I’m sure everyone who still reads this has noticed my marked neglect of Pumping Irony this year. I just didn’t feel it, for the most part. I had a lot of fun writing about Champions Online‘s first Comic Series, though my glass cannon character got stuck (and still is) on the final fight. The draft post is still sitting there since July waiting for me to finish it, meanwhile Cryptic has the second Comic Series currently running. For the most part, I’ve damn near given up on MMOs, and what’s left of my readership are primarily MMO Gamers. Right now the exception is Star Trek Online but the catch is, MMO or not, I don’t play that like an MMO. Other than that, I’ve mostly gaming on the Xbox 360, which has become my preferred platform for everything except MMOs for now.

The Blog

[This is the "glass is half empty" paragraph] That leaves me in a predicament. I’m barely playing MMOs and when I do, I’m still not bothering to write MMO blog posts. I’m mostly active these days on Google+ where everyone who’s moved there too has been far more accepting of my non-MMO and non-gaming interests. I’m still deciding, but don’t be shocked if I just pull the plug on Pumping Irony. I know one of the top rules for writing is "write for yourself," but this is a blog, not literature. If I get the interaction I seek elsewhere – in this case, Google+ – then elsewhere gets my focus.

[Now for the "glass is half full" treatment] However, I’ve also made a pact with myself to write more in 2012. I have Pumping Irony, and I have a few other blogs that have nothing to do with gaming at all. I’ve neglected all of them, so one way or another I’ve promised myself to take time to write on at least one of them, and to finally pick up writing fiction again. So, in one form or another, I expect more writing out of  myself next year even if it’s in a location you gamer-only readers never see. I enjoy the creativity involved in putting words to paper pixel, the behind-the-scenes research, and hopefully learning new additions to my vocabulary.

What I’ve Been Doing

Other than the aforementioned Star Trek Online, as I said I’ve mostly been on the Xbox 360. But what fantastic games came out this year! The past few months (and upcoming few still) was an onslaught of AAA titles that are well-deserving of anyone’s hard-earned cash.

Role Playing:

Skyrim. Obviously the big recent RPG was Bethesda’s Skyrim. Finally, Bethesda made a game that gets it right for me. Oblivion was a chore for me to slog through a few months ago, but I did it mostly out of spite. With Skyrim, on the other hand, I finally "got" what people say about Bethesda’s games being mostly about the exploration. Oblivion was bland – nearly every environment looked identical and the same music always played. In Skyrim, everywhere I go has its own unique appearance and music. The dungeons are more varied, even though I can still spot individual 3D "tiles" (a 2D description, but you know what I mean) being re-used for dungeon construction. And something very important for me, finally a third-person view that is functional and playable! First-person melee is horrid and bland, and honestly I don’t see it improving, so putting me in a third-person camera where I can see moves that cannot be accomplished from first-person keeps the combat interesting for me.

Fallout 3. As much as I’m enjoying Skyrim, it has caused me to get an interest in finishing Fallout 3, which I last played in May, 2009. I was level 16 at the time, but I had botched a few achievements. Similar to how I played Oblivion, my goal with Fallout 3 is to finish the game (and DLC) with 100% achievements. So I deleted my previous game and started over. This time around, I still can’t say the exploration is all that exciting or interesting, but achievement-wise (which equates to quest-wise) I’ve already surpassed where I left off two years ago, but am also only level 13. I’m not spreading my points all over the place this time, mostly concentrating on small weapons and other skills that will specifically get me through the game. Which is fine, because that’s also how I prefer to play this character. Unless he gets really bad die rolls, he is far more deadly at level 13 than my former level 16 character was. And being able to quickly and violently kill the Wasteland baddies makes me smile and even laugh, which perhaps makes up for the game itself not being all that fun (from a pure "fun" perspective).

Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga. I started DKS a few months ago, and got to the point where I could become a dragon and took control of my own Battle Tower. Then other games took my attention, but I plan to get back to it as soon as possible. It’s a really good RPG with some great action moves and a lot of diversity in its freedom to create characters. I don’t often play ranged characters in RPGs (MMOs maybe but not in real RPGs) but I am in DKS and it’s a blast. Some of the higher-tier abilities are just awesome to behold, and I’ve enjoyed the story so far.

