Over the last decade of gaming, probably the biggest hole in my gaming knowledge and experience is the Halo series. Not to say that I have zero experience with the series: I've regularly heard a lot of Halo discussion on the podcasts I listen to, and have played some Halo 1 multiplayer, Halo 2 single player and Halo 3: ODST co-op and online multiplayer. But each time I've played a Halo game, I've walked away with a general sense of apathy.
I've played enough Halo to see why people love this series so much. Halo 1 and 2 were graphically great for their time, feature a story that many fans enjoy, revolutionized first-person shooters (particularly on the consoles) and Halo 2 and 3 feature one of the most popular online experiences on any platform.
I will give the Halo series all of its due credit. However, none of this compels me to keep playing. I don't really care at all about the story and the combat just didn't feel that fun to me. I know I'm not providing much of an argument as to why I don't like Halo, but it just doesn't click with me.
For the last few months, PGR 4 has been my go-to "bored game". When I don't feel like playing any other video game in my collection, I pop PGR 4 into my 360. Not to say that PGR 4 is a bad game, but racing games aren't really my scene. I get bored quickly of any arcade racing game that isn't Mario Kart and realistic racing games such as Gran Turismo and Forza frustrate me to no end due to their demand of precision driving control skills that I just don't have. The only reason I even have this game is because it came free, along with a chat pad and headset when I bought last year's subscription to XBOX Live.
I am not one to be trusted for a definitive judgement on PGR 4 if you haven't already played it. I just wanted to write down a few impressions I have on the game after playing it for a few hours.
While not as demanding control-wise as the GT or Forza series, PGR 4 does demand the precise use of the gas pedal, brakes and emergency brake for drifting. There are a number of different cars and motorcycles for you to choose and unlock, which allows you to try and find the car that best fits your driving style. I much preferred to drive the motorcycles, though I still don't think I'm playing this game properly. I don't think it's so much a fault with the game as it is a fault in my ability. When I drive through corners, I almost never make a smooth turn, which usually ends in me either going too slow and having to smash the gas half way into the turn, or crashing into the wall because I approached it too quickly. I know that I suck at this style of gameplay and have accepted that. However, on easy difficulty, I have been doing at least well enough to make progress in the arcade and career modes.
Speaking of modes, the game comes with an arcade mode, a fairly extensive career mode and a number of online modes, which I haven't dared to attempt. I'm sure they're fun for driving fans, but I know that I'm not good enough to do any better than last place in any given race. With that said, I've spent most of my time in arcade and career modes.
Regardless of which way you go, you will encounter a number of different race types and cars the game rewards you with when you score enough "Kudos". Maybe I would get into it more if I had more of a vested interest in these cars, but unlocking cars isn't all that fun to me. It's just a mechanic I do in order to keep up with everyone else.
I've been having enough fun with the game to come back to it in short doses every now and then, but beyond my lack of driving skills, the biggest hurdle I'm running into is that the game lacks "soul". Everything about the game just feels so stock and standard that I couldn't pick PGR 4 out of a group of other major driving games. The presentation of everything is very bland and I just feel like I'm being shuffled along from one race to the other with no real excitement behind it. It's hard for me to personally invest in a game that isn't really doing much to grab me.
Once again, I am by no means an expert in this entire genre, so my opinion may be useless to you. I still think that PGR 4 is a good game to check out if you're into this genre thanks to its great graphics and relatively solid gameplay. For driving newbies like me, I don't think PGR 4 does anything to convert you into the next racing sensation. As a game I got for free, I'm glad to have it as a go-to "bored game", but it won't ever make my main rotation.
I'm still playing (and for the most part) enjoying Skate, which I'm playing at a very leisurely pace. While it's a lot of fun to just cruise around the world and bust tricks, there are some very awkward design choices that can annoy the heck out of you when you play Skate. The inability to walk can be infuriating due to the way the world is designed. Bystanders always seem to get in the way of your objectives, which leaves you skating into them more than you would like. But I wanted to talk about one very specific case of poor game design that drove me nuts.
Three things I need to tell you to set the scenario up for you:
1) Skate exists in one persistent open world. You can skate anywhere in the city seamlessly. However, should you want to warp to different parts of town, you can go to a subway station and use the train. When you do this, you're faced with a loading time while the game loads in the new area.
2) Much of the Skate experience is trial and error. It gives you a challenge, and you try and try again until you get it. To make the process faster, the game allows you to mark your own starting points that you can instantly warp back to the point should you need to.
3) There is a challenge in the game called "Gap It Up". In it, you have to skate over a bridge, hop onto a ramp, then jump over a huge gap. If you need to visualize it, I'll put a video in below.
This is where the game design weirdness takes place. The game starts you off pretty far away from the actual jump. You can set your own marker closer to the jump, but you then won't have enough speed to get past the first bump, which you can see in 0:04 of the video. At 0:06 of the video, you have to make and land that jump while scoring a certain number of points to complete the objective.
In the video, the player nailed it just fine. If you screw it up though, and you want to snap back to your starting position, the game actually takes you out of the game and drops you into a 15-second load time before you can retry the challenge. I don't know if this is happening because I'm too far away from the starting marker, or because the starting point and the ending point are between seams of the world that need to be reloaded in when jumping from one place to the next.
In every other scenario that I have encountered in Skate so far, I can hold the left bumper and press up on the D-pad and instantly warp back to where I started. However, in this one instance, the game completely breaks its flow by forcing you to sit through load times every time you screw up that trick. The loading is actually longer than the time it would take for you to even attempt the trick and if you screw up a lot (like I did), then you'll be watching a lot of seemingly pointless loading.
