Tag: First-Person Shooter

Weekend Writing: BioShock Infinite, the polarizing third installment.

May 22, 2021

It’s been about several months since I last wrote a Weekend Writing post. Admittedly me playing games has slowed down considerably in 2021, due to a multitude of personal factors. Fed up with playing Bingo Story and Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War all the time, I decided to tackle a game in my backlog. One that has sort of an infamy among gaming circles. A game that’s particularly very polarizing, to a point where people who praised it as the “Game of the Forever” and considered its creator a genius now consider it the worst game in the entire franchise. And since I talked about BioShock 2 back in 2019, I feel it’s fitting to play the third – and as of 2021, the most recent – game in the BioShock series.

BioShock Infinite is one of those games that I heard had sort of a legacy behind it. When released in 2013, the game was unanimously praised for its storytelling and gameplay, and won a myriad of awards. As time goes on, though, the general consensus has taken a 180 – damning criticism and people calling creative director Ken Levine a talentless hack. Even when I wrote about replaying BioShock 2 a few years back, that sentiment seemed to still be true, with some people even re-evaluating BioShock 2 as probably the best game in the series.

But hey, I always believe in playing things for myself rather than blindly going with what others say, so let’s see if this is infinitely amazing or infinitely terrible.

(Content warning: Plot spoilers for BioShock Infinite follow. While the game is eight years old as of this writing, I always assume that someone who’s reading this might not have played the game yet, much like me.

In addition, this game does go into themes of racism and political movements, of which I’ll also talk about here.)

Must these games *always* start with a lighthouse?

The plot of BioShock Infinite starts thusly: Booker DeWitt must go to Columbia – a magical city in the sky, via lighthouse – to rescue a girl by the name of Elizabeth, for a bounty. As the game goes on, it turns out the goal is not that simple as we think, partially due to Elizabeth’s magic ability to create “tears” in the world that go to alternate timelines and worlds. Thus Booker and Elizabeth must stop Zachary Comstock and the world of Columbia he’s made, while also figuring out the mystery of why Booker’s there in the first place.

As I went through the intro world of Columbia, there was a rather unsettling sense of christian white supremacy in the early story beats, which is a rather strong but somewhat upsetting start. Before Booker even gets the chance to visit Columbia, he must be baptized. Eventually Booker starts seeing the Vox Populi, the rival group of people demonized by the Founders that basically hate the cleanliness that Comstock’s Columbia brings. You would think that since there’s a clear hero/villain dynamic to the world that Booker would just be able to work with the Vox Populi and cause a revolution, right?

*If only this was a reality. Well, technically it is, but… it’s complicated.*

Well, technically no. Booker just wants to get out of Columbia with Elizabeth, being rather selfish. There’s a point in the plot where through a special ability that Elizabeth has brings the two of them into a timeline where Booker was the Vox Populi leader who became a martyr, but the rest of the plot tends to lean that both the Founders and Vox Populi are evil in their own distinct ways. I couldn’t roll my eyes any harder when they got to that point in the story.

Strife: The Outlier of the Doom Engine.

March 16, 2020

Doom is over 25 years old. The tale of id software’s first-person shooter causing a new wave of clones and derivatives has been told to death. But id wasn’t just content with making games. They were willing to license their technology out to other developers who would add their own spin and magic to it, sometimes those games becoming big on their own. For example, Raven Software ended up using id’s Doom engine to greatness with Heretic and Hexen using id’s fancy engine. The two were practically inseparable for 15 years after that, using id’s engines for their games for a very long time.

But there was one other major game that used that engine. One that had a troubled development due to a multitude of factors. You could say they had a bit of strife. The result is one of the more ambitious games made on that old Doom engine.

Not to be confused with that other Strife, the MOBA.

Enter Strife. A first person shooter that had a troubling development cycle and came out to little fanfare in 1996. Why did this game get thrown into the world of abandonware? Let’s find out.

Strife had a rough history: Developer Rogue Entertainment consisted of ex-Cygnus Studios people after wanting to make a new game after 1994’s Raptor: Call of the Shadows. The developers had conflicts with their boss, and decided to take their ideas elsewhere. After co-operating with people at id, Rogue got a deal with publisher Velocity Inc, makers of the JetFighter games and Battlezone clone Spectre, to publish their new project. Strife ended up releasing in May 1996, to passable reviews.

Problem was that by 1996, old “Doom clones” like Strife looked incredibly dated compared to the mind-blowing 3D visuals of Descent and id Software’s upcoming Quake, which came out a month later. This, combined with publisher Velocity folding not long after Strife’s release, meant that the game was basically dead in the water, and mostly forgotten by the general PC gaming populace.

