Thursday, December 6, 2012

Far Cry 3 and GOTY thoughts AKA rant

Still waiting on blops 2. Anyways, so I preordered Far Cry 3, and like the majority of the Internet, I am not disappointed. This is an easy pick for game of the year and I really hope it wins. It isn't exactly going up against a strong crowd. I might review the game later but right now I've gotta throw a 10/10 at it.

However there seems to be a hoard of fans praising The Walking Dead. Let me explain why these people, or yourself, are idiots. It's fine to like the game, I didn't, but it IS NOT by any means game of the year quality.

-The game is 5 hours long
-It wouldn't have sold or be nearly as popular as it is if it weren't for the TV show/Comic
-It's a point and click adventure, seriously.

Now, to go more in depth. Those are my simple reasons, but to really cut to the core I have to explain why the game absolutely in no way qualifies for a nomination let alone award. Let us start by saying what a good game is. See, the great thing about games is they are able to provide the visuals of a movie, the story of a book, an amazing soundtrack, an urge to continue playing and include you in it with fun entertainment. The Walking Dead succeeded in one of these categories. It failed EVERY single other aspect of what a game can be.

The Game of the Year is supposed to show what games can really truly be, and what they are. Art. 

The Walking Dead is ugly. I don't care if you like that shitty comic book style. It looks ugly, it is undetailed, still manages to have horrible res textures, lazy, and the characters are lifeless. The only time they actually show expression is overly dramatic.The game is also riddled with graphical bugs like flickering, missing models, sometimes causing input lag.

The gameplay is utter shit. Your choices barely matter, it's not fun to play. It's really damn annoying having to walk everywhere. Why can't Lee run? Why do I have to walk 2 mph to go examine something 30 yards away? The game is incredibly retarded with QTEs. Seriously, there are scenes where you could end up mashing a button for forever, when you're supposed to fail the event. Why the hell would you make an event that the player basically has to sit back for 20 seconds and watch themselves fail? And more often than not, when the QTEs are difficult, they're retardedly difficult with annoying death scenes. As someone who played RE4, I'm used to frustrating deaths, but they didn't go on for half a minute. What is this, Resident Evil 6?

The sound is a joke. Nothing sounds realistic, the soundtrack blows, the voice acting is hit and miss. Some characters sound like nearly robots (Hershel comes to mind) and others are decent or sometimes pretty good. But things like bashing a zombie's head in or shooting them leave a bit to be desired, not that you do it often. The soundtrack is awful, no reason to go into detail.

There's no replayability, the game barely makes your choices matter. It's not fun to see the exact same unavoidable scene twice. And at 5 hours long it just feels pretty meh. There's no shock or something the next time you try the game.

I didn't like the story, it felt silly and dragged out and poorly written to me. I know most of you reading this will probably completely disagree, but the Lee and Clem annoyed the crap out of me. I've never had such an unlikable character in a game before since Final Fantasy 10.

Far Cry 3 excels in every single area here. Maybe you'll be like me with TWD and not like the story, but you can't deny the impressive graphics, and the innovative gameplay. And for those who loved Skyrim, you'll be blown away by seeing a game can be both fun, and open world.

Friday, November 30, 2012

Far Cry 3

Some early thoughts. Probably going to review it, just need to make some time and get some inspiration. The game is amazing so far. I've been playing it for about 10 hours and have explored maybe a sixth of the island, and barely scratched the campaign.

The campaign isn't as good as I thought it'd be story wise, but it really shines during some missions. The gameplay is extremely well polished, it's just flat out fun hunting animals and killing pirates. I've actually chosen to travel on foot over car sometimes so I can hunt animals and kill pirates along the way. And unlike say, Skyrim, I don't use the fast travel the moment I get a new quest. Even if the new quest is right next to a travel point, I usually choose to travel there just because exploring is so much fun.

Although the game is shaping out to be a 9/10 or possibly a 10/10, I do have a lot of complaints, though all of them fairly minor.


-The controls are disturbingly poor sometimes. Why Ubisoft has issues with climbing in games I'll never know. I've fallen off radio towers and missed out on looting at least a dozen bandits because of the silly hold E thing they have.

