Virtual Adept

I wrote a review of the horror first-person shooter Clive Barker’s Jericho for Playstation 3 for the web site GameChronicles a couple of weeks ago, forgot to mention it but now I did so go read it and let me know if you liked the review or not. There should be a review of Conan coming up pretty soon also.

More bad news for Sony fans. You won’t get any lovin’ from the developers of Splinter Cell Convicted or Bioshock.

Bioshock is going to be the spiritual successor to the System Shock franchise, set in some kind of underwater utopia where genetic experimentation went horribly wrong. If you have not yet seen the developer-commentary gameplay videos of Bioshock, definitely check it out, this game looks great and will be far more to it than just a typical FPS shooter. I think some of their claims about the AI are stretching it a bit, but even if the AI isn’t as awesome as they claim it will be, the game still looks great and has a lot of unique gameplay to it.

As for Splinter Cell, I’ve never been a big fan, but it’s got to suck for Sony since it is a very popular franchise now. Oh well, I guess Sony has Metal Gear.

Bioshock and Splinter Cell Convicted are supposed to come out for the Xbox 360 and Windows.

 

Crytek, the developers of Far Cry have shown their new game Crysis at E3, which uses the greatly enhanced CryEngine. I think I want to cry, this game looks to be “da bomb”. Graphics are absolutely stunning, especially the jungle stuff. If this has Far Cry’s excellent AI, and the rumors that they are implementing a proper QuickSave function this time out, Crysis could be the first person shooter to watch for on the PC. You can watch the videos on Gamespot’s Crysis page.

Alex at These Damn Machines Are Killing Me has an interesting take on the FPS game for Playstation 2 and Xbox, Black. Ka-BOOM!

I should have mentioned this earlier, but GameChronicles has posted my review of the PC first person shooter, F.E.A.R. I give it 8.8 out of 10. In a nutshell, if you have a medium or high end gaming machine, you definitely need to check this one out. The AI is superb, and really gives the single player experience more realistic gun battles. You can get it at Amazon pretty cheap.

A new mod has been released for Doom 3 which recreates the classic original Doom shareware levels. It even has a very cool intro movie that gives the background story for Doom. If you have Doom 3 you need to download this really wicked mod, it rocks. Here’s hoping they release the rest of Doom and especially Doom 2 like this!

Two new reviews of mine, up on GameChronicles.

The first one is for the PC first/third person shooter GUN, a wild west hootenanny, yeeeeehaw! I gave it a 9.0. Check the full scoop in my review. This game totally rocks, if you are a western fan at all definitely check it out.

The other review is for the Xbox version of The Sims 2. I didn’t like it much, but I think it is just not my kind of game. Gave it 6.8. Here’s what I had to say about it. One thing is it does look pretty nice on my new HD TV in 720p.

Not much else to say, here’s my Now Playing list:

I reviewed Area 51 the PC shooter over on Game Chronicles. Bottom line, a pretty fun shooter that doesn’t do anything revolutionary, but doesn’t do much wrong either.

Spent the weekend with family, and also kind of went on a bit of a game buying binge. I got Cossacks Anthology which is really hard to find and I got it for a steal. I also snagged Warrior Kings and Shadow of Destiny for a song. And for PS2 I picked up The Getaway Black Monday. But the coolest game I picked up, and the one I installed first is Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, which I got for $20 at Best Buy. It’s a large install, the game comes on four CD’s (would have gotten the DVD version but it was $30).

So anyway I start it up. You begin by attacking a Japanese held atol in some amphibious assault vehicles and soon after I die, but instead of dying, the game flashes back to basic training. From there you go through basic training (the tutorial for the game) and then you get shipped off to Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. You then get thrust into gameplay that is definitely reminiscent of the film Pearl Harbor as you try and survive the Japanese sneak attack. Very cool so far, but I am still early into it. The graphics are quite a bit better than the original Medal of Honor was, but probably not quite as nice as Half-Life 2. Lots of eye-candy to see here though, with skies filled with Zeros as you desperately try and take a few of them down from your PT Boat as the battleships in the harbor are being destroyed.

Ok just finished Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy. Great game. I played through the Dark Side ending first. Very cool. At the end you get to fight Kyle Katarn and by far he is the most formiddable opponent in the game. I won’t spoil what he does that is so difficult or what the ending scenes are like afterward. Then I went back and played the Light Side ending, and it was also pretty cool, you got to fight a nasty Sith Lord evil thingy at the end which was pretty hard but not as hard as Kyle. One thing is, the Light Side ending is way easier than the Dark Side ending. That is because the last level running up to the ending sequence is full of Sith AND Jedi, but if you go Light Side the Jedi will help you fight, but if you go Dark Side you have to kill all of them.

