Back in 2001, a new game hit the market – “Operation Flashpoint”. It was a new concept in First-Person gaming. It was eerily similar to an earlier game – SpecOps. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was a new and improved version of DID’s “Wargasm”.

In short, you play the game as a soldier. However, your soldier can climb into vehicles and enter buildings. Now, prior to 2001, games just didn’t allow you to do this. If you’re a foot soldier, you’re a foot soldier all the way through the game. Yes I know, games like Battlefield and Call of Duty all can do that, but they were all made AFTER 2001, after Operation Flashpoint led the way.

Now somewhere along the way, the developers of Operation Flashpoint (ie the people who did the programming), Bohemia Interactive Studios (or BIS), had a falling out with the publisher, Codemasters. The result of this falling out was that Codemasters kept the title “Operation Flashpoint”, and thus BIS couldn’t use it anymore for any of their future games. So BIS changed the new versions to “Armed Assault” (in America it’s called “Combat Arms”). To the gamers, the name didn’t matter – what mattered was that BIS made new and improved version of the game we loved – Operation Flashpoint.

At this time, Armed Assault is already in its second incarnation – Armed Assault 2 (or ARMA2). In total, BIS produced 3 very successful games – Operation Flashpoint, the original, Armed Assault, and Armed Assault 2.

8 years later, Codemasters finally caught up with BIS, and released the SECOND Operation Flashpoint game. Affectionately referred to as “OFP2” for “Operation Flashpoint 2″, Dragon Rising is a totally different beast from BIS’s versions.

First and foremost, what comes to mind immediately was the awkwardness of issuing commands in OFPDR. When you are busy fighting, running, shooting etc, hitting the command key stops you dead in your tracks. Not only that, because the command radial uses the same WASD keys to select your commands, you often end up issuing the WRONG command to your squad. I have had it happen to me many times when I wanted to order them to FOLLOW ME and ended up telling them to MOVE somewhere else just because I was panicking and pressed W to go forward, and forgetting I was still in the command radial. All the time I’m in the command dial getting my fingers all knotted up, I’m standing still in the game world, being shot at.

In contrast, in ARMA2, even though they have introduced a new “quick command” key, the old key sequences still work. For veterans of the original game since, we’ve kind of memorised where each command goes, and we kind of instinctively hit the correct sequence without even needing to look at the screen. The new “Quick Command” feature is thus almost never used by me, but I can forsee that new players will find it useful. As an example, right now even as I’m typing, I can tell you that the command sequence to tell the whole squad to HALT is 1-6, and to go into stealth mode is 7-1. The command sequence to report status is 5-5, and to call for a medic, 5-4, and so on. Also, when the command option box is up on the screen, it does NOT interfere with you running, shooting, hiding or so on. You can issue a panicky “GET IN THE DAMN APC!!” (4-2-5) when you’re in the APC and watching your squad taking heavy fire, while still driving towards them without breaking the pace.

The next thing is something which I liked in OFPDR actually – the graphics engine seems more “optimised”, and framerates are at least 10 to 15 frames better than on ARMA2 for the same resolution. The movement is smoother, doing video capture didn’t “lag” the game much. In contrast, ARMA2 will sometimes slow down to a crawl during video capture. As an example, most times I see ARMA2 running at between 39 to 45 FPS on my PC. However with video capture turned on, it can drop to as low as 6 FPS! In OFPDR, the framerates were about 20 to 30 or so during video capture, and running at 50 to 60 FPS on normal plays.

The mission editor in ARMA2 is way more powerful than in OFPDR, but the scripting language (where most of the magic happens) is much easier in OFPDR than in ARMA2. As a comparison, I can make a simple “Attack that place and wipe out all enemies” in the OFPDR editor in under 20 minutes, complete with briefings and “objective complete” status flags. Compartively in ARMA2 I might need to spend a few hours getting the triggers, waypoints and other things all done for the same mission. The scripting language in ARMA2 is a little bit un-intuitive, unlike the one in OFPDR which uses LUA, which looks like a cross between C, Pascal, Basic, and Java. As long as you’ve done SOME programming in the past, doing event handling in OFPDR will be smooth sailing. Also, kudos to Codemaster for including the complete reference of commands, events and objects in the helpfile of the editor – no more hunting around on forums and such for some kind soul to gather all the neat info into a nice PDF reference.

