Beyond Duty

Well, Call of Duty 5: World at War was quite a mixed bag for me. It did turn out to be immersive, but at the same time, it still has quite many things that need work.

A quick rundown for those who didn't play with this one: it was developed by Treyarch instead of Infinity Ward. It takes us yet-again into the battles of World War II., on Allied and Russian side.

Graphicswise, I can't really have a bad word. Looks great, runs great. Animation is good, models are also.
The videos between the missions are OK, but I would have preferred them to be in style of the era, not this ultra-modern, showbiz-meets-documentary one. Guess the guy wanted to show how awesome they are.
There is only one disturbing portion: large caliber machineguns do tend to decapitate or maim enemies. While the former is of course instant, the latter gets started an animation of almost half a minute of the said sorry soldier gripping his new stump, face distorted in pain until either you take a mecry on him or he dies with an audience. If - like me - you tend to favour weapons that have rapid fire, awesome damage and accuracy, you'll encounter this part quite often.

Suprisingly, not counting the sniper, the most accurate and best all around weapons are the largest man-portable machineguns. If you ever see a 'deployable' gun, pick it up, you won't find anything better (save sniper for really long distance).
Yet again, grenade handling is bad. While it is assigned the same numerics that the guns, you throw it at once rather than selecting it. The other bad thing: Russians have a special molotow cocktail, which could have been fun, but takes ages to ready, ignite, then throw. Every damn time I tried to use it, the enemy either got shot to death before I threw, I got shot whil trying to say in range, or he got out of range. Grenades cannot be cooked, so their effectiveness is quite low. Due to the console-optimalized controls, throwing back a grenade is mapped to the same button as throwing your own.

Speaking of grenades, the audio portion is also quite good. I have to mention the voice actors, Kiefer Sutherland and Gary Oldman. Sutherland for the main allied character, and unless I'm mistaken, Oldman for the Russian sniper firend. I have to admit, our friend sniper was one of the best acted character I've seen in CoD, especially because he gives a real historic hint at the actions of the Russian army.
Sound are nothing to write home about, they are bearable and that's about it.

Story is.. well, it is a historic FPS. Then again, I liked the infantry parts of the Russian campaign, due to the aforementioned friend. Unlike 99% of the WWII games, namely Allied vs Nazi, this one is about Russian vs Nazi and Allied vs Japanese conflicts, bringing some variation to the genre.

Apart from standard infantry missions, you get a tank mission (lackluster), and an airplane gunnery seat (better).

To conclude this: good game for few hours, or for multiplayer, if you like the "whoever hits first wins" kind of play.

More...

Clouded skies

Yes, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is not that new, but I did not have an opportunity to play it till now. I have really mixed feelings about it. While it does have more than necessary old maps, it did have some fun elements, but it definitely is NOT a complete new game, maybe not even an expansion.

Graphics
With the .06 patch, DX10.1 was introduced. It looks surprisingly well on a HD4850, but is really at the edge of playability in 1440x900 maxed (except AA). It does not look extraordinary on its own right, but it is still way better than e.g. Fallout 3, while not so graphic as CoD 5. It has about all the wistles and bells one could think, and the modelling is on-par with the dead area.

Sounds
Dynamic music, which does not exactly turn off when combat is over. I've had better luck with ten year old implementations. Sound effects are nothing to write home about, they are there and that's it. I did like the muffled suppressed sound though.

Levels & Design
Well, this is the worst aspect of the game hands down! First, for about the price of a new game, you get mostly the old maps and some new ones. In places, the anomalies were moved, in others, left as they were. My greatest pain was to the fast traveling system: there are special NPCs, who will take you to other places for gazillions of rubels. You have to chose between ammo, an update to your rifle or a long trip. Better yet, after the forrest, I didn't bump into any trader NPC, so I didn't have any opportunity to exchange loot for money, which meant that my equipment quality went down the drain, even when I did collect enought loot to arm an army. (yep, my only cheat: carry 2 tons of stuff so I thought I didn't have to do return trips.) Then I dropped the loot before the feet of a repair NPC, amounting to quite a pile, but still no luck, you can't sell guns to anyone but the specific trader ones, which were nowhere around.

Weapons & Items
If you played with the original, you already met with just about everything you'll meet in here. An advice: go for headshots always, leave the heavy consuming rifles for others, or you will run out of ammo before enemies. Stick to the head, and you'll have enough, in most cases, plenty to spare.
As in the previous version, maybe even more, you're always stretched thin in rubels.

