#12 – Silent Hill: Homecoming (X360)
I love the Silent Hill series. My first one was Silent Hill 2 on PS2. It was an amazing experience and I've been a fan ever since. That said, Silent Hill: Homecoming probably holds the record for the longest period of time it's taken me to finish a Silent Hill game.
I spent the last four hours (or so Katie says) playing it and though at first I was frustrated with it (for it's lack of health items and somewhat steep difficulty), I can safely say there's nothing really inherently wrong with Silent Hill: Homecoming. It doesn't have a godawful long escort mission like The Room did. The combat is a little more involved than previous games but not to the point of turning Silent Hill into River City Ransom. There's some fresh new enemies, and that ol' chestnut Pyramid Head makes a couple of cameos. He just pops his big old head in, does something fucked up, and ducks out.
I suppose my biggest complaint about it is that it's kind of boring. The enemies don't come off as scary more than they do annoying. There's a spider thing that is an utter pain in the ass as you need to duck and dodge his attacks and he's CONSTANTLY blocking yours. You encounter more living people in this Silent Hill than any of the others, yet none of them really contribute much.
The game has a couple decision points where what you choose determines the ending you get. They occur late in the game and if you save before the first one, you can revert back to that save and you'll only have to redo the last two hours of the game to get the majority of the alternate endings and then there's one more for finishing the game on Hard difficulty. I may have the gamerpoint greed to see the low hanging fruit (the decision point endings) but I probably don't have it in me to grind through the whole game again to see that Hard difficulty ending.
I won't play the Rate Silent Hill Games game because I haven't played the first three in so long but I'll put Homecoming above The Room but definitely below 2 and maybe below 1 and 3. It's a good game if you're a fan and you can get it for cheap.
#11 – Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (PC)
This is an expansion pack. Does this count? Sure!
Though I've finished Doom 3 around four times, this is only my second time finishing Resurrection of Evil. It took even more tweaking to get running than Doom 3 did. For weapons it adds the grabber (a gravity gun) and the double-barrel shotgun. For monsters it adds the Forsaken (it's an original Doom lost soul), the Vulgar (it's an imp, and basically replaces the imp in every occasion) and the Bruiser (the size of a hellknight, shoots like a mancubus). It replaces the soulcube with the hellstone, which accumulates abilities like invulnerability as you beat bosses.
The grabber feels like a lost opportunity. RoE sticks to the Doom 3 formula of straight forward demon shooting so doggedly that it can't toss in a physics puzzle or any other use for the grabber besides tossing boxes and barrels at demons or catching projectiles and tossing those instead. So, given an opportunity, I prefered to use the grabber to save on ammo.
The hellstone by the end of the game basically becomes thirty seconds of god mode, as you're invulnerable, do way more damage, and everything else is moving in slow-mo. Until that point, I barely used it. Between the grabber and the double-barrel I felt I had enough firepower to deal with anything. It's at the end when they're tossing three revnants and two hellknights at you at once that you feel the need for that thirty seconds of god mode.
There's nothing new in the games' environments. Dig site, tech base, hell, they're all there. There's less monster closests, which is appreciated, and more demons that teleport in at will, which is not.
As far as expansions go, this one's not bad. It's more Doom 3, which I liked, with a couple new toys and a couple new targets and not much else.
I WAS RIGHT
This weekend news sites started to report that the governor of South Carolina was missing. His family, his friends, his staff, no one knew where he was. He didn't leave anyone in charge, just disappeared. Yesterday his office said that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail alone. Apparently not unheard of as he's done such things before but he usually told someone where he was going first.
In class we talked about it and speculated. I threw out there that he was off with a load of cocaine and hookers. We all had a good chuckle, blow and hookers is a good easy laugh, and went about our day.
It turns out I was closer to the truth than I thought. He was in Argentina, being "unfaithful to his wife". Piss test this man. I guarantee he'll come up hot for cocaine. What did I tell them? Cocaine and hookers. No one disappears for a weekend without telling anyone without good reason. Cocaine and hookers.
