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Jan 14th, 2012 at 06:06:04 - Vanquish (360) |
I found Vanquish on one of those "Best Games You've Never Heard Of" lists, which I love oh-so-much. Vanquish rules. It's apparently masterminded by some established Japanese designer. You can tell someone masterminded it, and that the person is an action/shooter mastermind indeed. Vanquish is a third-person shooter, a FAST third-person shooter. There's a cover system like Gears of War, and lots of guns too. The major difference between this and other shooters I've played is the booster pack. Your character is in this hi-tech experimental military armored battlesuit, like a good Japanese robot-man-mech protagonist. The suit has rocket boosters that let you slide around the battlefield on your back all John Woo-style, firing guns the whole way, like if you went on a Slip n Slide with a rocket launcher. It can be a little dizzying until you get used to controlling the speedy sliding mech-man, but once you get the hang of the orientation, it is tremendous fun. I found myself sliding circles around bosses, zipping from cover to cover, and careening toward enemies to jump up and melee them with a foot to the face. Each gun has a different melee move, and while they all do the same thing (1-hit kill on normal enemy soldiers) they have unique animations.
The guns themselves bring an RPG element to the game since they are upgradeable. It's a neat system that I figured out early. You can equip four weapons at a time. You always have stun/frag grenades, and then the other 3 slots (right, up and down on the D-pad) you can equip whatever other guns you like. So, an example of the upgrade system: I have an assault rifle equipped that has half ammo. If I pick up another assault rifle, it completely fills the ammo. If I have full ammo and I pick up another assault rifle, I get a bar toward an upgrade for the assault rifle. Once I get enough bars, I get a star. When I get a star, the gun upgrades stuff like its fire rate, ammo capacity, or damage. Guns either upgrade to 5 stars or 10 stars. The damage boosts are only for the max level, as far as I could tell. The trick is that when you die, whatever gun you were using is knocked down a bar. This doesn't seem to *always* be the case, and I never figured out exactly how it worked, but I played with this assumption. So if I'm using a maxed out assault rifle and I die, I respawn with full ammo, but it's no longer maxed out, so I lose my damage boost. I thought around the problem of losing damage boosts by always keeping at least two max-level guns on hand. If I died using the assault rifle, and thus lost my damage boost, I'd respawn and equip the other gun I had maxed out, usually the heavy machine gun. I maxed both these guns out ASAP and had them maxed for at least half the game. A 50% damage boost makes a huge difference!
The style of the world and the character designs are awesome. The game takes place not too far in the future where a Russian extremist group led by the antagonist launches a nuke and destroys San Fransisco to spark nuclear war with the US. Your character is this elite DARPA operative, and you go to a Russian orbital space colony with a ton of US Marines and have to rescue this scientist who is the one that developed some particular technology that powers your battlesuit and powers various weapons the Russians are going to use. You've got to stop the Russians from forcing him to launch more nukes and avoid war. The colony itself looks amazing. I cannot stress how amazing the colony looks, like the distant cityscape of this orbital colony is one of the coolest things I've ever seen realized in a game, movie, or artwork. And the fighting going on inside the colony is dynamic. There's always a spaceship crashing or a building blowing up beside you, things happening in the distance. It's very cool, and the pace that the game moves you is so fast (it slows down a bit in the last third or so), that you're just playing it in this GO GO GO! mindset. The enemies are generally standard cannon fodder, as are your endless AI Marine allies, but the beefier enemies pack a punch and provide a challenge, at least before you get all leveled up. By the end I was mostly just unloading 1000 assault rifle rounds at +50% damage into their faces and winning. Some of the enemies were more challenging though, like the first couple times you face these giant Soviet transformer bot things, or the mobile fight against the Marine commander.
When I beat the game, it gave me some stats. It took me 6 hours, 44 minutes. This "cover usage" stat I was never completely sure of. Does it mean I spent 19.12% of my time in cover or that I used 19.12% of the available cover throughout the game? I died 38 times. 595 friendly marines died in battle. I admit to letting many of them get wounded on purpose because when you revive them, they drop a gun for you. Many of those I let become wounded just went on to die. Sad! I assisted 33 friendlies. This is totally higher because it doesn't count all the times I assisted people and then died. So technically all these numbers are higher. I killed 942 enemies. I destroyed 8 secret statues. At the credits, there is a space shooting minigame where you shoot all the staffs' faces that are plastered on asteroids. I shot 76 developers.
Highly highly recommend this one.
