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Dec 5th, 2010 at 09:39:51 - Resident Evil 5 (PC) |
Resident Evil was short. The game clocked me just over 11 hours. Batman didn't have a clock but I'm pretty sure I got another 5 or so out of it, like 15-20 total. So two short but excellent games this week. I will never understand why people buy these at full price for like $50-$60. That's like paying $5 an hour to play. Unless you're a person who plays the same game over and over, unlocks every single thing (I finished Batman with 84% completion and RE5 with 25%!), or just has to have it now, why pay so much? Wait and grab it for $10 or less a year later. Batman's replay value is fairly limited as shown by my 84% in one playthrough. RE5 must count multiple plays toward 100% or something. It has a New Game + feature to start over with all your current equipment. I've got to play something that lasts longer next time, which will be approximately 1.5 months from now. I doubt I'll start anything new before then, just play around with some online games and go through some demos I have. Cataclysm comes out this week and I'll play some of that before I leave. It was fun to burn through these two this week though. I'm glad I got two good ones. They made for a good week of gaming.
So RE5 was an edge-of-your-seat action/shooter game. It really never lets up and I am not surprised I was able to sit and play it in two sessions because I was totally into it. The story after 5 RE games and countless little spinoffs was fairly straightforward in the standalone, but you can unlock backstory files and read some documents throughout the game, and man, there are just tons of characters and events and places spanning like 50 years of fiction. It's a lot. So luckily you don't need to know everything about RE to understand what's going on. They did a good job with story-telling. After 5+ games, you'd think they'd be good at it.
The boss battles were sufficiently epic and creative. One involved calling down a satellite laser beam to strike this giant mutated girlfriend of the bad guy who turned into a sea monster on a giant ship. Another one involved manning machine guns and rocket launchers. Another involved using a flamethrower to torch a monster. Another involved a little bit of stealth to cut power to lights and keep the boss in the dark so he couldn't dodge your bullets (and rockets). I very much enjoyed the bosses, and only kind of got stuck on one. Turns out I wasn't doing it very efficiently and ran out of ammo, but you couldn't finish without ammo. Some fights are very memorable.
RE5's regularly set up battles are great too. It generally starts with an enemy noticing you or you opening a door or gate or something that triggers it. The music picks up and enemies come swarming out of ceilings and doors with ever more deadly weapons. It's great because you can't just go crazy with your best gun. You've got to conserve your ammo by getting close to melee sometimes or using that weak gun over the strong one to save for a tough enemy. I usually loaded out with at least a shotgun and a sniper rifle, and I gave my sidekick a pistol and a machine gun. It worked pretty well as I good blast from up close and afar, and she handled the midrange. There's a nifty cover system that appears later in the game once the mutants get armed. Popping out to snipe is always fun.
RE had a surprising amount of puzzles, especially in this ruins level. They weren't too hard, but adding waves of enemies made them fun. The one I remember most involved mirrors focusing sunlight. You have to make your way through the labyrinthine level to find 3 pieces of a key to open the door to the next one, but there are all these sun mirrors that will regularly fry a section of the level. You've got to plan your running so you don't get caught in the sun beams. It wasn't so much a puzzle, but it was probably the most complex level in the game, and my favorite that I went through. I'd often walk into a giant room with multiple stories, ladders, crates, obstructions, and go "Yes, yes, yes" because it's like a mini-level. You know bad guys will come, you know you're going to have to take them all out while moving from point A to point B, finding goodies along the way, finding switches, lifts, doors, exploding barrels, and so on. Each little area was just exciting to play through.
I'm really glad, though I thought it would be lame at first, that it's co-op with the AI. The AI wasn't bad, no worse than the enemies. She kept up, sometimes led me ahead, followed orders without a problem, and was downright handy to have along! I usually hate sidekicks in games, but I was pleasantly surprised, and in fact, she made the game a lot better. I felt like I had a buddy playing with me. And you can do that online actually. You can play through an 'open' campaign where anyone can just jump in as the second character, or you can jump in someone else's. I'd play this with a friend, but don't care to with a stranger online. Shooting zombies together is a bonding activity.
