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Jul 21st, 2016 at 09:37:12 - Spec Ops: The Line (PC) |
I know the answers to my questions, but they've been bouncing around in my head for a week after playing the excellent Spec Ops: The Line: How is this game not more popular? How are people so into Call of Duty and Battlefield but not this? Why don't Call of Duty and Battlefield tackle tough questions about war like this game does? This is the best military-themed shooter I've played possibly ever. The story is brilliant. I don't care if it forces you into committing war crimes; that's the point: to think about this kind of thing from the perspective of soldiers who are stressed out, under fire, surviving, negotiating between commands, protocols, common sense, personal morality, ethical responsibility, mission objectives, situational factors, etc., etc. Until there are more games that quit letting us all play the hero all the time, we aren't going to de-glorify war and we aren't going to understand what it is like to be in situations where, yeah you theoretically have a choice, but it is constrained to the point of nonexistence or pure reaction and sometimes really bad things result.
War is traumatic, not entertainment, and that's what Spec Ops argues. It puts you in a terrible situation, a wrecked Dubai caught in a sand storm. Another Army group, the Damned 33rd, led by a guy named Konrad, had previously gone in en route from Afghanistan to evacuate the population, but they ended up taking over the ruined city and establishing martial law. So you and your team are sent in to recon for survivors after a radio broadcast from the Damned 33rd somehow gets out from behind the sand storm wall. You quickly learn that the Damned 33rd under Konrad has carried out atrocities against the Emirate civilians and foreign workers stuck in the city, so you (as the commander of your 3-man squad) decide to intervene. What follows is an epic journey to the heart of Dubai and ultimately through the mind of your character. This game takes clear influence from Heart of Darkness (character Konrad, character Kurtz, author Conrad) and Apocalypse Now.
I can't say too much about the story without spoiling key moments, but if you've read anything about this game, then you've read about the white phosphorous scene. It is horrific, far more upsetting than I had imagined. It makes me think what it might have been like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Tokyo and Dresden or some other place that was obliterated by people putting the "greater good" above the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. It makes me think about the people who gave the orders for these bombings and the people who created weapons of war and Oppenheimer's famous quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." It makes me think about drone attacks in the Middle East, and about the power of fear and moral crusading and the consequences of (competing) rigid ideologies.
And there are more scenes than just the white phosphorous one that elicit similar reactions, though it was by far the heaviest. But this is the kind of thing people need to experience, the perspective that people need to be exposed to, even if they disagree in the end. In video games, it's a perspective on war that hasn't been much explored, the perspective that war is hell; it is not about playing the hero. I look forward to playing some other recent games that challenge dominant perspectives on war, that challenge the good guy/bad guy dichotomy, that make me think. I just got This War of Mine during the last Steam sale, which provides a civilian perspective, and I've got Valiant Hearts queued up to play soon.
Spec Ops: The Line is a really important game thematically. It's not the most innovative shooter or anything. I found the gameplay fun, engaging, and polished, but this is the kind of game that by the end you are playing to see what happens. There is a cool mechanic with the sand. If you see sand falling or piled up outside a window, you can shoot the glass out and cause a sand avalanche that drowns or stuns enemies. Anyway, that's about it. Do yourself a favor and play this!
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Jul 18th, 2016 at 15:47:29 - Dungeons of Dredmor (PC) |
I played the tutorial and thought I'd soon get to this 8 months ago now! That's what happens when I get the bright idea to play a game at work. It doesn't happen. Except today. I re-played the tutorial, and played a couple games of Dungeons of Dredmor. Long story short, I died a few times and got bored.
Dungeons of Dredmor is a funny roguelike. It parodies all manner of RPG mechanic and trope. For example, you get quests by praying to shrines of Inconsequentia, Goddess of Sidequests, and they are utterly ridiculous stock fantasy stuff like "Azanoth the Usurper must die! And when you kill her, take the Ring of Fancy Runes and return it to Mrrgl the Mermaid in the River of the Merfolkian Peninsula." Then I think Azanoth or whatever item you need spawns in the level and you can happen upon completing the quest.
Weapons, armor, other items (and there must be hundreds), spells, etc., etc. all have silly descriptions that made me laugh plenty. Character creation is pretty wide open. There are like 100 perks you can choose, from like Swordsman (good with swords) to Pirate (you get a high Caddish stat), to Communist (this is hilarious; I leveled up enough to get the "Dialectical Materialism" feat, which gives you random Communist skills for a while). You choose like 7 or 8 perks, so there is a huge bunch of types of characters you can create. I chose pretty basic ones at first, then goofed around with some sillier sounding ones.
So you enter the dungeon, move square by square on the grid, find treasure, and kill monsters. Basically. It's a roguelike, so duh. Each square you move technically is like a turn, and enemies will take an action when you do. There are a bajillion items, and your inventory will fill up quickly. This was a source of frustration for me because you find so much shit all over the place. I started ignoring all reagents, then ignoring food because I was gaining levels and getting way strong for where I was and didn't need it. So it turned into pixel hunting on the ground and tedious inventory management after a little bit. You can sell items and buy more at stores and vending machines.
There are all sorts of other wacky things in the levels that I found. There are satanic transporters that teleport you around the level; there is a shrine to some fish god where you can make offerings of fish; there are statues of Dredmor (the titular big baddie) that you can smash for XP; there are tons of treasure chests, crates, and barrels to smash for loot, and more. If you like loot, you'll like this game. But you have to like to micromanage it a lot too...
