Far Cry 2 first impressions

 For too long has the corridor shooter been the only shooter. A corridor shooter is intensely linear, with only to directions to proceed in: Forward or backward. While the corridor shooters were great last-gen, with Halo and Half Life, they are getting a bit stale now. Hopefully, they will soon be replaced by the sandbox shooter. Games like Crysis and Far Cry 2 encourage you to make tactical decisions about things that are far above the corridor shooter. Rather then deciding, say, should I go left or right, you think about things like the time of day or whether you should let this character die or backstab faction A to do jobs for faction B.

The core difference between a corridor shooter and a sandbox shooter is that in the sandbox shooter you can play it your way. You could opt to make hit and run raids with a vehicle, or make a distraction with remote controlled mine and take your objective with little trouble while the guards are investigating. I hope that Far Cry 2,which allows you to do all these things, becomes the prototype for the genre. 

 Far Cry 2 takes place in Africa, and you play as one of 9 mercenaries from foreign countries. Your brought in to take out the arms dealer know as The Jackal, but that soon goes wrong when your character contracts Malaria. You eventually find some pills, and after a brief tutorial you are flung into a war torn Africa. The UFLL(United Front for Liberation and Labor) and the APR (Alliance for Popular Resistance) are tearing the Savannah apart with constant fighting.

The towns are all under ceasefire, but you will  find plenty of guard posts hanging around the Savannah. 

 Far Cry 2's open ended gameplay flow like this: Get a mission, which are available at almost every point of interest. Find a vehicle, and walking is not an option. Most missions can easily take place 10 miles away from where you received it. Then you have to scout the opposition, marking points of interest on you map. Then you have to formulate a plan. The worst approach is to go in guns blazing. Then,after getting past the guards, you finish up the mission and find a new one.

The gunplay in FC2 is different than most titles.Hip firing is totally and completely inaccurate, so you have to look down your iron sights. This system works well, and it cuts off all those stupid run and gun things we are used to using.Most enemies can take about 5-10 bullets, though one snot to the head kills instantly. Some of the new mechanics are great though. First is fire. Fire is no longer just a lame effect confined to one small area. It spreads quickly through the dry grass,and tactical use of it really helps with an assault. It can go inside buildings and is even affected by the wind. When used properly, fire will force you enemies out of their cover or alienate them from the fighting.

The other cool thing is that enemies no longer just walk around. They have to eat, sleep, patrol at certain times, clean their weapons, check for ieds and socialize.

Far Cry 2 is incredibly innovative and just comepletely amazing. expect a full review soon. 

Team Fortress 2 review

TF2 has been under development for a long time. The first game was a free mod for Quake and was soon adapted for Half Life 1. Soon after that, Tf2 was announced. Now, a decade later, its out.

The most obvious thing about TF2 is the art style. It looks like a Pixar movie with guns. Since there is no way to describe it, here is a picture

The graphics actually have a much more practical application then just looking cool. They are designed so that each class has a distinct out line. In most games most classes have different skins, but animate the same. While this system is fine for seeing what class a certain player is up close, it fails utterly from afar. In TF2,  since each character has such a distinct outline, you can see who's who from a distance. While this may not sound game changing, it allows you to see who is around you very quickly at any given time, this is essential when things get chaotic.

The nuts and bolts of TF2 gameplay is about class warfare. Each class fills a niche, and some will be entirely ineffective against certain classes whilst others will excel. The game is roughly based around supporting the offensive classes with defensive classes to slowly inch your way forward. The game does a great job of having a frontline mechanic, as sentry guns provide a very strong disincentive to go to far in into enemy territory. 

The only real problem with TF2 are them maps. A few have certain instances where a single engineer can just absolutely dominate with a sentry gun, and pyros never really seem to do okay. They either laughably fail completely or kill the entire team. It makes playing them frustrating. 

overall 9/10

Half-Life 2 Episode 1 review

Half-Life 2 was utterly amazing, an left you with a real cliffhanger. But rather than make a Half-Life 3, Valve decided to produce a series of episodes with a smaller amount of gameplay and a 20 price tag. Each episode is just that, an episode. Each has a fairly self contained story , but they also add a little bit to the main  plot.

