Bouncing from era to era for key items in TimeSplitters

Get ready, but I’ve never played Perfect Dark, and the only time I’ve spent with GoldenEye 007 was something like ten years after its release, being all illegal…with an emulator. Don’t think I even got past the first level, that oh-so-iconic dam. Shh, don’t tell anyone. Good thing I’m only posting this on my secret, private NotePad blog on my computer’s desktop and not a powerful, crippling entity like the Internet. The fact is I never had a Nintendo 64–I went the PlayStation 1 route, see–and so I missed out on just about every single big release from that system; my childhood BF-not-F had one, but we mostly ate up  wrestling games, as well as the multiplayer mode in Turok 2: Seeds of Evil.

And so when I read or hear the comparisons of TimeSplitters for the PlayStation 2 to those two previously mentioned name-heavy franchises, I kind of just shrug my shoulders. Because I don’t know left from right. That said, TimeSplitters is a bunch of goofy fun, even if it is a first-person shooter boiled down to a mostly multiplayer focus. Speaking of that, here’s the modes you can expect to hit X on at least once: Story, Arcade, and Challenge. I didn’t include the map editor there because map editing on the PlayStation 2 is a little scary, so I’ll just advise y’all to keep your distance and fire with precision.

Story mode in TimeSplitters is a big lie, even more so than in The Tiny Bang Story. The levels work more in a “time attack” manner than following a narrative and exploring at your own pace. Basically, you pick your level and difficulty (easy, medium, hard), and either a male or female character to play as. These levels are themed across nine fictional locations spanning the years between 1935 and 2035. The goal of each level is to grab an item–let’s just go ahead and call it a MacGuffin–and then make your way to the exit, which is generally not where you started. The split second you pick up the item, deadlier monsters begin warping into the level, making the return trip that much more hazardous. On easy, you can complete each level in a matter of minutes, and the main point of this mode is to unlock Arcade mode elements, like multiplayer bots, additional multiplayer modes, and so on.

Arcade is the multiplayer hub, and you can play against bots, but it’s still pretty soulless. Yes, that’s a remark coming from someone who ate up bot multiplayer sessions in Red Faction II and Killzone. The bot AI can be tweaked to five different levels of smarty-pants, but it still just feels like mindless chaos, like there’s no strategy at work. I imagine four-player multiplayer sessions are more lively. The standard modes are there in various forms, like capture the flag (well, capture the bag here) and deathmatch.

The Challenge mode can only be unlocked by beating all the Story missions on at least the easiest of difficulties, which is, obviously, pretty easy to do. It’s the best thing in TimeSplitters. Right now, I have three challenges in total unlocked: one involving killing zombies in specific ways with a time limit, another is murdering a bunch of duck-men before time runs out, and the other tasks you with holding onto a bag for a total of a minute in a three-minute arena filled with opponents. These are neat and fun; however, the difficulty in these challenges is beyond believable. So far, I have only beaten the zombie one, and it literally came down to beheading the last zombie a second before time ran out. For the bag one, I don’t think I’ve held onto it for longer than a total of twenty seconds so far. Bah humbug.

If there’s one thing that still stands out with TimeSplitters some fourteen years later, it’s that the game moves fast. Like cheetah speeds. The action moves at at extremely spiffy frame-rate and high resolution, still looking good for its day. In fact, it moves faster than more recent first-person shooters–sorry, BioShock Infinite, but you dropped your walking cane–and almost feels like your character is skating on ice, blasting away enemies and monsters with polish.

Something to not praise though are the outrageous character designs, which often have the men looking macho and powerful, while the women are given Twizzler-sized waists, large breasts, and sexual poses. Even the robotic forms. Still, there are some funny names to smile at, like Hick Hyde and Ravelle Velvet, but none of the characters, as far as I can tell, play differently from each other. The choice is welcome, but the gender portrayals are too stereotypical.

At this point, I’ve unlocked a good amount of TimeSplitters‘ content, but other than giving a few more Challenge missions another go I think I might call it quits. Again, the multiplayer isn’t filling me with joy or excitement, and I have no interest in replaying the Story levels on tougher difficulties because it just feels unbalanced and punishing. It sounds like later games in the TimeSplitters series, of which I have none, treat the story more traditionally and weave it better into the action.

