It also can likely be acreditted to the fact I've been playing games and have been unable to care due to the fact I've been playing Just Cause 2, so here it is, ramblomatic post number something something, pertaining to first person shooters and how they have eventually gotten worse and even more after that.
Back in my early days I played the infamously ruined DooM series, no I didn't play DooM 3... I played Doom 95, Doom II, Doom: Plutonia Project and Doom TNT.
In other words, every doom game that hasn't been afflicted with new generation syndrome, or NGS as I will call it from now on, hope you dont skim this otherwise you might end up having to reread to the point at which I said what it stands for to solve your curiosity.
I also played Heretic, Quake, Quake II and Hexen II, and i still play those games nowadays because they are fun and have multiple ways you can finish the levels, theres speedrunning it, or if you dont know where the exit is you might end up visiting about 5 secrets and kill every baddie on the level before you find the friendly pink dog... think waiting at the exit to give you a nice puppy bite.
I also played a few games from that Era that I couldnt buy back then, such as Duke Nukem 3D and regular Hexen and bot have the pleasing sense of fast-paced good feeling gunslinging with the only linear feeling being that I have to find the exit somehow, even though once you've killed all the monsters and nabbed all the items theres only so much to do before you have to say enough is enough and finish the stage, it makes you satisfied knowing that you had your fun, and if you did do everything then you might see a screen like this at the end.
Kills: 100%
Items: 100%
Secrets: 100%
And the fun never stopped until you finished the completely absurd amount of levels, usually any one of these games had 30 levels at release and expansions only help with the fact, Heretic was given two extra acts in Shadows of the Damned and the same followed with DooM, and thats before you even brought the modding community into it.
The other things I liked about DooM or Heretic or any other first gen shooter, was that you had no gun hold limit, your only limit was your ammo, which on higher difficulties was usually aburdly difficult to acquire so you had to conserve it and use the chainsaw and pistol, or Gauntlets of the Necromancer and Crystal Wand. There's a certain amount of satisfaction brought on by narrowly avoiding death by strafing to the left and picking up a medkit and even more satisfaction when you turn around and kill the tenacious flying shit who was shooting his fireballs at your last % or chain-link of health.
Asides from that it was fun and still is to this day, I wouldn't be playing it still otherwise, now that I've told you all about first person shooters that are good and proven that its not rose-tinted because my opinion still stands and I still play the games, lets review games that have succumbed to NGS.
The only one of these I've actually played is Quake 4, that is to say the only one of these rebranded classics I was stupid enough to purchase, DooM 3 has suffered the same NGS label and for the record this new generation is outrageously shitty and once you've played one you've played them all.
I have a feeling the urge to make realistic shooters was behind this change, where the word "realistic" can be in summarized in quotation marks as large as Microsoft Word will permit, if it were realistic I would have to find medkits because unless humans have a hidden regeneration trick I dont know about this is complete bullocks, you dont get pumped full of led, and then hide behind cover and return good as new, thats not realistic, thats just stupid.
A thing I often hear about DooM being unrealistic is by the fact that a single man can carry tonnes of heavy ammunition and weaponry and run around faster than a saint bernard. Yes thats unrealistic, only a train could carry 10 different weapons with multiple rounds of ammunition for each at the steady pace of a saint bernard, flying cargo ships would only be faster and trucks would be realistically slow.
The thing is that trying to make weight realistic has to limit either the freedom of how many guns you carry or how fast you run, and both are very bad gameplay wise, there are ofcourse unrealistic alternatives, such as a magical rift that serves the purpose of keeping your inventory in easy reach without limiting your speed and ofcourse theres the issue of simply lighter ammo, heretic did both of these unintensionally, since it was medieval fantasy it could be creative with weapons and ammo, the equivalent of the shotgun from doom was the 'ethereal crossbow' that used 'ethereal bolts' as ammo and since its ethereal you would instantly be under the impression it could weigh far less than its futuristic counterpart, its a wooden crossbow thats ammo might be essentially weightless, a lot of the other ammo was in the form of orbs, which float above the ground so they likely weigh nothing, the crystal wand is just a small amber gem on the end of the staff you attack with, the dragon claw is a weapon so small it fits on two fingers, the hellstaff is the staff bathed in hell, so it has a slightly weighty skull on it now, the pheonix rod is a short staturesque golden rod with a small ruby in the head and its likely the heaviest item just because of the gold, and the last weapon was a spikey ball launcher thing, which did look heavy but when you take medieval into context these are guys who held long swords made of iron and sometimes two of them, as well as rations and their heavy armor.
