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Jan 21st, 2016 at 22:28:10 - Tribes: Ascend (PC) |
Wow I got really busy really fast. I haven't found time to write this and it's been a week. Tribes is a lot of fun. I used to play old school Tribes in high school. This is really similar. You ski around and kill opponents. Hi Rez did a fantastic job designing maps around skiing. If you've never played Tribes, you don't just run around the map like most shooters, or even jetpack around. No, you ski. If you hold space bar on a down slope, you gain speed. You can then jetpack over a hill or keep holding space bar and ski up it, then jetpack off the top, launching you. Hit the next down slope, while still holding space bar, and you can continually pick up speed. This is "skiing." And you have to get good at it or you are utter cannon fodder.
In addition to getting good at skiing, you must become adept at shooting people who are skiing (i.e., moving reeeeeally fast) and shooting people while skiing, forwards and backwards. Then you have to get really good at shooting people who are jetpacking through the air. You've got to develop a sense of when and where people will land and fire at the ground at the right moment. It's a really fun, fast game, and there's a lot of dancing around, jetpacking up and down trying to outmaneuver your opponents, trying to make them think you're about to land, then jetpacking to the right or quickly skiing somewhere else. It's very cat and mouse I guess, and all the modes I played have this cat and mouse, pursuer and pursued feel.
I had intended to reach Rank 7 and open up a world of possibilities. You see, until rank 7, only team deathmatch and capture the flag are available to play. You gain experience when your team wins, by holding the flag, and getting other gameplay achievements. I was very much enjoying team deathmatch and capture the flag, particularly the twist on team deathmatch whereby there is a flag and whichever team is holding it their kills count double. So you want to be fragging people, but you also want to carry the flag, protect your flag carrier, and gun for theirs. It's an extra element of fun (and urgency to either get those 2x kills or avoid dying so you don't give the opponent double points!).
So I finally hit Rank 7. I eagerly went to the server lobby and what did I find? Oh, team deathmatch and capture the flag are pretty much the only modes anyone plays. Hahaha. There are several other modes, including "arena," which is just a 5v5 team deathmatch with a last man standing element, and some others that no one was playing. Oh well. I'll keep this installed and maybe play some capture the flag every now and then. I was looking forward to something surprising and fresh after Rank 7. Still looking for that multiplayer shooter that's going to stick. Trying CounterStrike next.
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Jan 8th, 2016 at 22:15:27 - Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (PC) |
I enjoyed this, though I'd heard a lot of people trash-talking it. That's what happens when you try to follow up the original Amnesia I guess. It's been a long time since I played Amnesia, so I can't identify everything that's different with this. I do know that you're in less mortal danger, so it's not as scary. The pigmen in A Machine for Pigs are largely there for atmosphere, and they're really easy to avoid when you have to. There is no more sanity meter, which is a shame, because that was a defining feature of Amnesia. I fondly remember the bugs crawling on my screen when I was going out of my mind from fear, and myself getting more and more anxious the deeper into madness my character went. No such thing in this one. Also, did you have to find torches in the first one? Or keep it lit or something? Maybe...But in this one, you have a trusty lantern that for some reason never burns out. Basically, you don't have to manage anything. And the puzzles are simple and the environments are pretty linear and you are guided efficiently from A to B.
What did shine was the atmosphere. You descend deeper and deeper into a machine (for pigs) chasing after your children. The machine is disgusting; it's a processing facility for like engineering pig people from pigs and...people. There's filth everywhere, steam, blood, guts, grime, gross water, leaks, rust. And it's always creaking and hissing and roaring. The sound design was possibly my favorite part of the game, simple but effective. Visually, not terribly impressive aside from the machine aesthetic. Honestly I thought it looked like crap, and there are some weird color effects. Much of the game is tinged with a gray-blue. Not sure why they went with that. There are also irritating visual disturbances your character has when he is talking with the Engineer. Those make you slow down and you can't see straight until they are done talking. Also I immediately noticed tons and tons of the same posters and signs. This isn't a big or long game, and I wish there was some more variation in the rooms and things, especially in the beginning. Like 3 minutes in and I'd seen the same things hanging on the wall and seen about all the types of furniture I'd see for the next 4 hours.
Story is revealed piece by piece, which was fine until I started getting really confused toward the end about who various characters were. It could have been clearer with its plot turns, as that sapped some of my enjoyment. But do yourself a favor and go read a plot summary at the end, and it makes sense enough, though it does get oddly supernatural. And I have to say, this machine (for pigs) is really impractical and would never work ideologically either. The main character(s) are convinced that processing whores and beggars and orphans into pig-people will somehow redeem humankind...uuh. ok. I really don't follow the logic. It gets weirder.
Anyway, neat game. Not essential, but I'm glad I played it.
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Jan 5th, 2016 at 20:05:36 - Planetside 2 (PC) |
Backstory: I downloaded some multiplayer FPS games (Planetside 2, Tribes: Ascend, and Counterstrike: Global Offensive) because I played some Star Wars: Battlefront at a friend's house a few weeks ago and had a lot of fun. I haven't played a good multiplayer FPS in a long time. That used to be one of my go-to genres, probably ending a decade or so ago when I discovered WoW and entered a long MMORPG phase. But I used to be pretty killer at Unreal Tournaments, Call of Duties, etc., and figured I should pick a good shooter to play!
SO, I'd long heard of Planetside 2 and wanted to check it out, one of these "MMOFPS" games. Sure enough, it's a persistent shooter and there are hundreds of players in the same spot at the same time. To say it's hectic is an understatement. I didn't quite know what was going on aside from "kill other team." You start off in a newbie area with some instructions to get you accustomed to the game and its varied objectives. Here's the rundown: There are 3 factions who constantly fight one another for land control across several continents on a particular planet. You choose a faction (these have various strengths and weaknesses regarding speed, armor, weapon rate of fire, etc.), create a character in that faction, and in you go. It starts you off cushy on an intro continent full of other newbs who don't know what's going on. That was clear enough. You learn controls, get a feel for attacking and defending checkpoints, learn classes, etc.
