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.

Crysis 3 is not a Masterpiece

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I have not played Crysis 3, and my experience with Crysis 2 is rather limited.  That said I really did enjoy Crysis 1, I thought it was pretty good and had fun with it.

So, while digging around the internet for stuff I came across this article on Gamespot

http://au.gamespot.com/news/crytek-crysis-3-is-our-masterpiece-6404708

Cevat Yerli, the founder of Crytek says that Crysis 3 is a masterpiece and that of one the main reasons for reviews being "tepid" is because of "gamer fatigue".

First of all, the reviews for Cysis 3 aren't as bad as this guy makes them out to be.  Most places gave the game either an 8 or a 9 and said generally nice things about it.  On Metacritic the thing has a 77 critic score, which I'd say is pretty fuckin' good.

What really bugs me though is how this guy is blaming the consumers for the lukewarm feedback.  You made a fucking first person shooter, in a time when the market is over saturated with first person shooters.  While graphically Crysis 3 is about as good as it gets, at the end of the day it's just another fucking shooter.  Not only is it just another shooter, it's the third in a series of games that would be classified by anyone over 15 as just another shooter.

Crysis 3 is not a masterpiece, it's just one more first person shooter game to add to the ever growing and overly large pile.  Granted, the game looks extremely pretty and I think Crytek are doing good things by showing what PC hardware is really capable of.  But Crysis 3, outside of the graphics is nothing special, nothing that will blow your mind.  It's not the fault of the consumer that you made another shooter when there are already too many, because if you didn't notice that then you must have your head under a goddamn rock.  Try making something truly original and then we can start talking masterpieces.

NOTE: Me saying Crysis 3 isn't a masterpiece doesn't mean I think it's bad.  I've not played it, I don't know if it's good or bad, but you can tell just by looking at it that it's not exactly breaking the mould.

Where is Half Life 3? (Or Episode 3)

I love me some Half Life, but I've got concerns for this series and I'm really hoping Valve proves me wrong on this one.

Half Life 2: Episode 2 was a game released in 2007 to follow up on the events from Episode 1 and Half Life2.  The game was intense as all hell and a shit ton of fun to play and got fans more invested in the Half Life 2 plot and universe with all sorts of crazy shit going on.  But the game ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, and we have barely heard anything about an Episode 3.  It's been so long that people are thinking that Episode 3 won't even be a thing and instead we'll just get a Half Life 3 instead.

Now I've not really been following all the news too closely but after giving a quick skim of the Half Life wiki on news regarding the next game, there has been nothing super concrete and everything seems like a bit of a mystery.

What I'm worried about is that Half Life 3 will go the same way of Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever or Too Human.  These games had huge development times and large amounts of hype, and then when they released they sucked ASS.  I trust Valve to not make a game that's shitty quality wise, but can they really deliver on the 6 years of hype that's been flying around since Episode 2?  Given the amount of time it's been, I don't think they will be able to do it, but I'm crossing my fingers and really hoping that they prove me very, very wrong.

Dead Island: Are You Serious?

Two posts in one day isn't usually my thing, I'm too lazy for that, but this just took the biscuit.

What you are looking at in the above image is the Dead Island Special Edition package, which comes with a model of a bikini-clad dead woman's fucking torso.  I mean seriously, what the fuck is wrong with the people who produced this, and is there seriously people who look at that and go "yeah, I want THAT on my desk"?

You know, I'm not getting on this things case because I'm offended or anything like that, it takes way more than a dead woman's torso to offend me, but this is just stupid.  I mean, what do you usually think of when you get cool models in special editions?  A character, a monster, an iconic item from the game or SOMETHING like that.  I mean hell, if you wanted to go for sex appeal you could have had a sexy bikini woman smashing a zombies face in or something, but you went for THIS?!

With this, not only are you loading the gun of every anti-game person on the face of the earth right now, but in the future, when there's another bit of gaming controversy, people are going to point to shit like this to "prove" the fact that people who play video games are "disturbed" or some shit.  Plus if people see shit like this, and then you tell them later that you enjoy a bit of video games now and again, they are going to feel something negative towards you because THIS is the kind of shit you're associated with, and it doesn't matter if you even like Dead Island or not.

There is drumming up controversy for publicity, and then there is just retardation, guess which this one is?