Tomb Raider Legend and rage quitting it

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I started to play Tomb Raider Legend a few weeks ago. I was really looking forward to this, I haven’t played it in ages and I am fairly sure I didn’t beat it the first time round. I remember really enjoying the game. You can tell by the title of this post that I had unexpected troubles so you can read more below about Tomb Raider Legend and how I unexpectedly found it very frustrating and have put that on pause for now. This is a particularly long blog post, even for me, so I have put the bulk of it behind a ‘read more’ type link so as not to take up too much space on the home page. I should probably do that more as I do go on a bit in my posts even at the best of times.

Spoiler warning for Tomb Raider Legend – I daresay very few people are worried about spoilers for that game as it is fairly old now, but just in case.

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Match three games and 10,000,000

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If you check my Steam gameplay time stats you might notice that I play a fair amount of ‘match three’ type games. These are the games with the moving tiles, or swapping jewels etc., until you line up three or more that match, and then they disappear, things happen, more tiles/jewels drop in and so forth. They are very casual soft core type games, Bejewelled probably being one of the best known of the genre (if indeed it counts as a genre). I have recently picked up another of these type of games, called 10,000,000 and I thought I would make a short post about why I play such comparatively simple and untaxing games quite a bit. I will say something about 10,000,000 as well.

Some ago I got Lucid on Steam and made a not very good YouTube video review of the Lucid game – that video was more about me testing out recording gameplay with commentary to be honest! I have had Bejewelled 3 for a while and have sunk 35 hours into it since I got it. More recently I watched TotalBiscuit’s WTF is … 10,000,000 and thought it looked interesting, so bought that as it was on a 20% off on launch offer. 7.5 hours of gameplay and less than a week later I have beat it. So yeah, I do play these things a fair bit.

I know this blog is straplined ‘playing on casual’ but I have explained that elsewhere, the reason I play these is that I find them an excellent distraction when I am ill, in pain, tired, on high strength painkillers and so on. Again elsewhere I have explained a bit about my health problems and disability and how computer/video games help when I am badly off with my problems – match three games seem to be like that, but more so. In that when I am very bad, or woozy, in pain etc. and can’t even cope with ‘regular’ games, I can usually spend some mindless time with a match three game. The other thing I can do when I am very ill is watch Let’s Play type videos on YouTube. For some reason both these things seem to work better than reading (or watching TV, which I very rarely do anyway) to distract me and not let my mind dwell on how crap I am feeling at that point. Or if I am being kept awake and am very tired but in too much pain to sleep they work too.

So, onto the latest one of these games I have been playing, 10,000,000. It has retro style ’8 bit’ graphics – the ’8 bit’ is in scare quotes as it isn’t really 8 bit but that retro graphics style seems to be being called 8 bit lately. Very simplistic, and not done that well to my mind, but the graphics don’t really matter that much in a game like this anyway. The gameplay has a twist in that you collect resources (gold, stone, wood) by matching certain tiles and use them to upgrade your ‘home’ allowing you to upgrade your attacks and character. You match different types of tile to give a magical attack or a physical attack; damage to different monsters is more effective with certain attacks so there is a strategy to it in some ways. You match chests to perhaps get items (magical attack orbs, one shot ‘big’ physical attacks, keys for the chests, food for health, scrolls), match keys to open doors and chests to get past them if you don’t have an item skeleton key, and so forth.

I did find the best strategy is not to hunt too hard for the precise best match for the current task but to keep matching as quickly as you can, the tiles falling down would often either line up or present a more obvious quick match for the attack (or key, or whatever) you require. It was useful to match wood, stone, shields (which give you shields to absorb damage) and keep an eye on the rest of the board waiting for attack combinations to present themselves. I had a lot of fun with the game, though I felt it to be a bit short, having beat it in 7.5 hours. Towards the end I ran out of things to spend XP, gold and resources on – I sort of felt that it would be nice to have a further stage where you could level up even more and so on, but for £3 or so I cannot complain.

Will I play it through again? I am not sure, it was fun to play through once, but probably not – at least not for a while. I might try to get the last of the Steam achievements but that will be about it for now. However I find myself popping back into Bejewelled now and again so I daresay I will play this one again in a few months. I haven’t played Lucid in a long time though, that game became a bit frustrating towards the end and the higher levels – and also that game was a lot more about the somewhat mesmerizing graphics and sound than the gameplay.

10,000,000 has distracted me from carrying on with Tomb Raider legend, which has been somewhat frustrating in places with control issues and lingering bug like features – but I hope to beat TR legend and will possibly do a blog post on it since I have some notes I have been making as I am playing it, mainly about the frustrations! The frustrations are mostly down to me, but I can see why some people prefer to play the game with a controller not a mouse and keyboard. But that is another post, when (if) I beat that game. Meanwhile, don’t look down on me too much if you seem me playing a lot of super casual soft core match three games if I am on your Steam friends list or something – I am probably feeling a bit rubbish and am distracting myself. And why not, it is still better than daytime TV.

Saints Row 3 done with for now

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Introduction

Well I have beat Saints Row: The Third. By which I mean I have played through the main mission line and got to (one of) the ending(s). You can check the choices I made for the main ending and one or two other choices during the main storyline if you really want to by checking my Steam profile and looking at which achievements I got. I won’t go into details here in case someone is thinking of getting the game, and doesn’t want spoilers. My Saints Row 3 initial thoughts blog post still stands, so check that if you want.

I did get a little tired of the game – as I stated in my previous post to this one (Catch Up) I lost most of my progress and had to repeat a lot (in fact, most) of the game. More specifically in my previous lost save I had done a lot of grinding and had got a high income, high respect level, lots of upgrades etc. and the thought of doing all that again really didn’t appeal. So after a while of doing activities and so on, I found myself starting to get bored with the game which is really not what I wanted. So I dropped the difficulty down to casual and just played through the main missions.

Things I didn’t like

I will start with some things that I didn’t get on with in the game. I will emphasize here that I really like the game, and had a thoroughly good time playing it. These niggles in this section are just that, niggles. A lot of them are just my personal preferences, and indeed my own lack of ability. I want to save the ‘things I did like’ section for afterwards, because it really is overall, an excellent game.

The main problem I had with the game, that wasn’t down to my own lack of ability with some aspects of it, was that the AI tended to have some really dumb moments, and had pathing problems. Also the AI controlling, for instance, other cars on the road or pedestrians was either really stupid or deliberately coded to be annoying and obstructive. I guess this is sort of amusing at first but it gets old fast, and when you are trying to complete a mission and a car just randomly rams you off the road and thus you fail the mission it is just plain irritating. Especially when it happens more than once in a row, and you get multiple failures due to sheer trolling by the game.

Often I would have followers – just general Saints help or mission specific homies – and I would get into a vehicle and they would just ‘run on the spot’ or orbit around the car (or whatever). This sometimes happening when I was trying to leave a combat area to get to an objective, so of course the car and the PC, and the NPCs are all taking fire and damage as the dumb AI NPC buggered about failing to find the car door. Also my player character would do this too – I would want to get in the car and leave a ‘hot’ area fast. So would run up to the car and press E. Sometimes this resulted in my jumping in rapidly, but sometimes the rapid get-in-the-car thing didn’t work. And my character would sloooowly walk gently around the car before getting in. Or not get in and just walk on the spot or orbit the damn thing. Of course enemies would be firing at me/us and enemy vehicles would be driving up fast and crashing into the car I wanted to get in to. Sometimes ending up with death or the car being trapped.

