X-Men Origins : Wolverine

Tom Clancy`s H.A.W.X.

A few weeks ago, a friend from work asked me if I played H.A.W.X. yet and if I like flight simulators. My answer was simple : NO and FUCK YOU. I barely forgot all the hours of stress while trying to figure out how to get off the ground in one of the F-xx series.
Though i didn`t want to stay completely in the dark, I decided to at least google the damn game. Google`s results were, as always, many and barely decisive, until i saw the magic words : TOM CLANCY`s. I didn`t hear about H.A.W.X before, but when i saw Tom`s name there, i knew that it deserved at least one try. So far, all of Tom Clancy`s games were great for me, so almost instinctively i knew this one would be great.
A few moments of download, another few moments to install the game and voila, i was ready to kick ass.
I have to admit that while the game was installing i kept having some flashbacks about my plane simply sitting in the airfield doing nothing as i had no fucking idea about how to take off, but there it was, i started the game campaign and, to my greatest surprise, my plane was already in the air.
"AI KARAMBA!!" shouted Bart`s voice in my head, now i am going to kick ass for real. In just a few seconds i adapted to the game, and already blowing some emo ass sky high. H.A.W.X. has an almost unique gameplay that relies on two very important things : SIMPLE and FUN. In my opinion other flight simulators are hardly SIMPLE and NO FUN at all, while H.A.W.X. is purely brilliant. The air-to-air fights are pretty much awesome and the air-to-ground fights are like a small challenge which consist of "how many tanks can you blow up before you hit the ground/have to turn your noze up and dive into them again". All of the missions include blow this up and protect/escort that, but even the protect/escort part consists on blowing enemies fast and effective. Though so far i`ve only played the campaign and it took me about 4-5 hours to finish i have to admit that the only bad thing i can say about this game is that the "realism" part si pretty damn questionable. At one mission i was supposed to take back L.A. and after a quick sweep of the city, another wave of enemies had appeared, i pretty damn expected to see more tanks and planes on the battlefield but i really couldn`t understand where did the fucking Anti-Air turrets had appeared from again ( considering that the city had been swept of all enemy forces ) ?!?!?!?!
Besides the great gameplay H.A.W.X. has great graphics to offer, even if most of the time i had to stare at the plane`s ass i can say that this game was a real treat for my candy hungry eyes ( especially now with my new PC ). All of the mission locations look as realistic as authentic ass possible.
Next to the cool graphics and great gameplay this particular game also has some of the best sound tracks so far. Put them all together and voila : i was fucking absorbed by game.

Just like all the games out there, H.A.W.X. isnt flawless, the most important thing for me simply had to disappoint me : the difficulty system. At the normal level i had many missiles and i took very low damage, at the expert difficulty i had slightly fewer missiles and i took a little more damage, but the enemies rarely managed to land a hit on me and they blow up really fast at either difficulty leveles ( 1-2 missiles ), and even for the dumbest of players there is an E.R.S.(Enhanced Reality System) to help them evade/intercept/fly.

Here`s a pic of me trying to play the game at the super mega awesome difficulty setting : my cat biting/playing with my hand while i was playing.

Things i learned from MMOs

- Whatever your goal in life may be, you must always be an adventurer.
- The outskirts of your training grounds have many small animals who will happily act as your punching bag.
- Spells make you thirsty.
- Eating normal food will heal even the worst-looking wound.
- Some people have the job of standing around waiting for someone to bring them things.
- No matter how many people tell him where they are, the farmer will never find his lost children.
- People will award you with large amounts of gold for delivering a letter to their uncle which lives 10 minutes away.
- Anything you kill will disappear soon, only to reappear a few minutes later, alive and having forgotten everything.
- Animals will puke gold when you kill them. Incidentally, that is also how gold is made as there never seems to be any coin-making factory anywhere.
- Your character can survive indefinitely without food, water, sleep or personal hygiene.
- Platemail covers 90% of the male body, but only 20% of the female body. However, in both cases it weighs exactly the same and offers the same protection.
- Chainmail bikinis are among the most powerful and protective pieces of armor.
- If you are a very powerful and ancient creature about to be attacked by a band of adventurers, the most logical course of action is to try and kill the one who pisses you off the most while randomly throwing fire on the others. Incidentally, the one who pisses you off the most is the heavily armored guy wearing a shield.
- Shields and armored warriors piss off powerful creatures more than spells of mass destruction aimed at their faces.
- No matter how wounded you are, you will never feel any pain or experience weakness. Sometimes, you will even experience strength.
- No one ever uses a staff as a walking aid or to hit something with. Instead, staves are used to increase the power of your spells.
- No matter how big you are, you will NEVER try to squish an adventurer who wants to kill you. Instead, you will try to hit him with whatever weapons you have at your disposal.
- Powerful creatures always carry powerful items they do not have any use for.
- Creatures will get tired of chasing you given enough time and will just forget about you, and are incapable of hearing/seeing things that are happening further than 20 yards away.
- A big enough sword can sometimes do more damage than an exploding ball of fire.
- Every general goods vendor in the world sells the exact same things in infinite quantities.
- No matter how shitty and useless something you pick up from the ground is, someone will surely buy it.
- Once you have killed enough monsters or done enough deliveries, you will be surrounded by shiny lights and will grow in power.
- No matter how many times you die, it will never be permanent.
- No matter how many times a creature kills you, you can always come back to try again.
- All dwarves are scottish, like to drink and live in snowy or underground areas.
- There is no such thing as fat people.
- Although all races procrate, there are very few or no half-breeds, unless they are powerful, significant and awesome. Half-dwarves are a concept which does not exist.
- Trolls are jamaican unless they are evil and/or dumb.
- If you are an evil creature, do NOT kill a good, innocent creature unless you want its spirit to come back and offer rewards to adventurers who kill you.
- Powerful adventurers who kill dragons for a living will sometimes collect cute fluffy things.
- The chinese are an evil nation composed entirely of farmers.

Prince of Persia aka "It's the shit"