Corvus only wears robes so he has the gift of no armour to weigh him down and the strength of what men did back in the 1200's so him wielding three rather heavy items, Gauntlets of the Necromancer, a Rod of Gold and the only way to beat D'sparil with relative ease spikey ball launcher thingy its not very unrealistic at all, honestly I'd say it felt he was carrying too little, mind you im taking out of the equation how many quartz flasks, invincibility rings, powerful books and everlasting torches he may be carrying, but thats still pretty fundamental, where as modern humans dont have the strength we did back in the year twelve hundred and whatever, and our weapons have only gotten heavier, so while DooM 95 isnt realistic in weight Heretic apparently is, also you get bags of holding so those spikey balls are taken care of and its likely you put your other weapons in their asides from the one your making craters in an imps face with.
I assume the bags of holding are enchanted because frankly what isnt in that game.
Now I'll get to the other issue with more recent FPS's with NGS and thats the blatant linearity and forced storytelling, just because your story is about World War II doesnt mean we want to hear your sick little twist on it, and the stories for the game have just as much depth as their fun predocessors, it amounts to kill all the bad guys, except instead of demons or cult members the bad guys are now Russians, Japs, Brits Aliens or fucking Zombies.
Fighting Aliens is okay, and I have no qualms with ripping Japan a new one just because I could pretend I was on a mission to kill all the little tits I have to put up with who rub manga and anime in my face.
Since America alone is responsible for this dross it always centres itself as the hero, lets face it this is immutable in just how sickeningly true it is, how many First person Shooters have you played where America is the enemy and you are fighting them as Japanese, or Brits or such.
Just because the enemy is zombies and they could be american doesnt do it justice, since america is still the heroes fighting the zombies, the same goes for aliens, its just america playing it off as being the hero.
I dont think there has been a film hollywood have produced where america didnt win in the end, if there country was being plagued by baddies, good examples come to mind like independence day, alien versus predator, war of the worlds, godzilla yadda fucking yadda.
Atleast in Independence Day the Aliens actually started the debacle while humans were uncharacteristically on rooftops posing with signs saying "yo sup sup, welcome to Planet Earth, we have some cool places you could visit, and thanks for visiting too, its so nice to see that we arent alone in this universe after all, unaware they were that the ship that crashed in area 51 had still living aliens in it that the government took in to experiment on and likely did a multitude of acts that displeased the aliens such as vivisection, nerve therapy and blood transfusion before locking them in a glass test tube for what would equate to the rest of god damn eternity, no shit aliens make a move after you make an unintended message of one of their colleagues, also its quite likely theyve been watching us for a while and seen loads of our stupid shit. So I say go aliens, thanks for foreshadowing the destruction of one of the world trade centres by our own stupidity.
I'm not joking, the mothership had its ion laser shit out of its bottom like projected diarreah at a skyscraper that looked quite similar to the world trade centre that was bombed only years after.
I dont think I would even really mind this so much if the games where you wiped out an entire sect of europe or asia were actually fun, but nooo... we have to be "realistic" and limit your freedom and fun with the game rather than learn from our reviewers that arent hired to pile 5 star ratings onto our newest sight-seeing tour and compliment our playerbase on their ideas because they are hapless sheep who have never played a good FPS and only know the 'kill this nation' simulator we have today.
The only FPS's that have come out recently that were actually good and fun were just about any of valve's releases in the last 2 years and Tribes Ascend, which has shown how FPS's should be done and should be the only one raking in multiple millions of dollars, but no they are on a microtransaction model and you can play the game pretty much limitlessly for free.
Modern Borefare and Twattlefield ask for 90 dollars and if you play them on XBOX you are ofcoursed charged just for playing with 5 or so other droids who will yell at you if you dont shoot some spec on the horizon with the rocket launcher.
