Category Archives: Software

Farcry

I’m probably not done yet or anything, but my spate of first-person shooters is at least slowing down a bit. Which is good, because there’s lots else I want to play, but since there’s already both a Doom 3 expansion released and a Half-Life 2 expansion scheduled for this summer, I’m sure I’m still stuck in these same woods for a bit longer.

Which made Farcry a welcome entry. No demons from hell that required a clumsy flashlight-or-weapon paradigm to fully unlock the fright potential, no transdimensional head-sized ticks waiting to leap out at you from the shadows… well, no, it really isn’t as good as the Half-Life series, so I shouldn’t deride. But it’s definitely the next best thing.

You play as Jack Carver, a Caribbean tour guide (or South Pacific? Well, somewhere with palm trees, sparkling blue yet crystal clear waters, and the occasional Japanese army skeleton or half-sunken battleship to break up the monotony…. so, yeah, probably the Pacific after all, then. Seems obvious, now that I’ve thought about it.) hired to take a beautiful young reporter on a tour of a nearby island chain. Only, before you even get there, someone decides you’ve trespassed a little too close, and blows up your boat. After that, the only thing left to do is penetrate the net of mercenaries, stop the mad scientist’s evil scheme, and save the girl. I mean, that was your best boat!

But, seriously, for the railroad scenario that all FPSes must be, this one does a pretty good job of making each next “choice” seem like the only reasonable one and even of sometimes providing multiple solution paths to each objective. But, shooting different things with different weapons, and each thing takes a different number of hits to kill it? *yawn* We’ve been here before, of course. What makes it work is the interesting storyline coupled with the deadly paradise motif. You genuinely want to pause now and then and take it all in, but more often than not, this is a bad idea. Plus, there’s a pretty good vehicle system, with everything from an inflatable raft with an outboard hooked on to a hang-glider.

I felt like it got a little too hard right at the end. I know, it’s supposed to and all, but this was essentially post-climax, which made it feel unfair. Both because I wanted to see how it turned out and because, well, I was ready to move on to the next thing. Which I will, but I only wish I knew how soon. My gametime is at a premium these days. Probably June, if all else fails.

Doom 3

So, after that long Half-Life detour, I finally did get around to playing Doom 3. And then came a very frustrating interlude this morning when, less than 10 seconds from victory, my wireless/optical mouse crapped out and I had to start all over. (Well, okay, just the last battle all over. Still, though. It was stressful.) In any case, after a 20 minute struggle to fix the mouse and a 2 minute struggle to replay that end bit, I have now finished.

Was it exactly the same as Doom and Doom 2 and Quake and etc.? Well. It still didn’t have a story the way Half-Life does. I mean, it has a story, and a pretty good one. But it’s basically the story of everything that led up to the endoomening. Space marine wandering around the planet Mars shooting demons, that part is identical, but now it has prettier graphics and a backstory. Which is to say, the fun in the game is seeing the graphics, but not in seeing how it turns out. Still, the backstory part is an improvement over the original Doom. I’d compare it to Doom 2 as well, but that would require me to remember anything, anything at all about that game that would distinguish it from the original. As for the Quake comparison, well, Quake sucks as a single player game, so this is much better than that. So, to answer the actual question: it’s different, but only cosmetically.

That’s okay, though. Going into Hell with guns blazing to save humanity is its own reward. On top of that, the graphical and auditory enhancements have made it pretty spooky. Okay, there’s no good reason in-game why you can’t have the flashlight and a weapon out at the same time. But it would ratchet the tension way down, and the whole point of the Doom franchise is to be twitching around at every noise afraid of being blasted into a lava pit by a giant beholder (which we call a cacodaemon, because this isn’t Dungeons and Dragons, but I think I know a beholder when I see one, thanks). It succeeds masterfully at this aspect, and the backstory-gathering is all gravy on top of that.

I hope they wait for Doom 4 until we’re at another full leap forward technologically, because otherwise they’re really going to have to write an engrossing plotline after all, and id’s only real innovative strength (at least, that others don’t do as well at or better) is the iconic shock image, eg Doom’s missile-launching minotaur or Wolfenstein’s power-armored Hitler. Good Stuff, yeah, but only so good when games that are chock full of plot are in the same place on the store’s shelf, for the same price.

Half-Life: Blue Shift

Last night, I got around to hooking up my new computer speakers. Once you have an upgrade like that, your only choice is to dig out a new game. Conveniently, I had an old new game laying around, in the form of Half-Life: Blue Shift, the second and final expansion of the original game.

