TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Category: Games I’m Playing

  • Gaming at 4K update: Star Trek Online Still On Top

    Since I got my 4K TV/monitor, I’ve been experimenting with games that can run at 4K resolution (3840×2160@30 Hz in my case). As I noted in my last post, Star Trek Online works very well at 4K. I’ve continued to play STO at 4K and couldn’t be more impressed. It looks good at that resolution (though the textures are still crap, but that is the case with almost all games – I’m looking at you, Dragon Age series), and plays smoothly, despite the 30 Hz update rate. So STO is a clear win at 4K.

    I played a bit of Saints Row IV at 4K last night and it mostly worked. It struggled a little bit, but was playable at 4K. The only bummer was the very visible tearing, because I didn’t turn vsync on. I didn’t bother with vsync, because I could see from the tearing that it was having trouble keeping up. So I turned the game back down to 1080p and it worked great. I suppose if my computer were a little faster, Saints Row IV might be a good experience at 4K resolution.

    I’m continuing to run LOTRO at 1080p resolution, because of the distracting visible artifacts at 4K, and I find 1080p mostly OK despite all the pixels being doubled in both axes.

    In short, we have a big winner at 4K in Star Trek Online, and we have a pretty good candidate if your machine is great in Saints Row IV. So cheers to 4K monitors!

  • Killzone Shadow Fall is pretty, but stupid

    Let’s say you just defeated your enemy by blowing up his planet. Then, apparently feeling guilt, you give the enemy refugees half your planet, because, hey, what could go wrong? I mean you have a (presumably small) population that hates you to the death and not just because you blew up their planet, so it’ll be okay if you give them half of yours, right? And rather than giving them some continent somewhere, you just put a wall up and they get one side and you get the other. Oh, and your citizens that lived there? They need to move, and your enemy may or may not cooperate in giving them safe passage.

    Does that sound like the stupidest, most contrived scenario for a game? It does to me, but that is the premise for Killzone Shadow Fall. Since I never finished Killzone 2 or 3, I don’t know if this is in keeping with spectacularly stupid plots or is a new achievement in stupidity for the series, but there you have it.

    Assuming you can muster up the effort to keep playing the game after that introduction, you’ll see a very attractive game that seems like it could be fun. You get dropped on the enemy side of the wall, yet for some reason, you don’t have any gear with you. You need to find all your stuff, including your personal helper robot, which is a nifty thing. Again, contrived and stupid. The video below shows me retrieving the ammo for my rifle with the help of the robot. I order it to go and kill the baddies then use it to make a zip line so I can get to the dropped supplies. I then explore a bit and find a downed allied aircraft. I stopped the video at that point, because I thought I was going to die, but I fought off the attackers and continued the mission.

    The main problem I have so far with Shadow Fall is, while it is pretty, the field of view is narrow enough that it is hard to see enemies until you’re being hit by their bullets. This is annoying. Surely if I can have flying robot helpers, I could have a HUD that outlines the enemies for me.

    In the short term, I have abandoned Shadow Fall and continued to enjoy Knack. Once Knack is done, I will consider what game I should play amidst playing LOTRO Helm’s Deep and Star Trek Online’s The Sphere.

  • Knack is my favorite Playstation 4 game so far

    I bought 3 games for my PS4 thanks to Amazon’s buy-2-get-1-free sale: Knack, Killzone: Shadow Fall, and Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag. I haven’t even opened AssCreed, but have tried both Killzone and Knack, and like Knack quite a bit. I’m not normally a platformer kinda guy, but Knack is very well done, mostly fun, and very whimsical. The graphics look good, but not in a photo-realistic way. Instead, it looks like a finely animated cartoon that we can participate in. The video below shows a short snippet of my gameplay, including me making a stupid mistake at the end and getting killed.

    While the game is fun, it isn’t easy, even on easy mode. Some of the combat gets quite easy, but some of the enemies can take you down in one hit. A few of the puzzles take a few minutes to figure out, but they haven’t been too hard as far as I’ve played.

