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Jun 16th, 2012 at 12:05:19 - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (360) |
Beat this tonight, and quite surprised and smug now. I was oh-so-stuck on the first one, and you bet I got real scared when in Vegas 2 I revisited the very same theater stage where I was stuck in Vegas 1. I was so overcome with anxiety over becoming stuck again that I became stuck again...briefly, then I kicked its ass.
Vegas 2 is basically a carbon copy of Vegas 1, the only real difference being character customization for multiplayer and a plethora of achievement-related shinies. There are Xbox achievements, badges, medals, in-game achievements, experience points in 3 tiers (roughly long-range killing, short-range killing, and odds and ends like killing enemies with shields or killing enemies while hanging upside down from a rope) that unlock a bunch of weapons, camouflage, clothing and armor. This game is definitely built with multiplayer in mind, and I'll keep it around for that possibility. If I do take it online, I'll be the old grey-bearded black guy with the safari hat, mismatched camo, and poorly done face paint, and proud of it. If I get more achievements and unlock more things, I can dress even sillier.
So Vegas 2 is actually a prequel-synchronous event to Vegas 1, which I appreciate because I didn't pay much attention to Vegas 1's story. They keep referencing what your team from Vegas 1 is doing in this game, and I guess the terrorists are all connected somehow. Vegas 2 is just as intense as 1. Controls and levels play out exactly the same way. In the chapter I mentioned, you revisit -- or visit for the first time chronologically -- one casino from Vegas 1. Vegas 2 spends most of its time playing out in less interesting locales than slot machine exploding gambling dens, but it's all good.
Chapter 5 deserves a mention because here the game takes a brief detour from the squad maneuvering. You go solo in chapter 5 as you chase the bad guy to an airfield. This chapter really shook up the gameplay. It was hard as hell because you've got no teammates to rely on. I usually send my teammates out in front of me to soak gunfire before I clean up after them. In chapter 5, it's just you alone in an enemy-infested industrial refinery area. You must be very methodical, rooting out all the enemies, checking every corner, keeping crouched, always staying behind cover, using height to your advantage -- basically using most of the gameplay mechanics to maximum advantage -- in order to succeed. I died a lot, but each death was a learning experience. Ah, there's the order by which to kill enemies. Ah, I should enter this door and clean out level 1 before taking the stairs to level 2. Ah, there's an enemy hiding in this corner that has killed me a few times and I just spotted him so now I know for next time! It's that good kind of meaningful death that I don't get too often in games.
My last comment, the final battle. I didn't make it to the end in Vegas 1...actually, let's watch YouTube real quick...okay so Vegas 1 didn't really have a boss fight...but the one in Vegas 2 was nice. You have to hide from/fire at a helicopter to get it to radio for help. When it radios for help, your mission crew can use the radio signals to shoot a guided missile at it. Meanwhile, there are terrorists coming from two sides and lobbing grenades left and right. It was kinda hard, but I eventually got it, and there's a nice checkpoint halfway through before you actually kill the main bad guy. The chopper part had an odd glitch, and this happened a couple other times too. The fight takes place on and around a tennis court (bad guy hiding out in Costa Rican manor, of course he has a tennis court). You take cover behind some rock slabs. The chopper is ahead of you, enemies pour from a shed onto the tennis court left-of-center, and on the right side one lone enemy rappels down a wall at the beginning (shoot the first shed guy, then shoot the rappelling guy, shoot the next shed guy, then alternate chopper/shed guy until you have to move due to the chopper shooting missiles in your general direction). So the rappelling guy, if you shoot him on his way down but don't kill him, will get to the ground, then start climbing back up. He'll get a ways up, then come back down, then climb back up. Kinda funny to watch.
That wraps up my Rainbow Sixes. I have half a mind to go try to get unstuck and finish the first one, but I have a feeling I'm just asking for trouble. Because I was really stuck. Really really stuck. And there is supposedly the 'hard part' yet to come. On another general gaming note, I'm done with my frenzy that's been carrying on this summer. Need to focus on work. Will finish Sakura Wars next time I'm at P's place and finish Bastion after work over the course of the week, probably start something else after those, but then I'm gone to the US for a few weeks and pretty much on home stretch to prepare prepare prepare to have a draft of something written/job talk done by the time school starts in 2 months. Ah, work.
