Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=462https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3060Gameplay: Basically the game was over as soon as I built the nuclear missile silos. The sky rained nuclear fire, I racked up kills left and right, and the game was done. The lack of a great AI is the main drawback to the game. Although there are third-party AI packs for the game, they still are subject to basic flaws, and need certain allowances. This makes the AI fairly predictable, and you never truely feel frightened. Granted, on a land map, the computer will swarm you, but with tanks and guns, you can stop him. Design: The game presents multiple avenues of conquest. There are fully integrated land, sea and air battles. Each venue is as legitimate as the other. Some game promise water combat, but fail to deliver. Other lack in the air department. T.A. manages to come through well on all of them. Aside from some pathing issues, the ability to create massive navies and pulverize your enemies is frankly exciting. Likewise, swarming your foes with gunships is also great fun, although perhaps not as effective unless you mix in bombers and fighters. T.A. manages to offer you many things to try out to keep you interested.Thu, 06 Mar 2008 02:30:38 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3060&iddiary=5925https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3060Summary: Total Annihilation is not your average RTS. Its setting is in the distant future. Two forces, the Arm and the Core, are waging a thousand year-long war over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machine. At the time of the game itself, the original reasons for the war seem to be forgotten, and the two sides are badly decimated, but still fighting. The introduction tells us that the combatants have depleted an entire galaxies worth of material to fight their war. Gameplay: Sadly, I only have the skirmish disc for the game, so I cannot play the campaigns themselves anymore. This log will cover my experience in skirmish mode. The AI in skirmish mode is terrible. Theres no two ways around it. Even a blind man could manage to win against the AI in hard mode. Knowing this, I set out to find an upgrade for the AI, as well as some new units. Once the computers could finally stand a chance against me, I settled down to duke it out with them. My favorite map is one called 7 Islands. It is large. Very large. The fastest aircraft in the game take roughly 30 seconds to travel from one end to the other, and these are jets that can out-fly missiles. It is also entirely made of metal. This last fact is especially interesting, but only if you know how the resource system in T.A. works. In most RTSs, you have a node of resources. You go to it, spend a few seconds mining, then return to some arbitrary point and turn in the resources. Rinse, lather, repeat. In T.A. this is not so. First off, there are two resources, metal and energy. To gain metal, you must find a metal deposit, or if you're lazy (like me) you play on an all metal world so you can put metal extractors anywhere you want. Energy production buildings can go anywhere, with some exceptions, such as geothermal plants which can only be put on geothermal vents. The best way to envision the resource system in T.A. is to envision a lake. This lake has two streams, one running into it, the other running out of it. The trick in T.A. is to always make the stream running into the lake faster thant he stream running our of the lake. Otherwise, your lake will drain. So ingame, you have two lakes, one for metal, and one for energy. Both of your pools are being added to and taken from constantly. When you start building a new building, your demand for metal and energy go up slightly. As soon as you finish building a Fusion Reactor, your energy supply will increase dramatically, permitting you to increase your energy consumption. Oh yeah, and you can build however much of whatever you want. You just have to have the resources for it. If you wanted to, you could build 500 Solar Collectors all at once, but I can guarantee you that your metal and energy production won't be able to keep up with it. Anyway, back to the map. T.A. is a great game for turtling, and as I am a defensive player, it works out fine. In a way its a race. I know the enemy has access to nuclear weapons, so I have to build up my base and protect it before the nukes start flying. T.A. has a very wide variety of vehicles, airplanes, and "kbots" (essentially tiny mechs like in anime) that allow you to defend your base. I prefer mostly static defenses such as the delightful Big Bertha, able to rain down fire on the enemy from a great distance. Combined with radar, three Big Berthas can stop an invasion before it begins. But ground defense isn't the only hurdle. The computer likes to send aircraft at you, and if your base isn't well enough defended, you'll get overrun. Speaking of combat, I should mention that T.A. doesnt have that ridiculous "I have you targeted so therefore my bullets will automatically hit you" system that just about every RTS under the sun seems to have. It has *real* physics. With some skill and