Dirigible of Pain

So while I was preparing for another close combat scenario, Overlord Johnson of The Secret Lair and KJToo.com sent me a report on his own experiences with a selection of simulations. The report is concise and lacks his characteristic sarcasm, but I felt it was good enough to share with you, my crew.

You are instructed to read the following. The next set of close combat will be utilizing one of the following simulations. If you are not up to speed with the technology when the simulation is run, then you will be used for the live fire exercises later in the week. Enjoy the report!

Here’s my breakdown of KILLING FLOOR vs. LEFT 4 DEAD (1 and 2):

-TIME COMMITMENT-

You’re going to spend about an hour (minimum) to an hour and a half or
more running through a single L4D campaign, broken into five chapters,
each with its own map.

KILLING FLOOR like a classic multiplayer FPS, rotates through a map
list. The game is divided into 4 – 10 waves of zombie per map, with
time between waves to shop for more ammo and/or bigger guns. The time
between waves is defined as part of the difficulty; playing on
“Beginner”, you have 2 minutes to find the trader (she moves with each
new wave) and complete your shopping; playing on “Normal”, that time
drops to just one minute. Once a map is loaded, there is no additional
load time between waves. Play a Short game (four waves) will take
about 10 – 15 minutes per map.

-SOLO vs. MULTIPLAYER-

Both games are designed to be played primarily as co-op multiplayer,
but can be played solo as well. I can finish L4D campaigns solo on the
“Easy” setting without a problem; I’ve got about a 75-80% completion
percentage playing solo at “Normal” difficulty. I can run through
KILLING FLOOR maps (Short or Long) on the “Beginner” setting without
dying 90+% of the time; I have yet to complete even a Short, 4-wave
map on the “Normal” difficulty setting while running solo.

I’ve not yet played KILLING FLOOR multiplayer, but I’d like to. The
various classes/perks intrigue me, and I’d like to see how they work
together in cooperative gameplay.

-ENEMIES-

L4D has six zombie types: normal + 5 special (Boomer, Smoker, Hunter,
Tank and Witch); L4D2 adds 3 special zombies (Jockey, Spitter and
Charger), plus some uncommon zombies (Mudmen and Clowns, for
example).

KILLING FLOOR has about eight zombie types: Clots (your basic,
lumbering, grabbing variety) and a bunch of special types, including
Stalkers (they cloak), Crawlers (damned spider-zombie hybrids), acid-
spitting Bloats, Gorefasts, Sirens and a couple of others. The final
wave of each KF map starts with just The Patriach (father of all
zombies; he cloaks, has a machine gun and a rocket launcher, and
heals), but if you don’t take him down quickly he can spawn others.

The zombies in KILLING FLOOR always know where you are and are always
actively trying to get you. Then again, there may be as few as 18 of
them in a given wave, so they can’t afford to be standing around
leaning on a wall; if there’s a zombie alive somewhere on the map, it
is trying to kill you. In L4D, there are zombies EVERYWHERE, and a lot
of them are just standing around waiting for something to happen. This
means you have a lot of opportunity to blow a zombie away without it
ever attacking, but it also increases the chance that you’re going to
duck around a corner and bump into seventeen walking corpses. Based on
my experience, the average campaign game of L4D will feature between
1,500 and 3,000 zombie kills, or roughly 300 to 600 zombies per “map”.
KILLING FLOOR will (unless you tweak the settings; I believe you can
control the maximum number of zombies per wave) have anywhere from 18
- 36 zombies per wave, so even in a Long game you’ll be killing less
than 500 baddies.

-GAMEPLAY-

KILLING FLOOR is a straight-up FPS with zombies in it. There’s not a
whole lot of imagination going on: you’ve got big guns, some
explosives, and waves of zombies. The terrain isn’t as useful as it
should be (I can’t jump up on that woodpile and then onto the roof of
the barn? Why not?), but some of the maps are pretty cool nonetheless.
There is a whole door-welding element that I like, which allows you to
control the environment to a degree, preventing (or at least delaying)
zombies from entering an area through certain doors.KF also has a
“Perk” system that allows you to essentially choose a class and get
benefits (“Perks”, get it) based on the class. Each class/perk can be
levelled up by performing activities related to that class. Want to
get better perks from the “Sharpshooter” class? Headshot more zombies.

L4D doesn’t bother with classes; all benefits are derived through
superior firepower and player skill. The sole exception to this is the
addition of adrenaline shots in L4D2, which allows you to briefly run
and shoot much faster than normal. There’s nothing you can do to
control the environment in L4D, but the game does have far more
complex (and satisfying) terrain modeling, which makes you feel like
you’re playing in a much more open, three-dimensional world.

