When you see a tag cloud, and the amount of twitter summary posts dwarfs all other tags it may be time to start writing more than 144 characters at a time. 
All posts tagged Rant
Top Sign Your Blog is Dying
Borderlands (2009)
Sometimes you do not need original ideas. All you need to do is collect the idea of other and improve upon. I figure that must be Gearbox’s motto. Many reviews talk about the possible combination of weapons, how the game is like a first person diablo, etc… All these comparisons are so relevant, because they literally took the game mechanics from other games.
Luckily, they pretty much only took the good parts of games, and in some cased the addictive aspects. And, for the most part is all first together well for one important reason: the game built for co-op from the ground up.
The single player game play is pretty lack luster. It isn’t really difficult, and it is a bit tedious. But, add a few friends and what was previously mundane becomes amazing. This is not only because because its more fun to play a game with friends, the game also does a good job scaling up based on how many people are playing. Not only do you face more enemies, you encounter tougher, and more varied enemies.
There are a few other improvements on the typical FPS game style. Many FPS now have some version of an incapacitated mode, particularly co-op games. In these games you go down, and have to wait for an ally to come over and heal/revive you. Well, Borderlands added a new twist called “Second Wind.” Basically, if you are incapacitated, and you get a kill you regain a little health and mobility. It works quite well, and I would like to see it in more games.
Unfortunately, there are some glaring issues with the game that would have been unforgivable in a single player game, but are mostly forgiven due to the fun of co-op:
Poor AI. Running out into the open and engaging in a firefight with some one that is behind cover is never a good strategy.
Lack of boss battles. The trailers for the game mostly featured two of the three big boss battles in the game. And while there are other lesser bosses in the game, for around 30 hours of game play, I would have liked to have seen a few more epic boss battles. At least they let you go back and fight Skagzilla again, which is always fun.
Traveling sucks. Even though you can sprint endlessly, and you get a vehicle after a little while, you spend a lot of time in the first third or so of the game walking around. Part of this is due to the quest system. Seriously, humanity has colonized another planet, had physics defining force fields, wrist communicators, and you have to get and turn in quests in person? Lame.
And, while you do get a vehicle that helps cut down on travel time, there are some serious issues with it. The biggest may be that you only get one vehicle, and it can only hold two players. Seems a little weird in a game geared towards four players. The other big issue is the weird damage system it employs. You can ram into enemies and instantly kill them. On the flip side, you can be killed instantly by enemy vehicles, which is really frickin frustrating in some areas in the game.
Some of the missions tend to get a bit repetitive. While you do not do a lot of “get ingredients for soup” missions that are so prevalent in World of Warcraft, you do spent a lot of time doing the same kind of activities. For the most part, most of the missions basically require you to go somewhere and kill something.
Level caps, seriously, wtf? I view level caps as a built in deterrent of continued play. Borderlands has a built in cap of 50. This basically allows you to max out an entire specialization branch in your skill tree (which isn’t a good idea). I was able to easily get to level 50 without even coming close to finishing a second play through. And, when I hit 50, I turned off the game and haven’t played since. By this time, I had already done all the quests on the first play through, and earn all of the achievements.
The first DLC has been release for the game, but it doesn’t increase the cap, and doesn’t really offer anything for me. Sure there is a new area, but I cannot advance my character by playing it, so I haven’t come up with a good reason to play it.
The second DLC has been rumored to contain at least two additional skill points as quest rewards, so that could work as a defacto level increase without actually increasing the cap. And, it looks like it will add some more arenas into the game. And, since the arenas were one of my favorite parts of the game, I may pick up this DLC and skip the first.
So, based on my experience with the game, I am going to give it a split rating, first based on the single player mode, 0 (average), and second, for the online co-op, 3 (cult classic) on the undecim scale.
Mercenaries 2 (2008)
EA recently announced that it was closing Pandemic studio. I wish they would not have, because this action resulted in hours of torture for me.
Initially, I thought this was a bad idea because I always remember them as the creators of Star Wars: Battlefront II, which is a fantastic game. I still go back and play it from time to time. Unfortunately, the reality of their close was probably a boon to gamers everywhere.
Vanlandw doomed us to a play through of Mercenaries 2. In what started as a one man show of support for Pandemic against EA, he pledged to play Mercenaries 2. Since I already had an unopened copy of the game I volunteered to play with him. This was a poor decision.
I am not exactly sure why I expected Mercenaries 2 to be a good game. Because, I never actually finished the first one. Sure, I purchased the first Mercenaries game, and played it or a while, but the gameplay was pretty lame, and it was buggy. The combination of buggy, and screwy difficulty curve made it a very frustrating experience.
The game itself was not exactly horrible, but there were some mechanisms that made the game a bear to play.
Games like this are really unrealistic. Thus, I expect a lot of arcade style of play where you can just blow through things and have a good time. Unfortunately, the developers decided to enforce some arbitrary realism into the game.
Limited ammo is probably the most annoying of these issues. It seems like whenever you get a halfway decent weapon you run out of ammo and are forced to use whatever crap weapon the computer is using. No fun there. And, much needed explosive weapons were always in short supply. I think I spent about 60% of the game carrying around an empty RPG. However, this is not nearly as frustrating as the vehicles.
