What Are You Currently Playing? 6.65: Neighbor of the Beast

[gunswordfist]

I forgot the..no wait, I remember now. Shining in the Darkness for Genesis made me give up pretty fast. I almost never quit games I own but good lord, robotic 16 bit first person dungeons are not fun at all.

[Spark Of Spirit]

It really is amazing the reviews that game had when it came out. I think it might even have the highest metacritic ranking of the 3, or it did a while ago. But I mean it's a completely unremarkable and unoriginal attempt at an FPS in a sea of them. It's like they gave up trying to top the first game (which shouldn't have been too hard) and decided to be like everyone else.

Which is amazing because Insomniac has never been known as a studio that does what everyone else does.

[Foggle]

2 has the highest MC rating and 3 has the lowest I believe. Just goes to show how worthless sites like that really are.

I think Insomniac learned very quickly from R2 to never try following the crowd again. They're much better at doing their own thing, and - questionable quality of a few releases aside - they've thankfully never made something like this since.

Anyway, apparently you actually could shoot the hidden snipers; I just wasn't close enough to them the other times I tried, I guess. Made that part extremely easy instead of trial and error like I thought it was, so that's good. But now there are invisible enemies (and I mean completely invisible until you're a couple feet away) who one-shot you...

[Foggle]

Oh boy the shoot-through-walls enemies are back! And they have just as much health as last time! Thankfully, they can no longer track you for entire minutes behind cover, so I guess that's something.

[Foggle]

There's a part where you have to fend off enemies from behind cover while someone opens a door for you. I dared move five steps to the left and got insta-killed by a single bullet because the game didn't like that. "Stay behind cover!" one of my soldier friends yelled as I died.

What a good game.

[Spark Of Spirit]

The future of level design.

[Foggle]

It gets better. After I died, I found out you can just hide in the corner and let your invincible AI partners kill all the enemies for you.

[gunswordfist]

I love invincible friends.

[Spark Of Spirit]

It gets better. After I died, I found out you can just hide in the corner and let your invincible AI partners kill all the enemies for you.

So it even plays itself.

And fans of these games usually mock on-rail shooters. Amazing.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I remember back when I was playing CoD Black Ops, I ended up "failing the mission" for not sticking close to my comrades on a set course, since I just wanted to go at my own pace and explore the environment. That's basically a perfect representation of CoD games. Either play it exactly one way, or don't play it at all. I don't think that I need to say which option I chose.

For the record, most sites ranked this as the best FPS of 2010, which is the same year that Halo: Reach came out, and while I'm sure that they factored in the multiplayer, many also called the campaign mode one of the best yet in the CoD series.

[Foggle]

I got to a boss fight where you're expected to use old-school circle strafe tactics to win, but your character's movement speed is so slow that it's impossible to do it properly and not take damage. Thankfully, your health regens fast enough to make it merely tedious rather than hard.

I love invincible friends.

In Resident Evil 2, there's a part where Ada briefly follows you. If you maneuver your character right, you can get behind her, and she'll kill all the enemies for you since she's invincible and has infinite ammo. That's probably the only time I've ever enjoyed that kind of thing in a game.

So it even plays itself.

To be fair, this game only plays itself 5% of the time, which is a lot less often than the typical CoD campaign does. Still, everything else about it is also terrible, so...

I remember back when I was playing CoD Black Ops, I ended up "failing the mission" for not sticking close to my comrades on a set course, since I just wanted to go at my own pace and explore the environment. That's basically a perfect representation of CoD games. Either play it exactly one way, or don't play it at all. I don't think that I need to say which option I chose.

That stuff's just the worst. For all its faults, Resistance 1 never had anything like that, and I don't think IG will ever make a game with such stupidity again.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I do like the system that Gears of War uses, where your allies can get "downed" but not killed. You can then either choose to risk going out of cover to revive them, or try to finish the fight yourself, but you don't have to worry about them dying on you since they'll automatically be revived after the fight concludes (except for Gears 2, where they can actually bleed out if you don't get to them in time, which is stupid).

[Foggle]

One of my AI partners just killed me by shooting the car next to me until it exploded.

This game, man.

[gunswordfist]

 

[Foggle]

I am on the last level and words cannot express how much I hate this fucking game. The entire second half of it is filled with square rooms and long corridors where you just sit in one spot for 5 minutes until it decides to stop spawning enemies or the boss' absurdly large amount of health finally depletes. Also, some parts are genuinely composed of trial and error & can only be beaten on your first try by sheer luck, the checkpoints have gone back to being stupidly far apart like in R1, and certain enemies can kill you before you even have time to react due to their high damage output. I haven't forced myself through a game I've had such little fun with in years. The third one better be worth it...