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Category: Video Games

Legions of Things

Published by NiteMayr on November 16, 2020

It took what seemed like years to finish “Watch Dogs: Legion” and literal Years for me to sit down and finish “Legion” from Marvel Television and I didn’t plan it, but I finished them both the same night.

Watchdogs: Legion is the continuation of the series started with “Watchdogs”, continued in “Watchdogs 2: Silicon Valley Monsters!” and now “Watchdogs: Legion” and I think this latest edition might have finally figured out the formula for the games, and that is to not have a primary character.

“Watchdogs: Legion” is (like the previous games and pretty much every Ubisoft game) an open world with a bunch of stuff to do while following a main mission. The “twist” for WD:Legion is that you can recruit “anyone” to join your fight. Including “bad guys” which is really where the game play system shines, you recruit someone, do a couple missions (sadly repetitive ones) and they join your team. All you can customize is their clothes, and the clothes and “battle mask” (my name, but you put it on to fight so “battle mask”) The main plot takes FOREVER to get through, there were what seemed like over 100 plot missions to get through and who you embody (the operative) matters, so choose your team wisely! I had a blast in the game, but the writing was kind of weak for the main plot, I had it sussed out in the first cinematic so I spent the whole game waiting for what I saw coming in the first minutes of the game. Which is sad, but there are only so many plots in the world and when it looked like I was going to be wrong, I was intrigued, but the mystery the game does a masterful job setting up really doesn’t “matter” in the game, you had to seek it out and the payoff isn’t great storytelling, but it *is* good world building, I think they were going to go somewhere else and left in the bits. I’m tiptoeing around the plot details as i don’t want to spoil it for anyone. The game is good, I WANTED to finish it, so yeah.

LEGION (from Marvel TV) WAS great, but I think they had wanted to go in a direction and had to swap motivations around a bit to make drama and it all got very “Manson with Powers” and if I’m honest, they went all cosmic, they didn’t need to ground so much of it after that.

What I loved: Behind Blue eyes!
What I hated: Problematic Protagonist and a heel turn that wasn’t

Fortnite: Save the Game

Published by NiteMayr on April 5, 2020

I’ve played “Fortnite: Save the World” for YEARS now and it’s not as good

That long title says it all, I used to play “Save the World” ALL the time, anyone who has seen me in game will recognize my banner as one of those ones that Epic gave us play-testers, I played the game before the deliver the payload mission was added, there was a time when outlanders had a neat “gravity bubble” power so the could get high like a ninja…

anyway, that aside to show me cred, I don’t like playing Save the World anymore, not like I used to, I played EVERY night for ages and even when I lost interest I’d try to play 99.9% of days (there have to be days away from the Internet)

So when I say “I don’t enjoy it anymore” that is saying something.

I started playing Battle Royale when I found out about the bases on the map, and the story missions and tasks have kept me playing

I used to spend HOURS in maps in STW just exploring, this is the level of commitment to STW I’m talking about and the level of goodwill that the STW team and EPIC have lost in me. I didn’t even bother with trying to get the spy weapons

Save the world used to be more than a wave shooter to me; but the game is just a borderlands in a bottle game now, and that’s what’s sending me to Battle Royale (never mind that the toxic players are like less than 1% of the player base now, so that’s nice)

So, in short, the Toxic player problem is mostly not a thing in BR (or it isn’t for me) I’ve loved the narrative in the current “season, whatever” and It’s a CRIME that I don’t look forward to Save the World everyday like I used to.

The Lobbers, by the way, were the worst thing of all the recent changes, having 20 or so bombs landing all the damn time in some missions? What?!?!?!

Call of Duty 4 was Great so Modern Warfare 2 should be awesome?

Published by NiteMayr on November 5, 2009

CODvsMW2

In this interview we get this gem:
Q – Ignoring IW.net, is the PC version a direct port of the console version?
A – Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.

No Mods, no console, no “lean” no self-hosting, no nothing.  You may as well buy the console, because it is piracy proof!  Wait, did you say piracy proof?  Why is it all over the net being played on hacked Xbox 360s?  Shoot!  Doesn’t that mean that this crappy negative-featured version is hobbled for no god-damned reason at all?  Yup!

Review: Dead Space

Published by NiteMayr on October 27, 2008

Dead Space

A repair crew visits a damaged mining ship in orbit around a planet that has yielded more than just pure mineral goodness; now the repair crew need to fight off the crazed and mutated remains of the mining ship’s personnel and escape back into space and home.

Dead Space plays about the same as every other Over the shoulder third person horror game. Aiming is fairly good, scares are plentiful and the Graphics are above par. Some notable game play mechanics issues that I found annoying, no jump. Fire was not always fire, it was sometimes “flail” at air, requiring you to remember that the right mouse mutton needed to be pressed … OH DAMN I’M BEING EATEN AGAIN!!!!.

Never mind that you can’t run & shoot at the same time. The game just punished you for having the gun out, you walked extra slow if you brandished any weapon larger than the empty gloves, but ran fine if you just “carried” the weapon. I spent the majority of this game cursing or panicking, it was high school all over again. Whether it was running down halls praying that nothing would pop out or frantically trying to get the damn gun to fire (which never seemed to work if I didn’t keep it at “the ready” before a fight. Did I mention that I kept the gun “ready” for more than 5 hours in the game?