My ‘favourite’ dumb NPC moment was during a helicopter mission, where the main PC (i.e. me) was flying the thing to get to various points (radio towers to plant bugging devices for Kinzie I think) and Shaundi was sitting in the side door shooting things. Right up until her AI decided it would be good to jump out of the helicopter. So there was the little purple/blue pointer saying I should go revive my homie, some 400 odd metres away on the ground somewhere!

Talking of helicopter missions, often you are sitting in that same side door and shooting (often shooting rockets) at enemies on the ground who are pursuing an ally in a vehicle who is going from place to place to do things. So the dumb AI comes in again where that allied driver gets stuck sometimes – but that isn’t the main problem. Your range of aim is a limited arc out of the one side of the helicopter. You can’t swap sides (someone please tell me if you can, because I couldn’t work out how to do it if it was possible!) and often the enemies that you had to target were literally not targetable. You could see the little red markers, behind you or too far to one side or the other (which is forwards and backwards to the helicopter since you are sitting in a side door). And sometimes those enemies would catch up to and kill or damage the ally you were meant to be protecting.

I really did never get fully used to the vehicle controls. With a longish gaming session I kind of got not impossibly terrible at them, but I would only have to take a break for a couple of hours, let alone a day, and I would be back to almost not being able to control anything. This makes a fair bit of the game much more frustrating than it should be. There is no fast travel system (again if there is and I missed it tell me how dumb I am and let me know how to access it!) so getting to mission starts, or even just activities and so on involves driving about a lot. Or even worse flying (I had even more difficulty with air vehicles than ground ones). And a lot of the activities involve vehicles and driving them fairly fast without crashing a lot. I have no idea why I had so much trouble. I guess it is partially the digital nature of WASD vs analogue sticks, but I am a PC gamer so should be used to that. I also had a similar problem with GTA. This one is definitely down to me! On the other hand I definitely don’t have trouble controlling vehicles in other games.

I really dislike QTEs, and the game has some. There are other games with lots more, and I would hate to play those. Limited save slots? I guess that is just the console port with checkpoint system nature of the game. Not a problem as there are a lot of save slots, and I only just ran into the limit towards the end of the game. Also the DLC I bought probably wasn’t worth it. I never did use the weapons, vehicles and cosmetic items I ended up with – and I discovered that a fair few of them unlock as you progress through the game anyway. The extra homies were just skins not extra homies, so that wasn’t worth it. I did get them for very little in Steam sales though, so no biggie. There are ‘proper’ DLC mission packs though, so that might be worth a look.

I reiterate though none of the above complaints are anything other than minor, and other gamers and reviewers don’t have those problems. So this is very much a personal view.

Things I did like

The rest of the game. Seriously, it is a great deal of ridiculous fun. Very violent but so silly it ends up like cartoon violence most of the time (e.g. like Tom and Jerry or Looney Tunes). You can also steer the game along silly lines somewhat. The fact that the game is gloriously ludicrous means you end up playing it with a silly grin on your face. The combat is fun, the guns feel good and you can upgrade them nicely for some serious firepower. Approach fights with some thought and things go a lot better than just charging in. I had to relearn that once or twice, but using cover and taking down enemies at a distance works really well. W-mouse1 will often get you killed even on casual.

The missions and activities had a lot of variety, although some activities got a bit repetitive (that was mainly because some of them I didn’t get on with though I suspect). After the main game is done you end up in the open world of Steelport, where you can just carry on to try and finish city takeover tasks, upgrade things as you get more money and respect (which is sort of the XP of the game). I won’t be removing it from my PC, but will leave it there. I am sure I will be revisiting the game now and again, after a while perhaps as I have played it a lot very recently (over 20 hours in the last less than a week according to Steam). A bit like Borderlands 1 – I have it on my disk and will revisit it, having reinstalled it in fact just to play again from time to time.

You can get Saints Row: The Third very cheaply when it is on sale, I mean extremely cheaply. The Steam sale has just had it at 75% off and other places have it on sale too fairly often. Well worth a look if you haven’t played it. Bearing in mind I don’t like driving based games, or even just driving sections in games, I still loved playing this game even though it has a lot of driving in it. The characters are really good and well written. They have personalities which goes with the fun and interesting storyline (which steadily gets more over the top as the game progresses) to make it fun to play through for the story. It isn’t an RPG though, so don’t expect Mass Effect levels of epicness. Just a lot of silly fun. It won’t make you feel like a superhero, but you can dress as one:

Saints Row 3 character in Super Hero outfit

Onwards

I managed to not play any City of Steam after all, they had server problems so the game was down for the days when I wanted to play it. Oh well, hopefully the game will do well in the next beta (I might play it then) and eventually get to full release. Feel free to check out my City of Steam blog post with my thoughts on the game (or rather on the first part of the tutorial for the game, as I found out later!). The City of Steam website is here and it is also on Steam Greenlight.

I still have a week to go before I go back to work – although there is some stuff other than playing games I want to at least get started. Not sure exactly what to play next, possibly Tomb Raider Legend as I said in the last post, and some more Borderlands 1 second playthrough I expect. The YouTube stuff is still on the backburner although I have tested recording and it went better than I thought it would. I wouldn’t mind playing XCOM as detailed in my post XCOM – Enemy Unknown and an update since that is my Christmas present.

Or something else might catch my eye in my Steam library (ooh shiny!) and I will go off on a tangent and play something I forgot I owned. And why not.

Catch Up

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I wasn’t sure what to call this post, it is a sort of an update I guess. To make a long story short I now have a lower grade computer – but it has a better graphics card so it actually is a better gaming machine in most ways, e.g. higher FPS and higher settings on most games I have tested so far. Plus I lost all back ups, plus I am having to (try to) recover access, passwords, logins, etc. to all sorts of things and services – including game services. With online DRM this is most of my games. Sometimes the most unexpected things happen. The expense is not inconsiderable too.

I have also discovered that cloud saves are very variable, even on the same service (i.e. Steam). Borderlands (1) is fine, but I lost a lot of (i.e. most) progress in Saints Row 3. And of course anything without cloud saves I will have to start from scratch. The main one I am sad about for this is all of Mass Effect. Everything, my canon run through and save game ready for ME3, all gone. However, I guess I won’t mind playing through those again from the start, but this does mean that I won’t be playing ME3 for a long time.

So, two weeks off before I go back to work. I was looking forward to playing some games but not quite in the way I imagined a few weeks ago. I will see if I can get back into Saints Row 3 or if the loss of most of my progress in that game will put me off it. I can do the extra Borderlands 1 stuff I mentioned in my YouTube videos of the end of Borderlands 1. I might play some Tomb Raider of some sort – I have never finished Legend so that would be nice. Sadly though I have missed out the the betas for City of Steam (see previous post) and I can’t seem to recover my login for that, so I guess I will wait until it gets officially released and play some then from scratch.

