Aliens V.S. Predator

"Wowie!" My friend says a few weeks ago. "You know what would be a great game to play online?"

"I don't care" I say.

"A game that came out a year ago, and is made mainly for consoles!" He responds.

"I'll only play it if you gift me it." Thinking I out smarted him.

"Alright!" He says.

"Ugh."


Aliens V.S. Predator is a game made by Rebellion Developments, who are known to gamers from their many AvP knock-off games. Outside of that, the only games I recognize of note worthiness is the "Gun" PSP port and "Rogue Warrior", which is a horrible start.

In AvP, you play as an Alien, a Predator, or a Marine, during the same plot events. The Marine Spaceship "Marlowe" has been shot down by an unknown species, and it has fallen onto a planet where Humans are discovering ancient Predator ruins and experimenting on Aliens. Predators are pissed off that the Marines are screwing around on one of their hunting grounds, Aliens are pissed off because their Queen is being held captive on the Marlowe, and the Marines are pissing on themselves in the corner.

Now, I love Alien and all of their sequels, and I love Predator and.. well, its sequel was shit. The movie Aliens V.S. Predator did a Freddy V.S. Jason sort of thing where two otherwise good franchises cancel each other out when paired together. I hated AvP, and I wasn't really looking forward to this game, as hinted by my discourse with my friend. The concept sounds great on paper! Different game play elements for each species. The sneaky Alien, waiting to pounce on its prey. The violent Predator, able to cloak, fight head on, and use ranged weapons. The Marine, ready to find the auto-target gun and piss off the Predators and Aliens.

Each campaign has the same major plot easily summed up with the question: "The Marlowe is down, what does this mean to me?". For the Aliens, that means they're going to try and rescue their Queen. For the Marines, it means he wants to go save his buddies. For the Predators, they just want to blow up the cadavers of their comrades. Fuck saving people I suppose.

The Alien campaign starts off interesting enough (Which I won't spoil because it is a unique way to start off a campaign), and then proceeds to fall flat on its face. It isn't that bad but it gets stupidly hard. As an Alien, the biggest advantage you have is staying in the dark and creeping around, which barely works. All the NPC Marines seem to have infrared vision, because no matter where you are, they're probably going to see you. I was sneaking around in a vent at one point, and I emerged out of it into the darkness of the ceiling. Just then, a Marine, on the total opposite side of this huge hangar, saw me out of the corner of his eye and proceeded to blast my ass and various other parts of my body off of me and back into the vent I was still crawling out of. That is bullshit. There were no lights around me. I was on the ceiling. He was on the other side of the room, on the ground. He didn't have the auto-target gun. I was doing everything right and he just used his telescopic vision to locate and kill me in a matter of seconds. I had quite a few moments like that, and it is just totally stupid.

On to the Marine campaign.

The Marine campaign is Doom 3. That's all I need to say. It's Doom 3. The environment, the weapons. It's Doom 3. They try to be creepy with all the darkness, but it isn't. It's Doom 3. Was Doom 3 scary? Of course not. It had those surprise scare moments, but that doesn't make it scary. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is scary. This is just people going "BOO!"

And finally the Predator campaign.

The Predator campaign has you running around killing Aliens and getting destroyed by Marines. I don't know why these Marines kick the ass off all the other species. I can't do that against my friend online. He can't either. You know how easy it was for Arnold and everyone else to spot the Predator in its movie? Of course not! It wasn't easy. I have no idea why it's so easy for everyone here! These guys can spot you out of no where. Even your little plasma gun thing runs out amazingly fast, so don't count on that. Proximity mines? Ha! The whole campaign is just hard and really retarded.

But how is the multiplayer? I would like to know too! I sat on my ass for 20 minutes, searching for a game. You know what I came up with? One game. Two people in it. This isn't a multiplayer experience, and I don't think we'll ever see one come out of this on the PC. It just feels like a console port, and I won't be surprised if it is. I played with my friend and the game was horribly unbalanced. I kicked his ass so many times with the Predator no matter what class he was, and he did the same thing when he was Predator. Is this why nobody is playing multiplayer? It might just be.

