Prepare yourself for a more than 2,500 word wall of text my friends...March
Ah the New Year... is always such a mind-numbing time for gaming. Whatever it was I had gotten for Christmas has come and gone in my mind and the winter months had been slowly ticking away with no new games. Spring began and I just needed to play something new and the only thing around the corner was Rainbow Six: Vegas 2.
I picked up the first of Rainbow’s ventures into Sin City late, sometime in the autumn (or ‘fall’) of 2007. I enjoyed the demo but wasn’t exactly expecting the game to blow my mind. It didn’t. The singleplayer was quite enjoyable but having played the ridiculously realistic Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield to death on my PC, Vegas seemed rather arcadey to me. The online was pretty dreadful; the graphics were dumbed down and the hit-recognition was appallingly bad.
As a result of my past experiences, I wasn’t really expecting R6V2 to be much better, though it would have to do for me – I just couldn’t wait another month for something to come out. The singleplayer campaign, again, pleasantly surprised me by being in-depth, thought provoking and having a good enough story to back it up (unlike the much older Rainbow Six games). The online was greatly improved with much more interesting gamemodes, better hit recognition and generally less laggy games.
The character customization stole the show for me though – I just love being able to do what I like with my character both online and off. Vegas 2 was the ultimate setting for me to do this as anyone who knows me will understand; I’m a bit of a military nut. I probably spent more time choosing different equipment, weapons and perfecting camouflage schemes to replicate real-world military units. I found myself thinking “today I’ll be a US Marine” or “today I’ll be an SAS guy from the Iranian Embassy Siege” and playing the online a ludicrous amount of time just to get more and more options for my character.
Sadly though, the game came out still in the shadow of Call of Duty 4 to the extent where I was almost aghast to find there was no party system in the game. All in all though, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 was a solid release that occupied me long enough until two much, much bigger games...
April
One of the most highly anticipated games in the history of the industry and I was hardly bothered. I picked it up regardless though. What? Grand Theft Auto IV of course.
I didn’t care for San Andreas’ storyline but it must be said that I played that game unyieldingly for months – flying jets and helicopters, doing stunts, riding bikes, doing races. That game had such a wealth of activities it was just a joy to play.
In comparison I have barely played GTAIV. I played the story through once and since then I have hardly touched the singleplayer at all. The Free Mode on the other hand, entertained me thoroughly with my friends, making up our own little games such as hunting a mate’s car in the helicopter gunship or our version of the film Speed where we’re on a bus that just won’t stop. It was so much fun. It got boring after a while though and we tried the races which entertained us a little more, but ultimately we all gave the game up after that. It sits on my shelf now, untouched since before the summer holidays.
A good game, but a huge letdown compared to the hours and hours I spent on San Andreas.
June
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I think that one short and epic sentence pretty much summed up the way I feel about this game. Hideo Kojima very nearly achieved perfection with this game and quite frankly, anyone who thinks otherwise is mentally unstable or, more likely, you just don’t have a mind open enough to play this game.
The graphics, as we have become accustomed to with Metal Gear games, are pretty awesome. Although they might not be as technically proficient as, say, Far Cry 2, they are easily some of the best visuals in any game to date. They’re simple visuals too – no absurd amounts of bump-mapping and reflections (*cough* World at War) but just good old detailed textures wrapped around perfect models.
Obviously, the story is quite stunning but I can’t really go into that in any detail now. Let’s just say that every loose-end of any previous game has been tied up and, unless you’re really bad at following the plot, almost everything should be cleared up and explained to you. The controls really set this game apart in terms of gameplay and, although certain advanced moves can be difficult to master, the wealth of options is incredible for a controller. For example, going into prone you can role onto your back and aim down the sights or throw a grenade over your head for more distance and there are a staggering amount of CQC (close-quarters-combat) moves if you can learn the controls well enough.
I don’t even know where to go with these next few sentences if I’m completely honest... I think the best way for me to summarise my opinion on this game is to say it’s perfect, apart from what few bad things I can think up now:
- The plot is still farfetched in places.
- Many of the plot details are explained by waving the magic plot-fixing wand called ‘nano-machines’.
- There’s much less emphasis on sneaking and a more westernized gameplay style of run and gun.
