glassedsoul's blog
At the beginning of the year I really thought that the next year or so would be marked by a plethora of sequels to all of the last 2 or 3 year's games, but it seems like instead we have entered the age of the comeback kids. It seems that all the developers of the world decided that 2008-9 is the time to add a new entry into that forgotten golden franchise from way back. All of the following games are from beloved franchises that have not seen a true/proper sequel in many years:
Last Iteration: Bionic Commando Elite Forces (1999)
I (sadly) never owned a NES or C64 thus never played this game, but the new entry looks really neat from what we've seen so far. Really gives you a sense of what if spider-man had a gun and wasn't a total wimp when it came to killing dudes ( I'm not saying spider-man is a wimp 
).Graphically impressive and a really cool setting/premise, hopefully the gameplay will follow through on this one.
Last Iteration: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (2004) or really Fallout 2 (1998 )
Never played any of the fallout games before, but they have really cool cover art! Kind of just looks like Oblivion with guns so far, but that's probably just because we haven't seen any real gameplay yet. I assume fans of that ****of game are excited about it (are they?).
Last Iteration: Twisted Metal: Head-On (2005) or really Twisted Metal 2 (1996)
Technically the latest iteration of this franchise came out about 2 weeks ago, but here's the thing; it was just a port of a 3 year old PSP game that was really just a rushed out version of Twisted Metal 2 running on a dumped down version of the Twisted Metal: Black engine. I believe that the franchise essentially stopped evolving after TM2, with 3-4 being void (obviously) and Black simply being a "back our roots" game and Head-On being a "even more back to our roots" game. Head-on played exactly like Black played, except had a much different tone. It also felt rushed in order to be a launch game ( what with a 6 player limit on maps, while even TM2 on PS1 had 8 ), and the few additions (upgrade system, mini-games), while good in theory, hardly affected gameplay. Both games were received well mostly by the fact that there hasn't been a Twisted Metal game for quite a time in between them, thus making their lack of originality forgivable. This time things will be different. They will need to add something new to the game to keep it worth playing, and the hardware jump practically demands it. In the video documentary David Jaffe mentions how he sort of feels this way about the last 2 TM games, and how TM2 still has the best gameplay of the bunch. A delicate balancing act of old and new needs to be achieved with this one, but hopefully with a bigger emphasis on new this time.
Last Iteration: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge (2001)
Was never the biggest C & C fan, but I, like every other strategy fan, totally bought and played Red Alert 2, even if just for a little bit. Always had a good sense of humor and was fun to play for a while with some cool units and whatnot, but was never something I ever really got in to. It Should be interesting to see it going up against the other beloved RTS series from the late 90s this/next year.
Last Iteration: Street Fighter EX3 (2000) (could be wrong on that, as I'm not sure what qualifies as a straight up street fighter game or just a re-release of one).
Like most sane people of the world, my experience of SF has been limited to the last days of arcades from the early 90s and the SNES version of SF, and I was far too young to ever really comprehend strategy for the game. But in my opinion the fighter genre is really dying and this is the genre's best shot at coming back. Love the look of the game and I'm glad they're not playing it too safe and not just re-releasing SF2 with 3d graphics, and are actually adding in some new gameplay features. I'm also glad (surely to the frustration of true SF fans) that they're attempting at making it more mass- audience friendly, so maybe, just maybe, when the inevitable console version finally comes to fruition, I (who hasn't played a fighting game in many many years) might be able to actually pick it up and have fun.
Last Iteration: StarCraft: Broodwar (1998 )
StarCraft is essentially my favorite game of all-time (and thus what I consider the best game of all time as well), and I've been ready for a sequel since about 1999. StarCraft is the best-selling strategy game of all time and is widely regarded as the greatest one as well, so the sequel has quite lofty expectations. And while there have been many new conventions added to the RTS over the last 2 years( it has really seen a renaissance of sorts), I think SC2 will still flourish without exactly going in the current direction of the market. I think I am more excited at just being able to finally log online and play StarCraft against people of my own skill level again, as SC lacks a matchmaking system and the people who still play online are far above and beyond my current level of play.
