Which possible war? (Review: Call of Duty World at War)

Which possible war could a shooter choose to focus on to become the next big success? You guessed right, World War II! This war certainly hasn't been done to death in the movie, documentary, or gaming genres. World War II games have become like a lot of sports game franchises – a new one is released every year with upgraded graphics and new players licensed.

Call of Duty World at War (CoDWaW) marks the fourth (sixth if you include the United Offensive expansion and the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube exclusive Call of Duty 2: Big Red One) game in the Call of Duty (CoD) series to focus on World War II. I suppose by focusing on World War II the game becomes cheaper to produce as they certainly don't need to employee any story writers. Sadly Treyarch also decided not to employee too people to focus on the single player either, which despite the fun of a limitless flame thrower, was still a woefully short three hours of wave after wave of either Nazi's or screaming Japanese soldiers.

Treyarch seemingly thought to very little about growing the series leaving that up to Infinity Ward, who have made the only decent Call of Duty games (1, 2 & 4). CoDWaW is a modified version of the CoD4 engine – they've added up to four player co-op to parts of the campaign, but visually and game mechanic wise it feels like a step back. The game plays more like a "rails" shooter (ie Time Crisis or House of the Dead) with a lot of invisible walls restricting where you can or can't go – I came across a few open doors that I simply couldn't walk through – and I was propelled forward to my death on more than one occasion when my AI teammates decided to walk into me.

AI might be a little too kind, AS (Artificial Stupidity) might be more accurate. My main gripe with the first CoD game was that you single handedly had to do absolutely everything as your team mates couldn't hit the side of a barn from point blank range. As the series as progressed, the AI has slowly learnt how to fire a gun and even better than that, not relied on you to do absolutely everything to win the war. Unfortunately, CoDWaW makes another step backwards here and the AI again requires every objective to be completed by the player, which seemingly extends to killing every opponent. In CoD4 I noticed my AI allies would at least throw back grenades if they were close enough – in CoDWaW my allied AI aimed their grenades at me, killing me on numerous occasions.

If you love the Call of Duty series I would still recommend CoD4 (price alone makes it better value, let alone the better gameplay and larger single player campaign), but if you prefer a WW2 shooter and have no interest in single player this might be for you.

WW2 Shooter + no visual improvements + incredibly short campaign  = One and a half out of five from me.

Micro Review: Red Alert 3

I'll skip a full break down of Red Alert 3, as I've already covered a fair bit of it in my review of the beta. Not much changed from the beta in terms of units or balance, so this is more to do with the single player campaign. Since that review however, I've played/completed Red Alert 2/Yuri's Revenge so I have a bit more insight to the Red Alert series.

Campaign

The story starts by the defeated Soviet forces going back in time to kill Einstein, the man who "won them the war" with his technology in Red Alert 2. When the Soviets return, they find not everything was how they'd imagined with a new "technologically superior" enemy, The Empire of the Rising Sun, emerging from nowhere.

The three factions, Allies, Soviets and Empire of the Rising Sun all start from the same spot but fork out to create their own "destiny" and ultimately victory at the expense of the other two. This raises the interesting question of what's considered cannon in the storyline - traditionally in all Command and Conquer games, it has been the Allies/GDI/"good guys in general" whose storyline is considered correct for the proceeding games. As such, they've always been the first campaign offered, but in Red Alert 3, the Soviet campaign is offered first.

My problems with the series isn't exclusive to Red Alert, but to nearly anything that creates a series out of time travelling. In Red Alert specifically, time travelling just gives the an easy out (in every episode!) to screw with the previous games story and never build on it. The Allied and Soviet forces are mostly made up of units/etc from the previous game, nothing really "new and game changing".

Bottom line

The bottom line is I'd give the game a two and a half stars out of five; while it is a solid RTS series it is getting old rehashing essentially the same story formula of the previous games, including Command & Conquer.

Red Alert 3 (Beta) Impressions

Please note: I must stress these are my impressions from the beta (v1.4), and may not represent the final product.

