These days, with money as tight as it is, I don’t generally buy brand new games. $60 on launch day, $40 a month or so later when it goes on sale? I’ve got plenty of other games to play while I wait for that 33% discount, thank you very much.

But for Demon Souls, an incoming PS3 RPG, I’m making an exception. Watch this Gametrailers video to learn about its unique and interesting ‘passive multiplayer’ system. I want to be playing this one when everyone else is!

I’m going to embed it but you should probably click through to the HD version.

So now that all three of the major console makers have some kind of motion controller system, I figured I’d stick my oar in and give my thoughts on what each platform offers. Major caveat: I’m not at E3. I’m basing all the following on what I’ve read, and building on the hard work the professional gaming press is doing in LA.

Nintendo (Existing):
When the Nintendo Wii initially came out, it offered 2 weeks of great fun followed by a period of “This is it?” for a lot of early adopters. Playing Wii Sports was awesome, but once that was out of the way, a long procession of games with ‘forced waggle’ followed, and many gamers quickly tired of randomly shaking the controller in order to accomplish anything.

Eventually the waggle-wave cooled a bit, and games started coming out that used motion control where it fit in naturally (e.g. pointing, or a quick flip to reload a gun), and standard controls for the rest of the game. Suddenly the Wii was interesting again, and I actually grew fond of the nunchuk/remote combo for controlling games. Having the controller essentially broken into two halves made gaming very comfortable.

Nintendo (Wii Motion Plus):
Next week, the Wii Motion Plus comes out. This is supposed to add more precision and 1-to-1 correspondence between controller and on-screen presentation. This means we’ll have to get up off the couch again. When Tiger Woods 10 is played with the Wii Motion Plus, you’ll have to actually do a full swing of the virtual club, rather than a quick pendulum motion with the WiiMote. At least, that’s my understanding. Hopefully the Wii Motion Plus won’t set back the state of Wii games by very much.

At this point, the Wii is essentially the ‘base line’ of motion controllers. Both Sony and Microsoft seem to be leap-frogging Nintendo in the motion controller arena.

Microsoft and Project Natal:
Microsoft really wowed audiences with its controller-free motion control system. A sensor bar consisting of an IR camera, an RGB camera, and a microphone sits in front of (or on top of) the TV and reads the movements of players. The IR camera actually measures heat, and via heat, distance from the TV. The microphone is for voice commands.

Folks who’ve tried the system say it really works. The neatest demo I saw was a version of Burnout hacked so that the player steered just by holding his arms out as if they were on a steering wheel. When they turn the imaginary wheel, the car turns. Sliding their foot forward and back controlled acceleration. Very neat tech demo.

But I have some concerns. First of all, how well is this going to work when I’m wearing a checkered shirt and standing in front of a paisley-print couch? [Update: After pondering this for a while, it occurred to me that this might not be an issue, given the IR camera. It could use the heat of you body to tell the difference between you and the couch.] The demos were done in an empty room with white walls. Apparently the system can adjust for lighting differences, so they have that much licked.

Assuming the tech works, is this what we really want? If you have a choice of playing air guitar Rock Band, or fake-instrument Rock Band, which would be more fun? Props are important; they give play a visceral feel. I find it ironic that when the PS3 came out with a controller that lacked rumble, they were heavily criticized for losing that feedback. But now Microsoft has a system that by definition has no feedback at all, and everyone is going nuts for it. Nintendo’s Wii Remote has rumble and a microphone and these aspects really add to the immersion. When you wallop a tennis ball with the Wii Remote, you hear and feel the impact of the racket hitting the ball. You won’t get that kind of feedback with Natal, nor is it clear how you’d move around using Natal. How do you get your on-screen character to run, turn (without you turning so you can no longer see the screen) or fire a gun?

