Since I'm leaving the states (semi) soon and it is illegal to rent games I went on down to Blockbuster and rented some games. Unlike the rest of America there are still 3 blockbusters within 15 minutes of my house. They all have the creepying smell of death about them though.
Halo 4
Sure was Halo-y. I still do not like the action figure feel of Halo. I don't know why I keep trying this series. I know the multiplayer is actually where it is at, but I hate the action figure feel. It is a very deliberate feel that (For bungie at least) is exactly how they wanted it to feel. I could barely feel whatever changes 343 brought to the whole thing as a non-superfan. It had some pretty visuals and watching all the spartan-ops cutscenes on youtube made me go "I'll watch that Halo TV series!"
DmC Devil May Cry
was a pretty cool looking game that the misogyny and terrible fucking writing and the stupdity just wore at me. Holy shit does this game not like women. Once again Ninja Theory has that "strong" female character that has serious issues and just needs a strong man to make everything right/rescue them. Also they say the dumbest fucking lines in history.
Two characters say "I know this place like the back of my hand." I think it is in subsequent levels. How bad do you have to be at writing/editting a script not to catch that. There's lots of detail lavished on the world look and dante's move list (not so much on enemy design.)
It would be offensive if it wasn't such trash.
Hitman:Absolution
I did plan to buy this game at some point to support IO Interactive. Then that stuff happened with them and it didn't matter. I know people are up in arms about it not being hitman-y enough but I got to the 3rd mission and quit because it was just like hitman to me and I couldn't give a crap about anything.
Metal Gear Rising Revengence
The official thread for this is filled with the MG nerds MGnerding it up (s'up guys). It was fun to read that stuff, even if they were all ultimately overcompensating for the nonsense plot. I played this after DmC so basically anything looked like fucking literature. I loved quiton flynn after the change over. I've been using that voice all week. It is a voice everyone can do. It was weird playing a stylish action game without a dodge or a block button. By virtue of not pissing me off after I die (Bayonetta) I'd call it Platinum's best game.
I wanted to box more in this game. I was dissappointed when I stood in front of sexy girl poster and no one on the codec noticed. I didn't feel a need to play it any more after beating it.
What I'm saying is I'm insane and would rather play Ninja Gaiden 3 over and over again. I think that game does a better job with "you enjoy all the killing." I haven't played another game of the stylish action genre where it feels better to press buttons. It feels SO GOOD to press buttons in that game. It is on my short list of games to buy again once I am settled. Man now I'm going to go download Ninja Gaiden 3 demo again just to play level one a couple of times. I will have a better time with that than any of these games that I do not regret renting.
I'm also debating renting Skyward Sward.
Showing posts with label PS3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PS3. Show all posts
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Thursday, May 10, 2012
God of War III (PS3)
God of War III is stupid. It is really really stupid. Kratos is consumed with a need for a revenge. A need so strong he will kill EVERY LIVING THING. This is not play for a moral message. This is played as to be AWESOME.
The game begins in the middle of something huge. Kratos is on a Titan climbing towards mount Olympus. Apparently shit is going to get real. You and the titan on a macro and micro scale start fighting Poseidon. Your chain blades pass straight through his water crabhorsedragon body like it was on noclip. There's on friction to that attack. On hard mode I hit the enemy and it kind of blinked and it hit me and I flew in the air. I never felt any friction or connection to a fight that was supposed to be AWESOME. Then there are like the mook enemies and you hit like 20 of them and it doesn't feel like you're doing anything.
Then I saw from a first person perspective eyes getting jabbed out. That was Kratos making orange juice with Poseidon. He then fell to Earth and flooded the world. Good job Asshole. I totally want Kratos to be real and come to my birthday party. Then he can Revenge everyone I know because VENGENCE and AWESOME.
Then there's a like a sex minigame?
This shit is embarrassing. I mean the game. Andrew Toups did say it better than I did when he was talking about the prequel more than 5 years ago.
Oh it was completely hilarious when I could just stand in place for 5 seconds while the boss (on hard) did an AWESOME attack that had no chance of hitting me.
The game begins in the middle of something huge. Kratos is on a Titan climbing towards mount Olympus. Apparently shit is going to get real. You and the titan on a macro and micro scale start fighting Poseidon. Your chain blades pass straight through his water crabhorsedragon body like it was on noclip. There's on friction to that attack. On hard mode I hit the enemy and it kind of blinked and it hit me and I flew in the air. I never felt any friction or connection to a fight that was supposed to be AWESOME. Then there are like the mook enemies and you hit like 20 of them and it doesn't feel like you're doing anything.
Then I saw from a first person perspective eyes getting jabbed out. That was Kratos making orange juice with Poseidon. He then fell to Earth and flooded the world. Good job Asshole. I totally want Kratos to be real and come to my birthday party. Then he can Revenge everyone I know because VENGENCE and AWESOME.
Then there's a like a sex minigame?
This shit is embarrassing. I mean the game. Andrew Toups did say it better than I did when he was talking about the prequel more than 5 years ago.
Oh it was completely hilarious when I could just stand in place for 5 seconds while the boss (on hard) did an AWESOME attack that had no chance of hitting me.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Games Digest Nov-DEC 2011 Part Ichi
Let's try and talk about all the stuff I played between my last main post and now. Including the things I had forgotten to talk about. The first thing to come to mind is Bionic Commando (PS3) by GRIN. It's an absolutely gorgeous game with fantastic swinging that reminds me of Spiderman 2 (PS2,GC,Xbox). I set it down after the first boss and during the second sniper-sneaking section because the game never really seemed built for that. Taking down one sniper meant two others locked on and fired. I could get angry and finally beat it after thirty minutes or I could just move on with my life.