    The biggest problem with the game is the checkpoint save system. Games and developers that use bad checkpoint systems like this one don’t respect their players. Yes, there are mini checkpoints during the gameplay, so if you die, you don’t go back too far (Killzone: Shadow Fall also has these), but they don’t stick if you need to quit the game. If you quit, the game restarts you at the chapter checkpoint, so I lost quite a bit of progress when I so nastily discovered this. Infuriating! Killzone saves the current checkpoint so you can quit and come back and not lose anything, so it is much better than Knack in this case.

    So do I recommend Knack? Yesterday when I lost so much progress due to the pathetic checkpoint system, I would have said “NO,” but after calming down a little and playing some more, yes, it is a worthy game and is fun to play. I’ve yet to try the co-op mode, but I look forward to that.

    And, of course, it’s killing me that the PS4 came out at nearly the same time as the new Star Trek Online season (The Sphere), which has a really fun battle zone for ground combat, as well as the new Lord of the Rings Online expansion (Helm’s Deep). Oh how will I get time to play all these things?

  • PS4 Impressions After a Full Day

    I’ve had my Playstation 4 since Friday afternoon and have had a good chance to work with it and can give my impressions.

    When I first hooked it up on Friday, I had planned to manually perform the required Day 1 patch from the patch file that I had on a USB flash drive. It turned out that the PS4 was faster at downloading it over the network than I was at figuring out how to convince it to update from the flash drive. The update went smoothly, as have all the PSN interactions so far. The rumors on Friday of total collapse of PSN seem to have been exaggerated, because downloads have been smooth, the store has worked well, and my small number of friends show up just fine. So kudos to Sony for a good launch!

    I don’t have the PS4 camera yet, because of a screw up with my Amazon order. While I’m partially to blame for that, it was somewhat Amazon’s fault. So my angry glare looking north towards Washington state is not at Microsoft, for once, but at Amazon. When I get the camera, I’m looking forward to checking out the Playroom tech demo that looks so cool in all the videos.

    The PS4 is, as you know from all the pictures is quite an attractive machine. As you can see from the photo below, it is smaller than an original PS3 and 2nd generation Xbox 360, and feels solidly built. I first hooked it up via HDMI to the TV and optical audio to my surround sound system. On Saturday morning, I tore all the cables out of all the machines and hooked all three game systems to an HDMI switch that connected to the TV. The TV then has an optical out that sends the sound to the audio system. This new setup meant I could get rid of my old component video switch that I was only using to switch optical audio from the PS3 and the Xbox 360. This setup works well, which is good, because there seems to be a problem with the optical audio on the PS4. When I was at the menu screen, the pleasant-sounding background music sounded good, but when I started a game (Resogun or Contrast, for example), the audio broke up and became very rough and awful. This happened when the audio output was either Dolby 5.1 or DTS 5.1, but if I forced it to use PCM stereo, it was OK (though stereo, which is not ideal). Things seem to be working better with the HDMI audio, so I’ll stick with that.

    Game Machines

    The Playstation Store is much quicker and more responsive than it was on the PS3, but of course that may be because there isn’t much content there yet. It does seem to be a better design, though. It launches quickly and getting out of it is fast and easy. The thing missing is the list of prior purchases. I preordered Warframe in order to get the preorder bonus, but I don’t know if I got it or not when I downloaded Warframe from the store. In the PSN section of the Settings menu, there is a “Services List” item within “Account Information” that shows I apparently have it, but such things should be accessible from the store, not from hunting 3 levels down in the System menu.

    The Dualshock 4 controller is quite good. It is comfortable and has a good feel to it, mostly. The “Options” button, which is used in place of the Select and Start buttons on the PS3’s controllers, is not in a convenient spot, yet games tend to use it a fair bit. DC Universe Online is the worst offender I’ve seen so far, using it to bring up a circular menu to get to everything, like your inventory and skills and journal, so you need to hold the unwieldy Options button, then navigate to the selection. Not a comfortable proposition, but that isn’t why I won’t spend much time playing DC Universe Online (more in a future post). The battery life of the DS4 is also quite lousy – certainly worse than the Dualshock 3.

