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']]}Black Mesa Review
http://www.google.com
Black Mesa, a mod that was developed for the sole purpose of reworking the classic game “Half-Life”, is a free-to-download title that attempts to resurrect what made the game so great to begin with. It’s a risky feat that begs the question, ‘Why tamper with a classic when the original is still readily available?’. Does Black Mesa deliver a compelling argument
to this question or does it fall a little short?
Black Mesa tackles level-progression in a very different way
than most other first-person shooters or for the most part, games in general do. It teaches you by means of exploration and
use of your tools rather than by following the next objective marker on a mini-map. Black Mesa is all the more engaging for this. The world becomes more of a domain of
exploration and experimentation rather than a place that guides you by the nose out of fear you might get “stuck”. This
allows for the level designers to actually do their jobs in a ways that are
more interesting. Levels become more
like puzzles rather than simple environments that lead from one confrontation to
the next. The best part about this is
that these puzzles often don’t feel like traditional “puzzles”. You never stop to play meta-games like in Bioshock
or drag boxes around a clearly designed puzzle room like in Zelda. The designers made it so that the game feels
very much like you aren’t solving
puzzles but instead are overcoming basic obstacles that make sense in the game
world.
The AI on the other
hand, seems to lack much of the finesse of the level-design. The basic monster AI works fine for the most
part aside from the occasional 4 legged-creature running into a wall. The soldier AI is where the game
suffers. The soldier AI isn’t…horrible. But it can be extremely frustrating in ways
that don’t really make sense. For one, the soldiers will always rush you. This
can work to your advantage more often than it does to your disadvantage. Over and over again I found myself hiding
behind some sort of cover and just waiting until they came to me. It ends up taking a lot of the tactical
gameplay out of the experience and you often feel the need to do this because of the second problem the AI faces: their
perfect aim. If there is one thing that
drives me mad in FPS games, it’s when the AI has the ability to hit you with
Every. Single. Bullet. It’s
severely limits your tactics and makes things extremely difficult in a pretty
unintelligent way. A game of planning
and using the environment intelligently turns into finding a box and hiding
behind it for most firefights. It doesn’t
necessarily break the game but makes most encounters with soldiers very unenjoyable. If it wasn’t for my misplaced pride, I would’ve
switched the difficulty to easy after a couple hours into the game.
Somewhere nestled in-between the quality of the clever
level-design and the poor soldier AI, rests the game’s platforming
segments. Most of the time these are
very enjoyable and work in the game's favor unless you are horrible at crouch-jumping. But what really weighs against some of these
segments is the brutal difficulty. You
are expected to do a lot within a very strict control set. You character’s jumps are very short…almost
realistically short. This makes what you
have to accomplish all the more difficult.
Most of the time your jumps have to be absolutely perfect. Any less than that will have you dying
instantly and spawning back to where you last saved. Between the soldier battles and the
platforming, it will only be a matter of time until you are saving with OCD-like
tendencies.
If your saving in Black Mesa is OCD then the sound might be
considered to be a little Bi-Polar. Most
of the original game is left untouched.
No music. Just you and the environment.
Some might find this a little dull but it actually works in the
atmosphere’s favor in many situations.
The chatter of soldiers or the sound of a resting zombie is only intensified
by this. Some music has been added to
act as transitional pieces during pivotal moments in the game. I liked these pieces; most of the time they were
spot on and helped intensify the mood.
But they are incredibly jarring. By this I mean they are loud and add almost
too much intensity to the game. When one
of these pieces comes on it feels a little out of place even if they fit in
with the general feel of the game.
It’d be somewhat of a catastrophe if I didn’t
mention the visuals in Black Mesa. Considering that’s where most of the work
has clearly been done. What they’ve
achieved here is on nothing short of a professional level and breathes life
back into a dated game. The graphics in
the environments are somewhat of a mixed-bag though. One area may look gorgeous and rival current-gen
standards while a different environment might look a little worse than Half-Life 2. As an overall product
though it does what it set out to do and makes the game all the more enjoyable
for it.
Black Mesa is one of those rare games that could change your
perceptions of what a first-person shooter can be. It transcends much of what we are used to today, with shooters that focus on killing enemies rather than challenging the
player's intellect by engaging them in thought-provoking environments. In many ways the game emulates how learning
happens in the real world by challenging you to discover solutions rather than simply
handing them to you. While on the surface
Black Mesa may appear to be just a glorified graphical mod, it does much more
for the genre. Black Mesa helps reignite
the qualities of what made Half-Life such an important game in the first place.www.google.comhttp://www.google.com
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']]}Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Review
When I first fired up Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for
the PC, I was admittedly a little disappointed.
It all felt like groundwork for what could be a good game. Thankfully, that was back about 2 weeks ago when
the game first launched. Since then the
game has absolutely exploded in user-created content. I finally understand why Valve didn't fill up
the game with new maps and modes. There
is absolutely no need to.
All Valve had to do was create a nicer looking engine,
balance the weapons, tinker with the UI and then call it a day. They had to create the backbone of the game. After that the users would take over and turn
it into a masterpiece. In many ways they
already did. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
is the ultimate first person shooter experience when it comes to user-created content.
The last few days I've played Tron-inspired servers where
one team dons blue suits while the other wears orange and firing your weapons
leaves a trail of the color that matches your suit. All on custom maps. It's a riot.
