Open Source Handheld Console GCW-Zero: OpenDingux, Kickstarter

GCW Zero Kicksterter is a project to create a spiritual successor to the low-cost Dingoo A320 handheld gaming console.

Thanks to SiENcE for pointing this out!

Fresh versions of Stunt Rally and Warzone2100

Just released today, there is a new version (1.9) for Stunt Rally:

Stunt Rally 1.9

It has a few nice new features, but probably the greatest update is a major change in the car handling physics, including an "easy" mode for those of us not wishing to practice for a career as a professional rally driver ;) and the guys would like feedback in the SR forum so let them know what you think.

A big collection of (partially quite crazy) screens can be found here.

Another great release that surfaced just today is Warzone2100 version 3.1.0. It cumulates all the changes made during the last 2.5 years, however if you tested the RCs already then there isn't too much new. Most notably they mention the new and fully fixed netcode, so that "out of sync" is a thing of the past (unless you have a crappy net connection like me :( ).

Have fun playing!

Homefront

The Short

Pros
- Decent enough shooter...that is, it never really broke
- Premise is interesting
- Multiplayer is stable and has a few unique ideas
- Graphics aren't...awful
- Explosive barrels are yellow instead of red. That's...a good thing.

Cons
- Single player is three hours long.
- Story is bland, patronizing to the intelligence of its audience, and borderline racist
- Shooting feels weak and bland
- Guns, sound effects, and voice acting are all very lame
- Even more "paint by numbers" than other Call of Duty clones on the market
- Controller support works, but only just
- Tons of blatant, in-game avertising
- Playing this game right after Spec Ops: The Line was a bad idea

Objectives: Keepin it simple for the dumb shooter fans

The Long

So let's get something out of the way real fast, despite my scathing reviews of the genre on this blog, I don't mind modern military shooters. I used to be really deep into Modern Warfare 2, and Black Ops, and for the most part I figure if you enjoy those types of games, that's cool and all. I mean, I wouldn't have played Homefront or Medal of Honor or all those other games if I didn't actually enjoy parts of the genre, right?

That being said, Homefront is an absolute disaster. 

I was actually looking forward to this game pre-release, and almost even pre-ordered it. As a fan of Call of Duty who was obviously seeing the series multiplayer (and single player) stagnate, I was more than willing to let THQ start up their own thing that could overcome it. However, after just a few minutes in both Homefront's borderline-offensive single player and shockingly boring multiplayer made me realize that Homefront is nothing more than an inferior clone, and all of THQ's large aspirations to make the game "better" than its competitors completely stumbled out of the gate. That, or died before even leaving the gate. 

So let's talk about Homefront.

Aiming down a red dot site? Never seen that before. 

Probably the worst thing about Homefront is its single player. Again, I felt the story had a lot of promise. It starts by giving you a stylized intro splicing real footage with obvious actors to show a series of events leading to North Korea taking over South Korea, allying with China to take over the majority of Eastern Asia, invading Hawaii, and occupying the Western side of the United States. It's actually somewhat chilling, especially for those who have followed North Korea in the news, because let's be honest...that country can be pretty scary. While the idea of it taking over the US is pretty far-fetched (especially since, I dunno, where the crap is the rest of Europe during all of this?), it's an interesting idea. Set a game in the US where half the country is occupied, and people are having to fend for themselves.

Homefront takes what could have been a decent premise and makes it downright stupid, and borderline racist.

Let me get this off my chest first, because I'm itching to say it: racial slurs for enemies, even if you made them up specifically for this game and are very obviously referencing "North Koreans," is not OK in your game. I get it, you want to show the people hate the North Koreans occupying their country, but having your team toss around racial slurs when you gun down people or using them amidst military jargon is not cool. I wouldn't say I'm one to get all uppity about this sort of thing, since I'm not a Korean-American and thus can't give my opinion on this game's representation of (what I'm assuming, based on the preface) is essentially both North and South Koreans, but still...seriously. There's even a scene in the game where they condemn a group of weird survivalists hicks (out of Utah, apparently  Do they have like ten wives too?) for being racist against your teammate who is Asian-American. Um...but you were all tossing around these racial slurs for the thousands of Koreans you gunned down during the game. But it's ok now because in-game you showed your guys are clearly incapable of racism because they defended your one team member who was Korean (and, also, the brilliant nerdy machine guy. Stereotypes, ahoy! Also, the black guy dies first. Again, awesome.).

First thing I said when I saw this cozy home base: it only exists to be burned in a "dramatic" moment later. SPOILER: I was right. 

