You’ve heard the turn of phrase before. “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.” Basically it’s an argument that doesn’t necessarily invalidate innovation, but suggests that working within established constraints means less work and a lower investment of time and resources. At the same time, only going with what’s known leads to stagnation. If people doesn’t innovate, nothing grows or changes. Yes, people like what’s familiar and are uncertain of new things. It’s why this year’s Madden is going to outsell a game coming from the independent market. It’s why fans are eagerly awaiting the next novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series and overlook brand new titles in the fantasy genre. This isn’t a universal truth to be sure, as there will always be people willing to try something new, but it’s true enough to be noteworthy and, in my opinion, worth examination.
When you get right down to it, on a mechanical level, there’s little difference between Gears of War and Mass Effect, especially the second title. They’re both cover-based shooters using a third-person perspective. However, they’re as different as night and day. The former’s focus on multiplayer, brutality and grim protagonists in interchangeable suits of armor is worlds apart from the latter’s storytelling, character design and decision making. In other words, they’re both wheels, but one’s a big thick tire on a monster truck while the other’s a Pirelli on a Bugatti Veyron. BioWare didn’t reinvent the wheel to make the experience of playing Mass Effect 2 distinctive from that of playing Gears of War 2, they just built that wheel differently.
Another good example? The aforementioned Song of Ice and Fire. It’s a fantasy novel series, so it’ll sit in the same section as Lord of the Rings. But George RR Martin isn’t all about exotic races, magical powers and a clearly-defined evil villain. Instead, his focus is on sweeping political landscapes, lands and armies rooted very much in our history and lots (and boy, do I mean lots) of interesting, well-rounded characters. GRRM doesn’t reinvent the wheel to write his books or get his point across. Instead, he draws from both the universes of fantasy with which we’re already familiar, and also from the legends and accounts we either know from studying history or recognize as familiar due to our own experiences. It makes a story with an expansive scope feel deeply personal.
It’s entirely possible that in our own creative process, we head down a particular path. We want to try something new. We want to go places that haven’t been explored, approach an obstacle in a radical way. As we proceed down the path, more ideas occur to us. It’s tempting to pull those ideas into the work at hand, just to see if it works. And then, when it comes time to look over where we are and how we came to be there, the path behind us is at least a bit messy, if not damn near incoherent. We’ve wandered a bit too far. We’ve tried to reinvent the wheel.
This doesn’t mean the mess is without merit, however. A square wheel, after all, can be chiseled into a round one if you’re willing to clean up the debris when you’re done.
The Steam sale has pretty much reached its conclusion, and has saved many lives. After all, bees can kill with their stings, eating outside is a good way to attract ravenous bears, and have you ever taken a soccer ball to the face? Damn. That’ll mess you up. Never happens when playing Steam games.
My first order of business during the Steam sale was to round out my PC’s version of The Orange Box. I finally got my hands on the full version of Team Fortress 2. User-made maps, Valve’s great updates, the works. I fired it up on the X-Box once later, and really, it’s not the same. You never find anything cool as you play, you only have a few generic achievements to pursue and you’re limited to about five different maps. Boring. I’ve been playing on the PC exclusively ever since. Along with Half-Life 2 Episode 2, I also downloaded Garry’s Mod at the same time. I haven’t played with it much yet, but the idea of a sandbox with a physics engine and a fully-functional programming language for me to play with is very appealing. It’s a back-burner, percolating thought. I’ll get back to it later.
Left 4 Dead and its sequel is a great deal of fun. The idea of being one of the last few humans alive fighting against a slavering horde of one’s former fellow man is both harrowing and kind of exciting. Especially if there’s plenty of ammo & pain pills laying around. The best part of these games, though, is playing with friends. There’s nothing more satisfying than shooting zombies off of a friend, and nothing more terrifying than getting knocked down and wondering if the undead will tear off your head before your buddy can come to your aid. I’m looking forward to playing more of it.
