Sean Cleaver

The Evil Within – Preview

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

The weight of expectation on The Evil Within is certainly on some broad shoulders. Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami happens to own those shoulders.

Annouced two years ago and almost finally upon us, the game follows a modern day Police Detective, Sebastian Castellanos into a deeply disturbing psychotic environment filled with zombie like creatures, shifting environments, evil monsters and the pairing of a mysterious boy and his doctor.

the evil within preview 1 Playing through the two demo levels I got the chance to experience, the atmosphere is certainly one reminiscint of the iconic survival horror of the PS1 era. Even at this early stage the classic over-the-shoulder view, dark colours and foggy outlines are effectively imposed here. As you walk in to the first level, you are almost paranoid of everything and desperate for supplies, smashing all the boxes you can and getting as little ammunition as is available. There are several other options you can use including a multi faceted crossbow.

In fact, that’s one thing that I was surprised by, the weapons. So far they are incredibly effective, almost too effective. The only thing that really stops you from going quite run-and-gun at this stage is the amount of ammo. Something that will change as the difficulty increases especially. Quite an interesting dynamic is the way that you can‘t fight off multiple enemies forever, or just simply mow them down in a haze of bullets.

Eventually you will get swamped and overrun. You can slow them down but until you take a flame to them, they’ll keep coming. You have to be precise with your shots to put the down in the first place and you have to be conservative. Your gun won’t always be on target, so no panic shooting. Melee will only buy you a bit more time. But the game employs some clever, and tense, devices to help you with dealing with the mobs. Plenty of objects are around that are easy to use as explosives, traps to set, corners and corridors to funnel them in to, but the best has to be the weapon wheel.

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The weapon selection wheel (think any Rockstar title of recent times) has quite nicely been implemented but unlike most games where it either pauses the game or continues it, it slows the action down, quite conveniently buying you some time to think, plan and execute you next moves.

The visuals of the monsters (known as The Haunted) are, to be honest, as you’d expect for a zombie monster horror. Everything is as gory as you’d also expect with blood, guts, flesh, and Shining-esque set pieces. However the star of the show already, by far is the audio.

From the first moment that you hear the opening bars of Clair De Lune echoing from the save points, you already know that you’re in for a scary ride. One of the things you notice when playing with headphones is how much the audio design is completely surround sound biased. The little sounds and the use of echoes and reverbs resonate in your ears and creep you out.

If one think has come along the furthest in the days of the PS1 survival era, it is sound options available to game developers and this game takes full advantage of that. At the games developmental stage, the audio is the biggest winner and the thing that needs improving the least.

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I must stress that this is an early stage, so there is definitely no criticism. This will be an incredibly atmospheric horror with many interesting subplots and twists along the way. But there will be some work needed along the way to make the visual and the weapon balancing just right, then it will certainly be a game to play with the lights off.

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Celebrate 5 Years Of Minecraft

Posted on May 17, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

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What can you say about the progression of Minecraft and the impact it has had on the video game industry over the past five years?

It’s spawned its own clothing lines, merchandise, been ported to every device under the sun, made stars out of YouTube gamers and has turned the industry upside down.

The procedurally generated sandbox survival game created by Notch has grown and grown and, as far as the game is concerned, shows no signs of stopping. New mini-game servers are launched all the time, people are still lapping up the content created by it and as an experience, it’s now a comfortable yet challenging old friend.

Normally with these kind of articles, we recount our experiences with the game, our favourite things that worked well and bits that didn’t. Except Minecraft isn’t a finite entity. It’s still going and new things are continually happening.

For me personally, and you can read many things that designers and industry folk have said about Minecraft, it is all about what the game does for you. There are people that use it for education, for PvP gaming, for a benchmark in their own games and even just laud it for inspiration (see Peter Molyneux).

But for me, it’s the ability to have your own deeply personal adventure. The world is your own randomly generated world. You do what you want in terms of building things, choosing your own path and your own story. You set how challenging its going to be for you and this kind of ‘create your own’ narrative is exactly what keeps me coming back to it. And whatever new things come or mad inventions are created, it always feels like a new experience.

You may have your own thoughts and memories on Minecraft, but as it’s five years old, I’m going to take you through five of my favourite things that Minecraft has done or created in that time:

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Creepers

A completely accidental creation. During the original programming for the game Notch had accidentally created an exploding pig. He didn’t know this until said pig walked up to him and exploded. Then, the Creeper was born. It is the most wonderful and hilariously frightening creature to have graced video gaming and makes some damn fine records, if you know how.

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The Far Lands (Or Bust?)

Back in its beta days, the game had an area known as the far lands. These are the furthest point from where you spawn. The game procedurally generates based on coding and mathematical formula, but it gets to such a point where the code breaks down. Like a signal degradation if you will. This creates the far lands, an area of crazy and random landscapes, completely strange block placement and a place where the rules of Minecraft no longer apply.

