After being told by everyone with enough functioning braincells to facilitate speech that "Call of Duty 4 was totally different and better then all the other games. You'll like that one." for the past eighty years, I decided to finally sit down and give it a try. Let's start with the Singleplayer review, as I feel Singleplayer should be the part of the game where developers put most of the work, if they intend to include a Singleplayer campaign.
It's bloody stupid. There, you can ex out of this review and go do something else now.
...Alright, fine, I'll tell you why it's stupid. In short, the answer is "For the same reasons every other Call of Duty game ever made except the first are also all stupid". In long, it's:
My first complaint is that, like every game anyone has ever made, the grenades have the explosive power of a warm cup of tea. I decided to count how many steps away from one you have to take to be safe, and the answer is "Eight". All of the explosive weapons in this game are completely useless, and I never use them with the exception of the automatic grenade launcher in the helicopter. The only thing they're good for is the AI spamming them at you as if you're the only valid grenade target in the game.
My second complaint is that the AI makes me want to pull my balls out through my eyes. My SAS squademates will run into a room and shout "Clear", which I take to mean "I have checked this entire room and it is now free of enemies" when it really means "There's a guy standing right next to me just outside of my cone of vision waiting to turn your balls into strawberry jelly the moment you step through the door". Besides that is the fact that the enemy AI seems to be precognizant; Every time they run around a corner and I'm there, they start shooting literally the instant they've turned that corner. They spend zero time searching before they spot me, zero time trying to make sure I'm not one of their allies, and zero time doing anything but murdering me before I can even aim at them.
My third complaint is that the silencers sound like The Iron Giant having sex with Bender from Futurama.
My fourth complaint is that it feels like you're always on a very slow moving conveyor belt in a perfectly straight line. If you lag behind too much (Because you like the sniper nest you're in, for example) the game stubbornly refuses to spawn any more enemies until you take two more steps forwards and fall off of your position. It's like the game was designed by an oversensitive drag queen who throws a tantrum and denies you sex every time you turn down their offer to go to their bi-weekly party for the fourth time in a row because you've got shit to do.
My fifth complaint is that there is literally never more then one way to tackle any objective. Yes, I know the path deviates mildly in one or two places, but it's just another straight line leading back to the larger primary straight line. All you can do is run face first into the infinite hoards of constantly respawning enemies.
My sixth complaint is that none of the AI snipers are even remotely as good at sniping as me, and I'm not even a very good sniper. I can shoot five people before they can take out one.
My seventh complaint is that the story is "Meh". A lot of times I didn't feel motivated at all to do any of the objectives I was given, especially later in the game when the nuclear missiles you were supposed to be rushing in to stop launch and then the man in your earpeace goes "Oh, don't worry, we'll just get the abort codes from the Russians!" Are you fucking kidding me? You had us literally invade a foreign country to stop one nuclear silo from launching two missiles (With twelve warheads) when you could have just asked the Russians nicely and they'd have given you the codes?
My eighth complaint is that most of the environments are very underwhelming, with a few exceptions, namely: Pripyat, because it reminded me of STALKER, which is a much much better game assuming you have a mod to fix the awful weapons. The boarder area around Pripyat when you're sneaking in: Because it was dark and foreboding and generally rather nice. Anything else relating to Pripyat that I missed.
My ninth complaint is that the game just got monotonous after a while. People dressed all scary-like run out of doorways yelling at you, you shoot them. Repeat for about nine million iterations. This was broken up nicely by short stealth segments, but there were very few of them and they were more just interactive cutscenes where you watch your squad leader do everything.
My tenth complaint is that I shot the major bad guy square in the chest with a .50 Caliber sniper rifle, and he survived when his body should have been literally cut in two.
My eleventh complaint is that the coolest part of the game, where you get to use the .50 Caliber sniper with cool bullet physics, lasts for literally a few seconds and only happens once that I know of in the game. To be fair, I haven't gotten past the part where you're taking the nuclear missile silo back yet, but I doubt it's going to happen again near the end of the game for some random reason.
My twelfth complaint is that the SAS acted nothing like the real SAS would. They repeatedly jeopardize their mission to save civilians who are entirely useless to them, which just isn't realistic.
