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Nov 13th, 2010 at 23:31:02 - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PC) |
I didn't expect to write about Call of Duty yet, but the single-player game is really small and I beat it in just three short sessions over a week. I bought the game over a year ago, maybe even a year and a half ago, and just never got around to it. I suppose I had some sort of expectation for CoD since it's insanely popular, high expectations. As I played the campaign, I was initially disappointed, but by the end I had experienced some shock and awe. It's clear that this is a multi-player game through and through. The single-player portion is all squad-based so you're never truly alone, and I feel like it just prepares you for online action. Of course, the AI is dumber than real players, but the teamwork, the tactics that work and don't work, you can practice offline. I found my teammates to be good role models. They take cover, they crouch and run, and sprint when it's appropriate, provide cover fire, toss grenades, etc. Having played multiplayer and being massacred, and then playing single-player, I feel relatively more prepared to step into the chaos online again.
So why was I initially let down? The game is 100% action-packed, like riding a huge wave, the entire way. But the beginning felt like an action-packed shooter that I've played before. You run through some middle-eastern and eastern European extremist-infested cities. All the countries over there are unstable and going through regime change and power struggles, and they've all got lawless militaries that you've got to gun through to get to the leaders. So you and your squad, in both the characters you play as, one in Europe and one in the middle east, frantically perform mission objectives and kill bad guys. You have to listen to lots of military guys yelling in military jargon and watch a lot of cut scenes with technical parameters of weaponry and such, which is always what turns me off about war games. I don't care about the .22 caliber blah blah with the blah blah bullet rounds that fires x times per minute and can puncture steel with x depth penetration from x meters away in rain but not sleet, or the size engine of military planes and what bombs they all drop. Don't care and not interested. I also tend to dislike just the attitude of war games, which is hyper-masculine kill people, defend your honor and bravado, and always comes across as trying to sound noble and heroic in the face of tragedy and death. I mean, those hint at my views on war and violence and masculinity anyway, so war games can grate on me if they are too typical in that sense.
Call of Duty 4 looked like it was going down that road, but then it took a nice turn toward the serious when the story picked up somewhere between the nuke going off and the helicopter mission to gun down the enemies using just some technology to detect them, not infrared, but something like that, not with simply sight. The story was heading toward typicality, but as you hunt down a warlord, a nuke goes off, and brings some drama and urgency to the whole thing. You then look to Russia to find out where the nuke came from, which leads you to this older Russian military badass guy with one arm (you get to blow it off in a visceral flashback mission where your commander missed assassinating him just barely). You have to go after his son, which you chase through a village/military complex, at the dead end of which he blows his brains out. In retaliation, the Russian general guy launches 2 nukes toward the east coast US and it's a race against the clock to abort the launches and escape the facility. The last missions, I'd say after the son's suicide, are just awesome. And there were a ton of awesome moments throughout the game too, mostly involving things getting blown up, like helicopters, tanks, and communications towers. The game looks phenomenal, and I was pleasantly surprised that after, what, 3 years maybe, it looks so amazing. It certainly made it more immersive, when it was already there. Even though I poke at the story and triviality of the early game, it was still completely engrossing, like, what it was doing, it was doing great. I actually saw my stepdad playing CoD4 a long time ago, years, and I kept wondering when I would get to the level I watched him being stuck at. Turns out it was the very end when you're racing the clock to abort the nukes. I wonder if he ever beat it.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about CoD4 that I hope other people got out of it, was that it made me think about war, the media, and the world today. Games with nuclear weapons always tend to strike a little nerve because there's always some nuclear threat by some country, and it's like, yeah, someone could launch some nukes, and any other number of attacks, and obliterate a chunk of people. The majority of us actually not being dead is impressive to me. Peace is very precarious. We (in the US, Singapore, the West in general) are very lucky that we don't have to directly deal with, on a daily basis, war and the threat of war that so many less fortunate people do. In these places where our video game Marines are fighting, civilians are dying all the time, but we tend to forget that. CoD actually hide this from us, as it never (or hardly if I'm forgetting) shows civilians, alive or dead. They simply aren't there. We do know they've been killed by nuclear weapons, but we never SEE them or interact with them or have to deal with them in any way. This is where our media comes in. The media can reveal or hide events. I found it interesting at the end of the game after you abort the missiles and escape (and one of the most epic very last parts of a game ever), the news reporter reports on rumors of nuclear testing in Russia. Nothing happened, just rumors of testing. This is the official government line and the media has to report. I can assume that people soon will go do some investigative journalism and uncover some of what really happened, but in this case, the media relays the Russian government or military's assurance that it's all right, it's okay. And of course the player knows that, yeah, it's okay because the international and US special forces saved the say, and their accomplishments are going to go unrecognized by everyone on earth, but it's just part of their duty, and they love keeping the peace and taking out the bad guys. Oorah, right? Which should make you think if special forces can influence such events on the side of good, surely they can do so on the side of evil or moral ambiguity.