If you happen to go YouTube, you may have heard of a content producer called Kurt J Mac. Since 2011, this crazy guy has decided to walk to the far lands with his canine companion Wolfie, and has been producing steady episodes of this since all in the name of charity. Even when he accidentally lost Wolfie and certain Gallifreyan-esque mechanics were used to retrieve him, the show carried on. So far, just over $269,000 has been raised for the Childs Play Charity by this endeavour alone, including donations from Notch. That is good (to quote Kurt J Mac) ‘INDEED!’

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Ultra Hardcore Mode

Sticking with the YouTube thing, this is a custom modded game mode that was so popular, Mojang built the ability to do it in to the game. Popularised and I dare say invented by the MindCrack gaming network, UHC is the ultimate in survival PvP multiplayer. Either solo, or in teams, you start at random points at the map with the aim of being the sole survivor. You play the game like survival but with rules in place such as no strip mining. The key thing here is that health regeneration is turned off so if you take damage, that damage will stick.

In the MindCrack rules, regeneration potions are banned too so that the only way you’re getting that health back is by a golden apple. Everything else is a scary free-for-all – you can put whatever modifiers to the rules that you like. The Hermitcraft’s UHC is currently making use of the newly implemented world border function to force people towards the middle or else face death. It makes for excellent viewing (MindCrack recently finished their 15^th season of it) and if you can round up enough friends, it is definitely worth trying.

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Mods

Well mods are going to come for any game aren’t they? Hell, I’ve had or seen mods for pretty much every PC game I’ve ever owned. But the Minecraft mods are so inventive, complex, easy, crazy, and impressive that they are at times new games in themselves. Not even counting the thousands of custom maps that have been created. The most well known modded pack is probably Feed The Beast, which is a collection of many mods thrown together. My personal favourite is the recent Attack of the B-Team mod pack. But there’s so many things like TerrafirmaCraft, Hexit, Skyblock, Agrarian Skies, CrackPack, Magic Farm, Life in the Woods… Too many to mention. These all contain mods with new biomes, new and better storage, more blocks and construction options and even technology.

The most impressive thing is, and anyone who’s massivly modded a game will know this, how well the base game actually copes. Yes there some glitches but for the level of modding that goes on, Minecraft is an excellent platform. And seeing as Mojang love this (they’ve even emplyed people from the mod community to work on the game) it makes for an excellent marriage.

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Community

Gaming communities are well known for their supportiveness of a game. But the Minecraft community has become much more than that. It’s become much bigger than the gaming trolls of online FPS play and surpassed the sharing communities of forums past. It is a community that stretches the globe, enjoys and supports the people that make the content they watch. It encourages involvement and maybe that’s because the game isn’t about victory but about working together to create something better. The official MineCon convention has come from this desire to bring the community together, and gaming conventions themselves now hold panels featuring Minecraft personalities to help other with the game from redstone, to YouTube and even to just having a good laugh. It is a community, once you get past the trolls and the haters, that makes you want to get involved and play. Even from the production of content, the MindCrack community has produced some of the best personalities and content from gaming, pranking, building and even role play that not only inspires the community but makes many people come together to share their enjoyment of the game and the content.

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I’ve missed loads of course and we all have such specific personal memories of playing on Minecraft. Why not share yours with us? Tweet us or comment on Facebook. I’d personally love to hear your thoughts and stories!

Happy birthday Minecraft.

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Why The next Nintendo Console Will Be Digital-Only

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

There’s a lot of rumours circulating that Nintendo are going to announce a new console at this years E3 in June.

I am going to come right out with a bold statement. This will be the first major console to ditch optical and disc media drives and go fully digital.

What we think we know right now is this:

There will be a console but no idea on hardware.
It could be called Fusion DS/Fusion Terminal if it is two separate consoles.
Nintendo filed for patents last year for a new type of controller with interchangeable buttons. [clear]

So why would I bet all the coins in the Mushroom Kingdom that Nintendo will go full digital? (Insert Tropic Thunder inspired one liner here)

Well because it is blatantly obvious. isn’t it? Nintendo has been subverting the competition throughout the entirety of the last generation of consoles. The Wii was the first motion controller, which was something nobody really wanted to touch. They used very dated technology, even for the time, which certainly limited the scope of portability for many companies. The WiiU could be considered a partial flop for going with a slightly updated console with a screen built in to the controller, something Sony use their portable console for. Even their portable consoles, the DS/3DS have gone against the emerging market of mobile gaming and not really changed in years.

But what has really convinced me was what Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata said in February, that the next console would be taking ‘cues’ from Apple’s iOS platform. So let me lay out my belief.

Pretty much every major Nintendo release on both consoles has been available digitally. Nintendo’s biggest aim has been to create a society around its networking accessibility and avatars. The Mii’s have been paramount to that. One of the first things that the Wii did well, which it honestly doesn’t get enough credit for, is its digital store.

The Nintendo e-shop has been in full swing since the off with apps and classic games and a heavy bias on back catalogue emulation, something that is decreasing now with the industry wide argument over backward compatibility.

