A 50/50 chance of Awesome: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars

Image by Colony of Gamers via Flickr

The name’s quite a mouthful, I know. I’m not sure what’s going on in Ubisoft’s head (or Tom Clancy), but I don’t really need to have the name of the creator of the developing company in the name of the game. Now, the 3DS launched with 2 Tom Clancy games. One sucked horribly, and the other one didn’t. That, however, is not the reason for the title. You see I bought my 3DS in a bundle, and came with a choice of 1 of two possible games. I, with no previous knowledge whatsoever, picked Ghost Recon over the other not-so-impressive Rayman 3D. I don’t regret that decision in the slightest.

This is my first experience in the series of Ghost Recon. In case you didn’t know, the Ghost Recon series is a series of shooting games, most based in the not-too distant future. You with/as an elite squadron of soldiers, called Ghosts. In this Turn-Based strategy game, you play as 6 soldiers, all of which are of different classes., and have different advantages and disadvantages. There is one of each of:

• Commando (Duke). Equipped with an assault rifle and a secondary weapon of a shoulder-mounted missile launcher.
• Sniper (Haze). He shoots people. From a long distances. His secondary is grenades.
• Gunner (Richter). He has a big gun, secondary is grenades. Due to his big gun he can’t move as far per turn.
• Medic (Saffron). Heals people, carries a pistol as a secondary.
• Recon (Banshee). She’s invisible, and hard to attack. Carries a silenced SMG as a primary and either EMP grenades or a knife for secondary.
• Engineer (Mint). Carries an assault rifle as a primary, and either a deployable turret or drone as a secondary. The turret is beastly in defence levels.

Unfortunately, your enemies also have those classes (except for recon), and also have things like mortars, rocket launchers, normal soldiers (commandos without annoying missile launchers) and civilians.

The gameplay mechanics are a big thing. Being turn based, every unit has an amount of squares on a grid they can move along, and a number of those movement squares can be used to shoot or do other actions. The larger or smaller the amount of squares between you and your enemy, the more or less your weapons do (eg the gunner does more from close ranger, and less from long-range, while the sniper is more accurate from a long-range than a close range. There’s also an intricate cover system. If you’re in a tree or bush, you’re considered to be in level 1 cover (which is -25% damage off the top of my head), and a building is level 2 (-50% damage). There’s also a line of sight system. If you’re behind a tree or not at the closest side of a building, an enemy can’t shoot you as they aren’t in line of sight. The combat system moves even further along with a return fire system- if an enemy attacks you while he’s within your range and vice versa, you will be hit with 50%-100% of their weapon power (depending on the gun- i.e. Richter usually gets 100% return fire while a sniper gets none), and Banshee doesn’t take any return fire because her gun is silenced. The game also has RPG elements with points received at the end of every mission which can be used to upgrade units to get better guns and perks. Each character has a choice of two different guns/secondary weapon, each with their advantages and disadvantages.

This really allows for a sense of procession throughout the campaign. The story revolves around an increasing movement in the Ultranationalist party, and a secret organisation that is stirring up trouble in Russian interests (Oil pipelines mainly) to try to provoke Russia to invade neighbouring countries. The Ghosts are sent in to stop this.

The 3D effect in the game I would describe as underused, as compared to other games. There’s the nice effect you get when looking down a chasm or something else like that, and with buildings the depth really makes it more impressive (oh yeah, and there’s a sweet bit where you blow up a train in jaw-dropping 3D). When it comes to the 3DS’ other additions, you have no wireless multiplayer, no StreetPass or SpotPass and no online multiplayer. The only multiplayer option is passing the one controller around for 5 different missions. The replay value of the campaign is also very low, with the changes is difficulty. Once you’ve played through the campaign, I’ll bet you just put the game down and move on, like I did. The single player skirmishes are uninspiring, and the campaign also eventually feels like a grind towards the end, with the entire final stages (bar one) being inside, removing the possibility of many  of the game’s mechanics.

You still have to remember that this game is only a launch title, and for a launch title, this game is really good.

My Rating

Music: 8.5

Gameplay: 9

Creativity: 7

Graphics: 7.5

Other: 7

Total: 39/50

First Game Review: Spiral Knights

Ah.. Spiral Knights. A free game made by Three Rings.. or is it?

Spiral knights is a game where you are basically an adventurer who’s fighting off fiends, beasts, jellys, and more to get to the core. Each gate to the core has three tiers. You must get to the tier two barrier on each gate and have a set of two star or better gear to be eligable to do tier two. To be eligable to do tier three (the last tier), you must get to the tier three barrier on each gate and have a set of four star or better gear. While you’re doing this, you’ll find minerals to collect. After you’re done dungeoning, you can deposit these minerals into the gate that you want to appear next. This is in fact worldwide. The gate that has the most minerals will be the next gate to appear. You’ll also make recipes which are bought with crowns, the currency in this game, and made with energy and crowns.

