Tag Archives: first-person shooter

Halo 3

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It occurs to me to state for the record that I did finally finish playing Halo 3. A few weeks ago, I guess? I forgot it was a noteworthy event, as it happens. The Halo games, as you may or may not be aware (but probably you are), chronicle a three-way war between humans (led by Master Chief, a genetically improved guy in a big metal powersuit), um… a confederation of aliens that I distinctly recall having a name that escapes me at the moment (led by religious fanatics), and the Flood (about whom the less said the better in the unlikely event that you care about spoilers for a game that is almost a decade old). The war is fought in a variety of places, but mostly on giant terraformed rings called Halos which figure prominently in the fates and histories not only of the aliens and the Flood, but of the galaxy itself.

In this game, a first-person shooter like the others, you control the Master Chief as always, and up to three other players in co-op play, which at the time was pretty new. Other games have made good roads into that space in the meantime, but, that’s how it goes. And you continue to fight against the other two sides of the war and try to save the galaxy and all. Also, there’s some pretty fantastically customizable multiplayer components to the game.

Despite the disinterested tone of the review, it really is a great game. It doesn’t have quite the strength of storyline of Halo 2, but the game play is equivalent and probably improved, so, decent tradeoff. If it weren’t for the fact that the game play in the original game was iffy, I could unreservedly recommend the whole trilogy as a pretty good sci-fi yarn wrapped around finding a bunch of guns and using them to kill things. Which, I mean, they’re aliens. That’s why they’re on the screen!

Resistance: Fall of Man

After long delays[1], I have finally gotten a PlayStation 3, what with the Blu-Ray playing capabilities and all. Resultantly, I also snagged one of the handful of PS3 exclusives that also looked in any way entertaining. And even more surprising than all of this combined, I finished the damn thing. It’s ever so slightly possible I may play through again, because there are lots of pieces of paper with more storyline that I missed and new weapons to kill the alien/zombie hybrid things with. In realism land, I won’t. But I might, and that’s a piece of shock in itself.

Resistance: Fall of Man chronicles a non-specific divergent history without an apparent World War II in which some kind of weird bio-experiment (that seems a lot more plausibly like alien technology to me) goes awry in Russia over the course of the 1930s and ’40s, and then suddenly breaks free and conquers all of Asia and Europe in a matter of months. The especial deadliness comes from the fact that the majority of humans caught up in the conflict are converted into new waves of killer alien/zombie hybrids themselves. So, never-ending supply of new soldiers. And now it’s late 1951, England has all but fallen, and it’s time for some random American dude to have a weird immunity to the alien takeover thing that makes him even more hybridized than the others, insofar as he gains powers and yellow eyes but retains his essential humanity, and then, y’know…. payback time.

I probably should be tired of games whose main point is to be mankind’s alien-killing service? But not yet!

[1] I mean, it launched, what, 2.5 years ago? I are slow!

Left 4 Dead

These past several Mondays, my regular game of Halo 3 has rapidly and with a feeling of potential permanency changed to a new game. Left 4 Dead is close to unique in my experience in that it has almost no single-player component, no particular plot beyond the thumbnail sketch of world destroyed by zombiepocalypse with which we are all so familiar, no character growth to speak of. It is a pure game experience, divorced entirely from any other considerations. I mention this primarily to explain why you’re getting this review instead of a variety of other games I have played for considerably more hours but not yet completed. Halo 3, for example!

The inevitable big question, therefore, is how does the gameplay work out? I haven’t played by myself, but I’ve played a few other ways: two-player split-screen, two-player online, four-player online, and up to four-versus-four player as well, in all four game maps. So I’ve pretty much hit the whole thing by now. In case you don’t know what a zombiepocalypse is… you know what, nevermind. I think you’re just not allowed to read this anymore. Because, come on! Anyhow, there are these four single-dimensional survivor characters about whom you can tell basically everything just by looking at them, and they are surrounded on all sides both by hordes of zombies and by specialized über-zombies that grow to incredible strength, have entangling frog-tongues, pouncing cat leaps, or blinding toxic sludge. And the goal is to either cross the dead, destroyed city (or whatever) to unexpected safety, or, on the other side of the aisle, to devour all flesh.

