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| additional notes by FABIO 09/01/2004, 7:05pm PDT | ||||
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curst wrote: The story is amusing for the sake of seeing how many plot points it can rip directly from Metal Gear Solid. Commando infiltrating enemy base? Check. Enemies former U.S. agents gone rogue? Check. Enemy leader linked to the main character's past? Check. Enemy grunts mind controlled by psychic former KGB agent? Check. Hottie working with you on the inside? Check. Hottie acting strange and coming on to you because she's being mind controlled? Check. I don't know what my character's name is, It's Nick. You should know that because every 5 minutes the hottie telepathically shouts it so she can nag you about doing some errand. Jesus it would suck being married to that. "Sweet, out at a bar with the boys, wife out of town visiting her siste-" "Nick! Don't forget to paint the house and take out the garbage!" "Fuck!" So no, the story's not terribly compelling, nor does it NEED to be. At first it might not seem that way, because this game really plays almost identically to Midway's The Suffering, minus any horror elements. I think it's the same engine and everything. You run around a la Max Payne, taking out sucka MCs with a pistol, and general act bored. That on its own wouldn't hold up for very long. Yes the 5 minutes before you get powers is very boring, just like Jedi Knight 2. Unlike Jedi Knight 2, it doesn't last for HOURS. telekinesis When I was imagining the perfect game I would make a few months ago, I came up with super powered individuals created in a government lab that bust out and go rogue, except for the main character, whose power is telekinesis, who stays to fight the rogues. Gameplay would be you telekinetically lifting everything in sight and flinging it around. You'd fight scrub foottroopers as normal enemies and super powered rogues from your former agency as bosses. No, seriously, I did. These guys went ahead and made my perfect game, by reading my mind! I swear there is some hidden genius design working bwhind the scenes where, more often than not, flinging an object in a random direction will unexpectedly set off a chain reation of awesomeness. I thought I would pick a guard up off a high ledge and fling him into the floor 30 feet below. He ends up crashing into an exploding barrel (which exploded) and getting re-flung in the opposite direction only this time he was on fire. A nice high-impact blood smear marked where the barrel used to be. Another instance was me picking up a crate and flinging it around a corner. I did that just to check for guards, but what I got was a massive explosion around the corner followed by debri and bodies being blown into view. This game is constantly making you giggle from all the sadistic shit you do. From the telekinetic ragdoll flinging to the hillarious training (with your instructor telling you not to worry, that the practice guards "are paid well", right before you lift them up and repeatedly smash their skulls into the wall), to countless other little things. start to crate Not only are there crates all over the place, you must stack them :( and there is an entire tutorial dedicated to crate stacking. Yet the game still kicks ass. but it IS a PS2 game so perhaps hardware limitations are to blame. I'm surprsed the PS2 can even handle all the physics in this game. I keep expecting it to slowdown or glitch up, but it doesn't. This is the best use of ragdolls since Painkiller (yes, even better than Farcry). There's other powers like mind control and invisibility and shit, plus you can make people's heads explode by sucking psi-power out of them (or, if you prefer, by taking over their mind and then forcing them to commit suicide), but for me the list basically ends with telekinesis and pyrokinesis. Unless you're some kind of GODDAMN FRUIT you'll feel the same way. How can you not love mind control? Messiah banked on this ability entirely to keep the game fun, Psi-Ops has it as just yet another one of the awesome powers you have. Remotely take control of a guard shooting the shit with other guards. Guard #1- "So now she wants me to take all these self-improvement classes." Guard #2- "Oh shit I hear ya. Last week the wife was telling me t-" *eyes get all glassy* Guard #3- "You can't take that kind of crap from them. You've got tARRRRGGGGGG!" *BLAM* Guard #1- "Oh my god you just shot hi-" *RATA TAT TAT TAT* Guard #4 (rounding corner)- "What happened? I heard shots and...oh god we've got men down! Are you okay?" Guard #2 (in detached voice)- "I am but my buddies are shot up real bad, could you take a look at them?" Guard #4-" Shit we need medic a-" *BLAM* Guard #2 jumps in some water and drowns himself The best was when a I mind controlled a tower sniper, had him snipe all the surrounding guards below, then forced him to jump off the tower. As soon as he started falling I released control. You could hear him come out of the trance and realize that he was falling. "Huh? What happened? Oh my head...oh SHIT! WAAHHHHHHHhhhhhhh..." Other games would just have bodies hit the ground with a thud. Psi-Ops shows the fall like it would actually happen. The guard tries to land on his feet but his legs can't take the force of the impact and you just hear them FUCKING SNAP as they bend backwards and the guard is on his knees weeping before passing out from the pain. I haven't even gotten pyrokinesis yet and I love this game. Curst also forgot to mention the awesome intro where an army of mind-controlled meat puppets break from goose stepping and charge an enemy position oblivious to wounds like blown off limbs and gushing arterial wounds. Negatives? The map needs improvement and there is the occasional dull part where it tries to be a stealth game, even though almost anything you do alerts all guards immediately (you can take them all out with your mindTM. The map shows you individual areas, but doesn't show where the areas are in the overall base plan and how they're all connected to each other. The objectives start out being easy to find, but soon you're wandering around wondering where to go far too often through areas with endlessly respawning enemie. That's pretty much it though. This game is yet more proof validating my "all good console games are sleepers" theory. Its low profile status is probably thanks to the completely generic name and box art that made me mentally skip over it until I started hearing the positive reviews. 9.5/10- It would be a 10 if they fixed the map. Fuck Metal Gear Solid 3, Psi-Ops is the future of action/espionage games. |
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