Tag Archives: Xbox 360

Force Feedback

Ughhhhhh… it’s been a while! I haven’t been playing much Xbox 360 lately, or much else besides World of Warcraft for that matter, but the one game I have been working my way through is Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Yeah, the first one – you should be used to me playing old games by now. 😉 Where, oh where, do I start?

I’ve got a long history with Star Wars games being somewhat of an in-the-closet Star Wars geek, and often times the fan service supplied in these games is almost enough to get me through them alone, for better or for worse. In the case of TFU it is definitely for the worse, unfortunately. TFU nails the Star Wars aesthetic fairly well and, as with the vast majority of Star Wars games, the sound effects and music are great. The graphics themselves are pretty solid, even quite nice on occasion, despite a few bugs here and there and relatively minor issues with animation, clipping, and the like.

Shaak Ti about to join the rest of the Jedi.
“Shaak Ti about to join the rest of the Jedi.”

Speaking of bugs, despite the game being massively patched since it was first released, there are still plenty of them to go around. I ran into a few major glitches during two different end level boss fights which left me unable to continue and extremely frustrated. I’d have to say that the bugs were a lot less annoying than some of the other things I took issue over though.

TFU plays, more or less, like other “character action” games such as the God of War series, for instance. One big difference though is your force powers, and due to the nature of many of them, it is necessary to have a way to target specific characters and objects beyond the typical melee and direction based targeting common to this style of game. TFU handles this by locking onto the closest enemy that you’re facing and allowing you to change your target at will though the targeting is often way too imprecise in the heat of battle causing you to sometimes lock on to a piece of a wall or a chunk of debris instead of the giant AT-ST currently standing next to you, filling your cloak full of holes. At best this can be annoying and at worst will cause you to die needlessly many times throughout the course of the game. The game is challenging enough without sabotaging you with bad controls.

Zzzzaaaapppp! Crispy Stormtrooper, anyone?
“Zzzzaaaapppp! Crispy Stormtrooper, anyone?”

The challenge is something else I have a problem with. There are some sections that are frustrating for various reasons (the infamous Star Destroyer part says hello!) but even allowing for those exceptions I absolutely hated running into hordes and hordes of common enemies that were somehow immune to various force attacks or otherwise frustratingly powerful. Isn’t part of the fun of having all of these amazing powers the ability to trounce people with them and generally cause all kinds of massive havoc? It succeeds some of the time but I often found myself feeling like I had to work a lot harder than I should have to work to get through a level or boss fight. Many of the boss fights took this annoyance up a notch by feeling overly cheap because of the combinations of their various immunities and special attacks.

Not to sound too negative! Graphics, sound, and general “Star Warsiness” aside, I also found myself really enjoying the story. While the tale of Starkiller isn’t exactly incredibly engrossing, it was pretty satisfying (in a shamefully nerdy way) to see how his story fit into the plots of the movies and the general canon Star Wars Galaxy timeline. It isn’t at all unusual for Star Wars games, books, comics, etc. to be considered canon but they don’t often tie so closely to the original trilogy. The endings were quite awesome as well. I chose the light side route (naturally!) and ended up watching the dark side ending on YouTube rather than suffering through the last level again.

You even kill a ton of Stormtroopers when you work for the Empire. I love Star Wars games!
“You even kill a ton of Stormtroopers when you work for the Empire. I love Star Wars games!”

So, I suppose I enjoyed TFU overall, somehow. Really, if it weren’t a Star Wars game I probably wouldn’t have completed it, though I’m sure I’ve felt that way many, many times in the past as well. Sadly, I just barely managed to like the overall experience enough that I’m now tempted to eventually pick up TFU2 from a bargain bin despite how much it got slammed in reviews though, that said, I wasn’t exactly desperate to play more of the first game when it was done and indeed will be skipping the DLC for now.

Now where is my damn X-wing/Tie Fighter reboot?

Ok, that title was a bit forced… get it? GET IT?! Surprise! My love affair with awful comedy is still very much intact. 🙂

Explosionaries 2

Another Xbox 360 game slowly but surely scratched off of my seemingly endless backlog! This time it was a copy of Mercenaries 2 that I reluctantly fished out of a bargain bin for something along the lines of $10. I say reluctantly because apparently Mercenaries 2 was a massive flop and I heard enough bad things to stay far away, at least at first, even as a fan of the first game. Still, its review scores were generally good with some people even going as far as claiming it was one of their favorite games at the time. Like many such games it seems to be rather divisive as the other end of the spectrum was well represented as well. The biggest issues seem to have been related to bugs, glitches, and the like, which is quite disappointing after how polished the first game felt combined with the fact that this go round was delayed multiple times. Playing it well after its release and much subsequent patching I’m guessing that some of the worst of these issues have been long since resolved as despite a few oddities here and there, my game was relatively glitch free.

