Ok so I bought into the hype-machine that is everything-Nintendo and plopped down my $19.99 for a Wii MotionPlus when it came out and along with the only other highly rated Wii MotionPlus-enabled game that launched with it: Grand Slam Tennis.
Here’s my single sentence description of the experience for everyone that was curious “Was it worth it?”:
Playing a Wii MotionPlus-enabled game with the new controller addon yielded no noticeable improvement in game immersion, realism or fun — you still end up playing “wrist tennis”.
To go more in-depth into what I mean there — even with the Wii MotionPlus addon enabled and a game that supposedly makes great use of it, the Wiimote still cannot properly discern the differences between fast hand movements and you end up executing the wrong swing.
I’d also point out there is no 1:1 or even 1:3 motion-mapping taking place here, it is still basic movement recognition used to trigger pre-scripted swings and strokes, exactly like Wii Sports 2 years ago.
NOTE: I’ve been playing tennis for years, really actively for the last 3, and playing this game felt nothing like real tennis. It felt like Wii Sports for anyone interested if you “really get to swing at the ball” or “can I really put top-spin on it?!” — no, no you can’t.
An example of the problem with motion detection is when you see a forehand coming at you, and swing your arm back to get ready for it — the swinging back motion registers in the game as a backhand instead of you preparing your forehand so your character executes a backhand in the game, inevitably missing the ball and you screaming in frustration.
I’d also point out that slices, lobs, dropshots, etc. are not done with swings of the remote, but again, just using the A and B buttons as modifiers.
This was hugely disappointing to me. I really tried to give this thing a chance, logging in about 8 hrs of gameplay in the last few days just to make sure I was “doing it right” as well as reading all the tips online — many people said to treat the side of the remote as the “face of your racket”. I couldn’t see any difference at all in the accuracy of playing with the MotionPlus regardless of the “side” of it I pretended was my racket face.
Overall the MotionPlus will likely provide excellent 1:1 motion mapping for any game that doesn’t require fast movements, but if you are hoping to finally get some awesome simulation of your favorite sports game or lightning fast sword-fighting or may light-saber fighting in the future, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Honestly, I’d sell your Wii and wait for whatever is next if that is what you want (which I do).
Over the last few weeks you might have seen a warning window like the one above (or similar to it) when visiting the site. Unfortunately it looks like some WordPress plugin-tinkering that I did right before going on vacation introduced an obnoxious malware hook into the site (don’t worry, it’s nothing epicly horrible).
I just finished manually cleaning it out using talgalili’s tip here. The infection was an invisible iframe-hack injecting a reference to the m-analytics.net site in every single .php or .html file hosted on the site — really obnoxious but easy enough to clear out and tighten up everything in the process.
Sorry you guys had to deal with that while I was gone, we should be good now.
Guys, if you are seeing something like this when you visit this site:
It’s OK — It looks like AntiVir (among other antivirus companies) have decided to detect remote iFrame references in webpages as a “virus” — unfortunately WordPress (like this site) and many of the WordPress plugins make use of iFrames to work.
A lot of people are noticing this on all sorts of WordPress sites (More #1, More #2). We seem to have picked up this behavior right after updating to WordPress 2.8 so that might be what is going on here.
Saw this on Digg, they are search result comparisons between Google and Microsoft’s new “Bing” search engine with an $80 million ad campaign behind it:
Given those results, I have to imagine Microsoft is going to allow advertisers to pay for higher search result placement — which, like this, will give us more helpful and completely unrelated search results to pour over.
Update #1: Awesome, Marc Chung noticed this morning that using Microsoft’s new super-search engine Bing, that when you searched for “Search Engine”, Bing ranked AltaVista higher than Google.
Dave Bullock just commented that Microsoft seems to have fixed the problem by completely removing Google all together from “search engine” search results. Nice! Just wait until advertisers start paying for those results and Bing will give you “PetsMart.com” as a search result for “Toyota Prius”.
