When criticizing a game, forum posters love to throw around certain words. For shooters, one of those words is "run 'n gun." In this big thread about Call of Duty, that phrase popped up in about every other post. There was quit a bit of debate about whether or not Call of Duty is a "run 'n gun" (RNG) shooter.
Here's a better question: Why's that matter? I said:
What's "run 'n gun" mean? If I look at it literally, that seems to mean I can run and shoot at the same time, or at least fast movement will have minimal effect on my accuracy (like in Unreal Tournament, for example). People get in arguments over terms without ever defining them.
So let's say our game in question is RNG. Most shooters are. So many posters in that thread seemed to think that if they said "COD's RNG!" enough, that automatically means it's a bad game. I've literally seen posts that were a single sentence: "CODs a run and gun shooter, lol." Okay, what does that prove? I'm not even getting into the argument of whether the game is RNG or not. When you break down what RNG means, it shines absolutely no light on whether a given game is good or not. It's just irrelevant jargon, like FPS versus TPS.
Tomorrow: "Realism" in shooters, another word people love to throw around as if it's actually relevant.
After cunningly avoiding the snare I had emplaced to capture Jehovah's Witnesses, a colleague entered my house this evening with a fresh copy of Halo 3: ODST.
My first ODST experience: I played Firefight on Crater with a friend for about 45 minutes. We got to 197,000 points when my Internet died. For those of you who don't have the game, there are achievements for playing Firefight on the various maps to 200,000 points. So that was just terrific.
I'll write a real first impressions article tomorrow.
So I was playing this stupid shooter recently, and like a stupid shooter it at one point continually spawned enemies until I performed a certain action. My girlfriend kept count, and I knocked off 25 guys in the couple minutes it took me to complete my objective. That got me thinking: How many people/creatures/entities have I killed over the course of my shooter career?
As a metric, I reference the Gears 2 achievement Seriously 2.0. For those of you who don't know, the description for that achievement is "Kill 100,000 enemies (any mode)." Plenty of people have this achievement. It's rare, but it's not incredibly rare. Keeping that in mind, let's consider two facts:
Gears 2 has been out for about a year.
Gears is not a fast-moving shooter. Both online and offline, kills come at a slow pace. Double/multi-kills are rare in Gears.
Let's contrast that to my shooter experience:
I've been playing shooters for over 15 years.
I've played every type of shooter there is. I've played tactical games like Rainbow Six, where you spend lots of time planning, and where kills are infrequent. On the other hand, I've played scifi run-and-gun shooters, where one BFG blast knocks out 20 opponents.
Considering the above facts, a very conservative estimate suggests that I've simulated killing a million living things in shooters. Damn.
I could wrap things up here, but inevitably, I have to compare Mass Effect to Oblivion. It's not my fault this time, though, it's my girlfriend's fault. While watching me play, she asked, "Why is it I can watch you play this game, but watching you play Oblivion makes me want to kill myself?"
Wow. Burn.
It took me a second to form a response, which was basically, "Because the story in Oblivion sucks!" Yeah, Oblivion is light as hell on story. Now, the overall plot of Oblivion (emperor dying, demonic invasion, finding a lost heir) is solid enough, and would probably be interesting if it were novelized. However, in terms of actually playing the game, the presentation of the story is very weak.
My number one reason for this: Oblivion has next to no characters. In place of characters, Oblivion has plot devices. Some people dispense quests, other people are the object of quests. None of them have anything very interesting to say, you never really get to know them, and you certainly don't think of them as real people. There are occasional exceptions to this (i.e., Martin Septim), but when compared to Mass Effect, Oblivion's characters run from bland to non-existent. Without good characters, even a well-conceived story is no more interesting or emotionally engaging than reading a history book.
Back to Mass Effect, after leaving the Citadel for the first time, I landed on an uncharted planet and began exploring the surface for survey-able resources, bits of space junk, and one side quest. My girlfriend remarked that watching me drive the Mako around, hunt for stuff, and fight some scavengers wasn't very interesting. I agreed, but then it occurred to me: If you completely removed Mass Effect's main quest and took away all the characters (your companions, Saren, Cpt. Anderson, others), and all you had in the game were the uncharted planets and the sides quests…you'd have Oblivion! Yeah, it's a perfect analogy:
Mako: Shadowmere. (Both are annoying on hills.)
Resources to survey: Ingredients to collect.
Combat that isn't as good as real shooters: Combat that isn't as good as real action adventures.
Lance Henrikson giving you missions in monotone voiceovers: Unrecognizable actors giving you missions in monotone voiceovers.
Space junk to find: Fantasy junk to find.
Hunt and fetch missions in similar looking planetary outposts: Hunt and fetch quests in good-but-similar looking dungeons.
Space pirates: Bandits (e.g., Random people who attack you for no reason: Random people who attack you for no reason).
