Late in Gears of War 3, someone will say, “Bloody hell, they found the UIR! It’s a Gorasni ship!” The line is delivered as if it’s something that matters, but Gears of War 3 hasn’t told me what a UIR is or who the Gorasni are. The line might as well have been “Bloody hell, they found the Boop-i-dee-bop! It’s a Whamble-di-dee ship!” It’s an example of how Gears 3 cares about itself far too much to be arsed to care about me.
But my favorite scene is after the jump Continue reading →
…as Bodycount goes on, it resembles an Agatha Christie murder mystery in which the cast of characters begins to disappear one-by-one
Read the review here.
You know how everyone has a vice? Like how some people are coffee addicts and some people are, well, heroin addicts? I’m a game addict. I want them all. I suppose part of this is my OCD, but there’s something deep and dark within me that makes me purchase these games and their collector’s editions with reckless abandon.
Point in case: I want Space Marine. However, I’m a big Gears of War fan and know I’ll be busy with Marcus and friends for quite some time. Luckily, the collector’s edition is only available from THQ and I hate waiting, so odds are I’ll just forget about it.
The lesson here, publishers, is to ship collector’s editions to stores so I can’t resist them. Or make two different ones, one I have to order from your site, the other I can get in stores. I’m looking directly at you, Dead Rising 2.
I’ve been told Hard Reset is a short game. I’ll have to take people’s word for it. It’s taking me quite a while to work through it, as I have to play many of the sections over a few times. I usually just need to work out which weapons are best for a given area, and then try a few times to get it right. On the normal difficulty level, this is turning out to be more challenging that I expected.
As a result, this isn’t a game I sit down to play for a few hours at a time, like Gears of War 3, which I powered through with nary a hitch, sometimes barely paying attention. Hard Reset is more like a short sharp dose of spectacular shootering, akin to a shot of espresso (to extend the metaphor, Gears of War 3 is a Big Gulp cup full of day-old 7-11 coffee). I partly blame/credit Hard Reset’s checkpoint system. This isn’t a “save anywhere then reload if you die” game. It’s a game about getting from checkpoint to checkpoint, which leaves the difficulty tuning up to the developers who made the game. I can respect this. They know the game far better than I do when I’m asked to choose easy, normal, or hard. Frankly, even those three choices are a bit much to trust to the average gamer.
If this is supposed to be a four hour game, a lot of my four hours are looping back over themselves, dancing circles around that line between challenge and frustration. Each section of Hard Reset is a challenge in making do with whatever resources I can grab, dealing with the weapon upgrade choices I’ve had to make, and testing my skill at old school Doom style shootering that laughs at the prospect of a reload or crouch button. Either that or I suck at shooters. Probably a little of both. But whatever the case, as soon as it gets to be too much, I can drop the difficulty level to casual. It’s tough, but fair, and the underlying gameplay is good enough to sustain it. The checkpoints that some PC gamers might bemoan as a console convention are sometimes actually game design.
I do wish Hard Reset did a better job encouraging replay by making the scoring clearer and more prominent. Most recently, Fear 3 is the best case example of how a clever scoring system can add a lot. Before that, The Club was unparalleled in this regard. Less successful attempts include Halo: Reach and ODST, Gears of War 3, Bulletstorm, and Bodycount. Without being at least as good as those games at scoring, I don’t see much of a future for Hard Reset. When I’m through with it, I’ll probably be through with it, which is a far more damning way of a game being short than by merely not taking very long to get to the end.
I’d like to think I’m above these little kiddie Kirby games. But then I actually play Canvas Curse, Epic Yarn, or now Mass Attack and I realize how wrong I am. The folks at HAL Laboratory, the division inside Nintendo that makes Kirby games, know how to make a fresh and exciting game featuring the same pale bloated character we’ve been playing all along. Unfortunately, no such thing is true about Epic Games, the folks who made Gears of War 3, which is also out this week.
Ah, what a relief! After a long summer of mostly junk, it’s nice to finally see something like Drive, which we all liked. A lot. Even those of us who weren’t already fans of Ryan Gosling and Nicholas Winding Refn. But first, a little impromptu Straw Dogs talk. Later, for our 3×3 this week, we discuss the most convincing movie scientists.
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