“Fly me to the moon…for free”

Posted by iainlithgow on April 4, 2011 · 2 Comments 

As I’m sure my regular readers are aware, I’m currently undertaking a challenge to spend no money on gaming at all this month, to try expose myself to a new style of game management and income generation (at least from the user’s side).

The first week of this experiment is officially over, and while I have had a few tough times (with the ultimate low point being standing in a store with a copy of Dragon age 2 in my hand only to realise that the evil “Past Iain” had removed my spending money card, and store loyalty card, in anticipation of a moments weakness) I feel as though I have already gained a bit of benefit from it.

My first port of call was spending a good few afternoons trawling the X-Box Live Arcade, for free demos to see what style of small arcade games are popular nowadays. To my surprise there was a fantastic variety available! Putting aside the numerous zombieand avatar exploitations games, over the course of a few nights I played about 10 different games, from slash-em-ups, racing games, puzzle games and even co-op city building I got a good look at plenty of titles I didn’t even know existed.

Now I understand that playing demos only allows you to play a small portion of the game, but I find that most demos are pretty much perfect for the purpose of this experiment. The reason for this is that the purpose of most demos is to show of the games unique selling points(USPs) then leave you wanting more. Now this is just my opinion, but when you play most games you are shown a handful of gameplay mechanics, say shooting, running crouching and jumping, and then for the rest of the game you are simply using these same mechanics over and over again for 8-10 hours till the credits roll. It is not that often new features are introduced later on in the game. So from a design and analysis point of view, demos allow you to quickly look at the USPs, UI, character design etc and then when the time runs out you move on, instead of playing the same game for 10 hours to gleam maybe one or two interesting ways the mechanics are used. As a result I can play 10 different demos and experience 10 vastly different gameplay experiences in the time it would normally take me to play one game. Something I have rather enjoyed ^^

Other than demo playing, I have spent a good deal of time playing Black Prophecy, a newly released free to play space dogfighting MMO. Below is a short review/summary of my impressions.

“In the grim darkness of the far future, all women have bright read hair…for some reason o.O”

 

So first things first, while the game sells itself as an MMO I wouldn’t really call it as such, at least not in the same way as what commonly jumps to mind when that phrase is used. There are no persistent shared worlds, no capital cities, no exploration and no random encounters with other players, hostile or otherwise. There are some RPG-lite elements involved, with skills you have to level, enemies dropping loot, missions and the odd crafting here and there, but in essence this game has much more in common with a map based FPS like Team Fortress 2 than something akin to World of Warcraft. Whether that is a good or a bad thing I shall let you decide.

 

So while it’s MMO status is somewhat debatable, it is definitely a very fun game to get into. You can launch missions very quickly through a relatively streamlined interface, that gives you the choice of solo and team PvP or Pve missions, before creating your very own instance and launching you guns first into the fray. The missions on average take no longer than 5-10mins each so it makes a great game to play if you have a quick half an hour to spare. All in all it is a very good game to pick up and play, I guarantee you will be spending allot more time blasting noobs in space than looking at your character panel (always s good thing in my opinion.)

 

“A random mission accompanied by my random thought process”

Aside from the basic gameplay it is worth noting that the “story missions” (mandatory missions you get every now and then to progress and fill out some back story of the universe etc) are generally good fun, each with their own cinematics and full (if somewhat ropey at times) voice acting. They are all very well thought out and provide a good blast of “epic-ness” to the experience. I was also very impressed by the music in the game, the proper orchestral soundtrack lends a richness and passion to allot of the dogfights and complicated flight manoeuvres you are bound to encounter (missions taking place in asteroid belts or around space stations are by far my favourite, if simply for all the crazy flying you can do.)

 

Also a super special note has to go to the fantastic text to speech system they implemented to give a voice over to the randomly generated missions. I lost count of the number of times I burst out in laughter at some of the words and phrases this poor little emotionless voice has tried to express. It’s hard to take peril seriously when it reminds me so much of playing with Microsoft Sam in secondary school.

 

All in all I have enjoyed it very much, and I will probably keep playing, even if just to see where they are planning to take the game next, and I would definitely recommend it to anybody interested in some good old dogfighting action.

 

So that’s been me for the first week, next week I’m going to hit up some League of Legends and see if I can finally find a game that will cure me of my fear of RTS games ^^

 

Until next time,

Cíao!

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