Why Brink Sucks

1. Implementation of menus:

They really tried to reinvent the wheel here.  My biggest problem is that it's too hard to figure out what's going on.  In campaign mode if you are at the mission select screen you can see little dots next to each mission.  If they are filled in it means you completed the mission.  That's great but there is nothing to tell you what difficulty they have been completed on, which is important since they put an achievement in the game where you have to beat every level on hard or in adversarial.  The challenge menu doesn't even tell you which challenges you have beaten.

2. Speaking of challenges:

In order to unlock any weapon or weapon related attachment you have to complete challenges.  Each challenge has three difficulty levels.  Levels one and two unlock weapons and attachments while level three will unlock the privilege of being on the leaderboard.  Wow, I get to be on another leaderboard where I can be 349745th?  Sweet.  That's a great incentive to sit through this frustration.  The challenges are punishingly hard.  You really have to level up your guy a lot before you can do well in them.  That's not the stupid part though.  Brink is a game designed to be multiplayer co-op.  The challenges can be played with friends and are much easier if you do so.  But you don't unlock anything unless you play solo!  What the hell.

3. Multiplayer implementation:

Playing the game with other people is actually fun.  But getting the game set up right can be tricky.

Here is how the rest of the world does it:  Start a multilayer lobby, invite your friends, pick a map/game mode, the game then matches you with other parties and individuals, play the game.

Here is how Brink does it:  Pick a map/game mode,  load into a match, bring up the lobby menu, hit the "invite party" button, realize that you are already in a full game and your friends can't get in, back out to the main menu and try again.

4: Bots.  Oh sweet Jesus the stupid, stupid bots:

This isn't a problem with just Brink.  A lot of team based multiplayer games have this problem.  You need bots to fill in when you don't have other people.  Bot's are great at doing exactly what they are programed to do, which never includes strategy or thinking intuitively.  This is a problem in a "thinking man's FPS" as Brink likes to style itself.  FYI bots, if I'm sprinting towards an objective to get there before the enemy does and you are supposed to be escorting me, it might be a good idea if you sprinted too!  And I don't know, maybe get BETWEEN me and the enemy while I hack the door or whatever, you know, so I don't get shot?

Brink isn't a bad game necessarily but it's designers made some decisions that were questionable at best.  I do enjoy and applaud the character creation.  It's deep an well executed.  I was running into a bug though were my friends an I were seeing default models instead of our own for about half the match.  Even so, well done on the characters.

Buck Futter

I have been playing this level for about 2 hours. Or more. Time sort of slips away with this kind of thing. I know that when I started it was light out, but no longer. Fuck this level. Fuck This level too. I'v been trying to beat that one for a while now. Some say it's the hardest COD level ever. But maybe they don't know about Mile High Club because they havn't beaten the game? The video I put in the last post makes it look easy, but I guarantee you the person who made that spent a significant segment of their life force to create that. Not life TIME, life FORCE.

I've come soooo close to beating this level. I know it's possible and that only makes it worse . I'm going to have to quit for the night. I want to soldier on (like I did through War Room) but I've been playing this shit for about 5 hours strait now and I can feel my brain swelling. This is the kind of psychological "treatments" they give prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Just one goddamn achievement to go...


OH and did I mention the worst part? MY OWN FUCKING TEAMMATES KEEP SHOOTING ME IN THE BACK!!! LIKE 50% OF THE GODDAMN TIME! I walk down the first hallway and there is no one to shoot me from the front, it HAS to be them. AAARRRGGG!!!

Fuck.

FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK.



Fuck.

The Suck of Anchorage

So I finished Operation: Anchorage. It started off as a fast moving diversion, but the ride was too short and the scenery along the way wasn't that great. Things went down hill when I realized I had missed one of the intel items and upon walking all the way back to get it I realized it was in a section of the map I couldn't get back to. It let me go back to the long section right after it so that I wasted 10 min walking through it, but no, not the section I needed to get to. Why didn't they block off all the past sections so I wouldn't waste my time? Or better yet, not block off sections at all? There was no reason to do it in the first place. Anyway, being the tight-ass completionist that I am, I had to revert to a previous save and wasted yet another hour.

