I'm too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts

Is Deus Ex: Human Revolution on your new games radar yet?  If it isn’t, then let me do you a favor and give you a heads up about it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a first person role playing game being developed by Eidos Montreal for the Xbox 360, PC, and Playstation 3.  Human Revolution is a prequel to the popular PC game Deus Ex and the less popular Deus Ex: Invisible War.  Set in a cyberpunk future and featuring a globe hopping campaign, Deus Ex looks to be what  Alpha Protocol should have been.  Like Alpha Protocol this game promises options. Specifically, Deus Ex is promising that any Mahatma Gandhis out there can get through the game with a minimum of violence using stealth, social skills, and hacking.

Beyond all the boring talking, sneaking, and keyboard twiddling Deus Ex is a first person shooter.  It is promising a wide range of weapons and weapon upgrades.  Of course, upgrading weapons is nothing new but it looks like Eidos is making an effort to make the upgrades more interesting than hum drum damage and accuracy boosts.  The only upgrade that has been specifically mentioned is an upgrade that transforms a boring dumb fire rocket launcher into a heat seeking missile firing murder machine.  But the weapons are not the biggest draw for Deus Ex.  If you just want a bunch of weapons and AI targets the newest Call of Honor Zone game will scratch that itch.  The story Deus Ex promises to tell is the reason to check it out.

The story is promising to be a complex epic that involves evil mega corporations, conspiracies, and everything else you would expect from a cyberpunk world.  It centers around Alex Jensen, Mr. Too Sexy For His Shirt up there, and the nifty new mechanical arms he is kitted out with after an epic beat down. Big Sexy’s involuntary upgrade to stainless steel dick beaters adds a side story that focuses on trans humanist ideals and ethics.  This plays out in a sepia toned, near future dystopia in which Jensen is some kind of cross between Solid Snake and Dick Tracy that works for a, presumably evil, mega corporation that makes vibrating prosthetic hands for the ladies.  Well, presumably they make more than prosthetics with naughty features but a cyberpunk conspiracy story about the near future porn industry is something that I find oddly appealing.

Time to wrap this up before I get into theories about how porn will drive the cyberpunk technology of tomorrow.  Deus Ex: Human revolution looks like a promising first person shooter that will mix stealth, action, and smooth talking into an epic story that actually attempts to tackle trans humanist issues and ethics.  It does not have a release date beyond some time in 2011 but the news makes it sound like it will be out this summer.  If it waits too long to be released it will be up against the powerhouse noob stompin’ duo of Gears of War 3 and Mass Effect 3 that is slated to come out just in time for Christmas.

Natural Selection 2 is a new PC game being developed by Unknown Worlds that spices up the first person shooter genre with real time strategy elements.  Unknown Worlds is a brand new development studio that was founded by the creator of the original Natural Selection, Charlie ‘Flayra’ Cleveland.  The original Natural Selection is a custom game mod for the original Half Life.  At its core, Natural Selection 2 is a multi-player first person shooter that pits fairly generic space marines against only slightly less generic aliens.  The space marines are called the Frontiersmen and might as well be the Colonial Marines from James Cameron’s movie Aliens.  The aliens, called the Kharaa, are more original but bear a strong resemblance to Starcraft’s Zerg.  Despite how generic the premise of each race is, the game itself looks extremely promising.  Natural Selection 2 incorporates real time strategy into first person shooting in innovative ways and has an exclusively multi-player focus.  The two races are generic but well differentiated and Unknown Worlds is working hard to make them balanced and fun to play.  The most promising aspect of Natural Selection 2 is that Unknown Worlds is embracing their modder roots by making their game extremely modder friendly.

