OK, I Take It Back

It’s acceptable to mock Peter Molyneaux for this.  But you should still reserve judgment on the game itself until it gets released.

What if you ran a beta and no one came?

A few weeks ago I signed up for the Red Faction: Guerrilla beta, which was easy enough to do.  After downloading the game, I quickly tried to see who was playing (and this was within the first day or two of the beta being opened up).  As it turned out, only one other person was playing, and as you need 8 to start a game, I was unable to try it out.  It was pretty late, though, so I figured I should just try again at a better time.

Well, I’ve now tried 3 more times since then at different times and on different days and I have still not been able to try this game out.  Only once did it find enough people to purportedly start the game, but then as soon as the game started, it ended as there was some weird connection issue and everyone dropped.  Trying to restart the game after that resulted in the same problem as before… no one else was playing.  I finally just tried again a few moments ago and was only matched up with 1 single other person… again, not enough to start a game.

So, Volition… is this really a helpful beta to you?  Not only does it obviously defeat the purpose of a beta (you know, to quash bugs and balance the game), but this is terrible marketing.  For some reason, the beta is now closed.  If they really want to tease people with the game, maybe they should open it back up again so, you know, there would actually be enough people to play the game.

Better Too Human Review

I apologize to keep writing about this game that seemingly no one cares about, but Cisco had asked me what I liked about the game in my last post, and I tried to explain but then further fumbled the answer by getting extremely wordy.

So, with that said, Brian Crecente of Kotaku, a far better writer than I, has posted a fair review that I think pretty much nails my own feelings about the game as well (unfinished for myself, so far).

Too Human Quick Impressions

I picked up the retail copy of Too Human today despite lukewarm reviews and it’s more or less exactly what I expected, which is to say that I’m having fun with it.  Here’s some things I’ve noticed though:

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Too Cool for Too Human

There are times when the gaming community kind of annoys me.  This is one of those times.

Look, I know that Too Human had a somewhat disastrous showing at E3 2006 which turned a lot of people off from the game.  No matter how the game turned out, this, unfortunately, would probably keep some people away from the game no matter what.  I’m also quite aware that some people didn’t like the demo that was released for the game.  Certainly, the game has its share of issues, which I’ve also acknowledged.  And if the sort of Diablo-esque loot and skill system doesn’t appeal to you, well, that’s fine too.  I get that the game is not for everyone.

But the game has inspired a sort of vitriol among the community that just saddens me.  It’s not because I love the game and just wish everyone would play it (since the full game doesn’t come out until tomorrow I haven’t even played the full version yet). I expect I’ll like the game despite its flaws, but I honestly don’t care if anyone else does or not (except that, perhaps, it do well enough for them to finish the trilogy if I like it).  The thing that saddens me is how the gaming community can fixate on something and just repeatedly keep whipping away at it for no other reason except that it had a bad showing once, and the developer has the audacity to try and promote its own game after that.  While Too Human has been a whipping post ever since 2006, with its imminent release, some of the criticism borders on ridiculous.

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The Price of Braid

To follow up on Geoff’s Braid post, according to Braid’s developer Jonathan Blow, the reason why Braid is $15 instead of say, $10, is because he was worried that it would turn into another “Space Giraffe”.  That is, a game that only sold a limited number of copies at too low of a price to be profitable (which he’s especially worried about since he says he went broke to develop the game).

This seems to be a direct reference to this Gamasutra article, which claims that because of Space Giraffe’s dedicated fanbase, Minter probably could’ve charged even $20 (instead of $5) and come out way ahead.

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Far Too Human

The Too Human demo has been out for a bit now and I’ve now played through it with all of the classes (to find out how to do this, check out this YouTube link… it’s pretty simple).  While the demo has convinced me to buy the full game, two of the classes just felt completely worthless to me: the Commando and Bio-Engineer.