My next likely fodder for a game review, however, is The Witcher. Being an old hand at role-playing games, and having played through the likes of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, this game seems right up my alley. I do still need to finish Dragon Age’sexpansion, so it’s almost a race between it and The Witcher, and Awakenings has a head start. Of course I need to take time away from World of Warcraft to play either of these when I want an RPG fix.
There’s plenty of writing to do, as well. The holiday weekend is meant for recharging my batteries, as is the upcoming family reunion in Mystic. But for now, in terms of gaming, it’s full Steam ahead.
Summer is here. To celebrate, Steam is having a mind-blowingly brilliant sale. They’re offering discounts on many of their packages – titles from publishers like Valve, Square Enix, Atari, Rockstar, etc. But it doesn’t stop there. Every 24 hours or so, they slash the prices on a few titles. So while normally a game that may interest you may be a bit on the pricey side, if you can catch it during this sale you’ll save a ton of cash. But why spend money on games at all? I mean, sure, you can pick up Torchlight for $5 and have Diablo-flavored fun with fresh graphics and an adorable animal sidekick while you’re waiting for Diablo III to emerge from Blizzard, but why do it through Steam instead of GameStop, for example?
I’m glad you asked.
W+M1
This has less to do with Steam specifically than it does with PC gaming in general, but for me, the control scheme of keyboard & mouse is superior than those for consoles. By this point, yes, I’ve gotten used to moving one thumb to push my digital avatar forward while the other thumb lets me look around. But when I return to a game like World of Warcraft and have more than a couple buttons at my disposal, the result is actually more immersive and has a great deal of potential for flexibility.
Take Team Fortress 2, for example. On the X-box, one of your precious few controller buttons calls for a medic, another does a taunt. You can hook up a headset to use voice chat, but unless you want your team hearing what you’re yelling at your spouse, you’ll need to move your hand from the controller to flick the mute switch. With the keyboard attached to your PC, you have a lot more options for communication. Many more voice commands are available for your character, and if those aren’t enough, the voice chat option operates with push-to-talk functionality, rather than being on all the time. And all of these are at the fingertips of one hand, while the other controls your viewpoint, combat commands (shootin’, etc) and weapon selection. It just makes more sense to me, but then again, I’m a crotchety old man set in my ways.
What is this DLC you speak of?
Another big difference is that not every developer wants to nickel & dime people for DLC. To Valve, DLC is called ‘updates’. None of the new maps, weapons or headgear available to players of Team Fortress 2 on the PC are accessible on the 360, because Valve doesn’t charge money for them, and they aren’t going to. Those games that do charge for DLC – Borderlands for instance – can do so via Steam if they choose, but it’s not a requirement. This again points to Steam being a more flexible and open-ended engine for content delivery than, say, X-Box Live.
Community Service
It could just be a matter of perception, but based on my experience, the community around Steam seems more constructive and geared towards fun than that of X-Box Live. There’s nothing wrong with a spirit of competition, but getting yelled at by twelve-year-olds who have nothing better to do than polish their console shooting techniques in preparation for the next Halo title isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. You’ll get the occasional loudmouthed loser on Steam, as well, but at least the admins of those servers can kick said loudmouths with a quick keyboard command. Good luck doing that with a console.
No Motion Controls
I think it’s going to be a long, long time before we see anything like Garry’s Mod hit consoles while developers are so hung up on things like motion controls and 3D. To me, gameplay innovation should about what can be done with the games themselves, not how one sees or controls them. Does nobody else remember the Virtual Boy? Am I the only one who thinks that adding extraneous peripherals to gaming consoles is a path leading to a dead end in development? I guess while everybody’s flailing around their living rooms trying to find ways to make that fun and unembarrassed, I’ll be playing with rag dolls in a physics engine. I’ve even had a couple of series ideas.
So yes. When I’m not writing, watching movies with my wife or playing World of Warcraft with her, I’ll be Steaming things up. Unless something exclusive to the consoles hits, like War for Cybertron. I mean, come on – from what I understand, somebody finally brought back what made the Transformers awesome in the first place.
