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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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Dec 3rd, 2013 at 12:14:44 - Gears of War: Judgment (360) |
Overall impression of Judgment: easy grab by Epic to sustain multiplayer through the end of the current console generation
Recommended for: die-hard fans of multiplayer GoW
Being the single-player oriented person I am, I was disappointed by this prequel. The story takes place through a series of recollections by 4 Gears who are on trial for detonating a massive weapon to attempt to kill a Locust leader and save a relatively small number of people. The game begins in the present, at the trial, and each chapter of the game is one of the Gears's testimonies. It's a neat way to tell the narrative, and it was further enhanced by the option to make missions harder through altering the memories of the Gears. So for example, at the beginning of each little stage (the ~5-15 minute sequences that comprise each testimony) you can click an icon somewhere in the environment to add some details to the testimony. Instead of just doing the mission normally, the character will testify like "We were unprepared for the smoke bomb traps the Locust scattered around that really reduced our vision." In that case, there are smoke bombs throughout the level and you can't see but 5 feet in front of you. Or, "The Locust are smarter than we thought," in which case maybe the Locust flank you from the rear. All variety of things to make the stage more challenging. Limiting guns or ammo, setting a time limit, more tough enemies, sentry turrets and laser defense grids...The downside to the cool narrative structure was that it didn't impact the story at all. No one cares whether there were smoke bombs or flanking enemies or whether or not you had to use only pistols. Doesn't change the story at all, and the guy putting you on trial doesn't say or do a thing differently.
After a while, I realized why the narrative didn't change: because this game is all about multiplayer, achievements, badges, stars, ratings, unlocks...taking on extra challenges just nets more stars, a way of quantifying mission rating. I was bummed out, but I kept taking the challenges anyway because they were fun. The only kind I didn't like were the timed ones because the environments are so damn beautiful that I hated running through them without pausing to admire!
The best part of the game was actually after the campaign when I unlocked a special series of missions that happened before Gears of War 3. That section played like the trilogy, and not like Judgment, as in the action wasn't as broken up, no focus on stars or whatever, felt more epic in scope than the entire main campaign. The story was not as forgettable, or rather, the action in it, although it really highlighted another weakness in the game's storytelling. The characters are real dull in Judgment. The trilogy did an awesome job (especially 2 and 3) of building characters, making them experience loss, providing backstory, giving them motivations and so on. This one...eeeeh. And at the end of this bonus level, one of the characters, Paduk, starts going on and on about his motivations and some girl named Sophia or something. I was like "who the hell is he talking about?" and I looked it up later and it was the girl Gear who had been in the regular Judgment campaign. I didn't even know her name! Nor did I know that she and Paduk had any sort of relationship whatsoever! Why not set that up better?
The main campaign doesn't add much new to the series. The story itself is forgettable, even though its form is novel, and unfortunately the focus on ratings and achievements just puts it even more firmly in the back seat. I think there was one new enemy only, this sort of medium-long range rifle unit that when shot too much turns into a berserker and charges. They added one unit, but removed TONS of other awesome ones. I guess it makes sense chronologically, but it's lame because the trilogy had some badass enemies. It did the same with weapons. It added one or two rifles and some defense turrets and tripwires (this is another way the single-player was like multiplayer -- there were lots of "defend your position from waves of enemies" levels where you set up and maintain defenses like in Horde mode)...and the game removed other badass weapons from the trilogy.
Another lame thing is that throughout the whole game, there was only one boss fight. It was good enough, but nothing special. Some of the boss fights from the trilogy I still remember clearly. This one...shoot it a lot, it retreats to a rooftop and spawns regular enemies. Kill them, boss comes down, shoot it a lot...Oh look, there's a glowing weak spot...shoot it a lot. It retreats to a rooftop and spawns enemies...repeat until dead.
There were also a few bugs throughout, mostly involving enemies not dying properly, not spawning properly, and the game not moving forward once all the enemies were dead (or seemed dead). A couple times a cinematic would begin, but there would still be enemies right next to the Gears, and they would just kind of run along with us. It was weird. Another time near the end of the extra mission, there was an enemy who hadn't spawned properly. He was either on top of this boat that I couldn't see or get to, or he was stuck in the ground or the rubble in the corner of the map. At least that's where his constant shouting of "Hostiles!" kept coming from. I could never find him and had to restart. It worked correctly the next time.
Back to eBay! I'll just play Gears of War 3 if I get the hankering for some multiplayer action.
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Nov 25th, 2013 at 21:43:57 - Mass Effect 3 (360) |
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G game, such a fantastic trilogy. Every time I play an ME game, I'm taken all over again by the rich universe. I get absolutely sucked into them. I can tell you about all the races, all the wars, detail the characteristics of all Shepard's past and present squad mates. ME3 impressed me even more than the other two with its narratives, both the overarching series narrative and the tons of stories of relationships between squad mates on the Normandy, between random civilians in the Citadel, and between people/species/organizations of all import.
