My friend Chris came over last night and we did some gaming before he leaves for Spain. First we played Last Night on Earth, which I’ve already reviewed for you. This time, however, we played one of the official downloadable scenarios, “All Hallows Eve”. In “All Hallows Eve”, the townsfolk are scattered around the board in random buildings, and one of them is secretly the Zombie Master, controlling the zombies with the Book of the Dead. The heroes have to interrogate each townsfolk until the Zombie Master is revealed, then defeat the Zombie Master, take the Book of the Dead, and burn it. I played the heroes in this one, and wound up finding the Zombie Master pretty quickly. I also wound up losing a couple of my heroes pretty quickly, though, and one of them became a zombie hero to boot. A well-placed gasoline marker killed the Zombie Master, the zombie hero, and an additional zombie, dropping the Book of the Dead in that space. All I needed was a fire item to destroy it; unfortunately, the one guy who had a fire item–Jake Cartwright, the drifter–had been killed a few rounds prior. I tried to get into the police station so that one of my remaining heroes could hold of the hordes with a pump shotgun while the other searched for fire, but my heroes got separated and poor Sheriff Anderson was overwhelmed, ending the game with a win for the Zs. It was a lot of fun, and I’d definitely play the scenario again.

After that we played Pillars of the Earth, which I’ve played three times now. I like this game a lot. It’s a game about building a cathedral, and it’s based on a novel so there’s a sort of narrative built into the game that separates it from other, similar games. There’s a lot of resource management and allocation that figures into winning the game, and while there is some randomness, there isn’t so much that it’ll ruin your long-term strategies; more likely, your opponent will do that.

Finally, on the Team Fortress 2 front, I’ve started playing around with the medic class. I tried the medic when I first started playing and found the class not to my liking; I didn’t have a good sense of who to heal and when. However, now that I’ve got 50+ hours under my belt and I know a little bit more about the optimal strategies in the game, I feel like I’ve got a much better handle on the medic and how he works. I’m having a lot of fun playing the medic, much more than I thought I would. Even better, I actually seem to be pretty good at playing the medic, which is gratifying. It’s a useful class to have some experience with, as there are few occasions when you have too many medics, and they are one of the most important classes for victory on any map. I’ve even managed to get the first unlockable, the Blutsauger, which is a needlegun that heals you 3 points for every hit, but can’t score critical hits. Pretty useful, in any case.

Something that has struck me about the core gameplay of the medic class is how the game incentivizes you to heal your buddies. In addition to making them more effective and even boosting their health beyond the norm, healing carries other benefits. The medic normally regenerates about 1 health per second, but when you’re healing someone that regeneration doubles. Also, while you’re healing an ally, you get credit for an assist any time that ally kills an enemy, which means that you can rack up a lot of points if you’re healing the right people. Probably most importantly, though, is the fact that as you’re healing people, you build up your Übercharge which, when fully charged, can be deployed to give you and your healing target ten seconds of invulnerability, an ability that makes medics extremely useful if they stay alive long enough.

I’ve been meaning to blog about Team Fortress 2 for a while now, but I keep on playing it instead. For those who haven’t played it, let me sum up: it’s really, really good. A brief primer: TF2 is a mulitplayer, team-based first-person shooter with objective-based gameplay and nine classes to choose from, each of which brings something different to the table and each of which plays very differently from the others. The classes are all really well balanced, too. The spy, for example, could be seen as extremely powerful with his ability to become invisible, disguise himself as the enemy, and kill people instantaneously with a knife in the back. However, if you’ve got pyros who know what they’re doing, they’ll be flaming their teammates frequently and, since there is no friendly fire, only enemy spies will catch aflame, and they’re pretty weak when caught out in the open.

It’s rare for me to find a multiplayer game that holds my attention for more than a month, but TF2 has really managed to do it. I’ve been playing since about Christmas time, and I have no plans of stopping any time soon. I love the variety in the classes, and in the fact that a single level never really plays out the same twice. My favorite class in TF2 is the heavy, and it’s the class I’m best with. The heavy is big, tough, slow, and packs a minigun. He can deal a lot of damage pretty quickly if left unchecked, but he winds up being a preferred target for spies and snipers, which leads to a high mortality rate, and heavies don’t tend to last all that long without a medic, either. Second on my list (a very close second, at that) is the pyro. I love the pyro’s mobility, as well as his ability to jump amidst the enemy and sow pure chaos. He’s not the antithesis of the heavy, but he’s very, very different in play. I also like playing the demoman from time to time, lobbing grenades and sticky bombs with wild abandon.

