GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[HackBond]

MW2: Boring
Halo: Reach: Meh, Okay
From Russia W/ Love: Okay
Bioshock: Awesome
Fallout 3: Boring
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Also known as Spyster or Nyxem
[Youtube]

[Decoy] Antenna | Control | Silo | Escape

[NapalmNero]

Spyster wrote:

Bioshock: Awesome Fallout 3: Boring

Being an "old school PC Elitist"

I think System Shock 1 & 2 are much better than BioShock and Fallout 2 is better than Fallout 3. But that is just the inner PC nerd talking

i do actually like BioShock, Fallout 3.. not so much
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Who?

[fantsu]

System Shock 2 is definetly one of the best FPS games ever created, but I think it is too old for this topic...

[Kerr Avon]

Deus Ex is superb, it's sequel DE: Invisible War is very inferior, though still worth playing. Bioshock 1 and 2 are excellent, System Shock 2 is fantastic (never played the first one). Project Snowblind is good but too easy and has no skill level selector (!), Timeshift is OK but should have been better, Timesplitters 3 is fantastic, No One Lives Forever 1 and 2 are very good.

Alien vs Predator (the 1999 PC version) is very good, but the modern XBox 360 version is very disappointing. Metroid Prime isn't really a FPS, but it's a superb game. Half-Life 1 and 2 were very good, as was the official expansion pak Opposing Forces, where you play as a soldier.

Perfect Dark is still my favourite ever game, with Goldeneye coming second. As for Perfect Dark Zero... *shudder*. Unreal Tournament 3 was another very disappointing game, I thought. And I didn't like Condemned: Criminal Origins, or FEAR at all, I found them both boring and uninteresting.

Halo 1 was very good, though over-rated - it did NOT define the first person shooter, nor did it make FPSs acceptable on consoles (Goldeneye did that), though yes, it is very influential, which I'm not too happy about, as I detest the two weapon limit and the regenerating shield that Halo has made standard. And yet Halo's genuinely good points (the great A.I., the flawlessly bugfree presentation, quick loading, well thought out controls) are often ignored by later games. Halo 2 was very good too, though not as good as I was expecting. And Halo 3 was too short, made the mistake of tedious organic levels, and just felt like a wasted opportunity. I haven't yet played Halo: ODST or Halo: reach yet.

And I don't play Medal of Honour or Call of Duty games, as they just don't interest me.


A very good game I've just finished (a couple of days ago) is Singularity. It's a first person shooter for the XBox 360 (and PS3 and PC, according to Gamefaqs, but I've not played those versions so I don't know if there's any differences).


*No spoilers, except for things that happen in the first few minutes or things you'd learn from the box or reviews*

Anyway, someone posted up on a message board about how good the XBox 360 first person shooter Singularity was, and I was curious as I'd never even heard of the game before (I try to play every FPS I can) and I went to the Gamefaqs' Singularity forum (Gamefaqs has a forum for every game for most systems) and there were several people there asking how a game this good had gone under their radar (as in why had the game gotten no publicity) and saying how good the game was, and why wasn't it getting more exposure in the main forums.

Anyway I found the game (it does seem to be quite rare), bought it and was very pleased with it. It's really good, very much like Bioshock crossed with Half-Life 2 with a bit of Halo thrown in. It takes place on a small deserted Russian island, which in 2010 or so has just suffered an explosion that's attracted the attention of an American satellite, so the a team of American soldiers fly in to investigate, but their helicopters are downed by another explosion, and you play a survivor of one of those helicopter crashes.






The gist of it is that in the 1940s a new element, exclusive to that island, was discovered that could be used to control time. Trouble is, it's unstable, and exposure to it causes mutations. You can guess the rest... Cue lots of fighting against humans and mutants, working your way through the island's varied environments, finding and using all sorts of weapons plus a device that acts as both as a gravity gun and a (de)-aging device, and traveling through time to save the world


It's really good, and is one of my favourite 360 games ever. It's basically just a first person shooter, with an atmosphere similar to Bishock (though Bioshock's atmosphere is stronger), with some great weapons, and no shortage of ammunition, lots of varied and interesting levels to traverse (unlike Condemned or FEAR, where it's just boring, linear-feeling from A to B type tedium), and great scenery to look at. There is a background story to discover if you read the notes and listen to the audio recording (again, a Bioshock similarity), and it never gets boring or repetitive.

The weapons can all be upgraded according to your choice, in their categories of damage, clip size, and reloading speed (each category can be upgraded twice), but you need a weapon upgrade token to perform an upgrade, so you're limited to the tokens you find (though a token can upgrade any one weapon of your choice, in any one category of your choice).

