On Generic Games
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
Thankyou. I have been living off this game for quite some time now. It is a great game but in terms of what I want from a space sim, it is nothing compared to Tie Fighter (Collectors Ed.) which remains on top of my all-time top game list, even though I haven't actually played it for nearly 10 years. (PLEASE RE_RELEASE IT LUCASARTS, PREFERABLY WITH SUPPORT FOR TODAY'S JOYSTICKS)Yahtzee Croshaw said:
perhaps instead of whining about a trend (an annoying trend but a trend) that he has well and truly whined about maybe he should actually whine about something i dunno maybe something new i mean what are space marine but a trend everyone should lump until its over and all look forward to brutal legend.
irrelevant but i really like war hammer 40k
irrelevant but i really like war hammer 40k
It also has probably the most satisfying weapons/bullet physics in a game that isn't Max Payne. Every bullet you fire actually goes someplace, and bullets don't magically disappear if you're out of range.saintchristopher said:
Not to mention the sound design is awesome.
All that aside, however, the game needed more checkpoints. If it were up to me, I'd have cut each level in half and separated it. We'd have twice as many levels of half the length. Which would be fine, because now levels would be about 40 minutes each instead of 80 minutes. Only the first level is of appropriate length.
Also, weapon balancing. Shotguns aren't good enough, and the AK is much too good. For a weapon that's usually inaccurate in games, you can basically snipe all day long with the AK in Black. But that Magnum is really awesome.
READ THIS!!! EAT LEAD: THE RETURN OF MATT HAZARD it is probibly the funniest joke game, and exactly what your asking forYahtzee Croshaw said:
and while your at it PLEASE look at the oddworld games, they went out of buisness bout '05, in their peak, and have made the highest quaklity games i have ever played
Yahtzee
"There hasn't been a mainstream, space-based, flight sim in ages, because you only have to render some ships, some floating rocks and a fuckload of empty void. Just about the only thing covering that niche right now is EVE Online, which is a little inaccessible to anyone with a boredom threshold shorter than sixteen years."
That may well be because Egosoft have taken 9 years, 3 games and 2 expansion packs (including Terran Conflict) to still completely miss the point about what makes a space game fun, each new entry to the series progressively stagnating the genre even further. I suspect other devs have been put off by it and frankly i don't blame them. See my X3: Reunion review if you like and don't worry about your recollection being tainted because if you've played (or at least attempted) 1 X game you've played the whole boring lot.
Try Freelancer, space game interfaces don't get any simpler than that; if you want to go to another planet, click on it, press F2 and off you go. To salvage cargo from an opponents wreckage, just press B to beam it on board. The list goes on. Or freespace 2, for it's thrilling combat.
"There hasn't been a mainstream, space-based, flight sim in ages, because you only have to render some ships, some floating rocks and a fuckload of empty void. Just about the only thing covering that niche right now is EVE Online, which is a little inaccessible to anyone with a boredom threshold shorter than sixteen years."
That may well be because Egosoft have taken 9 years, 3 games and 2 expansion packs (including Terran Conflict) to still completely miss the point about what makes a space game fun, each new entry to the series progressively stagnating the genre even further. I suspect other devs have been put off by it and frankly i don't blame them. See my X3: Reunion review if you like and don't worry about your recollection being tainted because if you've played (or at least attempted) 1 X game you've played the whole boring lot.
Try Freelancer, space game interfaces don't get any simpler than that; if you want to go to another planet, click on it, press F2 and off you go. To salvage cargo from an opponents wreckage, just press B to beam it on board. The list goes on. Or freespace 2, for it's thrilling combat.
I can't believe that no one has mentioned that Aaaa is a second generation to Screwjumper on xbl! I tried the demo for both and thought they both sucked. I have to say that due to this Yahtzee has lost a bit of credibility for me...
I had an cheesy insult at the end but decided to remove it and comment instead on the irony of "Generic Games" when Aaaa does the same thing to Screwjumper that Yahtzee gripes about in his article. Introduce new gimmicks that were not in the predecessor. I guess it's ok as long as it's not a shooter, right?
Well Yahtzee, it was good while it was good, but I must say that I'm finding you and the rest of the Escapist website to be a bunch of sellouts and won't be visiting anymore.
Goodbye!
I had an cheesy insult at the end but decided to remove it and comment instead on the irony of "Generic Games" when Aaaa does the same thing to Screwjumper that Yahtzee gripes about in his article. Introduce new gimmicks that were not in the predecessor. I guess it's ok as long as it's not a shooter, right?
Well Yahtzee, it was good while it was good, but I must say that I'm finding you and the rest of the Escapist website to be a bunch of sellouts and won't be visiting anymore.
