Pumping Irony

The first weekend of 2009 was kinda a bust, mostly because I’ve had serious insomnia all week and it’s catching up and hitting me hard. I did manage to get a full night’s sleep last night and feel better today at least, but I’m also afraid that will just cause an insomnia reset and start it all over again tonight. I’ve always had trouble sleeping; too often my mind and imagination will continue to race along regardless how tired my body may be. Eventually I end up in a situation of being too tired to sleep at all so I get back up and go about the day in a state of incoherence. Lately though some of my joints hurt which adds to the problem of not being able to sleep. If I sit, stand, walk, run, whatever they’re fine but once I lie down the ache starts up. What the hell? I’ve been asked to monitor my food intake, especially later in the day and evening, apparently watching for higher levels of sodium and/or processed sugar. My girlfriend is sodium-intolerant so I’ve taught myself to lay off the sodium too, but she did get me a metric ton of chocolate treats for the holidays. I’m being quite conservative with them (I can barely tell I’ve touched the heap) but perhaps there’s something to the sugar, I don’t know.

My girlfriend has been wanting a body wave in her hair for some mystery reason but she’s been turned away three times now because her hair is already highlighted. I have no idea what one has to do with the other; I certainly see enough celebrities with both color and styling. She finally found someone who would do it and made the appointment for Saturday morning. I got the phone call afterward as she was driving home that she had on her hat and oversized sunglasses, hiding out of embarrassment. “I look like the Jackson Five!” she cried. I have a feeling they gave her a perm, not a body wave, just going from her description but I haven’t seen it yet. She was driving straight home to hide and soak it in cream rinse and she wasn’t going to allow me to see it. I was hoping she’d calm down by Sunday so we could do something together but no luck, she was still freaked over the hair. She’s at work today so she must have managed to de-afro it or she’s hiding in her office all day.

Aside from laughing at my girlfriend’s follicle fiasco, you’re probably impatient for me to get to the games!

On the PC front, I finished up the Yule Festival in LOTRO, getting the Yule Horse mount for Arwellyn’s collection then the yule-fest wallpaper and the elven snowglobe (with a miniature replica of Elrond’s “Last Homely House” inside) to decorate her house. I was hoping to get the wrapped gifts decoration too, but no such luck this year. That and the wreath were the only remaining decorations I was interested in but since the Yule gifts were random upon opening the boxes I never did win them. Next year, I guess. I did turn in a single quest for some XP — she’s about 1.5 bubbles from 57 now — but that was it.

Otherwise the little gaming I did was on the 360. Starting with some Frontlines: Fuel of War online I managed to do surprisingly well (for me anyway) and we had some really intense fights. I’m debating whether to spend the 800 Microsoft Points for the DLC pack with new maps or not. Many of the servers were using the new maps, and I hear the Hindsight map is really awesome. But I managed to find enough busy servers to keep me entertained. I’m pretty impressed with the map design in Frontlines, especially the urban ones. They’re quite busy and packed with nooks and crannies to explore and get places that may not be obvious. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the linear and small maps most shooters have. I also put some time last night into Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2′s story mode (single player campaign) finally getting past the checkpoint I’ve been stuck at for so long. I think I also achieved Marksman level 8, and am about halfway to my next experience level (no idea what level I am currently). Vegas 2 really kicked up the RPG elements more than most modern shooters, where you get XP for every kill as well as for special kills such as headshots, killing an enemy on a rope, long range or short range, killing an enemy who’s hidden in cover, etc. I haven’t played around with what all that stuff will end up meaning in the long run yet, but just like getting XP in an RPG, it definitely appeals to the Instant Gratification urges. On the other hand, the R6:Vegas games are some of the most difficult (dare I say hardcore?) shooters I’ve ever played too. No COD4 style hand-holding and aiming assistance here, no sir! The AI is downright vicious and it only takes a couple hits (or a single headshot) to kill you no matter what your level or equipment is. But it also fits right in with the more realistic and tactical pace of what the game is trying to do versus playing through the highly scripted maps of COD4 where you always have a good chance to succeed (unless you’re on the highest difficulty which is stupid hard).