Episode 1 picks up right where Half-Life 2 left off. You awake in the ruins of the citadel and are greeted by Alyx and d0g. You are almost always accompanied by Alyx. She helps out in firefights and gives you hints for puzzles. The only real new game mechanic is that allot of times enemies will keep spawning until you have solved a puzzle, or blocked a door. In these times you are forced to leave Alyx with the enemies and find a solution. This leads to the real problem with her: dying. No matter how hard you try, Alyx will never die in combat. All this does is give you a easy way out of every situation where Alyx is right next to you. With her, hiding behind a wall is almost as effective as firing.

To counteract this, Valve beefed up the opposition. There are just more enemies then your used to dealing with. In the encounters where have to solve a puzzle during combat, you have to almost completely forgo firing, and just hope you have enough health to take everything they throw at you.

Besides this, Episode 1 is a blast. the pacing is great, there are no bugs, and few sections are downright brilliant. Most of the enemies are zombies, and the game does a great job of making them feel a bit more scary this time around. You really have to think in order to survive these attacks, rather than just shoot them before they get to you. There are no new weapons in Episode 1, and the environments are the same as the end of HL2. The sound is much better,and there is noticeably more music this time around. The only new enemy is pretty cool, but I wont spoil if for you.

Half-Life 2 episode 1 is a great game, and it leaves you  wanting more at the end. 8.5 out of 10

The evolution of the shooter genre

 A trend has occurred in gaming. Genres are being blurred, and stealth and action are now fairly commonly appearing in the same game. Rpg elements are in games like Cod 4 and Bioshock. This is is the evolution of the genre.

 Take Crysis for example. It has shooting, driving, stealth, open world gameplay, rpg elements (weapon customization), and a rudimentary class-like system which is all about using the right suit power when, with some highly scripted and fun gameplay at the end. Crysis is really a next gen fps. 

 So what is next gen? It's certainly not graphics, though amazing graphics do help with immersion. It's not downloadable content, even though thats quite amazing. Next gen is,simply put, freedom and options. It all started with Oblivion. This was, in my opinion, the first next gen game. You could be the character you wanted to be, not something shoehorned into a class. The quests were the same for each adventurer, and you could decide important things in the quest's, and these would have real impacts on the game world. Should you  kill the corrupt baron or let him face justice in court? It was decisions like these that made Oblivion something special.

 And freedom is not necessarily open world. Gears was free in that you could snipe or get up close and personal with a chainsaw. You could make choices about which path to go down, and the overall experience is amazing. You can order your squad to cover you, or you can cover them as they advance.

 Even though you have a set of objectives, there are many ways to go about them. This is really a next gen philosophy. Bioshock, Assassins Creed ( in a different way the most though), and Cal of Duty 4's multiplayer are all great examples of this. 

 Another next gen thing is immersion. This is where the Wii succeeds with its motion sensing. While the Wii's motion sensing is ineffective at best, the potential is still there. A few motion sensing gimmicks thrown in here and there greatly help with immersion. Bear in mind that "shaking the wii mote upwards" is the same thing as shaking it downwards. Motion sensing control schemes lose allot of precision, to the points where only one or two of these should be used.

 And this takes me back to the evolution of the fps genre. Rpg customization and more community tools are an inevitable thing. The basics are in place with forge (Halo 3) and the perks system (Cod 4). 

Brawl: Competitive or Casual?

 One of the most surprising things about Melee was it's competitive following. Without online play, the community had to band together and help teach newer players the tricks of the trade personally. Then tournaments came in, and the whole thing took off. One of the remarkable things about Melee was how it catered to the competitive player and the casual one. There were competitive maps like Final Destination, and then there were casual maps like Icicle Mountain.

