Cars going in a straight line. A rarity.

We might as well start with the best, the character editor. Streamlined and extremely detailed, the editor should be a defacto standard for all games. The ability to edit every aspect of your character, as well as create your own designs and decals for clothing and tattoos, results in something very unique and well accomplished by Realtime Worlds. There are not many games out there that come close to the amount of options available to you when it comes to developing who you are in the game world.

It’s a shame therefore that the customization in APB seems to be the only aspect of the game that is well polished. APB itself is at best a GTA clone without the charm and style of GTA. The city is empty, soulless and devoid of interest. It acts less as a functioning cityscape and more of an arena for the players. Where the likes of Liberty City, San Andreas and others could live without their iconic main characters going through it, APB’s city would become a barren lifeless landscape without its players. To make matters worse the city is split into three sections that have no real connection to each other other than through a menu screen. The two main districts for the game contain the missions and action of the game, while the social district acts as a neutral hub for customizing your character.

Pretty and quiet.

The game itself is heavily dependent on PVP; so much so in fact that APB could not seriously be recommended to someone who wants to play solo. You choose between two factions within the game; Enforcers or Criminals. You can guess really what each faction entails, and the flimsy story that accompanies APB doesn’t really explain much other than “You’re the bad/good guy, go kill the good/bad guy”. The missions themselves are supplied by different NPC’s in the game, who have you perform different actions that results in you levelling up and improving your relation with the NPC. The higher the relationship and level, the better the guns. There’s no story though, no real reason as to why you do the numerous fetch quests or attack quests that you perform in the game. In the end these missions exist only as the background objectives for what occurs in the PVP game.

The PVP can be fun at times. There was one situation in which I was running down the street with a fellow enforcer, chasing after a crim. Starksy and Hutch, Miami Vice, all the best cop shows rolled into that scene as we tried to hunt the bad guy. These moments though are fleeting, and you soon find yourself on the other side against what can seem like overwhelming odds. Missions you perform can result in an APB being sent out against you, in the form of another player or even a group. You can call backup if a group is against you, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get help, and given how small the player count is there’s a high likelyhood you will be on your own.

The likelyhood of this many people in the same place is slim

This results in missions becoming a race to the objective, because if the opposing player is already there, it’s extremely likely you’ll fail the mission. The player simply has to wait and find a good camping spot near the objective, resulting in death after death as you try to capture the objective, but find yourself shot from out of nowhere because the bad guy is camping in the vicinity. It isn’t fun. It’s tedious, annoying, and poor gameplay. Groups results in the same situation, but instead of one person killing you, you have three or maybe four. Call some backup to resolve this is APB’s tip, except everyone is eating donuts, or doesn’t care.

Vehicle combat and movement has improved from the beta, but it’s difficult to tidy up something that is pretty much garbage. The cars are sluggish heavy lumps of metal in which it’s advisable to pray to the car driving God before you attempt any sort of steering. Gaining a faster car is a death trap as it’s almost uncontrollable. The better your connection the less likely you’ll suffer from extreme lag spikes in your car steering, but you’re still in the end driving cars that feel like they have no physical attachment to the road, and can easily spin out of control.

And this many pimped out cars.

Combat itself is supposed to be a balanced affair, but you’ll increasingly find yourself taking on opponents who seem to have the upper hand in weaponry, despite so-called balancing in attributes. Shotguns are overly powerful, sniper rifles don’t really work, rifles work depending on what type and grenades are a nightmare. It feels all very rough, and to make matters worse there is a feeling that the engine is performing some sort of calculation or dice roll before the bullet hits the target. It’s as if you never really feel you’re doing any damage to your opponent.

In the end APB is a disaster that will take a while to iron out. When we first saw the information and news about APB at the conferences there was some worry, a little voice in the back of our head going “Customization is all fine and well, but where’s the game?” Sadly it seems our fears have come true; APB wants to be GTA Multiplayer, but fails miserably at it. The dubious subscription method of buying time in order to play the game raises questions as to whether Realtime Worlds perhaps knew that realistically they had a dud on their hands. Why buy this when there’s a perfectly good GTAIV multiplayer that’s free accross the road?

Duran Duran needed a new look.

Either way, APB as it is today isn’t very good. Like all MMO’s we’ll check back on it in a year to see if anything has improved over time, but in its current state APB cannot be recommended, even with an excellent customization tool. Soulless and without life, you should really just stick to GTAIV for now.

4/10

Hide and Seek?

A perfect example of this is a scenario you meet very early on in the Soviet campaign; defend the train until it loads up cargo and is ready to go. The aching slowness of the percentage meter gradually increasing is an experience most games fail to get right, resulting in either boredom or annoyance at getting so far then failing. With Men of War it’s an exhilarating fight to the death as Nazi forces move in from every single position and attempt to destroy you. By the end of the scenario all my men had been wiped out and pushed back to the very brink of the map. A smattering of soldiers were left to defend the train with it almost complete at 99%. Another minute to hold out against tanks and multiple infantry. By the end the train left with no soldiers remaining, the German tanks only a metre away from its destruction. Exciting, intense and horrific all in one, and that was just one of the scenarios.

Men of War is a perfect game in many ways. The ability to enter into and use any vehicle in the game becomes not only a boon, but a tactical choice. Do you move that truck out into the road so as to give yourself cover and a better firing position? Do you move up near to where the enemy is likely to attack so that you can blow it up later, creating enough of a shockwave to knock out the enemy? Company of Heroes taught us the meaning of clever cover usage on the map. Men of War takes this cover usage and adds in its own spice of action. Enemy tanks for instance are extremely deadly, but they’re not invincible. By clicking on the tank you can determine it’s area of attack, and therefore how best to flank around it so you can drop a grenade in and destroy it. You have to be quick though, as everything on the map is destructable eventually.

