tempest in a teacup

This past weekend I cleared another couple of games off my backlog – Metal Gear Solid 3 and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

First off, here’s what I thought of MGS3 as a whole.

The removal of the passive radar system from all previous games makes the game somewhat harder since you’ll have to lurk unseen to figure out what the guards’ patrol routes are. On the other hand, though, I thought the food and camouflage systems were pretty useless – the former is basically there to annoy the hell out of you by forcing you to hunt for food every few minutes and the latter is redundant since the camouflage types come equipped with a handy percentage value to tell you exactly what you should be wearing when. The cure system seems similarly ultimately pointless since the game pretty much tells you exactly what you need to use to cure your wound – and I never ran out of supplies (at least on Normal difficulty).

That said, it did have some great moments – the boss battles are way better than MGS2’s for sure (with the exception of one), and I found the lack of backtracking through the same areas (for the most part) to be an improvement over the first two games’ almost excessive use of it. The action sequences are generally less awkward than those in the first two games, although the first part of the game (when silencers are in short supply) is somewhat harder than the rest of the game.

So yeah, I thought it was a decent game, with some odd trappings that didn’t really make sense.

As for Uncharted, I thought it was generally a well-polished third-person shooter. It’s not quite like Resident Evil 4 where you have an inventory and can stock up on items, guns and other such stuff, nor can you really buy items. Healing and weapons are handled similarly to the Halo series, in that you can only have 2 weapons at any given time (one single-handed weapon and one double-handed weapon), and that you recover health gradually after avoiding damage for a certain period of time. In addition, unlike RE4 you can move while in ‘aiming mode’, and can also ‘fire from the hip’ while running. The game also features a Gears of War-like cover mechanic, which is pretty much the main way you avoid taking damage during combat.

Overall, as Yahtzee mentioned in his review, it’s a game that borrows extensively from games that came before it, and ends up being somewhat greater than the sum of its parts. I actually think it isn’t quite as challenging as RE4, partly because the enemy AI is somewhat retarded and partly because of all the additional abilities Nathan Drake has over Leon Kennedy. Still, I’d say it’s definitely worth checking out if you have a PS3.

So I’ve beaten the only PS3 game that I have…I suppose I could get Metal Gear Solid 4 if I wanted to.

Time for a good old-fashioned gaming post!

Company of Heroes

I finally decided to put some RTS gaming on my backlog. This game is developed by Relic, who are also responsible for Homeworld and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (as well as the upcoming Dawn of War II) – so their catalogue is pretty strong. As one would expect, therefore, Company of Heroes is pretty good. It focuses less on base management and more on front-line battle tactics, unit placement and maintaining supply lines (by holding territory). I’ve played a few missions of the first single-player campaign and it’s pretty great so far. As far as balancing goes, it seems to take a similar tack to Starcraft in that your units all have distinct strengths and weaknesses, and you need to use them to compensate for one another.

Team Fortress 2

I’ve been trying to play more Soldier and Spy, but honestly, I’m terrible at both, so I almost always end up falling back on my ‘safe’ classes – Pyro, Medic, Heavy and Engineer. Soldier is tricky for me since I’m still trying to get used to aiming ahead of where my opponents are, which isn’t always easy to do when they’re running straight at you. On the other hand, once I do manage to juggle opponents, capitalising on it to finish them off is something that’s starting to come naturally to me. Spy, though…man, those Youtube videos make the class look so effortless, don’t they. I think the most backstabs I’ve gotten in one life is 3 or 4.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence

I’m actually pretty close to putting this to bed. I’m at the final boss fight (which is annoyingly difficult because of the terrain and the associated time limit, not to mention the fact that outside of first-person aiming mode MGS3 has the same old clunky gun controls from the first game. I will say that the game as whole is pretty good, although I honestly think that the interface for selecting stuff like camouflage is pretty clunky (they did away with it in MGS4 which is good) and the entire hunting/food system serves no purpose other than to annoy the hell out of you. CQC I thought was kind of cool, although I don’t think I necessarily used it to its full potential.

