So another week has passed, and I can’t really tell what I did in that time. I know that once again, I read a lot of game reviews and as I’m writing these, I’m a little bit behind schedule for last week’s reviews. The funny thing is that I had to read the exact same amount of reviews as last week’s, and I can’t really tell where these new reviews came from! Maybe it’s because that I went on and downloaded a lot of old reviews that I always wanted to read but never had the time, however those could be for the week before that! I can’t really tell the difference between last week and the week before it.
Anyhow, right now, I think that I will read last week’s reviews tomorrow and this week’s reviews will be done in a really short amount of time, because I’m sure that I downloaded 25 reviews for this week, and only 4 of them are over 80. So basically, I may have to read at most 10 reviews (which is nothing compared to last two week’s 80 reviews). After that I’ll finally do the Naruto download providing (at last) and I believe that would be all for this week. I think that I may be able to write Nightfire review in the middle of next week, and Condemned’s a week after that (But it will probably get longer, I do this over and over again to get a feeling of what I can do in a specific time period.)
Blog Changes:Aside from those, I changed the blog’s comment settings, so anyone can comment as anonymous. I also made a topic list for the right part of the blog.
Another thing I did was the Wallpaper you see below. My brother had a weird wallpaper for his desktop, so I created it as a replacement, and I thought I could upload that onto my blog.
My Personal Life:As for my personal life, I will probably finally get my hands on “Final Fantasy VII”, even though I’m not gonna play it for now. I’m also looking for some Anime (Fullmetal Alchemist & Dragon Ball), but I haven’t been lucky so far, and I might have to do something more that just waiting for some guys at a forum to answer my request (Because I don’t have access to high-speed internet right now, I thought I could find someone that Already have these Anime and get them from him.)
I also had a somewhat weird conversation (read: fight) with an X360 fan on a gamespot forum here. At first I wanted to discuss with people about “Half-Life 2: Episode 3” ‘s prolonged delay’s reason, but most people didn’t read it and one of the few guys who did, got upset because I had mentioned that the reason might be X360’s popularity and lack of power (Well, I did a little more than just “mentioning”, but given how much I hate the console, it couldn’t be helped).
Also I finished three “days” in “Flower, Sun, and Rain”, an adventure game I played on my brother’s NDS (I was careful not to finish it though). “Flower, Sun, and Rain” has some of the worst graphics and character models I have ever seen. However it also has a really weird story that keeps getting complicated. If you ever thought that it’s not possible to do something, without actually knowing what it is that you’re doing, “Flower, Sun, and Rain” can prove you otherwise.
4-Player Split-Screen Gaming:One interesting thing that happened last week (In fact, today) was that some of my brother’s friends came to visit him today at our house, and finally we got a chance to play some split-screen 4-Player games. I’ve got a PS2, and recently I bought a multi-tap and some controllers to be able to play 4-Player games with my PS2. My brother’s got an XBOX 360, and so do all of his friends, and he had told his friends to bring their 360 controllers with them to play some 4-Player X360.
PS2 4-Player: TimeSplitters2At first I plugged in my multi-tap and for the first time, experienced a local 4-Player game: TimeSpliters 2. We started with a Deathmatch on a desert map. It was really fun, but it was kinda like all the other shooters I had played before. Of course, I won.
Then we changed to a Futuristic, arctic map (Why does everyone think that the future is full of snow?) and I swapped my place with my brother, observing other people play. Although I didn’t play this map, I could tell the difference right away. Instead of pistols, players would start with a super fast machine gun, which also had a zoom functionality, and the map was full of powerful weapons like SPAS-12s and Rocket Launchers.
As opposed to last map’s corridors and underground hallways, this map was made of a small building, and a huge snow-covered ground. You could see your enemies from a distance and the map was full of Rocket Launchers, so this map’s gameplay was hectic and fast-paced. You were busy trying to kill someone who has just came out of a building with your SPAS and the next thing you notice is a big Rocket heading towards your face. I really liked that map because it had an “Unreal Tournament” sense to it. In this map one of my brother’s friends won.
Next map was some kind of a hospital/mansion/streets map. This map’s weapons were shotguns, Thompsons, a Grenade Launcher, and most importantly, double Thompsones (Thompson is an old machine gun). The Thompson has a really high fire rate, so double thompsons basically equate to a shower of bullets. Unlike last map’s machineguns that would take 4 or 5 seconds to kill someone, double thompsons would kill in less than a second. This would give them an “Instant-Death” sense, making this corridor map really fun, because the right moment an enemy would notice you, your death would be apparent. So this map had a kind of “Watch for anything that moves, and then shoot ‘till you run out of ammo” sense to it. The winner of this map was the winner of the last map, and I finished second.