Let me just say that the music in Spiral Knights bypasses any other flaws of the game by far. The music goes with anything that’s happening in the game, like an ambush will have random baddie music and once you’ve completed it, it’s over and back to the kind fun happy music. I had heard about how epic the music was from a few youtube videos, but once me and my friends were really playing the game, we were just amazed. “Wow.. that music is pretty damn good..” The menu music is best though, it makes me just want to stay on the menu screen and just continue with my day, with that endless loop of music.

And as always, the bad part of the game.

I’d honestly only recommend playing this game if you’re alright with only one hour of gameplay a day. It’s horrid. The “energy” goes out so fast in this game because energy is now used for basically.. everything. Now, you start off with 100 energy. Making recipes take anywhere from 10 energy (1-star equipment) to 800 energy (5-star equipment), going farther into the dungeon takes 10 energy each time (unless you get to a terminal which is like a tiny rest area to get recipes and full health), there are random energy gates scattered in each dungeon that justwipe out a bit of energy, and you can’t just avoid them due to them being on the path, and lastly, if there are any dangerous areas that you and your group have the chance of going into, it’d cost energy for the member who opens the gate. But ofcourse don’t fear! You can always buy more energy! But how much does it cost? Well you can buy 100 energy with crowns (the currency in Spiral Knights) for the current price of 4,890 crowns which rises more and more each day, or you could buy from energy which goes from $2.45-$49.95. And getting crowns just isn’t that easy. Considering that just playing a few dungeons with yourself would be difficult unless you had some 5-star stuff, you’d be with a group. There’s always a lootshare and the only real time you’re getting good crowns is when you come around an arena when is mad difficult and makes you want to quit the game multiple times. Now if you completely refuse to pay a price, there’s ALWAYS waiting about 24hours to have your energy replenished. Yeah, boring.

Basically, the conclusion that me and other Spiral Knights players have come to is that Three Rings really just wants money. I heard from past players that before it had gotten on Steam, ofcourse it was on it’s own website. Well the Steam benefits are there too. Achievements were included :D. No “:D”? Well not for the older players who never had Steam. Although you could log in with your Spiral Knights account, the achievements would have to be redone by all of those veterans. Like the Master Miner achievement where you deposit 10,000 minerals into a gate. Just think if someone had done that and now had to redo that. And yes, “mining” on Spiral Knights isn’t as simple as buying a pick axe from a little roleplay store in the game and mine as much as you want. No. You can only get a mineral from a dungeon level, and the amount of the mineral you get is determined by the size of the mineral which is totally randomly generated, though big minerals come rare. The values go from 1-6 of a mineral.

Oh, and there’s an auction house that basically destroys the purpose of an auction house. Once the auction house was added, it also changed trade. You aren’t allowed to trade/auction any 4-5 star items. Not even 4-5 star materials. That’s a tad harsh. Just a bit. I mean it’s not like there were any RWT (real world trading) issues in the game, why such drastic measures? I mean the end game when you are all bored out of tier 3 things used to be to make high level things and sell them off to people who need it most, but now, there really is no end game. So what are the high levels to do now?

What sucks the MOST is that once you equip an item, you’ll never be able to sell it or trade it. Some think a reason for that would be so that way a new player wouldn’t be able to get a full set of (for instance) maxed out 5 star gear from a friend. I don’t really agree with that. If a friend wants to hand over their gear then let them! I mean it doesn’t have to be kept at their same level! They can be reset upon trading or something clever like that. You can’t deprive a bunch of players like that! Especially the ones who had a friend refer them to the game.

On the good side…

The game is SO intense that it’ll make you want to buy more and more energy! It really is a fun fun game! But for people like me who actually nolife and play a game even til it’s past completed, we can’t really do that. The overpowered enemies and what now keep the game interesting and force some teamwork habits.. XD The fighting is pretty nice after changing up the controls too. And wow, the graphics are beautiful. They’re so crystal clear. I love it. I thought this would be some low grade looking game but for something free, it’s got some look to it. It’s worth playing for this reason especially if you’re a graphics freak. The weapons are very unique and all have their good sides and bad sides. It’d be hard to recommend weapons mainly because well, everyone has their own opinion on the weapon to get. There’s weapons from swords and guns to crossbows and angel guns. It’s fairly creative.

Plus, there are just so many emotes you can do in this game, I was surprised XD. Most of them aren’t emotes that really just make you do emotes (such as the /dance command just goes “(player name) has the urge to dance!”). But it was still cute.