So I think Natal will spawn a new genre of games that take advantage of the hands-free control system. But where I think Natal will have the largest impact is with the overall UI of the Xbox. The idea of never having to search for the remote is very appealing. I wave my hand to browser through video or music selections, then I say “Play” to begin playback. Now *that* is both radical and useful, and I’d really love to see MS license Natal to other consumer electronics manufacturers.

And then there’s Milo. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in Milo. The demo was a heavily scripted event (Molyneux himself apparently admitted that) that made the demo seem more than it was. One of the most interesting aspect of Milo was the facial recognition. A person could stand in front of the Natal sensor and say his name, then when he returned, ‘Milo’ could identify who the person was. That’s pretty neat. The bit where the player splashed around in the water wasn’t anything new: the Sony Eyetoy has been able to do that for a while (granted the fidelity was better here). The conversation stuff was the most scripted…apparently Milo ‘understood’ just a few questions: this is understandable. If Milo worked as well as he *seemed* to work (without tricks) then he’d be about as smart as the voice actuated and controlled computer on Star Trek, and we just aren’t there yet.

But what was really, really cool about Milo was the head tracking. As you walked around the room, the view on-screen changed to reflect how you’d see the virtual world from that new location. This is really huge because it allows some very cool ‘virtual 3D’ effects; I can’t wait for MS to roll those out (see the video at the end of this post for an example of what I’m talking about).

So Milo was a really fun tech demo with some really cutting edge aspects, some rehashed stuff, and some smoke and mirrors. But the aspects that people seem so excited about (talking to Milo) isn’t what was really cool about the demo.

Sony’s Wand System:
Lastly we have Sony’s wand-based motion-control system. If you haven’t seen it, it consists of a pair of wands that include traditional controller buttons, and a light on the end of each wand. The Sony Eyetoy can track the lights with a high degree of fidelity. During the Project Natal demo, a player ‘painted’ by splashing buckets of paint on a wall. During the Sony demo, a player very legibly wrote his name on a virtual wall. That’s the difference in fidelity between the two systems.

In a lot of ways the Sony system seems like the Nintendo Wii Remote on steroids. A bunch of game applications immediately spring to mind. It has buttons so you can shoot a gun, and they could put an analog stick on it so you could move around a 3D space that way (a la the Nintendo nunchuk). The demo showed a very simple RTS game being played using the wands like a mouse. Let’s just pray that we don’t get a bunch of waggle games from Sony!

Really the three systems map well to now, soon, and future. Nintendo is the now solution. Depending on how much Wii Motion Plus adds, we’re all pretty familiar with what Nintendo can do. Sony offers the next step; an enhanced way of controlling your games that should be available and working well pretty soon (Spring 2010 they’re saying). And Project Natal represents the dreamy future. When Natal launches (my guess? sometime in 2011) it’s going to mean a rebirth of the Xbox 360 in much the same way that the NXE did. I don’t honestly see a lot of mainstream games supporting Natal, but I do see it refreshing the entire UI of the Xbox in remarkable ways, as well as adding a new genre: Natal Games.

Back to the head tracking issue. Here’s the video I mentioned. This fellow now works for Microsoft, but before he went to the big M he was hacking Wii Remotes:

*THIS* is the technology of Project Natal that I am most excited about!

UPDATE: GameSetWatch has a brief article up confirming that Johnny Lee is working on Natal.

UPDATE: Johnny Lee himself chimes in on his blog.

Here’s irony for you.

Shortly after the Sony PSP launched, industrious hackers started figuring out how to run homebrew apps on it. From then until now, Sony kept patching the firmware to lock out the homebrewers, and the hackers kept working around the patches. Sony’s message was clear, if ineffectual: thou shalt not homebrew.

Today, the Playstation Blog breathlessly announces that No Gravity: The Plague of Mind will be coming to the PSN tomorrow. In a very ernest attempt to part us from our dollars, the blog says, without a hint of hypocrisy, [No Gravity] hit the headlines for the first time in 2007 as a “homebrew” game for the PSP. It was acclaimed as a game that “puts tons of retail games to shame with its incredible polish.”

