Where were you when the servers went dark?

Earlier this week, Sega pulled the plug on the multiplayer servers for Chromehounds. While it's not a game I played often (personally, I logged maybe a total of 80 hours over the 3+ years I owned the game), and I had a lot of complaints about it, it's still overall a good game, if only for the experience I had playing it with fellow Geezer Gamers, and it will certainly be missed.

Chromehounds had a lot of really bad achievements — from the leaderboard-style ones; to the rare, random event one; to the ones that can only be achieved through impossibly long hours of grinding (even above and beyond what this achievement enthusiast is willing to endure). Of course, a lot of them can be forgiven, since they were created when achievements were still relatively new. The majority of these achievements, however, are now completely unavailable. Because they were dependent on the online war simulation, which was hosted on the dedicated server, there's now no option for getting those achievements.

But no game is all about achievements. Chromehounds was about building and customizing giant military robots, joining with a group of friends, and fighting a group of enemy robots. Our preference was for fighting computer-controlled opponents. Although they were fairly predictable and had accuracy and range beyond realistic, it was better than running into humans who played the game to such an extent that they would build ridiculous Hounds with obnoxious combinations designed to destroy an enemy in a single shot.

Of course, the computer-controlled players were controlled by the central server, as was the state of the war and all its battlefields, so those types of matches are gone forever.

Other server-managed features also went offline, such as squads. Initially, this was just sad from a sentimental view, but we realized that it also put an end to one of the highlights of the game: being able to trade Hound builds and parts with each other. Since you can only trade with people in your squad (and only when both of you were online simultaneously — this was also before sending things via an Xbox Live message was the norm), trading was also gone.

Probably the most irritating thing of all, though, is the non-war-related game modes. There was a group of four of us who were playing on that last, fateful night. When the server was shut down and the computer opponents were no longer available, we found that "Free Play" was still available. Launching a Free Play mission, we were able to play against each other.

This seemed like a good thing at first. It wasn't much, but it meant there was at least some way we could get online and get in Hounds with each other again. But we quickly discovered, as one of our party ended up kicked out to the game's title screen, that there would be no coming back. When you select "Xbox Live" from the game's title screen, the first thing it does is attempt to contact the central server. When it fails to connect to the server, it doesn't let the game proceed into multiplayer mode. Those of us who were already in that mode could stay there, but once we left, there was no coming back, even to play the game types that didn't require the server.

It's not terribly surprising that Sega took the server offline. Chromehounds is over three years old, which is a long time to be playing a videogame these days. But it does show the weakness in having a game rely on a dedicated server; and how when that server goes, so much of the game goes with it.

Sega is hardly the first or the most egregious offender of this, though. Electronic Arts uses dedicated servers for a lot of its games, most notably its sports titles, and they have announced the impending doom for dozens of their games, including relatively new titles like Madden 09. While this seems more conspicuously like a money grab by forcing customers to "upgrade" to the latest version of their titles, it shows how quickly a game can become "worthless" (at least online) when a company decides it's time to let go, if the game is dependent on a dedicated server.

On the other hand, there are games which probably owe their continued existence to the fact that peer-to-peer is more the rule rather than the exception. If Shadowrun relied on a dedicated server, it's not inconceivable to think the game (which only had an online component and had no single-player mode to speak of) would've lasted a year, considering the parent company, FASA, closed up shop very soon after the game's release. Halo Wars may have been in a similar situation, since developer Ensemble actually closed before the game was on store shelves.

Still, there are advantages to having dedicated servers, like deploying server-side updates and better connections (in the cases when certain peers don't have a good data path between them). Developer Valve walks the line best, by offering the option for using a dedicated server or a peer for a server in Left 4 Dead 2. (Left 4 Dead automatically makes the choice.) If the dedicated servers ever go offline (or, as I've already seen, the choice is made for a dedicated server, but the dedicated servers are already overloaded and none are available for a new game), the game is still fully functional in peer-to-peer mode.

