The Blood Bowl video game has a hotseat mode

Picture this: a chill breeze blows over a scraggly field as a group of orcs faces off against a group of undead. Steam puffs from the orcs' noses and mouths as they snort the cold air. The undead do not breathe at all. Then a ghoul charges forward, its bony claws tearing furrows in the grass and flinging clumps of grass into the air. It swings its leg, and kicks a spiked football into the air. Both teams leap into action as the crowd goes wild...

Blood Bowl is a tabletop miniatures game created by Games Workshop. It's seen a number of video game adaptations, most recently as Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition, which was recently on sale for ten bucks on Steam. It takes place in the Warhammer Fantasy world, which is a very grim Renaissance-era fantasy setting that features all sorts of terrible demons and monsters. In Blood Bowl, those terrible demons and monsters are playing football.

It's wacky, hilarious, and brutal. I've only played a little bit of the game, but so far I'm loving the sight of orcs, dwarves, elves, and more wearing primitive football pads and fighting over a spike-studded ball. Some of the teams play the game straight, while others cheat for all they're worth or simply focus on grinding the other team into the dirt.

The video game can be played either turn-based or as an RTS. I'm lost enough when playing the turn-based game, so I haven't tried the RTS mode yet. As a turn-based game, it even has a hot-seat mode. This means that two players can share a computer. When one person's turn ends, you just pass the mouse to the other player.

So if any of you have the game, or if you're in the area and want to stop by my place, why don't we toss around the old pigskin? Wait, that leather doesn't look like it was made out of a pig...

This is Why My Wife is Awesome

As all of you know, I have been on a Mass Effect kick lately. The gift my wife got me for our anniversary arrived today, and she left the package at work at the end of the day to bring it home. She also gave me explicit instructions not to open it without her.

High Expectations Salarian Uncle

Computer Game Review Supplement: Mass Effect Combat Supplement

Since my Mass Effect review was such a success (cricket cricket), I decided to post some more thoughts on the game. I'd like to talk some more about the combat system, because even though it's not the best thing about the game (the characters, story, and setting are what really make this game shine), it's still really fun, but it has some down sides you may want to know about before deciding about whether or not you'd like to play.

Combat will feel very familiar to gamers. You can hold the spacebar to pause the game and open up the squad command/special attack screen, above, which allows you to change weapons, change the squad AI's behavior, or use special attacks.

You will always have two squad members on your team. No more, no less. You can pick them at the start of each mission, or whenever you leave the Normandy.

Healing is very simple: press F to use a health pack. It will heal you and your squad. How much each health pack heals and how often you can use one depends on your squad's total First Aid skill.

You also have grenades, which you throw with R and detonate with another press of R. These can be very useful in certain situations and all but useless in others.

Combat is cover-based, meaning your character will hide behind cover if you walk up against it. You can pop up from behind cover by clicking the aim button (right clicking), which is very easy to get used to. Unfortunately, cover does not protect you from explosive attacks.

Mass Effect features very cool-looking bad guys rendered very well, but for all that, most of the time you're going to be shooting at the aiming reticles on your screen. These are drawn over all of your enemies, so you'll be watching for the red triangles rather than the cool-looking bad guy models. Also, when your enemies die, they disappear, so you can't even go inspect the fallen enemies to see how cool they look (or to finish the kill).

The squad AI is okay, but you'll have to get used to your squad mates spending a lot of time shooting at intervening terrain while trying to hit an enemy on the other side.

One great thing about the combat system is the way looting happens, or rather, they way it doesn't happen. Rather than having to end each fight by running around gathering up items from the fallen bad guys, you receive a notification every time you killed a bad guy and got an item, and the next time you open your inventory, it tells you all the items you found since the last time you opened your inventory.

As I mentioned in my main review, it's also nice that you don't have to worry about ammo, or about repairing the condition of your items. Your items heat up while firing, but you only have to let the heat dissipate before you keep firing again.

Biotic powers look really cool, and tech powers are interesting, too (though not as showy as biotic powers). Guns look like, well, guns, though one time I saw an NPC with a cold upgrade in his weapon shooting an enemy, and frost crystals formed on the enemy with each bullet hitting him. That was rad.

