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 FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2008 8:03 am |
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• Feeling Wrath over Wrath of the Lich King? November 13 • Barry says "Resist Resistance 2" November 10 • Missing Gamer Found Dead November 6 • Fallout over Fallout 3 November 5 • Little Big Planet Reviewed! November 4 |
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• Big Game Hunter: "Gears of War 2" November 17 • Big Game Hunter:"Fracture" October 13 • Microsoft aims to woo Japanese gamers to Xbox October 12 • Big Game Hunter: "Pure" October 6 • Big game hunter "Crysis: Warhead" September 29 |
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World of Warcraft’s long awaited Wrath of the Lich King has finally dropped, and fans are off and fuming. WotLK is the latest expansion in the WoW universe, taking place in the continent of Northrend and includes the newly minted hero class: the Death Knight. Of course everyone flooded their local retail center to purchase the expansion only to get the game home and find that – shockingly – that they really couldn’t play the game due to lag, bugs, and sudden server overpopulation. To all you cats and kittens out there that have yet to partake of this newest timesink, let me drop some much needed clarity on this issue. No game is one hundred percent when it drops. None. I’ve been playing Fallout 3 since it came out and while it’s a great game, the bugs and glitches make for some tedious game play – and keep in mind that’s not even an MMO. When Warhammer Online came out there were – and still are – bugs aplenty. Consider the insanity that is a newly minted MMO or expansion that finally drops upon our wearied brow. Sure, it may have gone “gold” a month ago while they start pressing disks but that doesn’t mean bantha poo-doo. That just means the majority of the code is golden; minor glitches and bugs will be ironed out in forthcoming updates. That problem is magnified with a game like WoW – is a victim of its own popularity. Today, right now as you – gentle reader – traverse this blog and my own brand of nerd narcissism millions of WoW players are trying to get their grind on. Right now. That means long realm ques. That means lag and not just any old lag will do in this situation. I mean laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag. You’ll be lucky to be able to even log on, much less down a mob. A friend of mine at another site jumped on and tried to check out Northrend ASAP, only to have his game CTD – or “crash to desktop” for the uninitiated – when he tried to take the boat from Minithel Harbor to the Great White North. And that’s just the technical rubbish. What about resource camping? Mob ninja’s, and of course everyone’s favorite general chat spamming of “ZOMG COME JOIN MEH GUILD IT IS TEH GREATESTZORZ!!1!!!1!ONE!!1!” It’s enough to make a grown man cry. Or at least punch a Murlock. I’ll be checking out WotLK, but a month from now and if you’re smart you’ll do the same thing. Let some of the bugs get fixed, let some of the lamers and spammers thin out and then go and roll the new content – or at least give it the Pepsi challenge. Oh, and do yourself a favor and keep far, far away from the collectors edition of WotLK. This box set is so bad it gave me a facial tick. So be warned: you try to play WotLK right now and the only think that you’ll be beating up will be your own will to live. And now a video that has absolutely nothing to do with video games but will make you feel better after spending money on a game you can't play right now. Huzzah! ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment NEW!
As I roll through the post-apocalyptic frag fest that is Fallout 3, I have become cut off from the world. So much so that the basic hygienic requirements for human interaction have been neglected – children now run from me and animals regularly growl as I tread past. So deep was I in my happy little world I was shocked – shocked I say! – to find out that there had been actual releases in the last week and a half. Resistance 2 and Gears of War 2, to be precise, had come and landed at my feet. I will be reviewing GoW 2 online and in the paper. Mr. Rolapp took Resistance 2 in hand and beat it. Mercilessly. I mention Barry because he’s written a review of Resistance 2 that will fly in the face of most video game journalists you’ll read out there. That shouldn’t be anything new if you are a Big Game Hunter reader – we regularly punish drivel, berate malcontents, and rely on the temperament of our better angels to remain objective enough to see the job done. But mostly we suffer from "Grumpy Gamer Syndrome." In video game journalism, this is a rarity. While the Age of Payola may be behind us in the video game industry, the simple fact is that the majority of websites that are dedicated to video games are in fact making money by selling ads of the very games their supposed to review. This results in tension between the editorial content and the advertisers, producing scores that are – shall we say – reciprocal. Ergo, games like the flatly idiotic Kane and Lynch can get away with scores such as 8.0 – mostly because parent company Eidos bought hundreds of thousands of dollars to advertise on those websites. Here at BGH, we’re fanboys – and girls – who love the culture and devour whatever new morsel comes across our collective radar. While we may, in turn, be impartial to some games because A) our slavish devotion clouds our judgment or B) because said games have garnered enough street cred to at least earn a modicum of respect in the community. What we don’t do, and never shall, will let our objectivity be tarnished by lesser mortals. What you read here is one hundred percent, unequivocally, pure editorial content that has not been sullied by advertising incentives or free swag (not that we ever get any). “Wow this is more of that crazy, new-fangled serious talk Justin! Some game blog!” Yes, I know. I just thought you would like to know that we are honestly trying to insert actual journalism in games journalism. Heaven forbid. ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment NEW!
It’s not often I get serious on this blog, so I’ll beg your indulgence just this once if I may. On Oct. 13, 15-year-old Brandon Crisp had a fight with his parents. The teen from Barrie, Ontario, had gotten into an argument with his mother and father concerning the amount of time he spent playing Call of Duty 4 online after his Xbox 360 was taken away. Crisp ran away that night, taking with him a few meager possessions. His disappearance triggered a nation-wide search that involved more than 1,600 volunteers and even Microsoft offered a $25,000 for information leading to his safe return. In the end, it was too late. ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment NEW!
