TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: Shooter

  • Enjoyed Destiny Beta, but the Moon mission blew it!

    I played the Destiny Beta on PS4 both solo and with friends and had quite a blast. My initial thought was that while I enjoyed the game, I wasn’t excited to buy it, because the co-op missions were a little too fast paced. What I mean is that as we would clear an area, members of the team quickly moved on, so I had to follow. I would have preferred to explore at my own pace, rather than be dragged from fight to fight. I felt the same way in the Isengard 3-man instances in LOTRO – it was all just running between fights.

    Then I played more games with friends and really enjoyed the interaction and the team play, so I was considering buying the game. In fact, I was convinced I would buy it and was even scoping out the GameStop version so I could get their pre-order exclusive. And I would get the $90 package instead of the $60 one, because it included the expansions that would cost $35 separately.

    Then, on Saturday at 2PM, during the server load test, they opened up the first Moon mission. I flew to the Moon, excited to see how the low gravity and no atmosphere would affect gameplay. It didn’t! The gravity was the same as Earth’s, so I couldn’t jump super far. And the roars of the baddies and gunfire and all the other sounds carried perfectly through what should be a nonexistent atmosphere. So the gameplay was exactly like on Earth, but with different scenery. I was and still am floored at this kind of mailing it in. Surely Bungie knows about the physical characteristics of the Moon, but didn’t want to take that into account for the game.

    Admittedly, this was a Beta test, so this could change before launch, but it certainly felt reasonably polished. If they were going to change the physics on the Moon, you’d think they’d want to have tested it to see how people compensated.

    So now my interest in buying the game has waned again, mostly because of the moon, but also because I’m hearing speculation that the game will contain not too much content. I can see that the game has lots of potential, but I’m not going to make a $90 bet on that potential.

  • Playing Far Cry 3 and enjoying it!

    In between getting my Risa starships in Star Trek Online and getting my Rune Keeper his war steed in Lord of the Rings Online, I’ve been playing and enjoying Far Cry 3.

    Far Cry 3 is an open world first person shooter/RPG game, in which you take out bad guys and wild animals on an island or two after you and your friends are captured by very bad guys. It is RPGish in that you gain skills and and crafting abilities with experience. Crafting is everything in the game. When you start, you can carry nearly nothing in your loot bag, ammo bag, syringe (for healing and buffs) bag, etc. You kill animals to craft better gear, which is mostly great, but sometimes frustrating. The animals in the game are not pushovers, either. The dogs attack in packs, the tigers and bears are tough, and snakes bite you while you’re sneaking through dungeons.

    Guns, on the other hand, are plentiful, and more unlock as you climb radio towers to scope out the landscape (much like synchronizing in the Assassins Creed games). Combat is fun, but not always easy. Many side quests require you to kill your target with a knife, so sneaking is important.

    A feature of the game I really like is that you actually have an impact on the world. As you capture enemy strongholds, the friendly islanders occupy them and the area around them becomes less dangerous.

    The checkpoint system is hit and miss. Usually, it doesn’t take you too far back when you die, but there have been a couple of missions (so far) that were very frustrating because of how far back the checkpoint took you.

    An unfortunate part of the game is that you kill the first boss (Vaas, the guy on the cover of the game, and a really bad dude) in sort of a drug-induced haze/dream sequence, so I didn’t get the satisfaction of putting a bullet into him and knowing he’s dead. I keep expecting him to pop up again at some inopportune time. During the first half of the game, he always has the jump on you, which was quite frustrating. I’ve just started the second part, which aims to kill Vaas’ boss, so we’ll see how that goes.

    But if any of this sounds fun, get Far Cry 3 (it isn’t too expensive these days) and play it. It’s pretty great!

  • Finished Battlefield Bad Company 2

    Yes, I know Battlefield Bad Company 2 has been out for quite a while. I had to wait until it was on sale to buy it, which I did a few months back, and finally got around to playing it. I’m very glad I bought it on sale, because it certainly isn’t worth a full-game price. I’ve seen in on sale on Steam recently for as low as $5, so that it totally worth it. Even $10 is worth it.

    Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a first person shooter that has the reputation as having the best single player story of all the Battlefield games to date. While that may be true, it’s a very short story and not a very good story, so “best” doesn’t actually mean good or great.

