Mass Effect: An RPG for the Masses?

Unless you've been hiding under a rock for over six months, you've probably heard of a little game called Mass Effect. The game has recently been released for the PC after an XBox360 exclusive period much like their previous titles Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire, which had a XBox release for quite a while before their PC counterparts were released. While the release of Mass Effect has been comparatively quicker than those two titles, the game itself has had more than its fair share of controversy. The initial attacks on the game due to its "adult content" included a ridiculous report by Fox News that was so far skewed against the game that it couldn't be classed as anything but an abject failure of "journalism." More recently, the Digital Rights Management (DRM) features of the PC version has suffered a large amount of bad press due to the measures and limitations it places upon the installation of the game in order to attempt to prevent piracy. And attempt is the correct word, for even despite these efforts, unfortunately pirated versions of the game do exist. I won't buy into the DRM argument here, for that would be an entire article in itself.

I have to confess upfront that I'm a BioWare fan-boy, having loved pretty much everything that they've produced, but even taking that self-admitted bias out of the equation, Mass Effect is an excellent game, and worth just about every accolade that is thrown its way. The story, characterisation and universe created have a great depth, which is likely due to the fact that they spent an entire year just with writers creating all those aspects as the initial phase of creating the game. This is the sort of thing that can quite easily go unnoticed by many gamers when it's there, but if this aspect is lacking in an RPG, it'll often stick out like a car in the background of a fantasy/medieval movie. There's nothing that ruins the immersion of an RPG like a proverbial hit over the head with a plot inconsistency or non-sequitur. Mass Effect is a polished and well-rounded piece of work, and even though there are a few failings in terms of glitches, they typically don't cause too much aggravation such that it makes you want to blow away one of your own teammates.


But I didn't intend this post to turn into gratuitous praise for Mass Effect, because I'd like to consider what effect it might have on the gaming industry in terms of the development of future RPGs. Why do I think this one game could have such a profound effect? Because Mass Effect has the potential to garner a wider audience than most RPGs that have come before, and prove that the increased development time of RPG titles over the comparatively rapid production of a first person shooter is worth the effort.

Firstly, Mass Effect is that it's not a standard RPG. Why do I say that? It's not set in a medieval/fantasy environment. By and large, that is the realm of RPGs, and many people simply cannot stomach that, disliking the whole swords, magic, dragons, and everything that comes with the Dungeons and Dragons or its related ilk. Yes, I can some of you screaming that it's not the first such work, and will point to titles like Fallout or Knights of the Old Republic, but the only thing that is potentially considered more geeky than Dungeons and Dragons is a unbounded love for Star Wars. Yes, Mass Effect is still sci-fi, so there is still a certain element of geek, but seeing as it doesn't belong to any of pre-established sci-fi franchises, it gets off a little more lightly. The fact that the eye candy is nice doesn't hurt at all either.


The combat of the game is also more like an action game or a first person shooter. This is a big win because of the way that many RPGs feature dice-roll based combat that is very much in your face, resulting in your clicking on your target once, and then waiting until the dice roll in your favour and your character manages to hit and kill your opponent. Yes, there are some elements of control you have to modify your character's attacks, but the frustration of gamers screaming at their computer "Stop rolling ones dammit!!!" as a fight turns from a pushover to a defeat due to sheer misfortune is an undeniable failing of the mechanic. Sure, your shots still can go wide in Mass Effect, but there's an element of direct control that is absent in most other RPGs.


The game is also completely voiced. Any interaction between the player's character (Commander Shepard) and anyone he or she meets along the way is heard, and not read, as it usual for most RPGs. This is a big thing for gaining a new audience for RPGs. Another big turn off for non-RPG players is reading through reams of lengthy dialogue simply to get a quest to kill more monsters. It's not necessary to know someone's entire life story before they say "Go kill some orcs for me please", though failings of that ilk are not unheard of. The dialogue is snappy by necessity, and keeps the game pushing along, and even the dialogue choices that the player gets to choose are a few words that are merely a representation of the words Shepard will say.


