Game review: Batman: Arkham City -- 8.5 out of 10
Just like it’s predecessor, Arkham City knocked it out of the park. If Arkham Asylum is a very good game, then Arkham City is a great one. It takes everything about Asylum and builds on it to make it even better.
The writing for the game was top notch; both in plot and in dialogue. The voice acting, particularly by Mark Hamill and Nolan North, complemented it perfectly. On more than one occasion, a funny remark delivered masterfully by Hamill as the Joker would make me chuckle or smirk — nobody can (or will) voice the Joker like Hamill. Nolan North’s voice (the voice actor of Nathan Drake, the personality spheres in Portal 2, and lots of voices in Arkham City) is everywhere, and he did a great job in every character. The plot has lots of twists in it but isn’t hard to follow. The large twist at the end is particularly well done — I did not see it coming at all.
She’s really been meaning
to get that zipper fixed
The story did seem to try and squeeze as many villains in as possible, a point that will satisfy Batman fans, but maybe crowded the story just a little. The part they wrote for Catwoman seemed too easy of an angle on the character: lots of cat puns, acting slutty, etc. I mean, come on, look at that. Other than in one section of the game where she has ambiguous romantic feelings toward Batman, she’s very one dimensional. To me, is a real bummer because I think Catwoman can be a very interesting character. Your move, Anne Hathaway.
Gameplay is very similar to Asylum, but with various additions and changes. Flying around the city is very fun. When you learn the dive-bomb/glide technique, it makes traveling in the game faster, more fun and feel more like you’re actually Batman. Hard to explain exactly, but it’s awesome. Just being able to roam around the city and come across groups of dudes to beat up is really cool. They’ll taunt you from the streets saying shit like “COME GET US, BATFREAK”, and I admit a few times I was convinced to oblige them and lay the smack down.
The typical enemies you encounter along the city are underlings of a certain villain’s gang: Penguin, Joker, Two-Face and the like. One main difference of these enemies though is that they the groups of them are peppered with ‘special’ enemies that have a specific attribute — one or two thugs in the group will have a knife that has to be dodged or a riot shield they’ll try to bash Batman with, for example. Accounting for these attributes adds a little more variety to the general combat than Asylum had. Another addition that mixed up the gameplay was the Riddler’s spies in the groups of thugs; if you knocked out every other thug in the group but this spy, you could choose to ‘interrogate’ him about the Riddler and get extra XP and unlock some concept art or other bonuses. Having to fight the enemies in a specific order was something small that added another dimension to the fights. I doubt many people will think this is as cool as I do, but whatever.
Maybe I’m inept, but I found some of the moves in the game hard to execute. The blade dodge takedown in particular I found completely impossible and terribly frustrating to do consistently. The Drive Bomb/Shockwave thing only worked if you started from a really high point and, because of that fact, I probably used it twice in the whole game. No big deal, but I wouldn’t have spent the XP bonus on it if I knew it was only going to work from super-high falls. The Batclaw Disarm upgrade, however, is very handy and I used it a lot.
Rocksteady Studios only really has these Batman games to mention for themselves, but I’m excited to see what they’ll do in the future. They should probably move onto another franchise after this game, though — I doubt they could go that much further with it. It seems that they have a caring philosophy in their game making, and it shows in these Batman games. Two thumbs up. I really enjoyed playing it.
P.S. — Total playtime was probably around 9-12 hours.
Posted by Thane on 04/11/11 08:35 AM
in gaming, game reviews
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Hide default input type 'number' up/down arrows in Chrome
Not a lot of easily found resources out there that explain how to fix this problem:
Chrome adds these arrow-like controls to <input type="number"/>. This would be helpful if all browsers did the same thing or if you could style the buttons easily via CSS… but this isn’t the case. To hide them, just add this to your CSS:
form input[type='number']::-webkit-outer-spin-button,
form input[type='number']::-webkit-inner-spin-button {
-webkit-appearance: none;
margin: 0;
}
Safari does not show these arrows by default, though I’m pretty sure iOS devices show some kind of default controls for the number input type, so this should work for that, too.
Posted by Thane on 17/10/11 11:01 AM
in web stuff, howto
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Game review: Duke Nukem Forever -- 3 out of 10
I will preface this review by admitting I did not finish it.
I pity anyone who did.
This game sucks. There’s no two ways about it. It should never have been released and should have been left to die.
The age of gaming where a Duke Nukem game is relevant is over. Back when gaming was in it’s Golden Age, you could pile on some dick jokes and some flimsy story about aliens invading Earth and it people would love it. More is now expected from games and their developers. This game requires you to suspend your disbelief at it’s crudeness and awful horribleness — and I doubt most gamers can do this for long.
Lets talk specifics.
Cons:
- A lot of the weapons are useless. For example, the weapon they start you with, the “AT Laser”, sucks. It fires at a weird rate and is weaker than a wet noodle.
Pictured: realism
- The hair on each character looks like it was modeled with 5, maybe 6, polygons. Tops.
- The load times in this game are atrocious. So atrocious in fact, that I felt the need to (and did indeed) time them. After death, you have to wait at least 55 seconds to play again. One time I had to wait 1:20. When you are progressing to another part of a level (a-la Half Life series) and there is a loading screen, the average time is 2 whole minutes, with one instance being almost 2:30. In and of themselves, these times could be worse, but they’re made unbearable by one factor: THERE IS NO PROGRESS BAR. I’m sorry, but this is inexcusable. Every game in the past 10 years has had short enough load times (rendering progress bars unnecessary) or some kind of or some kind of load progress indication.