Bad guys are here somewhere.

Once you get to grips with the game it can be both challenging and fun. The tutorial supplied with Men of War is a bit flimsy, but thankfully performing actions on the field isn’t to complicated. All you have to remember is that in Men of War, left click is for actions and right click is for deselect! This little change has caused me confusement a good couple of times since i’m used to right click for orders RTS games. Once you get over that you’ll also find a couple of surprises in the game. Enemies, some tanks, boxes and other items on the map can be looted, resulting in an inventory screen opening up, creating a peculiar RTS-RPG feel to the game. You can effectively loot the enemy for ammo, weapons, mines and other items in order to survive. Indeed you soon find as you play Men of War that it becomes advisable to do so. Ammo isn’t unlimited in this game. You will run out of grenades and reloading options, and once that happens you’ll need to restock or watch your men be killed easily.

There they are!

Graphically the game is in par with Company of  Heroes as well, though attempts to maintain a more gritty look to it as well. Sound is where the problem lies really, as the English dubbing for the cut scenes is sadly poor. Not dissimilar to another game i’ve played that was published by 1C Company, the dubbing sounds like it was performed afterwards to the game, and the English voice actors in question weren’t given an idea as to what’s happening in the cut scene. The result is quickly talking, slow pauses and generally terrible voice overs. It lets down an otherwise great game.

Other niggles are that the objectives aren’t always clear, and indeed the tutorial makes no mention of how to find the objectives screen to discover what to do. In one mission i’m told to retreat to the forest, but with a forest all around me it doesn’t bother to point me in the right direction. The result was I was killed a couple of times before I got it right.

Overall though Men of War is a great example of modern day RTS fun. It’s hectic, complicated and at times you’ll wish for a pause button just to breathe, but the rewards of fighting off endless hordes of Nazis are wonderful, as you feel you’ve achieved something. Definitely a recommended buy.

9/10

Ow. That wasn't very nice.

Presentation

Alpha Protocol’s presentation has its positives and negatives. The game world hud looks good and is unobtrusive to your vision. It’s not cluttered and remains informative. Overlays, such as enemy positions and their alert level, are easy to see and don’t blend in to the background. The menu system is another thing entirely, however. It is often bugged and unwieldy. Sometimes you click on one option and it takes you to another. The game also does not do a good job explaining all the controls in the control menu. The buttons for bringing up the map and your skills are simply not in the list. They are not hard to find on your own (example: the map is M) but by not listing them it is an inconvenience to the player.

Story

Is that a gun or are you please- oh, it's a gun...

The story in Alpha Protocol is about a new recruit to a secret United States black ops program named Mike Thorton. The game is set up that it is played as a flashback. The game opens with Thorton in an interrogation room having talks with a man named Leland. His role in the story is unclear at first, but you jump between conversations with him and the missions you are on which reveals more and more about what his role in the whole thing is. In the early game, Thorton is brought through various training courses and meets many of the players in the story early. You are then sent on your first mission, to stop a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia from using stolen missiles to blow up civilian airliners. What you learn on that mission sends everything spiraling out of control and Thorton quickly has to turn rogue. From there, Mike decides to unravel the mystery around what happened in Saudi Arabia which leads to many twists and turns a long the way. Even with the turns, the story is fairly easy to follow. Obsidian did a good job of not over loading the player with too many characters and only a couple of them were underused or superficial.

Graphics

In short, AP looks good most of the time. The animations all look excellent, whether it be a character’s reaction to your snarky comment or a jab to throat take down. It all looks good and flows very smoothly. The textures are high quality, though sometimes slow loading. Hair and clothing look like real 3D objects and not like a flat painted on surface. Backgrounds are similar as well as they do not like flat pictures but rather objects in the distance. The draw distance in the more open areas is also very good. There is no fog that an enemy can pop out of and you’ll never find yourself running somewhere before the area can fully load. It is not perfect, however. During quick movement of the mouse or quick character movement, a blur effect comes on the screen that is less than ideal. During the same quick movements you not only have the blur but can also be subject to stuttering graphics. There are various fixes out on the internet for the PC version to fix these, but that’s not really an excuse for them to in the first place. These slight flaws do detract slightly from what otherwise is a good looking game.

Sound

Note that he's missing the bad guys!

With a game like Alpha Protocol there is a lot going on with the audio. From footsteps of guards to the voice acting of the characters audio is very important for this game. When out on a mission, the ambient noises are also done well. In one particular mission, a passing train can be used as cover for your gunfire and in another, the roaring of a crowd can be used to the same effect. There are also various gadgets that mimic radio noise to confuse guards. Gunfire varies from weapon to weapon, as well. One assault rifle might not sound like a different one. But the meat of the audio in this game is the voice acting. There are a lot of conversations and a lot of responses from every character you meet. The voice acting is up and down, depending on the character. Certain characters, such as the main bad guy, are voice acted very well. You believe he is a cold and manipulative, looking out for his bottom line and no one else. Still, others fall flat, such as your boss. The VA attempts to come across like a police chief from an eighties cop movie but it misses the mark and can be dull to listen to. Thorton can be compared to the male version of Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series. The voice actor portrayed Mike as though he is constantly a smooth talker, no matter which speech options you select. For a game that lets you play in various styles, it would be nice if the Aggressive options didn’t have the same tone of voice as the Sarcastic ones. As with all voice acting, though, your mileage will vary.

