A Challenge

Still ... if i`m thinking about a challenge ... there`s no point in NOT to add a little review here about the most challenging game i ever played : Devil May Cry 3 : Dante`s Awakening - The PC version of course :)

DMC3 can be easily described as a Hack&Slash game, with tons of monsters to kill, some interesting bosses and the occasional puzzles to progress. To put it simple : Dante has to pass through a series of missions ( which are nothing more than levels ). At the end of each mission the player has to face his ranking, the players performance is ranked from D ( lowest ) to S or SS (the biggest). The rank is based on the orbs collected during the mission, the red orbs (currency used to buy items or to increase weapon/attack levels ), the time taken to finish the mission, the damage taken and the items used and stylish points. The stylish points are gained during combat by performing a series of unfuckingbroken combos on the nearby enemies. This is where the cool part starts ... thought it`s an action game and Dante has to be pretty aggressive to get from point A to point B .. you must have at least one tactic when fighting ... because not all the enemies will fight the same and surely you can`t expect to finish a level using the same attack. When attacking a stylish meter will appear on the screen, if you want it to grow from Dope to "SSStylish" you`ll have to keep attacking the enemies without taking any damage whatsoever and without repeating the same combo :)
But that was all about the fighting ... After defeating a boss Dante usually gets a new weapon, during the missions Dante may carry two meele weapons and 2 pairs of a ranged type of weapon .. guns to be exact :D. Besides the nice variety of weapons Dante can also choose a fighting style, because i`m way to lazy to type all the shit about the styles here`s a nice quote : Style selection is available at the start of each level, as well as during gameplay at checkpoints. The styles available are: Trickster, for dodging and agility; Swordmaster, with extra abilities for swords and other melee weapons; Gunslinger, which has more techniques for firearms; Royal Guard, which allows the player to repel attacks with a properly-timed button press, and thereby charge energy for retaliation; Quicksilver, which slows down enemies while the character attacks at normal speed; Doppelgänger, creates a shadow double that fights alongside Dante. I personally liked the Swordmaster style, pure hack & slash and a lot of nice effects and style points ;)

I guess this is all just bullshit, bullshit which can be applied to any other hack&slash action game. Devil May Cry had something special (besides the fact that it is the special edition playable on PC ), the more you play, the harder it gets. For example to unlock the HARD difficulty level you had to finish the game (storyline) in the with the "normal" difficulty, and because of the nice variety of weapons,levels and styles ... the game actually becomes replayable. The harder it gets, the stronger my will to play it. When it comes to DMC try not to underestimate the meaning of the word HARD: if at the normal level you encountered dumbass blue projectiles then you can bet you sweet keyboard that at the ultimate "Dante must die" difficulty level that monster will launch those projectiles (which are now homing or i think they are homing - i didn`t really get to watch them closely since every time i had to fight the EMOs shooting them you can be sure that the other mobs nearby had my full attention) a lot faster. Since the game offers a slight chance of boredom DMC has a nice "Bloody Palace" for all those mob killing action loving gamers :D. The Bloody Palace is actually a medium sized arena where mobs just keep spawning at 3 varieties of difficulty leves, as the player desires , but still hard. It`s really hard to get bored of Devil May Cry, even the game`s soundtracks can make you wanna kill something . Also if you finish the game at harder difficulties, besides the bonus features which will be unlocked, at some point you get to play with the evil character in the game, Vergil, Dante`s twin brother. Unlike Dante who kills for fun apparently, Vergil only seeks power, the power of Sparda. Here`s a little history lesson about devils going good: Sparda apparently was a demon who turned against his own kind for the sake of the emo world, sealing the demon world, but by doing so he sealed his mofo demon powers too, thus .. turning into Jesus. 2 more characters appear in this game, it seems that Dante and Vergil aren`t the only two members from a family here, for the first time appearing in the Devil May Cry series Lady also gets sucked into the story, a bit too much even, as Dante has to fight her at some point, Lady trying to be a BOSS ... trying indeed and also Lady`s dad appears giving Dante an unfriendly "invite". While Lady only appears only in some cinematics, Arkham, Lady`s dad tries to get the power of Sparda thinking he`ll turn into Christ or something and also turns Dante, Vergil and Lady against each other. Though as a nutjob he`s pretty tough, appearing a few times as a clown and fights Dante a few times and also appearing as and end game boss as the BLOB, a testicular like boss who, after taking some nice damage, turns into a few dozen sperm like leeches draining Dante`s health. I guess that it`s good to mention stuff like : against the blob Dante and Vergil fight together ... hard to control both at the same time but hey ... they`re brothers :D

