Electric Sista Hood :: Video Game Reviews, Tech Gadget Reviews, and Anime Reviews

More BioShock 2 News & Previews

Had I not played through the first Bioshock a few months ago, this game would not be on my radar, but seeing as how I did, now it is. And boy, this is one hell of a blip on the radar!

Bioshock 2 brings us back to Rapture as a Big Daddy. Don't worry. We'll still be fighting other Big Daddies, as well as Big Sisters and other new foes. There's some very cool tweaks to the gameplay as well. Oh yeah! Rapture has a new leader, some chick that's bent on religion an butterflies. I'm sure there's more to it, but we'll have to wait until February 2010 to know for sure. Until then, check out IGN's preview.

Labels: BioShock, Douceswild

Finish what you start...

Well, for starters there's exploding heads. This is always a good start in a first person shooter, right? The second thing worth mentioning is largely accurate weaponry. Oh, and it's not Bioshock or Halo 3 or Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed and what everyone else is talking about. But that hasn't stopped people talking about Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (a lot, really). But let's delve into the brains and the brimstone; I promise that other than that, this isn't your average review.

So you'd be surprised just how long I spent ruminating on this review. What to include, what not to include, what to obsess on, and things like this. What was I obsessing on anyways? By way of segue, let's do two things, and get that out of the way first and also discuss probably the best part of the game.

Them weapons is pretty cool. So, most of your reviewers are not going to say "Well, Halo was a great game, but gosh those Covenant carbines just don't behave like the other alien carbines I've used. It's just not accurate." I am, in fact, going to say that I've used a lot of the weapons in the game, know how all of them work, and am sort of a, well, a gun crank. (I refuse to use the term "gun nut" in reference to myself, however accurate)

So imagine my surprise when I shouldered up a Dragunov to drop a bad guy. It turns out the rifle moves around a bit. And, it moves in pretty realistic fashion. It moves the way it would if you were breathing. It moves the way it should when you fire it. And, here's the neat part, the bullet goes where it should. It's not like a lot of the other shoot-the-brains-outta-the-other-guy type of games; if the bullet hits the back left fender of the guy's noggin, that's what takes damage. And further, his whole head doesn't just pop off like it would in, you know, Unreal or games of that fashion (not that I mind that, of course — I'm all for heads entirely exploding, great fountains of gore popping out of body cavities and head spiders from Spica that live to slurp your eyeballs out through your nose, and so on). They tried so hard to make these guns real.

And by and large they did. Let me explain another realism before I sort of knock it a bit. You can really thump a dude with that pistol. If you're capable of mounting a frontal assault with a pistol (that is, you can keep bullets on target and also find cover as you press forward — because you sure can't count on your squadmates for cover, more on this later), you can go and do it. This is really cool. The reason for this is with the .45, we're slinging 230 grains of lead (15 grams), while with the 7.62 (the AK/Dragunov) or the 5.56 (the M-16 and HKS weapons), we're firing anywhere from a lowish fifty to a highish seventy grains of lead (3-5 grams). It moves faster, this smaller lead, but at close ranges, it tends to overpenetrate and actually can do less damage than a slower moving, larger cross-section, heavier, pistol round. I delighted, perhaps too much (this leaving me to some of my aforementioned rumination — I actually contemplated how foaming-at-the-mouth violent I had been or the game was in general; this for quite some time), in running around behind large groups of the enemy and just taking out dozens of them with well-placed pistol rounds. It was, in some ways, easier than doing the same with the automatic rifles (which are actually select fire, not all-on or all-off, with the exception of the kalashnikov derivatives, mostly, but you can't tell it to fire one round except with exceptional [xbox] trigger control), because the rifle is flying around all over the place, and the pistol mostly stays put. Relatively. A .45 still kicks, of course.