Quests which have you kill a certain number of monsters and then are resolved by a simple window of text: Quests which have you… Yeah, you get the idea.
There you go. Oblivion is Mass Effect minus the characters and main quest, just much longer. Think about it: The Cerberus side missions are about as interesting as any faction questline in Oblivion. The sidequests on the Citadel are as emotionally involving as the main quest in Oblivion. Compared to Mass Effect, the only thing Oblivion has going for it is that you can play for 500 hours and still not see all the game's content. This I've said before: Oblivion is a breadth over depth experience.
I borrowed a 360 from a friend and slapped in my harddrive, so I get to keep gaming while my Elite’s being un-E74’d. I’m working on my third playthrough of Mass Effect, this time on Hardcore difficulty. This is actually kinda difficult, as I created a fresh character, instead of starting with one of my earlier, leveled-up ones.
Mass Effect is an awesome game, period. My girlfriend’s playing with me on this one. Now you’re possibly wondering, “How the hell does someone play with you on a single-player RPG?” Well, she sits next to me and provides input on where I should direct my efforts and what I should say to people. Most of the time, though, she just watches me play.
I think this is pretty impressive, considering my girlfriend is not a gamer, has only played a couple games with me in the past, and has never just sat there and watched me play a game for any length of time. She does enjoy scifi (we’ve watched Star Wars and Babylon 5 together), which brings me to my point: Besides being a good RPG, Mass Effect is a solid piece of science fiction.
I’d originally typed quite a bit more than this, so I decided to split this into two articles. Today is just about Mass Effect. Tomorrow, I compare Mass Effect to Oblivion. See yah.
Requiem aeternam dona ets, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ets.
E74.
So my Xbox is dead. This one finally crapped out, after a couple thousand hours of gaming. That's my third dead 360 Elite. The first one stopped reading discs, the second one RROD'd, and now E74. I've run the gamut of problems, so hopefully the next one will work right.
While it's being fixed, I think I'm going to go get an Arcade and just slap in my harddrive so I can keep gaming. And then I'll have a backup when presumably my fourth 360 dies too.
There's been quite a bit of whining on the forums lately concerning the new features in the Xbox 360 update: Games on Demand and the Avatar Marketplace. Personally, I doubt I'll use either one of these, for the simple reason that I do not value them enough to pay the prices currently charged for them. That's all anyone should need to say to justify their purchasing decisions, but for some reason, that's not good enough. I'm going to address some of the common complaints here:
"Microsoft only cares about money!"
This falls into the category of self-evident statements like "There cannot be a round square." Yes, Microsoft cares about money. And? Is this in contrast to other corporations that don't care about money? There's a word for those sort of companies: Bankrupt (or mythical). Also, I'm sure all the gamers making this statement as if it's some sort of revelation don't care about money themselves...which explains why they spent hundreds of dollars on a piece of electronic entertainment.
"Buying virtual clothes is a ripoff!"
As opposed to the hundreds of hours of your life that you put into, say, an RPG, amassing virtual artifacts and gold: That's not a ripoff? I hate to break it to you, but gaming in general is not terribly productive. Hell, it's not productive at all. It's not supposed to be. Gaming's a hobby; it's just supposed to be fun. If somebody likes to play dress-up with their little Xbox guy and drive around an RC Warthog, and can do it for a few dollars, well, good for them.
"Games on Demand are more expensive than buying them at GameStop!"
This is true, but isn't the free market a grand thing? Some people might find it a positive tradeoff to pay more for a game and download it, instead of taking their time and gas money to go to a game store. If this isn't you, then don't use Games on Demand. This is not tricky.
"Getting a licensed product for your Avatar is like paying a company so you can advertise for them!"
Yeah...and buying an Adidas T-shirt in real life isn't?
"This is the last straw! I'm done with Xbox!"
Okay, how is the quality of the Xbox 360 gaming experience any different now than it was a week before this update? Usually the people saying this are the same ones who said Games on Demand and the Avatar Marketplace are overpriced anyway. To these people I say: The 360 is now unacceptable, because there's a service offered on it that you don't want and doesn't affect your gaming in the slightest? Whatever.
All right, I think I'm hitting "tl;dr" at this point, so I'll wrap this up. In conclusion, you are not being ripped off when a company is offering to sell you something that you didn't know about yesterday, don't want today, and won't need ever.
Avatar Unlockables When going to this option on my Avatar screen, it simply said, "Unlock Avatar awards by playing games." Hmm, I think that's the polite way of saying "This feature not yet implemented." I was really hoping they would award some Avatar items retroactively, based on a person's achievements, at least for the popular games. Like, if you have the katana in Halo, you could get that for your Avatar, or if you've beaten Gears 1 and 2 on Insane, then you can get a gold Lancer. I was hoping for something like this, but it doesn't appear that's how it'll work.
