This is partly due to the fact that I’m already a little sick of everyone talking about Diablo 3. It’s also partly due to the fact that I couldn’t play Diablo 3 if I wanted to, since my housemate is a photographer and has a penchant for uploading every day as opposed to uploading at night, when I leave the house for shift work. Consideration is overrated, apparently, or something. But luckily, old-school games are only a few megabytes large, so it’s all good right? (Sob.)

Old Duke's buggy makes me think of Big Red Racing.

Death Rally got a mention on Pixel Hunt over a year ago when Ken mentioned that Remedy Entertainment were re-releasing the PC title for iPhones. To coincide with the announcement the developers (responsible for Alan Wake and Max Payne) decided to publish the original for free on their website, although the link isn’t actually hosted on their servers any more.

One wonders if it was more popular than they expected. There’s certainly a lot to like from this top-down racer, which used to be a fairly popular genre back in the day (think Ignition, Micro Machines, Super Sprint, the freeware title GeneRally and a bunch of shareware titles).

A major drawcard for this little title today is that it runs natively on Windows 7 without the use of DosBOX, gracefully taking away all that pre-game fiddling you sometimes have to do with ancient titles. The controls are still pretty sharp too – although racers of this ilk often force you to take corners much, much wider than one would normally expect.

You know he deserves one in the back. Go on. It's worth it.

I was fortunate enough to be given a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta key yesterday and even more fortunate that my housemate was not one another of his long upload marathons, allowing me to gracefully download the client.

I don’t expect that kind of charity to last throughout the weekend (although it won’t matter on Saturday – I’ll get to that later) but luckily, CS:GO has a full assortment of bots that I can familiarise myself with when I’m weeping tears of blood because I’m getting demoted from Grandmaster in Starcraft 2 (since that requires you to actually play, sadly).

The old-school method of sharpening your aim in Counter-Strike involved heavy bot sessions anyway, so I’m perfectly fine with this. It wouldn’t do well to have my skills get rusty, especially considering the amount of changes to the recoil for most of the arsenal. The inclusion of new grenades will also require some fiddling about with, not to mention the slight tweaks to classic maps like Aztec and Dust (creating new angles for players, which means you have to move around the map slightly differently so you don’t get caught out).

You’d be surprised just how technical removing a box here or there can actually make the game. What I’m curious to find out is, after all these years, Valve have decided to bite the bullet and make the game more favoured for the aggressors; traditionally, most maps favour the Counter-Terrorists, the ones who get to sit back and camp the bomb.

There’s a bunch of other features I’ll have to check out as well – Gungame is included as a game mode from the outset, a tribute to the strength of modding communities, which is cute given that Counter-Strike itself is a mod – but I’m more interested in the maps themselves.

Oh, one other thing: if you’re in Sydney this Saturday, you should really consider coming down to the Paragon Hotel at Circular Quay around 6pm. Here’s a picture why:

Nerds assemble.

All those people are taking part in what’s known as BarCraft, where a few hundred nerds gather to watch Starcraft 2 in a pub and generally be awesome. The magnet this weekend is the resolution of the Global Starcraft 2 League finals in South Korea, a best-of-seven match between two of the best players in the world (they’re Korean, of course, although a foreigner made it as far as the quarter-finals which is fairly impressive).

If you’re interested, all the details can be found on the Australian Pro League’s Facebook page for the event. It’s a very friendly crowd – even the bearded guy in the front is cool, really. I’d strongly recommend that if you have any interest at all in gaming, come down – not so much because people are sharing their passion for Starcraft, but because hundreds of people are gathering to watch gaming in a bar.

And that is awesome.

So, dear reader, tell me: are you doing anything equally awesome this weekend?

Staring detachedly into the middle distance

Just mere moments ago, the developers of MechWarrior Online jumped onto Twitter to talk about the game. There were far more questions than the two gentlemen were able to address, but there’s loads of interesting information coming out of the chats. So instead of summarising the information, I’m just going to list the questions and responses verbatim from the tweet chat. If you’re on Twitter, you might like to check out the #mwochat hashtag to see all the tweets (including unanswered questions).