So apparently homebrew is evil and vile… unless suddenly Sony has a chance to make a buck off it.

Those guys at the Giant Bomb (whom I used to like before they started ignoring me on Twitter…bastages!) made this video of the weird new PSN title, Noby Noby Boy.

I have to admit, I only got a little ways into it before I had to jump up and go buy the game for myself (it’s only$5). I love bizarro stuff like this.

I *finally* completed Chapter 7 of Valkyria Chronicles tonight. I think it took my 5 or 6 tries all together — with each attempt being separated from the last by a greater number of days (been over a week since my last attempt).

If your first instinct is to leave a comment saying “I beat that one first try, it was super easy.” please realize you will be moderated out of existence, you bastard!!! LOL

Seriously, my ‘research’ indicates this is one of the hardest missions in the game. And by “hard” I mean “You have to play it a bunch of times to see what the enemy is going to do so you can make sure your troops aren’t in harm’s way.” Felt like a big puzzle to me. Blech.

Onward!

Dear Sony,

In general I really adore my PS3s (to the point I own two of them) but, please please PLEASE give us an option to turn off “preview” sound on the XMB.

Picture this scenario. The lady and I have dinner in front of the tv, and are watching Ghost Whisperer on DVD. A generally quiet show, not lots of explosions or screaming. We finish, turn off the PS3.

A few hours later, late enough at night that neighbors are sleeping, I turn on the TV, Receiver and PS3 on my way to the kitchen for a glass of water. Suddenly the walls are shaking with explosive sounds. I drop my glass and run back into the living room, where the PS3 is on, the XMB cursor sitting on the FEAR demo (thanks to Qore I already have it), and it is *blasting* out sound at an ear-splitting level.

I really, really hate that. I mean, I get that its cool that we can see and hear a preview window of the title selected, but please let us turn that off. Not everything enjoys an assault on the senses every time we turn our system on. The PS3, in our home at least, is much more than a game system: we watch DVD and Blu-Ray movies on it, watch Hulu via the built-in web broswer, and stream audio and video off the PCs in the office. It is very much a ‘media center’ for us, and me hitting the power button does not mean that I’m in the mood for EXTREME!!!!! violence.

And if Sony doesn’t give us that option, then publishers, please at least give some thought to what you’re blasting at us. The irony is that I turned the receiver way down to where the sound was reasonable, and started the demo…and had to turn the sound UP again. The ‘teaser’ was much louder than the actual game (and much louder than the DVD we’d been watching). And honestly, it made me think less (slightly) of the game…it was a bad first impression.

Thank you Sony, for your prompt attention to this matter!

Sincerely,
Dragonchasers!

I don’t usually get real personal on this blog, but I think I know you all well enough now that I feel comfortable telling you about this. I just need to tell *someone* y’know? Just need a willing ear to listen to my tale of sorrow.

Y’see, Valkyria Chronicles and I have had our first fight.

Things were going so great, and even when the fight happened, I just thought it was a little thing that we’d just get through. A speed bump on the way to our long term bliss. But days later, we’re still at an impasse.

I just can’t beat Chapter 7.

Worse, it’s a *long* battle and I’ve played for over an hour before hitting the “Game Over” screen. It isn’t that I’m a poor battlefield commander: rather, the problem is the mission is one big fat puzzle, and you pretty have to resort to trial and error before you can get past it.

## CHAPTER 7 BATTLE SPOILERS FOLLOW ##

The goal is to stop a mammoth tank that follows (it turns out) a pre-set route through the battlefield. The tank is bristling with turrets that’ll kill a squad member in one turn if caught out in the open. And the tank can’t be hurt until it blasts a stone wall (which it has to do every so often in order to move forward), at which point some vulnerable Radiators are exposed for 1 turn. Classic boss-battle stuff. There are 3 of these radiators, and after you knock off two of them, enemy reinforcements arrive, including an unkillable character with a 1-shot=kill weapon. Worse, by the time these reinforcements show up, the AI has a so many Command Points that the newbies sweep across the battlefield all at once. So you’d better have everyone in deep cover when they show up.

