Geeze, a week without a single post? Yes, it’s been a busy time for me lately, but thankfully I’ve been in the middle of beating two (yes, two!) games, and I just finished up one of them. Earlier this week I was working on finishing up Burnout Paradise when I decided I wanted to take quick break from it. I turned to Mirror’s Edge to fill the gap, my last remaining unbeaten game on Origin and the last game in my EA Humble Bundle.
Yesterday I beat Medal of Honor. No, not the 2010 remake. The original on the PlayStation.
You see, a long, long time ago, people used to have to go to a store to buy video games. You know – the brick and mortar kind. You would look at the games on the shelves, see if they had one you liked, and then bought a “copy” of it on a physical medium such as a compact disc or cartridge. Most of the time the game stores only stocked new games that were popular and sold very well. After a while, they would get rid of their old games to make room for new ones. If they didn’t have the one you were looking for, you were out of luck.
Sometimes, though, people would get tired of their old games and sell them back to the game store. Then the game store would put them back on the shelf as a “used game”, mark down the price, and then resell it to another person. If you were lucky, you might find some really old, valuable game buried beneath piles of used Madden and Need for Speed titles. But you had to act fast! Sometimes game stores would stop selling games from certain consoles altogether, and then it was even harder to find the games you were looking for.
This is essentially how my gaming life worked between the ages of 13 to 18. My friends and I were gaming junkies, and we searched high and low for our favorite classics. This was before digital downloads were a big thing, so finding a phyiscal copy of a game you were after was like spotting a unicorn. We scoured bargain bins for anything that seemed valuable at the time. The older, the better.
God, I hated this game.
Call of Duty 3 was one of the games I was dreading playing back when I started this backlog, and I finally decided to clear it out after my Black Ops binge. Even though the gaming industry heaped awards on top of Call of Duty 3 when it was released, in my opinion it is the most mediocre CoD out there. A developer from Treyarch once said in an interview that the team only had eight months to put out the game, and does it ever show.
To begin, Call of Duty 3 is downright frustrating. It’s central mechanic works by spawning infinite numbers of enemies to advance towards “cover points” if they are open. The goal is to shoot down these soldiers while advancing towards the enemy, thus pushing back their front line. Enemies stop showing up once you have overtaken the original spawn point. The disadvantage to this is that you are constantly fighting an infinite wave of enemies that will respawn faster than you can shoot them down, all the while leaving cover to run towards the next enemy spawn point. On the hardest difficulty you can spend up to 20 minutes just trying to get to the next checkpoint, mostly through a combination of trial and error and luck.
Needless to say, the very first thing I did before continuing was drop the difficulty straight down to zero. Yes, it seems like I’ve got a real streak for starting CoD games on the hardest difficulty and never finishing them. I had struggled through Call of Duty 3 for hours a few years ago before finally giving up. The game was just too damn frustrating.
I put some heavy playtime into Call of Duty: Black Ops on Thursday, but didn’t get the chance to write anything up for it then. I made it to about three levels from the end of the game before putting it down for the night. My afternoon was free today, so I plugged another hour into it and beat it. I may have judged Black Ops too quickly before – the story does pull up around the halfway mark, and the game play becomes a little more varied.
By far my favorite level in the game was the Arctic level as Victor Reznov. Not only does it feature two of the protagonists from World at War (Reznov and Dimitri Petrenko), serving as the major link between the two games, but its also the only level in the game where you go back to killing Nazis. What is so satisfying about shooting National Socialists, anyway? Perhaps I am merely nostalgic for the days of the WWII shooter. Back when the good guys were good guys, the bad guys were bad guys, and there was no convoluted conspiracy story line you had to keep track of.
Speaking of which, the story does get better a little later on. I’m about to spoil the story, so skip this paragraph if you concerned about ruining a storyline that is now four years old. Anyway, the game develops the primary characters more, but by far the most likable character becomes Reznov, who joins you on several missions. Reznov is an awesome character – he is heroic, resolute, and uplifting the darkest of moments. That makes it all the more shocking when a twist reveals he is a hallucination. Reznov is the Tyler Durden to Mason’s Cornelius – they are the same person, but Mason sees Reznov as a separate person thanks to a dissociation disorder explained by events triggered earlier in the game. It’s a plot twist I did not see coming, and although it’s not the most original plot device, it’s a level of writing I did not expect from Black Ops.
I’ve been getting a little tired of staring at my computer monitor lately (and sitting in my uncomfortable wooden desk chair), and I noticed that the consoles hadn’t been getting much love lately. Therefore, I decided that it was time to boot up an unfinished console game to see if I could strike another one off the backlog. I do love the refined controls of the PC, but there’s really nothing like sitting back in the comfort of an armchair and getting to enjoy a game on a 55″ flat screen TV.
