Starcraft 2: Loss of Productivity

First of all, let me be open about how bad I am at RTS games. I am horrible. I lose to the Very Easy AI setting in skirmish modes and am openly mocked as my enemies attack me with drones.

With that out of the way, I absolutely love this game.

Story

I know that most people are upset over the episodic releases. I was upset as well until I played the game. There are a lot of missions, and the storyline is fantastic. I found no plot holes ready to destroy the immersion and only a single part of the storyline was predictable(for me anyways). I will not give away the plotline. I will say that if this were a book and not a video game, I would not be disappointed. It does leave you with more questions than answers. I believe that is due to the way they are intended to release the next games and not due to any ignorance or laziness on the part of the developers and writers. Overall, the story is fantastic.

Competitive Multiplayer

The ladder system is kind of confusing at first. I am currently ranked 25th in a bronze 1v1 ladder in a seemingly randomly named group of 100. I have won 7 matches and lost 8. I have only came across one person that completely dominated me. I take that little bit of experience to mean that the match making is at least partially decent. As I said before, I am horrible. After my first 5 placement matches(which help the game decide what ladder to place you in) I was placed with other horrible people.

As far as balance goes, it seems like they have changed up the starting out zerg strategy enough that zergling rushes do not work against experienced players as well as they used to. I still managed to win 2 matches with it, but both opponents confessed it was the first time they had played an RTS. I did find that the terrans have a pretty decent advantage vs zerg early on. I have ready quite a few strategies trying to see a way around it and it pretty much requires the zerg player to be a bit more crafty than in SC1. I can have a supply depot and a barracks up before a zerg player is able to spawn zerglings. That pretty much cancels out the zerg ability to win an early game once you realize it is possible. Protoss dominate end game, as per SC1. I do not play with them as much as I would like because they require patience and micromanaging in supplies that I do not yet possess.

Overall, the game is pretty balanced. Blizzard's history in updating games for a decade after release leads me to believe they will keep adjusting until they get it perfect.

Custom Games

This is where Starcraft 2 sort of fumbles. Instead of me searching through a list of custom games, I am given a list of maps, sorted by type. This would be fine if I already knew what I wanted, but it kind of ruins the ability to find different games you did not know existed. It took me a while to get used to it.

Other than the list sorting, the custom games are similar to SC1. You have a bunch of variations of tower defense. A bunch of "income" games. A few RPGs. Which is AWESOME. I love having all these variations. I love that the game is barely out and there are already all these variations and different game types. It is very satisfying to be playing Red Circle TD and figure out a new strategy that is more efficient. Super Tank Defense is great as well.

Graphics

I play using a G72x. It is not a powerhouse, it is a laptop. It is a very decent gaming rig, but not nearly as powerful as a relatively new desktop.

I am able to run the game at medium settings at 1440x990 resolution with no slowdown at all. The game is beautiful. Zooming in on units does not make them look blocky. There is no noticeable tearing. The cut scenes are spectacular, if a little different than what was in the last game. My only concern with the graphics is that there is currently a bug that will force your GPU to run at max load and can potentially burn it up. Most video cards should have enough ventilation and cooling that this is not a problem. I am not so sure about my laptop. This is also one of those bugs that should not have made it into the retail game. The above link provides a fix for this until Blizzard patches to fix it.

Overall

I find myself wanting to find a big fault so that I can differentiate myself from all the other blogs and reviewers. I am by no means a fanboy of blizzard games. I cannot find a single reason why this game should not be part of every gamers library. It will play on lower end systems, the match making actually works pretty well. The different game types mean infinite replayability. It is a great game and should not be shunned due to Blizzard's decision to release the campaigns in episode form.

Cheaters

Cheaters aka @#%%@

Do cheaters get enjoyment from playing the game?

Do they need to have an unfair advantage over others?

Are they doing it for the "lulz" ?

Having spent years playing online games I have to say that cheaters fall into 3 different categories.