Game Play

Alpha Protocol’s game play can be broken down into two parts; the missions, meaning the combat and the actual player control, and the conversations with the characters that you meet. One of these is very strong, the other could use improvement.

Let’s start with the missions and the combat around them. The first thing to note is that almost all of AP can be played without killing a single character. When you sneak up behind someone, you have the option of knocking them out or killing them. If you use a Pistol, you can also employ tranquilizer ammo that renders enemies unconscious instead of killing them. The stealth element of AP plays similar to Metal Gear Solid. There are soldiers on patrol paths, alarms that must be shut off, moving cameras that you must avoid and turrets that all must be avoided. For the most part, stealth works well. Entire rooms of guards can be snuck past with clever use of traps and skills gained. You don’t even have to fire a shot or knock someone out at times. Stealth unfortunately fails on boss fights. Some of the boss fights render it completely worthless and you’re forced to engage them head on. This can be frustrating for a player that specializes in melee combat and stealth, as some bosses can not be fought that way. Melee combat is a very powerful way to go through the game. With higher skill levels you can take down enemies in a few amounts of hits before they can even harm you. Unfortunately, as noted before, some bosses can not be fought melee and there are no bosses that can not be fought with guns, so the balance there is a bit off.

Speaking of guns, weaponry in Alpha Protocol is broken into four classes. Pistols, Sub-Machine Guns, Shotguns and Assault Rifles. You can carry two weapons at a time and specialize in one or more of these classes. Sadly, this is where AP loses a lot of points. Recoil in the weapons is completely unforgiving, even with high skill levels in a particular weapon. Pulling the trigger more than once on a pistol causes the reticule to blow up huge, and that has nothing on the SMGs which are simply impossible to aim at a single target no matter what the range. They are a spray and pray weapon from beginning to end. Ranged combat disappointingly is all about relying on your cool downs and special abilities to be effective at it at all.

What Alpha Protocol does right are the conversations Thorton has with the people he meets a long the way. For these style of games having good dialogue and, more importantly, good choices for the player is absolutely key to making a memorable and good product. AP pulls this off better than any game that has come along so far for one simple reason: your choices have a real effect on the game and not in a superficial manner, as some other games in the genre do. Different characters respond to different actions in different ways and will often remember what you did at various points in the game, effecting the conversation and the subsequent actions. This game is very thorough and very thought out with its options. Every character you meet has a different set of rules of what they like and dislike and learning those, to use them to your advantage, is important to the story. If you are too crass to someone that could potentially help you, they will not show to help out. Subsequently, if you make another character angry it could cause them to make a mistake and allow you to more easily beat them. Everything about this game’s player choices and its decision making process is the best to date.

Final Thoughts

For Obsidian’s first attempt at an original product, Alpha Protocol is a good game. The combat and menu system drag the game down from being truly excellent but AP does a lot of things right. The player choices and their outcomes are phenomenal, the graphics and audio are also very well done. Despite its flaws, Alpha Protocol is a good and enjoyable experience that should be on everyone’s list of games to play.

Note: This review is based on the PC version at max graphics settings.

They weren’t that far off the truth. Playing video games through Steam was marred by an interface that stole processing power like it was sweets. Running a video game required the game to talk with the Steam server first, meaning the user had to be online to pass information back and forth. Rather than this being a simple quick process, 56k users found themselves having to wait the past part of 5 to 10 minutes before finally getting to play the game they wanted. Offline mode existed but was effectively useless as it still required the user to be online for the activation. After that the user could disconnect, but the timely process of going on and offline meant it wasn’t recommended.

The argument of course was that 56k was on the way out, replaced by the growing infrastructure of high speed broadband (high speed to the power of 512k!) and so the need to stay online was something the majority of people using Steam could do. There were other problems though as well; downloading Half Life 2 was a disaster as everyone at the same time attempted to download it. The rule of thumb for all Internet traffic of course is, if tens of thousands of people attempt to access your server to download something, you’re going to see your server go up in flames.

Steam prevailed though and continued, expanding its offering of games available on the market and continuing its ability to distribute games online. In a fairly short space of time Steam started to offer none Valve games, indie works and other objects of interest for the gamer. The community started to grow and so Steam started offering community based features and groups for multiplayer games in order for people to get together to play. Bugs ironed out, the offline system improved, the library fixed, anti-Steam consumers soon found their complaints removed, their arguments void.

It wasn’t long that others wanted a piece of the online distribution pie. Steam established itself very early, Valve brilliantly seeing into the future that the ability to download full games online and have them in one tidy client was the future of PC gaming. By the time EA Store, Gametap and others appeared, Steam was already a fully working powerhouse, that had moved from a program that could be used every once in a while to access games, to a primary gaming centre that sat happily on every PC’s taskbar and didn’t interrupt or chew processing power. Complaints about being constantly online started to decrease, perhaps as Valve expected, as more and more people moved on from 56k to DSL.

It wasn’t surprising therefore that other online distrubution clients found it difficult to keep up; they had to deal with the bugs and problems Steam dealt with years ago. They were well behind in the race. Eventually competition became cooperation. EA, Ubisoft, Activision, Atari, almost every major game publisher started to put there games onto the Steam market. After all, if it works, why try something different? Steam became not only a Valve distribution client, but the distribution client to use for PC gaming needs.

