[Review] - The Stanley Parable

After slogging through a slew of AAA titles the past year or so, I thought it high time to try out something from the lesser-known realms of gaming; the mod community. Half-Life 2 being a personal favourite of mine, and the high quality of the Source modding community known to me, I decided to try out a somewhat obscure mod on the HL2 Source engine, The Stanley Parable. Even though it's been recommended to me once or twice on some gaming forums, it rarely features in Top Mod lists and almost never gets mentioned when people list mods you have to try.

Which surprises me. In all honesty, The Stanley Parable probably didn't take nearly as long to create as 90% of the other mods out there, and the total playtime (even if you try out all the endings) won't be more than half an hour. But this doesn't mean that it's not a solid piece of gold in a field of useful, if less valuable minerals.

The thing you have to remember about the modding community is that it's not an industry at all. You have people creating games from existing frameworks that have all the creative drive that a gaming studio should have, but none of the financial obligation. Sure, this means that you get a game where the graphics are a year or two out of date and it looks like a lot of other games out there. But if you're using something like the Source engine that, even when very dated, still more than does the job of creating a very immersive atmosphere, then that argument becomes somewhat less valid. So you've got all the ambition, creativity and originality of a brilliant game, yet unfettered by any kind of publishing studio input where sales figures would dictate the creative direction of the game. Financial gain is mostly completely out of the picture, as most of these mods are released free to play.

Few mods illustrate this better than The Stanley Parable. Similarly to Dear Esther, it's debatable whether this is actually a game or just a very immersive form of interactive entertainment, as there is basically no gameplay apart from walking, and no skill whatsoever is required to complete it. The Stanley Parable explores some very interesting, if not extremely intriguing concepts, such as the relationship between a narrator and the story he/she tells, the inevitability of life and fate, and whether life itself is just madness or a series of pre-ordained paths.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let's get a quick overview of the game. The mod kicks off with a little cutscene where a voice introduces a man named Stanley, and explains the situation Stanley finds himself in. The rest of the (very short) game, you take control of Stanley and get offered a series of choices, which all affect how the game ends, all actions narrated by aforementioned voice. Later on, the unseen narrator's interest in Stanley's actions rise to the surface as you make a few simple choices regarding obedience, which spark some very interesting lines by the narrator and ultimately lead to very original endings. Without spoiling the story, it is worth noting that there are at least 5 endings to The Stanley Parable, each with its own philosophical motif, and it is worth replaying the game to experience every single one, as a single playthrough shouldn't last more than 5 minutes.

The voice acting in The Stanley Parable is one of only a handful of elements, but is pulled off with  remarkable finesse. Reminding me of the Bastion narrator in some ways, the voice acting is superb and forms the core of the game. Level design is very simplistic, but it serves the purpose of the game very well, with no unnecessary clutter and even broken level design being incorporated into the game itself. The graphics are dated, as the mod runs on the now 7-year old Source engine, but it doesn't detract from the experience in the slightest. As for the story; it is something truly original; if I were to describe it, I would say a mix between the original Portal, an Arthur C. Clarke time travel novel and those adventure books where you had to decide whether you wanted to run from the dinosaur on page 46 or throw your flask at its head on page 39.

Do yourself a favour and get The Stanley Parable from ModDB. It'll only take half an hour of your time, if you try out all the endings (which I highly recommend you do), and make you smile, think and wonder in a way that few other entertainment pieces can achieve. I've honestly never seen another game attempt something quite like what The Stanley Parable has pulled off, and even though short, I enjoyed the ride immensely.

FINAL SCORE: 90%

Blogger Mobile

So, just got the Blogger app for iPhone (even though I've had it before), but after an extended period of bugged use I've reloaded the phone's OS, tried out web apps, but to no avail... Blogging on the go was a far cry from pleasant.

We'll see how this one turns out. Thus far it seems pretty useful.

Stay tuned; Mass Effect 3, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Batman - Arkham City, Battlefield 3 - Close Quarters reviews and more incoming!

[Review] - Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 is a distinctly different game, depending on whether you play it as a single-player campaign or as an online multiplayer shooter. This review is therefore split into two sections, for the respective divisions.

