Reminds me of the original Mercenaries game for the PS2. The shotgun was glitched and didn't have any sound when fired, it made it feel like the most useless weapon in the game.
This is probably another reason why I like playing as Demo-man or Soldier in TF2 so much. When you blow up an enemy they burst into little gooey chunks with such satisfying squishy sounds.
I think this also needs to apply to magic in games. My favorite thing about the first Fable was how powerful the magic felt. A fully powered force push would send everyone in a town flying. Or a fully-leveled lightning would almost immediately kill everything in your immediate vicinity.
My weapons of choice
Saints Row 2's Pimp Slap hand, seriously, you can FLIP CARS with this foam finger, you can also cause people to go over building and then die. The Pimp Cane, a pimp cane, as a shotgun, and it does the same thing as the pimp slap, but in SHOTGUN FORM!
You can switch the Pimp Slap hand with the Apoco-fist in the upcoming Saints Row The Third.
This is definitely something the older games seemed to understand a lot more. Goldeneye still has every gun feel just right, and it doesn't even have reloading animations. Then when you try Perfect Dark with all the perks PLUS some deft reloading of contemporary, futuristic AND alien liquid like guns, its. just... ohhhh...
Absolutely 100% agreed on this article. And RE4 is really a great example. I anticipate when I have to reload the bolt-action rifle, the animation and sounds are just satisfying. The way the bullets don't go in smoothly, and Leon has to use force to get them in, and the clink of the stripper clip flying off as the bolt is pushed forward.
I think something that's overlooked in Killing Floor is the keen attention to detail Tripwire has put into the weapons. You can actually see the next round being pushed into the chamber on the 9mm handgun and the lever action rifle.
One thing I've always wanted to experiment with is what would happen if you gave the player more control over the gun. I remember one Half-Life mod, the shotgun wouldn't auto-cock between each shot. You had to hit fire again to cock it. It was badass. Imagine that artful pause you can do after a perfect kill. POW ... k-chk
Red Orchestra also had you pull the bolt "manually" after each shot, akin to the shotgun.
Perhaps make a mini-mini-game out of clearing a jam on a gun. It was pretty intense in Far Cry 2 when your gun suddenly jammed on you, and your character desperately tried to unjam it by pulling and hitting the weapon mid-fight.
I'm a gun nut, so these details add a lot to a game for me.
I agree. Before the vibration of dualshock controllers, I wonder how I played FPSes (I don't much now, but I like the clatter when I do).
While I could go on for days about why I like the PS2 game PRIMAL, one of the many things I enjoy is that the back of the box promises visceral combat and actually delivers it. In the first area, when you fight enemy soldiers and bust a finishing move to kill them, your character's claws actually sound like meat cleavers going through a pig's abdomen. Like they freakin' should. In the third world, when you kill enemies by hamstringing them and then stabbing them a few times, the controller only gives a little buck on the hamstring, but for the stabs, it feels like you contact the stone under the body with each hit. That's awesome.
And here is one more person who total agrees with this article. Also, My favorite gun is the molten rebar crossbow from Half-Life 2. The sizzle as you put a new bar in, the way it pinned things to walls, the satisfying thunk as you pulled the trigger... plus it shoots molten rebar!
Enemies taking damage is something a lot of games are missing nowadays. That used to be a big thing back in shooters for a while. Remember Goldeneye letting you shoot hats off people, clutching a leg, blasting guns out of hands, crotch shots drawing a two-handed grab. Or a more mediocre example, Soldier of Fortune for those who remember it letting you systematically blow limbs off of enemies. Maybe I just don't play enough shooters anymore, but the few I have played recently don't really seem to allow you to do that anymore. Fallout is the latest example I can think of letting you really target limbs, but their system was basically the same little canned animation flinch every time from humanoid enemies until you actually crippled the limb or killed them outright by tearing it off.
And with their limb removal I think they actually went and gave themselves the exact opposite problem Yahtzee discusses. By having even the smallest pistol able to decapitate someone, it means more powerful weapons don't really look stronger, enemies are torn apart equally effective no matter what you use, diluting all of them.
People don't always appreciate all the little things, but it's worse when the developers don't. You have to really study everything about a game to get the full effect. I wanna be a game developer, but so far it's been daunting. Right now I'm a crew of one man doing the programming, graphics, and sound all together. Not easy....
We should totally team up. Except that I'm as useless a programmer as a carpenter with no thumbs.
OT: Brilliant again, Yahtzee. Even when I would use cheats in Doom II, I'd always pick the shotgun because it was so much more fun to fire than anything else in the game. The same reason I picked Kar 98 in Call of Duty 3 because the firing of the bolt, the ejecting of cartridge, and the insertion of a new cartridge followed by a locking click was...sublime--especially after a headshot.
Remind me to ask for that to be a banning offense if it goes past the first page. Well, if you're not willing to discuss anything important, I'd better do it here.
It was the only topic worth mentioning since your review had fuck-all else that was worth talking about. What else was there to discuss? The way you didn't like something? Oh shock of shocks, the gaming-hate-critic hates something in a game! Clearly this is a fresh and original topic with a firm objective basis!
Discussing opinions is like laughing when someone farts; it's amusing for a moment but quickly gets old when everyone does the same thing. Not to mention it stinks.
Oh well...*reads rest of article*
Well, this is something I can agree with in terms of discussion value; aesthetic/kinects of weapons.
The first examples of GOOD weapon kinects that spring to mind:
1) The Crossbow from Half Life 2 (pinning someone to a wall by their throat is incredibly satisfying. That's all I need to say about that.)
2) The Blaze Pistol from Hellgate London
Since I doubt most of you have bothered with that piece of shit game (and I don't blame you)...the Blaze Pistol is a one-handed explosive-tipped dart launcher. You shoot it, and about 1.5 seconds after it strikes something, be it enemy object or wall, it digs in and then explodes.
This weapon is available to the Occultists/Mages/Whatever pretty much from the start of the game, if you can find/buy them. Despite being fairly weak-statistically (they are early game weapons, which means they scale poorly with a long game) they were bloody fun to use.
Oh, and you could dual-wield them.
They even provided a degree of strategy. See that Standard-Issue-FPS-Explosive-Barrel? Get the monsters' attention to charge at you, tag the barrel and then the monster(s), watch them fly back from the explosion and then watch their CORPSE explode shortly thereafter in midair.
Fucking priceless.
There are quite a few weapons in Hellgate: London with cool perks like that. Borderlands did the Gun-RPG better (understatement of the year), but it still lacked a few of these nifty/awesome weapons.
For my money, weaponry doesn't get any more satisfying than one particularly fantastic rifle in the game Armed and Dangerous, called the Landshark Gun.
See, you didn't so much aim it at targets so much as point it in their general direction and pull the trigger, whereupon the ordnance flew forward a few feet and then hit the ground... and then turned into a giant shark which would "swim" under the terrain (with the telltale ominous fin breaking the surface) before rising up and sequentially devouring several enemies in a simply spectacular animation. Man-eating sharks: the ultimate "fire and forget" weapon.
Also you had a black hole in a box, and giant mortar launchers shaped sort of like a tuba (of death!).
I think something that's overlooked in Killing Floor is the keen attention to detail Tripwire has put into the weapons. You can actually see the next round being pushed into the chamber on the 9mm handgun and the lever action rifle.
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