Like Mercenaries: Play Ground of Destruction, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is essentially a Grand Theft Auto 3 clone which has the unique spin of being set in a war zone filled with all kinds of potent military weapons and vehicles. When over-simplified and distilled to that level it is quite easy to see its appeal, eh? Still, the games make many other both subtle and not-so-subtle changes to the GTA formula which help distinguish it… but, honestly, while playing it I couldn’t help but feel that part of the charm of the original was simply that it was a really well executed GTA3 style open world game which, at the time, there were very few of, yet this generation there are an almost stifling number of similar open-world games on the market, and Mercenaries 2 has some trouble keeping up with the pack in some areas.

*Insert highly inappropriate Tiananmen Square reference*
“*Insert highly inappropriate Tiananmen Square reference*”

When I first loaded the game up I was a bit surprised with the menus and the presentation in general – it seemed quite polished and well designed. Once in the world the game started to show its cracks a little more, with graphics that at times looked… I don’t want to say last gen, but definitely early this generation – lots of pop-in, some odd, janky things going on with textures and lighting sometimes, etc. The one thing, graphically, the game does do really, really well is the explosions which, considering how important they are to the game, is a damn good thing. They’re the best I’ve seen in this type of game and combining them with the engine’s destructible environments (a feature I hope gets more and more common in new games) makes for a lot of incredible, large scale action.

Back to the action, as I hi-jacked my first attack helicopter and began rampaging through a Venezuelan city I thought “Wow… this is just as good as the original. Awesome!” and wondered where all of the negative reviews came from exactly. Unfortunately as I played more and more I ran into more and more tiny annoyances that started to slowly build up over time. Things like how utterly daft the AI was, having civilians walk out in front of my car causing me to lose money and enemy soldiers firing RPGs pointblank at me… while I was standing next to their commander, even. As an aside because of how insanely chaotic the combat can be I QUICKLY gave up trying to capture High Value Targets alive. I’m pretty sure I’d still be only half way through the game and missing half of my hair if I hadn’t since they often have a way of dying even when I’m being exceedingly careful around them. Back to annoyances: how, after amassing a good stockpile of them, I found the majority of the game’s much celebrated airstrikes’ usefulness to be extremely situational at best since you have to pretty much be at ground zero to throw a smoke grenade or drop a beacon where you want one to land is also a good one.

You got some of your building in my eye! Lawsuit! Lawsuit!
“You got some of your building in my eye! Lawsuit! Lawsuit!”

Still, this is a “sandbox” type of game (though I suspect with the popularity of games like Minecraft we’re going to stop calling simple “open world” games “sandboxes” sooner or later) which means that we always have the option of finding our own solutions to these types of problems. For instance, the airstrike thing? I found two great ways to overcome them: Put your beacon or even smoke grenade on a moving target and move it into the place you want to destroy, such as flying a chopper or crashing a jeep into a building and jumping out at the last second, though this does require some pretty precise timing. An even more interesting example: placing an artillery barrage beacon on a car and then hauling ass through an area while watching the chaos unfold behind you. The other method is a bit sneakier: use the game’s faction system to disguise yourself by jacking an enemy vehicle to deliver the bomb. My favorite method was via helicopter roof top landings. I’d buy or steal an enemy chopper, let my disguise kick in, and then casually land on or next to my target. When the coast was clear I’d hop out, throw down a beacon or smoke grenade, and then hop back in and hope I could get my chopper back in the air and a safe distance away before I ate a pair of 500lbs bombs or whatever present I was giving my little friends.

I suppose that is what sets good, or at least fun, open world games apart from not-so-fun ones: the game has to provide the players (and even the AI in some cases) with the underlying systems to let interesting, fun, emergent gameplay unfold. Mercenaries 2 pretty much succeeds on that front, providing you with plenty of tools to have a fun ride to the end. Of course, dumb but incredibly amusing stuff still happens as well, such as when I was calling in a helicopter and it landed right in the middle of the road. Just as it was landing a civilian was speeding down the road on a sports bike. The timing was perfect: just a few seconds after losing sight of the motorcycle behind the chopper, the chopper lands and I hear a satisfying “thud!” 😛

Never taunt your helicopter pilot.
“Never taunt your helicopter pilot.”

