Computer Games Magazine 196 by Paul Travaglino

BURNING CRUSADE • EMPIRE EARTH III

APRIL 2007 | ISSUE 196 www.cgonline.com

GEFORCE 8800GTS 320MB • THE PEOPLE VS. DEREK SMART • LIVE FOR VISTA

CONTENTS April 2007 | Issue 196

cover story 36 Brave New World

Can a first-person shooter with a persistent world be worth a monthly subscription fee? Huxley certainly hopes so. By Tom Chick

44 The People vs. Derek Smart

As the Battlecruiser saga reaches its end, is its developer the most hated man in gaming? Or is he the most misunderstood? You say you’ve never even heard of this game, or the stories about its creator? Read on…. By Julian Murdoch

36 44

48 Bustin’ Punks

There’s an ongoing battle being fought in gaming between those who cheat and those who try to stop them. Insiders from both sides of the battle dish on the covert world within the gamer community By Erica Van Ostrand

featured 16 It’s Not All in Your Head

The Shivering Isles expansion for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion makes it a little crazier. By Troy S. Goodfellow

28 Ad It Up

In-game advertising isn’t new; it’s been around for years. When you consider its history and the technology that’s moved it to the forefront of gaming today, it’s obvious we’ve reached a perfect storm of annoyance By Lara Crigger

58 Return of the King

Blizzard finally releases The Burning Crusade, and with it shows again why World of WarCraft is the biggest game in the world By Steve Bauman

72 Mighty Mini

Shuttle’s SD37P2 delivers big small performance By Paul Jastrzebski

78 Dueling for Profit

You may think dueling in front of Orgrimmar or Ironforge is pointless. But for some, the profit potential is too great to pass up. By Erica Van Ostrand

84 Modding to Oblivion

78 2 Computer Games | April 2007

If you want to expand Oblivion beyond oblivion—how existential—you can make Cyrodiil bigger and better with these mods By Brett Todd

CONTENTS

w w w.cgonline.com

EDITORIAL Editor-in-Chief

departments 12 14 28 70

Rebound Speak Out Newswire Your Other Systems

incoming 16 20 22 24 25 25 25 26 27

Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle Empire Earth III Sacred 2 Ancient Wars Sparta Infernal Made Man Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific Armada Online

reviews 58 62 64 66 68 69 69 69 71

World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade Star Trek Legacy Europa Universalis III Jade Empire Sam & Max: The Mole, The Mob, and the Meatball Civil War Campaigns: Vicksburg Panzer Campaigns: Minsk ’44 Napoleonic Battles: Jena-Auerstadt The Shield

hardware 72 76 77

Shuttle SD37P2 XFX GeForce 8800GTS 320MB AMD Athlon 6000+

online 80

Road to Nowhere

mod & ends 92 93 94 95

Out of the Box Cardboard Corner Mod Squads Alt.Games

insider 8

Upfront It’s Your Fault By Steve Bauman

Random Incoherence To Be Continued By Kelly Wand

Steve Bauman sbauman@cgonline.com

Contributing Editors Margot Harrison Tiffany Martin Online Editor Jonathan Trevisani

ART/PRODUCTION Associate Art Director Scott Wild swild@cgonline.com

Graphic Designer Ryan Cohen Web Master Damien Huze

ADVERTISING CONTACTS Advertising Director Jayson Dubin (954) 769–5916 jdubin@cgonline.com

Western Sales Manager Jeff Lubetkin (818) 222–7516 jlubetkin@cgonline.com

Account Executive Melinda Pino (954) 769–5928 mpino@cgonline.com

Three Finger Salute Ding Ding By Tom Chick Chairman & CEO Michael Egan President Edward Cespedes President & Publisher Jayson Dubin Associate Publisher Liz Halgas Comptroller Bruce Jones Marketing Manager Amy Greenfeig Marketing Coordinator Jay Suarez

demo disk Avast! Sail the high seas and channel your inner pirate with the scurvy demo of Tortuga: Two Treasures. Also this month: Exercise your war and diplomacy muscles with Europa Universalis III, and be totally stoked over Stoked Rider: Alaska Alien. And don’t forget to check out those wallpapers.

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INSTRUCTIONS The disc should autoplay once placed in your CD-ROM. If it does not, double-click on CGCD.EXE to launch the interface. If you have a defective CD-ROM, a replacement can be obtained by sending the original to: Computer Games, ATTN: CD Replacement, 65 Millet St. Richmond, VT 05477.

4 Computer Games | April 2007

Distributor: Curtis Circulation Co. (201) 634–7400 Reprints available. Foreign reprint rights available. Editorial Offices: 65 Millet Street, Suite 203, Richmond, VT 05477 PH: (802) 434–3060 FAX: (802) 434–6493 editor@cgonline.com © 2007 Strategy Plus, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. Unsolicited submissions become the property of Strategy Plus, Inc. If you wish to make a submission, please contact the editors.

UPFRONT

It’s Your Fault I “There’s nothing I like better than sipping a nice Coca-Cola as I adventure in the world of Outland.”

8 Computer Games | April 2007

t’s your fault that a small, plucky upstart like Electronic Arts can’t make money. Or, to put it more accurately, you’re the reason companies like EA can’t make more money, as most of the big players in the game industry are currently in the black. Still, all of these companies will soon go broke— and by “broke,” they mean “continuing to have record years thanks to the overall strong health of the industry”—because you demand that games have high production values. You demand expensive licenses. You demand name-brand voice actors. You demand fancy cinematics. You demand wall-to-wall TV commercials. You demand expensive retail promotions. You demand expensive offices in San Francisco. You demand millionaire CEOs. Quit screwing up games, you. Production costs are out of control, people throughout the industry complain, and the only way to save gaming is through the wonder that is the in-game advertisement. Paying $60 for six hours of mediocre entertainment and jump puzzles isn’t enough; you need to give more to billiondollar corporations. You need to give up your eyeballs, too. And maybe a kidney somewhere down the road. In-game advertising isn’t exactly new, as you can read in our “Ad It Up” feature on page 28. While it’s true that game development costs are always increasing—those huge launch parties and lavish press events don’t pay for themselves—so are the overall numbers of gamers worldwide. The risks are higher, but so are the potential rewards. In the case of EA, we’re talking about a multi-billion-dollar company with billions in cash reserves. It’s a wee bit hard to swallow the idea that the smart people who work there can’t figure out how to profit from the economics of game production—incidentally, the same economics that made EA a success in the first place—without shoving advertising down our throats. One company that hasn’t been whining about the economics of game development is another plucky upstart, Blizzard Entertainment. The company managed to sell 1.5 million copies of its expansion for World of WarCraft, The Burning Crusade (see page 58). In a day. Granted, Blizzard probably spent all of that cash it earned on the development of the world of Outland and the creation of the two new races; after all, the hundreds of artists

by Steve Bauman

that make your Draenei Shaman do the “Tunak Tunak Tun” dance don’t come cheap. Can you imagine how much revenue Blizzard is missing out on by not including in-game ads in the world of World of WarCraft? There’s nothing I like better than sipping a nice Coca-Cola as I adventure in the world of Outland. So why not put up some billboards in the coliseum in Hellfire Peninsula to remind me of my need for carbonated corn syrup? It’s corporate synergy at its most exciting! I’m positively giddy at the possibilities! Or nauseated— there’s a fine line between the two. Now, can you imagine the reaction from players if Blizzard ever decided to add in-game ads? The sheer quantity of angry blog and message-board posts would clog up most of the tubes that compose the Internet in minutes. Some people might even stop playing in protest… for a few days, at least. As a gamer, I don’t care whether EA or Ubisoft or Microsoft or Blizzard or any other publisher is profitable. I might feel different if I were a shareholder, or if I found out that each company was losing money and the industry was headed for the sort of widespread crash that befell it in the go-go ’80s. But the runaway success of this past Christmas— largely thanks to Nintendo, with the Wii and DS, and to Sony for the PS2, not the PS3—says otherwise. Don’t complain about costs when you’re recording record revenues and profits. You’re starting to sound like Major League Baseball owners, who whine and whine and whine about revenue disparities, then sign mediocre starting pitchers to five-year/$55 million contracts. But I understand. The money is there, and you can’t help yourselves. Fine. If you must use ingame ads, use them in ways that make sense. Put them in free demos; that’s a perfect trade-off. If I want to play a demo version of Battlefield 2142, I have no issue with staring at advertisements between matches or seeing them on billboards in the game itself. I can wrap my brain around ads’ offsetting the costs involved in operating a “free” game, even when the game itself is an ad for the pay version. But if you’re going to make money selling my eyeballs without passing some sort of savings on to me, I object. It’s an insult to put in-game ads in a $60 game, when there are ad-free ones for the same price. Give me cheaper games, or give my eyeballs a rest. ■

REBOUND Lisa,” as he puts it. Well said, Brett. And keep the Cardboard Corner coming, too. Dauntless Dad I really enjoyed the “Most Anticipated Games of 2007” article. I can’t wait to try some of those out in 2008! Jeffrey Howe My, aren’t we cynical about release dates. –ed

Hacking the System

Most Anticipated Games of 2007 After reading through your Most Anticipated Games of 2007, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not a gamer. There wasn’t a single title in that list that piqued my interest. Sigh. It looks like another year of playing Neverwinter Nights mods and randomly generated Combat Mission scenarios lies ahead. I really enjoyed Brett Todd’s article, “Baldur’s Gate Forever.” I tend to share his view of mods for quality, story-driven RPGs like the Baldur’s Gate series… nice. But mucking around with the original content of such games makes me feel like someone’s “painting a new smile on the Mona

Regarding the February “Applied Game Theory” column: Damn! All that education, all those years ago. What a waste. If only there had been World of WarCraft back then. Just think: “WoW 101.” Doctoral “WoW.” A Ph.D in “WoW”! I could’ve been president with those credentials. We can all sleep better knowing that in the future our social, spiritual, and financial leaders will have a thorough knowledge of World of WarCraft. Donald Bryant

“Just think: ‘WoW 101.’ A Ph.D in ‘WoW’! I could’ve been president with those credentials.” Double Agent Man Just some comments on the review of Splinter Cell Double Agent in the February issue. The

Mad-Mart

I played EverQuest II for a while a year ago, and decided to look at the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. I found two ways to get it. One is to buy it at a store for $40, in which case it comes with the original game, two other expansions, a printed map, and an in-game item. The other way is to buy it online at Sony, in which case it costs the same $40 without any of the extra stuff. I’ve seen other places where games are sold online. Almost invariably, they’re sold at full retail price (while stores like Amazon often sell the boxed version of the game at a discount), naturally come with less stuff (since everything is electronic), and sometimes with extra protection, making it inconvenient to move them to another computer. Why do publishers have to do this? I can’t see a lot of people paying the full price for an inferior product, and since it seems to me that the actual cost of the download is a lot less than that of the boxed product, the profit should be significantly higher. (In particular for a game like EQ2, where expansions are merely product keys, and no extra data is downloaded.) I’d love to hear what the publishers have to say about this. Eyal Teler Publishers can’t price direct downloads lower than boxed games; otherwise Mr. Wal-Mart will get mighty pissed off. –ed

12 Computer Games | April 2007

game’s positive attributes were indeed highlighted (and rightfully so, as it does deliver some intense gaming moments). But what about the low points? I’m usually not one to refer to sites like GameRankings or MetaCritic, but the general consensus is that the PC version of SCDA is, at many times, a sloppy mess. I think it reasonable to assume the majority of players were unable to experience the entire game at an acceptable level, without having to consult the Internet for quick fixes... from little things that niggle at you, like certain unbindable keys, to real showstoppers, such as safes that can’t be opened. And all the while experiencing general, random crash-to-desktops. Did the reviewer not encounter some of game’s legitimate issues? Or were they encountered and just not mentioned? In all honesty, I question the reviewer’s credibility, for the game’s plot synopsis is erroneous early on; it is Sam Fisher’s daughter that dies after the first mission, not his son.

This same daughter was a major part of this game’s predecessor, Chaos Theory, with which hopefully the reviewer is familiar. Razorguts Said reviewer is an idiot for mixing up two plot points: the death of a family member, and the death of a team member in the first mission. (And by “reviewer,” I mean “me.”) As for the other issues, no crashes here, and all safes opened fine (though I used a 360 controller to open them, as it was more precise than the mouse). –ed

Random Rant You know what pisses me off? It may sound stupid, but I get a little upset when I purchase a $50 game and the manufacturers try to save a couple of cents by not including a case to protect the CD or DVD. To those companies who ship their product with cases, thank you. To the companies that don’t, I will hopefully see your pathetic, penny-pinching, releasing-games-beforethey-are-ready, screw-your-customers asses in the bowels of Hades. Put the damn cases with the games. I hate you. TM Puna

REBOUND

SPEAKOUT

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD

Average Gamers Please Step Forward By A.B. Harris

ccording to the Entertainment Software Association, I’m the average gamer. I’m a male head-of-household professional in my early 30s, and I play games almost eight hours a week. I even fit some of the ESA’s more obscure data, such as “devoting more than triple the amount of time spent playing games each week to exercising… creative endeavors… [and] cultural activities,” as well as “read[ing] books or daily newspapers on a regular basis.” Is this sufficiently average? How about—hold on to your hats—“exhibit a high level of interest in current events… [and] vote in most of the elections for which they are eligible”? That’s me, the ESA’s poster child for gaming. So why is it that, when I attempt a nonpartisan appraisal of my alleged brethren in the gaming populace at large, I feel so different? So alone? Consider the recent next-generation console launches: All across the country myriad gamers queued up outside their favorite big-box retailers, sometimes up to a week in advance. Surely within this dedicated group, I thought to myself, I’d find a generous sampling of the average gamer. But in the amateur, shaky-cam event coverage, I saw not professional early30s heads of household, but a motley group of Mountain Dew-

on the gaming press itself. Certainly our industry has a responsibility to represent the average gamer, to be able to define its veritable consumer base? Or so one would think! But, after scrutinizing game magazine advertisements and fan forums, gamer interviews and reviews, I found no solace in what I discovered. Aside from occasional clever advertisements and infrequent constructive commentary, I found brainless ads and immature journalism. Sex and violence? Check. Tasteless banter? You bet. Shallow visual appeal? All present and accounted for. A sophisticated and insightful manner? Bueller? Bueller? Years ago, when the videogaming industry was in its infancy, the brainless ads and immature journalism might have been more acceptable, for all young industries have a learning curve. More importantly, the average gamer certainly wasn’t the professional, early-30s head of household, but was more likely to be a teenage technology enthusiast that the mainstream would deem a “nerd.” But this is the year 2007, not 1982. Within that quarter-century, this industry has seen an untold degree of technological evolution, surpassing anything before. More than ever, we have seemingly limitless options in the games available to us. We are closer than ever to creating truly virtual worlds that permit us to indulge the desire for personal experiences impossible in real life. And as time goes on, this evolution will assuredly continue unabated. But some perplexing questions remain: If gaming has evolved to such a great degree, why have the culture surrounding gaming and the mainstream’s opinion of that culture remained inert? And if indeed our industry’s culture is stagnant or, worse yet, actually devolving, who exactly is to blame? Furthermore, what steps can be taken to rectify the debasement? I alone can offer no solid answers to the above inquiries. Nor can the gaming magazines, journalists, and marketers; they simply cater to the perceived gamer demographic, the “average” gamer. And what about the ESA’s gamer profile? Although my findings suggest an entirely different profile, I still maintain the ESA in high regard. In fact, I consider their Game Player Data to be a paradigm to which we should all aspire. Dear friends, consider this a call to arms to demonstrate to not only our fellow gamers but also the general public that we are far more credible and intelligent than our perceived demographic suggests. Consider this a plea for us to serve as ambassadors, whether among our own or in foreign company. To maintain our awareness of gaming academia and share this knowledge with non-gamers. To live up to our average gamer profile. As a group of responsible gamers, we can change the mainstream.

“If gaming has evolved to such a great degree, why has the culture surrounding it remained inert?” addicted juveniles who had somehow shirked life’s responsibilities for a week-long urban camp-out. Wondering whether my initial judgment was biased, I watched on, as people in line were briefly interviewed. Unsettling snatches of conversation, tantamount to leetspeak, confirmed my fears—I was certainly not a member of this stratum of the population, be they average gamers or potential eBay sellers. Dumbfounded, I silently asked where exactly the ESA had gathered its data. Perhaps it was merely pandering to the mainstream press and its portrayal of gaming. But this assertion was promptly nullified, for I knew all too well that the plebeian view of gaming is rife with Hot Coffee-style shenanigans and ghastly tales of game-induced violence. Games are, according to mainstream media and the general public, a sordid and seedy form of entertainment, debauching our youth with sex and violence—which is a far cry from what the ESA suggests. I therefore shifted my attention away from the mainstream to focus

Do you have something to say? So say it! Send all topics and/or completed articles of no more than 800 words to editor@cgonline.com. Articles may be edited for space, or because we want to justify our existence by chopping your piece into little bits.

INCOMING

16 Computer Games | April 2007

HANDS-ON

It’s Not All in Your Head The Shivering Isles expansion for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion makes it a little crazier

“If Satan had a butler, he’d look a lot like Haskill, Lord Chamberlain of the Shivering Isles.“

f Satan had a butler, he’d look a lot like Haskill, Lord Chamberlain of the Shivering Isles. Big bald head. Red shirt. Giant gold necklace. Lots of sarcasm and snarky putdowns. So when he asks you to sit down, you do it, because you know cutting his head off isn’t an option. Then, once you agree to do what he has asked, DEVELOPER Bethesda the entire room explodes in a cloud of PUBLISHER Bethesda/2K butterflies. RELEASE DATE Spring 2007 “That’s my favorite part,” says Mark Nelson, the lead developer on Shivering Isles, the new expansion to Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. “Our special effects guys did a great job throughout the game, but the butterflies are my favorite.” The flurry of butterflies happens at the very beginning of the Shivering Isles campaign, so this should ring an alarm. If this is the coolest thing you’ll see, why continue? Probably because everyone has a different definition of “cool,” and Bethesda is filling this expansion with characters, art, and quests that take you to an unforgettable realm of madness. There’s cool enough to spare. The Shivering Isles are the planar realm of Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness. His kingdom is under attack from forces that will transform his not-quite-peaceable land into something that could transform him, too. And he doesn’t like change. Hopefully, Oblivion players do, however, because Shivering Isles is a clear break with the more traditional fantasy stuff of the core game. Rolling hills of goblins and limpid pools of mud crabs are replaced by a continent divided down the middle and populated by skinned hounds, nasty insects, and the mysterious Knights of Order, who have been sent to bring Sheogorath to his knees. The continental divide reflects the mad kingdom’s split personality. One half is Mania, a world of artistic eccentricities and peculiar obsessive-compulsive behaviors. The other half is Dementia, which is darker, seedier, and a little more disturbing. In short, it’s like living in Vincent Van Gogh’s brain. One half paints, the other half sends ears in a box. Nelson says that the psychological aspects of the kingdom are reflected everywhere. “Both sides of the Isles have the same wildlife, but they look different. An insect in Mania, for example, will be brightly colored where the Dementia version is all gray.” Both are dangerous, though, and will kill you on sight. Just because Mania is bright and shiny doesn’t mean it’s safer. Using madness as a theme also let the voiceover team create some truly unusual NPCs. Walking through the towns, Nelson provides colorful commentary. “That one’s a raving egomaniac.” “She’s narcoleptic.”“This woman’s a bit of a control freak.” Every character in the land of the mad has something a little off about them. “It really helps the voice actors get into a character when you can tell them that they should sound really depressed or

cgonline.com

INCOMING

“It’s like living in Vincent Van Gogh’s brain. One half paints, the other half sends ears in a box.“

paranoid. It keeps the characters from all being bland and generic,” says Nelson. Many of the quests will be related to these various neuroses and psychoses, so you can help find a claustrophobe a safe place to sleep outdoors, or collect specimens for a compulsive who’s writing an encyclopedia of everything. This is all background to a larger plot involving something called The Greymarch, a divine threat to all Sheogorath holds dear. He needs a mortal champion to beat back the Knights of Order and protect the insanity that means so much to him. Right-hand man Haskill will give you your marching orders, slowly warming to you as you do his lordship’s bidding. This is the path to the strongest weapons, and the most troubling sights, as entire towns are ransacked and giant crystal spires erupt from the ground. The realm of madness is certainly more amusing than the world of Oblivion. The border town is called Passwall, in a tribute to an overpowered spell of Elder Scrolls past. There’s a small quest that’s an homage to the classic Dungeon Keeper games: Adventurers pouring through the gate to pillage the realm are proving to be a nuisance, and only the Prince’s champion can stop them. Other quests have you playing Igor to a creepy Frankenstein type, and stocking (or robbing) a museum. Not only will the quests have multiple solutions, but many are very involved. Nelson says there is a 50:50 ratio of main quest to side quests, but a lot of the main quest is intricate, with multiple steps to take on the way through the story.

18 Computer Games | April 2007

Thanks to the scaling of enemy difficulty, there is no need to hang on to that old character you saved from the original game, either. Any level of character can jump straight through the portal to Wacky Land and have adventures. Of course, better equipment will make you more of a menace to the creatures you encounter, but there’s lots of new loot in the Isles. New lands mean new flora for you to practice your alchemy on, and super-rare “matrix” boxes can be turned into powerful weapons with the right skills and tools. “There’s, like, a 0.5% drop rate for a matrix,” says Nelson, just as a Grummite coughs one up (completely unscripted, he assures). “I never get them, and I’ve played through a lot.” Some people are just lucky. But, even with a drop rate that low, if you kill enough things it eventually has to come out, right? Shivering Isles looks to be more of the same in a very different place; all the fun physics, odd-looking faces, and compelling quests in a land where you are the only sane person. The geography is tighter (fewer plains and more cliffs), so it feels like there’s less to explore, even as it’s more convincing to the mind’s eye. Bethesda has done its best not to collide with any of the mods out there (“We are very conscious of the mod-making community,” says Nelson), so there seem to be no worries on that front. Shivering Isles—the first Elder Scrolls to have more than a single word in the title—hits store shelves later this spring. –Alex Handy

INCOMING FIRST LOOK

Runaway: The Dream Of the Turtle A

dventure games often start with just a bad idea. Not a bad idea of the game developers, but rather a bad idea of the characters. Of course, if they didn’t do something incredibly stupid, there’d be no game. This holds true for Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle. In the case of beach DEVELOPER Pendulo Studios bum Brian Basco— PUBLISHER CDV that’s you—he seems RELEASE DATE to let something beSpring 2007 sides his brain do most of his thinking. How else can you explain how he ends up in these horrible situations, where he has to continually save his girlfriend Gina Timmins, a former “dancer,” who is also known as the “trouble magnet?” The Dream of the Turtle starts out in Hawaii, and apparently soaking in the sun isn’t enough for one-time stripper… dancer Gina. So the two lovebirds take a day trip to an abandoned island, which is about as smart as going to that abandoned theme park, kids. After a plane crash, you’re in for a six-chapter adventure that’s a mix of Curse of Monkey Island and FarCry, where, as with the show Lost, you’ll find as many questions as answers. The game, with its Saturday morninginspired, cel-shaded graphics, features more than 100 unique locations, ranging from a secret military base to a Tiki Temple. The adventure promises a fair share of pixel hunting, but the developers stress that the linear story won’t let you get too far ahead if you miss that all-important item. You’ll interact with more than 30 characters along the way, and you may even see an homage to Monkey Island. It may involve a pirate ship. Publisher CDV is known for its strategy and war games and is moving in a new direction with Runaway. Adventure game fans may want to follow it this spring. –Peter Suciu

20 Computer Games | April 2007

INCOMING

FIRST LOOK

Empire Earth III “When Vivendi told us they didn’t want another game like Empire Earth II, we were happy because we didn’t want to do one,” says Mad Doc Software’s Matt Nordhaus, project director of Empire Earth III. He’s adamant that the next game in the series should live up to its grandiose name. DEVELOPER Mad Doc Software Empire Earth is like the frustrated little PUBLISHER Sierra brother of historical real-time strategy RELEASE DATE Fall 2007 games. No matter how big it gets (Stone Age to Mech Age!) or how many interesting changes it makes to its gameplay (War Planner! Citizen Manager!), there’s always someone else who pulled off that feature a little better and a little sooner. Throughout the studio, there’s a clear sense that, as well received as it was, something went askew in Empire Earth II. “It may sound great to look at a game and see 15 factions or something, but when they’re all pretty much the same, it’s not very interesting,” says Albert Meranda, one of Empire Earth III’s designers. “It’s the same with techs. You get a slightly different

22 Computer Games | April 2007

swordsman when you Age up, or can get gold just a little bit faster. We wanted to get away from that.” Empire Earth III is a radical change from the kitchen-sink spreadsheet approach of its sprawling predecessors. For starters, there are only three factions—Western, Eastern, and Middle Eastern— and each has a unique tech tree and units, as well as a single unique global power. “You can see it in how they build buildings,” explains designer John Cataldo. “The West is your default. You need builder units to get your buildings up. The East can use infantry to build structures. All of the Middle East buildings are produced by the city center and are mobile, too.” Each of the three factions can follow different paths, however. “You might focus on Western infantry where someone else focuses on Western cavalry,” says Meranda. But staying on one military path doesn’t preclude you from being a threat. “The rock-paperscissors is a little more flexible. So if you aren’t working on siege units, you can get fire arrows instead to attack buildings. They aren’t as effective, but it’s an option.” Cataldo and Meranda are very aware that they are deviating from the traditional RTS model. “We wanted to get away from having to manage 50 peons to gather resources,” Meranda says. “So we took the territory system from Empire Earth II and adapted it. Each territory can produce either raw materials, population, or wealth. It adds geography to your planning. Instead of building peons, you build a warehouse and it collects the resources. You can add workers to the warehouse, but they are working in the warehouse, so you don’t have to manage them.”