DMC leaves me speechless, just thinking about it makes me wanna play it, so .. to end this : combining great action with a nice story about a cool devil somehow growing up you get Devil May Cry 3 : Dante`s Awakening.

Gaming History: Deus Ex 2

Ah, at last, i get to play the sequel to one of the games which marked my life as a gamer. Obviously, i was waiting for this since the game appeared, dreaming of the days when i was going to grab my sniper rifle and once again wage war on power-hungry beauraucrats with a taste for world domination. What i got was...
Well, it's pretty hard to describe, but i'll try to make a comparison: what do you get when you eat a really tasty, creamy cake, so tasty and unimaginately delicious that you order another slice, and just as you're happily munching the first bits of it, you realise that the second slice is full of SHIT? You get Deus Ex 2.
Honestly, this game is so retardedly different and simplified from the first, that it left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that i felt like vomiting over the first few hours. Remember how you used to memorize door codes? Not anymore. Inventory management? Not anymore. Every item occupies one slot now, so a nice small can of soda weighs and has the same size as a rocket launcher. Skills? Nonexistant. IFF? Comlink? No mention of them. They're still there, but they don't show up in your augmentations list (which are now called Nanomods). Notes window? Not anymore. HP related to specific bodyparts? Hell no, you now have 1 HP bar (which doesn't even show numbers, or even a percent) and 1 "mana" bar (the old energy bar, but bastardized now so that each energy item you get recharges it to full). More than one type of ammo!? GOD FORBID! There is only one type of ammunition in the whole game. The only difference is that some guns take more ammo to shoot. Lockpicks? Hell no! Multitools can open doors now, so your retarded console-gaming mind doesn't have to grasp the complexity of carrying 2 security-bypass objects at once. A log window? What's that? Needing a medbot to install augs? Pfft, that's old school.
And many, many more... it's hard to describe how i felt when i saw this weak attempt at a game before my eyes, beaten down, bludgeoned, mutilated, sawed-off, ripped apart, teared to pieces, hacked open and trimmed to a dim, retarded shell of its former self. It felt like Thor's hammer suddenly dropped at maximum velocity down on my balls. Not even the music managed to get me, aside from a few songs played in bars by some chick, the soundtrack didn't stand out one bit. Where was that corporate tune, those songs that made you feel like you were an agent of the state, strolling through office buildings in some hi-tech world... gone. All gone. The game went down before my eyes like the Titanic, so much that i was ashamed to even play it. But i did... and i finished it, gathering what little respect i had left for the first title in the series. It felt shallow... i wasn't "there", i felt like some prick shooting his way through tight corridors without having any idea what the hell's going on. I mean, the game doesn't even tell you... you're dropped off at some facility, with some doctors and shit, and stuff starts blowing up in your face as some guys in hoods infiltrate it and manage to get past the ARMORED guards with the greatest of ease. Then people start suddenly acting like you were the one, and somehow you were really, really special. At least they don't ask you to save the world, though i kinda wonder why.
I'll admit, once i got past the first few hours of the game, it started to suck a bit less. Either i got used to it and stopped giving it the title "deus ex" and playing it like i'd play some other retarded shooter (focusing on the gameplay elements that ARE there more than on the ones that aren't), or the developers started to suck a bit less at level design, i don't know. It's possible that i also became a little more retarded due to my brain not being able to take all the virtual kicks to the balls. Meh, whatever... the game still has dialogue, though you never get too attached to any character (like you did in deus ex 1 with paul, for instance, or even Alex Jacobson and the crew at UNATCO), not even JC Denton himself, which appears in the game like some enlightened AI consciousness merged with human mind, capable of freezing entire oceans but unable to stop a bullet coming his way. What's "new" about the sequel is that you're not forced into doing what other people tell you now, you are given a set of objectives from different factions which often collide with eachother, so you have to choose who to piss off and whose ass to kiss. The beginning major factions are either the WTO (don't ask me what it stands for) or the Order (order of what? beats me), and you have to do stuff for them throughout 80% of the game. Now choosing a side is like choosing between a giant douche and a turd sandwitch: one seeks financial domination and optimisation of the world (no matter how many people they step on by doing it), the others are a bunch of mumbo-jumbo tree-huggers who want me to get in touch with my "spiritual self". Right. Moving along, the game still tries to integrate stealth into what seems like an action shooter, and make it a bit more dynamic by adding canisters (nanomods) that give you certain abilities once installed, most of which are taken from the first game, but with some new ones like emp damage on melee attacks, or even first-person control of enemy bots. You now need to choose between 3 nanomods in each slot, the slots being considerably fewer. Concerning this: WHY IN THE NAME OF FUCK CAN'T I GET BOTH REGENERATION AND OPTICAL ENHANCEMENT AT THE SAME TIME!? These were my 2 most favorite augs back in the first game, and now i have to choose between them. Gah.
So to close this, if you like first-person shooters with a tint of stealth, and (most importantly) have never played deus ex before, give this game a try. Then go play deus ex 1, just to raise your standards. If you have played deus ex 1, then don't bother.