I remember Microsoft taking a lot of heat for their lack of dedicated gaming servers (especially on a paid service), but I think these examples show what happens when games' online components are reliant on a company's continuing support. Games that are peer-to-peer (or at least can fall back to that as an option) can always be played online with a willing partner or opponent, regardless or in spite of the lack of company support or existence. It does also factor into my purchasing decisions. I am very leery of buying EA games (or other games that I know use a dedicated server) for online play, knowing how quickly they might yank support.

A face for radio

At GeezerGamers.com, we have a community podcast, where the hosts do a get-to-know-you interview with a member of the website, talk about current games, and then discuss some gaming-related topic of the week. Basically, it's just a bunch of old guys shooting the breeze about video games.

Since the hosts live on the east coast of the U.S., most of their guests have also been from the Eastern or Central Time zones, as those are the people they've happened to game with most often (although I've actually been a guest once myself). In order to remedy this and give the west coast members some representation (and to take some of the pressure off of the east coast hosts from having to do a show every week), there will now be two shows, an east and a west coast show, on alternating weeks.

What makes this exciting is, I will be one of the co-hosts! Fellow Geezers SquidgeyFlint and FireMedic41 will be the other hosts, as we do the West Side edition of the Geezer Gamers Community Cast.

Our first episode, where FireMedic41 acts as our "guest" and subjects himself to the "20 questions" segment, is up on the GGCC Blogger site.

Left 4 Dead 2

Valve took a lot of heat for announcing the release of Left 4 Dead 2 a mere year after its predecessor, which seems odd considering Madden games get a lot less and Call of Duty games get nearly zero criticism for doing the exact same thing year after year. Many seem to feel that Left 4 Dead was not given a promised amount of support or DLC, or that the content of Left 4 Dead 2 should have only been released as DLC for the original.

Left 4 Dead 2 in a lot of ways is the same game as Left 4 Dead, however it does bring a ton of new content that I think "merely" distributing it as a downloadable add-on would not have been feasible. (Honestly, if it were possible, they probably would've made a lot more money partitioning it out as DLC; so the argument that they were trying to milk customers by packaging it as a separate full-price game doesn't hold water.)

Left 4 Dead 2 brings four new survivors into the zombie apocalypse. The setting is in the southeastern United States, and the survivors have a distinct Southern flavor to them. The levels are a lot wider, meaning the survivors aren't guided down a narrow channel through the level; and the levels occur in broad daylight as well as the middle of the night. There are a lot more weapons, rather than just three different weapons in two different powers. There are also new assists (adrenaline shots and defibrillator units), and all-new melee weapons. There are also new special infected — the charger, spitter, and jockey — and new "uncommon" common infected, like CDA agents in hazmat suits and police officers in body armor.

The Director, the program that controls the overall experience, has some new tools in its arsenal, as well. It has more options for distributing medpacks and weapons (no longer placing the same groups of the same weapons in the same locations), the ability to block off some pathways and open up others to change the overall layout of the level, and even the ability to control the weather in some situations.

Ultimately, though, the gameplay is pretty much the same as before. You have to get through the level from one safe room to the next, trying not to get killed along the way. A couple of the new campaigns end in the same type of "hold out for rescue" event as before, but some have very new objectives. One, you have to collect gas cans and fuel up a car to make an escape (while hordes of zombies try to prevent you from doing it), and another you have to keep moving and run across a long bridge. There is even a new style of "crescendo" event — not only do you have mid-campaign moments like Left 4 Dead where you have to stand your ground against an extended horde for a predetermined period of time (e.g., while a noisy elevator slides into position to grant you passage), but Left 4 Dead 2 has new moments where you start the event at one point and have to battle your way through the zombies to the "off switch" to stop the event, and the horde will only keep coming until you do.

Although each of the five campaigns in Left 4 Dead 2 are considered a "game" and can be played in any order, the dialog at the beginning and end of each tells a more coherent story played in sequence, showing the survivors' journey from Savannah to New Orleans and their ultimate rescue by the armed forces. The game therefore does give just a little more of a story than Left 4 Dead — although there is still no real depth or detail given to the backstory. You still don't know a lot about the characters themselves (unless you read the little bio given in the manual), and nothing more about the infection itself.