I am not sure how you could finish this game without taking both light and dark force powers. There are certain powers that aren’t that useful (or at least, I didn’t need them much), but certain powers on both sides are just way too useful. I am not sure how I could have finished the game without Force Grip, it’s just way too convenient to Grip someone and then drop them over a ledge. Or Grip them and then run up and slash them while they have no sabre up. And I never would have made it through the last level without Force Heal, it’s just too much fighting and not enough healing around and Force Drain just isn’t a good enough substitute for Healing since you can’t use it in between fights.

I am thinking about playing through again, this time using a female jedi (yes, the game is customized to allow you to play either as male or female protagonist and the cutscenes all change depending on which you take). I’m thinking of trying to take NO Dark Side traits this time and see if it’s even possible.

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, if you are a Star Wars fan check this game out.

I already blogged a first look of Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy a few weeks ago. I’m almost finished with the game now. I got in several hours of it this weekend. This is a really fun first person shooter. Most shooters I get sick of and quit before I get finished with them, but this game stays different enough to be fun all the way through.

Near the end of the game there is a dramatic scene where you have to make a choice between following the Light side of the Force or the Dark side. I saved the game at that point and then took the Dark side path (muhahahaha). I’m pretty sure I’m making it harder on myself, though, because now at the end level I am having to fight both the good Jedi who were once my friends and also the evil Sith (because, you know, I want the Big Evil Power all to myself).

The jedi battles in this game are a hell of a lot of fun. You have a bunch of different Force powers at your disposal and you use those (so will the enemies) to try and beat them plus of course your light sabre. Forget about shooting Force-users (Jedi and Sith) with your guns, they just reflect your shots right back and you and you take the damage. Even grenades are useless, they’ll bounce it back right at you. I have managed to kill a few with grenades by using indirect fire (bouncing it off a wall and then having it land near them).

I concentrated at first on the Dark side powers, such as Force Grip (lets you choke people like Darth Vader, and you can lift them up and fling them around at higher levels) and Force Drain (sucks the life out of your enemies and gives some to you). After I maxed those two I started buying up a Force Berserker thing (forgot the actual name of the power) which makes you pretty much invulnerable, but you not-so-slowly lose health points while the power is active. So after the power ends you’re really weak, and easily killable. I didn’t like that too much so I only put 2 points in that one and the fourth Dark side power wasn’t that cool sounding so I decided to get some light-side powers. One power is extremely useful which reduces damage for any type of energy or physical damage, so with that bumped up to max, basically the only thing that can hurt you are the Jedi/Sith using their powers. Also put at least one dot into Force Healing. That way after you kill some things you can at least heal yourself back up to full. There’s also a power that lets you absorb Dark Force energy but I found that it’s not that useful so even though I bought it up two dots I don’t use it much.

By the end of the game the Force powers I used the most were: Force Grip - I would use this as much as possible. What I try to do is get close to a drop-off, a ledge, and lure the enemy Jedi/Sith up to me, then Force Grip them and drop them over the edge. Aaaaaaahhhh! Oh, so sorry, poor Jedi fall down and go boom. Another good thing about Force Grip is that it forces them to lower their light sabre, so if you grip them and then rush up and slash with your light sabre you can get in a free hit that way.

Force Drain also I use a ton. I used the Heal when out of combat but a lot of times near the end game I was having to fight 3 or 4 Jedi/Sith at once. What’s really cool is that there are Jedi AND Sith all there together (at one room I think there were like 8 force-users, some Jedi and some Sith) and so it’s a massive melee, with everyone wanting to kill me but also wanting to kill each other. During those I would take cheap shots at the Jedi (because I’ve found that the Jedi are harder to kill, so I tried to take them out first) while they were engaged with the Sith. When you’re fighting that many people the only way to stay alive is to use Force Drain to keep your health level up.

Force Push - you have to use this a lot. For one thing it’s cool to Force Push people over a ledge and listen to them scream as they plumet to their death. But for another, Force Push will break a Force Grip on you, so if you are being Force Gripped you hit the Force Push button as fast as you can to get out of it.

Force Speed - This is damn useful in a battle against multiple opponents. You can dodge their attacks and maneuver behind the Jedi/Sith to slash them from behind.

Force Jump - basically this is a mandatory power that is primarily useful just to make it through the levels because they require a ton of jumping. The nice part about this power is that it’s automatic, if you jump, you automatically Force Jump if you have the force power available. It can also be a life saver in combat if you are being trapped by two or more opponents you can jump away sometimes. By the end game when Force Jump is maxed out you can jump incredibly high.

