Tag: Freedom Force

For Freedom, Part Two

Irrational Games released Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich this week, which caused my productivity to crater. The original Freedom Force was the first game to break the superhero curse that had condemned previous attempts to produces a superhero-themed PC game to oblivion.

Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich could have also been called Freedom Force 1.5. Essentially what Irrational did was improve the graphics, update the AI, make some minor tweaks with controls and a few other changes.

That might sound like a criticism, but all the original Freedom Force needed were some tweaks here and there to go from good to great.

The graphics have been heavily tweaked. The 3D effects are much better, with terrain and buildings doing a much better job of handling multiple heights. This makes playing flying characters even cooler than before. The destructability of the environment has also been expanded, and awesome smoke and debris effects have been added. Nothing beats watching smoke rise and debris fly as your superhero squad takes on the supervillains in a crowded urban environment.

The AI for the first game was heavily criticized, and that has been addressed quite well in Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich. In the original game, characters would just sit around and get beat to a pulp if you didn’t give them direct orders. In Third Reich, you still need to micromanage to be most effective with your characters, but if you’re in the heat of a battle and a character without an assigned action gets attacked, it will respond semi-intelligently.

In all, the changes in control, AI and graphics simply add to the feeling that you’re actually in a comic book duking it out with supervillains. It completley fulfills every fantasy I’ve had since 13 (well, at least all the ones related to comic books).

Whereas the “Danger Room”-style feature in the original game was a post-release kludge that was never very satisfying, Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich ships with a fully integrated “Rumble Room” option which lets the player set up all sorts of one-off battles to test out new character designs or just have fun smashing giant robots over and over again (smashing giant robots just never gets old in my book).

I’m not really a fan of multiplayer, but Third Reich does offer Internet and LAN multiplayer support. Unlike the first game, which had multiplayer added on almost as an after-thought and offered only deathmatch-style play, Third Reich has a variety of multiplayer styles and even a basic scenario editor to try to give more of a comic book feel to the multiplayer battles.

One of the biggest elements of the original game was the mod community. For Freedom Force vs. Third Reich, Irrational delivered mod tools for download the same week the game was released. Last time Marvel got all pissed off and sent out cease-and-desist letters to Freedom Force mod sites that included likenesses of their characters, and Irrational at every turn discourages users from using the mod tools to create Freedom Force versions of trademarked characters. Some of the best mods for the first game, however, involved the JLA and other well-known characters and its likely that will be repeated this time around.

Bottom line — Freedom Force vs. Third Reich addresses pretty much every single complaint that players and reviewers raised about Freedom Force (which was still a great game, all things considered). If superheroes are your thing, its a no-brainer — you must have this game.

Computer Games’ Preview of Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich

Normally I don’t buy computer game magazines because game-oriented web sites do a much better job of covering games. But the January 2005 issue of Computer Games has an extensive preview of Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich, Irrational’s sequel to Freedom Force.

Whereas the first game was a Silver Age-driven comics game, FFVTR is going to be focused on the Golden Age with lots of Nazis to pummel.

Various outlets, including Computer Games, are saying the game should be out in March which probably means sometime in July.

In the meantime, Image Comics is out with the first issue in its six-issue Freedom Force miniseries.

New Freedom Force Patch

Freedom Force broke the superhero computer game jinx and is one of the best computer games I’ve ever played. But despite good reviews and relatively good sales, Irrational, the game’s developers, ended up partnering with Crave Entertainment which seemed primarily interested in a quick take-the-immediate-profits and run maneuver. Despite an excellent fan base, Crave even shut down the game’s official discussion board system to save money and a second, much-needed patch to the game has been in limbo since late last spring.

To their credit, however, Irrational kept on working on the patch in-house and this week finally announced its release (they seem to have a Seth-like approach to their software).

So, the good news is if you have a decent PC (the game runs fine for me on a 1 ghz. Celeron with a crap PCI 3d card), you can probably find this game in a discount bin for $20. Add the two patches, and you’ve got a full campaign worth of superhero strategy goodness along with a Danger Room option that, combined with all of the free content available online, means you can set up pretty much any superhero combat action you can think of? (Want JLA vs. Avengers? It’s in there).