The combat system isn't the best thing about Mass Effect, but it's more than serviceable. The most important part of any combat system is that it makes sense and is easy to use, and in my book, Mass Effect succeeds.

Team Fortress 2 Got Better

I don't spend a lot of time talking about Team Fortress 2 on this blog, though it remains far and away one of my biggest hobbies. I love the game, the videos of the characters, the fan-made video of the characters dancing, some/most of the fan art... and I may or may not be working on a cosplay costume. If I were, and I'm not confirming anything, it might be of the RED Sniper.

Well, recently Valve took their already nearly pitch-perfect game and made it even better through a long-awaited update that finally allowed players to trade items between each other. I celebrated by giving my lovely wife some Jarate.

The update also allows players to buy items with real-life money, which I'm usually against, but in this case there aren't any items that can only be bought with money, which makes me feel better. After all, TF2 is such a great game, why shouldn't Valve make some more money off it? And why shouldn't the community members who contribute items to the game see some return on their investment of time and energy? If this encourages more people to create items, I'm for it.

 The one thing that I'm not so hot on is the crates. Apparently people can now randomly find crates while playing, but can only access them by buying keys for money. I realize that there's nothing forcing the player to buy the key, but creating an item that can only be accessed if you pay for it seems dubious to me. It's like when someone says, "You know, I had this really weird conversation with one of your friends today, but I probably shouldn't tell you about it."

I won't go into what makes TF2 such a great game. If you love team-based shooters with a cartoony style and near-perfect class and map balance, you already play it. If you can't stand playing games with spazzy adolescents and consistently stacked teams, I probably can't convince you to change your mind.

But if you already like the game, then this update will probably make you love it more. And if you haven't played in a while, maybe this will help change your mind. Let me know if you have any items you'd like. I'll check in the back. We might have just what you need.

Computer Game Review: Mass Effect

Mass Effect was the best computer game RPG I have ever played. It had its flaws, but I happily overlooked them and enjoyed the story, the world, and the characters from the beginning to the epic finale.

First off, Mass Effect was made by Bioware, the superstars of computer RPGs. Their past titles, like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Knights of the Old Republic set the bar very high and were known for giving players a several ways to overcome every challenge, epic plotlines, great writing and memorable NPCs. In my opinion, Mass Effect surpasses all of those previous Bioware titles.

Mass Effect is set in its own universe, and the writers did a marvelous job filling out this world and making it every bit as immersive as the Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons properties that Bioware has worked with in the past. The game includes an in-game Codex that fills up as you play with interesting facts about the planets, races, monsters, factions, and technology you come across.

If I had to pick a favorite thing about Mass Effect, it would be the NPCs. As much as I loved seeing the cool settings and playing through the interesting and thought-provoking missions, hanging out with some of the coolest characters I've ever seen in a video game definitely made every part of the game even better.

I totally dug Garrus Vakarian, the turian renegade cop who quits the force to go after the game's bad guy, another turian named Saren.

I have to confess I developed quite a crush onTali'Zora nar Rayya, the quarian mechanic on a pilgrimage to find things to bring back to her people's fleet of aging starships.

But of course my favorite NPC was the krogan Battlemaster, Urdnot Wrex. The ancient, battle-scarred warrior is every bit as badass as he looks. His gruff exterior hides that he's genuinely worried about the krogan race, which is infected with a virus that has cut their fertility rate so badly that they're all dying out. It doesn't help that he often finds himself going up against other krogans, further lowering the numbers of his already endangered race.

I'll try not to say too much about the NPCs, because getting to know them is one of the coolest things about the game.

The main plot is suitably epic, and really hits the ground running. You don't waste any time killing rats and beetles in Mass Effect. The first enemies you fight are the minions of the main bad guy, Saren.

Saren is a Spectre, an agent of the Citadel Council who has special permissions to operate outside the bounds of ordinary justice. His motivations are mysterious, but his main goal is no big shocker: he wants to wipe out all life in the universe. And guess who gets to stop him?