Compared to Left 4 Dead, the characters in Left 4 Dead 2 don't show a lot of personality. (The notable exception is that Ellis, if you linger in the safe room for a moment at the start of each chapter, will launch into a very long story about the misadventures of his friend Keith, before getting cut off by one of the other survivors.) While the survivors in Left 4 Dead were constantly throwing out one-liners and brief little interchanges throughout their adventure (from Francis's constant murmurings of things he hates, to the always-entertaining elevator dialog in No Mercy, to Zoey, upon seeing the graffiti "GOD IS DEAD", whispering an awed, "Oh, no, the zombies ate God!"), the Left 4 Dead 2 foursome seem to be all business. They swear a lot more, too, which I don't terribly appreciate.

One thing I noticed about the level design is, because the Left 4 Dead 2 levels are so much more "open", it is much easier to feel lost. When playing the original Left 4 Dead, the level design was so constricted and the use of lighting was so dramatic, that it was quite nearly like riding on rails. There was almost no question where to go next. By contrast, I've found that Left 4 Dead 2 does not have the same "guided" feeling to the design, such that I'm not always sure where to go next. Part of that, I think, is because a lot of the levels are daylight, where "follow the light" just isn't possible — but even in the nighttime of the Hard Rain campaign, the lighting cues just aren't as obvious. In fact, I got thoroughly lost wandering through the sugar mill of Hard Rain, and if I didn't happen to be in a party chat with someone who happened to remember enough of that level to give me some general direction, I'm not sure how long I would've wandered around that level. One of the tricks the game uses to help you find out where to go is, when your character is about to go through the right door or up the correct ramp, he'll signal to his fellow survivors with a helpful "Let's go this way" — but that only seems to occur if you're already heading the right way to begin with. If you can't see or find the right door, you don't get a lot of help. Certainly, this is a problem that will fade with experience, but it does ramp up the learning curve in trying to get through the campaigns.

There are five new campaigns, which are all playable in co-op and versus modes. The Survival mode, that was added as free DLC to Left 4 Dead, is included in Left 4 Dead 2. There is also a brand new "Scavenge" mode, where survivors try to keep a generator fueled as long as they can while the infected try to prevent it. The variety of game types do give you more of an option of how much time you need to commit. A campaign can last up to an hour on the easiest level; versus can be a very lengthy proposition, depending on the skill of both teams. On the other hand, Survival and Scavenge offer a co-op and versus game type, respectively, that generally lasts a relatively short time, like 15 minutes or so.

All told, it definitely feels like much more of a complete package than the original, which by comparison seems like a Left 4 Dead Lite. Although it seems more difficult getting a team together (since its release has been eclipsed by this fall's mega-blockbuster Modern Warfare 2 — or is it because people aren't as excited about this release as the last one?), the teamwork and camaraderie in banding together mowing down hordes of zombies to get to the next rescue point is just as fun as the last time.

Download now, play next week!

Interesting DRM-related goings on in the PC world. The distribution network Steam is offering the ability to not only pre-order games, but pre-download them as well. Since downloading a full game is not an instantaneous process (and is expected to be even worse on a big game's release date), you can download the code early, but be locked out of play until you are able to activate your copy with their server, on the game's actual release date.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, as far as it goes. They have enabled that for the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2, and they also had it available for the much-anticipated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, whose official release date was Tuesday of this week.

Although the official retail release date was Tuesday, some retailers started selling copies early (which was quickly and "unofficially" copied by GameStop in those areas). So, if you elected to buy a physical game disc instead of the "convenience" of a digital download, there's a chance you could've been playing it early.

Wait, it gets better. When the official retail release date rolled around and people lined up outside retail stores to buy their shiny discs, those who bought the "convenient" digital copy found that it did not activate when midnight changed Monday into Tuesday. In fact, the digital copy would not unlock until Thursday, a full two days later. There was some more confusion as the unlock date was pushed even further out until Friday, but it seems to have been pulled back now to Wednesday night.

Meanwhile, people who bought their shiny discs will have had their fully functional copies for over a day and a half (assuming no issues with DRM).