Conclusion
Well, it rather feels like playing the same game again, with some graphical updates and barely a handful of new maps. If you plan on completing the sidequests as well, join the factions or something like that, than you're in for quite some time. If you only go for the main quest, it still is longer than most new FPS games. But nothing is an excuse for being the bug-ridden unplayable game that it was from the day it came out till the very latest patch, or having even less new content than an expansion.

More...

Platinum Generation

I thought I should mention a pleasant surprise I got while playing around with steam the other day. I have a first-gen Half Life: Generation Pack from old, so old, in fact, that Half Life: Blue Shift didn't come with it. This greatly annoyed me at the time, and continued to do so until this other day.

I thought: "what the hell, I'll activate this also on steam!" It's not a requirement or anything, I just thought to do so as a contingency measure, should I lose the discs or otherwise become unable to use them. I gave first the code for only the Half Life (I had separate codes for HL, Counterstrike and opposing force). Then continued to stare at the screen, as it read:

"Half Life: Platinum Pack activated"

I mean, whoa. That's a tad more than I bargained for. Very nice move. I did consider buying Blue Shift only to play it and get to know that side of the story, (no, I never pirated it,) but it always seemed a bit more expensive than I had left over after all other things bought.


So now I'm the proud owner of yet another a god-knows-how-many year old
game that I'd love to play through, which I got practically as a gift.

More...

Skin is the new Kevlar!

Yep, its time to mince Far Cry 2 apart. To sum up, it does not live up to the f(l)ame. It is undeniably beautiful, but tedious, infuriating and boring as well. Plus, it gave me a headache due to the (yet again) faulty widescreen implementation.


Graphics

The game is run by the new Dunia engine. I do not kid that I didn't have so much fun watching sunset/sunrise in any other game. The storms are noticeable, but nothing serious. Yes, the game does look very good. As for the headache, they went with the bioshock-esque vertical crop rather than the horizontal plus area, thus the supposedly wide 90° field of view is actually only 70°. No, I'm not the only one who literally got a migraine from this. At least you can already find a 3rd party hack to fix this. (See widescreen gaming forums for it.) No response from UBI, as always, they are off and away counting the money instead of fixing a buggy game.



Environmental Chaos (Or the lack thereof)

The supposed wildfire is just a small patch-fire, as it automatically stops a few meters away. Remember the dev video when they started a huge raging fire toward an enemy base about 100m away? Now you should rather forget it, there is no such thing.

Remember the destruction and mayhem promised to the shanty towns? Again, you'd better forget it, as even a few cm thick board is invulnerable to a jeep speeding towards it at 100 km/h. The only destroyable/movable items are the explosive barrels/some specific ammo piles, TV screens, radios (only to the point of turning them off) some paper boxes and the cars. Oh, and they magically respawn if you don't look in about 5 sec. No, I'm not kidding about the 5 second respawn.

Oh, and don't expect to be able to scale hills or mountains. Or jumping high enough to get on top of anything. Its there for only so that the developers can tell "hey, we included this as well!".



Artificial Unintelligence

So-called non-scripted AI could have been switched with one, as it appears as a low-end scripted one. Take car chases:
-enemy car spawns behind you when you don't look
-the car rams you, while the gunner fires away at you
-car stops next to you
-driver gets out, because he can't shoot and obviously a moving vehicle would be more difficult to target with an rpg/grenade/etc than the now-stationary enemy

This happens every friggin' time. No exceptions. Oh, maybe some, due to me shooting them to bits before they can complete one objective. Zero improvement. Also, if you kill someone in a no-guns zone, you have only to escape to the border and they magically forget all your sins.



Durability: Kevlar

According to far cry 2, even the average half-naked African can soak up bullets as a Kevlar puppet. No, even the head takes more than a couple of point blank bullets to disable the opponent. The chest/stomach wounds? They laugh at them. At least there are some armaments that kill them with one shot: sniper not to the limbs, rockets, grenades, close proximity explosive barrels. They are also quite resistant to fire. In this, they kept to the crysis(warhead) standard. I could understand taking half a kg of lead to the head and still shooting back if they wore full-body Kevlar/ceramic armor, (i.e.: those replica soldiers in F.E.A.R,) but that from an almost butt-naked rebel?



