I think it sits in that grey area between an RPG and an FPS that I’ve been looking for. It’s actually what I imagined WoW was going to be before it was released, an MMO version of the RTS Warcraft where humans control each unit in a battle and the results from those battles allow you to level your character.

The XP and bonus system is also a good way to give people an incentive to follow their leaders and also to play as a squad. At first I didn’t really like the lack of a killcam but on further thought, a killcam encourages a player to go off and play on his own, hunting down individual enemies that shot you, which really isn’t the point, it’s not a deathmatch game. The distance to the spawn point was also a gripe, but, again, if you are playing in a proper squad with medics and leaders you shouldn’t need to respawn as often as you should get resuscitated. The distance to the spawn also is a deterrent to spawn camping.

I’ve a few gripes still though:
1) The inability to throw back grenades is a pain. It makes holding a capture point redundant as a few grenades in the door will kill everyone or force everyone to run out into enemy fire.
2) Group comms need to be enabled outside of the game lobby and in the group menu itself
3) If I can cancel a reload by switching to my pistol I should be able to cancel a reload by using a melee attack also. The amount of times I’ve died in close quarters because my clip emptied and I’ve been forced to run around bunny hopping waiting for my reload animation to finish.

But overall it’s impressive. Definitely a day one buy for me I think.

Update 1 – 28/05/09: Now I’m the king of the swingers, a jungle VIP

I’ve been ploughing loads of free time into Little Big Planet and Street Fighter IV lately, but decided to give those a break to give this a whirl. Initial impressions are good, the dialogue is 80′s camp (I don’t know if this is on purpose or not) which is actually humorous, and the gameplay is interesting. To keep with the Bionic Arm theme of the original, a bomb has gone off in some generic city which means you can’t just walk right up to the bosses door, you need your extendable swing arm to grapple onto signposts, girders and broken bridges to swing from one checkpoint to the next. The swinging makes up the meat of the gameplay, the bones comes from what is at the checkpoints when you get there. You will usually have to fight a bunch of baddies to progress (on occasion you can go around them) but how you do so will govern what upgrades and trophies you will receive. It is usually in your best interest to see what challenges have been unlocked and complete them as soon as possible. The variety of challenges keeps the fights fresh as you are not just running and gunning. Thought has to go into how you plan to attack the next squad or outpost.

At this point I still like it. The swing mechanics can feel rather stiff at times, but I’m getting used to it. Hopefully, as more abilities unlock, the game will continue to get better.

Update 2 – 29/05/09: Doin’ it for da bling

Well I’ve decided I’m going to try and get a platinum trophy in this game. I purposely played through it on my first run in the hardest difficulty to get the Trophy for it, and after having a look at the list of Trophies (thankfully none of them are online grind trophies) it should be easily possible. Playing through it in Commando mode is tough. A lot of the time I have to resort to exploiting glitches in the levels to progress. For example I encountered 3 Biomechs blocking my path, I couldn’t go around them, and fighting all 3 of them at once at this difficulty would be suicide. So I found a ledge that they couldn’t reach and just took pot shots at them, slowly whittling away at each of there healths until I could jump in and pull off a radial move that would take out all 3 of them at once. Also, Snipers at this difficulty are an absolute pain. They track you without mistake, you really have to get used to moving out of cover, performing one quick finishing move, then back into cover before the next Sniper in the area has locked onto you.

The only consolation is that I imagine I will be playing it again now to unlock the rest of the trophies, but thankfully this difficulty level will be out of the way. The easier difficulties should be a breeze.

Update 3 – 01/06/09: Swing and a… hit!

Well I finished Bionic C0mmando over the weekend in commando mode, then finished it again a day later to unlock all of the trophies and get the platinum. In commando mode, the difficulty was insane in some places (particularly areas with snipers) but by the end it felt like something of substance had been accomplished. On my second play through I lowered the difficulty to normal (the lowest allowable setting) and while it didn’t feel like as much of a struggle, it was a whole lot more fun.

Moves I couldn’t even attempt before I now had plenty of time to pull off. for example, there are these flying baddies named “Polycrafts”. In commando mode, I had to constantly be in cover, shooting at them from a distance as they would never come close enough to allow me to grapple them. In normal mode, I was able to swing on a girder and throw myself towards them as I could take a lot more damage, this allowed me to get close enough to grapple onto them and perform an “adrenaline” finishing move, which basically pulls the operater out of the craft thus disabling it.

