Bioshock Infinite Is a Bad Game

 

Recently I did a stream where I finished Bioshock Infinite in a single session so I wanted to spend a post talking about it a little bit because while I didn't have an awful time with it, it's a pretty shitty game.

Bioshock Infinite was released in 2013 and follows the story of a dude called Booker DeWitt as he travels to Columbia, the city in the sky, where he is tasked with saving a girl called Elizibeth from some evil bloke called Comstock.  Elizibeth is no ordinary girl though as she has the power to open holes in space time so the two of them meet up and then go on a shooty, multi-dimensional journey to escape fantasy turbo-racist sky America.

As a game in it's own right, Bioshock Infinite isn't a bad game.  The gunplay is just fine, the Vigors (formerly known as Plasmids) make a return and give a few extra options to things when fighting and also there are set places where Elizibeth can open some space time holes for you that grant you access to guns, robots to shoot for you, movement options or cover.  By itself, Bioshock infinite is FINE, a good old turn off your brain and shoot bang the bad men until they go away and do it in the admittedly quite pretty backdrop of a sky city.

However Bioshock Infinite is not an original IP that we can judge entirely on its own merits, it's the third entry in a series and when you start to make those comparisons Bioshock Infinite becomes a incredibly dumbed down boredom-fest that is nothing more than a shell of what it once was.  Bioshock 1 and 2 didn't quite have the depth to be called a full on "immersive sim" but there was still a quite cerebral element to play.  For example you had lots of choices with what guns you used, you could carry all of them at once, pick a few to suit your play style for upgrading purposes and then attempt to tailor your approach to a situation based on that.  For example, if you were the kind of guy that favored getting in there with a shotgun you might use the ice plasmid for your human foes and the electro bolt to disable mechanical ones and go apeshit in a group of enemies.  If you prefered to be a bit more sneaky you might want to use the grenade launcher alt-ammo to lay down traps, equip plasmids that turn enemies on each other and try and avoid the fray.  There were a lot of options for play style and there were a lot of chances for you to use the environment to your advantage.  Another example might be that enemies were prone to running to a healing station in a level if they were low on health.  If you werent good at hacking or couldn't be bothered (the mini game did kind of suck in Bio 1) then you'd have to drop what you were doing to go deal with the fleeing enemy.  If you DID like hacking though, you could hack the healing station so that when an enemy tried to use it they would take damage instead, meaning that a fleeing foe is something you don't have to worry about during a heated shoot out.

These are just some very basic examples of stuff from previous games that you could do but Bioshock Infinite has NONE of that.  You only get 2 guns at a time, so there's no emergent play style because you aren't using guns you like or guns that are good for a situation, you're using whatever is lying around so that you have ammo for it.  The Vigors in this game are absolute dogshit and barely do anything most of the time.  I only really used 2 vigors the entire game which was possesion and shock jockey.  Possession was particularly broken because once upgraded it basically becomes a "delete a guy" button except before deletion he will fight for you.  I got a whole bunch of things that all kind of did the same thing, boiling down to nothing more than "click to do thing, hold and release to drop a trap for that thing".  Even the environmental stuff was bullshit because every area is just a shooting arena with a couple of rips in space time for you to abuse.  I didn't have to think about if I wanted to use the gun turret rip in space time, I just did it because why the fuck would I NOT want a robot gun helping me save ammo?  There's not even anything clever with the health system because they turned that into fucking Halo of all things.  Get hit, lose a shield and then suck your thumb behind a wall until it comes back, rinse and repeat until the fight is over.

They had made TWO games, even more if you include the System Shock games that worked and were fun and cool and instead of building upon the ideas layed down in all those games, they ripped it all out so you could play Call of Duty: Wizard Edition.  I'm not going to spoil anything in this review but clearly all the efforts at being "clever" went into the plot which involves time travel and multi-verse type bullshit but it's all just a bunch of pretentious nonsense and once you get to the end it's just as unsatisfying and the gameplay 

If there's one thing I cannot stand its the dumbing down of games.  If you want to make an original that's about a shooty person making heads explode then fine, do that, I'm sure it'll be a good time.  What you shouldn't do is take a game series that already exists and is interesting and rip all of the interesting aspects of that series out to chase lowest common denominator bullshit.  That just makes you an asshole

I finished it on hard, I might go back to check out the DLC chapters that were set in Rapture but I have no intention of ever playing the sorry excuse for a campaign ever again.  Fuck this game

F.3.A.R

I've not QUITE finished it yet, I'm getting very close but I'm having a brain fart and don't know what to talk about so I'm just going to talk about it now.  Before I start talking about the game itself I just want to say that the title of this game is really fucking dumb.  One, because replacing the E with a 3 is something that only a 14 year old Counter Strike player would think is cool and two, because its not fucking scary.