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Jan 13th, 2012 at 21:50:15 - Gears of War 3 (360) |
I started playing Gears again. It had been so long since I played last time that I just started over. I played Chapter 1 with M on hardcore. After playing Vanquish, and several other easier games, I totally forgot how hard Gears of War could be, especially on hardcore. We did fine together mostly because we could resurrect each other--well, not resurrect, but help each other up before dying. So we played chapter 1, or act one, or whatever. I turned it on the other day and finished chapter 1 on hardcore alone, but it was ridiculously difficult for me. I was dying left and right and would get killed in like three shots. Those Globbers that lob giant balls of imulsion would get me back into a corner and just kill me over and over. I'm really glad the friendly AI does its job well and revives me when I need it. Since hardcore was beating me up so badly, as soon as I beat act one I changed the difficulty to normal and I'm glad I did. I'm through act 2 and will probably play Act III today. One act per day is only 3 more days to beat!
The real reason for the Gears update is the multiplayer. A couple weeks ago, H and I took my Xbox over to N's house and we played Horde mode and Beast mode. It was my first time playing online either of these modes. There were four of us spread out among 2 Xboxes and 2 HD TVs. Beast mode was neat. You play as the Locust, and you select which one you want to be each round. If I remember (this was a few weeks ago), you get money for killing cogs, who have laid traps for you. The more cogs you kill, the bigger & badder Locust you can purchase to control. They all have their uses, sort of. Like wild tickers are good for eating barbed wire and other cog defenses. Of course the bigger Locust are good for just crushing and destroying. Then we played Horde mode, which I liked way better. In Horde mode you switch roles from Beast mode, so you're the cogs defending against waves of Locust. Locust come in waves for 9 rounds, getting increasingly more difficult, and the 10th round is a boss. This goes on for 50 rounds, spiking difficulty on the boss battles, but getting harder all the time. We split up me and N on the left side of this particular map, and H and W on the right side. The object is basically not to have the entire team die. N said we were supposed to defend this energy generator or something, which, if we controlled, we could build defenses spread out from it. I told M, who is a Gears fanatic, about N's strategy later, and she said "What? No, the goal isn't to necessarily defend that initial generator, but to stay alive. You need to go capture more generators." Because N told us NOT to go capture more generators because then we'd have to defend them. Two different ways of playing? N's instructions worked fine though -- we made it to wave 28 on our very first try, with W having never played the game, H being merely okay at shooters, me being decent, and N kicking ass. I actually DID end up kicking ass right alongside N (we dominated our left side) after I got the hang of the game again, and H and W improved a lot too. I want to play it more.
There's my Gears update. I also played some random Halo 2 co-op with H, speaking of team-based play. I bought the entire Halo series over Christmas. Halo 1 doesn't work on my Xbox, but 2 does. I didn't want to play 2 without playing 1, but H did, so we played for an hour and a half or so through the story, and I had no idea what was going on. I'm shelving it though until I get a chance to play Halo 1. Must play in order!
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Jan 12th, 2012 at 12:30:33 - Braid (PC) |
So I've fallen behind on updating this. I was home for Christmas, and then there was the Steam winter sale where I played a bunch of random games for achievements, and then I came home and played even more random games. I'll just go through some memorable moments that I have had in the last month. And if this sounds weird, it's because I'm using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a voice-to-text program, that I just installed today. I'm learning how to use it and training it by dictating gamelogs.
I played Braid for the first time visiting P in the hospital. Z and I kept him company while he was recovering from appendicitis or food poisoning or something painful sounding. I brought him his laptop and we all played Braid for like four hours. It was a very collaborative effort. We were all giddy and playfully competitive from trying to solve puzzles first. We took turns at the controls.
This time I played Braid in the Chicago airport where I had a three-hour layover followed by a three-hour delay, and I was lucky enough to snipe a seat next to a power outlet, where I happily played Braid for a couple hours. The first thing that struck me was how pretty the hand-painted backgrounds were. I remembered them from last time. I also remembered the story about time and regret and saving the princess. Essentially it seemed to be about the game designer's relationship with his girlfriend.… Or ex-girlfriend. Regardless of the emo-ness of the story, I find it quite compelling. Like Mario, the Princess is always at a different castle when you reach the end of the level.
