Blue Kae

This post is going to have lots of spoilers. If you haven’t played any of the games or haven’t finished the third one yet and you plan to then you should stop reading now.

I’m not going to give any spoilers or talk about the ending (see here for that), I just want to address the story and game mechanic changes from ME2 to ME3 and give my general impressions.

Story

There was one often asked question when Mass Effect 2 was released that’s been making the rounds again, “Should I play from the beginning or just start at 3?” My recommendation from then is as true if not more so:

You don’t have to play the first to enjoy the second, but it is a better experience having played both.

The game is much better if you’ve played both 1 and 2. There’s two entire games worth of emotional investment in the characters and events. This is one of the few video game series where I’ve laughed so much, and it’s the only game I can think of that’s made me tear up. And ME3 did it twice.

I have been consistently impressed and amazed with how many characters from previous game I ran into. I got to see how people I helped from both prior games had gotten on with their lives and what difference my Shepard’s actions had made in their situations. My only regret was that it’s been so long since I played the first game that I often had to be reminded (conveniently enough there was always an option via in-game dialog) who they were.

One disappointment for me was how few crew from either the previous two games were available to return to my ship for use on missions. The extended dialogs available on the ship are great, but there are also some awesome lines available during the missions. Of course all of the ones that were most important to me were there, but after the wide selection available in ME2, the mission team selection screen seemed a little empty.

Combat

For the most part, the combat in ME3 is the same as ME2. You have powers to set an ammo type, thermal clips to handle reloads, and a cover system.

You are no longer restricted to certain weapon types because of your class though. Instead all weapons have a weight value, and the more you carry the slower your powers recharge and become available again. I really liked this as it let my Soldier Shepard load up on several different types of weapons to handle sniping, general combat, and close range situations, and accept a hit to how fast powers became available again. Had I been playing an Adept or something similar, I could’ve gone the other route and just carried the lightest pistol possible and had super fast power recharges.

The weapon customization system has also a changed. You can add two upgrades to any weapon. Upgrades can be found on missions or purchased (either at the Citadel or through your armory once you’ve visited a Citadel store the first time). I especially liked that you could put a scope on any weapon and have a scope sight when you actually aimed it. For someone like myself, who’s not all that accurate with a sniper rifle, having a pistol with a scope and damage upgrade was really good as a high rate of fire rifle replacement.

The pace of combat has sped up. Enemies will use grenades to force you out of cover (and vice versa), so tactical movement become much more important.

Speaking of cover, I’ve read a lot of reviews complaining about the fact that going into and out of cover as well as jumping from one cover spot to another shares the same button as sprinting. While I got caught on that a few times myself, I didn’t find it frustrating. I imagine that has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t play shooters often. Mass Effect is a hybrid RPG/shooter (action?) game and as such doesn’t do either as well as a more specialized game does. Someone who doesn’t play a lot of shooters won’t notice the rough edges as much.

Multiplayer

I was really not happy about the addition of multiplayer to the game. It felt to me like something that EA was pushing so they’d have a way to add more revenue streams, like selling multiplayer maps. After seeing some of the videos I was a little less leary of the idea though, and I tried to keep in mind the lessons I learned from ME2 that the PR tone of a game often has little to do with the tone of the game itself (such as the aweful Jack promo videos).

Just after the game released, there was a bit of drama related to War Assets versus Readiness where people were upset that you had to play the multiplayer in order to get the best ending. Basically BioWare designed the system so that for every fleet or unit you recruit to the effort to free Earth you get points. However the points are adjusted by a readiness percentage, with the idea being that the more combat practice units get the more effective they’ll be. This incentivises people to play the multiplayer, which a lot of people didn’t want to do.

For myself, I had planned to give the multiplayer a shot, and I’m super glad I did because it turned out to be a lot of fun. How much fun? My final playtime for the single player game was roughly 32 hours. My overall playtime is 66 hours (or at least it was when I wrote this), and I’ve been continuing to play even after beating the game when my Galactic Readiness doesn’t mean anything.

I’m enjoying it so much because it’s co-operative multiplayer not competitive. You’re on a four person team fighting through 11 waves of enemies. You can revive fallen comrades for a short time and anyone who gets killed before they can be revived automatically revives between the waves.

An interesting side-effect of playing the multiplayer is I’ve gotten a chance to play the non-soldier classes, and this has started me considering additional play throughs of ME3 to try out the other classes in the full game.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve loved ME1 and/or ME2 but haven’t picked up ME3, you should. I know there’s a lot of drama around the final minutes of the game but that’s 15 minutes out of 32 hours, and even then it’s a matter of personal taste. Lot’s of people like the ending, lot’s of people don’t, but there’s only one way to find out for yourself.