Making decisions! That's all Alpha Protocol (PS3) is about. It's developed by Obsidian. That link should clear up any questions about what the previous sentence means. The dialog is about as entertaining as drinking sand, but I have to appreciate that game's choices are just different ways to be an asshole. There's no good/evil binary so much as choosing where to place your faith and allegiances. Yes there is a part where you have to choose between saving the girl or saving the people. I stuck by my choices and ended up with everyone I cared about dead at the end. The sex scenes were almost silly and short which made them almost not embarrassing and quality viewing compared to the ones in Mass Effect. It's a fun and dumb 15 hours and you see something brilliant in how all your decisions actually matter while not changing the structure of the game. There's occasionally the dialog choice of "Fuck You" or "Execute".
Mortal Kombat (PS3) has the world's greatest fighting game story mode and is everything it should be. Similarly I can't wait to spend more time on The King of Fighters XIII. I just have all these FPSes I'm bro-ing with. Battlefield 3 is a refreshing change from Modern Warfare 3.
MW3 is more COD Multiplayer. I haven't touched the single player campaign in it or BF3. I can say Spec-Ops in MW3 is probably my GOTY. It touches the same part of my brain that Modern Warfare 2 touched in 2009 and Dog Days viciously tore at in 2010. It feature sparkling level design (that you wish had gone into the multiplayer) and tight lovely situations and circumstances. I'd compare it to the arena stage in any Ratchet and Clank game or Super Meat Boy. Just chunks of wonderful game design. If only I could convince my crew to stop playing BF3 long enough that I could play more of it. BF3 is definitely a better game when you are playing it. Infinite Ward is still the king of menu design.
In BF3 you can't quit, change your loadouts, invite a friend, or even go into options between matches. I'm really not sure what the purpose of that was. It does feature some amazing sights. While MW3 is definitely worth it if you have one friend to play it with you at least need 3 other friends to truly enjoy BF3. The most common question I've had in the 12 vs 12 matches on the PS3 has been, "Where the hell is our team?" And you won't know! You'll be trying to defend or attack an objective and just wondering where the other 8 players are. You need at least 3 people you can stand playing video games with in a squad with you.
On the plus you can change it so you never hear other people talk. That only lasts for that game though. It defaults to "Squad" and then you have to change it to "none" when you are missing a friend (because they were in your squad but when the game started they were suddenly on the other team) and someone's crappy rap starts blaring through your TV speakers.
The sound is god damn amazing.
Making decisions! That's all Alpha Protocol (PS3) is about. It's developed by Obsidian. That link should clear up any questions about what the previous sentence means. The dialog is about as entertaining as drinking sand, but I have to appreciate that game's choices are just different ways to be an asshole. There's no good/evil binary so much as choosing where to place your faith and allegiances. Yes there is a part where you have to choose between saving the girl or saving the people. I stuck by my choices and ended up with everyone I cared about dead at the end. The sex scenes were almost silly and short which made them almost not embarrassing and quality viewing compared to the ones in Mass Effect. It's a fun and dumb 15 hours and you see something brilliant in how all your decisions actually matter while not changing the structure of the game. There's occasionally the dialog choice of "Fuck You" or "Execute".
Mortal Kombat (PS3) has the world's greatest fighting game story mode and is everything it should be. Similarly I can't wait to spend more time on The King of Fighters XIII. I just have all these FPSes I'm bro-ing with. Battlefield 3 is a refreshing change from Modern Warfare 3.
MW3 is more COD Multiplayer. I haven't touched the single player campaign in it or BF3. I can say Spec-Ops in MW3 is probably my GOTY. It touches the same part of my brain that Modern Warfare 2 touched in 2009 and Dog Days viciously tore at in 2010. It feature sparkling level design (that you wish had gone into the multiplayer) and tight lovely situations and circumstances. I'd compare it to the arena stage in any Ratchet and Clank game or Super Meat Boy. Just chunks of wonderful game design. If only I could convince my crew to stop playing BF3 long enough that I could play more of it. BF3 is definitely a better game when you are playing it. Infinite Ward is still the king of menu design.
In BF3 you can't quit, change your loadouts, invite a friend, or even go into options between matches. I'm really not sure what the purpose of that was. It does feature some amazing sights. While MW3 is definitely worth it if you have one friend to play it with you at least need 3 other friends to truly enjoy BF3. The most common question I've had in the 12 vs 12 matches on the PS3 has been, "Where the hell is our team?" And you won't know! You'll be trying to defend or attack an objective and just wondering where the other 8 players are. You need at least 3 people you can stand playing video games with in a squad with you.
On the plus you can change it so you never hear other people talk. That only lasts for that game though. It defaults to "Squad" and then you have to change it to "none" when you are missing a friend (because they were in your squad but when the game started they were suddenly on the other team) and someone's crappy rap starts blaring through your TV speakers.
The sound is god damn amazing.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Chronicles of Riddick (Movies and Games)
After people kept bringing it up I picked up the BluRay set for the Chronicle of Riddick. Having now watched the 2 films and the 20 minute Peter Chung thing I'm gonna give a verdict. Pitch Black is pretty good! I love things that deal with logistics of doing something. So it's really great they deal with logistics until they stop dealing with logistics for character drama.
Riddick is kind of thin as a character. It's Vin Diesel talking in his deep voice and acting as the plot requires he acts. It doesn't feel like there's internal dialog/conflict going on him. He will do what the plot needs to move forward versus any internal motivation. For an anti-hero not a lot of surprises. Oh and the 2nd film has deus ex machima and I always hate that.
But watching these got me pumped to replay the video game. And I could replay it and then play the sequel all on the same disc.
I didn't play the sequel. With the presence of DARK SOULS, GOD HAND, The World Ends With You, etc. a video game has to be awesome to keep my interest. Riddick had pretty much never grab my interest because I never felt like a badass. If I'm going to fight people in first person I'd replay Breakdown again and throw my controller through a TV.
