Games, milkshakes, and power armor
Showing posts with label video games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video games. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Well, check out me and my bad self!

It's been exactly one week since I went public with this blogging thing and I don't think I'm being too full of myself when I say I've gotten off to a great start! Almost 50 followers and almost 1700 views!. I just wanted to say thanks to all my followers, commenters, and dare I say, fans out there who've given me and my blog such a warm start off. I'll do my best to live up to the attention and post a little something interesting each day.
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As for today, the topic is promising game releases. In this case we're talking about Prototype 2.

I was a big fan of both Prototype and InFamous, two superhero sandbox games featuring gravelly-voiced protagonists that are spontaneously given superpowers in events that happen to nuke the living shit out of the city that they happen to be residing in. Both games came out at around the same time, and on the surface, look identical: You have superpowers, the city around you is in shambles, and look at all these people wandering around waiting for you to ruin their shit with ever more interesting powers as you progress the story. Now, that's where the similarities end. Aside from the different powers each "hero" has (and I add the quotations because both of the main characters can make a very large business of not only being colossal pricks, but nuking everything for blocks around).


Above: Cole McGrath of InFamous at the end of his evil ending. Below: Alex Mercer of Prototype, pretty much just being Alex.

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Now as I said I like both games, but for different reasons. Prototype was awesome in that it took everything that made the sandbox genre good too heart. It gives you a huge play area, an easy way to get around said area from the start of the game (whereas InFamous makes you wait for a good three or four levels in), and a huge population of people, soldiers, mutants and monsters to try out your ever-increasing repertoire of moves on. Mercer is by all accounts more awesome than your average person. He runs faster, jumps farther and can literally morph his body into anything from blades to claws to whips to body armor to other people to giant fists that look for all the world like Hulk Hands, which are always awesome (I would like to take this moment to apologize to my readers whose parents never loved them enough to buy them Hulk Hands). Aside from that, you can also use a handful of guns, tanks, and helicopters in your various adventures. While it doesn't have the attention to story or mission variety that InFamous offers it doesn't detract from the simple pleasure you get from stealthing into a military base disguised as a C.O. and progressively wreaking havoc inside until everyone is dead, then going outside and blowing the place up for giggles.
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To those people who haven't kept their ears to the ground for this in Prototype 2 you in fact DON'T reprise your role as the throat-punching Alex Mercer, but start afresh as James Heller. Apparently Heller was a soldier, one of many that were sent to kill and were summarily mowed down by Mercer (who by himself probably accounted for more casualties than Vietnam by the end of Prototype), but for some reason that of course had NOTHING TO DO AT ALL with the sudden lack of protagonist in the new game, Mercer infects with the same virus that changed him, instead of killing and eating Heller outright like he did for pretty much everything that looked at him crossways since the start of the first game. So, from what I can tell, the game starts and you take control of Heller with one objective: Find and kill Alex Mercer.
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Anyway, all that said I have high hopes for the sequel. Hopefully Radical games and Sucker Punch will cooperate a little better and release their games more tastefully spaced apart. Or maybe they thrive on competition? Who knows. As I said, the first game was an endless amount of fun, since you pretty much start the game as an unstoppable killing machine and build from there. From what I've seen Prototype 2 promises more of the same mass-dismembering, monster killing, helicopter punching goodness, and it's dialed up to eleven, and judging from it's predecessor, that's exactly what it ought to be.



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Thursday, August 11, 2011

I didn't enjoy the new Fallout games.


My level of interest in Fallout 3 (That is to say, dead)
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There's a good chance that I'm going to infuriate people with this post. For those select few who don't know, Fallout 3 is a video game that was released around two years ago to an audience of longtime fans, and is still to this day sworn by as the greatest game in the history of history by a good number of gamers. As you no doubt noticed by the title, I am not one of those so-inclined people. The game starts off with a character creation process that is admittedly original. You flash forward through different points in your childhood (your birth, a birthday, etc.) and it culminates in a personality test type of thing which drops a character class from a ridiculously long list on your lap. The introduction and character creation alone drags on for hours before finally getting to the action, and makes the process and introduction/tutorial levels from games like Dragon Age: Origins or Kingdom Hearts II seem comparatively exciting and fast paced. Suddenly for some reason that's beyond you your father leaves the vault which sheltered you and countless other families from the radioactive, post-apocalyptic wasteland that the world has become, an event which coincides with the community leader going banana-pants crazy and the whole vault going to hell, so you decide to take off after your dad. So, after hours of being stuck underground in linear corridors with clearly defined objectives, the game drops you in the middle of the desert and basically says "Well, off you go!" asbestos, illinois attorney

If the character creation system seemed overwhelming it's nothing compared to the sheer shitstorm of missions you get flooded with upon reaching the very first town. Immediately you're inundated with mission after mission from every person too lazy to leave their radiation-scoured hovel to handle things for themselves, and in the end you need to decide whether you want to help people, or for no reason whatsoever be a total asshole and detonate the huge bomb that these people for some reason decided would be a great thing to make the centerpiece of their village. I honestly stopped playing at the first town simply because I was dumped so many missions all at once I couldn't figure out what the hell to actually DO. I saw no way of actually telling which mission would advance the story and which would simply pay me a few bottlecaps (Seriously? THAT'S what they use for currency in the future?) and a pat on the back. new york mesothelioma lawyers, tax attourneys

