Free Realms ended up launching on the day it said it would, but got there by the skin of its teeth. I followed the Twitter FR conversation during the day to keep an eye on how things were going (in between builds of course.) Fortunately that didn’t effect me too much, the game was well and truely underway by the time I’d got home and had dinner.

I did have a couple of problems getting Free Realms working. I loaded up the web page and signed into my Station Access account, and then downloaded the client installer. I was then unable to access the character creation page, I kept being returned to the download page until I realized that I should be running on Firefox rather than Google’s Chrome browser.

After this little hurdle, and frankly since the uptake of Chrome hasn’t been that high yet, it won’t affect most folks, I created my character, gave him the temporary name of Seth Flamingwig and selected Stropp as my desired permanent name. I was then able to log into the game.

BTW, this won’t be much of a report, so far I’ve only spent a couple of hours in the game, and haven’t really done much yet. Having said that, my memory of last nights session is one of a lot of activity.

There are a lot of quests, or perhaps I should say missions, very early on. So far I’ve been asked to do some delivery quests, participate in a race and a demolition derby, scare and then beat up on some Robgoblins, enter a dungeon with a bunch of crazy lobster people, and cook a dish while the meat doesn’t keep still.

In that couple of hours, my professions, all except brawler which I took to level 2, stayed at level 1. I’m primarily a bartle explorer don’t forget, so I spent a lot of time just checking stuff out.

There have been a couple of reports from various bloggers that Free Realms feels a little grindy, and I’d concur with that description at this point (as early as it is), but there are some things that are really fun. I thoroughly enjoyed the kart race and demolition derby. (Even if it occurred to me that I being 43 yo was trying to demolish karts that likely belonged to pre-teen players… I must be a big meanie.) Those mini-games had a good sense of pacing and were over far to soon.

The only other issue of the session: After I logged off, I was unable to access the Free Realms website. The site just timed out and repeated attempts at various times before I went to bed ended in a error screen. My guess is that the site was suffering the Free Realms equivalent of the Slashdot/Digg effect.

Other than that, I didn’t experience any appreciable lag, and no bugs (that I could tell) or crashes. The game ran smoothly all the time I was playing it. That’s a nice thing to see on a launch day.

It’s probably still way too early to give a yay or a nay about Free Realms, but so far it looks like SOE has done pretty well here. I doubt that it will become my game of choice, or even a second MMORPG, but I think it has a place in the stable of game worlds that I visit.

The fact that it’s essentially free in these budgetarilly constrained times helps too.

Free Realms – Up and Running

Way back in the dim dark ages, oh lets say 1994, I bought my first laptop computer, a 486 DX2-66. On the day I picked it up, while waiting for the salesperson to get it from the storeroom, I had a browse through the computer games section. I not only came home with a new computer that day, I came home with System Shock.

After spending some time playing with my new toy, I decided to install the game. It came on seven floppy disks and took quite a while to load onto the computer. Then I fired it up and over the next few weeks had one of the more memorable gaming experiences of my life.

System Shock was the first first person shooter that I had played, and after I had completed it, I wanted more shock. So I went and bought Doom, Rise of the Triad, and several other less memorable games. Even though these games were great games, I was disappointed. I wanted more of the story, more of the interaction and more of the fully 3D worlds (and cyberspace.)

It really wasn’t until much later that I got my wish. System Shock 2 was released. Then there were the Deus Ex games. A little game called Cybermage was in there somewhere. My gaming storylust was sated for a time.

And now, the latest of the RPG style first person shooters, Bioshock has been released.

To be honest I wasn’t really looking forward to Bioshock. I’ve been more immersed in the whole MMO genre, which is what this blog normally covers, for the last few years. I knew it was coming up of course, but it was only on its release that I really took a look. My attention was grabbed so I took the plunge and bought myself a copy.

Gameplay

While I haven’t completed the game yet, I’m having a blast. Bioshock has some truely scary moments, and I have a feeling I haven’t seen them all yet. I’m finding Bioshock fairly challenging, however, I’m set for medium difficulty and it’s been a while since I’ve played a FPS.

For me, the biggest selling point of Bioshock is that there is a very strong story that is told through your interaction between the main antagonists, and by hearing the audio diaries of some of the victims of Rapture. I’m a big story guy. I love deep and complex stories. Bioshock is not disappointing me in that regard.

From the moment you enter Rapture, the city under the sea, your main opponents will be the splicers. Splicers are the citizens of Rapture who have gone that extra step in genetic self modification. They are also quite mad and will murder you as much as look at you. Some of them also move around like demented dancers on amphetemines. They’re quite hard to hit.

