Playing Vanguard, yep COD and I’m truly enjoying it. In an unlikely break from the Dark Souls games this feels fresh. Fully aware it mostly gets panned critically but the campaign is pretty smooth and the bit where you are forced to go airborne and fly a plane is the only time I have ever really enjoyed flying in a game, some thrilling air battles going on in this. It’s no Titanfall but it is massively exceeding my expectations. Oddly, not doling to bad in the MP either, I’m usually last in these things but not here, no idea why.
Have been playing through the Halo series with my pal over the last 18 months. (Side note: master chief collection is a very broken piece of software).
My assessment of the games:
Halo: Combat Evolved
The more ‘open’ levels are still spectacular fun and the whole game was generally groundbreaking for it’s time but a lot of this hasn’t stood up. Enemies take a load of bullets, there are too many of them. Many corridor fights are just holding down the right trigger until things stop moving.
Halo 2
Better than I remember it. A big step up in terms of combat and balance. However the storytelling is pretty poor.
Halo 3
As good as I remember it. Still probably the best package overall in terms of single and multiplayer.
Reach
Probably one of the better narratives in the series. Solid
ODST
An honourable attempt to do something different with the narrative but, like the rest of the series it’s very po-faced.
Halo 4
Can’t exactly remember this one other than the new enemies were a bit shit and the enemies were quite annoying (especially the butterfly twats).
Halo 5
I have a vague feeling this one was poorly reviewed but it exceeded my expectations tbh. Absolutely fine. Refined gameplay and an improvement on 4.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Aliens Vs Predator, Soldier of Fortune, Deus Ex, System Shock (does that count? I guess if Deus Ex does…), No One Lives Forever, FEAR, Red Faction…oooh Jedi Knight 2…Raven were such good developers.
Remember reading about someone who only managed to complete it after turning on all the lights in their house, turning the game volume to 0 and playing Christmas music loudly instead
Since we’re counting Deus Ex, that game blew my mind and is still one of those reference points that lives rent free in my head. That’s not to mention, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided which - even if it pales to the original in many ways - is possibly the most fun I’ve had playing a video game.
The thing this thread really brought to my immediate mind though was MODS. Fuckin’ MODS.
Remember watching my dad play a really good Half Life mod called They Hunger. I remember trying to make my own Deus Ex mod once too when I was a kid but I sucked at it.
…
Me and my sibling used to sit cross-legged on the floor awestruck-edly looking up at our dad playing Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and the like on the family PC. We also had IM Meen, which was an educational FPS that we were allowed to play (but we had to get dad to fight the bosses for us)
And lastly but not leastly, a seminal mainstay of the Manches family household in the latter half of the 1990s was Realms of the Haunting - which I hold responsible for my love of seeing really ordinary household interiors rendered in that warm low-poly 2.5D-whatever way
My Call of Duty multiplayer play style was often enjoyed by any in-the-room onlookers.
On the screen, one would notice that I would almost always have my character lying down and crawling around in that position. Usually getting spotted and killed like immediately, but SOMETIMES managing to land a successful stealthy knifing.
It would often be remarked upon how happy I looked, even when getting absolutely decimated by rivals. I would cackle very gaily whenever I launched one o’ those stealth kills