The linear level design simply fails when compared to the FPS' of old aswell, its basically a sight-seeing tour through a brown and bloom world ravaged by war where the notion of fun doesnt exist and all the characters are as boring as the hellhole they live in, if I ever get the tools to make a first person shooter without needing to know coding it wont follow your stupid "realism" filter at all, I've already thought of an idea for such a game already, which I will now describe simply because I want to.
Hellcat: The Nightmare Begins, similar in build to how DooM plays, you go around as a deep red and gray-black marsupial cat that looks like a stocky kangaroo, his starting weapon, that is to say... the equivalent of the pistol, will be a 16 Barrel Pistol as depicted here.
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| Yeah... |
Then you get other weapons like the Plasma Splitter, an electrically sparkling fuumar (Giant Shuriken) that comes back after youve thrown it, so its essentially an ammoless weapon but thats okay because you have to get it back before you can throw it again.
The Nuematic Disk would be a floating disc of arcane energy that hovers around you and hits enemies thet get too close, and I plan that you could shoot these without much delay and have over 5 at a time surrounding you character, but theyd fade shortly, the ones in the RPG version only last for one cycle around your character, but they are effective since unlike in the FPS you dont have Ammo in the RPG because Im using an old version of Vlads ABS which supports ammo about as well as I support his newer releases.
Then we have a pretty cool idea which is the scatter cannon, not to be confused with the direction based scattergun from TF2 the Scatter Cannon can rapidly shoot decent sized orbs of energy that travel at lightning speeds and have no set course or homing stratagem, their path is completely random so basically it can end up clearing a room of monsters with only pressing a button about 10 times, it serves as the 'oh shit' button and will have you rely completely on luck, which is probably a fresh inovation to the FPS Genre, even the classics like Doom and its clones were dismissive off such an idea for a gun.
The Railgun, basically from Quake III, serves as the deathshot sniper rifle we know and love except without a cooldown.
Then we have The FRG, or 'The Fucking Ridiculous Gun', its title being a subtle acrynomic reference to DooM's superweapon the BFG or 'The Big Fucking Gun.' Being limited by VX's field of play I can't say I'm sure what this will do yet, I plan to make it creative though, perhaps it will launch 20 cans of BOMB soda, and when they explode it will make 'slurrrup ah!' sound to signify how fucking delicious that BOMB was to that enemies now non-existent face!
Speaking of Enemies and the general Story arc, I tempted to have a game where we are ripping america a new one as the bitter europians, australians and asians we are and the ending would consist of me and my pals saying its finally over and then proceeding to teabag each and every pride failed corpse of a now cityless nation. I would have done that if it didnt mean losing half of my fanbase, so I am subjected to reveal that we're killing angels, which i dont care about revealing because any christian still within my fanbase is either a sensible person or hasn't played Intelligence yet.
So incase the title on the silly image above wasnt bloody obvious enough I made the games name based on the Character Hellcat, who may be strikingly familiar if you are one of the people who actually played Intelligence, so with such a name surely he has a backstory to tell for it, well yes, I had given a few subtle hints in the past, subtle hints such as two entire table-top games, a 50 page book in minecraft and an entire level in minecraft called Hellcat: School of Hell aswell.
The backstory is that he has been to Hell, (or Heldath) Heaven, (or Gal'vana) the Necropolis and back, where he learns about the three worlds after life in the best way imaginable, have a neat little visit, he soon realises that Galvanians are more capital douches than Hellions ever could be, The leader of Heldath... Seradath isnt as evil and fiery as Gal'dath would have mortals beleive, and the image of him as a skull-adorned red fiery asshole is through the use of Divine books, yes I refer to the fucking bible.
Seradath is actually pretty wise, he does have an icy demeanor around those he doesnt know and those he knows too well, such as Gal'dath, but mind you I'd be pretty bitter about a guy who kicked you to some ugly shithole under the earth and then starting a war with you, so I guess its pretty fucking validated, it holds true to the death count as well, Seradath killed 100 people and Gal'dath has killed ten million whatsoevers so in the case of the bible im going to say God is an insane fucking murderer and Satan is just a guy who has sporadic murderous outbursts and the rest of the time hes just happy being in hell.