There’s also Ryan. The coldly psychotic leader of Rapture. The man whose genius led him to build a city under the sea. He contacts you from time to time to taunt you and make threats, much like the mad computer Shodan in System Shock. You are assisted in the same way by Atlas, Ryans main opponent.

Bioshock implements the standard FPS mechanics that players know and love. Move using the WASD keys. Look and fire using the mouse. That sort of thing. There’s nothing really special here, it works as expected.

There are two forms of attack that you can use. Firstly, the standard weapons like the pistol, machine gun, and wrench. These use ammo, and there are three types of ammo that can be found for each weapon. The weapons are also upgradable from kiosks that occur throughout the city.

The second form of attack is by using Plasmids. Plasmids are very like psychic powers and use Eve. Perhaps the best way to describe Eve is that it’s like mana. Eve, like health, doesn’t regenerate on its own. For that you must find, or buy, Eve hypos to top up your powers. At the moment the pyrokinesis plasmid is my favorite. There’s nothing like setting fire to your enemy and watching them run around setting everything ablaze. Burn, baby, burn!

The difference from a standard FPS, and the commonality with games like SS and Deus Ex, is the ability to customize your character. You do this using various enhancements known as plasmids. You start the game with only a few open plasmid slots, but can buy more using Adam, a substance extracted from The Little Sisters. More on that later. You can also buy additional plasmids and gene tonics, you can find them laying about, they can be invented, and you can get them through photography.

Photography is a little different. You take photos of the various enemies and the camera researches them. Once a type of opponent is researched to the next level you get a reward. This might be a damage bonus to that particular type of enemy. Or it might be a new plasmid.

Which makes it important to upgrade yourself and your weapons. And for that you need Adam, which only comes from the Little Sisters. Sounds easy eh? Well it’s not. The Little Sisters have friendly guardians called The Big Daddies. Just give a Little Sister a mean look and the Big Daddy will be down on you like a ton of bricks, and they are tough. Leave the Little Sisters alone and they Big Daddies will pass you by.

But you need the Adam right? So you have to fight the Big Daddy. And once you’ve managed to take him down, you have a moral choice. Do you harvest the Adam, or save the Little Sister. Saving her will only give you a fraction of the Adam you’d get if you harvested. Harvesting is icky. I’ve done it, and each time I feel nasty afterwards. Bioshock is the only game ever to have made me feel this way in exercising a game mechanic.

Perhaps part of this is due to the relationship between the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies. The Little Sisters talk to these lumbering hulks like they are their own cuddly pets. When you take a BD down, the Little Sisters show concern for their fallen guardian. Not to mention that the Little Sisters are harmless little girls. Not quite, but enough.

Graphics

Unfortunately, my computer is unable to handle anything more than the lowest quality setting. I run a Pentium 3.4GHz with 2GB RAM and a 6600GT graphics card. I can go up to the higher settings, but the frame rate is too low to properly play. That’s okay though, because even at the lowest setting, this game looks awesome.

There has been a huge amount of work done in making the game look and feel like you are in an undersea city. Now when I first heard about the setting in an undersea city, I was expecting something like Sealab, with domes and connecting tunnels. But no. It’s not all bright and cheery. Bioshock has a real noir feel about it. Sort of like New York in the 40′s and 50′s. There are lots of towering statues and dark places. But it is a city in decay too, and that all comes through.

Bioshock is gorgeous. I wish I had a better graphics card!

Sound

In keeping with the setting, Bioshock is an audio masterpiece. The moment I stepped into the city proper, I was quite frankly, creeped out. There are moments in the game of pure fear that are not just the monster reaching out from behind the door. A number of times I have been creeping down the corridor to hear a slicer challenge me and send chills up my spine. The audio in Bioshock really sets the mood.

Downsides

There are great games, but there are no perfect games. Bioshock is no exception, but it’s close.

There don’t seem to be many bugs in the game, but I did get the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death once. The Nvidia driver crashed and brought the machine down just after getting into a new section of the city. Mind you this only happened once, and I did upgrade the driver the next day.

One of my beefs with the game play is that there doesn’t always seem to be an indication that I am taking on damage. The health indicator will go down of course, but there doesn’t seem to be a visual or audio cue that I’m getting hit. There have been a few times when I noticed there was a bad guy behind me just as it was too late. Other FPSes flash red on the screen or give some other visual cue. This would not go astray.

The other beef I have is the Vita Chambers. These are tubes that you are resurrected in if you should die. Now while they are there to help players, and I need all the help I can get, I feel like they make some things too easy. There was one fight I was in where I died repeatedly and just kept coming back until it was done. It just didn’t feel right.

