Category Archives: Game Logs

Mortal Komments!

I have some fond memories of the Mortal Kombat franchise starting from running into the arcade cabinet at a local grocery store of all places and admiring its cutting edge digitalized graphics and fantastic gore, quickly followed up by the obsessive, glowing buzz it gained from most of my then-8th grade compatriots. Soon after there was a lot of hanging out at local arcades as well as tracking down the various home console releases of the first two games with my friends. By the time Mortal Kombat 3 was released I had already developed a solid aversion to fighting games thanks largely to a mixture of the whole arcade/fighting game scene locally and my own lack of fighting game ability – really, most of my countless hours spent playing the console ports of MK 1 and 2 consisted of little more than me acting as a kind of moving punching bag for one of my much more skilled best friends. Great fun, that. (For the record I sucked at Street Fighter 2 as well. ;))

“”For a good time… don’t call Mileena.”

Still, I wasn’t being sarcastic about the fond memories. That was more than 15 years ago and I view those years in particular with a ton of nostalgia. So yeah, even if the MK games weren’t some of my favorites I still have a soft spot for them. I picked up the N64 port of MK 4 at some point, and I dabbled with some of the later games including Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. I can’t say I was greatly anticipating the 2011 Mortal Kombat but I was definitely intrigued by it. Fortunately unlike the last several MK releases this one had apparently actually lived up to its claims of returning to its roots and managed to become a better fighting game to boot by further diversifying and rebalancing its various characters.

I spent some quality time going through the story mode, some of the character ladders including the co-op ladders, and of course playing around in versus mode. Does it live up to the hype? Sure! If you never liked MK for its fighting system you might and I stress might be able to appreciate it a bit more now… but if it was the silly characters, over the top gore, dumb setting, or skimpy outfits you found objectionable then not much has changed – all of the stuff that appealed so strongly to my middle school peers and I is still intact if not even turned up a notch or two. The female character’s outfits are even more ridiculous, the gore… fatalities especially, even more gruesome. It’s the complete package. The biggest improvement there has got to be the story mode. I laughed along when I heard some of the podcasters I listened to scoffing at how many writers the game had credited well before its release but it actually does a surprising amount of fleshing out of the silly Mortal Kombat backstory. It essentially re-tells the plots of the first few games and the movie. It’s still dumb, sure, but unfair 2 vs. 1 matches and some annoying boss fights (suck it, Shao Kahn) aside it was great fun to play through.

“My main character – an Inquisitor Cleric.”

I’ve started winding down my WoW time lately for various reason and have instead started playing around with Rift. My brief synopsis: it has nice graphics, a cool class mechanic, and some other goodies but only really does one thing completely new to the genre: not suck. Well, let me explain… Rift’s mechanics are very much inspired by World of Warcraft (I’m being nice, guys) but unlike most of the MMOs that have come (and gone) since the success of WoW Rift actually not only barrows a ton of goodies from it but does so well. It’s very polished from the get go and the vast majority of little features and design tweaks that have helped WoW either become successful or stay successful over the years are already there. It’s so annoying to hop into a new MMO and come across problem after problem that have already been solved in other games. A lot of the time these are eventually patched out but… come on guys, why not just fix it from the fucking beginning? That’s Rift.

It’s about as good as you can expect from a WoW clone that aspires to be little more than a WoW clone. The setting and backstory are somewhat interesting but don’t appeal to me much personally but really, I’m almost totally done with this type of Everquest inspired theme-park MMORPG anyway, currently subscribing to the “if I want WoW, I’ll play WoW” mentality. I’ll still play around with Rift (and WoW) for a while but I doubt I’ll make any serious commitment to an MMORPG again until the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic… not that it is necessarily all that far off… nor may it do much to change the WoW formula itself, sadly. That said I’m very much interested in whatever Trion Worlds does next – they definitely seem to be an above average MMO developer so far.

