Lead & Gold

Lead & Gold: Gangs of the West was available on Steam over the weekend for a free trial. It’s a team-based, third-person shooter, set in the wild frontier lands, something akin to Team Fortress 2, but with outlaws and gunslingers. The game pitches two teams of players against one another in a variety of game modes, with four different classes for players to choose from. Each class has its own particular weapon combination, special ability, and a ‘synergy’, essentially a class skill which radiates out to nearby teammates and gives them one or other skill boost. The four classes are:

• The Blaster
  Armed with a double-barrelled shotgun and sticks of dynamite, radiate a defensive ‘synergy’ effect.
• The Deputy
  Wields a repeater carbine rifle, has the ability to tag enemies, and radiates the damage ‘synergy’ effect.
• The Gunslinger
  Armed with an accurate heavy revolver, has the ability to ‘fan’ his rounds off quickly, and radiates the ‘accuracy’ effect.
• The Trapper
  Armed with a scoped hunting rifle, is able to lay bear traps to immobilise enemies, and radiates the ‘criticals’ synergy effect.

Between these four basic classes, and the small variety of game modes, there technically doesn’t appear to be all that much to it. Yet the game’s simplicity is definitely its strong point. There’s no need to play a tutorial to get used to the action, nothing that isn’t basically self-explanatory which prevents players from diving right in and enjoying the gun fights. Since I have to play all games on reduced graphics settings, I can’t say how pretty the game can be, but the settings and scenery certainly fit the gameplay. There were plenty of laughs to be had, for a game that on offer was being sold for as little as €5 a copy if you bought a four-pack. I didn’t get a chance to play out all of the game modes, though they all appeared to combine one or more of the game’s basic mechanics — blowing up objectives with dynamite, stealing gold and taking it back to a team’s safe point, and generally killing the enemy players as many times as possible.

Hitting them when they're down... it's all part of the game

From what I could tell, the game was reasonably balanced between the four classes, with each having a useful role to play on the team. The synergies the players produced could probably lead to a very one-sided match if a team was well organised, however. Players could spawn either at the starting location, or by the team flag, which could be carried around as a mobile spawn point, and was often surrounded by a gaggle of players. A good group would stand a much better chance of staying alive, whilst disorganised enemy players kept respawning in dribs and drabs. Players sticking together not only provided synergy bonuses, but also healed one another, and were also able to rescue players who had been gunned down — players could find themselves grounded, similar to being knocked down in Valve’s Left 4 Dead. In fact, there were numerous cases where you felt inspiration from one of Valve’s multiplayer titles, it’s really a wonder the game wasn’t built on the Orange Box engine.

Which is perhaps one of the sorest criticisms of the game. I can’t help but feel the producers of this game have shot themselves in the foot with this free weekend trial. Whilst playing the game itself was a charming little diversion, actually getting onto a working server could cause all many of heartache and take more time than actually playing the game. The server browser gave the player the option of selecting a game mode, but as far as I could tell this had no effect on the list of servers returned. However if I selected ‘all types’, the game appeared to crash, or at least become unresponsive as the game process and steam.exe collectively used up 100% CPU time. Hosting a game myself was invariably fruitless, only once did I manage to get players on there, albeit that worked fine when they did. Every other time, however, I could start a game on my own and then the game would slow to several seconds per frame every time another player attempted to join (I only know this because a few of us were trying to get on the same server together). I couldn’t help thinking that had this game been built on an established engine, at least such problems would have been avoided.

The Trapper in action

In general, trying to get into a server of this essentially multiplayer only game was a sheer trial. Even the simple 2 player co-op mode didn’t work correctly: I joined a server with a friend and the game put me on the opposite team to him, i.e. it was him playing ‘co-op’ against me and the AI. As far as we could tell, there is no way to change your team, either before or during the game. Since the dedicated server appears to have come about as an after thought, most of the games we played were on client computers. This meant that the game may start off playable, and then become entirely unplayable as the host’s connection or computer became overloaded with players. Or the host would just decide he’d had enough, and quit leaving all players to find themselves a new host. Trying to join a friend’s game via the Steam menu usually failed, or in the case of a full server provided absolutely no feedback, not even to say the server in question was full. And at some point during the weekend the connections must’ve got crossed, as three of us playing on separate servers were unable to see that the others were even playing the game, let alone in a server. The was the concession of a handful of dedicated servers that at least provided a playable gaming experience, but there were all too few of those, and many were password protected or simply weren’t working or set up correctly.