If you read some of my other articles in this blog you'll find one dedicated to the Prince of Persia series, in which i'm praising it as one of the new millenium's more worthy game franchises. Well, as it stands, it looks like UbiSoft has joined the LucasArts bandwagon in what i can call either "milking the dead cow strategy" or "the Final Fantasy syndrome". Which basically implies that after a succesful game or series of games, you make another game with the same name, similar setting and mechanics, but completely different storyline and characters. So far, it works: the game takes some of its fame from the previous series, which almost assures great expectations (and big sales at the start), while keeping many of its previous fanbois. Because NOTHING that has "final fantasy" written on it can EVER be bad, amirite boys?
Well, i just finished it (and by "it" i meant the PC version) a few hours ago, and i'm impressed. I'm impressed at what lengths UbiSoft will go to when making a complete shiny failure is involved.
Let's be frank, however: it's not the game that is a complete failure, it's the execution. The game has incredible potential and a very artistic style (that vague reminds me of Suicide Girls), but its casual-friendliness and cracks in immersion ruin it thoroughly.
Let's start at the beginning, though: the story. This game's story is about some guy (who would be twice more mysterious and interesting if the game wouldn't tell us who he is from the bloody title) walking around through the desert storm looking for his donkey, named... Farah. That's a negative point from the start for taking the name of one of the most important and deep characters of the series and giving it to a fuckin' donkey that we never even get to see anyway. Suddenly he falls down a pit, gets hit on the head by a falling rock and accidentally finds an old, deserted kingdom which is on the verge of collapsing to a god of darkness. Well, no. What he finds is a girl who's getting chased by some very cowardly soldiers. So the prince chases the girl to this temple thing where her father slices a tree in half and starts the end of the world, spreading the land with a thing called "corruption" (which i will, from now on, call "shit"). Apparently the tree was a prison for the Dark Lord of the Shit, and now that dark lord is spreading his shit across the land in an attempt to destroy some ancient... things (called Fertile grounds - incidentally, they say the word Fertile about 100 billion times over the course of the game) that once destroyed will allow him to spread shit across the world as well. Utterly coincidental, the girl discovers that she has magic powers of light that allow her to clean up the shit. Well, whaddya know.
So the prince and the girl must now thread through the shit-infested lands, reach the ancient things and clean the shit up. Once they clear an area, strange floating orbs of light called "light seeds" (which i will subsequently call "points") appear and make the girl (which i will subsequently call Elika, because that's her name) feel better. Even more, if you collect (or, more precisely, bump into) lots of points, you can buy yourself a special power with them. And you get to choose this special power out of 4 total. The powers are there only to help you reach areas and you can only use them in special locations marked by different colored plates on walls, and are, in order: jump, jump, fly and run on walls. So your goal will be to run around cleaning up shit, then collect points which will allow you to buy powers to reach more areas where you run around and clean up more shit, and consequently get more points. Once you clean up all the areas in a specific quarter, you get to kill a boss and once you've killed all 4 bosses you get to kill the last boss which will finish the game. Easy.
Now that i'm through with the presentation, let's talk mechanics. The game is similar to the other games, but different. First off, there is no time power. You will never be able to rewind, stop or slow down time in this game (unless the game does it for you for increased dramatic effect). The prince gains some new abilities such as crawling on ceilings (Spider-prince, spider-prince, does whatever a spider-prince does. Can he shoot - from a web? No he can't - he's a prince), climbing on cracks in a wall and sliding down walls with his metal gauntlet that he just happens to have (and you're not supposed to ask why, because the game doesn't talk about that sort of thing).
Add to this the power of having Elika at his disposal at all times, which about doubles his overall effectiveness. First off, he can't die. Whenever he's about to fall into a pit of shit or an abyss, Elika teleports him safely away to the last place where his feet were on solid ground. This instantly replaces the rewind time feature, and makes the game freakishly casual to boot. No longer will we get the satisfaction of seeing the prince being sliced to pieces, bludgeoned to death or going SPLAT against the bottom of the pit. For one, the game doesn't have any sharp obstacles (unless you're one of those people who thinks that shit is sharp), for two, Elika saves you every damn time - even when she's supposedly incapacitated. You even use this "power" to solve a puzzle, for crying out loud.
Second, Elika can throw him around (i.e. a double jump) and the game is designed to make it seem like they're working together. You can even use her as a weapon in combat (suddenly, the awesome thought of bashing an enemy with her comes to mind), but we'll get into that later.
The graphics are grade A, and if it's not a masterpiece anywhere else, then the game truly is a graphical one. The levels are littered with sublime views that will leave your eyes wide open and gently massage your soul. Or something. However, the level design breaks the immersion somewhat. The actual amount of running you do in this game is about 5% of the ground you cover, and the levels are designed to have a way to leave them, and a way to come back. This is where the immersion starts to fail as i seriously doubt that any big old kingdom would have conveniently placed bronze rings that you can get a hold of right after doing a wall run, among other things. The zones are big and outdoor-ish, which is better than what the other PoPs offered us but i can only raise an eyebrow when i see this. I won't comment on the cell-shaded graphics because they never bothered me.
As with any PoP game, there must be combat. This game has combat. Problems are, it's not nearly enough combat, it's impossible to die in combat, it's so easy that you might as well let a monkey play it and most of the times it's over in about 5 seconds. You fight 1, max 2 enemies per level, and sometimes that includes the boss aswell. Let me explain: the combat style and mechanics are solid, and very VERY flashy, with combos out the ass. But when it comes to execution, normal enemies are insta-killed AS SOON AS THEY REACH AN EDGE OR A WALL. Ironically, all your attacks will push the enemy back somewhat, and as soon as they're near a wall/edge the prince instantly plunges his sword in their chests and kills them like the big hero he is. If the prince reaches the edge, the enemies will simply throw him to the other side. If it so happens that the prince takes too much damage, Elika will jump in and "save" him (an act which also restores some of the enemy's health). There's a certain strategy required for some bosses but in all cases it's so easy that you start to wonder what the producers were bloody thinkin'.
Also, there are quick time events. Like any self-respecting next-gen franchise, PoP HAD to copy quick-time events from god of war or whatever. I thanked god that the pseudo-quicktime events from Two Thrones were just that, pseudo, but it looks like Ubi took it to the next... level. Yes, it is very interesting to watch flashy animations on my screen while looking for a button that's supposed to appear and hurrying to press it before it disappears. Not.
As for the characters, the prince is a cross between an angsty teenager and Indiana Jones, and Elika is... well, a cross between bitch, drama queen and sensitive flower. The game tries to make you like her, oh, how it tries. But as much as it tries, it fails horrendously (AVAST YE, MATEYS! SPOILERS AHEAD! STOP READIN' IF YER LANDLUBBER ARSE DON'T WANNA BE SPOILT). I checked even the official forums and it confirmed my suspicions. You see, the game ends with Elika dying. And if you wait it out on the end credits, there's a final sequence in which the prince, defying all logic and morality, revives her but destroys all they had worked for so far, releasing His Shittiness upon the world... again. You see, you're supposed to develop such great affection towards her that in the end, you'd even forsake the world to get her back. Here's where the idea fails, because the prince does, BUT YOU DON'T. I did the last sequence reluctantly, while half-searching for a way i could get out of that place and into the desert. I didn't find it, but man did it feel wrong to negate her sacrifice just because i'm some sort of spoiled brat who dun care bout the world -or her duties and what she wanted to do- and simply fucks it all and gets her back. I said i checked the forums: there were fanboi topics saying that the ending affected them deeply, commenting on Elika's humanity and trying to find a reason for the revival, but not one of them said "yeah i liked elika so much that i would have done the same if i was the prince". Because the prince and Elika never share a serious moment of chemistry, because whenever Elika raises a hand, the prince is always lookin' away, because whenever the prince gets sentimental, Elika turns around and acts like a cold-hearted bitch. Everything they do share is smart-ass one-liners, ilke him saying "stop staring at my ass" and her saying "i thought you said it was a donkey". In conclusion, Elika will never reach the standards imposed by characters like Alyx Vance or even the old Farah.
A potentially great game, but one where (in my friend's words) the original developers seemed to be sleeping and the rest of the team quickly hurried to make the game in their absence, and finished it so as to give them a chance to show them how it's done. It's far from a bad game, but not too close to a good one either. If you're an adventure game fan, there's no big reason not to play and finish it other than the annoying hunt for points. Let's hope they wake up next time and design a game that doesn't make you collect stuff just to get it over with.

Furious Dance

It all started with Scccwwwhhhhh ... round the corner, and not long ago i literally saw the skill, Athene emerged from pwning noobs to dancing contests, and out of all the clips i simply loved the latest :


And now, it seems that Scooter isn`t the only one dancing round the world :





Simply... Fantastic, too bad he got banned.






I never thought that there are so many gnomes in World of Warcraft, lol to the gnome power and bow to the Dorf power =))

Noobs, small tits and DiCaprio

Every once in a while i find myself filled with the urge to simply destroy every fucking emo in my sight, and, if possible, to steal their flag of faggotry and return it to my base camp. I start up easily by buffing myself, laughing at my so called team mates who are so eager to die ( proven by the fact that they want to rush ahead of every other team mate and face the enemy ) and wait for the doors to open or the fence that`s blocking my way to fall. After the noobs who rushed ahead die, the true battle starts, i immediately pick my target, stun the hell out of him and using the power of righteousness i send the motherfuckers back to their base. In most of the cases things work out great for me, i simply hug God and beg for him to lay a bubble on my ass when things get too dangerous and if God refuses to help i simply use other superstitious bullshit to get myself back to full health : like bandaging my broken or missing leg or light myself up hoping that some holiness of the light will reach my but raped ass. Generally i can handle 2 normal players easy, 3 if i`m lucky but if the match is 10 to 10 i hope that i don`t have to. Lately on the other hand the l33tness of the battlegrounds amaze me, for about 3 to 4 hours we lost in the most shameful manner ever, and so, just like any other Romanian, i began to search for the idiots to blame. Turns out that most of my so called team mates are under 12, and i`m the only idiot to blame here, because i actually expected something from them, also i found out the hard way that no matter how hard i try i still can`t defeat the ZERG, leaving me with the simple conclusion : try again at a higher level.
If you never experienced the sensation above, means that you never played World of Warcraft (in the battlegrounds ), in witch case i highly recommend that you start enjoying the online sensation and by doing so, loosing your soul.