Speaking of helicopters, as with the first game their controls are simple and quite satisfying and I found myself preferring to use them as often as possible, keeping my stockpile full of my favorites at all times. SAMs and other AA can be damn annoying in some parts of the map until you start finding/buying more choppers with anti-tank missiles and get a knack of dodging them long enough to take them out. I’m still not entirely sure how you can avoid losing choppers (and even tanks) between missions nor how to repair and rearm them. I was convinced such a feature didn’t even exist at first to be honest but late in the game I was startled by the wrenching sound effect when I inadvertently repaired one of my choppers on a landing pad in the middle of an intense firefight. I think they only work if they’re both of the same faction, perhaps? Compared to other, similar games vehicles are almost treated like disposable suits of armor in this game – even if you don’t need one, or want one, hopping in one can save your life… even a crappy car. You also get the added bonus of seeing the hilariously bad ragdoll effect that happens when your character is blown out of a vehicle. I witnessed some pretty epic ones in which I was thrown hundreds of feet and twisted into all kinds of disgusting, if not physically impossible positions, only to stand up and dust myself off almost unscathed!

The game is much less stingy with money and store options than the first one, and the store is a lot easier and more convenient to use in general, though I stuck to my bad habit of being overly conservative with my spending, often opting to hijack enemy tanks and choppers rather than buy or use my own… JUST IN CASE… though I can’t really blame that on the game. I did have some bizarre glitches when ordering helicopters though – several times I had my chopper (and Ewan) vanish right before my eyes after landing, and at other times he’d simply never show despite losing my fuel and the item from my stockpile. Fuel was another annoyance, really. It always seemed to be in abundance until you really needed it, at which point you’d have to put your war efforts on hold while you went out on a savaging run. Oh, and speaking of glitches, several of the achievements I earned never popped for some reason, which is intensely frustrating for anyone who even mildly cares about such things.

All in all I found myself enjoying Mercenaries 2 a lot more than I suspected I would despite it not quite meeting all of my expectations. If you’re into this sort of game and have played some of the other bigger titles (including Merc 2’s biggest competition at this point: Just Cause 2) then I don’t see any reason not to pick this up if you can find it for dirt cheap like I did unless you simply have zero tolerance for some of the negative technical stuff I described. I certainly got my money’s worth at least. One word of caution: I’ve read that the Xbox 360 version is the best so your mileage my vary if you pick it up on PS3 or PC. I see the PC one on sale at various places for under 10 dollars frequently and, providing that it is indeed decent, I’d imagine it could be a very fun game to screw around in cooperatively if you have a bored online friend about. For a final summary, Yahtzee’s review was hilariously spot on!

As usual all Xbox 360/console screenshots stolen. I am a Mercenary after all! Oh, and for the record I played Chris Jacobs in both games.

Covered Up

I’m down two more Xbox 360 games from my oh so intimidating backlog of games.

First, I finally got around to playing through Gears of War 2. I did so cooperatively and I have to say it was a pretty polished and fun experience. The game still has excellent graphics despite its age and whether or not it does anything for you personally, a unique visual style. As a sequel it felt like “more of the same” of the first game in pretty much every way. Of course, I haven’t played the first game for quite a long time so that impression might be slightly skewed. My only real complaint other than the typical observations about the meathead characters and hole filled plot was that as a cooperative game I’m not sure I appreciate the designers’ decision to constantly try to separate the players by making them take separate paths. I’m pretty sure they were attempting to force you to work together by completing different but related goals to help foster some kind of greater feeling of cooperation but more often than not it just garnered a disappointed “aww, they’re making us split up AGAIN?” response from us. It felt like the game was attempting to keep us apart half the time and exactly what kind of co-op experience is that?!

Football sure has changed in the future...
“Football sure has changed in the future…”

I also dusted off my copy of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6: Vegas 2. Damn, that’s a long title.

Immediately Vegas 2 came off as very dated compared to most newer FPSes. It took me a while to get familiar with the controls which work fine for the most part but are definitely different enough from the Halos and Call of Duties of late to screw you up for a bit – I chucked plenty of grenades at my own feet early on. Once I got over that curve I started to appreciate the brutal, tactical nature of the combat over any lack of modern polish. I haven’t talked about it a lot here since I haven’t played much of it lately but I am a big fan of the more realistic, Tactical FPS genre of games so I suppose it started scratching an itch that I haven’t had scratched in a while. Having overcome that I struggled to remember how the hell the story of the first game ended. I knew it ended with a “To be continued…” sort of thing but Vegas 2 definitely doesn’t pick up feeling like a direct continuation. Then again this is a Tom Clancy brand game and I’ve played enough of those by now to not have to worry too much about the story.

