The quest for 50K is going much better than I'd originally anticipated; I've got 6 weeks to get 327 points. I'm pretty sure I can get that relatively quickly from Assassin's Creed 2, with an assist from Left 4 Dead 2. So, hooray for that.
This past weekend was a little weird, gaming wise, but when I think about it it actually worked out to my advantage. The weekend's primary goal was working on music, but every once in a while I needed a break, and so I'd dive in to something on the 360; and since I'd finished Modern Warfare 2's campaign already, I didn't feel pressured to pick one thing and finish it.
I keep grinding away in Forza 3; I kinda messed up and bought the wrong car for an upcoming race in the Season Play mode, and so now I'm just going through tournaments in an effort to make that money back. I can't remember if I made the analogy here or in an email, but here goes anyway: Forza reminds me a lot of the Tiger Woods games, in that there's an absolute ton of stuff to do, a lot of which I've already done in previous versions in the franchise. On the flip side, Forza 3 does not in any feel like it's treading water, the way the Tiger games have for the last few years.
I'm also still running around in GTA4: BOGT, which is making me love the original GTA4 a little less. The game just feels dated; not in its story or setting, but in its actual gameplay mechanics. Combat feels incredibly clumsy, and the game is just brutally punishing if I fail a mission - I lose cash, armor (if I had it) and ammo (which doesn't get replenished), plus time keeps moving forward so if I had something I wanted to do at a certain time, I probably don't get to do it if I have to keep doing a mission over and over again. Saints Row will never be confused with GTA in terms of story and emotional resonance, but in terms of having fun and not being endlessly frustrating, it's not even really all that close anymore. The Houser brothers are starting to make a little bit of noise about GTA5; I know there's tons to think about in terms of making a great GTA game (story, setting, dialogue), but I would suggest that they also add some refinements, if not a complete overhaul, of the way the game is actually played. Let us recharge our health; let us have mid-mission checkpoints; let us not be punished so harshly for failure.
I'm starting to get really excited about 2010 Q1; specifically, Mass Effect 2. And it occurred to me that I never finished my 3rd playthrough of ME1, so I decided to give that a bit of a whirl. As it happens, I'd stopped playing near the end of the last DLC they released; said DLC was more or less a glorified combat tutorial, which is arguably the least successful aspect of the original game. But whatever - I turned down the difficulty and plowed through the last few missions and got 100 Achievements for my efforts, and then I saw where I actually was in the story, and then I decided to call it a day. (If you're familiar with the first game, I'd just gotten off the Citadel and hadn't yet started those first 3 long missions you get in order to advance the story; in other words, I'd have a looooooooong way to go.)
And then, in a bit of idle panic, I downloaded the Torchlight demo from Steam, just because I'd heard it was good and I was curious to see if my aging PC could run it. The short answer is yes, it can, and shortly thereafter I'd purchased the full version and now I'm totally hooked.
This week: Assassin's Creed 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and the God of War Collection for PS3.
Finally, I want to give a shout out to Pandemic Studios, who very well might be getting shut down today. Mercenaries was one of my favorite games on the original Xbox, and Star Wars Battlefront was a lot of fun, and even Destroy All Humans! was worth a few chuckles. I'm hopeful that Saboteur will at least be a fine farewell from one of the more ambitious developers out there.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Modern Warfare 2
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
For years now, there's been a growing discussion about the importance of Story, specifically as it applies to videogames. The people having that discussion also may bring up the concept of Art, as in: "Are videogames art?" As the game industry grows larger and fights for legitimacy in the public eye, this question becomes important, even if it's not necessarily relevant.
A lot of great game franchises have been ruined by Story. The Tony Hawk franchise is a perfect example; the first few games really just focused on capturing the experience of skateboarding, and to that end they succeeded mightily. Eventually, though, as the game kept churning out sequels with marginal technical improvements and the need to innovate became stronger, the game developed a story mode. And that's really where the franchise fell apart, for me. I didn't care about being a little skate punk, I didn't need to stick it to the man, etc.; all I wanted to was skate, and do the things that I couldn't do in real life. I suppose I could've hung in if the story was at least told well, but it was bland and unoriginal. What was I supposed to expect? The developers had been making a skateboarding game, but now they were supposed to tell me a story? How do those particular disciplines mesh?
Then there's games like Brutal Legend, which is so focused on its story and the design of the world you play in that the actual gameplay feels like an afterthought. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn't. On the opposite side of that spectrum, a game like Borderlands has almost no story to speak of, but the gameplay is so well-designed and focused that it almost doesn't even matter that there's no story-driven motivation.
And then there are franchises like Metal Gear, where the story is so central to the experience that there's almost no actual game to play; a 10 minute action sequence will be followed by a 40-minute cut scene, and then you'll walk down a hallway and another 30-minute cut scene will ensue. I'm not going to get into MGS's story quality, because that's an entirely different 10,000-word blogpost, and in any event I've already written about it.
But story quality is important, and that's my real bone to pick with Modern Warfare 2.
The Call of Duty franchise's defining characteristic has been its scripted events. You'll play as an American soldier, and then after a big "event" you'll switch perspectives and then play as a British soldier, or a Russian soldier, etc. Call of Duty 4, which moved the franchise out of the trenches of WW2 and into modern day, kept this perspective-switching intact but also took it in intriguing and shocking new directions; the very beginning of the game features your character suddenly being executed, and the end of the game features your character dying in a nuclear holocaust. This whole idea of watching yourself die, totally powerless to save yourself, was unnerving and visceral and powerful.
The stakes for MW2, then, were set very high. How could the game's developers manage to top the jaw-dropping moments of the first game? The answer to this question was, unfortunately, "if some is good, more is better."
The "airport level", as it's been called, is genuinely controversial, and rightly so. You play an American soldier, undercover, who somehow has managed to be inserted into a Russian terrorist cell right next to "the most dangerous man in the world." The scene begins in darkness; you hear the sound of guns being loaded. The lights fade up; you see that you are in an elevator. The most dangerous man in the world says a few words, and then the doors open, and you see that you're in an airport, and you and your fellow terrorist are slowly walking through the airport, killing everyone you see. The creepiest thing about this sequence isn't the killing of civilians, or the obvious parallel to 9/11 and the lingering paranoia about airport security; it's the fact that you're all walking so slowly, making sure you're all taking the time to kill as many people as possible. You don't even have to pull the trigger during this sequence; the rest of your gang members will do all the killing for you. The lingering sense of dread is almost overwhelming; it's disturbing and uncomfortable.
So this is all shocking, and this occurs only about 1-2 hours into the game. But this isn't where the level ends. After you get out of the airport, you're back to shooting police and soldiers trying to stop you, and then the level ends with the Most Dangerous Man In The World suddenly revealing at the very last possible moment that he knows you were an American the whole time, and shooting you in the head.
Let's set aside for the moment that your identity as an American sets off a chain reaction that plunges the U.S. and Russia into a global conflict that eventually sees you, among other things, staging an assault to reclaim the White House in the wake of an aborted nuclear missile attack on Washington D.C., and let us instead examine the other ways in which your player character is suddenly killed at the last possible moment in an unforeseen twist. Your character is also in a helicopter that gets shot down and when you wake up you are trapped in the wreckage, with no bullets; an enemy helicopter approaches, and the screen goes white.
Then, for no apparent reason, your perspective shifts and suddenly you're an astronaut doing a space walk by the International Space Station, watching a nuclear missle's arc cross the horizon. This is shocking enough - that's probably why they put it in the commercial - but suddenly the missile is detonated and the electro-magnetic pulse generated by the missile's explosion sends you flying out into space.
And then, the scene flashes back to you being trapped under the helicopter wreckage - it turns out that the EMP happened directly overhead, and so everything electronic in the area suddenly conks out, and the helicopter that was about to kill you crashes, and so you escape. Hooray! Except that it turns out later that, after you've raided the Most Dangerous Man in The World's safehouse and retrieved valuable "intel", you're shot in the head by the main U.S. General in charge of the war effort, who then also sets you on fire.
And THEN, you're in the desert, for some reason - I'm not even sure who the "you" is, at this point, since "you" have already died several times - and you're chasing this same U.S. General, who manages to get into a helicopter from a moving speedboat, and then you manage to shoot the helicopter down, and it explodes, and then your speedboat falls over a cliff, and somehow you survive, and as it turns out the U.S. General also survived, and then he stabs you in the chest with a knife, and then eventually you regain the strength to pull the knife out of your chest and throw it (the knife) directly into the General's eyeball. And then the credits roll, while people walk around in a museum, presumably showcasing certain famous scenes of the war, which are really quite violent for a kid-friendly museum.
This is all to say that the story is so over the top that it becomes melodramatic and nonsensical and just plain weird. And the thing that really makes it ridiculous is that, at least in my experience, you die a lot during the campaign. The game is hard; it only takes a few bullets to put you down, and there are a lot of enemies who fire a lot of bullets. The game has a relatively generous checkpoint system, as well as recharging health, but therein lies the breaking of the suspension of disbelief - I've already been shot a hundred thousand times in the course of this level; why shouldn't I recover from being shot in the head at close range? Again?
The game part of the game is, of course, expertly well done. It's graphically impressive, the weapons feel incredibly powerful, the atmosphere is charged and violent and unsettling. The rag-doll animation following a kill shot is especially unsettling; people just drop. And then of course there's the multiplayer suite, which I dabbled in briefly last night and which better people than me can pontificate on. It's all very well done, and it's certainly worth a purchase, which is maybe a ridiculous thing to say given that anyone reading this probably already owns it.
But the story... wow. Here's a suggestion for the sequel, which was inevitable even before it was set up by the game's surprisingly clunky cliffhanger of an ending: maybe don't kill the player character as much. It's already been done far more than is necessary, and it ceases to mean anything since it's not like your character even says anything, or is even clearly identifiable. There were a number of times during the campaign where someone would shout something to someone, and it took me a while to realize that they were shouting at me.
On an unrelated note, a hypothetical question: who kills more people, Nathan Drake in Uncharted 2, or your player character(s) in Modern Warfare 2? I could probably actually look this up and get real numbers, but off the top of my head it seems like the numbers would probably be pretty close.
For years now, there's been a growing discussion about the importance of Story, specifically as it applies to videogames. The people having that discussion also may bring up the concept of Art, as in: "Are videogames art?" As the game industry grows larger and fights for legitimacy in the public eye, this question becomes important, even if it's not necessarily relevant.
