I wanted to try the new free-to-play RTS Age of Empires Online. I had been following a ‘No more games that use Games for Windows Live’ policy ever since a set of really awful experiences with Bioshock 2 a year or so ago, but a free game from a studio whose games I’ve really enjoyed in the past convinced me to give GFWL another chance.

I downloaded and installed the game, but when I tried to login to GFWL, which I have to do in order to play, it wouldn’t let me. Tried on the GFWL website and was informed someone has been trying to login to my account with the wrong password so many times my password is invalid.

I reset password, a reasonably straightforward process, hurrah! I am pleasantly surprised.

Try again to login. I’m informed I must provide product key and am unable to login. wth? It’s a free game, and anyway, why should that block me from logging in? Confusion.

Examine email looking for product key. Find none

Examine spam folder looking for email with product key. Find none. Grossed out by contents of spam folder.

Examine Age of Empire Online FAQ and message boards looking for someone with the same problem. Find nothing.

Google this problem. Find nothing.

GFWL lets you specify a backup email address. Look there and in that account’s spam folder for an email with a product key. Find nothing. More hot spam folder grossout action.

Ponder. Wth? With these things you can always find someone with a similar problem via google, and eventually arrive at a solution. I can’t so…what does that mean? It’s unique to me? Seems inconceivable? What out of all the parameters in play would be unique to me? My password. I check. I’ve made a typo. Try to login using the correct password. Eureka! I’m in.

Why the FUCK did GFWL send me off on a 30 minute goose chase looking for a product key when its issue was I had an invalid password?

Because it’s Game For Windows Live, a product seemingly designed to put anyone who tries it off of gaming on windows.

Age of Empires Online is ok – it’s definitely worth a look if you’re into RTS. Pluses include fantastic art direction and a ton of content. Cons are incredibly bad unit pathing issues and a brain dead AI. Message me if you’re playing and want to connect. Meantime, I’m back on my ‘will not buy products which require the use of GFWL’ policy. Developers and publishers, please: spare your customers the agony of this entirely shitty product. There’s no money hat large enough to make this worth the bad mouthing your product will get. Look into steamworks or anything, anything at all*, besides GFWL. It’s shit.

*(Except the stuff Ubisoft is doing, and, err, EA’s Origin stuff…jesus. Software publishing is going to the dogs! Just fucking use Steamworks, they appear to be the only company that recognizes customer experience should be primary).

Image via Wikipedia

Their website does a terrible job if helping you understand why you might consider donating and what they’ll do with the money, but I still gave $20 to the Gary Gygax Memorial Fund this week. Gygax is one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, originally a set of miniatures supplements he wrote with his friends that grew into a global brand. He also founded one of the earliest gaming magazines (Dragon Magazine), launched what became and remains the US’s largest gaming convention (Gencon), produced a hit animated television series (Dungeons and Dragons), and more. Gygax’s games and company played a huge role in my middle childhood, and I still have a stack of his books and supplements tucked into my basement rec room’s game cabinet. The intent is to build a statue commemorating his life on parkland in downtown Lake Geneva, WI, where he lived and worked for most of his life. He deserves the recognition.

The memorial is going to be in downtown Lake Geneva, in this park.

Related articles

• Help Memorialize Gygax at Gen Con Starting Tomorrow (tor.com)
• Be forever grateful to D&D’s creators (psychologytoday.com)
• Sculptor for Gygax Memorial Named (wired.com)
• Gary Gygax memorial in the offing (boingboing.net)

Is the worlds imagined by Studio Ghibli as recreated by a bunch of folks using the Minecraft engine.

If you’re unfamiliar with Studio Ghibli, stop what you’re doing and go watch Laputa, Castle in the Sky, or Grave of the Fireflies, or Porco Rosso, or, well, anything they’ve done, but especially those. Shorthand explanation would be that they’re a Japanese analog to Walt Disney.

If you’re unfamiliar with Minecraft, and you have a computer that’s less than 6-7 years old that can run Java, go spend the $15 or so to register. It’s a 3d lego toolkit with world generation, multiplayer, and zombies, plus a whole lot more, but that should be enough right there. Plus it’s absolutely brilliant.

