cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3811821

Ok no funny intro this time. You'll read it anyway, right? Cocks shotgun

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Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron (DS)

Nay don't get your hopes up: It's not a full-fledged Battlefront game on the DS. This is, for the most part, a top-down shooter, but it does take a lot from the Battlefront formula and bigger SW games overall. And it does have some first person and third person sections, so I'm including it just to round things up. Also, did you know there's a Battlefront game on the DS? I didn't.

Earlier this year I played Rogue Squadron for the N64. It's highly praised for the Star Wars feel - the music, sounds, assets, all that. And sure, that stuff works, especially if you like SW.

But I'm also not sure if a game should be praised for taking everything from other sources? It should stand on its own regardless of material, and frankly I don't think Rogue Squadron is that good outside of its licence. You don't even get space battles for crying out loud.

I'm mentioning this because Elite Squadron hits you with everything like a Star Wars game as well: The music, the look, the story as it begins at the beginning of Episode III. Yep definitely a SW game. But what is it aside of that?

Most of the playtime is spent in birds eye view, however everything is rendered in 3D, so there's no cheaping out there. It's not all there is though. Soon you'll also be riding a speeder in racing view with a back camera, and maybe most effectively, also fighting space battles. Like, in space. A war among the stars, who would've thought? And a few short turret sections here and there for good measure.

Shooting is very simple, the game auto-locks on a nearby enemy so you don't need to do much more than move and hold the button. As a battlefront game, you have 4 classes which you can switch at stations scattered everywhere. There's little reason to choose anything but a heavy and his chaingun, unless the game tells you to hack something.

Space battles are where it's at in my opinion. They're greatly simplified, in particular you can only move in a 2D plane left/right, but come on, even so flying a TIE or an X-Wing is pretty cool.

What's really interesting is how often the game switches between different mechanics. You'll never spend more then 10 minutes doing something before it switches to something else. It smells as being made for kids with a short attention span, but I still I welcome it, as it keeps things fresh. Again, it really is a simple game, so at least it doesn't get too boring.

I do appreciate how varied the environments are too - now yes it's all taken from the movies, but still, you get to to fight your fights on Geonosis, Kashyyk, Hoth, Endor, Mustafar, a few Star Destroyers... They look pretty nice too, all things considered. Simplistic, but recognisable and in 3D.

The story that holds everything together spans episodes III, IV, V, VI and a little beyond. You're a special clone - meaning you're the most generic dude with a brown beard game protagonist instead of the clone proper the Clone Wars are named after.

Anyway your twin brother stays with the empire, and you join the rebels, so you take part in all the major events and battles across the 4 movies, and meet most major characters. Eventually you even become a Jedi... Not what I expected, this kinda stands out like a sore thumb. But I guess it's a way to round things up and have truly everything in one game.

The story is quite cheesy in my opinion, but isn't too insulting and it does help move things along, especially combined with the fast pace of the game.

It's also a suuuuper easy game, enemies drop like flies. Well at least until the final boss, who's a cheating bastard (you'll never guess who is the adversary here, will you?), so I found it fair to cheat in return. Otherwise it would take like 20% of the entire playtime, sheesh.

So the game doesn't really have much of its own thing. It's almost all repurposed Star Wars stuff, if not from the movies, then from the Battlefront games proper. And what it adds, isn't much to write home about.

Still, it is close to an ultimate Star Wars DS game - you get to relive all the important bits from the movies, it keeps good pace and switches mechanics often so it doesn't get stale, and at total playtime of at most 4 hours, it's not too annoying.

Also, you can do skirmish fights with bots - including space battles, and various modes on the ground like point control, capture the droid or hero battles using the Jedi from the films. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong and just like with the big Battlefront games, multiplayer is really where it's at with this one.

Rating: 6/10 - optionally add a point or two for the bots, as that looks pretty fun.

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Dementium: The Ward Remaster (3DS)

Okaaaay I'll play it, geez...

So, I agree with the notion that if you can't make a decent story or setting, don't bother at all rather than make some generic trash. Which is why I don't mind that Bionicle Heroes doesn't have any story whatsoever, while the likes of Moon, C.O.R.E and Ironfall just go with the "fuck it, alien research going wrong and alien invasion it is, lol" first draft.

Anyway, the people behind Moon also made this horror game set in an abandoned hospital populated with zombies with teeth for ribs and children ghosts, because they come from Genericland ruled by King Standard the Universal.

I don't vibe with horror games well. I can do the Doom 3/F.E.A.R. kind of horror where I can move like a human with working legs and have enough firepower to level the continent 6 times over. Or alternatively when I can switch on wuss mode like in SOMA and go on to explore the apocalyptic carnage and be annoyed by stupid broken physics puzzles instead of the mutated critters constantly poking me with their bloody claws.

What I can't do much, is the survival kind of horror with tropes like limited saving, barely having ability to fight, and a character with shat pants that trips over their own feet.

Dementium is somewhere in between. There are weapons to deal with the threats (at least on the lowest "normal" difficulty), so that's something. But it also does the cheap horror gotchas like zombies jumping at you just as the new room loads, shitty little slimy flying embryos that can kill you very quickly if you don't pixel-perfect snipe them immediately, and infrequent save points, a very small area of vision without a flashlight, the walking pace of a salted snail, and the omnipresent annoying heartbeat, but... But... Hm...

