LOAF Reviews Arena (Sort Of)

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
I thought I'd put together some comments on Arena and the popular criticisms thereof - half a review, of sorts. The obvious disclaimer - I'm a 'fanboy' and pretty darned proud of it. I wear my flight suit to conventions, I update WCNews.com twice a day, I re-read Fleet Action several times a year. I've been consulted regarding continuity on half a dozen Wing Commander projects and I've had more pilots, star systems and the like named after me than I deserve. I'm in the credits for two Wing Commander games and two novels -- and I belong in at least twice that number. I've written published Wing Commander material for places as unlikely as the Japanese version of the Wing Commander movie DVD and others. I have twenty thousand posts to the CIC forums and countless others lost to the mists of agwc, origin's Chat Zone, etc. If I'm not in #WingNut then I'm probably dead. I've been reporting Wing Commander news since I was 14 - and I'm 26 now. Name an obscure port of Wing Commander and I've played it (Armada for the NEC PC9821? Check!). I've traveled across the country to visit places like Origin and Digital Anvil and EA on more than one occasion each. I took third place in EA's Arena competition last night. I've hunted the lost games and I've won more times than I should, enjoy your Prophecy DVDs. I'm also an opinionated bastard who cares more about the quality of Wing Commander and its fandom than anyone ever should - ask any fan project. My closest friends in the world are people I met because I'm a WingNut. For some reason, you guys continue to put up with me.

So that's my bias - live with it or don't. I know Wing Commander, many of the people bitching about this game do not. Confederation flag waving in back of me? Good.

In short: Wing Commander Arena is a fun game with some amazing moments. It is without question in my mind the most impressive Live Arcade game ever released, with the possible exception of DooM (which is, of course, only a well-ported port). Arena is a thousand times more complex than anything else available on the casual gaming service... and somehow that may be its undoing. Wing Commander Arena is not some attempt to personally offend you. It is not an attempt to 'cash in' on the dead Wing Commander brand. It is the result of a very intelligent Electronic Arts producer, a fan himself, wanting to give something to our community when he didn't have to.

I'm sure I can go on all day about the fun of the thing, but it probably isn't necessary. The capital ship mode, with giant broadsides between battlecruisers and coordinated defense and strike missions, is fantastic. Meteor Strike, a post-modern interpretation of asteroids, is pick-up-and-play fun. Defending the Midway in 'Gauntlet' is the same, and my heart rises up just seeing the ship design again. Navigating the tunnels in Boneyard while gunning down Chris Reid and AD is a thrill. Simply stated, I've been having the time of my life. Who could have imagined that there'd be a fun little Wing Commander spinoff to enjoy with friends in 2007? Nobody - but it's great.

It's full of Wing Commander elements - every single weapon is taken from a classic Wing Commander game, as are almost every single ship (the exception being the two battlecruisers and some of the space stations). How obscure are these references? The 'Vampire Missile' fired by a few of the fighters is actually a weapon that appears *only* in the 3DO version of Wing Commander III (where it replaces the Leech). They did their research! The tiny snippets of continuity text on the ship descriptions are a joy to behold and I wish there were more. The setting description in the help section is an amazing taste of something bigger.

There's a great variety of devices that you learn as you go, from a ship snaring tracor to a cloaking device. I'm five days in and I'm only now learning to use decoys properly. It's the old cliche, a minute to play a lifetime to master. The pickups are fairly tastefully done (the 'wingman' one is awesome!), though I will agree that they have no technical place in Wing Commander (though, of course, they appear in Armada: Proving Grounds and were slated for the planned WCP multiplayer too).

There's a good variety of maps, too, with a lot of color and complexity. One of the big problems with space combat games is that there's nothing cool in space. The occasional asteroid or minefield in the original Wing Commander is nothing compared to the elaborate visuals and tricks allowed to ordinary FPS games today. Arena, which is essentially an FPS in spaceships, has some cool locations - asteroid warrens, giant battleships, tunnels and domes of a shipyard... moreover, they're full of WC references! Broken Centurions float around the Boneyard, lines of Confederation Longbows, painted just as they were in WCIV, sit on the flight decks of the Space Station. My biggest complaint here would be the 'Proving Grounds' mode, the practice map which does the least admiral job of conivincing the player that he's in open space. Ironically, it's the most-open map that feels the most closed-in...