Shooters:

Battlefield 3. This is my new go-to shooter. I can’t say I’m 100% satisfied with it, especially some of the maps like Operation Metro that seem like more of a nod towards the Call of Duty style of gameplay, but when I’m playing on a _real_ Battlefield map, I get that _real_ Battlefield feel again.

Gears of War 3. I’ve always like the campaigns in the Gears of War series but I’ve never been a fan of the multiplayer, which I tend to describe as "shoulder rolling with shotguns." I’m just not that good at it, and because it is built around small teams (5v5) that makes me more of a liability to my team, so in Gears 1 and 2 I mostly chose to just avoid multiplayer altogether. Gears 3 is no exception – I’m still avoiding the competitive multiplayer – but with four-player co-op, Horde 2.0 and the new Beast game modes, there is so much variety with Gears of War 3 that I’ll probably give this one my vote for best value overall.

Modern Warfare 3. I own it. I finished the campaign, which was fun (for me, the best part of any Call of Duty) and finished up the series’ storyline. Multiplayer is horrible, though. As much as Black Ops multiplayer pissed me off last year, I gradually learned to at least tolerate it and would often play it even without friends. MW3 has caused me to violently rage-quit almost every single match, though. COD games have always been hyper-fast and hyper-twitchy, but MW3 seems to have finally crossed some invisible line in the sand that pushes it over the edge for me. It’s just not fun, and I do not enjoy dying, watching the killcam and seeing the guy didn’t even hit me, respawning and dying again before I can count to 5. I also don’t enjoy when I kill someone when I never hit him either. It’s sad when the COD franchise is a license to print money yet the multiplayer experience actually degrades with each iteration. In a related note, I did finally start the Black Ops campaign recently, and I’m about halfway through it. Since I only played multiplayer this past year, I had no idea whatsoever the game was set in the 1960s. Strange, but it seems to have put a slight damper on whatever semblance of positivity I felt towards the game.

Other:

Saints Row the Third. Over the top craziness in an open world. Where the GTA series went all serious on us, the SR series relishes in its zaniness. I’m not finished with the campaign yet, but think I’m getting close. The co-op is a lot of fun, though it’s a shame it still only accommodates two players. Like Gears of War 3, this one has been enough fun that I went ahead and bought the Season Pass which discounts all upcoming mission DLC.

Forza Motorsports 4. I’m not usually into racing games, especially the more sim-like ones that lock me onto the track, but Forza 4 has been quite enjoyable on a casual basis. I also picked up Test Drive Unlimited 2 which is a sorta-kinda MMO (they refer to it as a MOOR – Massively Open Online Racing) game.

Also plenty of other 360 and XBLA games have been in my roster, with more to come. I’ll try to do a better job of writing about them as we enter the new year!

Anyway, remember CCP’s DUST 514? Their console shooter that is supposed to tie-in with EVE?

The DUST 514 site is currently counting down to E3 so I guess it’s safe to assume CCP finally has some type of announcement for the game this year. A launch date would be nice… though I am still extremely skeptical of CCP’s chances of success in the pewpew-infested seas of the Call of Duty, Battlefield, or Halo series.

The latest DUST 514 rumor is that it may potentially be a PS3 exclusive, according to a Kotaku article. With PSN being a far more open network than XBL, I can unfortunately see this coming true since no one has yet managed to get Microsoft to agree on any type of pricing agreement. On the other hand, unlike PS3′s DC Universe Online, DUST 514 was never going to be subscription-based anyway, so special pricing agreements with Microsoft may be a moot point for this title. Guess we’ll find out in a couple days.

Anyway, it’s the “cool” (?) acronym for Treyarch’s new shooter, Call of Duty: Black Ops which released yesterday for all platforms.

The PC version has been plagued with “lag” (not the latency kind) that seems to stem from a glitch (?) in Steamworks overloading multi-core CPUs. I’ve read that setting it to single core will correct the situation until it’s fixed but I don’t really play FPS on PC anymore to know if that is accurate.

