• 20May 13

  Bioshock infinite step by step

  My roommate has a PS3 and a gamefly account so lucky me, I get to review another game soon.   But while most of the titles I've reviewed in the past were short and sweet and small indie titles.  This will be my first review of a big juicy AAA game.  So these next few blog posts will just be sort of like notes to help me write the review.  Ya sure, I could write them down on a notepad but who the frig does that anymore?

  - At the beginning I feel like you play as a begger.  You search garbage cans for loot, you steal junk off tables, eat loose apples and everybody ignores you.  Yes.  You pretty much are a beggar.

  -There's a story going on but I could really care less because the people in this sky town are absolute idiots.

  -Combat is horrible.  I mean, i'm not really a fan of the FPS genre anymore.  I used to be.  But now it's sort of lame.  Every FPS feels the same with some exceptions.  Bioshock infinite is not one of those exceptions.  The A.I just stands there and takes bullets in the chest.  Cover for a few seconds, pop up and shoot.  

  -The colors are great.  I think the graphics are really sweet.  Though you really cant interract with anything, the floating platforms all look gorgeous.  Bright, happy yet strange and intriguing.  I'll play more because of this point here.  I might even finish it

  • Posted May 20, 2013 11:47 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 17May 13

  Fun Vs. Good

   I made a pretty rediculous claim the other day that Westerners, for the most part, wouldn't know what a fun game was if it smacked them right in the face.  Then this person who clearly disagreed (as he should have) said in response, Fun depends on the person.  Essentially, fun is subjective.  

  I really don't agree with this.  I think it's an easy claim to make and easy to agree with because so many people like so many different types of things.  Saying that fun is subjective would only make sense next to this point.  But just because we like something doesn't make it fun.  For instance, I think professional sports players like and LOVE the sports they play, but I also think most of them are actually not having fun playing them (except maybe when they win a big game, but this would get me on another tangent about winning vs. fun).  Another example is my dad:   He likes to renovate houses, he likes to fix everything, huge hobby of his, but I don't think he's having fun doing it. 

  Now wait a second buster...How do you know? How can you tell when someone is having fun or not?  While I'm not trying to write a new definition for the word "fun,"  I will say that the act of having fun can be observed.  It's something you can actually see.  So If I was having fun and you were sitting next to me, you could tell I was having fun by just looking at me.  This is why I feel professional sports players are not having fun.  The game is now a job and everybody takes it way too seriously because of it.  My favorite baseball player (and a lot of people my age) growing up was Ken Griffey Jr.  Not because of his skills (although those helped) but because he actually looked like he was having fun playing the game.

  Many of the most lauded video games of all time, I feel, are not even close to the most fun games of all time.  I'm not saying one category is better or worse than the other.  But there is a clear difference.  World of Warcraft has already gone down in the record books as one of the greatest games ever made, for obvious reasons.  Now.  Have you ever seen somebody playing these game before?  I've seen plenty.  And there isn't much difference between the way they look and a someone who has a coma.

  And it's not just WoW.  Many of the greatest games have your brain fully obsorsbed into the gaming experience and your bodied glued to the controller.  Exacerbating the situation is how serious games are taking themselves these days.  Even Yahtzee was talking about this in his latest zero punctuation review of that Far Cry DLC.  The more serious the game is the more serious we take them.  

  The Wii sold so well because it was fun. Not because it had excellent hardware, or the best reviewed games of all time.  It sold because when you watched people playing it, you knew they were having fun.  What attracts people to MS and Sony was something different. And I have no problem saying that what attracted gamers to the Xbox 360 and PS3 were good games. 

  • Posted May 17, 2013 7:32 pm GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 13May 13

  A.I. is very far from good

  A.I. in shooters, and pretty much all action games, is extrememly awful.  Come to think of it, it's always been awful.  Pick some of the best shooters ever made and I would still tell you that the A.I. amounts to nothing more than a lump of old cheesecake in a Christmas stocking.

  It's a numbers thing.  The number of kills just piles up and life gets boring.  Enemies behave like one another.  Sure they do a couple of different things but after an hour of gameplay you figure those moves out too.  Sure new enemies are introduced but then we figure them out and before we know it all those new enemies are as boring as the enemies from the beginning.  Linear or sandbox, it doesn't matter.  

  There's a lot of talk now since these new consoles are on the horizon that we'd like to see more games with more characters on the screen.   Like, Imagine GTA6 with ten times more people on the screen!  While this sounds cool and everything, I can't help but think it's just going to be more of the same stupid creations multiplied by ten.  Just more aimless, retarded A.I civilians shleping around the streets looking for the brain that fell out of their head before the game started.

  But forget about that, my main issue is with the combat.  Enemy A.I. is horse manure.  It's like someone gave them all three pints of whisky and nothing to eat all day before entering the arena.  This goes for pretty much any game I can think of that features human to human combat in a third-person or first person shooter, and any action game really where other humans are the main target.  

  One enemy is not a challange, the challange lies in the amount of enemies.  Changing difficulty settings alters things like your health, how much damage you do, how much damage enemies can take, maybe it doubles the amount of enemies in the game world.  You say tomatoes I say it's no fun.  At the end of a single player campaign you'll made enough corpses to stack to the Mars.  

  Instead of pouring all this energy into creating massive worlds with endless amounts of enemies who couldn't hurt you unless thirteen of their buddies were around and they had a tank, a gattling gun, that dinasour thing from Power Rangers, why not try making a game where there's just a few dudes.  And make them use the environment like anyone would to survive.  Make them act like they dont want to die because they have two kids at home and a wife that loves them.  

  I would love to play a game where i'm on some mission and I get into some epic battle like from the end of the First Matrix or like one of the fights from the Bourne movies or from Kill Bill.  A fight that lasts for like 15 minutes and if you dont survive.  Well.  Time to do it again.  And I'm not talking about a battle with some large, mythic creature.  Just another person.  

  Some really smart A.I. would go a long way in video games and right now we are very far from seeing it.  

  • Posted May 13, 2013 10:32 pm GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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