Belated Shootember! Splinter Cell Conviction OR Adventures in uPlay

choke 'em out UNDER THE CLOWN

I didn't buy this game, but I've wanted to try a Splinter Cell thingie for a while, so when my friend offered to give me a free copy generated via a nvidia promotion I was all excitebike. Or, well ok, not so much excited as vaguely interested. The promotion was for the deluxe edition of Splinter Cell: Black List, but for some reason also came with a free copy of this game, which is pretty nice given I hadn't played any of them. It's pretty weird that a deluxe edition (ie, purchased by the game's core audience) would come with an extra game but hey that's really nice of them.

uPlay though, man oh man is uPlay a thing. I have two experiences previous with uPlay: One, I installed it to add a key from one of the Assassin's Creed games. I think Brotherhood, or something. The key was generated via a pricing error, so it was eventually revoked. I'm not upset about that, but it's worth pointing out that Electronic Arts had a pricing error that gave up hundreds of thousands of copies of games and they didn't revoke a single one. It worked too, that's why I have Origin and have actually given them money for Origin titles - Kingdoms of Amalur through Gamersgate, but certainly more of a success than nothing. My other experience is installing uPlay to figure out what I actually had on the account and the entire process being a bit well into irritating.

This latest experience is just a hassle. My friend gave me the code amazon had spat out. This code then goes into the nvidia website, which requires a webform. That gives me a coupon code for the ubistore, which uses my uplay account credentials. But it isn't uplay, really, because upon finishing the checkout process after getting all my ducks in a row (and it changing my address to a US postal code matched to Alberta, Canada which is a place I do not live in) it spat out ... An email. The email gave me the Conviction code, which I would then I have to input into uplay myself. But there was no Blacklist code!

No, that code shows up later, because this was before the release date. My word, there are so many more steps here than if it was on Steam. And most of them involve using outdated storefront software and gee wilkers mister ubisoft, get your damn shit together! Later it gave me Blacklist anyway and emailed me to let me know, but there's just so many things about this whole experience that gives me the feeling uplay is a year too early. Then an Installshield Wizard popped up and I honestly thought I'd traveled back in time.

I don't know overmuch about Splinter Cell, beyond the main character having a name I like and something about Tom Clancy which to my understanding is like a kiss of death? A friend of mine read spy novels by the dozens and Tom Clancy apparently upsets him. But this series has been going on long enough that something about it must be worth playing, right? And then the voice actor for Sam Fisher becomes apparent and it's the guy who played Ultra Magnus in Transformers Prime. UM was a space cop in the IDW run, and it's hard not to connect everything in my head and it's just so awesome. Sam Fisher, duly appointed enforcer of the awesome accord. Hells yea.

And then I remembered this is this VA's last game and damn it now I get why people were mad!

Play Relevant Month: Raging off the Rocks

When Doom was put out all those ages ago, it didn't really have much of a story. Like a good horror film, it presented itself through powerful visuals. It had lighting, it was spooky, you strapped in and off you went against the demon hordes. Game storytelling has moved up a fair amount since I was a little kid all those years ago, but there is something to be said for the Mario, the Sonic, the Doom style of gameplay introduction. You pick it up and go.

Rage on the other hand wants to have a story, so it opens with a cutscene, then what amounts to tutorial. The first time through, I got bored through the tutorial before I could save. I assumed it did the checkpoint autosave thing! So I had to do the start again. I stands out when you think about Doom, where I'd have been knee deep in the dead (hehe) in the same span of time.

The open is so jarring and weird to me besides. Like I said, you have your classic pick up and go games, and then you have storied games. In this, you're a guy in a pod, you wake up suddenly. And then pod opens to like, outdoors? So you think you're in the middle of some wasteland, which I guess you are, except some guy jumps you and bullets start flying seconds later. The pod was right there! If they wanted my delicious meaty bits, why didn't they just open the pod?

And then you're talking to John Goodman. He wants you to help out. For lack of anything else to do, you do. Spoiler: That describes the entire story.

Laser guided mutant ass simulator

Full disclosure: The last shooter I actually played through is Crysis 2, which I really like. In fact, pardoning my enjoyment of Doom I think Crysis is pretty much what I like in terms of single player shooting. I bought Hard Reset over the sale as well, but that game didn't seem as good so I went with Bulletstorm first. This, by the way, is how back logs grow into mighty forests of games.

