ZylonBane on 25/1/2011 at 22:14
Quote Posted by Sulphur
The only thing that Bulletstorm needs to be is fun. Just like Painkiller and Serious Sam -- you know, two of the most unoriginal yet fun arcade shooters ever made.
Name another game like Serious Sam.
Sulphur on 25/1/2011 at 22:15
Um, it's there in that very quote.
ZylonBane on 25/1/2011 at 22:37
Painkiller does not play like Serious Sam in any but the most superficial ways shared by ALL first-person shooters. Try again.
Serious Sam is a game about putting players in gigantic mostly-flat arenas and then throwing hundreds of enemies at them. This is unlike Painkiller, Doom, and indeed most FPSs, which put the player in more tightly constrained, more three-dimensional environments. Serious Sam is essentially a first-person arcade shooter.
If you consider a game that includes enemies such as screaming headless kamikazes, skeletal horses, machine gun-wielding scorpions, and biological mechs to be "unoriginal", well... I can't help you.
Sulphur on 25/1/2011 at 22:47
Serious Sam has its fair share of rooms and corridors, ZB. Its hallmark might be the arenas, but in terms of originality, the bigger picture is that Painkiller and Serious Sam lack any complexity besides running around and pressing the trigger button - with maybe the odd bit where you push a block to open a door somewhere.
Besides the Kamikaze bombers, the rest of the things that you described aren't unique in terms of design - visually or with respect to gameplay. They all have standard attack patterns, you learn how to dodge and utilise those patterns. Pretty much what you do in most games that give their AI a semblance of thought aside from 'rush the player'. Serious Sam mixed things up exactly by mixing all those enemies and their attack patterns in at the same time.
Painkiller may have been browner and more corridor-centric, and therefore memories of it tend to merge into featureless mush, but it had a fair amount of NPC attack variety as well. Not as much as Serious Sam, but the element of mixing different NPC attack patterns was in there too, albeit to a much more limited extent.
june gloom on 25/1/2011 at 23:48
I don't think what happened to Koki really qualifies as nurturing
Judith on 25/1/2011 at 23:58
I might be wrong but I don't think we had 1-3 AAA shooters per month in times of Doom or even Serious Sam. And I guess I'm with Zylon on "laughing problem". At least judging by the demo, where you get a lengthy tutorial movie, it's pretty clear that they're trying so desperately to sound funny and cool, rather than just being funny and cool in the gameplay part and letting the player experience that. I hope I'm wrong here or I'm just tired of shooters right now. That said, I'm getting back to Dead Space 2 demo ;)
Koki on 26/1/2011 at 07:11
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Serious Sam is a game about putting players in gigantic mostly-flat arenas and then throwing hundreds of enemies at them. This is unlike Painkiller
This is
exactly like Painkiller.
june gloom on 26/1/2011 at 10:38
Did you actually play Painkiller? Because it didn't really have much in the way of "mostly-flat arenas."
Sulphur on 26/1/2011 at 12:27
Quote Posted by Judith
I might be wrong but I don't think we had 1-3 AAA shooters per month in times of Doom or even Serious Sam. And I guess I'm with Zylon on "laughing problem". At least judging by the demo, where you get a lengthy tutorial movie, it's pretty clear that they're trying so desperately to
sound funny and cool, rather than just
being funny and cool in the gameplay part and letting the player experience that. I hope I'm wrong here or I'm just tired of shooters right now. That said, I'm getting back to Dead Space 2 demo ;)
We certainly don't have 1-3 AAA shooters per month now either. Holiday seasons are weighted down with them, but there certainly aren't 3 big budget shooters coming out every month for the rest of the year. Shooters have always been wildly popular - for goodness' sake, when Doom came out, the Doom clone became an entire genre unto itself.
That's beside the point, anyway. I think you need to settle down on what exactly your argument is - Bulletstorm was never touted as original, so to expect that from it now when it wasn't promised is sort of silly. If you don't like the atmosphere and the obnoxiousness of it, fair enough -- like I said, you can try ignoring it, but if you can't, you can't.
Oh, and I'm playing DS2 as well as soon as it gets here. ;)
henke on 26/1/2011 at 14:52
Don't read this if you're hyped about this game, rather just go into it with an open mind. You may get more out of it than I did.
There's a demo out for the 360, and I just played it. It's only one level, but you're urged to replay it a few times and try to improve on your score. There's a leaderboard that keeps track of your highscore as compared to your friends scores. So in that way it's a lot like The Club, which I didn't like. Also the presentation, more specifically the voice-over, is a bit annoying.
But what really matters here is of course the gameplay. Is it any good? And the answer is: eeeehhhhh... it's ok. I like the idea of coming up with creative ways of disposing your foes instead of the conventional "hide behind cover and try to get headshots"-gameplay. For instance in GTA4 when you shoot out the wheels of the copcar pursuing you and he crashes, blocking off the road for your other pursuers. Or in Fallout 3 when you spot powerful foes in the distance and set up landmines before you start sniping at them, then retreat to a nearby cover when they approach, get blow up by the landmines and you clear off what's left of them with your assaultrifle. When you either plan something carefully or spontaneously come up with an idea and it works thanks to emergent gameplay; that's "killing with skill" at it's most satisfying.
The problem with Bulletstorm is that it's not spontaneous. When you leash a guy and then kick him up in mid-air and riddle his body with bullets before it hits the ground; that's simply playing the game as it was meant to be played. When I kicked dudes off cliffedges or into sharp spikes it didn't feel like I was doing anything original, just doing what the developers wanted me to do. In this game, you do not need to be creative or inventive to kill with skill. And that takes all the fun out of it, especially as that is the game's main selling point.