On Xbox LIVE there have been a few allegations of glitches, some legitimate and some not.

Treyarch’s Community Manager weighed in on the CODBLOPS forums with a few choice words:

Some are people using old dashboards or old versions of the game. Others are claiming victory on old dev builds that don’t even connect to the version of Xbox Live that you use. Others are reproducible issues that we will hotfix or patch just like we said we would. In essence, we likely know more about it than you do from watching a video on Vimeo or YouTube. What many of these people want is to be Internet nerd famous. I’m not going to make them famous and you shouldn’t either. Internet hysteria from normal people is exactly what they want and that’s how many people reacted today. You gave them exactly what they want.

I’ve gone out of my way using my own limited, personal time to try and get to know about 8000 (and growing) as best I can. The last thing I want is for you to think that because I don’t talk about it … that we don’t know or care about it. We didn’t spend 2 years of our lives to toss it all in the trash in one day.

I thank all of you who sent in polite, constructive messages without the hysterics. So here is my one and only public statement about it.

I’m not going to talk about it publicly. We are disinterested in making mini-celebrities out of douche-bags. You better think twice before you glitch. You never know who in your game doesn’t like glitchers who reports you and saves the game in their File Share and tells us about it.

If a Community Manager for an MMORPG called glitchers “douche-bags” the community at large would be up in arms for such language. Maybe it’s “ok” since CODBLOPS is a shooter and people just expect smack-talk, even from the studio? Regardless, I think it’s great that this CM fearlessly let his feelings show, even if there ends up being some type of backlash. We have way too much “political correct-ness” these days and sometimes a little in-your-face language and emotion goes a long way towards getting the point across.

It was Aaron and Oakstout’s first time playing the game online at all, and they’d only briefly tried out the single-player to get a bit of a grip on the control scheme. Oakstout warned us how much he sucks playing shooters with controllers but jumped right in anyway (take that Hudson! ) and fared quite well.

The four of us created an XBL Party so we could all voicechat then I created a private server so I could give a verbal tutorial on how the control scheme, objectives and the squad system work. After a few scrimmage matches, I switched us over to one of Kaos’ dedicated servers to get them into the real game.

When we joined, we filled the server, which had auto-balancing enabled. Scott and I managed to make the switch quickly to Red Star but Aaron and Oakstout were stuck on Western Coalition for awhile. It was fun, however, being on opposing teams yet chatting together. It almost felt sneaky or something, like we were traitorous spies working for the other side.

I memory serves, I got the first kill against Aaron, who was attempting to sneak up on me. He’d apparently been following me for a bit and was closing for the kill when I spun around and riddled him with bullets. A quick “Hi, Aaron” over party chat got some laughs.

Awhile later, I hear Oakstout giggling like a schoolgirl. “Tee hee hee!” I suspiciously ask what he’s up to but receive just a “oh, nothing…” for a reply. Then I hear him “tee hee hee” again. I know he’s up to something… Then he says “hey, Scott, turn around for me.” Huh? You’re on the other team! What do you mean turn around? So I turn around and see the barrel of a tank’s cannon pointed at my head a split-second before a deafening BOOM! shakes my living room from Oakstout firing a cannon directly into my face. How he managed to sneak up on me in a loud tank I’ll never know, but I’m certain my short attention span had nothing to do with it…

One of the biggest adrenaline-charged laugh-fests came later on the Oilfield map. By that time, Aaron and Oakstout had finally managed to find slots on the Red Star side so all four of us were squad-mates along with the other 21 players on Red Star faction. Aaron was sneaking into one of the Western Coalition objectives while Scott was piloting a helicopter in his direction. Scott picked up Oakstout and myself, who promptly took controls of the turrets and rained a hail of lead down on the unsuspecting Western Coalition troops. Suddenly three WC choppers rose up seemingly out of nowhere and had us triangulated. Scott was frantically jinking left, right, up and down as all three enemy choppers assaulted us with bullets and rockets. Oakstout and I were shouting instructions to Scott and it almost looked like we were going to escape when the WC players tricked us into a bad position. Oakstout yelled “Descend! Descend!” as I’m yelling “Climb! Climb!” when three full volley’s of rockets slammed into our poor chopper and the sky was filled with a fiery blast as the charred, smoking remains of our corpses fell to the ground. Even Aaron said “jeez, I heard that explosion all the way over here!” Oakstout’s laughter over that one was infectious! That was an exciting few minutes attempting to fight out of a hopeless situation and nearly pulling it off.