After getting beat up in the worst possible way in the BattleGrounds i tried to escape the reality in witch i escaped from the real life, by jumping into another reality, a movie. As i was browsing through the internetz looking for something good to watch, other than youtube of course, i stumbled upon Resident Evil : Degeneration. Whenever i think about Resident Evil i instantly have a flash about a girl with small titties, nice legs and, tons of undead-hugging bullets and begging for brains.
Surprisingly this wasn`t the case here, because the first thing i noticed was that i didn`t escape from the gaming world, no, not this time, said a little cocksucker living in my head ( somewhere near the rear) as the first image from the movie had the word CAPCOM written all over it. The movie is about the characters from the game, all cool and emo and all in 3d.
My first impressions were as rational as possible : Where the fuck are the boobs !?!?!?!?
Instead of watching an overpowered character beating the shit out of the undead i ended up watching an overpowered Pc Game hero beating the shit out of the undead, well not exactly beating, because the movie was mostly about how they ran away from the zombies instead of killing/re-killing them and somehow they ended up at The Umbrella Corporation 2 aka Wilpharma Corporation.
Degeneration has it`s nice action scenes, the storyline is as sad as possible, in fact no real storyline was detected if i start to think about it, because the movie is more like a cutscene between the game series, a tittles cutscene.

As this movie ended i said to myself what any other gamer in my situation would say : this is not a good day for gaming, or watching movies. So i turned on the TV tried MTV wich turned out to be a /fail because none of the "latest hits" are for me, then tried VH1 and i was thinking about giving gaming a second shot, but this time at a fun game, the Jets`N`Guns Gold. Not surprinsingly even that game managed to beat the shit out of me and the more i tried to get over a fucking level the ideea of suicide seemed to sound better and better. Some time passes and my room mate gets a call from a friend who actually managed to convince us to get out of the house, and, go watch a movie at the mall. For me it was all the same, the day could not get any shittier. The entire year presented itself with cheap and fucked up movies, hardly a few games worth mentioning and a price increase for my rent.
And so we went to the mall to see Body of Lies, the seond i saw the poster with DiCaprio in it I turned emo thinking that this is just another love movie. Suicide was more tempting than ever, i had the motives, the means and the will power to do it, the rope was all around my neck and the movie started, the short advertisements managed to convince me that a rope cannot be enough, i need a few blades as well and a Cola.
Against all odds i am still alive, when i got out i was more than impressed, the movie turned out to be the movie i`ve ever seen this year, by far the best, unless they launch a Alizee rape movie any time soon.
Body of Lies was fantastic, it had no emo scenes whatsoever, the romance was as low as possible, amazingly low for DiCaprio. The action put together with the storyline and a few good actors turned out into an epic movie worthy of viewing at least once.
I don`t intend to start with the movie description, saying that it`s another movie about war on terrorism and all that, so here`s the trailer and enjoy :

World of Goo

Though i got my Wrath of the Lich King expansion on time, i discovered another highly addictive world, and not the World of Warcraft with all it`s glory and fame, but with World of Goo, with it`s ... Goo`s.
As a gamer i`m not particularly fond of puzzles and idiotic games which require somewhat more than average brain usage, but when it comes to funny games i immediately put my brain to work and start enjoying the game. World of Goo is mostly a game for kids, a game without a real storyline, without any meaning at all for that matter, it`s basically a physics emulator with goo`s in it.

Just a few moments after i started the game i was already having fun, and i mean laughing my lungs out, though the main objective of the game is to get the goo`s to a pipe ( as simple as i gets ), i never got tired of building "ladders" for my goo`s, and even when it all felt in my face ( thanks to gravity ) it didn`t bother me. The game is so cute that even when I failed to do the simplest of things the game had a nice, almost funny way of saying Fuck YOU!
One of the great things about this game were the levels, enjoying every level, though the main quest is the same, none of the levels repeat themselves, each and every level had it`s one way of saying : I`m unique but most likely the next one is better. In most levels -The Sign Painter occasionally gives hints, never tells what to do, but tries to help out.

Finishing the game was in fact easy, building large structures of goo in order to save the other goo`s was tons of pure fun, and why not? The graphics are cute, the effect are more than cute, and the sounds are hilarious. Seeing some of the goo balls burst into flames or explode may generate laughter, Watching them pop up as the gravity or the wind throws them into a windmill can also be classified as fun.

The lack of a real storyline here is amazingly compensated by the feeling that something is or will be happening, though the goo`s generally tend to go, and while i suspected that the game will end up with a massive goo made "building", i was wrong. The ending of each and every chapter simply blew my expectations away, they were part silly however but still, fun.

If i think about it, world of Goo managed to do what other games failed. With it`s pure simplicity and flexibility one could actually get addicted to the never ending fun.
Sadly the piracy rate of this game is more than 90%, not too good for the 2D Boys to be honest, but the game only has 70 mb and clearly it`s worth playing, and paying 20$ ffs.

Apocalypse Evolved: a Fallout rant

No surprise that i'm writing this since Fallout 3 went live several days ago, so i'm gonna cut it short on the intro. This is both a review, and an old gamer's perspective on Fallout 3 versus its predecessor.
Let's chill out a bit and go way back, to the era of games that didn't have million-dollar budgets, when consoles didn't each have their own code and when people made games because they had a passion for it rather than to gain popularity. That was the era in which i started gaming, and the time when i experienced some of the best moments of my life. Let's go back to when a tiny little company called Interplay got it into their heads to make a game about a post-nuclear dystopia where everything was ruined, desecrated and basically fucked up. But they did more than that: they added 2 of the most basic yet defining elements a game can have: violence and humor.
So take a really violent game with lots of humor set in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic universe, and you have something that kinda follows the idea of Fallout. Make that game have one of the best atmospheres, settings and feelings that ever graced the history of gaming and you have Fallout. Now i didn't play the first Fallout, and this is why i won't be talking about it here and now. However, its sequel, Fallout 2, i have finished a total of 4 times and still consider the best game ever made for the PC. Let's get this straight: it was not perfect. It was far from perfect, in fact it had craploads of bugs, the story wasn't the size of Legacy of Kain or even Baldur's Gate, but the game flowed on through all its problems. The bugs were more game-making than game-breaking(well if you saved a lot), to the point where you actually used some of them to have fun. The story was not the best there could be for its setting, but because of that very setting it was perfectly balanced. And the universe sucked you in, it dragged you down to the point that it was no longer a game. It was beyond a game. And that oppinion has been shared by countless people who have waited for a sequel ever since.
Enter Fallout 3. At first, everyone was dismayed that Interplay had dropped its own F3 project, but people continued to hope. Not until the license was brought by Bethesda did people start to fear: fear that Fallout would not in fact be Fallout, but rather a cheap Elder Scrolls copy. But you know what, The Elder Scrolls was a nice series, which proves they aren't totally idiots when it comes to games, and if they keep the Fallout essence intact, there's a nice chance it will be Fallout. So up until i finally got to play it, there was this burning question in my gut: will it, or will it not be Fallout?
So is it a cheap Elder Scrolls copy, in the end? Yes, and no. More like an incredibly well-done Elder Scrolls copy, because it's better than Oblivion, but NOT better than Fallout.
Let's start with the basics of what makes Fallout Fallout: mechanics. I think everyone who's played Fallout 1 or 2 remembers the interface's ease of use (when you mastered it) and the useful, fun options you had to customize your char. Well, how about Fallout 3? I can't possibly explain this without writing a wall of text so let's make a list.
Fallout 2:

1. Skills can be raised up to 300% and get more expensive to raise starting at 100%
   
2. Skills can be used frequently in a variety of unconventional situations
3. Tag skills get raised twice as fast and a tag increases the base skill by 20 points.
4. Background traits can drastically modify the way you play
5. Each point in a stat contributes to a very important aspect
6. Perks are gained once every 3 levels (by default) and offer unique, powerful and game-changing bonuses
7. There is no maximum level, and you can still play the game as you like after finishing the main quest
8. Weapons/armor don't degrade, and you can get your own travelling "stash" in the form of a car.
   

