Metal Gear Solid 4

The first game I bought for my PS3 was Metal Gear Solid 4. I had wanted a PS3 just to play this game, back in the days before I had a job when it first came out. I managed to keep all the spoilers at bay and so I was able to enjoy this game. And shit bricks. Lots of them. The story was almost too easy for me to follow after MGS1/2/3's joy of twists and turns. It had a few, but they weren't hard to follow. And it had to make sure it cleared up everything at the end. And man did it ever. But that's not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is the engine used in MGS4. The story made me shit bricks at times(as stated), and the engine did things I won't talk about. But really, I have never had an engine in a game feel this perfect. Bungie does a really good job with their engines, as does DICE and Valve. But a "plain" (man, it hurts to say those engines are plain. I love you guys, really) FPS engine working perfectly isn't as impressive as a stealth game's. In a first person shoot your focus is on moving from point A to B, and killing everything you can (save a few games). If the environment reacts to you and your weapons it's a solid engine. Throw in bullet physics, destructible environments and such and you're pretty much golden. More than Call of Duty has done. (I hate on CoD so much not because I think their games are bad(though they are not my cup of tea anymore), but because I don't see them trying to push the envelope and do new things with their games anymore). But with MGS4 I can go from 2 points and kill anything, and do it any number of ways.  Or I can sneak by and kill nobody a number of ways as well. They took out the spinning boxes for items which helped make them harder to spot and make the world feel better. They added the Solid Eye which did a great job of adding nice H.U.D. features to enemies and such (really nice when you can't tell if that person hates you or not from a distance). And the guns, oh God the guns!

They got the guns perfect! Snake doesn't tactically reload "right", sadly. But if you shoot half a mag, reload and look on the ground you'll see that one of the rounds is still a live cartridge. So even though he works charging handle on that AK when he doesn't have to, it correctly ejects a live round. It's easy to see in the Shooting Range. I can't tell if the ammo count goes down because of this but either way it is very cool to see. It was really nice to play a MGS4 game that really allowed you to play it as a shooter just as much as it allowed you to play it as a stealth game. MGS4 is mostly stealth, but for someone who likes the story more it's nice to have the freedom to play it how I want to.

I loved being able to aim in either 3rd person or 1st person at the press of a button. And I could lock it into 1st person when aiming right in the menu. I kept it in 1st person most of the game while in combat. And I could finally fight and not totally waste ammo (and get shot up). But I could still explore the world in 3rd person which lends best to the MGS experience. I really REALLY want to see this engine used for the next Resident Evil game. I loved RE5, but the engine made it a bitch to play. I needed to be able to aim down my weapon sites a lot of the time (the laser dot was a joke on target) but 3rd person is just what RE games are. I think this engine would be perfect at accommodating both types of players.

Everything else about that game was really awesome. The way the environment reacted to you was awesome. The flashbacks and such were great. The little hidden things were awesome. The cut-scenes were just like a movie as always. Only thing missing was trophies to convince me to play the game on harder settings a bit more [when there isn't a way to track the awesome things I've done in a game, I'm often less likely to do them]. But I at least want to do a "kill everything" and "kill nothing" playthrough. Now I want to see the rest of the games remade in this engine. Both MGS and MG. Mostly the Metal Gear games, as those are hard as hell for me (as most NES games are).

Medal of Honor

Remember when I did that "review" of the upcoming MoH game, like a year ago? Well I finally got the chance to play it. It was the first game I beat with my new PS3 and I think it's a good sign of things to come. The cover mechanic is nothing short of perfect. I could finally aim down the sites of a weapon and just barely creep over the top of cover to fire. I could also quickly bolt around cover to see if anything was there before I moved past my cover. It also kept me in first person view (Rainbow Six Vegas too you to third person and I felt that was overly cheap). You also weren't glued to the cover and you could take cover behind anything.

But the game wasn't perfect. I beat the campaign in about 4-5 hours, playing on the hardest difficulty on the first playthrough. I got at least 8 when I did this with CoD:MW2. But these 4-5 hours were the best of any campaign I have ever played, ever! It beats out Call of Duty 2 (which has held that ground and been that campaign for which I compare every other campaign to) in everything but length. A lot of the time I just forgot I was playing a video game, I felt like I was playing Airsoft or reading a really well done book. There were no over the top cliches and there wasn't the one bad guy that you killed at the end. Hell, only once did I enter a room with that "slow motion" thing that CoD has seemed to fall in love with. And I won't lie, I didn't like that part as much as the times I had to enter a room without slow motion. It really added to the adrenalin involved in kicking down the door. With most of the guns you don't carry a crap ton of ammo. (the SAWs are the only exception to this that I found). I liked how I had a few hundred rounds for my M4, and if I needed more I'd ask one of my team mates (who would only give you more if you were low enough. I guess the NPCs have Solid Snake's bandanna from MGS1 and they aren't keen on sharing). This was a good reason for you to keep the guns you started the mission with. I found myself ditching the M14 EBR and the shotguns for AK47s and G3A3s. Ammo was fairly rare for the guns you picked up off of bad guys, and your team mates couldn't give you ammo for a gun they didn't have (or an ammo type they didn't have).

