Category: FPS

first person shooters

“Irrational Games was unprofitable and probably misrun”

A lot of people swung off the dicks of Bioshock and the first two thirds of the original were very good (last third was not needed) to the tune of two sequels. While I didn’t play either of the follow ups (Bioshock was not a good FPS) they were reportedly good games.

That took forever to make.
And cost more to make than they sold.

So there goes Irrational Games. Three solid games put out and a closed studio. How does that happen? Essentially it comes down to Poor project management.

I’ve been there, where a project is so fucked and my teams have been sent to die on a hill by the upper management and everyone busts ass to get the work done only to be fired a month later because the sales and management team sat around for a year on Facebook instead of bringing in new work from clients or making sure scope was reigned in so the budget wasn’t blasted to the Kuiper Belt.  That looks like what happened here except in the game industry with a lot more budget dollars.

The Gaming of 2013

ahhh… the unlucky ’13 year was quite a year for games– or, dare I say, it should have been.  We had some MASSIVE releases last year with the culmination in some cases of decades of work for some development teams.  Yet for all their glory, the massive budget games were not the ones that I played and enjoyed, with a few exceptions.

Let’s run down the releases I got to play. Now I’m an ancient person with familial and work duties so there’s no chance in a given year that I’ll be able to play even close to everything that’s good. I have to make choices– very difficult choices with my budget of TIME.

Here we have the list of stuff I played or was seriously considering in order:
SashawtfAnarchy Reigns: This was the first game I bought in 2013 and it was…not great.  The price tag was good at 25$ or so, but I couldn’t get through the single player and the multiplayer, while interesting, just didn’t hold my attention.  The key issue was the core of the combat system– it just wasn’t all that great.   Compared to the AMAZING Urban Reign for the PS2, which is quite similar, it was a vast disappointment and from the ex-Clover team, that was sad.

Crysis 3: I am a huge Far Cry fan and though it pissed in my mouth with Far Cry 2, I still like the original developers a lot and I picked up the original Crysis and it was great fun. I haven’t bitten on 2 or 3 yet but probably will in the future.  I guess what did it for me was continued play of Battlefield 3.  Crysis 3 just seemed redundant and I didn’t buy it.

Hotline Miami: The first indy game of the year I picked up.  The ad campaign for this one was so incredible it was a must buy.  I never finished it — to be truthful after the school shooting last year I just couldn’t play it anymore– but I got a long way into the game before moving on to other games.  It was awesome.

Hear of the Swarm: Ok, for all it’s polish, Starcraft 2 is not fun for me to play.  The single player is quite boring and the actual storyline EXECUTION is just shit (the ideas are really cool though, just executed poorly and all tongue and cheek with the shitty-accent space rednecks and trying to be serious at the same time plus romance? what a space pissery!), the multiplayer, the meat of the game, feels like a fucking chore to me.  Plus, it’s a terrible annoyance to have to use Blizzard’s version of steam and ALWAYS BE ONLINE.  I figured out finally that as much as I love RTS games and Warcraft 3, I’m just not a Starcraft player so I skipped this one and will likely never play Starcraft 2 in any form again because it’s jsut goddamn tiresome.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger: This was an impulse buy and I didn’t get through it but played it a bit and was impressed. It’s essentially a rail shooter with a CRAZY story integrating with just about every Old West hero in the late era (think Jesse James/Butch Cassidy).  If this is cheap, pick it up, you won’t be disappointed even if you get like 3-4 hours of play only.

The Last of Us: Ok so this was a PS3 exclusive and I had no chance to play it. Apparently this is a great game for the story as it integrates stuff from the hugely influential THE ROAD into a zombie shooter.  I just wanted to note that if this had come out on other consoles, it would have sold a LOT more copies, especially PC.  Plus this has that short lady that’s in all the fucking movies these days that is always talking too much on screen.