So far, Red Faction: Armageddon asks very little, gives even less

I initially balked at the Humble THQ Bundle, confused by what it was. Certainly not indie, which was taken away from the collection’s overall title, but far from humble, too. These are triple A titles from a major company. So I slept on it. In the end, I just couldn’t pass up the chance to play Darksiders, Metro 2033, and Red Faction: Armageddon for the low, low entry fee of a buck. Yeah, that’s right; I went as low as I could. No need for me to go above and beyond the average amount paid for Saints Row: The Third, a fantastically fun videogame that I already own for the Xbox 360 and have played to nearly completion (minus the lackluster DLC). And I highly doubt there will ever come a day that I actually install the three Company of Heroes games, let alone one of them. I am so not interested in real-life war games. Oh well.

And for $1–or really $0.33 if you break it up between the three games I wanted from the whole caboodle–Red Faction: Armageddon is functionally fine. But that doesn’t absolve it from being a horribly backwards sequel that strips away everything that made Red Faction: Guerrilla a fun time: an open world, the freedom to destroy what you wanted and how you went about it, the various modes for online play, the impact a sledgehammer could deliver. And more, surely. Now, for those that don’t remember–heck, even I kind of forgot this–I played the demo for Armageddon back in May 2011, not really finding too much to talk about within it. I walked down a dark corridor and shot some alien monsters off walls, as well as reconstructed some ruined platforms and staircases. Yeah, very different from the previous outing.

In this one, you play as Darius Mason, another checkbox in a long list of white, disgruntled-looking, bald videogame protagonist men. Don’t get him confused with other bald, white men in the game. It is 2017, and he must reclaim cultist fortifications on the disaster-ravaged surface of Mars, as well as defend colonists from hostile Martian creatures thriving in the mines and chasms below. To do this, Mason will use various tools and weapons, such as the Nano-Forge and Magnet Gun, to dish out destruction or repair what’s fallen. He will also walk forward in a straight line and shoot swarms of alien monsters to death before repeating this process a few feet further down. The plot is dished out in small, predictable chunks, with characters being stock and uninspiring, and Mason as a action movie star wannabe. Really, his one-liners need to stop.

Then again, the plot in Guerrilla wasn’t that great, but the openness of the world and the freedom of your tools more than made up for that. Here, in Armageddon, all that is gone. It is a non-stop corridor crawl. Dark corridors too, filled with the same swarms of alien monsters which you can kill in one melee hit so don’t bother trying to shoot them in the shadows. The game occasionally teases you by bringing you above-ground, but it’s still just a straight run or vehicle-driven sequence that does not encourage exploration. In fact, if you stray too far from the zone where all the fighting is going down, you get a warning message from the game coupled with a countdown to return to the fight. I have to imagine if you don’t by the time the countdown ends, it’s game over. Yeah, none of that.

Overall, despite a fun set of tools at your side like the Magnet Gun and that super powerful sledgehammer, Armageddon is shockingly boring. You just follow a guided path and kill monsters along the way until you get to a cutscene or new section, doing it all again. Boss fights are uninteresting, requiring little skill and thought and just a better ability to roll out of danger while continuing to fire your assault rifle. I’ve been playing on the Normal difficulty, and it’s felt a little like Godzilla squashing a city of people; haven’t died once, haven’t run out of ammo, haven’t really found myself in a tough pickle. According to my upgrades wheel, I’m almost 75% through the story. Think that’s three or four more levels to slog through.

The Humble THQ Bundle recently added in the Path to War DLC for free since I already purchased the collection. I have no idea what it is and entails, but I imagine it is just more of the same missions from the main game. I’ll give it a try once I finish off Armageddon‘s campaign, as well as try some of the multiplayer options, before shelving the game for good and remembering back to the good ol’ times I had with the franchise back in Red Faction II and Guerrilla.

