Tech.Wapline

It looks like Koei has finally exhausted Asia. The publisher best known for its takes on Chinese and Japanese history heads to Europe with Bladestorm: The Hundred Years’ War. The game is a look at the bloody conflict that spawned a few classic Shakespearean plays and the legend of Joan of Arc. This shift to the West doesn’t come without its problems, however. Although the number of troops that cross swords on battlefields is impressive and while the multigenre gameplay that blends action, strategy, and role playing holds at least the promise of innovation, way too much repetition mires the game in mediocrity.

Those expecting a French-English version of the Chinese carnage depicted in Koei’s Dynasty Warriors series will likely be disappointed. Instead of the all-action theme of that franchise, Bladestorm throws a changeup that mixes melee madness with commanding companies of soldiers that range from knights and archers to pikemen and cavalry. Although you take the role of a mercenary seeking fame and fortune while observing battlefields from the standard third-person perspective, you go after your goals by taking charge of troops or fighting as part of groups. There isn’t a great deal of strategy involved when playing general, however. All you have to do to take over troops is run up to the nearest company of allied soldiers and click a button. With one bellow, you’ve got a gang of pals willing to die for you. If only it was that easy in real life. Anyhow, the only difference between this approach and the typical solo actioner is that you have to make a brief pit stop to grab a bunch of guys to attack along with you, so you don’t just charge enemy positions solo.

This rudimentary control scheme leads to Bladestorm’s downfall in some ways. Commanding troops is so simplistic that you can just about forget that you’re not alone. Buddies in chain mail follow you automatically, attack the closest bad guys whenever you hold down the right trigger, and make shared actions en masse at the drop of a button. Every action is so precise that it can be rather comical to watch. It’s like you’re part of a chorus line of medieval knights, all swinging swords and firing arrows in unison. Also, because you’re just abstractly going into battle, you never get the direct, visceral satisfaction of pushing a button to drive a sword into an enemy’s head. Even though it can be sort of cool to hit the shared actions buttons and see everyone in your company attack with swords or lances simultaneously, it doesn’t have the immediacy of solo arcade fighting. You feel a step removed from the fray, which isn’t very satisfying. And because there isn’t much of a strategic component in battles to compensate for this odd distance between you and the action, you sort of get the worst of both worlds in that neither element seems to have been pulled off very well.

Battles themselves are also pretty straightforward in that they always seem to play out the same way. You basically just rampage across a generic French countryside in each mission, conquering one base after another until you reach the target settlement and take it out. There is little variety in your fighting, while battles are typically so loaded with troops and so chaotic that they come off like crazed mob scenes where you fight battles of attrition with little direct control over the outcome. You send your swarm of goons in against the enemy swarm of goons and then hit the shared action attack buttons every time that they regenerate. If your health drops perilously low, you pull back to the nearest allied base to heal up and grab a fresh company of troops, then head back to the front lines. Conquering enemy bases is somewhat satisfying because of the appearance of named enemies and commanders that add a personal element to all the mass carnage. However, even then, you’re not taking on these foes in direct combat, so your level of fulfillment that comes from killing them is limited.

And for a game that attempts to depict some of the reality of fighting with huge numbers of troops, everything is awfully arcade-ish. Battles wrap at nightfall every day no matter what’s taking place when the counter runs down to zero and the sun sets. You can be right on the verge of taking an enemy stronghold, have dozens of troops inside the walls, and then have to do the whole thing all over again the next day simply because it got dark. Aside from the annoying repetition that this forces, it just seems dumb, as if you’re calling battles like ballgames on account of rain. Artificial intelligence is also anything but realistic. Enemies seem so reluctant to attack that they usually just sit back until you slam into them head-on. The only thing you really have to worry about is the high number of enemies. Sheer weight of numbers almost always rules the day, so you don’t have to concern yourself unduly with smart attacks or even the rock-paper-scissors formula that governs how units battle one another.

A little depth between battles makes Bladestorm somewhat more interesting. You spend time preparing to take the field in a tavern, where the barkeep offers you contracts for upcoming battles. You also upgrade books covering different types of troops (organized by weapons used), buy equipment, purchase units and strength-buffing pennants for instant deployment in battles later on, or get the latest gossip from fellow barflies. Being able to custom outfit the types of troops available to command and their battle skills through books is actually pretty interesting. It makes you feel like you’re really learning your mercenary craft and all of the personal equipment gives you the sense of actually controlling an alter ego. But these abilities aren’t all that obvious in battles. Sure, it’s great to buff the tackle skill of sword-wielding infantry. Yet all this really does is up the damage dealt out, so you don’t see any obvious difference in how the game plays. And even though a story is told as you lay waste to medieval France, there is no rhyme or reason to your actions. Although you’ll make it through the campaign quicker by sticking to one side, you can jump ship for whomever is offering the most money whenever you want, which eliminates strategic considerations when planning moves. Why bother thinking when the battles all play out the same way and there are no repercussions for swapping sides?

