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Rubilacxe

Blood 2

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Random question I know, but was Blood 2 a good game at all? I absolutly love the first and I've played the demo for Blood 2 several times...is it worth buying?

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I've heard that it has more bugs than a dozen Doom95s and the gameplay is horrible. However, there are some people that do like it. I myself would like to try it just to see what it's like. One thing is certain, it seems to be quite different than the first Blood.

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Blood 2 to me was the biggest piece of shit ever, I got a burnt copy off of one of my friends last year fired her up. At first I was like hmmmmm nice atmosphear then started playin.....fuck this is gay, the AI sucks ass the pistol and knife gib people to a few small chunks I mean come on! thats fucking retarded, enemies were lame and gameplay just all out was boreing as hell.
So......I give blood2 a 2/10 just because it looked kinda sexy at the time.

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Horrible game. The only thing it had going for it was it's continuity... kinda. The thing is, it could have been an amazing game. I remember reading all the stuff they had on their site when the game was still being made and there was such potential. After the first large batch of screenshots was released I posted some feedback to them wondering about the direction they were taking the game. The told me to shut up and that I was stupid for doubting the game would be anything less than great. Dumbasses... look who turned out to be right.

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I loved Blood 2. I thought it was great, and didn't find it buggy at all.

Note that, as far as I am aware, it doesn't work under Windows XP at all.

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Rubilacxe said:
Random question I know, but was Blood 2 a good game at all? I absolutly love the first and I've played the demo for Blood 2 several times...is it worth buying?


The short answer: Blood 2 cannot hope to hold a candle to the original game. But you might want to look at it anyway, if you can find this game in some bargain bin.

Blood 2's storyline is all messed up. Instead of continuing the original storyline, they throw in some of the original elements without explaining stuff. Such as, why are the other Chosen revived, and who did that. Gabriel is also a woman now, while I distinctly remember him being male in the first game. They also are on your side, storywise, but then why do you have to fight them near the end? Gideon's obsession with Caleb is understandable, but what is his link with the Ancient One? Worse: they don't finish the entire plot.

The dark humor that marked the first game is missing. Most of Caleb's punchlines are too long and thus not that funny. Civilians are annoying, and just stand there while you slaughter them. Now, where's the fun in that.

The engine is buggy. Make sure you grab the patch before you even attempt to start playing. Especialy gibbing stuff is retarded, with severed arms/legs hanging in mid-air. Sometimes the engine loses track of alternative ammo count (such as the grenades in the assault rifle) so that you suddenly find your ammo gone when you need it.

The armor-class is fucked-up and completely useless. One shot will take a full armor down to nothing. There are no seperate armor classes for different kind of damage like in the original Blood. Most weapons can be carried akimbo, and most have alternative firemodes (which is good), but some are just overpowered. Like an instant-hit rocket launcher. WTF. Other weapons just don't pack any punch at all, such as the napalm launcher which requires several shots to kill even the puniest of opponents. Dynamite can't be thrown around corners, but sticks to the first thing it hits. I'm happy with the flare gun, shotgun, assault rifle and tesla gun, although I do wish there was an option NOT to carry them akimbo all the time.

All enemies hit HARD. Boss enemies start to become invincible on higher difficulty settings, to the point of annoying the hell out of me. Most human enemies repeat the same sentence over and over and over again, and their speech contains swearing. Absolute worse moment is when one civilian starts swearing and gets bleeped over. They also have way too long lines, so that you continue to hear them while they're already a pile of gore (er... not pile... a jumble of arms/legs suspended in the air). A lot of times enemies just warp in.

There are several well designed levels on par with the original ones, featuring real-life settings. But they lack the complete freedom of exploration and you don't get that rewarding feeling you had in Blood when finding alternative routes. There's also a distressing lack of secrets. There are no theme-based episodes, but just one long trek through basically the same texture set: city / industrial stuff, with the exception of a couple of airship levels and the Ancient City.

They do manage on a couple of occasions to set down a level with a grimy, decayed feeling... such as a couple of slums and (my favorite) a dilapidated mansion.