This is not a game-breaking flaw in Skate, but I think it was a poor design choice to let this happen. If you're going to give the player the ability to snap back to their starting position from the beginning of the game, it should work that way always. Making me then sit through 15 seconds of loading to retry an 8-second trick is nothing short of infuriating, especially when I have to see this load screen 4-5 times in less than two minutes.
During a lapse in my gaming itinerary, I decided to pop Mirror's Edge back into my 360. Last time I wrote about this game, the game tried really hard to make me not like it. The game succeeded at that. I still love the premise of a free-running first-person game, but I stopped at the end of the second level in frustration, after dying roughly 50 times.
After a few minutes in the training level, I thought I was ready to go. What the training mode didn't prepare me for was encountering trial-and-error gameplay and crappy combat.
The biggest issue for me was that the game doesn't make it clear enough for where you need to go. There are obvious elements for you to grab onto, which are coloured red, but it's usually not that clear in the heat of battle. In the third level, I got to a point where I had absolutely no idea how to get out of the area before the guards came. I had to watch a YouTube video for the answer and when I saw it, I said to myself, "WTF!@#" I never would have come up with that solution myself. Due to the way the levels are designed, I get that feeling all the time. I could follow along with one of the many guides online if I really wanted to, but a game really shouldn't make me resort to that.
To compound the issue of getting lost, oftentimes you're under the gun by guards. In a game designed around running, the combat feels horribly out of place and leaves you greatly underpowered. Hand-to-hand combat is really clunky and enemies can kill you very quickly. Picking up a gun doesn't help much either, since the actual shooting mechanics are pretty bad and carrying a gun actually slows your character down.
I applaud Dice and EA for trying something ambitious with Mirror's Edge. I can see why some people absolutely loved this game. When it has you free-running and doing crazy acrobatics, it can be some of the most exhilarating action you'll ever experience. But to counter-point, there are a lot of people that hate this game, too. The problem is that the game isn't that awesome all the time. The experience is hampered by somewhat clunky controls, level designs that aren't easy to navigate on your own and terrible combat.
A sequel to this game has been confirmed, and it'll be interesting to see how they handle it. A lot of people have asked for Mirror's Edge to go third-person, but I think that would take away the most unique aspect of the game. Without being in first-person, it's just another Prince of Persia or Assassin's Creed style game. I do hope they polish the controls and make the areas easier to navigate. As far as combat, they can either improve the game by improving the combat mechanics or stripping combat from the experience completely to focus on the acrobatics. I won't be the first in line to pick up Mirror's Edge 2, but I'll continue to hope they refine this idea to perfection.
The other day, I received my DJ Hero setup in the mail. Not having bought refurbished products before, and being a bit concerned over the condition of the stuff they sent me, I was very quick and thorough with my inspection. The game was opened, yet the disc and manual looked to be in mint condition. As for the turntable and mixer, it looked just fine as well. Considering the fact that I can't even get DJ Hero used for anywhere close to what I paid for this refurbished version, it was a steal.
Within a few minutes of playing DJ Hero, it's clear to see that it's one of the more technically advanced music games on the market. There is a steeper learning curve to it than most, partially because of all of the elements involved in handling it and the general unfamiliarity with turntables that I expect most players to have when first trying DJ Hero. At the expert level, you have to think about pressing the three buttons on the the platter, rotating the platter forwards and backwards for scratching and back-spins without losing track of where the buttons are, moving the cross-fader, turning the effects knob and activating the euphoria button at the right time.
If that freaks you out, it shouldn't (yet). There are a number of difficulty settings, with the beginner setting giving you the bare minimum and every difficulty setting above that gradually introduces new gameplay elements to the mix. There's no shame into jumping into the game at beginner. As for me, I started out at medium and had a blast. By the end of my first day with DJ Hero, I had begun gaining 5-stars on the early mixes on expert difficulty. I don't expect myself to be the next DJ Q-Bert anytime soon, but the thrill of tearing through a mash-up is pretty awesome.
Speaking of the mash-ups, the game is made up entirely of mash-ups. This "genre" of music isn't necessarily my bag, but these all sound great and are almost all fun to play. There are two downers though that come with this package. The first one is that the set-list reuses a lot of songs. A lot of the songs get used more than once, and at least one song gets reused four times. The other downer comes from the implementation of the music. Outside of the back-spins and the effects knob, there's no room for your own creativity. In other music games, such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, that isn't much of a problem, because you want to play the songs the way they're meant to be played. But the nature of DJ-ing lends itself to a certain type of creativity that you just can't do by replaying someone else's mix.
OK, I lied; there's one more downer in regards to the music in DJ Hero. The game also comes with 10 mixes which can be played with a person on the turntable and another person on guitar. I appreciate the gesture, but these mixes are the least fun to play and sound very forced. In particular, the guitarist is getting the short end of the stick, having to play fairly boring guitar charts. Even if the tracks were great to play, 10 tracks isn't much to work with. DJ and guitar mode will probably last you an hour at most before both band members run out of stuff to play.
If you're in single-player mode, you will be spending much of your time in the game's career mode. This mode feels very bare-bones, especially compared to the likes of Rock Band, which does a lot outside of the gameplay, such as a loose story and unique challenges to spice up the experience. In DJ Hero, you simply move from set-list to set-list, earning stars to unlock characters and accessories as you go. There's no story or extra motivation beyond that. The other weird design choice here is that songs are grouped into sets, and you can't progress unless you beat all the songs within a set. While I see the benefits in being able to play through multiple songs without having to navigate a menu, it is a bummer when you come up short on the very last song, and have to play through the entire set again to redeem yourself.
