I am quite aware that this is a beta. Medal of Honor launches October 12, 2010 which means they have lots of time to work out the kinks. But, I believe the issues I have with this game are a bit deeper than the occasional freeze or jagged edge.

Medal of Honor’s multiplayer is DICE’s approach to the Modern Warfare formula. On paper: this sounds awesome. It’s Bad Company 2 meets Modern Warfare 2. The best of both worlds in one awesome reboot of a beloved franchise. However, as soon as I got into my first game, something didn’t seem right at all.

The first issue I noticed was the HUD; this game has a very poor HUD. Nothing is particularly easy to read quickly and seemed to be of a flash over substance design. This is, but a small example of the much bigger problem of communication in this game — between other players (the option for VOIP was defaulted to off) and between the game and myself. The game simply doesn’t convey the necessary info in a clear or concise fashion. The clear text “+10″ from Bad Company 2 was replaced with blurry text accompanied by some silly explosion-flash-thing which just gets in the way of the action — it’s just unnecessary for something so trivial as a kill via headshot.

Meanwhile, the “Tactical Support Actions” rewards seemingly go uncelebrated. It took me awhile to notice that I could pull up the UAV. Modern Warfare 2 does a fantastic job of notifying the player they’ve got something. “Predator missile ready for deployment.” “UAV standing by.” These little quips go a long way. None of that was apparent in Medal of Honor.

It seemed like the audio as a whole was a step back compared to Bad Company 2. Perhaps the “War Tapes” option in that game spoiled me, but it’s more than the lack of war ambiance. It’s the absence of audio cues for points accumulation, the lack of audio umph in the weaponry and the lack of fanfare for the end of a round. Most of these are tiny touches, but if DICE expects people drop their current shooters for this, they’ve got to get the fine details right.

From a graphical perspective, Medal of Honor is a step up compared to Bad Company 2. However, it does not hold a candle to Modern Warfare 2 in its current form. The two maps in the demo were rather large maps, but they did not seem to warrant a 30 FPS experience with this level of graphical fidelity. It doesn’t even feature the Destruction 2.0 of the Frostbite engine, so it really made me wonder. Granted, this is early, and they could make it look substantially better, but I have my doubts.

I envisioned Medal of Honor’s multiplayer as a focused team based shooter with destructibility, less emphasis on vehicles and more closed quarters infantry combat (think Arica Harbor Conquest). Instead, I played a poor man’s Call of Duty 4 (not as many kill streak rewards going on). It does have 24 players on the map, but I never got the sense of that. There were no squad support to speak of, so we couldn’t split up and cover certain areas of the map or area. It seems like DICE did have destructibility in mind at some point with how they mapped the explosives weapon to L2. I can pull out RPG/AT4 launchers really quickly in this game and since they’re relatively tame with the splash damage, it seemed like it would have been far more useful as a quick “destroy that wall” option. Sadly this wasn’t the case.

Although there isn’t much recoil to speak of when firing weapons, I did have a tougher time taking out people. I was seeing  hit markers, but it was taking a bit too long to down someone. It’s definitely not kill on first sight like Modern Warfare 2. Whether or not that’s a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of preference. I didn’t have much of a problem with it, it’s something I could get used to with time. Just like the rest of the shooting mechanic.

My brother was wondering if he should try the Medal of Honor multiplayer beta, here was my response:

“You wouldn’t like it. Why? You won’t like it because it’s not similar enough to Modern Warfare 2 — just like how I don’t like it because it’s not similar enough to Bad Company 2″.

What could have been a happy middle ground is instead a disappointing amalgamation of design philosophies complicated by the desire to be different for sake of being different. I think I’m just better off playing one or the other.

Or perhaps I should try Black Ops. I hear Treyarch is putting up quite the fight this year.

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My exposure to ModNation Racers can be summarized into these two items:

1. The E3 2009 stage demo
2. The Kevin Butler ad

And it looks like that’s all I really needed to know to get the gist of what ModNation Racers is all about.

People have described it as kart racing meets the “Play. Create. Share. genre” popularized by LittleBigPlanet and I think it’s a fairly accurate description. Today’s 900+ MB demo demonstrated two of the three pillars quite well.

The character customization is surprisingly deep and easy to use. I’d go as far as saying that they should have made ModNation Racers characters the PlayStation Home avatars since they’re far more lively and easy to customize than those mannequins. The car customization was equally impressive, rivaling that of Forza Motorsport 3′s from a high level standpoint. The canvas (karts) are so much smaller, but it looks like you can do a lot of livery stuff with it.

The most impressive aspect of the creation system was the track editor. Real time track creation and testing is damn awesome. Not everyone can create a functional and fun level with LittleBigPlanet, but I think anyone out there can make a kart track. I went in and tweaked the time of day, water level and threw in a giant spire in the middle of the track within 5 minutes. Very impressed with all of that.

