written on Tuesday, June 16, 2009
My bro picked up Killing Floor, so we got on voice chat and killed some undead on a public server. While it didn't make me fall in love with Killing Floor all over again, the guns, gore, and slow motion madness remain satisfying.
It was interesting watching the behavior of the players. People joined very quickly once my brother and I jumped on an empty server. When we all died and the server went to the next map, everybody left. We quickly got new people in and it was a full server again. And often, when someone would die, they'd leave. We'd almost always have a new person in before we finished the round. Are we seeing revolving ragequitters? Most people weren't too talkative, so it was hard to tell.
A lot of people playing Prototype kept comparing it to Spider-Man 2. They're both free roaming super hero games set in New York. Spider-Man 2 is considered the gold standard for being able to freely move around like a super hero. But since Hulk: Ultimate Destruction was often acknowledged as the better game, I never bothered with Spider-Man 2. All the recent reminders in Prototype threads got me to pick up a used copy, and it's pretty cool. Web swinging never quite lets me go in the direction I want to. And wall jumping is pretty hard to control. But when it really works, it's pretty insane.
Leaping off a building, shooting a web to swing just above some traffic, and letting go of the web to fling yourself through the air is awesome. From what I've heard, subsequent Spider-Man games didn't do it as well, which is a shame, because with a better looking city and some extra graphical effects to improve the sense of speed, just moving around the city would be fun enough for many people to buy the game all over again.
The combat is repetitive and simplistic. And there are arbitrary "hero point" goals that have to be met to progress the story, so I have to do a lot of it. But honestly, I don't really mind. It's easy, and I get to swing around between fights.
The only real problem I have is that it's locked up a few times. I don't know if it's the code, or the media, or my hand me down Xbox showing its age. So far it's only happened during loading, which doesn't narrow it down, but makes me lean toward the media or the system. But I'm enjoying the game enough that it hasn't felt like a chore to make up lost progress yet, and for me, that's saying something.
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