Headless Hollow

Headless Hollow posts, categorised for your convenience and enjoyment. On this page you’ll find posts vaguely related to Computer games.

Wednesday, March 9, 2005

Computer game review: Thief: Deadly Shadows

Thief When I played the first Thief game several years ago I was immediately impressed by the fact that you could find yourself, as the laconic thief Garrett, standing in the shadows of a corridor for minutes, carefully memorizing the rounds of castle guards to calculate the ideal time to creep forward and cosh one over the head. The ‘stealth’ genre had been born. The atmosphere was thick, and far from running about blasting everything in sight, you spent the game avoiding combat at all costs, instead hugging the shadows and sneaking about to accomplish your objectives.

I recently finished Thief: Deadly Shadows on the XBox after playing it off and on for months. On the whole it was enjoyable, though the game suffers from many of the problems that plague computer games in general. For one, it was too long. You rarely hear this complaint in computer game reviews, but if you’re over fifteen and don’t live at home, you just don’t have the time to play these games all the way through. Once you’ve learnt the mechanics and completed a few missions, the gameplay tends to become repetitive. Personally I think games should be half the price and half the length, so you could enjoy a game to completion and then go try something new. Is it just my attention span?

Secondly, games tend to run out of steam as you approach the end. They should be designed backwards, so the production team is full of energy and inspiration at the end of the game and exhausted, overworked and empty of ideas by the beginning. Having worked on The Omega Stone for a year, I know how long the hours can get as the deadline approaches. A common solution to this syndrome is to suddenly increase the difficulty level in order to stretch out the gameplay, and Thief falls into this trap (excuse the pun), so much so that I resorted to a walkthrough at the end just so I could finish the damn thing.

The next and always the biggest problem is story. The Thief series has developed an interesting world with a detailed background, and there is a story in this game. Unfortunately however it makes little impact to your progress—the sequence of missions is linear, and you can pretty much ignore the cutscenes—done in a nice, dark noir style by the way— and it would make no difference to the game. It’s a shame, because as a result you don’t care about the characters, or a feel a real urgency to complete the missions.

Thief makes few big changes to the series formula, but this game does feature a third-person view which I found myself using throughout—it’s just too much fun seeing Garrett sneaking about in the shadows (and a little easier). The reactions of the many characters you meet—guards, priests, zombies, feral-hippy types—seem quite intelligent until you realise that it is actually quite easy to fool them. For example, several times I found I could run with impunity through a building disturbing everyone on the way, then just settle into a dark corner and wait for everyone to calm down and go back to whatever they were doing. Surely the general alarm would have rung and everyone would now be more alert?

In general however, Thief is a cut above the average game of this type—until you start getting tired of doing the same sneaking about.

Three and a half water arrows out of five.

Update: I should also mention the long loading times, a common problem when playing games ported from the PC to XBox.

Update: Fascinating Game Developer’s Rant that touches on some of the reasons for the kind of gameplay problems mentioned above.

Posted by universalhead at 10:26 AM | Comments (2)

Monday, November 1, 2004

Guest review series continued: Myst IV

MystIV Peter Miller continues his guest review of the latest in the Myst saga, Myst IV: Revelation (Mac version). WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS!

Warning: major spoilers in this—I’m having a hissy fit about how crappy some of the puzzles are and I have to reveal mechanics.

So, I’ve explored some more of Serenia, Haven and Spire. Serenia looks marvellous and has many, many beautiful things to discover. I certainly hope that the puzzles are better than a few in Haven which are just CRAP.

Yes, crap is the word I used. The puzzle with the ‘monkey’ creatures on the totem pole is a good example. Once again, like the bookshelf puzzle in Yeesha’s room, I knew exactly what to do, but the execution of the puzzle mechanics is rubbish. To reveal the symbol on the totem pole that can bee seen from the pole hut, it is obvious that you need to mimic the warning tone of the little creatures with the sirens at the hut. But this is such a pernickity puzzle that unless you get the durations of the tones exactly right, or so close it’s not funny, you will get no result. I was so sure I was doing the correct thing, but nothing at all seemed to happen, no matter how carefully I mimicked the creatures’ calls. To add to this, the creatures make several different sets of tones, and, worst of all, the sirens are not the same pitch as the calls. This makes for a lot of variables. I got SO frustrated that I was forced to look at the hints, something I have NEVER had to do in a Myst game before. And then I find that I was actually correct in what I was doing, it’s just that I hadn’t gotten exactly the right durations of the tones. Notwithstanding the fact that I was even getting the comparative lengths of tones correct. This is just inferior puzzle design. Guys, learn from this—it’s frustrating and unrewarding. Don’t do it. It’s not fun, it’s just plain annoying.

