Red Faction 2 feels like a perfectly adequate dollar store book. It does the job, as a game which I can play. Things certainly blow up. I like shooting grenades at the wall to blow myself into the next room. But they keep tacking on this story, and they keep forcing these cartoonishly obvious characters on me. It feels more like bloat than anything else. Red Faction 2 feels like a B game aspirations of being Triple A. It should have owned the B.
After this Duke Nukem haircut jumped down from fucking whereever the fuck he jumped down from I was in a TV studio. I found a vent in the corner of the room, and I shot it discovering it to be a texture. Why is it there if I can’t go inside? It goes against the language of video games without really having a cause.
I found that my stationary A.I. friends were shooting through a window at some steel armored men. I shot at them and discovered my bullets were just ricocheting with no effect. Then I threw a grenade–first bouncing off the wall due to a misunderstanding of my character’s throw-arc–through the window. It exploded, and about a second and a half after the explosion the men shouted a death scream. A piece of the wall flew out and hit my screen. I figured I’d died, but it flashed “Objective Complete” on the black screen. I sat there for a few seconds staring at the black screen, my health bar still up, my bullet indicator. I pondered my place in life. My reason to exist. I realized the game had crashed, and decided it was time to move on.
Cowboy Bebop has been playing in the background. I decided I’d put it on in the back. I’ve always meant to finish it, but haven’t gotten around to it. But I can never remember the episode I left off on. So I’ve started on the first episode, my living room dark with the overcast evening struggling to remain daylight. It plays as I go to start Far Cry. I look out my window. A bird lurks on the roof across from me. I wonder if its trying to see Cowboy Bebop, or if its trying to see Far Cry.
I lurk through a jungle that looks like 2004 dripped out from the belly of a giraffe. The draw distance leaves maybe twenty feet in front of my face. I’m asked to lurk through this open environment, where the option is either stealth kill or shoot kill, but this is before games gave you stealth kill buttons, so the best stealth kill is to equip the knife and mash attack on a guy. Three hits and he goes down. On the other hand, I could engage them right away, and likely I will shoot them in the head way before they’re able to get a bead on me. But usually this behavior winds up with me dying from some lucky head shot, or from some hidden guard.
I got into a jeep and road around for a while. It was fun, and the level design left me feeling like the world was open, but the direction was littered with guards in a way that breadcrumbed me to my objective, which was to drive the jeep off of a cliff into a lake and then climb aboard a crashed tanker. For all that its worth, they started this game off right with the R.A. (Rambo Action).
It was on the tanker that I started feeling like shit. I don’t know, sometimes when I get lost in a FPS I start to feel this feeling in my head like I’d rather be doing anything else with my time, and I can almost feel myself getting sick to my stomach.
Eventually I did figure out where to go, but once I did I got shot by someone outside my frame of vision. So I decided it was probably time to move on again.
I watched hours of Cowboy Bebop. I just paused it. I’ve had a headache poking in and out like a mole. If moles do that. They do in video games (poke in and out of the earth), and I play video games.
I’ve recently been compelled to play Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare. I checked the steam store and it was $10. I grabbed that along with Call of Duty 2 because well it’s what I do. I spend money. Gotta spend money to lose money, pal.
CoD4 is the game that spoiled us all on shooters. With a quick paced, dynamic campaign and a sticky multiplayer it should be seen as one of the greatest shooters of all time, and I’m not the first person to say that. These opinions are not special. I am not a snowflake. Blah Blah, mindless fight club quotes, blah.
What makes the game feel good? It runs consistently, to start. Then you got an infinite sprint. Then you got a very snappy ADS (aim down sights). Then you got that crispy sounding reload, also a quick animation. You switch weapons fast. You drop down fast.
The only improvements for me are to make it so when I press the duck key, and I’m already ducking, I stand up. Same for prone. The game instead wants me to press the jump button, and my brain doesn’t work like that. Also, the leaning. Games in the aughts thought shooter fans wanted to lean, so they made sure to put that in a bunch of shooters, especially Call of Duty. While its useful, you can get through the entire game without using it, and to me that makes it feel like a wasted mechanic.
Otherwise it’s the same gameplay Infinity Ward nailed in Call of Duty 2, but crystallized, and the production value is still impressive to this day. Kinda wild they went ahead and “remastered” this game–it was nearly perfect to begin with.
I’m going to try and see if multiplayer will work while I watch/listen to Northernlion play some deck builder. I had to stop watching Cowboy Bebop because it’s 1 am and at the volume I couldn’t really hear a lot of speech, and for some reason my Funimation app won’t let me enable subtitles.
I had to patch the game to even get COD4 multiplayer to load. But I found games that had actual players in them, and the patch wasn’t a pain to set up, so I’m not really complaining. I played one game and didn’t do that well but I got some kills, and my negative KDR was certainly minimized by my chickenshit playstyle. I did get one person to type “nice” from one of my kills but, was it in sarcasm? It was definitely my coolest kill: running right up and MP5 to the face, then dying afterward when five of his teammates unloaded their clip at a free kill. It was kind of glorious.
