Caltrops - Article Submissions - Bioshock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Gears of War (draft 2, probably final)

Forum Overview :: Article Submissions

by Jhoh Clbbl O_____O 09/30/2007, 10:53am PDT

Bioshock

The Resident Evil 4 of the System Shock series. There is word going around that this is not the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. It IS System Shock 2! If they're the real System Shock 2 fans, they can kiss my FUCKIN ass, right downtown, and PRINT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But really, System Shock 2 is not even remotely like Bioshock. I haven't played System Shock 2 but whatever. Guns break down in that game. I played the Call to Juarez demo on the 360, and it had the same system where your guns would just explode after firing them too much, and you'd have to throw them down and get new ones. You know what? That is the dumbest thing ever. Any game that has that is inherently bad. So System Shock 2 is inherently bad. It is like the eddie vedder of video games.

No matter what you heard about this game, don't harvest any of the little sisters, ever. There is no morality judgment uh uh uh fuckin conundrum quandary decision to make, the game rewards you for rescuing them only, and punishes you for harvesting any of them. Especially if you're playing on the 360, then you can't get the sister savior achievement if you harvest even ONE of the bitches. I only harvested 2 of the gurls total and the game still treated me like a sick fuck even tho I saved like 5x more than I harvested. I AM THE GUY WHO IS GONNA CLEAN UP THIS WHOLE MESS THATS WHO I AM BITCH.

So hey, what is this game about? That is a good question! ^___________________________________________^ You are in a plane crash and find a light house that takes you to a 40s underwater city called Rapture co produced by a bipolar objectivist who may delete your website. Some Irish PRICK starts telling you what to do as if you care (psh) and SPLOYSURS and plasmids and nuthin loyk a fistful o loytnin. This is sort of a first person shooting game with "magic spells" and getting upgrades for your weapons and spells, which is awesome. The magic in this game is in "plasmids" which are like fancy injectables that alter your DNA such and such to give you crazy powers, like shining the light through the eyes of the ones left behind. You also get tonics which are passive benefits to various things in the game, hacking objects, combat fuckin shit, walking speed, hurfity blurf. You can combine your combat plasmids with various weapons by switching back and forth instantly for some major fuckin shit up combat. They give you plenty of guns, but from what I hear the melee weapon, the wrench, is the most powerful weapon in the game with the right combination of tonics. The options are your CHOICES! ^_^ You could even have a big dipper going up and down all around the bends.

My OCD compels me to find every single loose item and collect it even if I can't pick it up yet. For some reason the idea that there are some spare polys being used to render a small box just itches the back of my head forever until I am certain I have pressed the "make it vanish into your stash" button. You never know if those plentiful polygons will be slowing down your system wherever they are, so you better go pick up everything in the game, even if means setting yourself on fire just so you can waste health kits without having to leave an area with health kits not picked up, TO SPARE YOUR COMPUTER OR 360 THE STRAIN.

The plotline gets kind of crazy near the end, and a real discussion of the story and how it involves the gameplay of this game and perhaps any single player game can only involve spoiling it. So just go play it.

[Screenshot or funay comic drawing of Bioshoop should go here.]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

I remember joh hoping that Half Life 2 would be an EMERGENT game before it was released, so you run around a fully realized world with no load times where you take missions in and around City 17 with realtime dynamic fuckin loading whatever things.

Stalker is a good example of just this sort of thing... and why I will probably stop playing Stalker after I beat it. Tons of running around without vehicles, a very limited carrying weight, a money system which you spend the first 10 hours gathering only to find out all you can spend money on is healing, ammo, and suits. You can talk to the game's 2 vender characters to get an infinite amount of randomized missions to earn some extra cash items (ammo/health), but there's only like 5 unique kinds of these "grindan" missions, all involving running to an area, killing a set number of enemies, and walking back.

There's also faction reputation with 2 seperate armies, "Duty" and "Freedom." Gaining rep with one makes the other hate you, so I'm just gonna avoid them both and stay neutral. The factions and some individuals do get a thick backstory and some personality, so that is an added bonus to someone who wanted to replay this game a few billion times.

The developers did a surprisingly good job delivering more than just the "tech demo" videos we saw just before Doom 3's shitty release. I guess they saw that their tech wasn't so groundbreaking anymore and decided to add actual gameplay instead of just permadark monster closets. The game has so much depth I won't be able to spare as much time between it and the 50 dozen billion games I recently reinstalled and purchased. But that's not the game's fault.