As the player, you take the role of Commander Shepard. You can choose a first name for Shepard when you create the character, but everyone just refers to you as Commander and/or Shepard. You can choose to play as a male or female Shepard, and you also choose his or her appearance. I played as a male Shepard, so I'll refer to Shepard as "he." You also choose a role for Shepard, who can focus on firepower, technological attacks, or biotic powers (think of biotics as Mass Effect's version of the Force). You may choose to focus on two of these areas instead of just one, so I took a firepower/technological blend.

Your other choice with Shepard is to go either Paragon, Renegade, or a mixture of both. Unlike the normal good/bad choices that most RPGs offer, in which you can choose to either lie, steal, and kill your way through the plot or to stop and save every lost child and sick puppy you come across, Mass Effect gives you two ways to achieve the same goals: you can either go in guns blazing as a Renegade, sometimes sacrificing civilians to get the job done, or you can take the more careful approach of the Paragon, going out of your way to make sure only the bad guys get hurt. I appreciated that the game doesn't try to trick you about which choices are Paragon and which are Renegade.

To me, one of the best moments in Mass Effect was when I had the ability to choose, about halfway through a game, to either kill an NPC or allow it to live. I won't say any more, but even though I was playing a Paragon, I had a very hard time convincing myself to make the Paragon choice. It's when a game can make you pause and grapple with a decision that you know you're playing something golden.

That's not to say that the Paragon/Renegade system always works perfectly. A lot of times, the only difference between a Paragon and a Renegade is that the Paragon avoids civilian casualties, while the Renegade does not. This can be as simple as avoiding having civilians wander into the crossfire in a gunfight.

Soon after Shepard starts chasing after Saren, the Citadel Council makes him the first human Spectre. This allows you to choose your team and fly off in your new spaceship, the Normandy. Even though the Normandy's only purpose in the game is to ferry you from one quest to the next, I loved being able to run around inside my ship between missions, talking to NPCs and party members, and exploring my ship (which just happens to be the best ship in the human fleet).

After playing some  Fallout 3, it felt great to play a game where I did not have to worry about stocking up on ammo or repairing my gear. In Mass Effect, all weapons have unlimited ammo, but overheat if you fire too quickly. Also, weapons and armor do not degrade and never have to be repaired

One thing I could have done without, though, was the unnecessarily complicated inventory system (which I hear has been improved in the sequel). All weapons have many levels. The only thing this accomplishes is to ensure the you routinely need to switch out your weapon for another weapon of the same model but a better level. You also have to stick in upgrades to your weapons and armor, giving you extra damage or effects. Like the weapons, the individual upgrades also have levels, so you'll be switching them out throughout the game.

Another time-consuming aspect of the game is the amount of time you spend getting from place to place. This was my biggest gripe about the game. Almost every planet you land on is extremely mountainous, and you drive your all-terrain vehicle, known as the Mako, over endless hills and mountains to get from where you landed to where your mission is. This might not be so bad if there was more scenery along the way, but for the most part you don't even get trees or lakes to drive past.

Worse, if you come across some bad guys, you'll probably want to jump out and kill them on foot, because using the Mako's powerful guns to kill bad guys yields significantly fewer experience points than killing them on foot. This leads to the immersion-breaking realization that you can whittle down a big opponent's hit points with the Mako's guns, then jump out and finish it off with your regular weapons for the larger share of experience points.

The only point to driving from your landing point to your mission is that you sometimes come across a deposit of ore or a crashed probe or something. These do one of two things: give you items and experience, or give you money and experience. Helpful, but not worth boring, bumping driving to get to.

Whenever you interface with a rock deposit, crashed probe, beacon, locked box, or encrypted computer, you'll play a mini-game I think of as "circular Frogger." It's pretty intuitive and easy to get good at, and as far as hacking/lockpicking mini-games go, I actually quite liked it.

I'm sure I've left out some other things I should say, but this review is long enough now. I hope that those of you who haven't already played this excellent game will check it out. I, for one, have started a second play-through, this time as a female Shepard who will be going Renegade. I also look forward to importing my first Shepard into Mass Effect 2 as soon as I buy it. And Mass Effect 3 is coming out soon, too!