Moving on from there (which I was very glad to do as you can no doubt tell), I was able to solve the ‘bridge’ puzzle and adventure forward across the lake into another beautiful location, replete with mist and mossy rocks and even a rather fearsome creature that actually gave me a bit of a fright. I have to admit here that I have softened somewhat on my harsh criticisms of the creatures in Haven. This might be partially because in this latter part of the game there seems to have been a lot more care taken in integrating them into the backgrounds—they don’t seem nearly as ‘cut-out’ and their movements not so repetitive and stylized. The sound and music continue to be quite effective, leaving aside the rather naff jungle drums that appear again from time to time. Another puzzle here is difficult but not unassailable, but once again, the annoying mechanics of the game conspire to make it irritating. To make matters worse, this one has a time limit, which would not be too bad except for the fact that at the critical time I frequently duffed the ‘grasping’ of the one of the tone wheels—my cursor just slipped off the place it needed to be. These sorts of things make for very frustrating game play. The puzzle is tricky enough without this added annoyance.

From there, what appears to be the final clue in Haven is not too difficult to find (it’s rather a dud concept, by the way, but perhaps more of that later). There are some nice interactions with the monkey creatures, which left me a little disappointed that this had not come earlier in the game. It occurs to me that what Ubisoft could really use is someone to look at the emotional and storytelling curves in a game like this, much like a writer for a feature film. My feeling is that had this last sequence, or something like it, occurred when you first arrived in Haven, you would have a distinctly different emotional approach to what happened from then on.

Anyway, I digress. Back to Serenia, where there are fire spirits and waters spirits, wind spirits, bubbles, dandelions, fire orchids and some kind of balloon-like craft that drift across the distant hills. There is what appears to be a major puzzle involving the re-direction of channels of water, and the possibility of visiting the island of the priestesses across the lake. Serenia is a major achievement in convincing ‘world making’. There are some interactions with various priestesses which are effective enough, although some repetitive behaviour could easily have been curtailed I feel. But immersion in this world is complete and effective.

I note here that I was forced to turn off the ‘depth-of-field’ effect in Serenia because my system would simply not deal with it. I kept getting crashes or just incredibly slow screen updating. On consideration, the focus effect is unnecessary and really not very useful and aside from the fact that it is an impressive trick, does not add that much to the game experience.

Music in Serenia is appropriate and atmospheric.

More as it comes to hand.

Posted by universalhead at 2:17 PM

Friday, October 29, 2004

… And the opinion of your host …

This stupid game is driving me frickin’ insane!

Back to you Peter M.

Posted by universalhead at 3:21 PM | Comments (2)

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Guest review series continued: Myst IV

MystIV Peter Miller continues his guest review of the latest in the Myst saga, Myst IV: Revelation (Mac version). WARNING: SOME SPOILERS!

A few days on and I’m still enjoying Myst 4. I have now spent some time wandering around Spire, Haven and Serenia. Without spoiling too much, some further musings. One thing that occurred to me yesterday is that I’m playing the game with a very critical eye, and after thinking about why that was I came to the conclusion that this game is so good that its imperfections, when they appear, stand out in stark contrast to the rest of the game. Because this project is so well realised, it should be perfect. Or at least, some of the rough edges should have been sandpapered a little more.

A few examples by way of explanation: after a little exploration of Tomahna, I went through to Spire and was delighted to find myself in an original and engaging Myst world. Everything about it, from the craggy vertiginous staircase to the glowing crystalline floating rocks with their swarms of luminous fireflies, is wondrous. Ubisoft have understood a fundamental thing about the Myst experience, and that is that delight in the environment is as important as solving the little mysteries along the way. Spire is enigmatic, dramatic and beautifully executed. The puzzles are tricky (and in one case bereft of logic, or at least any I could see) but integrated appropriately. The musical score is engaging and mysterious and the ambient sound works very well.

My first disappointment came when I visited Haven. Now I hasten to say that I am being picky with these criticisms, but only because I think that a little more attention to these details could have elevated Revelation from a great game to sheer artistic genius. Haven’s jungle world is beautiful and lush. The designers have excelled themselves in conjuring an exotic and fantastic environment. The music is a little less than perfect in this world, with (as pointed out by the Headless Hollow illuminati) unfortunate faux ‘native drums’ a la Lion King being a little too focal in some areas. The sound ambiences are rather better, with mysterious sirens and wolf howls off in the distance, and all manner of unusual chattering wildlife. What really lets Haven down are the CG creatures that populate its wonderful scenery. It is almost as if the designers suddenly lost all their creativity in some late-night beer-and-pizza blowout. It’s not that the concept is not good—far from it. The creatures that browse in the swamp weed and clamber up through the trees are a great idea, it’s just that they are done poorly. I’m sure that what the designers have achieved is technically very clever; integrating 3D animals into the world in such a way that they appear to be actually there is quite impressive. But there are two major problems in my view: First, the creatures are for the most part daft. I wish people would avoid the compulsion, when creating alien life, to use the “what if we crossed a cow with a triceratops, gave it some wacky appendages, paint it mauve and made it walk on its hind legs” method. It never works. How about getting some biologists to advise you on what a browsing swamp creature might actually look like? And while I’m on the subject, never, never, never rip off another person’s alien creature: “hows about we cross one of those cute mogwai with a monkey?”—cheap and annoying. It’s not Gremlins it’s Myst and it deserves its own original and sophisticated creatures.

