Borderlands was alright, nothing amazing but a fun little romp. I do hate bullet sponge enemies, like, why do games even fucking have them? fuck.
Lack of creativity, I think. The saddest part is that you can generally make tough enemies without making them dumb.
I think the best fairly recent example is Mass Effect. The bosses there are definitely bullet sponges (as in, they take far more bullets than anyone else in the game could possibly take), but there is always some sort of power to mix things up and make things more challenging. Nothing extraordinary, it just forces the players to have to react to something instead of just mindlessly shooting.
In Borderlands, every fight I've seen with a badass mob has always been boring and, frankly, stupid. The only way that the battle is "harder" is that you have to hold down the left mouse button longer and do some more self-heals (since most of the enemies, even the charging ones, can turn on a dime and hit you, making battle strategy pointless and making movement almost useless...might as well just stand there, eat the damage, and heal up when you can, or if you're too low just run straight backwards and hope that you don't get stuck on the terrain, which happens WAY too much). Another way that they add challenge to boss fights is by putting shit in your way. Seriously, turn the clock back a decade. Why were games like Quake III and Unreal Tournament (or, for that matter, Doom) so much goddamn fun to play? Because it took a hell of a lot of effort to trip over the environment. Movement in non-tactical shooters should be fast, fluid, and smooth. You shouldn't have to mash the fucking strafe buttons to dodge a pencil-thin branch!
Also I really enjoyed half life, but it is easy and lacks a lot of the weapons and enemy types that the first game had. The episodes seemed to improve the game a decent amount.
I seem to remember enjoying it, but like I said, I seriously can't remember shit about the game. And every time I've tried to play through it since then bored me out of my skull.
Valve does much better with 4-5 hour experiences. Half-Life 2's biggest problem was that it was artificially long. I can't believe how long you have to sit behind the wheels of the most boring, lame vehicles ever conceived. Having to spend 45-60 minutes basically getting shot at the beginning of the game while suffering through an awful vehicle segment with a very,
very "meh" vehicle engine is the biggest demotivator ever.
Maybe if the vehicle segments were fast-paced and thrilling it would have been different, but they're seriously not.
Is FEAR 2 good? I was talking about it with ulti and he said it was heavily consolized.
I really don't see how it was "consolized." I think PC gamers throw that term out a bit too much. If the developer does something monumentally stupid with the controls (like, once again, fucking Borderlands) I could see it, but there are a lot of conventions that newer FPS's follow regardless of platform. It's not that many of them are "consolized," it's that the genre is evolving, for better or for worse.
Anyway, I thought it was a lot of fun. Very WTF-y at the end, of course, but it was an enjoyable experience. Some of the segments were genuinely tense, and I thought FEAR 2 transitioned between the shit-your-pants parts and the pull-the-trigger parts better than the first game did.
I've also restarted and modded skyrim pretty hard, trying to do a stealth build and I'm enjoying it.
I modded Skyrim before I even got through my first play-through, haha. To be fair, many of my mods are cosmetic.
Right now I'm rocking SkyUI, Realistic Smoke and Embers, Realistic Water Textures and Terrain, HD Ore and Ingots, and the Shrouded Cowl Beast Race Fix (which corrects a bug in the game...my, that didn't take long) in the cosmetic department. I highly, HIGHLY recommend SkyUI (basically replaces the UI with something a bit more usable on PC) and the realistic water mod (which makes water in general, and
especially waterfalls, look fantastic).
I use mods to make the alchemy ingredients and ore lighter as well, because I'm a cheating bastard. I also installed the SM Essential Kills mod, because when I want to go crazy and murder villagers I want to be able to actually kill
everyone.