Just so you know why I’ve been absent recently from the blog. This is by far the most time I’ve ever put into a game that’s not an MMO in the last twenty years, and I’m not even done with the main quest yet. At some point in the future I’ll write some more detailed impressions of the game. In the interim, if you have any questions leave them below.

Batman: Arkham City is an excellent sequel to Arkham Asylum. If you are a fan of Batman, then I assume you’ve already played the standard game.  Arkham City is just like it except it’s more and better. Go play it now, although if you haven’t finished Arkham Asylum and intend to then do that first or Arkham City will spoil the ending for you.

It is the Mass Effect 2 of the Arkham series. Rocksteady has improved the combat with more animations, gadgets, and moves. I particularly like the smoke pellet and I can remember panicking and dropping down into a group of armed enemies in AA many times, so it’s nice to have a countermeasure. The boss fights are also better here. They are challenging but not stupidly so, there’s always a trick involved and they don’t require multiple deaths to figure out. There are no hitpoint sponges. In general, the game does a good job of introducing new mechanics, training you to use them, and then building on those with additional challenges. There are no sudden increases in difficulty, and no sudden shifts in play-style.

I played and beat the game on normal difficulty, which is the mode I usually pick. There’s a hard mode which removes the counter indicator and makes the enemies more difficult, but I prefer to err on the side of too easy than too hard. After all, I mainly play games for the story and the experience of the environment, not for any sense of achievement.

Besides the combat improvements, Arkham City has similar pacing to Mass Effect 2. The game’s plot is a combination of urgent main storyline and explorable open world with side-missions. I know that mix of pacing really bothers some people, but I’m not one of them. If you prefer to just focue on the main story, most of the side-missions are completable after the main story mission is finished (and the one or two that aren’t are obvious, or were to me). In some ways that might be a better way of finishing the game, since there are areas you can’t reach until you get certain gadgets which you don’t get until you’ve completed sections of the main story. I spent a lot of time trying to get to certain Riddler trophies before I had the means to actually do it.

One item I was a little worried about was the number of villains being added to the game. As a child of the 80′s and 90′s, I’ve seen several comic book hero movie franchises including fall prey to the “too many villains” trap, where they try to pack so much into a single film in order to top the previous one that they don’t have from for plot, dialog (beyond one-liners), or character. Fortunately, Arkham City pulls it off. The main story focuses on Joker, Penguin, and Strange, and they are all fleshed out well (although the Joker steals the show as always). The cool part was the side-missions which included Bane, Mad Hatter, Deadshot, Riddler, Zsasz, and several others. The Catwoman/Two Face side story was fun too. With the exception of Joke and Riddler, I enjoyed the shift in focus from Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, and Killer Croc in the original game. Hopefully in the third (I’m assuming they’ll be one) game Rocksteady can pull out a few more interesting villains for Batman to face off against.

So like I said at the beginning, if you liked Arkham City then Arkham Asylum is that plus a little bit more. More combat, more gadgets, more environments, and more villains.

When Portal 2′s co-op mode was originally announced, I didn’t expect to actually play it. But when I mentioned the game a few weeks ago, MMOGC pointed out the amazing deal Amazon was running and we ended up planning to do the co-op portion.

The co-op game took us about five or six hours to finish, across three nights. I ended up as Blue (naturally) and GC played Orange. Organized as five courses, with eight puzzles in each, there’s nearly as much humor and story in the co-op mode as there is in the single-player game. Check out GC’s review here.

I thought having a co-op review for a co-op game would be fun, and GC agreed to do a little question an answer with me (this section is on GC’s blog as well)…

BlueKae: I had expected the co-op game to be fun, but it turned out to be a lot more fun than I realized. Challenging in different ways than the single player, and somehow easier too. What surprised you about playing co-op?

MMOGamerChick: From the start, I knew co-op was going to be about playing together, but what I didn’t expect to see was how often we were put into situations where we had to work together…but separately. Initially, I think I was picturing something akin to a two-player platformer, where you and your partner would go everywhere together, do everything together. There were some puzzles like that, but I’d say most of them involved each person doing very different things, sometimes in different parts of the room. It made things more interesting, in my opinion. It’s still very much about the teamwork because our chances of success still depended on both people accomplishing their respective tasks, but that meant trust was also very important — especially when we couldn’t see what the other person was doing and had to rely on coordination and communication.

Okay, my turn to ask a question. What did you find was most challenging about co-op?

BK: Remembering that I was playing with someone. I mean we were chatting the whole time so I knew you were there and all, but after playing through on single player I was so used to running into a new puzzle and starting to throw portals around that it was an adjustment to remember I was playing with someone. I know there were a few times when I wiped a portal of yours out with one of mine because I wasn’t thinking.

I very much agree with your surprise about how the co-op worked. I assumed that our portals would link up instead of being separate. It was definitely more about communicating, coordinating, and trust. The spike maze comes to mind.

