Endless Frontier - Started this. Pretty fun, with the exception of enemies with FORCED EVASION GRAH WHY. SRW PLOT seems to be in full force, so fun times should ensue.
Endless Frontier is to SRW plot what VP2's Seraphic Gate plot is to VP2 mainplot, or perhaps what WA2 monster intros are to everything else in WA2.
It's not only a trainwreck, it's a self-mocking highly sophisticated train-wrecking system designed to wreck trains
before they've even been made.
At least, so I gather. I should probably play it, that description makes it sound better.
Lessee, finally feel like doing game roundup!
Deus Ex:
Completed. First FPS for me!
General thoughts...
I can sorta see why people call it an RPG. Damage figures are very static, shooting an enemy actually applies an internal accuracy stat and an area where a shot will hit meaning that good stats matter as much for a headshot as aiming(unless you have a scope, but then your scope moves more with less accuracy), etc.
To someone that has never played an FPS and who has a definition of "Stats over skill foremost" for what he considers RPGs...it feels less so.
Generally it's a good beginner FPS though, remarkably forgiving basic curve combined with less of an emphasis on fast movement and aiming skill. You can get by without that.
Actually judging the game on it's own merits against the genre is, obviously, hard for me. Lessee if I can get my thoughts on it in a decent order, though...
Weapons are well balanced. This is very good. There's maybe two useless weapons. No one cares about pepper spray or throwing knives. The nearest most useless are the sawed-off shotgun, the crowbar and the knife. These are useless because you get better stuff, and even the latter two take up less of your limited inventory.
Weapons are rarely outright better than one another and the modification system ensures that the same weapon can be used throughout if you want, etc. This is, I cannot emphasize this enough, good balance.
I cannot emphasize this enough 'cause everything else is unbalanced on the PC end, namely skills and augs.
Okay, skills aren't that bad. Your average skill is worth something to level. Period. To L2, Trained. Not to L4, that's stupid in over half the cases.
L4 Swimming is a joke, costs four times normal swimming, and L2 Swimming will get you into 90% of the water-bound areas in the game without damage. The remainder, just pop a few Medkits, you lazy bastard. Or turn on Regen(but that's a seperate broken).
Medicine? I left it at L1, but it's useful to L2, where it doubles the impact of Medkits for cheap. The next upgrade costs twice as much and boosts them by 25% more. The final takes four times as much and boosts them by 20%. This is thought out well.
Lockpicking and Electronics, due to how ridiculously useful overall picking locks and, to a lesser degree, keypads is, could have been good. They cost the most of any skill in the game. Like, by miles. Oops so much for that past L2, no way in
hell I'm spending nearly 10k skill points for triple effectiveness lockpicks.
Enviromental Training might be worth L4. I dunno. I never used Ballistic Armor or Hazmats or anything in general. But maybe? I dunno. Optical camo is cool. I guess. I dunno. The impact seems pretty bad before L4 though from what I've read.
Weapons skills...lessee.
L2 Demo lets you keep bombs from blowing you up very reliably, WOOHOO ACCURACY AND DAMAGE USE TO EXPLOSIVES WHICH NORMALLY CHUNK THINGS. Oh and gas grenades. I'm sure they'll do more of their 0 damage. (I dunno. Maybe they last longer? That'd be silly though.) At least it's costs are lower than other weapons, but not enough lower to justify high levels.
Rifles is an awesome skill. Since evidently shotguns are rifles. (???) I'm not complaining. L4 is worth it.
Heavy looks worth the L4 on paper for a certain kind of player that wants to blow through the game and render a narrow band of enemies very dead. It's not bad to consider, due to the movement speed while using heavy weapons boost.
Pistols is worth considering if you're very cheap. And/or like mini-crossbow. <3 Mini-crossbow.
Low-tech is fun, doesn't need leveling though since the one good low-tech weapon happens to OHKO most of the stuff in the game. So much fun. But levels aren't needed.
So the moral is that half the weapon skills are worth hitting L4 and nothing else. But lots of stuff is worth L2. So it's
kinda balanced. And hey, Swimming is a great skill.
Augments, meanwhile, are worse on balance.
Yeah, worse. Now, the system is great, and well implemented. The balance between augs just sucks. Let's review. Augs are mutually exclusive, right? There's a certain amount of slots in a given area of the body, you can install exactly half of the augs that exist for that part of the body. So they should be pretty balanced, right?
Both arm augs are pretty even, for a wonder. Combat strength makes low-tech good early, and lets you bash down a few doors, Microfibral gives you THE POWER OF DONKEY KONG and lets you throw explosive barrels. I wish I'd gone Microfibral. Leveling Combat's sorta worth it but it's obsolete when you get the Dragon Tooth. Microfibral levels are a joke.
