Games

[illegal]

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/playstation3/resistance/

I read the review and it sounds like a really generic game. Even one of the good ideas you mentioned seems to have been done before.

a platforming segment where you make your way up a shaft by jumping on air vents blowing upwards

From your description, this sound exactly like a few sections from the bug-ridden but funny Shogo - Mobile Armour Division. Just so you know that even that part isn't original ;)

[icycalm]

That's good to know!

I guess?

The worst thing about Resistance, I think, is that they are already making a sequel. Resistance 2: Rise of Man, it will be called, apparently. I will be extremely surprised if it turns out to be worth playing! Thankfully, it will be a while before we get to find out.

Crysis FTW!

[GnaM]

Well, I won't comment since I haven't played Resistance, except to say that it's nice to hear an honest review of the game after so many mainstream reviews raved about it out of absence of anything else good to say about PS3.

So what FPS would you recommend these days? Crysis? Bioshock?

[icycalm]

Hi, welcome to the forum.

Indeed, one of the reasons I decided to review Resistance was because I saw all those nonsense cheerleading reviews in GameSpot, etc. Those guys are completely shameless.

As for recent FPSes I'd recommend, here are three in order of preference:

1. Half-Life 2
2. FarCry
3. F.E.A.R.

Note that I haven't actually played F.E.A.R. -- but I am recommending it from what I've seen of it so far.

By the way, try to avoid their console ports if you can, as they are all inferior to the PC versions.

Also, Crysis and Bioshock are not out yet. When they do come out I have almost no doubt that Crysis will rock, but as for Bioshock... we'll have to wait and see.


PS. By the way, your 1UP page is one of the better ones I've seen.

[GnaM]

To be honest, after buying a gaming PC for the 2005 round of new FPS's, I was rather underwhelmed by the whole scene. I played through Doom 3 and enjoyed it, but it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been. I played through parts of HL2 and Far Cry and lost interest in both before finishing. I played the FEAR demo, but it didn't blow me away enough to convince me that I would actually play through the whole thing. D3 ROE and Quake 4 were more of the same mediocrity that Doom 3 was, but more redundant...

Yeah, all the games were fun to a point and did certain things very well, but aside from the fact that they visually blew away console games at the time there was little to justify shelling out so much cash for the hardware (particularly after my apartment was broken into and my rig stolen, forcing me to buy another one after only 6 months).

So far the upcoming FPS I have the highest hopes for at the moment is Brothers in Arms 3...the first 2 games in the series were chock full of problems, but it actually looks like the 3rd one is solidly addressing them all and might actually do everything right this time.

All in all I feel like the design of FPS have not caught up to the technology they're working with. They can create gigantic amazingly-detailed environments, rendered with a very high level of realism, but they still can't take the AI or shooting mechanics much further than that of Quake 2, Half-life, or Counterstrike.

And no matter how photorealistic, the environments are still not all that imaginative. They're still canning us in generic corridors with frightening frequency, and while the open landscapes that games like Far Cry, UT2004, and Halo have treated us to are a welcome change from those infernal corrdiors...they're still not showing us anything truly out-of-this-world, which, given that these games are all supposed to be sci-fi, seems like a tremendous failing.

Anyway, thanks for the compliments on the blog, I know cruising user pages there is pretty hit-or-miss.

[icycalm]

Hmmmm... sounds to me like you are burned out on the genre! Perhaps you should give it a break and check back in a couple of years.

Advances are always being made -- if they are not coming quickly enough to satisfy your demands then that's too bad, I guess. Sure, the processing power is there to do much more than what is being done -- but so what? This will always be the case from now on. Writing better software is much harder than coming up with faster graphics cards, you know.

I guess I am playing devil's advocate here, but that's my reflexive response to anyone who has an axe to grind with a whole genre.

But then again, I have an axe to grind with JRPGs, so who am I to talk?

PS. The stand-out aspect of F.E.A.R. is its A.I. In other respects it's a pretty unremarkable game.

[GnaM]

Well, I have an axe to grind with JRPG's too...in fact I think I have an axe to grind with all games these days, which is why I spend more time writing about them than actually playing them these days.

On FEAR, I think my biggest annoyance was the fact that all of the assault weapons fire at minimum a 3-round burst every time you pull the trigger, so you can't squeeze off accurate single shots...despite the fact that the recoil of automatic fire has a blatant reduction on your accuracy.

As a result, my favorite weapon to use in the demo was the pistol, because it basically worked like an assault or battle rifle set to semi-auto...rather than engaging in the spray-and-pray the game prescribes to you, running though the first level downing enemies with a few well-placed single shots towards the head was a blast. When my friend told me there was little or no ammo for the Pistol through most levels of the retail game my interest in buying it pretty much died.

I was also not incredibly impressed with the AI in the demo when it would habitually forgo perfectly good cover to run into the open and "tactically" climb over a desk or jump through a window. Sure, it was a dumb move that made him an easy target, but at least it was a cool-looking way to die right? o_0