Support NeoGAF

[calder]

I was bored last night having my bedtime bowl of cereal so I pulled out some old magazines and read a PC Gamer from around 96. Good times. But they had a review for MW2 and it reminded me how back when the MW-type games were popular on PC my computer wasn't up to playing them so I sorta missed them all. Now I want to see if they are still fun because I'm up for some non-console hot giant robot on robot action.

My buddy has Mechwarrior 4:Mercenaries (or Gold, can't remember exactly what he said) but he lives a bit out of town. He's big into flight sims so he has fancy joysticks and rudder controls and shit I do not have - is MW4 a good enough game with a mouse/keyboard that I should drive 20 minutes to go pick it up? I'm fine with outdated graphics, hell I'm playing Colobot like a fiend lately, but I have less patience for limited gameplay and/or scope in old games.

 

[Shompola]

Yes it's good. Nothing is Mechwarrior 2 good though. But Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries is a good semi-sequel? to Mechwarrior 2 - Mercernaries.

 

[epmode]

i never really liked a mechwarrior game other than 2..
2 had the awesome hud, startup/shutdown sequence and in-cockpit voice. plus the incredible music. the other ones just lost the immersion factor.. maybe i'm just a graphics/presentation whore.(

apologies for not directly answering your question, i'm just wondering if i'm the only one that feels this way.

 

[calder]

Cool. Did you play it with a mouse/keyboard or with a joystick? Damn if I had just bought a decent joystick at some point I wouldn't have skipped so many cool looking sim games over the years. I wonder if decent sticks are cheaper than in the past now...

As a bonus my friend is going into work in a few hours and he said he'll just courier it too me without the box or manual. It'll make up for the time I sent him a DVD I had borrowed one hour courier to his office cuz he was whining.

 

[Crazymoogle]

Well, first off, the Mechwarrior titles always seem to play better with a Joystick. I've never used rudder controls or any of that extra stuff, but a Logitech joystick really goes a long way (even if you use a cheaper, non FF model like myself). Almost every mech has "torso-twist", which basically lets you walk one way and fire another, and without a joystick the process of recentering could be confusing; it's hard to say. (I'd like to say it would be, but then again, I played through the first edition of TIE Fighter with a mouse, so...)

Mechwarrior 4 is a fun game (and just recently was rereleased in a cheap, massive collection of MW4, MW4: Black Knight, and MW4: Mercenaries), but keep the following in mind:

-It's more 'arcadey' than MW3 and slightly more than MW2. They hired some weak actors for FMV and voice, and you use a cool but simplified visual "legoboard" for putting weapons on your mech. Getting mechs and parts salvage depends on your previous mission (except in Mercenaries, where the planets hold their own stock).

-On the plus side, the expansion pack does a great job of reversing the story of the first game on you, and if you're not a hardcore battletech guy, the legoboard is a much easier way to outfit a mech than the old chart method from MW2/3.

-There isn't really a lot of choice for how you progress through the game other than your mechs - MW4 lets you choose between a couple of missions at times, but you usually need to beat all of them. Mercenaries is much more open but still only has like 40 levels - no random generation stuff like back with MW1. As you might expect, there is the odd annoying 'protect this guy' mission but I found I could usually get through even the worse of those with an high-powered mech config.

-You have to 'core' mechs to beat them. In older games, blowing off a leg would do the job, but in MW4 that was deemed too cheap, so you need to just hammer on the midsection instead.

-The game looks surprisingly good and runs well on midrange gear; as I recall Mercenaries in particular tried to beef up polycounts and add some extra graphical fluff.

-The music can never compare to MW2 but has a cool orchestral bit on the last mission and some mildly entertaining guitar/synth/whatever pieces until then.

Overall the game is definitely worth a go, and I'd say worth a buy at the $20 collection price. After the first time through there isn't much in the way of replay value but I still find it inexplicably fun to load up a mech with Ultra ACs and start coring the opposition.

 

[Crazymoogle]

i never really liked a mechwarrior game other than 2..
2 had the awesome hud, startup/shutdown sequence and in-cockpit voice. plus the incredible music. the other ones just lost the immersion factor.. maybe i'm just a graphics/presentation whore.(

apologies for not directly answering your question, i'm just wondering if i'm the only one that feels this way.

MW2 certainly did win on some points - the music, the cockpit voice ("CRITICAL HIT - HEAT SINK" always comes to mind), but I preferred the MW3 HUD. Really, MW3 was a great game with a very mercenaries style 'survive on the stuff you find' system, it's just sad that even with the patches the game suffers from some really shitty bugs in the first 90 minutes.

MW4 was a great story driven game, but they did take the quick route out, which is a shame considering Mechwarrior would have been a perfect candidate for the massive graphical and technology jumps we've seen lately. I can just imagine the series with Mechassault style graphics, but it seems that nobody, even microsoft, wants to touch the Mech or Space sim genres anymore.

 

[Crazymoogle]

Regarding Joystick availability, the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro would be my choice - dunno how easy it is to find at EBgames but should be pretty easy to track down at a Bestbuy, Futureshop or whatever your equivalent is. Retails for 30 bucks (US).

I tried using a FF stick for MW4 once, and while a nice experience, I really started hating how much I had to fight the stick to do anything.

 

[Zaptruder]

They fucked it. This series like 40k has places to go. It could be again, wildly successful if it took the right direction and approach to the series.

Unfortunately the game that got closest MW2 has had it's day in the sun... with subsequent different companies taking up the MW/BT license and taking it in very different directions.

Right now... they've made it more akin to arcadey fisher/pricer toys mech simulator then the imagination inspiring MW2 and even the Virtualworld Battle Tech pods.

 

[ArcadeStickMonk]

One thing I enjoyed about MW4 is how many different way the controls can go. I've played it with a simple joystick setup, a super basic gamepad, an accurate keyboard\trackball setup, and a Saitek flight stick and throttle custom setup so complex it put Steel Battalion to shame. And it always controlled very well. This really speaks to how streamlined the game became though.

You might find that some of the departures that MW4 takes chafe you, depending on how much you idolize MW2. I feel that the new loadout system is a definate plus, since it uses weapon class specific zones to finally prevent you from piloting a Madcat shootin' lasers out of your missle racks.

You'll find that legs are harder to blow off now, and that jump jets work better. Some of the smaller mechs feel much more agile while others gain new differences like 360 degree torso rotation.

I agree that MW2 is the best, but I really dug how MW3 went for a slightly more sim approach. Being given a Bushwacker and thrown into a small bay, moving into enemy territory and seeing small boats and birds flying around was more immersive than the other games. MW3 had very, very detailed mission briefings too.

I had, briefly, MW4 Mercs, and I remember it being appropriately in the same vein as the first Mercs. I really can't remember which one had a more fufilling economics model, though, suffice to say that MW4 Mercs was a worthy continuation.

I'd take Mech3 over all of them, save maybe MW2 Mercs, as a single player game, but for multiplayer, MW4 will be much more accessable. This is important because the less accesable it is, the more likely that all your games turn into walking in a circle and shooting.

 

[WarPig]

Mechwarrior 3, curiously enough, was made by Zipper Interactive, who then went on to make SOCOM.

I can take or leave Mech 4, with the caveat that I haven't played Mercenaries. A Mechwarrior game where I can't blow a motherfucker's leg off isn't Mechwarrior to me.

DFS.