The Gamer's Quarter

[SuperWes]

Sunday for me was mostly a game day. I got to try out several of the games that have been sitting around waiting to be played as I made my way through others, and many - ok all - of these turned out to be First Person Shooters, so I dubbed the day First Person Sunday. Pretty clever, eh? I was never really a big fan of the genre. I played Doom back in the day, tried a little bit of Quake, and was heavily into Bond for a bit, but I only ever seem to make it far enough into the games that I get tired of being lost and/or fighting the same battles over and over again before I get burned out or something new comes along.

Recently, now that I've started playing Halo 2 system linked nearly every day at work during lunch time, the genre's started to sort of grow on me. I guess I don't hate it nearly as much as I used to and I'm at least willing to give the games a chance when they seem to be trying to do something new where before I would have just chalked them up as "PC Games" or "Doom clones," and tossed them aside. You could also say I'm slowly gaining American nationalism after years of Japanese training. With how stale the RPG Genre is getting I'm headed there, but I'm not quite a gun-totin' Rockstar Games spokesperson yet.

Anyway, the day began on Saturday night shortly after midnight. I downloaded the Xbox 360 Quake 4 demo from Xbox LIVE and tried it out. It controlled well and looked good, but honestly it played, looked, and felt almost exactly like Doom 3. The intro section was promising: there was a giant spider thing off in the distance that begged to be fought, but shortly after the intro section they send you into an underground base where you pull out your flashlight and fight demons in dark, pipe-filled corridors. I might end up getting the game when it goes down to $20, but only because I really want to play Quake 2 on the 360 for some reason.

Anyway, my friend messaged me while I was playing Quake and asked me to join him in some Halo 2, and since I wasn't really enjoying myself that much I obliged. We played some 2 on 2 team matchmaking and had a blast. Out of the 10 or so matches we played, 3 of them ended up being tie games and the rest were pretty close, only winning or losing by a few points. I really dig the matchmaking system they've got because it actually makes playing online fun. I have to admit that my time with Halo 2 was among the most fun I had with any of the games I played, but I'm sort of ashamed to say it. I have a lot of fun playing Halo, but I kinda want to drop the game. It's strange because I think I'd be happy playing only Halo for a long time, but I don't want to do it because, A: I don't want to become "that guy who only plays Halo," and B: when I play Halo I feel like I'm wasting time treading over the same ground when I could be experiencing new games.

At any rate, we played Halo until around 4:00 AM and then I snuck into bed and went to sleep.

In the morning, while Christina sat in bed reading, I went into the living room and tried out Geist for the GameCube. I'd been waiting for it to go down to $20, and last week I got lucky and was able to buy it for just $10. After bringing it home I wondered when I'd actually have time to play it. Sunday was the day and I got around 2 or 3 hours of it in.

Prior to Geist's release, I had been hearing a lot about its concept. I liked the idea of being able to take over people's bodies and use them to fight and solve puzzles, but when the game came out, I heard so many bad things about it that I put off my purchase. It seems people felt constricted by only being able to jump into certain enemies' bodies, making the game feel too linear. I've got to admit that what I played was pretty linear, but it never really felt linear. In fact, the game seemed to work best when it was having you solve puzzles with the game's unique premise than it did when it was being a first person shooter. It actually seems more like the N64 game Space Station Silicone Valley than it does Quake or Halo, and I appreciate that. I can see myself coming back to Geist some day, but I can also see myself getting to a difficult boss and never wanting to touch it again.

The next game up was Peter Jackson's King Kong - The Official Game of the Movie for the 360. This wasn't my first experience with Kong, but I'm trying to keep playing it because it's one of the few 360 games (along with DOA4) that I can actually have a consistantly good time with. Michel Ancel, the Rayman and Beyond Good and Evil dude, wanted to make a game that didn't use any visual indicators to clutter up the screen space and stand in the way of immersion and King Kong is it. This technique is admirable but it leads to a pretty simplistic design. The entire game becomes one of searching for weapons and running around avoiding enemies. It feels immersive, but not in the way I prefer. I like to be immersed in thought, always considering several options (but not too many), decising on one, and following through with it, but Kong is always about the moment. In Kong you always know what to do and you never have to keep track of anything because there's nothing to really keep track of.

