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