New Computer and Status Update

So, my Acer Aspire 5742G laptop’s harddrive decided to explode and since the piece of shit had overheating problems, I went ahead and got myself a spanking new PC. Specs are as follows:

 

Intel Core i5 4570 @ 3.20GHz

8,00GB Single-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz

2048MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

And a bunch of other stuff that shouldn’t interest anyone, like how I’m using my TV as my monitor because fuck having separate speakers.

So far, all the games I’ve tried on this have run over 150 fps on maximum settings, the sole exception being DayZ, but that’s more due to how the game works. I am aware that my processor may be a bit sluggish, but seeing as how this was built by me and a friend, switching it out shouldn’t be all that difficult. Handy tip if you’re not in the know. Buy a desktop in parts, get a friend to help you put it together, you might just get a computer like mine, which is a powerhouse at 3/4 of the price of an inferior computer. This thing cost me 1010€.

 

As for why the site hasn’t been updated, well, a lot of the games I’ve played over the year haven’t been all that interesting. The biggest game I probably played was Dead Space 3. I have been using my Twitter that I started up at around the beginning of the year to post thoughts on games that didn’t warrant a multi-paragraph post on here. Either that or you really don’t need me to tell you how absolutely fucking stupid the Xbox One is. Which it is.

So there you go. Now I’m off to kill some more guys in Chivalry. Remember, don’t be a leftclicking zweihander noob, or I’ll come and pull off crazy stunts as a man-at-arms.

 

Crysis 3 Multiplayer Beta

Trash.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but this is just Call of Duty with some special abilities. Big whoop.

I know its immensely popular. I know it rakes in boatloads of cash for Activision. So why do you think it’ll do the same for you? Well, not the devs certainly, it’s the marketing people. And I can’t really go and say they know nothing about what gamers want, hell the reason why every single multiplayer is a carbon copy of Call of Duty is its popularity; more people than not buy up that swill. Its their damn job to think what will sell well, then have the devs make just that. Perks, aim-down-sight shooting, when will it end? It’s getting very tiresome, knowing that every multiplayer component is exactly the same. No hidden gems, no matter how rough they may be. Take Condemned 2: Bloodshot for example. I killed a guy charging at me with a fire ax by throwing my goddamn pistol in his face. It remains as one of my favourite ever moments in online gaming. Can you do that in Call of Duty? No. Can you use a rocket booster pack to jump through the roof of a fully destructible building, before smashing the poor fool taking refuge there with goddamn Mjölnir, like in Red Faction: Guerrilla? No. Or maybe something a bit more mainstream: Wielding a Spartan Laser in Halo 3, shooting down an enemy Banshee, first laughing in glee then screaming in abject terror as the destroyed flyer’s wreckage falls on your ass. No, that doesn’t happen in Call of Duty.

The Call of Duty-type multiplayer is good only when it is in actual Call of Duty, I genuinely liked Call of Duty 4, and then the sole funny thing that can happen is someone getting squashed by your care package.

While not rife with funny moments, Gears of War 3 was the only game that I consistently, and for an extended period of time, played online. Back when it was in full swing Gears 3 was amazingly fun, before the servers were turned off and the Rise of the Laserburst. When the player base consisted of more than those two ridiculous guys. Those guys who always sent you hate mail, because they just sucked. Eat Retro Lancer, bitch.

If my computer hadn’t been built by absolute cretins and actually had a cooling fan I could get access to without disassembling the entire thing, Team Fortress 2 would be the game I’d probably play if I wanted to play online. TF2’s not without its problems, however. The name of the problem is the pyro and how Valve, in their infinite wisdom, gave them a ranged weapon that sets you on fire from across the map. Because that’s fair, right?

Acquisition: Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Silent Hill 3 for PC

I went on Amazon some time ago, thinking: I need more survival horror. Good thing too, as the recent Dead Space 3 demo showed how far the series has, as all survival horror series do, fallen from grace. Hell, the Wikipedia article for Dead Space 3 describes it as a shooter, while the original is labeled as a survival horror.

