The Gaming Grid

In my very last post, I stated that I wanted more. Well looks like I got my wish. They just released a deleted scene. This is an extra level but didn’t make the cut. But the big question on my mind is a single level worth 100 XBL points. I’m sure Ill wind up getting this anyways, but it still feels like I’m being ripped off. I think if they had a little more for this DLC I would have no problem.

The pinnacle of alien evolution, Maw is a cowardly fat blob concerned mostly with snacking and lounging. He can, however, absorb the traits of anything he eats, is virtually indestructible, and can grow to unlimited size. If he wasn’t a danger to all life in the universe, he’d make the perfect pet. In this action/adventure game, he’s the best friend of our hero Frank, and only by working together can Maw eat their way to freedom. The Maw was honored with the Audience Choice Award in the 2008 PAX-10 showcase of independent games.

Mirrors Edge was another game that I picked up after I had surgery. Now This is a really a bad game to play after you have had surgery. While This is a first person game, and you can pick up a gun, its not so much a shooter. It feels different from others. They made it to feel as if you are running and you actually take up physical space in that game. That might not make to much since right now. If you read Dave’s rants on FPS you might understand.

One of his issues is that your just a floating camera with a gun. Now that personally does not bother me, just because on my FPS I don’t mind some abstracts from real life. But it is kinda funny when you can climb a ladder and turn facing away from the ladder fire your gun. How are you still holding onto the ladder? Mirrors Edge makes the whole person. When you look down, you see your feet and hands. When you run you see your hands. They also have the camera rock and tilt as if it was your head.

Now this does some really cool things. it helps me to judge when I need to do certain moves. Other times, it makes me miss the target because the screen is not still. It is very hard to pull of the disarm maneuver on some enemies while running. I can only pull it off after I hit the slow-mo. The other thing this game does well is the cooler pallet. It has a lot of whites, reds, yellows, oranges. This is refreshing from the cooler pallets of the other FPS games.  But because the majority of the game is a bright white, It does sometimes give me a headache.

Now I know why they do this. Its so that you can see where the runner marks are. It does make a clear distinction for those. But half the time I get lost anyways because  I have been force fed the navigation way points and arrows of other FPS. Plus if you pause the game you can bring up a mini map or anything. This game does feel like an experiment on the genre. I personally think that the game works. I would like to see some controller improvement however.

Because you are running from roof top to roof top, you will be falling a lot. Now they did a really good thing with the save points. But it feels that the controls are a little flaky. You will not execute the move then you hit the up action bumper all the time. This sometimes makes for frustrating parts of the game, but overall I do enjoy the play. I have also been playing the time trial runs and those are awesome. I like that they really make you thing on what you can use to get around the map. However they do disable the runners marks so Its a challenge, but a fun one.

I bought this one, but if you can atleast rent this one. It is so worth playing.

This last week I was stuck at home. I could do anything but play video games, not a bad deal. I had just picked up Mass Effect from game stop for 15$. I never played it before, and was a little interested. I know that it is similar to Knights of the old republic. I really enjoyed KtoR 1, and figured to give this a shot. Now from playing a long line of BioWare games, I know that you usually level up, and so do your encounters. This has been my running problem with their games so far.

Now im not going to tell you how awesome the game is, or the plot. I really enjoyed the game, and its worth checking out. My only problem is with the enemy AI. My first run through was on veteran. You have to unlock hardcore and insane. When I finished the majority of subplots and the game itself I was level 45. Using the pre made character that they have for you. I had best armor and weapons on my characters, and I learned one thing. more enemies do not make encounters harder, they just make things annoying. That and when all the enemies don’t want to shoot at you, they just run up and knock you on your ass.

If they were going to make everyone run up to you, why did they not make melee a bigger part of the game. it kind of suck in combat, when your knocked down, and then five baddies run up to you shooting you. Whats even worse is your allies will fire at someone else across the screen instead of the guys shooting you. now I can understand ramp up the enemies as your character progresses, but fighting five rocket guys is not really that fun. they should either make it one mini boss equivalent guy, with henchmen level support. or match up the enemies, like put some sniper rifles and shot gun guys in there. I know rocket launchers will kill you in one hit, but its easy as hell to dodge them. More doesn’t make it fun, more just makes it annoying.

If I had to dodge behind cover from the snipers, and then the rocket guy blew up my cover, that would be cool. it would keep you moving and be fun level of difficult. One thing that would be cool, is kind of an AI director like in left 4 dead. except it watches how you do against certain types of foes. It will then make each encounter to your weaknesses, and thus changing up the game. Some times at the end of a game, you realize all the fights are just the same as the first fights. Lets add some flavor to the game.

I’m goning to play through again, this time as a biotic, I want to see how the game is played out.

As a video gamer, I think I represent a good niche market: I don’t care about your multiplayer games. The popularization of Xbox Live to the console gaming market doesn’t interest me; I’d much rather play a solid single-player game on the computer than spend the hours on Halo 3.

Multiplayer games have cornered the market and changed the direction that game development has taken over the last couple years, there’s no doubt. I was waiting for the day, when my favorite single player franchise, Command and Conquer was affected like the rest of the market. Considering their production company is EA, I expected the change much sooner than it had actually happened.

Red Alert 3, the latest installment of the franchise, has finally ticked over this milestone in my mind. (I am, of course, excepting C&C: Renegade - that’s not C&C. I demand my top down strategy.)

This was the first of the top-down-strategy series that I could definitely say didn’t feel like it’s predecessors. The classic C&C staples are there: resource gathering, saucy commandos, and ridiculous super weaponry. But instead of rehashing what makes a great C&C game, (which I may do at some point), I think we should focus on what’s changed in the franchise.

