Uninteresting $#!% #4
By jakob187 9 Comments
Hey folks. I'll be honest - didn't think I was going to have shit to talk about this week. I pretty much just played Blur over the last week, as well as S ranked Castlevania: SOTN. You know, it's amazing how much shit a person can remember about a game after not playing it for about 10 years. I did have to look up the fastest path to get Richter through to the inverted castle and kill Shaft, and funny enough, I found a video of a guy doing it in 8 minutes! It just made me realize that I need to get back on Doom and Doom II for some S ranks. Anyways, I ended up renting Transformers: War for Cybertron...so now I have something to talk about...
YOU FOOL! USE THE DARK ENERGON!!!
As a long-time G1 fan of Transformers, War for Cybertron wasn't a hard sell. Just throw out the words "Starscream defecting from the Autobots and the fall of Iacon" out there and see what G1 nerd doesn't attach themselves to it like a leech to a wound! The prospect of the game being high quality was made more evident by the fact that High Moon Studios, responsible for the underappreciated shooter Darkwatch, had my hopes up pretty high.
Going over to multiplayer, the previous statement of "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, FUCK SCOUTS" will ring true. While there are a fair number of objective game types to play (based around the usual objective game mode archetypes), the majority of the people are in the Team Deathmatch playlist. One nice thing is that you can choose whether you want to select games by Regional or Worldwide connection status. This is important, because in order for me to get into a match, I had to try connecting at least six different times before it finally put me in a game...that disconnected me right after the game was finished. I checked this with other Xbox stations, as well as my brother's Xbox, and it was the same case. Given that the game just recently launched and a big ticker scrolling across the main multiplayer menu stated that a patch was on the way, I'll assume High Moon is aware of the situation. After getting into some multiplayer matches, though, frustration quickly set in. You've got four classes, but the only two that seem to matter are Scout and Soldier. Well, that's what every seems to play at least. With Scouts, you can just transform into your fast little car, roll up on someone, un-transform, shoot your Scatter Blaster shotgun, then melee and move on to the next one. At least, that's how I kept getting killed. The few times that I did this with a scout, it worked pretty much exactly like that. Soldiers have a whirlwind ability that is basically a big "oh, so you wanna get close and shoot at me, then FUCK YOU" button to press. There are also Leaders and Scientists, which both have some advantages. Scientists can turn into jets, which means you can get pretty high up on some maps in inconspicuous locations and snipe everyone down. I don't remember the Leader class very well, so I won't bother to comment on them, but rocket launchers of some sort were involved.
- The hit detection is a bit loose on both single and multi player. This causes a problem specifically in single player, where ammo can get pretty damn scarce in the higher difficulty and you might have to be plowing some fucking shots into an enemy to down them (turret-wielding Autobots come to mind immediately).
- The levels are uninteresting. For a series that had so much color to it, Unreal Engine 3 sure knows how to lose so much of it and make this look drab and uninteresting. The single player just feels like you are passing through random hallways until you get to a big room, then more hallways to another big room. With the multiplayer, the maps feel very generic at first, but they can quickly become familiar with a little more play time.
In short, Transformers: War for Cybertron isn't the big surprise I was hoping for like Batman: Arkham Asylum. That doesn't mean it's a disappointment at all either. It's merely average. If you are looking for a good rental and something to kill your time with, this is the game for that. Don't expect it to blow your mind, and if it does, more power to ya. Any G1 fans that are looking for the story behind this might also wanna check it out, but I emphasize the word "check" in that statement. You can also CHECK it out by using this thing called "the internet".
I Still Can't Believe It's Not Mario Kart!
Last time on Uninteresting $#!%, I spoke about Blur, the latest racer from Bizarre Creations. Specifically, I pointed out that I liked the game quite a bit. This is not a follow-up to say "now I don't". It's more a follow-up to say "this game is good, but my interest is waning". After really digging into it, there are a lot of genius things behind Blur, but there's also a handful of issues that have risen from the car-part-strewn raceways. I'm not a big fan of the ability for players to use incredibly powerful mods against lower ranked players. While we could easily counter this by saying "well, Modern Warfare 2 lets you use mods that are higher end than others", it's not quite the same as Blur. One of the match types is called "Motor Mash", which is basically a destruction-derby-styled match type. One of the higher end mods (definitely past the level 25 point of multiplayer) is the ability to make your mines fragment on the road, covering a wider range. The basis of Motor Mash is that you are scored on how many hits you get on people. This one power-up absolutely OPs the fuck out of any higher-ranked player, and in turn, it leaves the lower-ranked players frustrated because they simply cannot compete. Essentially, it forces the playlist to be a lot like it is on a regular basis - filled with about 20 people and barely active. Meanwhile, the single player has proven to be quite the challenge...like, Midnight Club LA before the patch difficult...even on Easy!!! It's not necessarily that Bizarre Creations created good AI, although in some cases they really did. It's solely because of rubberbanding, a practice in racing games that allows players further back in the pack the ability to "rubberband" and move up with small assists and such.The one great thing about Blur, however? The achievements. Many find achievements to be ho-hum and stupid, but the multi-layered achievements in Blur really offer a nice challenge for us honest achievement whores.
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That's all for this week. Hopefully, I can grab a copy of Singularity at some point this week and check that out.
Until next time...piece.