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Early thoughts on Internet console games.
Oct. 18th, 2004 01:58 amI have so far tried it with two games.
Return of the King:
Lame. I was expecting the online game to be similar to the single-console multiplayer game, where two members of the Fellowship help one another through the movie-based missions. Instead, it drops them onto a tiny, glowing island (with a tree in the middle, I guess for aesthetics) and spawns endless waves bad guys for you to hack down together until you both run out of health and die. So basically it's LotrR: Holodeck Battles, or something. Geez, guys.
Noteworthy: The game makes use of a USB speaker/mic headset, if you have one. I can't imagine why it's useful for this particular game, since there's really nothing worth talking about. Nonetheless, I learn of this device's existence, and say: ah, another thingy I have to buy for unclear reasons.
One thing it does right, sort of: If you don't want to cruise for players inside one of the lobbies fillied with 14-year-olds shouting "U R FAG" back and forth (while, oblivious, the Fellowship Theme plays in the background), you can select 'Instant Matchup' and the server pairs you up with someone else who chose the same option, and sends you off to the game. Unfortunately, if nobody's chosen that option yet, you stare at a static screen until someone does, or you stop waiting and return to the online menu. Would have been better to treat it as a flag you can set, versus a modal dialog.
Hot Shots Golf Fore:
Better. I really love this game's single-player mode, and curiosity about its online mode was the driving force behind my getting that adapter.
When I first tried it, I hated it, largely because of a single factor: the real-time shot clock that starts counting down as soon as you tee up at any hole. If it reaches zero before you hole out, you're permanently kicked out of the game. Since I didn't know about it, this happened to me twice in a row, and I thought: This is entirely bogus.
I tried it again tonight, and discovered that suddenly there's more than enough time to complete a hole, so long as you display a modicum of skill, and don't dawdle. I know I've gotten better and faster at the game through single-player practice, but I wonder if they've made the timer a little looser server-side as well. I still don't know how I feel about it; it still seems a mite too fascistic; two or three of the players in the game I played tonight fell under the clock's cruel pendulum. A few more died before the 18th hole due to dropped connections, or possibly getting mad and quitting. (Of course, golf being golf, you can just keep on playing even if all your opponents drop dead, which is just what me and the (eventually) one other survivor did.)
Something that HSGF does right: In lieu of a dynamic ranking system based on network-play performance, all players can see each other's skill level based on how far they've advanced in the single-player game. This is actually a pretty good gauge, from what I've seen so far.
Observations:
There were dozens of people on the golf server, and the handful I played with and talked to seemed very nice and showed good sportsmanship (if we overlook the possible quitting). The RotK server had only a few punk kids connected. I suspect this is a reflection of the games' relative quality, as well as the sort of audience the two genres attract. I am glad that I hobnobbed with the golfing people first.
Chatting is a problem, because it's not obvious how to turn the PS2 controller into a language-input device. Both HSGF and RotK take the least imaginative path of summoning up an on-screen keyboard with which you can laboriously construct your messages, letter-by-letter. The network-setup program from the disc that shipped with the adapter did, I think, a better job, giving you a pie menu of alphanumerics. To type a character, you push the joystick towards one of nine on-screen clusters of characters (the fifth one being at center position), and then press one of the four controller buttons to choose a particular character from that cluster. (You switch between caps, lowercase, and punctuation keypads with another button.) This lets you hack out text relatively quickly, once you get the hang of it.
Very noteworthy (if you're into this sort of thing): a pie menu is an ideal on-screen selection widget if the principal physical input device involves a radial sub-device, like the PS2 controller's analog sticks. This didn't occur to me until just now.