Hey, look! I haven’t really said how the gameplay works out! It is frenetic, fast-paced terror as the survivors. Everywhere you turn, there could be a zombie with nothing to lose, whose only goal is to hurt you a little bit more, in the knowledge that you’ll be dead eventually. You’ve got limited weapons and ammo, limited ability to heal yourself, and essentially unlimited enemies. And as the zombies, it’s a strategic game of cat and mouse, in which you have nigh unlimited ability to find the survivors, and if you’re doing it right, herd them into cooperative traps with your über-zombie cohorts. You always come back, the only penalty for death being a period when you can’t keep attacking. On the downside, you’re pretty easy to kill and it’s hard to attack people who can shoot you from across the parking lot, well outside your range.

I guess it’s like this. Remember when Roddenberry introduced the holodeck in Star Trek, and any time the writers got tired of aliens, they’d have the opportunity to do a historical simulation of some kind, inevitably from the ever-popular twentieth century? The way I see the game is like this: thanks in part to the brilliantly conceived XBox Live network’s capability for connecting you with friends and letting you easily communicate with them however you want to, but mostly due to the beauty of the game itself, I see Left 4 Dead as pretty much the last necessary link for zombiepocalypse experience other than the invention of the holodeck.[1] It might actually be the perfect video game experience.

[1] Which really won’t ever happen, since the event itself will hit long before our technology is ready for a holodeck version.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – Game of the Year Edition

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I know objectively that I finish a goodly chunk of games each year, and that I could even demonstrate this via the method of counting back on the tag. And that this does not even take into account the many games I play partially but consistently fail to finish with. Nonetheless, it’s always a bit surprising to me when I do finish one, even one that’s a solid year old by now. Which, okay, is misleading: Call of Duty 4 only took me a couple of dedicated afternoons, and I didn’t start until this past month. Plus, I’m still nominally in the middle of Grand Theft Auto IV[1], and I’m actively about a third of the way through Dead Space. I play stuff, honest!

Aside from spending the money, one of the things that held me back from CoD4 so long was the Modern Warfare tag. For whatever reason, I convinced myself that removing the game from World War II meant there would be a lot of cool new weaponry, sure, but no plot to hang it from. To the contrary, it was as affecting as many war movies I’ve seen, and far superior to anything the franchise has previously put out. Russian and Arabic terrorists with nuclear capabilities, if you’re wondering, but it’s a couple of the characters that really make it pop, plus one incredible scene in which you don’t use a single weapon.

The multiplayer looks like it would be really fun with a sufficient number of players, but at the reduced amount we can usually pull together on any given Monday night, Halo 3 remains the clear champion of that aspect.

[1] Where “the middle” doesn’t appear to have scratched the surface in reality, plus I’m reaching the point where, without a conscious pushing of myself, it will fall by the wayside. I blame this at least in part on the giant pile of new games I want to play: Gears of War 2. Far Cry 2.[2] Saints Row 2. Fallout 3. Left 4 Dead. Even Resident Evil 5, if it’s out early next year as I’ve heard. (And I really need to finish RE4 before that!)
[2] Why did they split it into two words for the sequel, I wonder?

BioShock

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It only took me, what, 8 months to finish BioShock? 10? And yet, that puts me well ahead of any number of games that I still intend to finish, much less the ones I’ve long given up on. At any rate, it was well worth it. On top of fantastically fluid gameplay that allows for practically any tactics you can imagine, the enemies vary from simplistic to extremely challenging but without the penalty of being unable to proceed because of constant death-resets. It may not be my favorite gameplay, but it’s easily in the top ten.

Where BioShock shines, though, is in the storyline. I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged (though I intend to retry someday), so I can’t tell you exactly how stood on their head Rand’s theories are, but I can certainly tell that she would be entitled to quite a lot of energy generated by her grave-spinning corpse, were she ever to see it in play. The premise is simple: while on a trans-Atlantic flight in 1959, your plane crashes near the entrance to an underwater city commissioned in the mid 1940s by suspiciously-initialed industrialist Andrew Ryan, who built Rapture to escape from the communists, governments, and religions that wanted to steal his money and ideas. The sole survivor of the crash, you naturally enter the city as it’s the only place to find shelter from the elements. Before you can draw a breath to admire the fantastic art deco architecture, you’re plunged into the middle of Rapture’s civil war between Ryan and newcomer Atlas, who seems to be a rallying point for the people but now only wants to escape with his wife and children. And everyone you meet is infected with plasmids that give them strange biological powers, such as the ability to shoot fire and lightning from their fingertips. (Plus, they’re infected with Randian libertarian philosophy, and half of them appear to be undead; hooray for Objectivist zombies!) And then, things start to get mysterious.