If you get into a game with Aaron, don’t be fooled: he’s good! That was his first time playing and he continually held the #3 spot for Red Star on that server, while I was typically down in the 7-9 range.

As much as I like MMOGs, sometimes it’s even more fun to get with some friends in a normal multiplayer game and just have fun in a cooperative/competitive environment.

There are two post-NDA forums with a lot of information, one at the official Gearbox forums, the other at the fansite Borderlands Guide forums. I’ll highlight a few bullet points here though, since those threads are getting crazy in length already.

All the players who are spilling the beans were careful to mention that they only got 1-2 hours, the games were setup by Gearbox not themselves, and were limited to a few areas, so take that into consideration on some of the bullet points. Platform-wise, it seems everyone played the 360 version. There was only one PC on the scene and no PS3′s. The PC shooter guys didn’t bash too much (that’s a rare thing in and of itself) only saying their preferred controls are mouse and keyboard but that they fared just fine with the 360 controller.

• Level cap is 50.
• There are no melee weapons in the game, though certain humanoid enemies use melee weapons. Each character has a default melee action: Brick punches, Lilith does a palm strike, Mordecai does a sword slash and Roland does a combat knife slash. You can upgrade your guns with melee addons such as bayonettes. When using the ‘melee’ skill, the game automatically uses whichever (default or weapon upgrade) melee is stronger.
• Loot distribution is Free For All. Again, Gearbox started the games for them so it’s possible there are other loot distribution options, but FFA is what they dealt with at Gearbox HQ. However if FFA turns out to be the only mode Borderlands ships with, that will make PUGs a frustrating and risky venture.
• Borderlands is a true shooter, ie. no RPG mechanics under the hood artificially making your shots miss like you’d see in Fallout 3 or Mass Effect. However, the more you use a given weapon type, your character’s proficiency with it increases, though no one said what effect proficiency actually has on anything. Traditional shooter rules apply: crouching is more accurate than standing, and single shots are more accurate than bursts. Also there are no RPG attributes to increase as you level.
• Controls on the 360 are similar to COD4: A to jump, B to crouch (which is a toggle, and crouch-jumping is possible), X to reload and interact with environmental objects or pick up loot, Y to change weapons. Left trigger switches to gun sights. Left bumper is the character’s special ability. Right bumper is grenades. Click the analog sticks to melee and sprint.
• The 360 maintained a solid framerate even with lots of enemies on-screen.
• Death animations are a mix between ragdoll physics and set animations.
• You can equip ammo modifiers to your gun to add effects such as acid, etc. to your ammo.
• AI is decent. More advanced bandits will take cover, etc. like you’d expect in a shooter but the lesser types will stand there and get shot. I haven’t read anything about monster AI so it’s probably exactly what you’d expect.
• Skill trees are setup more like an MMO than Diablo. There are three trees to choose from and most/all of the skills are passive rather than active “oh crap!” buttons with long cooldowns. Each tree culminates with a single super power.
• In addition to all the gun mods, there are grenade mods as well so you’re not just limited to the standard frag grenade. One mentioned was a “transition grenade” which would heal you with whatever damage it did to enemies. Just like the gun mods, you can have several available in your inventory and quickly swap to a different mod type any time you need to.
• Quests are fairly simple and the typical MMO style formats. Kill ten rats. Kill this boss. Deliver this item to an NPC. Etc. The story is kept somewhat simplistic possibly to accomodate for the focus on cooperative play rather than specific characters like in a single-player game.
• What MMO players would call an “elite” or “boss” is called a Badass in Borderlands. Since the difficulty scales in cooperative play, everyone has said with four human players the Badasses more than live up to their name.
• The Medic role has a passive skill about halfway down a skill tree that will both damage enemies and heal players. One player mentioned a strategy for a particular Badass where Brick tanked the Badass and he stayed in the back and shooting Brick in the back of the head with healing ammo to keep him alive (and using Brick’s size as cover) and shooting the Badass when Brick’s health wasn’t critical.
• The world is open and (mostly?) seamless but there are “doglegs” (ie. instances) that are repeatable and full of hard enemies and good loot.