Wow. So, apparently, in the digital download future, we can not only buy games that we don't own, can't resell, rent, or trade, may not be able to back up and will lose at some uncertain point in the future, but now you can download games and not even get to play them!

I'm sorry, how exactly is this a good thing? Oh right, the publishers directly get your money, whether you get to play the game or not; so it's good for them.

Forza Motorsport 2

Riffling through some papers, CyberKnight finds an old, incomplete post started back in January. He blows the dust off the pages and decides to finish it.…

A friend of mine recently picked up Forza Motorsport 2, which has just been released as a Platinum Hit collection that includes all DLC for the budget price of $20 (and, interestingly enough, the DLC alone, still on Marketplace and still at its original price, totaling 2000 points, or $25, exceeds the retail cost of the game — but you don't need to hear me go through that again, right?); and in an effort to entice me to join him, he designed the car I've dubbed the "CyberKnight Industries Two-Thousand" that he wanted to "gift" to me. So I decided to pick it up.

I've played the Project Gotham series, and although I have an ok time with it, it's not something I spend hours of time with. I'm not exactly a car enthusiast, so really, racing one car isn't much different than racing any other to me. So, I have to say, in all honesty, Forza doesn't "excite" me. It's an enjoyable game, to be sure; just not something that I feel like I can fully appreciate as much as someone who could tell you the difference between a 2007 Porsche and a 2005 Ferrari, and what would happen if you put a Mitsubishi engine in each.

Which leads me to my next point. Project Gotham delivers a very "canned" experience — the cars in the game are the cars you get to race, as-is. However, in Forza, you can customize your car down to ridiculous details. Different engines are available, different drive shafts, injector systems, exhaust pipes, spoilers, suspension systems, tires, rims, parts I never even knew existed. For a race, you can adjust the downforce applied by the spoilers, adjust tire inflation pressures, gear transfer ratios, and so on. You can even paint your car, and although you're given a very basic set of tools and shapes, a competent painter with a lot of time on his hands can make very intricate patterns, designs, and pictures. What's more, cars can be traded, with all their upgrades and tunings and paint designs, in an online auction house.

In a race, too, you can get telemetry data on your car. Overlayed on the screen, you can see different data, such as the real-time friction vectors applied to each tire, the G-force sustained by the car, and other data.

On the leaderboards, you can download replays from other drivers, and during playback you can view the same telemetry data, and (if the driver allowed it) see what precise tuning data they used to drive their car.

The amount of customizability and information available is enough to impress a complete racing n00b such as myself.

Of course, there is still one annoyance that I can't seem to escape when it comes to racing games. If you're running against equivalent AI, you cannot make a single mistake. The next closest car will always be within a second behind you, and the first error you make in a turn (which, invariably, means you will spin out and end up facing backwards) will result in your opponent passing you, and you will never see him again. Forza 2 does have the option to turn down the AI's difficulty, which greatly reduces this frustration, thank goodness. (Even better, by the time I'm writing this, Forza Motorsport 3 has been released, and it includes a new feature — rewind — so when you make that mistake, you can actually "undo" it and not have one error completely destroy 20 laps of perfection.)

The UI is just a little clunky. It seems to take one too many button presses to have to get around to change cars or slip into the auction house to view your auction statuses. Going into a career race, if your current car isn't appropriate for the race but you have cars that are, the game is very helpful in showing you just the narrowed-down list of cars to pick from; however, that only seems to happen if your current car doesn't work. If your current car is fine, but you want to select a better one, you have to go all the way back out of career to your garage to see your full list of cars and find one yourself.

Niggling UI issues aside, I'd have to say the game sure impresses me. Not sure if that says a lot, considering I'm not a huge car or race fan, but there you go.

Wait... That's not really progress...

If you buy a piece of content, such as an Arcade game, off of the Xbox Live Marketplace, it is tied to two pieces of information: the gamertag that made the purchase, and the console on which that purchase was initially downloaded. Those two bits of information are encoded in a "license". That license is generated and stored on Microsoft's servers, and a copy is stored with the content (possibly encoded within the file itself, maybe in a separate file; its exact location isn't important).