[Single-Player]

THE GOOD:
-The graphics. Oh. My. Word. The graphics
-Destructible environments
-Bullet physics

THE BAD:
-Short, unimaginative campaign
-Bugs, glitches and general level of polish
-Game thinks it's a tech demo

Battlefield 3 is That Game of 2011. Not the "Game of the Year", but instead the game that most everybody had their own opinion about. This wasn't helped along by the release of Modern Warfare 3 within a few weeks of Battlefield hitting the shelves, and some higher-ups at Activision and EA getting it in their heads that the two games will be competing for the same market segment.
Which is the first fact I can share with you. Battlefield 3 is in NO way, shape or form a competing game to any Call of Duty. The single-player may have similar lengths, motifs and plot twists to that of a Modern Warfare game, but that can be said of a hundred Hollywood movies every year and even more FPS games. The similarities are, therefore, nothing any true critic would take seriously.
Moving on to the nitty-gritty. The actual gameplay. Battlefield 3's single-player campaign might be seen as a bit of a tacked-on component, as the core Battlefield games (BF1942, BF2142 and BF2) have never had much of a single-player storyline. This suspicion is compounded by the fact that Battlefield 3 had no storyline trailers apart from very last trailer before release.
Unfortunately, this does seem to be the case. Battlefield 3's single-player is a shortish campaign (it took this reviewer about 7 hours to get through the entire thing) revolving around a typically clichè Arab nuclear threat to 1st World cities such as Paris and Washington. You play the part of Sergeant Blackburn, a somewhat wiry jack-of-all-trades, who is being interrogated for a crime you only hear of a bit later in the campaign. Without revealing too much about the plot, I can say that the storyline has all the required disobeying of protocol and double-crossing required to make a modern military cliffhanger. Nothing one can't see coming from a mile off, but at least one always has a specific motivation to kill the soldiers in your sights. The game also suffers from serious Ramirez Syndrome (Google it, Ramirez!)... At one point I was tasked with triggering a line explosive to clear out a minefield. I had to abandon my tasked position as driver for the tank at the very back of the column, sprint past armored troop carriers and other tanks and barricades of marines egging me on, into the field of enemy fire to trigger the explosives. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what the ground troops are for? And I understand if the marine tasked with detonating aforementioned bomb has fear issues and is asking for some assistance, but did you have to take the driver of the furthest tank from the objective to do your dirty work?
Another gripe I had with the game was its roller-coaster difficulty curve. The first few minutes are laughably easy, but then, just short of an hour in, I hit the part of the game that took me almost 20 loaded saved games to get past. You are given the honour of manning an LMG and holding off half a city's worth of angry Iranians running down a highway at your platoon, brandishing everything from AKs to RPGs. The trick is that this LMG is mysteriously situated on an overpass occupied by enemy soldiers. No problem, I thought, take them out, get the LMG and start painting the streets red. What I didn't realize was that in THIS game, the corrugated iron sheets shielding the overpass from the street were not only not bulletproof, but apparently transparent from the other side. For as soon as I came within 5 metres of the gun, every single enemy reticule magically aligned itself with my eyebrows and the guys started flexing their fingers like Parkinsons victims on Red Bull. It wouldn't have been so bad had the save point not been two blocks back and two stories underground. So every minute or so, Blackburn would drop into the same darkened basement and run like a Kenyan up the stairs, around the building and into the glaring front line.
The mechanics are good, though. The guns feel especially solid, and DiCE's usually impeccable sound design does every bullet justice. Cover disintegrates realistically, explosions feel absolutely terrifying and there is no FPS with better NPC animation and ragdolling. Even the gimmicky suppression mechanic, where your vision starts to blur, your aim goes off and your hearing becomes all muffled when enemy shots land close to you, works to immerse you in the game a little more than you thought you'd be.
Pity about the AI and the bugs, then. The enemies tend to either stay in one place, their eyes riveted to the concrete barrier until so much as half a pixel of your camouflaged body shows and then start throwing half the annual output of a steel foundry in your general direction, or attempt to flank you by running straight for your hiding spot without taking cover. The game also feels unfinished in the bugs department. Bodies thrash about in death as clipping errors occur, and invisible walls sometimes take far longer than they should after a certain interaction to evaporate, leaving you soaking up lead like a damp dishcloth with nowhere to go.
Two specific occurrences come to mind. Once this reviewer had to run down a corridor to another generic objective, when an enemy soldier opens the door about 10 metres in front of me, then shouts in surprise as he and his friends start pumping their triggers at me. However, I had had a little too much coffee and too little sleep for the developers' taste, as yours truly, Trigger-Happy McTwitchington, had emptied an entire magazine into the poor Arab by the time the door squeaked past its halfway-open mark. Not so much as flinching from my brutal assault, as he hadn't completed his sacred duty to the game of opening the door, he shrugs off all the damage and continues with his routine as programmed, shouting and opening fire. However, at this point, Sergeant Blackburn was happily checking his gun's magazine for factory defects before inserting it into his gun, somehow oblivious of the ten tons of ammunition speeding his way. Blackburn dead, Alt-F4, reviewer fuming about temporarily invulnerable enemies.
Another somewhat humorous incident involved the end fight scene, choreographed in quick-time events as is the custom these days. For some reason, the body of my opponent had not been loaded by the time the fight started, leaving Blackburn punching fifty kinds of crap out of a small section of air. This block of CO2 and oxygen held its own though, throwing the poor sergeant around and tackling him, even grunting realistically when his wind got knocked out (see what I did there?)
The last section of the game is very satisfying, though. Walking through an enemy villa with a fully automatic shotgun and an overly accurate LMG makes you feel like Chuck Norris just donned a Kevlar jacket. Crummy plot and doomed NPCs aside, it's a shooter experience that you owe it to yourself to play once.


