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Jun 4th, 2011 at 22:26:27 - Shining Force EXA (PS2) |
I'm surprised by how much I like this, given some of the reviews. I mean, I knew I'd like it, but some of the reviews made things sound like big flaws that I don't find very bad. I'm looking at Gamespot right now to remember what all they didn't like:
"Mind-numblingly shallow combat." Yeah, it is shallow, but the game's a hack n slash. I think it's fun (although reviews say it gets really old after a few hours, but I'm going strong!). You push X to swing, and you can chain swings together by timing X right. At any point you can hold X to charge a special attack, but if you do it after a certain number of combos, depending on the weapon and the timing, then your special attack becomes part of a chain, and after THAT you can hold X again to chain a super powerful special that uses mana, and chain a couple of those depending on weapon. The amount of enemies you kill chaining the mega combos is awesome. But there is a big difference between using Toma and Cyrille. Toma uses either a 2-handed sword (with no magic capability) or a 1-h sword & board with usually 1 spell. Cyrille uses either a bow (with limited magic I think, but I've never equipped her with one) or a book, with a ton of magic spells. So with Cyrille, I don't want to engage in melee because her defenses are weak and her magic is so strong anyway. So while Toma is fun with the combos and spinning around the screen like a tazmanian devil, with Cyrille I just stand back and press triangle to cast fireball over and over and over. But there is plenty of intensity because enemies are everywhere, and getting hit much is generally bad, especially with the bigger baddies. So, to sum, it's not a deep system at all, but it's fun in practice. Oh plus, you constantly get to upgrade abilities and so I constantly see my characters getting stronger.
"Severe framerate instability." To look at this on the positive side, it builds tension! When a ton of enemies pop on screen, it does lag like crazy, which really should be annoying, but because the combat is so simple, you can keep fighting like normal. I like building combos and watching Toma annihilate 60 enemies in slo-mo.
"Poor voice acting." The voice acting is totally not poor! It's not awesome or anything, but totally standard RPG fare I think. The writing is about standard as well, so I've got no complaints there. Actually a lot of this game is just pretty middle-of-the-road if I think about it.
There are a few other *almost* annoying things that people could easily hate, but that I don't mind. In this game, your base is the 'Geo-Fortress,' which is build into a mountain and is used by the 'Heritor,' the person who unearths the holy sword, Shining Force, in his/her battle against the evil lord Malxatra. Your whole team is split into two parties: one that goes out and does whatever mission you're on, and the other who stays at the Geo-Fortress to defend it. The almost annoying thing is that (randomly?) enemies attack the Geo-Fortress, and whatever you're doing with the mission team gets totally interrupted, and you are forced to switch to the defensive team and have some 5-minute battle where you run around one of 4 levels looking for the 'boss' to kill it and stop the attack. Then the game ports you right back to the mission team, right back in the middle of whatever they were doing. Even if you're in the middle of fighting some really hard special enemy, the game will switch characters to defend, and then switch you back right into the middle of the fight again.
One thing I like are all the optional areas to go to and optional challenges to take on. There are enemies in stasis fields to awaken if you dare (that yield Secret Scrolls, which are like skills you can attach to equipment), places called 'Path of Challenge' or something like that complete with warning signs that you have to bust through if you want to tackle it, again with great rewards, Arenas for each monster type where you fight really hard bosses and tons of minions that feature different things like turning you to stone or disappearing or using ice magic or whatever, Training grounds where you go into a dungeon and fight a boss every 5 levels, etc. All this stuff, totally optional, but hard and rewarding!
The most unique thing about the game is upgrading the Geo-Fortress. Every now and then you find or are rewarded with Core Metal, which you use to upgrade the functions of the Geo-Fortress (you have to find other Metals to restore the functions in the first place, which I think I am still doing, or maybe have just completed, in the story). So it's got a radar to find treasures and bosses, it's got a defense system with defense robots to help with attacks, a long-range cannon, the training dungeon, and a couple other things. You spend core metal to make all of these stronger/more/better. Unfortunately though (or fortunately because it makes my decisions easier) most of the upgrades aren't that useful. I pretty much just upgrade the overall level of the Geo-Fortress and the training dungeon. I was upgrading some of the others, and might again later, but like the radar, okay, I explore the whole map anyway and I'll find all the treasure I can get. The defensive robots, I bought some, but I haven't had trouble defending the Geo-Fortress in a long time, so haven't bought more. But these things may come in handy later.
That's about it on Shining Force. Pretty simple hack n slash. Fun though, and good for an hour or two here and there.
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May 28th, 2011 at 06:30:26 - Crysis: Warhead (PC) |
Burned through this one, parallel story to the events of Crysis from another character's perspective. Kinda cool playing them back to back because this character, Psycho, often comes to places that Nomad was after he left and usually after the aliens ice blasted it. Of particular note is the tank field level on the way to the airfield that, earlier with Nomad was a hot firefight, and now, with Psycho, is frozen death. Very cool contrast.
They took the time to develop Psycho's character a bit more, and even gave us a glimpse into his mind regarding treatment of prisoners and unarmed soldiers. Then we see him struggle with the issue when a friend dies and an enemy lives. Nomad was mostly a generic soldier character, but Psycho has more to him.
Playing Warhead was about the exact same thing as playing Crysis, just super short (4.5 hours). Since you already saw the aliens in Crysis, they are introduced earlier here. There are two new types, one of which was pointless, and the other which was a legitimate challenge. The pointless one is a big orange squid thing (think Matrix squid machines) that drops bombs, but I never paid it any attention. The other are like shield aliens. They come with the smaller squids and they're 'linked,' so as long as the shield squid is alive, all the others have shields around them. Kill the shield squid first, then take out the rest.
There were plenty of exciting moments, and again, the whole thing felt huge, though admittedly Crysis felt more complete and its missions were chained together better. Warhead seemed to jump a bit more. That's about it really. Good stuff. Glad I finally got to play Crisis games.
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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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