Respawn of a respawn

Are you tired of waiting hours for a respawn to get the item from the epic monster? Fear no more, you have far cry 2! Just forget the premium item, you have a respawn wave in five seconds! Turn your back and there they are. Please be notified that you max be run over, shot in the back and otherwise blown to pieces while showing back. Also, please note that this may happen almost everywhere on the map, especially near roads/POIs of any kind. Annoying, frustrating, infuriating. This is something that can make you stop playing the game, especially in the second part, where you run into patrols almost literally every damn step. At least they drop some ammo and grenades, and are easy to kill (not because they would be taken down with a couple of bullets but because they are highly unintelligent).



Offline grind

While the PR named missions as a good point, I have to disagree. Take the weapon dealer missions for example: each end every one is the same: kill a "rival dealer", who drives around in circles with a truck and some (1-2) escorts. The mobile tower-given side quests are alike, "kill x guy in the city". Same mission, same goal, even the same reward, etc. Boring as hell. Yes, the main missions show a bit more variation, but that is something that pushes this oversight even more into our face.



Sounds

Not that good. As the pattern starts to emerge, I guess its not good because it cannot be shown so much in a game show as graphics. Sometimes sounds are not really where they should be, distance-wise.
Voice actors are good average, if you don't take into account one thing. Theyalltalktoodamnfasttotakethemseriously. Didn't they have enough time to record them in real-life length?



Copy-protection

Yes, I must. There are quite some confirmed reports of SecuROM making players unable to play the game. Just a fun fact: the DRM infested farcry2.exe is ~13MB in size. The one that was cracked is about 30KB. Of course, the cracked PC version was out not even a week after far cry 2 hit the store shelves, with the console version even before the official release. Those who bought cough up the money and have to endure unplayable games and such, while those who didn't have no DRM-related errors. Same old story again.


Conclusion

The game is pretty and may bring you some good moments, but it has some serious design bugs and underworked parts. Kinda like a design-show cloth.

More...

Greys have blood too, you know

Sooo, lately there has been a surge of freely playable full games. Not "the absolute most popular" of their time, but nevertheless, good ones. One of these was Area 51. The basic story is the usual: bad aliens come, some conspiracy, kill'em all. Apart from this, its a good game, with goo story for an FPS, it runs very well even on average or below-average PCs. Even if it wouldn't be free, it would be worth its time.

Graphics
As I said, its not a 2008 game. It came out in 2005, and if you played with Crysis and the lot this year, it will be a bit ugly. But still, at least it runs much more smoother than those. It looks OK, if you ask me, but nothing special.

Sounds
Again, I can only say that this was OK, nothing extra, nothing bad. Oh, there are two voices that are famous: Manson and Duchovny. They give their voice to an alien and the hero, and are good at it.

Weapons
Guns, guns guns, all (except alien and sniper) dual-wielded for double the fun. pistol, shotgun, submachineguns, sniper, plasma and meson alien weapons plus human and alien grenades. The last gun is the most original one: it fires a globe of electricity, then wherever it lands, stars electrocuting enemies. Unfortunately, it only has a few shots. Still, you could clean a room with one shot.

Levels
Not bad, varying levels of open and claustrophobic horror-inducing closed ones. The latter are not quite as good as in F.E.A.R., but can get you at times.

Controls
Well, here is the bad part. It appears that first, they have no mouse smoothing. Second, if you zoom, and move the mouse, something is fishy. You still move the sniper with the same big movements as without the scope. Very uncomfortable, if you ask me.

Time
Well, it takes about 10 hours at a headlong rush to finish, no counting deaths and the like. Good for a long weekend.

Verdict
If you're into some fast action FPS, but FEAR is too much horror for you, get this for a couple of dark nights.

If you want to download, here is a good place to start.

More...

Dungeoncrawling in SPACE!

Just today, Gas Powered Games released their next in line for the Dungeon Siege series. The new thing: they moved it into space, hence the title "Space Siege".

Well, I started expecting more or less the same controls and actions as in Dungeon Siege II. My bad. It's more like a 90% new game than a successor. And 10% RPG at that, if we take DS to be 40%. I wouldn't call it outright TPS, but its quite close to that.

The changes:
First, there is no inventory. Judging from the demo interface, you can pick up maybe a dozen guns in total plus use the same amount of special powers. Other than this, you collect a total of 7 cybernetic replacements for yourself, HP packs, grenades and credit-like "parts" for upgrades. That's it, nothing else. Basically, you go, shoot everything for parts, pick up everything, use that as upgrades, rinse and repeat.
Well, at least you don't have to deal with selling your stuff from the pack mule any more!