The Mod Culture: Game Mods, Fan Fiction, and Chaucer

Slashdot.Org linked to a Popular Science story about people who mod computer games. Frankly, the article itself is rather boring if you already know about modding, but what did strike me as interesting was the questions that were left unasked and unanswered in the closing paragraph of the article,

Not all game companies are open-minded about mods. Console manufacturers like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, which rely on game-disc sales and fear knockoffs, have yet to create a means for gamers to get under the hood of their titles, though that doesn’t stop them from trying. Microsoft’s PC-code-based Xbox, in particular, has the hackers salivating.

In fact there are also PC computer games who actively work to prevent people from modding their software. Roller Coaster Tycoon is the best example I can think of off the top of my head, where patches to that game were intentionally designed to prevent modding. Somebody would write a nice utility or mod and a new patch would be released that would break the mod.

Modding exemplifies the ongoing and ever-intensifying clash over who will control popular culture. What (most) game companies have discovered is that people who buy computer games do not simply want to play those games, but they also want to use games as a platform for their own self-expression.

In the past, companies have used intellectual property laws to keep people from telling their own sorts of tales this way. Fox and Paramount, for example, have both been activity involved in threatening and occasionally suing people who created web sites based on intellectual property they owned such as Star Trek or The Simpsons. For awhile, TSR — the original publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game — tried actively to prevent the publication of third party material on the Internet.

From there it is just a short jump to some of the media reaction to the Internet. Surprisingly, “deep linking” (a completely redundant term) is still controversial. Organizations from National Public Radio to The Dallas Morning News and others have used both technical and legal means to try to assert control over how, when and by whom their content is viewed and/or commented on.

One of the interesting things that Popular Science misses in its almost-exclusive focus on mods for first person shooters such as Quake and Half-Life is that many people use computer mods as a sort of high-tech fan fiction.

My favorite computer game of the moment, for example, is Freedom Force — a squad-level superhero game that is highly moddable. The actual game featured a set of completely new superheroes, but user-created mods have tended to focus on well-known characters. There is, for example, an excellent 6-mission mod featuring the Fantastic Four and another featuring the Justice League of America. And, inevitably, somebody even created a Buffy mod.

The same thing goes for The Sims where not a few people used skins and other add-ons freely available on the Internet to simply use the game as a backdrop for telling stories they posted on the Internet.

The problem for companies that are in the popular culture business and want to stop this sort of thing is that it is becoming easier every day for computer users to create original content that is derivative of copyrighted material.

On the computer game mod front, for example, many companies are devoting a significant amount of the game development time to making it easy to create mods (so easy, in fact, that even I can do it). But across the board, it is becoming easier every year for someone to buy a CD or DVD or book and to use that as a starting point for new and unauthorized tales.

The response from companies, of course, is to try to slap a lid on that either legally or through technological changes to computers that would make try to make them locked boxes when it comes to copyrighted materials.

I don’t think any of that will work because I those companies underestimate just how powerful a pull this sort of thing is. I have a friend who is a very successful newspaper columnist who has a couple books under her belt a gig at a national newspaper. Several months ago she sent me a link to her new web site, and lo and behold next to links to all of her serious writings was a section devoted to story after story of Xena fan fiction.

It is just human nature to both want to listen to stories and tell, re-tell, and rewrite stories. In fact some of the greatest works of art involve such copying and adding, except if it happened today I get the feeling that Boccaccio and Petrarch would have hired lawyers to send cease and desist letters to Chaucer. Our culture would have certainly been the worse had they had to deal with the sort of rigid intellectual property laws that are now commonplace. Hopefully we will yet prevent companies from eviscerating that sort of borrowing and experimentation.

Freedom Force, Will Eisner, and Intellectual Property

There is a fascinating thread over at the official Freedom Force discussion board about intellectual property and computer game mods.

Freedom Force is the first real superhero game for the PC (and, soon, Macintosh), and one of the best games I have ever played. It is also very moddable, and there are thousands of skins available for pretty much any comic book superhero as well as some completely new missions and campaigns. One of my favorites, for example, is an ongoing mod that pits the Fantastic Four in various missions.