DJ Hero is a pretty good game that has reinvigorated my interest in music games. It's core gameplay mechanics are a joy to experience if you can overcome the learning curve. In order to compete with the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, it's going to provide a deeper experience outside of just mixing music, such as a more compelling single-player mode and more downloadable content. I look forward to seeing what improvements Freestyle Games has in store for DJ Hero 2. Personally, I'm praying for the ability to hook up two turntables to one mixer for "real" DJ-ing action.
Before I go, I should talk a bit about the value proposition that DJ Hero at regular retail price offers. At the price I paid for it ($50 refurbished), I can fairly easily overlook the game's shortcomings and scratch away. However, at regular retail price of $130, I don't know if I could justify owning the game for that much, even though I think it's great. As for the special edition of this game, which is $220 in my country, forget about it. If you can get this game for under $100 and you're a fan of music games, then this may be right up your alley. At regular retail price, I would pass.
After years of completely ignoring the game and weeks of contemplating whether or not I should give Mass Effect a shot, I finally grabbed a copy of the game. I'm a few hours in and have all six potential party members on my side. I have a lot to say about this game, which I'll dole out in a number of posts in the future.
What I wanted to focus on first is the scope of Mass Effect. Without question, this is the biggest game I've ever played. In a number of ways, the Mass Effect experience is absolutely colossal to the point that it's intimidating the heck out of me.
The team at BioWare really have created an entire galaxy for players to interact with. Starting from the outside and working inward, let's start with the planets. There are a number of different planets for you to explore for missions and assignments. Even the planets that you can't explore have an entire back story for you to read should you care to learn more about it. When you're in a planet or a space station, the environments are generally big, full of variety and full of life.
Speaking of life, it's the characters that inhabit the world of Mass Effect that really take this world to the next level of scope. There are an insane number of primary, secondary and tertiary characters. The game does an amazing job of fleshing out the stories of every character you need to know through countless hours of dialogue and back story to read. All the main characters in the game feel like they've lived a full life before you started playing this game. Secondary characters have a surprising amount of dialogue and back story as well. Even bit players have enough "meat" to their characters to make them feel like real people. In an age where most games have trouble humanizing their main characters, what Mass Effect is able to do with this entire world is blowing my mind.
Where the intimidation comes in is how how I control my Shepard to interact with this world. You're constantly put in situations where your decisions affect the world. I've already encountered a few situations where I completely changed the world. While I'm happy with the decisions I have made so far, I know that this world could be very different had I approached these scenarios differently.
So far, I'm liking Mass Effect quite a bit. It's not without fault, but overall I'm glad to be playing this. You'll be able to read more of my thoughts about Mass Effect soon.
With the Perfect Dark remake hitting XBOX Live next week, now was kind of a weird time for me to pick up the 2005 prequel, Perfect Dark Zero. I loved the original Perfect Dark, but I've never played this one. At the time, reviews for this game were pretty good, but this game has been the butt-end of many jokes since. I finally decided to take the plunge when I saw a brand new copy at the store for the rock-bottom price of $3.
I have yet to play it, but I'm already second-guessing my purchase. I watched my brother play this game for a bit, and it was...dated. The original Perfect Dark is even more dated, but I played it when it was new and have built a strong sense of nostalgia around the game. Perfect Dark Zero on the surface looks old. The graphics don't hold up, the controls appear clunky in a Halo/Modern Warfare world, bad guys take a bunch of bullets to take out and the inclusion of arrows on the ground to tell you where to go feels like a crutch to compensate for poor level design.
With that said, the game only cost me $3 and I have yet to actually play the game myself. I think I'll give it a shot before the remake hits next week.
Yesterday at the Game Developer Conference, Sony finally announced the name and some more details about their new motion controller. The controller (and sub-controller) are now known as the Playstation Move. I'm not going to go into details about how the thing works, or what games were just announced to support it, but I'll be happy to direct you to places that have thattype of information.
What I wanted to do is use this announcement as a jump-off point for my current perceptions of motion control. Back in 2006, I was all aboard the motion control train. With Nintendo - my favourite game company - backing this technology, there was nothing that could go wrong, right? Wrong.
I bought my Wii on launch-day and had a blast with it. For the next few weeks that winter, every party with family and friends was a Wii party. While motion controls did bring something new to the table, Nintendo's initial stab at motion controls brought with it a number of problems.
For anyone that has played a Wii, you've figured out by now that the Wii remote doesn't translate your movements 1:1 into the game. Rather, it reads a gesture you make and then plays out the action on screen if you've done the gesture properly. What happens in most Wii games is that you end up not truly simulating the motions you try to do. Instead, the remote doesn't read your motions correctly and does something you don't want it to do, or you end up doing "short-cut motions" that work just as well as the full motion, which kills any immersion the game was supposed to provide. Flicking your wrist to throw a bowling ball works just as well as a full-body throw.
The lack of buttons, poor game translations from regular controls to "Wii" controls, games going crazy when the remote isn't pointed at the screen and a sudden shift in focus towards casual games made a lot of what the Wii was supposed to be about not that fun for me. I have tried the motion plus attachment, but having to constantly reset the controller to work properly is a pain. Within a few months of buying the Wii, I caved and bought my first non-Nintendo system since the Atari 2600 because I wanted to play games that controlled with buttons, d-pads and analog sticks. I still love me some Wii Bowling and Boom Blox, but most of my gaming time is now motion controller free.
Regardless of how I feel, the Wii has basically won this console cycle, leaving Sony and Microsoft floundering to try and capitalize on the success of motion control. Sony has taken a very "me-too" approach with the design of their Move controllers, and Microsoft is going way out in left field with the controller-free Project Natal. While they both claim to have better solutions to motion control, I have my doubts. Watching the Playstation Move in the video below only further fueled my doubts, as the person in the video punches wildly in the air and the game does nothing to respond to his movements.