Fallout 3:

1. Skills can be raised to 100, after that, fuck you.
2. Skills are rarely used in dialogue, and very rarely used outside of dialogue with the exception of using them exactly for what they're supposed to do. If Fallout 3 was Fallout 2, you could not repair the well in the first village.
3. Tag skills are a 15 point bonus for that particular skill and nothing else.
4. Background traits do not exist
5. Each point in a stat gives a measly contribution to 2 or 3 skills and a non-skill feature (like weight limit)
   
6. Perks are gained every level and 90% of them offer either a skill bonus, stat bonus, exp bonus, more dialogue options, accuracy bonus, money bonus, damage bonus (both situational and usual), action point bonus or a combination/variation of the above. The only truly unique perk is Explorer, but getting that means throwing away other good perks.
7. The maximum level is 20 and it's only attainable if you stray far, far away from the main quest for a long time and no apparent reason. After the game ends, you can go fuck yourself because you're not going back, no matter what ending you chose.
8. Weapons break themselves like you were hammering them with a super sledge instead of pulling a trigger. Not much different from Oblivion, that is. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't need copies of the same weapon to repair them. The car is gone, replaced by Oblivion's fast travel. Surprisingly, fast travel doesn't have a fucking trunk.

There are lots more i could add, but we're talking about game mechanics here. Bethesda has changed Fallout's skill and stat system to a state which would have been unrecognisable if the game didn't throw the word S.P.E.C.I.A.L. on our heads every fucking time, and if the game didn't make use of the same names for perks/skills. Which leads me to the next bit: if you ever play F3 after F2, you'll clearly see that Bethesda has tried hard to keep the Fallout humor and atmosphere. Sometimes, i think, too hard. First off, F2 never told us anything about SPECIAL, i remember discovering that the stats make up that word by myself. Second, some things seem exaggerated. For instance, the sound. Fallout 1 and 2 each had (if i'm not mistaken) ONE single old-school Jazz song attached to them. One GOOD song, which made sense in their given setting and were right on the spot where they should have been: the intro. In Fallout 3, you can choose to listen to a radio station that plays a crapload of these songs. And while i've been watching the Fallout 2 intro over and over just to listen to Armstrong's "a kiss to build a dream on" one more time, there's only SO many raiders i can kill while i'm "hackin' and whackin' and smackin'". So eventually i really feel the need to turn that shit off because it actually cripples the atmosphere instead of making it more integrating. And that's just an example... there's vaults everywhere, you use the same drugs (even though Jet was invented by the Mordino family far away on the west coast), but it just doesn't do it as good as Fallout did.
Then there's VATS. Vault-tec Automated blah blah. Basically, a very cheap re-enactment of the old turn-based action-point-based system. It's overpowered enough to make you use it (how i was able to shoot a gun 16 fucking times with pinpoint accuracy in what could qualify as half a second is beyond me), it feels awkward, it looks awkward, and it pretty much takes you away from the FPS experience and into the RPG. It completely eliminates all idea of tactics and using your action points in a smart way, making the game a "click the body part and shoot" thing, but at least it's entertaining in the form of violent slow-motion deaths.
I remember one particular pattern i used to follow in Oblivion: ride around, find dungeon, enter dungeon, kill everything in dungeon, loot dungeon, exit dungeon, find more dungeon. Then i played Fallout 3: walk around, find dungeon (cave/factory/office building), enter dungeon, kill everything in dungeon, loot dungeon, exit dungeon, find more dungeon. To the point where it's becoming pretty clear that they only put those dungeons there to extend the playtime. There's only 3 vaults of any significance in this game, the 3-4 remaining ones don't have any story to them and aren't related to the main story in ANY way. Sure, one is full of clones while the other is messing with your brain but overall it's just the same sequence i outlined earlier.
Which makes it kinda sad since that was the element that alienated me from Oblivion in the first place, and it's coincidentally also why i got bored of Mass Effect. Are people losing inspiration so much that they have to take simplistic MMORPG elements (aka the dungeon with no soul) and insert them into single player games as a way of extending playtime? Well, wake the fuck up and stop calling yourself game designers. Get a new name, like FAIL designers.
Ok, i've nitpicked the bad parts of the game long enough, and i think we can all agree that it ain't Fallout by now. Yet the fact that it ain't Fallout doesn't mean it can't be a good game, all things considered. Let's start with the obvious: the game is gorgeous. I've looked closely at the details and they've recreated the game pretty close to its predecessor. The first-person view is fine when you get used to it, and it doesn't obstruct the morbid beauty of the Wasteland. The soundtrack is good despite what i said about the old songs (well, as good as depressing music can get, i guess). The dialogue is nothing compared to Fallout 2, but it's vastly improved over Oblivion, as is much of the storyline and many of the quests. I finished the game, but reloaded and went back into the waste to see what i've missed, and i'm still not bored with it yet. At one point while i was exploding ghoul heads with my shitgun, i suddenly realised something: i was actually having fun. And i had as much fun during the robot sequence near the end of the game: you know what i'm talking about if you got there, and i dare say it's one of the most exhilarating experiences ever felt in gaming. So as non-fallout as it is, the game will still be worth a shot, especially if you have no idea what fallout is and/or played fallout but didn't like it (in which case i welcome you to the museum of rare people). So that's mostly it... i hope they don't decide to push the franchise further because i really don't want a Fallout 4 now. And if they do make Fallout 4, then let it be this. Take a look at it and see what the true Fallout 3 looked like. This, with all its ancient and fucked up graphics, is Fallout.
And despite what's happened to the game, it wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. Fallout, no matter what happens, will still live on in our hearts and in our minds as the game that gave us one of the best adventures in gaming. Because even if Fallout itself may change, we all know war... war never changes.

Dead Fantasy

So there i was working when a friend showed me this, i just love it :D




It`s not that bad, but then again, there`s more :




Thank the gods of gaming for GT and their good video quality.

Call of grenades !!

So there i was, minding my own business, trying to aim for the head, when all of a sudden the grenade indicator appeared, and then, just like a motherfucker, it doubled ... tripled. Just before i realized what happened i found myself blown up into the stratosphere by the vast number of frag explosions.