Russ Bullock, President, Piranha Games
Bryman Ekman, Creative Director, Piranha Games

Q: Will certain mechs be house specific and not available across the board, or is it a free for all in that sense

A: Mechs will not be limited to a house, however, we plan to adjust the C-Bill cost based on your allegiance (Bryan)

Q: Can legs be blown off? Is their limping with significant hip/leg damage?
A: Legs cannot be blown off. However you can do critical damage. The leg becomes useless and the mech limps (Bryan)

Q: Will the rank system have a “skill” level to pit us against similarly skilled players?
At launch match making will be very simple to maximize play time. As we evolve the game, matchmaking will be tuned (Bryan)

Q: Any chance of the quick-zoom reticule from MW3 coming back? Loved that feature!
A: Yes, but it will be slightly different in execution (Bryan)

Q: Since its F2P and can be updated on the fly. Do you actually plan to have an Open Beta, or release at minimal working condition
A: Yes, we plan to have an open beta (Bryan)

Q: What happens to the damage overflow if you shoot someone in a destroyed (but still attached) leg?
A: Currently we are not allowing damage overflow as a form of balance (Bryan)

Q: How much environmental destruction do you plan for the MWO project ?
A: What you see in videos is close to final. We plan on adding in tree destruction and small prop destruction (Bryan)

Q: The quadrupeds, and so-called “unsee” will be part of the game at some point?
A: Quads are not planned for launch. We may review them post launch. They pose some technical challenges. (Bryan)

Q: Will tonnage limits be added to matches, or is it strictly Role being filled as needed in a match?
A: Matchmaking will be limit at launch to basic pairings and evolve to class, tonnage, and a form of BV (Bryan)

Q: Mech skins? Or ability to color your mech to taste?
A: Both. Skins and cameo specs/patterns are supported (Bryan)

Q: How will the player’s initial ‘mech(s) be selected?
A: Players will get 1 free mech to start. They can chose from 4 1 in each class – light, med, heavy, assault (Bryan)
A: You will be able to choose from a selection based on the role you want to play (Russ)

Q: How many mechs are we going to be able to have in our stable at launch and atm how many can we unlock or buy after launch?
A: Great question. There shouldn’t be a limit to how many a person can own. Right at launch including variants? Dozens (Russ)

Q: Will you have (bad wot example) premium mech’s
A: I think there are some really neat ideas like notable named hero mechs (Russ)

Q: How can I guarantee my lance will be able to play together? eg the random matchmaking in other games is annoying
A: You can group together similar to a console party and then launch into a match as a group (Russ)

Q: Is there plans to show, graphically in-game, each different weapon as it is put into your load out?
A: We do a fair bit of this now and we will be able to add more and more as the game goes along (Russ)

Q: Will internal components be destroyable, can I take out an enemy weapon system in the torso with destroying the location
A: Yes absolutely that is your greatest tactic in dealing with enemies. Facing a Hunchback you know where to shoot (Russ)

Q: How many developers PGI is currently busy on the MWO?
A:  Around 40 + IGP and other support staff (Russ)

Q: In regards to group sizes, is that the upper limit of mechs in a match? Would there be matches with more than 12?
A: yes 12v12 is 24 mechs. Limit at least for launch who knows where the future takes us (Russ)

Q: How will the game deal with headhunting (Aiming at the head for an easy kill)?
A: In short we are and will deal with it just like the problem of legging. We won’t stick our head in the sand and ignore (Russ)

Q: what makes a slow medium (say, the Hunchback) more enticing than a fast heavy / assault (like the Cyclops)?
A: Good question but tough to answer in a tweet. The hunchback will probably cost half as much and is still a mean mech (Russ)

General responses
We do not currently have plans to release an SDK or Editor to the public. (Bryan)

We do support multiple monitors and joysticks. We have not officially announced how many or which ones (Bryan)

As to min specs, we don’t have all the info yet but we will quickly discover that info in the next couple of weeks (Russ)

As to VOIP – we know our players will use it and they have their favorite, but we are exploring an official option atm (Russ)

As to group sizes- well our game breaks down into lances and 3 lances is a company. So your groups can be up to 12 (Russ)

Yes we are working very hard to ensure MWO has servers in every major region. Things look very promising, talks underway (Russ)

As to all the questions about Beta! Ready? Stay tuned for that info soon ( as in next week ) (Russ)

Ninja Gaiden, a name once synonymous with high quality action and crushing yet fair difficulty, has had its name sullied. The release of NG3 is the low point in the series, not because it is a disappointing game, but it blatantly abandons what previous NG games did so well and replaces these parts with mindless button mashing and a difficulty level that challenges no one.