I was going to do (sometime) some more YouTube vids, but this computer has a much lower grade CPU than my last, and also the disk is fairly slow to both read and write compared to my last box. So I doubt it will record games very well, so recording for YouTube is, for now, on the back burner. I might do some test recordings but if it is as laggy when recording as I suspect it will be then they won’t be very good, certainly not good enough to upload.

Still two weeks off should see some gaming get done, even amidst a boatload of hassle. I will be spending time with my wife and having some nice Christmas food, and all the usual stuff (although we make less of a fuss about the year end holiday(s) than most I suspect). Hope everyone out there has a great Christmas/Holiday/Feast of the Unconquered Sun.

Update: I have managed to reset the password to, and thus regain access to, City of Steam. Not sure why it didn’t work the first couple of times I tried it. Also there is still one closed beta session to go, so I may well get to play some more after all. I will probably try an elven or human character rather than goblin this time.

City of Steam

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Introduction

City of Steam is (or will be, it is in closed beta at the moment) a free to play, massively multiplayer online, role playing game (F2P MMO RPG). It is browser based, but don’t let that worry you too much. It isn’t built with Flash but with Unity and uses the Unity web player. I first heard about it via TotalBiscuit’s Hyper WTF is City of Steam YouTube video where he played through some of the game (an earlier beta I think) with the City of Steam developers Mechanist. That video is an hour and a half long by the way, so a very good look at the game.

The game looked interesting, and I thought that the graphics looked very good indeed for a browser based game – so I signed up for the City of Steam email newsletter, found them on Twitter and Facebook and followed them there, and kept up somewhat with the news. I was very lucky and got a key/invite to the closed beta due to being on the newsletter list (don’t think everyone did but not sure) and the first of four closed beta long weekends was on the 18th to the 20th of November so I had a go. It is beta, so there were problems obviously. There was a ‘black screen’ problem for most of the latter half of the weekend that meant I couldn’t get on and play it at all. That was fixed, but by that time it was Monday so I had less spare time to play games in.

Here are my very early impressions. Totally subjective, this is not a review and definitely not objective. If this article piques your interest please do go find out more about it! Finally a warning about spoilers; I do describe the starting missions – which contain the tutorials – somewhat in the captions to the screenshots in this article, so that could be spoilerish for anyone that wants to play through the story totally unaware of what is coming up. I don’t imagine many will be that spoiled by the opening missions/tutorial in an MMORPG but you never know.

Character generation and start

There are a fair few races you can choose from – check the City of Steam website for details, it is worth reading a bit about the world, races and classes and so on there. I chose a Goblin (a ‘greenskin’) – other possibilities are one of four different varieties of human, two sorts of elf (dark and light essentially) and three ‘greenskins’ (Goblins, Hobbes and Orcs) and also coming in the future Dwarves (which aren’t traditional fantasy dwarves but look to be steampunk cyborgs or something!).

For my class I chose Arcanist, specializing in electricity. There are a couple of favoured classes for each race (e.g. the other recommended class for Goblins was Gunner) and again will not go through any of that here, do check out the City of Steam site for information on all this. I will say that there is enough choice to make things interesting, but not so much it gets confusing and it is tricky to tell one race or class from another. For me personally it is a good balance of choice and complexity in character generation. So for my Goblin Arcanist, specializing in electricity my main attack is to throw lightning bolts at the enemy from a sword like technical device wielded in my right hand. I had a shield in my left hand for combat.

The actual first level arcanist skill calls down a lightning strike from above on the enemy, and has the usual cost in ‘steam’ (a mana equivalent I guess) and a cooldown and so on. There are skill trees to upgrade through as you level up, but you start with a race skill (the ‘Goblin jump’ in my case) and have to wait to gain some XP before getting the first and subsequent level skills for the class, so I have got ahead of myself a bit here as that is after character generation.

Playing the introductory missions which also include tutorials

The screenshots aren’t as good as the real thing (I took them with FRAPS and there isn’t a compression setting, and it appears to over compress a bit – at least that saves some disk space and data transfer for my web hosting account!) but clicking on the thumbnails will get you to larger images (1080p). But as I said the game itself looks better than the screenshots indicate, especially after an update they did towards the end of the first closed beta session.

Movement is by WASD keys, or click the mouse and the player character will move to that point, or by clicking and holding the mouse and dragging it. Right clicking and moving the mouse moves the camera position. I ended up using a combination of all three and after a while it worked quite well for me, but it is good they give a choice of WASD or mouse based movements, as that is very much a personal preference. I had a little trouble with clicking on enemies to attack them from a distance, missing slightly and having my character run up to a bunch of monsters. That is probably partially finger trouble on my part, but on the forums a few people mentioned that they were having the same difficulty.

City of Steam screenshot Escape from Delton

Escaping from Delton with Uncle Fizzgig, escorting him through some underground areas as our route to the railhauler station was cut off. Some enemies were down here.

City of Steam screenshot the Colossus fighting as Delton burns

Having made it to the railhauler station Todpullen the Goblin looks out over his home city of Delton, watching the Colossus fight the invaders as the city burns. The Colossus is on the left – the big steam powered robot thing, it is fighting the flying demon like invader. The invaders arrived out of the spire you can see behind it with the laser like red light beam coming out of it upwards. The spire dropped from above releasing all the ‘brood’ – the enemies – that started destroying things. There is some more explanation in game via a cutscene and voiceover that describes what is happening in context of the lore of the world that City of Steam is set in. You can see the quest tracking arrow at Todpullen’s feet pointing back at the railhauler station entrance, indicating he should be going there quickly – but I think that he would have looked sadly over his home town as the fighting goes on, one last time before escaping to the Refuge in Nexus (via a railhauler journey).

City of Steam screenshot on the railhauler

After some more things to do in the station Todpullen makes it onto the railhauler – a big steam train affair that is the main transport between cities.

City of Steam screenshot finding/rescuing cousin further up the railhauler

Todpullen’s cousin managed to get lost or run up the railhauler, and was cut off by some brood that seem to have followed them onto the railhauler. No one is quite sure why they seem to be interested in the railhauler or the refugees, but the train guards aren’t coping too well with these monsters. Since he is the protagonist, Todpullen sets off up the train killing the monsters and making his way to his cousin, who is fine. The yellow thing with three dots above the guard indicates that he can give you a quest (upon left clicking him and going through some dialogue). Doing so means you get to go further up the train and end up meeting (and hopefully killing or at least driving off) what seems to be the head monster for this railhauler infestation.

I won’t go into the story too much as this isn’t a let’s play but a first impressions of new game in beta. The world in which City of Steam is set isn’t a planet but appears to be an artificial construct, made by some long gone (perhaps?) race. They left a bunch of devices and stuff around, and the catastrophe that befalls Delton (Todpullen the Goblin’s home town) was caused by one of these. But another device – the Colossus – wakes up after decades or more of not moving to fight off the invaders as the inhabitants flee to a refuge that has been set up in another city (Nexus). See the screenshots and text above for a little of this. The invaders (brood) follow the refugees onto the railhauler which leads to more adventures in fighting them off.