Apart from jedi/sith the other enemies of the game offer little challenge. Sometimes they can gang up on you and put a hurt on, especially at earlier levels. Also some of them might have powerful weaponry that can majory hurt, like a rocket-launcher. There’s some cyber-suit storm troopers that are hard to kill without heavy weaponry. There were also some light-sabre weilding droids that were very tough, and the only way to kill them was with repeated light sabre swipes or throwing the sabre at them. Also there were some jet-pack flying storm troopers that were only hard to kill because they are kind of hard to reach, but you can toss the light sabre at them and bring them down pretty easily. Overall there is a pretty good variety of enemies in the game.

There’s a bunch of different types of environments too. You perform missions on planets all over the known galaxy, such as Tatooine, Hoth, Yavin, Coruscant, and tons of other places. You will fight through space stations, star destroyers, ancient temples, high rise buildings in Coruscant, desert planets, ice planets, etc. You have one really cool level where you race along on speeder bikes while other bad guys on speeder bikes try and shoot you down. There’s tons of cool levels like that where you have something besides just pure gun/sabre to do. Several mini-games also. For example on one mission your ship gets tractor-beamed by a star destroyer and so you have to disable the tractor beam and then try and blow up the ship while you get away, but the ship comes under attack by tie-bombers (boggle, yeah, I’m not sure why they were bombing their own ship, unless I guess they thought you were in control of it at that point) so you have this part where you man a gun-emplacement on the destroyer and blast away at the tie-bombers.

This game is full of cool characters to encounter also. Luke Skywalker is there as a mentor and he’s in a bunch of scenes. Then there is Kyle Katarn, the hero of previous Jedi Knight games. He actually will go on missions with you a few times. There’s your buddy Rosch who is a fellow student at the Academy. And you encounter some other characters from the movie like Chewbacca. Not to mention - you get to fight Boba Fett!!

I can highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a good first-person shooter and especially if they also love Star Wars. Even if you don’t typically like a FPS game, you might really enjoy this one if you are a Star Wars fan because it is just so good. Also on the easy setting the game is very playable for a novice. The graphics are somewhat dated, it feels like a 3 year old game or so, but they still are servicable and look good enough to still be a lot of fun. Plus on the bright side of that they will run on modest hardware.

One note on the graphics - I was getting a weird problem where if I looked at a light at just the right (wrong?) angle my entire screen would flash white. This was very disorienting at first and gave the beginning of the game a bad impression. I ended up having to disable dynamic lighting or some other light-related graphics feature to prevent this from happening. This was on an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, with the latest Catalyst drivers.

Hopefully I can finish up the game this week and post my comments on the end game’s story and such. I can still even without seeing that part wholeheartedly recommend this game. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would rate this game a 8.8 or so.

Well I have “unwrapped the shrink” so to speak on Jedi Academy and have played the first couple of levels. So here’s my early take on this game.

First, the graphics. Pretty good but not great. I realize this is an older title. I have the game set to maximum eye-candy and it still looks kind of, hmm… stark. But it is colorful, I’ll give it that. The models movement is kind of robotic or forced, though, they don’t look very smooth. Facial modeling is not bad, I guess, for a game its age. So far I haven’t seen much of the environments, a jungle, a temple, and Mos Eisley space port. I hope that there is more interesting stuff to come later on.

The sounds and music is pretty good. Voice acting is very good. And the plot so far seems interesting. I really like the fact that we get to meet up with familiar Star Wars characters like Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca. Also Kyle Katarn from the earlier Jedi Knight games.

Controls are a bit difficult for some reason. I’m finding it hard to control precisely where my character is moving and especially where he’s swinging his light sabre. Jumping was seriously troubling compared to console action games like say Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, which had very intutive controls. So far there’s only been a little bit of jumping but I get the feeling that it’s coming in bigger doses later on. Aiming. Don’t get me started. The reason Storm Troopers could never kill Luke & company is that they are so inaccurate.

The Force Powers though, are really sweet. You get them right at the start, which is different than some other Jedi Knight games, and they come in very handy. You can Force Push, which basically can shove things around, you can Force Pull which lets you trip levers and things remotely, you can do Force Speed, which makes you faster, or you can Force Jump and jump much higher. Also Force Sense lets you see hidden things. I’ve decided to go Dark Side on this guy and so I can also do a Force Grip (like Vader did in the movies) where you can choke the living crap out of your enemies.

More details as I progress through…