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May 28th, 2011 at 01:45:39 - Crysis (PC) |
Crysis is one of the best-looking games I've ever played and it's over 3.5 years old! The #1 thing I'd read about it is how much it pushes the visual envelope on PC, and I can vouch for it. It does come at the cost of performance though, which is too bad, but I suppose people with ridiculously high-end PCs can smile real big. This PC is a top-of-the-liner from late 2009, runs everything on maximum, and handled Crysis on High (out of Very High) most of the time, but at the end I even had to turn it down to Medium, and even then it still stuttered like crazy. There's just so many explosions and epic things happening on the screen at once. I can't imagine what Crysis 2 looks like, or what kind of computer you need to run it, ha. And not to ruin story, but the level in the alien ship was the single most incredible looking level I've ever gazed at, ever.
I have to draw obvious comparisons between Crysis and both Far Cry and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare/Black Ops. First of all, Crysis looks a lot like Far Cry. Both take place on jungle islands, and the look of the games are real similar. In Far Cry, you're fighting against some government/guerillas/don't remember, and then you end up having to deal with aliens. In Crysis, you're a special ops agent fighting against the North Koreans, and then you end up having to deal with...aliens. There's not much in the way of story, so the focus is on action, action, action.
The most unique thing about Crysis is your nanosuit. Instead of loading you out with guns only, your suit makes you a super soldier with its 4 modes: strength, speed, armor, and cloaking. You can swap between them on the fly as the situation warrants. Mostly, I found the situation rarely warranted any specific one, so it's up to the player to be creative. Strength reduces recoil on your weapon, lets you punch things real hard and break stuff, and lets you jump real high, which was good for getting a height advantage. Speed makes you super fast, which is good for closing in quickly on enemies (then switch to strength and bam!) or quickly escaping to cover. Armor I used on some hefty enemies, and it reduces damage taken. And stealth, ever my favorite, makes you invisible a short time, and invisibility breaks when you fire a weapon or your suit's energy runs out. You can't abuse any of the powers because of the suit's limited and rechargeable energy, so I had to think and plan a bit. I used stealth the majority of the time, lured enemies near me, and picked them off one by one with a silenced gun.
Guns are very standard fare, nothing unique there.
That really is the gist of the game. It's very intense, which is why I bring up the CoD series, so intense in fact that I almost played the entire thing in one sitting, and would have if I didn't get stuck/frustrated at the end.
I do have a few gripes. One is that there were 0 boss fights until the very end. It made the pacing feel a bit off, not monotonous or anything, because the objectives kept on coming, and the whole game was epic all along, but singular battles just didn't happen, I guess because there's no setup for a 'bad guy' in the story besides the aliens and the North Korean general (which I'm hardly calling a boss fight because it was so easy and mundane). The singular things in the game were events instead of boss fights. For example, one mission you have to call an airstrike on a communications ship in a harbor, the climax of the overarching mission to secure the harbor and free up communications so the military can advance and find the general. You call it in and this awesome bombing scene happens with the boat capsizing and sinking into the water. There's another part with a crumbling mountain, rocks falling all around you, that was very cool.
Another gripe are the bugs. The mission to call an air strike on the ship, after you call the air strike, you get a call to 'hold off enemy air units' until your allies can fly in. When I played there were no air units. My choppers came in, one landed (and opened fire into the sky forever), and the other two just flew around. I ran around like 30 minutes, loaded, reloaded, couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, why they weren't landing and why I couldn't do anything. I went online for help and found tons of people posting about a plethora of bugs in the game, and on that mission in general. Someone said the enemy chopper is about 5 miles up in the sky and you can see with binoculars. Sure enough, there it was, firing rockets into the air (ah, and that's what the grounded chopper of mine was shooting at!), but I couldn't shoot it, too high. Another person said instead of the boat sinking, it just did barrel rolls forever. Another person said they kept falling through the ship's deck. But many, many people were asking how to make friendly choppers land. I took advice and loaded an earlier save, played some of the level again. Same thing. I couldn't find an answer, but I noticed that when I loaded it back, a chopper comes to harass me before I board the ship. Choppers in Crysis usually fly away if you shoot back at them or ignore them, and that's what this one had done. Instead, I took it on, blew it up, then another came, and I called the airstrike on the ship while the chopper was still active. A-ha! Now the event proceeded normally, as I kept the chopper occupied until friendlies came and helped bring it down.
