Posts filed under 'Games'
Maybe these aren’t really my “first” impressions, since I’ve been slowly playing Doom 3 for the last couple months, but these are my impressions so far. Doom 3 is the SCARIEST game I’ve ever played - hands down. Half-Life 2 definitely had it’s scary moments, but Doom 3 is ALWAYS scary and then some. All of the maps (so far) are very dark, the lights flicker (or just shut off entirely), and you hear odd and disturbing noises mostly in the distance, but sometimes close by (usually indicating a nearby zombie). Also, the rooms are very crowded and have lots of nooks, crannys, and hidden panels for monsters to jump out of.
But for me, that’s what is going to force me to play the rest of this game in cheat mode. I am so overly cautious while I move through the maps, that it is going to take me FOREVER to finish this game. It’s just too much. I really liked Half-Life’s style - there are some puzzles, some scary parts, some vehicle play, and a lot of combat. It’s a great mix. Doom 3 also requires a pretty high-end system to run properly. I know my hardware isn’t the most up-to-date, but Half-Life 2 didn’t give my system the severe beating that Doom 3 does. On that note, I found a really good walk through and a great tweak site for Doom 3.
I would say Doom 3 is a great game if you feel up for a real challenge, you want to get your pants scared off, and you have a nice, new computer system. I obviously won’t be charting my progress with blog posts, since I’ll finish the game soon on cheat mode, but I do have photo gallery that will get updated as I go. Right now the shots are boring because I don’t have the luxury of being able to take a screenshot of monsters while they are attacking me. You don’t see monsters until they are right in your face.
April 27th, 2005
I installed and played Painkiller last night. I’ve been really out of touch with the gaming world the past couple years because my priorities have changed (family, work, other grown-up responsibilities), but I try to keep up with what games people are raving about. I got a free subscription to Computer Gaming World and received my first issue last Friday, which included their games of the year awards. Painkiller beat out Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 for single player action game. And since I loved HL2 so much, I had to try it to see for myself.
The premise of the game is that you and your girlfriend have been killed in a car accident, and while she’s gone on to heaven, you have been chosen to bring down Lucifer’s generals before God lets you in. I don’t think that really meshes with Biblical doctrine, but I guess it makes for a good story. Anyway, you accept this assignment and start out in a graveyard that goes well beyond the description of haunted. I played through the first level, and so far, I don’t agree with the award it was given - Half Life 2 was much more involving and original. BUT, this is a pretty fun game to play. Unlike HL2, the action is completely non stop and you are constantly shooting bad guys. It feels very much like an arcade game, and I think that was the point because there are high score markers at the end of the level. I took a couple screenshots, but the level I played was way too dark, so I’ll make sure to get in some lighter areas before I snap another. I’ll keep playing for a while, but I don’t know if I’ll finish it.
February 3rd, 2005
I finally got around to putting up my Half Life 2 screenshots in my photo gallery. You can view them here.
Oh, and I also found a really good site that explains the story of Half Life at http://hlstory.fragfiles.org/.
January 20th, 2005
Well, I have finished Half Life 2, and I must say, with mixed emotions - but I’ll get to that later. I walked through the tunnel to preceed what would be some of the most spectacular images and architechture of the entire game. From the earlier post, you could tell that the Citadel is a very tall structure. At this point, I’m towards the bottom, but not the very bottom, which looked thousands of feet below me. There were a lot of piston-type colums on outside of the Citadel that were slowly pumping every 5 or 10 seconds. I had to jump down a cliff to get to a part where I could jump onto the outside of the Citadel. Once inside, I made my way through a maze of columns and small alleys. Then, I made it into the assembly line where the pods of humans were being carried off. I eventually made it to a spot where it didn’t look like I could walk any further, and it was quite obvious what I had to do. There was a line of empty pods that would stop, open, close, and get carried off. I jumped onto one, and then lost control and could only move my neck around a little.
This part took a while, but was amazing to watch. I bet I took more than double the amount of screen shots just in the Citadel than in the entire game. Of course, it’s easier to take shots when you aren’t busy killing bad guys. (I’ll be sure to post a link to my gallery where I’ll put up an album of my screenshots.) Anyway, I ended up at a containment area of sorts and was dumped out. They scanned me and found my weapons, so they got torn from me and disintegrated - except my gravity gun, which turned from an orange color to a light blue. Whatever it did was good, because once the guards came at me, I was able to suck him onto my gun and shoot him at his buddies! The evil guy came on to every screen I came by and was asking me to stop and insulting my intelligence. My HEV suit was also upgraded from 100 energy to 200, and every charging station only took seconds to fill up. So, I ascended my way up as far as I could go, taking out many waves of guards. I was delayed at a large tunnel where I had to take down guards and a strider. This is where I discovered my second source of ammunition for the grav gun besides guards. Throughout the Citadel there were these beams of energy columns supplying fuel to various devices. They carried these orange balls of energy that I could suck out and use as a rocket. So, I used these on the strider and took it out in 2 hits! Moving forward, I came to another dead end where I had to get into another pod.
