february 2nd, 2009

By deactivated-579a5a254c9a3 February 2, 2009 7 Comments

prologue

i hate having a shortage on time.
track and field started up again recently, and given that i'm ridiculously out of shape i have been forced to attend daily practices for about three hours. combine this - an unfathomably dull activity in every sense of the word - with the fact that homework is constantly burying me in tedium... and you can do the math to figure out that i am fucking tired of this shit.

I WANNA PLAY SOME GAMEZ.

chapter the first: in which psychomode talks about Unreal Tournament 3 and its shortcomings

for one reason or another, i reinstalled Unreal Tournament 3 this weekend and promptly began playing it.
of course, though, my system hates Unreal Tournament 3. for one thing, my graphics card is becoming increasingly outdated, and while UT3 can run relatively well on somewhat moderate settings, it still chokes too often for me to be comfortable with it and thus i am stuck with a relatively low configuration.
but that's all good, y'know. it doesn't matter that it looks WORSE than Unreal Tournament 2004 if the gameplay's good, right?

so i go online. i'm sure you've heard this before, but the community that is still actually playing Unreal Tournament 3 simply equates to a total trainwreck of a userbase. i searched up some nice, regular CTF servers, since i never seem to be in the mood for Warfare or vehicle-based game types anymore (blame a) Halo, and b) the fact that Onslaught in UT04 is vastly superior to anything UT3 has to offer) and lo and behold, there is a grand total of NINE people playing CTF, spread across THREE servers.

what the fuck.

and so, i re-evaluated my status on online multiplayer shooters. due to my rampant fanboyism related to this series, i declare that there is only one multiplayer first person shooter that i will ever need for the rest of my life, or at least until the community of this game completely disintegrates into nothingness. and that game is UT2004.

and that was the end of that.

don't get me wrong, Unreal Tournament 3 is a pretty well-developed game at its core. the controls are great, the weapons are fantastic and the maps (although there really isn't that many) are fairly well-designed, if a little unremarkable. most of the game types from Unreal Tournament 2004 return, save for the classic Invasion, although the copious modding community surrounding the game has not really manifested itself yet in the new game. overall, though, to me it doesn't really feel like Unreal Tournament. sometimes it feels like i'm playing a glorified version of Gears of War, really, with a first-person viewpoint and with tactics totally removed. the art style is pretty much directly ripped from the recent trend of clunky, mechanical, futuristic, pseudo-dystopian shooters, and the Egyptian/Greek/Roman architectural styles from the older games seems nonexistent.
another huge complaint that i have with Unreal Tournament 3 is the movement. in Unreal Tournament 2004 you were pretty much free to bounce off the walls like some kind of mental case. you were able to traverse entire maps scarcely touching the floor. you were able to string together the most ludicrous acrobatic combos this side of FFVII: Advent Children. in UT3, unless there's a mod that i've somehow missed, there is no such thing. i barely even jumped once. i haven't played even one low-grav map. it feels really restricted and clumsy and it just doesn't feel like the Unreal Tournament of old.
while UT3 is definitely a step forward in the technological department despite the fact that my system can't really cut it, i can't help but think that it's several steps backwards in the evolution of the UT franchise. i seriously think we've well and truly lost it. the series hit its peak with 04. when i feel like i want some slightly heavier, meatier gunplay, UT3 is definitely a great choice, but i'm seriously not that kind of gamer. i prefer things at a far faster pace. the frenetic gunfights of UT2004  are just infinitely preferable to those on display in this new sequel, and if you take into account the fact that UT2004 has the single best modding community out of any game i've ever played, it's really a no brainer as to HMMM WHICH GAME SHOULD I PLAY TODAY.

oh god run on sentences are so awesome.

chapter the second: in which psychomode talks about the F.E.A.R. 2 demo and its shortcomings (but also the things it does correctly, i swear)

so i'm not sure if i wrote about this either, but i also played the F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin demo about maybe a week ago i guess? i'm not really sure, but it was recent. again, this is a game my system, particularly my graphics card, has real trouble handling. i don't think i will play this game until i make a few more significant upgrades, but however i did manage to push through the entire demo at a measly 800x600, and here's a rundown of my thoughts:

• the new PDA system and HUD really aren't for me. a minor complaint, but i really do think that the gaming industry evolved past this a couple of years back. it felt clunky even in games like Doom 3, which were released like almost 5 years ago.
• how did the AI downgrade? how is that even possible? i realize it's just a demo, but the AI felt like a serious step backwards from the furiously smart bad guys in the original game. i played on Hard mode and had pretty much no problems in dispatching these motherfuckers. in the full game, i hope to see enemies that have IQ's in the triple digits please.
• this whole "outdoor fighting" thing really doesn't sit well with me. just as with UT3, it brings back painful memories of Gears of War. this whole apocalyptic debris-filled city thing really doesn't suit F.E.A.R. for me. F.E.A.R. was an awesomely oppressive corridor shooter and it did lots of things right. it was terrifically claustrophobic and it was absolutely scary as fuck because of it. i hope that the demo was rather unrepresentative of the environments of the full game, because the ratio of outdoor sections to indoor sections was a little too unbalanced for me. kinda odd. 
• i still can't work out what to think of the mechs. i seriously don't know whether i like them or not. i just fucking hope there's no vehicular sections in this game.
• onto the good stuff: the school section was executed perfectly. i want an entire game's worth of sections like that. i had goosebumps the entire time. i'm not sure what type of goosebumps they were, though. they were either "oh my fucking god i am terrified" goosebumps, or "oh my fucking god this is EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED IN THE SEQUEL" goosebumps. it's your call, but seriously i actually think it's the latter. absolutely awesome.
• the weapons didn't lose any of their awesomeness value. i hate to use a phrase as cheap as "awesomeness value" but frankly at this point in the blog my literal creativity is starting to down grade a little bit. given that i don't have a thesaurus handy, i have to use things like "awesomeness value" to get my point across. but seriously, the weapons are awesome and i can't wait to get more slow-mo headshots. which is pretty much what i (and 95% of gamers) spent the entirety of F.E.A.R. doing.
• SLOW MOTION OH GOD YES

... i seriously can't remember any other good points. the sections that actually did feature Alma were, of course, pretty freaky, and i'm definitely looking forward to some good old-fashioned psychological scares. maybe it's my terminal negativity, but as a pretty big F.E.A.R. fan i have to say that the demo was more of a mixed bag than i expected. i guess i just want more of the same in this long-awaited sequel, and it doesn't look like i'm going to get it. however rather than introduce some really innovative gameplay mechanics, the devs just seem to have borrowed them from other games and implemented them into a game where they don't really work as well as they should.
ignore my cynicism if you legitimately enjoyed the demo - which i did, although not on the same level as i thought i would - as i will definitely be buying the game. although yeah as i said i may have to wait until my computer becomes somewhat improved.

chapter the third: in which psychomode summarizes his weekly frustrations into one grammatically incorrect sentence

I'M FUCKING DONE WITH SORROW'S FURNACE FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

resolution

so yeah guys. i'm really sick right now so i think i should probably wrap this up and go to bed... although there's so much more self-indulgent ranting i'd like to do right now. for some reason i'm really in a video game kinda mood, although as usual the only two games i feel like playing are UT2004 and Guild Wars. i would play Final Fantasy VIII because i know that i should be doing so, but frankly i just came off finishing FFX for like the fourth time and i don't feel like playing another turn-based RPG for a while.
meh.
i'll probably start playing it tomorrow anyway lol... just to get me off of this fucking computer a little more often.
also probably gonna move my 360 into my room later this week, look to seeing me on Rock Band 1/2 playing some guitar/bass maybe. i would hook up my drums because they are by far my favorite instrument, but they seriously won't fit in my ludicrously small room. so yeah i'll probably be playing some guitar on RB2

LATER GUYZ

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