As you play through this introductory story and the first missions, tutorial text pops up explaining how to use your skills, how to move, how to fight etc. I will admit that I had usually worked out how to do most of that beforehand, just by reading tooltips and experimenting with clicking on things and doing things. I am sure most gamers would be the same, but it was nice to have things confirmed by the (not intrusive) occasional tutorial pop up, and of course if I hadn’t worked out how to do something I got told about it as the game progressed.

The Refuge (in Nexus)

City of Steam screenshot arriving at the Refuge in Nexus

Having arrived at the Refuge in Nexus we step out of the railhauler station and take in the view of the new city.

City of Steam screenshot Refuge map

As above but showing the map of Refuge – a fairly big place.

The Refuge is an area of the city of Nexus where the refugees from Delton (and possibly elsewhere, I don’t know anything about the starting missions and origins of the other races) first end up when arriving and getting off the railhauler. The starting missions here, which also include some tutorial pop ups as you work through new stuff, are basically sorting out your house, doing creature clearance quests in dungeons/quest areas, getting favours from locals and signatures from officialdom etc. Apparently Todpullen the Goblin’s good deeds on the railhauler coming in help out a lot as officialdom looked favourably on me for that.

I only did a couple of these before running out of time on both the beta and having to do other things in real life like work. I haven’t done any co-op with others at all yet, so have just played it as a single player experience. Dungeons or quest structures are instanced, and they consist of the fairly familiar ‘kill creatures, break and loot boxes, do the tasks you need to do down there’ etc. RPG experience. Lots of clicking on stuff and power/skill using. Very satisfying if you are into that sort of thing (MMORPG, Diablo etc.). I started to get used to the combat system at this point and things were going a lot more fluidly. I levelled up and got myself a Tesla Turret. Which is pretty much what it sounds like, I could place down a little thingy of wire and whatnot and it would zap stuff as that stuff came near it. Great for laying one down then going forward and drawing back the mobs through the area with the turret zapping away as I pulled the mobs past it.

City of Steam screenshot flying steam bike! Beta testing complete with some bugs

A beta bug I suspect; a flying steam bike. Don’t think it is meant to do that once they are implemented properly.

I played a little on the last day of this first closed beta session in the evening after work. There are three more closed beta sessions, the next in a week or so and a couple more after that up to and including Christmas. There had been a two hour server downtime before my final chance to play the game and when I played the game again the way the graphics settings worked was slightly different and the game loaded my GPU a little more (I wouldn’t have noticed except I run the Open Hardware Monitor software to keep an eye on things). However, the game looked a lot better, it had a slightly lowered fps (from 50 to 45) when in combat (lots of particle effects with my lightning attacks!) but it really did look very nice indeed – for any game let alone a browser based one. I did another dungeon or two (still story wise associated with getting settled in Nexus) and below there are a couple more screenshots. Not sure you can see the improved graphics because of the way the screenshots compress the file though.

City of Steam screenshot another part of the Refuge

This screenshot and the next two are showing another part of the Refuge from three different angles, but approximately the same point (this one before Todpullen entered a dungeon, the other two afterwards). There had been some sort of update to the game (the server was down for a couple of hours) and when it came back the graphics looked a lot better, but I am not sure it shows so well in the screenshots.

City of Steam screenshot another part of the Refuge

City of Steam screenshot another part of the Refuge

Thoughts on it all so far

The story behind the world is very interesting and somewhat different from the usual fantasy fare, with a somewhat steam punk feel to it in places but I wouldn’t call it straight up steam punk. This might say a bit more about my lack of experience in many other MMORPGs, bear in mind that I haven’t played Diablo or Torchlight for instance but I do think I would enjoy those games and will probably play at least Torchlight at some point (I actually own the first one, just have never played it (it is in my pile of shame along with about a hundred other Steam sale games believe it or not)).

I can’t really address the MMO aspect as I didn’t do any of that, but for me I enjoy MMOs if I have people I know and am friends with (internet gamer friends or real life) to party up with and do co-op PVE. I really don’t like PVP at all, in any game really not just MMORPGs – I much prefer co-op PVE if I am playing multiplayer. For instance with respect to shooters I like Killing Floor but not deathmatch type games so much. So for me, I like it a lot so far, but was playing it almost like a single player RPG experience with run around lots of clicky combat and looting things – and a neat story behind it all. Would that keep me playing? Depends totally on how much content there ends up in the final game, and also if I make friends and end up doing the harder dungeons with them in a party. Or perhaps if PUGs (pick up groups) can be easily formed on the fly in the game. It can be dispiriting if you want to tackle a harder level dungeon and both no one you know is on, and also no one in the vicinity wants to do it. Whether that is a problem will depend on how popular and populated the final game ends up.

I am certainly looking forward to the coming closed beta sessions, there are three more up to and including Christmas. Also the open beta after, I will see how I go but I may well get into the game and play it once it is released – and probably buy some stuff to support the devs if nothing else, if I am playing and enjoying the game. I am certainly interested to see how the game gets on, and how it all goes. I do wish it well and hope it does well, I think it is enjoyable to play, has a lot of nice and different things about it whilst still being familiar enough for MMORPG fans to get right into it. I shall be playing more definitely.

Thoughts for others: if you like RPGs and MMORPGs, and think you might like the steampunkesque (sort of) nature of the world then check it out, visit the City of Steam website and maybe try to get in on the closed beta, or at least have a go at the open beta (or just wait for release if you don’t like betas). On the City of Steam site there is a list of places where you can perhaps get closed beta keys – or you can always become a supporter (pay money) to get one if you are really keen. The browser based nature of it with the Unity web plugin works well and shouldn’t put anyone off as long as they can get over the initial ‘browser based’ thing. I definitely think it is worth a closer look if the first sentence of this paragraph applies to you. It is free to play so it doesn’t cost you anything to try it out.

XCOM – Enemy Unknown, and an update

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Introduction

This is a post that is explaining why I have bought a game soon after release, at full price – and the special edition of that game to boot. I haven’t done that for many years, I don’t have a lot of spare cash at all so I tend to buy games once they get somewhat cheaper. Also this post is a bit of an update to record/explain why I haven’t played any games for two or three months.

XCOM – Enemy Unknown

The game in question is XCOM – Enemy Unknown. I had heard about this somewhat from news about it before release. I don’t remember the original X-COM (called X-COM:UFO Defense in America, but called UFO:Enemy Unknown elsewhere) at all. I played games from around that era at the time (e.g. Tomb Raider 1, the original Command and Conquer, the original Syndicate) but don’t remember UFO:Enemy Unknown at all. Anyway, a fair few people seemed excited about it, but also worried that it would get turned into a yet another shooter of some kind like the Syndicate remake. So I kept a vague eye out for reviews, trailers etc. but only a vague one.