Natural Selection 2 mixes first person shooting with real time strategy elements seamlessly by allowing any player to assume the role of a real time strategy commander at any time.  Assuming the command role is as simple as hopping into a command center.  The command center switches the player’s view from the first person to a top down view.  Once in the top down command view the player is responsible for building up infrastructure and managing the economy for the team.  The economy in Natural Selection 2 revolves around building resource gathering structures on resource nodes Dawn of War style.  The use of Dawn of War style resourcing works very well in a first person shooter game because every room with a resource node strategically important.  The resource nodes provide a strong incentive to take and hold more of the map rather than just camping out in the spawn area.  This reinforces the run and gun, team death match style of play rather than conflicting with it.  The resourcing system is also used to promote teamwork.  Taking a resource node provides both the individual players and the commander with resources.  This gives every player a strong incentive to work together with each other and the commander because everyone benefits from taking a resource node.  Of course, the commander uses command resources for different things than the individual players use personal resources for.  Natural selection 2 also uses the tech tree to reinforce the teamwork that the resource system promotes.  Each team climbs the tech tree by capturing command points and placing new command centers on them.  As more command points are captured the commander can spend command resources to unlock new weapons and upgrades for the rest of the team.  The rest of the team, in turn, spends their personal resources purchasing the gear that the commander unlocks.  As the respective tech tree are unlocked the differences between the Frontiersmen and the Kharaa become more pronounced.

Game play video of Marines.

The Frontiersmen play much like you would expect generic space marines to play.  It seems like a deliberate design decision to make both factions fairly generic so that it is easy for anyone with first person shooter experience to pick up and play Natural selection 2.  The Frontiersmen, naturally, focus on superior ranged weapons and feature decentralized infrastructure.  Frontiersmen weapons are first person shooter staples like shotguns, grenade launchers, and flamethrowers.  Even though the weapons are first person shooter staples they are tailored to fill specific roles.  The grenade launcher is tailored to take out infrastructure at range while the flamethrower is tailored to take out advanced Kharaa creatures.  The Frontiersmen use armories and infantry spawning portals to decentralize their infrastructure.  Both the spawn portals and the armories can be built anywhere on the map by the Frontiersmen commander.  This allows the Frontiersmen to turn any area into a base.  The ability to create bases anywhere seems essential to Frontiersmen strategy.  Unlike the Kharaa, the Frontiersmen will run out of ammo and move relatively slow, so they need to be able to get to armories easily to resupply.  This makes using the real time strategy elements to make the spawn portals and armories close to the action key to winning as the Frontiersmen.  On the other side of the arena, the Kharaa feature a centralized infrastructure and focus more on individual speed and melee combat than the Frontiersmen.

The Kharaa resemble the Starcraft’s Zerg by having a more centralized infrastructure, melee focus, and faster movement.  The basic Kharaa creature that every player starts as is a smaller, dog-like ankle biter called a Skulk.  The Skulk can take shortcuts through air vents by running along walls and ceilings.  This allows the basic Kharaa Skulk to be a fast, versatile bushwhacker and harasser.  Each player can evolve from the basic Skulk into a different creature at any time, anywhere by entering a short chrysalis phase and spending personal resources.  Three other creatures revealed so far are the flying Lerk, the teleporting Fade, and the defense building Gorge.  The Lerk is a flying creature with a variety of ranged attacks that include a rapid fire spike, a sniper spike, and area denial gas bombs.  This makes the Lerk one of the few Kharaa creature with any kind of standoff firepower.  The Fade, on the other hand, forgoes ranged weapons for the ability to teleport over short distances and a powerful melee attack.  The Fade’s teleport allows it to, ideally, teleport in, pick a marine off, and get back out before the Frontiersmen can react.  The Gorge rounds out the faster, more offensive creatures by being able to place static defenses.  The static defenses the Gorge places are flower looking things that shoot any marines that come close to them.  The Kharaa also feature a more centralized infrastructure that revolves around Hive nodes.  Hive nodes act as both command centers and spawning portals.  The Hive nodes must be placed on command points and each additional hive node unlocks another level of Kharaa technology.  The Hive nodes also create eggs at regular intervals that the team respawns from.  Making the Hive nodes both the command center and spawning portal centralizes the Kharaa economy and sets them apart from the Frontiersmen.  Both of these races promise an innovative blend of first person shooter and real time strategy with simple to understand but well differentiated factions that only scratches the surface of what Natural Selection 2 could become.