Fallout 3

I decided to press on with the game inspite of my initial misgivings. The game is actually quite hard if you try to play it like a run-and-gun FPS. Which you can’t, really, unless you want to run out of ammo ten miles from any safe house with only a baseball bat to bludgeon Raiders to death with…not that I’ve ever done that *cough*. Half the time I end up wandering into some new town and getting eaten for lunch by some new enemy that seems to be at least ten levels higher than I am (most recently, giant fire ants). The weird uncanny valley people and spotty voice acting still bother me, but the game is at least reasonably challenging so I can’t complain too much, I guess. My first runthrough (as with Mass Effect) will be with a goody-two-shoes type character (although I did enjoy planting a live grenade on an unsuspecting Raider while I was invisible).

On a side note, Games for Windows Live (which Fallout 3 makes you install if you want to download patches) is decent enough but it feels rather pointless. There are a few games that you can play online using it, two of which are widely regarded as terrible ports of console games (Gears of War and Grand Theft Auto IV) and the remaining two of which aren’t particularly remarkable (Universe at War and Lost Planet: Colonies Edition). Other than playing online, the only thing it’s really good for is tracking achievements, which is kind of cute but an ultimately pointless feature. Hopefully the PC version of Street Fighter IV lets you play online with 360 players or something, because they are in serious need of some killer apps.

Also, Coldplay’s Viva la Vida is stuck in my head ever since I bought the album of the same name and the associated EP Prospekts March off Amazon MP3 this past weekend. Not that I’m complaining…

I’ve been hearing rumours that the 80GB Metal Gear Solid 4 PlayStation 3 bundle was soon to go the way of the dodo, and with it all backwards compatibility from the product line. I was pondering whether or not to take the plunge and shell out the cash for one of these bundles, but an e-mail that popped into my inbox at work swiftly resolved those thoughts.

A guy at work was selling his 60GB PS3 along with a few games, for the bargain price (relatively speaking) of $450. I wasn’t particularly interested in some of the games he was offering (Tiger Woods and Madden…right), but I realised that that sort of price for the long-discontinued 60GB model was a pretty damn good deal, so I jumped at it. Hence the shiny black monster now perched next to my 32″ HDTV.

The machine is remarkably quiet, even with a disc inside it – noise elimination was clearly one of their priorities in developing the hardware. Heat is another story, though – I tried to reposition the console slightly to make space for something else and the underside was almost too hot to touch.

That said, I don’t have much else to complain about. I’ll probably put Ubuntu on it so that I can use it as a media center (without being restricted to the formats that the PS3 supports natively). And now that I have something that can actually use the hi-def capabilities of my TV, I might start buying more DVDs (and downloading content from the PlayStation Store – I hear Xam’d is particularly good).

Games? Err, I got Guitar Hero III along with it, but until I clear my existing PC and PS2 backlog I’m probably not going to buy anything else for it. I’m still halfway through Devil May Cry 4 and I suspect I’ve barely scratched the surface of Mass Effect.

On a somewhat related note, I beat Metal Gear Solid at last (after disovering the first-person aiming option in the escape level which was never revealed to me, and in any case was rather difficult to use). Of course, the game rewarded me by freezing up right after the credits, preventing me from saving my complete file. Joy.

Overall thoughts? Rather rough around the edges, but it did have enjoyable moments.

I put a few minutes into Metal Gear Solid 2 – the two main things I brought away from it were

1. Yay aiming doesn’t suck as much!
2. Boo the cutscenes are still way too long.

I’ll probably only continue once I get the PS2 memory card adapter I ordered from Amazon tomorrow, so I can move all my save data onto the PS3. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the PS2 yet, but I’ll probably take it back to Singapore the next time I go.

I spent pretty much all of today on my couch playing the original Metal Gear Solid on my PS2. Like I said before, I’ve only played part of it before (on PC) with generally positive impressions, so I was wondering how the rest of the game held up. And my answer so far is “somewhat unevenly.”

