The importance of good matchmaking

I love Gears of War 2. I play at least once a week online for five hours or more with some friends and aside from Halo 3 I have more fun with Gears 2 that I have had with any other console multiplayer game. This only makes my attempts to play a public match using Gears of War 2 matchmaking more depressing. Gears 2 has been a mess of poor matchmaking and shoddy netcode since it was released in fall 2008, but some recent patches were intended to rectify the issues and slant the matchmaking system more towards the one used in Halo 3.

Earlier this week I attempted to play some public matches hoping the public matchmaking system wasn't the hellhole that it used to be. It placed me in a game with nine players whose minimum level was 47 out of 100. Since the majority of my online Gears of War 2 experience has been in private matches, my level is 3. Taking into account that the private matches don't factor into that score, I felt confident that I would be able to hold my own. Perhaps this would have been true if not for the lag. At one point the game ceased to respond to my input and when I gained control again I found that my death count had risen by three. Needless to say, (but I'll say it anyway), I was frustrated. After the game I checked out the gamercards of the other people in the match and not one of them is located in the same country as me. In fact, the majority of them are located in Mexico, (I'm in Canada).

An experience like that is unacceptable and can ruin a game. A matchmaking system has two purposes: to find other players of comparative skill and to find a game or other players that will yield a decent connection. If the system cannot achieve either of these goals, then creating and finding servers should simply be left in the hands of the players. Anyone, even blind monkey can find or set up a better server than the matchmaking system in Gears of War 2.














The king of good matchmaking.

_______ of War?

After waiting far too long for Gears of War 2 to be mailed to my home, (props to Future Shop for waiting a full week before starting the shipping process and to the Canadian postal service for not working on Saturdays), I've finally played through the single player campaign. Aside from having an absolute blast, there's something I began to notice around halfway in: Gears of War 2 has a lot in common with the God of War games.

In terms of level structure the games are quite similar, (especially once you go underground). Gears of War 2 and God of War both create breathtakingly epic environments, but put you on an ultra-linear, almost claustrophobic path through them. Both games utilize super-simple puzzles or minigames from time to time to break up the standard action gameplay. Both games involve rooms full of enemies where the exit will not open or appear until all enemies have been defeated. The civilizations represented in both Gears of War and God of War have a ridiculous fixation with switches and pressure plates.

(SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH) In Gears of War 2 the bosses also seem to draw directly from the God of War school of design. Seriously, taking down Skorge boils down to not aiming, not shooting, not moving, but just PRESS 'B' RAPIDLY. The bosses in the original Gears of War resembled classic FPS bosses, the sort you might see in Doom or Quake where you unload boatloads of ammo until you find a weak point, then unload more boatloads of ammo into the weak point while not dying, (think of RAAM or the corpser). In all honesty, while fighting the Leviathan, (though it was undeniably fun and one of the more graphically stunning enemies to date), I may as well have whipped out my blades of chaos and fell to my knees yelling "ATHENA!!!!!."

How do you review an MMO, or Little Big Planet for that matter?

There is a long standing disagreement among many gamers as to how reviews should be written for massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs as I will henceforth refer to them. There are a variety of reasons for this, but many of them stem from the fact that MMOs are made to be played for a long, long time.

One issue is that the average MMO player will put hundreds to thousands of hours into their MMO of choice, (several thousands for hardcore players), yet for professional game journalists deadlines are a fact of life and simply cannot put in the hundreds of hours necessary to adequately assess and weigh in on an MMO and still get a review out before everyone who cares has already read reviews from all the competitors. In most MMOs, the first 20, 40, or even 100 hours play very differently than later on, once the higher levels are reached. If a game's lower level gameplay is all flowers and gumdrops, that's all well and good but how will the game keep the experience rewarding later on? On the other hand if a game is dull or merely slow in the early stages, it still might ramp up after 20-40 hours once the player begins getting in on high level activities like raids and is powerful enough to access new areas and better quests. Of course it might just be a snoretacular feat of boredom straight through.

Another issue is that an MMO six or more months after release is very different from what it was at release, which is when it receives the majority of its reviews, (a prime example being Tabula Rasa). No matter how long a game is in beta, developers cannot perfect all balance issues, kill every bug and eliminate every exploit prior to the release date but in the following months MMOs often become more streamlined; bugs are squashed, exploits are eliminated and interfaces, quests, etc. are tweaked hopefully to improve the game experience. Also, around the release date there isn't much of a community surrounding the game and the number of people inhabiting the world isn't indicative of how well the game will be populated months or even years down the road. Social interaction is a major aspect of MMOs, and a review written within weeks of a game's launch, (and in some unfortunate situations, prior to launch), can't take a large part of it into account. Perhaps games should not be reviewed based on how many people play and what they do, yet I can understand the argument that if a reviewer hasn't gotten the change to join a guild and set up a large-scale raid/siege/assault on a super high-level boss or rival guild, then said reviewer has not really experienced all that MMO has to offer. The sort of highly organized, tactical experiences that require co-operative seasoned players simply don't occur in an MMOs earliest stages.