I'm not even going to get into the myriad of other challenges Sony and Microsoft have specifically in trying to launch these products into the marketplace. I just want to talk about how these control mechanisms work and what it'll take for me to fully buy into them as a main form of input. I'll break it down into three key points:
In my 20+ years of gaming, I've never had problems inputting a command with a button press. The game only has to decipher whether or not the button is pressed down or not. With motion control, there are so many more variables involved, and therefore, a higher percentage of error. It's so frustrating to play games like any Wii boxing game and see your physical energy go to waste when you throw a real-life hay-maker and see that my character is standing still.
The Playstation Move looks to be better than the Wii remote, but still appears to suffer from some accuracy quirks. With the Natal, we have no idea how accurate that setup will be when it hits living rooms around the world. I know it's a lot to ask, but I will always prefer pressing a button to doing a gesture if the gesture isn't accurate enough.
2) Purpose
Very early on in the Wii's life-cycle, a lot of third-party developers thought they could cash-in on the Wii hype train by shoehorning motion controls into traditional games. Time and time again, we've seen this strategy fail miserably. Often times in the case of motion controls, developers simply substitute a button press with a gesture, which usually doesn't feel good, doesn't accurately reflect the action on the screen and takes you out of the action more than brings you in.
Motion control games need to have a clear purpose for being in the game or don't bother. Developers need to create experiences that work with the strengths and weaknesses of the interface in mind and not force the player to flail their arms to substitute a button press. Throwing a baseball at a stack of blocks in Boom Blox feels awesome. Having to draw a star on the screen to activate slow-motion in Trauma Center feels awful and makes no sense.
While this particular point applies to all motion controllers (even you, Tony Hawk: Ride skateboard), I'm most concerned about the Natal on this one. Microsoft has hyped this up as the most natural gaming experience ever, but I don't see what's natural about flailing your limbs around to hit balls that are projected at you or driving a car by pretending to hold onto a steering wheel and pretending to hit pedals with your feet that aren't there. The big promise of motion control is the ability to give players a more realistic and immersive experience. Poor motion control implementation just feels even more awkward and out of place than any button press would.
While I am currently not much of a fan of the current implementation of motion controls in today's consoles, I'm reluctant to write them off completely. I know that motion controls are here to stay and will improve with time. By the time these things work as planned, maybe I'll warm up to them more. I'm still not sure if I'll ever be ready to let go of sitting on the couch and pushing buttons, but we'll talk about that when motion controllers finally come of age.
I'm officially 1/4 of the way through Dead Space, and there was something about the overall feel of the game that I thought was worth mentioning: the underlying sense of deja vu.
Normally, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. And to Dead Space's credit, it does do a few good things to make the game stand out on its own, such as the emphasis on shooting limbs and everything that happens in space or low-gravity scenarios. But it's pretty clear to see that Dead Space is clearly built off of other influences.
The third-person shooting action and survival horror elements are directly lifted from Resident Evil 4. The story progression though big events or small collectibles such as audio logs came from Bioshock and Metroid Prime. Much of the space station aesthetic comes from Metroid Prime. Outside of games, Dead Space takes a ton of cues from the "Alien" series of movies.
To be fair, if you break down 99% of anything ever made, you can find all the elements that came before it to create the final product. In Dead Space though, the game doesn't try and hide where those influences came from. If anything, I really feel like they tried hard to at least match its influences in terms of quality, if not surpass them.
Throughout my experience so far, I always feel like I'm playing a mash-up of a bunch of other people's ideas. But damn, they're executed so well in Dead Space. The overall level of polish and detail so far is spot on with what I think this game should be. It's fun, very exciting and constantly scaring the pants off of me. There is a moment towards the end of chapter 3 where you encounter something that is 10 times more insane than anything you've encountered up to that point and I almost lost it. I was actually yelling at my TV and mashing buttons during a moment that required precision because I couldn't help myself.
All of the things it borrows from other games kind of makes Dead Space a more "comfortable" experience. Not in the sense of being less scary, but being able to quickly jump into this world and have fun. It's always in the back of my head that I'm not playing something wholly new, but as long as it stays this good, that's totally fine.
After playing The Lost and Damned, I wasn't sure what to expect from The Ballad of Gay Tony. While the Lost and Damned did a lot of things to separate itself from the core Grand Theft Auto experience, I don't think all of it was worth while. I really loved the characterization in The Lost and Damned, but there was a very distinct point where the focus gets taken away from the main conflict and when you finally come back to it, the conclusion doesn't give you the payoff you were hoping for. All the while, I was struggling to get re-acquainted with the Grand Theft Auto controls.
I'm currently about 8 missions into The Ballad of Gay Tony, and it's starting off on much better footing for me than The Lost and Damned did. Controls are no longer a factor with me, now that I've had the entirety of the TLAD to get used to them. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but I'm not thinking about them any more when I play. While this game is currently lacking in innovation in comparison to TLAD, where it has it beat hands down so far are the missions. The game doesn't really have any "warm up" missions and goes straight into the crazy stuff. The second mission features you hitting golf balls on a driving range into a guy tied to the vehicle that picks up golf balls. From there, it's been increasingly bombastic and awesome.
My only gripe so far with Gay Tony is the plot and the characters. The story of Luis and Tony is probably the weakest of the three GTA IV stories, even though both characters are very likable. The main story arch is built around one person having to clean up another person's mess, which kind of has been done to death in this series. This even happened in TLAD, but it was offset by a great tension between Billy and Johnny. The antagonists in TBoGT just aren't as strong.