Call of Duty: Black Ops probably feels like a bit of an arbitrary choice, but part of me wants to blow through my unwanted titles first so I can sit back later and enjoy the games I actually want to play. Also, CoD games are notorious for their short campaigns, and that’s perfectly okay with me. I now own Black Ops thanks to my brother, who also owned an XBox 360 at one point. When he eventually sold his console to a friend of ours, I wound up inheriting some of his games, and it’s been sitting in my library ever since. Strangely, I now own almost every CoD game with the exception of Black Ops 2 and Call of Duty 2, even though I’m not a particularly avid fan of the series.
To me, Black Ops is a mediocre game by most measures. Perhaps the multiplayer was its main selling point, but since I’ve fallen out of the habit of playing CoD games merely for the multiplayer, this really means jack squat to me. So far the level design hasn’t offered anything innovative. Some of the environments are pretty interesting (the cosmodrome level was a very cool environment to traverse), but progression hasn’t evolved much from find cover, shoot, advance. Just last night I couldn’t help but sigh as I was told to jump on a mounted machine gun to defend an area from a wave on oncoming Vietnamese soldiers. The weapon set has arbitrarily changed once again, pointless since you don’t really need much besides the nearest semi-automatic rifle.
Well it was quite an eventful weekend for me, so I wound up not really touching my backlog for the most part. In between the Ubisoft and Sony E3 conferences last night, though, Andrew and I jumped back on Super Meat Boy to see if we could hammer out the last couple of levels in under an hour. Turns out we had quite a bit of difficulty on level 16, and it took us way, way longer to finish it than we expected. In order to cut down on some of the boring game play, I fast forward through most of it in the video. I hope you enjoy the spectacle of it.
After that, the remainder of world 5 goes by at a regular pace. It does take us some time to figure out the trick on level 18, but produced nowhere near the level of frustration that level 16 did. The worm bosses turned out to be my favorite part of this sitting, though. Once you found out how to beat them, there really isn’t anything more satisfying than hearing them get ground through a row of saw blades. Even though it was probably the easiest boss so far, it was much more fun than the rote memorization of the world 4 boss (literally, the boss from Hell).
After all of that though – surprise! Rapture actually wasn’t the final world! There’s still another whole world to go, though this one only has about 5 levels and does not seem to be as frustrating. Andrew claims he completely forgot about this world, though maybe he just didn’t want to ruin the surprise. We should have stopped it there, but we wanted to push forward and wound up spending another whole 10 minutes on the first level alone. Eventually Andrew needed to go get ready for the Sony conference and we ended it pretty unceremoniously after I beat the first level. Next time will be the last, we swear!
In other news: our video has an intro! The song was actually suggested by Andrew, and I thought it would be hilariously appropriate. I may do something more fancy later on, but for now this works out pretty well for what we need.
The video and audio quality is slowly improving, but both Andrew and I think it needs more work. The audio levels seem to jump randomly at points, and when we scream into the mic there’s still some really bad clipping. Fortunately I lowered the volume at those points so our yells won’t rupture your ear drums. The video is another thing. We have it on max capture quality and render it in MP4, but it still doesn’t really look too good. It’ll have to do for now, but I may have to invest in a computer capture card in the future.
So I continued my trend today by picking up where I left off in Super Meat Boy. This was also at the suggestion of my room mate Andrew Banks, who was also kind enough to do commentary with me on my first ever Let’s Play voice over! Woooo! Seriously, we’ve been wanting to do one of these for months now, but we didn’t really have the infrastructure set up to upload anything until now. This is definitely a big milestone for both of us.
Let me tell you, making a Let’s Play video is definitely not as easy as it looks. Those guys on YouTube like Egoraptor and JonTron are serious professionals. Trying to be witty while focusing on a game is tough. It’s easy to be funny while you’re relaxed with friends, but doing it in front of the mic is a whole other ballgame. We tried our best to be entertaining of course. Thankfully it’s easier to talk naturally about our lives than it is to force humor, so I think the video came out quite enjoyable.
The game? Oh right, of course. So I actually bought Super Meat Boy for no other reason than I was bored at work one day and thought I might want to play it that night when I got home. I think it was about $2.99 and I can’t even buy a crappy sandwich at Subway for that much money, so I thought it was worth it. I wound up playing it many months later and got to the last world, Rapture, before putting it down and getting distracted.
The first ten minutes of game play I was really struggling with the level I was stuck on from before. Right around the 11 minute mark I managed to beat it, and things go fairly smoothly from there on out. Skip to around 49:37 if you’d like to see my favorite part of the video, where I narrowly miss a hail-mary run through a damn tough level (though I beat it soon after). I thought we might wind up beating this by the end of the video, but the heat in my room got to us and we wound up just calling it a night. Next time for sure.