Instead the game ended up back in the envelope after I kept dying on a boring stealth section for an hour. Interestingly I remember this is the same place I set down the game years ago, then came back 3 months later and beat because it felt incomplete. But hey DARK SOULS.
Riddick is kind of thin as a character. It's Vin Diesel talking in his deep voice and acting as the plot requires he acts. It doesn't feel like there's internal dialog/conflict going on him. He will do what the plot needs to move forward versus any internal motivation. For an anti-hero not a lot of surprises. Oh and the 2nd film has deus ex machima and I always hate that.
But watching these got me pumped to replay the video game. And I could replay it and then play the sequel all on the same disc.
I didn't play the sequel. With the presence of DARK SOULS, GOD HAND, The World Ends With You, etc. a video game has to be awesome to keep my interest. Riddick had pretty much never grab my interest because I never felt like a badass. If I'm going to fight people in first person I'd replay Breakdown again and throw my controller through a TV.
Instead the game ended up back in the envelope after I kept dying on a boring stealth section for an hour. Interestingly I remember this is the same place I set down the game years ago, then came back 3 months later and beat because it felt incomplete. But hey DARK SOULS.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
LA Noire (PS3) 50 Cent Blood in the Sand (PS3)
Seem like there was something right in receiving both of these games from gamefly at the same time. Compliments and opposites.
Not going to try to make this a great narrative. So let's start with the latter first.
50 Cent: Blood in the Sand is the second game from business man 50 Cent.
That video about sums up my thoughts on the first one. This new game is for NEXT-GEN consoles though. It features even more exclusive music from 50 Cent. I love 50 Cent. I have no love for his music, but I find the man very good at his job (making money) and possibly unintentionally hilarious. I can never tell if he knows how funny he is. he named his dog Oprah and likes to tweet "Oprah's here licking herself lol". So yeah, it's never quite clear.
A lot of people compare Blood on the Sand to The Club a game I played very little of but was very said no one was playing it online. I'm not sure you were supposed to even play it online, but it looked like it would be a lot of fun that way. BotS has a combo kill system that rewards you for doing well (so obviously better than Vanquish (and no that is not sarcasm.)) It never really presents you with a chance to kill more than 3 headcovered Middle Eastern Men in sports jerseys at a time. Except for the mission where you set houses on fire and then mow down the guys as they run out screaming. That's where I quit playing, because that was fucked up.
It was fun before that happened though! 50 Cent is paid for his concert in a compensation crystal skull which is then stolen by some sort of Arab Ninja Girl. He must then KILL EVERYONE IN THE CITY to get his skull back. There's a Hind-D fight. You get one of Fity's friends as back up. His music is blaring. I'm fairly certain 50 wrote his own dialog. Hell maybe he wrote all the dialog, I wanted to keep playing to find out, but again that above sequence seemed like a good point to suddenly have moral doubt and quit.
It is a glorious celebration of 50. Not many people get to have their friends and themselves as stars in a video game. He got the opportunity TWICE. That's twice more than Marc Ecko did! 50's game is absurd but coherent. Ecko's was nuts.
He also has grenades on his bullet proof vest at the concert.
Then we have white bitches get murdered the video game, LA Noire. 5 hours in I was ready to quit but wanted to see how dumb the dumb resolution to the second act was. It was dumb. I was doing more or less the same actions every case, which yes is what reality is, but there were definitely ways they could have made the game more enjoyable doing the same things. The interviews/interrogations hit the uncanny valley really hard. I couldn't tell if I was to trust what I thought the people were doing or read what the programmers wanted me to choose between TRUTH, LIE, DOUBT. Also my PC's interpretation's of those choices was frequently baffling.
Best object holding since Shenmue. Hell it just made me want to play Shenmue. A common opinion I found on SB, and one that I share, is that LA Noire is something you play and then forget. Disposable entertainment. Actually this feels like everything you need to read about the game.
Not going to try to make this a great narrative. So let's start with the latter first.
50 Cent: Blood in the Sand is the second game from business man 50 Cent.
That video about sums up my thoughts on the first one. This new game is for NEXT-GEN consoles though. It features even more exclusive music from 50 Cent. I love 50 Cent. I have no love for his music, but I find the man very good at his job (making money) and possibly unintentionally hilarious. I can never tell if he knows how funny he is. he named his dog Oprah and likes to tweet "Oprah's here licking herself lol". So yeah, it's never quite clear.
A lot of people compare Blood on the Sand to The Club a game I played very little of but was very said no one was playing it online. I'm not sure you were supposed to even play it online, but it looked like it would be a lot of fun that way. BotS has a combo kill system that rewards you for doing well (so obviously better than Vanquish (and no that is not sarcasm.)) It never really presents you with a chance to kill more than 3 headcovered Middle Eastern Men in sports jerseys at a time. Except for the mission where you set houses on fire and then mow down the guys as they run out screaming. That's where I quit playing, because that was fucked up.
It was fun before that happened though! 50 Cent is paid for his concert in a compensation crystal skull which is then stolen by some sort of Arab Ninja Girl. He must then KILL EVERYONE IN THE CITY to get his skull back. There's a Hind-D fight. You get one of Fity's friends as back up. His music is blaring. I'm fairly certain 50 wrote his own dialog. Hell maybe he wrote all the dialog, I wanted to keep playing to find out, but again that above sequence seemed like a good point to suddenly have moral doubt and quit.
It is a glorious celebration of 50. Not many people get to have their friends and themselves as stars in a video game. He got the opportunity TWICE. That's twice more than Marc Ecko did! 50's game is absurd but coherent. Ecko's was nuts.
He also has grenades on his bullet proof vest at the concert.