Where did it all go wrong? All the developers had to do to please fans was make some new levels and keep the existing mechanics – let’s face it, the games weren’t masterpieces of design. Why stray so far from a winning formula? Was it an attempt to increase sales or did Team Ninja honestly believe that going down this path was a better option?

To get some sort of idea as to how far NG3 has strayed from what makes a Ninja Gaiden game great, consider the following feature list:

-          Difficult yet rewarding gameplay, including tight, complex combat and platforming.

-          Multiple upgradeable weapons, each featuring a different move set.

-          Various different types of magic and special attacks, all upgradeable.

-          Dynamic boss fights designed to push the player yet never be unfair.

All of these things are missing from the third game. What makes this worse is the only new feature introduced to NG3 is quicktime events. Gone are the extremely rewarding manoeuvres of the first two titles and in their place are “press appropriate button” sections. Perhaps Team Ninja wanted want to take a leaf from the God of War playbook, but in doing so they have bitten the hand that feeds them.

An obvious reason for things going haywire is the departure of the infamous Tomonobu Itagaki. A reportedly arrogant, immodest and brash game designer, Itagaki clearly had a vision for the Ninja Gaiden series: brutal yet fair action that rewards patience and practice. Had Itagaki been involved in the production of NG3 there is little doubt that the end result would have been much different from the watered down mess that has been published.

But is one man alone that important? This is not the first time it has happened. When Warren Spector left Ion Storm we got Dues Ex: Invisible War (which I quite liked-Ed), when ID Software guru John Carmack handed over the reins of Quake to Raven Software we got Quake 4. It is clear that some franchises need the guidance of a head figure and that without this leadership development flounders and struggles to retain its vision.

To further illustrate this, try imagining the next Gears of War game without the influence of Cliffy B, the next Mortal Kombat without Ed Boon or the next Metal Gear Solid game without Hideo Kojima. It is hard to believe that any of these series would be able to continue successfully without the focused influence of their guiding minds. These individuals have become the franchise.

As mentioned previously, “God of War” has also played a large part in NG3’s downfall. When GoW burst onto the gaming scene it gave players the ability, no matter their skill level, to pick it up and play. It also introduced many players to quick time events. These QTE’s were incorporated into cut scenes to add interactivity to the story. NG3 has belatedly copied this approach and yet at the same time missed the essence of what made them work in God of War.

The combat in GoW was accessible and easy to get into, yet beneath this accessibility was a fighting system that was deep and rewarding. It was a system that gave players that put the time and effort into learning its nuances a richer experience. NG3’s combat is also accessible and easy to get into yet it is missing depth. Without this, NG3 simply degrades into a button mashing fest, press X to win so to speak.

In GoW, QTE’s were used to great effect and were naturally implemented.  Command prompts were at the edges of the screen allowing the player to complete the event while still observing the cool things happening. These subtleties have been missed by Team Ninja and NG3 simply reverts to the most hated type of QTE, the pointless one. For example, every time you need to climb a wall you have to play a QTE. This seems pointless, you are after all playing the world’s foremost Ninja, and surely climbing up a wall could be done in a much more stylish and entertaining manner.

Ninja Gaiden 3 isn’t an abject failure. It looks great, the story is acceptable and the music is nice. However, these superficial plusses cannot hide the fact that Team Ninja failed to uphold a legacy. Leaving the very thing that defined the series behind them was a mistake that is unforgivable in the eyes of many fans. Hopefully, should Ninja Gaiden 4 become a reality,  Team Ninja go back to what worked, and we can place the third alongside all the other sequels that deserve to be forgotten.

Look upon me, and despair!

