The game is out, to mixed reviews. There’s no doubt that it’s good — it’s garnered a meta score of 8+ according to Steam — but the critics have both praise and complaints for this astonishing title. But what does the Guild say?
Ok, usually, I can marginally stomach what the average commercial reviewer says about a game, even if I can’t actually agree with it. For instance, I can understand the way that they all panned DOOM 3 simply because it was not an exploration of new territory, but rather paid homage to the places we’ve already been. I can understand how a masterpiece like Crysis could receive high scores as a game despite the fact that it made for a horrible movie and the fact that it was technologically flawed.
I can even understand how people can claim that Ruthless.com lacked depth.
…on the other hand, I cannot understand–or forgive–the disgusting, pandering, “I’ll touch myself for a dollar” bullshit that is the game industrie’s response to Ubisoft’s latest vile ejaculate.
First of all, Far Cry 2 is technically a sequel to Far Cry. I think. It has none of the same, “How dare you interrupt my vacation!” spirit. It hasn’t got he same level of polish. It isn’t made by the same people. And it isn’t even a continuation of the same fucking storyline. It’s intended to carry on the same lineage of “freedom” in gameplay, but it can’t even pull that off. (Malaria, anyone?)
Far Cry 2 is far from a sequel. It’s just… disgusting.
And that’s my impression from playing only the first thirty minutes of the game. Let me run down the short list of my complaints:
PC Gamer reviewed this as a 9.4. Now, I expected them to give it a higher rating than other publications (Gamespot gave it an 8.5), as they’re usually a little more lenient than I’d prefer. But the fact that Gamespot still gave this an 8.5? It’s like the one reviewer at IGN is now moonlighting with everyone else, too!
How the fuck does this deserve an 8.5? Everything about this game seems designed specifically to make the game punishing to play. Fixing a car actually takes 30 seconds of the same lame-ass animation repeated over and over. Walking through a door is an exercise in precision (which, as I mentioned, is difficult) and patience as you wait to be teleported from one side to the other via a short cutscene.
I’m sorry, but this game may be ok if you pirated it, but if you actually paid 53 dollars for it? You should be allowed to demand your money back. Perhaps that reviewer from PC Gamer wasn’t lying when he said it exceeded his expectations, but surely his expectations couldn’t have been that damn high…
I, on the other hand, have been the victim of wildly exaggerated positive reviews from just about everyone. This game got a higher meta score than Fallout 3, which is a genuine masterpiece.
This game got a higher meta score than Fallout 3.
There is no justice in this world.
…this ain’t it.
Unless we change the text on the calendar to red so that it matches the links. Because, frankly, we didn’t do a damn thing last week. Can you tell?
Ok, that’s not actually true. I wasted several perfectly good hours typing up drafts of something that I’m too embarrassed to show anyone (hence the lack of any updates on the Race page), purchased a new keyboard that doesn’t really work for what I need it for (no surprise there, right?), and finished both Crysis andCall of Duty: Modern Warfare. (Finally.)
Both Crysis and COD4 look amazing, although Crysis has a slight edge in graphics and AI. But COD4 is actually stable and runs at 90+ frames per second on my rig, where I’m actually doing quite well to squeeze anything near 60 out of Crysis and I felt that I was incredibly blessed to have finished the game in one two hour sitting over the weekend after trying out two more different drivers from nVidia.
I’m planning to replay Crysis soon, but the game does not appear to be entirely stable yet and actually crashed on the menu screen last time I was about to start. So I began to replay COD4 instead, trying out some of the cheats and trying to unlock a few more.
All the cheats actually suck so far. They’re just different graphics styles for the game. Big whoop.
The weird thing is that I actually managed to unlock cheat codes. Not only that, but I also unlocked what the game calls an “arcade mode.” Ok, that’s not to say that I’m not an ok player and that I don’t know what I’m doing or how to unlock stuff… I’m just saying it’s weird that the game even has cheats and an arcade mode. Perhaps it’s a leftover from whatever console iteration of the game exists?
I don’t remember. What I do remember (quite clearly) is that at least one of the player’s characters in the game (possibly both) and just about all the characters you actually develop an attachment to are killed in the game.
Oh. Right. Spoiler alert. (.!..)
This is a serious-ass game, dammit. It reminds me of watching the movie Blackhawk Down or something — except probably more intense because the skinnies are trying to blow YOUR ass apart and not some guy on screen. Of course, there are those in this world who do not feel a game should actually attempt to tell a story like this. But those are just missing out. 