Alright, so, that's the Singleplayer, but what about the Multiplayer? ...Well, it pains me to say this, but it's actually pretty good. I do have some complaints about it though:
The class customization has way too few guns, and a laughably tiny amount of attachments.
All of the gameplay flaws (Like teacups for grenades) are still present, and cannot be changed with Hardcore mode.
The shotguns are a bad joke. You have to be standing almost close enough to knife someone to use one... Which is also present in the singleplayer, and I'm not sure why I didn't mention it. They're literally even more useless then the explosives.
Buildings made of quarter inch plywood can apparently repel carpet bombing.
THE END. Now go do something useful, like playing STALKER.
Go Yiff in Hell.
2014-02-15
2014-02-13
Yiff in Hell 10: "I'm skeptical about..."
You know what I just love? When someone puts so little thought into their own philosophy that they go around making enemies of people that don't even really disagree with them, like a bunch of Crusaders with anxiety issues afraid that someone might figure out the last pope was secretly The Emperor with a slightly less obvious wardrobe.
I'm cunting about Christians again, specifically the ones that seem to get off by disagreeing with scientists like they get off by watching videos of the US Military shooting brown people in whatever nondescript pile of sand and religious zealots ending in "Istan" we're invading this week.
I mean honestly, it's gotten to the point where whenever I hear someone say "I'm skeptical about The Big Bang/Evolution/Anything else a TV preacher tells me is bad" I immediately make three assumptions about this person:
- This person is religious.
- This person doesn't actually know what they're disagreeing with.
- This person is not a scientist.
I know it's not smart to go around making assumptions about people, but I really can't help it. It's like listening to someone say "I'm planning a trip to Roswell New Mexico" and not immediately assuming that they're a UFO worshiping fuckhead with anal play fantasies that would make that one gay friend you had in highschool ashamed.
Look, I'm an atheist, and I've got a bone to pick with religion, but even I can admit this: Neither The Big Bang or Evolution go anywhere towards disproving the existence of a god (Not that "Because you can't prove it's not real" is a reason to believe in something)... They just don't talk about one.
"How do you know The Big Bang wasn't how God created the universe?" I'll ask people, only to get blank stares like I just started speaking Yiddish and turned black in a pub full of Neo-Nazis and people who voted for George Bush.
"How do you know Evolution isn't how god created all the animals and species we have around today?" I'll ask them, which often elicits the more telling "Because god said he created the world in seven days" response which means they're a Young Earth Creationist and need to be injected with Agent Orange until their asshole falls off and their skin inverts itself like something from a Clive Barker film.
Just because a theory doesn't talk about God doesn't mean it's automatically going out of its way to try and smear his name (His followers tend to do a fine enough job of that), it just didn't need to bring Yahweh the big cuddly mass murderer into itself.
Go Yiff in Hell.
Yiff in Hell 09: 2/13/2013
So, I finally decided to get off my aching ass and play Trials in Tainted Space. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's the sequel (Well, in a way) to the well executed (but admittedly repetitive) text-based sex game known as "Corruption of Champions". Those of you who browse E621 will go "Oh, THAT fucking thing". Yes, the very same thing that's been uploaded on E6 about ninety eight fucking times and seems to pop up in every search result for anything you ever look for... Ever.
Admittedly, the absentmindedness of whoever manages the uploading of the game to various pornsites has nothing to do with the quality itself, so I'll quit my bitching and just say this much: If you haven't played Corruption of Champions, you probably should. It's not perfect, but as far as sex games go, it's enjoyable and I still get a kick out of it today. Sometimes it was even fun to explore outside of just the sex aspect, just to see what the various regions of the world had to offer, but never for very long: It was just a sex game with interesting, inventive scenarios.
Enter Trials in Tainted Space, the sequel (In the same way Bioshock is a sequel to System Shock. Spiritual successor might be a better term.) to Corruption of Champions, and it appears the developer is thinking of taking it in an entirely new direction. I've only played the alpha so far, and I'll admit that I haven't played that much of it yet, but here's what I've noticed about it so far:
One thing that's nice to start is that, in the beginning, if you bother to read the story (I did), it's actually kind of interesting. Your father dies from the equivalent of intergalactic AIDS, and decides to hand the family business down to you... But first, you must prove yourself! The idea is that he wants you to go through achieving the same goals he did when he first built the business to prove that you deserve all his wealth, and the game starts out by making several bold promises; The tech class claims you'll end up designing your own turrets later on, there's talk of space-based warfare in some of the character creation screens (One of the skills affects your ability with aiming ship-based weaponry), and the game alludes to your eventually amassing a big enough crew that you'll need a larger and better ship.