After that we decided to play a team-deathmatch game. I teamed up with the winner of the last two maps (I know, It’s not fair), and my brother teamed up with another one his friends (One of his friends had to watch). I chose the first map for team-deathmatch, because I thought it’s better suited for team gameplay than those super-fast, die-at-the-right-moment-you-spawn maps. This match became really hectic, because when your teammate was in trouble, you had to rush to him (while trying to find your way through corridors) in order to help him out. So you didn’t have time to hide in the underground hallways, looking for weapons and waiting for an opportunity to blow people up while they’re busy killing each other. Of course, our team won the match.
Then we decided to play something else. Overall, I started playing telling myself that this is just an ordinary below-average console FPS that also has Multi-Player functionality, but in the end I was sure that this game is one of a kind. Each map had it’s own feel, weapons, tactics, and looks, and even though we only played three of the many maps and two of the many modes, I had a unique, fun time killing my brother’s friends in TimeSplitters 2.
Before I go on to X360, I must mention something rather absurd: In TimeSplitters 2, People shrink instead of crouch. This would give them more precise aiming but lowers their movement, and of course, it turns them into tiny dolls with some really dangerous weapons in their hands that are impossible to kill, unless you shrink yourself.
After that we played some one-on-one fighting games (Tekken 5, Naruto Ultimate Ninja 2) and then we decided to move on to X360. Other people wanted to play “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare”, but I didn’t, so we ended up playing “Call of Duty: World at War”.
X360 4-Player: Call of Duty: World at WarBefore talking about my experience with COD 5, I should mention that we played both TimeSplitters 2 and Call of Duty: World at War on a 46inch HDTV, and playing them on a normal TV would have probably be a different experience. As an example, you probably couldn’t read your remaining ammo in COD5, leading to frustration.
We started COD5 on a “Cliffside” map. The map was basically a beautiful “waterfall and old buildings” locale that was torn apart by war. You could see canons, ammo creates, bunkers and barbed wire throughout the map. COD 5 was a completely different experience to me because when playing TimeSplitters 2, we were all newbies to it’s gameplay, but as for COD5, there was a huge difference between our skills, mainly because some of us had played the game before.
The first thing I noticed when started playing was the map, which was done beautifully, and the game had no problem rendering 4 different views of the map in one screen (Which I though was impossible for X360).
I played a little with the controller to get a hang of how things are done and then started playing by killing my brother while he accidentally bumped into me. I’m a PC FPS player, and I usually play it safe. So I found some nice place that had a good view of the map and waited for someone to appear. This was quickly proven useless, because with an analog-stick, I couldn’t aim as good as I could with mouse. So I just emptied a whole ammo clip while desperately trying to lock my crosshair on the soldier who was wondering where he was being shot from. A minute later, my screen got populated with WWII soldiers, and while I was trying to aim precisely, someone just walked right to me and shot me to death. After that I changed my style of playing: I would sneak up behind people and then empty a clip in their stomach, which would usually kill them. I earned some frags by doing that and then I got the “dogs” perk for killing 7 people in a row. Next my brother killed me 3 times in a row (he has a really good analog-stick aiming skill, so he could easily aim my head while I had to barely move my crosshair on him and then hold the right trigger). Then I released the dogs, and they gave me some points while everybody else was wondering where these animals came from. My brother managed to kill me several times, and 3 or 4 times someone sneaked behind me while I was engaging someone else and scored a frag. But in the end I managed to score the most frags and I won.
After that I changed the map to a torn-down city building (or something like that) and switched my place with my former teammate in TimeSplitters 2 (Who was watching the first match). This map wasn’t really different and the gameplay remained the same. For the most part players would kill each other when they would notice someone who wasn’t looking at them, and I had a feeling that this game is more about luck than skill (or maybe more about knowing the map than being able to shoot).
Then I changed the game mod to Team-Deathmatch, and I teamed up with my former teammate this time against the other two of my brother’s friends. The map stayed the same. This game had a more tactical feel to it than TS2 but it had it’s flaws: When someone would die, he would respawn close to his teammate, so the other team managed to score the most frags by constantly spawning on a high location at the top of a stairway with a good view of the whole map (and us). We lost in this map.
Overall COD5 had a slower gameplay than TimeSplitters 2, and while fun, I had played lots of games like that before.
After playing COD5, we played a little bit Soul Calibur IV, before my brother’s friends left.
See ya next week!
I got it.
I got it.