But this change goes even deeper, Cataldo says. “Even if we have fewer resources, there is still a lot of gameplay going on. Some raw materials, like lumber, can be collected fast but run out more quickly. Stone is the opposite. It’ll last much longer, but you’ll get it at a slower rate.” This addition-by-subtraction attitude permeates the RTS level of the game. Air power has been simplified and the naval game focused on managing fewer ships. All this has been done in the hope that every decision you make will be an important one. The big changes are in the campaign game. “We didn’t want to do scenarios again,” says Cataldo, “where you might play it once and never touch it again.” So, to put the empire and Earth back in Empire Earth, Mad Doc has introduced a global map that you conquer region by region, turn by turn. As you move across the planet, you may be forced to fight a traditional RTS battle. But this isn’t the straight line from other area-based conquest campaigns (like those in Battle for Middle-earth II or Rise of Nations). You may unlock optional quests that give you alternative routes to victory. Nordhaus demonstrates a rescue-the-princess quest. Each region has native cities that may ignore you or impede you. “One village has captured the daughter of another chief. So you can choose to save her.” He stops to build a base and raise an army. “But you could just ignore the quest and kill everyone.” There are about 100 quests, each one contingent on whatever is going on in the game at that moment. “They are triggered by region, by technology, or by whatever assets you have,” Nordhaus says. “So you might not see all the quests for a while.”

Specialization also separates this Risk-like overlay from others you have seen. Territories can be set to economic or military modes, limiting what they can provide in a turn. In a nod to gameplay mechanics lifted from the boardgame world, you can target enemy territories with special powers. Play a coup card, and watch an enemy army convert to your side. Each of the three factions has one unique power at the end of the tech tree, the single nod to conformity among the three sides. “We wanted more, but they are hard to balance,” says Cataldo. “You don’t want to fill the powers with things no one ever uses.” The designers have high hopes for the diplomatic side of the campaign. They entered with only one rule. “No backstabbing,” laughs Cataldo. “We hate it when the AI makes an alliance and then attacks you in a couple of turns for no good reason.” Mad Doc is implementing a relationship meter that tracks the profitability of your international trade, how well you have kept your word, and whether you have similar interests. “If you like cavalry, another cavalry-heavy nation might think of you as a brother-inarms.” And there’s always the option of just avoiding the computer and playing against your friends. Though there are no random regional maps, you can generate a new world that is cobbled from the maps designed by Mad Doc’s art team. Will this be the game that moves the Empire Earth series into the top tier of RTS titles? It’s much too soon to tell. But Mad Doc is doing all it can to make you sit up and notice it has lots of new ideas for a genre that’s moving as fast as its innovation will allow. –Troy S. Goodfellow

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INCOMING FIRST LOOK

Sacred 2 T

he original Sacred came out in 2004 and received mostly positive reviews. Over the last three years, its reputation has actually inDEVELOPER/PUBLISHER creased; it was Ascaron Entertainment initially dismissed RELEASE DATE 2008 by many as a simple Diablo clone. Which it was. But it happened to be a better-than-average Diablo clone. The sequel, cleverly called Sacred 2 at this point, isn’t due until 2008. But it’s expanding elements of the first game that people dug—an open-ended gaming world, co-op and competitive multiplayer, plus the usual quests, combat, and loot—and adding new elements. According to Ascaron, the company has “given special consideration” to feedback from fans of the original. Sacred 2 will include two separate campaigns set in the world of Ancaria: Light and Shadow. The storyline is being written by Bob Bates, who’s well known to adventure game fans for his work on games from Infocom and his founding of Legend Entertainment. Players will have a choice of eight unique characters to play, though two of them are locked to the path of light or shadow. (The others can choose between the two paths.) Each character will have its own unique fighting style and start in its own unique area of the world. It remains to be seen whether Sacred 2 will improve on the somewhat middling combat found in the original. But with over 1.6 million copies of the original sold worldwide, Sacred 2 won’t have to be that much better to be an even bigger hit.

24 Computer Games | April 2007

Made Man

DEVELOPER Fund4Games PUBLISHER Aspyr RELEASE DATE Spring 2007

t’s finally come to this: One of the hooks for the third-person action game Made Man—not to be confused with “Man Made” or “Mankind” or “Maid in Manhattan”—is that it’s being created with the assistance of “mafia experts” to deliver “the most realistic organized crime story to hit the interactive realm.” (This apparently assumes that running through levels shooting people is “realistic.”) What developer Fund4Games means is that it’s hired David Fisher, author of Joey the Hit Man: The Autobiography of a Mafia Killer and The Good Guys, to assist with the narrative. The game tells the story of one Joey Verola as he exits the jungles of Vietnam and makes his way through the New York underworld. Accompanying Joey on his journey are some licensed music, which “immerses the gamer deeper into the time periods,” and the tools of his trade (i.e., over 25 guns). Look for it to bust a cap in stores this spring.

Ancient Wars: Sparta DEVELOPER World Forge PUBLISHER PlayLogic/Eidos RELEASE DATE Spring 2007

Infernal

DEVELOPER Metropolis PUBLISHER PlayLogic/Eidos RELEASE DATE Spring 2007

ublisher Eidos Interactive has scavenged the virtual underbelly of the European software industry to uncover Ancient Wars: Sparta two upcoming games: Ancient Wars: Sparta and Infernal. Ancient Wars: Sparta is an Age of Empires-style real-time strategy game from Russian developer World Forge. It’s set in the Mediterranean between 500 and 450 BC and lets you take charge of any of three unique races: the Spartans, Egyptians, or Persians. There’s little question that it looks a whole lot like Ensemble’s Age of Empires series, with a dash of that StarCraft “three unique sides” flavor. But the big question mark is whether it can match the polish of either of those games. Infernal was formerly unknown by the slightly more exotic but needlessly colon-ed name Diabolique: License to Sin. This interesting-sounding action game from Polish developer Metropolis Software gives you nice battles between Heaven and Hell. You start on the EtherLight side, which does the good work, but are fired and stripped of your powers. The Abyss, from the dark side, comes to your aid, and you make the switch from agent of nice to agent of not-so-nice. At that point, you’re running around levels shooting people and casting some kind of magic spells. God’s going Infernal to be pissed.

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INCOMING

That bubbling sound you hear is hundreds of drowning Japanese sailors.

a small room with games journalists, leaving only two days for the pair to explore the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area. But, with less than 48 hours left in America, Dimitrescu and Manea decided—actually, demanded—that they be taken to visit the USS Pampanito and the USS Hornet. The former is a World War IIera submarine docked near the touristy story helps convey just how into naval Pier 39; the latter is the famous aircraft warfare the Romanian developers becarrier that launched the Doolittle raids hind Silent Hunter 4 are. Dan Dimitrescu on Tokyo. and Ioan Manea, the lead game designer So fear not, sub-heads. Silent and lead programmer, DEVELOPER/PUBLISHER Ubisoft Hunter 4 appears to be in good respectively, both flew RELEASE DATE March 2007 hands. to San Francisco to This time out of port, online show their work to the players can man American subs or gaming press. It was the first time either Japanese destroyers. Destroyer captains man had been to America. The pair were will wield mouse-controlled gun turrets terribly jet-lagged when they arrived on a and the dreaded depth charge. While a Thursday night, a problem that would silent running sub is tough to find, if it’s only be compounded by an 18-hour flight lurking just below the surface, destroyer home three days later. Friday was spent in FIRST LOOK

Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific A

26 Computer Games | April 2007

pilots can spot it. In single-player, the world of Silent Hunter 4 is a dynamic and fully realized Earth. If you’re feeling frisky, you can flout your orders entirely and go for a cruise around the world, because the entire globe is modeled. As Dimitrescu likes to point out, “In this game, there is only one map.” This is particularly good news for mod makers, who will most likely add the German subs that aren’t in the game. Silent Hunter 4 models only the Pacific conflict in its campaign and mission modes, but it’s the entire conflict. Many of the battles demo-ed at Ubisoft headquarters were just that: battles. For example, the battle of Leyte Gulf was showcased. In that battle, your sub will be just one of the many ships preparing the waters for an invasion force. Patrol missions, by contrast, are full of vast, empty stretches of ocean, punctu-

NEWSBRIEFS

Armada Online DEVELOPER EvStream URL armada-online.com

dmit it, World of WarCraft players: Wouldn’t it be easier just to type “/follow partyleader” and have the computer do everything for you? When you get right down to it, most of the gameplay in Crafting is the fastest and cheapest way to improve your ship. MMOs is formulaic, and Unfortunately, it’s also the most difficult skill to level up. it could easily be taken care of by an automatic enemy targeter and a well-heeled party leader. While Armada Online is only in alpha, it’s already the only MMO you don’t have to be near to play. This space RPG is controlled with the mouse, and the venerable right mouse button is your best friend. That’s the one that starts you following a target. Right-click on someone who’s exploring the outer reaches of space, and you’ve become another ship in their armada. All of the attacks can be automatically triggered, and they focus on whatever baddies are nearby. So the game can basically play itself without your input. Of course, Armada Online is also a straight MMO played from an overhead perspective, with levels, special powers, upgrades, and PvP. And it’s the last one that’s the real draw. Needless to say, going zombie in PvP isn’t exactly advisable, and it’s the only real reason to leave your computer running Armada all day while you’re at work. Its PvP is similar to that of the classic WarCraft III mod Defense of the Ancients. Play revolves around control points that dot the map. Players conquer control points and buy upgrades that dramatically improve their performance, if only for the rest of the PvP round. These upgrades mean that a level 1 player can compete with level 36 ships after some well-placed upgrades. At this stage of its development, Armada only has a few starter areas. But there are always players online and exploring, so you can chase down space crabs as the member of an armada today. –AH

ated by the tense minutes that follow the spotting of black marks on the horizon. Thank Neptune there’s a time-compression button, because it’s possible to play out these lengthy forays into the deep second by second, hour by hour. Everything in this big blue ocean is randomly positioned, according to Dimitrescu. Start up a new patrol, and you never know what you’ll find or where you’ll find it. You may be ordered to the scene of a finished battle to pick up some stranded sailors in lifeboats. Or perhaps you’ll be sent to photograph some beaches in the Philippines, or just to hunt for some Japanese convoys. On board your sub, you’ll have to control your men as effectively as you control your rig. They’re all individual characters that can learn from effective commanders and will die if their compartments are flooded. Moving and

managing your crew is essential to maintaining a properly functioning sub; it’s particularly vital to have a well-managed damage control team. The first thing you’ll notice when firing up the game for the first time is how it models water. Sure, every game development team claims theirs is prettier than anyone else’s. But the water in Silent Hunter 4 churns and moves like a real ocean, with wake, whitecaps, and the expected translucency. Indeed, these added effects may put off some lesserequipped sub-lovers: Expect the system requirements to be relatively high. Starving sub enthusiasts should prepare their computers now. That means more RAM, and perhaps a newer graphics card. The only thing left out of the game is little men falling from the holes in the sides of boats: That would have raised its ESRB rating. –Alex Handy

■ Lord of the Cancellations—The status of the upcoming Lord of the Rings roleplaying game The White Council is in flux. Numerous online sites reported that it was canceled, and that members of the team were reassigned to other projects. Electronic Arts will only offer up a “no comment” when asked about its status. The game was to be an open-world Middle-earth RPG, essentially Oblivion with Hobbits…. ■ Roxy Spore Music—Legendary musician/producer/artist Brian Eno told an audience in Berlin that he was creating “generative” music for Will Wright’s Spore, according to the We Make Money Not Art blog (whose author, Sascha Pohflepp, attended the lecture). Eno is generally credited with inventing ambient music, and he has created—or helped create— some of the most influential records of all time, including doing production work for David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2. (He also composed the startup sound for Windows 95.) Eno has always been at the forefront of music theory and technology, so the idea of creating fragments of music and procedurally generating soundtracks—which fits the overall vibe of Spore—makes so much sense, it’s a shock it’s actually happening…. ■ Midway Revisits Area 51—Midway announced it’s releasing BlackSite: Area 51, a first-person alien shooter for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. It’ll feature squadbased action tactics, vehicles, and multiple multiplayer modes. (Say that three times fast.)….

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NEWSWIRE

Ad It Up In-game advertising isn’t new; it’s been around for years. When you consider its history and the technology that’s moved it to the forefront of gaming today, it’s obvious we’ve reached a perfect storm of annoyance BY LARA CRIGGER

28 Computer Games | April 2007

Johnson & Johnson’s Tooth Protector starred a green blob armed with dental tools that protected teeth from the sugary Snack Attackers. But when the videogame market collapsed in late 1983, companies quickly shelved these new advertising schemes. “The whole industry was wounded, just lying for dead,” says Ilya Vedrashko, creator of in-game ad blog Games Brands Play and an expert on the history of digital advertising. “Nobody knew if games themselves would survive, so it’s no surprise that it took a while for advertisers to start paying attention again.” Indeed, it would be nearly a decade before advertisers returned to pixilated pursuits.

ike death and taxes, ads are an inevitable part of life. And videogames aren’t immune… from ads, not death. (Yet. Taxes, on the other hand….) Companies like Massive, IGA Worldwide, and Double Fusion make headlines every day, scoring millions of dollars from investors by signing new multi-franchise deals with game publishers. It’s enough to make even the most casual of gamers cringe. While in-game advertising may seem like a new phenomenon, don’t be fooled. Despite economic setbacks and technological limitations, virtual shilling has been around for over 20 years. And it’s not going away any time soon.

In the Beginning, There Were Ads Games have embraced brand-related Easter eggs since the 1970s, when Moonlander, a text-based spacecraft simulator, allowed players to crashland onto a secret lunar McDonalds. But the first time advertisers actually paid cash for videogame real estate, the game was Bally-Midway’s Tapper, a 1983 arcade title featuring an overworked bartender and never-ending lines of patrons. Sponsored by Budweiser, Tapper prominently featured the company’s distinctive red logo, slapping it on everything from mugs and paintings to a blimp circling a sports stadium. The logo even covered the machine itself. Meant for bars only, the game somehow found its way into mainstream arcades, and enraged parents demanded its banning. Tapper was quickly recalled, stripped of all Budweiser references, and returned to arcades with a new name: Root Beer Tapper. Despite the Tapper fiasco, businesses couldn’t resist capitalizing on the runaway success of videogame technology. Marketers experimented with advergames, or games with elements and themes referencing popular advertising campaigns. For example, in 1983, Ralston-Purina released Chase the Chuck Wagon, based on its TV commercials featuring a wagon wheel rolling from a dog food bag.

Ads Love the ’90s But return they did, lured back by videogames’ seductive pull on teenagers in possession of disposable income. Sports and arcade games showed particular promise. Even in the 1990s, Electronic Arts was the undisputed king of sports games. The company had included fake advertisements in its titles for years, simulating the banners and billboards dominating real-life sports arenas. But as graphical resolution improved, real-life brands emerged among the fake ones. In 1993, EA introduced Adidas banners to FIFA International Soccer; three years later, it added plugs for CoolAir and Nokia to its NHL and NCAA Football series. (Curiously, however, sales juggernaut Madden NFL remained devoid of third-party brands until 2001.) Following in Tapper’s footsteps, arcade games also experienced an ad boom, the most memorable example being Konami’s 1989 hit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game. Littering the game were ads for Pizza Hut, which was also sponsoring a nationwide

[clockwise from left] Tapper, Chase the Chuck Wagon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, The California Raisins, Cool Spot

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NEWSWIRE Turtles concert tour at the time. Enemies could use empty pizza boxes for cover, and ad posters cluttered the NES port, which even included a restaurant coupon in the game’s packaging.

Telling Brand Stories? However, these games weren’t designed to tell the brand’s story, which is how Vedrashko describes the “advergame model.” Many companies returned to that model, seduced by the popularity of the burgeoning console market and its reduced production costs. In 1988, Box Office released The California Raisins, a platformer based on the famous stop-motion TV commercials. The following year, Domino’s Pizza commissioned Avoid the Noid, which featured mascot-of-the-moment The Noid, a creepy man in a Spandex rabbit costume. 7-Up was especially prolific, releasing three games in the early 1990s: Spot, a Reversi clone; Cool Spot, a platformer; and Spot Goes to Hollywood, an action-adventure. Advergames truly hit their stride in the late ’90s when General Mills released Big G All Stars, featuring nine cartoon mascots playing baseball. Available solely through proofs of purchase from cereal boxes, Big G was so popular that it generated more than three times the normal response rate for such offers. Coca-Cola matched that success with 1998’s The 3-D Interactive Mr. Pibb Game, which sold more than 750,000 copies. These games’ popularity laid the foundation for future advergames, including Burger King’s current hits, Sneak King, PocketBike Racer, and Big Bumpin’, which to date have sold more than 2 million copies combined.

“Burger King’s current hits, Sneak King, PocketBike Racer, and Big Bumpin’, to date have sold more than 2 million copies combined.”

Do In-Game Ads Work? You love ads. At least that’s what the Nielsen Company says. In 2005, the ratings giant released a study claiming that more than half of the gamers it surveyed believed ads make games more realistic. Commissioned by ad agency Double Fusion, the research also found that in-game ad campaigns led to a 60% higher awareness rate for new brand names. Not only do gamers like ads, argued Nielsen, but they work. But in 2006, Bunnyfoot, a behavioral research firm in the U.K., released its own study. This one says in-game ads have little—if any—impact on players. Because ads are poorly placed and neglect to take into account players’ excitement levels, recollection and recognition rates are low. According to Bunnyfoot, the traditional model just doesn’t work. Don’t feel vindicated yet, however. What most media coverage missed was that Bunnyfoot only conducted the study to support its “Sponsor Fixation Index,” a metric correlating player excitement to gameplay events through visual and emotional responses. Once peak “receptiveness events” were pinpointed using the Bunnyfoot index, in-game ads could be “re-engineered for greater impact and emotive engagement.” Awesome. And so much for unbiased sources.

30 Computer Games | April 2007

Ads and the Dotcom Boom/Bust Early in-game ads were “static,” or hard-coded onto the disc or cartridge. Examples include banners, signs, and product placements. Ads are still done this way, although instead of Budweiser mugs, gamers now encounter Axe Deodorant billboards or Sony Ericson cell phones, as in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. But the rise of the Internet inspired a new, more complex method of in-game advertising. In 1999, ad agency Adaboy patented a new technology that could replace default images in videogames with new textures containing advertisements. Details about how the image was seen could be retrieved from the player’s computer or console and used to better tailor the ads. Thus was dynamic ingame advertising born. However, Adaboy was plagued with internal problems and folded before it could properly capitalize on its new software. Erstwhile developer Conducent introduced similar technology, but in its scheme, ads could be inserted into the beginning or end of games, as well as between levels or even during gameplay. They would also automatically refresh and update whenever the player went online. Should the player click on an ad, an Internet connection would launch, and a browser would open to the product’s website. In short, Conducent was every gamer’s worst nightmare. In 2000, Conducent struck a deal with budget developer eGames to bring its system to the company’s titles. But eGames failed to notify its customers about the new software or to inform them that it allowed third parties to fiddle secretly with gamers’ computers. Barraged by complaints and threatened with legal action, eGames immediately removed the software, and Conducent went out of business shortly thereafter. However, the invasive program continued to circulate on the Internet, becoming so reviled that it helped inspire developer Steve Gibson to write the first anti-spyware program in 2001. When the dotcom bubble burst, advertisers once again put their videogame plans on hold. “The bust almost wiped out the entire online ad industry,” says Vedrashko. “Games were the first items to be checked off advertising budgets.” But recovery from the crash was quicker than it had been in 1983. Videogames had long since proved their staying power, and, although the start-ups that invented dynamic in-game advertising had collapsed, the technology

NEWSWIRE

21st century movie posters and soft drink ads looked more than a little out of place in the futuristic sci-fi world of Planetside.

itself was still viable. Encouraged by the mainstream success of 2001’s Crazy Taxi, a game packed with real-life brands like KFC and Levi’s, many marketers actually became more confident of the power of in-game ads.

Let There Be Ad Companies

Moreover, the technology would phone home to grab ads for each level the player entered, which caused longer loading times. Similar outrage erupted over IGA Worldwide’s software in Battlefield 2142, since the only warning about the ads EA offered was an insert included in the game’s box. “There was so much hype and tension and misinformation,” says Townsend. “But once we explained what the facts were, it all died away.” Still, as of press time, Battlefield 2142 remains ad-less, featuring only dummy billboards until suitable logos can be found. (A sample: “Ads can be sold.”)

QUOTABLES

One after the other, advertising firms dedicated solely to videogames mushroomed onto the scene. “We knew that the [traditional] agencies weren’t in a position to provide these ads,” says Justin Townsend, co-founder and current CEO of IGA Worldwide. “But we knew the demand was there. It wasn’t difficult for us to Coming Soon: More Ads spot that opportunity.” Now that in-game ad agencies have carved out a steady foothold, IGA Worldwide launched its Radial Network in 2005, signing deals gamers can expect to see more digital branding in the future, espewith Nadeo, CustomPlay Games, and Codemasters. The same year, cially because next-gen consoles are so Internet-connected. As Double Fusion released similar software, lining up partnerships with proof of the trend’s staying power, in May 2006, Microsoft bought THQ, Midway, and Eiko Interactive. Current 800-pound gorilla Massive for an undisclosed sum. Massive Incorporated entered the fray as well, securing Ubisoft, “There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that the Microsoft acquisiVivendi, Atari, and Konami among its initial publishers. “It was a pertion validated this space and this medium,” says Longano. Even the fect storm,” says Nicholas Longano, president of new media for Nielsen Company (responsible for TV ratings) wants in on the acMassive. “You hear very often that an idea is ahead of its time, but tion; in mid-2007, it will kick off a new service called GamePlay this one was right on time. All the elements just came together.” Metrics, which will record demographic information on gamers to Still, many attempts to match ads to Internet-capable games assist ad agencies. went awry, especially for sci-fi and action titles. In a famous examStill, Vedrashko remains hesitant. “I’d love to be optimistic and ple, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo posters wallpapered the futuris- upbeat about it, and I probably am, quietly,” he says. “But advertistic alien cityscapes of Planetside, and in Splinter Cell: Double Agent, ing in games is still a very hard sell on the agency’s part.” Nivea for Men advertised skin and hair care to a bald protagonist “It’s not as hard as it used to be, though,” he adds. “Many more sporting a permanent five o’clock shadow. But the most egregious people understand the marvelous things that can be done.” He mismatch was a 2005 Pizza Hut promotion in EverQuest II, where suggests the possibility of sky-written brands or AI programmed players could type “/pizza” into the command line and launch a to discuss product releases. “We’re going to see a lot browser taking them to the chain’s order info website. Although of experimentation in this area. It’s just a matter SOE claimed that “a pretty good number of pizzas are being delivof time.” ■ ered” through the system, negative PR led it to end the promotion and remove the command from the “Nothing is going to help a new game by going to a new game. operating system. There were some clear wins going Worse than mismatched ads from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there rewere inadequately disclosed ones. For example, SWAT 4 included ally aren’t any for Vista... They’re really grasping at straws for streaming ad support in its first reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run major patch. Gamers were infuriXP for a great many more years without having a problem ated by posters plugging the same with it.” –id Software master programmer John Carmack, in an interview with products in every room, from alleyGame Informer magazine. ways to janitor’s closets, sometimes appearing four or five to a wall.

32 Computer Games | April 2007

NEWSWIRE

Live Vista

Microsoft is ready to roll out its new Windows online interface

ne of the most important innovations in the technology behind computer games occurred more than a decade ago, with the arrival of Windows 95. (Other milestones include 3D cards and DirectX.) In the years that followed, Windows has gradually improved, with XP being the best version yet. But Microsoft hopes Windows Vista will change the landscape in unexpected ways. The biggest innovation may be the way you connect with your friends online. Windows Vista is implementing a version of Xbox Live, allowing you to use the same interface and features that have received so much acclaim on the Xbox 360 on your PC. To put it simply, you’ll be able to create a Gamer Tag, which can be shared by any game. The downside for PC gamers is dealing with the fact that the coolest names have no doubt been snagged by Xbox 360 gamers that already had over a year’s head start. On the plus side, Live will let you quickly scan your friends list to see who’s online and what they’re playing. Live for Windows will also include features like achievements, gamerscores, reputation, and online matchmaking. More importantly, it should seamlessly integrate some of the features of

“The downside for PC gamers is dealing with the fact that the coolest names have no doubt been snagged by Xbox 360 gamers that already had over a year’s head start.”