In the third perspective of the Black Mesa incident, security guard Barney Calhoun finds himself surrounded by a collapsing experimental facility, terrified scientists, impersonal military clean-up crews, and hideous alien monstrosities. In other words, if you’re looking for something new and different, pick up Half-Life 2 instead.

The game is short in a way that I haven’t experienced since Luigi’s Mansion. It doesn’t have any new monsters or weapons, or even all the monsters or weapons from either of the previous two games. It does have the same Half-Life charm, though. Puzzle-solving at its finest in a shooter, occasional scares, a well-realized world, and people to save who, unlike in previous episodes, you actually have a chance of saving. The only thing that makes it hard to recommend is that the G-Man has far too light a touch. But that’s okay. That’s what Half-Life 2 is for.

Half-Life: Opposing Force

51C9XNXNT7LWell, look at me, all with the string of finished games under my belt. I like to think the trend could even continue, although past experience indicates that these things run in cycles. Except the books, of course. I always, always read. Right now, my Half-Life kick is continuing with the first expansion, Opposing Force.

In it, you play as Corporal Adrian Shephard, a member of the military forces assigned to clean up the Black Mesa incident. There are a few familiar locations and at least two very memorable scenes to watch from the original, and the designers have cleaned up the moral ambiguity of playing as army guys bent on killing all survivors and especially on capturing Gordon Freeman, by setting Shephard’s arrival late in the incident. There are a lot more aliens running around, and the military have already started teaming up with scientists and security guards and whoever it takes to survive and escape.

Unfortunately for the player, you are opposed in this goal by special-ops black forces who view the army grunts to be as big of chumps as the army grunts viewed the scientists in the original game, and you are also opposed by the mysterious strange-voiced briefcase guy who has plans of his own (which, by the way Valve/Sierra/Steam/whoever I should be talking to about this, I hope will be explored more fully in Half-Life 3). And, as always, by the extra-dimensional Xen forces that are at the root of the problems in every game.

Can it be compared to the original? Strangely, yes. Whoever is on this design team is to be praised, because every storyline so far is nearly as deep as the original. The gameplay is nearly identical, and while yes, it’s a shorter game than either main sequence entry, I’m not going to fault an expansion for not lasting 30 hours. I am looking forward to the last Half-Life expansion, Blue Shift. Not as much as I would be if it was available on Steam for free with Half-Life 2, like the others have been. But I’ll find some highly legal way or other to get it. And before I’ve lost my momentary enchantment with the series, if at all possible.

Half-Life

I haven’t really addressed the issue of what happens when I re-experience something. I watched the Star Wars movies over Christmas weekend, for example, with nary a review in sight. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, and probably I’ll deal with it on a case by case basis. My gut instinct says that while movies are too easy to review at any moment, games and books require an investment of time and energy that makes it worth revisiting them. This doesn’t mean I’ll follow that rule, of course. But I might.

The thing is, I got so thoroughly sucked in to playing Half-Life 2 that I was more interested in re-playing the original Half-Life than Doom 3. (All the random red sparkle pixels in Doom 3 aren’t helping any, but I’ll get back to it, never fear. It was just starting to get good and terrifying.)

For a game that came out seven or so years ago, Half-Life retains incredible replayability. I went all the way through the game without cheating or skipping anything, up until the very last fight. I only cheated there because I was ready to move on and had beaten it once before for real. The graphics are very descriptive for being so clunky by today’s standards, and the storyline is enthralling. Gordon Freeman, our everyman hero with a PhD in physics who works at a top secret government research facility, is caught in the results of an experiment gone awry. In his struggle to reach the surface with his hide intact, he comes to symbolize to the workers in the complex their own shining hope to survive the disaster themselves (and unlike in most games, you genuinely feel bad when most of them do not), and he comes to symbolize a threat equal to the one he wants to escape, to those forces which oppose him.

Well, I don’t want to spoil it or anything, but the fact is that nearly everyone in the world has played this game already, and I’ll spoil it when I review the next game in the sequence anyway, as it would be unavoidable there. So, yeah, it’s the military clean-up crew and the dimension-shifting alien forces. Sure, they hate each other more than they hate Gordon, but he runs a close second. What is a physicist to do? Well, clearly, he is to kill anyone that tries to kill him first, and eventually stop the alien invasion once and for all, coming to symbolize the dreams for freedom of an entire generation of humans and Xen alien slaves who… but I’m getting ahead of myself. For that, you need the sequel.