Goodbye!
Ok, now I am confused. One week, your calling for games to be more indepth and call out the stupidity of games like Duke Nukem for being mindless gun fights, then another week call for more games like Duke because its what you think the genre needs to move back towards.
I'm not a fan of this old shooter revival movement.
Don't get me wrong, I grew up with games like quake, doom, goldeneye, perfect dark, Turok etc. And I really had a blast over the years playing them (Mmm I still remember all the time I put in unlocking absolutely everything in both Perfect Dark and goldeneye). But I went back and played everything I used to love for the old nostalgia feeling (I even gave serious sam a shot the other week), and quite frankly those games bore me to death now.
Walk forward, point, shoot. Just make sure you do the pointing part as fast as you can, and that's about it.
Regenerating health, a cover system and what have you serve to add more depth and variety than the above to your little encounters. Of course that's provided they're designed and integrated well, which in many cases they aren't, and are indeed just checking of a list of standard features to which the developers are begrudgingly bound.
But there'll always be bad games out there, what matters is that the ones that do it well provide a much deeper, strategic form of game-play than the oldies. And thus to me at least, are much more entertaining to play despite the fact they might not be as cool/fun to look at or talk about (what with the whole generic space marine in the future setting thing we have going on).
As boring as the artistic direction and storylines are in gears of war or crysis or left 4 dead, I have a hell of a lot more fun approaching each situation differently and actually having to think about how to handle each enemy creatively (relatively, for action type games anyway) Than I do running into each new area doing the exact same "Shoot everything in front of you really fast" routine.
Don't get me wrong, I grew up with games like quake, doom, goldeneye, perfect dark, Turok etc. And I really had a blast over the years playing them (Mmm I still remember all the time I put in unlocking absolutely everything in both Perfect Dark and goldeneye). But I went back and played everything I used to love for the old nostalgia feeling (I even gave serious sam a shot the other week), and quite frankly those games bore me to death now.
Walk forward, point, shoot. Just make sure you do the pointing part as fast as you can, and that's about it.
Regenerating health, a cover system and what have you serve to add more depth and variety than the above to your little encounters. Of course that's provided they're designed and integrated well, which in many cases they aren't, and are indeed just checking of a list of standard features to which the developers are begrudgingly bound.
But there'll always be bad games out there, what matters is that the ones that do it well provide a much deeper, strategic form of game-play than the oldies. And thus to me at least, are much more entertaining to play despite the fact they might not be as cool/fun to look at or talk about (what with the whole generic space marine in the future setting thing we have going on).
As boring as the artistic direction and storylines are in gears of war or crysis or left 4 dead, I have a hell of a lot more fun approaching each situation differently and actually having to think about how to handle each enemy creatively (relatively, for action type games anyway) Than I do running into each new area doing the exact same "Shoot everything in front of you really fast" routine.
I went back recently and played back through Serious Sam: First and Second Encounters. It does an amazing job and making you change how you play based on the situation. If you are being attacked by a wave of kamikaze beheaded either wait for them to get close and start a chain reactions or pick them off from a safe distance. Tons of secret areas that give the game replay value and the amazing scale of the fights. Serious Sam HD will be my go to game for a while after the PC release. 8 player online coop or multiplayer on a single PC, PC yes not just on Console. The weapons made you feel badass and the story was just enough to make the game not random. You also never know if that max health pack will cause a trap or spawn a horde of enemies or is just a normal health pack, the first time through at least. It makes it really memorable.
The sheer scale of the battles in Serious Sam still is really impressive.
I do agree though about Crysis and Left 4 Dead, the number of different ways to approach a situation makes it so much more fun. Playing Crysis like the predator where you grab the men one-by-one and taking the bodies to a hiding place, or going through it where you try to do it in the most absurd way possible. It was really enjoyable running toward a group in speed mode then jumping in strength and crushing one of the guys with your boot and fist and taking out the others in swift order. Left 4 Dead with friends, finding out the best ways to make it through expert, every time you die you try to think of a better place to go or different weapons to choose.
The sheer scale of the battles in Serious Sam still is really impressive.
I do agree though about Crysis and Left 4 Dead, the number of different ways to approach a situation makes it so much more fun. Playing Crysis like the predator where you grab the men one-by-one and taking the bodies to a hiding place, or going through it where you try to do it in the most absurd way possible. It was really enjoyable running toward a group in speed mode then jumping in strength and crushing one of the guys with your boot and fist and taking out the others in swift order. Left 4 Dead with friends, finding out the best ways to make it through expert, every time you die you try to think of a better place to go or different weapons to choose.
