Shooters: forever and always!

Hey guys, its been a while since I last posted and all the things I promised to share in the past kinda died out due to my absence. Today I want to talk a bit about the popular gaming genre of SHOOTERS!

 

We all know that shooters have taken over in the gaming industry because many people enjoy being able to destroy anything in their path with weapons. Personally I enjoy my fair share of shooters but my love of the genre is slowly dying because there are so many shooters over-populating the gaming industry with nothing different from any other shooter because developers focus too much on realism. I get input from my friends on why they like certain games any a lot of them buy a shooter to play multiplayer online. Its actually quite obvious that shooters rely heavily on multiplayer to make a sale as the single player is usually the same crap over and over again, and not to mention that it has no longevity. Shooters only give buyers up to 6 hours of single player game time and then create a multiplayer experience to keep the player glued to their console or PC.

There are shooters I admire which are:     

• MW2
• Gears of war series
• Halo

There are others but these are the 3 I feel are my most admired games. Actually I came to like Halo quite recently because when I first played Halo 3 I thought it was the biggest load of whale piss to ever be created. The single player felt tedious and dull except for the last mission which actually made the game for me, the multiplayer was fun besides one small ( which actually killed the multiplayer for me ) problem- YOU CANT SPRINT!
You know how crap it is to be playing a gametype like oddball where you "run" at exactly the same speed as your opponent and cant catch up to them. However a while later a bunch of my close friends started playing Halo: reach which allowed players to bear certain armour abilities ( one of which is sprint ) and after many entertaining multiplayer games I decided to buy it. To me its the best Halo game because the single player is very fun to do and is a lot more cinematic. Another new feature in reach is being able to perform "assassinations" on enemies by using melee on an enemy from behind. The enemy dies instantly but is shown being killed in a short cutscene.

The next thing I want to discuss is difficulty in these shootersis difficulty.

Halo reach and MW2 are games in which difficulty is used properly according to me. To introduce this I would just like to say that in almost EVERY game with a difficulty level there is an achievement involved for completing said game on the highest difficulty. To me I think its a bit unfair that certain players will have an incomplete achievement list because they are not good enough to obtain the achievement. A games HARDEST difficulty should be a challenge to most players but there should be a well set up environment where even the worst player can think of a way to get through the game. In Gears of war 3 you get the hardest difficulty known as "Insane" which, unlike the previous Gears games, doesnt allow the player to be revived. At first I thought it was a fair challenge until I got to a part of the game where I was on top of a platform killing off enemies while hiding from a barge shooting rockets at me. Enemy melee kills you instantly, 3 shots from an enemy kills you and the barges rockets ( even splash damage ) kill you instantly. I actually rendered that part of the game impossible with one person playing. The best or perhaps only way to get through the game on "Insane" is to camp in a room while another player that is playing on an easier difficulty finishes the job.

After that I tried Black ops hardest difficulty "Veteran". I looked at the achievement list to see that you get achievements for completing certain stages on "Veteran" and another for completing the game on "Hardened" or "Veteran". However I rendered this game completely impossible to complete on Veteran" as in certain stages in order to progress you need to fight off waves of respawning enemies which kill you with 3 pistol bullets. I also noticed that the enemy AI all of a sudden ALWAYS knew where to find  me and how to kill me while my allies AI got reduced to almost nothing. I looked at the games flaws and actually think its one of the worst COD game ever. Its poorly structured, unfairly difficult and it tries to be more cinematic in gameplay which actually kills the game as you watch your character have his 10th near death experience as part of an in game cutscene.

Anyway, next on the agenda is achievements. All games these days have achievements and as far as shooters achievement lists go you will notice that they have achievements for completing the singlr player and more for the multiplayer. To be fair I must say that its actually fun to try obtain achievements for a shooter but heres what irritates me, not just in shooters but other games to, is DLCs. Developers create DLCs to deliver a better experience for that specific game, which also adds achievements to the list (which are usually inobtainable to someone that doesnt have the DLC) I once played Oblivion for days to finish every quest to unlock all the achievements. After I successfully unlocked all 50 achievements and got Oblivions name on my 100% complete list I realised a month later that it disappeared because Xbox live updated the games achievements even though I didnt have the DLC. Now theres 250 gamerscore worth of achievements that I will never get. Its basically saying that you must pay for achievements, which makes me really angry. Same happened with Gears of war, only this time they released DLC within the first 3 months of the games release and now theres 2 DLC which must be purchased to unlock every achievement.

I think that shooters are kind of a waste of money these days although I there will always be certain titles I cant help but buy. MW3 is next on my list because its single player is actually good. I will hopefully post on something again soon. Cheers