The trailer that was released for the game really did, to my eye anyway, make the game seem like a 3rd person shooter. The trailer was mainly cinematic cutscenes, most of it taken from the introductory cutscene of the game. I only found this out later, the trailer just looked like a shooter with aliens on the other end. I think I read reviews of the game, in PC Gamer and on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I say ‘I think’ because I don’t remember getting much from the reviews, they didn’t pique my interest in the game and to be honest although I am sure they said that the game was a turn based strategy that really didn’t stick in my mind.

TotalBiscuit covered the demo of the game on his YouTube channel – TotalBiscuit’s analysis of the XCOM – Enemy Unknown demo. The demo wasn’t very good – in the sense that it didn’t seem to give a good idea of what the game was really like. But at least I started to realise the game was a TBS! Later I watched the WTF is … XCOM Enemy Unknown video from TotalBiscuit when it came out and I sat up and took notice. Just seeing someone play through the game on YouTube was a revelation. A metaphorical lightbulb went on over my head and I was starting to think that I would like this game.

So I went looking for more. I noticed that only one of the people I subscribe to on YouTube was doing a playthrough of the game – for some reason none of the let’s players I follow are doing it – possibly because a TBS isn’t as fashionable as the latest corridor MMS or episode 6 in an interminable franchise. However the playthrough XCOM Enemy Unknown – Evelyn’s Chronicle by Hathur99 was ideal. Feel free to check out Hathur99′s channel and you will see why I like his playthroughs, as long as you bear in mind I am a big fan of the Mass Effect series. I started watching his videos, and sat further up and took notice even more. I really liked the game, and it went from a ‘not even on my wishlist’ to me starting to look at prices and wondering how soon I could afford it.

So I stopped watching the playthrough videos (although I will go back and finish watching Hathur99′s playthrough once I have done at least one of my own) and was wondering about prices. To get to the point, with my wife encouraging me to get the game (probably to stop me moping) I got the special edition with various extras. This is my Christmas present from her and from myself to me (this is how I/we justified it). I got it from GAME as they have UK exclusivity on the special edition. The disadvantage of this is that without competition the price is always going to be high, but it wasn’t that much more than the price of the standard game. The advantage is that as I used to buy games a fair bit from GAME I had a bunch of loyalty points I could use up on the purchase. I also got a strategy guide too which lead to the previous post on this blog about printed strategy guides. I bought the guide with some spare PayPal money I had (from some internet business I do in my spare time – that isn’t video game related by the way).

The special edition came with the soundtrack (excellent by the way) and an art book (very interesting and helped me understand some of the look of the game that I thought was a bit strange), a clothing patch (which will get attached to a green polo shirt sometime, and worn to work to see if anyone at all recognizes it). There was also a poster showing the XCOM base (not called or callable SHADO sadly) but I don’t really have anywhere to put it, due to the other posters and things on the walls of my little computer/study room here.

I won’t be playing it straight away, as I explain in the next section. However, there is a final thought about this. If I hadn’t looked at actual gameplay footage on YouTube I would never have realised what this game was like. I don’t have much spare money at all, so I am careful with what non-essentials I spend money on – hence only getting games in sales and only when I am fairly sure I will enjoy them. If I had just gone by site and magazine reviews, the trailers, and the demo I may well have missed out on this game entirely. As I said I went from not even putting this game on my wishlist to buying the thing soon after release and buying the special edition to boot. That is unheard of for me at the moment, and totally down to seeing it being played by a gamer or gamers on YouTube.

Why I haven’t played any games for about three months

As I have probably said before, here or elsewhere, I suffer from chronic bad health. I have a progressive debilitating/disabling illness and during the last few months it has flared up very badly. When I get these flare ups I have to concentrate on my part time day job (as it were) as that pays the bills, and everything else gets put to one side. I am fairly bad on average, but when my problem gets really bad, it is awful. So yeah, I have been very ill for the last 3 months or so and am only just starting to (slowly, intermittently and with ups and downs) get a bit better from that. So basically I haven’t played games (other than a quick ten minutes here and there) since my Saints Row Three – initial thoughts blog post.

So today I got back to Saints Row the Third to pick up where I left off. One thing I did notice was that I wasn’t playing on the casual setting for the difficulty. If you read that post linked above I mentioned that I was having a lot of trouble and bumped the difficulty down to casual. Well apparently I had been playing on hard, and so I actually bumped it down to normal. At least I am playing on normal now and am not having lots of problems in combat (enough to make it interesting though). I am still a bit all over the place driving the car but that is fine as that is part of the game in some ways.

As well as SR3 I want to play some more borderlands 1 as I explained a bit during my Borderlands 1 Final Boss commentated gameplay videos on YouTube. I would like to play through as the Hunter perhaps, or at least do some playthrough 2 with my old Siren character. As I also explained in those videos my game disk semi-died and I was waiting for a Steam sale, which happened, so I know have Borderlands 1 GOTY on Steam, and the save files just transparently loaded up so that is good.

So it will be a little while, and also dependent on my health not plummeting again, before I get to play my XCOM game. But waiting to play my new game is OK, XCOM is more about gameplay, strategy and tactics than the story so spoilers won’t matter so much. And it looks like the sort of game that can definitely be played through many times. I have played a little of the early levels to see how it runs, and it runs well and is going to be fun, but I don’t want to leave other games half done (as I have in the past) by getting distracted by ‘new shiny thing’ so will save it for Christmas, when I will have a week or two off work anyway. It is my Christmas present after all.

Update 10th of November 2012: I have just discovered that there is in fact another XCOM reboot in the works from 2K Games (for comparison here is the Wikipedia page on the strategy XCOM reboot – the one that I have just bought and I talk about in this post). I had got the news and anticipation in the press and on forums for my game mixed up with that for the new game, in fact until now I didn’t realise there were two games. Anyway, it looks like the ‘shooter version’ of XCOM is actually being redesigned to be a lot more tactical, so that could be good.

I guess the success of XCOM – Enemy Unknown has made 2K reconsider making it yet another shooter? I hope so, straight up shooters are nice, but not every game needs to be one. Variety is good and if it can be shown that games other than the mainstream shooter can sell well and make money, then we will carry on getting variety in the games that are produced.

Printed Strategy Guides

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Introduction

I have recently bought the BradyGames ‘Official Strategy Guide’ for the game XCOM – Enemy Unknown’. It is a good book, nicely printed, good illustrations and covers the game well in terms of gameplay. But it does say on the front of the guide that it covers Xbox, PS3 and PC versions – but once you get inside it doesn’t cover the PC version, not really. Admittedly the only difference is the controls, but when it is describing how you do something and only gives options for the console controllers it is annoying. I suspect their excuse would be that I should be playing it with a controller, not a keyboard and mouse. This got me thinking about printed strategy guides, and what they are like these days from my experience in the last ones I have bought (XCOM, Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 3). They, to my mind, aren’t really strategy guides but in fact game guides. I have also started thinking about why I still buy them for some of my games and whether I should bother in the future. Hence this blog post expanding on all that.

