dsblog: a Nintendo DS weblog

The World Inside: Half-Life 2

Not being a typical fan of the genre, Half-Life 2 is the only First-Person Shooter (FPS) I've played in a while. I greatly enjoyed it, probably because it plays more like a first-person action-adventure in parts than a classical FPS.

Partly because it's been forever since I played an FPS—I played a lot of Threewave CTF back in the day, but not much since—and partly for a reason to put Windows on my iMac, I picked up the boxed version of Half-Life 2: Episode One at Gamestop. Valve uses their Steam system for internet content delivery, for better or worse, and while I feel fine paying cash money for a stream of bits, having the full HL2:E1 on disc let me skip downloading a bunch of it. With a $10 discount for already having Episode One, I bought Half-Life 2 proper on Steam and got both games for $40 total. (You could get HL2:E1 from Amazon, or Half-Life 2: Game of the Year Edition if you want Counterstrike instead of Episode One.)

It's obvious where all those bits to download are going: Half-Life 2 is a beautiful game. While I haven't written about many non-DS games, one big difference between the DS and games you play on a TV or computer is graphic capability. Namely, the PC and PC-esque consoles have it, and the DS doesn't. That's been mainly a good thing for the DS, as developers have been able to make games with actual play in them, on the relative cheap, instead of spending time and money delivering better graphics.

PC games can definitely deliver on the promise of that power. To see the awesome graphical capability at the PC gamer's disposal, check out Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, an additional download that comes with your purchase of HL2 or HL2:E1, kind of like a DVD extra. It fits into the story during the chapter "Highway 17," so I took a break from the real game and played it when I was near the end of that chapter.

Like HL2:E1, Lost Coast has optional commentary available, wherein folks from Valve describe some of the design that goes into making a Half-Life 2 series map, and the special "high dynamic range" (HDR) technology that's the point of Lost Coast. Part of HDR is to apply the idea of psychoacoustic modeling to graphics. These days, developers of new audio compression formats model sound as the brain interprets it instead of how physical sounds are made. You can determine the best information to leave out of a sound to make it smaller by seeing how well the human ear and brain will notice it's missing.

So, analogously, instead of modeling how light behaves in an objective, physical sense, part of HDR models how human sight works. For instance (and this is all in the commentary) there's a narrow dark passage in the rock you pass through on the bright sunny day, and as you emerge back into the sun, the engine can simulate how your eyes would really adjust to such a change in brightness. Just looking down in a shady part of the map can show how your "eyes" adjust to the darkness, seeing a little more detail after a moment.

However, while all that power is available now in Lost Coast, Half-Life 2 itself isn't perfect. The person models don't quite compare to the amazing Table Tennis models on the 360. As HL2 is on the original Xbox, you can chalk that up to generational differences if you like--especially as the fisherman in Lost Coast, described as "over two times as detailed" as the people models in Half-Life 2, does rival the awesome figures in Table Tennis.

But that's not to say you can't have a beautiful game that plays well too. As I said, I enjoyed it because it was a general action-adventure game more than a single-minded shooter. HL2 features driving, physics puzzles, and, yes, shooting bad guys. (At times the vehicle physics seemed oddly familiar, for good reason.) Half-Life 2 features several variations of Two Guys With Guns, as well: regular FPS action, but also engagement with your simulated AI squad, defending territory with automated turrets, simulated AI co-op (which you get throughout HL2:E1), some stealth assault and survival horror-ish areas, and assault on some pretty impressive enemy vehicles.

The parts I least enjoyed were the parts where the game thought it was a platformer. (What internet reviews I've read seem to agree.) There are some parts where you jump around on floating objects. If you thought it was taxing to jump precisely in an FPS engine, well, let's make the platforms move! Even if they made up some feature of the HEV suit where it could project a simulated third person view, I would have appreciated it.

I enjoyed Half-Life 2 for its variety, but could I call it a purpose-driven game? While Valve didn't do anything as radical as ditch the FPS model, HL2 does contain games besides shoot-and-run, and a story at least as interesting as many movies that make it to full theatrical release. Portal, a pack-in game to be released with Half-Life 2: Episode Two in early 2007, seems even more so: the Narbacular Drop folks made a puzzle game, and they've remade it as a puzzle game with a funny story that happens to use the Source engine.

But HL2 isn't that good a story setpiece, as many people will argue quite convincingly. The story is strong for an FPS, in my limited modern experience, but still pretty weak. In no way could I convince myself Valve wanted to tell the story of Half-Life 2 and decided an FPS was the best way to do that.

