Planetside 2 - Three Worlds Collide

Format: PC
Players: So, so many
Genre: MMO, FPS
Price: IT'S FLIPPIN' FREE!
Notes: Vanu Sovereignty Forever!

Released officially to the world just the other day was the epic new Sci-Fi MMOFPS Planetside 2. it had been in beta for a long time and has now finally been released to public, for those of us unable to receive a beta key and play in the past half year or so (me and my shit computer).

For those of you who don't know about Planetside, it's a game all about capturing bases and huge firefights. You can find thousands of people on a server at any given time, so there will always be something to shoot at. Anyway, let me explain a bit more... The concept of Planetside 2 is that three factions which you can choose to be in, the New Conglomerate, Terran Republic, and Vanu Sovereignty, are fighting it out across three huge continants, to capture territories on the planet of Auraxis, the story behind it all is quite complicated and if you ask me, completely irrelevant as none of it is mentioned in that game as far as I have seen. The point is you capture territories and try and take over the world, so yeah do that.

Look at all that lovely purple VS territory... What? No I'm not biased, not biased at all!

The battle is constantly taking place, that is one of the charms and nuisances of this game, as you can often find yourself fighting for hours to capture this one large base, only to come back the next morning to find you've lost it and many others and have to capture it again, it all depends on the kind of player you are as to whether you love or hate what goes on while you're asleep, or even just eating dinner.

When flying airborne vehicles you get a lovely view of the action, like from this beautiful VS Scythe, all ready to blast those fascist TR planes out of the sky!

There are, however, 4 problems I have with this game and to be honest I think a lot of them are probably only problems to me because I'm not used to PC gaming, like, at all. I find the controls awkward yet at the same time I know they're initially quite well structured for a PC game, WASD to move, E to interact, the standard stuff, and you can reasign the keys if necessary to suit your preference, vehicle controls are one of the more annoying things, because moving the mouse continues changing where I look, I can often find myself traveling forward, wanting to turn left so I move the mouse (Wonder why? I'm so bad at PC gaming I only use the 'W' key to move and rely on my mouse to turn me) and I crash because of it. Very irritating.

Another issue of note is what I call 'Call of Duty Syndrome', this is just one of those games where it's too quick to kill or be killed, it only takes a few accurate shots from a machine gun to kill, and that often means if you find a guy and machine gun him in the back, he'll be dead before he even has a chance to act on it, which is a little bit unfair, if you ask me. The next problem I have is the difficulty, because I assure you, if you play this game, and you're a pretty casual gamer, you will get killed over and over again by PC gaming pros with their special gaming mice and Alienware keyboards and fancy stuff, they'll have gotten all the best upgrades for their weapons and you will hardly stand a chance, so stay away unless you're up for a challenge. The last problem I have is that to really make a mark in Planetside, you can't really go it alone, so make sure you have some friends along, and make sure you're able to communicate with them, as typing '[/s]Let's go capture point xxx right now!' in the middle of a firefight will get you killed. and if you're wondering why having friends is a necessity here, it's because I tried capturing an entire base on my own once, there were no enemies there initially so I though 'screw it let's capture this place' but I only got 3/4 of the way done before the enemy had caught on and went to kill me. So yeah get some friends.

The game has an awesome day and night cycle too, makes the VS weapons fire look particularly beautiful when taking out New Conglomerate scum
.... I told you I'm not biased!

But despite all this, I'm still going to play Planetside openly and lovingly because it still holds so much of what really makes a game - Fun. It's very fun, capturing bases from the enemy and pushing them back is it's own kind of thrill and when the 'Facility Captured' notice finally comes up it's a great motivator. I haven't even talked about everything there is to say about Planetside here, there's so much more fun to be had on Auraxis, you may as well just go check it out yourself, and if you don't like it, there's a money back guarantee.

SIJRPG: Epilogue

Well if you haven't already guessed, this is going to be the last in my series of Spicy Ideas JRPG, because now I'm just running out of stuff to say since I've crammed pretty much everything I can think of into my other posts already.

Anyway, what else is there that I need to talk about? Well I've talked about the combat, but I haven't talked about what you're fighting against. One thing that really annoys me about so many JRPGs is the lack of originality when they come up with some monsters. I'm not saying they just take something real and chuck it in there, I mean most of the time at least they have some kind of design, but what annoys me is when they create a completely new enemy stronger than the one before, just by changing it's colours  It's like people saying red is heavier than blue, it's just stupid. For my JRPG I would make sure that all 250 monsters (and the bosses) were unique in appearance, no scrounging off the same 20 enemies just with different colours like, oh I don't know, every JRPG in the world (Except pokemon)!

Look at it! Look how many supposedly different enemies they can create from a simple slime! They've used  that same initial design to create more 'different' monsters than there have been hours in my life! I know it's their mascot character and all but that's just overkill.

So the only thing that I have left to talk about now is what there is to do post-game. JRPGs have had many different ways of handling this, for example, the Persona games let you start the story again, but you character gets to keep some of his stats, and adds a special new dungeon with insanely powerful enemies for an insanely challenging... challenge; in Pokemon you get to expand the journey with your team with new challenges, and of course, to try and catch them all (which won't really happen unless you're that sad); and the Tales games let you spend points you've accumulated in battles on things for your next playthrough, such as retaining your items or money, or getting 10x EXP from each fight. These are all great, it's just a shame they've never really been combined together to create a great post-ending setup, which is where my game comes in, featuring all the above, as well as some new tougher quests and some special hidden storylines for each of the characters, showing what became of them in the far future, years after it all ended...

In Kingdom heart 2, Sephiroth appears post-game as a hidden and ridiculously tough  boss, for those who want a real challenge. Checkout all that HP! It's over 9000 (Probably)

that brings an end to the Spicy Ideas JRPG series! I hope you enjoyed it, and hopefully a publisher has been reading this and likes my ideas, so I'll sit tight waiting for an e-mail from Namco-Bandai or someone, before I return to regularly scheduled programming in two weeks time! Bye-Bye!