This brings me back to that helicopter mission I talked about. It made me really uncomfortable. Why? Because I couldn't actually see who I was firing on. Looking down, I just see a lot of white and gray human-like figures running about, and I have to rely on orders to say who I'm to shoot and who I'm not to shoot. Some people below were flashing, and those were our allies. Others weren't flashing, didn't have tracers, and those were enemies. It was very impersonal, firing a gun hundreds of feet up from a helicopter picking off groups of enemies, or people I was told were enemies. We've all seen stories uncovered where gunners of this perspective and others have killed civilians, bombed churches, and so on, because they were acting on orders or thought they were firing on bad guys. Or worse, we've heard instances of soldiers killing civilians and committing other crimes just because they can. I wonder how many regular people I killed in that mission? All I know is whenever someone died, I got approval and praise from the officer radioing in my ear.
Another point that I'm not sure whether it was a design intention or not, is that I was initially very, and still somewhat, easily confused by who is an enemy and who is a friendly. The enemy soldiers looked really similar to my teammates to me. The thing is, if you stop to look, you get killed, but if you just fire on a hunch, you can live. So what if you see someone who might be a soldier or a civilian? If you shoot, you live. If you don't shoot and it's a soldier you die, so what are you going to do? You do what I ended up doing because I got tired of dying to enemies that I thought were friends. You shoot first, think later. This caused me multiple game overs due to friendly fire, which I think is funny because it's a serious no-no, yet so easy to do! So bravo to the design team if they did that on purpose. I mean, obviously the guys with socks over their heads are enemies, but really, at least in the first half, I was having trouble telling who was who.
And the most important question of all: Why do eastern European bad guys always wear track suits?
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Nov 13th, 2010 at 20:18:55 - Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (PC) |
First (second) impressions of LotRO are positive. This is the next of the games to try that have gone free-to-play, and according to Turbine, they doubled revenue the first month of going F2P, got back 1/5th of old players, got 1 million new accounts, and have tripled the number of players online. Like, wow. After playing DDO and EQ2 F2P, I can say LotRO's is infinitely better. Not only do I enjoy the game more, but the F2P model provides more options for actually playing for free if you want. I hear you can play pretty much the entire game hassle-free, which, if it's anything like the quality of the introductory levels, is awesome. I feel no limitations with my F2P character so far. I see I only have 3 bag slots, which is fine for now, and infinitely better than EQ2's smaller 2 bag slots. I'm sure there are probably some chat and mail and auction restrictions, but so far the game is so engrossing that I don't really care. This is in contrast to EQ2 where I was bored out of my mind after 10 levels. Granted I'm only 6 into this one, but it's looking bright.
I made a Human Lore-Master, which I can best place similar to a Warlock in WoW. I cast spells, have a Raven pet, can put DoTs and debuffs on enemies, and even have a nice self-heal. The class seems unique still and has a little different feel from anything I've played. You start the game in a race-specific tutorial instance, which in my case was busting out of a prison to rescue some hobbit and a man with another NPC, but at the end one of those hooded guys with the cold blades stabs the man you were trying to rescue, and at the end of the introduction, level 6 or 7, he turns and follows the bad guys after they all burn the human starting town. The tutorial is a private instance, and then the introduction is a public instance with just other beginners. Actually, I just assume the beginning was Man only because I remember when I played a dwarf a while back it was a different starting area, but here I saw hobbits too, and I thought they started at the Shire. Anyway, the story is presented really well, and even though it's something similar to stories I've played before, it's mixed with LotR lore, which makes it better without diluting LotR. I mean, if you didn't know anything about LotR, it would be straight up recognizable fantasy, but having seen and read LotR, I at least recognize some names of places, the races, the hooded guys, what happens if you get stabbed by one, etc. Yea, otherwise it's killing some boars and spiders, finding some herbs, saving a town from bandits, which happens in a very cool instance with a lot of fire. The cool thing though is the little quests mostly relate to the larger story line of trying to save the guy who got stabbed and trying to unravel this bandit plot to sack the town, which they are under orders from Mordor or something to do in order to retrieve the guy who got stabbed. So it all makes sense.
The game itself is absolutely gorgeous to look at and the music is wonderful. One time in town, there was an NPC playing a tune and it was just so nice to listen to, and fit the mood of the town, that I sat and listened to him play and watched a cat walk around, sit, lay down, meow, rub against the musician's leg, for 10 or 15 minutes. I just looked at the town. I did the same thing out in the open. I just looked. I hardly ever take the time to just look because I usually find environments fairly uninteresting, but LotRO's is beautiful. There are lots of green trees, grass, tall grass, sparkling water, amazing dynamic shadows and lighting, mountains in the distance, rocks and boulders, and rolling terrain. It's not all flat and boring, but looks like a countryside with farms.