Certainly in the third act (perhaps more appropriately called "the last third of the game"), the game devolves into the simplistic shoot-and-run plot, and what little story there is to deliver is handed over wholly in exposition. At the end I didn't feel so much at the conclusion of a fruitful journey as at the end of a series of fun, related games. Even the console platformer trope of a slideshow through the game during the credits would have at least reminded me how I got there, and what I accomplished in all that time I spent. Throw me a bone here!

But you do get some pretty cool FPS action in exchange. In spite of the hollow ring of the ending, Half-Life 2 was fun during the playing of it. I was amazed with the amount of variety of gameplay in, ostensibly, a first-person shooter, and can't wait to start on the episodes.

The World Inside: Table Tennis

As someone who hasn't enjoyed many sports games since Super Dodge Ball for the NES, I can still say Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis is a great game.

From Rockstar's own blurb to nearly every review on Metacritic, you get the message the game is designed to be the simplest thing that could possibly work: a distillation of the game that launched a thousand arcades into a realistic "sports" version right at home in 2006. The concept and control of the game is almost so spare that it could have been an Xbox Live Arcade title, except for the beautiful 360-era models and textures they needed physical media to deliver.

Playing is simple. Move your player with the left joystick, then use the right joystick to start your strike. The direction of the joystick is the direction of spin to put on the ball, and once you've picked it, the left joystick becomes where on your opponent's side of the table to aim. By switching up your spin selection and not getting caught off-guard by your opponent, you can build up focus. Spend your focus to save near misses with focus shots, or spend it all in a countdown in a focus mode to go to the next level of focus (red, yellow, green). There are a few other embellishments, but it's all covered in the tutorial mode.

Given Rockstar San Diego created a game so simple to learn, it's made great by being hard to master. After practicing in local multiplayer enough, I won several achievements playing through my first single player tournament against the computer. I had practiced getting into the zone where I could think about strategy instead of micromanaging the movements, and made sure to back away from the table quickly against hard hitters like Jesper. Even so, at the end of the tournament I was up against Liu Ping, and though I put up a good fight, I couldn't win. I haven't tried again quite yet, but hopefully someday soon I'll be able to beat at least the easy tournament.

My major problem playing the game is telling the difference between top and back spin. There's a whorl spinning around the ball, indicating the spin with its direction and color. The colors match the controller buttons (which you can use instead of the right joystick if you really want), making left and right spin easy to identify with the deep red and blue spinning laterally. Top and back spin, though, are shades of yellow and green that are already difficult to distinguish. Make them spin up and down and I never identify them correctly. The good news is, although the tutorial teaches you the "safest" way to return the ball is to counterspin it with the same direction it arrived with, I never noticed it be a decisive factor in game play.

The other major fault I have with Table Tennis is I remember paying $60 for it, Gamestop's regular going price for Xbox 360 games at the time. Whether I imagined that or it was a pricing mistake, it's not a problem for you: it's only $40. Some people may still think that's high for a game that's most like the $10 Live Arcade fare, but with a demo available, I expect they're moving many more copies of this great game.

The World Inside: PaRappa the Rapper 2

A new roommate brought, among other things, a copy of PaRappa the Rapper 2 for Playstation 2. This is the sequel to the grandaddy of rhythm games, 1996's PaRappa the Rapper for PS1. As Wikipedia says, it's superficially like Simon, but you copy not only each level's rap masters button pattern, but the same pattern in time to the music. This is the most basic form of rhythm video game, but even this stripped down, you can see how PaRappa spawned a whole new genre of game.

The game has a freestyling algorithm that scores you on extra presses you insert into the pattern. As long as your presses are in time and complicated enough, you can score extra points. In fact freestyling is the only way to get the maximum score for a level and attain "Cool" ranking. The algorithm is just an algorithm, though, and can seem pretty capricious in what it considers good sometimes.

The really awesome part, though, is multiplayer. You don't just play the levels competitively, but you play one line from a level over and over in a virtual rap battle of oneupsmanship, taking turns freestyling more complicated patterns until the game declares a winner. The inhumanity of the algorithm really comes into play here, as not only do you have to repeat or improve on your opponent's play, but do so to please a mechanical aesthete.

Here's me managing to pwn my slightly inebriated friend. This is just level one, so all the other levels have more complex patterns to play (and sentences to say).

PaRappa would be a very cool game to carry around on the DS, but until then, try it out on the PS2 (and bring some friends).