It’s a great week for games, with two of my favourite franchises seeing their third iterations released over the next several days. I always felt that Max Payne had some of the best shooting available in its time. This was particularly due to its groundbreaking “bullet time” mechanic that we see now in a number of modern games.

But shooting people’s faces with guns isn’t my flavour this week. Bashing their heads in with fists of fury is.

I’ve always enjoyed games in this genre. I played loads of Diablo 2 (not so much of the original), and followed it up with games like Titan Quest and Torchlight. One of the best games of 2010, Bastion, would heartily fall into the action-RPG category.

I spent a little time with Diablo 3 during the open beta weekend, and I liked what I played. The levels were a touch easy, but given it was only one dungeon, I’m confident the difficulty ramps up in later stages. I liked the characters, and though the skill trees are fundamentally different from its predecessors, it was interesting enough to keep me intrigued. The flow of combat was as good as, if not better, than the previous games. I never once felt that I had to stop the action just so I could complete some meaningless book-keeping.

There were a few lessons I wished the game took from modern ARPG designs in games such as Torchlight. The selling of useless items could be better streamlined. The utility of revealing unknown items, and the town portal could be better optimised. But despite these minor blemishes, Diablo 3 is a game I aim to spend countless hours on.

Diablo 3 will be available for the PC on 15 May 2012. It can be purchased via Battle.net for AU$79.95, but you could probably find lower prices on CD-key websites.

This and Top Cat is largely responsible for the current state of my subconscious. I'm OK with that.

I was walking home from work the other day with a colleague. He’s about the same age as me but he started gaming pretty much as soon as he left the womb, like myself. It doesn’t feature in all of our conversations – gaming that is – but there was one we had that evoked memories so powerful that I couldn’t let it go this week.

We started talking about old MS-DOS games. And when I mean old DOS games, I really mean games that were programmed in BASIC. Yeah, that old.

When I think of BASIC games, the first one that comes to mind was the Scorched Earth-style game where two gorillas were standing on the top of skyscrapers hurling explosive bananas at each other. It’s probably the most memorable title – it was programmed by IBM and came with DOS 5 along with Nibbles, after all.

And while I couldn’t remember it at the time, the mention of Gorillas made me think of (apart from the band) the rather technical Battleship Bismarck, a tactical game that pitted the Germans against the British in a turn-based naval war.

Anyway, the conversation then quickly directed to the picture you see the above, the lovable and astonishingly ancient 1984 title Alleycat. I’m almost embarrassed that I forgot about this title for so long – when I think of the first video game I ever played, my mind always steers towards Microprose’s F/11-7A Stealth Fighter, which spawned my love of all things Sid Meier (a crush that served me well in later years once Civilization 2 rolled around).

But the real truth is that out of all the games I played first, this was probably it. It wasn’t until my colleague brought it up that I remembered that my mum actually nicknamed me Alleycat – something I’ve never actually told anyone – after watching me repeatedly fail at this game.

Alley Cat’s actually a tricky little platformer, with the player required to help navigate a host of trash cans, dogs, electric eels and other obstacles to kiss a female cat, at which point you get an extra life, that little nugget of satisfaction that somehow prompts you to waste hours on end not dying so you can brag about how you truly are the king of the gutter. Or something.

It’s another example of just how memorable games can really be, even something as unsophisticated as this classic from the 1980s. I was almost physically shaking when I started to rack through the recesses of my brain.

I suppose that’s common for a lot of people in life at some stage or another; it’s cool that I was able to have “that moment” thanks to something from the 8-bit era.

But enough about me. What about yourselves – what memories do you have from gaming?

This episode sees Tim Schafer drop in to chat about Grim Fandango, which is a fancy (and only slightly misleading) way of saying that we do have an interview with the man, but he didn’t exactly swing by for tea and biscuits. Nonetheless, this episode’s highlight certainly consists of the extended Grim Fandango chat that Tim (err, our Tim) recorded with Tim (the famous one) for an article in the UK’s Retro Gamer magazine almost a full year ago now.

