Anno 2070 Impressions - Everything was better in the old days

I've been spending some hours with Anno 2070 this week. This latest installment in the build-em-up Anno series takes us out from the old times of wooden galleons and muskets that have been the trademark setting of the series so far, and instead dumps us into the semi-near future of the year 2070.

In Anno 2070's future Earth setting, global warming has certainly manifested itself to be anything but a myth, and has blessed millions of people with unexpected ocean views. Unfortunately it has also cursed several other millions of people with severe moisture problems and resulted in a frenzied competition for Earth's precious resources.

During the main campaign of the game you'll be tasked with assisting either of the two main factions in Anno 2070, the Gordon Gekko loving "Global Trust", who want nothing more than to suck every last piece of useful molecule out of mother Earth. Or the tree hugging "Eden Initiative", who are all about not trying to completely destroy what little remains of the planets ecological health. Also, I imagine that they smoke a lot of weed.

Jumping into the game, things will immediately look fairly familiar if you've played any previous "Anno" game.
Through an isometric overhead view you'll be overseeing your little slice of Terra and plan out small island colonies by building everything from ports, housing, mines, power plants and so on.

The important building is the tall white one... ah crap

In classic city building game fashion, everything is connected and every building adds something to your settlement, while also bringing in new requirements of its own.
You'll need to have tools to build buildings, but a tool workshop requires coal and iron, which requires mines and those require workers that need houses.
The way everything fits together is one of the most interesting things about playing these types of games.
You're constantly adding a new piece on top of your existing settlement, and every time you do, you'll have to make a tweak here and a nip there to make sure everything is still running optimally. It's not a game for people that crave action and big explosions, let me just make that clear right away.

3 Steps to make money on SWTOR's bad auction house system

If you've played Star Wars: The Old Republic for more than 10 levels, then you've probably had some experience with SWTOR's version of auction houses, the Galactic Trade Network (GTN).
And if you've had the misfortune of using this particularly nasty brand of an excuse for a MMO trading house system, then you'll certainly also have realized that using the GTN is an exercise in frustration.

The design of the GTN makes it needlessly hard to find items quickly, because you need to select several subcategories before you're even allowed to search for a specific item. And there's no quick pasting of item names into the search bar either. All search terms have to be typed in manually, which makes the whole process incredibly tedious.

Why would you make this interface that way? Why! I demand you explain yourself, BioWare!

But perhaps there is a silver lining to this particularly unpleasant case of insidious Darkside UI design.

Since it takes a long time to find what you're looking for, it's hard for people to get a good overview of what is available on the GTN and what the market price is. The result of this seems to be that a lot of people simply dump their items in the GTN at the suggested default price that the game gives them.

A "real" new X-COM game is in the making by Firaxis

While we're waiting on the delayed first person shooter take on the X-COM franchise, we can enjoy a fantastic piece of surprising news.
Game informer has just revealed that there is a new and "proper" X-COM game in the works, which will be a traditional X-COM game that focuses on large scale alien fighting strategy, mixed in with tactical control of your extra-terrestrial exterminating hired guns.

The game, which is nostalgically titled "X-COM: Enemy Unknown", is being made by Firaxis, which is a company with much experience in the strategy game genre, as they are the massive swollen brains behind several of the "Civilization" games.

According to Firaxis president, Steve Martin (don't laugh, that's his real name), there's been much consideration put into ensuring that this game will stay true to the "classic" X-COM games, as he explains in the interview with Game informer: "We were careful to keep XCOM: Enemy Unknown true to the elements that made X-COM such a revered game while delivering an entirely new story and gameplay experience for both die-hard X-COM fans and newcomers to the franchise."

It seems aliens, much like deer, are also hypnotized by car headlights. I'm sure this knowledge will come in handy

The game will feature destructible environments, a real-time strategic view (as we know it from the old X-COM games) and turn based combat (again, like the old games of the series).

I'm looking forward to seeing more details about this game, which will hopefully be a little easier than the first X-COM, which I recently went back and played and subsequently got my ass completely handed to me by.

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New Syndicate trailer brainwashes us with 4 player co-op details

This Syndicate trailer was posted just before Christmas, but it got lost among the piles of merriment and X-mas spirit, so I just saw it yesterday and thought I'd share it with you guys.

The video feeds us some more details about how the co-op gameplay of Syndicate will function, including a brief look at the four different agents that you will be taking the role as.

It's interesting that you'll be playing as four distinct agents and while I'm sure it'll add some flavor to the multiplayer experience, I feel that it does detract a little bit from the dystopian and drab vibe that is associated with the Syndicate universe.

In any case, it looks like we'll get to have fun kicking people in the balls and shooting them with large guns in the co-op multiplayer so there is always that, I suppose!



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The 3 biggest problems with storytelling in Star Wars: The Old Republic

BioWare has been pounding hard on the hype drum for the quality of the story in Star Wars: The Old Republic.
For the very first time we were going to be treated to a top quality narrative experience in a MMO. This was underlined by the way that BioWare proclaimed that making SWTOR was in many ways the same as making several sequels to the "Knight of the Old Republic" series, which was heavily story driven.