The drawback of course, is that the mission editor isn’t as feature packed and powerful as ARMA’s. As a very simple example – you can’t give the player a different weapon from the default one in OFPDR editor. To do so, you need to fool around with other files (or ‘hacking the game’). In ARMA, you can easily just issue a command or 2 in the script to change the weapons – provided you know the exact objectIDs of course.

During normal play, it is easier to play OFPDR than ARMA2 even on the normal, easy mode. In OFPDR you have a compass strip on top which shows you position of ALL detected enemies, your waypoints, objectives and so on. In ARMA2, you have to use the compass, switch to map view etc to do the same. More realistic, but more troublesome for gameplay. Of course this makes ARMA harder to play too since most of the time you can’t see the enemies until you’ve been shot. In OFPDR, you get a nice feedback of whether you hit the enemy or killed him with a little white or red expanding crosshair. White means you hit something and did some damage but didn’t destroy/kill it, and red means it’s dead. So in ARMA, you may have missed the enemy, but you see him drop (he may just drop to a prone position) and should you move your sights away, he may shoot you back and kill you. in OFPDR you can tell for sure if it’s a hit or a kill.

Then we come to the availability of mods, maps, and missions from the respective communities. In many cases, the community actually overlaps – People who played the original Operation Flashpoint also play Armed Assault. As we all know, Armed Assault and its family has a HUGE library of mods, maps and missions made by players for other players. In this way the game doesn’t get deleted once you’ve completed it – other people will make more new missions or new campaigns for you to carry on playing. Comparatively though, OFPDR has very few missions and campaigns, and as far as I know, just 2 or 3 mods. No new models, no new army, no new aircraft, no new weapons etc. In ARMA, you can mod to your heart’s content. You can add Israeli forces, French forces, British SAS etc just by downloading the correct mods. In fact, in ARMA (the first one) someone actually re-did the whole Operation Flashpoint campaign into ARMA format – meaning the same missions, same objectives, but now with the new ARMA graphic engine and physics. I can’t wait to see if someone else would do the same in ARMA2.

So when we come right down to it, which is better? Well my answer is – I couldn’t choose I bought both (quite obvious huh?), and I play both. However I tend to take OFPDR as a “casual romp in the battlefield” and ARMA2 for when I wanna really “get into” the game.

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<RANT value=”copyprotect”>

The copy-protection on this however, is a little too extreme. It says it “requires” a constant Internet Connection for it to work. That’s lame, because what happens if you’re not on Broadband, but on dialup, and each minute you’re on dialup costs you money?! That is irrelevant in Singapore since everyone is already on Broadband, but it affects people in other locales.

Secondly, what happens if Ubisosft servers are experiencing heavy loads? We can’t connect to “authenticate” and thus we can’t play it? The North America launch is coming on 9th March, that is tomorrow. You can expect a sudden spike in users trying to authenticate to your servers, Ubisoft.

That’s exactly what happened to me the other day – Ubisoft Servers actually went down (see “Related Articles” below). The game just quit suddenly to desktop, and when I tried to relaunch, it was stuck at he Login screen of the launcher for about 5 mins. Then when the game started and I chose “Story Mode”, the game went to a screen saying “please wait, contacting server” and the only option available at that screen was “Exit To Windows”.

At least Bioware doesn’t force the requirement on the user. Dragon Age, for example, just says the achievements and scores won’t be updated on your web profile. Mass Effect 2 just tells you that you won’t get Cerberus goodies if you don’t have an internet connection. They do NOT stop you from playing their game!

And game companies wonder why people continue to get pirated copies.

</RANT>

Ok, enough with the rants.

The game itself is pretty impressive. After about 4 days of playing this, I can tell you one thing – I learnt alot more about Italy (and some bits of the Italian language) in these 4 days than I ever did at school.

