Brain Assassin

This morn­ing I went to Gametrailers.com expect­ing noth­ing out of the ordi­nary, like I always do Today, how­ever, my sharp eagly eyes spot­ted a God of War 3 review. This review con­tains minor spoil­ers but you shouldn’t worry if you’ve already played its pre­de­ces­sors. The review does the game credit: You’ll see some stun­ning in-​​game graph­ics and parts of a few cutscenes. Well, I can’t wait for the game any way, espe­cially since the sex mini-​​game has been unearthed, but I want to play this game right now. Just look at it. That’s frig­ging awe­some, people.

Appar­ently, God of War 3 once again fea­tures a sex minigame. Every God of War title, even the PSP ver­sion, has included an optional, hid­den sec­tion where Kratos can please top­less maid­ens. In the third install­ment of the very suc­cess­ful fran­chise game direc­tor Stig Asmussen didn’t want to include the minigame at first. This time around, they decided to inte­grate the sex minigame into the story where it serves more of a pur­pose than in pre­vi­ous titles. In the con­clu­sion to the tril­ogy Kratos beds the god­dess of love — Aphrodite — her­self. He couldn’t pos­si­bly do bet­ter in fur­ther games, could he?

Bat­tle­field: Bad Com­pany 2 is here and it sure looks like great fun. I liked the first install­ment of the series well enough but I could never con­vince myself to buy it. I always had the impres­sion that some­thing was off. This time around I’ve already pre-​​ordered the sequel. Judg­ing by mul­ti­ple reviews, the game should be fun. Unfor­tu­nately, the humor from the first part seems to have largely gone AWOL and the single-​​player mode seems to be quite short.

Any­way, a tweaked and upgraded Frost­bite engine does it’s best to deliver gor­geous graph­ics and almost totally destruc­tible envi­ron­ment. You get won­der­ful vis­tas and a sense of depth only a few other games can offer. Appar­ently, the game’s mechan­ics seem to work great and your AI com­pa­tri­ots do their best to sup­port you. A col­lectible weapon sys­tem offers a rea­son to return to the cam­paign though I’ll prob­a­bly just play through it.

The mul­ti­player is where Bad Com­pany 2 deliv­ers. The destruc­tible envi­ron­ment adds an extra tier of strat­egy to the game as you can alter the play­ing field by a few well-​​placed explo­sions. Larger teams are seg­mented into smaller strike forces, called squads. Within a squad, play­ers can choose between four load-​​out kits, each fea­tur­ing its own weapons and unique tools. Con­trary to the cam­paign, where the player has one of the most for­giv­ing aim­ing sys­tems, there will be no aim­ing help any­where in the online mul­ti­player mode.

BC2 has a Meta­critic score of 89 which is rather good. So, how do you feel about Bat­tle­field: Bad Com­pany 2? Already played it? How does it com­pare to Mod­ern War­fare 2?

This march promises to be quite event­ful. I’ve just pre-​​ordered Bat­tle­field: Bad Com­pany II and God of War III from Amazon.co.uk. Best of all, Ama­zon is kind enough to pro­vide an in-​​game early AK-​​47 weapon unlock code for BC2. Accord­ing to a pre­view over at Ars Tech­nica you can beat the single-​​player game of BC2 in about eight hours or so. That’s O.K. because mul­ti­player ist the meat of the game. Appar­ently, you’ll also get a day-​​one map pack in the form of a one-​​time-​​use code included with the game. Just enter the code and you get two addi­tional maps. If you buy the game used, you’ll have to unlock the con­tent for US$ 15. Here’s a pre­view of things to come:

God of War III on the other hand is all about the single-​​player expe­ri­ence. Ama­zon bun­dles the game with a code to unlock a For­got­ten War­rior char­ac­ter skin, if you pre-​​order with them. GoW III ups the ante in terms of size by offer­ing areas up to fours times larger than those found in its pre­de­ces­sor. The pro­gram­mers and design­ers have included new instru­ments of death and ruth­less tech­niques for Kratos to learn. The third install­ment will con­clude the tril­ogy but there already are plans to cre­ate more games with Kratos. Here’s a trailer for your view­ing pleasure:

Dante’s Inferno, which has been shipped to cus­tomers already, is a game very sim­i­lar to the God of War fran­chise. It has already received mixed reviews, cit­ing »repet­i­tive and/​or deriv­a­tive game­play«. Nev­er­the­less, it has been con­cluded that this is a game that fans of action shouldn’t miss. As of yet I’m still unde­cided whether to buy the Dante’s Inferno or not. I think I’ll stay with Kratos though. Today, I saw the story trailer for NIER. While it cer­tainly isn’t to my taste there surely are a few sim­i­lar­i­ties to God of War. Actu­ally, the offi­cial press release says that this is a unique Action-​​RPG fea­tur­ing twist­ing sto­ry­lines cou­pled with deep char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. NIER is being pub­lished by Square Enix and will be avail­able in North Amer­ica on April 27^th, 2010. We Euro­peans will have NIER in stores almost a week ear­lier on April 23^rd, 2010. Enjoy the story trailer:

Last week I was on sick leave and I spent quite a few hours play­ing the lat­est install­ment of the Call of Duty fran­chise: Mod­ern War­fare 2. It’s the first title of the fran­chise that I own and inter­est­ingly enough, I bought it for the PlaySta­tion 3 rather than for the PC. Any­way, I love the sin­gle player mode even if it is annoy­ingly short. An expe­ri­enced player will defeat the game in only a few hours. Apart from the length, CoD: MW2 really does fine.

It’s the multi-​​player mode that tends to suck from time to time. The devel­op­ers — the guys from Infin­ity Ward — imple­mented a fea­ture called host migra­tion. This fea­tures pre­vents the game from end­ing if a match host leaves the game early. Instead, a host migra­tion delay allows a new host to be selected and the game to con­tinue on. Out of 50 times it worked three times for me. To be hon­est, it worked more often but in these instances the game became unplayable because of the sud­den lags and stut­ter­ing. All these count­less times when I saw

In addi­tion, the game has some seri­ous bal­anc­ing issues. Every time I’m on a team with two or three other peo­ple and we’re play­ing against a team con­sist­ing of eight play­ers, I’d like to stran­gle the devel­op­ers respon­si­ble for this screw-​​up. There’s no fun in that, espe­cially if you’d pre­fer Mouse and Key­board to a Gamepad any­way. So, you’re not the best player, you’re low-​​level, and your team mates are roughly your equal and you’re play­ing against eight high-​​level char­ac­ters who have access to bet­ter weapons and perks. That sucks.

Last but not least, have you ever seen the »Game lobby closed« error mes­sage? No? You’re one of the luck­i­est guys to ever play this game. The sys­tem looks for other player, waits for more peo­ple, joins another lobby, spends more time wait­ing, pre­tends to launch the game — and then it screws you over by dis­play­ing a notice with the infor­ma­tive text »Game lobby closed«. There are times where I def­i­nitely spend more time wait­ing for a game to be set up rather than play­ing it.

I seri­ously hope they fix these issues very soon. Nonethe­less, I have to applaud them for their update strat­egy. They have a very small foot­print of only a few megabytes and they down­load quite fast. Keep up the good work and fix these issues!