Final word: if it weren’t for the issues of connectivity, both being able to join and host servers, or having random runaway CPU usage when scanning for servers or hosting your own, this game would easily be worth the €5 or €10 it was on offer for. Sadly, given that a gaming evening might consist of an hour of faffing about trying to find a working server, before finally getting on one with your friends, only to play for 10 minutes and have the host either crash or leave and start the whole process again, it’s very difficult to recommend. And given that the version we played was already v1.7, it begs the question what the earlier versions had been like!

Note: I should probably point out that The Hidden during this scene was being played by someone who actually knew what they were doing, i.e. not one of us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Know your enemy... Subject 617

The Hidden: Source is a modification for the Source Engine (i.e. Half-Life 2 and co.) that pits a group of soldiers against Subject 617, aka The Hidden, a genetically enhanced experiment gone wrong. As part of a potential series of random MOD weekends, the Red Army got to trying this one out for size on Saturday night. We set up a server, which at the time of writing is still up and running, invited our friends lists and ploughed on into the unknown. Since most of us hadn’t even loaded up the game before, it probably made the experience all the more interesting. We did have a few visitors who had clearly played the game a lot more than us, which showed us what was at least possible in the game, but I think it would require a lot more practise to get even half as competent.

Here’s a short review of my own personal impressions of the mod.

Survival

The game lives off a pretty simple premise exploited regularly in the horror and thriller genres, but seemingly rarely in gaming circles, that fear of the unseen. All but one of the players on a regular map set up take the role of a regular soldier, and nothing out of the ordinary. You find yourself equipped with one of a regular array of weapons, shotguns, rifles and the like, and some extra goodies like laser sights, light amplification goggles and sonic alarms, whose purpose isn’t necessarily clear until you get your teeth into the game.

And that’s it. You’re on your own. Well, not quite, there are similarly another half dozen soldiers around you, stuck in a similar situation, to all intents and purposes very much on their own. At least to begin with.

Starting off as a grunt for the first time in the game is certainly a daunting experience. Knowing that you’re looking for something you basically can’t see puts your trigger finger on ‘itch’ mode, your old habits of aiming at silhouettes and bodies appearing around corners leaves you most likely to shoot a teammate than any potential fiend coming out of the shadows. It takes a while getting used to, but eventually we managed to get something of a clue as to our purpose in the game: ostensibly the soldiers are there to take out The Hidden, but actually they are very much the prey in this cat-and-mouse thriller.

The problem as the soldier was how little clue you had as to the state of play. The game provides no death notifications, so even when you think your back is covered, a few seconds without checking is more than enough to end your personal drama. Whilst I can’t speak for everyone, most of the time I never even saw our quarry/hunter. That includes the numerous times I was gutted by it, even when the thing stood apparently right in my face. Other times I saw things that I probably had little right in seeing, the wavy lines produced by The Hidden’s corpulence. Whether that was a result of poor play on the part of The Hidden, or on specific designs in the map, I’m afraid I have no way of telling.

The Hidden as 'they' saw him

Some of the maps included steam vents that gave a pretty illusion of The Hidden in various places, whilst others had dark enough corners and enough blinking lights, that even had I been chasing another soldier I doubt they would have had problems hiding from me. What became very clear after a short while, however, is that some people really had a knack for finding the beast. And I’m not just talking about the experienced players, even some of those of us playing the mod for the first time that night had much better eyes for the thing than the rest of us (yes, he’s ‘visible’ on that shot on the right). Maybe they just eat more carrots, maybe they’re the people who are good at Magic Eye posters, either way it was rather disconcerting news for the rest of us.

One thing we did eventually have to change on the server was the way in which the mantle was passed over: in the default settings, The Hidden’s vanquisher would take over the role in the next round, but this generally meant that a lot of people were running around pointlessly, whilst the experienced players when they joined simply passed the buck amongst ourselves (hdn_selectmethod 2 for a completely random mode).

The Hidden

The Hidden as 'we' saw him

So how is it playing the game as The Hidden himself? This is certainly what the mod is all about, the rest of the MOD is a filler for the real action. Certainly running through the tutorial is a wise move before stepping into his shoes, something that most of us hadn’t done on the night in question, but basically you could think of The Hidden as a mixed homage to the heroes of the Aliens and Predator franchises. The Hidden is pretty damn near invisible, particularly when standing still, and even when running leaves little more than a shimmery haze to give away his whereabouts. Principally armed with a knife, he’s slight and nippy, able to pounce fair distances, and also possesses the ability to hang on to walls and even jump wall to wall for a short period of time. Sadly, since none of us were versed in the fine arts we didn’t see much of that happening – but as already mentioned, most of us didn’t see very much of anything happening!