Assault on Dark Athena is a great followup to the award-winning Escape from Butcher Bay title landing just-shy of perfect due to what I can only describe as a lack of “balls”. The well paced levels, interesting NPCs and fun melee combat are all back, but instead of bumping the Riddick franchise up a notch with some more of this and more of that it just sort of re-delivers the same Riddick experience we already had.
Story
Good Enough. The story is straight forward and very in-line with the existing Riddick lore out there and picks up right after Butcher Bay’s escape. Riddick is this super-badass that tends to find himself accidentally included in some sort of crazy situation that he is forced to participate in, in order to get himself out of said situation.
The mechanic worked in Pitch Black, it worked again in Chronicles of Riddick, it worked in Butcher Bay and it works again here in Assault on Dark Athena.
The story was a bit sparse… when I would get to cutscenes that would remind me of what was going on, they were sometimes so far apart from each other that I had forgotten what I was doing. But it wasn’t really a huge issue.
Graphics
Pretty Good. I remember when I played Butcher Bay, I was blown away by the graphics from this completely unknown developer. The melee/hand-to-hand combat was phenomenal, the use of bump mapping was everywhere and the texturing and modeling of character faces was so fantastic I couldn’t believe how good the main characters like Riddick and Johns looked.
In Assault on Dark Athena, everything looked good enough that you didn’t think about it. I was never struck by anything looking fantastic and only in a few instances did I think “oh that texture is muddy”. I did notice that facial animation was excellent though, I don’t know if Starbreeze hopped on the GTA IV facial animation bandwagon with Image Metrics or not, but it was great.
The levels are pretty sparse when it comes to detail, but I didn’t ding the game’s score for this because (for some reason) I didn’t notice it until I really thought about it. Just the way Starbreeze makes these Riddick games, you never think “Where’s the bustling ship I should be walking through” like Assasin’s Creed or something, you just accept that there only seems to be like 20 people on this entire ship and it never dawns on you otherwise.
There are little environment touches that get you into the world though that I liked — like punching the wall and making it bloody in addition to busting your hands up pretty bad:
Music & Sound
The voice acting is excellent in this game. I didn’t hear a single NPC that made my ears bleed and if anything the purposefully enigmatic and confusing lines from Riddick himself were the most annoying.
Most of the NPCs are perfectly cast with voices that match their characters perfectly. One of my favorites was Dacher:
The facial animation adjoining the voices were also excellent.
The sound effects in the game were “great”, no complaints. The guns sounded good, melee combat sounded good and meaty. Environmental sounds were high quality and fit the scenes well. I think it says a lot about the quality of something when you don’t notice it as a detractor in a game — bad sound could ruin any game and good sound that stands out to the point of you noticing it above and beyond everything else is rare, so some credit is due to the Starbreeze developers for doing such a solid job with the sound.
As for music, besides the “combat” music, I didn’t actually notice any other music in the game. It’s a fairly quiet game.
Combat & Gameplay
Great. The melee combat was by far my favorite part of Butcher Bay, even though it seemed like you could always have a gun with you, I still chose to use melee almost exclusively the entire game. Fortunately the melee in Assault on Dark Athena still feels excellent:
In Assault on Dark Athena you can rarely find guns that you can keep on you as the game encourages you to stick to melee combat, especially around meat-targets (on the few levels that have many enemies or robotic ones, you get more weapon drops to use). It’s not quite as bad as Condemned where guns can only be picked up with 2 shots left in them, but it’s also not Quake.
The mechanics of shooting in Assault on Dark Athena are similar to most modern shooters, LT zooms you in and RT fires. In this case the only thing I had to “learn” was that B reloads instead of X:
It all felt pretty natural.
Climbing and stealth mechanics are again just as they were in Butcher Bay, thankfully (again) they were excellent in the first game and there was really no reason to mess with them.
Sneaking up behind enemies will ready your weapons as soon as you are within “striking” distance to initiate a context-sensitive kill (just click Attack and let the scene play out):
Conclusion [7.5 out of 10]
Assault on Dark Athena by itself is a good game, there are no qualms about that. By completely remastering and re-including Escape from Butcher Bay in the same box that makes this bundle an excellent value and “awesome” if you like the Riddick movies and the Riddick character.
