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 LATEST EPISODE:  The Game Shadow Ops: Red Mercury came out in 2004 for at least the Xbox and the PC. In a lot of ways it is a pretty typical first person shooter for its time: lots of scripted fights, paper thin story, health packs instead of regenerating health, short levels that railroad you from one spot to the next and a controller breaking level of difficulty. The graphics were nothing special then; Halo 2 came out a year later and looked a million times better. Hell, Halo 1 came out three years earlier and looked better. Level design reaches levels of OK at times, but spends most of the run of the game in "why in the world is it like this?" territory. You are probably wondering why I would sit down in front of this game and dedicate ANY time to it when I have all these complaints (and more!). I guess nostalgia accounts for some of it, I sunk a lot of hours into this game in high school, but never finished it back then. The other part is that this game is basically Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's (OG Modern Warfare) long lost cousin. No joke, story elements, levels, set pieces and so on all seem like weird echos of the better known game. I'll be pointing these things out as we go. Also, I have a weird desire to show off these semi-obscure games from a bygone era. I'm pretty sure no one remembers this thing but me and that really shouldn't be the case. It may be trash at times, but once you get into the challenge of the game it can get fun and intense. Then it just breaks for no reason and you hate everything. The LP This shouldn't take too long. The game has 26 chapters, but I literally sat idle at the pause menu for two hours one day while working from home and still finished the game with less than 6 hours of playtime. Now that I've actually beaten it the LP should move quickly. I'm shooting for three or so videos a week and then rolling into something else directly after this. I haven't done a shooter in a bit and everything I have lined up is shooters, so start with the most intense but short one to get back into it is the thought here. Can I help? If you know the right inputs to stop the game from randomly changing the settings that would be cool. If you want to get in on commentary or have something you want to see me try go ahead and PM me or post in the thread, I don't expect an overwhelming volume of posts because 1)This game was never popular and shared nostalgia will be limited and 2)I'm bad at video games and this is not a masterclass level of play. TABLE OF CONTENTS                
Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 00:52 on May 24, 2020 |
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Apr 6, 2020 22:11
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| # ? May 8, 2024 22:07 |
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I straight on BLEW through this level compared to my test playthrough. I thought this was going to be two videos at least and I was going to suffer any number of deaths. One thing that I've learned from the test playthrough is that your enjoyment of this game is HEAVILY reliant on how much you remember the scripted encounters. If you know a guy is hiding above the stairs or someone is going to throw a grenade you can avoid a lot of damage and limit your deaths. Death is a real punishment here, no matter how far into a mission you make it the game will send you back to the start of the chapter. Sometimes that is a few minutes, sometimes it can be half an hour, just depends on when you die. The close of the game is far more brutal than the start on that account. Pacing goes out the window and you get a series of brutal fights in a row with limited health around and you are just one bad turn from having to do it all again. I make a claim in this video that enemies don't drop health and left out an important detail: sometimes they do. It's limited, though. I haven't exactly tested it because there is no manual save/save scumming for this game, so I would have constantly come close to death to confirm it, but it seems if you get below the value a single medpack would heal (25 health) there's a small chance any enemy you kill will drop a pack. It seems to be 50/50 between that and ammo, which itself is at a 50% rate at best. Sometimes it is a godsend, other times you need both health and ammo (killing guys is the only way to get the latter), so you may live for a few seconds longer after a kill, but you won't be able to kill another guy because non-ARs suck.
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Apr 6, 2020 22:20
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Did your character unironically call himself an Operator in his first sentence?
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Apr 7, 2020 01:02
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This is going to be wild 
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Apr 7, 2020 02:13
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Polaron posted:Did your character unironically call himself an Operator in his first sentence? The original OP was done in Frank's character and involved the words "Dark Ops Hoorah Marine Tier one high speed low drag tip of the spear SEAL Operator" in that order. I think the game takes itself seriously, but it goes into parody way too often. Also it has a crazy long Wikipedia page for how little loved it was/is.