It’s not all rosey however. If you’ve walked into any game store as of late you’ll likely find the PC gaming section shoved into a dark recess somewhere in the back of the shop. It reminds of the time when the Dreamcast was on its last legs, and you had to crawl to the back of the shop to find the game you want, and usually wouldn’t be able to because the stock was so small. Section of games stores today for the PC give a smattering of new games mixed in with £3 “classics” that your gran would give you, such as Horse Riding Tycoon 4 (8/10!) or Random Generic RPG 2 (3/10). The result of Steam is that the retail market for the PC is becoming smaller (although it should be noted that the online market remains comfortably the same). The other problem I find is I like the neatness of Steam. The ability to find my gaming library through it, and use in game chat software and features, means I want all my games to run through Steam. Sadly however it’s still not that easy to do, and the result is that I can have games on and off Steam, muddled in my folders and library.

So what’s the future for Steam? With the continued rise of community interaction being created by the likes of social websites such as Facebook, the future is likely to be one involving even more community. The recent UI update for Steam has removed the chunkiness of the client and made it more streamline in market and community interaction, so it seems likely that the ability to make multiplayer parties like the ones seen in Xbox Live aren’t that far off. More games, more sales, more content is the hallmark of Steam, with better integration and games library access for all games installed onto your computer system. Valve has become the powerhouse of online distribution and will likely to continue this for years to come. Things look very rosey indeed.

Anyway! Onward now to buying more games in Steam’s massive weekly sale! My poor wallet…

The presentation is spectacular enough (if you have 3d specs I imagine), but the behind the scenes small print isn’t. What Sony aren’t telling you is that you’d need to fork out thousands of pounds to even use the technology they’re showcasing on that big shiny tv screen at the conference. 3DTV is a long way off being a consumer choice given we’ve just got used to HDTV, so the start of Sony’s presentation feels like false promise. You can have this in your home as well, if you fork out an extreme amount of money. Suddenly buying a Kinect that we don’t know the price off became a whole lot cheaper.

The presentation ended with the iconic Sony montage of titles available for 3d, before moving on the iconic graphs of “Look, we’re still doing good!” Precision and experience became the plus words, much like transform at the Microsoft conference, before the Move presentation began. It’s here you realise the mockery aimed towards Microsoft is so deliciously ironic that it’s insulting. If this were any other company it could be laughed off. They mock Microsoft’s Kinect throughout the Move presentation and a little after, and yet they seem to be ignoring a few fundemental things. The Kinect is attempting something totally new based upon the ideas of being able to move in gaming that have come from the Nintendo Wii. Sony cannot say the same thing, preferring instead to come up with their own Wii remote duplicate. The Kinect is a bold endeavour that will start off shakey with lacklustre games and then move on to better games. Sony cannot, again, say the same thing, preferring to put in cheap ability functionality into old games and referring totally to Wii style gameplay for new.

So in the end Sony can’t really mock, they have no room for these insults. They themselves are no better, and are indeed worse than Microsoft for plagerising rather than trying something new. Either way Move was shown off with a new game, Sorcery, an interesting magic based game that uses the Move more alternatively than anything that has been seen so far. Sorcery moved on to Tiger Woods golf (glance over all Tiger jokes), with good precision from the Move device, though I wonder what comparisons would be like between the Wii and the Move in this game.

Costs finally came out. $50.00 for the remote, $30.00 for the add on Nunch- I mean, Navigation Controller. Nice to know they’ve even copied Nintendo’s style of selling. The scene moved on to another Sony Montage of games that will be Move compatible, a whole feast of old and new. Then came the PSP, how silly of them given that Nintendo effectively blew everything PSP based out of the handheld water. What appeared for the PSP to try and sell it was one of the worst adverts ever seen with some rude kid who must be Sony’s vision of what video gamers are like. Another PSP Montage. Get it over with quickly I imagine.

Little Big Planet appeared on stage to show their sequel, a blessing surely to everyone as the LBP game is one of the strong points of the PS3. LBP2 looks very fun and it’s nice to know that the company in question are getting a sequel to their game. LBP dissapeared to be replaced with a talk on Playstation Plus. Early demos, shows, news, etc. Sound familiar? And yet they felt the need to still mock Microsoft for Xbox Live. DICE went on to show more Medal of Honour, which certainly looks pretty good, but in a market that is being saturated with war games it remains to be seen whether MoH can do anything better than the rest.

Dead Space 2 was next on scene and also looked very impressive and scary! As a fan of Dead Space 1 it’s good to see another game come out, and hopefully it will be just as exciting and frightening as the first. Then came the surprise, in sort of the same way of a surprise punch to the face. Portal 2 on Playstation 3, with Gabe Newell presenting it! Given Gabe’s extremely negative comments towards Sony, it was perhaps more of a surprise he was on stage than Portal 2 was coming to PS3. He did not look happy at all to be there, and I can’t say I blame him. Sony spun the news of Portal 2 coming to the playstation some ridicolous rubbish that it would be the best valve game on any console. Doesn’t say much really given the PC is the true home of Valve games.

Gabe scuttled off stage as quickly as he came on, perhaps not wanting to stay to long at a Sony conference less he explode in rage. Another montage, a couple of things here and there and on to GT5, finally getting released in November. Given how well Forza has did for the past couple of years since GT5 has been developed, it will be interesting to see whether GT can pull off knocking the crown off Forza. The conservative nature of the GT series means they’ve only just recently implemented collision detection and damage, and the license system that is infamous in the GT series may not go down well anymore in a hotbed of racing games that can be fun as well as simulative. All remains to be seen.