Everything they did with the weapons I expect to be done with the weapons in any FPS. They got reloading right (I have a blog post on that so I won't go into it here), they got the ammo amount right (you have an extra round if you reloaded with a round in the chamber), they got the reload speed right (I mean that it wasn't too fast, but it wasn't too slow. It allowed reloading to bring tension, but not to take a year to do). There was one thing I never expected any game to do, and they did it. You can change the fire mode of most weapons (I can make my G3A3 shoot semi-auto or full-auto. Same with my M4, etc). I love this! But it has been done before, showing your character toggle to change the fire rate, yeah, I've never seen that done before. Hell, CoD has their M4 and M16 modeled with the selector switch on semi.

And lastly I want to compliment the dialog. This is one of the reasons I felt like I was there (or reading a really good book) and it was something I was really looking forward to ever since I read about it on that Joystiq review. The time spent in the Apaches is filled with a lot of com chatter. And every bit of it feels so real. To the point at which you can only guess what exactly they mean (though a lot of it is still easy to follow). it was the same way in the game with the rest of your team.

The enemy AI wasn't the brightest in the game, but I'm not bashing it. Far from it, I'm complimenting it. If I came around a corner and shot a guy, there were a few times where there would be another guy in the room, but he wouldn't have heard me come in and shoot so I'd be able to shoot him as well. Seeing as how he is shooting his gone, and not looking my way, it makes sense that he wouldn't have a magic sense to know where I was. But at the same time the enemy would flank me, and that would often lead to some pretty frantic moments of shooting. The AI killed me maybe 7 times in my play through. 3 times I got stuck on something, once I shot the hostage rather than the hostage taker, but the other 3 were pretty illegitimate kills. Where I had done something that probably wasn't the brightest thing to have done (or the AI did something I didn't expect them to do). So thank you AI team, you guys did an awesome job!

In short, I want more games like this. Please. And I'd also like to ask, why do people call this a rip off of Call of Duty? Is it because it's "modern"? Comparing this to CoD is like trying to compare a Michael Bay movie to a Steven Spielberg movie. Michael Bay will have everything blow up, and will have the pacing set to "balls to the wall" the entire movie. Steven Spielberg will use action and explosions like a chef will use his spices. Often enough that you know they're there, but not so often that they get boring and you know exactly how every other "dish" is going to taste. I'd also say that comparing the early Medal of Honor games to the first Call of Duty game wasn't possible because in MoH you had fairly bad AI and rarely had anyone on your team along with you. Were CoD gave you team mates and had you fight in a war for a change. I look forward to the next MoH game, and I hope they go the same route of getting veterans (and active duty personnel) involved in making the game, so as to keep it as real as possible. So hats off to the amazing team that made this game (as well as to veterans).

Wow, for once I did a "review" with referencing Valve or Half Life. As for random experiences I had playing the game, I really didn't have any. And I don't find "I took cover, leaned out of it and shot 3 people before ducking back in" that interesting to share. 

Portal 2

It’s hard not to just do a review of Portal 2, but there are plenty of those out there already. What I really want to see is someone (not me, because my computer isn’t powerful enough to play Portal 2) take the levels and turn them into an FPS. I’m not sure if I’d want any puzzles (depends on how it could be done), but the dark areas just lend to a Doom 3 style setting. If you were Gordon Freeman running through the compound fighting Combine, I think you’d have a really fun game. It could also make a neat L4D2 campaign if you rebuilt stair cases and catwalks and put in the classic “press this button to spawn the horde and slowly open the way past” things.

 I’d also like to make note of the doors in the game that don’t have handles, but had a number pad above them. The texture of the number pad was very nice, but the texture on the “handle” was slightly poorer. This leads me to the idea that these will be accessible with an update later in the game, maybe to announce Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (much as they did to announce Portal 2). This is, of course, total speculation and it could lead to nothing, but it could still be a hint of what’s to come. 