All of these things feed into the overall cinematic feel of the game, which is the big winner for Mass Effect. After going through the process of customising their character's appearance, there's a nice introduction sequence which sets the tone for the entire game, even if the title and brief textual blurb is a little cheesy. The first hour of the game is interspersed with a health grab-bag of cut-scenes, such that the player can almost feel like they are playing a movie. The tempo and the stakes are high, the gameplay and controls are easy to pick up and understand. This cinematic feel is probably the most likely place that gamers will be converted to the genre, for the feeling of control in a movie-like experience is an appeal that is broad across a very large percentage of the gaming community. This was evidenced through the unprecedented acclaim for the single player experience of a first person shooter in the form of Call of Duty 4.

I must note that Mass Effect is by no means a perfect game, and while I've sung it praises, it does suffer from a few negatives. The AI has shortcomings at times, the main quest does suffer from being a little on the short side for an RPG, and the decryption mini-game can become a moderate annoyance, just to name a couple.

However, my aim with this article was to point out the areas in which Mass Effect has more wide ranging appeal than many other RPGs, rather than to provide a full and critical analysis of the game. (As there's already hundreds of other reviews on the web that do just that!) As an avid RPG fan, I can only hope that Mass Effect gains a comparative level of fame, and that it results in an increased RPG fan base which will raise the willingness of game companies to engage in the challenging development process that is required to produce quality games of this genre.

(Images courtesy of dignews.com)

Classic FPS Gaming Maps

AmstradHero here again! The recent release of the Call of Duty 4 map pack has added a few nice additions to its already impressive multiplayer map line-up. While I'll leave a detailed analysis of each map's advantages, disadvantages and ups and downs to Ferris (well, okay, maybe he won't provide that, but I've dobbed him in now!), I feel like I should make a couple of comments about the gorgeous 'Creek'. Firstly, it's visually stunning. Buildings, trees, foliage, a dried creek bed, this map has got character and attractive scenery in spades. Even better, that wonderful eye-candy doesn't impact the performance one iota, and it's still a frantic pace of killing and warfare despite its beauty and large map size. Even better, it's a well designed map. This is one thing that makes or breaks multiplayer maps, and while it's painfully obvious when a map doesn't work, it's not always obvious why.

Rather than producing a monologue of how not to make a map (although I may do that at a later date), let's take a look at some classic maps that have worked. As someone with a passion for building game levels, I would unashamedly say I would have loved to have come up with the design of these three gems.

Counterstrike: de_dust

If you haven't played this map, then either you've been hiding under a rock for the past decade or more, or somehow you've managed to avoid playing one of the most influential FPS titles ever. Not bad for something that was born from a Half-life mod. The elegant simplicity of this level is what makes it work. Even better, it showcases a few great design achievements.

Firstly, it caters for its gameplay. Counterstrike lived and died by its rounds of several minutes. Which means the action has to be tight and fast. If players are sitting around for minutes at a stretch with nothing to do or simply traversing to get to the action (yes, I'm looking at you, Battlefield 2), then it is no good. A round in de_dust could be over in a matter of seconds if things went badly, either leaving you to savour victory, or contemplate brutal defeat. Occasionally rounds would time out, but it was significantly less likely than someone actively winning.

Secondly, it caters for both the aggressive and the cautious. There's the tight inside area for quick carnage, or there's the bridge underpass for a skirmish of sniping and counter-sniping. Both are strategically important, meaning that you're catering for your two character archetypes in FPS games.