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Jun 15th, 2012 at 03:03:46 - Orcs Must Die! (PC) |
Bought this game partly due to recommendation from T and partly due to quirky and interesting take on tower defense. I'd played a couple levels for a Steam winter sale achievement back in January, and just fired it up proper the other day. Overall, I dunno, I'd give it a 3.5 of 5 or so, 7/10. It was enjoyable enough. I did like the silliness of it. Watching the orcs get shredded, spiked, chopped, lobbed into acid pits, etc. is endlessly amusing. The main character is a dimwitted apprentice and I found him quite funny at times. He talks a bit of story (which is pretty irrelevant except to drive home that he is an idiot) before/after each level, and later on some of his conversations with the bad guy are hilarious, particularly when she insults him and he says "oh, the old man (his master, before he died) used to tell me that!" Then she insults him again like "I will kill you and drink your blood!" and again he says his master used to tell him that...when he was drunk. Then she laments, "Oh if you only knew the pleasures we could have had." He says, "Hm, he never said that." I restarted the level to listen to it a couple times. With the presentation, trust me, it's funny.
The game wasn't as innovative as I'd thought it might be. Sure, it's tower defense from a third-person perspective. But I've played Sanctum (first-person but same idea). Sure, you unlock a new trap each level and you can upgrade them with skulls and choose your traps each level and purchase them with money...but I've played Plants vs. Zombies, which was way more interesting. Sure, you have to stop the orcish horde from getting to the rift, but that's tower defense. And sure, you have a weapon to shoot/swing and spells to cast, but that's every hack n slash game ever. All mashed together, this stuff is fun enough, but it doesn't have lasting appeal for me.
I found Orcs Must Die to be less strategic and more hectic. The game is a mouse-clicker. It'll wear your clicking finger down fast because you attack with your bow/polearm/spells as fast as you can click. Also, it is easy to be fairly single-minded about traps. I had a solid strategy that worked for 90% of the levels no problem, and I developed this strategy early on. Here are the Useful Traps: spike trap, ceiling crusher, springboard, archers. I'm pretty confident I can go back and beat the game with those alone. Then always keep on your wind belt, lightning ring, thunder ring, and use your bow. The springboard is probably my favorite. You just make a gauntlet of crushers and spike traps and fill any height position with archers...then do your best to put spring traps at the end and just launch the orcs back to the beginning of the gauntlet. I did so many levels without hardly firing my bow. Granted there is still a nightmare difficulty, but I've got no real motivation to try it. I had fun at the orc slaughter. Other traps I saw no use for. Like the swinging ball mace trap. It takes up the same # of squares and costs the same as 3 ceiling crushers, but the orcs have to walk through it as it's swinging. With the crushers, they just crush whoever walks under, period. Then there was a ballista...I don't even know what that does. Some air vents, don't see the point except to immobilize enemies a second. Why immobilize them when you could just kill them? So yea, some traps seemed overpowered, some seemed pointless.
There are also some annoying bugs. If you springboard enemies into lava, for example, there's a good chance that one will get stuck alive in the lava and it can be hard to find him and kill him to finish the level. It just sticks until you kill the orc who flew in the lava that should be dead anyway. I had a couple crashes to the desktop for no apparent reason. Sometimes you can't place traps on tiles that you should obviously be able to place traps on. Like for some unknown reason you just can't place over these 3 bricks and it ruins your symmetry. Archers also bugged out when I'd try to place them sometimes. They'd spawn in another location. The first time it happened I'd clicked like 5 times, then I found later this stack of 5 archers on the other side of the map. Weird.
Sooo, neat game, fun enough. My final word is don't bother with it unless you really like tower defense or you are really curious and want to play a quick pointless story with an amusing cast of characters, but there are way better tower defense games out there.
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Jun 9th, 2012 at 12:32:46 - Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (Wii) |
Never played a Fire Emblem game before, but I am a big fan of SRPGs. It looked challenging and epic and all those good things I like. Start the game, lots of political intrigue story going on, don't really care, pretty bad dialogue, introduces tons of characters and factions and all this, very confusing to try and follow. Ok, so maybe not playing for the story. Guess how many times I died in the FIRST TUTORIAL BATTLE? I think it was 3. And in the first few levels after? Yeah probably another 12 times.
Fire Emblem is HARD.
Fire Emblem enforces a fun little rule called permadeath. Sometimes if one of your characters dies it's game over. Fair enough. Other times though, if it's not a main story character, it's just dead forever. Fooorrreeeevvvveeer. And your characters literally get one-shot. Not even your weakest characters either. The mid-level ones still get one-shot. You cannot just send characters out into the field. You've got to plan to a really unreasonable degree to keep vulnerable characters out of the line of fire. I mean think about it. You can go the entire game growing a character and then screw up one time and have it gone forever. That sucks. So in my play time, I started on Normal difficulty since I like strategy RPGs and I'm not bad at them. Ok so Normal is like my Nightmare. I finally decided to switch to Easy after I'd been doing this one battle a few times, and was finally almost done with it. I went to attack an enemy with a normal full-health character, and she got counterattacked, crit, one-shot, dead forever. I was just like omg seriously? Putting it on Easy! So I restart and it really was easier, but just the fact that there is permadeath is just so lame. I had this level 1 priest, my only healer, who can only level up by healing allies. She was level one forever because on Easy (most of) your characters turn out much stronger than enemies, so she wasn't seeing much healing action. Then in this one level, some reinforcements came (enemy reinforcements come A LOT, from every which direction) and killed her because they spawned right near her and she couldn't get away. Permadeath, bam. That's when I stopped for good. And as far as I got, you can't just create a new character (maybe can later, dunno). So my healer died there and I was out a healer. Each character, no matter how minor, is actually a part of the story. Like she had a name and was a 'childhood friend' of another ally I had. And she died! Anyway, Easy was way better than Normal. You get I think literally twice as much XP and some other perks too, like again, literally half as many enemies. But yeah, permadeath makes me insane because that's all you're thinking about is 'ok is there any way they can kill any of my characters this turn?' Not fun to worry about.
