99.vikram
Tank
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2006
- Messages
- 4,321
- Reaction score
- 8
I wanted to write about some games that I've played recently when inspiration struck me like a whale penis to create this thread, where anyone can feel free to write a few lines about a game they played and loved/hated.
RULES:
1. Title in big letters.
2. No lists (pros & cons etc.)
3. No comparisons.
4. No number scores.
Let the reviewing action begin! I'll start -
Quake II
After playing Doom clones and Quake for a few years, I had become tired of FPSes until HL came along, so I never got the chance to play this back in the day. But I recently got this game and decided to give it a go. The game starts with a cutscene which was more than I expected considering Quake's plot was awful, even compared to Doom. The first few levels were a joy to play as I discovered one new weapon or enemy after another. I remember thinking at one point, this is really fun!
And then the monotony began to set in. The first problem is that almost all the textures are some dull shade of green or gray. Then there's the level design, which is ok for the most part, but when it sucks, it REALLY sucks - forcing you to backtrack like crazy or fight the same enemies in the same corridors over and over and over again (I'm looking at you, palace chapter). But all this pales in comparison to the final fight against the Makron, a creature that moves slow, fires slow and looks like a gay 14-foot robot.
There is a multiplayer component with many, many mods out there so you can play DM, TDM, CTF, Co-op or anything else you might want. But TBH the weapon balance is just a little off (Hyperblaster > All) and while Quake I DM may have a niche audience due to the small cramped maps and the awesomeness of the nail gun, Quake 3 Arena is just better than Q2DM in every single way.
Overall it was a nice history lesson, but if you're feeling nostalgic look for the demo, because the rest of the game is pretty much the same thing repeated 15 times.
System Shock 2
This game has had more praise heaped on it than any other shooter from that era, save HL. I would have tried System Shock 1, but I don't think I could enjoy a game that ugly (by today's standards). First impressions were pretty bad. About fifteen minutes into the game I realised something - it was ugly. All the pretty wall textures in the world couldn't hide the fact that those models were butt ugly. But about an hour later, I was hooked. I was never scared of anything in the game like people said they were, but I was dying to know all about Xerxes, SHODAN and the Many. The Janice Polito twist was particularly awesome. Plus I wanted that cool cybernetic upgrade that I couldn't afford yet, so I would scour each deck searching for hidden cybermodules and nanites.
But while the key finding, "leveling up", inventory management and hiding from mutants was good fun, the actual gunplay itself was quite bad. You have an uninteresting selection of weapons which jam every few minutes, with an implementation of recoil that's a little annoying. Ammo is very rare. And when you finally score a kill, it's not at all satisfying. The rest of the game oozes quality though, and for this reason I think it's worthy of the praise it gets.
It's not a very good shooter, but overall it's a great game in which guns are secondary to story and atmosphere.
NOTE: The final cutscene is a good example of why an FPS protagonist should never talk.
Ascendancy
I found this gem at abandonia.com and decided to try it out based on what was written there (along with the Antagonizer AI patch). It reminded me of Master of Orion, which I used to enjoy. I like 4X Sci-fi games as a rule (fantasy can GTFO), so I immediately fell in love with this game - a choice of 26 different races (many of which are very similar), an expansive research tree, a 3D map of solar systems and galaxies, and spaceship design & combat! This was everything I wished MoO could be and more!
So how was my first experience? Awesome. The game comes with a neat tutorial so you can skip the usual trial and error. And most of it is pretty intuitive anyway. It has a simple resource management scheme and when you build a ship or colonize a planet, you really feel like you've achieved something tangible. You can see ships moving around in 3D (each species has a different looking ship) and it feels cool when you imagine a star system with three colonized planets and two starships in it, ready to strike with Fourier missiles and whatnot. A little further into the game and I had made my first allies and enemies. The diplomacy AI is good, though the other factions do tend to gang up on the leading species. The enemy AI is patchy in combat, but it's not really bad. One thing I liked was the number of choices you had - retake a planet or destroy it? Use the nearest ship or wait for reinforcements to arrive through a starlane? Use regular weapons or the instakill one-time-only superweapon? Or just build a lot of ships and slowly stockpile them in a small planet's orbit? The joy of seeing all your ships arriving in an enemy system almost simultaneously to completely surprise the enemy is unparalleled.
There are flaws, however. There is no multiplayer, the AI is a little easy for seasoned Civ players and there is a major (game breaking?) flaw - the number of ships you can have is limited by the number of stars you control. This means that you win everything or you lose everything - there's no in between. One of your ships will pop out of existence if you lose just one planet in a system having four. But perhaps making the stakes higher is a good thing?
Try out this game if you haven't already. Make sure to download the Antagonizer patch so that the AI actually works. Even if it's not very difficult, you'll enjoy the experience of building a space empire in the Ascendancy universe.