For the Wii, backward compatibility was easy, because of the hardware used, and paramount because it was quite close to the Gamecube. The latter console is now thirteen years old and practically irrelevant. Unless there’s a huge motion control element in the new console design, then it’s unlikely the new console would be backward compatible to the original Wii games, and quite frankly, there’s no reason it should be.

The e-shop has been a great success on both consoles and even your local retailer probably stocks more game code cards for Nintendo than physical games now. The physical element of game distribution has long been a crux for publishers and an expensive problem, given the digital infrastructure we have now. Nintendo posting continuous losses may force them to take the brave action and cut out the physical all together.

But another reason could be pressure from publishers. Developing games for the Wii/WiiU has always been a tricky task because the majority of the market was Xbox/PS3. The lack of power the Wii had means that creating a Wii version of a game requires further work and more expense in the creation phase. Plus the heavily family orientated nature of the consoles limits what can be successfully ported financially.

So in order to attract more publishers, and even attract indie game creators, removing the physical and costly aspect of game distribution could be a good move. Something that (get ready for that all important claw back to a previous point) Apple has been incredibly successful at. The iOS Apple App store has given rise to a whole new approach to game creation, programming, and distribution has effectively revolutionised the market, as iTunes did before it. This was even before the iPhone became the primary smartphone of choice. Even Android and Google Play are following the same format for their phones/tablets/etc. Nintendo already have a fantastic, easy to use, well-stocked e-store.

Of course historically, Nintendo have never shied away from risks. As both Sony and Microsoft didn’t go down the digital only route, although slim console versions might, the door is open for Nintendo to pave the way forward like the rebels they’ve always been. They’ve done it before and innovation is arguably more important to them in their ethos than the entertainment hub mentality of the Xbox One or the more gaming orientated ethos of local rivals Sony.

Let’s face it, unless Nintendo announce they are making a super computer to rival the highest end Steam console then there is no way they are going to compete with the Xbox One or PS4. And why should they when they can do something different, grab that slightly different hole in the market and do it in the most cost effective way that they can.

So, I firmly believe that any console, handheld or otherwise, will be digital only. There will be no optical disc or cartridge-based drive on either. And I don’t think anyone will complain about it. In all honesty, Microsoft and Sony are not in a position to lose their disc drives yet and the consumer voiced their concerns when it was touted. Nintendo are in the best position, not only to experiment but also to see if such a model legitimately works. For Nintendo, I think it will.

Lords of the Fallen Preview

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

Lords of the Fallen has already had its share of comparisons, and it’s easy to see why. Being treated to a demonstration of a level following the anti-hero Harkyn, the new game from Deck 13/CI Games could easily be accused of ‘ripping off’ other franchises like Dark Souls, Darksiders and the like. Even the executive producer Tomasz Gop was formerly involved in The Witcher series. So it’s something they freely recognise but want to distance themselves from.

However I saw something different. I saw a game that, whilst with RPG elements, owes a lot more to its action and its combat. The player’s ability to have choices in how to handle a situation (gung ho, using the environment, using magic) makes the combat look very easy.

It’s all about timing, learning to use the combat system and followed up by how you want to you use it. In fact, I would say that as a game, its gameplay owes a lot more to franchises like Dynasty Warriors than its visual credentials portray.

“With the art direction, this definitely isn’t dark fantasy… It’s more of a high fantasy,” Tomasz told me.

Seeing the current build on a big high definition screen certainly helps to show how good it is.

“The old pen and paper Warhammer series was also an inspiration… but we want it to be more arcade, [in the] Dark Souls/Tekken kind of way.”

lords of the fallen 1 You can see what he’s getting at as well. The third person, almost hack and slash, style of the game certainly gives you a very easy pick-up-and-play atmosphere, which is where I got the echoes of Dynasty Warriors. Even just watching it, you could see that as an introduction game for someone who’s never played one before this would work excellently.

That’s not to say that the game is too easy. There’s going to be, depending on the gameplay style, around 20 hours of play in the game. That being said, once you’re in the rhythm though, it’s easy to see this becoming an Internet speed-run favourite. The way the game sucks you in though isn’t its story, or its next gen graphics or enjoyable smashing of nasty skulls. It’s that your anti-hero Harkyn has ‘credibility’.

The game’s lore and entire creative side has been started from scratch, so everything in here is brand new.

“What’s important is not realism but credibility, and the credibility in here means that we want people to believe that Harkyn is actually a guy who can learn things. He could actually wield these weapons, he can actually fight them because he knows what it takes to survive.”

That is something that comes across and makes you connect with Harkyn despite the RPG element of the game being rather secondary to the action and tactical nuance needed for the combat system. Again it means that things are not just there to be powerful or to make yourself heavy or affect your gameplay, but it can just look cool and be fun for, as I put it, kicking ass.

“I’m really fond of the design of the armours of this game,” Tomasz pointed out. “There’s so much detail, I love looking at this and hinting towards people ‘you might want to try this because it looks cool.’”