    That isn’t to say everything is bad about the game. The combat is good fun, with lots of guns to choose from. The banter between your squadmates is well done and funny and sets the mood well. The graphics are okay, particularly for an oldish game. The destructible buildings and scenery are great – you can’t hide behind cover forever, because the enemy weapons may damage or destroy your shelter. So the combat, gun selection, and game mechanics are good, and it is lots of fun to take out enemy held villages and such. There are even occasions where the player drives tanks, jeeps, quad bikes, and is a helicopter gunner (the latter is fun, but only happens once and is too short. It also isn’t quite as great as the door gunner part of Halo Reach).

    Sadly, the game uses a checkpoint system, which isn’t done very well. Most of the checkpoints are fine, but there are a few where you need to wipe out a bunch of baddies, then when you move to a certain spot, helicopters or other very deadly enemies are triggered. The problem occurs if you die in this latter stage, the checkpoint was before the initial fight. This only serves the purpose of being frustrating and dragging out the game (possibly intentionally, because it is so short). Some games have good checkpoints. The Gears of War series never put me too far back after a death. I just started play Far Cry 3, and it also seems to have a very good checkpoint system (although a save-anywhere feature would be better).

    I didn’t play the multiplayer, which is the big draw for Battlefield games, but if I were going to play multiplayer, I’d play it in Battlefield 3 or 4, not Bad Company 2.

    In summary, Battlefield Bad Company 2 is pretty fun, but has a short single player campaign. If you’re primarily a single-player person, get it on sale.

  • Replaying Mass Effect with a FemShep

    After I finished Assassin’s Creed IV, I was looking for a new game to play. I’ve played all the Mass Effect games, but always as the stock male Shepard. I’ve been told that playing as a FemShep (female Shepard) opens up new dialogs, and the “sex” scenes may be different, etc. So I decided to give it a shot and have been having great fun!

    I played Mass Effect when it came out last decade. I’d forgotten most of it, but I remember it being a fun experience. While the graphics are quite dated, it still looks pretty good (except for the prehistoric textures – BioWare seems to have a problem with textures in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games: the figures are modelled perfectly, but they wear very lo-res, jagged textures). The gameplay is good, and I chose to be an “Operative” so using pistols, sniper rifles, and tech, but no biotic powers.

    I’ve been busy doing all the side missions, so haven’t progressed too far into the plot missions, but it is still very compelling. I even like the bouncy planetary rover missions a lot better than the terrible scanning mechanic of ME2.

    I owned Mass Effect well before EA’s Origin existed. Origin discovered my other ME and Dragon Age games, but didn’t have a clue about the original Mass Effect. I tried entering the key, even tried installing the game so it could find it. Nothing worked until I tried again a few months ago, and suddenly Origin agreed that I own ME and would let me install it via download. So despite all our hatred for EA, they are improving things, and I’m thankful I can get rid of the case and DVD now.

    So if you have Mass Effect laying around, get it into Origin, and give it a go if you get bored. It’s still a great game.

  • My Love/Hate Relationship with Borderlands 2

    Having played and thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 2 when it first came out, I bought the Season Pass, but let the game languish as I played a few other games, had health issues that totally ruined my gaming ability for a while, and kept up with my Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and Star Trek Online (STO) playing.

    A few days ago, however, while waiting for the new STO and LOTRO updates coming this week, I jumped back in to play the Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. In this DLC, you and your NPC friends from the original Borderlands are playing a dice-based RPG similar to, but not infringing on the copyright of, Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, that means the player gets put into this fantasy world. And while you still have all your guns and grenades and powers, the enemies are using swords and arrows, though with deadly precision.

    The area in the DLC is quite challenging because of the various monster types. Some, like tree-based creatures are easy – just use fire, as are knights and others that fire works on. The damn skeletons are the problem. They are immune to nearly everything other than explosive damage and I just don’t have a good, accurate gun that deals explosive damage. But it’s a puzzle set for us by the developer to figure out how to overcome some of these tough enemies.

    That leads to my problem with the game. When you die, you reappear at a nearby respawn point, which is fine. But if you need to quit the game because it is way past bedtime, I will have to restart the area and all the monsters will have respawned. This concern was so great that I was trying to rush through a quest last night before bed, yet kept making mistakes and dying. I never did succeed, so I went to bed furious!

    Now, in the calm of morning, I can dispassionately look back at the game and not be quite so mad at it. Last night, I was sure I was going to drop the game again and go on to other games I’ve been waiting to play. Especially with the new STO and LOTRO content plus my PS4 will arrive on Friday, I’ll have plenty to do. But now that I’m not as furious, I will perhaps give Borderlands 2 another shot. When I’m calm and collected and have time to finish…

  • Enjoyed BioShock Infinite, but ending was too familiar

    I finished playing the fun BioShock Infinite last week and am finally getting a change to post about it.

