Mirror’s Edge: Parkour for the Lazy

So, sorry for not writing for a while. I know that my hordes of dedicated fans will be disappointed. Sorry. 

So I got Mirror’s Edge a while ago and I’ve been meaning to write about it. I really like Mirror’s Edge. It’s awesome. There are stunning visuals, great action, and best of all there is the awesome parkour that makes up the game. 

For those of you who don’t know what parkour is, go look it up. I’ll give you a minute. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Ok that’s long enough. 

For those of you that were too lazy to look it up, parkour is an extreme sport that people do out in the streets. It’s kind of like urban acrobatics. It involves wall running, rooftop jumping, and other shenanigans. It’s awesome. I  do parkour myself you know. It’s like free-running. 

Ok, back to the Edge. In Mirror’s Edge you play as Faith. Faith is a girl whose parents were killed in some riots a long time ago. The city you live in is closely monitored by the government and pretty much completely controlled by them. Therefore the people who do not want to be monitored need messengers called runners who are pretty much badass traceurs. Traceurs are the people who do parkour. Come on, focus. Faith is a runner. Ok, done with the background.

 

So in the first chapter, the prologue, you actually are delivering a message. But at the start of the first real chapter you find your sister, who was asked to meet with a mayoral candidate. She was knocked out and when she woke up the mayoral candidate was shot dead with her gun. So she goes to prison and you try to rescue her and that makes up the whole story.

A lot of reviewers and critics have been saying how stupid the story is and how there is no depth. I disagree. I like the story a lot, now it may not be as epic as Halo’s or many other games, but it is still a good story. It does not have depth and it may not impact you on a highly emotional level but I still like it.

I did have one problem with the story. It’s like, what? 6 hours long? It’s like trying to get a full meal off of half a sandwich and not eating the crust. It has no meat and it does not have nearly enough  to make it worth 60 dollars. 

Where players will be spending most of their time is the time trials. You try to make it through a part of a level in a certain amount of time which ends up to be a very fun and very challenging part of the game. 

The gameplay is fantastic. The running you’re doing makes you feel so awesome, and the moves you’re pulling are amazing. And that’s just the running. 

The combat is pretty cool too. the combat is mainly hand to hand. You disarm and knockout your enemies with a variety of different moves and you try to integrate the ass-kicking into your flow which makes stuff really awesome. You can use guns but the developers tried to make guns unnecessary and they slow you down considerably when you actually are wielding one. Now I’m not saying that the guns are not fun to use. Because they most certainly are. the LMG is like the SAW in CoD4 and it is one of the most satisfying weapons to use in any video game. 

On my first play through I didn’t use guns and it made for a really enjoyable experience, but when I switched over to the Hard difficulty I decided to use guns and also had a really fun time. Now if you are an achievement addict, you might just decide not to use guns because of the 80g achievement for not using guns for the whole game. But even if you don’t even care about achievements then I really recommend not using guns for a while anyway.

I also really want to emphasize how visceral the visuals are. The city feels alive and you can see for miles around from anywhere. The art style is also very original I think. The city is primarily White and there’s a little orange thrown in there but it really makes the game feel unique.

So if you have a good feeling about this game, then give it a try. If not, well try it anyway, just rent it. I loved this game. If you haven’t even played the demo on the XBOX live marketplace then go give it a try and see what you think.

Fable 2: Bigger, Better, and Just as Short

Fable 2 is bad. Just throwing that out there. I wanted to see how it would sound. And it sounds wrong. But Fable 2 is not bad; in fact, it is an awesome game. 

Lionhead has been working on Fable 2 since the first game came out. That’s been what, like four years? Anyway, imagining that it’s been worked on longer than like, Fallout and Oblivion, it was kind of disappointing. But not that disappointing.

So yeah, don’t get me wrong, Fable is a great game and a great experience, but that experience is just as long as the first Fable. Which is very short, especially for an RPG.

The length of the game is the main problem. It lasts about 15-20 hours and there is not as much replayability (in my opinion) as the first one. The main story is a good story but is only about 10 hours. Plus the extra five to ten hours that make up side quests. Which there are only like 10 or 15 of. There is definitely not as much content as I would have liked. I would like to point out that there is DLC (downloadable content) coming out for it in mid December, so hopefully that will add a lot.

There is not really anything else that I can say is bad about the game. Oh wait, there’s the armor. Armor does not exist. You can get some nice clothes, but not any armor. The only thing that clothes do is make you more attractive or scary or ugly. Now that’s really all that I have a complaint about.

So on to the good parts. 

