March 18, 2011 by Vinnie Leduc
Tuesdays are often exciting days for me. If you’re 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 year’s Oscars. My roommate, however, has had March 15, 2011, circled on his calendar for an entirely different reason: a game I’ve 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 I’ve heard of the Rome one, or I’m mixing it up with Ages of Empires or something. I’m not really into RTS’s 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 Starcraft’s 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 FPS’s on consoles, while David grew up catching Pokemon and deviates toward RPGs, MMOs, and RTS’s on the PC. As a former WoW player, he gets shit from me despite his insistence that he wasn’t 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, he’s logged a whopping 586 hours on Empire: Total War. I’m sure there are ubergeeks out there who will say that ain’t 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 David’s 586 hours of Empire beats all the cumulative time I’ve 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 David’s experience with his new beloved game. But since I wouldn’t be doing any actual playing (merely observing as I played my own games on Xbox), let’s call it “secondhand first impressions.”
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. He’s pleased. I’m wondering how many copies they had originally… 3? Meanwhile, my local Blockbuster Express machine is out of order, and I’m 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 I’m sure he’s about to get a taste of as he gets closer and closer, then farther, to finally getting to play his game. I’ve 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 can’t 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 David’s been fiending all throughout lecture to get back to play his game. He’s considered fleeing at every break, but today’s 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. It’s 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 John’s.
10:01 pm: We watch the opening. Nothing as extraordinarily impressive as something from Blur Studios, but it’s 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 clan’s unique background and skills.
10:07 pm: First thing David notices is the graphical improvement, which he calls “vastly superior to the last.”
10:35 pm: David notes that troops replenish themselves automatically.
10:46 pm: As I play Turtles in Time nearby, I hear David mutter, “How the f— do I do that?”
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: “I won my first battle; it helped to have troops this time.”
1:43 am: The in-game battle animations are new and improved. They’re 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: “The AI got a lot better, or I got a lot dumber… I’m banking on dumber.”
3:08 am: “In the past games, the formations could be seen before you choose them, but now they’re just pictures of dragons or spears, which you have to learn via trial and error. Like ‘flying dragon’ formation… wtf does that mean?”
3:55 am: “My allies didn’t do sh–. They f—— suck. They’re just sitting there, taking arrows. I’m about to have a catastrophic loss.”
4:06 am: I overhear David being told, “Our men are running from the battlefield. A shameful display!” It’s a line I’ve heard repeatedly throughout the night.
4:20 am: “F— it. I’m restarting it.”
5:15am: “It’s much better now that I know what I’m doing.”
5:31 am: We have a full day class starting in a couple hours, so we call it a night. It’s generally considered an unproductive and unsuccessful one because David is still dealing with the steeper learning curve, I didn’t 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 “cowardly” way. The AI used to attack despite being heavily outnumbered. Now they’ll wait on high ground, which makes defensive siege battles more frustrating because even though they’re on the offensive, they’ll 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 they’ve helped him finish off his enemies. He’s 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 friend’s single-player campaign as an opposing faction and potentially screwing things up for them bigtime.
Update: 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.