So, I'll end with this:

...Wrex.
...Shepard.

Watch some awesome trailers for The Old Republic

I can guarantee that The Old Republic won't be as awesome as these cinematics. Plus it's an MMO, so in reality the Sith would be named Darth Bauls. So let's just watch the videos several times each and bask in awesome Star Wars action.

Watch this brutal Mortal Kombat reboot video

(WARNING: NSFW, contains violence and disturbing imagery)



I find the trend toward making comic book and video game stories more realistic to be fascinating, and one of the best examples I've seen is the Mortal Kombat: Rebirth trailer. According to Wikipedia, the video was used to pitch the concept of a Mortal Kombat reboot to see if the director could get a studio interested. Here's hoping somebody bites, because this project is way too awesome not to happen.

The Coolest Video Game Box Art of All Time

First, start with a giant robot. When a lot of people think of MechWarrior, they think of the Timber Wolf, also known as the "Mad Cat." It looks awesome:


Then, you make it even cooler. But how can you improve on a design like that?

I guess it would look cooler if it were, you know, on fire or had a giant explosion behind it or something. Wait, that's not a bad idea:


And there you have it. You don't know how often I stood in the video game aisle at Sam's Club and stared at this game, wishing I were cool enough to play MechWarrior 2.

Incidentally, the second coolest video game box of all time is a game we did end up getting, but that's a story for another day!

Giant Robots

What's the difference between a 'mech and a mecha? They're both types of giant robots piloted by people in fictional future universes. Personally, I've always believed that 'mechs are chunky military weapons armed with cannons, missiles, and lasers, planet-bound, and often found in video games. Mecha are more slick and human-shaped, often have swords as well as ridiculous energy weapons, sometimes can fly and/or operate in space, and are often found in anime.

I prefer 'mechs. Maybe I dig that they're piloted by grim soldiers rather than whiny teenagers. Maybe I like how real they feel. And maybe I just love things like this:



I never played the other MechWarrior games. Apparently MechWarrior 2 was amazing, though. Maybe it's time I invested in a good joystick....

In other news, there is no way my computer would be able to handle the new game. I'm not likely to upgrade soon, either, since I honestly haven't been playing enough video games lately to justify the expense. Could I be... growing up? Now there's a scary thought. I think I'll watch some giant robots shooting each other again now to put it out of my mind.

TF2 Woes

I was playing TF2 today, because my lady digs it and her enthusiasm for it made me want to play once more. I was playing Sniper, my lady's favorite class, because Sniper had previously been my worst class and I wanted to get some better stats with him. My previous best life was 1 headshot and 4 points. This time I made 4 headshots and 12 points by finding a nice hidey hole in Goldrush next to a sentry gun/dispenser near the enemy base. I played several more games, then TF crapped out on me when I alt-tabbed from the game. I got back in, but when I tried to look at my weapon loadout it gave me some sort of error about not being on Steam. No worries, though, I quit and came back in... to find that I was back to 4 points, 1 headshot with the Sniper. Lame!

But you all believe me, right?

Now, here is a picture of the Team Fortress classes as women:

Is it wrong that I find the Pyro the sexiest? And the Medic is definitely second.

Peace!

UPDATE: And here's another one. And it's not the only other one I've found. Man, internets.

They Hunger for the Flesh of the Living

Valve has released the new Left 4 Dead game mode: Survival.

If you are part of my usual zombie-slaying posse, be advised that we have our work cut out for us.

Left 4 Dead: Good news for zombie lovers!

It sounds like the downloadable content for Left 4 Dead will be free! There was speculation before that Valve might make us pay for it, but now it seems to be official that the new game modes and will be available for free, on both PC and XBox 360.

Of course, you're not really expected to pay for anything during the zombie apocalypse, anyway...

Thinking Way Too Hard About: Guns vs Swords

For the sake of clarity, this post will not deal with swords that are also guns, other than to say that they are awesome.

