I don't like reading, I'll be the first one to say it. School killed my interest in reading by forcing it upon me instead of letting in naturally come to an interest. Or at least that's what I'm gonna blame it on. I mean, I used to like reading way back in... 3rd grade or so. Back before accelerated reading. Now I hate having to read things and face every reading assignment or book with the same dread that a young child has towards his siblings' concerts, or with the same dread that the Acheans had towards Hector SEE I KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON.
Actually, that's kind of a lie. I've read about 300 pages of this, but it lost me so early on. What exactly does that mean? Well, for one, I don't look into the text at all. I don't care what it has to say, really. These concepts are hinted at or mentioned and they just pass on right past me. I don't know what to look for when I'm reading this, so I don't know what I'm missing. And that doesn't bother me. Because this book lost me. I have a very basic understanding of the plot up to book 15, but it's a bit muddled. I'll see what I can muster up. Acheans are fighting the Trojans for Helen, Agamemnon, the leader of the Acheans, is an asshole and likes fucking people over for glory. Achilles is a super-powerful butthurt little kid who lets soldiers die because he was bullied and wants an apology. Gods fuck with outcomes of the battles, people kill each other, and Hector is an unstoppable Trojan by the virtue of Zeus or whatever. Hector kills Achilles' friend and that's when it gets personal, so he kills Hector. Oh, sorry, that didn't take up the required 300 pages of text with unimportant faff. Well, it's unimportant to me!
I just don't get it. This book survived 3000 years and will most likely survive 3000 more because it made it this far, right? How is this book considered such a classic? Why do people argue over the merits of this book over something more wholesome? Actually, no, those can apply to almost any book regarded as a "classic." But that just goes be to me disposition on reading and books in general.
My biggest issue is probably that the book just likes wasting my time. And no, that's not the mean-spirited "reading is a waste of time" stance I took in the first paragraph rehashed, but rather the mean-spirited "I don't understand why most of this text is here" stance. On three occasions for the class, we were told that certain books or sections of books could be entirely bypassed. Why is that? What am I missing? Why are they there if they have no impact on the rest of the story? Why am I reading this? Make it stop, please! Make it stop! There are segments of text where page after page after page is just a guy gathering his men with their armor and ships. Why do we need to hear this? Why is this important? I don't understand how anyone could be compelled throughout such a waste.
Actually wait, more specifically to how it likes to waste my time is the notion of fighting in this. Homer (yeah it might not have actually been Homer, but fuck you the name is an easy thing to blame) took a look at battles and came to the conclusion that talking about people stabbing each other over and over is actually kind of boring. But instead of deciding to cut out the boring shit for a streamlined, and more concise, series of text, he decided it would much better to make everything needlessly detailed. Not only does EVERY SINGLE PERSON get their own confusing name for no reason, every death is explicitly mentioned in the text. Why? Because fuck you, Calvin.
Most of the conflict comes from this one unstoppable dude slaughtering everybody and I guess this is just telling that I don't know how these ancient battles were enacted. It would be impossible for a group of people to just surround this dude and dismember him, no way. Little did I know that battles were just conga lines of each military meeting head to head in the middle with continuous one on ones. It's like the card game war if every single card had a name, a family, and a short description, like the shortsighted son of the Ace of Spades, the 2 of Clubs. And then occasionally the god of cards fucks with the line-up or drops an arrow onto the couple of the cards, or floods them out, or something weird.
Bottom line, I'm just not at all invested in the story. So many people are characterized that I can't keep track of them and lose all interest in them. Their cause isn't noble at all, fighting for a girl? Yeah, this is older times and they don't interact and deal with things like we do, but that's the inherent problem. Do I care that people do these brave and over the top acts for the glory? No! Fuck those people, the people who like to have a good image by doing weird shit, sacrificing themselves, fuck em. I think they're all selfish assholes, and this book is only reassures my point.
Maybe it'll get better later on, but I don't care. I couldn't be bothered to care. Hell, if I wasn't in this class, I wouldn't have given this book the light of day. If I were to pick it up on a whim, I would have dropped it 10 pages in. I just don't care about anything that happens in this book and I just want it to disappear. But it won't. It's existed for this long. There's no reason for it to stop existing. It's a classic, Calvin, don't you see? Can't you respect it? No. No, I can't. I can't respect it for taking the short time I may have on this planet and wasting a very valuable part of it. I mean shiiiit, I could have been playing Counter Strike instead of reading this.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Sunday, January 19, 2014
SAINTS ROW IV
Contrary to my latest blog post about To The Moon, Saints Row IV is a game that's just 100% damn good fun to play. Hands down, SRIV is easily the most fun I've had with a game in a long time. For those unaware, Saints Row is an open world sandbox game, similar to that of Grand Theft Auto. This game was available for free play for the weekend. In two days, I put in enough time to beat it. I played 18 hours in two days. The last time, I played for 8 hours straight. Now, I play a lot of video games, but I can't for the life of me point to the last game I played for 8 hours straight. It would probably be Rock Band 2 when I did the endless setlist and that was what, 2008? 2009? I dunno. Maybe I played a Call of Duty for that long sometime between now and then, but the fact that I could do this and enjoy it the whole time throughout and even now WANT to play more of it? That's pretty telling. This game is glorious. I'm genuinely upset it got overshadowed by GTA V.
