3DGalaxy

Two interesting shooters game out today. One is notable for being a standout game in the genre one Wii, which has traditionally lacked great titles in that category. The other being notable for being download only and sporting a stylised cartoonish look.

The Conduit

We just managed to get hold of these games today. My initial thoughts are that Conduit is good for a Wii shooter. The controls are heavily customisable which is nice, but to be honest I still feel like I can have more success with dual analogue. Perhaps it’s because I need to customise the controls more or that I need more practice, but at this point, I just feel like this isn’t where the future of gaming is. But don’t get me wrong, they work well and are quite accurate.

Online is good for the Wii but friends codes are dumb, Wii speak is not suitable for this type of game. It works for Animal Crossing which is slower paced and relaxed, but this demands a headset. But they won’t let us use bluetooth ones.

The matchmaking system works ok but seemed a bit slow when I tried to get into a game today. I thought it might be because the game doesn’t come out officially until tomorrow, but the game is already out in the US so I don’t really know what the deal is. It might be because it was looking for people in Europe first and couldn’t find many. Otherwise it could just be that their matchmaking tech pales in comparison to the likes of Call of Duty 4. It would be a shame if that is the case, but it is the Wii and I wasn’t expecting it to be lightning fast.

More coming regarding singleplayer and more online impressions.

Battlefield 1943

Battlefield 1943 is immense for the price. It’s kinda like an interesting combination of Warhawk and Call of Duty: World at War. In that the graphical style and maps along with the vehicular aspect are similar to Warhawk, but with first person view shooting is much more fun and integral to the experience.

I mentioned price and the reason I did was because this puts most DLC prices to shame, not to mention full game prices. It’s £10 download only from PSN or XBL Marketplace. Because it’s so similar to Warhawk, it’s interesting to think about why this game costs essentially half the price. Well, the game only includes 3 maps plus a fourth that will be unlocked once all players online total a certain number of kills. I’m sure Warhawk had more not including that game’s expansions but I’m not totally sure. Regardless, the game is certainly worth £10 especially when you consider that each map pack from CoD WaW costs about £8, just 2 less than this game. That’s astounding to me. It’s like EA and Dice are fighting the good fight here against rip-off DLC, even though EA have been known to shaft people themselves before.

One reason why I think this game is far more fair and balenced than Warhawk is because the planes in this are very tricky to control and require a significant amount of practice to be able to pilot them well and not crash constantly. In Warhawk planes are so overpowered. They can fly fast, have most weapons and can hover above the ground without taking any damage at all. They can block jeeps in and shove them off cliffs. Basically, they ruined the game, even if the game is supposed to be about planes, it takes too much away from the ground units. The only thing that could take them down consistently are turrets which can lock on as well as soldier rocket launchers. However I don’t believe that makes up for their power.

A well piloted plane in this game can be deadly but oftentimes you can be on the ground with planes going overhead and you don’t worry about them dropping a bomb on you or firing as they swoop past because you know how hard it is. This is fantastic.

I love the first-person view. It makes shooting such a big part of the game. Shooting in Warhwak to me was so terrible I hardly ever used guns. I either ran around with a knife or just jumped in a plane or tank. Even using jeep and just trying to run people over was more fun and easier than trying to shoot at people.

I also am a fan of the first-person view in vehicles. It just gives the experience of driving around more style and fun to me. There’s also the option of using a zoomed out view. This is mostly useful in tanks and especially planes when it can be hard to see where you’re going using the standard viewpoint.

Because it’s a download game there aren’t as many trophies as you would like which is a dissapointing side-effect of the download only forumula. But it has probably the easiest gold ever. None of the trophies are very difficult to obtain. Some will take time but don’t really require a great deal of skill.

Another area where it falls in comparison to Warhawk is in the stat tracking. For a download game, it’s very impressive. However, Warhawk is one of the best at prividing detailed stat tracking for almost everything in the game.

Aside from that, it’s close to perfect for what it is. The simplicity of the game is refreshing and the whole feel of the game is pure fun.

Conclusion

As I’m yet to play the single player, Conduit is an interesting game. The online is good for a Wii game, but still pretty poor if you rank it with the other two systems and also PC. Battlefield 1943 is a third of the price of Conduit and in my opinion is more fun. Of course it’s a multi-player only experience with only 4 maps, but at the end of the day, it’s about fun and not about the amount of content. Not to mention the fact that there probably will be DLC, and if they do £20 worth of DLC for the game and really ramp up the number of maps, then it will hard to deny that it’s a great game and worthy of Warhawk success.