I thought the story was pretty solid (albeit let down significantly by the pretty bad voice acting) and the ending just made you hungry for a sequel. A few of the levels had a really good epic feel to them, an example being the boss fight against the Mohole. Everything about this was perfect, the size of the boss, the sounds and the music and the atmosphere of the level. But this is just a drop in the pond.

Overall I really enjoyed this game. I thought the musical score was excellent and the sound effects where perfect (plenty of bass used to great effect), gameplay wise it never got repetitive or boring and graphically it was solid, changing environments frequently enough so as to never feel tired. If you’re looking for a challenge, some fun, a feast of eye and ear candy or a bunch of easily obtained trophies for your collection then I highly recommend this game.

Initially I was wary about the knock-offs, understandably, but from further reading online I discovered that these knock-offs where found to usually be either equal or better than the original pads. I was sold. They where cheap so why not. I bought them and, surprisingly, a week later they arrived in the post from China (we really do live in a global village). I immediately plugged them into my PS3, powered it up and they just worked. I loaded into Street Fighter IV and instantly they just felt better. The D-Pad is just more fluid to use than the stock Xbox 360 or PS3 controller. The D-Pad on the Xbox 360 has to be the worst I’ve ever used, it’s like a hairy wart on an otherwise excellent controller. I had hoped to use my Xbox 360 pads for ROM’s, but even something like Super Mario Bros is a pain when being played with the 360 controller. The PS3 has a better D-Pad, in fact you can play SFIV pretty well with it, but I found I hit a ceiling pretty fast in how far I could go with it. The lack of 6 face buttons and the feel of the D-Pad made it awkward to pull off more complicated combos and focus breaks.

Overall, the design of this pad is geared towards simplicity. It’s wired and super light, it also has 6 face buttons, needed for fight games in my opinion, especially in Street Fighter with its low, medium and high strength kicks and punches. It also has 2 shoulder buttons, tapered out to make them feel comfortable to rest your index fingers on. But what really separates this pad from the rest is the fantastic D-Pad, as far as I was able to find out, even though it’s floating (i.e. 1 whole piece sitting above the controller) underneath each direction has a separate button. It makes pulling of movements and combos a lot easier. Immediately I was able to get back to the same level as I was with the PS3 controller and started to improve. I can now pull off Akumas air fireballs with ease, and hurricane kicks and hadokens are second nature now. As for ROM’s, well I’ve been playing through Super Mario Bros and its finally a joy again.

It’s amazing how something as simple as a good D-Pad has been consistantly designed wrong or overlooked in the last few generations of game controllers. If you are looking to get into fighting games but don’t fancy a stick or are looking for something to use to dust off that old ROM collection then I can’t recommend these controllers enough. Just do a search on ebay for them.

**UPDATE** The D-Pad on both of these controllers have since broken. From doing some research I’ve found that they are not counterfeits, however they are defective original Sega Saturn Pads. In Japan, the pads I have where the first version, but it was found that the plastic that was used for the D-Pad was prone to breaking, due to its design and also the plastic used. In the second revision, the D-Pad was redesigned and they used a much more durable Nylon plastic for it. Visually the only way to tell the difference between the revisions is that the newer ones are gray with some blue buttons. If you are considering getting these, make sure you purchase the gray colored ones.

More info here: Saturn Digital gamepad

All of my school books where covered in my drawings of Sonic, Super Sonic, Knuckles and the evil Dr. Robotnik. In fact, because of this game I started designing the art work for my own 2D platformer, which, sadly, never came to fruition. Check out the album link below, my character “Spike” is not a rip off of Sonic at all *sarcasm alert*

My old video game drawings and ideas

I can’t think of my childhood without thinking of Sonic The Hedgehog and his sidekick Tails. I used to get “Sonic The Comic” to read and watch the Sonic The Hedgehog TV show on SatAM. I’d probably watch it eating my favourite can of Sonic shaped spaghetti pieces.

Which is why I was so devastated to see Sonic die a death in the releases that followed S&K. They just wheren’t good anymore. Sadly to follow was Sega itself, who made a few very bad marketing decisions and ended up isolating themselves from their core fans.

Sega have since stopped making consoles and are now solely a game development company. Most recently I played “Sonic Advance 2″ on the GBA:SP. It was very good in my opinion, which gives me a bit of hope that there is still a chance that they can revive Sonic. Also, I have high hopes for the new Sonic release, “Sonic Unleashed”.