- I definitely recommend you play Metal Gear Solid (or The Twin Snakes), MGS2 and MGS3 before trying to play MGS4.
Overall though, Metal Gear Solid 4 is, at least in my opinion, as close to artistic perfection as were going to see in a game for a very long time.
June wasn’t over yet though – I still had one more game to play. This franchise was probably the one that got me really into PC gaming. It combined famous World War Two battles with fast-paced, action-packed gameplay for multiplayer only. I was buying Battlefield: Bad Company.
I wasn’t planning on buying Bad Company at all, but after I played a bit of the demo online with a mate I found that there was huge satisfaction to be gained from working as a pair in a helicopter or tank. In retrospect it was probably a poor idea to buy a game only for two of the vehicles in it. Oh well, it was in the disc tray by the time I realised that. I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed the singleplayer strangely, as I hated it on the demo. It’s a funny world.
The graphics are fairly decent, though they don’t exactly stand out as being great. What are more impressive are the huge singleplayer levels that offer many routes of attack and, even though there aren’t many choices in tactics (it’s pretty much run and gun), it does keep the action fresh. The destructible environments that were so hyped were a letdown in the technical sense, though they do make the gameplay much more interesting and it’s still satisfying to watch. Graphically though, the destruction is just walls disappearing under clouds of dust and rubble.
What’s even weirder though, is that I hated the online. Much like the PS2 game, Black, Bad Company’s weapons have much larger clips than they do in real life so I assumed, like in Black, that that feature was just there purely for making it more action packed. Strangely though, players online can actually soak up the fifty rounds in your clip quite capably. This was just plain irritating for me and it led to me only ever picking the machineguns with their 200-round boxes. This ruined the online for me and although the vehicles were still fun, the abundance of people who would team-kill you for one was embarrassing.
All in all, a good singleplayer though lack of an engaging multiplayer experience has kept this game on the shelf for a long time.
September
I didn’t buy any games in September. What I did do though was purchase a £700 ‘mainstream’ gaming computer. This had been my sad and nerdy dream for the last two years and, until I worked over the summer, there was no way it was going to be realised. I’m very pleased with my computer as you may have noticed (I’ve mentioned it in almost every blog for the last two months).
My playing-time for September was chiefly occupied with a mod for the Source Engine (the engine that Half-Life 2 and, more recently, Left 4 Dead use), Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat. Insurgency, or INS, is one of those games that can simply not be played on consoles. In other words, it’s a realistic first-person-shooter. I played Insurgency on my old computer with terrible graphics and horribly long loading times but I managed to enjoy it never-the-less. I’m rediscovering it now and enjoying it thoroughly.
The game is multiplayer-only and set in modern day Iraq. You either play as Iraqi Insurgents or US Marines. The mod incorporates many features seen in Red Orchestra, another realistic mod for the Unreal Engine 2. Insurgency has iron sights, free-weapon sway (the gun moves around the screen rather than remaining completely central so you can’t tell where you are aiming off the hip) and 3D-scopes (the scope is zoomed in, but the area around the scope is normal vision). It’s safe to say you will die in less than three shots in this game.
INS is probably the only game I have ever played seriously online and, as a result, I’m now in a sort of clan for it. I mainly got involved in that sort of thing because recently, INS was put onto Steam (Valve’s digital-distribution system) and since has been getting far too many new players who don’t have a clue how to play and don’t want to learn. Being in a clan gives me the chance to play serious games with serious players so I can enjoy it properly, as I used to before Steam came and ruined everything for me.
October
I remember seeing Far Cry 2 in a PC magazine when it was first announced two summers ago. I recall showing my dad the screenshots and saying something along the lines of: “How amazing are they? Imagine if you had a computer that could run that.”
I think I was expecting far too much of Far Cry 2; I’m still disappointed now that it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. It’s a good game, don’t get me wrong, but there are far too many things that hold it back.
The visuals are remarkable, the best I’ve ever seen in a video game (if you ask, “what about Crysis?” I’m going to hunt you down and kill you) and it’s equally amazing that those visuals are retained throughout a fairly huge world. Personally, I was more interested in the immersive animations and actions that you can perform in FC2. Big things like weapons jamming and cars breaking down, but also little things like the camera doesn’t simply just teleport you into a different position in car – you actually see your hands and your legs moving yourself into the new spot.
