Hello readers!

I’ll be joining The Intellectual Gamer as an associate editor and contributor. In addition to Leo’s wordy walls of text, I will ensure that all my posts have colorful eye-catching pictures and maybe a video or two, because colors stimulate the mind and everyone likes to be stimulated.

A brief intro:

My gaming interests revolve around my gaming PC (which totally pwns Leo’s),  my Xbox 360 (which has never had a hardware problem, thankfully), and my Nintendo DS lite. Being an OCD ADHD gamer has its challenges since that means I get bored of any game after less than 2 weeks of play, so I constantly have a rotation of about 20 games on my roster and it’s quite unusual for me to completely finish a game unless it’s short and/or very good. I am biased towards shooters, strategy games, RPGs of all genres (Western, Japanese, Tactical), and puzzle games.

I come to you from the murky dark depths of the infentisimal mountain of videogame releases.  Also known as: November.

It always creeps up on you, as you wander the damp, cold tunnel of darkness, as you reminisce about the games that you left behind, games that you think “maybe I should go back and beat that game…”  And then, it happens.  It snatches you further into the shadows…and before you know it, you become blinded by the sheer amount of gold that you find in a dark and unexpected corner.  Early rejoicing turns to agony as you realize there’s just..too..much…awesomeness.  Just too much…for one gamer to bear.

Now, on with the blog.

I present to you: The Oblivion edition.

(A little backstory about my experiences with Oblivion: This is a game that I thought was going to be awesome due to the “huge expansive world” and “non-linear gameplay.”  Reviewers couldn’t stop gushing over how lush the environment was, how realistic your horse’s anus looked and just how “fun” the entire game was.  I have given Oblivion at least 3 tries, and each time I was unable to bear playing it more than half an hour before I was utterly bored to tears.  The combat is awkward and stale, the character level up system is wonky and pointless since the monsters all level up with you anyway, and the fast-traveling mechanic ruins the game completely since you spend time and energy to get a horse when you really don’t need one.  Oh and there were only 2 voice actors, one for male characters and one for female characters.  Either someone needs to explain to me why this game is so good, or this game was just totally overrated.

FAR CRY 2: OBLIVION IN AFRICA

I made the mistake of choosing a white character in this game, but I heard that there isn’t much difference between the characters besides visual differences such as the forearms you see.  I’m not sure if every character is like this but one thing is for damn sure: everyone, and their grandmother, hates your guts.  I mean it.  It doesn’t matter if you saved a kitten from a tree or rescued wildlife from a random wildfire.  No. No I don’t care.  Everyone hates you just because you exist.  PEOPLE THAT SO MUCH AS SEE YOU ON THE ROADS WILL TURN THEIR CARS AROUND AND HUNT YOU DOWN.  JUST FOR BREATHING THEIR AIR.  OR SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW WHAT.

The reason I call this Oblivion in Africa is because it gave me the exact same stale and boring feeling I got when playing Oblivion, and yet, it got rave reviews(just like Oblivion).  People were bedazzled by the graphics, and while I’ll admit that the game doesn’t look bad, it looks basically on par with everything else on the market right now.  It doesn’t hold a candle to the realism found in the Crysis series, however.  Reviewers also loved the immersiveness of the game.  It would be nice to agree with the reviewers except for the glaring problem of everyone hating you like you’re the white devil.

Imagine you’re driving along a beautiful savanna, wild animals running along side your jeep wrangler(tm) and your eyes squint as you see a beautiful golden sunset upon the horizon… and what’s this?  You see a friendly African neighbor driving past you.  You watch in confusion as your African brother runs over all the gazelles and zebras as he RAMS YOUR CAR IN A FIT OF INEXPLICABLE RAGE.  You stop and ask, “What is your problem, sir?” and you are only met with bullets from his AK 47.  Enemies respawn everywhere, across the map, within a few minutes.  This means your car will break down every few minutes and it’ll take you twice the amount of time to get anywhere than you normally would have to if you didn’t have this stupid AI characters beating you down every step of the way.  What the hell happened to immersiveness??

While we’re talking about NPC’s, you have a bunch of other foreigners (who seem to be in the exact same predicament as you are) who you can help out.  They’re supposed to be your “buddies” but all I see are “quest givers”.  They also talk monotonously at unnatural speeds.  You can literally FEEL the voice actors reading the lines in English.  Sometimes for certain missions, you get fed the EXACT SAME LINE.  Once again, where’s my immersive environment?

A trip to Africa wouldn’t be anything without an unhealthy dose of Malaria.  Instead of actually becoming progressively worse or being a productive plot device, it’s more of a nuisance.  Every once in a blue moon you suddenly see yellow spots on the screen, and you need to take your magic pills that make it go away.  You only need to obtain these magic pills once, apparently, because you seem to have an INFINITE SUPPLY of them.  So now Malaria has just turned into “press H every once in a while to fix your vision!”  I have no sense of urgency or “oh shit oh shit I’m gonna die I need medical attention NOW” since I can just keep popping pills for the rest of my life.  Once again: where’s the immersiveness?

Now that we’ve got all the bad out of the way, let’s put in some good words, because after all, this is a beautiful looking game.  There’s a wonderful article on how fire was implemented as a mechanic, and it’s definitely believable.  With a flamethrower you can set fire to almost anything you want, whether it’s people, animals, grass, trees, even houses.

The gameplay, i.e. shooting and running are all pretty solid as well, minus the fact that you can shoot off branches in one shot but you can’t kill a man with a single headshot.  It’s just such a shame that they promised so much immersivity and took away most, if not all of it by the incredibly dense and overly aggressive AI.

But IG, what about the quests themselves?  Well, they’re pretty repetitive and usually involve lots of driving from point A to point B and killing something/blowing something up.  Literally more than half the game is travelling, unfortunately.  Which also means running into the hostile natives.