What else...Ah yes, the only thing I didn't like about the game were some of the controls. The camera view was slightly awkward third-person off to the left side, and coupled with the camera swinging you around was a little uncomfortable at first. I did get used to it. What continued to suck was the context commands. I can deal with pushing F or V to run, duck, jump, etc. in action sequences. What I had trouble with was pushing A+D at the same time to do something. What I had even more trouble with, and what I don't know how made it in the game, was holding F+V to do action maneuvers. F+V? Really? So try this. Push F really fast to run! Now push A+D to dodge some rockets! Ok now quickly push F+V to climb! It's super awkward, especially while trying to WASD move at the same time. WASD and having to mash F+V on command is nigh impossible before doing it a hundred times. And you have about 2 seconds to mash the buttons before you die, and it doesn't always register that you pushed them either. V is also the command to tell your sidekick to come here, so F+V a lot of times turned into "Come over here!" *dies* Besides some control issues, I don't have any other gripes.
I'd totally recommend this game to anyone if you find it on sale for cheap. It's short and unless you have a tendency to replay games, there's not a lot to it. But it's incredibly polished, incredibly intense from start to finish, and just a ton of thrilling fun.
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Dec 4th, 2010 at 09:45:35 - Resident Evil 5 (PC) |
Resident Evil and Batman are a good combination to play together. I was so impressed with Batman that I was expecting relatively less from Resident Evil 5, but man, RE is pure adrenaline. I knew the series had strayed from the survival horror of its early days. RE4 was something like a zombie shooter, and this one seems to go further in that direction but somehow returns some anxiety of the earlier games. One level is all in a dark mine. The game itself is co-op with AI or with a friend/stranger on the internet. The mines are pitch black, so one character holds a lantern while the other takes the front. It's like in Doom 3 where you can either hold the flashlight or a gun. The sound in this game is excellent. The mines in particular, you hear the heavy breathing echoing through the shafts. The game is very immersive in part because of the sound effects, and also because of the level design. It's fairly linear and there are a ton of enemies. Action sequences have taken me over 20 minutes to do. Enemies will just stream and stream, and they drop enough ammo to keep you just barely going long enough. I think this game must have been tested and fine-tuned for a long time because the pacing is just perfectly intense.
The enemy AI seems to be stupid at times, like they'll just kind of stand in front of you, but it seems to work because when they stand there, I get scared that they're going to attack me. Usually it'll be like 3 or 4 of them in front and I turn and run, but the level designs are such that there are always limited places to run. The fights are all in small spaces. Enemies are definitely getting stronger and more resistant to my guns, which I finally decided to start upgrading. I'm around 1/3 of the way through the game and just now started upgrading. I didn't know really what all I could spend money on, and I didn't want to upgrade guns that I would replace naturally, so I glanced at a weapon list online and it turns out that you can unlock new guns from upgrading old ones. Upgrade away! Your partner AI isn't any smarter than the enemies. S/he is fairly conservative with ammo, is a smart healer, and never uses grenades. But s/he will also stand there or fire slowly even if an enemy is right in front of him/her. I wanted to play as the girl, but it defaulted to the guy. I guess you can only play the girl in multiplayer. Apparently the guy is from other RE games, but I don't really know the story or characters. This one also draws on the previous game(s), though maybe not RE 4 because I don't recognize anything here. The male character wants to find his old partner, and there's a part where he goes through some RE back story.
In contrast to Batman, the fights here make you think more, and the boss battles are much better and numerous. This game doesn't have all the personality that Batman has, but the story and the African setting are totally believable and suck me into what's going on because everything is just so polished and well presented. My favorite part so far is the jeep gunner sequence. Not unique or anything since a lot of games have gunner sequences, but this one was awesome and followed by a boss battle with what resembled a troll from the Lord of the Rings movies. The enemies aren't zombies by the way. It's about biological weapons and there's some mutant virus organism thingy that turns people into angry killing machines, kind of like 28 Days Later, but they're smarter and retain a bit more humanity.
