When you start watching The Two Towers, you get a little reminder of important stuff that happened earlier, like the wizard who fell off the bridge fighting the flaming minotaur. It’s an integral part of the Lord of the Rings, because the mistakes made earlier in the story lead to the choices available to the protagonists at the start of the second book.
When you start reading any book about Stalingrad, you get a little reminder of important stuff that happened earlier, like Operation Barbarossa. It’s an integral part of the Stalingrad story, because the mistakes of the previous year’s campaign led to the choices available to the Germans at the beginning of the second summer in Russia.
Explanations are good, because things seem weird and arbitrary if you don’t know why they happened, whether it is two midgets taking a two-thousand-league trek into the heartland of a genocidal warlord, or a genocidal warlord fighting a campaign two thousand leagues into the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, sometimes things just seem weird and arbitrary.
After the jump, David Glantz vs. J.R.R. Tolkien Continue reading →
It was often said in the Stalingrad pocket that it was better to have a cousin in the Luftwaffe than a Father in Heaven.
–Heinz Schroter
Seventy years ago this month, in a place between the Don and Volga Rivers, the Soviet Red Army broke through the front lines of the Germans and their Italian, Rumanian, and Hungarian allies. The 250,000 men of the Sixth Army were encircled, and over the course of the next ten weeks, starved, defeated, and destroyed. Few of its survivors saw their homes again.
Some years later, people with overactive imaginations and a lot of time on their hands invented a way to recreate these events using cardboard squares with numbers on them, paper maps covered in hexagons, and some six-sided dice. Want to drive a make-believe German tank over your dining room table? At one point in time, you could walk into many Toys R Us in the United States and buy a boardgame with a panzer and some German landsers on the cover, or Hitlerian code name for a title, like “Wacht Am Rhein”. Right down the aisle from Raggedy Ann and Andy. Now we download complete games about the war on the Eastern Front from the Internet and leave the stuffed dolls by themselves.
After the jump, we’re doing the War in the East thing again Continue reading →
That large chunk of Detroit steel above you is a M103. It was designed in the 1950s to destroy Soviet armor in a general European war that thankfully never happened. Prior to playing World of Tanks, I had never heard of the M103. Then, when I first heard of it in the upcoming patch notes, I didn’t like it. Now I love it.
After the jump: How I learned to love the M103. Continue reading →
In 1986, Kesmai released Air Warrior, one of the first online flight simulators. For an hourly fee, players could use their 2800 baud modem to dial into the DARPAnet, or whatever, and fight in an online battle arena. Given the technology in play, I can only imagine that it must have been a gigantic train wreck. But it must have been a train wreck with potential, since Kesmai kept improving on the game; releasing sequels, getting it onto mainstream services like America Online, and eventually switching from an hourly fee to a flat monthly fee. By the time I encountered Air Warrior it was a sophisticated product, allowing 256 players to choose from over 40 planes (plus a few ground vehicles) and do battle. For the time, it was groundbreaking. Even today, few games are willing to shove 256 players onto a map.
While Air Warrior’s technology may have been ahead of its time, the Air Warrior business model was anything but: Pay a flat fee, play with planes. There were no experience points, no awards or badges no micro transactions, and no artificial gating. Every plane was available to every player. How the hell were you supposed to monetize that? Kesmai didn’t seem to have a great answer; they were eventually bought out by EA, who did a good job keeping the Kesmai monthly service running up until the point when they didn’t.
Today, Air Warrior is but a memory. Wargaming.net, however, seems intent to fill the gap in our souls with the upcoming World of Warplanes. Not being in the beta, I can’t tell you much about the game, but I’m pretty sure the first time I log in I will not have 40 planes immediately available to choose from. If I want them, I’m going to have to buy them.
After the jump: Becoming a “BargainJaeger” Continue reading →
If you’re a veteran player who has not played for a while, World of Tanks offers its own new set of challenges. Prior to the introduction of the new physics patch, you may have routinely scraped the edges of bridges, lakes, or ravines while maneuvering. It was never a problem, since invisible walls kept your tank on track, leaving your hands free to use the (terrible) chat interface, or whatever.
Today, if you stop paying attention by a lake you’ll end up drowning in it.
After the jump, change kills. Continue reading →
World of Tanks is a strange hybrid. Part online arena shooter, part sim, and part MMORPG, there are few games that seek to occupy the niche it has carved out. This makes the game compelling, delivering an experience that is not available anywhere else. However, the very factors that separate the game from the rest of modern gaming also serve to confuse and alienate new players. It’s easy to jump into a game, maneuver, and shoot. WASD moves your tank, the mouse moves your turret, and left-click fires. Basic stuff.
But just when you think you’re getting the hang of things, your tank mysteriously explodes. Uh-oh! How did that happen?
After the jump: why you are dead Continue reading →
A lot has changed on the virtual battlefields of World of Tanks in the 18 months since Dave Markell’s excellent series of articles. The matchmaker has been improved. Many new tanks have been added, including French and British tanks and tier X medium tanks and tank destroyers. The roster of available maps has grown significantly. Two new game modes have been added. The graphics have been improved through the use of a new renderer. And a new physics engine has radically changed the gameplay on certain maps.