Lords of the fallen 2

This could be, if you forgive the two MMO games coming soon, the first fantasy action/RPG to land on the next generation consoles. Its combat is easy to pick up and play, like Ryse you could surmise, and its RPG element isn’t so deep that you need expert advice on a D20 and a history of mages to embrace it.

Due in the winter months of 2014, you can expect Lords of the Fallen to fall quite literally into your Christmas laps for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Of course at the moment there’s no word on if the Xbox One version will hit 1080p. But if it’s a choice between the game being finished and the resolution holding up other releases, we got the feeling the release would be more important.

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Enemy Front Preview

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

THE NAZIS ARE BACK, THE NAZIS ARE BACK!

Real Nazis of course, not those zombie/alien/mutated/alternate reality ones, genuine Nazis. In the context of a video gaming sphere, WW2 games have been gone for a long time.

CI Games have decided that, given the slew of future shooters and ‘modern’ combat games, it was time to revisit the events of the Nazi machine, complete with chain smoking commanders, and plop us down in the middle of resistance fighting in Enemy Front.

The concept is pretty easy to grasp, you’re an American newspaper reporter who is trying to get stories from rebels behind enemy lines, until you’re eventually more of a shooty-shooty sneaky-sneaky mercenary than a journalist.

I managed to get some hands on time with the game and bag a few words with Steve Hart, the executive producer of Enemy Front.

CI Games are of course no strangers to shooting things, having been responsible for the Ghost Warrior series. This game is set more towards the end of the war, exposing the German’s attempts at nuclear fission and splitting the atom.

This then sees you going from various different locals in Europe that, seeing as it’s been a while for a WW2 shooter, gives you a nice feeling of actually belonging there. The textures and overall feel of the environments – be they the French countryside, snowy Norway or the rubble of Warsaw – seem to escape that maligned browny-greyish tinge that so many WW2 games possess.

Thankfully this is something that the Cryengine tackles very well, along with the lighting elements.

“Each area has its own texture set,” Steve Hart told me. “We’ve got dynamic lighting passes for each level… They’re so far removed from any other WW2 title. It’s been in development now for two to three years… [the art team] have worked tirelessly on it.”

So a lot of effort has obviously gone in to the visual artistic direction.

Including the weaponry. Every weapon is lovingly recreated from the authentic guns complete with accurate reloading animations. It could be classed as a good historical document on the weaponry.

“The development team really pushed to get the bespoke animations,” Steve tells me. “The team are big WW2 nuts and military nuts and have put the extra effort into creating it.”

Why do a WW2 game though? Well, according to Steve, the market is ready for this now.

“People are after something like this now and CI Games (a Polish company) wanted to get across the whole Warsaw uprising story.”

The game isn’t just this run and gun shooting affair though, given the companies history of sniping games. The game gives you a HUD that incorporates a stealth system. You can, or at least attempt to, give yourself a sneaking edge and are given the tools to do so, such as binoculars and tactically tracking the soldier’s patterns, even a record player hiding somewhere for distraction (good luck if you can find it, I did – ner ner de ner ner).

Of course the one thing that some of you may have already guessed is that this is now a last-gen release, coming out on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC later this year. It will also feature the obligatory multiplayer modes we come to expect now. Graphically, the older consoles may struggle a bit more with the visuals, compared to the PC version but hopefully time will tell when we get closer to release date and see some more and play some more.

For now, it is a thoroughly enjoyable WW2 shooter and a return to a gaming environment long abandoned nearly five years ago, but now a bit overlooked and ready for a return.

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Enemy Front by CI Games is due to be released on June 10, 2014 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

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The Elder Scrolls Online Review

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

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A thousand years before the Dragonborn was summoned to the Throat of the World and around 800 years before Uriel Septim was slain and the gates of Oblivion opened up around Cryodiil, there was you, caught in the events of the Elder Scrolls Online.

The Daedric prince Molag Bal is realising his machinations of world domination and will combine both the hells of Oblivion and Nirn. The Imperial City is in the middle of a battle between the three factions, each forced to coexist in an uneasy alliance to fight evil as they wrestle for control. After escaping prison (Elder Scrolls cliché number one), you awake to find yourself in the world of your faction. Your only guide on this journey is The Prophet, an observer you helped free from prison, who is trapped elsewhere and that only you can see and hear. And so you find yourself leaping from quest to quest, putting things right that once went wrong, hoping that the next… No, wait. That’s Quantum Leap.