The big question becomes: how does one review an MMO? Should it be reviewed based on the game exactly as it is at launch or should bugs, exploits and other issues be ignored based on the assumption that they will be fixed in the future? Should a reviewer have to guess whether the game will build up a thriving community and economy?

In my opinion an accurate MMO review would have to be written about four to six months after launch and the reviewer should make it at least 70% of the way to the highest level in the game if not more. Unfortunately for mainstream video game press that isn't an acceptable option, not to mention that most people who were interested in the game will have already either tried a free trial or read one of the early reviews. MMO-specific websites sometimes put out late reviews after putting loads of time in, but those must be taken with a larger grain of salt than usual because they are often written by people who

Another possible answer that I've heard is the idea of re-reviewing a game from time to time or after major updates. It's a fantastic idea but there are two major problems as I see it. The first problem is that as it is gaming publications and websites are already swamped trying to find time for their journalists to research and write previews, set up interviews, play through the games that they have to review and then write the reviews. We're not talking about movies here that only need to be watched for an hour and a half to three hours. Games take anywhere from ten to upwards of fifty hours to play through for a proper review. Try adding in the responsibility of re-reviewing games on a regular basis and it can just be too much. The second problem I see with re-reviewing games is that if re-reviews become the norm, then developers and publishers will be that much less motivated to make sure a game is adequately complete before releasing it. If an MMO is going to get re-reviewed anyway then why not just release the beta version in stores and say it's done. It can always be patched for a higher score. A similar mentality is already on the rise on the console game side. Ever since the current generation of consoles has allowed games to be updated, I've seen a lot more games being released in an unfinished form, (Alone in the Dark... you broke my heart).

Soon, we'll have a whole new style of game that may raise similar and possibly more questions regarding how reviews should be written. Little Big Planet is set to come out in October this year and the game is essentially a super-intuitive game creation tool that you play within. The game itself almost mirrors the Playstation 3 in the manner that the creators have created a fantastic and powerful tool, but since the people who use it won't be able to instantly grasp everything it is capable of, the most delicious fruit that it will bear won't show up until later on down the road. As it has taken Playstation 3 almost two years to before games could show what the system was really capable of, (largely due to developers learning how to program for the system), it may quite some time as well after the game's launch before we see the really good content for Little Big Planet.

So how does one write a review for Little Big Planet? If the single-player game that comes bundled in is amazing and the design tools are fun and intuitive then obviously the answer is easy, you score it nice and high, discuss the game as-is and mention future potential. On the other hand, what if the game as it is at launch is simply an awesome game design tool with an afterthought single player game bundled in? Do you review it based on the promise of great community content popping up in the future? Can a review truly be written based on the potential of a game rather than what is actually there?

So undoubtedly now you're looking for my answer to all these problems. Truth is, there's no "right answer" and any way that a review for Little Big Planet or an MMO is handled, it will be forced to make assumptions and walk a fine line between not giving a game enough of a chance and giving a game too much credit. As more non-traditional games are released that, by design, won't reach their innate potential until long after they have been released, (hopefully many more), it will be interesting to see how reviews are handled going forward.

Wasting Time

I'm waiting for the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed demo to download on the Xbox, and in the meantime I've been playing Half-Life 2: Episode 1. This is the third time that I've had to start it from the beginning due to unfortunate circumstances (and poor planning). I began playing it after purchasing The Orange Box when I still lived in NC. I wasn't too pleased with the first hour or two but I thought it was just starting to get interesting, (after the fight with the ant-lion queen), when I had to pack up for my move to Canada.

Once in Canada and without my framerate-destroying desktop, (shipping it up here was a much longer process than it should have been), I found myself hungry for games but without a machine capable of playing them. Fortunately the Half-Life 2 engine scales wonderfully to lower-spec systems so I loaded up Steam on my laptop and installed Episode 1. What the heck, right? It only meant re-playing through an hour or so. I loaded the game, dialed down the graphics and away I went.

Of course, no sooner than I get into playing, my boxes show up from NC. The motherboard in my desktop had been mortally injured en-route so I took a day off from gaming to pick up a new motherboard as well as a new hard drive because I'm a compulsive bastard and dove into my computer's guts. After reinstalling Windows, drivers, etc., my computer was blowing away games faster than ever. I couldn't help myself but in re-installing my games it reignited my interest and I began to re-play through several of them, pushing Episode 1 to the back of my mind.

That's where Half-Life 2: Episode 1 remained until today as I mulled over what I should do while waiting for my download to complete. I sat at my computer, loaded up Steam and proceeded to play Episode 1 again, from the beginning, for the third time. Could I have just played it on the laptop? Yeah, sure, but why play with the graphics turned down when my desktop can handle running it with 5000x antialiasing and anisotrophic filtering?