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Apr 7, 2020 02:53
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Video is good, but is there a way to balance the audio a bit? The gunshots/player characters are deafening relative to your voice.
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Apr 7, 2020 10:16
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Oh man, it's like a love letter to terrible 90s action movies, but it feels like it takes itself too seriously. Anyway, Red Mercury itself is quite an interesting thing, it's like a modern day philosopher's stone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury Exactly what it is and what it's useful for changes wildly depending on who you ask, but the theory I like the most is that it's a hoax deliberately put out there by the CIA et al so that they can pick up on would-be arms smugglers/terrorists when they try to acquire the stuff. Crazy Achmed fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 12:02
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ilmucche posted:Video is good, but is there a way to balance the audio a bit? The gunshots/player characters are deafening relative to your voice. Ditto on this - had a really hard time hearing you at parts! Also the intro, oh my goodness
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Apr 7, 2020 17:26
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ilmucche posted:Video is good, but is there a way to balance the audio a bit? The gunshots/player characters are deafening relative to your voice. I have a standard audio ducking setup that has worked flawlessly for like, 8 LPs that this game's audio somehow confounded. Episode 3 I start reducing the overall volume and using a more aggressive duck that SHOULD be good for the rest of the series. I will mention this in a video later, but in addition to the audio being a little weird there are no subtitles in any of the cutscenes because they are actual videos and it appears Zombie forgot to put any in there for the PC version, even on non-English VAs. As a result, I have zero insight on what any Russian says in the game. Edit: Something I found while looking through the game files (because there is no support for the game so I found where they were by clicking on everything) are the mini-docs the studio made about different aspects of the game. Seems a good time for this one: The Making of Sound Design Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 17:43
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Is this the same zombie that made the game locus? I have only nostalgic memories for that game which apparently can't be run on modern machines. I'm guessing it's for the best, really.
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Apr 7, 2020 18:55
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ilmucche posted:Is this the same zombie that made the game locus? I have only nostalgic memories for that game which apparently can't be run on modern machines. I'm guessing it's for the best, really. It is. They were one of those companies that existed solely to release a torrent of games you would find in jewel cases in the electronics section of Walmart across from the broken WiiU display. I'm seeing like six Spec Ops (pre-Spec Ops: The Line) and a bunch of Delta Force games and some military training simulators (America's Army as well). Clicking a few Wikipedia links gets you to a fun place. One of Zombie's founders, Mark Long, had a deal with comic book imprint Radical to create a military sci-fi series. His co-author was Nick Sagan, son of Carl.
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Apr 7, 2020 20:22
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I'm not done watching the intro and I can already hear the VA struggling not to laugh while reading this bullshit. This is great.
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Apr 7, 2020 20:56
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Well this looks like a piece of poo poo.
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Apr 8, 2020 02:58
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I know it’s such a small thing to complain about, but those subtitles floating up from the bottom of the screen are so distracting.
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Apr 8, 2020 03:15
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Well, the game made it almost a whole hour before throwing down a pun level title, and the laziest one they could think of as well. I mean, Ice Cube made it on Predator, that album was old when this game came out. Anyway, there's a couple things in this level that you don't see for the rest of the game: weather and wildlife. You would think that the fog we see in this video would be sort of setting trends for the rest of the game. Snow or sand storms could be a thing, a downpour could limit visibility just as easily. Nope, that poo poo goes straight out of the window. There's not even smoke effects in the next video and it will make sense why that is worth commenting on once we get there. Wildlife I could give or take, it's just some butterflies here (see title card), but hey; it makes the world feel a little bit more alive, like it isn't populated just by you and some bad guys. I don't even think there are animal sounds in this level, just butterflies every now and again. You can get away with that poo poo in something like Halo where you spend the entire game on an artificial planet, but on earth...even in city levels you can have like dogs and cats. Butterflies are literally it for the entire game, though. I don't know why, I just think that's worth remarking on.