A lot of great game franchises have been ruined by Story. The Tony Hawk franchise is a perfect example; the first few games really just focused on capturing the experience of skateboarding, and to that end they succeeded mightily. Eventually, though, as the game kept churning out sequels with marginal technical improvements and the need to innovate became stronger, the game developed a story mode. And that's really where the franchise fell apart, for me. I didn't care about being a little skate punk, I didn't need to stick it to the man, etc.; all I wanted to was skate, and do the things that I couldn't do in real life. I suppose I could've hung in if the story was at least told well, but it was bland and unoriginal. What was I supposed to expect? The developers had been making a skateboarding game, but now they were supposed to tell me a story? How do those particular disciplines mesh?
Then there's games like Brutal Legend, which is so focused on its story and the design of the world you play in that the actual gameplay feels like an afterthought. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn't. On the opposite side of that spectrum, a game like Borderlands has almost no story to speak of, but the gameplay is so well-designed and focused that it almost doesn't even matter that there's no story-driven motivation.
And then there are franchises like Metal Gear, where the story is so central to the experience that there's almost no actual game to play; a 10 minute action sequence will be followed by a 40-minute cut scene, and then you'll walk down a hallway and another 30-minute cut scene will ensue. I'm not going to get into MGS's story quality, because that's an entirely different 10,000-word blogpost, and in any event I've already written about it.
But story quality is important, and that's my real bone to pick with Modern Warfare 2.
The Call of Duty franchise's defining characteristic has been its scripted events. You'll play as an American soldier, and then after a big "event" you'll switch perspectives and then play as a British soldier, or a Russian soldier, etc. Call of Duty 4, which moved the franchise out of the trenches of WW2 and into modern day, kept this perspective-switching intact but also took it in intriguing and shocking new directions; the very beginning of the game features your character suddenly being executed, and the end of the game features your character dying in a nuclear holocaust. This whole idea of watching yourself die, totally powerless to save yourself, was unnerving and visceral and powerful.
The stakes for MW2, then, were set very high. How could the game's developers manage to top the jaw-dropping moments of the first game? The answer to this question was, unfortunately, "if some is good, more is better."
The "airport level", as it's been called, is genuinely controversial, and rightly so. You play an American soldier, undercover, who somehow has managed to be inserted into a Russian terrorist cell right next to "the most dangerous man in the world." The scene begins in darkness; you hear the sound of guns being loaded. The lights fade up; you see that you are in an elevator. The most dangerous man in the world says a few words, and then the doors open, and you see that you're in an airport, and you and your fellow terrorist are slowly walking through the airport, killing everyone you see. The creepiest thing about this sequence isn't the killing of civilians, or the obvious parallel to 9/11 and the lingering paranoia about airport security; it's the fact that you're all walking so slowly, making sure you're all taking the time to kill as many people as possible. You don't even have to pull the trigger during this sequence; the rest of your gang members will do all the killing for you. The lingering sense of dread is almost overwhelming; it's disturbing and uncomfortable.
So this is all shocking, and this occurs only about 1-2 hours into the game. But this isn't where the level ends. After you get out of the airport, you're back to shooting police and soldiers trying to stop you, and then the level ends with the Most Dangerous Man In The World suddenly revealing at the very last possible moment that he knows you were an American the whole time, and shooting you in the head.
Let's set aside for the moment that your identity as an American sets off a chain reaction that plunges the U.S. and Russia into a global conflict that eventually sees you, among other things, staging an assault to reclaim the White House in the wake of an aborted nuclear missile attack on Washington D.C., and let us instead examine the other ways in which your player character is suddenly killed at the last possible moment in an unforeseen twist. Your character is also in a helicopter that gets shot down and when you wake up you are trapped in the wreckage, with no bullets; an enemy helicopter approaches, and the screen goes white.
Then, for no apparent reason, your perspective shifts and suddenly you're an astronaut doing a space walk by the International Space Station, watching a nuclear missle's arc cross the horizon. This is shocking enough - that's probably why they put it in the commercial - but suddenly the missile is detonated and the electro-magnetic pulse generated by the missile's explosion sends you flying out into space.
And then, the scene flashes back to you being trapped under the helicopter wreckage - it turns out that the EMP happened directly overhead, and so everything electronic in the area suddenly conks out, and the helicopter that was about to kill you crashes, and so you escape. Hooray! Except that it turns out later that, after you've raided the Most Dangerous Man in The World's safehouse and retrieved valuable "intel", you're shot in the head by the main U.S. General in charge of the war effort, who then also sets you on fire.
And THEN, you're in the desert, for some reason - I'm not even sure who the "you" is, at this point, since "you" have already died several times - and you're chasing this same U.S. General, who manages to get into a helicopter from a moving speedboat, and then you manage to shoot the helicopter down, and it explodes, and then your speedboat falls over a cliff, and somehow you survive, and as it turns out the U.S. General also survived, and then he stabs you in the chest with a knife, and then eventually you regain the strength to pull the knife out of your chest and throw it (the knife) directly into the General's eyeball. And then the credits roll, while people walk around in a museum, presumably showcasing certain famous scenes of the war, which are really quite violent for a kid-friendly museum.
This is all to say that the story is so over the top that it becomes melodramatic and nonsensical and just plain weird. And the thing that really makes it ridiculous is that, at least in my experience, you die a lot during the campaign. The game is hard; it only takes a few bullets to put you down, and there are a lot of enemies who fire a lot of bullets. The game has a relatively generous checkpoint system, as well as recharging health, but therein lies the breaking of the suspension of disbelief - I've already been shot a hundred thousand times in the course of this level; why shouldn't I recover from being shot in the head at close range? Again?