So…what to do. I can’t decide. I’m sitting pat for now. E3, the biggest gaming industry trade show, is next month, and I’m going to see what comes out of that before doing anything.  I should note that while the PS3 still works, mostly, aside from multiplayer, I’m worried trophies won’t sync correctly when the network comes back up, so I’ve been staying off of it. Meantime, it’s back to gaming on the PC primarily.

The problem was, when I got everything wired up, I had no audio coming from the computer. Ultimately this boiled down to a driver issue that’s related to the fact that when you’re using HDMI, your video card is responsible for delivering the audio to your output device. I had to update my realtek audio drivers, disable all devices, then restart the machine and reconfigure, before I could get audio out. I found this forum thread helpful, as well as this image illustrating the three places you need to make changes to your system configuration in order to get audio out.

While this is a driver issue ultimately I blame Microsoft for this – it’s hard to imagine making something as simple as ‘I want sound from my computer’ more complex.

Posting this in case it’s helpful to others.

Super Crate Box from Vlambeer on Vimeo.

Hydorah Official Trailer from Locomalito on Vimeo.

Continuing my trawl through games I started then set aside, last weekend I completed 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. This is a dumb, fun, 3rd person cover based shooter. It’s a riff on the same gameplay mechanics in Gears of War 1 and 2 with an over the top plot and mixed production values. The story follows the adventures of 50 cent and his crew in the middle east. They get ripped off by a concert promoter who offers them a jewel encrusted skull in lieu of payment. This also gets ripped off and 50 cent and his buddies spend the rest of the game shooting and cussing their way through various middle eastern locales in their quest to retrieve the skull. This game has no pretensions of grandeur – it’s the videogame equivalent of a B-movie and it pretty much delivers. The graphics, models, and audio are all middle of the road, but the feel is solid and the game isn’t long enough to wear out its welcome. It has a bit of arcade scoring in the mix, where stringing together insults and combos raise a score multiplier, but for the most part I just ignored this and blew through the levels. I only busted out a curse/combo now and then as I unlocked new curses, for the laughs rather than to help with the score.

You can find this game for under $20 new and often for under $10, and it’s worth it for the laughs at under $10. It won’t win any awards for originality but it’s a fun ride while it lasts.

Video below of some gameplay and cutscenes to give you a sense of it. I finished it on the xbox 360, it’s available for the PS3 as well. It’s got an average of ~72 over on metacritic, and that feels about right to me.

I’m still on a roll, finishing games at a rapid clip. Susan was out of town for several days at a conference which also helped.

It’s clear Gears of War 2 was written for 15 year old males, and for the most part I hated it. I disliked the first one and traded it in before finishing it, and ended up with the sequel because of a buy 2 get 1 free sale at Gamestop. I’d heard the sequel was an improvement on the original, and it probably is on a technical level, but the abysmally stupid plot, awful dialog, and mediocre game mechanics all drag the thing down into ‘don’t bother playing this dog’ territory. The script writers are channeling braindead hollywood action flicks from the 80s, think, say ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando‘ level dumb dialog. Lots of folks loved this game (it’s got a 93 rating over on metacritic for example) – I guess I’m just not in the target audience for this one. My appreciation for it wasn’t helped by the fact that I played it right after Halo ODST, a game with a refined combat and gameplay aesthetic that Gears of War 2 compares very poorly to. The one positive thing I can say is that the game does have some imaginative settings with impressive scope, especially when you venture underground into vast cavernous areas with ancient temples, sunken cities, and a giant worm out to get you – that part was a visual treat. Everything else…I disliked.

The clip below plays some of the cutscenes from the game and gives a pretty good idea of why I disliked the game. Video quality’s not that great but the audio is really the point. Don’t play this with other people around, it’s definitely NSFW.

I finished Halo O.D.S.T. (aka Orbital Drop Ship Troopers), the 4th game in the Halo series (or like the 8th, if you count the Marathon games as the spiritual predecessors they were) over the weekend. I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected. I’ve solved all the Halo games at this point, including 2 of them in coop, and I figured I had seen everything the Halo games had to see at this point, plus Halo 3 concludes the Master Chief‘s story arc, and I sort of figured without the Master Chief I wouldn’t be interested.