Here's what I'm worried about, though: The game mentions weapon modification, and I'm afraid it's going to be a bland upgrade system rather then any real sort of customization. I haven't really seen a lot of games, especially RPGs, address the customization well at all. The idea is always "This weapon is bigger, you kill things faster with it." There was a glimmer of promise in this direction, though, when the game mentioned the various types of damage you can do. What I've noticed so far are: Kinetic attacks (projectile, blunt, sharp) and energy attacks (Blasters and the like), with mind powers hinted towards for the player. Here's what I'd LIKE to see: Rather then a base "Kinetic" type, I'd like to see several sub-types of kinetic attacks. Piercing attacks, blunt attacks, and cutting attacks for example. You could choose to cut with your knife for high damage versus soft unarmored tissue, or stab someone with it to get it to go through armor. You could have hollow point bullets (The kind that expand on contact with a target) that deal a lot of blunt damage and very little piercing, and full metal jacket bullets (High piercing, low blunt). In terms of energy, I'd also like to see different types of energy weapons available: Light-based (Can be reflected off of shiny surfaces, causes a burning effect. A laser, for example.), Gamma radiation based (Passes through nearly anything, but has an affect kind of like poison rather then instant damage), and maybe Microwave based weaponry too. As for the customization, I'd like to see various scopes that provide bonuses for targeting specific body parts or offer more then one shot per turn (Like a 4x magnification scope versus an aimpoint), folding stocks (They could be folded up when in the inventory to take up one less inventory space, and then take a combat turn to unfold, but provide an accuracy bonus when used), and various types of magazines. I'd also love to see various types of magazines come into play, with a chance for the weapon to jam more frequantly with higher-capacity magazines and ammo management becoming a factor in the gameplay.
Now enough frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog having meat jiggled infront of its face (Take that as you will), it's time I got down to talking about what's already in the game.
The sex scenes are very well written and plentiful right off the bat, with your first one coming just a few screens into the game once you're out of character creation. As in CoC, they cater to a wide variety of kinks whether you like them or not, but I like that: The way the writer handles the kinks in this series has turned me on to some things I didn't like before, because they're very good at describing why something is sexy. There's a scene where you're licking the sweat off of a bug, which sounds stomach turning, but it's written extraordinarily sensually: The sweat is described in a very pleasant, tasteful way, and you can't help but love it a little even if it grosses you out a bit.
Despite how well everything is written, this game falls into the same trap as CoC: You either read the mountains of text (And there are mountains), or you read nothing and waddle around like a drugged toddler in a room of Norwegian pedophiles, completely oblivious to everything except the occasional twinge of pain as someone shoves their cock up your ass. That's fine for a sex game when you really don't care about the detail, but I feel like this game is trying to be more then a sex game, and I think it has that potential. What this game needs is the option to look at all that detail if you want to, along with the option to just play it like any other RPG if you're not in the mood to sit down and read The Wheel of Time series in one go. Remember what Star Wars Bounty Hunter did? You could run around the whole game blasting everyone that cocked a brow at you like some kind of pissed off Korean Vanilla Ice, or you could take your time and use your scanner on people to figure out everything from their entire criminal history to how many squares of toilet paper they used in a day.
I really think TiTS (Yes, that's the name.) needs something like that: A simpler more "Gamey" style of play for the casual gamer just looking for a quick romp with blasters and sex, and the more detailed "Zork" style of text-based gameplay for people who like that sort of thing. I hover in the middle: Sometimes I'll read everything that's typed for screens in a row, and sometimes I'll just skip past half of it to get to something more interesting. What would be nice would be, like... A dialogue box at the top of every screen of text that basically sums up everything that screen says.