For whatever reason, these (mosly legendary) games are finally getting a fully-fledged sequel, some more drastically different than the previous entry than others (Bionic Commando). What does this mean? I don't feel quite at liberty to say, but I think it says something about the way the industry works; no matter how "c1assic" a game may be, there's always room for a sequel it seems in gaming. In movies there are rarely sequels to older movies (save for the last 2 years though with a new die hard and indianna jones and rambo, so maybe it's just a fever going around?), but games are always getting sequels. Part of it is because of the "risky business" of making original IPs, while the other part is how there are a lot of things that can be done in a sequel of a game (new mechanics, better graphics) than what can be done in a sequel to a movie. It seems like no matter how "perfect" a game can get, there's always something else that can be added as time goes on. I guess this whole phenomenon just points out the differences between games and movies in a way.
What do you guys think? And did I miss anything?
I have compiled a list of some predictions for the upcoming year:
-StarCraft 2 will not be released, or ever given a release date.
-Wrath of the Lich King won't come out either.
-A full-on sequel to World in Conflict will be announced and released in late 2008(running on the same engine as the original), but it probably should have been an expansion pack.
-Battlefield 3 will be announced and will be running on a version of their new frostbite engine, and it will once again announce that the next battlefield will support over 100 players per server, but will once again go back down to 64.
-Half-Life 2: Episode 3 will be debuted before E3 08 and said to be ready for release by winter 2008, but won't come out until winter 2009. No new games will be announced by Valve, and no official maps for portal will be released either. I will say expect exactly 2 Team Fortress 2 maps that will come out on PC and not on the consoles, and then maybe 1 more map in 2009.
- Far Cry 2 will be pushed back to Winter 2008, and still be really buggy, but probably less buggy than STLAKER.
-PS3 will start to really gain momentum and start making sense that it costs way more than the competition: Blu-Ray will not be deemed the "winner of the format war," I don't think a true "winner" will be deemed until at least 2010, when people start to actually buy HD-DVDs and BRDs.
-360 will start to lose momentum as it's big gun for 08, Ninja Gaiden 2, will be as good as the original game, but will not be as popular to the masses as say, Halo or Gears of War.
-GTA4 will be pushed back to early September (won't risk a last spring/summer launch), and be pretty good, but probably not mind-blowing.
-MGS4 will be the craziest MGS yet story-wise, but will not be the best MGS gameplay-wise. And will face bad marks on reviews for not having a fully-featured online component, and instead saying that Metal Gear Online is a separate game (the whole dividing them up as 2 separate products is totally stupid).
-Burnout Paradise won't be as good as takedown or revenge, but still good.
-God of War 3 will be unveiled at E3 in only trailer form.
-Killzone 2 will be released, look great, play ok.
-Resistance 2 will be announced for winter 08 and be totally overshadowed by Killzone 2.
-Gears of War 2 will be unveiled, still won't care about the story, but dual wielding chain-saws. You heard it here first.
-Spore will finally be released after getting delayed to fall 08, and will be game of the year.
-A new game from the Ico and Shadow of the Colossus studio will be unveiled, won't come out until 09.
-Besides the release of God of War: Chains of Olympus, the PSP will either start to fade out of existence or get a huge boost in support this year.
-Project Origin will be mediocre at best due to being developed with the 360 as the main platform and not the PC.
-Wii sales start to slow down( Wii are through!), I will finally be able to play Mario Galaxy.
-Smash Bros Brawl will sell more copies than Mario Galaxy has and will ever sell, but will not be met with as high critical appraisal.
-Capcom and Konami will not merge.
-Atari finally hits the old dusty trail.
-If I wanted to be wild, I'd say that THQ and Take 2 will merge.
-More DS colors.
-Wii will not pass 360 in sales, but come extremely close, PS3 starts to close gap.
-Last year PS2 will see ports from other consoles.
-Generally a good year for games, but no 2007, but almost every big game released this year will be a sequel.
Anyone who read my last blog post (Which I think is absolutely no one) would know that I play a whole lot of TF2, or at least try to. Generally speaking, the game has been a bit(or sometimes much) harder to enjoy over the last few weeks due to the greater abundance of server mods and user-made maps. I usually am all for user-made content, but in the last few years, I have found myself doing all I can to stay away from them. I used to be a rabid Counter-Strike: Source player, but by the middle of last year, it became unplayable for me. About 90% of all the servers were either only playing the maps dust and dust2, or filled with dozens of user-made maps.