By default you are supposed to go through the game scavenging all of your weapons and ammo from dead human enemies, which there are plenty of. I tried to hoard tons of weapons and ammo for selling just to find out that you can't really do this, because if you carry 10 kg over your weight limit it doesn't even let you walk, and any point in the 10 kg overload range prevents you from running without almost instantly draining your run stamina, forcing you to go for a soda because it is better than slander AND better than lies. There are only 3 normal shops in the game, although any neutral NPC will buy a few items off of you, like artifacts. You'll have to leave hundreds of weapons lying around in the game, which all persist, so you have to be like OH MAN IF I COULD JUST CARRY 5 OF THESE ASSAULT RIFLES BACK TO THE SHOP, but no it won't let you do that. So, don't have OCD and play this. It's like the opposite of Bioshock, which encouraged you to search around for every item you could find and pick it up at the very least to clear it out of the world and empty out into the faces of some sick fuckin muddafucks. In STAWKER, you just leave it on the ground and try to move on with your life. I know their attempt was to create the feel that you were "living off the land" in a way by constantly having to change out your weapons depending on what ammo the local enemies dropped, but I could just never get into that because every time I had a free kilogram I would fill up the carry weight with extra ammo or shit, most of which I need. You'll end up looking at your inventory trying to consider what you should get rid of, energy drinks for stamina, anti radiation meds, loads of ammo, assault rifle, pistol, artifacts, quest items, bandages, stacks of med kits, food, the occasional sellable, and realize that you can't really get rid of any of it. Then you run around trying to take damage or radiation just to eat up all the tons of consumables you have, then get to the next area and realize that they pour on more radiation damage and you shouldn't have wasted all those meds. Also it would've been nice if they had a hotbar so you don't have to open your inventory every time you need an energy drink to refill your stamina, etc.

Now, I have something NEW for you to obsess about. It's called a row........ of steel bars. 8( YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Gears of War:

This was seriously one of the coolest shootan games to come out this year or last year shit I dunno but it is a game all about occasionally taking cover behind plentiful concrete shit, awesome fuckin super awesome Unreal 3 engine graphixxx, and fuckin getting some major balls to run right up to a motherfucker and start chainsawing into his shoulder until his body rips into fuckin chunks and flops all over and then the chunks get kicked along the ground as you start moving again and get caught on your feet and you have to fuckin blast them to giant splattery blood flop chunks with your shotgun to unhook the dude's fuckin half blown off torso from your foot. Then you shoo chook a fuckin big fuckin sniper rifle to crack some stupid fuck's head right in half. Not only is there a lot of choo kleek and shoosh klix and cla shax but they even added a bonus fuckin thing for reloading where if you hit the reload button again in a sweet spot it reloads even faster and gives your new loaded shots some extra power. If you hit it outside of the sweet spot though your dude fumbles the clip and says RRRRRR SHIT and it takes a little longer. If you're in cover or not being attacked by enemies though you can usually fuck up your reloads all you want, but fucking up your reload in a tense situation only makes shit more tense and can just have you get your ass fuckin smokes like a newb ass NEWB while your duder is fumbling with his gun.

The dynamic cover system is so fuckin good that it actually works in multiplayer, that is how fucking good it is. You push A, and it presses you against a wall. At the edge of a wall you can blind fire or hit the aim trigger to pop out and aim a few shots, then let go to go right back into cover. For standing walls you can stand or crouch, for lower walls you automatically crouch, and when there's a short wall with pillars and you move along it, your dude automatically crouches at the short parts and stands again at the pillars. When standing at the edge of a wall, you can hold the move stick towards the edge and hit A to dive and roll out, or if there's another adjacent wall nearby, you hit A and your dude does a dash to that other wall and immediately takes cover there. And this not only protects you from enemies shooting you in single player, but in multiplayer other players really will not be able to get a good shot on you, so it's not just a cosmetic "I am in cover so the AI has to react differently" thing, it is actual fuckin cover. IT'S ACTUAL FUCKIN COVER!!!!!!!!

The obvious comparison is to kill.switch, the game where you just hide behind everything and basically blindfire everything in the game like that would be possible. In this the cover system is better, and blindfiring is actually not a legitimate tactic unless the enemy is right on the other side of your concrete divider or car or wall or whatever. You can crack their whole fuckin bodies in half without having to risk popping all the way out.

Also the enemy AI in this game is really really good. The enemies all take cover, and if you do start hitting the occasional exposed kneecap, they don't hesitate to run right the fuck out of there and find different cover. And instead of their leaving cover making them more vulnerable it actually makes it challenging and realistic without being all realism fag realistic (push shift I to inspect grenade). Most of the guns have an offset and no crosshair without going into aiming mode, and the enemies themselves actually move like they are trying to avoid damage instead of moving all slow like they are very sleepy. So it's fuckin awesome. It creates kind of an "awesome" effect where the game is fucking awesome and you go from beginning to end blasting giant fuckin dudes into soup. Literally, you shoot them, and then they don't fall over or gib or anything, there are no ragdolls in this game and the Unreal 3 engine does not yet support ragdolls. Instead, when your bullet touches the enemy's skin, they disappear and are replaced by a nice small bowl of warm soup sitting politely on the ground. And then someone's about to get their muthafuckin HEAD BLOWN AWF and you read about your results. IN T