I don’t usually have much of an up-to-date PC gaming machine. Over the last few years, I’ve only really had a work PC that was semi recent. My latest work PC is a screamer with a 1GB videocard, that also thankfully restarts itself when some new games get busy and has firewalls blocking everything but WoW, CoD4 and Steam. So I’ve been playing Day of Defeat Source, which is a remake of the original DoD. I hear there’s another graphical revamp of DoD (though I’m not sure if its official or unofficial) in the works.
Reviewed on PS3. Developed by Insomniac. Published by Sony
Not being a pro site, C1 doesn’t have to try and rush reviews of games in time for the day of release. Although this review goes up just in time for the release of another big PS3 FPS it must be said that Resistance 2 was lost in the late 2008 Holiday release rush and for good reason. It offers absolutely nothing compelling over Gears of War 2, Little Big Planet, Fallout 3 or Call of Duty World at War. The sequel to the PS3′s first million-seller, R2 improves on the rather ordinary original in very slight ways, concentrating on online multiplayer modes and delivering an adequate gameplay experience. Merely adequate.
The game follows the protagonist of the first game, Nathan Hale, who has now found a voice in a n adventure with actual cinematics rather than a concept art montage. In this alternate history where the Earth was invaded during WWII, we have ridiculously anachronistic technology (the “cobbled together from the alien tech” argument makes absolutely no sense) such as Xbox1 vintage headsets, advanced projectile weaponry and vehicle design straight out of Starship Troopers. In the few levels set in smalltown America of the era, there’s less atmosphere than Fallout 3.
As far as the game itself, R2 continues with the rather ‘gamey’ and gimmick-laden weapons of the original. The controls are ok and none of the usual criticisms of the DS3 controller and FPS game really hinder your progress. But the level design, cheating AI and general difficulty (played on normal) made it a very frustratiing experience overall. I can sometimes swear occasionally during gameplay but the number of times I involuntarily utter the words “Fuck Off” after yet another cheap death might make anyone watching me through a hidden webcam think I have Tourette’s syndrome. It takes me back to Jak II (another developer). I made it halfway through the single player campaign before rage-ejecting the disc from PS3 (the boss battle against the Swarm if you must know).When the AI isn’t raping you, the level design instills a feeling of deja vu. You feel as though you’ve been here before. It’s like visiting a McDonald’s in a different city. It looks and feels exactly the same even though you’ve never been there before.
The game is not pretty to look at. Not ugly but not particularly impressive for a first party effort. Compared to the Ratchet and Clank, MGS or Uncharted games on PS3, this game looks nearly as ordinary as some third party movie lisence games. The visuals seem very flat, with really ordinary lighting in most levels. It does look slightly like a Wii game with higher poly models. The visual style is bland to say the least and derivative of so many better games. The sound is not up to the usual standard of a developer of Insomniac’s standing with nothing sounding crisp. I found the radio effect on voice particularly annoying. A guy who’s standing in front of you and not wearing a headset speaks to you as if you’ve picked him up by accident on HAM radio. What’s worse (and somewhat illogical), this radio voice is 3D and moves when you pan the camera. …. the fuck?
OK, so the clinical singleplayer and merely adequate presentation must mean that the multiplayer is fantastic. Well, no. It’s OK, but suffers from a lack of real direction as to what you’re meant to do and where your enemies are in relation to you. I jumped into a game and found it relatively easy to start killing foes so kudos to the online system, but after a while it was apparent that the maps were so big (R2 is one of those games that shows that more people per server, whilst a nice technical achievement, doesn’t make for a better game). I ended up in the last 5 minutes of the round wandering around with minimal health looking for someone to either shoot or put me out of my misery. There’s apparently a coop campaign that’s supposedly completely different from the normal singleplayer but I will never ever find out if its any good.
Insomniac have usually made games I have found very accessible and loved, but there’s something about the Resistance games that just doesn’t gel with me.
Controller1.com rating 1/3
Reviewed on Xbox 360. DLC also available on PC. Fallout 3 game required. Fallout 3 also on PS3, but without DLC.
