by Matt | Jun 30, 2008 | Games
In what I’m calling a stroke of insanity, I picked up a Nintendo DS Lite last week. I saw one of the hard to find candy-apple red ones in Target and I decided I needed it. My reasoning was that it would be a good time killer when we’re up at the hospital with my father-in-law. Turns out its one of the best things I’ve ever purchased, time killing or other wise. It’s an awesome little device. The screens are bright and clear, the games look good, they’re simple and fun and most important, it’s very hackable.
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by Matt | Jun 12, 2008 | Games
I had a chance to check out the demos for both Civ:Revolutions and Battlefield:Bad Company this week. Neither of which really blew my skirt up. I’ll start with Civ since it’s franchise is near and dear to my heart. Not to say that Battlefield isn’t, but the most recent incarnations of that franchise have repeatedly left a bad taste in my mouth. Post-coffee-acidic almost.
Sometimes, it would be good, even after years of hard work, for someone in these development studios to speak up and say “Yeah, this just isn’t working”. That’s how I feel about the new Civilization port to the 360. That somewhere along the line, even those who were developing it, had to actually play it on the 360 to test it out. At that point you’d think they’d realize that sometimes a genre/style of game simply doesn’t work on a console. Turn based strategy games are a good example. It’s watered down, stripped of all it’s juicy bits, glossed up for a more mass market and lacks all the depth that comes with the PC versions. It would be like taking a weeks worth of History Channel specials and creating a 30 minute Saturday morning cartoon with them. Yeah, the basic idea is still there, but it’s become comical in it’s presentation. This is both metaphoric and actual when we’re talking about this game. Although Civ 4 for the PC had a slight stylized edge to it, it was really only present when talking to your advisors or other leaders. They looked, well, computer generated, and for good reason, they are. Civ:R takes this literally to the cartoon realm. They are talking cartoons and it’s ridiculous. What’s worse is that for every major decision, and every minor encounter (random roaming barbarians for example) they pop up on scream and yell at you in gibberish (ala The Sims) about something the like/don’t like and refuse to shut up or go away. I looked into the options and I didn’t see any way to turn them off. All I could do is turn their volumes down but that leaves them jumping around on the screen like retarded mute mimes. They’ve also reduced/streamlined features for the console version, again, because the scope of the original was too big to squeeze it all in. Did you like building roads, having workers, managing the happiness of your cities, building outposts on specific resources and so forth? Cause I did, and NONE of that is in the console version. Roads aren’t built where you want them, you merely choose two cities (that you control) and it builds a strait line between the two. I don’t know about anyone else, but when I was about to attack another country, I would build roads right up to the edge of their land, that way my legions of troops could march right in in fewer turns. That ability is gone. Workers? Automated, and you can’t assign them specific tasks, like growing food, gathering resources, working the special resource nearby, or building said roads. Nope. All automated, and not in the way that would be helpful. I guess that’s ok because they’ve taken away the NEED for food and happiness, and anything else that made the city management part of Civ fun. Now the only benefit to building Wonders are paltry tech boost that you probably are about to get anyway. “Oooh, if I build the Colossus for 50 turns, I get Navigation, sweet!” Too bad you can research Navigation in 5 turns.
So, when you consider buying Civ:Revolution in the near future, remember that while it is a Civ game, and it does have the basics required to call itself that, it is in fact the Saturday morning cartoon version of it’s older, wiser and more in-depth brother. If you’re ok with spending $60 on what, visually, looks like a XBLA game you’d spend $4 on, then by all means, knock yourself out.
