The Price of War

I beat Modern Warfare 2 on veteran yesterday, leaving me with just Fallout 3 to finish before I feel ready for Final Fantasy XIII. It was a satisfying win to be sure but I was surprised that it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. There were certainly some really hard levels. I mentioned Takedown in the last post and I feel I must bring up Contingency and Loose Ends as well. These three levels are exercises in pain. In a lower difficulty Contingency isn't that bad but on veteran you have to finish a certain part in a 3 minute time limit. This negates the essential strategy for beating veteran which is to go slow and take your time. For a level like Takedown it's a strategy you must employ but in Contingency you have to run through as fast as you can and I found myself doing something that bordered on trial and error, running through it 20+ times trying something a little different each time. Loose Ends is a level that just pisses me off, there's no other way to put it. It was a pain in the ass on regular and it was a rage inducing shit-fest on veteran. The whole level is a paper cut and lemon juice festival but the last segment is just one big kick-in-the-balls-cake with a big fuck-you-cherry on top. I'm not going to spoil it for you, if you've played it you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't be prepared. I'm not kidding, the game literally gives you a big fuck-you at the end as a special thanks for playing.

Those three levels aside, it wasn't that hard. My basis for comparison is Call of Duty 2 in which every level is agonizing on hardened and up. I really like MW2 though. It may be the best shooter I've ever played. You feel like you are in a summer blockbuster, every second is a fantastic set-piece battle. Having gone through it twice I was still eager to go back and find all the intel items, which I did on recruit. Let me tell you, recruit is an entirely different game. Parts that on veteran would take you 30 minutes to slog through take 30 seconds as you execute a brisk walk through a raging firefight. The difficulty levels in a Call of Duty game are kind of like a spectrum ranging from arcade to simulation only instead of arcade having more enemies it has less which makes it not as fun. That's what they need for the next game, a mode with recruit level damage but a veteran or more level of enemies. I'd play it.

On a bitter-sweet note I just got 10 great cds for 30 bucks. The bitter sweet part is that it was from a going out of business sale for my favorite used cd store. Damn this recession, damn this recession to hell!

Preorder

A few days ago I preordered Final Fantasy XIII along with the collector’s edition guide book. I know this goes contrary to my normal practice of buying games more than a year after they come out and at a fraction of the price but part of the reason I do that is so every few years I can afford to buy the newest Final Fantasy game. The total between the game and the book will be over $90. Well worth it (hey I could have spent $120 on Tony Hawk Ride). Final Fantasy is the exception to my rule. Which rule? All of them. I am not the kind of person who gets excited easily. Things that get most people worked up to a frothing frenzy of joyous anticipation usually only manage to induce from me a shrug and a muttered "meh". But for Final Fantasy I am what could be modestly described as a fanboy. And to be a Final Fantasy Fanboy (or F3 if you will) you pretty much have to be unimpressed by things. You have to have an unhealthy amount of patience and the uncanny ability to distract yourself from diabolically long development times. FF13 has been in development since before 12 came out. That was in 2006. That was four years ago. It's a good thing the games are so long you can spend at least some of that time hooked up to the Final Fantasy intravenous drip, a few precious months where the black muddy cloud of life can be diluted by a water-color rainbow. When you're chasing the dragon the rest of the grime smeared world fades away behind you, your vision tunnels as if approaching the speed of light, and the ground falls away beneath you while you float without effort suspended by naught but your neurons in the humming syrupy aether. At this point the existence of self is barely credible, an argument held aloft by a chorus of laughing sub atomic particles mankind will forever lack the fortitude of spirit to discover.
So yeah, March 9th, woo-hoo.

My task now is to complete all of my other self imposed gaming obligations so that my plate will be squeaky clean for the advent. This will mostly consist of trying to finish Fallout 3 to a satisfactory extent. That last sentence is a fool’s errand in and of itself. Epic poems could be written about "finishing" a game like Fallout 3. The word "sisyphean" comes to mind. On top of that I've decided to try and beat Modern Warfare 2 on veteran. If you've read previous posts you have an idea of my relationship with Infinity Ward and their venerable franchise. Challenging their dreaded hard mode is an act of suicidal self destruction that has produced in me fits of rage so pure they result in memory loss and permanent increases in blood pressure. These are periods of my life where I can only recall the aftermath; as if I awoke to stumble from my basement storm shelter and found that my home was no longer there. They call it "veteran" instead of "hard" because you come out the other side with post-traumatic stress disorder; like you've lived through something that will be read about in textbooks by bored school children. No man knows how he will die, but for me I would put money on a Call of Duty-induced heart attack or stroke. The description for veteran says, "You will not survive". They are not talking about the game.

I'm optimistic though. I'm already half way through it and the hardest level of the game, "Takedown" is behind me. As for Fallout 3, if I just concentrate on completing the official missions I could feasibly be finished by the end of the month. But then there are the expansions and the temptation to play through again as an evil character... and then again as a neutral one...