2014. nov. 11.

Bethesda took a hard row to hoe by trying to revive a legendary series, the Fallout saga of Black Isle. Ancient Fallout fans of the gamer population – who got into this post-apocalyptic, radio active world in 1997 and 1998, Anno Domini – were making grimaces on the first pictures and videos. Most of them were seeing just a post-apocalyptic Oblivion behind the trailers, and this scared off a lot of players even at the beginning. Somewhere I can understand it because the IV. episode of the legendary Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion was dividing RPG fans seriously. After Morrowind, a classic CRPG, Oblivion from the Spring of 2006 was an action-adventure game full of RPG elements. It was disappointing for a lot, so they had the right to be afraid of an “Oblivion with guns!” – quoted from Todd Howard, leading producer of Bethesda. Todd felt like this, but what we got in the end was much more than a new Oblivion with firearms in a nuclear setting! The story and setting of the Fallout series is based on America in the 50s. This was an era of nuclear arms race, silly songs, cold war producing the antagonistic America Dream, exemplary life in a carefree consumer society which raises and feeds perfectly sterile plastic emotions. However, the creator of the Fallout setting, Tim Cain was dare to go further and changed history. The world of Fallout is like a future imagined in the 50s. The main characteristics are the wanton use of nuclear energy, the advancement of technology to a point where robots are serving a softened puppet society and cars are fueled by fusion power, and finally, the frenzied nuclear arms race. Cold war lasted longer than in real, till in 2077 the fear of a world in flames came true. As a requiem of the long war against China, the whole planet was sprinkled with atom bombs. Of course, the American Dream must have not to dissipate, and a chosen lot escaped to underground shelters built by Vault-Tec. Years passed, generations grew up before the huge airlocks opened again, and people could start a new life on the wasted surface of Earth,...

2014. nov. 11.

I’ve tried it. Really. Several times. Again and again. Finally, I gave it up; this game is a no-go. It has a number of problems in its own, not to mention a comparison to the great predecessor. Mainly that it completely smells like a franchise. I bought it without a thought, because Fallout 3 (FO3) made the bed for it very nicely. What’s more, the setting reaches back to a much older time; the first two episodes were released sometimes in ’97-98, and CRPG fans lost their heart to them immediately. Anyone says anything, in my opinion, FO3 (released in 2008) deserved the Game of the Year title. Besides the complex system of interaction and free roam setting, the consequences of your character’s deeds made it an excellent computer role-playing game. Then they released… this thing known as Fallout: New Vegas (FO:NV). I deliberately waited for it. As I wrote above, I bought it without a thought. Then it was sitting in the computer for a long time, because I simply couldn’t play with it. The Western impact didn’t help the usual Fallout-atmosphere at all. It didn’t became both of them – instead it became something in-between without any clear outline. It isn’t Western enough, not even with all the gamble and the environment, and this unpleasant impression certainly lessens the original post-apocalyptic Fallout-atmosphere too. Characters are raw, or maybe they are just not unique enough. In this moment I can’t remember any figure more illustrious than the others. Another boring element was the radio, and a third was the row of events. The music and the DJs got entrapped in the snare of self-repetition in no time. Just imagine how exciting it is to listen boringly well-known and average hits while you are walking on the bleak plains and hillsides. Yes, I have a problem with the hills too. I understand why I can’t climb a high-pitched mountainside. However, plant life clearly marks if you can pass on a terrain, and it is very annoying to barge into an invisible wall on the middle of a grassy and easily walkable hillside. I felt limited in my freedom of exploration, in a game expected...

2014. nov. 11.

The term “role-playing game” is not about a character sheet. By this fact Fable III shows the fig to all the story-driven action, adventure and/or hack’n’slash games that try to make you believe they have something to do with the CRPG genre, just because they have a character creation and/or development system. Here and now we can tell they have not. Because the lack of character creation one can believe Fable III is more like a JRPG, but the similarity stops here. You don’t have to play through a linearly written story — of course, there is a story, but most of the time you can go forward as you wish, and a lot of things depend on your actions. Let me tell that 30% of the game is story, one fifth of it is combat, and the rest (you count it right: half of it) is partly treasure hunt, partly a free associating social RPG. Unfortunately, the second episode wasn’t released on PC, but in its time the first Fable squarely showed that combat is only a necessary but not basic element of a fantasy game. Opponents could be defeated easily, so combat couldn’t hinder you in exploring the story, which was an essential hero tale. The mere slip of a boy became a powerful hero that cleaned his homeland by weapons and magic. This was a simple but perfect foundation spiced with some fashioning, posing, love (even between the same sexes) and chicken kicking. In Fable common people are not just garnish for the main meal but organic parts of the interaction between the player character and the world. In the third installment this was lifted to such a high level that literally amazed me. Fable III supplied me with everything I felt missing from CRPGs in general: You can be friends, you may run errands, you can love each other, fuck (The Legendary Condom of the Gods +5 — no comment), get married, maybe you get an STD, give birth to a bastard, etc. Or you can go on the other way and build your kingdom on intimidation, sacking and tyranny. Because you will be a king or queen, and that’s...