That brings us to Battlefield: Bad Company. This one is a little tougher to crack because there were elements that I honestly enjoyed. Then I tried to play it. Let me start at the beginning. BF:BC is primarily a single player storyline set in this larger “battlefield sandbox” style environment. Ok, not bad so far. It’s also supposed to be comical, which surprisingly it does an ok job with. The visual aspects are stunning. The combination of the Battlefield gameplay engine with the Frostbite visual and physics engine and full Dolby 7.1 is truly awesome. Thing like fog, smoke and “grit” feel real and look impressive and the sound is off the friggin hook. When you’re under fire, the game turns down the ambient sound and blurs your focus slightly to give you a real feel for the moment. You can hear yourself breath, see the incoming fire, and you respond accordingly. Think the opening beach scene from Saving Private Ryan when Tom Hanks is just kind of looking around wondering what to do next. It has that feel to it. And that’s an impressive compliment, especially coming from me. So, if it’s funny, nicely executed and beautifully done visually, what’s wrong with it? It plays like crap. The controls are clunky, the weapons are weak and unresponsive, the vehicles don’t handle at all, and most of all it just don’t “feel right”. Any gamer knows what I mean by that. It’s what separates a good game from a great game. Doom 3 was a breakthrough visually, but it just didn’t play properly. It wasn’t fun to play. Battlefield 2142, same problem. It’s like comparing Call of Duty 4 and Army of Two. Both are combat/action games, both have nice environments, physics, concepts, and art. Ao2 is just painful to play for more than 20 minutes. Things simply don’t feel right. That’s why it’s on the shelf and CoD is still in the tray after 6 months. I digress. Compounding the problems with BF:BC is the franchises long history of strictly multiplayer games and the fact that, if anything, having a great multiplayer component should have been a given. There’s no reason and more importantly, no excuse for them making a mediocre multiplayer experience. It played worse than the single player, mostly because the impressive visuals were turned off to make the multiplayer smoother. Everything about the multiplayer was disappointing. This makes me wonder where the quality multiplayer development team went. Apparently they didn’t go to Kaos Studios while they were developing Frontlines, and they sure as hell aren’t still at Dice. How a developer with nothing but multiplayer experience can screw up a multiplayer experience is truly mind boggling.
If you’re thinking about getting BF:BC for it’s multiplayer, don’t even bother. If you’re looking for what might be a fun, yet possibly game mechanically speaking, frustrating single player game, then you might enjoy it.
by Matt | Jun 6, 2008 | Culture, Games
I rarely cut and paste. I find it demeaning to the medium of blogs as a whole. In this case however, it couldn’t be helped. I had tried, repeatedly, to sum up my compassion for computer gaming for some time, in hopes that I could convey how much I love the platform even though I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time with the 360 version of Call of Duty lately. Tycho, as always, delivers a far more eloquent description of the situation than I could hope to. I present it, distilled to it’s purest, the reason PC gaming will always be part of my life.
“On a weekly basis, we’ve got apocalyptic news about the PC as a platform interleaved with assertions of a phoenix-like resurgence. The phoenix-like resurgence portion is rarely built on any stable metrics, so it’s impossible to know the vigor of this reconstituted sovereign with any precision. The important takeaway point is that everything is incredible, perpetually so, even while publishers, developers, and many of your own (supposed) friends choose to grip gamepads during their increasingly constrained leisure hours.
I don’t think you can have any perspective on this industry unless you’ve spent time with PCs. You need to know that when Insomniac is talking about how they’re going to have sixty players, and squads, and so forth, that Battlefield 2 had sixty-four players, and squads, and maps for specific playercounts in two-thousand five. In 1999, I played a game of Tribes with a hundred and twenty-eight players over a modem.
…
What I’m talking about is perspective. If you want to look into a Goddamned crystal ball, spend some time with a tooled-up personal computer.
…
I’ll never be able to divest myself of the intense nostalgia I have for this platform. I can’t be without it. But if a person wants to play videogames in their spare time and not perform mechanical surgery on their equipment, that doesn’t make them an idiot. It makes them a pragmatist.”
Epic.
by Matt | Apr 28, 2008 | Aggravation, Games
If I hear one more website put forward the notion that the new GTA is not only better than sliced bread but in fact redefines the loaf, someone is going to have a substantial loss of blood. I think I’m the only one that realizes that we’re heading into the summer video game season and summer is always dry and crappy. There is nothing more transparent than the summer video game release schedule. It’s the polar opposite of the movie schedule.
It’s simple. Games that didn’t make it for the holiday sales push, get released in the first two retail quarters of the next year. Everything else either has an unannounced release date or is slated for winter.
This doesn’t stop the more, shall we say, monetarily influenced media outlets from decrying that this year is going to be the best year of all time for video games. This is going to be such a fantastic year.
Horse shit.
While the video game as a medium of entertainment may do very well this year, the upcoming release schedule is a bit lack luster.
Even if I gave a shit about Grand Theft Repetitive, which I don’t, what exactly am I supposed to look forward to for the next 8 months?