Everyone knows MX bikes and ATV quad runners are a big part of THQ’s MX vs. ATV series–after all, they’re in the name. But in the next entry in the series–the upcoming MX vs. ATV: Untamed–they’ll be far from the only mode of transportation you’ll be zipping along through the mud and dust. In this developer diary, Brian Coonce, principal game designer on Untamed, gives us the scoop on vehicle customization in the game, as well as a few details on a new vehicle type that makes up in fun what it lacks in stature.
MiniMotos and Customization
By Brian Coonce
Principal Game Designer, Rainbow Studios
When most people imagine the life of a game developer, they think of people who need to get outside more often and drink less soda. While this may hit uncomfortably close to home for many of us, the crew at Rainbow Studios has also always held a great passion for the outdoors. Ten years ago when we started making our first off-road games, our development team consisted of weekend warriors and insights from pro riders to help ensure we were making the most accurate off-road games in the market. Fast forward to today, and you’ll still find that racing heritage throughout the MX vs. ATV development group: Six of our team members ride competitively, even more own their own quads and bikes, and every year the team attends the World Supercross GP when it stops in the Phoenix desert. Heck, we even own a sandrail.

So when the design team sat down to create MX vs. ATV: Untamed, customization of vehicles and riders was high on our list. In MX vs. ATV: Untamed, we wanted to ride the same bikes and quads that we ride in real life. As a result, we’ve blown out the customization ability to give you ultimate control over what you ride. Paint your plastic to match what you take out on the weekends, or color the chrome to match what you’ve always wanted. Tweak your suspension and handling to match your own riding style. You’re even allowed to mix up the machines by choosing new grills, tires, and suspension sets. And make sure you’re decked out in the same gear you ride in; with more than 100 of the top racing brands included in the game, you’ll be able to look like the pros do. Still not close enough to the real thing? Choose from 20 of the top MX and ATV riders including Ricky Carmichael, Chad Reed, Grant Langston, and Ryan Villipoto.

Another perfect example of our passion for motorsports is our inclusion of 50cc pocketbikes in MX vs. ATV: Untamed. For the casual off-road racer out there, a MiniMoto bike is essentially a two-wheeled go-cart. Imagine a miniaturized MX bike with a lawnmower for a motor and you’ll get some idea of what it’s actually like to ride one of these things. While obviously lacking in power compared to their larger counterparts, MiniMoto bikes are a blast to ride because of their quick-turning ability and low profile. You might not hit the top speeds of a typical MX bike, but because you are so low to the ground the sense of speed can be just as thrilling. Out on the track, you don’t even need to see a pocketbike to know when one is around; a pack of MiniMotos sounds more like a swarm of bees than the roar of a 250cc or 450cc bike.

We’re such fans of pocketbikes that when we moved into our new offices, we had to have the carpet replaced because team members had left streaks and tears while riding around the empty hallways. Management was obviously not thrilled, but how can you resist 25,000 square feet of wide-open office space? In MX vs. ATV: Untamed, we took advantage of the unique physics of these bikes to create custom courses that cater to their speed and agility. You’ll notice special animations, too, as the riders kick to maintain balance in turns and shift to maintain position. So before you write off the big dude on the tiny bike, make sure you try one out for yourself first, either in real life or in MX vs. ATV: Untamed.

Pain is a fine example of what can be done with the Havok physics engine, some destructive urges, and little else. It twists its basic principle of using a fleshy crash-test dummy as slingshot ammo into several compelling single- and multiplayer modes, all of which tap into the same primal urges that make watching a car crash or popping bubble wrap so compelling. It’s not a terribly intellectual game, and apart from the Rube Goldberg punishment routines you can put your puppet through, it’s never very complicated; but damn if it doesn’t make for some misanthropic fun.

The underlying mechanic in Pain has you loading up a guy into a guy-sized slingshot then launching him into the world, usually with the intent of inflicting as much pain on both your character and the world around him. You can adjust the angle and power of the shot before you launch. Once you’re in the air, you’ve also got a pretty significant amount of drift control over your trajectory. Holding one of the face buttons as you sail through the air will make your guy stretch his hand out in one of four directions, allowing him to grab onto objects in the environment. Holding one of the face buttons in conjunction with either the L1 or L2 buttons will cause your guy to strike one of a number of generally stupid poses, which can earn you bonus points, allow you access to hard-to-reach spots on the map, or just make it easier to inflict specific types of damage to your character’s anatomy.