The best part was having a second person to help figure out how to solve the puzzles. I wasn’t tempted to go look at Youtube once. If/when there’s a Portal 3 are you looking forward more to single player or more co-op?

MMOGC: Both. I mean, obviously the co-op is a huge draw, but single player has its moments. And both portions were filled with humorous moments, GLaDOS doing her thing. That’s what made the whole game, I think. It would be difficult for me to say which I prefer or look forward to more.

And I totally agree with you about remembering that I was playing with someone. Though with regards to wiping out each other’s portals, I just like to think of it more as both of us being on the same page. Great minds think alike and all that!

BK: True! I think the single player had a bit more personality, maybe that’s because it stretched across two games. Did it seem to you like the single player was more about how to solve a puzzle and the co-op was more about actually doing the solution?

MMOGC: Oh yeah, definitely. I approached single-player and co-op very differently. In co-op (and I think you might have noticed this too), the first thing both of us did with a new puzzle was run in there and start exploring, playing with whatever buttons or stuff we found. I found myself “working backwards” in co-op more than I did in single-player. First find the exit, then “do” the solution.

BK: I wasn’t quite that organized about it. Mostly I was just trying to make sure that when we picked a solution that it was using all of the different parts in the puzzle.

MMOGC: Let me ask you another thing. Were you stressed at any point? ‘Cause I know I was. I kept thinking, “Oh crap oh crap oh crap, I’m going to let Blue Kae down and he’s going to think I’m an idiot.” I’m not the best when it comes to coordination and reflexes. There were several times that I botched a jump or a portal and I just felt terrible.

BK: A couple of times, definitely. I worried about getting you killed on a couple of puzzles where there was timing involved. But most of the time it was so easy to run back in, that I didn’t worry much. I can’t remember getting frustrated at all though.

MMOGC: Well, it was definitely much more enjoyable to play with a friend.

BK: I totally agree. The frustrating parts for me in the single player game were figuring out what to do next. Having someone to talk with and point out things I missed made the game much much more fun.

MMOGC: I totally carried you. Haha, just kidding.

BK: There were definitely puzzles that you just got right off that I didn’t and vice versa. There was only one puzzle, I remember, that stumped us both for a bit.

MMOGC: That part really was cool. I saw where my own weaknesses were, and was grateful when you figured stuff out that I couldn’t. I was really happy that we were able to figure everything out between us without going to outside help.

BK: Yeah, I ended up hitting Youtube twice for puzzles in the singleplayer game when it stopped being fun.

MMOGC: And fun is what it’s all about.

I decided to check out Terraria recently. It’s a 2D game similar to Minecraft that everyone has been excited about. I’ve only put about five hours into the game, and I’ve had fun but I haven’t gotten sucked into the game in the same way I did with Minecraft.

Both games have a pixellated art-style. Both games focus heavily on exploration and building, but Terraria has more of an adventure game side to it. You have more health than you do in Minecraft, and there’s a lot more combat in the game both in the daytime and the nighttime. Ironically, I never felt like I was in as much danger in Terraria as I have in Minecraft. Because it’s a 2D side-scrolling world, zombies can’t sneak up on you, and even if one get’s the drop on you, you can live much longer even without armor.

For me, the 3d perspective is just more engaging. In Minecraft, I feel it when I stand on top of a cliff and look down. When I’m mining run across a cavern, the yawning black space is much scarier and more exciting than coming across a cavern in 2D.

I’m planning to continue playing Terraria occasionally, but it scratches a different itch than Minecraft does.

No spoilers, I promise.

Portal came out as part of the Orange Box back in October 2007, nearly a year before I started this blog. I originally bought the Orange Box for the Half-Life 2, but I got so much more enjoyment from Portal than either that or Team Fortress 2. That’s especially surprising because I don’t like puzzle games or platformers. I’m not a fan of the Mario or Sonic games. I quit the first God of War (and the series) when I got to a wall of blades jumping puzzle.

The game was concise and fun. It had challenges but always prepared me in advance to solve them. These bits made for a very good game.

The humor made the game great.

So, four years later (roughly) Valve has released Portal 2. I’ve been looking forward to the game and yet avoiding nearly all of the marketing. Since it came out right as I was focused on Rift, I figured I’d wait until I was ready to play it then buy and download it (I’m trying to keep my mountain of unplayed games shorter than Everest). I was excited to play Portal 2 but wasn’t feeling and urgency to play.

Amazon forced my hand though by offering the PC version for $30. Even better, I apparently had $15 off promo for a game too which I found out when I checked out, so I ended up getting Portal 2 for $15. That’s a steal.

I feel bad though. I bought a physical disc and had it shipped to me, yet all I used was the license key. I literally opened the box and typed the key into Stream then started the download. The disc never left the box.

