Recently Played
Work and a lack of reliable internet have killed a lot of my gaming habits recently. But a quick rundown of stuff I've been at recently.
TF2 - Is as stupidly good as ever. EdgeGamers run a pretty nice selection of servers. Pretty strict on the behavior rules (no rudeness, no swearing, no religion, no politics, and a few others), but it seems to lead to a pretty nice climate to relax and frag people in. And going by their size (I believe the largest clan for FPS games, definitely the largest within TF2) they seem to be doing alright (I think they're currently running something silly like 7-8 TF2 servers, 4-5 DoD:S servers, 2 CS:S servers, and a CoD4 server). I've recently found the joy of playing scout and spy in addition to my general love of pyros and demos, so things are good.
CoD4 - I wasn't expecting a lot, but the single player really is very very good. One of the more cinematic and epic gaming experiences I've had recently. I'm also a sucker for unlock systems in FPS games, TF2s class updates, and BF2142 unlocks were both winners for me. It's a shame then that CoD4 is tied down to such utterly terribly multiplayer. If they'd given some sort of BF-like squad system, or really any gametype other than "Kill everyone" (and yes, every CoD4 gametype is "Kill Everyone" because no one understands the other types, i.e. the least intuitively implemented Capture and Hold and CTs/Terrorists modes ever).
Bioshock - Not a fan. Yes, the water looks pretty. And yes, I understand it's a more detailed story than most FPSs try to tell, but it still leaves me cold. Usually I'll dig through to the end of a game's story even if I have to jack the difficulty down to easy or turn on god mode so I can blow through annoying bits, but even then I couldn't be bothered to dig through Bioshock. And this really comes down to two things:
A) The combat sucks. It's a whole host of things from poor weapon accuracy, to spastic enemy movement, to high enemy health and low weapon/spell damage, all on top of ammo conservation concerns. I have the feeling that the developers want me to use combos of weapons and plasmids on every enemy to make things tolerable, which I might have been open-minded about if they hadn't thrown some many random cannon-fodder enemies in, and hadn't omitted a Last Weapon Quickswitch button that's now essentially mandatory for FPS games.
B) I hate everyone. Everyone I felt even mild sympathy for turns out either not to exist, or nailed to a wall. Yes the eventual meeting with Ryan is somewhat impressive, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter when I as a player don't care whether or not all of Rapture sinks into the sea and implodes, taking my character with it. Developers need to learn that simply looking out of a characters PoV for the entirity of a game doesn't buy them empathy, especially when we haven't seen anything from that PoV to induce it (including the, admittedly demanded by the storyline, paper thin protagonist backstory). Slaughtering hordes of faceless flapper beasties just isn't a significant bonding experience.
Mass Effect - Much much better than I expected. This is apparantly where all the talent that I'd expected in NWN2 went, and in the end I'm not unhappy, as I'd rather have one stupidly good space opera RPG than yet another fantasy rpg. Naked space booty is just an added bonus. The combat took me a little getting used to, but I did really enjoy it once I got into it. It's a fairly linear experience, the sidequests are very much sidequests. But frankly non-linear storylines are overrated, especially in RPGs, where I suspect a well written linear experience is much more preferable to a game that lets you explore it's mediocrity in whatever order you prefer (especially since I find most games whose storyline is the draw equally boring to replay regardless of linearity, so non-linear games simply make me feel like I've payed for content I haven't seen because one playthrough doesn't get through all of the story). I'd also like to point out the final assault on the Citadel as a good example of imaginitevely using the setting (lets have the them fight up the side of a building!) to seem like you're doing something different with out actually having to build anything new (other than some textures). Unfortunately now I'm left waiting for the sequel. /pout
Halo 2 - I've finally figured out what it is about the Halo series that does it for me: music, and voice acting. Because really, it's kind of a mediocre shooter, probably a bit better when it first came out, but the fight mechanics don't change drastically in the series. It's still the same old-school unrealistic (read: enemies can require many shots to kill) shooter at the end of the day. The combat is so-so, and most of the levels are very very repetitive. You could probably slice out 50-60% of every map (the copy/pasted bits) and end up with a much tighter experience (which is essentially what CoD4 did, same focus on story but with much shorter walks between epic setpieces).
But the sound gets you over that. The music really is amazingly well done, a good blend of epic stings and action guitar to help move the monotony of space hallway #1241. The wheel that keeps everything, including the player, moving in the end is the Chief/Cortana relationship. The story is nice and epic, but it's only interesting through the lense of those two and their scrambling to move from one precarious position to the next. It moves through the cutscenes, and her in-mission asides, and (I think) is one of the primary reasons the Arbiter missions feel so flat, as Tarturus generates no empathy as an obvious villain from the get go, and the elite with half a face is almost indistinguishable from the redshirts he drops in with, there's no emotional hook.
The problem with all this is that since the cutscenes for the entire series are now on Youtube, you can simply watch them in order there and enjoy 80-90% of the music and voice acting. While it's obviously less that what you'd get playing through the game, I'm not sure if the remaining 10-20% is worth $50 and 25 hours of playtime.