There has been some ruckus on the web about 2K Games use of activations and rootkits for security. While the Securerom isn’t technically a rootkit, it acts like one, and potentially opens up a computer to attack. At least that’s the fuss. The other issue is that Bioshock can only be activated five times. It was originally twice. Bad luck if you reinstall your OS frequently. When will game publishers learn that making life difficult for legitimate customers only increases piracy? Bad publisher. No twinkie.

Conclusion

I am having a great time playing Bioshock. I guess that sums it up pretty well. A game is meant to be fun, and that is what I am having. It’s challenging and scary and has an engaging story. It has that just a few more minutes dynamic.

Bioshock is a magnificent game. If you enjoyed the Deus Ex and System Shock series, or if you like deep stories in your games, I think you will enjoy Bioshock.

I give it a rating of 9/10.

Bioshock Review

World of Warcraft is indisputably the 800 pound Gorilla of the MMORPG ecosystem. It has a worldwide subscriber base of over 8 million players. It has just released an expansion pack that sold 2.4 million copies in the first 24 hours of release. It’s going strong and taking all comers.

Can anyone tell me then why Sigil Games and Sony Online Entertainment released Vanguard: Saga of Heroes in its current state, and against the recommendations of its beta test community?

In spite of some of the things that I’ve read about Vanguard, I decided to give the game the benefit of the doubt. I went to Sony’s web site and purchased the digital download. I then proceeded to download about seven gigabytes of install files. Once the files were downloaded I started the install. Unfortunately the downloads didn’t go well and the install failed. I re-downloaded the two corrupted files, two gigabytes each, and then managed a successful install. Yay!

Upon starting the game, familiar Sony Launcher dialog appeared and checked all the files before downloading the first update. Incidentally, the launcher always checks the files on startup even if nothing as changed. It’s a bit of a pain since it delays getting into the game. To be fair Everquest 2 does this as well.

When the game finally launches the next problem occurs. The screen blanks and the monitor gives me an Invalid Input message. This means that the video card is talking to the monitor such that the monitor can’t understand the signal. Okay. Alt-Tab doesn’t work. Restart the computer. The next attempt is better. The monitor still flashes up the message, but it quickly disappears and the game boots up normally.

Vanguard has a decent selection of races and classes. All up there are twenty races and eighteen classes. I created a Vulmane Dread Knight called Stropp. The character creation provides a whole lot of sliders to tweak your characters appearance. I think this is where it scores a point over World of Warcraft. I like lots of choice.

Getting into the game after creating my character was pretty easy. There was a little bit of lag, but it wasn’t too bad. I didn’t see many other players either, but being in an Oceanic timezone that’s not unusual. I did the first few quests without any problems, no complaints there.

Where I do have complaints is the user interface graphics. Every time I opened a user interface panel, it opened with completely corrupted textures. Random coloured snow isn’t something you want to see in a user interface. Moving my mouse over the panel caused it to resize and then display properly. This effect reminded me of some problems I had in Neverwinter Nights 2 before I updated my graphics drivers, which by the way are currently up to date.

The graphics didn’t really impress me either. I couldn’t play the game over the balanced setting, and on this setting I thought the graphics and textures were somewhat dull. My machine is just over a year old, custom built with a 3.4 processor, 1GB ram, and a 6600 GT video card. Not exactly cutting edge stuff, but it plays EQ2 like a dream, and EQ2 looks much better than Vanguard.

One part of the game that I did think was very well done was the Diplomacy mini-game. Sigil’s idea to use a card battle game to allow players to engage in non-combat gameplay is very innovative in the MMO gamespace. It’s always irked me that World of Warcraft, amongst other MMOs, implements non-combat gameplay in the most basic crude terms. Case in point, WoW’s fishing. That should have been implemented as a mini-game. Vanguard scores high here.

I haven’t really done more than scratch the surface of Vanguard yet. I’ve only spent a few hours, and have done a few quests. I want to spend some more time in the game and experiment with the crafting. I’d like to do a bit more adventuring.

Now back to my question. Why did Vanguard get released so early?

There are a substantial number of reasonably high profile games coming out in the next few months. These games, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings, Stargate, Tabula Rasa, are all looking at World of Warcraft. They are all aiming to steal a few bananas from that big monkey. The competition is heating up.

It’s really important to impress your customers early. First impressions do count, and bad press can hurt. If your players are faced with bugs, they are going to complain. If there are other choices, they’ll take those.

So why release a game that is simply not ready?

Vanguard vs the 800 Pound Gorilla