Xcom: Enemy Within: This is a follow up to Xcom: Enemy Unknown from 2012 and I just didn’t bother with it despite my love for the first game.  I hope this combat engine sees more life as it’s great. I will pick this up eventually…

Company of Heroes 2: Ok so here is a sequel to one of my favorite RTS games. COH, along with Warcraft 3, redefined what I wanted out of an RTS, and they did it in very different ways.  Unfortunately, the ENTIRE COH team left Relic Games long before COH 2 was started and I read so many bad things about the game that I didn’t pick it up.  The comments from Russians about the game is pretty crazy if you check metacritic– I guess they forgot that Stalin was a murderous dictator that was able to save the country from another murderous dictator?

Rogue Legacy:  While I don’t have a controller to hook up to my PC, I gave this one a shot and it was pretty interesting.  It’s not Battle Block Theater though.. no sir. Hence, I had problems playing it for very long.

Dota 2:  2013 IS the year of DOTA2, hands down.  The game came out of beta and everyone was playing it before, and everyone and their MOTHER is playing it now.  It is the best game of 2013, no question about it.  Obviously it’s a game that doesn’t appeal to everyone and it’s a very very deep rabbit hole to get into (and you have to practice) but I think this was a huge release for the year.  It’s tough to say it was the best when you want to give it to something new– since the game is getting close to 10 years old from it’s first incarnations, but DOTA 2 is by far the most important and best game of 2013.

Saints Row IV: I loved Saint’s Row 3. Loved it and played the shit out of it.  IV is excellent— except I can’t play it anymore.  Whether it’s my configuration (unlikely) or a patch I can’t tell, but the game will no longer run on my computer.   I got 20 hours in and then simply had to stop playing after one of the patches hit. I uninstalled, reinstalled, check the interweb tubes for a solution which ended up being “wait for the next patch” which I don’t even think ever came.  Sad that they didn’t take their PC users seriously this time around.

Diablo 3 (consoles): The monumental failure of a game that is Diablo 3 hit consoles in 2013 and they did a good job. Unfortunately, the game is fundamentally flawed and cannot be ‘fixed’ with the removal of the real money auction house.  This is what happens when you spend 12 years and millions of dollars on what amounts to a PAY TO PLAY iPHONE GAME.

Total War Rome 2: How the mighty have fallen.  This was my fucking BIGGEST disappointment of the year.  I warned my wife and wee children that I would be huddled in the basement for MONTHS on this fucker, but I put in 40 hours of frustration and was done. Rome 1 was my second choice for game of the DECADE from 00 to 10 only second to the almighty Warcraft 3.  What the fuck happened? 1) Too large of a budget  2) Too short of a timeline 3) crappy battle engine.  This series is dead to me.  Shogun 2’s battles sucked despite EVERYTHING else about the game being excellent.  The design choices + the battles being shit tanked this game forever.  Warhammer Fantasy Battle Total War will suck.

Path of Exile:  Another Diablo 3 killer, I did not get a chance to play this and probably won’t.  It’s been on my radar for a long time, but — I just want to keep playing Torchlight 2– like forever.

Battlefield 4:  Why come out so soon?  I still feel like I didn’t have the time to get into BF3 and ALREADY there’s a new BF game out?  And it’s not an offshoot like Bad Company or 2142, it’s the full on thing… why?  I just didn’t want this and saw no reason to buy it.  This does not need to come out every 2 years…

And for all that– it’s still just the year of DOTA 2.

unstoppable

 

Saints Row IV initial thoughts

It is one of the greatest games ever made. At first it seems like more of the same from SR3 but shortly it proves to be something wholly different, terrible and awesome. I’ve been waiting for a game like this for MANY years (a fun open world superhero game) but had no idea it would come in this form of total insanity.

There will be some awful Co-op gameplay videos posted soon by maurice!bastard.