Here is where I would try to outline the plot but I'm only going to skim over it very briefly because I'm so mad about how misleading the name is.  Basically you play as Point Man (from the first game) or his brother than you capped to stop Sada...no sorry, Sama....no sorry again, Alma from giving birth to ghost babies after she raped the main character from the second game.

Now F.E.A.R 1 was trying pretty hard to be a horror game.  It had the spooky set pieces, lots of areas where there wouldn't be any music playing, a little bit of misdirection here and there as to whats an enemy and what's a spooky hallucination.  It failed, really hard, but it tried and I can commend the effort.  F.E.A.R 2 was a lot more action oriented but the attempts at horror were still there, again, complete failure, but you can tell someone tried at the very least.  F.£.A.R just dropped the horror thing almost entirely and it just became Call of Duty.  They should have called it Call of Jumpscare or L.O.U.D or something.  They do little sections where spooky cultist men will come after you and there's blood on the walls or they'll have a twitchy beast jump out at you but 98% of this game is just shooting dudes in the face with a machine gun.  What's hilarious is I had a friend come over and he saw me playing it and he was like "Are you playing CoD m8?". 

That's not to say that it's a bad game, by any stretch.  The shooting is fun, Point Mans slo-mo mechanic is still satisfying, they now let you play as the brother if you like doing magic shenanigans instead of shooting, it's a generally well made game with a lot of polish.  Just that title is one of the most misleading things in the history of all games.  Still, it's only £13 on Steam and for what you get it's pretty good so if you like your FPS games definitely check it out, just don't expect to get any actual horror out of it, is all.

Maybe Call of Duty Should Stop Making So Many Sequels

Call of Duty was a series that got its start in 2003, which I bet a whole bunch of the embryos that populate modern CoD servers weren't aware of and it's a series that I didn't have much interest in for the longest time.  A younger me would have looked at something like Call of Duty which was set during World War 2 and then I'd look at something like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem or Unreal and I think I'd much rather play a game like that over something all gritty and realistic. 

But then 2007 rolled along and out came Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and at the time it really did blow me away.  People had liked CoD in the past but no one in my circle of friends had ever raved about a game in the series as much as they were with Modern Warfare so of course I end up trying it and really enjoying it.  The game was just generally really fun and the multiplayer really helped give it some sticking power.  I remember thinking at the time that this was easily the best console FPS multiplayer experience I ever had but my expectations were particularly low after trying out F.EA.R and Prey's multiplayer modes.

Fast forward to 2016 and I had to do a google search to find out what Call of Duty is up to now.  I had no idea what the fuck Infinite Warfare is but I think the series has gone all spacy and science fiction with multiplayer looking more like a slowed down, shit version of Unreal or something (in Black Ops 3 at least) rather than an actual Call of Duty.  Not that there's anything inherently wrong with this, it just seems that since I dropped off the series has taken a weird direction.  That doesn't mean however that the game has lost any traction by the sounds of things, there always seems to be some degree of hype for the latest installment and the multiplayer modes always seem well populated.

However a week ago I stumbled across an article on GameSpot that said "There will always be Call of Duty games", here's the link

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/activision-ceo-there-will-always-be-call-of-duty-g/1100-6443574/


I'd be upset by this if I was a fan of the series.  Every time there is a new Call of Duty game you have to shell out full price and these games come out yearly.  Sure, you can linger around on the old games for a while but if you're into the multiplayer, which most are, you WILL have to move to the next game or else be completely left behind.  Every goddamn year another full priced game with the inevitable DLC map packs that you'll have to buy a couple of months down the line.  The sheer blatancy of the money grubbing here is astounding and I'm actually baffled as to why there aren't huge numbers of fans just putting their foot down and saying "no".

Just look at Counter Strike as a great counter example of this.  Counter Strike Source was bundled with Half Life 2, a game that every man and his dog had, back in 2004 and then Global Offensive came out in 2012.  That's an 8 year gap and the game is consistently populated with a large number of players

To top that off the game is only like £12 and you don't have to worry about another one coming out in the next 6 months.  Sure, you can shell out extra cash for a few maps or to get some skins for your guns but this shit is all optional and you won't have trouble finding matches without the extras because despite having not played for a long time I'm sure DE_Dust2 is still a thing.