I’ll stop there. Tons of additional information is available in the two forum threads I linked, especially the official Gearbox forum. If you have the time, by all means stop over there and give it a good read. But be warned, it’s at 86 pages before it was locked.

Unrelated to the NDA, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford said this week that there will not be a pre-launch Borderlands demo but they might get out out post-launch. Borderlands is currently in certification mode, meaning it is feature-complete and the team is polishing things up for launch. They’ve already had more ideas during this phase that will be included in DLC. Sounds like they’re already working on two DLC expansions and they will be listening carefully to the community for ideas and to adjust their DLC plans to fit what the players are looking for.

Homefront is set in near-future America where players fight a North Korean occupation of America following the collapse of the US economy. Sort of an eerie blend of our current times with some Cold War thrown in for flavor. Indeed, the story behind Homefront was penned by John Milius,who wrote the original Red Dawn movie in the 80’s as well as the in-production remake, wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and many other films, and the story for Medal of Honor: European Invasion.

I suspect the single-player campaign will be one-sided much like Frontlines: Fuel of War was. In that game, players could only play through the story from the Western Coalition perspective, ultimately fighting their way to the Red Star base in Moscow. The multi-player game obviously allowed players to choose a faction. (Red Star for the win! Capitalist pigs die!) The wording of today’s announcement leads me to believe Homefront will play out the same with a one-sided campaign then open multi-player battles.

I’ll most likely check out the game if it will be another sandbox shooter and if it continues KAOS’ little innovations.

My hopes for Homefront, and KAOS’ future games, are that they launch with dedicated servers for PC first and foremost. I still to this day feel that was the major nail in the game’s coffin from the PC side of things. But also give dedicated servers for the consoles – we love having those available on the 360! Second, I hope they’ve either gotten a grip on the Unreal Engine. Frontlines was their first time using the Unreal tech and… it showed, performance is still an issue. I’m not much of a fan of the Unreal Engine anyway but if KAOS is stuck with it from licensing it for Frontlines or just deciding to use it again now that they do have experience (I have no idea how the licensing works but I suspect it’s on a per-game basis anyway) they need to put everything they can into giving the best performance possible. Third, audio. I remember the audio engineer saying they used a stock sound library for Frontlines for budget reasons. It was your first game, so fine. But now, spend a few bucks, get out there and record your own high-quality sounds. Look at DICE… when it comes to the audio quality and immersion, it’s hard to beat a Battlefield game. But try, please.

The update will come in the 1.50 patch for Battlefield 2 and the 1.51 patch for Battlefield 2142. No release date has been set at this time.

I find it amazing that EA/DICE is still supporting these games with new content and bug fixes. Battlefield 2 is approaching 4 years old, and 2142 is nearly 3. The last update to 2142 was the 1.50 patch in May, 2008.

I’ve been trying to play 2142 but it keeps crashing to desktop when I launch it with no error messages to give me a clue what to fix. I spent time uninstalling the game this morning, updating all my drivers, then reinstalling. It just finished, in fact, so I’m crossing my fingers that it’s playable again.

Despite its’ shortcomings, Battlefield 2142 resonated with me and I’ve enjoyed every moment of it. I dream of a Frostbite engine sequel. In fact, I’ll go so far as to wish for a Battlefield Bad Company: 2142 that gives a good single-player campaign for when I’m not in the mood for multiplayer. DICE seems to listen somewhat to their player base, so fix what we complained about in the first Bad Company, namely the lack of squad options, the “noob dots,” and the restrictive maps that made it seem less of a sandbox shooter than was intended along with fixes to what we complain about in 2142 and you’ve got my cash. I’d even buy it both for PC and 360 provided the developers give each platform equal dedicated attention rather than following the current trend of leading with a console SKU then pissing off the PC players by giving them a “dumbed down” port.

