Merry Christmas 2011

A very Minecraft Christmas to you all, courtesy of Yogscast



JD

My most loved enemy.

My Usual Spiel: Test Drive Unlimited 2, return of the obscene wealth simulator‏

Also Known As: TestDrive Unlimited 2, TDU2: Test Drive Unlimited
Also on: PS3, X360
Genre: Racing
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Eden Games

Hello again everyone it’s time for another spiel and this time it’s the next installment of my favorite driving game series ever. The title comment for this review comes from the CVG.com review I read of the first Test Drive Unlimited (TDU) it was immensely funny reading it at first as it was quite true, it was the essence of what the first Test Drive was, pretty much all about cars (and bikes) and I ask myself, has much changed? I guess not, after all Test Drive unlimited is a racing game, and a racing game has cars but this time other features have been made more accessible, but just barely.

I will start with a brief review of the first Test Drive Unlimited which I had the pleasure of playing through multiple times, I first came to read about the game when I was looking to entertain myself with a new driving game. The last one I had played was Need for Speed Carbon which was the second last of the underground car modifying subseries of EA’s Need for Speed (NFS) line of products being released, the last being Undercover which quite frankly I didn’t even notice. So when Shift rolled its way out into the third generation of consoles with its real-life tracks and legal races I decided I’d need to get a (semi) realistic racer that I could get into, I’d been a fan of NFS Hot Pursuit 2 which was an earlier incantation of semi-street racing on large tracks with sports and supercars back in 2002 but I wanted to get away from the NFS series. The other thing I wanted to get into was getting online in a driving game especially in an open-world environment with a bit of multiplayer racing thrown in there as well and Test Drive Unlimited looked the way to go.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2: Beautiful looking for the time and functional

 The first test drive unlimited shined in its graphical quality, giant open world, customization of avatar and selection of vehicles which includes dozens of cars and sports bikes. I had great fun buying cars of different classes and racing them in events all across the island which as well as normal and knockout races included things like taking models to their photo shoot, car delivery and believe it or not, drug delivery. As well as that you could buy clothes and houses to store your growing collection of cars and bikes. It faltered with its online aspect which was possibly the worst multiplayer system in any recent game I have experienced, the flaming hoops you had to jump through in order to get any kind of multiplayer event organized was ridiculous, at the time I was playing there wasn’t much multiplayer races going on, probably because they were so hard to manage that a lot of people didn’t bother with them entirely. Another very annoying problem was that the friend system was appalling. It was so hard to do the simplest things like marking someone as a friend and even harder to work out who was your friend and whether they were online plus the people who were around you seemed totally random all the time, I tried to meet up with a friend who played the game too and we organized to drive to the same place in the game world but we couldn’t see each other. There was next to no multiplayer interface and you could only chat to people nearest to you with no chatbox and no other chatting tools i.e. whispering which I think is the most basic thing you need for any kind of open world multiplayer.

Test Drive Unlimited 1: Cars and bikes

 It was clear there was a fair amount of improvements to be made on the multiplayer front, but as far as the singleplayer aspect went it was well worthwhile. So when I heard that a sequel was in the works a lot of people had quite high expectations of an improved multiplayer system, as did I to a degree, but somehow I knew that it was only going to be mildly better. I bought Test Drive Unlimited 2 (TDU2) for PC namely because I wanted to focus on online playing and to be honest I would rather rely on typing then talking and trying to hear people through your speakers and/or headset, though now I kind of wish I had bought it for console because the chat system in the game is pretty much exactly the same as the first one. There’s only one chat channel when you’re in the open world and it’s only for people relatively close to you, this changes in the multiplayer matches of course and you can talk to your friends, but I really I found myself just wanting to use the Steam overlay (which doesn’t work by the way cause I didn’t buy the game through Steam) to talk to friends or just playing in a window. You are able to join a ‘club’ (kind of like a racing version of a guild) but I’m unsure of whether this has a‘club chat’ option.

I’d hate to use World of Warcraft as an explanation of how things should work, these games are both old and new but still have great ways of communication, WoW is held up by its mouse related interface of course but it’s a testament to the tools we should have to communicate with each other for example things like a search to see who’s online at the moment, the ability to speak to the one person (aka whispering) the ability to invite others to a group and only speak to the people in that group and/or guild and most importantly have a chat channel which everyone can talk in. The lack of these things make the online world a hollow experience, and of course you could argue that WoW has been out for a very long time and is much more popular and that’s true but there’s no reason why they could not learn from this. Minecraft which is in its earlier stages is an example which has been massively enhanced with hundreds of modifications by a very large community allowing all kinds of chat options as well as tools for playing the game. There’s a reason that these two games either have great text-based communication options already or have good ones added by a modding community , it’s because they were both made specifically for computers and are very popular games with very large fan bases. Test Drive Unlimited 2 sadly is and has neither of those things, this is one of the things I have realized then dealt with pretty much from when I started playing the game and what a lot of people (namely these few) were afraid of and that is the PC version of TDU2 is pretty much a direct port from the xbox360 version. This is mainly noticeable in the interface as the coloured buttons are the shapes of the xbox system controller and the menu system doesn’t have enough functionality and the whole thing have this big and clumsy feel to it, especially when trying to use the mouse to move around, the icons on the main map are way too big as well cluttering it up but it’s functional to some degree.

