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After complaining about the bad, it is now time to praise the good. Some great encounters /levels from games I have played and why I love them.

Thomas Whitfield, Blogger

August 28, 2009

5 Min Read

 

So Yesterday I rannted about encounters (and some gameplay items) that make me crazy.  Today, I'd like to praise a few encounters levels and gameplay options I enjoyed and explain why I liked them.  Please note this is not an easy/hard thing.  A lot of the things I did not like in the last post were indeed hard, but not hard in a reasonable manner.  I don't mind hard encounters, as long as they are scaled appropriately.

 Most of these are not art based as well.  While many/most of them look cool in and of themselves, the coolness of the visuals isn't what I'm after here today.  I'm after mechanics and playability.

 No an exaustive list in no particular order (please excuse errors in level naming etc.):

CoD: WaW  "Black Cats."  In a refresing change from the tank battles in most of the CoD games (and in my opinion more fun that the c-130  use in MW) this level has a fun shooting gallery feel to it.  Still haven't gotten the "Sum of all Zeroes" achievement but I enjoy trying.

CoD: MW   "All Ghillied Up"  Probably my favorite CoD mission from any of the games.  Well balanced and fun. Has a good atmosphere that links with the mission objectives.

 

Fallout 3 Point Lookout "The mansion running battle"  Lots of fun as you haul butt though the mansion.  Great event scripting and difficulty curve.  Playable with imported weapons (from an advanced savegame, and with the new weapons from the DLC (not all FO3 DLC is as friendly to its own new gear when enemies are scaled to high level chars... like the Pitt)

 Fallout 3 The Pitt 'Steel Bar Achievement / Scrapyard Design"  I loved running all over the scrapyard to find the steel bars.  Enemy placement and amounts were great. (Though some of the reward guns were kind of weak for an advanced character).

 

Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 "Terrorist Hunt Mode"  A lot of fun to play co-op and much improved over RB6 V1's version.  Ultimately this game was pretty much unsupported after release.  The mode is soemthing my firends and I still break out and play.  Maps for the qwhole game don't really sup[port sniper rifles at all (while many of the maps in RB6 1 did).  Gameplay is still fun and requires teamwork on a lot of maps to clear (especuailyl on realistic difficulty).

Hitman : Blood Money "Suburban Assasination mission"and the "Clinic Rescue (with 3 assasinations)" levels.  These 2 levels are probably the most freeform of the levels. Lots of way to finish these missiosn with good ratings.  Many of the other missions have a much more set way to beat them for the best ranking (you can beat them other ways, but usually get a lower score). Seducing the drunk wife as the clown is just wrong on a lot of levels.  Pretending to be a doctor for each of the guys in the clinic is pretty funny as well.

 

Everquest 1 "Sebilis"  On for my favorite dungeon crawls (not camps BTW) tough dungeon with a lot of mobs. Jewel of pre-instanced dungeon gaming

Everquest 1 "Upper and Lower Guk" Again, great crawls, though eventually camped up.  More examples of great pre-instanced dungeons.

Everquest 2  "Splitpaw Adventure pack"  Although SOE gave up on Adventure packs, this one was very well done with solo, herioic and raid components (when the raid boss wasn't bugged).  Nice balance of content, decent scaling rewards.

 

Vanguard:SOH "The crafting system" Probably my favorite MMO crafting sytem.  Unfoirtunately conencted to a game that doesn't seem to have a real future to it.Right amount of challenge to get the best results. A fully featured minigame of the highest order.

 

Halflife 2 "Ravenholm"  I'm not a zombie fan(Alos an honorable mention to the Diplomacy system, which was also goood, but not as wid really, but I liked this level. It is a strange left turn in the game.  Creepy, weird, but not really hard.  It is beatable with guns, and with just physics traps and the crowbar. Way more fun than the Antlion levels.

 

Not a complete list by any means, I also skipped some games where I loved the gameplay thoughout but couldn't pick one spot to showcase as a favorite part (origional Pool of Radiance, or Fallout 1/2, TIE FIghter etc.).  I probably stretched my origional idea by including entire levels here already.

What do you want to recall fondly?  Why was it so great?

 

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P.S.

Recently I have been trying to rememeber the name of an old old PC game.  I believe it was a MS-DOS game. If I remember right it was in the 256 color era.

The general plot was the Moon disappeared taking with it 4 people that were on the moonbase there.   Using cloning and salvaged alien technology, the crew members explored/traded and tried to get the moon back to Earth.  Whenever you died you churned out another copy of that character / ship etc. and went out again.  It had a little bit of RPG character skills element when you cloned a new copy of one of the characters... and it had space ship 2D combat (with configureable ships and tech trees).

I think Moon was in the title, but can't be sure.  Having a really hard time searching for it without a real title, or anything besides my vague memories of fun.

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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