Game Curmudgeons

The Orange Box release time is now.

If all goes well, jubilation and playing of Ep2 and Portal.

Or, if you see an addition to this post in the next 3 minutes, we’re having a repeat of TF2.

Hurk! Decrypting! So slow. Still, let’s hope for now TF2 “Hey, it’s here! Hey, I can’t fucking play it!”

Valve is set to release The Orange Box in 8 hours.

Now, we’ve only played Team Fortress 2 so far, like everyone else in the beta. And that alone to me makes it worth it. We’ll have a full review up in a few days after the official release, but the beta has been an absolute blast, and gets better every day. Valve’s rapid patching, improvement of balance, and elimination of any exploits has been amazing.

Honestly, I’ve enjoyed TF2 more than any other multiplayer focused game. More than the BF games, more than Quake Wars, and yes, more than Counter-Strike or Halo 3.

While the full review is going to include HL2:Ep 2 and Portal(which are pretty sure bets), I feel I can safely say that TF2 alone is worth the price of admission. If you’re not so sure, there’s always the standalone for 30 dollars, which is absolutely worth it.

DRIIIIIIFTIIIIIIIIIIIIING

Okay, that’s out of the way. Jesus H. Christ, I can’t stop drifting in this game. I’m not that far in, and I’ve hit a level where I get to drive a 1950s race car, and it’s a level in the snow which would take most cars 4 mintues to run. But because those things are notorious for sliding, AND it’s in the snow, I get 10:30. It’s still not enough, because the second I get to a decent speed, I start sliding to one side or the other, and then, the drifting returns rather involuntarily.

Everything in this game drifts. Motorcycles do it the least, and high end sports cars the most. The game is one big constant drift. And I have to admit, it’s fun.

PGR4 is managing to walk the fine line between arcade and simulation racer still. You can’t just go balls-out full speed into every turn, or you’ll smack into walls and lose your bonus points which are used to buy new and better cars or even places to race.

It keeps a good speed though, and a fair amount of tension, at least in street races. Events tend to be much easier.

Only, at this point, two real complaints. 1-Editing my paintjob is limited to picking a pattern and picking the colors, and rotating/scaling the pattern. Forza 2, as boring as the game is to me, really raised the bar for designing a paint job. I’ve seen cars with Harley Quinn perfectly recreated, and I expect that level now in my racers that go online.

Beyond that, motorcylces don’t have seperate front and rear brakes. Yes, I know, being bothered by this makes me one of the three people who bought Tourist Trophy, and one of two who cranks the Moto GP simulation setting all the way up. It’s not the end of the world, but as a result, motorcycles feel like they’ve lost a lot of their ability. No crazy slides and turns from manipulating the brakes individually. It’s stupidly hard to drift with a bike, in fact, the opposite of the rest of the game. Really ends up being a disadvantage in races that are scored by getting lots of points instead of speed.

Oh, I’m not fond of the music. It’s rare licensed tracks work for me, though the PGR tracks aren’t nearly as bad as, say, anything from EA Trax(excepting for Skate, which managed to avoid the usual emo and indie pitfalls for the most part). Lots of bad techno, bad rock, bad, well, everything. PGR4 is the poster child for custom soundtracks, but even if the one included wasn’t so bad, I’d be playing Dethklok over it. And really, I think we’ve all come to accept that My Chemical Romance does not belong in the Alternative Rock category. Microsoft, Bizarre Creations, please take note. My Chemical Romance does not belong in the same category as Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters.

More thoughts and a real review to come, after some time with the online functions and trip through career mode.

Update!: Apparently I just drifted so hard my TV couldn’t handle anything that fucking extreme. This morning it’s turning on, attempting to warm up, and shutting back down. I suspect I drifted the fan into oblivion, it makes a rather horrid noise then silences. Which is too bad, I was really looking forward to more career time. I guess that’s a good sign for the game’s eventual score.

The game has been in beta for two weeks and already it’s hard to find friends or groups (an addition of the Steam Community added with it. Love the Steam Community features. See below for more detail) playing it. Why? Because the whole game is very small. There are six different maps, though Valve promises more later, three different game types and nine different classes. The whole game will take about 10-20 hours to burn out on for most people.