Thankfully, Rockstar got the missions right, which is the most important part of any GTA to me. TLAD had some missions that felt almost broken in design to me, which upset me more than anything else in that game. Everything so far in Gay Tony has been smooth as butter. I can overlook a somewhat weaker story when I'm busy driving away from a biker gang, the cops, a tank and a low-flying helicopter and throwing remote sticky explosives at them all.
Back in 2008, I was very intrigued by Dead Space. After E3, the buzz going around was that it was like the evolution of Resident Evil 4. Since that game is one of my all-time favourites, Dead Space was very much on my radar. The reviews came out great and it eventually went on to sell at least enough to warrant a greatest hits re-release.
So why didn't I pick it up back then? I don't know, really. At the time, I know I was busy with Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead. After I was through with those games, I would always look at that box every time I went into a game store, but never acted on it. I even saw this game brand new for $10 and still didn't buy it. For whatever reason, I just kept passing it up.
That is, until this past Christmas break. Using a gift card I received, I picked up Dead Space...and let it sit on my shelf for two months while I played through Modern Warfare 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Lego Rock Band, The Lost and Damned, Borderlands and Silent Hill: Homecoming.
I'm only about half way through chapter 1, but dude...Dead Space is kind of rocking my socks. For the few of you who aren't familiar with this game, I'll give you a quick rundown. You are an engineer who has been assigned to fix this giant space station. You and your crew crash land on the space station, and quickly realize there are aliens on it. In terms of tone, mood and atmosphere, this game is very much like the movie Aliens.
What the game is currently lacking in innovation, it makes up for in polish. Even in 2010, Dead Space graphically is one of the best games out there. Audio wise, my goodness. It has some of the most amazing sound of any video game. The ambient sound really sets the tone of the game and does a great job of freaking you out to the point where you're not sure if those creepy noises are coming from the game, or something in the other room of your house. Leading up to the release, EA was hyping up how the game doesn't have a heads-up display in the traditional game sense. Instead, information such as your health and amount of ammo in your clip are displayed on the character himself and all menus are pulled up within an in-game floating "screen" that you can look around. This is supposed to keep you immersed in the game, but I would have been fine with a regular HUD. Nice touch nonetheless.
In terms of the horror elements of Dead Space, it's about on par at this point with Resident Evil 4. The "horror" you feel mainly comes from jump scares and the tension you feel when your character is physically threatened, which is a lot. If you're looking for a more psychological horror experience along the lines of Silent Hill though, then this isn't it.
The one thing that has me tripping up at this point are the controls. Granted, I've played this game for less than two hours at this point, but some elements of the layout and how they work are taking some time to adjust to. For instance, when you're not aiming your gun, the right stick acts as an independent camera control rather than controlling where your character is looking. What this means is, you can swing the camera around so that you're actually looking at the front of your character. It's weird when I try and look around from the perspective of my character using the stick and instead it moves the camera independent of the character. I'm also not a fan of left bumper acting as the run button. Having that handled by pushing in the left stick would work much better in my opinion.
There is still a lot of time for this game to get better (or worse), so I will reserve final judgment until I'm finished with it. I look forward to seeing how this plays out, because it's off to a great start.
Over these past few weeks of unemployment, the game that has monopolized my time is Modern Warfare 2. Having played multiplayer for just over 24 hours, a lot of that was "not fun". I say that in the sense that for every time I killed someone, I died about 2.5 times. There were games where I would kill two people and die 20 times. The core mechanics of multiplayer are fantastic, but the competition is hella fierce. Most of these people also have an extra two years of Modern Warfare 1 experience as an advantage on me. As far as I know, the game doesn't do anything to keep low-level players from playing high-level players, so you pretty much have to play the best-of-the-best every time you hit the battlefield.
Being a hardcore gamer and one with experience playing other first-person shooters, I was able to analyze my play, recognize my mistakes, do my best to correct them and equip my character with the right load-out to fit my style. Now when I play, I regularly score over 1,000 points with a close-to 1:1 kill/death ratio. Sometimes, I even dominate the field. The game has become a lot more satisfying and fun to play now that I can play at a level I'm happy with. Granted, I wouldn't consider myself "good", but I can get by. I had to go through this same curve when learning Street Fighter IV. I lost a lot at first, but was willing to put in the work to get better until I did.
For others though, I can totally see how this is a very unappealing experience. In the grand scheme of things, you shouldn't have to play a game like you're training for a sport. I've heard so many people talk about their avoidance of playing online first-person shooters with the general public because the level of competition is just too high. Usually the story goes, "I die, then I re-spawn and immediately die again before I even have the chance to move!" I got lucky with Modern Warfare 2 clicking with me in a way that I can get by. Most of the time when it comes to competitive online gaming I'm not so lucky.
Despite all the negative things I've said about Silent Hill: Homecoming over these last few posts, I was ready to let all that slide. I was already over half way done the game, and I thought I could put up with the game's faults for a few more hours for the sake of completing it. That will never happen now. Or ever.
In my last Silent Hill post, I said I would continue playing it until the game committed a heinous act against fun. It just did.
I played the game for about half an hour just now, and I got to the puzzle pictured above. The only picture I could find was of the completed puzzle. When you start out, the pieces are all scrambled and you have to slide them around the space to create that emblem. No big deal, right? These types of puzzles have been in thousands of video games before, and can usually be beaten if you slide the pieces around enough. Not this time. I tried it over and over again, but there was one piece in particular that would be stuck on the opposite end of the board. I normally don't have the patience for these types of puzzles in games, so the moment I get stuck, I hit a guide.
To my horror, the very first step in every guide I found said to move the double block in the top right hand corner one space to the left. I looked at my screen and realized that my screen didn't have a double block in that position. I watched video solutions on YouTube and realized that my blocks were laid out completely differently from what everybody else got.
Dude, what?