Notice the XBOX360 (and possibly PS3) resemblant coloured buttons?

Though I digress, I’ve never really played a MMO style Racer so I really don’t know what’s good and what’s not and I guess comparing it to a third-person long standing MMO really isn’t fair, also another problem that hinders multiplayer is that there it seems there is quite a lot of people from non-english speaking countries so there’s both lag and the language barrier. I feel I shouldn’t complain as I always see a decent of people playing TD2 when I come online but it’s still so hard to find random multiplayer matches, I could honestly not remember how many times I’ve seen a visual ‘occupied with players’ flashing ring around an event in the world only to find that there are no players playing in it, I just want to scream “just give me a list of every single multiplayer race going on both islands whether it’s ranked or not with some decent filters i.e. race type, players, not empty, not full, ping etc!!!” then I realize it’s kind of a long and complicated statement to scream out. Maybe because the first game’s multiplayer system was so terrible that it’s going to take them awhile to get things up to scratch, hopefully that’s by TDU let’s say‘4’ (that’s a good number) there’s actually a solid PC multiplayer system of course my wishful thinking never really rewarded me much in life.

Multiplayer lobby with people in: I don't get to this stage much but it's fun when I do

 Well now that I’ve got that off my chest, and believe me I do apologise for those 4-5 paragraphs about me complaining about the multiplayer and interface. I will continue now with something I enjoy about test drive, the actual cars and the driving. Believe me I for one aren’t the best sports car driver in games or in real life, I have never driven very fast for an extended period of time, but I have a decent amount of mildly realistic car game experience, while nowhere near the kind of stuff you need to do any good at the likes of Gran Turismo 5 or Forza Motorsport. I play driving games with my old Logitech Rumblepad 2 which is basically a PS2 Dualshock controller for the PC so I use the joysticks to steer and accelerate/brake instead of the bumpers that the PS3 controllers have, but it still works well enough. I’m slightly ashamed to say I play the game on the middle road “sport” setting of the driving assistance. In my defense I did try the higher level (hardcore) but could not handle the more powerful cars as I was pretty much permanently with no grip cause of the huge amount of torque and besides there’s only 3 levels anyway (the other being “full assistance”). So that’s that I may not be great a virtual driver but Test drive makes it fun no matter what skill you are and soon you’ll be cornering and hitting those gear shifts like a pro, and yes even with automatic transmission you still can’t just floor the accelerator, unless you want to do a burnout that is.

At the next intersection, turn left

And now for the cars, the cars are obviously a big part of Test Drive as before they are divided into classes of type and engine power (roughly) the car types are Asphalt (A), Off-road (B) and Classic (C) each type having a range of tiers A1 to A7 etc and annoying to some people you have to do pass a couple of trials to acquire the license to drive every single one of them, but I don’t mind, the tests are pretty helpful. Type C and B only have 2 classes though and this makes the A class seem kind of an overhaul as it has much more cars than the others and the A7 and A6 tiers only have 3 and 4 cars respectively which doesn’t exactly give you much choice seeing as you have to get at least one . This is what gets you buying a lot of cars and a lot of houses to store them in (as you do) and the varying kinds of vehicles make it more interesting it’s great fun going from screeching around in a modern sports car to cruising in a 1950’s Cadillac, even more so is the new off-road tracks and cars that just about makes the game worth playing by themselves, there’s something very non-realistic (and environmentally baneful) about roaring down a woodland path at 200kms an hour in a huge SUV but oh man is it fun. Another big point about test drive is the various camera views you can use both while driving and in the replay mode, and what’s more you can use your controller’s D-pad (or appropriate keys of whatever you are using) to look around the car in outside view or with your head in the interior view. TDU has always had very good interior detail, and it’s fun to watch your character steering and changing gears or just not looking at where you’re going for fun’s sake.

The garage/showroom in one of my houses, yes plural

The environment in test drive has improved a bit I would say, the new starting island Ibiza has very picturesque scenery with rolling fields, woodland forests and western style rocky mountain ranges with a bit of change in the environment compared to TDU1 which apart from the inner cities did not differ that much. Unfortunately though the graphics are reasonably good looking they do somewhat pale in comparison to the like of Forza and GT5, the cars and environment does look good, but not as good as they could so to speak though I like to think that their good in their own special way. There also has been the exciting addition of roundabouts which are a nice touch of realism but technically no-one apart from the traffic goes round them the right way and their a ripe spot for hooning players (just like in real life). As well as the new island with its new scenery and roundabouts you get pretty much the old game for free as the whole island of Oahu makes a return, the only difference being that there is now off-road tracks and you get there via a different airport and starting location, the layout and scenery in Hawaii are pretty much the same as before just given a bit of a touch-up but it’s good to have it there again, I’m especially fond of the way the edges of the road are very wide and don’t count towards ‘running off the road’ penalty which they have removed in Ibiza. There is also a new reason to do some exploring, various car wrecks of certain cars are scattered around the whole island and if you happen to drive near them your “car wreck radar”will start bleeping depending on how close you are (just like in Aliens) finding 10 of the same car wreck awards you with a new free car to add to your collection, tis a nice little fun activity to do that beaks up your usual everyday activity of driving really fast expensive cars with no regard for your own or others safety (well most of the time).