I almost started to replay the game on Arcade mode, but decided against it. There’s just not much that’s arcade-like about a game with no health bar, no armor meter, and no sense of classic “get the girl, live happily ever after” mentality. There’s a scene in the middle of the game that really brings this home: you stagger out of the wreckage of the helicopter that was supposed to take you to safety in the midst of a hellish, transformed landscape created by a nuclear blast.
You can hear a radio in the background telling you to get to the nearest casualty collection point or some shit. But there’s no real point. You’re dead on your feet and you know it, soaked with enough radiation to sink a battleship.
It reminds me of a somewhat similar game, Brothers in Arms — a game where your character appears to die in the first scene. (That game was such a pain in the ass to complete that I don’t even know how it ends, whether or not you actually live through it.) Except, in this game, you don’t really have that backdrop of WWII to play off of. No heroics against a global evil or anything.
Just a mad man with a few loyal followers and some good nukes.
Well, I finally finished Portal this morning (it wasn’t that it was too hard, though I did get stuck in Test Chamber 18; I simply got sidetracked by Half-Life 2, HL2 Episode 1, and now HL2 Episode 2.). I must say its one of them ore innovative games I’ve seen in years and did make me start thinking in a new way. Portal is a first-person puzzle game that requires you to solve various tests using a portal gun (at first, it only creates one portal, while the second is created for you. Later, you get full control of being able to make two portals at once). You use these portals to instantly move from one or the other, either yourself or other objects. The laws of physics apply too: anym omentum you carry as you pass through a portal continues out the other side. When you get good enough with them, you’ll be sailing hundreds of feet acorss a room with some quick shooting. And it happens to be one of the only puzzle games I’ve actually played where you can actually die.
It is rather short, but its good enough that this is only a downside because it leaves you wanting more. Good stuff though, all the way through. I’ve yet to start working on the advanced test chambers, which are essentially like bonus content: its reworked versions of the several of the final test chambers in the single-player game, only either harder, or with special stipulations. Beating these is also how you win about half of the game’s Achievements, too.
Is it worth the price to be paid to get it by itself ($20 last time I checked)?…well, maybe, maybe not, depending on your gaming tastes (I personally think $20 is a good deal for it, to be quite honest). However, it comes with The Orange Box, which also includes HL2, HL2 Episodes 1 and 2, and Team Fortress 2. Considering The Orange Box is only $50 for five great games (a few other things come in it too, though off the top of my head, I don’t remember the particulars), its a steal. By the way, the song during the final credits…priceless.
My only complaint, besides a minor grievance with the length, is that the much-promised cake in the game is a lie. Damn you GLaDOS, and damn you Valve! 
Rating: 5/5
For more information, visit these links:
Official Steam Portal page
Wikipedia: Portal (Note: beware plot spoilers under the Story section)
Believe it or not, like it or not, back in in 1998, Half-Life was the future of computer gaming. With the release of Half-Life 2 in 2004, one could say that the series (the canon included all of two games at that point, with Valve having seemingly disavowed all knowledge of Adrian Shepherd or Half-Life: Opposing Force) had become stale.
After all, it’s the same gameplay all over again. Silly weapon balance with a focus on balancing firepower and tactical limitations (e.g. the pistol has exemplary long range accuracy, but hits like a spitwad, or the crossbow has the longest effective range of any weapon and even includes a scope but suffers from a poor trajectory and extended flight time). There are no bosses to speak of — simply powerful enemies enshrined in puzzle-laden levels. Opposing Force addressed certain complaints (for instance: that no one weapon is better than any other), but Half-Life 2 is not an evolution of Opposing Force.
These issues are patently obvious ingame and become tiresome any time you find yourself wishing the pulse rifle were a little more useful, or that the submachine gun did not share the ballistic characteristics of a water pistol. But that isn’t what you read in the reviews two years ago, is it.
Because no one cared.
It’s 2008 now. Half-Life 2 is still the future of gaming. In Half-Life 2, you’re no longer playing a game so much as playing a movie. On a now defunct blog I commented at the time that the faces of your enemies are obscured by masks in order to allow the player some distance from the act of killing fellow human beings that, frankly, look human (in addition, of course, to the fact that they are traitors and are at best deformed and corrupted humans in the world of the game).
The “final boss” in Half-Life 2 is a teleporter meant to send a certain Dr. Breen (no one important) to an undisclosed location (nowhere important) and destroying the teleporter (which does not shoot back) does not actually prevent the whole place from blowing up and killing the player’s character (who is preserved, but by another means). Therefore, detonating the stupid thing was incredibly pointless — and yet it mattered at the time.