So at the same time as we were allowed to go apeshit with the Dragunov (you can see I like the sniper role), and they went to all the trouble to make it realistic, when they actually give us a Barrett to work with (that's the .50, folks), they have the nerve to mention the "...Coriolis effect" and you must contend with windage and bullet drop, you cannot actually take this Barret with you and maim at will. With the Dragunov you cannot take out an entire army of goblins who were looking the wrong way. This is because the game is structured such that you find subsequent groups of guys who are behind subsequent sets of cover which, while deformable (you may shoot through some walls with some weapons, you may, uh, "move" some obstacles), forbid you from actually utilizing the weapons they spent the most time on. With the Dragunov there is also not bullet drop or windage, but you also can't engage at 600 yard distances to really experience these sorts of things (more on the continuity/environment thing in bits later).

The rest of the weapons (with the exception of their admirable treatment of the lowly pistol) were the same old bull shit we see in every other first person shooter. It's the same old game. Lots and lots and lots of rounds downrange (not necessarily on target), and augment with grenades, and you will win. On every difficulty. The problem, as I said, is with the structure of the game.

So while there are glaring problems with, shall we say, the continuity of the game (it is a war, fought as a chess match — and I do not intend that to be a compliment), it's frighteningly realistic, noise-and-smoke-and-gore wise. It will suck you in, and you'll find yourself genuinely wincing when bullets come your way and you can't figure out how to get to cover (incidentally, the bullets are not especially accurately depicted, but I'm going on second-hand information here, not having been actually shot at before; bullets "snap" or "pop" as they pass by you, and frankly, that sounds scarier to me than the muzzle flash and bang I see across the battlefield). I actually found a couple times when playing the game that my stomach would get knotted up and I'd need a beer or some other moderate tranquilizer to take the edge off all the violence. At other times, it was easy to revel in the gore and frenetic pace of some of the battles.

Play it in a dark room, concentrate on not getting killed, make sure the volume is loud enough, and your television has enough contrast (dark is real important, especially on plasma displays). It's quite an experience.

So those are the easy picks for goods and bads of the game. Here's the more nitpicky crap you can expect from me, just in general.

Your squad will never save your life. They'll never provide supporting fire. They'll never lead a charge. They won't throw back grenades (which, incidentally, you can do if they get too close). They barely even return fire. On all difficulties. This got to be so frustrating that I took to actually shooting folks in my squad dead so that they wouldn't give my attack away. I know this is a first person shooter, but this is "modern combat," and it's a third- or later generation FPS, and "first person" implies a certain amount of napoleonic go-get-em-and-rip-thems-guts-outs kind of business, but please, if you're going to send me in with a squad, I want them to act that way.

Which brings me to the online play: don't bother. Here's the thing. Most of the folks you'll play with online all either want to be the sniper, or all hate the sniper(s). They all want to charge, or none of them will. If you can really find a group of people in that repugnant swamp of testosterone called xbox live, and play with them continually for weeks, you can form a cohesive group and actually play as a squad (and you can do this in any of the live games, really). The problem is the aforementioned repugnant swamp. Everyone's an asshole, nobody's really good at the game (or they are, and they're an elitist asshole, which is worse). All the realism in the game is for naught when you realize the simple fact that in actual combat, while nobody's thrilled about dying, if you say, "hey, I'm going to go rout these fuckers, provide some cover fire", they probably will. That, incidentally, is why we have fully-automatic weapons. For cover fire. Anyways, I was told by one of the folks I correspond with, "oh, you must play it online. It's so different." Maybe I'm just full of hate for my fellow man and I'd rather blow everyone's brains out and not have anyone complain. Or maybe I don't like thirteen year old boys with microphones too close to their pimpled faces. Whatever, the online experience is spoiled by the players, the continuity problem of the game prevents it from being played in a realistic fashion which is, ironically, provided by the engine of the game.