34 Computer Games | April 2007

third-party software such as Team Speak and Xfire. With Live, Microsoft says that you’ll be able to send text messages and invites, and even use the traditional voice chat across the Windows and Xbox 360 platforms. In other words, who needs to pay for long-distance phone calls when they’ve got Vista and Live running? The first three Live-enabled games will be Halo 2, Uno, and Shadowrun, with the last two being cross-platform compatible. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to frag Xbox players in Halo 2, because Microsoft has no plans to update its multiplayer for the 360. All three of the games will be available in the coming months. –Peter Suciu

OTHER VISTA FEATURES ■ Windows Game Explorer Accessible from the start menu, it lets you launch games and view game ratings; in the future, it will let you launch games by selecting the most recent saved games.

■ Parental Controls They let parents decide which games are accessible to kids, so this feature blocks certain games by rating or content.

■ DirectX 10 PC games have been looking pretty good in recent years, but DX10 is a major leap forward. Aside from the new eye candy, the biggest improvement is that for a videocard to be DX10-certified, it must support all DX10 features. No more of this “Shader Model 2.0/3.0” madness.

So You Want to Be a Pro Gamer… Are you always beating your friends in 1v1s? Maybe you think you’re a great shot, and maybe you are. You’ll only know if you pit yourself against the best. 1v1 competitions online abound at every skill level, from amateur league to the rank of those who put Jonathon “fatal1ty” Wendel to shame. From amateur to professional, there’s no shortage of 1v1s if you’re looking for fresh blood. BY ERICA VAN OSTRAND

The CyberAthlete Amateur League has over 400,000 registered users and is a spin-off of its parent company, the CyberAthlete Professional League. CAL hosts 1v1s in seven games, including Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, Madden 2007, Quake III, Starcraft: Brood War, Unreal Tournament 2004, WarCraft III, and Warsow. caleague.com

Quakecon is a week-long conference that attracts over 3,000 gamers and is hosted annually by Id Software. Past years have seen Quake III and Quake IV tournaments, along with a Ms. Quakecon for the ladies. Last year’s Quake IV tourney split $35,000 among its top three contestants. quakecon.org The World Cyber Games is considered

TeamWarfare League has over 500,000 registered users and hosts 1v1 competitions in over 20 games. Check out the details and sign up for one or more of them at teamwarfare.com.

CyberEvolution, because it’s pay-to-play, maintains fewer participants, but it offers cash and prizes to the winners. cevolved.com Global Gamers League offers head-tohead action in Age of Empires III, Quake III, WarCraft III, and Warsow. ggl.com

The World Series of Video Games gets big media coverage on DirecTV and has some big-name gamers competing, including fatal1ty. If you think you have what it takes to go up against gamers at his level, check out thewsvg.com to get information on their tournaments in Quake IV, WarCraft III, and Project Gotham Racing 3. This league offers cash and prizes to its winners.

the Olympics of videogames, where even fatal1ty loses from time to time. Last year, more than $450,000 in cash went to the winning gamers. It offers 1v1 competitions in FIFA Soccer, Need For Speed, Starcraft: Brood War, WarCraft III, Dawn of War, Dead or Alive 4, and Project Gotham Racing 3. Read about last year’s winners and watch for details on the 2007 Games at worldcybergames.com

NEWSBRIEFS

■ Wallpapering Your Desktop—In February, the folks behind Gamewallpapers.com launched a new website, CGWallpapers.com. It’s devoted to promoting original artwork by people all over the globe who create those game-related renders you love. If you sign up from one of the artists’ links, that artist gets 20% of the revenue from your monthly or yearly subscription…. ■ Ritual’s MumboJumbo—Casual game developer MumboJumbo acquired Ritual Entertainment, creator of SiN. One of the founders of MumboJumbo, Ron Dimant, was formerly the CEO of Ritual. According to the press release, “The acquisition of Ritual(TM) marks the most significant instance in casual gaming history of a mainstream game development house migrating to a casual game publisher.” ■ Meretzky’s Blue Fang—Legendary game designer Steve Meretzky—of Infocom and Legend Entertainment fame—has landed the position of “Senior Game Designer” at Blue Fang Games (Zoo Tycoon). ■ People Hate Violence—A survey conducted by Zogby International and the American Bible Society shows that people are sick of gratuitous violence in all forms of entertainment. They also want their entertainment to include positive messages and references to God and the Bible. A full 21% feel that entertainment should be free of sex and murder, which means you wouldn’t be able to produce a number of stories from the Bible, har….

The CyberAthlete Professional League is considered the professional “circuit” for most gamers, and it hosts regular seasons of Quake III tournaments where you can win some of that cold hard cash. thecpl.com

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BRAVE NEW Can a first-person shooter with a persistent world be worth a monthly subscription fee? Huxley certainly hopes so. BY TOM CHICK

i Jong Kang is fighting a creature that looks like a walking pterodactyl. When asked what it’s called, he says something—Ban-ko?—that sounds Korean. Kang is, after all, Korean. When he’s asked what that means in English, there’s a confused moment when it’s obvious something’s been lost in translation. Then someone explains that is what it means in English. “Banquo,” Kang says. “Like in Shakespeare.”

COMING TO AMERICA Kang is the production director for Webzen, the Korean company that’s creating what it calls a “hyper-action sci-fi shooter”: Huxley. It was initially being developed at Delphieye, a studio Kang founded. They’d created a Serious Sam-style shooter called Nitro Family, which was published by THQ as budgetware. Plans to make a multiplayer version of that game evolved into something far more ambitious. This was the first inkling of Huxley, and it led to the acquisition of Delphieye by Webzen. The Unreal 3 engine was licensed in 2005, and Huxley was announced.

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WORLD

HUXLEY

From a Serious Sam-like shooter to an MMOFPS. Watch out for those Shakespearean monsters.

Right now, Kang has his hands full. He and someone else at Webzen, who’s sitting at another computer across the room, are showing a cooperative mission. They’re being swarmed by these Banquos. Kang’s left pinky occasionally darts out and hits the Tab key, then taps the Q key on the way back to its WASD position. The tab is switching his special ability, and the Q is activating it. There’s a sprint skill that lets him tear around the map with smoke trailing from his heels. An IR view makes enemies easy to spot from a distance (this is particularly handy when he snipes in a later deathmatch level). A targeting bracket shows the creatures’ hit points. A tackle ability lets him rush forward with a motion-blurring effect, banging into Banquos to damage them. He’s killing Banquo after Banquo, hardly leaving anything for his teammate. “That’s probably not the name we’re going to use in the final game,” Jason Wonacott leans in to explain. Wonacott is the director of corporate communica-

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tions for Webzen’s American office, and part of his job is smoothing these sorts of rough edges from the game in its transition across the Pacific. The idea was that Americans would be able to relate to names from the greatest written works in the English language. Banquo, Othello, Rosencrantz. It’s an indication that Huxley is being created for a Western audience, but the challenge is that it’s being created by a Korean developer. They may not appreciate that we’re not quite that literary.

FRAGGING MOBS

Huxley is a bold, although not unprecedented, attempt to appeal to shooter fans while getting them hooked on MMO pricing. Sony’s Planetside was an early headlong attempt that didn’t pan out very well. Because Planetside sprawled across a wide-open world of strategic proportions, the pace was a bit off. It took time to get to the shooter bits. “You felt kind of lonely,” says Kang. “They made a great game for a small group of people,” says Huxley project manager Jay Chung.

The character designs are unmistakably “foreign” to North Americans. The guy with multiple forearms/hands? He’s called “Romeo.” Awesome.

Huxley is designed to avoid this by taking an approach similar to Guild Wars. There will be persistent cities in the traditional style of an MMO, with players running around buying, crafting, trading, and shouting inane things in the general chat channel. But when it comes time to get into the shooter bits of the game, you simply go to a terminal and call up a list of instanced battles. Click to join and you’re in. “It’s an FPS where you can take relationships back into the city,” says Chung. “That’s why some people aren’t playing shooters. People feel they’re wasting their time and money.” Chung is obviously speaking from the perspective of a culture that puts a premium on MMO persistence. In the U.S., plenty of people are playing shooters, but not necessarily plenty of MMO people. But Huxley isn’t like Planetside’s attempt to work an Everquest-shaped shell around a shooter; it has more in common with TRIBES, Unreal Tournament, or even the Battlefield series. It is, at its core, a squad-based

HUXLEY

Among shooters, Webzen positions Huxley halfway between CounterStrike and Quake.

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shooter played on the same kind of maps that would cycle through any server’s map-list. The persistence exists largely between the shooting, rather than being forced into service as a context for it.

DUDE, WHERE’S MY BIOGUN?

Among shooters, Webzen positions Huxley halfway between CounterStrike and Quake. During a Power Point presentation, a slide shows Counter-Strike on the left end of a continuum and Quake on the right. Under Counter-Strike are the words “Military Strategic Action.” Under Quake are the words “Sci-Fi Hyper Action.” Unreal sits on the line a couple of notches to the left of Quake. Huxley sits smack dab in the middle. “It’s not really hardcore sci fi, with a biogun or something like that,” says Chung. The weapons are assault rifles, shotguns, and grenade launchers. But it’s still sci fi. There’s nano ammo for all the guns, so you never reload a weapon. You wear armor that has a shield value, and shields regenerate over time. Your armor also has skill slots that give you special abilities, such as the sprint, IR, and tackle abilities Kang demonstrated. Among the other skills are recoil reducers, double jumping, warnings for nearby enemies you can’t see, and a bright flash of light that will blind attackers when your health falls to a certain critical level. Heavier armor has a higher shield value, while lighter armor has more skill slots. As you level

up, you can progress along a series of licenses that let you use different equipment, including the vehicles on certain maps. Higher-level players get increasingly powerful weapons and the option to choose among more skills and equipment. But the actual gameplay is entirely skill-based. There’s no auto-aiming or attack macros. You hit another player by aiming your gun and clicking your mouse the old-fashioned way.

THE MANY FACES OF HUXLEY Like any MMO, it starts with the character generation. You select your race and sex, then set things like body type, hair, and even facial features. Like most developers who go out of their way to create this sort of thing, Webzen is proud of its face morphing. Chung demonstrates by nudging around the various sliders for facial features. “You can actually shrink and stretch your nose,” he notes, shrinking and stretching a character’s nose. Once you’re in the game, there are single-player story-based quests, repeatable quests you can grind, co-op quests, deathmatches, squad-based team games, and fairly elaborate game types. Kang began his

360 DEGREES OF HUXLEY Approximately six months after the PC version launches, Webzen is planning to release a version of Huxley for the Xbox 360. There will be instances of simultaneous players from both platforms on a server, but they won’t settle the debate over whether playing a shooter with a mouse and keyboard is inherently superior to playing on a gamepad. The idea is that a 360 player may have to go into a PC server for a certain quest, for example. “They’re not exactly sharing a world,” says Chung. “But they can communicate.” The two versions will focus on different aspects of the backstory. The PC version is about finding out what happened to Dr. Huxley, who’s recently disappeared. The 360 version is about a terrorist group called the Hybrid Liberation Organization, and it takes place 50 years after the events of the PC version.

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HUXLEY

Banquo-killing level while he was showing off an early version of Nostalonia, the “human” city. It consists of a community plaza with shops, NPCs selling items, banks, and mission terminals. There are also residential areas with space for clan halls and possibly player housing. A Mustang Club with a P-51 logo in front is an example of how this might work. The cities are built from a streaming system without loading screens. Webzen says its cities can hold up to 2,500 players at once. Kang talks to an NPC in the city, which triggers a script. The NPC leads him to a new location, where a car pulls up and another character gets out. A bit of exposition is delivered; then Kang and his companion are whisked away to an instance stocked with AI monsters. At one point, they have to shoot at a wrecked train high overhead on a ruined rail bridge. A car falls conveniently into a gap in the river, letting them get across. They eventually reach an APC and drive it through more monsters. It’s an overthe-top shooting gallery of a mission, equal parts Diablo and Unreal Tournament. It ends with a cinematic of the APC ramping over a chasm so they can escape back to the city.

MATCHMAKER, MATCHMAKER, MAKE ME A MATCH Single-player missions will earn players experience and loot, but you’ll also need “battle points” to level up. You get these by playing multiplayer games, which support anywhere from 2-200 players. Kang demonstrates several game types with other players from around Webzen’s office. During a deathmatch, he climbs platforms to use a sniper rifle. He works his way out to a platform hanging from a crane and switches on his IR. The players are highlighted below him. Easy pickings. Then they load a map that has control points. To

42 Computer Games | April 2007

take these, you have to stand on a platform next to a tower. The platform rises as you stand on it, and it accelerates when more people from your team are with you. Eventually it gets to the top, and your team’s icon appears over the tower. There are two of these on the map: Control both to win the game. Then there’s a map made of canyons, with tanks winding through them; fighters overhead swoop over the canyons and down into them to harass the tanks. Then there’s an open valley littered with pieces of a fallen satellite that have to be collected. The first team to collect enough parts gets to build a mech. Among the people at Webzen who are working on Huxley are Cedric Fiorentino and Per Vognsen, two guys from Epic who are known for their work on Unreal Tournament 2004. Ever played Facing Worlds? Of course you have. That was Fiorentino’s work, as he designed several of Unreal’s best-known levels under the name “Inoxx.” The Unreal influence is obvious as Kang shows off several of Huxley’s levels. The setting is a postapocalyptic dystopia. The game’s two races are divided into mutated people who live in a sleek, newer city and traditional humans who inhabit a run-down metropolis laced with exposed pipes that spew steam. Among the levels Kang shows is one with a sort of Jules Verne/Myst vibe, another cobbled from towers and shacks, an industrial mining area, an abandoned outpost, and a level build around a tanker that’s run aground. One of the more memorable concepts is a sunken city where platforms hug half-submerged buildings. Webzen has signed a deal with Massive to stream ingame ads into Huxley, but even here, Wonacott insists, the postapocalyptic theme will be consistent. “You might pan your view up and see a billboard for, say, Pepsi, but it would be shredded and torn up.”

Huxley–as a game, as the product of another culture, and as a creative endeavor–isn’t just another shooter. A SHOOTER BY ANY OTHER NAME

Later, at dinner, the Webzen guys explain a bit about the game’s name. “You could say Brave New World was an inspiration,” Chung says. “And we needed a name for our scientist.” The story recalls Miyamoto’s casting about for a Western-friendly name for the heroine of his adventure games and settling on the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald— without any intention of evoking madness, alcoholism, and infidelity. Aldous Huxley’s name doesn’t have any of that baggage. But it’s a curious choice, considering how often Webzen is asked about parallels to Brave New World. The designers offer vague comments about the class-system in their imagined dystopia, but they eventually admit there isn’t much there. Still, a discussion of Huxley the game character helps explain why the monsters were given names from Shakespeare. The idea is that Dr. Huxley is an educated man with a love of literature. Since it fell to him to study and classify the “hybrids,” as the monsters are called, he chose names from the Bard’s work. “I didn’t know that,” Wonacott says, apparently rethinking the whole idea. You can almost hear the gears turning in his head: “Can we get away with calling a monster a ‘Banquo’ instead of a ‘Terra Dactyl’ or ‘Wasteland Birdman’ or some such thing?” The answer remains to be seen. But the question makes it clear that Huxley—as a game, as the product of another culture, and as a creative endeavor—isn’t just another shooter. ■

HUXLEY REDUXLY Aldous Huxley was an English writer whose best-known work is the classic 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. It’s almost required reading in high school nowadays. It presents a “utopia” where warfare and poverty have been eliminated, and everyone is extremely happy because they’re highly medicated with a drug called soma. Social contentment and tranquility have been achieved by eliminating most things people actually find pleasurable, like family, art, science, religion, and philosophy. (Of course, those things also cause people much grief.) At the end of the book, the lead character is given a choice between a life of conformity and one in squalor on the margins of “civilized” society, so obviously he chooses… suicide. The book attacks assembly-line production, which was a revolutionary change in industry at the turn of the century. Considering the robotic, metronomic, repetitive way people play MMOs, the choice of Huxley as a name for the game is wonderfully ironic.

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ull up a chair and listen to a tall tale. Once upon a time, we used to care about who made our games. We’d read about these people. We’d write about them. They’d actually show up and talk to us. They’d tell us about their games. We could even tell them what we liked and what we didn’t like, and they sometimes listened. We’re talking honest-to-God conversation. The most infamous and outspoken of this species was one Derek Smart, Ph.D. His exploits are legend, and it is our sacred trust to pass the legend down from generation to generation.

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Battlecruiser 2.0 was released in 1998 and eventually offered as a free download.

In 1992, Derek Smart has an idea for a game. Or “THE GAME,” as he’s fond of calling it. THE GAME is Battlecruiser 3000AD, a sweeping space opera that puts the gamer in the command chair of an enormous, well, Battlecruiser. But unlike the Wing Commander series of the same era, this is to be no “hop in and shoot” arcade experience. This is going to be a simulator. “When I set out to develop this suite of games, I knew exactly what it is I wanted,” Smart says. “I wanted a game that would stimulate my mind. A game that I wanted to play.” So Smart starts coding. He has no idea how to make a game, he just does it. He spends the next four years both developing Battlecruiser and telling the world about it (gracing the cover of this fine magazine along the way).

THE GAME finally emerges in 1996, and that’s when the Legend really starts. Smart has signed a deal with Take 2 Interactive. They have their minds set on a Christmas release, but Smart refuses: The game is nowhere near ready, has yet to emerge from beta, and is undocumented. Take 2 insists. So Smart walks off the stage, signs away the rights, takes his marbles and goes home. Take 2 sticks a CD of what they have in a box and drops it into the market. It’s essentially unplayable. All that promise disappears overnight. The world blames Smart. They heap bile

46 Computer Games | April 2007

on him. Magazine editors and 13-year-olds with dial-up connections post their opinions on the Net. Most people—most rational people—would just move on. Not Derek Smart. “That kind of attack is what strengthened my resolve,” he says, looking back.

sations and urban legends about Smart’s online and offline behavior are updated daily. He beat up a Coke machine. He called the police on stalkers. He had the phone company tracing phone calls. He faked his Ph.D. He forged e-mails to make himself look like the victim.

That resolve leads him to sue Take 2, regain his rights to what will become a longrunning franchise, and continue pursuing his dream. He patches. He releases manuals. He carries the torch. “All that time, I was confident that there were others out there who shared my vision,” he says. So he keeps at it.

At the peak of the crapstorm—in the middle years between that first release and the 2001 release of the sequel, Battlecruiser Millennium—the real game has nothing to do with space combat, graphics, and AI. For most of the world, the game is baiting Derek Smart. “I’ve been playing the Derek game for over three years now, and it... never... gets... boring,” posts one of Derek’s most frequent anonymous adversaries, known as “sharmers.” “It’s like Pro Wrestling, a soap opera for white trash. Our game is a soap opera for computer game geeks. Wonderful stuff.”

At the same time, the Derek Smart flame wars become one of the most highly documented sports on the Internet. Smart, naked and unclothed, playing nobody but himself, enters into heated battles with mostly anonymous detractors. Bizarre accu-

In 2003 the Battlecruiser series was rebranded as Universal Combat.

Smart fights back. Daily. And he doesn’t couch his opinions in politically correct PR dialogue. “I can get down there in the dirt and belt it out with the best of them,” he says. Smart loves a good fight, and he’s good at it. “Someone brings a grenade to a firefight, I’ll be the guy hoisting the nukes.” And the nukes fly. Even the most skeptical and unbelieving Internet philosophers give him credit for one thing: he’s good at this. “Smart never descends to incoherence in his public discourse. In this respect, he is far better than most Internet trolls,” admits Phillip Scuderi, a journalist who’s covered the Smart chronicles from the beginning. “But coherence is no sure sign of sanity; clarity no counterpoint to depravity.” Over time, his reputation as an online defender of his games and unabashed pistolwhipper of his enemies overshadows the games themselves. But Smart’s dedication to his dream game and to his small but ferociously loyal band of followers never wanes. When he finally patches up and polishes Battlecruiser to his satisfaction, he does the unthinkable—he gives it away as a free download. He follows this with Battlecruiser 2.0 in 1998, which he also ends up giving away to the fanbase. Next, he goes into a three-year period of near-constant development, lasting until the franchise re-sets with Battlecruiser Millennium in 2001 and the Universal Combat series that follows. Throughout this period, Smart’s sorties

into online forums remain animated and controversial. Whenever the discussion on a gamer site turns in his direction, he appears. (This leads to yet another urban legend: Utter his name thrice and he shall appear!) And his appearance often leads to the derailment of entire communities. He admits that, when a conversation piques his interest, “I post, and walk away in most cases leaving nothing but scorched Earth behind.” Shawn Andrich saw the Smart-bomb land at several game community sites he’s managed over the years, most recently at GamersWithJobs.com. He couldn’t stand it. Fearing a descent into madness, he banned Smart most recently after only a handful of posts. “I’ve banned him from two different sites now,” says Andrich. “If I ban him from a third site, I think I get a tote bag.”

The Derek Smart story is about games, despite all the controversy. “Some people tend to forget one very, very important thing about me,” he explains. “I am a gamer.” And that’s what’s driven him to work, rework, re-

fine, and expand a single vision for 14 years. But a Derek Smart game is not for the faint of heart. Every game in the Battlecruiser mythos is a complex flight simulator, tactical strategy game, and resource management challenge all rolled up in a dense interface. When you fire up Universal Combat (the Collector’s Edition is the latest version), there’s little question you are playing his game. When you open up the manual—because you ain’t learning this one by feel—he’s right there in your face: “In this tutorial, unless otherwise stated, ‘click’ implies that you left-click using mouse button one. Yeah, it’s the one on the left. Ingenious, isn’t it? If you’re not certain which button I’m talking about, stare at the mouse for a bit.” That’s right. He’s talking to you. You wanna play? You’re playing on his terms. Unless you’re a fan—a big fan—and you’ve got the patience of a mule and really, really want to play them, you’re going to get frustrated pretty quick. This difficulty level, the unapproachability of his games, isn’t a function of sadism; Smart wants the game to be complex. “They’re not—and never have been—for the typical gamer.”

And he’s going to keep making them that way, even as he moves away from the PC and on to his new projects, an original series of space games for the Xbox 360 called Galactic Command. He heads into this brave new world completely unafraid. “What makes a man is not just his ability to stand strong but also his ability to get up when he falls,” he says. And even then, the world will not see the last of Smart. Love him or hate him, Derek Smart will not go quietly into that good night. He’ll keep making the games he loves. “I turn 44 this year, and my guess is I’ll probably be doing this until they turn the lights out and wheel my sorry ass out.” ■

If you’re looking to take the Battlecruiser plunge for the first time, or want to reunite with your old Universal Combat friend, there’s only one place you can look. Smart has signed an exclusive deal with Turner’s GameTap service to distribute Universal Combat Collector’s Edition. He joins other niche independent games such as Sam and Max and the latest Myst game, Uru. But that’s the end of the line. Smart’s taking his dream to a different audience. Watch out, Xbox 360, here he comes.

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g t in gamin h g u o f g in op attle be ry to st t b g o h in w o g e n on thos ish on There’s a heat and c o h battle d w e e h s t o f h o t s h side between munity from bot s r e mer com id a s g In e . h t m e th within t world r e v o c e th AND

VAN OSTR BY ERICA

eading down the dark and deserted hallway, you crouch below windows, scurry past doors, and quietly make your way toward the enemy flag. Down a set of stairs you go, and through another doorway. This time, one of your teammates stands there, staring into space. You stop, patiently waiting for him to keep moving; maybe he saw someone! All of a sudden a few shots ring out, and you’re still standing there, staring at a medic in the door, only you have 90% less health. A stab in the back finishes you off. The medic revives you, and you get up, thinking, “What is this medic’s problem? He’s not shooting….” At that moment, the “teammate” behind you knifes you again.

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We’ve all been griefed at one time or another, and most of us hate being on the receiving end. To new players, griefing tactics like XP whoring (ignoring team-based objectives in order to advance in rank for the sake of advancement), team killing, and door blocking can seem like cheating. But are they really cheating or just bad behavior? In some leagues, it falls under cheating. “When one is playing for money, bad behavior is simply not acceptable,” says Richard Hayden, managing producer for the pay-to-play league Prizefight. “Alas, it is something one is forced to endure from time to time on public servers.” Prizefight is a large gaming league that allows you to put money down on your own frags to win cash prizes. While bad behavior often ruins a game for you and your teammates, it doesn’t get most idiots banned from a server by anticheat software. Although the culprit may end up at the mercy of a sympathetic server admin, it’s not considered cheating to shoot your teammates. Real cheating is combated by gaming league administrators like those found at Prizefight and TeamWarfare League, and by professionals like Tony Ray, creator of PunkBuster and president of Even Balance.

