Griefing is Dead

Left 4 Dead 2 has always enabled the greatest of griefing to occur, more so than almost any other PC game. Left 4 Dead 2 instilled a high population of griefers because of the outrage at the abandonment of Left 4 Dead (1), and L4D's current obsolescence.

Left 4 Dead 2 griefers could employ a variety of tactics, such as:

1. Killing oneself and/or others.
   
2. Mic-spamming.
3. Leaving and rejoining to avoid a kick.
4. Spamming votes.
5. Et cetera.

With the addition of the Restart Game and All Talk votes, VALVe allowed for an escalation of griefing that involved continuously restarting chapters, especially when a team loses. If griefers enjoyed their time on Left 4 Dead 2 before, they enjoyed it one thousand times more now.

From August to November, the reign of griefers continued, until VALVe restricted voting to one vote per person, per round (on average).

Today, VALVe succeeded in the final strike against griefers by ensuring that votes to kick take effect even if a player disconnects. As of today, the reign of griefers in Left 4 Dead 2 has ended.

Review of Loom

I just finished playing Loom, an extremely old adventure game (the first release on that of a floppy), that I have found in extreme distaste. This qualifies as one of the worst games I have played in quite a while, as it uses the point-of-no-return game style multiple times, in which you have to either load to a previous save point or restart the game if you forgot something. The game took me a total of around eight hours to beat from 11:00-19:00 on Wednesday, the 20th.

I will also use this post to prototype how I write reviews for games. I will start by listing the possible attributes of a game, and then explaining why I gave it that rating in detail.

Attribute	Rating (Unicode)	Rating (Plain Text)
Overall	★☆☆☆☆	1/5 Stars
Plot	★☆☆☆☆	1/5 Stars
Character Development	★☆☆☆☆	1/5 Stars
Gameplay	★☆☆☆☆	1/5 Stars
User Interface	★☆☆☆☆	1/5 Stars
Video	★★☆☆☆	2/5 Stars
Sound	★★★☆☆	3/5 Stars

Plot
The game had a somewhat interesting plot, but it lacked severely in execution. For instance, without spoilers, the player has to meet all the characters again at the end of the game and it becomes a let-down, because you do something for each of them and it never expands into the other characters' conditions at the end of the game. The ability to hear drafts by ear interested me more than the plot, which is a rarity as I usually play singleplayer games for the plot.

Character Development
The game had no character development whatsoever, something expected of at least the main character in an adventure game that usually tries to convey a morale learned by the main character. The characters stay exactly the same as you met them the first time to the end of the game.

Gameplay
Gameplay makes for the worst quality of this game. As aforementioned, the game has 4 points-of-no-return, three of which where the player must use a draft from earlier in the game almost immediately after reaching that point or they must start over.

Secondly, the game plays around three or four drafts with higher notes than the user has already learned, then the user has to go past a point-of-no-return and expected to figure out that draft without the ability to relisten to it.

The game should have implemented the following systems:

• Unlockable teleporters for all the points-of-no-return unlocked after a user progresses past the point.
  
• The ability to pick up the book at the beginning of the game and store drafts in it.
• When a player hears a draft the player should have to replay it to learn it and add it to the book.
• The game always allows players to relisten to drafts which require a higher note than the user already knows.
  
• A notification to stop the user from progressing to a point-of-no-return without learning all drafts in the area.
  

User Interface
I had to figure out how to play this game myself. I found no instructions in the game directory and found it quite tedious. F5 opens the Save/Load dialog, F7 toggles fast/slow animation, F8 prompts a restart of the program, F9 toggles subtitles, QWERTYUI play the notes CDEFGABC respectively, and space pauses the game. All the function keys could have easily become an ESC menu, and the game should have told you the use of the other keys.

Video
I will never judge an old game on its graphics, because I love old games and I play them a lot, but I do judge them on their graphics compared to other games from the same year and what the video has to offer.

The video does not go fullscreen; now that is a basis of personal preference, and it might benefit the user in the end as I could easily pause my game and work on something like this with it on the side.

The video's largest problem probably stems from the environment; when I first started the game I did not recognize that you had to turn around and go down the mountain from behind it. Usually a game where a player cannot see his or her character does not bode well.

Sound
I actually found myself surprised in the quality of the sound for this game. The voice actors had a lot of definition to them, they did not sound awkward or fake. In addition, and most obvious, the game requires the player to replay four notes by ear on the hardest difficulty, which seems easy for some until they actually play it. The game also had decent FX sounds and music when the player did certain events.

Steam Profile Summary

I don't have enough room on my Steam profile to post this, so I'll post it here:

I am a fluent EventScripter. My premiere work is PracticeMod which no longer works because of the CSS update, followed by Squads Mod and Pure Jailbreak. PracticeMod originated from Practice Weapon Restrictions which aimed at simply restricting weapons to lower ranking members. Pure Jail Break came from Jail Break Muting, which aimed at simply muting Terrorists, Spectators, and Dead Counter-Terrorists for a free-flowing game of Jail Break.