On to the meat and potatoes of any modern shooter: the multiplayer.

[Multi-Player]

THE GOOD:
-Pretty much everything
-Especially the physics and gravity
-Sniper lens glint vastly diminishes camping

THE BAD:
-Origin and Battlelog
-Some minor bugs
-Imperfect spawn system

Upon installing a new game, most people try out everything in the menu at least once before actually playing the campaign. I spent about half an hour playing the single-player, and then switched to the multiplayer to see what DiCE had pulled out of the hat for this one.
Three weeks later I realized I had completely forgotten that Battlefield 3 had a single-player component. I also realized that I was running dangerously low on crucial nutrients in my body and that I hadn't slept for days, but that was for the addiction paramedics to worry about.
Not quite as bad as all that, but there does lie a grain of truth in my statement. BF3's multiplayer takes a day or two to get used to, especially if (like myself) you've spent the last 3 years playing Call of Duty online. However, once it gets its hooks in your brain, you are in it for the long run.
At heart, Battlefield 3 is still a Battlefield game. It shines best in the big, open maps the franchise is known for, but also manages to be exciting and well-executed in the tighter urban maps. What impresses me most is the balance between classes; normally Assault and Sniper were the only ways to go, with squads upon squads of riflemen supported by clusters of camping marksmen crawling across the map, leaving twitching corpses and raging noobs in their wake. Now, each class has a much bigger part to play in the big picture. Sure, there are still camping snipers and some maps lend themselves to long-range firefights, but DiCE has compensated properly with the addition of projectile gravity and scope glint. Projectile gravity basically means that all of your bullets are affected by the pull of Mother Earth, and that they have travel time. So none of this insta-kill laser bullets nonsense of most other online shooters; a sniper has to aim much further ahead and compensate for bullet fall. Over a distance of 400m a bullet takes almost a second to reach you, which is ample time to dodge should you know where the slugs are coming from. The same distance causes an almost 2 metre drop in bullet altitude, so if you've been hit in the head with a .50 cal, you know it's not some snotty kid with an aimbot; the snipers really have to work for their kills. Stopping a camper is made doubly easy by the snipers' scope glint; any rifle using a scope with a magnification larger than 4x will have a glint, seen as a small flash of light almost like a flashlight seen from far away when aimed in your direction. It's not large so as to always give your position away, but if you're looking for a sniper in a specific area, you'll spot him easily if he has you in his sights.
The medic class is another prominent absence from the game, having been integrated with the Assault class. One might argue it an unfair advantage that riflemen are now not only able to shoot faster, but revive fallen mates as well. However, the shock paddles are only unlocked at a later stage, with the initial loadout only including health packs. This type of equipment also takes the place of a tertiary weapon, such as an RPG, putting the Assault class at a noticeable disadvantage in the heavy firepower department.
The Support class used to be just for noobs that needed as many bullets as possible to kill an unarmed opponent at minimum health. Now, with the inclusion of the suppression mechanic in multiplayer, throwing your own weight in lead around the battlefield becomes a much more useful tool. Not only are you crippling the effectivity of enemy infantry by suppressing them with random spraying, but if an enemy troop is killed while under the effects of your suppression, you get an assist bonus.
Which brings us to the final class; the Engineer. My personal favourite since the older BF games, although normally very lacking in the anti-personnel department, the Engineer has been given fangs. Lots of fangs.
For a start, the Engineer now carries the same primary weapons as the Assault class (even though they have seperate unlock trees). The standard pistol features, as always, but with the inclusion of a tertiary weapon as well as a piece of equipment, the Engineer becomes a force to be reckoned with. Especially as the starting weapon is an RPG-7. And anti-tank weapons in this game are remarkably accurate, and with no waver left or right, making the only impediment to sharpshooting with an RPG the effects of gravity: so plash damage and the ability to blow holes in walls makes the Engineer a force to be reckoned with. The equipment slot also makes for interesting battles. The three main pieces you'll be using here are the Repair Tool (speaks for itself), the AT-Mine (ditto) and the EOD Bot (huh?). The latter is a remote-controlled explosive-defusing robot shaped like a flattened WALL-E, equipped with a Repair Tool. This little cyborg is enormously useful, as it can remotely repair vehicles and equipment as well as capture points in Rush mode. On top of all this, the Repair Tool can be used as a close-range offensive weapon, making the act of taking out campers that much less dangerous. Roadkills are also a possibility if the Bot has built up enough speed; however, it takes a LOT of practice to steer properly. It's very finicky and sensitive and tends to get stuck quite quickly, making the scenario of WALL-E lying on its side in the street after hitting half a leaf, repair tool flaring furiously at any sign of movement, a not uncommon one.
Now a little something about the game modes. Five game modes sounds a little dry compared to some other shooters, but think of how many modes you actually play on a consistent basis. The normal Team Deathmatch and Conquest modes make their appearance, with the former involving smaller areas, usually on the urban maps, and the latter having its usual massive-scale vehicle-enhanced ticket-reducing spawn-point-capturing mayhem. Rush is a twist on Capture the Flag, with both teams having a set number of nodes that have to be destroyed by the enemy team, using either an engineer, a vehicle of some kind or heavy armament. A set time limit gives the attackers a countdown to beat for destroying all points, while the defenders have to hold and repair their boxes.