The game takes place in Italy. It starts off in Florence, in 1476 or so. When you come across various landmarks, some of  which you have to climb, a database entry crops up  and you can read about the history of that place. Currently my playthrough has me stationed in Venice (or “Venezia” as they called it). The game hero also is friends with the famous Leonardo Da Vinci, and it’s funny how they portrayed him in the game. Funny as in “ha ha” funny.

Now you get 2 hidden blades compared to Altair, for one thing. You can do double kills silently. You can also fight unarmed, and then disarm your opponent and use HIS weapon against him.  I love doing that to those guys in armour carrying lances (“Brutes” as they are called in the game). I always disarm them and use their weapon back on them.

Also, they made Assassin’s Creed 2 more RPG-like. Now you can upgrade your armour and weapons. You earn money by doing sidequests like “Beat Up The Husband” and “Assassin Contracts”. In the story, you are given a pretty run-down villa and you can use the money you earned to upgrade it. An upgraded villa provides a source of passive income for you. Every once in a while, you should return to your villa and collect the money. Right now my villa provides me about 74,000 worth of florins, which I take it to be the currency of Italy during the Renaissance. Trust me, that is a lot of money. You can buy anything with that amount of money, not counting the income you have from completing quests and continuing with the story. There was once I had about 200,000 florins on me all at once, before I spent it on upgrading the Villa and buying weapons and armour and such.

They also introduced new ways you can kill silently. Dropping from a ledge will activate the air-kill. If you’re hanging off a ledge below someone, you can reach up, pierce him with the hidden blade and pull him over the edge in one fluid motion. Or, you can hide in a haystack, wait for your victim to come along and then reach out, pierce him with the blade, and pull him into the haystack.

Here’s a video of me doing a funny series of haystack kills on the city guards:

The one thing I found very interesting was the Italian language, and realising where our modern words came from. “Coffee” is “cafe”, and milk is “latte”. Then I noticed they called young ladies “madonna”. Interesting indeed!

There are also interesting and funny tidbits of information about famous historical figures in the game. For example, I took on a courier mission and read the note – it was from Michaelangelo (yes, THAT Michaelangelo, not the Ninja Turtle) to his father, explaining why he quit school and wanted to go into painting and sculpting. He hoped his father won’t be too disappointed and that he’ll prove that it was the right decision one day, and hoped his father will forgive him.

Right now I’ve spent about 40 hours in the game, and I’m still only halfway through I think. As I said before, the current gameplay only placed me in Venice, having just escorted Leonardo Da Vinci there.

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The amazing thing is that I keep discovering small bits and pieces of funny things I never saw the first 4 times. The video below is a compilation of the majority of the funny bits:

Joker flirts with EDI:

However, this video below is my all-time favourite moment in Mass Effect 2:

I am guessing this will be my last playthrough for Mass Effect 2, before putting all my Shepards on the shelf (or on my harddisk) and waiting patiently for Mass Effect 3. I’ve done almost everything different among all the 5 Shepards – from completely evil to completely good, and variations in-between. I’ve also blown up the enemy base, and kept it. I have done little things a bit different between the 5 playthroughs. I would like to see how each different thing I did now would impact the outcome in Mass Effect 3.

On a whim, I ran a screenshot of my female Commander Shepard from Mass Effect 2 through the MyHeritage.com celebrity lookalike locator. The result is below:

MyHeritage: Celebrity Morph – Family photos – Family origins

Funny huh? It seems that my Commander Shepard looks like Natalie Imbruglia, a singer If you don’t know who that is, here’s a video of her:

When I imported another ME1 character, I was amazed at all the bonuses the second guy got! 55k of palladium, platinum, element zero, and iridium! Man, you can upgrade half the ship with all those freebies! And ELEMENT ZERO, the rarest element of them all, I have over 55k tons of it! In the first playthrough I could never get more than about 20k tons on board, thr0ughout the whole game!

Plus, he gets a bonus power right off the bat, from a list of “unlocked” powers due to my first run through.

Now I’m on my second run, this time trying to play a bad guy. Ok maybe not a “bad” guy per-se, but a ruthless, results-at-all-costs guy. Plus, it’ll be fun when the time comes to play good-cop bad-cop in the game with an informant!

