It’s boring AND pointless, even beyond the norms of most MMO games. Maybe that’s an unfair comparison, since this isn’t a game in any way.
Imagine, if you will, that Yahoo’s dubious groups were vomited into a 3d… presentation I guess since it isn’t a game and realm sounds way too grandiose.
The first Vampire The Too Long Title game for the PC didn’t sit well with me. I’m sure it had something going for it, but it wasn’t anything going for me. So, this game went past me totally unnoticed. Lately I’ve seen some forum posts reminiscing about it, and thought, what the heck, let’s try it out.
The game is about 4 years old now, and is based on the Source Engine, the same engine behind Half Life 2. While HL2 looks amazing, this game… well… doesn’t. The models all look pretty good, and thanks to the engine the facial expressions are great, but the textures are all rather bad. The artists put a lot of work into the faces, probably because they had to, but generally every other texture in the game makes it feel more like Deus Ex or Half Life. This isn’t a deal breaker, but knowing what the engine can do, and knowing that White Wolf could afford more/better artists, it’s a little sad. I’m sure it’s a release time issue, especially considering the game is unstable as hell. Everyone has awful hair.
The voice acting is surprisingly good. You don’t get a voice, despite interacting with dialog, which is distracting but sort of par for the course. Options to seduce, intimidate, and… whatever… are denoted by a color and style scheme. It looks goofy, but it’s useful for knowing, at a glance, how that option is going to play. Still, if a player can’t tell the difference between seduction and intimidation, fire a writer.
You build your character very much as you do in the pen and paper game, though with a lot fewer points. Except for Disciplines, your powers, which you get an extra point for. It’s pretty flexible, and, to me at least, easy to grasp. So far the game gives you a lot of ways to solve problems, and plenty of opportunities to flex your array of skills. I’ve even intimidated passerby into giving me money, which was fun.
There’s two limiting factors to how brutal you can get. Humanity, and The Masquerade. You start with 7 points of Humanity. As that lowers, your character might freak out and randomly attack people on the street, leading us to The Masquerade. There are laws to vampire society to prevent you from causing human-kind to become too interested or knowledgeable about vampires, aka- The Masquerade. You start with 5 Masquerade points, and if you lose them all, it’s game over. Humanity can be gained by doing charitable things, such as saving a person, which is nice because you can then game the system to kill that bum, because you have some padding.
Combat isn’t super, but it’s not bad at all. All of my powers feel useful, even the stupid ones, and the combat pace is just right, so far, to let you manage them pretty easily. It could definitely benefit by lifting more ideas from Deus Ex, in that a paused screen for selecting active powers and equipment would be real handy, but so far it’s not an issue.
Anyway. I’m pleasantly surprised, and we’ll see if it keeps giving.
So, I picked up Chromehounds, since Aaron decided to get a 360, and I lust for mech combat.
I’ve completed all but the final single player mission, which I haven’t even looked at yet. More on that later.
It’s from… uhh… From Software, the guys behind the Armored Core line. There’s definitely some similarities, but it’s more of an underlying philosophy than anything specific.
Points of similarity-
Customizable mechs
General control scheme is very similar
Overall look of the models
It diverges pretty wildly though. AC has always been a fast moving game, with a very ninja robot feel. Even the slow mechs could boost along at pretty high speeds. This game feels more like a conventional armored column. Combat is intense, but not terribly fast in any sense. Even the fast machines feel more like jeeps than, say, a spaceborne rocket. Pretty much everything is earthbound, though there’s a component to let you hover for a few seconds, it isn’t anything like the boosters in AC.
There’s a ton of intelligence gathering and disruption options. Mechs only get a radar image of very close targets that are on the move, except for the commander, who can see any unit positions within the network area you control. Missions can happen at night, and unlike most games that can mean damned near pitch black. You have a headlight you can turn on, but all that really does is mark you as desperate or retarded. To this end, you can equip a flare launching mortar, or nightvision.
The flares are awesome. Not only do they show off the studly lighting effects, but targets within the flare radius will show up on your radar, and the flares are up long enough to actually be useful.
The nightvision is also great, but obviously only helps out one guy. Also, like real nightvision, it isn’t really as useful as, say, a small sun illuminating the hostiles.
The maps have COMBAS towers, which create the network area. Units outside of the area lose communications, and towers are captured by standing next to them for 10 seconds. The commander equips a portable version, enabling them to keep the shit together. There are also jammers, so your scouts can play hell with the enemy line.
Blah blah blah, I fucking love the game. The single player is just training, and a way to get parts, before you go online and, presumably, get your ass handed to you over and over. The parts are what keeps me from that final mission. See, and S rank gives you more parts, so I’m redoing every mission I didn’t already get an S in.
More after I’ve drank enough to go online.
I was struck by an idea for a Castlevania game the other day. One set in the future, with a bunch of new set material and whatnot.
Naturally I talked to my buddy Art about this, since he lives console games of all sorts. He informed me that Aria of Sorrow is in the future.
I was taken aback. I’ve even played part of the game! What the hell? Surely he’s wrong!
No. So I dug further. The game adds a pistol, and in Boss Rush a rifle. That’s the only difference between it, and previous incarnations. This made me look even deeper. I suddenly realized, and it made me feel slow that it’s taken this long, that since Symphony of the Night, those bastards at Konami have just copied and pasted the game over and over. Sure, dialog changes, but it’s usually just the same crap you’d get from bad (aka most) anime. Some, precious few, weapons get redefined. Bosses change in one way or another. That’s it! The MAP hasn’t changed in like 7 years. It’s a magical castle, you can do what you want with it. The basic enemies don’t really change either, and, most importantly, neither does any significant gameplay.