Actual online game cheats encompass a wide spectrum of third-party programs and game exploits that unscrupulous players use to their every advantage. Most PC gamers have heard of the major ones: aimbot, wallhack, autofire, speedhack, multihack, and texture and model modifications. Not only are there different kinds of cheats, but each is used in different ways. Some are built into the game. Some adjust in-game settings to give you an unfair edge. Some require hacked game files. Some are, in the words of Maddog, the Anti-Cheat Director for TeamWarfare League (who doesn’t use his real name because he’s received death threats for exposing cheaters), “outside programs that take over game actions and feed extra data to a player that others cannot access.” Maddog says that the most recent trend in cheating is the network cheat. “They work over the Internet and load directly into DirectX instead of as a program on the person’s computer. By doing this, they bypass normal anticheat software detections via running tasks and through the use of

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“Many regular gamers who try using a cheat just to see what it is like later admit that they simply can’t go back.” –Tony Ray Screenshots or in-game demos. A player using the cheat can see the differences on his screen, while in-game screen recorders do not see it, because the cheat program works outside the game.” Fortunately, this type of cheat, the most advanced available, is rarely made or used. “Network cheats running on a third-party box are detectable and/or preventable at the game server using various advanced methods,” says Punkbuster’s Ray. “However, these hacks are extremely rare, as development requires a tremendous amount of time/effort, and very few punks with advanced knowledge and equipment can run them properly. Most authors spend their time on cheats that are much easier to produce and can be used by a vastly wider audience. As far as I know, it has been years since a working ‘man in the middle’ hack that actually did something useful was released for a popular multiplayer game.”

Given all these different cheating methods and the elusive cloak-and-dagger routines of hiding and detecting them, you’d expect

both league anticheat and anticheat software team members would have a hard time trying to catch these players. Even Balance, Prizefight, TeamWarfare League, and others like them are fighting what seems like a never-ending losing battle. By far the biggest and most powerful warrior against cheaters and their ilk is Even Balance’s PunkBuster. Once it’s enabled, it scans your computer while you’re playing to ensure that you aren’t using cheats. You’re tracked online, in both public and private arenas, and in most competitions by your Globally Unique Identifier, or GUID. Your GUID is a code generated from your CD key. If your GUID is banned, you have to purchase a new copy of the game or wait out your ban period. PunksBusted.com fights cheating by collecting a list of cheaters called the “Master Ban List,” or MBL. Whenever anyone is caught cheating by PunkBuster, their GUID and IP are sent to the MBL. Server administrators download the list and keep it updated on their own servers. So within hours, cheaters won’t be able to logon to other

Honest Cheats Team myg0t on cheating, from the guys who wrote the book on it… Of all the online game cheaters in the world, the most (in)famous may be Team myg0t (myg0t.com). By crashing servers and causing hundreds of players to rage at their PCs since 1998, this team of online gamers practically wrote today’s definition of cheating. “The idea behind myg0t was pretty simple,” says member OldManPeterson. “It originated in Counter-strike, a game which everyone at the time took very seriously, more seriously than any FPS to date. We found it fun to mess with the people playing this game, more fun than playing the game in the normal way. It started off simple, with team killing and spamming, which later turned into cheating and much more. We went with whatever pissed people off the most and gave us a good laugh.” Myg0t has many different ways of creating mischief. “My personal favorites have not even been cheats, but rather using the game mechanics themselves to disrupt the game, such as door blocking or team killing,” says Peterson. “I find it more challenging and more rewarding.” Team myg0t realized early on that one cheater in a match just wasn’t enough to overthrow a game. Its members learned that it takes teamwork to ruin an online match. One cheater is annoy-

ing; putting six myg0t members in a game server together is hell for players and server administrators alike. “We could clear out a 32-man server in minutes, with lots of pissed-off people,” Peterson says. “So we often game with each other. Raging games solo can be fun, but it is much funnier when you enjoy the laughs with others.” Some anticheat organizations consider XP- and script-whoring to be cheating. Do you ban someone simply because they’re smart enough to script their actions, thus making their play more efficient and productive? According to Peterson, if it doesn’t require a third-party program, it isn’t a cheat. “If you can do it using only the game itself, then it’s a flaw in the game, not a cheat. In that situation, developers are to blame, not the person taking advantage.” At least the members of myg0t are honest about their cheating. What even they don’t understand are the players who deny it. “Anyone can win using an effective cheat, as it’s all automated,” says Peterson. “But it’s like beating a single-player game with a cheat. It’s just not very rewarding.”

These cheats, it appears, are prejudiced against the color blind.

servers until the cheat is gone. Depending on your infraction, these bans can last anywhere from one session to indefinitely.

Some leagues run their own anticheat software, either by itself or in addition to other software that allows them to track what’s happening on each player’s screen. Other gaming leagues, like the CyberAthlete Professional League, mostly run LAN competitions, where cheating is rare or nonexistent. In most LAN competitions, especially those in which a large amount of prize money is involved, referees physically walk around the competitors’ tables and watch

over their shoulders as they play. Some LAN competitions even get their own computers sponsored so that players are forced to use a fresh system instead their home computer. Many anticheat administrators and teams must adapt to cheats after they’ve already been released. “After you find one, they get reverse-engineered so we know how they work,” says Maddog. “From there, you can develop your anticheat software to catch what they are doing.”

Most leagues rely on their administrators’ own eyes and ears to catch cheaters, and

Prizefight is no exception. “Enforcing an anticheat policy is somewhat easier than fighting a virus, because an experienced admin can spot dubious behavior even if anticheat software has failed to pick it up,” says Hayden. “We use a combination of industrystandard anticheat software and proprietary server and client-side tools to detect cheating, but the manual review always remains the last (and admittedly retrospective) resort.” Admins like Maddog feel that it’s up to developers to take cheating more seriously. “Most of the cheating issues for us seem to come from developers who leave the de-

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Glossary of Cheats ■ AIMBOT Just like it sounds, this is a hack that will aim at your enemies for you.

■ ANTI-CHEAT HACK This sly piece of code goes directly underneath PunkBuster and tries to “interfere with its normal operation.” Using this hack results in a “global ban.”

■ AUTOFIRE As the name implies, this baby automatically and repeatedly fires your weapon for you when you mouse over an enemy target.

■ GAMEHACK This hacks directly into the programming code of the game to yield a cheating effect.

■ GAMEHOOK This is an advanced hack that undermines the computer operating system itself, so the foundation the game relies on is compromised to produce cheating effects inside the game.

■ MODEL MODIFICATIONS Similar to texture modifications, these cause the models (aka your enemies) to become brighter or a sufficiently different color that they stand out against the normal background and are extremely easy to pick off.

■ MULTIHACK The multihack is coded especially for a particular game and gives the cheater a “package deal,” or a multitude of cheats in one code snippet, like extra ammo and invisibility.

■ SPEEDHACK This evil program tricks the game’s timing mechanisms so that the cheater can reload or run faster than they could normally.

■ TEXTURE MODIFICATIONS Modifications to the appearance of the map so that players stand out against backgrounds and are far easier to spot.

■ WALLHACK This little bugger makes walls vanish, allowing you to see through and around objects you shouldn’t.

52 Computer Games | April 2007

“No commercial hack site that I’ve ever seen tells the truth to prospective buyers.” –Tony Ray velopment codes still active in the publicly released versions of their games,” he says. “If they would remove this section of the software, cheaters would not have their foot in the door of the game, and it would make cheating that much more difficult.” The people developing cheats are fighting time. They know that there is only a tiny window between the release of the cheat and the moment when some anticheat person or software will be able to detect it. So it’s a wonder that people keep coming back for more cheats, and they’re even willing to pay for them. “[The people making and selling cheats] lie,” says Ray. “No commercial hack site that I’ve ever seen tells the truth to prospective buyers. Again, if you think about it, anyone who sells a program to cheat is willing to be untruthful to any degree in order to make a buck or two.” Ray believes many cheaters are addicted to cheating. He thinks they’re simply unable or unwilling to play fairly. “There are clear parallels to real-life addicts who allow themselves to be controlled by something valueless like gambling, drinking, or drugs. That sounds dramatic, but many regular gamers who try using a cheat just to see what it is like later admit that they simply can’t go back. Playing clean just isn’t fun for them anymore.”

Some people play games to relieve the stress from their intense days and busy real lives. Some people play to win. Some play because they love the fame and notoriety that comes with being a top player. Some people play for money. But most people just play to have fun. Players who cheat share all of these motivations. So what’s the difference between cheaters and regular players? After all, it is “just a game” for everyone, right? For cheaters, it goes well beyond “just a game.” They’ll purchase or steal multiple CD keys or copies of the game to keep their bad habit going. Will “Polaris” Everett, CEO of TeamWarfare League, feels that people just want things to be easy, and that the anonymity of the Internet makes it easy to avoid guilt. “The vast majority of our cheating discussions revolve around plausible deniability,” he says. Hayden thinks people cheat for many reasons: insecurity, revenge, kudos, and respect. “Some people will cheat because they envy the notoriety highly skilled players have, and wish to garner some of that notoriety for themselves by faking how good they are. Some people cheat just to annoy other people and make their use of cheats obvious. Others cheat in order to prove they can beat an anticheat system. ‘Why they do this’ is an interesting psychological/philosophical question.” ■

www.chipsbits.com PC Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars Command & Conquer 3 gets the series back to its roots in the Tiberium universe, with new gameplay features that rewards players for their own unique play styles. All-out war rages over Tiberium and the fate of the planet rests in the balance.

Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific Takes players to the depths of the Pacific Ocean as the skipper of an American submarine. Players engage in massive battles with enemy units, manage and evolve an entire submarine crew, and earn promotions and commendations to ensure victory in the Pacific.

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Seven Kingdoms: Conquest Starting in ancient Egypt in 3000 B.C. and ending in a final battle on a futuristic Earth, players will have to have their fingers on the pulse of their civilization as the two races clash every 1,000 years.

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Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade Play as one of three races in this full 3D futuristic RTS. Set in a mysterious futuristic universe where organic machines are built using genetic engineering, take on the role of Captain Iconah to explore and conquer the Universal Heart.

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The Settlers II 10th Anniversary

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Turtles must save New York City from a monstrous evil that lurks around every corner, while trying to maintain their unity as a group. Based on the CG animated movie produced by Imagi Animation Studios.

Revisit the 1996 classic, enhanced with up-to-date 3D graphics and new gameplay additions. An all-new game engine will generate an interactive 3D environment and charming comic strip look including beautiful fauna and flora.

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XBOX 360

Guitar Hero II

Forza Motorsport 2

Features a brand-new and expanded track list, more venues and new play modes, and aims to rock longer and harder than its predecessor. The Xbox 360 version also adds 10 new songs, downloadable content features, leaderboards and online features.

Forza 2 includes everything from Corvettes to Lamborghinis and includes many of the favorite features from the Xbox version of the game. However, the jump to 360 has also brought a few changes.

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The Darkness

Too Human As the Cybernetic God Baldur, players are thrust into the midst of an ongoing battle that threatens the existence of mankind. Baldur is charged with defending mankind from an onslaught of monstrous war machines bent on the eradication of human life.

On the eve of his 21st birthday, fearless mafia hitman Jackie Estacado is suddenly possessed by the terrifying and spectacular powers of The Darkness. Gameplay features include a seamless and unique blend of modern crime drama and supernatural horror.

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Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia

Assassinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Creed

In four-player melee action, you will fight off the monster invasion in this top-down action/shooting game. Customize and build your own weapons by grabbing parts from the house and town to create more powerful attack tools.

Set in 1191 AD, the Third Crusade was tearing the Holy Land apart. Shrouded in secrecy and feared for their ruthlessness, the Assassins intend to stop the hostilities by suppressing both sides of the conflict.

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PS3

Enchanted Arms

Army of Two

Players take control of Atsuma, who early in his adventure manages to inadvertently open a seal which revives the fierce Devil Golem. Players face increasingly difficult challenges and learn to master Atsuma’s special fighting and magical abilities.

Throws gamers into hot spots ripped from current day headlines where they will utilize unique two-man strategies and tactics while seamlessly transitioning between playing with intelligent Partner AI (PAI) and a live player.

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Armored Core 4 Armored Core®, the mech action game that defined the mech genre is back to take on next-generation platforms! Armored Core® 4 reinvigorates the brand by offering an all-new storyline, new environments, and online capability.

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Indiana Jones Indiana Jones returns for his most incredible interactive expedition ever. Set in 1939, this epic, original Indy story puts you in the fedora of the legendary adventure hero as he unravels the clues found in ancient artifacts spanning the globe.

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Virtua Tennis 3

MLB 07: The Show The Show adds to its already robust online feature set and delivers Online League Play which offers the ability to set up customizable leagues with up to 30 teams complete with full stat tracking, point benefits and rewards.

New enhanced, photo-realistic graphics and advanced player animations that perfectly match the behavior and mannerisms of individual professional athletes. Improvements to the game’s AI have also upped the challenge to becoming the top seed of the tennis world.

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Wii The Godfather

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon The seventh entry in the ongoing fighting series is a full-blown armageddon, bringing together every bloodletting character in Mortal Kombat history as well as adding new characters eager for violence.

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Based on the 1972 film of the same name, The Godfather immerses you in the dangerous world of the Mafia. The game features GTA-style gameplay, a new storyline, and voice-acting by original cast members.

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Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Players test their air-combat skills as they experience the most famous battles of World War II. As a squadron leader, players can fly up to 38 WWII aircraft in both single-player and multiplayer missions.

The Turtles must save New York City from a monstrous evil that lurks around every corner, while trying to maintain their unity as a group. Based on the CG animated movie produced by Imagi Animation Studios.

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Driver: Parallel Lines

Meet the Robinsons

This new edition of Driver is set in New York City and features an open mission structure unfolding a story of double-cross and revenge set over 2 distinct eras of New York City.

Disney’s Meet the Robinsons is an action adventure game that lets you go back in time. The game weaves in and out of the film’s plot offering an allnew adventure.

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www.chipsbits.com PSP Tenchu: Shinobi Taizen

Driver 76

You play as ninjitsu masters Ayane and Rikumaru in an all-new storyline that takes place immediately following the events of Tenchu: Fatal Shadows. Each character is tied to a different story, and each story offers different levels to play through.

An action driving game that features Hollywood-style car chases while also letting the player experience the open environment on foot. The game thrusts the player into the heart of the 1970s, through 27 missions divided into six main plots.

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Full Auto 2: Battlelines Featuring exclusive content including a new 56 event single-player story mode, 15 selectable cars designed specifically for the PSP version, numerous multiplayer and arena modes, and a host of new weapons guaranteed to cause massive destruction and havok.

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After Burner: Black Falcon This arcade-style flight game combines intensive air combat with a multitude of explosions that allow gamers to relive the experience of the classic After Burner arcade game. Gamers can also compete against friends via ad-hoc in a variety of multiplayer modes.

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Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2

Bliss Island

GRAW 2 places gamers in control of the U.S. military’s elite fighting unit, the Ghosts. In the year 2014, the rising conflict between Mexican loyalists and insurgent rebel forces has thrown Mexico into full-scale civil war.

Players will take on the role of Hoshi the Zwooph, a small blue fluffy creature with a long trunk, in loads of mini games that revolve around his unique ability to expel precision puffs of air from his trunk.

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PS2 Medal of Honor: Vanguard

Shining Force EXA

Step into the boots of Frank Keegan, Corporal of the 82nd Airborne Division and engage in battles throughout Europe. From Operation Husky to Operation Varsity inside Nazi Germany, you’ll fight behind enemy lines in the epic WWII battles.

A bitter war between two world superpowers has raged on for decades with armies of beasts devastating the people and the land. Two young heroes rise up to begin a heroic journey to stop the fighting and unite the divided world.

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Heatseeker

Made Man Based on real-world events, allowing players to assume the role of Joey Verola as he is indoctrinated into the dark world of organized crime and relive his life— every moment, every kill—as he rises through the ranks to become a “Made Man”.

Heatseeker will strap players into the pilot’s seat and deliver an exhilarating white-knuckle ride that’ll have them clutching the joypad as they engage in facemelting 6G turns and fight against a seemingly-impossible amount of airborne enemies.

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Legend of the Dragon

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Legend of the Dragon is a third person action game with RPG components, which features fantastic martial arts movements from the TV series. Twins fall on opposite sides of good and evil and use magic bracelets to change into half-man, half-beasts.

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GAMECUBE

Radio Allergy

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An enhanced port of the arcade-based Naomi game, featuring stylized, cartoon-shaded graphics for a vertically-scrolling shooting fest. Shizuru amKigusa must utilize her portable terminal suit to defeat the ruthless group of terrorists.

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Meet the Robinsons

Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess

Disney’s Meet the Robinsons is an action adventure game that lets you go back in time. The game weaves in and out of the film’s plot offering an all-new adventure.

When an evil darkness enshrouds the land of Hyrule, a young farm boy named Link must awaken the hero – and the animal – within. When link travels to the Twilight Realm, he transforms into a wolf and must scour the land with the help of a mysterious girl named Midna.

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Backyard Baseball 2007 Features a roster full of top MLB pros as kids and includes all 30 MLB teams, uniforms, and logos. In addition, the game’s kid-friendly, non-violent format, and high level of diversity makes it especially popular with the whole family.

Shrek Smash and Crash Racing Crash through the Shrek universe atop a mount with a personality all its own! Play as your favorite Shrek character and pit your racing and combat skills against an assortment of twisted fairy-tale opponents.

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XBOX Call of Duty 3 Through the eyes of four Allied soldiers, Call of Duty 3 brings players closer than ever to the fury of combat as they fight through the Normandy Breakout, the harrowing offensive that liberated Paris and changed the fate of the world.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance In this superhero-filled action-RPG, players assume the roles of more than 20 Marvel Super Heroes including Spider-Man, Wolverine, Blade and Captain America, and through their actions determine the fate of both planet Earth and the Marvel universe.

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Fight Night Round 3

Far Cry Instincts Evolution

Round 3 brings the most intense boxing videogame experience to the virtual ring. On the way to becoming boxing’s greatest legend, train to fight like the best including Muhammad Ali and Oscar De La Hoya.

Jack Carver goes back into the jungle in this follow-up title. This new edition introduces players to an entirely new story, characters and game features that reflect and improve upon the critically acclaimed elements of the first title.

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NCAA Football 07

The Godfather

Turn the tide in your favor and control momentum like never before with NCAA Football 07. In the new Campus Legend mode, you must remain disciplined to maintain a high GPA and improve your character and intelligence on and off the field.

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REVIEWS

Return of the King Blizzard finally releases The Burning Crusade, and with it shows again why World of WarCraft is the biggest game in the world

RATING ★★★★½ GENRE Expansion You Already Own DEVELOPER/PUBLISHER Blizzard Entertainment REQUIREMENTS World of WarCraft ESRB Teen

K, you ran out and bought The Burning Crusade the day it was released. (You and a couple million other people in North America alone.) In fact, you probably had it preordered. And you’ve already leveled your Draenei Shaman and Blood Elf Paladin to 70. As a normal “review” of the expansion, this article is kind of useless. So consider this a “State of the World of World of WarCraft,” circa early 2007. Everyone expected the worst from the Burning Crusade launch: crashing servers, endless queues, and login problems. Some servers experienced all of these issues, but World of WarCraft mostly sputtered along

58 Computer Games | April 2007

without any major problems. And what people found is that… Blizzard kind of knows what it’s doing with this whole MMO thing. The Burning Crusade adds some muchneeded high-level content to a game that had grown pretty stagnant for the Level 60s who spent all day and night dancing in front of the Auction Houses in Ironforge and Orgrimmar. As soon as the Dark Portal opened, those people whisked themselves away to Outland. This left most of the highlevel areas of Azeroth pretty empty. While the exodus means performance is greatly improved in the major cities, and there’s much less chaos in some of the more popu-

lated zones, people making the 1-60 grind will find it much harder to get pick-up groups anywhere. And anyone who wants to venture into some of the previous highlevel instances, like Molten Core, Blackrock Depths and Spire, and Zul’Gurub, will have to rely exclusively on bored guildmates. Thus far, no level-based MMO has avoided this problem of expiring content, so it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves in Azeroth. It was already happening before Burning Crusade. Fewer people were doing Dire Maul, for example, and chances are no one will be running it today. In fact, there’s little reason to go through any instance

HOW WE RATE: ★★★★★ = REALLY, REALLY GOOD | ★★★★ = REALLY GOOD | ★★★ = SORTA GOOD | ★★ = NOT SO GOOD | ★ = REALLY NOT SO GOOD

[left] Here’s everyone on Eonar waiting for the Dark Portal to open. [above and right] Everyone created a Blood Elf within minutes of the Burning Crusade going live. [bottom]

when you’re between Levels 50 and 60, because Outland eliminates much of the need to grind for goodies. Two hours of questing in Hellfire Peninsula can garner serious greens and blues to replace gear that took over a year’s worth of instance runs to obtain. A lot of people are pissed. But this was inevitable. Did people really expect any Level 60 gear to be better than the gear beyond 60? Did they think the same way about their Level 50 gear? It’s nuts. Still, the new high-level quests are more interesting, and there are fewer punishing bits of tedium. Outland is full of PvP and PvE on all servers. It feels like a mini-war is raging in each region, and everyone in the zone can receive a bonus when their side is “winning” the larger battle, even if they’re not participating. The Outland areas have a lot of overlap between Horde and Alliance when it comes to questing, and both sides come together in the awe-inspiring city of Shattrath. There, you can see the cost of war

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REVIEWS

Silvermoon looks amazing. It’s a wee bit annoying to get around in, though.

on the faces of all its refugees. At least you could see it on their faces if the graphics were a little better. There’s a lot more faction action in Outland, with complex interactions and potentially lucrative—and reachable—rewards for reaching higher levels of reputation. Horde can ally with the Draenei Aldor and Alliance can ally with the Blood Elf Scryers (or vice versa) in Shattrath, for example, and your decision can be based on the loot either side offers your particular class. (Given their coexistence in Shattrath, it almost appears as if Blizzard is moving the Horde and Alliance together… maybe to fight that invasion from StarCraft in the future.) Normally, faction grinding isn’t all that entertaining. Fortunately, there’s no Cenarion Circle, Centaur, or Furblog-like grind in Outland. Almost every mod and quest earns you reputation with one faction or loses it with another. If you pay attention to the fiction, there’s an interesting dynamic at work… though, ultimately, it’s about raising your reputation to a point where you can buy some raid-level gear without needing to raid. (You can even buy epic gear.) It’s too bad the faction stuff isn’t taken

60 Computer Games | April 2007

further. If there were more quests that cost you standing with your own faction—say, an Alliance one where you needed to kill a number of bad Draenei, which would offer a lot of XP and riches but put you at odds with the general population (and lower your faction ranking)—the expansion might add more interesting choices for players. Though it’ll take a while to explore all of the higher-level content, the non-PvP endgame of WoW remains an exercise in rote memorization and repetition. It feels more like a spreadsheet with empty cells you fill as you play than an amazing adventure. Outside of PvP, there’s little emergent gameplay in instances, because everything is so rigid and linear. This criticism applies to all MMOs, and some wear their math even more proudly on their sleeves than Blizzard’s. But given the size of the World of WarCraft player base, Blizzard should be held to a different standard. Why not introduce one (more) instance with more random AI and less scripting? You can increase the risk as long as you increase the rewards. The grind from 61-70 is much slower than it is during any 10-level span while

you’re moving from 1-60, though it isn’t nearly as slow as Blizzard promised. Level 70 characters appeared within days of Burning Crusade’s release. While that says more about people’s willingness to play the game nearly 24/7 than it does about a problem with leveling, it still must be of some concern. People sat on Level 60 for almost two years; will they be content to remain at Level 70 for just as long? For who are those bored with their Level 70s, there are new races to roll. The Burning Crusade adds the Draenei and Blood Elf, each with its own all-new starting zone. The new races are a mixed bag. You can quibble all you want about how the choice of the Blood Elf and the Draenei was made solely on aesthetic grounds—the Horde needed a pretty class for server balance reasons, hence the Blood Elf; the Alliance needed a Tauren. But you can’t deny that Blizzard can create some killer environments. Its art direction is unparalleled in gaming right now, and the new big cities of Exodar and Silvermoon are superb examples of the skill of Blizzard’s artists in making a relatively simple 3D engine come alive. Both cities are amazing works of art.

TOP SELLERS

DECEMBER 2006

Run away! The trees are attacking!