The second problem is that all the animals feel very ‘stuck-on’ despite their relation-to-the-player persistence. It’s a shame. It’s one of those things that drops you out of the reality of the world, rather than draws you in. It makes you aware that you are playing a computer game. Personally, I think it would have been preferable to have dropped these creatures entirely, and risked criticisms of the world feeling ‘empty’.

Serenia, on the other hand, has some fine ‘otherworldly’ life. Its Roger Dean influenced quasi-Mayan landscape is simply beautiful. I haven’t explored much here yet, but suffice to say that I found it intriguingly explorable and well worth the effort of solving the extremely annoying and badly executed bookshelf puzzle (I mean, come on guys—I knew how to solve the puzzle well before I could wade through the illegible and obtuse D’ni text renderings. That’s not good puzzle-setting; that’s just difficult game mechanics. And I had to use pencil and paper, which kind of defeats the whole concept of the photographic journal introduced in Myst 4.)

I re-iterate: my criticisms are minor in the scheme of the whole show. Myst 4 is a remarkable achievement. I strongly feel, though, that it is a pity that a final Quality Control pass was not done on the game and some of the messier elements whipped into shape. It would have been worth the extra wait. I’m up for testing of Myst 5 chaps. I’m a hard taskmaster, but your game will be better off for it.

Stay tuned!

Posted by universalhead at 10:22 AM

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Guest review series: Myst IV

MystIV Headless Hollow once again welcomes Peter Miller with the first in a series of guest reviews of the latest in the Myst saga, Myst IV: Revelation (Mac version). Go here for his review of the downloadable demo. Take it away Pete!

Well, first impressions of Myst 4: Revelation are that it might well live up to expectations. Even my very high expectations.

I was suspicious at first. The installer boots a frustrating command-line ‘Wizard’ that is so redolent of Windows that I felt that I might need to wash my hands after touching it. I would have thought that Ubisoft might have gone the extra few inches to make an OS X friendly installer, but I guess I should just be grateful that Revelation got to Mac in the first place. Anyway, it’s but a moment’s distaste and the installer did its thing without problems. Be warned though, a complete install takes in excess of 7 gig so you need plenty of space on your drive. There is a minimum install option which I assume may require swapping of the 2 DVDs which the game comes on.

The menu page is still rather cheap-looking. It seems kinda weird to me that it shouldn’t be a beautiful hi-rez illustration. It’s not as if it has to do much. The music here is the same lovely piece used in the demo.

Without spoiling things, starting the game moves you quickly into the story. There is the usual preamble from Atrus and a rather twee but bearable intro to the new world.

Then you get to see just how good the game mechanics are. As promised in the demo, everything is full of life and movement. There are beautiful lighting effects, sun, shadow, moving clouds, birds, insects, smoke, water; it’s all there. It is a joy to just move around this world and look. It reminds me of the first impression I had of Riven which is my favourite installment of the Myst saga.

There are still some ragged moments; on my PowerBook the synchronisation of dialogue in the movie clips was never right. Some of the transitions are a little bumpy and there is annoyingly long pause between most of them.

Music-wise, Jack Wall’s score is more evocative and better realised than Exile. It seems to have a greater emphasis on atmosphere, and a much wider palette of instrumentation. It feels folkier and more appropriate to the Myst ouvre than Exile’s rather more derivative offering. That’s not to say it doesn’t have drama—there are some great moments and I found myself getting quite caught up in the story at one point when I should have been hurrying off to keep an appointment. I think that can be taken as a very good sign. The music features quite a bit of vocal work too, which is a thoughtful musical reflection of the addition of more player/character interaction than in the previous titles.

The ambient sound is also nice—not quite as evocative or original as Riven but appropriate and well realised. I recommend that you play the game on a good sound system to get the best out of the beautiful sonic environment. There are some lovely little tricks that you might miss if you’re just relying on your Mac’s inbuilt speakers.

Thus far, I have encountered only a couple of the game’s puzzles, and they seem appropriate and clever. The story is simple but there is already some subtext: SPOILER FOLLOWS! (For instance, at one point Yeesha shows you a pendant and talks about what it can do. She complains that Atrus doesn’t take it seriously when it shows her ‘visions’ but that her brothers do… Wait a minute. Her brothers? Sirrus and Achenar? Aren’t they supposed to be imprisoned and isolated on other worlds… and she has spoken to them? That doesn’t bode well… )

There’s also another engaging feature in this game—there is humour! I laughed out loud a few times, once at some clever psychological manipulation (oops, I probably shouldn’t have opened that box… ) and another time at a pretty obvious reaction (well, what do you think happens if you poke your finger into an electrical generator?).

Some warnings. A friend who is running the game on a PowerBook with a slightly slower video card than mine doesn’t have access to the interactive water effects, nor to some of the ‘immersive’ effects (the moving trees and plants and the depth-of-field effect for instance). The same thing happens on my G4 and Cinema display. On that machine, even at the minimum resolution there are also many graphic anomalies such as visible mattes, image tearing, strange glitches and so forth. So you need a pretty fast video card to make the best of the game.

So, first impressions are good. More as it comes to hand.

Posted by universalhead at 1:05 PM