Need For Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed Diary - Part 5 - Gameplay Padding

Sometimes it feels as if developers are trying to pad the length of games by arbitrarily increasing the difficulty of races or the time needed to finish a race in the Time Attack mode. Also the fact that a lot of these tracks are recycled between different game modes makes the career mode tedious.

Maybe I am getting old, but I find it extremely difficult to stay focused on a single race for 6 minutes! This leads me to make mistakes, and it takes longer for me to get through the career mode. 

This is the low hanging fruit of adding longevity to a game, in my opinion. 

Too long for me to stay focused.

Need For Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed Diary - Part 4 - The Intrusive Interface

Modern day game interfaces are getting ridiculous. I can think of at least three EA games that have this HUD clutter problem. Battlefield 4 when it first launched was insane. 

Shift 2 also has the same problem. There is an option to disable the HUD, but that leaves out some of the information I care about. I am not sure why the developers won't give us the option to disable, resize and move UI elements. 

I think simple tweaks to the UI can greatly impact the experience. 

Battlefield 4 UI at launch. Insane HUD clutter

Need For Speed Shift 2 HUD

Need For Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed Diary - Part 3 - Manufacturer Showdown Events Are Fun

These are probably the most fun events so far. I get to try out different cars, and I don't have to worry about difficulty spike based on the type of car I select, and usually the cars themselves range from retro to exotic. 

Speaking of difficulty spike, it still bothers me how unbalanced the game is at times, even when I turn the game difficulty to easy. 

Porsche Cayman S is great to drive

Need For Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed Diary - Part 2 - The Schizophrenic Difficulty

This game's difficulty doesn't make any sense. There are times when I lead an entire lap without any real competition and then there are other laps where I struggle to reach the podium (3rd place or better).

I think it has something to do with scaling difficulty with car upgrades. I should try removing all upgrades and see if I can do any better. 

Or maybe, I am just very bad.

Top racer has an 8 second lead...I can barely reach top 3 spot.

Battlefield 4 Diary - Part 1 - Dragon Valley 2015 MVP

Battlefield 4 is the game I played more than any other game. I played this more than all the other games I ever played combined. So I got my money's worth. All thanks to DICE LA. 

The round I played yesterday was pretty great. Joined with a friend when things weren't looking good for our team. Managed to do well and help our team win. 

Also Dragon Valley 2015 is an excellent map These days this is the only map I play conquest on. Thankfully there is a fairly popular 24/7 Dragon Valley 2015 conquest large server.

http://i.imgur.com/4P4Ns2x.png

Killing machine

Need For Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed Diary - Part 1

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Purchased this game in 2011 from NewEgg for $7.64 (including shipping). This was back when EA was still selling DVDs of their games, and Origin was in its infancy. 

I really enjoyed the first Shift game. When I found this game for cheap, I couldn't resist. So much so that I hadn't played it for 4 years. 

After 2500+ hours of  Battlefield (both 3 and 4), I want to get back into single player gaming again. Hence why I resumed F.E.A.R. as well. 

I think Shift 2 is definitely worth the $7 I paid for it. I am not sure I would pay anymore than that though. It has some extremely annoying design choices. Unskippable intro sequences before every race is definitely one of them. The developers, in their effort to create "an immersive" experience, managed to create an extremely annoying experience. Had I paid full price for this game, I would be even more annoyed.

Also, its not really a sim game. I not as much of an arcade racer as Need For Speed Most Wanted, but by no means is it a simulator. Don't let the marketing fool you. That doesn't make it a bad game though. Its still fun. As long as you paid no more than $7 for it. 

Well...

Someone at EA has a lens flare fetish

That attention to detail

F.E.A.R. Diary - Part 1 - Procrastination

I played some more F.E.A.R. today. Really like the it. Its a traditional PC game. Its got quick save, checkpoint save and manual save. They don't make games like this anymore. When I first played the demo for this game in 2005, I waited to play the full version because at the time I was using a BFG GeForce FX5500OC AGP card. I could barely run the game on medium at 1024x768.

I waited longer than I intended. I moved to a different country, graduated college twice, got a job and in 2011, I installed the full version of F.E.A.R. for the first time. I was using an EVGA GeForce GTX 570 at the time, and I was thoroughly impressed by the graphics. I played it for a bit, and soon Battlefield 3 consumed my gaming, and I barely played any single player games once I got into Battlefield 3.

Soon after that it was Battlefield 4.

I finally started playing this game a few weeks ago, because my motherboard died, and I had to send it for repair, and I was looking to play a single player shooter. I downloaded F.E.A.R. again from Steam, restored the backed up save files and I resumed.

This time around, I had an EVGA GeForce GTX980. Not that it made any difference.

The game is still a lot of fun. The Steam version supports 2560x1440 resolution. Sort of. The game claims its unsupported, but it allows me to play it in this resolution.

F.E.A.R. has a Half-Life and Deus Ex vibe to it. I don't have much more to go. I will be done with it soon at this rate. Then I will move on to GTA4.

Some F.E.A.R. screenshots -

Quick save in an FPS game. This was before the Call of Duty epidemic.

TPS report in F.E.A.R. An homage to Office Space.

First Post

Writing this first post on a cold winter day on January 24, 2016. I intend to keep this blog all about the games I am going to play. 

At the moment, I have GTA 4, Need For Speed Shift 2 Unleashed, F.E.A.R and Dying Light installed on my machine. I intend to finish these three games as quickly as possible so I can move onto other games in my Steam account. 

I am going to play F.E.A.R now and I will probably come back with some screenshots.