#24 – 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (X360)
Yep, that 50 Cent. This game was far better than it probably had to be. It's an inappropriately competent Gears of War clone. Compared to the last 50 Cent game, Bulletproof, Blood on the Sand is nearly a masterpiece. It's fun, looks good, and plays well. It's basically everything Bulletproof wasn't.
Now I'll either go back to playing Bionic Commando (which is decidedly less fun than Blood on the Sand) or I'll go back to Condemned 2.
#23 – Borderlands (X360)
Borderlands is awesome. I'm still playing it, to fill out the achievements. The four player coop works so well, I can play with random strangers with no voice communications and it's basically impossible to not have fun. The AI kind of falls apart in live coop though. Playing alone, I was always mobbed. Often enemies would spot me well before I'd spot them. Playing on Live, there were a lot of instances when I'd walk up to a couple of enemies, blast them to death, and move on without a single reaction from them.
Also, the ending is a whole big bag of what the hell is going on here. Seriously. I honestly hope I missed something along the way.
#22 – Crysis Warhead (PC)
One good turn deserves another, right? Hey! Crysis was awesome! Crysis Warhead is also awesome! My biggest complaint is that there's literally too much story. The protagonist in Crysis was a faceless (but not voiceless) dude who ran around and defeated the North Koreans and invading aliens. The game was the story. Warhead suffers from side characters who are meaningless to the game, whom you never get attached to, and are too much the focus of drawn out cutscenes. I would've been much happier if the game took the approach of "Here's Psycho, remember him from the Crysis? Here's what he did on the other side of the island! He kicked ass and brought back a dead alien." and left it at that.
But that's really my only complaint. The action ramps up much faster in Warhead but that's most likely the result of the devs expecting you've already played Crysis and thus were already adept at switching suit modes and exploiting your own style of gameplay. There are a couple of not-exactly-on-rails segments which are fantastic, in particular a train that you are free to hop off of whenever you like, if you feel like hoofing it back to where ever it went, through North Korean checkpoints and machine gun nests.
Crysis Warhead has a couple more weapons, seven more missions, and Korean train full of action. Just skip the cutscenes and you'll be in for a fantastic six hours.
#21 – Crysis (PC)
I didn't see this one as my next finished game but here it is. Last weekend it was on sale on Steam in a $30 pack with Crysis Warhead. When Crysis was released two years ago it had the reputation for being a game with system requirements ahead of its time. Without spending an exorbitant amount of money, no desktop machine could run it on full detail at a decent framerate. I knew mine couldn't so I decided I'd wait till the day came when I could.
I'm proud to say Xerxes 3 handled it like a champ and it only suffered some slowdown during some very intense fights with the aliens at the end. The game, even by today's standards, is absolutely gorgeous. No game, except for maybe Far Cry 2, comes close to looking as good as Crysis. It is an absolute monument to PC gaming superiority.
The whole game is absolutely balls out insane. You run around in a nano-machine powered super-suit, killing North Koreans, blowing shit up, and then fighting off aliens. It ramps up from sneaking around in the jungle, escaping patrols, to assaulting enemy fighting positions and rolling through their battlespace in tanks, to grabbing some sci-fi weaponry and blasting aliens. It just gets more and more intense as it goes along. I've read a lot of complaints about the last sections of the game, in which you're fighting just aliens, as being boring and too straightforward. Straightforward yes, but definitely not boring. It just happens to be a rather sudden shift from sneaking and scouting to running and gunning.
I've got Crysis Warhead queued up and downloading. I'm going to be playing more Left 4 Dead 2 in the meantime, and maybe finish Borderlands.
#20 – Dead Space (X360)
Last night I beat Dead Space. I don't know why I waited so long to get it. It's exactly the kind of game I get hooked into and don't want to stop playing. That's also the third game of the five I bought last month that I've finished. The only two left now are Far Cry 2, which I'm halfway through, and Red Faction Guerrilla, which I've barely started because I've been spending all my 360 time on Dead Space.