Lack of game manuals with modern games

You used to get manuals with games. Sometimes very comprehensive ones, going into detail about the game, the gameplay, the controls and so on. This was usual and normal, you just got a printed manual with the game. These days? You are lucky to get a 5 page pdf – and often that is a link to something on the web and not even on disk. Older games expected you to have read the manual and to have understood the controls before starting the game. These days the convention is to have a tutorial at the beginning of the game to slowly introduce the controls and lead you through the process of learning how to play the game. So the manual became less necessary and basically shrank to a small mnemonic device to refer to if you forget a control or two (e.g. if you take a break from playing the game for a while). Sometimes these terse pdf documents don’t even cover all the controls for the game!

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the modern way of doing things, a tutorial introduction to a game or tutorial level at the start (skippable for later playthroughs is nice) is a good way of doing things, as long as it is a good tutorial. With in game codices and so on a lot of the information that used to be in the (sometimes huge) game manuals you got with games is now in the game itself, which makes more sense in a lot of ways. There is more memory, disk space and so on these days so such information can be put into the game. Printed manuals are now more expensive than including the information in the game, which is the opposite of how it was when computers were more limited.

But all this has meant the demise of the printed comprehensive game manual that comes with the game when you buy it, and I think that the printed third party strategy guide has stepped into this position, for reasons I can speculate about, and have done below.

Printed guides vs the web

So, game guides that come in the game box from the developer are going, shrinking, going digital. Printed third party strategy guides appear to have evolved and moved to take their place. The in depth strategy guidance for a game is now on the web. Third party sites cover games extremely well – game FAQ sites and game walkthrough sites were the king for a while, but these days Wikis appear to have supplanted that (with a few outstanding exceptions, e.g. Stella’s Tomb Raider site).

The problem comes with deciding which site to go to or to trust. There is often more than one Wiki for a given game, a couple of ‘proper’ crowdsourced information Wikis and also probably one or two hosted on or from big gaming sites (to try and drive traffic). There will be several game walkthrough and guide sites, especially for the popular games. YouTube walkthroughs will abound for those too. Some of these are rushed out purely to drive traffic with scant regard for good information. A Google search will throw up a lot of hits, and often the entries high up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page(s)) get there by being good at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rather than containing accurate content.

Another problem with Wikis etc. is that to become a good source of information, they need to ‘mature’ for want of a better expression. They need contributions from many gamers who have played and beaten the game. For that information to be checked and corrected by other gamers and so on. The early information just won’t be as good, because not many people will have completed the game. So if you want help with a recently released game that is a problem. Of course, mostly people like to beat the game on their own to avoid spoilers and because that is a lot of the point of a game (playing it yourself not just doing what someone else did to get through the game). But still the problem exists.

Finally for some smaller, less popular games, the Wiki information can be hard to find and navigate through on the guide sites. I personally have problems with the Binding of Isaac Wiki. On the other hand that game in particular has a lot of stuff in it that isn’t explained and it is quite hard to work out what it does – so it is hard to actually work out good information for the game to upload to the Wiki.

My use of strategy guides then and now

Strategy guides were – or should have been if they were good – additional to the game manual. They were carefully researched and written by someone who had thoroughly played through the game, more than once, and had figured out the tricks, tactics and strategies that could be used to help beat the game. They contained things to help you get through the tricky parts, or to help you collect all the secrets (or whatever) in a subsequent completionist run through. This latter point is how I used to use them (e.g. the early Tomb Raider games); I would play and beat the game, then get a strategy guide and play through again, using it to help me find the things I missed the first time. This function of comprehensive printed strategy guides has been completely supplanted by the web these days for the reasons above.

But now the ‘strategy guides’ are game guides, an overgrown game manual. You can still use them in the way that I outlined above, but they really aren’t as in depth, and also often contain incorrect information, or are missing information (see the next section). So for the ferreting out of missed parts of a runthrough of a game, getting all the secrets and so on, although it can be useful to have the game guide open on the desk next to you it is often as convenient to pause the game and Alt-Tab out to a web browser parked on a Wiki. Or if the game doesn’t allow Alt-Tabbing out (which it really should!) then researching the Wiki first before a given play session.

Whereas my older game guides from over ten years ago were well read, and look worn, the guides I have got for the occasional more recent game are fairly pristine. I might have looked up one or two things in them. In particular I found that the Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 Prima guides had hard to read maps, and the in game maps were so much better I tended to just not use the maps and walkthroughs of sections in those guides. There wasn’t any strategy in them, the useful strategy for Mass Effect 2 I found on the Wiki or in BSN (Bioware Social Network) forum threads.

‘Official’ game guides only

Another thing is that game guides are ‘official’ and come out at the same time as the game. What happens is that the game guide publisher (e.g. Prima or BradyGames) gets an exclusive contract from the publisher of the game to produce the official game guide, and then gets early (pre-release) access to the game, or sometimes just information about the game. They are then on a deadline to publish the guide so it comes out at the same time as the game is released to the public. The result is by definition rushed, and often a fair few mistakes slip through.

There is no way that such a system can produce a true strategy guide. So it doesn’t – you end up with what is basically an enlarged version of the old game manual that you used to get with the game in the box. Also with only one guide publisher getting each exclusive contract, there is no competition. You can’t look at reviews of two or three strategy guides (reviews by gamers who have used the guides alongside playing the game) and see which is best. There is only one. With this lack of competition there is also no pressure on the guide publisher to correct any mistakes in the guide with errata or an addendum – although errata do get published on the guide publisher’s website sometimes. The market for these printed guides is small enough that it probably isn’t economic to print second editions either, and who would pay for them anyway? It is the opposite problem with trying to find the best Wiki, walkthrough or game FAQ – in that case there are so many and also so many opinions that there isn’t any consensus as to which is best. You just have to work it out for yourself. At least it is usually free to access game Wikis and so on.

My collector tendencies

So, bearing in mind all the above, why do I still buy the occasional third party game guide? Basically it is a collector tendency in myself for games that I really like. I really like Fallout 3 in particular so I got the guide to go with it. Also that guide and the Mass Effect 2 one I got on sale and they were bargains. Mass Effect as a series I am very fond of indeed (just check the Mass Effect category on this blog!) – Mass Effect 1 doesn’t have a third party guide for the PC version (it was originally an Xbox exclusive) but I got the Mass Effect 2 guide and did try to use it with the game, but as I said just didn’t find it useful at all compared to the information on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, these are good books if you are into the game, and aren’t ‘bad’ at all, it is just that printed strategy guides in general aren’t as useful as they used to be.

So really I have these guides for recent games because I really like the games, and have a tendency to get things associated with the games. I also have Mass Effect novels, comics and graphical novels for instance. The latest guide I have bought – the XCOM one – I basically bought because for the first time in a very long time I bought a game on release date and am really looking forward to it. In addition I bought the ‘Special Edition’ of XCOM Enemy Unknown. So buying the guide too is part of my enthusiasm for this game. Why I am enthusiastic about it, and why I bought the special edition on release is another story and I might make a blog post about that topic on its own. By the way, I got the BradyGames XCOM strategy guide from The Book Depository and it was discounted and cheaper than anywhere else including Amazon (well, the UK Amazon – the US Amazon has it even cheaper but won’t ship to the UK for some things). The Book Depository is worth checking out if you are looking for a book and checking for the cheapest out there.

