It appears that Blogger and Firefox have decided I'm making this post wether I want to or not, so here goes.
The 10/10, 95%, 5 star reviews would have you believe that Fallout is perfect, but its not. (yes, I said it). Its good, VERY good, but like all good games (especially rpgs), it has some dumb problems. The trick here is that the parts that are good are SO good, the sub par parts are easily forgotten or ignored. This sort of review / reception dichotomy is usually reserved for painfully average games that try desperately to achieve greatness with a few innovative ideas (can't wait to write this Conan review!), but somehow Fallout 3 is this kind of magnificent game that inexplicably makes a half-hearted effort to be mediocre.
For instance, from first person view you can run, jump, fight, talk, and everything just fine, but they also included a clunky pointless 3rd person camera. It's obvious the gameplay was designed with first person in mind, but somewhere along the lines a 3rd person view was shoehorned in, probably to make the clothing guys stop cutting themselves. Seriously. If all you want to do is stand there in the sun, pan the camera 'round, and check out the clever hats and shirts you pick up off of corpses, fine. Otherwise, leave the Left Bumper alone. In third person, jumping, manipulating objects, and (realtime) combat are horrendous. The camera could give a damn what you want to look at (much less what you're shooting or swinging at) and all your animations are just terrible. By constrast, playing this game in first person (like Bioshock) gives you the impression you're actually there, in the wasteland, fighting hell and high water for your survival. Third person reminds you constantly that this is just a video game, and your character is just some blue screened puppet on a map, barely responding to your button presses.
Then there's the Pipboy 3000 / menuing system (and this probably has a lot to do with trimming keyboard PC controls down to joystick face buttons and triggers). The Pipboy 3k is a one stop shop for mapping, questing, equipping, you name it. But you wouldn't believe the number of times I've dropped a gun or important food because the buttons are stupid, or how many times I've accidentally rested for an hour instead of reading my map because its press B, then Right Trigger twice, then left analog once, then right analog stick to zoom out just to see where you're at in the wasteland.
Last but not least, there's the whole "this is still a c rpg underneath all the console fluff" learning curve. All the boring character creation stuff is presented during the games opening chapter, with a nice little narrative and some interesting sequences wrapped around it to keep you entertained, but all the stuff you really want to know (how to converse, get quests, equip things, heal yourself, read maps) is presented by cold text crawls that pop up one time when circumstance happens upon them, then never return. The reality is, you're going to have 20 opportunities (experience levels) to undo your poor understanding of the Agility or Perception attributes, but if you weren't paying attention to the random on screen text during that one radroach segment in the vault basement, may god have mercy on your soul because they are never going to explain how to use a gun again.
That said, it is a safe estimation (even at only a couple hours in) that a shitty third person cam, crappy menus, and a constant need for the instruction manual are the worst sins this game is going to commit. The design of the thing is dynamite, the aesthetic appeal is immaculate, and outside of its throw you to the wolves tutorial mentality, the gameplay systems work like charms once you wrap your head around them. Last night I wasted 3 or 4 hours of my life, just wandering around the desolation, shooting people in the face and hitting dogs with a baseball bat. There were some quests done here and there, some small purposes to all the wandering, but it all boiled down to one trepidatious man, one hostile untapped world, and a ton of bullets. At this point, I wouldn't have it any other way.
-F.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
Dead Space
Let me preface this review with a sentence:
I love to shoot stuff.
There's no shortage of stuff to shoot in Dead Space. Mostly what you shoot are these strange mutant alien guys that die much more quickly if you aim for their limbs. This is one of the innovations that Dead Space brags about on the back of their box. They also brag about an intricate story filled with twists and turns.
Let's talk about the strategic dismemberment first. This is a novel approach to a shooter, considering that's I've been taught by video games since I was five to aim for the head or chest. It took a while to get used to shooting for the limbs, but it was fun and I hope like hell that i can deprogram myself from aiming for the limbs before Resident Evil 5 comes out.
The fact that I'm already talking RE5 should probably give you a hint that this is part where I'm going trash Dead Space, and you're right. While the controls are tight and the game play is solid, It's nothing we haven't seen done already or done better in games like Doom 3 or RE4. This could have all been fixed with the intricate story promised on the back of the box... However, the back of the box was lying about that... oh my God it was lying to me about that.