I used to buy every "good" game that came out, unless it was a sports game, and I'd play them for about an hour or until I got stuck and I'd shelve it. I've got mounds of games that are technically fantastic and I'll never finish them. Because they're not my type. I have learned now that I have a specific type of game. There are certain genres that when presented alone, or sometimes merged with other genres, that I will play right through. Sometimes regardless of whether or not they're worth playing.
And my wallet has suffered for it in the past. I'm usually rather good about waiting until a game goes on some insane sale before I get it though sometimes I'd buy a title outright that I had no business in buying. I think if I finish all five of these games I'll have shown to myself that I know what I like. Even if I only manage to get four of the five (because Red Faction Guerrilla might get dropped), I'll at least be able to say I'm familiar with what I like but need to work on my spending control.
Here's some games that I may recognize as "OMG AWESOME" but I'm never buying (unless they're ultra cheap, or gifts): Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, any future Grand Theft Auto, any Final Fantasy.
I may not get Dragon Age, even though it's awesome, because it's a Bioware RPG and even though I love Bioware RPGs, I've only beaten one of them. I'm getting Borderlands, even though it's a loot game, because it's a first-person shooter.
Anyway, I'm rambling now. Point is, some video games are awesome but I don't need to own them. Some video games are awesome, and I love them. Some video games are garbage but I love them anyway because they're my type.
#19 – TimeShift (PC)
I don't know how I made it through this one. I'm going to gloss over the technical details so I can get to why this game really pisses me off.
It's visually competent even though everything has a plasticky look. All the weapons sound weaker than they should and halfway through you get a crossbow that kills every enemy in one shot. Combined with the ability to slow and pause time, this is basically god-mode. Even though it starts out kind of rough (lots of enemies, weak weapons), this one weapons eliminates nearly all difficulty in the game. There's four types of enemies. In the entire game. Everything takes place in dirty brick buildings. This is the most mediocre first-person shooter I have ever played.
This brings me to the crux of my disappointment in this game; its blatant disregard for the materials it centers itself around. This is a game where you play a nameless guy in a prototype time-travelling suit. Your boss takes off with the first prototype to go back to 1939 (???) and use his advanced technology to install himself as a Hitleresque fascist dictator. You take off through time after him only to have your prototype time-travelling suit damaged in the landing, which results in your quest to track down the big bad guy to get a piece off of his time-travelling suit to send yourself back to your own time. Along the way you help the local resistance overthrow their oppressors through your localized ability to pause, slowdown, and (sometimes) reverse time.
Okay, brain surgeons. When the bad guy, aptly named Dr. Aiden Krone (are you fucking serious?), takes his time-travelling suit to some random point in the past and radically alters the timestream that lead to the creation of his time-travelling suit, he creates a time paradox! Let's ignore that though.
So you have been building another suit through which to travel time. I guess if one time-travelling suit is good, two is better! You're violently thrown through time, and while you manage to mystically avoid reappearing in the timestream in a location free of materials dense enough to kill you outright, you're tossed like a rag doll into a wall that damages your time-travelling suit to the point of stopping you from further jaunts through time. From then on your suit is unaffected by bullets, rockets, exploding crossbow bolts, jolts of electricity, and balls of weaponized plasma.
In fact, your suit can still slow, pause, and when gameplay allows, reverse time! These are the skills you will absolutely rely on to survive your adventure to find Dr. Aiden Krone! These too, inexorably, damage the timestream and create paradoxes! When you reverse time to put yourself in a position you wouldn't be able to get to without reversing time, congratulations! You've just created a time paradox!
The story about what happened before Dr. Aiden Krone took off with his time suit is dribbled out in short (like 10 seconds) cutscenes that (often) interrupt the gameplay and occur with increasing frequency as you get to the end of the game. Apparently the nameless protagonist has been sleeping with one of Krone's female lackeys who has been leaking information on Krone's time suit to him. In the opening cutscene Krone disappears through time but not before he's planted a bomb in his old lab. The bomb explodes and you see the female lackey engulfed in flames and almost certainly dead.
