MAG 256 Launch Event

by SOHAIB: Sony’s new PS3 game MAG, which stands for Massive Action Game, is both the laziest title in the history of gaming and a pretty accurate description of what happens. It’s certainly a game, shooting does classify as action, and it is of a considerable scale. MAG’s hook is that you can play it online with up to a massive 256 players. To celebrate this, the launch event, MAG 256, saw 128 journalists and gamers convene in one room in London. It quite literally sounds like they were half-arsing it.

Developed by Zipper Interactive, best known for the military shooter series SOCOM, MAG is what happens when you think 8 v 8 games aren’t exciting enough. Set in a modern war with three private military corporations in a ‘shadow war’, it’s a first person shooter set on a massive scale.

To match the scale of the game, the event was set around a giant structure of the numbers 256, and also featured a wall displaying tweets with the hashtag #mag256 projected larger than reason would allow. Being highly mature, I began to fill this up with tweets about my journey to the event, my desire to CONTROL the screen, and random twaddle.

“I am looking down on you all. This is because I am better than you. Also, I am on a balcony.”

Stopping me from texting were the announcements from the ‘Voice of MAG’, a man whose parents either hated him or was given a name to set him on one career path, instructing us to return to our “battlestations”, to play 2 rounds of each of the 3 game modes.

I tend not to enjoy online shooters too much as I find they’re over-competitive. Many multiplayer modes have their own game elements and rules and so the only time you get to practice at them is when you go online: and with the level of responsibility you get in your small team combined with the verbal abuse you’ll receive over the headset if you’re not good, it’s very offputting to get the practice in you need to be any good, and so I just avoid the game.

But with MAG, and this might seem like odd praise, you’re allowed to be a bit crap. This isn’t to say the game is broken, it’s not, rather that you’re one of 128, relieving the pressure, and within that you’ve got a group that’s structured and you can be given orders. You can choose to maybe focus on sniping, or do the most healing (because no-one else seemed to), or try and take people out but you can still feel that you have a role within the team. You might not have the entire war resting on your shoulders but you can still make a difference by sticking around that control tower and defending it as people from the opposite team made attempts one by one to take it. It might not be the best strategies used by both sides, but it worked and was enjoyable.

The thing that MAG is really effective at is getting the feeling of being at war. I mean that in a good way, if such thing is possible. The scale of the battles is huge and with other players running around too you really get a good sense of it. Instead of being limited to a linear path, there are huge environments to explore and fight in… although sometimes it did feel repetitive in terms of running to get to a point, dying, respawning and repeat.

The PS3 copes with the demands of the game fairly well. Visually, the characters and environment all looked good. The animation… less so, but I’m not sure whether it was the fact 128 people were on the same internet connection to the states or that the game is more jerky than beef jerky. Characters would sometimes judder around slightly making it hard to know whether your shot hit them (just wait a few frames and you’ll find out), but vehicles were the worst. The tanks would just make huge jumps around the map looking so awkward and stuttering so much that even the worst stop motion animator would tell you that you need to make that smoother.

For a game that could be a complete mess due to the sheer size of it, MAG is a great surprise. The levels feel of a great scale and if you manage to get a full game going it really does feel lively. The controls work (though having the healing gun and grenades one button press away from each other is highly dangerous) and the respawns didn’t feel too long away.

It wasn’t the most ideal situation to play the game, giving everyone headsets while standing so close with such loud TVs meant that it was easier not to talk to anyone and guess where your platoon leader goes. Despite that though, I’m really impressed with MAG. It pulls off a difficult concept really well, though how well that transfers to the real world playing of the game is another matter – hopefully Zipper will release new content and encourage people to keep playing it so you get the full experience of it.

Oh, also, MAG. Seriously, they couldn’t come up with another name? MAG? It sounds like something you might hear shouted while someone smashes the table. Sony clearly have high expectations of the target audience.