Microshit Strikes Again!

 

 

People who know me know I'm a BIG BattleTech/MechWarrior nut. I love the games, I love the novels, I love the universe in general. My greatest fanfic to date is a BattleTech fanfic. MechWarrior 3 is pretty much one of my favorite games of all time, and the three MechWarrior 2 versions (MW2, MW2: Ghost Bear's Legacy, and MW2: Mercs) are all faves. And I had such high hopes for MechWarrior 4, high hopes that led me to download all 60-something MB of the new MechWarrior 4 test program in a heartbeat.

Now my worst fears have been realized.

Microshit has fucked it all up.

That's right, friends, Bill Gates and co. aren't just satisfied force-feeding us their crap OS, their crap bloated software, and their crap internet shit, now they're ruining one of the best PC game franchises in existance. They've, ugh, Microshit-ized MechWarrior!

Want proof?

Let's look at the MechLab interface in MechWarrior 3. MechLab is the place in the 'Mech games where you configure your 'Mech in the way you want it. Here is a screenshot from MechWarrior 3: Pirate's Moon.

MechWarrior 3 had probably the best MechLab interface. It was simple, elegant, and efficient. Changes were made literally with the click of the mouse. You had to think about your design, of course, balancing heat, firepower, weight and space issues, protection, and speed while you worked to make a 'Mech design. This was a thing of beauty, a work of art.

Now let's look at what Bill Gates' minions of evil did to it:

Gone is the ability to fully customize a 'Mech. Now you are restricted to what you can put on actual parts. For instance, instead of putting an autocannon on the arm of this MadCat, I can only put energy weapons! Some might say this makes sense, and you wouldn't want lasers and autocannon fire to come from missile racks like those on the shoulder of the above Mad Cat. Well, guess what: that's not how it works. The Mad Cat A variant has three medium pulse lasers on the left shoulder missile rack. There is a reason they call 'Mechs like the Mad Cat, Thor, and Avatar OMNIMechs: because their weapons and equipment are modular, allowing for easy field reconfiguration. Too bad Microshit's designers haven't cracked open a BattleTech novel in their lives, or at least read source material.

You'll also notice that the click system from MW3 (and MW2) is gone. Nope, Microshit's designers decided everyone wants to do it the Winblows way! You have to click and drag weapons to equip and de-equip now, with fun little popdown windows and scroll bars!! The ability to assign various equipment and weapons to certain parts of the body is largely gone, replaced by the restricted system you see above. Their idea of "criticals" are these little itsy bitsy "box-like" shapes that each weapon takes up so much of. I guess Microshit thinks that making "cool" looking weapon icons and box shapes to assign them in is better than the numbers and name system that MechWarrior 3 utilized, and that it makes up for the loss in your ability to customize your 'Mech with the freedom that MechWarrior 3 gave. It might impress a three-year old, but not a mature MechWarrior gamer, and DEFINATELY not a BattleTech fan.

Checking the demo out, it's easy to see where they don't even do pulse lasers right. They seem to think that pulse lasers are cool multiple "pulses" that come out of the weapon. The novel description of a pulse laser is closer to the MechWarrior 3 appearance: a steady pulsing "beam" that gets it's name because of the micropulses in the beam that "bore" through material and eliminate the waste that occurs when a laser's heat is transferred to vaporizing or melting material instead of continuing to damage the actual target. Still, my problems with that aren't as severe as my problems with their MechLab interface.

That's not to say there aren't a few pluses. You can apply your own decals, so in multiplayer games someone might ride up with a 'Mech sporting the Starfleet arrowhead or Babylon-5 insignia, or maybe even a national flag. :-) The in-game graphics are cool, and I'd probably buy the game anyway to get a chance to kill some pro-Katherine Steiners (my fellows will tell you of the utter hatred and loathing I feel for Katherine Steiner-Davion). But, surprise surprise, these could have been in the game even if it weren't made by Microshit.

So, let's face it: the evil cancer on the PC market that is Microshit has struck again. Now BattleTech has been hit by their scourge. It's really a pity, but then again, FASA has turned a series that could have been a legitimate sci-fi contender and fucked it up royal with a bad publisher (RoC's bullshit 80,000 word limit, anyone?), by neglecting to pay star writer Mike Stackpole for his excellent work on their core novels, and now by forsaking Microprose, which had done great with MechCommander and MechWarrior 3, and letting Microshit take over. BattleTech has been assimilated by the evil Microshit Collective. And it's the fans of the MechWarrior games and BattleTech in general who are going to suffer for the mistakes of FASA.