The game part of the game is, of course, expertly well done. It's graphically impressive, the weapons feel incredibly powerful, the atmosphere is charged and violent and unsettling. The rag-doll animation following a kill shot is especially unsettling; people just drop. And then of course there's the multiplayer suite, which I dabbled in briefly last night and which better people than me can pontificate on. It's all very well done, and it's certainly worth a purchase, which is maybe a ridiculous thing to say given that anyone reading this probably already owns it.
But the story... wow. Here's a suggestion for the sequel, which was inevitable even before it was set up by the game's surprisingly clunky cliffhanger of an ending: maybe don't kill the player character as much. It's already been done far more than is necessary, and it ceases to mean anything since it's not like your character even says anything, or is even clearly identifiable. There were a number of times during the campaign where someone would shout something to someone, and it took me a while to realize that they were shouting at me.
On an unrelated note, a hypothetical question: who kills more people, Nathan Drake in Uncharted 2, or your player character(s) in Modern Warfare 2? I could probably actually look this up and get real numbers, but off the top of my head it seems like the numbers would probably be pretty close.
Monday, November 9, 2009
WIPTW: Confessions of a Crack Addict
Me and my level 36 Soldier finished Borderlands early Sunday morning, and after selling off my excess loot and giving my skills a re-spec, I decided to screw around with the Playthrough 2 mode and see if it would really be worth playing through a second time, and about two hours later I forced myself to turn off the 360. That shit is dangerous; I was getting ridiculously awesome loot drops just outside the very first town.
I remain totally amazed at how much I enjoyed Borderlands, especially considering that I have absolutely no idea what the story was about, or who anybody was, or what I was ultimately supposed to be doing. I'm even more amazed that I never really cared about any of that stuff. My main focus was leveling up and getting better gear, and that remained constant even as I began my 2nd playthrough. The story is ultimately irrelevant. It would be nice if a sequel addressed this specific flaw, but the mechanics of the game itself are so well-designed that I'm not entirely sure I'd notice, one way or the other.
***SLIGHT SPOILERS***
The only time I was bummed out by the lack of story was at the game's ending, which can't even be called "ambiguous", as that would imply that something actually happened. And it's really only a bummer because it was the first time since I'd started the game where I wasn't engaged in some sort of forward motion, towards something. The game's promise of the Vault was just vague enough to keep me somewhat interested, even though I couldn't really tell you what of the game's missions were actually about, besides going to point A and killing a bunch of people, or going around the map to collect certain items. I never really questioned why I was doing any of that stuff, as long as it meant that I was getting XP and new guns. If the game had even touched upon that element, in a sort of meta/Portal/Bioshock way, that would've been nice. Instead, the game's ending just felt obligatory, as in: the game is over now.
If Modern Warfare 2 weren't arriving tomorrow, I could easily see myself spending another 10-12 hours playing through again, and even more than that if I somehow didn't hit level 50.
Also spent a little time with the 360 version of Dragon Age: Origins, which is... a little disappointing, although to be fair I haven't really sat down with it and allowed myself to get sucked in. I will say, though, that it feels awfully weird; I keep expecting it to have real-time combat, and it most certainly does not, and I suppose I'd be more into it if I were playing it on the PC.
I remain totally amazed at how much I enjoyed Borderlands, especially considering that I have absolutely no idea what the story was about, or who anybody was, or what I was ultimately supposed to be doing. I'm even more amazed that I never really cared about any of that stuff. My main focus was leveling up and getting better gear, and that remained constant even as I began my 2nd playthrough. The story is ultimately irrelevant. It would be nice if a sequel addressed this specific flaw, but the mechanics of the game itself are so well-designed that I'm not entirely sure I'd notice, one way or the other.
***SLIGHT SPOILERS***
The only time I was bummed out by the lack of story was at the game's ending, which can't even be called "ambiguous", as that would imply that something actually happened. And it's really only a bummer because it was the first time since I'd started the game where I wasn't engaged in some sort of forward motion, towards something. The game's promise of the Vault was just vague enough to keep me somewhat interested, even though I couldn't really tell you what of the game's missions were actually about, besides going to point A and killing a bunch of people, or going around the map to collect certain items. I never really questioned why I was doing any of that stuff, as long as it meant that I was getting XP and new guns. If the game had even touched upon that element, in a sort of meta/Portal/Bioshock way, that would've been nice. Instead, the game's ending just felt obligatory, as in: the game is over now.
If Modern Warfare 2 weren't arriving tomorrow, I could easily see myself spending another 10-12 hours playing through again, and even more than that if I somehow didn't hit level 50.
Also spent a little time with the 360 version of Dragon Age: Origins, which is... a little disappointing, although to be fair I haven't really sat down with it and allowed myself to get sucked in. I will say, though, that it feels awfully weird; I keep expecting it to have real-time combat, and it most certainly does not, and I suppose I'd be more into it if I were playing it on the PC.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The Quest for 50K, or, the world's saddest violin playing just for me
Today is November 3, 2009, and my Achievement total is currently sitting at 48,723. That gives me 2 months to get just under 1300 Points. Hitting 50,000 wasn't necessarily a stated, determined goal of mine, but I hit 40K on my birthday last year, and getting 10,000 points in a year seems like something worth pursuing. However, I'm not entirely sure I'm going to be able to cross the 50K threshold in time, and maybe there's a tiny part of me that's a little bummed out about it.