Speaking of your companions, none of them are likable (except the Korean, weirdly enough. At least he was sort of witty). You have your rough-neck leader who is supposed to be a role model, but instead he's just a huge dick. You have your sort of hispanic girl ally who has a bare midriff and whenever an explosion happens that launches you all on the ground she somehow lands so her perfectly-rendered, jeans-covered butt is facing you. Classy. And...that's it, actually. There's a black commander but he dies (um...spoilers?) in like the first two missions so...awesome.

But where this game really fries my bacon is with it's attempts to be "edgy." It starts with Koreans busting into your house and putting you out on a bus that drives slowly through town. As you do this, you can watch all the atrocities that the North Koreans are doing to the enslaved Americans. Taking them to labor camps, shooting one that tries to one away, randomly gunning down a set of parents in front of their child (seriously...why?), complete with blood (that looks like bad ketchup, by the way) splattering on your bus window. You know. Edgy.

It only gets worse from there. As mentioned in the image, you find this utopian little self-sustaining refugee house, which exists for you to walk through once and come back to find it burned and everybody strung up and dead. You see them shoveling bodies into mass graves, only to have to "press X to hide in mass grave" later to avoid overhead choppers. You find a bunch of rednecks who just want to linch your Korean buddy and rape the girl, who spend their time torturing everybody they find but especially North Koreans. It's just one obvious attempt to "push the envelope" after the next, and all of it feels so fake and forced it's more offensive for being stupid rather than offensive to have a purpose. 

Seriously? This is the worst. 

[Tangent inbound]

See, I'm all for edgy content, or stuff that makes me thing. But that's just it: edgy content needs to have a purpose. It needs to serve the story, or at least (in a game's sense) the gameplay. The problem is, while books and movies have gotten this right, games rarely do. Mostly we have crap like "No Russian" from Call of Duty, that exists just to be "shocking." It isn't really shocking because it's only skin deep. You can distance yourself from it because there's no deeper story implications, nothing that makes you mull it over and consider how it applies to yourself. Not to butt in on another review, but Spec Ops: The Line has a lot of very similar elements as Homefront, but because it addresses them serious and as the atrocious as they actually are (like using white phosphorous and burning people alive, which you do in Homefront without batting and eye but face some awful consequences in Spec Ops) the story has impact. Homefront is like that punk 12-year-old kid that you know who swears all the time around you and talks about sex or whatever. He's trying his hardest to get a rise and be "adult," but he's so ignorant and blatant it's just him making a fool of himself. Because Homefront doesn't use any of its shocking imagery, it all comes off as weak and bland.

Not to mention it falls into that "shoot thousands of non-white people as a totally white person America #1 Hoo Ra!" problem that plagues this whole genre. Makes me a little sick to my stomach. 

I'd also like to lastly point out that this is the first game where they actually recorded voice for "Take cover inside the Hooters!" and "Regroup in the White Castle!" I'm so glad to see in-game ads playing prominently in video games these days that an entire level is about infiltrating a TigerDirect.com physical store, complete with "half off!" and "killer deals on GPUs!" adds plastered everywhere. Maybe it was because I was playing the PC version, and if I'd done it on Xbox it would have been a Microsoft Store or something. 

Mediocre at best, deplorable at worst. 

It's also worth mentioning the single player is three hours long. No, that's not me exaggerating  I checked my Steam time after burning through the game on easy (including all deaths, menu navigations, me trying to figure out how to make the controller work properly, etc.) and my in-game time was just over three hours. Seven missions, one of which is maybe ten minutes long. What a great value. 

Multiplayer tends to be a bit better in terms of content, at least. It actually is pretty clever. The better you play, the higher your "priority" ranks up. So you get better unlocks (like weapons, scout drones [my personal favorite] that you can use to tag people for your allies, attack drones, etc.) but as your stars get higher and higher the other team sees your general location on the map and gets a massive points bonus for hunting you down. This idea of somewhat penalizing players for doing well (to aid the other team) is actually a pretty decent idea. And, as stated, the power-ups are cool (and there's vehicles in this game), like the scout drones and other stuff.

The problem is the shooting in Homefront is just as bland as its story and copy-cat feel.

Plus, really bad looking blood. 

Guns sound awful, to start, like pea-shooters. While I was annoyed at Metal of Honor for running by the book, at least Dice knows how to make a game sound good. Homefront doesn't. The guns sound bad, as does all the voice acting and everything else in the game. I guess I usually put this paragraph by the graphics section, but whatever.