#10 – Wolfenstein 3D (XBLA)
I guess you can get simpler in gameplay than Doom 3. No updates were made to this XBLA port of a 17 year old game, just shooting nazis in pixelated mazes. I played through every single level, on Bring 'Em On difficulty (that's one short of I Am Death Incarnate), and I may never play this game again. Six episodes, with ten levels per episode, makes for one long game. Here's some dead simple notes on each episode:
- Hans Grosse is harder to kill now that I'm older than 8 years old.
- Zombie nazis can eat my balls. Fuck this episode!
- Mecha Hitler.
- Completely forgettable.
- THE BEST EPISODE. Simple-ish levels with lots of nazis to mow down!
- FUCK THIS EPISODE. Hell-ish levels, lots of those damned fast nazis, nowhere near enough ammo. Imagine every step is at an intersection. To either your left or right is a nazi. Or both. You have to crawl through each step because if you run through, a nazi is going to step out and shoot you in the face. This is the first four levels of this episode! I HATE IT.
#9 – Doom 3 (PC)
This may have been my fourth time playing through Doom 3. It's barely compatible with Vista and took entirely too much work to get running the way I wanted but it works. It still looks amazing, with the exception of some blurry textures particularly on other people in the game. As far as gameplay goes, it can't get much simpler than Doom 3. Shoot demon, collect ammo, open door, end level. There's not a ton of variety to it and that's probably one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. When all you want to do is shoot stuff in a beautiful, tense environment, you can't get much better than Doom 3.
The downfall of disc based media in video games
No one keeps the case, art, or manual. If my searches on ebay and amazon.com are any indication, nearly everyone buys their game, throws out the packaging, and lightly scratches the disc but keeps the game in perfectly playable condition.
This really sucks. To those of us insane enough to care about the details such as packaging, as time goes by our selection of buyable games will continue to diminish. Thanks to others' lack of concern, the prices of complete games will artificially jump up just for the fact of having the whole game in one piece.
What is so hard about keeping the game in the case with it's manual? It makes sense! It's one package that keeps the disc safe and the manual handy in an attractive package!
I have a good excuse
For not posting recently. You see I've been playing this two year old game. Maybe you've heard of it. It's called Team Fortress 2.
When I got The Orange Box two years ago, I got it for Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. I had probably about zero interest in Team Fortress 2. I had never played the original Team Fortress, nor Team Fortress Classic, and multiplayer gaming isn't really my thing. Now I've heard the heaps of praise given to TF2. I tried to block it all out, because it's just another multiplayer game I won't get into like Counterstrike. Until I really knuckled down and played it about a week and a half ago.
I had an absolute fucking blast. It's amazing! There's not a lot that I can say that hasn't already been said. Valve put so much effort into the details of the game that it's always fun. Each class is balanced and full of character, the action is fast without being spammy, and it's nearly impossible to be a true burden to your team if you're at least playing the game. I could probably go on and on about it.
So if you're one of those people like me who have thus far only enjoyed two-thirds of The Orange Box, jump into TF2. Play the classes, find one you like, get good at it. Play on public servers, there's rarely any bad ones. Get a headset, it helps with teamwork! Add me to your friends, I'm emnii, we'll shoot dudes, or each other, it'll be great!
wolf3d.exe
Wolfenstein 3D was released on XBLA today. I downloaded Doom while I was at it and even though they made no changes to either game at all, they still hold up today. I had nearly forgotten how intense playing the original Doom on Ultraviolent difficulty is and it's been ages since the last time I played Wolf3D. I don't even think I've ever played Wolf3D on anything but the easiest difficulty, it has been so long. Zombie nazis on the second episode are giving me so much hell that I get excited when I find some regular nazis because they're easy targets. Hans Grosse utterly destroyed me the minute I opened his door.
The music and sounds in the game are so memorable that I can hear them even when the game is off and they will probably be the lullaby that puts me to sleep tonight.