The show ended on a highlight, Twisted Metal. It started off so well, but started to go a bit poor both graphically and gameplay wise the further the show for it went in. Indeed by the end of it, it felt pretty “meh”. Sony didn’t throw out any new toys to play with at the audience, or give them free stuff. This is Sony after all. In the end the conference did well in that they didn’t overrun an unneccessary showing of what the Move can do, but the insults, montages and general blind arrogance of Sony always irk me, and to start off a conference showing a feature that requires several thousands pounds to actually use just goes to show what sort of demographic Sony are aiming for.

Overall this years E3 has felt mediocre all round. It says alot that Nintendo pulled off the best show, despite effectively relying on old products made sequel (and Epic Mickey, which looked pretty good). Just as E3 started a pretty poor run up, it went and ended pretty quietly. Gamers will be pleased with the offerings of games on show like Bulletstorm, but this lacklustre year could have been so much better all round.

Reggie pops back on scene to waffle on about sports, and there’s a pang of worry that the extra long Zelda gameplay may in fact be the only good thing Nintendo has to show as they move on to Mario Sports Mix, a game that’s instantly forgetable and once again relies heavily on the mini-game shovelware context the Wii is known and hated for. Why Reggie didn’t show NBA Jam on screen, another Wii exclusive, is anyones guess. This video was then followed by Wii Party and Just Dance, or rather Just-Put-Your-Hands-On-Your-Ears, the music was so terrible.

So a couple of poor games out the way and Nintendo throws another piece of excitement for us; Golden Sun and Goldeneye. Golden Sun looked happily classical and will no doubt please alot of fans. Goldeneye meanwhile looked very impressive. The video features Daniel Craig, but also features all the scenes and maps we know and love from this N64 classic title. Revamped and remodelled it looks pretty impressive and it’ll be interesting to see how well it does when it finally comes out. The big news perhaps is that they’re claiming both these games will be out this holiday season, yay!

If you weren’t excited by now at even the thought of this Nintendo conference actually being good, Reggie then throws out Epic Mickey at us, with Warren Spector arriving on scene. I definitely liked the artwork and thought behind Epic Mickey, and i’m glad to see that in gameplay EM has retained most of the darkness that the artwork incorporated. The gameplay feature of painting in features into the game looked very interesting, as well as the Steamboat Mickey platformer scenario that they played out. Overall the game looks like definitely one to get when it comes out, returning perhaps to the classical days of gaming.

Kirby up next and Nintendo starts to trail off in interest again. They do so well then they throw out another game that could be so much better. Your little sister will love Kirby Yarn; it has a cute bright cartoony nature that is definitely for the kids. Then they move on again to three top games; Dragon Quest, Metroid and Donkey Kong. Our favourite Kong returns in a new game that looks good, while Metroid also looked very impressive. The impatience though was growing. Where was the 3DS?

Sure enough it appeared, Nintendo’s newest toy, and in an instant they effectively blew away any hope of Sony ever again making a dent in the handheld market with the PSP. Claiming to be 3D without the huge fashion statement specs, the 3DS looked chunky but slim, stylish and smooth. The only complaint that could be taken from the outing of the 3DS is that us folks at home can’t actually see what it’s like to experience because there’s no way of showing it on TV. We’ll have to wait. The conference continued with explanations into the technology behind 3DS and top games coming out for it, including the return of Kid Icarus it seems. A video popped up with critique members explaining their thoughts on the 3DS, before it ended with a camp but nice enough video of the 3DS swallowing the japanese execs and setting Reggie on fire! All fun and games on the Nintendo floor.

As if to add salt to the wound, Nintendo then does a one upper. No, not free 3DS’s to everyone in the show floor, but rather a chance for everyone to try out the 3DS along with a hot woman holding it. Women+3DS = Nintendo wins? Apparently so it seems!

The conference started well, went well and ended well. The worlds gone mad. Nintendo actually doing well at E3? Good news indeed! All that was left was to see how Sony would fair against a strong Nintendo conference and a somewhat weak Microsoft one.

The conference started off good enough, with Treyarch showing off their baby Call of Duty: Black Ops. The cynical side in me wondered how much Treyarch were whipped by Activision into supplying the amount of gameplay footage we saw, and indeed how much technology and ideas were now being footed from the unofficially dead Infinity Ward. Either way Black Ops looks promising, although its title is somewhat confusing. What exactly is so secret about flying about a russian helicopter and blowing the shit out of everything?

The trailer ended to be replaced by a monotonous Microsoft drone, one of many it turned out. With much talk of transforming your TV, transforming your entertainment and other words beginning with transform, you would have thought the next thing to pop up would be a Transformers game. Instead Kojima (our friend, according to Monotonous Drone 1) made an appearance to show some footage from Metal Gear Solid: Rising, one of many games that will use Kinect (but far more interesting than the rest of the games shown). The hacking and slash katana action of Rising looks fairly interesting, ending in watermelons. Whether this is an example of true gameplay footage or not however remains to be seen. Rising ended as quickly as it started, to be replaced by the usual suspects. Halo. Gears of War.

It’s not that Halo and Gears of War aren’t exciting games to have, but rather that these games have their own running hype outside of Microsoft that they really don’t need showcased anymore. The showcase of Halo: Reach was alright, but was nothing we hadn’t seen, until the very end, when there was a new feature of space battle action. The showcase of Gears of War was also good to watch, but again didn’t really showcase anything we hadn’t seen before, or certainly knew would come from a Gears of War game. Big monsters, big guns, muscle men in big suits. The usual.