Because I bought Command and Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath, I was given access to the Red Alert 3 beta program. Additional keys have been released as part of an exclusive deal between EA and Fileplanet, first to their (Fileplanet) premium account holders but most recently to the free accounts too.

The beta is limited to online multiplayer only and to four maps (2x 2v2 and 2x 1v1 maps), but there is no limit to access to the three factions and their respective units.

Gameplay

It's hard to comment if the gameplay is good, bad or otherwise in a restricted beta of a game especially when it is limited to just multiplayer, but I can draw comparisons. It plays much like any RTS - you collect resources, create buildings that provide X resource (in this case, electricity), create units, provide defense, or unlock further units (in the case of Russia; the Allies and Empire of the Rising Sun both 'research' the next tier of units). There is nothing particularly different or innovative with the gameplay presented in RA3.

The previous two games released by EA since acquiring Westwood/C&C rights have been C&C: Generals (and it's expansion, Zero Hour) and C&C3:Tiberium Wars (and it's expansion, Kanes Wrath), if I was to pick which one RA3 is most like, it'd definitely be Generals.

Generals has a "rewards" system, where you earn "experience" by doing stuff, which could include creating buildings, units, or removing substantial chunks of the enemy. In return, you could spend your experience on three rewards trees (dubbed at the time 'General Abilities'), which included unit upgrades, aerial assaults, spawning units anywhere on the map, etc. RA3 features the same system, although the rewards don't seem to be turning-the-tide-of-battle as some of the Generals rewards were (hint, this is a good thing – it sucks when all your hardwork can be undone by an enemies reward).

Zero Hour introduced another dimension of combat (sea, alongside air and ground) to Generals (which does not appear in C&C3), but is present in RA3. While this does have the problem that the developers have to balance yet another playing field, it really does add so much more to the game.

Graphics/Art Style

While I haven't played a lot of the older games in the C&C universe, I've played a fair bit of Generals, and C&C3, and it is safe to say the visuals in RA3 are nothing like those. The easiest comparison would be Half-Life 2/Counter Strike to Team Fortress 2. The former are 'realism' shooters while the latter is a stylised, over the top, brightly coloured piece of art. RA3 falls into latter category, having many over the top effects and everything is very brightly coloured.

Like all games thus far based on SAGE (or RNA as its now known) it has appealing visuals in the unit models, detail textures, and particle effects, but throw it into a multiplayer arena and massive slow downs occur unless all players turn the graphics quality down. The game doesn't become choppy as if frames are being skipped, it simply slows down the game speed so it takes longer for things to occur. With C&C3, I found settings that were silky smooth in single player, even during the epically scaled final battles, would bring the game to its knees in even the smallest 1v1 game online.

Problems

While this is a beta and you must expect most bugs or problems that will be fixed, it is hard not to see some that will never be fixed given the track record of EA.

Gamespy
For reasons that have never benefited actual gamers, Gamespy is involved in the multiplayer aspect of RA3, providing the chat lobby and game match making services. It is extremely rare (Quake…sure) to see a game that has benefited from Gamespy's assistance with lobby/match making – and RA3 is no different. It mimics all the flaws of C&C3's online play, where available games often don't appear at all or the list continually expands and contracts so fast that it is often impossible to actually select the game you wish to join! One of the worst 'features' is that you have to be in the chat lobby (and currently there is over twenty) of the game creator to see the game; change lobbies and you see a different subset of available games.

Netcode
One thing that has played SAGE/RNA games has been poor networking code. During the days where I semi-frequented a gaming focused NetCafe, it was rare to see a LAN game of Generals finish without at least one of the players crash out due to network issues. The initial release of Kane's Wrath was plagued with a 'out-of-sync' issue, which after a period of time would just lose connection with other players, rendering the game useless. EA denied that such a problem existed (stating it couldn't be replicated and that a very small percentage of the player base was effected) for some time, until they decreased such occurrences with a patch (but not totally removed) after three months!

In RA3, I've already seen one or two out-of-sync issues, and many players randomly dropped from the game!

