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Denver, 3:39 AM
Mon Nov 30
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/24/09
The whole betrayal thing really ruined the game I'd say. Makarov was the primary villain, but after that he became essentially insignificant. All that for nothing, basically.
The final duel was interesting enough. Mostly scripted, but it was definitely shocking to pull a knife out of myself. I could almost feel it.
11/24/09
There are problems with how they told the story (or didn't tell it). I think if the gameplay wasn't so good it would have been reviled. But the gameplay is good.
Pawns in Shepard's revenge plot. On veteran difficulty, I got a little shell-shocked, a little PTSD. Never enough cover, too many people trying to kill you, never really understanding why I'm killing other people except because I was told to, dying and dying and dying. The betrayals of trust. Seeing peoples eyes as I killed them.
Makes me feel a little sick, recalling it.
11/23/09
I have always enjoyed the Call of Duty experience, as it has always put you where the most exciting thing is happening, but you are not always necessarily the most important person on the playing field. This is true with both entries of the Modern Warfare series. They are in effect making more memorable characters, but keeping the player's relative facelessness. Even when the player finally re-assumes the mask of Soap, he once more loses his voice and his unique look for that of the eyes of the player. Where as Roach had no image or voice, Soap did before Roach's death. This is the first time the mechanic of the CoD faceless hero has bothered me, as this is no longer a faceless, rookie hero. This is Soap, the dude his wasted the big baddie in MW1.
Aside from that, I enjoyed the entire game, the plot and everything much more than the first entry.
11/23/09
And no, "Badass" is not a personality.
11/23/09
11/23/09
As for the second game, yeah it's totally crazy. It turns more into a good guys vs. bad guys thing with little more depth than that since we really see no motivation from the bad guys, and the good guys motivation is only "revenge 'cus they're bad!"
11/23/09
11/23/09
Personally, of the games that are coming out in the next three months that seem to have a linear enough story, I'd be interested in seeing how people react to Dante's Inferno...
11/23/09
11/24/09
Well there are book clubs that deal in classic literature, with the idea being not so much that everyone is reading it for the first time, but that everyone is experiencing it fresh together....making it easy to discuss since you just read it and aren't recalling memories from high school days. The game club could work the same way....even if most of the commenters have played the game, replaying it would refresh your memory of its details and also give you the perspective of a modern gamer.....something we loved 10 or 20 years ago may hold up, or it may not.
11/23/09
Shepard was clearly no longer worried about allies, or even his country. He wanted revenge. He knew that any losses suffered by the invasion would be replenished by new recruits in the surge of patriotism that would come after the attack. All he wanted was revenge, which he wouldn't be able to get without Makarov attacking first. At least that's what I took from the story.
I thought the last levels were a great experience. While the boat sequence took more than a few run throughs thanks to a deadeye chopper gunner, it was a hell of a ride. Like others have said, while the end probably was completely scripted and wouldn't let you fail if you tried, I've got a hard time believing anybody couldn't have been sucked in by that final sequence. I also thought the museum credits were a cool way to do something most people will skip. I didn't realize until now you could go back and walkthrough, I'll have to give it a look. Thanks for the game club, it's been a lot of fun and helped me pick up on details I definitely would've skipped over.
11/23/09
He obviously isn't opposed to covering things up if he's worried about being the initial aggressor.
I think there has to be motivations that we don't know about besides revenge. Or maybe there isn't, and Shepard is just evil for the sake of being evil.
11/24/09
Then again, could also be the whole evil to be evil thing, who knows?
#speakup
11/23/09
1. The ending of the game suffers from the same issue every chapter along the way did- it peaked somewhere in the middle and slowly faded.
There's a reason why the "boss fight" model is used in virtually every game.
You start simple, gain comfortably, end big.
Pretty much every chapter in MW2 ends with a whimper rather than a climax. They just kind of peter out. Same with the ending of the game. It's actually rather dull.
2. When Infinity Ward want to go big, they throw something at me that is outside of the skill set I've been learning throughout the game.
For an example of this done right (and pretty much everything else), look to Uncharted 2- As players go through the game, they're asked to learn and master a certain set of skills and moves, at which they're expected to get better by the end of the game, and every boss fight and climax utilizes said skill set. You always feel like you're playing as Nathan Drake.
MW2 kept throwing me out of my element for the big set pieces. The snow mobile, the boat, the knife-pull-out-of-my-chest-and-chuck-at-the-badguy are all cool moments, but they have nothing to do with the rest of the game.