At end of that long and bewildering pod trip, I came to a drop off where two guards met me, took my grav gun, and then Dr Mossman showed up. She told me how sorry she was and that Dr Breen (evil guy) wanted to talk to me. I was still in my pod and was carried into his office, where he was arguing with Eli about how great his society of new humans was going to be. He asked Eli to consider helping him, he refused, then he brought out Alyx in her pod, and he still refused. So, he said he would teleport them to some random planet or something. Then, he turned to me and asked me to help, but Dr Mossman could take it any more and locked the doors to his office and told him to leave us alone. He grabbed my grav gun and shot out one of the doors to go teleport himself somewhere. Alyx and I said our thank-yous to Dr Mossman and Eli and left them to get Breen.
We saw him talking to some alien person through a hologram and he dropped my grav gun and shot out to an elevator to go down to the teleporter. Alyx got on the system to find out what he was doing and told me the only way was to go down to the core to stop him. I took the elevator down to follow Breen and was met with lots of Combine guards. At this point, I basically had to scale the outside of the teleporting core to get to the top. Along the way, Dr Breen insulted me more and I kept getting shot at by guards. Finally, I made it to the top and Alex told me to grab the energy balls and shoot at the core to destroy it. Two big gunships flew up and started hammering me with bullets, but I just kept throwing those balls at the core. About halfway down to my health, I destroyed the core and Dr Breen, and Alyx came out from the console to see. She said something about us having to get out of there because the destruction of the core could level City 17 or something like that. I started looking around for where to go and then, all of a sudden, the core made a huge explosion!
But, the explosion paused almost as soon as it stopped and I saw Alyx shielding her face. Then, out of the paused fireball, the infamouse G-Man came walking out. He told me how great of a job I had done in such little time, so my services were being asked for somewhere else. Then, the screen when black, then white and inverse colors, then some pychadelic stuff started coming through the G-Man’s face while he was talking to me. He was basically saying that my job was done for now and then he said he had to go. The screen was black at this point, and a white door slid open and he grabbed his briefcase and walked out. THE END. I had a big question mark on my face. I was dumbfounded. But, then again, that’s pretty much how the first game ended too. I will say that this is probably the best first person shooter game I have ever played, and probably the best game in any genre I have ever played. It had non-stop action, great gameplay and problem solving, and a really great story. The parts with the zombies and aliens really freaked me out sometimes and made me jump. The only downsides were parts that seemed to go on too long and the ending. But, I play too cautiosly sometimes and the ending definitely hooked me in for Half Life 3!
January 17th, 2005
I took out the next two generators to disable the barriers, but got trapped in one of the rooms in the house. Combine solders started throwing grenades through holes in the walls and busted through the doors in massive numbers. After my squad and I took them out when headed downstairs to exit the building and met more waves of soldiers. This was probably been the most gun fighting I’ve done yet in the game. After exiting the area, we went downstairs and met a resistance force soldier that told us they dropped a crate of rockets in the courtyard that could be used to take out the striders outside. Striders?!? Striders are these huge spider-like vehicles that have a powerful mounted gun and an even more powerful energy canon that has a cool animation that I can’t describe. They take about 6 rockets to take down, so that means that you can’t just get some rockets, hide behind a wall and take it down. I ran around like a freak taking down around 6 striders, so it took a while. Then, I got past a barrier in the street and headed down it.
I exited into a very large tunnel that had only one solder running towards me, I quickly brought him down and knew something bad was going to happen because of the largeness of the area. Once I ran down it and got to a certain point, a large explosion happened behind me and a strider was crawling after me! I ducked into a torn up building full of soldiers and flammable barrells which I used to extinguish the soldiers. I scaled the building being careful to not let the strider (who was pacing around the building) see me, but these flying scanners kept revealing my location. I think I blew up about 20 of those things before I found more rockets to bring down the strider. Once that was over, the building connected to another street with more striders that I had to just run past, because there were no rockets to be found.