This game is just stupid. Plain fucking dumb. It has a fun concept, yes, but it fails on all levels. The NPCs are idiotically difficult, the auto-aim gun is way over powered for online play, and the online play isn't even there anymore.

Want to play the game? Play Thief, Shadow Warrior, and Doom 3.

Dead Rising 2

Since I haven't updated my site in a long time (Apparently I've tried, because I have like 10 posts that are drafts which will never see the light of day), and I want to get back into reviewing things, there's going to be a wave of reviews coming. To start it off, I'll review a game that I played a lot over the past two months.


Capcom has finally made their sequel to Dead Rising, a game where you screw around killing zombies in a mall, with the game Dead Rising 2, a game where you screw around killing zombies in a casino.

Dead Rising was a great game. Being able to run around and create mass genocide with things you found laying around a mall is amazing. Me and my friend played it for so many hours (until one of us decided to kick the console while I was playing it so it scratched the fucking shit out of the game and caused it to be unplayable back in 2007 and since then the only fucking part I can play is the beginning, taking pictures of zombies, and it pisses me off to no fucking extent.) just killing zombies and ignoring the case timer running out. There were a few things that made me mad about it, and it is by no means a perfect game. The aiming was shit, case timers would go way too fast, and some of the bosses were just plain hacking. I was hoping that they would fix those problems. Well, suffice to say, they didn't, but I'm not disappointed.

Dead Rising 2 picks up five years after the zombie outbreak in Willamette from the first game in the series. Since then, people decided to get rid of their new zombie friends by making 'Terror Is Reality', a game show that has people killing zombies in various ways for cash. Unless you want to trudge through the derelict 'Terror is Reality' multiplayer mode to see them all, you're only going to see the main event, Slicecycles. This is where we meet our protagonists, Chuck Greene, and his daughter, Katey Greene, who has to take the zombie-ism suppressant Zombrex, lest she wants to reenact a scene from Quarantine. Our hero is trying to win the cash prize from the show to keep Katey from biting his face off, when in a surprising twist, another outbreak occurs! Our protagonist heroically hauls his ass to the nearest panic room with Katey, who still needs her Zombrex, so it's up to Chucke Greene to go get her some.

Capcom has made a great sequel with this. Out the window is picture taking for upgrade points, and now, you just kill zombies with weapons you glued together. The weapons you combine together a lot of the time don't make any sense, and are made solely for the spectacle of seeing it, and with that comes very very strange combinations you won't think of. As an example, would you think to combine a tennis racket and a tiki torch? I didn't until I got the combo card. I barely ever got combo cards anyway. The only ones I would get were from leveling up or the occasional one from an escort mission. I only got two from posters, and even those I could barely make half the time. All the combos I made I found online, or within the combination room itself. All the combo rooms have a few things kind of hinting what you should make. Like, a bow and some dynamite right outside its door. Well, we all know what that is from. Rambo! Of course, with a bow, you have to shoot it, so we come back to our old friend aiming.

Although the aiming does feel a little bit better, as I can tell from my memories of the first game (Which I would play, but oh no, it had to go and get fucking destroyed), the problem with the bosses is still present. The game is a bit more merciful with its sharp stick and doesn't shove it up your ass as fast this time because the main cases are generally easy if you have any idea of what to do. The side mission bosses are where the game just likes to twist and push that stick until it's coming out of your ears. I understand why they're hard, don't get me wrong, but I felt there should've been more boss battles I've could've done on my first play through. I tried a lot of them, the Chef, the Pink Chainsaw guy, and I couldn't beat any of them on my first time around. The only ones I could beat were the ones to get Zombrex or the actual main case bosses. I like a good challenge, but you just have no inventory space to cope with the low health you'll have fighting the side bosses.

Although it may seem I'm complaining a lot, I really like this game. They pulled a Terminator 2 on us. It may not be that much more creative than the first, as most of the game takes place in a mall (Oh, I'm sorry, a 'plaza'), but it still feels new and different, especially with the introduction of vehicles. Just don't expect to be driving them because you'll never get the money to buy them without playing online, which nobody does.

