Sunday, February 7, 2010

MAG inpressions and weekend gaming



While out getting breakfast this morning, I saw a commercial for MAG and it got me thinking. Kyle was in the early MAG beta and may have his own opinions, but I have never played the game myself. I enjoy first person shooter games, while not great at them, I do enjoy them. Didn't someone tell Sony that this is going to be a horrid, horrid idea? The major flaw in FPS games is that no one listens to anyone else. This is excluding clan matches, and dedicated servers that have a core player base. More often than not, people like to just run around on their own and kill people. A leader for each team is assigned, and there is some algorithm to assign it, but in the grand scheme of things, if people don't know that person, why would they listen to them. MAG, being a large scale game will just make it worse. For every player who is actually dedicated and will remain organized and listen to the leader, there are at least 2 players who will ignore everything the leader says, run off on their own, and call people by racial slurs. I would compare MAG to Marxism, on paper, it may be a good idea, but in practice, it will end with innocent dead people, and others in poverty. I don't plan on playing MAG, I will stick to the FPS games that don't put me in a game with 127 douchebags who will say stupid things, and get me killed. Other than the massive numbers, I haven't seen the game offer anything that peaks my interest. My other major complaint about the game is it's name, "Massive Action Game", who is the marketing genius who came up with that one? I love it when a game tells you exactly what a game is from the title, like "Driver". The difference here, it even tells you it is a game! They could have at least come up with something more original than Massive Action Game, that may be the worst game title I have heard. Though, I guess it all ties in together, the game seems to bring no innovations to the genre, other than putting a large amount of players in battle at once, and with a vanilla name, at least they kept a theme to it. "Hey guys, we have nothing new to offer you, except you can play with another 127 people on your team who are most likely assholes and won't listen to the leader." Sounds like a game I want to buy.... "Oh yeah, and we call it...Massive Action Game!!!." Wow, sign me up for this one! In closing, everything in this game sounds like a bad idea to me, maybe there are people out there who like babysitting 127 people protected by the cloud of anonymity, but for me, I will pass.

This weekend has been somewhat gaming light for me. I have been playing some Madden 09, which I haven't played in a while, maybe it is the Super Bowl hype that got me in the mood. I played two games, Keep in mind, I have not won a game yet vs the computer in Madden 09 (yes, I am that bad.). The first game went into OT, against the St. Louis Rams, I got the ball down to the 10 and threw a pick in the end zone which resulted in a loss. The second game was against the 6-1 Colts. I actually won the game. The majority of my issue was throwing over the middle. Something in Madden 09 makes the linebackers godly pass defenders. If you throw a ball within 10 yards of a linebacker, it is an interception. I swear I threw the ball to a completely open guy, with a completely open passing lane and out of nowhere a linebacker appears in the middle of the field, jumps 25 feet in the air and picks me off..it's kinda insane. I decided to stick with a running game, short passing game, and the occasional deep shot to Randy Moss. It worked out well, and I won my first game 24-7 against the Colts. Other than Madden, I plan on getting a little TF2 in before the weekend is out. I should be picking up Mass Effect 2 within the next 2 weeks, and I plan on going back and finishing the Pitt in Fallout 3, and picking up Broken Steel soon after.

2 comments:

  1. I have been reading reviews,trolling message boards,and listening to pod casts to try to get ne reinvigorated with excitement for MAG. All to no avail. I gave the beta a chance and was disenfranchised by the experience. I guess the game is alot of respawning, travelling across half the map, getting killed, respawning and parachuting into battle, being killed before you land. That was my gripe from beta which seems to be just part of the game. Deal with it. I have also been reading and hearing the S.V.E.R. army has a majority of better perks so players from the other 2 factions are jumping ship. It doesn't seem like Zipper has any balancing mechanic in place to keep MAG from turning into S.V.E.R. Mixed with PS Home where all you do is walk around a map not populated with any enemies. I am turned off by the emphasis on team work but there are no consequences for straying from orders from a superior officer. Players can cowboy up and go renegade. If there were consequences , like losing money or XP , team work and following orders would be a sure fire strategy; that is assuming your squad leader takes an active roll in setting objectives and taking the lead. I am trying so hard to jusify getting this game, but I have a copy of Modern Warfare 2 with a months worth of dust on my shelf that will satisfy my casual FPS multiplayer needs as a break from some of the other games I plan on gettin pretty deep into in the coming months. -Kyle

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  2. I am not biased to xbox. I am really a PC gamer if anything, and I would have the exact same impressions of MAG if the game was on PC, XBox or Wii to be completely honest. The idea is stupid, if you put 25 people who don't know each other, together in a game, they will not function as a team. If you have 200+ people, that is only amplified.

    If you enjoy MAG, great, but at the end of the day, I think it's a bad idea and will crumble within a year. From what I have seen, the game brings nothing new to the FPS table besides massive amounts of people, and that isn't always a good thing.

    If you like the game or disagree with me, that is perfectly fine, but I am not biased at all. I enjoy games on all platforms, and I would love to get a PS3 for a bunch of games, but it's not in the cards right now. Kyle has the PS3 and he can talk about many of the game, I just figured I would post my impressions of the game based on my experience in First Person Shooter games to date. Nine out of ten times, people don't play as a team, unless they are in a clan or are friends, which I mentioned I was excluding from my post.

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