Here’s a list of the more prominent titles shown at the Vista-centric Games For Windows event that took place in San Francisco this Monday.

Age of Conan
Shadowrun
Supreme Commander
World In Conflict
Hellgate: London
Crysis

I’m not mentioning the others, mostly because they are already released or alternatively, are minor puzzle games.  Browser entertainment stuff for the most part, like the new Vista version of Geometry Wars.  And of course, there were some systems just running Vista on its own, inviting users to take a few minutes to examine some of the new non-gaming features.

Also I had the opportunity to talk to some devs from NVIDIA, who were able to describe some of the bigger advantages of DirectX 10 and how that relates to new hardware and software.  Impressively, this actually made a lot of sense without sounding like a sales pitch.  The most important stuff was basically that by integrating physics processing units onto the graphics card itself, games that called for physics processing could instead be routed to the graphics card instead of the cpu, resulting in less strain on the cpu without taking up even more processing power on the gpu.  This would allow the CPU to allocate more resources towards AI and fewer resources on the graphics.  With titles like FEAR showing off the impressive new AI routines that games can manage now, it’s a pretty good trade-off IF they can get developers to code games that take advantage of it.

But likely, you want to know about the games.  After all, it’s called “Games For Windows” and not “NVIDIA talks your ear off” for a reason.

Age of Conan:  I should preface this with an up-front disclaimer:  I don’t play MMORPGs.  None.  It’s nothing to do with how good the MMO is, it has to do with the fact that I don’t rent games at $50 with recurring monthly fees.  Unfortunately, this means that I also don’t really know much about how to compare this game to others in the genre.  The combat can be real-time or turn-based depending on what actions are being taken, and the graphics are pretty decent.  Certainly the game violence quotient is notable.  But since the game attendant was playing a GM character in the opening stages of the title, I did not get to determine what the social aspect would be like or the big city-building draw of the later game.





Shadowrun:  Sort of like a steam punk Counter-Strike, Shadowrun mixes mysticism and heavy weaponry around for an interesting shooter action game.  Using magic and technology to move rapidly through levels, I played on 360 against a PC attendant.  The magic makes itself quite notable and is a big factor in the game because of the lack of serious magical offensive capability.  The most useful spell being a teleport move that allows players to move through walls, floors, and other objects.  This has a big impact on how one should approach a situation. In my case, I found that my elf character was especially lethal with a sword, running through enemy groups slashing away before zipping through another wall, then approaching from another angle (the ceiling, perhaps) and finishing off anyone I had missed.  Through all of this, I never felt lie my character had been buffed up in an effort to artificially rebalance this play style, it was just the new abilities allowing for a new style of play.  Certainly something to be commended.

Supreme Commander:  Created by the same team that made cult-favorite RTS Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander’s first and foremost goal seems to be “epic scale.”  With a map so large that it was being displayed in mini-map style on a second monitor, the idea of directing huge numbers of units on a huge scale was pretty evident.  According to the attendant, the map being played was 1/16th the size of their largest maps, and 16 times larger than their smallest.  Otherwise, it seemed to follow a pretty standard C&C or Blizzard RTS formula of base building, resourcing, and unit-recruitment.  While the demo had a unit cap of 500, I was told that there would be none in the final title.





World In Conflict:  Easily my favorite title on the show floor, Cold War RTS World In Conflict not only looked great but also introduced several major changes to the RTS formula.  Eschewing the resourcing and base building of standard RTS games, WiC placed resource limitations on each side and had them fight for the map with units that had serious value.  But more importantly, there was an obvious team aspect to each side, with multiple players each taking a wildly different unit selection (infantry, air force, armor, or support) each with vastly different capabilities.  Air force could take down armor with little difficulty but could not take the capture zones on the map while support could lay down Badgers (mobile bridge tanks used by the US Army) or mobile anti-air.  And of course, being the Cold War, the occasional tactical nuke could come into play at any moment, turning a small village (tac nukes are designed for localized damage,) into heavily irradiated rubble.  Yes, irradiation, making the control point nearly useless.

Hellgate: London:  Take the monster-slaying RPG formula of Diablo and mix with the FPS stylings of Unreal Tournament.  What do you get?  Hellgate: London.  And sadly, I just could not get into it.  Monsters felt underwhelming, the beginner weaponry seemed too powerful (or at least, I understood it to be beginner weaponry) and the “horror” setting was about as unscary as you could get.  This one definitely seems to be a pass, sorry to say.










