MOH, Black Ops, BF:Vietnam…. Decisions.

There are three first person shooters (FPS) options coming out within the next couple of months. There’s Medal of Hono(u)r from EA/DICE due out on October 12th, Call of Duty Black Ops from Activision/Treyarch on November 9th and the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam expansion pack (again from EA/DICE) due to be released in “winter”. Decisions will have to be made.

What to get, what not to get. Whether to bother getting any of them….

Here’s my position at the moment. I played the MOH Beta and was fairly uninspired. Apparently EA have made many changes to the game since the closed beta…. but they can’t change what it is: a connection based shooter. And as everyone knows, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Talking of connection based shooters, Black Ops fits there too and to be perfectly honest I think I’ve had it with connection based shooters.

Oh..what’s ‘a connection based shooter’? Good question. It’s all about ping, and how it’s dealt with. Essentially, the lower your ping, the more advantage you have. I’ve touched on ping before and its effects in game, but in a nutshell the person with the lower ping has their actions recognised by the server first. In connection based shooters this equates to lower ping, rather than fastest finger, wins. For example, if two people face each other off, Player 1 has a ping of 50ms and Player 2 has a ping of 100ms. Even if they both press fire at EXACTLY the same time in the real world Player 1 is going to blow away Player 2. Brilliant.

Recently, I’ve picked up CoD4 and 5 and my gaming experience has been very poor because of ping. Especially as most connection based shooters do not use dedicated servers which means that every player is not only at the mercy of their own connection, but also of that of the host! For many people it’s not something they even think about, but for me it’s a major pain in the ass and I’m fed up shelling out cash for a bad player experience. Having two decent rounds out of ten just doesn’t appeal to me which is why I’ve recently been playing less connection dependent games (and non-FPS).

So if we’re decided that MOH and Black Ops are not going to get a look in due to their connection based nature (and MOH is poo) then surely that leaves the Vietnam expansion pack for BFBC2. A sure fire bet!

No. EA and DICE have pretty much blown it now. Why the hell would I want to give a company MORE money when they continue to insult us. Oh sure, there’s the Gun Club “loyalty” system, in which I’ve earned two rewards so far, one which is anonymous and “coming soon” and the other is as useful as a chocolate teapot (early unlock for the M24 on MOH…).

Currently, as far as I’m concerned, BFBC2 is a mess and will continue to be a mess until they sort out the crate bashers. Conquest and Squad Death Match are not as engrossing game modes as Rush, but what gets me is that crate bashing was a game ruining “feature” in BC1….. so why is it in BC2 at all? DICE apparently have 34 “issues” that they’re looking in to from feedback on the forums – what those issues are, and which of them they will realistically fix, seems to be a closely guarded secret.

While BFBC2 continues as is, I won’t be buying any expansions for it. And when BFBC3 comes out, maybe I’ll just wait for six months after it comes out and get the Retail Ultimate Edition for less than the release edition with all the added bits that everyone else paid for….and a cherry on top.

So that’s nought for three at this moment in time. I’m finding it very difficult to be enthusiastic about any shooter games because it’s effectively all the same bullshit wrapped in different packaging being sold to us by a bunch of spivs who want the dollar, but not the responsibility.

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David Nicol is Articles Editor at hupitgaming.com

Black Ops, or Medal of Honor?

I’m not asking which one to get as at the moment it’s going to be neither. What I’m asking is: is there a difference? Despite them coming from different developers both the games are remarkably similar.

It seems the only thing that differentiates them is the gimmicks. The look and kill “pop ups” are almost the same. In this video from Hutch it looks very similar to the Kabul Ruins level from the MOH Beta:

And here’s MOH in case you haven’t seen it yet:

I know there’s only so much you can do with an FPS…. but really?

Peas and loaves

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David Nicol is Articles Editor at hupitgaming.com

NextGenTactics MOH Beta Intro

NextGenTactics have released a vid going through the options on the Medal of Honor Closed Beta from EA/DICE. To be honest, I didn’t actually know that these things existed. Look out for the cameo from Hypermole (Gary).

Peas and loaves.