The damnedest thing is, people bash on survival horror a lot. Then why is it I like it so much? So much so, that I go on Amazon to buy games for a system I didn’t even own yet? Sure, the controls are universally clunky, but that and the fixed camera angles are part of the fun and atmosphere of the genre. I watched my eldest brother play Dead Space and he ended up staring at a wall while something supposedly scary was happening behind him. If the camera had been fixed to force the player to see the creepy stuff, sure, it’s only good for that one time and is decidedly cheap but the way I see it, if it startles you that one time, it did its job, which is leagues better than sticking your face into a wall and missing it out completely. Another point against modern “survival horror” is that you can’t simply run from enemies to conserve ammo and/or health, dreading that you might have to come back later. Nowadays, the games bury you in supplies, whether enemies drop the said supplies or you just buy them from a shop that’s around every corner with money the enemies also drop. Just squeaking past the final boss with one bullet in your handgun, your guts ready to fall out if someone as much as sneezes at you gives you a sense of victory not found in games anymore. Having a large area to explore and sometimes, heavens forbid, backtrack through, knowing where you left enemies, planning the fastest or the safest route there using your map. Does it go past the saferoom? What about the place you need to get back to?. You cleared it out, but is it clear anymore? What if something new lurks there?

We’ve seen a resurgence of other forgotten genres through Kickstarter, the CRPG, the space sim. What about traditional survival horror?

With the tangent over, let’s get to the issue at hand.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is one of the games you usually find in best horror games lists. I really can’t tell yay or nay yet, as the setup I have for my old consoles is annoying to get out. Basically, I’ve got a ye olde CRT television set, since RGB and SCART look like ass on my HDTV, on a chair that doesn’t have wheels and it’s in between my couch and a bookshelf. Whenever I want to play, I have to drag the chair out from its little nook. At midnight or beyond, not really something you want to do on the third floor of an apartment building.

So, the game. I played for a couple of hours after the postman kindly slammed it through the letterbox. I didn’t exactly get into the survival or the horror parts, but I hear once I do, the game is amazing. Here’s hoping. I did run into puzzles, if you can call moving clock hands a puzzle. The game had crammed the time 3:33 down my throat and when I got to the grandfather clock in a study of sorts, the answer was simple. Trying my best to get the damn thing to accept my answer, however, wasn’t going to work. I was dismayed at first, believing myelf to be so smart, with snarky remarks and all, for figuring out the answer and then being cast down in my hubris. I went around the mansion, searching every damn corner I could, before returning to the clock. And this game. This fucking game. A voice whispered: three thirty-three. I can’t tell you how close I was to smashing the controller through the screen.

So, afterwards I get to the first proper combat bit. Chopping the heads off weird gangly things was fun. Also, how cool was that the Romans actually spoke latin at first?

Silent Hill 3. Had to get it for the PC, seeing as how the HD collection was just trash. Didn’t get to play it much yet, spent about an hour trying to get it running on my native resolution and upon doing so, the game worked fine, but the menus slid off to the side. I do love PC gaming. So easy, so simple, so convenient. Also, either the US postal service or Finland’s very own, privatized postal office biffed up the case. Slightly annoying, as the copy was new and unopened.

The Best and the Worst of 2012

The year 2012 came to a close about an hour ago, so what better time than now to take a little look back and list the games that were the best, and the worst, of the past year.

The best games, in no particular order, of 2012 were the following:

FTL: Faster Than Light

This little indie game tickled that special fancy that reared its head after watching Firefly, the fancy to captain my own spaceship through the cosmos. You’re on a trek through numerous star clusters to deliver a vital piece of information to your superiors. Gameplay revolves around your ship and its crew, carefully managing the power consumption of the various systems aboard your ship, like weapons and shields. Crew can be placed on these systems to boost their efficiency and the more you keep one crew member on one system, they gain proficiency for that particular system. A fully upgraded engine with a fully experienced crew member will allow you to dodge almost all incoming shots. Mind, however, that your crew can die as a result of various trauma, such as burning to a crisp or asphyxiation. FTL is hard to nail down when it comes to genre. It’s a roguelike, meaning it is the rule, rather than the exception, to lose the game and once you do, you cannot reload a previous save; you must start all over again. Add to that, for better or worse, the fact that every playthrough will be randomised, so if you got a sweet new laser for your ship and subsequently blow up, you most likely won’t be as lucky. Of course, you may also find an even spanglier laser.

