WHY?!
Friday, February 5, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
Just Reading It For The Articles
So I was playing DOA Beach Volleyball and joking that "I'm just here for the volleyball, honest." But it occurred to me, how many volleyball games are there? I mean, what if you honestly really wanted to play a volleyball video game? How many outlets do you have? I know the DOA volleyball games have a shockingly large female audience that plays it for the relationship building aspect, but maybe there are actual volleyball enthusiasts who play it less as a choice and more as a lack of options. Or they could go play actual volleyball, but it's 31 degrees Fahrenheit out here.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Let's Play Recommendations
Following on his entertaining Let's Play of Red Faction: Guerrilla, TyrantSabre is now doing a Let's Play of a personal favorite of mine, Ace Combat 6. He admits he hasn't played any of the other games in the series (HERESY!), but he's apparently done his research enough that he can talk about the setting of the games irregardless. And download the original videos (requires a Viddler account), the streaming videos on Viddler are almost unwatchable.
Also, since the original video got deleted, I'd thought I'd fag this up a bit and post the completed version of this little horror show:
Also, since the original video got deleted, I'd thought I'd fag this up a bit and post the completed version of this little horror show:
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Strange And Terrifying Developments
Corporations have had the limits on their political contributions removed. Corporations can now legally buy out politicians, thereby allowing them to re-write American law as they see fit. Pray that Sony doesn't become too ambitious AND become aware of this blog.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
So Why Not?
I can sorta kinda understand why Metal Wolf Chaos never made it to the US. But it's been a few years, American politics have changed. I say we should get this game on XBox Live. I know I'd download a game about the Vice-President leading a coup-de-tat and the only way to stop him is for the President of the United States to pilot a giant killer robot and liberate America. Admit it, that sounds fucking awesome.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Danger Close
The first proper paragraph of this is going to be a look at the plot and politics of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, so if you care that much about spoilers you should skip the next paragraph.
Based on what some people have been saying, when I opened up the case for Modern Warfare 2 I expected a bald eagle to fly out and land on an M1 Abrams tank that was firing into Stalin's face. No such luck. The game does fulfill the right-wing fantasy of having another "good war", a war without any ambiguity where America is clearly the good guys and our enemies are explicitly evil. We are not the invaders overthrowing a sovereign government because it doesn't live up to our political ideals. Instead we are the invaded, fighting off an army more interested in carnage than military conquest. But that's where the right-wing politics end. The story of how we reached that point sounds like something out of the 9/11 Truth Movement. The villain is an American general who engineers the invasion of America for the purpose of putting America on a 'total war' footing and using that power to liberate the rest of the world from the shackles of not being American, all to sate his meta-historical(?) ego. If this were something from the Glenn Beck Show, that conspiracy would be a red herring to distract us from the evils of brown skinned people. But in the game the conspiracy is the truth, which is decidedly less Sean Hannity and more "Loose Change" (if you don't know what that is, Google "loose change 911"). So before we start having a kneejerk reaction to the games right-wing militarism, maybe we should look more closely at its left-wing narrative.
Gameplay wise, what you heard about Modern Warfare 2 is true. It is criminally short. Admittedly I had all the free time of Christmas Day, but after sinking my teeth into Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 and watching Rebuild of Evangelion, I still finished Modern Warfare 2 the same day I opened it. There's a new "Spec Ops" feature that can lengthen gameplay a bit, but it was built with co-op in mind. You can play most of the missions solo, but the ones that really interested me (shooting from an AC-130) are co-op only and I don't do multiplayer. But make sure you play Spec Ops with a friend, some of those missions are frustrating enough and griefers aren't going to help ("I swear I'm not aiming at you, you're running into my line of fire"). I'm sure Spec Ops and multiplayer add countless hours to the game, but I'm a single player kind of guy and Campaign mode was short as Hell.
The actual game mechanics are little changed from the previous game. Most of the guns are new, or at least sport new target sights. There are some new toys, like thermal sights for some rifles and a heartbeat detector on one gun. The biggest change is the action flick style chase scenes. I'll agree with the harsher critics, all pretense to realism flew out the window after the snowmobile sequence. But, if anything, I've been a critic of realism in games so that didn't bother me. It's essentially the same game with a new story, but like the Gears of War franchise, too many changes probably would have angered me more than anything.
Of course the game carries over one of my chief complaints about the first game. The enemy AI seems very aware that you are the player, and so long as it can kill your character it "wins". It doesn't matter if you're in a platoon of over a dozen other soldiers, every RPG and machine gun in a three mile radius is trained squarely on YOU. This game even created something new for me to complain about. In the first Modern Warfare, if you took too much damage the edge of the screen would turn red and you'd have to go hide somewhere until magical tissue regeneration saved you. Often, it was a good idea to take the second before you might die to kill the guy shooting you, thus giving you plenty of time to heal up. In Modern Warfare 2, every hit you take splatters raspberry jam on your eyes, and if you're near death everything turns into a blurry red smear. Good luck finding cover when you can't see a damn thing, let alone defend yourself.
