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Sep 17th, 2012 at 10:19:47 - Homefront (PC) |
Homefront, Homefront, Homefront. At first I thought, Wow, you are a serious game. This will pull my heartstrings and make me hum the national anthem as I shut down the computer post-play. I will break out my American flag bed sheets and go to bed warm knowing that I am safe and that North Korea will never invade the country I love...
And then I got to what I will refer to as the Product Placement level, which was the most ridiculous piece of crap I've ever had to put up with. The Product Placement level is otherwise an interesting level, as is most of the game, except that there are approximately 5 blatant product placements. Let me list the ones I caught (both up to and including the Product Placement level):
1. At least 2 Pabst Blue Ribbon ads
2. White Castle billboard
3. NOS energy drink machines
4. I'm pretty sure there was a different energy drink earlier that I don't remember, before I started writing these down.
5. Fender billboard
6. Coffee Beanery building
7. The Product Placement level takes place in and around a GIANT TigerDirect.com megastore and a Hooters. A HOOTERS. Are you kidding me? My FAVORITE part of the game was in this level when my squadmate continues to yell at me, "ENEMIES IN THE HOOTERS!" The first time I heard it I almost fell out of my chair laughing. "ENEMIES IN THE HOOTERS!" I just wanted another character to yell so bad, "I HEAR THEY HAVE GOOD CHICKEN WINGS!"
Like, the number and prominence of the ads was just stupid and I almost quit the game right then. I'm okay with small ads in games here and there, like on a can or like a small thing. But these were giant billboards and buildings, the only things on the horizon, and the freaking level took place in the freaking TigerDirect.com store with like 1000 TigerDirect.com decals plastered everywhere. For like 20 minutes I looked at TigerDirect.com and listened to "ENEMIES IN THE HOOTERS!"
But I powered on through my ill feelings about the ads and beat the level. Oddly, there isn't hardly any product placement after that level. They just got it all out of them right there.
So this game was quite fun. It's an extremely guided experience and the set events were really exhilarating at times. You get to take control of several vehicles and use a couple special weapons throughout, all of which I enjoyed. The chopper mission guarding the oil tankers was probably my favorite of all. I actually got a special achievement on it for not dying once! It feels very old-school because there is no cover system, no RPG elements, no sound or line of sight mechanics. For there to be no cover system, there sure is a lot of cover. You just crouch and pop out and shoot and crouch again. It's like Homefront ignored many of what I consider advances in the FPS genre over this generation of games. Same thing for no RPG elements. In a day and age where like every game has something that levels up, Homefront feels oddly pure. And for the sound/visual mechanics, what I mean is that you don't sneak. One mission, we were 'sneaking' up a tower, and I didn't even realize it until my squadmate assassinated an oblivious guard. I was like, wait, we were sneaking? There's no sneak button! Shouldn't he have heard us? But that doesn't concern Homefront. There is another mission, the stealthy farm mission, and several instances in other missions, where you must make your way from A to B without being detected. In the farm mission, I CLEARLY made eye contact with numerous enemy soldiers, but because the whole of Homefront is so completely scripted, it seems that if they weren't supposed to see me, they wouldn't. The scripting is sometimes irritating because it so limits the player's freedom. You pretty much can't move anywhere unless the game says "go there," but even then 95% of the time you're following an ally and you inexplicably HAVE to follow. You will hit all kinds of invisible walls if you try to go ahead of them, or climb a ladder before them. So it's a hell of a simple game. The plus side is the shooting feels awesome.
My least favorite part of the game, gameplay-wise, was going through the Utah farm. This level was very slow-paced compared to the rest, and rubbed me the wrong way like the Product Placement level. I will call this one the Southern Redneck Stereotype level. In this stereotype, most Americans who love guns and are kind of crazy will be given a Southern accent and portrayed as a racist hillbilly, especially in games. This is why Southern accents are way overrepresented in military games. So even though this farm was in UTAH, at least 1/2 the characters there talked like they were from Georgia. "We gon' kill them stupid Norks y'all. Jes gimme my gun and watch 'em dance!" Like seriously, so annoying. As someone from the south, I hate it when Southerners are portrayed this way. Yes, we are all dumb, racist, gun-toting, freedom-loving backwoods retards who wear flannel and talk funny. Thank you Homefront for reminding me of my roots.
The game is quite graphic too with its depictions of violence, in the beginning especially. It totally preps you with a school bus ride through occupied Main Street where you watch a lot of civilians die in various disturbing ways. There is also a scene later on that is definitely one of the most disturbing scenes of a game ever, somewhere up there with sticking a needle in Isaac's eye in Dead Space 2, except more of a genocidal kind of way. But I'll let it surprise you...