Sure dust and dust2 are c.lassics, but man, I want some variety now and then. Those maps get old, especially when everyone on the server just wants to go straight for the AWP, which I believe is the one design flaw in the entire game (the AWP is basically the one-shot kill sniper rifle in the game, that although is fairly-well as balanced as it can be, it totally ruins the game when too many players use it. It turns the game into chicken, where all players are too afraid to go into the open because if they do they will die in about 2 seconds.). I would actively look for servers that restricted the AWP from play (which there were usually 1 in 10 servers, which I would say is evidence on how divided the community was on the AWP).
Server mods are usually bearable, but it got to the point on CS: Source that I couldn't join the server without 1st downloading different sound clips (that I just know that I had already downloaded on 12 other servers) for about 5 minutes, only to finally join the server and not hear any of the sounds that I just downloaded at all. Server mods are especially harmful to TF2, as time and time again I'll join a server only to find out it has the "fast respawn" mod, where you respawn in about 3 to 5 seconds, much faster than the max of 15 seconds it could take you to spawn. But this completely offsets the balance of the game since the winning team can't gain any momentum, as the designers purposely set it so that the loosing team will have longer respawns to help ensure that a stalemate won't occur.
Most servers in CS(including all versions) only play a very small handful of the official maps and have a large amount of user-created maps, which generally speaking, are totally horrible(example: fy_iceworld and the 300 or so variations such as fy_iceworld2003). Most maps are super unpolished and don't usually try to be a very good map. I usually have a lot of respect for map-makers, but I feel that most maps on CS: Source or TF2 are just the map-maker trying to show that yes, they have the ability to make maps for the game. Too many times have I joined a server on it's last round, and after playing the map for about a minute, I am suckered into downloading a new map and trying it out for a few minutes, only to realize that it is grossly unbalanced.
The problem of unbalanced maps is especially prevalent in TF2, where just about every user-made map I've played has very few, if any, small corridors that are vital to the balance of the different c.lasses. Scouts are able to jump around their opponents with ease and snipers are able to pull off headshots across entire maps, while pyros have a hard time trying to just get close enough to their opponents without taking getting killed.
For the 1st month of TF2 being out, I was in heaven. All the servers only played the official maps, and server mods were non-existant. The 2 worst things about CS Servers were gone, and it appeared that I would be able to finally have fun playing shooters online again, but now it seems that I will have to battle these same problems again. Now I'm all for the rights of server owners and they should be allowed to do whatever they want with their own server, and admittedly there might actually be people out there that like playing those maps, but at what point has the community completely ruined the game? TF2 is still a much easier game to find a good server and play in, but I fear that someday soon it will be CS: Source all over again.
So in conclusion: Server mods and user-made maps are good in theory, but bad in practice.
What do you think about server mods and user-made maps? Good or bad?
Some have said that 2007 is the new 1998, but I don't think that 2007 can really be hailed as a year that was as great as 1998, partly because not as many amazing games came out, and partly because most of those games are either direct or indirect(such as Crysis) sequels to other games, some of which came out in 1998. I remember a long time ago when Gamespot did a special with that one show on G4TV(forgot the name of which) about 1998 and how it was the greatest year in gaming, someone said that it was because virtually every genre in gaming was either defined or redefined. I think that as time goes on, we will be able to see if that holds true for 2007 games, as many games have certainly upped the ante for what to expect for a given genre, but I don't feel that all genres have really been improved upon to the degree that they were in 1998.
Any way, my top five picks would be:
Orange Box(PC)- all three games in my opinion are outstanding, I personally played through episode 2 about 5 times and plan on doing it again before I go back to school, and I played through portal about three times. Episode 2 starts off slow just like every other Half-Life game, but once it picks up it's pace, it becomes one of the single best single-player experiences to be had in gaming. It's hard to start playing the game and not wanting to just go ahead and finish it, partly because it's so damn well paced and fun, and partly because the end is literally just 3 or 4 hours away. Portal is pretty much the most unique game of the year that I've played. The game is unnaturaly funny, it's just so weird to have humor in a videogame, and it's also just damn fun to do the fling. But to me, the game I played more than any other game this year is most definantly Team Fortress 2 and TF2 is really my personal GoTY.