    The PS4 has a standby mode and an off mode. In the standby mode, it can download updates, finish downloading games you’ve purchased, and apparently be awakened by a PS Vita for remote play (I don’t have a Vita, so haven’t tried it). For the ability to do those things, it consumes 10 watts. Always. Sounds like lazy engineering to me, Sony. I could see that it would take 10 watts when downloads and installs are happening and the DS4 is charging, but then it should throttle back to a watt or two. Y’know, cut the Ethernet to 10Mbps, reduce power on the WiFi like tablets and smartphones do, etc. We as a world, and I, in particular, consume too much energy as it is, so having millions of brand new units that are designed to consume 10 watts when they are ostensibly off is unfathomable to me. I will do my best to turn the damn thing off, even though the power button puts it into standby mode. Oh, and that DS4 that needs charging so often – it needs standby mode to charge. I turned my PS4 off last night with the DS4 plugged in, because I had heard it charges when the PS4 is off. It isn’t charged, so apparently it doesn’t charge in the off mode. Darn.

    Downloads and updates are much smoother on the PS4 than they were on the PS3. Multiple downloads can happen at once, and they continue while games are running unless the games need the network. Overall, a big improvement, and pretty nearly where my PC has been for many years. Game updates are an interesting conundrum, however. When you first put in a game disk, it immediately starts copying the game to the PS4’s hard drive, so we will all fill our drives reasonably quickly. And though the game is cached to the hard drive, we still need the disk in the optical drive for, you know, piracy and inconvenience reasons. Once part of the disk has been copied over, the game can be started, which is a nifty feature that we don’t have to wait for 50GB to be copied. But, once you start the game, if there is a patch for the game, it will start downloading, but your play will not be interrupted. Now I’m guessing they won’t patch a running game, so this means you’ll be playing an unpatched game until you quit and allow the patch to install. While this is perhaps more friendly than the PS3’s system of making us wait while a patch downloads, I don’t like the idea of playing that unpatched game when the patch may be downloaded and be sitting there on the disk. So if I see a patch download notification, I quit the game and let the patch happen before I’ll play it.

    Finally (for this post), the PS4 comes with some nice coupon codes, including one for a free month of PS Plus (PS+). PS+ is $50 a year and was essential on the PS3, because it allowed a PS3 to update itself automatically, much like Windows has been able to do for years. It also gave members lots of free games, some of which are truly great, so it is well worth it. I have been a PS+ member for a while, so I had to check what happened when I applied that free month coupon. Digging around in the aforementioned “Services List” menu item, I saw that the free month was properly applied at the end of my PS+ subscription, but the auto-renew was turned on for an option much more expensive than the $50 per year plan. So if you use that coupon, disable the auto-renew or you’ll have a nasty surprise!

     

  • My Love/Hate Relationship with Borderlands 2

    Having played and thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 2 when it first came out, I bought the Season Pass, but let the game languish as I played a few other games, had health issues that totally ruined my gaming ability for a while, and kept up with my Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and Star Trek Online (STO) playing.

    A few days ago, however, while waiting for the new STO and LOTRO updates coming this week, I jumped back in to play the Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. In this DLC, you and your NPC friends from the original Borderlands are playing a dice-based RPG similar to, but not infringing on the copyright of, Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, that means the player gets put into this fantasy world. And while you still have all your guns and grenades and powers, the enemies are using swords and arrows, though with deadly precision.

    The area in the DLC is quite challenging because of the various monster types. Some, like tree-based creatures are easy – just use fire, as are knights and others that fire works on. The damn skeletons are the problem. They are immune to nearly everything other than explosive damage and I just don’t have a good, accurate gun that deals explosive damage. But it’s a puzzle set for us by the developer to figure out how to overcome some of these tough enemies.

