Michael Walbridge

World Supremacy

December 6, 2010

I’m not really sure who World Supremacy is supposed to wow over. Low-budget turn-based strategy titles need two things to be worth the time: they need to be well-designed and they need just one other rewarding variable, some sort of gravy to go with the meat. That gravy could be effective multiplayer options, a challenging computer opponent, a single-player campaign with a rewarding storyline, or involving graphics and sound. Something, anything. While World Supremacy as a game is well-designed (it borrows heavily from the always-enjoyable Axis and Allies), it doesn’t have any other necessary rewards to make it worth picking up, though not for lack of trying.

The biggest difference between World Supremacy and Axis and Allies is that World Supremacy has simplified Advance Wars-style combat for every time there is a battle. Units come on screen in the order of their having arrived at the space. The attacker moves and attacks with all his units first. Units are on a grid and have varying attack ranges. Units die in entire pieces. If you have 3 tanks and your 6 infantry units don’t quite kill a single tank, there is no damage or life that carries over to the next battle. Against the computer, you simply get to the middle first, wait for them for a turn or two so you get the first hit, and you always have the advantage. Why not just roll the dice and let the stats grind it out? The combat is not very satisfying either, as Advance Wars and its imitators have fog of war, special abilities, and the map is the combat. Here, the map is the map, and combat only happens when one space moves to another. It’s an ambitious change, but does not mix well with the rest of the game.

There are optional neutral countries to liven the game up, as well as a random map generator, which is always a plus. Choose as many players and as large of a map as you want–with saved games, you can make an extremely large or small game. While these are better features than the managed combats, these elements also don’t mesh well, since the only multiplayer options are hotseat (which doesn’t mix well with either the optional fog of war and the non-optional manually fought battles) and TCP/IP. That’s right, TCP/IP. Is this a game for only one opponent?

World Supremacy also has more units than Axis & Allies, which are upgradable. You can also build cities, which up your money count without you having to grab new territories. There are also nukes, which is a different and admirably bold idea.

Ultimately, most of these features don’t matter, even though some are well-implemented. The computer is predictable, boring, and easy to stomp, there are no advanced graphics, sounds, or storylines, and the multiplayer options are not friendly. The elements of design as a board and strategy game are done well in World Supremacy, but all the mixed signals and flaws of all the bonus features make for a boring and uninteresting experience. No gravy here.

Pros: customizability, simplicity, randomly generated maps, unit depth and options

Cons: No multiplayer community features, poor UI, overpriced ($30), absolute lack of graphics and sound make it feel like a mod / free-to-play game, the combat sequences

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

August 4, 2010

PC / Reviews / by Michael Walbridge /

I’m sure you want to know if StarCraft II is as good as the first, and if the multiplayer is balanced, and if the campaign is like, cool and everything, and if the game is wholly new. The answer to all of those things is a strictly technical yes.

Hype and anticipation are inseparable from certain games, though, and the way StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty turned out is a fantastic microcosm of the how video games are different today from ten or even five years ago.

Reports on the multiplayer have been around a while because of the beta, so the first order of business is the campaign. The simple linear progression of Mission 1 to Mission 10 is a thing long-gone. The first StarCraft had a plot that, for its day, actually had you interested in the characters and the events. You were the accompanying commander/cerebrate/judicator guy whose job was simply to be awesome at mobilizing units and follow orders. You watched passively as the people you served made tragic choices, cut off alliances, backstabbed, politicked, and swore oaths of vengeance like it was a sci-fi version of a Greek tragedy. Many characters had zippy one-liners (“Clearly Tassadar has failed us…you must not,” “He’s our snake now”).

That’s all different now. You follow Jim Raynor as he attempts to overthrow Arcturus Mengsk, running into various friends and hostiles along the way. In between missions there are newscasts to watch, a jukebox to play with, and characters to talk to. Those characters are very generic and archetypal, and they fill the campaign with predictable plot twists. Achievements (in multiplayer also), easter eggs, and mission order choice are all part of the mix too. Completing levels and finding hidden items give you access to upgrades and new units. The campaign will feel a little more like a quest this way compared to the first Stacraft’s, which felt like a multiplayer tutorial and movie.