And I’m serious there. You *need* the sequel. This is shaping up to be one of the best video-game storylines available, if they can even maintain the same meager slide in story quality for the forthcoming Half-Life 3 that occurred between 1 and 2. If they improve again, well, watch out!

Half-Life 2

I know it looks like I’ve been neglecting my duties here. Instead, I just randomly finished three different things in the same 18 hour stretch. I’m not really clear on how that kind of thing happens, and yet here I am.

This time out, Half-Life 2, the story of Gordon Freeman, the rogue physicist who can’t seem to catch a break. After going through the rift accidentally opened by his fellow scientists at the Black Mesa research facility to put a stop to the creatures coming through, Gordon wakes up years later to find that his efforts didn’t result in as safe a world as he’d expected.

Then, crowbar at his side, he finds himself swept along by events once again, this time not just in an attempt to survive but due to the efforts of a resistance movement that has long viewed him as the savior of humanity. As many dark turns as were taken in the original Half-Life, this story nevertheless has a more somber feel to it. The stakes are higher, the betrayals are more deeply felt (if less surprising), and the character interactions are more fully realized. All this despite the main character never uttering a word of dialogue.

As for the gameplay: Lots of loading screens. It breaks up the game, which didn’t bother me. I can easily imagining it bothering other people, but I typically enjoyed the pause to relax and reflect. Spectacular gameplay. Well, fine, anyhow. I think that the FPS control and interaction scheme has been finalized for quite a while. No real improvements, but it’s worked very well, and continues to here.

The graphics are breathtaking. I’m on record as having said that they were a solid increment above the Final Fantasy movie, and here I mean the in-game play, not the cutscenes (of which there are none). I’ve since considered that I may have overstated that. The character movements in Final Fantasy were more realistically human, but still images and especially facial expressions don’t really hold a candle to the ones in this game. The rest of the world is essentially photorealistic. If FPSes weren’t quite to twitchy, it would be very easy to entirely forget you were playing a game.

I look forward to Half-Life 3, although not to the years-long wait for it. I expect I look forward to whatever expansions that get thrown out too. However, I do wish the game wasn’t so tightly copy-controlled that you have to be online to play the game. I didn’t pay money for it, as it came free with my video card. That smokescreen aside, I feel very uncomfortable not owning a physical copy of a game I’ve paid for. Not even the CD so much (although that too), but the idea that if I unplug my ethernet cable, I suddenly no longer have the game. For one thing, companies do go out of business from time to time. Mostly, I mistrust the precedent. Today, I can’t control my own purchases, tomorrow, eyeless crabs are latching onto people’s heads while an unelected military organization enforces the whims of our unseen alien overlords.

Starfox Adventures

512EC3HYF1LAt about the same time I was playing Wario World, I also tried out Starfox Adventures. It got a whole lot more play. Then, I got distracted by all the life stuff going on, and then Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out. This was a good game, and all, but you just can’t compete with that. I mean, yes, Metroid Prime 2 probably could, but that’s why I haven’t bought it yet. And Half Life 2 probably *will*, if I can ever get my desktop back into working trim.

Anyway, none of that is big on the relevance. The latest Starfox is a weird hybrid thingummy, in that it’s about 65% platformer, 20% RPG, and 15% space shooter. There’s this planet full of dinosaurs, and stompy old T-Rex has taken over, just as you’d expect. With no Utahraptor to hold him in check, it’s up to some blue-furred chick and later our hero, Fox McCloud, to step in and save all the peace-loving Dromiceiomimi, Triceratopses, Woolly Mammoths, and other reptilian species from having all the minerals in their planet exploited.

Like you’d expect, you gradually gather money to buy maps and more sophisticated items, plus bomb plants, magical staff power-ups, vine seeds, and lots of other types of items I haven’t gotten around to yet. Basically a cheap knockoff of Zelda or Banjo Kazooie, but if you have lots of time to play that kind of game, it’s not so cheap a knockoff as to make it pointless. Also, though it shames me to utter such a furry thought, the blue-skinned chick was kinda hot.

Wario World

514DEMK6TTLSo, part of the problem with reviewing video games is that my system requires me to be finished consuming the item in question. Having quit definitely counts, but it’s harder to tell when I won’t really be playing a game anymore, as opposed to if I get sick of a movie or a book.

