Where’ve I been? On Naboo, mostly.

Sony release the ultra-hyped Star Wars Galaxies and I bought it, of course. My intent was to heap pile upon pile of derision on it.

But I hit a snag. The game absolutely rocks. It’s the most Role-Playing MMRPG since UO. Might even surpass UO in terms of role-playing. In fact, in a way its hardly a game…it’s more like a virtual galaxy for you to work and play in. I’m totally hooked.

I was playing with the demo of Gladius (warning for office workers…there’s music on that site) off a recent XBox magazine cover disk. This is the LucasArts gladiatorial combat game.

It’s really very neat. A strange melange of gaming styles. You have rpg aspects in that characters have stats and such. Some strategy bits in that it looks as though you spend your coin on building a team, with various choices of what type of warrior to hire. Then you get in the arena. Set up starting positions, with height and terrain playing a very real role in combat.

Combat is turn-based…each character moves in succession, based on abilities. You have various movement and ‘spell’ points (I’m guessing at terminology as I had no docs). You have a variety of different attacks that use up these spell points. But here’s the catch..when it comes time to attack, there’s an arcade element to the game. You have a gizmo that looks very similar to the ‘swing meter’ in old golf games. A horizontal bar with various zones in it. An indicater slides across the bar, and you have to tap a button to mark your swing. There’re big ‘normal hit’ zones that are easy as pie to hit. Then there are weak zones (which you want to avoid) followed by a very small critical hit zone, and so forth. The idea being that you can risk the critical hit but you might land a weak hit instead. The normal hit is basically a sure thing.

And that’s the basic attack. For combos you have to hit two buttons. Special attacks are carried out by various “Simon-like” mini-games (ok, miniscule games). It’s *really* fun how it blends character stats with your own abilities. But if you’re a thinking gamer, I’m hoping that sound tactics and normal hits will carry the day.

Nothing here is totally new, but the way its all combined makes the game feel very fresh and fun. This one is now on my MUST HAVE list, to be sure!

EVE is a new space-based MOG. On the surface its similar to Westwood’s Earth & Beyond: you have a ship that you fly around in, mining asteroids, fighting NPCs and exploring. But once you get into the game you start to learn that EVE is very different.

Basically, it boils down to this. Whereas E&B was a MMORPG with ships instead of player avatars, EVE is an alternate universe to make your mark on. There’s almost no hand-holding going on, there are no levels. You choose your own path… you can focus on getting the beset ship possible, or increasing your personal skills, or on getting rich…it’s all up to you.

At the heart of this is a player-driven economy that gives the players the tools to interact with each other in meaningful ways. From your first day in EVE you can start selling items when you’re offline, for instance. Players can hire each other to haul cargo, put a bounty on an enemy, or commission a star ship from another player.

Corporations, which take the place of Guilds, add long-term goals for players. A Corporation can build its own space station, albeit at great cost in terms of cash and materials. This will require all the members of the Corp pulling together to work towards a common goal.

You’ll notice I referred to EVE as a MOG, not a MMORPG. While a major portion of the game is about character development, there’s a solid economic empire building game in here, too. Be a trader sniffing out the best trade routes between systems, or be a miner, or a builder, or a bounty hunter. Or do some of each. Amassing wealth in order to buy better ships and equipment is a big part of the game, and the player-to-player economic possibilities keep things interesting.

The last thing that sets EVE apart is how ‘low impact’ it is. Make no mistake, there’s a lot of downtime in this game. Mining asteroids, or making multi-jump trips, can take a good little while. Oddly though, rather than being annoying I find this relaxing. If I need more excitement I can always hunt pirates for a while. But just as an example, as I write this, my ship is mining an asteroid on my other laptop (which accounts for how disorganized this post is…I had to go kill pirates a few times in the midst of it).

The thing that scares me about EVE is that its starting to remind me of my first online gaming addiction: Megawars III, on the old Compuserve Service. If I get as hooked on EVE as I was on that game I’ll be in trouble, indeed!