Crysis

Crysis. That name should say so much.... anxiety, disappointment, fascination, disgust, and so on and so forth. You all know it, and if you don't, suffice to say it is one of the most controversial games of the year 2007 and 2008. And at the same time, THE most graphically advanced game ever made. A review to it is pretty much beating a dead horse, since i don't think there's a magazine on the planet which hasn't reviewed this thing. But at the same time, not reviewing it would be like saying Doom never existed. So here's my review to probably the most anticipated game of 2007.
I said before that i got a brand new pc, and it didn't let me down when i tried to run crysis on it: basically, 64bit, vista, directx10, all settings to very high, 30 fps. Playing the game like this got me a pretty nice experience with the game, so apart for a few words at the beginning, i'll try to review this thing without saying a single word about the graphics. Now, to get them out of the way:
This game is absolutely STUNNING, the graphics often causing you to stop and just STARE at the thing for like 2 minutes before moving on. They really make you forget about the game entirely and just see it like the closest thing to a CG movie you've ever seen. I swear, not even Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (cg movie if you never seen it) looked THIS good. Incredible. Wow.

AHEM. Now that that's out of the way, let's get on with the real review. The story is pretty thin and nothing spectacular, predictable, but not so shallow. Not shallow because it at least manages to explain why you end up being the single person who kills 2394287423458 korean troops single-handedly (something that few FPS games actually care to explain, it's usually because you rock so much or something like that). Basically, there's a new thing in town, and it's called the nano-suit. This prototype nanotech exoskeleton is the one you and your squad will wear during an operation in one of the (unknown) islands in the... i forgot what ocean it was. The operation involves saving some researchers from the mean korean army guys who now have control of that island. But of course, something goes wrong. Your squad starts to get horribly butchered as your team-mates get killed and/or kidnapped by some huge weird alien ship things, and in the end there's only you and your fellow scottish nanosuit-wearing bloke who happens to have better luck than the others and not get himself killed, or disappear. Meanwhile, you fight half of the korean armada. Fun!
Of course, that's only until about halfway through the game, when you accidentally stumble upon an alien spaceship (or whatever it was, seemed more like a base to me) buried deep within the mountain, which was awakened by the idiot archeologists and the koreans who were poking their noses where they shouldn't have. From this point on, bye-bye koreans, hello aliens. The spaceship itself is a brief encounter (about one level), you get thrown out of it pretty fast, then the fun begins. Basically, that's where the game turns from tactical, headshot-filled shooter to "give'em all you got and then some" as you can't possibly headshot the aliens' ships.
But i'm getting ahead of myself. Your suit is a flexible thing, having several "modes" you can switch between (sharing its regenerative energy between each of them) such as having your suit's energy act as armor, battery for a cloaking device (i.e. you can turn invisible, predator-like), increased strength or speed. This basically gives you several options to go through the game with, as the increased strength function makes it easy to kill enemies in melee and jump about 3 times as high, the cloak function makes getting near enemies or getting to better positions easier, and if it's too hard for you, you can always switch to speed and run through them. Switching to another mode is instant and doesn't cost anything, but uses the same energy, so your cloak will be pretty short if you're low. Normally, energy