The thing that's keeping me going is the awesome visuals. The game displays concept art while it loads and when the loading is finished they toss you in control. More than once I didn't realize that the game was done loading because the on-screen visuals at the start of the level was layed out just as well as the concept art they had been displaying! It's a beautiful game, and there are moments when just standing still and looking out in front of you is prettier than entire games. The characters aren't quite up there with the backgrounds, but hey, at least they got one thing right. I will say this: If they don't let me out of the jungle soon I might have to quit playing. The game is jungletastic! I'd rather have an incredibly short game than a game with a single environment for the whole thing. Thankfully, I hear the game is pretty short.

After I got sort of stuck in Kong I took a shower and went outside to do some chores. It was a nice day outside but I hadn't realized it because I was inside all day playing games! Thus the life of a gamer.

When darkness fell I came inside and fired up Killzone for the PS2. I bought it because of a discussion on these boards a few weeks ago, but I hadn't actually brought myself to play it yet. All I have to say is wow. It's a really, really good looking game that plays tightly and has a very strong sense of design. It keeps you immersed by rarely having cutscenes, telling the story mostly through gameplay instead, playing well, and having some truly beautiful setpieces. The only real fault I have with it so far is the voice acting, which is hillariously bad sometimes to the point of LOLdom. There's one guy who yells, "Noooooooo," and it puts Darth Vader to shame.

Unlike the other games mentioned here, Killzone sees your character accompanied by three or four other soldiers. Reading about this is what made me hesitant about the game in the first place. Reviewers claimed that these soldiers seemed to get in the way more than help, and now that I've played the game I can definately see their complaints, but I also think that they missed the reason that they're there in the first place. For me, the soldiers are there to keep me headed in the right direction, and at this they do a superb job. I have a terrible sense of direction when I'm playing a game that takes place in the first person perspective and these other soldiers help me with this by letting me follow them from area to area instead of relying on my own navigational skills. They also allow the story and tutorial stuff to take place within the game itself through actual team members instead of through AI streaming itself into your helmet or some other contrived sci-fi idea. It makes the game more personal, and it really makes it feel like a war instead of a one-man-army style game, even if you actually ARE a one-man-army being led around by a bunch of lousy shots.

In short, I like what I've played of Killzone a lot, and if I actually finish any of these games, Killzone will probably be the one. From what I've played so far it looks and plays much better than even Xbox 360 flagship title, Perfect Dark Zero, and it makes me wonder how in the world it reviewed so poorly.

So there you have it. First Person Sunday, and many first impressions of old games that nobody who visits The Gamer's Quarter are even interested in. I think I've stopped turning Japanese, I really think so.

-Wes
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[dhex]

i feel your pain, wes. welcome back to america, son.

quake 4 is awful. it really isn't worth your time. at least doom 3 had interesting environments. i'm getting a free pc copy of it from the vid card company i got my 7800 from, so i'm not quite sure what i'm going to do with it after that.

i just finished f.e.a.r. recently. it's good. but it's definitely flawed, at least if you're using HL2 as a benchmark for fps games, which i am.

area 51 is terrible. i was expecting competency. i was wrong.

i have to go back to far cry and play it again. same with doom 3.

have you played half life 2?

i enjoyed killzone a lot more than i should have, probably.

semi-related: s.t.a.l.k.e.r. had better be awesome or i am going to stab my eyes out.

so is geist worth getting? i was intrigued, but then i saw all the "it sucks" reviews and thought twice. i have a gamestop gift card with 40 bucks to burn. (unrelated: i almost bought knights of the old republic last night, but the boxart made me change my mind)

really unrelated: if i'm more or less convinced that i'm never going to buy another console ever again (for a number of reasons) i probably shouldn't write for tgq anymore, eh?
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[dark steve]

Knights of the old republic really, really sucks. I swear.