I was a little sketchy going into the game at first, but about 2 weeks after it came out I realized that "oh yeah, this is a Valve multiplayer game." Playing the game never gets old because every c.lass is so unique and although there are only 6 maps, they are each extremely well-designed and I have yet to get bored of any of them. The game's atmosphere is just so fun. All the characters are just fin to watch, which is very rare for a multiplayer shooter. The game is instantly accessible yet has extreme depth. Each c.lass takes hours of playing to master. The game is designed better than any other game in recent memory. Everything in the game is just perfect in my opinion. THe way that before going into each match, you are reminded of your personal bests, and given motivation to do better. The way that the game only tracks your points and not kills/deaths so that it encourages you to be a support role or just not be afraid to get killed. The way that an uber-charge can completely break a stalemate. The way that a player coming through a teleporter is marked so that the opposing team knows that there's a teleporter near by. The list just goes on and on. Valve has completely retook the position of best multiplayer FPS designers in my mind with TF2.
Crysis- The main reason I upgraded my PC this year (also the fact that my old one sort of broke 
, Crysis is the best looking game I ever played, but it is also in my opinion just about the best first-person shooting that can be had in a videogame for the first half of the game. Once you go into the alien ship however, it looses a lot of it's draw, but the sheer novelty of zero-gravity and fighting in a frozen jungle is enough to carry the game through the back half. It's a shame that the multiplayer doesn't have the things that make it so damn fun in the single-player though, such as the destructible environments and physics.
Crysis truly raises the bar for how the act of shooting a gun should be handled in a game far more than any other game in recent memory. It also brings the level of interactivity with the world much higher than any other shooter in the market. It's such a shame that it is selling so poorly, hopefully though as next year it becomes cheaper to get a PC that can properly run Crysis, it's sells will catch up.
World in Conflict- I was hooked on this game within about 20 minutes of playing the alpha of it back in May, and although I still have display driver problems with it running on DX10 and Vista (The only game I have installed that has problems), it is still a blast to play. The single-player was really fun I thought, and for a change, I thought that the narration and presentation of the story was very well done, and pretty much it was much, much more engrossing than any other strategy game on the market. It had a very believable and compelling story to tell coupled the fact that all the characters are very well developed. It managed to do Red Dawn without being Red Dawn, so to speak.
The multiplayer in the game is what got me hooked on it in the first place, and is pretty much the most unique online experience I've had this year, and pretty much second only to Team Fortress 2 to me. All the maps are very fun, and the way that teamwork is encouraged more than in any other strategy game on the market, where each player HAS to work with each other in order to win, and fill their roll, really makes this the funnest strategy game I've played online since StarCraft.
God of War 2- The original was my favorite game of 2005, and pretty much my favorite console game in modern gaming. The sequel in my opinion is even better. It's longer, more boss fights, a few new mechanics that add a lot of depth but keep it simple(such as the golden fleece), and a plethora of extras that kept me coming back longer than most games with multiplayer. This is also probably one of the only games that I played that had a huge cliffhanger ending(which there were PLENTY of this year), but still left me satisfied at the end (probably the best end boss fight of any game I've played this year, but then again, not a lot of end boss fights in games any more...). Definantly deserves the mantle it has as the last game that I'll play brand new on my PS2.
Bioshock- I too strongly forgot why it was that I liked this game so much back in August. I remember though that I had one particular time, I think the 2nd day that I was playing it, that I started a session at around 4:00 and when I stopped playing a bit to use the bathroom, it was 8:30. Bioshock is defiantly an engrossing game. I personally thought that the world created was incredible, but after I played through it, I couldn't help but wonder to myself, "what was the game about again?" I feel that the game had an incredible world, very good atmosphere(but not the best), but the story sort of falls apart when you meet Andrew Ryan. So I was his son? Why did Atlas have to speak in an accent if I had no memory of his true identity in the first place? Maybe I just need to pay more attention to the game, because I usually like a game with a good story, and I usually do my best to pay attention, but for some reason I just couldn't quite come to grip with the story until after beating it and then reading the plot outline on Wikipedia. Which is weird, because I'm able to follow the Metal Gear Solid storylines with little trouble (well, except for MGS2 .