Let me give you some quick examples.  My first time through the demo with the Champion I obviously had no idea what I was really doing, but by the time I got to the second “timed challenge” (which gives you 40 seconds to kill an onslaught of enemies), I was able to complete it.  With the Berserker and Defender, these timed challenges were incredibly easy, and I beat them with at least 10 seconds to spare.  In my last play through with the Defender, I never died (in fact the closest I ever got was about 1/4 life left) and my combo meter was always maxed out (I think) at 3.  When playing with the Commando and Bio-Engineer, I couldn’t complete any timed challenges, I died 2-3 times, and I’d be lucky to get my combo meter up to 2.  The Defender, by the way, has the added advantage of seemingly not falling over when all those annoying missiles blow up near you, a huge plus in my book as rolling out of the way or shooting them down can be tedious.

Now, there’s obviously a lot of factors that are influencing my thoughts on this: personal preferences, length of the demo (classes start specializing more the longer you play the game, I’m guessing), and basic lack of skills or understanding of how to best play these particular classes.  I don’t have a problem if any of these factors led someone else to another class, but it just seems like there’s something very fundamental about the game that makes the Commando and Bio-engineer poor choices unless you just want a rough ride through the game.  Based on the demo, the gunplay in the game just isn’t nearly well implemented enough to be used as a sort of primary weapon, and the Commando and Bio-Engineer rely far more heavily on guns and grenades.   In that sense, one could potentially look at the Commando and Bio-Engineer as two different “Hard Modes” for the game.

In any case, I’m wondering whether anyone else has given the demo a chance and what their own thoughts on these classes are, particularly if you found them to work pretty well.  I’m also sort of curious as to whether people think unbalancing classes to create a “hard mode” class is a good idea, although I’m a little skeptical of it if that’s sort of the idea in Too Human since it’s also a Co-op game (and who wants to be the weak one when playing with a friend?).

Prince of Persia’s Stunning Trailer

I have to say that if the game is as good as this trailer is beautiful, Ubisoft has a big winner on its hands.  The inclusion of a Sigur Rós song for this trailer was a good choice, although their music always has such a powerful meloncholic affect on me.  I wonder if the game will actually evoke this same mood.  Hopefully, the trailer is not deceptive in this sense, but the artistic style is certainly appropriate for it.

Microsoft Gains First Strike and Scores a Critical Hit!

You’ve probably heard by now that one of Sony’s biggest theoretical exclusives, Final Fantasy XIII, is coming to the 360.  To be honest, even before I owned a PS3, this was never a huge concern of mine.  To begin with, I knew the game was basically never coming out.  And as much as I liked Final Fantasy IV, VI and VII, I never really got too into any of the other ones (got close to the end in VIII, barely started IX, played a little bit of X… X-2 and XII are on my shelf unplayed).

But, yeah… I know there are a lot of Final Fantasy fans out there and this will make probably half of them ecstatic, a quarter furious, and a quarter who don’t care.  Either way, this is, at the very least, a major psychological blow to Sony and a big coup for Microsoft.  A friend of mine was literally trying to sell his 360 to pick up a PS3 MGS4 package because he figured he could play MGS4 and (what he most wanted) Final Fantasy XIII whenever it finally came out.  Based on this news, that is no longer going to happen and he is keeping his 360.

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Rock Band 2 is already a good deal…

There is a bit more information that’s coming out regarding Rock Band 2 now, and while everything is mostly positive, I guess most people are thinking that it may not be quite as big an update to warrant a “2″.  Instead, 1up, for instance, is wondering why, outside of the obvious instrument improvements, a lot of the new features couldn’t have been released in a title update.

Now, if you’ve been reading our site for awhile, I think you know how often I like to complain about how things are priced.  But I’m just really not sure what the problem is here.  Most Madden games are basically roster updates, yet people continue to shell out $50-$60 every year for them. Regarding Rock Band 2, let me break it down as simply as possible for people:

For $60, you get 70 new songs.

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