I was just thinking about doing my latest round of infrequent updates to catch up on what games have become available, but the answer seems to be not much, and we've lost some of the existing games.
Pointblank joins the ranks of the closed FPS. It's a shame, because the game still looked good, and when I last played it a couple months back, the community still seemed to be there. PlayNC seems to be moving to focus solely on MMORPGs and casual games.
Also, Another Day has closed as well. This is no surprise as the community was pretty dead when I was last there, but don't let that reflect on the quality of the game. It was a decent shooter.
Psychic Online, Metal Black, Dizzel, Metro and Gundog are still "Coming soon", so who knows when we'll see them.
Born to Fire seems to be the only new FPS game these days. The FPS scene in Korea is getting small. We've had 6 FPS shooters close recently, while only gaining 1. It's left some portals without a FPS that previously had some. I don't know if FPS in general are getting less popular, but it seems like MMORPGs are the big money makers as most portals, except Pmang, have many more MMORPGs than FPSs.
Showing posts with label pointblank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pointblank. Show all posts
Pointblank Part 3 - Inventory, store and notes
I didn't post yesterday because I was busy playing Pointblank and sorting out some more stuff about it. It is truly a fun game. The first thing I want to mention is typing in hangul in the game. When I first loaded it up I was surprised to find that no matter what I did I couldn't type in hangul in the game. Apparently the game blocks the alt-shift keys from doing their job and switching the language bar. These are the default keys. Luckily windows lets you switch them to ctrl-shift. Doing so allowed me to switch the language bar and then use the right alt key to toggle English/Korean letters. I'm not sure what their thinking is in disabling these keys, but if you find yourself similarly stuck, I recommend trying that.
The store in Pointblank functions like some of the other stores. Things you buy are for x number of days. In this case, 1, 7, 30, or 90. With increasing discounts the longer you purchase it for. This rewards people playing a long time. However if you have to take a break you might lose your items and have to drop more points on getting them back. When you go to buy a weapon you can choose the time you want to have the weapon, check the various stats and then buy it. If you want you can also gift it by click on 선물 instead of 구입. Most of the stats are similar to AVA or konglish. There is a weapon that sounds like a pea-shooter that is apparently very deadly as I always get wasted by it. I particularly like the heavy machine gun and use it in the helicopter maps as it really does a number on them. In the inventory you can activate an extra weapon for each slot and in game you can toggle around them, so you aren't entirely limited by your inventory set-up prior to entering the game.
After a short while you'll burn through the first few missions. After you've used them all up you'll notice that you don't get a new mission. To get a new mission you need to spend points unlocking it. For some odd reason you can unlock the missions one at a time or unlock a whole group. I can often finish a whole mission in one match so I'm not sure why you'd want to bother unlocking a single mission at once and not a whole group. You only get the big prize for completing the big group anyway. If you're not getting any new missions, you can go to the mission area, and click the drop down menu. choose a mission you haven't done and buy it. A full mission seems to cost around 5000 points and you'll likely get almost that much back just in the time it takes to complete it. For completing one mission I got a weapon for a day, you also get point bonuses, and some other stuff. Again, just buy all the missions, I can't see the point in getting one at a time. It would just be a headache. You can change the active mission (if there is something you're having trouble doing and want to move on) just by going in and clicking a different uncompleted card. Most of the missions you'll do just through normal gameplay. Killing people, throwing grenades, etc. Sometimes you have to kill with a specific weapon or sometimes you have to kill them when they are looking at you. If you don't know what weapon to use, press "T" to bring up the weapon list in game and compare the names to the mission. You'll usually find a match.