Now that Dead Rising 2 is out and about, we can look forward to the new DLC, Case: West. Will it be Back to the Future 3 or will it be Matrix: Revolutions?

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Back in 2006, Battlefield 2 was one of the greatest games I had ever played. It still is. Since then though, I haven't played another Battlefield. All of my friends were buying this game and professing how amazing it is.

Battlefield 2 had it all. Helicopters, jets, tanks, and jeeps all were amazing. I made sure to get a $50 dollar logitech flying stick just so I could fly everything properly. I had way too much fun with it. There were a few problems with it though, especially around the beginning of it's release. The load times were shit with the parsing game info. The MEC loading theme became what I believe to be the sound of purgatory. Sadly though, a lot of new gamers never played Battlefield 2, but I won't rant about that again. I stopped playing it around the time that my computer started having its first issues back in late 2007. I never bought any other Battlefield games up until Bad Company 2. No idea why. Just didn't. I started playing the 360 more around 2007 too, so Halo 2 and 3 were taking up a lot of my time and I forgot about BF2.

All of my best friends on Steam were playing Bad Company 2. They were saying it is really amazing, and that I should get it. After they peaked my interest, I bought it. I made sure to play it right away, maybe play single player with some bots first, but wait, Campaign? They finally jumped on the Campaign bandwagon and strayed from the 'single player means multiplayer maps except with bots'. That's not that bad. They seem to rip off Call of Duty 4 and 6 though. Their loading screens are basically Google Earth with a filter over them. I don't mind though, Call of Duty was a good game. The game started and I ran into my first problem. No prone. Okay, the fuck? Whatever, I guess they'll just add it in after because it was way too much work for them. I mean, okay, there are many games that are great without prone, but this is one of those games you expect to have prone in them. I have a high tolerance for shit for the Battlefield series so I just took it in stride. I fucked off to the multiplayer because the singleplayer campaign is pretty much boring and way too fucking hard (though I hate saying that). I started up the server browser with it being way too retarded and not loading anything, so I tried to do the play now but that was still fucked up and it kept making me try to join already full servers. After about 20 minutes of trying to get into a server, I finally joined one that my friend was in. No idea what happened to the jets, but you know, take it all in stride. The gameplay right now is about average. No idea why you die when the UAV you're controlling dies [EDIT: Upon further review, I was just getting sniped by some fag, but I hadn't tried the UAV too much because the respawn time for it is like 10 minutes], but whatever. I know BF2 started out really bugged, but I thought that they would actually try their best to fix their previous problems. Like, releasing a game really REALLY bugged was a problem. I mean, holy shit, I can barely play anything and yet all the servers are full. Even the servers that aren't full give me an error saying they're full.

This game broke my joyful stride through my memories of Battlefield and it'll be a while until I can run this part of town again. I know it can get better. I know it will, but right now this is what it is: shit. It really does suck. It just resembles an old franchise trying to stay, as the kids this days would say, hip. I say fuck the Campaign mode and fuck you cutting corners for it. I want a multiplayer experience from the Battlefield franchise. This hasn't given it to me yet.

R.U.S.E. Beta

A few weeks ago, the R.U.S.E. Beta opened up to everyone on Steam. Knowing nothing about it, I decided to jump right into it.

R.U.S.E. (and I have no idea what R.U.S.E. is an acronym for) is an RTS game set in WW2. In the same vein of EndWar, R.U.S.E. tries to add a new spin on the RTS genre. R.U.S.E.'s big spin on the genre is the ability and emphasis on tricking your opponent. In R.U.S.E. you have the power to fool your opponent with ruse cards. You get two at the start of each round and another about every 5 minutes. You can do things like hide your base, or your troops, or send fake units to attack them. That's all fine and dandy but Ruse also sets their maps on a war room board in a different environment. Sometimes it's a bombed out building, other times it's an actual war room. They say they did this because now they can have bigger maps than other RTS games. I'm not too sure about that, but it is interesting to zoom out and see what the war room looks like for a few seconds until you start to realize the enemy is sending a shitload of paratroopers to take over your base.