Developed and published by Bethesda.
Our first DLC review on c1 and its Fallout 3′s first piece of DLC, Operation Anchorage. F3:OA is a side mission for the game based around the Outcasts you may have seen around the map. You agree to use your Pip Boy to interface with an old Virtual Reality pod and voila, you’re transported virtually back to the campaign to oust Chinese Army occupation of Alaska before the Balloon went up.
The DLC is a lot more linear than the rest of the game and more action oriented. Its more Mass Effect than Fallout. You take nothing in and take nothing out, so you can’t loot corpses since your vanquished foes vanish along with any weapons and ammo. You have ammo dispensers and health dispenses dotted around the map, not always where you need one and since you can’t carry meds, it does change how you play fairly significantly. You can’t go into a fight, shoot, heal, shoot heal. You have to heal when you see the dispenser and hope you can make it through the few throttled areas with enemies aplenty without dieing.
There’s a boss encounter at the end but if your speech stats are high enough, you may able to avoid altogether in a rather bizarre way. At the end of the simulation, you unlock some booty that you can return to at any point (though i’m not sure if items respawn- i’d doubt it). There’s nothing in the booty that you can’t get elsewhere but its nice to have it all in once place.
The other thing the DLC does is remove the level cap, so its definitely worth doing if you plan to do everything in the game. The actual F3:OA mission is not all that great and made me stop playing F3 once I was done. I would say its essential only if you are planning on doing EVERYTHING. There two more F3 DLC packs scheduled in the next few months but I think I’m done with this game. The levels here should take around 3-4 hours which is not bad for the price but you just need to know that it doesn’t play like the rest of the game.
Controller1.com rating 2/3
Killzone 2 comes out this week. I hated Killzone 1. It was so try hard yet failed to make any positive impression upon me, its gameplay wasn’t anything special and its level design merely adequate when it didn’t suck. There were no highs and no particular lows but it was middling in every way. So I’m going to buy Killzone 2 when it comes out later this week.
I’m not a heavily invested in PS3 fanboy so there’s no particular reason why I cling to KZ2 as the PS3 saviour and poo poo any contrary opinions with such anger that counsellors will have a field day. The first game was just a fairly ordinary game so I don’t hold out hope that Killzone will be game of the year since, graphics aside, there’s no indication that Guerilla have done anything majorly different this time around. Time will tell.
So why am I buying this? Its a shooter, a genre which I obviously enjoy (if you’re reading this, then you’d have a fair inkling of this fact) and there isn’t much competition from shooters in the first half of this year. And its a well received one. Yes, there are lots of platitudes being spouted about this game, but I’m guessing they can’t be completely wrong. 80% plus on review sites is a decent indicator. And truth be told, its the comments about this game not being innovative, just doing the FPS very well that actually intrigue me. We have Left 4 Dead, Gears 2 and Call of Duty World at War late last year- all very good shooters. Even though Resistance 2 was not great, it is certainly playable. But there’s a bit of drought of these games in the early part of the year. We are promised Halo 3: ODSTDSTDTSTD and MAG later in the year, and probably a new Infinity Ward shooter. But who will fill the gap till then?
Or will we just go back to playing CoD4?
Two system exclusive demoes were released onto their respective systems late last week. One was for the first big 360 only game of 2009, Halo Wars and the other was for Sony’s Great White Hope, Killzone 2. Halo Wars demo we will Focus Test soon, but since I plan to buy the full KZ2 game, we aren’t go FT the demo. Here are some impressions of the Killzone 2 demo. Let’s preface this by saying I played 2/3 of the original game was unimpressed to say the least which is why I’ve not boarded the hype machine for the sequel. Good looking doesn’t mean great games, especially when the developers, Guerrilla Games, have yet to prove they can make something fun.
The demo starts off with you attacking a beach held by Helgast troops, then you move inside. Then some slo mo opera happens and you see a video trumpeting the high review scores the game has received so far (the game’s been in the can for a while, possibly held back so to avoid cannibalising sales from Resistance 2). See the picture below for a taster
More about the actual demo, though.