-The UI is a little ugly. It's large and close to the center of the screen. And there's no in game map anymore. The game is less immersive than Far Cry 2 sadly. But that's a tough game to top UI wise. At least it's better than Skyrim's.

-The voice acting is hit and miss. The main character personally annoys me.

-Hunting is frustrating sometimes. It's annoying looking everywhere for an animal to hunt for a new holster. At least they let you carry 4 guns instead of the 2 guns thing games seem to embrace today.

-Some performance issues. I can run the game on medium/high settings okay, still a few FPS drops.

-Needs moar Vaas

-Hunting missions require you to use a specific gun for them. It's just a minor annoyance and they usually give you a good gun but come on.. I want to use the new AK-47 I just got, why are you making me use a shotgun?

-Check points can be frustrating

Oh, and black ops 2 will still be coming. Just waiting for a patch to fix my performance issues.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Sorry-Delay

I know I said I should have the video up today/tomorrow but I haven't even begun working on it in truth :V. I'm really sorry, I was completely spaced out this past week and then today I checked the calender and surprise... I'm now a year older.

Yeah, I actually forgot my birthday for a while there, but I promise I WILL start working on this soon. If anyone is curious or impatient enough I'm going to give a projected score of 9.6-8.8. Probably on the upper end of that scale. Yes, I like the new Call of Duty, yes, I'm aware it's the cool thing to hate it right now. No, I haven't bought every Call of Duty game and I haven't enjoyed every one.

Also I need to get some practice with my mouse, just got a new one from my sister and it's waaaaaaaay bigger than my old one. Also it's wired :(. Going to take a while to get used to aiming.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Youtube

I'll still be posting news here, but I'm going to occasionally be using http://www.youtube.com/user/deathguardian08/featured for some reviews. Just a heads up. Blops 2 review around the coming weekend.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Still Alive

I'm making a note here...

Sorry, I'm still alright and planning on working on this, been a little busy and unsure of what to review next though. MIGHT make a move to Youtube and do video reviews thanks to some suggestions, I need a way or someone to edit the videos though. And I still need suggestions for what game to do next.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Borderlands 2

Not much background info here. Pretty much everyone is aware of the first game.

Borderlands 2 is in the same setting as the first, on the world of Pandora. Thankfully, it doesn't reuse much at all level wise. Though there is one notable area fans of the first game will all remember very well. The game still has fairly diverse environments, with there being plains, deserts, and arctic zones. Overall the game has a bit more color to it than the first.

Graphically of course, they kept the shading effect, and did a great job with the UE3 lighting. Especially notable on the PC are the brilliant particle effects from weapons. And the phsyx features are fantastic.

Everything looks great in game, the new HUD is cleaner and animated now, the textures aren't uneven, though they still have that popin effect when you enter the area, Though now zooming in with a sniper rifle doesn't cause popins either thankfully. Texture wise all the problems the first game had are now fixed besides a few seams in the world. The animations all look great in first person. And some npcs look pretty cool doing unique actions.

Note, unlike the first game where he'd simply clip through the couch and disappear, bodies now ragdoll. Nice.


On the downside some stuff is missing detail, some npcs have faces that look like they were made in MSpaint. And the third person animations can sometimes remind me of Dead Island -shudder-. Most notably players still have some stiff animations such as jumping, sprinting, and weapon swapping.And the new menu UI is... not very optimal, a major issue being where you spin the mousewheel before moving your cursor over a gun, which will completely break that menu until you exit it and go back.

The gameplay is still solid, if anything it's vastly improved with many more unique guns both in looks and effects. Many more types of class mods and the skill trees are all a bit more unique this time around. The AI is improved in a lot of ways, though this also caused some VERY frustrating moments where I'd enter 'fight for your life' mode and have all the enemies hide behind cover. Does it make sense for enemies to hide? Yes. Is it fun when you're in the middle of a huge boss fight? No.

 The character building is pretty much the same besides there being new options, the game now has relics which are like class mods except without restrictions. There's some minor character customization, you can now change your skin and face/helmet to be a bit more unique. It's definitely better than the first, but it could still use some work. The level cap currently is 50 so unlike the first you won't be able to near fill all your trees leaving some very similar characters.
Badass Ranks are a little like skill points, and are shared between all characters. They really help with your build.


