Fall Release Schedule Blues

Ughh… It’s that time of the year again. Way too many good games coming out at one time – I still haven’t recovered from this time last year! *eyes unplayed copies of Gears of War 2, Fable 2, and Dead Space on his shelf* In no particular order we have: Brutal Legend, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Borderlands, Torchlight, GTA: The Ballad of Gay Tony, etc. never mind the recently released games that I haven’t bought yet such as Batman: Arcum Asylum and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Ugh… So little time (and money) but so many awesome games.

Funnily enough of all of these games one of the ones I want to play the most is the newly release Fallout 3: Game of the Year edition (on PC of course.) I’ll be buying that one soon but I’d still like to finish up Garn’s Oblivion adventures before jumping into it.

Dropping on to the Lost Planet

Oh shit, it’s game log time and I actually played some things this time!

As predicted my next 360 foray was Halo 3: ODST. ODST has pretty much been talked about to death lately on all of the gaming forums, blogs, podcasts, and the like so I won’t go into it too much. I played through it co-op via splitscreen on Heroic difficulty and enjoyed it quite a lot. It’s nice and short but well paced and a lot of fun. If you’re a Halo (particularly Halo 3) fan then this is a must buy despite the lack of the iconic Master Chief. I plan on going back and getting more of the achievements, including going after all of the audio logs, in a subsequent playthrough sometime soon. I also dabbled in the new Firefight mode a couple of times with some friends and, as predicted, enjoyed the hell out of it. There’s just something to be said for working together with friends in just about any game and the Gears of War 2 “Horde” mode template that everyone has been shamelessly copying lately really seems to nail a certain pure aspect of that.

Silenced pistols are the new black.
“Silenced pistols are the new black.”

Next up I decided to play Lost Planet: Extreme Condition on my 360. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps it was the ever increasing nip in the air around here as we move into the fall that made me want to jump head first into Lost Planet’s abundant virtual snow banks… or maybe I just dig mechs? Who knows. I remember thinking the game looked cool since well before it was released but until the relatively recent announcement of its upcoming sequel I feel like it has been overshadowed by newer games. I’ve got a couple of friends who really dig the game though and one of them, NetworkShadow, even demoed it for a few of us at his place one day not too long ago. I really got into the idea of trudging through the beautiful snowy environments. The graphics might be fairly dated nowadays but people were blown away by them at launch and they’re just stylized enough to remain easy to appreciate even now.

E.D.N. III has some pest control troubles...
“E.D.N. III has some pest control troubles…”

I managed to beat the game in just a few sittings and although there were some tricky sections (including lots of old school set piece boss battles) I found the game to be fairly easy. In fact a lot of my difficulty came about from trying to collect the achievements for all of the “target mark” collectibles for which I had to replay a few sections, even a few entire levels to complete. The character’s movement and control felt slightly off to me (though admittedly I play relatively few 3rd person action games) but once I got used to the controls it all felt quite smooth and I was generally quite happy with it. I was a little disappointed by the last boss fight which hit on a pet peeve of mine – throwing entirely new game mechanics at you in the last level. I didn’t feel like Lost Planet’s case was as gross as a lot of other game’s and I once I got a good feel for it I could more or less tell what they were going for. Still, it was fairly annoying and I ended up having to replay it like 15 times before I finally managed to beat it.

Lost Planet is also one of those newer Capcom games that seems to heap on a large amount of Western influence for some mysterious reason I don’t suppose I care enough to speculate too much about – something about increased international sales or a bold new direction or something, I don’t know. Indeed the game reminds me a lot, the setting, graphics, control, and the core gameplay, of a lot of Western 3rd person shooters, however there is an unmistakable Japanese feel to the entire game. I’m not just talking about the often silly extended cutscenes but the game itself often feels like somewhat of a 3D take on an oldschool side scrolling shooter like Contra or something. It’s hard to explain but I’m sure some of you who have played it know where I’m coming from. Regarding those cutscenes though, I’ve got to say that not playing many Japanese games, particularly the cutscene heavy JRPG genre, I do find an occasional dip into the cesspools of insane Japanese cutscenes to be pretty refreshing.

What's better than mowing down aliens with a minigun? Mowing down aliens with two miniguns!
“What’s better than mowing down aliens with a minigun? Mowing down aliens with two miniguns!”