So. I’m going to re-write my idea to not have anything to do with it.
I’ve played games that were longer.
Games that were more involving.
Games that had more variety.
But none of them were that disturbing and funny. And though I mention variety, I can’t properly express the sheer awesomeness of the game. It has the reverse problem of Shoot ‘em Up, in that no matter how I describe it, it sounds boring. A straight linear game where you don’t shoot anything. That’s an eye catcher.
The game is short. I’d say 3 hours is a fair estimate, though you could hone yourself into some kind of retard ninja and do it in 2. Yet, it is damned near worth the price, all by itself.
Here’s hoping for a sequel.
The cake is a lie.
I never expected it to be good, but I was still disappointed. We were promised fairly free and open gameplay, and instead I was directed everywhere and had, at most, the choice to follow the direction or look at areas with absolutely nothing worthwhile in them that led to absolutely nowhere else.
Sure, it looks good, but I even take some exception with that. In the first videos I saw, it seemed to me that you may as well be a generic magic user in some sort of twitch game. Like Oblivion. The character waves his hand around, and depending on what power is equipped different colored lights or fairy dust fly off his hand, causing some stuff to happen. No real physical change is perceived, but suddenly fire and lightning squirt from your limbs.
In the demo, you get your first power from a syringe you find laying around. Apparently you’re supposed to be the world’s most frightening junkie, because you just immediately cram this unknown thing from an obviously messed up place into your tender surfaceworlder flesh. Then bam, lightning fist, with nary a change in complexion.
I’d like to have seen some physical change, possibly with detrimental effects if I switch back and forth a lot. The option to carry a couple of things rather than immediately shoving them into my body would be nice too.
Ah well. It was to be expected.
So, I just finished playing the first couple levels of a game called El Matador. I’d never heard of it, like ever, but saw the title and decided to try it.
You play some sort of DEA officer, starting in Miami and quickly moving on to Colombia. The game was listed as “stealth action”, but they must have a different definition of stealth than I do. Perhaps theirs is more along the lines of “shoot waves of people”. Anyway, it’s a 3rd person shooter.
It actually looks pretty good, and runs pretty well even on my aging system. The shadows are very granular without AA, so you should try to run it with that on.
The controls are pretty standard, but could have used a few extras. Namely, leaning and a freaking flashlight. I usually have a flashlight, and I’m not hunting armed retards in dark hallways.
The game features bullet time, implemented almost identically to Max Payne. It isn’t as useful as Max’s, but the gauge refills pretty quickly. You start off with a pistol of some kind and an AK. I found the choice of the AK odd for an American force, but what the hell do I know? The first room isn’t too hard, but there’s a lot of shooting and none of the hand holding typically found in any game these days. So, that’s good so far. Assault weapons, straight into action, and the ability to slow it down to line those shots up. Nice.
Then I started dying. A lot. So did my men, but they can only kill a guy if they’re all shooting at him for about a minute, so, ya’ know, that’s negligible. The guys shooting were plenty challenging, all on their own, but it was the grenades that almost made me not want to see the next stage. I can understand a group of hardcore criminals having between, say, 1 and 6 grenades, but an unrelenting barrage of them is unacceptable. And they’re cripplingly powerful, destroying legions of men. Until I get one, then they’re like K-Mart grenades or something. Maybe my cop hands are all sweaty and the moisture reduces their strength. I don’t know.
Eventually I make it through the death zone and end up under the building, which was a club of some kind. The dispatch lady is all freaked out, saying “We don’t have any floorplans for beneath the building!”, which was retarded since it isn’t like I had a map or guide of any kind up to this point. Oh, and the voices aren’t that bad, but the dialogue is best left to the imagination.
So, kill more dudes, get more ammo. There’s some kind of boss battle with a guy in a stairwell. Wasn’t all that hard and I got a machine gun out of the deal.
More dudes. Find some chick, leave the other cop with her. Fight another boss. This guy was King Hippo tubby, but running around like a meth-chicken, so I unloaded the machine gun on him.
So on. Find a dead DEA team at the bottom of what appears to be a well. I can only imagine that the script of the game punished them into self-awareness, and into the merciful arms of group suicide.
Last boss battle for the intro level. This guy is a skinny, sort of fruity albino man in a white suit, with a pretty ordinary looking pistol. Thus far it takes at least 4 uzis or better to take me down, not that such a situation is rare or anything. Still. He leans around the corner (that bastard is rubbing it in my eye!), and shoots. All of my armor evaporates. What the hell? Who made this gun? Satan? God himself? Is this man the chosen one gone wrong? Whatever the case I end up quickloading time after time. Finally the AK of Justice and all 5 of my sad grenades take him down.
Then you go to Bogota for some reason, and inevitably end up shooting a lot of people. The dialogue here is awful, but the action has been less annoying.
Pros-
Cheap. You can grab this thing for like $6 off Amazon. No, I’m not linking to it, find it yourself.
Entertainingly fast paced, very arcade style gameplay.
Cons-
Very arcade style. You die constantly.
Can’t lean, so you have to do special dances with the mouse to see exactly how many dudes will be killing you.
When you reload a save, your weapons always default to burst fire. Seeing as burst fire makes you a millionty percent less accurate, this is not something I desire.
Anyway, if you’re bored and come across this title, try it out. If you crave hearing lines that make the latest Die Hard sound like, well, a somewhat better movie, then feel free to order it. I think there’s a demo out there somewhere too.