Sadly, this excuse will fit a lot better on the following review, because I knew I didn’t like Wario World within the first fifteen minutes. I was playing it back in mid-October, at my parents’ house. I expected it to be pretty good, what with finding Wario to be a fairly amusing character in the Mario Bros./Donkey Kong Nintendoverse, and especially due to the brilliant WarioWare, released at the same time for the Gameboy. Alas, sheer lameness lay ahead.

I got off to a great start by not realizing that the initial area was mostly just the menu of places to go, not actually part of the real game. So, poor introduction, check. Then, after I finally did work out where to go to play the game, it turned out not to be 3D after all. I mean, I like sidescrollers just fine, but it’s not what I saw coming here. (Technically, there are three dimensions, but while right/left and up/down are fully articulated, forward/backward is about ten feet wide.)

And the gameplay itself just really wasn’t much of a much. The puzzles were somewhat interesting, but I found one of them to be unsolvable during the first world, and the first world is supposed to be about getting up to speed, not about not being able to do stuff. I bought it used, so no instruction book. This could indicate that some special move I wasn’t aware of could have helped me, but frankly, that’s still bad design. Games these days are supposed to tell you how to use the buttons as you go, because there are too damned many of them to learn all at the start.

The long and short of it is that the problems I encountered were mostly due to missing info and poorly managed expectations. Still, though, most games I expected to like going in would hold my interest long enough to get through the rough patches, or at least make me want to explore online for whatever info I needed to be able to play. This one did not, and when googling isn’t worth the effort, that’s just a flat-out failure.

Pikmin 2

I wasn’t really impressed by Pikmin when it was first being advertised, but a guy at work loaned it to me, so I played it through. Turned out to be a lot of fun. Solidly in the real-time strategy genre, but disguised to look like a kid’s game. And better than most of them, because you have much more solid control over your troops than in Starcraft, say. But, it was also pretty quick, done within a week, so I gave it back and never got a copy myself. Fun is fine and all, but short is lame.

Except! Sometime in the past 3-4 years since then, my game practices have turned around, and I run out of patience pretty quickly now. (I have some fears about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in this same vein, as the reviews make it appear to be bigger than ever. And I didn’t quite finish Vice City.) So, when Pikmin 2 came out earlier this month, I leapt on it.

The gameplay is essentially identical. You run the little guys around killing big scary monsters (well, okay, ladybugs and frogs, mostly) and bypassing geographic obstacles in order to collect shiny objects that can be sold as artifacts on your home planet, thereby getting your shipping company out of hock. You’re limited to a set time per day, and must leave at night. On top of the strategy of building up the right forces for each task, the monsters will regenerate after a few days and the geography will too after a few more, so there’s the added strategy layer of how many days to stay in each area.

Changes to play include an unlimited number of days to play, randomly generated caves to explore, and two main characters to control the Pikmin, instead of just one. The first one doesn’t change play a lot; sure, you have time to be thoughtful and unhurried, but you pretty much had that during the first game. The caves aren’t as random as the literature would have you believe. Each one has the same treasures and creatures in the same order. The only difference is the layout of where these are placed on any given cave level.

Where the game shines is in the multiple player aspect. I’ve only played by myself, so all I can see is the glimmer of how useful two minds able to control two groups independently would be. The ability to control two groups on sequence is great, though. You can start a group on a task, then move back to another. It’s also a lot harder to accidentally leave any Pikmin behind. Also, I’m blathering, because this will be non-sensical to someone who hasn’t at least seen the first game. My point is, this is a boon to the strategic element game that cannot be overemphasized.

The rest of where the game shines is in the game world itself. It’s genuinely fun to watch and read everything that goes by. Fun enough that when I made a big flub on Day 10, I restarted and didn’t resent it. Fun enough that despite having played the end credits about an hour ago, I’m likely to pick up the controller and finish exploring every nook of the game that I can find, later today and over the next several.

Everything has a downside, of course. This one is in the save-game structure. You can choose to save at the end of every day, which is fine. You can’t have multiple save files, which is lame, but acceptable. (Technically, you can have up to three. This is designed for multiple players at the same time, but you can do copies and get up to three that way, if you really wanted to expend the effort.) The game auto-saves when you enter a cave and when you move on to each successive floor, which is terrible. You can auto-save or you can limit the number of save files, but doing both is ridiculous. This is why I had to go back and restart 10 game-days in, incidentally.

In any case, that’s not a game ruining flaw, and I would recommend either of these games to any Gamecube owner. It’s not quite good enough to buy a system for, though. Luckily, there are multiple Zelda and Metroid games released / planned over the next year to satisfy that issue.