I'm really starting to hate games with mandatory Co-Op. Being an adult gamer in a rural part of the country, I have no IRL friends that play video games. They're all out hunting wildlife or fixing cars or something. So when it comes to games like Left 4 Dead and the newly released Alien Swarm, I'm stuck with playing with total strangers. Unfortunately for me, most total strangers are also total idiots.
There's always the guy who wants to rush ahead of everyone else. Then when he inevitably gets killed he accuses the rest of the group of being the bad players. Then there's the griefer. Forget shooting the aliens or zombies, he just wants to shoot teammates! When shooting becomes boring he resorts to things like wasting powerups and welding teammates into rooms. A rarer form of idiot is the mastermind. He is the leader nobody voted for, and refuses to play unless everyone follows his (usually bad) instructions. Listen mastermind, all 4 people in Alien Swarm do not need to pick the ammo pack for their secondary piece of equipment to be able to beat the first mission on easy difficulty. Go ahead and kick me then.
Since Alien Swarm came out 3 days ago, I've played about 8 games on it. Only one of those games actually had people in it that were actually interested in working together to finish the mission, and it was lots of fun. The other 7 games I just wanted to go back to playing something with single player, or something where I can play against these idiots instead of with them.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
MLB 2K10
I have never been a fan of sports games. Realistic sports games, anyway, I have always liked arcadey games like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. But when Gamestop was having a sale at its download store for $3 for a 1-month old game, MLB 2k10 by 2K Sports, it was hard to pass up. I played it and... it sucked. It was impossible to play with mouse and keyboard. With a controller, it still sucked, because the game uses its own button naming conventions: A, B, C, D. Is there even a somewhat common game controller that uses those letters for its buttons? My saitek uses numbers. Every time the game said to press A I had to remember that it really meant 3, B was 4, C was 1, and D was 2. Give me a break! Also, the game would give me "bad gesture" on my pitches no matter what I did with my control stick.
Three months later (last week) I invested in an Xbox 360 controller for my PC. As it turns out, my saitek controller sucked. The bad gestures went away immediately. The buttons in the game menus are still named weird, but at least A and B are in the right places. All I have to remember now is X = C and Y = D. The game suddenly wasn't so bad. It was worth the $3, at least.
The most impressive part of the game for me isn't the pitching or the batting (at which I am HORRIBLE), it's the announcers. It sounds like you're actually watching a game on TV. The way they talk about individual players is really cool. I imagine that they have a bunch of recorded statements and the game just fills in the correct player's name at the right place, but it sounds so natural that it makes me wonder sometimes if they really did make full statements about so many players instead of just having the game fill in the blanks. At one point in a game I managed to hit 2 homeruns in a row, and they even said something like "the pitcher looks really distraught now, after those two consecutive home runs" and they mentioned my feat again later in the game.
I played a game on July 4th and not only did a "Happy 4th of July!" graphic appear on the screen next to the scoreboard, but the announcers even mentioned it being a "special 4th of July exhibition game." I know this isn't a new thing, as I've seen it before (You Don't Know Jack: The Ride takes it as far as making fun of you for what time of the day you are playing), but it was a nice surprise nonetheless.
They must have put a lot of effort into the announcers in this game, and I'm truly impressed. I'm even considering getting 2K11 for full price if/when it comes to PC next year.
Three months later (last week) I invested in an Xbox 360 controller for my PC. As it turns out, my saitek controller sucked. The bad gestures went away immediately. The buttons in the game menus are still named weird, but at least A and B are in the right places. All I have to remember now is X = C and Y = D. The game suddenly wasn't so bad. It was worth the $3, at least.
The most impressive part of the game for me isn't the pitching or the batting (at which I am HORRIBLE), it's the announcers. It sounds like you're actually watching a game on TV. The way they talk about individual players is really cool. I imagine that they have a bunch of recorded statements and the game just fills in the correct player's name at the right place, but it sounds so natural that it makes me wonder sometimes if they really did make full statements about so many players instead of just having the game fill in the blanks. At one point in a game I managed to hit 2 homeruns in a row, and they even said something like "the pitcher looks really distraught now, after those two consecutive home runs" and they mentioned my feat again later in the game.
I played a game on July 4th and not only did a "Happy 4th of July!" graphic appear on the screen next to the scoreboard, but the announcers even mentioned it being a "special 4th of July exhibition game." I know this isn't a new thing, as I've seen it before (You Don't Know Jack: The Ride takes it as far as making fun of you for what time of the day you are playing), but it was a nice surprise nonetheless.