Yes, I'm going to be busy with other stuff over the next 2 months; we all are; the holidays are nearly upon us and we all have stuff to do. But I'm also just not entirely sure that the games are going to be there.
There are 5 major Xbox360 games left in the calendar year, as far as I'm personally concerned: Dragon Age: Origins (currently shrinkwrapped, sitting in my messenger bag), Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and Saboteur. I'm also still heavily invested in Borderlands and Forza 3.
So that's 7 games, not including Brutal Legend which I don't know that I'll ever finish (and certainly won't get any multiplayer achievements for), and not including the 500 points for both episodes for GTA4, which I'll be lucky if I get half of.
I can rule out getting more than 300-400 in both MW2 and L4D2; I don't really play multiplayer all that much, and in the case of MW2 I'm sure I'll only do the campaign on Normal difficulty. I'm sure I can rack up 400-500 in Assassin's Creed; I have no idea how much time I'm going to put into Saboteur, and if it gets shitty reviews I might just hold back from renting it altogether. So it's really about finishing Borderlands (which supposedly isn't all that difficult), getting as much as I can out of Forza, and doing my darnedest with Dragon Age, which is anywhere from 40-100 hours that I probably don't even have.
It's going to be close. It would certainly be nice if the 360 did something cool to mark the event; I'd even settle for a "I got 50K gamerscore and all I got was this stupid t-shirt for my avatar" thing. Most likely, though, I'll cross 50K and nobody will know but me; I'll pour myself a glass of single-malt scotch, pat myself on the back, and then blog about it here, for an audience of none.
Yes, I'm going to be busy with other stuff over the next 2 months; we all are; the holidays are nearly upon us and we all have stuff to do. But I'm also just not entirely sure that the games are going to be there.
There are 5 major Xbox360 games left in the calendar year, as far as I'm personally concerned: Dragon Age: Origins (currently shrinkwrapped, sitting in my messenger bag), Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and Saboteur. I'm also still heavily invested in Borderlands and Forza 3.
So that's 7 games, not including Brutal Legend which I don't know that I'll ever finish (and certainly won't get any multiplayer achievements for), and not including the 500 points for both episodes for GTA4, which I'll be lucky if I get half of.
I can rule out getting more than 300-400 in both MW2 and L4D2; I don't really play multiplayer all that much, and in the case of MW2 I'm sure I'll only do the campaign on Normal difficulty. I'm sure I can rack up 400-500 in Assassin's Creed; I have no idea how much time I'm going to put into Saboteur, and if it gets shitty reviews I might just hold back from renting it altogether. So it's really about finishing Borderlands (which supposedly isn't all that difficult), getting as much as I can out of Forza, and doing my darnedest with Dragon Age, which is anywhere from 40-100 hours that I probably don't even have.
It's going to be close. It would certainly be nice if the 360 did something cool to mark the event; I'd even settle for a "I got 50K gamerscore and all I got was this stupid t-shirt for my avatar" thing. Most likely, though, I'll cross 50K and nobody will know but me; I'll pour myself a glass of single-malt scotch, pat myself on the back, and then blog about it here, for an audience of none.
Monday, November 2, 2009
WIPTW: World Series edition
I am incredibly superstitious when it comes to the Yankees in the postseason, and the incredibly annoying feature is that the superstitions are always changing from year to year. During the 2004 meltdown against the Red Sox, I feel like I let us down; the first three games I'd listened to on the radio, and because I was traveling on the 4th game I ended up watching it on TV, which is where everything fell apart. This year's winning formula is apparently that I cannot watch any of the game on television, or even be in the same room if the game happens to be on. I'm serious. Within 5 seconds of me turning the game on, something bad happens to the Yankees; I turn the game off; they end up winning.
As a result, I've been able to get a bit more quality time on the 360. This weekend was all about Forza 3 and Borderlands, with a tiny bit of GTA4: BOGT on the side.
Forza 3 is definitely the best in the series. All the pre-release hype made special mention of Turn Ten's desire to make the game as accessible as possible for all kinds of gamers, not just driving sim enthusiasts, and to that end they have succeeded. The single-player campaign is long, robust, endlessly customizable, and thoroughly rewarding; just about every single race ends up giving you something new. And since I know nothing about cars, I feel much freer to simply buy cars that I'm somewhat interested in, since I can always auto-tune them up before a race if they're underperforming. The franchise is really only guilty of two things; recycling content and less-than-spectacular graphics. I suppose I can forgive the graphics; they're certainly not bad, they're just underwhelming compared to, say, DiRT 2. The recycling of tracks, though, does get a bit annoying; I feel like I've been driving the same tracks for years.
Ultimately, Forza reminds me a bit of the Tiger Woods franchise, in that they're both great time-sucks and, simultaneously, great for just a quick dip. If only Tiger Woods could make the same sort of advances in terms of keeping the game fresh.
Borderlands continues to be the game that keeps on giving. My soldier is now up to level 28, I think, and I feel like I just can't put the damned thing down. I have absolutely no idea what's going on in the story, and I couldn't care less; I pick up a bunch of missions in a particular area, I clear 'em all out, I score tons of loot, I cash them in, I level up, lather, rinse, repeat. That the game does a pretty terrible (i.e., nonexistent) job of letting you know which of your 10-15 missions is actually essential to moving the story along ends up freeing you to explore more of the world because, well, why not - there's loot in them thar hills, and sticking to the main questline would render a lot of it unexplored.