Consider this instead. Let the sniper teams get "inserted" seventy-two hours in advance. Let them hump out to a good firing position and arm them well. Have people armed with AT-4's or Javelins or MANPADS or whatever you want to call it, and teach them how to use them. Then, let's have a war. Let's have a real, "modern combat" kind of war in a real-time, more of a MMORPG game. That'd be pretty cool. And, like I said, all the elements are there, in the game. It is rather ironic. You may think I'm being unrealistic about this, but I think something like it has been achieved with the squawkbox crowd. They can fly whatever the hell they want to fly, from a DynaSoar to a Concorde to a Sopwith Camel, but they need to conform to physics and air traffic control, and, oh, it's impolite to crash into other aircraft.

So it kind of makes me sad to bring Halo 3 up in this review, but one of the things Halo 3 did really well was have squad dynamics. You could expect friendly AIs to do the right thing. If you jumped on the back of the warthog or muskrat or whatever that little thing was called, you could expect Johnny Jarhead to, you know, drive you the right way or vice-versa. If you turned out to be a real jerk and start shooting the good guys, they run away from you. They provide cover fire and they're involved in the whole war thing, and you can even hang back and let them pick people off, and wait to go finish off the entrenched ones on your own.

That's another thing that's missing, for what it's worth. There's nowhere near enough talking in the game. Nobody talks. You're in a goddamn war, and nobody's going "ow oh god my knee, my knee" or "where's that morphine I'm gonna diiiiiiiieeeee" or whatever (again, not having had the pleasure, I guess). Halo, again, excels here. Sometimes it's comical, but it's always there. Even back in Marathon people were talking.

So the game is flawed. It's a good game, and I liked it, but I can't bring myself to really play it anymore because I see its flaws, in the utterly useless good guys, and the lack of any grander scale, despite the fact that the game is played out almost against a novel in terms of story (not that you really participate).

Labels: BioShock, Call-of-duty-4, guns, Halo3, modern combat, rant

Finish what you start...

Jack Thompson is at it again and this time, he's not alone. He has enlisted the aid of his 15-year old son in his crusade against violent video games.

The Florida lawyer, Jack Thompson, has struck again and now, his fury is coming down on a local Best Buy. He sent his 15 year-old son into the store to see if someone would sell him a copy of the popular video game, Bioshock, which they did. He is now insisting that both the clerk and the store manager should be fired immediately.

This is not the first time that Thompson and his son have united to bring down mature rated video games. Five years ago, he sent his son into the same Best Buy to buy GTA Vice City, with similar results. Here is my question to you. Is Jack Thompson a hypocrite for sending his son into the store to buy something that he, himself, proclaims is "dangerous to youths"? I understand his intentions, but is proving a point worth "corrupting the mind "of his son even though he, no doubt, will not let him play the game? That's like sending your kid into the video store to buy porn then saying, "I had no intention of letting him watch it. I just wanted to prove a point."

What are your thoughts?

Labels: BioShock, Douceswild, Jack-Thompson, Videogames

Finish what you start...

So Metacritic.com has declared BioShock from 2K Games bestest game ever according to every reviewer that has touched the game.

And they are damn near right.

I'm still a much bigger fan of God of War but BioShock is an incredible game that excites and scares the beejeebus out of me at times still. For me it's more of a "thiller-survival" game than a "survival horror" game, and a million downloads of the demo on XBLive can't be wrong.

If you haven't already grabbed the demo, log yourself onto XBLive and get it already... and hit up the BioShock website.

That is all.

Labels: 2K-Games, BioShock, Ninjasistah, Videogames

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Bioshock 2 Preview Brings Pure Rapture

posted @ 10/30/2009 11:42:00 AM by Douceswild

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

posted @ 1/21/2008 10:19:00 AM by Alex J. Avriette

00-Thompson: License To Mystery Shop

posted @ 9/21/2007 12:23:00 AM by Douceswild

BioShock: Yeah, It's That Good

posted @ 9/10/2007 05:48:00 PM by Ninjasistah