The fast sequel thing really turns me off to the series.  The game doesn't look shit by any means, it looks well polished and fun to play but the fact that I know Infinite Warfare will be perma-shelved in 2017 for the next one makes me not want to buy it.  I wish they could just give us ONE game that they update constantly with lots of cool shit rather than this yearly release stuff.  It's not like you couldn't have WW2, Modern Day and Sci-Fi War shit all in one game and just release it as a stand alone multiplayer experience at this point.  Still, if they did stop they might lose their license to print money so I guess the sequels will never end.

FPS Used To Be Better

FPS is one of the biggest genres in the industry and always kind of has been.  A long long time ago we had Wolfenstien 3D, Doom, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D among many many others and now the big players in the genre are things like CoD, Battlefield and other more realistic military type shooters.

But that's kind of my problem with the modern FPS game.  Most of them are sort of realistic type military shooters like Call of Duty.  The only other thing we have aside from that are things like Halo but that's just a military shooter with a sci-fi coat of paint.  These games aren't bad by any stretch but they don't come nearly as close to the thrill of the old school FPS.  The fast paced, acrobatic, labyrinthine and colorful shooters of days passed has been replaced with gritty, realistic yet unchallenging games and I can't help but feel things are significantly worse off as a result.

Most people who hold this kind of opinion of older games are accused of having rose tinted nostalgia goggles but this is one of those cases where those games were just better.  I've recently been playing Serious Sam HD: First Encounter off Steam and I'm having so much more fun with this than I have with any other modern FPS title.  I can have more than two weapons, my health doesn't regenerate for free, equipment and enemies are colourful and interesting, there are secrets everywhere and so much more.  I felt a similar thing when playing Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition a few months ago too.

Even multiplayer FPS was better back then.  It used to be all about speed, skill, knowledge of the map both for layouts and pick ups and that was just the tip of the iceberg.  Things like Quake which used a lot of rocket jumping had all sorts of weird shit in play that I can't even begin to wrap my head around.  Granted things are a lot more accessible now but it's a damn shame that the games just aren't quite as fun.

Still, this is just me and I don't want to completely disregard modern FPS games just because I feel the old ones are more fun.  I have a lot of fond memories playing Modern Warfare 1 and 2 online with buddies and sometimes I find myself getting tempted to try out  the latest version of Call of Duty.  Let's not forget the new Star Wars Battlefront which looks cool as shit.  That said, I'd much rather play some Doom, Serious Sam or Quake than CoD or Battlefield.  Luckily the genre isn't completely devoid of old style games and things like Painkiller and that new Rise of the Triad game are keeping things geared more towards fun than realism and prestige bragging.

I Hate the Word Gamer

I hate the word "Gamer", it's easily one of the most annoying things that I ever hear when browsing websites about games.  But I never used to hate this word, my hatred is kind of recent and it's party because of what the industry has become over the many years.

Back in my day, a "gamer" was just another way of saying an enthusiast.  It was a term used to describe a person who was pretty good at games and was knowledgeable about them to boot and that's all it meant.  As long as you took some kind of pride in this thing that you called a hobby, enjoyed it, learned about it and got good, you were a gamer.

But that has all changed now and hearing the word "gamer" makes me imagine the post pathetic pieces of shit that make it embarrassing to play games.

You know the kind of people I mean, like the ones pictured above.  They don't necessarily have to be fat and unshaven, they can look like perfectly normal people, it's the attitude that pisses me off.  These are the kind of people who play usually one or two titles, usually Call of Duty or League of Legends mainly, and constantly go on about "gamer cred" or the importance of fucking achievement points or whatever stupid bullshit.

The kind of person that you know people like Geoff Keighley (The Doritopope) are pandering too when you see that kind of thing.  The kind of people that lap up all this overpriced DLC and accept bad business practices because "you aren't a gamer if you don't", right?  The kind of person you can imagine sitting in a big fat couch with an Xbox headset on screaming at his team mates about how shit they are in any given FPS game du jour.

So yeah, fuck the word gamer.  Just because you play Call of Duty and farm easy games for achievement points doesn't make you one.  Imagine if just because I could throw a piece of chicken into the oven and let it bake for 40 minutes, that qualifies me to be a chef.  That would be ridiculous and so are these people.

I think it's time Call of Duty just stopped

This was something I was supposed to talk about a long time ago but I got side tracked.