Shooting is serviceable but not tight. While Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are obviously developed by people who have made these types shooters in the past, Homefront feels lacking. While I'll admit it was hardly bad, when I played on a controller the auto-aim seemed borked, and when I switched to a keyboard and mouse it felt waaaay too imprecise, even after messing with my mouse settings. This is combined by unrealistic and unreliable "kicks" from guns, weird iron-sights that never seem to hit where I point them, and the fact that most SMGs are just straight up underpowered, this game feels like a budget game. Which it wasn't released as, it was released as a Call of Duty killer. Sorry, not gonna happen.

Kills earn points, which you can cash in for one of two rewards. Not a bad system, honestly. 

Graphically this game looks dated. It's hard to describe, though, with static images. The game looks ok in screenshots, with a lot of texture detail, bump-mapping, and despite looking generic at least it appears to be...ok. The problem is this game looks horrible in action, and I'm not talking about the framerate. It just looks...well...the textures look like early Xbox 360 games. You know what I'm talking about, the ones that just discovered HD, so everything looks kind of weirdly shiny, like it was up-rezzed? Again, it's hard to describe, but I played the game both on the Xbox 360 and then on the PC with everything jammed up to max settings, and it looks...straight up bad. Like a budget game.

And "Domination." Woo. 

Homefront is an excellent example of failed expectations. Again, I was looking forward to this game for quite a bit, thinking it could convey a dark and interesting storyline and an actual multiplayer experience to compete with Call of Duty. Instead, we get a game that's a cheap knock-off and feels like it at every turn. It's story tries too hard to get attention and ends up floundering, the multiplayer doesn't do anything that breaks the mold or even matches it, and the game looks and sounds straight up bad.

I've been putting off playing Homefront despite having gotten it on Steam a while back because of what I've heard, and I kind of wish I'd listened. Sure, it was only about three hours of my time I sunk into the single-player, but I'd much rather have spent that time doing just about anything else.

Unless you really like bland modern military shooters, Homefront can remain forgotten. One out of five stars. I'd recommend Medal of Honor over it any day.

One of the worst thing ever.

Games That Changed My Life Part 1: Final Fantasy IV

"Games That Changed My Life" is a multi-part series on games of particular personal note in my own history. These games have incredible significance to me in one way or another, and I'll be explaining exactly why on each reoccurring episode. 

Final Fantasy IV

RPGs are all over the place today. It seems like you can't shake a stick without hitting one, or at least games that incorporate what was once considered "RPG" (aka "Role-playing game") elements. Experience points make their way into Call of Duty, Halo, Puzzle Quest, and all sorts of genres. But it wasn't really that long ago when RPGs were considered somewhat "niche," and the rift between JRPGs and Western RPGs was that much more massive.

What does this have to do with my memories of Final Fantasy IV? Well...not much, but I needed some sort of intro to make me look reasonably intelligent.

Just roll with it, ok?

I'll be frank here: I was probably the biggest terror ever to raise. Not because I was a bad kid or anything (I always tried to be good), but because I was a super hyperactive one. Say what you want about ADHD and how we overdiagnose, I was the poster child for that. Add that my two younger brothers were probably not the most darling little angels ever, and you have yourself a nice stressed mom and the inability to keep a consistant babysitter for more than two or three sessions. Think of us as Calvin and Hobbes, except there's three Calvins.

The only babysitter that I remember lasting multiple times was Carson (last name withheld to protect the innocent), and this was because he had a tactic. First, he was male (and we were all males) so that somehow made things easier. Second, he let us do anything we wanted until bedtime, then he didn't take any guff. And third, he snuck his Super Nintendo over quite regularly.

The incident in question began when my parents decided to take a day trip to L.A. Carson was the only one willing to deal with the trio of terror for that long of a period, so his skills were enlisted. On the way over he made probably the smartest decision he made that day: picked up a copy of Final Fantasy IV from the Video Rental store a few blocks from my house.

He got stuck on this boss for a while. Didn't know to just use Lit-3 and end it in one hit.

As ADHD kids, we glued ourselves to video games. Hell, I still do (I'll admit it). We never had any systems growing up, so playing on an NES, Genesis, or SNES was a real treat. So when he came over with this new game for us, we were thoroughly engrossed.

I remember everything from that game. He played the game from the beginning all the way up to the point where Tellah died (then got stuck on Barbaricca, the Elemental Fiend of Wind) and we watched over the course of who knows how many hours.

Now, I'd played games before (I don't remember how old I was, but it couldn't have been above ten) on the computer, but nothing like this. Nothing that had a story to it. I remember my brother and I being elated when Palom and Parom were enlisted, and so mortified when they turned to stone to save Cecil and the crew that my brother literally cried and we had to turn the game off for a while to comfort him. Tellah's death was equally impactful, as he was one of our favorite characters because of his awesome magic spells and spiffy attire (or at least, that's why I assume we liked him so much).