However, in giving the Draenei/Alliance the Shaman and the Blood Elf/Horde the Paladin, Blizzard has essentially thrown up its hands when it comes to trying to balance this mess. Though each player can still personalize their character by applying talents in radically different ways—hey look, more math!—there’s little difference now between Horde and Alliance. This sameness runs counter to the uniqueness that’s a hallmark of Blizzard’s past designs. You pass through 20 levels or so in the new areas, and both feature some of the best quests in the entire game. The Blood Elf areas are more conventional, though Eversong Woods is gorgeous. There’s a little black hole of questing once you leave Falconwing Square, but once you’re past that very minor hurdle things pick up. Most importantly, you get to fight a named Murloc named “Mmmrrrggglll”—so that’s how you spell that sound. The second Blood Elf area, Ghostlands, is kind of Dustwallow Marsh 2.0, an unspectacularly gloomy place that’s chock full of quests. And Trolls. And spiders. The Draenei get a much more interesting

set of quests in much less interesting zones. Azuremyst Isles and Bloodmyst Isle are the sort of environments Blizzard can probably do in its sleep, but the designers went all out with some amazing low-level quests. You get a short preview of what it’s like to ride a mount—this is something Blizzard should have done with each race, as a way to make you really want to get to Level 40. Another preview gives you a series of very cool temporary enhancements as you learn more about the Furblogs. There’s even a nice payoff once you’re ready to leave the region. It’s all these little moments that remind you why the journey to 60 or 70 is as important as the endgame. (It’s too bad most of us are unable to enjoy that journey properly until we’ve actually reached our destination. Ah, sweet irony.) No one does all levels of content better than Blizzard. World of WarCraft remains more focused on getting you to 60 or 70 with as few impediments as possible. Does this make it a carebear game, the equivalent of “My First MMO”? Sure. There are plenty of more hardcore alternatives out there. World of WarCraft is the most popular game in the world, but it isn’t all things to all gamers. Still, there’s no denying that World of WarCraft is compulsively playable, and Burning Crusade only makes it more so. Blizzard’s still got it, whatever “it” is. They’ve always had it, and it appears they always will. ■

Sims 2 Pets Electronic Arts ★★★½ 1 The of WarCraft Blizzard Entertainment ★★★★★ 2 World Sims 2 Electronic Arts ★★★★★ 3 The II: Total War Sega ★★★★ 4 Medieval Sims 2: Glamour Life Stuff Electronic Arts Not Rated 5 The Simulator X Deluxe Microsoft ★★ 6 Flight Sims 2: Happy Holiday Stuff Electronic Arts Not Rated 7 The 2142 Electronic Arts ★★★★ 8 Battlefield or No Deal Global Star Not Rated 9 Deal Radiator Springs Adventures THQ Not Rated 10 Cars: Simulator X Microsoft ★★ 11 Flight Sims 2: Open for Business Electronic Arts ★★★½ 12 The Sims 2: Holiday Edition Electronic Arts Not Rated 13 The of Empires III: WarChiefs Microsoft ★★★★½ 14 Age of Empires III Microsoft ★★★ 15 Age & Claws Pet Vet Valusoft Not Rated 16 Paws of the Rings: Rise of the Witch King 17 Lord Electronic Arts ★★★★ Sims 2: Nightlife 18 The Electronic Arts ★★★★ Nights 2 19 Neverwinter Atari ★★★½ Tycoon Collection 20 Zoo Microsoft ★★★★ Source: NPD Group/NPD Funworld. The December list is based on units sold by more than 70 channel partners, representing 90% of the U.S. retail consumer market.

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REVIEWS

[below] Skilled piloting is your only hope, but unfortunately Legacy doesn’t support it.

Disengaged The boring Star Trek Legacy doesn’t make it so BY KELLY WAND RATING ★½ GENRE Paycheck DEVELOPER Mad Doc Software PUBLISHER Bethesda Softworks ESRB Everyone

rom its unintentionally ironic title to the myriad errors and broken promises riddling the documentation, Star Trek: Legacy is a clunky, junky paradigm of everything that currently sucks about the game industry. It’s rushed, lazy, cumbersome, boring, inauthentic, and stingy. But the graphics aren’t bad, at least if you consider the mise en scène of Xbox menu screens easy on the eyes. Series scriptwriter veterans DC Fontana and Derek Chester go to honorable pains trying to weave a remotely coherent story that links three different eras, four races, and five famous starship captains. They even tackle inherently meaty Trek lore like the Sundering, an epic event that forever divided Vulcans from Romulans (except for the ears, obviously). But except for Patrick Stewart, the (most likely misdirected) actors

62 Computer Games | April 2007

phone their lines in, and the rest of the game follows suit. Legacy gelds the free-roaming immensity of space by reducing it to a visually barren 2D pane. It’s a huge leap backward from 2002’s Star Trek Bridge Commander—and Mad Doc’s own Star Trek Armada II, for that matter—although you can also toggle to a different, visually barren tactical grid. At least the tiny waffle-squares of that view are helpful, since it’s hard to tell in-game how far you’ve warped, what with all the planets’ being of blandly similar size. The sadistically unwieldy WASD control scheme and infuriatingly tight camera view leave you with the constant sensation of skidding across a giant sea of molasses without being able to turn your head. To be fair, maneuvering feels like pulling teeth on the console, too. The designers seem to lack the imagination to visualize space: Ships stall out if they try to climb too

“high,” as if they were biplanes. And they can’t backflip or bank, or even make a graceful U-turn. The largely arbitrary physics don’t even attempt to convey a realistic scale. Ships collide with planets and ricochet off them like bumper cars. Virtually every convenience you expect in a PC game released since 1988 is MIA here. You can’t remap keys, and the ones you’re stuck with don’t feel optimal. You can’t zoom in or out. You can’t save your game within a mission, or save more than a single campaign at a time. You can’t buy captains or upgrade ships in your fleet management screens with command points, despite assurances in the manual about a Fleet Assembly screen. Friendly AI ships refuse to repair themselves, no matter how hellish a pounding they take. And the most common actions, like scanning, repairing, and tractor beaming, require you tediously to open various pulldown menus

TOP 10 SELLERS OF 2006

1 World Of WarCraft

2 The Sims 2

3 The Sims 2: Open For Business

4 Star Wars: Empire At War

5 The Sims 2: Pets

6 Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion [above] Few other games so effectively tap into our ancient distrust of cubes.

and select the right icon from an all too skittish and unresponsive cursor. The game overflows like a popcorn machine with little annoyances. Inexplicable lapses in logic and lore abound. Photon torpedoes ignore shields entirely? Cloaked ships can’t warp or repair hull damage? Archer declares that “Any mission with Vulcans means trouble”? Isn’t that Tribbles? Skirmish mode offers tons of terrificlooking ship models to choose from. But you’re told little about their capabilities, and they all handle roughly the same: like medicine balls of gum. There’s zero sense of a crew onboard for you to yell at, a loneliness that’s only magnified when you’re trying to babysit four ships at a time in skirmish mode. Internet play’s operational as of a patch, but there’s little

point, since the matchmaking lobby is a graveyard. Star Trek: Legacy does have a few things going for it. The enemy AI is fairly challenging, especially its downright computer-like efficiency at cycling its weapon energy and shield power levels. (But the mouse sensitivity is so twitchy, you’re apt to lose your target at the slightest tap anyway.) The sound design isn’t bad, in a screeching-phaser and exploding-cube sort of way. Finally, the idea behind the game still holds great promise, and the franchise will undoubtedly survive this rocky nadir. Still, those jonesing for great space combat may be better off reinstalling Independence War or Freelancer. The legacy at hand offers only frustration and disappointment. They made it so. ■

7 Age Of Empires III

8 The Sims 2: Family Fun Stuff

9 Civilization IV

10 The Sims 2: Nightlife Source: NPD Group

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REVIEWS

[left] The Holy Roman Empire rarely stays this divided. [above] This list menu will be your best friend for 300 years.

EUROPA UNIVERSALIS III Not in our stars, but in our selves RATING ★★★★ GENRE History Channeled DEVELOPER/PUBLISHER Paradox ESRB Everyone REQUIREMENTS 2GHz CPU; 512MB RAM

ame design is a risky venture, especially when your prize franchise is at stake. If you don’t change anything, you’re accused of milking a tired title for all the cash you can get. If you change the wrong things, you can break whatever it was that made your game special. But what happens when you make the right changes for the right reasons and lose something? This is the paradox facing Paradox. Europa Universalis III is a much-needed revamp of a much-loved title. For the uninitiated, Europa Universalis puts you in control of a nation through the early modern period, from the discovery of the New World to the French Revolution. The current edition’s renovation takes out a lot of the predictability and lockstep gameplay of previous entries, which forced you either to play through history or play around it. (Your Russia is a strong and stable monarchy? Too bad. The calendar says it’s time for the “Time of Troubles.” Have fun with the collapse.) No more of that. Now national fragmentation will be based on policy choices you have made or the incompetence of your random monarch. The historical record remains to be written. One good example of how this works is the new “core province” system. The earlier games would stick your nation with the

64 Computer Games | April 2007

“historical cores,” which are provinces that your nation claimed by right. Now cores are acquired in a more dynamic way. Border disputes are randomly generated, giving you the chance to claim nearby territories. This means that your British Empire can get cores around its colonies, or a claim on French lands that surround Calais. You can strike out in whichever direction the new history points you to. The result is a grand campaign game that has even more variation than the earlier entries. Randomizing cores is only part of the new era. Gone are the major historical events, replaced by more context-dependent ones that can happen to almost anyone. This is a welcome relief for those who planned their games around the scheduling of certain events, but it has two negative consequences. First, the historical events often served to keep a major nation on the right track though historic increases in stability or armed force. Without these, larger AI-controlled powers often hover between low and very low stability. Second, the historical events added some color to each nation. “Expand colonial borders” doesn’t have the same ring as “Found the Star Chamber” or “Reform the Janissaries.” There is less to distinguish one nation from another, and playing Poland isn’t significantly different from playing Portugal. This missing flavor is replaced by much greater flexibility in customizing your nation. Since all the monarchs, generals, and

advisers are randomized after your start date, you can pick and choose your focus. You can choose 10 of 40 government traits, with new slots opening up as you research the appropriate technology. These range from options for better soldiers to lowering costs for stability, but by and large the economic advances are the wiser choices. You can change your government from a monarchy to a republic if you think the payoff is better. Up to three advisers can be chosen to accentuate imperial policy, and the better the adviser, the greater the chance of a beneficial random event. For people wanting a more historical experience, Europa Universalis III has opened up the game to allow you to choose any start date you want between June 1453 and July 1789. Want to begin on Henry VIII’s first day on the job? Set the menu clock to April 22, 1509 and have at it. Major events like the Thirty Years War have already been bookmarked for your convenience. The menu screen itself is a pleasure, since you can scroll through the months and years and watch the map change. In fact, the best changes to the game are in the interface. If you’ve ever been confused by Europa Universalis, be confused no longer. Tabs drop to remind you of major decisions that need to be made. Sound cues alert you to diplomatic overtures. There is a list menu you can set to track the things you are most interested in, like ongoing sieges, merchants, or colonies being devel-

STARSTRUCK Everyone has an opinion, and some aren’t afraid to share it on websites. Since no one trusts the press, here are some “real gamer” reviews of some recent releases, in their own words, with their own unique interpretations of the English language.

Burning Crusade Edition “World of Warcraft is nothing but a cokkie cutter MMORPG with no real substance. People claim haters hate WoW for no reason. I am a good reason I BETA tested WoW and Blizzard plain ruined a good idea. The expansion is nothing special.” ★ “bc may have delayed peoples social lives, which would be the only con. Play, play.” ★★★★★ “WoW games are totally boring the consoles have sweet games like Halo 3, Gears of War, Grand theft auto, etc. DOWN WITH PC UP WITH CONSELE” ★

[top] It looks nice, but the terrain map isn’t that useful. [above] Faith and begorrah!

oped. There’s a lot of information in this game, and none of it is hidden. There’s no way to set messages to pause the game, and some functionality, such as automating the merchants, has been removed. But this game is a tutorial in interface design. The AI is better at the small stuff, too. It is very aggressive in colonizing the world, assisted by the dispersal of other people’s discoveries across the globe. It manages armies more sensibly, though it is still too reluctant to take on rebels until a city has fallen. Your computer rivals aren’t confident in taking on larger, weaker empires—India falls easily into your lap—but can negotiate a tough settlement on whomever they fight. There isn’t enough gold floating around for war to be profitable, and the wars have limited goals, befitting the time period. The improvements even touch something as basic as army recruitment. In a feature lifted from Paradox’s World War II game Hearts of Iron II, your war-weary regiments are automatically refilled from a manpower pool that is affected by government type and policies. You can only recruit one provincial regiment at a time, so mercenaries prove to be an important force multiplier. Battles lead to increases in military tradition, from which you draft new generals. It accrues too slowly for you to get really powerful leaders, but your king can be drafted into service in a pinch.

“the first is good enough this is just amazing plus u can talk with ur friends wile playing.” ★★★★★ “Games good, can't play cause can't process a credit card with enough money on it, and verified for internet use and can't call cause machine that picks up doesn't work.” ★

The final product needs some tweaking. It is too difficult to initiate an alliance, spies are mostly useless as advisers and agents, and it is too easy to be tolerant of every culture you run into. You always lead alliances at war, meaning you can stiff your friends if the war becomes inconvenient. The music is much less interesting than the period score that made the last game such a pleasure. Always mod friendly, Paradox has opened up almost everything to amateur improvements, so you can expect a wider range of options in the coming months. Europa Universalis III is still one of the best grand strategy games you can find. Newcomers to the series will be thrilled by the possibilities the game provides without an overwhelming quantity of menus. There will probably be some complaints about the event culling, but the world is now in the palm of your hand. You chart your course, and you make your fate. Nothing is foretold. –Troy S. Goodfellow

“I have never seen a worse expansion. Blizzard and their intrepet coders have accomplish an act of laziness and stupidity. After the first week a dozen of my friends and collegues have already left the game.” ★ “i love the blood elves i don't normally play horde but they are the best race ever” ★★★★★ “The new races look like they were sketched by 10 year olds. Hopefully they will make a patch in the near future to fix the lack of effort that they put into this expansion.” ★★ “I think that for an expansion, it seems to lack as much content as one would expect to get. Hopefully some company will come out with something that breaks the mold and makes it fun to immerse yourself for hours in a game again.” ★★★

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REVIEWS

Kung Fu Fighting

Unless you really want to, that is. Even if it remains the same old, same old, Jade Empire also remains a great RPG with a ton of replay value. Sure, the story of a mysterious orphan realizing his destiny and saving the world rips off everything from Conan to Star Wars. (The game’s competing Way of the Open Palm and Way of the Closed Fist philosophies are barely disguised versions of the Light and Dark sides of the Force.) But this fantasy take on medieval China features such spectacular ambiance, not to mention an outstanding script and voice acting, that you won’t care. Only occasional lapses into fortune-cookie philosophy and music better confined to joints where you wolf down General Tso’s chicken interfere with the atmosphere. The gameplay falls on the console-ly end of the spectrum, though. This is a latter-day BioWare effort that has more in common with Knights of the Old Republic than with Baldur’s Gate. “Roll your own” character creation has been shelved in favor of selecting a prepackaged hero at the start of the game. Aside from a few big moral choices and at least three very different endings, most of the main plot and quests are relentlessly linear. Lots of talky cutscenes have to be clicked through, and, as in KOTOR, dialogue choices boil down to playing Gandhi or being a total dick, so there are few shades of gray in character development. Another sop to console gamers is hands-on action. Where battles in even a combat-heavy game like KOTOR played out in semitraditional, pause-able RPG fashion, in Jade Empire you manually Hai Karate! foes. Instead of giving orders, you get all over enemies like

It may be two years since its Xbox release, but everyone’s still fighting in Jade Empire: Special Edition BY BRETT TODD RATING ★★★★½ GENRE Hai Karate! RPG DEVELOPER BioWare/Gray Matter PUBLISHER 2K Games ESRB Teen REQUIREMENTS 1.8GHz CPU; 512MB RAM

etter late than never. BioWare sure took its sweet time porting its chop-socky RPG Jade Empire to the PC, but the wait was worth it. Even two years after the game made its debut as an Xbox exclusive, this role-player remains mm-mm fresh, thanks to its unique Asian setting and kung-fu-fighting flavor. Just keep in mind that this is pretty much the exact same game Xboxers ranted and raved about in 2005. Even though publisher 2K Games has slapped a “Special Edition” subtitle on the box, there isn’t anything that special here. Sure, revamped textures give the game a gorgeous new look that makes it hard to believe it’s a last-gen console port. Better combat AI seems to make enemies tougher than they were before. New fighting styles and a playable character that was previously available only in the limited-edition Xbox version fill out the feature list. But there still isn’t enough here to change the substance of the game. So if you’ve already wiped out the Lotus Assassins and pitched sweet woo to Dawn Star, there’s no need to do it all again.

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[above] Toto, we’re a long way from the Forgotten Realms. [left] While most of the dialogue is great, the clunkers come off like something you would pull out of a fortune cookie.

Thankfully, BioWare has done a good job of translating the controls from the Xbox’s gamepad to the PC’s mouse and keyboard. The arcade-first combat can be overwhelming. But that’s due less to any problems caused by mouse response or WASD movement than to the sheer difficulty and issues with twitchy camera angles and background scenery that gets in the way. The fighting is livened up by a great selection of villains to slap around. Even though the setting is a quasi-realistic medieval China, Jade Empire touches on D&D fantasy and even a little steampunk. So baddies include authentic kung-fu goons, mythological beasties like ogres, golems, and anthropomorphic foxes, a variety of spooks, and a few automatons. Foes are nicely mixed up, too. It’s tough to get bored when one moment you’re slugging it out with a couple of Lotus Assassins and the next you’re taking on a pack of creepy masked ghosts. If you do start to yawn, chances are that’s when the game will throw a minigame at you, like a really nifty—if wildly out of place—take on the classic arcade shooter 1942. Even if you’re not a fan of console role-players, or you’re one of those purists who think action-oriented combat has no place in an RPG, give Jade Empire a look. Few games in the genre tell a story this well, and fewer still combine that intriguing tale with such absolutely superb game mechanics. ■

“Dialogue choices boil down to playing Gandhi or being a total dick, so there are few shades of gray in character development.” white on rice. Battles rely on on-the-fly switching between martialarts fighting styles that include hand-to-hand techniques such as the evocatively named Legendary Strike and Heavenly Wave, ranged magic attacks like Dire Flame and Stone Immortal, and whipping around a sword or staff. The combat is typically intense and speedy. You can’t survive by button-mashing, because you have to do a lot of blocking, skillswitching, and leaping around like you’re auditioning for Cirque de Soleil to weather battles with gangs of thugs, demons, and ghosts.

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REVIEWS

SAM & MAX: THE MOLE, THE MOB, AND THE MEATBALL Son of Son of Sam & Max I Am, plus some cannoli on the side RATING ★★★ GENRE Sam & Maxian Adventure DEVELOPER/PUBLISHER Telltale Games ESRB Not Rated REQUIREMENTS 1GHz CPU; 256MB RAM

he third episode of the continuing new adventures of the lovably absurd Sam and Max shows that Telltale knows how to do episodic content right. At least when it comes to delivery: Each episode has followed the previous one by 3-4 weeks. Valve, take note. The only problem is that each episode is getting easier. Maybe that’s inevitable; once you shake off your adventure-game cobwebs and get more attuned to its funky vibe, the solutions become more and more obvious. Even with that in mind, “The Mole, The Mob, and the Meatball” reaches new heights in telegraphing solutions to its whacked-out conundrums. The result is an

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[above] Sam and Max get naughty. [right] Don’t whip that out in the casino.

episode that can be finished in less than an hour, versus the 2- to 3-hour completion times for previous ones. Even if you think it’s goofy to judge games by their quantity of play, as opposed to the quality, that’s a wee bit short. (Some of that truncation of play is due to the re-use of locations; you spend less time amusing yourself by clicking on their various hot spots because you’ve already heard their descriptions.) “The Mole, The Mob, and the Meatball” has some continuity with the previous episode, though it’s mostly a self-contained adventure. Sam and Max need to investigate the Ted E. Bear Mafia-Free Playland and Casino for possible ties to the Toy Mafia. There’s also a missing mole—of the “reports on nefarious activities” variety, as opposed

to the skin lesion one. Bosco and Sybil are back, with another twist on their previous activities, but for the most part, things are getting a bit too predictable and repetitive. The episode is still worth $8, though barely so. Hopefully, it’s the least substantial one, because if Telltale continues down this path of least resistance, the last installments may consist entirely of a giant “Solve” button in the middle of Sam and Max’s office. –Steve Bauman

The Little Engine That Almost Could Napoleonic Battles: Jena-Auerstadt, Panzer Campaigns: Minsk ’44, and Civil War Campaigns: Vicksburg are oldschool wargames, but not in a good way BY TROY S. GOODFELLOW

hen a pop-up announces that this is Turn 1 of 500, you know you’re in trouble. But that’s not unusual in a John Tiller game. His games are heavy on research and light on anything that makes a battle go faster. Good scenario design can only get you so far before you realize that the American Civil War was probably shorter than a single Tiller campaign. At its best, the Tiller engine can still amuse and enlighten. It shines in its representations of Napoleonic warfare, and the campaign in Jena[top to bottom] Napoleonic Battles: JenaAuerstadt, Civil War Campaigns: Auerstadt (★★★) offers simple choices before you get Vicksburg, Panzer Campaigns: Minsk ’44 down to the fighting. The scenarios range from a dozen turns to a few hundred, and this is where you will find most of the exciting combat moments. The AI opponent is competent, if not brilliant, but it certainly beats trying to take an epic-length battle to e-mail. The battlefield can be tight at times, increasing the tension. The battle itself poses the classic quality-versus-quantity debate, but there’s never quite enough quantity to overwhelm the player. All the titles suffer somewhat from the central failing in the Tiller campaign design. Both Minsk ’44 (★★½) and Vicksburg (★★½) have interesting scenarios in interesting settings, but both also take a long time to get going, especially in the campaigns. The grand battle in Minsk has hundreds of units by itself; the Soviet opening artillery barrage seems to go on forever. Then you need to move these units, one at a time. There isn’t a lot to distinguish Minsk from the other Panzer Campaigns games, either; one marshy plain in Eastern Europe is pretty much like another. Ironically, despite the size of the armies, you may experience a time crunch turnwise narios are less than 50 turns, and the soundtrack of period music is if you don’t want to send your Red Guard charging through a minebetter than the usual set of war tunes. field. The fact that there is still an audience for this type of wargame Though similar in style to Jena-Auerstadt, the Vicksburg game resays as much about the traditionalism of the grognard as it does quires a lot more patience, especially in the campaign. There is alabout the traditionalism of the company. These titles are, in effect, most too much geography to cover, both in terms of space to tratabletop cardboard wargames that you play on your computer, and verse on the map and difficult terrain. You can easily lose sight of they can take nearly as long to finish (though setup and clean-up where you are, and the viewing options—in all the games—are too limited to help you make quick sense of the battle. The AI opponent are much easier.) An update to the interface and better unit management would be boons to those of us who want to get to the is sometimes too willing to walk into an obvious trap or to abandon good stuff faster. ■ a strong defensive position. Fortunately, most of the Vicksburg sce-

“The American Civil War was probably shorter than a single Tiller campaign.”

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REVIEWS

YOUR OTHER SYSTEMS BY TOM CHICK

he cool thing about Rogue Galaxy (PS2) is that it was created by Level 5, the folks who did the sublime Dark Cloud 2. But the sad thing about Rogue Galaxy is that it’s not coming into the same world that greeted Dark Cloud 2. Specifically, that happened to be a world without World of WarCraft. Level 5 brought it an adroit blend of fishing, photography, crafting, random dungeon-crawling, citybuilding, real-time combat, exploration, time travel, and blissfully unfettered leveling up for the sake of leveling up. Now Rogue Galaxy presents something much less. It’s something that fits comfortably next to the pre-XII Final Fantasy games, something clogged with a syrup-slow story, forced party mechanics, and convoluted quasi-crafting/leveling. And it’s all strung together by random combat at its worst: a series of overbearing real-time hurly-burlies that appear periodically out of thin air and are two-thirds played by bad AI. They’re governed chiefly by how many mana and healing potions you have left since the last save. The sci fi is light, the story is sadly rigid, and the little sideline occupations, like crafting and insect battles, aren’t very well folded into the game. Rogue Galaxy will find its appreciative audiences, mostly among the type of folks who love their Japanese RPGs. But the rest of us have been spoiled by WoWs, Oblivions, and Final Fantasy XIIs. Also for a niche audience, but much more familiar to us old-school PC gamers, is Hotel Dusk for the Nintendo DS. This stylish and moody, but plodding, adventure from the creators of Trace Memory is like something Sierra would have made back in the day. Make no mistake: It’s slow. The squirming line drawings of the characters and the better-than-average writing breathe life into the hotel’s denizens, and there’s enough mystery to keep the plot moving forward. The gimmick of holding the DS sideways— like a book, get it?—is actually a bit tedious, since this isn’t how the DS is designed to fit in your hands. But, for a game based almost entirely on dialogue with a few desultory puzzles, Hotel Dusk holds together better than the average interactive comic book. For a bit more action, there’s a new shooter for the 360, Lost Planet. It looks good, which counts for a lot, but more importantly for a sci-fi game, it looks different. Its lost planet benefits from not fitting neatly into the pigeonholes you’ve already seen. With funky, spectacular creatures, including some typical Capcom boss battles, and a menthol-cool world with an icy, Hoth-esque vibe, this isn’t just a game about demons in space dungeons. The price you pay is gameplay. Lost Planet is brimming with strange conventions, like a time limit based on gathering “thermal energy” (isn’t this just a fancy way of saying “heat”?) and

70 Computer Games | April 2007

[top to bottom] Hotel Dusk, Rogue Galaxy, Lost Planet, Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

clunky vehicle-based interludes where you’re stomping around awkwardly in Transformer-style mechs. The story is an absurd tangle that plays like a parody of a Japanese RPG. In fact, in many ways Lost Planet feels Japanese, despite trying so hard to be Western. It’s an example of worlds colliding. But, like so many shooters that don’t fit into neat categories, it’s weird enough in multiplayer to give you your money’s worth. Lost Planet on Xbox Live is slightly more cerebral than Gears of War. Finally, there’s the absolutely ludicrous handheld Warlords game for the PSP. The DS will get the more conventional turnbased Warlords, but the PSP gets Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, a combination of RPG leveling and casual puzzling. The puzzle is a blatant Bejeweled clone, but you alternate turns with an AI until one of you loses all your hit points. Spend your money improving your city and buying inventory, and spend your experience leveling up to improve your skills and learn new spells. Yes, there are spells that you can cast instead of taking your turn. It’s ludicrous not because it’s an absurd idea (which it is), but because of how well it works. Puzzle Quest is every bit as powerful and unlikely an addiction as Warlords: Battlecry. ■

[top to bottom] The boys chillin’ at the barn; Vic checks out some HD soft porn; When in doubt, shoot the guys with guns.