The actual “Play” aspect of ModNation Racers was a bit of a let down. I was a bit mdisappointed by the framerate. It was smooth and probably 30 frames per second, but it just didn’t feel right initially. I’m sure if I spent more time with it, I’d get used to it though. Aside from that, I had no complaints with the kart racing. Drafting, drifting, aerial tricks and attacking enemies fed a boost meter as I raced around a track. It wasn’t very exhilarating with A.I. opponents, but that could have been attributed to the simple track they included within the demo.

The “Share” aspect of ModNation Racers wasn’t included, but there was a message proclaiming their intentions to import the demo created tracks into the full game. That’s a very good sign. I hope their system of displaying and promoting user created content is better than LittleBigPlanet’s. LBP’s was cute, but not very useful.

I’m not picking up ModNation Racers any time soon, but not because not for quality reasons. Like I said, I was very impressed by the creation tools, but I’m simply not a big kart racing fan. Still, I’m very pleased to see this whole “Play. Create. Share.” genre propagate.

ModNation Racers releases May 25, 2010 exclusively for PlayStation 3. For more information, check the official website.

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I’m a fan of arcade racers — Wipeout HD being the favorite of the lot. I’ve always wanted to get into four wheel arcade racing, even though I haven’t found much success with that breed of arcade racer. Burnout: Paradise could have fit the bill, but I wasn’t feeling it after the demo. (I realize the game has changed dramatically since then, but then I haven’t gotten around to trying the latest iteration.) Fortunately, there are more arcade racers coming this month via Bizarre Creation’s Blur and Blackrock Studio’s Split Second. I checked out the demo for the latter.

I dug the demo of  Blackrock Studio’s previous work, Pure. It looked, played and ran superbly. It was also quite exhilarating for its vertigo. Split Second isn’t about vertigo or speed for that matter — it’s about explosions. Like a Michael Bay movie. I drifted and drafted my way around a simple track building up power charges in order to trigger predetermined explosions. These triggered on-track explosions can than be used to wreck my opponents or alter the layout of the track.

When I first learned of this mechanic, I thought it was going to be awesome the first time through, but would gradually become repetitive and predictable with each passing race. It turns out I was right. After trying the demo three times, I was already seeing past the explosions and into the simple racer.

Like the gameplay itself, I was initially wowed by Split Second‘s visuals. After spending a bit of time with the demo, I began to see the faults in the visuals. Aliasing was a bit distracting and so were the lower resolution textures on the track’s assets. To sum up: Split Second just didn’t hold up to closer scrutiny.

Now let’s see if a Blur demo will show up.

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Blizzard games have always been pretty scalable and I was wondering how my five year old Shuttle PC will fare. Here are the important specs:

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0 GHz)
Memory: 2 GB of DDR-400
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
OS: Windows 7 x64 Home Premium

And here’s the configuration I ended up running the game with:

The auto configuration actually pinned my resolution at 1280 x 720 resolution, but I bumped it up since I try to play my PC games at the monitor’s native resolution.

To my surprise, the game ran at a somewhat playable framerate. There were hitches when sudden shifts in on screen unit counts occurred, but other than that I did play a single successful 2 v 2 match.

As I alluded to, I’m was not big on the StarCraft multiplayer so don’t expect any major insights into the game itself aside from “it’s more StarCraft” — at least for now anyway. What I was most impressed with were the first “five practice” matches I was greeted with when I first launched the multiplayer. It’s supposed to help Battle.net gauge my skill level and throw me into the appropriate league. I can’t say how well it works thus far since I’ve just completed a single match, but it seems like a great idea.

The map I played on had rock barriers to discourage rushing and plenty of resource locations to expand to. It was a noob map and I welcomed it. They also fixed the game speed to “normal” which was nice. All in all, I think these kinds of touches will open up StarCraft II to a wider audience than the original ever did.

I hope to play more of StarCraft II, but I don’t when. Although it runs on my current machine, it is nowhere near optimal visual or performance benchmark. I’ve always said I’ll build a new PC for StarCraft II, so I guess I’ll have to look into that before proceeding any further.

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How many games can you think of these days that give you that old, nostalgic feeling of wonder?  I’m not just talking about wondering what’s going to happen next.  I’m talking about the feeling of wonderment you get when you are faced with many discrete options to choose from and you have to stop and analyze the consequences of your actions before proceeding.  And you know you have to choose carefully because you can’t go back, you don’t even know if the decision you are about to make is a drastic, life changing decision, or simply an insignificant forgettable gesture.

I haven’t gotten this exciting feeling since the days of reading choose-your-own-adventure books as a teenager.  Heavy Rain offers you decisions in a seemingly random way, you walk up to objects wondering if they are going to have a quicktime event button to press over them, and are delighted when you see one.  And even more so when you see two or three possible button sequence options to press near the object.

