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Mar 2nd, 2008 at 03:00:00 - Battle For Middle Earth (PC) |
GAMEPLAY
Started in on the evil campaign this time, and I can see why Rohirrim can run over orcs the way they can: you build a lot of orcs. The very first mission is to build 100 orcs. After the first, evil missions boil down to "build a lot of orcs and kill everything." Your bases in the evil campaign are generally less secure than in the good campaign - both of the good sides get free walls around anything bigger than an outpost, and castles are nigh impenetrable without siege equipment, which the AI doesn't really make good use of.
DESIGN
The most distinctive aspect of this game is the building system. Buildings can only be placed on "foundations" which are created by citadels, the foundations for which are pre-placed on the map. There are three levels of citadel foundation: outpost, camp, and castle. Outposts have three foundations regardless of faction, while camp and castle foundations depend on which army you play. Resources are generated by structures, and so generating a lot of resources precludes building a large number of unit producing buildings. This system also precludes "offensive towering" - building "defensive" towers in or near the enemy base, a strategy endemic to the genre. This system also allows the pace of the game to be defined by the map - a map without castle foundations is very different from a map with camps at most.
Buildings also have three "levels" - resource buildings level up automatically over time, while unit producing structures level up after building a certain number of units. Higher level resource structures produce more resources, while higher level unit producing buildings build faster and often gain access to new units and upgrades at level 2.
These are innovative systems, but they are innovative ways of simplifying the genre - rather than deciding when it is time to "tech up," or how to lay out their base, players upgrades their infrastructure in the course of building up their armies and have base layouts defined for them. This, combined with other aspects of the game's design which tend towards the same end, are probably a consequence of the game's movie license - these decisions were probably made to cater to those drawn to the game by the movie brand without necessarily being interested in an RTS game as such.
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Feb 27th, 2008 at 01:13:45 - Battle For Middle Earth (PC) |
A note between my assignment entries - one of the strangest choices they made in this game was to change any part of the plot that would deny you a hero unit (no dropping Gandalf off the bridge in Moria, Boromir survives Amon Fen, ect. This might be understandable if to do otherwise would cause a hero shortage, but the Fellowship missions suffer from acute hero glut.
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Feb 26th, 2008 at 01:27:18 - Battle For Middle Earth (PC) |
SUMMARY
Battle for Middle Earth is an RTS set during the movie version of JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. It features squad units (also seen in Dawn of War), hero units (also seen in Warcraft 3), and a unique build system, in which buildings can only be placed on predefined plots.
GAMEPLAY
I played the first few missions of the Good campaign. The campaign starts in Moria, which roughly tracks the Moria scenes in the movie and acts as a kind of tutorial focusing exclusively on hero units. It goes well enough until the very end, in which the Balrog fight is playable. An on-screen prompt advises the player to "use Gandalf's special abilities to defeat the Balrog," but simply using those abilities as often as possible is insufficient - one must also "dance" Gandalf while those abilities recharge, giving a series of move orders that keep him just out of the creature's range. This is unintuitive, and I died twice before I caught on.
For as far as I got, the campaign alternates between "fellowship" missions, which involve guiding the fellowship (which consists entirely of hero units) through predetermined hordes of normal enemies, and Rider missions, in which the player fights a skirmish as the Riders of Rohan. Only the last Riders mission I played offered any real challenge (the Balrog being a fake challenge by my lights). The Riders' cavalry seems a mite overpowered - they can simply run over any enemy infantry for instant kills at the cost of a little health.
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Feb 21st, 2008 at 01:22:31 - Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) |
GAMEPLAY
Only got two Colossi this time, mostly because the bird presented a step up in challenge: this one actually came close to killing me, and threw me off after I climbed on it - both more than once. It was the first colossus that wasn't effectively a puzzle - before the bird, once I figured out what was necessary, it was trivial for me to accomplish it. I also got a much better feel for the horse. Unlike most game vehicles, the horse in this game mostly steers itself. This is especially evident when riding through narrow paths - the horse will make the small adjustments necessary to navigate a crooked stone bridge on its own, and attempting to steer through them manually will only slow you down.
DESIGN
By description, Shadow of the Colossus at first seems to be a string of boss battles separated by games of hide-and-seek. However, the bosses are more like levels than boss battles, as their bodies constitute an environment which must be navigated in order to reach a goal point. A puzzle element precedes the core navigation which constitutes the meat of the game: reaching the navigable portion of any given Colossus' hide is not a simple matter of running up to its leg and jumping on. There is an automatic hint system, which has thus far delivered genuinely helpful advice after giving me a reasonable interval in which to figure things out for myself, not a trivial design accomplishment by all accounts.
I haven't mentioned the presentation side of things at all yet, but since it appears that from the sixth Colossus on finding the fight is no longer trivial, I have to in order to make a gameplay related point. Shadow of the Colossus was made to be a beautiful game, and it is, but the aesthetic chosen for this purpose was very realistic, and so has fallen to the common fate of all realistic games: the relentless march of technological advancement has dated it. Therefore, the forced delay between battles, which was designed to show off the world, is far less justifiable than it may have been at launch. Worse, if one gets lost, the only hint available is the sword's ability to point you towards the next target, which doesn't even work in every area (it requires sunlight).
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ajrich has been with GameLog for 16 years, 10 months, and 11 days |
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