barely fatal

As seen on The Consumerist, our link of the week:

In Newsweekly -.- Gaming -.- Blizzard of GLBT gaming policy questions

Of course, we all want a clean, fundamentalist, non-gay World Of Warcraft. I mean, what times do we live in? Is this the free world or what? What do they think? In the end, they’ll want free speech and the like. Scuzzy.

As of last friday, the MMO WW2 shooter Battleground Europe started a 14-day trial for all interested players. The trial period is free and is meant – of course – to make you buy the full version later. I’ve yet to try it, and despite being sick of WW2 games having this kind of dynamic battlefield surely is a challenge for the designers – I’d like to find out how they perform.

Volume one in The Virtual Battlefield Series, Battleground Europe features the armies, vehicles, weapons and equipment found on the battlefields of Western Europe 1939-1942.

I finally got to see Serenity. Let me tell you, Serenity != Firefly. That being said, let me explain, why.

First of all, I expect you to have seen either the series or the movie. If you haven’t, hell, go and rent or buy the DVD! You’ve missed a phenomenon! But first things first. On some message board (I think it was at IMDB) I read that if Firefly was like Star Trek, Serenity was like Star Wars. That’s so true.

Serenity is a mainstream compatible sci-fi action movie. It has space battles, guys with guns, a horrible threat, the evil character and the good guys on their ship. For the average sci-fi flick, Serenity is a good, solid movie – entertaining and worth watching, popcorn cinema. Firefly is about nine characters with their very own personality, intentions and secrets. Firefly has action, too, but it helps to transport the story and develop the characters. It’s not there for the sake of itself. Firefly is experimental in many facettes. Serenity, well, Serenity isn’t.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 2: Gound combat

Landing your troops and fighting on the ground works different from regular RTS’ like C&C. Depending on your faction and the planet you are sieging (or defending) the locals will help or fight you (reminds me of the Fremen in Dune 2000). Weather has positive or negative effects on certain weapon types. There are random (annoying) anomalies like sand storms.

You can only land your troops at ‘reinforcement points’, and only as many as the point can support. To land more units, you have to conquer more of those areas, if there are any on the map. That system leads to interesting fights: you have to choose carefully which units to land where and when (landing takes a few seconds). If for example you land all artillery in one spot and troops in the other, it’s likely both groups will be destroyed, one by troops, the other by tanks. Mixing is everything.

Bases can be secured with a forcefield. You have to destroy the generator so you can make attack runs with bombers from orbit. Conquering special places on the map can grant you bonuses, like upgrades for your troops. All in all it’s challenging, but again I found it hard to keep track of what’s going on and where (and why). It’s a lot of information. You can build defensive structures or healing stations on special pads that you have to conquer and hold, and you can build structures on your own planets (before the ground battle starts). Each planet has a structure limit. So you have to decide wether you want to build three barracks or two barracks and an ion cannon.

Ground graphics are functional, too. Weather effects are nice. Later there ought to be hero characters like Vader helping you, but I couldn’t find any in the demo. There are mods out there which tune up the demo and let you play with more ships on more planets. LucasArts doesn’t like those so I won’t link here.

So, in short: Could become a good game after all, if they tweak the AI and the pacing. For a hybrid or genre mix it’s promising. There’s no diplomacy for obvious reasons, I would have liked that though. On the strategic map, you’d expect to have time to make decisions, it looks so turn-based. When you get attacked out of a sudden you realize it’s real-time what you’re playing after all. I don’t like that part too much, too hectic.

PS. After playing some more I find the AI isn’t as bad as I first thought. When zoomed out, the fighters are so tiny you can hardly see them fighting. The squad icons stick together and it looks as if nothing was moving, but they do attack enemies on their own. Corvettes have the tendency to run when they get hit, but I guess that’s what ‘vettes do.