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.

My Freedom Force Review

It’s official — the superhero computer game curse is finally over. Freedom Force arrived in stores for this week and it is getting extremely good reviews from gaming web sites. I’ve spent the last two days running through the game’s 25 missions until my eyes are too blurry to focus. Freedom Force is largely what I expected, but it still has a lot of unrealized potential.

FF is basically a squad-level real time strategy game coupled with an RPG-like character creation system. The player takes up to four characters into missions. This can get pretty hairy, so pressing the space bar or right clicking pauses the game and allows the player to issue orders to the superheroes. Much of the game is spent pausing to give orders, letting the game run to see your characters carry out those orders, and then pausing again to issue new orders.

Some people have complained about this style of gameplay, but I think it worked great. A strict turn-based system would be completely unwieldy. FF achieves a nice balance that is half-turn based and half-RTS.

The graphics and sound are both excellent. There’s nothing quite like watching one of your heroes hovering above the din, throwing lightning bolts down upon an unsuspecting villain. The game is well-balanced and, just like in the comic books, requires figuring out how to get your 4 superheroes to work like a team to defeat the enemies.

The character creation system is superb. You have to play the first several missions with the characters included with the game, but can create your own characters and bring them into missions later. Characters are created based on a system that very closely resembles the sort of thing common in pen and pencil games like Champions. There are point limits to characters, and attributes and powers are purchased from that point pool. The power creator, like Champions and other RPGs, offers numerous basic attacks and allows the user to modify them such that pretty much anything you can imagine from the comic books. In fact, there are very few comic book heroes or villains which could not be constructed with this system, and certainly the few stragglers will be addressed in the inevitable expansion packs.

A player could spend hours just creating characters. The main drawback with Freedom Force is that the rest of the game is not quite as well fleshed out as the character creator is. Many of the missions were, frankly, tedious. Rather than the enormous superteam battles from comic books, much of the time in missions is spent picking off low-powered underlings. That’s okay the first time through, but there is not a lot of replay value in most of the missions.

Unfortunately there is no basic single player skirmish mode. At a minimum many players assumed they’d be able to pick a map, through a few super villains on it, get their superteam together and just be able to go at it. But there is no option to do that as of yet, though so many people are requesting it, such a mode will almost certainly be offered via a patch at some point.

Similarly, there are a lot of complaints about the multiplayer. For a number of reasons — mainly the pause and go method of gameplay — I’m not sure FF necessarily lends itself to multiplayer that well anyway. But for those folks who were really looking forward to it, the multiplayer is hampered because a) the only option is deathmatch and b) multiplayer over the Internet uses the much-hated Gamespy, which is difficult to use if you are behind a firewall (and even if you are not, Gamespy is still a pain).

FF could also benefit from improvements in its control system. Even with only four characters to keep track of, controlling the heroes can be difficult. There is no way, for example, to tell what action a particular hero is trying to carry out. There is no queuing or way point system either, so players end up doing a lot of micromanaging. Allowing even a 3 or 4 level queuing/waypoint system would dramatically improve the experience. Again, though, it seems likely this is a feature that the developers will add via a patch at some point.

At the moment, the developers are working on cleaning up the map and game editors before releasing them to the modding community. That is where this game will really take off. The positive reviews mean the game is going to sell like crazy so there will likely be a lot of people working to add different mods (already, the number of superhero skins available for downloading is just amazing).

Freedom Force is not there quite yet, but it is clearly going to be an excellent platform for all sorts of superhero goodness. Is it worth $40? If you’ve waited for more than a decade for a decent superhero computer game like I have, the answer is yes — buy it ASAP. People not so enamored of superheroes might want to wait a while to see how the issues above are addressed by the game developers and/or the FF community.