They also tried to pull off a HUB feeling, without actually making a hub. So you regulary return to a "previously visited" level but with all stuff reset. So eg. all those bins you had destroyed are back. Totally unconvincing and totally fake, and it completely destroyed any possibility of immersing yourself in the game when that happens. Looks to me like a cheap way to make some more levels, by using one level more than once. The only time it looks -somewhat- convincing are those subway levels, considering one subway looks pretty much the same as the next. By the third or fourth time they even manage a twist by letting you crawl outside.

So overall: no. Best description would be: "uninspired, most of times". But you can pick it up at a bargain price and grit your teeth until you reach a nice level, such as that mansion. Then you can close your eyes and think about how nice this game could have been instead. Because that is the tragedy: despite engine problems, this game COULD have been on par with the original.

BTW, the game does run under XP provided all your drivers are up to date. But music refuses to play on my box.

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Blood 2 was one of the most dissapointing games ever, Mordeth said almost everything there is to say about the game. The only cool thing about it was Caleb during the intro sequence.

BTW Mordeth, what do you think about the way the game ended?

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is there a Life Leach or Aerosol Can still? those were like 2 of my favorite weapons from the original...especially after the expansion when the Life Leach could become a "sentry gun"

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It seemed like a totally different game. I never really saw much of blood though, but enough to know it is better then the second one.
although that night we had mushrooms.. so it was extremely weird to watch being played.. I wasn't sure if the warped textures where normal or not...

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Man... you know what's even worse? The Blood 2 expansion. Not only does it try to be cheesy (and turn out really bad), but it also completely contradicts the story set up in the first game. Ophelia a sorority girl? Ishmael was really JoJo? Even the addition of the classic cultists couldn't save that horrid add-on.

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What about the official Blood 1 mission pack (I think it was called "Cryptic Passage"). I've never managed to get hold of a copy of it, but is it any good?

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I'd have to say that Mordeth has it straight, on the whole. Though there are some worthwhile scenes that will stick with you always.

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I have Cryptic Passage, but I don't have a slow enough computer to play it (I always get a 'Runtime error 200').

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Ichor: Actually, that sounds like a DOS4GW problem. No idea how to work around it though.

BTW, if you have any programs that run too fast, there are programs designed specifically to slow older games down. The one I use is Moslo, although it doesn't always work (e.g. the driving sequence in Police Quest 3 is still around 1,000 times faster than it should be ;))

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Heh, i had a demo of it and thought some bits where dumb, like there where these soldiers, and a headshot wouldnt kill them in one shot, but if you shot this red light thing on thier backpack it would kill them with one hit, and the pools of blood on the floor looked more like sick (with some bright purple bits) because thier palette got fucked up

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The best game expansion I've played was Deathkings of the Dark Citadel. Although the Quake 2 expansions weren't bad either.

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It's three extra hubs. No new music, textures, or enemies, but it is very fun and nice looking. It's also a little harder than the original.

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A little? Heh, I think at some points it was rediculously difficult.

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Mordeth said:

There's also a distressing lack of secrets.

Perhaps they're just so well hidden that you missed them all :P

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Alboroto said:
BTW Mordeth, what do you think about the way the game ended?


Totally retarded. [SPOILER] You would expect Caleb to seal the rift between the dimensions, or a hint that he indeed carries the essence of Tjernobog and, in effect, has become the guardian god of all worlds. But none of that... just an intermission showing Caleb to attempt to seal the rift, but you never find out if he succeeds or not.

The only cool thing was the credits screen, with the Chosen walking side by side.

Nightmare said:
What about the official Blood 1 mission pack (I think it was called "Cryptic Passage"). I've never managed to get hold of a copy of it, but is it any good?


It has a mix of good and not-so-good levels. Some stuff is amateurish, such as similar combat area's but with different hordes of monsters with one switch each to complete a sequence. Other stuff is really good, such as the secret bog level and the riverboat one. Definately grab this one if you come across it.

BTW Cryptic Passage is a commercial third-party add-on, and not an official Monolith product.