And these games are tough. It's bad enough that your character seems to have a twelve foot high "KILL ME" banner stuck in the top of his head. I normally play the original Modern Warfare on normal difficulty, but occasionally I get frustrated enough with cheap deaths to play it on easy. Modern Warfare 2 is harder, combining the "everyone decided to kill you and only you" problem with the raspberry jam in the eyes and I died about two dozen times in the same exact spot on that damn oil platform. Often I'll beat a game on a difficulty I don't like, and henceforth swear to only play it on lower difficulties. In Modern Warfare 2, the difficulty I beat before swearing it off forever was normal.
If you're like me and only play single player, the game's length feels less like a sequel and more like an expansion pack. But it's certainly fun, and if you play multiplayer it's probably much longer. If you haven't yet played this game, give it a spin. If you haven't yet played the original, you might want to try that first so the story has some context. Of course the sequel has Kevin McKidd, the original doesn't. Makes all the difference in the world.
Based on what some people have been saying, when I opened up the case for Modern Warfare 2 I expected a bald eagle to fly out and land on an M1 Abrams tank that was firing into Stalin's face. No such luck. The game does fulfill the right-wing fantasy of having another "good war", a war without any ambiguity where America is clearly the good guys and our enemies are explicitly evil. We are not the invaders overthrowing a sovereign government because it doesn't live up to our political ideals. Instead we are the invaded, fighting off an army more interested in carnage than military conquest. But that's where the right-wing politics end. The story of how we reached that point sounds like something out of the 9/11 Truth Movement. The villain is an American general who engineers the invasion of America for the purpose of putting America on a 'total war' footing and using that power to liberate the rest of the world from the shackles of not being American, all to sate his meta-historical(?) ego. If this were something from the Glenn Beck Show, that conspiracy would be a red herring to distract us from the evils of brown skinned people. But in the game the conspiracy is the truth, which is decidedly less Sean Hannity and more "Loose Change" (if you don't know what that is, Google "loose change 911"). So before we start having a kneejerk reaction to the games right-wing militarism, maybe we should look more closely at its left-wing narrative.
Gameplay wise, what you heard about Modern Warfare 2 is true. It is criminally short. Admittedly I had all the free time of Christmas Day, but after sinking my teeth into Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 and watching Rebuild of Evangelion, I still finished Modern Warfare 2 the same day I opened it. There's a new "Spec Ops" feature that can lengthen gameplay a bit, but it was built with co-op in mind. You can play most of the missions solo, but the ones that really interested me (shooting from an AC-130) are co-op only and I don't do multiplayer. But make sure you play Spec Ops with a friend, some of those missions are frustrating enough and griefers aren't going to help ("I swear I'm not aiming at you, you're running into my line of fire"). I'm sure Spec Ops and multiplayer add countless hours to the game, but I'm a single player kind of guy and Campaign mode was short as Hell.
The actual game mechanics are little changed from the previous game. Most of the guns are new, or at least sport new target sights. There are some new toys, like thermal sights for some rifles and a heartbeat detector on one gun. The biggest change is the action flick style chase scenes. I'll agree with the harsher critics, all pretense to realism flew out the window after the snowmobile sequence. But, if anything, I've been a critic of realism in games so that didn't bother me. It's essentially the same game with a new story, but like the Gears of War franchise, too many changes probably would have angered me more than anything.
Of course the game carries over one of my chief complaints about the first game. The enemy AI seems very aware that you are the player, and so long as it can kill your character it "wins". It doesn't matter if you're in a platoon of over a dozen other soldiers, every RPG and machine gun in a three mile radius is trained squarely on YOU. This game even created something new for me to complain about. In the first Modern Warfare, if you took too much damage the edge of the screen would turn red and you'd have to go hide somewhere until magical tissue regeneration saved you. Often, it was a good idea to take the second before you might die to kill the guy shooting you, thus giving you plenty of time to heal up. In Modern Warfare 2, every hit you take splatters raspberry jam on your eyes, and if you're near death everything turns into a blurry red smear. Good luck finding cover when you can't see a damn thing, let alone defend yourself.
And these games are tough. It's bad enough that your character seems to have a twelve foot high "KILL ME" banner stuck in the top of his head. I normally play the original Modern Warfare on normal difficulty, but occasionally I get frustrated enough with cheap deaths to play it on easy. Modern Warfare 2 is harder, combining the "everyone decided to kill you and only you" problem with the raspberry jam in the eyes and I died about two dozen times in the same exact spot on that damn oil platform. Often I'll beat a game on a difficulty I don't like, and henceforth swear to only play it on lower difficulties. In Modern Warfare 2, the difficulty I beat before swearing it off forever was normal.