KILLING FLOOR is geared more toward the BATTLEFIELD 1942 crowd; while
L4D maxes out at four players in cooperative modes, I believe KILLING
FLOOR is good for eight players, possibly more. Both games have
competitive modes as well, but I haven’t played around with them
enough to render any kind of opinion or even accurate information.

Popularity: 42%

So Lady Vandermore and I have been playing Champions Online for just about six months now, and both of us enjoy it for much the same reasons.

• We don’t always get to play for long stretches of time.
• We don’t always get to play every day.
• We like being able to finish things when we do play.

I must note, that neither of us have played many MMOs since the days of EQ and Guild Wars. I enjoyed EQ for a while until the grind got to me, and Guild Wars was fun for the two of us until we had explored all that we could and then also lost our copious free time we used to enjoy. We are not MMO’ers in the normal sense.

We got interested in Champions Online for two reasons:

1. We have both played the Champions RPG and Hero System, and we enjoy them both. Though taking days to create a character is long behind us, we have fond memories of it.
2. When we played the Halloween events, it was free!

Since we are waiting for Star Wars: Old Republic to come out, Lady Vandermore thought it would be fun to have Champions Online as a filler game until is came out. It served that purpose well, until we started running out of content. Then we started to get a little tired of it as we had less and less to explore and more and more repetition. We nearly quit except for one reason: our role playing guild.

While the game was still mostly fun, it wasn’t pay every month fun for us. Then Lady Vandermore found our guild. It’s a roleplaying guild as I have mentioned earlier, and since we had already made up characters in our own heads for the characters that we were playing online, joining a roleplaying guild just made sense.

It’s not quite what I miss from tabletop roleplaying, but in some cases it is superior to them. It allows for an evening of roleplaying with the visuals that we always had in our heads (though it’s a little limited on the special effects) and also ends when we need it to, ready to pick up again when we have the time to jump online again.

They’ve recently added some more content, and I’ve explored that as well. It’s been fun to do, but since I have maxed out my level I don’t feel the need to do the quests in the game. In fact, I feel that I should save them in the hopes that they will open up the level cap. So I have a bunch of content waiting for me if I ever get bored with the roleplaying, and hunting down my nemesis in game (the one part of Champions Online that I am still actively pursuing).

It’s been a fun game, and I see us playing it for a while yet. When Star Wars: Old Republic comes out though, I don’t know that it will stay on our list of games to play. Unless of course, the roleplaying is just that darn good. Plus, how can you go wrong with a master villain like Dr. Destroyer who obviously takes after myself. He has such good taste in helms.

Popularity: 63%

So I recently picked up Borderlands. I know, I know, it’s been out for some time now. I’ve been playing Champions Online with Lady Vandermore of late, and while I have wanted to play Borderlands, I didn’t have anyone consistent to play it with and I wanted to play it with a full four players.

So when the latest weekend sale on Steam came out with it for half off, I went on a crusade to find those people. I was able to get three others from one of my face shooting gaming groups to go in on the four pack with me. So all told, it was about $19 each to get the game. Not bad for a nearly new game to share with three friends.

So one of the Overlords, Kris, from The Secret Lair and KJToo.com, and I were the first to fire it up. He had already been playing in single player, since he evidently has faster internet speeds than I do for the Steam downloads. We both jumped into a multiplayer game proceeded along the mini tutorial with the Claptrap robot leading us into town. I was playing the Tank character, and he was playing the Siren, iirc. We had just gotten into town and hadn’t even met the first human NPC yet, when I needed to sign off and do some things in the physical world.

Overall, the experience though brief, was so far shaping up very well. Getting the hang of moving and shooting wasn’t hard since I have played FPSes before. The trick was getting used to the reduced accuracy since I was level 1 and my guns sucked. That would change as I played more.

Later that afternoon, the other two players were able to play and all four of us got together for some good face shooting. Shooting bandits, usually mutated, and skags, creatures that look sort of like dogs with bark for skin, is what you start out doing. We didn’t get very far during our first two sessions, still getting used to the game. Our most recent session has unlocked the vehicles for our use, and those of course for me have become my weapon of choice, running over various mutants and skags.