Another problem, speaking of mountains of text, is that TiTS implements a much needed map system, but it seems kind of incomplete. It's just a bunch of boxes, and if you don't read the dialogue text in the center of your screen, you've really got no idea what's there outside of a few icons that indicate certain types of shops. What I'd really like to see is different sprites for different types of terrain, so you can see a clear change that means you should start paying more attention to the text. For example, the first world changes from a city to a jungle with NO sprite representation... The boxes all look exactly the same, so I found myself wandering out into the jungle by mistake looking for more shop boxes. If the boxes had some kind of visual representation of the terrain type, whether or not the player is reading the text could be a great measure of how observant the character is at the moment: Text boxes might hint towards danger ahead while the terrain looks otherwise normal on the minimap. Sort of like a person just blinding trudging along the jungle versus someone carefully making their way through it and watching out for trouble.
At any rate, I'm actually pretty excited for the next update of the public release of the game, which is more then I can say for most of the AAA titles I hear about these days. Pretty sad when a game with a multi-million dollar budget like Call of Duty Ghosts is less interesting then a comparatively low budget text-game.
Go yiff in Hell.
Edit: I've been informed by the developer that the game already has various types of kinetic attacks. My failure to notice it comes from how little I've played the Alpha so far. I've also been informed tha- Actually, I'll just give you the e-mail.
Ah cool. A few notes:
-It's not a sequel, more of a spiritual successor. The games aren't connected in storyline or universe at all.
-For damage types, we have kinetic (bashing), slashing, piercing, thermal, electric, etc... It's just that most powder guns deal kinetic damage at the moment.
-I plan to add color-shifting to map tiles indicative of their zone. So we're ahead of you on that front, we just haven't gotten to do it yet.
Admittedly, the absentmindedness of whoever manages the uploading of the game to various pornsites has nothing to do with the quality itself, so I'll quit my bitching and just say this much: If you haven't played Corruption of Champions, you probably should. It's not perfect, but as far as sex games go, it's enjoyable and I still get a kick out of it today. Sometimes it was even fun to explore outside of just the sex aspect, just to see what the various regions of the world had to offer, but never for very long: It was just a sex game with interesting, inventive scenarios.
Enter Trials in Tainted Space, the sequel (In the same way Bioshock is a sequel to System Shock. Spiritual successor might be a better term.) to Corruption of Champions, and it appears the developer is thinking of taking it in an entirely new direction. I've only played the alpha so far, and I'll admit that I haven't played that much of it yet, but here's what I've noticed about it so far:
One thing that's nice to start is that, in the beginning, if you bother to read the story (I did), it's actually kind of interesting. Your father dies from the equivalent of intergalactic AIDS, and decides to hand the family business down to you... But first, you must prove yourself! The idea is that he wants you to go through achieving the same goals he did when he first built the business to prove that you deserve all his wealth, and the game starts out by making several bold promises; The tech class claims you'll end up designing your own turrets later on, there's talk of space-based warfare in some of the character creation screens (One of the skills affects your ability with aiming ship-based weaponry), and the game alludes to your eventually amassing a big enough crew that you'll need a larger and better ship.
Here's what I'm worried about, though: The game mentions weapon modification, and I'm afraid it's going to be a bland upgrade system rather then any real sort of customization. I haven't really seen a lot of games, especially RPGs, address the customization well at all. The idea is always "This weapon is bigger, you kill things faster with it." There was a glimmer of promise in this direction, though, when the game mentioned the various types of damage you can do. What I've noticed so far are: Kinetic attacks (projectile, blunt, sharp) and energy attacks (Blasters and the like), with mind powers hinted towards for the player. Here's what I'd LIKE to see: Rather then a base "Kinetic" type, I'd like to see several sub-types of kinetic attacks. Piercing attacks, blunt attacks, and cutting attacks for example. You could choose to cut with your knife for high damage versus soft unarmored tissue, or stab someone with it to get it to go through armor. You could have hollow point bullets (The kind that expand on contact with a target) that deal a lot of blunt damage and very little piercing, and full metal jacket bullets (High piercing, low blunt). In terms of energy, I'd also like to see different types of energy weapons available: Light-based (Can be reflected off of shiny surfaces, causes a burning effect. A laser, for example.), Gamma radiation based (Passes through nearly anything, but has an affect kind of like poison rather then instant damage), and maybe Microwave based weaponry too. As for the customization, I'd like to see various scopes that provide bonuses for targeting specific body parts or offer more then one shot per turn (Like a 4x magnification scope versus an aimpoint), folding stocks (They could be folded up when in the inventory to take up one less inventory space, and then take a combat turn to unfold, but provide an accuracy bonus when used), and various types of magazines. I'd also love to see various types of magazines come into play, with a chance for the weapon to jam more frequantly with higher-capacity magazines and ammo management becoming a factor in the gameplay.
