 |
|
SHEPPARD’S
VIDEO-GAME PIE
By Stephen Lea Sheppard
Photo by Dan Siney
|
|
|
|
HALO WARS
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Microsoft
OK, first thing you should know: I’ve got an Xbox 360 demo unit. I use it to play pre-release review copies of certain games, such as this one (also Dead Space, Ninja Gaiden II, a few others). The second thing you should know is, whenever I try to connect my demo unit to Xbox Live I get error messages. So this is a review of Halo Wars as a single-player game. I know, I know. It’s a real-time strategy game, and the whole point of those is multiplayer. Sorry—I’m laboring under a limitation inherent to my methodology.
Anyway. Halo Wars is a real-time strategy game based on the Halo franchise, the last Ensemble Studios project before Microsoft shut them down. (Which may or may not amount to much—it looks like the former Ensemble employees are just going to start up a new studio and keep doing what Ensemble did.) Ensemble created Age of Empires, by the way, so they do have a certain amount of experience in doing RTS games—those of you who’d complain about a Halo game not made by Bungie, I retort that I’d rather have a Halo game not made by Bungie than an RTS game made by people who don’t know RTSs.
The plot of Halo Wars centers around the UNSC colony ship Spirit of Fire, during the opening days of the human/Covenant war, back when there was more than one surviving SPARTAN II and humanity thought they could win through conventional military action and not a solitary unstoppable super-soldier activating deus ex machinae all over the galaxy. The Prophet of Regret is seeking out ancient Forerunner artifacts etc, and the Spirit of Fire follows the Covenant around to different planets and tries to beat them to whatever superweapons the latter are looking for, meet the Flood, and do everything you’d expect them to do in a Halo game. That’s the last I’ll say of the story.
How do I like the gameplay? Well… it’s pretty good, for a console RTS, and keeping in mind that I’m not great at RTS games and have no idea what its multiplayer is like. It’s very clearly an attempt to adapt traditional PC RTS concepts to console use. You build bases, which let you harvest resources, and which build and upgrade units. It’s simplified—bases can only be built on specific pre-designated points, and structures can only be built on upgrade points around those bases—but it still follows the normal PC paradigm, and this is where most of the failings lie.
Using only the control pad, it’s hard to field multiple combined arms forces quickly and effectively. It’s relatively easy to use them once you get them (the game has a handy “select all units on screen” hotkey, and it seems like the units have enough intelligence not to demand rigorous micromanagement), but actually building a decent army with more than one type of unit is a pain when you probably have a few units hanging around your base you don’t want to make part of it. There is likewise no way to build hotkey groups, so executing a pincer attack, for example, is a pain—at the end your two forces will be jumbled together and you’ll need to separate them manually again. Each unit type has a special ability, which operates on a recharge counter, but if you have six marine squads with rocket launchers and you want three of them to fire at a tank while the other three wait so they can fire at a different tank, you are basically shit out of luck, because selecting three of your six marine squads is fiddly.
Those complaints aside, I’m overall pretty fond of the game. The tech tree is cool to navigate—I like how, for example, the increased health upgrade for your marine squads is called “New Blood,” described as more marines per squad, and when you purchase it, the number of little visible marines in each marine squad actually increases. If you buy grenadiers for your warthog jeeps, they actually show up in the seats. I like manipulating the units and making them do things. I think the designers weren’t quite bold enough in their departures from traditional PC RTS tropes; it’s full of little moments where I find myself thinking “This feels suboptimal on a console,” but they’re not frequent enough to drown out the moments where I’m thinking “This is fun to play.”
(Compare to, for example, Tom Clancy’s EndWar, which is an RTS designed from the ground up with console play in mind. It lacks a lot of the elements most people associate with the RTS genre but has no “Suboptimal on a console” moments.)
MOON
Platform: Nintendo DS
Publisher: Mastiff
Moon is a single-player-only FPS in which the player controls Major Kane, a space marine in an astronaut suit (seemingly all the humans in the game wear astronaut suits, presumably to save on memory), as he explores an alien complex below the surface of Luna. The D-pad (or face buttons, for lefties) moves him forward, back, left, and right, while the L (or R) trigger fires his gun. Looking up and down, turning, and switching weapons is done with the stylus. In certain sequences, he drives a moon buggy, or takes control of a small remote-controlled drone to explore ducts too small to crawl through himself.
I’ve just described the entire gameplay experience. The game is a mass of repetitive hallways, samey-looking enemies, and strafing to dodge globular energy bullets. Oh, and story sequences handled like Metal Gear Solid’s CODEC, but without the voice acting.
It’s almost too simple a game to be bad—there’s hardly anything present the developers could have fucked up. At the same time, there’s really nothing compelling here, either. It is as generic as it’s possible for an FPS to be. If, as a DS owner, you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “You know what would make my life better? A decently executed but bland first-person shooter for my Nintendo DS to play on the bus,” I guarantee you’ll love this one.
Me, I’d rather read a book.
STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD
See all articles by this contributor Anonymous, on May 21, 2009 wrote:
Thanks for fighting the good fight my man. | | Anonymous, on Mar 19, 2009 wrote:
LEA!!!
I LOVE FREAKS AND GEEKS!!!!!!!!