Games Completed in 2011, #24 – Red Faction: Guerrilla

I thought Red Faction was really neat, what with their revolutionary tech at the time of being able to blow a hole in a wall and then go through said hole. Red Faction II did all of this as well, but tried to mix up the gameplay too much and also annoyingly threw in waves of zombie monsters. While the main mission stunk, I did enjoy myself in the local multiplayer against bots; yes, this was around the time that everybody and their brother were playing Halo over the Internet, but I lacked such a connection, and so it was bots for me. No big deal. I got really good, especially on Deathmatch, and you’ll just have to take my word on that.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is not Red Faction III. Still not sure if that’s a good or bad thing though. This time, the game is set on an open-world Mars and is not a first-person shooter. Instead, it’s a third-person action adventure title (with some driving, too), and our main dude Alec Mason is out for revenge over his brother’s murder, as well as to bring down the oppressive Earth Defense Force. That harkens back a bit more to Red Faction‘s plot where a no-name miner begins the great uprising. As Mason moves forward with his retribution plan, he’ll befriend some folk and make many enemies and destroy a bleep-load of EDF property, slowly whittling down their numbers and resources.

I originally played the game for a good amount of time upon initial purchase, but stopped after some of the Dust missions proved too hard and frustrating. Mission instructions were not very clear, and the moment you were caught out in the open and not hiding behind a crate, you were most certainly dead. It was when–many months later–I switched the difficulty from Normal to Casual that I saw myself advancing better. And I’m totally okay with that. There’s no reason to not to if it’ll help me experience and play a game I bought with hard-earned Space Credits. After the difficulty switch, it was a quick run through the remaining missions, which all lead up to an underwhelming finale that saw Mason rushing towards his target, throwing like ten sticky bombs on it, and blowing it up nice and good. And so:

Red Dawn (100G): Liberated Mars.

You’re welcome.

It’s an okay game. The truest fun comes from exploring the map, seeing some building you want to crumble, and then doing it however you want. The missions and driving aspects are less fun, often punishing or too nit-picky on how they want things done. After beating the game, I went back to clean up some Achievements, but there’s several for collecting things like ore deposits and radio tags that I just don’t want to go for. Too big of a map for such trivial thingies. Oh well. Online multiplayer is fun and something I expect to revisit from time to time, but waiting ten minutes for a game to start is not fun. So it has its pros and cons just like Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood‘s multiplayer.

Let’s end this post with a quote taken out of context from Red Faction: Guerrilla, but something all of us gamers can understand completely, yes? Here it is:

“If the EDF didn’t want us shooting these explosive barrels, they shouldn’t leave them around so much! Right?”

Damn skippy.

Testing the fields and busting tanks in Red Faction: Guerrilla

I gave the demo for Red Faction: Armageddon a spin the other night, and there’s not too much to talk about. It’s basically Red Faction: Guerrilla, but with a pinch of horror and a really neat new weapon, the Magnet Gun. Instead of taking place above ground on Mars, we’re now beneath the regions of Tharsis, deep below the dusty soil, where horrible abominations breed and lurk. It’s different enough from its predecessor in terms of locale, but the game seems to play very much the same. You run, you shoot, you obliterate things in your path.

I then had the itch to go back to Red Faction: Guerrilla after the demo was over, especially because I do enjoy causing massive amounts of in-game destruction. It’s just that the main story and main story missions have always given me grief; I can’t seem to get past the first few missions in Dust, unfortunately, but at least I have the freedom to drive around, blow structures up, and mine for ore.

I also played some more online matches and many rounds in Wrecking Crew, which is just an excuse and exercise in weapons of mass destruction. Matchmaking for online games is pretty slow and will probably severely slow down once Red Faction: Armageddon comes out, but I did get in several rounds of Team Anarchy. I held my own most of the time.

Anyways, here’s what I was able to unlock Achievement-wise after going back to the game for a bit:

Can’t Get Enough (20G): Played every mode on all maps in Wrecking Crew.

Field Tested (10G): Earned 1,000 XP in Multiplayer.

Tank Buster (10G): Blew up 100 small hydrogen tanks.

It’s still a hit or miss for me in terms of fun, but there’s something about Red Faction: Guerrilla that keeps calling me back. I dunno. Probably a deeply buried love for the original two PlayStation 2 games; heck, I spent countless nights battling AI bots in Red Faction II because I enjoyed it so very much. Maybe I’ll look up an online strategy guide and see if it can kept me (and Alec Mason) combat the EDF.