Next up for the 360 is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. An interesting note, and one I remember mentioning once or twice on the old podcast, is that I’ve had Call of Duty 4 since right around the time it was first released. I had the PC version and only really bought it to play multiplayer with friends however. As a result I never even started up the single player campaign and somewhere in the back of my mind I had always figured I’d probably enjoy it more on the Xbox 360 and that the achievements wouldn’t hurt either. So, here I am, nearing the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and I’ve finally tracked down a decently priced used copy of the game for 360. I can’t wait! I’ve heard so much about the campaign and, who knows, I might even give multiplayer on Xbox Live a try while I’m at it since it’s such a blast.

On a non-console related note I also continue to play Half-life 2 from time to time – I’m about to start Episode 2 and wrap the game up. I’ll talk more about Half-life 2 in a separate post when I finally get around to finishing it.

Big Fake Robots

With Planetside on my mind and a lot of great memories welling up, I’m also reminded of one of my stupidest moments in online gaming.

As I mentioned in my last post I’m a big fan of Planetside and I’ve resubbed to the game many times, though because of the game’s many flaws I can never stay subscribed for very long before I get bored, annoyed, pulled away by something more enticing – at the very least I get my fill and cancel yet again. Shortly after renewing my account for the first time in many, many months I coincidentally received a new issue of Computer Gaming World in the mail that had a relatively small article about this huge new free expansion they were adding to the game that centered around the addition of what they called Battle Frame Robots, or simply “BFRs.” Mechs for you Planetside virgins.

Sometime later I was curious about what kind of idiocy was going around on the official message boards as a result of this (SOE’s Planetside forums were always a pretty hideous pit of bitching about the developers, flame wars over game balance and other perceived designed issues, and immature braggadocio) only to find absolutely zero mention of this new content being added whatsoever. Suspecting I might somehow be the first to know, but not 100% positive, I posted a purposely naïve sounding message asking what people thought of the new content. Call it trolling if you like, but there wasn’t really any ill intent.

The first several replies to my post consisted largely of people questioning my sanity, but many others were intrigued and wanted to know more. I then posted a link to a picture of one of the pages of the article. I quickly grew tired trying to explain what I was on about and just posted high resolution scans of the entire article and tried to limit my number of replies as the replies grew more and more heated.

The bringer of evil.
“The bringer of evil.”

The absolute torrent of flames and accusations hurled at me was truly something to behold. The board absolutely erupted into frenzy as thread after thread was created on the subject. I was amazed as I watched things I obviously knew to be 100% fact get torn apart and debated incessantly. Some of the amazingly intricate conspiracy theories people came up were quite fun to read though I’ve got to say. A large number of people replied to my posts or PMed me asking for more proof, wishing I’d die in a fire for being a filthy con man, congratulating me on such a brilliantly executed scam, and, most annoyingly of all, bluntly declaring that I was a liar and betting millions of combined dollars that everything I had posted was pure bunk. Insert some great revelation about “John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” here. I admit that after awhile I started throwing out some purposely snarky and slightly misleading replies just to mess with people since I knew the actual, verified truth would eventually come out.

After another day or two of this madness the devs finally responded and confirmed that what I had posted was true. Believe it or not, I didn’t get a single check in the mail or even an apology in my inbox. *sigh* Still, it was pretty exciting being the most infamous person in an entire MMO for a couple of days and some deep down, maniacal part of me got quite a big kick out of watching all of the chaos I had caused.

Here are some fun supporting links:

…and all that is just a small sampling!

It’s funny. BFRs were hated by a large portion of the community the second I posted about them but they were even more hated once they finally made it into the game: as many of us had feared they were grossly imbalanced and the game suffered as a whole due to their addition. Eventually they were nerfed over and over again until they were just another vehicle on the battlefield, albeit still an extremely powerful one, and the process of acquiring them, never mind them actually being on the battlefield, altered the general flow of combat from then on. The controversy still lives on as you can see from the celebratory comments on this news item announcing that BFRs apparently won’t be reappearing in Planetside 2. I, for one, actually liked the idea. 🙁

Edit 2021: All of the SOE forum links are dead now, unfortunately. Thus is the nature of online forums, I guess. The PSU one is still alive somehow, though. I also added a clip of the original controversial image to the post! As an aside, re-reading this now, I hate to think I might have inadvertently fucked over a PR push for this new expansion that could have helped the game. Still, if it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. I also have to wonder if the way that BFRs were… announced, as it were, actually made a difference in how they were received. I guess we’ll never know.