Once your guy makes contact with any part of the environment, he turns into a floppy, Havok-powered rag doll, though you can still nudge him in different directions with “ooch,” an ability that will refill at regular intervals as long as your guy is still in motion. There’s also super-ooch, a more potent, single-use version of ooch, which you can charge up by shaking the Sixaxis vigorously. In addition to being fun to say, ooch is a critical factor in getting the most out of each launch, and judicious use of ooch can make a single launch last for several minutes. Ooch can be kind of finicky as well, and you need to use it as soon as you earn it. As we found from our experience, a full ooch meter can randomly disappear at a moment’s notice. As long and detailed as the game’s mandatory tutorial is, the inner workings of ooch remain somewhat mysterious.

Pain builds a number of modes around these mechanics, and they all deliver different takes on the same basic “throw guy at stuff” premise. Paindemonium is a basic sandbox mode where your only concrete objective is to rack up as many points as possible. And, really, half the fun of Pain is figuring out different ways to hurt your guy and break stuff. The mime toss mode is more focused, requiring you to launch your guy toward a mime that’s suspended in midair, grab him, and then hurl him through a bunch of panes of glass. Your goal here is to break all the glass as quickly as possible, with as few throws as possible, and the complexity of the various, unpredictable physical forces you’re dealing with can make this a serious challenge. Spank the monkey has you targeting football-loving monkeys as they appear in different locations on the map. It gets a little bit tricky when the game starts challenging you to take down multiple monkeys at once, but it’s still kind of shallow and probably the least compelling of the single-player modes.

On the multiplayer side, you’ve got three different modes from which to choose. There’s horse, which goes by the basic rules of its basketball namesake, though without the basketballs. After the first player launches, the next player has to make contact with one of the items that the first player did while also beating his or her score. Bowling is a two-player game that has you launching your guy at a standard 10-pin setup, though the fun twist here is that the other player can trigger various explosives during your turn and a well-timed telephone booth flying at your face can turn a strike into a gutter ball real quick. The fun-with-explosives mode litters the level with explosive crates, and each player tries to bounce off more of these crates than the last. The multiplayer modes, especially bowling, really amplify what’s great about Pain, which makes the fact that there’s no online play kind of a downer.

As great as the Havok physics engine is at simulating impact, velocity, momentum, and the relative value of Pi, or whatever, there are still times when it seems like you lose speed more quickly than you should. The camera can also be frustrating at times, occasionally changing perspective at inopportune moments or simply getting stuck on the other side of a solid object. The biggest complaint to be lodged against Pain, though, is that for the current $9.99 asking price, it feels a little lean.

The world of Burnout is about to open up. With Criterion Games’ upcoming Burnout Paradise, the high-speed, crash-’em-up style of Burnout play you’ve come to expect from the series is expanding to include go-anywhere, open-world gameplay, as well as online play that will keep you and your friends zipping through the highways and byways of Paradise City long after the game is released in January. Hot on the heels of last week’s look at the Paradise demo, we’ve been spending some time with the full game for a sneak peek at what to expect once it crashes into store shelves.

Though it’s tough to boil down a game as huge as Burnout Paradise, the way we see it there are three overall ways to enjoy your time in Paradise City. Step one is simply getting used to the huge expanses that make up the open-world environment; the entirety of which is open to you from the get-go in Paradise. The city is massive, and you’ll likely spend your first hour in the game just trying to get your bearings or marveling at the sites. With enough time, you’ll get to know the city pretty well, learn the shortcuts you need to get you from one spot to the next, and even uncover some secret spots that don’t show up on the game’s minimap.

Once you’ve got some miles under your tires, you can move on to the second step of enjoying Paradise: the challenges. Every intersection in the game has a challenge associated with it, and you can choose to enter a challenge simply by stopping at an intersection and burning the tires (by pressing the LT and RT triggers simultaneously). Different challenge types are indicated by colored dots on the minimap, so you always know what kind of challenge you’re near. The challenges themselves are pretty standard Burnout fare. You have your race challenges that take you from one end of Paradise City to the next, and your stunt events where you execute as many huge jumps, drift turns, and barrel rolls as you can to string together to score huge point combos.

There are also marked-man events, where you must get from one point to another without being taken down by psychotic drivers looking to do your car much harm, as well as road-rage challenges, where you flip the script and try to take down as many cars as you can in a given amount of time. Finally there are make-specific challenges, which you can enter only in the prescribed car. To switch cars, you head to the closest junkyard (the Paradise equivalent to the garage) and change your current ride for any car you’ve collected on the way. You collect cars either by upgrading your license, or taking them down during the occasional street encounters with these special collectible rides.