Rogue would eventually bounce back, making expansions for id’s Quake and Quake II – Dissolution of Eternity and Ground Zero, respectively – and helping out on a former id Software employee’s pet project: American McGee’s Alice. In an ironic sense of history repeating, Rogue itself would dissolve in 2001 as the CEO left to go join EA, resulting in the remaining people forming Nerve Software, which is still around making games today.

Back to Rogue’s debut. I found Strife thanks to the now-defunct Home of the Underdogs, which was a common go-to spot for so-called “abandonware” titles. (Other games I found thanks to Home of the Underdogs include Blood II: The Chosen, which I wrote about back in 2012, and the amazing System Shock 2.) At the time, I had made a good amount of progress into the game itself, but at some point, I forgot what I was supposed to do and ended up bumping around in a sewer area repeatedly before giving up and moving on to other games.

After not touching Strife for so long, I decided to give it another try, nearly 15 years later, and see if it was as good I remember it. Turns out it’s… alright.

Games I beat in 2018: Enemy Front, possibly the true successor to Medal of Honor.

January 16, 2019

Welcome to the first Secret Area post of 2019. Here’s something that was several months in the making. This was mostly due to procrastination. Naturally, I’m writing about a game I finished last year, two days short of a year after I had beaten it. And it’s a callback to a post I made last June. Let’s do this.

Last year, I had written a somewhat scathing review of the 2010 Medal of Honor reboot, which took the legacy of a long-standing WWII FPS franchise and basically ruined it by being a Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare copycat. You can check that post out here. At the end of that post, I had hinted towards a game that I had said was just as close to the original Medal of Honor games.

Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch, but it is a World War II FPS, and surprisingly a decent one at that.

Enemy Front was a shooter released in 2014 for various platforms, including PC. Released by CI Games, it was a fairly unknown budget shooter in an era where those kind of shooters were slowly disappearing due to the drought of retail games as well as the prevalence of Steam making it a newer (and cheaper!) haven for the cheap schlock of the past.

I had heard of it thanks to a certain YouTube personality. Ahoy – later a maker of wonderful flashy documentaries about Doom, Half-Life, the Amiga, and many others – had done a video chronicling the arsenal of Enemy Front. He had done similar videos before for Call of Duty and other franchises, and would later be revised to an all-purpose format with his Iconic Arms series of videos. I’m still waiting for the new season of Iconic Arms, just to see what games he uses as an example for the weapon he’s talking about.

Though, it wasn’t just a British YouTube personality talking about a budget polish-developed FPS’s weaponry that got me to snag Enemy Front. It was also dirt cheap on a Steam sale. All it takes is something to be under $5 and you’ve caught my interest almost immediately.

Broadcasting your war diaries doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.

Enough preamble. Let’s get to the meat and actually talk about Enemy Front proper. You play as American journalist Robert Hawkins as he reports the stories of a resistance front all around Europe. Hawkins’s voice sounds familiar to me. There’s no voice cast in the game itself, and IMDB only gives a brief unconfirmed list. I swear I heard him in that infamous Duty Calls game I also wrote about long ago, but there’s no proper credits for that one (or for Enemy Front).

Later meeting up with resistance fighters, Hawkins must stop the Nazi menace in various locales around Europe, including during the Warsaw Uprising. A fair share of the game takes place around that Polish conflict. It’s fitting, considering developer/publisher CI Games is based in Warsaw, Poland.

Human shields are a good way to be threatening. Until they realize you just grabbed some expendable low-ranking goon.

Games I beat in 2018: Medal of Honor, the mostly forgotten 2010 reboot.

June 15, 2018

Hey folks. Sorry that my posting is still somewhat erratic at the moment. Things have been going on in my life, and for a good while I didn’t have anything interesting to write about. I’ve amassed so many junk items over the years that they’re all strewn about in my room, hoping one day they’ll be played and/or written about.

So instead of struggling to think about something, I’m gonna do some posts about some of the games I’ve beaten throughout 2018. Surprisingly it is a small list, as I had fallen into the trap of playing the same quick pick up and play games instead: Killing Floor 2, Payday 2, Asphalt 8: Airborne, and more recently, Quake Champions.

Despite having a massive backlog, I still did finish a few games throughout the year. This was originally gonna be a post with two reviews, but this particular review got so lengthy that I had to split it up.

So let’s talk about a failed reboot of an iconic franchise, shall we?

327982-medal-of-honor-windows-front-cover — Mr. DudeMcLargebeard getting ready to shoot the evil people.

(Warning: Spoilers for the story of Medal of Honor 2010 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 lie within.)

Back around 2014, I had written (but oddly didn’t publish) a thing about Medal of Honor: Airborne, which I had replayed because a friend was streaming the game. It’s one of his personal favorites, and while I liked some elements of it like being able to drop anywhere on the in-game map, or even the creative weapon upgrade system, it just felt like a tired shooter going through the motions, and was going beyond the more historical angle of Medal of Honor, even having Nazi super soldiers wielding MG42s like it was nothing.

