I know it's geeky for me to say so, but so far one of my favorite things to do in GTA4 is play a minigame called CUB3D. It's like a three-D Tetris, but actually more interesting than it seems. I hope that somehow it becomes available for the 360 in the Marketplace. I'd pay for it.
GTA4 is the most immersive game I've played since Oblivion, and I've only put in 3 hours.
Being Niko is a whole lot more easy, mature and realistic so far, than being CJ back in San Andreas. GTA4 has an organic quality to it, unlike the paranoid frenetic pace of San Andreas. In Niko, you get to see the bottom of the pile of Liberty City, but it is not preternaturally dangerous. You ease into the dark life. My Niko is not there. I've just started. I got about 150 bucks in my pocket, I walk the streets a bit. I bought a pair of boots from the Russian market. I met this girl named Michelle and we went bowling. I sat down in my filthy apartment and watched Katt Williams on TV. I got into a fight to save my cousin from some Albanian loan sharks, but I got my ass kicked by a guy with a knife four times before I actually got through it. It feels like the pace of a real life, day turns to night and sometimes it rains.
Carjacking is stupidly easy in this world - easier that hotwiring a vehicle, but that's part of the fun. The driving engine in GTA4 is an order of magnitude more refined and subtle than any urban shoot 'em up game before, and the hand to hand combat engine defies button mashing of the sort that powers Bully. It makes a world of difference. I figured I could just knock over these fat thugs with some cool moves. No such luck. My Niko was basically spent after 50 punches. If you have to fight three men, you had better have a weapon.
As before, the music is crackling. The audio talent and variety in
GTA4 is the benchmark against which all ghetto ambiance in the gaming
world must now be judged. That too shows some mastery on the part of
the Rockstar crew. I can't tell you how quickly stupid and repetitive
comments just destroyed True Crime
despite the ripping sound track. Once again, Rockstar has put together
some excellent radio parodies and now added television parody as well.
The
art direction is spot on. I am transported to Brooklyn and Queens
in Liberty City. The light, noise and shadows under the tracks, the
wooden clunk of my shoes on the boardwalk, the weeds and garbage cans
under the light in the alley at night. GTA4's Liberty City is a
completely intelligent and sophisticated riff off the American urban
underclass. It is both exploitive and serious. This is to gangster
gaming what the Sopranos was to gangster stories on TV. It has been
more than evolved, but revolutionized and humanized with a deft touch.
I really truly expect academics to take a close look at this
representation of urban life. So far, it is utterly convincing.
But none of that prepared me for being drunk. Yes drunk. My Niko took his cousin out to a bar and then I get drunk. The experience is extraordinary. Niko stumbles trying to walk straight, the entire view is fuzzed and wobbly. I can't even get in a car to drive because I nearly get run over in the middle of the street. Before I can get to the curb I can hear cops coming, and then my head starts spinning harder. I had to laugh out loud it was so uncanny.
I approached GTA4 with more than a bit of trepidation. I have a difficult time being the criminal, but I'm emotionally sympathetic to Niko. It's more than just the date with Michelle and the relationship with cousin Roman, it's the whole world.
I have been playing Rainbow Six Vegas for a week in anticipation of ganging up with my old buddies for the new release. Who knows, we might even become a devastating clan. So last night was the first time I played the game and it looks new and interesting.
The four biggest differences are all important.
1. Tight Maps
Everybody will tell you
immediately that these maps force you to think. Open areas where you
might have just dashed across in Ghost Recon or Call of Duty - don't
even think about it. The enemy is deadly and they don't miss. You
simply must use your tactics. I've been on just a few co-op terrorist
hunts and everybody right now is calling out positions and thinking
about their load outs. That's because when the AIs are lurking twelve
feet from you behind cover, they're ready to pop you quickly.
The maps are claustrophobic and you get the feeling that there is an enemy around every corner, it's not as tight as Splinter Cell, but this is definitely and indoorsy game. Sure there is lots of outdoor action but busting down doors and hiding in cover is really part of this game because there are few wide open spaces.
