Life After Patch 1.03

So I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to word this since inevitably, it would create an entirely larger situation for Titan Studios. And really, it’s just breaking out my thought process after my first review of the patch itself. So, Mundy et al, you guys are doing a great job, and I don’t mean to make your lives worse by pointing these things out, but I figured that you’d want to at least put it up on a whiteboard somewhere. After playing a lot of hours of the 1.03 patch, I’ve noted a couple annoyances and interface issues that have since plagued the Fat Princess community.

Bugs
There is still a strange bug, but ever since the patch, there are many times that I would chop up metal as the worker and actually have the pieces disappear into thin air. You’d get the points for the chop, but can’t pick up the piece. There is also an audio bug that carried over from the original code where if you switch teams, then you can’t hear your team but can hear the other team and converse with them. Sounds like a if/then logic error somewhere, but I’m not definite about that. In any case, that is usually corrected during the game after or sometimes mid-game, but it is a strange chat bug.

Game Join Interface
Unfortunately, there are certain hosts that do not allow joining, due to ports or firewalls, or whatever else. I’m not really sure why you can’t join, and others can, but it just happens. But when this happens, you can usually tell that the network connection is going to fail, but you have to wait for the timer to time out before you can rejoin another game. It would be fantastic to be able to cancel a game join, and close the connection. It also would be great if there was an advanced list of games out there or something where it gave a status of how many games were currently playing. This might not be possible due to the fact that Fat Princess is really more P2P based, than server side, but it would still be interesting.

Hosting
I can’t explain how annoying that the kick/ban features were taking out and how it allowed those players that just want to screw up the play for others to come out of the wood work. Just by my own count (and these are only the names I remembered to document), the numbers have grown on the Wall of Shame since the patch. It could be the same account, but I’m going to say that there were a couple instances that there were players that found it amusing to copy the infamous tkpanda14888 after seeing what he did. And legitimate players that are trying to play the game can’t do anything about it anymore.

We really implore Titan Studios for a way to stop this type of systematic degradation of the game. Be it through a voting system, or bring back the banning, from my own experience, there really just has not been as many problems before as there are now because we can’t even police our own community now.

Team Balancing
Currently, the team balancing code is pretty strange if you ask me. You can actually have players join up and unbalance the teams even more if the losing team has less players. Now, why that is, I’m not sure. If the teams are even, I think that there should be a preference towards joining with your friend that you clicked on when joining a game, and if not that then any other friend that perhaps is already in the game. This gives you the chance to at least game with your friends but keeping the teams balanced out.

PSP Interface
We all know that the PSP is getting a version of Fat Princess sometime in the future (at least that’s the word). It would be fantastic if the PSP version was a downgraded resolution of the PS3 one, so that those that are on the go, can actually match up with their friends on the PS3. That would mean that either the PS3 version would only support eight players maximum for those types of games, or the PSP version would have to support 32 players maximum but at a lower resolution (which is obvious due to the screen size).

While having a separate game is great, I can’t explain how many times I was out in public and feeling like I needed a little Fat Princess fix where I could join up with my friends that I usually gamed with on the PS3. Creating this type of transparency between consoles and portables is something that not many have attempted and is actually something that I have always felt would be a tremendous boon to the gaming industry.

Synopsis
I can’t really say too many bad things about the game itself. Much of the above are more wants than needs, and things that have been voiced often enough by others over chat to mention. And truthfully, for the fifteen dollars that you spend on this game, and almost three hundred or so hours on this particular game, the cost per entertainment ratio has far exceeded any of my expectations. Believe me, when I say that if you’ve ever played CTF type games, this is one unique gamer experience.