Games
New RPGs blend classic tales with new environments and updated graphics.

By Eric Baker

By Bethesda Softworks’s count, its new game Oblivion, for the PC and Xbox 360, is the fourth in the Elder Scrolls series, which began with Arena back in 1993. From that beginning, each game has grown and evolved to keep pace with the computing environment. Arena, for instance, didn’t require a 3D graphics card. Oblivion requires not only a 3D card, but a pretty recent one to show off all its pixel packed, shadowed, and flared beauty. The third game, Morrowind, was a launch title for the Xbox, the first Elder Scrolls game to appear for a console. Now Oblivion is the first RPG out for the Xbox 360, a system that lets it flex the power of its graphics and game engine.

As the graphics, interface, and engine of the Elder Scrolls series have grown and evolved, Bethesda has remained constantly committed to creating a game world that is both huge and wide open. There is an overarching quest that ties the game together, but there is a fantastic number of side quests to do as well, and there is no particular pressure to get on with the main quest instead. Far more so than any other RPG series, Elder Scrolls gives the feeling of being in a living world where the player’s choices are both plentiful and meaningful.

As an example of how Oblivion works, the player might take a quest to search a specific character’s home. To find that character house, the player has to follow him home, but then the character is in the house, so the player can’t search it yet. The player has to wait for them to leave. This not only makes sense, but isn’t onerous because there are lots of other things the player can do in the world and then come back to the house later. The world depends on the player’s actions, but it isn’t always triggered by them.

All of the many characters and dialog trees in Oblivion are done with full audio. Players can choose to make their character from a variety of fantasy races. Oblivion has players actually play the game for a while before it has them choose a class and begin assigning characteristics. In fact, the game will suggest a character class to the player based on how he has have approached the game from the start.

Another thing that has stayed consistent with the Elder Scrolls games is that the characters gain experience and increase their skills and stats as the game goes on. Thus hitting an enemy with a spear increases the character’s spear skill and strength, but doesn’t make them any better at unrelated things like casting magic. A character’s skill level is based on how much improvement it has earned, which can be a problem if singular isn’t improving his combat skills along with their peaceful ones. Enemies scale to the players’ character’s level, so a 15th-level thief is going to face 15th-level monsters, even if his fighting skills are only at level 5. Players who keep up their sword play or dangerous magic in addition to their peaceful pursuits will have no trouble.

Overall, Oblivion is a terrific and entertaining game that will consume hours and hours of the player’s life whether he is playing on the PC or the Xbox 360.

At the other end of the spectrum is Bone: the Great Cow Race from Telltale Games for the PC. This is the second adventure game based on the popular comic book by Jeff Smith. This game picks up the events of the comic while the Bone cousins are still scattered and just beginning to learn about life in the valley. They all come together for the Great Cow Race, one of the true gem story lines in the Bone comic.

Both Oblivion and B:tGCR have a lot of dialog trees to work through, and both use full spoken text, but that is where the similarities end. B:tGCR is an adventure game in the old-time mode of Myst, although funnier and less of a life commitment than the classic game. Players are presented with a mostly static background. They point and click their character through it, looking for clues, solving puzzles, and talking to NPCs. This is a story driven by adventure. Players don’t feel like a character living in a world, they feel like the protagonist in a really good and really funny story.

The hardest thing for fans of Bone is going to be the first hour or so getting used to all their favorite characters having voices that don’t sound at all like the ones the fans have been hearing in their heads as they read the comics. Artwise, however, no adjustment is needed at all. The pictures and animation are very true to the comic; it is very much as if the panels have come to life. There is a hint button that can be turned on or off and the game is as hard or as easy as the player likes, depending on how often one asks for hints. Fans of Bone will enjoy seeing one of their favorite stories told again. People new to Bone will enjoy the story for the first time.

Auto Assault for the PC is a MMORPG from NCSoft, the same publisher that presents the City of Heroes games. City of Heroes is done by Cryptic Studios and Auto Assault is from NetDevil, so it is understandable that AA has far more in common with World of Warcraft than it does with CoH despite the shared publisher. Set in a post apocalyptic Earth, AA pits humans, who are coming back to the surface after generations underground, against mutants, who lived through the dark years above ground, and Biomeks, the race humans created to fight the Mutants for them. Players can choose one of the three races to start with and each race has three different classes that players can choose to start as. Players can name and dress up both their humanoid avatar and the starting car in which they will actually spend most of the game.

The easiest way to understand advancement in AA is that the player levels his humanoid toon, and their car is its armor and weapons. The environment Town is used for crafting and shopping, and all the areas that are not “town” are for fighting. There is no penalty for dying beyond the time it takes to drive back to where you died from the repair stations.

The biggest stumbling block for players coming to AA is expectations. When thinking of a fighting car game, players may be tempted to think of the wide open highway chases of movies like The Road Warrior. In fact, AA is more like a demolition derby simulation, at least when it comes to combat. The enemies are mostly either in cars of their own or some sort of monster that is as mobile as a car, but boss enemies are tied to certain zones. So while the player will get some good speed on the shattered highways while traveling from encounter to encounter, combat is much more a matter of circling and maneuvering, trying to point the car in the right direction while avoiding the terrain.

Taken on its own terms, AA is an interesting and inventive game with a decent background and some good features like built in voice chat when you’re in a convoy and a very deep crafting system. The hard part is accepting the game’s terms instead of wishing for a more “born to be wild” experience.

One of the surprise hits of 2002 was Kingdom Hearts for the PS2 by Square-Enix and Disney. It has taken 4 years, but Kingdom Hearts II is now on shelves. It features the return of Sora (voiced by Haley Joel Osment) as the hero with the Keyblade who must cut his way through the various Disney and Square worlds to save them from destruction. Along the way, he is accompanied by a changing cast, but for most of the game his companions are Goofy and Donald Duck. This is a conceit that just doesn’t get old, particularly when the party travels through Disney’s more recent properties, Tron and Pirates of the Caribbean. Both Jack Sparrow and Barbossa are in the game. Even if it isn’t Johnny Depp voicing Sparrow, Geoffrey Rush did give life to Barbossa. In fact, the majority of the voice acting in the game is either by the original actors or by the actors that have stood in for them on voice work before.

As with the previous game, fans of Disney are going to be happier than fans of Square. In this country at least, the Disney characters are just more familiar, and their stories are more straight forward, more susceptible to paring down to single video game level than their Japanese brethren. On Square’s side, however, is the game play, which will take minimal effort to pick up for any player who has ever been through a Square RPG. For people new to the controls, when set on basic difficulty, the game is so easy they will have no trouble plowing through the puzzles and combat to get to the next interaction with a favorite character or scene.