The combat feels a little slow to respond, which could be a little bit of lag on my end, not sure though. I get 'can't cast while moving' messages sometimes. Like, I have to move, make sure I stop, and then cast. It's just a little less fluid than I'm used to. That's really the only hiccup. Everything else is good, or I'm learning how to do it better. The spell effects are pretty too. The training system is familiar to any other MMO. Go see your class trainer every level or 2 for new skills. There are like 5 menus, sets of abilities, talents or whatever, that I can see but can't access and don't really know how, when, or where to get them. I hope not too many are locked in F2P. I have no idea how long I'll play this for. I imagine until I hit some kind of F2P wall, but the genius of F2P is going to be when someone figures out how to make players invest so much time for free that they're willing to subscribe later or buy from the store. All other F2P games didn't make me want to keep playing because it felt so constrained, but LotRO seems more my style and less constraining, so who knows.
One reason the F2P model here is more attractive to me is because you buy things with Turbine points or something, which you can use cash to buy, OR can earn in game. This one is new to me, earning points in-game. Now, I don't know how to do that, but it sounds like I could theoretically unlock the most important stuff I want to have without paying any money. If I'm enjoying the game anyway, and I can unlock things by playing it to make playing it even better, well that's just a win-win. This all depends too on how interesting the story is for me, and how much LotRO feels different from WoW or other single-player fantasy games I've played. I don't want to sink time into a game I've played 10 times before and then not be able to do anything at a high level unless I start paying for it. If the game is completely entertaining all the way, then that's fine, but I won't grind levels if I don't expect something cool to happen. So yeah, I'm thoroughly impressed so far. A lot of other people seem to be too. There are a ton, a ton ton ton, of players starting out. I haven't seen so many new characters in a zone in a long, long time. I grouped up with one person, who asked me if I played CoD: Black Ops, and I had to tell him I just started playing Modern Warfare. He named our group the Lore-Masters of wherever we were, asked me to explain my tactics in hypothetical situations he imagined, and tried to recruit other people to join our party. It was an interesting interaction for an hour or so. S/he seemed like s/he may have been playing the game a while, but seemed very noobish. Like I'm noobish to LotRO in particular, but I would only show it related to LotRO-specific things, not to playing an MMO in general, which, since LotRO feels very much like WoW, standard, I picked up immediately. So, we'll see when I get a chance to play around some more in Middle Earth. I want to beat Call of Duty's single-player mode first, which I'll probably have time to do today and get that out of the way. Then perhaps Middle Earth at home for a while.
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Nov 13th, 2010 at 05:38:35 - Shattered Horizon (PC) |
Shattered Horizon was the other freebie on Steam last weekend. I almost played it some on another free weekend back in like June, but never got around to it, and I almost ran out of time last weekend, but was determined to give it a shot. I'm glad I got to mess around with it for a couple hours because it was very interesting, and reminded me most of the old Tribes games and/or Unreal Tournament's outdoor space levels, or of any low/no gravity mod I've ever played. It reminded me of these, but really takes the low/no gravity mechanic a lot further. You play the game in a space suit. Your space-suited character is armed with a gun you load out with at the beginning of the match, as well as some special weapon, one of which, for example, is like a repulsion grenade that launches people off the surface of the asteroid or wherever you are, off into space and hopefully to their suffocating death. Pretty neat.
The levels are very cool and consist mostly of space. There are asteroid belts to fly around, mining facilities and other industrial themed levels. You basically begin each level flying toward some space rocks. You can use a boost to propel yourself faster. You can also tilt and roll to go in all directions. It can get quite disorienting because in the blackness of space, everything is, well, black, and events are happening all around you. The map tries to tell you where other players are, but I didn't get good at reading it. I often got shot and had no idea where from. Sometimes, the screen edge would flash indicating the direction, and other times not. Even if I could turn the right way, that player could now be above, below, on the other side of me, behind an asteroid, or boosted away. All the asteroids and such provide a lot of cover, basically serving as giant confusing barriers to your line of sight. Battle in space is hectic, shooting at flying characters and boosting around, looking in all directions for danger.
I found battle on the surfaces a bit more comfortable, but less exciting. If you push F, you 'attach' to a surface and can then kind of space walk on it. Attaching leaves you vulnerable to attacks from above in space, but you have to attach to capture nodes and whatever to meet victory conditions. I didn't get a good sense of the game modes, though I played a few. I did notice a domination type where you hold nodes, but I was busy figuring out how to fly around and shoot stuff. My lifespan in Shattered Horizon was generally quite short, but by the end, I was engaging in some satisfying gun fights in space, enough to make me glad I tried out the game. There were many more people online here than Lead and Gold, and the game is certainly unique.
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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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