Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (360):
This is a weird game.
It sound paradoxical but Portable Ops -- a lazy cash-in cobbled together of MGS3 models and a cheap rope felt more of MGS game than this.
Peace Walker changes every single game mechanic:
- movement -- can move while crouching, can't move lying down, a complete reverse of how it's been
- combat -- can't drag bodies anymore but, can slam mooks into walls and each other, also -- chain takedowns
- mission structure and ranking -- PO already had divided campaign into small missions, but now you can replay them for better score like an action game.
- alert states (you can bump into people and they will raise an alert but if you taken them down right there this alert will be lifted and won't count)
"Bosses" so far are all just mechanized war vehicles (tanks, LAVs and other similar machines), so there is no personality attached to them, no backstory and no Assasin's Creed-style final speech because it's just a helicopter or something.
These bosses feel like they've either been design around co-op exclusively or with a monumental grind in mind. You only have two weapons -- even less than in Portable Ops! And if you want to take down "boss" non-lethally you
need to dedicate one of the slots to either Mosin-Nagant (tranquilizer shooting sniper rifle) or tranq gun.
Weapon limitation wouldn't been as bad if you didn't went out of ammo not even 10% into the fight. So i suspect they want you to level-up your weapons until it becomes good enough so you can kill bosses in one go without calling for support (which reduces your rank). Or just play with three buddies.
If boss has troops accompanying it the only way to approach the battle is to throw a smoke grenade and then take down the troops one by one and send them flying into the air by attaching balloons to them and repeat until there are no more reinforcements.
This is a shocking downgrade in boss design both from gameplay and writing viewpoints. Previous games all had some outrageous great diverse characters that sometimes were even fun to fight mechanically.
Here -- have a tank or something, i dunno.
I actually really like hand-drawn cutscenes, It's actually 3d in-game cutscenes that look bad for me -- because of the same Snake's absent never-changing face, no emotion no nothing, it's like a dead mask. Very distracting.
DMC3 (360):
Spent a lot of time playing and finally after about 3 years and 100+ hours of playing i can say that i am officially mediocre at it. Yay. I S-ranked normal campaign but it took me a ridiculous amount of time and retries.
My main problem is how DMC3 commits you into animations only allowing to get out of the combo in certain windows, so you have to know when exactly is the next opening in a combo and to time them to stay safe and not get hit. In Bayonetta and NInja Gaiden you roll away whenever you like, but in DMC there are moves where you are locked in and can't do anything if you see a demon attacking.
Eventually i just started to completely stop attacking a full second in advance when i see an enemy starting a swing at me. So i just stand there and wait until attack comes and then i do short jump (the most safe evasive move).
Playing this type of game makes me rethink entire Bayonetta combat because of how elementary Witch Time makes it -- basically each time you dodge all enemies get become immovable for about three seconds. Only on Non-Stop Infinite Climax where Witch Time is disabled you get closer to how DMC3 plays on even on Normal.
Assasin's Creed: Rogue (PC):
Game is like a mish mash of all previous games: building city from II is back, and so are random assasins from Brotherhood, but you also have managing fleet from III and IV and overall setting and even characters from III.
Seeing features from II cropping up in this game made me retroactively realize how much of a gamechanger III was. It dropped so much from previous games and it all stick so now seeing "old features" coming back and merged with post-III series is jarring and weird.
By now i am fully a templar for all intents and purposes but game still pretends main character can't put 2 and 2 together and doesn't know it, despite that my new clothes have a templar cross and i a have been killing "bandits" with assasins flags for a while now.
Motivation for main character for going rogue was kinda weak and amounted to simple miscommunication.
Weird how assasins that come up randomly and try to kill me are all identical, scruffy looking women, maybe Ubisoft just made one model and didn't felt like doing another one
Super Meat Boy (Steam):
This game took over my lunch breaks for the last weeks.
In a way this is as much of a grind as managing mother base or launching ships in Cormac's fleet minigame because it's almost endless too -- collecting bandages, unlocking characters, finding and beating warp and glitched levels, getting A-rank times on everything, and each of these little goals may take hours to do because of how stupidly hard it became it this point.
It's obviously much more involved than just staring at TV watching some numbers change though. Beating all levels in a world in one go requires an average player like me to figure out the most safe patterns and play each one of them for hundreds of times.
Most of the characters feel like useless gimmicks, but Ogmo (from Jumpman free games, i actually played several of them before that, they're pretty cool) feels like a full upgrade over regular Meat Boy. It also seems like some of the bandages can only be reached with Ogmo's double jump. Not only Ogmo's double jump gives a lot more mobility but you also get a lot more control because second jump nullifies your momentum in the air.
Topic: What are you playing? (Read 768764 times)