Not that skeleton noir should overshadow everything else. The front end of the show brings some punch of its own, in the form of two special guests (Two! That’s not only more than one, it’s also more than one-and-a-half!) including Kotaku AU’s Mark Serrels, as well as Lizzie dominator Tracey Lien, who could also be associated with the Australian Kotakus (and roughly seventy three thousand other places). Oh, and Jickle and Nathan join Tim, too. They even bring their potty mouths along for the outing.

____________________________________________________

You can listen and download the podcast directly (.mp3 file) through the player below, but please also subscribe to the Cast on iTunes! That way, you will automatically download new episodes as soon as they’re live on the site.

0:00:00 – Intro

0:03:51 – Trials Evo, Shadowloo Showdown, Endless Space and Resistance 3

0:22:07 – Music – Baba Yetu (guitar) (by Sandra Bae)

0:25:20 – Tim Schafer talks Grim Fandango

1:13:33 – Wrap up

Theme Music: Visitors from Dreams (by Mathieu Stempell Dma-Sc)

Mark’s Pepsi Max supplied by the Devil himself

Helpful Links:

Shadowloo Showdown. It’s about fighting games and stuff.

Sandra Bae’s Youtube page. You should probably click this.

Tim Schafer’s Grim Fandango design diary

Do you ever feel like there just isn’t enough time to read about new console sports games? No? Me neither, but that didn’t stop me from mashing together two new sports games into a single review under that extremely flimsy premise. To be honest, there are a lot of titles to cross the desk here at Pixel Hunt, and not all of them are enthusiastically snapped up for review.  Sports games are often victims, considering they’re usually “improved” carbon copies of the previous year’s installment. So to make the whole process a bit easier (mainly for me), sit back and enjoy a special Pixel Hunt Dual Review: Sports Edition.

We begin with UFC: Undisputed 3, developed by veteran wrestling game studio Yuke’s. Your initial experience here can be a little frenetic if you don’t follow UFC in general. Matches veer back and forth from boxing to kick-boxing to wrestling to what you’re pretty sure is just a good old-fashioned man cuddle. It’s not always clear who’s currently winning or how mounting another man is helping him get there (it can’t hurt-Ed).

But persevere and you’ll find that UFC3 actually houses quite a complex and well-balanced fighting system that does a damn good job of translating the frantic struggle and sometimes sheer luck that’s found in a real UFC match. Most matches are short, vicious affairs ending in the first round. If you don’t keep your guard up almost any hard strike to the head has the possibility to daze you, and once dazed you’re only a few hits away from being knocked out completely.

This is what I liked about the game. It’s visceral, and not just in that marketing execu-speak way. Heavy punches and kicks can take a while to wind up but when they hit there’s a meaty smack that really satisfies. This sensation is taken up to 11 when an opponent is knocked to the mat, as finishing the match often requires you to pounce on them and unceremoniously punch their head into paste. The game doesn’t give you a health bar so the only way you can gauge your damage is by the visible cuts and bruises that build up on your character during a bout. Visible damage also lets you know what areas you should begin to concentrate on actively guarding, as TKOs can occur when any body part is damaged to its limit.

While your first inclination might be to create a stand-up boxer for simplicity’s sake, the game features some pretty deep customisation options to allow you to really create a fighter with your own personal style. The three basic styles are striking, grappling and submission, but each can be tweaked with its own flavour. Muay Thai fighters, for instance, can throw devastating knee attacks from clinches while Sambo style fighters have a unique array of leg takedowns and submissions.

So the actual fighting is brilliant. A pity then that this enjoyable core is surrounded by uninteresting modes and a metric ass-load of loading screens. Seriously, the gap from “Press Start” to the main menu is a full 60 seconds. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so noticeable if the fights lasted longer, but given the game is prone to short, sharp bouts you’ll probably end up spending more time loading the game than actually playing it. The Career Mode is also a bit of a dud given that it’s not driven by any actual story. It’s merely a long series of self-scheduled matches with long breaks for repetitious training to improve your stats.

If you can look past this then UFC: Undisputed 3 is a really enjoyable game, particularly if you’re big on the wrestling genre in general. It can be a little impenetrable at the beginning, but once you’ve managed to get a handle on the controls there’s a really satisfying balance and feel to the combat.