2014. nov. 11.

Imagine what Baldur’s Gate would be if upgraded with modern, three-D graphics and some German precision. The River of Time (TroT) is based on the system and world settings of a PnP RPG famed as German D&D, and broadly speaking, it gives you the experience I’ve tried to catch in the first sentence. I suppose it was not a very good business decision to publish a game that can catch only a smaller part of a smaller part of the gamer audience in general. In the same time, this tiny group of gamers will rank it among the ten best CRPG of all time. But not because it is really one of the bests. It’s a decently manufactured stuff, all right, but it doesn’t punch too much weight. But the experienc is fascinating. Honestly speaking, Baldur’s Gate has no special place in my heart. I have several problems with it; at the end I felt like trying to brawl myself out of the nightmares of a power maniac Dungeon Master. There was no catharsis, no satisfaction from the well-finished adventure. To tell you an example, Icewind Dale was much more balanced. Of course, I don’t mention these two games at random. In spite of every flaw they have and beside every merit they have, their most important characteristic is that they symbolize a sort of barbaric-heroic age of computer role-playing games. Compared to the latest CRPGs they are like Conan books compared to the Earthsea series. If you doesn’t know/understand what I babble here, don’t mind about it, but I tell you that perhaps you won’t be able to handle TroT on its place. Because its rightful place is on the neo-barbaric-heroic shelf, and it has not too many companion there. You can put the first episode (Drakensang: The Dark Eye [TDE]) there, and maybe the recently released Legend of Grimrock too (although it is more like a neo-antique thing), but I don’t know more. Just a brief summary: The prehistoric age of CRPGs was marked by text-only games, and the transition to a new era can be characterized by Eye of the Beholder, Champions of Krynn and the early Ultima series. Then came the...

Third episodes are somehow hard to release. Fans had to wait ten years for Fallout 3, and the case of Doom 3 was exactly the same. Diablo III beat them by an extra three years to sharpen the appetite. So we waited thirteen years, and at last the favorite clicking-monsterkiller game os a good many people arrived. Among the several reasons of lateness the most important is that the game was rewritten three times. No wonder, the development started in 2001, and there was a lot of advancement in the technology since then. Not to mention the open secret that the character development system of the second Diablo was worth not heap of crap. The multi-way development opportunities were actually almost one-way at each character, because only the most effective characters could walk through the whole game. Only in the recent years the system was altered such way that skills started to strengthen each other. In spite of this Diablo II was successful enough to make the bed for the third part. The enormousness of the fan base was perfectly indicated by the 6.3 million copies sold on the first week. A must add; it deserved. Because the game was made excellently. From the graphix to the skill system lots of things were rethought and rewritten. It is not boring to replay it on different difficulty levels, because the monsters and the spells can bring new challenges and things to explore. On Normal difficulty you can watch the environment, read the story, but on Nightmare and Hell difficulties you have to be more and more tactical with the skills and the equipment. Relatively to the previous episode, character development was entirely reformed. There is no chance to purchase ability points, which – by the reason mentioned above – had no use anyway, but in exchange we get a level-dependent skill system with a heap of modification runes, and that makes hundreds of combinations to use what you want in the given situation. You can overwrite your choice anytime, so you can adopt to the various situation and will never “botch” your character. Identify and Town Portal spells had vanished, as did the Horradric Cube,...

