So I'm finding Supreme Commander a very love / hate affair.  Don't get me wrong, there's tons to love -- huge armies, love the mega-zoom, lots of neat little mechanics and massive carnage.

But in order to effectively complete the second campaign mission, you have to know that secretly, control-alt-right clicking does a totally different kind of move order than normal right clicking (attack move & in formation vs scattered regular move).  This is clearly a contender for the worst UI award -- and I should know, I've worked on a number of games that are serious competitors on that front as well.

It's quite peculiar given how elegant other aspects of the Supreme Commander UI are that you have to do a largely undocumented doubly-chorded modifier click in order to do one of the most basic commands in the game. 

Don't let that stop you from checking out Supreme Commander though -- it's a different kind of RTS than the more tactical and small scale affairs represented by the Company of Heroes and Command & Conquer games.

I'm down to the last few bosses in Crackdown and starting to focus more on hunting the orbs.  In general I really enjoy mechanics like this, where exploring the city is a key element of the game.  The appeal of just being "in" the city is a lot of why I like open ended city games, so having that be in alignment with my game goals is always pleasant.  But I think that Crackdown may have gone a bit too far.  Between the two types of collectibles in the world, there are 800 (!) orbs to collect.  300 of which are intentionally hidden in obscure and hard to find places.

Now, I don't mind a bit of collection.  But I do think if you are going to have it to that level, it is incumbent upon the design to provide some balancing mechanism so that the last 20% of orbs aren't going to be a nightmare.  Normally with a "reasonable" number of things to collect like the 50 horseshoes from San Andreas or the CDs from Saints Row, it is feasible to use a strategy guide or FAQ to track down the last few.  But with 300 (even setting aside the 500 agility orbs) that's a much harder problem to manage just knowing which ones you have and haven't already gotten.

If the game added just a slight way to provide some high level hints about when one might be near, the process would be a lot more possible to complete without cheating.  That just strikes me as a more solid design.

My favorite strategy / online game no one has ever heard about, Star Chamber, has recently re-released as part of the SOE Station's cadre of games.  I'm busily downloading the new client now but I'm pleased as punch that this has happened... hopefully it will get a few more eyeballs on what remains one of my favorite online "card" games.  If you haven't checked out this hidden gem of a game, and you like games like Magic or games like Master of Orion, you owe it to yourself to do so...  just follow the linky linky...

I thought this was an interesting tidbit to come across today, with Sony announcing that the PS3 model released in Europe will be a different one than the one in the Japanese and North American markets.  Specifically, it won't have the backwards compatibility chip that implements the BC feature in hardware.  Now, aside from the business implications of releasing the PS3 into the European market late, more expensive, and with fewer features, it asks some interesting questions about the future of the platform.

Removing that chip is clearly a cost cutting move -- quite strategically important.  So that implies that future revisions in the other territories may follow suit.  Now at that point, you have two different models of PS3s floating around, ones that use hardware BC and ones that do it in software.  If you're Sony, do you really want to support two different BC pathways?  Probably not.  So most likely, you disable the hardware BC on the older machines via a firmware update an enforce software BC.

Now, I don't think this is necessarily the disaster that the fan boards proclaim it to be, if the software BC is good it has the potential to be a good deal better than the hardware version (though I'm not holding my breath).  But does Sony have the right to disable actual hardware features in a game system I already own?  That seems like dangerous legal territory to tread in...

Here is a neat article (from the Inquirer, of all places!) on the mechanics of what happens in a console death spiral and why Sony is getting perilously close to falling into one.

I still think you can't discount the long term brand loyalty of the PS3 but I have to say I think the article sums up the situation neatly.  Why develop a game for the PS3 when you're looking at a lot of risk without a lot of reward?  The only way Sony can turn it around is with some key exclusives (titles or features) and I don't see that on the horizon -- yet.  Holiday '07 is still a ways off but if they're still faced with this dilemma in '08 I think that aspect of the console wars will be well and decided.

 

 

Why is it that exceptions thrown in C# include a functional stack trace, but not line numbers?  I spent way too much time today tracking down an exception in one of our web-based tools that would have been terribly simple if only I had line numbers...

Playing Rogue Galaxy toinght with Xavier... it gets to be about 15 minutes before his bedtime, and we agree at the next save point he'll head off to sleep.  Unfortunately it winds up taking over an hour before we find the next one.  :(

That's just wrong, folks.  Saving is a right, not a privilege.  Enough other things outside of the scope of the game can interrupt such that having no stopping point for that duration is just serving no positive benefit for your game.  Have a suspend save (destroyed on load) if you must, but infrequent saves just forces me to stop playing your game as soon as I can -- because I don't know when the next time I can gracefully leave is.

I love NPD day, especially at places like NeoGAF.

Y'know, if the PS3 is going to have any kind of serious market share it is going to have to, I dunno, maybe actually outsell the Xbox 360.  For at least one month.  Sometime.

The Wii, on the other hand... well, I didn't see that level of success coming back in October.  It will be interesting to see what happens when their supply situation resolves.  I maintain that they are in a sufficiently different market space to not directly compete with the 360, but we'll see.

It's a fascinating console war.  Grab some popcorn.  :)

No surprise to anyone that I'm pretty interested in Crackdown... I'm an absolute sucker for open world mayhem games.  We got our copies within MGS a week or so ago and I've been playing it a lot (well, when I get the chance between work, kids, and Warcraft).  It's no GTA but in many ways, like Saints Row, it sets a high bar for GTA4 to meet.  The draw distance is absolutely amazing -- you can stand atop a building and see out across the whole city including pedestrians and far off traffic.  While I was no great fan of the look in screenshots it plays a lot better in motion.

What impresses me most is the co-op though.  You can do pretty much every activity in the game in full co-op and it's fun to just wander the city doing random stuff along with your buddy.  That's not even getting into all the sandboxy fun you can have just inventing your own games and challenges.  Gears of War set a high bar for co-op but I think Crackdown manages to exceed it.  The number of good co-op games has been one of my favorite unexpected surprises of the way the Xbox 360 has played out.

Sorry for the week-ish long delay.  It's been a wild ride around here.  About a week ago was DICE, which was a big step up from last year though still not without its faults.  Then after returning from DICE the whole family promptly was attacked by a nasty virus (of the biological, not binary, variety).  Fortunately we all seem to have mostly recovered...

Anyways, I plan to get back to my regular posting schedule, I hate it when I miss a few weeks.  I can't decide if these down periods should be punctuated with posts from me about the very non-game related things I'm doing.  To that extent, the blog becomes a little more personal than analytical, which I don't mind so much but is a bit of a change of pace.

I definitely plan on doing a little more research into this whole "moblogging" thing all the kids on the intertubes are talking about these days (or even, dare I say it, liveblogging)... unfortunately I'm too wordy for the likes of my little Treo and the tablet PC I have as a pseudo-laptop is awful for extended text entry.