First off, the game makes you engage in firefights with what are probably the most clunky shooting controls ever. The game has you press square to shoot, but your handgun has an auto-targeting mode engaged by holding square, which prevents you from firing off shots quickly. Manual aiming is really a crapshoot. On the other hand, your rifle fires in full automatic mode when you hold down square, and you can fire it while running if you hold down X while shooting. Keeping in mind that X is normally the button assigned to crouch, this is a rather unintuitive setup, and that the game expects you to enter gunfights with it is somewhat ridiculous.

The second problem I have is less important, but it’s somewhat detrimental to the game’s atmosphere. MGS goes to great lengths to make you feel that your actions are taking place in a realistic, believable world. The attention to detail is incredible. Given that, it really spoils the atmosphere of the game when Revolver Ocelot says something like “Press Circle to regain your strength!” It only serves to kill the atmosphere built up to that point.

I have a few more issues with the game (I think the dialogue repeats itself way too much, the cutscenes are about 50% too long, and the plot’s way of trying to make us empathise with the villains by having them spout their entire backstory as they die is just terrible characterization) but honestly, I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t gotten anything out of the game. The boss battles are suitably epic and challenging, and the sneaking areas are pretty well-designed for the most part.

I’m at the start of disc 2, so I assume I’m about halfway through the game at this point. I will say the good has outweighed the bad so far, but I suppose I’ll see if that trend continues.

Capcom and Konami appear to think that it is.

First off, Megaman 9. Let’s start off with a disclaimer – I’m not a Mega Man fan. My experience with the franchise is limited to a few minutes with Megaman X and Megaman Zero 2. That said, MM9 has me somewhat dumbstruck. It’s not that it’s a 2D sidescroller (that isn’t an issue at all, and in fact is probably a good move to appeal to Megaman fans). What I take issue with is this:

Mega Man 9 eschews the style of the more recent PlayStation-era Mega Man 8 or even the SNES Mega Man 7, instead going all the way back to 8-bit visuals, imitating the style of the NES games. Series creator Keiji Inafune commented that old-school Mega Man games don’t “fit into the grandiose and expansive world that the consumer gaming industry has become, and so you have to make games that match the current expectations.” This helped determine the game’s direction as a retro-style downloadable title for the WiiWare service.

2D is one thing, but the last thing I expected Capcom to do was take a leaf out of SNK’s book and completely recycle old assets. Actually, even that comparision isn’t appropriate any more, seeing what SNK is doing with King of Fighters XII. Yes, the old Megaman games are revered as classics, but if anything they are loved because they were good games, not because they used art from the 8-bit era! All this seems to be is another cheap attempt to cash in on fan nostalgia (see Street Fighter IV) by completely missing the point of why people love these games in the first place.

If they’re going to put it on a modern console, why not go all out and make a game with state-of-the-art 2D graphics that still stays true to the Megaman legacy? Heaven knows.

On top of that, it looks like Konami saw the announcement and decided to one-up them with their announcement of Castlevania Judgement for the Wii. The game is (of all things) a 3D fighter with motion controls.

I don’t know why Konami thought that Castlevania was great fodder for a fighting game. The system snippets in the article suggest that the game will play exactly like the main games, with heart meters and sub-weapons, but in a 1-on-1 format, which sounds strange. Still, it may be doable. The main reason I’m panning this announcement is the fact that the game uses motion controls.

I cannot think of a single fighting game on the Wii that has benefited from motion controls. Bleach: Shattered Blade is a shallow waggle-fest. Guilty Gear XX Accent Core has motion controls but no-one with any sense will use them. And the flagship fighting game on the Wii, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, eschews them entirely. The precision and timing that such games demand from their players means that control is of paramount importance (which is why any fighting game player will always insist on using an arcade stick). After about 9 months of using the Wii, I can safely say that the Wii remote does not have the necessary control. Games like Sonic and the Secret Rings suffer because of this, particularly on the later levels where it demands split-second reaction from the player.

If Konami knows what they’re doing, they will provide a classic controller option.

There was also that Ubisoft announcement of that new Prince of Persia platformer for the DS which inexplicably uses a chibi art style, but I don’t really consider that to be on the same level as these two dumbfounding announcements (although I think it’s probably just as unimpressive at this point).