Gears Of War 2

I have been stuck on this one part of Gears of War 2 for an hour. I have had to restart from the last checkpoint well over 15 times. It is a giant, confusing battle where you just explode sometimes, where enemies randomly become invincible and you sometimes have less health than you actually are supposed to have. No matter what weapons you have, you run out of ammo and it's never good enough anyway.

Meanwhile, your dipshit AI companion just sits behind cover not doing anything. No, you just sit tight, Dom. Let me handle the entire fucking game in what was clearly designed to be a co-operative experience. Whatever's most convenient for you. I mean, none of the enemies attack you anyway, so it's not like you matter.

The battle comes in waves. You finish off some, and then there's a pause, and then more enemies just show up... but there are no checkpoints. So when the game cheats to make you lose, you have to do it all over again. I'm surprised they don't just start you off back at the tutorial again.

Sometimes enemies don't spawn when the game tells you to kill a specific number of them. So you just lose. The game just brute forces a GAME OVER screen because it knows it fucked up, and you have to do the whole thing over again, and then fail through no fault of your own.


Oh my fucking god you guys, it is so hard to put into words just how unfair and awful this is. I've beaten Sonic 06, okay? I finished that shit. And that was less broken than Gears of War 2. This game is like fighting that bullshit Silver the Hedgehog boss fight where he can just catch you in an infinite loop without ever actually killing you, but every five minutes. There are parts where the game wants you to do a specific thing, or shoot at a specific part of a monster, and it does not fucking tell you. So you just die over and over again, making no progress at all. It offers no hints or context through any of its' visuals, it's audio or its' gameplay mechanics, and then it acts like you're the one fucking around.


It's as if they designed a campaign and enemy encounters as if you have four human players at all times, and then didn't bother to scale that down or even bother playing the single-player mode. To see if it even works. This is worse than any Halo game I've ever made fun of on this blog. This is the kind of game that deserves a Mr. Plinkett tear-down.


I think Cliffy B owes me an apology for this.


END OF LINE

~A.H.

"Gears of War: Judgment" Review

by Alex Hill

I... think I like Gears of War: Judgment. But it's not a game that's trying particularly hard to be liked. I'm not sure what it wants to be. It's too big to be DLC for a previous game. The changes are both too extensive to be an add-on, but too grounded in the past to be its' own product. It's too small in focus to be the long-term leveling shooter that Gears 3 was. It doesn't invest in its' characters quite enough to be story-based. If you described it to police, it would be a fat, thin, tall, short, young, old person.



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Gears Of War: Judgment

After 3 games, I finally started to like "Baird" and "Cole" from Gears of War. In fact, I wish we'd gotten more of them. They were a lot more tolerable to be around than the main characters of this series. I can't have been the only one who wished they'd gotten a spinoff. Maybe with "Sam" and "Carmine" to round out the team.

But with the Locust dead forever, they'd probably have to do a prequel or something. Ooh, and maybe they could get the Bulletstorm developer to handle it.

...Yeah, kind of like that.

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~A.H.

Mass Effect 3: "Things I Liked"

This may sound hard to believe, but the ending to Mass Effect 3 didn't go back and destroy everything that was good and pure about this series. But that's not for a lack of trying. I can still enjoy the events that lead up to it, even as it tries desperately to make everything I did across 90 hours completely pointless.

Here is a small list of things the ending could not ruin for me(in no particular order).

(MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD, YOU BEEN WARNED):


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Left 4 Dead Fan Film

Enjoy it now, before Youtube is destroyed by a supremely greedy and retarded bill in the U.S.!

END OF LINE

~A.H.

"Gears Of War 3" Review

by Alex Hill

3.5/5

The original Gears of War was as juvenile as it was artless. It stretched itself thin on gimmicks. It was barely coherent and largely stupid. Its' attempt at characterization resulted mostly in loud and obnoxious stereotypes. Its world was the result of an ugly obsession with polygons, and macho muscle-headed bullshit. The games industry has "borrowed" a lot from this series since E-Day. That childishness is the only thing they've managed to do better than Epic Games. Not even when their CEO openly mocks independent developers at conventions.

And then something curious happened: Every other game wanted to be like it(and to be fair, Halo, and Grand Theft Auto). It was warmly-received by critics and the public. Men and women, despite it's "NO GIRLZ ALLOWED" tone. It even landed the highest honour the Game Developer's Choice Awards can bestow. It was like watching the Best Picture Oscar go to Bad Boyz II. So not only was it successful, this turd was critically acclaimed(by people who I thought knew better). Something about this series turns reasonable men into sluts.

A New Challenger Appears!

-Freddy Krueger is in Mortal Kombat.

That... actually kind of fits pretty well by guest-character standards in fighting games.

Jazz Hands

Trends

I remember one time I was at a friend's house, and we played Halo 2 online. We joined a custom game where they were playing by rules they made up. It was called "Zombie". I don't know if it started there, or was carried over from a different game. It was based on honour rules. If you died by the enemy's hand, you had to manually switch over to the enemy's team, and now must face your former comrades. Like how after you've been bitten by a zombie, you become a part of the same mindless horde that took you down.

People liked this enough for it to be a built-in game mode in Perfect Dark Zero and Halo 3. No more having to go in and change teams by hand.

Then Gears of War 2 had the "Horde" mode, where victory is impossible and the only real goal is to see how long you can last against waves of increasingly dangerous opposition. The end is inevitable, the goal being to see how long you can cheat death. People liked this enough, so Left 4 Dead put in "Survival" mode, and Halo gave us "Firefight".

Then games like Dark Void gave us Jetpacks(although they were around during the Duke Nukem and Tribes times, they were out of vogue until recently.) We liked those, so now they're back apparently.