First, the combat. The combat is the high point in fable. You can switch seamlessly from magic to melee to skill combat, skill being guns and crossbows. The view of combat really reminds me of Assassin’s Creed. You look from third person down at your character from an eagle eye view, that is not directly above the fray. You’ll play one way in combat, possibly using all three varieties, or maybe only one. But then you’ll hear about your friend playing another way and try it. Every single thing in combat is fun. I liked magic and melee combat in the beginning, but then I got a legendary pistol and started using skill a lot more, which is very fun.

One thing that makes using skill so fun is the sub-targeting system. When you get to a certain rank in skill, you can use this sub-targeting. You can target any enemies, body parts (including the groin) and shoot at them to kill the enemy, amuse yourself, or cripple them. 

Magic (Will) is also very interesting and fun. Lionhead really tried something new with it. They didn’t use mana. Let me repeat that. No mana. You’re thinking “What the eff? No mana? That’s Insane! It’s Crazy! It’s so crazy, it just might work!” And it does work.

You charge up your magic to a certain level to cast a certain level spell that you assign into one of the five slots. You assign a level 1 spell to the first tier of your spells then a level 2 spell to the second tier and so on to the fifth tier. It sounds kinda complicated but it’s really very simple. So you charge up for a certain amount of time to get to one of the tiers and then you cast the spell. You are very vulnerable when casting but it is almost always worth it to take the damage and cast a high level spell.

Lionhead also did the spells themselves oddly. If you buy one spell then you can either cast it in the area of a circle or you can target one person with the spell to make it more powerful. For example, you can cast inferno in an area and have flames shoot up all around you, or you can aim it at your enemy to knock them over and set them on fire. And remember, none of the spells use mana.

The melee combat is just normal melee combat but there is only one button to do everything.

I just thought of another thing bad with it. This involves the co-op in the game. There is co-op, but it is not very fun. It does not go into split screen so the camera can get really annoying. You tend to split up and you can’t and then you and your partner will argue for a little about which way to go.

But there’s something that is also kind of frustrating about co-op that is not as big: achievements. Now that doesn’t sound bad, because it’s not bad for anyone but achievement freaks. You work really hard for one achievement and then get it. But then you look at the description and realize that you could have just gone into co-op and gotten the achievement by being there when your friend did the requirements for the achievement. Or not even when they got it. Just being in the game of a friend will sometimes give you every achievement they have. One achievement is to build a real estate empire that is worth more than 2.5 million gold. It’s really hard to get. Unless you have a friend who got that achievement. Just join their game and voila! 100g! It’s kinda frustrating when you realize how easy it is to get a hard achievement. 

Now the world. The world is very cool but still didn’t seem that much bigger than the first Fable’s. The world really is a lot bigger but it doesn’t seem like it because there is never an incentive to go explore. You can go outside of the paths, unlike Fable 1, but you never need to and it there is not really a point. The world is beautiful and very very cool in some instances but again there is not that much point to go and find the cool parts, especially when you can go and play Oblivion and just stare up at the night sky.

Fable 2 is a fun game and it is a really fun, humorous, full experience, but it has some small problems, and some big ones too. I definitely recommend this game for anyone who liked Fable 1 but if you didn’t then don’t get it. If you didn’t even play Fable than give it a try. You may love it.

So, once again, post comments or email me if you have anything to say.

Dead Space: the Grace of the Floating Severed Limb

Dead Space. I know what you think of when you see those words. You think, “Oh, a survival-horror game that’s kinda like Resident Evil 4, but takes place in space and is just a little less creepy”. But when I see that title… I think pretty much the same thing as you. 

But that little difference between the two games, that whole being in space thing, makes a big difference that looks and feels great in a game. I have never played a game that is so… unique, yet so alike another game. The look and feel of Dead Space really can send chills down your spine. 

Dead Space is set in space. What a surprise, that’s in the title. You play as Isaac Clarke, an engineer who is sent to the ship/planet-cracker (a mining ship) Ishimura to repair some damage it has taken. For some reason Isaac knows how to dismember zombies without thought or regret, and seems very experienced at it right from the beginning. Hmm…

You get near the ship, which you see has no lights on and the communications array is blown. Kinda… ominous.

You get on the ship and go to activate a uh… what’s it called… a disinfectant thing. Your team gets attacked and you have to run away. After running for a minute or so you load up on an elevator and a necromorph (one of the crazy zombies that kind of resemble plaga from RE4) gets its head chopped off in the elevator doors after getting too close for comfort. Some pretty sharp doors. They’re like bladed or something. Reinforced for a freak zombie outbreak. But anyway, the beginning is very exciting and a great start to such a great survival horror game. 

The gameplay is fun. The combat really shines because of the way the developers made it. You use “strategic dismemberment” to save ammo and to weaken the enemies. So strategic dismemberment is where instead of just pumping rounds into the enemies, you aim at their limbs and blow them off to kill them faster and more efficiently.