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Medal of Honor Beta – First Impressions

I’m trying very hard to focus on the positives here. It is a bit difficult, I know that it’s a beta, but there are some problems that really shouldn’t be in a beta – they should have been picked up in QA prior to any public launch (closed or not).

So I’m going to get the negative bits off my chest first otherwise I’ll just be sugar coating them.

1 – Freezing – when playing as Afghan/Local/Insurgent if you check the scrore screen during spawn the PS3 freezes, if you score 40 points with your gun the PS3 freezes. I think it may be an anti-terrorist measure, but it’s definitely annoying and worrying too. I don’t want my PS3 freezing! What happens if it freezes and the magic smoke escapes – I’m pretty sure that in the T&Cs I agreed to to play the Beta there would have been a section that says something like: “Your PS3 may explode, we accept no responsibility for such situations….” so I’m thinking that either I’m not going to play the Beta until this issue is resolved, or just not play as the locals. Which brings us nicely on to….

2 – Unbalanced Teams – it seems that the only people who actually choose to play as the locals, or let the system choose for them are the new players like me. The freezing issue means that people are opting NOT to play on the locals side, and those that do get frozen out of the game as soon as they manage to string a couple of kills together. So you end up with hugely unbalanced games. I thought it was just DICE’s awesome team balancing effort again, but on ponderation the reason is now clear (see 1 above).

3 – Arse Backward Weapons – Weapons that should be strong are weak and vice versa. Especially the tank – it’s redundant and pointless.

4 – Non-destructible environments and pointless vehicles – I don’t understand the reasoning for having indestructible environments, especially when you have tanks in the mix. Fair enough don’t have guns damaging buildings, but RPGs and tank rounds should damage them, or at least injure people hiding behind them. Do I really have to get a perfect headshot with a tank against someone hiding behind a MUD BRICK wall before they can fire a rocket at me from their impenetrable fortress of dust? Come on, it’s ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the vehicles themselves. The tanks should really just be stationary heavy MGs or something as the maps make it that you can’t go anywhere in them anyway. The maps are too small and the battle areas are too cramped for tanks.

I think that’s the negative bits out of the way…. so on with the positives:

It looks nice.

It also rewards players who put the time in with godly powerful weapons, but that’s a bit moot if EA/DICE continue with their pay-to-boost business model.

As andresparra said to me about the game: “it combines all that the Battlefield fanboys hate about COD with all that the COD fanboys hate about the Battlefield saga”. I think that fairly sums it up in its current state.

Let’s not forget that this is still in the Beta stage so any and all of the negative aspects will probably change. It’ll be interesting to see the difference between this beta and the demo (if they bring a demo out) or the full game. Currently I don’t see this game being high on my list of games to buy. You can’t be all things to all people and this is what Medal of Honor is attempting to be.

Peas and loaves.

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MOH Beta

Today one of the guys from YouTube gave me a code for the Beta of Medal of Honor from EA/DICE which is awesome in itself. I’ve never played the beta of any game before so this is two firsts in one for me.

I got it all sorted out without any problem – I guess I must be lucky due to the amount of people complaining about not being able to get in to the beta, or it could be that DICE have done some tweaking. I had a quick partial game of whatever the conquest type mode was on Helmand playing as the locals. It was only a quick game to make sure it was all working okay.

When I spawned it was to the losing side – DICE at its finest – and quickly found that pretty much everything is different to both MW2 and BFBC2. The Americans(?) were attacking and they were in their tank. It shot me in the face a number of times while I tried to hit it with the 40mm grenade launcher until my daughter helpfully said during one of my numerous spawns “Why don’t you play as that guy with the thing on his back?”. I’d been choosing the assault class each time, not realising that the ‘special ops’ class had an RPG! It is a bit silly though – I would have thought that Spec-ops would be have been some sort of sneaky mode class – not a KABLAMMMO LOOK AT ME OVER HERE class. But I digress.

Over all my initial taste was fairly frustrating, but that’s down to me for the most part. I’ll be playing it later and recording it in order to give my view of the beta so far.

Peas and loaves.

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