As a testament to the difficulty of Faster Than Light, out of the 77 games I’ve player over 30+ hours, I’ve only actually beat the game three times.

If there was something that I’d change about FTL, there would be two: first, teleports would not work if the shields are still up, because the overwhelming majority of my losses were due to boarders being relentlessly hard to repel, an annoying blemish on an otherwise great challenge. Second, I would have added some sort of free roaming mode after finishing the game or attempting to do so a few times. Other than these two issues, FTL: Faster Than Light is a game that I would recommend everyone to try. It’s fun, addicting, has a good soundtrack and is cheap.

Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops: The Line showed us one simple thing: modern military shooters need not be Call of Duty. You can tell an engaging story set in the present with soldiers of a modern army. Spec Ops: The Line is not about how the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans and maybe some Middle Eastern terrorists blew up the American dream with nukes and Ebola. No, Spec Ops is something else and I don’t want to say anything to spoil it, but trust me, it’s a great game with a solid third-person shooter core. Also Captain Sheridan.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

The tactical, turn-based strategy genre has been all but forgotten, save for a precious few over the years, but XCOM: Enemy Unknown brought the genre back into the limelight, not as a small indie title, but made by the people who made a gaming juggernaut, Civilization, namely Firaxis. Of course, even this was not enough to satisfy some diehard fans of the series, and some of their points are valid. The game featured less micromanaging and a more streamlined design. I understand where their gripes come from, but the genre has been without major attention for so long, you can’t make too complex a game without warming up the audience for more advanced features in the future. And I sincerely hope there is a future, for the genre and for XCOM.

Now for the worst games of 2012. There were a lot of bad games out this year, but thankfully, I avoided purchasing them. There were, however, a few that slipped the net, clumps of scum wrapped in gold foil.

Assassin’s Creed III

The Assassin’s Creed series was about the Assassins versus the Templars, that is it. Assassin’s Creed 3? Well, the main character is not even a real Assassin. He doesn’t follow, or recite, the eponymous creed of the Assassin brotherhood. His only concern is the safety of his tribe amidst the American revolution. And I get the feeling I’m supposed to be in awe whenever one of the founding fathers shows their mug on screen. It’s not like the revolution was as big a deal as the backdrops of the previous games, the Crusades and the Renaissance and yet, the whole thing was made to seem larger than life, it took centre stage in the game. Altaïr never, for example, took an active part in the Crusades, he didn’t go out and kick King Richard’s arse for example, distinctly unlike Connor. Every and I do mean fucking every big thing that happened during the revolution, Connor was there, Connor made possible, Connor fucking did it. The Boston Tea Party, the signing of the fucking Declaration of Independence?

By the end of it, I was so sick of the revolution, I just wanted to get back to the modern times if only to avoid what felt like nationalistic chest thumping in a game made by French Canadians. Wait, what? It would not have been such a big deal if the previous games had made such a huge fucking number of their own specific time period.

As for gameplay, this game has the worst in the series. One-button free running, less options in combat. Not the way to do it.

Mass Effect 3

This game is a fucking travesty. BioWare took a series into which me and countless others poured hours upon hours to learn all there was about the universe and the people who inhabit it only for them to give us a nonsensical ending. What’s most depressing is that there were bright spots in the game. The conclusions of your teammates stories, namely Garrus and Tali. They stuck with you from the first game.

Mass Effect 3 is the worst game of the past year because it hurt on a personal level. I consider the first Mass Effect to be the single best game of this generation, period. Then they do this. First Dragon Age, then Mass Effect. The ending ruins it all.