Production values: through the roof. The video cut scenes are chock full of some pretty big Hollywood names. EA has sure figured out that Jenny McCarthy is the perfect sell to the gaming dork who is playing a computer game in a dark room at 3 in the morning. Though, to be honest, I preferred Eva to Tanya. Just sayin’.

Speed and Efficiency: I don’t know what changed, though I suspect that the Empire Earth RTS engine was used instead of whatever Westwood was developing, but the game plays more smoothly than Tiberium Wars, the previous game in the series.

Plot: It’s a C&C game. It didn’t have Kane, which was a strike against it, but it was pretty good otherwise. I like that the game knows that it’s just for fun and doesn’t try and take itself too seriously.

Gameplay: This is where the biggest changes took place. Instead of being the lone commander in your missions, you now always have a co-commander. The AI usually controls these units, and it does so with a big lack of the usual awful AI decisions.

Okay, the co-commander gimmick was cool for the first couple missions, but didn’t really impress me. Until Phil told me that you can play co-operatively through every single mission in the game. Phil and I loaded up one of the Japanese missions on Sunday. And, I can say, pretty definitively, that it is as cool as it sounds.

So, bottom line: If you’re a fan of the Command & Conquer series, you’ll enjoy the game. The first couple missions you play will have you thinking that this isn’t the game you remember - and you’ll be completely right.

But change is good when it’s progress.

I can happily say that I’m a Gears of War fan. I played the hell out of the original and (now that they’ve fixed matchmaking) I’m playing the hell out of the sequel. I’m a multiplayer kind of guy when it comes to games like this, so I don’t expect much out of the single player experience. In this case, that’s a good thing since the single player in Gears 1 was mediocre and was downright bad in the sequel. Despite my love of Gears multiplayer, let me riff a bit about the warts in the single player.

The Gears series does its best to frame its fighting into the framework of a story, y’know, to motivate the player and stuff. Now, virtually no one expects a shooter to have a good story. More times than not it is just there to provide you with some justification to blow stuff up. That’s why games like Half Life are so well regarded, because they had a great story that tied directly into the gameplay. Of course, that all that great, immersive storytelling went out the window in Half Life 2 and was replaced by copious amounts of physics puzzles, but no one cared because at least you got the play with the gravity gun and go through Ravenholm.

In the original Gears, the story starts out fine. You’re broken out of prison and thrown into a series of desperate battles. Typical fare, but workable. The trouble comes about two-thirds of the way through the game when you finally set off the resonator, your goal since the first chapter. It doesn’t work, which I thought was awesome. The problem is that instead of exploring that thread, the writers throw in a weird deus ex machine that is never given proper explanation. At that point, the story loses what little narrative focus it has and the game becomes a series of scenes with little to no justification for being there. It feels like they just chopped out parts of the story and what you’re left with makes little sense.

All this gets excused away by most folks, including me, since chainsawing enemies is fun no matter what the story is.

Things get worse in the sequel, though. Again, the story begins by making sense and then completely falls apart halfway through. The characters go from trying to save the last human city to wanting to destroy it in the blink of an eye. It’s a horrible plan and the quickness of the characters to adopt it is alarming. Now, it’s not as nonsensical as the first game, but it is equally as head-scratching.

The bigger problem in the sequel is that the bad story isn’t backed as much by the gameplay anymore. Someone at EPIC decided that there needed to be more story in the game and less instances of blowing things up. This means that you spend half of your time in the game with your finger in your ear listening to the characters in Command and Control. There is noticeably less combat in the game. In a game that’s made fun by bounding from cover and destroying enemies in fun and gruesome ways, this is a problem.

And what set-piece battles there are feel gimmicky. Only a handful of times in the game are you bounding from cover, flanking, chainsawing, and trying to take down waves of locust emerging from a hole. Most of the time you’re given some new weapon that can end the battle quickly or need to survive for a certain amount of time in an area where you can’t actually kill many locust while waiting for and NPC or vehicle to save you. The scenes where you actually get to fight, like in Gears 1, are still a blast. They’re just few and far between.

That’s right, they watered down the gameplay in Gears 2. Now, the designers may have felt justified in this as they have added a multiplayer Horde mode where you and your buddies take on waves of locust. So you can have all of the old-style gameplay you want without having to put up with any story. While Horde is fun, it doesn’t excuse the new and bad direction single-player has taken.

And while I’m on a rant, let’s chat at bit about vehicle sequences. There is not a single vehicle sequence in either games that is any fun at all. EPIC doesn’t seem to know how to make them fun. The car sequence in the first game was the worst part of the game since you couldn’t move and shoot at the same time. We get another taste of that in the second game with the Centaur, which handles like the entire vehicle was made out of lead. Then we get a boring rail shooter followed by a slow-paced trek where you’re basically invincible while riding a Brumak. The sequence with the Brumak could have actually been fun were it not so slow-paced, honestly.

So cool it on the vehicle sequences, EPIC. They’re not fun. Here’s a rule: If I’m playing a Gears game and I can’t find someone to chainsaw within fifteen seconds of looking they you’re doing something wrong. Leave the vehicles and giant worms on the cutting room floor next time.

And, finally, if you’re going to have an ending sequence boss fight that’s pretty much non-interactive, just make it a full fledged cut scene. Thanks for fooling me into thinking I was useful there at the end.

In summary, both games shine in multiplayer. Gears 1 is a fun single-player experience with terribly told story. Gears 2 is a subpar single-player experience with a terribly told story.

And now you know.