11/23/09
I guess I felt disappointed with the ending because I don't really feel like my actions mattered....sure Shepard's dead and maybe we can get the "truth" out. But at the end of the day WW3 is still going on...
We'll see if MW3 can redeem this plot...
11/23/09
11/23/09
After the part going down the falls I kept getting killed after I destroyed one of the enemy's raft. Died like 9 times in total and IMO the most frustrating part of the whole game (more so than going down the hill with Ghost).
What I was looking out of it was a quick fun time. Which in a way I did, but unfortunately it makes me angry at EVERY reviewer that how quickly MW2 ended didn't really seemed to have affected its score. I know there is mulitplayer, but MW2 had it easy. Very easy.
11/23/09
I was in a fuckin' lake! Definitely felt really cheap.
11/23/09
Ok, first, EVERYONE SHOOT EACH OTHER RIGHT NOW!! Yeah, that's a great level, where everyone is an enemy and will stop shooting each other to shoot at me at first site. Even though I was wearing cammo i didn't help when i was crawling on the ground because eagle eye AI can somehow see right through my disguise and with their pinpoint accuracy, shoot me up. Now suddenly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as told by radio chatter, and I'm given the location of a super secret base where Sheppard is. Oh boy, hey Makarov, or whatever, why didn't you have your awesome fight there instead?
Anyway moving forward, We get to the base, and its a secret underground base, in the middle of Afghanistan... Well, kind of goes against the level of realism that the series was going for up until that moment, but hey I guess that's cool. It was cool, until I got to the sealed room with countdown self destruct sequence. OK, now you've gone past my suspension of disbelief.
The rest of the game follows the same kind of cool to play but mind numbingly stupid plot holes. Sheppard gets in a helicopter, yet for whatever reason decides to fly low and next to the water were you can conveniently chase him down. Soap, or whoever, shoots Sheppard's helicopter down with a single bullet, and falls what must be a distance of at least 100 feet. You go over the waterfall of similar height, yet somehow land on dry land and survive. Sheppard is perfectly A-OK, and after all this a knife to the face finally KO's Sheppard.
I don't know. I guess the guys at Infinity Ward saw one too many movies and forgot how to tell a proper story. Maybe this level was made late into the development cycle so they just sort of shat up an ending in time for release, but in comparison to the rest of the game, the ending felt sloppy and if they really wanted to go with the "Sheppard is a traitor" angle, there were tons of other directions they could have taken that wouldn't have felt so empty upon analysis.
11/23/09
I half expected IW to leave the cargo door open and leave me to shoot a jet fighter out of the sky with my pistol. Or better yet, jump out of the plane and stab the pilot through the glass. All of those scenarios wouldn't be surprising at all.
It seems like the story/level writers tried to follow Freytag's pyramid in every level, and in the overall storyline.
It was probably answered in the last Game Club, but I still don't know why Sheppard betrayed them. They're part of Team 141, did he betray all of them? Doesn't he have a bigger conflict to focus on? And whatever happened to Makarov? Did that bullet/Rojas thing ever help, or was that all pointless?
Dammit IW, my inner action movie fan was pretty much satisfied, but my regular self was really fucking confused/disappointed.
And yes, that countdown thing was ridiculous. They had how many pounds of explosives set to a 16 second timer? And we survived? Wtf?
I think all of this is Uncharted 2 syndrome for me. The campaigns just don't compare.
11/23/09
What kills me about this game is that I probably would have felt that the game was over the top and unrealistic even if they hadn't handled the No Russian level the way they had...but that level ruined the game for me.
Many of the levels felt linear and lifeless, but this one suffers the most, as it clearly had room to play out different.
I attempted to knife terrorists in the back when they separated from the others. I attempted to shoot the terrorists. I attempted to run to the end of the level using only flash bangs without engaging the army.
What irks me is that that the story could progress at my death in any of those scenarios, but instead, the game shoe horns you into a movie that I personally wouldn't pay to see. Despite the fact that the character we're playing dies anyway, the game forces us to kill the soldiers trying to stop terrorists. The single player campaign lost me at this point. If you want to have a moral story that touches on right and wrong in an interactive format, you need to at least give the illusion of choice.
Good stories require the viewer/user to have empathy for the characters. If you follow the "They're not real!" school of thought, you're left with apathy for these characters, and the experience of the game suffers a result. So yeah, they're not real, and that notion stayed with me for the rest of the single player campaign. Moving my character through the levels is a good explanation of how single player felt. In Modern Warfare (COD4), I crawled past the troops in the sniper level, and I felt the tension. In MW2, my character did what ever the developers demanded to progress from one checkpoint to another.