I quickly got bored of the small map and used "instant action" to drop into a hotbed of activity on one of the main continents. Holy crap. Hundreds of people. Tanks, planes, stealth people, snipers, alerts everywhere! I tried to go solo, died a lot. I tried to team up, did a little better following squad mates. I tried a medic, healed some people. Tried a light assault infantry, got ahead of myself, died a lot. Saw who killed me in the kill cam and it was routinely people who were "battle rank" (level 30, 40, 50...100). Seeing as you use experience to purchase better guns and upgrades, I was horribly outmatched. Lame. I generally spawned, ran from A to B and died immediately. I rarely if ever won in a 1v1 shootout even if I'd stick my crosshairs on their head and hold fire. I'd see that the enemy had less camera shake, took less damage when falling, all kinds of little perks that helped them out in a fight.
It was really cool to see the scale of the game, but I felt completely hopeless dying over and over. I've played a lot of Tribes: Ascend in the last couple weeks and immediately enjoyed Planetside 2 less. I don't want an MMOFPS I don't think. I just want to drop in, play some capture the flag or team deathmatch, and drop back out. Planetside 2: neat game, not for me.
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Jan 4th, 2016 at 21:32:23 - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PS3) |
Ok, so this has been a much longer experience than I anticipated. I clocked over 20 hours and this game draaaags on and on. I estimate that for every hour of gameplay there is, there is 1 hour of cut scenes (usually overdramatic). I'm not exaggerating. The gameplay is pretty great, and some of the cut scenes are cool, but many are not (see the last chapter of the game + the epilogue + the "debriefing" aka epilogue pt 2).
I also started taking issue with the weird sexism in the game. I'm not sure what to chalk this up to...Japanese gaming culture? This having lots of Metal Gear fan service? Catering to otaku boys who have never had girlfriends before? Seriously, I would never make these kinds of generalizations about "otaku boys" or anything, but some of this game was painful for me to sit through. At one point, Naomi (hot scientist female with unnecessarily revealing shirt) is flirting with Otacon (Snake's nerdy computer scientist genius friend) and Otacon can't believe it. Naomi takes his glasses off and says he looks better without them, so he proceeds to not wear his glasses, rendering himself practically blind, and stammer on and on about being an otaku and never having a girlfriend. Then she has sex with him, pure male fantasy. Another male character continually slaps the ass of a female soldier, right in front of another soldier whom he likes and who marries him at the end of the game (again pure male fantasy; marry one, slap the ass of another at your leisure and suffer no consequences). All fights with the four "Beauty and the Beast" bosses end with the women unnecessarily sexualized, slithering toward Snake in skintight clothing and almost moaning. Sunny, the little girl on board Otacon's base is a science genius, but also appears responsible for cooking everyone's food. Naomi at one point "bonds" with her by showing her how to better cook eggs that the men will like, sticking a flower in her hair, and stating that "Us girls always have to look our best." Come on, these are both supposed to be scientific geniuses! But Sunny is being trained to cook and look pretty by low-cut-shirt wearing Naomi who uses sex to get things. Why can't they JUST be smart and valued for those qualities, the qualities that Otacon is valued for? Like, a couple sexist things, okay fine, it's the story and I get it. A pattern of hypersexualized women and unnecessary pandering to the male gaze? That's some bullshit!
Rant over. The story is typical Metal Gear complexity. I didn't know what was going on half the time, especially as the plot thickened near the end. Who is doing what why? I should have just skipped it all and played the damn game, haha.
This one changes up Metal Gear gameplay a little bit. There's less emphasis on stealth with many parts rewarding run 'n gun methods of getting through levels. You can sprint to checkpoints without killing anyone or taking cover sometimes, and that's what I did. When you do need to take cover and move stealthily around an area, it's really fun, and the early game excelled at this. You get a lot of toys to play with like everyone's favorite cardboard box, a barrel (which reminds me that there is a game-long poop joke, thumbs down), a Playboy magazine with which to distract guards, various guns with various bullets, etc., etc. There is also some intermittent emphasis on close quarters combat (CQC) which I never remembered how to do and had to look up in the manual every time I was required to use it. There are some levels where you control mechs or shoot a turret from the back of a truck and that kind of thing.
Boss fights were pretty cool, though the last two Beauty and the Beast ones took a while. The one with the dog took me probably an hour and was really intense. I liked it a lot even though it was very difficult. The last Beauty and the Beast fight took me a while to figure out too, but it was neat and involved mind control.
One other thing worth noting is the amount of nods to previous Metal Gear games. They are everywhere, from items to in-game computer terminals to characters breaking the 4th wall. For example, when you fight Psycho Mantis (forget the name in this game, but it's basically Psycho Mantis), your crew tells you to plug the controller into port 2 (that's how you beat Psycho Mantis in whatever previous game he was in). But of course you're on a PS3 and there are no controller ports, and the characters make comment of this (you have "upgraded hardware" and you'll have to figure out some other way). The Shadow Moses level was really neat with audiovisual flashbacks to an earlier game. There is a lot of theme music from previous games. Very neat touches. I played all the main previous games, but don't necessarily remember details, yet the nods to them were fantastic when I caught them!
So that's that. I hear Metal Gear 5 is quite a different beast in many ways and I've heard great things. I heard great things about Metal Gear 4 too, but I only thought it was okay. I'll grab 5 at some point and look forward to a Metal Gear sandbox.
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