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Dec 14th, 2013 at 14:57:31 - Max Payne 3 (360) |
Girlfriend and I finished MP3 a couple nights ago. Fantastic game, we both really enjoyed it, especially the story. We played on easy to focus on the story. My friend and I have been having a conversation regarding Jesper Juul's Casual Revolution. He keeps trying to make the argument that games are becoming easier, more hand-holding, more casual. I disagree and think that instead of games trending toward becoming easier, they are trending to cater to a broader range of players and play styles, greatly expanding players' options. Max Payne 3, as one of a thousand examples, has at least 3 difficulty settings. Like I said, we played on easy in order to focus on the story without many difficult gun battles getting in the way. The game WAS easy, but that was because we chose to play it that way. We could have played it on hard, we could have gone for achievements, we could have set our own goals, any number of things that the devs allowed for to let us play the game at the difficulty of our choosing. This friend of mine I've only known for a couple months, and I think he is just a hardcore gamer who sees his territory of hard games being eroded by mobile games, sees his World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online catering to new players, and he's feeling...hosile or something. I'm trying to get him to see a more balanced perspective. Anyway...
I had played a few chapters of MP3 by myself a month or two ago, but stopped when my girlfriend said she wanted to play it too. So we started over together. We haven't played a game together in years due to me living halfway across the world, and I have to admit I thought she was...more skilled than she was! She didn't do so hot with the 360 controller aiming and whatnot. But I know we've played Halo before! Turns out she said she doesn't like Halo because of the controller and aiming is hard. I was hoping she could play and I could watch, since I'm always the one playing games, but after she tried for an hour, she made me control Max.
I can't say a lot for the gunplay really. It's basically the same as the previous Max Payne games. There's bullet time and slow dive, you can have 4 weapons, can dual wield pistols and SMGs. There's a nice cover system that you use all the time. No grenades or anything besides guns. Still pick up pain pills. There's a nice new feature where if you are shot by a bullet that would otherwise kill you, if you have a painkiller, Max automatically enters slo-mo, and if you kill an enemy in slo-mo, he automatically takes a painkiller. So you don't die unless you are shot with no painkillers or unless you don't manage to kill anyone when Max enters slo-mo. There's also a gratuitous kill-cam. When you kill the last enemy in a section, you get to see a gory death. That's nice to let the player know when they've cleared an area.
You can find golden gun parts scattered around the levels. I'm not really sure what they do besides make your gun golden. It is probably more powerful or has more ammo capacity. I unlocked one only. Then you can find clues around too and investigate them for Max's commentary. Some of the early levels are timed, which I thought was stupid since there were clues around. It made it so we couldn't explore and search for clues. Why are the clues there if you can't spend time to look for them? After the early levels though, there weren't any timed levels. Kind of strange.
Ok, enough about gameplay. The story was fantastic. That's what we played the game for. Max is washed up popping pills and drinking himself to death. He gets a job from another cop from his past, and the story is about that job, that cop the family they work for, and as usual, Max battling his demons. Of course there's a massive conspiracy and backstabbing and people aren't the people they say they are. Some of the game's locales are pretty incredible. The majority of the game is set in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In particular I remember the night club, the favela (though that spans like 3 chapters and is the one part where the game dragged!) and the police station. The voice actor who plays Max Payne really does a top-notch job. All the characters were excellent and voiced very well. We were hoping that the ex-cop from North Dakota that Max kept running into was a criminal mastermind, but it remains inconclusive. He sure did show up in some suspicious spots.
When Max is drunk or really injured or his head is spinning or whatever, there is this cool visual effect that is sort of neon, Drive / Hotline Miami screen tearing and fuzz. Whoever did the cinematic video parts of the game deserves an award. Seriously, that visual effect was SO perfect for conveying Max's physical and mental states. Also, the game's music, perfect.
Pretty much everything about MP3 was spot on. We enjoyed every minute (save the overlong favela section). Highly recommended.
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Dec 12th, 2013 at 12:06:31 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (360) |
Fun action game in the vein of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, though not as good as either. The combat just isn't as deep or varied. You can pretty much button mash this one and it doesn't matter much whether you learn a bunch of specific combinations and moves. You will need to learn to parry and dodge though, mostly for boss battles. There are only 3 sub-weapons and your main weapon, no range attack options really.
It's a Metal Gear game and plays off of the Metal Gear 4 story, which I haven't played yet. I didn't need to play them in order though. Knowing enough about Metal Gear in general and the game doing a good job presenting its backstory made my experience of the narrative pretty smooth. The story is actually pretty sick and involves harvesting poor street children to turn them into cyborgs/child soldiers. It's funny, my girlfriend and I are playing Max Payne 3 and that story also involves organ harvesting. Anyway, the voice acting is good, story is typical convoluted Metal Gear, but I'm used to it so I liked it.