Game play video of aliens.

Unknown Worlds is promising to embrace its roots as a Half Life 2 custom mod by releasing an extensive suite of modding tools with their game.  An extensive modding suite will allow players to do whatever they like with the game.  This means that any player could come up with new weapons for the Frontiersmen, new creatures for the Kharaa or even whole new games.  The Natural Selection 2 community is already talking about making mods that pit Frontiersmen against Frontiersmen and Kharaa against Kharaa.  The community is also planning to make a classic team death match game that strips out the innovative real time strategy elements.  Those mods are just the beginning of what Natural Selection 2′s modding community will come up with.  Unknown Worlds is promising to support their community in their modding endeavors.  Unknown Worlds is making a very smart decision by supporting their modding community because the modders will invariably add a lot of replay value to their game.  There are a lot of examples of how a mod has added a lot of replay value to a game.  Warcraft 3′s modding community, for example, created the Defense of the Ancients mod which was the inspiration and proof of concept for both League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth.   Other examples of popular mods that that added a replay value to there respective games are Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, and the original Natural Selection.  Unknown Worlds support for its modders is a virtual guarantee that Natural Selection 2 will end up being much more than just what the developer publishes.  The promise of extensive modding makes an extremely promising game even more promising even though Natural Selection 2 is only in beta testing.

Unknown Worlds has not yet set a release date for Natural Selection 2.  There seems to be  little chance that it will release this year, but don’t despair.  If anyone wants to play Natural Selection 2 right now they can zip over to the Unknown Worlds website and buy a beta copy.  Everyone that thinks Natural Selection 2 will be an awesome game should go buy a beta copy because Unknown Worlds is using the revenue from selling beta copies to finish their game.  There is also the promise that anyone that spends buys a beta copy will get the full game when it releases.  I encourage everyone who can afford it to go and buy a beta copy because Natural Selection 2 has a lot of promise and I would hate to see it fail for lack of funds.

Duke Nukem Forever will be the most famous vaporware game ever until it is actually released.  Recently, it was announced that Duke Nukem Forever would be released on May 3rd of this year but 3D Realms, the original development studio, has announced release dates for Duke Nukem Forever many times before without ever releasing a game.  This release date is different because Gearbox Software, the developer of Borderlands, is announcing the release this time.  Gearbox Software took over the development of Duken Nukem Forever after 3D Realms collapsed 2009.  3D Realms had been working on Duke Nukem Forever for 12 years when they folded and Gearbox worked on it for at least another year.  Which begs the questions, why did it take 14 years to create Duke Nukem Forever and why did the original development studio go under?  The short answer is that Apogee and 3D Realms, the original publisher and developer respectively, monumentally screwed up Duke Nukem Forever’s development.  The development process was so bad that Apogee and 3D Realms became the butt of the games industry’s jokes for years. Zero Punctuation even got in on the fun and made a spoof episode on the nonexistent Duke Nukem Forever.

All jokes aside, there is much more to Apogee’s story than Duke Nukem Forever.  Apogee’s founder, Scott Miller, literally invented digital distribution and game demos back in the 1980s.  Those innovations propelled Apogee to a meteoric rise that was eventually brought down, in part, by failing to ever finish Duke Nukem Forever.  The Machinima series All Your History Are Belong To Us has chronicled the rise and fall of Apogee and Duke Nukem Forever very well.

The first episode of the four episode series by All Your History Are Belong To Us about Apogee Games and Duke Nukem shows how Apogee was started by Scott Miller and how that he revolutionized the game world by inventing digital distribution and game demos.

The second episode of All Your History Are Belong To Us’s four part series on Apogee Games shows how Apogee conspired to found Id Software.  Id Software was founded after Scott Miller convinced John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack to leave the Softdisk corporation.  Once Id Software was founded they used Apogee’s digital distribution model to revolutionize gaming by creating the original first person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D.