Don't do iiiit!Yahtzee Croshaw said:
Forgive my intrusion, but if what you don't want is something bland, repetitive, boring, and horribly designed*, then steer clear of this game. While it is true that the gameplay really does consist of doing nothing but murdering tons of dudes, with one or two vehicle sections, it does it so horribly it's like Painkiller's evil twin brother who promises boxes of delicious chocolate, but when you eat it you realize it's nothing but a load of shit. It only has maybe 3 kinds of levels, A cave structure, a beach, and a city, and each of them are incredibly uninspired. There are about five or so enemies with the more powerful ones being designed exactly like the smaller ones, just bigger. Also unlike Painkiller it's weapon selection is like virtually anything you could find anywhere else. I hope I have saved you the trouble of tracking down a crappy game that would only dissapoint.
With the only thing in common between those two games is the unconventional two-fire weaponry.Cuddly Knife said:
And Painkiller was great AND NO I'm not being a Yahtzee fanboy, I played Painkiller when it was released year ago back in 2004.
Anyway, the old formula is a great one but it will need to have some style, I mean Doom will always have that retro charm while Serious Sam is ironic since its not serious at all haha! And Painkiller is over the top in general, mostly in it's religious/mythological setting.
And Yahtzee, if you want to try Earth Defense Force 2017, besides the insects (of which theres a good few of), there also multiple kinds of robots on the ground and flying and the odd giant Godzilla-esc monster. Boiling water is fine, but why not a projectile flamethrower? Or better yet a tank?
I'm not reading 4 pages of comments to see if someone else already said this, and I know it isn't really relevant to Yahtzee's job(reviewing CONSOLE games), but there are plenty of mindless Flash games out there. They give you simplified controls, but more than enough weapons and enemies to use them on. Madness Interactive is a prime example. It's a 2D shooter in which you progress through stages in a slummy city where everyone wants to kill you for some reason. You beat the first enemies with your hands, then use the weapons they were holding to kill more enemies, taking their weapons when you run out of ammo, climaxing with fighting a flying dude who has a machine gun, and resembles Jesus, while also taking out tons of cannon fodder. If you can't be bothered to do that, there's a practice mode where you just create weapons with the touch of a button, then use those to obliterate enemies called in with another button. Returning to my point, games like this are available for free on the internet when you tire of these generic shooters with their fancy supersoldiers and extra powers and sophistimacated storylines.
Not that anyone cares, of course.
Not that anyone cares, of course.
I had the same idea!!!
GTA4 would work so well if all the pedestrians were replaced with zombies.
That would be worth another 60 bucks. Of course somethings would have to be upgraded to suit the zombies, but it'll be great!
GTA4 would work so well if all the pedestrians were replaced with zombies.
That would be worth another 60 bucks. Of course somethings would have to be upgraded to suit the zombies, but it'll be great!
Unless you've got Vista with Direct3D 9, in which case it's touch-and-go to see if either game will actually run.Supernova2000 said:
That snipe aside, there's also Tachyon: The Fringe, which makes some pretense at being a "mercenary" game (It's really a choose-a-side deal) and has Bruce Campbell as your character's voice actor, and the Evochron series, which isn't all that dissimilar to Privateer and Freelancer.
Damn right, what we need these days is the vast sandbox city like GTA4. The swarms of zombies and ability to use mostly anything as a weapon from Dead Rising. The badassery of using tanks, helicopters etc from prototype, the weaponry epicness from Dead Space (Oh man I just loved that game. The force gun is for wimps, plasma cutter ftw xD)
It would be the best game ever. xD
Or you could add the spaceborn detail from X3: TC and incorporate it into a massive zombie invasion where you can fly from battleship to battleship blowing up zombies with big guns and stuff. Switching from space to planetside throughout. xD
Jesus, imagine the amount of HDD space a game like that would need.
It would be the best game ever. xD
Or you could add the spaceborn detail from X3: TC and incorporate it into a massive zombie invasion where you can fly from battleship to battleship blowing up zombies with big guns and stuff. Switching from space to planetside throughout. xD
Jesus, imagine the amount of HDD space a game like that would need.
People say that but I think Novelty only wears off on people with a bit too much douche in them.AmrasCalmacil said:
It's one of those things you could pick up at absolutely any time and play for 10/20/60 minutes and not need an investment.
I'd play a game like that for hours though...assuming that the zombies only got worse. I'd love to try and fend off 7 billion zombies in a single towering skyscraper even (they'd flood in from the lower doors). Add in terrain damage and the fear I might bring the building screaming to the earth from too much integrity damage.
Anywho...