Another annoying thing is at the end, you get this TAC gun that is supposed to auto-lock onto the last boss, which, when you go on deck then, appears to be a giant spider thing. The damn gun wouldn't lock. This is what made me quit playing last night. I looked it up after trying to make it lock for like 30 minutes, and turns out you're not supposed to use it on that boss. You have to use regular guns on that boss. Then why do I have this TAC gun now?! And why don't they tell me just to use regular bullets?! Because, hey, if you give a player a giant new gun, they will try and use it on the first giant enemy they see, and it really doesn't make sense not to be able to, especially when said gun has infinite ammo. Okay, so kill the spider boss, then a giant ship comes out of the ocean and I have to kill its turrets. The TAC gun won't autolock again! I had read this is the last boss and the TAC gun is for the last boss. Oh, the TAC gun is ONLY for shooting its heart, and you have to use regular ammo against the turrets. So irritating! I finally got it right and brought it down.
So my gripe is that like 20% of my play time in Crysis was trying to get around a bug and trying to use the TAC gun when I secretly wasn't supposed to be using it. If the rest of the game weren't absolutely stellar, I would be less forgiving, but the rest of the game was absolutely stellar.
Up next: Crysis:Warhead.
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May 27th, 2011 at 00:35:03 - Global Agenda (PC) |
The Global Agenda client has been on my computer for probably 9 months, and I finally got around to trying it, just to play a few hours and delete it. I spent a nice enough few hours with it this week, but it's same old same old MMO. I can't remember why I was excited to try it back then, but I imagine it had something to do with the post-apocalyptic/dystopian setting and the fact that it plays like a mix between an MMO and a third-person shooter. Unfortunately the MMO feel and the TPS feel can be found done much better in other games, so the UI and combat did not hook me. Plus, and I never thought about it because I never played one, this whole MMOFPS(or MMOTPS) thing is noooo good if you have any kind of lag whatsoever. More on that later.
Global Agenda doesn't look or feel like a AAA game. It's pretty and functional enough, but nothing made me go "ooooh" except the very first time I left The Dome city and looked far into the distance of the desert, seeing water pumps and dusty towers dotting the canyon-esque landscape. The characters had a cool sci-fi-hi-tech look to them, but environments and NPCs were pretty bland. My character, for example, was a mechanic (or engineer or some word like that) and sported a robotic third over one shoulder! Oh, plus everyone starts out with jet packs! You can fly short distances from the very beginning of the game, which is pretty cool and I definitely saw the tactical advantages this could bring, as the environments are built upward. Since my mechanic was a bit of a ranged DPS class who could snipe, I often jetpacked to cliff edges or rocks or buildings above my enemies and shot them from there.
The first time I played I had some lag, and it caused a couple jetpack-related deaths, and quite a few deaths to NPCs. In a shooter like this, where your bullets actually take a split second to travel to the enemy, and there's a visual cue, a stream of bullets, to show it, lag means you aren't aiming at them. Therefore you miss. You don't 'target' an enemy and cast 'shoot gun' at them. You actually, like a shooter, have to follow them with crosshairs, and the enemies like to jump and run around, which made this difficult. Of course you get better with practice, but it's very twitchy, and it's only magnified in PvP. I played other times with no lag, and it was better, but still challenging!
A couple cool things: You auto-loot on a kill. There's no corpse-clicking; items go straight to your inventory. Love it.
