Post
by BEAST » Wed Sep 12, 2018 01:56 am
I currently beat Myth: The Fallen Lords (or more accurately, The Fallen Levels plugin for Myth II) on Legendary with no casualties, and I'm trying to beat Myth II: Soulblighter on Legendary. It's amazing that the developers of Halo were responsible for these games. Myth's like a tactical early 3D equivalent of WarCraft, but with no base building, and mainly just surviving against hordes of baddies with only a handful of units. Dwarves throwing explosives at the undead is always fun.
I could tell you about my experiences with Unreal and Bioshock.
I didn't get to beat Unreal until some time around '07. I played it with an unpatched vanilla CD for Unreal on my old used XP laptop. It didn't get rendered properly, so it was pixelated. It kept fluctuating between extremely fast and extremely slow, regardless of settings. The even longer levels were very slow to get through when I was on unstoppable slowmo. Nevertheless, I beat it. The Scaarj Queen boss was cathartic. The little green guys are the worst enemies. I didn't expect Unreal to be such a comprehensive and awesome experience. I knew it was awesome when I first played it on my family's old '98 Windows computer newly transplanted with a Voodoo graphics chip, but I never got to see fully how awesome it was until I was older.
I got the Unreal Anthology later, which allowed me to play the other games. I certainly enjoyed Return to Na Pali, but I was kind of disappointed by the new weapons and enemies. I was expecting the human enemies to be more dynamic, rather than gliding, stiff enemies that just kept shooting at you. It was pretty uninspired to end the last level with a repeat of the Scaarj Warlord rather than a new boss. I never understood why some expansion packs just repeated old bosses rather than creating new ones. Quake II: Mission Pack 1: Reckoning comes to mind. The one thing I really liked from Na Pali was its closing track. It sounds like a Polynesian syntho jam. It just has an awesome mood to it.
As for Unreal's weapons, I like them just fine, even though I know other players feel they're weak. It does help that the combat it fluid and dynamic, and there's plenty of ammo. Putting game on slowmo speed certainly helps in the tactical combat against the respawning enemies during the arena sections. The slowmo setting even helps on the Unreal difficulty. It still amazes me how advanced Unreal was for '98.
All in all, the one gripe that I have with Unreal is that it doesn't have enough save slots. I would think that for such a long game, with no chapter selections, it was at least deserving of more save slots. I want to revisit the progress I made in certain levels, not just cheat to skip to the levels I want to revisit.
As for Bioshoch, I still have to complete Bioshock. I'm not a master player, but I'm halfway the game so far. I got better at the hacking and the plasmid weaponry. It's amazing how it took elements from System Shock 2 and Half-Life to the next level. It probably could've done better than to imitate the structure of System Shock 2, but Bioshock is still pretty impressive.