Yea, no buts. It's a totally standard horror shooter, complete with cryptic messages written in blood, shuffling footsteps, locked doors and all that. Now, props for existing before the explosion of bazillions other 1st person low-poly horror games that are out today and do the exact same thing; and obviously it's on the DS/3DS, so that's extra points. But we had seen all of this so many times even before.

The game does exactly what it wants to do I guess, so if you're looking for horror on the go, then this should work well enough. DS is the right system for it indeed, as even the 3DS version already makes it a bit too smooth, while the native DS roughness fits it well. It's definitely creepy and unnerving enough. Mostly.

I quit about an hour in, when a Silent Hill-style skinless boss killed me in a locked room, because the controls are just fiddly enough and the walking pace is just slow enough for "real" combat to be quite annoying. And of course the last savepoint was several critters- and darkness-filled rooms back.

These and other classic survival horror tropes aren't even scary, it's just annoying bullshit and a great way to make me close and uninstall the game. I looked up a playthrough and I don't feel like I missed out on anything but more of the same blood-filled hospital hallways and repeating annoying enemies over and over anyway.

I sorta respect that the devs succeeded in what they wanted to do; for a DS game (originally) this is quite cool. However, even more so than Ironfall, it's not easy to look past how extremely derivative and uninspired it is. I think I'm rather gonna try Luigi's Mansion for some scary fix.

If you do want to try it, I suggest the DS version, as the PS1 low-poly styling and narrower field of view gives it more charisma.

Rating: 5-6/10 - functionally it's fine, but the clichés are annoying, and damn is it generic as hell. The extra point is just for there not being a lot of DS/3DS games like it.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3: Defiance (DS)

Send help. Why am I doing this to myself? COD4:MW really was a trojan horse of the N-Space developer, as it was quite alright, but the sequel and one later 007 spinoff were utter trash. I have no interest in World of War as it's clear that Brothers in Arms blows it out of the water, and I briefly tried Black Ops to find that it's also basically unplayable. But one remains... Egh fuck it, it can't be worse than what I've already seen.

But well, the game doesn't start too bad. It's a stealth mission, which is quite the first for COD and not as shit as GE007, the snow looks decent and hey, music is a more constant presence. Even the framerate doesn't tank too much until you start running into multiple enemies, and the AI is scaled back to the level of the first MW. Alright, maybe this won't be such a disaster.

And so I was playing - basically just going through the motions, and I certainly felt the same was the case for the developers. Just going through the motions, no passion anymore. MWM at least had a bit of that. In that one you had a remote controlled robot you needed to deploy and pick up; here, if there's a RC section, it just switches you to the robot's view and then back.

There is a handful of new mechanics, but they're all scraping the bottom of the barrel. To breach a door, you place a charge with a button, it blows, and then the scene goes into slow-mo like in the "big" COD games, except when I first got it, I didn't know if it's actually slow-mo or just the framerate tanking.

Even the TV news clips are mostly gone and there are just text briefings now. Everything in this game feels so, so tired. Maybe that's where the 'improved' gameplay comes from... There just were no more attempts to make something cool.

Of course, it doesn't help that while the previous two games had you chase after nuclear terrorists all around the world, here you get the most mundane objectives - secure a warehouse, secure a pipeline, secure a weapons shipment... Since MWD follows the main MW3 game and its ridiculous idea of Russia invading with wave attacks of middle-aged men and malnourished teenagers armed with weapons from the 50's... Er, okay, I guess this was quite prophetic after all. But in the whole game you only have random missions in the US, and it ends on a complete whimper.

I don't mind that in theory - I still think the simpler COD4 worked better than the overconfident, but almost unplayable MWM; and there's nothing wrong with small-scale, personal stories in games. But it feels truly lifeless, as if it was the last game out of five DS shooters in two years, in addition to all the other games n-Space has made during that time, and they ran out of steam.

Bugs are back too - AI glitching, objectives not registering, sounds not playing. More evidence of the same.

But in terms of playability, or rather playability to bullshit ratio, it's still the best of the trilogy. It went away with double-tap aiming and stupid minigames of COD4, it doesn't have the dogshit framerate and rabid AI of MWM... It just really doesn't have much of anything.

Not exactly an epic ending to the MW trilogy, the COD on DS saga, or the whole N-Space shooter lineup. Well, they died as they lived: Meh.

Rating: 5/10 - listed in dictionary under the definition of "average".

==========

Older reviews:

I. Moon, COD4, C.O.R.E., Ironfall: 3DS community - Patient gamers

II. Chibi Robo, MechAssault, Bionicle: 3DS community - Patient gamers

III. Brothers in Arms, GoldenEye Rogue Agent, COD:MWM: 3DS community - Patient gamers

IV. Metroid Prime Hunters, Dead'n'Furious, GoldenEye 007: 3DS community - Patient gamers

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3629866

I'm still alive! Still playing shooters on the 3DS! Still mad!

