Retro Game Friday: Nightfire

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m covering one of my favorite Bond games. It’s James Bond 007: Nightfire!

Plot: The plot is okay, it’s a pretty stereotypical Bond plot so it doesn’t have that great a story. Nonetheless that wasn’t the main draw of the game for me at the time.

Gameplay: The gameplay of the single player campaign was okay, but pretty lackluster. The Multiplayer allowed for Bots, which was a rarity in that day and age and allowed me and my best friend to play with each other rather than against one another. I remember playing with him for hours when I was younger, although I do remember thinking that it would be better if the Bots were better programmed.

Art: The art has aged really poorly since then, but back then it was pretty darn good.

Music: Classic Bond music, not much else need be said.

Overall: A fun game, although it was best played with a friend.

For those who like: FPS Games, Bond Games, Multiplayer.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above.

Video Game Tuesday: Shadowkeep’s Seasonal Content Is Not OK

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m once more upset with Bungie. It’s why Shadowkeep’s Seasonal Content Is Not OK!

Seasonal Content?: So let’s get this out of the way first. I haven’t played Shadowkeep, I didn’t receive a review copy and I have no desire to get back into a game that I love to hate on, unless I get asked to do so. That being said the plan outlined about a month and a half ago by Luke Smith regarding future content with Destiny 2 is completely unacceptable in my eyes. It involves limited time content that will take tens, if not hundreds, of hours of player’s time and throw it all away forever. They gave an example using the Black Armory content, where it’d ramp up over the course of a single season (about 3 months real time) and by the end of it all the main activities introduced in that season would be gone forever, including all the loot and activities. That’s not okay in a game like Destiny. Fortnite and games like it get away with it because it’s a purely PvP game at it’s core. Sure you can ignore the competition parts and go complete certain Battle Pass objectives in a match, but that really isn’t what the game is about.

Destiny on the other hand is all about the power fantasy and getting cool guns. If they remove the ability to get certain guns forever that’s not okay. People who join late, or even people who have unfortunate circumstances in their actual lives that prevent them from playing during that season like say a hurricane flooding your home, are completely and utterly screwed over. It’s a weaponized form of FOMO, or the Fear Of Missing Out, and that’s a completely predatory and unacceptable practice on Bungie’s part. It proves, at least to me, once and for all that Bungie doesn’t really care about their player base and it’s one of the biggest reasons I’ll not be going back to Destiny 2 unless I’m asked to do so with a review copy. If I had lost the ability to gain Vex Mythoclast in Destiny 1 when The Dark Below launched I would’ve been incredibly upset and I know I’m not the only one who would feel that way.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.

Video Game Tuesday: Black Armory’s Launch was a Failure

I’m back with a familiar topic for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. It’s all about why Black Armory’s Launch was a Failure!

Black Armory?: Black Armory was the first DLC drop after Forsaken launched for Destiny 2, and it was a massive middle finger to the player base once again. There were many things I had faintly hoped Bungie had learned from in the past, but apparently five years into this series they still make really stupid mistakes.

Like what?: They decided to make the first new activity of the new DLC an activity that even people who had the very best gear the day before the DLC released couldn’t complete without being highly skilled premade group despite flaunting the ability to match make the activity and locked it behind a tedious grind. Black Armory wasn’t like past DLC that included Story Missions, Strikes, New Vendor Gear, New Exotic Armor, or Crucible Maps, instead it included none of those things, and just added a new activity and a raid that was locked for a few days after it’s launch that started off at a new gear level that was vastly over the previous cap. They included no ability to catch up for those who hadn’t reached that previous cap, so those who were just hitting 500 power level were still unable to even contemplate doing these activities until a month or more had passed depending on their luck. This has been lessened with a recent hotfixed change that made Prime Engrams drop more often up to the 600 power level cap, but that’s a really shitty bandaid that doesn’t fix the issue with RNG deciding to give you the bird and still requires players to grind constantly.

The fact that the very first activity was geared for people at 630 power level was a big fat screw you to the player base considering the cap was 600, and getting 1 or 2 increase in power level is a serious grind for everyone at the level.  People who had stocked up multiple bounties with Powerful Rewards and keys from the Raid could easily skip most of the grind and get a character past this with ease, but most people weren’t expecting to have to continue doing the same old content just to even think about doing the new stuff and still most likely fail.