Slipping into his skin (he doesn’t appear to wear shoes) was at once a joy and a frustration. Being able to run around nigh-on invisible, and watch the others bumbling about from a safe corner was easily one of the most rewarding factors of the mod. With some practise, or with a lot of luck, you could also cause some real mayhem in a group by getting in, killing someone and then disappearing again just as quickly. Those were some very entertaining moments, even as one of the remaining soldiers in the clutch, waiting and hoping you weren’t to be next. The makers also provided The Hidden with an excellent addition to his arsenal in the form of pipe bombs, which acted like flashbangs in many other games, dealing damage but more importantly disrupting people’s vision, giving The Hidden plenty of opportunity to run in and pigstick someone to a wall.

Sadly, there was a lot that made your job as The Hidden one of frustration and pain. Given the fact that most people weren’t able to see you, their first resort was to start randomly firing in corners and down alleyways, with the pure hope of hitting something. Unfortunately, the tactic often paid off, with half a dozen people shooting down every potential corridor they would eventually hit something, and the blood spurt which confirmed a hit would bring a fair bit more concentrated fire to bear on you. More than once I was found sitting observing from a fair distance in the darkness, hit by what I can only assume was a stray bullet.

The soldiers are also armed with some tools that can make your job more difficult. The laser sights are perhaps the most obvious, in that they hit The Hidden before whatever wall or scenery behind him first. The sonic alarms I don’t believe I saw working, either because no player was fool enough to rush through them, or I simply didn’t notice them going off, but one of the soldier’s support weapons consisted of what looked like a paintball gun which fired some kind of blinding drug, which left The Hidden’s vision black for some seconds. If we hadn’t all been on TeamSpeak at the time, it may have been less obvious when the weapon had had an effect, but since someone generally screamed some obscenity when his screen went blank, it normally resulted in a kill and made it one of the more effective weapons in the game.

As previously mentioned, there was also the issue of those rabbit-eyed players who just appeared to be able to see you. Whilst most players were blind to your dancing around them, even so far as being unable to shoot at you properly when you were stood with your knife in their kidney, there were others who had the knack of spotting your trail from a distance. Perhaps also the experienced players were able to predict where you would stand most of the time, else had got used to the mysterious effects, but when they were on the server it often made your life a short and painful one.

The game

Aside from the basic mode described, in which The Hidden and soldiers are pit against one another over the course of a round, there is also a quicker version available, where each player killed becomes an additional Hidden. In the latter variant, the last player(s) alive are given a short time to survive against the team of invisible ghouls, and so can still score points against The Hidden adversary.

The Hidden playing with our corpses

All in all, the mod certainly had its moments. There were occasional rounds when things got pretty creepy, as one by one the soldiers were picked off, corpses were pinned to walls, whilst all the while the soldiers were chasing ghosts and shooting at shades. I remember one particular round when our experienced Hidden player had us shooting one another, and shivering in our boots as he returned to pin the body to the doorway. Similarly, life as The Hidden could be extremely rewarding, watching the utter panic fire after you’d successfully managed to cut down one of the soldiers in a group, or chasing a disoriented soldier after throwing a pipebomb into their clutches.

Sadly, those moments were also reasonably rare. Many a round for many a player ended without even catching a glimpse of something you thought was The Hidden. Other times, the round was over for you almost as soon as it began, and the rest of the time was spent looking through cameras, still trying vainly to find the thing which killed you. Which was unfortunately another downside to the mod. The authors had decided that to prevent players from cheating on out-of-game voice comms software, there would be no way to spectate The Hidden. As a result, the game as a dead person was even more boring than it is in a game like Counter-Strike, since the few camera perspectives available provided little clue as to where the next bit of action would take place, nor indeed would it necessarily happen in front of one of the few camera positions.

This decision, which should really be in the hands of the server admins, unfortunately also affected the SourceTV demo recordings, as the only way to manipulate them is to use cheats and fly around manually, not even able to lock onto the individual player perspectives (note: I had to increase my sensitivity to crazy levels to get this to work even within reason). Whilst we did eventually install a little plugin from this forum (Scuzzy’s Spectator Hidden Trail), this really could have been a lot easier and included with the mod in some way. There were also a number of bugs we discovered, such as The Hidden’s pigsticking animation only working the first time, or the shotgun which got stuck on the reloading animation and refused to fire until a weapon switch, which could really have been polished up.

