would be pointed during aiming. Speaking of the GTA-style auto-aim, it is improved as well; the mechanic is largely similar, but the snap-to angle of tolerance is easier to deal with, especially considering the framerate problem.

Also noticed that all of the online menus are less easy to understand exactly what's happening. There is a big 5/16 in the upper right corner, though the participating player lobby is on the left side of the screen. The game shows your current total money/XP, but not what the next level's required total or remaining-to-next-level is.

Most egregiously unthinking when considering the online "community," the randomly chosen host has complete power over what rules are in effect for the next game, including traffic density, police presence, pedestrian presence, duration, what strength level of weaponry will appear, and the real game-changer: auto-aim on/off.

There's nothing like having some spastic 12 year old decide at the last instant that he wants a 10,000 XP limit game (no time limit!) only throwing Sticky Bombs. Or suddenly find out after 5 games with auto-aim on, that the most recent host has decided for none. I prefer RDR's multiplayer which has been crafted around predetermined weapon sets, which have separate but valid win conditions.

Most strangely of all, with all the effort which must have gone into Races, there are only points awarded for first and second place. I may have seen money for third, but there's not even a consolation prize for anything past third. That makes sense in terms of authentic race podium presentation, but not for an online game. There are so many ways they could have tossed out $50 or even $10 increments for items they're already measuring and reporting, encouraging people to play more: clear a checkpoint without taking car damage, fastest lap, fastest time to clear a checkpoint, beating your previous best time during any of those, airtime during jumps, completing the race... It's like they don't want anyone to play anything other than Deathmatch.

Oddly, more people were playing it than Deathmatch. There were always full lobbies for races, which emptied out as people quick halfway through the race if it looked even a little like they might not win. I was in a three person race where the other guy was clearly going to win, and he even held up for a little bit, just to keep it seeming competitive. He was either having fun, or just wondering why I didn't quit like everyone else.

My friend, Tox, supplied the subject line. It's true on a very deep level, but I'm trotting it out here to talk about game design decisions. Someone elsewhere stated that the difference between Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption is simply a matter of the setting. He felt that that "The Old West" is simply a better, more fresh environment than "urban crime," so GTA should be taken into the future, or the past or something which would pull it away from its traditional more-or-less modern setting. This is my rebuttal: ( kinda long )

Pre-completion review of Brütal Legend: It's very good, despite a couple of serious missteps. (Full disclosure: I have several friends at Double Fine, some of them very dear to me, and I am very clearly biased.)

The first misstep is the demo version of the game; it doesn't really show the game off for what it is. It touches only on two aspects of the core experience: epic, gorgeous, heavy-metal inspired environments, and third-person mêlée combat. There's a driving sequence that might as well be on rails, and a boss fight in an arena.

In actuality game is an open-world/driving action game (a la Grand Theft Auto), featuring story progression missions which usually focus on real-time strategy gameplay (think Warcraft). There are side-missions which consist of skirmish-level RTS with fixed unit resources (no resource management, but RTS controls apply), races, hunting, and a very occasional mission which focuses on using Team-Up powers in a new context. The depth of the gameplay is primarily invested in the RTS sequences, but the bulk of the time in singleplayer is in driving/exploring the world, and non-Stage-Battle missions.

This is really the second misstep: The game stops teaching the player about the complexity of the RTS portion of the game right about the point where it's needed the most. The game is fastidious about teaching the player how to attack, defend, drive a car, all stuff that could have been pretty well handled through trial-and-error. It doesn't teach the player about managing overall unit "Load" or improving their Stage (increasing their tech level). It gives very brief instruction on sending only a portion of massed forces out with individual orders. There's a really smart, complex game, an RTS reconsidered particularly for the controller-driven console market, but it isn't successfully conveyed to the player.

In fact, I'd been cruising through the singleplayer with nary a hiccup until "Dry Ice, Wet Graves" at which point I became seriously frustrated. The learning curve took an immediate turn for the vertical, leaving me running directly into a wall. I played it several times before looking up some strategy guides online, at which point it became fun. More fun that it had previously been, in fact -- a sudden insight into its depth of gameplay is all it took.