The story is non-existent at best. At the beginning you find out that you're an engineer sent to fix a broken space ship floating around a planet where people are disappearing and doing other random spooky things. (The animated comics that you can see on YouTube are great at setting this up and they basically fooled me into buying a game where I thought I was going to get a great narrative. Good job EA, you got me.) So knowing this the game starts. Your crew consists of two guys that are alien meat (yeah killed in the first five seconds) and two bitchy imbeciles that you just keep wishing would die... seriously you wish it. You want it. After the two pieces of meat kick the bucket the story stops. Immediately. There is no more story until mission 7... for me that was about six and a half hours into the game. Yeah mission 7happens but then it goes into lull mode until the end where you have a couple of plot twists that are obvious and overdone, and one plot twist that you get at the very end of the game that makes absolutely no fucking sense and it just in there for a cheap scare. Once the plot actually surfaces it's just a bland mix of Event Horizon, Alien, and Fight Club. So what do you get in the place of plot during all this?
Cheap scares. Things that make you jump the first two times, but seriously, you and I both know that the monster lying there isn't dead after the 27th time, and that when you get off the tram, you'll immediately be startled by tweeddle dee or tweeddle dumbass trying communicate via a loud and staticy comlink.
The other thing you get? Orders. You get two different supporting characters telling you what to do while hiding in separate closets shitting their pants throughout the whole fucking game. So let me get this straight, I get follow idiotic repair quests from assholes while getting randomly attacked by mindless monsters for no apparent reason other than I'm there. Wait a minute... I work in IT... THIS GAME IS MY FUCKING LIFE!!! Gaaaaah!
Weapons: The first gun in the game is the best on you'll get. The line gun and the ripper aren't bad either (who doesn't like shooting saw blades?) but most of the weapons suffer from Turok syndrome. Seriously a force gun that slightly nudges the enemy back as if to say, "Please good sir, you're encroaching my personal space, could you take two steps back?" Fuck you force gun. The upgrade system is needlessly complicated. Seriously that's all you need to know.
The lack of a HUD is actually pretty cool and I like the way your menus are handled by holographic projections from your suit. That's pretty sweet.
Zero G combat is fun at first but its novelty wears thin real quick. Trust me, get hit by enemies you can't turn to see is no fun.
So yeah, I pretty much just tore this game apart, but like I said earlier, I like to shoot stuff, and that's probably why I'm currently on mission five of my second round through this game. Either that or I'm an achievement whore. Or I like to come home and play my job after living it all fucking day. Or I'm just killing time until MK Vs DCU. (ED BOON DON'T YOU DARE BREAK MY HEART AGAIN LIKE YOU DID WITH MKA!!!!)
Seriously Who knows?
-M
I love to shoot stuff.
There's no shortage of stuff to shoot in Dead Space. Mostly what you shoot are these strange mutant alien guys that die much more quickly if you aim for their limbs. This is one of the innovations that Dead Space brags about on the back of their box. They also brag about an intricate story filled with twists and turns.
Let's talk about the strategic dismemberment first. This is a novel approach to a shooter, considering that's I've been taught by video games since I was five to aim for the head or chest. It took a while to get used to shooting for the limbs, but it was fun and I hope like hell that i can deprogram myself from aiming for the limbs before Resident Evil 5 comes out.
The fact that I'm already talking RE5 should probably give you a hint that this is part where I'm going trash Dead Space, and you're right. While the controls are tight and the game play is solid, It's nothing we haven't seen done already or done better in games like Doom 3 or RE4. This could have all been fixed with the intricate story promised on the back of the box... However, the back of the box was lying about that... oh my God it was lying to me about that.
The story is non-existent at best. At the beginning you find out that you're an engineer sent to fix a broken space ship floating around a planet where people are disappearing and doing other random spooky things. (The animated comics that you can see on YouTube are great at setting this up and they basically fooled me into buying a game where I thought I was going to get a great narrative. Good job EA, you got me.) So knowing this the game starts. Your crew consists of two guys that are alien meat (yeah killed in the first five seconds) and two bitchy imbeciles that you just keep wishing would die... seriously you wish it. You want it. After the two pieces of meat kick the bucket the story stops. Immediately. There is no more story until mission 7... for me that was about six and a half hours into the game. Yeah mission 7happens but then it goes into lull mode until the end where you have a couple of plot twists that are obvious and overdone, and one plot twist that you get at the very end of the game that makes absolutely no fucking sense and it just in there for a cheap scare. Once the plot actually surfaces it's just a bland mix of Event Horizon, Alien, and Fight Club. So what do you get in the place of plot during all this?
Cheap scares. Things that make you jump the first two times, but seriously, you and I both know that the monster lying there isn't dead after the 27th time, and that when you get off the tram, you'll immediately be startled by tweeddle dee or tweeddle dumbass trying communicate via a loud and staticy comlink.