Just for the record, I’m still playing, and enjoying, Brute Force on the XBox. I’ve seen a lot of lackluster reviews. Maybe I’m just crazy, but I think its a solid game. Doesn’t push too many envelopes or anything, but its fun to play, and at the end of the day, isn’t that what matters?

Out now for the XBox, and early thoughts are pretty positive. Not the bar-raising game it was hyped to be, but still pretty darned fun. No XBox Live support though, which is a shame since you can play Co-op locally.

Now that the hype has cooled down a bit, I’m reflecting on E3 and feeling kindof depressed. While there were some very cool games at the show, they were, for the most part, all shooters: Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Doom III, Call of Duty. I can’t recall any really exciting strategy games or RPGs. Granted, MS rolled out Mythica but that, as well as the other big MMORPGs (World of Warcraft, Middle Earth Online) are way out on the distant horizon. We’ve got Star Wars Galaxies out soon, but beyond that…very little non-shooter gaming to look forward to this year.

Picked up Planetside, the new sci-fi MMFPS from Sony. Early impressions are very favorable. The game looks good, documentation is good (a sore point after the Shadowbane debacle) and it seems like the gameplay is rich enough to have legs. You can play it as a straight-up shooter, or you can specialize in being a medic or and engineer or a spy…lots of vehicles to drive or fly. A huge world…

Yup, it all looks great in theory. Be a few days before I can really sink into the gameplay, though.

Well, I rented Enter the Matrix for the XBox yesterday…and returned it today.

I really wanted to like it, but between an awkward control system, weird clipping problems, a dodgy camera and a feeling that you’re never really in control of the character you’re playing, it just wasn’t good. I’m sure Shiny got caught in a time crunch and didn’t have enough time to polish it to where they should have.

The game looks cool, with great Matrix-y fighting moves, but in fact you have very little control over them. Hit the Focus (their word for bullet-time) button and the Kick button and maybe your character will leap up and double-kick two nearby opponents, or maybe s/he’ll leap up, push off a wall and do a total round-house kick to one of them. As far as I could tell, the game decided.

You can use either a first or third person point of view, but you can’t move in first person and you can’t look up/down in third. When you’re fighting a helicopter that’ll cut you down in seconds, this becomes very awkward indeed. Either stand still so you can look up to aim at it, or dodge and not be able to target it.

In the driving sequences, we have crash physics that leave your car tumbling, clipping through building after building, for ridiculous amounts of time until you finally lodge against a building that is solid.

And the controls! Eeek. The little black button is your first button. Try to hit that in a panic.

You can do neat Matrix moves like a cartwheel while firing your gun, and the hand-to-hand combat sure looks neat. You can see what they were going for and it would’ve kicked major ass, but it just never got finished. Between this and the new movie, my Matrix fanboyism has dissolved in a matter of days. 🙁

OK, E3-03 is over and gone, I’m back from travelling (note to self: next year don’t travel on the weekend after E3) and its time to start sifting through the madness. Being a lazy bloke I’m delighted at how much TV coverage can be found. G4’s Pulse was probably the first show to hit the air with E3 coverage, and TechTV’s X-Play starts their coverage this weekend.

Given that I’ve just started digging in, my initial impression is that the XBox and PC are the platforms to be on this coming year. I haven’t seen anything mind-boggling on the GameCube or PS2 so far. Specifically, the two games that have wowed me so far are Halo 2 and Half-Life 2.

The most interesting sound byte I’ve heard so far is John Carmack on DOOM 3. Apparently they went with a linear, strongly scripted type of gameplay for D3. With games like GTA3 and BF 1942 making ’emergent behavior’ the current industry buzzword, its interesting to see id backing away from AI and relying on scripting. While DOOM 3 looks good, I’m skeptical about it as a game; in my opinion while id has made a lot of great 3D gaming engines, they haven’t made a lot of great games. That said, I can’t wait for it to come out, just so the DOOM 3 engine can start being licensed by other developers.

Eek! I could’ve sworn I posted this… Micrsoft followed Sony down to the $179 price point for the XBox. Thus far, Nintendo hasn’t budged. Pretty conservative price drops, but “pretty conservative” seems to be the theme for the big 3 console makers at this year’s E3.