8

Our other game today is Grand Slam Tennis 2 from EA Sports. For those playing along at home this is actually less of a sequel and more of a multi-platform HD release of the original Grand Slam Tennis on Wii. It’s up in the air why it’s billing itself as a sequel but it’s probably so people assume that it was good enough to have a predecessor. Or maybe three years is just too long a gap to finally deliver a cross-console port.

Whatever the reason, the final product is an unremarkable, straight-laced tennis sim that only really distinguishes itself from the competition by the fact that EA Sports actually ponied up the cash to pay for the Wimbledon licence. There is a full roster of real life tennis stars including Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, the Williams sisters and our own Lleyton Hewitt. The roster also includes several tennis legends like Bjorn Borg, Boris Becker and Lindsay Davenport. The inclusion of legends is cool from a tennis standpoint, but it does end up looking a little odd when your opponent for the Australian Open semi finals is an 80′s styled Stefan Edberg. It’s even more odd when you manage to play a match with Pat Cash taking on John McEnroe … that’s commentated by Pat Cash and John McEnroe.

Your enjoyment here is reliant on one thing and one thing only: do you enjoy watching tennis? If you do then Grand Slam Tennis 2 does a very competent job of bringing the sport to your console, but if you don’t then you’re likely to discover that the nature of tennis is irrepressible. It’s a slow scoring and low action sport that certainly isn’t made any more exciting by being in video game format.

The game uses the right thumbstick to control all your shots, which ends up being very easy to learn but can be quite tricky to use. The tutorial mode will show you how to direct and spin your shots, but it also shows the inaccuracy of mapping everything onto a thumbstick. Take Tiger Woods in comparison: in Tiger, your golf swing’s accuracy depends on how steady you can keep your thumbstick while making a straight line down and then up. Grand Slam works on essentially the same principal, but it demands it every few seconds instead of after a carefully planned address. The result is (I suppose quite literally) a hit-and-miss affair. It’s incredibly difficult to paint the corners of the court with shaped shots, because there really is only a fraction of a millimetre on the inputs between a cross-court slice and a mid-court return.

There is the option to play with Arcade controls, which maps different shot types to different face buttons, but this comes with the extra difficulty of using the left thumbstick for both movement and court aiming.  Hitting the shot becomes easier but placing it right where you want it is still difficult.

Like UFC3, the Career mode here is also quite bare-bones.  A career lasts ten years, each year encompassing four major tournaments and four off-season events.  In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that while I stuck out the career mode in UFC3 to the bitter end, I only lasted two years before moving on in Grand Slam. Although the game thankfully doesn’t make you play full matches every single round (the shortest allowed is 3 Games, 1 Set) I felt by the end of the first year that I’d seen everything that was coming my way and the second year didn’t do anything to shake my theory.

Supposedly there is a substantial and alarming difficulty hike mid-Career, but once again I didn’t actually make it far enough to confirm that. As I said earlier, Pat Cash returns from the Wii version to provide the match commentary and is joined by John McEnroe (who also harangues your progress through the tutorials). The banter isn’t bad, but it does repeat itself almost every single match. By the 50th time you’ve heard the pros and cons of hitting the ball deep, you’ll be reaching for your custom soundtracks to drown it all out. The official soundtrack is provided by Paul van Dyk and it’s fine except that being tennis is a silent game there is no music during matches, so he’s actually providing a soft trance accompaniment to the game menus.

Overall, Grand Slam Tennis 2 isn’t a bad game but it surely has to have one of the slimmest target audiences in the sports game genre (maybe beating out AFL Live). If a realistic tennis sim is what you’re after then this is the game for you … but it better be all you’re after!

6

Pigs is spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace....

Some of us are enjoying what has been lovingly nicknamed “Ball Sniper” (Dylan and Sniper Elite V2) in the past week. But I’ve been seeking something a little more otherworldly. Stellar Impact has been heaps of fun, though it’s hard to find a game. There’s not many people on there, and I’ve been kicked out of game lobbies more than once (I suspect my low level was the impetus for that).

