7outof10-Video games & stuff

Looking for a good video game site, one written by gamers for gamers? Then this is the place to visit. It also happens to be the web magazine I write for, so you'll excuse the blatent plug. Here's the link: 7outof10

Game Review: MAG-PS3

While waiting for Zipper Interactive’s MAG to install its various components on first inserting the disc there’s a certain amount of anticipation and excitement as to what visceral delights lay beyond, and why shouldn’t there be? MAG: an online FPS with vast, sprawling combat zones with an heavy emphasis on team play and tactical planning, a healthy array of weapons and equipment ready to deal death upon your foes and of course, the chance to play with up to 255 other gamers. All the ingredients are there for what should be an afternoon of exciting, yet challenging mayhem. MAG, the thinking mans FPS. Yet for all its grandeur something’s not quite right about MAG, but to understand what that is one has to understand what Zipper Interactive have actually tried to achieve.

Technically speaking MAG is quite an achievement with teams made up of 64-128 players battling it out over huge, war torn environments with visuals that, while not as aesthetically pleasing as some other titles, still pack a punch with a frame rate that rarely misses a beat. It’s this level of commitment to keeping everything tightly sewn together that clearly sets SOCOM teams’ Grand Opus as more than just a tech-demo showing off the PS3’s extra grunt secretly hidden away beneath all that black, shiny plastic.

The front end is as much as one would expect from an FPS title. There’s a selection of different soldier types ranging from mercenaries, war criminals, ex-special operatives and so on. Each of these are placed into separate factions, (SVER, Raven and Valour), and each have their own selection of weapons and equipment to choose from. One you’ve decided your soldier type, faction and initial weapons loadout, (there are three to begin with, with others being unlocked as you progress), you’re ready to enter the combat zone. As with any other game of this type you begin with the obligatory training level which, if the joke cracking commander directing you is anything to go by, Zipper Interactive are a little embarrassed about: “Oh look, a rock, better make sure you ‘jump over’ that!”
Clearly if Zipper already knew what kind of gamer was going to pick up MAG on day of release, albeit one who probably wouldn’t require such a simplistic introduction on the basic functions of an FPS title, then it does raise the question as to why they included one at all? Once you’ve got your training out of the way, have waited patiently for the queuing time to hit zero and you’ve selected a squad to join, it’s time to deploy into the field.

256 players at any one time is a lot to take in, even for the grizzled FPS veteran, so MAG eases you in nicely with a ‘mere’ 64 players and little in the way of objectives. Experience is awarded for wounding, kills, repairs, healing, securing objectives etc. As you level up, so does the amount of players injected to the battle. The jump from 64 to 128 players is surprisingly quick with the move up to 256 taking a little more time, but with this being where the best of what MAG has to offer is, it is, for the most part, worth the slog.

While MAG certainly lacks the mayhem of close quarter combat found in the likes of Modern Warfare 2 it does have an intensity all on its own and when it all comes together and works it can often be an exhilarating experience. Of all the games currently doing the rounds in all things that is war, Zipper Interactives’ entry into what is ostensibly an overcrowded market is without a doubt the one that will conjure up the most images from your favourite war films. A relentless barrage of explosions churn up chunks of dirt and rock across each and every map, countless rockets hurtle overhead towards unknown targets behind you and a gazillion bullets zip by and ricochet in every direction, each one threatening to put you face down in the ground at every turn. If there is to ever be a follow up to MAG, then fully destructible environments would clearly be the most obvious inclusion to the format; in fact, with Zipper being able to hold everything neatly together in such huge playing areas with relative ease it would seem almost nonsensical not to include such a feature in a game desperately crying out for it.

In the early stages of play game modes are typical in that they range from the basic team death match, (Suppression), to capture and secure objectives, (Sabotage) found in many an online FPS experience. As you progress too much bigger battles with more players the action moves into an even more strategic environment under the headers ‘Acquisition’ and ‘Domination’. Here objectives range from infiltrating enemy territory to steal transport, destroying anti-aircraft batteries, eliminating enemy defensive lines and so on. It’s these later objectives that, while not brimming in originality, are enough to comfortably steer the game play away from becoming stale and somewhat hackneyed.

