damn, my sock is wet

I’ve seen a couple tweets, read in various comments and message boards about how characters in Heavy Rain are mispronouncing “origami” in a variety of ways. I’ve also noticed this while playing, particularly with the newscaster.

It’s one thing when some stress “ori-GAH-me” while others are peppy with “ori-GEH-me”, and it’s another when the entire cast mispronounces the word the same way every time. The former is realistic; the latter is lazy.

Point your friends to this word:

Acai

Ask them to pronounce it. Chances are you’ll get at least three variations.

"I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite blog on the Internet."

I loved the first Mass Effect despite hating certain design decisions: driving the floaty Mako to collect rocks that had insignificant money and xp values; playing Simon Says for rocks and lockers; unlimited ammo; the utter lack of variety in non-storytime quests, and the overabundance of items and navigation of items. With the exception of Skip Dialogue still being the same button as Confirm, all of this has been addressed in the much superior sequel.

Combat: ammo count is the big change here, and what I find most satisfying is the feedback when baddies are hit with firearms. In the first outing, shooting a baddie was like shooting a wall. Not only do the weapons in ME2 feel considerably heavier, the weight can be seen when baddies are pushed or stunned with each well-placed bullet. The submachine gun is a welcome addition; good as a fallback weapon or for killing swarms of baddies that don’t drop ammo since this gun has the highest max ammo count of the bunch. Plus, I’m getting sick of shotguns even if accompanied by the space adjective.

The biotics (haven’t used tech yet) also seem much more useful this time around; faster cooldown, and now with attacks differentiated by effectiveness against a defense type there is another combat tactic with utility – mainly because biotics don’t consume resources.

My only complaint is one I have with all cover-based games: it’s easy, to the point of tiring, to see an upcoming battle simply by the presence of cover. If I’m running down a hall that contains nothing for me to hide behind, that’s a guarantee I won’t be attacked.

Equip: strange not to have an Equip screen in an RPG yet the absence works. The first game had way too many items – as does every Bioware game. The lack of any true item collecting in ME2 means you spend less time in the Pause menu. In fact, even though the layout of the Pause menu is the same, the only reason to ever bring it up is to save and load. The majority of missions can now be seen on the galaxy map (Christ it was annoying tracking quests in the first game), and all upgrades are done through another menu.

No Mako: I mean, come on. Who the fuck actually liked driving this pile?

Space Dungeon Variety: the game is a lot more segmented. Gone are the elevators, the backtracking in missions. Missions are separate from hubs – unlike the first where, for example, you arrive at Zhu’s Hope only to have to walk to the Mako so you can drive to the Exogeni HQ. If this mission were in the sequel, you’d land on Zhu’s Hope, talk to the quest-giver and then the game would load Exogeni since the HQ would be a different map. I guess the game pampers you, but Christ, I’d rather sit through a loading screen than walk, which is just a poor attempt to invoke a grand adventure.

And what ties the experience together is the ability to import your ME1 saves. Sure, nothing you collected carries over. And yes, importing also makes checks for certain decisions you had made. Yet for me, the look of my character plays a big part. I spent a lot of time customizing my Shepard, and I invested a lot of time into both genders. I’m playing as my Shepard, not the Shepard Bioware created. Customizing appearance is important to me and even more so since this is a space opera, even more so since you see your Shepard from the front more than you do from behind (I never understood the point in changing your char’s appearance in Oblivion or Fallout 3). Usually I’m indifferent about character designs for protagonists – even with Bioware’s Shepard: Marketing Version. Perhaps indifference is too weak; it takes a lot for me to like a char design. The less flash the better. I’m not an adolescent – a woman who covers up can be just as sexy as a woman exposes.

And I have to say, I wouldn’t have invested as much time as I have if the voice actors for Shepard were less than stellar. Jennifer Hale in particular – mesmerizing.

me about to die

After 14hrs 57mins, 1900 kills and 1755 deaths – this is what happens when you constantly run into fully guarded Domination points – someone finally called me a little bitch. Not sure the reason; we were in the lobby, I don’t remember killing him repeatedly or getting murdered by him in previous matches. Maybe he didn’t like me because out of all the gamertags in the lobby, mine didn’t have brackets or numbers or numbers subbing for letters or every other consonant in caps. These names look like they should be passwords.

So if you see me and my pronounceable handle in MW2 killing someone, your chances of dropping me are pretty good – destined, in fact.

tuck you

Even though I liked the first game, the only thing I remember about it is Drake’s sweater; it took quite a beating and still managed to have part of its hem caught on his belt. I also remember the Nazi submariner occupied by those men-creatures. Ooh, and I remember the final boss, Rico QTE.

Uncharted 2 is perhaps the only game where I can easily switch between – and enjoy, with satisfying rewards – the three approaches to combat. I can sneak around for stealth skills, squeeze the trigger or throw ow punchies. Like the rest of the game these transitions are fluid, with no added complexity to the button presses, and each approach has its benefits. With most game you’re provided a handful of ways to take down baddies yet the majority are superfluous so you end up performing the easiest one because it usually turns out to be the most efficient. In Uncharted 2 you can start off with stealth kills to lessen the baddie numbers, you can melee to conserve ammo, and you can go iron sights or fire blind. All of these are easy to perform, and each one pretty much has the same damage output; given you go for headshots, all the above approaches are one-hit kills.