Ok, I've said some rather vague things so far. More pointed here...When I first started the game, I was on the edge of my seat. Really that persisted through most of it. It is action-packed to the max. There are giant explosions and loud pounding music and the visuals are excellent and it's so damn fast and the enemies are brutal and it's just like GO GO GO GO GO a million miles an hour. It was relatively easy to learn for an action game like this. There's a soft attack and a hard attack button. You get some items, like grenades and rocket launchers and of course a box to hide in. I used items if I was in a pinch, but that was pretty rare.
Raiden (your character) has some sort of special vision that lets him see enemies through walls and see item crates. You can sometimes avoid fights if you want. There is a slight/optional stealth element to the game. But fighting and killing enemies gives you points to upgrade your health, weapons, learn new combos and so on. I pretty much killed everything I could.
Some enemies get really hard though. They've all got some weakness or another that you can exploit. In the beginning, you just slice and dice the crap out of everyone around. Then you start having to play surgeon a little more carefully and cut off enemies' arms to get rid of their rocket launchers, or cut off their legs so they can't dropkick you. Raiden has this contextual move called [some Japanese word] that slows down time and lets you literally cut enemies to pieces. If you cut specific highlighted parts of their bodies, you can get bonus points, intel, disable them, and so on. It's really bloody, if that goes without saying. Oh, and the camera is really wonky. Sometimes it can't keep up with the action on screen. That can make battles overly difficult.
Bosses are a lot of fun, some more in-depth battles with several parts. If you are getting stuck, you can talk to your team through the codec and they will tell you "you have to parry his attacks!" or whatever. Lots of help there. The final boss battle though was a pain in the butt. I made it to the last phase with 0 health kits and couldn't do much to beat him. Watched it on YouTube instead.
That's really about it. Fairly generic action game when all is said and done. Doesn't hold a candle to Bayonetta.
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Dec 5th, 2013 at 11:05:47 - Faster Than Light (PC) |
Real proud of myself! My "how far did I get tally" (if I were keeping one) would now look something like this:
Sector
1 - III
2 - IIII
3 - IIIII
4 - IIIIII
5 - IIIII
6 - I
7
8 - I (!!!!!)
I made it ALL THE WAY to the final boss yesterday. I was SO nervous once I got into Sector 6 because I'd only made it there once and had gotten obliterated. But I didn't have much trouble there, then nail-biting in Sector 7 got me through without much of a problem. Sector 8 is set up a bit differently. There are still all the random nodes, but the Rebel Mothership (or whatever it's called) is in the sector and you have to intercept it before it gets within range of the Federation base. There are a few free repair stations near the Federation base and the Rebels take one node every couple turns, which limits your options on where you can (relatively safely) go.
The Rebel ship would get within range of the Federation base in 5 jumps. It seemed to take 1 jump for every 2 of mine. But the Rebels also occupied nodes every couple of my jumps too, so if I had dallied, I would have been cut off from intercepting, or would have had to go into Rebel controlled areas, super dangerous. I went more or less straight for the Mothership and intercepted it when it still had 2-3 jumps left.
The Mothership is a beast. It has (or at least this one had -- is there a range of values?) four weapons EACH under a different system! So I couldn't just knock out their weapons system and disable the guns because it had 4 systems too. Lame. It also had four shields, like 8 crew members, and I think every system installed. I don't remember drones, but it probably had them. It had a teleporter, but its crew never teleported. I did okay against it I think, survived and knocked a little bit of health off, but eventually I it hit me so much, the fires were spreading too fast, the oxygen was draining too fast, and it destroyed my hull after a couple minutes. Wasn't really a close fight. One thing that I think would have definitely helped is if I'd had defense drones. I had 3 shields, which is good I think, but the missiles penetrate shields, and that's what tears me up if I don't have defense drones to shoot down some of the missiles.
I had an awesome crew and setup going though. I had a full 8 crew, like 5 engi to super repair things, a rockman to put out fires, a mantis for some combat. Ideally I would have maybe 2-3 engi, 2-3 rockmen, a mantis or two, and the zoltan are neat because they power systems of rooms they are in, freeing up a power bar for you to use elsewhere. I was trying to get that achievement to have 6 unique crew members, but I only had 5! I've never seen the 6th and have no idea what it is. I need that or to "repair the Kestrel from 1 hull to full" to get my second Kestrel achievement to unlock its alternate layout. I had thought I would get to the end with the main Engi layout because it had gotten me into Sector 5 a lot and into Sector 6, but the Kestrel proved a beast. I had a really nice weapons setup going on and 3 shields, so I could more or less obliterate the enemy's hull before it did much to me. And I had so many crew members, being boarded was never a problem.
Anyway, I feel very accomplished. I'm going to tone down how often I get a game of FTL in since I know what the end looks like. I want to try and unlock some of the other ships. I've still only got 2, out of however many...6? 7? I guess they come from quests and events and things that I just have to get lucky and find. I got that Engi ship like my 5th game from something, before I knew what I was doing, so I wasn't paying attention to how I got it.
