Update 18/06/2013 — New post coming today, but like a moron I forgot to email myself the stuff so that I could finish and upload it at work so it’ll have to wait till the evening.
If you asked me a question via the Ask Hentzau box in, oh, the last month or so, I just found out that Gmail had been helpfully rerouting them to my Spam folder. I will hopefully get around to tackling the backlog soon.
This is terrible.
Has AirLand Battle been released yet? I have no idea; as of writing this I’m still back at the start of May playing the multiplayer beta. Hopefully if I reviewed it I did end up mentioning the excellent work that’s been done on the game’s sound, including its music. Listening to it while watching a pair of A-10s desperately strafing a tank column that’s threatening to break through your lines is one of the better experiences I’ve had in recent years.
What can I say, I’m sucker for anything that has heavy amounts of percussion in it.
First, there was Wargame: European Escalation. Now, almost exactly a year later, there is another one of it. Since I loved the first Wargame I’m more receptive than I might otherwise be to a sequel that’s been turned out in such a short period of time, but if it were another developer and another series I’d probably be inclined to assume that AirLand Battle was a low-effort attempt to cash in on the original game with another made using the same assets. AirLand Battle asks for the full £30 on Steam (although it was 25% off if you already owned the first Wargame and you can pick up a disk copy on Amazon for just £20) and so it was going to have to do more than be a slightly shinier iteration on the Wargame concept in order to justify its asking price. Fortunately – and actually somewhat surprisingly – it delivers in spades.
A little over a year ago I wrote a two-part history of Bungie Software. It took in their early games – Pathways into Darkness, Marathon and Myth — which were nearly all superb in one way or another, and then abruptly stopped with only the barest mention of the series that’s eclipsed all Bungie’s other achievements: Halo. There were several very good reasons for this, first and foremost of which is that Halo is Microsoft’s flagship game series and it’s already had countless column inches written about it. There’d be little if anything new that I could add to the discussion, even if that discussion is one so corrupted by PR and marketing that it’s now reaching the point of parody, and so that was where that particular pair of posts ended.
For one of the best-looking games ever made it is remarkable how badly Metro: Last Light screenshots. My usual method is to get Fraps to automatically take a shot every ten seconds while I’m playing, and out of around 2000 screenshots captured over seven hours of play there were maybe half a dozen which weren’t a horrible, blurry mess. Modern FPS games are very into their motion blur and depth-of-field effects, of course, so this isn’t a phenomenon that’s strictly confined to Last Light, but it has it worse that just about any other game I’ve played thanks to its unique gameplay conceits.
So they got Jeremy Soule in to do the music for the original Company of Heroes, and it’s his usual plinky plonky generic crap. Then they get a different guy in (one of the many, many Ian Livingstones working in the games industry) to do the music for Opposing Fronts, and the result is that the British end up with the best music in the entire game.