I only ended up getting the game because Toys R Us had a buy 2 get 1 free sale after Thanksgiving and I couldn’t find anything else I was interested in. My first session with the game seemed to confirm my suspicion – been there, done that, I thought, and I quickly set the game aside for others. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to clear out my game backlog before buying any new games though, and I love buying new games, so I returned to it and warmed up to it as I played.

The Halo series does a pretty good job with their basic combat mechanics, and their level design focuses on setting up repeated ‘situations’ or skirmishes that require tactical thinking, skill, and sometimes a little luck. The same skirmish can play out wildly differently each time you approach it after a failure too, which helps enormously with enjoyment. In terms of what ODST brings to the party this time around…well, not much new. Some tweaks to the weapons, graphics, vehicles, a lack of the more resilient Master Chief, and that’s about it. The relatively short plot follows the misadventures of a squad of soldiers on a mission in a city under siege by alien invaders. It’s told non-linearly, and while in the end it’s not that exciting, by the standards of most first person shooters it’s actually pretty solid. I played on normal difficulty and either the game is fairly easy or I’ve played enough Halo games to do really well at them, because I mostly found it pretty easy.

The one new thing that ODST does bring to the table is a multiplayer mode called Firefight that’s pretty fun – it’s basically the human players versus increasingly powerful waves of AI characters in skirmish battles. It’s tough, frantic, and a good deal of fun. The rest of the multiplayer is basically what you see in Halo 3 with a bunch of additional maps included, including some which were DLC for Halo 3.

So – would I recommend it? Qualified yes – if you’ve played Halo games and really enjoyed them, no question, you should pick it up. If you’re a singleplayer only player, well, it’s a tougher call. The single player is fun and well designed and has an above average story for the genre, but it’s also fairly short. If you’re a Halo 3 multiplayer fan, it’s probably worth picking up just for the Firefight mode alone.

Roundup of reviews of the game

• Frankenreview: Halo 3: O.D.S.T. [Round Up] (kotaku.com)

I’m on a roll thanks to one of my New Year’s resolutions. I finished Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty earlier in the week. It’s a short coda to the previous game, Tools of Destruction, and explains how Ratchet figures out where Clank is after he…disappears at the end of Tools of Destruction. I scored the next game in the series, Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time on sale over Christmas and I wanted to finish this game so I could move on its sequel. This is the 8th (!!!) Ratchet and Clank game and it doesn’t bring much new to the table. There’s more of a focus on puzzle solving than in the previous games, and it’s really short, maybe 3-4 hours long, but it’s still got the trademark Ratchet and Clank humor and I enjoyed it well enough. The series features run and gun arcade adventure with some light puzzle solving, a lot of saturday morning cartoon humor, and generally great graphics. I’ve played all of them and solved several of them, including this one, but if you’re going to skip one, this is the one. Counterbalancing that is it’s cheap – I got it for $9.99 from the Playstation store as a download. Below is an ~8 minute video showing off some of the gameplay. Bottom line, if you’ve played the previous games and enjoyed them, you’re likely to enjoy this one as well.

The diet and exercise resolution has turned out to be easy thanks to the bout of pneumonia. My weight had been creeping up and by this fall I was over 180 for the first time in a number of years, something I had begun to worry about. Stomach issues and a generally slacker attitude to exercise had me off my regimen for almost all of the summer and fall, so I figured, time for a new years resolution to address it. Pressures off now though – I’m down under 170 for the first time in at least 4-5 years. I just need to keep it off. As soon as my stamina is back it’s back on the exercise regimen, possibly adding in running, which I haven’t done regularly since I left Maine.

The second resolution is inspired by a successful resolution from years ago. At that time I had gotten addicted to buying books off of Abe books, ebay, and Amazon, and my to-read pile was growing faster than my read pile was decreasing. I resolved to only buy a book after I had finished at least one, and to generally focus on bringing down the number of books in the to-read pile. It worked. I still have a huge to-read pile (>20 books) but it no longer grows and it’s no longer close to 100 books. This year I’m applying these principles to videogames, because my to-play pile is like 15 games at this point and maybe higher. I’ve resolved to not buy a new game unless I finish one, and to focus on finishing off games I’ve left partially completed. I have this terrible habit of starting whatever new game I acquire, playing it obsessively for a week or two until the next game comes, then moving on, rarely finishing anything. No more! I’m working my way through games at a rapid clip, and not opening anything still in the shrinkwrap until I knock games off the list. So far it’s working – I’ve finished 4-5 games since the year began, and this was with me unable to play games for two weeks thanks to the pneumonia.