2014. Sze. 29.

If you liked Darksiders: Wrath of War, then you will love the second installment. Apart from the story that is simple like a pebble, everything is epic. The characters, the locations and generally the whole experience raise the series to such a level that I was just wondering about what can come in the third and the fourth part? Briefly for newbies: In the world of Darksiders the end came, so heaven and hell are battling and humanity is extinct. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse came, or in the first part rather just one, War, who tries to tidy up. But the Seventh Seal is not broken yet, and the Horseman was summoned by a great power to saddle the Apocalypse on him. It is typically the case of the chicken and the egg: no one can tell if the World’s End brings the Horsemen or the Horsemen bring the Apocalypse. Anyway, War does his homework with a gentlemanly cut (hmm… with some thousands of powerful cuts), and at the end he breaks the Seventh Seal. Because of this he goes to prison powerless, but his fellow companions hear the call and hurry down from the sky like falling stars. That is the point where the first part ends. The second one begins when his buddy, Death gets the general picture and looks after things to help War. It belongs to the story that the four Horsemen are members of the same race, the Nephilim, which they exterminated by themselves. They are like brothers, and this gives the motivation for Death’s quest. War mostly showed some deficiency in the area of anger management, but Death is another matter; he is not able to think little. He must pick on the biggest ones and gave no littler quest than to erase War’s sin to help the bro. If it was not enough to find it out: He wanna erase the Apocalypse and resurrect humanity. Here I must emphasize the bright twist; a Horseman of the Apocalypse, Death, the one-man-executor-squadron is fighting for the resurrection of a powerless race whose only thing to do in the multiverse is to live, mate, become sinners and saints while...

2014. Sze. 29.

Do you know the old, ternary apportionment of the world: Heaven is up there, Hell is down somewhere, and between them there is a planet called Earth? At the end, judgement day comes when spheres above and below are clashing together. Where else, if not in the middle realm? In the setting of Darksiders there are some great changes in the topic of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. According to the Bible, they are the messengers of God, forerunners of judgement day and harbingers of doom at His command. However, in the world of the game they are the last remnants of a race created before the angels, and judged to extermination like flawed prototypes. The last four members of the race swore an oath: In exchange for their lives they keep the Law, in Heaven and Hell alike. Featuring God is always problematic, regardless of media, so the developers decided to insert the Charred Council, a lower power under Him. The Council is — strictly in my definition — less an executing but a judging authority. The relationship is between God and the Council is not entirely clear to me, but in fact, it is not so important, have no influence on the game experience. The point is: This way the game picks up some kind of gothic fantasy style, avoiding sanctimony and blasphemy alike. The beginning of the story can be guessed from the foregoing: Forces of Heaven and Hell are battling on Earth (in the present era), then the Horsemen come and the party is on. Or rather, only one Horseman comes, War, who roughly spanks everyone but the big one at the end of the intro. As a dedicated executioner, he is hated by everyone, practically, so no wonder if all the angels and demons want to kill him at sight. The real conflict starts when it turns out that War came alone, and the other Horsemen were not summoned. The Council charge him with descending on Earth by his own will, but he firmly claims that he was called. Finally he gets a simple task: Without his former power he must prove his truth or die trying. During...

2014. Sze. 29.

  Once upon a time, after the release of the game I tried the paying version out in a free weekend, and I wrote my first impressions about Champions Online, but that is not actual anymore. Cryptic Studios (they gave us the Star Trek MMO too) restarted the whole heroismo in a partly free version with microtransactions. What you basically must know about the game can be summarized in short: The game system and the setting is based on Champions PnP (Pen and Paper) superhero role-playing game, and the microtransaction model doesn’t decrease the enjoyment level. Of course, if you pay for the game, you get more possibilities, but that doesn’t mean that you can be stronger with the bought options. For example, you can entirely customize the powers and appearance of your hero, while free players can improve their characters only in given directions. However, because only the style and the side effects (stunning, freeze, poison, etc.) make differences between the powers, paying players get no better or stronger things, but they have significantly more options. Mentioning style… How can a superhero video game grab players who doesn’t know the original PnP role-playing game? With style, of course. There are no Marvel or DC comics characters known by millions to make the setting unique. The gameplay is the same as offered by other MMOs and superhero games: You beat the bad guys and take the reward. Graphics is prime, but this is a requirement nowadays. What do remain, if not the style? And the game is stylish, that’s a fact, or I can write that it’s rioting in cool elements. So that somewhere I can’t even interpret the abundance offered by the developers. It’s because I have a character, it’s appearance was made unique during character creation, and I don’t wanna change it. Well, a few days ago I gave her a cape, but I don’t get used to the sight and I’m not sure I will keep it. In words, I have a unique toon and I wouldn’t buy 99 percent of the costumes in C-Store even if I could. Maybe the devices and some other things, but I don’t feel the...