(I just explored the Duel asteroid a bit more. Switch your cameras and look up - there's a fleet of battlecruisers flying around you! These maps are *alive* in the most obscure possible ways.)

Some other praise: unlockables are very well done. It's highly enjoyable to 'earn' new ships as you go on. I unlocked a pile of Confederation fighters immediately... and then had to work like heck to find the Kilrathi ships. Earning the final Paktahn Mauler felt amazing! Game balancing is very well done... even the game-winning Broadswords with their amazing tractor-torpedo combos can be brought down by the lightest fighter flown properly.

Arena can also claim the most perfect netcode I've ever seen. The XBLA port of DooM's four-player deathmatches are almost unplayable because of lag. Two-player games of *Carcasonne*, a turn based card game, frequently lag very awkwardly for me. I have never, not once, run into any sort of ping issue with Arena. A sixteen player game feels like a two player game, which in turn feels just like the single player game. The programmers at Gaia who optimized this thing deserve medals - good medals, not Golden Suns. Wing Commander Arena also does at least two things for the very first time on XBLA - 16-player multiplayer and teamspeak. Microsoft added these options for EA, and any future game that utilizes them owes Arena some gratitude.

Now let me speak to the internet at large:

If you're on the internet bitching about how the game "isn't Wing Commander" or ranting that the graphics suck, you're an idiot. There's no two ways about it - you're just repeating something else another idiot said on a cheapo Podcast or a disgustoblog. I've raged about the idiocy of feeding off of cynicism before and I don't need to again here... but suffice it to say, Arena is Wing Commander through and through - from the ships to the settings to the weapons to the spirit. It doesn't play like Wing Commander III... but neither do Armada, Academy, Privateer and a dozen others. Variety is something we've always fought for, not tried to avoid. The simple irony of internet jerks insisting that life would be good if EA would just stick to a formula for future games is brain-blasteringly staggering.

The graphics are stunning for an Xbox Live Arcade game. They're detailed and lush and 3D and complex and all sorts of other adjectives. There is not one other XBLA game that looks this nice - I don't think there's another sub-50-megabyte 3D game in the world that looks this good. Maybe the kids today have Super-HD Blu-Ray whatever games that perfectly replicate World War II down to the tiniest grain of sand... but they sure as heck aren't buying them on Arcade. Is Wing Commander getting blasted because it's so good that people are comparing it to full games instead of Arcade stuff? Probably - nobody is going on about how horrible it is that you only get four fish in Feeding Frenzy*.

* - three fish and one whale.

You're also an idiot if you're insisting that they port [insert classic WC title] to XBLA. There's an Academy episode where Maniac tries to pick a fight with a giant Kilrathi warrior. "Going hand to paw with you furballs is my idea of a good time," he says. "Then you've obviously never done it," the Kilrathi replies. Have you ever played a console Wing Commander? I love them dearly, but their control schemes are something to suffer through rather than to seek out. Just hit left-shift triangle up blue to autopilot and then shift shift up square to change your guns... a 102-key keyboard has *never* translated to a console or handheld well before. Don't believe me? Pick up EA Replay and try the original game on the PSP.

Let's give credit where credit is due - Arena's control scheme is genius. They've boiled down all the essentials of Wing Commander into the Xbox controller. The full guns option is brilliant. Instead of shift-direction-button to change through your weapons, just assign one to each trigger and pull both to fire everything at once! It seems so obvious, but nobody ever figured that out before. I've heard some of the Xbox kids insisting that the control scheme is confusing. I don't know if they're being (even bigger) jerks or not - I picked it up in about three seconds, but it's possible that there's some earlier console space combat game that swaps what the thumbsticks do or somesuch. I picked it up in about three seconds, and I'm no game player.