Then we have white bitches get murdered the video game, LA Noire. 5 hours in I was ready to quit but wanted to see how dumb the dumb resolution to the second act was. It was dumb. I was doing more or less the same actions every case, which yes is what reality is, but there were definitely ways they could have made the game more enjoyable doing the same things. The interviews/interrogations hit the uncanny valley really hard. I couldn't tell if I was to trust what I thought the people were doing or read what the programmers wanted me to choose between TRUTH, LIE, DOUBT. Also my PC's interpretation's of those choices was frequently baffling.
Best object holding since Shenmue. Hell it just made me want to play Shenmue. A common opinion I found on SB, and one that I share, is that LA Noire is something you play and then forget. Disposable entertainment. Actually this feels like everything you need to read about the game.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Fukubukuro 2010 #5 DOG DAYS
I love stories about heroes trying to escape hell. Reading an essay about After Hours an oft-forgotten Scorsese brought this to front. While opposite in tone, trying to escape Hades is the core story of both that movie and
GAME OF THE YEAR 2010
Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days.
If you played the demo, and didn’t instantly love it, I can’t help you. 10 seconds into the demo and I was frothing for it. By the end of the demo I wanted to drink deep from Dog Days’s (YES that’s the one part of this whole thing I’m sure is grammatically correct.) cup. I needed Dog Days bad. Then I heard it was 5 hours long, and man no. Action movies on blu-ray are 19.99 USD. I ended up waiting a month until Gamefly put the game directly into my mailbox.
I co-opped the game at the house of the man I co-op games with. I was equipped with a energy drink that tasted like Crystal Light Lemonade and 30% sugar. He had a pepsi max. I also had a little, then regretted that this year I had given up zero calorie beverages. The situation called for it, even though I vastly prefer Coke Zero to regular or diet.
We blasted through that game in seven hours. We laughed like hyenas at the naked level. The sucker-punch ending made me step back and go, “That was pretty good.” My friend might have liked the game less than I did, but was being polite. I couldn’t pry a verdict out of him. The game fully satisfied me from beginning to end.
I again lamented it’s 60 dollar price point. Games can’t continue doing this. Back-Mops breaking all sorts of records doesn’t mean anything when it takes 2 less people to generate the same level of profit from one sale. I briefly considered, years ago, with the success of Katamari Damacy that maybe, games would get universally cheaper. This generation ended up being more expensive all around.
2 months later, 3 months after it’s release, Dog Days was all of 19.99 at Best Buy. I bought it and immediately played through the game again offline. Then I tried online, which was already something of a ghost town. Any complaints I can level at the game are in the multiplayer. The online stages are not nearly as gloriously genius as the single player levels. I can’t mute the jackasses that made me sit out the 5 minute match I waited 10 minutes to play because he held me up then threw me to the ground and shot me before I even got the QTE prompt to get out of the hold up. I did find a few people to run through the single player with, and everything is glistening level design.
If you didn’t like the demo, I can’t help you. The demo starts with a fantastic escape from a restaurant out the back way, and might be the only time the level doesn’t make sense in reality because I can’t remember where the actual restaurant entrance is. You also hop over the same broken wall a few times. But when it is time to MURDER CHINA, the level design is perfect. If you played this alone, maybe this is why you didn’t find it genius.
There is always two paths, the straight path for Lynch, the side path for Kane ( the side path for Lynch, the straight path for Kane.) The man taking the straight path is there only as distraction to the private body guards for the mafia elite and to not get killed. When the side path gets a clear shot at the white suit cleanup team, they have to kill as many of the chinese military as possible before they realize he’s there. The low-level gangsters will then focus on Kane, giving straight path Lynch a shot at headshotting the police officers just trying to kill two unstoppable men.
Our demo level has K and Mister L escape onto a street. On the left side is a video store. On the right is a building under construction and a catwalk. On the street you have convenient cars. One man should obviously be fighting through the video store, the other is his cover fire. Cars sometimes blow up, and the catwalk’s cover will get blown to bits. Our video store hero’s cover is good for the most part. Most of your opposition is flooding out of a restaurant down on the left side, which has a lot of propane tanks around it.
A later escape has you in an area with three warehouses and a dozen different ways to approach the problem of murdering everyone and getting out of China. Every failure feels like you did something stupid. Getting away with something stupid is a sigh of relief for you and your partner. After a dozen times of playing through the game I'm still getting surprised by myself of my co-hort's discovery at another way escaping everything we deserve.
There was no reason this game was going to be a success at 60 dollars. It’s too much of a decision. Hell if I could recommend it to anyone for that price. This game might of set the world on fire at being released at 19.99. I0 Interactive might still have been a development studio. This game features at least 3 scenes I had been waiting for in an action movie.
Friends on Steam ended up getting the game for 5 dollars when it was 5 dollars on Steam. I was happy at everyone on my list that suddenly had that game in their possession. Either way, this friend complained that their were no civilians in the game, even though the opening movie somewhat promised there would be. I didn’t have a response to that, it somewhat bothered me in my response playthrough. The satisfaction in killing all of armed-China came back, and I got over it.
His other complaint was all the enemies had the same AI if they were military personnel or thugs jumping off moving motorcycles. I didn’t notice this either, maybe because what you were fighting was just another bit of windowdressing. Through their own actions Kane and Lynch end up having the entire city of Shanghai hating them. The game gives us just enough showing that we don’t need any telling about them.
Dog Days is fantastic, brief and features a shootout at a McDonald’s. I’ve been waiting for that for years. It has the most glorious idle menu screens. The 15 seconds of running across an empty lot and an helicopter flies over is worth more to anyone than the entirety of Brak Fops and most action films. The guns are stupendously loud! Everytime I play the game I have to remark, “Holy lord, I’m kind of killing a LOT of people.”