Unreal Tournament: Facing Worlds

No list of classic maps would be complete without this map. It's been in every incarnation of Unreal Tournament thanks to the recent addition of it for UT3 - oh, the travesty at it not being included in the shipped version! Why? Because it is unequivocally FUN. Yes, it is a heaven for those players that love sniping, and potentially hell for those that don't, but despite it's massive and imposing sniper nests at opposite ends of the map, this Capture The Flag map again delivers the goods in terms of grandeur and gameplay.While at first it seems like snipers are king, snipers can't capture the flag. So again, it caters for its design. As a pure deathmatch map, it would likely be an abject failure, but its matching of a level made for sniper fodder contrasted against the need for run and gunners to actually achieve the objective needed to win means that it was an instant classic from its inception.

Even better, the game mechanics of dodging (and translocation, if it's not disabled) that are integral to UT mean that sniping isn't the instant fatality provider that it could easily be if this map existed in other FPS games. Not to mention that the potential for countersniping is so high that snipers have to continually monitor their opposition rather than just peppering the running players with headshots.

Quake 3 Arena: The Longest Yard

This level was unusual and innovative for its time in that it consisted of a heck of a lot of nothing. Really and truly, there's virtually nothing in this level. Eye candy is virtually non existent, as is in fact, anything. There's minimal geometry or hard ground for players to stand on, yet it still plays great if you fire up Quake 3 now.

The reason this level is so well designed is due to item placement. If you can control the level in Quake 3, then you have a massive advantage over your opponents. The Longest Yard is a strange and incongruous beast that both enforces this aspect of the game (which is a weakness or strength depending on your opinion - but that is another argument I don't have time for here), but also breaks it ruthless style. The two most powerful items in the level (the railgun and quad damage) are situated in the middle of empty space in clear view (and shooting range) of the rest of the level. Which means despite that you are screaming through the air at break-neck speed with very little ability to kill other people, they very much have an excellent shot at killing you, especially if they've managed to make the jump previously and pick up the beloved railgun.

So there's a trio of classic and brilliantly designed FPS levels. You'll notice a lack of games from recent titles, and you might argue I'm dwelling in a nostalgia paradise, but the truth is that these maps were very influential in the success of their individual titles, and have also influenced the development of levels in all FPS games since. I'm sure if you look in your favourite FPS map, you can see a little fragment of them in there...

(images from moditory.com and gamespy.com)

I was a failed teenage game developer (part 3)

(..continued from part one and part two)

It had always been a distant dream of mine to be a game programmer. At the time, of course, it was possible for young coders to whip up popular games in their own garage and flog them off as shareware. This shut-in, computer-chained lifestyle seemed like the sort of one I wanted to lead.

My bedroom had cut-out magazine pictures of my gaming heroes.. a PC Gamer interview with iD Software back in the Doom days, a Commodore 64 magazine piece on Jeff Minter, a shoddily self-drawn System 3 logo.. I'd gaze up at them almost daily, pinned on my little bulletin board.

I tried somewhat half-heartedly to achieve that dream. After saving months worth of allowance money, I finally managed to gather enough dough to purchase Andre LaMothe's enormous book Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus. It was littered with code snippets showing how to do simple graphical tricks, play sound, and so on. It also weighed in at a rather imposing 600 or so pages, giving it definite blugeoning potential. I think it may actually feature as a murder weapon in Cluedo.

This sheer intimidation factor alone left me unimpressed, and I returned back to the comforts of my QBasic world.

During the last two years of high school, I also kept a running diary about how I was going to create a 3D SWAT-based game. I used pages upon pages to lay out the game design and describe how it would work. Looking back on it, some of it was rather cool, even though Sierra have since made a game franchise that was pretty much exactly what I had in mind. Here's my crazy mind at work in the diary's first entry, describing the sound design:

Sound will be a high priority, I want, no, I need
headphones/mics for the game. This would make for
interesting conversations between the players..

"RED ONE, THE PERPERTRAITOR IS IN THE SOUTH
BLOCK, LEVEL 12E. OVER"
"COPY THAT, RED THREE. I'M THERE. GET BACKUP."
"ROGER RED ONE. WE'RE COMING. OVER..."

and stuff like that. You could have conversations during
the game!! And you could chose which person to talk to as
well. No music - that would spoil the atmosphere. Cool.

Sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but as anyone with XBox Live and any modern FPS can attest, the only thing headphone and microphones have brought to gaming is the ability for anonymous twelve-year-olds to call you a "GAY N00B FAG".

Just like the Hindenburg, so too did the plans for "SWAT" begin to slowly crash and burn, with the diary turning into an often-hysterical fest of teenage angst. It wasn't all lost dreams and skipped opportunites, mind you. Oh no. I did make some games. Five of them, in fact. And after looking back on them tonight, well, maybe it was for the best that I didn't end up in the business after all.

It seemed so funny at the time.

My first three were all Grod games (see part 1 of this series). They were terrible text adventures which involved a series of picking random action choices (A, B or C), one of which was going to be the correct answer, with the other two basically leading to 'GAME OVER'. No clues were given as to the correct answer, and most of the time it was just things that a 14-year-old would find cool or funny. As in the following example taken from Grod 3:

YOU DECIDE TO GO TO LAS VEGAS. YOU WALK TO THE AIRPORT
WITHOUT A HASSLE. THEN YOU ARE FLYING. WHILE ON THE PLANE,
THE STEWARDESS WALKS UP TO YOU AND TRIES TO CHAT YOU UP.

WILL YOU GO TO THE LUGAGGE COMPARTMENT WITH HER OR STAY?
(A) GO OR (B) STAY: A

YOU GO TO THE COMPARTMENT AT THE BACK AND START TO
PASH EACHOTHER. YOU START TO GET REALLY EXCITED BUT THEN
SHE TRANSFORMS INTO OPRAH WINFREY AND MAKES A
SPECIAL ON YOU ON HER SHOW. THE TOPIC WAS
`MEN WHO RAPE FLIGHT ATTENDANTS. YOU ARE LAUGHED AT FOR
THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! HA HA! WHAT A LOSER! HA HA HA!

GAME OVER.

Ha ha ha indeed! At the time I was pretty proud of my creations. But one fateful day, my coding rival BISHTRONICS gave me a disk containing a solitary file: GROD4.BAS. Not only was it an unofficial sequel to one of my babies, it featured something the other Grod games didn't.. graphics and sound!

At the time, this was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.
Yes, even more amazing than Robocop.

My mind was blown. Once again, my dismal productions had been bested! The next few weeks were spent tirelessly writing what I hoped would be the ultimate Grod game, Grod 5.

Might I add at this point, that drawing graphics in Q-Basic is one of the most mind-numbing, suicide-inducing things one can ever hope to do. It's full of statements like:

DRAW "BL200 bd100 r50 u60 r300 l250 g50 e50 r250 u20 ....."

that draw each line pixel by pixel. I couldn't even tell you what the above does anymore. But hell, my reputation, BARGOSOFT'S reputation was on the line here, so if it meant nights of sitting there manually creating terribly simple graphics line-by-line, that was the price that needed to be paid.

Suffice to say, Grod 5, like all the other games, pretty much sucked. Although it featured such gameplay additions as secret rooms (during "A,B,C" prompts, you needed to type a phrase that no-one in their right mind would type without looking at the code itself), and non-linear progression (you can go via the left door.... or the right door! Cripes!), it was still the same crusty old Grod underneath.

It's all about the gameplay, not the graphics.. right..? RIGHT?

As 1994 drew to a close, so did my three-year career in QBasic programming, taking with it my desire and patience to write these terrible games. And so, during the warm summer months, I wrote my last hurrah: Snake Stone : Death of a Galaxy.

Spanning around 2500 lines of code split into three separate files, it was the Grod-style of "A,B or C" text adventure gaming pushed to its limits. A long introduction sequence, frequent graphical interludes.. I spent far, far too much time on this baby.

And yeah, it still pretty much sucked.