I also started working on Array, HordeMode, PandaHacks, UnitRename, UnitScrimmage, DeadChat, Juggernaut, MercFire, Pause, Specter, SurfDeathmatch, and WeaponRestrictions. As a quick description of each:

1. Array was to create managable arrays in EventScripts.
2. HordeMode was a port of two cfg scripts by White to spawn 300 health bots with only knives and the players had to survive for 3 minutes.
3. PandaHacks are a number of scripts converted from cfg to EventScript provided by TechPanda.
4. UnitRename was a script that would change a |KTM| member's name to full Greek with a squad symbol and appropriate tags but the CSS update stopped that.
5. UnitScrimmage was a port of PracticeMod that would allow CSS teams to have Ready Up scrimmages.
6. DeadChat was a script to allow dead players to chat deprecated by DeadMsg (not my script).
7. Juggernaut was a script that would spawn one Juggernaut/5 players with 999999 health and about 85% speed and the other team would have to kill him.
8. Specter was a script that would spawn on Specter/5 players with 1 health and 300% speed.
9. SurfDeathmatch creates Deathmatch in Surf.
10. WeaponRestrictions was a very linear script and one of my first next to PWR. Nothing is automated with loops and every line is written out manually.

Bioshock 2 (~comparison to Bioshock 1) Review

So I finished Bioshock 2 on the 18th at around noon and I've had a list in my head of things I did and didn't like. Of course I've procrastinated on writing this and I have other things I want to get to, so I feel I must finish it already.

In short, I would say Bioshock 2 was to Bioshock 1 as Left 4 Dead 2 was to Left 4 Dead. To explain these quickly:

Left 4 Dead 1

1. Better characters.
2. Better sounds.
3. Better UI.

Left 4 Dead 2

1. Better gameplay.
2. More gametypes.
3. Better AI director/events.

Bioshock 2 had better gameplay, i.e. the duel-wielding that should have existed in the first, but Bioshock 1 had a better storyline and even a better atmosphere in some cases.

To expand on the latter of those statements, Bioshock 1's storyline was the People vs the Parasite, whereas Bioshock 2's storyline was the Tyrant vs. the People. Sofia Lamb does not rally the splicers against the Tyrant nearly as well as Andrew Ryan did against the Parasite. The atmosphere of Bioshock 1 is better in that you have areas that stay in your head. Arcadia, Fort Frolic, the core of Rapture (starts with an 'h', I can't look it up on the Bioshock Wiki as there seems to be a problem with it), I mean nothing in 2 compares to shutting down the core.

As with atmosphere again, when you saved Little Sisters in Bioshock 1, it looked beautiful, like you loved her, in 2 you just put your hand on her and Turn on the Bright Lights (yes, an Interpol reference). Also Somewhere Beyond the Sea was a home run for Bioshock 1, that game got me loving that song.

As far as gameplay goes, hacking was much more fun in Bioshock 1 than in Bioshock 2, sure it was realistic in 2, but who cares about realism 10,000 leagues under the sea? Health and Eve restrictions at 5/5 was ridiculous, iirc it was 9 in Bioshock 1. I'd either have 5/5 Health and Eve when I didn't need them or about 0/1 when I did need them, because you use 5 after about three or four battles on difficult then you have to run back to the store to buy more.

Ammo was annoying on Bioshock 2 and the same thing, either I had no rivets or I had too many. Default max was 48, upgrade increased it to 62 I believe which helped a little. Same with the machine gun (240 max) and the shotgun (24 max). The elimination of tonic categories was one good move for Bioshock 2 though.

I also hated how I could play on High Graphics for Bioshock 2 but not Bioshock 1 with the same specs, I noticed Bioshock 2 installing Visual Studio 2005 Redistributable. I'm sorry, TWO-THOUSAND FIVE? Code five years out of date, especially now that it is 2010 with the release of VS2010.

If there are two big kickers though that make Bioshock 1 better than Bioshock 2, these were it. First, Bioshock 1 was level-based, Bioshock 2 was linear. If you missed a Power to the People you couldn't go back for it, but in Bioshock 1 you could. The second is that Bioshock 2 had no final boss, sure you had a big horde attack you, but no Frank Fontaine trying to rape you with Adam.

So in a shorthand list for reference, things which made Bioshock 1 better:

• Saving Little Sisters looked beautiful
• Hacking was more fun
• No Health and Eve restrictions
• Ammo less restricted
• Somewhere Beyond the Sea
• Using Visual Studio 2005 in its time
• Player can go back to previous levels (i.e. not a linear game)
  
• Final Boss

Things that made Bioshock 2 better:

• Duel-wielding
• No tonic categories
  

Welcome to my blog!

Hello, my name is PatPeter and welcome to my blog. I've had various opinions I wanted to share with the world over the past few my life, but only in the past few weeks did I think of putting it in blog form. This blog will have the following:

• Political Rants
• Religious Rants
• Game Reviews
• Game Rants
• Miscellaneous Posts

I'll add more sorts of categories as I think of them, this is only a rough start.