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Nov 13th, 2010 at 05:16:01 - Lead and Gold (PC) |
Steam had a 'free frontiers weekend,' where we could play Lead and Gold and Shattered Horizon for free. I took a little bit of advantage and played around with Lead and Gold first. It's a wild-west themed team shooter, like Team Fortress 2 but with 4 complementary classes, each with their own unique team buff and type of gun and special ability. For example, my favorite was the trapper. She's a sniper with a raccoon hat who gives I think an accuracy or critical hit buff to teammates in range. Her special ability is to lay down bear traps. My favorite moment in the game was playing with the trapper. I perched on a balcony and killed 5 or so enemies in a row when one ran out of the doorway onto the balcony. I handily shot him dead and then had an 'Aha!' moment. I laid a bear trap in front of the door. The guy came back, felt some pain and went down, when I shot him. I laid another trap and killed another would-be assassin. It was really cool and I felt really smart.
Lead and Gold has an interesting third-person off-center perspective. I thought it would be weird not being first person, or at least third-person center like normal, but I got used to it almost instantly. You still fire down the middle, and it actually kind of opens up the screen a bit having your character off to the side. The gunplay itself reflects the setting. It's not as frantic a game as most shooters, which is probably one reason I liked it as much as I did. The gameplay is basic team shooter stuff with the wild west twist. So there's deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag (or sack of gold), defend the control point (or sacks of gold), take as many (sacks of gold) to your base as you can within the time limit, and demolition, which doesn't involve sacks of gold, but does involve dynamite, another olde time staple. While you're carrying the heavy loot, you move slower and can't shoot so it's up to your teammates to protect you. Unfortunately, there were very few people online playing, even on the free weekend. There were usually 10 or 15 servers online when I was logging on, and there was a big lag beast it seemed like, everywhere.
There were a couple other game mechanics I liked more or less. One is this last stand idea that Call of Duty and some other shooters have adopted. When you get shot, as long as you aren't absolutely pummeled, you remain alive enough to pull out your pistol and try for revenge until the other team realizes you aren't dead yet and shoot you again. I always had a hard time noticing if someone was really dead or not. By the end of the weekend, after spending maybe 2 hours total on the game, I was getting the hang of double-checking for movement after I shot someone. It sucked to 'kill' someone, turn around and then you be the one to actually die. When you die or go to last stand, your teammates can actually bring you back right there by interacting with you. I found that either people don't know they can do this or they don't care. I never once received any help! I did revive others though. When you die, you either spawn at your base or at a mobile spawn point that one teammate can carry around on their backs. This would also have been cooler without so much lag and if people were actually using it strategically, to push forward in domination or something. I don't have too high esteem for the few players I played with. They were in general really bad, and I know that because I am not great at shooters, and I was kicking ass. There is also a rank system where you accumulate experience and ranks as you kill enemies and take objectives and things. It's map specific, so your rank resets after each match, and I'm not quite sure what it matters. My guess is it increases accuracy and other stats. Either that or it's simply cosmetic to psych out opponents.
The maps are very nice and fun. There are a lot of places for sniping, multiple paths everywhere, lots of height levels, like stories of buildings and rooftops, places for close-quarters combat in buildings and alleyways, and so on. The two maps I played the most were a saloon town and like a mining quarry with a giant bridge. They were excellent and I wonder what others are like.
The game also unfortunately enjoyed crashing to my desktop on occasion. Still, I had a whole lot of fun with the game. I just wish more people had been playing it because I doubt I would ever buy a shooter with less than 1000 players online on a free weekend. There's no single player component either, no story, so it would only be an online thing. Yeah, so too bad, because it's a fun game. I realized at some point that I'd been smiling the whole time I was playing.
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Oct 31st, 2010 at 03:57:18 - Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (PC) |
Mmm, good ending. I expected basically what happened to happen, but without the twist Raynor pulled. I was pretty stunned, but man, very cool. Such an epic story and so well integrated with the missions. Too bad the Zerg campaign is going to be like a year from now! I expect many people will have become so good with the other two races in the interim between expansions that the missions will not present much of a challenge, on normal at least, like a few did early on this time before I became more proficient with Terran. Even some hard missions were getting easy towards the end. Luckily there's a brutal mode if hard is too easy. Stupid achievements are so fun to try and get but after I've beaten the campaign, much more campaign play is going to feel like wasting time chasing achievements. Fun time, but could be spent on other stuff. Ah, the tension I feel with achievements.
And I'm glad the multiplayer is such fun. I thought about it and realized I like the randomness of it. I've no idea who I'm going up against, or what race they are if they choose random (I always choose random for these reasons). I've no idea their strategy until I encounter them. Online games are so dynamic. I mean, you've generally got to prepare to attack or defend a rush at first, and then it gets more dynamic. The beginnings are where RTS games have always been purely mechanical, following build orders and such to maximize income or get the fastest rush or whatever. I prefer the middle stages of a match where the rushes are over and it's like, "Ok, so now what? What are they going to do and what am I going to do?" Poking around their base, scanning, sending overlords and observers, sending that marine or probe on a suicide mission to find out my Terran opponent has blocked his entrance, all so much fun and so important to gather intelligence to plan and enact my particular strategy.
I'm still in the learning stages of all the units, and definitely most comfortable with Terran because of the campaign. It's a little confusing having spent so much more time with the campaign than online because some of the units and abilities are different. I remember going into multiplayer games thinking I was going to amass an army of Marines, Firebats, and Medics to find out there are no Firebats or Medics in multiplayer. And then being so used to my bunkers always holding 6 Marines and realizing that's an upgrade now, and various other stuff. I'll get used to it sooner or later.