The good: Its pretty. Its got some very nice lighting effects. The score is magnificent and the sounds mostly great (if a little muted).
The bad: People laughed at Gears 2′s “10 shitloads” dialogue and it looks like KZ2 is trying to go down the same path. It’s just generic .
Gameplay: the demo doesn’t do anything you have seen a bazillion times before but I think it does it ok. It’s just not very responsive to control though.I’m actually less enthusiastic about the game since playing the demo but I hear its mostly good and I think I need a shooter. Fallout 3 is kinda shooter but not quite.
Fallout 3 got a good going over this past weekend (up to level 11 and around the 22 hour mark- not counting many many restarts. I had a few issues where I would find a new area, went exploring and then found i wasted two hours on an area where I have to trigger a mission elsewhere first. So after a while I decided I would just map the thing. I literally spent about 3 hours walking around the map so that I can now fast travel anywhere and get to a location with a minute or two. I really want to go onto another game but F3 just does everything that Mass Effect didn’t.
One thing still bothers me about Fallout 3. There are many places where people make homes in various places that are still habitable. But no one has cleaned up. The war was years earlier yes people have lost many things: love ones, their homes and it seems their brooms.
Reviewed on PC. Developed and published by Valve
The original Day of Defeat was a free WWII mod for Half Life and after Counterstrike was one of the few mods to be successful enough to be bought up by the makers of the originating game (as happened with Counterstrike and Left 4 Dead). In 2005, the game was ported with semi upgraded graphics to the Source Engine, though with only 4 maps at launch though others were added intermittently. At some point, spurned on by the success of Team Fortress 2, DoD: S received a mini makeover with a film grain effect and killcams straight out of TF2 (yes Call of Duty did them first but these are literally the same as TF2′s down to the sound effects and the ability to take screenshots). Now you have nemeses and can gain revenge on those who kill you too much.
The game is a really simple class-based game with two teams (one German, one American). Most maps are simple capture the flag deals, but with a very fast paced capturing system compared to the eternity it takes to capture a control point in a Battlefield game. Other maps involve demolishing enemy installations (tanks, anti aircraft guns, etc) but basically its a “shoot and respawn until the map runs out of time” game. There’s a simple, yet deep game here that’s been keeping a loyal band of people still playing in this PC shooter environment ruled by the trio of CoD4, TF2 and L4D. People use grenade launchers and there’s no nasty n00btube comments like there would be in CoD4.
It doesn’t hurt that the Source-engined version of this game is over four years old and will run on almost any PC still in circulation. On a modern machine it looks ok but you may be missing the graphical OMFG you get with Crysis. Call of Duty 1 and 2 were bigger sales successes yet I can’t find a game on my ISP’s servers. There’s that typical Valve feel to the way it works and sounds, with the nasty touch that when you lose a round, the winners have about 10-15 seconds where they can kill any enemies still alive with impunity. Ouch!
So here’s the question- why has there never been a sequel to this and why not a console port? CoD WaW’s success proves there’s still a large market for good shooters, even WWII ones. I guess the new Wolfenstein will just have that Nazi-hunting FPS market to itself this year.
Clint plays L4D for the first time, Cam bitches about a new videogame for neither the first or last time while George *facepalms*
For those who can’t let go, I have some advice- Let go. Where I work, people regularly use their PC’s to play multiplayer games at lunch and after work at the end of the week. Because the place is so big and stuffed with geeks there are several different games going on around the building. There’s the WoW fraternity, TF2 players (whose ranks have been thinned recently), Left 4 Dead and CoD4 Modern Warfare. Yesterday we had some interesting conversations on our private CoD4 mailing list and it highlights a problem when you play a good multiplayer game for a long time and tire of, but have no immediate successor lined up.
So these guys have basically played Call of Duty modern Warfare at lunchtimes for over a year. They don’t like CS or TF2 or LEft 4 Dead, they love CoD4. They are very good at it and most are ranked level 55. They also play a mod, so they’ve levelled up using this bot mod only with the bots turned off so they’re basically playing standard CoD4 but one where they can only play against each other if they want to preserve their rankings). This is why its hard to tear away the TF2 guys from their game or WoW players to a new MMO. They’ve invested so much time in the game but are so sick of it but they’ve invested so much time in it but they are so sick of it but, well, you can guess the rest.
