Category: First-Person Shooter

Posted on

How’d It Age #3 – Metroid Prime

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Gamecube, Wii

Under normal circumstances, this would be a very short ramblings. Yes, this aged well. Yes it’s still an incredibly good and fun game. Yes you should buy it. The end.

But I have some thoughts here on the various versions, with a bit of a wild card. I’ve played all the versions of this that have come out, whether it’s the original release, the Wii update for Trilogy, or what is now the remastered version on Switch. If I look at the versions side by side, I don’t think there’s a real clear winner in terms of which one is the best. There’s things that the last two do that I think are interesting and better, so the real question is, which one should you play?

The Switch version is a pretty easy recommendation, especially if you’re a typical console FPS player. The dual-stick controls drastically modernize the game, making general traversal much better than other versions. It allows the game to just flow better, which is a bit of a surprise to me. It also drastically reduces the benefit of aim lock, which is something that surprisingly makes the game quite a lot easier. It’s also easy to recommend it because of the updated visuals, which really do a surprising amount to modernize the experience.

However, I don’t think that’s the best control scheme. I actually think it’s pointer controls, and unfortunately I don’t think that the Switch pointer controls feel as good as they do on the Wii. I noticed that they were occasionally getting out of sync which is something that I’ve seen on other pointer-style Wii ports, as well as with motion-assisted games like Splatoon. This is where the Wii version via Metroid Prime Trilogy really shines. The pointer input scheme on that version is as close to mouse-focused aiming as I’ve ever seen on a console game, and it shines in this experience. It makes boss fights in particular incredibly precise to fight, and again is something that reduces the need to really use aim lock. Combined with a heavier reliance on strafing compared to the original, this is as PC-styled as the series gets.

That said, I do have a wildcard and that comes in the form of PrimeHack. This is a fork of the fantastic Dolphin emulator that adds in support for traditional PC keyboard/mouse controls to Metroid Prime Trilogy, assuming you have a legal way to rip your discs down or feel like sailing the high seas. This can be combined with things like the Dolphin supported for HD texture packs to transform the PC experience into something closer to the remaster’s visual styles with an even better control scheme. The first time I played Prime in this way was a revelation. It transforms into a PC game so easily that I can’t believe more shooters aren’t trying to fill the adventure game niche that this series did. At high framerate and resolution combined with keyboard/mouse controls, this just feels like a modern PC game, despite being 20 years old.

I suppose I never really answered the question of which version you should play, and I think my answer really comes down to any of them. Play the Switch if it’s the easiest to get at. Play the Wii version if you want consistent shooting input. Rip your disc and play it on PC with a texture pack if you really want a surprising experience. However you play this game, you won’t be disappointed. It really does still hold up.

Posted on

Shelved It #18 – Halo Infinite

More Info from Microsoft

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

This feels like a game that was searching for an identity that it never found. It’s very clearly Halo, but it tried to push too far into the Ubisoft open world formula, and it doesn’t really feel like it made it there. While the shooter part of it works really well, it felt dragged down by the rest of the metagame in the half dozen or so hours I put into it to the point where I just didn’t feel like picking it back up.

The core mechanics of this game are still as good as ever. Ya I get if a console shooter isn’t your cup of tea, but for what it’s aiming for it’s still incredibly fun in moment to moment combat. The guns have really clear archetypes and you kind of fade into the ones that you like to play with the most. Aim assist is just present enough to reduce the frustration of aiming on a gamepad. Running enemies over in vehicles is still fun. The Ghost being as small as it is meant that I could pretty much bring it anywhere, including into encounters it didn’t belong. However, it’s the enemies that still work the best.

Halo enemies always had really clear purposes, and that still works here. Grunts are still your fodder and effectively die in one hit, but they fit the role of distracting you well. Jackals still have the pain in the ass shield, which encourages you to get into melee range or use explosives to clear them out. Larger enemies like Brutes encourage precision in order to kill them faster via headshots. New enemies like the Skimmer add a level of verticality to throw you off just scanning at ground level. In general, the encounters are built well around sprinkling a few different types of enemies to make you approach them in varied ways based on the environment. In a vacuum it works well, and in past games it’s been able to be balanced against slow growth due to the linearity of the experience. That is all gone here.

The open world nature of this entry just feels like a mistake. Rather than having crafted encounters along a relatively linear path, you’ve got random encounters that constantly pop up going between points. Rather than the core gameplay being progression through a story, you’ve got a lot of miscellaneous stuff scattered about. The problem is that there’s only so much you can do with this kind of gameplay. It’s Assassin’s Creed or Ghost of Tsushima without the variety. You don’t really have the ability to do large scale traversal puzzles like that series. You don’t really have the choice to do stealth-focused gameplay or action-heavy sequences as a distinct choice. You just have guns blazing.

Where this ends up dragging is that every encounter feels the same. As you’re going from story point to story point you’ll inevitably see a bunch of encounters. However, it all bleeds together. You’ll see your half dozen grunts, a couple jackals, and a couple brutes/hunters/elites. Rinse and repeat. Between story spots you might see a half dozen of these. You’ll also see typically a handful of side quests – rescue a squad, destroy a base, kill a target – that also just have the same combat. Because the open world just has so much ambient combat, you quickly reach a point where it becomes a chore to traverse, rather than fun to traverse.

