Everything about the game kicks ass, from the plot and music to the choices and controls (especially the controls). Many of the decisions you made in ME1 affect what happens in ME2, which in turn will carry over to ME3. This should all be common knowledge if you’ve ever played the series before.

One of my favorite new features is probably the interrupt system. Pushing a Merc out of a fifty-story building never gets old.

I also enjoyed the romantic sub-plot (you can choose a love interest, which is much more involved than the first game). Nobody could even come close to Miranda, IMO. (And the after-game love options were a nice touch too, although I was hoping you could rescue your LI from the Collectors in some capacity near the climax of the game. Didn’t quite happen though, maybe for ME3…)

I won’t go into many more details and spoil the game for those who haven’t played it yet, and I don’t have any major complaint’s about the game. Although I would’ve like to see more variety in the mineral collecting options than just scanning random planets, like defending a platnium-producing base from Eclipse Mercenaries or something.

A few more weapon options would’ve been nice too. Why’d we only get stuck with two types of SMG’s and Heavy Pistols? Maybe five or six options per weapon choice (similar to the heavy weapon options).

So anyway, they don’t detract from the game at all really, just get to playing it and enjoy the experience! (And with Southpaw control options, no less.)

I get the Fucking Red Ring of Death!!! Again!

The console wasn’t moving, it wasn’t overheating, and the power supply box (nor the system itself) wasn’t even on the ground. It came out of nowhere.

For the few years I’ve owned a 360, I’ve gotten this error Three Damn Times! And each time it had to be repackaged and sent back to Microsoft for a few hundred dollars. As if those greedy bastards didn’t make enough money off of just hardware and software sales alone, they had the gull to charge customers for repairs. Sure they may have offered an extended warranty for now, but then they retracted it, assholes.

Every time I see those smarmy lights flashing at me, I just want to throw the system into the jaw of a Microsoft Executive. And this time is no different.

And if that wasn’t enough, I can’t even play computer games properly on my computer anymore.

Take for example, “Star Wars: Empire at War”. The game is already a few years old and I was looking forward to trying it out for awhile. I get through the copy’s installation process and am just about to launch the game, only to find out my computer doesn’t meet the correct processing requirements.

My computer has an Intel Celeron 2.7 Ghz CPU. SW: EaW requires at least a 1.0 Ghz CPU from either an Intel Pentium III or an AMD Athlon processor. Are you kidding me? The damn thing only runs on TWO Specific Processor-types? What complete bullshit!

Really? How can one of the largest computer companies in the world manufacture such shitty hardware? Or how can certain games “require specific processors”? I’m seriously considering just boycotting the industry altogether. (At least until corporations pull their heads out of their collective greedy asses and start thinking about the consumer for once.)

Bah! There’s nothing that can be done.

Let me start by saying that I’m right handed, but I play all First Person Shooters (FPS) and adventure games left-handedly. I have been using southpaw control configuration ever since Rare released Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64 (It was actually the game that got me interested in FPS’s).

After reading rave reviews for Mass Effect, and the thought of actually getting to fly a spaceship throughout the galaxy in a non-linear story fashion was a terrific concept. I thought I was going to have loads of fun, then I started my search through the game menus to adjust the settings to my liking, and guess what? That’s right, only four options pertaining to gameplay.

FOUR options? THAT’S IT?!?! What a joke. You’d think in the year 2008 with all the advanced gaming technology, computer programming capabilities, graphic designs, and hard drive space, that the developers could take an hour or two and assign some user-selectable control features; but nooooooo, you can’t even prioritize what is arguably the most important factor during gameplay, you know, controlling your character.

The Bigger Picture

These companies don’t take their customers very seriously. Take for example tech support. You spend days searching through and posting on company forums and FAQs, spend an hour on the phone only to be put on hold for another hour so that the tech rep can tell you he doesn’t have an answer for you, and you’ve just realized you’ve pissed away a week searching for an answer to which would result in pissing away even more time (having fun) playing the game.

Accountability?

I think it’s about time for arrogant game developers to stop discriminating against players while simultaneously getting their heads out of their asses to spend a few minutes programming the features in. Don’t they realize that there’s a whole demographic of other gamers that use alternative control schemes for just about every genre?

