Hacked Off

Earlier this week, my Xbox Live account was hacked. My Microsoft points balance of about 1600 was all but emptied and an attempted purchase of a further 6000 points only failed as the credit card linked to my account had expired. According to my purchase history 'I' had purchased three items of FIFA 12 'Ultimate Team' DLC (I hadn't). According to my Windows Live account, I'd added another email to my account (nope) and changed my security to one in Chinese (hmm, no).

I'd had a hard, tense day at work and really wanted to unwind by shooting some terrorists in the face (MW2) followed by an early night. As it was, my evening was completely free of face-shooting and I was up until gone midnight deleting stuff and wandering around the internet changing other passwords and generally upping my security levels. Not what I'd wanted to do at all.

I'd been aware of a hacking problem on Live, particularly in relation to FIFA DLC - one of my friends list had had an identical hack before Christmas and you don't have to search far on the internet to find similar stories. Indeed, the verb  'to be FIFA'd' has started being used  ("I have been well and truly FIFA'd").

I'd never succumbed to a phish for my log in details and my password was judged 'strong' but a fat lot of good that did.  The Internets say that there's a weak link in Microsoft's security software and that may be the case (I'm no expert).  There's clearly something wrong given  the number of incidences of hackage reported on the Internet.  

I reported  it to Microsoft, who said that my Live account would be locked and the details  passed to its 'investigation team' and that this was likely to take up to 3 days.  12 hours later, I received an email from the investigations team, which said that they had verified that unauthorised access had taken place and then gave me a code for Microsoft points  slightly in excess of those that I had lost.  All I need now is for my account to be unlocked and I'll be back in the game (this hiatus may do something to remedy my FIFA addiction - 80+ hours to date).

Given how quickly my claim was agreed, coupled to the fact that early reports of this problem last autumn stated that accounts were being locked for up to a month, has led me to think that Microsoft know what's causing the issue and don't want to fix it.  The 360 is coming to the end of its lifespan, with its successor expected to be announced, in some quarters, at this year's E3.  Who knows what shape Live will take in the next generation of Xbox consoles?  Do Microsoft consider it cheaper to pay off those unlucky games like me who've been hacked, compared with the cost of altering deep-grained issues within Live's code, when Live for the Xbox 720 (this almost definitely won't be its name) may be far different?

Limbo - review

When I was growing up in the eighties, UK TV's Channel 4 would frequently show, late at night, animation shorts produced from behind the Iron Curtain. Not exactly Mickey Mouse, they were often dark, grainy and disturbing. Maybe they were in some way a veiled critique of communism, or maybe that's what   forty years of communism does to you (though Stalin was a big fan of Disney, apparently). To a 13-year old awaiting a  'red triangle' programme, they were a nuisance but, looking back, the films were actually very good.

It was these shorts that were brought to my mind when I first played Limbo, a new  XBLA game. The visuals also reminded me of David Lynch's Eraserhead and of German expressionist silent cinema,  as Limbo is completely monochromatic  - a unique look for a videogame (well, since ZX81 days, anyway).

Limbo is a puzzle-platformer, like last year's media darling, Braid.  In the game, you play as a small boy, shown only in silhouette with two blinking dots for eyes (poignantly, these wink out when he dies).  The boy has to proceed from left to right in a scrolling expressionist landscape of dark forests, factories and towns, avoiding a variety of ways in which the landscape (and the odd giant spider) can dismember him.  And I  really do mean 'a variety of ways' - I was chopped to pieces by buzz-saws and fixed machine guns,  electrocuted, squashed by pile-drivers, fell from great heights, drowned, impaled by arrows (launched by other small boys), squashed by boulders and more.  Even though the boy is only shown in silhouette, these deaths are often graphically depicted (the 'gore' can be muted in the options screen).

This is probably the jolliest scene in the game

The objects and structures in the game behave rigidly to their own rules and it is by understanding these rules - reversing gravity for example - that the player can work their way through the spatial puzzles set by the developers.  As with Braid, the player gets a great sense of achievement in working out a puzzle that had previously seemed impenetrable, though I thought the difficulty level was significantly lower than with Braid (not that I wasn't stuck a few times).

There is a story attached to the game, that the boy is trying to rescue the soul of his sister, trapped in Limbo but this has very little connection to what you're actually playing. Back in the olden days when I started gaming, programmers would often, I have since read, make a game and then add the 'story' (essentially just for the text on the cassette insert) at the end - space empire, aliens, lost kingdom, curse, blah blah blah. Limbo's 'story' reminded me of that - it seemed to have very little intersect with what I was doing, other than in the name. I think, like the best art, players can bestow their own meaning on what they see in the game, rather than having the artist tell them explicitly what the work is about.

Yes, that is a dead body in the right-hand box

I wondered as I was playing, enraptured by the art style, would I have been so keen on it if it was a Wario game (instinctively, I feel it is more of a Wario game than a Mario one) and had more conventional visuals. Rather shallowly, I think I probably would not - the art style is so bound up with game, I think it would be a far lesser game if it had conventional 'videogame' graphics.  That probably says more about me than Limbo though.

Fantastic

I don't think I could write about Limbo without mentioning its price and length. The full game is 1200 MS points, which is in the top bracket of XBLA prices but it can be completed on the first play through  in only 4 hours (and far more quickly in successive play throughs, when the you know how to solve the puzzles). There is a trial game that you can download for free, so at least you can see if it is the type of thing that you'd like before paying the money over but, even if it is, the '£/gameplay hour' ratio is quite steep. 