So Call of Duty: Ghosts got quite a bit of flak from people with taste after E3.  They made a big deal about this stupid dog and how you will connect with it on an emotional level or some such nonsense and then proceeded to show absolutely no game play at the major press conferences, at least none that I remember.

Then during E3 I found a game play clip that pretty much sealed the fact I'm never going to buy this game, and I'll show it to you.

Are people actually serious about this goddamn game?  There are so many problems with that trailer it boggles my mind.  How does a dog do that? How does one dog freak out a room full of trained soldiers to the point where the break the bloody door down and allow themselves to be shot in the back of the head. 

The people who think these kind of scenes are cool are either idiots or just underage.  It's been the same with pretty much every Call of Duty where all the set pieces are just either designed to shock the user or to imitate popular action flims.

I personally got sick of CoD a long long time ago, but this bit of footage really shows just how stupid the series has got.  It's probably still a ton of fun to play for the people who like these games, and I bet the multiplayer is a blast but I'm not going anywhere near this game upon release.

Patapon

You know it saddens me that games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 get all the praise it gets when it's just another bland military shooter, and then games like Patapon barely get any attention at all because it's got cute characters and gameplay that doesn't involve shooting things in the face....

My bitterness aside, Patapon is a game on the PSP that I've been playing recently that is sort of hard to put into one genre.  It's kind of a strategy game, kind of an action game and kind of a rhythm game all at the same time.
So the deal is that you are an drum playing God known to the Patapons as "Almighty", and using your drums you must guide your Patapon army to a place called Earthend so they can go and visit a thing called IT.  The Patapons pilgrimage to see IT is sort of their entire purpose in life, but there is a rival clan called the Zigatons who have their own prophecy that involves stopping you no matter what.

It's a cool plot and considering I've not managed to beat the game yet I'm genuinely curious as to see if the Zigatons were at all justified in trying to wipe me out.

So the game play involves playing drums in rhythm to assign actions to your Patapon army.  For example "Pata pata pata pon" (square square square circle) will make your army move foward on the 2D level.  Other combinations of pata, pon and chaka will do different thinks like attack, defend, charge up etc.  Between levels you are taken to a camp screen where you can change equipment, make new Patapons for your army or play rhythm mini games for bonus items.

It's a simple game but that doesn't meant it's easy because this game will fucking kick your ass sideways if you're not well prepared and cunning in battle.  If you think you can just advance and attack your way through the game you will be wiped out faster than the blink of one of your little dudes eyes.  This thing is hard and requires a great deal of preparation and planning before you can beat the later story missions, but when you do it the feeling of achievement is great.

So if you have a PSP and you have not played this, go fucking do it.  If you can't find this but you can get hold of Patapon 2 or 3, go play them as well.  I've not had much experience with the sequels but they can only get better really.

More Rise of the Triad-esque Shooters Please

I made a post quite a while back about how I want there to be significantly less shooters on the market because the whole genre is fucking boring now.  Then videos of the now in production Rise of the Traid game come along and slap me in the face and tell me to shut up and do a rocket jump for joy.

For those that don't know, Rise of the Traid is a fuck old PC shareware FPS game released in 1994 and it was one of those shooters that sort of looks like Doom to the uneducated masses but is actually a pretty unique game to anyone who actually played the damn thing.

Anyway, the old game isn't really relevant here, but if you want to play it you can grab it off GoG, but the game is getting a reboot for the new age.  The first time I heard this I just ignored it, I imagined that they were just going to pull a Syndicate and turn it into yet another garbage shooter to throw on the pile.  But one day I got linked to an 18 minute video of the multilayer and holy shit does it look fun! Check this shit out! 

FUCKING. YES! It's like Quake and Unreal Tournament and shit like that.  None of this boring military "erh mah gerd killstreak" campfest semi realistic dogshit.  This is people running at the speed of sound, picking up floating guns, rocket jumping and just generally being nuts.

Bottom line, if shooters are here to stay, then more like THIS and less of this Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Medal of....whatever you get the idea.  Less slow crap, more good, fun shooters like we used to have.

Less Shooters Please

This generation we have had a lot of first person shooter games, and I do mean A LOT.  To be honest, I wish this shit would fucking stop.

Before I go on, I don't have anything against FPS games, I actually quite enjoy them but I'm sick to death of going to a game store and just seeing FPS games fucking everywhere.  New Call of Duty, new Medal of Honour, new Crysis.  Good lord, don't people get bored of playing the same kind of game day in day out?