Scattered among the various parts of the adventure are funny moments. One’s here:

Just listen to the conversation – funny as heck! Also, another part you may come to on Illium, is where a male Turian and a female Quarian were discussing relati0nships. The Quarian was lamenting about how disasterous her date with a human male went, and you can actually hear the Turian saying things to try to get into her pants!

The best part is – the Quarian says she has “stimulators” built right into her suit so she doesn’t need relationships now… wahahahahah! Funny!

Ok this is a short post. Just sayin’ how cool the game is to have funny parts.

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If you have never played Mass Effect before, you should. It’s one of the rare games I actually ran through multiple times – maybe 4 or 5 times, each time trying a different path.

And now, Mass Effect 2 is here. Naturally I waited for it eagerly like other fans. In case you did not know, Mass Effect has always been slated as a trilogy. After Mass Effect 2, there will be a Mass Effect 3. Probably in 2012?

In any case, one of the BEST THING is that not only can you import your old Mass Effect 1 character into this game, but you continue him/her! What do I mean? Well the history of what happened in Mass Effect 1 are retained here. If you killed someone, that person won’t appear in Mass Effect 2. If you saved the council, the same council will still be here in Mass Effect 2.

I imported my 3 characters into Mass Effect 2 immediately. One’s “good”, the 2nd one was “evil”, and the 3rd… well he’s kinda neutral.. has both Paragon and Renegade points, and that’s the one I’m currently playing now. One thing I did remember about the original Mass Effect was that it was DAMN HARD to be “evil”. Sometimes, you have to be “good” to complete a quest, and then you get Paragon points instead of Renegade points.

Thus far from what I see, it may still be harder to be a bad guy as it was in Mass Effect 2. Seems like many conversations have more readily-available dialog options that lead to Paragon points than Renegade ones. However, I will have to wait till I re-play this with the “evil guy” to know more.

How does Mass Effect 2 link to Mass Effect 1? Take a look:

Cool huh? Uh yeah that’s the video from one of my characters in Mass Effect 1 – a good-guy female Shepard I don’t know why the audio is out of sync – the original video file I uploaded was fine.

Anyway the second cool thing is that after you import your character and the game starts to throw you into the story, you are given a chance to customise your appearance again, or just accept the same face you created when you played Mass Effect 1. For continuity I chose to keep the same face.

I did try to customise the face though, and the thing I didn’t like was how it resetted the face to a “default” face instead of just letting you customise from the imported face. I had initially thought I wanted to give Shepard a little stubble on his chin.. to signify the time passing between Mass Effect 1 and 2.

Gameplay-wise, it’s mostly the same. However, now you don’t buy Biotic Amps nor weapons anymore. Now you research them on your ship and unlock them when you have recruited the right people into your team. Also, the planets now contain minerals which you need to mine to get the raw materials to create the new items you researched.

A major part of the game involves you running around upgrading your ship and your crew’s equipment. To survive the later part of the game, you need to upgrade everything as much as you can, before you head for the Omega 4 Relay. Well that’s fine for me since I normally get side-tracked in an RPG and I explore other places before I go back to the main quest.

Speaking of crews – well you do get some of the old crew members back. Most of the team members in this game will be new. Some of your old team members are now holding different positions in various other places, and yes you do get to meet them and talk to them. The odd thing is that, those old team members that you DO recruit again aren’t automatically “loyal” to you. Take for example, Garrus. Back in Mass Effect 1, I helped him confront the crazy doctor and he was grateful. Now he’s not “loyal”? Come on man, you OWE me!

I also was disappointed that when I went back to the Citadel that I couldn’t go back to the old places. I’m basically locked in to the new part – Zakera’s Ward. Even the Presidium was very limiting – I could only go to the human consulate office, and then when I exit the office I am back in the rapid transport system. I wanted to walk around the Presidium!

Anyway right now my game saves tell me I’m almost 40 hours into the game, and I’ve only played maybe 40% of the game. I’m thinking it’ll last as long as, if not longer, than Fallout 3.