One can't help but be reminded of Fallout 3 when playing Borderlands, as post-apocalyptic first-person RPGs aren't really a dime a dozen. And yet the two games could not feel more different. Leaving aside from the drastically different art styles - which I don't really want to do, as Borderlands looks absolutely incredible and utterly unique - they move at completely different paces. Fallout 3 was slow, ponderous, and dark - and it absolutely worked in that particular context. Borderlands might as well be a first-person shooter, on the other hand, as it plays fast and furious. It's dark as well, but it's also zany. I think I enjoyed the overall experience a bit more in Fallout 3, and yet I'm probably having a bit more fun playing Borderlands.
Ultimately, Borderlands is clear-cut proof that a game - specifically an RPG - doesn't need a great story in order to be fun. That kinda sucks to admit, because I wouldn't at all mind being a bit more emotionally invested in what's going on in Borderlands, and it flies in the face of what Tim Schafer and Valve and GTA represent. We'd all like to see better writing and storytelling in games. And yet even without a clear motivation to get from one side of the game to the other in terms of story, here I am, compulsively doing missions and killing dudes and exploring and wanting to turn the game off after just finishing up this last thing and then holy shit, another hour has gone by, and look at all the cool stuff I have now.
I almost feel bad that I barely gave The Ballad of Gay Tony any time this weekend; I did a few missions, got a feel for the story and the characters, remembered how to get in and out of cover, and more or less left it at that. It's still good old GTA4, even though the game is starting to look a little rough around the edges.
Which reminds me - there's a lot of driving in both GTA4 and Borderlands (and Forza), and the controls are totally different for each game, and it takes more than a few minutes to remember which is which. I do wish there was some sort of control scheme that all game developers could agree on when it comes to driving in 3rd-person action games.
Jeez, I almost forgot - I also tried out the first hour or so of the new Ratchet & Clank game. It's good, fun, solid, and I just don't have the time for it right now.
As a result, I've been able to get a bit more quality time on the 360. This weekend was all about Forza 3 and Borderlands, with a tiny bit of GTA4: BOGT on the side.
Forza 3 is definitely the best in the series. All the pre-release hype made special mention of Turn Ten's desire to make the game as accessible as possible for all kinds of gamers, not just driving sim enthusiasts, and to that end they have succeeded. The single-player campaign is long, robust, endlessly customizable, and thoroughly rewarding; just about every single race ends up giving you something new. And since I know nothing about cars, I feel much freer to simply buy cars that I'm somewhat interested in, since I can always auto-tune them up before a race if they're underperforming. The franchise is really only guilty of two things; recycling content and less-than-spectacular graphics. I suppose I can forgive the graphics; they're certainly not bad, they're just underwhelming compared to, say, DiRT 2. The recycling of tracks, though, does get a bit annoying; I feel like I've been driving the same tracks for years.
Ultimately, Forza reminds me a bit of the Tiger Woods franchise, in that they're both great time-sucks and, simultaneously, great for just a quick dip. If only Tiger Woods could make the same sort of advances in terms of keeping the game fresh.
Borderlands continues to be the game that keeps on giving. My soldier is now up to level 28, I think, and I feel like I just can't put the damned thing down. I have absolutely no idea what's going on in the story, and I couldn't care less; I pick up a bunch of missions in a particular area, I clear 'em all out, I score tons of loot, I cash them in, I level up, lather, rinse, repeat. That the game does a pretty terrible (i.e., nonexistent) job of letting you know which of your 10-15 missions is actually essential to moving the story along ends up freeing you to explore more of the world because, well, why not - there's loot in them thar hills, and sticking to the main questline would render a lot of it unexplored.
One can't help but be reminded of Fallout 3 when playing Borderlands, as post-apocalyptic first-person RPGs aren't really a dime a dozen. And yet the two games could not feel more different. Leaving aside from the drastically different art styles - which I don't really want to do, as Borderlands looks absolutely incredible and utterly unique - they move at completely different paces. Fallout 3 was slow, ponderous, and dark - and it absolutely worked in that particular context. Borderlands might as well be a first-person shooter, on the other hand, as it plays fast and furious. It's dark as well, but it's also zany. I think I enjoyed the overall experience a bit more in Fallout 3, and yet I'm probably having a bit more fun playing Borderlands.
Ultimately, Borderlands is clear-cut proof that a game - specifically an RPG - doesn't need a great story in order to be fun. That kinda sucks to admit, because I wouldn't at all mind being a bit more emotionally invested in what's going on in Borderlands, and it flies in the face of what Tim Schafer and Valve and GTA represent. We'd all like to see better writing and storytelling in games. And yet even without a clear motivation to get from one side of the game to the other in terms of story, here I am, compulsively doing missions and killing dudes and exploring and wanting to turn the game off after just finishing up this last thing and then holy shit, another hour has gone by, and look at all the cool stuff I have now.
I almost feel bad that I barely gave The Ballad of Gay Tony any time this weekend; I did a few missions, got a feel for the story and the characters, remembered how to get in and out of cover, and more or less left it at that. It's still good old GTA4, even though the game is starting to look a little rough around the edges.
Which reminds me - there's a lot of driving in both GTA4 and Borderlands (and Forza), and the controls are totally different for each game, and it takes more than a few minutes to remember which is which. I do wish there was some sort of control scheme that all game developers could agree on when it comes to driving in 3rd-person action games.