There are 4 stone walls that the enemy has to blast, and 3 radiators to destroy, so you can muff one attempt. Basically you need to use your tank and lancers to destroy the turrets, then when the radiators appear, charge the tank with a grenade-carrying troop (ie, not a lancer) and stuff a grenade down the opening of the radiator (and once you destroy one, the others drop, so its not good trying to get 2 from 1 wall blast). So far I’ve gotten as far as trying for the 3rd spot, and I gosh-darned MISSED throwing the dang grenade (and really you’re just dropping the thing in a hole). ARGHHHH!

Each play through I get a bit farther along, but again..we’re talking an hour each attempt. I just now googled and there are some walk throughs for this mission, and I guess I’m going to resort to them. It’s just been such a shock and a disappointment to find such a puzzle-based, trial & error dependent mission after all the fun I’d been having finding my own way to fight each battle.

I’m hoping this battle is an anomaly and not the way the rest of the game plays out. I hate “puzzledy” strategy games. I want to develop *a* winning strategy, not find *the* single pre-programmed ‘win’ strategy through trial and error, y’know? [Having now read a few of the aforementioned walk-throughs, it's clear there isn't literally 1 way to beat the mission, but still all the methods are pretty similar, and you'd still never be able to beat the battle until you played a few times to learn where and when the triggers were.]

Finally we get to the core gameplay mechanic of Valkyria Chronicles: combat. As you flip through the panels of the Book mode, you’ll come to missions that must be undertaken. You’ll also unlock skirmishes as you move through the game: these can be played over and over in order to level up your army.

Combat takes place on two levels: there’s a strategic ‘map’ view of the combat area used for planning, and then a third person view for the actual combat. Each turn you get a set number of Command Points which are spent to give a particular fighter a turn, or to issue a command-level Order. These Orders are learned via the old man in the Cemetery back at HQ or get unlocked via leveling your army. Orders do things like heal a particular unit, increase evasion, call down sniper fire on a specific enemy, etc. You’ll tend to use these pretty lightly, with the bulk of your Command points going to giving your troops a chance to move.

Once you expend a Command Point to activate a unit, you zoom down into the 3D representation of the battlefield until you’re looking over that unit’s shoulder. A unit has a set number of Action Points it will spend in moving around the battlefield, and the ability to perform one activity per movement phase. That activity can be firing at an enemy, hurling a grenade, or healing an ally. As a unit moves it’ll be given the opportunity to crouch behind sandbags, crawl when in tall grass, etc. There are no time limits to this phase, but enemies will fire at you while you’re exposed and moving around, which can put a quick end to that unit’s military career.

In order to fire/throw/heal, you tap the R1 button which brings up a targeting reticule. At this point time is frozen. You move the reticule over your intended target and hit the X button to fire. Location on the target does count, so you can try for head shots or try to hit the radiator on the back of a tank (the mechanical version of a head shot). Grenades arc and do area-of-effect damage but their range is pretty short. To heal someone (or in the case of an engineer, repair the Edelweiss) you need to be adjacent to them. If you’re firing on an enemy who is unaware of you, you get a bonus to you chance to hit.

After firing, a unit can continue to move assuming it has Action Points left. There is a brief pause after firing which seems designed to let the bad guys get off a least a couple shots at you, but it is very possible to dart out into a street, shoot a bad guy in the back, then run back behind cover before he can return fire. In fact, that’s SOP for a Scout. Once you are done moving and firing a particular unit, hitting the Circle button brings you back to Command view to issue more orders. You can issue multiple orders to a single unit in one turn, but each time they get fewer and fewer action points (and in some cases ammunition is limited and replenishes only between turns). At any time you can end your turn, and unused Command Points will “roll-over” to the next turn.