The third episode shows how Apogee continued to rise with the release of Duke Nukem’s first 3D game, pithily titled Duke Nukem 3D, and how the seeds of Apogee’s fall were planted.

The fourth and final episode of the All Your History Are Belong To Us series shows how Apogee finally self destructed with its failure to ever release Duke Nukem Forever.

The story of Apogee and 3D Realms stands as a cautionary tale for other video game studios, and an example of how hubris can bring down even the mightiest developer.

Yay, box art

DC Universe Online the most unique massively multi-player online game that has come out recently.  What makes DC Universe Online unique is that it spites the World of Warcraft formula in favor of Crackdown style game play.  DCUO apes Crackdown and other open world games by including mini-games like race challenges and collectible orbs.  The WoW formula is further shunned by the combat being more involved than hitting the 1 through 6 keys in the right order.  The combat is more exciting than the standard WoW fare because DCUO has introduced button combos and a dodge roll.  The addition of button combos and a dodge roll makes the combat more like Crackdown or Prototype than WoW or City of Heroes.  The unique style of combat makes DCUO play more like a brawler and keeps the combat from feeling like the repetitive grind that plagues most other massively multi-player online games.  The other thing that sets DCUO apart from other MMOs is that all of the quest givers are fully voiced, recognizable DC characters.  Having the Joker or Batman as your main quest giver gives DCUO a lot of character that other MMOs lack and is a huge improvement over getting quests from random faceless NPCs.  Using the DC license to create memorable quest givers really brings the universe to life and makes getting a new quest into a treat.  The combination of good voice acting, recognizable characters, brawler style combat, and sandbox style mini-games puts DC Universe Online head and shoulders above the other massively multi-player online games on the market.

In inclusion of fully voiced DC characters as mentors makes the choice of mentor one of the most important choices in DC Universe Online.  The mentors are the main quest givers and every mentor has its own quest line.  Because every mentor is a well realized character from the DC universe the choice of mentor flavors the whole experience.  For example, having the Joker as your mentor is a much different experience than having Batman as your mentor.  The Joker brings a fun, if psychotic, flavor to the game while Batman is, well, an asshole.  In movies and comics it is fun to watch Batman be an asshole, but having your quest giver be a cold, distrustful asshole gives the game a much different flavor.  With that being said, you should definitely make a character with Batman as your mentor at some point because half the fun of DCUO is seeing what each mentor has to offer.  Each mentor gives every play through a different flavor and those flavors complement the varied combat styles to make every character that you create a unique experience.

Every weapon and power offers a wildly different play style.  The weapons range from pistols to bare handed brawling and each weapon offers unique moves and button combos to give each weapon a unique play style.  The weapons alone give the player a lot of incentive to make multiple characters until you find a weapon and power combo suits your individual play style, and with the amount of options to choose from there is a weapon that suits your play style perfectly.  The combination of weapons and powers breaks DC Universe Online’s character creation out of the tired mage, priest, fighter, and rogue rigmarole that so many other MMOs are stuck in.  The fun and unique combat play styles are made even more fun by the bosses being recognizable DC characters.  Every dungeon has a boss like any other MMO, but in DCUO the bosses are characters like Batman and Robin.  After figuring out what an asshole Batman really is it was a joy to have a chance to stick a knife in his codpiece.  Making the bosses recognizable DC characters makes beating up bosses much more fun than it should be.  I found myself looking forward to the end of each quest line to see what character I would get to beat up next, but if beating up Supergirl or Scarecrow ever gets dull there is a lot more that DCUO has to offer.