Achievements! Oh, boy, achievements. You can't have a passing familiarity with the Xbox 360 and not love these things. They're the original Wing Commander's medal ceremonies writ large -- they're collecting baseball cards and earning scout badges and a bunch of other archetyles rolled up together. I've enjoyed quite a few sleepless nights trying to finish the last Lego Star Wars level so I can show my friends how cool I am. Achievements for Wing Commander? Fuhgettaboutit! I honestly wish I had a hundred more to work on - scoring my 200 points was incredible. Gaia did a great job of balancing achievements - a few are nice and easy and a few are ones you have to really play to earn. That's the way it should be... hard work pays off, forcing you to play the game. There's a special place in hell reserved for whoever decided it was a good idea to make the G.R.A.W. achievements completely impossible, and having suffered through that I feel qualified to speak about Arena.

Let me talk about one in particular, though: Hot Dog. Back up: after seeing Wing Commander demo'd at ComDex, LucasArts quickly announced that they were going to do a similar game involving the Star Wars property - the same license Chris Roberts originally wanted for WC. Wing Commander (and Wing Commander II) were huge hits before X-Wing finally made it out, and the world held its breath. Star Wars seemed like the perfect competitor for WC... it was naturally cinematic, flopping it into Wing Commander's gameplay would be the easiest zillion dollars they could make. But X-Wing beat the world by doing something different - it wasn't the obvious interactive movie, it was a tough-but-rewarding space sim in the truest sense. No giant movies, but a combat model that was complex and that rewarded you for gaining skill.

What I'm leading up to is that Wing Commander Arena stole something good from our old competitors - the Ring Game. It's basically Wing Commander's equivalent of X-Wing's 'gate' training mode... the most frustrating, chair-arm-beating why-God-why space combat practice mode you ever loved. In the Ring Game you have to navigate through a series of floating rings that increase in difficulty as you complete the levels. You have a very limited amount of time, you're under fire from other players and if you mess up you're forced to restart. Sounds stupid? Sure. Sounds simple? NO! To pass it you have to learn the game's maneuvers, you have to learn to be quick and smooth and fly well. Completing the third level (and earning Hot Dog) is a badge that we can proudly wear to show that we enjoyed the hell out of this game. What's more, the Ring Game is *entirely extra*. It's not some special mode or some advertised feature or anything of the sort... it's just a pickup that you can happen across in one of the game's maps. Immersion at its finest.

I do, however, have some criticisms and suggestions. Note that these are very specific, while the positives I've discussed have been in broad strokes. Do not take the fact that a third of my review in terms of text is criticisms as being negative - I could spend a hundred pages praising the capital ship combat were it necessary to so do.

- Arena needs more multiplayer setup options. I know Arena is supposed to be a simple pick-up-and-play game, but the sheer number of weapons/modes/systems already belies this. It would be nice to have a little bit more flexibility in establishing your matches: I'd like to be able to choose my own ship color, set a much higher number of frags required and also set some limitations. 'Just Rapiers' or 'Guns Only'-style options would extend the lifetime of the multiplayer quite a bit. Additionally, I would really like the ability to continue a match with the same group of people after a battle is won.

- Voice identification. I would like to know who's talking. I know my friend's voices, but it would be great to be able to identify the absolutely filthy fifteen year olds who make me turn off my headset during public Bearpits.

- The Demo. EA screwed this one up bad - or maybe Microsoft did. I'm told it's a requirement that demos can't have multiplayer... which means that Arena's demo is basically *nothing*. The single player mode is fun, but it's pretty sad in context. Heck, "Meteor Storm" is more a clever parody than it is a reason to buy a game. The idea that you can play an incredibly complex capital ship battle *or* use the same setting to play 'Asteroids' is a wonderful joke, but you wouldn't pick up the latter and believe the former could exist, though.

- Training. Arena needs a training mode. You and I can jump right in and understand what's what... but I really don't think a lot of the audience can. The message boards are full of people wondering what weapons do and how to unlock ships and so forth. IGN's incompetent reviewer couldn't even figure out how to get to one of the menus. The game needs a little scripted AI fighter who shows you the ropes... even if no one in the universe ever used it, it would have saved flak in the press.