So in fact, the puzzle the game gave me really was impossible to beat. I did more research on this, and apparently I'm not alone. This IGN forum user ran into the exact same problem as me. The only solution for her? Restart the game from the last save point. In this GameSpot thread, user peetowser said he wasted 3 hours of his life trying to solve this glitched puzzle until he realized it was broken. When he reloaded it, it worked fine. For those forum users, maybe their tolerance towards the game's deficiencies are higher than mine. But for me, this game ends right here. I've been force-feeding this experience to myself since the beginning, and if the game requires me to go back 30 minutes into the game just so the puzzle pieces can reset, it can go to hell. I am not giving that game any more of my time.
Even if I pass that, there's a chance that the game's next set of puzzles might glitch out for them too, just like it did for these people. Just like with Fight Night Round 4, I refuse to support games that are broken to the point that they actually prevent you from finishing them. I don't have any immediate plans on checking out any of the other entries in the Silent Hill series, but if they're as janky as this, I'll dedicate my gaming time towards other things.
With not much going on in my life right now, I spent most of today in my basement completing The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. I know, this is the third Knoxx post in as many days, but now that I've beaten the main quest and most of the side missions, I'm ready to write down some final impressions of the DLC.
As mentioned in my first two posts, this DLC starts out ludicrously hard. If you just completed playthrough 1, or have a maxed out level 50 character on playthrough 2, you will die in the beginning. A lot. I got destroyed by the very first bad guy I saw, and continued to be dominated throughout most of the experience by flying drones. I can see a lot of people giving up on this DLC at the start, but if you can tough it out, you'll be rewarded with a really good add-on.
If you're starting this DLC in between level 35 and 50, then your experience will vary wildly. My brother is level 43, and this was how I found out that General Knoxx does not scale to your character. If you play with a level 43 character in playthrough 1, you will demolish everything in your path. If you play with a level 43 character in playthrough 2, you literally wouldn't stand a chance against anything.
For me, the moment I hit the jail level was where the experience finally came into its own. The jail level was easily my favourite part of the DLC because I felt that level captures Borderlands at its best. Yes, that's half-way through the DLC, but at this point regular encounters were tough, but fair. From that point on, it played just like you would hope it would. You get to shoot lots of guys, level up your character, and there are no shortage of big-time guns (elemental ones in particular).
The ending to General Knoxx was much more satisfying than the main game. Without spoiling it, the boss fight is much better (and still tough) and the payoff is much improved (and exciting).
The only major aspect of this DLC I haven't tried yet is the ultimate boss. There is a level 64 boss that is practically impossible to beat by yourself, but with a party, you may stand a chance. If you beat the boss, you will have a chance to get some of the best guns in the game. The boss will never go away, so you can take a crack at it as many times as you want.
For 800 MS points, you get a lot of content from The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. Lots of new gear, quests, missions and a raised level cap are more than enough motivation for someone who just beat the game to go back to Borderlands. Playing through the main quest and the side missions will take you approximately 8-12 hours, which is very good considering the price. Just be warned that if your character is in the low 40's, you won't find a playthrough that fits for you and if you're coming into it maxed out, you're in for a rough start.
I normally pay no mind to video game related petitions. They're usually stupid demands made by and supported by equally stupid gamers. But I couldn't help but discuss this recent petition related to Sonic 4. To be fair, not everyone in the petition is in support of it, and some people are there just to make fun of them like I'm about to.
Fans of the sonic series are like most sega fans, we want their old games brought back to the glory days when sega was pretty much the power in video games. Seeing the gameplay of sonic 4 has made many of us realize what we already knew, Sonic 4 will simply not be anywhere near as good as the original sonic games. Either way, We will decide to finally show sega what the fans truly want. A real sonic 4, as long as sonic 4 stays the way it is, we will not buy it, we will in fact buy sonic 1 on release in protest of sonic 4, till we end up with a re tool, or change, we want sonic in hd, not sonic RUSH HD. We will not buy a future sonic game, till we get a true successor to sonic 1/2
There are a number of ridiculous things I can point out about this flawed argument, from the fact that we've only really seen 5 seconds of actual gameplay, to the fact that no people outside of Sega have played it, or that Sonic Rush kind of is the same thing as Sonic 1 (and is kind of good), or that Sonic 4 kind of is Sega's attempt to recapture the feel of Sonic 1. But I won't point those out. What I will point out is...
WHY ARE YOU GOING TO SHOW SEGA HOW MUCH YOU DISLIKE ONE OF THEIR GAMES BY BUYING ONE OF THEIR GAMES!?
You're still giving them money, whether you buy Sonic 1 or 4. Sega wins either way and your stupid cause is more meaningless than it already is.
As bonus material, I decided to post some choice comments from the petition below. Enjoy.
Name: Andie Key on Feb 18, 2010
Comments: I had hope for the game, even after the trailer. Turns out the gameplay and game truly is crap. I won't be tricked again SEGA (looks at you unleashed)
Name: Garnet M. on Feb 19, 2010
Comments: its just a 2d sonic game gears of war is much better anyway Name: Goog on Feb 19, 2010 Comments: If it even gets one score 8.5 I call BS SONIC 4 is TERRIBLE
Name: Sonic 92 on Feb 20, 2010
Comments: I am a fan of the Sonic games, I am very unhappy that Sega has made Sonic 4 the way that they have. I urge you sega, do not release the game as is. I will pray you do the right thing.
Name:Anonymous on Feb 21, 2010
Comments: yo dis looks like a game ud get at micky DS yo
After my initial lukewarm impressions to The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, I wasn't sure what I would be getting into the next time I played it. I was hoping that having reached level 51 would at least get me past the initial difficulty curve and the rest of the experience would be smooth sailing.
Nope.
General Knoxx is hard like the Rihanna song. Lance soldiers and bandits always seem to be leveled higher than you, making every gun fight a war. If you're up for a challenge, then General Knoxx will not disappoint. Shooting guys and getting better guns is as fun as it always has been in Borderlands. I just hope you come prepared with the right load-out to take on some truly tough competition.
Oddly enough, one of the first enemy types is also the most annoying and difficult. There are flying drones on the highway that gave me trouble the last time I wrote about never cease to be annoying. I actually got to a point where I seemed to be stuck in a death loop, where I would get gunned down by a number of air drones every time I re-spawn and before I even have time to react. I was "thisclose" to giving up on the game right there. After looking through message boards for advice, I was finally able to get past them by using a combination of a shock trooper class mod, a shock mod for my turret and a shock sniper rifle in unison. Never in Borderlands have I ever had to resort to such desperate tactics.
The story behind everything you do is notably better this time around. In particular, Mad Moxxi brings a lot of personality and charm to what is is you're doing. The last ninja fight wasn't nearly as bad as the first two, as I was able to drop the ninjas fairly quickly, with the exception of the boss ninja. For the most part, I am starting to warm up to it.
However, I have come to realize that The Secret Armory of General Knoxx features one extremely-annoying flaw: NO FAST-TRAVEL. I've already seen six new zones, and the only fast-travel station is at T-Bone junction. For me to continue where I last left off, I will have to trek through three different zones by vehicle and by foot, which will take at least 20-30 minutes of my time, not including any battles I'll face in between. As much as I want to continue this quest, I really don't want to have to travel across that world again.
I'll have more impressions as I play through it. If you're going to buy any supplemental Borderlands content, this is the way to go. Just know what you're getting into.
The Secret Armory of General Knoxx just hit XBOX Live and PSN and I was quick to purchase this Borderlands add-on. Unlike the other pieces of Borderlands DLC, this one brought with it a number of additions, including new zones, new guns, new vehicles, new bad guys, a bunch of new quests and most importantly, a raised level cap. With 11 more levels for my soldier to grow, I was eager to shoot more dudes and collect more guns. I've only played just over an hour of it so far, but I thought I'd share my initial impressions.
When you load up the first new zone, T-Bone Junction, a video plays that sets up the story. General Knoxx takes place after the events of the first game, and the Atlas corporation is looking to take you out. However, you still have Scooter and Marcus helping you out, as well as a mysterious ninja, who promises you access to General Knoxx's armory if you help her, which is basically the equivalent of the Vault. Story was one of the biggest weak-points in the main game, and I sort of get the impression that they're trying a bit harder to convey the story better.
From here, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx started off on the wrong foot. The very first encounter you face are a pack of ninjas, which from what I gather are a big deal in this DLC. Right now, I'm not liking the ninja encounters. Part of that dislike comes from the level scaling; I'm not sure if this content scales to your character or not, but I started with a maxed-out level 50 character and the level 51 ninjas immediately wrecked me. That extra level made them way harder to kill and way easier for me to die. I died at least 4 times trying to beat the first ninja boss, which cost me almost $2 million in lost cash.
The other problem I've had with the ninja encounters is that I don't think the game engine was built for players to fight enemies that move the way the ninjas do. The ninjas are extremely quick and can move laterally almost instantly. It's really hard to do any sort of meaningful damage when they're constantly running laps around you. I was getting physically dizzy trying to keep up.
The raised levels of enemies made the first few quests up until you reach Mad Moxxi really hard. Had the enemies started at the same level as me, the fights would have been much more reasonable without being too easy. But because they're all leveled higher than you possibly could have been coming into this DLC, I found myself getting owned repeatedly. During the first highway encounter, I died a number of times because I thought I could handle fighting two airborne drones in my new Monster vehicle. Nope. Then I got into a mess of a situation where I was killed just outside of a checkpoint by a lance vehicle that shot a giant shock blast. When I re-spawned, the same vehicle shot and killed me before I could even move. This happened twice in a row. Thanks for cheating me out of another $800,000. Before I had finished the fourth quest in this DLC add-on, I had lost over half of my money due to dying, which took me two playthroughs of Borderlands to save up in the first place.
I finished off my session with another ninja battle. I leveled up to 51 half way through the fight, and noticed that I was doing a bit more damage and the ninjas were having a much harder time taking me out. Unfortunately, the fight did not end fair and square. You fight the second boss ninja on top of a bridge a few hundred feet above the ground, but my boss managed to jump off the bridge herself. She lived, but the game did not know how to handle the fact that the boss was hundreds of feet below me. The ninja just zipped back and forth and I picked it off like a fish in a barrel.
I get the feeling that I'm only scratching the surface of The Secret Armory of General Knoxx so far, so I will withhold final judgment till I'm finished it. If you're looking for a new Borderlands fix, this seems to be the DLC to get so far because it raises the level cap and adds a ton of new content. Due to the unfair enemy scaling to start, the initial awkwardness of the ninja fights and at this point typical Borderlands jankyness, I'm not as high on it as I would like to be. But I'm hoping it picks up after a rough start just like the main game did.
Dante's Inferno hits my soul in a very weird spot. I don't even care about actually playing any of the games in the same category of Dante's Inferno, because it's just not my thing. From everything I've heard about its gameplay, it plays competently. However, I've been thinking about this game for quite a bit over the last year because I absolutely hate the thinking behind this game.
If there was a game that you could say a marketing team had too much control in making, it's this one. In my head, I think the thought process behind the game went down like this:
Marketer A: "Hey, our sales are down. How can we make more money?"
Marketer B: "How about if we make a game like God of War? Those games sell like crazy, and if we make one just like it, we'll sell like crazy too!"