 But rather then embracing the competitive community as they did in Melee, Sakurai shot it in the face. While Melee was precise, Brawl is floaty and unbalanced. Many characters have been unnecessarily nerfed(Captain Falcon) and the majority of items make the game to random, too unskillful. Many of the new maps are simply uncompetitive, whether they be easily too easy to throw someone off or simply kill players, and many have stupid gimmicks like Wario's map. No map has succeeded in coming close to Final Destination, and even some characters are broken. Take DeDeDe, for example. He can grab people and grab them again before they leave his grab range, but this only works on some heavy characters. The rest he can grab 4 to 5 times giving them an extremely small window where they can control their character.

 The online has banded the community together in a new way: Against Nintendo. Awful lag in every game, a matchmaking service thats more like an A.I upgrade then playing against humans, no choice whatsoever  for what game type you want to play. With Anyone ( the aforementioned  online matchmaking service) is a joke. The only way to get a playable game is through your friends list and this is limited to 64 people. There is no way to communicate outside of a sentence long message for each taunt. 

 Nintendo has tested the patience of the competitive community, and without reason. There's not even any leader-boards! 

GTA 4 first impressions

 GTA 4 is here, and it's everything its cracked up to be.  Even though you play as illegal-immigrant Niko Bellic, the real star of the show is the city itself. Liberty City is an unbarred satire version of New York City. People behave exactly like they do in New York: Pissed off and on a Mission! Rather then get your license plate number when you hit them, they flip you off and start attacking you. All the landmarks are in place along with the boroughs (although they are all under different names). 

 One of the most talked about parts of the new Gta is the gunplay system. You pop in and pop out of cover at will, and can even blind fire. You can now free aim, but this is sort of finicky as it requires you to half pull the trigger. This as stupid as it sounds, and I think it would have been better off as a toggle option somewhere in the menu or something.  Combat is pretty thrilling , but the police chases are really the highlight here. Its now radius based, so you might need to get a qaurter mile away from a cop before they stop chasing you. You can't kill them either, as all that does is raise your wanted level. 

 The driving is very good, but its all to clear these are not sports cars. Just jacking the first one you see will often get a ride that simply does not want to turn using a powerslide. At higher speeds they bounce along realistically, and will occasionally flip over. There's no "press rb to flip" option, so your pretty much hosed once they flip. The cars also take damage realistically and wont just explode out of the blue. You can shoot out of the car to, which is pretty cool.

Dark Sector First impressions

Dark Sector has really been a long time in the making. It was the first announced next gen game,but back then it was a sleek sci-fi shooter rather then dark and gory game it is now. The core of he gameplay is very similar to Gears of War: Spirt from cover to cover and pop out occasionally to shoot at enemies. Your health regenerates a bit slower, although you have more of it.  You tend to fight more enemies, and with no squad these are quite a challenge. However, the game gives you a quite interesting tool: The glaive. This little three bladed death frisbee is allot like a boomerang that decapitates people. It returns to you within a few seconds of throwing, and will glitch through walls to find you. If an enemies is hit by the glaive, they most commonly lose a limb. 

 Chopping someone's head off with it is a bit finicky though. I don't know whether hitting someone in their neck or  their head will trigger it, and its nowhere near as satisfying as hitting someone anywhere else. The glaive is actually really easy to use, and is easily your weapon of choice, but only because it makes the game too easy. Since 60 or so percent if hits with it result in death,  and it functions almost exactly like a gun ( just aim and hit RB ), you end up breezing through firefights. The game tries to make it less of a firearm and more of a super death frisbee with after touch ( slo-mo that makes the camera follow the glaive and lets you guide it )  and power throw ( cheesy timing minigame ). Both of these are optional, but are so good you feel guilty about using them.

 Hopefully the complaints will resolve themselves later into the game (I'm only halfway through).

Super Smash Bros Brawl Review

  Super Smash Bros is a side scrolling, multiplayer centric beat em up action game. These have always had single player, but thats never been the focus. One of the series key points is huge amount of depth concealed in this while still being easy and fun to learn. 