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I can hardly believe it – 1 year had passed since Fallout 3 was released, and I gave up trying to play Fallout 3 due to the numerous crashes I kept getting. At the time, the patch level for it was at 1.35.

After finishing Dragon Age for the 4th time a couple of weeks back, I re-installed Fallout 3 on my “new” Windows 7 OS, and applied the latest patch I could find, which is v1.7.

I am glad to say that either the new OS or the patch made Fallout 3 finally playable. Oh there were still crashes, but not as often. No longer do I crash near water. No longer do I crash when trying to exit Megaton. No longer do I crash when I switch weapons. No longer do I crash just for simply running out in the wastelands.

So, I was faced with my old saves. Many people would know this syndrome well – “what the hell was the last thing I was doing?”. Yes it’s been a YEAR since I gave up playing at level 5. I was very tempted to start all over again, but I decided against it. I loaded up the “newest” save among the list, and tried to see if I could “pick up where I left off”. Initially I was floundering, and not because I didn’t know how to control the game. It was more of a sense of disorientation. I had a number quests in my Pip-Boy 3000 that needed doing, and I didn’t know where to begin. Also, I seem to have lost the “package” which was found in the Marigold Station in Grayditch, and supposedly to hand it over to a guy in Girdershade. I went there, talked to the guy, but no dialog option showed up for handing the package in.

The second sad thing is that I seemed to have lost Dogmeat, my faithful dog. Well he must have died since I didn’t find him in Scrapyard. He could have died before the latest save, but I don’t remember. Ah well.

Anyway, from there I just went on my merry way. The great thing about Bethesda games is that you are not “forced” into a linear progression for the main quest. You are free to run around the world and kill stuff as you please. I did just that – “To heck with the main quest, I’ll just look around first”.

Well one thing led to another, and I picked up a robot (RL-3) follower as well as a Brotherhood Of Steel paladin. So now I am wandering the wastelands in a “3-man patrol team”, so to speak. We killed almost everything we came across, including those “Yao Guai” (妖怪), which are actually mutated bears, and Deathclaws. I found these 2 to be the toughest monsters in the Wastelands.

Then, I ran into a very surprising problem – I hit level 20 and I couldn’t gain xp anymore. What the hell? I haven’t even found the father yet! I haven’t even gone to Rivet City! After scouring the Internet for info, I realised that I could easily increase the level cap with a mod. Since I was downloading mods, I took the “pretty face make-up” mod too, to make women look more like women than haggard hags. Yeah I know it may not be very in-keeping with the whole post-nuclear apocalypse theme, but I want nice looking women in my games

The only problem is, I still have alot of places I haven’t explored yet and I got “stuck” on the main questline last night. So much so that I actually followed it to the end of the game. Well not really stuck, but it’s that “I gotta do this thing to see what happens next”. Yeah I did that for the main questline and inadvertently finished the game.

I still haven’t done Tenpenny Towers yet, for one thing. I also haven’t figured out what those satellite dishes are for yet too. Also I haven’t gone inside the Outcast HQ to wipe them all out yet. Well originally I had wanted to be friends with them, but for some reason, they now go hostile on sight. Even those Wasteland patrols out there also turn hostile when I pass near them. No it’s not because I’m wearing Enclave armour nor Brotherhood armour. I tried wearing the Outcast Armour too, and they still went hostile on me.

Oh yes, I still haven’t made anybody’s pants explode yet … *evil snigger*

So tonight, I’m gonna find a save point where I have not triggered the final sequence of events yet, and I’m gonna run all over the Wastelands doing my own stuff until I’m good and ready to “finish” the game.

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Of course it is inevitable the natural animal (and human) instincts start to rear their heads in games – sex.

The interesting part of it all is, well aside from the sex itself, is that the games depict what the current worldwide social dynamics are. Back in the 70s for example, the world “gay” meant “happy”. Well it still does mean “happy” today but a new slang has been attached to it – male homosexual activities. Similarly, Dragon Age reflects this in the way it handles sex between the player and the characters. Dragon Age allows straight sex, meaning male and female, gay and lesbian sex, to occur.

