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March 29, 2024, 03:43:23 PM

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FPS NIGHTMARES

Started by Lemming, November 17, 2019, 12:23:16 PM

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Lemming

Perfectly happy for this to evolve into a dual-purpose ARMATRADING AND CLASSIC FPS THREAD (the first such thread in internet history, and the net's only place to discuss both Gearbox's shortcomings and Joan's whole catalog in the same post). Her whole discography is littered with brilliance and so many different styles and genres but that 1976 self-titled album really is especially ace. In addition to "Down to Zero", "Love and Affection" is one of those rare songs that's so good that it feels like it shouldn't even be able to exist.

(mandatory mention of FPS games here)

Ferris

You'd be living a "half life" if you didn't listen to her back catalogue, eh readers?!

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Seems appropriate for a thread about gun games to involve arms trading.

Lemming

I've been going back and playing some of THE CLASSICS on various fan-made source ports, as part of my months-long attempt to put off having to play shit like "Codename Outbreak", whatever that is. Something really worth checking out is The Force Engine, which currently allows for feature-complete playthroughs of Star Wars: Dark Forces and will apparently include support for Outlaws in future builds.

Just replayed Dark Forces (on Hard!!!) on this and I really enjoyed it, more than ever before. A lot of the things that wound me up in the original playthrough like the ceiling turrets and the FUCKING deathtrap level on Jabba's ship were a lot of fun this time around thanks to slightly smoother controls and clearer visuals which meant I only walked into landmines about half as much as I did in the original.

purlieu

Mate stop replaying things we need new reviews.

Lemming

Replaying games has allowed me to go back and release FPS NIGHTMARES: DIRECTOR'S CUT: DEFINITIVE EDITION. This new re-release features enhanced effects for the reviews, such as bloom and lens flare, making them look better than ever before:


This is the definitive way to ~*experience*~ FPS NIGHTMARES.

The next game on the actual list is the mysterious Project Eden, which it seems virtually nobody has ever played.

madhair60

I thought that was third person! But interested anyway. I remember it, multi-character thing with a big robot?

Lemming

That's the one! Wikipedia has it listed as an FPS but it does seem to be one of those games from the era that's essentially meant to be played in third-person, but has a first-person option included just for laughs.

Made by Core Design! It'll be interesting to see what Core were up to during the brief period where Eidos weren't forcing them to churn out a yearly Tomb Raider.

Pink Gregory

Kim Justice did a big vid on Core Design a few months ago, I don't remember catching all of it but might be of interest.


evilcommiedictator

Quote from: Lemming on July 21, 2022, 05:18:05 PMThe next game on the actual list is the mysterious Project Eden, which it seems virtually nobody has ever played.

I have the CD right here - it was meant for four player co-op with each person having a different skill, one operates consoles, one has a shield, one is immune to things and so on.
I played it when I got it but found it a bit slow as I had to swap between each character, so I wonder if it is a big thing or not

Lemming

Playing around with one of the many AI art generators that are now up on the internet, laughed so hard at this I nearly puked:




Would make it my profile pic if I wasn't so firmly attached to the Nina Hagen one.

shoulders


Lemming

FPS NIGHTMARES' renowned unique, freeform update schedule DELIVERS FOR THE BRITISH PEOPLE once again!

Started Project Eden and ended up ditching it, can't remember why at this point. I think my save wouldn't load. Might go back to it. My chronological list of FPS games has not only figuratively gone out the window, it's also literally gone out the hard drive. At this point, I might just post reviews of whatever's available, if anyone's still interested. I've had a review of Far Cry written and saved for like a year that I might as well post. With that in mind, here's:

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)



RELEASE DATE: November 19th, 2001



STORY: BJ gets captured and taken to Castle Wolfenstein (again, though this is a prequel to Wolfenstein 3D, or something). After escaping, the race is on to stop the Nazi Ubersoldat project!

HALT!: I really liked this game when I was growing up. Though I played Doom and Heretic constantly as a kid, I was so small that they were basically just nice colours and shapes on the screen. By the time of Blood and Outlaws, I was just about old enough to move around without immediately getting sniped, and then of course Half-Life came along, but it was the games released around the turn of the century that felt like "my" games, in that I was at an age where I could engage with them properly and not just go "goo goo ga ga" at the screen while getting fucked up by a Cacodemon.

Max Payne and Mafia were among the first games I remember actually going to the shop myself on the weekend to buy, and being suitably amazed by both. RTCW was one of the others - I was the kind of cunt who read PCGamer or PCZone (forget which), and I'm fairly sure it had been hyped up to high heaven. "THE GRANDADDY OF FPS IS BACK!", they probably wrote. I got RTCW around the time it came out and absolutely loved it, and had nothing but fond memories of it.

I'm bringing all this up because it's easy to be nostalgic for this whole era. In reality, though, it's a bit of a weird time for gaming, and FPS games especially - developers are grappling wtih the possibilities presented by new engines, and with the abstract design of early-to-mid 90s FPS games pretty much completely gone, the focus is now on creating more believable and realistic game worlds. This often translates to smaller and more linear levels - not necessarily a bad thing, but a style that can easily lead to dull results if you're not careful. Developers are also trying to figure out how full 3D combat ought to work. I think, despite seeming to be rather forgotten in the pantheon of FPS history, Soldier of Fortune was the first game to really make full 3D combat work - enemies having countless reactions to being shot, numerous damage zones on enemies to achieve different effects when hit, and varied weapons that each have a different feel and are appropriate for different contexts. Oh, and *BEING ABLE TO FUCKING LEAN AND FIRE FROM COVER*, can't understate what an absolute difference that makes.

There's something telling, though, about the fact that the new wave of FPS games that's revived the genre recently - Ion Fury, DUSK, Amid Evil, etc - tend to go with the approach of just pretending that everything developed after 1998 didn't happen (well, that's oversimplistic, but you get what I mean). You can kind of feel a sense of confusion in a lot of these early 2000s games - there's a desire to break away from the keycard mazes of the past, but no real idea of what the future is meant to look like. Developers are quick to try and shake up the gameplay with half-implemented ideas like forced stealth levels and crap vehicle segments that might have raised an "oh, I see what they're going for" at the time, but inspire more of an "oh god no" when played twenty years later.

This BORING PREAMBLE is here because RTCW strikes me as a game that's awkwardly stuck between two distinct periods of game design, and which time hasn't been kind to. It's impossible not to play RTCW in 2022 and not immedately begin comparing it with its immediate forebears (Half-Life, Soldier of Fortune, NOLF) and its immediate successors (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty). It feels as though it sort of predicts a lot of MoH and CoD's style, but in a way that's not as successful as either of those games, while simultaneously exhibiting some of the same pitfalls as other pre-CoD shooters of the day.

Onto the game itself: As the world teeters on the edge of Nazi domination, the FPS genre teeters on the edge of descending into a pile of identical miltiary shooters! Will BJ save us... OR DOOM US?

The intro to the game is good - you spawn in a cell, standing over a guard's dead body and holding a knife, just as in Wolfenstein 3D. Castle Wolfenstein has gone from being a nightmarish maze in 1982's "Castle Wolfenstein" to a rather smaller and more navigable maze in 1992's "Wolfenstein 3D" to a pretty comically small and lightly-guarded luxury resort in RTCW. Nevertheless, the visuals are incredibly impressive for 2001, the atmosphere is strong, and the design of these first few levels is quite tight (phwoar). You're up against the most basic enemies so headshots are lethal, and you get to grips (phwoar) with the MP40, the gun you're likely to be using for most of the first half of the game. These levels are a bit easy, even on the hardest difficulty, but they're straightforward FPS fun. Good start.

Soon you are tasked with navigating a village and chumming around with your German resistance mates. Again, decent enough level, and then we get to the catacombs. The catacombs are possibly the most memorable bit of the game - not because of the level design itself, but because this is the first time RTCW feels like it's really got its own identity. The WW2 theme and the supernatural theme tie together wonderfully with the German soldiers retreating through the tunnels pursued by the undead. The zombies are fun to fight and feel significantly different from human enemies. Though the level design isn't exactly top-of-the-range, it does include some really cool stuff - zombies coming out of the walls, a room with three deadly traps to dodge, the floor collapsing from underneath you... has a very Indiana Jones feel.

After this, we get another decent level in which we raid a cathedral to face off against some of the most elite SS troops - a group of witches bound by a coven who have "extreme training" which, strangely, allows them to take several shots to the head without flinching. That's "training" for you. Up til now the game has been almost comically easy on the hardest difficulty, so it's a nice change to have these SS UBERWITCHES who shred you to absolute shit. Get caught in their line of sight and they hit you with hitscan automatic fire that can kill you in about two seconds. They're hidden in corners and tend to ambush you, but it doesn't feel unfair - if you check your corners, you've usually got at least some chance of taking them down before they kill you. They wear catsuits, by the way. To guard this cathedral that's already occupied by Nazi forces.

Followed by this is the first boss battle, a really lame fight against this big flesh golem thing. It's just a matter of unloading all your automatic weapon ammo into it. The only thing it can really do to you (other than a ramming attack that you'd have to actively try to ever get hit by) is to throw ghosts at you, which will blind you and kill you in seconds, but which also disappear shortly after spawning. Very poor boss fight, but not the worst in the game, amazingly!

So, that's the first set of levels (or first two, if the castle escape is meant to be its own mission). So far so good. Combat is quick and feels reasonably balanced, the game's unique occult themes are present, and the level design is pretty solid. The boss fight sucked, but find me a good FPS boss battle.

After that, we're thrust into the forced stealth mission in the forest which everyone hates. Not going to defend it, but I think people overstate the case a bit - it's not insurmountable, you won't get seen unless you start sprinting, and you can clear it pretty straightforwardly in about six or seven minutes. The problems for me start coming after this level - the V2 research facility and the airbase are both a drag, just concrete corridors with countless mooks to gun down. Again, though it's arguably not fair to compare RTCW to games that came later... this feels exactly like MoHAA and CoD, except RTCW's combat and encounter design is weaker than both of those games, making the inevitable comparison an unfavourable one.  Before entering the base there's a big open area which also doesn't quite come off, you can clear it effortlessly with the Snooper rifle or even the regular Mauser.

Here, we also meet the paratrooper enemy, and quickly learn that they're going to be a colossal pain in the cock. Enemies so far have been high-damage but low-health, meaning as long as you get the first shot in, you've got a chance of coming out on top, and if you get a headshot, you've won. The paratroopers deal high damage but are also spongey, and for the first time, the combat's weaknesses are laid bare. There's no pain/stun/flinch stuff in this game*. If you and a paratrooper are face to face, you can fire your MP40 at close range directly into his head and still die as he calmly aims and fires at you like nothing's happening. Reminiscent of Unreal's Skaarj or Half-Life's HECU, except both those games had many ways to mitigate the naffness of the combat. RTCW doesn't.

*there are stun animations in the game, but with two problems. One is that the only time I can remember triggering them is by shooting the SS enemies in the head with a sniper rifle - needless to say, an enemy soldier going "ooh fuck" and stumbling for a second after a direct headshot before taking aim at you is completely annoying when it feels like it ought to be a kill. Secondly is that, according to people online, enemies are invincible while playing the stagger animation - I can't confirm if that's true, but if it is, fucking hell, what an awful design choice.

Next mission set is possibly my least favourite - you're to escort a captured tank through a ruined city (MoHAA would do this exact same thing a year later!). Mainly, you've got to rush ahead of the tank before it drives itself into the inevitable panzerfausts and anti-tank guns lurking for it around each corner, clear the area, then stand around like a twat waiting for the tank to slowly reach you and clear a small knee-high obstacle so you can proceed. Like all the game's levels, this is really short and takes about four or five minutes. After that, we've got to fight our way through some ruins, which really dragged for me, not least because the SS and paratrooper units are now the main enemy force. The game still isn't difficult as such, but because enemies now take more than a couple shots to kill, the flaws of the combat come to the forefront, and everything feels unimpacftul and weak. The presence of snipers and panzerfaust-wielding enemies means that gameplay can devolve into seeing where you're being shot from, dying, reloading, then proceeding with your mystic foreknowledge of enemy sniper encampments until you clear the level.

There's another concrete-corridor research facility (during which the sci-fi and occult stuff finally comes back, but regrettably in the form of Lopers, these lightning-knobs who can't be stunned and leap towards you to fry you with electricity even as you unload the Venom minigun into them).

I'll stop the blow-by-blow here to summarise by saying that I think the game starts to go to pieces after this point. The spongier the enemies get, the more the failings of the combat system become apparent. The Ubersoldats and Lopers just bring everything down whenever they show up, and the elite human enemies make everything into a chore. Most of your weapons get outmoded, you'll mainly rely on the paratrooper rifle which I found felt really naff to fire. Your only real advantage at this point in the game is range, because the spread of most weapons is so ridiculous that as long as you're stood a good distance away from an enemy, they'll barely hit you, and you can return fire with your more accurate rifles. The final chapter, in which you descend into a digsite full of weird shit, at least brings the mood of the game up even if the gameplay has gone arse-wards. Oh, there's also one more forced stealth mission, which takes place in a village where you have to assassinate some Blokes and Chaps. I actually quite liked it, barring the presence of one guard who magically sees you from 5000 meters away through a wall.

So...

THE GOOD:
- The variety in levels can be impressive when you're not running around in in samey concrete bunkers. The first few missions in particular feel nicely varied - the opening does feel like a desperate escape that turns into a rampage, the town and the catacombs are a great pairing of levels that shift you from the mundane to the fantastical very suddenly and very effectively, and the forced stealth forest mission - while bollocks - does have a certain appeal in how it shows the devs' willingness to shake things up. The second forced stealth mission is genuinely not bad at all, and presents a cool little puzzle in which you've got to figure out when and where to strike against the guards to avoid raising the alarm.

- The production values are incredible and the game is visually fantastic. The graphics can easily compete with games released a couple years later.

- Some levels have great design. I really liked the town with the German resistance early on, and the cathedral after the catacombs.

- After an easy start, the difficulty becomes pleasingly tough on Hard, and for a brief while the game hits a great difficulty balance. It does collapse towards the end, of course, though even when the spongey enemies do arrive, there's a certain appeal in the challenge, though that appeal disspiates when the FUCKING LOPERS FLY AT YOU AT 300MPH

- While the stealth mechanics don't really seem to work consistently, their presence is appreciated, as in NOLF.

- The first third of the game is really enjoyable, combining a great mix of Hollywood-WW2 stuff and weird occult shit, and providing enemy types that keep the combat's flaws to a minimum - weak human soldiers who can deal a bit of damage but die fast, zombies who take half a clip to kill but are slow and mostly melee-based, the fire demon things who need to be engaged at range to avoid their flamethrowers, and the SS witch squad who can kill you in half a second if you're not on the lookout.

THE BAD:
- As mentioned, the great weakness is the simplistic combat. Lack of enemy reaction to being hit, spongey enemies in the later levels, and generally unimpacftul gunplay conspire to drag the game down. NOLF seems like a good point of comparison, in that both games are shooters with slight stealth elements and varied level design. NOLF got away with the occasional crap level because the combat generally worked well, guns were fun to use, and enemies felt reactive. RTCW screeches to a halt on the occasional crap level because the core mechanics just aren't strong enough to keep things moving.

- There's not much in the way of weapon variety - you're mostly stuck with the regular set of WW2 weapons. Your MP40 is joined by a Thompson and a silenced Sten. The Thompson is pretty useless and perpetually short on ammo and the Sten, while accurate and lethal, overheats after like two nanoseconds (which is a cool gameplay feature).

- Bullet spread is ridiculous, unless you crouch, at which point your accuracy is nearly perfect. Better make sure you're always crouching before firing, or you're just wasting ammo. I don't know why this is in "THE BAD", other than that it annoys me that a submachine gun magically becomes vastly more accurate when BJ kneels down a bit. First time I've ever done a THE GOOD/THE BAD thing, please be gentle.

- This one's subjective, but I hate real-world military shooters. That's not to say I dismiss them out of hand - I really like MoHAA and the first CoD overall - but it's always in spite of the setting. The advantage of Wolfenstein should be that it's less grim and boring and more fantastical and Indiana Jones-y - I mean, you aquire the Spear of Destiny and literally go to hell to fight a demon in Wolf3D's expansion, and the end of Wolf3D itself has you fighting Hitler Mages to reach Mecha-Hitler. But, completely contrary to my memories of this game, the supernatural elements are rather thinly-spread. It's always there in the background of the plot, but most of the game's actual levels could just be swapped for levels in CoD or MoH with nobody any the wiser. The game hits on all the tropes - bombed-out city with burning buildings, stealthy dam assault at night, U-Boat pen, rocket facility, endless series of concrete corridors with signs that say "ACHTUNG". I was really struck by how much of RTCW is, essentially, just a regular WW2 shooter.

I mean, look at this - even if you've never played RTCW, you already know what's going on in all these images, where we are, what we're doing, what we'll find in these levels:




Wolfenstein 3D mostly used the WW2 setting as an excuse to not bother writing much of a story, but even that put more of a twist on things than RTCW. Wolf3D at least had a sense of cartoonish ridiculousness about it - surreal visuals, SS officers who were inexplicably physically larger than regular soldiers, absurd end-of-episode bosses ("GUTEN TAG!"), the demented grin and the leitmotif when you pick up the chaingun, the jokey plot summaries at the end of each mission, the ridiculous animation of BJ hyperventilating and grinning in the elevator, "GET PSYCHED", all that. RTCW feels po-faced by comparison. It almost feels like an expansion back for MoHAA that randomly inserts a zombie or cyborg every five maps or so. There's a few traces of Wolf3D's silliness - the Helga character and her catsuit witch brigade being the most obvious - but it's not often.

FINAL RATING: One of the hardest things in playing games from 20 - 30 years ago is that you can't really get into the mindset of playing them when they were released. It's impossible to play RTCW in 2022 and not immediately make connections to MoH and CoD, and the 20 years of military shooter hell we suffered through since. What might have seemed fresh in 2001 now feels very worn out, what might have seemed like a promising idea we now know to be a failure (forced stealth!), graphics that might have been impressive at the time now just look like any other Q3 engine WW2 shooter.

People might think that CoD and MoHAA are unfair points of comparison, and that RTCW isn't comparable with them beyond the surface level. In that case, I'd nominate NOLF as the other obvious game to compare and contrast with. Where NOLF's sense of style is unsurpassed, RTCW's tone a bit muddled. Where NOLF's core combat mechanics are sound, RTCW's are too basic. Where NOLF's weapon variety is superb (ammo types!), RTCW's is limited. Both games have stealth systems that don't quite work, but NOLF feels more committed to it with the (useless) gadgets and shit. Both games do have enemy conversations you can overhear as a mini-reward if you manage to skulk about undetected far enough.

But I think the MoH and CoD comparisons are fair, especially MoHAA, which is a near perfect match for RTCW, having almost the exact same concepts for levels at times, and focusing on the adventures of a mostly-lone secret agent (CoD being obviously more about massive spectacle and squad-based stuff). In pretty much any area of comparison between the combat of MoHAA and the combat of RTCW, MoHAA comes out on top.

That's the problem. The game strikes me as being in a similar place to something like, say, Klingon Honor Guard (and I liked that game!). Basically, almost everything Klingon Honor Guard did well had already been done better by the likes of Jedi Knight, and would subsequently be done better by Half-Life. Klingon Honor Guard is a good (albeit flawed) game, but you can understand why it barely gets a look-in from anyone these days - it compares unfavourably with games released both immediately before and immediately after it.

RTCW retains a few 90s-ish design elements that give it an edge over its subsequent competitors - each still level has secrets to find, for example, which is always something sorely missed in later 2000s FPS games - but the whole WW2 military shooter angle is about to be done in spectacular fashion by the two incoming titans of MoH and CoD, and combat against mostly-human hitscanner enemies in full 3D spaces has already been handled better by SoF and NOLF, with the latter even arguably doing the stealth shooter thing better than RTCW. RTCW's only real advantage is the supernatural and sci-fi elements, but in practice the "exotic" enemy types really suck (except the zombies, who are alright) and the unusual weapons are just an experimental minigun (which you'll have to save to deal with the sponge-bastard Lopers and Ubersoldats) and a sucky tesla cannon.

On the other hand, you could compare it to Mortyr, in which case RTCW comes out looking like the greatest piece of art ever made.

That's my take on it: a strong first third or so, a generally weak final third, and a rather forgettable middle section. The game is mostly solid, with some great moments and some awful moments (THANKS TO THE FUCKING LOPERS). Definitely still worth a playthrough in 2022, but brace for a bit of a late-game slog. I played on the hardest difficulty and, for anyone who's playing for the first time or revisiting, I'd suggest swallowing your GAMER PRIDE and playing on a lower setting instead, because Hard simply isn't fun in the later levels. 3 LOOK AT THIS, HERE IT COMES, NO WAY TO AVOID IT, WOW, INSTANT DEATH, FUCKING HELL out of 5.



By the way, did you know that this game was developed by the same people behind Redneck Rampage and Kingpin: Life of Crime? Both games had severe problems with spongey and unbalanced enemies, it's actually a miracle that RTCW is as good as it is - and I'm saying that as someone who really warmed to Kingpin.

THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A THE DAY TODAY QUOTE:



I know this one's a beloved favourite for many people - again, I went into it expecting to give it at least a guaranteed 4/5 - so tell me why my lukewarm reaction to the game is wrong! Begin your message with "LOOK HERE, LEMMING, YOU'VE GOT IT ALL ARSE-BACKWARDS AS USUAL. LET ME SET YOU STRAIGHT...".

Mister Six

Hooray, the reviews are back! Cheers, really enjoyed this one.

Ferris

Look how lovingly someone has rendered the sight and foregrip on that FG-42 rifle. Real early '00s craftsmanship, half way between realistic and cel shaded. Video games never looked better than this era, you can keep yer PS5s and 4K HD gaming.

See also: the lovely blue hue in the dam screenshot that has been applied to everything. Nice.

PlanktonSideburns


purlieu

Quote from: Lemming on September 20, 2022, 12:11:16 AMif anyone's still interested.
Understatement of the year.

Yeah, get these posted, we'll take whatever. Looking forward to your take on the Half-Life sequels whenever they come along as well.

Remember also getting pulled into the PC Zone hype and buying this, I loved the early levels and any game where you can overhear enemies conversations as they go about their day instantly made me think it was the most immersive thing ever. I ended up getting really put off the game as soon as the supernatural parts came in (should have done my research) and thought the same about Far Cry, going from an immersive world done well in a specific time and place to then going to catacombs and the usual diml-lit greys with monsters running about.

Now I know that it doesn't last for long this review makes me want to pick it up again and give the rest of the game ago (+1 for more reviews, still top 5 all-time threads on here).

Lemming

#1548
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002)



RELEASE DATE: 20th January, 2002



STORY: When WW2 breaks out, one man must undertake a series of dangerous missions to turn the tide of the conflict. For more information, check here.

30 SECONDS!: Over 70 million people dead, many more left with life-changing injuries and permanent mental scarring. Countless homes destroyed, countless young men forced to fight and die, countless women and children subjected to brutality and sexual violence.

Families torn apart. Millions rendered homeless and destitute and starving, innumerable women forced into survival prostitution. Nazi death camps, executions, bombing of civilians, famines, wholesale destruction of towns and cities, people tortured and brutalised en masse, people killed as human medical experimentation subjects, the deployment of two nuclear weapons.

What do you think of when you consider all this? Don't say it, I know what you're thinking - you're thinking this sounds like a great backdrop for some high-spirited jovial shoot-em-up fun! And the good people at 2015 Inc. (wow! futuristic!) agree with you! They've made MEDAL OF HONOR: ALLIED ASSAULT, a cheerful and breezy romp through one of the world's darkest hours. As we giddily blast our way through the most lethal conflict in human history, will we be able to collect all the medals - even the vaunted MEDAL OF HONOR itself?*

*no, because the Medal of Honor itself is not actually among the medals you can win in this game

Alright, the game is essentially an update of 1999's Medal of Honor for the PlayStation, many of the missions in this are based on levels from the first game in the franchise. As in that game, and in RTCW, we're playing as a very special boy who's so good at shooting people that a group of important men have decided to promote him from "SHITTY IDIOT" to "SPECIAL AGENT", and he therefore gets to go on all the most exciting missions. Our name? MIKE POWELL!

The first of Mike's heart-pounding adventures is "LIGHTING THE TORCH", a daring stealthy nighttime rescue operation in the deserts of Tunisia! We're being dispatched to rescue lost SAS agent Jack Grillo, who's fucked his whole mission sideways and needs to be bailed out by Americans. Highly embarrassing for him, but even moreso for us, because our squad begins the stealth mission like so:



That's us on our covert stealth mission. Dressed in gear that immediately identifies us as members of the US armed forces. Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans - the crafty Germans somehow see through our world-beating disguises and the entire thing turns into a deathly clusterfuck about thirty seconds into the game. This is good news for Mike, who now finds himself in his element (being a man who shoots at other men).

First thing to mention is that they did a great job with the gunplay - you start with an M1 Garand rifle which feels great to fire. The very first area has a town gate to fight your way through, giving you an opportunity to test the Garand's long-range capabilities by shooting the guys on the walls. The intro level is generally pretty good - you pick up an MP40 pretty quickly (which feels and sounds fantastic), giving you a chance to dick about with a close-range SMG, and the level concludes with a turret segment that's about as boring as all other turrent segments.

I played on Hard and the difficulty was excellent in this first level - your health drains fast if you're shot and anyone with an SMG can take you out in seconds, but the maps are designed in a way that always gives you a chance to react before the pain starts. Plus, enemies stagger when hit by anything, and the game features a locational damage system, so enemies will react more to being shot in the head than in the foot (obviously). Additionally, enemies sometimes have surprise animations that they play if they turn to see you and weren't aware of your presence, which gives you the chance to be a piece of shit and strike first - that's cool and I don't think it's really been in any other game up til now.

There's no way to save your team in the first mission. They have low health and are stupid so they tend to die throughout the level anyway. You'll be lucky if "Private Allen" manages to survive the starting cutscene since he hurls himself into the exploding truck that you're all fleeing. But if you do manage to save your team, all but one of them will suddenly and simultaneously drop dead of heart attacks at the end of the level:



No worries. These men were expendable - their only job was to get super-agent MIKE POWELL behind enemy lines. We soon find Grillo, who's like "fanks for sayving me, mayte". What follows is a pretty dull section in which you have to follow him and are thus tied to his laughably leisurely pace, which eventually leads you into a stealth mission and then a turret segment where you're on the back of a jeep driven by Grillo.

Cunt that he is, Grillo rejoices in driving the jeep very slowly through heavily-guarded areas, and almost seems to steer the fucking thing into oncoming panzerfausts. You won't last long on Hard, and I had my first death here. Mercifully the ride ends and you're dumped into one more level of standard solo FPS action, which concludes the mission. Overall it's a great opening to the game - you cover a big range of styles from standard corridor shooter to mobile turret segment to stealth, you get to mess around with a nice range of the game's weapons, and the level design does a superb job at easing you into the basics of combat.

Next mission is to sneak into a U-Boat facility (like we just did in RTCW) and scuttle a U-Boat. This is a remake of a mission from the PS1 Medal of Honor, but it expands on the concept far beyond the original game. First though, tragedy strikes - Grillo is shot dead! Goodnight, sweet prick. You've got a sniper now and the game expects you to use it, putting deadly accurate enemies halfway across the map. When you get inside, the disguise segment starts. The mechanics are nothing special - just don't walk near officers, and always make sure you're out of sight before you murder someone to steal their ID - but something about the novelty value of this whole segment makes it really work.

When you board the U-Boat and plant the explosives, your disguise is ruined. I'm not joking, you literally change back into your American uniform. Go in third person if you don't believe me (you also had a different face and haircut while posing as a German officer). With everyone in the base now telepathically aware of your location, the race is on to escape! What follows is some qualtiy corridor shooter action, marred by a fucking stupid bit right at the end where you've got to run through a field of hitscan snipers to reach the escape train. Still, another good mission.

Mission three is the one everyone remembers:



The spectacle here is pretty incredible, though the level itself is pretty gimmicky - crouch in the safe zones when the machineguns are firing, move up to the next bit of cover when they're not. I'm not sure how this works exactly, I think the entire beach just turns into a damage trigger when the machineguns are deemed to be firing, but it's straightforward. You clear the bunkers on your own - man of the match or what?

After that we're forced to trek through the boring country roads of France. We get our first heavy weapon, the BAR. Theoretically it combines the range and accuracy of a rifle with the rate of fire of an SMG, but in practice I'm shit with it and just ended up mostly relying on the Thompson as usual. Here, the game starts to pull some bullshit:



Can you see the sniper in this shot? He's a hitscanner who takes about 50 health off with a single shot, and can fire about once a second. The answer is no, you can't, because he's not visible. He's down in that bush. There's another one with him too, and there's a third in a small crack in the wall of that structure completely obscured by the tree. All three of them can see you perfectly even though you literally have no way of seeing them. I don't know what they expect you to do here. No matter how you play the game, you will necessarily get shot first here. It's trial and error - on Hard, you have to make a quicksave prior to rounding this corner and then basically blind-fire into the bushes, or throw a grenade. Then stand still to see if you die. If you don't, you've won, if you do, reload and try again. You can't charge into the bushes because you'll die before you get anywhere near, and you can't creep up to them because a) the gunfight has already started thanks to a guy running over to you and forcing you to return fire and b) they see you immediately anyway.

Soon we're onto mission four, which starts out as a fairly straight remake of the first mission from the original MoH before turning into its own thing. It's fairly brief, but does notably end with a fucking awful segment where you've got to flee a compound that's been alerted to your presence and there are, in addition to the invisible snipers the game's starting to rely on, INFINITELY SPAWNING ENEMIES. Why?!?! There's also guard dogs who can three-hit kill you from full health and attack about twice per second. Wonderful. You meet Manon, by the way, the one who gave you the mission briefings in MoH and was the player character in MoH: Underground.



Look how weird the art style of her model is compared to everyone else!

Soon we're onto mission five, the exact moment the game shits itself. You know it's bad when it starts with this music.

Can you spot the hidden snipers here? I think there are six in this shot, and no I'm not joking:



No, you can't spot even one of them, but believe me, they're there. You often get fired upon by several at once if a single atom of your body drifts into their line of sight. Reminder that on Hard, they take about 50 health off, meaning instant death if fired upon by more than one at a time.

This is Sniper Town and it fucking sucks! There is no way through this that doesn't involve getting killed. You have to die, figure out where you got shot from, and then try again with this mystic foreknowledge you've scried of the enemy's locations. This isn't even just down to me being shit, I'm absolutely convinced you can't do this without getting killed and quickly glancing up at the compass to see the direction you were hit from before the game reloads. This is monstrously shit. It'd be one thing if they were all hidden in windows, but they're also on rooftops (with just the top half of their head visible) and, in one case, STANDING JUST OUTSIDE THE FUCKING LEVEL BOUNDS (the one in the corner of the rooftop as you head into that circular side-street). They all see you immmediately no matter what you do, they all have perfect aim, and since they're AI, they can all see and shoot through foliage that completely obscures them from the view of you, the human player who doesn't have a built-in aimbot.

There's no way to save the fucking clowns who spawn with you on this level. You can't even really benefit from their immediate and unavoidable deaths because you can't see the fucking muzzle-flash from the gun that killed them, given that it's behind six trees and only a single pixel of it is visible from the non-euclidian angle it's being fired at. Here's an example of how sharp your eyes have to be (this guy shot me immediately after taking the screenshot):



Immediately following this is another sniper level, except in this one you have to escort a tank crew who haven't got a fucking brain cell between them and whose passion for getting fucking killed seems to far outweigh their passion for reaching this special tank we're meant to be taking them to. Despite this, the second map is nowhere near as bad as Sniper Town itself. There's bullshit aplenty and some fuckers obscured in total darkness hiding in attics of ruined buildings, but ultimately it's a breeze after that horrific first map.

After this you get to drive a tank! Wheeee! This section isn't up to much - infantry show up to mindlessly stand in front of you and shoot you, but they can't actually damage you, so it's a complete waste of everyone's time. There's like three things that actually pose a threat to you - other tanks, anti-tank guns, and panzerfaust troops - and all can be seen coming a mile off. To finish this mission, there's a sniper segment where you've got to run around like a blue-arsed fly while the gormless tank crew sit around getting chunks torn out of them, a la that escort level from RTCW.

The final mission is stupidly hard (occasionally due to endlessly spawning enemies, fuck off!) but overall great. It's essentially one long unbroken dash through a stretch of snowy forest that takes you into numerous bunkers, and tests many of the skills you learned over the course of the game - avoiding spotlights, stealth (the stealth level in the village is great), disguises, sniping unseen bastards, pure shooting, and finally a massive mega-shootout in a poison gas bunker that seems to be another remake of an original MoH mission. The ending is suitably ridiculous, as you rush out of the exploding bunker (while suicidal guys are inexplicably rushing in to get you) and have to cross a very small but brutally difficult outdoor stretch to get to the escape train. Game finished, EASY. TOO EASY.

THE GOOD:
- This is just a really professional product, which sounds like a stupid thing to say but given the quality of some of the shit in this thread, MoHAA stands out as having superb production values and you can tell that at least a couple of people playtested the damn thing.

- The campaign takes the player through several different mission styles, which keeps it from feeling like a big samey mess.

- The game's length is just about perfect, finishing at pretty much the exact moment it begins to grate.

- The core combat mechanics are quite strong, mostly based around either killing enemies outright with rifle headshots or placing them in staggered states with automatic weapons.

THE BAD:
- Aside from the semi-jokey intro remark, I tried to keep my whinging about the WW2 setting to a minimum on account of the fact that it's boring to read, but I wrote about it anyway here:
Spoiler alert
the game is fucking weird. In addition to everything I've already said, and putting aside the inherent oddness that exists in the concept of a lighthearted action game being set in a real-life conflict... the presentation is utterly bizarre. This is World War 2, but it's not really World War 2, because WW2 isn't fun. So there's no violence here - it's bloodless. Literally bloodless. People flinch when shot, and if they're shot enough they fall over and die instantly. They have little "auugh" death noises but they don't scream in pain, they don't suffer. Both the American and German characters in the game don't talk like real people - they don't panic, they don't raise their voices, they speak in calm monotone, they don't react to seeing their allies get shot, and they barely react when they're hit themselves. They're like the gangsters from Assault on Precinct 13 - they're inhuman, surreal and unreactive, more a representative idea than a group of actual people. Even in the final level, when you release poison gas into a room of people, they drop dead in under two seconds, because any representation of the actual consequences of what's going on would be greatly upsetting and serve only to distract from the fun you're having bouncing around the place firing your BIG GUNS.

Naturally, there are no civilians anywhere. Not only that, the ruins of the houses you fight through don't have anything to suggest that there were ever any people here. Yeah there's a bathtub and a toilet in some of them, but there's no personal effects, not even a photograph of a family who may have once lived there. The world has been stripped bare of anything that might even slightly upset you, the player, because this is a fun paintball tournament where we all wear these costumes and run around blasting each other. This is World War 2 but nobody gets hurt, nobody suffers, nothing bad is happening. It's extremely unnerving and the game is so sanitised and bland to the point where there's something almost ghostly about it, a strange echoing emptiness. It wears the clothes of something terrible, but it in itself is just an endless monotonous beige. The enemies aren't people. Your allies aren't people. You're not even a person, you're a floating gun who doesn't feel pain or much of anything else. There are no people being harmed by your shooting spree because there was never anyone to harm. There are no children or even teenagers, there are no women anywhere except for Manon, there are no non-combatants. Everyone in the world is an adult man in a military uniform, holding a gun. I don't know what the average age of real-world combatants in WW2 was, but everyone here seems well into their 40s.

MoH:AA has just enough tastefulness to shy away from the sort of comic book action adventure shit Call of Duty will throw at us next year, but not enough taste to just... not wear the mask of real-world suffering in the first place. The result is kind of freaky. I'm sure it says something or other about us as a society that things like this exist and are popular, and that all of us are capable of turning our brains off with practiced ease and thoroughly enjoying the game despite all this, but fuck knows what.
[close]

- A few of the later levels have respawning enemies, which is just highly annoying.

- Sniper town.

FINAL RATING: Well, we're in it now. This game's popularity is surely a key factor to blame for the rise of the generic ultra-linear military shooter, which will be propelled into the spotlight with 2003's Call of Duty. MoHAA bears the marks of much of what's to come - player movement is clunky and slow, a far cry from the strafejumping and lightning-fast sprinting of 90s shooters. Maps are smaller and more linear, with no secrets to be found. There's much more of a focus on spectacle and scripted events than raw gameplay. Your experience is on-rails, highly curated and controlled by the developers. You're almost secondary to the game in a lot of ways - you're told where to go (either by railroading in the level design or actually told by NPCs), you do what the devs want you to do and have little control over much of anything.

Hard game to hate, though - the core combat mechanics are solid, the map design and enemy placement are very strong in parts, and the game has a lot of variety, taking the player on a tour through all kinds of styles - the first mission's faux-stealth stuff, Omaha Beach's cinematic interactive cutscene stuff, the tank segment, the disguise stuff with the U-Boat... there's a lot going on and each mission has at least one unique gameplay element.

This is a game that just wins on presentation and strong central mechanics for me, even if it feels like it's good despite itself. 4 Low Poly Doomed Landing Craft Men out of 5.



Check my medals!

Fucking livid about those two empty spaces on the bottom right. The middle one was given to me for beating the game on Hard, but those two slots at the bottom are for Easy and Medium difficulty playthroughs. Augh! I've got to play the entire game twice more just to finish my medal collection? Fuck off. Surely they should just give you the Easy and Medium medals for a Hard playthrough, no questions asked.

PlanktonSideburns

You have to use the Prince Andrew mod to get that level of medal leniency

madhair60

I used to love this game. It's sort of proto-CoD, isn't it? I'm sure I read that somewhere. I don't remember having issues with hitscan snipers but frankly I was probably playing on babby mode.

H-O-W-L

Frontline was the real proto-COD Medal of Honor game IMO.

Ferris

I played one of the newer WW2 FPS games recently and it was just awful. Got it for free on PS+ so was willing to go for some mindless baddy-zapping but it was so mawkish and the sense of unease described by Lemming that this is real, but also not, made me switch it off after the first 15 minutes. It was just overwhelming.

Seems like this game really was a harbinger of things to come.

samadriel

Did MOHAA have a level based on the Battle of the Bulge?  I know one of them did,  and it was a ridiculously shit level design, you just trudged around in pixelated snow, bumping into invisible walls until you finally found a German to get shot by.

Quote from: Lemming on September 27, 2022, 03:52:38 AMTHE BAD:
- Aside from the semi-jokey intro remark, I tried to keep my whinging about the WW2 setting to a minimum on account of the fact that it's boring to read, but I wrote about it anyway here:
Spoiler alert
the game is fucking weird. In addition to everything I've already said, and putting aside the inherent oddness that exists in the concept of a lighthearted action game being set in a real-life conflict... the presentation is utterly bizarre. This is World War 2, but it's not really World War 2, because WW2 isn't fun. So there's no violence here - it's bloodless. Literally bloodless. People flinch when shot, and if they're shot enough they fall over and die instantly. They have little "auugh" death noises but they don't scream in pain, they don't suffer. Both the American and German characters in the game don't talk like real people - they don't panic, they don't raise their voices, they speak in calm monotone, they don't react to seeing their allies get shot, and they barely react when they're hit themselves. They're like the gangsters from Assault on Precinct 13 - they're inhuman, surreal and unreactive, more a representative idea than a group of actual people. Even in the final level, when you release poison gas into a room of people, they drop dead in under two seconds, because any representation of the actual consequences of what's going on would be greatly upsetting and serve only to distract from the fun you're having bouncing around the place firing your BIG GUNS.

Naturally, there are no civilians anywhere. Not only that, the ruins of the houses you fight through don't have anything to suggest that there were ever any people here. Yeah there's a bathtub and a toilet in some of them, but there's no personal effects, not even a photograph of a family who may have once lived there. The world has been stripped bare of anything that might even slightly upset you, the player, because this is a fun paintball tournament where we all wear these costumes and run around blasting each other. This is World War 2 but nobody gets hurt, nobody suffers, nothing bad is happening. It's extremely unnerving and the game is so sanitised and bland to the point where there's something almost ghostly about it, a strange echoing emptiness. It wears the clothes of something terrible, but it in itself is just an endless monotonous beige. The enemies aren't people. Your allies aren't people. You're not even a person, you're a floating gun who doesn't feel pain or much of anything else. There are no people being harmed by your shooting spree because there was never anyone to harm. There are no children or even teenagers, there are no women anywhere except for Manon, there are no non-combatants. Everyone in the world is an adult man in a military uniform, holding a gun. I don't know what the average age of real-world combatants in WW2 was, but everyone here seems well into their 40s.

MoH:AA has just enough tastefulness to shy away from the sort of comic book action adventure shit Call of Duty will throw at us next year, but not enough taste to just... not wear the mask of real-world suffering in the first place. The result is kind of freaky. I'm sure it says something or other about us as a society that things like this exist and are popular, and that all of us are capable of turning our brains off with practiced ease and thoroughly enjoying the game despite all this, but fuck knows what.
[close]

I'm normally comfortable with "silly adventure WW2", but I remember finding the spiel at the end of the Axis campaign of Battlefield 1942 uncomfortably anodyne. It's all, "Congratulations, thanks to you  Germany and Japan have swept comprehensively to victory on all fronts" etc etc, without scolding you even slightly for the resulting Jewish and Manchurian genocide you've just facilitated. Maybe it's a bit silly to expect anything but bland congratulation,  but I think some text or video examining what a triumphant Axis really means outside of soldiers trading gunfire could've been really atmospheric.

Lemming

Quote from: madhair60 on September 27, 2022, 12:45:37 PMI used to love this game. It's sort of proto-CoD, isn't it?
Apparently many of the devs from MoHAA went on to make Call of Duty, and pilfered most of the ideas they'd already used. The tank segment and the Grillo jeep segment in particular feel like really naff first drafts of the tank level and car chase from CoD.

Quote from: samadriel on September 27, 2022, 02:18:13 PMDid MOHAA have a level based on the Battle of the Bulge?  I know one of them did,  and it was a ridiculously shit level design, you just trudged around in pixelated snow, bumping into invisible walls until you finally found a German to get shot by.
That's in the "Spearhead" expansion pack I think. I don't remember the expansions too well, other than that they were jankier than the base game and that they went in a more CoD-like direction with heavily scripted sequences and silly larger-than-life stuff happening. A bit from "Breakthrough" sticks in my mind where you team up with some German guy who's working for the Allies and it devolves into a daring rooftop chase where your German chum is spouting out all kinds of lame superhero one-liners while waves of hapless goons pop out of thin air to try and thwart your escape.

grainger

I think I played this game years ago. As I remember, it tried to have its cake and eat it. It had cut scenes between levels talking about the seriousness of the war, bravery, duty, etc., all with THIS IS SOLEMN music playing. Then in the actual levels you ran around personally killing hundreds of German soldiers and winning the war single-handedly.

Lemming

Indeed. I think Call of Duty takes the cake with those anti-war quotes whenever you die, hilariously offset by the more upbeat and jingoistic quotes about duty and victory whenever you beat a level. "War would end if the dead could return" after you get killed by glitchy grenade physics, followed by "death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily" when you manage to reach a nondescript door that represents the end of the level.

Really looking forward to getting to CoD because my memories of it suggest that it's so wildly insensitive and its treatment of the subject matter is so cack-handed that it makes Medal of Honor look quiet and respectful by comparison.

samadriel

I think I turned off CoD 4 when it spouted some quote from fucking Condoleezza Rice when I died.  Fuck that shit.

Pink Gregory

Which CoD was it where Iran-Contra's Oliver North was involved in the advertising campaign?

Lemming

Been very slowly playing Soldier of Fortune 2 but fucking hell its rough going. Rarely seen a game more obviously rushed out the door. It is said that the game sucks total shit because Raven were diverting all their resources into Star Wars: Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast 1. All I can say is that it better be fucking good to make up for the absolute state of SoF2. Nothing works, the whole thing is wildly uneven and levels obviously haven't been tested properly, some levels are over twenty minutes long while others are over in about two minutes (and you get the same quicksave limitation for both), and there's been no playtesting - the early game was too easy and the AI was deliberately terrible, but by the point I'm at in the game now (Kamchatka), they seem to have tweaked the AI to telepathically know your exact location and hitscan you for insane damage from outside the draw distance. Their accuracy is spectacular, you can open a door and they'll shoot you to death through the crack before it's even fully opened.

Quote from: Pink Gregory on October 16, 2022, 06:32:35 AMWhich CoD was it where Iran-Contra's Oliver North was involved in the advertising campaign?
Black Ops 2, apparently. Absolutely dreading getting into that whole era of CoD (if I ever make it through SoF2).