So what's this game about? What's the premise? Intro sequence is a mission with you killing terrorists. They're planning on launching a nuke. And they actually succeed in it. And how do you stop it? You jump ONTO THE MISSILE. And then this song comes on. Your squad mates say a bit about how heroic you are while you're ripping parts of this missile out. You pull enough bits out, then jump off and it explodes midair while you're freefalling. The title card appears, then you land at your desk in the oval office, perfectly fine, because that's the kind of game this is. You are the president. Then the earth is abducted by aliens, mainly one named Zinyak. He trap everyone in their own personal hell, one which you initially escape from, then appear in a simulated version of Steelport where you have SUPERPOWERS.
Surprisingly enough, the dubstep gun was one of my favorites for overall
effectiveness as well as BADASS VALUE.
A great video game critic once said something like, "A sandbox game is only as good as the means one has of traversing it." A mission or two after you enter the simulation, less than an hour in. You're given super speed and super jump. Instantly this makes crossing the city (something you'll do A LOT) fast and, most importantly, fun. Clusters are also introduced, little blue floating collectibles. There are a thousand of em. 1255. Throughout the game, I got about 1150. They're fun to get and you they function as upgrading your superpowers. Partway in the game, you also get an ability that shows the clusters on the minimap helping out greatly. They never become an annoyance except maybe when you want to quit because it's 5 in the morning and you're tired but you keep seeing one in the horizon. It managed to reintroduce the fun collecting of Crackdown without being the tripe of Crackdown 2.
The bulk of the game is doing the random sidequests while the game tells you that it's useful to fucking with Zinyak or something. It's a bullshit reason, but they're fun to do, so who am I to complain? There are the sprinting races inside the simulation which are really fun, as well as ones in a simulation which are less fun. There are towers to climb, there are collectibles to collect, there are things to do, and that's the important thing to note. There are a lot of things that one can do and most of them are fun to do. Sure, they have fuckall to do with the actual plot, environment, and are just sidequests for cash and xp, but they're there, and the fun ones are really fun. And the other ones? Well, they're there if you want to play em.
The progression of the game is what you'd expect, given the premise. Get your crew back bit by bit, then kill Zinyak. You save each member from their own personal hell and each one remains entertaining and vastly different from each other. They're all memorable and perfectly fit the tone of the game. And the tone is fun. Cause this game is fun.
Just one of the crew member saving missions.
Another one is a replication of Final Fight.
Ultimately, I'm just a bit upset that this was so overshadowed by GTA V. GTA V, while yeah, it was a technical marvel, it certainly didn't grab me quite like SRIV did. I have no real reason to go back and play the single player in GTA V. I don't really connect to the characters, the plot is... I dunno, crime/gang stuff. The best part about GTA is the environment is pretty cool. That gets instantly rocked by traversing buildings Prototype-style. Yeah, super powers nullify the purpose of cars, but that doesn't bother me for a second. Superpowers > cars any day of the week. What are the benefits of driving a car, you get to listen to the radio? Shiiit, there isn't a single song in GTA that I like to listen to often enough to listen to outside of the game. There's not a song I miss from that game, nor a song I have that I'm glad is in the game. That soundtrack suuuucks. SRIV on the other hand, while it has a significantly less number of songs, they are significantly better. Not only can you listen to the radio outside of a vehicle; it's always on, you can make a playlist AND there are enough songs that I'd use on a playlist! Macklemore, Kendrick Lamar, FIDLAR, EMF, Haddaway, ah, so good.
At the very bottom line, this game accomplishes what it set out to do. It took it's silly premise and ran at a dead sprint. Superspeed. This game doesn't ask to be taken seriously, which works absolutely towards its favor. It works excellently and it's been a long time since I've had quite this much fun with a game and easily top 2 games I played from 2013. It's genuinely difficult for me to decide my GOTY with this in the mix. 100% recommend.
9.5/10
To The Moon
NOTE: This blog post is going to be spoilerriffic, so if you think you'd be interested in an emotional, story driven, isometric, pixel art journey through a dying man's memories, BUY IT.
I've always held gameplay to be more important than story in a video game. Games can exist with no story, Super Smash Bros. Melee and Rock Band just to name a few. But a game cannot exist without some sort of gameplay, that just makes it a really long movie. Say what you will about games like Heavy Rain, or The Stanley Parable, but they DID in fact have a some gameplay, if if it was just wandering around and hitting contextual button commands. But especially last year did I discover the importance and impact of a great story-driven game. Through playing both Bioshock: Infinite the Spec Ops: The Line, I discovered that even if gameplay is important, a game can always have more impact with a compelling and emotional story.
Enter To The Moon, a 2011 indie game from the mind of Kan Gao and developers Freebird Games, although it's worth noting that the team of Freebird couldn't fill up a starting lineup in a basketball game. And that's the kind of thing that should help you figure out what the game is. It's a bit short, taking around 2-3 hours to beat, has a purposefully retro aesthetic, and has no spoken dialogue. Almost. I'll touch more on that later.