People that played the beta realised that the introductory story arc was long and fairly uninteresting with drawn out moments of conversation with little to no action. So in the full release, this has been cut down and altered to get you into the action quicker. Like most Elder Scrolls games you start in an attempt to flee your incarceration, for reasons never to be explained, and end up in a town ready to go literally anywhere in an expansive and lonely world. Except it isn’t that lonely anymore. The story arc however doesn’t really collaborate with everything in the right order and the secondary characters and hours of questing that you start doing first is in retrospect completely unimportant and counter productive to the progression of the main story. So much so that once you get around to it, you’re confused by both strands and really don’t care.

the elder scrolls online review 3 In a RPG like Skyrim, you want to spend time immersing yourself in the story and take note of every character’s narrative and impressions. In an MMO you want to raise yourself by levelling and get the best loot to do the hardest dungeon challenges and PvP battles. And so you really do just find yourself clicking through all the carefully scripted and expansively voiced dialogue with wooden characters and acting to get to it and really, you give up caring. I say carefully scripted, at some points, you don’t even get that. I’ve seen an NPC quest where you must avenge a man by slaying a creature that ate his foot, whilst he clearly still has both feet. Also (in a horrible hodgepodge of editing to facilitate the introductory story cut) the great Dumbledore himself, Michael Gambon, who voices The Prophet, has to be substituted for an audibly poor voice-alike to accommodate the change in narrative.

It is written with a complete onus on the solo adventure, and as the word ‘online’ suggests, you are far from alone. With the online universe, it’s very hard to sell that story with a level 6 Wood Elf jumping up and down beside you like a hyperactive child who’s snorted ten lines of pure sherbet. My disappointment stems from the fact that it feels like a substandard Elder Scrolls game and the core ideal of the lonely player in a huge world discovering their story, and that true sense that you are changing things in that world with your actions, has suffered with the leap to MMO. It sadly means that questing can feel quite laborious and unenjoyable at times.

That being said…

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Once you have stopped caring about the game’s failing as an Elder Scrolls title, and comparing to its predecessors, you realise it isn’t those Elder Scrolls games you enjoy and that this is a totally different beast. For all the narrative criticism I have, as a game it’s actually quite enjoyable to play. You need only look at the visuals to see it.

As far as MMO’s go, they need to be easy to run but also visually appealing and not a complete recycling of textures in the various places. The world itself is beautifully realised and if you can run the higher graphics, you will not find a better-looking MMO. There are early points where you are around an area for a while and the textures begin to bleed their familiarity into your eyes but other than that, it is a wonderful place. I’ve been playing it on a Mac. I started with high graphics and it worked well and looked stunning. I’ve since reduced the setting to give myself a better frame rate and it still looks good in comparison to its contemporaries.

I’ve not had any problems at all with bad clipping, lag spikes or any such connectivity issues in the game, apart from the launcher being pretty sketchy about any errors and log in fails. Clearer information that the login has failed due to your subscription elapsing would help enormously. To play however, it is incredibly smooth and the gaming experience is all the better for it. The first person view is good, but really doesn’t lend itself to the MMO environment that well when facing multiple enemies. The third person view however is great, easily adjustable and the HUD is brilliantly designed to allow for easy ‘hack and slash’ attacking without character boxes and inventory disrupting the view.

the elder scrolls online review 2 Once you learn the HUD and get into the levelling system, which is a hybrid of Elder Scrolls basic Magic/Health/Stamina and the WoW style attack skills system, you realise that this game is actually a very good MMO. The learning curve is incredibly easy and the world design, unless you just wander off like an idiot, is very careful to level you correctly and keep you in areas that don’t make you lose enjoyment by going in too deep. The fact that there isn’t a Player to Player trading system like an auction really does help to keep you more on top of your inventory and stops people getting too overpowered due to their economic nuance.

The inclusion of the crafting system inspired by Skyrim is also very welcome. Food is much more MMO-based and useful as a tool than other Elder Scrolls games and the combination of that, drink and such as Provisioning is excellent. The ability to make your own weapons is also very well executed and whilst you don’t really think of it as much as you do in other MMO’s in looking for ore, you will occasionally spot an ore and you can casually level yourself as a blacksmith with very little change to the overall progression of your game.

In fact The Elder Scrolls Online plays so well that my only grumbles about the gameplay are very minor ones. When you find an enemy, their body will have a small red aura about it to indicate that it is an enemy. However the health bar of that enemy is red with white text displaying what it is and what level. Unfortunately every single character and player has the same health bar and white writing. I’d much rather have enemies more clearly indicated in their health bar as, as soon as I get to two or more around me, along with fellow players, it can be confusing.

The only other grumble I have is that sometimes the hit box is a bit glitchy. Especially if you are all up in their face or visa versa, you seem to lose the hit box of the enemy but you yourself will take damage. So you need to have an amiable gentlemanly distance about your melee combat. The same goes for accessing crates/boxes/etc. The game feels like the view point has been designed for the first person mode so when you spend all of your time out of it, it can be a tad annoying to find the right position to access things.

The combat is actually quite good though. You never feel too over or underpowered and enemies will only punish you if you’ve been stupid and run headlong into a throng. Resurrection wayshrines are also decently interspersed. Sadly my time flying around on different quests means that I haven’t experienced dungeon raids or PvP first hand. But from what I’ve seen, it is a good system. Cyrodiil is the setting for the entire PvP arena and you end up naturally gravitating towards joining a group and experiencing the collective battling. Despite it being a game of attrition rather than level or strength, there is a lot of reward for creative tactics and smart coordinated assaults as you attempt to take the Imperial City.

