Before I Forget: Rainbow Six Vegas 2

I completed Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (RB6V2) a few days ago. I have to preface by saying that I enjoyed the first one immensely. Sure, the first RB6V has some issues and bugs, but overall I had a good time playing co-op with friends and got a few weeks of multi-player out of it.

After buying the game with three other friends from work, I learned that RB6V2 only has two player co-op! Well, I guess technically they have four-player in terrorist hunt mode, but story mode is where it’s at. I could see why from a design standpoint why they reduced it to two. The implementation of re-spawning on any other alive member of the squad makes the game incredibly easy, even on higher difficulty settings. This was the case in RB6V2 , since it allows one player to be extra aggressive and draw fire, and the other guy to hang back and basically be the mobile spawnpoint. In RB6V, having three extra spawnpoints made the game challengeless.

A friend of mine and I played all of RB6V2 on co-op on the “realistic” setting with little trouble. Another friend of mine has been playing through on realistic on his own, and having much more difficulty. I decided to help him out on the last two levels, and his impression was that all tactical gameplay went out the window after I joined in, but that it was a lot of fun to see me killing other guys and whatnot. Evidently, the difficulty doesn’t scale well for co-op, but the fun factor scales appropriately. Game design issues aside, I think it was a mistake to move away from four player co-op, if only because it’s what people expected from the first game. I will say that the co-op portion of the game is much smoother in the sequel, especially with hot-joining. The server / map list from RB6V wasn’t really gamer friendly.

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“Army of Two” Impressions

I finished Army of Two a few night ago, and decided to write a little bit about it as I’m playing it some more on co-op.

I gotta admit, I’m a huge sucker for co-op games. I like playing together with other people more than playing against them. So, here we have Army of Two, a game built from the ground up to be a two co-op player game. However, I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the game. I think in general, it’s a game of missed opportunities.

Let me say what I like about the game. First, obviously, is co-op. Not many games even have co-op as an option, so it’s pretty ballsy to create a game that is built on the foundation of co-op. I’ve already played with with a couple of friends, and just being able to play with them makes the game fun to some degree. Second, I like being able to buy and upgrade weapons. I wish more shooters had weapons customization and upgrades. I also have to give them credit for making the weapons feel distinct. For example, the MP7, the minigun, the shotties, pistols, and so on, are all fun to use in different ways.

Okay, let’s talk about missed opportunities.

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Seeing Polished Work = Motivation

This is pretty straight forward, but creating something for your game and bringing it to a finished, shippable state is the only way to go.

“But Jesse, we don’t have time to get it finished! We need to just get it working and move on!”

Bzzzzt. I’ve seen it time and time again. We’ll create some half-baked prototype feature, get an event “working,” put in a temp animation, or place a temp texture. Then, people on the team will start complaing about it, laughing about it, or whatever. Placeholders tend to stay in the game for way to long, and it starts demotivating people. It’s really hard for people, even those working on the game everyday, to see past temporary and placeholder assets. And that’s really bad for team morale. Above all, everyone on the team should believe in the game you’re working on, and placeholders won’t help with that.

Okay, not all holders are bad. I think in some cases, if they look really close to final, that’s an okay thing, especially if you’re placeholdering for memory concerns. I think this is espeiclaly true for sound and VO. However, really bad, or even medicore placeholders will damage team morale, and I think hurt the overall quality of the game in the long run.

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“Frontlines: Fuel of War” Verdict

Okay, so the game wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t awesome either.

Really, the best part for me was one mission where you start with a Barret, and later gain access to the various remote control death toys. The level ends with a defend sequence that went too long, but you also get to set up some rail guns which are pretty meaty. One problem though, is that there are some wacky sequences, like where the enemy uses nukes in your immediate vicinity (it’s okay, they’re tactical) and because you’re in a tank, it’s all gravy. However, you can’t get out because you’ll die of radiation! I hope those tanks you’re in are lined with 10 feet of lead. But later, you can get out once you’ve gotten closer to where the nukes went off. Maybe the nukes wore off? That’s some halflife on those radioactive isotopes.

One of the later (maybe the last?) levels has an equally silly sequence where you’re rolling into a destroyed Russian city and there’s like 50 nukes going off all around you. I guess in the future, we make nukes less radioactive, or something. No one really seems freaked out or cares, but I don’t think the game takes itself that seriously anyway.

So, single player was okay. Crazy ragdoll, contrived situations, 50 bullets to damage a guy, but cool toys.

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“Front Lines: Fuel of War” First Impressions

So, a couple of guys at work convinced me to get Frontlines: Fuel of War. Apparently, it’s from the guys who did the Desert Combat mod for the Battlefield 1942 back in the day. Anyway, I saw a couple of videos and saw some cool shit with drones and air strikes. Since other people at work are playing it, I figure “What the hell,” and take the $60 (plus tax) plunge.

The first thing I did was hop into single-player to get a feel for the game. The game felt pretty smooth. The frame rate stayed at a solid 60 (a necessity for any FPS worth it’s salt), and the weapons felt decent. The story has a pretty cool premise, but I’m not sure about this reporter guy. I felt a little disconnected. I’m sitting there thinking to myself “Oh no, they’re going to make me play as this reporter that turn out to be a bad ass,” which fortunately they didn’t. They seem to be spending a lot of time on this character, so I guess he becomes important later.

Anyway, I complete the first mission, and the drones were a pretty cool gameplay element. I was hoping for a little turret you could shoot right away, but maybe they get to that. For now, I got some flying bombs which isn’t a bad way to start. Also, my AI squad seemed to stay around me and move around enough, so that’s good. The enemy ragdoll is a little silly though. I pepper an enemy with a few rounds and they flip head over heels. I prefer a little more realistic ragdoll, maybe even blended with an animation. I dunno, maybe it’s an Unreal engine limitation? I see a lot of games with unrealistic looking ragdoll.

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Super Duty-o Bros.

Pretty slick, eh? Finally got around to converting the Mario level I made from Return to Castle Wolfenstein to Call of Duty 4. Too bad there’s some scale issues. Oh well, it might be good enough, we’ll see. A video of the original RtCW map can be found here.

Meetings…

So, I’m not a big fan of meetings. Actually, I like some meetings, just not most. For example, when we get talk about cool shit like weapons and give input on how they feel, that’s a good meeting. Hands on meetings, where you get to play the game, those are awesome.

The problem is that most meetings I take part in aren’t typically about cool shit. They’re usually about addressing on-going problems. That’s all good if we actually get to the root of the problem. What isn’t good is when people have to leave at a certain time, but we “have to get through this” before they leave. Those kind of meetings tend to waste peoples time.

I’ve been reading a lot of Joel Spolsky’s book called “Joel on Software.” If you haven’t read it and you’re in the games / software industry, you’re missing something huge. Anyway, one of the core points he drives home is to fix code before moving onto something new. The idea is that if you’re working on some problem, and you encounter some bugs, it’s better to deal with them now instead of having to relearn the problem later which takes way more time from polishing the game or adding new features. It hits home for me since I’ve been through that many times. The other nice thing is that you get an awesome, stable base to build things on. Also, if you have to cut some features because you ran out of time on the schedule, at least what you have is solid.

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Meme of the day

Who has two thumbs and loves memes… this guy!