Welcome to Mars

I thought I needed a game to fill in the gap until I could play LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 again, but I think I was wrong. That’s like only two days away, and tonight I’m visiting Tara, leaving really only yesterday evening and tomorrow evening to battle boredom with my Xbox 360. Well, not really boredom…more like…procrastination. Yeah, that.

So. Red Faction: Guerrilla is cheap. The good kind of cheap. I found a used copy for $17.00 and, always having been a fan of the first two in the series, decided to give it a go. I’ve been on an open-world kick as of late, and for the first hour or so, it was actually hard to tell the difference gameplay-wise between this and The Saboteur. You run around and destroy the enemy’s stuff; you can hijack vehicles at the push of a button; the cover system is pretty lame; and you die a lot because instructions aren’t clear. But it’s fun. And crumbly. And set on Mars.

Red Faction is one of the first games I got for my PlayStation 2 way-back-when. That and Dark Cloud. It promised me I could blow holes in walls…and then go through the holes. Finally! It and its sequel were first person shooters, and they handled pretty well. I actually have more fond memories with Red Faction than with Red Faction II because I enjoy being a low miner in a renegade faction than some super soldier taking out zombies. Yup, zombies again. The only thing Red Faction II had going for itself was its multiplayer, even if I only ever shot at bots.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is more of an action-adventure game set on a very red, very dusty, and very empty Mars. You’d think with all that terraforming they’d have built a mall or burger joint. Anyways, this change is welcome. You play as a dude. Mason something. Something Mason. It doesn’t matter, and neither does this spoiler that comes at you predictably in the very beginning of the game: you are out for revenge against the Earth Defense Force (EDF) for killing your brother. Basically, you want to blow up EDF stuff and make people on Mars happy. Along the way you’ll collect salvage to buy new weapons and perks.

I played the main story for about two hours last night, which involved liberating a small development–I struggle to call it a town or anything close to that–from EDF hands. Blew up some buildings, defended a dorm, ran over some radio transmitter towers with a reinforced vehicle, and so on:

Spread the Word (10G): Liberated Parker Sector.

After that I roamed around the area, trying to collect some more salvage before exiting to the main menu screen. From there, I decided to see what this Wrecking Crew thing was about. Turns out…you wreck stuff! You are given a choice of levels and game styles, each with their own restrictions. Some limit the time you have for destroying stuff, and others limit your ammo. Fun all around. I tried each one once. Here’s proof:

Party Time (10G): Played all Wrecking Crew modes once.

I also partook (now that’s a funny word) in one multiplayer match over Xbox Live. I was not on the winning team, and I think I shot an enemy player once. There were also a bunch of jetpacks I didn’t know how to use. Yeah, gonna need some more practice…

So, all in all, it’s a decent game at this point. Like I mentioned before, very same vibe I got from The Saboteur. Big open world, lots to do and collect. That could be a good thing. We’ll have to see how it all plays out…

Red Faction to get the Syfy treatment sadly

Red Faction and Red Faction II are games I enjoyed yet never beat. Haven’t played Red Faction: Guerrilla save for the demo, which was fun, but I’m sure I’d have a great time not beating that game as well. Pew pew pew, explosion, explosion, save, accidentally forget to play again. That’s my process, at least. I enjoy them for the slow-paced shooters they are, and blowing holes in walls is always a party.

That said, I’m a little concerned about this news: THQ signed a deal with the Syfy channel that will allow them to produce a two-hour, direct-to-television movie based on Red Faction, the first game in the series which was about space mining and a rebel uprising.

And more so this news: In addition, Syfy will be involved with the next Red Faction game in some capacity.

Eep.

As well all know, videogame-movie adaptions never work out well. Yes, I know, I own Street Fighter: The Movie on DVD, but hush. The adults are talking. And just because Red Faction has all the makings of a Saturday afternoon Syfy “film” (let’s use that word sparingly)–mining colonies, slaves, futuristic weapons, bad voice-acting–that doesn’t mean it should be made. Alas, I don’t get the Syfy Channel anymore so I won’t be able to tell you all how this monkey-made movie turns out…