The majority of my 360 time was spent with Tom Clancy’s EndWar, however. I used some gift money to pick it up Saturday morning and what a gem this is! I’ve said before that, while I enjoy RTS’ I’ve never been very good at them. The more recent batch has failed to hold my interest (mostly because of the pull of MMOs) and the console versions of both Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 and Command & Conquer 3 were both too same ol’, same ol’ for me (not even getting into BFME2′s atrocious performance). I don’t have the attention or focus for base building and resource gathering, which is why I more readily took to Massive Entertainment‘s “Action RTS” (Ubisoft calls EndWar “real time tactical” or RTT) games such as Ground Control, Ground Control 2 and World in Conflict. They skip the base building and micro-management and put you directly into the action. I also mean that quite literally, since they’re full 3D games not the old-style 2.5D overhead view, so you can truly get right down into the action. EndWar follows suit in glorious fashion, with gorgeous 3D graphics, fast performance and plenty of explosive eye candy. Unlike BFME2 and C&C3, EndWar is not a port of a PC game; it was designed for the 360 and uses the console’s strengths and limitations to its advantage.

EndWar’s uses a rock, paper, scissors style combat chain. Tanks beat Transports. Transports beat Gunships. Gunships beat Tanks. Two infantry types are also available. Both are very powerful — probably the most powerful of all units — but are limited by their slow travel speed (unless inside a Transport) and vulnerability while exposed. You can have infantry take cover or garrison buildings to protect them as well as giving them a longer attack range and increased rate of attack. However the enemy can target the cover or buildings and destroy them, taking your infantry with them. Engineers are the slowest infantry but can both secure (capture) and upgrade uplinks. They use rocket launchers and other heavy weaponry so when under cover can be used to take out enemy vehicles. They can be upgraded to deploy minefields and other explosive anti-vehicle attacks. Riflemen run faster than engineers and have very strong attacks when under cover but can only secure an uplink, not upgrade it. They can be upgraded with stealth armor and sniper rifles. Familiarizing yourself with the combat chain and which units are strong or weak against others helps you with your own battle strategy.

RTS have always been tricky to control and manage with console controllers. EA used a fairly quick drop-menu selection in BFME2 and C&C3 (both games used the same engine) which worked well enough. Ubisoft took things to the next step: voice recognition! Unlike the poor attempts at voice recognition in the past, Ubisoft should really be commended on their work here — the voice recognition in EndWar is fast and nearly flawless. During the voice training phase it only missed a single phrase and once trained it’s only missed a couple commands. Given my insomnia-induced state of incoherence and exhaustion, I more than likely muttered or slurred my words. It uses a simple Who, What, Where format which is fast to say and fast to execute. “Unit 2 attack Hostile 3″ or “Unit 4 move to Zulu” or similar commands tells your units what to do. To switch camera I can use the D-pad then press the X button or simply say “unit # camera” and the camera quickly scrolls to the selected unit. Need more units? Again use the D-pad to select which unit type or simply say “deploy [unit type]” and it’s done! Practically every function in the game can be accomplished with voice commands, the main exception being instructing your infantry to take cover or garrison a building; you have to do that manually with the controller, but you can use voice command to tell them to secure an uplink. I’ve tried various voice recognition software over the years with disappointing results. EndWar has changed my mind and actually made me wonder how much use the application of voice recognition could have in gaming, and not just the strategy genre. Even if you have an intense dislike of all things RTS, EndWar is worth a rental just to see what a great job Ubisoft did with the voice command system.

EndWar uses a large and complex campaign system. The offline single player mode is called World War III and unlike normal single player games, each battle matters. If I lose a battle, I’ve lost that battle permanently, there’s no restarting from the previous save point to try again. There are three factions: US, Europe and Russia. Each has the same overall unit types but they all have distinct attributes. Russians tend to be the slowest but most heavily armed, for example. I think I read the US units have the fastest speed. I’m only at the beginning of the WW3 campaign and during an accidental click-fest I appear to have chosen Europe as my faction for now.

EndWar’s online mode is called Theater of War, which is labeled a “massive multiplayer” campaign. My understanding of how ToW works is limited to a small amount of reading so far; I’ve not ventured online myself yet since… I suck at RTS games. Each battle you fight is 1v1 or 2v2 in a given map. It’s the total amount of victories or defeats in a given region from all players which are tallied at the end of the day to determine any movement in each faction’s frontlines, including eventually sacking the enemy’s capitol city. I suppose this could be considered a blend of standard RTS multiplayer with the “massive multiplayer” aspect being tracking the total activity each day to determine each faction’s gains, losses and movement in a three-faction RvR war.

My only complaint with EndWar is… me. As I said, I suck at RTS. Badly. I do have one XBL friend who owns the game but he’s Australian so the time difference is an issue. Also, like me, he’s mostly a LOTRO player so getting him out of Middle Earth and onto the 360 can be a challenge but I’ll see if he can give me some EndWar 101 lessons sometime while I plod along myself and hope to actually get a clue about strategies one of these days.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.