Everything about ME3 is streamlined even further from ME1 and 2. Movement and shooting feel great, using biotics is awesome as ever, interfaces are excellent and there are improved squad commands. There's a weapon upgrade system with lots of different weapons and upgrades to find and purchase, and they brought armor back. You have to purchase sets and/or pieces and collect them, and you can choose a stock armor set or build your own from the pieces you find.
Anyway, if you're breathing, you probably know something about Mass Effect, so I won't ramble about gameplay details.
You know what was cool? The stakes were high. For Shepard and the entire galaxy. Beat the Reapers or die trying. ME3 was so epic because it concludes the trilogy. It's not about a piece of the puzzle; it's about completing the puzzle, arranging all the pieces that you've found in previous games. You have to bring all the races of the galaxy together to unite against a common enemy. They don't all want to cooperate because they've all got their own squabbles, and you get to make some meaningful choices. I couldn't believe it when a certain masked character I liked a lot in the other games committed suicide after something I did, something I genuinely believed to be a good decision. Another decision I thought was good at the time turned out to probably have been bad, but it was too late by the time I changed my mind, and my stomach twisted because I could see the consequences of my decision in the future.
You have to accrue "war assets," which consists of ships, special personnel, weaponry, schematics, artifacts, and on and on to help with the war effort against the Reapers. You acquire these from doing (side) missions, which don't feel "side" at all. They are every bit as intense as the main story missions and feel almost as meaningful. Maybe you get a distress call from some scientists or you find a Cerberus base and decide to shut it down. NPCs on the Citadel, the mega city in the ME universe, also provide you clues to find war assets. In the Citadel, lots of NPCs will be having conversations with one another that Shepard can overhear, and sometimes even weigh in on. Sometimes these conversations, many of which last almost the entire game (every time you go back, the next part of the conversation plays, which gives a great window into the lives of a variety of people on the Citadel during the Reaper War), drop hints that an NPC needs some object or another. When you're flying around scanning planets, you can find these objects and tell the NPC you found it, and you use it (maybe a downed ship or some medical treatment or something) as a war asset.
Come to think of it though, I'm not actually sure the impact of the war assets. There's a menu, and by the end of the game I had almost every war asset possible (which is a lot), and there was some "galactic readiness" index. Each sector of the galaxy was at 50%. I think this was the online portion of the game that they made to affect something or other in single player. I didn't play online or post to Facebook or any of that, and so I really have no idea what it all does. Is it weird that getting war assets still felt meaningful to me even though they didn't actually do anything? I think that speaks to how much the story impacted me and how invested I was.
Best Mission: Geth server mission and final mission
Best Word Used: some NPC said "fuckton" and I laughed
Thing I Miss Most From Previous ME Games: the Mako. Exploring desolate planets and gazing at the stars was incredible. I honestly think I wouldn't like the series as much if that hadn't been in the first game. It really set the scope of the universe that gets totally abstracted in 2 & 3.
Thing I've Never Done In A Game Before: I took the male-male relationship. In ME 1 & 2, I pursued Liara and Tali (or Tali and Liara..). I don't explicitly remember being able to pursue a male in 1 or 2, but there's a guy, Cortez, in 3 who lost his husband. Cortez was my favorite new addition to the Normandy, and his story was sad and touching. There was a lot more homosexual visibility in ME3 with a solid handful of NPC stories on the Citadel involving gay couples. And it was human-human sometimes, not just the "does it really count" human-asari female relationship. I am always really curious about how race, gender and sexuality are dealt with in games. Usually it is ridiculously poor, but BioWare has a reputation for being forward-thinking and dealing with those issues better. I was really impressed. All the homosexual relationships in the game were treated as normal. They didn't have to do with prejudice over being homosexual or challenges of it or anything. It was presented in the universe as unchallenged, happily acceptable fact. One woman was trying to have her child sent to her after her wife died in duty. The problem wasn't that she was gay and would she turn her kid gay or make her kid have psychological problems or whatever, as it too often is in meatspace, but just that it was dangerous and there were bureaucratic hurdles. No one questioned Shepard and Cortez getting together, and the game showed them making out in a club and did the implied sex scene and even the morning after scene, same as for heterosexual relationships. It was just really touching to see homosexuality presented as normal and not a problem.