We are officially through, BioWare.

Rambling About Dead Island

I’m an avid fan of zombie movies and games, even if zombies have become such a cliché I like to think I started liking them before that happened. For the past five years, I’ve followed the development of Dead Island, which was at first described to be a survival horror role-playing game with zombies focusing more on melee combat since guns and ammunition is hard to come by on a tropical island. I was instantly interested in it and began raking through gaming websites for information regarding Dead Island.

For quite a few of the years, nothing was told about the game and I was beginning to think it had become vaporware. Then, not too long ago Techland, its developer started trickling bits and pieces of info about Dead Island. They opened the game’s website that had been ‘under development’ for years. Then came more pictures, then the somewhat controversial teaser trailer that I’m pretty sure most of us has seen. Then Monday, the fifth of September 2011, pre-release reviews started popping up all around the internet.

And I felt devastated. I had this fear that had been gnawing at me ever since I saw the first gameplay videos. Dead Island is not a survival horror role-playing game with zombies. Oh no, no no no. What Dead Island is, is in essence Borderlands, but with zombies. And the emotional style of the teaser? Gone. Make way for a more light-hearted romp through an island paradise infested with zombies.

Machetes with an electric current running through them? Scores? What is this, Dead Rising? Let’s not forget, should you find an abandoned briefcase and you find, say, a weapon therein, YOU HAVE TO PAY IN-GAME MONEY TO GET THE WEAPON FROM THE A B A N D O N E D BRIEFCASE. Disregard that last one. It is not true. But it could have been.

I’m sorry, but what the fuck is this shit? I didn’t wait for so many years for this! I wanted what they originally said it would be, not this arcade piece of shit! Is it so hard to make a zombie survival role-playing game?

Of course, that’s not all. If you’ve played Call of Juarez, another game by Techland, you know that the game had this feel of a low production budget. Call of Juarez was a cool game, don’t get me wrong, but this?

No. Just no.

Well, the silver lining is that at least Space Marine seemed good, I played the demo on both the 360 and PC. And while I think it’s absolutely stupid when they decided that Space Marines don’t need cover, I still like it. It’s a Warhammer40k game, the setting alone will make it good. But Relic should try playing the table-top game and not take cover, then we’ll see. And besides, two weeks and I’ll be playing Gears of War 3, unless it betrays me like Halo: Reach did.

P.S. When Dead Island was released on Tuesday, they accidentally released a developer version through Steam. Way to go.

Rambling About Halo: Reach

It’s been over a half a year since Reach came out, so I’ve had time to mull it over alone and with friends. I decided to edit this post a year and a half later after Halo: Reach’s launch, just to make it more up-to-date on my opinion. Basically everything you need to know is in this first paragraph. I’ve come to one conclusion: yes, it is a good game the game was extremely disappointing and boring. It has great gameplay and great horrible multiplayer. It’s got an impressive sizable, yet bland platter of features, no question. However, upon closer inspection taking but the slightest glance with trained eyes, Halo: Reach just feels half-assed I don’t know whether the word I’m really looking for is full-assed or no-assed, so I’ll go with Halo: Reach just being shit. How, well, let’s take a look.

First off, let’s start with the campaign: in a ViDoc, Bungie mentioned how they planned the entire Reach campaign, the military, in-universe one. From July 24th to August 30th in the year 2552, Bungie mapped out how the battle developed. When I heard that, I imagined we would see huge clashes with the UNSC and the Covenant, shit just blowing up left and right, people dying, alien monsters laughing in their alien tongues at you, that was what I imagined, you know, kinda like in the “Deliver Hope” trailer. In the game we get just small-scale skirmishes with that one incredibly stupid jeep attack. The UNSC “spearhead” of a bunch of jeeps, a few ATVs and maybe one or two tanks really makes me sad. I imagined you’d be fighting against legions of Grunts, Jackals, Elites and Hunters. Maybe blow up Ghosts, Wraiths and Scarabs in a Scorpion or maybe even one of those grenade launcher Falcons. Hell, why not let us pilot a Pelican with rocket pods and shit. No. Jeeps and quadbikes.