HARRIS IS THE MAN!!!!!!!!!!! | |
| Stephen Lea Sheppard, on Mar 17, 2009 wrote:
No, and I’m not likely to. I’m up to my eyeballs in Star Ocean: The Last Hope, and then I have about sixteen billion Atlus and Gust JRPGs to work my way through. GTA games just aren’t my preferred play style. | | Anonymous, on Mar 16, 2009 wrote:
have you tried gta chinatown yet? | | Anonymous, on Mar 13, 2009 wrote:
i love the canadian band Rush | | Anonymous, on Mar 13, 2009 wrote:
they reviewer reminds me of the guy in Grandma’s Boy who talked in the robot voice. this made me find the article very amusing. | | Anonymous, on Mar 12, 2009 wrote:
Why does the top right green ship thingamabob not have a shadow? It’s freaking me out. | | |
| Stephen Lea Sheppard, on Mar 11, 2009 wrote:
You know, if you’re a small studio with a limited budget for development of a given game, I think it’s probably a bad idea to spend it all on trying to push the limits of how shiny you can make it look, especially if that’ll have a deleterious effect on the quality of the gameplay you can create. Sure, "It’s on the DS" isn’t an excuse, but "If we made it prettier we’d have to make it play crappier, because we only have so many resources and we have to divide them up somehow" is.
Moon looks ugly and I don’t like it. But I don’t dislike it because of how ugly it looks. I dislike it because what it offers -- a competent but unremarkable FPS game on a portable -- is something I don’t want. | | Anonymous, on Mar 11, 2009 wrote:
Dont care if it is on the ds moon looks completely GASH. no excuses just because its on the ds, they should be pushing games not sitting back with a "that will do" attitude. | |
| joe bananas, on Mar 11, 2009 wrote:
@tinkerer. Goldeneye was so rad! still reckon i would go a round of throwing knives on pyramid over this stuff. these days i prefer to be outside rather than gaming it up. | | Anonymous, on Mar 11, 2009 wrote:
Is this how the supposed Ender’s Game Battle Room game will be laid out? Do you know anything about that? | | |
| Stephen Lea Sheppard, on Mar 11, 2009 wrote:
Keep in mind that Halo Wars is a real time strategy game, like Command & Conquer or Starcraft -- it stays in that super-zoomed-out view all the time. The individual units are actually very low detail; you just can’t tell, because they’re itty-bitty.
It does look pretty, though.
As for what book, I’m rather enjoying re-reading Charles Stross’s "The Atrocity Archives," which is fiction, and then I’ll get back to reading John W. Dower’s "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II," which is not.
I liked the Watchmen movie. I’ll buy the extended edition, but I probably won’t see it again in the theater. | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
If the future looks like an office park then perhaps we should give up now. | |
| megabreath, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
after quick googling i know what QFT is only a couple weeks after finally looking up PWN and All Your Base Are Belong To Us. | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
Halo is gay-lo. | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
"i still can’t shake the idea that halo’s only a intergalactic version of goldeneye. i’ve only played the original though so maybe it’s gotten better."
QFT!!!!! | |
| tinkerer, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
i still can’t shake the idea that halo’s only a intergalactic version of goldeneye. i’ve only played the original though so maybe it’s gotten better. | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
i spen three of the best years of my life playing nothing but halo. while my friends were having unprotected sex with large groups of underage women while using intravenous drugs, i beat the game on the hardest difficulty setting- take that losers | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
in my experience, video games of this caliber are better than heroin. i will play anything with the halo name on it, even if its halo hopscotch, it doesnt get any better | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
Now that you mention it, space sacrifice would be pretty sweet. Heads wouldn’t roll, they’d simply float away. The space marines would need little wipers for their helmets like Mercedes headlights. | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
it would be sweeter if the romans or aztecs could fight the space marines. theres nothing more entertaining han anachronistic violence | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
"you cannot go wrong with space marine on a mission to shoot everything. "
if i was president, this is what all space missions would entail. that, and shooting zero-g porn. just think - sasha grey getting tagteamed on the international space station? uh, yes please. | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
you cannot go wrong with space marine on a mission to shoot everything. | |
| shep, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
hey shepp, shep here. what books would you rather be reading? have you seen watchmen yet? what did you think? | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
it’s nice to know that even in the future halo world there’s still room for public art for me to destroy. | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
the HALO empire expands even more. i am pre-ordering their sugary breakfast cereal and biohazard thongs | |
| electricboogaloo, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
halo has gotten INSANE. granted i haven’t touched a game console since my college dorm days, but wow. if that’s an actual gameplay screenshot then i am very impressed. nowadays the graphics of the actual gameplay are looking more and more like the videos they play before you actually play. does that make sense? you get my drift. | |
| Chloro-Phil, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
Maybe that’s what it really looks like on the Moon. Pumping pure oxygen into your helmet can have some odd effects on perception. | |
| Tammy Faye, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
i think video games have gotten too good. how am i supposed to keep up with all this techno tomfoolery? once i get to the point where i’m not getting annihilated on a multi-player game there’s another one out that i have to get my ass whipped on. | | Anonymous, on Mar 10, 2009 wrote:
that looks like the monsters in starship troopers, which actually wasn’t that bad of a movie if you take it for what it is, back when denise richards was worth looking at too. | | | Next 30 comments > |
| |