The manual for XCOM, even with the Special Edition, is just the same old five page pdf. Very unimpressive. The art book and the other goodies are very nice though. So a strategy guide to supplement the almost non-existent game manual is probably a good idea. Will I use it much? No idea, but I am happy I bought it – so don’t get the idea that this article is negative and I am channeling my inner grumpy old man (it was all better in my day!). Just some thoughts about how these things have changed. Due to the guide not covering PC controls though, I have still had to print out a crib sheet from the minimal pdf game manual with the controls on it.

My personal use of guides and ending thoughts

So, strategy guides – for me anyway – are nice to have things for games that I really like. More for the ‘collect things to do with the game’ than anything else, although they can be useful. I will probably still get the occasional guide, but not often and not for most of my games. They still have a place, but more along the lines of replacing the now nonexistent (mostly) game manual than as an actual in depth strategy guide. If you have more than one monitor and the game supports Alt-Tabbing out then you probably don’t need one at all. I will probably read the guides I have for research before second and later playthroughs. Sometimes even just read them for relaxation (yes I know that is probably a bit too nerdy for my own good).

As for the future I really don’t know how well printed strategy guides sell these days compared to both how they used to sell and to the sales level of the games themselves. The strategy guide publishers (at least the big ones, Prima and BradyGames for instance) also sell digital versions of their guides. So someone can have it open on a tablet or laptop as they play the games on the console, or as I mentioned above on their second monitor on the PC if they are PC gamers. I daresay things will move on, but I suspect there will always be a place for big glossy good looking books about games, partially because if done well they are nice things to have.

Internet Upgraded

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I have Virgin Media broadband and it was at 20Mb, on an old NTL (I used to have NTL cable before Virgin took them over) modem. Virgin are upgrading their network (to DOCSIS 3 from all DOCSIS 1) and increasing speeds, and so to take advantage of this I had to get a new ‘superhub’ to replace the old modem. My internet would have stopped working at some point unless I downgraded to 5Mb (I think).

I was a little worried about this, as the superhub, Virgin Media, Virgin Media’s customer service, and even the delivery company they use to deliver the equipment all have a fairly bad reputation – Google ‘Virgin Media superhub’ and see all the entries for people having problems. Anyway, I am in an area that seems to have a fairly good service from Virgin internet wise (it is in the Thames Valley with all the tech companies so I guess that is part of the reason why, perhaps?). Also I wasn’t even going to try and use the wireless and router functions of the new superhub, as that seems to give most of the problems. I am using it in modem only mode, and leaving the rest of my network gear as it was before.

It took half an hour to activate, then a fair bit longer for it to upgrade its firmware. Then I had to do a fair bit of fiddling to get it into modem mode. It worked, for a few minutes, then refused to talk to the router. A couple of modem reboots, and a router reboot, later and it seems to have settled down. Hopefully it won’t do that too often, but it has been stable for a couple of hours now. If a few weeks go by with no outages or reboots needed then I think I can call it all a success.

Here are the speedtest and pingtest results:

SpeedTest results

PingTest results

That will do. Theoretically for an extra £7.50 (or a bit more) a month I could get 100Mbps (going up to 120Mbps eventually) but I think what I have now will suffice. So, despite the bad reputation of Virgin it all worked quite well, so my fears were luckily unfounded. Some praise for them then, from me at least, as they often seem to get nothing but criticism. In case anyone is wondering what that 60MB down/3MB up is costing me, it is about £47 a month – but that includes cable TV and telephone, with cheap international calls and all week all day free national landline calls included. It is the best deal available to me at the moment from anyone, even with new customer discounts. That is the main reason, along with the higher bandwidth than other ISPs around here (for now at least), that I have stuck with Virgin.

Caved in and bought Mass Effect 3

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As the title says, I have caved in and bought Mass Effect 3. I always was going to buy it eventually, but after all (if I could work that out) the single player campaign DLC had come out, so I could play through the whole story with all the additional bits in one go, for my ‘proper’ run through. There are two reasons for me doing this, one is that it worked very well for Mass Effect 2 for me (see my Mass Effect 2 done properly this time post for instance), the other being that I am fully aware of what the ending is like, so I would like to enjoy all the story before that happens. I have explained in previous posts how being spoiled on the ME3 ending is probably helpful for me, rather than an annoyance. This is all just in the case of myself of course, as always.

Anyway, the thing that triggered me off into buying it now was that it was (still is as of the time of this post, the 1st of September 2012) on special offer on Origin. I got the heads up from SavyGamer whom I also follow on Twitter – @SavyGamer. I got the standard digital edition for £7.49p. I don’t think I have even seen Mass Effect 2 for less than that, and I think that will be the lowest price I will see for a while! So I bought it.

The DLC (as far as I know) doesn’t get discounted so I just went ahead and bought the two single player campaign DLCs so far released (From Ashes, and Leviathan). These require BioWare points and for UK people BioWare points are cheaper from the BioWare social site than from Origin (you have to be a bit careful to make sure that your BioWare login and EA/Origin login are the same account – this is important for all sorts of reasons not just buying BioWare points!). Login to the BioWare social site with your EA/Origin login (which should be the same as your BioWare login these days, since the assimilation proceeded past the point of no return) and go to Profile → Add BioWare points.

One other thing, and I didn’t spot this at first (@zappdos (a friend on Twitter) pointed it out a bit too late, and I really should have seen it as it stares you in the face on the BioWare points store page), is that the points are cheaper if you buy them in lots of 800, rather than going for the 1600. The only downside to this is that if I make a bunch of purchases in a row my credit card company at least tends to regard it as suspicious and lock out my card*. On the other hand they are very very trigger happy in doing this and do it a lot. It is really annoying. Anyway, thanks to @zappdos at least I will remember to look more carefully next time.

So now I have ME3 and the two campaign DLCs released so far. I have no intention of even thinking about considering the possibility of playing multiplayer. It looks a cool fun multiplayer game, but the ME3 PC tech support forum on the BioWare social site is full of threads with people who have been banned from online ME3 by EA – which because of the requirement to be online each time you launch the single player game too (if you have DLC installed at least) means you can’t play the main game either. They get banned if they happen to be in a game with someone exploiting a glitch, or even if they encounter a glitch. One guy got glitched in an MP game and took a while to exit out of the game (he tried to de-glitch himself first) and EA banned both his and his wife’s accounts! Same IP address you see. Apparently getting glitched is an exploit for which they ban you, no appeal, no chance of playing the game again. Now, I daresay it is a minority of ME3 MP players who are being banned for nothing they did wrong, but it is a big enough minority that I don’t want to risk it. So I won’t play MP – and if that means I don’t get the ‘optimal’ ending so be it. The info in this paragraph came from reading the BioWare forums as stated above, so take that as you will – I guess all those people complaining could possibly have really been ‘cheating’ in some form and were making up stories to cover it up, but there are so many of them.

I do want to play all the campaign DLC, and there is a good chance there will be more released (if Leviathan does well according to Patrick Weekes (via Twitter)). I think there are fairly strong rumours about a possible Omega (as in take back Omega with Aria T’Loak) and weak possible rumours about another Citadel based DLC. So I am intending to try and wait for those, or at least to make sure they won’t be happening, before starting ME3. The Omega one in particular, if it is helping Aria take it back, sounds like it could be really good.