The game begins by looking down onto a house by a lighthouse. Two kids play the piano when they hear a crash. The view cuts and two scientists, Neil and Eva, climb out of a car. The tone is established as being a bit comedic, with the two pointing fingers, and the driver explaining that he swerved to miss hitting a squirrel but did anyways. They bring a large case from the car and you are then given control to direct this group to a house. You reach the house, knock, and are welcomed in by a woman who brings you upstairs to a dying man named Johnny. You know very little about him until you take a look around the house. You discover a room completely full of paper origami rabbits and a broken music box. You then go back to the man and your partner and discover why you're there and what you're doing. With helmets, the scientists access his memories. With this technology, they can grant patients their dying wish. Johnny last wish was to go to the moon. He claims not to know why, so you and your partner traverse back through his memories Memento style (and actually use mementos as links to previous memories) in an attempt to spark the desire to go to the moon at a young age in order to have him become an astronaut in time.
This is where the true meat of the gameplay is introduced and doesn't really deviate from this until a bit of an arcade segment near the end, but that's not that important. There are essentially two modes of playing. There's walking around exploring and clicking on things collecting clues to link to the previous memory sequence that's pretty reminiscent of Cole Phelps but 8 bit and more natural. The other gameplay thing is switcher puzzles that appear when attempting to travel back to the next memory. That's about it. Does that sound enticing to you? Probably not, but this game doesn't sell itself on the gameplay and neither will I.
Not really sure how to describe it, but the buttons flip all the things in the row and you
want all tiles face up. Simple enough, mostly.
As you travel back in time, you begin to discover just what happened throughout Johnny's life. You discover he is a widower to a woman named River. She rejects using money to continue with her medical bills in favor of completing the dream house they'd started. Johnny plays a song he composed on the piano for River which was the same song the two kids were playing in the intro sequence. By passing back again, you witness an exchange where River gives Johnny an origami rabbit and asks him to describe it. You get the feeling that Johnny isn't quite describing it in a manner River would have preferred. Continuing further, it is revealed that River has a persuasive personality disorder. At moments she appears to be distant and unable to relate to things, and as this was diagnosed lately, it's very difficult to treat. Regressing further, you experience the couple's wedding, their dates, their lives together. You feel the connection between the two and really become attached to them, even though you know the end. Or at least I did.
One memory is jumped into with Johnny confessing the something was the reason he first approached her, although doesn't say what. Later, you see this first encounter in a school. Johnny is encouraged by his friend Nick. It's an awkward encounter, one to be expected, but they agree to go on a date and to go see a movie. Then the next jump into Johnny's young life is blocked. We're unable to see what happens, nor access it. Returning to the future, we discover that Johnny has beta blockers, an item used to block out one's memories. By triggering his memory with a scent similar to that time (contrived, yeah, especially as the scent is the dead squirrel roadkill), Eva and Neil return to the young memory to discover Johnny had a twin brother, Joey who was killed in a car accident. By moving further back, we see Johnny was a bit jealous that Joey appeared to be the favorite, but joey was nice enough about it. We then go to Johnny's earliest memory, one at a carnival at a very young age. He runs off into the woods to a spot to gaze at the stars. River appears, but doesn't reveal her name. They talk about the stars and how River sees a rabbit constellation. She asks Johnny to explain it, and he does it extensive detail, until he is called away. They say they'll meet there again in a year, and if they get lost? They'll meet together on the moon.
With this, we discover Johnny's long wish to go to the moon, as well as what happened with the relationship. The beta blockers covered up the original encounter of Johnny and River, and any attempt the scientists had of sparking such an interest of space travel to Johnny as a child was futile, since the reason for going to the moon was always there. By preventing Joey's death in the memories and taking River away temporarily in the school to somewhere else, Johnny continues on with his life alone. We chronologically progress through the memories with any semblance of Johnny and River's relationship being wiped away. This all happens throughout a cutscene and was truly upsetting for me, enough to possibly squirt out some liquid from my eye-holes, but that's not important. The only problem was that this is also the one instance of a voice-over. The song that they chose to play over involved a child singer. While I understand why, I kinda killed it for me. It would have been excellent with the piano pieces they used the whole time.
We reach the conclusion and see Johnny being initiated into NASA. He takes his tour around the facility as we follow him until finally, he is introduced to one of his partners, a woman by the name a River. And yes, this entire ending is contrived, the fact that they BOTH get into NASA to be in the same crew together is an outrageous possibility, but fuck you because I wanted this relationship to end happily and it did! Even if it was only Johnny's memories.
No, those aren't tears, I swear.
It's rare that a game has such an intense emotional impact on me. This game was 3 hours long and had a bit of bollucks and annoying gameplay, but this was a game I was genuinely interested in seeing be resolved. I wanted to see how it ended. Was a disappointed? Absolutely not. Unfortunately if you read this, there's pretty much no reason to go buy and play it now, but at least hopefully you understand my enthusiasm for it.