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Dec 3rd, 2013 at 12:54:37 - Faster Than Light (PC) |
Been meaning to write about this for a while. I think I've been screwing around with it for a month at least. FTL is my first "roguelike." I'm no expert on the genre, so I can't say what is or isn't a defining feature. I would describe FTL as a dungeon crawler in space. Your goal is to make it alive from the beginning (Sector 1) to the end (Sector 8). Each sector of space has a bunch of randomly located points of interest you can jump to and I guess each point of interest has any number of things you may find there. It might be nothing, or an enemy ship, or a store, or a wreck, or whatever. There are tons of little events and variations of them that I've found. So you jump from point to point, trying to get safely through each sector. At the end of each sector, you get a choice of which sector to enter next. There are a few sectors to choose from each time you jump sectors, and you can see the path to Sector 8 and attempt to plan accordingly. There are Green (controlled by friendlies), Red (controlled by hostiles) and Purple (nebulae) sectors. I have so far tried to plot a course through greens wherever possible! Reds are ok if you're prepared for heavy fighting. Purples are straight up mixed bags because in a nebula, your scanners are disabled. You can't see the interior of your ship unless you have a crew member there, and so you don't know if there's a fire or breach unless you see the oxygen going down or systems starting to go red. In nebula, there are also sometimes ion storms, which cut your energy in half. You assign energy to power your various systems, so that is BAD because you operate at 1/2 capacity. Disable your shields to power your weapons? Hmm. Nebulae, not my favorite thing.
You start with a basic ship and can unlock more by (I think) happening upon quests or schematics or something throughout your games. I've found one other ship. Then you can unlock different configurations of each ship by getting a couple achievements with that ship. Each ship comes equipped with a specific number and type of crew members, weapons, enhancements and attributes. So for example, the Kestrel, the basic ship, has 3 humans manning it and comes with a missile weapon and a burst laser mark II. The Engi, the other ship I unlocked, comes with two Engi crew members and one human, an ion cannon, a drone bay and a couple drones. The other configuration of that Engi ship I unlocked comes with only one Engi crew member, and different weapons and drones and enhancements. So each ship/configuration you play is going to have different innate strengths and weaknesses. I've found the Kestrel is good for trying to get a lot of weapon firepower since you start with 2 good ones. The Engi are masters of drones, so I never use missiles on an Engi ship.
There are I think 6 different aliens too, and they also have different attributes. Humans have nothing special. Engi move slowly, do 1/2 damage in combat, and repair damaged systems very quickly. Mantis move quickly and do extra damage in combat. Rockmen are immune to fire and have extra health.
There are a variety of systems onboard your ships, like the engines, the piloting, the weapon systems, drone systems, doors, med bay, and so on. You can upgrade them all for improved functionality. Doing so requires you spend "scrap," which is the game's main currency. There are 3 other resources too (fuel, missiles and drones) that get expended when you jump or fire weapons or use drones. But scrap upgrades stuff and purchases stuff from stores. Anyway, for some of the systems, you can also put a crew member in the room containing the system and the crew member will boost its efficiency. So manning the weapons makes them recharge faster.
The game is REALLY varied! Writing all this out, I'm like wow. There are hundreds of crucial decisions to make every single game. Scrap is always scarce, enemies are everywhere, everything seems a gamble or a tradeoff. I could use another crew member for 50 scrap, but I could also use a laser weapon for 50. Which to buy? I would love to spend my 200 scrap to upgrade my shields, but there also might be a store nearby that has any number of wonderful things for me to buy. But the store might also have nothing I want. And I might encounter a Mantis ship with a teleportation system on the way. In which case, maybe I should go on and upgrade my doors so their boarding crew can't move through my ship. But if I upgrade the doors, I won't have enough to buy the cloaking system at the store, if they have one. And I've only got 3 fuel left. I can't really afford to detour to the store anyway because they might only have 1 or 2 fuel for sale, and then I won't be able to make it to the exit...It's craziness!
Two things have remained constant through every game. First, I learn something important. I've played 15 or 20 times and I learn something awesome every time, a rule or a lesson or a priority hierarchy. I've been learning how to prioritize weapons firing on the Kestrel. I learned that unlocking a new layout for a ship gives you different starting weapons. The last game I played I learned to repair my hull strength to full EVERY TIME I have the option. I am trying to learn other things, like memorizing the visuals of different weapon types so that I can assess enemy threat at a glance by being able to tell if they have missiles or lasers or ion cannons or what. The second constant is that I will die. Every time I will die. I have no idea how many games I will play before I make it alive through Sector 8, but so far I've made it to Sector 6 once and Sector 5 a handful of times. The last time I played, I died from a solar flare. I only had like 5 hull left and the solar flare melted it. I had passed up repairing to save some money, but in the end that decision killed me.
The battles are real-time and there is so much to manage when it gets hectic. Firing up to 4 weapons, maintaining up to 4 drones, moving up to 6 crew members about the ship, watching all the enemy's weapon fire, trying to fight off enemy boarding crews, make sure systems are powered, fighting fires, and on and on. Here's to me getting better and slowly being able to make it farther! OH, and I'm playing on EASY!
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