I know it’s not technically the spring yet, at least not if you’re paying any attention to equinoxes, but here in Houston it sure feels like spring already. It’s 60, muggy, and the mosquitoes are into their spring training warm-ups and are looking forward to a promising season and probably a spot in the playoffs.
After two solid days of play, and years of previous experience, I feel it safe to say that MW2 passed the “15-Minute Test” with flying colors. That’s not to say it’s perfect however and this post is more pointedly a rant about the sour notes in an otherwise brilliant symphony of gaming goodness.
It’s arrived. I’ll see you all online.
Matt out.
I just finished sitting down with the demo for Left 4 Dead 2 and I have to say that I’m not terribly impressed.
Unabashedly, I’m a huge Valve supporter. I have every single game they’ve ever made and enjoyed all of them. I hold Valve and their game franchises in the highest regards. That’s why it’s so hard for me to dog on L4D2, but I almost feel like I have to.
My biggest complaint with L4D1 was that it was too short. Valve has always adhered to the “less is more” and “quality over quantity” theories of design, which is something I can appreciate. However, L4D1 was so short that I hardly felt that it had justified it’s full retail price tag. I played it over and over again with friends and inside of a month we had grown tired of it’s 4 measly campaigns. Yes, technically there are multiple levels per campaign but when the entire campaign can be finished in under 3o minutes, they barely even count as levels.
I have to admit that when I heard they were making L4D2, I wasn’t surprised that people were upset. The first game was so short, people had figured they’d continue it by ending levels down the line. While they’ve promised to do so, I don’t think even if they had one or two more entire campaigns to it, it’ll really be considered a full game even then. L4D2 will apparently follow in a similar fashion, with just a couple campaigns when it ships.
I’m sorry, but there just isn’t enough meat on the bone to get me to bite this time. Four more campaigns would bring the franchise to 9 total (4+1 original and 4 new). With a retail of $60 a piece, that’s 9 levels for $120. I’m sorry Valve, I love ya, but I just don’t see the value.
This compounds when you actual play the demo. The levels seem small, the textures and colors seems washed out, and the gameplay is identical even despite what Valve is trying to spin as large improvements. Yes, the zombies now take localized damage (legs, arms, head, can all be shot separately), but when you’re blasting away with a shotgun, it really doesn’t matter. I’m hitting legs, arms and head all at the same time. The zombie levels in CoD:World at War offered better locational damage. They also added melee weapons. While the sound of hitting a zombie in the head with a frying pan is humorous, it hardly take the place of a pistol with unlimited ammo, so picking one up is hardly a good move offensive power wise. They “added” weapons, sorta. They added models of weapons, but kept the basic selection the same. There’s now a pump-action shot gun, a nice chrome hunting shotgun and an assault shotgun. Guess what? They’re all still shotguns. You still are making a choice between shotgun or uzi, they just have a couple extra flavors.
So, they hardly changed the game mechanic, the outside daylight levels are boring and washed out and it’ll still be a short limited depth game. What exactly is the upside here? Oh, that’s right, it’s made by Valve, so it’s polished and almost perfectly executed, which is true. It’s as solid and as fun a shooter as you’ll ever find. It’s settings are awesome (Savannah, as a level, epic), it’s design is awesome, it’s characters are funny, all that good stuff. It just all comes back around to simple economics. A game with four levels compared to a game with twenty levels, for the same price, is hardly a comparison at all. It’s really a “one steak or a hundred hamburger” type of consumer decision. I’m not saying one is better than the other, I’ve certainly had my “I need a good steak” moments, but that’s what this is going to come down to.
As much as a love zombies, and as much as a love Valve, I just can’t make this one make sense. Unless I see some gameplay videos or some sort of mutliplayer aspect that just blows me away, I’m afraid that L4D2 is just going to have to go into the “wait for a sale” category before I bother picking it up. Hell, even Bungie realized with ODST that it couldn’t sell a 2 hour game for $60 so they threw in a new multiplayer mode and a whole second disk of Halo 3 bonus stuff. Come on Valve, prove me wrong. Show me that this is worth $60. Oh, and while you’re at it, where the hell is Half-Life 3? You’re obviously not busy making zombie levels, so let’s get to it fellas. Chop chop.
Halo 3: ODST is a solid addition to the Halo universe, but, at least in my opinion, fails to advance the franchise or add anything substantial that couldn’t have been added via downloadable content. It’s not to say that ODST isn’t without it’s merits, of which there are many, it’s simply that those merits don’t add up to enough to push the game into either a new dedicated user base or a whole new product of it’s own.