Torso augs: Let's see. There's three torso slots.
Regeneration. Oh, Regeneration. You card. "Hi guys I consume 120 EN a minute which is a seventh of your bar." "What could possibly be worth that?" "Oh, I heal a third of a basic L1 Medicine medkit a second in healing." "...what." "At L4 it's one and a third!" "Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat." Yeah. Regeneration almost feels like the lategame is built around it, to a degree, but that doesn't keep it from being the best Aug in the game. By several hundred miles.
Power Recirculator: "Oh, I make Regeneration cost 50% less, so now you could run it for like twenty minutes or something, once I hit L4." ".............." "Oh, and I make several other really killer augs unbelievably usable and kinda broken. You have to remember to turn me off since I take a liiiiiiiittle energy though, and I kinda am not much at L1, so FAQs anti-hype me. ._." "..."
Synthetic Heart. "I MAKE EVERYTHING ONE LEVEL HIGHER! BECAUSE THERE ARE CLEARLY A LOT OF AUGS SO FAR THAT NEED LEVELS." "That's great, how much energy do you take?" "ALMOST AS MUCH AS REGENERATION." "..." "AND I'M ON A AUG CANNISTER THAT CONTAINS POWER RECIRCULATOR." "...there's another one of these so I can at least get both of you, lowering your downside, right?" "NO." "...check please."
Energy Shield. "I make the nastiest damage in the game lower! By 25% at L1. And am situational as hell, almost nothing uses Energy weapons. This makes using the limited amount of upgrade cannisters on me iffy until late!" "What can are you on?" "The same one with Regeneration." "...there's another one of that can, right?" "...eventually?"
Enviromental Resistance and Aqualung: "We both kinda suck. One of us lets you swim longer but you can swim long enough with L2 Swimming. The other doesn't really block enough damage without upgrades and is as situational as Energy Shield." "Why should I use you, then?" "We're on the second augment cannister in the game?" "...Okay sure one of you goes on, the other option is Energy Shield anyways."
Leg Augmentations:
"We both kick ass and should be leveled to L4." "Which should I get?" "Speed's clearly better. Run Silent is fun if you want stealth though." "Kay."
Subdermal Augmentations:
Cloak. "No one can see you with me on! But they can hear you. It's not really perfect..." "How much do you cost?" "300 EN a minute, about a third of your bar." "..." "Leveling me makes it lower." "Oh." "It caps off higher than Regenerate anyways." "..." "..." "...Um." "Power Recirculator breaks me to hell and makes the cost as much as Regenerate at L1 anyways." "Oh. Sold!"
Radar Transparancy. "I'm cloak for bots!" "Bots are stupid." "I work on cameras." "This is sounding better." "Oh and bots really can't do anything to you, since they can't hear, unlike with Cloak." "Sold!"
Ballistic Protection and EMP Shield. "I'm out of slots." "We're earlier!" "Oh. Crap. Um. What do you do?"
Ballistic. "I resist most of the damage in the game by over half!" "...that's...pretty good." "I need to be L4 for that." "Oh. What do you do at L1?" "Block 20%." "...uh. Well, that's still not bad, actually. Worth considering. I still like screwing over cameras and playing with stealth camo more than getting shot though." "Aw."
EMP Shield. "I can full block EMP damage!" "EMP damage is MP damage. Well, EN damage. Bio-Energy damage. Same thing." "...well yeah..." "And it's rarer than hell." "..." "And you need to be L4 for that." "...I'll just go now."
Eye Augments!
Targetting: "I boost your accuracy!" "How much?" "4% per level." "Hey, that's...almost okay." "And I'm a Scan spell too!" "That's super. Boring, but super."
Vision Enhancement: "I give you nightvision!" "I have a built in light." "I don't alert enemies!" "You cost four times as much as the light." "I let you see through walls!" "Enemies through walls. At L4." "...I'll just be headed after EMP Shield."
And finally, Cranial Augments.
Agressive Defense System: "I'm missile resistance! You know, like enviromental defense. And EMP Shield. And all of those other awesome ski-" "NEXT." "Wait! I work better!" "How?" "I blow up enemies that try to missile you by detonating the missiles in their faces at high levels, and basically block missiles at L2." "...okay, that's not too bad."
Spy Drone: "._. I'm kinda slow at L1 and can't kill anything and don't really spy well and cost 150 EN a minute." "...well...uh...do you do anything well?" "Not at L1." "What about above L1?" "...well, at L2 I can OHKO smaller bots. And I move twice as fast. Is that any good?" "...still doesn't sound that worth it, but..." "At L3 I move three times my L1 speed and OHKO large bots." "..." "At L4 I can OHKO multiple bots at once, OHKO them with a glancing detonation rather than having to hit full on, and move faster than you run." "...........sold!"
