T w e n t y S i d e d
Here I take a stab at Red Faction: Guerrilla.
It’s a tough game to make fun of. It’s filled with absurdities, but they don’t translate well into comedy. It’s just, “Hey, you know how the game sometimes does that odd thing? Yeah? That’s dumb, isn’t it?” The plot is sometimes just tepid, sometimes painfully ridiculous and contrived. The fun comes from blowing up and knocking down buildings, and the game is always trying to portion that stuff out. It wants to make sure you eat a helping of driving around on labyrinthine brown terrain and babysitting NPC companions before you can enjoy your building-toppling cookie.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
The Brilliance of Mass Effect
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
Humorous, but not really funny enough to laugh at.
To be honest, all while playing the game I was thinking “Do they really want me to take the plot seriously?”
Some games are actually better without a story.
The best part about this game is that the big Totalitarian Martian Regime has decided to enslave all the people on Mars for such a totally ridiculous purpose. Despite the fact that they are able to travel to and terraform an entire planet, apparently they haven’t come up with a better way to mine resources than by using pickaxes and hammers. I can accept stupid plots, especially if they don’t take themselves too seriously (see Just Cause 2), but in this game even the premise of the story is massively flawed.
Ehh… It doesn’t fail quite that badly.
1) There’s sci-fi mining equipment all over the place.
2) Even if they aren’t the primary tool for a job, hand tools have proven to be extremely resilient (manual screwdrivers are still prevalent, even though the powered variety has been around for years). This is doubly true in frontier areas, where transportation and service costs are high.
3) Even if that doesn’t convince you, the use of hand tools is still a cosmetic issue, rather than a flaw in the premise. The premise is “evil organization enslaves workers to perform hard labor.” That works whether they use hand tools or sci-fi gadgetry.
Unless, of course, you feel that a terraforming civilization should be able to automate the mining process entirely using either robots or magic “mining rays.” Which is fair enough, but will probably lead to quite a bit of disappointment if you consume much science fiction.
I like that the other driver never answered Alex and just kept going ‘zomg it’s you!’ It’s always a bit jarring for me when my PC becomes a sudden celebrity, especially if I just got somewhere and no one should really know me yet.
The character’s name is Alec, isn’t it?
It’s funny, my GameAccess queue ended up delivering this to me just yesterday. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
You know, I have zero familiarity with a lot of these games, but the humor in the strips is good enough that I don’t have to to have it be more than worth my time to click over and read them.
Just thought I’d share that today.
Very funny that you picked this for your strip; I played this game a few months ago and always thought the AI allies were idiots for this exact reason.
They came handy in some missions though.
I also liked the “safehouses” where no enemy ever followed you even if they were fully visible and not well defended. And the enemy pulling out of entire zones just because you broke a few of their buildings with a hammer. Oh, and no mining ever being seen anywhere. And loads of vehicles circulating everywhere with no reason, before and after you liberate an area. And the ever spawning enemies. There’s a lot of material for strips here.
Anyway, still liked the game. Should have been a bit shorter though. And the PC version is a buggy mess.
Ok, back to Mass Effect 2.
I played the first Red Faction and was very dissapointed. Sure there was deformable terrain, except when you needed to be kept on the rails. Then you couldn’t dig through the wall o ge around the door – by God you had best go get that key!
I never finished it. Got part way through and then epiphany! Thousands of digruntled workers and even a full-fledged revolutionary council, but they can’t get anything done without me. Me, all by myself, is going to save the world. Heard it too many times in too many games.
What makes that even more amusing is the fact that Red Faction has highly Communistic overtones. Though the ‘only thou canst save mankind’ is applicable there too. At least they never went the opposite edge and made you feel useless, Like F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate did for me.
Did you buy Metro 2033? I would be very interested in a 2033 review.
Please tell me this title was a Jonathan Coulton pun, or I’m going to be very sad.
I actually played this game for a long, long time before realizing that I didn’t have the red (as in RGB) cable plugged in… And it didn’t look a ton different.