So... the last couple of weeks, when I finally found some time to play games, I played StarCraft II. Oddly enough, I hadn't played it until this point, and I wanted to... you know, do some research on how talking heads cutscenes look these days
.
Anyway, having finished StarCraft II, I actually found some time for Saga today. I played and finished the Valkyrie mission.
Is it time for more anger management? A bit of it, certainly. I'm pretty sure capship missiles have been mentioned here before. I think I may have mentioned them myself once or twice. Capship missiles are pure shit. They are bad. They are not good.
No, I don't mean in the sense, you know, that they're a challenge. They are difficult, but that's besides the point. They are shit, because they are not fun. You get within several hundred metres of a missile, and it still feels like you're pixel-hunting in a damned 1990s adventure game. I have to wonder how people playing this with joysticks coped - I played with a mouse, but even the precision of the mouse just didn't help.
I hope never to have to shoot at capship missiles again in Saga, but I expect that I will have to. I'm not looking forward to it. It's just not enjoyable. And you know, I haven't played WC3 in ages, but I'm pretty darned sure it just wasn't like that back then.
Next up - HUD colours. I guess the fact that I flew this mission with a blue HUD is my own fault. Especially since the last time I played it (when was that? May?), I did get as far as the transports, so it could have occured to me to change the colour of the HUD. Be that as it may, Saga kinda falls victim to its own customisation options here. Normally, what a designer would do is give the player whatever HUD colour works best - and if a particular mission requires a different colour, he'd find some excuse to switch colours on the player. For example, assign different HUD colours to different ships, do planetary missions using only the Hellcat, and give the Hellcat the amber HUD. Anyway, that's really more of a digression. While you could have prevented it, it's still not your fault I flew this mission with a blue HUD.
But really, HUD aside, the mission was fine once the missile interception was over. The atmosphere was a really nice change, even though it somehow made me feel claustrophobic (WTF?). I think I've said this before, but you guys need to pat yourselves on the back for implementing the atmosphere this way - it may seem like using a skybox is a simple and obvious solution, but simple and obvious solutions are often the hardest to come up with.
Also, I gotta give that first Valkyrie mission the Fonz (that's two claps, a double thumbs-up, and a "Hey!"). Probably the best mission...ever? As soon as the music hit (and the explanation; that it messed with the cats? Priceless), I got all inspired and stuff, flew a great mission, wasting kitties left and right. Loved everything about it, except the part where it ended...
I'm split on this. The mission itself was pretty dull. I mean, you were simply blasting through a bunch of identical transport ships. So... on the one hand, I can't help feeling that the Valkyrie music was wasted here, that this kind of thing would be better for a big capship assault mission. On the other hand, it made an otherwise dull mission more interesting - just as the atmosphere skybox did, too. This is good.
Finally, the debriefing after the mission. Naturally, I got yelled at a lot for having a few missiles slip past me. You know what's strange here? Given my reaction to some of the previous missions, I would have expected that I'd be pissed off at the game designers here. I mean, you knew how tough missiles are, so you shouldn't make people yell at me for failing to blast them all. Well... maybe it's just because I haven't played the game for a month, so I'm not that emotionally invested in it at the moment, but I didn't get angry. I just plain didn't care. Saga has a lot of people yelling at you, so you get used to it...
Looking forward to playing the next mission, in any case. But also angry about that
. I'd been told to expect a big strike mission (and certainly that sounded like a lot of fun), instead I get to escort shuttles or something. Ah, well - such is war.