But to those who are quick to dismiss freemium games, the biggest change is still to come: In the upcoming Version 8.1 update to World of Tanks (currently available on the public test server) premium “gold” ammunition (purchasable only with real-life money) will also become purchasable through the in-game “silver” currency. With a stroke, Wargaming.net has eliminated your excuse for refusing to try the game!
After the jump, your new excuses for not trying the game! Continue reading →
I’ve been playing Secret World steadily for three weeks, hoping Funcom and Electronic Arts will fix it “any day now”. Today, I’m done. Over the weekend, three things convinced me to throw in the towel.
1) A quest called The Black House is still bugged and I can’t complete it. It’s not the only bugged quest, but it’s the one I care about most. I consider it a barometer for the state of the game given where it’s located (along a major thoroughfare), how simple the fix should be (an item doesn’t appear at the third stage of the quest), and how much I like it (a lot). That it remains broken after three weeks is unconscionable.
2) As of the latest patch, the chat system is broken in an entirely new way from how it’s been broken since release. I’ve previously used a custom chat channel to talk with friends on different servers, who are members of a different faction. Now custom chat channels don’t work. The chat system has had plenty of minor issues, but this latest issue is one step forward, one fifty foot plummet back.
3) Where other games might have a level cap, Secret World has a system of combat builds using different abilities. It’s an intricate bit of statistics wrangling wonkery that I am more than happy to engage in. Except that for the last three weeks, Secret World routinely decides I want to see simplified information for many of the skills. In other words, it will randomly close the statistics I’m supposed to wrangle, leaving me with vague text descriptions. This has been the case for three weeks, so if I want to create and manage character builds — in other words, if I want to play the game as it’s designed — I have to frequently log out and log back in to fix the tooltips. How is it that one of the many patches hasn’t fixed such a serious interface issue?
All of this is an example of how not to release an MMO. So I’m done for the time being. There are plenty of games that work correctly. I’d just as soon spend my time playing them instead.
After the jump, the things I’ll miss. Continue reading →
When the quests in Secret World are hard, sometimes it’s because the game is broken. Other times, it’s because I’m an idiot. For an example of the latter, I submit to you a really cool quest early in the game that you have to solve by exploring the world as a ghost. In your ghost state, you have to find white ravens that will fly away when you approach, leading you to the next waypoint. I spent longer than I care to admit trying to get the raven in the above screenshot to fly away.
Up next: good-bye, cruel World
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To play Secret World, you have to buy the retail product, sign up for a recurring subscription fee, and subject yourself to the temptation of micropaying real world money for cool outfits. Fortunately, the last bit gets easier as you play.
After the jump, is it wise to wield a sharp weapon while wearing a hazmat suit? Continue reading →
Sure enough, there’s a theme park in Secret World. Haunted, natch. But otherworlded or otherwise, I love a theme park in a videogame. One of my favorite theme parks was a whole level in the Battle Out of Hell add-on for Painkiller which included a working roller coaster. Theme parks — I’m going to lump circuses into this category — aren’t as novel as they were back in the day of the original Blood or Bad Day on the Midway. But they’re still just as welcome a sight.
The recent corridor shooter Darkness II had a disappointing theme park level, which makes me wonder if theme parks aren’t better suited to open-world games. Part of the appeal of a theme park when you’re a kid is being set loose to do whatever activity you want: ride the rides, get some junk food, play some of those games to win prizes, go through the fun house, whatever you want. Bully really got this with its theme park, which was like an open-world game inside an open-world game. Grand Theft Auto IV and Crackdown both had abandoned theme parks. Were abandoned theme parks always this forlorn, or does that partly come from seeing those famous pictures of the ferris wheel at Pripyat after the Chernobyl disaster?
After the jump, how does Secret World’s theme park measure up? Continue reading →
Being a horror themed game, Secret World has its share of haunted houses. Two of them are among my favorite quests in any MMO. This isn’t necessarily saying much, given that the bar for making a good MMO quest is notoriously low. But these two haunted houses are examples of everything right and everything wrong with Secret World. For better and worse, this is what happens when you play an MMO partly designed by Ragnar Tornquist, the creator of the Longest Journey single-player adventure games.
After the jump, I won’t spoil anything Continue reading →
Secret World has three starting cities, one for each faction. The Dragons start in Seoul, the Illuminati start in New York, and the Templars start in London. That guy up there is in London’s Haitian market.
After the jump, guess what he’s selling Continue reading →
I’m a dude, so I don’t carry a purse. But one thing Secret World has taught me is that if I did carry a purse, I’d optimize the heck out of it.
After the jump, what’s in the bag? Continue reading →
I have the utmost respect for the people at Ubisoft. They’re involved with some of my favorite game franchises going, and their work glows with thoughtfulness and care. However, even I can admit that they’ve made some really dumb decisions. Like the fact that they release PC versions of their games months after the console versions. Like their ultra-restrictive DRM. Like the smoke bomb.
After the jump: Ka-pow! Ka-pow! Ka-pow! Continue reading →