2. Sprinting.
I can't tell you how annoying it
has become to play R6V after playing Gears of War or Call of Duty or
Frontlines. It just seems way too slow by comparison. But part of that
pace was its appeal because you had to think your way around, not just
run and gun. Well now you can run and guess what. You still have to
think. In fact you have to think more, because the accellerated pace of
this game, which was already way more deadly.
The great new aspect of gameplay makes this game really cool and it
took about a dozen online 7 on 7 matches for me to see the magic.
Running short distances and slamming into cover in R6V2 now approaches
the excitement of doing the same in Gears of War. It's more difficult
to accomplish in Rainbow, but the tactic is immediately familiar and
the way that the new tight close combat maps work, this is how you can
inch your way to the enemy stronghold. That's excitement. I was
practically spawn killing using this technique.
3. Armor
Armor makes a much bigger difference in
this game. I can remember the frustration of the old R6 when spawn
killing was a problem and you could dance around and pump people full
of lead and people would dance on their left joystick and not die. Now,
there can still be a little bit of dancing, way more than R6V, but only
when they are wearing armor. In combination with sprinting, it makes
for a more dynamic part of gameplay because you can change up armor on
each respawn. The less armor you wear, the longer you can sprint.
Adjusting your armor for different maps adds a real dimension I really
appreciate right away.
4. ACES
In Project Gotham Racing 4, the Kudos
system finally reached perfection. I think that can now be said about
the ranking system in R6V2. I love it. The fact that you accumulate
your points in co-op whether you win or lose is very cool and the three
categories of achievements are stellar. I''ve never been one to
accumulate internal rankings for more than just the big guns, but these
are actually fun in a non-fanboy way.
A few other things I've noticed. The interiors of some of these maps are very sweet looking. Almost to the quality of Splinter Cell. Putting the ROE on the Back button is a little bit annoying - it's one of the things I use a lot, especially when I want them to flash & clear and then engage weapons free.
Enemy AI seems improved slightly and now there are two weapons they have and you don't that are to be feared and respected. The SPAS 12 is back, and deadly as ever, but now they have the AUG Para. That bad boy is nasty.
It's really funny to play the game that Nulan sees in our future, an international conflict over the last oil on earth. The peak oil crisis is the premise for the new large scale multiplayer battle sim on XBox 360. It's an excellent game. It just came out last week, but the weekend before I had been playing the free demo. It took about 30 minutes to get it, which was a bit long for me in a first person shooter. But as soon as I did, the veils were lifted from my eyes which allowed me to see that this is a landmark game for the 360.
First of all, it's got more weapons and more vehicles than Halo3.
You start with one of six basic loadouts (Sniper, Rockets, Assault,
Heavy Gun, Silenced Sub, Shotty) and you carry a pistol and grenades or
mines or C4. Then there are four addional weapon sets you can get as
you score kills or objectives in the game. They are {Ground Support,
EMP Tech, Air Strikes, Drone Tech). Each of the weapon sets has three
levels and you can switch your loadout and/or weapon sets during the
game. You have to die or respawn yourself, but the option is always
there. So that's 24 sets of stuff to begin with. But wait, there are
two versions of each of those, you can use NATO style or Sino-Russian
tech. After all you're either with us or with them.
I have to say that the greatest part of this game are the vehicles, and most especially the attack helo. But even the six man helo is extra cool. You can pickup five teammates and parachute them behind enemy lines to mount a surprise attack, but watch out for anit-aircraft flack and rockets that lock on. Still you have flare countermeasures and you can always bail if you're taking too much damage. The first time I realized that I could jump out of a helicopter and then pull the ripcord, I freaked out. Ultra cool. There are tanks with three kinds of guns, Stryker-like APCs, 8 wheeled AA + SAM vehicles and super quick Humvees with the 50 cal. All can be used to move your team around.
But there are also drones. You can hide behind a rock and send a UAV up and over into enemy territory. Some fire rockets, some you just get close to the bad guy and explode. There are six different types and they really add a new dimension in battle.
Airstrikes in COD4 are just weak compared to the way they are handled in Frontlines. Frontlines is, by the way, nothing but team warfare online. No capture the flag, no oddball or any of that. This is really the most realistic war gaming for multiplayer, period. Battlefield 2 comes close when it comes to big team battles, but Frontlines is far superior. You can call in three types of airstrikes. A precision JDAM, a cluster bomb attack, or an awesome 105mm gunship barrage.