I still come back to the originals though every few years by playing them through an emulator on my PC. Time is very kind to the 16bit era of games as they look as good now as they ever did. I guess the only aspect that has changed is the resolution and size of the TV that I play them on. I played Sonic first on a 15″ CRT TV in my bedroom. Most recently I played through it again on my current 42″ 1080i Plasma. The colours are still as vivid and the gameplay still as excellent but Sonic is now looking very jagged around the edges due to his low pixel count.

It seems though that a bunch of die hard Sonic fans wheren’t happy with Sonic aging the way he was and have decided to give him a facelift.

The guys over at “sonicretro.org” are working on a complete remake of the original Sonic 2 game but this time they are bumping up the resolution to the eye bleed inducing 1080p. You can check out their progress here: Community Projects: Sonic 2 HD

Sonic in HD

I’ve already tried out one of the early Alpha’s from their site and it is looking quiet impressive, but it is very bug ridden so it will probably be a while before we even see a complete level released. If you don’t want to take a chance with the Alpha you can watch the video link below. Also bookmark their site and stumble & digg this project as much as you can to get it the support it needs and Sonic deserves.

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If you’re a gamer and you haven’t heard of Crysis then hang your head in shame. Sure it might not have the best gameplay or story, but graphically it can’t be touched by anything on this generation of consoles.

If you have a rig that can run it with all the bells and whistles enabled (i.e. enthusiast settings) you’ll understand the want to take high definition screenshots (have a look at some of mine below) You can use them for posting on forums about this game or, if like me, use them as wallpapers for your computer, PS3… etc.

Here’s how. (note these steps also work for the original Crysis)

Step 1: Navigate to “C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsCrytekCrysis WARHEADGameconfig”
Step 2: Create a new text file and name it “autoexec.cfg”
Step 3: Open this document in notepad and put in these lines of code:

e_screenshot_width  3840 (this is the value that I use)
e_screenshot_height 2400 (this is the value that I use)
e_screenshot_file_format jpg (can be jpg,tga,bmp)

Optionally you can add these extra lines of code depending on your preferences

r_drawnearfov 10 (removes the gun from view)
cl_hud 0 (disables the HUD)

For the resolution you can put in any value you want, I used a multiple of my desktops resolution (i.e. 1920×1200). Personally, I don’t have the optional commands in my file as I prefer to enable/disable them when I’m in the game via the console.

Step 4: Go back to the main game directory, “C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsCrytekCrysis WARHEAD”

Step 5: Make a new text document and name it “system.cfg”

Step 6: Open this file in textpad and add these 2 lines of code

con_restricted=0 (lets you use advanced console commands within Crysis: Warhead)
r_getscreenshot=1 (lets you use an easier way of taking screenshots) ♦

Step 7: Start up the game and go into your settings and DISABLE FULLSCREEN. This point is very important, if you don’t do this the images will come out all messed up. If you are using Aero you might want to disable it

Step 8: Begin a single player savepoint or new game, whatever.

Step 9: Get into position at somewhere where you think you’d like to take a screenshot

Step 10: Press “Esc” to pause the game (don’t worry about the menu that pops up, this won’t appear in the screenshot) This is also handy if you want to take an action shot, whilst in a gunfight or something you can press “Esc” to pause and then take a screenshot of the action.

Step 11: Open up the console, usually its “¬” (the button next the “1″ and below “Esc”)

Step 12: Type in “e_screenshot 1″. You will see a flash of some images from your screenshot on the screen. When its finished your screenshot will be taken.

Step 13: To view your screenshot, alt-tab to your desktop, and navigate to “C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsCrytekCrysis WARHEADGameScreenShotsHiRes”, in this folder will be all the screenshots you have taken

There you have it, in this folder you will have your screenshots. You can leave them as is, or you can shrink them down with Photoshop or VSO Image resizer which will make them look like you have the AA maxed out.

Try taking screenshots with the HUD disabled for clean wallpaper images, also an easy way to get rid of the gun is to switch to fists (he will put his fists down after a few seconds)

♦ If you don’t want to be hassled with any of the above steps, of course you can take normal resolution screenshots by hitting F12 once you’ve enabled the command in the above “system.cfg”. These screenshots will be saved to (on Vista) “C:Users<USERNAME>DocumentsMy GamesCrysis_WARHEADScreenShots”

Additional Personal Tips & Tricks

1. Disabling the annoying start up advertisement videos:

Navigate to “C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsCrytekCrysis WARHEADGameLocalizedVideo”, create a new folder here and name it something like “video_bkup” or “die_you_corporate_waste_of_my_time”, in this folder put these files:

Trailer_Crytek.sfd, Trailer_CrytekC.sfd, Trailer_EA.sfd, Trailer_Intel.sfd, Trailer_NVidia.sfd, Trailer_PEGI.sfd, Trailer_Rating_Full.sfd

After you have done this, when you load up the game you will be taken directly to main menu.

