04: Sand in my Shoes

OK guys, this is my 4th attempt on getting a nice introduction for this one, but Spec Ops: The Line doesn´t make it easy for me. At first I wanted to talk about how I don´t like 3rd Person Shooters that much, but it felt unimportant. Then I tried to approach it from the controversy that sourrounds this game and again it felt wrong. What I tried to say was: I get what Yager Development was trying with this game, but at least for me it doesn´t work because I think that Yager themself missed their own point. I do get that they want to take an anti-war position with this game and in both the cutscenes and the Storytelling itself it really works. They show you what effect your actions have, the characters question if their actions where necessary or not or if it was even the right thing to do. And the twist at the end really comes as a surprise and it works. I love the game for this, I really do, however it sadly still falls flat on it´s face and leaves you with very mixed feelings because the gameplay doesn´t support the anti-war approach the game tries to take. The big issue here is that Spec Ops is just a run off the mill cover based 3rd Person Shooter with a few turret-sections mixed in for good measure. And to make matters worse the violence during gameplay sections is way over the top with heads exploding with huge amounts of blood leaving bodies with a clean cut at the neck. It just feels wrong to have a splatterfest while mowing down waves of enemies and then trying to tell the player "Look at this, this is how bad war is and it does bad stuff even to tough soldiers!", it just doesn´t work.

This issue is even sadder when you realize how much Yager managed to get right with Spec Ops. Sure, the gameplay isn´t anything special, but Dubai covered and partialy buried in sand from a series of Sandstorms makes for both a very unique and in places surprisingly beautiful setting. In other places you really feel that this version of Dubai is a place where people have to fight to survive and fear for their lives on a daily basis. The environmental storytelling works and it feels like a lot of thought went into building a believable place. The Soundtrack is a mix of a less memorable original score and much more memorable licensed music by Deep Purple, Jimmi Hendrix and Bjork among many more. Amazingly each of these Songs fits the scene they are used in perfectly. The Story itself? A somewhat forgettable mess. Like mentioned above Dubai was hit by a series of Sandstorms and while the rich and wealthy upper class left the city before things got too bad the working class got trapped in the city. When Colonel Konrad, leader of the 33rd Infantry Battalion heard about the Sandstorms he vouluntered the 33rd to help and ignored orders to abandon the city. When the Storms got so bad that the city got cut off from the outer world Konrad declared martial law and the 33rd began to commit atrocities to the civilians left in the city. Some members of the 33rd didn´t like this and they tried to stage an coup d´etat, wich failed and got them exiled. The CIA then send in a Black Ops Team to investigate, as a part of this plan they started a revolution with the civialns to bring Konrad down. After a looping radio transmission get´s out of the city a three man Delta Force Team is send in to gather information.

Like I said the Story is a bit of a mess, heck, most of the time I wasn´t even sure if the CIA and their followers where on my side or not and at some point I stopped caring  about who it was I where shooting at. Sure, this may have been the intention of the developrs, but at the point I didn´t care anymore about my enemies the whole idea of the game already fell flat for me. Don´t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the game as a cover based 3rd Person Shooter, and as that it is great, but in my opinion the anti-war message they tried to get across doesn´t work when the gameplay doesn´t support it. For that the game schould have been much slower with much fewer enemies and a more realistic approach to violence. Yes, I do know that a slow, realistic game with an anti-war message would have been much harder to sell and andvertize, but I feel that it is the only way to really get the message to the people that play the game. I still recommend that you play Spec Ops: The Line yourself, just don´t expect that everything feels like it should belong in the same piece of media.

01: New Year´s Doom

The year isn´t even a week old and I have already beaten the first game in my attempt at the 52 Game Challenge and it is a regular one for me and that´s because of a little tradition of mine. You see, every year on January 1st I play through the original 3 Episodes of Doom. I have done this for the last decade or so and I do this to, in a methaphorical sense, show everything that went wrong in the previous year who is the boss. Why only Doom and not Ultimate Doom? Simply because I don´t like the 4th Episode. And even though I have played through it so many times by now using a lot of the official ports and fanmade sourceports I wouldn´t consider myself to be an expert when it comes to this game. The highes difficulty I can beat it at is "Hurt me plenty" and I don´t even know all the secrets on E1M1. The gameplay itself is easy enough to understand: Kill everything that moves and that isn´t you and find the exit. To find that exit more often than not you have flick some switches, collect different keycards and try to not get lost in the labyrinth-like levels. And these well designed levels can get fairly and complicated due to how the Doom-Engine itself works. Maps have to be build around the limitation that you can´t have multiple room´s above each other, and you probably won´t notice that unless someone point´s it out to you. Some of the maps make it even more confusing with teleporters that move you all around the map. The original PC-Version has a really awesome MIDI-Rock / Metal Soundtrack that is inspired by Hard Rock and Metal Songs from the late 80´s and early 90´s and it fit´s the fast gameplay really well and with the much more recent XBox Live Arcade / Domm 3 BFG Edition version of the game this Soundtrack really comes to live. To make all the Demon-killing easier you get small, but varied set of guns, my personal preffered tools of destruction are the Shotgun and the Chaingun, depending on the enemy I´m dealing with, the plasma gun get´s rid of larger groups with ease and the powerful rocketlauncher is something you have to use with caution because you can easily kill yourself with the blast radius. Your Pistol becomes obsolete the moment you get the Shotgun and the ultimate demon destroyer is the now legendary BFG-9000, this slow firing beast destroys everything hat´s comes a bit too close to it. This game comes highly recommended, even more than two decades after it´s initial release.