The store in Pointblank functions like some of the other stores. Things you buy are for x number of days. In this case, 1, 7, 30, or 90. With increasing discounts the longer you purchase it for. This rewards people playing a long time. However if you have to take a break you might lose your items and have to drop more points on getting them back. When you go to buy a weapon you can choose the time you want to have the weapon, check the various stats and then buy it. If you want you can also gift it by click on 선물 instead of 구입. Most of the stats are similar to AVA or konglish. There is a weapon that sounds like a pea-shooter that is apparently very deadly as I always get wasted by it. I particularly like the heavy machine gun and use it in the helicopter maps as it really does a number on them. In the inventory you can activate an extra weapon for each slot and in game you can toggle around them, so you aren't entirely limited by your inventory set-up prior to entering the game.
After a short while you'll burn through the first few missions. After you've used them all up you'll notice that you don't get a new mission. To get a new mission you need to spend points unlocking it. For some odd reason you can unlock the missions one at a time or unlock a whole group. I can often finish a whole mission in one match so I'm not sure why you'd want to bother unlocking a single mission at once and not a whole group. You only get the big prize for completing the big group anyway. If you're not getting any new missions, you can go to the mission area, and click the drop down menu. choose a mission you haven't done and buy it. A full mission seems to cost around 5000 points and you'll likely get almost that much back just in the time it takes to complete it. For completing one mission I got a weapon for a day, you also get point bonuses, and some other stuff. Again, just buy all the missions, I can't see the point in getting one at a time. It would just be a headache. You can change the active mission (if there is something you're having trouble doing and want to move on) just by going in and clicking a different uncompleted card. Most of the missions you'll do just through normal gameplay. Killing people, throwing grenades, etc. Sometimes you have to kill with a specific weapon or sometimes you have to kill them when they are looking at you. If you don't know what weapon to use, press "T" to bring up the weapon list in game and compare the names to the mission. You'll usually find a match.
Pointblank Part 2 - Gameplay
As I said in the last post, I was pleasantly surprised with Pointblank. I wasn't sure what to expect, but the game was quite fun. The gameplay centers around sexy police officers and criminals shooting each other up. The graphics are nice and the gameplay interesting. There still isn't any gun sights except for sniper rifles, but the play modes are various and there are destructible environments. There are 5 types of gameplay on the main screen but one of them I couldn't try. Every game I tried to join gave me an error. It was called "Challenge"(챌린지). Not sure what the point of it is. The first kind I'll mention is 폭파미션. This is a demolition style mission like counter strike. As you know I'm not a huge fan of these, so I just confirmed its play style and moved on. 1 death, plant an explosive device.
저격전 is Sniper Deathmatch. You can only be a sniper and you face off the enemy in opposing buildings. You can try to sneak across and wreak havoc with your knife if you so wish. 단쳬전 is team deathmatch. These and all other maps seem to always be played to 100 deaths. Gameplay is pretty fast, and people make ample use of smoke grenades. The game play is a lot less twitchy than Karma 2. It is still fast, but I found myself getting slaughtered far less than in Karma 2. Not everyone stepped around the corner with guns blazing. I decided to play some team deathmatch and it was a lot of fun. On the map I played you could hurl grenades to break up a wall and try and move through. On another map there was a library and you could get on the roof and shoot out panes of glass to drop down.
The last gameplay type was the most interesting. It is called "파괴미션" which means demolition, but I'm not sure why. I didn't see any demolition happening on the map. What I did see is circling helicopters that you had to try and take down.
You could pick up rocket launchers and take them out, and at the beginning of the game, someone would spawn in it. They could either bail out, or jump on the minigun and start blazing. The video I've included has me jumping out and then killing some people, but I've also uploaded a video of me shooting the minigun which was pretty fun. It means you can't die until the end of the mission. The first team to blow up the other team's helicopter wins. You don't control the helicopter either. It is on a set pattern. At one point it will drop down and dock with the playing field if you want to get on it you can. I can't see the advantage of being on it and not being in control of the minigun. The helicopter moves far too much to be an effective sniping platform or anything like that.
This game is really quite fun. Up until now AVA has been my favorite FPS in Korea, but Pointblank is a serious contender. It is missing some of the finer controls, like weapon sights, but I didn't miss them that much.