Batman is so much fun to shank

Like every other massively multi-player online game, DC Universe Online has Player vs Player combat but it mixes up the PvP formula up in interesting ways.  In addition to the standard Player vs Player arenas that every MMO has, this game uses the DC license to let you plays as iconic figures like Batman and the Joker in PvP arenas.  Each iconic DC character uses a different weapon and power and playing as Harley Quinn or Robin is a good way to try out new weapons and powers without having to invest time and effort into making a new character.  The Player vs Player arenas with iconic DC characters are fun, but if Player vs Player combat is not your bag DCUO also offers group cooperative Player vs Environment  instances.  The cooperative Player vs Environment instances are fun and easy to get a group for, but at time of writing they still need some balancing and debugging.  Go figure.  No big surprise that a new MMO still needs some balancing and debugging the first week of its launch.  Even with bugs and balance issues the instances are still fun and will be even better when they get properly balanced and debugged.  There are endgame raid and duo events as well but they require a max level character, so I have not gotten to play them yet.  If the group instances are any indication then it is safe to say that the raids and duos are basically fun but they still have some balance and bug issues.  Even if group Player vs Environment instances, Player vs Player arenas, or the chance to shank Batman is not your thing DCUO still has something to offer.

In addition to everything else, DC Universe Online offers the same simple pleasures that a sandbox game like Crackdown offers.  Like Crackdown, there are collectibles to find and races to win.  Of course, there is always the simple joy of climbing the tallest building in the game, the Lex Corp Tower in this case, and jumping off.  It even has an achievement system in place to keep track of how many races you have one or how many collectibles you have collected.  The best part of the achievement system is that when you complete enough of the achievements you are rewarded with an extra skill point.  It is good to have a practical reward for the fun dicking around that is bound to happen in a sandbox game anyway.  DC Universe Online has managed to mesh a sandbox style world, MMORPG elements, and brawler style combat into one of the best sandbox games that has come out recently.

DC Universe Online is a massively multi-player sandbox game with brawler style combat that uses the DC license to create a sense of style and character that other massively multi-player games struggle to achieve.  DCUO makes full use of the DC characters with its impressive voice acting and solid script for the mentors, and by creating bosses that are more fun and memorable than the usual MMO fare.  The DC license is even used to turn Metropolis and Gotham City into riotously fun sandbox cities.  All in all, DC Universe Online is an impressively fun game that promises to get better once the balance issues and bugs are worked out.  On a more personal note, DC Universe Online is the most fun I have ever had playing an MMO style game.  If you want to know more, check out the preview article on this site for some links to actual game play footage.

You’re Invited!
What: The actual release of most famous vaporware game ever.
When: May 3, 2011

The only downside to this is that I’m pretty sure the maps will only come up in matchmaking if everyone in your party has the map pack as well, just the way it worked in Call of Duty 4. I guess I can just hope my friends pick it up so we can dominate some more on Crash and Overgrown.

Starcraft 2 Beta Gameplay

If that one video was not enough for you then check out more at that guy’s Youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/HDstarcraft#g/u

• First Impressions

Wow.

Yep, that’s my initial reaction to this game.  Wow.  Bioware really nailed it with this game.  The extra long opening sequence really set the tone for the whole game.  Seeing the Normandy get blown to bits and my Commander Shepard get hurled into space to die tells you right away that this game is serious.   The graphics in the game are amazing.  I actually had my wife come up to me and ask me to play the game some more so she could watch it  (that reminds me…I have a suggestion for Bioware, but I’ll leave that for the end).  The music though is what really sets the tone in this game.  The first game had decent music, but Bioware just raised the bar with this one.

Recently I just finished my second play through. Before the game came out, I had heard a lot about how this game was supposed to be so much longer than the first game.  There was so much more voice acting done for this sequel, so obviously the gameplay must be longer, right?  Well, Mass Effect 2 certainly is better, but just not sure it’s that much bigger. I managed to finish both play throughs in roughly thirty hours each, doing every single side quest I could find each time. The first game was comprised of four main quest areas to go through with a bazillion side quests that were as annoying to play as could be. Mass Effect 2 went the opposite direction and gives you almost two dozen main quests to do and just a few side quests. At least with Mass Effect 2 you don’t have every single area looking like just another cookie cutter cutout of the previous area. They really did improve in that area of the game.

• Got rid of the Mako

One of the most annoying parts of the first game that almost all gamers agree on is driving the stupid Mako vehicle. While the Mako seemed like a cool idea at first, the first game made you spend probably half your time playing just trying to drive the stupid thing up the side of a near vertical mountain side.

