I've been playing video games since I was a kid in the 1980s with a Commodore 64, but it wasn't until a decade later that I really threw myself into gaming. Up to that point I'd played with a NES and of course that C64, but as much as I enjoyed it, nothing had truly gripped me and sucked me into the wide world of video games that I now know and love. It took the release of the original Doom in 1993 to hook me once and for all, and I've been loving life ever since.
Viewing entries tagged
first person shooter
There are times when it's easy to forget how relevant the cost of a game can be when thinking about quality and enjoyment. After all, my experience with the original Destiny was quite mediocre, so I never expected to be playing the sequel anytime soon. That is until Bungie and Activision decided to discount the game heavily not long after release.
Like a lot of people in the world, I'm not American, which might seem a relatively banal thing to say, but games are pretty good at reminding me. Especially when the big shock of a first person shooter is that it takes place on American soil, which doesn't mean a whole lot in reality. Maybe it's shocking and interesting to have your home featured as a battleground, but if that's what you're whole game is riding on, you might need to rethink it for foreign audiences.
Okay, it's fair to start off with a statement: the last Battlefield game I actually enjoyed was the first Bad Company. I even spent many hours playing the Bad Company multiplayer, thanks to the novelty of its destruction system that seemed incredibly "next-gen" for me at the time. I'm not about to say that Battlefield 1 is better than Bad Company, but at this point it probably gets the silver medal.
Before we had DLC and digitally distributed patches, there was a wonderful thing called an "expansion pack". These were like dreams come true after you'd sunk countless hours into that game you'd saved up for and gingerly cracked the box to get inside. Loading up an expansion felt like finding a treasure trove of extra gameplay that had somehow always been there, just hidden away and waiting for permission to exist and entertain.
In a time before broadband internet and the proliferation of online video streaming, the only way to see footage of games before they released was to find a web site hosting a file, then wait weeks for it to download over a dial-up connection. This is how it was when Unreal Tournament 2003 was due to be released, and I dutifully sourced a keynote speech from Cliff Bleszinski where he talked about and showed off the latest tech to feature in the game. I think it was only about a forty-five minute video, but seeing those rag-doll effects and new weapon models for the first time really blew my tiny little mind.