9/10
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Grand Theft Auto Online
GTA Online was a thing that made perfect sense, something that people understandably wanted, something just a bit more structured than GTA IV's. GTA IV had freeplay, which devolved to people killing cops together, picking up weapons, stealing cars, just the very base, simplistic things that make GTA fun. Killing things with different weapons you can pick up, driving cars you can steal. The fun comes in the hi-jinx that you and other players create, as well as enjoying the fun possible to create with the game's boundaries. What are the restrictions in playing? Well, you can't go bowling, but I can't honestly say that's a limit in the sense that mechanical pencils limit you to not sticking them into a pencil sharpener. What I'm saying is that the things it took from you weren't preventing you from doing what you would (most likely) want to do in such a game, just as a mechanical pencil lets you complete the desire of writing. Why do I say this?
If I were to describe GTAO, in a word, it would be restrictive. Or it would be grinding. What is grinding? Grinding is the padding of gameplay with useless, boring tasks to unlock abilities, or other fun things. Grinding is not fun. Nobody should really build a game around grinding. Then your game is a Skinner Box and people don't play it for fun, they play it to be told they accomplished something. Which they didn't. Because it's grinding. It's not hard, it's boring and tedious. Nobody's gonna be impressed if you cut down a tree with floss, no matter how much you brag about it.
Blasphemy! Heresy! How can such a thing be said!? I'll explain my position articulated with where I am in the game. I have quite some hours into GTAO and am level 28. I have a house, two motorcycles and a bicycle in my garage. I have a few guns, just small arms and an assault rifle, nothing big or flashy and at the same time, nothing FUN. No rocket launcher, no sniper rifle, no sticky bombs. Why, you ask? Well, some items are locked off until you reach a certain level, and others are just too bloody expensive to have to purchase and constantly refill ammo for. "Now Calvin," I hear you say, "you can get money AND experience for leveling up at the same time by doing jobs, races or other activities!" Yeah, and you know the problem with that? They all suck. Well, that's unfair, they don't all suck, but most of the ones I've played certainly do. To purchase upgrades for personal vehicles, you have to win races with those vehicles, so why do any other races when they don't help you get your wheels upgraded? I just have to do more races! And frankly, I don't play GTA to race, I play it to make pedestrians into the fillings of my vehicle and building sandwich. So down go the races as a fun alternative.
Yeeaah, I love riding on jet skis then getting gunned down. I'm having fun already.
Deathmatches are just hideous. Max Payne 3 is a shooter with shooter mechanics. GTAO is like trying to shoot moving ducks in a carnival while you're strafing on a segway. They just aren't fitting for a larger scale gunfight especially when you're constantly getting flanked, or being killed by bigger, better weapons because you couldn't make the money to purchase good weapons and ammo because you're stuck trying to get money through deathmatches and you can't because your weapons all suck and have no ammo and you can't get better ones because ARGH!
It's also important to mention the survival mode, which is 10 waves of horde-like gameplay. "If you make it to the end, you get $20,000!" the game says enthusiastically. Yeah, what does it require from me to make it to such a level? "Well, err... You're gonna have to play it safe near the later rounds to make sure nobody dies-" Wait, why is that? "Well, the higher the level, the more enemies there are and the harder they are to kill! And helicopters!" So yeah. Survival devolves to you and buddies hanging out in a spot waiting for the AI to path to you, which they usually won't. Then you'll walk out to find someone to kill and instantly die. They always have better aim than you AND more people than you. Playing it safe takes around 2 hours for $20,000. Does that sound good? Well, it shouldn't when a race can give like $5000 for 5 minutes AND the fast cars you want cost upwards to $650,000 with upgrades up to $25,000. Survival is a test in patience, waiting in tedium. Because that's what I want in my Grand Theft Auto game.
Finally, the jobs. Let's take a look at the jobs. Briefly. I've done some jobs, some missions. I have not done a single mission that didn't follow this format:
1. Go to a place
1. Go to a place
2. Kill people there
3. Pick up item
4. Return item to place
5. During drive back, people will drive towards you and try to kill you.
6. Kill some of them, return product.
EVERY SINGLE MISSION I'VE DONE followed this EXACT same format. And yeah, if some of the later ones deviate from the format, excellent, but I didn't get that far. And I don't want to. If my incentive to slog through shit is to have fun, why can't you just remove the shit? Why can't you just have a fun game, huh? It's necessary to start with awful, boring things that people hate? You shouldn't have to bank on the silliness of your friends to make the jobs fun.
Now, I forgot to talk about the character creation, which needs only brief mention.
This is EASILY the stupidest way to create a character. How many times have you created a character and thought, "I want to do this less directly. How about instead if directly picking faces, body type, size, and the basic body things AS WELL AS picking clothes for your character, I'd much rather do this more indirectly by picking 4 grandparents, then adjusting resemblances." Probably zero times because you're sensible. And then you can allocate time per day in doing activities which does something, I have no idea what. Thanks for the direction game. Now I know.
Seriously, can anyone tells me what this does?