HALO 4 REVIEWED

console FPS. that phrase will make some people gag and puke, like a saturday night drunk. i clearly remember the first time i played halo 2 on xbox. it was horrifying trying to make a microsoft console controller do what i knew a mouse/keyboard could do so much better. i was playing a fucking FPS with a console controller, it was terrible, it was 2003 or 2004 i think. there were two HUGE BLACK xboxs linked with a cable of some kind and it was 4 v 4 on two tvs in separate rooms in one house. 4 players on one tv, a tv screen split 4 ways. that layout was HORRIBLE in comparison to the MANY LAN parties i had attended where each player had there own computer, monitor and mouse/keyboard. YA I GOT FUCKING HOUSED by these console FPSers most of the time because of my console controller problems, but my PC FPS tactics did translate pretty well and I was able to hold my own after an hour of play all the while hating the controller and most of the people i was playing with. console FPS people are different from computer FPS people.

in 2006 i picked up a xbox360 for gears of war because you could take a chainsaw gun and cut bad guys in half. some time later i picked up halo 3 and played that some, it was okay nothing great and the controls sucked in comparison to mouse/keyboard. i played it because i had a friend that was NOT a pc gamer and he wanted to multiplay that shit up. so we did.

in 2008 i played COD4 on the xbox360 and finally went full on gay for FPS on consoles. so easy to just play mutliplayer game after game, the console made the multiplayer portion of the game so easy that going back to PC networking options looked completely archaic. so ya FPS can work fine/better on a console in some respects though M/K control on the PC will always be more accurate/brutal.

oh ya, HALO 4 REVIEWED. i guess i would call HALO 4 the best the xbox 360 has to offer in the halo bag. BUT LET’S BREAK DOWN THE OFFICAL KEY FEATURES OF HALO 4 ACCORDING TO AMAZON.COM!

Key Features

– The Reclaimer Saga Begins: Experience the dawn of an epic new Halo adventure, solo or split screen with up to three friends.

yep, sure like me some options playing the ENTIRE store co-op. but uh, the story is not very epic. it’s a linear who the fuck care’s affair where you are just ushers from shooting gallery to shooting gallery. why i love it so much worries me, i do love it but i know in my heart it’s pretty mindless. i think it works so well for coop because it’s so simple.

-Go Beyond the Story: Halo 4’s Infinity Multiplayer features a vastly expanded suite of multiplayer modes, weapons, vehicles, armor abilities, a new loadout and Spartan-IV player progression system.

CALL OF HALO’D. yes the multiplayer mode is your industry standard xp/upgrade slog. i’ve played about 4-5 hours of it not nearly enough to dig into all the customization options and i most likely never will play long enough to experience all of the “player progression system”. that sounds pretty geyh. yet again what i’ve played of multi is giggle inducing fun. i like the crazy vehicular combat, dude getting mowed down from heavy turret fire or run the FUCK over. it’s all easy to understand and less of a gawddamnedclusterfuck like in the BattleField games. what i mean to say here is a suck at battlefield games and with little or no effort i do well in halo 4. you tell me what that fuckin means about the games.

– Spartan Ops: Extend your campaign experience in a massive-scale adventure that builds upon the “Halo 4” Campaign. Receive a weekly series of cinematic episodes on Xbox LIVE followed by new gameplay missions, played solo or cooperatively with up to three friends – effectively delivering two campaign experiences in one game!* (*Online multiplayer and Spartan Ops missions require Xbox LIVE Gold membership (sold separately). System requirements forthcoming. See www.halo4.com)

sure sure sure, i like this part. i’ve played about 3hrs with my friend and it was nice easy fun blasting shit up all over the place. it works well and there is a metric shit ton of content being released, 5 new maps every week for fuck if i know how many weeks. it will take months of playing 2hrs a week with my friend to get through it all. massive-scale? no so much it’s bigger but not fucking massive, perhaps has massive as the xbox360 can produce without shitalloveritself. two campaigns? they reuse some/all of the maps from the main campaign in spartan ops so this is kinda a fucking lie but only internet assburger dickjags complain about that misleading key feature.

– War Games: Battle the competition in fresh, immersive new game modes and strategies.

this is pure marketing asspeak. nothing in this game is that fresh/new. it’s very HALOY which MOST of the internet halo geeks are happy to smoke.