Dead Space 3 (how it should end)

I've never had the joy of playing Dead Space. It's a game that's on my list, but not too high on it. I've played DS2 and, while fun, it wasn't a game that made me want to go out and drop 60 bones. I have, however, seen about 70% of Dead Space 2 being played including the ending. Just so you know where I'm coming from when I tell you how Dead Space 3 should end.

You should have to take out another marker of some kind near the end. At some point you finally get captured by the Space Forces (whatever their name is). You wake up and you're no longer under the effects of the marker (something has been constant through the game to show you've been under its control or rather its effects). You are informed that you've been drugged in some way so as to remove these effects. Your guy starts bitching them out for not doing more against the necromorphs and anything more about the marker you've learned. At which point they call you a sick son of a bitch.

"Necromorphs? Is that what you've been killing in your head? You sick mother fucker. You've been killing off living breathing humans! They've been trying run away as you've walked through blasting off their limbs with mining laser!"

"That..that's not possible! They've run at me!"

"In self defense. They don't have the right door codes to get any farther away from you, what do they do? They turn around and fight in a last ditch effort."

Something like that at least. I think it would be the best twist a video game has ever thrown out there. And I've played (and understood) Metal Gear Solid 2 :P I don't see it happening because it doesn't seem like something EA (or the original creator) would want to take the series. At this point you pretty much have to end it. It would be pretty cool to see a level where you have to run past a bunch of necromorphs to destroy the last marker. You can either kill them all (needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few) or you can dodge them and still destroy the marker. I love when a game gives me very hard moral choices, it makes a game feel a whole hell of a lot more real and way more memorable.

Oblivion

First off, sorry. I know it has been almost 2 months since my last update. Not that I have a bunch of readers, but still. I've been playing a lot of Minecraft, and there isn't much "blog worthy" in that game. It's like playing with Legos. You can't show off anything until you get done, and the adventure of building it is only fun for you. Unless you're the kind of person who likes hearing "I was digging for this brick, and I kept finding this one. And then I found the brick I was looking for only to realize I now needed that other one I kept finding! But now I couldn't find it!" Which, in Minecraft is "I spent 3 hours digging a mine shaft last night. Found like 5 diamond and 20 iron. It was awesome."

But this blog title isn't Minecraft, it's Oblivion! So, who has seen the Skyrim trailer? Oh man, is it awesome :D
http://www.joystiq.com/video/8845f15c For those who haven't yet seen it. All two of you in the whole world. It's a Bethesda game. It's pure crack! They make games that you'll get hundreds of hours of gameplay out of. I'm still playing Oblivion. Just going everywhere and killing everything. It's a beautiful game and it's built around looting. Which is my favorite part of gaming. Why, I don't know. But it's just so addictive. Anyway, even though it's an awesome game, I haven't had a lot of epic stories involving it. But I have found a lot of things that raise questions and the like.

First off. Gems. They serve no purpose in the game other than gold. That's pretty lame, in my opinion. In most fantasy games gems are good for something. Often something cool, like increasing the power of weapons and the like. I'd really like to see gems have a use in Skyrim. Maybe they can be used in alchemy at a high enough level. I think that would be pretty interesting to see.

Next. Why is the gameworld for Oblivion so huge, but the game world for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas so small? It's annoying to play Oblivion and see this massive game world and then play New Vegas and feel like the world is so small.

Can we please get more than one waypoint on these maps? I'll often find something really cool that I want to go back to later. Maybe it's not on the map, or maybe it's fairly forgettable. I'd like to be able to mark these places on the map. Something that says "hey, I found something cool here that I either want to go to again or that I can't get into now." This happens more in the starting levels of Fallout as you find high level locks that you can't pick yet. But you don't want to forget about this safe! Now I don't want all these to appear on my HUD, but something that will help me remember that they're there would be nice. I don't feel like I should have to print off my own map to do this kind of thing.

There aren't many areas I'd really want improvement on the "Oblivion engine" but those a few. That weren't fixed in the last 2 Fallouts. They added a keyring in Fallout 3, so I won't bitch about that being annoying in Oblivion. Etc. But this leads me to one HUGE bitch of a complaint. Why did you put New Vegas on the Oblivion engine rather than waiting and putting it on the Skyrim engine? Once I play Skyrim, going back the New Vegas (with all the DLC. Because God knows I've already done everything I could do in that game as of now) is going to be a pain in the ass. It will feel so... well... ugly. Unrefined. It's like going back to Morrowind after playing Oblivion. The same game is there, it's just missing so many things you've gotten use to that it makes playing it a chore. The only good thing that comes out of this is the hope of an awesome Fallout game on the Skyrim engine. The last 2 have been fun, well worth the money, but they haven't been as magical as I really hoped for. Maybe a newer engine (and the leaps and bounds worth of improvements from 3 to NV) will help to capture the feel of the original Fallout games better.