It also attempts to have you empathize with the characters, but doesn't do a very good job. It's mostly a little laughable, in part due to all the cursing and the far far stretch that is the story. It's a cool idea, don't get me wrong, but come on. The little home away from home in suburbia was a notable eye-roller. "It's our little piece of America" the guy says as the kid swings on the playset and the woman cooks a meal in the kitchen. Makes me all teary-eyed! Hey wait a minute, all the children in the game look like Bobby Hill. And the (adult) characters curse like sailors. It's a little over the top. But I won't lie. I felt oddly patriotic running through suburbia defending Joe Everyman from the invaders, and finally at the end, assaulting the Golden Gate Bridge. That's a whole different question too. What exactly did my rebel group accomplish? We blew up a couple tanks, one Goliath, a helicopter, and killed maybe 100 troops on the Golden Gate Bridge...and freed America? Ummm. I thought North Korea had a bigger army than that...
And seriously, a big 'what the hell' goes out to the length. I beat this sucker in under 4 hours. What a joke! You want to make a AAA FPS and you're going to have a 4-hour campaign? Fail. Did they run out of time? What happened there? I would have been pissed if I'd paid more than a few bucks for this. Oh well. I don't not recommend Homefront. If you want a short, action-packed, scripted shooter, grab it on the cheap. It's got some cool things going for it.
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Sep 16th, 2012 at 03:52:18 - Total War: Shogun 2 (PC) |
I booted up Total War: Shogun 2 yesterday afternoon to check out this deep strategy game. It has been sitting installed and dormant on this computer since the summer sometime. A bit about my large-scale strategy game history: I've never played a Total War game. When I was younger, like probably in my teens, I spent time with one of the Civilization games (maybe #2) and Age of Empires. I always liked Civilization a lot, but Age of Empires was borderline. I enjoy building cities. I enjoy making alliances and trading. I enjoy getting rich.
RTSes are generally a good fit for me IF they are not too heavy on the military aspect. Oddly, I can do fantasy just fine. Starcraft and Dawn of War games I absolutely adore. Company of Heroes and other more militarily realistic games I just go over my head. It's all the units and the strong-against-this/weak-against-that, cover, tons of formations and abilities, gun types, ammo types, tank types, all this military jargon. I don't understand it. I don't have much interest in playing real Army. Squad-based shooters go the same way. Something about the realism and the tactics I don't like. Again, somehow I can do fantasy just fine.
So Total War unfortunately for me falls under the 'too militaristic' side. It's set in feudal Japan in like 1545 or something when a bunch of clans were warring over supremacy. Cool idea. But there's no story. Just: become shogunate. Bad idea. I wasn't compelled by any narrative. The game does give you context-specific objectives, like if the citizens in one of your towns are becoming unruly, an objective may appear that says to garrison the city by building a couple units. And there are a shit ton of units and things to build. Each city, as far as I got, can be upgraded with 3 additional buildings, which can all be upgraded several times, plus you can upgrade roads, farms, markets, and all kinds of other stuff. All of the upgrading serves one purpose or another, bringing in more money, making this or that kind of unit have some melee resistance, and a hundred other possibilities. So I was trying to learn what was the importance of each type of unit. There are a bunch of different types of archers, spearmen, cavalry, gunmen, bomb-tossing men, siege weapons, ships, swordsman, and on and on, then special units like ninjas and monks. And they all use the Japanese names, and I just wasn't memorizing them all.
I guess my biggest problem with the game was information overload. Right from the beginning, during the 2-hour tutorial campaign, I was just overwhelmed. The adviser ('help' NPC who explains menus and functions to you) basically talked at me the entire time. Then when I started a regular campaign map, she just started talking at me again, everything I clicked on. It was like "Here is a ton of information! Here is some more information! Here, have even more information! I hope you're remembering all this -- oh look, more information!"
I sucked at the battles, so I was happy when I could autoresolve them all, which seems to be more or less a numbers game. In the battles, you control squads of like 100 or so units of whatever types you have on a giant battlefield. They move real slow, and you're supposed to be able to plan tactics to flank with cavalry, send your spearmen in front of your archers to protect them and stab enemy cavalry charges, bombard with catapults, etc. etc. It's neat for sure, but I just hated playing the battles.