recharges pretty fast (unless it's draining), and the suit also recharges your health, meaning the game has no ways to restore hp other than the natural way. Weapons are also customisable, supporting many enhancements such as a grenade launcher or various types of scopes. You can also carry only 2 weapons besides the pistol, the rocket launcher and grenades (and another special weapon in the last level). Those weapons are conventional, such as assault rifles, shotguns, SMGs, a minigun, and there's an alien weapon in the later levels with unlimited ammo. What i liked about this game was the diverse ways you can finish it: for instance, i can skip about half of the first level by swimming (although that doesn't really happen later on) and just killing the guys in the boats (which may also be harder than killing the enemies, since the boats have miniguns attached). You can enter any vehicle and drive it, there's even a tank level later on which i really hated (i mean, i'm supposed to kill 10 tanks with one which is exactly as good as they are). Most buildings are destroyable, the physics in the game behaving very life-like (especially if you're running with the settings on very high), making you want to throw another grenade inside a house just to see how it blows up again. You have a map and a radar (you can use the binoculars to "tag" the enemies so they appear on it), the primary objectives being a green dot, secondary are yellow dots. All in all, great liberty in playing it, basically no matter how much you play it, you'll never do everything exactly the same thanks to the wonderful physics and the many ways you can kill your enemies. Now what i didn't like about the game was that those damn koreans need about half of my cartridge to die if i don't get a headshot in... which isn't very realistic since that's about the same amount of bullets I need to die, and i'm the one wearing the fucking exoskeleton. So the enemies die painfully slow if you don't headshot them... that isn't SO bad, until you find the koreans wearing nanosuits (yes, you'll find those too). Those motherfuckers are so freakin' hard to kill that after i wasted my entire minigun clip on them, i just quit and punched them to death with maximum strength (for some reason, they're awfully slow). At least the aliens aren't so hard... you know you're gonna need about half a clip, or even a full clip to kill them (i found it awfully easy to miss in this game), but at least you don't get pissed when you missed the headshot. So the game is basically headshot hunt until the alien level (yes, you do have a sniper rifle, but there's about 3 times as many enemies as bullets for it). Still, a well-placed grenade will usually give you a measure of satisfaction... sometimes. Oh, and another thing - how come a guy with a fucking machinegun emplacement can shoot and HIT me from a mile away? Aren't those things supposed to be inaccurate from that distance? I can say the same for the enemies, who must have went to Legolas's School of Heavenly Sharpshooting or something, since whenever they see you, they start firing those assault rifles in burst mode and ALWAYS hit no matter what distance there is between you and them. Gets frustrating after a while, but if you do it right, you probably shouldn't get hit at all.
So, to sum it up: good gameplay, great physics (occasional bug here and there, but that can't be helped i guess), average storyline (major cliffhanger at the end, has potential for the second game of the intended trilogy). Not the best game, once you take out the graphics. But even so, it's a game to be played, even if only for the freedom given by the modes you can choose from. Add the graphics and it becomes a must-have. Almost.
Multiplayer's already hot and running, and has promise. Won't beat counter-strike, but i find it a lot better than Halo's, for instance. Good game, all in all. A must-play if you're a gamer, since it's a staple of next generation hardware.
Until next time, i bid you farewell.