Now with all of this, it's very easy to make the wild assumption that I hate this completely and prefer GTA IV over it in every way. That's just not true. I do enjoy it, just terribly disappointed with how Rockstar had arranged this. Why close off the fun things? Why make people grind for fun weapons and vehicles ESPECIALLY when other players can kill you over and OVER AND OVER.
This is not how you make a fun game. I understand the need for progression, as a multiplayer mode that gives you everything (see: Just Cause 2) can get boring and lose its fun after some point. But at the same time, the fun in multiplayer ESPECIALLY in sandbox games is creating fun with friends or other people and then destroying shit together. Give us some freedom, Rockstar. How about this, let us create a private game (which is already annoying as it is because you have to create it from story mode), then let us set a bunch of options, give us money, give us the option to buy whatever, let us mess with cops. Restricting us in a GTA game makes us not want to continue on especially when we get our shit pushed in by random players. We don't want to get to that level to exact revenge, we'll just quit and play a more fun game.
Bottom line, this could have been great. As it is, it's annoying. I can still have fun, because friends can make things fun, and given vehicles and high places, fun things can be formed. But it could be so much more. Making money annoying to get and having to grind for levels is bad. And it's obvious, they want us to circumvent the annoyance of that by buying money with real money, but that's dirty, Rockstar. And hey, where are the heists?
4/10
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Nazi Zombies
I liked Nazi Zombies. I really did. Treyarch, you dun fucked up. Here, I'll make this quick and simple right now. I will list the zombie maps in order of best to worst.
#1. Verruckt - World at War
#2. Der Reise - World at War
#3. Kino der Untoten - Black Ops
#4. Call of the Dead - Black Ops
#5. Ascension - Black Ops
#6. Shi No Numa - World At War
#7. Nacht der Untoten - World at War
---Official separation of maps I enjoy to those I don't---
#8. Five - Black Ops
#9. Moon - Black Ops
#10. Shangri La - Black Ops
#11. Buried/Die Rise - Black Ops II
#12. Tranzit - Black Ops II
Honorable shit mention - Dead Ops Arcade
Clarification, I have not played Mob of the Dead nor have I played whichever one has the Big Daddy/Nautilus from League of Legends in it.
But hey, do you see a pattern here? I sure do. Let's see the ones I don't like. All maps available in Black Ops II and then the last maps in Black Ops (and Five but shut up). Let's delve a little deeper into this.
The maps in World at War are all solid. I put the original as the last one I enjoy purely for the fact that in comparison to the other maps, it just seems a little bare, but I can still enjoy it. The only reason it's as low as it is is because there's only so much you can do. Shi No Numa is also moderately low (for the good games) because again, there's only so much you can do there, or so me and my friends discovered. It succeeds on the fact that it's still zombies and there's nothing particularly annoying except yourself and your friends sucking. Verruckt and Der Reise almost need no explanation as to how and why they're great. The way they're structured allows for many fun options including a FULL MAP ROUNDABOUT in Verruckt.
Simple, solid, wonderful.
You can also be a complete shit and hang out in the BAR room for no reason. Why is that room even there? Just cause. And the fact that this is the only map where people start separately kind of confuses me, as I thought it worked quite well. These maps I can replay again and again without having to do the same exact thing for success.
Black Ops maps on the other hand... They're a mixed bag. The theater is great for the things it does well. It's a large, but clear cut map. There's nothing confusing, you don't really need to be explained anything. The power doesn't need three arbitrary things to be activated, and it's relatively easy to upgrade a weapon. The major fault of this is the introduction of Treyarch making horrible decisions. Every map from here on out has some terrible design choice, some incredibly annoying aspect/enemy. Why are there Nova gas zombies that pop and are fucking annoying? They're not a challenge. They just suck and are annoying and everyone hates them and there is NO WAY to get around it. They felt they needed another enemy to circumvent burnout, so they added annoyance. Thanks.
Call of the Dead and Ascension are really close in terms of quality. I really enjoy both of them, as the maps are (arguably) easy to maneuver through, and there's not much to be explained. Yeah, Ascension, we don't have to do three things for power, but we do for Pack-a-punch. Call of the dead just has both of em straightforward just sitting there, you just gotta get there. But again, with these maps, we feel we have options when playing them. The layout of the maps doesn't make them so crushingly difficult that we feel we have to hold out in one place for success which is BORING. But again, they have some stupid, annoying decisions. Monkeys in Ascension can go fuck right off. Yeah, they replace the dog round AND give you all a free perk if they don't break they machines, but oh they WILL break the machines. They go for the machines you have perks in and trying to defend against small, quick moving things is futile. Machines are usually in corners, so you'll be trapped in this corner trying to defend a machine and just get shit on. Call of the Dead has George, and I don't even hate him that much, but he could have been implemented better. It's fun to harass him for no reason, and he DOES actually add tension when you round a corner and see the big bastard lumbering your way. He takes a while to kill, which scales based on how many people you have, and I actually killed him multiple times with friends using sickles only. I dunno, I had fun doing it. But the biggest problem about this is that he comes back. He shouldn't. If he takes ass-long time and ammo to kill, he shouldn't come back ever, ESPECIALLY not the next wave. That's a dick move.