At the end I had written something to the effect “It’s not as amazing as Frontline or Allied Assault, but it’s probably better than Medal of Honor: Warfighter.” At the time, I hadn’t played the most recent Medal of Honor games, and 2018 felt like the time to tackle Medal of Honor 2010 – as I’m gonna call it from here on in, to distinguish it from the 1999 original – and I felt disappointed all the way through.

20180101134508_1 — I finished this back in January, as the very first game I beat in 2018. This was not a good start to the year.

Realizing World War II games were on their way out after a near ten-year period of them constantly coming out, EA was in a bind. Medal of Honor was considered this prestigious franchise, and they didn’t know where to take it. Their solution was to see what their competition already did three years prior and follow suit: Go modern, and see if it stuck.

The problem was that this came out right after the extremely successful Modern Warfare 2, and was out the same year as Call of Duty: Black Ops – probably in my top three favorite Call of Duty games for various reasons – so already EA was climbing a very, very steep hill. With Medal of Honor 2010, EA didn’t get to the top, but instead slipped and started rolling down the hill, giving themselves bruises and broken bones along the way.

Gameplay wise, it’s a boilerplate roller coaster of a modern military shooter. Shoot the bad guys, reload, occasionally use a grenade launcher or call in airstrikes. Right click aims, Left click shoots. Occasionally you get medals for headshots or multikills, a holdover from Medal of Honor: Airborne that doesn’t make sense here. There’s even a level where you’re in a helicopter. Occasionally soldiers go “hooah” and speaking military lingo so frequently that it’s almost self-parody.

Even something like this has been done, and done better elsewhere.

It’s clear Danger Close was glancing at what Call of Duty 4 did years prior, and tried to copy it, but didn’t understand what made Call of Duty 4 such the blockbuster success.

Budget Shooter Theater #5: Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.

July 5, 2017

“Best played co-operatively.” It’s something that’s fairly obvious for some games: Left 4 Dead, Payday 2, Killing Floor, the works. These are the kind of games that are built from the ground up to be played co-op with friends or random players, but can also be played by yourself if you want to. To me, the term also applies to games that have a single player campaign, but is infinitely more fun with a few friends. Like Sven Co-op is for Half-Life. That describes Serious Sam, the chaotic shooter series, to a T.

10638-serious-sam-the-second-encounter-windows-front-cover — I wanna know who thought to give Sam this 50s chiseled-guy-in-a-pulp-comic look.

After realizing the “Decision Wheel” I made was leading to my own picks rather than unique or random ones, I abandoned the idea and replaced it with a simple queue system where friends and viewers could request games to be played on future streams. As I was asking for requests, my friend Cambertian on Twitter suggested this one for me to try, and it was quite the interesting pick.

I’ve played Serious Sam games in the past, where I tried to play through the classic games solo through the HD remasters, but I never got very far in them. I was more successful playing through them co-operatively with a few friends, where I played through The First Encounter HD, Serious Sam 2 and even part of Serious Sam 3: BFE. Sadly the group I had to play Serious Sam 2 and 3 were from separate communities, and we had a hard time matching our schedules enough so we could finish 3, since one of them was from the UK whereas the rest of us, including friend of the site Bobinator, were based in the US. One of these days I might replay 3: BFE solo, but we’re here to talk about the original games.

2_1_Ziggurrat_shot0000 — Even for a 15-year-old game, it still looks pretty.

The Second Encounter is basically an expansion pack to 2001’s The First Encounter. It adds a few new enemies to its bestiary such as a pumpkinhead looking monster with a chainsaw, an Reptiloid Demon that throws homing fireballs, and even alien variants of the simpler headless foes of First Encounter. There’s a few new weapons in addition to the common arsenal of shotgun, tommy gun and rocket launchers, including the valuable sniper rifle – devastating against middle tier enemies – and the Serious Bomb, the game’s answer to the BFG.

There’s a few new locales like the jungle, some temples, even a snowy land, each area defining a certain episode of the game. These are much different than the aztec temples that are prevalent in First Encounter, and it brings a nice look to things.

2_2_Persepolis_shot0001 — A common sight in *Serious Sam*: Lots and lots of enemies.

Serious Sam is part of a genre I’d call “slaughter FPSes,” as they relate to the Doom community’s “slaughter map” design of straightforward levels and lots and enemies to kill. Many of the rooms in The Second Encounter throw loads of enemies in fairly open spaces, which isn’t particularly hard.

However, once I got partway into the second episode, the game starts ramping up the difficulty in an unfair way. They loved putting loads of Kleers – the skeleton monsters – in very cramped corridors, making it difficult to push through without getting stuck and repeatedly taking damage. The flamethrower was my best friend a lot in that section, as it killed them pretty fast.

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