Montana Fragfest

The Grand Theft Auto series has been a classic series for all gamers. From the top-down excitement of GTA and GTA2 to the mind blowing 3dness (and the infamous hot coffee mod). Chinatown Wars takes the top down of the originals and the 3D (and hookers) of the later games mixes them together.

The Good

This game is fun, VERY stylized, and adult. Why do people love GTA games? Because they are open-ended sand box games that allow you go drive around hitting people with cars and causing mayhem.

The top down style fits very well with the limited 3d capabilities of the DS. Also the stylization makes you really forget that you are on a portable unit.

The Bad

The story is pretty lame, which isn’t that big of a problem. As I said above, the story in these games are worthless, but they are challenges so you end up doing them anyways after an hour or two of driving around for no reason.

The aiming can get a little wonky at times. While someone right in front of me is blasting me away with a shotgun, the game decides the woman pedestrian at the edge of the screen is a bigger threat.

The Ugly

The corny ass dialogue and goofy cut scene art is enough to make a person stab their eyes The characters in the cut scenes look like a 5 year old did them, and the conversations are just juvenile.

Although I did laugh the first couple times I heard a hooker say “You wanna piece of my pie?”, hearing it 300 times again while walking around the city gets old fast.

The Skinny

This game is fun. It has some problems, but I’m really enjoying the new crop of mature games coming out for the Nintendo console. I loved GTA and GTA2 so this game fit very well with me.

Tell you what, I’ve been a fan of the Battlefield series for a long time. Didn’t play much 1942, but I’ve played the HELL out of Battlefield 2 and loved every minute of it. As you all may know, I also happen to love Team Fortress 2. These reasons are why I was so excited to hear about Battlefield Heroes. With the announcement of an expanded public beta yesterday, I couldn’t help but sign myself up and give it a review.

The Good

The game look great. Very stylized (like Team Fortress 2), good sounds, great models. I like the “gain points to buy new items” aspect, because it encourages players to play consistently to buy and keep better weapons. Besides the pilot there are two extra seats on planes, and by seats I mean you sit on the wing and shoot at people.

The Bad

The game has no focus. The loss of the mini map makes you feel like you are just one guy running around a field. The weapons dont’ feel like they do damage (except to you, of course), and you feel thrown into a game with no teamwork whatsoever. My favorite ability in the Battlefield games was the ability of teammates to spot enemies for you. They have removed this from Battlefield Heroes and without this it is VERY hard to find snipers (and trust me one good sniper can just wreck a spawn) or let your pilots know where enemy planes are. There is also no voice chat or commander, which makes it TERRIBLY difficult to coordinate a team.

The vehicles are TERRIBLE. When flying a plane you have no clue where the other planes are and no seeming way to gain an advantage on them. The tanks just seem silly and without the mini gun for the driver there seems to be no good way to kill infantry with it.

The sounds get annoying QUICK. They tried to make the sounds as cartoony as possible, but I can only hear the sad trombone sound (only much higher pitched) so many times before I want to choke myself with my mouse cable.

The Ugly

As it stands right now, I would pass on this game. It just feels too disconnected. There is no teamwork and therefore it’s just another run around and shoot things, only this time you are stuck in a cartoon.

5. The Audience – It seems as a whole that PC gamers are usually mature. You see quite a few more whipper snappers playing the consoles these days. That is okay, I like to surf different crowds. You know, hop on Xbox live and pretend to be 16 then go to the Montana Fragfest TF2 server and be an angry 40 year old. This age gap is very apparent when on Xbox live when that DAMN 12 YEAR OLD WONT SHUT THE HELL UP AND QUICK SCREAMING INTO HIS HEADSET ABOUT “PWNING” AND TALKING SMACK ABOUT YOUR MOTHER. PC gamers just talk about getting drunk and/or stoned and still kicking ass on the server.

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All the scout stuff added I don’t care about, the only thing I see that matters in this update is:

Changed backstab handling to fix facestabs

I kidding, of course I care about the rest of the update! I’ll play around with it when I can and report back, in the mean time you can read the full update details and hop on yourself.

Today valve released the first unlock of the scout update to the world. What is it? A baseball. Why should you care? Because the baseball stuns enemies, even those enemies who happen to be invulnerable. Didn’t get that? If a heavy is ubered you can stun him with this weapon. The downside? No double jump when carrying this puppy.

This update is looking to bring back the thunder to TF2, I know I personally have completely given up on the game. Perhaps I’ll have to start practicing again so I can hit a home run or two.