Expert is a 1995 Playstation doomclone by Japan. Thats like 4 interesting things right there. It is also Nihon Butsu’s last game. Wow. And all the weapons seem to be projectile based opposed to hitscan! Woah!
It’s also real stupid unfair for that last point as if the enemy has line of sight it is shooting the shit out of you and you have to have the cursor dead on them to deal damage. With a dpad. It’s not uhh great. But the building in the game has 100 levels. Does that translate to 100 levels I dont know! I only played to level two.
There is very little information about this game in English. I’d submit a HG101 review but that would take me playing on an emulator and screenshots and I am lazy. It was a good 500 yen though.
There are also stills cutscenes with too much talking and you get to choose your layout between levels. Which might be the first shooter that did something like that before Rainbow Six?
Just did two quick playthroughs of Pinstripe for both, uh, flavors of ending. The unskippable credits assure me that a lot of people helped kickstart this pretty mediocre game.
They added new particle effects and shooting stuff is even more satisfying now. Chunks flying everywhere, so messy. They also added a tutorial mission god knows why. Some of the 3D models also still look like they have been lifted straight out of a PS2 game. At first I thought like whoa this looks worse than EDF4 how is that possible? But it does get better. Slowdown has been not very severe even though I don’t have a PS4 Pro and this would be disappointing if there wasn’t so much stuff going on. But I do wonder how much more there could be going on if they’d stress the PS4 into single digit frame rates. Maybe it’s gonna happen at some point.
I was kinda bummed that they didn’t introduce a new character class this time so I went for the vanilla EDF1 experience with Storm 1 / Infanry / Ranger whatever the name is, because while I love me some dash-cancelling Fencer action (because it reminds me of Zangeki no Reginleiv) I just wanted something simple this time around. But there’s new enemies of course and some nice new features like weapons get upgrades now so old stuff can stay relevant and there’s stat boost equipment too but I don’t know what it does because my Japanese is not good. Uh what else?
Had the momentum to play through Tiny Echo and Quadrilateral Cowboy in the same day. They’re both quite good!
Tiny Echo is slow but relaxing, demure but mysterious. I liked feeling as though I was watching a narrative in a foreign mythos without the pressure to refer it to my own.
QC is by Blendo, whom I am a huge fan of. I’ve been following Blendo since Gravity Bone, and I think this game gave me the closure I desperately wanted from Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving. The story felt a bit looser, but that’s natural considering the other games were five minutes long each. It’s also way more mechanically focused, in an interesting way. Blendo is pretty good at using first person perspectives in subversive ways. Even when you do get a gun, you have to use it from a third-person perspective. The only downside to the gameplay is that the missions aren’t terribly complicated, and there’s no incentive (besides competing with friends) that I know of to complete missions faster.
I just played about 4 hours of Grim Dawn, 2 player co-op.
Its pretty good. but the difficulty curve on the harder difficulty of “veteran” isn’t much of a curve. Its still been superrrrrr easy and then all of a sudden there were 5 super hard enemies in a group which would basically 2 shot us.
looks nice and runs really well. It has controller support. But for some reason it only uses like 8 buttons and doesn’t use the left two shoulder buttons. So I was still having to put less urgent skills on keyboard buttons.
While I’m at home visiting my parents, I am limited to games I can run on my 4-year-old MacBook Pro (dual-booted into Windows).
This precludes me from playing Rainbow Six: Siege, so I decided to dig into the archives and play a bit of the first Rainbow Six. As you could guess, a 20-year old 3D tactical FPS has not aged very well – there are many, many interface-level ‘quality of life’-type issues that make the game somewhat of a chore to play. The terrible AI – both for teammates and opfor – combined with bizarre AI sightlines results in lots of unexpected behavior. It seems that if any part of your model – one pixel of your foot, even – is visible, you’re liable to get one-shotted. The sloth and inaccuracy of throwing flashbangs makes them nonviable as a pro-active measure. And the in-action map’s lack of details from the planning screen makes it more difficult than necessary to figure out what other teams are doing or are about to do.
That said, when Rainbow Six clicks, it’s fantastic. There’s a thrill in planning out waypoints for four teams to breach a building, flank, escort a hostage, and cover the escort, then giving the step-by-step orders in a mission. Watching your eight operators go into action is delightful; I’d play a game that was entirely the tactical planning, plus some amount of surveillance and cueing in the field.
At the same time, I’m impressed by how Siege captures and streamlines the core elements of Rainbow Six: making the CTs perform the intelligence-gathering also gives space for a bit of chat to plan an attack before the ‘action’ phase. Teams often spontaneously and organically plan and execute plans like ‘one team clear the upstairs then both teams push into the garage simultaneously’. It’s fascinating that the game maintains so much of its tactics and planning while keeping a fast pace and allowing the multiplayer to be non-hierarchical.
A question: are there any contemporary games that capture the tactical planning of Rainbow Six?
I’m unsure if there are any modern games with planning like that.
But, Rogue Spear is a whole lot better.
And the first Ghost Recon is pretty amazing. Rather than a planning phase, you drop into the level and have to be slow and calculated, with real time orders. Lots of recon. Covering fire, flanking, etc. It kinda plays like an first person view RTS.
Full Spectrum Warrior borrowed a lot from Ghost Recon and was also pretty good.
full spectrum warrior and the expansion are top-notch. i think they are on steam these days.
among the clancy-branded, i really enjoy ghost recon: advanced warfighter. i don’t think i’ve played any other game that made me feel more like i was in an actual firefight
Yeah Frozen Synapse is kind of like the arcade version of R6 planning, but in general no, there hasn’t been a good CQB FPS since Raven Shield (which is the best R6, get it). Technically SWAT 4 is later but I don’t like the law enforcement context.
Thanks for the responses @meauxdal and @disestablished! Yeah, I played FSW and many Tom Clancy games when they were newer. Those games are all good but also are pretty old. I’m seeing whether there’s … maybe … space for a new game.
@Dracko oh thanks for the tip. I got Frozen Synapse in a Humble Bundle forever ago but assumed it was more Jagged Alliance-y than R6 planning-stagey
@Father.Torque Yeah I played Raven Shield closer to when it came out and it is good. The SWAT games also turned me off due to the LE context. The newest one is still a decade old, though …
Yeah. There’s this huge gap waiting to be filled for a highly technical CQB game. We’ve got ArmA for battlefield stuff. Some indie projects pop up from time to time promising to be “the new Rainbow Six,” but always fizzle away. Raven Shield really is the last one, you’re not missing anything.
The Vegas games are fun in co-op (but only in co-op), but they’re modern and TPS’d and sloppy and not what you’re looking for.
Well the R6: Vegas games have a lot of the mechanics in Siege. Like remote gadgets, peeking, repelling, etc. and you can do little mini planning things for charging into a room.
I.E. you are looking into a room on a camera and you can see the left half of the room. So you can mark visible tangos for takedown (or hostages to be careful about) and since the right side of the room is not visible, also give plans relevant to that. As well, you can tell your Rainbows which door to enter, if they toss something in first, etc.