Now spoilers follow but I guarantee I am doing you a favor if the story is the reason you're playing this. When you find Dr. Aiden Krone, he's piloting an enormous mechanical spider. Seriously. To destroy the spider, you have to blow up the plasma turrets on it's back and underside. With your guns. Once it comes crashing down you're treated to a cutscene of the nameless protagonist blasting Krone's brains out and taking the vital piece of the his time suit needed to return to his own time, which was helpfully taped to Krone's wrist. He returns to his own time with just enough time to see his lover destroyed, only to reverse time, disarm the bomb, and save her. In the absolute game's final slap to the face, the wrist computer on the protagonist's time suit flashes "PARADOX CREATED" and he flashes out of existence. WHAT??? In terms of the time-fuckery that this game commits, this is a relatively small infraction!
So here it is, don't play TimeShift. Especially if you've ever put a single brain cell into thinking about time travel. If you absolutely must play a first-person shooter, you can do much better but this will give you a weekend of "entertainment". Right now I'm trying to reverse time to prevent myself from buying this in the first place.
#18 – F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (PC)
I don't know why I waited so long to play this one. I love the original F.E.A.R. so you'd think this would've been a no-brainer.
F.E.A.R. 2 takes place concurrently (only for a short time) and during the aftermath of the first F.E.A.R. You play a SFOD soldier named Becket whose team is grabbed by Armacham, juiced full of experimental drugs, and then sent on a mission to stop Alma while chasing down leads on the how and the why of it all. You get the gist of the story in radio communications and in-game cutscenes but all the details are in logs scattered throughout the levels, similar to the first game but there's a lot of more of them this time.
F.E.A.R. had amazing graphics at the time and Project Origin doesn't disappoint. The effects are similar to the first game with lots of sparks and dust when the bullets fly. The best looking effects come when you're having hallucinations. Colors fade, return, your view goes blurry and sharp, lights flash on and off. It's impossible to describe effectively.
A big complaint about the first game was the lack of variety in environments. It was a lot of offices and industrial areas. Personally it didn't bother me much, but Monolith took it to heart. Of course there's more offices and industrial parks but there's also a school, a medical facility, research labs, and the destroyed streets of Auburn. You never feel like you're walking the same corridors over and over and no one environment really overstays its welcome.
F.E.A.R. 2 also has the same fantastic gunplay that the first game had. Enemies are quasi-intelligent in dropping for cover and flanking your positions. That said, on normal difficulty, the game never gets too hard. I don't think I died a single time. Between the abundance of armor and health packs, the whole game is just a little easy. The only nuance that threw me at the beginning is that when you hit the slo-mo button on and off, there's a little bit of a spin-up and spin-down. It was basically an on-off switch in the first game so having a second of delay really threw me off at the beginning.
My favorite part of this game were the areas where you get to stomp around in the elite power armor. It isn't just for the amazing amounts of firepower the elite power armor brings, or the carnage of the fights you get into with it, but the effects while you're in it. As it takes more damage, alarms scream, the screen gets distorted, and warnings flash manically. It's a hell of a lot of fun and really makes me clamor for Monolith to make good on the easter eggs it's put in recent games and make a sequel to SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, a mech game they made a decade ago.
There's no easier way to put it: F.E.A.R. 2 is an awesome first-person shooter. I played through it all in a single day, which is a task I don't think I've ever done. It's basically amazing.
#17 – Star Wars: Dark Force 2 – Jedi Knight (PC)
Jedi Knight is one of those games I would've been best off leaving in my memories of it. To say it has not aged well is an understatement. Some of these levels that I fondly remembered are absolutely godawful, in particular the last three and early Jedi levels. Though you get a lightsaber in this iteration and it does become your primary weapon through most levels, reflecting blaster fire with it simply doesn't work early in the game and late in the game it's still easier to use Force Pull to rip the weapon out of your enemies hands before you get shot up too bad than it is to reflect shots back at them till they die. The last boss was a total pain in the balls and left me with this sour feeling. I don't think I'll be playing Jedi Knight again anytime soon.
#16 – Star Wars: Dark Forces (PC)
I've said this before but Dark Forces is probably my favorite Doom clone. It brought the Star Wars universe with all its diverse locations and creatures into a two-and-a-half dimensional game with an engine capable of faking 3D environments and set pieces. It didn't and still doesn't get near enough respect.