So, much as I loved Portal, this game here? Best game I’ve played not merely in 2007, but probably in most of the decade. I cannot realistically praise it enough. I know I’m late to the party here, but if you haven’t played it yet? It’s on the “must” list, I promise. It’s even forgiving to people who do not play first-person shooters.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Most of my video game time[1] lately has been spent perusing the Orange Box for A) a Half-Life 2 experience that doesn’t involve sparkles flying across my screen[2] and B) an improved gamer score. It has been quite good to me on both counts, and hooray for that. The task has been spread out over so many months, though, that when I finally finished the other new content on the disc, I forgot that completed games get reviews! That is a little bit embarrassing, and the moreso because this is coming a few days out of order. But so be it, I have no other choice at this late date!

So, right, in the summer of 2006 I downloaded the first incremental sequel to Half-Life 2 from Steam and played it, and other than whatever bizarre video driver conflict I was having, it was extremely fun! Episode Two took rather longer to come out than I had originally heard, and by the time it finally appeared, I needed a refresher. (And a higher gamer score.) So that explains the delay since I got access to this newest sequel. (Well, and Portal, which is its own kind of awesome excuse.) Anyway, I got refreshed and voila, time to play! Which I did.

Directly following the climactic destruction of City 17 at the end of the previous game, Gordon and Alyx are forced to continue their journey to deliver the stolen Combine data on foot. The trouble with this plan is that the bad guys have some pretty brutal new assets for making our heroes dead, and since they’re on the ropes right now, they seem willing to throw almost all of their effort into preventing the success of the resistance. Along the way, there’s a friendly garden gnome, ever more antlions, gut-wrenching drama, and a promise that Aperture Science[3] will feature heavily in Episode Three. These really are the best first-person shooters on the market for storyline; they blow Halo clean out of the water.

[1] Not all; there’s Halo on Thursdays, for example.
[2] Thanks, PC gaming!
[3] Also, whenever Episode 3 is released, I bet Portal will have a sequel at the same time. Which would be fantastic.

Portal

35979-portalI’m about halfway through Bioshock, and probably within an hour’s play of finishing Mass Effect. But I at least finished one of the three or five big awesome games that have come out this quarter, and I’ll take what I can get. Mind you, I’ll be playing most of the rest of the stuff in the Orange Box before too much longer, but many of those games have been previously reviewed, so I doubt I will again unless some kind of mood really strikes me. (On the other hand, at least there will be no stupid sparkles flaring all over my screen to distract me. Thanks, PC gaming!) The important part for now is that I have finished Portal.

At the risk of over-selling it, Portal is what a video-game would be if someone took pure awesome, distilled it into its Platonic form, and then burned it onto a game disc. Yeah, okay, that’s probably an oversell after all. Anyway, Portal is a game set in the Half-Life universe. You play as a volunteer at a Black Mesa rival company called Aperture Science, testing their Portal Device. The function of the so-called portal gun is to open transdimensional portals between two points in space, effectively joining them into a single point. Aside from this possible violation of the laws of physics, the portals otherwise adhere to natural laws, conserving momentum and gravity in ways that would make Escher smile like the Cheshire Cat. Utilizing the portal gun and the assistance of the Artificial Intelligence in charge of the testing chambers, you make your way through a series of tests designed to confront you with diverse challenges that can only be solved through ingenious use of these portals.

The game has three essential strengths: 1) The puzzle-solving aspect, although sometimes frustrating, is mostly a true delight. In a way that no FPS has ever done before, it lets you come up with novel solutions to otherwise insoluble problems. Every victory, however small, leaves you feeling like a giant among men. 2) As of Half-Life 2, Valve has really captured the urban decay chic, and despite that almost all of the game takes place in sterile white test chambers, there’s a real sense of the same kind of minimal but undeniable wrongness about things that marks their other recent efforts. 3) The dialogue is outstanding, even though there are only two characters with lines in the entire game. It swings between hilarious and chillingly disturbing with, at the risk of repetition, disturbing ease. (Also, the end credits contain a wonderful song to which I wish I had the mp3.) Oh, and 4), the three things I just listed combine to form a very tight and affecting plot.