Part of me wonders if the expectation or hope was for BL to become a primarily multiplayer hit. Similarly to the way Halo smoothly brought multiplayer FPS genre to consoles, perhaps the desire was to bring RTS to the same audience. So far the attempts to do that have been overly complex; despite some clever button-chording, Universe at War and C&C Red Alert still focus on a tremendous complexity and depth, slavishly following the model of PC-based RTS games, allowing for homogeneous or heterogeneous unit grouping and orders. BL takes all of that and says "b'bye" and allows the AI to determine most unit behavior. This relegates the player to telling bulk groups where to go, thus freeing the player from unit-level micromanagement and replacing that activity with directly assaulting the enemy with their highly mobile, reasonably powerful avatar.

Imagine you're playing Warcraft or Starcraft, and your unit selection pointer, that gloved fist can travel over to the opponent's side of the map, dispelling fog-of-war as it moves, and then can begin flicking, snapping at the enemy units directly. Your "pointer" can diminish or destroy your opponent's forces. All I can say is "YAY!" Harrassing enemy troops is great, though if you linger too long your character can be destroyed, basically just resetting it to your own stage and awarding 50 Fans to your opponent.

Also, there should be a KLOS 95.5 sticker for The Druid Plow. Or whatever Schafer was listening to when he was in high school. But it was KLOS for Los Angeles, though I embraced my metalhood much later in life.

Along with having a fresh take on the RTS, the game tells an epic story through gorgeous cutscenes, fantastic voice acting and animation, and some spot dialog from interacting with the entourage at various points on the tour... er, "quest." On that animation thing, the facial animation is just spot on, start to finish. I recall some great stuff in Psychonauts as well, but much of this feels like a Pixar movie made for metalheads. Nothing's melodramatic and overblown, just believable, moving scenes with surprisingly endearing characters.

But artistically the thing that really gets me going is the world itself. I don't want to distract from what DF has accomplished with the RTS and story, but as an ex-world designer ("once and future world designer"?) I am very impressed with the world itself. Interviews prior to launch have mentioned they want the world to feel like it could be a heavy metal album cover, no matter where you look. I didn't know how they'd pull that off, but it's there. In spades.

More hours have been spent just tooling around and looking at the world than playing the game. I've looked for the "completion" items like Dragons and Legends and metal ViewMaster things, but I actually sit there in awe when the vista view is happening, and panning around the landmark for a larger view. These landmarks are all composed to make the world look like those old album covers which were so evocative of the feelings that the music brings. These need to be given away as wallpaper on the official site. They're gorgeous. They're so pretty in fact that I don't want to play the story missions, because I just want to drive around and absorb the feeling of being in the world. I was driving in my hot rod around the cliffs when the weather changed to a stormy night. Blue lightning flashed and lit the whole world in a stark, cerulean blue hue. Rain poured down as I tried to drive as close to the cliffs as possible, all the while the storm raged. It was just insanely beautiful.

I always mimic aalfonso when he posts these things, mainly because I don't think to do them until I see one of his.

Brütal Legend. HELLS YES. Acres of land to cover in a big daddy roth style hotrod with heavy metal spewing from its MOUTH OF METAL stereo system. Exploration with item unlocks. Gorgeous, gorgeous heavy metal album cover evocative landscapes (I want wallpapers!). Top notch voice acting and writing, constantly wavering on the line of loving and respecting heavy metal music, and laughing at all it entails. I'm worried that the game may end up being short, so I'm pacing myself rather than trying to get through it. I want to spend time in this world, but I tend to drop a game as soon as I finish the main story.

GTA IV: My disc cracked and died, and while I followed up with official replacement channels I grew more and more obsessed with being able to play the yet-unfinished DLC, Lost and Damned. Now with so many of my friends playing Ballad of Gay Tony, I'm extra stoked that Weezie transpacifically flung a copy my way. I played some of each DLC this weekend. So far the side characters in Gay Tony seem like a return to some of the more sophomoric humor of earlier GTAs rather than the "I wish I was Martin Scorsese" feeling of IV.

The Beatles: Rock Band was out in full force during our Halloween party this weekend. Lots of fun singing, though one of my friends is a fantastic singer. She was killing my performances out of the gate and getting great scores even on Expert on her first playthrough.