- They should have had more press explaining the '2D plane'. If you're calling this game '2D', you're -again- an idiot. Wing Commander I, II and Privateer were '2D', this game is 3D. Stop repeating things you heard on the internet - the people you're listening to are as dumb as you are. That said, EA should have really pressed the issue in the publicity. Sean Penney explained on IRC that more of a Z-axis would have limited the game to four players, per the amount of bandwidth allowed through XBLA's architecture. More than that, I know from experience that multiplayer combat in open space... sucks. It turns into a single ramming rush and then a forever turning battle... or it simply allows the fastest player to escape into the void with impunity. Forcing the player onto a plane was the best choice in terms of gameplay, but the world doesn't understand that at all.

- I've also run into some bugs. If you receive an invite from the 'score' screen of a previous match then you can't accept it. That's probably Microsoft's matching/VOIP stuff screwing up, but someone should fix it. I also heard about people getting 'stuck' briefly on the wrong plane last night. That hasn't happened to me yet, but it sounds kind of painful.

The short version: buy Arena and I'll see you for Wing Commander 6!

Feel free to reuse any part of this article wherever you feel it might be appropriate.
 
LOAF I think you've hit the Mk IV Heavy Torpedo right on the warhead. Reading your "review" hit the spot a in a lot of ways and I agree with your assessments. Your complaints are right on, but in comparison to the positive, they are miniscual. You also did a great job of talking about the "WCness" of Arena without even needing to mention Star*Soldier, which just goes to show how WC this game really is.

The no Z-axis is something I think people quickly get over. I've logged quite a bit of WCP MP time and I can say that LOAF is right, games do often turn into head on ram turn fests, but that's more a result of the fact that space in MP is totally devoid of anything. I still have a blast playing WCP MP, as it is WC MP, but Arena has the advantage that I can hear friends I've had for other a decade for the first time.

It was great the first time Frosty and I were in a game and we unloading all our missiles on each other and telling each other how much we hated each other (all in jest) only to realize....we could hear each other because we were on the same team and had just wasted all our missiles for naught. Also, hearing voices talking about how some of our games remind them of BoT (that one wingnut only game we played in Station come to mind) or how they dislike shooting down Lonewolf in certain maps, it's just amazing. BradMick, myself and a few others a few days ago spent an entire game just talking about WC continunity and even turned a few Arena players onto the CIC because they didn't believe such a place existed! (Have they been hiding in the Core Worlds since the war broke out or what?!)

WC6 is looking more and more likely every day and I'm glad the CIC and all of us have been rewarded for our time waiting, I do have to say we are the greatest group of "fanboys" I've ever come across.

Continue to Fight the Good Fight guys...
 
There is not one other XBLA game that looks this nice - I don't think there's another sub-50-megabyte 3D game in the world that looks this good.
I can safely claim to agree 100% with LOAF, but IMHO, this is one of the most interesting aspects of Arena. It comes in at, what, 42 MB? Out of a possible maximum of 150 MB? Think about it - there's room for a whole lot of DLC! That is, if enough people convince EA that the WC franchise is still alive and kicking - by simply buying and playing Arena on XBLA. If you ask me, that's a very small price to pay...
 
Yeah DLC would be great. There were already (bullshit) rumors floating around Arena the other day that MajorNelson was saying new maps and ships were already in the pipeline, but after doing some investigating it appears they were just generic morons.

Although maybe soon we'll be able to fly the Centurion instead of looking at the trashed ones in the Boneyard.
 
The no Z-axis is something I think people quickly get over. I've logged quite a bit of WCP MP time and I can say that LOAF is right, games do often turn into head on ram turn fests, but that's more a result of the fact that space in MP is totally devoid of anything. I still have a blast playing WCP MP, as it is WC MP, but Arena has the advantage that I can hear friends I've had for other a decade for the first time.