“It might look like I’m winning but there’s about 500 more marines not in the shot…”

I’ve also wrapped up the adventure mode of the Xbox 360 version of Peggle Nights – no surprise there, it’s still great, simplistic pick up and play fun. Finally, I’ve been playing some Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade again, just dabbling with the Necrons in skirmish battles since I’ve been considering returning to playing tabletop 40k again and am learning towards putting together a Necron army. Thank god the table top game and Dawn of War’s RTS mechanics are nothing alike because I’ve yet to win a single damn game as the Necrons. 😕

Force Feedback

Ughhhhhh… it’s been a while! I haven’t been playing much Xbox 360 lately, or much else besides World of Warcraft for that matter, but the one game I have been working my way through is Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Yeah, the first one – you should be used to me playing old games by now. 😉 Where, oh where, do I start?

I’ve got a long history with Star Wars games being somewhat of an in-the-closet Star Wars geek, and often times the fan service supplied in these games is almost enough to get me through them alone, for better or for worse. In the case of TFU it is definitely for the worse, unfortunately. TFU nails the Star Wars aesthetic fairly well and, as with the vast majority of Star Wars games, the sound effects and music are great. The graphics themselves are pretty solid, even quite nice on occasion, despite a few bugs here and there and relatively minor issues with animation, clipping, and the like.

“Shaak Ti about to join the rest of the Jedi.”

Speaking of bugs, despite the game being massively patched since it was first released, there are still plenty of them to go around. I ran into a few major glitches during two different end level boss fights which left me unable to continue and extremely frustrated. I’d have to say that the bugs were a lot less annoying than some of the other things I took issue over though.

TFU plays, more or less, like other “character action” games such as the God of War series, for instance. One big difference though is your force powers, and due to the nature of many of them, it is necessary to have a way to target specific characters and objects beyond the typical melee and direction based targeting common to this style of game. TFU handles this by locking onto the closest enemy that you’re facing and allowing you to change your target at will though the targeting is often way too imprecise in the heat of battle causing you to sometimes lock on to a piece of a wall or a chunk of debris instead of the giant AT-ST currently standing next to you, filling your cloak full of holes. At best this can be annoying and at worst will cause you to die needlessly many times throughout the course of the game. The game is challenging enough without sabotaging you with bad controls.

“Zzzzaaaapppp! Crispy Stormtrooper, anyone?”

The challenge is something else I have a problem with. There are some sections that are frustrating for various reasons (the infamous Star Destroyer part says hello!) but even allowing for those exceptions I absolutely hated running into hordes and hordes of common enemies that were somehow immune to various force attacks or otherwise frustratingly powerful. Isn’t part of the fun of having all of these amazing powers the ability to trounce people with them and generally cause all kinds of massive havoc? It succeeds some of the time but I often found myself feeling like I had to work a lot harder than I should have to work to get through a level or boss fight. Many of the boss fights took this annoyance up a notch by feeling overly cheap because of the combinations of their various immunities and special attacks.

Not to sound too negative! Graphics, sound, and general “Star Warsiness” aside, I also found myself really enjoying the story. While the tale of Starkiller isn’t exactly incredibly engrossing, it was pretty satisfying (in a shamefully nerdy way) to see how his story fit into the plots of the movies and the general canon Star Wars Galaxy timeline. It isn’t at all unusual for Star Wars games, books, comics, etc. to be considered canon but they don’t often tie so closely to the original trilogy. The endings were quite awesome as well. I chose the light side route (naturally!) and ended up watching the dark side ending on YouTube rather than suffering through the last level again.

“You even kill a ton of Stormtroopers when you work for the Empire. I love Star Wars games!”

So, I suppose I enjoyed TFU overall, somehow. Really, if it weren’t a Star Wars game I probably wouldn’t have completed it, though I’m sure I’ve felt that way many, many times in the past as well. Sadly, I just barely managed to like the overall experience enough that I’m now tempted to eventually pick up TFU2 from a bargain bin despite how much it got slammed in reviews though, that said, I wasn’t exactly desperate to play more of the first game when it was done and indeed will be skipping the DLC for now.