In a smart move, Bioware decided to drop the whole Mako from the sequel. In a not-so-smart move, they replaced it with something as annoying, if not more so. Planet scanning. Yep, now you don’t drive around a planet looking for minerals. You just sit in orbit and move your little cursor all over the planet scanning for minerals and launching probes when you find one. What makes this more annoying than the Mako driving to me is the fact that you actually have to do it in this game. The first game made all that mineral hunting an optional side quest. Mass Effect 2 makes it a requirement because you need those minerals in order to upgrade your weapons, armor and ship.

• Combat

Mass Effect 2 made some serious changes in how the combat plays out this time around. In the first game the combat seemed a bit nerfed with weapons able to have attachments that made the game a cake walk. In their efforts to improve the game, Bioware introduced the Mass Effect equivalent of ammunition – thermal clips. Technically, your weapons still have unlimited ammunition, but this time around you have to use thermal clips to keep them from overheating. Thermal clips aren’t unlimited, but at least they’re universal between weapons. It gets a bit annoying on the higher difficulties to have to manage your thermal clips, especially if you’re playing as a soldier that has no other special abilities like the biotics and tech specialists do.

There are also changes in specific abilities custom to each character class. Soldiers, for example, are the only class that has the ability to use assault rifles. Vanguards get biotic charge, Sentinels – tech armor, Adepts – singularity, etc. This time around you no longer feel you’re just playing a subset of two other classes, but instead you have your own special characteristics and advantages if you choose one of the 3 combination classes (Sentinel, Infiltrator, Vanguard).

Another change is the addition of heavy weapons.  This sounds really cool at first, but then you find out that Bioware decided to make finding ammunition for it just about the hardest thing to do in the game.  However, when you do manage to get ammunition for it, all I can say is damn, I love the Cain! I am, of course, referring to the above pictured M-920 Cain.  This gun packs a mean punch.  Hitting an enemy with this is like setting off a nuke in their face.  Just for fun, I used it on casual difficulty on the end game boss.  Killed it in one shot.

• Storyline

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• Gameplay

In order to survive the final mission, you need to have the loyalty of your squad.  For some reason, Bioware decided to equate loyalty with your team’s survivability.  When you actually play the game and put the same character in the same situation, whether or not the enemy shoots and kills them depends solely on their loyalty to you.  To me, that just seems weird.  Another thing about the loyalty factor is that it’s either a yes-they’re loyal or no-they’re not.  There isn’t a lot of middle ground.  Their loyalty is gained by doing the side quest they tell you about after being recruited.  Personally, I would rather have seen a loyalty system based off of what actions you take when that character is in your party.  That would at least require you to play with all the different characters at different points of the game and make personal decisions in alignment with that character in order to earn their loyalty.

Gone are the infamous and annoying elevators from the first game.  Bioware resorted to just showing us loading screens when they needed to load more of the game code.  As a gamer, that’s fine by me.  Mentally I tend to just block out loading screens whereas before, they actually had conversation going on during those elevator loading times. Show ▼

• Overall Impressions

Mass Effect 2 has to be the most polished, well made game I’ve seen.  Ever.  Unfortunately for Bioware, all they did is raise my expectations for the last installment of the Mass Effect trilogy.  Even with how good Mass Effect 2 is, there is still room for improvement.  The scanning for minerals part of the game is what really stands out as needing improvement.  Aside from that and a few release time glitches (finished missions not showing as finished, audio cutting out in certain key scenes, and walking through in game geometry) Mass Effect is as as close to a perfect game as I think it could be.  Assigning a score to the game, I would have to rate it 9.8 out of 10.0 with that little bit missing due to the aforementioned reasons.  The game leaves you wanting for more, eager for the next game which sadly won’t be available for a very long time.

This website has a philosophy I can get behind. Classic games with no DRM, updated to run on Vista or XP machines, and low prices. They have a very nice selection of games arranged by category and I expect more to be added in the future. Happy nostalgic gaming!