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Metroid Prime Hunters (DS)

Note: This covers only the single-player campaign, not bot matches.

Everyone and their pet, and their pet's pet, and their pet's pet's flea, is telling me to play this...

I've never played a Metroid Prime game, but the 2D Metroids leave me conflicted. I appreciate the sci-fi setting and love the spooky atmosphere, so I always start one with a good feeling. Then I get hit by the difficulty, getting lost and stuck, needing to find upgrades, backtracking, the vague story, basically I dislike the combination of stuff that makes Metroid Metroid.

And so it starts with MPH as well. The game handles amazingly well. While a couple other shooters feel pretty good for the DS, Metroid offers precision and speed on the level of a full gaming system. I'm especially a fan of the high field of view, which gives the game an alien vibe, but more importantly just feels so fine. Indeed there are full console FPSs that can make me ill after 10 minutes due to narrow FOV, and yet this little DS game can manage such a wide view. Nice.

One issue is that there's a good amount of buttons in addition to camera control and double-tap jump, all on the touchscreen. So it's easy to make a mistake and switch weapons instead of jumping during first person platforming over a death pit while on a timer.

The are a couple different environments to visit - frozen space stations, lava fields, the occasional psychedelic path or flesh interfaces... It all looks fantastic and especially impressive in 3D and on a DS. It's such a shame that the DS doesn't support linear texture filtering. This game especially could benefit from not being so blocky.

I can't praise the music and sound design enough either; and again not just "for the DS", but in general. I don't know why so many games nowadays refuse to use punchy sounds. Metroid, even with its laser guns and other sci-fi elements, sounds more believable than real-life shooters.

Although it's also quite eerie to hear the same musical themes on the same kinds of levels across Metroid games for decades. I'm not saying the throat chorus doesn't fit with lava pits, I just don't quite follow such a deep association.

There's a story of some sort, I guess? You need to collect some things that other people also want, and there's this and that about an extinct civilisation or other in purposely obtuse logs, and you kill everything and win. Like any other Metroid or every Nintendo game for that matter, it runs with the porn movie analogy when it comes to stories.

The level design is a bit of a double-edged sword, I think. It flows well, and levels tend to loop into themselves and offer shortcuts, so they aren't too obtuse to navigate... At least at first. But they're also quite contrived and videogame-y - doors opening after you kill all enemies, suspiciously morphball-sized paths, and layouts making less logical sense than 2D Mario levels. I hear they're mostly just repurposed multiplayer arenas - and yep, that tracks.

You need to revisit each station again after you have the right tools/weapons to open the doors. It's not just a simple rehash though, entire new sections open up. Here the levels become more complex, making it easier to get stuck, and overall the level of ~~bullshit~~ sorry, cHaLLeNGe, ramps up quite a bit.

The enemies are mostly fairly standard alien critters, but surprisingly, a few types move ridiculously fast. Even more surprisingly, I was mostly able to keep up with them. I couldn't imagine fighting something so quick on anything but a PC with a mouse, and yet here on the DS, it works.

Where the game really strains its controls, are the bosses and countdown challenges. I hate the whole concept of videogame bosses that are eventually dropping a whole barrage of nukes on you while you're stuck in a tiny room with them, chipping on their oddly specific armor weak points until they pop out of their shell for 3 seconds so you can chip away on them directly 1 hp at a time or missing all the shots with a railgun and having to do it again and again and again and again and again. Those bosses.

So at some point I resorted to cheats, because I was getting a cramp in my hand from doing the same motions over and over and over and over and over and over. And the bosses aren't even fun - just lame automatic defences copypasted over and over (and over and over). The hunters and mini-bosses you encounter all over the game are much more creative. At least the final one ends on a high note, although it's just a JRPG type monster with all the bullshit boss mechanics.

And of course every station goes on to auto destruct after the boss, and that's more cases where the game turns fugly. First off, it's just contrived as hell. If the thing is about to blow up, how come that I can come back later? And how come the timer is also set to just about the right time for that particular instance of that station?

So you need to backtrack all the way through the whole damn map - teleports stop working because fuck you, except of the necessary ones because shut up. First person platforming may be involved and that just becomes irritating on a timer. Enemies respawn and you need to kill them again to open the damn doors, sometimes a hunter shows up, all the while you might be low on health and having sweaty hands after the boss fight - and - again to stress that part - on a pointless timer.

I guess it's just as true here as with the 2D titles: the game is cool except of the Metroid tropes. Most of the time, it tends to be pretty helpful, usually it's fairly clear where to go, there's a groovy 3D map, and even checkpoints. You don't even need to find suit upgrades, so at first it's easy to just vibe with the flow of the game without too much friction.

But, after the first third of the game, the honeymoon is over and it switches into some sort of a hardcore mode. A lot of the time you get locked in a room with more enemies, or you need to do "puzzles" which just involve running around in a couple rooms, pixel-hunting for buttons, navigating contrived labyrinths, more pixel-hunting for stuff to scan, beating pointless timers, first person platforming or everything together.