But, of course, none of the people making these skins or mods has any right to do so. The Fantastic Four are the property of Marvel and creating a mod involving them violates copyright and trademark laws. So far the companies aren’t complaining — but Will Eisner did.

One user made a skin of The Spirit and Eisner was apparently not happy about it because the version of The Spirit posted online carried a gun and Eisner has some problem with guns. So Eisner sent contacted the creator of the skin and asked him to take it down, which the author did.

Immediately, of course, some people started complaining about the evils of intellectual property, to which one observant person noted there was a whiff of hypocrisy in the air,

I’m broadly speaking against “intellectual property”, but I notice that this community has one set of morals regarding “warez scum” and another when it comes to copyright breach of comic characters.You can’t have it both ways, so either we start handing out cd keys ands iso files to all comers or we have to shut up about “bad form” and corporate greed when someone says “don’t skin my creation”.

The general response seems to be “modding is different than making warez” but most of the responses seem like they are rationalizing: What they do is warez, what we do is fair use.

I doubt Marvel, DC or other comic book companies will complain or send cease and desist order so long as their characters are not portrayed in ways inconsistent with their vision of said characters. Marvel, after all, tolerated and then licensed an X-Men Quake mod so it could be commercially released. But it would be nice if there were a way for companies to formally make such not-for-profit activities legal without diminishing their trademarks so that fans and modders could have clear cut guidelines of what they can and cannot do with stuff like this or fan fiction/films.

Other Reviews of Freedom Force

Tech TV – “‘Freedom Force’ is rock-solid entertainment. Comic-book fan or no, playing this game will put a silly grin on your face and remind you that sometimes you have to toss cars around in the name of justice.”

TFH Gaming Review – “FF is not just a great strategy role playing game, but a triumphant, genre-transcending realization of the long missing super hero role playing computer game. Comic fans, particularly ones with fond memories of early comics, will marvel at the faithful rendition of a classic comic universe inked into the fun, involving game play.”

ZenGamer.Com Review – “Freedom Force has arrived and it is one hell of a rip-roaring old fashioned good time on your PC.”

Gamespot Review – “Irrational Games has combined the surface elements of a role-playing game with a tactical combat engine, creating a hybrid that isn’t very deep but is totally satisfying in its breadth. And, perhaps more importantly, Freedom Force has a winning personality and a developed style that’s as good as PC gaming has ever offered–it joins the ranks of games like Interstate ’76 and Grim Fandango.”

Media and Games Online Network Review – “The release of Freedom Force marks two very special occasions. Firstly, it is the first superhero game to land on the PC. Secondly, it is one of the best games in general to land on the PC in a long time.”

Gamespy Review – “The curse of the superhero games has finally been lifted. After a string of superhero-themed titles were canceled or lost in limbo, Freedom Force finally made its way to the shelves. Not only did it make it, but it’s a super game with a consistent appealing tone, solid gameplay and a beautiful engine.”

IGN.Com Review – “Freedom Force is, quite simply enough, a truly outstanding game. Despite miniscule setbacks in the areas of interface and artificial intelligence, it quickly becomes and then easily remains an incredibly enjoyable, fun, and involving adventure. In lovingly crafting a lighthearted, wholesome, but always comedic and laughable theme, Irrational has indulged the playful boys and girls inside all of us. Thank you, I say.”

Gamers.Com Review – “I have one huge problem with Freedom Force: I don’t have any notes. Every time I sat down to play it for this review, as hard as I tried, I got completely lost in the game, totally involved in the deceptively deep tactical combat, engrossed in the delicate juggling of RPG character development, and utterly swept up in the goofy, giddy, overwhelming sense of fun that permeates every 1 and 0 burned onto the game CD.”

GamesDomain.Com Review – “The game is huge fun to play through, with a great combat system backing it up. Team play becomes vital in the latter stages, as enemies come with resistances to various attacks, and choosing the right team is highly important. The game is a romp through 60s superhero cliches, mixed with excellent gameplay and a flexible character development system.”