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.

Sonic has had a hard knock life ever since his heyday on the Genesis. He had a ton of problems transitioning into 3D (which most people say the Sonic games never really pulled off well), he's been held back by stupid sidekicks, his old games have been shoddily ported to every platform imaginable, his new games have been riddled with gimmicks, and he's even been subjected to bestiality. Eww.



I'm not going to go into detail as to why Sonic has sucked, but I'll summarize most of it in once sentence.

"The core ideas that made Sonic fun in the first place didn't translate well into 3D."

With that said, the Internet is losing it after Sega just announced the upcoming release of Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1, which returns to the classic Sonic-only 2D style that popularized the hedgehog in the first place.

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.

A few nights ago, after a match of Street Fighter IV, I received a message from the guy I just beat. Usually, when I receive these types of messages, it's either something like "good game" or some form of verbal harassment. This time though was different.

He asked me in a voice message (not in an exact quote, but you'll get the idea), "How do you do moves and combos? I've only had this game for 2 days."

My instinctive response was to refer him to the training mode. He then replies with something like, "I know there's a training mode, but what buttons do I hit? I don't understand this."

Uh oh.

If you know anything about Street Fighter, you know that's a very ambiguous question to ask and an even weirder one to answer. Moves are dependent on your character and button configuration, while combos mostly rely on the "canceling" system, all of which is far too much to explain within the 250 character limit over XBOX Live.

I learned how to play Street Fighter IV primarily because I've been playing Street Fighter II for almost 20 years now. We learned by either playing similar-skilled people in person at the arcade or at home, or played with people better than us that were willing to give us pointers. Even back then, Street Fighter was a complex game to learn and you couldn't really get better unless you dedicated a lot of time and effort into getting good at it.

That environment to go hands-on and learn doesn't really exist anymore.

There is no arcade scene pretty much anywhere outside of Japan. People aren't really getting together to play at other people's houses like they used to. Fighting games, while making a comeback, are still not even close to mainstream. If you strictly play online, odds are you're playing a seasoned veteran who will just beat you up and go without giving you any sort of advice. If you're not able to spot patterns or observe the right things in an online match, you'll just get beat repeatedly without learning anything.

So how do you learn now? Well, unlike my generation, there is more resources on the Internet than ever before. Just Google it and you'll pull up a ton of beginner guides. There are also a ton of beginner and expert videos to watch on YouTube. Those helped me transition into IV a lot, but part of that was because I have a Street Fighter II foundation to build on. Without that, reading the guides and learning from the videos becomes much more difficult.

I hope the guy who messaged me on XBOX Live eventually figures the game out to a point where's he's happy playing it. Sadly, the best ways to learn just don't naturally occur in today's gaming environment.

This fighting game needs no introduction, as many still hail it as one of the greatest fighting games of all-time.

To me though, I'm basically jumping in cold. Back when this hit the arcades, I was a bit too young for my parents to let me just go to the mall and hang out at the arcades. Also, during the few chances I got to play this game, I was destroyed by a pro every single time.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is probably the fighting game I've always wanted to get into that I never really got a fair shake at. Now that it's out for XBOX Live and PSN, we'll see if I can find out where my curly mustache is at.

So far, it's fun, but on a very base level. I can do special moves, but all of the intricacies of the game are lost on me. I've won a few matches, but that was thanks mainly to some Sentinel button mashing and Cable super spamming. I'll definitely work on my game so that I'm not a complete embarrassment.

With Street Fighter IV as currently my main game, and with Blazblue around the corner, will this find room in my regular rotation? Or will I forever be the New York Knicks?