Dream of Waking

I beat it on Xbox 360, getting nearly all of the achievements. I beat the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned DLC. I quit on Mad Moxxi because that DLC suuuucked. But between the main campaign and Dr. Ned, I put a load of time into it.

I just beat it again on PC. 14 hours, 30 minutes. I just started Dr. Ned. Then I’ll do the Secret Armory of General Knoxx.

I’m still amazed by some of the weapons this game throws at me. A lot of them are garbage. Then you get something absolutely fucking magical. Like an accurate shotgun with high damage, fast reload, large magazine, and ammo regeneration. This is the gun that Zombie Island was made for. I can’t lose with this thing.

This game caught me by surprise. It didn’t get much hype and what it did get didn’t excite me. Crawling around in tunnels in the dark, who cares? Then I found out that the developers are the engineers who made S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which I loved. It got pretty positive reviews, with some complaints being about the difficulty and poor gunplay and dumb AI.

I’m pleased to report these complaints are mostly unfounded. Metro 2033 is a beautiful game with a strong narrative, even if Artyom’s motivations are somewhat unclear. I beat the game on normal difficulty without much trouble. The weapons in the game are no less responsive than those in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I knew from the start that bullets were currency in the game, and that crappy bullets existed, but I didn’t figure out how to use those crappy bullets until halfway through the game. The crappy bullets really are crappy, being much louder, less powerful, and more inaccurate. It really makes you value those money bullets and forced me to decide when it was worth shooting my money away.

Around the halfway mark, there’s a vendor who will sell you either heavier armor or stealthier clothing. I had spent nearly all of my good bullets on a better gun, which was poor foresight on my behalf because guns are everywhere. I was duly punished for it though, as I was never offered the opportunity to buy a different armor again.

I got Metro 2033 on sale, and it’s one of those games in which I wish I had bought it on release. The game is short, but it’s really immersive. I hope 4A made enough to keep developing, because I’ll definitely get their next title the minute it comes out.

Unlike a lot of people, I really enjoyed Doom 3. It’s a big departure from the first two in terms of atmosphere and gameplay, but it holds its own and looks good. I’m doing what feels like my yearly replay of it, except on Veteran (hard) difficulty and I feel like the increased difficulty is really exposing some of the less obvious flaws in the game. I may not even finish this playthrough.

Half of the enemies jump out of closets. It’s one of those obvious flaws that you learn about in the first 15 minutes of the game. On medium, it’s no big deal because you take a hit, turn around, pop them, and they die. On hard, you still take that first hit, and it’s always at least 15% of your health. So you can take two paths with it; you can keep rolling and slowly bleed out from repeated monster closets, or you can quick save after every fight and reload when you find a monster closet so you can better deal with it. It sucks.

Lost souls are the fucking worst. They were an annoyance in Doom 1/2 but never a real threat. In Doom 3, they’re tiny, they hit for at least 15%, they bounce out of the way if you hit them without killing them, and when they hit, your view moves. I died in the first encounter with lost souls. LOST SOULS. Flying, screaming skulls pecked me to death.

The shotgun, which sucks at any range beyond 1 meter in front of you, is the best weapon to kill them with because it’ll almost always kill them in one hit, except you have to wait until it’s charging at you and it’s right in front of your goddamned face before you can think about pulling the trigger. The shotgun only holds 8 rounds, and it takes forever to reload so you better not miss!

And let’s talk about how much the shotgun blows. The shotgun in Doom 1/2 is one of my favorite weapons. It is versatile and possesses a good amount of stopping power. The shotgun in Doom 3 is worthless beyond 1 meter ahead of you. If you are not jamming that shotgun into the bad guy’s face before you pull the trigger, you’re going to have to shoot them twice. That said, it will kill ims, soldiers, zombies, maggots, and those dumb teleporting things  in one shot, so what I’ve found myself doing is dancing around while they shoot at me, and then charging at them before I blast them in the face, then running backwards in case that first shot didn’t do the trick. It’s a huge letdown. It’s horrible. Thankfully the plasma rifle is even more awesome than it was in Doom 1/2.

Even playing on hard, Doom 3 is no more difficult. It is just more annoying. Playing it feels like work. I will probably abort this playthrough, and remind myself next time to play it on medium again, when the game is more fun.

I have finally, finally, finally finished Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. I missed the boat on this one when it was first released, picked it up from GOG when it was re-released there, got stuck finding an exit, and now I’ve cleaned it up. This is an old Monolith game, and it shows. It’s not as buggy as Blood 2, but it has its fair share of glitches. Still, the action is fast, the mechs are fun, and it still sports some impressive-for-its-time effects. The mechs have a useless vehicle mode, and some of the fights are in unreasonably cramped quarters. Gun fights are super-short, as nearly all the enemies have machine guns and you can’t particularly afford to take a lot of damage from them. It’s usually a case of who spot whom first, because if you can get a couple bullets in them first that’s nearly enough to kill them, or at least interrupt them long enough to mop up some others. The game is clearly heavily influenced by anime and the designs and sound effects work fantastically towards this purpose. Overall, rather fun!