Im going to play it(arena) tonight at a friends house, but i have to say, 3D space combat quickly does turn into a turn- and toss slugfest, I have yet to try WCP MP, but it's easy to fight in a "netwars" way, if there is nothing but "void" around you, you just go "slug" the "bad guy". But a filled enviroment with asteroids, space garbage causes a challenge, race through it, fight through it, and let the other guy mess up, by concentrating on you and forgetting about a speeding asteroid, or the other way around. An edge could be to use "fighting game" system, you make a quick hit early in the game and then run off, you win by damage percent as time is up, so the other guy has to chase you down.

WC Armada i tried first, years back, and it was slow as hell using null-modem, while doom, rise of the triad, duke nukem, whacky wheels, gave me fast-paced action!, WC has afterburners, and asteroids, X-wing vs. tie fighter, and netwars do not(although there is a speed upgrade, and a cloaking device, in netwars), the sole fact of afterburners gives you an edge to avoid the turning slug-fest, space junk(asteroids, mines) lets you use it, i had tons of fun with f-15 strike eagle III, and a game called "terminal velocity", dogfighting a friend, hiding behind objects, "hugging the ground", chasing from odd angles. In my home town we actually had a jet simulator where you could go up against each other(the controls consisted only of a throttle, and a 2-buttoned joystick)that behaved much like WC (no stall, unlimited gun ammo, afterburner with limited fuel), there is no such "gamer" setup anymore on the market these days, saitek isn't the quality of the trustmaster setups from back then. I have seen no more fun console 1-on-1 dogfighting since crimsons skies on the original xbox.

I have to agree with the arena team on the lag, if it really takes that much, you at least all have thesame handicap using a 360 with a controller :)
 
One thing I would have wished port to PC. Why, because of modding, it could extend arenas lifetime a lot. Altough I dont think Arena will fade away its the best MP WC game we have atm not counting Armada or WCP-MP. But think Arean would profit more if it had bigg moding comunity like Freelancer had. Overall Im happy as things are and hope there will be more official WC games comming.

@Mace
I had a chance to play Armada through LAN so no lagg. We found the experience quite fun, both the strategic and tactical alas Armadas days are gone and Arena is here.
 
Im going to play it(arena) tonight at a friends house, but i have to say, 3D space combat quickly does turn into a turn- and toss slugfest, I have yet to try WCP MP, but it's easy to fight in a "netwars" way, if there is nothing but "void" around you, you just go "slug" the "bad guy". But a filled enviroment with asteroids, space garbage causes a challenge, race through it, fight through it, and let the other guy mess up, by concentrating on you and forgetting about a speeding asteroid, or the other way around. An edge could be to use "fighting game" system, you make a quick hit early in the game and then run off, you win by damage percent as time is up, so the other guy has to chase you down.

Well hopefully at some point in the future HCl can add those things to WCP MP. I know he's been working on it, but I still think it is a little bit away. I'd recommend trying WCP MP, it's a good time when there are more than 2 or 3 players. It's also really cool to watch a furball from a distance away and then unloading a salvo of missiles and cleaning up on kills. :D

WC Armada i tried first, years back, and it was slow as hell using null-modem

Armada has been neglected in terms of internet play, we have the ability to do it now, but I've yet to try it myself, although I'm more than willing. Hopefully the upcoming CIC bday would be a great time to give it a try.

I have to agree with the arena team on the lag, if it really takes that much, you at least all have thesame handicap using a 360 with a controller :)

The lack of lag in Arena games really is amazing. In WCP MP it's not too noticeable but it can give the host an advantage as you can notice to a degree from the MP scoreboard. Houkiboshi usually hosts our games because for some damn reason I can't and it gives a very slight edge.
 
Just a quick question:
Has anyone compared Arena's gameplay to Star Wars: Battlefront II's space battles segments in terms of gameplay and style?
 
I haven't played Battlefront - but embarrassing as it sounds, I'd say that it's a lot like a more complex version of the space combat levels in *Lego* Star Wars.
 
I'm five days in and I'm only now learning to use decoys properly.

My feelings exactly!