In short: My good friend Chris Pinner can forgive Dog Days because the bodiless camera is just following Kane and Lynch, and you’re not the camera. He has a thing for FPS games not showing the body you see. I hope he loves Breakdown (Japan does Half-Life and Halo is Xen.)
GAME OF THE YEAR 2010
Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days.
If you played the demo, and didn’t instantly love it, I can’t help you. 10 seconds into the demo and I was frothing for it. By the end of the demo I wanted to drink deep from Dog Days’s (YES that’s the one part of this whole thing I’m sure is grammatically correct.) cup. I needed Dog Days bad. Then I heard it was 5 hours long, and man no. Action movies on blu-ray are 19.99 USD. I ended up waiting a month until Gamefly put the game directly into my mailbox.
I co-opped the game at the house of the man I co-op games with. I was equipped with a energy drink that tasted like Crystal Light Lemonade and 30% sugar. He had a pepsi max. I also had a little, then regretted that this year I had given up zero calorie beverages. The situation called for it, even though I vastly prefer Coke Zero to regular or diet.
We blasted through that game in seven hours. We laughed like hyenas at the naked level. The sucker-punch ending made me step back and go, “That was pretty good.” My friend might have liked the game less than I did, but was being polite. I couldn’t pry a verdict out of him. The game fully satisfied me from beginning to end.
I again lamented it’s 60 dollar price point. Games can’t continue doing this. Back-Mops breaking all sorts of records doesn’t mean anything when it takes 2 less people to generate the same level of profit from one sale. I briefly considered, years ago, with the success of Katamari Damacy that maybe, games would get universally cheaper. This generation ended up being more expensive all around.
2 months later, 3 months after it’s release, Dog Days was all of 19.99 at Best Buy. I bought it and immediately played through the game again offline. Then I tried online, which was already something of a ghost town. Any complaints I can level at the game are in the multiplayer. The online stages are not nearly as gloriously genius as the single player levels. I can’t mute the jackasses that made me sit out the 5 minute match I waited 10 minutes to play because he held me up then threw me to the ground and shot me before I even got the QTE prompt to get out of the hold up. I did find a few people to run through the single player with, and everything is glistening level design.
If you didn’t like the demo, I can’t help you. The demo starts with a fantastic escape from a restaurant out the back way, and might be the only time the level doesn’t make sense in reality because I can’t remember where the actual restaurant entrance is. You also hop over the same broken wall a few times. But when it is time to MURDER CHINA, the level design is perfect. If you played this alone, maybe this is why you didn’t find it genius.
There is always two paths, the straight path for Lynch, the side path for Kane ( the side path for Lynch, the straight path for Kane.) The man taking the straight path is there only as distraction to the private body guards for the mafia elite and to not get killed. When the side path gets a clear shot at the white suit cleanup team, they have to kill as many of the chinese military as possible before they realize he’s there. The low-level gangsters will then focus on Kane, giving straight path Lynch a shot at headshotting the police officers just trying to kill two unstoppable men.
Our demo level has K and Mister L escape onto a street. On the left side is a video store. On the right is a building under construction and a catwalk. On the street you have convenient cars. One man should obviously be fighting through the video store, the other is his cover fire. Cars sometimes blow up, and the catwalk’s cover will get blown to bits. Our video store hero’s cover is good for the most part. Most of your opposition is flooding out of a restaurant down on the left side, which has a lot of propane tanks around it.
A later escape has you in an area with three warehouses and a dozen different ways to approach the problem of murdering everyone and getting out of China. Every failure feels like you did something stupid. Getting away with something stupid is a sigh of relief for you and your partner. After a dozen times of playing through the game I'm still getting surprised by myself of my co-hort's discovery at another way escaping everything we deserve.
There was no reason this game was going to be a success at 60 dollars. It’s too much of a decision. Hell if I could recommend it to anyone for that price. This game might of set the world on fire at being released at 19.99. I0 Interactive might still have been a development studio. This game features at least 3 scenes I had been waiting for in an action movie.
Friends on Steam ended up getting the game for 5 dollars when it was 5 dollars on Steam. I was happy at everyone on my list that suddenly had that game in their possession. Either way, this friend complained that their were no civilians in the game, even though the opening movie somewhat promised there would be. I didn’t have a response to that, it somewhat bothered me in my response playthrough. The satisfaction in killing all of armed-China came back, and I got over it.
His other complaint was all the enemies had the same AI if they were military personnel or thugs jumping off moving motorcycles. I didn’t notice this either, maybe because what you were fighting was just another bit of windowdressing. Through their own actions Kane and Lynch end up having the entire city of Shanghai hating them. The game gives us just enough showing that we don’t need any telling about them.
Dog Days is fantastic, brief and features a shootout at a McDonald’s. I’ve been waiting for that for years. It has the most glorious idle menu screens. The 15 seconds of running across an empty lot and an helicopter flies over is worth more to anyone than the entirety of Brak Fops and most action films. The guns are stupendously loud! Everytime I play the game I have to remark, “Holy lord, I’m kind of killing a LOT of people.”
In short: My good friend Chris Pinner can forgive Dog Days because the bodiless camera is just following Kane and Lynch, and you’re not the camera. He has a thing for FPS games not showing the body you see. I hope he loves Breakdown (Japan does Half-Life and Halo is Xen.)
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Surfing H3O (PS2) Megaman X7 (PS2) Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City (PS3)
Because of this, I have always wanted to play Megaman X7. I needed to hear X go, "I'm through fighting, I'm going to look for a peaceful solution." It isn't on youtube (Or I couldn't find it.) The actual delivery of the line isn't as awful as you imagine it to be. It's delivered as lifelessly as the rest of the game.