And now the bad maps... Five is, again, just incredibly annoying. You work your way down the building until you get to the power room and you punch it. Then come the Novas, as well the Pentagon Thief. Ohhh, the pentagon thief. You ever want a fight a bullet sponge who steals your gun? No? WELL TOO FUCKING BAD. It's like playing Rock Band, then reaching a difficult solo which not only has a lot of notes, each time you fuck up, it deletes progress on previous songs. Lose an upgraded gun because you thought it would be easy to kill him with it? You fucked up and it's most likely gone forever. But not only that, during this round, the elevators don't work, so you have to rely on these random teleporters to get from place to place. You'd have a better time just standing in the corner getting wrecked by this guy as it just saves time and you'll be done with this shit again. And again, the only really strategy is hang out in the pack-a-punch room and shoot em as they come in. Or that's the only one I could figure out.
Next on the list is Moon. Oh ho ho hooo, Moon. Moon is a culmination of just awful, AWFUL ideas. The only reason it's above others is it's a bit endearing with its awfulness like a frail puppy covered in its own shit. You can't help but just laugh at the ideas it fucked up. So, you spawn and you gotta run to a teleporter to go the moon, but you can wait and farm some points before round one. I like this idea, but you better hope you and your partner are coordinated. One goes down, you're fucked. You're not going anywhere. But when you DO make it to the moon, there's no air! You know this by your character gasping for air THEN DYING. There are NO instructions, nothing telling to get the fucking breathing apparatus, they just kinda hope you'll figure it out. That's NOT how you make a game. Come on, I know you're working on Call of Duty, but you have to know SOME basics about gameplay and conveying what you're supposed to do. Next on the list of moon-characteristics: low gravity. Low gravity is fun, especially with a dolphin dive. You know what's not fun? Sprinting down a slope, then floating all the way down only to be greeted by the welcome wagon of rag-tag zombies ready to know at your floaty ass. Why are there zombies on the moon? Whatever, I don't care. Next, the map layout. The map layout is horrendous. Between every room is small enclosure between the two rooms that serves two purposes: having a breathing apparatus for when the game decides to spawn you NOT in the original spawn, and pushing your shit right in. That's right, you will die because of these opaque, ridiculous doors. Too many times a scenario where, "Oh shit, my friend's down 5 rooms over! Better sprint over." You open the door to find 6 zombies ready to greet you with with 6 swipes, INSTANTLY down on your ass, or better yet, finding the astronaut who headbutts you to the spawn. I haven't even mentioned the astronaut yet, he takes some random name as if he was player controlled or something. He's a bullet sponge that grants you NOTHING for killing him. Don't wanna waste ammo but still wanna kill him? Try the knife. Or don't, cause he grabs your ass and blasts you to the spawn. Now, this isn't annoying in itself, but the stupidest thing is this removes ALL of your perks. ALL OF EM. THAT. IS. BULLSHIT. I love losing an insurmountable amount of progress do to BULLSHIT like this. Oh, and as a final takeaway, there's a room with bounce pads, a Bio-Dome. These bounce pads have a predetermined arc that sometimes decides just not to work. You miss your landing because you can't control yourself or do anything in the air? Say goodbye to everything, you're fucked. And when you make a worse Bio-Dome than the one with Pauly Shore, you need to rethink your life. So that is Moon. Not even the worst one yet.
Shangri La is just miserable. This one's balls hard, you never feel like you can do will in this level. There are no good places to hold out, there are no good roundabouts. You play for 5-10 minutes, get your ass handed to you, then you quit or play a better map. From bullet sponge zombies that explode and kill you, to getting trapped by spikes between sections of the map, this doesn't do anything good. And there's not even anything to write home about. Even worse.
To round out the Black Ops maps, I'll say a short a bit about Dead Ops Arcade. Ever wanted to play a more generic, music-less, ugly version of Geometry wars? Well, this is the game for you! A $1 indie game is better than this.
Dead Ops Arcade is a lesser map than I MA3D A GAME3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT
But now we finally reach the Black Ops II maps. Now, I'll say this, I bought every map pack for every map I stated above. Yes, I'm a bit stupid, but that's besides the point. I didn't buy Black Ops II. I didn't play any of these nearly as much as the other ones, and for good reason. I played Die Rise and Buried about 5 times total for both. They're confusing messes of maps. Sure, some may like the freedom and exploration, but when you need to pay money to get to other parts of the map, this becomes a hefty total, and you don't know if these are good ideas. You get lost, then you're dead. And Die Rise has a mix of dogs and monkeys. Instead of a dog round, there's something that moves quickly, jumps on walls, then scratches your eyes out. Then you die, get pissed, and toss the disk into a paper shredder. There's not much to say on these maps, as I didn't play them too much. It just boils down to too complicated, to much shit that's not explained, too much shit I can't be bothered with. Next.
TRANZIT.
