December Recap part 2

I'm not going to write a full review of Black Ops. It's sold a bajillion copies and it's a great game. This you already know. I do want to talk about it though because a bajillion-selling game needs to be spoken of, the way an exploding gas main or nude co-worker needs to be spoken of. The situation demands commentary.

First I'd like to praise the campaign's story. It's not often I want to keep playing a game to find out what happens, and it's certainly rare for an FPS. It's not that Black Ops wasn't predictable. I had an inkling of the outcome and I wasn't far off. I think I wanted to keep playing to find out if my theory was right. The campaign itself had some bumpy spots where fun gave way to frustration but for the most part I enjoyed it.

I was disappointed to hear that titles and emblems would not be unlocked in multiplayer via the completion of challenges. One of the things I liked most about MW2 was that not only could you customize your title but you got those titles by feats of awesomeness. In this way your title/emblem was both an expression of your personality and a way to show off what you'd accomplished. My title/emblem combined the following:


"Kill every member of the enemy team without dying (at least 4 enemies)."

with


"Kill an enemy, Pick up his weapon, then kill him again with his own weapon."

I felt that was a combination that both spoke of who I was and what I was capable of. While I was disappointed that you would be able to have whatever you wanted I was excited that emblems would be custom creations using a layer system similar to Forza's. Once I unlocked the emblem feature I went strait to work to create my dream emblem... only to find out how limited it was. You only have 12 layers, the color pallet is shallow, you have to buy layers AND shapes, and shapes cannot be skewed or warped, only turned and resized. Even as limited as it is it's fun to create emblems, and there is a prestige element in that you have to pay for everything, and shapes are unlocked by level a little bit at a time. So you can't have a bitch'n emblem without spending some time in the game. I've seen some pretty impressive emblems, and I'm going to try to take some pictures and post them here.

Gun Game. The wager match thing is a cool idea but it's overshadowed by the best of its 4 gametypes, gun game. Holy crap this game is fun. It's got the raw feel of bare bones deathmatch but you get to use 20 different guns in one match (assuming you do well)! There is no thrill greater than scoring that final tricky kill with the ballistic knife. There is no agony like the sting of someone's backstab sending you back to the crossbow at the last second. The first time it happened to me I howled like a grieving mother over the corpse of her child. It was... bone chilling, unreal, amazing.

Also, glitchy networking. Fix it.

Finally, how cool is it that you can play with the old DOS-esq computer? It has ZORK!

cd C:FUN

Holiday 2010

I'm getting Black Ops for Christmas. That has been prearranged with my wife. For adults most of the magic is lost from the Christmas experience. If I were a child I would "ask Santa" and then spend December with my fingers crossed. You can drop "subtle" hints as an adult, but I don't have the patients for that. If by some chance she doesn't get it for me I'll just go buy it myself, so either way I'll be playing it before the new year. Yay Christmas.

Until then I'm trying to prestige a second time in MW2. I seem to be leveling up crazy fast as compared to my first time though. less than two months and I'm lvl38. It took me 11 months to Prestige the first time.

The Prestige

Last week I finally reached Prestige in MW2. It felt good to finally get there. My rise through the ranks since then seems to be going much faster than it did the first time. I'd like to think I'm better at the game than I was 11 months ago, but I'm pretty sure the enlisted levels require a lot less XP. We'll see haw fast I can get to Prestige 2.

My wife asked me if I wanted a game for Christmas and I told her I wanted CoD Black Ops. I don't usually think of myself as a primarily FPS player by it's the only new game I'm genuinely excited about. Fallout New Vegas should be a great game, but I still have 2 expansions for Fallout 3 to get through so I won't be playing F:NV anytime soon. I'm going to try really hard not to buy any new games for the rest of the year, partially to save money but mostly because I have a ton of great games I haven't given enough attention to.

Next up: Even more Borderlands. I'm lvl 38 and just started playthrough two. The new DLC bumps the level cap to 70... time to roll up my sleeves.

Borderlands

I had two days off this week. In those two days I logged about 16 hours on Borderlands. Christ that game just sucks time like a black hole. I feel like I should pack an over-night and feed the cats before I start playing. Hella good fun though. Will and JT accompanied me for a good part of it. I havn't touched the DLC yet. I can't wait to play it more. I got the shakes baby, daddy's got the shakes baaad!