Demonic Invasion in Progress

If you ask me what my favourite Video Game is the answer will always be the Original Doom from 1993. Over the years it became somewhat of an ritual for me to beat it at least once a year. For such an early FPS it did so many things right, every weapon has it´s purpose, every enemy has an weak point, the levels are fairly open considering the limitations of the engine and computer hardware and the music kicks some serious MIDI-Ass. I wouldn´t go so far to say that is perfect, but it is pretty close. Doom 2 while still being very good didn´t too much for me. Some of the new enemies it introduced wheren´t balanced enough and overall it has the awkward feel of an Expansion Pack sold as a new game. After that humanity had to wait a whole decade to get a new Doom, and what a change of pace that one was. The Original games where fast, twitchy, gore fueled and heavy metal powered games, Doom 3 slowed things down. A lot. It had the same enemies, weapons and basic story as the original, but the gameplay was much more of an Horror game that in places took it´s time to build up some suspense. And because of that the version of it on the Original X-Box is the version of Doom 3 you should play. It cut´s out a lot of the slower parts, shortens some maps and feels a bit faster and more like an action game because of it. Between 2004 and now we only got an Add-On for Doom 3 and an re-release for more modern Hardware, but we finaly got a new Doom, and oh boy, what a glory one it is.

And to be honest with you I´m somewhat surprised that I even say that it is good at all, I hated both the Closed Alpha and Open Beta Multiplayer Tests for it, I was highly sceptical when I watched Videos with 10-15 Minutes of uninterrupted gameplay of it, I didn´t like the idea of even having unlockable weapon- and armor upgrades and yet I am now here saying that it is the best FPS I played in the last decade. Why you may ask? Well, because it is a modernized version of the Original. It is fast, twitchy, gore fueled and heavy metal powered. Everything is designed to be fun, nothings slows you down while you plow your way through hordes of demons, heck, you shouldn´t even slow down while in combat, Imps are bombarding you with Fireballs while the Pinky-Demons blindly charge in your general direction and only stop when they hit a wall or die. And because reloading weapons would slow you down you don´t have to do it, all the ammo you have is ready to be fired all the time, only the double barreled Shotgun (better known as the Super Shotgun) has a reload animation, but it happens so fast that it never becomes a problem. And even the Glory Kill dubbed Killmoves don´t get old over the duration of the campaign, the animations are quick, they are varied enough and they give you a short moment to take a breath when in combat. And even though there is a fairly decent Story somewhere between all the gore it never get´s in the way of all the fun, it just does whatever it needs to do and even the Doom-Guy himself doesn´t give a fuck about the details.

 The campaign levels are filled with secrets, each one even contains an unlockable Classic Map, featuring Pixelated Glory from Doom 1 and 2 and populaed with the new interpretations of the old Monsters. They are fun to play, but they need a slightly different approack than in the originals because of the changed gameplay mechanics. But the fun doesn´t end when you finish the campaign, after that you can jump into either the Multiplayer or the Snapmap mode. The later is basicly a Doom Lego Set that allows you to easily build your own maps with predefined room pieces, then you can fill it fith demons, objects, weapons and such fun things, set some rules, make it Single- or Multiplayer or even Co-Op. This Mode alone could be the source of endless fun. Sadly the Multiplayer is much weaker than everything else in the game. The reason for this is probably the fact that the MP-Part wasn´t developed in-house at id-Software. It was outsourced to an Studio that previously worked on the MP Parts of Call of Duty - Ghosts and the Halo Masterchief Collection, and you can see and feel that everywhere. It features Weapon Loadouts with just 2 Weapons and Customizations straight out of Halo. Don´t get me wrong, the MP is fun for a few matches, but it surely is nothing you will play for extended periods of time. Overall the new Doom surely is a loveletter to fans of the originals and it can even be considered an apology for Doom 3. It comes highly recommended.