After the opening part of the Anchorage simulation you have all your guns taken from you and you have to requisition equipment kits as if you were playing Battlefield or something. Why??? Carrying a variety of weapons is one of the things that makes Fallout such a fun game! None of the loadouts includes the coolest weapon in O:A, the Gauss rifle. You can get the rifle but only if you pass a speech test which I failed because I was only level 4. Why would you make an expansion with only one interesting new weapon, and then make it really hard to get? I should get to play with it the whole time! That's what I paid five dollars for!!! Stupid.

The coolest part is that you put together a squad of AI companions from a list of the usual soldier archetypes, a mister gutsy, or a sentry bot. I picked the sentry bot. This is cool until you realize that Fallout 3's weakest point is its piss-poor companion AI. You have no control over your team. You tell them when to attack and they do it until the mission is done. They kill things well enough, almost too well. The game is so easy I could have gone without them; there are health and ammo refills all over the place.

It didn't actually get hard until the end when you fight the Chinese general.

**Kinda Spoiler Alert**

The last part of the simulation is a raid against the Chinese stronghold. You run in to this last area together with a few U.S. soldiers in power armor (who's presence makes the game even easier) and in front of you is this general and some elite Chinese soldiers. You exchange some meaningless dialog and then the general attacks you, head on, with a sword. Well hes going to have a hard time against my gun! No, it turns out he's got more hit points than a whole pack of deathclaws. So I start shooting him but I don't have a lot of action points so I'm forced to fire outside of V.A.T.S.. I realize I'm taking a lot of damage but it doesn't look like he's hitting me. Suddenly I'm dead. I figure that maybe the Chinese soldiers are shooting me but when I target them they are green (friendly). I finally realize that it's my own fucking men shooting me! As I attempt to shoot the general they keep running through my line of fire, and when they get hit they turn on me! What kind of STUPIDMOTHERFUCKINGSHIT is that!? WHY ARE THEY EVEN THERE!?!? The Chinese soldiers aren't shooting at me so its not like they are protecting me. The whole thing is just to create the illusion of a battle. Sorry, but the illusion was shattered when a hand full of frag grenades failed to scratch the tiny oriental man who's only protection was a cotton uniform!! In order to beat it I had to run in circles around the battlefield so that the general couldn't hit me, waiting for my AP to recover so I could shoot him in V.A.T.S., so as not to accidentally hit any of my own men. If I were to summarize the experience it would be: Not. Fun. At. All.

Basically Operation: Anchorage takes all the things that makes Fallout 3 great and trows them out while accentuating the few crappy parts. If you think about it, an expansion where you get to go back and fight one of the pivotal battles of the war that destroyed the world should have been Amazing! Instead it's just a big disappointment. Just to make up for it I blew up Megaton three or four times. Awesome. Every. Time.

I'm taking a Fallout break and going back to Final Fantasy 13 for a while.

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!

A letter to Infinity Ward

You sons of bitches are just the spawn of the very living devil you mother fuckers. I swear you’re a bunch of circle jerk baby killers. You slaughter them in their cribs and feast on their tender flesh. I’ll bet you even laugh at their mothers as you smear the blood all over your faces. You fascist shit suckers.

What the fuck made you think it would be a good idea to put a checkpoint RIGHT FUCKING IN FRONT OF A GROUP OF ENEMIES? Did you do it on purpose? Did you really feel it was necessary to force me to watch myself get gunned down over and over again and have to read some bullshit war quote every time?

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about here is the scenario. Call of Duty 2. Second mission of the second level. Veteran difficulty. I and my comrades (read: guys who run in front of my gun while I’m firing so I can be called a traitor and have to restart) have just liberated a station house in the middle of the train yard. As soon as I clear the top floor the enemy stages a counter attack. No problem! I just happen to be on the top floor with a sniper rifle. I’m happily picking off Krauts when suddenly I see checkpoint reached message in the top corner and about two seconds later I’m being shot in the back! I turn just in time to see four Germans who have ascended the staircase behind me pump me full of hot German lead.