Bulletstorm when compared to Crysis has a worse engine, shorter single player and a worse story. It's also got straight up worse gunplay, with a weird melee element that sort of trips you up when enemies magically get into melee and start pushing you around. I say magically because it's either an issue with how they spawn in or I'm not sure, but often I'd suddenly be getting kicked in the side by a mutant you'd think you'd notice running screaming at you.

That's pretty unfair though. Bulletstorm isn't necessarily an attempt at producing a serious shooter, rather a more slapstick goofy gunplay engine wrapped around a basic and simple story that works. You play a guy out for revenge on some jerk off, and you crash land a resort planet that didn't run its logistics so well and was overrun with mutants. It's heavily implied that the one faction of mutants you fight are the remaining tourists.

The game's resource system is uniquely structured around how you fuck enemies up. If you kill enemies with generic bulleting into the gut, you actually run out of ammo. On the other hand if you do fun trickshots, of which I think I explored maybe half the hundreds of them, you get bonus points. This helps encourage weapon variety, since different munitions have different costs and plus it's cool to laser guide an explosive sniper round into a mutant's ass, explode it and kill his friends for bonus points. They probably could have built more of the game around this as its fundamentally enjoyable and doesn't need a great deal of exposition to cover for.

The game's weapons are, however, woefully shitty and a major problem even on normal is that the guns basically don't feel like they do anything. I think I killed about 75% of all enemies with the sniper rifle, with some other limited amount going to the shotgun. The shotgun is terrible, with an effective range of about two feet and almost no damage dealing capacity. In this sense the "Trickshots" become something you absolutely have to do all the time, which takes the wind out of them. Half the time you're better of just booting enemies repeatedly into things, which seems a little ridiculous and gets tedious. There's also a sort of plasma leash weapon that you can pull enemies in and boot them out with, except it doesn't reliably work on half the enemies in the game so I just stopped bothering with it.

Enemy variety isn't great and enemy design isn't especially satisfying. There's a breed of Skull that can soak up regular gunfire without flinching, which is just moronic. I can't wrap my head around this design decision at all. I died to this several times simply because I can't tell them apart from the other enemies, or more likely because I was getting bored of spamming headshots off the sniper rifle. The bosses are, again, something you repeatedly shoot with the sniper rifle. If other weapons work well for them, I don't know, since you're only allowed 3 weapon slots and you need the sniper rifle to kill most everything and then something to switch to in melee when you get swarmed. Which is the shotgun, even though it sucks.

In normal games this isn't quite an issue, but in this you find yourself irritated without guns to do those jobs. You can boot enemies in melee, of course, but it isn't effective on multiple targets and is pretty wimpy unless you have something to kill them into.

On the plus side all the guns have an alternate fire mode that opens up some additional sweet options. The sniper rifle can switch to explosive rounds while the shot gun has some sort of powered up flame blast. Both of these options make them better at their existing jobs, though, so it's not really as exciting as it should be.

What does surprise me is just how good the 'vehicle sections' if you will, are. There's a couple arenas where the game switches it up a bit and I'm surprised at how much better they are than say, every vehicle segment in every fps ever. They're easy and simple, but the point of mixing up a game's variety isn't to brutally challenge the player, rather to break up the set pieces so you don't start to find the tedium.

So all of that is a little mediocre and probably why the game didn't go so well. On the other hand, the game is wonderfully immature in just the right way. The protagonist knows he's mostly fucked and voices his opinion in such a manner, a constant stream of goofy dick jokes and other high school levelbits. It's a sort of modern gallows humor that works exceedingly well within the game's setting. The planet you're on has been fucked sideways by human error and the story explaining what happened is actually much better than expected. There's some good development there and I actually found myself interested in the explanation of how everything got to go mad max style.

My favorite part is probably the female protagonist, simply because in a sea of immaturity, dick jokes and 'your robot side likes how I look in these pants' she isn't written as some goofball bimbo or shrieking nancy. The fact she didn't end up as sex object beyond being attractively drawn (but then so is the male lead) was really satisfying and helped keep the immaturity in the right quarter, but moreover the fact she's an important element to the progression of the story and the main character's "sort of" redemption works really well. Mostly because it is absolutely and completely unexpected.

She introduces herself by punching you in the face. Fresh!

For $5 I'm pretty satisfied with Bulletstorm. I don't know how the multiplayer is, since I'll never bother with it, but the campaign was fine for the five dollars. You can tell they put a ton of good honest effort in trying to keep the arenas fresh and interesting, with the bizarre ass resort world and its myriad of death traps properly varied.

I am going to have trouble watching Transformers Prime after hearing Blum make all those dick jokes, but oh well, Starscream is pretty goofy like that anyway.