I was able to muster through Knights of the Old Republic with the default controls, barely. (Though this is only because it didn’t require quick reflexes and precision to aim and shoot and such.) Not offering personalized customization is a bad move BioWare, a BAD MOVE for everyone.

All I’m asking for here is a downloadable patch or something to accommodate control schemes that offer players the most comfortable experience possible. How can I possibly enjoy a game if it controls like shit?

Don’t you game developers realize there is a potential win-win situation for both of us here? Not only will there be:

• Happy Customers who can play a game as comfortably as possible,
• But you’ll also get more business and increased revenue in game sales

This doesn’t go for just BioWare though, there are other games I’ve played that have been ruined by crappy controls, like Splinter Cell and Bioshock for example. To be fair though, it isn’t just the game developers who are at fault, the publishers more than likely have a hand in this as well. With the constant schedule deadlines, financial expectations, and all the developmental timelines they set, it’s no wonder great games don’t come along very often.

At least Some Understand

How hard would it be to program a few custom control schemes into the game? Not very, I imagine. This is one of the features I LOVE about Quake 4 (and Doom 3), they offer a completely customizable control system. Any button can be used for reloading or shooting, hell I could even Left Trigger to Jump if I wanted to.

I can say the same thing about the Halo franchise (my favorite shooter genre of all time at the moment). While every button may not be programmed for any feature the player wishes, Bungie still included a plethora of options for both thumbstick AND button layouts. Let me tell you, if it didn’t I sure as hell wouldn’t have played Halo’s two sequels, and I doubt the series would have anywhere near the magnitude it currently holds without these specific control features.

Allow me to give a big thanks to ID software for RECOGNIZING that there are southpaw (and legacy) players out there, and it makes sense to offer these choices because over 10% of the population are left-handed by default, not to mention the rest of us who chose to learn to play FPS’s with southpaw layouts.

Microsoft did take a step in the right direction though, by adding the universal game control feature to the Xbox 360 dashboard. However this can be easily overridden by the game’s programming, which means most, if not all, game developers can ignore it if they wish. (Thank God The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was affected by this feature, or else that game would have been shipped back to the stores too; and guess what, playing the game with southpaw controls made it that much more ENJOYABLE.)

At least Southpaw Legacy (formerly altcntrlgmr.com) gets the situation, and was a great resource of information available for use to find out which games support different controls and which don’t. Should we follow in Southpaw Legacy’s footsteps, and hold game developers and publishers to industry quality standards? I say yes.

I was thinking about purchasing a rewired game controller from Llama due to the fact I find it nearly impossible to play with the default controls. And I sure as hell knew I couldn’t solder the damn thing myself using their hardware guide, even if I tried. Besides this would violate the 360 controller’s warranty, if something were to go wrong (which definitely would in this situation, given my hot-wiring skills). But unfortunately they have been discontinued due to their high demand (gee, I wonder why?). However even if they were available, I probably wouldn’t purchase one anyway, given the high price tag these things had.

Just do the fact that a company like Llama exists should tell the video game industry something (Hint: It has to do with the horrible gamers have to choose from). Maybe if the devs put a little more thought into the economics of the industry, and just how many gamers are left behind in the dust, they wouldn’t have such a bad reputation (from my point of view, that is).

Until companies like BioWare start taking their customers more seriously, I won’t be purchasing any future video game titles from them. It’s too bad too, you could’ve earned another $50 bucks from me purchasing your game, unfortunately you chose to ignore people that have different playing styles.

Thanks for nothing, Game Developers.

(UPDATE = 6/19/2009)
OK, I really need to update this post. Despite the initially clumsy controls, I still desperately wanted to play the game, so I spent a few weeks honing my skills with the game.

I learned that Mass Effect’s layout is a lot like Splinter Cell’s control scheme in that respect, which I already WAS familiar with.

I’m already on my third playthrough, and overall it’s a damn fine game. If BioWare would just give more freedom through control options, coupled with the vastly intriguing storytelling and large, quantitative replay value, they would have a Gaming Masterpiece.

]]> http://www.lightningshock.com/2008/05/26/what-the-hell-no-southpaw-controls/feed/ 10 http://www.lightningshock.com/2008/02/11/3d-websites-will-they-happen/ http://www.lightningshock.com/2008/02/11/3d-websites-will-they-happen/#comments Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:03:25 +0000 James Lewitzke http://www.lightningshock.com/2008/02/11/3d-websites-will-they-happen/ We always hear about how Virtual Reality is the next step in the Videogame World, or how we all may one day experience holographic movies. But what about interacting with those three-dimensional environments to give and retrieve information?