The other half of Uncharted 2’s gameplay is just as entertaining. The jumps are easy to pull off, and missing one comes with barely noticeable load times and a respawn not too far away from the misstep.

gimme

The writing and performances – just as much fun as playing the game. The story is typical Baddie wants power, one man to save the day. But whatever. Execution is what’s important, and Uncharted 2 is a great escape. The banter between Drake and whoever happens to be the companion at the moment are enjoyable – like when you jump into the pool on the hotel roof. And not having the controls taken away from you during these moments are pluses. Not all conversations need to live in cutscenes.

Uncharted 2’s greatest strength is its pacing. The pattern is platforming-gunfight-platforming-gunfight. Both types of gameplay put you in interesting scenarios, mainly because the set pieces are fun to navigate and shoot through. A scene in particular: the first time you and Elena are alone. You have to jump on a post that consists of multiple signs pointing in different directions, and as you hang, baddies start pouring in from adjacent rooftops. Cover consists of the signs, where you have to constantly shuffle over and strafe to deal with the baddies coming from various directions. And this is also a great example of the game teaching you two different mechanics and combining them to give you a novel scenario; at this point you’ve already been platforming on signs, and obviously you already know how to fight. And it’s never repeated again, which makes the sequence stand out even more.

Another is a chase scene where you have to jump from truck to truck. In the hands of less proficient developers, you would be told which truck to jump on and when. For this game, your indicator is the truck on fire, and the truck you’re supposed to escape to, well, you better be looking in the right direction. It’s a frenetic sequence that doesn’t slow down to hold your hand.

And while the last boss was neither astounding or dull, at least the game ends on a humorous note – I can’t remember how the first game ended which most likely means it was either unimpressive or not offensive enough.

Actually, Uncharted 2’s last boss was a yawn-fest. The running sequence that follows – much more exciting. And it wasn’t even a QTE.

my eyeballs are gonna vomit

So apparently MW2 has the same hidden intel items scattered across the game, something I didn’t realize until after I completed the campaign.

The game is so frantic: the way the story is told through cutscenes that bombard you with all kinds of military and surveillance flash; the way someone is always screaming at you during the missions, to either hurry up or inform you of contacts in whatever direction; the way the person you’re supposed to Follow gets farther and farther away as you hide behind a mailbox because russians are pouring out of a suburban house. Never has a game that for the most part doesn’t have timed missions bullied me to keep pushing forward i-dont-care-how-many-explosions-just-went-off-you-better-be-killing-baddies-while-running-you-useless-cretin. A lot of the missions are so exhausting because I feel like I don’t have time simply to stop and admire the environment.

Plus, it doesn’t help that when you’re getting shot, the screen goes even more apeshit, with its violent shaking and blood splatters.

Did the airport scene in Modern Warfare offend me? Not at all. I’m not showing off. This kind of violence is hyper-real (am I using this term correctly?), but it’s also a mature video game, and an M-rated game is at best a PG-13 movie. Rape, child molestation – these are extremes that make me uncomfortable in any medium…

Take the movie Irreversible. SPOILERS AHEAD SO SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU NEED TO. Not only is Monica Bellucci’s character raped, her boyfriend and friend bash the skull of the person they believe is the rapist when actually the person they should be demolishing watches from the background. This is the most depressing and unbearable movie I’ve ever seen. It kills me every time I think about it – and it’s nothing but pretend.

What hit me the hardest in the No Russian mission was the part where, while the majority of the civilians are either running away or falling dead, there are a few that stand still, hands up, believing they will be spared.

Forgetting the controversy for a moment, the scene is simply well-executed; they way it starts off only with the sound of people suiting and gearing up in an elevator; the chorus line of police officers in riot gear. Even the game slowing you down to a crawl so you can absorb the chaos – or to make the situation more stylishly violent. yet this slowdown is also a good design decision because it prevents you from running through the level, running into the crowd and possibly interrupting scripts. Infinity Ward wants you to decide for yourself if you want to squeeze the trigger, and for them to tell you their story, they need to limit your playground. They simply don’t want you to play like an idiot for this particular mission.

Besides, the other highly structured solution would be to make the mission on rails. At that point you might as well turn it into a cutscene. And at that point you might as well cut the scene, at which point, we might as well continue with the mentality that all video games are kids toys.

Do I want to have an Irreversible video game experience? I wouldn’t want to play a game that took me through the movie’s plot but I wouldn’t outright damn a game that depresses me like Irreversible does. It’s like with books; I like to read books for fun, but I’m not adverse to a book that challenges me intellectually or emotionally. And I think video games can do the same; we each just have different thresholds.

Some things I don’t care for in Borderlands:

Backpack Upgrades – why is this an item I have to use? Why can’t it simply give me a message saying your inventory space has been increased as opposed to me having to go into my inventory and use the upgrade? Seems like an unnecessary step. I mean, unlocking weapon slots isn’t an item you use.