On the contrary, the special units were quite fun to play with. See, I always liked Civilization because I think there was less emphasis on fighting and more on culture or diplomacy or other methods of doing things (if I remember correctly). So if you build the proper building, you can recruit a ninja. Ninjas sneak around the map and you can have them attempt assassinations against enemy generals to weaken an army's morale, or have them open city gates before you charge in with your army so it's easier to take. Monks can be sent to cities to convert the population to Buddhism. I played some of one campaign before giving up in frustration. The #1 problem I had was that I discovered a European trade route, and from that point on Christianity spread though my cities like a damn plague. Since I was Buddhist and didn't want to convert, my citizens got all uppity and kept revolting. I tried to quell them with troops and new castles and pubs, and eventually tried to send monks around to bring them back to the Way, but their splinter religious rebel armies ended up sacking a bunch of my towns. I never even got off my little starting island in the campaign. Which was set on 'easy' by the way.
Shogun 2 also has massive technology and skill trees that you start learning at the beginning of the game for your clan and for individual generals and special units as they gain rank through battle and use. That was also overwhelming. I could see trying to pick on strategy, like "I will be very strong with melee fighters and have a strong economy to back up mass production," and having that focus my play some, but this time it was just hectic. There is also a diplomacy menu where you can make alliances, declare war, trade hostages, and so on. It's a lot of stuff.
I wish I hadn't uninstalled the game already because I would copy all my recent activity to show how much I was getting my butt kicked. It was something like this each turn by the end:
"Citizens revolting in X City"
"Christians feel oppressed and revolting in Y City"
"Trade route is being attacked!"
"Trade route is being attacked!"
"Citizens revolting in H City"
"The enemy has destroyed your supply lines in D City!"
"Christian rebel forces defect to enemy army!"
"Tagashi clan has declared war on you!"
"Murakami clan has broken your peace treaty and declared war on you!"
...
..
.
And for the record, I never lost. I QUIT!
Seriously though, it really is a neat game especially if this kind of strategy game is your thing. It's obvious that a ton of research into historical Japan went into this, and the militaries, cultures, music, visuals, etc. are really well done. But this type of strategy game isn't my thing, and now I know to avoid the Total War series!
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Sep 11th, 2012 at 10:12:26 - Diablo III (PC) |
Ok last entry about Diablo and I'll shut up. It seems like every time I play something happens that makes me want to contradict what I said earlier. So I came home from work tonight and sat down to just try a little of Inferno by myself. P and I had cleared through Act 2, so I figured I could do Act 1 alone. 5 minutes later and I was crying of boredom. You have to go real slow by yourself in Inferno or else die a lot, so the fast pace and 'joy' of killing things that was my (1) earlier is somewhat stifled in Inferno, especially alone. Also, elite packs are annoying. Sometimes they have the super deadly combinations, and if they don't then a lot of times they'll have like Extra Life or Shield or one of these stupid ones that makes them take for freaking ever to kill. That's boring in co-op too. I think the elites take too long to die. I actually prefer the hard ones to the long-lasting ones because at least there's a challenge with the arcane/jailer/molten ones instead of standing there holding the left mouse button for 3 minutes.
Second thing I said earlier, that the upgrading was more interesting than I thought, is also false upon further inspection. I used the auction house and finished decking out my barbarian in level 60 stuff. It took probably 30 minutes total. And in the hour I played with P and in the, I dunno, 3 hours I played online tonight, I got 0 upgrades. So forget upgrading.
The fifth thing I said earlier was that there were supposed to be other things to look forward to doing, like acquiring all kinds of gear sets and getting Paragon levels and starting another character. I already said no to the latter two, and it turns out the 'acquiring gear' is a pain. The stuff I bought off auction was cheap, but it turns out that's because it isn't the high-end desirable stuff, even though it is good enough for me to wade around in Act 3 Inferno (which I beat with a group tonight, twice!). I mean, I still die a lot and don't do much damage, but I have good starter gear for Inferno I guess. So you're supposed to build your character up and get better gear. I went online and checked out barbarian websites for character builds and stat priorities and whatnot, saw a couple interesting ones, and decided to buy a couple items according to their stat specifications. I had been focusing on strength and vitality, then life on hit, life percentage, all resistances. So I have a ton of HP, over 60,000, more than I've even seen anyone have, but I still die easier. Not exactly sure why. Anyway, the stats for these barbarian builds are more attack stuff like crit chance and crit damage, along with strength, vitality, life on hit. That combination of stats on items costs like millions of gold. Like even hundreds of millions of gold. For reference, at level 60-1, I have under 200,000. So I obviously cannot afford to purchase anything. So what people do is build magic find sets and go farm. Uuuuh, that sounds fun. Not. They build magic find sets and then hope to get good stats on items they find to use or sell for big bucks. This involves repeating the exact same couple of farming spots over and over and over and over forever (because you're never done upgrading). Sounds like raiding but a hundred times more monotonous.