It's rarely much fun anymore, and usually not even a decent ChaLlEnGe - or when it is, it gets absolutely fucking console-snapping-rage murderous. Most of the time, it's just the same handful of boring or annoying tasks to do over and over. The game always shows you what it wants in a cutscene anyway (which you need to view every time you inevitably fail some of these), so it's not even a surprise. Just busywork to finally get over with.

I was reading my notes from when I started the game, phrases like "Overall, It's hard to not be impressed with this whole thing," "Even if it came out today on a non-handheld system, it would be a decent game; so on a DS in 2006?" and "Damn, what an achievement."

And I just wonder if someone switched the game on me for a much lesser version. It still has a solid basis and looks great, but really leans into repetition and stupid challenges rather than new ideas and atmosphere. Nearing the end, I felt more motivation to finish the trashy Modern Warfare Mobilized, while Metroid seemed like obligation, if that makes sense.

Just like the previous Metroids I've played, the damn game lured me in with the atmosphere, and then dropped a bunch of nails on my path, and a few hammers on my head. Even more sneakily this time, with all that friendly 3D and fun shooting. I feel cheated.

At the end it has left the same weird taste in my mouth as the 2D Metroids, especially the modern ones. It's too concerned about keeping alive the SNES era tropes to feel right, and it doesn't even do those tropes all that well.

I shouldn't be too harsh on it as it's still quite a feat, but I can't stand games which start really well and turn into exactly this.

Rating: Well 10/10 duh, it's a Nintendo title and I'd get exiled to the Sun if I gave it anything less. So I would never give it something like 7/10, not like it gets boring and annoying after a while, of course not!

==========

Dead'n'Furious (DS)

With a lot of these DS shooters, especially the likes of CoD, I kept thinking - why won't they just make a rail shooter? Most don't have much more gameplay anyway, the turret sections tend to be the best, and the genre seem well fitted for the DS.

So here's something to test this theory: The railest-gunnest-shooterest rail shooter of 'em all, because this is a zombie game. A match made in heaven, really. You're some semi-anonymous convict who has to get through hordes of zombies when the prison (and everything around it) gets overrun by zombies. A couple cinematics flesh out the....ehm, "story".

It's as basic as it gets, but we really don't expect much from this genre, I think. You have 3 firearms and a crowbar, with which you tap and slash the screen, and you reload by sliding the magazine to the ammo slot. Makes sense. Other than that, it's about some cool environments as a setting, and then just about blasting zombies.

The environments are... Fine. I was somewhat worried it will all be only the prison, but you'll get through a bunch of different areas, so there's even some alluded background story to it. Some exteriors are particularly nice and substantially creepy. The world isn't all that vast though, so you'll spend a lot of time just turning around a lot in every room.

And zombies are just fine as well. They shuffle and ruffle towards you, and as you shoot them, they stumble and rumble and their bits fall off, like good zombies do. Some other critters like bats and rats are there as targets as well, and a few cool bosses show up too.

I've not played a lot of lightgun games so I don't know how this one fares in comparison. But I like how it flows. You're railroaded on a path, but you keep looking about, turning around, and occasionally can choose between two ways. It's funny - while with CoD I was wishing to just have my character put on a rail, here I sorta want to grab the controls and move my character myself. So I'd say that makes it pretty good.

If you're mad enough to read my past reviews, you may know I'm quite a filthy casual who runs away from most gaming challenges. And so I can't begin to try to imagine to fathom the concept of thinking about finishing this game without cheats. I couldn't get past the first couple levels. After enabling infinite health and eventually no reloading (because I couldn't even finish a time sensitive mission without that), I can only conclude the game is made for superhumans, or teenagers.

Well, I suppose you can spend dozens of hours trying to polish your moves and timing to millisecond perfection, or two hours playing through with cheats. Anyway, blasting zombies like this is pretty fun, and I don't even like zombie media otherwise.

Rating: 5/10 I guess? More fun and more competent than most of these shooter things, but doesn't offer all that much.

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GoldenEye 007 (DS)

(The 2010 remake, not to be confused with the 2005 game GoldenEye Rogue Agent.)

I've tried the N64 GoldenEye a few months ago, and well, it's so quaint, it's adorable. It's very obvious the team was just learning the ropes of first person shooters - that's understandable since these were still fairly early days, for consoles at least. Still, GoldenEye feels more like a Bond mod for Quake than a real game to me.

Then 8 years later, Rogue Agent for the DS was a very oddball throwback that, in return, felt like a Bond mod for Duke Nukem 3D. But due to all the maddening hype surrounding the OG GE, a remake of the original was inevitable... So here it is. The DS version.

The game seems to loosely follow the main beats of the N64 game. In practice, that means it looks roughly like an N64 game, runs like shit and the levels are bland, boring and not making any logical sense. Where the N64 maps were large, empty but rather free-roam-ish, here they're small, paper-thin linear affairs, where you follow a marker all the way and can't stray more than a centimetre off the path. Well, I guess that's what a modern recreation means today.

But no worries, the remake introduces more modern features. Such as sprinting, without which Bond walks at the pace of morning traffic. And also ironsight aiming, without which he can't hit the wide side of a barn. There are the annoying little animations for things like takedowns or using the phone, forced scripted movement, and simply every other trope of a subpar 2010's COD-wannabe. Except, this is the DS, so instead of at least offering some spectacle, it just feels sad.