Rock Band Unplugged: Still enjoying this though the track listing is stiflingly limited compared to even Rock Band 1.

The 360 has been my main gaming platform for several months.

Keeping with what seems to be my LTTP theme in gaming, I've re-opened The Orange Box because I'd never played anything on it except Portal. Several rounds of TF2 under my belt, and I can honestly say it's just about everything I'd hoped it would be. HL2 is also impressive, despite its age. It feels like a fairly standard FPS with decent graphics, and the general tone of the story from HL1 is intact, excepting some excessive handjobbery over "Oh, my! it's Gordon Freeman, our hero!" - Gordon's an everyman, and was not particularly competent at that. Especially the way I play him. ;-P So all the added whattaguy moments seem unnaturally transported from the Halo series' grunts' reactions to Master Chief. It's kind of a mistake, because Halo's gameplay centers around being able to rest and recuperate all HP quickly, but HL is an ablative, attrition-based HP and armor model. Gordon will die a lot, MC not so much.

Burnout Paradise is good for a number of reasons. I think it's an E-Rated title, so I can play it in front of the kids.

Naruto - a.k.a GTA Ninjatown - I was really enjoying this sandbox fighting game, but lately am finding it harder to continue. The fighting system isn't terribly complex, but if I play much of anything else between Naruto sessions, I tend to forget its unique combo-then-jutsu rhythm.

Still playing Rock Band (1) at work every day during lunch, pretty much able to do Hard guitar or vocals consistently, but am not much closer to unlocking 1 Million Fans 'cheevy soon, because lunch is not enough time to play the larger venues' longer sessions.

I've had trouble turning my PSP on for ages. It's fine, I'm just uninspired. GTA IV left me a bit cold, and going back to Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories has dropped in priority because of that.

EA Chicago vets sign with Activision // News:

Development veterans behind the Fight Night and Def Jam series for EA Chicago have formed a new studio and signed with publishing heavyweight Activision.

Robomodo was formed earlier this year following the closure of EA's Chicago outfit, and is lead by director Josh Tsui, who has previously worked on Mortal Kombat titles for Midway and Fight Night Round 3 for EA.

"At Robomodo we are dedicated to doing it right, from the way we approach game design and art, to the methods we use to manage our projects," commented Tsui.

"Our culture is focused on enabling game designers and artists to innovate, while providing them with proper management oversight and technology support."

The 35-man team has already inked a deal with Activision to work on one of its key franchises, although further details are still under wraps.

"Activision has embraced our vision and agreed to give us a shot with one of their IPs. We are fortunate to be working with the largest publisher worldwide, and we are looking forward to collaborating with their team on one of their upcoming games," added Tsui.

Joining Tsui as partners of the studio are David Michicich who takes on the role of CEO, Nick Ehrlich as COO, Peter Sauerbrei as CTO and Richard Ho acting as motion director.

Tsui, Michicich, Ho and Ehrlich all first worked together at Midway, and have since gone on to work on titles including Tao Feng for Microsoft, Wrestlemania 21 for THQ and Def Jam ICON for EA. [emphasis mine]

No offense, but JESUS GAWD, no wonder they were dropped. I am officially giving up hope for whatever they're working on. Fight Night Round 3 and Def Jam Icon LOOKED great, but FNR3's Total Punch Control is an innovation in search of a need, and everything that worked right in Def Jam Vendetta gameplay can be attributed to AKI.

My copy of Mercenaries 2 (360) arrived in the mail yesterday from Play-Asia.com.

The first game is the first game which took GTA's formula and did it better. While GTA just added more bells and whistles to its core gameplay with each sequel (until GTA IV), Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction took the challenge of allowing players to sculpt their own means of gameplay, either completing missions stealthily and with minimal body count, potentially without the victim even knowing who was responsible, or tackling them head-on in a blistering, booming, destruction without discretion manner where nothing but the trees are left standing. (A joke in itself for Mercenaries veterans)

After 2 hrs. of playing, I can confirm that the game is basically MORE OF THE SAME -- which in this case I wholly endorse. It's Mercs, plus some resource management, full game co-op play, and TREES YOU CAN DESTROY.

Bring that noise. I want some.