For an evening of random mayhem, in which no one really knew what to expect, or what was going on, the mod was great craic and well recommendable. It’s not really something that I’d make into my regular diet, nor that I would be willing to play on my own, but for a kind of party game atmosphere it was pretty easy to get into. Unfortunately, the steep learning curve for getting decent as The Hidden (not helped by the default player selection mode), the randomness of being hit whilst apparently invisible, or even the inability to see the damn thing that’s making sausages out of your guts, make the game not one for the fainthearted, and very difficult to imagine getting into except on such a mod night. Since you’re likely to spend most of your time dead, the lack of decent spectator modes can also quickly turn this one into a frustrating yawner.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Via Gamer Melodico]

Someone set up us the bomb!

To celebrate the release of more sourcey update fun to that old favourite Counter-Strike: Source, we’ve gone ahead and dusted off our old server (i.e. reinstalled it) after many years’ absence. Currently a fairly vanilla set up, some admin rights for Red Army members, some stats enabled for—well, for the hell of it really—and a regular map cycle.

Feel free to join us for a laugh this weekend, as we relive some of the good old times… and doubtless plenty of the bad! Things should get hotting up on Saturday night, after the USA take on Ghana in the World Cup, and may continue on Sunday night where they left off.

Also, don’t forget to have your say about our potential random MOD night in the coming weeks! Have your say for the choice of MOD here.

Red Army |#2| CSS Fun Server |HLStatsX| IP: 94.76.241.67:27020

For whatever reasons I have some fond memories of the first film: maybe it was the fact that I was a big fan of the games at the time, or perhaps the Enter the Dragon nod of the plot, or perhaps just watching Christopher Lambert trying to be funny. Whatever the case may be, on the basis of that preview Tachareon certainly deserves to be given the reboot reins, if indeed Warner Brothers have any plans in that regard.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

TeamSpeak 3

At the Red Army, we’d been using TeamSpeak 2 as our communications software of choice for some years. In fact, aside from sitting in the same room as one another, I can’t really remember ever seriously using anything else. For whatever reason, we’d made our decision over using Ventrilo and there wasn’t really anything else which came into question. When Skype first became popular, a few of us moved over to making Skype-to-Skype calls and occasionally attempting to hold conference calls, but whilst the quality was a big improvement, the galloping bandwidth usage and the difficulty of using it in conjunction with gaming soon drove us back onto our TeamSpeak server.

Over winter, however, we decided it was finally time to move forwards. Someone suggested we give Mumble a try, an open source, low latency and high quality piece of software, specifically designed with gaming in mind. Personally I’d been using it with a Day of Defeat: Source clan, and could easily tell the difference and note the advantages over our trusted TeamSpeak. The latter had essentially given up producing updates, and their website continually advertised their all-new TeamSpeak 3 version to be ‘coming soon.’ Curiously enough, however, TS3 was released as an open beta almost as soon as we installed and tested out our own Mumble server for the first time. Here’s a quick summary of our tribulations with them both, and why we finally chose TeamSpeak 3 as our successor.

TeamSpeak 3

Strange that this should appear just as we were ready to abandon it as vapourware, TeamSpeak 3 certainly appeared as something of a surprise. If we’d actually been paying attention, the open beta for TS3 was announced back in October, 2009, but since the last update for TS2 had been way back in 2007 (and that only a security update, as far as I know) it’s no surprise we hadn’t been following the news.

My first experiences with this release were fairly frustrating: for whatever reason, the beta version of TeamSpeak 3 that I was running insisted on pumping all of my audio back out through the line-in, making my presence on the server more annoying than usual. No loopback cables were plugged in, no Stereo Mix or What U Hear devices, nor was the microphone at fault. Since the effects were limited to TS3 I can only assume it was some strange bug in the software, but I haven’t been able to confirm whether or not it’s been fixed or not.

