03 May, 2008

Keepalive: Alien Shooter Vengeance, RIP, Shadowgrounds: Survivor

There's been a lot of abortive playing as of late. Alien Shooter Vengeance threw up a brick wall to my progress in the form of level eight. For one thing, other on foot levels gave me a chance to buy upgrades right at the start. Level eight doesn't, and I was out of armor and health packs. Plus it threw me up against giant monsters launching homing rockets in areas with basically no cover.

RIP also brought the fail. The difficulty was not well balanced. I played on easy, or "tourist mode" as I call it, and generally ran into very difficult levels not too far in. I understand that from my few forays into single player DooM maps. It's at least mildly interesting to design the level for yourself, which usually ends up becoming the medium or hard level of difficulty. Designing for the other two levels is just lame as you really don't know if it will be appropriate to their skill levels or even fun. The easy way out is to always design to the same pace and just make the enemies weaker or stronger, but that's generally no fun at the higher difficulty levels as it simply increases the time one has to spend dodging while plinking away at the baddies. Of course that doesn't account for RIP 2 having a bug that made level 40 unbeatable. But whatever.

I went back to Shadowgrounds: Survivor. It has the option to start the game fairly powered up, which was plenty fun. I played through almost the whole thing, which begs the question, should I retroactively raise it's score if it's fun enough to play through again? I'm not planning to, but maybe I should.

Of course, if that's the case, I should probably raise Just Cause's score, too. I've played that some more. But truthfully, I'd just done it to drive and fly around the pretty islands. Any attempts to actually play the game just annoy me.

No, S:S might deserve better. So why didn't it get better in the first place? Stay tuned.

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