Fallout over Fallout 3 Fallout 3 is not a first person shooter. While my “interwebz” have been on hiatus for a week or so, I’ve been forced to give up my usual rotation of online games: Team Fortress 2, Warhammer Online, PoxNora, Wrath of the Lich King Beta – which has given me the opportunity to enjoy the irradiated wonder that is Fallout 3. Enjoy it and, at times, revile it. Bethesda has created a game that is a faithful adaptation of the game, a spiritual successor if you will of the Black Isle series. It’s been called an RPG FPS. I would argue that it is the former and not the latter. Here’s why. First, an FPS considers several elements when creating a universe for believable combat – whether you are combating mutants or pesky North Korean soldiers. While post-nuclear Washington D.C. certainly delivers with a bleak, survivalist tone; but among the destroyed buildings use of cover is almost non-existent unless you duck into a doorway or behind a partially demolished wall. Most FPS games utilize cover and using the “Q” and “E” buttons on the PC you are able to lean from cover and shoot. In Fallout 3, not so much. Often enough you are forced to trade fire down a hallway with a mob, your eyes flitting from your health bar to the mobs to see who will win the fight. While this basically encapsulates most shooters, I can’t help but think it was a major oversight to combat to not include a better cover system. The second problem I have is with the Vault Assisted Targeting System, or VATS. When activating VATS you essentially pause the game, select a section of the mob for concentrated punishment, and let fly depending on how many action points you have accumulated. Damage is done according to distance, weapon DPS, weapons proficiency – melee, heavy weapons, small arms and energy weapons – and the mobs armor. The difference in combat with VATS and vanilla FPS combat is huge. Using action points, you can only fire so many times but with the law of averages, you will be almost guaranteed a hit – a hit in a specific area of the mob. Tag the mob in the leg and cripple it and it won’t be able to chase you as fast. Cripple and arm and its aim will be off. Plus – and this is important in a game where survival literally means how many bullets you have in a magazine – ammo conservation in VATS is far superior. Third – and this has been driving me absolutely up a tree… I mean gnashing of teeth frustrated – is the fact that while I can see the irradiated wasteland as far as the eye can see, the game only rendered a mob when it is practically on top of you. “But Justin, you must be playing this on a Commodore 64! Lrn2upgradenubkkthx!” Not so much, actually. I have a high-end PC with dual-SLI graphics cards and can run Crysis at max setting just fine – yet mobs in Fallout 3 do not materialize until they are five to 10 yards away from me. Sure, they can shoot at me from much farther away, and I see this hail of bullets coming at me and I don’t even know where it’s coming from. Overly harsh critique? Maybe. I would argue that Fallout 3 is an RPG first and a FPS second. But it seems to me lately that my experience with FPS games lately has been lacking. Even FarCry 2 – which was supposed to be a transcendent FPS experience – was lacking when it came to enemy AI, making the game slightly comical. Fallout 3 is a great RPG, and I’ll recommend this game to anyone who asks. I just wish it was a better FPS. ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment NEW!
For quite some time Sony and developer Media Molecule have been promising an original platforming game that would redefine the genre. Little Big Planet definitely lives up to that promise and more importantly, the hype. The game starts off introducing you to the dream world that is Little Big Planet and to the unfortunately named protagonist of the game, Sackboy. Really, the puns and innuendos write themselves here. Once you gotten through decorating your character and marveling at the already impressive art and textures, you are instructed on how to begin playing the game by the narrator’s soothing and somewhat snarky British accent. Little Big Planets tagline reads “Play. Create. Share.” and that is how it introduces you to the different aspects of the game. At first your only option is to play the story mode, which acts as a tutorial to the game play and different types of activities available in the game. Game play is simple and fairly intuitive. X button jumps, square button pulls up menus, the O button closes those menus and R1 allows Sackboy to grab and manipulate the environment. The only slightly aggravating aspect that I have found thus far is that the transitioning of Sackboy through the fore, middle and background layers is a little rough. By jumping you will automatically shift from a front layer to the one behind it, but to jump back requires you to hold the analog stick down and perform a jump, which does not always respond appropriately. Also the angle of the side view perspective can make it difficult to see if you are on the correct layer to cross a bride or jump across a divide to the correct layer. By the first area’s second stage, I got the distinct impression that the story in story mode was just a façade to mask the mode’s true intent, which is to have you collect content to decorate your Sackboy and create your own levels as well as inspire and show off what you are capable of creating. That is not to say that the game levels aren’t visually stimulating, enticing to play and have no replay value. On the contrary, the replay value is immense. Not only are there levels that require you to come back with two or more players to be able to unlock all of that level’s content, but there are blank spots in the game that require stickers or other decorations to be placed on them that won’t be available to the player until later in the game. And since the games second objective is to create, you will want to return to the stages to collect everything they can. Speaking of creating, this is where the games real potential is found. While the tool list for creating is quite extensive and will allow you to draw, delete, animate, create sound and bolt items together to name just a few options; to access these tools you will need to sit through tutorials. The tutorials do a good job of letting you know how to do what you want to do but can get a little grating. While I do enjoy witty banter and British accents as much as the next guy, it did feel like they could have just cut to the chase a little more. All and all you are going to spend at least an hour going through the tutorials just to get all the tools you’ll need. ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment NEW! |
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