While the enemy is moving, you’ll be looking at the Command map. You’ll see spotted enemy units moving (and your troops will auto-fire on them from time to time, but seemingly not as often as the enemy does to you) or “hear” units moving in the form of comic-book style sound-effect bubbles appearing on the map. These will give you a general indication of where the enemy is.

And those are the basics of combat in Valkyria Chronicles. I’m finding battles to be an awful lot of fun, hearkening back to classic PC games like Jagged Alliance or X-Com. “Opportunity Fire” is represented by units auto-firing when they see an enemy. Most battlefields have Camps to occupy, and you can Retreat units from these camps (move them off the battlefield) and bring in Reinforcements from your squad in their place. So (for example) if you run into a squad of tanks and are short on Lancers, you can Retreat a couple of Snipers and bring in Lancers to deal with the tanks. Some aspects of the battlefield are destructable, which adds to the fun. When the Edelweiss knocks over a wall that’s protecting a bunch of AI units leaving them exposed to withering fire from your Shocktroopers…that’s a good feeling.

The AI isn’t particularly challenging, at least early on in the game, but the odds are always stacked against you (and finishing a battle faster yields a better rating and rewards). This fits in with the overall theme of the game being a small group of militia kicking the butt of a much larger military force. But I have seen the AI do some really silly things, like attempt to auto-fire on one of my troops but instead shoot another AI unit standing next to the firing unit. On the plus side that shows that ammo is “live” with a real trajectory and collision detection, I guess.

I guess that ends my rather verbose “First Look” at Valkyria Chronicles. I didn’t know much about the game when I added it to my Christmas List, other than the fact that it was a strategy game that was getting good reviews but not doing well in sales. So far I’ve been absolutely delighted, and I hoped that by describing the game a bit, I could turn on a few PS3 owners to this (so far, at least) excellent game.

Today I want to talk about the somewhat unusual RPG aspects of Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3. Full disclosure: I’m now about 11 hours into the game and some aspects of it still haven’t “opened up” yet.

Individual characters in VC don’t gain experience or have inventories. Instead, characters (each of whom has a name and a background) are broken down into five classes: scouts have lots of mobility but not a lot of armor or firepower; shocktroopers carry machine guns for big short range damage; lancers are anti-tank foot soldiers with low mobility; engineers have low combat skills but can repair tanks and resupply everyone; snipers have high long-distance firepower but not a lot of mobility or armor. Finally your ‘main character’ is a tank commander, and he drives around in a custom tank named the Edelweiss – as far as I know this is the only tank you get in the game.

At the end of every mission you gain ducats and experience. Ducats are used to upgrade weapons, armor and parts for the Edelweiss. When a weapon is upgraded, every unit that carries that weapon immediately gets the upgraded model. So if you upgrade the sniper rifle, it means all your snipers get more powerful. Ducats can also be spent to finance the ongoing writings of an embedded reporter who travels with you. These unlock “side stories” to the main story, some of which come with extra missions, and some of which are just expository.

Experience is used to “level up” a class of soldier. You can spend experience points as you see fit, distributing it among the five classes, but I’d imagine most people are going to do what I’m doing and just distribute it more or less evenly so all classes stay about the same level. Frankly this takes a lot of the classic RPG decision making out of the game (which is part of why I’m calling this a Storybook Strategy game rather than a Strategy-RPG). There’s also a mysterious aged gentleman that you meet who can teach you new Commands in exchange for experience points. More about Commands in my next post.

So now you’ll be thinking that all your troops are more or less interchangeable, right? But no, each individual is in fact unique. First, their stats vary slightly, and with these, what you see is what you get. If you have a particular Shocktrooper with lower-than-usual HP, you just have to live with that. Also, each character has a set of other characters that he or she likes, and having characters who like each other fighting together gives some bonuses to combat.