Moments earlier :
Bored of EVE i decided to try out some action, my nationalism was low so i tried some Call of Duty , what better way to throw away that boredom, other than filling the enemy with led >:) I installed the game, configured it, and VOILA, i entered the realm of Modern Warfare. Unlike other games i know, Call of Duty decided to play some SPORE, and evolution managed to grab it and threw it out into the real world. Now we`re not fighting blue blooded nazies, now we`re fighting emo terrorists, and radioactive dogs, and rabid dogs, and radiation, and helicopters, and best of all, at some point you actually find and capture the emo leader, enjoy a nuke blowing up in your ass and even a few "stealth" moments.
Generally, this game is ok, somewhere above ok even. As i went through the single player i was mostly amazed, i was even enjoying the game, though there were some moments when i wanted to throw the fucking PC out the window. I never managed to figure out why all potential good games have big good bugs and glitches. For starters, i never figured out why the hell do i have to wait for a team mate to open up a door for me, sure sometimes that`s a good thing, but try to picture yourself near the fucking and the fucking objective point is after the fucking door. Not having an "open fucking door" button really sucks, i thought the dev team figured that out by now. One of the most possible reasons for not having the magical "open door" button may be the stick to the storyline idea, but let me say just this, if your team mates have a few path finding problems or need to be triggered by the player to do something, then the player is knee deep in an ocean of shit. In most of the team misions i found myself somewhere deep in the battlefield and my fucking team was near the start zone, probably because i rushed ahead, but let`s be real here, all was great but apparently, i skipped out on the storyline and the mission wouldn`t continue/door would not open unless a specific team member would be there open the door.
The singleplayer missions are the clasic ones : go there kill that/ protect something/ run like hell/run like hell after a nigger and capture him/ go there kill that, but this time using a sniper. Most of them are okay, but when i had to look for the emo leader in each and every house in a sad little village, it all seemed like a big fucking cliche. Of course the emo leader will be in the house surrounded by blades/blood/and guards, of course the other houses are a waste of time, and of course going straight for the house would be the fastest way in, but no, I had to check out each and every mother fucking house before i reached the one that really mattered. One thing kept bugging me though, throught the campaign you keep switching from one character to another, both fighting on the same side however but they have nothing to do one with each other, so why not just ask the player at the beginning the simple yet marvelous questions : On which side do you wanna be? PUNK! Another sad yet annoying part were the dog fights, this is just sad to be honest, out of all the battles all the possibilities, when a dog attacks it seems that the ocean of shittynes is being poured on me, they just had to add it, the worlds most fucked up moment in all action games, the one, the only, the "press X button NOT DO DIE", if you don`t press it, you die, if you press it too late or too soon, you die, le fuck.

Overall, the single player was quite ok, the soundtracks did their job high above ok, and the graphics are strong enough to make the player feel as if he is really participating in the blood bath.
The multiplayer however turned out be more than simple fun, for a few straight days i found myself addicted to it. The mods are pretty much standard, except for the hardcore, but the gameplay itself is simply fantastic. The more you kill the more xp you gather and from time to time you might actually level up, in military ranks, unlocking better and better weapons and some interesting perks, like bullet penetration, damage, grenade blast. The fights are usually fast, the ways to kill are fun and the potential drama is almost divine, the death cam exists ( after you die it shows the possition of your killer) and after a few straight kills (without dying) you can use the recon chopper to show your enemies on the radar, a useful tool indeed, but after even more straight kills you can actually call in an air strike to blow the motherfuckers sky high.
Best of all i loved the multiplayer maps, from cities to hangars and straight on the field, they were simply great, with plenty of potential sniper locations, best suited for various perks and let`s not forget, the potential drama.

Respect the superior race

SPORE, the one, the only, the evolutionary game. The game which can make you smile, make you laugh, and can even tuck you to bed.
A highly anticipated game, Spore started out just fine, great even with a few glitches however, but the game managed to overcome it`s not so nice parts with state of the art possibilities, the illusion of freedom, and a strong hunger for creativity. One of the things i liked most about Spore is that no matter how big or how ugly you are, there will always a creature stronger and another one weaker. Also there are three ways of going through the game : herbivore, carnivore or omnivore. The herbivore part clearly suggests a strong amount of "EMO-l33tness" having to go peaceful on just about every other species or you end up dead. As for the carnivore part, the game just gets easier, you kill everything, you eat their corpses for hit points, and all that stuff until you end up dominating the world. The omnivores tend to be more industrious, and unlike the others, they prefer to buy their opponents.
The game lets you start at the EMO stage, in a small or big pond on a selected planet, you appear. Small enough to eat and ugly enough to be avoided. The first stage of Spore can be compared to a PacMan game, meaning that the only thing you can do is eat shit and/or die.Trying to somewhat represent a "cell`s" life in the real world, but here, the more shit you eat the bigger you get, the bigger you get the more dangerous you are. The way you build your creature isn`t as important as it should be, because you can morph it into a dick, literary, and back at any time you want. Sure the number of legs, teeth, horns and other mutant parts are important, but where and how you place them simply does not matter.
After reaching a certain level, a brain spawns on your creature, somewhere where the head is supposed to be, congratulations, you reached the creature stage. In this stage things tend to be a little more complex, but sadly, they are not. There is only one rule : Only the strongest/richest survive. After the creature stage i climbed on a ladder and reached the conclusion that the fun just ended, and i mean it. Up to the creature stage you create the creature, after that, you dress it up. The tribal stage turns into a RTS, a bad RTS ofcourse, it is short and hardly worth playing. Few moments after and voila, i got to build my own city, fact which sounds good in theory but sucks ball in practice. Designing buildings and pleasuring my Penises, C`OMMON. Here, the goals is simple : kill/buy/convert other cities, in other words, become "the biggest, the best".
Despite the fact that i tried playing it on all possible methods: religious, economic, military; at the last stage it all ends up the same way, an RPG, a BAD rpg to be exact. While the first four stage are short and fun, the last stage involves a series of shitty missions, involving planet coloring, collecting EMO`s from all over the galaxy and blowing up would-be enemies.
It`s hard to believe though, this game promised a lot, but what it really did is quite simple, it put together 5 types of games and the result is clear : BULLSHIT. The fun stages are short and the fucked up ones are long and full of shit.

I guess i should say more about SPORE, more about the "Sporepedia", but when i think that the creator of spore made his money by creating girl-games like The Sims, I rather cut my tongue out. Who knows, maybe Will Wright only wanted to show the world that there`s a little Hitler in all of us.

The little engine that could

After months of brainless MMO`ing i finally got the guts to step up and play the game which was supposed to be the best of the best, the game which defined the new generation : Crysis

From the first day when i heard about Crysis i was simply stunned by it`s requirements, sure the game was promising some interesting stuff, like the so called freedom and some neat gameplay but all these just can`t be compared to the graphics. So i recently bought just about the best pieces of hardware money can handle and what better way to test it`s power but to install Crysis.
Starting the game i was somewhat impressed with it, the weapons were standardishly nice, the whole island was looking fantasticly good and with the abience, it almost seemed real. That ultil i started the mission. Let me just put it this way : all the graphics in the world cannot, just cannot compensate for the flaws in the gameplay and the AI, i`m not saying that the graphics aren`t fantastic, but let`s be real here. In order to take down an enemy lots of bullets are required, 2-3 shotgun shells to the head or a well placed grenade. But the strangest part is that you can actually go through the game, untill the part where you get out of the alien ship, only with your fists. As far as the enemies will go, i`ve lived to see two strange situations : at one point the emos were shooting at me from an impressive distance with damn good acuracy, in other situations the tards could land a bullet on me thanks to the gimp tree who kept me cover.
The game offers a short, yet interesting amount of weapons. For starters some are good some are useless and all of them can be modified with either a scope, flashlight laser pointer etc. The main character, "Nomad" can cary two weapons a few grenades and a potential RocketLauncher. The rockets will follow the pointer the grenades will prove useful, but the other ones, they just run out of bullets too fast.

Next to the graphics this game was supposed to show off it`s "freedom". Though such things are always limited, the player must do some quests ( go there, kill that, come here, blow me, and stuff like that), and the only "freedom" existing is represented by the vast ways to accomplish a mission. From charging in to stealth or by simply running. Let me just say that the game promised more, a lot more.
Another interesting thing in this game is the nano-suit. Crytek gets a nice piece of candy for this one. Other shooters have power-ups usable only when picked up or when some fanatic score is achieved, Crysis however puts the suit on you, and the only thing you have to do is to switch from one power-up to the other. Fantasticly when the player uses a power-up the suits power is drained, but no problem here you easy mode player fucks, the suits energy is restored at a high rate.
Sadly i expected more from Crysis, a lot more, tons more even. After finishing the game and going through that /fail ending this is the conclusion : Crysis = ultra pro graphics + imba nanosuit + idiotic AI + EMO enemies + mediocre weapons + a shit for a storyline.
Crysis isn`t the game it suposed to be, it`s below average. Worth giving it a try but, like is said before, all the graphics in the world cannot compensate for the flaws in the game.