I took to launching mines into every room I entered, but that made no difference, as the monsters were often non there until I saw them. Let me state that again, if I couldn’t see the monster, it often wasn’t there. Which means I could shoot a mine into a room, have it explode, then run face first into the monster behind the door that wasn’t there until I saw it.

Perhaps if Issac ran through the whole game with his eyes closed, there would have been no monsters at all!

My rating: 4.5 stars
****1/2

I’m being overly critical, of course.

I played the game in small bursts; letting my heart rate slow to a near attack between firefights and enclosed space battles with small crowds of dessicated infants with serious worm issues.    It wasn’t a “dark” game, which was refreshing, as many horror games hide the monsters in the dark and rely on them jumping out to get you (Doom 3, and so on).  Dead Space scared you by letting you know the monsters were coming well in advance and that there was nothing you would be able to do to stop them, save gird your loins and find a solid wall to stand against or a long open space to run through.

The dismemberment mechanic worked fairly well, but beyond the really touch monsters, I was able to bludgeon or stomp most of them to death with minimal effort; which happened more than I would have liked.  Also, I don’t think I killed a single human in the game.  Which was a crime, as more than one human character needed to be dismembered by my line gun.  C’est La Vie.

I played the Game on my Core Duo, on Windows Xp Sp3 with an Nvidia 8500GT video card and 2 gigs of ram.  I turned off bloom, blur, motion blur, advanced lighting and shadows and played it at 1440×900.  I don’t think I suffered one slowdown or hiccup in game play.  Not one.  It was solidly beautiful and fluid throughout, even without added dressing.

As for the plot, there were some fairly severe inconsistencies introduced; not the least of which was the Marker itself.  I won’t stray into spoiler town, but I will state this, [spoiler] “THE MARKER WAS NOT THE SOURCE OF THE EVIL, IT WAS THE SOLUTION TO IT. “[/spoiler]

Review: Two-Fer Wednesday Mass Assassin Effect Creed palooza

Published by NiteMayr on August 13, 2008

I’m not even going to bust out the hReview format one this one.

I didn’t finish Mass Effect or Assassin’s Creed.  I coulnd’t get into them.  More correctly, I DID get into Mass Effect, but couldn’t mustre the interest to see it through.  Assassin’s Creed had that sci-fi wrapper that just turned me off and made me scream at it to just get to the Killin’.

Mass Effect was a  good game, I just didn’t care how it came out.  The vehicle parts really ruined it for me though, please release a patch to skip those please.

In the end here are my thoughts:

Avoid Assassin’s Creed, it’s not enough fun to justify the cost.

Mass Effect is good, but the main plot isn’t all that compelling.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Oblivion Lost Mod is Awesome

Published by NiteMayr on June 25, 2008

I reinstalled STALKER the other day there; I had read about the Oblivion Lost mod and decided to try it out.  Initally it was “more of the same” but once the changes started showing up, (freaky weather, startling darkness, zombies and mutants all over) it got very very exciting.

I can’t portray how startling the crazy weather and sudden black nights are in text; especially when it comes on out of nowhere.  The screen goes black and then the whole world seems to shake and rumble.  It was amazing.

Congratulations to the Oblivion Lost team for an excellent Mod.

Not a Deep Crow

Published by NiteMayr on June 24, 2008

Deepack-CrowPa, originally uploaded by NiteMayr.

I paid the 10 bucks to get the full SPORE creature creator. Not really for me, but so that my kid could play with it and really get to see all she can do with SPORE when it comes out.

I tried to make a Deep Crow with it (but you can’t control the color all that well) so I had to punch it up in post.

Please enjoy Deepack-Crowpa

You know you've done wrong by your customer when

Published by NiteMayr on September 17, 2007

Starting immediately, we will be upping the activation count to a 5 by 5 plan. We will be raising the maximum amount of computers a user can have BioShock installed on simultaneously from 2 to 5, and allowing a user to reinstall BioShock on each of those computers from 3 times to 5 times

Oh, something is wrong with your install?  Reinstall.  Hmm, still not working, reinstall.

Have these people even seen the inside of a software support center?

Reinstall is step 2 in the four-step customer blow-off plan for bad techs.

For those at home, the four-step plan is this:

1.   Did you reboot?  Will that take a long time?  Go ahead and call back if that doesn’t help!

2.   Did you reinstall?  That will take a long time!  Go ahead and call back if that doesn’t help!

3.   Did you install Patch X+1, [where x is the version the customer has and +1 is a cosmetic update]?  The download will take a long time.  Go ahead and call back if that doesn’t help!

4.   I’m sorry, I don’t support that operating system, let me direct you to the correct agents, thanks for calling!

At least twice in any long-term support issue, a customer is going to be forced to reinstall.  If they have done so on their own they are already buttressing against these imaginary limits.

Let customers who have physical media or downloaded “unlocked” media reinstall as they want, if you are trying to lock stuff down to prevent piracy, REWARD paying customers with content that is only available through online activation of keys, make the enhanced content online only and activated only through an SSL encrypted keying system.

Ta Daaaa!

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