– Track your groups, stats and scores on HaloWaypoint.com

stats. fine sure stats. my e-penis is larger then your internet butt hole will accommodate, see! see right here! this e-dick is much too massive and would split your brown starfish into uneven pieces. surgery may be required.

– Edge-of-your-seat Entertainment: Immerse yourself in Halo 4’s graphics, sound and epic game play including a mysterious and deadly new class of enemies* (*Online multiplayer and Spartan Ops missions require Xbox LIVE Gold membership (sold separately). System requirements forthcoming. See www.halo4.com)

graphics are TOP notch. this can and will not be fucking understated. the shit looks like doom3+rage with a solid FPS. okay you PC GAMING CUNTS halo 4 is not as good looking as current PC games played on 1500$ computers, but shit the xbox is 200$ and old and fuck and halo 4 rides the xbox like a FUCKING CHAM-PEE-YOEN! we are seeing GREAT PROGRAMING AT WORK and should be happy some nerdgod programmers are still milking that sweet xbox teet for me. i have multiple times stopped during single player to have a slack jawed look around like a cleatus, marveling at the graphics. i’m pretty sure the designers are paying homage to doom3 with some of the spaceship interiors and rage with some of the air landscapes, that is OKAY BY ME.

NOW LISTEN HERE PEOPLE! so you bought a xbox360. you are a poor person so you didn’t get a hard drive with your xbox. you are poor and you pay for xbox live gold access every year. you are poor and bought a 60$ xbox game and now you want to play this $60 game on your $200 xbox that has a internet connection, at least another $40 bucks a month and use your $60 a year xbox live gold access for some multiplayer HALO 4! oh you are too poor you cunt, you can’t play multiplayer HALO 4 on the xbox without installing the second DVD to the xbox hard drive which you are too POOR to purchase. on the back of the HALO 4 case you are told about this in the smallest possible writing. (you can now use any 8 or 16GB usb 2.0 flash drive instead of a offical xbox hard drive for game installs so you have to be too poor to buy this even). i’m sure some poor xbox players got pissed the fuck off when they could not play multi on the day they bought HALO 4 because they couldn’t install disc2. WHAT THE FUCKALL EVER! if you have a xbox360 with no harddrive you should not even be spending money on xbox shit at all. just stop breathing now.

HALO 4 is a great xbox360 game and one that should be owned by all xbox360 peeps.

HALO 4 is a 1 on said official binary scale.

Windows Live on PC: what an awesome idea!

Hang or defenestrate, it makes no difference to me.

Thence, I got Bulletstorm off steam the other day for 19.99 and thought: alright, People can Fly is a pretty good shop based on Painkiller, and even though the main voice actor is the same guy from URBAN REIGN and a thousand other games, it couldn’t be that bad– and it’s not.  Though it follows the whole “you are playing a movie” style, it’s fun and despite the whole redneck’s in space vibe (yet again), the dialog is snappy and filthy and far better than the embarrassingly strained Redneck’s in space babble of Starcraft 2.

However, like Dawn of War 2 and lots of other games I try to avoid for this reason alone,  if you buy it from Steam you then have to sign in to play it on windows live.  Like the true measure of gaming ennui, Diablo 3, Bulletstorm, a primarily single player game has an online all the time requirement?  And WHY did this get pirated?  Simply put, without Windows live the pirated version is a better experience than if you, like me, did the right thing and purchased the game legally for the PC.  Now call me an idiot because I forgot my Windows live login first off, then apparently if someone else is logged in as you (like some childe watching my little ponies) you cannot validate your game or even play it.  All of these things make sense, but of course, I just wanted to play the SINGLE PLAYER game and not be connected to the internet in any way. I don’t want achievements, I don’t give a goatsee about anyone seeing on my gamer tag that I have been playing Bulletstorm and finally it seems like it would be a crap multiplayer game, so I have no interest in that (which is sad because Painkiller’s DM was great!).

So to end this rant, I want to say that I do like Origin and Steam (of course) because they offer VALUE to me.  Windows Live for PC offers absolutely nothing but total annoyance for all users.