Different cars in Burnout Paradise have different attributes. There are your souped-up, tricked-out speedsters, which are obvious choices for the race events, as well as bulkier rides whose strength will keep your challenge hopes alive even when the pressure gets intense. Choosing the right car for the right event becomes more important as the game progresses. For example, you don’t want to enter a marked-man event with a slim, speedy sports car like the Rossolini LM Classis, as it will most likely get eaten alive.

As you travel through Paradise City, you’ll encounter stations along the way that can provide some timely help in a crunch. Perhaps the most valuable are the repair shops; drive through one and your car will be instantly repaired and ready to continue on its way. Gas stations come in handy, too; zip through one and your boost meter will fill up to its maximum as you exit. Finally, there are the paint shops; yeah, they don’t really help you for challenges, but they’re an easy way to quickly (and randomly) change the color of your ride. All of these stations appear on your minimap after you’ve discovered them for the first time. It’s good to know where all of them are, so exploration in the early goings is a must.

Winning challenges in Burnout Paradise is how you upgrade your Paradise City driver’s license and thus get access to better vehicles. However, it isn’t just about the intersection challenges; every road in Paradise City is a challenge unto itself in this game. By pressing up on the directional pad, you can enter one of four road-rules challenges: two race (offline and online) and two crash events (offline and online). Road-rules races challenge your timed run from the very beginning of the street to the very end, whereas crash events will test your high score in “showtime” mode, which is essentially one extended car accident.

By pressing the left and right buttons simultaneously, you can enter showtime mode at any point, even during a challenge. Your goal is to destroy as many cars as you can before your boost meter runs out. You can press A to leap your heap of wreckage into the air, and hitting big-score objects such as buses will give you a multiplier to your score (and more boost to continue the mayhem). At the end of race or showtime events, you can save your results for offline events, or upload them in online events, to compare your handywork against others. Each street in the game has its own lap time record and showtime score to beat, which essentially turns every inch of asphalt in Paradise into its own mini-game.

The seamless uploading of times and scores for races and showtime events is really just a prelude to the third and potentially most rewarding method for playing Burnout Paradise: online multiplayer. Here, up to eight players can compete and cooperate in a variety of challenges. All online access is controlled with the directional pad. You can first invite friends to your multiplayer session by choosing them from a list. Once your pals are in the same session as you, you’ve got a lot of options. First of all, you can create races from scratch, choosing the start and end points, as well as setting any checkpoints you wish players to drive through along the way. You can also create multiple-race events, with each succeeding event taking a completely different route than the one prior.

Where things really get interesting online are the online challenges, which feature both competitive and cooperative play that opens up the world of Paradise in exciting new directions. There are 50 challenges to take part in online, and the kinds of challenges available depend on the number of people online with you. Though there is some overlap, the list of challenges available to four people online is slightly different than the list available to five or six, and so on. These challenges run from the relatively mundane, such as crashing into one another or meeting at a particular spot on the map, to the considerably more interesting, such as power-parking challenges (which judge you at your skill in parallel parking your car at top speed).

We’ve had a chance on a couple of occasions in the past to play Frontlines: Fuel of War, and we’ve been suitably impressed by what we’ve seen each time. This week, we sat down with an exclusive Xbox 360 build of the game to play through the first four levels of the single-player campaign and to check out the latest multiplayer build from Kaos Studios.

The Frontlines universe and backstory are centered on the struggle and war over fuel in a world depleted of natural resources. While the game is set in 2024, the opening cinematic includes current world political figures such as President George W. Bush. Information on the war, and its causes and consequences, is conveyed through an embedded reporter who tags along explaining updates as new intel comes to light. You take on the role of a Western Coalition soldier charged with fighting the enemy. In this case, the enemy is the Red Star Alliance, a future grouping of Russia and China. The two join forces in the hopes of securing the last available oil deposits in the Caspian, and naturally the United States and the European Union get together on the counteroffensive to make sure that if anyone gets the oil deposits, it will be them (and yes, this does smack of Cold War Part II).

With the scene set and the lines drawn in the sand, the campaign opens with you and your team–the “Stray Dogs”–relieving Alpha Team at an oil refinery in Turkmenistan. Hostiles shoot your chopper down, and you’re forced to defend its charred remains and what’s left of your squad. Once that’s completed, you’re given the choice of one of two new missions: locate and destroy a SAM (surface-to-air missile) site on a rooftop, or capture an enemy armory. You will need to finish both to progress through the level, but you are given the choice of the order you’d like to do them in. In some cases you may also find that completing one objective over another gives you an advantage by supplying you with a vehicle or weapon that makes the next part easier. Choice plays a big role in Frontlines, and while the first level is quite linear and your objective options are limited, past here you’re often given up to six or seven tasks to complete in expansive environments at your discretion.