In the real world, there are swords and there are guns, and there's really no point in comparing the two. While there are apparently still some people out there who kill other people with swords, these people are usually insane enough for it not to count. Plus, modern-day sword-using killers tend to kill people who are unarmed and not particularly interested in fighting back. If someone with a sword tries to fight someone with a gun, the results are unlikely to surprise anybody.

When you take the realm of fiction, however, the situation is often reversed. This is partially because fictional worlds operate not so much on stodgy systems of "logic" than on systems of "awesome," and partially because the protagonists of these stories need a challenge that usually isn't offered by gunning down sword-wielding enemies from across the room.

Giving your protagonist a sword when his enemies all have guns is a good way of establishing his badassitude. Whether he has to rely on his sneakiness, his forethought, or simply his bullet-dodging acrobatics, he's going to be the underdog, which makes his victory that much more impressive. As an added bonus, the anachronism of using such an elegant weapon hearkens back to a more civilized age, so our hero gets the associated ideals of honor, duty, etc.

So far, so good. If you're writing a book, comic book, or movie about a guy who uses swords to fight guys with guns, it's not going to take a whole lot of explanation for me to say, "Okay, you've got me sold, now let's see some violence, plz kthx." This is an advantage to the "my story, let me show you it" method of storytelling: total control over the plot lets you sacrifice logic for the sake of awesome thanks to the underlying assumption that, if this was anyone else with a sword, they'd be shot to pieces in five seconds, and it's only because our hero is so skilled, trained, lucky, and badass that he gets to carve up his enemies instead.

Of course, there is another method of storytelling that we nerds experience, and that is the "my story, plz tell it to me" method found in video games and roleplaying games. In this method, the system is laid out for you, but it's up to the viewer to generate the actual events. This means that, rather than being able to say "99% of the time gun beats sword, now let me show you the 1%," you have to set up a scenario in which sword always beats gun, or at least stands a good chance against it. And this is where things get weird.

Perhaps the most famous example of this is Final Fantasy VII, in which a guy with a sword (Cloud) does a crapload more damage than a guy with a gun (Vincent). Then you've got systems (see: D&D) where a great big sword is going to be doing more damage than a gun. One wonders, therefore, why anyone would bother using, or even inventing, a firearm, when a sharpened piece of metal is more effective.

There is a reason behind this decision, however, and it deals with the main underlying difference in combat in video games and RPGs versus real life (or media based on real life, such as novels and movies). In real life, it takes a single good hit to take someone out of a fight. This hit could come from a sword, a gun, a rock, or a Scud missile: the result is the same. Death. In video games and RPGs (and RPG video games, and RPGs based on video games), a single good hit is going to hurt your opponent, but they will keep fighting. They lose hit points, but they are not dead, and now it's their turn to hit you.

So while real life combat operates on a more or less binary system of damage (dead/not dead), video games and RPGs have to come up with a sliding scale of damage ('tis but a scratch through MASSIVE DAMAGE). Realism goes out the window, and now we have to decide whether a bullet to the chest should do more or less damage than a sword to the chest. Looking around for something to base this decision on, we come across the previously-mentioned principle of "awesome," and naturally decide that a sword should do more damage.

Because, fundamentally, it's cooler to stab someone than to shoot them.

Cinematic Trailers of War-!

Yesterday I discovered that there are new cinematic trailers available for the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion and for Warhammer Online. Most of you are probably already aware that the trailer to Warhammer: Mark of Chaos is my favorite video game cinematic of all time, but this new Warhammer Online video comes close. In fact, if you haven't seen these yet, I would recommend watching the World of Warcraft one first, just because the Warhammer one is so far superior that the Warcraft video, though impressive in its own right, will seem boring in comparison.

While we're here, I thought I would run through some of my other favorite video game cinematics:

You already know it's coming, so let's start with the Amerigo video from Starcraft.
On the topic of Starcraft, my other favorite video from the game was the intro video to Brood war.

Warcraft 3 also had some excellent cinematics, most notably the human ending and orc ending.

Diablo's cinematics were never as good, somehow, but this one from Diablo 2, featuring a fight between the Wanderer and Tyrael, is okay.

The opening cinematics to the original Dawn of War and the upcoming sequel are both very impressive.