Planning a ho-down for some time this weekend. If I can get enough people I want to have one last Modern Warfare 2 party before the world forgets about it and gets involved with whatever the holiday lineup has to offer. If I can't get enough people then maybe we can get a fourth for Borderlands. If nobody wants to play with me at all then I'll sulk and read a book or something. Who I am kidding, I've got way to much single player crap to finish up to waste time on books! Silly books. And their pages. Silly.

Stuff that's not Final Fantasy

Taking a break from Final Fantasy this week. I've been playing a few rounds of Modern Warfare 2 each morning when I get home from work. I feel like I'm getting better at it. I play mostly free for all deathmatch and I manage to get a "kill-cam" win about once a session now. It may sound noobish to get excited about such things but the feeling of improvement is one of the best feelings a human being can have and it's one that "1337" players seldom get to enjoy. I've found tremendous success with the care package and sentry gun kill counts. Using a care package as camping bait is an old strategy but I like the twist of planting a sentry gun and letting it do my camping for me. The 4 and 5 kills necessary to get these makes it easy to do.

I had to go to the doctor the other day which required me to drive to a part of town with a Play N Trade nearby. Proximity to a Play N Trade almost guarantees a purchase. I went in looking for SNES or PS1 games as usual but ended up with copies of KOTOR2 and Twilight Princess in my hands. KOTOR2 was less expensive but I've been eyeing the Zelda game for few years now. Damn Gamecube games are still hella expensive for their age but you know you're buying quality. Plus if they haven't gone down in price buy now they're not going to later, or get any easier to find. Although I'm not likely to play through the whole game (much like Metroid Prime) I'm glad I grabbed it and now I'm considering TLoZ: The Wind Waker and Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door to round out my GC collection.

...OK and Starfox Assault. But that's it!

So I had a scare the other day. I was tidying up and accidentally dropped my wife's 14 year old Game Boy Pocket. I guess the glue had worn out because the plastic shield over the LDC screen popped right off. There was a moment of panic but it turned on just fine. A light application of modeling glue and a few hours later the shield was back in place. My Spring cleaning endeavors also resulted in me moving my SNES and old 13" TV into the office. This opened up a lot of space on my dresser which is cool because I had some framed photos I needed to find a place for. I had to store all my modeling supplies to make room for the SNES and TV but I play way more video games than I do modeling.

Lastly I mentioned Brink in a previous post after seeing it at PAX last year. I saw the most recent videos for it yesterday and it looks like it's going to be a fantastic game. I have a feeling I'll be doing some campaigning among my friends come fall to get them to buy it.

A Public Service Announcement

::Attention::

If you are a dirty redneck slut and you are at a party stoned out of your mind, please do not randomly bite me or my friends. Seriously, it will just work out better for everyone if you don't.

Great, now that we've got that out of the way I can tell you about the weekend, or rather three weekends ago. Last weekend contained very little video game time. It did contain a trip to Texas, a last minute wedding, being awake for 56 strait hours, and a strange series of events which prompted me to make the above statement. And that's all we need to say about that weekend.

Three weekends ago I had the pleasure of driving up to my old home town in northern Virginia to see some old friends and play some old games. Er, new games. When I arrived the host (who I shall call "David") was busy pulling a new TV out of the box. This modest 46" was going to go in his bedroom eventually, but for the festivities we set it up on his kitchen table. In the dining room (or what was intended to be a dining room) there was a second set-up. Will brought a projector from work and aimed it at the blank wall. The host had his own not-so-modest TV in the living room and Will's little brother had yet another spare TV next to him. We all had 360s and the 5 of us (my other friend who I shall call "Vlad" was there but systemless) spent the next 48 hours playing all sorts of shit. Highlights included Modern Warfare 2 (which is great when you have everyone in the same room), a rousing 4 player run through I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT, and a 2 hour push into Gears of War 2's horde mode.

I also found time to play a little Forza 2 and over the course of those sessions I finally reached career level 50. So that was cool. Got to try out the first 15 or so minutes of Bioshock 2. It seemed like a great game but considering I've spent the same amount of time with its predecessor I wasn't inspired to go out and grab a copy. I did however pick up Red Faction Guerrilla, which is hella fun. It has some issues no doubt but played about 15 hours of it over 2 days so they must be doing something right. I'll put up an Impressions post about it later.

Needless to say that weekend kicked ass despite the drive and sleep deprivation, which is becoming old hat for me at this point. I'll try to throw up some pictures once I figure out how to pull them off my phone.

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...