Dance for me!

This was the moment when I realized something. Video games aren't just toys. I'd cut my teeth on things like The Incredible Machine 2 and played truckloads of NES and Genesis games as friends' houses, but this was the first time a game was more than just a fun little interactive activity. It had a story, like a book. It had characters. It had emotion. It had memorable scenes (Tellah casting "Meteo" on Goblez was embedded in my mind for nearly seven years as I searched for this game after I'd forgotten the title. It wasn't until the advent of the internet in the late 90s that I actually rediscovered it). It has beautiful music on par with the classical stuff we were learning on the piano. It was more than a book could be, because it had images. It was more than a movie could be, because it was interactive. It was something wholly unique, a means to present story on a plane unlike anything we've ever seen.

Needless to say, it was impactful. We liked it so much we named a truckload of our Lego characters (we were way too big into Legos) after the characters, with the "Tellah Guy" being a mainstay who worked his way into all our of Lego adventures. When Carson got stuck on the three sisters boss for several hours (he couldn't figure out how "Wall" worked) we thought they were, in fact, the final boss of the game (I was relieved several years later when I replayed it and found the three sisters are cake). I remember Edward's girlfriend dying, and Tellah being furious. I remember the hovercraft (and even then I thought it was weird that this was in a medieval setting) and floating over water. I remember "Jump, Kain, Jump!" as Carson got stuck on Barbaricca for forever. And I remember Cid being my second favorite character, if only because of his huge hammer and love of airships.

Never Forget. 

For me, this was an impactful moment in my childhood and my gaming career. It introduced me to RPGs, a genre I would not rediscover until nearly half a decade later. It showed me story in games, with real emotional weight. It blew my young mind on so may levels that video games could be like this, something the industry (and those outside of it in particular) are still trying to comprehend even to this day. It's something I'll never forget.

Fly on, Red Wings

Even as I replay the game today and realize it's...well, let's say "dated," to be nice...I can't help but be completely engrossed and wrapped up in nostalgia as I re-remember and rediscover things buried in my mind. Granted, that only lasts until after Tellah dies (though Carson did load another save on the rental copy that was on the Moon, which lead to mass confusion), but the music, the feel of the game; all of it is still there, buried deep in my brain. It's something special.

As a final, maybe not relevant anecdote, many years later when I went to college I had another weird Final Fantasy IV experience. This was around the time iTunes was starting to get big (2004ish) and they just introduced the network-sharing feature. Naturally, everybody on our dorm shared all their iTunes music so the whole building could see everybody's library. They could also see their playlists, including their "Top twenty-five most played" and playcounts.

The sound of my ruined college.

Due to some freak accident (that or I left it on overnight or something), Hello, Fat Chocobo got something like two-thousand playcount. Again, no idea why. However, this quickly became a huge in-joke that I was unaware of. People from four or five floors above would walk past my room, humming the song loudly. They taught their friends to do it too, so whenever we went to social gatherings somebody would hum or whistle it absently at some point during the visit. To this day I have no idea why the playcount was so high, but it pretty much cursed me for my entire freshman year of college.

That's all for this time, but expect some more trips into Nathan's psyche and personal game history soon. Because that's what you always wanted: to get inside my brain. Yeah you did. Admit it.

Red Eclipse, STK feature in Microsoft Promo

Hat tip to forum member TheLastProject who posted about a promotional video for a proof of concept research project called 'IllumiRoom'.  The main game shown is Red Eclipse, but SuperTuxKart also briefly appears (implicitly as the game played by a girl!) around the 0:48-50 mark.

I doubt they were actually showing an Xbox as I'm unaware of either Red Eclipse or SuperTuxKart being able to run on one.

I find it fascinating that 2 FOSS games would appear this way.  Either this is an indication of red tape avoidance (no permission required for GPL games) or a cultural shift within Microsoft - or perhaps I'm just reading too much into it.

It certainly adds some validation to the games themselves, indicating they are impressive enough to feature as part of a video by one of the world's foremost technology companies.  So hats off to the developers of both projects and also the projects that enabled them (CubeSauerbraten, TuxKart) - I like it that both games are good examples of open source in action.

GarageGames raising money to port MIT-licensed Torque3D to Linux.

Just a quick heads up.  GarageGames is currently raising money to port their recently open sourced Torque3D engine to Linux, including editing tools.  Here's a link to their IndieGogo page.  They're using a fixed funding campaign, so you don't have to worry about losing your money if they don't reach their goal.