Jeez, I almost forgot - I also tried out the first hour or so of the new Ratchet & Clank game. It's good, fun, solid, and I just don't have the time for it right now.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
What I Played This Weekend: ALCS edition
It always seems like whenever there are a ton of great games coming out all at once, I'm usually really busy doing lots of other things, and yet I feel compelled to own them all anyway. In any event - the little gaming time I had this past weekend was divided up pretty evenly between trying my hardest to enjoy Brutal Legend, and being very pleasantly surprised by Borderlands, with a little bit of Uncharted 2 online co-op, and a tiny taste of Demon's Souls for the hell of it.
I don't quite know how to express how bummed out I am about Brutal Legend. The art direction is stupendous, and the world itself is just fantastic. I love driving around and exploring the world and seeing all the incredible stuff there is to see, and my compulsive need to seek out hidden collectibles is very well satisfied. The dialogue and cutscenes are fantastic, and even though the sidemissions are incredibly repetitive, they almost never last more than a few minutes, and the rewards generally result in neat stuff in Ozzy's Garage.
But goddamn, the stage battles completely suck all my enthusiasm out of the game. It eventually got to the point where I had completed every side mission and found every hidden thing I could possibly find, just because I wanted to play the game as much as possible without having to go through the stage battles. And, of course, the story can't progress unless you do those stage battles, and therein lay the tragedy.
I don't necessarily hate real time strategy games, I'm just not very good at them, and Brutal Legend's brief tutorials don't really help me in terms of figuring out what the hell is going on, and the game does such a terrible job of providing adequate feedback, especially when I'm on the ground trying to kill people because my army refuses to move. Once you start getting wounded, and the screen starts turning red and the heartbeat starts pounding louder, you're almost always dead, and I've yet to figure out why. Even when I try to fly away, I die. And even though I've eventually won every stage battle I've participated in, I really don't understand why, and the whole thing just feels shoddy and poorly implemented.
I have all the respect in the world for Tim Schafer; I'll play anything the man works on. But I'm starting to feel that there's more to a game than art direction and funny dialogue; ultimately, a game either succeeds or fails based on how much fun it is to play, and Brutal Legend is not very much fun at all.
Meanwhile, Borderlands is fun as hell. It starts a little slow, but once you finish the first round of missions and get a vehicle, it really starts to open up. I dinged up to level 15 pretty quickly, and have been itching to get back to it ever since. Haven't tried online co-op yet, though, since none of my real-life friends have been able to find a copy in stores.
Speaking of online co-op, I did a few levels with Gred in Uncharted 2, and while they're pretty much taken wholesale from the game, they're still a lot of fun. It really shows just how improved the combat is; the mechanics are rock-solid and it's arguably even more fun when you're shouting out positions and scrambling for cover and ammo and trying to heal each other.
Finally, more out of morbid curiousity than anything else, I tried Demon's Souls for 20 minutes yesterday. I can see why the game gets good reviews; the game is hard but it's fair, and I eventually died because I was being impatient, not because the game cheated. And then, of course, I saw where I respawned from, and saw how far I'd have to go to reclaim my lost souls, and I said "fuck this." I don't have the time or the masochistic tendencies to really put it through its paces.
Tonight: Forza 3.
And coming soon, we're going to be doing a big GAMES OF THE DECADE feature, featuring a special guest or two. Stay tuned.
I don't quite know how to express how bummed out I am about Brutal Legend. The art direction is stupendous, and the world itself is just fantastic. I love driving around and exploring the world and seeing all the incredible stuff there is to see, and my compulsive need to seek out hidden collectibles is very well satisfied. The dialogue and cutscenes are fantastic, and even though the sidemissions are incredibly repetitive, they almost never last more than a few minutes, and the rewards generally result in neat stuff in Ozzy's Garage.
But goddamn, the stage battles completely suck all my enthusiasm out of the game. It eventually got to the point where I had completed every side mission and found every hidden thing I could possibly find, just because I wanted to play the game as much as possible without having to go through the stage battles. And, of course, the story can't progress unless you do those stage battles, and therein lay the tragedy.
I don't necessarily hate real time strategy games, I'm just not very good at them, and Brutal Legend's brief tutorials don't really help me in terms of figuring out what the hell is going on, and the game does such a terrible job of providing adequate feedback, especially when I'm on the ground trying to kill people because my army refuses to move. Once you start getting wounded, and the screen starts turning red and the heartbeat starts pounding louder, you're almost always dead, and I've yet to figure out why. Even when I try to fly away, I die. And even though I've eventually won every stage battle I've participated in, I really don't understand why, and the whole thing just feels shoddy and poorly implemented.
I have all the respect in the world for Tim Schafer; I'll play anything the man works on. But I'm starting to feel that there's more to a game than art direction and funny dialogue; ultimately, a game either succeeds or fails based on how much fun it is to play, and Brutal Legend is not very much fun at all.
Meanwhile, Borderlands is fun as hell. It starts a little slow, but once you finish the first round of missions and get a vehicle, it really starts to open up. I dinged up to level 15 pretty quickly, and have been itching to get back to it ever since. Haven't tried online co-op yet, though, since none of my real-life friends have been able to find a copy in stores.
Speaking of online co-op, I did a few levels with Gred in Uncharted 2, and while they're pretty much taken wholesale from the game, they're still a lot of fun. It really shows just how improved the combat is; the mechanics are rock-solid and it's arguably even more fun when you're shouting out positions and scrambling for cover and ammo and trying to heal each other.