Quests are much, much, much better this time. Every quest has a voiced character and is pretty unique, much less of 'go kill this boss' that the first game kept throwing at you. And every quest is essentially guaranteed at least a chuckle, from the main antagonist paying you to kill yourself, to you collecting 'nudie' magazines for a certain mechanic. It actually made me want to go do side quests, though the game felt a little overwhelming when in the late game it constantly throw sidequests at you halting the main story's progression.

Sadly, the game doesn't hold the feel for a second run. Although that's possibly just me, it just felt somewhat like a chore to play through the game again with no new rewards (you'll get the same skins as your first playthrough) and nothing besides enemy levels changed. I'm trying to drag myself to play through as either a new character or work on my current one that I've beaten the game with. Although, this time the game comes with a Crawmerax styled boss, which I am very excited to try fighting.

Speaking of the story, it's much, much better this time around. It's actually very interesting and can make even single player fun to play through. Handsome Jack is probably one of my favorite antagonists, he's incredibly amusing, insanely manipulative, and just an overall douche. There are very few characters that can make you love them for half the game, then hate them the next. Well, that try to anyways.
Jack is a surprisingly unique villain, both in appearance and personality. Also yes, those character cards are back.
The only complaint I've been able to muster is the gunplay doesn't feel as good as a good number of the other FPS genre. I personally can't place it but it sometimes feels off. After plugging in a controller and playing around with it I noticed the vibration helped but still seemed like it was missing something. That's not to say it can't be fun, I quite enjoyed it most of the game, but there would be parts that felt a little tedious.

The sound is great. Guns sound powerful, melee sounds are good, the only complaint I have is I wish stuff like being lit on fire actually sounded like there was a fire. The main change you'll probably notice is the voice acting. It's just plain brilliant this time. They got rid of all the flat and mainly voiceless quest givers of the first, and kept the quests to the major characters, which all felt very unique and had great humor. Even your character will talk a lot (at least Zer0 did) and be fairly amusing. The voice acting is just, outstanding, easily one of the best casts in video game history.

In summary, Borderlands 2 is a direct sequel that will please the fans of the first and bring a few who disliked the first into the ring. The game proves that you can keep the formula similar and still keep the game feeling fresh, unlike several major game series that as of late have been going downhill. Borderlands 2 is simply more Borderlands, which is not a bad thing. The gameplay is a lot faster, the jokes are funnier, in general everything has been touched upon and improved. The game caps in around 32 hours and has plenty of large DLCs planned.

+The art style still works and looks great
+The characters are brilliantly done
+Stays true to the first, no fans should be disappointed
+Story is much much better
+The game is pretty long with some moderate replayability

-Loot system can slow down the game and be tedious
-Combat is still a little lackluster
-The game is still its best when played online

9.3/10

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Guild Wars 2


A mmorpg. A mmorpg without monthly fees. A mmorpg without grinding and no monthly fee. A mmorpg to slay off Blizzard's 'shall not be named' game? Perhaps.

Guild Wars 2 takes place in the classic mmo fantasy setting. Slaying, ogres, bandits, and dragons of course. While many people are sick of the fantasy theme many still quite enjoy it. I personally don't mind the setting, though it doesn't score it any points in my book.

Visually, the game is actually quite nice looking. I just barely can't run Guild Wars 2 on max and have to peg the rendering down to 'normal'. On the plus side, unlike many modern games, in particular rpgs, there are no muddy textures slapped next on to hi-res ones. At least none that I saw. On the downside, it still has the ugly (yet much smaller) hotbar we've seen over and over.
Chopping trees has never before been so pleasant to look at.
There are a few camera issues with some characters, some people have reported it causing annoyances with jump puzzles but I haven't missed any jumps that weren't a cause of me making a poorly timed jump. And there are some rendering issues as well engine wise but aren't too noticeable.

The story is quite good. It really seems to depend on what race you pick (yes, every race has its own fully voiced story) and a few choices. Personally I favor the Charr the most but I enjoyed Human as well. Your choices do matter a bit, though the general ending to the game is the same. I personally really quite enjoyed the voice acting as well, they even got the main character from 'The Guild' Felicia Day to voice one of the characters.

