Об играх
By 49th level finally managed to join a raid for Lassal, and we even beat him. At least now I can stop thinking about it.
Had two legendary items drop from updating a monster entry in the in-game encyclopedia. I’ve beaten bosses for far less.
By 53th level I think there’s another such a slump. Takes a day or two of grind to get to level 56. Encyclopedia gives huge boosts, though.
Got a second legendary helmet, and it’s the same as my first one. That’s just my luck 🤷♂️
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What I didn’t expect is that England would be involved in this. Turns out England learned how to collect amrita, philosopher stone. And now the plan to incite a war in Japan to collect more of these, and maybe even conquer Spain.
So glad there’s a simple pause option in this game. I hate games without pause.
There is a ton of game mechanics, and they are introduced all at once. There are stances, that change how fast and how powerful your attacks are. There’s also a “berserk” mode, and a super-move that you can execute once you enter the berserk mode.
How hard is this game? Pretty brutal. It’s not Dark Souls, it’s Bloodborne. It’s much more fast-paced than any of the Dark Souls games. Armor doesn’t do shit, even minibosses finish you in two swings. But there is some kind of parry system against the bosses, and a stamina recovery system. You get most of your stamina back if you press a button at a right time. Also, there is apparenty a combo system that requires you to switch stances in between. A real finger-twister.
Almost dropped the game on the second boss. But turns out the game just doesn’t explain a lot of mechanics. There are healing items. You can run out of them, like Bloodborne and unlike Dark Souls. But at least they are automatically stocked to the max capacity.
Also, you can imbue your weapon, which is also very useful against the boss.
Completed Modern Warfare (2019).
We manage to kill the Old Terrorist, but the brother-terrorist escapes to St. Petersburg. That’s unexpected.
There is a bunch of “minigames” along the way. One is to cut the wires of the suicide jacket.
Another is to survive Russian torture (nobody told them Russians don’t torture with water).
We meet with Nikolai, another character from the original Modern Warfare. Also, turns out Kyle Garrick is now Gaz. Previous Gaz was I white guy.
That’s also the first mission we actually get to pick our weapons. At least we’re given a choice of three pistols.
Origin shotgun is fun, because it has that distinct handle on the side, and also a suppressor. At the last two missions you are given a lot of cool tools: incediary shotgun, and even minigun. Wish they would give them earlier, though.
Don’t remember when was the last time I was so invested in Call of Duty game. Maybe Black Ops?
We capture Hadir, but almost immediately trade him to the Russians. We then go after general Barkov in his gas-producing plant. Alex decides to “become a hero” and blow the plan himself. Farah manages to kill Barkov.
At the end they mention some old “friends”: “Soap” I remember well, as well as General Shepherd. Had to remind myself who Riley was, though. They also mention Zakaev, so I wonder if we’ll get yet another recreation of the most famous “sniper mission”
There’s a mount mechanic, which I remember mostly from the Battlefield series. While in cover, you can stabilize your weapon, especially LMG. And you can also peek around the corners.
It seems they got rid of the endless waves of enemies.
First indication that this is a reboot, and not continuation of another Modern Warfare – Griggs is alive again. Originally, he died in the ending of Call of Duty 4.
We capture leader of the terrorists who hides inside a hospital. Typical. He’s brought to the embassy, but the mob storms it, and manages to free him again.
Sniper mission is super fun. Bullets actually fly in arcs and you also need to take wind into the account. Absolutely solid.
The plot twist is great as well, I haven’t seen that coming. Turns out we were fighting alongside the chemical terrorists all along.
And I was wrong about this being Syria. In the episode in the past the fathers head turban and poppies point to Afghanistan. Even if you ignore the Russian invasion. But then, father gives his children cellphones. So, it’s an interesting amalgam.
Also interesting that as I child, you can’t shoot straight, because the gun is too heavy.
Haven’t played Call of Duty for a few years now, and didn’t feel like I miss much. But decided to give Modern Warfare a try anyway.
For some reason I’m struggling to see enemies in this game. In the first level, there are very bright fires or lights.
Then in the London mission, civilians and terrorists look very much alike. There are no hit indicators, and no crosshair highlighting either. Maybe that’s on purpose, though.
Whole point of London episode, besides re-introducing Price, is to show that Price is willing to sacrifice a single civilian in order to save the others.
