Baud Attitude

I am rapidly running out of Call of Duty games.  Knocking out MW3 and BLOPs in the last few days leaves me with only Call of Duty 3 – the rather poorly-received console-exclusive entry in the series – and the original 2003 CoD and its expansion.

I will confess that, when I finished MW3, I switched to Recruit difficulty for BLOPS just to blow through the thing with as little fuss as possible, and this turns out to have been a good move.  But more on that later.

Modern Warfare 3, which I played first, was a pretty decent wrap-up for the trilogy.  It suffered a bit from a frenetic series of character viewpoint swaps, and I am more than a little tired of the slow-motion-QTE-to-kill-the-final-boss mechanic, but I have no complaints to speak of.  If you’ve played Modern Warfares one and two, you may as well finish it out.

BLOPS was a harder call to make.  On the one hand, it had a pretty interesting story and a neat framing device.  On the other hand, I thought it that suffered considerably by having entirely too many scripted sequences of the “you could normally jump over a wall of this height, but we’re going to make you wait until we say it’s OK” variety.

It wasn’t as bad as Homefront – nothing could be quite as bad as Homefront – but I spent way too much time waiting for NPCs to open doors for me.

There’s also a surprisingly dumb bit about halfway through the first level, where you breach into a room and there’s a slow-motion bit where you shoot someone.  This is, in itself, not dumb; it’s a mainstay of the series.  What IS dumb is that, for no logical reason, the weapon you have equipped changes mid-breach to the pistol you started the level with, even if it’s no longer in your inventory, and then changes back to whatever gun you were holding afterwards.

Seriously, guys, if you want to put in a cutscene, just put in a cutscene.

It was also the second-buggiest PC port I’ve ever played, and I am putting it behind Stranglehold ONLY because Stranglehold managed to blue-screen my PC.

CODBLOPS did not cause any bluescreens.  Instead, I had a couple of crashes to desktop (which come with losing all level progress, of course), one bizarre sequence where my character started randomly clipping through the level and warping around until he was killed by an exploding barrel, though the game didn’t actually acknowledge my death, and a lockup on the next-to-last level that happened three times in a row and was particularly infuriating because the level is nothing but a series of unskippable cutscenes and sequences where you press forward to walk down a hallway.

The workaround that I finally found is to set the video mode to 800×600 and turn off antialiasing and shadows, then spam the ESC key during the sequence that crashes to constantly pause and unpause the game.

This sort of nonsense is so out of character with the generally highly-polished Call of Duty experience that I have to wonder exactly what the heck went wrong during the development cycle, and I am really glad that I elected to start on the easiest difficulty level just because it meant that restarting levels from scratch wasn’t THAT painful.

I am really bad at playing games in series order.

I got introduced to the Call of Duty series with the second installment, enjoyed that enough to buy Modern Warfare within the first week or two of its release – and even PLAY it almost immediately, which is always a problem, followed THAT up by making a video card purchase decision based partially on the included copy of World At War… and then pretty much put the series down for several years, until I needed SOMETHING to show off on my shiny new PS4 and bought Ghosts.

Since then, I’ve played BLOPS2 and Advanced Warfare, both of which were pretty neat in a borderline science fiction way.

ANYWAY, now that I have lost any gaming hipster cred I might have ever had, I will admit that I’ve been going through my rather depressing backlog looking for games to play that are on the short side, and Modern Warfare 2 practically fell out of the list.

It’s almost embarrassing how much I enjoyed it.  It’s not exactly a cerebral game, though there IS a continuing story that made me realize how little of the original Modern Warfare I remembered and made me commit to actually playing the third one before I completely forget what went on in this one.

Rather, it’s designed to grab on to the parts of the lizard brain that like watching stuff blow up and give them a good tickle, and it does that very well.

At the time of release, it made a bit of press for itself by including a terrifically tasteful level where you play as a member of a terrorist group shooting up an airport.  That may actually have been why I avoided buying it back in the day, come to think of it; I am somewhat allergic to manufactured controversy.

Fortunately, you can skip the level – I don’t remember if that was a launch feature, or if it was patched in later – and I took the skip option with zero guilt.

There isn’t much point in talking about the “game bits” – it’s a Call of Duty game, for crying out loud, so you fight an endless horde of respawning enemies, always trying to make it to the next check point, while your squad mates tell you what to do. Things explode, there are neat set pieces, people say stuff like “tango” and “foot-mobile” and “hooah”, and the good guys mostly win.

I will give a special bit of attention to the achievements, because they’re just about perfect.  You get a set number of achievements just for completing the story mode, a few more achievements are based around the optional “Spec Ops” missions, which are 5-10 minute affairs reusing parts of the single player maps, and there are a handful of achievements for doing assorted other goofy things, like using five different weapons in a row or killing two enemies with a single bullet.  I wound up with 50% achievement completion without really needing to try very hard, which is way above the 30-40% achievement rate I aim for.

Yes, I set my sights very low.

Anyway, I’ve blown through 9 games and two Skyrim expansions since coming back from China and am feeling much less guilty about buying Splatoon on Friday.  Backlog progress always feels good 🙂

Normally I try to come up with clever titles for posts.

At first, I considered “The Only Thing That Can Stop A Bad Girl With A Sword Is A Good Girl With A Sword”, but that seemed excessively long.