Snake Stone in action

There was a Snake Stone 2 planned, but I only managed to write the introduction sequence and the first "A, B, C" question. I think once I got to that point, I realized that it was about time I invested my efforts in something other than giving a piece of crap a new coat of paint.. like, playing Duke Nukem 3D for instance. Yeah. That'd do just fine.

One day I shall auction off the code to Snake Stone 2 and make millions.

And on that note, this three-part epic on teenage nerddom draws to a close.

Epilogue

Before BISHTRONICS and BARGOSOFT eventually crumbled into nothingness, a third competitor emerged. Word had spread through the nerd playground that Todd - the IT teacher's son - had written games the likes of which no-one had ever seen someone write before.

We begged to see what these games were, and when he finally showed us, our jaws dropped. He'd written an air hockey game with actual VGA graphics, animation and sound. I imagine we were feeling something akin to what the developers of Awesome Possum must have felt after seeing Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

Convined that he couldn't have made it himself, when we next were over at Todd's house for a party, both BISHTRONICS and BARGOSOFT decided to join forces to launch a corporate espionage attempt at finding out our new rival's secrets. Our attempts were stunningly successful. What did we find?

A copy of Andre LaMothe's Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus.

Why hello there, palms! Please meet my face. Repeatedly.

The end.

Rise of the Gaming Bug?

Hi, I'm AmstradHero. After plugging my NWN2 module in his last post, Ferris has now been generous enough to allow me to guest post on his blog - which I'm going to take advantage of by writing about bugs in computer games. I'll start with a little warning that this is a little bit lengthier than previous posts...
Every gamer knows what it feels like to get frustrated with a game. Whether it's losing to opponents in an online match, struggling to defeat a particular hard segment of a game, or simply figuring out the correct path through a puzzle, games are designed to be both fun and challenging. However, the one frustration that is the bane of every gamer are bugs or gameplay elements that simply don't work. If you've been a gamer for any length of time, you're almost certain to have your own horror story about a bug or glitch that caused you countless hours of grief. It is also true that sometimes these can work in your favour - and certainly, I remember clocking up the high score in a variant of choplifter on a BBC Micro due to a glitch that let me continuously destroy a tank for points. The Internet proved a saviour for PC gamers when it enabled the release of patches that have now become commonplace. While this was a fantastic step forward, the problem that has increasingly reared its ugly head is that games are being released and that patches ARE expected, as opposed to being a means of dealing with a series of unfortunate events that cannot be avoided. Additionally, often these patches are being used to add in functionality that should have been included from a game's first release.
Let's draw on some recent examples to prove a point. First off, I'd like to take aim at one of the pride and joys of my FPS gaming enjoyment for many years - the Unreal Tournament franchise. When the Unreal Tournament 3 demo was released, I, like many other eager fans, downloaded the UT3 demo with much anticipation and indeed a sense of glee at returning to the frenetic pace of a game that makes you feel like you should be taking a cocktail of speed, acid and amphetamines just in order to get the maximum enjoyment out of it. Dealing death with an Instagib shock rifle while leaping off walls and maniacally laughing like the arch-villain out of a B-Grade action flick is exactly what I'd come to love and cherish about the series. However, when I downloaded the demo, I was brought back to reality with a resounding kick up the jacksy and the completed obliteration of a gamer's false sense of self-worth as embodied by the power of his gaming rig. After playing one vehicle CTF fragfest against bots and finding it putting my moderately aged system through its paces until I dropped the settings down a little, I decided to fire up a deathmatch game for pure unadulterated slaughter. Or I tried to. My box froze unceremoniously on the menu and I clicked "play game", and nothing short of a reboot would fix it. Undaunted, I fired the demo up and tried again, after all my machine is getting a little long in the tooth... Load up, choose instant action, play game... BAM. I spent more time installing the darn demo than I did playing it. If I hadn't been a one-eyed UT fan, I wouldn't have recently bought UT3 and found that the full version lacks all the bugs of the demo that was obviously released far too early. Thank God. I still love you, Epic.

