Bad Company 2 SP first impressions:

It's a lot better than the first one. Cool start but a bit supernatural.
Far too many cut-scenes in the first level and too much messy variety in them. There's first-person cut-scenes where you can jiggle the camera, first-person cut-scenes where you can't jiggle the camera, in-game first-person cut-scenes where you can turn around but the other controls are locked (and it has those fucking ridiculous widescreen movie black bars that appear for no reason like in The Bourne Conspiracy), Modern Warfare rip-off satellite loading cut-scenes, third-person cut-scenes where you can jiggle the camera and third-person cut-scenes where you can't. I'm sure I've missed a few out but you get the jist.
To put it bluntly, why the fuck do we need any cut-scenes. Modern Warfare gets by perfectly without any.
Another thing MW does better is the death screen. You die, up comes a a poignant war-related quote (or the fucking annoying "you were killed by a grenade/dog/lawnmower"... I know) then you're back in the action. In BC2 you die. You go to the death menu. You select retry. You wait five seconds for the level to load, presumably because the console has forgotten about it while waiting for you to fuck about with the menu. Then you're finally back in the action.
I'm playing on hard so I die fairly often and going through that every time really breaks the flow of play.
Another annoying thing is when you pause the game there's this repetitive distant banging sound, like someone dropping a brick on an empty oil drum outside your window in perfectly slow rhythm, so if you pause for quite a while to, say, write a pointless blog post that no-one will ever read you have to mute your TV. This is annoying. Why put such a fucking stupid soundtrack in a game?
The shotgun's good.

You know what really grinds my gears?

Rhetorical question. Rhetorical answer = AI support characters who take credit for shit you've done. Alyx did it in Half Life 2 and it's one of the only things I can think of that I didn't like about that game.
It just happened in Uncharted 2, in the monastery level. I had to move this statue thing to climb up it to get through this gap in the wall but I had to wait for Elena to help me. When we pushed it in place a very short cut-scene showed Elena climbing up it and saying to Drake: "Look we can climb up it. Come on!"

A) I fucking know. It was my idea.
and
B) Please shut the fuck up. I'd be up there now if the cut-scene didn't lock the fucking controls.

In contrast Benson (I think his name is) the Filipino(?) tracker(?) is perfect. He helps you out as much as you do him and, although he talks quite a bit, he doesn't speak English so it doesn't matter. And I can't tell if he's taking the credit or not.

In other news:
I've been trying to play shooting games, Uncharted 2 included, using only the shotguns (where they're available).
Firstly to see if it's possible i.e. have the developers put this gun in to give me more choices in tackling a situation or are they just conforming to the traditional selection of weapons for the sake of it?
Secondly, following on from this, does the traditional weapon set have a place in contemporary games?
And thirdly do you give a shit? No?BYE

Wow...

I am shocked. I just completed The Bourne Conspiracy. By which I mean the half of The Bourne Conspiracy the developers bothered to make. It was just building up momentum then it stopped. I guess it was long enough for a game but I was expecting at least another hour or two.
I thought it was a joke but there was a 30 second cutscene then the credits rolled. I didn't even get to find out if the back door was locked or not.
That is very annoying. I know Zero Punctuation said the CoD4 ending came out of nowhere and I always disagreed with that but this is taking it to another level.
BYE

The Internet according to Miley Cyrus...

I found this piece of shit on a blog of all things. Irony surely lost on the author.

"I’m shocked and stunned. Miley Cyrus has been talking sense. Usually just to understand what teenagers are saying I need a Babel fish, never mind whether what they are saying actually means anything.
Talking to Movieline she says “I’m telling kids, don’t go on the internet. It’s dangerous, it’s not fun, it wastes your life, and you should be outside playing sports or something”.
I couldn’t agree more. The internet is fine for a middle-aged, pizza munching, armchair jockey monkey but I’m sure there were better things to do once upon a time."

BYE

Ahahahaa sorry 1 more!

