24 June, 2009

Keepalive: TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, ArmA

written on Tuesday, June 23, 2009

TimeSplitters made it's Co-op Tuesday debut. It's okay. But I don't think either of us were particularly taken with it. It was more fun to make jokes at the expense of Lego Batman.



Some Penny Arcade forumers are getting excited about ArmA 2 coming out. The ArmA games are pretty hardcore military simulation. Think Battlefield 2 for people who like talking in acronyms, accounting for wind when they shoot stuff, and dying a lot. Reading all the militaristic stuff in the Republic Commando books, it had a certain appeal. But I downloaded the demo, which largely broke me of that. Everything feels cumbersome and boring.

I'm sure it's more accurate, but realism in gaming has never been desirable. The impression of realism and actually "being there" is cool. But when your transport gets shot up and you have to spend minutes of your life that you'll never get back just walking, or when the person running the artillery doesn't really know how to run artillery and kills you by mistake, it becomes painfully apparent that reality blows.

The only thing that could make the game fun would be having a bunch of friends to play with. We could make up lewd marching songs and otherwise be ridiculous. But even in the rarefied air of the PA crowd, it's been pretty rare that I've found people who's company I would enjoy enough to spend five minutes sitting in a transport with them.

No comments: