Cycopl

games yay

I haven't been online playing wow much lately, I've just been playing too many other games. There have been a lot coming out lately, and they keep pulling me away from my wow obligations... I've got Ultimate Spider-Man, Serious Sam 2, Black and White 2, Age of Empires 3, X-Men Legends 2 (won't install for me but I have yet to play around with it), and the new doom 3 expansion called "Quake 4".

Ultimate Spider-Man is the game I've been playing the most, surprisingly. If I couldn't play it with my PS2 controller, I probably would have written it off pretty fast. But the game is just so fun when I use my PS2 controller, it's like playing a very nice looking console game. I mean, it IS a console game, but PC games usually don't feel like a console game, although lately it seems like they've been trying... Now when I am driving around and looking at trees and stuff, I wish I was spider man and could swing off of them and stuff. I want to web zip over buildings irl... it would be so much better than walking or driving. The game really only takes like two hours to beat, the story mode is really short. But that doesn't really matter to me, because the races are what makes the game fun. All though the city there are random race courses, where you have to swing around and hit certain targets in a certain amount of time. There's targets up against buildings that you have to climb on to get, there's targets that are just random floating platforms that you have to jump on, there's some that just float in the middle of the sky and you have to swing off of a building and get enough height from jumping out of the swing to hit the target. It seems like the races were the real intention of the game, the story mode was something just thrown in there because.. well... every game needs a story mode. I've gotten gold medals on all of the easy, medium, and hard races so far (there are still "insane" races that are indeed insane). Let me tell you, that is no easy task, lots (if not most) of those "hard races" required me spending at least an hour on them, learning and memorizing where all of the targets are, the order of where to go, what moves are best to use at the best time. The races are what has kept me playing the game so long. It kind of makes playing spider-man like playing a tony hawk game, which isn't very weird because it's made by some of the developers that worked on tony hawk.

I haven't played too much of any of the other games I've downloaded, but I've put at least an hour into all of them (except maybe AoE3, RTS games don't fascinate me as much as they used to). Serious Sam 2 is insane, not just in how they throw a thousand things at you, but just the theme of the game. Protecting these little blue african midgets, lots of crazy hidden secrets and easter eggs. Serious Sam 2 is awesome though, kind of how FPS games should be. It doesn't try to be an interactive movie like lots of FPS's do nowadays, but that's not bad.

Black and White 2 looks beautiful, and seems to be a little more complicated than the last one, but from what I've seen, seems like a lot more of the same thing. I'm sure I'll enjoy it a lot more when I find the time to play it more, but the first impression I got was "this is just like black and white", and it made me go sample another game. It's not exactly the same though, you can control military units now, and that could lead to some awesome huge battles between countries/religions... Which would be another way of spreading your belief to other parts of the world probably.

Quake 4 didn't disappoint me as much as I thought it would, actually. The game looks a lot like Doom 3, but the graphics are better. I think the main difference I've noticed is that Quake 4 isn't NEARLY as dark as Doom3. One of the first things I said when I was playing it was "this game is way more colorful than Doom3", which is true, but only because Doom 3 consisted only of black most of the time. You notice the colors a lot more when you can see everything and not have to focus on a certain part with a flashlight. The monsters are less demonic than Doom3 and more cyborg-ish. The human models look exactly like the human models from Doom3. The opening sequence of the game was a little too cliche for me, they were inside of a marine dropship, the dropship gets shot down, the screen goes black and you hear nothing but a heartbeat... It was a lot cooler when HALF-LIFE did it, and also every HALF-LIFE EXPANSION, and also probably lots of other FPS's, and let's not forget that Anarchy Online does it when you start a new character, just in much crappier graphics. But yeah, the game is fun and I'll probably play through it once I get around to it.

I should probably play some WoW some more and take advantage of that rested time I've built up before I binge on some more single-player games, but it's hard to pull myself away from all these new games to play.