modern warfare 2 is about to get season 5 and we have to Stop Konni 2023. Konni is the russian ultranationalist pmc. you might have heard war is bad but actually it’s fine, nobody ever dies. alex, the mustache guy who quits the cia to be the ultimate simp operator for the not-kurds and sealed himself in a room he had to manually explode to save their leader gal from doing it at the end of the first game shows up in this one, he’s fine, he’s got a prosthetic leg. the leader of the evil american mercenaries you fight throughout the 2nd game, you blow him up in a tank at the end, he’s back for this season so you can team up with them and fight the russians. he was never in that tank he was yelling at you from in that boss fight. never there.
warzone is the battle royale thing I haven’t done that much, dmz is the extraction mode. so you do runs and you want to get the good vests and backpacks and guns, if you die you lose everything, if you get away you keep it. you have insurance slots to bring along your own weapons but those have a timer on them if you lose them. you do missions to be able to upgrade your stuff. you can also request to join up with other squads out there now, so not every encounter with other players has to be hostile. you can hear other players when you’re near them so when you’re using you’re more secure discord comms you have an advantage. you can also hear their last words while you’re wiping their whole team, and you can hear whether their an asshole or not to help you decide if they want to request to be revived and added to your team after.
there’s three different maps, one is a real tiny japanese island that it’s real hard to avoid running into other players on. there’s a castle in the middle with good stuff in it you can try to raid. one is medium sized city in the netherlands under pmc control, and the other is giant middle eastern area, al mazrah.
season 5 there’s going to be “active combat zones” on each map. where the russian pmc and american pmc are going to fighting each other. hopefully that’s as interesting as it sounds. they are also adding disguises and a Walther WA 2000 and a 2011 pistol.
al mazrah has a thing called building 21, which is a place you can only get in on weekends if you have an access card. it’s difficult but has lots of good weapons, but other players in there are going to have their auto shotguns with incendiary rounds and be a pain to deal with. there’s also an underground area called koschei complex. it has 4 separate entrances. you pick one and your sealed in and loaded into a new map basically, and the countdown timer for extraction resets. each entrance is different, one there’s gas you got to deal with, one is flooded, one is in the dark and you need night vision etc. sometimes there’s other players in there with you you got to watch for. or you can let them do all the work and pick them off at the end. so I’ve heard. one time we shot a guy to death right as he was in the elevator to leave. those doors close pretty slow so you got to watch out.
snoop dog, nicki minaj and lara croft are coming to the game as operators.
My friend told me to play this game called “Tunguska: the Visitation” which is some RPG that has a recreation of the stalker rookie village in it because he said i would hate it and this is the first thing that happened after I made my character
the game just drops you off at a border checkpoint and says you can get robbed or fight, and if you pick fight it just drops you into the level and the tutorial tips are so late that youre already stealth killing enemies by the time it tells you how to equip your melee weapon. i had actually killed all the border guards before it told me i could equip a rock to throw and distract them
Also your editor in chief at the NYT has zero decorations in her office besides two framed pictures of yeltsin and gorbachev
Floor 3 hasn’t introduced a new mechanic yet and maybe not a lot of new enemies have shown up, so maybe I was yawning a bit. ; ) Tempting to take the ladder right down to 4 but dang I got a map to fill out! I could just skip out of battles–I’m fairly comfortably overpowered as it is–but ehh we’ll see. ; )
Although, most of the battles on this floor have been shorter! Just one wave of enemies usually, whereas most on floor 2 were three waves.
played a short gameboy studio game called you’re not supposed to die (at the tournament of death), i liked it, the page makes it sound blunter than it is bc it’s mostly like this pleasantly elliptical character piece about a rich failson with a thing about water… and then he starts his submarine rental service…
at this point the game makes a really perverse decision that i sort of dug. you wander around the little submarine, basically the size of a house in pokemon blue, and talk to the other passengers, and then get informed you’re on “hour 2” or whatever of the dive, and you have to do it over again. and then after a while the lights go out, and you have to do it in a pitch black screen. everybody else has changed positions so you have no choice but to wander around sightlessly hammering the interact key, never sure if you’re walking into a wall or not. the space is small but still large enough that it’s hard to hold on to a mental map of how many squares you can walk up or down, in efforts to systematically explore it. the only way you can ever place yourself is with reference to a handful of objects dotted around the edges - toilet, logitech controller. and once you talk to everyone in the dark they change positions and you have to find them all over again. and it repeats maybe 8, 10 times in total??
anyway i found this terrifically enervating and like, kind of exhausting to button mash for such a long period, with no hint of when it would end, but at the same time it was such an odd bold choice and did lead to some cool effects… you can’t see what you’re talking to but that’s used very sparingly for any kind of “artistic” interiority or memory effects, mostly it’s just scraps of text, toilet, nothing, nothing, toilet, nothing, scrap of text… listening to weird sounds and knocking in the dark… you doggedly try coming up with systematic approaches to finding your way around the room even though they somehow never work out, at a certain point people start dying and as you begin finding “A corpse…” in the dark you’re never sure if you’re just bumping into the same one again and again or if everyone is already dead and you didn’t notice. cool effects from the “oh jesus surely they’re not expecting me to do this” school of game design.
i played FEAR 3 today and coincidentally was looking to see what some of my first posts on SB2 were and anyway here’s me having basically the exact same opinion 4 years ago lol
i also read about the development of FEAR 3 and they ratfucked the day 1 devs. the original game was apparently more like FEAR and had procedural scares (?!) and was about a completely different FEAR team which sounded sick. then wb games got the FEAR license, decided the story needed to have the original characters AND be written by the 30 Days of Night guy (instead of someone who wrote for Hellboy and X-Files!!!), and also be co-op and focused on action because a wb executive liked cod spec ops. day 1 worked themselves into exhaustion to release it and then became a subsidiary of wargaming after all the talent fled the studio.