What you’ll notice about Assault on Dark Athena is that it feels identical to Butcher Bay — that’s not bad, but that is what kept the game from being “amazing”. Instead of amping up the Riddick character and his exploits for us in this sequel we pick up right where we left off and keep moving forward.
This would have been a lot like if Gears of War 2 hadn’t had the improved cover system, more epic battles, awesome co-op or any of the other enhancements in the sequel and they had literally just done some new levels with no attempt at making it “bigger and badder”. Assault on Dark Athena feels a lot like that.
Overall, if you loved the first game, you’ll like Athena. If you liked the first game, you probably want to rent this.
Areas of Improvement
As with our video game reviews, we don’t feel it’s fair to criticize a game unless we can provide feedback on how it could have been better, so here is our feedback for the Assault on Dark Athena team:
Gore… more damn gore. You have an M-rated Riddick game, I know Riddick has never really been about insane gore, but when you Ulak someone in the face or in the chest, it would have been awesome to get some dismemberment from time to time… it would have made melee combat feel much more intense.
More badass Riddick moments — I didn’t feel like a super-calm/smart indestructable badass in this game like I did in Butcher Bay… I think part of that is the lack of NPC interactions where I can be revered. This is a really hard intangible to describe, but in the movies Riddick tends to get to be a badass when doing something super-strong or really smart to double-cross someone or kill someone else… I just didn’t get that “omg I rock!” moment. An example of what I thought sucked, is when Revas dropped down from the cieling on Riddick after he found Dacher dead… that is the type of stuff that dupes chumps, not Riddick!
Gore… did I mention gore? Serious… punching someone’s face in just to get the screen splattered with blood and cave in their nasal cavity would have been so awesome. More specifically, either matched Condemned 2’s gore or exceeded it slightly.
More action-oriented cutscenes.
More context-sensitive super-kills, like with the Alpha Drone, but more often and with more characters.
More ways to kill people — I kept the Ulaks armed almost the entire game because other weapons were boring. Guns were the most boring and for melee the hair-pin and knife were really boring to use… you just “poked” the person straight on until you got lucky with a “disarm” or context-sensitive sequence… atleast the Ulaks slashed all over the screen like crazy.
No magical boss fight requirements. We ripped Turok a new asshole for this one and up until the 1st Alpha Drone fight there were no special requirements for killing anything… then suddenly I spend a half-hour and 30 rounds of explosive ammo only to go online and find out I have to plant 4 or 5 rounds on the thing before detonating them… god lame.
I liked the original Just Cause, I mostly liked Mercenaries 2 (loved the idea, but game + bugs == annoying)… combining the two together to bring you an out-of-control, over the top fucking awesome-sauce complete with Grapple + Parachute… I haven’t been so jazzed for an “out of control action-fest” in a while like this:
My god it’s the little things with software… it’s always the little things that endear you to software for the long haul or turn you off of it forever.
As mentioned a few times, I’ve been on the Windows 7 RC for a bit over a week now and been pretty much thinking it’s great.
It seems another one of the nice little touches in Windows 7 is that when you try and delete a file that is locked by a process, it no longer just tells you that the delete failed — Windows will actually tell you which stupid process has the file locked so you can go close it (instead of rebooting and hoping for the best).
Here’s an example of a PNG I tried to erase off my desktop:
Laurence Hartje just sent me a link over to Charlie Wiederhold’s blog where he reiterates the “Chair Story”.
We were talking about 3D Realms’s announced death and thought things started to sound fishy when Laurence sent this along. At first glance “The Chair Story” sounded stupid, but it was from a 3D Realms insider from back in 2001 when the company became infamous and EPIC started taking over the world with engine licenses and game exclusives.