    That leads to my problem with the game. When you die, you reappear at a nearby respawn point, which is fine. But if you need to quit the game because it is way past bedtime, I will have to restart the area and all the monsters will have respawned. This concern was so great that I was trying to rush through a quest last night before bed, yet kept making mistakes and dying. I never did succeed, so I went to bed furious!

    Now, in the calm of morning, I can dispassionately look back at the game and not be quite so mad at it. Last night, I was sure I was going to drop the game again and go on to other games I’ve been waiting to play. Especially with the new STO and LOTRO content plus my PS4 will arrive on Friday, I’ll have plenty to do. But now that I’m not as furious, I will perhaps give Borderlands 2 another shot. When I’m calm and collected and have time to finish…

  • Two #LOTRO Videos: Mounted Minstrel and Michel Delving Horse Race

    I took two videos in LOTRO recently and thought I would share them.

    The first is very short. I was experimenting with NVidia’s ShadowPlay in LOTRO and happened to turn it on just as a not very bright mounted orc started attacking me. I’m posting this to show how dangerous a mounted Minstrel can be. I was able to take the enemy down in seconds even from a full stop, though he was higher level than my Mini. I’m really liking the Minstrel class for combination of damage and healing, though when I managed to get a bunch of enemies attacking at once, he died. However, he was able to take down the Craban Master Warband near Garsfeld solo, even though it’s a small fellowship one.

    The other video is the horse race near Michel Delving. This run got my Hunter enough Fall Festival Tokens that he could buy the Spooky Caparison of the Bat to decorate his War Steed.

     

  • Saints Row IV Powers Video using NVIDIA ShadowPlay

    Yesterday I mentioned some of the awesomely fun powers the player has in Saints Row IV. Well today, I have a video showing it. This also gives me a chance to try out NVIDIA’s excellent new ShadowPlay feature.

    In the video below, my character (I don’t normally play female characters, but SR4 allows you to change genders and looks nearly at will, so this is what the POTUS looked like at that moment) did a bit of jumping, gliding, running, and killing people. One of the powers is to have an aura of flame which lights bystanders on fire, but not other Saints. It apparently also imbues bullets with fire, but I didn’t use it much, so can’t say for sure.

    My game was running at my monitor’s resolution of 2560×1440, yet NVIDIA’s ShadowPlay scaled it behind the scenes to make a 1920×1080 H.264 video without any apparent burden on my CPU or the graphics in the game. I’ve used FRAPS before, but this achieves much greater compression and less system impact. I think it’s a great thing that NVIDIA has given those of us that use their graphics cards.

     

  • Finished Saints Row IV and Liked It

    I finished Saints Row IV and the DLC Enter the Dominatrix on my PC and liked it a lot. Enter the Dominatrix ended up being fairly amusing and had some cute flashbacks to Saints Row 3. Overall, the game had lots of humor, tremendous swearing, and fun.

    Since the majority of the game happens in a simulation (it would be a major spoiler for me to tell you why), you get all sorts of abilities beyond just shooting and blowing stuff up. For example, you can run super fast, jump super high and glide across town, shoot ice or fire blasts, use telekinesis to throw enemies, and more. I used the word “super” in that last sentence twice, because this game really makes you feel like a superhero more than any other game I’ve played. You’re not an invulnerable man (or woman) of steel, but a badass that can cause great mayhem, but still be injured or die if you don’t take care. It’s a delightful way to play and lots of fun.

    In addition to the superpowers, there are some terrifically fun weapons, including the bounce rifle (rounds hit multiple enemies), the black hole gun, and the dubstep gun (enemies dance before they blow up – awesome!). The grenades of SR3 are gone, but not missed too much. Of course, the giant dildo bats are back, but there are even more fun melee weapons, though perhaps none more amusing than beating the baddies with a huge dong, but I tended to stick with the laser sword (a non-infringing homage to light sabers, I presume).