The trouble is, this isn't an isolated case, and it extends to full versions of games as well. I found STALKER close to unplayable due to various glitches and even when it wasn't being more buggy than a Louisiana Bayou, I found myself continually clearing out a never-ending stream of bad guys who would attack on sight as though someone in this radioactive zone was churning out people like Darth Sidious in Attack Of The Clones. Then there's Heroes of Might and Magic 5 seemed like a lesser cousin of its predecessors when released, though this may have been because half the information about the units or the gameplay wasn't made clear - it took about 500Mb of patches before you gained even basic things like checking the abilities of your troops! I could go on, like moronic AI, an appalling inventory system, or having enemies disappear or be encased in walls in Mass Effect, or the patches required to Neverwinter Nights 2 in order to make the camera usable. It is even possible to level complaint about your moronic AI allies in Call of Duty 4, but with these I'm hitting smaller issues and I think we've long learnt to expect as much support from AI in single player FPS games as we do expect facts from a US election campaign. (I should confess that I absolutely loved both Mass Effect and Call of Duty 4 regardless)

Of course, it would be remiss of me to argue the poor maligned gamer like some whining child or someone falsely claiming worker's compensation benefits, without presenting the other side of the argument. Testing IS done by gaming companies, but the problem they have to deal with is that they are dealing with an unknown platform. There are countless combinations of various bits of computer hardware from numerous manufacturers, and then there's varying patch levels for those components to consider - though by and large that mostly boils down to video drivers. This sort of problem is one of the factors that might lead to the death of PC gaming in favour of consoles, but that's another discourse entirely.

As for the solution: well, that's the sixty-four million dollar question, isn't it? Test cases are a fairly useless approach for most situations given the wide variety of possible actions in today's complex games. After all, speedrunning relies heavily on the unexpected consequences of various unforeseen actions, and if this type of ingenuity is taken away, then gamers will feel hamstrung by a lack of freedom. While heavy testing of individual segments can be carried out, the large scale problems are the challenge, due to lacking the ability to have several thousand testers at a company's fingertips. Unless, of course, the public beta angle is pushed more heavily. This, of course, has to be done in a carefully managed, fashion, because gamers do not (and should not) become the first line of testing. This also results in the difficulty of releasing a game sample large enough to give the gamers a taste of the game without giving them too much such that they don't want/need to buy the game. Ideally, games would undergo a substantial testing regime internally, followed by a closed beta, then finally an open beta for larger scale testing to occur. Of course, this also means that release dates should not be set unrealistically, and that companies should adhere to the maxim that dictates quality is better than quantity, and something should be done right, or not at all. Quality is something that gamers have come to expect, and the plethora of bugs and oversized patches issued for many modern games can start to leave a slightly bitter taste in one's mouth.

Guitar Hero: aging disgracefully, or better than ever?

The Guitar Hero series would have to rank as some of the greatest games ever made. Simple to learn, but fiendishly hard to complete (on expert difficulty), the games have something for everyone. I was hooked after playing Guitar Hero II on Playstation 2, and thought that I would never make it beyond medium difficulty. Well, it wasn't long before I was working my way up through hard and expert, and seeking more songs I purchased a copy of the original Guitar Hero. Another great game with an excellent selection of classic songs, although the controls did seem a little unforgiving compared to Guitar Hero 2 (they must have finessed them for the sequel). I loved every minute of GH1. Actually, perhaps not every minute... trying to beat Cowboys from Hell on expert still makes me want to throw my guitar through the TV.