Personally, I think it is worth it. After playing the trial and liking it, I rationalized that I'd pay a similar price for a blu-ray disc for a film with a shorter running time and not feel cheated and, if the game was of similar quality, the player should not feel cheated either.

Metropolis,  anyone?

I thoroughly enjoyed Limbo from start to  all-to-quick finish.  It might not be to everyone's taste - my wife said to me while playing it 'Are you still playing that horrible, depressing, game?' -  but if you want to play something totally different from anything else released this year, give Limbo a try. 

Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment review

  

Vandal Hearts: Flames if Judgment is a sequel of sorts (it is set before the first game on the Vandal Hearts timeline) to a pair of PS1-era strategy role playing games (SRPGs), Vandal Hearts and the imaginatively titled Vandal Hearts II.

I was a huge fan of the first Vandal Hearts game on PS1, playing it through several times.  It was the first game of its type that I had played (I don't think that Japanese SRPGs were released that often in the West back then) and it is one of my favourite games of all time (I must get around to posting a top ten). Vandal Hearts's first sequel was poor in comparison but even so I started looking forward to Flames of Judgment from when I first heard that Konami were making a downloadable update. 


For the uninitiated, the Vandal Hearts series (and SRPGs generally)   entail you controlling a small band of characters in a series of one-screen, varied terrain, grid-based battles. Battles are turn-based, with the player moving their characters within its movement allowance for that turn and then attacking, healing, waiting etc.

A grid-based battle, yesterday.  And that's not a black border  - that's my telly

The character types conform  to usual RPG conventions - fighters, archers and magic users -  and the narrative they travel through is played out in the cut scenes that take place between the battles .

Ah yes, the narrative. The story centres around two nations, Balastrade, where the game is predominantly based and most of the characters come from and Urdu. There was a war fought between the two many years before, in which they'd fought each other to a standstill and which was then followed by an uneasy peace.  Fortunately for the game's story arc (if not the inhabitants of the countries), that peace breaks down very early on in the game and you then follow the story of Tobias, the game's main character  (a war orphan).


Like I said, it's an RPG - don't expect high literature.  The story arc is Lord of the Rings lite - a quest, an ultimate weapon, betrayals, friendship, evil, rogues.  And so on and so on.  But no-one plays RPGs for the story (do they?) and for SRPGs read that doubly so - the story is there to fill in the gaps taking you from one battle to the next. No-one needs an Metal Gear Solid style cut scene in a SRPG.  Or in Metal Gear Solid, for the that matter.

You'd be surprised how many cut-scenes end in a fight.  Or maybe not. 

Unlike the earlier games, you are limited to the same six characters throughout the game, all of whom are selected for each battle (if a character 'dies' in battle, they 'retreat' and are back on the roster for the next battle). There are no character classes as such but different characters are better at some things than others, so the player tends to make them perform that  function. For example, a character might be good at casting magic, so you tend to load him/her up with spells and they take on the role of a wizard, even though they are not referred to as such. 


Similarly, there is no promotion in levels - the characters have numerous stats, showing how well they do a certain action or perform a certain task and, during battles, those individual stats level up. As with most things in life, continual performance of an action makes you better at it, so the more arrow-flinging an archer does, the better he or she is at archery.

The game is not particularly long - Raptr says I took 16 hours 40 minutes hours to complete  - but you could probably do it quicker than that. I tend to micromanage my party a lot between battles and also like to plan my moves on the battlefield to the nth degree, like in  chess (which it resembles but like the chess from the first  Star Wars film). However, it was only 1200 MS points and I would sooner pay that for 16 hours of great SRPG action than play £30 for a full price game that gives me 16 hours of fun and 14 hours of slog.

The art style is different from the first games and other SRPGs, particularly in relation to the character models, which quite 'cartoony'.  The biggest problem visually, though, is with the pallete used. The landscapes, other than those battles that take place in towns, are too close in hue to that used for the character models and you can find that your best laid defensive lines have an inadvertently camouflaged enemy soldier lurking within them. This is probably the only aspect of the game that I didn't like. Vandal Hearts avoided this by having the character models 'pulse', like a  Roobarb & Custard cartoon, so you could always pick them out from their surroundings. I have my doubts that that technique would have worked with the new art style but it would have avoided the 'shit, didn't see that ninja' scenario. Though I suppose that is the point of ninjas.

The loading screens display concept art.  Pretty, aren't they?

One final point on the art style - the cut scenes. They have a strange, shaky-movement,   Captain Pugwash feel and the characters don't seem to have any necks, like a world populated by the genetic offspring of Gladstone Small. And yes, I am aware of of the irony of trying to raise the profile of a niche-genre, download-only title by referencing two 70s Britsh kids' programmes and an 80s English cricketer.

I loved Flames of Judgment but then I love SRPGs - I put 160 hours into Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on GBA - and I greatly enjoyed its gently cerebral change of pace from that shown by most other 360 games.  I don't think that it's going to change anybody's mind about SRPGs, though. There is nothing that the game does that wasn't done by similar games 10 years ago but what it does, it does very well. If you want an updated SRPG, pick Valkyria Chronicles  on PS3 (my favourite PS3 game); if you want an enjoyable, if not epic, example of the genre, go for Flames of Judgment.  


Better still, get both.