Oh, you can also manufacture (read: buy) hp packs and grenades from the parts, not just weapon & self upgrades.

The controls are tricky a bit. You can't move with anything else but the mouse click. Weird.

What remained constant:
The story is the usual "gone-to-explore-other-systems-but-found-angry-powerful-aliens-instead" one. Then again, which *Siege had more of a story? They were all for the easy action, not the intriguing story.

As usual, there is still no save. Not that there would be a use for it in such a game, especially with zero items...

The system requirements are good, that is, runs on full-out on my aging PC.

The amount of enemies seem to be about the same as in the previous installment, numerous, but not many.

Well, the demo setup is ~900MB, and gives off about 10-15 minutes of game play. If you're finished, go back to spore CC!

More...

Massive storyline

So, Mass Effect. Yes, the one with the oh-my-god-full-sex-scene engineered shocks and all its variations. Quite a good game actually, not perfect, but still there.

The Good
Well, no one can deny that ME is -in more than one way- a milestone.

Graphics is just exquisite. That is, if you have a halfway decent machine and set it to max. What I saw detail in NPC heads of Crysis, I see it everywhere in ME. There were some bugs with older video cards, but mine were eventually resolved with satisfaction.
The last planet was a crowning achievement for this, I have yet to see anything like it.

Sounds and Music is way above average. There is the usual problem of voices being too shunted even with maxed out volume, -sadly quite common bug lately,- but voice actors and music composers did a phenomenal job.

Story was also good, quite enjoyable with the side trips, even with the cliche evil. The characters were original, mostly not closed into their own stereotype, with rich background info. Having a couple of not auto-generated paragraph of info for every planet you can visit is also a big plus. I found myself not one time just reading them for passing time and smiles.

The Bad
There were a number of things I dislike in ME sadly. Most of them come from being a console-first game.

First, the horribly raped inventory system. I think they had to get a fair number of meetings on the topic "what makes an inventory not work" to get something like this. I liked the fact that you can have dozens of items.... but when its full, and you pick up better equipment, you have no other option but destroy the pickup. Why have a full inventory? Because first, you get a truckload of items per encounter, then there is the fact that you can have 8 characters which all level with you... oh, and there is no mass-delete for items, you have to select them all one-by-one, push delete & confirm... a tedious process. Add the fact that in no way can you access the whole of your inventory, only at a shop, and it comes clean why it is even worse.

The next thing comes from the cute designer-shape conversation selector... for all of your conversation options, you can chose between some pair of words, not one whole sentence, god forbid the whole answer! Most of the time the answer even contains the words... other times it is quite FAR from the answer itself. Very annoying, to say the least!

Of course, the "bad guy" path is -yet again- the usual "I have a bad mouth/attitude problem" kind. There is no real evil path, you work for the very same goal against the same guys with the same guys. Heck, I have a feeling sometimes even the answers to the good/evil paths are the same.

Equipment and their usage... there are -as I already pointed out- a truckload of equipment. They all vary in strength, weaknesses, price and availability. There are two problems here: first, unless you explicitly say so, your gang doesn't even have the brains to use a gun they are proficient in. Second, there is no real variation in the guns other than their stats. Armor are more varied, but guns are not so.

The maps were... repetitive, to say the least. There is one map for every "transport ship", one for every "human colony building", one for every "underground mine" and so forth. The only distinguishing feature each have are the randomly placed junk/containers and some locked doors. Other than these, they are all the very same. There are some unique places, like most of the main quest ones, but other than that, no variation whatsoever.

The story is good, but has some interesting jumps and quirks that are not explained... Some info vital are learned seemingly of thin air, plus the fact that a delusional, paranoid, hysterical ("The end is near, robots gonna kill us all!") armed and dangerous, out-of-touch-with-reality individual is not dispatched with haste to the nearest (perhaps military) mental clinic is laughable, if you ask me.

Lastly, they still can't make a head-molding tool that does not produce eerie female heads. Well, at least it's waaay better than that of Oblivion.



All in all, Mass Effect is quite good game to pass a few (20-30 for main quest, about 10-30 for all others... oh, 3*, if you want to play all difficulty levels) hours, but has its problems as well. That said, the goods outweigh the problems, even if some of them are annoying as hell.

More...