NEWSBRIEFS

■ Winter Steam—Valve updated its Steam software this winter with a number of useful features. It includes a new user interface, background updating (which lets you download while playing instead of forcing you to wait on launch), and guest passes. The last feature enables owners of certain Steam games to let friends play them for free for a limited time. The first game to use this feature was Day of Defeat: Source…. ■ Rag Doll Kung Fu Hits Stores—Wild Hare Entertainment announced that it had reached an agreement to put Rag Doll Kung Fu in stores. (It was previously only available via Steam.) Developed by Mark Healey, it uses physics to let you push, pull, and generally abuse your on-screen fighter as if he were a puppet on strings. The full version has 16 levels in single-player story mode, plus a number of minigames …

THE SHIELD Another poor TV cash-in RATING ★½ GENRE Licensed TV Schlock DEVELOPER Point of View PUBLISHER Aspyr Media ESRB Mature REQUIREMENTS 1.6GHz CPU;

256 MB RAM

he Shield is terrific TV. It has brilliant writing and never pulls a punch. The morality play that is the life of detective Vic Mackey helps keep the FX channel on the map. Unfortunately, the videogame completely misses the point of the series and ends up being just another forgettable attempt to turn a TV show into something it was never meant to be. The game version is a third-person action shooter with primitive “detective” elements that allow Vic to search couches for drugs and guns by pressing the F key and whirling the mouse around in some bizarre minigame. Vic beats up suspects, shoots gang members, and lives on both sides of the law by deciding whether to pocket the contraband or turn it in to the evidence room, which in turn lowers his “heat” rating. It’s like the designers took the chance to turn The Shield into the R-rated show it was meant to be: There is low-grade soft porn on every TV screen, as well as a lot of “adult” language. Many cast members are on board, and while the voice acting isn’t too bad, it’s amazingly repetitive. When searching an apartment, Shane says the same two or three lines over and over. The game gets points for allowing you to skip cutscenes, and the save locations are spread liberally

throughout—assuming you make it that far without realizing you could be doing something that’s more entertaining. Like sleeping. Or defragging your hard drive. Even the story doesn’t make any sense, as it takes place after the Strike Team robbed the Armenian Money Train, which happened three seasons ago. Given the PS2-quality visuals and a console design that leads you by the nose from place to place, it’s hard to recommend this game to even the most ardent fan of the show. Just buy it on DVD and leave it at that. –William Abner

■ More Steam Valve—OK, this is silly. In yet more Valve/Steam news, the company is offering new pricing for the five people who don’t already own Half-Life 2 and who want to get in on the goodness that is Episode Two (whenever it sees the light of day). The bundles are dubbed Orange and Black, and the deals are as follows: Black is $39 and will include Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. The $60 Orange includes all of those games plus Half-Life 2 and Episode One….

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H A R DWA R E

Mighty Mini Shuttle’s SD37P2 delivers big small performance BY PAUL JAZREBSKI RATING ★★★★ MANUFACTURER Shuttle MSRP $399

ust over five years ago, a company named Shuttle that was known for cheap desktop motherboards introduced the SV24, a small barebones system that managed to produce high-end desktop performance from a tiny case. It created what we now call the Small Form Factor PC. Every Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer soon jumped on the newly created SFF bandwagon, with dozens of new products flooding the market within a few months. Some of the designs were cool, and others definitely weren’t. A few years later, most manufacturers gave up and focused their R&D efforts almost entirely on “normal” desktop motherboards. Shuttle was always a step ahead of the competition. Its main focus and core competency lay in transforming new, high-end chipsets from Intel, VIA, and NVIDIA into mini-versions and cramming them into an SFF case, while still managing to give them the same performance as their full-sized counterparts. Few companies were as effective, and Shuttle is left as the only manufacturer in the world of high-end barebones systems with the latest motherboard chipsets. Shuttle’s newest design is the SD37P2. It’s based on Intel’s flagship 975X Express chipset. It’s the only SFF barebones system that can utilize Intel’s Core 2 Duo line of CPUs. For $399, you get the case and motherboard, but you need to install your own CPU, videocard, and drives. From an aesthetic standpoint, the SD37P2 looks great. The design is smooth, with rounded edges instead of the usual boxy look. Its DVD tray is hidden from view, and the front bezel has two hidden USB 2.0 ports, audio inputs, and bright blue LEDs. Shuttle has actually gotten rid of all legacy connectors (parallel and serial ports) on the back panel, leaving room for six USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, Ethernet, and 7.1 Audio connectors. One of the biggest problems with work-

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ing on SFF systems is installing the hardware. (If you thought it was easy to cut your hands working inside a normal PC case today, imagine what it was like five years ago, when every edge inside a tiny SFF case was as sharp as a knife and just waiting for you to bump into it.) Through countless revisions over the last five years, Shuttle has perfected the build of its systems to make the installation of hardware as easy as possible. The hard drive trays easily snap off, memory slots are along the edge of the motherboard, and CPU heatsink installation is so easy a trained monkey could do it. The SN37P2 is one of the few SFF systems that features four DDR2 memory slots, giving you some upgrade room in the future. The SN37P2 also has a very small and quiet 400-watt power supply, four SATA slots, one PATA ribbon, three hard drive bays, and, interestingly, two PCI Express x16 slots (when two graphic cards are in use, the two slots are effectively x8). This lets you run two ATI cards in Crossfire mode, which is fine for high-end performance. But it would make

more sense to include a standard PCI slot for a wireless adaptor or a sound card. As a game machine, the SN37P2 performs almost identically to any desktop system with the same hardware, falling within 2-3% in all benchmarks. It gets noisy under heavy loads, though that’s mostly from the videocards. But in normal, day-to-day use, the SN37P2 is whisper quiet. Overall, the SN37P2 delivers great performance, upgradeability, quiet operation, and sleek looks. It packs enough features to make it a good choice for anyone looking to build a rig that’s small and different from the standard desktop machine. The Specs Intel 975X Express Chipset; dual PCI Express x8 interface; ATI Crossfire support; 7.1 HD audio; DDR 667 support; Integrated Cooling Engine and Smart Fan; integrated cable management; 400-watt PSU; eight USB 2.0 ports; Ethernet; Firewire

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Shuttle has perfected the build of its systems to make the installation of hardware as easy as possible.â&#x20AC;?

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H A R DWA R E

A Fatal1ty at CES Jonathan “Fatal1ty”Wendel takes on all comers at the Creative Labs booth in January and lives long enough to be interviewed

onsidering the carnage in the Las Vegas Convention Center during the height of the Consumer Electronics Show this January, it almost seemed as if the C.S.I. team might be called on to make an appearance. Fortunately, the mass slayings were limited to the digital domain, where Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel took center stage at the Creative Labs booth to show off his skills, as well as a line of new hardware products. Peter Suciu sat down with Fatal1ty after he won a match by a mere 25 to -4.

You’ve been coming to the Consumer Electronics Show for a number of years, so how is this one shaping up? This one has had a pretty big announcement from me. I just signed my new deal with the Fox Family and DirecTV to be their global spokesperson and commentary guy for their new championship gaming series. We’re taking gaming to the next level and really making it a pro sport. So we’re going to have players, a draft; we’re going to have salary players and everything. It’s coming to the point where this is going to be the premier league for gaming; it will be televised on TV just like a real sport. I’m really looking forward to it. If you’re a commentary guy, does that mean you’re going to be hanging it up and retiring from competitions? I’m definitely not retiring. Basically, I’m focused on making sure that gaming gets the

“Console gaming is great, but what you can do with a mouse and keyboard you just can’t do with a controller.” respect that it deserves. And pushing this thing forward and to make this sport mainstream. This is the best opportunity we have to take this to the next level. What are the games you’re looking forward to playing this year? I’m really looking forward to Unreal Tournament 2007 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Those are two of my favorites right now. As you know, I’m a big FPS kind of guy. Strictly PC, or any console games? The Wii has a lot of great games coming out, and it is going to be interesting to see how they use the Nunchuck controller, and the Wiimote. The PS3 has the 1080p graphics, and the games look great, and of course I’m playing the Xbox 360 too. Gears of War seems to be one of the most popular games right now, so yeah, I’m a big gamer all around. What about Windows Vista? What do you think

74 Computer Games | April 2007

the new OS will bring to gaming? It brings the best elements of the console world to the Internet world. Basically, it’s going to bring the console gamers and PC gamers together, and if they can perfect that, they can make a much bigger community and make gaming much more organized, and we can all have a hell of a lot more fun. And bigger tournaments. What’s up with the rumors we’ve heard about you and Paris Hilton? (Maybe we’re thinking of Fatal1ty look-alike Kevin Connolly of HBO’s Entourage and Nicky Hilton.) Or is this just like the rumors of PC gaming being dead? [Laughs] That’s not true. I’ve not been with Paris Hilton. What will happen in the future, I do not know. And the PC isn’t dead, either? Look, the PC is like Formula One racing. NASCAR is awesome, but Formula One racing is the next level. Console gaming is great, but what you can do with a mouse and keyboard you just can’t do with a controller. Will you be hitting the AVN Show [Adult Video News] after CES? No, I will not. I tend to stay away from stuff like that, try to hold an image and be a role model for younger kids. So I tend not to do those sorts of things.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Q: A:

Should I upgrade my machine to Windows Vista? Should I buy a new machine with it? Is it fast? Is it slow? What’s the deal with DirectX 10? –Everyone

The Future is Big

hile most gamers know the Electronic Entertainment Expo, its 10-year run pales beside the 40 years the Consumer Electronics Show has under its belt. Since 1967, this has been the annual event for TVs, stereos, and computer technology. And every year the various players have tried the usual oneupmanship when it comes to the size of their television displays. In recent years, this has meant larger and larger plasmas, until at last Panasonic actually delivered its 103-inch HDTV set. It costs a mere $70,000, which is why only hip-hop artists and dot-com superstars can afford one. [In other words, it perfectly matches the demoIf you can understand this flow chart pregraphics of the average sented by Kenwood, you may be ready to expereader of CGM. –ed] rience media in 2007 and beyond. In 2007, the focus was on the largest LCD flat-panel sets, and LG/Philips showed off “the largest 100-inch LCD,” which isn’t the same as “the smallest 100-inch LCD.” It was a moot point, since Sharp stole the thunder and introduced a 108-inch LCD TV, which is not only the largest 108-inch one but also the largest set, period. LG did take center stage and a “Best of Show” award with its hybrid Blu-ray/HD-DVD player, which should hit store shelves this fall for about $1,200 (if LG can be believed). Of course, this won’t be the only way to avoid the Blu-ray versus HD-DVD format war. Warner Brothers showed off its Total Hi Def Discs during CES. These discs offer the same movie, but in both Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats. And not all TV news was big. Some of it was small but mobile: Verizon unveiled its upcoming V CAST Mobile TV service, which will bring streaming live television to mobile handsets. The service will launch later this year, include seven or eight channels of live TV, and work on two new phones from LG and Samsung. –Peter Suciu

No. Yes. Yes. It depends. Who knows? There you go. OK, some more detail. On new hardware, Windows Vista is extremely fast. In fact, it feels faster than XPs, because it uses your 3D accelerator for the interface. (On an older, slower videocard, this may be less true. Then again, a slower videocard is usually paired with a slower overall system, so you may be looking at other reasons for the performance issues.) The new and improved security, better aesthetics, tons of major and minor interface improvements… those things add up over time. But games are notorious for violating tons of Windows conventions, so expect to have issues. Vista’s Limited User Accounts are designed to keep malware from doing all sorts of damage to critical Windows files, so games get a number of warnings. Expect You know you want your problems when you want to store windows to do this. files in “System” areas (like the “Program Files” folder). This wouldn’t be an issue if all games followed the “My Documents/My Games” structure for storing saved games and profiles, but even Microsoft’s own games aren’t consistent about this. And look for serious problems with some of the more heinous copy protection schemes, like StarForce. (It doesn’t work at all, thank God.) Vista is more resource intensive than XP, so expect some degradation of performance if you upgrade. (In some random game testing, it ranged from 5-10%.) You want 2GB of RAM. If you have less, Vista can also use Flash drives as fast disk cache—expect hard drives to start shipping with large, Flash-memory-based caches, which will give everyone a performance boost. The Sidebar is kind of a goofy alternative to widgets in OS/X. There are a few for Xbox Live; down the road, you can expect more game-specific and related ones that may increase its usefulness. For now, it’s eye candy in search of utility. DirectX 10 is a non-issue today. A few games in 2007 will add some snazzy DX10 effects for the small percentage of people who have Vista and DX10 hardware. While there’s no reason not to buy a DX10-compatible videocard today—right now, the GeForce 8series is the only option—there’s also no reason to run out and buy one. Most gamers will want Vista Home Premium ($159 upgrade/$239 full), which is similar in features to XP Media Center Edition. While Vista Ultimate will be the choice of people who feel a strange compulsion to have the biggest and best of everything, its extra features are mostly for serious work. And its $259/$399 price tag is a bit much for extra powerful back-up utilities and encryption. This may sound like a condemnation of Vista. After you’ve used it for a few months, it’s obvious it’s the best version of Windows yet. Still, it isn’t the leap that Windows XP represented over the barely working 98SE and Me. If you have a good XP machine, there’s little reason to upgrade it to Vista. At the same time, if you’re putting together a new machine today, there’s no reason not to get Vista.

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H A R DWA R E

Giant Killer If you’re in the market for a $300 videocard, there’s no better choice than the XFX 8800GTS 320MB RATING ★★★★★ MANUFACTURER XFX MSRP $299

hen NVIDIA launched its 8-series videocard late last year, its performance compared with the existing 7-series line was off the charts. It was also the first DirectX 10 card, and it still is. Of course, there was a catch: The 8-series cards cost a small fortune. The GeForce 8800GTX with 768MB of DDR3 memory sells for $599, while the slightly lower clocked 8800GTS with 640MB sets you back $399. Fast forward to the present day. ATI’s next-generation DirectX 10 chip, the R600, is still nowhere to be seen, and this has given NVIDIA even more room to expand its line—and its market share—with no competition. The newest 8series card is the $299 GeForce 880GTS 320MB. The only difference between it and its $100-pricier cousin is the amount of RAM. It has the exact same clock speeds—500MHz core and an 800MHz memory clock—as the 8800GTS. XFX was one of the first out of the gate with a card. It comes with the full version of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, as well as a lifetime warranty and 24/7 technical support that’s based in the U.S. After running it through some benchmarks, one can clearly see that the 8800GTS 320MB totally crushes ATI’s most expensive Radeon, the $350-ish X1950XTX, at all resolutions and settings. In fact, the 8800GTX is only 10-15% faster than the 8800GTS 320MB in all but the most graphically demanding games at the highest resolutions.

As long as you’re not trying to play them on a 30inch LCD at 2560×1600, almost all the games currently in existence or scheduled for release this year will work fine with this card’s 320MB of memory. If you want excellent gaming performance with DirectX 10 support and have little desire to spend an arm and a leg on a videocard, the XFX GeForce 8800GTS 320MB is your best choice today. –Paul Jastrzebski

BENCHMARKS 3DMark 06

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

1280×1024

1280×1024 9812

8800GTS

10752

8800GTX

8655 6767

X1950XTX

176 184 180

8800GTX

182

X1950XTX

5439

1600×1200

142

1600×1200 8586

8800GTS

9587 7468 5891 4679

No anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering

76 Computer Games | April 2007

179

8800GTS

6338

8800GTX X1950XTX

183

8800GTS

7543

153 180

8800GTX X1950XTX

172 164 124

4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering

Catch-up

NEWSBRIEFS

AMD gets closer to Intel with the X2 6000+, but it still comes up short MANUFACTURER AMD MSRP $607

t’s no secret that AMD has been playing catch-up since Intel launched its Core 2 Duo line of processors. While AMD has kept its prices low, each of its processors has lagged behind Intel’s, often by significant amounts. It’s odd to see the company playing the game Intel was playing with its preCore Duo line, with minor speed bumps and few technological advances. In its defense, AMD was way ahead of Intel for a long time, but it’s time for something bigger. AMD’s new 3.0GHz Athlon X2 6000+ isn’t that big leap. But it goes some way toward closing the gap with Intel, delivering performance close to that of the midrange Core 2 Duo E6700 while exceeding that of AMD’s current flagship for the AM2 socket, the FX-62. Ignoring the dual-processor 4x4

platform and the FX-74, the X2 6000+ is the fastest AMD CPU you can buy. It also delivers its performance with lower heat and power consumption than previous X2 and FX processors. The X2 6000+ is a good processor, and at $600 it’s reasonably priced for the performance it delivers. It has a full megabyte of L2 cache per core, making it for all intents and purposes an FX processor. (The big difference remains that its multiplier isn’t unlocked for overclockers, like that of the FX line.) It’s hard to recommend the 6000+ over a similarly priced Core 2 Duo like the E6700. But if you’re an AMD loyalist, you don’t have to feel too bad about selecting this CPU. You still get plenty of bang for your buck. –Steve Bauman

BENCHMARKS 3DMark 05 CPU Score 3.0GHz Athlon 6000+

7305

2.8GHz Athlon FX-62

7021

2.93GHz Core 2 XE6800

10453

2.67GHz Core 2 Duo E6700

9425

3DMark06 CPU Score 3.0GHz Athlon 6000+

2215

2.8GHz Athlon FX-62

2102

2.93GHz Core 2 XE6800

2483

2.67GHz Core 2 Duo E6700

2285

PCMark05 CPU Score 3.0GHz Athlon 6000+

5613

2.8GHz Athlon FX-62

4601

2.93GHz Core 2 XE6800

7486

2.67GHz Core 2 Duo E6700

6693

■ Serve Your Home—Microsoft announced the Windows Home Server in January. It’s a small Network Attached Storage box running a trimmed-down version of Windows Server 2003. Most setups will include four hard drives in a RAID. Vista and XP will auto-detect the device, letting you easily manage your media and backups over your network. Microsoft will be licensing the tech, and HP was first out of the gate with the MediaSmart server, which is due this summer…. ■ When 24 Inches Isn’t Enough—If you’re looking to upgrade your tiny 24inch LCD but don’t want to make the leap to 30 inches, Dell has released a 27-inch model that uses the 24-inch display’s 1920×1200 resolution…. ■ Better Laptop Video and Sound—From the “genuinely interesting, if skepticismarousing” file comes the ASUS XG Station, an external videocard/soundcard for laptops. It attaches via the ExpressCard slot. If upgradeable, this might be a good solution for people who want to game at home while maintaining a truly mobile machine. Just don’t expect it to perform like a dedicated desktop system…. ■ Ultimate Gamer Desk—If you have $4,000 burning a hole in your pocket, perhaps the Ergoquest 500 is the desk for you. It’s a height-adjustable work station that can be used while you’re seated, standing, or lying down. It can even support three LCD monitors. More information can be found at officeorganix.com….

Sandra X1 Arithmetic (MFLOPS/MIPS) 3.0GHz Athlon 6000+ 2.8GHz Athlon FX-62

18338/21860 17119/20339

2.93GHz Core 2 XE6800 2.67GHz Core 2 Duo E6700

18441/27001 16300/23475

Test platforms: AMD: ASUS M2N32 Deluxe motherboard, 2GB Corsair DDR2 PC8500 RAM; Intel: Intel D975XBX motherboard, 2GB Corsair DDR2 PC8500

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ONLINE

Dueling for Profit

You may think dueling in front of Orgrimmar or Ironforge is pointless. But for some, the profit potential is too great to pass up BY ERICA VAN OSTRAND

78 Computer Games | April 2007

“After staring blankly for a bit, they would go, ‘Bwuh?’ “‘OK, well, you want to duel me and it has to be for gold, so… how much would you like to wager on the outcome?” Steffen says that 90% of the time, people just laughed and canceled the duel. The other 10% of the time, people were willing to put their gold where their mouth was. After a while, regulars would show up to duel, viewing Steffen as “a sort of punk to knock off a pedestal,” he says. The only way to thin the crowds and find the true challenges was to up the stakes. Eventually Steffen reached a 5g minimum, which means most people on Uldum couldn’t afford to duel him even if they wanted to.

f you play World of WarCraft, you’ve probably noticed the large groups of people sitting outside Orgrimmar and Ironforge dueling, sometimes for six to eight hours a day. Most players decline the duels offered to them as they walk into these cities, wondering why these duelers aren’t out enjoying the rest of the game like everyone else. For some duelers, it’s a profitable in-game business.

Take Greg “Olaef” Steffen, a Paladin on Uldum. He’s been dueling for money since June 2006. Olaef divides his time between work and real-life participation in 30-100 duels a day. His winnings? He averages 750 gold per week profit after expenses like potions, bandages, gear, and enchants. Steffen has won duels worth as much as 25,000 ingame gold. “Three days after I hit 60,” he says, “I’d won enough [from dueling] for an epic mount, having started with 5g.” One of his regular dueling partners keeps a running tab with Steffen and currently owes 898g. He makes partial payments when he can. Steffen got into dueling for profit via a friend, who told him the weakest PvP class was a Paladin. “Now this was, to me, the deciding factor in why I picked my character,” Steffen says. “Yes, I made my choice solely on selfconfidence, ego, if you want. I liked the fact that I could take what was considered by those in my local community to be the weakest class for damage, PvP, etc., and make it one of the most remarkable. Every game has its methods to madness; it’s up to us to break them, no?”

Steffen’s most memorable duel was the first one he fought after hitting level 60. As he was sitting out in Dun Morogh with his trusty two-hander, wearing his Russet Hat, a

“Three days after I hit 60 I’d won enough for an epic mount, having started with 5g.”

Early on in WoW, Steffen found that he hated farming but loved PvP. Unfortunately, farming is pretty much required for making money, and you need plenty of gold to PvP decently, just to afford supplies. “There is an immediate and obvious gold sink in this game that one has to deal with,” Steffen says. “While the costs are not as hefty as those of a raider, PvP is a lot less profitable. So I figured I could kill at least two birds with one stone. Whenever people started to challenge me to duels, I’d just say, ‘How much?’

guild leader walked up to him and sent him a private message. “He walks up and tells me that now I have hit 60 I should respec Holy, as no guild will take a ret-nub for late game content,” Steffen says. “It was just his good-natured advice and all, ya know.” (A “ret-nub” is a Paladin specialized in the “Retribution” talent tree, one that gives them extra damage and skills that up their damage rate. At level 60, most Paladins specialize in the “Holy” talent tree, because it gives them specialized healing. These types of Paladins are known for doing less damage than others.) So, being the ornery, stubborn type (as Steffen describes himself ), he told the adviser to consider going Holy spec too, since he’d never seen a Warrior hurt a Paladin. Which, of course, brought out a duel flag. The resulting duel left one very angry Warrior complaining about a need for nerfs and “cheap” wins for Paladins. ■

TIPS FOR SUCCESS Think you’ve got what it takes to make a business out of dueling? Olaef explains his most important lessons for regularly winning duels:

■ TIMING Anyone can create a Mage or Warlock and cast spells. The difference between a good caster and a bad one is whether you can cast a spell in the right place at the right time.

■ KNOW YOUR CLASS SKILLS/RACIALS If you don’t know how your own spells work and how to use your own strengths and weaknesses to your advantage, you’ve got some ground to cover before you even think about learning other people’s abilities.

■ KNOW YOUR OPPONENT’S CLASS SKILLS/RACIALS In his second duel as a level 60, Olaef fought a druid decked out in tier 1 gear. He lost. Badly. But this was because he didn’t understand what the Druid was doing, which was waiting for Olaef to run out of mana. Once he figured that out, Olaef made his mana last throughout the fight.

■ GEAR Every little bit of HP and damage can make the difference between you or your opponent ending up in a crumpled heap on the ground. You never know when you’ll be dueling and win by a margin of three or four health points.

■ TRICKS, GIMMICKS, AND SELF-CONFIDENCE Farming some special items (like Magic Dust from Dust Elementals in Westfall) is a nice tip, but sometimes just having confidence in your character is all that matters. It’s knowing a cheesy way to get out of a sticky mess, and sometimes it’s just convincing your opponent they cannot win. Stage presence is still a huge part of any contest of skill like this.

■ DON’T PUT YOUR FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH This is a catch-all concept that covers a few basic points. For example, it’s bad etiquette to whine and cry after you lose a duel. Using bandages and/or potions during a duel is fair, no matter what the outcome.

