LOKI - The forgotten Diablo Clone!

Hey! Hey!

So starts a new week of corporate slavery and one of my most favorite things to do on Monday mornings is give you all a detailed summary of what PC games I bought this weekend.

Before I begin however, let me give you a little back story. A few weekends ago my friend and I visited our local Best Buy to see if there were any new movies or games we could pick up. As I was perusing through the PC game aisle I saw a 3-Pack RPG set which contained Dungeon Lord, Gothic 3, and LOKI. Now I must admit that I'm a big Dreamcatcher fan. They are a wonderful developer of action and adventure titles. I did quite a bit of research on these games in the past and I finally had the chance to pick all of them up at one time. I do think the price was a little high for them however. $20 dollars. I would have been sold at $14.99 but whatever.

When I got home I installed them all but Gothic 3 and Dungeon Lord seem to be very in depth games so I focused my attention solely on LOKI. Now for all you Diablo fans LOKI is literally a Diablo clone. If Blizzard Entertainment would have came out with Diablo 3 a few years back it would have looked exactly like LOKI. That doesn't mean it’s bad, it's actually very well made, the graphics, animation, sound, and voice acting are superb. The game itself (LOKI) like Diablo is pretty straight forward. Pick a hero, move around, talk to quest givers, and bash heads.

The only real problem I have with the game as of yet is the choice of heroes. You get 4 choices, 2 Women and 2 Men and I have to be honest here I really don't care for any of them except the Norse Warrior. The Amazon Shaman girl shows some promise but they just all fall under the "Blah" category in terms of interest. I understand why they did this to make it balanced but they needed to include at least one more Male character just to give it an extra little boost. They seem to be equipped with a multiplayer option but I haven't had the chance to play online with any of them yet. If I could get into the groove of LOKI this could be the Diablo-ish game to get me all warmed up for the soon to be released Diablo 3 game.

Have you guys ever heard of LOKI or the other games? And if so what do you think?

Painkiller and the NEW Painkiller Resurrection

In my opinion Painkiller was the closest thing we gamers got to an old school shooter in the last decade. If IDSoftware remade Doom correctly then it would have turned out similar to Painkiller.

Painkiller was an FPS that didn't need a storyline. It had the balls, it had the action, it had the atmosphere. The story was just extra. What was really important was to see how many monsters you could cut to pieces with the whirling blade thing or how many bad guys you could stick to the wall with your steak gun.

The boss battles were perfect. Giant monsters that took up the whole screen in a large arena...Perfect. The challenges were not annoying to complete at all, and the upgrades were awesome....Slowing down time and rapid fire were my favorite.

What don't present day game developers get about making a good FPS game? They need to re-play DOOM, Hexen, or DukeNukem3D as soon as possible and realize what they are missing.

Now, I'm not just making this blog to praise Painkiller. We should all do that in private. I'm creating this blog to show people that a NEW Painkiller game is coming out soon.

http://www.dreamcatchergames.com/dci/painkiller_ressurrection

http://pc.ign.com/articles/971/971617p1.html#

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painkiller:_Resurrection


Click the links and Discuss!

Bioshock review! With Spoilers!

Bioshock is probably the most well thought out First Person Shooter I have ever come in contact with. The storyline is epic and the ideology of Ryan (the creator of Rapture) is a very nice portrait of how elites think and how their ideas drip down to the lower masses and infect them as well. You hear Ryan speaking of "Parasites" AKA poor and then when you fight the citizens of Rapture they have fallen victim to his crass elitism. The game mechanics are truly remarkable and filled with an almost endless amount of variety

. Weapons can be upgraded, Plasmids (Super Powers) can be upgraded, ammo can be invented, things can be hacked, and so on and so forth.

Flashbacks are common and it gives the player an uneasy feeling that they aren't being told something. There are hints within the NPC dialogues that something isn't what it seems and as the story unfolds twists and turns arise that can only be found in some kind of 1940's radio broadcast.

Now the graphics are wonderful. Problem is that because my game has no CD/DVD to read off of there is a lot of frame rate loss in the loading areas. Most of which are at doors when the frame rate drops significantly. The atmosphere of the game is remarkable and you really need a super charged computer to work this game properly. So if you have a PS3 or XBOX360 I would advise you to buy the console version because it doesn't run too well on PC.

The game has this early 1900 feel to it. Neon lights, retro futuristic architecture, even peoples accents come from the early 1900's. Except instead of playing a noir detective in New York your playing a stranger in an underwater city filled with insane people.

Disclaimer!! Spoilers!!!

So I have to admit that after Andrew Ryan died the games story took a nose dive. I don't know what it was really; maybe the voice actor of Andrew Ryan was so good that the other guy "Atlas" Frank Fontaine couldn't really match his performance. All in all, I have to hand it to them, it was a good twist in the storyline though but it just lost a lot of momentum. Andrew Ryan's elitist voice going on and on about parasites and the tyrannical hand of government really filled the game with his insane ideology and I like how all the people of Rapture were conditioned over the time they spent there to think just like him. I think towards the end of the game Frank Fontaine said it the best. "Everyone who came to Rapture thought they were going to be captains of industry but they forgot that there is always someone who has to scrub the toilets" Andrew Ryan catered to the elitist class and Fontaine catered to the poorer classes. They both used their social class to fight one another and in doing so, destroyed each other, the city, and were all driven mad while doing so..

Cryostasis first look!

First off, let me say that Amazon.com has amazing customer service. They really get the product to you fast and in the same condition it is advertised.

Ok, I was roaming around the internet a couple of days ago and I went over to Destructoid to check out the news and they had an article on how Amazon.com was having a super sale on the new game Cryostasis. So, Me being a sucker for sales I checked it out. It seems to be a $39.99 game and it was on sale for $12.99. I said sign me up! So I purchased it and it got to my house yesterday.

Now when I finally got into the game play I had this old familiar feeling. I couldn't place it until I got my first weapon (A heavy lock) which my character used as brass knuckles. Right then I new exactly what game I was dealing with. It seems to be a more detailed clone of Sega's Condemned: Criminal Origins. If you haven't played a game like this the way to describe it is that its not solely based on long range combat like many other FPS's, its more of a down and dirty, in your face, first person brawler. Like Condemned. At least in the beginning.

They did inject something new into this tired old genre. As you progress throughout the game you will come upon corpses that blink red. Kind of like if they had one of those lights that the cyclists use clipped on to them. Its funny the first time you see it because the corpses are lit up and blinking like Christmas trees in all these strange positions. So, you go over to them and right click and instantaneously you are transported into their past, playing as them, trying to change the events that led up to their demise.

For example: I found one dead body huddled up (blinking of course) by a door. When you click on him you are brought back to the situation that killed him and you have to run to the right, lock the door so that water doesn't flood the chamber and then use the broken handle from that same door you just came from to fit into the other door that is missing a handle. Then you open all the locks by using all the handles and you move through the door and its over. His soul is saved!

I like the mix of puzzle, creepiness, and action. Good stuff all around!

But Beware of the dreading SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS!......This PC game is for those who have tricked out their PC's. Don't get this if your computer has trouble running Pac-Man emulators.