And the opening cinemat of what would have been Starcraft: Ghost wasn't bad, either.

I'm sure we've all already seen the trailer to Starcraft 2, but have you seen this meeting between Raynor and Zeratul? (Not a true cinematic, but still cool)

I realize that all of these are either for Warhammer games or Blizzard products. What can I say? They do seem to have the best cinematics.

Painkiller

The first thing I have to say about this game is: where have you been all my life?

Or, more precisely: why hasn't anyone told me to buy this game yet?

One thing I've been meaning to blog about here is what you might call the "FPS Pistol Syndrome." This is the annoying tendency of games to start you off with crappy, boring weapons, supposedly to make you appreciate and enjoy the big, fun weapons more. Even when you do get the big weapons, ammo for them is scarce, so you're stuck using the crappy weapons most of the time anyway.

Of course, the game I'm referring to is the grandaddy of the genre, DOOM, which forced you to start the game with the nearly-worthless pistol that takes several shots to kill even the most basic enemy. It takes ages to get the famous BFG 9000 which, though fun to use, eats through the rare plasma ammo like a fat kid with a jar of caviar. And what happens when you run out of plasma ammo? It's back to the good ol' shotgun and minigun.

The question I have is: why? The point of playing a video game is to have fun. Wouldn't the game designers want to maximize the amount of fun their players are having? If you ask me, forcing a player to run around with the pistol is like forcing Sonic to spend half the game walking, or making you go through boot camp before deploying to Normandy.

In Painkiller, your starting weapon is awesome. I can only describe it affectionately as the "spinny killy blade," as this is exactly what it is. Essentially, you dice your enemies to pieces with a madly spinning weapon. Its alternate fire shoots the blades from the gun, allowing you to either do impact damage when it hits enemies or, if you hit a structure, you can create a lazer beam between the blade and yourself to hurt enemies that cross it.

And that's just the starting weapon! The second weapon you get is a fairly standard shotgun (though it's still very satisfying to blow apart monsters at close range, and it can freeze enemies). The third weapon is the famous stake gun. If you've heard of Painkiller, you've heard of this weapon. I played the demo first, and the experience of nailing a crawling enemy to the floor through the head was what sold me on the game.

So far, most of the enemies can be killed with one shot from the stake gun, a close-range blast or two mid-range blasts from the shotgun, or a split-second meeting with Mr. Choppy.

I haven't gotten very far into the game, so I've only seen the first few levels. I imagine it probably gets somewhat tedious after a while. Nevertheless, I must tip my hat to the game designers who really went out of their way to make the game fun to play.

I should also mention that the weapons in this game are delightfully Steampunk. It's fun to watch the moving parts of the weapons... when you're not employing those weapons on the twisted minions of darkness, that is.

(Side note: Steam told me that I'd be buying Painkiller: Gold Edition, but when I installed it, said Painkiller: Black Edition. From what I understand, the Black Edition comes with extra DRM. I understand this can be a deal breaker for some people, so you have been warned.)

Diablo III

So I was going to blog some more about makers vs. writers, or maybe about whether anyone is lurking my blog, or about the next few stories in the Steampunk anthology (they're all good so far), or maybe the possibility that I might be playing a Steampunk game of Mutants & Masterminds soon.

As it turns out, this will all have to wait (or rather, it will all have to be summarized in the preceding paragraph, and possibly expanded on later). Because, you see, Blizzard has announced Diablo III.

If you have not checked out their site yet, you should go there now. NOW.

I played a crapload of Diablo with my brothers back in junior high and high school. I remember many an afternoon when homework and chores had to be put off because we had died and dropped our items in some godforsaken corner of the dungeon, and we couldn't quit or we'd lose al our loot. Usually, spitters were involved.

Then Diablo II came out, which was like Diablo, except better in almost every possible way. Okay, so there was less emphasis on dungeon exploring, but it still rocked. In many, many ways, it was much more playable than its predecessor. And then the expansion came along, with new levels, characters (though I was never a big fan of the Assassin or Druid), and best of all, an improved resolution.

So you should all check out the new game. If you like video games, you'll like Diablo III.