I mean we've just had the PS4 thing from Sony which I mentioned yesterday and already we've had fucking Destiny and Killzone.  Keeping in mind that the other games were Knack and inFamous (and I'm not counting that "announcement" from Square as a thing, fuck off) that's half the line up so far as fucking FPS games.  If there were more games than that I don't care, 2 is too many.

I'm a big fan of Rhythm games, I enjoy all sorts of shit from Voltex to DDR to Beatmania, it's great.  But if I just played rhythm games every time I went to the game centre and every time I came home then I probably would have quit gaming by now, that shit would be stale.

I wouldn't even be so annoyed about it if the styles were varied.  If we had some more Doom/Quake-esque FPS games at least there would be some variation on the theme.  I know it's probably not going to happen because this shit sells like hot cakes but I've got my fingers crossed on there being significantly less semi realistic military shooters in the upcoming generation.

Note: I know Destiny isn't quite a "military" FPS but it's still the same kind of game play that I'm bored of.

Fuck off Mountain Dew

Last night I saw a horrifying video, something I wish could be erased from my mind and from existence, but alas, that will never happen.

I am talking about this!

What most people are upset about when it comes to this video is the state of the industry, and while I'm upset about that, it's not really what I'm most upset about.

No, what I hate most about this video is that THIS, this congregation of wankers playing a mediocre shooter is the face of gaming, the face of the hobby I have known and loved for many many years. If you tell anyone that you enjoy video games now, this is what you are associated with, a bunch of pricks pounding soda like it's whiskey playing mindless shooting games and covering yourself in face paint like a fucking 5 year old at the fair.

It's pretty obvious that not everyone who enjoys games are like this but this is what people will think if you bring it up. 

What double sucks about this whole situation is that this shit is holding back gaming as a medium.  There aren't really any games right now that stack up to the great books and films, but that's because it's still a young form of entertainment.  That said, if we ever hope to achieve something truly great, we need to stop doing this bullshit!

I don't have a problem with Call of Duty and games like it, these kind of games have their place and they are a good laugh at the end of the day, but this shit shouldn't be at the vanguard! 

So fuck off Mountain Dew, stop pandering to the lowest common denominator and let the medium grow.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive First Impressions

Before I start talking about this game lets have a BIG FUCKING DISCLAIMER!  I was never really all that good at Counter-Strike: Source and even less skilled at 1.6, so if your looking for someone to give you the ins and outs of this game from a competitive standpoint, I'm not your man!  Also, there are going to be pretty much no pictures in this post because I was having so much fun I forgot to take some, and I'm too lazy to load it back up.

Anyway, with that out of the way, I can finally start talking about CS:GO.  If you're not sure what it is, then you're either too young or you have been living under the rock your whole life.  CS:GO is the newest game in the long standing Counter-Strike series of games, basically the big grand daddy of team based online shooting.

It's actually refreshing to play a realistic style shooting game where my decisions actually fucking matter for once.  Health doesn't regenerate, at all, so if you go and make a stupid move in a fire fight, you're going to be punished for it, HARD.  Also you're limited to what you can take into each round by how much money you have, so in the early rounds or when you are losing, you really have to make careful, planned, intelligent decisions for what guns and gear you are going to buy.  So take all your Call of Duty pre-set load outs and regenerating health and fuck off, this is a real mans game.  I don't hate Call of Duty but the difference in skill required to play this, and to play CoD is astounding, so you best be willing to put in some practice hours in order to get good here.

Before CS:GO came out, I found that I was actually rather bored of CS: Source, I just didn't have the urge to find a mix or play in a public or anything like that, but when I fired up Global Offensive, holy shit was I pumped.  The menus are so sleek looking, the reticule is cool as fuck and best of all, the sound design is top notch.  Seriously, I have never heard guns sound this good in games before, it was giving me a fucking rush just hearing the effects.

The best feature I thought after playing it for about an hour was the match making.  You can very quickly find a casual or competitive game, and on top of that you can even play the much loved Gun Game mode through the matchmaking.  It just speeds everything up and makes the whole thing more accessible to those who don't want to trawl through server lists.  But I'm from a generation where server lists were the only thing around, and Valve made the correct decision not to remove the feature.  Custom games, custom maps and everything else are all still available through the games server list feature, so this game really does feel like a complete package.

Basically, the game is fucking awesome and you should play it.   Sure, there might be debates around the competitive nature of this game that I'm not aware of, but if you're looking for a fresh change of pace from all the Call of Duty and Battlefield type games, then this is for you.