And now, prepare to call for my head, a gaming Jihad.  Because I am about to say something so scandalous, so controversial, that it may well match the animosity in Presidential elections or Star Wars edits.

Crysis is booooooorrrrring.

Now, lets be fair for one moment.  The level I played, the jungle village seen in a number of Crysis videos released so far, is purportedly pre-alpha, a stability release first and foremost that contains a number of game mechanics.  It’s quite possible that the game has matured grandly since this version.  But this mythical supreme version of the game is certainly not what I played.

The first thing I noticed, obviously, was that Crysis is pretty.  Very pretty.  Foliage, textures, particle effects and the like are rendered in stunning detail.

But this is where the game stops being quite so remarkable.

Players have a number of interesting abilities, stuff like super-strength or speed and temporary cloaking technology (which didn’t seem to work that well).  Also, there are a number of options for customizing weapons.  And thanks to the Crysis engine, you can interact with your environment in a number of ways, knocking over small trees or military HMVVWs (“Humvee” is the civilian vehicle variant) with your bare fists and even blow apart some buildings. At least once I blew a wooden door open with a 12-guage military shotgun, and was quite impressed at the interactivity of the environment.  

What I did not see though were ways in which this would actually do anything to help the gameplay itself.  Enemies made no serious use of the buildings for cover, meaning that there were no major reasons to blow them apart.  They would find cover, but not effective cover.  I could still headshot them easily while they crouched behind ineffective crates and steel barrels (I could find only one exploding barrel on the entire map, and it wasn’t even red.  But there were plenty of other explosive items about), allowing me a significant height advantage.  I could knock over some small trees or throw a barrel (or even another soldier) with my super-strength, but it had little effect on the other items around me.  They just pounced off other players, too.  One might think that a super-strong soldier could do a fair bit of damage to a corrugated steel shed, but only with high explosives could I get those to budge.  One might remember me being able to knock a 2-ton vehicle clean on its ass with my bare fists, but if I try the same to a bit of weak steel sheeting that hasn’t already been knocked loose I’m SOL.

After slaughtering a small unit of North Korean troops, I suddenly heard the ominous noise of a chopper vaguely reminiscent of a Hind gunship settle in over my position.  Most players, at this point, are told to get into the jeep and try to shot it.  Alternatively, we could grab the nearby RPG and try to blow it out of the sky, but were warned that it could dodge pretty easily.  They were right; the helicopter dodged my first shot or two, then drifted off over a nearby ridge, too far out to shoot at but well within range of its powerful cannon.

Now, this thing is shooting the hell out of me, and I realize that I’ve been beaten.  So does the attendant.  “Sorry,” he says, “It should have stayed there and tried to attack you, like a real helicopter.”

What?

Allow me to explain to our readers the standard engagement practice of most modern and not-so-modern military helicopters:  Stay out of site and range, determine target, and then rain death and destruction in a massive torrent.  Then, fly the fuck away as fast as can be managed.

So I point this out to the gentleman, who is rather surprised.  Further, I explain that I had actually been impressed that the vehicle managed to do this, however unintentionally.  In my mind, the chopper had finally understood, in a stunning display of AI that it needed to engage a superiorly armed target from an advantageous position instead of sitting there like a damned fool waiting to be blow up.  The attendant was speechless.  Clearly, it had never crossed the mind of the dev team how helicopters would actually engage an opponent, or were weary of breaking convention and not having the weapons platform sit there waiting to be shot back at.  Without destroying the helo, and without an ability to pursue it to its location, the game had to be restarted.  Later, playing through a second time, my suspicions were confirmed.  When engaging in the jeep, blowing out the rockets from underneath, the helo just kept strafing back and forth in the same area like a massive bull’s-eye set against the tropical sky.

Great AI, huh?

One thing I’d like to mention here:  while the game looked nice, and even if the AI was improved, there is no reason whatsoever why the game could not easily be ported to PS3 or the XBOX 360.  Really.  There are plenty of console games out there that look this good and are this expansive, so the decision to make it a Windows exclusive game is clearly Microsoft trying to push Vista harder, similar to how they have marketed the PC version of Halo 2.

Of all the games that I saw at the event, only one felt like a serious reason to buy a new PC for, and it wasn’t even the one I thought it would be.  Fortunately, there are some other games on PC to look forward to, but some of the heaviest hitters may not be all they are cracked up to be.