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Apr 8, 2020 23:07
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I don't know what I'm watching any more! I don't even know if this is a trainwreck or something more glorious.
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Apr 9, 2020 00:48
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I am enjoying this trip back through era-specific jank
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Apr 9, 2020 01:16
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bbcisdabomb posted:I'm not done watching the intro and I can already hear the VA struggling not to laugh while reading this bullshit. This is great. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 11:08
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So it takes to the end of the third episode in this series and about an hour and a half into the game before we get any information on why the opening half hour took place. In Media Res is a great storytelling technique in movies and books because you get introduced to the characters in a critical moment and if you do it well you still get the tension and unpredictability that makes fiction great building up to that opening moment and gives you an opportunity for a bait and switch twist. In games it is a bit harder to do if you try to incorporate gameplay because most games open with a training sequence of some sort (though they save it for the second level here, so I think they had unused Syria levels that they made the intro mission, by the way) it doesn't make sense for someone to be instructing you on basic poo poo at the start when story-wise you've killed like a battalion of dudes. Prototype did it well, it starts you off at the height of your powers and uses that time to train you with prompts and instructions, then sends you back in time so you want to build up to be that badass from the opening. Final Fantasy X opens with your party camping near the final location but offers no gameplay. I had to kind of stretch for those, even. It's just hard to do well in games and Shadow Ops proves the point. There are characters in the cutscenes from the first episode that you meet through the game (like at the end of this video) but, and I need you to stick with this so you can tell me I'm not insane, the game basically throws that entire opening sequence out the window later to the point where I can only assume there are two realities that are merged into one by the red mercury explosion. It's totally possible the designers just expected you to put down the controller after a few hours and never play it again, I don't know. Listen, I tried to show off how broken the game was earlier in a recording and it somehow didn't break and I'm very upset, maybe I'm being too hard on poor Shadow Ops. Probably not, though.
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Apr 10, 2020 20:40
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The hard-as-nails, mid-riff baring secret agent is how you know its a early/mid 2000's military FPS.
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Apr 11, 2020 04:25
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Who thought this was good pacing to introduce the story? Some frantic shooting to reach a nuke, which blows up anyway. But never mind that. Switch to some unrelated crawling in the forests of Kongo and introduce the nuke mission (that already happened) in a cut scene at the end.
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Apr 11, 2020 12:43
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Kibayasu posted:The hard-as-nails, mid-riff baring secret agent is how you know its a early/mid 2000's military FPS. You know the funnier part is that it looks like she's wearing a form fitting sleeveless, stomach exposing wool sweater based on what the material looks like in the video. where do you even buy one of those?
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Apr 11, 2020 18:08
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This is the dumbest loving thing, lol. Yelling at the SFC to gently caress off because he doesn't get to come on Frank's suicide mission. I'm pretty sure they just chuck Words at the script to make it seem Action and Intense. Also, she's got me questioning the "intelligence" part of her occupation if she's wearing wool to the Congo
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Apr 12, 2020 04:50
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It wasn't that much wool.
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Apr 12, 2020 04:52
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Kibayasu posted:It wasn't that much wool. My operating theory is that her grandmother knitted her that sweater vest like 25 years ago and she just keeps wearing it like it is normal.
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Apr 12, 2020 18:27
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Ah, look at me, already a week in and I'm breaking schedule. I meant to post this yesterday but I spent 11 hours just at my desk doing actual paid work with no break (and am doing the same today, and every day since this whole COVID thing came down), so be happy I just remembered this was a thing, I guess. I am just frequently going to compare this game to Call of Duty, especially in the snow level that opens up the video. I can see this being a really low poly count version of any of the sniping missions in COD as those always put you on a set of invisible rails and expect you to just shoot people in the head from cover. However, it blinded me to the real comparison, that one level in Goldeneye where you wander around the snow near the Russian Satellite Dish thing sniping some guys, killing others with brute force. The difference being in that game you get useful weapons, in this one you get a sniper rifle and a pistol, so when they want you to start running and gunning you are just not a match for the average enemy. Up to now I think this is the closest I have come do dying just because of the game's design. Speaking of the game's design. Oh my god is the shotgun bad. Just watch the video to see.
