Monday 21 December 2009

Unreal Tournament 3

I bought Unreal Tournament 3 at Fry's Electronics while I was in Vegas last week.  I had been wanting to get it for like ever, but I was waiting for the Mac OS X version, which will probably never come out.  But it was $20 at Fry's so I decided why not?

Overall, glad I got it, had fun, but its not what I was expecting.  Too Gears of War-ish to me.  Didn't really feel Unreal Tournament to me.  Its hard to explain.

There are two different modes to it.  Campaign, and Instant Action.  Instant Action is just regular old Unreal Tournament.  Campaign is different.  Campaign tells a story.  While the story is decent enough, the gameplay kind of kills the story.  I dunno, trying to explain Respawners is kind of dumb.  Basically, in war times, Respawners mean people won't die, they just respawn.  But fragging enough players will eventually wear the respawners out.  That explains the deathmatches.  Now Capture the Flag was even worse.  FLaGs, or "Field Lattice Generators," are basically items that generate power to the respawners.  Somehow getting the flag to your base weakens the respawners?  I dunno.  It didn't make sense.  The only maps that made sense to me were the Warfare maps which are supposed to be a cross between Assaults and Onslaughts.  To me, I didn't see much resemblance to Assaults.

Respawning and Capture the Flag are just FPS conventions and should never have to be explained.

Fortunately the weapons are all the classic weapons.  I actually found the BioRifle useful.  But the best weapon in the game in my opinion is the Rocket Launcher.  With the Flak Cannon as the Runner up.  With the Rocket Launcher, its an instant kill if you hit them in the crotch.  Its not entirely hard to do, but if you hit the feet they'll live and same if you hit them in the chest, arms, or head.  

Flak Cannon is still the instant kill in close quarters, but is kind of useless in long range.  Alternate fire on the Flak takes a bit to get used to.  It arcs too high to me. 

The Shock Rifle is still as useless as ever in my opinion.  I always loved the idea of the shock rifle, but I could never figure out how to use it right.

They brought back the impact hammer/piston.  It looks completely different, and I found myself accidentally using it a lot because it looks quite similar to the Flak.  A nice touch, when you killed someone with the Impact Hammer, bloods splashes on your field of vision.   

The enforcers were brought back, but they were changed, and in my opinion, not for the better.  Alternate fire isn't Gangster Style, but rather a burst of 3 shot quickly in succession.  When you pick up two, theres a reference to the Gangster Style, but I'm not sure if you shoot them like that or not.

The Sniper Rifle is pretty cool.  And a lot easier to Head Shot with than UT2k4's.  Unfortunately, its made useless for actual sniping, since the bullet trail is highly visible to anyone in the game.  Fortunately there is no smoke in your face after a shot.

The Link gun is the Link gun.  I didn't notice much change, if any.

Minigun Stinger is decent.  Not as useful as previous games though.

Now, as much as I like the series, I absolutely suck at it online, so I play single player only.  And thats where UT3 loses a lot of points.  Single player is hardly customizable at all.  One of the things I loved so much about UT99 and 2k4 were the customizable bots.  You can set the bots' teams and everything in previous games.  In UT3 you can set which bots are in the game, but not which team the bots are on, so they're always on different teams.  

And then the absence of Brock and Xan is sad.  Both of them are Unreal Tournament Staples.  Whats more is the presence of Lauren.  Why have Lauren without Brock.  They're supposed to be lovers.  Its just stupid.  Hell, Facing Worlds wasn't even available on release!  Granted it was released with the Bonus Pack, but its fucking Face!  It should be the first map made!  At least Deck 16 was available on release.  All-in-all there aren't enough classic maps.  I mean, yeah, I know its a different game, there should be new maps.  I understand that, but there should be more than just three classic maps.

Apparently the people behind ChaosUT didn't think the game worthy of having a Chaos Patch.  Which is sad, because ChaosUT is fun as hell.

In the end, I'm glad I got the game.  I had a lot of fun playing it.  But the game tries so hard to be different from the previous entries and suffers from it in my opinion.

Saturday 12 December 2009

Dominion Tank Police

I had read the manga awhile back, which wasn't anything particularly awesome, but as it was by Shirow Masamune, I had to give it a try.  I thought it was pretty good.  So I decided to watch the anime too.  I haven't finished it, only on episode 3.  Its fairly good.  I don't particularly remember the manga too much, but the anime seems more linear than I remember the manga being.  I laughed out loud in a few scenes.

If anything, its entertaining.  And its not a long series, so I'll find out how it turns out in a bit.