    First of all, the game is fun, which isn’t a surprise, since almost every other reviewer said the same thing. The skyhook travel system is great fun, but don’t mistake this game for an open world. It is a very linear game in which the skyhook rails loop back to the area you are currently exploring/shooting to bits. The combat is satisfying, with both gunplay and magic powers called “vigors.”

    Sadly, you only get 2 weapons at a time, so ammo management is very important. In the tower defense-like section near the end, I ran out of ammo for both my weapons and would have had to scramble to find another gun if the fight went on any longer.

    The graphics are generally excellent, except for flower bushes and other plants. Take a look at this video and see how poorly done they are. Even LOTRO does better than that!

    While we’re complaining, the checkpoint system stinks. Really badly! Unlike good PC games that let you save wherever you are so you can quit and go to dinner, BioShock Infinite’s checkpoints were often 10 or 15 minutes apart, so if you don’t want to lose all that progress, you’d better hoof it to the next unmarked checkpoint. Luckily, dying doesn’t set you back that far. In fact, dying costs you a bit of money and brings the enemies back to full health (though the dead ones stay dead), so it isn’t a bad mechanism.

    Your companion throughout much of the game, Elizabeth, the girl you are sent to “rescue/capture,” is a delight. She never gets in the way, tends to have good things to say, always keeps up, and keeps giving you money, health potions, and salts (to power the vigors) as needed. She’s terrifically done and should be a model for future game companions.

    So the game is linear, but we get to make choices, right? Like in BioShock where we could choose to harvest Adam from the Little Sisters or to save them, right? No, here we play things pretty straight, and the few choices we make don’t have a huge good vs. evil impact. In fact, as far as I can tell, the ending is the same, no matter what we did.

    And that ending…

    Spoiler alert. Stop reading right now if you don’t want to know the ending and what my thoughts were. Now! Stop!

    The buildup to the ending is pretty cool and set the stage for what the eventual ending was. After a battle, Booker DeWitt was to be baptized to be absolved of his sins (and apparently he had lots of them from the battle against Indians). In one timeline, Booker didn’t accept the baptism and decided to live with his sins and became a Pinkerton guy and was eventually sent to the cloud city of Columbia to rescue Elizabeth (his daughter, it turned out). In another timeline, he took the baptism and became the Prophet Samuel Comstock and build the cloud city of Columbia, and, since he was sterile by then, kidnapped Elizabeth (Anna) from Booker in the other timeline with fancy machines that could bridge the two.

    So the solution is that a bunch of Elizabeths from different timelines got together and killed DeWitt by drowning him, thus preventing him from becoming Comstock and causing all the evil.

    My thought as my character was being drowned by his daughters was “haven’t I seen this before?” Yes, at the end of BioShock 2, the protagonist is killed by his daughter and other Little Sisters. C’mon, not that again! Do the developers feel some sort of guilt and think their daughters should kill them? What gives?

    I was also disappointed that not much was done with the heavily publicized racism aspect in the game. Racism is very present and is obviously depicted as evil, yet Booker doesn’t seem to have any racist tendencies, and his views on racism, if any, don’t affect the outcome in any way. Things are a little too scripted, and it would have been interesting to have the racism affect the player more than just showing it to him.

    So overall a fun game and well worth playing, but it isn’t quite as great as many reviewers say.

     

  • Finally finished Gears of War 3 and loved it

    After finishing the Deus Ex: Human Revolution game and DLC, I jumped over to the old Xbox 360 to play Gears of War 3. Actually, this is the 3rd time I’ve started GOW3. Each previous time, I was either distracted by work or home crises or something, but this time, I was resolved to play the game.

    Yes, GOW3 could fall into Yahtzee’s “spunkgargleweewee” game category, as it mostly involves running from one chest high wall to another with an overbuilt space marine. But it is a very well done, atmospheric, cover-based shooter. While there are still lots of unanswered questions about the Locust and the Lambent, and why the Locust Queen looks human, none of that hurts the gameplay for a second. In general, you know where to go, what to do, and, to some extent, why, and that you need to kill lots of baddies on the way.