저격전 is Sniper Deathmatch. You can only be a sniper and you face off the enemy in opposing buildings. You can try to sneak across and wreak havoc with your knife if you so wish. 단쳬전 is team deathmatch. These and all other maps seem to always be played to 100 deaths. Gameplay is pretty fast, and people make ample use of smoke grenades. The game play is a lot less twitchy than Karma 2. It is still fast, but I found myself getting slaughtered far less than in Karma 2. Not everyone stepped around the corner with guns blazing. I decided to play some team deathmatch and it was a lot of fun. On the map I played you could hurl grenades to break up a wall and try and move through. On another map there was a library and you could get on the roof and shoot out panes of glass to drop down. The last gameplay type was the most interesting. It is called "파괴미션" which means demolition, but I'm not sure why. I didn't see any demolition happening on the map. What I did see is circling helicopters that you had to try and take down.
You could pick up rocket launchers and take them out, and at the beginning of the game, someone would spawn in it. They could either bail out, or jump on the minigun and start blazing. The video I've included has me jumping out and then killing some people, but I've also uploaded a video of me shooting the minigun which was pretty fun. It means you can't die until the end of the mission. The first team to blow up the other team's helicopter wins. You don't control the helicopter either. It is on a set pattern. At one point it will drop down and dock with the playing field if you want to get on it you can. I can't see the advantage of being on it and not being in control of the minigun. The helicopter moves far too much to be an effective sniping platform or anything like that. This game is really quite fun. Up until now AVA has been my favorite FPS in Korea, but Pointblank is a serious contender. It is missing some of the finer controls, like weapon sights, but I didn't miss them that much.
Pointblank Part 1- Installation and Menus
As I was preparing to install this, I thought "Yay, another FPS. I certainly put a lot of those on the blog". Well with every site having several of them, they are an over-represented genre in Korea. Plaync has little outside of MMORPGs which makes it tough to put much else up from them. However, I must say I was pleasantly surprised with Pointblank. First thing we'll do is head over to the Pointblank page after having logged in at Plaync. Click the big giant game start button to kick off the install. Now, Plaync has a custom built installer that handles all their games. You can open this application, the Plaync launcher from your start menu after you install this first game. Should you want to try other games you can easily download them from there rather than opening the individual pages. The install process took long enough that I was logged out of the Plaync site, so if you get an error when you try to launch the game, go back, refresh the page and login again. Then click start again.
Now you want to click the button labeled 설치 and it will start to download. When it is finished the install will kick off as normal. That button will then turn in to an upgrade button, why it doesn't do that on a first install I don't know, and then finally it'll turn in to a play button when all is said and done. After the game launches you'll be asked to pick a nickname which can be the same as your ID if you want. The rules for ID/nickname creation on Korean websites seems haphazard and confusing. The display name can't be the same as your ID, but the nickname can. It is also going to throw up a few welcome screens after you choose the nick name, just close those down. One warning about the menu. There is apparently some kind of auto-join in play in this game. If you're just sitting in the channel it is going to offer you games. 
You can see this message on the left. It will look something like that, with a different number depending on what room it is offering you. Click 취소 to ignore it. You'll get one every little while. If I can figure out how to disable them I will be sure to post it.
Now on to the main menu. The first thing you'll want to do is change the resolution. Joy of joys, the menu actually changes resolution too. This automatically gives the game bonus points. There are a number of standard features, shop, inventory, settings, clan, friends, and missions. Missions little quests or tasks you have to do in the course of your playing. As you do them you'll get experience and notifications about them. In the beginning you have to do something like kill someone, or get a headshot. It seems like you'll complete them just through normal play so I wouldn't worry too much on them. If you get stuck on one, try running it through google or phone a friend. One thing I did notice is that the background music was unreasonably loud in this game. Go into the sound settings and turn that down. The background music is controlled with the upper slider. Up next, gameplay, videos and screens.
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