In future videos I plan on tweaking the audio levels more. The music is a bit too loud in some places even though we turned it down a lot already. This is what experimentation is all about though.
So I managed to get a little bit of game time in after last night’s episode of Game of Thrones. As expected, the final level was nice and short and I was through it in about 20 minutes. The boss itself was actually rather easy to beat – I don’t even think I needed a health pickup the entire time I was playing. Perhaps I should have stuck it out on normal mode after all.
Overall Hard Reset was an entertaining game, and that’s all it really needs to be in my opinion. I really enjoyed it toward the end when the level design got better. What’s great about this game is that the pace never really slows down too much. After each fight there’s ample ammo and health to pick up, so really all you need to do is focus on surviving the fight, rather than converving for the long-haul. Sadly, I still cannot tell what is going with the story, but I’m okay with that.
Rather than take screenshots, I managed to record my entire session for your viewing pleasure. Because the game crashed last time, I actually got sent back to a prior checkpoint, so you get to see the end of the previous level in addition to the final boss.
Sadly, there’s no commentary just yet. Still getting my equipment set up for recording. In the future I will probably add in some audio commentary to make a nice Let’s Play video out of it.
So where to go from here? If I follow the trend and pick up games I’m close to finishing, Super Meat Boy might be on the plate (last world), or possibly the original Medal of Honor for the PS1 (on the last level for that one too). Or if I’m looking to clear out my Origin games next, I might go in for some Mirror’s Edge, which has remained completely unplayed. Stay tuned!
Today is Sunday, which means two things: a new Game of Thrones episode, and some down time to get some gaming done. For my first progress report I’ll naturally be jumping into a game I’m already in the middle of playing. I received Hard Reset few months ago in a first-person-shooter Humble Bundle that I bought mostly to get System Shock 2. Along with that game, though, I got about a half-dozen other games that have been clogging up my Steam library ever since. And I still haven’t played System Shock 2 yet. Go figure.
Hard Reset is what one would call an old-school shooter: lots of enemies, and very little plot. If at first that sounds like poor game design, guess again. Old-school shooters are designed that way. They emphasize killing massive amounts of enemies that spawn in overwhelming waves. The action is so fast and exciting that it becomes the focus of the game itself. Serious Sam or Painkiller are great examples of the genre, and Hard Reset plays almost exactly like them.
Funnily enough, old-school shooters have become almost a parody of the genre, since the action in these games are often pushed to the point of absurdity. Many of them even force you into going outside of your normal FPS comfort zone. Waves of bad guys purposefully ambush you at the most inconvenient times, and enemies are frequently spawned behind you without notice and when you least expect it. It’s a game that requires fast thinking. For a game that emphasizes shooting over all else, it’s pleasantly surprising to see how well they trick you, and how easily you’ll fall for it.
About a year and a half ago, I opened an account on backloggery.com, a website that allows you to catalog and keep track of your beaten and unbeaten games. My intention back then was to get back into gaming after five intense years of engineering school. I had just secured a job for after graduation and had politely declined the leadership positions I was offered from my student organizations. Senior year, I decided, would be the time to reclaim my life and get back to doing the things I loved: reading, writing, and playing video games.
Unfortunately, this was much easier said than done, and for several reasons. The remainder of the school year sped by, and before I knew it I was graduating with a BE in electrical engineering and facing a full-time position at a major bank. It was at that point I discovered the reality that, even as an adult, time is a scarce resource. Work eats up most of your time, for sure. Then on the weekends you want to go out, or risk feeling like you wasted all of your free time sitting in front of a computer. On weeknights time gets split between free time, errands (gotta do the groceries when you live on your own!) and spending time with your friends. And then there are the nights you’re simply too tired to care about anything.
But worst of all, battling the backlog is about battling your own desire to buy new games. Sounds silly, I’m sure, but consider the Steam sales where you can basically buy a year’s worth of games for about $2. Or consider the Humble Bundle offers where you can literally pay nothing to get good games. Sadly, a cluttered library full of unplayed games is the reality for many gamers.
Thus, I created this blog as motivation to get back on track and actually finish out my backlog. Here I will post reports on my progress in addition to my thoughts on beating games, being an adult gamer, and the gaming industry in general. As of today, I have 75 unbeaten or unplayed games in my library. Not bad, really. There are people who have it a lot worse, anyway. If I’m good with not buying any new games, I may have it done in a year’s time. If not…. well, we’ll see.
For now, here are some rules I will be following:
I’m sure more rules will follow, so keep an eye on the About page for the most up to date information. Also, I’m still on a basic WordPress template right now, but I’m hoping o improve the look of the site in the coming days. For now, the content is what’s important. Who knows what my backlog will look like a year from now, but here’s to hoping my number that the number is down, not up.