Games VS Movies : Postal

Postal, the game which inspires carnage, tons of blood, big guns, strange guns, and lots of ways to kill an emo. I guess that the best way to describe this game is: FUN.

Recently I saw the Postal movie, just like the game, is great. From the beginning to the end I laughed my guts out as I watched the postal dude spread funny lines from left to the right, as he was put in many great situations and mostly, the way he managed to handle them all.

The movie starts in one of the funniest, yet controversial, possible ways ever, a joke about 9/11, as how the whole stuff wasn`t the way it supposed to be. Shortly after the great intro I saw the main character of the movie just like in the game, and trust me on this one, there was no one better for this role, there are only a handful of actors I know, who have this lovely effect on you, when I saw Zack Ward, I instantly realized one thing: he`s going to rape or kill one or many emo`s.

Starting in front of his trailer house in Paradise City, listening to the crap his fat bitch of a wife had to say, and only after a few seconds, how he finds out about the fucking she does when the dude isn`t home.

Generally this movie is like a roller coaster, it has as many superb parts as it has stupid and boring ones. For some strange reasons, probably the power of Hollywood, in this movie I saw one of the most useless characters in a movie: “the good looking secondary character, the bitch, the cool looking coffee seller girl”. Sure the movie added tons of hot babes, but why did this one had to appear as if she`s the postal dude`s girlfriend or something. Sure the movie had the classical emo killing, hippie raping, and best of all: A few explosions involving the number one fans of Allah. Sure the movie added the cat-pistol, or, how I like to call it, the headshot through a cat`s ass.

After an hour of watching the shower of blood, and the gut flow this movie had to offer, it ended with absolutely the greatest fucking line in the history of man kind as we know it, and with the dream of the masses coming true : The explosion of the wife, and the epic line : I regret nothing!

Work and Gaming

In order to survive and/or play on`line games i need money, in order to get money i need to work. But i`m a gamer, gaming is like work for me, so how to combine the two ? The answer is simple : gaming at work or playing web fucking text based games.
It all started with the "need" to play, the need got stronger ... and stronger ... and the no games at work policy started to mean nothing to me. Beginning with shitty games like www.travian.com and www. bitefight.com, games which needed me to be on`line in somewhat crucial times, and i went on to flash games, long live miniclip.

I intend on saving some time simply by not throwing shit on the well deserving already filled with shit web games, and simply move on the games which can be played at work and deserve to be played.
Clearly the most played game at work is ... the one ... the only : Solitaire. Let`s just face it, solitaire was made to be played at work : it`s the ideal game if you need time to fly, the game which can offer a shitty challenge ... not a great one ... or a worthy one .. but still .. a challenge.
The other Windows games are playable, but they didn`t really manage to get the job done, sure Minesweeper is ok but its as interesting as hugging trees.
An interesting game worthy of playing at work is Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Easy to find and free to download. This game saved me from total boredom lots of times, sure it`s old and doesn`t look too good, but, just like other tycoons, makes time fly away. Hehe .. nothing like a good windowed game to end the working shifts.
Depending on the working place ... i actually played some arcade games in the office, nothing beats Tyrian while waiting for those mails :>

For the moment, at this I`Cafe where i waste my time and make money ... i can play just about any game, for the moment sticking to WoW and Lineage2.

Above all, when i get tired of just about anything and there`s way too much work to do I simply start a nice flash Tower Defense :

Free to Play

While i was gaming the other day, curse.com sent me this interesting news about a new, chinese free-to-play MMORPG (or at least i think it's chinese). Wow, how fascinating. The game will have the utterly stupid name of Secret Online, and will feature... a lot of stuff. Now keep in mind that if there's something i hate in gaming, it's free to play MMOs. Compared to their pay to play brothers, f2p's are known to have an incredible lack of depth, story or mostly anything else that can call them games. They are basically moneymakers for the respective companies which feed on the players' need for social interaction. And i will attempt to prove that using quotes from the upcoming "game"'s feature notes.

Satisfaction from PK
-Both great visuals and feels very smooth/fast paced.

Are they serious? Alright, this is new. Finally a game that embraces ganking and griefing as something you should take "satisfaction" from. So i won't only be frequently disturbed from my levelling session, but it'll be done with nice shiny effects too. And it'll be fast.

Enhanced battle system

-Every class has their own special battle system; you will explore new strategies and tricks to use your character to its max abilities.

Wooooo. So you're telling me that there's DIVERSITY in this game? Who would have thought. Then again, i wouldn't be surprised if this game had only 3 classes.

Players can get thousands of different kinds of crafting materials from almost anything they do, kill Monsters, questing, gathering etc and able to craft different types of equipments at special NPCs. Players can produce everything for the game economy and use formulas to select bonus attributes according to their character’s class, which there are endless different results.

Here's another thing that i truely hate. I don't seriously know why every producer thinks we LIKE hoarding every little useless piece of string we find thinking that we might need it at a later time. I sure don't. That "thousands" translates only into "you better get a large inventory son".

Use materials to craft your own transformation scrolls，you can transform to any monster in the game! And there is no “the best form”, only the better!

"Only the better"? Rock/scissors/paper, you mean? Cooooooool. Not. There goes the attachment to your class if everyone can transform into a fucking mob. And it'll make PK feel more like PVE too.

Some of players’ actions can influence the game world’s history. Player’s heroic actions will be recorded down in history books of the world. Real world's 1 minute equals 4 minutes in world of secret Online. The ratio is 1 to 4. According to difference date, they are different festival & special quests. Ex: Every January and June in Secret Calendar will hold Mountain God worship events at Stream village; Every February and March in Secret Calendar, will hold festivals at Norfolk.) Also, the first time player’s character is created on the server will be recognized as character’s birthday. There will be special rewards given at each birthday.

The birthday part is interesting, i'll give it that. The rest is nothing new. The "history book" thing is just an attempt to log events someone does and integrate it into the lore.

River of history cannot be stopped, which shall always move forward

'the fuck? Get better translators, you chinese pieces of shit.

Infinite Randomly generated quests for our quest lovers!

Yeeey! Another thing i hate: quests without a story. Quests without a plot, quests without a real reason. Quests without a soul. wants you to go to and kill for . Do this and he will reward you and possibly . And they call them "quests". Let's get something clear, ok? Stop calling these things QUESTS. Call them CHORES because that's what they are.

Secret Online has a market economy system that’s similar to real life economies. Most of the prices of its items can go up-and-down in relation to supply and demand. The prices that gamers see in different stores are only prices of these stores, not universal. To better emulate the real market system, Secret Online’s dynamic economy is fluid, meaning that item prices fluctuate from store to store and even from day to day based on supply.

Such big words for just some dynamic store prices. FYI, MMORPG economy will always mimic real life economy. Player-made economy, that is. Only thing is that in this game, the items which are needed by many players will be EXPENSIVE AS SHIT unless the server's mostly empty.

Different zones in Secret Online are connected together without needing to load every time entering a new zone. Every zone has its own different background story. Don’t be fooled by their beauties, when danger is always just around the corner. Be on your constant guard bla bla bla bla bla bla

This is both new and interesting. (get the sarcasm?)

Secret Online has it’s own unique Newspaper system; everyday the system will integrate any events or news created by players into a newspaper! There is also information sections that players can post advertisements, seek friends, seek marriage and more!

"TOP NEWS! Legolass2k has killed the Hairy Goblin of Big Dark Swamp while being ganked by Gimlypwnzor!" And as if real life wasn't bad enough, we now have matrimonial services in MMOs. Jesus.

Unique Instance Dungeon

Uh-oh. Here it comes: the exciting new features of the new "unique" instance dungeons.

Fun and challenging Instance Dungeons

Propaganda!? I expected something more unique-ish than "iz unique because iz nice".