As a result, most of my gaming over the last few months has been via Mumble, however from what I experienced and what I’ve been told second hand, is that TeamSpeak 3 is an excellent successor. In terms of latency, it easily outstrips the earlier version, something made clear if you sit in a TS2 and TS3 server simultaneously and listen to someone speaking. Whether Mumble or TS3 has better latency was impossible for me to tell, that is to say if there is a difference, it is so fractional as to be lost on my ears. Despite the reduced latency, the quality of the audio has not suffered in any way, and is in fact a good step ahead of TS2. Personally, I found the quality of TS3 to be slightly crisper and clearer than Mumble, though this may be in large part due to the reduced number of knobs, dials and whistles on the configuration page. This latter point is a major plus in TS3′s favour: where Mumble offers a setup panel that really in little way explains what the user should be doing, TS3′s setup wizard is somewhat clearer, quicker and produces a decent result without much in the way of tinkering. This could partly be a result of so many years using the forerunner TS2, and being used to their methods, but even our more impartial clan members had similar things to say.

In addition to the usual suspects of having rooms, administrators and varying codecs, TS3 also offers some extra features that may or may not prove useful in the future. There’s a facility for uploading small files directly to the server and having them accessible to all clients, which could certainly prove handy when you just need to pass something on quickly. There’s also the option of positioning the voices of the other TS3 clients in chat, such that you can make it sound like player A is ony our left and B on your right. Probably quite useless, but plenty of fun to play with I’m sure! Now you can finally sit that person with the annoyingly crap quality microphone over in the corner where he belongs.

In conclusion, this is where my vote lies, presuming they have fixed the bug that affected my PC and I can actually use the thing. Mumble puts itself forward as a light client with no frills, but that seems to my eyes to be totally negated by the complicated set-up procedure. Tied on latency, and maybe edging it on quality, TS3 has the advantage of the extra features and easier configuration.

Mumble

Since I originally had problems with the TS3 installation, I’ve used Mumble a fair bit over the last few months with a couple of clans, and overall impressions are good. The lower latency is definitely a major improvement over TS2, which is again clear to see if you join both servers simultaneously (or get spied playing TF2!). The gaming overlay function, which produces a list of players in the channel over the game you’re currently playing, and highlights who is talking, is also a pretty nice feature which has been very useful on occasion, especially when you don’t know everyone you’re talking with.

In terms of quality, the software certainly outdoes TS2 and is probably as good as TS3, or it could be if it was set up correctly. Unfortunately, this is no easy task. Although the software guides the user through the set up procedure, on more than one occasion I’ve heard people confused about what exactly you’re meant to do, and indeed which way you should be sliding the bar in order to get the best quality. The result is unfortunately much less reliability when it comes to overall quality, and you invariably need to tweek your settings afterwards. Sadly, the simple menu for doing so pretty much hides all of the useful options, whilst the advanced menu bombards you with some many sliders and tickboxes, and it’s difficult to know where to start when touching up your sound settings, even in comparison to TS2.

Interestingly, as far as I understand it and in contrast to the TS3 model, the server does not set the quality and therefore the bandwidth requirements, rather each individual user has his/her own settings. This has already proven useful; where certain users have logged on using slower Internet connections, we’ve moved into a lower quality channel on our TS2/3 server specifically with that in mind, but with Mumble this isn’t necessary. This does, of course, have some disadvantages. Since users can essentially set their own quality standards, it means that the overall impression you get from the software isn’t as good as when you join a high quality channel in TS3, which may account for some of my observations here. The software also seems to attempt to moderate its quality level according to recent trends, which can result in some very odd behaviour: one clan member was using a fairly flaky Internet connection, which would temporarily timeout, yet where he would simply disappear from the conversation in TS3, his voice ended up being transmitted in some kind of robotic bursts in Mumble. Similarly, once sat in a channel on my own for a while, Mumble had set itself onto an exceedingly sensitive setting (perhaps thinking I was talking and it couldn’t hear me) which meant that when someone did eventually join the channel, everything I said was überloud, and my microphone picked up the mice scratching in the attic.

Aside from those issues, I haven’t really much experimented with the channels and so forth, though it is handy being able to write to clients more easily (and have messages read out by Stephen Hawking’s sister). I was actually considering if it would be possible to read out questions for one of our #redarmy-clan quizzes, simultaneously sitting in several channels at once, though haven’t really looked into it properly yet!

In conclusion, Mumble is certainly a no nonsense client when it comes to extra features, however the complicated set-up scores a major point against the program. One definite advantage over TS3 is the client’s ability to set his own codec requirements as opposed to being dictated by the server channel, which is great news for low bandwidth users, but perhaps not such a great boon given today’s typical Internet connections. If we take latency and quality to be on a par with TS3 (or slightly worse), there just doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to using Mumble.

Click here to view the embedded video.