Ninja Gaiden, maybe, we’ll see. Metal Gear? There’s never been a more over rated franchise. Killzone and Far Cry? No thank you. Fable 2? I’ll buy it but it won’t be earth shattering. Spore? Starcraft 2? Ha, if those games even get released this decade I’ll be surprised. The only, and I mean only, games that I’m really looking forward to this year are the Jason Bourne game and the new Soul Calibur. But those are games with limited replayability and limited depth, respectively. The latest Jedi games (Force Unleashed) looks promising as well but it won’t be out until the end of September. That’s it. 3, maybe 4 mediocre titles? That’s pathetic.
They’re not really any triple-A titles this year. No Halo, No new Mario, no Half Life. They think they’ll be able to pull off a Gears of War 2 release by November, but I doubt it. Just you wait. It’ll be “Christmas or Q1 2009” by the end of the summer, I guarantee.
“And although the gaming business has been booming for years, 2008 will surely prove to be its breakout year.”
This statement was apparently written by either a CNN corespondent or someone who just “figured out” how to play Peggle… or both. Maybe I’m too involved in my own hobby to have an outside perspective, but I’d say that 2006 was gaming’s breakout year. Unless I’m mistaken, all three major platforms we launching, game sales were up 200% and people were lining up to get there hands on’em. If that’s not a breakout hit for an industry that had the reputation for corrupting the minds of children, I don’t know what is.
So please CNet, save your ill conceived declarations that this year will be so huge for gaming that it will eclipse all others before it. When we get a Halo 4, GTA5, Guitar Hero 6, Rock Band 2, Half-Life 3, Doom 5, Call of Duty 5 year, THAT will be a breakout year for gaming.
2009 might be that year. We’ll have to see. There are certainly enough big franchises working on their next incarnations for it to happen. I doubt we’ll see any major releases like that this year, so that chance of them happening next year are pretty good. But for now we have to endure a long, dark, video game free summer. Be prepared my friends. The drought is upon us.
by Matt | Mar 25, 2008 | Games, Reviews
Now that I’ve finished it, it’s safe to talk about it. That’s my rule. That’s why you haven’t seen a review of half the games from this winter (see previous post for aforementioned rule breaking).
Army of Two isn’t a bad game. At least not in the same way that American Idol Karaoke is a bad game. It’s entertaining, fun to play, has good current-gen graphics and has a fairly interesting storyline. Army of Two’s problem however is that it just doesn’t try hard enough. Whether this is a direct result of EA putting it “back in the oven” and delaying it a few months to iron out the kinks or if it was actually worse off in the first place will always remain a mystery.
The fact remains that it was a great concept for a game that was unfortunately executed poorly. Let me give you an example. In style, the game closely resembles Gears of War. Third person perspective, lots of swearing, “military” guys kicking ass in a tag-team sort of way. We’re only really swapping aliens for terrorists. Unfortunately, where Gears shines is in things like the cover system, creative camera angles and deeper style. Ao2 has one of the weaker cover systems I’ve seen in a current generation game. Gears, Rainbow and even CoD (which doesn’t have one) put it to shame. You can “slide” towards an object of cover by pressing Y and you’ll grapple on to it in the loosest sense. Pressing Y will also randomly cause you to vault over the object or forward tumble roll towards it. This can happen if you’re already standing near it of course, resulting in equally confused players and AI enemies. You don’t necessarily “look out” from behind cover. Holding the left trigger which lets to you aim, will automatically stand you up and zoom in your sights. I can only assume this was an attempt to save buttons by the developers. It’s a novel concept, but when you’re in the middle of a fire fight with 30 guys surrounding you, standing up and aiming isn’t exactly a brilliant tactic. You’re dead before you can get a shot off. There is an alternative however. Blind firing from behind cover typically produces unworldly results. I’ve scored headshots from 50 yards away by blind firing. This takes realism in the complete opposite direction. No long do you actually need to “aim”, swinging a wild arch of fire around proves sufficient enough. You can imagine my frustration when attempting to “play the game correctly” only to discover it doesn’t really give a shit.