The last two modes give an extra twist to Rush and Deathmatch; with Squad Rush and Squad Deathmatch, the battle is split between up to four sides instead of two. Teams are smaller, but there are far more enemies on the map and battles tend to get very hectic indeed.
The standard XP-earning unlock system holds few surprises, with one of my few gripes being the relatively small amount of unlocks available. Sure, there's a lot, but the high XP requirement means that you'll only unlock a new toy once every few matches or hours. More noticeable in the beginning stages, this can be a little frustrating, especially when being one-shotted by a guy with a Lvl50 sniper, while you need to drop at least two or three rounds into a moving target before getting the kill. On top of new weapons and equipment, individual weapon add-ons, ammo types and class specializations make your personalizations worthwhile if you stick out the dry spells.
Class specializations are another interesting feature. A little like "Perks" from the COD games, these give you more ammo, make you less vulnerable to explosives or even allows you to sprint longer distances. The difference comes at higher levels, when you unlock Squad Specializations, which automatically gives the perk to everybody in your squad (a squad is a subdivision of your team).
XP is earned for almost everything you do; anything from repairing vehicles to detonating enemy explosives gives you bonus XP. With 100XP per kill, it's not uncommon to end a round with several thousand XP and only a handful of kills due to assists, repairs and marksman bonuses like headshots, ending a killing spree or landing a shot over a long distance. It makes doing activities other than running and gunning worthwhile and satisfying.
The maps are, overall, satisfyingly varied and well balanced. Large-scale outdoor maps have enough cover to avoid snipers, and smaller urban maps have enough twists and turns to avoid players who spam grenades and explosives.
The Frostbite 2 engine, however, plays its trump card in the destructible environment feature. See a sniper camped out in a third-floor window? Grab your RPG and blow out the floor from underneath him. Stuck in a building and need to get to street level pronto? Blow a hole in the wall and drop to safety. Have a cluster of enemies holed up in the foyer of a bank? Call up your buddy in an Abrams tank to drop the roof on the bastards. It really adds a whole new dimension to gaming, and once you get used to it you'll wonder how you ever did without it. You can never be certain you're covered from behind, as the wall you thought you put behind your back might have been replaced by thin air mere seconds ago by some random detonation, and the inclusion of rubble doing physics damage makes it that much more fun. It's gimmicky, but it works and it changes the whole way you see the battlefield.
The problems I have encountered with Battlefield 3's multiplayer are largely not in-game. Sure, some small bugs and imperfect hit detection are annoying, but they occur infrequently and are constantly being patched. Spawning is also a minor gripe; in highly populated or full servers it's not uncommon to spawn right in front of an enemy or projectile. However, this usually means you've just chosen the wrong spawn point. They could have worked on a line-of-sight spawning system or some small spawn immortality though.
No, the major gripes I have with the multiplayer lies in the background architecture. Origin is touted as a Steam replacement by Electronic Arts (sure it's their own brand new digital distribution service, but the fact that EA pulled some current and all future releases from Steam to feature exclusively on Origin supports my statement). It works, most of the time, but it's definitely still a beta architecture. No in-game popup chat, and other useful features like a screenshot manager and in-game browser are sadly lacking. This, coupled with glaring bugs with the flagship PC release made me extremely annoyed with Origin. Upon inserting my disc, Origin was installed and the installation process was taken over by Origin, as is the custom with online distribution services. However, it then flatly refused to install from disc, even though I had all content available on the retail DVDs, and continually tried downloading the game files from the internet. It took some bypassing, Googling and unnecessary hassle to get my game installed from the discs I paid good money for.
An in-game browser is also replaced by Battlelog, an in-browser browser. This basically entails logging in with IE or some alternative browser, and using the web site to apply your filters and manage your online profile, giving you a list of servers almost as a "search result". You then join the game by clicking a button in-browser. This makes switching servers a major hassle, though, a fact which is surprisingly lessened by the excellent response time when using Alt-Tab. I was majorly annoyed by the fact that 64-bit browsers are not as yet supported by Battlelog, meaning I had to abandon my Firefox and use bog-standard IE for accessing Battlelog. The plugin used to launch the game is very buggy as well, and on more than one occasion the browser window crashed as a result. Frozen loading screens and unresponsive browser-to-game connections just added to my frustration.
The presence of an offline multiplayer would have been a big bonus, but unfortunately it doesn't come packaged. EA hasn't ruled out this feature in future patches, so let's keep our fingers crossed. Latencies to local (South African) servers are staggeringly low, with my cable connection in Stellenbosch registering some games with a consistent sub-5ms ping. Another thing going for it is the fact that there is almost always a populated local server, with some games taking place at 4 in the morning. At peak times there are sometimes more than 20 populated servers; and for SA, that's pretty impressive. Forming a squad with your friends in Battlelog and playing a 1000 ticket Conquest is an experience you'll never forget, with nary a block of cement higher than knee-height remaining after the 1000 tickets are used by either team.