Then it finally reared its head; Kinect. By the end of it I was wishing for the Gears of War and Halo trailers back. What should have been a concise demonstration showing off Kinect’s abilities turned into a long dull part by part look at technology that was neither exciting nor dull, sitting instead in a grey area of “This is all fine and well, but shouldn’t we be showcasing far more games?” The showcase started off by showing that Kinect also has speech recognition ability. “Xbox, play” the smiling guy says, and thus begins what will surely be another long running Internet meme as we wonder whether we can tell it to kill, or find love. He was soon replaced by a woman talking to her sister through the Xbox in what has to be one of the most stilted, wooden acted conversation ever to grace these conference showings. Fine, great, we get it. Kinect can act as a webcam as well as do the stuff it’s made for. Get to the games!

It was here that Microsoft’s conference became the Nintendo conference without looking. The games, if they could be classified as this, were the same class of shovelware the Wii was throwing out a dime a dozen. Simple action based games like running, jumping and so on. Games that may well be Kinect based, but I would hope would not be a proper example of Kinect’s capability. The games continued, each with their own actors (it should be noted by this time it appeared that Microsoft had bought 80% of the Asian workforce, so high was the count of Asian’s on scene. Racism aside!) ham acting their way through games that were okay to downright boring. Kinect Sports was the most ironic, stealing just a little perhaps from a certain game with a similar name.

It felt like it wasn’t going to end, then Microsoft throws a poor kid on stage to play with a tiger on screen. I felt sorry for her. Nobody wants to be acting like an idiot on stage, least of all acting like an idiot when your audience is the game critique who report back to the gaming populous who are in tune with the Internet community. I fully expect gifs to follow sadly. She was replaced with dancing, Harmonix’s newest dance creation for Kinect. The female was alright. The spectacle based nerd made a mockery of himself, and again will probably have to face they ire of a not to sympathetic web community.

Ubisoft and Turn 10 showed off Kinect based games next, though Ubisoft’s showing could be classified as less of a game and more of a fitness exercise. Yes, it’s Kinect Fit in all its glory, with a women dropping her clothes somewhat on stage, much to the excitement of pasty white nerds. She was replaced by Turn 10, who in probably the most silly of statements suggested that “We can’t enter into Ferrari’s in real life, but with Kinect you can!” Except I can’t. It’s virtual. VIRTUAL!! If Forza are making another game for Kinect I do hope it’s a proper full game, and not just a “Forza Lite” to fill the Kinect shovelware gap.

Kinect finally started to wind down. Price? They didn’t say! After all that, they didn’t even mention how much the damn thing would cost, glancing over it totally and explaining it would be out and about for the holiday period in November. The conference wound down to the Xbox Slim, and managed to surprise everyone by stating the newest console would be out today at the same price as a standard Xbox. Pretty good. Then they do something so cringe worthy I can’t help but feel it was to soften the blow of having to listen to so much Kinect rubbish. They gave everyone in the audience a 360 Slim. How nice of them, eh?

I don’t often get behind the “Who won” arguments that come from these conferences. In the end each company is a product of their means, and they all do equally well in their own way. Despite this, Microsoft’s conference this year felt thoroughly deflated and lost. They’ve given Sony and indeed Nintendo a clear advantage to impress. You’ll have to wait till tonight to see if that happens!

Left Mouse Button will be covering the biggest news items from E3 throughout the conference, as well as any media and videos that come out. We’ll also be doing feature articles on our thoughts for each of the conferences, as well as articles on games we like, and maybe ones we don’t! Stay tuned for more today and for the rest of the week!

Current Coverage

Microsoft Conference – Our thoughts on Microsoft’s outing of the Kinect, games and other stuff that popped up at their conference.

Ow. That looks painful.

First Impressions

On the load up for the first time, there are already a few complaints. First, it must connect to XBL before it lets you play. It was taking forever to connect last night, so a restart of the Xbox360 would mean waiting through five minutes of “Connecting…” before even getting to the first menu. Then it would pester me to download DLC, the Online DLC (yes, you have to download it). I finally redeemed my code for Online play (on the back of the manual) just so it would stop bugging me. The “Connecting…” delay is obnoxious and took anywhere between one and five minutes. Not a good start overall. Load times for the game aren’t all that great either. It could be that I’m playing from the disc on a vertical Xbox, but simple things like loading up a custom shirt for your Create-A-Fighter takes a good ten seconds.

Finally after all that, I loaded up the tutorial. I played the demo and I got the basics of stand up fighting, but clinches and ground fighting completely escaped me. I played through the tutorial to understand how all that worked. It helped a lot. The tutorial is well detailed and is recommended for first timers to the Undisputed system.

Presentation

The presentation for the game is very good looking. Menus are sleek and easy to navigate. The bouts themselves feel like watching a TV or PPV broadcast. The commentators for the fights are also decent. They can be repetitive at time, but no more so than other sports games. In Career mode they will reference previous fights that your fighter has had and give some analysis of mid-match highlights. It definitely feels like you’re watching a real UFC fight.

Gameplay

Gameplay between 2009 and 2010 is largely unchanged. The addition of Southpaws leads to new host of animations to accommodate their fighting style. The control scheme is mostly the same with only one change, when you’re in a submission you no longer mash the face buttons to get out of it, instead the right stick is rotated clockwise. Grapple and clinch transitions are still performed by swinging the right stick in various arcs; your strikes are still done with the use of face buttons. Anyone that’s played 2009 will have no trouble adapting to 2010.