 Tres magnifique

 Unlike the previous game there is now a story mode where you start with that old cliche movie ‘dream sequence’ “where you’re a huge star then you wake up to reality and you’re really just a ordinary bloke with a shitty job” in this case it’s a valet driver and you end up joining this big racing championship for rich people which is the basis of the singleplayer mode. The different events coincide with the car and class types so there’s a C4 event and A6 event etc and for each type of car and about 5-6 events inside that inc normal race, time trial, eliminator (last man standing), speed limit which is basically:“keep above this speed without crashing for about 2 minutes” and checkpoint where you have to basically break the law by going through the speed cameras as fast as possible (hey, we’re rich and drive hugely expensive cars who gives a stuff?). Additionally to this there is a Championship every so often where you drive cars from various classes and types and all this is accompanied by various cutscenes of you and all the drivers and your‘rival’ for this particular event. In my opinion this storyline and cutscenes are basically fun to watch for all the wrong reasons. I usually go easy on cutscenes in games, unless they happen to cheesily replace them with a picture and text explanation of what’s happening (I’m looking at you Tenchu 3) but the cutscenes are made laughable at best due to the terrible and cheesy voice acting and the outdated and animatronic look of the human models, I enjoy a good storyline to break up the usual race-o-rama etc but frankly most people would not have the required attention span. Also there is all your usual random events such as giving attractive ladies a lift and some new ones including seeing how fast and crazy you can drive and tailing someone’s girlfriend to eventually find they are cheating on them, this always seems to be the same guy who gets you to do this, and judging by the amount of times this type of challenge appears he kind of has a serious woman problem.

This is about as animated as the character models get.

 One of my favorite features of the first Test Drive was the huge amount of wealth you seemed to accumulate while doing nothing but racing cars (and bikes) and spending it on nothing but cars, bikes, clothes and houses of which were of no real use other than to store your increasingly large car collection. This is what makes Test Drive different from other racing games, in TDU2 you aspire to be some sort of cashed up celebrity racer with pretty much no regard for the safety of others or Hawaiian residents for that matter, with your incredulous wealth you can buy cars and upgrades, houses, clothes and even things like haircuts and cosmetic surgery (yep, it’s truly celebrity). One thing I have noticed however, is that through the Test Drive games the clothes have been somewhat ridiculous looking, and in TDU2 this is no exception for example, would you wear a blazer with a hoodie underneath? would you also wear a blazer with no shirt? would you wear bright shiny red tracksuit pants with the same colour high top shoes? Most (normal) people would not, so I suppose that the idea is to dress outlandishly like the crazy celeb you are supposed to be. Your house (or houses) is now slightly more interactive as you can now walk around inside them and access various things such as the TV or your laptop which give you access to various info including stats and game announcements, you can also now modify the interior of your house with different floor and walls, couches, dining tables and chairs which is a nice touch, not that you can actually sit in them (or the pool for that matter), but at least you can walk around and outside not to mention your cavernous garage where you can ogle your cars from every angle, even the interior. The actual customization of the cars is minimal, as this is no Need for Speed Underground, it is limited to tuner stores which have a pretty over-simplified way of upgrading your car for money and also a “sticker shop” where you can apply new car paint in various styles and/or decorate your car with a very limited graphics system.

Mah house, I like the 'island' feel

 There has been one DLC (Downloadable Content Pack) so far for the game, this was the Exploration Pack which gave access to both new challenges and new “car wrecks” to find to acquire new cars as well as a few other much needed tweaks. To be honest though what I am waiting for is bikes, I very much enjoyed the motorcycles in the first test drive and now (halfway through my second attempt at the game) I find that they are going to be released in the next DLC packthat has been announced for release around February 2012. Though this isn’t all flowers and roses, there appears to only be 3 bikes two Ducati’s and one Harley Davidson, and there will only be new multiplayer not singleplayer challenges added for bikes. So whoop dee doo 3 bikes, though at least we actually do get a Harley style one I suppose, it seems that bikes were a thing that Eden Gamesnever meant to put in and are just giving bike fans (like me) something to make us shut up. So in retrospect I really shouldn’t complain, I can at least ride bikes soon, but due to all the restrictions on the singleplayer races (and the removal of the no class requirement races) it doesn’t look like I’ll be using the bikes in the singleplayer races at all. Also I sincerely hope the new cars that come with the pack will fill up the A classes with not many cars too choose from, though I doubt it as they look to be mostly superfast A1/A2 style machines and I also hope that the new clothing stores have less freakin silly looking clothes.