It’s not just about killing monsters

This is both new and interesting. Somehow, i think it's just propaganda again. They probably meant "iz not about kill monster, iz about explore and look at pretty sight too".

It belongs to you and your friends

How romantic and intimate! You can be fucking sure that we'll be holding hands while we eviscerate goblins and shit. Seriously, this makes me laugh... treating an in-game location as something intimate isn't something a sane man would do. Then again, they're chinese, and they're up there with the japanese in the "weird shit" category.

"Secrets Online" is a new 3D MMORPG building upon the rich and vast history of ancient hegemonic China.

Drawn from the timeless dispute between the evil dynasty of the Yellow Emperor, Shen Mo, and the heroic Chiyou, our story shows the people rising to battle ancient demons and devils, as the powers of heaven and hell clash. bla bla bla

Oh boy. Another MMO focusing on the rough and forgotten history of emperor Chu Hors Wang and his empress Mi Sutcha Ho of the Yu Fat Fok dynasty which has briefly existed a bajillion years ago during the year of the Farting Dragon, on the third moon of the shintzu era. Or something. In other words, a long boring filler story that no one will give a shit about since it only focuses on the mighty whatshisface's family affairs or somesuch.

Alright, i'll stop here. And i promise that this is the last time i'll pick on cheap pieces of chinese shit. I think.

EDIT: oh, and here's some concept art too.

Boredom: Neverwinter Nights 2

I should have taken up NWN2 a lot of time ago, but that didn't happen since i was saving the game for my "escape" route: when boredom becomes too bad, turn back to the only game (or so i thought) that could present any more interest for me: a D&D game.
I'm going to be brief, since Devil already made a (brief) review for it in the first gaming post of this blog.
Basically, it was a disappointment. I started the game hoping to try my all-favourite D&D class (sorcerer). Alright, so they took Time Stop, my favourite spell, from the game. So they nerfed the sorc class to kingdom come for "balance" reasons while buffing the wizard class a whole lot. Who cares... it's still sorc, right? Well...
Apart from being full of glitches, the game is outright... boring. I stood the usual 3+ hours at the character creation screen only to be met with crappy animations, bad voice-acting, same casting incantations as the old NWN1, crappy character control (even though it was customizable), all those useless items and professions that you hoped would just go away in the second of NWN's expansions (talking about craft alchemy, weapon and all that nonsense... basically just "please hoard lots of junk") and the all-new party system which is as stupid as it gets. Want to control your character while letting the others' AIs do their job? Well i hope your character isn't a spellcaster since you'll almost always step in front of your party making you the first char that every mob you see, attacks. I even had the stupid situations of running around with 2 mobs on my tail while the stupid dwarf tank was taking his time killing the third. Obviously, stopping to cast would mean half of my hit points go bye-bye. Which is the reason i took invisibility as fast as i got it... making the game even more boring as i had to cast it before and after every fight. Joy.
Then there's the melee-to-spell ratio which is awfully fucked up, at least at the lower levels: my magic missle can do a whopping 5 damage, while the stupid dwarf with the stupid sword scores regular 21-damage hits. I need to get into almost melee range to cast color spray, i am weak and useless in melee, while the stupid dwarf can tank 3 enemies with no fucking problems whatsoever. Not to mention that he tends to score 1hitkills on all of them before i'm done casting my crappy missle (yes, all of them... great cleave and all that).
The story has potential, but it's kinda ruined by the stupid voice-acting (meh, not like NWN1 was any better) and the dumb, dumb AI of your team-mates which kinda likes to lag a lot.
All in all, i'm going to give this game one final try and then move on. The Witcher, perhaps? Or maybe Thief 3... wow, that sounds boring when i even think about it.

Gaming Masterpieces: Half-life

Half-life. The name should be enough to spark a certain feeling in your mind. If it isn't, then you are not a gamer. Half-life: you should know it without me telling you that it's one of the better first-person shooters that has ever hit the market.
Whenever i think of Half-life, i can't really think of anything that was bad about it, or that i didn't like about it. Not to say that the game didn't have SOME flaws, just that everything it stands for tends to dim that to the point that they're not recognisable anymore.
At first glance, Half-life was just a normal FPS with some guy who shoots aliens and soldiers. But there's something about it... something in the way it's done that says "you're here" in a way that no other shooter can, because it heavily exploits the features based on human emotions: the feeling and setting. Until now, no other game has managed to get me so intrigued in the exploration of a top-secret science facility which destroys itself as you go deeper and deeper down its dark corridors. The feeling is amplified by the way the story is told, i.e. only through the eyes of the main character, which is given a name but not a face: Gordon Freeman. You know how he looks like through the loading screen and the game box's cover, but there is a lack of mirrors or mirror-like surfaces in this game, and we never see the game from any point of view other than Freeman's eyes. There are no cutscenes, and the intro and outro consist of trips seen in real-time through Freeman's eyes. This gives the game a measure of integration, in that you become Freeman, and whatever happens to him has a greater impact upon you than when, say, the guy in Quake died or something. Even though people talk to you, Freeman never says a word, which in Half-life 2 is exploited further by making people feel uncomfortable when they, for example, make a joke and you don't laugh.
The thing that sets you apart from the local NPCs and also the thing that tries to explain why you are able to kill 43753874 monsters without dying (if you've read my Crysis review, you'd know i consider that kind of explanation something that every FPS should have) is the HEV suit, an enviroment suit which protects you from damage received (i.e. your "armor") and offers you an interface with which you can monitor your health, ammo and so forth. You take it for experimental purposes, and you end up keeping it.
Marked with a degree of guilt from the fact that it was you who started the alien invasion of the Black Mesa Research Facility (you are lead through a series of events at the start in which you need to push a crystal inside a beam, starting a "resonance cascade" which rips apart the fabrics of dimension and invites aliens into our world), you are encouraged to explore, survive and fight your way through many diverse, interesting and challenging levels. The story also deviates, special ops marines start to appear and contrary to the belief that they're there to rescue you, start shooting everyone, including the scientists. You are taken prisoner and left to die, you escape and have to fight your way to the facility's Lambda Complex in which the scientists are devising a solution for the current situation. There are no objectives, the game doesn't feature much interface other than your normal suit's health, ammo, armor, light gauges and weapon icons, this is only what the scientists you find along the way tell you. At the Lambda Complex, you are teleported to an alien world called Xen, on which you will eventually finish the game, by killing a huge ugly... thing. This is the point when you are faced with another of the game's original elements: the G-man. The game is made to make you think that this man is always following and observing you, always appearing on a ledge, platform or level which you cannot reach (and usually cannot shoot), and as soon as you look at him, he casually and enigmatically strolls off. G-man stands for government man, because of the fact that he wears an office suit and always carries a briefcase with him. He finally faces you at the end, when you can see that he is indeed powerful, as you are without weapons and cannot do anything to harm him. He talks to you and congratulates you, saying that certain... people (although the term "people" is not used) have taken interest in your abilities, and offers you "further employment". Meanwhile, you and him are teleported through several alien scenes, ending with the tram that you rode in the intro, but that now seems to be flying through space. At the end, you can accept the G-man's proposal and exit the tram (the door opens and a teleporter light appears), or wait until the door closes, at which point you will be teleported in front of a huge army of aliens, the screen will darken and Freeman will be presumed dead. Note that Half-life 2 is designed with the first ending in mind.
Going back to the feeling, i mentioned that this game has no cutscenes. That would usually make a game dull and boring, but Half-life succeedes to become an exception to this through its wide use of scripted events. Laboratory equipment that explodes in your face, trams that explode with you in them halfway to your destination point, taking you somewhere else entirely, ambushes set up by the millitary, alien monsters knocking doors apart, all of these take the place of cutscenes, and all of them are happening in real-time, with you having not just a front-row seat, but a role in them as well. The puzzles are easy enough to not be an inconvenience and hard enough to matter. All in all, Half-life is one of the games that shouldn't be missing from a gamer's repertoire.
Following the great success of Half-life, 2 expansion packs were released: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. The former takes place through the eyes of a millitary soldier named Adrian Shepard, which appears to talk (by how the drill instructor is talking to you in boot camp), but we can't really hear what he's saying. The one thing Shepard and Freeman have in common is that they're followed around by the same man in an office suit. The ending of Opposing Force takes you face-to-face with the G-man again, and you can now see the full conclusion of the Black Mesa incident: the whole facility is nuked and wiped from the face of the world. After which, the G-man takes you into custody again. Shepard has yet to make an appearance in any of the Half-life sequels.
Blue Shift is a short expansion featuring the lab security guard Barney Calhoun, and is the only one of the Half-Life games featuring a happy ending. Barney never goes to Xen and never uses alien weapons, but sets things in motion for Half-life's sequel (such as the teleporting sequence), eventually escaping Black Mesa with a group of scientists.
The expansions didn't have the same success that Half-life originally did, but are considered worthy descendants nonetheless.
In conclusion, as long as i remain a gamer, Half-life will always have a special place in my heart as an example for how future games should be. A masterpiece in itself.