Balance
In one of the patches C&C3, the ability to construct multiple defenses at once by building multiple cranes was removed. It was a fairly drastic change, and effected singleplayer as well. I can't help but shake the feeling that there will be some major balance upsets after the release of the game. Russian submarines currently seem to be overly powerful just as their Terror Drones are – to the point where I've had a few games where people have quit when others have gone Russian.

Will it drain my wallet?

The inevitable question is: despite its flaws, is this game "good enough" to be worth shelling out for? If you're a hard core C&C/RA fan, it's got some solid stuff in there which you'll love. If you are a C&C/RA fan but are a Westwood purist? Not a chance – there is too much of the "EA Influence" inherited from Generals and C&C3. I fall short of being a fanatic to the series or to Westwood so the decision is a little tougher. I've been burnt by the flaws in Tiberium Wars and Kane's Wrath and generally poor support by EA in those games as well as Battlefield 2/2142, but RA3 does offer some genuinely different gameplay to be entertaining.

My answer is, no, I won't be buying it upon launch because I don't feel it is worth the launch RRP of AUD$99.95; while the game might be fun, it's just too "same-y" in both the good and bad aspects. If I can find it for AUD$60 or under, I'll reconsider, but for now the similarities in gameplay to C&C3 and Generals are just encouraging me to hold tight to my money until StarCraft 2 is released.

Gallery

Review: Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H/Intel G45 Chipset

My initial choice for a G33 board for my HTPC was to get whatever would work for the right price, with the goal of turning it into a gaming capable machine by adding a PCIe x16 graphics card which would also give me DVI/HDMI output. As cool as gaming on a 40" 1080p panel is, the keyboard and mouse just aren't up to scratch in their current forms.

When I needed a new motherboard for a new system (my Windows Home Server box) and I learnt that Intel G45 chipset boards were around the corner, offering AVC/VC1/MPEG2 hardware decoding with DVI/VGA/HDMI out, I put one and one together and ended up purchasing a Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H motherboard, the only G45 motherboard I could find for sale (at $169) in Australia.

The G45 chipset introduces the GMA X4500 HD, which brings Intel inline with both ATI (780G/HD 3200) and NVIDIA (GeForce 8200) by offering an integrated video chipset capable of hardware assisted decoding of Bluray and HD-DVD's. In reality this translates to reducing CPU usage during playback of hi-def discs by making the GPU do a lot of the work. Previous Intel chipsets have been pretty woeful in this regard, actually hampering playback if hardware assist is enabled.

Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H Features

The back panel is fairly well endowed, HDMI/DVI being my main concern, but optical audio out, 6 USB ports, eSATA, Firewire, 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, and six stereo audio jacks.

Internally it consists of the usual assortment of ports you'll find these days. The only things of interest are 5 SATA ports (6 total in the system, if you include the eSATA port on the back), two PCI slots, a PCIe x1 slot, and a PCIe x16 slot which is only capable of PCIe x4 speeds. I can see the reasoning – people who buy this board should really be using it in a HTPC, and with the newfound speed of G45 an dedicated graphics card isn't needed, but it still seems "wrong". This is an issue specifically with the Gigabyte board not a blanket problem with G45 boards.

Oh, and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), for all the times you need your HTPC to be uberly secured?

Lets face it, the feature set on this makes it a perfect board for a HTPC, general home computer, or heck, even a workstation/personal server, which has always been the aim of the "G" chipsets from Intel (perhaps Larrabee will change this?). It is not designed as a gaming board, and the PCIe x4 slot posing as a x16 slot makes sure of that.  

The Test

I had trouble enabling Cyberlink's PowerDVD to take advantage of the G45's hardware acceleration, so I turned to ArcSoft's Total Media Theatre (TMT). TMT's CPU usage always seems to be a little higher than PowerDVD's (I'm not sure if it is the application or their codecs), but the latest version worked fine with offloading to GMA 4500 HD.

Jumper used less power (with HW Acceleration On), despite identical CPU load, because the TS contained file was moved to a hard drive, instead of being read from the disc. I'm guessing a Bluray/HD-DVD drive draws 10 –> 15w while playing a movie.