Yeah, balance could use work. Still, overall, it's a very good game on gameplay.
Plot was...well, not a focus, but worth reading. Neat enough without getting in the way, as it were.
So much of the gameplay is in the details of areas, as well. Most areas have three or four ways to get to your goal. And the goal can be as simple as "Enter building.". Still multiple ways. There's multiple ways to do damn near everything. Hell, the three endings really are just them carrying this to it's logical conclusion, the game has a clear enough way they wanted you to go, to me.
Overall a very good game. I'm not really sure how to rate it, though. Haven't played enough FPS.
I'd post more games but this may have gotten too big already...
Edit: Looks okay.
System Shock 2:
Also completed. Second FPS!
General thoughts...
Much more skill based/active/generally fast than Deus Ex. In fact it feels like I'd imagined FPS to feel and not how Deus Ex did(DE has an interesting feel to it. It rarely feels like a game where you're darting around fast.).
Extremely good at scaring the hell out of you. The entire setting is scary as hell early and manages creepy very well until the end, IMO. Trips is right; It stops feeling like you're about to die at any moment, later, but the conversations you start hearing late are just creepy as hell. It's an oddly straight forward game for one so drat good at both scary and creepy as angles, plot-wise; There's nothing really stunning about it at any point, and rather little that's horribly mysterious, just scary.
Gameplay-wise, the game is weird on balance; I've never seen a game where bugs boost balance and interesting options as substantially as this.
Let's see, gameplay generally.
Standard weapons! Wrench is awesome(and technically Standard as it gets boosted by skill in it.). It is your only melee weapon. It can't break. It doesn't take ammo. It does as much damage as a shotgun. Why, I don't know, just go with it. Wrench beatdown are go. Go, Wrench. For great justice. Until the midgame, then you stop using it.
(Incidentally; Breakage is kinda a misnomer, things generally break as much as FE4 equipment. That is, they break until you fix it and only if you don't fix it first. Unlike FE4, it's random though and can happen on a full durability weapon. That's stupid. Less stupid in a game with quicksaves than it could be. Still sorta stupid. Also some things take way too much repair.)
Pistol is good. Trips highlighted it's problem to me, as he said, he was low on all Pistol ammo. There is a reason. The Pistol uses excellent ammo very badly. It tends to fall in a bunch of really retarded damage ranges that end up with it 3/4/6/7/whateverHKOing enemies with the better Armor Pierce/Anti-Personnel bullets. Standard bullets are trash on it. However, it does tend to do the most damage of any weapon you have, barring Assault Rifle and Grenade Launcher, to the greatest variety, barring the same two.
Shotgun kicks ass for a different reason. Ammo is everywhere, the favored weapon of Hybrids is shotguns and you can always get at least a shot off them, often a clip of six, and it's standard ammo requires no changing on the fly or anything, just shoot things in the face and deal remarkably okay damage. Alt ammo isn't bad either.
Assault Rifle is game-best weapon, for much of the same reason that I knock Pistol; It has all the Pistol good points but it tends to barely fall into incredibly dangerous damage ranges that let it do crap like three-shot Rumblers with the right ammo, or one-shot maintenance bots, or like two/three shot the others, all with not a lot of damage left over. It's just how it's damage ranges work. It's badass on paper, and in practice it's moreso.
Energy:
Laser Pistol rocks face if you get it at the start(Which is a little obscure and easily missed and requires you to be Army, but.). It's a limitless-but-low-capacity ammo weapon at a point where THIS IS MASSIVE YOU HAVE ALMOST NO AMMO AT ALL. And it one-shots Hybrids in Overdrive mode. Shiny!
Gained at a more normal point it's...still decent, normal mode is entirely for plinking Protocols and cameras, but Overdrive works well on every Hybrid flavor for a free bringdown that doesn't require you to get close(nice against the grenade ones especially), Overdrive does well against higher bots, and it even works against Midwives decently. Downside, Overdrive mode is slow. As hell. So long-range firefight with hiding behind things is go if you want to abuse it for enemies it doesn't one-shot. It ends up with an ammo capacity that lets it shoot off like 15 shots of this per charge.
Laser Rapier is a Wrench that requires 4 Energy and 3 Agility. I'm not sure why. It does deal more to mechs, but less to Annelid-class enemies which you're more likely to melee. Albiet barely more, meleeing either is a Bad Idea. This is the sort of area where SS2's lack of balance is starting to become evident. It gets worse.