But I do love the guys at High Voltage for daring to do something cool on Wii and they’ve succeeded in making a great shooter for Wii. But when it comes down to it, if controls are the main thing that seperates this game from the HD systems, then I would say that while they are good controls, I don’t think they redefine the genre sufficiently to make enough people want to play this type of game with pointer controls. And I personally don’t think it’s worth sacrificing the graphics and online community support of the HD systems for controls I personally don’t see to be significantly better than what we’re used to on consoles. But that’s just my opinion. Plus, that’s if I had to choose. Luckily I don’t.

That said, I bought the game for a reason and I’ll definitely go back for more, single and multi-player. Plus, if you only have a Wii then this is definitely a game to get. I know the High Voltage guys said that their focus was on making the best possible game in the genre for Wii, and they’ve definitely done that.

Even if you’ve got another system though, if you can afford to spare the cash to support High Voltage, I think you should. Because if this game doesn’t sell then we might not see really much else if anything in the hardcore space for Wii. Other publishers and obviously Sega will be watching this and be considering their future titles for the system based on this game’s sales. This includes High Voltage’s next game, The Grinder which is a Left 4 Dead style co-op zombie shooter for wii due for next year. I know I’m anticipating that game more than conduit so I want it to get a publisher and be successful, so support this game if you’re like me.

To finally sum up. The Conduit is an ambitious title that people should be supporting. Battlefield 1943 is a fantastic and very well priced downloadable game that you should also support to show that you’re willing to spend money on downloadable games, but for stuff that’s worth paying for and priced fairly. So I say if you can, buy them both. You can’t go wrong on either in my opinion.

One thing that I realised about me and WoW a while back was that what is fun about the game to me is exploring the world and doing quests trying to level up. It sounds funny to say that because you spend all that time working towards the end goal of getting to max level. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great feeling to finally get there, but if you don’t want to be in a raiding guild, and you don’t do arenas, like me, then what do you do?

Well there are things. In the past I’ve gone for achievements, collected things like pets and mounts, had fun with my guild friends and levelled alts, not to mention working to get the chef title, which I did eventually get which was cool. But it’s so hard to be bothered to put time into alts because I always feel like I’m getting no where fast when I play them.

However, Blizzard are trying to make the game more friendly to new players and more casual people like me who have a hard time getting the drive to play more new characters. In the past they have done things like made levelling faster (it still feels like forever) and making the slower mounts available at level 30 instead of 40 and for less gold. I enjoyed those changes but I felt like they needed to do more to hook me again until a new expansion comes out.

Well, in the next patch they are doing a few things to try to grab my attention. These include making mounts available another 10 levels earlier and for less money. Making the slower flying mounts available at 60 and for less gold while also making them much faster. 150% faster than running over the current 60% is a very good increase.

They’re also making travel form available for druids earlier and making the forms more customisablenow too which is cool. Therefore if I do go and level some alts, it’s going to be hard to resist my druid.

Anyway, cool stuff Blizzard, keep it up.

IGN just put up a story discussing the DSi and how it’s fared so far as it passes 3 months in stores in the UK and US. I posted a comment on the article but since I went into quite good detail and because it will get pushed out of view almost instantly by a horde of other posters, I decided to post it here as a semi-full-size blog post. Check it out.

I’ve been lucky enough to have a brother who bought one when it came out so I’ve had a chance to play with his. And it saved me £150.

I have to say, it feels so nice to hold. The finish is much better and the buttons feel nicer too. The camera is a total gimmick and poor quality. The music player I don’t need and most other people won’t either, and the bigger screen I guess is nice but it’s not really that noticable. DSi Ware has some decent games but really nothing must-have to me at least. Buying points is much harder and time consuming than Playstation store on PSP and App store because they don’t save your card details so you have to type it in every time. The games are overpriced by miles compared to App store stuff which doesn’t help either.

So for people who still have a fat or no DS at all then absolutely get one. But if you have a lite, I don’t see why you should get one until DSi Ware becomes amazing. I got my first DS in June 2006 just as the lite came out so luckily I bypassed the fat altogether and I’m happy until DS 2.

That’s all for now, until next time.

edit: It seems like the vast majority of the comments so far are similar to mine in saying that it’s a decent system, but not a big enough leap forward for lite owners unless you’re a total Nintendo fanboy of course.

I know it’s easy to knock Nintendo for their underpowered, waggling controlled system but now that motionplus has arrived, things are changing. The premise of the Wii was to make games better with controls good enough that it was ok to sacrifice graphics, and until now that hasn’t really been the case.