Beating him into submission, UFC style.

Graphics

Graphic wise, the game is polished. Sponsor logos adorn the ring, your coaches and trainers cheer you on from the outside, the crowd looks good in the darkness (house lights are turned down). Bruce Buffer looks like Bruce Buffer. This year, longer hair models have been added and there is some minor clipping issues with them during clinches. It’s not that big of a deal as it is not that noticeable. The biggest concern with the graphics is the re-use of models. Because Yukes packed in 100 fighters, more than they’ve done for any WWE game, some of the models are reused. Certain fighters look like they changed the skin tone and the face model while leaving everything else the same. This mostly goes for the lower card and lesser known fighters. The big name guys like Brock Lesnar and Rampage Jackson all have distinct and unique character models.

Audio

Audio is probably the most lacking feature of UFC 2010. The menu music is cheesy generic rock with no licensed music, which is a norm these days. It’s a short loop of the same riffs on repeat. I wound up turning off the music and putting on some music of my own. Voice acting is hit or miss. Dana White does a good job in the career mode with his parts but the voice actors for CAFs lack emotion and have no passion in their voice. On the positive side, the fight sounds are good. When you hit someone with a big shot the sound reflects that. A strong shot provides an ample thud when it connects while a weaker one is more of a tap sound. You really know when shots are connecting from the audio clues.

Career Mode
Career mode is a big emphasis this year as well. They didn’t want you to just climb a ladder of fighters but to experience training, media events and other aspects of being a UFC fighter. There is an added aspect of managing your relationship with other fighters that sets up rivalries and friend ships. But career mode has its issues.

Ahh yes, nothing more exciting than watching sweaty men grind and grunt.

Heading into Create-A-Fighter to make Justin Sane, the Light Heavyweight kicking and takedown master. I noticed as I was creating him that “Hmm, they certainly give you a lot of creation points to start with.” Why? Because this is literally Create-A-Fighter. You can’t load these guys into the career. When you start a new career, it takes you to the Create-A-Fighter screen but without all the creation points. There is nothing warning you about this. I wound up having to make Justin Sane twice, though I think my second one came a lot better. One of things that’s neat is you can put sponsor logos on your gear, meaning your shorts, t-shirt and hat. The only two sponsors available to me off the bat where THQ and Yukes. I tossed their logos on all my gear just to jazz up my stuff a little.

And we’re off into my life as a professional fighter! The first thing they do is offer you to do the tutorial. I skipped it as I already played through it. Then they let you pick your first amateur fight. The amateur fights are different in that the guys are ranked by order of difficulty. Meaning the 4 difficulty settings and not some sort of ranking or rating. There’s also only 4 weeks before fights. During those off weeks, you have a couple options. Training which works on your base stats and is automatic, Sparring which works on your more detailed stats and can be automatic or manual (more on that later), Camp Invite which lets you learn your special moves, Rest which is what it sounds like and Game Plan which lets you pick bonus stats for the next fight. On top of all that, there’s two stats that have to be balanced before going into your fight. Conditioning and Fatigue. You want to have Conditioning as close to 100 before your fight and Fatigue as close to 0 as possible. It’s a tough thing to balance. You can also be injured if you try training, sparring or going to camp with too much fatigue.

In my case, I fought three amateur fights before moving onto the pros. A max of five fights is available and it’s recommended to do all five. When you become pro, they drop you into a minor league. They also make you pick your difficulty. This matters for not just the fights themselves but also for Sparring. They penalize you forty percent in Beginner, twenty percent in normal, no penalty in the third tier difficulty and give you a twenty percent bonus in the hardest. The minor league is made up of a fake league and fake fighters. The fights are awkward since there is no commentary or Buffer intros to go with them. It’s just the crowd and the fighters. A bit odd with silence. The game lets you pick your opponent and they tell you where on the card the fight will be. The ranking starts at thirty and you start at Unranked. I do my first bit of training and I am terrible at Sparring. I’m earning so little points that I notice all my skills have dropped to zero.

As I later learned, skills decay when you don’t put points into them. And they decay fast. The same goes for your basic three stats. They’ll drop four points in a week if you don’t train them enough. When my stats and skills cap at forty early on, dropping from twenty eight to twenty four is a huge drop. I really don’t know what the hell to do at this point but I head into my first fight. I spent most of the match dropping kicks into the mid section, ruining my opponent’s stamina. I left some obvious welts as his rib and stomach area turned bright red. Everyone always remarks on face damage, but the body damage is done well. Eventually my rib kicks put him on the ground and I got on top. Some haymakers finished off my opponent and I had my first professional victory.

There's something definitely wrong about this...

At this point, I decided I wanted a knockout move and went into the Camp Invite section. There’s a lot of camps to select from and I selected American Top Team and decided to learn the Muy Thai Left Leg Head Kick. To do this, I had to land 2-hit combos using the new move. It took me two training sessions to learn it, but if I was better I could have done it in one (later, I went to Brazillian Top Team and learned GSP’s Right Head Kick in one session, then back to American Top Team to upgrade my Left Kick to level 2, that took two sessions. Then again back to ATT to learn the Flying Head Kick which I learned in one session). One thing I noted is that my training partner at ATT is Thiago Silva and my relationship with him improved as we trained. Now I have a real KO move and I’m still trying to figure out how to keep my skills and stats from decaying. And most importantly, how to do Sparring effectively.

