Teamspeak

After using TeamSpeak for a while I highly recommend it for anyone looking for voice comms in their games. It's really easy to set up and I was running a server for others earlier today while getting on with other things and everything worked just fine.

Dawn of War

I completed Dawn of War last night. Maybe Warcraft III gave me too high an expectation but I suppose I was hoping to have a go with all the races in the campaign mode rather than just the Space Marines. I mean there is still skirmish and multiplayer and I really look forward to them, but they tend to have very different play style from campaign missions. Campaign missions will generally progressively unlock the tech tree and have small isolated groups of enemies who rarely upgrade their base whereas skirmish will generally have quickly developing enemies with all the tree available straight away, hence the learning curve is a lot steeper.

It was, after saying that, very enjoyable. I love the animation sequences and attention to unit detail in the game. I'm still not sure about the mid combat reinforcement of units, but it is a new way of doing units and I understand why the choice was made.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

I find myself pretty much trying to play through the games that I got for Christmas. One of the fine games I received was Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Now Penny Arcade expressed that they had removed much that was fun out of Sands of Time so I was a little concerned, thankfully the combat doesn't really seem like that much of the game, though I often had to replay the combat scenes against bosses since they often kicked my ass.

I was enjoying the good old jumping around levels doing the acrobatic stuff. One stage I was happily jumping around, but really couldn't figure out where to go. I did notice the Prince looking strange, and thought there might have been some reason for it that was yet to be explained to me. Well after half an hour of exploring I thought Damn, the developers have outsmarted me with their fiendish puzzles I went to GameFAQs admitting defeat, I looked up multiple FAQs all of which referred to a cut scene and jumping through a hole an uberboss made. I don't remember the cut scene, and I certainly couldn't find the hole. Turns out I'm not the only one and it looks like there is a bug in the game. So looks like I'm rolling back to an old save and hoping for the best.

It worries me that bugs like this appear in console games, yes I have an XBox version and Live so I might be able to download a patch, if they make one, but those with other consoles or without Live won't be able to patch the game. The lack of testing on games now worries me, I think it bodes ill for the console gaming scene (traditionally who could mock the PC gaming scene as they could just play a game rather than install it, fight with hardware configuration, and then have it crash every 20 seconds). I know that this will probably mean that I put Prince aside for a while, and it might well be shelved before I've really had a chance to play it. This seems a shame, because despite my initial reservations it seemed to be shaping up quite well.