The EMP weapons are also formidable. You can setup a pulse beacon that renders all vehicles and drones ineffective for a good radius, or you can launch an EMP rocket that will drop a helo or stop a tank in its tracks.
Online play with 32+ players on a battlefield is really awesome. It
brings back memories of COD3, which was previously the best big team
battles. COD4 is very good, but it doesn't have the frenzied action -
something about the new maps just doesn't quite do it for me. I can't
explain why. Still, you can get up to 50 people playing. The rounds are
timed for one hour, and you just rip through it.
Maps on Frontlines are huge, and you always need to be on the lookout for UAVs. You can shoot choppers out of the sky, but you cannot survive helo attacks. You had better see him first and hope he doesn't evade your missile.
There are certain things about Frontlines that I find more realistic. Close explosions don't always kill you. I think the idea that you're going to throw a grenade back to the enemy preposterous. There's none of that in Frontlines. Airstrikes are time delayed and targeting is non-trivial. So you can effect some friendly fire, or just miss the enemy altogether. Sniper fire does not work well unless you pop the head. It feels like a more realistic version of sniper fire. Tanks feel very safe. All that small arms fire that's deadly becomes a mere annoyance when you've got armor.
The single player game in FFOW is unremarkable save two or three
unique elements. I find the tank battles to be fairly tedious and just
a real pain. The AI for driving is very weak, unlike in Halo where you
can just jump in the backseat and let your driver take you to the right
place. However, there are multiple nukes and one or two defending
battles that are well worth it. Controls are very good although close
combat is klugey. The long distance combat is unbeatable.
Right now an underused option is the squad based system. You can command a squad and set objectives and communicate, but everybody is a noob now and few people are using that option, even helo pilots don't communicate with the people in their aircraft. I suspect that's different in the ranked games and will become more prevalent as time goes on, but for now most people are just mostly mewling that they've been jacked.
I suspect that this is the big competition to Endwar. For massive online battles, it is the new benchmark. The only reason Halo is better is because more people play it and are used to it, but these maps, weapons, vehicles and tech give new dimensions to battle that every new game is going to have to try to match.
This is me, Sixoseven, alias Cobb and a bunch of other stuff that's above your paygrade. I'm putting this website together for a number of reasons, not least of which is to get my head straight about who some of you are. We've been gaming for years now and to tell you the truth, I don't know who half of you are, really. I could leave that as it is and that's cool - I'm not going to stalk you, although I might want to be around when Spook is shooting models, or when Lethal is lighting up...
Also I can setup calendars and whatnot so that we can coordinate gaming schedules. Plus face time. I really hate that I missed going to the Long Beach Grand Prix with the gang, and that of all the times I was in Seattle over the past six months that I missed Banderson.
I have to admit I got all weepy when I got on one of those throwback GRAW2 maps, and I thought to myself how long we've been at it. So I figured that I should resurrect the clan, for what it's worth. All in favor just nod your head. Good. See you online.
By the way, my name is Michael, but don't call me that, it would creep me out. 'Six' is just fine. I'm going to reserve a domain so this will be easier to get to - you know maybe cultofsuntzu.com. I can also set this up so if you like, you can be an author on the blog and write what you feel, gaming related or otherwise. If you like that idea, leave a comment and I'll hook you up.
It's probably impolitic to say so but I've been hungry for Halo lately. I love Gears, I love Rainbow Six, I love Splinter Cell. I really like Ghost Recon, and I've had a lot of fun in games like Counterstrike, XIII, Call of Duty and even Unreal Tournament. But my fingers and my tactics all come back to Halo. I've been thinking about that lately.
My clan buds, The Cult of Sun Tzu, and I have mostly been playing Rainbow Six Vegas since it came out. That's cut into my Gears time, and now I'm getting sloppy in that. But what really got to me was that I was doing something fundamentally wrong in R6 which was being aggressive. Aggressive play works best in Halo but it will get you killed very quickly in R6. So I spent a lot of time worrying about why my game was off and not thinking about it. It wasn't until I decided to play some Halo that it all came back to me.