Unreal Tournament 3

Once upon a time there was a nifty little game called Quake 2 with a nifty little map called The Edge. Its single-player campaign was good enough, but what made the game REALLY sweet was this single map played on multiplayer deathmatch mode. Producers took note of it and adopted the ever-profitable marketing strategy of "hey, let's milk the cow!". This is how Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament were born, and soon became unstoppable engines of fandom and finger-cramps for the thousands of insane gamers everywhere. The former had a rather short carreer (featuring only one expansion) before returning to the mode that made it popular (aka single-player), but the former, which also featured a different name (adding "Tournament" meant they could make sequels to it AND the original game without them overlapping) flourished and produced many (more or less retarded) offspring: Starting with Unreal Tournament 1 (which we will call "Unreal Tournament" from now on because i'm too lazy to add the 1), then Unreal Tournament 2003, 2004, and then jumping 2001 sequels down to 3.
You'd think giving it a more distinguishable name than Unreal Tournament 2007 would mean that it attempts to bring something entirely new and different to the scene, but other than "the usual", there doesnt' really seem to be something entirely GAME-BREAKING about it.
Let me elaborate on that. The game starts with an annoying "please insert username/password for online play" prompt instead of the normal main menu. I didn't really want to experience online play right now so i just clicked "play offline". Once you get into the main menu, you find that it has been drastically cut down. The plethora of multiple options in UT is no longer here, and it pains me like a piece of paper stuck in my ass to find that the options menu was toned down like this. No more UI color/icon customisation, for one. The game just chooses for you based on the team you're on, and i still can't stop myself from wondering why they would make the game more retarded like this. It just doesn't make sense. And while i'm at it, i also noted that there is no option for disabling the stupid jump-strafe that occurs when you press the same movement key twice in a row. I never liked that option, in fact i hated it with a passion since it hindered my playstyle, so thumbs down for the idiot who considered that it should be always enabled.
Moving past the bastardized options screen, the game still has a single-player campaign which can be played and hopefully completed. Hopefully, because after working to progress in this game for half a day, after taking a break i found that the game didn't save my progress at all when i got back to it. So it was either start the game anew and try to finish it in less than a day, or "fuck you, UT3". I chose the latter. Still, i feel like i got enough out of the campaign to form an oppinion, which is: don't play it unless you team up with a few friends and finish the campaign in online-mode. Seriously, the AI in this game is so idiotic that you shouldn't even bother. Your team-mates might do well in team deathmatch mode, but when made to do more complex actions (such as think instead of shoot), they become some of the worst liabilities this side of the Second World War. So stupid in fact that in a certain mission i actually competed against THEM for who gets the base-capturing powerup first, since if they got it, they would go kamikaze on the other team with it and die, leaving the powerup lying helplessly on the ground where it would eventually blow up. The game would have been easier if i could tell them what to do like in the former Unreal Tournaments, but the producers decided to follow the bastardizing habit and tone THIS down too. The command menu is now limited to about 5 orders that you can't even direct to one teammember at a time. And even with those, i didn't notice any bloody difference either. The idiots were STILL getting themselves killed, still taking their sweet time to defend a point that didn't need defending and still jamming our Leviathan in narrow pathways, while the enemy was coming in an endless line of endlessly respawning endless ugly alien zerg. Endless.
I guess i could bash the AI some more, but i'll move on and talk about the graphics instead. The game is as gorgeous as it is shiny, and features some of the most impressive sights i've ever seen in a game. It's no Crysis, but the grapihcs tend to concentrate more on fantasy than realism so who cares. Still, all the shaders and stuff make the background blend in with the characters to some extent, and it's pretty difficult to see them with an untrained eye, while the AI with its telescopic X-ray vision can see you from the other corner of the map through a fly-sized hole.
The difficulty has also been tuned up, as i could previously easily attain the rank of "unstoppable" or even "godlike" while playing with bots at the "skilled" level, right now i can't even maintain a killing spree for 5 seconds without getting my brain splattered by some precisely-aimed expertly-timed Shock Rifle combo. This is made even more difficult by the (seemingly) lack of health items on the map. And speaking of maps, i really wanted at least some re-makes of the old maps that made Unreal Tournament what it is today, and i was pretty disappointed when i found nothing like them. I guess constantly re-making old maps is a 2-sided coin for the producers, but they could have at least re-made Morpheus... that was my favorite, damnit.
As for the gameplay, well the Assault mode is gone (and the nice, sophisticated maps are gone with it) and the power struggle mode is now replaced by "Warfare", which is basically the same (build and control key points to make a link to the enemy base, rendering it vulnerable) but with one major element thrown in: orbs. An orb is the powerup i mentioned earlier, it spawns at your base (you get a new one everytime the old one is gone) or at the last key point you control that features an orb respawner, you get it like you get a flag, it behaves like a flag(meaning you can't drive vehicles around with it), and it instantly captures (and heals) enemy checkpoints for you, or if you take it to a checkpoint it will make it invulnerable until you go away or it explodes. If you die, it falls on the ground and explodes in 13 seconds (more or less) during which you can pick it up again. If it's an enemy orb, you can "use" it and it will explode, often killing you in the process. Warfare maps usually have vehicles (if not exclusively), and there's a thing about vehicle maps which pisses me off to no end: say you're walking down the street, happy that you just got your hands on a shield belt + rocket launcher combo, when suddenly, SPLAT. You get run over by a Manta, a Goliath cans your ass, or your face gets melted by a hellbender shock-rifle-combo. It's frustrating, and it makes the game outside of a vehicle feel like you're a lone infantryman in Command&Conquer. Dead meat, that is. Killing vehicles is damn hard if you don't have the anti-vehicle gun (called Avril here), and even with that, some vehicles are so heavily armored that you only scratch them. There's also a hoverboard which replaces the translocator in vehicle missions, but if someone so much as touches you while you're on it, you go down rolling (also losing any orb or flag you had).
Story-wise, the game finally tries to incorporate a complex story into the mechanics of a multiplayer arena-type game. Basically, you and your elite (ahem) squad are a bunch of guys who are really pissed off at the world because they got owned by some aliens whose leader is a female human. Because they're so pissed off, they enrolled into the mercenary corps to try to earn some cash and fame. This is where the "oh wait, you're kidding" part starts: apparently there's some new tech in town, and all over the battlefield there's that thar respawners that everyone's been so a-hooked on back in thar Tournament thingy. And cuz the enemy's a-respawnin everywher' you gots ta kill'em till they stop. That don't explain why the battlefield's the size of an arena, why you simply can't walk past certain points but who cares 'bout that detail mumbo-jumbo.
Seriously, with all its flaws and dumbness, this is still Unreal Tournament, the game that has made itself a brand. And whenever you see that brand, you know that you're gonna have some pure quality fun. So take it. Play it. Hell, it's Unreal Tournament.
PS: forgot to mention, Malcom's making an appearance too.