The other thing you get? Orders. You get two different supporting characters telling you what to do while hiding in separate closets shitting their pants throughout the whole fucking game. So let me get this straight, I get follow idiotic repair quests from assholes while getting randomly attacked by mindless monsters for no apparent reason other than I'm there. Wait a minute... I work in IT... THIS GAME IS MY FUCKING LIFE!!! Gaaaaah!
Weapons: The first gun in the game is the best on you'll get. The line gun and the ripper aren't bad either (who doesn't like shooting saw blades?) but most of the weapons suffer from Turok syndrome. Seriously a force gun that slightly nudges the enemy back as if to say, "Please good sir, you're encroaching my personal space, could you take two steps back?" Fuck you force gun. The upgrade system is needlessly complicated. Seriously that's all you need to know.
The lack of a HUD is actually pretty cool and I like the way your menus are handled by holographic projections from your suit. That's pretty sweet.
Zero G combat is fun at first but its novelty wears thin real quick. Trust me, get hit by enemies you can't turn to see is no fun.
So yeah, I pretty much just tore this game apart, but like I said earlier, I like to shoot stuff, and that's probably why I'm currently on mission five of my second round through this game. Either that or I'm an achievement whore. Or I like to come home and play my job after living it all fucking day. Or I'm just killing time until MK Vs DCU. (ED BOON DON'T YOU DARE BREAK MY HEART AGAIN LIKE YOU DID WITH MKA!!!!)
Seriously Who knows?
-M
First Impressions: Spiderman "Web of Shadows"
Is there anyone out there who can tell me the proper usage of colons, semi colons, hyphens, and parantheseses (?!) when it comes to titles of things? Because Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix is practically a sentence, but Super Street Fighter 2: Turbo "HD Remix" just looks gay.
ANYWAYS.
I asked myself this morning if I really wanted to move everything I did (or rather, intended to do) on that other gaming blog I started over here, or if I wanted to try and keep them separate or if I just wanted to give some of this shit up entirely because it was inappropriate or not per-brand (thank you, John Edwards) or some-other-meaningless-literary-construct to this blog. In the end, I decided; Fuck it, I'll write whatever I want. I'm doing this collaboration with my friend and that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside which makes honesty a little more forth coming. Plus the cleverness of our subtitle is sure to draw a few more random internet searches so somebody might actually read them here. So, with that said, guess what game I got to pop my new (read: refurbished) 360s cherry with last night?
Now I'm not going to bore you with the typical Spiderman 2 vs Spiderman 3 vs Ultimate Spiderman vs Spiderman Friend or Foe rhetoric, because its tired and everybody already knows that Spiderman 2 is the best spiderman game ever made and Spiderman 3 was a trainwreck and anyone who disagrees is wrong. If you really want the gritty details, go read any other spiderman video game related article on the internet anywhere, seriously. We can't get enough of it.
So Web of Shadows is the latest and is trying desperately to be the greatest. From where I sat (with a pounding headache and healthy amount of angst towards the Cleveland Browns, so excuse the lack of enthusiasm) it seems Shaba Games have taken great lengths to infuse the game with something new and not just make Spiderman 2 again which sadly, is what the fanboys (myself included) have been clammoring for the hardest. Honestly, I applaud it, but the hour or so I put into it last night was not enough to decide if it will pay off.
The so far so good of the thing is this. The game appears to have a story, which is important to me, and not just a bad guy shows up spider-man beats him, then bigger bad guy shows up and spider-man beats him one either. This one starts with a taste of a chaotic New York with spider-man hinted as both cause (by way of the black suit) and solution (by way of being spider-man) then Tarantino's its way back to days before when Spidey first gets the suit and things are still normal. It wets the appetite for whats coming and serves as a decent vehicle for the 'this button punches, this button swings, and this button throws fucking cars at people' tutorial that it bookends.
Which is important because that is the meat and potatoes of the thing. The fighting, I mean. Spider-man has perpetual access to both suits from the beginning and for once actual appear to function differently. Not to the point where one can swing and one can't, but their differences in combat are obvious even at this early stage. Best of all, the on the fly switching is so well integrated that you can actually switch suits in between individual hits of your canned combos. At this point I don't have the upgrades necessary to really call one better or worse and it will probably boil down to use this suit for the following enemies and use this one for others, but the tailoring and application of them to your playstyle is obviously going to be a big part of this.