I’m such a hopeless nerd.

I’ve also put myself on a budget. Mint.com rocks for helping you see where you spend your money. I spend too much of mine on games, and that’s stopping as well.

Anyway, to sum up a rambling post, figure on a lot of  ‘Game finished’ posts from me, especially over the next couple of months, as I focus on a game at a time instead of flitting from game to game.

A little friday fun of a different kind, we’ll call it the  ‘scare the spouse with your gaming expenditures’ edition. Steam is the most successful of the PC gaming digital distribution platforms. I’m a big fan and have been using it for years. The folks at ddgamer have put together a little tool to calculate what your account’s worth. Remember when you look at this that the numbers are based on the current value of the software, not what you actually paid. For me this means my account looks like it’s worth a lot more than I actually paid because I so often take advantage of the weekly and holiday sales Steam offers. Caveats aside, here’s my account, which today is worth $1,603.26. Change the username to your own to calculate the value of your account. A side note – folks have actually been selling off their Steam accounts, so if the number makes you feel sheepish and you want to try and recoup some of that money, you can try selling it on Amazon zshops or ebay or whatever. Mind that Valve (owners of Steam) may not approve, it’s probably a violation of their TOS, etc etc.

The game loosely follows the plot of the recent (mediocre, I thought) film, fleshing out various areas of the plot with more opportunities for combat and adding in a huge section of flashback material that’s only slightly touched on in the film, but it also strays far afield in parts. The game’s actually up for an award for the script which surprised me when it was announced – not that the game’s script is terrible or anything, it’s above average for this genre but really, that’s not saying much. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s basically an origin story but it jumps around in time a fair bit to tell the story.

Gameplay wise it’s an arcade brawler at heart, with a thin veneer of rpg layered on which allows you to increase the power, number, and styles of attacks, recuperative powers, and special abilities Wolverine has as the game progresses. There’s also some light collectathon stuff going on in the form of dogtags on the corpses of fallen comrades and wolverine statues which unlock challenge missions.

The game’s sort of the videogame equivalent of junkfood – nothing beyond capturing the essence of Wolverine is done especially well in this game, most of the gameplay systems are mediocre riffs on mechanics you’ve seen before, but on the whole it comes together as a fun little brawler.

Below is a video of one of my favorite sections of the game, wherein Wolverine manages to take down a Sentinel. Few things will make you feel more baddass than that

* One caveat here – I have not yet played Batman: Arkham Asylum yet, and it’s supposed to be even better.

Who wouldn't want this chair for their entertainment room?

How can you resist? Surround sound, acoustic tile insulation, comfy foam padded seat, this chair has it all. Good thing I’m married….

Another reason to love my iphone: a remake of the classic old Commodore 64 rpg-lite, Sword of Fargoal, by the original developers. Info on the new iphone version can be had over on toucharcade, there’s a decent write-up on the original here on wikipedia, and I’ve mentioned it at least once before here when a pc version was released. I picked this up when it came out several weeks ago for $5, and it’s on sale now for only $1.99. Definitely worth grabbing if you played the original and have fond memories of it, and also worth a look if you enjoy the genre.  The remake adds graphical polish, item and monster enhancements, and user interface changes to make it work well on the phone.

I won’t be buying the sequel. This fantastic chart over on Destructoid sums up why: this release is a huge middle finger to PC gamers. I’m not going to get all caught up in the nerd angst these moves by Infinity Ward have provoked, I’m simply going to walk away from their product. I think they could basically care less – they know they’ll sell 10 million+ copies to console gamers. Good on them, they know their market. I think they’ve lost sight of their PC market though. Meanwhile there are plenty of other great modable, extensively multiplayer, , extensible, client/server FPS for me to choose from on the PC. Personally I think Infinity Ward should take a good look at Valve and think about how Valve is succeeding in all the areas Infinity Ward is claiming are causing them to make these changes.

update: There’s also a pretty good summary of all the downgrades Infinity Ward have applied to Modern Combat 2 over here on Ars Technica

The same principle applies if you played Fate some years ago – Torchlight is by some of the same folks and if you like Fate, you’re going to love Torchlight – it’s Fate on steroids with a shiny new coat of paint.

