Return to Wolgograd

On the Homepage of the german magazine Gamestar, there surfaced some info on Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad. Some of you might know that I dearly loved RO back from whet it was the tiny little version 1.2 Beta as a mod of Unreal Tournament 2003, up to when it got released on retail.

The info is as follows:

*There will be a SP campaign for both russians and germans, and it will be beatable in coop. Coop is also available in a skirmish mode.

*You will be able to position troops with a simply user interface.

*Heroes: You can become an online hero. Only hero players have access to the bets and rarest weapons, plus they boost the moral troops on their own side while causing fear on the opposite side.

*All earned medals and perks will be available to check by players in game.

*There will be a first person cover system.

While it has some features that I do like, like the SP campaign from both the Russian and the German perspective, Coop play, and finally a First Person Cover System. (All caps on purpose, for more info, see the very first post on this blog.)

But other than that, It too much sounds like CoD4 for my tastes. I think it's especially worrying that there isn't a single word on how RO is more realistic than any other game out there. At least on infantry level.

Well, these news do put me in a great position though. RO2:HoS just became a very unlikely candidate to dissapoint me. Sadly, that's because my expectations plummeted.

Good Exercise

Sorry for the lengthy absence, but I was preoccupied with loads of work. Sadly, none of it involved any payment. To be more precise, I helped my girlfriend's brother, who shared the flat with her, to move out, I helped a friend of my girlfriend to move, and I moved in at my girlfriend. That meant a lot of carrying heavy stuff, a lot of assembling furniture and a lot of cursing. No surprise then that I won't touch Sokoban for a while now.

My moving in came to a premature halt, as we discovered a huge mold patch on the wall in her brother's room, which is going to be my office with a guest couch. So we're not done yet.

But now back to gaming: Not having much time at hand, and starting to get used to physical exhaustion, and also because I really craved to try out WiiMotion Plus, my new gaming fix is Wii Sports Resort. Actually, I wanted Grand Slam Tennis, but I chose not to get that due to various reasons:

Firstly, with Wii Sports and Mario Power Tennis, my girlfirend would've given me the look if I'd brought home another tennis game.

Secondly, my girlfriend isn't much of a gamer. The only thing she plays is Mario Kart Wii. Quite excessively. So there's a potential to turn her into a gamer, but it has yet to be tapped. So I thought going for something versatile would help.

Now let's discuss the game. Having twelve sports tripled the offer of Wii's standard title Wii Sports. Now I won't review every game, especially as most of them come in up to three different flavours, making mastering them all quite an effort, even more so if you're also after the Stamps, which, according to the IGN guide, can be a PITA to get.

There are two sports which shine brightly, because of their visceral and very satisfying gameplay: Swordsplay and Archery. I dare say those two alone are worth the actually quite humble price Tag of 45€, as the package contains the game and one WiiMotion Plus addon. Having played those two modes excessively, I can't wait for a medieval action or RPG game to use those controls. I'm thinking along the lines of Die by the Sword or Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Could be a Samurai or Ninja themed japanese game too.

The three games more or less directly ported from the original Wii Sports - golf, bowling and table tennis play nicely as usual, allthough I found the original bowling a tad more intuitive.

Which brings us to the downsides already: the other sports range from unremarkable to annoyingly gimmicky, and I'd stay clear from the biking and air play modes. They simply are not fun.

Especially flying planes is not very well thought through: you ought to hold the WiiMote like a toy plane, meaning at it's "belly", but you need to press the buttons on top of the controller to play it. I'd rather had the WiiMote upright as flightstick and the nunchuck as a throttle control. That might have upped the complexity a lot, but would've been much more intuitive.

Other things I don't like: Most games make you play in turns, which makes four player games quite lengthy and tedious. Of course this allows you to multiplay without having 4 WiiMotion Plus controllers (Which add up to 85€ each, if you have to buy the WiiMote, WiiMotion Plus and a Nunchuck), but it makes mulitplay less frantic and fun.

Also, limiting table tennis and dogfighting to two players takes a lot of possible fun away.

The worst part is that there is no online multiplayer possibility. It would make the game much more interesting, especially if there isn't someone else around if you want to play.

Another annyong point is having to unlock most of the games and features. I know that's not a Wii Sports Ressort specific problem, but still, I can't understand it. Either you don't have every game at your disposal, or, because you already unlocked everything, you're considerably better than anyone you play with, making them not wanting to play with you.

Of course, in Wii Sports Ressort you can unlock most things in multiplayer mode, but still the problem somewhat exists, as you don't always want to wait for a friend to unlock a game mode you want to try out.

On other news, I can highly recommend Neotokyo is a great TC for the Source Engine. It has an Akira or Ghost in the Shell like setting, and gameplaywise it strongly resembles the good old Frontline Force for HL, which I really liked back in those days. I'd only whish they'd go down more towards the anime looks, which would make the game more stylish and somewhat mask some realism problems, like having a generic screen zoom rather than using the beautifully modeled optical sights on the guns.

And lastly, RO:Ladder has announced the next Red Orchestra Nations Cup. We're trying to field a team, so if you're Austrian and interested, get in touch with me, or sign up on roladder and reply in the topic on the forums there.