Finally, more out of morbid curiousity than anything else, I tried Demon's Souls for 20 minutes yesterday. I can see why the game gets good reviews; the game is hard but it's fair, and I eventually died because I was being impatient, not because the game cheated. And then, of course, I saw where I respawned from, and saw how far I'd have to go to reclaim my lost souls, and I said "fuck this." I don't have the time or the masochistic tendencies to really put it through its paces.
Tonight: Forza 3.
And coming soon, we're going to be doing a big GAMES OF THE DECADE feature, featuring a special guest or two. Stay tuned.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Quick Thoughts on Brutal Legend / Uncharted 2
I won't write about Brutal Legend just yet. It's clearly a labor of love by Tim Schafer and his DoubleFine team, and it wouldn't be fair to talk about it before I've finished it. The reason why I haven't finished it, though, is that the RTS-lite stage battles make me miserable, and every time I fire the game up I do everything I can to avoid having to do them. As a result, I've explored about as much of the world as I can, and I've found a whole bunch of the secret collectible stuff, and so now the game exists in two distinct halves for me; there's the half where the world is awesome and the artistic vision really shines through and everything is hilarious and fun, and then there's the half where I take the game out of the tray and wait for my rental copy of Borderlands to arrive.
Wait, didn't I say I wasn't going to write about Brutal Legend just yet? Shit.
I will write about Uncharted 2, though, and I'll do my best to speak coherently about it; it's been a few days since I finished it, and hopefully I've flushed most of the excess hyperbole out of my system.
Because I'm not as great a writer as I like to think I am, I'm not entirely sure I made the point I wanted to make when I got all pissy about Adam Sessler calling U2 the best game he'd ever played. (After all, something's got to be the best game you've ever played, and now that I've played it, U2 is as good a choice as any.) The point really should've been that there are better, more responsible ways for a critic to speak about something s/he is reviewing; otherwise, you're basically writing pull quotes for the box art, and it makes me suspicious.
And the truth of the matter is that U2 is fucking fantastic. For all that it might lack in innovation, it is exceedingly ambitious; Naughty Dog strove to make the best action adventure game ever made, and to that end, they succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. They have set the bar immeasurably high. U2 is at the very least the finest PS3 game of this generation and will probably keep that distinction for the rest of the PS3's lifespan, and if something even better somehow comes along, we will all be the better for it.
It is perfectly, relentlessly paced; exploration glides into action and back again, within the most beautifully constructed locales ever seen in digital form. Perhaps you've heard of the train sequence; it's easy to talk about and it occurs early enough in the game that you can talk about it without really giving anything away. Other games have featured action set-pieces on moving trains - one of the Splinter Cell sequels immediately comes to mind - but here, the train isn't just moving along a straight line, in the dark, past the same few lightposts over and over again. You're in the jungle, in broad daylight, and the train's course is constantly undulating back and forth, which means you have to compensate and anticipate the train's movements when you're trading gunfire and tossing grenades; not only are you fighting enemies but you're also trying to move to the front car, which means you're also climbing all over the train and dodging signposts and traffic signals; oh and there's also a helicopter shooting rockets at you. It's all you can do to remind yourself to blink and exhale.
I haven't tried the multiplayer or the co-op yet, but even so - the single-player campaign is a staggering achievement in interactive entertainment, and is absolutely deserving of all the accolades it has received.
Wait, didn't I say I wasn't going to write about Brutal Legend just yet? Shit.
I will write about Uncharted 2, though, and I'll do my best to speak coherently about it; it's been a few days since I finished it, and hopefully I've flushed most of the excess hyperbole out of my system.
Because I'm not as great a writer as I like to think I am, I'm not entirely sure I made the point I wanted to make when I got all pissy about Adam Sessler calling U2 the best game he'd ever played. (After all, something's got to be the best game you've ever played, and now that I've played it, U2 is as good a choice as any.) The point really should've been that there are better, more responsible ways for a critic to speak about something s/he is reviewing; otherwise, you're basically writing pull quotes for the box art, and it makes me suspicious.
And the truth of the matter is that U2 is fucking fantastic. For all that it might lack in innovation, it is exceedingly ambitious; Naughty Dog strove to make the best action adventure game ever made, and to that end, they succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. They have set the bar immeasurably high. U2 is at the very least the finest PS3 game of this generation and will probably keep that distinction for the rest of the PS3's lifespan, and if something even better somehow comes along, we will all be the better for it.
It is perfectly, relentlessly paced; exploration glides into action and back again, within the most beautifully constructed locales ever seen in digital form. Perhaps you've heard of the train sequence; it's easy to talk about and it occurs early enough in the game that you can talk about it without really giving anything away. Other games have featured action set-pieces on moving trains - one of the Splinter Cell sequels immediately comes to mind - but here, the train isn't just moving along a straight line, in the dark, past the same few lightposts over and over again. You're in the jungle, in broad daylight, and the train's course is constantly undulating back and forth, which means you have to compensate and anticipate the train's movements when you're trading gunfire and tossing grenades; not only are you fighting enemies but you're also trying to move to the front car, which means you're also climbing all over the train and dodging signposts and traffic signals; oh and there's also a helicopter shooting rockets at you. It's all you can do to remind yourself to blink and exhale.
I haven't tried the multiplayer or the co-op yet, but even so - the single-player campaign is a staggering achievement in interactive entertainment, and is absolutely deserving of all the accolades it has received.
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