Oh, and EA/DICE? Wake up and get your games on Steam already…

First off, no I have not been banned due to PunkBuster. What I am is unable to play the game I’ve purchased. Out of curiosity a few weeks ago I bought Kaos Studios new shooter, Frontlines: Fuel of War over Steam. I’ve enjoyed the handful of games I’ve been in so far, although the nerve — nay, the stupidity — of anyone releasing a shooter without dedicated server support in the 21st century was beyond disappointing. Kaos’ 1.0.2 patch rectified this but it seems the damage had been done. Even last week Frontlines’ server browser was showing zero dedicated servers for the game.

June 5, Kaos pushed out the much-anticipated 1.1.0 patch, which among other things, adds PunkBuster anti-cheat support. I wasn’t 100% positive if I can use a “normal” patch for a Steam-enabled game, so I waited until Steam auto-updated the game the following day. Great, right? Not so much…

As you can see on the lower left, I do have PunkBuster enabled. Yet, for the past three days, I’ve gotten this error and have been unable to join any PB-enabled servers, which is the majority now. The other problem would be player count. Zero players on any servers? I’d love to think it’s because everyone else’s PB is broken and they can’t play, but I’ve seen a fair share of activity on PB-enabled servers the past few days. So it’s just me.

I recall having similar problems with both BF2142 and CoD4 — PunkBuster has been nothing but a pain in my ass — so I went to my old standby fix: run the official PunkBuster update software. I ran the PB updater, let it update itself then checked for updates for my PB-enabled games. Turns out both BF2142 and CoD4 were in need of PB updates. I could have sworn that PB was supposed to check for updates when I’m playing PB-enabled games? Anyway… I try to add Frontlines to my PB games list but hit another snag:

Ok, so let me get this straight: Kaos gets the green light from Even Balance to put PunkBuster in their game. But Even Balance doesn’t bother to put out an update that the game is officially enabled?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?

I’ve been participating in the public 1.50 beta for a few weeks now and have really been enjoying the changes, the new maps, and the wide screen support. The new maps have been repeatedly tweaked in accordance with testers’ feedback, and they play like a charm now! Always great to have more maps and more support in these games, and I’m still amazed it ever happened, considering it’s an EA-published title.

What I do not approve of is DICE repeatedly demonstrating they keep their heads firmly implanted in their rectal cavities. Command line switches? C’mon… it’s one thing as a quick shortcut to login with command line switches in the game shortcut, it makes an already lengthy process of loading the game and logging in a little quicker. But some of this stuff — namely the new wide screen support — is an option that hello!?!? should be in the friggin’ OPTIONS! This is a game not SSHing to a Linux server to do administrative work. The only reason I ever found the wide screen support to begin with was doing a web search for it. Even the readme.txt doesn’t tell how to do it, only that “We have seen a massive demand for widescreen resolutions in Battlefield 2142. This feature is still in a Beta state for your use and is not yet fully supported.” Oh, and don’t even get me started on the Battlefield series still having the fugliest fonts in gaming… or that my avatar can drive a hover-tank, climb a tower to snipe my foes, or fly aerial vehicles but goddamn if he doesn’t stub his toes trying to run over railroad tracks a couple pixels high…

Just to clarify, to enable wide screen resolutions, add the following switch to your BF2142 icon: +widescreen 1 then in the video options only wide screen resolutions will be in the drop-menu to select.

The two highlights I’m most looking forward to are the two new maps, both of which are futuristic versions of 1942 maps (I always loved Wake Island in 1942!) and widescreen support — both 16:9 and 16:10!

Really looking forward to 1.50 (hell, I may even do the beta?) and especially looking forward to native 16:10 so I won’t need Widescreen Fixer any longer. (Quite frankly, I’m not 100% sure it’s even doing anything…)