Someone Buy Me A Pair of Spider Jerusalem Shades
By jakob187 6 Comments
- Halo: Reach Beta Initial Impressions
- Super Street Fighter IV
- Borderlands: The Secret Armory of General Knoxx
Hey, folks! Amidst Dead to Rights: Retribution and Nier and a bunch of other not-so-psyched-to-play games coming out, this past week has ended up being a "catch-up" on stuff that hadn't really gotten played as well as stuff that simply needed to be checked out. The only exception to this would be the Halo: Reach beta, which launched yesterday. It was surprising to open the front page of Giant Bomb and see that the Reach beta was capable of surpassing World of Warcraft as the most played game yesterday, despite the fact that even Modern Warfare 2 is always lagging behind by just a margin...and Halo 3 by a regular sizable portion. Anyways, on with the blog...
ZOMG DEY CHANGD MUH HALOZ!!!
The Reach beta has shown me that Bungie did everything I could hope for in a new Halo game. The way the loadouts work is intelligent, as it means you can keep a relatively balanced setup without fear of people just combining OP bullshit and using only those kits all the time. I will say that a jetpack with a needler seems a bit too easy, but I digress. The feel of the controls has a slightly different aesthetic that feels awkward but right at the same time. The character movement seems a bit more fluid, and the enhanced graphics really show off how great of an engine Bungie really can build. The map designs are intelligent and varied enough to keep things interesting, but they are also very firmly planted into the world that Reach is trying to create...which is more than I can say for many of the other multiplayer maps that Halo 2 and Halo 3 happened to feature. Keeping your multiplayer maps somewhat rooted well into your universe and world, something that Call of Duty has done exceedingly well, is necessary to make it all worthwhile for me.
I only got to chow down a few matches last night before my eyes were incapable of staying open. I'll be taking some closer looks at this over time, and I'll keep y'all updated. Suffice it to say, my initial impressions have left me excited for a Halo game again. = D
The Pointlessness of Trials
No, my problem is with the trials. Namely, I don't really give a shit about doing the trials, because most of the shit you learn in there can only be applied in an actual match IN VERY RARE INSTANCES!!! There are never NEARLY enough bread 'n' butter stuff being shown in these things, and that's thoroughly disappointing. Should internet research be necessary in order to figure this stuff out? NO! I've been going through Juri's trials, and it's not that I CAN'T do them. It's that most of them are POINTLESS! I'm never...never...NEVER going to use Juri Trial 24 in an actual match. NEVER! Sure, I understand that it's showing people what kind of moves can link into what, and it tells you the progression of those. However, it never SHOWS you how that should look. You have to hit the internet. There's also the fact that hitting the back/select button to bring your moves pulls up a separate menu showing the moves rather than simply switching over the moves that are displayed on the screen with the actual inputs instead. It's fucking frustrating!!!
The counter to this argument is "there weren't any videos back in the day of Super Street Fighter II Turbo - just sitting around and playing for hours". This is absolutely true, but if we had the capability of having YouTube back then, I'm sure the videos would've been available. Those games also had no tutorials or training mode available to the player, making it rather difficult to learn anything without simply fighting people. You had to learn through watching guys play, as well as word of mouth. With the arcades being all but dead in America, it would be incredibly difficult to try and learn everything simply by word of mouth. A gamer can learn and retain something much better if he can see it. Why aren't we putting the basics of tutorials, like a simple Juri combo of j.LK > c.LK > c.MK > Senpusha into the tutorials? Sure, some of the stuff in her trials are worthwhile - about three of the combos shown, maybe four.
There's nothing I can do to honestly change the way Capcom has designed this, but I think it's a damn travesty that they negated the ability for more accessibility by offering a more robust and USEFUL trial set for players to go through.
Knoxx'n on Heaven's Door
Now that I'm up to level 57, what is my general impression of The Secret Armory of General Knoxx? Fuck The Secret Armory of General Knoxx! I'm all for a challenge, but I think that Gearbox completely lost the idea of what made Borderlands so fucking great in the last two pieces of their DLC. The terrain of Knoxx doesn't feel open at all, which kills the idea of this big and expansive planet. The lack of quick-travel points makes traversing all the highways and ignoring all of the Probes and Crimson Lance and Drifters and Cheta Paws...well, it just makes it GODDAMN ANNOYING! The Secret Armory of General Knoxx is little more to me than excruciating TEDIUM!
And for what? To use a Monster to do half of my killing because everything can wreck your shields and health in just a couple of hits? Like I said, I'm up for a challenge. What I'm not up for is KNOWING that I am 2 or 3 levels HIGHER than an enemy, but he's still wrecking me the same as he was a couple levels ago. Despite my upgrades, despite my use of skill points, death comes about every minute in this DLC, and it's got me to that I feel like using a dull spork to turn myself into a eunich would be more fun at this point. AND I HAVEN'T EVEN GOTTEN TO CRAWMERAX YET!!!
"But Josh, are you playing with a group?" No, I'm not playing with a group, and I shouldn't have to play with a fucking group. The whole purpose of vanilla Borderlands was that the enemies came out in higher numbers and were more powerful based on how many people were in your party. This meant that you COULD solo the game without being penalized for it. In Secret Armory, it feels as though you are punished every minute for not having a party member. Maybe my friends don't have the DLC, jackasses. Maybe I don't want to jump online with a bunch of random fucktards ninja-looting whatever they can and generally pissing off with their wank pearlescents or whatever.
I can only hope that Gearbox will get some more DLC out soon enough that will turn my opinion around about their ability to create decent DLC. Until then, I'm going to grind through Knoxx, then grind through Underdome, and then forget the game exists.
That's all for this week, folks. Until next time, piece!