There are two weapons that can't be upgraded, special weapons that you find at set points in the game, plus you get another device that can be used as a weapon.

There are RPG elements too, as you find processed E99 (Element 99) scattered all over the island (be it in a corner of a room, a suitcase, a locker, a dumpster, etc) and you can use this to purchase upgrades to your skills at special vending machines. No, I don't understand the logic either, but then I don't understand why such an amazing new element wouldn't get a better name than 'E99', or why the Russian people always speak English in their notes and recorded messages (American English at that, using terms such as "Mom baked me cookies today"), why you can carry seemingly unlimited amounts of E99 (and not get infected by it, either!), or why top secret Russian laboratories have signs in both Russian and English.

Anyway, the game does have it's flaws, sadly. For one, it's too linear, although it's much less noticeable in this game than in many others. Also, you can only carry two weapons at a time, which I don't like, though some people do. On the plus side, any upgrade you perform to a weapon is carried over to all weapons of that type that you might find (so if you have a shotgun and upgrade it, but then dump the shotgun for a different weapon, then later on if you pick up a shotgun from somewhere else then it's somehow upgraded!).

Another minus point (I think) is that there is no friendly fire. Far worse is that the game is rather easy; on the plus side there is no regenerating health, but there are plenty of health packs around (and like in most other games, the enemy never use them, only you), checkpoints are fairly regular, your weapon and personal upgrades make you a killing machine, and the enemies are competent but hardly amazing fighters.

And the in games problems aren't exactly MENSA worthy either. Alright, so in a FPS they never are, and in truth you wouldn't want them to be, as you play FPSs for fighting, not thinking, but if a FPS has in game problems to be solved then you'd expect them to be at least a little bit challenging. But Singularity commits the grave error of treating the player like an idiot - your cursor (the onscreen sights at the centre of the screen, I mean) changes according to what it's pointing at. This means that you can sometimes find the solution to a problem before you've even realized that there is a problem to be solved! You walk into a room, look around, and your cursor changes as it passes over the item that needs to be activated (I can't say more without giving away part of the plot). When you can activate something, the cursor either gets a semi-circle of colour around it (to show what you can do), or you get a prompt to press X to activate the whatever it is (and it's described for you in text). I don't want that, I want to search for the solutions myself, with no help from the game. It's not like the problems with be hard with no help, as they are not difficult at all.

Still, Singularity is a shooter not a problem solving game, so that's a minor flaw, and indeed it serves to speed up the action as it gets you through the problem quicker, so to some it might not be a flaw at all.

The biggest problem though is that it might not have much replayabilty. Situation led FPSs always seem to have this problem, as you tend to remember the main parts, and so repeatedly playing though them becomes almost a chore, like going through the motions. I don't know if this is true of Singularity yes, as I only finished it yesterday and haven't restarted it yet. And if it does prove too easy over time then you can always forgo the upgrades.

The story is good, but nothing special to those of us who read science fiction. And I hate the way you get shut off from past areas, such as if you walk through a door then the door sometimes shuts and locks behind you, for no reason other than to stop you going back again.

Another problem is that there are some bugs. I once got stuck in the floor, and had to restart the game. Once, an enemy soldier spawned right in front of me, and once a friendly character went ahead of me into a room, and when I went in she wasn't there, and there was only one other way out. When I pressed the button to open that door, she spawned in front of me (out of mid-air, I mean, before the door had even opened). To be fair, perhaps these bugs have been fixed with a patch - my 360 hasn't been on line since before I installed the game so I don't know.

Oh, and there are three endings to the game, which is great. Or would be, except you choose the ending by one action at the end of the game, so you can just reload the last checkpoint when you've finished the game, and replay the last section again and make another choice to see the other endings. How stupid is that? You should decide the ending not by one action, but by your actions throughout the game.

Maybe in a sequel (which I certainly hope they make).

Anyway, I know that I've listed a load of negative points against a few positives, and probably made the game sound bad, but that's because I can't say much good about the game without spoiling anything. It really is good. It's very enjoyable, it's long, has a good story which is fairly well told (the Half-Life games still hold the crown in that area, though), some great weapons, lots of variation in the areas you work through, very atmospheric graphics (and some of the set pieces are fantastic), and the ability to choose how to upgrade your weapons and your abilities (or not upgrade them at all, if the game does prove too easy) should add some real replay value. Also, the contents of some containers seems to be randomized, though I don't yet know by how much, but that might make things more interesting.