This was a serious mistake on Bungie’s part, and instead of really creating a solution they hotfixed it the next day to give the activity a 5 power level decrease in total, meaning people had to spend only a day or two less in a very lucky week to get to that level. I’ve long held that Bungie has no clue how to properly communicate with their consumers, and this is another mark in the long list of proof I’ve been keeping of this fact. I had been playing Destiny 2 nearly daily since Forsaken up to the release of Black Armory, a thing that hasn’t happened since the Dark Below way back in 2014. That quickly changed when I was told to continue the grind just to do a new activity that wasn’t really all that fun in comparison to the work required to do it. I’ll be deleting Destiny 2 off my PlayStation’s hard drive once again and I’ll hope Bungie gets a clue in the future on how to treat their player base, but it’s a tiny hope now and I expect only more screw ups from them.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. Have a Merry Christmas everyone!

Retro Game Friday: TimeSplitters

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m back with a game that is quite unremembered. It’s TimeSplitters!

Plot: The game really didn’t have any plot, other than “Stop the TimeSplitters!”. Granted that when you get down to pretty much any story it boils down to something along those lines, but still the fact that that was pretty much the entirety of the plot wasn’t great.

Gameplay: Thankfully this was a really fun game, which considering it was made by people from Rare, who made GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, that shouldn’t be a surprise. Multiplayer was the big draw of the game, and since this was made in the heyday of local multiplayer you had to be careful of the other players screen watching you, and trying to do the same to them without them knowing.

Art: The art has aged poorly, but in the day it was pretty impressive, and considering it was a PlayStation 2 launch title you can bet it’s graphics were really hyped up.

Music: I don’t remember it, as I was dealing with trash talking to my friends and them doing the same to me.

Overall: A great game if you played with others for multiplayer, but otherwise a lackluster single player game.

For those who like: Multiplayer, FPS.

Not for those who don’t like: Either of the above.

Retro Game Friday: Crysis

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m covering a game that was the benchmark for graphics in gaming for a while. It’s Crysis!

Plot Synopsis: The game begins on August 7, 2020 when North Korean forces led by General Ri-Chan Kyong take control of the Lingshan Islands. A team of American civilian archaeologists, led by Dr. Rosenthal, send out a distress call indicating that they have discovered something that could change the world. A week later, Raptor Team is dispatched to the islands, with the core mission of evacuating them and securing any valuable information that they have. The team consists of Nomad, Psycho, Aztec, Jester and team leader Prophet (all under code names); they are outfitted with Nanosuits, which help protect them from gunfire and explosions, as well as giving them superhuman strength and abilities. As they perform a high-altitude jump onto one of the islands, an unknown flying entity disrupts the jump by smashing into Nomad, and the team is separated.

Plot: The plot is okay, but it’s not super amazing either. That being said it wasn’t terrible either. It just was, and while Mediocre isn’t quite the right word I want to use, it’s the best I can come up with at the moment with a splitting headache.

Gameplay: This plays like a lot like other FPS, the big “gimmick” for Crysis though was the ability to switch between various power armor modes. There was Speed, Armor, Strength and Cloak. Frankly I preferred Speed as I enjoyed getting reloading faster, but that might just be my personal preference for speed archetypes in almost every game.

Graphics: This game’s max settings were incredibly expensive to be usable at the time of release because of how much strain they caused. You might remember hearing the question “Can it run Crysis?” as a way of determining how much of a powerhouse your PC was. So yes, the game looked pretty damn amazing. That being said it still aged not particularly well, but a hell of a lot better than Halo CE did, although that is a game from the previous generation of gaming.

Music: Honestly don’t remember it, and frankly I might not have ever listened to it as I was using a roommates computer to play it during college.

Overall: A good game, but mostly famous for being a graphical nightmare for PCs if you didn’t have a powerful enough computer.

For those who like: FPS Games, Sci-Fi, Military Fiction, Drama, Action, Awesome Artwork (especially in the day).

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above.