Gamers are used to having access to unlimited, or near unlimited ammo in vehicles. Its just kind of defacto standard. Pandemic decided that it would make the game more fun if you could blow through all the ammo in your vehicle in ten seconds. I am not exaggerating. You spend a fortune to get this vehicles dropped, and before you know it they are basically worthless. But, it is not like it mattered anyway, since the vehicles explode so easily.
Speaking of which, there is a mission in this game that may have to go on the list of all time worst missions in video games. “Doom Patrol,” puts you in the driver’s seat of, “Cacharro de Muerte,” otherwise known as the piece of shit. This is a car / monster truck with the ability to have some kind of booster jump. In this mission, you are forced to go through a brutal obstacle course in a typical race fashion, where you have limited time to progress to the next checkpoint.
While you are navigation the course you are confronted with all kinds of obstacles that threaten to flip over your vehicle. If you do land upside down, or on your side you are screwed. You have to blow up the car and start the mission over. However, this issue in itself, while frustrating isn’t really a deal breaker. So, to make it even more obsurd the developers decided they would going to through in some enemy troops to shoot are you. Again, quite annoying but not that big of a deal. The total bullshit comes at about nine minutes into this ten minute mission. Some jerk decided to put a tank in the middle of a hair pin turn. If you mess it up you die. Vanlandw and I spent at least an hour attempting this mission over and over again. I still get made just thinking about it.
Beyond those major issues, there are a lot of little things that just add up to irritation.
- Having the female constantly repeat the same damn thing to you
- Repetitive missions
- Brutally long travel times
- Sluggish/clumsy vehicle controls
- Sluggish aiming sensitivity combined with overly aggressive sensitivity acceleration.
And the list goes on and on.
Having considered all these issues, I still have to give the developers props for putting in full co-op for the game. Granted, it is glitchy, and we did experience a couple of hiccups, it worked for the most part. And, for that simple pleasure the game was endurable to the end. More studios should get on the co-op train, I’m looking at you infinity ward. Seriously, pulling out full campaign co-op for that bastardized special ops crap in the game? You should be ashamed.
Upon due consideration, I am going this game a 0 (average) on my Undecim scale. The reason I rated the game so high was because of the full campaign co-op, and the fact that the game came out on my birthday.
Sitting at the Kid’s Table
Boise State and TCU get invited to the party…but they have to sit at the kid’s table.
The BCS people continue to find ways to make the system appear even more rigged, and pointless. Granted the only BCS match up that really matters is the census championship game. I am not exactly sure what the point of the other bowls is. Anyhow, since it would look really bad to lockout Boise State for two consecutive years, they must have decided to go ahead and give them an “at large” bid. And, it would be been unjustifiable to lockout number four TCU, they let them in as well.
In what I can only assume is an effect to make the BCS conference schools look better (by not allowing the chance for a non-BCS school to defeat them) they have matched up BSU and TCU. So, while they do have a BCS game, it is the functional equivalent of sitting at the little kids table at Thanksgiving. Ugh.
Windows is Awful, I Give Up
Over the past few days I have been making some DVD’s of some hunting videos my dad as filmed. And, I have to say the process is a total nightmare.
All the positive buzz around Windows 7 made me decide to give it a shot, so I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Pro to use on the Dell I bought to do cross browser testing earlier this year. And, despite being a relatively inexpensive machine, it has much faster hardware than my PowerMac G5 which I have traditionally used for this task. So, I decided to pick up a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (and they apparently came out with a new version right after I bought 7, and the upgrade cost is the same as the full version cost, lovely).
The XL1 only has a firewire port on it, so I had to install my PCI firewire card in the Dell. I thought it was going to be pretty simple, because Windows 7 recognized the device and automatically installed drivers for it. Neat. Unfortunately, the drivers it so helpfully installed were wrong. Thanks to a tip, I found out that in Windows 7, you have to go to the device manager, and then update the driver for the device. From that dialog you click on browse a specific location, and then pick from a list of drivers. You have to pick the legacy driver. Finding that little gem was a waste of a perfectly good afternoon.
Now I have Windows recognizing my firewire card, and the camera. Hurray. I started a project in Premiere, and went to import the video. Didn’t work. The import screen knew that I had a camera, but simply refused to work with it. Piece of junk. I had to do some digging around, and I discovered that I could get Windows Live Movie Maker, which sucks, but it was able to import video for me.
After importing from WLMM I was able to import the video into my premiere project. From that point on it was mostly just annoying dealing with the issues with Premier Elements, and its generally lagginess and poor stability. Of course, the first DVD I attempted to burn turned into a coaster, thank’s Adobe. Luckily, on subsequent attempts the burn process completed successfully.
The whole process took a really freakin’ long time. During the first DVD took about as long as it would have taken to do it on my G5 with iMovie/iDVD. The difference being that the G5 spends most of the time encoding because it is ancient. Whereas on Windows I spent the time dicking around just getting stuff to work at all.
This entire process has made two things quite clear to me:
- Windows still sucks.
- I need a new desktop Mac.
Recent Comments