Now where is my damn X-wing/Tie Fighter reboot?

Ok, that title was a bit forced… get it? GET IT?! Surprise! My love affair with awful comedy is still very much intact. 🙂

Explosionaries 2

Another Xbox 360 game slowly but surely scratched off of my seemingly endless backlog! This time it was a copy of Mercenaries 2 that I reluctantly fished out of a bargain bin for something along the lines of $10. I say reluctantly because apparently Mercenaries 2 was a massive flop and I heard enough bad things to stay far away, at least at first, even as a fan of the first game. Still, its review scores were generally good with some people even going as far as claiming it was one of their favorite games at the time. Like many such games it seems to be rather divisive as the other end of the spectrum was well represented as well. The biggest issues seem to have been related to bugs, glitches, and the like, which is quite disappointing after how polished the first game felt combined with the fact that this go round was delayed multiple times. Playing it well after its release and much subsequent patching I’m guessing that some of the worst of these issues have been long since resolved as despite a few oddities here and there, my game was relatively glitch free.

Like Mercenaries: Play Ground of Destruction, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is essentially a Grand Theft Auto 3 clone which has the unique spin of being set in a war zone filled with all kinds of potent military weapons and vehicles. When over-simplified and distilled to that level it is quite easy to see its appeal, eh? Still, the games make many other both subtle and not-so-subtle changes to the GTA formula which help distinguish it… but, honestly, while playing it I couldn’t help but feel that part of the charm of the original was simply that it was a really well executed GTA3 style open world game which, at the time, there were very few of, yet this generation there are an almost stifling number of similar open-world games on the market, and Mercenaries 2 has some trouble keeping up with the pack in some areas.

“*Insert highly inappropriate Tiananmen Square reference*”

When I first loaded the game up I was a bit surprised with the menus and the presentation in general – it seemed quite polished and well designed. Once in the world the game started to show its cracks a little more, with graphics that at times looked… I don’t want to say last gen, but definitely early this generation – lots of pop-in, some odd, janky things going on with textures and lighting sometimes, etc. The one thing, graphically, the game does do really, really well is the explosions which, considering how important they are to the game, is a damn good thing. They’re the best I’ve seen in this type of game and combining them with the engine’s destructible environments (a feature I hope gets more and more common in new games) makes for a lot of incredible, large scale action.

Back to the action, as I hi-jacked my first attack helicopter and began rampaging through a Venezuelan city I thought “Wow… this is just as good as the original. Awesome!” and wondered where all of the negative reviews came from exactly. Unfortunately as I played more and more I ran into more and more tiny annoyances that started to slowly build up over time. Things like how utterly daft the AI was, having civilians walk out in front of my car causing me to lose money and enemy soldiers firing RPGs pointblank at me… while I was standing next to their commander, even. As an aside because of how insanely chaotic the combat can be I QUICKLY gave up trying to capture High Value Targets alive. I’m pretty sure I’d still be only half way through the game and missing half of my hair if I hadn’t since they often have a way of dying even when I’m being exceedingly careful around them. Back to annoyances: how, after amassing a good stockpile of them, I found the majority of the game’s much celebrated airstrikes’ usefulness to be extremely situational at best since you have to pretty much be at ground zero to throw a smoke grenade or drop a beacon where you want one to land is also a good one.

“You got some of your building in my eye! Lawsuit! Lawsuit!”

Still, this is a “sandbox” type of game (though I suspect with the popularity of games like Minecraft we’re going to stop calling simple “open world” games “sandboxes” sooner or later) which means that we always have the option of finding our own solutions to these types of problems. For instance, the airstrike thing? I found two great ways to overcome them: Put your beacon or even smoke grenade on a moving target and move it into the place you want to destroy, such as flying a chopper or crashing a jeep into a building and jumping out at the last second, though this does require some pretty precise timing. An even more interesting example: placing an artillery barrage beacon on a car and then hauling ass through an area while watching the chaos unfold behind you. The other method is a bit sneakier: use the game’s faction system to disguise yourself by jacking an enemy vehicle to deliver the bomb. My favorite method was via helicopter roof top landings. I’d buy or steal an enemy chopper, let my disguise kick in, and then casually land on or next to my target. When the coast was clear I’d hop out, throw down a beacon or smoke grenade, and then hop back in and hope I could get my chopper back in the air and a safe distance away before I ate a pair of 500lbs bombs or whatever present I was giving my little friends.