1. People that do it because they can and do not care that it ruins the game for others.
2. People that do it "for the lulz."
3. People that do it because they feel that everyone else is.

People that do it because they can are usually the casual gamers. They do not think about other gamers because they do not interact with them so it is not something that even occurs to them. I believe this is a very small minority of the cheaters out there. Most of them will deny that they are cheating and either leave or suddenly start playing very badly for a while. They do understand that it is wrong, they just do not see why it should matter.

The people that do it for the "lulz" remind me of the 13 and 14 year olds that act out to get attention from their parents. There are thousands of books on how to handle children that act out. Sadly, those books do not apply here because you cannot take the player to Disney Land for good behavior. These players are the majority. You will hear them bragging and taunting other players. The only way to effectively deal with these players is to ignore them. I usually end up switching servers or logging out for a while when I encounter these types of players. Even if you ignore them, chances are someone else will not and the person nerd raging at them just encourages them. As a side note, most of these players will deny doing it for attention, they will say they are doing it because it is funny when people get angry at them. These are the same kids you remember in preschool that would cry for hours when the teacher took their building blocks away. Trust me.

The people that do it because they think everyone else does it are the ones that run into the second group all the time and decide that everyone must do it. They are usually new to a game or to gaming in general. This group usually either gets banned or decides to stop cheating after a while. They are not doing it because they want to beat everyone or because they are jerks. They are just doing it because they do not know any better and think that it is something everyone does.

In summary, the only group of cheaters that really need to turn in their gamepad are the people in the second group. Casual gamers do not play enough to be an issue and the people in the third group are actually kind of useful because they show other people that you do not have to cheat to play against others.

It is a video game. If you are going into rages when you see someone cheating you should probably log out and get some fresh air.

It is a video game. Remember that you are not the only person playing, imagine how you would feel if you were playing dodgeball and the other team was using bean bag guns.

Review: All Points Bulletin

I do not review just one aspect of games, I review all aspects of them.

1) Account Creation

This is probably one of the simplest things in all of gaming, creating an account. Except with APB. With APB I spent a total of 30 minutes just trying to get my account created. Why? The CD-Key format is not explained. At all. I ended up getting on with their technical support before I figured it out for myself. More on technical support later. The format they want the CD-Key in is XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. Nowhere does it say that the hyphens are required. In fact, I cannot think of another game that requires the CD-Key to be like that. Ok, my account is created! What do I get to do next?

2) Character Creation

Customization is where APB shines brighter than most, certainly brighter than any other game in the genre. You start out with a blank character. From there you can go the easy and quick route of selecting general body types and facial features. Or you can click on the button at the bottom and customize just about everything. I spent about an hour customizing my character, I could have spent longer but I wanted to actually shoot at people.

3) Gameplay

The game is advertised like it is a Grand Theft Auto multiplayer game. It starts out like it is GTA as well. You have an NPC you "pledge" with. Pledging means that they will offer you missions as you are cruising around town. You also gain rep with their faction and also with that specific person. The higher the rep, the better the cash and more unlocks you get. Now, you can play as either an enforcer or a criminal. The names are pretty straight forward. Criminals are criminals and enforcers try to shoot them or arrest them. As you are cruising around town you will start being prompted for missions from the person you are pledged to. At first, the missions are pretty simple. Drive here. Pick up item x. Drop it off there.

However, after you have completed a few missions, you will start to get missions with opposition. Opposition is the enemy. It is other players. If you are an enforcer, it is criminals. As you start your mission, they get a prompt for their own mission, and it is usually to stop you. You will also be prompted for missions to stop them. This is where the game gets a bit frustrating.

The match making system is pretty terrible. Just about every mission I had after 2 hours into the game had me outmatched numerically and most of my opposition had a rating(the level system) 3 or 4 times higher than mine. This means that they had higher health pools, regenerated health faster, and had better weapons. All of which means that you were basically cannon fodder. The few times I got lucky with a grenade kill or running someone down with my truck quickly turned into dismay because the other 2 or 3 people on the persons team would immediately kill me. At that point, the mission types start to blend together into one big suck fest.