There’s no way to compare weapons in-game, it seems, so I tend to stick to the one I am given.
Storywise, US Marines and CIA are trying to capture Russian’s chemical weapon shipment.
But then some version of “ISIS” captures the truck instead, killing most of the marines. Next day, there’s a terror attack in London.
We then join kurds in “Syria”, where Russians are being Russians.
In “Syria” there’s an interesting mechanic to the series where you pick up junk and make silencers out of it. It’s not crafting, but still something I haven’t seen in Call of Duty.
Of course there’s no Modern Warfare without some crawling under a truck or two.
Or lying in the grass without moving.
Bounties are pretty boring, but they do allow to level up pretty quickly, I give them that.
There are no two-handed weapons in this game. But if you play as crusader, one of the rage-modes is a two-handed sword.
Around 35th level you get access to raids of 8 people. Gathering enough players is quite hard. The chat is full of calls for Lassal (which is the name of the raid boss). Reminds me why I hate MMOs.
Of course 3rd episode is Jungle. It’s not bad, though. Fetishes are one of my favorite enemies in terms of the design.
Guess who’ve got two legendary shields of the same type? 🤦♂️
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Can’t say I’m too excited about “open world” part, but the fighting part of Street Fighter VI looks absolutely fantastic:
I’m mostly excited about the drunken kung fu fighter, obviously.
Hit my first roadblock at the end of the dessert episode, when the game told me literally that I need to be at level 35 to progress, while my character was only 32.
Also about that time got my first Legendary item. Those are the only items that actually need to be identified in town.
Besides the usual gem system that has been around since Diablo 2, there’s also a new “rank” system, that basically allows you to upgrade different equipment slots. That is, if you level up rank of your shield slot, any shield that you wield will become stronger. Level up everything!
The nice part is that when you equip a new item with sockets, the game will also propose you to transfer your gems to this new item. Very convenient.
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“Zero” from Ace Combat Zero is one of my most favorite video game tracks of all time.
And this live performance of it is fantastic. Very interesting to see how the performer actually looks:
Completed Dark Forces.
There’s a few slightly weaker levels in the middle. Vertical city is still amazing, though. It’s not too vertical, the engine has its limitations, but the bridge hanging above the abyss of the cosmos and some flying scrap and the sound of the wind still feels right.
Speaking of the sound and music, I took it for granted, but the developer of the engine has a whole post explaining how music was a separate program, that the game interacted with to get that interactive music that changes with game events, and not just a simple music loop. And the music sounds right. Guess because it’s either the authentic music tracks or composed by the same author. After all, this was made by Lucas Arts themselves.
A few things blew my mind at the Imperial City. First, they actually implemented spotlights on the roof.
And second, the moment you walk in to the imperial building, and there’s a ton of Imperial Commandos there. What a show.
Also, I would have been surprised by Boba Fett, but I actually remembered this part, although slightly differently. I remember that he used his pistols, and here I was blown away by his rockets.
On the final level, there’s a conveyor belt that I remember felt very difficult back in the day. But on WASD, it’s almost trivial.
What’s less trivial is the amount of Dark Troopers the game throws at you in the last two levels. Luckily, by that time I had plenty of ammo for Assault Cannon. But still I found those to be more difficult than the final boss battle, mostly because the final battle takes place in an open hangar with plenty of space to maneuver, while some encounters with Dark Troopers are almost face-to-face.
Last bit that I forgot – the sewage monsters. I hated them as a kid. But back in the day I played on an old monitor which was very dark, and I think I didn’t know there’s a flashlight in the game. So that eye popping out of the water followed by a bite scared me. Noways, the only difficult part with those is that they bite through your shields.
I already mentioned that the graphics aren’t far from a 10-year old game. Where it differs though slightly is in the models. The models look better. This includes both your character and enemies. At first I was sure they are mostly reusing old models from Diablo 3, but when you fight King Leoric (yes, you have to fight him AGAIN), you’ll see him riding a horse.
Manoruk, a giant lich popping out of a doorway is also a lot of fun.
There are now splashes of blood on the character, and the fabrics such as crusader’s tabard looks better too.
The fights are slightly more telegraphed, I would say, than Diablo 3. Bosses would highlight the zone they plan to attack, and your attack draw cones or lanes as well.