For all intents and purposes, Zipper Interactive have succeeded in their endeavour to bring mass player combat to the online world of the first person shooter and should you be lucky enough to venture into a match where a good percentage of players are all reading from the same page it does, as already stated, work very well. It’s a shame then that so much seems to have been lost on so many of Zipper Interactives’ target audience. As briefly touched on in the opening segment of this review MAG is a video game all about tactical planning and team play, indeed in order to get the best from MAG, working together as one unified unit is a requisite. Unfortunately the majority of your time spent with MAG will be on your own with barely a word spoken, beyond the occasional obscenity, between yourself and your ‘team mates’. Whole games where careful tactics are a necessity in order to gain the upper hand are left in a total shambles as each of your chosen brothers saunter off on their own with their only intent being to kill as many of the enemy as possible, completely oblivious to the objections that will secure them victory in the field and, somewhat ironically, garner them far more XP than any amount of headshots. If your dying avatar is suddenly given a second lease of life due to a comrade-in-arms sharing a medi-pack with you it’s not because they heard your desperate please for help but because they were most likely stood directly behind you at the time or happened to be passing by just moments before you drew your final breath. Looking back at the opening training sections it might have been more applicable if Zipper had used this tool to educate gamers on how MAG should be played as supposed to which button makes you crouch and which throws grenades.

But is it fair to lay MAGs failings at the feet of the very people who play it? Perhaps Zipper Interactive, in their eagerness to bring hundreds of players together via the most popular genre to hit consoles in the last ten years, made a glaring oversight when it came to what gamers actually want from their first person shooter experience? Maybe just gathering a few friends together to spend an evening ‘blowing shit up’ is all they require and to hell with plans of attack and thoughtful planning? Shoot first, ask questions later. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

Whatever the case, MAG still has a lot of work ahead of it and maybe, in time, it may find an audience worthy of its sense of grandeur. For now though, as long as gamers across the globe are content with the instant thrills provided by Modern Warfare 2 and more recently, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, MAG will continue to struggle in the depths of its own ambition.


7/10

Great Movie Moments: Superman Vs Clark Kent

Okay, Superman III was a decidely average film but this sequence, (the best in the movie), is solid gold.

WIP, (Work in Progress): Elhaim Maiden of Light

This is my first mini that isn't by GamesWorkshop/Citadel. As good as they are, GW aren't the best when it comes to sculpts of the fairer sex, (god only knows why given the sheer amount of talent at GW), so this has been a real challenge, but an enjoyable one so far. There's still lots of work to do but I should have her finished come Thursday when I have some time off from work.

The 41st Millenium-what's it all about then?

On looking up further news on Relic's 40K video game "Space Marine" I came across this rather interesting and humorous piece on the 41st Millenium.

"Thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the mighty Imperium of Man has spread across the galaxy, to discover that the galaxy is a hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch shit himself in terror, and that it has a hell. From without, the Imperium is assailed by alien monsters from the depths of space, nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons (as well as soulless death-machines and nightmare daemons); from within, treachery, heresy, mindless incompetence and the festering taint of Chaos threaten to tear it apart.

Warhammer 40,000 is not a happy place. Rather than just being Darker And Edgier, it paints itself black and hurls itself over the edge. The Imperium of Man is an oppressive, stark, and downright miserable place to live in where, for far too many people, living isn't something to do until you die, but something to do until something comes around and kills you in an unbelievably horrible way - quite probably someone on your own side. The Messiah has been locked up on life support for the past ten millennia, laid low by his most beloved son, and an incomprehensibly vast Church Militant commits hourly atrocities in his name.

