Tag: first person shooter

Game finished: Halo O.D.S.T.

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Halo 3 - Master Chief
Image by Ricardo Saramago via Flickr

I finished Halo O.D.S.T. (aka Orbital Drop Ship Troopers), the 4th game in the Halo series (or like the 8th, if you count the Marathon games as the spiritual predecessors they were) over the weekend. I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected. I’ve solved all the Halo games at this point, including 2 of them in coop, and I figured I had seen everything the Halo games had to see at this point, plus Halo 3 concludes the Master Chief‘s story arc, and I sort of figured without the Master Chief I wouldn’t be interested.

I only ended up getting the game because Toys R Us had a buy 2 get 1 free sale after Thanksgiving and I couldn’t find anything else I was interested in. My first session with the game seemed to confirm my suspicion – been there, done that, I thought, and I quickly set the game aside for others. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to clear out my game backlog before buying any new games though, and I love buying new games, so I returned to it and warmed up to it as I played.

The Halo series does a pretty good job with their basic combat mechanics, and their level design focuses on setting up repeated ‘situations’ or skirmishes that require tactical thinking, skill, and sometimes a little luck. The same skirmish can play out wildly differently each time you approach it after a failure too, which helps enormously with enjoyment. In terms of what ODST brings to the party this time around…well, not much new. Some tweaks to the weapons, graphics, vehicles, a lack of the more resilient Master Chief, and that’s about it. The relatively short plot follows the misadventures of a squad of soldiers on a mission in a city under siege by alien invaders. It’s told non-linearly, and while in the end it’s not that exciting, by the standards of most first person shooters it’s actually pretty solid. I played on normal difficulty and either the game is fairly easy or I’ve played enough Halo games to do really well at them, because I mostly found it pretty easy.

The one new thing that ODST does bring to the table is a multiplayer mode called Firefight that’s pretty fun – it’s basically the human players versus increasingly powerful waves of AI characters in skirmish battles. It’s tough, frantic, and a good deal of fun. The rest of the multiplayer is basically what you see in Halo 3 with a bunch of additional maps included, including some which were DLC for Halo 3.

So – would I recommend it? Qualified yes – if you’ve played Halo games and really enjoyed them, no question, you should pick it up. If you’re a singleplayer only player, well, it’s a tougher call. The single player is fun and well designed and has an above average story for the genre, but it’s also fairly short. If you’re a Halo 3 multiplayer fan, it’s probably worth picking up just for the Firefight mode alone.

Roundup of reviews of the game
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Why I’m not buying Modern Combat 2

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I really enjoyed Modern Combat – I played through and enjoyed the single player campaign, and I played a ton of multiplayer when it came out. I also enjoyed World at War, its sequel, and still occasionally play it online.

I won’t be buying the sequel. This fantastic chart over on Destructoid sums up why: this release is a huge middle finger to PC gamers. I’m not going to get all caught up in the nerd angst these moves by Infinity Ward have provoked, I’m simply going to walk away from their product. I think they could basically care less – they know they’ll sell 10 million+ copies to console gamers. Good on them, they know their market. I think they’ve lost sight of their PC market though. Meanwhile there are plenty of other great modable, extensively multiplayer, , extensible, client/server FPS for me to choose from on the PC. Personally I think Infinity Ward should take a good look at Valve and think about how Valve is succeeding in all the areas Infinity Ward is claiming are causing them to make these changes.

update: There’s also a pretty good summary of all the downgrades Infinity Ward have applied to Modern Combat 2 over here on Ars Technica

Friday fun for halloween – Zombie outbreak

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Armed Assault is a first person shooter that aims to be more of a simulator than a run and gun action game. It got decent reviews when it came out, and was notable for the strength of its mod community and the tools available for it, along with the size of the areas you can play in. There are tons of available mods, most aiming to simulate various military activities – using a squad to liberate a city, fight off an incursion from an attacking force, implement an ambush on a military convoy, that kind of thing. In honor of Halloween, I offer up the Zombie Outbreak mod for it, which allows you to set up a sort of ‘Day of the Dead‘ scenario where a number of zombies get introduced into an area and can infect the civilians and military personel in the region. You and a team of friends can then try and combat the outbreak, using the kit you start with and anything you can scrounge. It’s really pretty cool, and I’m posting this partly in the hope that a friend or two will pick up Armed Assault so we can team up, but even as a solo experience it’s pretty fun. You can score Armed Assault cheap off of ebay, or in the $30 range on Steam or Amazon.com. Definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in some Halloween themed zombie battling action. PC only, you need a decent gaming rig to run this.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

An ingame screenshot demonstrating the high dr...

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a ~5 minute youtube video showing off what the gameplay looks like:

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