In the end, even if it's my fault that I can't really appreciate the story as much as most, I consider this one of the top 5 mostly because it's extremely fun to fight Big Daddys. Easily one of the best enemies in a game. I just wish that the act of fighting enemies in the game was more fun as well, because there is a lot of potential in it. In the end, this passage about Bioshock that is probably too long is more of a rant on it's flaws despite the fact that I consider it to be the 5th best game of the year that I've played, which should be a good enough testament to it's well, goodness.
It should be noted that I have not played Super Mario Galaxy, partly because it's still impossible to find a Wii, partly because I'm pissed at Nintendo for it still being impossible to find a Wii, but mostly because I don't feel good about buying a Wii for just one game that I'll play.
Dissapointments:
Yeah, Assassin's Creed borders from pretty cool to total crap when you are on your like 7th pick-pocket mission, which is so insanely short and simple that it just makes me mad that it's in the game, but then it gets way hard just to get to the place to do it because every guard who sees you fall starts a chase sequence, which gets pretty boring after about 4 hours of the game. Comma-splice anyone?
STALKER- I wish it would be at least unbuggy enough to play through the game, but I got about six hours in and a bug happened where it would crash whenever I left a sector, and since the auto saving is so horrible, I would have to restart the whole game after it just started to get interesting. It is currently uninstalled.
Call of Duty 4- The campaign is pretty fun, although it is pretty much JUST like the other 2 from Infinity Ward except for different weapons. It did have a much better storyline(in that it had a storyline) and thankfully had very few vehicle missions(which were always the very low points of CoD games), and admittedly the one where you're up in a plane is pretty cool.
The multiplayer In my opinion was pretty lame. It basically plays identical to the original back in 2003, which was pretty fun back then, but I got tired of that gameplay back then as well. I don't really know what it is about it, but I just don't like the way it plays. The perks and ranks don't really affect the way the game plays at all, and in the end that is what really matters in a multiplayer FPS, not unlocking stuff. And to be fair, that has more to me not liking the pacing of CoD4's multiplayer than the game itself not being good.
Well that was a much longer post than expected, and I honestly don't know if I expect anyone to read it at all. I guess it's good that I put all my thoughts on the big games I played this year down somewhere though, I pretty much covered everything.
NOTE: the word c.lass is spelled with a . due to the restrictions on the site.
It seems every year comes and goes with a rumor of some sort surfacing about StarCraft 2. I grew up on StarCraft, it was the 1st game I became literally addicted to. It was the game that turned me from a kid who plays games into a gamer. And now it seems more likely than ever that StarCraft 2 will finally be announced , but this news has got me to really contemplate what a sequel for StarCraft would be like.
I'm one of those people who believe StarCraft is pretty much as perfect as any game has ever gotten, I mean, why else would it still have a larger online community then most RTSs released that are ¼ as old? What could Blizzard possibly do in a new StarCraft game to make it better? This is a game with a tremendous pedigree, and the sequel would (and pretty much already does) have impossibly high expectations.
2 years ago, hell, any time before October of last year I was ready for SC2 to come out, at least get announced, and completely blow my mind away, and get me back on the RTS wagon. After 2003 I pretty much moved on to other genres (thanks in part to Counter-Strike). I was on a 4 year dry-streak of RTS, until a game last year called Company of Heroes came along and completely saved my RTS fandom, and completely changed the way I saw RTSs. The gameplay is much more organic then SC (or pretty much any other RTS), with essentially no stats in the game, just realistic things happening that works for the game instead of just inhibiting it. Company of Heroes is a technical marvel that really shows how far RTSs have come since StaCraft in terms of graphics and gameplay.
For a sequel to StarCraft to come out, it would have to have all sorts of elements from all recent RTS releases. Fully 3D graphics, believable scale, destructible environments, and much more are expected in any new RTS. But if StarCraft 2 was to incorporate those things, would it really be StarCraft? RTSs today are so much different from 1998, how could SC2 possibly maintain the StarCraft vibe without drastically leaving the original's formula, and changing the very essence of the game? Do we really want a sequel to StarCraft? Perhaps StarCraft would be best left as it is.
I have faith in Blizzard though, and I know they know what they're doing. So whatever game it is they're going to be announcing on May 19th, I'm sure it's something to look forward to.
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