The genius of what Valve is doing with this game, though, is the fact that they’re still supporting it after release. They release new maps, they tweak the gameplay and, best of all, they release class-based achievement packs with unlockables. It works like this: they release a bunch of achievements–little goals for you to work toward, for those who aren’t familiar with this concept–and as you get achievements, you unlock alternate weapons for your class. These weapons aren’t patently better than the ones you start with, but they do offer slightly different strategies and styles of play, which is nice, and they allow for some customization of your chosen class. They’ve released three so far: the medic, the pyro, and the heavy. I’m not much for playing the medic, but I’ve managed to get all of the unlockables for the pyro and the heavy, and they all have merit.

The pyro can replace his shotgun with a flare gun. The flare gun does less damage, but sets enemies alight from a distance, which can be very useful for the aforementioned chaos-sowing. Then there’s the backburner, a replacement for the flamethrower that is functionally similar except that it can’t fire the standard flamer’s compressed air blast (used for pushing people around or reflecting projectiles) and deals automatic critical hits from behind. Finally, there’s the axtinguisher, a replacement for the axe that deals less damage but does critical damage to foes on fire.

The heavy has probably my favorite alternate “weapon”, the sandvich, which replaces the shotgun. It’s not really a weapon; it doesn’t deal damage. It does, however, heal you when you eat it, though it makes you extremely vulnerable for the four seconds that it takes to eat it. Then there’s Natascha, the minigun replacement, which deals less damage but slows enemies under fire. Finally there are the KGB, the Killing Gloves of Boxing, which replace the heavy’s normal fist attack. They’re slower, but if you kill someone with them you get five seconds of gauranteed crits.

I am continually surprised with how much I love this game. I rave about it to my friends and play whenever I get the chance. If you haven’t tried it yet, and you like multiplayer FPSs at all, you need to try it. You owe it to yourself.

Spore. Ah, Spore. I’ve been looking forward to the game for a while. It’s an intriguing concept: a game where you create and evolve a creature into a whole race of creatures, from a single-celled organism all the way up to a space-faring race, with complete creative control. Sounds like fun, right? If you’ve clicked the link, you may have already noticed that it only received one star on Amazon.com. With such a cool premise, why is it rated so badly? Was it poorly executed? Not from what I’ve heard. No, it’s another problem altogether.

Sadly, Spore is saddled with some pretty restrictive DRM. In short, it allows you to install the game three times, ever. Period. Want to install it a fourth time? Buy a new copy and throw out your old one, because it’s a coaster now (or a Frisbee, if you prefer). Want to get one of your installs back by uninstalling? You can’t. Sorry. Why did EA do this? Ostensibly, they did it to prevent piracy. The thing is, this game showed up on BitTorrent sites before it was even released, so apparently it didn’t even fulfill its purpose. This means that those who want to pirate the game can, with very little effort on their part, while those who buy the game legitimately are treated to a heavy-handed reminder that EA doesn’t trust its customers. EA has effectively just alienated the entire hard-core gaming market. Those people who upgrade their PCs every six months to a year? Yeah, they might have bought the game. They won’t now, because eighteen months down the line they won’t be able to play the game they bought anymore.

It really baffles me. EA had to know that this wouldn’t really do anything to prevent piracy, because Mass Effect had the exact same DRM, and it’s been pirated plenty. With that in mind, wouldn’t it have made more sense to put a simple disc check on the game, save money licensing the DRM, and sell more copies? It seems simple.

In the end, I’m faced with a decision, as are many others who want this game but don’t want to deal with the DRM. Either I buy the game and get treated like a criminal, or I pirate the game and I’m not. On the one hand, I want to support Maxis for making such an interesting and innovative game. On the other hand, I want to send a clear message to EA that this kind of DRM is not okay with me, and the clearest way to talk to a giant corporate entity like that is with your dollars. What does everyone else think?