ODST is first and foremost a Halo game. You can take away all the super powers, the regenerating health, the duel-wielding guns and massive green death-machine that is the Master Chief, but at it’s core it’s very much the same game. And why shouldn’t it be? Bungie long ago perfected the formula for FPS goodness that has launched the to the top of the multiplayer world. They know how this works and they deal in it every day. The game has solid mechanics, good action, very good (and well voice acted) characters and believe it or not, not a half bad story. Actually, I enjoyed the story of ODST more so than I did Halo 3. Then again, ODST is aimed more at my tastes. I enjoy a more tactical, dark, creeping sort of FPS as opposed to Halo 3’s more “in your face neon” variety. ODST successfully has all the subtlety that Halo 3 lacks.
It’s downfall is that it’s the length of one, perhaps two, of Halo 3’s campaign story levels. And that’s not for a lack of trying on my part either. I finished the story, on Hard, in under 4 hours. I was left with a feeling of brief satisfaction followed by wanting more and being pissed that it simply wasn’t there.
Like nearly all the Halo games, I just wanted more substance. Bungie can create just interesting, exciting worlds, characters and gameplay and yet somehow they’ll all are simply vanilla. There is no FPS more generic and uninteresting than Halo. There is also no more perfectly executed and perfectly balanced experience than Halo. It’s quite the oxymoron. How can something be so loved, played and enjoyed and yet be so completely basic?
Regardless, ODST is a comparable shooter, but simply fails to bring anything to the table in terms of “above and beyond” interest. You’ve played this game before. All story arches and little interesting collectible audio logs with back story aside, you’ve played this game, in spirit, a thousand times. Perhaps that’s what people enjoy, the familiarity? It’s like watching Monday night football when you don’t care about the teams. You just watch because it’s football and you like football. ODST is a FPS, and you like first person shooters.
Bad sports analogies aside, there is enough here to warrant a rental of a borrow from a friend, but hardly enough for $60. You can thank me later for taking one for the team. A 4-5 hour story, no matter how compelling, just doesn’t equal out to full retail price. Especially with nerfed multiplayer.
Speaking of which, Firefight mode is both awesome and completely bullshit all at the same time. Again, it’s not a new concept in terms of game play, it’s more of your standard survival mode fair, but it’s extremely well done and a blast to play. Unfortunately it’s completely and totally defeated by it’s lack of XBL match making. That means that you can’t play it with anyone on XBL, unless of course they’re in your friends list, have the game and want to play at the same time you do. You can’t, by design, just hop online and get a quick game in. The greatest single system for playing video games in our current gaming culture, and a direct partnership with the creators and operators of that system, and Bungie still couldn’t manage to open it up to the masses. That’s a huge party foul. I’m sorry, but when you literally create the game AND system that defines a console, and a title in your flagship franchise doesn’t have adequate multiplayer support, that’s bullshit any way you slice it.
So, ODST is really a strange duck. It has everything that made Halo great, but interesting new characters and a fun single-player survival mode, but it’s also ridiculously short and strangely crippled. To which, almost as an afterthought, Bungie throws in a disk that has all of the previously released Halo 3 multiplayer maps on them, all 2 of them (no, Forge does not count). In what I’d consider extremely insulting, everyone who loves Halo and already has all these maps packs gets a disk that they may as well use as a coaster, where as the rest of us, we get extra maps for a game we don’t really play and, after taking a look at them, I can’t really understand how anyone was tricked into buying them in the first place. Are Halo fans really that thick headed that they’ll shell out $10 a pop for a map pack with 2-3 maps in it? That’s nuts. I’m sorry, maybe it’s just me, but the pricing model of downloadable content is complete and total shit. After paying $60 for a game, you want me to pay another $20 to have the “full experience”? Fuck you pal. My price point is $50, anything over that and it better be pretty damn special, and $30 over that is simply out of the question.
All this boils down to an easy to summarize experience. Halo 3: ODST is great for a rainy weekend when you don’t have anything else to do. It will, however, be completely and totally forgotten after the wave of Modern Warefare 2 insanity that’s about to hit. If you have ODST already, hang on to it, let your friends borrow it, whatever, in a month it won’t matter. If you’re thinking about picking it up, I hope I saved you the trouble. You can thank me later.
Matt out.
Well, E3 has come and gone, announcements have been made and with one or two exceptions, everyone had a pretty good idea what to expect this year. While I’m obviously interested in what the game industry releases in the next 8 months, I thought it would be fun to think about gaming’s next generation. These ideas might require advancements in technology, be licensing and logistical nightmares or just plain old bad ideas, but I thought it might be an interesting exercise anyway. So, join me if you will, for what I feel are 15 games that just NEED to not only happen, but be so awesome that they advance the genres they represent.
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