While I had a lot of fun ordering my squad mates around, clearing rooms with well-timed flash-bangs and flawless shots through thermal goggles, sniping from afar in the pitch dark, and otherwise being on the enjoyable end of a lot of face pwning, it wasn’t all puppies and rainbows. I actually became quite frustrated with the game more than a few times during the run. Silly stuff, like unevenly placed checkpoints, including a major pet peeve of mine: checkpoints right before scripted events or cut scenes. Probably the most of annoying of these was right before the final major firefight of the game. I must have had to watch that damn thing play out 20 times before finally surviving the fight long enough to make it to the end scene of the game. Most of the checkpoints were placed decently early on but it definitely seemed to go downhill the later into the game I got.

Rainbow 6 prefers to conduct most of its firefights in crowded city streets.
“Rainbow 6 prefers to conduct most of its firefights in crowded city streets.”

Of bugs, the generally fairly well received cover system of Vegas seemed a bit less reliable in Vegas 2 than I recall it being in the first game. I found myself flipping out of cover, leaning out of cover on my own, and generally not behaving as expected a bit more than I was comfortable with. This seldom resulted in any fatalities though so I guess I can’t bash on it too much. I also ran into one part of the game which I had to replay about 5 times due to the cut scene at the end the level not triggering after completing my object of clearing an area despite wasting tons of time trying every trick in the book to avoid having to reload. Arghhhh!

Your squad mates are still hilariously stupid at times. They often fail to do a good job checking corners when entering rooms or taking up good defensive positions when ordered to move to certain places which contrasts sharply to how well they do these things at other times. Probably my favorite example of their stupidity is that when one squad member is injured (which itself is frequently the result of something pretty shockingly dumb occurring) the other will usually make their way their location as if to secure them BUT won’t actually try to save their life without being manually ordered to. This can create some pretty tense situations if you decide to split yourself up from your two squad mates to employee some more creative flanking tactics, as the game encourages you to do from time to time. Dashing around to try to get a clear shot of my downed team mate to issue the “heal” command in time resulted in at least a few deaths of my own during the campaign… oh, and despite how easy it is to heal your squad mates they’re apparently completely incapable of healing you. Why?! Oh, I guess because you’re not alive to explicitly tell them to. Pfft…

My squadmate decides to investigate an explosion face-first while I intelligently take cover behind a barrel of highly flammable liquid.
“My squadmate decides to investigate an explosion face-first while I intelligently take cover behind a barrel of highly flammable liquid.”

My other biggest complaint about Vegas 2 is probably the difficulty. Yeah, yeah, I know I just praised it for its brutal combat two paragraphs ago, but honestly, damage and ballistic models aside, most of the more difficult sections of the game felt only difficult because of the sheer number of enemies they pack into some of these areas, and most often, the absolutely painful choke-points and scripted scenarios they expose you to along the way. In other words, it oftentimes only felt difficult because the designers’ went out of their way to make it overly difficult in those particular spots. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: a good Tactical FPS doesn’t need a ton of enemies to be fun! If the damage and weapons models are “realistic” enough, 2 enemies in a room is a challenge… and that challenge usually feels much fairer than, say, the scripted hordes of unlimited NPCs games like Call of Duty 4 throw at you. Combining that, however, with having to have your 3 man squad off 50 terrorists in one level encourages you to run through quickly rather than carefully entering and clearing rooms, only adding to potential frustration while minimizing the tactical gameplay the series is supposedly built around.

Despite all of those negatives playing through Vegas 2 did in fact feel fairly satisfying and refreshingly different alongside other FPSes I’ve played through recently. I highly doubt I’d volunteer to play through it again anytime soon but it might indeed inspire me to play through some of my favorite oldies such as SWAT 4.

Ahh, one last thing… when I played the original Vegas I didn’t have an Xbox Live Vision cam so I couldn’t test out the awesome ability to map your own face to your in-game character. Thank god for that! After my several attempts to get it working at all I was greeted by some horrible looking, wax golem-like facsimile of myself. Yes, even more hideous than the real thing. Yikes!

As usual for console games, not my screenshots.