Always Bet on Gamer_152

It’s Sunday 5 September and this week, in addition to shaking my fist into the air, cursing those who get to be at PAX 2010, I’ve also been playing plenty of video games. Perhaps one particular game I wish I hadn’t been playing was Peter Jackson’s King Kong. I went into the game with low expectations but had been told that the game wasn’t that bad really, however I find myself strongly disagreeing with that view. I don’t want to be overly negative about my experience with the game but I’m finding it hard to pay the game any compliments that don’t involve phrases like “that texture isn’t as bad as all the others” or “at least the dead enemies fade out before they can glitch out too much”. The graphics are ugly, the gameplay is generic, the lack of HUD is an issue, the controls are poorly done, my list of gripes really does stretch on and on but before we all fall into some kind of complaints-induced coma I think I’ll leave it at this for now; my first impressions are that King Kong is a very bad game.

 Helicopters may be evil but planes give them a good run for their money.

Now we have that out of the way I can talk about what I have enjoyed and once great source of fun for me has been the Altitude free weekend. I have played Altitude before and just during the two free weekends I’ve participated in I’ve racked up over seven hours of play. Like most indie games the fun in Altitude comes from the originality of the game, however unlike a lot of indie games it’s not a game trying to flaunt a highly artistic premise or tell a complex story, it’s just a fun multiplayer game. I’m not sure the game could keep me occupied long enough for me to want to fork out money for it but in the last seven hours I’ve had a very good time enacting some crazy plane-on-plane violence.

This week I’ve also continued my time with Red Dead Redemption. Everything from the characters to the graphics to the gameplay is of a really high quality and while I’m not into taking massive splurges of story missions at a single time every time I boot up the game I find something to like about it. While Red Dead is a great game in its own right many of the things to like about the game are the same things that Rockstar pulls off well with Grand Theft Auto; an enthralling open-world experience, a variety of side-missions, people within the world that act realistically and some great narrative elements. I don’t get quite as much of a sense of a living, breathing world as I did with Grand Theft Auto IV but I believe this is something inherent to having your game take place over miles of desert and barren wasteland. One thing that has hit me particularly about the game is that everyone within the world of Red Dead seems to have had the worst life imaginable, be a complete asshole or both. Much like in Grand Theft Auto not only do many of the characters lead rather dark lives but there are not always clear-cut lines between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” within the world and this is one of the best things Rockstar does with their characters. So I finish another week still eager to jump back into the big, wide world of Red Dead Redemption.

 It's time to kick ass and resume development of a 13 year-old game.

I would continue to whiter on about my continued experiences with Alan Wake or how I find Counter-Strike: Source a palatable experience when played offline and with a friend but we all know what the real big news this week is and I can go no longer without talking about it; Duke Nukem Forever is finally being finished. Gearbox and George Broussard deserve some kind of medal just for keeping this project up and running, instead of letting it die but as is the case with most other gamers I’m more interested in Duke Nukem Forever as a legend of the video game industry than an actual game. However, that’s not to say I have no interest in Duke Nukem Forever as a game, the quality of the product as a whole remains to be seen but from what game journalists have been reporting back from PAX it sounds like what has been shown of the game at least retains the spirit of Duke Nukem. I’m a little surprised the game was even complete enough to be shown at PAX but this seems indicative that Gearbox must have been working on the game for some time now. There is a challenge in itself for Gearbox, trying to take a game that was half-created by another studio and develop it in their own, unique way while still retaining the original style of the game, and while we don’t yet know if DNF is a hit or a miss, Gearbox is one of the best studios that could have been chosen to pick up this project and deliver the punch line to the long-running joke that is Duke Nukem Forever.

Finally, as I did last week I’ll close this blog with homage to my love of bullet points. Links are incoming!

• This 20 person Team Fortress 2 cosplaying masterpiece has blown my mind.
• Judging by the latest trailer it looks like Kirby's Epic Yarn is everything you'd want it to be.
• Does anyone else find the Star Wars: Force Unleashed II multiplayer scarily familiar?
• Here is yet another Team Fortress 2 fan doing brilliant things with this live-action version of Meet the Heavy.
• And for those of you who just can't get enough news on Halo: Reach here is the first of the four-part Bungie panel at PAX.

Thank you for reading and enjoy your gaming.

-Gamer_152