Monday, June 06, 2011

Varying Degrees of Assessment

E3 is this week.  There's going to be a lot of cool announcements, which is a double-edged sword.  It's good because it gets us excited for a bunch of new games coming out.  It's bad because these new games will take years and years to be released.  On this blog, I rarely write about games that aren't released yet.  And I'm not about to start now!

Ok, first let's get Hunted out of the way.  There is one aspect of this game that everyone is hating on, and it is the one area of the game where I will stick up for it.  To all those saying the graphics are shit and that the game looks like shit:  Go get your fucking eyes checked, you blind wombat.  Or perhaps this is another case of the human race's epidemic of being self-entitled cunts?  Is that it?  In that case:  News-flash, you self-entitled cunt, not every game is Crysis 2.

Every other complaint you can have.  The game is rubbish.  It came this close || to being excellent, but it was not to be.  Quite honestly, there is only ONE thing that needs to be different, and all the other annoyances would be quite tolerable:  It needs to be fucking easier!  Bad guys should not fucking two-shot you on casual difficulty.  What the devs were thinking here is beyond me.  Obviously they weren't thinking at all.

While on that topic, let me make an observation here about co-op in a game.  Something that I think devs seem to not realize is that the co-op version/portion of a game needs to be approached quite differently from the single-player version/portion.  When you're playing a co-op game with a partner, it's typically going to fall into one of these three categories:

1. Your partner is a good friend of yours, and you'll be doing a lot of chatting, joking, and tomfoolery while you play the game.

2. Your partner is actually your partner, and you'll be doing a lot of chatting, joking, and flirting while you play the game.

3. Your partner is a complete stranger, and there will be a learning curve as you adjust to each others' play-style.

No matter which one of these you are, your mental capacity while playing the game is quite different than if you were playing it by yourself.  You won't be as focused, and you won't be concentrating AS MUCH on actually playing the game.  As a result, making the co-op version as difficult (or moreso) than the single-player version is just about the stupidest mistake you could possibly make.  Why does no one else realize this?

It's not like raiding at all.  With raiding (or clan based multi-player for that matter), you are a group of GAMERS who are playing together BECAUSE OF THE GAME.  Co-op games are just the opposite -- it's only TWO people, and rarely do clans play co-op games (because why would you need a clan for that?)

Valve did it correctly with Portal 2.  The co-op campaign differed from the single-player campaign in all the correct ways:

1.  It had more silly, irreverent humor.

2.  It was easier.
3.  It never made you feel like one of you was more important that the other (except GLaDOS' humorous attempts to do so, which was simply part of #1).

In any case, sadly, I would not recommend Hunted to anyone.

In more positive gaming news, I'm nearly finished in my second play-through of Fallout: New Vegas, my goal being to reach the end so that I can try out the two DLC packs that I have purchased.  I could obviously check them out right now if I wanted to, but I simply had the urge to play through the entire game again.  I was just in a Fallout kind of mood.  I'm certainly glad I did, because just about every main questline is ending differently for me this time around.

I also discovered this weird bunker out in the middle of Asscrack Nowhere, and it was full of dead people.  I have a quest pointing me to that bunker, but I can't figure out why.  I look forward to exploring that in a bit more detail later.

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