So let's talk enemies. The AI is really lame. First of all, they completely target weak characters, characters who can't attack/counter. Makes sense enough, but I mean, it's freakin brutal here because they die forever. For this certain logic, the AI routinely is stupid as hell. Many enemies will just stand in one place until you attack them. Some you can draw out by moving into their attack range and others you can't. You never know which ones will move and which ones won't. I mean I did figure out that enemies standing in doorways and in front of chests don't move, but others will or won't too. So you can't like 'pull' them reliably. And in a game where your characters permanently die, you need some reliability. Also, like I mentioned earlier, reinforcements come quite often. There are WAY too many enemies on the maps in this game. Those reinforcements are chargers. They come straight for you. It's easy to be overwhelmed. In the beginning of the game, they keep giving you characters of wildly polar levels. So I had my level 1 priest and my level 12 mage...and my level 1 thief could go around one-shotting enemies and taking more hits than the level 12 fighter...???? Doesn't make sense. So you can kind of abuse these stronger characters, but your weak characters don't level as much because you want to rely on the strong characters who won't die because if you use the weak characters and make one miscalculation, they die! And even using the strong characters a lot, you'll still get a million reinforcements and they'll eventually die too because you can't heal them because your healer is level 1 and she can't move near enemies or else she dies! AAAHH!
Mmm, despite all the things I hated, the combat system is pretty cool. Weapons have durability, which I've never seen in an SRPG before and I kind of liked. I also liked the inventory system and the trading and how you can choose which weapon to attack with on your turn. So a lot of my characters had 2 or 3 different weapons by the time I quit, like a weak sword for when I just need to knock a few HP off, a strong sword, and a magic sword that can attack over 2 squares instead of only 1 for range attacks. Characters in this game always counterattack if they're in range. So if a swordsman attacks another swordsman adjacent, there will be a counterattack. So you have to be smart. If a swordsman attacks an archer (who say can only attack 2 squares away, not an adjacent square) then the archer can't counterattack. So I'd soften up enemies with non-counter-attackable attacks and finish them off with what could have been counterattacked if the enemy didn't die. There was also a neat rock-paper-scissors system for weapons and magic. Sword beats axe, axe beats lance, lance beats sword kind of thing. Lots of skills to equip. Terrain and terrain effects. Seems like a cool battle system. But characters need some balancing and the game just needs to be less punishing and I'd probably eat it up. As it stands, I have had Disgaea 2 sitting in my stash for like 2 years, so I've got no time for inferior SRPGs!
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Jun 9th, 2012 at 11:51:21 - Dead Space: Extraction (Wii) |
I don't think I knew this game was a rail shooter, or really even what it was like to play a rail shooter, and certainly not how dizzying rail shooters with a Wiimote could be. I used to play Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast, but that's about it...that was a great party game, for real.
So first of all...Dead Space on the Wii. Looks terrible compared to the PC games. The game is very dark. I turned the brightness most of the way up but then the contrast was obviously off and it just looked even shittier. I also watched a few short gameplay videos online and it looked dark and shitty on every one of them too. Like I had trouble seeing enemies until they were right in front of me. The character would turn like I was supposed to be shooting at something and I might see something barely, like BARELY, visible in the blackness. Then it would eat my face. And the Wiimote aiming reticle jiggled all over the damn place, and the character kept looking up and down and the camera was moving on its own and I know that's what a rail shooter is but noooo I didn't like it! If you want to pick up ammo, maybe you'd see it as the character turns, but I at least was too slow to pick much of it up. Definitely felt like it was moving too fast for me to keep up. Maybe if they'd had a slower difficulty or something would have been a little better there.
On the plus side, the story seemed neat. It takes place before the events of Dead Space, so it's about the discovery of the Marker on that one planet, and follows some of the miners and other people living on the surface there, just the beginning of Convergence, people starting to go nuts, all that. And I watched the ending on Youtube, and it's really cool how they tied the ending to the beginning of Dead Space.
Oh well! I tried!
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