Gameplay wise I'd say it's great. Unlike a lot of other mmos you won't be standing still, doing nothing but watching your character attack is an easy way to get bombarded by mobs. The game really focuses on positioning, and the dodge in the game is quite useful and important. In fact, you can kill some quite high level monsters, even champions solo if you can time your dodging well.

Of course, one of the most important parts of a mmo, is the progression. The leveling system is amazing, it actually is pretty much the same curve all the way from 30 to level 80. Meaning almost every level from 30+ will take you roughly an hour and a half. And as a plus for some and minus for others, everything scales. When you're level 80 and go into a level 5 zone, you'll have stats similar to a level 5. The drops do scale to your actual level, which is nice, but also makes it somewhat questionable why you would ever want to kill monsters in higher level areas.

Of course, leveling in mmos has never been fun. Well, not until now anyways. There is no grind in Guild Wars, or rather, the grind is fully optional and discouraged. Killing mobs will grant very little XP and often common loot, while doing things like exploring (yes, you get xp for exploring the map) and doing events will reward you greatly. And of course, crafting is important in Guild Wars, though I managed to hit level 80 without actually making anything and just getting xp off collecting items. This of course, is going to bite me in the ass later when I want to create some of the better weapons in the game.

The combat is pretty dynamic and has plenty of things to mix it up. There's unique skills for being underwater, picking up an object, and your have your own two abilities for your offhand weapon. One of the cooler aspects of the abilities are the combos. Say, have a elementalist place a wall of fire on the ground and have an archer stand behind it shooting arrows through the wall at enemies will actually create fire arrows doing more damage and setting the monster on fire. It really encourages teamwork and makes every class viable.

Speaking of the classes, with no trinity class setup, no dedicated healers or tanks, you won't be kicked out of groups looking for priests here. There really is no way to just be a healer, since every class is actually able to heal themselves, what this means for the average mmo player is that no longer will you be able to be blamed for not healing, or not tanking properly. If you die, it's most often your fault. Of course, running headfirst into a huge group of monsters will probably still get you yelled at.

Some of the boss are really cool and unique. Notably in dungeons they'll often have some special bosses with abilities you won't see elsewhere in the game. In one instance you will fight an archer on a platform whom teleports as his hp drops. Stating he'd rather fight you face to face, he moves to the other platform and takes out his sword. It really helps mix things up, though oddly enough, some of the bosses in dungeons actually end up being easier than the waves of henchmen you'll slaughter your way through. Another complaint is the end game boss, which I'll leave the notes out for spoiler reasons, but I will say quite a few Redditors didn't enjoy it.

Skyrim ain't got nothing on this.


The downed system is one of the best innovations in a mmo I've ever seen. Much like Borderlands, when your hit points hit 0 you'll fall and enter a dying mode. Where you'll have a few moments to kill an enemy to get back up. Your friends can revive you (regardless of class, and they can revive you even if you're fully down) or you can heal yourself. With each class getting their own downed abilities. No longer will you die with a boss having that tiny sliver of HP left. Or die several seconds out of combat because of poison.

The downed system is actually quite fun. And you'll feel great when you get back up with just a sliver left.

Now, the monthly fee that has been a plague on just about every modern mmo. This fee essentially guarantees no cash shop which gamers today have come to dread. Guild Wars does indeed contain a cash shop, but the purchasable items are majorly for appearance and not much else. There are some fun items like a buyable 'cow drop' ability, which allows one to drop cows on opponents in pvp. There isn't anything super overpowered or 'pay to win' content in the store. Thanks to this, you don't need to feel obligated to play the game and can come back to it anytime. You're actually getting something when you buy this game.

I can't really describe this game in a short review, there's just too much to go over, but generally the game is just astounding. AngryJoeShow had a great review which can be found here .

+NO MONTHLY FEE
+Looks beautiful and just outstanding in some zones
+Plays unique, you won't be standing still watching cooldowns
+The combat is awesome, the downed system removes much of the frustration of other games
+Personal Story is great and even if you don't like the mmo gameplay the story can keep you going
+Events are interesting and there are enough to prevent grinding
+There's no tagging, this game shares xp and rewards, not punishing you for working as a team
+Tons of content for the price, easily comparable to skyrim
+Amazing soundtrack, by the same guy who made Skyrim's music

-No face to face trading?
-Players new to mmos may face some challenges getting into the game
-Still has the mmo feel to it. It's not going to fool anyone into thinking it's a normal RPG.
-Still relies on having a group of friends to play with, game can getting boring solo

10/10

The game isn't perfect by any means obviously. But the game has enough content and honestly a game no one should miss.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

I am Alive




Ah, this game. A 15 dollar price tag, an original premise, a hyped up release. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, besides the developer's 'Fuck You' to PC gamers, it switching hands mid development to Ubisoft, and basically being a game made in 2008 released in 2012 not much.