The only question now is do I go on and finish the rest of the game tomorrow, or do I stretch it out a few more days?
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Dec 4th, 2010 at 02:17:54 - Batman: Arkham Asylum (PC) |
What a great game! All I knew before playing was that it got high review scores across the board, the fighting was supposed to be fun, and there was a detective mode where you could be stealthy. I played a demo that Daniel had on Xbox for about 10 minutes this summer, so when Steam had it on sale for $10, I pounced.
First of all, this is the best looking game I've ever played, hands down, especially the views of Arkham from up high. The graphics are mind-blowing and it's a year old. The style is great too, total Dark Knight stuff. The whole game's presentation is dark. It's very much the Batman of the last two movies and the first Tim Burton one that I watched about 50 times when I was a kid. Joker is the main bad guy in this one, and he's straight up sadistic. I found out watching the credits he was voiced by Mark Hamill. Joker gets himself arrested to hatch a plan to take over Arkham Asylum. He breaks out all the inmates and it's really great listening to him on the closed circuit prison TV taunting both Batman and his henchmen. Generally, Batman walks into a room with a handful of inmates and you've got to pick them all off. Joker is omniscient in the prison, watching everything. He'll say, after you kill an inmate, "Is someone missing?! Oh, I'm losing count," to which the other inmates respond by yelling at each other, finding the dead guy and getting terrified of being in the same room as the Batman. Joker's taunts are dynamic too. Say there are four inmates, he might say "Come on! There are four of you and only one of him!" Then you kill another one and he'll say, "You guys are supposed to be the criminals and murderers!" Get one left and he might say like "It looks like you're all alone with the bat! Hahaha! My money's on the bat!" And the inmates go from acting ballsy in groups to being scared of their shadow as their numbers dwindle. They'll slowly walk turning around every 5 seconds and talking to themselves. It's really neat to watch.
The other omniscient character is the Riddler, and I have no idea where he is or how he can talk to you. He's in charge of all the "extras" in the game. You can find hidden riddler clues, interview tapes featuring various of the famous inmates, these weird history of Arkham Island tablets with some old guy that I never figured out the point, and you can solve riddles. The Riddler will also taunt you, more at the beginning, but less as you find more of his secrets. Then he'll start claiming that you're cheating, you must be cheating, how did you find that one, and you must be looking on the internet. He's pretty amusing and I found it fun to cause him distress by completing his challenges. His challenges unlock bonuses like character art and biographies, which were cool to flesh out the world. Most of the extras required no real thought, just some looking around, and you're able to find more as you acquire new abilities. So most of them weren't about figuring much out, but recognizing a weak wall or a Riddler clue that you can either get to now or have to wait until you get a new gadget. The kind I did like though were these where you had to go into Detective mode (highlights clues and things you can interact with) to find big Riddler question marks, which were always split somewhere, so you might see the dot in one place and the top part of the ? in another, and you've got to find a vantage point to line them up. Those were the most challenging.
The fighting was supposed to be a big deal, and I think it's very fluid. Stringing together combos is very satisfying. There's a context sensitive counterattack move that often chains punches and kicks together. You can also throw enemies, use gadgets like your batarang, and stomp them when they're down. The game ends up pitting you against 8 or so enemies at a time, most of which are basic inmates with fists or steel pipes. Sometimes inmates will have a gun or knives or a cattle prod and those can be deadly if you don't play it right. I'm not a huge fan of these more free-form fighting systems. I really like the strategy turn-based stuff or shooters better than the action-y punching and kicking, but it was fun, and I got used to it. I never got past like an 18-point combo, which I feel like is low since there are achievements for all the way up to 40. General progression through a room can be more or less stealthy. I tended to prefer going stealth mode, zipping from gargoyles up high, dropping on enemies, stringing them up, doing stealth kills. The game does a great job making you feel like the stalking predator that Batman is. The scared inmates really help with this.
