Ten Week Anniversary!

Hey Murder Junkies and Junkettes!

This is the tenth post to this blog and as such represents ten straight weeks of commentary and criticism of all the digital shooting and looting, slicing and dicing, and general murder and mayhem we all enjoy from time to time.

So let me just take a moment to pat myself on the back for managing to take my creative impulses and tether them to a steady schedule for so long.

*pat*

Felt great, thanks for asking! Let's talk about some games!

I didn't really have a topic prepared for this weeks post because the rest of reality has been kind of intrusive lately. I've been doing some side work with some people, making a bit of scratch, you know the whole hustle and grind.

But in my spare time I've still been playing them vidya gams so I might as well tap out a few words for ye olde blogge.

On the PC I've been playing the first Halo, also known as the best Halo, and it is still just as great as it ever was. Halo really refined and distilled a lot of things from the FPS genre of the time to make it so that these games could also be played just as well on a console as they could on PC. It was Halo that popularized such genre staples of today as regenerating health/shields, the two weapon limit and mapping "throw grenade" to its own button instead of making it just another weapon you had to select. Also it had responsive and entertaining enemy AI that most games still haven't managed to copy yet.

That said, I vastly prefer playing Halo on a PC as opposed to a console simply because the plasma pistol's rate of fire it tied to how quickly you can pull the trigger and I can click a mouse button a whole lot faster than I can pull a shoulder button on a controller.

I am a Halo god with that plasma pistol. I was already a Halo god because I played it so much back when it came out but the PC version is really easy, even on the hardest difficulty. I don't know if the multiplayer still works or not because gamespy shut down their servers but I'm sure some plucky, resourceful Halo fans have worked out some kind of solution to keep the online shenanigans going.

On the PlayStation 3 I was replaying BioShock 2 to farm up some trophies I missed the first time around but now I'm playing Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, which is a great new Metal Gear game. The story is still some fucked up soap opera written by an even more fucked up Japanese guy but the game itself is great.

Ground Zeroes amounts to basically a prologue to the main MGS V game coming out soon, called The Phantom Pain. Ground Zeroes takes place just before that game and sets the stage, story-wise, while also introducing the player to all the new changes they've introduced to the series.

Mainly, it's still stealth action but here there is equal attention given to both. You can play totally stealthy or just run and gun and it's really good either way. Also the levels are very very big this time around, making it basically a kind of open world Metal Gear game. This is exciting to me because I love open world structures to my games and I think Metal Gear is a good fit to try something like this out.

In Ground Zeroes the open world is basically a military base that you have to explore to find a few VIP targets that are being held there that you need to rescue. After beating the main mission once you open up numerous little side missions that send you back to the base to complete various other objectives. The game tracks your progress and at the end of each mission tells you how well you did.

It's pretty good and I like it a lot. Last night I opened up a couple side missions that are very clever and also very fan service-y and being a fan of the first few 3D games I really appreciate that they put them in there for me.

On my phone I've been playing a lot of Random Heroes 2, a little platformer/shooter game where you select a character and a weapon and run through about 90 levels shooting alien invaders and picking up the coins they drop so you can buy more characters and weapons and upgrade them.

 The main hook here is that there are more characters and weapons to buy, and even more upgrade for each, that you'll need to go back and replay all the levels over and over again to farm up enough coins to get them all. While the game is free you can pay real money to just buy coins so you can upgrade your favorite character and weapon and play the game that way.

I enjoy playing it in my spare moments because it's got great controls, gameplay is quick and fluid, and it's just plain entertaining. Levels get bigger and more intricate the further along you get, as well. Basically when I get to the point where I'm developing mobile games to publish on phones one of the games I'm planning on copying is Random Heroes. At least the controls and snappiness of it, if not the actual game itself.

I kind of like exploring more than just shooting so my RH clone will focus more on the exploration than the shooting, though I plan on including lots of both.

Oh did I mention I have also started working with the Unity program to design my own video games? Because I have started working with the Unity program to learn how to design my own video games.

I currently have a sphere on a plane that I can move around using the arrow keys of the keyboard and have attached a camera to it that follows it around. I've got the plane boxed in with some walls and I have some collectible items I've made and scattered around the area. I'm working on setting it up so that when you collect these items it counts them for you as a score and the level is over when you've picked them all up.

Eventually I plan to morph this ball rolling game into something a bit more fun. One of my priorities now is figuring out how to write a script that lets me make the ball jump so it can roll and jump around the levels. That way I can design some platforming elements. Likewise with shooting, I'd like to make the ball shoot as well so I can make it kind of a shooter too.

That's all in the wings at the moment. I need to finish up this basic prototype first and then work on adding those other things. Also since it's October I'm going to try and make something simple and 2D that involves ghosts vs. skeletons. So that should be fun as well.

Speaking of fun I just got a copy of BioShock Infinite, the only BioShock game I have yet to play, so I might have another BioShock article soon.

But maybe not, while I'm sure I'll enjoy blasting bad guys in a fantastic setting I doubt Infinite will give me anything new to say about the series that I wasn't able to say to in my review of BioShock 2.

So that's where I've been the past week. Between bouts of work I've found time to play on my computer, my phone and my TV just as Dionysus intended. I'll see you again next week and hopefully I'll have something more substantial for you to chew on.

Thanks for reading.