Hoodie and blazer? I blame the Rappers

Or hey just ditch underclothes altogether

Epic shoes, I just noticed she's wearing legwarmers with high heels

 To be perfectly honest I would not recommend this game to a hardcore driving simulator enthusiast, nor would I recommend it to an arcade style racing enthusiast, Test Drive Unlimited 2 is for those people in between who like the other things you do (or could do) in car games without all the motorsport and car technicality or mindless pedal-to-the-metal-slamming-into-the-wall-in-order-to-turn gameplay. TDU2 is for the people who want a pleasantly realistic racer who are into cars but not toointo cars if you know what I mean, it’s a good game if you’re able to look past the flaws, The graphics do look a bit dated for this day and age and I’m not even going to mention the character models, I’m still not a fan of the way multiplayer is set up, but as I said before this is the first time I have tried a so called “Driving MMO” but I maintain the fact of the direct port from console does not help. The driving experience seems to vary, sometimes the driving feels like a chore, especially with the knockout races, other times I’m so entranced I’m paying more attention to the scenery than I am driving other times I’m having so much fun driving I’m switching camera angles like crazy as if I‘m making a movie while I’m driving.

The new island of Ibiza, the blue lines are the highways that i've traversed, zoom in further and you can see more roads

 I enjoy Test Drive Unlimited 2, it lets me race classic and new cars in a great environment. If you want a semi-realistic driving game set in two and want to be a millionaire celebrity racing superstar and also be able to meet and race with other players, then this is the game for you.

JD

Caution: Multi-millionaire insensible tourists in ridiculously powerful cars ahead.

The Past and Times of Yore: WC3, The Founding of Durotar‏

For completion’s sake I have recently finished the Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne expansion bonus Orc campaign named “The Founding of Durotar”

The Founding of Durotar, Campaign Menu showing Rexxar and Misha

This decision basically came from questing and exploring in World of Warcraft specifically where I was either thinking about the new areas that had come in cataclysm and/or thinking about the events that occurred between Warcraft III (WC3) and World of Warcraft (WOW). The Orc campaign in WC3 was mainly about them landing on the continent of Kalimdor in the area which would soon be known as Durotar with both their alliance with the Tauren and Darkspear trolls and continued struggle with the humans. Speaking of the Darkspear Trolls, there was a custom campaign that Blizzard made to show off that part of the WC3 Map Editor. It detailed how Thrall met Sen’jin (and Vol’jin) when the Horde reached the Broken isles on the way to Kalimdor, however this campaign although being ‘bonus’as well was only selectable from the ‘skirmish’ game screen as it was not an actual campaign . 

Rexxar and Thrall in an in-game cinematic in the first chapter

 The Founding of Durotar, takes a different approach from the usual WC3 RTS style, instead of commanding a whole army, you played as a small group of heroes, the most prominent being Rexxar, who is a half orc/ogre hybrid of the Moknathaal and is also a BeastMaster which in turn is one of the neutral heroes available from the Tavern. Rexxar by chance runs into the Orc Leader Thrall while he is building a new nation for his people and eventually leads the horde army against the bulk of the human Kul Tiras forces led by the staunch hero of the second war Admiral Daelin Proudmoore. During his quest he meets various other characters who are also able to be played some hero units some not. One of the purposes of this campaign was to let you play the existing predominately horde related heroes and units again as well as introduce you to the new horde hero and units as well as some new neutral heroes as well, as shown below.

Rexxar, Rokhan and Cairne Bloodhoof in the final chapter of The founding of Durotar

 Heroes

• Rexxar (Beastmaster)
• Misha
• Rokhan (Shadow hunter)
• Nazgrel
• Drek'Thar (Far Seer)
• Chen Stormstout (Pandaren Brewmaster)
• Samuro (Blademaster)
• Jaina Proudmoore (Archmage)
• Cairne Bloodhoof (Tauren Chieftain)

Units

• Spirit Walker
• Troll Batrider

(Taken from WoWWiki)

Playing through levels in control of a single hero is something really wanted to do pretty much throughout the whole of WC3, I even went so far as to customise multiplayer maps via the WC3 World Editor so I could play alongside the computer with a single hero unit, this idea was also picked up by the makers of the custom map Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) which became wildly popular. Basically what Blizzard were trying to do with this type of gameplay was to use the Orc Campaign in the expansion as a player introduction to the single unit questing adventure style of play in WoW as the Orcs didn’t exactly have a huge part to play in the Frozen Throne storyline anyway. Going back and finishing this campaign also answers a lot of questions and gives some insight of what actually happened between the finish of the Orc campaign in WC3 and the start of WoW, for example it explained who Rexxar was, how Durotar was claimed and Orgrimmar built and how Ogres and Tauren and many main characters appear in the WoW today, also it explains about Admiral Daelin Proudmoore and where Kul Tiras had been this whole time, though technically their island home is yet to be added to WoW.

Admiral Daelin Proudmoore, as he appeared in WC3 in the final chapter

Anyway It was a good experience, even though I got a bit impatient at the end and just wanted to see what happened, I played almost the entire Warcraft series of games from start to finish and have accumulated a broad knowledge of the Warcraft universe. I do like informing people of lore they may have missed out on especially when they may not have played any of the previous Warcraft games as it is a lot to learn by having WoW as your first ever Warcraft game. Saying that though a lot of people never bothered playing the singeplayer of many of the previous Warcraft titles, sometimes this can get annoying like for example people who ask things like where the Dark Portal goes to even after The Burning Crusade expansion had come out.