it makes all the choices in the game make so much more sense. the combat isn’t half bad, it still strikes the tense cover shooting elements the first game does, especially on hardest. it’s competently put together. but it’s a slop game. bargain bin shit. its main aesthetic and mechanical competitor is The Darkness 2. wb completely ruined day 1 by riding them into dust working on the daydreams of executives too stupid to tie their own shoes.
ironically also the fate of monolith, original developers of FEAR, also at the hands of wb. relegated to the ip mines to make wonder woman, and before that lotr games that commit the cardinal lotr sin of not matching canon. the downfall of a once great studio.
anyway. fear 3 is goofy and stupid and playably fun in the exact way you imagine when i say “early-10s 360 fps”. it’s such a picture of the time and the circumstances of its creation in a way that almost enhances it for me. if you hold a particular love of FEAR then yeah it’s offensively stupid and badly paced and the story don’t make no sense. but FEAR 2 is also quite bad, in a way that makes it feel more soulless, and it’s by Monolith.
maybe the series was always meant to turn out like this: a prodigal and tortured parent with two hideously inferior children.
FEAR 2 also has that gross ending with alma sexually assaulting you, that’s the main thing i remember about it, and also how they managed to make the bits where you’re in a giant robot feel like crap. and it not being nearly as good as the first. one of the most disappointing sequels i’ve played.
I wasn’t always his biggest fan, but the timing of this tracks exactly with Monolith co-founder Jason “Jace” Hall leaving WB in 2007, and being replaced by Monolith CEO–and former Monolith marketing person and later NOLF producer–Samantha Ryan.
Turns out floor 3 DOES have a new mechanic: the central room lets you in the door but then pushes you out, but not before revealing another ladder going down–I’ve found three of them so far, and the pattern implies there’s probably another in the NW corner. So it looks like we’re now into a multi-level maze in which to get into that room you’ll have to come up into at least that one area from floor 4.
And things were spicier this time too because way more new enemies started showing up. ^ _^
And maybe the coolest thing: I realized I was hearing a “whooshing” sound–like you hear when going through a doorway–when just moving into certain squares, and finally realized that it means there’s a secret door in an adjacent wall! Really cool touch! Nicely immersive, and way easier to find secret doors now–as long as I keep my ears open–rather than the ol’ “bash your head against every wall” approach that’s been the go-to since at least “Eye of the Beholder” for DOS. ; D (Not to be confused with the “burn every bush” from Zelda.) (These were both things I watched my much-more-patient-than-me brother do when we were kids. ^ _^)
Other PS+ catalog games I tried for an hour or two to see if they are worthwhile:
Resident Evil 7: Alluded to this in the quick questions thread but I thought the first hour or so of this was tremendous. It didn’t feel very Resident Evil IMO, in fact when I put it down I thought it had shifted over to being much more Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but unlike so many first person horror games I tried briefly there is a certain verisimilitude here that brings it to life. I get the feeling that was in part due to that opening bit being more heavily scripted and cinematic in a way I’m not sure a full 10 hour game can be, but not gonna blame it for being too good early on.
Also I now understand all the references I heard about that game hating hands >_>
Doom Eternal: This seemed fine but with a few… well red flags might be too harsh, perhaps yellow flags if such a thing exists? Ammo seemed much less plentiful in order to push the player to use the chainsaw more and the tutorial suggests a similar fire thing that produces armor, I could see that going sideways but for now it seems like it could be fine. This game seems to think I care about the story a good amount which is a heck of a misread, I interpreted the last game as playing as a nonverbal ball of rage people occasionally spoke at but this one seems to want a secondary focus and perhaps even lore and… I don’t know. Also not sure about this early focus on weak points and specific counters you are supposed to use for specific enemies, overall it felt like a step down.
EDIT: Also making me make a bethesda account to play this in single player is obnoxious, just took my PS5 offline instead.
Spiritfarer: So I don’t play management games (which is the term the game itself uses) so perhaps this is just the way they are, but this feels very “why don’t you just build the whole game out of tutorial?”. I put a few hours in and I felt like I was just walking a straight path of “hey do this, great now do this” the entire time. Wonderful spritework and it is something one can just turn their brain off for, but I’d actually consider it a more extreme busywork machine than even Ubisoft has managed to produce in any of their lawnmower sims. That said I keep failing to delete it and instead putting another hour in.
Yeah this is promising. The name entry gimmick genuinely disoriented me for a moment there, then I laughed out loud when I realized what it did. And it makes such a big difference to have an integrated audiovisual presentation instead of just doing a novel with talking heads behind it.
Played Breakpoint with my brother, Cania, and very briefly iguferon yesterday, but made the mistake of playing when I was way past the point of exhaustion and making it miserable for pretty much everyone.
You have read it exactly right, I think you will find this is the prevailing opinion around here. It doubles down hard on both those things and is much the worse for it.
I put half of this blame on game journalists who let the developers say “Actually Doom is a puzzle game” without putting them in their place about that nerd shit and reminding them that it is a game about punching demons.
The other half of the blame is the developers entirely, who, after seeing people love the stripped down story they were forced to put in the game because all their big plans had to be scrapped, came away with the opinion that now they had the runway to tell that story they always wanted to. They should have refocused on a protagonist who doesn’t have patience for gods and prophecy as long as they still have shotgun shells in hand.