I leveled up like five times too which was nice. The server had a high XP rate. I don’t know how that will improve my experience, but that server seemed to have, even with the high XP rate, a more stripped down experience compared to the others. But what do I know? I haven’t really played this game in over a decade. I’m certainly out of it when it comes to that “scene.”
What am I chasing? Bouncing from game to game like this. What’s the point? Am I searching for myself in these video games? Am I trying to give myself an excuse to think? To have thoughts? To write them down? Am I trying to hold on to my free time the best I know how, by getting the most experiences in the time I have? Why can’t I let myself just go in and loose myself to enjoyment?
I’m going to play Kero Blasters now. Then probably Batman.
There are some video games that feel like a vitamin. Others feel like a bowl of spinach. Games like Grand Theft Auto, Gears of War, Call of Duty, feel like junk food. Kero Blaster feels like a glass of water. Not only was I refreshed by ingesting this liquid: it is something my body needs.
Kero Blaster is a 2D action platformer in a similar vein as Mega Man, only it was developed by Cave Story genius Pixel. I purchased this game as soon as I discovered Pixel was responsible for it, and that purchasing the game directly gave him money, as opposed to the leeches at Nicalis.
I do not know if he actually gets any money. I don’t know if he cares about making money off his games. I don’t know anything. Sometimes we place lofty statements behind our purchases in America because we are taught to be that way. It’s part of consumerism to base purchases on ideals. Maybe this is true, maybe its not, that money improves some aspect of a person’s life, and that making one purchase over another benefits the world in the way you want to see.
I look at the Halo Review that I’m currently working on, and I wonder what the point of it is. Why not review this indie game I love instead? Why not beat Cave Story and write a review about that? What about the hundreds of indies I own across other consoles. Wouldn’t that coverage help more? Why would I care about coverage? I don’t have the right to cover anything: I’m just writing this blog for me. I’m just giving myself an excuse to write, and I’m giving myself an excuse to not feel bad for playing video games. Right? RIGHT?!
When I’m awake I ask questions. I only seem to let myself go with it when I’m dreaming.
Originally I forgot to talk about Kero Blasters. When I say its like Mega Man, I mean it feels like Mega Man 2. The running, jumping, and shooting feels so exact, and the enemy placements feels so fair. I’ve never found myself in a situation where I’d need to better my reaction time, or otherwise keep moving to avoid death. Everything in the game so far has called for solutions, almost like a puzzle game. It feels like switching between one’s various robot master weapons in Mega Man games.
So far I have four weapons. They can be upgraded, but only in the midway point store of each level. Upgrades are achieved by collecting coins, which drop from enemies and treasure chests. These are fun to collect because platforming is fun, and avoiding death traps is fun. The game’s weapon upgrades aren’t just meaningful–they’re hand tailored to delight the player. Instead of just upgrading your basic pea shooter to shoot lemons, this game has you upgrade your pea shooter until it becomes a laser. A laser that obliterates everything in front of you. It feels satisfying, and it has me anticipating progression in a way most linear platformers cannot achieve. Usually, in a 2D platformer, it has to be Metroid-like for me to anticipate progression. Or it has to be Mega Man, where I’m looking forward to screwing around with a robot master weapon. This game does such an incredible job taking inspiration from the Mega Man games. The platforming is made better with a double jump unlocking jetpack. The weapons all have not obvious use cases that players stumble into while playing. The game puts me into a pleasurable flow state most games cannot achieve.
Also, these graphics are colorful and enduring. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cuter pixel moment than when my frog smiles at the camera after receiving a new weapon. Everything in this game is adorable. The music, the dialogue, the sprites.
It’s a shame more people don’t talk about this game. It’s available on your switch. Stop playing Animal Crossing for a millisecond and check this thing out. I’ve been a major Cave Story fan since the aughts, and I had to find out about the game in a buried message board somewhere.
I was going to play batman, but I’d rather play 1001 Spikes. I think I’m going to do that. Then, since it’s nearly three in the morning, I’m going to go to bed. I wanted to play civilization. I wonder if I’ll do that tomorrow. Maybe I’ll just stay in bed.
….
Eventually I got out of bed.
I played some Civilization 5. I like it better than 6. Other than that, I don’t have anything to say. It’s Civilization, and those games are fun. They’re fun because they’re decision simulator in which the game is constantly asking you to make decisions while suggesting decisions that would be sensible to make. Because of this, they funnel a gamer’s vision. They are gamer vision thieves. Accordingly, they are time thieves. You become immersed in making decisions. I find this to be relaxing, yet scary, and thus I never finish a single game of Civ. Maybe one day. Maybe one day….
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