2. An easier way to switch between your suit modes:

This is a feature in the game that I’ve heard of only a few people using but it makes playing the game a lot easier, at least for me. Instead of mapping the suit modes HUD to Mouse 3, map “Suit Modes Toggle” to it (it’s in the Weapons Tab of “Mouse & Keyboard Setup”. Now, when in game, press this button once for Armour, twice for speed, 3 times for strength and 4 times for cloak. It works better because you don’t have to stop to bring up the menu and select a mode, you can continue to move, aim and strafe whilst also switching between suit modes. It seems odd at first but becomes intuitive very fast. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Closing Thoughts:

Stay tuned for my review of Crysis: Warhead, also let me know if this article was of any use to you. If you have taken any screenshots using this guide, leave a comment and link to them here.

12►

It got me thinking about how much I love the PoP series. Even from it’s old Rotoscoping days I’ve loved it. I remember playing it for the first time over at a friends house on their commodore amiga and being blown away. The rotoscoping of the Prince made his movements look so realistic, also his movements where very human, when he ran fast you needed to allow a certain amount of space to stop him before he fell off a ledge. This game also had something no previous game I’d played had. It had gore. I mean the gore might of only been a few red pixels on the screen, and definitely tame by todays standards, but it was so real. When you ran through a patch of spikes or a set of guillotine jaws suddenly your character fell to the ground and his white uniform was now covered in red. Sadly I never completed the original. I had a brief period of re-interest in it when I was in college as it would run on the PC’s there. The funny thing about it also was that the audio would transmit over the PC’s built in warning speaker (it is normally used to warn you of system errors with successive beeps) so you could always tell in lab who was playing the original PoP by the amount of noise their PC would be making.

Aside from that I left the series alone for a good while, but in 2006, having a void of no games to play I decided to give the new trilogy of PoP games a shot. I was blown away. Played back to back the new PoP series is some of the finest gaming you’ll ever experience. The gameplay is balanced, the controls are intuitive, the story is interesting and the combat does not get repetitive. The artistic styling of the game world is also simply stunning. However there has been much debate about which game in the trilogy is the best.

The first one, The Sands of Time, was the original so it has the nostalgic advantage of being the first to introduce us to the gameplay, environments and combat. The second, Warrior Within, went a lot grittier and darker, replacing the explosion of sand when you dispatch a baddie with actual blood. The soundtrack also went very grungy and the Prince himself started to look very Emo and somehow had had the time since the first game to get tatoos all over his right arm (if you watch the “making of” doc included with the game you’ll see his tatoos are identical to the ones on the lead designers arm) A lot of people didn’t like this change, personally, I’m glad the art department had the guts to break mold and try something new. I felt the combat was greatly improved with Warrior within, my only gripe was the levels. Instead of the linear approach of the first they went for an approach similar to the original whereby the levels crisscrossed each other. It made for a better maze system and better puzzling solving, but at times I would leave the game and then come back to it and have forgotten which of the numerous paths I had to take.

The third, The Two Thrones, really sealed the deal for me. It went back to the ethereal stylings of the first but kept the combat systems of the second. It also went back to being linear, much to my delight, like the first. I think if the 2nd hadn’t changed the artstyle as much as it did the 3rd would not of seemed so great. The contrast between the 2nd and 3rd really made it shine and a pleasure to play. The ending was also perfect, it answered the questions in the storyline and brought the series full circle to explain aspects of the first. All in all though the trilogy should not really be viewed as 3 separate parts but rather as a whole, and as a whole the series is excellent and complete.

Which is mainly why, when I heard they where making another PoP game, the feeling was bittersweet. I wanted to play more of the Prince of Persia but the completeness of the previous 3 meant that this would now be broken. The more I’ve known about and seen the art direction of the new game the more I’ve liked it. The dialog seems a little cheesy, obviously to pander to the younger or casual market, but the gameplay innovations and immersive environments will probably save it for me.

We’ll have to wait and see though. Watch this space for a review of the new installment once it gets released.

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