The curious thing about the game as a whole is the divergence between the single player and multiplayer. For one thing, StarCraft II will have three parts. The campaign here is all Terran, all 26 missions, and we won’t even see the next campaign, the zerg, for about two years. The campaign will only teach you about one of the three races (a lot of players in multiplayer pick terran), and even there some of the upgrades and units don’t exist in multiplayer. The fact that the firebat and medic return for the campaign yet don’t in the multiplayer is a curious choice. Was the balancing not complete, or did they keep them just for nostalgia’s sake?

Regardless, the missions are creative and the objectives interesting enough that it won’t feel like a grind of base-stomping just to get to the next audio file, and for that the campaign is to be commended. Polish and volume of content were the main goals in mind. The graphics of the missions are more varied and intense here too. 12 years is a long time, and the sounds and graphics are appropriately new, though in the case of the the graphics not remarkable–that’s fine though, as scenery is not what strategy games are about.

For most, the multiplayer will be the most important part as that is where the majority of the time will be spent. The graphics here are actually a little simpler, presumably to keep the competition friendly. The game is the same–workers on minerals and gas, build order, base expansion, map knowledge, the whole formula is unchanged. Warcraft III was a very experimental game. StarCraft II takes no chances.

Most people didn’t want it to, either. But here are changes that are large, subtle, and more telling: it’s easier to add a friend by Facebook than it is by username. An Internet connection is absolutely required for single player, as is an email address connected to a Battle.net account. There are no channels to go to like in StarCraft or any of the Warcraft games. Custom games requires lots of uncomfortable hoops (though there are already some admirable tower defense creations in place) and the ladders are split up into tiny groups, none of which can be seen online anywhere, the way it can in World of Warcraft or Warcraft III. You can see the stats of 100 players at a time, all about your skill level, randomly assigned.

It’s cold and anonymous and encouraging you to play with your real friends. People do this anyway. Some people want the online culture, and it’s gone. The balance is fine and the looks are fine and the changes are nice but the channels and visible ladders are gone. What gives?

Ultimately, StarCraft II gets perfect technical marks and worthy artistic ones. I won’t kid anyone: we all want to see and play this game, and if there is disappointment, it’s not enough to warrant a regret in purchasing it. The real question is whether the story or the culture makes you feel the way the first did, whether the consolized style of Battle.net is going to matter to you.

Tekken 6

December 13, 2009

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Michael Walbridge /

I’m going to make a bold claim about a highly polished and anticipated sequel from a well-respected game series. Tekken 6 absolutely does not do what Street Fighter IV does, and Namco Bandai had the rare opportunity to draw converts to the fold of fighting games, a difficult task. It was in their grasp, but they made two simple but major mistakes.

The first one is that the training mode is lacking, and there is no excuse for it. Tekken 6 is more like Virtua Fighter 5 than it is Street Fighter IV; the characters have the better portion of, if not more than, 100 moves each. Many of these are simple and are simply the difference between holding back when you press left punch rather than forward; others are two to ten hit combos. At any rate, each character is highly complex and it takes a while to learn them all. Virtua Fighter 5, Dead or Alive 4, and even previous Tekken titles assisted with this difficult learning curve by allowing players to cycle through the moves by successfully performing them. As soon as you’d perform the first successfully, the next one would appear on the screen, and it would go until the movelist was done. This was the definitive way of learning moves.

Tekken 6 does not have this feature. You can look up the move list and see the moves performed, and choose to have one specific move posted on the screen. To see the next move? You must press pause, go back in to the move list, and select it. For every. Single. One. Tekken 6 has new characters in the series, so even veterans will wish this feature were back.