This part was very hard because all of the buildings where blown to pieces and there were countless soldiers shooting at you, while you are trying to not be seen by the striders. I eventually got some resistance force help, but they didn’t last long. Finally, I got to the top of one of the buildings and found some rockets to bring down 3 of the last striders in the area. I balanced some I-beams across to the other street and found more help. We came to an intersection and I saw a car get thrown into a statue and thought, oh great. But, that was Barney and Alex’s “dog”, who rushed in to help me take out a squad of Combine soldiers. Barney said dog was looking for Alex and wouldn’t stop at anything. At this point were right next to the very tall Citadel, where the evil scientist was hiding out, but there was a very thick and tall wall blocking our way. Dog lifted up one of the posts that revealed a tunnel below. I climbed down and that’s where I stopped.
January 17th, 2005
I went to the roof to meet Barney and he told me just to lob some grenades to kill the two snipers. After that was easily done, we teamed up to get past the barriers and into the Combine, since he was undercover as a Combine soldier and could open any door. He opened the first barrier and met a little resistance, but no big problems. Then we got into a building and met up with a few resistance forces that joined my squad. We saw through a window a large, old building that would take us into the combine. But, to get to it, we had to dodge these supressor beams that would just shoot down large laser-like beams onto you and do a lot of damage. Once were were through that, we killed off a bunch of soldiers and got into the building.
Here, I discovered a new enemy - underground turrets. They would only set off by crossing though beams, but once you did, they would pop up, scan for targets, and blast away. At first, they were hard, but I got the hang of it by just running up next to its blind spot and dumping a grenade into it’s chassi. Apparently, we had to find some energy generators and disable them to get any further. This was actually one of the tougher battle sequences because a LOT of soldiers came at us and it was dark and I had to disable a bunch of those underground turrets while keeping Barney alive. I had to reload my game several times before moving forward. Once through that, we found the first generator and disabled it. Now, I’m on to get the next two.
January 16th, 2005
I took the last person in my squad and headed down the hallway. We got to a room with a lage hold in the floor and saw a bunch of zombies get toasted by some turrets. I threw a couple grenades down into the room to take care of the turrets and forged ahead. We went through the maze of the building, taking care of soldiers and whatnot when we met up with Alex again. She brought us to a control room where she had a plan of attack for a barrier just outside. More people joined my squad and we headed outside for Alex to do her work on bringing down the barrier. Meanwhile, TONS of solders attempted to stop us, but Alex finally opened the barrier just long enough to let us all through. She expected a bridge to be on the other side where we would meet up with the rest of the team, but it was blown to smitherines. She climbed a pipe on a building next to it to see where we should go, but got ambushed by gunfire. I’m sure she’s not dead - just delayed, as usual. At the last minute, she told me to go down into the canal and into a tunnel beneath the building we wanted to go to.
I made it in, and went through the tunnel (full of zombies and critters) to get to a larger area with a bunch of catwalks. After killing many soldiers along the way up, I finally got to the top and back into the building, which was full of more zombies and creatures. At the exit of the building, I met up with a resistance soldier that told me that Barney (one of the resistance leaders) is waiting for me on the roof of a building, but the forces were split up by snipers. Great. I headed outside to see a girl say “I’m coming with you, Freeman!”, then get sniped. The other guy followed me and got sniped too - stupid AI. I made past a few more snipers and into a building with more creatures and a half-dead guy in the basement that told me to go to the roof to meet Barney. I climbed the stairs to what I think is the roof, and that’s where I stopped. I hope Barney can get me out of this mess!
January 11th, 2005
Once in the tunnel, we were hit with a heavy barrage of “manhacks”, which are these little flying buzzsaws that have bad aim. I had to point my squad into the opposite end of the tunnel, but they usually refused in order to take care of the manhacks. Once we were mostly clear of them, they complied and we went into a small building with more manhacks, and through the other side into the other part of the tunnel. This section had soldiers galore and 2 mounted guns. The bad part for them was that there was a lot of flammable barrels around for me to shoot. Many explosions later, the area was clear and we went to the other side, where was saw a small hole with a resistance soldier behind it. He told us to back away and he would blow a hold for us to get through, but of course, it would take a minute. No sooner did he end his sentence, and a bunch of manhacks and soldiers came at us from behind. This time, I had a mounted gun to play with, so it was pretty easy taking care of the waves of attack.
Once through the hole, we found a door that we could only open from the inside and I had to go through a big toxic waste area. I had to use my grav gun and move things around to jump on top of, while getting suprised every so often by a zombie or 5. Once I was through that, I opened the door and let my squad through. We proceeded out again into City 17, which was a FREAKING mess. The buildings are in shambles and you have to jump through holes in the floor sometimes to get around. But, there was a lot of people to help me out along the way and to join my squad in case I lost someone. This is where I’m at now, and I hope it’s over soon because the environment is really annoying. You can’t really tell where to go, but the game does an pretty good job of making you figure it out. You also don’t know if you are going to face a group of zombies or soldiers - or both. Currently, I’m in a dark hallway with only 1 person in my squad because we just went through pure hell in the city.
