Dead Island

Hey, have you seen the trailer for Dead Island? Yes, this is early summer 2011 and this trailer is one of the most popular things to come out of E3! Did it even come out of E3? Maybe. But it's really artistic and emotional and powerful!

I actually do really like this trailer. It's really well done and paints this game to be an intense, emotionally rollercoaster of a zombie game. And what did we get? We got... Dead Island. A game that made gamers around the world go "eh." The game got 7-8s from review sites, but all in all, the game is just... Not very good. This is coming from a person who played a game for like 60-70 hours, mostly by myself. I can't convince people it's a good game, I can't convince MYSELF it's a good game. Because it's not. I mean, it's okay...

But lemme explain the game a little. It's an open world, sandbox-ish rpg zombie survival. The game largely consists of wandering around doing side missions of various flavors of ridiculous. You'll have endless missions of giving bottles of water to somebody, or a mission to get a person a teddy bear, or an awful escort mission. The missions are almost always boring and just kinda needless padding. You never feel like you're making progress, just doing menial shit.


The environments range from beach resort, to shitty shambling town, to jungle area, to, if I remember correctly, testing labs. Yes, I completed this game 3 times, and no, I barely remember what happens in the end. Bottom line, the beach resort is the only good environment. You can drive the awkwardly handling trucks around a pretty open area and have fun getting them lodged in staircases. The city has you walking everywhere getting blindsided by people with guns, and the jungle level is, well, a fucking jungle. I don't even remember what the labs were like, but I feel there were a lot of people with guns to kill. Either way, they go from interesting and kinda fun to bad, bad, boring.

The story? Shiiiiit, it's almost all mashed together from generic zombie ideas. Take zombie ideas you have, throw them into a pot, boil boil boil, out come the zombies. You are one of four survivors immune to the infection, therefore you do stupid sidequests for people that have no personality that nobody cares about. The city's been overrun by people who want to assume power over all the lifeless houses and dead bodies, and you need to help random people by stopping them? Then you go to a jungle for some reason, and, hold on, lemme read up on this plot again from Wikipedia... ... ... Oh god, that's right... God, I remember this plot. A guy starts talking to you via radio or something, tells you he can make a vaccine from the survivors, he's on a prison, then you go there, help the prisoners arm themselves or something, then the infected the scientists were studying kill the scientists at some point, then the guy on the radio steals a prototype vaccine or something and you kill him on the roof. This plot just seems so tired, there's not a single thing interesting about it!

I promise this looks more fun than it is for 90% of the time.

Speaking of things not interesting, let's take a look at the enemies. Generic walkers, generic runners, generic big guys that take a lot of hits and knock you back with impressive force even if they themselves have no arms, the exploders, the fat guys that spit at you, the big guy that charges at you, and people with guns. Not a single one of these are interesting, and the fun of killing dies halfway through act 1. You fight with weapons that break apart as if they were all held together by masking tape and chewing gum, you repair them by shoving dollar bills into a workbench, or upgrade them by stapling money to them making them more powerful, yaaawn. You also have a kick, but that drains your stamina as well as swinging, running, or jumping, so you're bound to be back peddling without any stamina while zombies slowly walk up to you, smack you once and you fall on your ass because no stamina means you fall over like bowling pins.

It shouldn't be difficult to see why this game is so boring. It's a game that survives only on concept. Almost everything in this game is implemented poorly. Story sucks, characters suck, enemies suck, environments suck, combat sucks, really, it's difficult for me to think of a single good thing about the game. I mean, analog combat was kinda fun, but it still sucks running out of stamina all the goddamn time. Uhmmm... Driving is funny, I wouldn't say fun... Really, it's a game that holds up on concept alone. With the incredible trailer, it was forced to be a serious drama of a game and ended up flat out silly, or eye-rollingly stupid, or just impossible to be invested in because everything about it is so one dimensional. The only redeeming quality comes from playing with friends and getting into wacky hi-jinx, like getting a truck stuck in terrain, or laughing at the shadow animations. Eventually that wears off and you're just fucking booooored.

I can't convince myself that Dead Island is a good game. It's not a terrible game. It's just so boring and annoying and barely functional. It doesn't deserve the trailer that announced it. A fitting trailer would have been bulletpoints in black font a white background for how factory made and lifeless it seems. And it actually makes me a bit angry thinking about it now. Yeah, this game kiiiiinda sucks.

Binary Domain, First Impressions

So, if you are a PC gamer at all, you should be aware of the Humble Bundle. If not, what have you been doing?! The latest of bundles happened to be a Sega bundle, and having not played many of the titles, I decided to give it a go. One of the greatest things that can happen is when expectations are largely surpassed and that's what Binary Domain has done.

