World's Worst Man

The myth that BioShock was innovative is just a product of people who don't have experience with the genre. That's fine for regular folk, but you'd think professional reviewers would do some research before making those kind of claims, especially when the comparisons to System Shock 2 were constantly being made before the game's release. But, I've long since come to terms with the fact that PC gaming doesn't reach an audience nearly as large as console gaming, so titles that are a "poor man's versions" (ie. not as good, and made in the same style) of older PC games (Halo, BioShock) will get praised as being original masterpieces.

I beat the game a few minutes ago. Can't say I was impressed with the story or how it was told at all, but I'm an RPG/MGS fan, so I'm used to professional video game story-telling and cut-scenes. I'd say about half of the missions were really good, and half of them sucked. Just too much aimless wandering around and back-tracking in some of the missions. As I've mentioned, the co-op is horrible and seems to have just been a throw-in. There just doesn't seem to be any benefit to having a buddy playing a long, and the respawn system is rather frustrating. I didn't do any multi-player, but it seems like it would be awesome due to the amount of vehicles and weapons in the game (even though you didn't get to use them very much in the campaign).

Halo 3 might be the same formula as Halo 1, but it improved on many aspects of the formula. A better selection of weapons and a more interesting and varied level design being the first two things that jump out at me. How it compares to Halo 2 I cannot say, since I never bothered with it after the mediocrity of the original game. I'd say the bigger problem with the game is that it was seemingly made only for people who played the previous games. No attempt was made to explain the story from the previous two installments, or give hints on what you're supposed to do in certain situations. The plot was basically a sad attempt to put a serious, dramatic story into a campy sci-fi super-soldier game, so it wasn't a big deal. But not knowing how to approach certain situations early on kind of sucked. Comparing the MP3 and Halo 3 reviews is funny though, because I'd be hard-pressed to name one area where Halo 3 was better than Metroid Prime 3. If a reviewer is going to blast a game just for being similar to it's predecessors - without actually examining whether or not there were significant improvements - he should probably maintain that standard for all games though. I would say that would be a rather silly line to take though. Halo 3 and MP3 both had enough differences from their predecessors, or improvements on the formula, to be excluded from that criticism. This isn't a Zelda TP situation where the entire game, right down to the environments and combat, feels exactly the same.

Everyone is losing credibility for the Halo 3 reviews to be honest. The 1UP review accurately depicts a number of the failings in the game, but the guy gave it a 10/10 anyway. Some of the other reviews just ignored the issues altogether and gave it ridiculous scores. The stupid scores are ok if the review is actually worthwhile (ie. it addresses all aspects of the game), but to ignore clear flaws is rather misleading I would think. Although in the case of a double standard, it's possible that the reviews in question were done by two different people. I'm not sure that's the case in this instance, but it has happened before.

The Wii specs are pretty brutal, I'm not sure people are really under-selling its power. Expecting the graphics to improve over time is natural - developers will become more familiar with the hardware the more experience they have with it. But that also applies to the PS3 and 360, so it's not like the Wii is going to get any closer. That's fine though, the Wii is what it is.

Yea, I just started the game solo, on heroic difficulty, and it's much more enjoyable. I think the co-op just sucks; partly because of the idiotic 4:3 scaling it uses, and partly because there's really no tactical or strategic benefit to playing with another person. The campaign seems designed for one person, unlike say Gears of War where it was quite handy to have a human controlling the sidekick.

So I played the first couple of missions of the campaign. I guess the first thing that struck me was how the split-screen is put into a 4:3 box - meaning there are black bars on the side of the TV even though I tried both 720p and 1080i. Suffice to say, the viewable area is incredibly small on a 32" TV. There didn't seem to be any setting that would fix that, so I really don't know what the hell they were thinking when doing the split-screen. The graphics aren't very good at all. That might be because I'm playing split-screen, but the graphics aren't even touching Gears of War or BioShock, the former of which I also played split-screen. Neither does the level design seem as detailed or interesting as those other games. The gameplay seems pretty weak. The point of the game seems to be to kill hordes of enemies that aren't very smart or difficult to kill, using weapons that don't seem to be a whole lot different from one and other. There's certainly nothing as cool as Gears of War's chainsaw gun, or BioShock's plasmids. I can't say I'm impressed at all with this game, especially in comparison to the greatness that was BioShock and Gears of War. But I am fairly early in the game, so perhaps things get better later. Edit - Mission 3 is much, much, much better. It's actually paced well, and the second half has an awesome environment. It was actually a challenge too.

I remember when TF2 was supposed to be a Quake 2 mod. Then a Half Life mod. Then a stand-alone game. Now finally it's coming out. The sad thing is, even though I'm an original TFer and was in the clan that was supposed to play in the first TF2 match, I really have little interest in the game right now. I think it's because I know my PC won't be able to run it well enough to play competitively, and there's so much competition within the genre. If my buddies are getting it, I may have to break down and get it anyway, so hopefully it's worthy of the TF name.

I'll be downloading it, and soon it looks like since it was released early. The co-op is the draw for me, and the game looked like a vast improvement over the first two installments, so I'm going to give it a try. Hopefully it has bots for local multiplayer as well, but I haven't really read much about the game so I don't know.

I have it. I played it for a bit and decided it wasn't nearly as good as GT3/4, so I haven't played it since. The two series share too many of the same tracks and cars to make it worthwhile to play the knockoff. I'm probably going to grab PGR4, because it seems to be a different kind of game, what with the street racing and such rather than the professional racing.

I actually really loved the music in Goldeneye. There really needs to be a new, good, James Bond FPS, if for nothing else than the single player would be awesome.

That was in response to DrVenkman. The single player was decent, but I think the draw of the game was multi-player. At least, that's what I got from hearing people talk about it. The reason I don't think it's aged well is that it's pretty much been one upped by many games since its release. Locational damage was done better by Counter-Strike - and others - with it's "true" locational damage (one headshot kills, 3 body shots, etc). Stealth was more in-depth in games like Thief, MGS, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex. Not to mention the games like the Half Life series, which aren't really the same type of gameplay, but probably hit aspects of the genre better than Goldeneye. I don't doubt that there's still playability in it, but in a critical sense I don't think it's held up very well.

Start the thread then. We can just use it to post witty banter and insider jokes, even though it's much more offensive than gross smarminess and an inability to deal with differing opinions.

Goldeneye was successful due to its multi-player, which was the first time a console FPS had multi-player of that depth. Obviously it was nothing new for PC gamers - Doom had already done 4 person multi-player, while Quake was doing 32 player online multi-player and revolutionizing PC FPS gaming around the time of Goldeneye's lifespan - but Goldeneye was reaching a different and probably larger group of gamers, so it didn't matter what the PC games were bringing to the table. It was more or less the same situation as Halo, and the same thing that's happening with BioShock, but that's just the nature of PC gaming I guess. It's not as widespread or popular as console gaming, even more so today, so a lot of those PC games fly under the radar - and when carbon copies of those games are released, many people consider them original and they receive a ton of praise.

I don't think it's laziness like I've heard mentioned elsewhere, but I think it's more that developers have trouble making games early in a console's life cycle because they don't have much experience with the dev kit. The Xbox 360 had similar problems with crummy graphics in some of their early games. You can also compare the games of any console from it's early to late life and see a rather significant difference in graphical quality, which is also a by-product of having more experience developing for the system.