Personally, I think Borderlands did everything Fallout 3 did but on a much more manageable scale, with an environment that both was out to kill you and still managed to make itself endearing. The characters are much more quirky and memorable (cl4p tp anyone?) and while I did like the 50's modern art style Fallout took, I liked the cell-shaded, much more colorful and flavorful world of Pandora much more. Each area had it's very own character and feel, a quality that, between what I've played and seen others play, is seemingly absent from the world of Fallout 3. The classes and character customization still lets you create a character that works well for the type of play style you want to use, not to mention it's a simple matter to alter what points go where. Not to mention the world is huge, but has a fast travel system AND go carts that allow you to zip along the dunes and run things over. Not only that, but Borderlands has guns for MILES! Seriously the guns can do anything in that game. I've seen shotguns that shoot rockets made out of acid, sniper rifles that heal you when you kill someone with them, and pistols that shoot incendiary bullets with rapid fire so fast you can empty the clip in a split second (Granted, not great for ammo conservation, but damn if it's not impressive to watch). Plus on top of all that, Borderlands is multiplayer, something that Bethesda decided not to include in their game. I respect Bethesda for wanting to devote their full attention to a great single player experience, and by wide accounts that's exactly what they did, but I enjoy shooting mutants with friends a lot more than by myself. insurance, home, car

I've heard Fallout 3 be called Oblivion with guns in the past. If that's the case than Borderlands is Diablo with guns. Guess which of those two I played more, as well?

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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Introductions

Well, here goes! I couldn't quite decide what exactly I wanted to blog about, so I'll make it about a little of whatever comes to my mind, whether that's a little or a lot. I guess I could write a little more about me, but I think that kind of got covered in the "about me" section. As I've said I'm a big Warhammer nerd, and that will probably feature a lot around here considering how much of my day I devote to painting/building/strategizing my Warhammer 40,000 army. Perhaps a bi-weekly Warhammer post is in order? What makes me so interested in it, you may be asking? I think it's probably the background. Warhammer 40,000 has an IMMENSE backstory spanning tens of thousands of years, spanning multiple races and the setting is a huge, dystopic, Orwellian fantasy where innocence and trust is replaced by paranoia and war. Everything in the game is larger than life, the battles, the robots, the explosions, even the soldiers. This game is what started the Space Marine motif. Eight-foot tall super soldiers in powered armor with artificial organs and a warrior culture I find endlessly interesting to read about. Anyway, enough about that. I'll gush more about my favorite hobby in later posts.
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More about me? Well, aside from my occasional jobs painting various small plastic/pewter/resin figures a lot of my time is spent browsing the internet, playing video games, watching movies, swearing, exercising so I don't turn into a hambeast, and taking care of my dad, who's got a lot of mobility issues currently. I'm a total gamer nerd. An aspect of my personality that's been hindered somewhat due to a busted 360 and lack of spare money for games for my ds and/or PS3. I play shooters, RPGs, MMOs, when I can find interesting ones, and action platformers. I'll occasionally I'll play RTS games but I can never seem to get the hang of resource management..
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Anyway enough for now about me. Simon says the topic of the day is:
Cinema!
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I've been on a horror movie kick for the past couple weeks. Mostly foreign horror movies recently. I don't know what it is about Japanese/Chinese/Korean directors but they can come up with some disturbing angles for supernatural movies. A lot of American horror movies run something like "Group of young adults end up in a house that's rumored to be haunted on a dare/scary slumber party/booze-fueled excuse to expose tits and have a sex scene when all of a sudden HOLY SHIT SURPRISE KIDS the house is haunted and everyone dies except the spunky heroine and maybe the meathead (or conversely, the awkward nerdy guy) she likes and they have to go and release the trapped spirit/banish the demon/just burn the whole motherfucker down before the evil spook kills her too. Then at the end it's everything's smiles and unicorns until OHMYGAWD hint that the spirit's totally not vanquished after all, end credits." I think my propensity towards Asian horror has something to do with the directors having a lot more scary shit to work with culturally than just ghosts or demons. Yes, there are those but it's less of a crutch for the genre. For instance the other night I saw a movie anthology that had a short story about a television star who goes looking for a beauty treatment and somehow ends up getting convinced to eat dumplings made out of unborn baby fetuses. You read that right. Aborted baby cannibalism. How many American directors would have the sack to make a film about that? It's a genuinely disturbing idea and it's fascinating to watch the woman's degeneration as she's somehow cursed by eating these dumplings. That's just one example, don't even get me started on the differences between the American and original Japanese versions of "Grudge." free, travel

Anyway, I think that's quite enough for now. Like/subscribe/comment/ do your thang and I hope you guys like my new blog. More to come tomorrow!
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