You have to argue with yourself a bit over whether it’s worth the money and if you’ll keep it up. One major sticking point, especially compared to its competitors, is its cost, as it is the most expensive MMO and PC game at the moment. I’d say it’s worth the try for 30 days, although unless the subscription costs come more in line with what is affordable in reality then it may not keep a large enough player base. When it comes to around the console releases however, this may be a very different story and I’m sure that will affect the pricing of the PC version massively. Especially given the relative failure of other MMO’s at higher prices like Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World, the console market may force the price to be more competitive. Keep your eyes peeled.

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[tab title=”Summary”]

Elder Scrolls Online fails to live up to the hype created by the title when it comes to telling a story which sadly detracts from that fact that, if you can stomach it, it’s a very good, easy to learn game that rewards your faith in it.

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[tab title=”Good Points”]- Excellent learning curve and gameplay system.

– Great graphics.

– Runs very well regardless of system.[/tab]
[tab title=”Bad Points”]- Very expensive.

– Horrendously constructed narrative.

– Doesn’t live up to the name.[/tab]
[tab title=”Why a 7?”]Because the game itself is not bad. Sort out the cost, stomach the failure of an introductory story and you’ve actually got something quite enjoyable.[/tab]
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SingOn Review

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

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This is the strange thing about this review – SingOn isn’t strictly a game. I mean there are gaming elements to it of course, but the truth of it is this is more of an app than a game.

SingOn is a karaoke ‘game’ that is coming for the PS3 this week for its initial release. However its plans on household domination are hoping to be stretched to most consoles and even Smart TV’s. That’s because all this game/app needs is an internet connection. SingOn boasts a rather large catalogue of over 1,000 songs of various different genres. How? Well because, in the words of Tommi Halonen, Executive Producer of SingOn, it is “a streaming entertainment service rather than a gaming title.”

SingOn will have an ever-expanding catalogue of titles on a weekly basis. Unlike the rhythm games that proliferate and, let’s face it, spam our DLC sections on the stores; it will all be streamed to the game. Much like a karaoke Spotify if you will. The idea is that this is a social game that everyone can play. Halonen, who does a mean version of ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams by the way, expanded on this further to me, saying:

“It’s a party game, it’s a family game, it’s for everybody basically. That’s why we have such a wide range in the catalogue.”

SingOn Sean Which is a good thing to point out. At launch the catalogue will be fairly substantial with everything from rock, heavy metal and pop going up to be streamed. I managed to throw in a few verses of Poison’s ‘Every Rose Has It’s Thorn’ and some ‘More Than Words’ by Extreme. But there will be very regular updates, at least weekly if not more often.

“That’s one of our strengths,” Tommi pointed out to me, “for example, we keep updating the UK chart, so whenever there are new hits coming on radio players and Spotify we can put it on within the week, which is something no one has ever done before.”

In fact the benefit of this is that, because they are all Karaoke songs, there isn’t anything of the red tape horror of copyright legislations and all that palava from record labels/publishers.

In my most humble of moments I asked Tommi “What if I’m crap at singing?”

”It doesn’t matter. We have a few voice changing features. We have TuneOn which auto tunes your voice.”

So now you have the facts, you can have the review.

In fact there are two modes. There is the auto tuning function, which is pretty good, and there is a RoboOn voice, which emulates the kind of Daft Punk style electronic voice to the song. Advance warning, the latter seems cool, but if left on, the novelty will quickly wear off. If you do this and have hyperactive kids or irritating friends, it’s best not to tell them about it.

The service works very well indeed. The streaming of songs is quick, the words come up and your lyrics appear on the screen with an excellent sparkly fill. You’ll also get points (ala rhythm games) in order to judge your performance. This is where, as a veteran player of these games, I did notice a slight latency issue. But that could also have been me jumping the gun in anticipation of the lyrics. Something that familiarity of songs occasionally does. So in that regard the service is very good.

The catalogue is already as varied and open as it can be. In fact the only thing I noticed it was missing was musical theatre. Which, knowing several performing artists and their love for karaoke, is probably for the best unless you want to burn out your PS3 from overuse.

The social element is certainly something this game pulls off pretty well. The playlisting function and the ability to search while the songs are running is excellent. It’s smooth and it isn’t intrusive at all. So there isn’t any of that dithering silence between songs. You can get up, swap things around and have a continuous stream of people warbling their little souls out without the irritating pauses and indecision.

SingOn

So where are the negatives here? Well… You of course need a microphone. SingOn can use any mics from SingStar, Rock Band and Guitar Hero automatically. Which certainly solves the issues for console owners that have them. If not you can get them easily second hand or in a shop for cheap enough.

How much is it going to cost me, you ask? Now there are a few options here, you can have a three hour pass for around £3, a 2 day pass for £6 or a whole year for around £50. Really your choice here is a justification of how much you want to use it. The app itself is free and includes ten songs, also for free. If you think you have a party coming then your options are there. Certainly beats a DJ and people arguing over the iPod anyway.

