I've been meaning to post about this for a while, because it really kills a lot of modern shooters for me. Halo and Call of Duty started a trend that is just destroying modern shooters, recharging shields and health. Many people praised this concept as it was brought into popularity, and it is now seen in almost every shooter. Mass Effect, Halo, Call of Duty, Killzone 2, Gears of War, and Bad Company are only a few games that are guilty of this sin.
Why is this such a bad thing? How can so many games with such high praise from reviewers all have it wrong? Many people claim that recharging means the game is faster paced and more intense, however I can't disagree more. Recharging health and shields removes almost ALL of the difficulty from a single player perspective. You are not punished for any of your mistakes. Poke your head out of cover at a bad time and take a few shots? No problem, hide for 10 seconds and you are 100% fine again. Back in the good old days of Quake and Doom, you needed to find first aid kits and such to get you health back after such a mistake. Make too many mistakes and you will run out of health pickups for the level, and you will die. There is no such management of health in new shooters. Just duck down for a few seconds and you are fine. Not punishing mistakes removes almost ALL of the intensity from shooters. I've just started playing Killzone 2 on my PS3 and seeing it frequently mentioned as one of the better shooters on the console. It just doesn't get me going like older shooters did. Taking a few hits means nothing at all, if you aren't gunned down full to dead, you can recover with no consequence. There are no tense moments where you need to enter combat at 50% health because there are no first aid kits nearby.
Now you are probably raging at me for focusing on single player, because nobody but me cares about single player games anymore. Well it sucks for multiplayer too. Recall that a few posts ago I talked about camping in shooters. Recharging shields and health means campers can take a few hits and not need to move around to find health and armor to replenish themselves. Taking a hit or two doesn't phase a camper, because they will simply recharge. A few hits here and there would kill a camper if he didn't recharge between every person that gets a shot in on him. Recharging also means that damage put on any player in general doesn't stick, so there is no difference between a near-kill or getting completely wtf-pwnt by someone. Without recharging, if you almost killed them they need to resupply or you will beat him easily when you find him again.
I don't want people to get me wrong, I have enjoyed some new shooters, I'm not somebody that only likes classic games. But I feel that nearly every shooter would be better off if they went back to an old school static health system, instead of the recharging crap that almost all new shooters are using.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Hellsing
More anime! So I just recently finished watching a short running anime called Hellsing. This show is another rare anime that doesn't fall into the childish humor and meaningless filler crap, +1 awesomeness! The art work does a great job adding to the atmosphere. The show follows the efforts of the Hellsing organization, led by Sir Integra Hellsing, to purge the world of undead, namely vampires. However, the Hellsing organization's secret weapon is an uber powerful vampire named Alucard. The reason Alucard works for Hellsing is not clear. Alucard is a fun character. Basically, he is a total badass. There is also a new vampire that joined Hellsing, however her story doesn't get filled in as much as I would like because you follow their vampire hunt for 13 episodes.....
Yeah, 13 episodes. This is a problem. Where I praised Gun Sword for having a story to tell, telling it, and being done, Hellsing is simply not long enough. I don't know if the show was cancelled (would have a hard time believing it) or if it was planned to be so short, but the story doesn't get filled in enough. Yes, the story arc is completed at the end, but you don't get to see nearly as much about the characters as I would like. It sucks that we don't really get to learn a whole lot about Seras Victoria, the newly turned vampire in Hellsing. You never learn exactly why Alucard works willingly for humans. There is a TON more story that was asking to be told, but is never seen.
Hellsing was was a fun, quick watch. However, I was sorely disappointed by the total lack of episode count. This should have been a two or three season show, not half. Regardless, overall I did enjoy watching it.
Note: This applies to just the series Hellsing. They have started making a set of OVA's called Hellsing Ultimate that I have not seen.
Yeah, 13 episodes. This is a problem. Where I praised Gun Sword for having a story to tell, telling it, and being done, Hellsing is simply not long enough. I don't know if the show was cancelled (would have a hard time believing it) or if it was planned to be so short, but the story doesn't get filled in enough. Yes, the story arc is completed at the end, but you don't get to see nearly as much about the characters as I would like. It sucks that we don't really get to learn a whole lot about Seras Victoria, the newly turned vampire in Hellsing. You never learn exactly why Alucard works willingly for humans. There is a TON more story that was asking to be told, but is never seen.
Hellsing was was a fun, quick watch. However, I was sorely disappointed by the total lack of episode count. This should have been a two or three season show, not half. Regardless, overall I did enjoy watching it.
Note: This applies to just the series Hellsing. They have started making a set of OVA's called Hellsing Ultimate that I have not seen.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Gun Sword
Long time no blog! I will try to do a better job keeping this up to date, I've just been busy with other things. Today I want to talk about anime. Anime frequently start running filler episodes, and/or have episodes filled completely with humor that has a target audience age of around 10-12 years old. This sucks. A lot. It turns a genre of shows that I really like into childish crap. Many shows hit this snag and they turn into kids' shows rather than great adult television. Gun Sword doesn't go there, and therefore I love it.
Gun Sword has a story to tell, and it tells it. The show only has about 26 episodes. It completes the story and its over. It doesn't have a load of filler crap, or episodes dedicated to fart jokes and fluffy clouds for 10 year olds. I watched the entire show in 3 days, and I was sad that such an epic story was so short, a blessing and a curse. The world Gun Sword establishes is amazing. It has a lot of attitude, and the mechs are awesome. The characters are believable. Van isn't just some happy hero going out to do a great deed for the glory of justice. Van has a score to settle, revenge against the Clawed Man, and he is going to MESS HIM UP. Van can be related to, he is flawed and makes mistakes. The fight scenes in this show are great (its mostly mecha battles).
The story of Gun Sword focuses on a man named Van, who we learn possesses a powerful mecha. He starts off as a rather mysterious character, and all we know to start with is that he is out for revenge against the Clawed Man. Van saves a town early in his travels, and a girl there accompanies him to search for his brother. I thought this young girl would be the bane of my existence with this show, as they frequently become the center of the childish elements that ruin so many anime shows. I'm not going to claim there is never a childish moment, but Gun Sword stays away from this MUCH better than most animes I've seen.
Gun Sword is a great ride, and it was streamable on Netflix when I watched it a few months ago. If you enjoy anime and get the chance to watch Gun Sword, give it a try, I promise you won't regret it.
Gun Sword has a story to tell, and it tells it. The show only has about 26 episodes. It completes the story and its over. It doesn't have a load of filler crap, or episodes dedicated to fart jokes and fluffy clouds for 10 year olds. I watched the entire show in 3 days, and I was sad that such an epic story was so short, a blessing and a curse. The world Gun Sword establishes is amazing. It has a lot of attitude, and the mechs are awesome. The characters are believable. Van isn't just some happy hero going out to do a great deed for the glory of justice. Van has a score to settle, revenge against the Clawed Man, and he is going to MESS HIM UP. Van can be related to, he is flawed and makes mistakes. The fight scenes in this show are great (its mostly mecha battles).
The story of Gun Sword focuses on a man named Van, who we learn possesses a powerful mecha. He starts off as a rather mysterious character, and all we know to start with is that he is out for revenge against the Clawed Man. Van saves a town early in his travels, and a girl there accompanies him to search for his brother. I thought this young girl would be the bane of my existence with this show, as they frequently become the center of the childish elements that ruin so many anime shows. I'm not going to claim there is never a childish moment, but Gun Sword stays away from this MUCH better than most animes I've seen.
Gun Sword is a great ride, and it was streamable on Netflix when I watched it a few months ago. If you enjoy anime and get the chance to watch Gun Sword, give it a try, I promise you won't regret it.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
How to: Fix Modern Shooters
I'm not the kind of person who will pose problems without providing an answer. As noted in my previous post, modern shooters are suffering from a major deficit in gameplay, mainly due to campers in multiplayer modes. Shooters used to be my favorite genre, but with the ever growing camper problem, it simply wasn't fun anymore. This is the simple in concept but somewhat difficult to execute solution to the problem.
The arcade shooters of old, most notably Quake, really didn't have issues with campers. This is for two reasons. First of all, you spawned with very little in terms of equipment, while the map was littered with gear. This forced players to move about the map to pick up essentials like armor, ammo, health, and weapons, not to mention things like quad-damage super powerups. Modern shooters frequently spawn players with all of their gear for a chosen role (snipers with rifles, heavy assaults with machineguns, etc.) meaning from the second you drop in the level you are capable of gunning down foes. This means that you can pick a dark corner, hide, and crush people that stray into your crosshairs. This wouldn't work in Quake. Your starting weapons aren't sufficient. Even when you picked up decent firepower, if you hide in a room without going out to get armor and other gear, your shots will fail to one-hit kill (if you had armor and full health in the Quake series, you wouldn't get gibbed unless an enemy had a temporary quad-damage powerup). This will allow your opponent with superior armor and weapons to turn around and melt your face.
This brought on the important concept of controlling the map. Having several important pieces of equipment on the map made players want to control areas, and try to deny other people items by keeping track of respawn timers and recollecting the item again right once it spawns. This means players need to move to try to prevent other players from obtaining powerful weapons, and making sure they are able to get sufficient gear to battle their enemies. If you camped, you would be surrendering too many resources to the enemy, and you would die an awful death when the player you let gear out to the max finds your dark corner. This concept of controlling spawn points of powerful weapons is completely absent in many modern shooters simply because they drop you in the map completely ready to go, with only a few (if any) smaller powerups on the map.
The second way to build a camper-resistant shooter is simply the quality of level design. Map designers need to be more and more aware of the current trends in shooters, and build their levels around preventing these cheap tactics. They need to be aware of sniper locations, blind corners, and rooms with only one entrance. I'm not saying these elements can't be present in a level, but if you throw too much of this in one package (or just one incredibly good sniper spot) it becomes a camper's game. Levels need multiple paths to the same location, and while cover is necessary in shooters there can't be so much that any idiot with a shotgun can camp a well traveled corner and pick up cheap frags. Halo is a prime example of a game with lackluster map design. Halo has weapons (not really health and armor like Quake) and vehicles to get by moving about the map, but many of the levels I played on had wicked spots for snipers and blind corner shotgun campers.
Promoting movement through essential equipment pickups and ensuring maps don't have too many (or too good) camper spots would increase the entertainment value of shooters by a massive margin. We can hope someone (I'm looking at you Id Software, super awesome multiplayer Quake 5 next please!) will release a shooter to teach this younger generation of gamers what a real shooter experience should feel like. Movement, map control. Lets put those 1-hit kills and sniper nests aside people, and pick up our nailguns, rocket launchers, and plasma rifles.
The arcade shooters of old, most notably Quake, really didn't have issues with campers. This is for two reasons. First of all, you spawned with very little in terms of equipment, while the map was littered with gear. This forced players to move about the map to pick up essentials like armor, ammo, health, and weapons, not to mention things like quad-damage super powerups. Modern shooters frequently spawn players with all of their gear for a chosen role (snipers with rifles, heavy assaults with machineguns, etc.) meaning from the second you drop in the level you are capable of gunning down foes. This means that you can pick a dark corner, hide, and crush people that stray into your crosshairs. This wouldn't work in Quake. Your starting weapons aren't sufficient. Even when you picked up decent firepower, if you hide in a room without going out to get armor and other gear, your shots will fail to one-hit kill (if you had armor and full health in the Quake series, you wouldn't get gibbed unless an enemy had a temporary quad-damage powerup). This will allow your opponent with superior armor and weapons to turn around and melt your face.
This brought on the important concept of controlling the map. Having several important pieces of equipment on the map made players want to control areas, and try to deny other people items by keeping track of respawn timers and recollecting the item again right once it spawns. This means players need to move to try to prevent other players from obtaining powerful weapons, and making sure they are able to get sufficient gear to battle their enemies. If you camped, you would be surrendering too many resources to the enemy, and you would die an awful death when the player you let gear out to the max finds your dark corner. This concept of controlling spawn points of powerful weapons is completely absent in many modern shooters simply because they drop you in the map completely ready to go, with only a few (if any) smaller powerups on the map.
The second way to build a camper-resistant shooter is simply the quality of level design. Map designers need to be more and more aware of the current trends in shooters, and build their levels around preventing these cheap tactics. They need to be aware of sniper locations, blind corners, and rooms with only one entrance. I'm not saying these elements can't be present in a level, but if you throw too much of this in one package (or just one incredibly good sniper spot) it becomes a camper's game. Levels need multiple paths to the same location, and while cover is necessary in shooters there can't be so much that any idiot with a shotgun can camp a well traveled corner and pick up cheap frags. Halo is a prime example of a game with lackluster map design. Halo has weapons (not really health and armor like Quake) and vehicles to get by moving about the map, but many of the levels I played on had wicked spots for snipers and blind corner shotgun campers.
Promoting movement through essential equipment pickups and ensuring maps don't have too many (or too good) camper spots would increase the entertainment value of shooters by a massive margin. We can hope someone (I'm looking at you Id Software, super awesome multiplayer Quake 5 next please!) will release a shooter to teach this younger generation of gamers what a real shooter experience should feel like. Movement, map control. Lets put those 1-hit kills and sniper nests aside people, and pick up our nailguns, rocket launchers, and plasma rifles.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Gaming Triumphs and Failures, Part 2
How about we tackle the iconic genre most people think of when they hear about videogames, first person shooters. I've played countless FPS games, from Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 1 through 3, Doom 1 through 3, Battlefield 1942, Halo, etc. I can truly tell you, FPS games are going downhill. They aren't changing at all. First off, WHY ARE THEY ALL EITHER WW2 OR MODERN ERA? The Call of Duty series pisses me off. Do something original. Not every shooter needs to be placed in modern day situations. Not every shooter needs to be a world war shooter. Where did the aliens go? The fantasy creatures? The alternate worlds? Those are reserved for survival horror and RPGs I guess. After I played Battlefield 1942 everything just started to look the same.
Halo was fun when I played inhouse matches with a group of friends. Halo at least innovated a little bit with regenerating shields to keep the action going instead of finding health kits to restore an HP number (my thoughts on regenerating health in FPS games will be explored in a future post). Halo grew old sort of quickly, and became a camper's game...like almost every FPS on the planet. Games like Doom and Quake were fast paced, and didn't do headshot one hit kills like modern games. You just didn't get gibbed very often like in modern shooters. In newer shooters, you can just camp in a corner and pick people off before they can figure out what happened. I know, Quake had some camping, and I know you can counter campers. Before I hear the cries of “OMFG UR NOOB LOLZ” I'm not bad at new shooters. I'm not great, but I do know ways to counter snipers and campers, I just think it makes for a very lame style of play. I understand realistic shooters have their place, but I long for the more arcade style of Quake and Doom where you can take a rocket and live to fight back and lob your own hardware at your foe. Long intense fire fights were normal, with people jumping over missiles and dodging behind pillars while shotguns reloaded. Now its frequently about jumping people or landing a sniper shot, with intense longer firefights being rare occasions. Some would argue its just a different style of play, which is true, and I just like the old better. That doesn't take away that new FPS games just are NOT innovating ANYTHING, they are just reskinning and adding some new features that have little impact to whats going on. An untrained eye could hardly tell the difference between Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 2, and Bad Company 2. I don't like it, I know I will get flamed for it. But I believe the FPS genre is dying due to complete lack of innovation.
A noted few have pushed the enveloped. I enjoyed Gears of War, which added a rather nice cover mechanic for stop and pop shooting. Mass Effect 1 and 2 were rather good, while both having flaws (too much pointless space to explore in ME1, with generic sidequests, ME2 had the horrid mineral searching) by pushing in RPG elements with a good story while maintaining fun shooter action.
I'm not trying to say any individual Call of Duty game, or other recent shooters, is bad. I haven't played them enough to make that judgment. It just annoys me to no end how everyone thinks each one of them is a miraculous work, when in fact they seem more like expansions most of the time. No other genre has been so stale for so long, while still being so highly praised. It also doesn't help that the Call of Duty community is just as bad as any others that I have mentioned :)
Triumphs: Arcade style FPS games, daring to innovate in a proven genre, Doom and Quake multiplayer
Failures: Rereleasing the same game 10 times with new graphics and two new features and calling it a sequel, Campers, Mass Effect's empty space and Mass Effect 2's mineral searching
Halo was fun when I played inhouse matches with a group of friends. Halo at least innovated a little bit with regenerating shields to keep the action going instead of finding health kits to restore an HP number (my thoughts on regenerating health in FPS games will be explored in a future post). Halo grew old sort of quickly, and became a camper's game...like almost every FPS on the planet. Games like Doom and Quake were fast paced, and didn't do headshot one hit kills like modern games. You just didn't get gibbed very often like in modern shooters. In newer shooters, you can just camp in a corner and pick people off before they can figure out what happened. I know, Quake had some camping, and I know you can counter campers. Before I hear the cries of “OMFG UR NOOB LOLZ” I'm not bad at new shooters. I'm not great, but I do know ways to counter snipers and campers, I just think it makes for a very lame style of play. I understand realistic shooters have their place, but I long for the more arcade style of Quake and Doom where you can take a rocket and live to fight back and lob your own hardware at your foe. Long intense fire fights were normal, with people jumping over missiles and dodging behind pillars while shotguns reloaded. Now its frequently about jumping people or landing a sniper shot, with intense longer firefights being rare occasions. Some would argue its just a different style of play, which is true, and I just like the old better. That doesn't take away that new FPS games just are NOT innovating ANYTHING, they are just reskinning and adding some new features that have little impact to whats going on. An untrained eye could hardly tell the difference between Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 2, and Bad Company 2. I don't like it, I know I will get flamed for it. But I believe the FPS genre is dying due to complete lack of innovation.
A noted few have pushed the enveloped. I enjoyed Gears of War, which added a rather nice cover mechanic for stop and pop shooting. Mass Effect 1 and 2 were rather good, while both having flaws (too much pointless space to explore in ME1, with generic sidequests, ME2 had the horrid mineral searching) by pushing in RPG elements with a good story while maintaining fun shooter action.
I'm not trying to say any individual Call of Duty game, or other recent shooters, is bad. I haven't played them enough to make that judgment. It just annoys me to no end how everyone thinks each one of them is a miraculous work, when in fact they seem more like expansions most of the time. No other genre has been so stale for so long, while still being so highly praised. It also doesn't help that the Call of Duty community is just as bad as any others that I have mentioned :)
Triumphs: Arcade style FPS games, daring to innovate in a proven genre, Doom and Quake multiplayer
Failures: Rereleasing the same game 10 times with new graphics and two new features and calling it a sequel, Campers, Mass Effect's empty space and Mass Effect 2's mineral searching
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