Tranzit... Tranzit... This one map could have its own blog. This is the absolute worst. I don't understand people who enjoy this map. I genuinely don't. Not only is it upsetting that Black Ops II was released with less Zombie maps than Black Ops, it's also worse than any of the previous ones. There is so much wrong with this map, from the confusing nature of the map's mechanics, to the enemies, to the map layout, to the characters, to ANYTHING. I can't say there's a single thing about this map I enjoy. Yeah, the original map is in there somewhere, but I tried to find it once (with instructions on how to do so, mind you), couldn't find it, died, couldn't be bothered. But first off, the characters.
CHARACTERS:
The characters first had voices in Verruckt, then were given actual characters in Shi No Numa. Occasionally, the main 4 are different people, like in Five, they were Nixon, Jefferson, Castro, and Macnamera (who is an atrocious asshole), or Call of the Dead where they're 3 actors and Sarah Michelle Gellar who is the only notable one for being annoying. But this one has four assholes and not a single one likeable. The original four where all right, Takeo was kind of annoying with his Japanisms, but Richtofen more than made up for it. This one, everyone talks way too much and says things that make you cringe, or just makes you upset.
MAP LAYOUT:
The map is post apocalyptic, something that's not surprising on it's own, but it has these cracks on the ground and lava pockets that hurt you by crossing over them, which will happens all the goddamn time. Take a few steps, hit some lava, get stunned, slow down, get hit by zombies, die. The mapitself is separated into 5 sections, each one separated by intense fog and a long road. You're intended to travel between the two on a bus which takes some time to return if it leaves without you, which creates waiting, something this map is all about. Occasionally, you'll have to get to the previous section, so you want to wait for the bus to get there, then wait for the bus to go, so you'll leg it. Going through the fog is like wading a maze of hip-deep shit, then getting periodically stabbed for it. You'll occasionally lose direction of where you're going, have to go through extended sections of lava, which you might not make and just die, but worst of all are the "denizens." They fly to you, grab onto your face, and scratch at it. You have to repeatedly knife to get them off. AGAIN, not at difficult, challenging, or fun. Only annoying. The shouldn't be. But since the map is separated into 5 sections, they're essentially 5 separate maps, each of them too small to be interesting, and have some vital perks that you may have to go back to. Traveling from part to part sucks, and staying in any one spot ALSO sucks.
MAP MECHANICS:
So, as you know, the main thing is the bus that transits people from section to section, and as you know, I hate it and it sucks. But other mechanics are stupid and don't make sense. You can craft items if you find all the necesary items, but you can only ever carry one of these. You ca make a zombie riot shield which to be fair is quite funny, but it doesn't give you any points, and you'll need to carry the turbine anyways to unlock the pack-a-punch room. This in itself is a confusing mess that is incredibly difficult to discover on your own. You gotta place a turbine by a green door with a power symbol on it, then in the next section, you have to blow up a vault door with a grenade or ray gun. This in itself is confusing, as there's no way to know that would work. Then, if there's a turbine by that door, a chamber in the vault will open up. Again, this is just asking too much of the player. And if you say I'm just stupid and couldn't piece it together, fine. But having to do this with the constant threat of zombies is annoying. To people who defend things like this by saying that making crawlers were always a part of playing, yeah. That's true, they were. BUT, we didn't play Zombies to get to the crawler part. We didn't play to get to the point where we can stick our thumbs up our asses and wait for shit to be done. Nobody's favorite part was watching other people use the box 20 times. We play to shoot things and have fun. Tranzit is none of that. Tranzit is a test of waiting, patience through bullshit, and having a high tolerance for the map's shit.
Now, after all this, there's one more thing that needs to be mentioned. Treyarch and their "easter eggs." The easter eggs where you activate three stones or bears to play a hidden song is fine. Those are generally harmless and neat to discover on their own. But from Call of the Dead onwards, there are achievements for each level to do a multistep process which takes an ass long time and would no way be naturally stumbled on. Things that take 40 minutes to do, some REQUIRING 4 people is absolutely bullshit. Completeing the easter egg in Call of the Dead grants you NOTHING in game. There's no incentive to do it in the game, only for external bragging rights. They're not fun, they're bullshit. Just take a look at some of these. Seriously. THIS is BULLSHIT. I hate the presence of these. MAYBE in a game on its own, MAYBE in a game where you're not CONSTANTLY bothered by the presence of zombies, especially in a game where you initially die in only two hits. These are awful and I don't understand how people would figure these out without a guide, or enjoy some of them. They're incredibly luck based, and shit.
And so with all of that, you should be able to understand why Zombies are just a bit dead to me. With each iteration, they attempt to add more shit to make it BIGGER AND BETTER, which like the Call of Duty series in general, has just been a downward decline into mediocrity and frustration. Zombies used to be great, it used to be simpler. I could have forgiven them if Shangri La was the worst it got, but it's not... Every single one in Black Ops II that I've played is just awful. There's nothing good about them except for how great they make the older ones feel and play. So, Treyarch, you've lost me as a CoD Zombie enthusiast. I hope you're happy. I will forever remember the fun I had and will continue to play the good ones, and even occasionally play the shit ones for a brief, BRIEF period for a laugh, or for a fresh experience.
I mean, at least none of them are Extinction level bad, right?