RTS games aren't my thing, but I can tell that this isn't that special.

Since it's beta, there's not too much that I can be truly mad at the people for, because it isn't done. Sure, the whole ruse thing is neat, it just isn't that new or amazing. Tricking your opponent has been a tactic in RTS games for a while now. Building a bunch of Black Hands or something to go attack your opponents teammate while you send the actual army of tanks and shit has been my tactic for a while. Sure it hasn't worked. Apparently my idea of an army of tanks would be like 20 of the lowest ranked tanks, but still. It's an average RTS game, but by opening the beta to everyone on Steam, they reached out to the crowd of people who never play RTS games, and they're going to get them to play and buy.

Tricky.

Army of Two: The 40th Day

A long time ago, when Army of Two first came out, I decided to play through it with my brother. After about 4 levels, we forgot about it until a few days after The 40th Day came out. It was a fun game. Just a bit annoying and stupid. Now, The 40th Day decided that annoying the fuck out of us was an integral part of the game and decided to amplify it to the extreme.

You know, I love co-op games. Making on the spot plans with a buddy is awesome. That's why I enjoy tactical multiplayer games. What ever happened to those days? These games are going down the shitter because people feel the need to make them overly complicated. The basics are basics because they were simple and good. Now, things like split screening seem to be so fucking hard to do. Resident Evil 5 decided to fall into this category of shit split screening. Their idea of a split screen meant that they shouldn't just have it split off in the middle with both people having widescreen top and bottom respectively. No, they thought it'd be a good idea to make it widescreen, but be fucking broken off from each other and have huge black bars on the sides of each of the screens. One takes the top right and another takes the bottom left. The fuck is their problem? Couldn't find a place for the radar? Fuck you, put the radar on each one of the people's screens and have it where you cut out everything when you made it retarded.

Army of Two: The 40th Day decided that they loved the idea of failure even more than just making the game annoying. No, they had to make it so that it's hard to see too. The Split Screen is vertical. VERTICAL. Are you fucking kidding me? I have to make it 4:3 in SD to get widescreen. I don't give a shit about your 'vertical elements', at least give me the option to make it widescreen in HD. Assholes. Do you know why 16:9 is better? It's a physical reason. Have you looked at how human's eyes are placed? They're placed horizontally. Our main field of view is left to right, not up and down. You should notice how it's easier to look left to right than up and down.

Anyway, AoT:40D is just as annoying as the first one was, just this time they made it so that it's hard to see though. I've barely played the game because it pisses me off so much.

Call of Duty: World at War

The other day I bought 'Call of Duty: World at War' for Nazi Zombies. The regular game is pretty good but I've played wayyy too many WW2 games. Seems as though a lot of people who play this haven't.

I tend to hate all of these gamers who are new to FPS games. It's not that they suck, or that they only play them on consoles (which can also make me mad), but it's because they are so annoying. These FPS game noobs always think that they are awesome, and they've played a lot of FPS games. These people played Halo 2 as their first game and think that they've played a lot of FPS games since then should be slapped. I was saddened when I was talking to my friend who was just born a year or two after me to call himself a 'hardcore' gamer. He says his favorite genre is shooters and his first game was Halo. He only plays on consoles, and he's never even played the classic games that define today's shooters. He hasn't played any of the Dooms, Duke Nukems, Quakes, Medal of Honors, early Call of Duty, Counter Strikes, Half-Lifes, Battlefields, Serious Sams, etc. If it's a 3D FPS, and you can't iron sight aim with it, he hasn't played it. He thinks that he's a 'hardcore' gamer just because he dedicates 12 hours a week to gaming. Fuck him. I play a lot longer each week than he does in a month. He thinks he's a 'hardcore' gamer because he's been playing games since Halo. Fuck him. I've played games since Duke Nukem 3D came out. I've played Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, Dooms, Serious Sams 1 and 2, Battlefield 2, Quakes, Counter-Strike: Source, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, the first Medal of Honor, and many many others. Still, he calls himself 'hardcore'. I don't even consider myself 'hardcore'. I just call myself a gamer.