Games on Demand You can now download full, retail titles from Xbox Live. These tend to be more expensive than just buying them at the store. I doubt I'll ever use this. I'm old fashioned in that opening the box and reading through the manual are part of my gaming experience.
Sort Your Friends List I've complained about the 360 friends list since 1990, when I first read a prophecy by Nostrodamus complaining about how feature-poor the thing is. The 360 friends list sucks balls. Why can't I organize my friends into folders? Instant messaging programs since the beginning of history have allowed me to do this. Anyway, you can now sort your friends list. Your sorting options are as follows:
Online Status: This is the old way the thing was organized. Gamertag: Organizes your list alphabetically, regardless of whether someone's signed in or not. Activity: Sorts by the games your friends are playing. This is useful, though I have one complaint: It always puts people on the dashboard at the top. Why? Who cares about people sitting at the dashboard? Put them at the bottom.
And there you have it. I might have missed a minor feature here or there, but that pretty well sums up all the new stuff. The only thing I will use in the foreseeable future is the friends list sorting. So, all in all, I say it's a good update. I have a useful feature that I didn't have before, while nothing I like has been taken away. Tomorrow, I'll post up some commentary on some of the complaints levied at the update.
Thought of the Day: Gaming brings you: Palantas' Impressions of the Xbove Live Update
I've been pretty busy lately, so I didn't do much reading on the new update. I'd heard various things, but I had not exhaustively researched it by running a quick Wiki search like I learned how to do in college. So here goes my play-by-play of all the new and wonderful things I encountered after signing into Xbox Live yesterday...
It took two to three minutes to download on my good connection. Not bad. I didn't get a whacky video like with the NXE udpate. (Yeah, sad.) When my dashboard loaded, it added that "Welcome" tab from the NXE, which I quickly banished again. I watched a video with some woman named Tina Wood, who informed me that I could get an RC Warthog. Neat.
The first thing I checked out was the new Avatar Marketplace. You can get clothes from some brandnames like Adidas, and some others I didn't recognize. Nothing really caught my interest; I don't imagine they'll be adding any Brooks Brothers for your Avatar anytime soon. Basic clothing, like a T-shirt, cost 80 G (G = international monetary symbol for Xbox Gamerpoint). More expensive clothing cost 160 G. That seems a little expensive to me. To outfit my little guy in the new, emo-looking clothing they have, I'd have to spend at least five bucks. That's kinda on the high side, I think, considering I can get a game for that much.
You can also get clothing and accessories from games, these games...
Splinter Cell: I checked out this one first...and was disappointed. It's nothing but T-shirts and ballcaps that say "Splinter Cell" on them. What a bunch of BS. Sam Fisher never wears anything like that.
Star Wars Clone Wars: Now this makes sense, since Avatars look like they're on this show anyway. Here, you can get some real stuff, like clonetrooper armor, priced at 400. The helmet comes separately at 160 G, though, so the total price for a clonetrooper outfit is 560. There's also a 400 G lightsaber.
Halo ODST: There's a red beret, but I can't get it because I'm not in an Airborne unit right now (Army joke). Oddly you can get a ring for 40 G. Yeah, a ring, like what goes on your finger. How the hell is anyone ever going to notice that? (Maybe if they ever have Lord of the Rings attire, you can get the One Ring and turn your Avatar invisible.) There's also the afore-mentioned RC Warthog, for 320. My little guy looked so happy playing with it, much happier than I ever am in real life, except when drinking. Finally, you can get UNSC Marine armor for 400, which includes the helmet. Definitely a better deal than the clonetrooper armor.
Halo 3: T-shirts and other BS. Disappointing.
Gears 2: COG armor for 320, with a helmet at 160, so it's inbetween clonetrooper and UNSC armor in price. I wouldn't get the helmet, though, since people with helmets always die in Gears. There was also some Locust armor, which made my Avatar look like one of the scantily-clad, bondage-inspired girls from Quake III:
No joke. Definitely do not recommend the Locust armor. Oddly, the Gears section also had "Crimson Omen Skate Shoes" for 160. 160?? How the hell are skate shoes going to cost the same as a futuristic combat helmet?
Fable 2: All clothes and ballcaps, including a "highwayman's outfit." Okay... Why can I have a lightsaber but not a longsword? Speaking of that, the lightsaber's been the only weapon so far. Why no Lancer? Why no battlerifle?
Bioshock 2: A Big Daddy doll for 240. Looks like a voodoo doll. My Avatar's going to stick pins in him if he comes across a Big Daddy. Which, my Avatar might if they ever put out a Big Daddy suit. Right now, you can get the helmet without the suit, which makes you look like a titanic toolbag.
All right, this is getting pretty long. I'm going to finish my feature review tomorrow, and then write some commentary on it the next day. Have fun paying out the ass for T-shirts and dressing up your Avatar.
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