RPCS3

Emulation has come a long way. Almost every single PS3 game is playable, meaning you can fully finish it without any game breaking bugs. There’s also plenty of upscaling so games can look better than ever. There’s locally tracked trophies, keyboard and mouse compatibility, out of the box compatible with mostly any controller you have, DS4Windows or not, pretty good!

There’s still some issues though. Different region releases need different patches, settings, and they might or might not work. The US version of Call of Duty 3 crashed whenever I loaded a game, and I didn’t really feel like playing it all in one 12hour go. Thankfully, the EU version worked just fine with the default settings, so all I had to do was adjust the resolution scaling.

Call of Duty 3

CoD3 felt a bit more like a movie, especially with the constant homages to dead characters a la Starship Troopers by having their phrases used by the squad mates they had before death. The story started getting a lot more interesting compared to Call of Duty 1&2, though it was still pretty lame compared to what I remember from Modern Warfare and its successors. Will see if that memory holds up to reality.

It was a bit hard to keep track of who the fuck I was. In the previous ones they told you at the beginning of the mission, but here I had to deduce based on who the NPCs gave orders to.

There were branching paths that ultimately lead to the same story conclusions. When I died, I didn’t feel like trying another path, but pursuing the one I already was on to finish it. I figured it was easier to take the road you already know.

Bang bang, pew pew

Since these games are so hard just because of the controls and they force you to play much better than you would a modern game that has all these baby handles, I kinda understood how to play video games again. Every time I fucked up, I would rush in and fuck up again, got angry, then calmed down and figured out what I kept doing that made me die.

One of the things that stops me from easily doing this in more modern multiplayer shooters is the skill based matchmaking which turns every match into these sweaty split-second decision making moments where you have to stay on edge all the time. Can’t scratch your balls or get some water without the enemy beheading you.

That being said, shooters with a controller are so unsatisfying I didn’t really try to improve much. I don’t intend to play a shooter with a controller ever again. In high intensity fast paced stuff your aim just hacks onto the enemy, but without the aim assist it’s impossible to aim with the controller as good as you can with a mouse. Want to turn a centimeter to the left because your aim was a tiny bit off when aiming down sights? Too bad, in that time the enemy shoots you in the face, which redirects your aim somewhere above him. This problem would not have existed with a mouse where I can quickly swipe where I need. The hitboxes are also very questionable.

It wasn’t even a skill issue. Aiming normally was fine, but aiming down sights was slowed down too much, and sensitivity could only be changed for the entire game, not just the down sights mode.

The gamer blood in me raged at the thought of Normal difficulty, but the rage towards playing this with a controller was worse, so it evened out.

I have the same opinions of the weapons as the previous game. Snipers? Great. M1 Garand? Great. Thompson? Fuck off.

Other stuff

Friendly NPCs don’t teleport around you. This means if you get to the objective too fast, they might be stuck somewhere on the map and never get to you. To fix this just run away from the objective and go back, but it wastes a bit of time.

The AI is not as braindead as in 2, but I’ve had many moments where I was supposed to aim some large weapon to fight off far away enemies and my friendly AI just let me die from a single dude smacking me in the back of the head with his rifle. I’ve had my squad mates run right past an enemy that was killing me without a care in the world.

The driving was fun, though even there the gunners did not do absolutely anything. They were having a leisure drive, talking about life, having a smoke while I was driving through literally World War 2. But, you know, fun.

I hate invisible walls

At least don’t have soldiers jump it RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME!

What’s next?

I’m just happy it’s over with, and I can’t wait for Call of Duty 4. Finally, a mouse again!

I don’t think I’ll continue straight on with CoD4 though, I’ll get burnt out. I barely finished 2 of these 10 hour games in the past half a year, trying to spend a bit more time doing “relaxing” things such as playing video games, I work too much, so burnout wouldn’t be nice.

I think I’m going to continue my chronological GTA run. I’m still at the first one, Vice City Stories. Great game, you should play it. I finished it 2 years ago when I did a release order run of the 3d era games, now I’m trying to 100% the achievements from it. I started it I think back in November, should really get to finishing it.