Gameplay: Poor Good Great Excellent Awesome

Graphics: Poor Good Great Excellent Awesome

Music: Poor Good Great Excellent Awesome

Creativity:  Poor Good Great Excellent Awesome

Extras: Poor Good Great Excellent Awesome

Time for epic bloggery!

Tiara:

Hello people of wordpress, but more importantly, this blog! My name is Tiara :D! My friend Shaun added me to this blog with a great idea: Co-Op Gaming reviews. I just think that it’ll be so fun. I’d mainly review games that I play regularly, free games, MMO’s, and flash games. All reviews will be on this blog and my personal blog under the Links (which you can just click on from this post). My information (Like games I play on a regular basis) with my username on those games will be on my personal blog, and if you ever want to add me, just tell me “Hey, saw your blog, wanted to add you” or something neato like that so I know you’re not some.. random pedobear.

Shaun:

I don’t get around to blogging as often as I would like, so Tiara’s going to be adding her crazy activity to the blog. She’ll be doing all sorts of game reviews. You can still expect some personal stuff from me as well as game reviews. Make her feel welcome, and welcome to trollsandrickrolls!

To celebrate this momentous occasion, the theme and a few other things have changed around the site.

I’ve changed

And so, therefore, my about page has also changed.

Check it out!

My First Negative Review: Ridge Racer 3D

First off, I have a Goldeneye Wii review complete, but my stupid laptop died and it is now gone. I’ll probably get around to doing a multiplayer one but I doubt I’ll have the courage to make another one again.

Alright, I now have 3 games on my 3DS. I’ll get Ocarnia of Time when I can be bothered, as I never had a N64 and never got around to playing it. I subscribe to the Official Nintendo Magazine Australia, and by their review of Ridge Racer, I decided I wanted a 3D racing game, so I bought it. I’ve never played previous Ridge Racer games, so if this is the way the whole series is, take it as my criticism of the series instead. From first glance, the game is good. The graphics are a good example of what the 3DS can do, the 3D effect is only mildly annoying (because when I play racing games I tilt the handheld a little bit to the direction I’m heading in, which causes you to get a double image). The game’s music, again is great. There’s a wide range of tracks you can choose from, and while techno is not quite my forte, I still like it. This seems to be repeating itself. The racing tracks, again are good. Besides being windy and too narrow, the tracks are wide (the irony was NOT intended) and varied. You’ll have beautiful cliff coastlines, tropical beaches, massive cities, snowy mountains and so on.

Right about now you’ll be reading the title and wondering what the hell I’m on.

Here’s the negative part. You’ll start racing, and then there’s this commentary on. A woman saying things like “Whoa” (when you hit something), “This is getting intense” (when you hit a car) and “You’re in xth place, (x-1)th place is just around the corner” (when you’re on your final lap). The commentary changes and there are many more events the woman wants to comment on. However, when she say’s it’s getting intense and you’ve only just nipped the person next to you, or when she’s reminding you what place you’re in when it’s clearly on the HUD and your opponent is right beside you, and telling you you’ve used nitrous when you clearly are aware of it because you’ve fucking just hit the button yourself it’s really REALLY ANNOYING. Here you are, rocking out to the awesome soundtrack and there’s some stupid lady adding her input constantly. You can’t turn it off, either. While it’s good to know that you’re on the final corner because the zoomed-in map on the touch screen doesn’t show the finish line for some stupid reason, or reminding you that your nitrous tanks are full. And yeah, the complements on my driving are nice for about 10 minutes, and then that’s about it. So I have to resort to muting the game and missing the sweet music.

It gets worse. It’s pretty obvious from first playing the game that the turning circle of the cars is horrible, so you have to drift. That’s good, and what the developers intended to do. When you drift, it builds up your nitrous bar, which is customisable (I.E. auto filling up, available to use as soon as you getting it and to the amount you specify instead of filling up tanks and then using up that tank). Again, nothing wrong with that. The game lets you use a a button that automatically puts your car into drift for newbies (and me) or you can do it manually. Again, that’s good. The game is split up into four categories of cars, which increase in power as you advance through the categories. Again! Good, it lets you get a feel for the game before throwing you into some crazy muscle car. The cars can have custom paint jobs and have different advantages and disadvantages (which is hard to find out due to know stat bar) and different top speeds and drift type.

The review seems to be going positive. What a pity, it’s not going to be any more.

You’ll start off seeing only one car on the track. The car in 1st place starts a half to a third around the track in front of you. You’ll get in the car in front of your’s streamline, catch up to it, and then duke it out until the AI decides to give up, and falls back. You don’t go faster than them, you can’t intelligently manover around them, you just duke it out, and then the AI drops back. Move up to the next car. Stay in the streamline. Duke it out. Repeat.