Well, what's it about? The year is... something future, maybe like 2042 or something, and as a result of sea levels rising, many cities were left inhabitable. People got too attached to said destroyed cities and decided the best thing to do is create newer cities on top of the older cities. Nobody can really do anything in the flooded areas except robots causing a massive increase in demand for said bots. With these robotics, a New Geneva Convention was established with added clauses, such as Clause 21, robots may not externally appear as humans. One of these, a "hollow child," was found slinging accusations at the main robotics company in America. With heavy denials, attention is turned to a Japanese corporation, and is where the game picks up with you, Dan, and your friend, Bo, infiltrating Japan "covertly."

Gameplay focuses the standard third person, squad based, action-shooter. You have some guns, you have a couple people with you, and you shoot at robots. The gimmick this game touts is issuing squad commands through your mic. You can yell things like, "Cover me!" or "Sure," or "Damnit!" to respond to teammates or signal things in battle. The only mic I have is an onboard mic on my laptop and living in a house with 30 other dudes doesn't leave me feeling comfortable shouting weird things at my computer. Alternatively, I just hold tab at hit whatever response I feel accurate. While it may be an interesting idea, it's just easier to hit buttons for it. It reminds me of that whole Mass Effect 3 "better with Kinect" bullocks.

The actual gameplay is shooting various flavors of robots with various flavors of bullets, and I will say, 4 hours in, shooting robots is pretty fun. The standard robot grunts you fight aren't completely harmless, but still kinda fun to kill, as they explode into bits providing visceral exploding joy. The others I've fought being spider-ish zapping ones, spider-ish exploding ones and robo-snipers have all been fairly unique and entertaining, if not sometimes annoying. The bosses have been fairly creative and unique as well. Tense and rewarding, although sometimes repetitive in the whole, shoot this spot a thousand times- oh, now-I-get-a-command-on-how-to-actually-beat-this-guy-and-I've-been-doing-nothing-this-whole-time kind of boss fight.



The games not without its faults. Playing on the PC, it's really quite messy of a port. There's no rebindable keys, or any key configuration or layout at all. You don't reload with R, sprint with shift, or switch weapons with the mouse wheel. If you missed how to do something in the tutorial, you're stuck guessing how to do it, and even the tutorial kinda sucks on PC. Aim with [M] and shoot with [M]. Reload with [M], shoot a charged shot by holding [M]. Contextual crane adjusting minigame? Move box with WASD, turn box with [M]. If you didn't catch on yet, M is something on the mouse. No, I'm not going to tell you which one, figure it out yourself. The game also has problems with unplugging or replacing anything in the audio jack, resulting in the game crashing for whatever reason. One time the game crashed causing me to play a goddamn rail shooter segment again. Which kinda sucked. Although it did lead my to notice that every time you get hit, and I mean EVERY TIME you get hit, your character responds with an audible grunt. Getting shot at with machine guns, UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH reminding me of beta Minecraft where Steve had a male voice indicating when he got hurt, then falling into lava.

Who doesn't love RAAAAAAAIIIIIIIL SHOOOOOOTER SEGMENTS?

Aside from this, I haven't had anything in terms game-breaking bugs or something really taking me out of the game. I'm pretty interested in the story and the characters, actually. I want my character to be liked by the other people on the team, and, like in real life, appreciate the approval of my squad-mates. The setting is pretty interesting and I do want to know what more we'll discover. Now, I am only 4 hours in, but seeing robots programmed to think they're and discovering they're a robot for the first time is pretty damn moving. A goddamn robot committed suicide and I felt bad! Have YOU ever felt bad for a robot? Didn't think so!

I dunno. I've been crushed before by the loss of a volleyball as well, so maybe pulling my strings isn't as hard as it seems.

8/10 (for the first 4 hours)

GTA V Story 1

Joined a race, still am, actually,45 minutes into it. It's supposed to be a fun race where you drive around and blow each other up, nobody's actually meant to win it. I could have won 40 minutes ago. There's a shipping container in the middle of road. A truck drove into it, started glitching, front end inside the container. I climbed on, and as it was shaking it caught on fire and exploded, killing me.

5/5 would race again.

Collectibles in Video Games

Collectibles have an interesting evolution throughout gaming, an evolution I'm pulling straight out of my ass and assuming. Easter eggs began in games as early as Adventure on the Atari 1600, and from then, people always wanted shit for people to find. Now, power-ups are also something that started at some point and probably also had some affect on the state of collectibles today, but I can't be buggered to do any research about them because this is a silly blog post I'm writing at work to kill time. And I just got all the collectibles in Saints Row IV yesterday night (great game read the review here).

BUT anyways, I imagine at some point an easter-egg guy and a power-up guy got compressed together into one gaming concept: the collectible. When did this happen? Well, uhm, sometime, uhh, around the, uhh, sega... playstation... nintendo... microsoft... colecovision era. You know. Sometimes they're there for fun, sometimes they're there for stat boosts, and sometimes they're then main focus of the game. But there are ways to do collectibles right, and there are ways to do them wrong. So lemme tell you what is right and wrong.