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Apr 14, 2020 18:30
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I swear to god this game is so broken that you can't break it properly. Episode 9 was the stumbling block to this LP for almost two weeks before I found a post deep on the steam forums claiming you didn't have to go push a button I thought was necessary and therefore didn't have to have your game crash no matter what, which was what happened to me literally every time I played the game. I now believe that crash had a couple requirements that I didn't realize existed before, essentially they boil down to you stepping over an invisible line when you have loaded episode 9 but have no further episodes unlocked. I attempted to show this break before the start of the next video and it wouldn't work (I then proceeded to beat the level instead of quitting like a moron), so my limited knowledge of how these things work makes me think that there is some weird memory thing that forces the game to close if you load 9 but have no previous or future levels either loaded or available. The only way I can prove this theory is to start a new profile and get it to this point and see if it happens by dying on purpose, but there is no way I am doing that to myself.
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Apr 16, 2020 03:12
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I can't get enough of the "HOUP" damage yell e: also hot drat, that lack of hard crash was great biosterous fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 14:26
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Is this the Anti-LP Curse? The game won't crash or otherwise stop the LP even when you want it to?
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Apr 16, 2020 15:28
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berryjon posted:Is this the Anti-LP Curse? The game won't crash or otherwise stop the LP even when you want it to? There's a minor geometry glitch in the next video, but outside of that everything has been perfect. I even went so far as to record a second attempt at crashing the level to show what I was dealing with for like two weeks straight (I beat the rest of the game over a weekend once I got past this, it was that perplexing an issue) and it just refused to crash. I have no idea what triggers the crash or why it suddenly went away when I started the game from the beginning I think it has something to do with not having level saves after this mission or something, I can't make sense of it.
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Apr 16, 2020 21:28
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For a game this stunningly mediocre to not do what you expect is actually pretty impressive. Especially when that means "not crashing."
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Apr 16, 2020 21:57
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Until the ammo counter came back when your settings broke in part 3 I thought you had infinite ammo, I may have missed you explaining the cut off ammo before that part. This game feels like a more action-y version of an earlier game called Project IGI, which was also a "tactical" shooter where "tactical" mostly just meant its really hard until you mostly know what the scripts are going to do and then be exactly where/when you need to be. Now that I think about it it also had a lot of the same story beats and I'm starting to think the Call of Duty tropes may not actually be wholly original 
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Apr 17, 2020 05:06
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Psion posted:For a game this stunningly mediocre to not do what you expect is actually pretty impressive. Oh, yeah, this game has zero internal consistency on anything. Character design, voice acting (there's one Russian voice actor for everyone who needs to speak Russian, he sounds nothing like Vlady), or story. Hell, Frank ends up wearing a completely different Tacticool outfit at the end of Episode Six than the last time we see him outside at the end of episode 3 or from when he was in the lab at the end of last episode. Most games get really lazy and just give someone the same outfit at all times, these designers kind of said gently caress it, dumped all their money into modeling Frank as many ways as they could and neglected everything else. Kibayasu posted:Until the ammo counter came back when your settings broke in part 3 I thought you had infinite ammo, I may have missed you explaining the cut off ammo before that part. So for whatever reason the HUD works on a different resolution scale than the rest of the display, it looks like the different elements of the HUD, things like the sniper zoom level, the boxes around your weapons and health and even the ammo and gun type icons are all different elements that work on different scales, despite there being a single HUD Size value in the game settings. I think setting the game to a 16:9 resolution instead of the native 4:3 is what is causing the problems in the first place, but the fact is that not everything is breaking in the same way, like the standing/ducking icon gets moved in a different way and scale from the gun icon, even the black bar that appears with the white scale line for sniping moves differently from its partner element. Side by side comparison of the normal and upscale resolutions become a fun game of spot the difference:   The stance and health icons just stretch, the gun and ammo and grenade icons stretch and move up, the boxes that contain them stay the same. The sniper zoom scale moves a quarter of the screen to the left and somehow takes the previously indistinguishable from background black bar with it. There's some little white line at the bottom of the sniper scope view in the normal resolution that also moves off to the left. I think there were underlying issues with the HUD stuff from the start, promotional stills that are on the game disc have an objective radar at the top of the screen (going into the options menu for a second will gently caress with the resolution, so I'll hold off on finding out if it is still there for a bit):  By the way, the stills in the system file consist of the weirdest things. I mean, there are eight straight exact duplicate screenshots of Galena through a door and then the pause menu and then 10 shots like the one above in a row. These aren't screenshots I took by accident or anything, these are just in the System files as .bmp's. I don't know what the gently caress.