After the second level I looked at myself in the TV, blacked by a long loading screen and said, "You could be playing a good video game."
Maybe Surfing H30 is that video game. I don't know. It doesn't work with component cables on a PS2. I got a demo video and then a black screen while sounds of me failing to be radical played. The demo video made the graphics look terrible in the way early PS2 games all do. I'm still going to buy the Japanese version if/when I find it. Also if I bother to learn what the Japanese version's name was.
I bought it for $1.99 because the premise of the Japanese version is AWESOME. Meteors are wrecking havoc on Earth so aliens from across the galaxy come to Earth to catch the wickest waves. The US version kicks that idea in the junk in favor of generic xtreme sports game that was so common at the time. It was published by Rockstar of all people, so I can't even understand why they would change after they made Body Harvest (N64). Body Harvest which asks you to find the TOLL MASTER not 5 minutes into the game.
I was going to put it off, but let's go ahead and talk about GTAIV:Episodes from Liberty City before I forget what I thought of it. First, it's exactly what I want from a GTA game and everything I hope GTAV is. I want that game to be 6 interconnected 10 hour stories that have the whole world unlocked from the getgo. Episodes is 2 12 hour stories with a bunch of bonus stuff that I felt okay not playing. They are also devoid of what made me quit GTA IV about 4 hours in.
Any game longer than 10 hours better be fun/challenging/entertaining all the time. It should starve off thoughts of my own morality. If it is a bad time for more than 5 minutes at a time it is making me a worse person. It is lowering my life quality.
While I'm no doubt years behind the rest of the internet on this, all the base bonus content in GTAIV is awful. More that it requires you play it to advance the story/make the game easier or more fun. The man-dates/real dates are all draining terrible wastes of anyone's time. The reward for the real dates is offscreen sex. In The Ballad of Gay Tony you can call a girl at any time to have off-screen sex with. Sometimes she even calls you.
I was trying to seq-way into this but it went somewhere else: The pool in GTAIV is awful. The pool in Duke Nukem 3D is better. Hell, the pool in Yakuza 4 is EXCELLENT. I guess it says something more about me how much bad pool minigame bothers me. In TBOGT they don't even bother to make a golf minigame any representation of golf. You aim your cursor exactly where you want it to go and if you hit X correctly twice it goes there.
In general improvements to GTA, IV helped with mission-checkpoints, immediately restarting missions, and keeping your weapons if you died. I stopped San Andreas on the "fly the terrible fucking plane under bridges but if you touch the water you ARE FUCKED". Which easily required 10-15 minutes of my life to get back to the starting point to fail again. I think I've tried that mission 3 separate sessions.
Let's actually talk about the game now! It's pretty good! The stories are easily a thousand times more swallowable than Niko's. I could never reconcile "I needed to get away from all the killing" with all the killing Niko does immediately before and after saying that. I've heard people argue for this, but it never makes sense in the face of him saying that he is tired of murders and then commits hundreds of murders.
At least The Lost and The Damned mentions this, "Look at this, I hope I never have to fight that Niko guy. He is psychotic." The Lost and The Damned has you playing the VP of a Biker Gang right when the President gets of prison. You've been making deals, keeping the peace, and making sure everyone has money to live. The President is a little more carefree about this lifestyle and immediately pisses off a rival gang and drives half the city to fucking hating you. I liked the cast and missions even when I didn't like the cast. It has a more expansion pack feel of the game as the levels are spread out across all 3 islands. Most of the missions in TBOGT are centered around GTA's Manhattan.
TBOGT's story is about the exact opposite of what you would think the title would imply. You play Gay Tony's straight business partner/clean up boy. You're never involved in the actual business, but you are always in-charge of cleaning up his messes. You're also a "self-centered greedy killer." Excellent, a GTA protagonist that knows exactly what he is! "I don't man, I kill for money." His self-awareness is really refreshing.
That doesn't have anything to do with being gay though. The game treats homosexuality like it treats American conservatism. Being gay is pretty weird! Almost every character in the game calls Tony a faggot, insinuates that you have sex with him, and they MIGHT be a closet homosexual. Your character takes it in stride, but Gay Tony is never shown being gay. He can never decide on his accent. It does show onscreen heterosexual sex at least twice, and has the possiblity for off-screen sex at any time (see above.) It even has a female character whose entire existence is to complain that you won't have sex with her.
The whole is someone going, "I'm not gay dude. It's just the title, but I'm not gay." Tony has a boyfriend who exists to be an asshole and get murdered. It's amazingly heterosexual despite the title. At least there's a rich Arabian man-child who misuses American slang wonderfully.
Much like everything the video I linked two paragraphs ago shows everything that I have been trying to explain and kills my wish to write more.
Next time, I'll talk about something that isn't video games!
After the second level I looked at myself in the TV, blacked by a long loading screen and said, "You could be playing a good video game."
Maybe Surfing H30 is that video game. I don't know. It doesn't work with component cables on a PS2. I got a demo video and then a black screen while sounds of me failing to be radical played. The demo video made the graphics look terrible in the way early PS2 games all do. I'm still going to buy the Japanese version if/when I find it. Also if I bother to learn what the Japanese version's name was.
I bought it for $1.99 because the premise of the Japanese version is AWESOME. Meteors are wrecking havoc on Earth so aliens from across the galaxy come to Earth to catch the wickest waves. The US version kicks that idea in the junk in favor of generic xtreme sports game that was so common at the time. It was published by Rockstar of all people, so I can't even understand why they would change after they made Body Harvest (N64). Body Harvest which asks you to find the TOLL MASTER not 5 minutes into the game.
