Section 8 (XB360/PC)

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Pulp Hero
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Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Pulp Hero »

I picked this game up on a wim, and so far I am having a blast.

While most games promise "Unique experiences!" with accompanying gimmicks, this really is an FPS that breaks the mold. Section 8 soldiers are essentially book Mobile Infantry- jetpacks, super running, electronic weapon lock-ons, and deployed weapon turrets are standard issue for every trooper. There are two primary weapon slots that can take any combination of the beefy future guns. You also have two equipment slots to juggle; they include standard FPS fare like knives, deployable explosives, and grenades alongside unique upgrades like healing beams and lock-on jammers.

Your soldier also has a number of attribute slots to upgrade to fit your play style. Want to become a rocketeer style jetpacker? What about a sprinter that the enemy can't get an electronic tag on? Or how about saying "Fuck You" to the anti-air defenses and becoming a super tank? Yeah, its cool.

And on to the game's Back-Of-The-Box bulletpoint features: Inserting from orbit and dynamic objectives. These really work to focus the combat and remove the long slogs to get to the combat area.

The single player is not as compelling. All the missions are basically training for multiplayer and feature atrocious voice acting.


Final thought: I recommend this for the addictive and compellingly different multiplayer.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Stark »

So by 'unique experience' they mean 'Tribes'? Sounds like I already played this game ten years ago. What's actually new about it? I've only seen the hilarious banner ds.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Ford Prefect »

About the most interesting thing about Shin Tribes: Son of Tribes: Electric Boogaloo is the mechanic by which you can respawn from any point on the map. if it's decently implemented, then it means that 'territory' in a game will be determined by something more dynamic than capturing some flag. Admittedly it's only being replaced by 'density of AA coverage', but I'll take the gimmick. :) Also, maybe the player personalisation won't be completely broken? That might be cool, if they get right (lol).
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Pulp Hero »

I've built a character that so far has been able to easily survive AAA fire, so it can be beaten if you really want to jump through it.

Jumping is fun and if you decide not to burn in, you have some limited steering, which adds to the available tactics (jumping straight onto a sniper perch or steering into a zone covered by AAA guns at the last minute.)

The customization is good and aside from the healing upgrade (which is a must-have) nothing seems necessary to win with.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Andrew_Fireborn »

Been playing it myself. Few issues, but first the good points:

Combat is fast, but not CS/CoD 1-3 bullets and you die style. The Rocket Launcher actually isn't the king weapon here, it moves far too slowly to reliably hit even slow Infantry, though it can kill an unshielded trooper in one hit. Unfortunately, it's also too slow to reliably hit the two player targets it is designed for, Heavy Armor and Tanks. (Taking, in my experience, 1/4-1/6 of the HA's life, and less than an 1/8th of a tanks... It does kill deployables very quickly, though it's somewhat outclassed there by the -shotgun-.)

There is only one game mode, similar to some other games, you cap control points which give you a steady income of Victory Points. The only real twist here are the Dynamic Combat Missions, or sort of mini-missions that reward a fair number of victory points upon completion. (Or, should they be failed, the other team.) These are activated via a sub-currency earned via the actions of your squad. There're four types, and the easiest of each to earn seems to be a "Kill 2 people with X weapon(s) in one life" deal. All of the DCMs ultimately boil down to "take something somewhere."

VIP: Escort a super-soldier to a currently friendly Control Point. Sticks around that CP awhile afterward.
Commando: Above but enemy CP.
Convoy: Drive/Escort a vehicle to a currently friendly Control Point.
Bomb: Spawns at friendly CP, take to enemy CP.
Intel: Vice versa.
Outpost: Active a beacon to call in a large structure with AA & Repair functions. Keep it alive for the set time.

I can't say I've noticed them being worth different amounts. Though I would say the VIP is the easiest to accomplish, as he has about 8+ times the health of a Player Character, and with a little support can make short work of attackers with his Machine Gun.


Now, on the downside: GFWL is -mandatory-, and brings it's baggage along. I've been unable to find a single server at less than 78 ping, most being mid 80s. Also, it's prone to disconnecting you from the servers, tonight was especially bad as I got disconnected almost a dozen times.