Just like COD:MWM, the devs were trying to imitate the full console versions of the Bond games. And again this failed miserably. It's the most on rails, dumbed down and lifeless FPS I've ever played and again I have to wonder why not just make a lightgun/QTE game instead. Heck, even the usual "minigames" to open doors and such are replaced with the blandest gestures. At one point you need to close the DS to do a thing, but the game takes about 6 screens of text to explain it. That's how dumb it thinks the player is.

If you ask me what does work in the game, I honestly draw a blank. I guess so many shitty stealth levels can better accommodate the shitty framerate than shitty shooter sections? How's that for a positive. I guess the music is kinda decent? But I'm not giving it credit, as it's just basic Bond themes probably taken from the full console games anyway.

So it's combining the outdated simplicity of the N64 original with the annoying mechanics of COD, without the excitement of either, and finishing it off with the worst framerate I've seen yet. Oh, let's not forget other details like horrible voice acting or stupid animations. It has everything a proper shovelware should.

I wish this game was only an hour long like Rogue Agent, because I somehow had to continue watching this train wreck. It kept surprising me with new lows, and I just half-expected the game to spontaneously combust at some stage.

But even I have my limits. I can't go on with this one. Maybe it's not the worst kind of a lifeless, nostalgia trip, shitty corporate cash grab tie-in ever, but never mind it totally is. What a colossal waste of good bytes. They really should've just ported the N64 game.

Rating: 1/10 - it's close to being The Room of DS games, except it's not funny.

==========

Older reviews:

I. Moon, COD4, C.O.R.E., Ironfall: 3DS community - Patient gamers

II. Chibi Robo, MechAssault, Bionicle: 3DS community - Patient gamers

III. Brothers in Arms, GoldenEye Rogue Agent, COD:MWM: 3DS community - Patient gamers

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3376007

Yea I'm still at it, checking out the shooters on a system that definitely wasn't made for them. And still finding some that are good.

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Brothers in Arms (DS)

I had nooo clue what to expect from this. I've owned one of the PC games for ages but never played it beyond trying out a training mission. Well, let's see...

From the start, it's apparent that this game will outshine the Call of Duties. The European battlefield looks actually damn good and immersive. This genuinely feels like a frantic WWII battlefield, with vehicles driving and exploding everywhere, ground shaking, squadmates running around and Germans shouting, planes bombing and crashing, and people falling from windows. Madness.

And soon enough, you get go drive a tank too. But unlike the one snail-paced ultra-linear tank mission of COD:MWM, here you get to actually battle other tanks on a field, blow up towers and drive through walls. Vehicle controls aren't the best, but this is actually fun! Color me impressed.

The other controls are decent enough, and you run with a brisk pace. The framerate is on the lower end, and there's no sensitivity setting, but since this is a 3rd person game, neither is a real deal breaker. And the game actually looks good enough that the slower framerate is warranted. The DS really has its work cut out from it here. With all the insanity it obviously struggles. It can feel a bit janky, and yet I never had a problem following the action.

The missions are quite free form. Commands are more like suggestions, and how you proceed and finish objectives is largely up to you. Need to destroy a tank? You can blow up nearby gas tanks, or find a panzerfaust, or run to it and treat the crew to a grenade.

Some parts are more scripted, but it's still a major step-up from all the other strictly linear shooters. It's weird needing to re-learn not to run directly at an objective marker. Modern gaming gives us some weird habits.

There's some tactics involved, but it's not like the full console BiA games. This one is very much arcade-y, you even get a score and rating at the end of each mission. It's truly immense fun and checkpoints are frequent, so even if you die or fail, there's no frustration, just hop back in. Failures are often hilarious anyway, like going to set a demolition charge but getting crushed by a tank. It's almost shameful to make war look this exciting.

There are three campaigns, each one shorter than the one before, and sadly it's over way too soon. Or at least that's what it feels like. A bit over 3 hours feels much shorter than about the same time spent in the likes of COD. Higher difficulties and more weapons are unlocked after finishing, so maybe it's worth it going at it again.

Games like this aren't made too often nowadays. I imagine this is what it would look like if someone wanted to make a squad shooter in the Sega Genesis era, if it had the power. Or, it's like crossing 2001's intensity of Medal of Honor with the craziness of The Saboteur. How can that be a bad thing?

Rating: 8.5/10 - even with the struggling framerate and some jankiness, this is another highlight of DS shooters and an amazing achievement.

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GoldenEye: Rogue Agent (DS)

Release year of 2005 makes this a very early DS shooter and as such... I'm quite impressed? It controls well, runs fast, doesn't look too disgusting, there's multiplayer with bots... The setting is pretty cool as well - you play as a "bad" agent under a Bond villain, so you get to do more crazy stuff than usual.

That said, it feels like a mission pack for the N64's GoldenEye, it's so quaint. If you're nostalgic for that game, you could have some fun with this. But while the N64's 007 held me just out of some morbid curiosity when I tried it recently... This one certainly offers more.