The atmosphere definitely creeps you out. And because the developer doesn’t succeed in creeping you out with the necromorphs it makes it a little less horror-ey than I would have liked.

One of the things about the atmosphere that makes it so creepy is the sound. In one room, there is a sound as you walk across the floor that just makes you want to get away from wherever you are. EA did a great job with that. 

The story is good, but not very good. It’s not complicated, and it doesn’t make sense sometimes, but it kinda reminds me of a sci-fi/horror novel. You do all you can to get off the Ishimura with your two friends, who don’t seem capable of doing anything but opening locked doors for you and getting hurt. 

One of the coolest things about the game are the zero-g rooms. You can jump from one side of the room to another, and you often get ambushed in these special rooms. You can really have some fun with battles in the zero-g (that’s where the title of my post comes from). There is even Z-ball, the zero-g basketball in the ship. I bet you can’t beat my high score. 

Overall, Dead Space is a fun game and a great one to play if you’re really in the mood for a survival horror game. If you liked RE4 then definitely give this one a try when you get some spare moneys. 

Once again, please put some comments up if you have anything else to add, or anything to disagree with.

Better Late Than Never: Gears of War 2

I know it’s a little late, (10 whole days after the release) but it’s good to start with Gears.

I was kind of disappointed by Gears. Wait, don’t ridicule me yet. I was disappointed mainly by the fact that it comes out at the same time as so many other awesome games like Mirror’s Edge and Left 4 Dead. But also by the fact that I won’t have time to play anything else. So yes, Gears is super awesome.

Everything that CliffyB said he would deliver, he did. The campaign is pretty awesome and the story is strong, but it’s not what you’ll be playing most of the time. The strong point, and I mean the really really strong point, is the multiplayer. Especially horde.

Horde is mind bogglingly fun, and that fun factor increases with the amount of people playing it with you. My friend and I just this weekend made it to wave 40, and then tried for about an hour without success to beat it. That’s what is so fun about it. On the Day One map you go and sit behind the cover above the arcade and wait for some massive boomers to come and shoot rockets at you while you pelt their faces with shotgun ammo. And on wave 40 it takes about a clip and a half (at least) to kill a boomer like that.

On horde if you don’t use teamwork, well, you get screwed. On the later waves there will be some grenadier with a shotty, who will run up to you and blast you and your separated team into little tiny bits while you try to meet up in the middle of the map.

To say the least, horde is hard. But that is what’s fun. It’s just so hard to describe the excitement on your friends’ faces whenever you beat a wave that you’ve been working on for a long time.

What’s really interesting about horde is how Epic did the waves. Each wave, the locust increase in numbers and harder enemies spawn during every wave. But at every tenth wave starting with 11, the locust get either their damage, accuracy, or health increased, but the enemy spawns start back over at level one. It works out very well in the end, even though it doesn’t sound like a big enough challenge. And let me tell you, a grinder with 3 times as much health, twice as much accuracy, and twice the amount of damage is not cool. It’s like fighting RAAM all over again, 70 times.

 

 

The online is fun too. Especially Submission (which should have been called Meat-flag, as Epic originally announced). You take down a shotgun wielding AI, take them as a hostage, and drag them to a capture zone, where you win the round. But all of the online is very fun. The connections are almost always seamless, and the games are intense. Really intense. The matches are fun on almost any map, as long as your team is not the one getting curb-stomped and chain-sawed all of the time.

There is not really anything bad I can say about Gears multiplayer, except for one problem my friends and I were having: It takes forever to find a team to play with, and then a team to play against. I expect that the problem should be fixed soon, but I’m not sure if it was because of the limited amount of people who got the game in the first week, or because of a network problem. Whatever it is, it should get better any time soon.

So yes, go and buy Gears right now, if you don’t have it already. It’s easily one of the best games I’ve played on the 360 since Oblivion and Halo and it is worth the 60 dollars. Hell, it’s worth a lot more than 60 dollars. So go and buy it, before the price goes up.

Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Oh yeah i forgot a few things. The difficulties. The difficulties are now Casual, Normal, Hardcore, and Insane, which you can’t even play until you’ve beaten the game at least once. The gap in difficulty from normal to insane really is insane. Most of the time you don’t even go down, you just die. Add that to the fact that the locust have up to four times the amount of health as you, it is pretty damn hard. 

I also forgot to talk about how the story is strong. The addition of the search for Maria, Dom’s wife, adds a lot to the game. You really can relate to Dom, you know, especially if you’ve lost your wife in a war against a terrible alien species. Besides that off shoot, the main story is very good. At some times you won’t get why you are where you are, but the blood and violence lets you forget that and just have fun doing whatever it is that you’re doing. 

Well, now that the entry is actually done, go and buy Gears. You’ll thank me.