Then I considered “Putting the Broad in Broadsword”, but that was (a) demeaning and rude and (b) inaccurate, as neither of the main characters uses a broadsword.

On the other hand, I am now desperately in need of a game featuring a Japanese anthropomorphic feline swordsman, so I can write a post titled “Putting the Kat in Katana”

Um.

So, back to Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae, the game I started off talking about before I decided to get all clever.  As you might have guessed, it’s a game about two women with swords, one of whom is the Bad Guy.  She’s been possessed by the spirit of an evil sword which is draining her life force and blah blah blah she’s bad, go kill her.

For no logical reason, she has a small army of mooks that you, as the Good Guy, need to brutally murder in your pursuit of vengeance.

I guess they come with the sword.

If you’ve played Oneechanbara – and if you haven’t, get on it – you’ll be familiar with the basic principle.  You get dumped into the middle of an arena, enemies spawn and try to swarm you, you kill them, occasionally you fight giant bosses.

UNLIKE Oneechanbara, this is a little more tasteful, with not much more than the occasional panty shot to roll your eyes at.  That may or may not be a plus, I’ll leave it up to you.

On “Normal”, I got my pleaty-skirted arse handed to me my the first boss, so I started over on Easy and cleared the game without too many issues, which then let me start a second playthrough on Normal with all of my upgrades from the Easy clear intact.  I suspect this is how you’re supposed to do things, but if you can clear it on Normal without doing a New Game+, more power to you.

It’s not a long game.  On easy, I cleared it in under an hour.  That being said, there are lots of upgrades to unlock and difficulty levels to clear, so it’s got some replay value.

What it is lacking in length, it makes up for with some very satisfactory swordplay and acrobatics.  Your character has a ton of different animations and watching her dash, roll, and slice her way through an encounter is a blast.  I suspect that this is REALLY designed for people who like to calculate frame counts in moves and put together sophisticated combos, but even a scrub like me can get some impressive moves out.

Two thumbs up.

Normally I consider a game’s story and setting to be more important than the actual mechanics.

Hard Reset proved a very notable exception to this rule, because it does not have a deep story.  It’s more like “Once upon a time, there was a man with a lot of guns who hated robots, so he shot them all.  The End.”

This is unfair to the author of the ACTUAL story, I admit, because there’s a heavy cyberpunk thing going on with an evil corporation and malevolent AIs and nanomachines and a robot uprising and oh for the love of God just go and re-read some back issues of Mondo 2000 and watch Blade Runner for the 30th time, then come back when you’re ready to shoot robots.

…

So, let’s talk about the mechanics a little bit, because the story isn’t the important bit for a change.

Hard Reset is, in just about every way, a love letter to Doom and other FPS games of its era.  There’s no regenerating health, no cover system, no iron sights, no 2-weapon limit.  You pick up med kits to heal, ammo boxes to refill your bullet supply.  Every level has a ton of secrets to reward exploration, and you are given a score at the end of each level based on how many secrets you found, how long you took, how many things you blew up and so forth.  Enemies almost never come one or two at a time and you are almost always fighting a swarm of mixed nasties.  The best thing you have on your side is that you can use the environment against the swarm; every level is full of stuff that explodes or electrocutes, and steering the oncoming hordes into harm’s way is fantastically satisfying.

The environment, being mostly ruins and wastelands, is fairly bleak, but it IS pretty, and also full of all kinds of sexy physics objects to get knocked around by explosions.

There are a couple of notable differences from the Doom formula.  First, the game uses checkpoints rather than allowing you to save freely.  This is usually OK, but there were a couple of places where checkpoints were spaced maybe just a LITTLE far apart and I wound up seeing the start of one particular level far too many times for my liking.

Second, you don’t pick up weapons.  You earn currency from blowing up robots and from finding it scattered throughout the levels.  You use this to buy upgrades, and the same currency is used for upgrading armor and abilities and for buying and upgrading weapons, and this is where I went terribly wrong in my playthrough.

If you are smart, you will spend your first few upgrade points on buying the Railgun, which is a gun that SHOOTS THROUGH WALLS, and has an optional scope upgrade that lets you SEE THROUGH WALLS.  Oh, and it’s a hitscan weapon, meaning that there is no lag between clicking the mouse button to shoot and when the thing you are trying to shoot gets hit.  This differs from the game’s rocket launcher, which has a significant travel time from firing to impact.

If you are dumb, you will not buy this until you are nearly done with the game and incredibly frustrated with the apparent difficulty level.

So, yeah, it’s possible to really do yourself a disservice there.

I also ran into a compatibility problem with my AMD graphics card.  It turns out that, if you are forcing antialiasing through the AMD drivers, there are no menus and no videos when starting the game.  You see a blank spot where there obviously should be menus, but you can’t actually do anything.

Need I mention that trying to search for information on a game called “Hard Reset” is not the easiest thing in the world?  Google returns page after page of people trying to reboot their phones or other electronics.

Sometimes PC gaming can be an exercise in frustration.

When Hard Reset originally came out, it was a seven level game that ended abruptly after five or six hours and left a lot of folks confused and wanting, so the devs added five extra levels and made them available to anyone who’d bought the original game.  That’s pretty solid on their part.

Short version: minor gripes and one AMD-specific issue aside, this was one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played this year.  Seriously recommended.