written on Thursday, June 18, 2009
I finished Spider-Man 2. After as much as I'd heard about it getting super repetitive, I was expecting it to be longer. I didn't really have a problem with the repetition. As long as I could web swing around the city and occasionally stop a random crime, I was happy.
The combat never got better. It actually got somewhat worse as the game introduces guys in robot suits to fight. They suck and are no fun. I really missed Hulk: UD's ability to perch on a bad guy and yank out wires. Having Spider-Man just run in a circle to stay behind a guy while occasionally getting off a combo was unrewarding.
And the boss fights were pretty mediocre as well.
3 of 5
I say that knowing I'll probably go back to it. But, like Just Cause, I'll only go back to traverse the environment because the activities therein are less fun than getting around / admiring the scenery.
I like to play games while listening to podcasts sometimes. According to some podcasters and forum posters, I am not alone. Mostly it's something fairly simple: a puzzle game, a retro game, or something simple to keep the hands busy. Some people use knitting the same way. I've been using Republic Commando. I've got the shirt project in progress, and I finally picked up the first book in the series, so I've got it on the brain.
The way I'm playing it is oddly casual. I'm lobbing grenades and giving orders like a grade school coach of a sport no one cares about. That's partly because I've got the volume turned down to listen to the podcasts. Nothing seems as immediate with the volume turned down. But it's also a strange combination of familiarity and infatuation. I'm admiring the feel of the weapons. I'm stopping to look at the particle effects. I'm taking in bits of the battle that occur in the background. Essentially, I'm soaking in it.
It feels especially self indulgent and like I should be ashamed somehow.
I still have to finish the story on hard, but I went back and finished all the arcade mode challenge league stuff in TS:FP. I did it to unlock more of the 150 total multiplayer characters the game offers. I'll never unlock them all as some of the challenges require large amounts of luck to get gold trophies in. And even the ones that don't aren't generally fun enough to bother with.
The TimeSplitter series has never really clicked for me. Perhaps it's because when the other kids were playing Goldeneye (made by the same team), I was playing DooM.
I respect the cartoon aesthetic the games go for. But the lack of detail / saturation makes it come off rather bland.
The shooting is smooth, but the weapons lack punch. They seem like nice ideas on paper, but they don't have that pleasantly crude feel that DooM's or even Ratchet & Clank's do. It's probably the sound effects. Sometimes the reloading sounds seem louder than the report of the weapon.
And the movement seems very fast for a console shooter. I enjoy that in DooM, but without the mouse it makes close quarters fighting difficult. There's also no head bob at all. Movement feels unnaturally smooth.
I'm justifying my inability to get into TimeSplitters because when I list out everything that's in the game, it's pretty fantastic.
- three dozen weapons from various time periods
- 150 characters for use in multiplayer including crazy stuff like a bear with a fez, the gingerbread man, and a guy with a box on his head who thinks he's a robot
- more multiplayer modes than Unreal Tournament with tweakable parameters (weapon choice, time limit, lives per player, etc.)
- eight player online
- bots for co-op multiplayer
- co-op campaign
- level editor
The game is copyright 2005 and there are many games coming out this year that won't measure up. John Davison recently talked about Red Faction: Guerrilla "overdelivering". And it seems an odd thing to say. Who doesn't want more? But sometimes it's just overwhelming. TimeSplitters has so many options that I can't imagine most people would ever try them. Heck, it took me a couple years just to come back and finish some of the challenges.
But there's just something about the game that screams generic, and all the bells and whistles in the world can't really save it from that.
3 of 5
I keep thinking it's the same thing that happened to Unreal Tournament, and is why UT3 sold so poorly (at least initially).
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