But, you say, that’s not bad. And if this were a single player game, I’d agree. But a multiplayer game that you get tired of in 10+ hours? That doesn’t sit right with me. If you’re into multiplayer games like Counter-Strike, the Battlefield series(BF2 being the best of them), etc, you’re probably used to a game like that grabbing you for hours and hours and being played on and off for months, maybe longer (I still fire up BF2 from time to time). The official word from Valve is that they will be releasing more maps, but they didn’t want to include too many in the initial release (the six maps are the same six maps, plus any beta testing changes) for the sake of a having a large quantity. So they went with quality over quantity. I can respect that. Except, these maps are small. Really small. Think as small as many of the original Counter-Strike maps. So you’re going to know these maps like the back of your hand in a week of play.

Yeah, I know, this seems to be a really lousy complaint against what is by all the talk in the great big internet is a really good game. Hell, I was going to originally name this piece the Team Fortress 2: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (you know, since that idea has never been used before). But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Yeah, the game has some really good stuff. The art direction and the sound are above and beyond top notch. The personalities they have for the characters are pretty cool (though a friend brought up that there isn’t much diversity in the races or sexes of the people…a very fair point). And the balance feels pretty spot on, especially for a beta.

The flaws of this game bring it way down though. Because after a bit of play, the voices, the art direction and so on don’t really matter. The personality of the characters even less. What matters is variety of play, variety of levels, interesting gameplay to drive the game beyond being a flash in the pan. With that in mind, Team Fortress 2 falls down.

As a matter of fact, thinking about it, maybe this game wasn’t really designed for me, the squad based game playing type. The graphics have a very fierce requirement level (though so did Battlefield 2 when it was first released), the big points (art direction, graphics, etc) of the game aren’t particularly appealing to the Counter-Strike player beyond a few plays and a big part of their PR push was the characters personalities, something I said at the time was really cool, but wasn’t going to convince me to play the game. Maybe I’m not the target market like I thought I was. Maybe I should just stick to other squad based combat games and play this game from time to time when I get bored of Episode 2.

On a side note though, the Steam Community stuff that came out with TF2 is sweet personified. I know every time a buddy is playing the game and I can join them directly through the Steam interface. When the game first came out and everyone was playing, I never joined a server directly, just through Community page joining up with one of my friends. That’s great. And so is the Shift+Tab overlay in the game to allow to see the your friends, what they are doing and communicate with them, be they in game or not. Those are great features that should be in every game. I’m going to miss them when playing other games most definitely.

The problem being I don’t think any of that is going to get people to keep playing this very small game that took nine years to develop. I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but I find myself getting bored already. I’ve played all of the levels, have the choke points pretty much defined and what classes are best used where. It’s nice and comfortable already…and kinda boring too.

Have you ever had that feeling that, no matter how very well you do something, no matter how confident in it you are, you absolutely know somebody has done it better than you? Nothing wrong with what you made, certainly not, but you’ve seen the better version, you’re a fan of the better version?

That’s how I feel right now, thanks to a Zero Punctuation Review of Halo 3. And that’s how Bungie must feel about Halo 3.

See, no matter how good this review is, Yahtzee just said everything on my mind, better, and faster. Really, you can just click that link and consider this a reworded version, with extra text and punctuation. It’s not the same thing, but it’s similar enough in what it is to draw comparison. And that is precisely where Halo 3 is, respective to its genre. It’s come out hot on the heels of Bioshock, and with Half-life 2:Episode 2 about to launch.

I, like everyone on the god damn planet, already expected to feel a certain way about Halo 3 before getting it. And like everyone else, I was prettymuch right. Apparently Halo 3 really is what you make it, or at least expect out of it, Bungie’s intent be damned. The people who expected the second coming got it, and those of us who expected average got it.

This review is, in all fairness, huge. It’s one of the biggest video game releases, well, EVER. It’s a big game with a lot to talk about, and this review will indeed be hueg like xbox. So read more after the cut.

Moar! »