So. Is Battlefield 3 worth it?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yes; and if they had used Steam instead of Origin and Battlelog, the game would have had at least 3% extra on Metacritic.com.
For R350, this game is a steal, and the addition of the first DLC, which consists of Battlefield 2 maps re-done in Frostbite 2, adds to the nostalgia factor and multiplies the fun.
Battlefield 3 is far from perfect, but it is a peek into the future of First-Person Shooting, and PC Gaming as a whole. Pushing a whole lot of revolutionary technologies, this game is a so-so single-player tacked on to an absolutely staggering multiplayer. Hours, days and weeks of otherwise productive time will be lost if you buy this game and have the internet connection to play online, but in the opinion of this reviewer, it's worth every second, and every cent.

FINAL SCORE: 88%

1st!!!

After dabbling vicariously in the mires of the online content distribution known as blogging, yours truly has decided to try something a little... well, it's definitely been done before. But now I want to jump on the bandwagon.

From the base camp I will henceforth refer to as "Insert Brain", I will be publishing reviews of games, software and technology, as well as personal impressions and rants about the same. However, this will also be home to my How To-guides on anything and everything technology-related, my Top 10 lists of websites, apps, music and games, some in-depth discussions on technical matters such as the science behind sound or building a website from scratch, as well as housing all the fascinating, interesting and frankly disturbing things I dig up from the depths of the interwebs, saving you hours of pointless advertisements and pornography.

Contributions, feedback and requests are welcome; sending them to martinbckr@gmail.com should get you a prompt reply and, hopefully, a result.

Happy surfing!