The fire in the game was overly hyped by magazines and websites and, although it looks very nice and it is useful, stories of being able to destroy as whole camp using one shot from a flare-gun and the weather are blatant lies. Also, it takes too many rounds to kill an enemy but as you go further into the game this becomes less of a problem.
One of the biggest irritants in Far Cry however, is the lack of useful fast-travel. There are bus stops that let you travel to four or five locations on the map, but five times out of ten these bus stops are no closer to where you want to be than where you’re standing. In the PC version you can save where ever you want, meaning that the safe-houses are really only useful for advancing time forwards for night missions and what-not. It would put far more emphasis on unlocking safe-houses if you could fast-travel to one. It’s not even the long travelling that’s annoying (I could simply watch the beautiful terrain go by my car window), but it’s the fact that an enemy patrol car or outpost stops you every ten seconds and apparently every African in the game is out to kill you even if you’re just bobbing along in a shitty sedan.
By far the worst set-back of FC2 though is its terrible amount of bugs. Most of them are the game itself: enemies that clip through rocks and then shoot you from the inside of them; generally buggy AI; broken ragdolls; animals that die if they walk into a stationary car etc. The most irritating bug for me though is a hardware specific one: Radeon 4870 (my graphics card) + Windows Vista 64 + Dx10 = mad stuttering. And by ‘stuttering’ I don’t mean low framerates, I mean the game just stutters. I’ll be running it at 50-70fps on all highest settings but it will still stutter every couple of seconds. I’m not the only one to suffer from this either, it’s been reported numerous times and there is still no patch from Ubisoft or ATI to fix it. This bug makes FC2 pretty much unplayable for me.
November
So, almost 2,500 words later we have reached this month and the end of my blog. So what have I played this month? Two of the most awesome demos to ever grace the Marketplace – that’s what! I’m talking about the demos for Mirror’s Edge and Left 4 Dead. I don’t want to say too much about these as they are only demos and perhaps, like with Battlefield: Bad Company, I’ll end up hating them when they’re released (but I highly doubt that).
Left 4 Dead is one of the best online experiences I’ve ever had. I would never recommend it to one who plans to play on his own or with strangers (the main reason I don’t plan to buy this for PC) but if you’ve got enough close mates to play this wit regularly then I must insist that you buy this. It’s not just mindless zombie violence – it’s built entirely around team-play. The ‘boss zombies’, for example, are made in such a way that if you’re on your own they will kill you straight away, no problem, but if you’re working together and sticking together they’re really easy to deal with. This is why finishing a map on L4D on the hardest difficulty is so very, very satisfying.
It’s not often that someone other than Sony or Kojima Productions dares to be different so it’s nice to finally see that DICE have finally ‘rolled’ away from the Battlefield series (see what I did there?... dice... roll?...hehe). Mirror’s Edge offers a completely unique style of game that combines Prince of Persia –style platforming with a realistic first-person camera. The special effects and sense of scale and speed really make playing this game something special and it must be played to really understand why everyone likes it. The art style is possibly the greatest aspect of this game and its quirkiness compliments to original gameplay style perfectly. I could just look at Mirror’s Edge and be happy, let alone play it... and this has led me to become somewhat obsessed with it.
Oh yes, and I almost forgot. I played Gears of War 2 today... *cough*... and um... I quite... I like it. YES I SAID IT! I LIKE GEARS OF WAR 2! It’s not perfect, it’s not special but by hell it’s a massive improvement on the original. For a start, there are more than three different types of enemies and the guns actually sound like guns now. Okay. No more of that.
Overall I’d say it’s not exactly been a great year of gaming for me. R6V2 was good enough, GTAIV was disappointing, Bad Company was average and Far Cry 2 was a letdown. Well done then MGS4, you managed only to make me cry with your touching and involving storyline instead of through being just another shit game.
So, finally, there’s the end of my epic wall of text. I hope you enjoyed reading this (albeit in small chunks) as I enjoyed writing it and trying to conjure up my memories of games that seem so old now.
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