Story-wise, it was a very smart move from Blizzard to release this after Diablo 2 Resurrected, as the story takes place after Diablo 2 and before Diablo 3. So most of the iconic characters such as Deckard Cain or Charsi are still alive and well, and gamers now remember who they are.
And in general, it feels very much like a tribute to Diablo 2. You even visit first woodland, then a desert, just like in Diablo 2.
Battle Chasers is a very special kind of game. Because it shouldn’t have been a game at all. The franchise started as a comics by two brothers in ’98, but albeit the art and character design were fantastic, authors couldn’t keep up with the pace, and pace is very important for comics. So, the story got interrupted for almost 15 years. It’s really a miracle this game got released at all, really.
The battle system is a classical JRPG 3×3 turn based style. The dungeons are more of a rogue like nature, though, generated from discrete blocks. The main battle mechanic is called “overcharge”, and it allows regular attacks to generate temporary mana supply. This is useful since mana is quite limited and is not replenished easily. So, your characters end up alternating between regular attacks that generate mana and powerful spells that consume it. Other than that, there’s a lot of “status play” involved, which reminded me of Darkest Dungeon mechanics. Character affected by one ailment may take increased damage from another type of ailment: eg “sundered” character is susceptible to bleeding.
What I really liked is there are no trash characters like in Final Fantasy or Persona series. I liked design of all of them, and have used all of them extensively.
All enemies are visible on both the world map and inside dungeons, so there are no random encounters. Nice “quality of life” improvement is that fights are optional if your party outlevels the enemy.
The drops are a mix of randomly generated and unique-but-autoleveled stuff, with the common green/blue/purple rarity system.
Most unfortunate part is that the storyline is just a huge filler. W40K fans wouldn’t be bothered by that, of course, but others will.
I liked how artifacts you buy for boss tokens are real game-changers. Gives you good reasons to hunt those extra bosses, instead of just grinding.
Sidequests are fun, although not very intuitive sometimes. At one point you have lo light 11 torches, using flint, which is a random drop. I have up after lighting 10 of them and running out of flint, thinking that probably I’m doing something wrong. No, you just have to grind more flint.
Another quest asks you to find a specific skull. On the other side of the area there’s a roaming unique executioner, so it’s quite obvious he’s the own that drops it. But no. The skull is actually randomly dropped in a dungeon. I had to do the dungeon 3 times until I finally got it.
I ended up completing almost everything there is to the game, and enjoyed every bit of it. Well, maybe except some of the random stuff you have to do in order to get the ultimate weapons. Had to complete the same dungeon 6 times for that. But compared to some other JRPGs, this is basically nothing.
Probably one of the games I enjoyed the most this year.
Hunting for the ultimate weapons was fun, but the only problem I have with them really is that they don’t possess any unique abilities. Just weapons with the strongest stats. Even some non-unique weapons were more interesting.
As I mentioned, the storyline is pretty solid. Empire develops a new kind of troopers, called Dark Troopers, which resemble T-800 Terminators the most.
Those are unleashed on a Rebel base, and we are sent to investigate.
We find a weapon, so we look for a weapon inventor that hides in sewers.
He tells us about a research base, so we go there a find a strange metal. We then fly to a planet where that metal is mined to thwart Dark Troopers production, and fight our first Dark Trooper there as well.
In the meantime, Empire officer that was providing intel to us is captured, so we go and rescue him from an Empire prison.
There is some in-game dialogues, which doesn’t have captions. Since I mostly played pirated versions in the past, I wasn’t even aware of that.
You then get captured by Jabba the Hutt that is smuggling stuff for the Empire. Not sure why Empire needs anything smuggled. They are the government! There must be better, more efficient ways to do this.
As a kid I was terrified of that episode. You get stripped of all your weapons, and have to fight that huge lizard you’ve never seen before with your bare hands. Hell, I still died once in that episode even as an adult.
What I didn’t remember is that there are two lizards (they are called kell dragons) on that level. I was wondering about that, because I looked at the game sources, and there is handling of explosions for kell dragon. I thought that there are some grenades laying around in the arena, but no. It’s for the second encounter.
Diablo Immortal also made me aware that Diablo lore was quite heavily retconed.
