🚀 go-pugleaf

February is too damn short. It seems that just as soon as it's
started, it's already over; how am we supposed to get any game-playing
done in such a short time?

Well, no matter; I did what I could and played what I played. It's the
end of the month again, so let's all share our play-lists once again.
PCs, console, hand-held, hell, even tabletop if that's your thing;
tell everybody what games have occupied your attention for the past
thirty (erm, 28) days. And if you are really into it (or just bored
enough) share a few thoughts on the games too. Or not; your choice.

Me first!

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Short and Sweet
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* Grand Theft Auto 4
* Dead Space 2
* Line of Sight Vietnam
* The Bureau XCOM Declassified
* X-COM Enforcer


TL; DR 
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* Grand Theft Auto 4 (replay) 
Let me just start by saying that I replayed GTA4 using the ICE 3.0
graphics enhancement mod, and ohmigod, does it make the game look
gorgeous. It's not quite up to the standard set by the sequel, but it
comes pretty damn close (well, most of the time; some of the textures
and the shorter draw distance knock things down a notch). In some
areas - particularly the AI animations - the game is noticeably
superior. Not bad for a nine year old game.

The gameplay is pure GTA, with all its strength and weaknesses. The
huge open world is wonderfully detailed; more so, in my opinion, than
that of GTA5. The vehicles control as terribly as ever, and the combat
is middling. But it's the scale and variety of the world far more than
the gameplay that was always the draw of the franchise.

The satire and humor, on the other hand, are decidedly sub-par; too
biting and nasty to be enjoyable even for a Rockstar production (even
for the guys who made literal murder-simulators with the Manhunt
games). I did quite enjoy the early parts of the game which focused
more on Nico, the protagonist, and his relationship with needy cousin
Roman. Nico is a truly broken person and the developers managed some
surprisingly deep and satisfying characterization, making him equally
loathsome and pitiable at the same time. Unfortunately, the latter
half of the game degenerates into broad stereotypes with increasingly
fantastic adventures, and this early magic is sacrificed for cheap
jokes and over-the-top action cliches. I struggled to play the game to
the end.

Still, revisiting Liberty City in all its newly-found high-res glory
and following Nico's wounded journey through the city's dirty
underside - at least in the beginning - was a welcome return to one of
gaming's classic titles.



* Dead Space 2 (replay) 
I constantly harp on how important I think it is for games to be
innovative; I forgive otherwise poor gameplay or world-building if
they show evidence of trying something new, and penalize triple-A
titles if they play it safe and just rehash tired cliches and genre.
So I'll be the first to admit my appreciation of Dead Space 2 might
seem a bit hypocritical. It's not just a sequel, the whole franchise
is little more than a re-skinning of the Resident Evil games with
better controls and more gore; innovative it is not. 

But damned if it isn't a fun - if unadventurous - game. In part this
has to do with its excellent production values - the levels are
beautifully detailed (given that they are all blood-drenched
renderings of Futuristic Space City #437) and feel practical and
lived-in, which greatly helps to sell the horror. The characters and
story  are fairly strong too, although I can't help but feel the
developers missed an opportunity to play up the idea that the
protagonist was truly insane and everything was just some
phantasmagoric hallucination. The gameplay was fairly solid; the
enemies were quick and deadly, if somewhat predictable, and the
weapons /just/ effective enough to keep from getting killed (the game
was a bit extravagant with ammunition, however, which lessened the
feeling of threat). But Dead Space 2's real strength was in its
pacing; it mixed its action sequences and quiet scenes in just the
right balance. I never felt bored and I never felt completely
overwhelmed, a balancing act of exceptional performance that few games
manage successfully. 

So I'll be the first to admit Dead Space 2 doesn't expand the hobby in
any way, but it still was a great game to play.



* Line of Sight Vietnam (replay) 
LoS: Vietnam's biggest fault is that it came out in 2003, the same
year as Pterdon Studio's far better game, "Vietcong", was released.
Had it been released three or four years earlier, it's failings would
have been much more forgivable, as it shows evidence of being a game
caught between in the transitory period of pure action shooters like
Doom and more story-focused titles like Half-Life or Call of Duty.

It didn't help that it was a budget shooter utilizing a game-engine
from a 2001 game ("Deadly Dozen") that itself was already dated when
it was new. Although LoS: Vietnam featured impressively large and open
levels with a good amount of foliage, the too-near fog sabotaged the
effort, leaving everything feeling as claustrophobic and linear as any
late-90s Doom-clone. Worse though was the AI. Not only could it draw a
bead on you from hundreds of feet away, it spawned in such numbers it
often felt more like playing Doom than the modern tactical shooter it
wanted to be. It was also -perhaps an unfair criticism, given its
release date - a difficult game to get into from a modern perspective,
given the lack of modern conveniences, most notably the lack of iron
sights for the weapons.

Still, it was obvious the developers were trying to create something
different; there was a rudimentary stealth feature that - although
poorly implemented - and creeping through the brush was satisfyingly
tense. The buddy AI was a useful assist, all the more so since you
could switch to the other player at any time (unfortunately, it too
often got stuck on the terrain and I had to manually take over just to
ensure he didn't get left behind). Better done - or a few years
earlier - and the game would have been a classic. Unfortunately, even
by 2003 the game felt dated and - when compared to Vietcong -
disappointingly sub par. 