And one final thing...Since so many of the Terran troops are criminals, I wonder if the game is making fun of the idea of using ex-cons or current cons as cannon fodder. All the more normal citizens seem to be in command posts, although they are either pirates, mercenaries, corrupt and power-hungry emperors, strange delusional emperor's sons, or whatever. Some are normal. But the troops are mostly convicts. Is this funny or not? Is this a serious idea or not? In context of course, it's just the Starcraft universe, but that idea has been tossed around and employed forever by real armies. I wonder why they fight? Like Tychus, maybe some made deals for freedom. Maybe they have no choice. Maybe they just like killing. Maybe they want to die. Maybe they found something to believe in or something worth fighting for. Maybe they are only criminals from one perspective, like in the New Folsom mission, where Mengsk was holding all kinds of political dissidents, scientists, and other free-thinkers the Dominion called dangerous criminals. I like the tooltip on one of the unit upgrades or somewhere. It might be the Medivac ship. But anyway, the tooltip says something like "Led to a doubling increase in Marines' lifespans from 8 seconds to 16." It's a rough life.
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Oct 30th, 2010 at 10:15:10 - Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (PC) |
Incredibly excited because I'm almost done with the campaign. I've got one more mission to go. The game has been absolutely stunning for me thus far. Every level is unique in some way. The slow phasing in of new units over time in a logical way consistent with the story has helped make each level something to look forward to. Then the levels themselves are so fun to play through, and I've happily played each one multiple times to unlock all the achievements. 25/26 missions down and I think I've only been unable, with a reasonable amount of attempts, to complete 2 on Hard. I've had so many memorable moments in the campaign so far, like killing the Brutalisk in the lava, using the giant laser to barely score the minimum number of enemies killed for an achievement, racing the wall of fire, swarming with armies of battlecruisers or marine/medic combos for fun, and finally today, getting to use nukes.
The last bit of dialogue after the blowing up the platforms mission just emphasizes how great the game and story are for me and how nice of a presentation it's been. Warfield brings out the Protoss relic, and Tychus, always ready for action, cautions something like, "I don't know Jimmy. This thing might upset the time-space continuum or something." Raynor responds, "Come on now Tychus. This ain't science fiction." I love it. Can't wait to finish tomorrow.
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Oct 30th, 2010 at 04:08:29 - Disciples 3 (PC) |
I've downloaded a handful of demos the last couple weeks for some games that looked neat but got bad reviews, or that I've heard about in the past and am curious to try out first before committing cash. Last weekend I tried out Disciples 3, a strategy RPG like Heroes of Might & Magic. I played some of a HMM game maybe 4 or 5 years ago, and thought it was cool, but boring. I get a similar sense here after toying a few hours with the demo.
The graphics are very nice, especially for a strategy game. The maps are colorful and full of treasure, buildings, and enemies. Your characters are quite detailed, and the battlefields, spell animations, and so on look pretty nice. I also liked the music and sounds, though I imagine they will quickly get repetitive.
Another thing that already became repetitive after clearing like half of one map in the first Human level was the fighting. This is very, very, very unfortunate because fighting, and the thinking about the fighting, should be the most important thing in a strategy game. There's an 'auto-resolve' or something button that will finish out the battle for you, but the AI is apparently really dumb. I put auto-resolve on a few times and my ranged archers or casters would mysteriously die, when they didn't come anywhere near death while I was controlling them.
There are three interwoven story lines for three races, and they seem very unbalanced in the first level. In the demo you can play the first level of each race's story arc. I first played the Legion, and was stunned at how difficult the battles were. I had enemies killing my characters in two hits, and I seemed very outmatched. I died miserably a few times before switching to the Human campaign, which was surprisingly much more forgiving. I completed half the map before dying, a process begun by the auto-resolve system killing off my ranged. Ranged, by the way, seems the way to go since they can attack anyone on the battlefield from anywhere on the battlefield. The computer regularly would just huddle their ranged into a far corner and make my melee chase them down while being pelted with spells and arrows. It felt both cheap and tedious.
So, there are various objectives on the maps, like rescuing some peasants or whatever, just like any normal quest objectives in an RPG or RTS. You control a unit, which is a main story line character and a few support characters. You can equip armor and things on the main character, which is cool, and everyone can level up and get stronger. You also have a castle, which is like your base, and you can spend money, of which you get a certain amount of the various resource types per turn, to upgrade it. Upgrading is very RTS-tech-tree-like. You can build a Mage Tower to learn spells, build buildings to upgrade your squires to knights, your clerics to archbishops (not exact names, but same idea), etc. You can perform one action at your castle per turn, including training troops and deploying new leaders. Instead of one army running around the map, you can have more.
I really like the idea behind the game, like the general design principles it follows, like exploring giant maps with all sorts of unknown treasure and peril, leveling a main character and support army, going through a tech tree, using spells, fighting battles on a grid, and so on, but the game just feels flat and dull. The same thing happened with HMM all those years ago. I specifically remember at first being like, Oh cool, this is so awesome!, and then a week later having become incredibly tired of its repetitiveness. Disciples 3 just seems like a lesser version of HMM, but with so much potential.
Oh, and the voice acting is atrocious. I am willing to bet my savings that they got someone from the dev team, or some friends who are really into fantasy, to do the voice acting, specifically the story exposition. It's that bad. And the voice volume changes from normal to really quiet on loading screens. It doesn't make sense.
I won't be buying this one, but it looked interesting enough to try.
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