March 18, 2011 by Vinnie Leduc
Tuesdays are often exciting days for me. If youโre a whore of any combination of moviewatching, DVDs collecting, or gaming, you know that every week Tuesday is new release day. For me, last Tuesday meant that The Fighter would be available at Redbox and Blockbuster Express, and I could use the occasional slow school day to finally check out the last of the 10 Best Picture nominees from this yearโs Oscars. My roommate, however, has had March 15, 2011, circled on his calendar for an entirely different reason: a game Iโve never heard of and will never have much interest for, Total War: Shogun 2.
The latest, and eighth, installment in the Total War series is the first direct sequel to the original Shogun: Total War released over a decade ago. Since then, the strategy game series has spanned the globe and various historic periods via popular campaigns like Medieval: Total War, Rome: Total War, and Napoleon: Total War.
I think Iโve heard of the Rome one, or Iโm mixing it up with Ages of Empires or something. Iโm not really into RTSโs unless they involve machine guns, as illustrated by my complete RTS experience listed here:
- offline Command & Conquer: Red Alert and a couple scrimmages of offline C&C 3
- cheating through the original Starcraftโs Terran campaign and getting annihilated online a few times because all I do is recreate scenes from the first Starship Troopers by loading up dropships with marines
- two playthroughs of the Halo Wars demo
My roommate and I have quite different tastes in gaming. I grew up stomping Koopa Troopas and now prefer sports games and FPSโs on consoles, while David grew up catching Pokemon and deviates toward RPGs, MMOs, and RTSโs on the PC. As a former WoW player, he gets shit from me despite his insistence that he wasnโt anywhere near as hardcore as some of those serious WoW addicts you hear about. An avid fan of the Total War series, David has played all of them except for Napoleon: Total War; however, heโs logged a whopping 586 hours on Empire: Total War. Iโm sure there are ubergeeks out there who will say that ainโt shit, but to me, nearly a month of playing the same game is unfathomable. I barely have two full days of playtime on Black Ops, and I bet Davidโs 586 hours of Empire beats all the cumulative time Iโve spent playing full seasons of various 2K Sports games and NHL iterations.
I thought such dedication to some stereotypically nerdy-ass game deserved some of my curiosity, so I decided to chronicle the first 24 hours of Davidโs experience with his new beloved game. But since I wouldnโt be doing any actual playing (merely observing as I played my own games on Xbox), letโs call it โsecondhand first impressions.โ
When a game like this comes out, David typically goes on a Mountain Dew-fueled 24-hour run until he gets bored or passes out on the keyboard. Unfortunately for this game, he ran into complications that have ultimately cut the actual game content of my look short, so I need to apologize that. 1: He had a presentation inconveniently due the next day, and 2: our internet connection was down for huge chunks of the week (Atlantic Broadband, you suck). So here goes:
9:45 am: Leave for Best Buy, which opens at 10 am.
10:17 am: David grabs the penultimate copy at Best Buy. Heโs pleased. Iโm wondering how many copies they had originallyโฆ 3? Meanwhile, my local Blockbuster Express machine is out of order, and Iโm pissed.
12:02 pm: Shogun 2 has finished installing and patching. David has used the waiting time to get in his most productive work on his presentation on anxiety disorders, which Iโm sure heโs about to get a taste of as he gets closer and closer, then farther, to finally getting to play his game. Iโve used this time to run to my local Redbox for The Fighter.
12:22 pm: Internet goes down. David proclaims that this is the worst day ever. Not only can he not play online, but he canโt research and finish his presentation.
2:58 pm: Internet is back, but we have to go to class now. The Fighter was good; Christian Bale was amazing.
8:14 pm: Class is over, and Davidโs been fiending all throughout lecture to get back to play his game. Heโs considered fleeing at every break, but todayโs professor just happens to be one of the stricter ones and an administrative director of the program.
9:55 pm: He quickly wraps up his presentation. Itโs finally game time. He sets up his gaming station downstairs. He moves his laptop to the middle of the table, buffers the seat with two additional ass cushions, tilts his pumpkin-sized fan 30 degrees downward towards his laptop three inches away, and cracks open a Whiteout Mountain Dew. I order Papa Johnโs.
10:01 pm: We watch the opening. Nothing as extraordinarily impressive as something from Blur Studios, but itโs animated beautifully and makes me want to watch the last half hour of The Last Samurai.
10:05 pm: Depending on which of the 10 clans you choose to play as, the intro movie will be slightly different to showcase the clanโs unique background and skills.
10:07 pm: First thing David notices is the graphical improvement, which he calls โvastly superior to the last.โ
10:35 pm: David notes that troops replenish themselves automatically.
10:46 pm: As I play Turtles in Time nearby, I hear David mutter, โHow the f— do I do that?โ
11:09 pm: David loses a battle so badly that he restarts the entire game; he attributes his defeat to the change in tactics employed by the AI.
12:22 am: โI won my first battle; it helped to have troops this time.โ
1:43 am: The in-game battle animations are new and improved. Theyโre more cinematic, and David points out to me some guys who are struggling to reach for spears lodged in their backs and arrows in their arms. These are nice little details that I can appreciate.
2:31 am: โThe AI got a lot better, or I got a lot dumberโฆ Iโm banking on dumber.โ
3:08 am: โIn the past games, the formations could be seen before you choose them, but now theyโre just pictures of dragons or spears, which you have to learn via trial and error. Like โflying dragonโ formationโฆ wtf does that mean?โ
3:55 am: โMy allies didnโt do sh–. They f—— suck. Theyโre just sitting there, taking arrows. Iโm about to have a catastrophic loss.โ
4:06 am: I overhear David being told, โOur men are running from the battlefield. A shameful display!โ Itโs a line Iโve heard repeatedly throughout the night.
4:20 am: โF— it. Iโm restarting it.โ
5:15am: โItโs much better now that I know what Iโm doing.โ
5:31 am: We have a full day class starting in a couple hours, so we call it a night. Itโs generally considered an unproductive and unsuccessful one because David is still dealing with the steeper learning curve, I didnโt get much to report on, and I barely got any achievements while playing my own games.
However, David is satisfied with his purchase and calls the latest Total War a good buy. He enjoys the greater emphasis on melees and compliments the AI for being smarter in a more โcowardlyโ way. The AI used to attack despite being heavily outnumbered. Now theyโll wait on high ground, which makes defensive siege battles more frustrating because even though theyโre on the offensive, theyโll sit back anyway and wait for you to come out and expose a vulnerability. In addition, David can no longer rely on a shady tactic he could employ in previous games: killing his weakened allies once theyโve helped him finish off his enemies. Heโs looking forward to the rest of the week when he can try out multiplayer and one feature I find particularly interesting: the ability to join a friendโs single-player campaign as an opposing faction and potentially screwing things up for them bigtime.
๏ปฟUpdate: With our internet connection alive and well, David’s managed to get some multiplayer matches in. He didn’t have any nice things to say about the level of competition online, so go eat your heart out and get some easy wins and confidence boosts. He did mention that the maps reward players who don’t camp in the protected high grounds and who instead can pick up buffs in the lower areas that grant their troops various power-ups like additional stamina or quicker reloading.
