Tuesday 24 February 2009

The Fall of the Monolith

My eagerly awaited (at least by me) review of FEAR2: Project Origin.

I just hope the phase Monolith are going through ends now and they can start making really really good games again... preferably with the PC more than an afterthought.

Reading reviews of the console version it's clear that they didn't make FEAR2 easier, they just tuned the difficulty for the inaccurate aiming of a control pad. Once you start playing with mouse and keyboard, especially with slow motion, the whole thing becomes a pushover.

Shame.

UPDATE: I love it when developers listen. Maybe I will play the game again!

- Chris Capel

8 comments:

  1. Pads can fuck right off, basically.

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  2. On a more serious 'tip', as some Ragga artists might be wont to say - if pads were meant to be used for FPS games, auto-aim need never have been invented.

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  3. Agreed.

    What disturbs me more is, now that publishers have made FPS games successful on consoles, they're making a big effort to do the same with RTS games. Right down to denying us PC gamers the chance to play these games properly.

    While this will undoubtedly cause Halo Wars to fail, as even on console it's piss-easy, you can imagine publishers watching, slowly and surely drawing their plans against us.

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  4. They will NEVER succeed in making proper RTS games on a console if they persist with pads... and if they switch to mouse and keys, they've effectively got a micro-PC there.

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  5. Sometimes, I like to watch videos of cross-platform FPS games. I like to watch a console player attempt to aim.

    Sometimes I like to watch their multiplayer videos, videos posted on youtube as a declaration of 1337ness as they thoroughly wtfpwn their enemies. With auto-aim, which would be called an "aimbot" on the PC.

    Then I turn my attention to Deus Ex: Invisible War, and I weep for the curse of consolification.

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  6. I've seen vids like that too. It makes me feel both angry and smug when you see someone tracking another, shooting bullets, the bullets hitting the wall just behind them as they run, because the console turns so mechanically - level and slow. Every gun you practically have to use as a saw to saw through someone with your bullets, as opposed to our PC precision aiming. It's ridiculous.

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  7. There's a reason cross-platform multiplayer doesn't yet exist - even in a co-op game like L4D...

    In fact, have any of you seen L4D on a console? Expert mode is like Normal/Easy on the PC, certainly in terms of number of enemies.

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  8. I still find myself chuckling over the console L4D video I saw, where it took the player a good 2-3 seconds to aim at a single zombie. We might be elitists, us lot that have done every campaign on expert, but we're usually aiming at zombies before they're even there. Half a second can mean victory or failure.

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