I know I’m surely not a coding expert (at this present time). This would probably require a whole new web browser system, heck, maybe even a whole new markup language to function properly.

I could see the first phase of this project involving just adding new HTML attributes (such as “depth”), and HTML elements which could contain different “sides” of the 3D projection (like the north side “title tag” or maybe they would ad an X,Y,Z “grid position”).

One other important revolutionary function I feel would be adding a brand new “Navigation System” to the website (which could end up replacing hyperlinks, well at least internally). You’d navigate by the ways of keyboard arrows (along with four more keys to navigate vertically, and much like the ways you control character in a first-person shooter videogame. But you’d still use your mouse to click whichever links, page elements, etc. are visible.

Potential Advantages I can see:

• Much more space to store, view and access information
• It Gives users a whole new perspective (current 2D sites seem a bit plain and boring now, don’t they?)
• Number of options are greatly increased, more freedom to choose what and how you want to design your site
• It would be on the “Cutting-Edge” of technology
• More business opportunities are created (like new advertising venues and fresh ways to communicate with one another)

Disadvantages of this Design concept:

• Very difficult to code and design (from a web developer’s standpoint, but hey, everyone can learn, right?)
• Choosing just how to implement this sort of idea will result in many conflicting ideas (Consistency is important)
• Probably tons of wasted space (if we’re designing in a cube format), most probably won’t need everything a 3D Website has to offer
• Navigation may seem difficult and unnatural for the first few months (or years) of use, new browser applications and improvements would have to be created for them to run properly

I realize this idea is kind of “out there”, but I still think they’d be a cool thing to see.

1. Force Powers

How cool would it be to learn different powers? Maybe nothing too extreme, but say we could go on adventures to find ancient books that would teach us things about the force we cannot comprehend.

The power I’d like to learn the most would definitely have to be “Death Field”. This power was common throughout the KOTOR video game series. Basically what would happen is that when you are near a few enemies, you’d cast “Death Field” and it would deplete your enemies health while simultaneously recharging your own, very neat.

2. Medical Packs

Whenever I would become sick, I could just pull out a medkit, inject the antibodies (or whatever medical resources they’d contain) into my body and become instantly cured.

You would probably have to carry around more than one, because most medkits probably wouldn’t heal you completely in one use.

3. Revamped Currency System

Anybody playing KOTOR would know what “Credits” are. It’s a simplified currency system where everything is bought and sold using them. No pointless multiple forms like “Pennies”, “One Dollar Bills”, “Five Dollar Bills”, etc. One standard for the entire galaxy.

4. Personal Shuttle Transport

I’ve always wanted my own personal air-transportation vehicle. It would make flying over traffic a breeze, be a perfect getaway vehicle (not that I’m implying you should do anything illegal), and not to mention they’d be super-cool to fly!

It wouldn’t have to be too big, maybe something Millennium Falcon-sized, probably a tad smaller. This way I could infiltrate through enemy defenses virtually undetected, I could explore uncharted worlds with the craft’s lightspeed hyperdrive, and I could bring a small party to travel with me.

5. (Obedient) Droid Servants

Having dirty houses, smudgy windows, and is not something people like to have, but unfortunately, most people have to deal with them due to time constraints in their lives. I’m also implying “forever obedient” machines here because I don’t want them to turn on us Terminator-Style.

I’ve dreamed about having my own personal assassin droid like HK-47 from the Knights of the Old Republic Series. He’d love carnage, obey my every word, and be my own bodyguard. (not like I’d need one though, due to these following inventions…….)

6. A Lightsaber

I had a dream a while back that I was a lightsaber wielding jedi (or Sith, probably the latter ), and I was a master dualist, no one could match against my skills and prowess. But then I realized, in this universe that we live in, our guns don’t shoot “laser beams” like the blasters in the Star Wars Galaxy do, they shoot actual metal bullets, which leads me to my final invention…..

7. A Personalized Energy Shield

If I had an invisible metallic energy shield (to protect myself from bullets, swords, etc.) surrounding myself, along with a lightsaber (the only weapon that would theoretically be able to slice through my shield), I’d be virtually invincible .

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 lately, great game.