I read someones evaluation on the body count for God vs Satan, and Satans number of kills compared to gods is like comparing me and John Romero to our frag count on Quake III Arena, beleive it or not John Remero is god and I'm Satan and im shit at Quake III and John had a hand in developing it and is apparently pro going by Notch.
So yeah, I'd love to give a source for it but I've lost the link and I dont really care.
So story synopsis:
Hellcat is just fucking around in his condo at Brisbane (its the mansion in Intelligence) when he goes to walk outside and finds himself falling down a huge pit of hellfire, when he lands he finds himself in what could only be described as the middle of a Red Cordial factory accident, but it is infact Heldath, not sure why he has been damned since hes only been a good little camper in life and cant recall any event that would damn him except that one time he stuffed his face at a wedding he wasnt invited to, he is soon greeted by a character called 'Black Death' who informs him that he is needed at the front and dont worry Seradath will explain everything, they then have a duel for an unspecified reason outside of getting you used to boss mechanics, which are basically anything you can do with events, and then she teleports out, leaving only the Plasma Splitter behind, which Hellcat takes and uses from that point on.
You then go up an impressive flight of dangerous stairs you really dont want to fall down until you reach the pretentiously named Seradath City, which fades from dark red blackdead to ice blue scoop or two in the way of Terrain and scenery, you are then given a few quests to prove yourself worthy of entering Seradath's stronghold, which involve two fetch quests and a kill quest, while the concept is simple the fetch quests are divided up by puzzles and platforming to keep it entertaining, and the kill quest also gets a relatively difficult boss which is lets just face it... INTENSE!
Though if you are good at top down Action RPGS or top down shooters you can avoid getting hit entirely even when two huge waves of douche bolts streak across the screen or 10 douche orbs are summoned and chase you down.
The Boss uses a simple long range Douche Ball attack for regular hits, but dont be fooled, he is still difficult and intense! I've died to him myself just because I didnt dodge the douche bolt enough and forgot to press 'Q' to chug a health pot.
The Fetch quests are to get a Red Skull Key and a Yellow Skull key, you need both to enter the Citadel of Icecrown emptytown, you are then instructed by Seradath, given some plot info which ive likely spoiled already, and then you are immediately sent off on a mission to conquer Gal'vana with an army of impressive size, you lead the Seraphs, of Seradaths army, har har.
That wasnt on purpose it just so happened to be useful now, even though I've made subtle hints that Seradath was a character for a long time, subtle hints such as an entire fucking 7 hour game, I doubt any of you remember the pathetic excuse for 2 years of wasted development. It was called Terra and Seradath was the Antagonist and final boss x4 since he has immortal properties and in the end the Protoganist uses his 'pure heart ragnarok reacharound macguffin' and finally kills him for good.
Being that Terra's story was about as original as a poor mans version of Final Fantasy X, which ironically enough was already a poor mans version of star wars, I will now happily say that none of Terra's Story was canon and that Valin simply doesnt exist.
Trixie does though because me making an item with her name in it in Intelligence creates the unfortunate reality that it is now canon, however I can atleast do my part and have her not look like she bought her dress from hot topic because it was the only thing small enough to fit on her tiny monkey body, that she didnt have to pull over her big head because its 4 times bigger than it should b.
For reference on what the fuck I'm on about, this is how Trixie looked.
Thats the basic story, and as you might guess its going to be pretty short, I have plans to give Nola some backstory and reference another game I'm making which will explain Nola's love for Pep in Intelligence, she really gets around that woman.
And while the story will be there more than it was in DooM where all you had to go by was what you killed and a monologue at the end of each chapter it wont feel so lengthy like it did in Intelligence.
It will give you an idea of whats going on and let you know the characters while weaving exposition into the story instead of handing out a fucking notebook.