I didn’t think that I’d be picking up anything new, but stumbling across the trailer for Endless Space whilst on Steam had me completely sold. I mean, just look at it:

I’ve got a soft spot for sci-fi 4x games, such as the Master of Orion series, Alpha Centauri, and Sins of a Solar Empire. I’m always terrible at these games, but that soft spot exists nonetheless. The combination of exploration, researching new technologies, building immense fleets of spaceships is intoxicating.

The game is currently in its alpha build, but pre-purchasing from Steam gives you immediate access. The current build doesn’t have any multiplayer, and only 5 of the eventual 8 races playable. Still, there’s plenty of content ready for consummation. The game is also fairly stable, and shows a high level of polish.

Endless Space is currently available for pre-purchase (with access to the alpha build) on Steam for US$22.49 (Admiral Edition) or US$26.24 (Emperor Edition).

But I digress. It’s just that the frustration you get sometimes when dealing with IT on the night shift – they’re tired and want sleep like everybody else – has been similar to something else that can only be politely described as labouring through.

I miss nebula. We need more nebula in our gaming lives.

When my housemate has been charitable enough to choke our internet connection with his repeated uploading and downloading (he’s a photographer, so it can’t be helped) I’ve taken to the Wing Commander Saga to relieve my frustration.

That was the plan, anyway, until I quickly realised that the fan-made remake of Origin’s glorious space opera was actually just as good at inducing rage as say, Counter-Strike or even, I shudder to mention, MOBA games.

It’s not entirely the developers fault; they’re working within the limitations of the Freespace 2 engine, and while it’s performed admirably so far, it lacks some of the more modern touches one would expect. The support for mice isn’t as good as Freelancer, while the inability to skip cut-scenes and voices makes for an incredibly frustrating experience considering how goddamned difficult the game actually is.

The difficulty should be expected I suppose: after all, that’s what the fans wanted, especially in light of how easy games can be these days. But I’m still struggling to complete a tutorial escort mission: without the support of my AI wingmen, the support ship I’m trying to save melts like butter and I cop a torrent of abuse for failing my primary mission.

There hasn’t been a lot of classic space operas over the years: the X3 and Evochron series comes to mind, with the latter probably being the best sequel to Freelancer in spirit as any, but that still doesn’t really prepare you for how punishing Wing Commander can be given the fact that you’re stepping back in time in regards to the control scheme.

If I’m feeling a little more masochistic this weekend, I might give the Wing Commander Saga another roll, although it’s worth pointing out that I’m having better luck playing the original Wing Commander than I am with the remake. Go figure.

What’s your weekend shaping up to be like?

But I have had my eye on the development of a particular indie game for the past months: Stellar Impact. I first read about this game on the always fantastic Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Though I’m not entirely familiar with the MOBA genre (DOTA, League of Legends, etc), but there were a couple of things that piqued my interest.

Turn around, bright eyes.

Firstly, I’m a bit of a naval theme nut (one of my lesser obsessions). I’m instantly attracted whenever a game has a strong naval flavour to it. Particularly so when that flavour bleeds into the combat mechanics. I’m reminded by games such as Sid Meier’s Pirates (the more recent incarnation), Harpoon or Fleet Command. And if anyone adds in a healthy dose of sci-fi, well, just shut up and take my money.

Following the MOBA formula, players control one of multiple classes of ships (from a frigate to a destroyer to a carrier). Forming teams with other players, they face off against another human team, capturing and destroying control points. The key difference here lies solely in the combat mechanics. Creeps (AI-controlled drones) do minimal damage to the other team’s control points, so the heavy lifting falls upon the players. The key to the game lies in the ability to manoeuvre your own ship. Ships move as you would expect any capital class ship to do: slow and ponderously. And because the maximum damage is done from a broadside position, changing a ship’s facing to maximise damage and minimise exposure is paramount.

I picked up the game just last week, and only managed to get two rounds (2v2) so far. There’s quite a steep learning curve, as each ship has its own pros, cons, skills and abilities to learn. But the people I’ve played with so far have been exceedingly patient, and have made my two matches a pleasant one. I’ll definitely be re-visiting the game some more this week.

Stellar Impact is available for the PC on either Steam or Desura for US$9.99.