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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.