I was going to put it off, but let's go ahead and talk about GTAIV:Episodes from Liberty City before I forget what I thought of it. First, it's exactly what I want from a GTA game and everything I hope GTAV is. I want that game to be 6 interconnected 10 hour stories that have the whole world unlocked from the getgo. Episodes is 2 12 hour stories with a bunch of bonus stuff that I felt okay not playing. They are also devoid of what made me quit GTA IV about 4 hours in.
Any game longer than 10 hours better be fun/challenging/entertaining all the time. It should starve off thoughts of my own morality. If it is a bad time for more than 5 minutes at a time it is making me a worse person. It is lowering my life quality.
While I'm no doubt years behind the rest of the internet on this, all the base bonus content in GTAIV is awful. More that it requires you play it to advance the story/make the game easier or more fun. The man-dates/real dates are all draining terrible wastes of anyone's time. The reward for the real dates is offscreen sex. In The Ballad of Gay Tony you can call a girl at any time to have off-screen sex with. Sometimes she even calls you.
I was trying to seq-way into this but it went somewhere else: The pool in GTAIV is awful. The pool in Duke Nukem 3D is better. Hell, the pool in Yakuza 4 is EXCELLENT. I guess it says something more about me how much bad pool minigame bothers me. In TBOGT they don't even bother to make a golf minigame any representation of golf. You aim your cursor exactly where you want it to go and if you hit X correctly twice it goes there.
In general improvements to GTA, IV helped with mission-checkpoints, immediately restarting missions, and keeping your weapons if you died. I stopped San Andreas on the "fly the terrible fucking plane under bridges but if you touch the water you ARE FUCKED". Which easily required 10-15 minutes of my life to get back to the starting point to fail again. I think I've tried that mission 3 separate sessions.
Let's actually talk about the game now! It's pretty good! The stories are easily a thousand times more swallowable than Niko's. I could never reconcile "I needed to get away from all the killing" with all the killing Niko does immediately before and after saying that. I've heard people argue for this, but it never makes sense in the face of him saying that he is tired of murders and then commits hundreds of murders.
At least The Lost and The Damned mentions this, "Look at this, I hope I never have to fight that Niko guy. He is psychotic." The Lost and The Damned has you playing the VP of a Biker Gang right when the President gets of prison. You've been making deals, keeping the peace, and making sure everyone has money to live. The President is a little more carefree about this lifestyle and immediately pisses off a rival gang and drives half the city to fucking hating you. I liked the cast and missions even when I didn't like the cast. It has a more expansion pack feel of the game as the levels are spread out across all 3 islands. Most of the missions in TBOGT are centered around GTA's Manhattan.
TBOGT's story is about the exact opposite of what you would think the title would imply. You play Gay Tony's straight business partner/clean up boy. You're never involved in the actual business, but you are always in-charge of cleaning up his messes. You're also a "self-centered greedy killer." Excellent, a GTA protagonist that knows exactly what he is! "I don't man, I kill for money." His self-awareness is really refreshing.
That doesn't have anything to do with being gay though. The game treats homosexuality like it treats American conservatism. Being gay is pretty weird! Almost every character in the game calls Tony a faggot, insinuates that you have sex with him, and they MIGHT be a closet homosexual. Your character takes it in stride, but Gay Tony is never shown being gay. He can never decide on his accent. It does show onscreen heterosexual sex at least twice, and has the possiblity for off-screen sex at any time (see above.) It even has a female character whose entire existence is to complain that you won't have sex with her.
The whole is someone going, "I'm not gay dude. It's just the title, but I'm not gay." Tony has a boyfriend who exists to be an asshole and get murdered. It's amazingly heterosexual despite the title. At least there's a rich Arabian man-child who misuses American slang wonderfully.
Much like everything the video I linked two paragraphs ago shows everything that I have been trying to explain and kills my wish to write more.
Next time, I'll talk about something that isn't video games!
Monday, January 31, 2011
Enslaved: Journey to the West (PS3) & Kane and Lynch: Dead Men (PS3)
Unlike most, I left the demo of Enslaved with a suspicion I would enjoy the full game more than the Uncharted series. I still find video games to cost way too much and got it from Gamefly. Much like the game I played through this weekend, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, it felt like two stories in one.
Enslaved starts with traversing a lush detailed nature-overtaken New York City. The demo is the beginning of the game, so if you've played that, you've seen the establishing shot. Something happened 200 hundred years ago, and now human beings are being collected/killed by robots. Don't think too hard about which the robots seem to be arbitrarily trying to do.
I wanted to enjoy navigating these gorgeous environments, but the game felt a need to give me an unskippable fly by of every area. This didn't one hundred percent tell me where I needed/could go. There's several invisible walls, and the game won't let you jump unless you can jump. I understand why they didn't go with auto-jump, because this is taken after the uncharted series, but it felt like it was playing itself. Indeed any of the wall climbing sections I completely by hammering the jump button and paying enough attention to point my character in a proper direction.
Our cast and title and the first half are based on Saiyuki:Journey to the West which I like everyone else know was the basis for Dragon Ball and nothing beyond it. But our Monkey has a slave helmet on that we are shown can totally kill the person wearing it if conditions are met. Our conditions are if we get to far away or our slaver (girl-protagonist Trip) dies. She eventually gets semi-kidnapped but that doesn't seem to hurt us that much. Also our mind-fuck left-field ending (which game stupidly calls an epilogue) makes the slave helmets not make any sense, but who am I judge?
Before that ending the game tosses away our Journeying 300 miles west of NYC to Chinese Mountains and gives our team a need for revenge and a 3rd cast member that got his own DLC. I almost bought that DLC but then the game was already back to Gamefly, so I guess I didn't care that much about him. Our quest for revenge starts (I guess?) and for the second half of the game I kept asking "What are we even doing?"
Meanwhile we are witness to frankly amazing dialog:
"We did it. We made it to the crash site. This is where the slave-ship crashed."