[Mister Toups]

May I kindly recommend the No One Lives Forever series?
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[Dracko]

Out of curiosity, who's your favourite character to play as in Killzone?

I was generally impressed by it, even though it was very obviously glitchy and would have benefitted from polishing, but it's hardly a (cheap) purchase I regret, and I still play it to this day. I understand the voice-acting complaint, but I enjoyed the dialogue and presentation. The story was strong and cinematic for an FPS title, I felt, and I really liked how it was more of a war tale, with a number of personal elements and conflicts left in too, even though they're very lightly touched upon, than a sci-fi one. I'm looking forward to the PS3 sequel, if only to finally know what direction they'll be taking with this fairly promising series.

If you're in an FPS mood, may I also suggest giving Deux Ex (Avoid its sequel, though) and the System Shock series?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

hekka.

toups: i am going to check out said series. if i could find boxed copies in stores i'd have used up my gift card already.

i'm all over warren spector like syphilitic sores over the body of a 14th century portugese sailor.
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[SuperWes]

[Mister Toups]

It's not that hard to find. I see copies of 2 all over the place, usually around $15. You can find the first one in bargain bins pretty easily too.

It's worth the trouble! Particularly part 2! Though some people like the first one better.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[Dracko]

I remember getting my copy of NOLF with a bonus CD with groovy super-spy tracks on it. Anyone else got that?

Haven't played the second one, though, or the unofficial sequel, Contract Jack. I'll have to check out the demo for that one, come to think of it.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[simplicio]

You know, I just started playing FEAR, and it's interesting, and I think it's got some good ideas and AI and atmosphere and certainly graphics, but the guns really take me out of the experience. Now I'm no gun nut or anything, but so much of the FPS genre lies in the shooting aspect that the weapons need to be well done. In FEAR I feel like I'm playing with BB chainguns; the bullets zip out of my submachine gun with little sound and recoil and even less effect on the target. The enemies will take several bullets without breaking stride, unless you happen to get a headshot in the mix.

I just finished Call of Duty 2. It's fantastic. Sure, a segmented mess with little bits of storyline and all, but it does a lot of things right, most notably the support action. Just about the entire game you're running around with a squad of people, and unlike most games they actually are useful, but Infinity Ward managed to balance things out well enough that it still feels like your game, even when your teammates are being more useful than you are. They'll lead you at times, but often you'll need to start the charge. Really, the whole game seems to take the Russian section from CoD 1 (the best part of that game) as its inspiration. The defensive portions can still be a painful process of trial and error though.

By the way Wes, where'd you manage to find a $10 Geist? I've been wanting to pick it up for a while, but I don't really want to spend even the $25 Gamefly's asking for it.

I just came home with Disaster Report, Maximo: GtG, R-Type Final, Breath of Fire: DQ and Zelda: Oracle of the Ages. All used at gamestop and most of them in pretty shitty shape. I may end up having to return all the PS2 titles except Disaster Report (which was what I wanted most anyway).
But you know what? I kinda like having to coerce old GBC carts to load properly. There's a sense of coaxing and accomplishment when you finally blow that last piece of dust away that lets you progress beyond the startup screen. It's like you've won something just by starting the game!

This post brought to you by too much coffee and no food all day.

Edit: PS: Oracle of the Ages does a fantastic little thing when you erase a save. What a nice way to say goodbye!