While I'm sure people didnt play Intelligence only for the story since despite a few oddities its pretty generic, "chosen ones must face ancient evil blah blah blah" was a plot that was inevitable, I really tried to avoid the chosen ones trope but how else was I to explain you getting a free ride out of the Necropolis, well actually that statement is pretty silly, since Limbo is just standing on the street when you meet him and he later returns to battle after being killed canoically for about 5 fucking seconds by a rather disparite boss to the one you were expecting.
Anyway I'm actually going to base the Necropolis on my original concept of it even if it means I have to parralax map, the Necropolis I had in mind was not the necropolis that I ended up using for Intelligence because the necropolis I had in mind was 10x larger than the already supermassive place that Intelligence features, and that has been cut up multiple times already.
The Necropolis I imagine is a futuristic floating city of death, relatively similar to the Necropolis in Heroes of Might and Magic but advanced by several thousand years, the image I used for the false Necropolis loading screen was found from a google image search and is funnily enough from Heroes of Might and Magic. If it wasnt obvious I mean this one.
The one in my head has multi-floor looming skyscrapers and 8 sectors instead of four, so it would end up similar to Midgar from FF7, with much more daily dose and even more black.
Unlike the legend breaking dissapointment that was Puke Dukem Pornever or Take Four, I will not stoop to the shitty disease of NGS, much like the team behind Tribes Ascend and the company of Valve I realise that this New Generation is a cancer that can only bring fun to incomptent twats who were born in 2000 beyond or simply never played a Good FPS, that is to say, one that doesnt replace fun with realism, there is nothing fun about Quake 4, honestly the most joy I got out of it was the point at which I got to kill my friend when he turned strogg, because it was funny to be able to silence that guffawing shit. Then I re-entered the brown and bloom halls of boring linear progress and continued shooting my weapons that felt about as good as a floppy one, the jump scares were the only scares and the game felt like a really dried out prune in atmosphere, the world building was complete shit, since nothing resembled anything in Quake 2 or before, even the Strogg were strangely different and I didnt feel like I was playing a Quake game, I felt like I was playing really grotesque real life, and heres the summary of all this.
If you want to play 'Realism Shooters' why not go ahead and play real life, join the army and wield a gun you gigantic fucking pussy, then if you die atleast you might have been remotely good for something, because currently if you enjoy realism shooters all your doing is ruining the FPS industry as a whole and if you all die by some virus brought on by playing realism shooters no one is going to fucking miss you.
Now on the happier less hatred wrought side of the spectrum I'm going to do a mini-review on a game I bought recently and that is rocking my very foundation.
Actually we've had quite a good bit of luck with sandboxes lately, Skyrim, Saints Row the Third and Grand Theft Auto 4: Episodes from Liberty City have all come out recently as in, within the last year, though GTA4 EFLC doesnt bring me in as much as Saints Row the Third it has a lot more in the way of exploration and I was impressed with the subway feature, also the strip clubs are one of only two things that help me to jack off so no reason to hate.
But this game is a year older in retrospect but I only bought it yesterday, Just Cause 2: Grappling simulator twenty-ten, this is the best sandbox I've played to date, even outdoing skyrim, with a world that could almost be the size of Russia and a weapon set that feels as good to fire as your mum is to please at my place, it features limitless grappling from tree to rooftop to that enemies truck, which makes it feel like I'm spiderman, you can also tie two things together, which is a lot of fun, you cant tell me that you dont get satisfaction out of grappling two enemies and watching them flail against each other like fisher price ragdolls, you can also grapple onto just about any... okay you can grapple onto any surface asides from item crates and event tyres, I remember once doubting I could grapple into the thin post of a streetglight, only to find out that you not only can, but you can stay up there and watch the cars go by like your batman, this brings a lot of added fun to combat and with such a massive gameworld you do need to get around. I remember once I had an enemy vehicle chasing me that I'd already dispatched the gun man of by roping him to the back of his pilots ride and watching him get dragged along as a lifeless corpse, I then flung my hookshot into the front of his vehicle and then shot the other end at a palm tree just as he passed it, and after only two seconds his ride had flung around the tree like a ball on totem tennis-- what made it so fun was that it was pretty hard to do right, since the enemies ride armoured jeeps its rarely they go spinning out of control before the tether snaps, so not only was i rewarded for trying to associate my enemies with the immutable fact that you should give trees more love, but it was a once off that I have tried to repeat and had difficulty, when it happened I was bursting with giggling laughter which you only usually hear from excited japanese school girls, I like the ideas of some of the weapons to, such as the sawed off shotgun which was a one handed shotgun that was easier to find than its two handed counterpart and from what I could tell had no disabilities for the sake of balance, I would never have contemplated duelwielding them though since getting amo for one of them is hard enough without having to serve two, i've only actually done up the 'choose a faction' mission to find where some guy is, but its perfectly okay because the sandboxing has me covered, its everything a sandbox should be, the only complaint I have is that you cant enter any buildings, but with a gameworld that likely could occupy half of the downunder I'm willing to let that slide since Saints Row the Third is almost the same, if i ever make a sandbox it will likely not be as big as Just Cause's world because its very hard to resist copypasting, I would also give every skyscraper, house and dwelling of any sort an interior, this is a frustation I have in particular with Saints Row the Third where they have a club that promises peepshows or strippng nudes or something else that would serve the purpose of letting me jack off, but the door is just a part of the environment, and my ready willy remains floppy.