You can immediately go into instances. The tutorial drops you off at level 5, and yeah, instances at level 5. The early ones I played were very basic, took 10-15 minutes, but bosses had moves that would mess you up if you didn't handle them correctly, and there are certainly a ton of opportunities to play smart. GA has the basic 3 roles among 4 classes, and each class has 3 specs to choose from. I kinda figured this out from doing a few instances. There's the Medic (healer), the Assault (tank), the...stealthy one (melee dps) and Mechanic (ranged dps). My class was also the pet class. I could specialize in sniping, in defensive stuff (shield barriers to protect the party from gunfire, missile turrets and things), or drones (my pet). In instances, I would run ahead of my team and set a barrier when I thought there might be a fire fight, then hang back and pick off enemy ranged. The stealth class would run ahead and set explosives. The assault class just ran in guns blazing. The healer class healed. One of the bosses had a giant flamethrower, and another boss was a juggernaut who charged at us. They basically involved moving and staying behind cover, but were fun. Jetpacking away during fights is also very cool. I liked pulling aggro on the juggernaut, then flying out of the way when he charged me.
My goal was to get to level 10 so I could try PvP, which I did. The one available map was a 'take 3 objectives' one and was fun enough. It reminded me quite of Team Fortress with the medics, the engineers setting up turrets and barriers, the spies running stealth and backstabbing people, etc. The level ranges are HUGE. It looked like this map was for level 10-29. Somehow I still killed people and felt like I contributed. Not sure if they balance out stats or whatnot like WAR. I know I had the same amount of health, and like I said I did kill some people, but some obviously took way less damage than others, and some definitely killed me real fast. The dungeons were the same way, me being level 5 going in with level 20 players. Maybe there's just not a lot of stat increase in the interim. Dungeon enemies would mop the floor with me, especially bosses I'd die in just a couple hits. Anyway, however they balanced this stuff, it made me feel useful at low levels.
I also did some questing to see how it flowed, and it's totally generic. Go there, kill 10 of these, collect 5 of those. It's funny the features that I now expect to come with games, like quest tracking. Quest tracking has become pretty standard, and Global Agenda's system is hardly there. You can only track one at a time, and although quest locations show up on the map, you can't track them from the map! You have to open up your journal, select the quest, and select 'track quest.' No hotkeys or anything. And the most annoying little thing, 'M' doesn't open the map! You have to push 'N' for map. 'M' opens the mission menu where you queue for PvP and instances. 'M' is always map! So questing was...questing. Nothing special. By the time I stopped though I'd died a handful of times and got better at planning my infiltration of enemy-heavy areas. As a mechanic, it turned out to be cool, and my favorite quest was one in which I had to kill 2 semi-boss guys, who each were surrounded with 3 lesser enemies. I spotted one of these groups crossing a bridge in the distance, so I flew up on top of a rock, set up a turret and a barrier, crouched in a corner, pulled up my scope, and opened fire. As usual, they started running and I couldn't keep my crosshairs on them well, so they all got close before I killed one. I was protected for a short while, but when the shield went down, they turned to focus fire my turret, at which point I jetpacked to the ground and flanked them, killed another lesser enemy while my turret finished off the big guy! Then I jetpacked up again and repaired my turret as it fought the last enemy. I imagine combat gets cooler as you go on, but this was the best instance of 'ooh, that was cool.'
One thing that makes the game feel dead is there's like no music. It's very quiet. NPCs also have no voices. They don't greet you or anything. Definitely missing something there.
And finally, my favorite thing to wonder over, the payment model. GA is now totally free to download and play (used to have to pay for the game). You can upgrade to Elite Agent status for the price of the game box, $20, and this grants you DOUBLE xp when you complete quests, finish a mission or battleground, as well as an additional item reward for the instanced content. You also get access to the auction house, mail, can create guilds, and have chat restrictions removed. Here's where it gets crazy. You can then buy 'Boosters' that add another 50% xp. It was incredibly defeating to finish an instance or battleground and have the summary tell me what I earned, and then tell me what I WOULD HAVE earned, or what I missed, if I were an Elite Agent and/or had a booster pack. Oh man, I could have gotten 3x the xp and two additional items! Crap. It's a huuuuge incentive to buy that stuff if you really like the game. Other than boosters, the cash shop is really limited compared to, say, Turbine's.
Summary: Fun enough, just another MMO. Oh, and P gave me his copy of Aion with 1 month free, so there's another 'flying' MMO to try at some point.