My wife started playing Team Fortress 2 on my X-Box live account yesterday. She said she’d gotten some things done in preparation for our move on Saturday, and wanted something ‘quick’ to fill the time. She ended up getting sucked into the epic and pitched conflict between RED and BLU.
She’s discovered that she’d probably enjoy playing the Pyro most of all. She’s continuing to experiment with classes, but that seems to fit her requirements of speed, durability and fun factor. She just likes setting folks on fire. Anyway, we took turns, and while I was sniping people she looked up some of the advantages the PC has over the X-Box, specifically some of the unlockable weapons.
“Snipers get a bow?” she asked me at one point.
“Yep, it’s called the Huntsman,” I replied. She punched it up.
“Wow. If you’re playing a Sniper and I’m a Pyro, I can set your arrows on fire.”
“Seriously?” I had to look away from the screen to confirm this. I might have gotten backstabbed in the meantime. “That’s super cool.”
She looked at me. “We totally have to do that.”
As if I needed another reason to love this woman.
Now, granted, we can’t pursue this plan right away. We’re moving, as I’ve mentioned, which means bills need to be paid on a couple of fronts, our littlest furball needs some major vet treatment (and Spark could probably use a booster shot as well) and I would need to acquire or assemble for my darling a computer that’d run TF2 smoothly. However, I know a lot more people using the PC version of the game, the controls are likely a bit better, and there are the aforementioned unlockables.
More on this as it develops, but suffice it to say my geeky heart was aglow pretty much all night last night. Other than that I’ve been doing a lot of running around getting the move arranged, keeping things somewhat sane at the dayjob and plowing forward with Citizen in the Wilds. Yes, that’s the title I’m going with for the Project unless something better comes along. I guess I could have blogged about that instead of gushing about how awesome my wife is.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I never played the original Team Fortress (now dubbed Team Fortress Classic). I don’t know if I ever had enough friends who also played that could have helped me assemble a decent team. But the appeal of the idea was never lost on me, and with the advent of Team Fortress 2, as part of the Orange Box, the burning coal of an idea concerning team-based class-focused competitive shooter action has been refined to the point of diamond pearlescence.
With an aesthetic that’s one part The Incredibles and one part Sam Peckinpah, Team Fortress 2 introduces us to rival companies Reliable Excavation & Demolition (RED) and Builders League United (BLU). These companies employ a variety of mercenaries in an attempt to secure various construction sites. Some of them are the sources of a valuable resources and others are the secret location of some sensitive documents. Whatever the reason for the spit of land in question to be fought over, RED & BLU reveal themselves to be dedicated to defeating each other to the point of people blowing each other into juicy chunky bits in the name of their employer’s victory. It’d be a somewhat chilling commentary on the cutthroat nature of business and the brutality intelligence agencies are capable of perpetuating, if the game wasn’t so hilariously over-the-top and presented like an animated 60s Bond film with more explosions and less voluptuous women.
The focus here is on the co-operative nature of team game play, and so the aesthetic is designed to ensure that any players class, current weapon and team affiliation are easy to determine at a glance. Because sometimes a glance is all you get before parts of your body are flying in all directions. In a similar mode of thought, the maps of the game are not interested in being visually intricate in the manner of some Halo environments, nor are they the dingy corridors or dank caverns of Gears of War. While most of them tend to be somewhat arid and unadorned by vegetation, they’re also easy to navigate and provide not only open areas for large skirmishes but various ways for players interested in using stealth to get into positions while those laying traps have plenty of spots from which to choose. Speaking of which, the classes bear particular mention, in that the phrase “something for everybody” has never been more true in a gaming sense.
Awesome comes in a variety of flavors.