We could use a capable 3D engine with mature, commercial quality editing tools on Linux (yes, there are other FOSS engines that run on Linux, but what we don't have is something that comes close to Unity at the moment in terms of ease of use) -- not to mention the fact that this would open the door for people to port a lot of existing games.

If you'd like to see this happen, stop by their IndieGogo page and help them out.

Spaceteam

Spaceteam

The Short

Pros
- Frantic multiplayer game where you are a SPACE TEAM
- Free
- Can be played 2-4 people and game adjust difficulty accordingly
- This game is an absolutely hilarious, insane good time
- Cleverly written and designed, with no two games the same
- Did I mention it's free?

Cons
- Some of the "disabilities" are much, much worse than others
- Might make your friends hate you if you play really bad
- No advanced options (team switching)
- Can't have more than four people...though that might be a pro
- Not available on Android. Since it uses local Wifi, I'd love to see cross-OS play here

It's time to form a team. A Spaceteam. 

The Long

I heard a lot about this game over the holiday from the various gaming blogs and podcasts I listen too, with several even considering it in their Game of the Year deliberations. It made me curious about it, but the screenshots didn't look particularly enthralling. Yeah, it's a space game. Yeah, you hit buttons and turn dials. And yeah, it's multiplayer only and is free. So..?

I had these reservations, sure. Until I played it.

Spaceteam is one of the best things you can get on your iOS device at this given moment. Assuming you have friends (local ones, mind) that own iOS devices as well. 

This game is so frantic, it's absurd. 

Spaceteam is incredibly simple, yet incredible in what it does. Essentially, you and up to three other people are...well, a Space Team. You are all part of a ship that is running from an exploding sun, and it's your job to keep the ship up and running to avoid getting blown up. How this is done is through a variety of random, menial tasks. For example, you might have a dial called the "Zaxon Zapper," and you'll need to turn it to 3 and then to 5 when the game tells you to, before the time runs out. Simple, yes?

Well...no. Because sometimes, instructions for your screen appear on your friends' devices. And sometimes instructions for their screen is on yours. Because everybody gets a completely different set of controls on their various iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, you have to yell it out to them to do what is needed ("Flip the Dekadatter!" "Eject the Metapods!") before time runs up. Get enough right and you'll jump to hyperspace for a brief breather before it continues. Screw up enough, and you explode and your team dies. Your space team. That's not a good thing.

The magic of Spaceteam is the absolutely frantic co-op, and the absurd things the game makes you say. With four people, you have all four of you yelling commands, hoping that the right owner will catch their needed maneuver through the din. Not to mention asteroid fields (everybody has to shake their devices at the same time) and wormholes (everybody has to flip their devices at the same time) can mess up your controls. Screw up a lot and bits of your controls fall off, slime covers buttons, or (the worst), your translation machine fails, turning button names into nonsense. It only gets harder and harder until you die, with the challenge being to get as many warps as possible.

Sometimes they turn to random symbols. Because Spaceteam hates you.

Without a doubt, this game is some of the best fun I've had with a group of friends owning iOS devices. We played with two iPhones, and iPad, and an iPod Touch. There was no lag (minus our own yelling and misinterpretation), the yelling escalated quickly, and there's the awful sense of embarrassment when you issue a command and then realize it was on your button set to begin with. The game is chock-full of near-misses and awesome feats of teamwork, and when you fail you just want to start the whole frantic, yell-fest again.

By not being "just" a touch-screen game and incorporating real-world cooperation, Spaceteam succeeds in a way I wouldn't have imagined from a simple phone game. Yes, I could critique the graphics (which are charming but hardly pushing the envelope) or the lack of group options (I'd love to see it make two groups of three, then have people swap groups during hyperspace. That would be insane) or more than four players, but for what it does...it does it perfectly. For a frantic yell-fest that hooks your team and sends you into elated hysterics when you just make that hyperspace jump together, Spaceteam is something else. 

Unfortunately, this game is not available on Android (yet). It is free on iOS, with a few very minor in-app purchases available (none of which are necessary to enjoy the game; they simply make it a bit better). It requires everybody be on the same local Wifi (which makes sense, as you have to be near each other to even play the game) or Bluetooth together, but all iOS devices have Bluetooth now so it should be an easy connection. We had no issue getting together on a local Wifi. Because it circumvents stuff like Gamecenter, I could see cross-platform play (Android and iOS) with this game, which would be delicious.

I feel a bit silly review this game, but let me just say this: if you have friends that have iOS devices, get this game and force them to play it with you. Trust me, it's a load of fun, probably the best "party" iOS game ever, and gets you to all yell totally stupid stuff while trying to be the ultimate Space Team. Words don't do it justice. Just get it. Seriously. JUST GET IT.

Four out of five stars.