Tag: terrible game

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Dungeon Keeper

I exist!

twenty-four!
twenty-four!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, others, I am here to tell you that EA has once again outdone themselves. They have managed to screw up one of the most beloved games of all time, the one heralded by many to be one of the greatest real-time strategy games ever, Dungeon Keeper.

Dungeon Keeper  is  was a brilliant real time strategy game in which you build and maintain a dungeon while trying to keep heroes from breaking in an stealing your gold. It was wonderful. And then, EA decided to make an iOS (i.e. iPhon or iPad) version of it.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong about iOS games, (although there might as well be) but they did do something very terrible that is really only present on iOS games and Facebook games, and really terrible. They made everything take forever to do.

Before, there were two kinds of blocks, those that take seconds to mine, and those that can’t be mined. In the iOS version, the blocks take anywhere from three seconds to twenty-four hours to mine, just to free up one tile of space. That really ruins it, because the thing about making a dungeon is that you make several different rooms, each serving a different purpose. The rooms can be any size, but the smallest you can get with the room still having practical purpose is about a three by three area of tiles. It can take days to make anything even vaguely useful!

But not to worry! You can speed it up! How, you ask?  By paying money! Yay— wait, that’s terrible. Basically, the currency they use to speed things up is called gems. They go at a rate of one hundred to one hundred forty gems per dollar, depending on how much you’re willing to buy at once. One of those delightful blocks I mentioned that take a day to mine will set you back two hundred forty-nine gems. That’s two and a half dollars to mine a single block!

That’s pretty much all I have to say about this blatant cash-grab. Now go torrent the original two or something.

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Call of Duty: Ghosts

Heaven's Gate
If only the game looked this good.

Photo Credit: Hartwig HKD via Compfight

Dear god why.

So I’m told Call of Duty: Ghosts came out. Also, the PC port is abysmal. There are quite a few problems with it. Lets start from when you first try to play the game. There is a fifty gigabyte install, making it ridiculous to even get it on your computer. Once you do, only the upper third or so of the PC gaming community will be able to play, as it artificially requires six gigs of RAM. One may (mistakenly) think that it means it is an amazingly beautiful game, but more on that later. If were to actually get to play it, you will find that it only takes up a fraction of that in processing power. You can even use a mod to circumvent this artificial requirement, and it works just fine.

Considering you are probably an intelligent person, you might first go to the options menu once you start up the game. It falls flat. First off, you will probably be noticing frequent stuttering in the background for no apparent reason. Looking into the options menu, there is a nice slew of options for graphics, but only one slider for volume. In most games, you will probably want at least two or three, as you might want the voices or sound effects a bit louder than the music. You might look in the gameplay options, and find a distinct lack of an FOV slider. For those uneducated in the ways of gaming, FOV stands for field of view. The field of view is how wide your cone of sight is. Now this might not be a problem, if it weren’t so low. This means that you will frequently be shot by people standing next to you that you can’t see. Also, many people will get motion sickness from a low FOV, as it is sort of like looking through a window. If you are close to it (i.e. in front of a monitor) you will see more than if you are far away, and if this isn’t the case, you may get sick.

But I digress. Onwards to gameplay and graphics. Once you get in, you will find that it is reasonably hideous. It looks like they never updated the engine from the older Call of Duty games. This leaves me wondering why the game is so taxing on your system. 50 gigabytes of memory and (sort of) six gigs of RAM for this? The thing can bring a gaming machine with the best parts you can get for it to its knees, without even looking pretty. If you can survive the lag, the gameplay is highly iterative, uninspired, and bland. There is almost nothing new from previous Call of Duty games, and those were just run of the mill first person shooters.

Now go buy Battlefield 4.

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Sim City – Part One: DRM

Sim City
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Kevin Labianco via Compfight

 

     Sim City, the old nineteen eighty-nine city building game. I’m sure every retro gamer has fond memories of this game. However, EA is at it again, with their DRM-happy nonsense.

     They made a reboot of the series called Simcity, because ,you know, it’s trendy to name reboots after the original game. Gameplay-wise it was horrifically mediocre, however that isn’t what I’ll be talking about. I’m here to talk about the DRM. EA had decided that the best way to stop pirates was to force you to need a connection to the servers in order to play at all, even single player. This on its own wasn’t a very good idea, as not everyone has internet that transmits data as fast as a computer does locally.

     However, the real kick in the teeth was that even paying customers who had purchased the game weren’t allowed to play. Why, you ask? It’s due to the fact that so many people went on the servers, that the servers collapsed and nobody could get on. This on it’s own wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, as it happened to Diablo III, if it weren’t for the fact that it took them several weeks to get it fixed. This naturally caused a bit of an uproar, though they didn’t seem to care in the slightest.

     To make everything I just said seem more pleasant, this isn’t the end of the nightmare for paying customers. Also, this isn’t the end of the story, but that’s something for another blog post.