Anyway, my (elusive) main point is that since Guitar Hero 2, I think the series may have lost its way. Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s was a disappointment... at first. Nothing much had changed since GH2, except for the deletion of bonus tracks. Not a good start. However things rapidly improved, with the inclusion of some fantastic songs. Wrathchild by Iron Maiden anyone? The top-notch tracks were the saviour of GHE:RT80s. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, however, went right off the rails. The fundamentals were all still there, and the track list was decent, but the game just didn't have the same feel as the prequels. The one-liners and tips that appear during the game weren't funny anymore, and the in-game graphics had undergone a wholly unnecessary makeover. Why did new-GH-developer Neversoft mess with a winning formula? Why couldn't original-GH-developer Harmonix crank out one more Guitar Hero themselves before moving on to Rock Band? And while I'm asking questions, why am I still stuck on 31/40 songs completed (expert mode) in Guitar Hero 2?

So many questions...

COD 4 pwns HALO 3

Am I the only person who didn't like HALO 3? Sometimes it feels like it, although Zero Punctuation's HALO 3 review gave me hope that there were people out there as underwhelmed as I was.  I bought HALO 3 on the strength of the reviews I had read, but on playing the game found it to be ordinary in the extreme.  After persevering with it for a day or so (and really wanting to like the game), I could put up with it no longer and traded it for Tom Clancy Rainbow Six Vegas.  Now there's a decent game!  

Compared with HALO 3, I  didn't have any trouble getting into Call of Duty 4.  COD 4 grabbed me from the first moment, and it hasn't disappointed since.  The single player game is absorbing and the multiplayer is intense- and with a real strategic side to it.  I was preparing myself to be let-down by COD 4 just as I was by HALO 3 (and COD 3 for Wii, come to think of it...), but it looks like the game reviewers got this one right.  :)

(images from got-next.com and activewin.com)

Sensible World of Soccer - a missed opportunity?

One of my all-time favourite games is Sensible Soccer (aka SWOS), first released for the Amiga in the early 90s.  My mates and I played Sensi to death, wearing out many TAC-2 and Konix SpeedKing joysticks in the process. The ultimate version was Sensible World of Soccer, which boasted thousands of real life players and teams from all over the world.  It was recently announced that Sensible Soccer was included in a list of the ten most important video games of all time - a fair call I reckon.  

So it was with great joy and anticipation that I downloaded Sensible World of Soccer on Xbox LIVE Arcade.  First impressions are that Sensi looks and plays just like I remember from all those years ago.  I swear that the goalkeepers seem much better in this version, but it's just as likely that my skills have diminished somewhat.  But what have Codemasters done to the online play?  - it's a mess!  It is almost impossible to host or join an online game, and when selecting teams both players control the menu at the same time.  Bizarre!  And if you are fortunate to get an online game going, prepare for l-a-g because you are going to experience a ton of it.  All in all a very disappointing experience. Fingers crossed that Codemasters rectify the problems soon.

(image from teamxbox.com)

Call of Duty 4: Martyrdom is fun

I've been playing Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare on Xbox 360 quite a lot lately.  I'm sure you all know from personal experience (or have read in the zillions of reviews on the web) just how fantastic this game is.  So I won't bore you with yet another COD4 mini review.   Although I am mostly getting M21-whipped by 14-year olds, I have managed to progress up through the ranks and obtain new perks, with Last Stand being my favourite.  Last Stand enables you to remain alive (but immobile) for a short time after being 'killed', so that you can exact some pistol-revenge on the enemy who assaulted you.  Maybe I'm just sick, but I can't help laughing each time I put a few 9mm rounds into an overzealous enemy who thinks they're about to finish me off.  Last Stand, however, pales into insignificance compared to the tastefully-named Martyrdom perk.  Martyrdom, as I have found out numerous times, causes the enemy you have just slaughtered to drop a live grenade next to their corpse.  I fall for it every time, with the grenade exploding just as it dawns on me that I should run away.  It's pretty awesome actually, except for the fact that I don't have the perk yet.

BTW, why am I having trouble getting a decent connection when playing COD4?  Occasionally I get green bars, but usually they are yellow or orange.  This doesn't help when fending off the hordes of juveniles with P90s, red-dot sights, and the ability to see around corners.  The joys of Australian broadband maybe?

(image from CharlieOscarDelta.com)