A few paragraphs into it I was glued to my screen. Charlie purports that a deal was hatched between the leads of 3D Realms and EPIC (Mark Rein, Cliffy B, Broussard, Scott Miller, etc.) where 3D Realms would work on Duke Nukem Forever, acting effectively as a game-engine brainstorming and R&D factory for the Unreal engine and publicly report that they were using different/incremental/better versions of “Unreal Engine” over the years while never actually delivering anything.
On the flip side, the rumor-mongering using the incomparably popular and well-known “Duke Nukem Forever” name would drive licensing sales of the Unreal game engine for EPIC.
Pretty interesting story in an of itself already. At the end of the story Charlie clarifies that in the secret meeting where everyone had to sign off on the agreement, to hold everything as a secret for decades, he was attacked by Cliffy B, Mark Reign and Tim Sweeney to the tune of getting hit with a chair, held down on the floor and threatened with shoving his face into a broken chair leg to sign the contract because:
I apparently wasn’t aware how *real* business is done and that if I didn’t want to find out why those two companies had maintained such a strong position in the industry dating back to the shareware days (when it seems people didn’t ask nearly as many questions about why developers appeared, made a game, and then disappeared without a trace)… I had better reconsider my answer.
Damn… not that hard to believe if you have the least bit of vision and could see in 1990s how many billions were on the table in the gaming industry if you were able to pull it off the table.
I wonder what Microsoft’s secret deals have looked like… I could totally see Balmer hitting someone with a chair.
Solely in the interest of archiving the post forever, it’s pasted below. Please see the original link for Charlie’s original post though.
Update #1: I’m not claiming this is either right or wrong, but it’s a entertaining read non-the-less.
The bar for movie-tie-in games has officially been raised. In my estimation it began officially with Wanted: Weapons of Fate, right before that the Bond tie-in games were still a little weak, but after Wanted we had Wolverine and now Terminator that are both looking like pretty solid B/B+ games from what I’m seeing. The gore-fest alone that is Wolverine makes me want to play it.
Looking at the new Terminator Salvation gameplay video reminded me a lot of the Wanted cover-transition effects (which looked great, so it’s a +1) as well as some of the run-and-gun of Uncharted… I think it’s the pacing of the game that made me think of Uncharted:
Looked a little bit “shoot the machines… over and over and over”, possibly falling into the trap that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed fell into with repetitive gameplay, but who knows, there might be more under the covers.
Big thanks to Ted Regulski for sending this one in and Laurence Hartje for the clever post title.
ShackNews is reporting that 3D Realms is currently in a “situation”. The assumption, given that the company hasn’t released a game in 37 years, is that the “situation” is they are “broke” or more notably, that it’s impossible to run a company and meet payroll solely on hot air and “bullshit dollars” — that’s the currency I imagine they use internally.
While companies related to 3D Realms, Apogee and Deep Silver, seem devoid of financial trouble, no one really cares given that they are currently working on “Duke Nukem Trilogy” — a series of Nintendo DS and PSP games. Not to discredit their work, but when you start talking about a closing of 3D Realms, there is likely only 1 thing people think about: Duke Nukem Forever.
The most maddening bit about this and probably the karmatic force that caused this shit-storm to finally come to a head is 3D Realm’s co-founder and unflinching perfectionist (I don’t mean that in a good way) George Broussard. He’s been at the helm of that company since 1987 and in that time been entirely incapable of keeping the DNF project on track. The DNF development team has been through what I think is now 3 complete engine changes (someone with a better memory fill in the blanks, but I think it’s been something like Quake 2 engine to Unreal Engine to a Custom engine to some final mish-mash engine they were building on now with a 3rd party physics system no one ever heard of ).
I had the impression they were spending so much time (enjoying?) working on tools and creating their own engine that they lost sight of the ultimate goal: The Game. I’m sure it was justified with a hand wave and table-pound along the lines of: “The technology is limiting us! We have to have the right tools!”, but under it all anyone that has managed a team successfully before has to recognize this as a Type-A/perfectionist/developer mind set… your focus and enjoyment comes out of problem-solving, not out of actual product delivery.