Case 1: Banjo Kazooie/Spyro the Dragon (EARLY PS1 era Spyro, none of this wishy washy Skylanders bullshit, whatever it is)

Make a hub-based adventure game where you go around and collect a bunch of small things in a level and collect less larger things in the same level where the larger things are more important and ultimately the goal of the game. Now, I've only played like 20 minutes of Banjo Kazooie in like 2010, so whether any of this is accurate to the game I'm just assuming because fuck you, I was a Sony kid. But I loved Spyro. I loved getting everything I could in each level, as I am a perfectionist. It was excellent. The collectibles were very liberally spread out, some of the larger, more plot relevant ones were quite rewarding, like the skateboarding one, or were more bullshit, like boxing. This type of collectible in a  game, when well executed, can result in a masterpiece, like PS1 Spyro games. When executed poorly, it can result in, well, Enter the Dragonfly.

Case 2: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare/World at War
You get collectibles (intel/death cards) in the campaign, and they alter gameplay when you replay the campaign. Well, if you're playing World at War, it affects the co op campaign. But only if it's online. Splitscreen death  cards is asking a bit too much. BUT, regardless, I think this works pretty well. I played through the campaign of CoD4 many a time, and many times I fiddled around with the cheats. Ragtime Warfare, or infinite grenade launchers was always a blast, and the very few times I've played co op with paintball mode, or with rocks has been a fun time. Collectibles affecting gameplay of linear games, thumbs up from me.

Case 3: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Modern Warfare 3
This encompasses the three Call of Duty games, the last three I fully played, MW2, Black Ops, and MW3. This has intel scattered out throughout the campaign. ... And that's it. Really, that's it. You find the intel for the sole reason of... Perfectionism? Because you want the achievements tied to it? That's the only reason I got intel in those games, it was my only incentive! It was really just kind of an after thought, or an addition because, well, the previous games had them in it! And we just wanted a shred of replayability. Now, some people may enjoy finding intel, but no, this kind is not for me. It's just kind of a waste.

Did you want a reason to replay any given level? Now you do!

Case 4: Bully: Scholarship Edition
There are 75 collectibles, in the forms of rubber bands, scattered throughout the open world map of Bullworth. Upon collecting all 75, you're granted with an achievement as well as the rubber band ball weapon, a ball that you throw and bounces around for a while until settling. This is a pretty fun item, and to my recollection, pretty powerful. It's a solid reward for your exploration. Although the exploration is kind of undermined, as the rubber bands are all just indicated on the map. I actually kinda like this, they knew that people would just look up a map online anyways, so why not just give it to them? If it was possible to temporarily remove them from the map, that would be nice, but I really dig the execution.

Case 5: Crackdown

This is actually a lot similar to the Spyro/Banjo Kazooie type of having a bunch scattered around to pick up. The only difference is that now it's an open world city and you're a SUPER SOLDIER. And I'm only gonna talk about Crackdown 1, as Crackdown 2 is Crackdown 1 where everything is stupid and also your dog's dead. Crackdown, to my knowledge, has 500 agility orbs, 250 or 300 secret hidden orbs, and 50 or so stunt jumps. Almost all the jumps are in awkward positions making the attempt to get them all the more fun. The secret orbs are pretty spread out, but I don't think I ever found more than 100. The agility orbs, on the other hand, are plentiful and beautiful. From atop a building, one could see dozens of agility orbs ready to be collected. They're fun to get, AND they serve to improve your agility level, allowing you to run faster, jump higher. This MAKES the game. Crackdown is a game made entirely by its prevalence of collectibles, and it may very well be good enough to make my next top-games list.

Case 6: Saints Row IV/Assassins Creed something
Now, I've only ever heard of the manner of Assassin's Creed collectibles for one of the games, maybe Brotherhood, maybe Revelations, but I remember hearing that you collect a certain amount of feathers or something, maybe 50% or 75%, and the rest will just appear on the map. Similarly, after completing a side mission in Saints Row IV, you unlock a collectible finder to display any pick-ups on the map. I like the idea that progression shows any collectibles, or that by finding a certain amount exposes the rest. Also, Saints Row has them integral to gameplay and even story, as contrived as it is. But I'll let it slide for how camp the game itself is.

Yes, I got all of these because this game is awesome. And hell, this guy already got 300 of em.

Case 7: Grand Theft Auto IV
200 pigeons scattered around the city to shoot which may also give you a wanted level. Fuck you.

I hope you've all learned a great deal from this and about my interests in games. Having collectibles be very prevalent and drive gameplay? Excellent, awesome, do it. Having them be displayed in the game, if it's a sandbox game and there are a bunch to collect? I like it. They know I'm gonna either look it up anyways or just not bother. Having a few to unlock secrets or unlockables, essentially easter eggs? I can enjoy those as well. Having a few because your game feels obliged to have them? A waste of my time that the developers know and use only to artificially increase replayability. Collectibles should be fun and rewarding, not a chore.