Dragon Age Origins is already rated M18, so… you know what to do – if you’re under 18, you aren’t supposed to be here

First off, the normal straight sex – male and female.

This can happen if the player is a male character goes for Morrigan or Leliana. If the player is a female character, then this occurs when you go for Alistair or Zevran. Sadly, Sten is too stoic for sex, and Wynne is too old, I guess. No, you can’t have sex with the dog, you pervert!

Lesbian Sex

This happens if the player is a female character and goes for Leliana. Never managed to get the sex scene to trigger with Morrigan though.

Gay Sex

This happens when the player is a male character and gets Zevran interested enough.

Interestingly, if you have missed it, it seems Zevran and Leliana are both bisexual. You can trigger sex scenes with them regardless of your character’s gender. Also, in The Pearl in Denerim, when talking to Isabella the ship Captain, you can trigger a suggestion of an orgy. If you have Zevran and Leliana in party, and you suggest to get to know the captain in private, Zevran and Leliana will “volunteer” to come along.

There’s one more sex scene towards the end – sex with Morrigan. It takes place with the player if it is a male character, Alistair if not, and if Alistair already left your camp due to a decision you made, Loghain (yes the traitorous bastard that tried to kill you countless times).

The point is, games reflect current conditions. Today, it appears we accept that same-gender sexual activities are tolerated, even if they might be frowned upon. Personally though, I don’t care what my friends’ sexual orientations are… as long as they know I am STRAIGHT and they don’t try to be funny and try same-gender sexual moves on me.

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Ok this will probably have nothing to do with games. After all, I’m still kinda playing Dragon Age. I’m on my 4th run-through with a 2-handed warrior now, and this time around I’m trying to get in bed with Leliana first, dump her, then hook up with Morrigan. Yeah I’m a playboy

Anyway!

My previous webhost started to give a lot of problems, what with all the downtimes and such. Sometimes I can’t even log in to FTP to back the site up so I can move to a new host. However, today, I managed to!

So, now this blog is sitting on a new host, with the latest Wordpress 2.91, with all new plug-ins and what-nots.

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Ok, I know I have been neglecting this blog.

Right after I discovered Jade Dynasty, and got engrossed in it for 5 months (to reach max level), I also got Operation Flashpoint – Dragon Rising as well as Dragon Age:Origins.

Despite the “Dragon” words in the titles, the 2 games are vastly different. Operation Flashpoint is a combat simulator, where you play a soldier fighting in battles (much like Rainbow 6), and it is a first-person kind of game. Dragon Age, however, is an epic RPG. When I say “epic”, I truly mean “epic”.

Dragon Age, in my opinion, is the best yet from RPG veterans Bioware. Like Mass Effect, I’ve already completed 1 playthrough, and now I’m nearing the end on my second run. On my second run, I discovered many quests I have left out during the first run, and I already thought I was pretty thorough! Well, apparently not.

As with most RPGs I play, I do not use cheats or walkthroughs. To me, it spoils my fun. Only upon completion of at least 1 run-through will I look at walkthroughs to see what I missed the first time around. With Dragon Age, I have yet to use a walkthrough and I’m already discovering things I missed out!

As mentioned earlier, Dragon Age is epic in scope. The main quest will have you recruiting allies to help you to defeat The Blight. In the story, you are told that you have official documents, treaties, with the Elves, Dwarves and Mages. From then on, it’s up to you.

However, you don’t HAVE to recruit them. Yes you do need an army, but you don’t have to stick strictly to Dwarves, Elves and Mages. At each of these groups, when you are doing the quest to recruit them, you can opt to “go the other way” and recruit their adversaries.

During the game, there are many instances where the characters seem to really “come to life”. During one of the quests, when I was back in camp, one of my companions decided to sing a song.

Your travelling companions will soon start to tell you their stories, and you can go on their personal quests to help them. If you get their approvals high enough you can even fall in love and have romances with them!

Dragon Age is also “modern” in a sense. Romance can also happen between a same-sex NPC and player.

I am still wondering when I can get back to ArmA 2, and also to start on Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising. So many games, so little time!

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