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May 26th, 2011 at 13:10:44 - The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (PC) |
Dark Athena is basically a slightly updated Butcher Bay. It's a direct sequel, beginning with Riddick and Johns again, but ending with Riddick and a little girl escaping. 3/4 of the game is on the ship, Dark Athena, with the other 1/4 on a doomed civilian planet, and it's the 1/4 I think that shines. This is primarily because Riddick gets a SCAR gun that shoots remote sticky bombs. From the minute I got it, I hardly used anything else because it is so satisfying to blow up enemies and things with sticky bombs. Even when a machine gun or stealth would have served me better, I opted for sticky bombs! Other than the SCAR, okay okay, it really doesn't shine in that last 1/4. There are some damn annoying enemies, but god am I glad I got to shoot them with sticky bombs.
But really, the planetside part felt tacked on. I know that Dark Athena was supposed to be an expansion to Butcher Bay, but delays and such ended up turning it into a full-fledged sequel. My hunch is the planetside part became the extra oomph that turned Dark Athena from add-on to sequel. By all means, Riddick and Revas' first fight on Dark Athena should have ended the game, but inexplicably they both live. Riddick escapes in an escape pod which gets shot by a space missile, and he somehow descends through the planet's atmosphere, crashes on a beach, is unconscious for days, and is still strapped in his seatbelt when he wakes up, unharmed. Come on now, that missile, and especially entering a planet's atmosphere after being hit by a missile, would have killed him. As for Revas, she got a dang spike shoved through her neck! The next time we see her, she's talking normally and has no conspicuous hole, wound, or scarring of the neck. But when Riddick can survive a planet crash in a blown up pod and the last boss in an armored suit dies, not to a spike through the neck, but to falling down an elevator shaft, something just seems off.
Taking both games as a whole, I enjoyed them more often than not. Despite some cheap enemies spotting Riddick and his apparently bright red target in the shadows, and some weird sound issues in Dark Athena, the games are full of intense stealth and shooter play. Oh, and also, profanity and Vin Diesel's one-liners, which stop being as cool as the games go on.
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May 21st, 2011 at 06:39:16 - The Witcher (PC) |
Beat The Witcher earlier in the week and haven't had a chance to sit down and write about the last half. I thought I saw there were 6 chapters and an epilogue, so last entry when I was beginning chapter 4, I thought I was halfway through. Turns out I was wrong and there are 5 chapters and an epilogue, which is short, so I really wasn't far. Seriously a great game, and highly recommended RPG. The end was cool, story wrapped up nicely, yet obvious where the sequel begins, and the final boss's last words before he dies are awesome. Took me 44.5 hours, which according to howlongtobeat.com (a cool little site that averages user-submitted completion times), is just under the average. There are 7 DLC episodes that are extra story bits for some of the characters in the game. Dunno how long those will take, but I'm gonna go Riddick -> Amnesia DLC -> Crysis -> Witcher DLC -> Crysis x-pac, to split up all these shooters.
At the end of the game, the main choice you make unfolds, whether you helped the elves, the humans, or remained neutral. I think it was ambitious the way they tried to make choices matter, but really, you get one of 3 endings, same boss though. I thought the boss would be different, like, I thought the last chapter would basically have a different goal depending. And most of those 1 or 2 moral choices you make along the way don't have much impact, as in it changes some little things, like which female character falls in love with you or whether the witch or some peasants help you out for a fight. Some of the choices turn out to be meaningless, like I suspected earlier, especially who you implicate for the murders. It does in fact have to be Ramsmeat because Kalkstein and Thaler are written into the story later. I thought that meant the story would be different had you implicated Thaler, for example, but nah, it's the same because Ramsmeat has to die and Thaler has to play his role later. The Witcher 2 is supposed to have 16 different endings. I'm real curious to see where they take the idea of choices with consequences! The Witcher 2, by the way, is getting rave reviews across the board, so I will be anticipating the ol' price drop on that one.
A couple other random things...I ended up being the world champion of both boxing and dice poker, neither of which ever get any more difficult than the first matches, which is a shame. Fistfighting, you just block, punch, block, punch, and repeat until you win. Dice poker is all random, and the opponent won't raise or take any risks whatsoever unless he's like 99% sure of it. The last dice poker player plays no different than the first.
