My apologies for the delayed update. Alas, I went and saw the midnight showing of Return of the King, and as you can imagine I was quite destroyed. It took me an entire day full of sleeping and Generals to recover. Also, as long as I’m making introductions, I’d like to dedicate this post to Tycho, who went out of his way (some time ago) to appear that he was distressed that I no longer update. This one’s for you, bud.

While it may appear to you, the untrained reader, that I have merely not updated in a longass time, there has been more happening beneath the surface than meets the eye. I’ve actually been conducting research in a field that is of the utmost importance to writers and authors everywhere. Conventional wisdom has always told us that “The (newsposts, articles, homeworks, doctoral theses) won’t write themselves!” But, I thought, what if they could??? So, I opened up my trusty text editor, and said aloud “Gee, it sure would be great if that newspost just wrote itself!” After a few minutes I helpfully added “Take your time, though!” to try and relieve any performance anxiety the self-generating writing may have been feeling. To give it the benefit of the doubt, I waited until December. At the end of the study, I’m sad to report that my findings were inconclusive. Some random gibberish had appeared, but that may have come from some point when one of my roommates tried to foist himself upon me sexually and I had to slam his head into the keyboard.

Obviously, a lot has happened in the weeks I’ve been away, so we’ve got a bunch of catching up to do. When last we talked, I was playing C&C Generals, and now I’m playing C&C Generals, and SOMETIMES I play True Crime or Call of Duty. As it turns out, a funny thing happens to your finances when you are a college student who cannot get federal loans and works only part-time and does not enjoy unlimited parental assitance. Unfortunately, it’s less of a ha-ha funny thing, and funny more like the way God forsook Job and made his life miserable for no good reason, which now that I think about it wasn’t very funny at all. Either way, my budget for video games has been shot to hell, and I am gripped by the very real fear that Call of Duty & Generals may be the only two video games I’ll play ever again. There is a distinct possibility that unless I can find a way to sell more of my t-shirts, I’ll have to turn to a life of crime, which I guess would at least be amusing for all of you. (Hint: That’s my was of asking you to please, please buy the t-shirts.)

The short description of True Crime: Streets of L.A. goes something like this: It’s like Grand Theft Auto, except it’s not fun. The slightly longer description is that it’s like Grand Theft Auto with a bunch of cool concepts that expand on the GTA theme but were ruined by slipshod execution. The Peter Jackson Extended Edition description is the same as the slightly longer description, except in it I mention that you can unlock and play as Snoop Dogg, which is the best part of the game but is novel for no longer than 10 minutes.

Truthfully, I appreciate where the game is trying to go. There’s a variety of mission types ranging from car races/chases to shooting rampages to stealth infiltration missions, and there’s a very cool Good Cop Bad Cop karma system that continually changes the cinematics you see, the endings, and the attitudes of the in-game citizens and other police. There voice acting is by and large well done, and there’s a really intriguing upgrade system that lets you get fighting, shooting, and driving techniques. The problem is that for every element of the game that’s great, there’s a sucky counterpart. The controls are awkward, and the camera constantly seems like it’s working against you. The “tail this car!” missions are long, but never difficult OR entertaining. The melee fighting heavilly favors button mashing, and is never really fun no matter how many upgrades you get. The same button is used for regular gun firing and slow-mo aimed firing, which is possibly the single most frustrating thing in the entire game. It feels a lot like they focused all their energy on accurately modeling Los Angeles and never stopped to accurately gauge which portions of their game were or were not fun. That’s not the sort of sensation one appreciates paying $50 for. In all fairness, however, I read that True Crime 2 is already under development, and I can tell you already that the first one showed enough promise to make me intrigued at the prospect of a sequel.

I could go on to tell you about the only other two games I’ve played recently, Mario Kart: Double Dash and Call of Duty, but we’re already way over the 800 mark, and considering the unlikliness of me aquiring any new games anytime soon, I don’t want to blow my wad for the next few months all in one go. Instead, it seemed appropriate to end on a C&C Generals note.

As I mentioned previously, I’m essentially living in some kind of institute for the study of Command & Conquer: Generals. At this point, I’d say my roommates and I spend as much time talking about Generals or watching replays of games we’ve played as we actually spend playing games. Recently, EA got off their lazy asses and made the 2 or 3 programmers from the Generals team that they haven’t already canned release a patch for Zero Hour, which seemed fantastic because it addressed the critical balance issues in the game affecting the GLA and specifically the Toxin General. I should have known better, however, because while the new patch fixes the old issues, it now creates a new inbalance that in my opinion makes the game unplayable. This error is so fucked up that you don’t even have to have played Generals to understand how bad it is. The Alpha Aurora Bomber is a unit belonging to the USA Super Weapon General, and all Aurora Bombers have this neat ability that makes them 100% invulnerable on their way toward a target. The new AABs are now not only invulnerable on their way in, but they pack enough punch to destory all normal enemy buildings, AND they do area-of-effect damage. That means a single bomber can knock out most defenses in a cluster, or destroy an entire column of units, or destroy virtually any building on the map. If that doesn’t sound fun to defend against, it’s because it’s NOT. A single airfield full of four AABs can now destroy about a third of any average player’s base in a single pass, and there’s nothing the victim can do to prevent it. In short, way to go, EA. Your dedication to quality assurance and product testing is more evident than ever, you fucking jackasses.

(CW)Safety Monkey has left the server.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2003 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Misc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.