    In the previous GOW games, I quickly dropped the standard Gears’ Lancer rifle, because the enemy rifles were pretty good and ammo abounded, while Lancer ammo was hard to find. In this game, ammo was fairly easy to come by if I kept my eyes open, so I stuck with the Lancer through the game (with some excursions to explosive weapons for certain enemies). I’m glad I did, because using the Lancer’s chainsaw to rip through close-in enemies was great fun (and typically better than shooting when the enemy closed on you), as was executing injured baddies by splattering their guts all over the place.

    The fights were fairly tough, but sufficiently well balanced that they tended not to get too frustrating. The GOW games have a particularly good checkpoint system, so if you die, you don’t have to repeat much (unlike the frustrating, yet wonderful Dark Souls). I’m happy that the GOW series has reached a reasonable conclusion, though I see that there is a prequel coming out to hoover more money from our wallets. Well, if it is as good as GOW3 was, I’ll pay…

  • Mostly liked Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Missing Link DLC

    After I finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I played the DLC package, Missing Link. It turns out I should have played it before the second to last mission of the original, because the DLC mission takes place during the voyage there. It didn’t take away from the game, however, because it was completely orthogonal to the main plot and couldn’t influence it in any way.

    In fact, the DLC mission starts you essentially at the beginning with no upgrades to the augments. Quickly, you get some Praxis and can upgrade as you see fit. I played the mission much as I played the main game: sneaking where necessary, but killing lots of enemies when shooting would work. The DLC would likely be played better as a stealth mission, and it would have been a good opportunity for me to practice the stealth skills, but I didn’t.

    The mission is reasonably good, but sad in many ways. I won’t go into details, but many of your allies die, and the game forces you into a moral choice that requires some number of innocent deaths. There is apparently a trick to eliminating those repercussions, but once you know you need it, it’s too late. I presume they’re hoping for replay value, but I’m not going to bother.

    Overall, if you can get Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Missing Link on sale, get it. I thought it was pretty good.

  • Finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution and really enjoyed it

    I finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution and thought it was all it should have been. I played the original Deus Ex many years ago and liked it quite a bit (though remember little of it now), so had high hopes for this one, and wasn’t disappointed.

    Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a first person action game with RPG elements (as you gain experience, you get to upgrade your augmentations to help you jump higher or hack security systems better, etc.). The game is sometimes a shooter and often a stealth game, because there are some situations where going in guns blazing doesn’t help or may not even be possible. You make good use of cover and can employ a variety of lethal or non-lethal weapons. The game is quite a challenge, because your character doesn’t start out as a badass and can die very quickly.

    There are a number of frustrating situations, but in the end, there are solutions for all of them. The biggest problem with the game is inventory management. There isn’t enough space to store all your guns and ammo, yet you need to carry all of them, because ammo is scarce in many levels, so you’ll need to switch guns a lot. Towards the end, ammo is more plentiful, but you want to keep all the cool guns you’ve acquired and upgraded. There are a couple of unique guns: a laser rifle and plasma rifle, so when you see them, get them even if you have to drop something less powerful. The laser rifle makes the final boss fight trivial.

    The game is interesting because it is really a morality story. It has a number of factions arguing for or against human augmentation (and eventually really trying to stop it), and you’ll hear compelling arguments from all sides. At the end, you will need to make a choice as to how the future development of augmentation goes (or not), which is nifty. Overall, the game is very well written and thought provoking. Certainly not a “happily ever after” game.

  • Finished Borderlands 2 and the ending didn’t suck

    I finished the story missions of Borderlands 2 over the weekend and really enjoyed the game. The ending was significantly less lame than the ending of the original Borderlands (umm, killed the monster, but no fancy loot? WTF?). This time, there were some nice drops from the final monster and Handsome Jack – so many, in fact, that I couldn’t carry them all, thus they were lost forever. The final boss wasn’t all that bad, especially compared to some of the earlier robot bosses that were extra tough and extra dangerous. So overall, it was a great game. I’ve now unlocked Vault Hunter mode, which I presume is simply a harder mode that gives better loot, but I have little interest in that. I’m more interested in trying a different character type.

    So even though my level 33 Siren is pretty badass, she’s still able to die, either when confronted by lots of robots or by a super tough mobile boss (the huge Mom skag, for example). I think the skill progression tree goes a little slowly, and, if you don’t put all your points into one tree (there are 3 per class), you’ll never get the top-tier skill. Sure I was able to beat the game without it, but I’d like to have had it. But other than minor complaints like that, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and recommend it to everyone who likes shooters and first person RPGs.