The mission structure I am less thrilled about as so far it used GTA style "Mr. Johnson hunts" and akward dialogue trees to get a reason to fight and then go and fight. Granted, 'fight' means use your tendril arm to yank people off the top of buildings or throw a car down the street, but every time I beat up a bunch of guys for Luke Cage, he simply asks me to do it again, only do it twice as much. Why not just tell me to beat up 200 guys to start with, Luke? Why 15, then 30, then 150? The reality is these dumb missions say [OPTIONAL] in big bold letters next to the conversation selections, and I could probably just ignore them and advance the story, but the old school gamer in me knows (or at least has been deluded in to believing) that nothing is truly optional when you're trying desperately to justify the $70 you just spent on something. We both know that if I don't see every single ounce of content this game has to offer then Activision wins.
At this point, one can only hope the awesome move list can keep up with the tedious optional missions and that the main story can cash the check its opening has written. The current presentation and promise have already projected its quality light years beyond Ultimate and 3, but that will be meaningless if its way too short or face plants on these [OPTIONAL] missions. Even then, if all goes as I hope, it will still take some serious direction to top the rose tinted bias aura that Spider-man 2 still projects in my heart.
-F.
ANYWAYS.
I asked myself this morning if I really wanted to move everything I did (or rather, intended to do) on that other gaming blog I started over here, or if I wanted to try and keep them separate or if I just wanted to give some of this shit up entirely because it was inappropriate or not per-brand (thank you, John Edwards) or some-other-meaningless-literary-construct to this blog. In the end, I decided; Fuck it, I'll write whatever I want. I'm doing this collaboration with my friend and that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside which makes honesty a little more forth coming. Plus the cleverness of our subtitle is sure to draw a few more random internet searches so somebody might actually read them here. So, with that said, guess what game I got to pop my new (read: refurbished) 360s cherry with last night?
Now I'm not going to bore you with the typical Spiderman 2 vs Spiderman 3 vs Ultimate Spiderman vs Spiderman Friend or Foe rhetoric, because its tired and everybody already knows that Spiderman 2 is the best spiderman game ever made and Spiderman 3 was a trainwreck and anyone who disagrees is wrong. If you really want the gritty details, go read any other spiderman video game related article on the internet anywhere, seriously. We can't get enough of it.
So Web of Shadows is the latest and is trying desperately to be the greatest. From where I sat (with a pounding headache and healthy amount of angst towards the Cleveland Browns, so excuse the lack of enthusiasm) it seems Shaba Games have taken great lengths to infuse the game with something new and not just make Spiderman 2 again which sadly, is what the fanboys (myself included) have been clammoring for the hardest. Honestly, I applaud it, but the hour or so I put into it last night was not enough to decide if it will pay off.
The so far so good of the thing is this. The game appears to have a story, which is important to me, and not just a bad guy shows up spider-man beats him, then bigger bad guy shows up and spider-man beats him one either. This one starts with a taste of a chaotic New York with spider-man hinted as both cause (by way of the black suit) and solution (by way of being spider-man) then Tarantino's its way back to days before when Spidey first gets the suit and things are still normal. It wets the appetite for whats coming and serves as a decent vehicle for the 'this button punches, this button swings, and this button throws fucking cars at people' tutorial that it bookends.
Which is important because that is the meat and potatoes of the thing. The fighting, I mean. Spider-man has perpetual access to both suits from the beginning and for once actual appear to function differently. Not to the point where one can swing and one can't, but their differences in combat are obvious even at this early stage. Best of all, the on the fly switching is so well integrated that you can actually switch suits in between individual hits of your canned combos. At this point I don't have the upgrades necessary to really call one better or worse and it will probably boil down to use this suit for the following enemies and use this one for others, but the tailoring and application of them to your playstyle is obviously going to be a big part of this.
The mission structure I am less thrilled about as so far it used GTA style "Mr. Johnson hunts" and akward dialogue trees to get a reason to fight and then go and fight. Granted, 'fight' means use your tendril arm to yank people off the top of buildings or throw a car down the street, but every time I beat up a bunch of guys for Luke Cage, he simply asks me to do it again, only do it twice as much. Why not just tell me to beat up 200 guys to start with, Luke? Why 15, then 30, then 150? The reality is these dumb missions say [OPTIONAL] in big bold letters next to the conversation selections, and I could probably just ignore them and advance the story, but the old school gamer in me knows (or at least has been deluded in to believing) that nothing is truly optional when you're trying desperately to justify the $70 you just spent on something. We both know that if I don't see every single ounce of content this game has to offer then Activision wins.
At this point, one can only hope the awesome move list can keep up with the tedious optional missions and that the main story can cash the check its opening has written. The current presentation and promise have already projected its quality light years beyond Ultimate and 3, but that will be meaningless if its way too short or face plants on these [OPTIONAL] missions. Even then, if all goes as I hope, it will still take some serious direction to top the rose tinted bias aura that Spider-man 2 still projects in my heart.
-F.
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