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Apr 17, 2020 18:23
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In a noble effort to outwit this dumb game I only screwed myself over and ended up having to play/record more of it. This is probably one of the least painful levels to have to retread, even though it can get difficult at times. The key is the stuff you see me do in the areas with the grated floors. If you know the spawns and get to the right spots you can get out of those rooms having lost little to no health and can typically backtrack to get leftover health packs if you are in a bind. Future levels have very few cheesable locations like that and so help ramp up the difficulty curve. There are spots later where you will be in firefights with a swarm of enemies and zero cover and no health behind or in front of you, so playing conservatively is the best option you have in all cases. That often means breaking the AI like I do here or abusing the scripts and spawn points to survive. The other option is death and restarting the level. Some of the ones coming up can take 30 minutes to clear and one bad decision or forgotten enemy near the end can screw you hard.
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Apr 18, 2020 17:14
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"This game is not about effort." - truer words have never been spoken about this game.
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Apr 18, 2020 18:04
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imfdb says that the weird gun is this thing, which apparently I've seen in lots of other games but I have no memory of it.
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Apr 19, 2020 01:07
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Uh-oh, Sweater Chest is jealous of the attention Frank's giving Not-Natasha! And that scene of the team rising out of the water. Just ... wow.Tacti-kewl Ops: Red Mercury.
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Apr 19, 2020 18:26
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I seriously have no idea why the game goes dark in the recordings, it looks fine while I play it. I will try to fix that in the future, I only realized how bad it was when editing the episode after this one which...well, it has its own very weird issues. You will see. There's nothing particularly wrong with this level besides from the incredibly difficult firefights you get into here. It's a trying, but forgiving enough level where there are healthpacks available where you need them for the most part and a pretty easy sniping section to break things up. it does find a way to lend more credence to my theory that the glass in the game is not transparent for the AI as the only pane in the entire level gets broken through as part of a script by the AI, but whatever. This is also where you start to see me just completely ignore things that aren't the main assault rifle, which is kind of the situation for the rest of the game. I mention it in the next few videos, but there is a damage drop off factor when firing some weapons at a distance. The pistols lose the most the fastest, the sniper rifles do the same damage at any distance, the shotguns suck...Assault Rifles seem to just do the same damage to the same body parts no matter where they are, so you use the main weapon at all times. This leaves you prone to running out of ammo. At least one of my deaths in a practice run was attributable to trying to finish a segment of the last level off with a pistol and sniper rifle. This is why you rarely see me fire full auto. The game is stingy enough with ammo drops that going guns blazing is rarely a good idea because you may not recover all of the bullets expended for several firefights, which leads to an overall deficit in bullets which is, I am told, bad for you.
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Apr 21, 2020 02:21
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I can't believe we got to see an enemy rubberband-lag in a single-player offline game. This game just keeps delivering.
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Apr 21, 2020 03:43
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biosterous posted:I can't believe we got to see an enemy rubberband-lag in a single-player offline game. This game just keeps delivering. You have no idea. If I told you how the next video starts you would think I was lying.
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Apr 21, 2020 11:35
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