Essentially, what you need to know is that I had a lot of fun with it. It certainly is a social game though, best enjoyed in the company of friends, family or people who are too drunk to be classified. It isn’t a game like your Rock Band’s or Guitar Hero’s. If you’re having a house party, it’s certainly something awesome to have on without the clunky, bad quality karaoke machines you can get from catalogue stores. But hey, it’s free so give it a go.

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[tab title=”Summary”]

It’s an app, not a game, which streams karaoke songs to you so you can sing your heart out (butcher) your favourite songs without downloading. The expanding catalogue and UK Top 20 deal will see it remain joyfully up to date too.

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[tab title=”Good Points”]- Streaming works very well.

– Large ever-expanding catalogue.

– Easy to use.[/tab]
[tab title=”Bad Points”]- Mic needed.

– Pricing options need you to work out how much you’ll play it.[/tab]
[tab title=”Why an 8?”]It is exactly what it says it is and does it well. A wonderful social gaming experience.[/tab]
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The Elder Scrolls Online – Character Creation with Sean

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

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Sean walks us through the character creation process in The Elder Scrolls Online.

Filmed/Edited: Sean Cleaver

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RollerCoaster Tycoon – 15th Birthday

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

rollercoaster tycoon feat

The point of this piece is to look back on a game that I have incredibly fond memories of. In fact, I have nothing but praise for this game. But I’m actually going to start this with something very recent: Tumblr.

There is a meme somewhere out there about the creative genius that RollerCoaster Tycoon provided, which I think supergeek/actor/writer Wil Wheaton publicised. It is explained as thus:

A scenario in the game, Rollercoaster Tycoon, was to get a higher approval rating than your rival who was based next door. In a feat of insane evil and creative extermination some of the 20th Century’s dictators are known for, this player set up a rollercoaster that led people to their deaths. The catch though is that the angle he had the rollercoaster positioned that flung these poor passengers to their deaths was just so that they flew in to the park of his competitor. The game recorded the deaths in his competitor’s park and his approval ratings dropped like a stone… making the game easier to win. A death coaster, by design for competitive victory.

rollercoaster tycoon 2 Sandbox games have done incredible things in recent years. SimCity could allow you to subjugate your population to Beijing-style air pollution. You can execute potential and non-potential rebel dissidents in Tropico and many have manipulated Minecraft with the unnecessary deaths of many different enemy mobs for a player’s own gain. But I find something incredibly enduring about Rollercoaster Tycoon. It’s simple design and isometric view was a bit more simulation than Theme Park, taking its cues from its big sister, Transport Tycoon. All of this was the genius of Chris Sawyer.

Nowadays, Atari has given the licence to Elite and Zoo Tycoon developer Frontier Developments, but the fact the original game still exists is a testament to its fortitude. These were the days where Theme Park was looking a little dated, at that time anyway. It had been ported to every console, which gives you some impression of how little it needed to run. So Rollercoaster Tycoon came along and gave a slightly more adult, graphically superior, smoother and quicker take of the genre for the PC market. I say slightly more adult…

There were still the same kinds of challenges and quirks, like upping the salt and the price of drinks. But the tools that the Tycoon series had for landscaping the many crazy environments and more impressively, completely free design in your main rollercoaster attraction, were a cut above anything on the market at the time.

In fairness, the only things that began to come after this were more 3D based games, so you could argue, apart from maybe a few Command and Conquer or Civilization clones, this was the last truly original isometric strategy/simulation game of its type. Its freedom of creativity, so long as you had the money, is still a draw now as it is one of the best selling games over at GOG.com. An iOS version, with input from Sawyer, is due to come out in April with the spirit of the original games along with a fourth in the franchise.

Which leads me back to the Tumblr post I saw. I remember designing great parks. I loved the log flume style rides and super fast crazy things. I remember really playing a lot with the sandbox mode on the deluxe edition, which has both Alton Towers and Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Even now, looking up online, I saw some things that I completely had no care about.

The game had no speed up option. Well, not like we do now. As a complete clone of Transport Tycoon, there was no super speed. I didn’t care. The game had some issues with rail, building and queue placement due to the isometric system. I didn’t care.

rollercoaster tycoon 1

But I look back now at all my creativity that I had and that I still have in my mind. I look at the vast worlds I’ve created in my brain for fiction and the massive locations I’ve explored as a gamer. I look back at the scope of builds that people have created in Minecraft and that I’ve done myself that I could never have comprehended before…

Yet never had it crossed my mind to design a rollercoaster that purposely flung people to their death into a competitor’s business so you could win out against the competition. Rollercoaster Tycoon has given rise to quite possibly the most creative, ruthless, evil and commercially viable mind in all creation. A game that can do that is surely worth a bit of your time and money.

Happy Birthday, Rollercoaster Tycoon.

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Missing the Obvious: Limited World

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Sean Cleaver

Open world games are a fundamental part of modern video gaming.