When you go to access this piece of content (i.e. play the game, or select the downloaded map from the in-game menu, or watch the video, or whatever the "content" is), the console reads the license and checks to see if either of two conditions are true:

• 1) Is the gamertag in the license currently signed in and connected to Xbox Live?
• 2) Is this console the same console as the one in the license?

(note that a valid, active connection to Xbox Live is required to validate condition 1)

If you have, or have ever had, more than one console (either you own more than one, or you've replaced it via a store warranty instead of a Microsoft repair), you may have purchased content on multiple consoles, and so you have licenses that have different consoles stored in them. If you are the only game player in your household, this might not be a problem, as no matter where you are, you will always validate against condition 1 and be able to play your content (as long as your internet connection is active and Xbox Live isn't down).

However, if your internet connection goes down, or you have other family members in your household, you may find that some of your legally purchased content doesn't work right — either it's unavailable, or it only lets you play in "trial" mode. This is because condition 1 can't pass (either you aren't logged in when your family/housemates are, or you are unable to log in), nor can condition 2 (it was initially downloaded to some other console).

To mitigate this, Microsoft created the "License Transfer Tool", which lets you transfer all your licenses' console registrations to the same console. Using the tool, you can move everything to your new/current console, updating the console ID stored in the licenses on Microsoft's servers. To update the copy of the license on your actual console, you have to re-download each piece of content individually — however, when you select to re-download a piece of content you already have, your console just updates its copy of the license, which is a very quick download. It's still tedious if you have a lot of content to re-download, since you have to do it one at a time, but at least each download itself is typically less than 15 seconds.

Finding all your content used to be a royal pain in the neck. You could go into your Xbox dashboard and page through your download history, but, since everything (every preview video, every game demo, every seemingly inconsequential bit) is stored there, it was tedious to page through and find it all and download it all one-by-one from the console.

Now, the last page of the transfer tool on the web has a link to your download history, and you can add items to your queue straight from there. Each piece of content is labeled with what it is (demo, video, arcade game, add-on pack), making it much easier to tell at a glance whether it's something that needs to be queued, and an "add to queue" button is right there on the list. The queue is still limited (to a couple dozen items), but if your Xbox is on and signed in while you do this, it will be downloading the licenses faster than you can fill the queue.

Note that Microsoft insists this is not for everyday use, for moving content back and forth between consoles at-will. To enforce this, they only allow the tool to be used once every 12 months.

I had been resisting doing all of this for a while, but my kids were bumping up against some arcade games that were showing up as trials again recently, and I decided to bite the bullet and do it (again; I had done it once before, the harder way, well over a year ago), and I marveled at the improvements in the process. Now they can play all the games I've downloaded.

Sounds nice and easy, right?

Well, it occurs to me that, with every Xbox I've gone through (I think I'm on #5 now), and with some licenses that have transferred and some that haven't, whether I've used this tool or not, the vast majority of my games have not had any issues whatsoever going from Xbox to Xbox.

Why? Because they're on disc.

While they did make the license transfer tool much easier, it's still many, many, many times harder than it should be. Why can't you move your Xbox Live Arcade game to another console and let another gamertag play it? For that matter, why can't you take a game to a console that's not connected to the internet? There's nothing stopping you from doing that with a disc.

Maybe they did make a bad situation better, but it's still a very bad situation.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Hey look, another review that was waiting for me to finish. Since I finally finished the game, I suppose I'll finish the review now.

I'd wager just about everyone knows the story of Star Wars, at least as told in the movies. Episodes I - III tell of a young boy, literally born from the force of good, who is born in poverty and struggles to fight for what's right and good as he grows up; and of a man of evil, who transforms a republic into an empire with himself as the head, brings about war and dominance, and corrupts and twists the young man to become his servant. Episodes IV - VI focus on that formerly good young man's son, who dedicates his life fighting the evil of the emperor and his father, in the end redeeming his father from evil.