Anyway, World at War is pretty good. At least Nazi Zombies is. I've played like 3/4s of the way through of the Single Player though. Still, I think that it is pretty good, and that Treyarch made something half decent that nobody else had done. At least with Nazi Zombies. There's only so much WW2 you can do. I think it's been long enough for another Omaha Beach level. Mohaa had a Omaha beach level ripped straight from Saving Private Ryan and it was bad ass.

Brutal Legend and Overlord 2

I played Brutal Legend and Overlord 2 a while back but I never reviewed them so I figured I have nothing else to do so I might as well look over them again and give you some of my thoughts on the games.

Brutal Legend is the latest installment from the crazy awesome dudes down at Double Fine. Their last game was Psychonauts, which came out of the blue and was awesome. I don't think I ever finished it though...

Anyway, Brutal Legend follows the adventure of Eddie Riggs who is voiced by Jack Black. Eddie Riggs is a roadie for a band. He builds things, repairs guitars, and makes everyone else look good while staying out of the limelight. Eddie is killed when he saved one of the idiots in the band. He then is transported to the land of Heavy Metal...

Brutal Legend is an amazingly good game. It follows the same art as Psychonauts, meaning that everyone looks a bit cartoonish and full of hyperboles. The plot has weird areas which are kind of spoilers I suppose, so I can't really talk about them. The game does rank up as one of my favorites ever. Brutal Legend does begin to fail very VERY hard when you have to do RTS elements. They are really difficult and the controls are awkward on consoles. That aspect of the game reminds me of something else too...


Overlord 2 is in many aspects related to Brutal Legend. They both have an RTS element, though Brutal Legend doesn't use it as much as Overlord 2 does.

In Overlord 2, you're some dude who was almost lynched as a kid for being incredibly awesome. He became evil and is now attempting to take over the world.

I haven't played Overlord 2 in quite some time but what I do remember of it I remember fondly. Towards the end of me playing it, it got really boring and repetitive. Probably hard too but if I say that it'll seem like I really suck at games. Anyway, Overlord 2 is fairly fun. I was disappointed that you (as in the human.. thing) didn't do much in the game. I love slashing people up with the sword. It also pads the game with a lot of useless additions. You can add decorations to your underground fortress of doom, but there's no point.You can revive some minons you lost, but there is also no point to it. The underground place is way too complicated and way too huge. It takes long to do anything there. Oh well. I think I liked it though.

Anyway, those are my reviews.

Book of Eli

Well I'm back to making reviews I suppose. The first review of 2010 shall be "The Book of Eli".

The book of Eli is a film based in a Fallout 3-esque apocalyptic future. Denzel Washington is a Lone Wanderer traveling west across the lawless and barren wasteland of the USA. He's been traveling 30 or so years reading a book over and over every day. He's run into many traps and foes along his travels and has become very adept at detecting where people are hiding.

Gary Oldman is a leader of a town who is looking for the 'twinkie' of his childhood as Woody Harrelson did in Zombieland. A book that is very near and dear to him. He hires goons to kill and loot travelers to find the book. He discovers that the Lone Wanderer has it and he will do anything to get his hands on it. The Wanderer will have none of that though, and will protect the book at all costs.

The movie is pretty good in my opinion. Sure, a lot could have been better. It felt a bit empty and boring at parts, but I still enjoyed it. It reminded me a lot of Fallout 3, which I'm sure some of the writers have played. Denzel Washington even mentions "I Fought the Good Fight" at one part.

I can see how many people didn't like this movie. I didn't think it was a major masterpiece but it was a good movie. Sure, the plot was a bit... thin. They could have done more with the plot and actually said why everyone nuked each other. I'm sure the writers could only think of Fallout plot points, so they didn't say more about how they survived.

It was good though. I'd go see it if I were you.

I also have to mention how stupid the poster is. Why did they have to shove that comingsoon.com right out there? It destroys the look and feel of it. Whatever.