And finally...the finale. Wow, lots of people hated the ending huh? My opinion: people like to complain, and once people started complaining, it became cool to hop on the 'crappy ending' bandwagon and complain too. I thought the original endings were fine. One thing people didn't like was that there was no closure. My response to that is to use your imagination. It's YOUR Shepard and YOUR Mass Effect game, so use your imagination to think about what happens after you make one of the (admittedly few) choices at the end. You don't need someone to hold your hand and tell you whether or not the entire Alliance fleet gets stranded on Earth and starves to death or whether or not everyone lives in peace or whatever. Come on! But there are some valid criticisms for sure. One that I didn't see raised in anything I read about it, is that if you pick the ending I did, the final scene with the stargazer makes no sense, because what the stargazer is speculating about would be common knowledge. That final final scene only makes sense in the context of the "destroy" ending, but it plays for all of them anyway. But I'm not picky either, and the DLC endings did give people a lot more specificity about what happened after the ending, and differentiated the endings more.
I love these games so much. 3 of the best games ever made, and taken together definitely one of the best trilogies of any medium.
**Just to edit and tack on something--I wanted to mention my Shepard build because I played it differently than previous ME games. In the first two I did really biotic-heavy builds, I think pure biotic and one that was like biotic and range weapons. Mass Effect lends itself well to a slower, more calculated approach to combat, so hiding behind cover and using Singularity to suspend enemies in the air, then popping out and shooting them with powerful assault rifles, was always a good choice. This time I wanted to change it up, so I went with the close-combat specialist type, Vanguard. The Vanguard's strengths are having tons of health and shields, and having quickly recharging shields. This is necessary because the Vanguard gets up close and personal, specializing in melee and shotguns. I usually supplemented myself with an assault rifle (then sniper rifle in mid-game, then pistol for the last chunk) so I could still hide behind cover and shoot some to make good use of the Vanguards two ammo types. But the Vanguard is built around rushing opponents. Biotic Charge makes you sort of teleport to an enemy, knocking them back and doing damage. Another, Nova, lets you discharge your shields to damage an opponent. Nova isn't on the power cooldown, but you can use it whenever you have shields up. So you can chain Biotic Charge -> Nova to ram and then blast an enemy. If they are still alive, then you shoot em in the face with a shotgun or melee them, since as Vanguard, you've probably invested points to boost melee and shotgun damage.
There is also a "heavy melee" attack that is brutal, and some of the upgrades for Biotic Charge and Nova give some great synergies. By the end, I could use Nova twice in a row, and if I killed an enemy with heavy melee, my Biotic Charge immediately cooled down. I also had another ability from a crew member (each crew member can teach you one ability and you can have one extra ability active) that reinforced my armor and let me discharge that current to regenerate shields. So here's what I got good at doing:
Biotic Charge -> Nova -> Nova -> (if they're still alive) Heavy Melee (which makes Biotic Charge immediately available) -> target another enemy and Biotic Charge -> Nova -> Nova -> Heavy Melee (resets Biotic Charge) -> repeat. Then that extra crew ability was badass because if I ever got shot or ran out of shields, I just used it and refilled them. I could blitz around the battlefield and it was AWESOME once I finally got good at it. It was hard to learn to do though! Enemies in this game could be vicious, and getting close up isn't something you want to take lightly. You've got to be precise if you're playing a close-up type character. Also, it's not the best character build for some of the bigger boss-type enemies. You don't usually want to charge enemies who kill you in one shot. I still used a pure Biotic (Liara) to complement me though. It was fun to have her use Singularity to hold an enemy up in the air, and then Biotic Charge and slam into them while they're suspended. The other crew member I used most was Garrus, primarily for range weapons and Overload, which obliterates enemy shields and armor, something my character wasn't particularly strong at. Anyway, just wanted to share that I played the game almost completely differently from a combat standpoint and I loved it.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Nov 25th, 2013 at 22:27:11.
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Nov 17th, 2013 at 12:04:48 - Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (PS2) |
I gave this another shot...over two years (?!) later. Good news: I got farther than last time. Bad news: The AI is still terrible and I'm getting rid of it.
Last time I must have just been tired or not thinking clearly. I had had trouble assembling a bridge with Luke/Obi because enemies keep coming and interrupting the building process. This time I figured out that if you just kill all but one enemy, you can usually assemble things before getting shot. So no problem there, but your AI companions are still really dumb. They fire a bullet once every 10 seconds or so and stand in the way of things.
It's still awesome to destroy objects and have them burst into Legos, and I went back to the cantina and unlocked some stuff. You can buy different characters like storm troopers and you can purchase random things like disguises (puts fake glasses and mustaches on characters, quite amusing) and a skin that turns your grappling hook into a chain of daisies. There was tons of stuff to buy, but all greyed out so I couldn't see!
I've played other Lego games with my little brother since failing at this one a couple years ago, so I feel like I've played it before. And since it's Star Wars, I already know the story. So all in all, I've got no motivation to spend my time going through it. Also, since I just played Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction, I just kept thinking "this isn't as good as R&C." So I'm gonna gift it to my little brother, who will enjoy it more than me!
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