Anyhow, It was great to finally finish off this last bit of Warcraft 3 as I for one enjoy lore a lot and finding out more about the Warcraft universe is exciting to me whether it’s reading a book, the internet or playing an old game. 

Until we meet again, know your lore,

JD

Rexxar, Misha and his Quillboar and Hawk as they appear in World of Warcraft

this land cannot be tamed….

Fraps, Fiendish and the Expressionable masses

I have done a bit of experimenting with fraps and found it quite easy to use not to mention useful for screenshots, viewing your frames per second (this is sometimes abbreviated as FPS confusingly the same as First Person Shooter) in any game you desire as well as recording videos as I was thinking of making a youtube account and adding videos to my blog if the need arises. Usually I have just found relevant videos from the net if I need to show something. But I suppose having my own videos would be useful if I want to show a specific example of what I do in a game, I decided not to go with it for my Battlefield post as there was enough content out there to use. I think this kind of thing would be more suited to my Minecraft posts where I can catch what happens in my experiences or show off what I’ve made by way of panning camera and walkthroughs. 

I like to think of myself as a writer more then a videoblogger as my very Minecraftesque friend TheFiendish has established himself to be, I’ve seen some scepticism from certain places that there is quite a lot of Minecraft (as well as other game) machinima out there and I’d rather not add to the mass (though you could argue there are a lot of blogs out there too) but when you obviously haven't scripted what you are going to say, it does begin to sound a bit painful unless what you are doing is someway incredibly exciting.


The Fiendish's, 'Let's play Minecraft' series, riveting stuff

One of the things I like about writing is that I can write in a lot of places that aren’t at home and I can express things better rather than through unscripted babble or a voiceover while viewing game footage. Also I use screenshots because I do save every one I take on my hard drive and they do take up a bit of space, and if these happened to be videos they would take up about triple the space, though technically there would not be as many videos and possibly less screenshots if I did this. Additionally I do not have the best internet bandwidth cap (25gig per month), so I would rather not be uploading and constantly auto-downloading while checking the videos, though these issues can all be rectified in some way.

I will definitely keep this in mind though, especially for future Minecraft posts.

JD


We might possibly be genuinely interested.

My Usual Spiel: Battlefield 3, Long live the War Veteran(s)

Also Known As: BF3
Also on: X360, PS3
Genre: Online Shooter
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: DICE (Digital Illusions CE) 

Good aftereveniorning, time for more shit I’ve done played and time yet again for another post title, this is the last one I need to create I think of posts with a theme cause I can’t seem to post anymore without it having some sort of theme, or I think the term is regular article, though I still need to ask my good friend Dave Jackson how he gets that‘regular posts’ feature on the side of his blog. Anyway as“The Past and times of Yore” is the title for reviews of games of the past (and sometimes more recent past) “My usual Spiel” is the new title for my reviews of reasonably new games, games of which I came out in the past 1 or 2 years but unfortunately it’s kind of hard to judge. 

I indeed have decided to go back and review past games I have played but it’s kind of hard to differentiate between the past and the“present” in general let alone game releases and obviously I do have to play the game first before I review but that’s not too much of a problem as with new games I buy the game then immediately play it (usually) and whenever I go back and replay a game singleplayer or otherwise the review usually comes after it. Also “review” I probably not the right word to use for these things my “spiel” refers to my“take” or “opinion” on the game and what it means to me, instead of catering to all crowds and giving a score out of 10 at the end, saying that I do try to write the blog to be intelligible to people who don’t usually play computer or video games (or at least the ones I do)hence the large amount of hyperlinks(heh heh) but for the most part there is a lot of gamer lingo in there and I apologies for anyone finding it difficult to both read both my prose and the technobabble mixed together.

But anyway, time for more relevant words to today’s topic though I do need to give a bit of backstory on my whole EA Battlefield experience to make things a bit more clear for my actual review.

Well I’m going to say it, I’ve always been a staunch supporter of EA/DICE’s Battlefieldseries, at least that’s where I stand, it’s kind of a gaming version of the old Australian Holden vs Ford car rivalry, of course one could argue that they’re both different games despite the initial similarities though I still don’t see why you would buy both.

Lego: experience it your own way

This series I can say has a special place in my heart kind of like Lego has a special place in the hearts of children, It provides a service to me as my preferred kind of multiplayer FPS as Lego provides a service for keeping children (and adults) entertained. It also provides me with many different experiences of the one medium, this game gives the FPS genre a much broader feel then the likes of Counterstrike Sourceand the older FPS such as Quake II provides, it allows me to play the game in one way and when I get bored of playing that particular style I can continue with a different style of play. And thus is Battlefield, the game of which I have enjoyed ever since the likes of Battlefield 1942that has graced my screen to this day and as my good friend Brok power has pointed out numerous times Codename Eagle that has come before it. Battlefield 3 is the latest one to come out and is the successor to Battlefield 2 which in turn was the successor to Battlefield 1942. I never played 1942 much online it was more of a LAN game for me (as was Battlefield Vietnamand Desert Combat) only more recently since I had purchased the complete pack for a bargain price I had a small go on the 3FL server Brok had recommended and played on consistently which I even had a go of myself and I got to say it was pretty fun, previously I had only played singleplayer with bots, which is also fun but does get a bit lonely after a while. Battlefield 2 however has been my most online played FPS, I really didn’t have a problem with it, it was a good enough replacement for Vietcong which was one of the first games I played online and the first one where I was serious, serious as in I was in a clan as was online at specific times in order to play for “wars” against other clans, Vietcong was a great game in a way that it had a great multiplayer and a great singleplayer which is a great achievement for an FPS.