So realism is completely gone. We’ll put that down as a given. Why then, does my super solider need ammo at all? Surely he’s so super awesome to hit people blindly that he doesn’t need actual bullets to do it. Oh no, no, that would be too weird. No you still have to pick up ammo is the typical ways. This is of course, not a law of the universe that’s shared by your partner. At any given time you can tell you partner to lay down cover fire. In doing so he gets the attention (the game calls it “aggro”) of all the enemies allowing you to sneak past or behind someone or something and give it a firm kick in the balls. That’s a great idea, but your partner NEVER runs out of ammo. You, yourself, depending on your gun, usually haave about 250-300 rounds. At 20-30 rounds per mag, you’ve got about 10 mags, give or take. Considering that you’re using your own gun like a fucking bullet hose, you’re always running out of ammo. I spent the vast majority of the game telling my AI buddy to lay down covering fire not so that I could kill bad guys but so that I could sneak around and loot their already dead corpses in peace. At one point I left him firing at will on a hidden enemy, walked away, went to the bathroom, made a sandwich, came back and not only was he still firing, but he hadn’t managed to kill any of the dozen bad guys near us. Useless would be an understatement.
Co-Op is really the only point of this game. It’s single player is so damn short (6 missions???) that it’s hardly worth multiple run throughs except if you’re playing with someone who hasn’t played it before. It’s really the perfect example of what I call a B&B game. Buddies & Beer. It’s the game that you get out when you’ve got 4 or 5 guys over and you feel like blowing some shit up and don’t really care about the specifics. You’re tired of playing 4 player split-tiny-ass-screen Halo and want to try something new. This will keep you entertained for about a 12 pack. Beyond that it’s not worth it any more.
It’s got a smattering of semi-interesting play modes that should keep even the most bored co-op player busy for at least a little while. It is however, kind of pointless to keep replaying the single player missions. After beating the game once you get all the weapons unlocked and all you’re playing towards then is in-game money. The in-game money is used to buy things that don’t make a damn bit of difference… like crappy face masks. Apparently, realizing that changing your mask from “creepy gray” to “creepy green” isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be, the developers decided to entice someone to actually do it by making it an opportunity for achievement points. Oh, and lest I forget the “pimped guns” you can purchase. Ever wanted a gold and diamond crushed AK-47? Yeah, me neither.
In all fairness, I didn’t give the online modes a try. Presumably, that’s where you make the “big bucks” so that you can buy, umm, more masks. I doubt I would have wanted to play with other random XBL users and my buddy Dane (the only person who seemed mildly interested in the game) wasn’t around.
Wrapping this up, it’s not that Ao2 is a bad game, it’s got attitude, humor, stuff blowing up, but when you get down to the finer points, you get more content out of any number of action movies that have been edited for broadcast TV. It’s over too quickly, it has zero re-playability and without friends around to go through it with you, it’s pretty pointless. I think this will be a trade in, and that concept is something I’m against on principle. It would make a fine rental, but beyond that, don’t bother.
6/10
by Matt | Mar 18, 2008 | Games
I’ve been trying to finish Army of Two for damn near a week now and just haven’t been able to do it simply for lack of time. Yesterday, my day off, I tried at least a dozen times to play, each on being interrupted by power outages (storms yesterday). I’m trying to finish it because I’ll be picking up Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 tonight and I didn’t want anything getting in my way of playing it exclusively. I’ve been bad about my own rule and I wanted to try and avoid breaking it again.
Matt’s Law # 17 – New video games should only be embarked upon after finishing the previously purchased game.
This winter I broke that rule all over the place. Once CoD4 came out, the gloves were off. There were way too many games and too little time. I still haven’t finished Assasins Creed or Guitar Hero 3 on Hard. I usually don’t have a problem putting down a game if it’s lost my interest, I call that the extended version of rule 16.
Matt’s Law # 16 – Video game that are playable after 15 minutes have passed the “15 minute test” and are typically safe to continue being played with a high probability of enjoyment. Games failing the “15 minute test” are subject to mockery and ridicule.
Both the afor mentioned unfinished games have passed my personal 15 minute test with ease. They’re fun games. I just never went back and finished them.
Army of Two has been fun, more fun in co-op mode than single player, but fun none-the-less. Since I doubt I’ll be going back to it outside of a co-op oppertunity, it seemed a shame to never finish it once R6 drops. Sadly, that might not happen. What various reviewers have called “the perfect shooter” is waiting at a friendly neighborhood retail establishment for me. No, I didn’t pre-order it. I don’t do that anymore. I’m talking about Target. Or, if Target is getting theirs tomorrow (as GS and EB have already told me they are… aka: what good are you people?) I’ll begrudgingly go across the street to Wally World because I know they probably have an entire pallet of it sitting, in a shambles, somewhere in their electronics section.
So, if you’re looking for me for the next couple weeks, I’ll be busy whacking terrorist scum.
Matt out.
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