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ONLINE

road to nowhere by Cindy Yans

Betrayal Whether or not it’s ethical to love ’em and leave ’em

he Barbarian in the bank, wearing a garish red outfit, looked incredibly familiar. Now, where had I seen that toon before? In an OMGWTF moment, I realized that it was Angrified, a former guildmate and friend who had been raiding with me one day and the next day not only resigned from the guild but retired completely from the “Good Guys” faction. He’d decided to sleep with the enemy, and it was hard to say why. Boredom? Why does anyone have an “affair”? Now here he is, back home again. When he did that, I was horrified. OK, not horrified… this is, after all, make-believe. (Or is it?) And since it’s not as though he betrayed

sources to perfect her gear to the nth degree; when the guild earned the right for its members to purchase the ultimate barded mount for a fair price, she was the first in line. The next day, she too jumped ship to join our oppressors. She deceived us into accepting her loyalty… for what? For a horse? A horse, a horse, her dignity for a horse. Damn her. All of this is, of course, about betrayal. In EverQuest II, the concept of betrayal is hardwired into the game system. You can decide at any time to betray the faction you joined, and then live within the People’s Court until you earn the right fully to join the other side. It’s an interesting game mechanic, and definitely challenging. In a PvP context, though, there is a whole different dynamic. I believe it makes no sense at all on a PvE server—but when you can actually kill the guys on the other side, the whole betrayal thing becomes much more dramatic. And drama-queen-ism is such a big deal when you look at MMO interaction—almost as big a deal as it is in high school. These situations don’t get as icky in World of WarCraft or Dark Age of Camelot, or most of the other major MMOs. They simply don’t allow you to have characters of different factions on the same server. A betrayal system with that condition would cause the ultimate problem of what to do with the turncoat’s alts. Auto-delete them? Probably not. Auto-betray them? Maybe. I thought about all this for a while and decided that, in a broader sense, there are many levels of betrayal in the context of MMO gameplay. I remembered the time I switched games, leaving one guild for another because everybody didn’t leave when I did. This is a form of betrayal too, I guess. I mean, when I return to World of WarCraft or Dark Age of Camelot these days, I have a hard time looking former guildmates in the virtual eye… just as Angrified did with me. I can almost hear them hurling insults like “You killed Kenny!” It’s like a marriage, though. At least for some folks. You get bored, you seek new adventure, you move on; the wife keeps the house, the boat, and the villa in Spain (or you do). How much loyalty do we owe to people with whom we’ve spent a lot of time and developed some very real friendships? This is why people are still playing EverQuest and Ultima Online, isn’t it? At some point, betrayal of any kind becomes out of the question. As I look to move on, which will inevitably happen—either back to my last spouse, The Burning Crusade, or forward to something like Warhammer Online or Age of Conan—I’ll put any perceived outrage about betrayal on the back burner. For now, whenever I see Salty, I’ll slaughter her mercilessly, over and over, still angry at her selfishness and her underhanded deception. And each time, as she lies there, I’ll stare down at her corpse and shout, “Give us back our horse, bitch!” ■

“A horse, a horse, her dignity for a horse. Damn her.” my family and left them bleeding in a ditch (or is it?), I decided to let bygones be bygones, and I /wave’d him. He was, in fact, still bound to one of my “just to you” whisper shortcut keys in Ventrilo, although the server password had been changed. Maybe I expected him to return someday, apologetic and glad to be back. Except… he looked sheepish when I /wave’d him, or at least as sheepish as an MMO toon can look. Perhaps it was the way he turned away at the sight of me that did it; perhaps it was the lack of any response, even though I stood there waiting. Perhaps it was because he realized he had burned a lot of bridges before his exit, and was having an inner debate over whether one of them was mine. Salty, by contrast, performed an act of overt treachery. She joined our guild late in life and used our skills and re-

80 Computer Games | April 2007

NEWSBRIEFS

MMOCABULARY Bank Sitter Someone who hangs out in full view of the masses, generally near highly populated areas (like a bank, vault keeper, or auction house), to show off his über outfit and equipment. In RL, this would be a “narcissist.” Emotes

Ways of expressing feelings and emotions in the gameworld via commands (very often slash commands) that create text or character animations. Examples: /dance or /fart.

Link To show others in your group, guild, party, or other chat channel the stats of a particular item, there is usually a method of “linking it” into view. Clicking and dragging the item’s icon into the chat window and Shift-clicking on it while your cursor is on the active chat line are two common ways to do this. E.g., “Link me that über ring you got yesterday.” ■ Age of Delays—Funcom announced that it’s delaying Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures to October 2007 from its original spring release date. “More time to hone the game” was the reason given for the delay, with director Gaute Godager channeling his inner Barbarian and adding, “By Crom, I feel certain that we will deliver a game that will appeal to a broad range of players as we introduce new features to the genre.” The Xbox 360 version will still launch after the PC one….

Exploit

This is taking advantage of a game glitch or misusing a game mechanic to gain what most developers consider an unfair advantage, going beyond the scope of the rules of the game. Like, just because the game “lets” you do something, that doesn’t mean it’s OK to do it.

POWERLEVEL World of WarCraft: Onyxia’s Lair Onyxia resides in a fiery cave below the Dragonmurk, a dismal swamp located in Dustwallow Marsh. While many have succeeded in bringing her down, it’s not all that straightforward. Here’s a beginner’s guide to the first phase of this large raid instance.

Special Attacks ■ Fire Breath Cone-shaped fire that hits everything in front of her for massive damage. Solution: Always keep her pointed north, away from the groups on the sides.

■ Knock Back AE knock back that throws you really far, most likely well into the egg area if your backs are to them. This will respawn whelps that you’ll have to deal with. Solution: Correctly position yourselves at her sides, as far away as possible, while remaining in melee range. Keep your backs away from the eggs!

■ Tail Whip A cone-shaped short stun that hits everyone behind her and does medium damage. Solution: Never stand behind an angry dragon.

Plan The Main Tank rushes in a good 20-30 feet ahead of everyone else to make sure he gets initial aggro. No one is to attack Onyxia until the MT is in position and has been in position building aggro for at least 60 seconds. MT slowly moves into position at the north center of the lair a maximum of 10-15 feet away from the north wall. When he’s positioned correctly, the Knock Back should bounce the MT against the north wall and have him land very close to his original position. Onyxia should always be facing north. If the MT loses aggro, Onyxia will turn to one of the sides and kill everyone with a Fire Breath. When she’s at 70% life, take a good 30second break from attacking until the MT rebuilds aggro—better safe than sorry. During that break you can drink a fire protection potion in preparation for the next phase. At 65% she will walk from the north to the south and take flight. It’s not over, but it’s a good start.

■ World of Grand Theft Auto—What do you think of an Unreal Engine-powered MMO set in a modern urban environment, where players can take part in the “political, economical, and social life of a big city”? You can own cars and real estate and bump into criminal groups. Sounds pretty cool, right? Here’s the kicker: It’s called… CrimeCraft. No joke. Check it out at crimecraft.com…. ■ World of Popularity—It appears someone is actually playing that World of WarCraft game. Right before the release of The Burning Crusade expansion, Blizzard announced that its sorta popular MMO has surpassed 8 million subscribers worldwide. (“Subscriber” is something of a misnomer, because 3.5 million of those players are in China, where they pay pennies per hour.) Still, over 2 million people in North America and 1.5 million in Europe are paying $15/month. That’s… a fair amount of cash….

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NOR SHALL STAY THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS.

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MODS & ENDS

Modding If you want to expand Oblivion beyond oblivion–how existential– you can make Cyrodiil bigger and better with these mods BY BRETT TODD 84 Computer Games | April 2007

s epic role-playing games go, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is up there with the best of them. Which means that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really, really long and is packed with an incredible amount of stuff to see and do, from slaying dastardly Daedra in other dimensions to prancing about picking wildflowers. Odds are that the game keeps the seriously obsessed busy for at least six months. But some people have just gotta have more. So, keeping in mind both the spirit of the typically gluttonous gamer and the imminent release of the expansion, The Shivering Isles [see page 16], we present the following voluminous compilation of Oblivion mods. Collect them all.

to Oblivion

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MODS & ENDS Balancing Act FRANCESCO’S LEVELED CREATURES & ITEMS By Francesco This wildly comprehensive leveling mod removes all in-game scaling so that gameplay feels more realistic. Basically, this means that encounters and items no longer feel tailor-made for your pointy-eared (or not) avatar. Like Oscuro’s similar mod (detailed below), Francesco’s mod makes the game harder, in that you can now run into bad guys who can mop the floor with you. It also makes high-level equipment like Daedric armor and weapons a lot rarer, so you can’t so easily trick yourself out like Zeus and slaughter everything that moves. Conversely, some aspects of the game are easier, which makes the overall gameplay much more… what’s the word? Ah, yes, “credible.” Additionally, the mod is entirely modular, so you can pick and choose which NPCs, adventures, etc. are altered and which are left alone. Francesco’s also tossed in a bunch of snazzy new armor and weapon styles fresh off the runways in Kvatch to please the graphic whores (you know who you are). tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2518

NATURAL WILDLIFE By Torag One of the bigger annoyances in the original Oblivion was the way all animals would attack you on sight, even lowly mudcrabs. It got to be a bit much. But now you can scrap the When Animals Attack! vibe for more realistic Audubon antics with this small plug-in, which makes animals act more sensibly. Aggressive

beasties like wolves and wild dogs may still goon you in the wild, but crabs, deer, and their timid woodland pals will flee unless you corner them. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2063

NO PSYCHIC GUARDS By Nvdrifter Anyone who’s ever so much as lifted a lousy apple in Oblivion knows how irritating it is that guards seem to have a preternatural

OSCURO’S OBLIVION OVERHAUL If Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul was underwear, it would be a standard pair of tightywhities that just about everybody owns. That’s not meant as an insult—this mod works for just about everyone, as it perfectly revamps the default creature and item scaling of the out-of-the-box game. Every NPC and creature in the game has been level-capped, so there are no more guards clomping around with equipment better befitting a demigod than a grunt. Some encounters have been more

86 Computer Games | April 2007

sense for any crime that occurs in the game and come running on the double. This mod is a godsend: It prevents guards from hearing the cries of whining victims unless they’re within 1,000 feet of said whiner. It makes the game more realistic and allows you greater opportunity to go on crazed murder sprees, so everything is win-win. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2299

By Oscuro

randomized, and others have been set at specific difficulty levels, so every adventure no longer feels as if it’s been attuned to exactly where you are in the game when you encounter it. Finally, Oscuro has tossed in a bunch of new dungeons and locations, with allnew enemies like Frost Minotaurs and revised familiar foes like vampires and other undead. Not surprisingly, all of these alterations make the game a fair bit harder: You can no longer cruise around cockily assum-

ing you can murder everything you encounter. If you download just one Oblivion mod, make it this one.

Especially if you’re looking to spice up the campaign for a second run-through. jorgeoscuro.googlepages.com

Interfacing BTMOD By Tikigod and Beider An oldie but still a goodie, BTmod remains one of the premier UI mods for Oblivion. It removes a lot of the console-specific issues that borked the PC version of the game. The biggest changes here involve the resizing of the inventory, map, and quests screens, whose huge original forms were more appropriate to TVs than computer monitors. It also adds some hot-key menu access and an extremely helpful weapon-durability icon to the main screen. btmod.beider.org

DARKUI By Blackhawk If you want one UI mod for Oblivion, chances are you’ll be happy with DarkUI. Much like BTmod, it changes the default interface into something more appropriate to PCs by shrinking font size, but it also darkens the menu color scheme by using a leathery texture more evocative of traditional fantasy gaming. That part’s an acquired taste. Some players love the deeper hues; some find them so dark they get in the way of reading inventory lists. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=1962

[above] BTmod [upper right] WZ_Inventory [right] DarkUI

IMMERSIVE INTERFACE By Harfleur Nothing gets in the way with Immersive Interface. Harfleur’s take on UI modding doesn’t add stuff, it removes it. All of the necessities on the main game screen, such as the compass, character bars, and weapon and spell icons, shrink to less than half their original size, leaving you with a lot less clutter when you’re trying to close those pesky portals to Oblivion. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=4109 WZ_INVENTORY By WZ This blast from the past revamps the Oblivion inventory menus so they look and function much like the modular ones in Morrowind. As a result, the entire interface seems more optimized for the PC, and the overall feel of the game (at least when it comes to wrangling swords and potions into inventory slots) is much more similar to old-school PC RPGs like the Neverwinter Nights series. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=3595

Lands and Locales DAYS & MONTHS By Darkelfwsv It doesn’t sound like much—and at a measly 2KB, it really isn’t—but Days & Months is an absolute necessity, as it translates the names used for the days and months in Cyrodiil into plain old American. Frostfall, for example, now becomes the much less confusing October, so you know when to set out your Jack-o’-Lantern. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=3504

bell-book-and-candle accouterments are all over the place, rooms have been added and expanded, and shelves groan under the weight of even more books. (Yeah, that’s one thing this game really needed—additional reading material.) tessource.net/files/file.php?id=4466

ARMORYLAB By Tom Supergan All the buyable houses in the game get an automatic renovation with ArmoryLab. Install this mod, and real estate everywhere is upgraded, with six new rooms divided into armory and laboratory sections. You can use these facilities to grind up potions, craft weapons and armor, do some enchanting, or simply store and display ill-gotten gains. There’s even an arboretum where herbalists can set up their own grow-ops. supergan.com/pics/index.php

ARCANE UNIVERSITY REVAMPED By Watchingthewheels Arcane University looks a lot more, uh, arcane thanks to this mod. Though the changes are mostly cosmetic, they nicely turn what was a second-rate Hogwarts into a legit school for wizards. All of the Gandalf wannabes now wear more elaborate robes, some carry different magical staves, more

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MODS & ENDS

[left to right] Mountain Tower, Illumination Within, Solace

KUMIKO MANOR By Academician_Nwahs Right up there with Mountain Tower (see below) as a primo piece of mod real estate is Kumiko Manor. Situated on beautiful Topal Bay, about a mile south of Leyawiin, this old pile boasts an alchemical laboratory, detached mage tower, full armory and training center, an archery range, numerous storage rooms, a master bedroom filled with display cases, and a dining room big enough to serve the Donner party. It also comes with unique armor and weapons left behind by the previous owners, who apparently are too rich to worry about abandoning priceless artifacts. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2747 MOUNTAIN TOWER By Sage Rime Location, location, location. That’s what real estate agents say is key for the market value of homes, and if so, then Mountain Tower must be worth a fortune. This house mod adds a huge mage’s tower to Cyrodiil, located in the scenic, snowy Pale Pass near Brum. Along with this great, rather Aspenish setting, the tower itself features dropdead gorgeous rooms loaded with custom textures. Much of this joint looks like something out of “Medieval Architectural Digest.” Just check out luxe accouterments like the green-marble staircase, pool for tropical fish, polar bear rugs, and hand-carved bed in the master bedroom. The tower is more than a pretty face, as well, since it comes 88 Computer Games | April 2007

with a decked-out alchemy lab, custom spells to zip you to the Imperial City and back, and a rooftop garden for growing potion ingredients. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=3384

SOLACE By Mealmoran Dragonlance fans and Ewoks will feel right at home with Solace, a new tree city populated with new NPCs and located in Blackwood. It’s a great-looking urbanwilderness cross that is the antithesis of the typical rigidly constructed Oblivion city mod. Unfortunately, Solace is a bit too wild in spots and can be tough to navigate. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=4581

Eye and Ear Candy ATMOSPHERIC WEATHER SYSTEMS By HTF If you want to turn sunny Cyrodiil into wet and foggy London, download HTF’s Atmospheric Weather Systems. Actually, to be fair, it should be specified that this mod adds five times the number of natural weather effects in the stock-standard Oblivion, along with seasonal weather patterns and more dramatic, romantic evenings that can easily put you in the mood to ditch the RPG and seek out your significant other. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=6730

ILLUMINATION WITHIN By Slap and ModMan While it doesn’t sound like much, few mods change the look of Oblivion more than this one. Slap and ModMan’s outstanding creation adds lighted windows to just about every building in Cyrodiil, making the game feel more lifelike during the evening hours. Buildings operate on various schedules, so cathedrals get their candles going at different times from private homes, and taverns light up the night at different times from shops and guilds. There is a lot more here than meets the eye, too, as loads of new textures and 3D objects like shutters had to be created to make possible the illuminated windows. The performance hit is minimal (unless you’re in an area with lots of lights and water reflections; then it’s welcome to Slowdown City). But there is a “lite” version that eases the burden if your PC is already chugging under the weight of the original game. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=3700

LANDSCAPE LOD TEXTURE REPLACEMENT By Shaja As odd as it might sound to some, a fair number of people thought Oblivion wasn’t all that good-looking a game out of the

OBLIVION STEREO SOUND OVERHAUL Beautiful People By Midnight Voyager Just what the title says, Beautiful People makes all the denizens of Cyrodiil a lot easier on the eyes. Creator Midnight Voyager has collected about a dozen separate mods like Ren’s Beauty Pack and Mystic Elves, Nequam’s Elaborate Eyes, and KyneTarse’s Vampire Hunter’s Sight in order to make everybody look mahvelous. You also now get a crazy number of choices when rolling up characters at the start of the game, especially when it comes to eyes and hairstyles. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=5175

Younger Hotter NPC Women By Nenina OK, the name sucks. But this is actually a very good mod that smooths out the often iffy facial graphics that make a lot of women in the original Oblivion look a bit like reflections in a funhouse mirror. And no, it doesn’t alter any body features or give any of the in-game babes beer-commercial makeovers. Pervs. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=5288

box. Hence the motivation for Landscape LOD Texture Replacement, which doubles the size of the default landscape textures. The result is long-distance visuals that look a lot sharper and clearer than those in the base game, but with a significant performance hit. Midrange systems can really chug, and even chew-bubblegum-and-kick-ass rigs bog down in certain spots. Like most visual-improvement mods, this little number has built a fanbase, so you can download additional mods that enhance it and jazz up its performance. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2182

NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS By Max Tael So, got a killer system? Well, do ya, punk? If you’re answering in the affirmative, you might want to take a gander at this. It essentially reskins the entire outdoors, making trees, mountains, tall grass, water, and even the moons look sharper and more vivid. It also includes 40 different weather effects such as rainbows (up from the seven in the original game) and more than 20 new insects to harass you in the great outdoors. The lone caution here is that you can’t fire up all the mod’s bells and whistles on a rig that gets sand kicked in its face on visits to the beach. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2536

MORE IMMERSIVE SOUND By Deckard All the ambient audio effects in the game are enhanced here, giving every locale a You Are There! feel. Now, when you’re in the woods, you can really hear the trees and the buzzing insects. When you’re in the middle of a city, you can hear the people bustling all around you. And in dungeons, you can really hear that axe whistling toward your head courtesy of 3D sound positioning. Unfortunately, this mod conflicts with Natural Environments. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=5487

Natural Environments

By PsychEroc Better cricket chirping might not seem like much of a draw, but the Oblivion Stereo Sound Overhaul combines this with a pile of other audio enhancements to create a more lifelike sound landscape. Most of the ambient sounds in the basic game have been boosted in volume and bolstered through the addition of 42 new wind and storm effects. Lightning and thunder now really rock the house. Directional sound effects from the original game haven’t been touched, though, so nothing here gets in the way of vital audio cues like those provided during combat. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=5861

People and Creature Mods CREATURES ALIVE By XFusion Encounters with Cyrodiil’s wildlife are made more authentic with Creatures Alive. XFusion’s mod alters the behavior of deer, wolves, and the like by adding lifelike behaviors such as pausing to drink from streams. Tiny creatures like mudcrabs and rats now flee from your big manly presence, too, and some animals trail young behind them. You need to give the mod 72 hours of in-game time to reach full operation. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=5251

CROWDED ROADS By Maximius Clutter up your wilderness travels in Cyrodiil with Crowded Roads. Install this mod and you soon start encountering fellow travelers on the roads between major population centers, not just the standard game’s highwaymen and patrolling guards on horseback. The number of new wanderers (263) is hardly staggering, so don’t expect the mod to create gridlock outside the Imperial City or anything. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=4805 LIFE TRANSLATED By moDem and SAgiZm Originally in German, this collection of NPCs by moDem has been ported by SAgiZm so that speakers of the King’s English can now enjoy the goodness. As for the specifics, the mod features almost 100 NPCs, including town guards, beggars, dogs, and even a few kids (who are impossible to kill, so Jack Thompson can silence his weary one-note tune and rest easy tonight). tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2681 cgonline.com

MODS & ENDS Servant of the Dawn, Adults Only Rating for Oblivion

Cheat Thrills ADULTS ONLY RATING FOR OBLIVION

Quests and Adventures AGAINST THE ZEALOTS OF THE NINE By Jolard Not to be confused with Bethesda’s official Knights of the Nine mini-expansion, Against the Zealots of the Nine deals with a secret society associated with the Church of the Nine. Much of the combat involves spooks and various other undead, which gives this adventure something of a Scooby-Doo Goes to Medieval Times atmosphere. It ends too soon, but that’s more of a testimony to the mod’s quality than anything else. As a neat little extra, the mod includes a mansion in the Cheydinhal ’burbs that becomes your digs on completion of one of the quest lines. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=3849

BLACKROCK MOUNTAIN, LAIR OF THE HYDRA, TOWER OF THE LICH KING By Vibliribland This trio of dungeons from Vibliribland is available as separate downloads, but they should really be installed and played together. Each adds a tough new location to the base game. Blackrock Mountain is crammed with Daedra-lovin’ orcs, the Lair of the Hydra features a, um, hydra, and the Tower of the Lich pits you against, uh, a lich. Each locale contains unique weapons and armor and other groovy loot that make the risks of plumbing the depths of these damp,

90 Computer Games | April 2007

probably awfully smelly, deathtraps totally worthwhile. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=4489 www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=4490 www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=4492

SERVANT OF THE DAWN By Endrek Anyone disappointed with the almost unrelentingly good-guy attitude of Oblivion will like Servant of the Dawn. This quest mod alters the default Mythic Dawn faction, adding all-new adventures and ranks that allow you to get up close and personal with those nasty Daedra. Embrace the hordes of stinky eeeevil, and you can even take over as the boss of the cult. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=6855 TALES OF TWILIGHT: THIEVERY IN THE IMPERIAL CITY By JOG Garret wannabes will like this one. JOG has added a fence to the Imperial City named Derrien Venoit, who buys ill-gotten goodies, along with assignments to get him good stuff by robbing people. You get 11 fairly lengthy new quests in the main plotline, along with a pair of miscellaneous adventures. A full 17 minutes of all-new voice acting is included. User-made mods don’t get any more professional than this. If a few more modders made Oblivion add-ons this good, Bethesda might have a tough time charging people for its own expansions. A sequel is apparently in the works. cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/User:JOG

By w00t Don’t tell the ESRB, but Oblivion has a mod that lets you do naughty things with girls. Though it’s burdened with an absolutely stupid name, this mod provides a horsefaced female companion who’s willing to share your bedroll on those cold Cyrodiil nights. The unimaginatively named Heather Golightly follows you, fights at your side, and, um, frolics with you in cheesy red underwear that would shame Frederick’s of Hollywood. Roy Orbison probably never played a single computer game before his untimely passing in 1988, but he surely wrote “Only the Lonely” for the people downloading this one. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=5210

CAPES AND CLOAKS By Someone1074 Do the Liberace look with Capes and Cloaks. Hundreds of different models of this always stylin’ wardrobe affectation are for sale in the shops of Cyrodiil after you install this mod. All colors are on offer, and anyone willing to do a little picture editing can Photoshop a logo or insignia onto any cape or cloak for that added touch of arrogance. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=4539

DARK BROTHERHOOD ADDONS By SoNico717 Enhance the popular Dark Brotherhood sidequests with SoNico717’s collection of bows, arrows, armor, and other goodies for the evilly inclined. It also adds a traveling Dark Brother who sells these items in various locations across Cyrodiil. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=3565

Other Mod Resources Although most of the links provided in these listings hook you up with the absolutely outstanding The Elder Scrolls Source website (tessource.net), there are many other Oblivion resources on the net. Check out the following sites for more information about downloads for Bethesda’s awesome epic:

A’s List of Recommended Mods aelius28.googlepages.com/home

CHEYDINHAL PETSHOP By Proudfoot Take Fido on quest with you, thanks to the Cheydinhal Petshop. Fourteen furry companions are available in this merchant mod, including basic buddies like Golden Labs and Siberian Huskies and more exotic (usually) four-legged friends such as the Imp and the Battle Boar. All of these pets level up with you, grow, and can be given orders. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2054

CWAR’S CHEST OF FUN By CWar Chuckles abound in CWar’s Chest of Fun, a mod full of goofy spells and magic items with devastating, yet still damned funny, effects. Some of the hocus-pocus includes a collection of warhammers that send victims hurtling through the air with 1,000 points of damage, rings that turn you into a veritable god with maxed-out stats, and an amulet that can cast a spell to make cats and dogs rain from the skies. Big whoops can be found here, especially if you want to do the “I am death incarnate” thing and stomp your way through the Daedra. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=3361

HILARITY By Stabbey_the_Clown Liven up Cyrodiil by casting a few of the spells included in the Hilarity mod. Every in-

cantation here is geared to tickle the funny bone with the always-hilarious deaths of others. Insane Hercules makes target heroes tough and homicidal. Failed Levitate suddenly poofs the unfortunate victim to a few thousand feet above Terra Firma (watch for the splat!). Stark Reality removes clothing from a person or group…permanently. Just a couple of caveats—don’t try these spells in a “serious” game, and don’t save the game with one of them in effect. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=3821