More interesting though, are Potentials. Each character has a set of Potentials, which are either buffs or debuffs that trigger depending on the situation on the battlefield. Potentials can be environment related (some characters are country-bred and hate being in the city but get a bonus for being in the country, others might have allergies to pollen and are adversely affected by being in tall grass) and others are character-related. Lots of characters have Potentials such as “Likes Women” (potential for a bonus around females) or “Hates Men” (potential for a debuff around males) while others have Potentials related to how many people are around them. And it goes on and on… I’m still uncovering new Potentials all the time (as a class levels up they ‘unlock’ more Potentials for that class).

So this is where the real role-playing comes in: You’re about to go out on a mission. You check the terrain and the situation. First you decide what kinds of troops you’re going to need. Then you have to decide which individuals are going to work well in this environment, and further take into account their inter-personal Likes and Potentials in order maximize their chances for success. You can spend a lot of time building the perfect team for a particular mission.

A few last notes: when an individual’s health drops to zero hit points, he or she collapses. You now have three turns to get a friendly to the fallen unit in order to medivac them off the battlefield. Also, if an enemy gets to the fallen tropper first, the enemy will finish them off. Once an individual is dead, they’re gone for good. You have a good sized pool of soldiers to pick from, but remember that each has a different set of Potentials; you might really want that individual for a specific purpose later on. Plus you get to know all these people and it feels bad to let one die (assuming you’re any kind of role-player).

Lastly, if all this fiddling with Potentials and Likes and so forth sounds like too much of a pain, you can run “Skirmish” battles to earn ducats and experience and just level up your army, making them powerful enough that the edge given by careful team-building isn’t needed to win the day. I find choices in play-style like this to be a positive, but I know some people need to be forced into playing one way and will see this as a flaw. Do yourself a favor and don’t go crazy leveling up your army by grinding Skirmishes. The game is incredibly fun when the battles are challenging affairs.

Next time, I’ll finally get to Combat in Valkyria Chronicles.

As mentioned, I received Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3 as a Christmas present this year. So far I’ve put 4-5 hours into it, and my initial reaction is very favorable indeed.

This game is probably classified as a Strategy-RPG but I’m going to coin a new genre here: Storybook Strategy. A Storybook Strategy game is a strongly narrative-driven game that uses strategy battles to move a story forward. In the case of Valkyria Chronicles, the term applies literally since rather than a world map or other device, you literally move through the game via a book.

The book tells the story of the small country of Gallia, caught between two super-powers in an alternate-world World War II (called the Second Europa War here). The Empire in East are the ‘bad guys’ while the Federation to the West are…well, less bad anyway. The Empire were the initial aggressors. Gallia sits on the coast of the North Sea roughly where Estonia and Latvia are in our world (geography isn’t exactly the same as the real world) but the little country feels more western than that. At the start of the story, the Empire is invading Gallia to get at the Ragnite that lies unmined under Gallian soil. (Ragnite, in this world, is the chief energy source; kind of oil and coal and dynamite — even medicine — wrapped into one resource.) The story revolves around Squad 7, a rag-tag militia squad doing their best to contribute to the defense of their country.

Anyway, back to the book, which looks like a richly illustrated history book, where each illustration or map triggers a cut-scene or battle (the actual text surrounding these panels isn’t readable). So you turn pages and work your way through chapters uncovering the story via cut-scene, and moving things along by winning battles. The ‘watercolor’ art style is very bright and peppy, but already there are some dark themes manifesting. The Empire has no qualms about killing civilians, even shooting them in the back as they flee. And among your squad there are issues of extreme racism and hate between members. Quite different from the usual “Good guys are GOOD” angle that most games take.

In Part 2 of my First Look, I’ll get into the RPG aspects of the game, which are fairly unique in a number of ways. I know that “linear” is a bad-word in the gaming nomenclature, but I really enjoy a linear game if it tells a compelling story, and so far Valkyria Chronicles’ story has me hooked.