- Animations for Duke and other characters are not good. Duke’s jumping animation is laughable and the facial animations convey no emotion of characters whatsoever. See what I mean in this video.
I read in the comments for this video (and similar videos) that this jump animation is an “homage” to the previous games. Probably not a great call since most players of a Duke Nukem game nowadays either a. aren’t going to remember a jump animation from 15 years ago or b. probably hadn’t been born yet. - This game has some of the most macho pseudo-homoerotic dialogue I’ve ever heard in a game. This isn’t ass slaps at a baseball game, it’s lines like “Strap on the dildos, it’s time to tear up alien ass”. Said by a male. Lines Duke says often include a lot of literal talk about his own penis, or going up somebody or another’s ass. Now I’m not a homophobe, but Duke’s raging womanizing and heterosexual persona and his constant homoerotic one liners were kind of unsettling to hear together.
- The depth of field when doing the ‘rail sight’ style aiming is horrible. The amount of blurring on things that aren’t exactly where the gun is aiming is way exaggerated and you can’t see anything. For fighting groups of enemies, this is not helpful.
- The tips at the loading screens weren’t all terrible (some were actually kinda funny), but the one that says “Use melee attacks to conserve ammo” is just complete bullshit. Melee in this game is terrible and useless. Your enemies almost always melee you first and theirs is almost always stronger than yours — meaning if you try and ‘conserve ammo’ as the tip suggests, you’re going to die a lot. Plus, there’s not really a shortage of ammo.
- The crane part is directly ripped off of Half Life 2. The part where you get into the crane is almost a direct copy. No shame.
Pros:
- A lot of the props in the game are destructible. Barriers for cover, some buildings and the like can all be chipped away at with explosions.
- The game doesn’t hold your hand with waypoints or direction on where to go. Granted, the game is linear and it’s pretty easy to figure out where to go most of the time, but sometimes it isn’t and the game does a good job of making you figure that out sometimes.
- Puzzles in the game actually require something more than a pulse to solve. In particular, the puzzle inside the trailer with the power lines was actually pretty rewarding to solve.
If you were on the fence about whether or not to play this… I would probably suggest that you save your torrent ratio or (god forbid) your money for something worthwhile.
Let’s put it this way: if this game was reduced to $5 in a Steam sale, I would most definitely not buy it.
Posted by Thane on 23/07/11 04:18 PM
in game reviews, rants
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Game review: Red Faction: Armageddon -- 7.5 out of 10
I really really liked Red Faction Guerrilla, so when I saw they were making a sequel to it, I was very excited.
Armageddon is also a fun game. The gameplay was arguably more fun than it’s predecessor, considering it had more weapons and more gameplay mechanics to assist with the fun factor. The game also had a lot of polish on it. Everything was really well crafted and you could tell a lot of people really put a lot of work into it. The writing was actually pretty good and definitely better than I expected. The voice acting was also much better than I would have predicted.
My one main criticism is this: the environments. The story takes place almost exclusively in underground tunnels of Mars, so the environment is fitting — but by the end of the game it gets sort of old. I would realistically estimate that 80% of the game looks very close to the above screenshot. Just a dark cave with either shanty-like broken down buildings or hyper-technological buildings.
The subsequent enemies you fight are of an alien race that live underground. You also fight humanoid enemies as well, but this is probably 10% or less than the entire game. Again, it fits the story of the game well, but it’s a little tiring. I also find it more enjoyable to fight humanoid enemies, but this is merely personal preference.
So here’s my advice to people interested in this game: play Guerrilla first. If you like that, then play this one after you finish that. I doubt anyone that hadn’t played Guerrilla first would have liked this as much as I did.
This is going to be a rare statement from me, but I hope there’s DLC for this game… except on the surface of Mars instead of underground. I enjoyed the environments and world of Guerrilla better, and bringing the new engine and weapons to those environments would be really awesome.
Posted by Thane on 19/06/11 10:44 PM
in gaming, game reviews
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My List of Things Where a "Good One" of It Doesn't Exist
Let me explain:
In the world, there are a few products where no matter what brand, how much you pay, new or used, they all blow. Here’s the list.
Dishwashers.
EVERY single dishwasher I’ve EVER used sucks. Friends dishwasher, parents dishwasher, dishwasher at place of employment? Sucks. Every house I’ve moved into? Even worse. Dishes never get fully clean. Or theres some inexplicable problem, like after every wash JUST the silverware somehow is the only thing not clean.
Printers.
Ink problems. Jamming paper. The cheapest, shittiest manufacturing possible that feels like it’s going to break every time you touch it. Loud as FUCK. The fact that printers themselves are cheap because the printer manufacturers are just tricking you into having to buy ink — which is basically as expensive as unicorn blood. And when ink is sold in the 3/4 color combo cartridges? So I have to pay for a WHOLE NOTHER 4 color cartridge because I’m out of MAGENTA? Nope, sorry, I’ll be taking a hammer to your face, printer.
Umbrellas.
Think about the longest length of time you’ve had an umbrella before it broke. Not very long, is it? The shitty little arm things that hold it up are always terrible and bend really easily — even on expensive umbrellas.
I’ll update this list and repost when I add to it.