a fast computer, it is possible to navigate a single unit through an artillery barrage. Why? Because the guns at long ranges are inaccurate. You can also hide behind terrain. Why? because the projectiles follow real paths and can and will smack harmlessly into things. Planes will outrun missiles, shrapnel falling out of the sky will damage buildings on the ground. Combat is visceral and fast. Often it is over before it starts. I'd hear an alarm, explosions and by the time I went to see what was going on there'd just be some smoke and bits of enemy plane falling out of the sky. It's thrilling to see your Punishers track and rain fire down upon targets a quarter of the map away, and see radar signatures tick off one by one. Currently, the computers are fighting amoungst themselves, any aircraft that get near my base are immediately shot down, and I'm working on building three nuclear silos. I'll take my break now.Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:39:33 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3060&iddiary=5729https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2670Gameplay: Gameplay eventually devolved into irritating repetition. The nuances of the game dictated that I would eventually run into something, or fall, or some other silliness that would send me back to the beginning. A certain enemy type was responsible for my death, a certain ball-throwing pitcher of some sort. The balls *always* seemed just right in my path as I jumped. The games plot did not captivate me enough to entice me to play further. Design: The game, for its time, must have been great. But now, it seems to me to be more of a curiosity, or a source of nostalgia. The puzzles and jumping and dodging, at their time, were surely exciting and challenging. But gaming has moved onto other sources of challenge. Instead of leaping from platform to platform, we have grinding for items and taking cover behind walls and blindfiring. The games artwork, however, is cute and simple. It is not particularly flashy, but conveys the idea of background and movement, etc. The animations for Mario are amusing, such as holding onto his hat during the downward leg of a jump, or ducking and covering to dodge underneath things. I was frankly impressed at the detail, for all its simplicity. The pausing,however, was irritating. When you collect a mushroom or break open Yoshi's egg, the game pauses for a moment. I found this irritating. Perhaps I am truely a child of my era, where I need constant action, but when trying to simply get to the mid point of the level, the stops and interruptions were an annoyance.Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:58:49 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2670&iddiary=5053https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2670Summary: The Mario series hardly needs an introduction, but I will provide one anyway. The ultimate premise of the game is to rescue "the Princess" and to do this one must hop, bop and work ones way across a series of very odd levels. My intelligence is apparently lacking, and I must travel to a number of castles in order to locate this Princess. Gameplay: Mario is just as I expected it to be from what I have heard: mindless jumping and running around. Gameplay seemed to revolve mainly around avoiding things and jumping. At least the way I played it. My emotional state was one of alternating frustration and glee. The levels were amusingly laid out, simple and colorful. Irritating because the enemies would move in an unpredicted manner, resulting in my death. Which in turn resulted in me having to repeat the same level over and over. And over. In all, I get the impression that this would be a great game to play in down-time between classes, or assignments, or other games.Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:41:52 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=2670&iddiary=5048https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1603Summary: Kane and Lynch is a fairly standard third-person shooter. You play Kane, the beat-up, foul-mouthed mercenary with a dismal history. Your assignment is to retrieve a package (referred to as "it" throughout the game) in order to save your family and then be killed. However, being the low-life scum that you are, you take every available opportunity to foil the plans laid out for you. Gameplay: Perhaps the more interesting aspect of this game is that your character, Kane, is not a hero. In fact he is the exact opposite. He has probably raped, plundered and burned his way across the globe, and his only qualm so far is that he is running out of friends to bail him out. Going hand-in-hand with this is his fatalistic view throughout the game. He not only expects death at the end of it all, but even seems to embrace it. Most shooters these days have some sort of hero that is motivated to survive and help people; Kane doesn't give a shit about anyone but his daughter. He is perfectly willing to walk all over, use, kill or otherwise manipulate anyone who gets in his way to save her. The levels are dismal and linear. Dismal, because throughout the game, particularly the last half, there