[Dracko]

I'm fairly surprised I forgot to mention this the first time around, but I really enjoyed Brothers in Arms, and intend to purchase its sequel.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[SuperWes]

[dhex]

i recommend the beginning of call of duty 2.

more on killzone later.
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[xvs07]

[dhex]

i was joshin' - who else will edit out all of the ... shit?

anyway, re:killzone

. . .

killzone was a good time. it has the same pallette as shadow of the colossus. it's effectively made. the plot is ok enough. the cutscenes are atrocious, but i think cutscenes should be phased out of fps games entirely, so take that with your kosher salt.

the mall scenes stick out in my mind. you're still stuck in a box - a problem no one, not even my beloved hl2, seems to be able to fix - but it feels like a warzone. of killing. hence the name.

it's no stalingrad, though. cod2 did so much good at the beginning and so much not good by the end. they should just make a soviet shooter based on the battle for stalingrad. like a career style joint, with permanent injuries, etc.

i'm gonna go see what halo looks like on the new graphics card now.
KILL ME NOW
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[Tablesaw]

[dessgeega]

[DonMarco]

[dark steve]

And a bitchin' HD version of Tetris: The Grand Master!

[Ryan - SuperWes' Bane]

Whoa, did I actually do something good by bringing up that thread on Killzone? And I'm liking it too, but it's nowhere as much fun as the first Halo was . . . but I do like the atomosphere in Killzone more. Don't know why ...

[RaBeeWilliams]

I bought Half-Life 2 a few days ago, and I've been gaming the Hell out of it since I'm taking a vacation from my computer and the internet for a while (mundane “life stuff” keeps getting in the way). In a very odd, almost prophetic omen, I beat Half-Life 2 on the day Wes made this thread. I never saw it in time, because, well, I was playing more Half-Life 2.
Since then I've picked it up again, and I'm about half way toward finishing it on Hard mode. This setting, I feel, throws any complaints about the AI being unpredictable out of the window.

I bought the Game of the Year edition, which means I got a bunch of add-on stuff, like the Counter-Strike and Half-Life: Source, and the utterly beautiful, almost tearful Lost Coast level. I just finished playing Half-Life: source not too long ago. I'm very surprised at the lack of quality it is suffering from, even though there’s a PS2 version out there that looks better, and is a few years behind when this update was released.

I'm dog-tired right now, but I plan on giving dhex some hard-knuckled feedback on the game when I'm more sober.
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[Lackey]

Half Life 2 is a very good game to watch someone else play. Or at least, I'm finding that to be the case.

Not that I don't enjoy being the one with the controller. I like a game which gently encourages the player to fill their role. This is especially true if you have someone else watching; I find myself instinctively playing in the most dramatic way possible.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dhex]

this stuff makes me laugh. garry's mod is truly something else.

http://hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2005-11-18
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[DaleNixon]

I enjoyed Geist thoroughly.

[Mr. Mechanical]

So I'm playing Killzone now. Found it for $15 today. I like what it's doing overall, but I keep wanting to compare it to Half-Life 2. If they had just spliced all the levels together with a few "interactive cutscenes" like HL2 then I'd probably enjoy it a lot more, but the story isn't really strong enough to carry it like that. I like how the camera moves around to exaggerate the perspective, like when you're reloading and such, though it makes me a little motion sick at times.

As it is it's just a really fun corridor-type setpiece shooter with some really nice aesthetics and environments. I'm pleased.

[dhex]

well, i reinstalled far cry. damn. if it weren't for the ape monster fuckers, it'd be a really fun game all the way through. but the sneaking and whatnot, on a high end system, it is the good. i took some bird screenshots to make a banner later.

which is sort of a shitty fps trend that no doubt messes with other genres as well. they introduce weird overpowered mutant fuckers with no real pizazz and change the mechanics halfway through the game.

anyway, halo...looks like crap. even with fov fix and everything. well, not crap really, but it looks like a console game, but shiny. i'm playing it on hard and i see what people mean about the ai, sort of.
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[Dracko]

What do people say about the AI in Halo? All I've ever heard is how amazing it apparently is. It's well done, I'll grant it that much, but from what I got from the demo, the game is severely unbalanced for the most part. Hell, I didn't even bother with the assault rifle. It looks, sounds and shoots bad. The pistol is far more enjoyable.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Mr. Mechanical]

See, I really like the assualt rifle. It's great for short to medium range bursts, taking out Elite shields with a sustained burst while charging, then mopping up the grunts. It's my general go-to weapon because I like to pick my fights close and nasty with lots of hitting. At the longer ranges, yeah, it sucks balls, but it was never designed to shot long range. The pistol tends to make things too easy for me, so I've stopped using it as much as I used to.