The level and game design are indeed straight out of 1996. Okay, you can only carry two weapons, but you get to go wild with railguns, miniguns, akimbo P90's and disintegration beams, so I rest my case. Even the music sounds like MIDI, and the sprites, varied real world environments, interactive set pieces and animated fire textures make it look and feel so much like a Build engine game.

So while maybe it's quite primitive by modern standards, for such an early DS shooter (if not the very first) the game works very well, and I didn't feel tired at all while playing it. It is quite charming.

And then it goes onto... Oh wait, it's over. The whole single player took me an hour and a half to finish, and that includes having to replay two difficult sequences a couple times. Well, that explains how it fits onto a 16 MB cartridge.

Still, if N64's GoldenEye gets so much praise for bringing shooters to consoles, I'd say Rogue Agent deserves recognition for bringing them to the DS. I can imagine how in 2005 it might have seemed outdated and a bad deal due to being so short, but today it actually feels retro-fresh, and at least not outstaying its welcome.

Rating: 6/10, and I retroactively declare it an unappreciated gem of 2005.

==========

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Mobilized (DS)

Hey, it's time for another "it's time for another Call of Duty" joke!

Obviously nowadays COD is quite a meme - until recently (as far as I know at least), every year brought a new COD. Well, "new" but not really new, you know. More like a good old, comfy reliable thing.

And that's what I expected here too - COD4 for DS was good enough but flawed, so the direct sequel should be about the same, hopefully less flawed (it makes the dumb double-tap iron sights optional). And it would also be interesting to see the further progress the same devs have made from Rogue Agent through COD4 to beyond.

But... Hold on, something isn't right. This feels terrible. The framerate is crap. What the fuck. This is unplayable.

It could be borderline passable if the game remained the simplistic shooting gallery of COD4. But the devs wanted to make a big boys FPS now with more aggressive AI, while the player's health is apparently lower, walking speed is slower (you now need to sprint to get anywhere) and the red mist effect when you get hit is stronger.

It's a deadly combination, and the DS simply can't handle all that, so it often chugs into an an unplayable mess.

Oh great, I got a "slow learner" award for dying too much because I can't see shit. Well fuck you too, game.

It does improve a bit after the first two levels, especially since I figured that the best way to play is to just let my squadmates do all the killing while I hide until everything is dead. At least there's more music to listen to while ducking behind cover. They really blew the sound budget apparently, because there wasn't anything left for more than one lame death sound.

So why even bother? Well funnily enough, the game does have some merits. Again the turret sections are the most fun, as are various vehicles. You get to fly a drone, sneak around with a RC robot and drive a tank. Although that's just one mission and an incredibly shitty tank, so still not much to write home about.

Also the minigames are pretty cool, and for the first time among these DS shooters, I actually got invested in the story. You chase after a nuke all around the world, but are always late and thus fail the mission objective every time. It's not typical videogame territory to be constantly undermined like this, so I appreciate it.

So, um... I guess there's a pretty fun game in here, if you cut out all the Call of Duty bits? Granted, the presentation is fairly impressive, but dammit it's still the DS, so it feels more like doing a demake of COD in a Wolfenstein engine anyway. It would be cute if it wasn't a real product.

To be honest though, the shooting bits are about the level of playability I originally expected DS shooters to typically be at, so it's still cool that there are some good games of this genre. But it's bizarre that Rogue Agent, the oldest shooter of the bunch and from the same devs no less, is so much more playable.

Rating: 1.5/10 - half a point for finally some minigames that aren't crap, and that's about it.

==========

Older reviews:

Moon, COD4, C.O.R.E., Ironfall: 3DS community - Patient gamers

Chibi Robo, MechAssault, Bionicle: 3DS community - Patient gamers

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3175498

I'm on a mission to try out lots of first/third person shooters on the DS and 3DS. It's quite an underappreciated genre on these systems, even though the DS has quite a rich selection. They can be quite fun and some can be finished in an evening.

This time they just happen to be mech/robot themed.

First batch of reviews: 3DS community - Patient gamers

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Chibi Robo Park Patrol (DS)

This isn't a shooter per se, but you do control a humanoid character in 3rd person, and you get to fight enemies with a squirt gun, so it still kinda counts. And I played through it, so at least if I write about it, it wasn't a complete waste of time.

So the story is, you're a pocket robot whose job is to battle pollution by renovating a park, which you do by planting flowers, watering them, and... Help them grow by dancing for them. Yes, it's a Japanese game, just roll with it.

You also get to manage and build structures and features of your park, employ and meet a bunch of colourful characters, and battle against a personified pollution. I found this game on a list of open world games for the DS, which I guess is technically true, if you count a few buildings, one road and an alley as open world.

It's pretty charming if repetitive and not very rich experience, especially at first before you get to unlock minigames and figure out other stuff to do. There are even a few vehicles, sadly with silly touch controls.

There's an elephant in the room however. Never have I played a game that wastes my time this much. With every new day you start (which is about 10 minutes), you need to sit through close to two minutes of the same fucking monologue, every time. Worse, you need to confim Every. Fucking. Sentence to continue. And of course the text rolls out one letter at a time, because again, it's a Japanese game. Someone explain why is this a thing?