Short, contrived and having way too many "wow" moments with way too few fun moments.
11/23/09
However, the end of this game left me feeling more excited than most films I've seen thus far. Maybe I'm just bat-shit crazy, but I found myself speaking to my monitor with clear emotion. Thankfully, there wasn't anyone around to hear me doing so without seeing me in context. ;P
As soon as you awake, coughing up water and stumbling around, you see one of the shadow company lads crawling towards you from the wreckage, leaving behind a trail of blood. At first, it was a sad and pitiful sight, but when I remembered looking at Ghost's face as they were pouring gasoline on him, I felt absolutely no hesitation in disemboweling this bastard.
Then I continued forward and noticed the second man to my left, barely conscious. He picked up his gun and aimed at me. "No way," I said out loud. Then I heard a -click- and it actually pissed me off that he was in this state and still trying so hard to kill me. I actually went out of my way to slash him, too.
Then I saw Shepherd leaving the heli and I managed to make it right next to him, but he ran just as I slashed and I missed him. I yelled "NO!" I was so into it. When he was running into the dust cloud in front of me, I was yelling "get the fuck back here" at my monitor. It especially sucked because he ran faster than me and there was nothing I could do about it. When I tried to stab him near the car and he ended up stabbing me instead, I got this sense of complete hopelessness. First Roach, then Ghost, now Soap, and Price is nowhere to be found. When Soap came to and was staring in the barrel of Shepherd's pistol, I knew Price would show up out of nowhere and save my ass, but up until then, I expected fully to be killed by Shepherd. The feeling of hopelessness was again reinforced when Shepherd kicked the gun away just as I got to it.
I found myself hitting F like a madman, haha (to get the knife out). After it was all done with, I thought to myself "Shit, this is how it's gonna end, isn't it? All of the heroes die for the sake of killing one villain." Huge wave of sadness as I thought that and the screen was fading to black as Price laid there motionless. Then all of a sudden he regained consciousness and as soon as he rushed to help Soap, all that hope started coming back and you just knew that the worst had passed.
Because of all these twists and whatnot, I was half expecting Nikolai to betray us, too. Especially when Price said "I told you this was a one-way trip" and Nikolai responded with "It still is." I was like "OSHIT". Fantastic ending, though, in my opinion. Maybe I'm just simplistic. ;P
11/23/09
11/23/09
Or the writers suck.
Your pick.
11/23/09
11/23/09
11/23/09
11/23/09
Makarov was using Price and Soap to get at a target he could not. He's not their buddy, and they're certainly not his, but at the time they had a mutual goal, and Makarov isn't foolish enough to pass up the opportunity to take out a strong foe.
11/23/09
So much was going on in that level that I thought maybe I was so busy trying not to die, that I missed the part where I picked up the special piece of paper with his phone number or an enemy comander's walkie or something.
Also, I really felt they built up this huge thing about Price and Makarov hating each other so much that it was a complete let down that nothing came of it. It was basically a non-point after Price's rescue...I guess thats what MW3 is for, right. :)
11/23/09
It's just not out of the realm of Price's skill set to find an enemy communications device in the middle of a full scale battle either.
Of all the unexplained and missing pieces of the MW2 puzzle, this one just doesn't bother me.
11/23/09
1) Price and the Nuke
Did he just... fire a nuke? I know the common myth is you can go to Russia and buy weapons grade plutonium like it was a loaf of stale bread, but how the heck did he fire a NUKE? Maybe he can read russian, but their security can't be that lax for a nuclear device... can it?
Possible resolution:
Is / was Price actually working with Mr. You-Know-Who and that's how he knew how to launch the nuke? If so, did the producers at IW watch too much Alias? (Price's mother is the real mastermind behind the whole thing, but she's not really evil because she was doing it to protect him! Or was she?!?)
2) The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming... from... where exactly?
Last time I checked, The US has Canada to the north, Mexico to the south, and the biggest oceans in the world on the left and right. How exactly did the Russians get an invasion onto American soil...? The amount of troops streaming down must mean they have a base of operations close enough they can send troops carrying planes constantly...
Possible resolution(s):
Ferry across the Bering Straight, take over Alaska with the rest of the country not noticing (hey it is Alaska), stroll through Canada (those Canadians are mighty nice people) and just setup camp at the Canada / US border?