243: Guerilla Warfare

[Jaz McDougall]

Guerilla Warfare

Red Faction: Guerilla lets players level entire city blocks with little more than a sledgehammer, yet players must still worry about health bars and limited ammo. But Jaz McDougall has had enough of this developer oppression, and he's decided to throw off his shackles the only way he can: by rewriting the rules of the game.

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[Onyx Oblivion]

You want a game that ENCOURAGES rule breaking?

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts.

Anyway, the built in cheats in RF:G more than made up for it. Super Hammer, Super Health, Super Jetpack, Infinite Ammo, all that good shit.

 

[vaderaider]

That was a very good read.
Sandbox games can be good with no cheats activated, but put them on and the real fun begins

 

[CUnk]

I was initially unimpressed and bored with RF:G due mainly to the reasons you mention. It was too easy to die and the frustration of having my mayhem cut short was wearing on me. Then I set the difficulty to low where it became nearly impossible to die and my enjoyment of the game skyrocketed.

 

[Veylon]

I'd consider this to be cheating in it's highest form: creating a new game to play with it's own pleasures and challenges. Realism is good in it's own way, but surrealism can be highly entertaining as well and should not be underrated.

 

[mechanixis]

Red Faction Guerrilla is a pretty prime example of this phenomenon. I was very excited about it pre-release, but once I got to playing it I realized it was thickly layered under a story I could not bring myself to care about (because it certainly wasn't why I was drawn to the game) and some stringent rules about Alec Mason's fragile mortality. I wound up tiring of it pretty fast.

This strikes a cord with a lot of sandbox games - I remember recently playing Assassin's Creed 2 recently and wishing the characters would just shut up, because all I wanted was to romp around as a dude in the renaissance who climbed buildings and stabbed people. The worst offender is Prototype, which goes out of its way to find ways to kill you, with a difficulty curve that seems extremely offended by your desire to be stronger than your NPC opponents. There's even a whole level where you lose almost all your powers and it takes half a dozen missions just to get them back. And it also is constantly shoveling an incredibly bland, poorly told story down your throat, full of misplaced cliches and the most insanely convoluted method of exposition I've ever seen.
The fact is, with most sandbox games, I don't want a narrative or a complex character to play as; I just want an intricate world that reacts dynamically to my behavior.

Fingers crossed for Red Dead Redemption.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

Fingers crossed for Red Dead Redemption.

You're not going to be able to fire your gun at someone until you hear the opponents life story.

 

[mechanixis]

Fingers crossed for Red Dead Redemption.

You're not going to be able to fire your gun at someone until you hear the opponents life story.

Also your character is susceptible to all diseases of the time period, and should you come down with one you must lie in an in-game infirmary bed in real-time until you recover.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

Fingers crossed for Red Dead Redemption.

You're not going to be able to fire your gun at someone until you hear the opponents life story.

Also your character is susceptible to all diseases of the time period, and should you come down with one you must lie in an in-game infirmary bed in real-time until you recover.

And the nurses are ugly.

 

[MDSnowman]

God the thing that annoyed me about RF:G was the total lack of story. Running around and blowing stuff up was fun, but it felt fairly pointless with the flimsy story and character.

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

RF:G could have been a great game, only if it wasn't so repetitive (missions), and also the story felt very short if you put aside the secondary missions... the multiplayer is great Fun, but let's hope that in 5 to 10 years they don't bring down those servers (which are messed up, cause it finds you servers instead of you choosing which one you want to play) in exchange for those of the Sequel of Red Faction Guerilla...

 

[LTK_70]

I hated playing Red Faction: Guerilla. It was a complete pain in the ass. Reading this gave me some motivation to play it again...

 

[SomeBoredGuy]

Do you mind if I ask where to find the trainer in question? Sounds like a lot of fun.

 

[duckfi8]

Do you mind if I ask where to find the trainer in question? Sounds like a lot of fun.

same here

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Yes..... so remove balancing and what not and don't worry about making a game but a "experience".

IMO this is dumbing things down to much you are making a game not a film or a bit of flash and bang to consume and forget.... Bioshock had no balance or pacing and that destroyed the game for me and this modern design emphasis on streamlined experiences is just making me hate shallow modern games all the more.....

 

[Tolerant Fanboy]

"But no matter how thoroughly you might enjoy Niko Bellic's struggle against his psychopathic tendencies in your first play through of Grand Theft Auto 4, you don't return to Liberty City to have a quiet stroll or go clothes shopping."

Am I the only one who thought "If you want to go clothes shopping, you play No More Heroes!"?

 

[Jazmeister]

Do you mind if I ask where to find the trainer in question? Sounds like a lot of fun.

same here

I nabbed it from cheathappens.com. It's the "mega trainer" by a team called Reloaded (I think). I've had trouble getting it to work with the steam version since RF:G was patched - you need some sort of premium membership to get the latest version of that particular trainer. Still, it was good while it lasted.

Yes..... so remove balancing and what not and don't worry about making a game but a "experience".

IMO this is dumbing things down to much you are making a game not a film or a bit of flash and bang to consume and forget.... Bioshock had no balance or pacing and that destroyed the game for me and this modern design emphasis on streamlined experiences is just making me hate shallow modern games all the more.....

I know what you mean. There is a fine line to walk here, because sitting down to just burn through all the content with some cheats can be dull too.

I wrote this because, by ridding yourself of the annoyance of the game's basic challenges, you can enter a meta-game and try to set yourself loftier goals. One of the coolest things I did that I couldn't fit into the theme of this piece was low-gravity-hammer-only mode. Essentially, I limited myself to the hammer and went sailing around the vertical space of the areas to complete objectives. The main challenge I set myself was to lure down a helicopter and try to smash it with the hammer. I didn't manage - your jump isn't infinite, even with the altered gravity - but I did get close by precision-hopping across the environment and finding a nice high mountain. I felt like Thor. There's something unique to sandbox games that makes them very well suited to this type of thing, too.

I was just reading Jim Rossignol talking about something similar over at RPS, and it certainly feeds into this discussion: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/02/28/counting-for-taste/

 

[wildpeaks]

you need some sort of premium membership to get the latest version of that particular trainer.

Yes, they usually keep the trainers of the most recentt version of popular games only for paying members because they only produce trainers from games legally bought (they don't use pirated games for example), and the servers cost some money to keep up, that's why they changed to that way some years ago.

But honestly, for people who play many games, the lifetime membership is worth it: within days of the games or updates being released, they already have working trainers, without the risk of viruses you'd get from p2p, and they only do singleplayer games, so it's not helping scripts kiddies looking for messing in online games.

 

[wildpeaks]

You want a game that ENCOURAGES rule breaking?.

There is "The path [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Path_(video_game)]" as well. It was funny to see how many people complained about the demo because they actually followed the "do not go in the forest !" objective, which finishes the demo in two minutes without seeing anything :-D