 Not much (if anything) has changed in Brawl. Up to 4 fighters still desperately clamber to knock opponents off the stage, but it feels allot better then melee. Most of the balance issues are fixed and the game feels a bit more floaty, but this is a good thing as melee was a bit overprecise. The stages are good, but allot of them are just too random.

 And this brings up another point: Brawl has been made for the newcomer. Roughly half the stages try to kill you, and most of those are just frustrating, not another threat to watch. Take spearhead. Sometimes the stage flips upside down, and then your controls get inverted a by a second effect. This almost always leads to death. Another thing is the smash ball. Its a little orb that comes in and floats around until some hits it enough, then gives the person that broke it an awesome move. If these were balanced, they would be great. But many of them cant get a kill in ideal situations. Lucario's and Jigglypuff's  barely do any damage, and Metaknights does damage but not much else.

 Overall these complaints don't take much away from the game. Its great fun and anyone who owns a Wii should check it out.

9 out of 10

World of Warcraft first impressions

WoW. Not only is this an abbreviation for this game, it also describes it's size. The title is quite literal, this game is actually a world, at least landmass wise. It's probably larger then the states.

So Wow is an mmorpg ( massively multiplayer online role playing game) and the best one out there. I can't really sum up the experience vey well, so here's an overview of the game. You head out as your chosen race and class to complete quests. Most of them involve killing a few specific enemies or a boss level character, and the rest tell you to talk to someone or deliver something. The game is so huge you would feel completely lost if you were did not have some sort of objective, and the huge amount of quest fulfill that.

Another large part of the game is gear. While finding some cloth armor or an average battleaxe will occur every few enemies, a real nice piece of gear is a real rarity. I just found my first green (uncommon) item at level 10! Most itmes you find some useless crud like a dry scorpion eye worth a few copper.

The next part of this addicting formula is the combat. It feels really hectic at the higher levels, and this is great. While most monsters you have to kill rarely pose a threat, if you get careless you can easily be swarmed and taken down in a matter of seconds. This creates an environment of tension and excitement, and carefully creeping around to avoid being attacked by too many creatures feels like a minefield! Sometimes you have to assault a dungeon and this changes the rules. Rather then picking your fights in a huge canyon, you are up close and personal with a range of beasties in a claustrophobic environment.

WoW is an experience that cannot be described with words. Well, maybe one: Wow.

I just realized that you can click on the images to get larger versions for the comic.

comic, part 2

Ghost Squad

Ghost Squad started off as an arcade game, probably in Japan. The basics of the gameplay is that you shoot terrorists, and then move around then shoot some more. The game supports the Wii Zapper, and that works quite well with this game. In true light gun fashion, you move the cursor to the edge of the screen to reload.

Now the game forces you to shoot quickly, but there's little payoff for accuracy. Simply spraying a hail of bullets orks better then a precise head shot. And since you have unlimited ammo, the game becomes more about how quick you can reload rather than how your gun skills are. Another fault is the terrorists logic. In one restaurant scene, you go prone under some tables to shoot people in the legs. Rather then run behind you and shoot you, they prefer to hurl themselves directly into you line of fire. Then they get their buddies to the same thing. The way the terrorists move and shoot could have been handled better, but it does not hurt the game too much.

Over all, Ghost squad is a decent rail shooter, but it only last about an hour and a half. 7/10

Below is a comic I made with Halo 3 and My Comic Life on a Mac Osx 10. I will try to include a page or two whenever I update this blog.
Oh, I couldn't write this on the same post due to formatting glitch.

Comic

Wii Zapper

The Wii Zapper is one of those things you think you might need, but then realize you don't. While it's not critical to nay of the games that use it, it greatly enhances them anyway, even if it makes it a bit harder.