So back to this group of CoD lovers. One guy, who’s one of the better players, and the one who wrote the bot mod we played, has basically had enough. I know because I’ve played him on the 360 version as well as the PC- He’s spent more time on that one game than I have on sleeping in the past year by the looks of things. you know the type, complaining about others using the grenade launcher (the n00b tube) So he’s trying to rally the troops into playing something else. So what about Call of Duty World at War? Nope- WWII, buggy, yada yada. Which is funny because he hasn’t played it. Ok, then what?
Operation flashpoint was suggested. The group was all excited but apparently was a colossal let down. I could have told them that. Then Codename:Eagle, apparently a pre EA DICE made this before BF1942. Apparently buggy too so that went down in flames. Its funny, but I’m sure many games have this same dilemma. What do you play when you’re sick of something. I recall years ago, when we played Medal of Honor Allied Assault multiplayer, we moved straight onto Call of Duty (the original). When that grew stale, there was no immediate successor until the UT2004 demo came out. Battlefield Vietnam came out and filled the void for a while but that didn’t last. Eventually someone suggested the original Counterstrike and they went back to that (without me for the most part since CS has never gelled for me). WoW kind of killed the LAN gaming network for a few years (that and some other loopholes being closed by the IT department). Counterstrike source came and went a few times, lots of RTSes and MMo’s and then new FPSes becoming fashionable again amongst theses fairly PC-centric types with CoD4 and TF2 (and then Left 4 Dead).
But the habits are hard to kick. Left 4 Dead took away some of the TF2 players (not all), but CoD WaW has not pulled the CoD4 guys away. I’m guessing that either these dudes will be bringing in CoD2 next week or Battlefield 1942 or BF2. And it won’t last. I reckon give it a month before thy come back to Modern Warfare.
I myself played Left 4 Dead but i found the online wasn’t more fun than SP for me and I kind of lost interest after writing the review. Then I saw on steam my Day of Defeat Source needed an update so I patched it and tried it having not played it since CoD2 came out in late 2005. Well, you can see the TF2/influence now. Film grain effect and killcams straight out of TF2 (same sound effects) but that aside, this is still one of the better fast paced shooters. It has changed so little that I can’t help wondering if these guyus will ever get bored with playing these same maps over and over.
What makes guys play this sort of game over and over so much, even years later? CoD WaW has come out and sold very well, but I find the PC community to be quite small. My ISP is one of the larger server providers and there are only two normal TDM servers for CoD WaW compared to about six to eight for Modern Warfare. Hey, people are still playing Quake III somewhere.
Its hard to let go.
Reviewed on PC. Also on Xbox 360. Developed by Valve. Retail versions published by EA
Left 4 Dead is Valve’s latest First Person shooter, based mainly around online cooperative play. L4D has also managed to at least partially bury the meme-cow (a cash cow for memes) that was TF2, at least in the short term. So what is it about this game that’s got everyone excited?
So the conceit is that each of the four stories are their own survival horror movie. Four survivors- Francis- the tough biker, Louis the office worker, Zoe the spunky chick and Bill, the old fart ex marine. Those are my descriptions based on playing the game so forgive me if they misrepresent the ‘canon.’ The four of you basically go from point A to point B Starting and ending each level in a new safehouse. And along the way there are zombies. Like everywhere. There are the common or garden zombies who just move towards you, sometimes slowly, other times rushing at you, often in numbers. And there are the specials.
There’s Boomer, a giant fat bile factory, who, if you get too close, will vomit on you and have hordes of zombies rushing you. Then there’s smoker, with his enormous tongue; Hunters who’ll jump you and pound the crap out of you; and tanks, who are basically big motherfuckers. There’s also the witch, but DON’T DISTURB THE WITCH YOU TARD!
