Quite Possibly containing spoilers. Beware.
So, here we are. It's mid-november and we're all busy as bees with studies, work or other late-autumn chores.
And then BOOM, game explosion.
I haven't by far gotten all the games I
want to play, but time and money are thankfully both in short supply, or I would be in some serious trouble with my own studies.
The games I have played recently are:
Dead Space
Fallout 3
the Demo of Left 4 Dead
First of all, Dead Space;
This is a good game. If you're a survival-game fantast who enjoy Resident Evil and your occasional BOO-horror, this is the game for you. I found the additional material (comics and movie) enjoyable and they certainly added some more flavour to the otherwise, admittadly, bland storyline. They did a damn good job with the interface and most of the logs you find are all interesting reads/hearings.
Gameplay-wise the camera-angle is poor. Naturally, they went for immersement with the close-up third-person camera, but most of the times it's just annoying. I've read some forums where people claim this to be part of the "Isaac's a mechanic, so of course combat has to be difficult"; this is of course utter flabberglabber; camera has nothing to do with how good a person is with fighting. It's manageable, but something you get kinda locked into corners, or miss important things. Luckily you can rotate the camera, so that keeps it at least functionable.
Design-wise I love this game.
some people complained about how the ship was made all dark and spooky-like. Clearly some people didn't get to the later parts of the game. Red-carpet recreation-rooms is all I have to say about that matter. Enemies are sexily disgusting and Isaacs armor and its upgrades make me cry manly tears of joy. I absolutely love the slow build-up of protective pieces of whatever-the-hell those ceramic platings are.
I'm just wondering why Engineers would have to chuck out their own cash to make their uniform more protectice.
The armament is an interesting topic in itself; most likely the only reason you'd replay the game, at least in my opinion. I got stuck with the initial plasma cutter and the linegun until the final boss, where I sold the line-gun and got myself the strongest weapon and even had enough money to max its stats.
Zero-G was definitely amazingly done, but not really that interesting to me game-play wise. Mostly they involved annoying labyrinth-puzzles.
Finally, I'd just like to lodge a complaint with the Ministry of Internal Rogue Affairs. I know you guys like to do it from behind, but let some other people in on the cake; you don't have a monopoly of attacking from the back, every game should be able to offer that, not just World of Warcraft. ;)
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Fallout 3 is an interesting purchase.
First of all, I had a hell of a time getting it to work. For the initial play-through I had to get used with getting booted out to Windows more or less on an hourly basis, but whether because of the recent patch, or simply because my system got used to it (a peculiarity of my computer; it takes it about five attempts to play a game before you can finally do it. Blue-screens aplenty) I don't know.
This is a game for fans. Honestly. Although I highly enjoy the times I've spent smashing open super-mutant skull with my trusted Fisto! in my hand and my even-more-trusted-yet-constantly-dying-dog Dogmeat at my side, I can't really shake the feeling that the game is, at least story-wise, pretty mediocre.
There's a lot of winking with the old crowd, and certainly many parts of the game ARE enjoyable; but so much of that is in the subquests, the main quest is just plain stupid really. Don't try to think too much about it when and if you play the game.
Some parts are, of course, absolutely brilliant. Anyone who have watched the pre-release videos have also more or less seen the best point in the game. It is ruined, however, with the apparent survival of one of the game's most annoying NPCs.
The VATS system is a nice touch, if a bit unnecessary. Especially when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. Target-shooting is of course fun and I had a lot more use of VATS on my first playthrough when I focused on smaller arms. Now I'm doing unarmed / heavy weaponry, and there's rarely a moment where I don't hit my intended target. Burnmaster love.
There's also the mixed hatred/joy of the Capital Wasteland Orienteering Squad. Getting somewhere is HARD. Really HARD. In my entire first play-through, I missed the fact that the compass generally points you to the next point-of-entry that you need to pass through to get to where you want. This lead to
hours of frustration where I hit level 15 before I'd even finished one of the first major questline-quests in the game. >_>
Fallout 3
is a Post-apocalyptic Oblivion in many ways, but it is much, much better. The game still suffers from an incredible lack of voice-actors. You hear nearly every old person in the game being played by the same, very recognizable, voice actor. Some of the youngers ones are less distinguishable, but you always get a Deja Vú whenever you get to a new town.
I'm expecting some heavy patching in the near future for this game, as there are quite a lot of annoying little bugs that ruins the immensment for you. I'd also like to see the developers using more of the little tidbits of information they leave lying around here and there. Also, a lot of NPCs feel like they
should be important, but that might just be Fallout 1 & 2 haunting me. If you could ever say more than "Hello, Goodbye" to a NPC, you could bet a thousand bottlecaps on him/her being an important part in a future quest.
The Bad Karma route is hard to play, but not impossible in this game. A lot of times, the only choices you have are saving someone (and getting rewards for it) or not (quite possibly even killing the person while not getting any rewards unless he/she had it on him/her), but from time to time you'll get a more... neutral evil response and that feels refreshing.
And then of course there's always
that. One press of a button and I went from a complete saint to utterly neutral.
Anyway, graphic-wise the game is good, and music-wise as well. The tunes get repetitive after a while, sadly, and although there are a few unlockable radio-channels, nothing really piques your interest for more than an hour or two. Playing without a radio on offers some of the original scores of the game, scores that are far too good to be pushed into the sidelines like this.
Overall, if you're not a fan of the series, you'll probably see the game as a passing fancy; interesting, but hardly ZOMGPANCAKES good. Exploration is fun, if time-consuming, and if you're into unlocking secrets you'll have plenty to occupy yourself with. There have been additional content promised, so I'm looking forward to that.
If you ARE a fan, you probably already have this game.
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Left 4 Dead
I just played the demo for the first time. Incredibly intense and interesting, if a bit confusing. Some of the graphics feel horribly flat and unworked at, but considering the amount of activity the game has to manage, I really don't feel like moaning too much about that.
It's exactly what I hoped for and a bit more, and even with AI-comrades I never felt that I wasn't being backed up. I naturally achieved more kills, but my health was also more often than not quite close to death.
Being something of a New Generation Zombie-Freak, Dawn of the Dead (remake) lover and such, I absolutely squealed in joy at the intro. While not nearly as intense as that, I did play on Normal and I have no doubt that with other people, I'll be screaming like a piglet when we do co-op.
Definitely worth looking into; the demo is free and downloadable from Steam, amongst other.
Ahhhh, writing something that's NOT an essay or otherwise homework-related is surprisingly refreshing.