Level two–titled Captains of Industry–sees you infiltrate a town before needing to capture and hold multiple points. Here your skills will diversify slightly. You’ll need to not only secure ammo supply points, but also hack a computer to gain access to Red Star Alliance tank blueprints. After destroying another SAM site, you’ll be airlifted some armoured tank support, which can be used to destroy enemy vehicles blocking your way. Once they’re eliminated, you’ll move on to secure and disable a tank manufacturing factory, stemming the flow of war machines. You’re free to make the trip on foot should you choose to ditch your tank for something a little speedier and portable (such as a shoulder rocket), although obviously you’ll be slightly more vulnerable.

Your next scenario sees you parachute into a mountainside village complete with grassy hills and mud huts and swarming with bad guys. Unfortunately, it’s not an interactive cutscene, but later you do get the ability to deploy a chute when making jumps from a great height, which saves your legs as the ground rapidly gets closer. Like in all levels, you’re given the option of outfitting your soldier with the best tools for the job, and with so much open space and so many guard towers, the sniper rifle is a good choice. Gadgets play an important role in this level, and the unmanned stealth drone is perfect for throwing out and navigating to a high point you’re looking to scout out. Once it’s in place, targets are clearly marked on your HUD, and you can follow their movements before you stick your neck out. Provided the drone isn’t spotted and shot down, you can switch back to your primary weapon and sneak closer for easy kills before the enemy knows where your shots are coming from. Once both guard outposts are secured and the targets are neutralised, you’ll move to an area with more huts. Despite their prevalence, mud huts aren’t the best hiding spots, particularly around rocket launchers, because they tend to crumble. On the plus side, you can clear your own path by lobbing grenades and traveling through buildings. Late in the level, a five-minute timer begins, and you’ll need to secure and retain two buildings in the zone at once. We were overrun and lost one building just as the timer ticked out, but the clock simply restarted, and we didn’t fail the mission. The second time we were able to hold both for the duration and move on.

We also got the exclusive chance to play the fourth level of the single-player campaign–Graveyard–which begins with your team suffering a tactical nuclear weapon strike. Naturally, the first thing you do is jump into a tank and head towards your attackers, even if you can’t get out of your vehicle because of the radiation levels. The game is still undergoing balancing and tweaking, but we found tank driving to be one of the harder things to do. Even with the tank turbo button–which gets you moving a little faster–steering was heavy, and it was hard to navigate around some of the boulders strewn in the environment. After defeating waves of enemy tanks, we found ourselves needing to destroy three mobile artillery units, although we were able to do this part on foot. Here it’s a case of clearing to the target, holding the X button to initiate the explosive charge, then placing it and getting out of there before the explosion. After you’ve done this, you’ll need to survive an attack-chopper gauntlet, thin its soldier ranks, and destroy a nuke launch site that was no doubt aimed straight for you and your team.

When it comes to multiplayer, at this stage we’re told that the console versions of Frontlines (that’s the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) will ship with 32-player support, and the PC version is still aiming for 64. The main mode in Frontlines multiplayer sees you in either of the game’s two factions battling to control checkpoints in order to move the aforementioned “front line” deeper into enemy territory. This gives Frontlines a decidedly more action-packed focus compared to some other shooters, since sneaking around to capture undefended checkpoints or remote objectives simply isn’t included. Because all the checkpoints in this game are literally on the front line between the two factions’ controlled territories, teams will be forced into firefights and confrontations to capture or defend. A THQ rep has told us that more modes are planned for the game’s ship date, although they won’t be disclosed for some time yet.

As in other modern shooters, you’ll get the opportunity to choose a specific “class” before heading out into the field, although Frontlines takes a somewhat different approach since it lets you mix up your weaponry with class-specific abilities (or as they’re called in the game, roles). While you can choose classes such as assault, heavy assault, sniper, antivehicle, special ops, and close combat, at the end of the day they’re really just different loadout options. From there, you’ll have to choose a role, which grants you specific abilities that can be upgraded as you progress through a match. The ground support role, for example, gives you perks such as the ability to repair vehicles or deploy turrets. The air support role lets you call in surgical air strikes initially and eventually levels up to large-scale cluster bombing. The EMP tech role can hide you from radar and will allow you to disable enemy vehicles, while the drone tech role lets you use Frontlines’ many mini remote-controlled vehicles to scout, attack, or disable enemies.