Let me tell you, the first time I played the first hour or so of that game was boring and repetitive, the second time was downright tedious. This time I should have been getting paid for that shit because it felt like work. I've heard that the rest of Episode 1 and 2 are great... if that's measured comparatively to the beginning, then I'm ready to believe it because that first section in the citadel doesn't exactly set a high mark for the rest of the series to hurdle.

I guess I'll have to find out later, because my demo is done downloading and I'm out.

There's a lot of shooting energy balls into energy collectors.

Surprisingly, grabbing and launching combine soldiers can get old, and it doesn't take long.

I'm sure that if you know anything about Peter Molyneux or his many unfulfilled promises regarding what will be in his games, you read the title of this post and sighed... or perhaps rolled your eyes. The fact that you're reading this means that at least you decided not to just ignore it completely.

This particular promise of innovation looks like it might bear fruit. Molyneux claims that development on the game is actually complete, so the fact that this "innovation" actually sounds pretty darn cool is compounded by the fact that it has apparently already made it into the final build of the game.

The innovation is what Molyneux referred to as "friend orbs." Friends orbs are actually representations of all your Xbox Live friends as they play in their own Fable II single player game that manifest as glowing purple orbs at the same time in your single player game. For example, if a friend of yours is playing and standing in front of a shop on his/her Xbox, then in your game there will be a little purple ball of light floating in front of that same shop in your own game at the same time. Wherever that friend is in their game, the little purple orb will be their in your game all in real time, (provided you are both connected to the internet). You can then walk up to the orb and invite them to join you without going through any Xbox Live menus and if your friend accepts then BANG you'll be playing coop instantly.

Molyneux may be a man with a reputation for having enough hot air to lift a balloon into the sky, but this particular innovation is truly an interesting concept and I can't wait to try it myself. I just hope that it works just as advertised and that there is an option to turn the friend orbs on or off on the fly.

On the Precipitation-Lubricious Cliff of Legitimate System Requirements

I, like many gamers, am a fan of Penny-Arcade. Not a huge fan or even a big fan, but I'll admit that I check for new strips a minimum of once a week. One thing I have to give them absolute credit for is rabid devotion to, and love for, videogames. It only makes sense, then, that two guys who so love and understand videogames would pour their sweat, blood and all manner of other bodily fluids into making the best game imaginable. "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One," is the result of their toil and I figured I should at least give the demo a shot.

Unfortunately, my experience has been a bit of a mixed bag; upon installation I tried to run the demo at the default settings and beyond the usual torrent of developer and game logos I was treated to a black screen and no hard-drive activity. Being a long-time PC gamer I've become accustomed to this sort of occurrence and often as not, simply rebooting the system after an installation will help motivate an application to work properly. After alt-tabbing out of the blank screen and restarting my system I dropped the graphic settings to a mere 800x600 resolution and started the game up again and sure enough, I slid uninterrupted through the opening sequence into the character creation menu where I was pleased to find that whatever character you create, it looks like Mike Krahulik drew it straight onto the screen. In fact, the whole game looks like it came straight from the panels of the comic strip. Krahulik's signature look has been masterfully transferred to the third dimension and what the game lacks in graphical capabilities is made up for with style. This approach is similar to what has been done with the episodic Sam & Max, Team Fortress 2 and the upcoming Battlefield: Heroes, (among others), and one of the results of such a design formula is that the games don't look dated, yet run on a wide variety of systems including PCs long overdue for an upgrade. You might understand why I was shocked when I ran into more performance issues.

The game ran like a fat guy trying to make it up a flight of stairs after a trip to Dairy Queen. I'm talking anywhere from three to ten frames per second. The laptop I'm playing on is by no stretch of the imagination a machine designed for gaming, but I can pull solid framerates on Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted at higher resolutions so I was not expecting this low-tech episodic demo to be a slap in the face along the lines of Crysis. For a game such as this to run this poorly at 800 by 600 pixels is absolutely inexcusable, especially when my system meets the recommended system requirements. I would love to speak right now about the gameplay and the writing and one would hope the great sense of humour but the game just doesn't have quite the same flow when the mouse cursor, (the primary method of controlling the game), is either moving like molasses or jumping across the screen.

Stylistically the game is fantastic, a shame it wouldn't run properly
click on image for full view









As I said previously, I can't give my impressions on the game when running under ideal conditions. As a guess I'd say that if you are a fan of Penny Arcade, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is something you'll want to check out at least. I would only warn you that if you plan on playing the PC version and you have even the slightest doubt as to whether you can run the game smoothly, you would do well to try the demo before you drop twenty big ones on the full version. Until game companies start listing realistic minimum and recommended system requirements that's the best way to find out if a PC game is right for your rig.