The game takes place in an apocalyptic city where you play as an unnamed protagonist whom of course has a family which is now missing which consists of a daughter and wife. Like we haven't seen this scenario in movies before.

Anyways, let's start with the appeal to our eyes, or rather, gray marker being jabbed into our eye sockets repeatedly.


If Fallout 3 bothered you with that nasty green tone, I am Alive will be much, much worse.


I don't understand the recent obsession in games today being brown and gray all over. This effect is not fun for people who like to play games for extended periods of time. Some people may defend this as being an 'art style'. The PC version has some minor flickering. And all this would be acceptable if not for the issue that the game has early 360 graphics. The AA is awful, and the game doesn't appear to take advantage of any of DX 10/11's features.

The animations are just flat out silly. At one point in the game you will carry a girl on your back whom doesn't move, at all. The running animations aren't great, when aiming your hand shakes but the gun magically stays still. The climbing is.. okay Occasionally the protagonist will speak without his mouth even moving.


Just a mess all around graphically, but more importantly, is the gameplay good?

Well that's a mixed answer, the game has climbing a little similar to Uncharted, except actually I'd say it's more interesting due to the stamina system. It's a little hard to see where you're going when you're climbing which is both nice and bad, it's incredibly frustrating when your health is slowly being drained by a dust storm and you are repeatedly dying without seeing a pipe to climb, but it's also nice that it isn't as obvious as Assassin's Creed.

The human interaction in the game is actually pretty interesting. I was fairly both impressed and amused by it, at first anyways. You start the game out with a pistol with no ammo. Eventually gaining new weapons such as a machete and bow. The game is by no means a shooter, so if you were expecting to be leaning out from walls to shoot mutants you're in the wrong place. Many of the characters in the game will be looters who simply want your gear, and there is occasionally a way to change up how to handle the situation.You can choose to let them approach you ready to pat you down for supplies and whip out your machete, or you can take out your gun and try to get them to surrender or tell them to back off to the edge of cliff and kick them off.

Although these are very cool ideas at first, it becomes extremely repetitive after a while. And it's more so frustrating when you attempt to save a bullet by killing someone with the machete but actually don't have it as a possibility since the developers decided you HAVE you shoot someone.

Now, if the checkpoints weren't occasionally awful and you didn't have a limited number of retries this wouldn't be so bad. And well, it's not quite as cool as it sounds.


Press 'E' to pull out your machete, then spam click 'LMB' to win the QTE. Fun Fun Fun.


Although I was highly amused the first encounter you have no ammo, and the man approaching you would back off if you pull your gun out. My game was bugged the first time and he wouldn't actually walk backtowards the pit, and I ended up pulling the trigger only to hear a 'click'. Where the looter would remark 'Hey, that's empty!' and proceed to chase me down and kill me with me not actually being able to do anything at that point.

The controls are a little awkward and feel like there's input lag on the mouse. But otherwise I had minimal trouble with climbing or fighting.

The Music is okay. It's nice sounding but it's just dumb having dramatically urgent music playing when I run around my apartment. The voice acting was fairly decent. I'd rate it at least above Skyrim's acting though that isn't saying much. The guns don't sound that nice, and cutting someone's throat with a machete shouldn't sound like scissors cutting paper.

The story kind of falls apart with no real premise. You kind of just end up like a teenager with ADD and wander around doing whatever is next. The ending wasn't that great, I won't spoil it if you plan on actually picking this up.

So, to wrap things up.

+The game is 15 bucks
+It has some original elements
+There aren't many PC games with decent climbing controls
+Can keep you interested just to see what you'll get to do next, spreads out new abilities well

-Ugly
-Story isn't strong enough to keep me playing just to see what happens
-Combat is silly
-Checkpoints can be unforgiving

6/10.