We’re still playing, and I look forward to our next session. I recommend getting it if you have some friends to play it with, though the leveling and quests can quickly get out of sync if you have a player or two keep playing their group character as a single player. Since the leader of the party is the only one who can select the quests, and if they have already done the quest they can’t do it again, if they out level you and finish quests you haven’t gotten then you are out of luck. That’s so far the only real down side of the game that I have seen. I’d be cool to have more of a free-form leveling mechanic, or at least the ability to redo older quests if you have a character who hasn’t done them in the group.

The game is definitely for me and fits the minorly multiplayer online role playing game niche that I always crave. This game and Left 4 Dead feels really good to me, but Borderlands also fills my need for computer role playing game with a leveling mechanic. If any of my perceptions change, I’ll be sure to let you all know in a future post.

Popularity: 91%

This, sadly, is a hard review for me. For years I have been a diehard fanboy of the FEAR series, throwing myself in the original FEAR and playing it to death along with the expansion Extraction Point. Like a giddy little school girl I waited eagerly for the sequel since hearing about it back in December, and when the demo was available for Steam I downloaded it as soon as it was available and played it over and over again for at least two weeks. Now here I am, having just freshly come off of beating the game after receiving it in the mail yesterday evening with a overwhelming feeling disappointment and confusion. The fear is sadly absent from FEAR 2 Project Origins. Let me explain.

You see I’m a huge fan of the video game horror genre, games like the Fatal Frame series, the first few Silent Hill games, and of course Eternal Darkness for the Game Cube (One of the most under rated games of all times by the way, check it out if you get a chance.) And I’ve been a fan of FPS games since the dawn of Doom, losing myself for weeks at a time in the many sequels of Doom, Quake, and of course Medal of Honor……so getting into the FEAR series was rather a no brainer for me. The first game fed my desire for pulse pounding, mouse destroying FPS action, running and gunning till my heart’s content, squealing in glee as I pin enemy after enemy to the wall with the Penetrator….which of course gets a name change in FEAR 2, but I digress. Now couple that with the terrifying sequences of Alma popping up and messing with your head, along with the creepy whispers of the Replica army’s General Paxton Fettel left me at the edge of my seat screaming colorful variations of “Get some!” and “ Holy Sh!t, what the F- was that….OH GOD!” If you ever listened to me on The Game Master Show you know how “articulate” I can be with my choice of words.

By now you are probably wondering why I keep babbling about the first game and its expansion and not getting to the actual review of FEAR 2, I’m trying to illustrate a point. FEAR 2 has a huge wet steamy serving of the hardcore FPS action, while offering little to none of the scares and thrills that blanketed the first game that kept its predecessor fresh and interesting. Yes, there were a few tense moments in the game when Alma would show up and decided to mess with your head, but it seemed very rushed and almost added as some afterthought like a Michael Bay’s horror movie remake. It was as if someone in the development team forgot that FEAR was suppose to be a horror game, and just hastily threw in some scenes pretending that they were frightening. Honestly, the first FEAR had me jumping in my seat, leaned over the keyboard to where my nose was practically hitting the monitor, damn near FEARful (get it?) to turn the next corner. The magic frankly was gone. No tense scenes, no me accidently waking up someone in my house screaming like some flipped out girl at a Justin Timberlake concert because something nearly scared the crap out of me, just me sitting there during the “scary” parts going “Seriously? That’s it?”

And well as I said there was a bit of confusion that occurred in the game along with the overwhelming feeling of disappointment. Now I consider myself a relatively intelligent person, not exactly the most book smart individual, but I know how to put my pants on and can generally tell you while watching a murder mystery movie that without a doubt the butler didn’t do it…..and be right. So I come to the ending of the FEAR 2, and I promise I won’t give anything away, but as it ended suddenly and the credits began to roll I found myself blinking in a befuddled manner before standing up with my arms outstretched yelling “What the F@#K just happened!?” I mean I think I can tell you how the game ended, what about six hours of game play led to at the very end…but I’m not certain. Now by no means do I need everything that happens spelled out for me, but some clarification would have been appreciated.

With all that said however I can’t call FEAR 2 a bad game, it was a solid FPS, and had moments in fire fights where I found myself gleefully grinning while clicking away at my mouse lighting up Replica soldiers while other members of the squad that the main character belongs to let forth some amusing action movie lines while tearing down baddies like “Man this is therapeutic!” But for me the game left me wanting, the horror and suspense that drew me to the FEAR series was all but gone. If you like FPS games, this is certainly a game that is worth your while to play, and if you enjoyed the previous installments of the FEAR series you may care for it as well…..but hardcore fans such as myself may find it more than a little lacking.

Popularity: 82%