If you're like me and only play single player, the game's length feels less like a sequel and more like an expansion pack. But it's certainly fun, and if you play multiplayer it's probably much longer. If you haven't yet played this game, give it a spin. If you haven't yet played the original, you might want to try that first so the story has some context. Of course the sequel has Kevin McKidd, the original doesn't. Makes all the difference in the world.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
God Damn Newtypes
Despite having picked up Modern Warfare 2, most of my time has been spent with Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 (because I don't do multi-player).
To make my co-contributor to this blog feel vindicated, there is no Japanese voice option in DWG2 (that's what I'm calling it from here on), not that I really mind. I've been developing a lot more respect for Brad Swaille lately, and this game sees the triumphal return of Michael Kopsa to the role of Char Aznable. Char's Japanese voice actor has a bad habit of not having any vocal inflection (which annoyed the Hell out of me in Utawarerumono), and the english VA they got from Blue Water followed in his footsteps.
The game doesn't so much build on the house of the original Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, instead it burns the house down to the foundation and re-uses the foundation. There were two sets of fans clamoring for various changes. One group wanted more Gundam SEED, and another wanted Char's Counterattack (there was a group that wanted Gundam Deathscythe to show up, but they were ignored for writing slash fics about Duo and Heero), both groups got what they wanted. DWG2's "Official" mode is massive compared to the original game, despite actually having fewer characters. While Scirocco and Haman got cut from Official mode, the remaining characters get a minimum of five missions, most getting seven or eight, and Char and Amuro both get a 2-3 mission CCA bonus scenario.
"Original" mode got cut in favor of Mission mode, which is... bigger. I do sorta miss Original mode, since the story they wrote for it was this fanfic thing where it felt like they put a bunch of Gundam nerds in a room and told them to come up with ideas, but everything they said had to be preceded by "wouldn't it be cool if...". That's how we got such interesting set-ups as: Elpeo Puru becoming a Domon Kasshu cheerleader, shonen cliche Judau Ashta apprenticing himself to space dictator Paptimus Scirocco, Heero Yuy getting suckered into training under Master Asia, and pacifist cross dresser Loran Cehack getting into a relationship with genocidal schizophrenic Puru Two. I wanted to see how that all panned out, but it was cut. Not that the story missions in DWG2 don't do some odd crossovers. In Kira Yamato's story, Jerid Messa seems to take personal offense at Lacus Clyne for some reason, and Kira and Athrun steal the Gryps 2 colony laser from both the Titans and Char's Neo Zeon. If you're not a Gundam fan then those people and factions are not even words but jumbles of letters. If you are a Gundam fan then you can see the continuity snarl in all that. And those are just the scripted encounters, most of the enemy aces you face off against are randomized.
Which gets into the whole relationship thing. As you shoot down pilots they tend to dislike you, while fighting along side them makes them like you more. Barring story issues, of course. The pilot randomization seemed to be under the impression that Kira and Lacus wanted to murder each other, but Lacus' friendship with Kira never dropped out of the top tier. This comes into play as you get invited to join various Gundam factions, such as Zeon, Axis, Neo Zeon, the Earth Federation, the AEUG, and Diana Counter. To get in, pilots for those factions have to like you (you can also get Nanai Miguel to "mess around with your egg salad", to quote BioShock). If you're worried about the randomization thing forcing you to fight pilots you wanted to befriend, there are also "Friendship" missions that exist solely to let you farm relationship points with pilots who don't like you.
I enjoyed the original game, and my complaints about the sequel are few and far between. First off, the mobile armor fights need some serious balancing. Some of the mobile armors have attacks that can cover a whole field in fire, and they sometimes spam that. Also, it's nice that the camera locks on to a mobile armor whenever one shows up to fight you, but it's not so helpful when Quess and the Alpha Azieru launches funnels that shoot you whenever you try to do anything. You can shoot down the funnels, but with the camera fixed on the mobile armor that's easier said than done. Then there's the learning curve. It's not especially bad, but it's especially noticeable for a Dynasty Warriors game. Despite all the changes between Dynasty Warriors 5 and Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, DWG was still a pick-up-and-play experience for me. But the changes between DWG and DWG2 had me combing the manual for a half hour before playing. The learning curve isn't bad, it's just shocking that one even exists. And, of course, DWG2 retains the original game's problem of making you keep allies alive despite said allies having the survival instincts of lemmings.
If you liked the original game, you'll like the sequel. If you were on the fence about the first game, the improvements and added depth of this one really make it worth your while. If you've never seen or heard of either Dynasty Warriors or Gundam, it might make an interesting rental. It's certainly a treat for the eyes after all that "real is brown" that permeates games lately, Gundam has the Amazing Techni-Color Battlefield. If you didn't like the first game, though, the core complaints you probably had weren't fixed here. Of course it's starting to feel more like old school Dynasty Warriors when some random grunt interrupts your combo, leaving you vulnerable for an officer/ace pilot to ram a musou attack down your throat. Thanks for that consideration, guys.