And what do we have in its place? A scenario campaign mode, with a horribly acted story. In this mode, you run around in 3D beating people up with moves from the game, but in the style of an old-school beat’em up, complete with a horde of enemies and a boss at the end of each level (usually one of the 40 characters). If you want to see the story prologue and ending for each character, it’s through this really long mode; you unlock characters, then select the arena and fight through about half a dozen matches. But you have to unlock them all. Arcade mode doesn’t do it. Arcade mode makes you pretend that you are fighting human characters with stats and a gamertag, as if you’re playing people in the arcades in Japan.

The online mode isn’t up to par, either. It feels impossible to execute one-frame links or difficult combos. Most people I fought (and advanced fights I watched) featured the exact same combo or two over and over again. I know that’s a Tekken thing in general, but I can’t help but feel the lag exacerbates it. And at any rate, the code is not as atrocious at the level of King of Fighters XII, but it’s no Street Fighter IV or Blazblue, either.

There are literally over a thousand pieces of apparel you can purchase for each character’s model that you buy with cash earned by playing the game in every single mode, which rewards the completionist in you. It especially rewards completing all the awkward single-player modes (the campaign, incidentally, has co-op, not that it improves it too much). Also, the game is butt-ugly and looks grainy and old, so that takes away some of the pleasure of acquiring the items.

So there’s a campaign, and plenty of unlockable crap, some of which is funny. The outfit possibilities are amusing, something quickly learned just by playing online a while, but it’s not important. Not compared to good netcode and a decent training mode. Neither of these things are going to help make Tekken 6 “hardcore”, as it were, or expand its audience, and it’s a shame, because in an offline mode versus another player, the way fighting games were meant to be played, Tekken 6 is doing as Tekken does. There is no radical change in gameplay or the system, but with the impressive roster and new levels, there didn’t have to be. They could have just given us a some good online netcode (at least the online options are extensive) and a good training mode, and some of the people who got into fighting games from this year’s deluge (KoF XII, BlazBlue, SF IV) would have become adopters. Unfortunately, there will be fewer converts, fewer people standing around the arcade machine. This was Namco Bandai’s chance, and they blew it.

But if none of that matters to you, and you really like Tekken, it’s pretty much the same thing it’s always been and you can be happy with that. Previous Tekken players can pick up Law, Paul, (Armor) King, Lee, Lei, Nina, Julia, Xiao Yu, or any of the old school characters and find that their old Tekken skills are still of use. I’ve never seen such a well-rated game drop its price so quickly. Did you know that within 3 weeks it already went to fifty bucks new? I’m sticking by my theory: they kind of catered to the converted, at least, but didn’t do enough to draw anyone new in. There is nothing new to see here. Move along. Hardcore only.

Madballs in…Babo: Invasion

November 4, 2009

PC / Reviews / by Michael Walbridge /

Madballs in…Babo: Invasion has a weird title, so you’d think it’s one of those indie titles that tries to break the mold by doing something extremely weird and abstract.

It is not one of “those titles”, though. It may seem a curious comparision, but I’ll make it now—it’s a game that is not “retro” as it’s not patterned after games from the 80s and early 90s, but it does hearken to the days of the N64 and the PS1. The madballs are like the products of the 80s, large balls with a face on them.

In this title, the balls are characters that are part of two warring factions, and they shoot each other with lasers, machine guns, rockets, and your other standard projectile fare. For the single player fare, there are two campaigns that last a few hours. The sprites and backgrounds look really good for a budget game that take up only 400 MB. They are bright, colorful, varied, and original. The levels are linear in design but not in geometry, with a few sections requiring Sonic-style bursts of speed over twisting curves, others requiring jumps on to platforms, and yet others having mini-puzzles such as pressing buttons in the correct sequence.

The star of the campaigns, though, are the bosses. They have a lot of flair and character to them, and they have the enjoyable old-school flavors of shoot, dodge, shoot, dodge, and “figure out the weakness” to them. The challenge with these bosses (and the levels) is only moderate, with the focus appearing to be on high scores rather than on whether you can beat it. The ride is enjoyable, even though the levels are blazed through. Online co-op is not featured in enough games, either, and this game has it, thankfully.