If you're on the internet bitching about how the game "isn't Wing Commander" or ranting that the graphics suck, you're an idiot. There's no two ways about it - you're just repeating something else another idiot said on a cheapo Podcast or a disgustoblog. I've raged about the idiocy of feeding off of cynicism before and I don't need to again here... but suffice it to say, Arena is Wing Commander through and through - from the ships to the settings to the weapons to the spirit. It doesn't play like Wing Commander III... but neither do Armada, Academy, Privateer and a dozen others. Variety is something we've always fought for, not tried to avoid. The simple irony of internet jerks insisting that life would be good if EA would just stick to a formula for future games is brain-blasteringly staggering.

Bravo!
 
Just a quick question:
Has anyone compared Arena's gameplay to Star Wars: Battlefront II's space battles segments in terms of gameplay and style?

I hated the space battle missions on Battlefront 2. I liked the Xbox version slightly better than the PC (better controls) but comparing either to Arena is like comparing a bicycle to a Harley Davidson:D
 
Another minor critique - some of the map objects have transparency issues... if I fly right up to some of the girders on the space station map, for instance, I can't see my fighter through them.
 
Surprisingly good post LOAF. :)
Even if i don't like the concept of arena, and i will not play it(not because i'm stuck up asshole, just i don't have cash for xbox, and it's not very popular here), you people made me, over time, grudgingly accept it as a real wc creation.
But i will still insist on calling it a spin - off :)
No one can complain about arcadeness of arena if they ever played academy(and i did)

Anyways i liked your review, even with that ego inflating beginning :D
 
Surprisingly good post LOAF. :)
Even if i don't like the concept of arena, and i will not play it(not because i'm stuck up asshole, just i don't have cash for xbox, and it's not very popular here), you people made me, over time, grudgingly accept it as a real wc creation.
But i will still insist on calling it a spin - off :)
No one can complain about arcadeness of arena if they ever played academy(and i did)

Anyways i liked your review, even with that ego inflating beginning :D

Well you should get an entry in for the 360 Elite the CIC is giving away then you wont' have to worry about raising money for your own. :D
 
But i will still insist on calling it a spin - off:)

"Spinoff! Is there any word more thrilling to the human soul? Hi, I'm Troy McClure."

But seriously, of course it's a spinoff... and spinoffs are great! What's Star Trek without The Next Generation? What's Babylon 5 without In the Beginning? What's Star Wars without the Holiday Special? Practically *nothing*! Spinoffs are what make franchises - from Privateer to False Colors to Prophecy to the Academy TV show, spinoffs are what make the Wing Commander universe go around!
 
just being a nitpick on this point
I don't think there's another sub-50-megabyte 3D game in the world that looks this good.
there are these guys that create FPS with doom like graphics and manage to compress stuff like that below 1mb. Same way as that robot puzzle game (whatever it was called) used some new type of compression to achieve a incredibly small size while using the unreal 3 engine.
So yeah, there are several games that are better looking and below 50mb =P
 
Can you mention a few examples of better looking, fully functional, modern, commercially available games bellow 50mb? And if you really want to nitpick, LOAF didn't said such games didn't exist.

Arguably doom-like games probably won't look as good as Arena, because Doom doesn't look as good as Arena.
 
just being a nitpick on this point there are these guys that create FPS with doom like graphics and manage to compress stuff like that below 1mb. Same way as that robot puzzle game (whatever it was called) used some new type of compression to achieve a incredibly small size while using the unreal 3 engine.
So yeah, there are several games that are better looking and below 50mb =P


To counter Nitpick you, the only reason those games are so small is because they use tremendous on-the-fly resources to spontaneously generate the content.

ever wonder why spore has been in development for so long? its because 90% of the computers out there (their target audience) couldn't run it without it looking like a slideshow.

Arena is a traditionally made game that is under 50 megs, and that is phenomenal, considering I have single picture files on my computer that are well over 100.
 
I'll stand by my comments, although I meant them in terms of XBLA - obviously, in my subjective opinion the original Wing Commander is the greatest looking game in the world. But really, take out your fighter in Arena, switch to camera option four and look at any obect up close - things like jumpgates and pickups and walls have the tiniest rivets and markings visible on them... and why? Clearly, a lot of love went into this title.
 
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