The problem is, as bad as the Imperium is, the other forces in the galaxy are generally far, far worse. Death is about the best you can hope for against the vast majority of the other major players in the battlefields of the 41st Millennium. The basic premise of 40k, insofar as it can be summed up, is that of an eternal, impossibly vast conflict between a number of absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal and in one case omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology and creative piece of nastiness imaginable turned up to eleven. The basic sidearm of a Space Marine is a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Astronomican, a navigation aid, has the souls of thousands of psychic humans sacrificed to it every day, dying by inches to feed the machine. The faster-than-light travel used by most factions carries with it a good chance of being eaten by daemons. There are also chainsaw swords, gloves that crush tanks, mountain-sized daemonic walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of small cities and warships that level continents, if not simply obliterating all life on an entire planet just to be sure.

There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness; there is only war.

The 40k universe is a spectacularly brutal playground of tropes and horrible things taken to their absolute extreme. Entire planets with populations of billions are lost due to rounding errors in tax returns. Orders of capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Super Soldier Knights Templar serve as the Imperium's special forces, while the trillions of soldiers in its regular armies take disregard for human life further than most people could believe possible. A futuristic space Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even a hint of the taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, and is backed up by legions of supercharged daemonhunting super soldiers and fanatical power-armoured battle nuns. The ancient and debased manipulator-race contrive wars that see billions dead; their depraved cousins cannot live without torturing numberless innocents to death in unimaginably horrible ways. There's a Bug Swarm trying to eat everything in the galaxy, a light-years wide hole in reality through which countless daemons and corrupted daemon-powered super-soldiers periodically attempt to destroy the universe, and an entire civilisation of undying Omnicidal Maniacs serving their star-god masters' desire to exterminate all living creatures, down to the last bacterium. There's a genetically-engineered survivor warrior species infesting every corner of the galaxy and cheerfully trying to kill everything else in the galaxy because it's literally hard-wired into their genetic code. The closest thing to the good guys you can find in this setting is a tiny alien empire sandwiched between all the other factions, and they have a thing for forcing new subjects into their empire through orbital bombardment, sterilisation, and concentration camps".



'

Some more of my minis

Better camera and better pics. Still need some work on my photography though. It's a damn sight harder than I've ever given it credit for, so kudos to anyone who has the skills.

You couldn't make it up...

In my previous Blog I often pondered the unscrupulous goings on of our countires bankers and politicians, but after discovering it made one rather miserable I scrapped it and began anew with the Blog you see here now. Unfortunately a recent development has come to my attention I simply couldn't let go.

Lloyds Banking Group, as it is now known, is to hand out millions of pounds in bonuses to five executive directors irrespective of their performance last year, (their buying of HBOS, a move which brought the group to its knees and one that cost the tax payer millions of pounds, for example). The bitterest pill to swallow? Top director for the Lloyds Banking Group, one Eric Daniels, could be paid as much as 10 million pounds in bonuses. 10 MILLION POUNDS!

One question: Why don’t I get a massive bonus when I royally balls things up?

Oh and the Government’s stance? Well, they’re keeping a low profile about the whole issue. Surprise, surprise.

Richie Potter-AKA Spurt-Reynolds-Minis

This fantastic work here is by Richard Potter, (click on pics for a closer look).

Rich was a studio painter for Gamesworkshop who I came to know and became good friends with during my time in the Gloucester GW store. Working in the studio alongside some of the best mini painters around at the time, Rich finely tuned his own skills as painter and modeller and without his guidance I would, as he would often say, "still be painting miniatures with my feet..."



The above mini, (like a lot of Richard's work), has been heavily modded using a mixture of other models and green stuff, (the modelling putty predominantly used in mini sculpting), and won him a note of commendation at GW's anual Golden Demon painting competition.



Rich actually worked on a lot of this mini at my old flat in Gloucester, (inbetween bouts of Goldeneye and my ever lasting bottle of 'White Lightening' cider).

Bizarrely this Ghoul has a 'brown stain' on the rear where its bowls have apparently empted from being somewhat dead. At least that was Richie's explanation....

Richard predominantly paints, mods and builds Transformers these days, of which you can see via the link to his Deviant Art page on the left. Well worth a look, even if you're just curious.