Alien weapons can take out Elite shields much more quickly than human weapons, but they don't pack as much punch as flying hot lead. I find myself playing the game quite efficiently with just the Assualt Rifle/Pistol set up that you get started out with.

I talked about the Halo AI in this thread.

[Scratchmonkey]

The higher the difficulty, the more you have to get used to using all the weapons. The assault rifle comes useful when you have to do some close-to-medium bursts, as Mr. Mechanical points out.

The pistol is overpowered though, especially with the scope. I personally feel that they over-reacted in Halo 2; they did a good job with weapon balance in that game though.

[Dracko]

[Lackey]

I rented FarCry once. The editor that came with it was much more fun than the multiplayer game. I didn't play the singleplayer game extensively.

Me and my brother made a jetski racetrack.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dessgeega]

[dhex]

more fps madness: chronicles of riddick: escape from butcher bay is actually really good. it's not perfect - the engine's collision detection is a bit fotzed, and it's certainly kinda hard - but damn if i'm not impressed. the vin diesel model sits in that uncanny valley, for sure. i wish the prison part / faux rpg section had been a bit longer, though.

edit: totally unrelated, but am i the only one who thinks the next reiteration of silent hill - if they make one - should be entirely in the first person? system shock and fear prove this to be a viable option, sez i.
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[Shapermc]

[dhex]

yeah, i forgot about your vertigo joint.
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[Lackey]

There's a long bad part in the game where you fight mutants/zombies, but I love the surface part. It looks like a mall or a public washroom.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dhex]

in closing, riddick was a good game that ends weakly. far more than i had a right to expect for 20 bucks.

next up: finish painkiller. then replay far cry. again. and maybe halo on legendary?
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[SuperWes]

Far Cry Instincts for the Xbox is $15 at Circuit City this week. Anyone know if it's worth $15?

-Wes
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[dhex]

yes. yes it is.
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[Lackey]

The level editor is (see above).
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[RaBeeWilliams]

Last night, I had only gotten about three hours of sleep after playing the free trial of Day of Defeat: Source from my Steam account, but this morning I woke up around 8:35 with little to no problem. I was quite late on playing through the game, only getting one day in while sitting on this trail for over the weekend, but, honestly, online games scare me a little. It's not from a fear of performing badly, just the anxiety of jumping into a new product without much knowledge of the competition. It's a little like the whole "snakers" debacle that ruined Mario Kart DS for so many people a while back. They stop wanting to play the game because some people had a large leap on them in skill and took the fun out of the game, thanks going to this tactic, to which I can't really disagree. Having been a "snaker" myself, I could easily get a four second lead (but only on certain tracks; it wasn't fool-proof) on players that didn't bother with it, and I lost a lot of attraction for the game when I would:

a) get dropped be people after a couple of races
b) run into some uber-God, Far Eastern Snaker, that could pull a four second lead on myself, “snaking” be damned.

And thanks to the cultured search feature WiFi system, it was very hard to find someone with a common ground of skill.
That's what my debacle for Day of Defeat was, when I was hovering my curser over the game when the download had finally finished. I was thinking if this could be another "No-n00bs welcome” syndrome that MK (and I'm sure a wider number of other games that I have a premature knowledge about - having to resort of an anecdote revolving around a kiddy kart racer) had suffered.

So, my first few matches went very smoothly. The whole game focuses more of teamwork than raising your kill quota, which is a welcomed new task to me. On every level, there are flags that must be captured for the team that you are representing, be it the U.S. Army or the Germans. Both classes have the same sort of weapon classes, but different reactions from these weapons based on your class.
Basically, the game boils down to finding a nice cozy spot to hang out and laying fire on an opposing choke points, preventing the enemy from scoring on one of the five flags on the level, until you can get enough recruits on your end to take said flags. There's no “bunny-hopping” or ‘skipping’ technique that make you harder to hit or powerups in the game that make you harder to kill, giving the game a very in-depth feeling of death appearing from any corner of the map. It's quite exhilarating. The maps, as few as there are, are hardly unbalanced. So any position that the enemy has taken up can be rushed on or flanked with the proper fire power, or well placed, banking grenade. Yet, since the damage that can be dealt is so very neighboring on realism, having many firefights that only last for a few short seconds (I really missed my “bunny-hopping” in those short seconds, too), a tactician-al approach, coupled with the element of surprise can overtake any seemingly doubtful scenario.

