Rage

[Post updated for clarity and grammar. Also it's now gluten free and is fortified with iron!]

It's been a long time since I've done a blog post, and it's been a long time since Rage came out. So most of you would either own Rage, or wouldn't care to own Rage. So, like most of my posts, this isn't a review, but I did plan this post in my head while playing the game.

I was very excited for it and I picked it up at launch. I was slightly disappointed, but mostly because I hyped myself up over the idea of a new id IP. The A.I. was amazing (it reacted in ways that were semi-predictable, but most shooters have the enemies doing things that you 100% see coming every time. So it was a massive step forward, but not so large of a leap that I feel I'm going into the field of video game A.I. too late), the textures were not as awesome as I wanted, but they had a wonderful amount of detail (playing on PS3). The guns sounded great, the cars handled realistically without being a racing sim (though the game felt like a racing game with an FPS mini-game a lot of the time), and the world was both original and strange without going too far in either direction. But, alas, the game had a lot of faults. Mostly, however, I found the faults were in the story.

[Super fast plot details for anyone who hasn't played the game. The governments of the world find out that an asteroid is going to hit Earth and destroy all life. They all decide to make Arks and store select people underground in them to survive the impact, and also decide not to tell anyone so as not to induce panic. These people are given magical nano-machines that basically revive you on death, help you heal over time, give you a HUD; basically anything a normal shooter likes to give you anyway. The Arks preserve everyone in a sleep state for, like, 100 years at which point you'll go above ground and restart humanity! The first group to come out of the Arks are military members, with everyone else following in 20 or so years. Some Arks, like your own, are staged to come out later than the others. And everyone else in your Ark is, for some reason, dead (likely a long time by the decay). So you're all alone, thrust into the wasteland. You're also wearing an Ark-suit. The plot is basically Fallout as a pure shooter, but it's set up well enough as to be a fun time! So, join me as we see this plot fail.]

The story was a pretty good one, but (much like the Halo games) the story wasn't much of the actual game. My biggest issue, however, was with the Authority and some of the raider groups. Or, more specifically, a lack of a problem. The Authority is, at no point in the game, a threat to you personally until you start shooting them/invading their bases (as in you can drive up to their defensive wall and they won't start shooting at you until you start shooting them). Everyone in the towns tells you they're evil and fascist, but the game doesn't show them in an offensive light until you've started killing them. Of course the Authority wants revenge/justice at that point! You see some floating robotic scanner things (think scanners from Half Life 2) in the first town after you stir things up a bit, but they don't really respond to you (even when they see and, presumably, scan you). Shouldn't the Authority have the ability to scan you (and others) remotely with these things and, I don't know, pick up those nano-machines all Ark survivors have? We also don't see this Authority killing civilians in the towns or really doing anything generic fascist-like that the townspeople seem to be insistent on. One of the Authority soldiers (after taking control of a subway town) will tell you to "pick up that can" in a very nice homage to Half-Life 2 and the Combine. A group that is shown to be evil before you ever get to pick up a crowbar and bash some skulls (and headcrabs) in! In this case, if you look down, you'll see there is a can of food on the ground. So this evil Authority soldier is pointing out a can of food on the ground and telling me to pick it up.

In this subway town (the Authority take it over after you complete this mission) you get tasked with killing a group of "raiders" who supply the town's power (because they're charging more money now or whatever). Now the mayor of this town seems way more evil than these raiders; and the same can be said of most of the raider groups. In this case you are tasked with killing them simply because the mayor wants cheaper power. The world is bloody gone, be happy you have power! So those raiders are walking around the town demanding protection money or looting your caravans? No, it's a group of Russians who have power plants. In one of the co-op missions (the first) you get to hear how the guy who gives you the sniper rifle in the main story got that rifle. It's a nice bit of backstory (that isn't needed, but it's probably more fun shooting wise than the main game) but his reason is also more evil than these Russian "raiders". The Russian group of raiders is drilling for oil in an old (abandon) prison. You are tasked with stopping them. This would be like America invading Canada because they started drilling for oil that they planned to export to the US anyway! The first raider group you fight (the ghost guys) are typical savage raiders, so killing them makes sense (although, even then you're doing it because the guy who saved you from them told you to rather than because you want revenge or something). But the British group is a bunch of drunks who tinker with cars (not evil, but not good. It seems likely they harass local populations, but you don't ever see it). And every other group seems to be pretty okay. One raider group (located where another Ark pops up) is said to be savage, killing anyone that enters their land and not speaking a language anyone understands. I felt bad killing these guys (though not as bad as the group or Russians [in hindsight that feels really racist of past-me]) because I didn't have a good feel for them being "bad guys" in the least. They defend their land, and if someone comes into it and doesn't leave (while being shouted at) then they get killed. I bet more than a few Native American tribes wish they had taken that stance when Europeans came to America (and some, of course, did).

I played the entire game waiting for plot twist. Waiting to take down part of the Authority only to find out that the group I had been working for was self serving, and used an Ark survivor knowing they would be naive and powerful. When the game ended (and, much like a fall, it's the sudden stop that kills you) I was left disappointed and wanting so much more. Not because id didn't bring me a good game, but because id could have brought me an orgasmically-amazing (amazingly-orgasmic?) game with a slightly better story and a slightly longer game. I look forward to the DLC that I pray comes [future me: it did. I bought it. I didn't beat it but plan to. Though I'm on PC this time around]. And the same with a Rage 2 [which will likely never happen]. But I hope Bethesda helps them bring in a good story teller. No id game has ever had a drop-dead amazing story. "Space Marine killing the spawns of hell" was fine for the 90s, and it still makes for a fun game today, but it feels dated. id doesn't need to make a story driven game (Halo isn't story driven, and yet it has so much story. Final Fantasy games are pure story these days), they can keep a linear game (like Half-Life) and still tell a fun story. I really look forward to seeing what the bring forth, and they will always be one of my favorite companies (if only because they bring some of the coolest new tech engines to the gaming world).

[I'd love to rewrite this post but it feels dishonest to do so. I'll likely play the game again and write another, better written, post about it. This post was updated for clarity and grammar, but not for content. 1/14/2015]

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.