Vietcong: a most classic and one of my favorite FPS

Battlefield 2 however did have its differences from Vietcong, for one Battlefield 2 was set in present day using modern weapons, and it had (depending on the map size i.e. 16/32/64 player) a vast amount of area to move around in and that’s just one of the reasons I liked about it another was the different sides and classes you could go, classes were a big thing in all of my FPS playing and it is one of the reasons I never liked Counterstrike Sourcethat much. What I mean by this is that a side is what army you are playing as, whether it be the US or Russia or some kind of Middle Eastern Army (MEC, PLR) and your class is what role you are taking, whether it be basic assault, medic, sniper, engineer etc and what made it great was that all armies have different weapons to each and all classes had different weapons as well. BF2 also had vehicles, and lots of them which included jeeps, APC’s, tanks, choppers, jets and more, along with the vast expanse that was most levels this was a great combination. I played Battlefield 2 online for lack of a better word (or two) a lot, it had next to no singleplayer aspect but this didn’t matter, you played BF2 multiplayer online and that’s all that happened it had ranks and weapon unlocks and was kept alive by expansions and booster packs such as Special Forces, Euro Force and Armored fury. I played a small amount of clanning and warring. And it was good, it worked well, it played well with a few minor quirks here and there and I enjoyed it.

Battlefield 2: Simple and effective

Of course I could go on to Battlefield 3 right here but except the Battlefield saga kept going, I for one did not play Battlefield 2142 much at all (I think I played the demo for about 10 minutes) though sometimes I wish I had cause it looked kind of fun. After Battlefield 2 my main FPS of play was Battlefield Bad Company 2 (this is an odd title I know and there were a few more Battlefield games between this but I didn’t play them so look to the video above) Anyway this is where I noticed things had changed which were:

• It had a Singleplayer story-driven mode
• It was limited to only 32 players
• There was now less classes and they had changed their loadout and abilities
• You were no longer able to play as the Commander.
• There was no Airstrike, Vehicle drop or Minimap UAV (this was replaced by a remote-controlled helicopter and possibly the support mortar)
• The maps were smaller so there was somewhat less vehicles altogether
• There was no prone ability
• You could no longer use the Laser guided missile in the Jet or the TV-guided missile in the Attack Chopper

I did know this type of thing would happen as I had skipped over a few battlefield games since BF2 and yes there were some good things namely better graphics for one and new unlockables. But I casually brushed some of these changes aside as I always had this idea that the Bad Company series was largely singleplayer focused and was EA/DICE’s attempt at a singleplayer Battlefield experience which by my opinion, worked. I only played the second Bad Company game but I enjoyed the fast paced storyline for the most part. Recently I was talking with a friend regarding Battlefield 2 and he made an interesting statement regarding the series saying that: Battlefield 2 was all the pieces laid out, the whole modern-day combat product with all of the features (well mostly) and they have taken bits away, added bits on, meshed pieces together and generally changed things around. Regardless I was a bit taken back by these changes whether they were permanent or not.

Then came Battlefield 3, I wasn’t really expecting it until I decided to get Bad Company as an upgrade for BF2 I naively thought it was the sequel to BF2 but obviously this was incorrect. So I basically was not expecting anything when it came out and it was only through the encouragement of friends both to play with and write my review that I purchased it not too long ago for a bargain price of $57.00 I might add at a certain non-commercial gaming shop in Elizabeth st. And I will start with the Singleplayer.

Running, following, hoping you don't get shot, usual exciting day

I’ve never really expected a singleplayer in Battlefield, that was largely the territory of other games of roughly the same field, such as Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, Day of Defeat maybe?. 1942 had only a sort of play through all the maps in a half-historical re-enactment of World War 2. Battlefield 2 had no singleplayer campaign at all apart from the semi-useless 16 player bot mode which I think was bettered in later patches but I never bothered to check. Bad Company was the first one largely based on a singleplayer experience, a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare style of singleplayer mode to be precise and Battlefield 3’s singleplayer mode is no different. I hate to complain about this but I have never liked this style of singleplayer storymode, my favorite singeplayer experience of all was not in the Half-life series as some might think, but in Vietcong. Vietcong had a great storyline, you were the same person the whole time a new sergeant going into a new base during the Vietnam war, you had your office and quarters where you could read your diary, previous mission reports and many other documents you also had a firing range you could go to and pick any weapon you had unlocked or picked up to test out and take on the next mission and there was almost always a meeting in the briefing room which was heaps of fun to watch before you went out on your mission and on several occasions you could walk around the whole base.

