Monthly Archives: November 2014

Thoughts: Advanced Warfare

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Reviewing two Call of Duty games in one year? What is the world coming to?

I see Advanced Warfare as CoD’s sluggish response to a gaming world that’s starting to leave it behind. CoD 4 was an incredible success that moved the series out of its increasingly-tired WW2 setting and set the FPS trend for the next half-decade, and five years ago you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a Modern Warfare imitator. Today, though, things look very different. Even this second incarnation of CoD is getting long in the tooth; Modern Warfare-era shooters have become just as overexposed as WW2 was a decade ago, and CoD is facing challengers to its crown (Titanfall in particular) that are innovating in ways CoD simply cannot if it remains resolutely entrenched in the modern world. And these newer games are good enough — and successful enough — that for this shooter with a hundred ripoffs, this FPS that used to dictate the direction of the entire genre, the message is finally becoming clear: adapt or die.

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Thoughts: Door Kickers

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I’m really not sure about the name “Door Kickers”. I think it was chosen on the basis that you’re going to spend a lot of time in this game kicking in doors, and a lot of doors do indeed get kicked since as a matter of policy SWAT teams apparently never use the doorknob. If they really wanted a name that best represented your in-game activities, though, they could have gone with “Get Shot In The Back By A Terrorist You Missed”. I admit it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue — but then neither does Door Kickers.

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Thoughts: Beyond Earth

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Beyond Earth is a doomed-from-the-start attempt to shift the familiar Civilization empire-building action into the future. It’s doomed because no matter how good Firaxis made this game, by setting it around the colonisation of an alien world it draws inevitable comparison with one of Firaxis’ very first products: Alpha Centauri, a game that’s rightfully regarded as one of the genre’s absolute classics. Beyond Earth was never going to live up to Alpha Centauri’s better qualities, both real and imagined, and I’ve tried to take this into account when playing the thing; Beyond Earth should be judged on its own merits, not the nostalgia-fuelled remembrance of a sixteen year-old predecessor. What surprises me, however — and especially so for a Firaxis title — is that even if you take SMAC out of the equation, even when you compare Beyond Earth to the modern Civilization franchise that spawned it, I think it fundamentally still isn’t a very good game.

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Sunday Soundtracks

TIE Fighter.

Yes, I already did TIE Fighter. But I’m resurrecting this series for one week only because I just found these excellent redone versions of the TIE Fighter soundtrack. TIE Fighter’s iMUSE soundtrack was fantastic, but the audio technology of the time did mean it sounded rather more beepy and boopy than it perhaps should have. Just listen to this Pilot Registration music; it really does the original justice.

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