Boss battles tended to be both unique and easy. Since it's Batman, you never actually kill the villains, which I realized most of the way through and liked, and they tried to make the battles fun and interesting, but they all used the same mechanics over and over, that is, double-tapping to dive side to side to avoid things and fighting a ton of inmates while trying to kill the boss. The contexts were cool, but the actual doing of the fights were repetitive on the whole. My favorite sequences were definitely the Scarecrow ones. When Batman starts coughing, you know Scarecrow is near and you're about to be pulled into a nightmare with a 10-story tall Scarecrow trying to find you and break your mind. You have to run platformer-style through the levels avoiding his gaze and holding onto your sanity. Scarecrow's demise is so good too. It directly precedes my second-favorite boss fight.
One of my favorite things about this game was the dynamic environments and characters. The Asylum feels alive and it changes over the course of the night. First, over the course of the game, Batman's cape and suit get progressively more torn and ripped, complete with a cut on his face by the end. He might have even been growing stubble. As Joker's plan unfolds and he gets a tighter and tighter grip on the Asylum, you see his 'renovations' to it, including spray paint tags proclaiming "Joker Asylum," his giant visage that gets constructed over time at the entrance to the visitor's center, presents he leaves for you containing those chattering teeth of his, and just general destruction and dead guards who used to be alive. It's very neat. Then the huge one is when you have to stop Poison Ivy from taking over the island with her mutated plants and her plants literally destroy the place and change the landscape drastically. Incredibly cool.
Batman gets an easy recommendation from me. The last game I played that was anything like it was Bioshock, which was also amazing, and it's good to have found another type of action/stealth/whatever mash-up of genre.
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Nov 24th, 2010 at 08:39:56 - World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (PC) |
So, the Shattering happened in WoW the other day. I just logged on. Oh my. The world is different. Azeroth that has been Azeroth for 6 years is revamped. I see so many, uncountable really, changes. There are flight paths everywhere, Stormwind's towers are destroyed, the auction house moved closer to the bank, bigger bank, carpets in the bank, new bricks in the city, or new lighting effects that make them look new, a Hero's call board (whatever that is), guards flying over the city on gryphons, the canals flooded parts of the city, the daily fishing quest that is now in SW instead of Dalaran awards +fishing skill, there are new NPCs in various places, new banners outside the districts, the Park has been utterly destroyed and is now a ruin of burning ember and water flowing off a cliff from the canals, there's a new construction area where shipbuilders are working in the Docks, a giant barred mystery gate in the Docks, all kinds of other laborers working on what look like siege weapons, a big lake in the city, a massive cemetery, including the grave of the queen, an outdoor chapel area by the Cathedral, a new area with a pond, a farm, and the new druid trainer location where half of the Dwarven District used to be, a second bank in the Dwarven District, just a ton of new skins and graphical enhancements to about everything, a vastly different Stormwind castle with an impressive new entryway and statue of the King of Stormwind, a revamped battlemaster's room, a wing of the castle is totally gone, found an archaeology trainer and some portal to a place called Tol Barad...
And this is just one pass at one city in this entire world. I am stunned at the amount of detail and attention put into the Shattering. Everything looks different. Everything. I won't see all the changes for a long long time. I've spent so many days, weeks, months being in this world and I can't believe it's just all of a sudden different. It's really hard to wrap your head around, like if the city you live in or your campus just looked drastically different one day, maybe if it was the site of some disaster or a Christmas decoration makeover. Yeah. Just wow. There are new gnome and troll starting areas that I will definitely play through with one of the new race/class combos, and then when Cataclysm actually launches I'll play through the Worgen and Goblin starting zones, and take one to 85 eventually, a hunter or warlock. Incredible.
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