The part that makes this announcement feel completely deserved is the constant mysterious babble from Broussard over the last 12 years baiting fans with promises amazement and wonder and year after year, decade after half-decade never delivering anything.
I can’t help but imagine that the realm folks suffering here are the developers that have been pouring blood into that title for 10 years. The creative directors, the designers the coders… the folks that truely believed in the title. They will never get a chance to see their creation sing.
I’d be really curious to know what the feelings are internally towards management/etc. about this whole ordeal… are the team members pissed off/relieved/etc… who’s fault was it really? Honestly, after 12 years, you know there is a tell-all book coming out of this. Hell, there was one for the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
Enjoy the teaser trailer from 2007, and the only gameplay you’ll ever see from this title:
… what’s that? You want to remember what it looked like back in 2004 when it’s released was right around the corner? Sure, here’s the first teaser that I still remember being totally pumped about:
P.S.> If you can tell I’m bitter — I absolutely am. I was never a crazy fan of Duke Nukem 3D… it was just as good as every “great” game of it’s time, but the buzz that started occuring around Duke Nukem Forever, even all those years ago got us all thinking that 3D Realms was going to introduce us, single-handedly, to next-gen gaming. When it continued to not happen year after year after year, with the promise that they would introduce us instead to next-next-gen gaming and so on… well it became more of a pie-in-the-sky adventure than it did a real product.
A young gamer inside of me from the 1990s, sitting infront of his 486 with his 3Dfx VoodoExtreme card is really really sad today…
When I originally installed Windows 7 64-bit, I had 4GB in my machine. While the performance improvements I saw were noticable and appreciated, it was clear that Windows 7 was more than happy to consume all the RAM I could possibly throw at it:
At the urging of Grant Gochanuer (happy owner of 12GB of RAM), I went ahead and upgraded the RAM in my machine from 4GB to 8GB.
After a full day of use, Windows 7 Resource Monitor looks like this:
While the performance difference is not night and day for me, I will say that the first thing you notice is that the more RAM you give Windows 7, the less often it seems to hit the hard drive.
I have some fairly monsterous Firefox working profiles and Java IDE configurations that by all accounts brought my old Windows XP and Vista installs to their knees on loadup. Now with 8GB in Windows 7, my disk blinks lazily along while everything stays completely responsive and whatever I’m loading fires up in half the time (give or take).
I will say one huge data point that used to drive me crazy on my old Windows install was when I fired up my working Firefox profile for blogging — I maintain 10 or so tabs at all times in this working profile, each site a Gmail account or WordPress administrative interface along with AJAX traffic analysis tools — pretty much a worst case as far as JavaScript/Memory load times go. On my old installs of Windows loading up this profile could take anywhere from 10-20 seconds depending on what my computer was currently doing. Now it seems regardless of what I’m doing (Java IDE + VMWare for example), the profile comes up in about 6-8 seconds and doesn’t seem to trash my hard drive anymore.
Windows 7 is becoming a must-have upgrade for me and anyone else willing to throw some serious memory at it. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than an SSD and this 8GB upgrade only cost me $94.
Ignition Entertainment is asking the fans of The King of Fighters series (in preparation for KoF XII release) to hop over to the official KoF forums and vote on your favorite box art for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game.
King of Fighters is (one of / the only) remaining fighter that is still using hand-drawn animation. For some enthusiasts of the fighter platform, this is the only way to play fighters and for others, seeing classics like Street Fighter IV move to full 3D was jarring at first, but I think Capcom has shown with careful attention to detail, the transition can be made without entirely changing the game. The retro in me loves to see new releases coming out for the KoF franchise with the characters fully intact in 2D however… most likely because that’s the only way I’ve ever known them.
Here’s some gameplay bits from the Terry Bogard character intro for KoF 12. Note that while the animation is still hand drawn, the fighting has certainly been spruced up with plenty of 3D effects:
The choices have been narrowed down to 2 options for each platform and you must create a forum account to vote for one:
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Jul 2, 2009
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