As far as balance goes, most of it seems decently balanced. Though the RL needs more of a punch against tanks. The tank in this game is a land battleship, takes four people to fully man it, giving it access to pretty much at least one weapon that will kill anything it finds quickly. It has a huge amount of armor, basically requiring at least 3 people with Rocket Launchers or det-pack grenades to stand a chance at destroying it. There is a limit to the number that can be deployed at once, but two of these things working together will only get killed if they mess up badly. (That's with only the main gun/driver position, not all 8 teammates tied up.)

The passives are your standard "More Health, more damage, faster movement, faster recharge." The outliers being the Anti-AA Passive (which also boosts health a little IIRC) and one that makes static defenses take longer to target you, and the radar take longer to display your position to the enemy.

The Jetpack feels like it only has about 2 seconds of flight (enough to clear a 2.5-3 story structure) and seems to take 10~ seconds to recharge. (All recharging functions have an all-or-nothing method. They start recharging as soon as they're not being used, but the recharge time is not useable until it refills the bar completely. Shields recharge in the same manner, but in 1/4 segments.)


All said, it's pretty damn fun. Though, the real test is if it'll hold onto that in a month or two.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Stark »

ITT people complaining about 80 ping lol.

4p tanks really make it sound like Tribes again. It's interesting they changed the power system to expressly stop skating, which was the most annoying thing in Tribes ever.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Andrew_Fireborn »

Stark wrote:ITT people complaining about 80 ping lol.
Yeah, I'm spoiled by my Souce game servers generally being under 50, if not 30. Plus TF2's lag "compensation"...

Which brings up another annoyance that I forgot: The server browser doesn't seem to cache at all. Every time it's accessed it takes a good while to populate the list. Which adds up quickly if the game decides it doesn't want to maintain a connection like it did tonight.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Zixinus »

So by 'unique experience' they mean 'Tribes'? Sounds like I already played this game ten years ago. What's actually new about it? I've only seen the hilarious banner ds.
My thoughts exactly after watching gameplay trailers. They've just reinvented Tribes.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by General Zod »

How prevalent are these escort missions? Because escort missions generally suck ass.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Stark »

Andrew_Fireborn wrote:Yeah, I'm spoiled by my Souce game servers generally being under 50, if not 30. Plus TF2's lag "compensation"...
ITT 20ms is seen as significant by retards.

As a silly question, does S8 have cross-platform play? I mean, Shadowrun tried it, but it failed for totally unrelated reasons. I'd love to play a shooter where I can hear PC gamers whine and bitch about 'zomg conefire' and tell us all that PC gaming isn't dead.

Borderlands isn't cross platform either to my knowledge. :(
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Andrew_Fireborn »

I don't believe so, outside of apparently being able to host a 360 server on a PC.
Stark wrote:ITT 20ms is seen as significant by retards.
Not an argument I can really support. But the closer to 100 the ping is, the less playable things like TF2 or Dystopia become. I realize it shouldn't affect it that much, but it does seem to. Hell, this is the same class of games in which people swear by various frame rates increasing their fire rate.
General Zod wrote:How prevalent are these escort missions? Because escort missions generally suck ass.
Well, I listed all 6 varieties of submission, and they're all escort to some extent. They're also generally the difference between victory and defeat because while the CPs are wrth 4~ VP every so often, the few times I've noticed the DCM successes adding, they've been worth 150-250. [Unsure if it's a server variable or a difference in value between the DCMs themselves.]
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Uraniun235 »

i literally cannot win at computer games unless i am on a gigabit LAN


even then i will become v. upset if the host is running any unnecessary windows services



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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Stark »

ITT 'closer to 100ms' = 'closer to unplayable'.

Good old pingwhiners. :)

Ur you better shut down your host processes man i don't want a 2-3ms spike throwing off my dps
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Havok »

I actually downloaded and played the demo. It was boring and didn't seem to be anything special.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by DPDarkPrimus »

The demo was fun but not anything special. The orbital drop feature is nifty, but one feature does not a $60 purchase make.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by weemadando »

I played the demo for about 2 minutes on 360.

