LOL@WOW

Seriously though, they make like 165 million dollars a month off of WoW and the best they can do are in game cut scenes with their horrible character models/animation? I mean c'mon people, there's a reason machinima is really popular. Because anyone with a lot of spare time can do it basically for free. Is it wrong to expect more out of the biggest MMO developer in the world? This kinda crap is like turning in a book report without reading the book, everyone knows you really just don't give a damn anymore.

I don't want to sound like an ungrateful shithead but, is it bad to be kind of annoyed to recieve something for christmas that you specifically asked NOT to recieve? I mean I wasn't being cute, I really didn't want it, and what's worse is I can't even return it!

But that's another rant entirely

[EDIT]: So I received a lot of gift cards and unemployment for Christmas....sorta ironic.

Hal

Only the finest in virtual crazed hobo fighting

So there's this game, called Condemned Criminal Origins, I just wrapped up the last achievement in it yesterday, that game is pretty good, but what I still don't understand, is why on Earth when the game came out, did every game critic in the universe wank himself raw over the combat system?

Sure it emphasizes melee combat, which is unusual for a shooter, sure it's more realistic than 99% of the shooter market, BUT that doesn't mean it's well implemented!

I played through the game twice, and I still didn't master the "block" system. You press block and your character brings his weapon up for a brief moment, and if you're lucky you block an incoming blow, but if you're unlucky you get the shit beaten out of you by violently crazed hobos! I found it far more effective to just sprint backwards, or fire my tazer, since the enemies have a wildly varied set of crazily effective attacks and you've just got the one blunt whack. There's literally no way to predict when the attack is actually coming, and if you're off by even a hair you take the hit full to the face. I don't get it, the enemies draw back if you block too long, so why can't you just hold the block button down? Is there anyone that can't maintain a defensive position after FBI training?

So basically if a "central" part of the combat system is broken, the whole fucking thing is pretty broken. That and the guy moves PISS slow for an FBI agent carrying almost no gear.

But those are my only two gripes, the story is interesting, the pacing is excellent, and some moments of the game made me nearly crap myself. It's a really good game, especially for ten bucks since it's old as dirt, but the combat system is not revolutionary in any stretch of the imagination. I mean this is SEGA and Monolith we're talking about.

Oh, it's short, and some of the achievements are piss awful fetch achievements, which considering you can't go back through areas of a level you've completed, are just tiresome, especially when the only guide available online isn't written in any goddamn order.

I really do wish more games would limit you to just the ammo you find in the gun and maybe a magazine or two that you can salvage from other guns of that type, it really makes you care about every shot. More FPS games should feature a "normal" guy as the protagonist, it makes things a lot more interesting in a sea of space marines in power armour that carry ten thousand rounds for 15 different kinds of weapons and run at 25 mph.

Definately a good way to spend a night or two, I don't regret renting it one bit.

Hal

Oblivion Lost

Well, I finally finished the last quest in the thieves guild and picked up the last achievement for Oblivion, and I gotta say, I like the game, but I honestly don't ever want to play it again. Ever.

Honestly, after a year or so of playing games like WoW, (and I use the word game loosely) I'd almost forgotten what a real quest in an rpg was, one that didn't require you to just kill 25 bugbears or whatever nearby and kill the same monster a thousand times over to level.

That said, there are a great many things that mar Oblivion painfully and ultimately leave it vastly inferior to its predecessor Morrowind.

Level scaling has got to be the most terrible idea Belthesda has ever dreamed up and refused to let go of even though it's widely regarded as the worst aspect of their games. Rather than scaling your character to his environment by leveling him up through your actions, the game scales the environment to you as you level, the end result is that under ideal circumstances the game stays the same difficulty from start to finish.

But in reality, since you level by using your skills, you'll quickly find yourself vastly outclassed by your enemies, if your leveling skills are the abilities you use most frequently. Level scaling was in morrowind, but your stats rose a lot faster between levels, so it wasn't a burden if you played however you felt like.

The whole idea is fucking moot anyways, because it's one of the only games I know of that actually features a difficulty slider ranging between +100 (impossible) and -100 (piss easy).

The magic system is much less interesting and varied, as well as much more difficult to acess fully without gimping your character in all other regards.

The stealth system is horribly broken, as for instance, killing a person in a sealed room after stealthing up behind him, alerts the guards immediately if you fail to kill him/her in one hit.

The AI is horribly stupid. Granted the AI wasn't great in Morrowind either, but Morrowind didn't make a huge stink about how great the AI was. No AI that routinely runs between you and your target mid axe swing is great.

Also, the graphics, while fantastically bueatiful, are flavorless and bland, as well as incredibly laggy. I mean seriously, this brings me to an old gripe I've had for awhile now, what ever happened to the days where it mattered more that the game ran smoothly than it looked pretty? Comparing morrowind to oblivion is sort of like comparing world of warcraft to everquest, sure the graphics in wow are terrible, but they have character, and flavor, while the graphics in everquest are better, they look like they were drawn by some high school kid during lunch break, and are horribly unoptimized.

Take for instance fast travel, yeah I think being able to go anywhere you've been before is sweet, but I think they just threw it in because they couldn't think of anything as origional as the silt strider transport system from morrowind, or the mark and recall spells, now those were handy, I miss those.

The saving grace of the entire game was the shivering isles expansion, because it reminded me more of morrowind in art and style.

Also, the game fucking crashes occassionaly (constantly on the PC). On a console? Goddamn, I remember back in the day you'd get laughed into the fucking dark ages if you made a game for a console that crashed at all.

Bottomline? It's a good game, but Morrowind is still better. I knew this the moment I watched two guards spout the same conversation at eachother. "I'm looking for heronymous lex" they both say to eachother, and then turn to me and say "can you help me find heronymous lex?"

The story is pretty good though I must admit, if you can stick with it.

Also, Patrick Stewart dies like 15 minutes into the game.

Y'know how cell phones have all sorts of cameras and games and gps systems and internet browsers on them now but the actual phone part of them is somehow inferior to a phone that is just a phone? Yeah Oblivion is sorta like that. All this extra stuff is cool, but I think somewhere they forgot why the elder scrolls games were so good to begin with.

Hal