It's priced right at 20 dollars, and at that comes with Link's Crossbow training. While this is definitely not a full fledged game, in short bursts (30 minutes or so) its great. It's basically a shooting gallery, with some movement thrown in. Each level is a mix between a few different game modes, the most prevalent one being target practice which lets you shoot targets. This works well, emphasizing accuracy over blind firing, which makes the game very precise. Firing quickly but inaccurately will get you nowhere. For each successive hit, your multiplier go's up by 1.

There a few more game types, but the standout is ranger. Here you walk around the map firing at enemies. While the controls are a bit unwieldy it's quite imersive. It's also a bit too hard too find all the enemies so that holds down this one. The is overall a cut above average, and it's worth your time to play it if you pick up the Zapper.

The Zapper is compatible with most recent Wii Fps's, notably Ghost Squad and Medal of Honor Heroes 2. With a little bit of mucking around in menu's you can get it to work older game's too, like Metroid Prime 3. This is a bit harder to control then normal, but it works overall.

I give the Wii Zapper an 8 out of 10. This is the rating for the casing itself, not the compatible software. Links Crossbow Training is a 7 out of 10, and perfect for half an hour or so bursts.

Metroid Prime 3 first impressions

So I just rented Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. It's not really what I was expecting. In the past, Metroid was a side scroller with allot of shooting. So then the Gamecube comes out the game not only makes the switch to 3d, but to a fps. Most fps's control by moving the left stick and looking with the right stick. Not Metroid! Our off all the first person shooter's I have played, that game was the hardest to control. You to hold a button just to look around! Everything else was fine, but the controls were just so bad.

Well, now the inevitable Wii version is out. I was fairly impressed with the basics of the game, with the player sort of manipulating objects with realistic motions. You would twist things with a twist motion, pull them out by actually pulling out... The problem being that this only works one some objects, like controls panels where it only manages to be annoying and imprecise. But rather then move your hand around pick up objects, which would be quite amazing and immersive, but no. Quite like the speech craft mini game in Oblivion, it just feels tacked on.


Besides that minor flaw, everything else holds up fairly well. Combat is well handled and fun, and an intuitive control scheme for your grapple beam feels nice when fighting shielded enemies.

Metroid Prime is set to be the game that Wii owners have been waiting for since that rather bland Red Steel came out. I will try to review it soon.

Schedule

Ok, I'm trying to get this blog up and running again. I will try to start posting three times a week. Just a few things before I make the next post. First: Forums! Please post in them or register if your here. It doesn't take long!
2: Guest posting! I have set up a guest account, so leave a comment on this post if you are interested in posting on this blog, as I could use the help.

Mass Effect

I finally got it! I got their lost copy, and it was the collectors edition. Its sort of hard to describe the game, and none of the revewiers really got the feel of the game. Have you played KoToR? Its exactly like that, but not. The basic gameplay sends you across multiple planets to do quests. You earn xp (it is an rpg) by doing various things, like killing enemies and reading books, plus hacking terminals. Its a nice split between tactical third person shooting (think r6v mp) and abilities.

Its not quite clear about anything in the beginning. I was actually a level 4 before I figured out how to do anything to do with abilities and stat progression. The combat is quite weird, with you micromanaging every aspect of your squad, or leaving it up to the AI. The best example being when you order one member to physically lift up an opponent while you snipe him and the next shoves him off a ledge. It switches from fluid and smooth to clunky and hard to use, then back the next second. Besides this, the combat is fun and overly challenging.

The game feels alot like GoW for its cover. Its cover system works okay, but you just move into cover rather then press a button which works better.

The next big thing is the speech. This is,simply put, unbelievably-mindblowingly-awsome!
You pick a response from a wheel, and your character gets the gist of that off. Example: You pick the response "the council should back off" and your character says this:" Tell the council to send off their men". It works much better then the stuff in KOTOR. They did a great job on making the aliens feel real, between the cold and calculating Turians to the ruthless Geth robot race.

The plot has a similar awesomeness. Bioware has created another masterpeice. I will review it soon.

And remember, if you wanna post something, leave a comment and I will get back to you.