Michael Baying it up in New Vegas

I had made an explosive character and decided to name him Michael Bay. If you don't understand why I'd name him after that director, you've never seen one of his films. At any rate, I picked all the Explosive based perks I could get my hands on, and it made for one hell of an awesome playthrough. I normally just used the grenade launcher (the one that like every boomer has) but I'd break out the missile launcher when I felt like doing a bit more killing. I waltz into the Great Kahn's camp and walked into their main house. I've still not figured out how to convince them that Ceaser's Legion is simply using them, but I don't dwell on it too much. I pull out my missile launcher, stand by the door and point it at the wall behind the leader's table and fire. The resulting explosion is so massive that I lose about half my health, my partner gets knocked unconscious, and every Kahn in the building is dead and and flown all over the house (and blown apart). There are 2 things that makes this awesome. The first is that I yelled "Michael Bay!" before I fired the missile. The 2nd is the fact I was using normal missiles. I thought I had shot a high explosive round by the amount of damage I had done, but no. Maybe the fact I named my character Michael Bay made his explosive damage triple or something. If I was a programmer I'd so do that. Add lines of code into the game that some names effected the gameplay in unknown or little known ways. Buck Rogers would make energy weapons do a lot more, and maybe make more aliens show up. I'm sure it would be a fair amount of work to intertwine it through the whole game, but it would be very awesome to see none the less. One day when I'm programming video games I'll be sure to do something like that.

Doom 3

I haven't played Doom 3 in a while, but I remember it had a feature I haven't come across in another First Person Shooter. Or I haven't remembered it being an option in anything else. At any rate, one of the options in the menu was to turn off "auto reloading." That is to say that you wouldn't automatically reload when your gun's magazine was empty. I know more than once this threw me off (mostly with the shotgun) because I'd drain the mag into something, and then frantically click the fire button. Freaking out as no shooting was being done, until I'd remember to reload. It's quite embarrassing to admit, what with being a gun nut and all. But I'd really like to see this added to more video games. It really added to the horror aspect of Doom 3 and I really think it would add to the thinking aspect of other tactical shooters. It's not an option I'd ever use in online play (just like turning crosshairs off. I love playing with crosshairs off, but when other people can use that unrealistic advantage I see no reason for me to cripple myself and turn it off. Games like Halo I exclude from this since you have a realistic device that would give you a heads up display in real life) but it's an option I'd really love to use in the campaigns. The level of stress added is amazing, given a change so small. This is a change I see as being fairly simple (coding wise) and something that would really change gameplay. Remember how you never had to reload the pistol or the shotgun from Doom? You had to time a pump with the shotgun, but you never had to reload it. I can only imagine what a hellish time I would have had in Doom had I had to worry about reloading the pistol and the shotgun. But I can't tell you how much I'd still love to see that change.

I like a level of realism in my games that a lot of people think takes away from the fun. They don't want to be limited by real life when they play. A lot of people don't like aiming down weapon sights. A bunch of people hate when weapons do a realistic level of damage. I find that being limited by such things makes a game that much more rewarding. I can go play the Call of Duty 2 campaign on easy and die only from my own stupidity. Or I can play it on veteran and watch myself dieing more often than shooting. But when I finally beat a level, the reward is more than worth the effort. Any idiot can beat a video game with invisibility on. And while it's fun to screw off on easy or play CoD4 with the slow-mo cheat on, there just isn't any reward when you beat the level or kill the final boss. I'm sure I've said it before but I beat MW2 (I like to call it CoD7. Since MW means Mech Warrior to me before it means Modern Warfare, but I digress) on veteran the first time playing it. There were a few challenging points, but nothing that got me stuck for days. Hell, I had it beat in 2 days (totaling under 10 hours of gameplay, if I remember correctly). In contrast, it took me months to beat Rainbow Six Vegas. I had to take EVERY corner tactically. The second I stopped worrying about the enemy was the second I walked around a corner right into a shotgun. When I finally did manage to beat it I felt a level of accomplishment that I hadn't felt since beating CoD2 on veteran years earlier. I'm still trying to beat CoD2 on veteran on my 360 (I'm a PC gamer at heart, so the joysticks won't ever give me the same control as the mouse) but that's another story for another time.