Let's get the negatives out the way first. Though there are 10 weapons, nearly all of them fall into two categories; repeating lasers and explosives more likely to blow yourself up rather than the enemy. An enemy type, the Grans, are armed with their fists and grenades, and they throw those grenades with laser precision. They are easily the most annoying enemy in the game and they come in ridiculous numbers. One of the levels takes place on Jabba's space cruiser and that level is filled with Grans and nowhere near enough health or shields. The absolute worst level in the game is the third one, Anoat City. Really too early for a level as un-fun as Anoat City, which is a pain in the balls that begins with a switch-flipping sewer puzzle and ends with platform jumping followed by a swarm of health-sapping enemies. The whole level is filled with enemies of the health-sapping variety and by the end of it, after you've performed the olympic triple-jump marathon, you're either dangerously low on ammo or (in my case) completely out and stuck running a gauntlet to the end. And the final, minorest of quibbles, some of the level music (which is fantastic and ramps up appropriately when you're in the action) repeats itself.
Now that I've taken a dump on one of my favorite games, why don't we explore its merits! There's a fantastic variety to the levels. Imperial bases, desolate moons, hazy mines, scummy bars, and the ubiquitous ice planet are just examples. One minute you're crawling through a disgusting sewer and the next you're blasting stormtroopers in an Imperial detention facility. The variety extends to the creatures you encounter along the way. Of course there's stormtroopers and Imperial officers, then there's aliens, droids, and mindless monsters. You do spend an inordinate amount of time blasting stormtroopers and those damned Grans but the other enemies of the game are by no means underrepresented.
Though I list the lack of variety in the weapons as one of the game's detractors, the weapons all feel sufficiently destructive and Dark Forces has one of my favorite video game weapons of all time: the Stouker concussion rifle. It's one of the most powerful weapons in the game so you don't get it until you're three-fourths finished with it but when you do it's like the heavens open up and you can hear a choir of angels praising your new implement of destruction. It is neither repeating laser nor explosive. It's basically a rocket launcher, minus the rocket. You fire it, with an amazingly satisfying sound, and things in the distance blow up in a blast of white-blue. No projectile, just a flash and and explosion. If you fire it at something too close to yourself, it gets you too, but it's a risk well worth taking. You can clear whole rooms of enemies in one or two shots of the concussion rifle and while it only uses 4 units of ammo, it comes with 100 each time it's dropped. Oh yes, you get the Stouker concussion rifle only after feeling its effects a couple times at the hands of your enemies. I absolutely love this weapon and though it's been replicated in Jedi Knight and Jedi Knight 2, it never feels as good as it does in Dark Forces.
Dark Forces isn't all action and no brains though. There's a number of rather enjoyable level puzzles. Breaking out a prisoner in a maximum security in the Imperial detention and gaining access to an Imperial computer vault stand out as two of the better ones, though as said before, Anoat City has an absolutely ridiculous switch-flipping puzzle in the sewers and that one sucks.
Everything about Dark Forces feels right. The movement, controls, weapons, enemies, levels, even the lack of lightsaber. About the only thing missing is a multiplayer mode, which would've been awesome, but the game stands on its own without it. Any Star Wars or action game fan would be remiss to pass up playing through Dark Forces.
#15 – Ben There, Dan That (PC)
I'm not very good at adventure games. I bought this in a two pack with Time Gentlemen, Please on Steam for $5 on the Idle Thumbs' recommendation. I didn't quite know what I was getting into except that they were adventure games by indie developers that were rather good.
To be honest, when I fired it up the first time I felt like I'd been scammed. It opened in a small window with no apparent option to switch to fullscreen. There's sparse music but no voice-overs. The graphics and animations were very base and simple. Despite these, the game is absolutely charming. It's well-written, funny, and at times absurd. It's short and easy (remember, I suck at adventure games so if I beat this one, it must be easy) and completely enjoyable. I haven't touched Time Gentlemen, Please yet, but I feel I may have already surpassed an acceptable dollars-spent to entertainment-gained ratio.
I personally enjoy supporting "the little guys" when I can, apparently even to the point of buying two games I may not even finish, so if you're into adventure games and you have $5 to spare, you should probably check these out.