Tag Archives: FPS

Games

Wandering the wasteland

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I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for about a week now, and I can happily say that it’s probably one of the best games I’ve ever played. When people talk about open-world games, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the Grand Theft Auto series and its legion of imitators, but Bethesda Softworks have been making three-dimensional open worlds since Arena was released in 1994. It was at that time insanely ambitious but successfully set the stage for a series that would become known for its huge, open worlds rendered in lush, beautiful graphics and a completely open and free-form design that could leave some players paralyzed by the bewildering array of possible places to go and things to do in the game.

Fallout 3 is in some ways the logical conclusion of one end of that evolution: the video game as immersive virtual world. Reading the comments by detractors in this thread on LYN for example (most of whom it seems were complaining about a game that they’d pirated since they started playing it before it was actually released), it’s obvious that many of them didn’t get what this game is about. Take for example the complaints about how short the game is. It’s still early days yet in my journey through the wastes, so I can’t fully tell whether this is true or not, but I suspect that if you make a beeline for the main quest and barrel through it to the exclusion of everything else, you’d end up finishing the game in fairly short order.

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Games

A Game: Mercenaries 2

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There’s really only one word to describe Pandemic Studios’ Mercenaries 2: World in Flames: explosions. Just about every gripe that you might have about this game can be rebutted with that one word. Are your eyes bleeding from the crappy graphics? Blow some stuff up and enjoy all the pretty explosions. Do you find the AI-controlled soldiers comically stupid? Fire a rocket-propelled grenade into their midst and watch the explosions toss them every which way. Are you cringing from the lame story and dialog? Call down a few airstrikes randomly to make yourself feel better.

Like its predecessor, Mercenaries 2 is a Grand Theft Auto clone, except that you’re not a two-bit hood but a grizzled mercenary and the open-world environment you’ll be gallivanting around in isn’t a metropolis, but a warzone. The game is set in a near future Venezuela (a fact which pisses off Hugo Chavez to no end) that is being fought over by various factions for its oil resources. Early on, the player is brought in to help a businessman mount a coup to take control of the country but is subsequently betrayed without being paid. This sets the stage for the player to exact his revenge, while earning a tidy profit by performing missions for the various factions vying for control of the country of course.

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Games

Awesome Lego Sentry

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I’ve reinstalled Team Fortress 2 and I’ve been playing it on and off, mostly on the Malaysian Bolehnet server and some Singaporean servers. It’s especially funny to play on the Malaysian servers and hear people trash talk while joking about Anwar being online playing.

The above picture appears to be a TF2 engineer sentry made entirely out of Lego. I shamelessly stole it from the Lowyat forums.

Games

A Game: Mass Effect (PC)

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By all reasonable metrics, Mass Effect should be a thoroughly average game. Its FPS mechanics are mediocre at best, the vehicle portion of the game features a tank with laughably bouncy and unrealistic handling, many aspects of its interface are an exercise in frustration and its idea of a massive space station holding millions of inhabitants is a handful of sparsely populated rooms connected by elevators and corridors. Yet for all that it is still easily the best 2008 game that I’ve played so far this year and that’s because it’s a game that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Bioware’s latest and greatest RPG that was released for the PC only this year is a mishmash of game types. Superficially it bears a striking resemblance to its celebrated predecessor, Knights of the Old Republic, and indeed you can think of it as Bioware’s attempt to make another Star Wars RPG without actually having the rights to the license. However, instead of KOTOR’s turn-based combat mechanics that looked and felt real-time but were really determined by behind-the-scenes hit ratings and die rolls, Mass Effect is a fully-fledged, hit-box based FPS. In addition, certain segments of the game put you in control of the Mako, a sort of all-terrain wheeled tank armed with a cannon and a machinegun. At the same time, it’s also an RPG with a well developed story, nearly enough sidequests to rival Oblivion and a large amount of dialogue, all of which is wonderfully voice acted. Finally, you are given control of a starship with which to explore the galaxy and one of the many ways to earn money is to survey uncharted planets for resources. To long-time computer gamers, all of this is reminiscent of the classic game Starflight which is already sufficient reason to forgive many of the game’s flaws.

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Games

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

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Since even Half-life 2: Episode 1 is two years old now, it’s probably not fair to write a proper review of it so I’ll just jot down some of my thoughts on it. Its graphics are noticeably better than that of the original Half-Life 2, but still some way short of current standards. The most confusing thing about these episodic sequels is that they’re named Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and so forth, when as even Gabe Newell has said, it would make more sense to name them Half-Life 3: Episode 1 etc. Still, wholly brand new sequels are usually a lot more ambitious than Episode 1. The improvements, while noticeable, aren’t spectacular, and the way the story continues immediately after Half-Life 2 makes it feel like you’re playing new chapters of the original game rather than something completely new.

Episode 1 continues with Valve’s tradition of telling stories without cutscenes, choosing instead to keep the player in control in a tightly restricted environment to give for the NPCs to finish their canned speeches. It does work well, thanks to decent writing, good voice acting and, as before, Valve’s impressive technology of enabling the NPCs to have realistic facial expressions. But the way the game keeps locking you in rooms that can only be unlocked by an NPC after finishing a speech does get a bit too transparent.

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Games

A Game: Bioshock

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Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone. I rejected these answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose RAPTURE.

– Andrew Ryan, founder of Rapture

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Bioshock has been named by multiple sources as the best PC game of 2007, so it was some trepidation that I picked it up, hoping that all the hype wasn’t totally unfounded. As the much heralded spiritual successor of System Shock 2, also written by Ken Levine, Bioshock has always had a lot to live up to, and judging at least by its unexpected commercial success and the near universal acclaim of game critics, it has largely succeeded at that. To me, there’s no question that Bioshock is a pretty much a unique gem, there’s nothing else quite like it in the market, but at the same time, I’m painfully aware that a lot of the hype is undeserved and the thought of what Bioshock could have been, if the designers had just been a little more ambitious and daring, is positively agonizing.

That Bioshock is a triumph of aesthetic design and storytelling goes without question. The opening FMV of the protagonist sitting in a plane, reading a mysterious handwritten message, segues seamlessly into the first scene as the player takes control of the sole survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Flames rage on the surface of the ocean as you, confused and exhausted, swim through a gap in the burning debris of the plane to the shelter of a lighthouse that stands, incongruously, on a lonely rock in the middle of nowhere. You push through the gilded double doors and suddenly it’s like walking into a different world. A banner proclaims, “No Gods, No Kings. Only Man”. Music wafts in from an unseen source. Plaques on the walls valourize the virtues of “Art”, “Science” and “Industry”. The grand stairs lead down to a roughly spherical pod sitting in a small pool of water, a bathysphere. You step inside, because there’s nowhere else to go. Then you settle in your seat as it takes you to the bottom of the ocean. The year is 1960. Welcome to Rapture.

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