While not giving away anything whatsoever of the plot, let me just say that right from the first second of the game the humor is back and it’s amaaaaaazing! I had a great time making my way through the environments and enjoying the humor and personality in the game. It’s able to build on the history of the first game so there’s no ramp like in the first game where you don’t actually know there’s a story for the first half of the game (assuming I remember the pacing rightly).

As far as the pure mechanics of the game, puzzles are less about reflexes and more about understanding your environment. That can lead to some minor frustrations, but if I could figure it out then anyone could.

All in all, I think Portal 2 is an excellent sequel. I’m looking forward to trying the co-op when GC is ready.

Does whatever a spider can.

Watching the reruns of the 1967 animated series in the 80′s was my first exposure to Spider-Man, and the theme song from the show is usually the first thing that pops into my head when I think of the character. He was my favorite superhero as a kid, more than either Superman or Batman (although Batman was a close second). So when I saw a preview of the new game Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions as few months ago, I preordered it from Amazon.

It showed up on Tuesday this week and I’ve played about four hours so far. My initial impression is: great game, I’m having a lot of  fun, but I’m a little disappointed.

The graphics are absolutely amazing. The game looks very very good, both the world and the animations. Beenox has really managed to make the comic book art-style come alive. Playing in the game is like being in a comic book, but it looks and feels like a real world. What’s more, each of the four universes: Amazing, Ultimate, Noir, and 2099; have their own recognizable style both in graphics and dialog.

click for a larger image

Besides the graphics, the voice acting is also very well done. Neil Patrick Harris does the voice for Amazing Spider-Man (he did the voice for Spider-Man in the New Animated Series). Christopher Barnes does voices Spider-Man Noir and originally worked on the original animated series from 1994. Josh Keaton is the voice for Ultimate Spider-man (he did Spider-Man in the 2008 Spectacular Spider-Man show), and Dan Gilvezan voices Spider-Man 2099 (he did Spider-Man in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends from the 80′s). Of the four, Neil is my most favorite and Gilvezan is my least. They all do a quality job and have good dialog, but something about Gilvezan’s voice bothers me (while I wrote that part after the tutorial, after the first 2099 mission his voice is starting to grow on me). Oh yeah, and Stan Lee narratives, and it totally fits.

Beyond the sights and sounds, the action is fun but linear. The game opens with a tutorial mission that sets up the conflict of the story and introduces you to each of the four Spider-Men. Once that’s completed the first four stages are unlocked, one for each universe. When you pick a stage you select a difficulty level (easy, normal, hard). When you finish the stage, the game rates you on speed, use of combos, and how many collectibles you found. All completed stages are marked with which difficulties you’ve completed (so if you finish a stage on normal, then easy and normal are filled in). Each stage also has a dozen or so challenges that you can complete for bonus points (which are used for combat and character upgrades). The stages/ so far, are linear starting with an encounter with a villain and progressing through a series of areas to a final boss battle. Re-playability is limited to playing again on a higher difficulty or playing to finish a challenge that was missed (some of them are optional and some aren’t).

I’ve finished the first four stages (all on normal), which completes Act 1 and unlocks a cut-scene and the next four stages.

While I’ve really enjoyed the game so far, the disappointment I mentioned above is in the linearity. This is completely a problem of my own expectations. After I preordered the game I put it on my media black-out list. My assumption was that like most (all?) of the recent Spider-Man games it would have an open explorable world to web-swing through and include a series of story-line missions. If I’d thought it through, I would’ve realized this isn’t really possible considering there are four different universes to populate, which have been a ton of work I’m sure.

So my disappointment with the game has nothing to do with the game itself, but is just from a mismatch between reality and assumption.

I’ll write a follow-up, once I finish the game.

Serpent Lantern, the first Adventure Pack from Cryptic Studios for Champions Online, came out last week. I’d been looking forward to trying out the new content, even though my level-capped Silver Hunter still has quite a bit to do in Vibora Bay. I’ve been spending more time in the Alpha Quadrant and Middle-earth than Millennium City, recent and I was looking to SL to reawaken my interest.
Continue reading ‘Silver Hunter and the Serpent Lantern’ »

Red Dead Redemption: good or bad? Neither, it’s awesome! To illustrate how much I like this game let me give you the list of Xbox 360 games I’ve completed: Crackdown, Fable 2, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Red Dead Redemption. That is a very small subset of the 360 games I own, so any game that I actually finish before I lose interest and move on is something special.

I finished on Sunday evening, the in-game stats read that I’ve complete 96% of the game and spent 5+ days playing. The percentage seems about right given the number of unlocks and side-quests I’ve done, but the time played can’t be right. Raptr has me clocked in at 44 hours, which seems more accurate to me. Just as a comparison to Rockstar’s last game, I played GTA 4 for about 3 hours.

Continue reading ‘Red Dead Redemption’ »