Unlocking Weapon Slots – why are half the weapon slots locked at the beginning? This doesn’t make any sense. What’s the purpose in restricting the number of weapons I can quickslot? Imagine if Fallout 3 restricted the number of weps you could assign to the d-pad. Having more weapon slots isn’t about making your character more powerful; it’s about giving the player convenience. Titan Quest had a similar issue, where after completing two quests you’re rewards with extra inventory space; the extra stash space I can forgive because you had to buy it. So essentially, put a price tag on extra space instead of handing it out as a quest reward.

Bruisers – heavy-type characters/units that force you to change the weight you put on your priorities; perhaps you want to unload everything into the heavy first or maybe you prefer to kill off the smaller opponents so you can deal with the tank in isolation. But the Bruisers in Borderlands don’t look like heavies. Well, they do in that they are bigger than everyone else, but all they wear are pants. I tire of games that have bullet sponge baddies, and it aggravates me more when their indication is simply thick bigness. Put some fucking tank plating on these motherfuckers or something. Just because you have more muscle doesn’t mean you’re bulletproof. This is just lazy design.

Untouchable Quest Items – this is just insanity. Send me off on fetch quests, I accept this as a game trope. But send me back to the same area over and over? Gimme a fucking break.

I’ve always wanted to play a Diablo-type game set in a gunpowder world.

The story of Borderlands – does it really matter? I’m sure the quest descriptions are fine, but that’s not engaging me; I see it simply as information, unimportant since it’s not the facts that take me to the objective. If this game had a minimap on the HUD, I wouldn’t know what the game looks like.

The whole bazillion weapons aspect doesn’t bother me. After all this is a randomized item-drop game, and with this kind of play, a large variety is best. That’s the whole point. You want gear that’s different than what your friends have. You go on the same adventures but you want different rewards; maybe to brag, maybe to define your char. I’m not playing this game for the story or well-structured single-player experience. I want progressively better gear to kill mobs.

And while the randomness of the drops is entertaining Pandora is not, mainly because the world is static. I can always count on those three bandits that hop the fence just outside Fyrestone; that locker opposite the skag arena always has weapons with requirements greater than my character level. Sure Diablo 2 had fixtures, but their maps always had a randomized layout and to a lesser degree different monsters; seeing the same tile sets never bothered me, probably because from a technical point it’s more efficient to play with the arrangement of the map than have a giant catalog of cycling tile sets.

Diablo 2 had a flat map, pockets of baddies whose locations were randomized. In Borderlands, though the map is much larger and varied in elevation, you will always find the same pockets in the same areas. Farming consists mostly of opening chests. A baddie can drop anything; a weapons chest will always give you guns and ammo.

Diablo Diablo Diablo.

I’m also not fond of the vehicle. I do appreciate its purpose as a fast travel option – I don’t think a town portal scroll would work well since progression is not a straight line, one area to the next and no reason to look back. I just don’t like having to drive to a destination and then get out to fight. Which is strange since while I also got tired of Far Cry 2’s I didn’t mind the GTAs’. Perhaps it had something to do with the former being an FPS; perhaps it had something to do with the same issue as Borderlands, in that, there were always outposts on the roads that always had baddies, and while you could sometimes drive past them, it was always best to kill them. Nothing in GTA consistently blocked your path to the next mission other than traffic and the law, but nothing ever pulled you over without a reason.

Too bad. As an uncommon occurrence racial profiling could be entertaining.

And because I’ve started a playthrough with coop and everything is shared, I’ve been having to buy ammo from the vendors. When I have 0/1020 SMG rounds and can only buy in quantities of 72, that’s a lot of clicking that could be simplified to “click here to refill entire count.” I mean, come on – have you ever stopped short of buying all the ammo you could carry and say “that’s enough for me, I like being one clip light”?

I had fun the first time around. I just don’t see myself going through another playthrough because even though the loot will get better, killing the same type and number of baddies and navigating the static world are just tiresome.

You have 150 rounds total, and in the extreme case, this is the equivalent of carrying 149 clips. Ammo management is simply keeping the counter from reaching zero – but I guess that’s an oversimplification since any kind of management is maintaining a supply.

If games counted clips, that 150 round total means you have, let’s say for example, 5 clips (30 rounds each). If you put three in someone’s center mass and then reload, you just threw away 27 rounds.

Forced to keep track of both counts would make you think about how you approach each exchange because the number of bullets remaining in the clip after the first fight will drastically affect how you approach subsequent executions.

The vids shows off more of the QTE’s, something I despise in action games. I still have no idea what the fight between Leon Kennedy and Krauser looks like because I had to watch the bottom of the screen for those goddamn button presses, and Heavenly Sword’s is an exercise in burning off my patience. Heavy Rain is looking like it can fix the stagnation by having the button presses appear and then move with incoming/oncoming danger. It’s an elegant system since you can watch the action and have a greater sense of reacting to the action as opposed to waiting for the button presses to appear in its reserved screen estate.

Although I wonder why the baddie feeds Norman to the car munching machine instead of simply feeding him a bullet.