So, first of all, WHERE IN THE HELL DID ALL MY GUYS GO?! Are they so fucktarded moron useless that they can’t hold a position for 60 fucking seconds? I don’t even see their bodies. They are just gone. Did they jump out? Did the Germans use a cloaking device and sneak past them? Did the thin third floor atmosphere cause them to pass out? And we just cleared the building! A building surround by open courtyard. So where did those soldiers even come from? Repel in from helicopters? Hide in a cardboard box?

So now every time I respawn I have about 3 seconds to turn around, throw a grenade and crouch behind a flimsy wooden table, shoot the guy who runs around the table, and then pick off any one else. I died about 40 or 50 times. Only twice did I… Wait I forgot one, I had to change weapons in those 3 seconds too because I got the fucking checkpoint holding a rifle instead of a machine gun and it only had ONE FUCKING ROUND LEFT! This means that I had to turn with the right stick, hit the b button to crouch, the right bumper to throw the grenade, and the y button to swap. Usually I died half way through the swap animation. As an aside, why is b crouch? Why isn’t it left stick down like many other games? That makes more sense since it’s movement oriented and frees up your right hand to do other stuff. Like STAY ALIVE. So anyway I managed to get past the initial 4 man onslaught only twice and when I did I found myself trapped on the top floor and when I moved over to the staircase I was immediately shot in the face buy the guy who was just waiting there with his gun pointed at the space where he knew my head would be. That wouldn’t have been such a bad challenge if I had a checkpoint right before THAT. Why couldn’t they have put it there? What did I even do to trigger that checkpoint? I all did was shoot a few guys, I wasn’t even moving! Did it trigger because some of the enemy made it to the building? That would be an example of BAD GAME DESIGN. You put a checkpoint somewhere safe. Somewhere the player can pause if he wants. Somewhere he is not going to get his head BLOWN OFF. You don’t put it right before the enemy kicks down my door, especially not while my BACK IS TURNED!

The checkpoint is designed so that the player doesn’t have to start the level all over again every time they die. This is a wonderful invention that some games don’t even have and for most of this game you do a good job with (this is especially important considering the difficulty level). All of that is ruined by this one experience. In this case the checkpoint did the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. I decided to just start the level over (I didn’t have much choice). As soon as I did I found that I no longer had the same weapons! Instead of the sniper rifle and machine gun I had from the previous mission I had a crappy iron sight rifle and a pistol. A fucking useless pistol! I guess you guys just had to have one more little laugh at my expense. Next time why don’t you just come to my house and stab me in the eye, it would be easier than making a game.

A letter to Valve: Addendum

Addendum:

OK, I figured it out and it wasn't as bad as I made it out to be but you guys are still jerks.

PS:

I'm so glad that the AI in Left 4 Dead is better than the idiot followers in this game. I'm happy when they die because then they aren't in my FREAKING WAY.

A letter to Valve

TO: Valve level designers
RE: Second turret stand off at Nova Prospekt

Dear Valve,

FUCK YOU. You are a sadistic bunch of inflamed assholes and I want you to die. Thank you very much for giving me three auto turrets to aid me in my defense (and by defense I mean futile attempt to survive your hopeless death trap). It's too bad that they are completely worthless. It's too bad that the endless waves of heavily armed soldiers can just run up to them and push them over. It's too bad that if I try to put them up again I am defenseless while I fumble with your awkward controls trying to get them upright. It's too bad that my own weapon runs out of ammo ridiculously fast even though I've worked painstakingly through the past ten or so levels to conserve every bullet I could, and it's nice that you've given me some ammo and extra health laying around but it sucks that I have to hack through a crate to get to it wasting precious time. I'm sick of your god damned game and it's boring endless stupid "puzzles" and cheap deaths and stupid characters. I hate that I have to pick off a shit-ton of little spider things to get to some action and once I get to some action its impossibly hard bull shit. FUCKING GOD DAMMED BULLSHIT!!!!

Love
-The Player