I thought I found a KKK reference which freaked me out a bit, until I realize that the leader of the Order is also called the Grand Master, and that the little kid who told me that he wants to play 'hang the elf' and that he's 'always the Grand Master' really was talking in context.
Just to mention again, the info screen is fantastic. It keeps records of all plants, monsters, characters, locations, quests, important terms, all in nice readable and searchable format. Whenever something new happens to a character, for example, that character's entry will have a new ! by it, letting you know there's new info for the entry. I like the auto-updating there, and all that information really, really, really helped me keep track of what was going on. Other story-heavy games should have the same at least.
After finishing any game, I look at cheats and walkthroughs to see if there was anything really neat I missed, to see what cheats and easter eggs exist, to see if anyone has any advice or strategies that I could have used or if I did something novel that other people didn't do. In the Witcher, then, I checked out all the alternate choices of story that I didn't choose, like what would have happened if I'd done X instead of Y. No real surprises there. There aren't any cheats to speak of, just a couple exploitable bugs fixed with the enhanced edition. I found out I could have been selling weapons, but I never did because you can only carry the ones for which you have free weapon slots. Since my slots were all full, I never picked them up off the ground, but I should have been selling what I had whenever I found a vendor! I never once modified or created a weapon, so all those runes and meteor stones were wasted. I never once upgraded my armor! I always wondered why there was only 1 hotkey for potions, and that was because better armor has more potion slots! Aaaah! No matter though since I never even used the 1 hotkey. I never once made a bomb, and I only used weapon coating like twice, so all those materials were also wasted.
While looking at extras and tips, I stumbled upon a box back of The Witcher and had a good laugh, and an idea for something to do after I play a game. The back of The Witcher has some truly outlandish claims. Obviously what goes on the box is put there to move the box off the shelf. Gamers need to be able to pick it up, be impressed, and then buy. But to what extent does the need to lay out eye-catching game features lead said displayed features to be...mmm...exaggerated? There's certainly an element of subjectivity to say that features are exaggerated, but perhaps some of these can be ranked along a continuum of more or less accurate, as identified by consumers who actually played the game. What if you had participants playing a game, and show them the box back when they were done, and then talk to them about how accurate they think the highlights listed there were in relation to their experience? This would be cool in general when prompting people to reflect on their gameplay experience.
So for me and The Witcher, I wrote down a couple that jumped out.
"More than 90 hours of nonlinear gameplay." Considering my time was 44.5 hours and the average on howlongtobeat was like 48, I'm going to reject this one. Perhaps if you played it through twice, but that is in no way 90 unique hours. 80 of those hours would overlap. And in my 44.5, I completed or at least started every quest I came upon, went to every area, spent probably a normal amount of time dying and retrying things, running around, picking flowers, talking to NPCs, exploring, etc. No way in hell there are 90 hours of gameplay.
"6 different sword styles." Actually there are 3, and then those exact same 3 with a different sword. So I would argue there are in fact 3 different sword styles.
"over 120 different attacks assisted by magic, potions of your creation and modifiable weaponry and equipment." 120?! Hahaha! This is what I used. 3 sword styles for each of the two swords. We'll be nice and call it 6 since we need to add up to 120. 5 signs. ... ...6+5=11. 11=120? Negative. Oh right, but I didn't use bombs. Maybe there are 10 unique bombs. What else performs a qualitatively unique attack? Maybe they're counting weapon coatings which make your weapon more effective against certain monster types. Maybe there are 10 of those. That's 31 total. Maybe they're counting animations. Each sword style has like 4 or 5 animations you can chain together. Oh okay, let's give them 4 animations times 6 sword styles = 24...24+31 is 55. Okay, we're almost halfway there. Yeah...No. No clue where they get the 120 number. But you know what else? It doesn't really matter because there are TWO(point five) types of button that you push to attack. (1)Right click to use a sign (1.5)Hold it to charge it (2)Left click to use your sword, and repeat the exact same timing for every stance in every fight in the whole game.
Was The Witcher overzealous with their box features? I think so.
Anyway, anyway, anyway. Fun stuff even with 10% of the attacks and 50% of the length. Go play.
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