EMP Rifle completely devastates: Protocol Drones, Maintenance Bots, Security and Assault Bots(I think those were the names of the higher bots), Cameras, Turrets, Midwives and Assassins. It kills all of these things so fast that the only ones likely to get more than one shot out of that entire set is Assassins, and that's because you missed them despite the blast radius because the pricks are fast as hell. This is still way better than every other weapon's performance except maybe hitting them with an EMP Grenade.
EMP Rifle does all of this basically for free, actually emptying it's charge requires you to use the largely-pointless alt mode(Which might be able to one-shot Midwives and Assassins though? I should have tried that.). It's situational, but very good. May not be valuable to everyone though, depends on how much you fear that set of enemies.
Grenade Launcher is awesome. Grenade Launcher, due to a bug, is not a reason to up Heavy, but, then, there is a dearth of things you may want to spend points on if you're skipping Psi, and it's at least boosted somewhat by it. Grenade Launcher massacres everything in the game(As long as you get it that first modify, this is important) with fairly rare ammo that takes up a lot of slots since it's all situational ammo except the two that aren't, and really you want them all anyways, barring maaaaaaaaybe EMPs if you have EMP Rifle. It is hard to hype as a weapon, since the ammo is really not very common, but it ends bad situations, for the most part. It rocks. Awesome emergency weapon.
Stasis Field Generator sounds like it sucks. I didn't use it and the on-paper of "Stuns things a little while" I've been able to find on it hasn't helped me. Ah well.
Fusion Cannon sucks. It uses a...fairly common, at least, late-game ammo to...deal lots of damage to bots, wait, I've heard of a weapon that trashes bots and requires L6 to use. It was better at it. It also damaged half-bots as much as this and didn't have any risk of blowing you up and fired over twice as fast. Okay, Fusion Cannon sucks at it's main theoretical role, but what about as a general purpose weapon? Well it can bonk down Hybrids, multiple of them with a single shot, that part's kinda neat. It can also....uh....well Annelids resist it and Assassins take less from it than the EMP and Rumblers just take neutral from it so it kills one in like twelve seconds or something which the Shotgun can do nearly as fast. Er. I don't see a point here, maybe I'm missing it~
Exotic? Well, there's Crenshinibo-er, the Crystal Shard. Which is the best melee weapon in the game, outclasses the Wrench, and GASP AND ALARM DUE TO A BUG ACTUALLY DOES ENOUGH DAMAGE TO JUSTIFY IT AGAINST LATEGAME ENEMIES. Useful bug. (It does double damage with the Smasher OS Upgrade if you use the Smasher variant. It also gets doubled Strength bonuses to damage. The net result should, with decent Exotic, be enough to one-shot Assassins and actually kill Rumblers before you get torn in half if you're lucky. AKA "Enough to consider worth meleeing them maybe.".) Much like the Grenade Launcher, a bug adds useful and neat versatility to the game.
Viral Proliferator can one-shot spiders if you level past L4 Exotic. You probably won't, but the highly fast two shot at close range that can hit multiples of them is more than enough anyways. Sure, it doesn't do anything else, the only Annelid besides them is Psi Reavers and no, it just doesn't work against them, feel free to try and fail to kill them with it. I suppose the anti-Human mode has uses if you don't mind getting OHKOed by the backlash if enemies are close.
Annelid Launcher sucks. I ranted about that to Trips, so I'll just leave it at game-worst weapon hands down by miles, note the downsides of the Proliferator are about the same, mention that it consumes FOUR TIMES THE DAMNED AMMO AND IT'S THE RAREST AND MOST PAIN IN THE ASS AMMO IN THE GAME, and leave it at that.
Other game elements? Stats are well balanced; Even at their high end, despite rather hefty final two levels costs, they may be worth it. The technical skills...are less so at high end. Modify L3 and Repair L3 have decent uses for decently cheap on Cyber Modules(Skill Points) costs but are...eh. Research has few uses beyond L3 as well(L4 really, but LabAssistant module gets you that last level). Maintenance is good basically all the way to L6 though, ditto Hacking. So, pretty balanced.
Psi I didn't mess with. It's unbalanced as hell anyways. >_>
Overall another very good game. It's kinda straight forward for something with so much depth. Hard to put another way.
And now, AN RPG!
Pokemon Platinum:
Just got to Veilstone.
Generally much better than Pearl was. Battles are about 75% the time due to a bunch of little pauses now being gone. Pokemon variety is up hugely, all the new evos being added in is wonderful and both fixes some of the problem the game had and allows you to actually muck with all the neat new ideas inheirent in them. The game could move faster, but it's more like Gen 3 now than "Whaaaaaaat this is so slow ._.".
Of course, the game's pretty broken, you can get full evos like Probopass as early as just before Gym 2. But hey.
Oh and I think EXP bars charge faster now. I'm not sure, and won't be until I gain 2k EXP off something, but so far it feels notably faster.