Post-fight, you get Cred Bonus based on the fight and your sponsors. As you win, the sponsors you put on your gear upgrade to be better (for example, THQ and Yukes started out worth twenty cred per item they are on but I now have up ranked up to level five and they’re worth sixty each) and you earn better sponsors. When cred reaches certain thresholds, you can upgrade your either the Training or Sparring. In my case, because my skills were so bad I upgraded my Sparring partner. This gave me a twenty percent bonus to my points, effectively canceling out the twenty percent penalty I have for being on a lower difficulty. It also raises the cap on my skills from forty to sixty. The same would go for my Training if I upgraded that. But the two things I learned the most was about the stat decay. There are “caps” in place, so if you get a skill or stat past thirty it won’t decay below thirty. The two caps are fifty and seventy. All this means that the way to train early is put your “main” skills to thirty and then work on the other ones as you go. In my case, that meant my Takedown and my Stand Up Offense – Kicking skills should go to thirty first. The other advice is that you only need to put 1 point into a skill to reset the decay timer. So you can pump your main skills and drop single points into the other ones to prevent their decay.

Remember, the safety word is banana!

I won my next couple fights, improving my record to 10-0 and in the process I became the number seven ranked Light Heavyweight. One of those wins was against Tito Ortiz, who I had the pleasure of knocking out in the second round. After the fight, Joe Rogan approached me in a post fight interview and I was able to disrespect Tito twice. By contrast, I had a fight with my ATT training partner Thiago Silva and I showed him respect in the post fight. On my relationships screen Tito was fast in not liking me while Thiago was somewhat of a friend. I’m not sure how this plays out in the long run but any time Tito Ortiz does not like you it is a good day. Dana White came by to see me again and offered me a spot on the upcoming UFC pay per view. I picked Forrest Griffin as my opponent.

This is where the first real issue with Career mode pops up. When you crack the top ten in ranking the game cranks the difficulty way up. In my first ten fights I was winning close matches in the first two rounds but Forrest beat me in less than thirty seconds. I’m not even sure if I landed a strike. He put me on the ground, I could not escape and he made me tap. For anyone that doesn’t follow UFC, Griffin is a bad submission fighter so for him to make you tap is pretty embarrassing. This process repeated itself against other top ten fighters. There is no difficulty curve here; it is a brick wall of frustration. This difficulty problem plagued the 2009 version and it is really detrimental to see it remain in 2010.

Overall

UFC Undisputed 2010 is a great game and is a must buy for any UFC fan. It is by no means perfect as there are a few annoyances with certain aspects of the game and there have been network issues over the first few days. But THQ and Yukes have done a good job capturing the immersion of the UFC and improving on last year’s effort. Career mode is deep, the graphics look good and the game play is fun. A recommended purchase for sure.

8/10

League of Legends is from the creator of DOTA, the Warcraft III custom map that inspired a Basshunter song. I never played DOTA, but it was quite popular. In a nutshell, you control a hero with a variety of heroes and fight against other heroes. Wave of little minions back both sides up. Killing the minions levels you up, which in turn buys you new abilities. The ultimate goal is to destroy the turrets in your way, break into the enemy base, and destroy their giant crystal-thing. You get bonuses for killing heroes and turrets in the form of lots of gold. Exchange the gold for items, which makes you even more powerful, and so on. There are tanks, support heroes, and heroes who focus on damage. In this way, League of Legends is pretty straight forward; nothing groundbreaking here.
League of Legends is a popular game, and no doubt it will become even more popular in the future. It’s free, and you can buy extras with either paid points or an in-game point system. New content, such as champions and maps, are released, and word of mouth about this game is everywhere. So, as a poor student, I decided to check it out. After a few hours of League of Legends, I was prepared to condemn it for the following reasons.

1. The community. A video game having a poor community is nothing new, of course, but games like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, World of Warcraft has enough depth and fun of gameplay that you’re willing to stick it out. The hordes of bad teammates you get in League of Legends might be enough to put you off the entire game until you figure out what you’re doing.
2. The initial lack of gameplay. You start off with about 10 or so heroes, but the heroes you get may not be to your tastes. As time goes on, you get talent trees, runes, and so on. The game is completely different when you’re a level 30 than a level 5. Games go from about an hour to half an hour, and there’s a lot more strategy.
3. Playing alone. Combine playing alone with point one, and you have the recipe for a frustrating forty five minutes. Never has a game been so aggressively unfun. However, when I teamed up with a few level 30 friends and got on Vent and we all played, I ended up having a really good time. And even later on, when I knew some of the tricks of the trade and had a few wins under my belt, I could play alone and tip the balance from lose to win by myself.

Ultimately, League of Legends is a game you have to sink some time into – time to get the points to earn new heroes you may enjoy more, time to learn the strategies, time to get over the frustratingly game. Luckily, the game is free, and while you can pay real money to get heroes and skins faster, you can get them with in-game points as well.

Ultimately, League of Legends is a labour of love. While it may be initially frustrating, the gameplay when you get over these hurdles or play with friends is rewarding and fun. League of Legends borrows heavily from the Warcraft franchise heavily, but not to the point where it feels derirative, and there are sure worse franchises to be inspired by. It is a free game, so it’s perfect for a long summer if you’re on a budget, and killing sprees are legitimately fun. Give it a whirl, and brace yourself for an initially bumpy game, but you may find yourself surprised.

7/10