To make my co-contributor to this blog feel vindicated, there is no Japanese voice option in DWG2 (that's what I'm calling it from here on), not that I really mind. I've been developing a lot more respect for Brad Swaille lately, and this game sees the triumphal return of Michael Kopsa to the role of Char Aznable. Char's Japanese voice actor has a bad habit of not having any vocal inflection (which annoyed the Hell out of me in Utawarerumono), and the english VA they got from Blue Water followed in his footsteps.
The game doesn't so much build on the house of the original Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, instead it burns the house down to the foundation and re-uses the foundation. There were two sets of fans clamoring for various changes. One group wanted more Gundam SEED, and another wanted Char's Counterattack (there was a group that wanted Gundam Deathscythe to show up, but they were ignored for writing slash fics about Duo and Heero), both groups got what they wanted. DWG2's "Official" mode is massive compared to the original game, despite actually having fewer characters. While Scirocco and Haman got cut from Official mode, the remaining characters get a minimum of five missions, most getting seven or eight, and Char and Amuro both get a 2-3 mission CCA bonus scenario.
"Original" mode got cut in favor of Mission mode, which is... bigger. I do sorta miss Original mode, since the story they wrote for it was this fanfic thing where it felt like they put a bunch of Gundam nerds in a room and told them to come up with ideas, but everything they said had to be preceded by "wouldn't it be cool if...". That's how we got such interesting set-ups as: Elpeo Puru becoming a Domon Kasshu cheerleader, shonen cliche Judau Ashta apprenticing himself to space dictator Paptimus Scirocco, Heero Yuy getting suckered into training under Master Asia, and pacifist cross dresser Loran Cehack getting into a relationship with genocidal schizophrenic Puru Two. I wanted to see how that all panned out, but it was cut. Not that the story missions in DWG2 don't do some odd crossovers. In Kira Yamato's story, Jerid Messa seems to take personal offense at Lacus Clyne for some reason, and Kira and Athrun steal the Gryps 2 colony laser from both the Titans and Char's Neo Zeon. If you're not a Gundam fan then those people and factions are not even words but jumbles of letters. If you are a Gundam fan then you can see the continuity snarl in all that. And those are just the scripted encounters, most of the enemy aces you face off against are randomized.
Which gets into the whole relationship thing. As you shoot down pilots they tend to dislike you, while fighting along side them makes them like you more. Barring story issues, of course. The pilot randomization seemed to be under the impression that Kira and Lacus wanted to murder each other, but Lacus' friendship with Kira never dropped out of the top tier. This comes into play as you get invited to join various Gundam factions, such as Zeon, Axis, Neo Zeon, the Earth Federation, the AEUG, and Diana Counter. To get in, pilots for those factions have to like you (you can also get Nanai Miguel to "mess around with your egg salad", to quote BioShock). If you're worried about the randomization thing forcing you to fight pilots you wanted to befriend, there are also "Friendship" missions that exist solely to let you farm relationship points with pilots who don't like you.
I enjoyed the original game, and my complaints about the sequel are few and far between. First off, the mobile armor fights need some serious balancing. Some of the mobile armors have attacks that can cover a whole field in fire, and they sometimes spam that. Also, it's nice that the camera locks on to a mobile armor whenever one shows up to fight you, but it's not so helpful when Quess and the Alpha Azieru launches funnels that shoot you whenever you try to do anything. You can shoot down the funnels, but with the camera fixed on the mobile armor that's easier said than done. Then there's the learning curve. It's not especially bad, but it's especially noticeable for a Dynasty Warriors game. Despite all the changes between Dynasty Warriors 5 and Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, DWG was still a pick-up-and-play experience for me. But the changes between DWG and DWG2 had me combing the manual for a half hour before playing. The learning curve isn't bad, it's just shocking that one even exists. And, of course, DWG2 retains the original game's problem of making you keep allies alive despite said allies having the survival instincts of lemmings.
If you liked the original game, you'll like the sequel. If you were on the fence about the first game, the improvements and added depth of this one really make it worth your while. If you've never seen or heard of either Dynasty Warriors or Gundam, it might make an interesting rental. It's certainly a treat for the eyes after all that "real is brown" that permeates games lately, Gundam has the Amazing Techni-Color Battlefield. If you didn't like the first game, though, the core complaints you probably had weren't fixed here. Of course it's starting to feel more like old school Dynasty Warriors when some random grunt interrupts your combo, leaving you vulnerable for an officer/ace pilot to ram a musou attack down your throat. Thanks for that consideration, guys.
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