Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Playing Nightfire again

This past weekend I took a brief, two hour vacation from the next gen console games, an decided to play one of my favorite multiplatform shooters: 007 Nightfire. It has been such a long time since I played the Gamecube version, but I feel that this game in the multiplayer does things that most games have stopped doing all together.
1. AI bots. You don't always need online gameplay for a game to have good multiplayer. It was one of the last few games made by EA and what was probably Gearbox that still had AI bots in splitscreen mode. But the thing that I liked, especially on the Gamecube version, was the fact that you could customize 6 AI bots! That's actually a lot for  2002 console game. Sure, Unreal Tournament from the 90s had similar customization with up to 15 bots, but it was also featuring online multiplayer, as well as the fact that it was a PC shooter.
My favorite part about the game, however, was how it ran on the same engine as the original Half Life, which was probably one of the greatest shooters made in the 90s and possibly of all time. The hit scan for 2002 was seemingly realistic, and killing bots and other enemies was a lot harder when I turned off crosshairs, something that I would dare not do in an online multiplayer game.
The graphics were also still pretty good as well, and the Gamecube did the 2nd best job  of showing that. Everything was clean. It was no PS3 game, but it definately looks believable for it's time. That was when games were simple, and didn't try to depend on multiplayer to get some big bucks.

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