I quit in the end because I found a set of "wizard keys." Intrigued, I used them and they whisked me away to my own private realm. I couldn't figure out exactly what to do there. There was a portal control, so I clicked it. It prompted me to type a name in, so I typed Aa and a portal opened. I shouldn't have done that because I got teleported to what I later learned was "Diggle Hell" and promptly massacred. The enemies usually aren't too difficult or unfair, but what the heck?! Why did I get teleported to Diggle Hell with overpowering enemies? Well, if I were to play again, I'd avoid messing with that teleporter.
When it comes down to it, there are much better roguelikes out there. Dungeons of Dredmor is fine, and I really like the humor, but if I want to die repeatedly, I'd rather do it in Spelunky or FTL. Glad to finally get this out of my backlog.
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Jul 12th, 2016 at 19:59:31 - Return to Castle Wolfenstein (PC) |
Ugh, 15-year-old FPS. It was fun for a while, but after 2 hours, it's just turned into me save abusing. Kill a room, save, kill a room, save, die, reload, kill an enemy, save, die, reload, etc. The story is ridiculous, as Wolfenstein should be, and it's way more difficult than I thought. Maybe I should have put it on the easiest difficulty. Oh well.
All the guns so far feel about the same to shoot. You just run and jump and crouch. No cover at all. The AI is really dumb. They'll just charge straight at you, run out of cover and stand there, and so on. I think that's why it's hard in part is because there's nowhere for me to run either in some of these open areas. And they hit hard, and there isn't a lot of health or ammo lying around. I had to use an ammo cheat!
I also had to use a health cheat once! I'd saved the game before this door, and when you open the door, you get hit with a sniper round for 20 damage. I had less health than that and so I died about 20 times before I got pissed off and looked up cheats. The funny thing? After I used the health cheat, I ran through the door, and the sniper didn't shoot. Funnier thing? I ran back that way after hitting a dead end, and got sniped and died. But thanks to the health cheat, I hacked my way past the sniper again.
Right now I'm fighting some super female soldiers and they are kicking my ass too. There are three of them in a big open room and I just can't handle them. I mean, more practice, sure, but I'm not having fun. I'm sure this was great in 2001, but not now. The game feels soooo dated. At least it's not like when I tried to replay Duke Nukem and realized that it was made before you could look up and down in FPSes. Haha, that sucked.
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Jul 8th, 2016 at 19:51:43 - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (PC) |
Played this a long time today, but am going to retire it. I think I bought it like 4 years ago, but I could never get it to work on Windows 7, even with patches and community support, on my old machine. Installed it on a whim the other week, and it works fine on this machine with Windows 8.1. Definitely glad to have played it. A beautifully flawed game.
The game's version of Los Angeles is super grim. Story NPCs are great characters, from Smiling Jack to the split personalities of the night club owner in the first hub (I didn't realize she was a split personality until 1 second before it was revealed; I thought the game was glitching and/or one of the characters was being silly and dressing the same as her sister) to the college-educated anarch in Downtown. The story is engrossing as well, enjoyed the quests, tracking people down, planting some explosives, learning about different vampire clans, etc. There is a ton of potential to explore vampire fiction in games and not have it be like Twilight.
The game is soooo reminiscent of Deus Ex, it's crazy. It looks similar, the atmosphere is the same, the movement and combat feel similar, similar sinister story, etc. As I thought about Deus Ex though when I replayed it years later, Vampire is showing its age. The graphics are still okay, and the art is good so it's nice to look at, but the combat suuuuucks. I mean, the ideas are cool. You get melee weapons, guns, and vampire powers. I can throw a swarm of bats at people, go invisible, and call on super strength, all very handy. But getting into fights is just a clickfest hoping you drain their life before they drain yours. Also interacting with objects in the environment is finicky. Sometimes the interact icon just doesn't show up, other times you can't click on it. Irritating.
It would be cooler if there were more of a traditional action RPG or adventure game skill tree. They sorta mapped D&D rules onto character creation and stat management. You get some starting feats, points to put into various attributes, which raises the value of skills. If you have played D&D, it's nothing you haven't seen. But I think it works to the game's disadvantage because your character doesn't noticeably improve much. The D&D system for CRPGs works so well because it's usually with squad-based games. You have four or five characters you're managing, and you're learning more spells and doing more micromanaging, seeing improvement in how skills and abilities interrelate as new enemies and situations are tossed at you. In this game, combat is just always me running around clicking left mouse to attack until someone dies. I can stealth in the beginning and get some stealth kills, sure, and I can toss some bats or use my super strength, but I'm still just clicking madly. It's lost its charm quickly, which is too bad.
Another way it's showing age is that, although the NPCs are neat and the dialogue is excellent, they don't feel very interactive. They're information dispensers. Vampire came out in 2004, so we hadn't seen any Mass Effects or Dragon Ages. More interactive NPCs were just around the corner for the most part, NPCs who seemed to KNOW you and your character and seemed to really be invested in what happened, or in what you said to them among the various dialogue options, or who frequently did things with you.
So anyway, I did enjoy this for the most part, but I get the gist of it, and I think I will use Vampire as the excuse to play a string of older games I have lying around on Steam.
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