Murder simulator for today: Saints Row 3

Baurice!Mastard and I got in on some co-op Saints Row 3 last night with ridiculous results. I laughed so hard from the basement region that I woke the kids and the wife was afraid I would stumble into the bedroom at midnight babbling about how great shooting people out of a cannon attached to a car was.  After playing a bit of 2, I’m shocked at the overall quality of 3– great graphics, good sound, a much better driving/crashing/damage engine and it turns the entire gameworld into one big pro wrestling match with the fighting system. Forget the guns, the DDT’s and clotheslines are where it’s at!  If you like the genre (which I’m hot and cold on in general), this is a must buy as it is completely over the top insanity.  This is just a tiny taste of the mayhem of co-op.

and

Post Funmatic Stress Disorder

I close my eyes and see Paris alleyways and cafes on fire with APV’s shattered in the middle of cobblestone streets with swarms of desert cammo’ed guys running around shooting AK-74M’s and throwing grenades, or goggled men in on their  belly in a long snake crawling behind a low wall as mortar fire rains down and people complain and complain.  Needless to say, a lot of battlefield 3 has been played by yours truly– about 12 hours of multiplayer so far, which is far less than many of the players, but quite a bit for me in less than a week.

The first days were just chaos, all the new maps and new players running into each other, having firefights with their own team mates, following people into dead ends or off the maps, crashing every type of vehicle off cliffs, into mountains either deliberately or accidentally but now, especially since the game came out in Europe, play is in earnest and has gotten much more focused and tactical without all the running around all over the place alone.

It’s a great game, and while I loved Battlefield Bad Company 2, BF3 is better, especially multiplayer.   Even playing alone and not listening to your squad at all, it’s a thinking man’s FPS, as the rushing in doesn’t work very well in most situations (some, yes), especially if you get spotted, and in the open, you will get spotted.  There are people that play that all they do is sit somewhere and spot people coming in for their teammates to clean up.  The difference when going into an engagement spotted compared to not is absolutely huge and, of course, most n00bs have no idea even how to do this.

I’m finally got 350 shotgun kills today.  After this I have no idea which weapon I’ll use– there are really too many guns and really all I want is my Baur from BF2142 (which I have heard is the G3A3 that can only be unlocked after (gulp) about ten hours of co-op match work).  For any new players, the gun stuff is very confusing– especially since when you use a gun you unlock the optics for it ONLY and have to start over with the next gun unlock.  For the Assault class, where every unlock is some random assault rifle, this can be pretty lame.  I guess because I didn’t play BF2 much, and the gun list was a lot smaller in BFBC2, I’m a bit lost (hence the shotgun only).    So as tired as the military shooter genre is, I have to give this game the highest possible rating.  My only complaint is the client side prediction–especially since I rarely get off more than two shots with the shotgun when near someone else– it can be frustrating to get the rubberband effect when you know you had a bead on someone.

Of the maps that are out– I like Caspian Border the best.  This was in the beta for a short time at the end, has a lot of open space and lots of wooded areas and is just a fluid, fun map with a lot of nervousness about the vehicles rolling around, though they are horribly vulnerable out in the open to the choppers.   The central three objectives (Woods, Hilltop and Gas Station) are just terrific to fight over as they are quite a bit like a Devil’s Den area of nastiness.  My least favorite is the Bazaar as it’s just too much about shooting down hallways with RPG’s for the entire map.  Meatgrinder maps can be fun, but the chokepoints on that map just get tiresome.

My shotgun build out, if anyone cares, is the 870MCS with the HOLO sight and Slugs.   This works at short range, but only does 91% damage without a head shot so you have to get two shots off for the kill, against someone with a submachine gun close up you are probably dead meat running and gunning.  However, compared to buckshot, which is better close up, I chose slugs because you can tag people at medium range and it still does a lot of damage– a head shot will kill outright.  So you can snipe with it (which is ridiculous but works) and you can shoot at people you are facing that are lying down and get a kill with one shot most of the time because there is the head right there.    One of the later unlocks, which you’d think would be better,  is the flak shell and this has not worked for me at all.  It seems to throw a lot of crap around but doesn’t get a lot of kills.  Flechette rounds– buckshot is better unless you are shooting through trees and stuff– not all that common.  Most of the sight unlocks are total trash for the shotgun– you don’t want a big ass scope getting in your way when you are shooting off the hip– and it’s too difficult to judge where your shots are going from a scope anyway (you don’t have any tracer shells to track).