It needs a bit more Terra Nova and a bit less "UT mod".
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Havok »

DPDarkPrimus wrote:The demo was fun but not anything special. The orbital drop feature is nifty, but one feature does not a $60 purchase make.
It's nifty like the first 5 times, then I was looking for the skip button.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Oskuro »

Andrew_Fireborn wrote:Now, on the downside: GFWL is -mandatory-
Wooops! There goes my interest in this game.
Stark wrote:4p tanks really make it sound like Tribes again. It's interesting they changed the power system to expressly stop skating, which was the most annoying thing in Tribes ever.
So annoying it became a feature, if I recally correctly.

Also, wasn't Tribes a sequel from a Mech game (namely, Earth Siege)? Talk about funky evolution.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Stark »

LordOskuro wrote:Wooops! There goes my interest in this game.
Why? GFWL is hardly ev0l teh spywarz. I wish more PC games would use it - cross platform stuff like this might even slow the death of PC gaming.

And man, Tribes 3 was basically BUILT on skating. It also sucked and failed, because having a forum full of hardcore idiots saying OMB N00B LERN TO SK8 doesn't sell games.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Oskuro »

Nah, I'm just not very happy with the whole Games for Windows move, it feels like a hoop MS is trying to make game devs jump through, and failing from the looks of it. That didn't stop me from getting World In Conflict, though, but GFWL is just an unecessary resource hog. Games had perfectly viable server browsing tools, even without Gamespy, I don't see the need for that piece of crap. And if by "Multi Platform" you mean "MS platforms running GFWL games only" then yeah, not much of a selling point.

Regarding the death of PC gaming, it's actually the death of AAA games on the PC, wich isn't a bad thing, seeing how most of them are comitee-designed money makers with zero innovation. New devs with new ideas can't (and shouldn't) cope with the price tag and loss of creative control required for console development, wich means you get to see new and interesting stuff (even if at its embryo state) on the PC, as it fucking should be, the PC is a tool after all, not a dedicated gaming machine. Of course, I'm a "games are art" hippy, so whatever.

As for Tribes, I never got to play it, although I've read a lot about it. Although, if I had, I guess I'd be agreeing with your opinion on those pro-skaters.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Stark »

Who uses GFWL for server browsing? I jus use it to keep up with XBL stuff while I get double achievements on F3 :). What's lame is they eventually made a standalone app (like msn) that doesn't let you do anything useful. What's the big deal with xposing Live stuff? If I could keep it up on Pidgin that'd be awesome. MS just loves fucking up their own shit with inter departmental rivalry. I'm interested to see how Stardock's 'Read to Play' thing goes, since it's a similar idea but works with everything/existing servers etc.

And yeah, PC will always have Hearts of Iron. :) the low-end market on PC had better stuff anyway (and certainly the only games I'll be buying on PC this year.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Oskuro »

Stark wrote:Who uses GFWL for server browsing?
I must admit my limited experience with GFWL comes from playing Gears1 on the PC, and it was the only way to set a non-LAN game up.

I don't mind the whole achievements thing, or the integrated IM and friendlist, I just want to be able to say `no`to GFWL without crippling the game.
Stark wrote:And yeah, PC will always have Hearts of Iron. :) the low-end market on PC had better stuff anyway (and certainly the only games I'll be buying on PC this year.
Hey, World of Goo restored my faith in artsy PC gaming recently, and it's even on the Wii.
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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by Exonerate »

I gave this a try during the open beta, and as usual, wild claims of innovative and revolutionary gameplay were grossly exaggerated. It's basically Battlefield without ships and planes. Overdrive is a nice feature that means you don't need to spend half an hour to get across the map on foot, but that's about it. The jetpack is gimped - it's more like a Pogo stick that is only capable of one short hop.

It's always funny to see Australians jump in with "WHY BACK IN MY DAY..." stories whenever anybody complains about their connection.

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Re: Section 8 (XB360/PC)

Post by weemadando »

Where's the "back in my day", this is present day shit too.

Try playing any EA game - the servers are in the US, so you usually get a timeout in the match-making phase, let alone should you ever try to play the game.
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