Ahh, trademark army banter

 There is none of these things in the BF3 singleplayer it revolves around a story where you are blipped flashback-style into the minds of several different people and do various army related things which all revolve around the one storyline, there is no home base, no office or quarters, no picking your weapon, no briefing just a harsh awakening and a boot in the head (sometimes literally it seems with the shaky camera) to get your fun-filled action-packed mission-face on soldier. But don’t get me wrong I’m not saying this isn’t fun filled experience, it is fun, but coupled with the features I had previously described would have made the entire experience all that more fun(er) and possibly (ier) and also last a bit longer, maybe I just wanted to see what happened, but usually with things this action packed it is over relatively quickly. Vietcong had that kind of slow paced walking through the jungle ambush style of play which added a great deal of atmosphere and suspense and anyone who has seen movies such as Platoon and then watched Black Hawk Down

Platoon: stealth, jungle and suspense

Black Hawk Down: action-o-rama

Maybe it’s my fascination of being in an expansive online world that I like that attracts me to games that have it (Battlefield as an FPS example, WoW as an MMO example and Test Drive Unlimited as a racing example) except this isn’t exactly the same type of interaction that a typical MMO would give (well, at least when it’s not player vs player enabled), in this environment there’s danger around every corner, literally a corner could be a shield or a barrier from being spotted by a prowling tank (or “lumbering” whatever a tank does) and obvious difference being that pretty much every living thing you interact with is either a friend or an enemy, there are no civilians here, although I sometimes wish there were. I’ve always wondered what games like the Battlefield series would be like with civilians around like you usually see in news reports and documentaries, where you not only have to check your fire for friendly units but for civilians running around as well. I have played the entire singleplayer campaign now and ran through totally deserted streets apart from the scripted events of when enemies suddenly appear and you mow them down. Of course there are certain reasons why I thought there are no civilians in most FPS games:

• You could shoot them for fun like the cold blooded murderer you are :D
• You could use them as human shields
• They could be distracting
• They use up extra graphical and processor power

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, however took civilians to a new extreme as you can see below:

I have not played Modern Warfare 2, but seeing this like this makes me think that the Battlefield 3 singleplayer could have been much more entertaining, of course Patrick Bach, Executive Producer of Battlefield 3 had this to say. To be honest, I don't want to be slaughtering masses of civilians in fact I don't even want the intention to, I just want them to be there, walking, running, screaming, hiding doing what you usually do when a gunfight breaks out, to give you the challenge of distinguishing whether they are a threat or not.

Anyway on to the multiplayer front and as if this post hasn’t been long enough already I’ve got a bit to say, once purchasing the game I was quite eager to see what this momentous release was like, what they’d changed and what was new, and the first surprise was how the installer scared the hell out of me. When you install Battlefield 3 for the PC you have to install this thing called Origin which is basically a new version of the Electronic Arts downloader, and "downloader" being the key word as when you actually activate your product you have to actually press the button to “download” it after this it proceeds to download the game saying it’s going to use 11gig of your bandwidth even if you have the DVD in the drive. However, the difference being is that if you started the origin installation process with the DVD in the drive it would say it’s“downloading” but you notice that it’s going way too fast and there’s no net activity because it is “downloading” off the DVD, but if you started the origin “download” process with no DVD it actually would download the whole 11gig. Well gee that’s not confusing at all is it?

I rarely complain about game company ‘requirements for play’ but this is just ridiculous and dangerous especially for people (like me) with fairly small internet bandwidth caps. But anyway I got the game installed from the DVD thankfully and found that the BF3 main menu system is run from your web browser, which is a very interesting change that I have not seen before, but it works ok and is fine with me, having a look at the multiplayer games available I do enjoy having a large amount of server filter options which work well. I found the in-game interface easy enough to manage, the new player spawning system is pretty good the way you can spawn directly into vehicles, but does take some getting used to.

BF3 spawn screen: fancy but not too complicated

 Now for the classes, this is probably going to sound like a rant from me because I have always been a huge fan of class-based FPS as unlike the FPS of old you could do something which made you different from the other person, it gave you a role to fill that no-one else could i.e. Medic can heal, Sniper has long range capability and the nuances that balanced them out i.e Medic could provide health and revive but their weapons were weaker, Snipers had long range weapons but in close range could only defend with a pistol, Engineers and Anti-tanks were slower and equipped with SMG’s or Shotguns but packed more firepower with other weapons and with either a boon or bane to vehicles and Assault were basically the all-round class. To be honest I had no problem with the 7 class system that BF2 had, all of them had their own special way of playing and their own toys. But as I mentioned earlier in the post this had changed in BF2142and then slightly changed again in Bad Company, this wasn’t too bad I guess they had merged the Spec Ops and Sniper classes naming them‘recon’ resulting in Snipers having C4 and being able to unlock a Spec Ops style Carbine, they had also merged the Engineer with Anti tank so you were able to unlock and choose either rocket launchers or anti tank mines to use. These two changes I tolerated but then it kinda got weird, they had given the support light machine gun to the medic and given the ammo resupply bag to the assault class so there was no more support class which was kind of strange cause I always had thought of assault as the main non-support class.