Not only because of neon colors erupting from all directions, but
because of the gameplay implications it has.
Suddenly you need to address not only actual enemy movement but plan
your strategies around where these shots are being fired from. Now take a step back and realize; this is one
server, a mere morsel of what Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has to offer.
Since then I've played on maps inspired by Crash-Bandicoot,
new takes on old custom favorites like ‘Churches’, and even fought on a pirate
ship using knives only. The experience
is sublime. Constantly being fed new
content from a solid backbone is all that I've ever wanted from an online
first-person shooter. Counter Strike: Global Offensive delivers over and over again.
I'd be misguiding you if I didn't bring up that the game has
some problems. It becomes apparent when
first starting up a custom match and you need to download new content for a
server. The game doesn't even provide a
simple loading screen to let you know what's happening. It just leaves you with a blank screen. This is pretty troublesome since if you are
anything like me, you will come to the conclusion that the game just isn’t
responding. I had to have a friend tell
me what was going on. Furthermore there are
a bunch of small glitches peppered throughout the experience. Thankfully, none of them make it unbearable
to play. It's more or less about
realizing how to deal with them. I
expect they’ll be remedied in a short time.
The game comes packed to the teeth with completely
redesigned weapons. A few of them are a
little disappointing with a ‘cheap’ look or feel. But it's really a mixed bag. For the most part the weapons feel solid and more
importantly: balanced. And the variety
is definitely there, establishing favorites will probably only take you a
couple of matches.
The visuals in CS: GO are enough. That's really the best way to put it. As someone who is satisfied pretty easily
with graphics I was fairly impressed with how nice the lighting and subtle
design choices on some of the guns looked.
It even shows through on the custom maps, where you'd expect less effort
to be done in this area. A good way of
putting it would be, “It looks like a current gen game doesn't exactly break
down any boundaries”. Even this point ends
up not really mattering considering how you will get pretty much endless variety in visuals through custom content.
As a vanilla product, CS: GO is a major disappointment. I would not recommend purchasing this game on
anything but the PC. Thankfully on the PC it is anything but disappointing. I'd even go as far as to say that I haven't
been more excited about the future of a game in years. The incredible backbone of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive combined
with the limitless creativity of the modding community is likely going to have
me sinking hundreds of hours into the title. At 15 dollars that kind of
longevity is a hell of a buy. I wouldn't
recommend missing out on it unless you simply don't like first-person shooters.
9.5/10
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']]}New Super Mario Bros. 2 Review
Alright, so when playing a 2D Mario game you probably shouldn't expect a reinventing of the wheel. But I just expected a little something more. Intstead I felt like I was playing levels I had already played years before with the first title. To make things worse, none of it was that engaging. The collecting a bazillion coins concept that the game seems to be fixated on is nothing more than a gimmick. It's essentially taking a major part of the old games and just blowing it up to a tiring extent. It has quite a few gameplay implications because ideally you are supposed to collect as many as possible. This effectively changes how you play the game when they are..well...everywhere. The point ends up becoming mute when you realize there is really no purpose to collecting these coins. You don't unlock extra levels or anything interesting like that; you just set up high scores to beat later. Without a ranking system that leads to further unlocks based on the coins you collect for each level, this effort is effectively useless. I had no desire to go back to beat my prior coin-hoarding scores.
Which leads me to the Coin rush feature new to the New Super Mario Bros. franchise. I will go on record to say that I find this feature to be incredibly pointless. You play 3 levels at a time at random, trying to collect as many coins as possible with the catch that you only have one life. This concept is flawed in a number of ways. My first problem is that there is no online leaderboards or anything like that to incentivize going for high scores. I'm not usually one to go for that type of thing but since this mode is all about setting records you should be at least able to share those records online with your friends. My second problem is that since the courses are random you really have no way of comparing your scores locally with anyone to make it somewhat competitive. You can only show what you got out of 3 random levels that likely won't match one of your mates. I feel like the developers got together and decided that they wanted to make the game seem longer and more interesting, so they came up with a more frustrating version of what's already in the game. The fact that you can see your coin totals for each individual level in the normal story mode seems to diffuse what they are trying to do here. Doing it at random takes away any sort of competitive vibe from a mode that is striving to promote competitive energy. In the end, all that's left to ask is: "Why"?
Although I've went on a bit with the negatives, New Super Mario Bros. 2 isn't all bad. It has some fantastic level design, especially in the ways that it taunts you with reaching the desirable star coins which can be used to unlock extra paths leading to additional levels and power-ups. I only wish that the game mixed up some of it's locations a little more. How many times now have we been to the Desert or the Snowy Mountains? Despite the samey locations, the visuals still end up looking nice on the 3DS, even the way the 3D is layered ends up having a nice effect; although it doesn't have any gameplay implications.
The sound in the game mostly consists of classic tunes remixed with something a little more spunky and playful. Overall I liked it even if it did seem a little too familiar to the first game.
New Super Mario Bros. 2 has tons of style, great design choices, and addictive gameplay. The game has a lot going for it. But if you are a veteran to the series like myself, about halfway through the title you might begin to wonder when the game was going to differentiate itself from prior games in the series. Unfortunately that time will never come. It doesn't exactly break the game but it will definitely make me a little bit more cautious before I buy the next game in the series.
7/10
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