Laughing quite a lot as I just finished the first driving section of Conspiracy. It was fucking hilarious.
Like a cross between Midtown Madness and the vehicle sections of James Bond games. You drive round (and through) a linear set of streets (and china shops) at top speed in an indestructable Mini Cooper being chased by French police (although you can't look behind you so you can never tell if they're still there or not).
The funny thing is it seems like most of the driving could be cut out if you were able to turn right as you set off.
Just the pace of the thing is completely different anything so far it really is fucking funny. And the woman in the car with you keeps shouting "JASON!" like it's Heavy Rain.
BYEEE

This Bourning

Ok played so more of Conspiracy, getting quite into it now. Got to grips with the shooting a bit more and there's enough cool set pieces and brutal finishing moves to keep me entertained.
Following on from what I said earlier there was another boss battle (against the same guy) and I was again annoyed by the post fight cutscene. This time I won the fight and Bourne kills him in cutscene. Yes that's right Bourne, not me. What is the fucking point?
Anyway like I said the game is growing on me, as is the ever frowny Jason Bourne. I've noticed that he looks a fair bit like Fern Britton's husband who does the cookery bits on This Morning. So I'm now playing the Bourne Conspiracy pretending to be an amnesiac day-time TV chef who is killing hundreds of baddys in order to get home and make sure the back door is locked.
I think so far the game's visuals and cinematic style are its saving grace.
B
Y
E

aaaand...

...it does that really annoying thing where, when you get a call from your boss, you can't move and those widescreen black bars come from the top and bottom of the screen, apparently to make it more cinematic.
...Jason Bourne is constantly frowning as though he's trying to remember if he locked the back door on his way out this morning.
...it does that other really annoying thing of telling you how to get into cover but not out so you just have to experiment by running away from the chest-high wall, standing up and then getting shot.
...you can never tell where you're actually getting shot from.
...you move so slowly when your gun is drawn.
...it takes ten times longer to holster your gun than it does to draw it.
...every enemy near a chest-high railing seems to have the innate instinct to fall over it to the ground/water below when they've been shot. And I do mean every enemy. By which I mean the one enemy that's been copied and pasted throughout every level so far.
...the AI in the pacific campaign in CoD: World at War is either completely retarded or offensively authentic.

for FUCK sake

I cannot fucking stand games where you do a boss fight, win outright, then have a cutscene show the enemy in fine health beat the shit out of you and win. Why not just have the cutscene instead of the fight.
I'm playing The Bourne Conspiracy and that just happened. It might be ok if the fight itself was biased in the enemy's favour, I mean for fuck sake it was a fist fight with a seven foot tall African guy, and you had to lose the fight to continue.
If you lose this fight you have to start from scratch, beating up five henchmen then the boss.
If might even be bearable if the fight differed from any of the others in the game but it didn't, well he had more health so it was slightly longer but it was still punch punch punch block over and over with the occasional cutscene special move thrown in to spice things up, korma style.

The rest of the game (that I've played so far) is sooooo fucking clunky and sluggish. The aiming is erratic considering you have to go for a headshot every time. You're supposed to be Jason Bourne professional headshotter but instead it's like the crosshair and the baddy's head are two repelling magnets.
Will play more but that new thing in Splinter Cell would have worked perfectly in Conspiracy. That combined with the cover shooting stuff from Uncharted.

Prediction Time update

I've played rather a lot of Call of Duty this weekend (mainly 4 and 5 with a touch of 2). I've picked up on a few more things during these re-playthroughs including one in World at War which is fucking brilliant I reckon. Might write about it at some point.
Anyway, in a previous post I said:
"I think that if there is a third Modern Warfare game (fingers and all crossed) that some of the time will be spent playing as the US in a counter-attack against the russians and the rest will be as Soap and Price on the run."
I'd like to add add a tiny bit to this as I think Nikolai will be helping Soap and Captain Price stay low and I have a feeling MacMillan might step in to lend them a hand as well (if he's still alive).
Kamarov could also be around, perhaps in both the American and "British" stories.
There might also be a story element regarding Makarov, don't really know how though. Maybeee you could play as a loyalist soldier under Kamarov, or Nikolai, and in some bits you could be aiding US troops against the Ultranationalists and in some bits looking for and assassinating Makarov.
Not so much a prediction but I, and millions of others I think, would like to see more of Ghost and/or Gaz, maybe they could be your superior in a flashback like when you play as Price in CoD4.
Please please please don't fuck it up Activision. Don't get rid of Infinity Ward.

Dunno what else. BYE

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