Eighteen hours later, I have once again survived The Zone. I can’t come up with the words to describe the experience without sounding scatterbrained so I’ll say that it improved on the experience in Shadow of Chernobyl in nearly every way.

I spent over eighteen hours playing this throughout the last five days, and now it’s over.

This isn’t a review. I’m not done yet. I just started, really.

I blasted through Bioshock 2, and now I can turn my attention to STALKER: Call of Pripyat. Pripyat is the third STALKER game, and after the disappointing second outing Clear Sky, it feels like the sequel that Shadow of Chernobyl deserves. If you own Shadow of Chernobyl or Clear Sky through Steam, you can get Call of Pripyat now for $20. It sells for only $30 to begin with, but selling it for $20 through a customer loyalty program is criminal.

Once a day, at a random time, a radiation emission blasts The Zone, killing anyone not within cover and scattering new artifacts across the landscape. I had just finished a mission when the emission warning sounded. My nearest cover was a good distance away and I was overburdened with loot. The warning gives you two minutes, I make it close within a minute.

My cover is in a hillside bunker. As soon I step inside, I spot three zombies. I put a few bullets in them and they drop. No one else is coming near my bunker so I don’t bother looting their bodies. In the next room is two more. I take a few bullets for trespassing, by one that was hiding in the bathroom, and keep trying to make my way deeper into the bunker. I’m technically not safe until I’m dug in like a tick. I can hear barking inside, which could be a number of any variety of nasty mutants.

I turn my flashlight on and creep further in. I’m safe now, but I see that the barking is from a pack of mutated rats. I spray some bullets and the majority of them expire. The Zone is scorched with radiation while I sit in the dark with mutant rats running back and forth past me. The wave of destruction passes, I work my way back to the bodies of the zombies to collect ammo, bandages, food, and useful equipment before I emerge from the bunker and start on my path back to the STALKER base.

This was about five minutes of gameplay. Since Sunday I’ve spent almost six hours playing.

This is my third time through the entire game. I’ve owned it since release but just recently bought it on Steam for the convenience of being able to install and play it on a whim.

Here’s my bottom line opinion on Republic Commando; it’s the second-best Star Wars first-person shooter. Just below Dark Forces. It has the unfortunate distinction of being the best game to come out of the prequel trilogy, and doesn’t escape the taint of the prequel’s legacy. I may even like the ideas behind Republic Commando more than I like the game itself.

Let me drop some bombs on what’s wrong with Republic Commando. The weapons sound and feel very weak. Your primary weapon is the DC-17 blaster, which is a modular weapon that is an all-purpose rifle, a sniper rifle, and a grenade launcher. Of those, I ended up using the rifle the most for it’s accuracy and abundant ammo. It doesn’t do a ton of damage, it sounds like a toy gun, and shoots way too fast. In fact, none of the weapons sound very powerful, even the powerful ones!  I would have appreciated if they stuck to standard Star Wars weaponry and sounds, like they did with the enemies, who often sound more menacing than they are.

Speaking of enemies, they all kind of behave the same and there aren’t enough of them. There are only three or four of each type. Battle droids, super battle droids, destroyer droids, spider droids. Fat Trandoshans, Trandoshan mercenaries, big Trandoshans, scavengers. Geonoshan warriors, elite Geonoshans, Geonoshan babies, yes, babies. General Grievous’s guards. That’s all of them! It makes the game feel more repetitive than it is. The Star Wars universe is teeming with life. There isn’t much an excuse for this lack of variety.

So what does Republic Commando do right? The intro to the game is great. It details where you and your squad came from, all from the first person perspective. In fact, this game takes a page from Half-Life in that the entire game is played from the first-person perspective. There are a couple of scenes where you are not in control of your character, but they’re limited.

The squad AI is not smart but it’s competent. They’ll kill enemies, heal themselves, heal you when you drop, take cover, etc. There are certain set pieces that you can order a squadmate to take position at for a specific purpose (like sniping or anti-armor) and they’re meant to be used. Your squad dies less when they’re in one of these ordered positions. The squad also has fantastic vocal banter. Each member is a personality, and I got attached to them as the game went along.

Though the levels are a little cookie cutter, there are plenty of objectives to them and no lack for fights. I was fighting in corridors, in small courtyards and hangers, on multi-level starship bridges, and in trees. They’re not as varied as Dark Forces, but each environment is well made.

And now I can get to what stops this from being a great game. They can fix the sound effects and toss in a couple more enemies, but it’s harder to change the setting. Republic Commando takes place at the onset of the Clone Wars. It starts on Geonosha even. And though it takes place over a two (three?) year span, it could have gone farther. This was a pre-Episode 3 game and it shows. It feels like a teaser leading up to Episode 3 and, ultimately, suffers for that. It doesn’t deserve to be timely movie release fodder. It deserves to be treated like a game that can stand on its own two legs. Something that can be taken out of the context of the prequel release. It doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with Episode 1 Racer, Star Wars Starfighter, Bounty Hunter, Obi-Wan, or any other godawful prequel game.