I like Mass Effect quite a bit. I like Bioshock better than I’ve liked any game since Half-Life 2 came out. That said: if you find time to invest yourself in a game before the year ends, it should be Portal. You’ll thank me later. (Except you mostly won’t, because who hasn’t already played it? Nobody, that’s who! (Dear people who haven’t played it: no offense!))

Peter Jackson’s King Kong

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Back in the hazy, halcyon days of yore, when I had just gotten my ‘siddy, there were a fair number of launch titles I was interested in. And a few I wasn’t, mostly racing games and Perfect Dark Zero, which always seemed kind of terrible and whose demo left me cold. And there was King Kong, which seemed pretty awesome, but outside my then-jobless budget. And then as the months passed, it kept looking kind of old and worn compared to the new shiny games coming out at the same prices. (I’m looking at you, Dead Rising and Oblivion!)

But then, earlier this month, it was sitting lonelily on the shelf at Fry’s for $19.99. That is the exact perfect price to win me over. And as it happens, it’s a price I’m pretty happy with. It’s still a lot prettier than Wii Sports, but when I compare it to any of the last 6 months’ worth of HD games I’ve played, it lacks a certain indefinable something. I’m pretty sure that something is realistic water effects, and wow, behold the snobbery of me! Anyway, aside from that, it was a pretty good game. Maybe slightly short, and maybe slightly easy, but neither in such a way that I felt like I’d lost out on the deal.

As the title implies, it’s almost a straight port of the movie, though with a lot more fighting giant insects and man-sized dinosaurs, and a little more running from T. Rex-y ones. I took longer than I should have to figure out the right way to perform most of the combat. But since I was playing as a script writer turned adventure hero, I don’t mind so much. Also, I’m sure the game would have been a lot easier if I’d been willing to leave areas with any of my enemies unkilled. The play as Kong part suffered from some of the same failure of learning curve on my part, which is less excusable, since I kind of figure he knew how to fight all along. (Though if so, where did all the other giant monsters keep coming from? Shouldn’t they have been dead by now?) Still: perfectly fun game up until the last level, where it suddenly becomes a quagmire of misery and depression. In case you’re not familiar with the game or any of the three versions of the film: nevermind why.

Geist

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I finished another game. Only, it wasn’t for the 360 nor was it for the PC. It’s definitely been a while since I’ve wrapped up an old-gen title. So, neat, go me. Geist is a pretty clever game. After getting captured in a rogue corporation’s secret lab, a federal agent finds himself ripped from his body and reprogrammed to inhabit other people as part of a political bid for power. Except, a little ghost girl mucks things up before the mental reprogramming takes hold, and Raimi is left to wander the underground structure incorporeally, inhabiting computers, faucets, rats, or people: whatever is necessary to get him closer to the secret of the lab and a way to prevent it from coming term, and whatever it takes to find and reclaim his own body.

Anytime the game is about the FPS, it is fairly serviceable but on the whole subpar. Anytime the game is about being a ghost, taking over devices to use against the enemies or to frighten them enough that they lose control and can be taken over, though? Pretty darned cool. I’ve definitely never played anything like it, and that’s not something I get to say that often anymore. Wrap it up in a bow with a decent storyline and the novel concept of a ghost girl that isn’t intended to strike dread into my heart, and I’ll have to say that I was pretty happy with it.

Minerva: Metastasis 2

To my substantial surprise, the Minerva project released another level. On the bright side, this means I got to play a little more Half-Life thingy, with the lovely headcrabs and all. On the less bright side, I’m reduced to recording fleeting thoughts on someone’s homebuilt game level. It’s like if I owned a Vespa. Sure, it’s well made and intriguing and all, but I still feel kind of ridiculous, you know?

It picks up right where the last level left off: exploring the unlikelily large underground Combine facility. Learning about the nasty headcrab soldier experimentation that’s been going on is plenty enough reason to annihilate the place, if only it was possible to discover a reactor or a spare nuclear device or something. Oh, well, maybe next level. (I had the impression that Metastasis as title implied ongoing title changes following a cancerous theme. The simple numbering instead has me split between maintaining this guess and expecting a very large game and revising the guess to expect that the title will ultimately be unsatisfying, just an authorial choice of cool word. It remains to be seen!)