Call of Duty: World at War and The Last Remnant.
It is, as it turns out, very difficult to write something and perform it both. Instead of just remembering the script, I have to also remember which bits of stuff I'm remembering as the script are the script, and which bits are cut material that were in the script for variable periods of time until I edited them out.
The camera and editing work is really impressive, though; thankee, Vice people, for making me look better than I am.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Killzone 2: A Review
I am unlikely to review Killzone 2 for Vice, on account of it's one half the subject of my first non-review Vice Magazine column, due in the April issue. I think that means can review it here, instead. Amy, my boss at Vice, is pretty cool and has never gotten angry at me doing this sort of thing before.
In some objective sense, Killzone 2 is an admirable attempt to move the tropes of World War II shooters into a science fiction context, where most non-World-War-II shooters dwell, while leveraging the Playstation 3 hardware to create one of the most visually attractive games I've ever seen. In a completely subjective sense, as a game it's pretty awful and I just as often hate it as enjoy it.
Its designers have chosen to import my least favorite parts of WWII shooters, namely, huge open battlefields with dozens of allies and enemies interacting simultaneously, which makes it hard for me to keep track of what's going on and feel like I'm winning because of my own mastery of the play mechanics. Two thirds of the way through I had to dial the difficulty down to easy to progress pass a few bottlenecks, places where the game was hard in an annoying, "Do everything right and maybe you die because of sheer bad luck anyway" way. Unlike, say, Halo, which I quite enjoyed tackling on Legendary difficulty, I can imagine no reward to trying this game in its harder modes. The weapons are poorly differentiated and distributed, the enemy soldiers are all very similar in appearance and behavior, and there's not much variety in play experience that I could detect. Maybe someone who's well versed in the subtleties of single-player WWII shooter campaigns might appreciate its play experience more than I.
Moreover, the elements it pulls from more traditional shooters, namely the boss fights (a fight on a rooftop against an enemy automated flying drone and a duel at the end against one particular elite soldier), are poorly implemented and feel both thematically out of place and badly designed. In the former's case, I can accept puzzle bosses in games that try for less verisimilitude than this one, but here it feels like the game stopped being Killzone 2 for a wile, and in the latter's case, the one guy isn't a puzzle boss but he is a teleporting super-soldier who can inexplicably take twenty times as many bullets as any other dude wearing the same model armor I've met throughout the game. See above, re: acceptable in games less verisimilar than this.
I can't recommend Killzone 2 to anyone who wants a solid game to play. It makes for a good, I dunno, historical benchmark experience, in a "This is the state of gaming right now" way, and it's going to go down in history as an Important Game, so if you want to have experienced that sort of thing it's good, but in terms of a polished shooter that requires player skill and follows internal logic, stick with F.E.A.R. 2, the other half of the subject of my first non-review column for Vice Magazine's April issue.
In some objective sense, Killzone 2 is an admirable attempt to move the tropes of World War II shooters into a science fiction context, where most non-World-War-II shooters dwell, while leveraging the Playstation 3 hardware to create one of the most visually attractive games I've ever seen. In a completely subjective sense, as a game it's pretty awful and I just as often hate it as enjoy it.
Its designers have chosen to import my least favorite parts of WWII shooters, namely, huge open battlefields with dozens of allies and enemies interacting simultaneously, which makes it hard for me to keep track of what's going on and feel like I'm winning because of my own mastery of the play mechanics. Two thirds of the way through I had to dial the difficulty down to easy to progress pass a few bottlenecks, places where the game was hard in an annoying, "Do everything right and maybe you die because of sheer bad luck anyway" way. Unlike, say, Halo, which I quite enjoyed tackling on Legendary difficulty, I can imagine no reward to trying this game in its harder modes. The weapons are poorly differentiated and distributed, the enemy soldiers are all very similar in appearance and behavior, and there's not much variety in play experience that I could detect. Maybe someone who's well versed in the subtleties of single-player WWII shooter campaigns might appreciate its play experience more than I.
Moreover, the elements it pulls from more traditional shooters, namely the boss fights (a fight on a rooftop against an enemy automated flying drone and a duel at the end against one particular elite soldier), are poorly implemented and feel both thematically out of place and badly designed. In the former's case, I can accept puzzle bosses in games that try for less verisimilitude than this one, but here it feels like the game stopped being Killzone 2 for a wile, and in the latter's case, the one guy isn't a puzzle boss but he is a teleporting super-soldier who can inexplicably take twenty times as many bullets as any other dude wearing the same model armor I've met throughout the game. See above, re: acceptable in games less verisimilar than this.
I can't recommend Killzone 2 to anyone who wants a solid game to play. It makes for a good, I dunno, historical benchmark experience, in a "This is the state of gaming right now" way, and it's going to go down in history as an Important Game, so if you want to have experienced that sort of thing it's good, but in terms of a polished shooter that requires player skill and follows internal logic, stick with F.E.A.R. 2, the other half of the subject of my first non-review column for Vice Magazine's April issue.
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