There’s no plot in Reach whatsoever. No, a series of disjointed skirmishes against the Covenant cannot be considered a real story. How are they disjointed? Well, because you fucking teleport from one mission to another. Example one, you are in a city. Cut-scene starts, shit happens, fade to black. Then another cut scene starts and you’re mystically transported into a fucking GLACIER. What the fuck! I would’ve wanted to see at least some form of dialogue in between, considering that in the cut scene before the jump, a pretty damn important plot advancement occurs, one of the Noble team gets fucking SHOT IN THE HEAD AND DIES. Another example is when Jorge throws Noble Six out of the Covenant Corvette. That’s it. We don’t see Six’s re-entry into the atmosphere. Next cut-scene, Six is already walking about the planet’s surface, maybe favouring one foot. I would’ve wanted to see how that thing that was on his back the entirety of the last level works! Oh, and not to mention the ship you and Jorge set out to destroy? It had already fallen out of the sky lying quite contently on some mountains. I would have wanted to see that hulk crash to the surface!

Don’t get me started on the levels ONI: Sword Base and Nightfall. First, you’re talking to Doctor Catherine Halsey, a pretty major fucking character in the overall Halo storyline. You know, the woman who not only INVENTED the SPARTANS themselves also invented THE MJOLNIR ARMOUR and of whom Cortana, yes your A.I. sidekick in the main Halo trilogy, is basically a computer program copy of! Jesus Christ, man! No introductions! She’s just in the fucking glass box talking about shit. When my eldest brother, who is not by any definition a gamer, played through Reach he was like, who the fuck’s that bitch? To him, Dr. Halsey was some random person talking down to Spartans, supersoldiers, for no apparent reason. And what happens after the you meet with Halsey? The next cut-scene has you on some random cliff in the dead of the night. And nobody says anything, except when to cater to punk kids who think sniping in Halo is some sort of impressive skill. That’s not impressive in the least. Take out four guys armed with an assault rifle and one (1) grenade, now that is impressive. No shooting in the shin twice for a kill bullshit, just chucking lead full-auto. But I digress.

In Halo 3, the whole deal with the portal under New Mombasa and how it leads to the Ark, you know how that would’ve been done in Reach? Master Chief blows up the AA gun, does dramatic pose, portal activates sending everyone flying, fade to black, WHAM, next cut-scene, you’re flying in a Pelican over a landscape you have never seen. Some NPCs make vague references to an Ark, but you can’t really tell. And what the fuck? When did Guilty Spark get here?! What about in Halo: CE, you get to the escape pod in the first level, Master Chief says: “Punch it,” fade to black, WHAM, you’re in the destroyed pod and the others… in the impact… there’s nothing you could do. Oh, oh, what if in Halo 3: ODST, they took out the semi-free roam sections out and just jumped from flashback to flashback? That is what the Halo series would’ve been if they had been done like Reach.

Yes and the characters are paper-thin. Unlike the squad of ODSTs who actually have more facets than “aggressive black guy,” “tech-savvy, russian-esque accent girl” and let’s not forget, “by-the-book commander man.” Just, wow.

Now, the ending was good, I still haven’t changed my mind. Predictable as shit, but still, it was a good ending. Quite different from all the other Halo games, but that is the only praise I’ll give to Reach’s campaign. However, it was soured by Red Dead Redemption already doing basically the same ending.