Within a pretty short time I basically just started hijacking the first Ghost I could find and running around guns blazing. From a practical standpoint, it made encounters much easier to skip because I could just zoom right on past. When I got to an encounter I did need to engage in, it also meant that I was in a moving resource with infinite ammunition and pretty predictably high power. From a min/max standpoint it was just far more effective. However, whenever I didn’t have a Ghost the game instead just felt like a chore. At that point I knew this one wasn’t working out for me.

It also ultimately didn’t help that there’s no co-op. I’ve played almost every entry in the series exclusively in co-op, so not having that is a huge drag. I could see this style of metagame working well in co-op because I could log in with the same group of people, run around for a while doing whatever as we shoot the shit, and over time we could progress through the game. Doing repetitive things over time wouldn’t matter as much because that’s kind of not the point of just having fun playing games in that group setting. Not having co-op at launch – although it’s apparently coming soon™ – is a baffling decision for a series built on co-op stories and multiplayer gameplay.

Infinite just kind of feels open world for the sake of being open world, and it feels to me like an anchor around the game’s neck. The core shooting mechanics are still fantastic, but when you are doing repetitive ambient encounters instead of crafted linear segments, there just doesn’t feel like any sense of progression or growth. Every encounter gets kind of samey, and over time I just felt like avoiding them entirely. For a game built around combat, not engaging is a weird thing. In all likelihood I’ll revisit this when co-op finally launches, but for now this one feels like a swerve that isn’t working for me.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #159 – Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands

More Info from 2K

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Windows

It’s been a long time since I played a Borderlands. I loved the first couple, quickly fell off The Pre-Sequel and altogether skipped 3. However, this one pulled me back in with a somewhat more unique setting thanks to them diving full into Tiny Tina’s shenanigans. I’m not going to pretend that the writing felt like it was aimed at anyone older than 12 years old, but boy does the game loop still just work.

If I was to point at one thing that made this work so well for me, it’s that the typical Borderlands gameplay just slots right in. Those games already had elemental attacks, so there’s your fantasy magic. Those games already had alien creatures, so fantasy-focused characters just slot in. Those games had the sirens, so mages just fit in place. The core was there, so even in a completely D&D focused setting it all feels entirely familiar. Guns are perhaps a bit weird, but whatever it’s D&D. I’m sure someone has made it work.

That’s not to say that things felt stale though. The way I built out my character felt unique in a way that I don’t remember being able to push in previous games. I ultimately went with a two-class combination of the Spore Warden and Clawbringer class archetypes. The first of those is a poison summon-focused class with an emphasis on critical hits. The second is a fire/lightning summon-focused class with an emphasis on damage mitigation. The obvious thing to notice there is that I’ve got three elemental damage sources already, but it’s more than that. The crit + damage mitigation let me do silly things with stats.

Ultimately my character ended up being a glass cannon. All of my stats went into three things – crit chance, crit damage, and elemental damage. I did nothing with any mitigation stats so if I took damage I was more often than not dead. However, my increased crits meant I could save myself in almost all situations extremely effectively with a kill while bleeding out. If not, my mushroom summon could also revive me while my secondary wyvern contined to dish out damage. Also, because my summons had three elemental types I could build into a fourth (in this case, health drain) that helped me stay alive at a higher rate while still hitting enemy weaknesses. I furthered this by exclusively picking shield wards with low health pools but quick recharges, where my goal was to have its recharge be less than 2 seconds. Basically, I could probably take one hit but would need to be getting out of harm’s way, but could quickly rejoin the fight afterwards.

It’s a build that for me really hit into the strengths of how they setup the classes for this game. They really kind of just turned the ridiculousness knob a bit more and pulled out some unique combos that feel like they’re pushing the mechanical boundaries for the game in fun ways. It let me mould my gearing around my class setup, and in this case allowed me to treat the game as more of a cooperative experience despite playing in single player. It’s the kind of thing that really is truly unique to the Borderlands series.

I will give a shout out to their overworld change as well. Getting rid of vehicles is one of the best things about the metagame here. Rather than travel through miles of garbage to get to your main story locations, you have a relatively nice area to explore. It’s got a lot of side quests and collectables and combat encounters to do. However, it’s also much faster to get through. It’s a fairly common improvement that the game has shown. Everything here is much tighter. As an example, the side quests feel much better integrated into the story’s golden path, so you can do them as you wander through instead of going out of your way. They’re also generally more often substantial side stories rather than collection quests. The whole experience is very much Borderlands with less padding, and it’s to the benefit of the game.

That said, the screenshot above in which you seduce a drawbridge is indicative of my main problem with the game. The comedy just feels immature. Some of it is funny, but I found myself groaning instead of laughing more often than not. In a lot of ways, it really just made me feel old…..which might be true, but it’s not something that I ran into in past games. It’s things like the queen of the land being a unicorn named Butt Stallion, or seducing the drawbridge, or Torgue’s cursing being bleeped while being far more common under the guise of trying to stick to a teen rating. Rather than trying to hit a rating, it just feels like it was written for that level of audience. It was never egregious enough for me to not want to play the game, but the writing definitely was not helping the game for me.

This game feels like it’s going to end up on my long term short list. Borderlands 2 filled that role for a long time as the game I could hop into and just play for the sake of playing. Diablo 3 filled that role for a while, especially on the Switch. Of late that distinction has gone more towards games like Forza Horizon. However, this one may take over for a bit. It’s just such a well refined gameplay loop that it’s easy to hop in, and for me it’s made the series feel fresh again. In good news, gear hunting after the first play through also means I can just ignore the comedy and gear grind, which is probably what I wanted anyway.