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.