I wrote a review of Grand Slam Tennis a little while ago and I said that even though it has some drawbacks, it’s an awesome tennis game and has a lot of potential to get better in future editions. The controls and career mode were great, but left things to be improved in my opinion. With Tiger 10 for Wii, it feels pretty much like they’ve nailed the controls perfectly on their first attempt.

Obviously with golf you’re only going to make one motion with the club so it does make it much easier to design controls for. But what’s so impressive here is that they’ve not only made it servicable, they’ve gone into such detail to a point where you really feel like you’re swinging a golf club.

The draw and fade when you swing can be a bit tricky to get to grips with when you want to keep your shots straight, but after a while it will become fairly natural, especially if you’ve ever played golf before. Even if you do have trouble, you can turn on the all-play difficulty setting which essentially ignores your tilt (draw and fade) when you swing so that you can focus on power and placement. Even with this turned on, the experience is still incredibly rewarding, especially putting with the new precision putting controls where the game detects how far you pull back, and how hard and far you extend forward on each putt. You can see the distance on screen and just remember how you would play it on a real putting green or every crazy golf, and it will probably be represented close to perfectly in the game.

I went back to play the game without motionplus earlier and you can definitely feel the difference. In precision putting the difference isn’t as obvious, But when your going for a drive or an approach shot, you’ll definitely notice the difference.

With motionplus, you can see perfectly every movement you make with the club on screen. If you move it up and down quickly as you backswing, you’ll see every minute detail of that movement. Without motionplus, you’ll notice that you have to backswing the remote quite high up behind you before it’s represented on screen at all. Obviously the faster you do it, the less you’ll see the issue, but it’s still there and it defintely shows a big improvement in motionplus. Also, obviously with motionplus it can tell much more precisely how hard you’re swinging. Without motionplus, it feels much more digital, not to the point where it’s either swing or no swing, but you’re definitely much more limited in how hard or soft you are able to hit balls.

I’ve yet to really go in depth with the online component of the game but so far I’m impressed. I think overall I prefer the online of Grand Slam Tennis because it’s so simple, but this definitely has some cool options. Things like being able to “play against the pros” and using the forecast channel to import real-time weather into the courses in the game are nice little features.

Overall, this game is awesome and in my opinion the best realistic golf game ever made. I say realistic because I still really enjoy playing Everybody’s Golf. I wonder if they’ll be a version of that with the PS3 motion controller. To be honest, if that ends up being as good as it looks, then there might be little reason to play tiger on wii in future. But as of right now, you shouldn’t miss out on this game if you have any interest in golf whatsoever. I don’t consider myself a big golf fan really but I love playing it in games and you will too.

Hmm. I guess this news was inevitable. I mean Facebook has mostly taken Myspace’s spot as the premiere social networking site. And it’s hard to really dissagree with everyone who has switched, because Facebook is clearly a better designed site with a nicer and cleaner user interface.

Eventually Myspace was going to have to cut back because of their reduced traffic and try to cut costs as much as possible.It’s unfortunate for the people who will lose their jobs but I guess when you work in an industry as fickle as this, you have to be prepared for it as much as possible.

It’s tough to know if Facebook will also have to take these same kind of measures soon. I mean I don’t think anything other than a new site coming along can stop their sucess continuing, but you never know.

As far as something like Twitter, It’s a difficult one to call. I’ve been on Twitter (albeit not very active) since it debuted I think a couple of years ago or maybe more. Basically eveyone has it now so that in a way is frustrating to me because it’s like I get no credit for being an early adopter, and the service risks becoming a huge fad and fading away eventually.

Personally I love twitter and dislike facebook. I like how on Twitter I can talk to everyone and get my thoughts out there in a way where even though I’m talking to the world, it doesn’t feel overwhelming. For some reason, Facebook makes me feel so stressed when I go on there and am barraged with a bunch of random crap from people I know but haven’t seen for ages. It’s weird to say because it applies to twitter too, but I really don’t care about the absolute BS people post on there constantly, and I don’t want people to know absolutely everything I do, like who I become friends with, whether I update my profile info or post a new message. I’ve never posted a status message on Facebook because I want it to be my own personal thing. I suppose if I added a bunch of those same friends from Facebook to twitter too then it might ruin twitter as well.

But on the other hand, even if that was the case and I did have the same bombardment on twitter, it would still be a better experience for one main reason. Twitter is so simple and easy to use while also being stylish. I love that. Facebook can get so convoluded and over-complicated to a point where I don’t want to be bothered anymore. Twitter isn’t like that at all. All you can do is post messages, @reply people and direct message. That’s it.

Going back to the subject of this post, I think if Twitter continues to keep it simple and it doesn’t end up being the next myspace then I think they have a good future. Same with Facebook, even if it’s not exactly to my taste.