is a strong sense of living on borrowed time. The end is in sight, and your only goal is to simply stay alive long enough to fulfill your objectives and then die. Although you have a small squad at your command during most of the game, you still feel like you're all alone. Even when you get reinforcements towards the end while you assault the Cuban capital (yes, you read right) the extras only seem to accentuate the fact that beyond your small band of cut-throats, everyone is out to get you. Design: The levels are also pretty linear. You start off at point A, work your way to point B, do some stuff, kill some dudes, then mosey on over to point C and the level ends. This is rather surprising because linearity is something that is becoming more and more rare. Games generally offer multiple avenues of progress, typically a stealthy way and the not-so-stealthy way. You are provided with a silent means of killing foes in Kane and Lynch, but the sneaking mechanic left something to be desired. In one particular level, you are supposed to sneak down off a mountain to infiltrate a hacienda while at the same time preventing the guards from setting off warning flares. After my first few attempts at sneaking up behind one of the peripheral guards, and failing for the most part, I felt that rather than waste time trying to sneak up on guards, I should just get everyone into position and then open up with all the automatic weapons I had and hope that everyone dies before they get the chance to set off the flares. However, this lack of options wasn't really all that bad. It was a run-and-gun game. That said, the levels are quite varied. I never once got the feeling, "Hey, didn't I just fight through this office complex?" You've got prisons, nightclubs, banks, another prison, the Cuban Capital (slightly ruined through artillery fire), jungles, a subway and more. All the levels are nicely designed with ample areas to hide behind (although the cover mechanic leaves something to be desired, see below). As for fighting, the game borrows a good deal from Gears of War. The cover system could have been done better. The cover mechanic, when you near something that provides cover, will automatically snap you into cover. While this sounds like a great idea, I seemed to spend a great deal of time edging closer and closer to a corner waiting for Kane to step into cover-mode hoping I wouldn't die from being shot at. At the same time, when I decided it would be a good time to pop out of cover to move somewhere else, Kane would simply sit there and stare stoically at the ground. Moving in and out of cover seemed a bit ham-handed in general. Frankly, I feel they should have followed in the footsteps of Gears of War or Rainbow 6 Vegas and had a button keyed to "find cover" rather than allowing the computer to decide when to protect you. Also borrowed from Gears of War is the health system, right down to the darkened screen. When you "die," you fall to the ground and you have to wait for a squadmate to come revive you. While you lie writhing on the ground, you are treated to a cacophany of voices, some yours, some not yours, yelling at you, in a flashback-ey sort of way. A nice touch I thought, but it just becomes monotonous towards the end. In addition to you dying, your teammates will cheerfully charge into the open and then become stricken with an overdose of bullets. It then falls to you to revive them. Apparently it is impossible for squadmates to administer adrenaline. Who knew. When this occurs, it feels like Rainbow 6 Vegas all over again: you curse your squadmates for running into enemy fire, then hope you dont get mowed down while you stab them in the chest. I'll get back to the good things. There are little touches like your teammates cussing you out when you order them around to much. If you listen carefully, you can hear Lynch muttering to himself under his breath. The graphics are very pretty. The dialouge is amusing at times, and hardly heroic like some games. The conversations sound like they should be, a bunch of hardened criminals arguing about leadership, the best way to rob a bank, or just cussing each other out for doing stupid things (like slaughtering a lobby full of civilians with a shotgun). By far, to me, the most appealing aspect is the dark nature of the game. I say this because frankly I am tired of games where you are some hero and and you save hundred, or thousands, or the world, or the universe, yadda yadda. For once its fun to just shank someone in the face and then mow down his friends as they come running out of the next room. Throughout the game you sort of dread the ending, because you know its not going to be happy, and you also know that a lots of people are gonna die. Of the endings, there are two, and neither is particularly appealing. The game is combat oriented, and not much else. Don't expect long stretches of holding your fire, because there really aren't any. (This entry has been edited1 time. It was last edited on Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:15:04.)Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:13:51 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=1603&iddiary=3324