So the only one that really stands is playing with friends. Random people are alright too, but I'm glad to finally be able to jump in games with people I know in real life. With that said, I will just see them from time to time in-game, and I am done playing by myself and without people I know because I see no point. I did just go in on a preorder 4-pack of Torchlight 2, so hopefully that doesn't overshadow Diablo too bad!
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Sep 11th, 2012 at 04:31:59 - Diablo III (PC) |
Resolved a couple issues I had with the game going forward. I might have stayed up all night last night clearing Hell difficulty. I did Act 1 alone, then partied for Acts 2,3,4. It's hard to leave a group when you're flying along because you get caught up in the success. I did learn a few things.
First, the game is just fun. It's a joy to run around killing and looting things. It's hard to argue with the simplicity of that.
Second, the upgrading game is keeping me interested. I thought it wouldn't, but for now it is. Once you move from Hell to Inferno (the last difficulty), there's a HUGE boost in item power. The level 60 items are like whoa. I mean there's a huge range. 1-handed weapons can be from like 200 DPS to 1200 DPS; 2-handers from 300 to 1600 or so. I finished Hell using a sword and board, the 1-handed sword being something like 300-400 DPS. And I had, I don't exactly remember, maybe 20,000 HP. Well, the last thing I did before logging off was ogle the auction house and replace about half my things. Hell sword = 300-400 DPS. New Inferno sword from auction house = 800+ DPS. Old Hell 2-handed sword = 400+ DPS; New Inferno 2-handed sword = 1200 DPS. My HP went from 20,000-ish to where it is now sitting comfortably at just under 50,000. So the odd small upgrade may not get me excited, but I do love the massive jumps here.
Third, the auction house is important. I do enjoy buying and selling things. Particularly buying them. For cheap. All the stuff I replaced cost me maybe 50,000 total, which was like 1/4 of my gold. Okay, 1/4 of my gold to seriously overhaul my character? Yes, please. I have 3 stash pages of rares to sell too, and I can make a lot. The 100-item limit though is making me feel like I have to compulsively check on auctions to list new things.
Fourth, I can play with friends! I logged on once this afternoon to check my auctions and P was online and invited me. I'm level 60, and he's level 60-5. I was at the beginning of Act 1 Inferno and he was stuck on the last boss in Act 3 Inferno. So we weren't too too far apart. I mean, I closed the gap since Friday. So he came and ported me to the ends of Act 1, 2, and 3. We killed the Act 1 and 2 bosses, and wiped a bunch on Azmodan in Act 3. So now we're at the same spot. Pretty cool. And I can play with any of my other friends I like now that I've opened up almost the entire game.
Fifth, other things to do looking forward. From talking with other people, I know that the game supposedly changes at Inferno/level 60, kind of like WoW changes at max level. So far, Inferno doesn't seem particularly hard. P and I breezed through Act 1 and 2, maybe died a couple times on the Act 2 boss. Act 3 ramped up considerably though, so that might be a gear check. So you do have to focus on upgrading gear, and I guess it's cool that it's not upgrading just for the sake of upgrading, but upgrading in order to complete Inferno. But I'm sure I could join a party and beat Inferno that way, and then what is the point of continuing to collect gear? Is that the 'end' of the game or is there more still to do? Does it become upgrading for the sake of upgrading after that? I suppose that's where the paragon levels come in. You get +3% magic find and gold every paragon level, so I suppose that would help you deck out other characters and what not. But I DO NOT want another character or anything, so then again, the point after completing Inferno is what?
Until then, I have figured out that I can build some sets for specific situations, like a broad DPS set and a vitality set. I can have items to focus on life steal, and I can make a resistance set. Those elites are bastards and I figure resistance helps immensely. P and everyone else I know have magic find sets to help them get more rares and the chance for an upgrade. Will I bother with that just to get upgrades? Which is the easiest way to get upgrades? Magic find or buy on auction? Or magic find to get the gold to fund the auctions? Crafting? Who knows. I feel I cannot rest until I find more answers to these questions. I used to have dreams about Diablo 2. I wouldn't be surprised if Diablo followed me to sleep soon too.
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