I’m still alive, honest, and still playing games. Yes, it’s still mostly LOTRO, but I’ve also added Minecraft to the mix. I’ll eventually do something worthwhile with that and post a YouTube video like everyone else or something.
In the meantime, though, I would like to talk about BulletStorm. One thing I do between gaming and work is try to stay up to date with what the next distraction will be (at least once they come close to release date). I saw an ad for BulletStorm (shall I call it BS?) on TV and thought it was right up my alley. You see, I’m from the Unreal Tournament school of FPS. I like fast-paced, bouncing off the walls games with ridiculous guns. And colour! Glorious colour! Like many commentators, I am bewildered by the trend of the last decade towards a palette of desaturated browns. Gears of War might have been a good game if not for their drab choice of games.
Back in the 1990s, there was plenty of choice: Doom, Marathon, Unreal, Halflife. And then CounterStrike came along, was stupidly popular (to be fair, it was a good game), and all of a sudden there was only Unreal Tournament… which got worse and worse with every release.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the TV ad:
Much more up my alley. Today, I caught this quick review on Facebook:
Dear epic games, Bulletstorm sucks. Way to fail.
My friend goes on to complain that it’s too repetitive, but I think that he may not have examined FPSs lately. Over at Giant Bomb, they’re saying something different:
In some weird alternate universe, John Romero is still a part of id Software and every first-person shooter out there is filled with new iterations on the old “riding the rocket” or “sucking it down” death messages found in the original Quake. Games went in a different direction in that universe, eschewing the petty grasps at realism found here in our dimension in favor of seeking out new–but stilltotally juvenile–ways to tell someone that they suck. On top of that, they’re all finding bigger ways to blow things up and new ways to have guns rip polygonal bodies apart, often while making as many “edgy” references to Satan as they possibly can. In that universe, Bulletstorm gets two stars for being too colorful, wholly repetitive, and a shameless bite of the ideas found in the Grudgehumper series, namely Grudgehumper VI: The Devil’s Warehouse. Back here in the real world, however, Bulletstorm is a refreshing shooter that challenges you to do more than just hide behind a burning car and shoot soldiers in the face.
That’s a game I want to play. I think I’ll get it tomorrow. I’m not expecting much because it’s been way too long since an FPS was fun for more than a couple hours, but I think it’s a worthwhile gamble. Besides, it’s made by the team who brought us the gun that shoots lightning and shuriken!