The official expansion is called One Whole Unit, and contains the original three episodes plus one new. This new episodes contains some new monsters (nothing shocking though) and is mixed bag of good and bad levels. Especially the first level looked totally ass, and had me fearing for the worst. The rest of the content was a bit similar to episode 3.

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I just so happened to stumble upon an old pre-release Blood2 storyline last weekend, and thought to share :) Apparantly, they were planning to have an intro where Caleb is trying to figure out how to resurrect the other dead Chosen (which is pretty difficult I'd say, considering how he burned his beloved Ophelia and ate Gabriel's heart and all, heh). But the last ingredient for that dark ritual is in the possession of the Cabal, who intend not to have Caleb have a chance at power again and so are sending in their troops to stop him.

So far that makes perfect sense, and I can't understand why this scene was replaced with that dumb subway intro. It even agrees with the add-on Cryptic Passage, where Caleb is hunting down an ancient scroll... possibly describing a resurrection ritual..?

Now there are still a lot of questions open, though. In Blood2, the return of the Chosen is portrayed in cutscenes as an "accidental" side-effect of firing a Singularity Generator (you know, the museum cutscene, when the scientist sidekick buddy of Gideon tries to squash Caleb with it.). In this version of the story, the resurrection of the Chosen has been partly succesfull, although they seem trapped between dimensions... maybe this is why the Singularity Generator is able to make them emerge..? And although bend on throwing over the Cabal, the other Chosen try to warn Caleb that he has now Tchernobog's power and has to use it to seal the rifts between worlds. Caleb might actually have become the 17th incarnation of Tchernobog, as Ismael at one time refers to him as "you're the One that Binds, whether you like it or not".

And there's the question of Tchernobog's nature itself... a raw power force neccessary for the survival of all dimensions but needing a physical body to excert its powers. In the original Blood, it wanted to use Caleb. It disavowed him, and set him on his path. Because for every life Caleb took, he somehow absorbed their power and became the "living conduit" Tchernobog wanted to use to "break free into the mortal world". Which makes no sense for a force that actually keeps worlds apart. It might be that the wish to break free was actually the wish of the man who had become the 16th incarnation, and not of the force that is Tchernobog itself. Because that wish to "break free" certainly is illogical when coming from the entity itself. Caleb's refusal to "embrace, at last" certainly threw that plan in disarray :)

See, lots of possibilities for an inventive storyteller... instead of the stupid incomplete storyline it got now :/

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Ichor said:

I always get a 'Runtime error 200'.


I've had that message with quite a few old programs. Usually small DOS utils and the like. It is usually related to a problem with turbo pascal programs that fall over when a computer has a clock speed above a certain number. I can't remember the details, but that's basically it.

There are a couple of utils I have found that can fix the problem. There is one called TPPatch that can patch an EXE so that it no longer gives the problem. The other is a TSR program that you run before the problem program and it allows the problem EXE to work. I mainly used the first to fix the EXE, but on a couple of occasions TPPatch didn't work and the TSR came to the rescue.

Sorry I don't have links for any of the above. Can't find them on my HD either, but maybe a google search will throw them up. That's how I found them in the first place.

Oh yeah, and of course, utils like moslo which NiGHTRMARE mentioned can also solve the problem.

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Blood 2 was a total disappointment really.... It is buggy as hell - the enemies make Doom's demons look like rocket scientists and the weapon and enemy balance is all fucked up. Enemies will hang in the air, jump onto your head and get stuck and all kinds of horrible things. Playing it, it's pretty surprising that they actually released it in that state. Nevertheless though, I must admit I kinda enjoyed it - the atmosphere and music is pretty good in places and some of the level design is really awesome (the asylum-ish looking mouldy Cabal safehouse, the Cathedral and the ancient city with it's blood rivers come to mind). Also the enemy design is (to me anyway) exceptionally nice in places.

But Caleb's lines all stink, half the weapons suck, there is no interactivity and it really bears very little relation to the original Blood. Somewhere in the world, the one word headline style thing in a magazine review will have said: "clotted".

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