Now the Dark Wanderer in Diablo 2 is not just your anonymous warrior character from Diablo 1, but Aiden, son of Leoric and elder brother of whatever the name of son of Leoric was.
It’s no secret that some games from the 1990s are easier nowadays to play on an PSX emulator. Emulators allow key remapping (and proper gamepad support!), higher resolutions, and also there are some nice shaders available that emulate what the game was supposed to look like.
But in case of Dark Forces, this isn’t the best way to play this game. Raising internal resolution doesn’t improve the visuals much, and running this even on my top-of-the-line CPU is very taxing. There is a better solution though. Someone has been working on a complete engine rewrite for Dark Forces, and it’s still actively developed and works really well: https://theforceengine.github.io
I’ve almost finished the game some 20 years ago, but for some reason lost all of my progress. So I do remember it, but quite vaguely.
The game requires you to be quite intentional in what you do. At one point you need to pick up codes, and read them in your inventory to get the combination.
There is actually a quite good story to the game. And that’s from the age when storylines weren’t common in shooters at all. You don’t just shoot everyone. There are characters, like an Empire officer that gives away information to the Rebels, and you may need to rescue that character at some point, for example.
There are some quite challenging acrobatics, even with WASD. That’s taking into account that there’s no save/load system in this game.
Was surprised to see ricochetes from walls.
I also didn’t remember there were powerups. There’s one akin to quad damage from Quake that supercharges your weapons, making them fire twice as fast, and another that supercharges your shield.
In the prison level, I vaguely remember the ingenious elevator puzzle (the one where you have to align the elevators to jump on their roofs), so it wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was to figure out that a blinking force field means that it’s active, while a still forcefield means that you can pass through it. I bumped into a blinking one a few times, and thought that I need to find a way to disable it, because on another floor there was a force field that you had to disable (for no good reason, that is, beside a few pickups).
Arcane Expanses is one of the most interesting episodes, with some truly lovecraftian architecture on one hand, and some of the longest and hardest levels on the other. The most interesting parts are the huge water bubbles hanging in the air, than you need to traverse. Only natural that the fight with the twin bosses of this episode occurs in one such bubble.
In general, the game is very good at not abusing mechanics. For example in the Arcane Expanses you meet snakes spitting acid. Stepping into an acid puddle damages you slightly. This is the only place in the game you will meet those.
The Forge episode with levels such as “Gauntlet of Torment” is probably the least favorite of mine. The only positive thing I can say about this is that the boss looks inventive.
Solar Solcitce is probably the most tactical episode. I also like how the Sun sets once you kill the Solar Saint.
The final episode is hard, but interesting. The geometry is against you, you fight on tilted platforms hanging above the abyss.
The final boss looks like a mushroom trip, but a short one, and in a good way.
Diablo 3 for the poor from the authors of Diablo 3? Not necessarily a bad thing, really. I mean, Diablo 3 wasn’t especially technologically advanced even when it first came out ten years ago. And nowadays some phones have 12 RAM. So it shouldn’t be surprising that they are able to run the game just fine. After all, Diablo 3 was running great on Nintendo Switch back in 2018, and it’s actually my favorite version of the game. Also, it seems the game runs in a low resolution. So the camera on PC feels very close to the character.
Item stats are super-basic. Every item has just one attribute: attack for a weapon, HP for armor.
Once you get past the training quest line, the game begins to resemble MMO. You’ll see other people around you running and killing monsters. But I managed to ignore them mostly. A couple of times I had to go into dungeons with other people, but those end pretty quickly.
The way most of the quests work is usually that you need to kill X enemies to progress.
There are no rolls. Not sure if there ever were rolls mechanic in the PC version of Diablo 3, though. Tried PC version now, and there’s still no support for gamepad in it.
It’s really impressive that they voiced all the dialogues. And there are even some cinematics.
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Certainly a powerful homage to Hexen, or maybe even Heretic series, as there are no classes, and more than four weapons. There are no Tomes of Power, but you still power up your weapons using souls of enemies. And Blue and Green mana crystals are straight from Hexen.
Choosing difficulty and episodes is done in Quake 1 style, where you walk around jumping through different portals.
The only part that really surprised me is how overpowered the starting weapon is. It fires magic missiles at a good pace, and those are homing, and I mean extremely homing – they can follow jumping enemies and still hit them.
