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.

Migration

Now I know what most of you think: the blog's migrating to somewhere else. But that's wrong, I am physically migrating. Now, as a part of a lengthy process, I brought my gaming and work PC to my girlfriends place, where I actually do spend most of my time. So it's one very significant step of moving in together officially, which should be completed by the end of the month. Whish us luck.

And now let's get back to gaming related topics: Angband got released on the Android Market recently, and I'm hooked. It's a concept that's so simple , yet still so deep and realistic that I truly long for something similar with a technically modern approach, without losing the initial depth of it. Also, it made me play Iter Vehemens ad Necem again, whenever I'm near a PC. Yay for rogue-likes.

Just one small warning to those of you who want to download the app for their Android phones: It needs a keyboard, so you're pretty much screwed if you went for a HTC Magic rather than the good old HTC T-Mobile G1.

More free stuff!

Now don't get me wrong, I don't plan to become a freebie announcement center, but I couldn't skip hat one:

To celebrate the series 15th birthday, Bethesda chose to offer The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall for free. The download can be found here, in addition to the first part of the series.

Mechwarrior for free

With yesterday's announcement, Battletech authorized the free distribution of MechWarrior 4 with it's expansion packs over at Battletech.com. The download should be up soon.

Now's the perfect time to get your mech-fix!

A dream is coming true!

It's been a long time since I've been excited about an upcoming game. But when I stumbled upon the news on IGN today, I almost creamed my pants.

Yes, it's a new MechWarrior in the make! Hopefully, it will see the light of day.

Protection

Last weekend, I attended a "Die Ärzte" concert in Linz. Much to my surprise, they had a very neat offer there: for 20 Euros, you could obtain a USB-storage stick with the live recording of the concert, plus a voucher code to download the encore the next day.

Now what really struck me was the vendor who told me upon purchasing the strick that the music didn't have any copy protection, so I could copy it to as many computers as I wanted. Even the band announced the stick, and added: "Or you can download the songs on piratebay tomorrow."

Of course they won't offer them there themselves, but still, not trying to prevent that, and even encouraging it, was an epiphany for me.

It actually works. The DRM on music is a last struggle of the dying music industry, but the artists themselves have other means of generating income: live concerts and merchandise. The internet basically made buying CDs obsolete, and most people know that only a tiny portion of the CD revenues land in the hands of the artists. Thus, you don't neccessarily have to feel bad about downloading music rather than buying it. Also, you can't download the live experience, so go and support the bands you like by going to their concerts.

I know this sounds rather like a pro-piracy article for now, but here's the turn that also connects the topic to gaming: while free distribution does work for music, it can't for games. There are no live concert like events to substitute for less bought copies. Thus I can understand the industry's try to rescue itself by copy protection systems. The problem is though, that they cannot possibly work.

Not only are many protection systems very intrusive on the systems, they're all breakable. In fact, most games are cracked and available for download before the actual release date. Also, you don't have to register accounts, always have the DVD in the drive or other inconvenients associated with legitly buying a game.

So basically, using protection to fight piracy is a battle that can't be won. It costs money, and I guess not little, to use SecuRom and the likes of publishers. And they don't achieve what they're meant to, they can't stop pirates. The only thing they do achieve is alienate people who would want to buy, but don't want to open their computer to protecting and possibly data mining (*cough* The Sims 3 *cough*) applications.

So I for one think that the publishers should skip the whole DRM business and give the customers incentive to buy their games rather than suspiciously eyeing at them like everyone was a pirate.

Incentives could be a comeback of gimmicks going with the game, like cloth maps, novels, soundtracks, or pretty much anything else that comes with collectors editions nowadays. Or online systems you can't live without (even though that might need registering).

On a sidenote, I'd also like to see the price of downloaded games via Steam or other means to be reduced. I think it's ridiculous that a game costs more on steam than in a store, especially since I can play the latter outright and have a printed manual to read. I don't think that servers cost as much as a world wide physical distribution.

An unlikely relative.

This weekend, I got to try out Overlord 2 on both PC and PS 3. I only played for some hours, so I don't feel I know it well enough for a deep review, but I can say I like it, and I do think that it's an improvement over the already quite fun first part.

But what really struck me was that it plays very similar to Little King's Story I mentioned in my last post.

In both, you expand your residence. In both, you send your different minions via a button press in the direction you face to do various tasks. In both, your main tactic to defeat strong enemies is the timing of attack and retreat. In both you can (and should) lead a promiscuous life, and lastly, in both you strive for world domination. In fact, there are only three major differences I could make out:

1) The setting: You're basically Sauron in Overlord, while you're a cute little king, quite surprisingly, in Little King's Story. While the first is very pronounced in portraying you as evil, I actually like Little King's approach more. It all looks cute and cuddly, while you're actually genociding the local wildlive, agressively conquer other kingdoms and marry multiple princesses.

I find it quite interesting how the perception of a game changes based on how it looks rather than what you have to do.

2) The perspective: Overlord features an over the shoulder view, while LKS is top down. I prefer the first, because it's easier to aim with your minions and you feel more involved with the world.

3) The combat: Overlord features "The Scorcher" among other very visceral weapons. LKS has a sparkly scepter. No need to say more...

Another thing I want to adress are RPGs. Why do all modern RPGs feel so shallow? I am on the brink of finishing the first Mass Effect, and while it's a great game, it doesn't capture me like old school RPGs like the original Fallouts or the Ultima series.

That dawned on me after participating in this thread on the Tripwire Interactive forums and reinstalling Arcanum, which I actually never got into, despite it's heritage. And right now, I'm totally sucked in and I love it.

Another tip for old school RPG players, even though it's more a hack and slay type of game than a true RPG is Eschalon. Worth checking out, especially when you're rig isn't up to modern games.