Starting in Counter-Strike
Ever since around a year or two ago, I've been eager to get into another online multiplayer game. Call of Duty had kinda grown stale especially due to overplay my freshman year of college. I've hopped around a few placing around 5 hours into Chivalry, 5 hours into the PC version of Call of Duty 4 which I rebought for the sake of a lively non-hacking community, 10 hours into Tribes: Ascend which just decided to stop working for me, and few others, neither of them really sticking with me the way earlier Call of Duty installments. I think I've finally found that game, it being Counter Strike.
Now, I have dipped my feet into the waters of this popular series, but only for short periods, like playing in the computer lab in high school and playing CS: GO (Global Offensive) for a bit on 360 which I have no explanation for my purchase. I am now have about 4-5 hours logged in CS:GO, and will probably continue to play more as well as put some time into CS: Source. Being fairly new, I spent most time against bots of varying difficulty with defuse and deathmatch gametypes. Now, it's difficult to articulate just why I'm enjoying more than other games, say Team Fortress 2. Part of it is that my deaths and successes are entirely on me, part of it is that I play a lot against bots, part of it is that I still feel improvement.
NOT GETTIN TIRED OF THIS SHIT.
I'm not a team player at all, which might pose to be an issue. This is why I like (well liked) Call of Duty more than the short amount of time I played Battlefield 3. I'm not at all a team player. I hate the idea of being shit because my team sucks just as well as I hate keeping me team down. I go on my own, succeed or fail, and notice the issues of my teammates. With TF2, I don't feel comfortable playing many roles. I have 2 hours in medic and soldier each, then the next most is the heavy with around 20 minutes. CS;GO 1 character, with the exception of bomb runner or defuser or whatever, but any person could be that person. It's not hard to figure out how to play as what you are. You shoot the bad guys, plant/defuse the bomb when necessary. And I'm not at all saying that there's no teamwork in this game, I'm saying that if I play casually, which I do, I won't really care about the rest of the team. Such is how I play Call of Duty. It can't be played with teamwork, but fuuuuuuck that.
Now, when it comes to improvement on the game, my biggest problem with the game is raised. The entire game is focused on headshots. This dynamic expresses just how shit I am at PC shooters. Get into an encounter, aim for the head, sometimes get lucky, but mostly not. If you get killed, it lets you know how many shots hit you, and how much damage it gave, as well as how much damage you gave and how many times you hit. Really, it just lets you know exactly how shit you are. Often, things like Damage Taken: 162 with 2 bullets. Damage Given: 8 with 1 bullet. How the fuck you give 8 damage with an AK-47 is beyond me. I'm still pretty shit at the game, I'll admit that, but it is a bit frustrating having an encounter where I instantly get shit on. Now, this also happens in Call of Duty, but with the low base health in that game, it's easy for anyone to get a kill AND you can aim down sights do aid in without having to worry about recoil nearly as much.
I'm good at games, I swear.
In conclusion of all of this, I feel that there's a long way I have to go, and most importantly, I'm still interested in this, I do want to get better. I just feel I have a long way to go, a lot to unlearn to figure this game out as well as I did in Cod4 or Modern Warfare 2.
CS! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Music to Mention: Here's To Never Growing Up
Now, if I were to make a list of the best and worst pop songs of 2013 (and I just about have), this wouldn't be on either of the lists, and actually wasn't even considered on either. Why does it deserve a blog post for itself then? Well, this was the last song I heard before stepping into work yesterday AND getting out of the car coming home from work today. I've had a bit of time with it stuck in my head and what exactly are my thoughts? Well, I mean, I like it enough to stick with it on the radio, that's measurably better than many other songs on the radio, but it's a weird song. It seems to be intended to be a party anthem, but it's slow, plodding, not exactly something to jump up and down to. The verses and the bridge are both kinda soft and hard to belt due to the separated melody of the verse and range of the bridge. Yes, the chorus is notably shoutable, mainly for the part where they shout the name of the song, but it's hardly one people can get "partying" to. And as a lesser point, I do enjoy Radiohead and even included "Just" at number 34 on my list of favorite songs, but I can't name a single song that I'd sing at the top of my lungs. And it's not like an enjoyment thing, it's just not really possible due to the range of the vocalist. But more importantly than strict musical analysis is the the obvious subject matter of the song.
Avril Lavigne does not have to grow up. It hardly looks like she's grown at all in 10 years.
Avril Lavigne does not have to grow up. It hardly looks like she's grown at all in 10 years.
Avril Lavigne writes a song about never growing up. Avril Lavigne is a popstar. She makes lightweight, catchy, pop songs about being rebellious, teenage relationships, and other mainstream garb. Although I'm in no place to criticize completely on pandering to certain audiences, but as I'm 19 year old sophomore in college, this song kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I mean hell, I don't want to grow up, but I don't really have a choice, now do I? It's just a part of growing up, something Avril Lavigne deosn't seem to do, nor need to do. So I guess when it all comes down to it, I'm just a little it jealous of Avril Lavigne, jealous I don't lead such a lifestyle. Which is a little silly, isn't it? Maybe I just need to grow up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)