REALLY? That was only our goal for the first 3 stages.
"That submarine is in some kind of hanger."
followed a minute later by.
"It's some kind of rail system."
Jesus. Reviews talk about the excellent dialog of this game. Well, I guess all 3 of those lines were delivered by the same person. Also I'm glad people in the wasteland know what a god damn submarine is. I'd probably be less scrutinous of the plot if it wasn't rated Teen so that we had gratuitous God of War Robot torture-murder and completely out of place "Shitttttttttt!" Not of place with what's happening, but very little of this story would need to be changed to make it E.
Then again, I guess it's the first retail game ever to use the word "penis." As in, "Your hand is on my...penis."
I'm ramming pretty hard against it, but it really wasn't that bad. Outside of the story, the game has good level progression, and it made me mildly excited for DmC because at least this game never gave me an artificial barrier and said, "destroy an arbitrary amount of monsters to make the barrier disappear. Usually your weak girl-protagonist won't move unless you kill them. I don't know if that was them being clever, or a happy accident. I guess we'll see!
I guess it's better than Heavenly Sword too, as I at least played this one. Not immediately shut off after hearing a girl want to play a game that sounded like something a child pounds out on a computer then asks if it's a real word. (I would actually give that word if I remembered it/hadn't blocked it out.)
On to Dead Men, a game where the demo left me feeling incredibly cold to. I only decided to play it because Kane and Lynch Dog Days is definitely GAME OF THE YEAR 2010. Should you play Dead Men? No! Because in that same time frame you could play through Dog Days again! Halfway through Dead Men you'll suddenly be playing a squad based cover shooter war game. It's weird and cumbersome and I didn't really like any of it.
There's also a "Nam Lu Parkway" which I think (There's a lot of globetrotting for international police murders) is in Tokyo and that sort of made my blood boil. I'm glad I played this game second, because it would have had a hard time getting me to play Dog Days, which is a much better game in every way. Yeah I guess I don't really have much to say about Dead Men.
I did play through Shining Force (Genesis) this week, and that was fantastic.
Enslaved starts with traversing a lush detailed nature-overtaken New York City. The demo is the beginning of the game, so if you've played that, you've seen the establishing shot. Something happened 200 hundred years ago, and now human beings are being collected/killed by robots. Don't think too hard about which the robots seem to be arbitrarily trying to do.
I wanted to enjoy navigating these gorgeous environments, but the game felt a need to give me an unskippable fly by of every area. This didn't one hundred percent tell me where I needed/could go. There's several invisible walls, and the game won't let you jump unless you can jump. I understand why they didn't go with auto-jump, because this is taken after the uncharted series, but it felt like it was playing itself. Indeed any of the wall climbing sections I completely by hammering the jump button and paying enough attention to point my character in a proper direction.
Our cast and title and the first half are based on Saiyuki:Journey to the West which I like everyone else know was the basis for Dragon Ball and nothing beyond it. But our Monkey has a slave helmet on that we are shown can totally kill the person wearing it if conditions are met. Our conditions are if we get to far away or our slaver (girl-protagonist Trip) dies. She eventually gets semi-kidnapped but that doesn't seem to hurt us that much. Also our mind-fuck left-field ending (which game stupidly calls an epilogue) makes the slave helmets not make any sense, but who am I judge?
Before that ending the game tosses away our Journeying 300 miles west of NYC to Chinese Mountains and gives our team a need for revenge and a 3rd cast member that got his own DLC. I almost bought that DLC but then the game was already back to Gamefly, so I guess I didn't care that much about him. Our quest for revenge starts (I guess?) and for the second half of the game I kept asking "What are we even doing?"
Meanwhile we are witness to frankly amazing dialog:
"We did it. We made it to the crash site. This is where the slave-ship crashed."
REALLY? That was only our goal for the first 3 stages.
"That submarine is in some kind of hanger."
followed a minute later by.
"It's some kind of rail system."
Jesus. Reviews talk about the excellent dialog of this game. Well, I guess all 3 of those lines were delivered by the same person. Also I'm glad people in the wasteland know what a god damn submarine is. I'd probably be less scrutinous of the plot if it wasn't rated Teen so that we had gratuitous God of War Robot torture-murder and completely out of place "Shitttttttttt!" Not of place with what's happening, but very little of this story would need to be changed to make it E.
Then again, I guess it's the first retail game ever to use the word "penis." As in, "Your hand is on my...penis."
I'm ramming pretty hard against it, but it really wasn't that bad. Outside of the story, the game has good level progression, and it made me mildly excited for DmC because at least this game never gave me an artificial barrier and said, "destroy an arbitrary amount of monsters to make the barrier disappear. Usually your weak girl-protagonist won't move unless you kill them. I don't know if that was them being clever, or a happy accident. I guess we'll see!
I guess it's better than Heavenly Sword too, as I at least played this one. Not immediately shut off after hearing a girl want to play a game that sounded like something a child pounds out on a computer then asks if it's a real word. (I would actually give that word if I remembered it/hadn't blocked it out.)
On to Dead Men, a game where the demo left me feeling incredibly cold to. I only decided to play it because Kane and Lynch Dog Days is definitely GAME OF THE YEAR 2010. Should you play Dead Men? No! Because in that same time frame you could play through Dog Days again! Halfway through Dead Men you'll suddenly be playing a squad based cover shooter war game. It's weird and cumbersome and I didn't really like any of it.
There's also a "Nam Lu Parkway" which I think (There's a lot of globetrotting for international police murders) is in Tokyo and that sort of made my blood boil. I'm glad I played this game second, because it would have had a hard time getting me to play Dog Days, which is a much better game in every way. Yeah I guess I don't really have much to say about Dead Men.
I did play through Shining Force (Genesis) this week, and that was fantastic.
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