The mission types are pretty limited and almost all of them end in one of three different "final stages."

1. Hold a position from the enemy. You have limited lives and once they are gone the enemy wins. The enemy might or might not have limited lives. You have a countdown, usually 5-10 minutes. The variations of this are protect the area from them, or take the area from them.
2. Stop the enemy(also known as a bounty mission). You have to kill the enemy player x amount of times. They usually have teammates. Killing teammates does not count towards winning the mission. If you have teammates, the enemy can kill them to win the mission. This mission type sucks. All the opposition has to do is jump in a car and drive moderately well and they win.
3. Escape from the enemy. If the enemy kills you x times you lose. If you survive for x minutes or kill the enemy players x times, you win. This is the most frustrating mission type for the enemy players. You just get in a car and drive away. Or, if you have a decent group, get on a roof and you are basically invincible because no one can get to you without you shooting them in the face.

The missions get pretty stale after about 5 hours of playing.

Combat is also quite frustrating, as it seems less based on skill and more based on who starts shooting first or who has the better gun. I ran around with a Light Machine Gun for quite a while and had no problem killing anyone in a car. I could blow the car up before they had finished the exit animation. However, once they were out of the car I was usually dead. The upgraded guns that are only available to the higher rated players would not be that big of a deal if the match making system was not placing them against the lower rated players. It is basically a trial by fire until you get a high enough rating to use the upgraded weapons. For a game that is based around Player vs Player interactions, the match making and weapons balance seems to have not be thought out very well.

4) Graphics

The games graphics are pretty decent, when the game is not lagging. When you first login, everyone will look the same until all of their avatars have loaded properly. This usually only took 20-30 seconds. However, once you get into a big firefight, things can sometimes slow to a crawl and then you end up dead. This is not all server side, I am sure some of it is with my computer. But, the graphics are not that great that it should cause any serious client side lag. I have yet to find a game I cannot play on high settings. Indeed, APB says I can play it on high settings. The customized vehicles look great. The character animations are a bit robotic at times but still look pretty decent. The environment looks fantastic, none of the obvious cookie cutter patterns you see in a lot of games with big open areas. Other than the occasional slowdown, the graphics are good.

5) Support

Technical support is big for any game, but especially big for a game that just recently launched and is based entirely online.

During my account creation troubles I called technical support. It told me I had a 45 minute wait time, so I hung up and got onto their technical support chat option. It said I was 6th in line with a 1 minute 45 second estimated wait. 15 minutes later I had discvoered, through trial and error, the correct format and created my account. For fun I waited until a technical support rep came on. 22 minutes later they entered the chat. They said, "Hello, are you there?" "I am disconnecting if you do not respond." Then they disconnected. This happened in the span of 20 seconds. So far, my technical support experience sucked.

Later on in the weekend I was having trouble connecting. It would let me get as far as "Entering District" but would sit there for as long as I would let it. I would end up having to go to Task Manager and ending the process. I thought that maybe the server was down for maintenance, but I could never find anything about server status on their website. I even searched their technical support knowledge base for it, no luck. Eventually, again through trial and error, I figured out that my AV was seeing the punk buster(anti cheat) software, that APB installed and ran in the background, as a threat and was blocking it.

6) Overall Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. The gameplay is fast and exciting.
2. The character customization is unmatched.
3. It is probably as close as we are going to get to a GTA MMO for quite a while

Cons:

1. The matchmaking system is terrible.
2. Technical support is non existent.
3. You are never, ever, ever told about the market place or where to go to customize your vehicle or put on your new outfits. You basically stumble across these features while trying to find a bathroom.

I give this game 4 out of 5 stars. The problems that it has are easily remedied via patches and even with those problems, the game is still fun as hell to play.