Now enough frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog having meat jiggled infront of its face (Take that as you will), it's time I got down to talking about what's already in the game.
The sex scenes are very well written and plentiful right off the bat, with your first one coming just a few screens into the game once you're out of character creation. As in CoC, they cater to a wide variety of kinks whether you like them or not, but I like that: The way the writer handles the kinks in this series has turned me on to some things I didn't like before, because they're very good at describing why something is sexy. There's a scene where you're licking the sweat off of a bug, which sounds stomach turning, but it's written extraordinarily sensually: The sweat is described in a very pleasant, tasteful way, and you can't help but love it a little even if it grosses you out a bit.
Despite how well everything is written, this game falls into the same trap as CoC: You either read the mountains of text (And there are mountains), or you read nothing and waddle around like a drugged toddler in a room of Norwegian pedophiles, completely oblivious to everything except the occasional twinge of pain as someone shoves their cock up your ass. That's fine for a sex game when you really don't care about the detail, but I feel like this game is trying to be more then a sex game, and I think it has that potential. What this game needs is the option to look at all that detail if you want to, along with the option to just play it like any other RPG if you're not in the mood to sit down and read The Wheel of Time series in one go. Remember what Star Wars Bounty Hunter did? You could run around the whole game blasting everyone that cocked a brow at you like some kind of pissed off Korean Vanilla Ice, or you could take your time and use your scanner on people to figure out everything from their entire criminal history to how many squares of toilet paper they used in a day.
I really think TiTS (Yes, that's the name.) needs something like that: A simpler more "Gamey" style of play for the casual gamer just looking for a quick romp with blasters and sex, and the more detailed "Zork" style of text-based gameplay for people who like that sort of thing. I hover in the middle: Sometimes I'll read everything that's typed for screens in a row, and sometimes I'll just skip past half of it to get to something more interesting. What would be nice would be, like... A dialogue box at the top of every screen of text that basically sums up everything that screen says.
Another problem, speaking of mountains of text, is that TiTS implements a much needed map system, but it seems kind of incomplete. It's just a bunch of boxes, and if you don't read the dialogue text in the center of your screen, you've really got no idea what's there outside of a few icons that indicate certain types of shops. What I'd really like to see is different sprites for different types of terrain, so you can see a clear change that means you should start paying more attention to the text. For example, the first world changes from a city to a jungle with NO sprite representation... The boxes all look exactly the same, so I found myself wandering out into the jungle by mistake looking for more shop boxes. If the boxes had some kind of visual representation of the terrain type, whether or not the player is reading the text could be a great measure of how observant the character is at the moment: Text boxes might hint towards danger ahead while the terrain looks otherwise normal on the minimap. Sort of like a person just blinding trudging along the jungle versus someone carefully making their way through it and watching out for trouble.
At any rate, I'm actually pretty excited for the next update of the public release of the game, which is more then I can say for most of the AAA titles I hear about these days. Pretty sad when a game with a multi-million dollar budget like Call of Duty Ghosts is less interesting then a comparatively low budget text-game.
Go yiff in Hell.
Edit: I've been informed by the developer that the game already has various types of kinetic attacks. My failure to notice it comes from how little I've played the Alpha so far. I've also been informed tha- Actually, I'll just give you the e-mail.
Ah cool. A few notes:
-It's not a sequel, more of a spiritual successor. The games aren't connected in storyline or universe at all.
-For damage types, we have kinetic (bashing), slashing, piercing, thermal, electric, etc... It's just that most powder guns deal kinetic damage at the moment.
-I plan to add color-shifting to map tiles indicative of their zone. So we're ahead of you on that front, we just haven't gotten to do it yet.
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