You’ll be doing this incredibly boring repetition until category 2 (I wouldn’t know beyond there, I rage quit at this stage). It’s fun for about an hour, but with the gran prix races only introducing a casual reverse track or a new track every 2 or three gran prixes it gets boring. Fast. Category 3 is the same, only slightly faster. And then sometimes you’ll get to a point where you’re duking it out with another car, and all of a sudden your car is flung backwards, and you drop about 4 places. That glitch has happened SO many times it’s not funny, forcing you to repeat the sometimes 4-5 minutes long tracks and the streamline, fight streamline, fight repeating dance for another 5 minutes.

It makes me rage so hard. Such a good game besides the two previous negatives, which completely ruin it. It’s not a game you can play for 4 hours straight and just can’t put down, instead you’ll feel brave and tackle it for 10 minutes at a time until you inevitably rage quit. I’ve heard category 1 is different and way better, but sorry, I’m not sitting through hours of repetitive gameplay and tracks, annoying glitches and commentary until I get to the “interesting” part. It’s not interesting gaming, and you rage quit not over being incredibly hard but instead incredibly hard AND annoying AND repetitive AND repetitive AND repetitive AND repetitive.

My Rating

Music: 9

Gameplay: 2

Creativity: 3

Graphics: 8

Other: 1

Total: 23/50

Genre Clash: Turn-Based Strategy vs Real-Time Strategy

(I’ve had this post lying around for a while, unfinished. It’s finally finished now though!)

Probably the biggest reason why I haven’t been posting here is because I got back into playing Age of Empires 3 on their online service, ESO. It got me thinking, which strategy genre is better, TBS or RTS?

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll give you an example.

Chess is a turn-based game, and Snap (the card game) is a Real Time game. In Chess you go move by move, taking it in turns. In Snap it’s anyones game. If chess were to be in real-time, it would be utter chaos and most of the strategy would be out the window. Snap, on the other hand, would be impossible and incredibly boring. You get it?

Comparing games in different genres is hard because of the differences between game in the genre. The games are designed around that genre, and work for that genre. So the comparisons will not be revolving entirely around games, games will be used more as an example.

Let’s look at one example of both TBS and RTS. For TBS, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars on the 3DS (maybe a post on this later if you’re lucky), and, of course, for RTS the Age of Empires series (PC only, as the DS one was Turn-based)

Turned based games generally allow for more time to ponder the decisions, while RTS focus on fast-paced decision-making. If you’re a quick thinker, RTS is for you, but if you like to take your time making choices, maybe TBS is for you.

TBS fans tend to criticise RTS gamers that RTS is a click fest-rush fest, while RTS fans criticize TBS gamers that it is for people who can’t make fast decisions. Shadow Wars is a brilliant game for strategy. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that TBS games offer more large army strategy- they’re more large-scale, while RTS games tend to be a lot faster paced (Age of Empires supremacy anyone?) and more focus on a small battle with less units.

RTS games are often very repetitive, with players each having an idea of different build orders for units and buildings that they stick to from game to game, while TBS tends to be more touch and go, and strategy-orientated.

Either way, RTS is still for me. So if you’re into short burst of action and not into long, brain bending strategy fests, then RTS games are more your forte. If you like busting your brain, Turn-Based it is.

Pokemon Black: Postgame

Long time no blog!

So yeah, I “finished” the postgame of Pokemon a while ago. I wouldn’t really call it finished as much as significantly complete. At least until Infinite Space came into my life (more on that later).

So, the postgame. I’d describe it as being significantly large. It’s non-linear, like HG/SS’s postgame. The levels jump up to about 65 from the level 53 highest in the elite four. It made me really confused, like I’d  forgotten something. You also have to find six of the seven sages scattered throughout.

So it’s not QUITE as big a postgame area as HG/SS, but it’s ok. Marvelous Bridge is ok, and Village Bridge would easily have the best music in the game (without the weird old man singing). I challenged the elite four again, and this time actually beat the champion and entered into the hall of fame. I haven’t caught all the postgame legendaries, or experienced more than winter and autumn in the game. It’s a decent postgame in summary. Oh, and Looker (from Platinum) and Cynthia make a cameo appearance (Cynthia is hard to beat!).

 

In summary throughout the many parts of my Pokemon Black review. It’s a good game. The new pokemon (although weird) and region are a welcome change, the new graphics are insane (I mean, Castelia City, come on) and the (again weird) storyline make this a must have for any DS owner.

 

PS: I’ve used the Entralink and Pokemon Global Link now. The Entralink hardly compares to the brilliant underground mode of Pearl/Diamond. I feel like a 5 year old when I use Global Link. I haven’t, and won’ be using it again- it’s very insulting.