Marketer A: "Genius! Ok, where do we start?"
Marketer B: "Um...We need something like Greek mythology but not exactly Greek mythology."
Marketer A: *goes on Google* "How about the Divine Comedy and Dante's Inferno?"
Marketer B: "Awesome! Does he fight in it?"
Marketer A: "Not really. But maybe in our version, Dante can be a warrior. And he can carry around a giant scythe that works like the God of War chain-blade thing! And he'll fight through the seven layers of Hell, named after each sin."
Marketer B: "You're on a roll! But I just wanted to say one thing. This has to sell to teenage males, because our demographic research show that they spend the most money on these types of games."
Marketer B: "Ok, this is just a thought. How about, in the Lust level, we have giant demon women and when you cut off their nipples, spiders come out. And they have 8-foot vaginas that you have to grab and throw into other 8-foot vaginas?"
Marketer A: "That's what the kids would call, "Cool.""
Marketer B: "Isn't "cool" an old expression by now? Why don't you find the new word for cool on that Urban Dictionary thing."
Pardon me for being pessimistic, and maybe a bit condescending towards marketers (even though I've worked in both advertising and marketing), but this game is creatively bankrupt and conceptually a blatant cash-grab first and a game second. I'm not a communist, I understand that people make games to make money, and I understand that not every game needs to push the medium forward, but how can you not see what Dante's Inferno is at its core? Even the great reviews for this game call it a rip-off of God of War.
Maybe the game plays just fine, and if you enjoy it, great. But my sentiments against the product's existence are so strong that I already feel insulted as a gamer from knowing this product is available now and will probably sell well. If there's any statement I can make to show my displeasure, it's to not buy the game and not talk about. I won't be buying Dante's Inferno, and I'll stop talking about it...now.
When it comes to video games, it's very easy to figure out what to do with games that are clearly good and games that are clearly bad. A good game will not let you go until you've squeezed every last bit of the experience out of it, while a bad game will eat at your soul until you get rid of it. But what are we to do with mediocre games? The games that aren't bad, but aren't necessarily good, either?
The last time I wrote about Silent Hill: Homecoming, I had some good things to say about it and a number of criticisms as well. The post ended on a very negative note. Despite the things I disliked about the game, I did go back to play it again. I wanted to be able to definitively back up my negative feelings towards the game and let it collect dust on my shelf once and for all. The problem is...it got kind of good. The scenarios I was playing through were interesting enough to keep me pacing forward, even though I'm still not sure exactly what the story to this game is. I played some more, until I felt like I was done for the day.
Unfortunately for me, this is when a new problem arose. I got to a stretch in the game that did not offer a checkpoint to save. I said to myself, "OK, I'll just play to the next checkpoint." I wouldn't actually get to the next checkpoint for another hour. Games made in this day and age that have such disparate save points should die in a fire. I was ready to let this game go when I decided to check a strategy guide, just to see how far I had made it through the game. "Damn it!" I said to myself. "I'm half way through."
I've only been playing this game for about four hours. At this moment, what's another four hours? I could still get to experience what is good about this game, if I can bear with its weaknesses. There are also achievement points to be had, which seem to be coming at a decent rate. Ultimately though, I should be playing games because their fun, right? And there are definitely other games I could play that would be more fun. But maybe this game will be fun enough for the four more hours I'll need to beat it.
Maybe I'm just a game snob, but I don't like having to think about whether or not I want to continue playing a game. If it's good, I'll keep going. If it's not, forget it. But when you play a mediocre game and already have invested some time in it, the choice of whether or not to play it gets murkier than it really should.
So what am I to do with Silent Hill: Homecoming? I have decided to play it through to the end on two conditions. One, I will only play from one checkpoint to another. I don't ever want to get stuck want to quit between checkpoints ever again, and I won't know when the next one will arrive. The other condition? If this game commits another heinous crime against fun, then I'll bury it once and for all.
Up until the release of Mass Effect 2, the original Mass Effect was a game I thought I would never touch with a 10-foot pole. The premise of the game did not appeal to me at all. I was well aware of the pedigree that BioWare has in the role-playing game space, but I hate RPGs. The last real role-playing game I ever got into was Super Mario RPG on the Super Nintendo. It featured third-person shooting combat, which I like. But I also don't like managing an AI squad and I also don't like the idea that all of the combat is dictated by dice rolls rather than shooting ability. Ultimately, I passed on this game because it didn't sound like it was something I would like.
However, ever since Mass Effect 2 hit the streets, I've begun to reconsider my stance on the series. When Mass Effect 2 first came out, the word on the street was that it was a great RPG. With Mass Effect 2, people are already saying that this is already the best game of 2010, regardless of what else comes out this year. It sounds like they've really fine-tuned the experience from the first game and ironed out all of the technical problems that scared me away from the first game.
Maybe it's time for me to give this series a shot. Even though I traditionally don't like the style of game that Mass Effect is, the last few months have really opened my eyes up to gaming experiences I normally would have passed on. Batman: Arkham Asylum, Modern Warfare 2, Assassin's Creed 2 and Borderlands were all games that weren't initially on my radar and all of them rocked my socks. On a personal level, there could be some awesome gaming to be had from Mass Effect. On a bigger scale, if Mass Effect 2 is as big of a deal as everyone says it is, I'd like to have at least tried it to be able to speak intelligently about it.
I guess the only major catch is that Mass Effect really isn't a series you can start at the sequel. Since the game will carry over your save and all the decisions you made from the first to the second, starting fresh at the second game just doesn't seem right. If I'm going to do this, I want to get the full experience.
Once I get my job situation sorted out, I think I'll give the series a shot.
Image from Bandwidth Blog
