In Third Person

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.

It was the year 2000. Clutching my pre-order receipt that I've been in possession of for over a year, I went down to the local video game store to pick up my copy of Perfect Dark. Its spiritual predecessor, Goldeneye, blew my mind with a great single player campaign and at the time, God-like multiplayer. I must have put in hundreds of hours into that game, easily. Everything from trying to unlock all of the cheats in single player to all-out assaults on my friends and loved ones in multiplayer. Looking back, Goldeneye is one of those games that defined that whole generation of gaming.

With that said, I had high hopes for Perfect Dark. Everything that I had read and seen about the game seemed like an improvement on what was my favourite game at the time. I was quick to pre-order it, which would come back to burn me when the game was delayed multiple times. The anticipation was killing me. By the time the game was ready to ship, the reviews for the game were glowing and I would almost shake at the thought of finally getting my hands on it.

Did the game live up to the hype? I know a lot of people dismissed this game when it first came out because it wasn't Goldeneye 2, but they missed out on a game that was amazing for the time. Everything about it, from the graphics, to the controls, to the gameplay, trumped everything that Goldeneye had to offer. Single player had a lot more to offer in terms of mission variety and multiplayer was insanely customizable. To this day, Perfect Dark is one of the few FPS games with bots. Gears of War has horrible bots and Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have bots at all. Between my cousins and I, this was the go-to party game for a long time. I'm pretty sure all of our profiles have over 100 hours logged in, easily.


The only things that held it back were two-fold: it wasn't Goldeneye and it was a bit ahead of its time. Despite being the superior product, Perfect Dark did not have the charm of Goldeneye, which really hurt the game's perception among the masses. Among gamers that played the game, some were turned off by the technical failures of the game. It wasn't for a lack of tech-savvy on Rare's part. This was clearly a side-effect of pushing the Nintendo 64 farther than it was capable of going, even with the ROM expansion pack. The frame-rate would dip dramatically in spots, particularly in co-op, which is practically unplayable.

Maybe when Perfect Dark gets released on XBOX Live this month with HD graphics and upgraded frame-rate, people can finally overcome its technical faults and see it for what it is. Though maybe what it is now, is an out-dated game that is light-years behind the Halo's and Modern Warfare's of today. My expectations for the re-release won't reach the highs I felt about 12 years ago, but I'll be ready to toss out Laptop Guns on day one when this comes out.

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 original Bioshock came out of nowhere for me. It was a game that was a getting a lot of buzz from the journalists, but from the little I had heard or read about it, I didn't care at all for the game. In my eyes, it was just another first-person shooter. Then the demo came along and rocked my face into another planet. Everything about that game to the spooky atmosphere to the combat and the impressive plot progression of that demo had me sold. It was the first game to ever sell me based on a demo. I rushed out on the morning of release and bought it.

I beat that game in a week and was extremely satisfied with that experience. It had its faults, and I'm not so sure the game deserves the hyperbole it has received since its release, but it was an excellent game that deserved to be as successful as it was.

This is where corporate steps in and makes me feel really weird. It was shortly after the success of the first game that 2K announces a sequel to Bioshock. On there end, of course you make a sequel. The first one made a lot of money, so here's your chance to make even more money. 2K even mentioned possibly making five more Bioshock games on top of the original. I loved the first experience, but never did I feel like that game warranted a sequel. I still don't feel like there needs to be a Bioshock 2.


Everything up to this point for Bioshock 2 feels like a corporate cash-in. They put the sequel in motion the moment the money made sense, removed the original team from producing it, and did a bunch of focus tests "to see what people wanted". They keep hyping this up as the sequel to Bioshock. They brag about how the game is a return to Rapture, but who wants to go back there? They say that now you get to play as a Big Daddy. Spoiler Alert: You sort of play as a Big Daddy in the first game. It sucked. I know they're the cool characters on the box, but no, I don't want to play as them. Also, they've decided to put multiplayer into Bioshock 2.

That last point is extremely alarming as it is a clear sign of cashing-in. It actually disgusts me to see all of these games that aren't built with multiplayer in mind have multiplayer jammed into it because the corporate big-wigs saw how many hours gamers were putting into Halo and Call of Duty and figure they can do the same. Games like The Darkness, Condemned and Metroid Prime 2 had shoe-horned in multiplayer modes that didn't fit the game, aren't fun and nobody played. Even Assassin's Creed is getting online multiplayer. Ugh.

Before I go off on a tangent, let me get back to Bioshock 2. The original game was amazing. I will be the first person to eat my words and buy a copy of Bioshock 2 if the game is mind-blowing and respectful of the original. However, I can't help but feel that Bioshock 2 completely ignores the creative vision of the original and only exists to fatten the wallets of executives who couldn't give a damn about video games. It's that principle that makes me reluctant to dive back into the world of Rapture, even if it's good.

During the early days of the World War II shooter (early 2000s), controlling a character from first person and shooting dudes was not really something I wanted to do. After games like Perfect Dark and Goldeneye sucked away hundreds of hours of my life, there wasn't really anything out there like it that I wanted to play. None of the FPS games of that generation appealed to me and I couldn't get a handle on playing these styles of games using dual analog sticks. Yes, that means I even missed Halo 1 and 2 in their prime. In the case of Call of Duty, I couldn't handle a dual stick FPS and I didn't want anything to do with WWII. Both of those elements combined for a series I had 0 interest in ever playing.

Ever since I invested in an XBOX 360 though, I've since played a number of FPS games. Heck, literally half of my game stash are FPS games, even though I still don't consider myself that big of a fan of the genre. By the time the Modern Warfare games took off, I had overcome my problem of dual sticks. But did I care for a more realistic war setting for a game? Not enough to go out and buy the game on my own.