After playing around the game just to build up confidence, I moved to a sever that had a few more players on it, and picked the U.S. infantry. Here, one teammate graciously (or gratuitously) used the voice chat feature to tell everyone his P.O.V. of the combat. It wasn't too graining though, as this teammate had every right to point some people in the right destination. And I even helped him out in a few scenarios. Basically, the main problem that we where having on this map was priority. When a new game starts and everyone spawns, the U.S. army starts very close to a nearby church, which can be protected very well by a sole sniper, since there are bars in the balcony that block grenades from entering. On the German’s side, a bridge was their first item of business, since rocketry can protect it from a far side of the map.
What the matches boiled down to was the U.S. trying to bum-rush the bridge before any shrapnel-shooters (rocketry or grenades) could make it to their positions. It sounds like over analyzing, I’m sure, but in the heat of the battle it felt like an objective.

It felt like a very complete game, with beautiful audio (from far away, you can hear the normally loud sputter of an artillery gun as only the muffed sound of popcorn on the stove and under a lid), surprising visuals (including a realistic bloom effect from walking from out of the shadows and into light and vise-versa, and shockingly great ragdoll physics) with plenty of surprises, even if it does end with you being on the loud end of a sniper rifle. I don’t really play online games just to score well, though. It’s more like inserting a higher level of spontaneity that I sorely miss from games these days.
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[DaleNixon]

I have to say something about Killzone. Hey, it's Sunday and I'm playing it! Well, yesterday I started up Halo for the first time ever. (Yes, it's the first time I've ever tried Halo) I found it pretty boring and monotonous at that point where you've gotten the Warthog for the first time and you are entering the artificial cave area. Does it get better?

Anyway, I put in Killzone shortly afterwards. I am completely blown away. Killzone is probably the scariest first person shooter I've ever played. Killzone is so so dark without being ridiculous like Doom 3. I think Killzone should be the game called "Black". I'm currently somewhere in level two with the objective of "reach the comms room". The enemies with their red glowing eyes and their distorted voices really creep me out. I often enter rooms crouched with my view zoomed in... I'll get so focused on a certain area of the room expecting enemies to enter from when, suddenly, shots will ring out from my left or right and voices are shouting "KILL HIM!" This is quite a rush.

The enemies lay down cover fire and duck behind objects patiently waiting for you to make yourself visible. They know you are outnumbered, and they play like they know. They'll catch you sneaking in and they'll waste you while you frantically try to stand up from your crouch and backpedal towards cover while firing frantically in the direction of wherever you heard a voice or gunfire.

[Dracko]

Oh God, Black.

I'm currently hesitating between buying Black or Shadow of the Colossus next month. I only have enough money for one.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8926325136071596338&pr=goog-sl
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[Shapermc]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[DaleNixon]

[dhex]

well, i finished deus ex: invisible war.

something got lost along the way.
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[Dracko]

The X-Box or PC version?

I could go on about the flaws of the game, for there are too many, but the one thing that really did it for me on the PC version was the fact that you had to constantly reconfigure your control settings after each zone change.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

pc version, though i didn't have to change nuttin'. my screen resolution did get fotzed occasionally, but i was using a widescreen hack.

i can't quite hate a game that quotes alexis de tocqueville. it's trying. but they feel like they gave up too early.

though the tradeoff of a relatively realistic political environment - not only does everyone have an idea for how things should be, every single solution has serious drawbacks, just like real life - is that all of the endings are kinda...bleh.
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