If you’re not familiar with these games, they’re easy to pick up and play, feature some light’ish rpg elements, tons of variety in setting, enemies, and most especially loot. You run around doing simple quests, fighting bad guys, leveling up, gathering up swords of +5 smacking of goodness, lather, rinse, repeat. They don’t necessarily require much heavy thinking but there are tactics that work and those that don’t, with plenty of health potions required for those who don’t want to bother thinking and just want to plow ever deeper into the dungeon.

I love the genre and this is the best example of it to come along in years. There’s a video below so you can get a sense of the gameplay. For now this is PC only but there’s a Mac version on the way due in January. For now you can only buy this via the digital download services but a boxed version is also on the way. There are also development tools on the way and the game is very Mod friendly. If this does as well as Fate did, expect tons of additional content, conversions, and more.

My only criticisms of the game are that I wish the loading was a bit faster and I wish they had included multiplayer, but man, it’s $20 and it’s a blast to play. Definitely worth checking out if it seems like it’s up your alley.

There’s a ~10 minute video of the gameplay below to give you a sense of it. I played the game on the Xbox360 but it’s available for other platforms as well including the PC. I never tried the multiplayer so I can’t comment on that. Its main distinction from other FPS is the time power suit you have, which gives you 3 powers you can activate (slow, reverse, stop) which are tied to a power bar which recharges over time. Many of the game’s levels require the use of one of the powers to progress, but it dumbs things down by helpfully auto-selecting the appropriate power so long as you hit the activate button at the right time. At first this annoyed me but I pretty quickly figured out the game was going for full on non-stop action and this design choice fit in with that pretty well – why stop to think, just keep shooting son and it will all work out. That plus the fact that firing off your slo-mo or stop time power and laying a beatdown on the enemies never got old  and was a blast slowly raised my opinion of the game as I played through it. I’d give it a 4 out of 5. You can score the console version for $10-20 used and I’ve seen the PC version for under $10 in bargain racks. At that price the game’s definitely worth checking out if it sounds like it’s up your alley. Make me an offer an you can have my copy for the 360 – I paid $20 for it. Here’s the video:

Graphically the game is beautiful – in fact it’s one of the best looking games I’ve played on the PS3. There’s great use of light and shadow, very detailed textures, excellent models and animation, and great art direction.

Audio is similarly superb – it’s one of the best sounding games I’ve played on the PS3 as well and the voice acting was great.

Gameplay is a mixed but mostly positive bag. On the downside, the game’s fairly repetitive, and while the ship is realistic and the game breaks up the corridor crawling with some great action set pieces in very large spaces, there’s still a ton of corridor crawling and it can get old. The controls are tight but the weapons are a mixed bag – some seem much more effective than others no matter how you upgrade them and it’s difficult to know where to spend your resources effectively. The difficulty seemed pretty fair on medium. There are a number of physics and logic puzzles to work out, often while under fire from multiple enemies, and these were some of the highlights of the game.

The plot was just ok – it starts out like a riff on the plot from Aliens, with you and your crew dispatched to rescue an orbital mining operation that sent out a distress signal then stopped communicating, but it morphs into a muddle of religion, government conspiracy, double crosses, alien artifacts and a mutating alien lifeform that’s has some similarities to the one in the classic John Carpenter movie The Thing. It wasn’t bad by any means but by the end Susan and I were weary of it.

The game has one other superb attribute – it’s got one of the best interfaces I’ve seen in a game. Most everything you do and interact with in the game you do via a 3d computer interface that projects out of the spacesuit you’re wearing or out of objects you encounter. It’s really well done and I hope more games mimic it.

I picked this up used for $35 but would have been just as happy paying $60 retail for it – it’s a really great game and well worth a look.

Here’s a video to give you a sense of gameplay and graphics: