FPS: Viking Style

You would think that as a mighty kick-arse Viking that I would already have my fill of being so powerful in combat that the very sight of a horned-hat still causes entire cities to evacuate their homes and their bowels.

Unfortunately for the people in these cities and gamers online, my thirst to pwn is too powerful to ignore. Much too powerful. I'm thinking of actually organising my own intervention, because sometimes I can get really out of hand. And it's really a sad cycle, because after one of my 'incidents' and the party is ruined (and I mean that quite literally as the building the party is held in only has one wall and the roof left) I am left alone, which makes me a sad Viking and leads to me to trying to find new friends and better parties and more resistant walls or at least less resistant roofs, and then some idiot will say 'I hear these walls are super resistant' in passing conversation and then the Gentle Beauty will appear in my hands as if by magic, and in trying to prove myself to a new group of people I will inevitably, once again, turn a party into a corpse-ridden ruin with only one wall and the roof remaining.

I am the Viking Gamer and I have a problem. Thanks to the internet, my simple problem of what to do when the urge to pwn takes me when I'm in my Viking house is solved.

FPS's (first-person shooter {DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH}) are the modern placebo to ease our basic human/Viking need to express dominance over others. And why not? Besides the atrocities committed to grammar and the english language, there are no victims in online competition.

At the moment there are an abundance of FPS's available, so I have put on my Viking hat and answered the my own call of duty in bringing you a comparative review of the games I actually own. Due to my inability to figure out how to get images that aren't copyrighted, and fearing getting the horned hat sued off my head, I will try to images up at a later date.

MAG

MAG stood for or stands for Massive Action Game. I hope they actually dropped that as a massive action game could be anything. Devil May Cry is a massive action game, due to it being massively awesome and involving action and actually being a game. Hell, if you connected me up to a controller my life would be a MAG.

Moving on, I really couldn't get into this game. The hook for this game was that it was supposed to be massive, truly massive, in allowing 256 players to play against each other simultaneously. While it delivered on this, I honestly couldn't tell the difference between playing on this scale and playing with the 30 or so players on COD.

Due to the enormity of the maps, players being split up into units and teams spawning closer to a specific objective as to encourage teams to try and complete these objectives. With this setup it's more than likely that you will only really get to battle against your counterpart unit from the other team. While the idea that you were fighting with a hundred or so other people was cool, I couldn't feel a connection to these players.

Even though we were technically under one player, a major (most probably an weighty hairy nerd like myself) there was no sense that this player was co-ordinating the battle, and if he was, what could he honestly do? He could say, 'unit B go to B point', but this is the net. We have complete freedom in this online universe to do whatever is possible in the game. I could just as easily tell him I'm the Viking Gamer and that he, a mere non-Viking mortal couldn't instruct me on what to do. Imagine if our good friend Mr. Snipes was to get an order issued to him. The devastation to English grammar and spelling would be catastrophic.

The weapons and levelling system in this game were awful as well. To give you a basic run-through, you decide between being an operative in one of three different factions; Raven, Valor and S.V.E.R. Raven are the high tech, highly trained operatives; Valor are Yank stereotypes and SVER are the most badly voice-acted, stereotyped 'rebels' or 'insurgents' or 'freedom fighters' from somewhere. Judging by their accents they are probably from the Middle-eastern-Indian-South African-Pongo Pongo region of the world.

Once you choose your team, and by that I mean definitively choose as once I chose I couldn't for the life of my figure out how to start a new character, you begin.

Your character starts out, as expected, with average gear and a choice of customizing that gear to your preferred style of play. Unexpectedly however, you are given armour choices. My first thought was, and unequivocally, WTF. This isn't WoW, Guild Wars or Borderlands. At first I thought this was still fair and balanced as the armour typed allowed a certain amount of speed and protection (protection ↑ = speed ↓ and vice versa) but unfortunately there's much better armour later on in the game. This isn't a RPG people, it's a FPS, where the only things that should really count towards your living or dying are your abilities to aim and duck.

At first I disregarded my uneasy feeling towards this setup and started up a game, believing that my abilities to aim and duck would give me the edge I needed to really get into the game. This did not go according to plan. At all.

The automatic rifle and light machine guns I began with had ADHD, and bullets refused to go where I shot them. It's like your first time at paintball all over again. I can honestly spit with more accuracy than these guns could fire.

The sniper, on the other hand, was incredibly accurate. It was also incredibly boring. No sway, just a giant cross-hair and bullets that kill in a shot or two. Using it for the first time, I found a position and began my time as an invisible killer. After about 20 straight kills and running out of ammo, I began to wonder whether I was just incredibly good or whether this game was just really, really bad.

Lastly, I haven't mentioned the graphics in MAG because there's nothing about them that's particularly remarkable or hasn't already been accomplished by another FPS (on the Playstation 2).

COD MOD 2

COD MOD 2 (or Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 {DUUUUUUHHHHHHBEBBYYYYFLEEEEEEH}) is what I consider to be the benchmark of shooting games. The graphics are good, it's fairly realistic, has a great levelling system, has an excellent range of weapons which are not only tactical but well-balanced and has a great range of modes to play online.

The only things I can really say about COD, besides that it has achieved an excellent level of balance, is that it has exceptional, near absolutely perfect levels.

There is no point in COD that I feel completely safe. There are two entrances to every building, there are a hundred ways to sneak up on an enemy and in those sneaky positions that take a bit of running and climbing to get to you're left out in the open with no real protection. There are no places to camp unfairly and no clear advantages in spawning on a certain side of the map.

The killcam feature of this game means that you can always find out roughly where that sneaky sniper is hiding to exact your Viking revenge, and if you are the sniper, it forces you to change positions meaning a constant flow of game play.

If I have one complaint against COD, and I do, it's that it takes me about 30000 years to connect to a game online, and that's not even when I'm trying to enter a game in a party with Ianardo. When that happens, the game will either drop one of us or both of us and then make us add each other again then take 30000 years to find a game then drop one or both of us and repeat the cycle. While this makes me want to shoot myself in the face, the match we actually DO get to play in often numbs my anger, making me forget the many hours of my life I've wasted waiting to pwn.

Lastly, get COD on the PS3 and add me as a friend. You know you want to.

KILLZONE 2

Killzone 2 is stunning. The environments are beautiful. The game play is incredibly realistic. The grenades are super fun to use. Levelling brings you classes which are actually useful in their diversity. The aiming system is great and the missions in the multiplayer mode are not only fun but actually require team work and a different range of classes to really accomplish.

In Killzone you begin as a soldier with a choice of two different but incredibly similar automatic rifles. These rifles are your bread and butter, and unlike MAG (Massive Waste of Time) these rifles will serve purpose of killing people no matter what your level of accomplishment is.

When you are introduced to new classes and a different array of weaponry, there are clear choices to be made about what role you wish to play during the game, and upon death you can alter these choices to suit the current objective or if you just want to see how it looks when someone else's face is blown off with a different gun. My favourite class would have to be Scout, as they can deploy flares which allow fellow players to spawn at this point. Tactical game play anyone?

However, I have two problems with the game. No.1 is that this game is in desperate need of a killcam, and that's because of reason no. 2.

This games levels are stunning to play in, but are not as balanced as they could or should be. For instance, I found a spot, despite being quite in the open, gave me a terrific, and I mean TERRIFIC, view of enemy players. I was able to kill about 20-30 odd players without a single death. This wasn't due to incredible skill or accuracy (even though I have both). It was due to my excellent position and due to the fact none of the opposing players could figure out where I was. A killcam would be great here, as I got bored with continually shooting down players and they were probably quite furious with getting shot down without ever knowing where I was. If at that stage I had the sniper rifle, I have no doubt that I could have easily racked about 50 kills, and once again to clarify, not because of how awesome I am (and I am reinstating that I am), but because of this position.

Another problem I've found with the level design is that in death matches, more often than not, one team ends up holed up in their base (which is the default place to spawn) and then having to continually fire out and throw grenades through a single door.

In conclusion, I am tipping one of my horns to COD and the other to Killzone, as they have proven themselves to be excellent. To MAG, however, I give you my middle finger and hope you get dysentery.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.