BF2 spawn screen: Seeing this made me happy even before playing.

 And so in BF3 I look at the classes and find that the Assault and Medic classes have now been combined, so in theory there was no assault anymore and the Medic class I had always gone and loved was now the only choice for a base assault class, as the Support was back to normal having the LMG again and the ammo bag. I just found it annoying that this had happened cause now my identity as a support class was skewed I have sort of decided to either go Assault (Medic), Support or Engineer depending on what my squad needs, but this is made more difficult because of the fact that both the Medic and Support classes are both displayed as the same icon in the deploy screen.

Battlefield 3 classes: more gear more specializations, more unlockables, better?

Furthermore to my ranting I’d also like to point out that I do not approve of the new minimap, I mean compared to what people say about it I can see things fine in its neon glowingness, the thing that annoys me is the new way you can zoom in and out. The minimap in both BF2 and BC2 had two modes one was where it was in a corner of your screen and it showed your immediate area, the other was when you pushed the button to enlarge the map (mine was capslock) and it automatically showed the whole map. In BF3 the minimap is controlled through the N and M buttons, one to enlarge the map the other to zoom the map if I so desire. When starting play the minimap displays your immediate area as usual but when I press the button to enlarge the minimap it comes up with an enlarged version of my immediate area, I don’t want this, I don’t think anyone would, what I want is when I press the enlarge map button I want to see the whole map I don’t want to have to press N, N, M just to see the whole damn map. People have told me that they don’t really use the large minimap or even that they don’t need the minimap altogether as you just “know where to go” but I for one use the minimap a lot especially when seeing spotted enemies around me and also just when I want to check out which areas of the battlefield I should go, of course I don’t know whether someone has brought out a fix already or this is going to be changed in a later patch.

Oh great an enlarged version of my immediate area, not my cup of tea

 Planes are back, fill her up please!

 With the aircraft there are now jets in the game again, but after having played the singleplayer mission being a Jet gunner and having lots of fun with the ground attack toys I was mildly disappointed that apparently you cannot be a jet gunner in multiplayer, with used to one of my favorite things to do in BF2 although only being able to use the one hard-to-use laser guided missile, it was very satisfying when used properly and speaking of which they have also taken out the popular TV-guided missile from the attack copper (sigh). Speaking of aircraft though I am now quite elated as I mentioned before you could auto-spawn into the choppers and one of my favorite things to do as an engineer was to sit in the chopper as a passenger with my repair tool out and repair the chopper when needed, it’s quite humorous as people get frustrated as to why they can’t destroy it and also helps because the choppers (especially the transport ones) are easily shot down.

But apart from those things not too much had changed that mattered greatly to me, sure the graphics are better but Battlefield 2 though in its entirety was perfect for me (well that is after all the bugs and glitches were sorted out) it replaced Vietcong as my main multiplayer game for a great length of time until I eventually discovered the greats of MMORPGS with the infamous Lineage 2 and then WoW which ultimately became one of the reasons I don’t play FPS heavily or in clans anymore, the other being the repetitiveness FPS play i.e. run around get shot, spawn again repeat, next map repeat though I’m not going to get into that whole argument that’s just one of the reasons. As I read one employee of DICE saying that it’s very hard to tweak a game when doing so means that you may change or take a minimal feature a single or group of users know and love and I can agree with that, it’s always what I think whenever something is changed in a game sequel or patch, instead of complaining about it, just think about the person who has to make these decisions. Battlefield 3 in its entirety is fun to play, even if it’s missing or changed a few things that I did enjoy myself with and I hope the series continues to be great as the ones I’ve played have been my best experience of multiplayer FPS gaming, it allows people who are not the best at running and shooting to excel and have fun in other ways and allows so many different aspects of play to specialize yourself in.

Battlefield 2002-2011, No matter which side of the war you’re on, long live the veteran.

JD

I may have died but I was different to everyone else, well at least I tried to be

Minecraft Adventures: Mikeland Factions spawn area re-visited

Just a quick post here regarding the Mikeland Factions server

As some of you may have read from my previous post I wrote about my adventures of the Mikeland Factions minecraft server, but forgot to get photos of the magnificent spawn before it was destroyed due to the unexpected loss of the modifications on the server thus rendering the spawn area unprotected (and those of you who do play Minecraft will know all too well what that means)

Well fortunately the server and the spawn area has been made anew (not sure whether that was the official post though)

So here we are, some shots of the best spawn area I have seen in any Minecraft server as yet

Spawn area on top of the tower with a water fall-stopper down

The spawn tower with cages for naughty players

View of middle courtyard from spawn

The world portals and a pvp arena

Alternate pvp arena

Shop district

Shop district (unfinished)

Admin shop

Admin shop

The playable pvp arena

Awesome huh? too bad I probably won't be playing on Mikeland anytime soon with the rumored return of a new server from the one and only Norc of Neonetwise, and stay tuned for some Battlefield goodness

Signing out.

JD

I am a patron of the arts