Multiplayer has potential but ultimately falls flat. There are a handful of levels and modes, but it is poorly balanced, with some heroes and weapons generally being superior. Certain levels especially favor certain strategies, making the competition feel less about skill and strategy and more about uncontrolled chaos. Even worse, it requires plenty of play in single and/or multiplayer to unlock all the weapons and characters. Weapons and loadouts can be changed in between deaths, like in many FPS titles.

I played the demo on Xbox LIVE. The unfortunate thing is that the mouse provides much smoother control and precise aiming, but the console is where all the players are, whether it’s for co-op or versus modes. At either rate, Madballs price-tag is highly reasonable (ten dollars eitherway) and you get a very polished and original take on gun-based action, if not challenging or competitive.

ESRB: E10+ for balls shooting at each other in a cartoony context

Pros: Has co-op, original, lots of content for the money, well-polished

Cons: Community is lacking in Steam when mice are better, versus modes have balance issues, too many unlockables take too much time

Fossil Fighters

October 30, 2009

DS / Reviews / by Michael Walbridge /

Fossil Fighters is two-parts-Spectrobes, one-part-Pokemon with group battles, turn-based battles, and a narrower range of creatures.

Wish the review could be done now. So okay, what else? Instead of fighting Pokemon to level up and capturing the ones you want, you only fight other Pokemon trainers. I mean, Fossil Fighters. And instead of capturing Pokemon, you dig up dinosaur bones, like in Spectrobes. Had this also not been done before, it would be one of the more novel aspects of the game—as you go through the barebones story (“Someone stole my stuff! The villain!” “You can beat this guy! I know it! You’re the best around! To be an awesome Fossil Fighter is your destinnnyyyy”), you are permitted to explore other parts of Vivosaur Island to dig for higher level vivosaur (vivosaur = dead dinosaur you reanimate with a machine) fossils to add to your collection. You then take the fossils to a machine where you use a hammer and drill to get through the rock and to the bones without damaging them. The amount of damage will affect the vivosaur’s stats, so it’s important to do it well. This minigame will probably enthrall young kids, but will become a unique, skill-based kind of grind for anyone older, especially since you can only hold 8 fossils in your bag at once.

Fortunately, the game lets you save anywhere so you can simply reload it if you aren’t happy with the results. And your character moves lightning fast, meaning you won’t take a lot of time to travel around the island doing your errands and rushing from quest objective to quest objective. And if you find a bone you don’t need or get a duplicate that ends up with lesser stats than your best dinosaur, it ends up being a donation, and donations earn points that you can use to trade for better goods.

The game has an enjoyable challenge level to it, but is still easy, as would be expected considering its target audience. The battles are the bright spot, as it feels more like a strategy RPG than a regular one. Instead of switching out your dinosaurs in an extended 1v1 battle, you simply have one 3v3 battle with field position being a strategic choice. The front dinosaur can attack any of the dinosaurs save any resting in the back, while being able to be attacked by any dinosaur, while the supporting two play the exact opposite role. Each dinosaur has a small set of moves and has various roles. Each move also costs a certain number of points, meaning that not necessarily every dinosaur will be able to attack, so the using of moves has to be planned carefully. The front dinosaur can rotate to a back spot where it can’t attack or be attacked at all, resting for a couple of rounds. The concepts and selection of vivosaurs are easy enough to understand while still being complex enough to allow some creativity and challenge for younger players.

The world here is not as rich as Pokemon’s or even Spectrobes’. Kids may appreciate Fossil Fighters’ few unique qualities and improvements, but this is no stick of dynamite at the moment. Again, adults will find it too cutesy and easy; the writing is trite, the story is simple, and the whole thing doesn’t have much depth as many other strategy or RPG titles.

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