There are a few gestures they ask you to make on the controller including rotating the analog stick, tapping a button, holding a button, or shaking the controller, and all the gestures seem to vaguely match the motion you see the character doing.  You can sometimes do the action (analog rotation) a little slower and the animation you see on the screen (eg. Character raising a cigarette to his face) will happen slower.  Another combination of gestures the game makes you do occasionally is press and hold a button sequence, so I found myself playing a game of twister with my fingers on the controller.  And sometimes I found it physically impossible to reach a certain button because I hadn’t used the right fingers to press the buttons.  This adds something I’ve never seen in a quicktime event game before.

Some might say that a lot of games these days are being too linear.  Even when they claim to have an open world that changes based on your decisions, the overall plot always seems to remain the same.  It remains to be seen how linear or open-ended Heavy Rain’s storyline will be.   I played through the demo twice, being a good boy and choosing all the nice guy options the first time.  The whole thing felt like a movie scene.  It was pretty easy to choose the “right” decisions and be the hero of the day, but after a while the action started to pick up and I found myself frantically trying to keep up with the increasingly fast popping up of quicktime events.  I was worried that I would be focusing too hard on getting the button presses correct to focus on what was happening, but that didn’t happen.  The button presses happened at perfect times so I could enjoy the action, then add some input, then see the results of my success or failure before the next button press had to occur.

The second play through, I chose all the ‘bad boy’ decisions and during the action sequence, I just purposely failed to press the right buttons at the right time.  This resulted in a different sequence of animations and reactions from the characters but the plot remained the same.  Clearly there was no way to end the game based on a bad decision here, but it was just the demo so I’m sure there will be much different plot lines in the full game.

I love the controls.  You use the right trigger to walk slowly or normally, but there is no running.  At first I felt myself wanting to run, but this game is supposed to have a movie feel to it and by not allowing running at all times, they force you to calm down, relax, and explore the environment.  I also like how the left analog stick moves the characters head, and I oftn found myself turning my head before I made the character start walking which added to the realism.

The Heavy Rain demo was everything it needed to be.  You get two different characters to play, two different scenes, two different examples of gameplay they are offering, and a bunch of different easter eggs to find if you explore around a bit.

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What do I know about Dark Void? Let’s see.

• It’s developed by a western studio and published by Capcom.
• The protagonist resembles The Rocketeer and is voiced by the incredibly prolific Nolan North.
• It’s a third person shooter.

And that’s about it. Needless to say, I don’t know very much about it. It was interesting enough to warrant a download of the 700MB demo and after going through it, I can see why Capcom isn’t too fond of the idea of having western studios develop new franchises for them.

I found many things about Dark Void to be incredibly distracting. The core flying was fine — I’d even say it is exhilarating — but there were so many little design decisions which drew my attention away. First and foremost is the protagonist. He’s essentially Nathan Drake or a crude clone of him. Nolan North is an incredibly talented voice actor as evidenced by his excellent work in Uncharted franchise. But for some odd reason, developers keep casting him in the role of “generic dark haired dude”. The guy has range and Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time proves that. (He voiced Sigmund).

While that was a bit distracting at first, I pushed it aside and began flying around shooting things and going through the “tutorial”. I found the controls responsive enough and thus far the game looked fine with minor screen tears here and there. It was all fine and dandy until I encountered robots which resembled the Geth from Mass Effect. While that was a peculiar design decision, I was able to let it slide. What I couldn’t understand was their decision to change up the tried and true button arrangements for cover. Why did it have to be on the square button? It’s not a game breaker, but it was a bit distracting having to adjust to a seemingly needless change.

After disposing of the robots, the demo wrapped up with a boss tease. I imagine I’d have to fly around and shoot at weak points to take him down. I’ll never know for sure because I won’t be picking this up. Dark Void‘s greatest strength is the flying and while I thought that was well crafted, it was the only unique thing about it. Everything else was either a poor copy off a superior product or a needless alteration. That’s how I felt about it anyway. I’d recommend folks check out the demo for themselves and let me know. At the very least, you could experience some of the best flying sensations in a video game.

Dark Void debuts January 12, 2010 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. For more information, visit the official website.

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I get what it’s trying to do. In fact, I think the tri-faction, character creation and somewhat persistent nature of the online play is awesome. But what MAG fails to do is establishing the basics; the feel and look of the game just doesn’t measure up to the competition of today. Hell, I would go as far as to say that feel of the gunplay doesn’t even measure up to 2003′s Call of Duty. I’m playing Call of Duty: Classic right now and that game — that six year old game — has more reload animations than MAG.

The gunplay just doesn’t feel right either. It works, I can mow down people, but it doesn’t feel remotely satisfying or modern. Going back to Call of Duty: Classic and its inventory selection of grenades is understandable, but doing that in a 2009 modern day shooter? I don’t understand it. And why do these grenades sound like firecrackers?

It just isn’t right and that’s how I feel about MAG as a whole. It has a lot of great ideas, but when even the basics don’t feel right, what’s the point? Thanks for offering the beta, Sony. Now I know I can safely pass on MAG.

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