    While SR4 didn’t have Burt Reynolds, it did have fun cameos that I won’t spoil here. In general, the voice  acting was good and the banter with your homies was great fun! Some of the characters and enemies must have been from SR2 and maybe even the original Saints Row, neither of which I’ve played, so I didn’t know the references, though those missions were still fun.

    The sex/romance scenes are a hoot compared to the serious and drawn out ones of the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. For example (and kids need to stop reading right here), when the player selects the button to “romance Kinzie,” a cutscene plays in which the player says “Hey Kinzie, wanna fuck?” Kinzie then slugs the player, then says “Let’s go!” and jumps on to kiss the player and both fall to the floor. That’s it – no stupid bed scene where you’re still wearing your armor as your partner lays there in underwear simulating sex. So while SR4 is cruder than others, it isn’t as stupidly teenage fantasy sex-oriented.

    So overall, SR4 is great. While I finished it on PC (at least until the next DLC), I have it on PS3 too in case I can do co-op mode with friends. Great fun!

  • On the Importance of Game Controller Support

    I was somewhat out of gaming action for medical reasons for more than a month. During that time, I was pretty much unable to use keyboard and mouse to play games. I was, however, able to use my Xbox 360 controller for Windows to play games that supported it. And that led me to discover how poor the support for game controllers is in many of the games I enjoy.

    One of my favorite games, Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), doesn’t support game controllers, so I was out of LOTRO for a month or so. Sure, I logged in occasionally to check mail, but couldn’t play it even a little bit. But TallGuy, you say, MMOs and controllers don’t mix. Well, there you’re wrong.

    My other favorite MMO, Star Trek Online (STO), has native support for game controllers. Even more importantly, it has a fully programmable binding mechanism that lets me customize button combinations, so I can use the triggers as modifiers (think Shift or Control) for the few face buttons. Therefore, I can easily get to 2 rows of the skill bar without touching a keyboard or mouse. I can fly my ship or move my captain with one stick, move the camera with the other, crouch, run, shoot, and do pretty much everything I need with an Xbox controller.

    Games like Diablo III and Torchlight II didn’t support the game controller, of course. But the PS3 version of Diablo III shows that it is entirely possible to convert a clicky game into a controller game. The PS3 version is great – my wife and I have lots of fun playing it. She’s a wizard, so can nuke the enemies from a distance, while I’m a healing tank (monk) to take the pressure off her. And a lot less chance of getting carpal tunnel on the PS3 version.

    Very sadly, Sins of a Solar Empire can’t be played with a game controller. Nothing would have been better than to conquer the Sins universe many times during my convalescence, but it was not to be.

    A thoughtful friend gave me a nifty game, Evoland. It is pretty cool and supports game controllers very well. If you want to experience the evolution of RPGs over many years, give it a shot. I spent a good few hours with it.

    The laptop computer I was using wasn’t overly great (thanks to HP for abandoning it and not releasing modern drivers, since it is an i7 quad core with an AMD 6770 GPU), so it can’t run graphics intensive games like Skyrim or Borderlands 2 or Batman Arkham City well, so I didn’t use those, even though they work with game controllers.

    Instead, I gave up on the PC and finished Halo 4 on Xbox 360 and then finished Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood on the PS3. I enjoyed both, but I especially loved AssCreed because of exploring Rome and its historical buildings.

    So, my point is that PC games should have better game controller support. Keyboards are fiddly and not appropriate for all games (sure, for a shooter, I’d prefer keyboard and mouse any day), and there may be people that have some limitations or are bedridden that would be better off with a controller.

  • Thirst for Power LOTRO kinship website removed

    I’ve taken down the Thirst for Power website for lack of use. All it seemed to get were spam posts advertising fake designer bags.

    Since the kinship is similarly a ghost town, I don’t think anyone but me will miss it.