Better Oblivion

INVISIBILITY ROBE By Moonracer

Endarire’s Oblivion Mod List

Install this mod for some sneaky stuff. The black-as-a-Model-T Invisibility Robe lives up to its name by making you as see-through as Claude Rains. It also comes with chameleon capabilities that render you impossible to spot during combat, making it perfect for undercover killing sprees. Bonuses include a ring that gives huge health pluses and a hood with night-eye, water-breathing, and detect-life powers. tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2214

betteroblivion.com

Buddah’s List-O-Links ni-te.de/wzLabs/content/ oblivion/linklist.html

ElderScrolls-Oblivion.com elderscrolls-oblivion.com

The Elder Scrolls Files (Filefront) elderscrolls.filefront.com

antiochforever.com/files/members/ Endarire/OB/Mod%20List.htm

Oblivion Mod Wiki tescreens.be/oblivionmodwiki/ index.php/Main_Page

The Oblivion Quest List devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/quests

Oblivion Source oblivionsource.com

OBLIVION MODS MANAGER By Timeslip The Oblivion mod community is pretty big. So before you head to the Net to do any downloading, you may want to start by grabbing this helpful utility that tracks, sorts, and archives the mods you’ve installed and which mods you want to activate for gaming sessions. If you’re going to do any mod experimentation, your first step should be installing this virtual assistant from Timeslip—especially when it comes to altering the look of the base game, since many of the visual mods conflict with one another. timeslip.chorrol.com/obmm.html

The Oblivion Texture Overhaul devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/ obliviontextureoverhaul

Planet Elder Scrolls (GameSpy) planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com

UESP Wiki uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Oblivion

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MODS & ENDS

out of the box by Brett Todd

Cardboard Gaming When computer and boardgaming collide

all it the great gaming migration. And for a change I’m not talking about the depressing drip, drip, drip of PC gamers leaving their desks for the console couch comfort of their living rooms. I’m talking about the move back to boardgames, about how gamers are switching off their TVs and monitors and retiring to the dining-room table to kill monsters and build empires like Mom and Pop. Well, it’s not quite the way Mom and Pop used to do it. Way back when, the games of choice were mostly simplistic party favors. Adults hauled out zany fare like the home version of Beat the Clock on Saturday nights when everyone was too drunk for euchre. Kids had gimmicky numbers like Operation, Don’t Break the Ice, and Mousetrap. Boardgames back in the early ’70s were a lot like early

boardgaming. Boardgame designers and publishers have belatedly caught this trend, and are at last giving the people what they want. We’re now getting boardgames loaded with the depth and involvement of the typical PC game. Even Hasbro was forced to acknowledge what was going on a few years ago when it finally updated Axis & Allies. The lines are blurring between high-tech gaming that requires the latest in computer technology and low-tech gaming that requires a bunch of laminated cards, plastic figures, and a slab of cardboard. And it’s a win-win scenario. PC diehards are getting the opportunity to try a new/old form of gaming without sacrificing any depth or playability. Longtime boardgamers are getting all of the advantages and innovations that have developed in the computer gaming community over the past couple of decades. Take modding, for example. Even though boardgaming is geared toward old-school family fun, you’re missing out on a lot if you don’t take advantage of the resources available online. Every boardgame with a measurable fan base is supported with fan-made scenarios, characters, alternative rule sets, printable strategy guides and player aids, and just about anything else you could imagine. As in the PC modding scene, the quality ranges from the outstanding to the absurd. Check out some game entries at BoardGameGeek.com, and you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that some people have way too much time on their hands. How else to explain such questionable additions as user-made player cards that let Spider-Man or Doctor Who take on Cthulhu in Arkham Horror? But for every ridiculous mod, there are loads that are really useful. As goofy as the above example is, there are dozens of great add-ons for Arkham Horror, from player-aid sheets to credible characters. Caylus lovers can download tuckboxes for storing building tiles and resource blocks. Tiles for Puerto Rico allow you to play Guybrush Threepwood and turn the game into Monkey Island. A tremendous number of fan-made scenarios allow you to play Richard Borg’s hot trio of BattleLore, Memoir ’44, and Commands and Colors: Ancients forever. Whether you’re into the North American or the Euro style of boardgaming, chances are that there are mods out there to improve your game of choice. We’re witnessing a remarkable confluence here of gaming worlds that were previously worlds apart. Boardgame designers and publishers are finally starting to embrace the idea that gamers are gamers, no matter what platform they choose. In the process, they’re also realizing that they can claw back market share from PC and console gaming… if they make a few changes in how they do business and let the gaming audience at large know they’re out there. ■

“Boardgames back in the early ’70s were a lot like early videogames, in that they were repetitive and catchy.” videogames, in that they were repetitive and catchy. There was slightly more complex fare out there, but you were generally stuck with the likes of Risk and Monopoly, unless you were fortunate enough to have a gaming shop close by where you could delve into all things Avalon Hill. Thanks to a late, great Canadian chain called Leisure World (which pretty much single-handedly brought D&D, wargaming, and cool miniatures to Ontario in the ’70s), I was one of the lucky ones. But things didn’t start to look up for the mainstream player until the mid-’80s heyday of the Milton Bradley GameMaster series, which was highlighted by such gems (for the time) as Axis & Allies and Shogun. These days, complexity is the name of the game across the board. Mainstream games like Arkham Horror, BattleLore, Memoir ’44, and Marvel Heroes come with instruction manuals that run to 10 pages or more. It often takes gamers two or three play sessions to suss out the rules, and even then they usually have to retreat to the Net for official FAQs, lists of errata, and forums to get answers to specific questions. You can thank computer games for this. After almost two decades of playing sophisticated strategy games on their PCs, nobody is sated by the simplistic when it comes to

92 Computer Games | April 2007

CARDBOARD CORNER

WorldBrianof WarCraft Trading Card2 Game30-60 minutes Hacker Upper Deck Entertainment DESIGNER

PUBLISHER

PLAYERS PLAYING TIME

f Burning Crusade burn-out hasn’t soured you on all things Azeroth, you can now geek out offline with the World of WarCraft Trading Card Game. Don’t let that account expire, though. This take on the land that Blizzard built, brought to you by the baseball-card kingpins at Upper Deck, is pricey and feels too much like Magic: The Gathering. Where the MMO is a time sink, this is a money pit. You could sink more cash into this game in a week than you could into the online game in a year. A solo starter is a whopping $17.95, and it comes with just a 30-card deck and two boosters, which isn’t nearly enough to fill out the 60-card deck required by the full rules. So kudos to Upper Deck for coming up with a new way to bleed the wallets of CCGers dry. At least they package this meager offering in a nifty plastic storage box big enough to

MSRP $17.95 (One-Player) Starter Set RATING

★★½

hold the cards they didn’t bother to include. The gameplay doesn’t justify premium prices. There are only two big innovations added to the Magic template. First, players guide heroes who can be decked out with RPG accouterments like swords and armor. This means you’re in for some PvP action. Heroes also differ quite a bit, which forces you to change strategies and cards depending on whether you’re fielding the likes of Graccus the paladin or Omedus the undead priest. Also, any type of card can be tapped for mana. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it adds strategic flexibility, as you can use any card for an instant resource hit. Still, this game doesn’t offer enough that’s new to lure away Magic addicts. Maybe that will change once advertised frills like raid decks arrive, but the incentive just isn’t there right now. –Brett Todd

SPOTLIGHT: SIMS CONNECTION

s odd as it sounds, the custom-content scene for The Sims 2 doesn’t get a lot of consideration in these pages because it’s a little too mainstream and too big. It’s tough to cover a community that deals largely with casual gamers and has tens of thousands of downloadable options. Thankfully, the lack of attention from hardcore gamers hasn’t caused any problems for designers of Sims 2 custom content like Janna Tanisaka. As an admin at the voluminous Sims Connection website, she creates content to liven up the game and oversees a database with great options to trick out Will Wright’s pop-culture phenomenon. “I felt the original Sims game lacked a lot of objects, and felt there was much more we could do with the game’s environment,” says Tanisaka. “Our primary motivation at Sims Connection is to create diversity and avoid cookiecutter environments.” Tanisaka has certainly done her part. Both alone and in collaboration with other artists at Sims Connection, she has created hairstyles, clothing, and businesses such as a burger joint, a sushi bar, and even a wizard shop. Sims Connection is loaded with other content, too. There are ski lodges that make you want to book tickets to Aspen. There are groovy apartment blocks, a rustic Mexican village, and a

Beat bad hair days with the help of the Sims Connection.

chocolate shop that regularly tops the download charts. Every possible design touch is available for interiors and characters. You can choose from modern loftstyle bedrooms, Waverly dining-room sets, sleigh living-rooms, and more, and you can dress your Sims in hippie wear from the Casual Couture line and to-die-for GQ duds. Sims Connection is a great place to dip a toe into the ocean that is the Sims 2 mod community. Just be aware that the site isn’t entirely free—there is a registration fee of $5 per month to download premium content. simsconnection.com

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MODS & ENDS

MODSQUADS

by Brett Todd

Rage Against the Machine Since big guns and dinosaurs go together like chocolate and peanut butter, it’s surprising that nobody thought of a mod like Jurassic Rage before. This Unreal Tournament 2004 total conversion pretty much completely rips off the plot of the book and flick, with a bunch of pissed-off velociraptors escaping from a jungle-island cloning facility. Instead of having to rely on Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum to save the day, here you step into the combat boots of the typical shooter super-commando and gun down scaly critters by the truckload. In accordance with that theme, the gameplay is basic shooter fare. But there is one interesting angle here: The modders are planning on rolling out episodes every 30 days. The developers hope to post a new installment of the game that moves the storyline along and adds new in-game content. That’s a fantastic idea—but so far, unfortunately, they’ve had almost as much bad luck meeting episode deadlines as Valve. While the first release, Evolution 1, went up as planned in late November, the follow-up was delayed for over a week right before X-mas. It finally went live just before the end of 2006, but then server problems took down the entire website. At press time, the mod team was still working on getting the site up and running again, and they were also promising that the third episode would arrive on time before the end of January. Cross your fingers, folks. jurassic-rage.com

[top to bottom] Jurassic Rage, Tragedy in Tragidor, Black Mesa Source, T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age

When the Feeling’s Gone and You Can’t Go On We’re in the early days yet, but the first truly must-have mod for Neverwinter Nights 2 may have already been posted. Tragedy in Tragidor is a remake of a well-regarded module that Phoenixus first made for the original NWN, and it’s certainly been drawing a lot of downloads of late. Virtually no changes have been made to the plot or setting, in which the dirty little secrets of the hamlet of Tragidor are revealed after a caravan gets stranded in the little burg on a dark and stormy night. As before, Tragedy in Tragidor is recommended for solo players, levels 5-7. The adventure is fairly tough even for those at the high end of that level spread, however, and many battles require some tactical thinking. So be on your guard, hackers and slashers. nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Nwn2modulesenglish.Detail&id=83

Back in Black Black Mesa is back. After a year of scant activity on the mod’s official website, the team trying to remake the original Half-Life with the Source engine has returned with a (teeny) vengeance. While the total conversion remains frustratingly incomplete, the

94 Computer Games | April 2007

modders have offered proof that they’ve been slowly but surely plugging away at this project during their online absence. Yes, folks, that means a selection of snazzy, all-new screenshots! Just about every aspect of the sooper seekrit research facility that Gordon Freeman unintentionally sabotaged is now illustrated. No word on when Black Mesa might finally see the light of day, although the screens look awfully good. blackmesasource.com

Out of the Shadows One of the best mods for Thief II has gotten a little bit better. T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age, a full-blown unofficial expansion pack released for the fantastic 2000 sneaker back in May of 2005, has just been updated with a version 1.1 beta patch. This fixerupper should repair all the more serious bugs found in the initial release, although the devs aren’t promising that all the minor niggles have been addressed. At any rate, if you’ve never played T2X before, now is a great time to download it and check it out. The all-new protagonist, plot, and missions live up to the legacy of Looking Glass. thief2x.com/default2.asp

Alt.Games By Troy S. Goodfellow

Play With Fire Chris Bateman Something of a modernized take on Arkanoid and Tetris, Play With Fire is a 3D puzzle game that makes you get your fireball to the target by jumping, flying, or just plain burning. If combustible blocks are holding up a platform, the platform will fall once the blocks are destroyed. Contact with burning things “levels up” your fireball, enabling it to torch tougher materials. The game is the brainchild of game-design theorist Chris Bateman, author of 21st Century Game Design and Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Video Games. “Puzzle games, generally speaking, are like little microcosms of game design—there’s something very pure and compact about the way they fit together,” he says. “Their simplicity is an asset, but of course it also limits their depth and longevity, so there isn’t as large a market for them as for other styles of play.” Play With Fire’s longevity is enhanced by three modes—Fun, Puzzle, and Challenge—that represent an effort to draw in a wider range of players. Bateman says, “I tried to create a core design that might appeal to a variety of different styles of players, but I think this was overambitious for such a small game title. It’s great that the game has a Fun mode that anyone

can play (and hopefully enjoy!), but I fear the Puzzle and Challenge modes will be the ones enjoyed by the audience the game actually gets.” This game is anything but casual, though, and has slightly higher system specs than your usual puzzler. It has a unique look and play style that lift it above the usual get-there-in-time game. The Fun mode just lets you burn stuff, appeasing the firestarter in all of us. Play With Fire is a captivating game that will challenge even the most experienced maze master. manifestogames.com/playwithfire

NEWSBRIEFS

■ Zombies!—The world probably doesn’t need another zombie-rific mod based on Resident Evil, but that hasn’t stopped the Moonlight Interactive team from whipping up one called Resident Evil: Twilight. It’s a Half-Life 2 total conversion that’s supposed to be about 60% finished. The developers are promising a lengthy, 21-mission solo mode of play, along with co-op and other multiplayer options, so there should be lots to do when the mod goes gold. All of the screenshots look appropriately gloomy. For more info, surf on over to the official website at www.evilmod.de…. ■ Days of Modding— Even boardgames are getting into modding. Days of Wonder is now offering an online scenario editor for BattleLore. Log into the game’s official website at battlelore.com to access the Adventures Editor tool, an enhanced version of the program that designer Richard Borg used to make the original game. An online database at the site is also starting to fill up with official and unofficial add-on adventures created by fans…. ■ Baldur’s Gate of the Dead—If you’re still playing Baldur’s Gate, you can liven up your travels on the Sword Coast with The Fields of the Dead. This mod updates D&D rules, buffs NPC AI, adds new content like spells and magic items, and even drops a new region onto the map to challenge experienced parties. Download it from echon.dk/fotd….

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INSIDER RANDOM INCOHERENCE

To Be Continued

wipe out most of Earth’s human population. Oops. I was hoping that 10 years later DOOM 3 would resume this solipsistic storyline right where it left off, with Taggart by Kelly Wand alone with the demons at last. Instead, there was a bunch of stuff about keycode numbers. The last time I felt that let down was when I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. And The “Life is the art of being well deceived.” —William Hazlitt (1778–1830) Phantom Menace. Quit telling me stuff you already told me better the first time. ame sequels have a reputation for rarely living up to The problem with game sequels is that story and games don’t really go together. From Half Life: Episode I to The the quality of their forbears. In fact, the term Burning Crusade, games futilely try to convey an effect of flux in a necessarily static universe. The whole notion of try“sequel” is usually just a euphemism for a graphically ening to maintain gamer attention spans in narrative suspense over the course of years seems foolhardy—and, as dehanced remake rather than a continuation. scribed above, the narrative is often scrapped and retconned beyond recognition anyway. Of all the complaints leveled against DOOM 3, none Instead of really advancing what they consider story, echoed my own gravest misgiving, which was that it wasn’t games usually offer up anticlimactic teases that would eman actual sequel. The third episode in a trilogy, the clincher, barrass a newspaper comic-strip panelist. Almost every the finale. And DOOM’s case was especially tragic, because it game ends on some half-assed cliffhanger, though the pissed away a nifty set-up. clichés vary with the era. After killing all the monsters, savThe first two games concerned a single grueling but ing the day, and becoming an alien with the amazing ability wacky day in the life of hapless, doughy-fisted jarhead Flynn to jump 1.1% higher, you’re informed by some guy about Taggart. I identified with that guy, from his gleeful smirk at finding a BFG in a lava pit to his nonstop suspicious sidewise “new orders” (Quake IV). The boss, you find out belatedly, turns out to have been merely a sub-boss (Half-Life, The glances. Without any boring preSims). Your car ran out of gas somewhere in the Mojave, and amble, we meet Taggart in now your savegame’s corrupted or maybe irradiated (Fallout mid-adventure, already 2). Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you armed with a pistol and merely blew up the auxiliary reactor core; the one you really under attack by a wanted is apparently six moons (i.e., expansions) over zombie. Best entry (Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude). point ever. In short, designers consider it dramatically satisfying to Taggart goes leave you with the message that the whole game you just on to shoot a played was merely a 20-hour ad for the next line of snake bunch of zomoil. Apparently, electronic enter“Optimism is junk food for tainment marketing departments expect these complex plot threads the soul, but with a more to be retained by their mostly adolescent audience, since we all know agonizing comedown.” threads have been the primary obsession of every generation of adolescents since Theseus. bies and But these “teasers” aren’t intended just for players. They’re demons infestfor the manufacturers: an announcement that the next ining the hallways stallment is already in development. Which is weird, when of a stupid corpoyou think about it. From a business point of view, keeping ration’s business ofprofitable gravy trains going for as long as possible makes fices on Mars and its sense. But the assumption of more to come is also a distracmoons; then he finds a tion, and an excuse not to make the game at hand a standportal to hell and kills millions of snorting pig-guys alone masterpiece. In most cases, it’s a dangerous lie, since most games won’t be profitable enough to merit sequels or and whiny goat-guys with expansions. plasma guns fused to their wrists. The industry’s chimera of choice right now is the MMO. Then he kills a spider-demon. Then it’s determined by cosHundreds are in development or being planned, even though mic forces that he’s “too tough for hell to contain,” and back conservative statistics strongly suggest that 99% of them will he’s sent to Earth. But, like Bruce Campbell, he clumsily lets fail before year’s end. Why? Because they can’t peacefully coloose some more demons along the way, who proceed to

96 Computer Games | April 2007

exist. Hardly any players devote their time to more than one MMO simultaneously; people pick their favorites and dig in for the long haul, because the games themselves have taught them that time is the priceless resource. How many times in life can players be expected to start from scratch and make time-commitments that the sanest businessmen on Wall Street would have considered laughable 10 years ago? Despite being unnecessary, ill-advised, and in many cases unprofitable, jillions of bad projects will continue going forward into production—not because companies aren’t aware of these crappy odds, but because everyone working at corporations is expected to remain neurotically optimistic at all times. True, optimism is much more effectively used in private to convince oneself that one isn’t defined by slaving for corporate masters. But in today’s corporate world it isn’t just mind control, it’s the new competence. The entire modern American economic model is founded on the wishful and fictitious: Companies even report their earnings based on what they hope they’ll make. Optimism is really just spin, designed to put a bright face on poop. It’s junk food for the soul, but with a more agonizing comedown. In modern corporate vernacular, there is more virtue attached to positive thinking than to speaking plain facts, though the latter often requires a legitimate virtue, namely courage. Comptrollers don’t want to hear the Shinsekis. Ironically, this attitude is bad business, because a problematic fact usually presents its own solution when it’s considered objectively. Here’s an example of what a fact is: Every publisher wants five-star games, but few are willing to pay for them. The solution is either to pay up or to make what you can afford, which doesn’t have to be shoddy. But inevitably publishers prefer the timehonored strategy of rallying pinch hitters with creative rhetoric, certain their words will be enough. It’s a process that more often than not winds up costing their company more money than it would have to hire A-listers. Trying to affect absolutes not through tactics but through force of will is what a gambler does. You’d think that the more money was at stake, the more careful publishers would be, but oddly the trend is the reverse. Money is the rich man’s Eros. Shading the truth isn’t just not frowned on in today’s culture. It’s considered a marketing art form of consummate discipline,

even though the most popular methods pretty much boil down to parroting alliterative memes, imitating others, and enforcing lockstep repetition. Admittedly, these skills can come in handy, since our lives are constantly subject to compromise; no one would ever get laid otherwise. Yet thinking nice thoughts is a poor substitute for analytic appraisal—and, worse, it’s often mistaken for tenacity. Nothing teaches us these very distinctions better than playing games. Positivity doesn’t help you win. You need to produce, and quickly. You need to second-guess hostile strangers and shrug off calamities. It’s more like work than fun a lot of the time, when you think about it, so you don’t. And undergoing these mental tortures makes the mind stronger and more flexible. Sweat is good for you. To openly snake from Nietzsche, you need to climb the mountain to attain the view. (If for no other reason than that you can’t jump off otherwise.) Much like playing games, making them is often a bitch—even when you’re churning out the desultory pap mandated by intricate brand-license contractual obligations like those on which this country was founded. But, when you get right down to it, so is bending over and sticking a flaming… (continued next issue) Next month: Do games exist? Steven Wright and Senator Joseph Lieberman debate this age-old paradox to the death using only their minds! Best two out of three!

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Ding Ding M

flexible. For instance, you can set the number of experience points between levels. Snatch elaborates: “Let’s say you want to create a game that’s really challenging. You can set the by Tom Chick number of experience points required for Level 2 at 1,000. But some developers are making more casual-friendly games, so they can set the number of experience points at 100. We don’t any game developers find it easier to use technology want to restrict what developers can do with our technology.” Snatch says that, in some particularly grueling early builds, testers were required to accumulate 5,000 expericreated by someone else, whether it’s id Software’s ence points for Level 2. “We had to stress test the engine for the really hardcore player base. You know, those people graphics engines, Havoc’s physics, or the weapon everywho play games like Vanguard or Devil May Cry.” Snatch is pushing the technology in new directions by albody ripped off from Painkiller. And in some cases, the lowing developers to break out of the old paradigms. “With creators of that technology stand to make a pretty penny. our engine, you can plug in a whole new system. For instance, you can make it where players have to earn ‘honor,’ or maybe ‘respect,’ instead of ‘experience points.’ It’s a very “I may not get a Ferrari out of this, like John Carmack, but modular system.” I hope to at least be able to afford a Dodge Viper,” jokes He brings me over to a cubicle and introduces Rajiv Russell Snatch, the founder of Snatch Up. The company Rosenblum, a co-founder and recent hire from the game dehopes to join the growing list of businesses built on licenssigner program at the Westwood College of Technology. ing technology to game developers. I recently visited their Rosenblum brings up a grid display, and Snatch explains offices in sunny Chatsworth, a Southern California commuwhat we’re looking at. nity near Los Angeles. “This is the actual inner workings of our engine,” he says. “We’re going to license a leveling engine,” Snatch says. “It’s “It’s part of our proprietary technology. On the left, you can called the ProGress engine.” He demos how it might work in see the player’s level. On the right, under this column laa mock-up of an MMO. beled ‘XP,’ you can see the requirements. Then out here, we “See here, when I kill this guy, I get 10 experience points. have room for additional information to be plugged in. In So what’s going to happen if I keep killing a bunch of these this example, we’re working on an RPG system where spells guys? Well, watch this.” He spends about 20 minutes killing are folded in at a certain point. For instance, you get Magic creatures that look like rats. Missile at level 3, but you don’t get Resurrect until level 9. Now “We feel that leveling is a part of human nature, watch this. If Rajiv clicks here, and then here… no, that butwhether you’re talking about school, the ton, Rajiv… not that one, the one over there… dude, you just workplace, or Scientology.” –Russell Snatch re-sorted the columns… here, give me the mouse… see how we can switch those two spells? Now a third-level character “Are those rats?” I ask. can cast Resurrect. This saves developers a lot of time.” “They’re placeholder art,” Snatch says. “I think they’re sup“Is this Excel?” I ask. posed to be dragons.” “Well, yes, it is one of our internal development tools, like Game developers have to create their own leveling sysMaya. But all the information here is our own proprietary tems from scratch. This can take hours of work for a game technology.” designer whose time might be better spent elsewhere. With “We’re in talks with some really big names, but we haven’t more genre hybrids being introduced, there are more announced anything yet,” Snatch explains over lunch. We games that need leveling systems. Snatch lists examples like split the check. “You had the rest of my cheesecake that I Battlefield 2142, Forza, and Age of Empires III. didn’t eat, so let’s call half of that yours, OK?” “OK, now look here,” Snatch says, pointing at the screen. Snatch sums it up: “At Snatch Up, we feel that leveling is a “Did you see that? I just killed enough rat dragons that I part of human nature, whether you’re talking about school, went up a level. See in the upper left-hand corner where the workplace, or Scientology. It’s all about the ding. And there used to be a 1? Now it’s a 2. I’ve just gone up a level.” we’re here to make that easier for game developers.” ■ One of the advantages of the ProGress engine is that it’s Computer Games Magazine (ISSN 1546–5101) is published monthly by Strategy Plus, Inc., 65 Millet Street, Suite 203, Richmond, VT, 05477. Subscription rate is $19.97 for a 12-issue subscription, $31.97 Canada. Periodical postage paid at Richmond, VT 05477 and additional mailing offices. Produced in U.S.A. Postmaster: Send address changes to Computer Games, PO Box 1965, Marion, OH 43306.

98 Computer Games | April 2007