There's a time between Episodes III and IV that we don't know a lot about. The way the movies are set, we don't need to know much about them, as we see at the end of Episode III the seeds of the story that will be picked up right where it left off in Episode IV 28 years earlier. (That's right, kids — Episode IV came out first. Oh, and let's just be clear: Greedo never fired a shot.) But it's probably safe to assume Vader didn't sit on his hands for 17 years waiting for his kids to grow up and kill his boss.

The Force Unleashed inserts a story into this time frame. Darth Vader, while on his Jedi genocide mission for his emperor, finds that one of his victims has a son who is strong in the Force. After killing the Jedi, Vader takes the little boy and raises him to be his own apprentice, secretly. His goal is to use this apprentice to overthrow the emperor (it's a Sith thing, it's what they do), and to prepare him for this task, he trains him to be a powerful combatant. Which means, basically, you get to kick butt with the Force.

One of the main selling points in The Force Unleashed is its blending of technologies to create a realistic environment. The Digital Molecular Matter engine is in play so that wood splinters, glass shatters, and metal warps; and the Euphoria engine is working so when you pick up an Imperial trooper and fling him through the air, he will panic and attempt to grab on to anything he can to stop from flying around. The result is a fairly realistic feel to the environment. You know, considering it's in a galaxy far, far away and you're causing Imperial troops to fly through glass and wood with the controlling power of the universe.

The premise of the gameplay is solid. I mean, who wouldn't want to be an awesome, Force-wielding mercenary? Sure, you've seen Yoda use the Force to pick an X-Wing up out of a swamp, but this trailer shows the potential scale LucasArts was going for, where the apprentice is seen pulling an Imperial Star Destroyer out of the sky.

The problem is, they seemed to spend the rest of the game making sure you couldn't just waltz through and kick butt with the Force. Enemies have shields that resist the Force, others have weapons that effectively ignore Force shields and lightsaber blocks, and what should be the most common of enemies wield sticks and staffs that hold their own against a lightsaber. In other words, they nerfed the Force.

Additionally, your character is extra-nerfed, as well. Every hit will knock him off-balance or down enough to leave him vulnerable to a number of other attacks while he sobers up — on the harder difficulty settings, this often means one or two hits (and the combo of follow-up attacks received before you can even block, let alone fight back) are enough to do you in. Enemies will, of course, have little difficulty breaking out of any multi-hit combo you try to inflict on them in return, with their Force-resistant sticks and armor.

Not to mention this poor, tormented soul whines like a farm boy pining for a set of power converters — but I'm starting to accept that as standard fare for a Star Wars story.

The boss fights are an exercise in frustration and patience. Usually, there's a certain move or trick that tends to work better than anything else, but usually it's just a matter of evading or racing one unblockable attack after another until you eventually wear the boss down to a quick-time event to finish him off. Those finishing events do add a nice touch of cinematic flair, plus a little bit of cool-down after an intense fight, but they do leave me wondering, "Why couldn't I have pulled all those kick-butt moves on him during the last 10 minutes of combat?"

The story itself isn't bad. It actually does a pretty decent job of fitting right in with the movies, including what I consider the "default" ending. (You have two choices at the end, resulting in a "light side" and "dark side" ending, and the way the camera is positioned at the time you make the choice, it pretty much has you aimed straight down one path and almost completely hides the other.) For as cheesy as it is in some respects, it's not at all out of character for Star Wars — love it or leave it.

The game play, though, leaves a lot to be desired. It's fairly frustrating, even when you're playing at the easy levels (you don't die so much, but you still spend an unreasonable amount of time getting knocked down and waiting to stand back up). It's hard to shake the feeling that you're fighting with both midichlorians tied behind your back.

Still, I slogged through it, because there were achievements to be had. And it's not like I'm any stranger to frustration.

I did pick up the Jedi Temple mission pack when it went on "sale" as a "Deal of the Week". It was extremely short. I played through the mission in a half hour on the hardest difficulty, and because (maddeningly) the difficulty completion achievements don't stack, I played through three more times on each of the lesser difficulties. By the end of two hours, I had played through it four times and completed all achievements. I haven't had any interest in the $10 Tatooine mission DLC.