Anyway, 6 more days until Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is out, which will likely put my BF3 playing on hold until early next year so I’m going to go get in on some good shooting.

Here are some insane videos just showing the breadth and depth of the chaotic madness that is BF3:

It came from the wave 10/24

In addition to being the one week in the next month or so where the gaming industry hasn’t forced us to spend our hard earned cash, this weeks theme, if themeing of such randomness is even possible, would be “I MOUNT MY PLATYPUS!”

Apparently there’s going to be a micronauts film.  I don’t really think this is possible, but what the heck.

Some awesome color photos from the late 30’s and 40’s.  http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Some dude despecialized the first Star Wars movie, i.e.: keeping as close to the original film while bringing it to HD quality.

I wouldn’t mind getting telefragged in this type of situation.

Close to the worst indy game I’ve ever played.

Beta stats for BF3.  Pretty amazing how many people played.  Makes you feel a bit like dust in the wind, except of course then you think again about the fact that you are a sentient being living out what is, compared to most other organisms in the biosphere, limited immortality,  in a universe that is largely filled with absolutely NOTHING — then you can feel like a unique little flower again like they taught you in the 70’s.

And then this, posted in it’s entirety:

At my old house I had this old man neighbor that would wait for me to rake my yard and then come out and use his air blower to blow the leaves from his yard into my yard. I was confused the first time I saw it happen so I didn’t think much of it. I thought to myself, “Oh he’s just an old retired boob and is sloppy with his leaf blower.” the first time it happened. But then when I went back out to rake up the leaves he had blown over I saw him in the fucking window watching and giggling.

When I went back out to rake my leaves later that month, I caught a glimpse of him in the window watching me rake the yard so I was aware that he was specifically waiting for me to be done. Sure enough, as soon as I went back in the house he came back out and did it again. I was fucking pissed. So I came back out and he wasn’t outside so I went and knocked on the door but there was no answer. The neighbor that lived on the other side of him saw me and noticed my hulk smash expression and came over and started chatting with me and said that he’d been living next door to the guy for 12 years and it has been happening the entire time he lived there. His retaliation, which I got to watch in action shortly after our conversation, was to buy a leaf blower of his own that was more powerful than his neighbor’s version, and blow all the leaves back into the guy’s yard and when the guy came out to blow them into other people’s yards again he would stand out there with his more powerful leaf blower and they’d have some super fucking silly old man leaf blowing duel shooting the shit back and forth at each other.

I didn’t have the money for the leaf blower, so I just took all of the leaves and raked them up and flipped them all over his bushes and shit so he couldn’t blow them out of there. I also started pissing all over his wife’s garden every night and killing all of the flower and sleeping soundly knowing that they were eating vegetables that had grown thanks to drinking my piss.

In the winter, the fucking guy would do the same thing with his snow blower. He’d wait for me to hand shovel the sidewalk and then blow the fucking snow from his section of sidewalk all over my front porch, walkway up to my house, and the sidewalk in front of the house. I hate shoveling, even more than raking, so I wanted to slaughter him but Midge thought that maybe if I did something nice for the guy and chatted with him he’d stop doing it. So I gave it a try and helped him out with fixing some shit in house, including his broken ass computer, and the thanks I got was he started plowing in my fucking garage door back in the alleyway. At that point I had to give him a quality sensless style shouting until he went in the garage and started brandishing some shovel or ax or something at me. This just made me even angrier so I started making a physical move towards him so he ran back in his garage and locked himself in there for awhile. After that, I started taking ALL of the dog shit from my back yard, which there was a huge amount of (two black labs worth) and threw it all over his fucking yard and continued to piss through the fence all over the areas that his wife’s gardens were