And someone should DEFINITELY remake this game with multiplayer. :E
RULES:
1. Title in big letters.
2. No lists (pros & cons etc.)
3. No comparisons.
4. No number scores.
Let the reviewing action begin! I'll start -
Quake II
After playing Doom clones and Quake for a few years, I had become tired of FPSes until HL came along, so I never got the chance to play this back in the day. But I recently got this game and decided to give it a go. The game starts with a cutscene which was more than I expected considering Quake's plot was awful, even compared to Doom. The first few levels were a joy to play as I discovered one new weapon or enemy after another. I remember thinking at one point, this is really fun!
And then the monotony began to set in. The first problem is that almost all the textures are some dull shade of green or gray. Then there's the level design, which is ok for the most part, but when it sucks, it REALLY sucks - forcing you to backtrack like crazy or fight the same enemies in the same corridors over and over and over again (I'm looking at you, palace chapter). But all this pales in comparison to the final fight against the Makron, a creature that moves slow, fires slow and looks like a gay 14-foot robot.
There is a multiplayer component with many, many mods out there so you can play DM, TDM, CTF, Co-op or anything else you might want. But TBH the weapon balance is just a little off (Hyperblaster > All) and while Quake I DM may have a niche audience due to the small cramped maps and the awesomeness of the nail gun, Quake 3 Arena is just better than Q2DM in every single way.
Overall it was a nice history lesson, but if you're feeling nostalgic look for the demo, because the rest of the game is pretty much the same thing repeated 15 times.
System Shock 2
This game has had more praise heaped on it than any other shooter from that era, save HL. I would have tried System Shock 1, but I don't think I could enjoy a game that ugly (by today's standards). First impressions were pretty bad. About fifteen minutes into the game I realised something - it was ugly. All the pretty wall textures in the world couldn't hide the fact that those models were butt ugly. But about an hour later, I was hooked. I was never scared of anything in the game like people said they were, but I was dying to know all about Xerxes, SHODAN and the Many. The Janice Polito twist was particularly awesome. Plus I wanted that cool cybernetic upgrade that I couldn't afford yet, so I would scour each deck searching for hidden cybermodules and nanites.
But while the key finding, "leveling up", inventory management and hiding from mutants was good fun, the actual gunplay itself was quite bad. You have an uninteresting selection of weapons which jam every few minutes, with an implementation of recoil that's a little annoying. Ammo is very rare. And when you finally score a kill, it's not at all satisfying. The rest of the game oozes quality though, and for this reason I think it's worthy of the praise it gets.
It's not a very good shooter, but overall it's a great game in which guns are secondary to story and atmosphere.
NOTE: The final cutscene is a good example of why an FPS protagonist should never talk.
Ascendancy
I found this gem at abandonia.com and decided to try it out based on what was written there (along with the Antagonizer AI patch). It reminded me of Master of Orion, which I used to enjoy. I like 4X Sci-fi games as a rule (fantasy can GTFO), so I immediately fell in love with this game - a choice of 26 different races (many of which are very similar), an expansive research tree, a 3D map of solar systems and galaxies, and spaceship design & combat! This was everything I wished MoO could be and more!
So how was my first experience? Awesome. The game comes with a neat tutorial so you can skip the usual trial and error. And most of it is pretty intuitive anyway. It has a simple resource management scheme and when you build a ship or colonize a planet, you really feel like you've achieved something tangible. You can see ships moving around in 3D (each species has a different looking ship) and it feels cool when you imagine a star system with three colonized planets and two starships in it, ready to strike with Fourier missiles and whatnot. A little further into the game and I had made my first allies and enemies. The diplomacy AI is good, though the other factions do tend to gang up on the leading species. The enemy AI is patchy in combat, but it's not really bad. One thing I liked was the number of choices you had - retake a planet or destroy it? Use the nearest ship or wait for reinforcements to arrive through a starlane? Use regular weapons or the instakill one-time-only superweapon? Or just build a lot of ships and slowly stockpile them in a small planet's orbit? The joy of seeing all your ships arriving in an enemy system almost simultaneously to completely surprise the enemy is unparalleled.
There are flaws, however. There is no multiplayer, the AI is a little easy for seasoned Civ players and there is a major (game breaking?) flaw - the number of ships you can have is limited by the number of stars you control. This means that you win everything or you lose everything - there's no in between. One of your ships will pop out of existence if you lose just one planet in a system having four. But perhaps making the stakes higher is a good thing?
Try out this game if you haven't already. Make sure to download the Antagonizer patch so that the AI actually works. Even if it's not very difficult, you'll enjoy the experience of building a space empire in the Ascendancy universe.
And someone should DEFINITELY remake this game with multiplayer. :E