The nine classes are broken into three broad categories: Offensive, Defensive and Support. Offensive classes are all about taking the fight to the enemy. The Scout is concerned with speed first and foremost, getting right into an opponents face and either blasting them with a sawed-off shotgun or beating them into a pulp with a bat. The Soldier uses a rocket launcher at range, a shotgun close-up, and a shovel when maggots just get too close to the guy’s war face. The final offensive class is the Pyro, who not only pushes back enemies with their flamethrower but can also light invisible spies on fire just as much as everybody else. Defensive classes, on the other hand, are designed to make sure that getting close to them is a bad idea. When it comes to blowing things up, the Demoman is unmatched, using either standard grenades from a launcher to blast oncoming threats or sticky ones to lay traps for unwary intruders. Fans of flying bullets and a metric fuckton of health need look no further than the Heavy, whose multi-barreled companion Sascha mows down the opposition as the player takes on the role of mobile wall of enemy deterrent. The Engineer is more of a stationary defender, building sentry guns of ever-escalating power and complexity in order to dissuade anybody from the other time from getting close. Finally, the Support classes are those that fall into neither offensive nor defensive roles exclusively, but exhibit flexibility in their specialization. Paramiliary units wouldn’t last long without a Medic, and this class is just as much at home supporting an offensive push as standing behind the Heavy to ensure there’s no shortage of gatling-flavored death for all comers. The Sniper can perch either over an area where his shots will clear the way for an offensive push or back by the friendly objective to create a place full of would-be infiltrators. Last but certainly not least is the Spy, the gentlemanly backstabber who must carefully choose when and where to reveal themselves regardless of whether they’re sneaking into an enemy base, pouncing on the stragglers in an assault or sabotaging a nest of defenses.
If you’re at all interested in shooting stuff with or at other people, chances are one of these classes will be up whatever alley happens to be yours.
“One of you ate my sandvich! I know it! I MAKE YOU CRY SOME MORE!”
Given its emphasis on co-operative play, Team Fortress 2 is one of those games best played with people you know. This can be a group of friends or an organization like a clan or guild, but either way, my experience has been that randomly joined games are nowhere near as fun as those played with folks with whom you’re familiar. Given the pervasiveness of verbal abuse and elitism among on-line game players, especially on Xbox Live, joining a random game of Team Fortress 2 might just turn some people off of the concept. Mastering any one of the game’s classes takes practice, and doing so in an environment where you’re being reminded of how much you suck can be quite a deterrent. Then again, that could just be my opinion, given that somewhere along the line I turned into a big fluffy care bear.
Regardless, if you can find a bunch of people playing on the same platform, seeing a plan come together in Team Fortress 2 can be a fun and rewarding experience. If nothing else, the way in which the game is presented makes it notable, unique and downright awesome. The gameplay itself might not be for everyone, but I’d be surprised if there was someone out there who didn’t appreciate the time, effort and sheer amount of fun represented by the various Meet the Team videos. It’s difficult to find anything overtly critical to say about an online shooter focused on co-op play that’s balanced between the disparate roles people might wish to play, and I’ve yet to play the Steam version that includes updates with unlockable weapons and costume changes. So, instead, here’s that picture of the Sniper again, because if I do dive back into Steam to play Team Fortress 2 in the near future, you’ll likely find me donning a hat decorated with ‘gator teeth and keeping my eyes peeled for those pesky Spies.
Stuff I Liked: Balanced classes in co-operative setting under the pretty peerless direction of Valve. Stuff I Didn’t Like: Again, it’s a personal thing, but some of the people in random games who trash-talk new players just for being new & inexperienced really rubbed me the wrong way. Stuff I Loved Love: The aesthetic, spirit and mentality of this game and its ongoing production makes me strongly inclined to give it another go as soon as I can afford to download it via Steam.
Bottom Line: Well, I just said I’m going to find a way to get it on Steam, which is probably about as definitive a recommendation as I can muster. I don’t want to discourage Xbox owners from playing, either, and if you find a few of you are on a server hosted by Xbox Live, drop me a line. I just might show up.