Why is a good question. Games aren’t supposed to invoke that kind of emotion, are they? And yet in the case of Half-Life 2, the outcry about the bad ending (it is a tradition in the HL series to give each game an incredibly shitty ending, so that was to be expected) had nothing to do with the lack of closure for the story (which we all expected, since Valve, along with several other developers, is trying to move toward an episode-based release scheme and, of course, everything has a sequel these days), but because it ended in a cliffhanger: does Freeman’s “love interest” die or not?
Immediately old school DOOM players like me want to know, “Who the hell cares?” But, of course, after playing the game we realize… We do.
10 hours of emotional investment will do that to a person. Just think: if you can mourn for the hero of a two hour movie when you know that nothing you scream from the middle of the theater will make any difference, how much more will you care about the hero of a video game when you’ve been fighting to keep them alive for the past two days straight?
That’s the real power of a video game these days. Actually, that’s been the real power of a video game since back in the 1990s when someone first decided, “Hey, these pictures can tell a story!” If you recall a little game called Dark Forces by LucasArts in their heyday, you almost certainly remember the sense of horror instilled by the second mission where you explore the remnants of a rebel city following a massacre, or the rage you shared with Katarn when he discovered that his partner, Jan Ors, had been captured.
…or, for that matter, the incredible sense of, “Don’t I have better shit to do with my time?” you felt when you were sent to rescue Crix Madine from an Imperial prison. (I still hate that guy, and I barely even know him!)
At some point it’s no longer the weapons or the gameplay that you remember after the fact (even though, yes, everyone still writes love letters to the double barreled shotgun in DOOM II). It’s the people and their stories.
If other people experience this in the same way that I do, it will prove exceedingly difficult to censor video game content in the future. For every Postal (if you don’t know, don’t ask) there is a Call of Duty — just as for every… (insert crappy movie here; I can’t think of any) …there is an Unforgiven.
Ok, actually, the ratio isn’t nearly that good. It’s much closer to 10:1 than 1:1. But if we can cut Hollywood that much slack, I think we owe developers like Valve the benefit of the doubt.
It’s an impressive sort of name. A little cliche, even, actually–especially for a gaming machine. But I have a good excuse for christening my new machine PREDATOR. Frankly? …that’s what it reminds me of.
How so, you ask? I got a smaller case this time around and then tried to cram more inside it. It’s a pretty regular sort of ATX case with two video cards, a sound card, a bigass HSF unit, and a giant power supply. Incredibly enough, everything fits…
EXCEPT for the power cables, which are still hanging out the side of the case like the Predator’s dreadlocks in that Schwarzenegger movie. As soon as I got everything put together I knew exactly what I was going to call it. I may never get the side of the case on this thing!
I’m extremely satisfied. There were some hitches in the build process (obviously) including the fact that one of the transistors on the motherboard was actually bent over and in the way of one of the fan connectors (I’m not liking eVGA very much so far) and the fact that getting the giant Zalman HSF in place was a chore and a half, and the motherboard and my RAM don’t seem to get along very well, but I’m satisfied with the overall result.
The Core 2 processor is currently overclocked at 3.2 gigahertz and running at a 1.35 to 1.4 volts (stock is 1.325) and a nominal temp of around 45 degrees (my old processor ran at more like 105) Celsius.
Ingame performance in Call of Duty 4 is exceptional as far as I’m concerned, with zero hitches and magnificent vistas. Crysis is a little rougher around the edges; without SLI enabled, the game isn’t quite as happy at very high detail and 1280×1024 resolution. With SLI enabled on nVidia’s beta driver release from the 13th, performance is noticeably better, but the drivers appear to be a little buggy and occasional crashes have occurred, as well as some graphical errors in certain lighting conditions.
Patches and driver updates should iron out any difficulties.
I, on the other hand, have not fared quite so well. CoD4 requires tactics that are completely alien to me in a singleplayer game. The offline campaign plays like a session of Battlefield, requiring you to take ground in order to stop enemies from spawning infinitely. That’s taken some getting used to.
Crysis has been a little less challenging and probably much more rewarding so far. I do feel like I’ve gotten the hang of its rather unique mechanics and that I’m getting downright dangerous with the assault rifle–not to mention the left hand that Nomad uses to throttle his enemies before finishing them with his right.
Updates to come, of course.
–Bishop, RGc1 CenCom
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