That Merlion Design Was Originally In White

» Written on October 29, 2006 at 6:29 AM «

Just in case you were wondering.

See, I yet again have proof!

Which do you prefer? Make your choice. Indeed, it appears that both offerings are on the gallery. Just so, you know, you know.

Anyway, it appears that Medal of Honor: Heroes has finally (goddamn) arrived here in Singapore for the Playstation Portable.

You can tell a post made by me is going to be good when I start spelling things fully, without truncation.

For, once again, lack of energy to type out pure hatred all over again, I shall post what I did at over at the Hostile Intent forums:

“Having been hyped up to be one of the best PSP and soon-to-be a classic, I had high expectations for this, and hoped it would be better than what Syphon Filter could offer.

First impressions?

You can’t trust EA, Sony, or Ubisoft. They fuck you over. Good.

The game is a pathetic excuse for a first-person shooter. The graphics are very good when they work, but horrendous when they don’t. And they don’t work a lot more often than they do (More on this later). Controls are indeed a welcome relief from what most control schemes offer, and that’s about all that’s good about the game. When EA said they’d made the missions shorter for “on-the-go” purposes, I was assuming they meant that the missions would be as rich in content, maybe broken down into several sections.

Here’s how the first mission played out. You go in as a soldier surrounded by a few AI dumbasses (Bad AI can sometimes be forgivable but wait, there’s more) and start killing Germans like a hot scalding knife through butter. Then you reach a point where you plant a charge and get out of a small bunker. It blows up, and you go back to the place where you spawned.

When the mission ended, I was like, “That’s it?”

Perhaps a training mission? No. The rest of the first campaign would continue to play out in this manner, just running around killing nazis and planting charges and watching them blow. The explosions weren’t even lackluster spectacular.

I’m already finishing the second campaign, and so far, there’s only been one other game mode I’ve seen: basically you run around in a city, kill Germans and cap flags. Then the mission ends. Honestly, there is no semblance of a storyline at all; it’s just random missions being thrown at you. I don’t even know why they bothered to call it a campaign mode.

So…now to the brighter side. The graphics are really well-done in certain instances. The grittiness and grunge feel of the game does permeate at certain points, especially in towns and in urban areas. Other times, though, especially a certain mission involving a beach, the look was almost comical, and reminiscent of games from the times of DOOM. And the player models, well…there’s really no excuse for how horrendous they look. I already thought they looked bad from the screenshots, but jesus, in-game…you really have to see it to believe it. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

Pop-in is also quite common, even at short distances. This would not be so bad if enemies also didn’t just pop in out of nowhere, and they can fire even when you can’t see them. It’s just fucking annoying. And on the subject of enemies, they aren’t exactly too smart either; as mentioned earlier, the AI in this game is balls, a noticable defect these days with most games. I honestly doubt the PSP isn’t capable of better AI: I wouldn’t mind sacrificing facing less enemies if it meant they’d act smarter and fight better. Speaking of enemies, your friends aren’t much better. They get left behind…a lot. Be prepared to go a lot of situations alone as they tend to disappear and reappear magically all over the place out of thin air to help you out, or, more likely, piss you off by throwing frags all over the place, especially in the place you were planning to take cover at. Oh, and they can’t spot or shoot for nuts.

Loading times are very good, perhaps one of the few games that actually have reasonable loading times. Syphon Filter’s developers need to learn from this, but I doubt they ever will.

Multiplayer with 32 living beings was…well. It’s sort of like Battlefield 2. The MoH online experience is delightful (though of course not as delightful as the real BF2), but marred by the user interface and bad coding. The UI doesn’t look retarded, but the way it’s designed…it’s almost as if EA wants to piss off players. Or maybe it’s a silent cry for help by overworked and underpaid developers or something. Whatever.

Bottom line? Wait for this to grow old, and get it pre-owned. It’s not worth the full price or the hype. I could see this being a lot of fun if you have friends to ad-hoc with while waiting for class to start or something, but that isn’t the usual case for a lot of people, so I say :tdown:

It makes me wish I had spent my cash on GTA LCS instead while I waited for VCS.”

And there you have it. Honestly, fuck EA games. Yes, in bold. Goddamn kapitalistic gaming review sites that get paid off by EA to give such insanely high scores for a game that clearly doesn’t belong in the same league as other true classics do.

And today was the last day of the X06 event in Singapore. Of course, I just had to get in on some action.

Outside the compound, near Raffles City. Interesting design, crappy location.

Now we see what the globe design is really for. I gotta admit, this was probably the coolest part of the event. For locals, you might remember this effect being reminiscent of the Omni-Theatre.

Gears of War for the x360 was on display (It releases here on November 7th, of course, that is a release date, which means it might be, ah, invariably delayed.

Battlefield 2142 was on display too, though the PCs running it were experiencing weird graphical issues due to the Windows Vista RC2 release they were using instead of typical Windows XP. I don’t think I’ll be purchasing it though, mainly because of my hate for EA now and the advertising fracas. Plus the game doesn’t seem that great anyway.

On another note, it was my first time using Windows Vista, and while it looks nice, it is quite apparent that there are still quite a number of things to be nitpicked about before Jan 1st, 2007.

Oh, mobile users, how you must curse me so for this post! Fear not; I swear a redesign is in on the way. Though not now; I have a presentation to attend to and, er, redesign in order to meet the demands of society’s dregs, namely, groupmates, teachers…you know, the usual.

A kid, who rats on another kid, is a dead kid.

   

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