It doesn’t carry the same tone as those games. The developers did their damnedest to give this game a fair chance. They go out of their way to make  you know that you are playing an elite soldier. You’re no jedi, and you’re not fodder either. You see your share of ally deaths and the Clone War takes its toll. But you’re fighting bugs on Geonosha. And battle droids, even if they’re way more menacing than they ever were in the prequel movies. They may bleed oil, wear a metallic gray paint job (rather than the orange seen in the movies), and the super battle droids may be some tough motherfuckers, but they’re still battle droids, which are inherently lame. There’s a pitiful tie in with General Grieveous in the form of his bodyguards, which flip and hop around like Chinese acrobats, with electric sticks. They’re not threatening in the slightest, more annoying than anything, and serve only to give General Grieveous an excuse to make an unwarranted appearance.

What I’m getting down to is that in Republic Commando you are playing, in essence, a proto super stormtrooper. I wish the devs would’ve been allowed to run with that rather than get tied to the time frame that stuck them between the two prequel movies. I hope we can get another Republic Commando game, but I’m not expecting it. This franchise has legs, that get cut out from beneath it by the movies it was made to support.

Max Payne 2 is amazing. It is a huge improvement over the first Max Payne in nearly every way. One of my favorite, and most important, changes is that Max Payne himself no longer looks like he’s smelling a rank fart. He looks like a human. The other characters also look like humans, rather than video game models wearing human faces. The bullet time is infinitely more useful as it replenishes faster and it gets a boost when you kill someone. The dodge-shooting also works better as it will let you keep firing from the ground, and doesn’t immediately jump up and break the action until you stop firing.

The story is a lot more cohesive, and more interesting. It’s not just a dude killing everyone in his way to get to the person who killed his wife and daughter. There are different motives and they change, and the characters change. The game is short as hell, but so was the first Max Payne, and with less frustration.

Max Payne 2 is a better game than the original and, for all intents and purposes, you shouldn’t feel compelled to play through the first Max Payne before you play this one. It is a truly great game.

I was never really interested in this game, even though I know it had a huge following when it came out. I got it, and Max Payne 2, during Steam holiday sale. I’ve owned Max Payne 2 for a while but never got far in it and when I tried to install it recently either the disc was bad or it wasn’t entirely compatible with Vista/7.

For being nearly 10 years old, it doesn’t look that bad and the action still holds up. It’s a revenge story told in noir style with slo-mo gunfights. That’s pretty much Max Payne in one sentence. The slo-mo isn’t as useful as it is in F.E.A.R. because you move just as slow but it gives you a better degree of control in your aim. You can actually see individual bullets or pellets in each gunshot. Still, I found it was often the case where just running around and circle-strafing were more reliable than going into slo-mo as the enemy AI didn’t lead much when they shot and had a harder time hitting a moving target than I did hitting them standing there.

It’s about 10 hours long but it’d be much shorter for a pro. A lot of that time was spent reloading and re-doing some tough gunfights. I never found ammo to be a problem but I used every single health item there was. There’s no cheesy boss fights but there are certain character who can very obviously withstand a lot more bullets ripping through them than their common henchmen.

I’m loading up Max Payne 2 but who knows if I’ll get to it before I move.

I was actually quite close to finishing this about three months ago but the way the game works is that your units have persistent levels and the game will randomly generate optional missions to accomplish for more experience points and loot. I saw an enormous list of missions and felt a little overwhelm and getting tired of the gameplay so I stopped playing. Matt got this last week and we played a 1v1 game and he totally stomped me so I suggested trying out coop mode, and after that I felt the desire to polish this off in the fastest manner possible. There were only two unique missions left anyway.

I loved the first Dawn of War so I was a little skeptical when I read that Dawn of War 2 was not only vastly different but also a better game. But it is! Rather than harvesting resources and building bases, which have no place in the tabletop game, Dawn of War 2 focuses on small unit tactics by giving you control of a small handful of hardy units and putting the emphasis on using cover and flanking and equipment loadout rather than throwing as many bodies as possible at the next encounter. The multiplayer is a little more traditional with the main objective being the capture and holding of victory locations, with unit building and resource harvesting.

The game looks and feels great. Weapons have appropriately powerful sounds and effects. When your assault marines jump into a fight, they send enemies and terrain flying outward from them. Grenades and artillery blast the landscape and buildings to pieces.

This all comes together to make Dawn of War 2 and more dynamic, and, ultimately, a more enjoyable game than its predecessor.

I can’t remember the last time I played all the way through Quake, so this totally counts. Hey! Quake is 13 years old and it’s still balls out insane! The level design kind of suffers towards the end (episode 4 outright sucks) but it’s still totally fun to play through, if a little short! I may take a break to keep slogging through Max Payne or I may hop into the first Quake expansion. I haven’t decided yet.

The Steam Holiday Sale. It has begun.

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.

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.

Hmm well where is that safehouOH FUCK A ZEBRA!

(I didn’t run over it. I didn’t even try!)

(This game is amazing!)

… there’s some dudes up around the bend. They will most likely shoot up my boat. :(

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.

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.

Using the elite power armor in F.E.A.R. 2.