That makes it sound simplistic but its actually a blast to play, easily the best Valve MP game in ages. You can play either by yourself which is underrated and an enormous amount of fun, and are able to select any chapter in any of the campaigns (of course there are no checkpoints within any of the chapters, so if you die you start again). Or you can play with three others, each of you taking on one of the four characters (one of each BTW). You need to work together, if someone runs off and gets cornered, they will need to be rescued. You can of course heal yourself or heal you teammates and they can of course heal you if they feel like it. But Multiplayer does highlight one thing, the AI in this game is very good (even on single player).
This is down to the much vaunted AI director. This will spawn enemies at just the right time and in just the right places. No two playthroughs of this game will ever bee the same and for that reason I recommend playing the single player through by yourself at some point. When you play with people, they’re selfish with health packs, shoot you by mistake and run off by themselves and get killed- which is a pain since that leaves more infected for you to deal with. There’s also a versus mode where four humans can go against four players on the zombie team. The zombies are weak but respawn and can choose exactly where they will lie in wait for their human opponents.
The graphics are pretty decent for a source based game. It doesn’t look ugly per se, it just looks a little underwhelming compared to even some the best console games, let alone high end PC’s. Sound is fantastic, from the music, the voiceover work to the punchy effects.
Left 4 Dead looks like a poor value proposition when you compare it to Team Fortress 2, but it actually offers so much more, not least is a very good single player mode. It’s memes are also not as moronic and insular meaning this is a fun game for everyone to get right into. Everyone loves zombies right?
Controller1.com rating 3/3
Left 4 Dead left me non-plussed a few weeks ago when I last wrote about it. I have kept at it a little longer- still in the single player mode. I’m finding it a lot more fun than the Singple player of some other PC FPS’s I’ve played in my time. So much that I think the single player is a greatly overlooked part of the game. I’m not even sure I really want to play multiplayer all that much.
Years ago, my first taste of PC multiplayer was the coop mode Terrorist Hunt on Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. I had skipped Quake, Unreal and BF 1942 for various reasons but I got heavily hooked on that MP game for months on end, playing at night on our work LAN. We played the games maps as well as custom maps and we never played adversarial modes. Why? Because my friend who mostly hosted hated playing against other people. This was before co-op was a major selling feature of most shooters. He probably would have loved left for dead. I don’t know I’ve not seen him in a while since he’s gone off games.
I’m currently on the last mission of the Airport level (or the third of four campaigns). Even though its the equivalent of playing BF1942 with bots, its still a highly agreeable single player game. But even though I love PC multiplayer shooters, well CoD at least, I don’t know if I will want to play much more multi of this. Something about Valve games that attracts the rather unforgiving hardcore. In SP, if you shoot your team mates by accident, you get a warning. In MP, if you shoot your teammates you get a smack on the head. One of the single best features of CoD WaW is the one-level zombie mode that is unlocked once you beat single player. I hope Treyarch can turn that success into something a little meatier in future iterations or even DLC.
Fallout 3 is one of those games that you know will just eat your time. I’ve been slack and am still only three hours in but I’ve only had time to play the game on weekends recently so my progress is slower than a Trabant on an economy run. I’m liking it far more than Oblivion. I made it 10 hours into oblivion before losing interest but I hate later had pangs of regret in selling it. Actually wait, I gave it to Clint and he wiped his ass on it, or something. Or he got a dirty disc error. Something like that. I like the setting but obviously in a game that can take 100+ hours, I’m only going to see a limited version of all the game has to offer. And that’s OK. I need an ending to games and if one isn’t in sight, boredom takes over, quality or no. Probably F3′s shooter presentation is what is making it more palatable to player over something set in another fantasy realm. F3 is SF which has always been more my cup of tea. Irish Breakfast, if I’m not mistaken. Mine’s strong with milk, no sugar.
Lastly I played a teensy bit of Rock Band ACDC. For various reasons, including a ridiculously cheap price tag (not RRP), I bought thsi rather than the full version. I am disappointed that you can’t use it to buy DLC, but it is weird for someone who’s played Guitar ero for so long to suddenly play exactly the same game with such a different look- despite it being exactly the same.