I also remember a lot of the puzzles and solutions from P's hospital extravaganza. However, I forgot a lot. I remember the bit about manipulating time. I remember the objects that are not affected by time reversal. I remember some of the puzzles where you have to slow down time so that objects unaffected by time interact in specific ways with objects that are affected by time. This particular level involved I think three doors and three keys or something. Actually, as I'm sitting here thinking about it, it's really hard to describe. So, the controls are basically left right jump and rewind time. When you rewind time everything moves backwards in time except certain colored objects, or sparkly objects or something. So some of the keys are sparkling and some of the doors are sparkling, which means that some keys can be reused and some doors can be reused when you rewind time. So you have to figure out in what sequence to use each key on the doors in order to make it down the hallway where there is a puzzle piece. The levels are somewhat nonlinear, and the puzzle pieces are scattered around in such a way that you have to come back to many levels later once you figured out tricks to get earlier puzzle pieces. We never really figured out the point of the puzzles because it paints a little picture of the story ( and they let you walk across them like a ledge) space and that's about it as far as we can tell.
There's not a lot to say, and I'm mostly just writing this to train Dragon, but those painted backgrounds are so pretty and stand out so vividly that playing the game feels like a dreamscape to me. I've got a few games to finish before I picked this one back up, but I look forward to getting back into it.
Oh my God, I just selected all and said copy and it selected all and then replaced all of it with the word copy. That was scary.
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Dec 8th, 2011 at 15:20:54 - Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (360) |
Having heard forever that this one is totally worth playing, I finally bought it (for the second time) to play. I bought a PC version a year ago but it didn't work with Vista and I could never patch it or anything, so grabbed the 360 version a couple weeks ago. The great thing about this is that it's a film game that is indeed worth playing. The only other good one I can think of is the Chronicles of Riddick game, so it's an elite club.
King Kong is short and sweet. It follows the movie pretty closely from what I can remember and all the movie cast provides voiceovers. Jack Black is the best voice for sure, and the Ann character has such a blood-curdling scream. You play as the Jack character. It's funny though, I don't think he's EVER shown because the game is in first-person. So all the other characters, yeah, I recognize them from the movie, but MY character I have no clue what he looks like because I don't remember from the movie!
There are a few really cool things about this game. Even though it's from 2005, it's pretty. The environments look good, and Kong and the other big dinosaurs especially are epic looking. I read an article once that was talking about the horrible facial animations for the human characters, Ann in particular, and that one was spot on. I don't even think their lips move when they talk. It doesn't take away from anything though. The game is from a first-person perspective and you play as Jack AND King Kong. The King Kong sections involve big monster fights and ape-platforming, swinging from branches and such. Playing as Kong is awesome. The controls make it feel just like you're maneuvering a giant gorilla. It slows down and feels powerful. You can go into "Fury Mode" by mashing Y a lot. Kong beats his chest, roars, and then deals a ton of extra damage. The game is completely linear, and the Kong sections really benefit from this because it makes the platforming fast and purposeful. See, Kong is always doing something specific, chasing a dinosaur, running away with Ann, or whatever, so he has these short and intense platforming sequences.
I thought the game would be more an FPS, but it's more action-adventure from a first-person view than a shooter. Your main weapons won't be guns, but spears. Guns are kind of like your "oh shit" button. So there are spears laying around everywhere. There is also fire everywhere. If you dip the spear in fire it becomes a flame-tipped spear, which does more damage and can be used to ignite grass. This is important because apparently on Skull Island grass and knee-height shrubbery is impossible to walk through. It must be burned away. I wouldn't call any segments of the game puzzles, but they could have been. Maybe they're puzzle-like. Sometimes you need to burn grass, but there's no fire in sight, so you've got to set out with a spear and find fire. There are these gates all around too that require handles to turn to open the gate, but the handles will be missing, so you've got to set out to find the handles. It usually takes just a minute to spot them and another minute to get it, but sometimes there's a small sequence of things to do in order to get the handle.
Enemies can all be killed with spears, except the giant V-Rexes, which can only be killed by Kong. It's kind of unrealistic to kill a big dinosaur with two flaming spears, but at least # of spears to kill varies in proportion to the difficulty of the dinosaur. There are a couple other weird things, like why are there crates of ammo and guns on Skull Island? Who hung ammo crates up by ropes? Why are some of the fires located way up high in ridiculously stupid places that no one would ever look and serve no purpose (I'm looking at you, Millipede level).
That's about it. Fun game. I think it took me maybe 7 hours. It's divided up into really short chunks, usually probably in the 10 minute range, but some as short as walking through a tunnel or watching a cut scene for like 1 minute.
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