Alright after a week of procrastination the guilt has finally caught up with me and I'm hopefully going to breath life back into this potentially dead thread.
In my last post I stated that I was going to do a write up for Running With Scissor's 2003 controversial game Postal 2. However after playing for a good day and a half I found that I really didn't have much to say. I'm even questioning whether or not this is a game that encourages genocide (by genocide I mean enemy genocide, not the real life kind). I mean yes, the residents of Paradise Arizona do everything within their power to make me kill them, but it's technically not required. The other two games I mentioned in my last post, DOOM and Painkiller, not only encourage but almost force you to kill all the bad guys on the screen. I mean with weapons like the titular painkiller (a kind of swivel death blade thingy that quickly reduces enemies to piles of mush) and the stake gun, it seems kind of like a waste of time to create such unique weapons without the incentive to use them. Other than that, the only thing I can really say about Postal 2 is that it's a great way to blow off steam, even better than doing rampages in the Grand Theft Auto series.
Anyhow my next entry into this series is one that I can't say I've been looking forward to, but it needs to be said so without further ado here's the next entry on:
Online Gaming
Like it or not online gaming is pretty much the direction that all first person shooters are going. I for one am not a big fan of online gaming for a number of reasons, which I will name. Firstly I find a majority of the gamers to be loud, annoying douche bags with the intelligence and maturity of a doorknob. Secondly, I never really felt like I was getting any better at the games no matter how long I played, I always just felt like a running target only to fall prey to some AWP using pus
sy. Lastly I feel that the online multiplayer gaming is starting to subtract from the single player game, with more effort going into tarting the multiplayer up, whereas the single player is just plonked on for antisocial rejects like myself with very little effort actually put into it.
Now that I've got that out of the way, I can talk about some of the good things I've found in multiplayer games, one in particular, EA's 2002 World War II entry Battlefield 1942. Battlefield 1942 (BF1942 as it will now be known) does just about everything differently from my other online game, Counter-Strike. Instead of a small map that focuses more on intense and adrenaline oriented left mouse clicking, BF1942 focuses more on map exploration and ambushing, as well as the use of it's many many different vehicles. You get a friend that can actually fly a plane while you man the gun turret, you can do some incredible damage. Some people say that it's the equivalent of AWP users in Counter-Strike, however I disagree. AWPing requires you to stay in one place looking through a scope while striking down enemies in one shot. Using a vehicle in BF1942 requires you to hone in on your accuracy while in a moving vehicle. There is also the possibility of getting shot down by anti-aircraft guns or a well placed RPG. The other major selling point for me is the fact that you respawn after 15 seconds, rather than waiting for the last person on your team to either be killed or be triumphant. I often found myself rooting for the enemy to kill the player on my team just so I could actually start playing the game instead of reading Playboy (For the articles of course). Then when I somehow managed to survive whilst all my teammates were slaughtered I became very self-conscious about my playing ability, much like when we played baseball in P.E. and all eyes were on me. When video games bring back the same feelings that P.E. use to bestow on me, something has gone very wrong.
I know what some people are going to say, "What? a post on Online Gaming and no mention of Halo! WTF mate?" Let me say this, I HATE the Halo series. My first exposure to it was on PC back in 2003 when it was ported by Gearbox (makers of Half-Life: Opposing Force and Blue Shift) so I thought it would be good, however I was sadly disappointed (and out 20 bucks). The story was fairly uninteresting and gave me no real insight as to why the Covenant wanted to kill us. I found the game to be a little schizophrenic, especially with their enemies. You had the little enemy midgets running around with their pathetic weapons and dialogue, then the tougher enemies who still managed to succumb to a single rifle butt to the back. On the levels where you did have friendly A.I. I never really noticed them helping at all, except when they died and I could pick up their ammo and/or health kits. After reading some reviews on the PC version I saw that most sites gave it a rather mediocre review, so of course I just assumed all the issues I had with it were just because it was PC. So when I got my 360 in 2006 one of the first games I picked up for it was the original Halo because it was 10 bucks and still found the same problems. I did play it a little further than I did on the PC, but when I got to the part where you're being chased by the Flood while following Guilty Spark 343 going through the same fuc
king room again and again in what is one of the most blatant uses of copy and paste I've ever seen that I just said "fuc
k it" and turned it off.
With an experience like that, it is pretty understandable as to why I never bothered with playing it online. The game did do things right, I'll admit that, I like the fact that it was one of the few to introduce the limited arsenal which is more realistic than carrying a melee weapon, pistol, stronger pistol, shotgun, machine gun, grenades, some kind of exotic weapon that you never use till the boss, and rocket launcher. Actually that's about the only nice thing I can say about it, so yeah that's where I'm going to end this. I've watched people play it online and to be honest it looked just like Counter-Strike but with different guns, locales, and skins and seeing as how I only played Counter-Strike to try and keep my distancing friendships with people back in Vancouver in tact, but eve that didn't work and instead I lost three years of my life getting killed a lot and never getting better.