The technology exists now that vast, incredible, imaginative worlds that a player can explore and find lots of completely ingenious things hidden in every nook and every cranny can be created.

But to quote a line from Star Trek (movie number six if you’re feel feisty) – “Just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we must do that thing.”

Just to point out to you that during the Xbox 360/PS3 era alone there were no less than forty, FOUR ZERO, open world games. Off the top of my head I can give you both Dragon Age games, all three Mass Effects, both GTA releases, all three Saints Rows, the Elder Scrolls, another two Rockstar games, the Fallouts, the Far Cry’s and the Fables (including the recent HD remake). That’s twenty-one games there alone, and I haven’t even put in the Assassin’s Creeds, the Mafias, the Godfathers and any other PlayStation exclusive games. Or the Batman games! I’ve criminally excluded three Batman games there too. That’s another thirteen on top of the twenty-one. Dishonoured is another, Sleeping Dogs…

Batman-wrong-1 Whilst I’m making a point of the vast quantity of open world titles available, the amount of games isn’t what bothers me. It’s that sometimes a much better game is missed because of the decision to make something open world, in my opinion. So my point of missing the obvious here is that we sacrifice something because we create too much. We lose the quality.

Let me give you a few examples of what works and what bothers me. Sometimes you want to go around and explore a vast world where everything is dynamic and the story is well thought out and encapsulating for the player that the vastness and scariness of the world is put aside. In this case I would raise Red Dead Redemption as the pinnacle of that. Over Grand Theft Auto 5, you ask? Yes, because Rockstar actually did something they are normally criticised for which was providing an ending for the game that was incredibly satisfying and well thought out. A well designed linear game.

I’ve mentioned scariness because some games actually scare me because they are too much. The world is so big, so massive and so populated with things that once you’ve completed the main storyline you are left with an utterly bewildering set of options and to be honest, I have enough trouble organising my own life to worry about finding enough to do to level me up past level 25. In this regard, I offer the Bethesda games, specifically Skyrim. If Skyrim has any fault in its beautiful visuals, epic scope and atmosphere it’s that is was too epic, too overwhelming and too lonely.

bioshock infinite 2 Come on now Sean, you’re just being particularly picky now aren’t you? Yes. Maybe I am, but some games actually benefit from not being open world and I also think that helps the longevity of a game. Grand Theft Auto online, for example, has a major flaw in that there is no real narrative or direction to be guided in past a certain point. GTA Online suffers from the fact that the levels are designed around the environment, which doesn’t give me, personally, a full enjoyment of a game.

Now, Bioshock on the other hand is something that has benefited very well from the rise of technology without getting in to the open world bracket. Yes it’s a very open shooter that allows you to explore the beautiful crazy art deco inspired environment of Rapture or the steampunk-esque floating Columbia. But they are levels. Regardless of if you can travel around them, they are all specifically designed levels that have an incredibly beautiful immersive environment. Irrational Games’ nuance at storytelling is (or was) second to none. Could that have been achieved if Rapture was a fully open world autonomous environment? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as atmospheric.

A second example of this is a game that was originally open world and still retained some open world elements, but discarded them because it made the game too open, too complex and hard to achieve the narrative exposition that they were looking for. That game was Alan Wake. This wasn’t scrapped because it was too much for the technology to handle after becoming an Xbox 360 exclusive, but because the thriller element of the game could not be delivered with it. Frankly, Remedy made the best possible move there. Thriller games (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark) benefit more from being enclosed, small and well designed. If the world is too big, it becomes a bit convoluted to program a random scare in to a design with no levels.

Open world games do push you in a directional narrative and you could argue that the Assassin’s Creeds aren’t truly open world compared to the other games. But there are many games that, whilst it is great that they exist, might be better with a scaling back of thought and a better implementation of level design.

south park review 2 I’m not saying that open world is becoming an easy or lazy option, not by any means. But there is a tendency I feel to let the world be the level and dictate your moves and personally I don’t like it. I think a good game can suffer because of it.

South Park: The Stick of Truth is an interesting case here and an example of why open world isn’t always the answer. Firstly the town of South Park is small. That makes the open world a bit more limited, but completely able to be explored. Secondly, the narrative of the game does drive you in a quest laden turn based combat game. But to get to these fights, you have to negotiate designed levels. Because of the 2D visuals of the game, this looks like a platform game, but actually it’s quite a designed level as the lampooning of Canada in the Zelda/Pokémon series style neatly shows. Thirdly, everything in the game, the sub-quests and the story, guide you but still allow you free reign to explore and do it on your own terms without being overwhelmed.

Now the game industry has a choice here and I think the rise of independent gaming will make that choice for them. The next two years are going to see heavy lighting/physics based stunning driving games, incredibly smooth and frantically busy first person shooters aimed at multiplayer audiences and vast open worlds full of quests to explore. But would they be missing the obvious if they took a step back from these types of games to deliver a more stable, concentrated and well-designed progressive game?

I think so. But I’m not you so tell me to shut up and go away if you want.

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