January 10th, 2005
A lot has happened since my last post for HL2. I finished the prison area by waiting yet again for Alex to get to me and fending for myself with wave after wave of Combine soldiers coming. After that was done, we proceeded to a room where Dr Mossman (bad lady) is . We find her and she denies everything, but Alex isn’t fooled and makes her bring her father out of his pod. She takes him out and then Alex makes Mossman enter the coordinates to some place I can’t remember. She enters coordinates for the teleporter, but at the last second, Mossman grabs Eli and they go somewhere other than what Alex told her. So, Alex decides to go back to get to our original starting location and get help from the scientists. But, as luck woud have it, we had to wait for the teleporter to “warm up” and more waves of soldiers came at us.
After finally getting in and teleporting, we greet Dr. Kleiner, who says that the teleporter is really slow and it took us a week to get there. Meanwhile, people have started to resist the Combine forces and a revolt is starting. They tell me I need to go somewhere (I always forget the details, don’t I?) and Alex’s robotic “dog” gets to escort me. I go outside into City 17, and backtrack some of the streets I started out on. Dog helps me out a LOT by throwing large cars and buses at Combine forces, but then I got to a point where he prys open a barrier and only I can get through, and I think he gets blown up or something.
After that, I went down another street and met up with 4 resistance forces pulling down one of the large screens that I saw the evil dude on early in the game. Then, they joined me as a squad! They worked very much like the antlions, and actually better, because all I had to do was put my crosshair on some location, hit “c” and they would go there. So, I proceeded through the maze of City 17 with my squad and made them lead the way most of the time. I got to an area with these “hoppers” that puzzled me at first. They were mines that stick in the ground and sense when you get near. If you get too close, they hop in the air and explode. But, if you use the grav gun to pull them out of the ground, you can replace them and they won’t hop when you get close.
Right now, I just got through a pretty tough checkpoint with a lot of buildings and a large barrier involved. I got through the barrier, into another building, down into the basement, and now I’m in some sort of tunnel area with my squad still in tact. Well, mostly. 
January 10th, 2005
I got a good solid hour and a half to play yesterday while my daughter was sleeping, but it doesn’t seem like I’ve gotten very far. I went through the prison by cleaning up the soldiers with my antlions and got to a control room where I had to jump out of a window into yet another large area, but my antlions couldn’t follow. This would, of course, mean that I’m about to face something big. I jumped out and a bunch of soldiers busted through a double door, so I started shooting at them but they weren’t concerned with me because they were running from a mother antlion. I had no rockets, but only a bunch of flammable barrels to throw at her. This seemed to only anger her more. After a lot of running around, I found a large hole in the wall that was blocked by junk. I used my grav gun to quickly move it and got through the hole before the mother could get me.
I was now outside of the prison and looking down a long alley full of rubble and junk, but there was a large steel structure on the right side. I started going down the alley and the structure started to move! A section of it raised up, paused, then promptly came smashing down on top of me, killing me. Reloaded the game and did this a few times and finally saw that I had to move a box to get into a wall that took me to the next level.
Once inside the wall, I crawled through and came to a train station of some kind and saw Alex running around. I met up with her and she hacked into the building we were next to so we could find out how to get her father. I had to escort her through the building and help her kill off the soldiers that came at us, but we finally got to a comptuer that showed us where her father was. He, and a lot of other folks, were being held in these pods to be used in experiments. She brought him down and opened the pod and he was ok, but we had to find a way to get with the other scientists to figure out how to free everyone.
Alex let me go back into the building while she helped me out through a radio in my HEV suit. I was basically back in another prison building, but this time she could open gates for me and tell me where to go. I got to a command post where I couldn’t go any further because of a large energy field blocking my way. I was able to use two auto turrets to temporarily hold off the soldiers coming through the barrier, but they didn’t last long. After about 10 minutes of wave after wave of soldiers, they stopped coming and Alex broke through the roof. She tapped into a computer and we watched a conversation between the head evil scientist and that woman I knew earlier was going to be trouble. Alex was upset, but even more determined to bring down the evil scientists. She unlocked the energy barrier and I was back into another prison area.
And that’s where I am at the moment, but this time I don’t have the help of my antlions. I am started to get tired of the game at this point. I think there should be more story of maybe it should change up the environment for me a little more. I’m really getting sick of being in dark, rundown buildings and having to be so cautious. I hope this changes.
January 9th, 2005
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