Atleast in SR2 you could enter more houses and shops than the ones that served a purpose, and some even had half nude chicks in them, for interiors I'm going to say GTA4 wins the mark here though, being able to actually hop on the subway and get around quickly was something they forgot to put in in SR2 even though they did have a train go all around the city. GTA4 also introduced more open shops, including a strip club where you can actually pay to have attractive women take everything off, no I shit you not, theres boobs, bum and all walk into a private room and give you a personal lapdance, if you do it three times another joins you and they have pretend lesbian eroticism, it even has a three-way direction camera, this and deviant art are the only 'safe' means of which ive had to jack off in the last 6 years and will continue to be for the remaining six until I become a wizard.
Yes I know it sounds ludicrous that being a virgin until you are thirty gives you wizard powers but I cant help but think its a little true, and if not I can be an ironically shitty wizard. The reason i hold stock in it is because there has to be SOME magic in the world, I mean we wouldn't have burnt all those wiccan in the purge if they didnt have the ability to do some form of black magic, and the red indians have certainly shown some sort of magic with their pow-pow shamanism, and the fact they still do this amazes me and I respect that a lot in a world where society has grown apathetic to magic of any kind and kids have their childhood ruined by their parents telling them Mary Poppins is a fraud or that the Genie in Aladin doesnt live in disneyland and cannot grant each person three wishes on account of him being a cartoon. Parents and siblings who know better are real shits sometimes, but I wont go into that.
Anyway for the example of magic I gave above about wiccan and the purge and black magic, its that witches were conceptualized as older crones, asides from good witches because the good side always has to have hot chicks everywhere.
I imagine they were all virgins given the strict influence of god at that time and it so happened one of them found a way to utilize black magic at around 30 and trained herself and others over the span of years and eventually decided men were being too sexist and rightly fucking so and gave them a dose of a medicine they couldnt have, and so the men replied like absolute douches by burning them all on a stake.
Fucking hell, its no wonder no aliens who know better than we do haven't come by for a tea party, looking at the history of humans and all the inconceivably dumb and brutal acts weve comitted probably makes us the laughing stock of the entire fucking universe. I know somewhere across the timeless expanse of space some innocent alien teenager watching EARTH on the outsider channel is going to be laughing his first laugh of evil when we eventually blow ourselves up like unspeakable twats, his evil will be shortly followed by a sigh of relief that we never invented trans-planetary travel like I predicted we would in Intelligence and then followed by silence as he meditates to cleanse him of such evil thoughts.
If Planet Irk truly exists and the Irken have found out that they were infact right, and that Earth isnt useful even as a giant storage planet for their gratituous amount of snacks, then maybe we can be blessed by the fact we'll get to see an Armada that has topped every warband of ships ever seen, including the Spanish Royal Navy which was burned by "fiery pride" and the Imperial Star Destroyer fleet in star wars, well okay maybe not that.
But still, the Irken Armada is Pretty Impressive and is one of the few times watching local media I've been doubtful that the protagonist was going to fucking win like they tend too.
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