All in all, with the campaign, it felt as if Bungie didn’t really give two shits about it. You HAVE to know your Halo backstory to get any sense of what’s going on. I’m not talking about playing the rest of the Halo games, oh no, I’m talking about reading the novels, which I have. The fact is this: for a fan of the series who knows the lore, you already know what’s going to happen. To Reach, to the Pillar of Autumn and to the galaxy. Bungie probably assumed that there’s no need to elaborate any further, flesh out what happened during that fateful struggle. Reach’s doomed, but in the end Master Chief fires a laser at a light bulb and everyone lives happily ever after. However, for someone, like my eldest brother, who has NOT read the novels, he’ll not get what’s happening at all, BUT he doesn’t really care for a deep story. He just wants to shoot shit up. Reach wasn’t made for Halo fans. Not at all. It’s tailor-made for casual gamers. People who buy up every Call of Duty and its knockoffs on release. That is a lame goodbye, Bungie.

But wait! There’s more!

Getting into multiplayer, I’ll make one thing clear: bar a few things that I would change in a heartbeat, Halo: Reach has the best multiplayer out there. Nuff said, but let’s look a bit deeper. For starters, the multiplayer maps, not Forge World mind you, I’ll get to that later. Well, what can I say, Bungie was lazy with them. Every single one of them is ripped right out of the campaign. Which means that these maps were designed multiplayer first which were then added to the campaign. Ergo Halo: Reach was developed MULTIPLAYER first. That’s not the Halo I became a fan of. I bought the Halo games for their campaign first, multiplayer second and in Halo: CE’s case, multiplayer was an added bonus!

And now we get into Forge World, this is just personal preference, but I hate every single Forge World map. They are tight, yet open areas, ideal for sniping, which I don’t do. Every map looks EXACTLY the same, which is like shit, to be honest. I see Forge World as the personification of Halo: Reach’s development laziness.

I won’t get into the DLC maps, because you have to play in their own little playlists to actually enjoy the maps and the playlist contains objective game modes. Good luck trying to win with complete idiots as your teammates.

What’s this all boil down to? Well, for me, Halo: Reach was a letdown. I expected it to go out with a bang, being the game depicting the greatest, bloodiest battle in the war that the whole series is based around, but no, it was a lousy whimper. People say Halo 3: ODST was a letdown, but I really can’t see why. It hands-down beats Reach.

I’ll leave you with a quote:

“Take my advice, Rookie. You ever fall for a woman? Make sure she’s got balls.” – Gunnery Sergeant Edward Buck.

P.S. I gave Bungie a lot of flak in this here post. It’s simply because Bungie was easier to blame, since they developed the game. I don’t know if these issues I have with Halo: Reach are, in fact, a fault of Bungie or if it is Microsoft or 343 Industries breathing down their neck, I don’t know.

Rambling About Resident Evil

This is a sort of continuation to my earlier post, relaying the info on Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, but I didn’t want to clog that with a rambling.

As we all know, the last two major installments for the Resident Evil series haven’t been much of the survival horror the series created, rather they were third-person action games with only one of them containing any horror at all. Resident Evil 5 never happened by the way. What I’d like, is a traditional Resident Evil for the current gen consoles. All I’m asking. Instead, we get this shoddy piece of shit that only focuses on the bad online features. Fuck that, I want a game where there is no gorramn partner, no gorramn multiplayer. I want a game where it’s just you, hammy lines, a ton of zombies and other menagerie. I want a game where you need to find twelve different gemstones, tiles, keys or plugs to open the bathroom door. I want a game where I take a box of pistol ammo off of a shelf, a group of zombies crash through a window. I want a game where the final boss is always, ALWAYS a fleshy blob with tentacles. But no. What we get is bullshit.

And don’t get me started on the RE games being developed and released on hand-helds. Fuck hand-helds, I don’t want to sit in a corner looking like I’ve got problems, staring at this miniscule screen, straining the fuck out of my neck. And yes, I know you can hook up hand-helds to your bigger screens, but that defeats the purpose of the fucking hand-held, now doesn’t it?

I’ll be glad if the HD remake pack comes out in Europe, I really will be, since that includes the last real Resident Evil, even if it is a remake that was remade once already.

Even if it doesn’t come out in Europe, at least we’ll get to play RE:ORC and one game thought long dead, Dead Island, so at least I, and I’m sure many of you, will get a good dose of zombies this year.