I suppose that is what sets good, or at least fun, open world games apart from not-so-fun ones: the game has to provide the players (and even the AI in some cases) with the underlying systems to let interesting, fun, emergent gameplay unfold. Mercenaries 2 pretty much succeeds on that front, providing you with plenty of tools to have a fun ride to the end. Of course, dumb but incredibly amusing stuff still happens as well, such as when I was calling in a helicopter and it landed right in the middle of the road. Just as it was landing a civilian was speeding down the road on a sports bike. The timing was perfect: just a few seconds after losing sight of the motorcycle behind the chopper, the chopper lands and I hear a satisfying “thud!” 😛

“Never taunt your helicopter pilot.”

Speaking of helicopters, as with the first game their controls are simple and quite satisfying and I found myself preferring to use them as often as possible, keeping my stockpile full of my favorites at all times. SAMs and other AA can be damn annoying in some parts of the map until you start finding/buying more choppers with anti-tank missiles and get a knack of dodging them long enough to take them out. I’m still not entirely sure how you can avoid losing choppers (and even tanks) between missions nor how to repair and rearm them. I was convinced such a feature didn’t even exist at first to be honest but late in the game I was startled by the wrenching sound effect when I inadvertently repaired one of my choppers on a landing pad in the middle of an intense firefight. I think they only work if they’re both of the same faction, perhaps? Compared to other, similar games vehicles are almost treated like disposable suits of armor in this game – even if you don’t need one, or want one, hopping in one can save your life… even a crappy car. You also get the added bonus of seeing the hilariously bad ragdoll effect that happens when your character is blown out of a vehicle. I witnessed some pretty epic ones in which I was thrown hundreds of feet and twisted into all kinds of disgusting, if not physically impossible positions, only to stand up and dust myself off almost unscathed!

The game is much less stingy with money and store options than the first one, and the store is a lot easier and more convenient to use in general, though I stuck to my bad habit of being overly conservative with my spending, often opting to hijack enemy tanks and choppers rather than buy or use my own… JUST IN CASE… though I can’t really blame that on the game. I did have some bizarre glitches when ordering helicopters though – several times I had my chopper (and Ewan) vanish right before my eyes after landing, and at other times he’d simply never show despite losing my fuel and the item from my stockpile. Fuel was another annoyance, really. It always seemed to be in abundance until you really needed it, at which point you’d have to put your war efforts on hold while you went out on a savaging run. Oh, and speaking of glitches, several of the achievements I earned never popped for some reason, which is intensely frustrating for anyone who even mildly cares about such things.

All in all I found myself enjoying Mercenaries 2 a lot more than I suspected I would despite it not quite meeting all of my expectations. If you’re into this sort of game and have played some of the other bigger titles (including Merc 2’s biggest competition at this point: Just Cause 2) then I don’t see any reason not to pick this up if you can find it for dirt cheap like I did unless you simply have zero tolerance for some of the negative technical stuff I described. I certainly got my money’s worth at least. One word of caution: I’ve read that the Xbox 360 version is the best so your mileage my vary if you pick it up on PS3 or PC. I see the PC one on sale at various places for under 10 dollars frequently and, providing that it is indeed decent, I’d imagine it could be a very fun game to screw around in cooperatively if you have a bored online friend about. For a final summary, Yahtzee’s review was hilariously spot on!

As usual all Xbox 360/console screenshots stolen. I am a Mercenary after all! Oh, and for the record I played Chris Jacobs in both games.