Speaking of weapons, another really fun one is a Star of Torment. Combination of shotgun and nail gun that looks like a morgenstern. Corpses remain stuck to walls, similar to Messiah.
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I’m feeling that I’m getting only dumber with age. I can remember than around 2003 I managed to get to the 3rd episode, which is Egypt. Then I had stumbled on a bug though, since this was a game rip, and dropped the game. Although looking back, I’m not sure anymore it was a bug, and not just some puzzles in this game being quite incomprehensible.
Anyway, locations that in other games would be considered a very secretive secret, in Hexen 2 are the only legitimate way to advance the plot. To make any progress in the first episode, you’ll have to crush furniture, break stained glass windows and find hidden rooms behind rotating book cases.
First episode is done very nicely, with medieval aesthetics only Quake engine provides. It is a big boring, though, since you have only two weapons for the entire episode, one of those being your “fists”.
Things I didn’t remember: every character has a passive skill. Assassin’s skill is completely useless, though. She can become invisible when standing still.
As in the first game, every character has their own set of weapons.
The snag of this is that for assassin the second weapon she acquires are completely useless grenades. And you won’t know that you’ve chosen a character with a completely useless second weapon until you spent a few hours completing the first episode. Grenades in Quake were awful. And here they are even worse: flying in wrong directions, passing through enemies. The funniest part is that scorpions, new enemies in the second episode, are able to strafe grenades.
The second episode is a very boring set of Aztec temples full of lava. But at least I managed to complete it without a guide, something I couldn’t say about the first episode.
Like the first game, you have to combine your final weapon from multiple pieces. There are just two pieces, though, and they are very easy to find. You also get more chances if you somehow managed to miss them. Scarab Staff, final Assassin’s weapon, is something between Railgun and Rocket Launcher. It is able to compensate for the uselessness of her grenades. You get it in the second episode, and will spend the next three episodes switching from it only when you run out of mana.
Not sure if this is due to some bugs in even the latest official version of the game, or something to do with running the game on newer machines, but Death, the second boss, gave me a lot of trouble. Scarab Staff had almost zero effect on it. My guess this is because bosses have higher resistance to splash damage. When I tried to use the crossbow combined with Tome of Power, the game simply crashed on me due to “too many explosions”. Had to fly after it (you get infinite flight in this boss battle, which was cool) continuously healing and backstabbing.
If I considered the first episode puzzles to be slightly illogical, the third episode, Egypt, is even worse. At some point I thought that I have struck another bug, since my character wouldn’t step on a button, jumping over it instead. Turns out its another “puzzle”, and to solve it, you need to exit the room, and enter it again through another door. By the way, stepping on that button opens a secret door in a completely different part of the level. And the game won’t tell you where.
The fourth episode, Rome, is slightly easier. It’s boring, but at least you don’t need to look for secrets to progress. The fourth boss, though, War, is a complete bullet sponge. And it also has homing throwing axes, that are almost impossible to avoid.
Final boss is easier than most of the other Four Horsemen. At least it doesn’t have homing projectiles. But is still a bullet sponge, even on the lowest difficult. The animation of the boss growing is impressive for its time, but the effect is diminished by the game not being able to handle the lighting properly.
Other than that, there are some troubles with water physics as well. Sometimes the character won’t be able to jump out even from a shallowest pool. I had to load my game multiple times due to being stuck in a puddle.
Having said all that, I’m glad I finished what I started some 19 years ago, but wouldn’t recommend doing that to anyone else.
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В оригинал не играл, а вот римейк решил попробовать. Римейк, надо сказать, тоже довольно непонятен и неудобен. Страшно представить, что там в оригинале. Хотя может расчет на то, что игрок будет читать руководство?
Как фехтовать – не объясняют. Как искать клады – тоже. Зато все время предлагают на кого-нибудь напасть.
Бои проходят один на один, даже если кораблей у тебя несколько. По какому принципу идет стрельба я так же не понял. Большую часть времени ядра летят куда-то не туда. Самый эффективный способ пока – взять корабль на абордаж. Для этого достаточно столкнуться с кораблем противника. А дальше в непонятной фехтовальной игре его захватываем.
Бармен тут дает подсказки, где сбыть тот или иной товар. Правда он не проверяет, а согласны ли там торговать с капитаном.