And indeed, after my experience with playing the Bounty Hunter class in the beta weekend in late November, I was very impressed with the way that story was integrated into SWTOR. I was propelled through a compelling narrative that saw me trying to make a name for myself as a infamous bounty hunter, and all the framing, cut scenes, voice acting and even missions design, really made me feel like I was playing through a Star Wars movie.

Fast forward to today, three weeks after I joined up for the full retail version of the game and created my Sith Inquisitor character.

I still feel that the basic story in SWTOR is a good one, but several critical problems have revealed themselves to me by now and I am unable to find the same enthusiasm for the storytelling mechanic as I did when I first jumped into the game.

Riding a speeder bike on Hoth is hard to ruin, no matter how badly you tell a story

Before I get into explaining my issues with how SWTOR does storytelling, let me start by clarifying that my issues are aimed at the class stories, which acts as the main thread that leads you through all the content in the game.
There are lots of other small stories that you come across as you travel from one planet to the next, but for the most part these are not nearly as interesting as your main story. They do the job well enough to provide an excuse for why you need to go right-click the blue glowing object, but as a whole they're a couple of notches lower in terms of quality from the class stories, and I'm pretty much okay with that.

With that out of the way let's look at the issues that I have with the storytelling in SWTOR:

1) Pacing

When you start out on your first planet the quests that advance your class story make up the significant majority of all your quests. You'll quickly start loading up on side quests, but generally you'll be advancing your main story very frequently.

As you get further and further up though the levels of the game, you'll find that the time between advancing the story quests becomes longer and longer. I'm still only at level 39, but I'm spending several hours on side quests exclusively before I get my next little bit of main story.

Coming up on Light Speed Gaming in the first week of 2012

Another week is coming to a close and it's time to...what?...the week already *is* over? But what happened to Sunday? Yesterday, you say?

Hmmm... alright, it seems that day is lost in a haze of hangovers, but that won't stop me from doing my weekly wrap up of what I had for you here on Light Speed Gaming and what I'll be serving up in the days to come.

I started last week off with my impressions on Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I formed as 3 reasons to play and 3 reasons not to play. You can really boil it down to "It's a good MMO but it's still an MMO, with all the flaws and drawbacks that come with those games".

Next up was an exclusive interview with Muse Games, developers of the dieselpunk airship piloting game "Guns of Icarus Online". In the interview, Muse Games tells us all about their thinking behind this game, which looks to be quite different from anything else thanks to its class based, first person perspective take on piloting airships.

Just before New Year I vented some of my frustration about some of the really nonsensical things of the Star Wars movies. Even within the fantastical universe of Star Wars, these are things that stand out to me as being really silly and unlikely.

Finally, rounding out the week, or rather kicking off this week, I tucked in a small Sci-Fi Do Want about the computer UI from Minority Report.

Like the deserts of Tatooine, the stream of SWTOR content here on the blog is seemingly endless

So that is 2011 all boxed up and consigned to the archives of the past. What do I have in store for you here in the futuristic year of 2012?

Sci-Fi Do Want: Minority Report gesture based computer UI's

Last time on Sci-Fi Do Want I raved about the coolness of the ED-209 from Robocop. With its menacing visage and absurd background, it soared straight into my sci-fi loving heart.
But this time we're going to be looking at something without the ability to blast you into pieces with 20mm cannons, though we stay in the realm of law enforcement.

Yes folks, it's the computer interface from the department of PreCrime, as featured in the 2002 sci-fi movie "Minority Report"

If you've seen the movie "Minority Report" then you know that the mouse and keyboard is going to be made obsolete by slick gesture recognition.
Never mind that holding up your arms in front of your face for 8 hours would certainly lead to excruciating amounts of pain and chronic injury to your shoulders and elbows. A little physical disability is a small price to pay to look that cool while checking your inbox.

Work with Excel spreadsheets *and* work out your upper body at the same time!

The interface in Minority Report works by the user putting on a special pair of gloves that enable the computer to track your hand movements. This is then coupled with a very large screen that allows you to easily grab and manipulate anything that's on the "desktop".

It's a system that is reminiscent of the gesture controls that we already see today on smartphones and on the Kinect, but of course without any of the many hitches and flaws that are present on these existing platforms.
I think that it's even cooler because you can almost imagine what it would be like to use it in real life, because it is so close to technology of today, yet it is clearly on a whole other level from anything that we have experienced so far.

Old Republic personal play journal entry up on MMOCrunch

Just wanted to let you all know that I'll be doing a journal series over on MMOCrunch where I'll be sharing my thoughts on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The first entry is up now and details my adventure through the starting planet of Korriban, as my baby Sith Inquisitor took his first steps on the dusty planet and faced the hard challenges of trying to become a Sith Lord apprentice.

"Feel the burn!"

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