It still gets worse. Need to recharge - which you need several times a day at first - same monologue. Found a cartridge with new features? More yapping and tapping. Talking to someone? Blah blah blah tap tap tap. Building new stuff for the park? Unskippable animations, and more monologues to tap through, one sentence at a time, rolling out one letter at a time. The day is done? Animation... Yea there are 3 kinds of animations you can skip, and dozens which you can't.

Seriously, screw this. The game itself is pretty addictive and catchy, if you fancy this quirky park management thing, but half the playtime is spent just watching the same stuff over and over and over and oooooveeeeeerrrrrr. It's ridiculous.

Definitely skip this if you value your time at least a little bit.

Rating: 2/10

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MechAssault: Phantom War (DS)

So this is a proper Microsoft MechWarriors game on a DS. How is it that the DS has so much cool stuff?

What can I say about this? You have a mech and you battle other mechs, in valleys of various planets rendered in this 3D engine like every other mech game. There's a future war of some sort like in every mech game, you do war stuff and mech stuff and sometimes you leave the mech to do a bullshit hacking minigame, because this is also a DS game and those are mandated by law. You have different mechs and tanks that do different things and different weapons and armor and jump jets and grappling hooks and stuff. You know, it's a mech game.

I quit at the typical bullshit mission of protecting a base made of wet tissue paper against neverending waves of mechs. Fuck the person who came up with these damn missions with a sharp peppermint stick. They will never, ever be not annoying. Also, I wish that the mech would sound like a giant mechanical beast rummaging through the world, and not like walking in wet flip-flops. Why can't things in games sound loud and boomy anymore?

Either way, it's a completely standard little 3rd person mech game that's fun for a while, and then you get bored, or you die and the checkpoints are sparse, so you go play something else, and then someday open it again to blow up some mechs. Nothing has changed much since the inception of the genre. It's a mech game for the DS. Nothing else to it.

Rating: Mech/10

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Bionicle Heroes (DS)

Now back to a regular first person shooter. Time to destroy some LEGO creatures.

First impression: well what do you know, sensitivity of touch aiming can be increased beyond the "old man in a wheelchair" speed some other games max out at? Who knew!

In fact, this one has surprisingly fast, responsive and natural feeling controls. Even double-tap jumping feels just about right. Unfortunately the precision isn't at the same level, especially on high sensitivity setting, but the controls are made for pace.

The speed is pretty important here, because this is a proper retro arena shooter - I get reminded of Rise of the Triads or Painkiller. It doesn't even bother with a story - at any time you can select out of 6 worlds (ice, volcano, castle...) and in you go.

Just go in, and kill everything by circle-strafing Quake-style. Every world also has a new weapon to collect in the first level, and upgraded versions in later ones. The combat feels punchy, especially with the upgraded weapons. I mean, we know there's something oddly satisfying in talking apart LEGO, especially if it's done violently.

The levels aren't any slouches either: there are secrets, jump pads, environmental hazards, bridges to rebuild. As you power up, new and more powerful foes show up. It never gets too challenging though, to be honest.

At first I wished there were more enemy types in different environments, but over time there are about 10 distinct types in about 40 variants, so still more than other games offer. Bosses also give you powerups to replay older levels and find more secrets, plus challenges and cheats to unlock, so there's a decent engame too.

It also looks and sounds fine - the rather simple style allows for better resolution I guess - and always rocking some catchy electronic music.

What starts as just a cool and stylish game to quickly blow off some steam, turns into a really good FPS by all accounts. At first I launched it just to check it out, and then realised I've been playing for 4 hours.

I do wish the controls were as precise as they are fast, but considering the nature of combat, it's not a huge deal. This is how you do a retro shooter.

Rating: 8.5/10, if you are okay with just some old school arena shooting

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3035900

The 3DS and DS aren't systems created with shooters in mind, but that won't stop me! Especially since I'm stuck without any other gaming system at the moment, so I'll deal with what I have.

All of these games have touchscreen aiming. I personally just use my thumb, holding the 3DS like a controller. This way I find controlling these games pretty serviceable, not too different than using a second thumbstick. I just wish all of them had the option increase the sensitivity beyond the maximum setting.

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Moon (DS version)

This game has one main shtick - using a small remote-controlled robot to solve puzzles. Which means crawling through a low space and opening the door. It is kinda cool maybe once, not so fun a hundred times. Especially if you need to do it again when backtracking, which is close to 50% of the game. Yep, get to the objective, then all the way back. Over and over. At the beginning there are some shortcuts, but those eventually disappear.

However, at one point you get to go out to the surface of the Moon and even use a moon car... This was pretty great. Two missions, a few minutes each. So why is the rest of the game just crawling through the same repetitive halls and vents?

The weapons are functional albeit standard, and the AI is about right, so combat and controls feel decent enough if rather bland.

Terrible music, I had to turn it off. But the atmosphere is pretty decent without it... The game does sell the loneliness of the setting well enough. These devs also made Dementium, which I've not played yet, but I sense that they were going for the somewhat spooky feeling too.

The story is classic B-Movie shlock. Alien artifact, government conspiracy, logs from scientists, you know the drill.