As you can see Hardware Acceleration works for VC1 and H.264/AVC (and one would assume MPEG-2, but I don't have any 1080p MPEG-2 sources) which reduces CPU usage as much as 70%, which in turn reduces power usage by as much as 22w.  The Hardware Acceleration Off values are roughly the same as what the G31/33/35 chipset's will achieve with power usage a watt or two higher.

The Bottom Line

Pro

• 8 Channel LPCM Audio (ATI's 780G chipset only supports 2 Channel LPCM, but ATI's newer 4000 series cards, and Nvidia's GF 8200 boards have 8 Channel LPCM). While I'd love to use this until I get a better audio system it doesn't matter to me. Still, it's nice to somewhat future proof it.
• HDMI/DVI/Display Port support
• "Works as advertised" – X4500 HD does indeed do the hardware accelerated decoding for H.264(AVC), VC1 and MPEG2 as described.
• Dolby Home Theater (encapsulates all analogue audio to a DD stream, which is handy when you have a 6 channel analogue stream which would otherwise be down-mixed to stereo)

Cons

• Price. As it stands, it's cheaper to go with a G31/33 motherboard, and throw in a low end video card from ATI or Nvidia and you'll get the same hardware assisted decoding. On the other hand, that will net you higher power consumption, and if you choose a non-passive model noise will be increased.
• While the PCIe x16 is physically a PCIe x16 slot, you'll only get PCIe x4 speeds out of it.

Review: American McGee's Grimm

Well, McGee is back to it again and this time in partnership with GameTap is offering the first episode (A Boy Learns What Fear Is) of his game series, Grimm, free.

I'll cut to the chase, its 193meg of rubbish.

Graphics

In a gaming world obsessed with realistic graphics, it's refreshing to see games that differ from the norm, be it celshaded hijinks like XIII or Team Fortress 2, or seemingly water-coloured games like what I've seen of Diablo III thus far.

Grimm certainly lacks the realism, but unfortunately also lacks and sort of quality in the graphics department. Utilising the Unreal 3 Engine of course gets it gets motion blur, but incredibly low quality textures, models and even animation reminds me of the first generation of game mods, certainly not something you'd see from a "seasoned" professional such as McGee.

Gameplay

Mario or Sonic are fine examples of platformers. You run around, you collect things, you dodge or defeat evil, and then you arrive at the end of the level. Often there will be a series of jumping puzzles that require varying degrees of skills to time and pull of the jumps perfectly, else you face doom. 3D platformers are much the same.

Well, Grimm's a platformer too, a 3D one at that. Unfortunately, there is no real evil to dodge or defeat, you simply run around somewhat slowly spreading "darkness". When you stand still, you pee. Yes, you pee. You pee and then you can jump to where your pee hits. So there goes the puzzle bit of jumping – you're given an exact guide as to where you'll land.

You also get to perform a "buttslam" by pressing the jump key twice. It spreads darkness a little further, or stuns those trying to clean up darkness.

Should you still insist on playing this game, there are six levels which shouldn't take you more than five minutes each if you want to convert everything to darkness. If you don't, maybe two or three minutes each. The entire game was over in less than the time it took to download for me (I'm on 1.5mbit ADSL)

Bugs

• Apparently will throw a bit of a hissy fit on x64 installsTurns out this is a problem with the GameTap installer which requires a 32bit system. Works fine if you install from 'setup.exe'
  
• If you've got UAC turned on, you must force it to run as Admin, otherwise you can't change game options and even worse, you can't progress anywhere in the game. You'll finish a level, and it'll restart the level.
• Alt tabbing caused instant crashes for me.

Closing Thoughts

I don't know what the target audience is – it'd be too dark for littler kids, the dialogue is too dry/boring for 'adults', and the gameplay is too boring for everybody. Edit: American confirms (in the comments) that the game is aimed at the casual gamer.

Despite how little I think of reviews giving games a rating, I'll have to give this one a over generous 2/10. The first point is for the price – free is good, and the second is for licensing the UE3, so that Epic can stay in business long enough to inevitably make UT4, or better yet, Gears of War 3.

McGee, if you read this I'm sorry, I'm not trying to break your heart, but this game was crude not just in the idea of game, but execution of the game as well.