To keep me off caving in again and starting it, I have two novels (Retribution and Deception) and one set of comics (Invasion) to read (plus another graphical novel (i.e. comic set in one binding) on preorder (Homeworlds)). Plus a whole bunch of games to play of course, so I should be OK. Though I am due soon for another massive computer failure (every 11 – 18 months) so there is also that, though I am dusting the inside of this one a bit more often which should help.

*Update as of the following day: Barclaycard locked my card down after all, according to their staff (after a ridiculously long phone call) the combination of two transactions with EA yesterday, plus a domain renewal (for this domain) today, was very suspicious and they locked out my card. They made me jump through hoops to unlock it – all this ‘for my protection’. They do this every couple of months at least, and it is really annoying and can cause problems as they (Barclaycard) sometimes reverse the charge on a genuine transaction – if they ever do that with PayPal or Steam (for instance) I will lose those accounts. About one in three times they lock out the card they don’t phone me about it, so I am blissfully unaware until my card gets refused at a petrol station or something, which is embarrassing. It is like they don’t want my business as I buy stuff on the internet.

Saints Row Three – initial thoughts

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Why I like Saints Row 3 over other crime sandbox type games

By ‘crime sandbox type games’ I mean GTA and others of that ilk. I do own GTA 1, 2 and 3 (including Vice City and San Andreas) and have played some of those on a previous computer that had XP (according to Steam GTA 3 will not run on Windows 7 at all but there are fixes so I might reinstall and have another go sometime). I didn’t get on with them, although a lot of the problem I had was with the vehicle controls to be honest. I have had a similar problem with SR3 as I go into below in its own section. But more to the point although they are good games, in terms of gameplay, I am not sure I get on well with the ‘play as a criminal and do horrible things to innocent people’ theme, especially if it tries to be realistic (I am not saying GTA is that realistic by the way!).

It is probably similar to my playing Paragon in Mass Effect, or high positive karma in Fallout 3 – that is kinda the way I like to play, as a good guy. No idea really, I am not good at self analysis. Initially I thought the Saints Row games were similar, and they are on the surface. Then I saw some reviews and that intrigued me to go look up some gameplay. Saints Row 3 is ridiculous, over the top, cartoony fun. It is very silly, and very amusing to play. So I got it (in a Steam sale, natch!), and have finally got round to playing it.

Having seen some gameplay (let’s play stuff on YouTube) and having played about a bit with the character generator I thought it would be fun to create a strong female character as the protagonist. I usually create male characters when given the choice, other things being equal, mainly because I am male and it is easy to default to a matching gender – for instance in Bethesda’s games (Morrowind, Fallout 3, and I daresay Oblivion and Skyrim and New Vegas when I get round to playing them) I have mostly created males. But it is nice to play something different now and again if the female character is done well (e.g. FemShep definitely, female Hawk in Dragon Age 2 not so much – just my opinion as always). Also, most action games have a male lead. So if I have a gender choice and the female version can be created as a suitable character (i.e. that fits the game, as with most action games you have a strong character as the lead) then I like doing that sometimes (depending on the game really).

Saints Row 3 seemed to be a good game for doing that. So I maxed out the strength slider (the fat option ended up too blobby, and I didn’t want a Barbie doll type female as the leader of a tough gang) and added some ‘sex appeal’ (pure fanservice boob size but with the strength at max a middling boob size was out of proportion). I ended up with:

Saints Row 3 character Deezelle

My name on the Saints Row 3 community site is Todpull (I couldn’t get Todpullen) and the above characters ‘name’ is Deezelle – I uploaded it/her if you are interested. Since the screenshot and character upload I have added a couple of tattoos.

Trouble getting used to controls

I am, as I suspected I would be, having trouble with the controls. The game doesn’t have a cover system per se but you do have to use cover and dodge about a lot, whilst at the same time shooting accurately. I seem to be able to do one or the other, not both. So I can hide and eventually get killed, or kill a few enemies but get killed myself faster. With the ‘waves of enemies’ challenges/activities there seems to be a helicopter or two that shows up about wave three, and one/two shot kills me. I can’t seem to hide from the helicopter, and it seems to be very tough no matter what I shoot it with – even a satellite controlled reaper drone strike doesn’t appear to do much, although I am probably using it wrong?

The above problems were on normal difficulty, so I have finally caved in and am playing on casual to match my strapline. I don’t like doing that but when it was taking several frustrating goes to get anywhere, and not managing anything except the easy challenges, I decided I would rather progress with the game on casual than get dispirited on normal. Hopefully with more practice things will get easier and I can bump it back up to normal at some point.

The main control problem I have is with vehicles. It is a sort of twin stick approach where the WASD keys control the vehicle travel, and the mouse controls the weapons (leaning out of the window and shooting at the moment). This is unlike, say, Borderlands where the vehicle travel is mouse based and was totally natural and easy for me. The SR3 scheme I, for some reason, find really awkward. I mean to start with I was awful. Embarrassingly bad. Things are a bit better now and I am determined to get used to it (I have no idea why I find such a common and often used vehicle control scheme so hard!). It isn’t that it is the keyboard and mouse, I have the same trouble with such a scheme using a controller, where it is a true twin stick scheme (i.e. you actually have two control sticks!). I always turn the wheel the wrong way when reversing. Then I take it slow, try to think about it, confuse myself by overthinking it and turn the wheel the wrong way anyway. Bleh. I have no trouble reversing and not hitting the entire neighbourhood in real life in my car by the way (thank goodness!) so I am again not sure what my damn problem is.

This control problem is definitely all about my failings, not the game’s.

Early game only so far

Loads of silly fun. I find myself just going out of the crib, on foot or in a random car, and just finding trouble in Steelport. I managed to discover a few challenge types before they cropped up in the main mission progress, so really I ought to do main missions a bit more I think. But it is a sandbox game and you can just go out and muck about. I am only about 20% into the story line so far (with a respect level of 8 or 10 or thereabouts). I really hope that once you finish the campaign you are allowed to free roam, and can finish up taking over the city, doing all the activities and whatnot. I suspect I will keep the game on my hard drive once I have finished the campaign, just to dive in and muck about for half an hour now and again.

I have bought a DLC – the Penthouse Pack. I know this is at odds with some of my statements above, but I thought the idea of fashion models (that is what Penthouse is about, isn’t it?) being in a gang was amusing. I also thought it would give me extra homies (the proper homies, the strong ones) but in fact it just re-skins the saints help homies who are fairly weak. Though they can shoot more accurately than me at the moment (see the above section!). They are just re-skins of the gang members you get in game anyway, not extra ones. I really wanted some extra help as I was having trouble. Oh well, it was only a quid or so.

Anyway, so far it is lots of fun. Hopefully it won’t get too repetitive! The melee weapon choice just has to be the infamous attack dildo (called ‘the penetrator’ in game I think):

Deezelle wielding melee dildo

Would you hang around if this was coming at you?