Overall, while I appreciate these guys were trying to make something slightly different, I'd give it a pass. Maybe I'll check the 3DS remake a shot if it's available, but if it's the same kind of game, I'll bounce very quickly.

Rating: 3-4/10

==========

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (DS)

If anything, I was expecting something worse than Moon. Surprisingly, this is... Pretty good?

There is one major flaw: to use iron sights, you double tap the screen - which is much easier to do by accident than to get it on purpose. It's not completely game-breaking, at least on easy difficulty, so I managed to live with it. Eventually.

Other than that, it feels like a COD game through and through, just simplified. There are some annoyances, like a few sections where you get offed by a sniper, which really goes with the COD territory rather than this being a bad game, if that makes sense.

The game knows what it is, and works with the limitations of aiming with the touch screen, so the combat is more like a whack-a-mole shooting range. Again, just standard COD stuff, but I think on DS it would work better as a light gun style game. The turret sections are really the most fun anyway. Some bomb-diffusing minigames are thrown in too.

It sorta follows the story beats of the main COD4, sadly without the interesting parts. No Chernobyl here.

Music is mostly absent, only kicking in during some events, making the game eerily silent most of the time.

Lots of bugs like falling through floors and sound cutting out, but for those few hours it's tolerable.

The sequel has the option to trigger iron sights with a button, and honestly I'm quite looking forward to that improved game. It also helps that this one is the shortest of this review batch, so it doesn't overstay its welcome. Overall, a decently worthwhile endeavour.

Rating: 5-6/10 (knocked off two for the stupid aiming system, and bugs)

==========

C.O.R.E (DS)

This game REALLY wants to be a 1997 PC game. The intro cinematic is competent, the level design is surprisingly solid (if somewhat confusing and with no map), the industrial music slaps, there's lots of blood and no reloading, heck you can even jump?! There are secrets (at first)!? And is that damage grunt from Quake? First impressions: This gonna be good.

Also coming with that retro territory are manual save points and health/armor stations. That's less welcome on a limited system like the DS in my opinion, but could still work.

So what went wrong? EVERYTHING. The shooting, the combat! The stuff you play a shooter for! Most enemies are hitscan, pack a damn punch and are placed such that they start shredding through your armor as soon as you open some doors. Sometimes from behind, or from the sides. Not a good combination with slow, imprecise aiming, and non-regenerative health.

Additionally they are often difficult to see (everything is grey on grey) and very difficult to hit, so even the lowliest spider is a formidable and annoying opponent.

The weapons aren't exactly impressive either, despite all being swiped from the Quake and Unreal series. You can rocket jump however, so there's that at least.

Even on easy difficulty, I'd run out of ammo or die of lead poisoning pretty often. This design is simply unsuitable for the controls DS offers.

The story? It's an underground military base with alien science experiment going wrong theme, what can you expect. Pretty much the same as Moon.

Such a disjointed game. Something special could have been here, but I suppose half the team was smoking crack.

Rating: 2/10 for gameplay and generic setting 9/10 for the 90's-era shooter style if you're into that, and music

==========

Ironfall: Invasion (3DS)

I had to keep rewriting this review as I was playing the game, my opinion of it kept shifting that much. It began at "painfully generic Gears of War clone with very decent visuals for the 3DS" through "damn good looking game feeling like mostly made from store-bought assets" to "really impressive indie project that actually has some personality of its own".

If C.O.R.E. is ripping off games of the late 90's, Ironfall is ripping off games from the early to mid-00's. Movement and mechanics straight from Gears of War, weapons from Unreal II I guess, the whole feel reminds me of games like Pariah or Resistance.

Together with ridiculously generic basic enemies (a metallic, humanoid robot like from a 70's B-movie), and other things ripped wholesale from elsewhere, I feel like it could've worked better to add some humour and sell it as a parody. It still is in my head.

But it keeps getting better as time goes on. It certainly has a lot more variety than Moon or C.O.R.E. - just like in COD4, you travel around the world - and overall it has some weird charm to it. Even some cool bits thrown in, like one cool boss or playing as a different operative. And some minigames too, can't be without those...

The story is another alien invasion/rescue nonsense - is this the only way to make a shooter with a new IP on the DS or 3DS? But it is just enough to not be too offensive. Music is the typical action game/music bank kind of stuff - but there's a lot of it, so it helps.

At the end, I guess it wasn't such a bad idea to put together a game from other people's ideas, backed by great tech. I've played worse shooters on better systems. I'd probably even rather play this than the first Gears... Which isn't saying that much, but still. (I'm just not a fan of GoW.)

In addition to touchscreen aiming, you can use the C-Stick too, but it just doesn't work for me with such a fast-paced shooter.

So yea... Good enough for what it is. Quite a blandburger, but still deserving to be a 3DS cult classic, if for nothing else than because there are so few games like it on this system. It could hardly be any better under the circumstances of a three-person dev team; I just wish someone else could have used this engine to do something really new.

Rating: 7/10 (because there are so few games on the 3DS like it, otherwise it's a very average 5/10)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2207898

Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.

WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…

It had such a knowledge of the user's needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.

The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90's, which eventually, of course, they did.

Unfortunately, we didn't teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.

Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.