Archive for February, 2009

I brought home my copy of Killzone 2 yesterday morning, and got to try it out for a bit before my wife came home with the kids. (Don’t want those impressionable minds filled with that stuff at their age!) Last night is when I really got to play. I played a bunch of games, created squads, created a clan, joined friends, all that.

Awesome.

The game is truly great. The graphics are stupendously wonderful. The game types are awesome. The levels are inspired with great variety. There are lots of players online. There are many of options when it comes to creating games. You can even create your own games and save them as a template to be used later.

Of course, my lack of true talent shone through when I played last night. I only got a few kills per game, and it took me all evening to level up twice. Such is life. I’m creating a clan to help with this problem.

While I had a blast last night, Killzone 2 online is not without its problems.

The largest problem is gaming with your friends. You can join a match that your friend is in, but you never know if you’ll end up on the same side. When it cycles to the next match, the teams get mixed up (otherwise a very good thing), but it’s easy possible (as my dad says) to end up on opposite sides again. You never know if you’ll be on the same side.

My friend pointed out that sometimes you want to be competitive and play on opposite sides. That’s true. But I’d like to have the option, at least, of staying on the same team as my friends. When a couple more friends and I get together to play, I don’t know what we’ll do. The game seems to suggest that you can choose which side to be on, but I guess team balancing was always on because I was never actually able to join the team of my choice.

A similar problem is that squads don’t get kept from one match to the next. So every time you start a new match, you need to set up a squad again. I realize that maybe not everyone in the squad will be around anymore for the next match, but would be easy for those members to be removed. I’d like some squad persistence.

Oh, and while I’m wishing for things, I might as well chime in with one more thing. Killzone 2 is a team game only, but sometimes I wish for some of the best modes from other games. I really really want to have a King of the Hill mode in Killzone 2. It’s by far my favourite mode from Halo 3, and I think that KotH in KZ2 would be awesome. (I don’t suggest Halo invented KotH, I’m just saying I enjoy it there.) While I’m snatching modes from other games, I think KZ2 would enjoy Headquarters too. It’s my favourite game type from CoD. Hey, I can wish, can’t I? Maybe the Guerilla Games guys read my site…

EBGames called last night to say that KZ2 was in and that I could pick it up today. So I did exactly that. Unfortunately, while I work at home, I do have responsibilities. So I played two quick games (that weren’t very full of people) and now I’m back to work. Well, except for the fact that I’m typing this.

Want to know what impressed me the most? My shadow! I walked past a light on the wall and I saw my shadow on the ground turn from my side to go in front of me, just like a real shadow. I know it sounds like a small thing, but for some reason or other, it really impressed me!

I don’t know the maps at all, and since there were only about ten people in the game, it took a while to find the bad guys. But I managed to kill two right off the bat. Hopefully this portends things to come! I was ISA, and we won the round, so I got a score multiplier to boot! I also got the “Body Count Specialist” ribbon, which was a nice bonus. Check out my stats here.

Annoying things? Yeah, the menus still annoyed me. I’m going to have to get used to them. I didn’t much like the bobbing up and down as my character walked. But such is life, I guess I’ll get used to it.

Along with Star Wars and Indiana Jones, WarGames was one of my favourite movies growing up. (I guess it helped that I was am a computer geek.) In the movie, WOPR is a massive computer that learns. From a simple game of tic-tac-toe it learns that global genocide, probably killing itself in the process, is not a good idea.

Sony is also a massive entity, but one that does not seem capable of learning.

LittleBigPlanet is Sony’s version of tic-tac-toe. It played the game of creating, marketing, and selling the game. Sony created the online infrastructure for the game. It let the game loose on the world. And we all know how that went. There was hardly any marketing for the game (at least in North America), the servers were lousy, and the game was patched a bunch of times to make it work. It’s selling well in numbers now, but one can hardly consider the launch of the game a raging success.

WOPR learned from tic-tac-toe, but Sony hasn’t learned from LittleBigPlanet.

Guerilla Games created Killzone 2 for Sony, and they’ve done a good job. From all accounts (I am picking up mine later today), it is an awesome game. But then they just had to go and give the game over to Sony. I’ve seen just one ad for the game. I haven’t seen any other advertising. That’s not how you promote something, Sony. Also, just try going to Killzone.com. As of this writing, it’s down (again). If you do manage to get on, try to add a friend. It might work. But it probably won’t. (And why do we need to add friends anyway? Isn’t that what our PSN friends list is for? Edit: The game does indeed use the PSN friends list. So I don’t know what the Killzone.com friendlist is for.) Go online with Killzone 2. Join a friend’s game. There’s a good chance you won’t even be put on the same side.

Sony really needs this game. They need a launch that goes well, that gives Sony a good name. That tells people that Sony still has it, and that people need it. So far, that isn’t happening. Killzone 2 is Sony’s marquee shooter for the PS3. Let’s hope they shape up.

This game will succeed. But I have a feeling that it will be despite Sony, not because of Sony. See y’all online tonight!