They must have put a lot of effort into the announcers in this game, and I'm truly impressed. I'm even considering getting 2K11 for full price if/when it comes to PC next year.
The DLC Scam
The first paid DLC ("downloadable content") I heard of was the infamous Horse Armor for Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It cost $2.50 and all it did was, as the name says, put armor on your horse. It was purely cosmetic. My reaction was the same as most of the other gamers: Who would pay for that crap?
Plenty of people, as it turns out. And thus the DLC revolution began. Now you nearly never see a game released that doesn't have some paid add-on content released along with it. Why are people buying this stuff?
First of all, the term "DLC" is all wrong. I've been able to download content for PC games for ages, in the forms of patches and mods. But that's not DLC, you see, because DLC you have to pay for. They should call it pay-to-unlock content, because it's not even "downloadable" most of the time. They just put the DLC on the disc and you have to pay to unlock it. Which of course means that the extra content is actually a part of the finished game! They just decided to lock it and charge extra for it before they shipped the game out.
Naming conventions aside, I'm not a fan of DLC because of the way most of it integrates into games. A recent game, Mass Effect 2, has DLC that adds a new character to the game. The DLC integrates itself into the middle of the storyline; it's not a continuation of the story. Since I had already finished the game, I had no use for such DLC. If instead I was a new player, I wouldn't want to immediately pay extra to add on to the game I just bought. I would be more concerned with the game being worth what I paid in the first place. I guess it's aimed at people who are halfway through the game? I don't know. Fallout 3 DLC was the same way, I had already finished the game and was disappointed by the ending before any of it even came out.
DLC also needs to be worth the cost. Modern Warfare 2's DLC is a huge disappointment in this area. $15 for 5 maps, only 3 of which are new; the other 2 are recycled from the first Modern Warfare game. Luckily there are some great developers out there who still release stuff like new maps for free.
The only DLC that makes sense to me is stuff like the music store in the Rock Band series. It doesn't matter if you're a beginner, an expert, or even if you have Rock Band 1, 2, or both. If you like a song, you can pay 2 bucks to be able to play it. When Rock Band 3 comes out, I'll be able to play it still. And it's the only DLC I have ever purchased so far.
You know what I like? Expansion packs. I buy the crap out of expansion packs. They have a clear purpose and a clear audience: they are for people who have finished the base game, because they take place after the base game. None of this "pay $5 to add a brand new level 10 mission to the game! Oh, you're level 50 already? Time to restart to see this new stuff! After you pay, of course!"
Plenty of people, as it turns out. And thus the DLC revolution began. Now you nearly never see a game released that doesn't have some paid add-on content released along with it. Why are people buying this stuff?
First of all, the term "DLC" is all wrong. I've been able to download content for PC games for ages, in the forms of patches and mods. But that's not DLC, you see, because DLC you have to pay for. They should call it pay-to-unlock content, because it's not even "downloadable" most of the time. They just put the DLC on the disc and you have to pay to unlock it. Which of course means that the extra content is actually a part of the finished game! They just decided to lock it and charge extra for it before they shipped the game out.
Naming conventions aside, I'm not a fan of DLC because of the way most of it integrates into games. A recent game, Mass Effect 2, has DLC that adds a new character to the game. The DLC integrates itself into the middle of the storyline; it's not a continuation of the story. Since I had already finished the game, I had no use for such DLC. If instead I was a new player, I wouldn't want to immediately pay extra to add on to the game I just bought. I would be more concerned with the game being worth what I paid in the first place. I guess it's aimed at people who are halfway through the game? I don't know. Fallout 3 DLC was the same way, I had already finished the game and was disappointed by the ending before any of it even came out.
DLC also needs to be worth the cost. Modern Warfare 2's DLC is a huge disappointment in this area. $15 for 5 maps, only 3 of which are new; the other 2 are recycled from the first Modern Warfare game. Luckily there are some great developers out there who still release stuff like new maps for free.
The only DLC that makes sense to me is stuff like the music store in the Rock Band series. It doesn't matter if you're a beginner, an expert, or even if you have Rock Band 1, 2, or both. If you like a song, you can pay 2 bucks to be able to play it. When Rock Band 3 comes out, I'll be able to play it still. And it's the only DLC I have ever purchased so far.
You know what I like? Expansion packs. I buy the crap out of expansion packs. They have a clear purpose and a clear audience: they are for people who have finished the base game, because they take place after the base game. None of this "pay $5 to add a brand new level 10 mission to the game! Oh, you're level 50 already? Time to restart to see this new stuff! After you pay, of course!"
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)