Pagoda of Gaming

A Pondering On Far Cry 2

December 31st, 2008 by TheMissingNin

I’ve spent most of the day playing this, and I have a couple of things to say.

It’s nearly the perfect game… Maybe that’s too generous - The designers have plopped infront of me a game that could be, with a couple of tweaks, perfect. The pain comes from a couple of sources. For starters, the huge amount of barriers put in place between yourself and next objective. So much that it feels like… RL.

Allow me to Examplify. The overall task of the game is to kill a gun dealer. The story then presents a “questline” that involves you working for one of the organisations that allegedly bought guns from said dealer, working your way through the organisation, ala GTA, to presumably the final encounter.

But shit, you’ve got Malaria (not to mention that you literally just stepped off the plane… But hell, it’s Africa, so everyone must have some kind of infectious disease). So you have to go do a side quest to get some medicine. And your guns are shite, and if you pick up a gun off an enemy it’ll rape you by jamming or running out of ammo every 5 minutes. So you go do some more side quests to unlock more guns from the gunshops, and then do some more side quests to get enough diamonds to pay for said guns.

And then you’re presented with a path to your objective, which goes through about 5 heavily armoured checkpoints, and is riddled with random encounters along the way that almost always involve 2 wankers on a Technical jumping out of the jungle to drive over your nuts. This happens EVERYWHERE YOU GO.

You also have to go through all that again on the way back. Because the game respawns absolutely fucking everything if you leave it alone for five minutes.

The death mechanic is also somewhat borked. When your health drops to zero, your “Buddy” grabs you and pulls you to safety and allows you to heal up. He then decides to stick around and more often than not decides to get shot. Which is what happened to my first buddy. You go down there and start looking him over and you’re given the choice to stick a magic healing needle in him or stick a bullet in his brain (awarding you the achievement “Goodnight Sweet Prince 40G”). But if you stick him with 3 magic healing needles, it actually kills him. IT DOES NOT WARN YOU OF THIS ANYWHERE. THANKS A FUCKING BUNCH FOR KILLING MY LIFELINE (and also awarding you the achievement “Goodnight Sweet Prince - 40G”).

My second buddy died in a scripted encounter. In that he was down and awaiting heals, and I was trying to get enough space between him and the enemies to give said heals. But all I’ve got is a silenced pistol with no ammo, a sniper rifle that has awful aim, and there’s 8 enemies. Luckily I remember that I’ve been hauling about a Flamethrower since the start of the game. So I shoot that off to NO EFFECT. Except that in Far Cry 2, the fire realistically propagates. And it propagated directly away from the enemies and directly into my dying buddy, who then very quickly became my dead buddy.

And so I’m buddyless. And every death from now on, or until the game decides to give me a new buddy, is a load from save affair.

The guns feel odd. I don’t know what it is exactly - if it’s a case of bad controls or they have some fucked up semi-auto-aim. Not to mention the weapon jamming and extreme ammo scarcity. Again - probably a case of intended relism. And yet, it still takes an entire clip to kill someone. And they’re SHIRTLESS… NO BODY ARMOR.

But apart from that, it’s a really good game. Beautiful scenery, amazing atmosphere. The fact that Diamonds are the ingame currency. The physicality of your character - like the way he “holds” the map in his hands when he’s driving, or pulls a bullet out of his arm with a plyers in an action to recover health and the camera is right there looking at it, or even the way he changes position in a vehicle.

It’s just overall lacking some solidity, and that it’s a giant hassle to get from one place to the other. The Giant Bomb Review gives it a good once over. Check it if you’re interested. Infact, in a final comparison, it reminds me alot of Stalker, especially when it comes to the game’s pros and cons.

Maybe I should’ve said “Mission” instead of “Quest”, makes it sound like WoW. Whatever, it’s all just “Generic Goal Giving Mechanism”. Yeah, guess what else I’ve been playing. I’ll be back soon. Got those annual posts to write up first. I also got Dead Space in today too, so I might have something to say about that by tomorrow.

step on my patch

Posted in Video Gaming, X-Box 360 | Comments Off

Steam Has A Sale On

December 28th, 2008 by TheMissingNin

Despite their recent dickery, in the form of making currencies local, the valve dudes have a very nice sale going right now, along the lines of 10%-75% off of EVERYTHING.

I picked up Peggle Deluxe, Defcon, and BIOSHOCK for something round about �12.

AND BIOSHOCK WAS ONLY �3.50!!!!!!

The sale ends on January the 2nd, 2009. So you’d better be quick.

Did I also mention that you can also get 25% off of Left 4 Dead?

Proper post coming soon.

I should learn to be a man