* The Bureau XCOM Declassified (replay) 
The Bureau's biggest problem was that it was released after 2012's
"XCOM: Enemy Unknown"; that's a nearly impossible act to follow, even
if it wasn't a title that attempted to shift the beloved franchise
from tactical strategy to third-person shooter. Had it been released a
few years earlier, it probably would have received a much more
favorable reception.

This shouldn't be taken to imply that was the game's only failing,
however; even with a more advantageous release date, it still would
have received its fair share of criticism. One of its biggest issues,
I feel, is that it wasn't quite sure what sort of game it wanted to
be. Was it a pure shooter? A tactical strategy game? An action RPG? It
had elements of all of these, but implemented none of them fully or
satisfyingly, resulting in a half-hearted mixture of all of them.

Played as a pure shooter, it was adequate, at best. Too many of its
poorly-paced levels just dragged on, with overly long combat
interrupted by empty and pointless corridors stretching endlessly
between the combat arenas. Arguably, the combat was supposed to be
spiced up by the tactical strategy element where you would order your
allied AI to move about and use special abilities, but the dreadful
interface and even worse AI made your allies more of a hindrance than
advantage. I usually found it easier to just park them out of danger
and take out the bad guys myself. Then you get back to base and the
game switches into a sort of Mass Effect lite mode, except none of
your choices really have any effect on the storyline and all the
side-quests sort of dry up at the halfway point of the game anyway.
Plus, despite some obvious rehashes of familiar enemies and tropes, on
the whole the game didn't /feel/ like an XCom game, and instead seemed
more of somebody else's sci-fi adventure unhappily forced into an XCom
skin. 

Ignoring all the things that made XCom unique, the game was
acceptable, if flawed and unexceptional, but burdened with the
expectations that came with the franchise it was no surprise the game
failed so miserably. 


* X-COM Enforcer (replay) 
Few people remember that the unfortunate X-Com spin-off, The Bureau,
wasn't the franchise's first FPS; that honor belonged to Enforcer.
Released in 2001, Enforcer was an even more ungainly fit to the
franchise, being little more than an action-shooter that owed almost
no similarity to the earlier titles of the series. But ignoring its
unfortunate connections with the franchise, the game could be
surprisingly fun.

Enforcer utilized the Unreal engine and - remembering this game is now
16 years old - quite good looking. It lacked any spectacular
set-pieces, featuring instead rather humdrum locations such as trailer
parks and city streets - but provided a good amount of detail and
variety. I particularly enjoyed the number of things - cars, propane
tanks, signs, garbage cans, doors, windows - that I could blow up with
my guns. Even more impressive was the sheer number of enemies
available to kill. While most games of its day struggled with five or
six enemies on-screen at once, Enforcer managed 20 to 30 at a time,
and by the time I reached the end of a level I usually had slaughtered
my way through four or five HUNDRED of the villains. In many ways, the
game was more akin to modern "horde shooters" than the scripted
adventures of its contemporaries. Similar to horde shooters, killing
enemies earned you resources ("research points") with which to upgrade
weapons and abilities. While this encouraged "grind", I didn't mind
that much; the weapons were suitably overpowered and a well-placed
shotgun blast could take out five or six enemies at a time. (The AI
wasn't too deadly on its own, but their numbers could quickly whittle
down my health if I wasn't careful).

The game's biggest flaw - aside from its XCom lineage - was that it
was played in third-person, and it had lousy targeting and camera
control. The latter was even more problematic when it came to the
occasional jumping puzzle or navigating narrow ledges. It also was
uneven in tone, never quite sure if it was an action-adventure, a
horror game or a tongue-in-cheek poke at the whole UFO genre. 

Still, as a quick pick-me-up shooter it was enjoyable, if simplistic,
fun.



* Shadow Ops Red Mercury (replay) 
The easiest description I can give of Shadow Ops is "Call of Duty
Modern Warfare", if done with a less talented team and worse
technology.

It's evident that Zombie Studios, the developers of Shadow Ops, wanted
to make exactly the same sort of game that Infinity Ward would produce
three years later; it's the same sort of spec-ops bullshit, scripted
and liner story-driven adventure as would dominate the genre for
nearly a decade, albeit released in 2004 instead of 2007, and not done
half as well. 

In part, this was a failing of the technology; the graphics engine
just couldn't produce the necessary quality of visuals, still being
stuck with the "real is brown" graphics and blocky polygonal
characters that seemed just a step above Quake's monsters. Better
lighting and production values would have greatly improved the effect
and immersion of the game, but the aging Unreal engine just was not
able to provide these. But the game also suffered from poor level
design; not just in how the levels looked, but also in flow and
layout, in how it clued the player as to where to go next, and in
enemy placement. Gameplay was too frequently interrupted by video
cut-scenes (because in-engine graphics couldn't cut it), and the
inability to drop or pick up new weapons seems a baffling choice. 

The story is the usual Modern Warfare awfulness, with a super-human
protagonist soldier-spy mowing down enemies in venues as varied as the
Congo, to a Russian research facility, to the streets of Paris itself
(none of them very convincingly rendered), all in pursuit of a madman
with the eponymous "red mercury" bomb. In this area, at least, the
game is on par with the more notable Call of Duty games, which are
equally nonsensical and stupid, but that's not much of an achievement.

As a historical footnote, the game is of marginal interest as it
evidences the direction the genre was moving, but as a game it is
forgettable and unenjoyable trash. 


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And that's me, for February. Now that I look back at it, that's a
pretty good impressive number of games played to completion for just
four weeks. Imagine what I can do in a month that has 31 days ;-)

So what about you? What Have You Been Playing... IN FEBRUARY 2016?