As the hype train built up to critical mass for the release of Modern Warfare 2, I started to think that maybe I've been missing out on something special all along. I would often look around to see if I could get Modern Warfare 1 for cheap and at one point almost caved.

Luckily for me, my mom won a limited edition XBOX 360 with two controllers and a copy of Modern Warfare 2. I'm still not sure exactly what to do with the second 360, but I'm sure my brother and I will find a good use for it as well as all the other stuff it came with. We immediately busted the box open to play Modern Warfare 2 and see what the hype was all about.



First off, I should address my initial problem of being disinterested in the story/setting. Has the game changed my perception on "realistic" war? Not really, no. I still don't care that this takes place in the somewhat present. I read through the story of the first game and beat the campaign of MW2 and still don't care. Even playing through the "No Russian" level didn't really do anything for me. I appreciate the effort they put into this to try and make it as "Blackhawk Down" as they could, but it just doesn't stroke me the right way. Until I played as Soap, the game never really gives you a good sense of who you are, why you're hear and why you're doing the things you're doing. Ultimately, it feels like a Hollywood action movie that's big on excitement and short on substance.

Does any of this take away from the game for me? Not really, no. Behind it's setting and bombastic plot is arguably the best FPS game I've ever played. The core mechanics of moving and shooting guys feels just right. All of your shots feel like they have the appropriate impact and everything reacts the way you think it would. There's no shortage of guns and weaponry that adds layers of depth to the game. Do you arm yourself with a machine gun or a shotgun? Do you choose a rocket launcher and become vulnerable up close? Do you take a riot shield to protect you in exchange for a gun slot?

Movement from walking, running, crouching and crawling is easy enough to do and adds a lot to the game. Where the game takes it above and beyond are the extra weaponry, such as the AC130 and Predator missiles. Dropping a huge bomb or shooting hundreds of bullets from a helicopter at soldiers on the ground never felt so awesome.

In campaign mode, every stage is exciting to the point of ridiculousness. Every scenario seems to have been carefully thought out to provide maximum impact of adrenaline. Due to this planning, the story can take a back seat to riding snowmobiles or defending a burger joint from Russia. Maybe the experience would have more of an impact on me if I cared for the story, but I'm fine as is shooting guys.

The new mode introduced in Modern Warfare 2 is Spec Ops, which is sort of a mix of co-op campaign and Horde mode from Gears of War 2. Instead of a full blown co-op campaign or straight-up Horde mode, Modern Warfare 2 takes the best bits of campaign mode, adds co-op, and provides players with a scoring system to track your progress. While I still would have preferred straight-up co-op as well as this, Spec Ops is extremely fun to play and a great addition to the overall package.

As for multiplayer, not much more I can say about it. With the number of modes, options, perks and RPG elements, it's easily one of the best multiplayer experiences ever crafted. For me specifically, I think it's wonderful that 4-player split-screen was added. I know that the feature is antiquated and hardly anyone uses it anymore, but I still love using it when I have people over at the house. We all grew up on Goldeneye, so splitting a screen four ways is no big deal. The only thing that could have made it better is the inclusion of bots when you're not online.


Now that I know what this whole Modern Warfare thing is all about, I feel almost sad that I've been depriving myself of this experience for the past two years. Has it changed my mind enough to try the Treyarch Call of Duty games that come out every other year? I'm not sure if I would go that far, but I look forward to putting in many hours into this one.

Last year, the original L4D rocked my socks hard as the ultimate zombie game. Gathering up three of your friends and attempting to survive the zombie apocalypse made it one of the best multiplayer experiences ever conceived. However, many also felt the game was a bit light on content.

Just one year later (and to the surprise and dismay of some) Left 4 Dead 2 arrives in stores with five new campaigns, four new survivors and a bevy of upgrades. For the most part, I feel like Valve has this down to a science.

At its core, L4D2 is what I wanted out of the first game. The core of what made the original is still here, augmented with a number of improvements. There are more campaigns, more guns, more special infected and more to enjoy.

The game comes with 5 campaigns, one more than the last and each chapter is generally longer than chapters from the first game. The new weapons do a great job of spicing things up, especially the melée weapons that are great up close and the grenade launcher that requires you to change your play style when you have it in your hands. Multiplayer is much more fleshed out with all of the campaigns being available for multiplayer as well as a bunch of new multiplayer modes.

For fans of the series and newbies alike, this package has a lot to offer and makes the old game pretty much obsolete. However, there are a few gripes I have with the game that keep it from perfection.



One of these gripes is more of a personal one. I really miss the original characters. Even though their absence from the sequel doesn't change the gameplay, I've grown attached to the original cast and the new cast just doesn't have the charm.

A gripe that does affect the gameplay is the difficulty balance. At normal difficulty, this game feels notably harder than the first, and at times downright cheap. There are times where you'll get rushed by a horde, boomer, spitter and hunter at the same time or some other combination that leads to insurmountable odds. A patch has been announced that supposedly includes some balance tweaks, so this may not be the case in the future.

Compounding these issues are your AI partners, who are dumber than doorknobs. They seem to have amazing accuracy when they decide to shoot, but they're prone to watching you get owned by a special infected for a while before deciding to help you out. In fact, they're even worse than your AI partners in the original. Try your best to play this with some friends and bypass the friendly AI completely.

In the wake of Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2 still manages to provide a FPS experience worth playing and easily surpasses the original as the ultimate zombie game. If you're looking to run through the zombie apocalypse, there's no better way to do it.