Somebody may have the statistics somewhere for all games but in a Halo Big Team Battle the difference between the best player and the worst player in terms of average time between deaths is generally not more than 20 seconds or so. Staying alive for an average of 40 seconds and getting 3 kills per spawn will make you a pretty good Halo player. In R6 you're highly unlikely to do will if you only stay alive for 40 seconds in Team Sharpshooters, and you're probably not going to get 3 kills in that time. It takes 40 seconds just to get to the other players' spawn in R6, but that's another subject.
Rainbow Six is a slower, more deadly game than Halo. There's a lot of creeping and sneaking around, relatively speaking. But the very notion that you're on a team of six or seven makes your Halo senses kick in and your instinct is to run towards where the shooting is going on so that you can steal a kill as soon as someone's shield flashes. The problem is of course there are no shields and one of those shooters is going to be dead by the time you get there and probably hiding waiting to pick you off.
So there are interesting dynamics going on in the different shooters and maps, and you have to take that into account. Too much Halo is bad for your R6 and vice versa unless you are thinking about your tactics in each game as a completely different set of reflexes.
I'll probably be picking up a strategy guide for Gears after Christmas because I'm going to try to start getting ranked over there and the level of competition has started to rise. But I've noticed clearly that it's a much more intense short distance game. The new melee on Halo2 is a significant change too. I have yet to adjust to that. The way to use cover on Halo doesn't translate at all in Gears.
If I were to come up with a system of shooter tactics there would be some high level things I would keep in mind.
Now I need to stop talking and get back online. All this talk is making my fingers hungry.
I was a pinball wizard, so I came to the video game revolution prepared to be a sucker.
My first pinball game, the game I learned on, was Bow and Arrow. It was at the Holiday Bowl on Crenshaw. Replay was set for 60,000. I can still remember that. One dime per game, three games for a quarter. These were the classic dimensions of a pinball machine.
There were several great pinball games I played during the 70s, and my favorite arcade was over near USC at Woody's Smorgasburger on Figeuroa just south of Adams. Bow and Arrow was the top game there and it sat right on the corner at the southeast door. My two pinball buds, Espinoza and Person shared my enthusiasm for the game. We used to drive there on Wednesdays, as juniors in highschool. We rode in Espinoza's yellow VW bug.
At Woody's there was a jukebox of course, and there were four songs that will always remind me of Woody's. First and foremost would be "I Don't Want To Lose Your Love" by the Emotions.
In the category of badass, Kane & Lynch is way up there in attitude but mediocre in gameplay.
I think that the producers of badass videogames, you know the kind, know that there's only so much they can get away with. In the end, it's difficult to compete with gangster movies, John Woo and Jerry Bruckheimer. But there is still some room for creativity in this arena as the makers of Kane & Lynch have discovered.
The premise is simple, the theme is classic, the execution complex, the results both better and worse than expected. You are Kane, a man who has been busted out of prison by a dude named Lynch. You soon discover that Kane you are a mercenary who has betrayed (perhaps not intentionally) a set of kingpins collectively known as The Seven. Lynch is assigned by the Seven to get you out of prison precisely to recover that thing that you stole, otherwise your family gets it. It turns out that Lynch is a semi-psychopath who goes postal when he's off his meds. You play a squad-based shooter that starts out with just Lynch in search of the precious stolen artifact. When Lynch, in a bank robbery kills dozens of hostages, you realize that you will both be hunted to death.
It turns out that Lynch may not always listen to your commands, and you discover exactly how creepy he is as time goes by. You pick up various henchmen and find that they have personality conflicts as well. The them of Kane & Lynch is loyalty and betrayal, and at any time, the smoothness of the narrative gets interrupted by somebody hesitating and not obeying your commands.
That's bad enough because Kane & Lynch is a very ambitious game with partially destructible environments (a la Black, a la Matrix movie lobby scene with the exploding tile columns), a cover system and squad commands. None of which work as nicely as any of the Tom Clancy titles (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon). The controls are somewhat awkward - it's sloppier than
Mass Effect has been pretty much everything it was cracked up to be. Now that I'm just about to finish what I think is the last boss battle, I'm very much considering playing it again.
This latest RPG has all of the good stuff from the Knights of the Old Republic game, and little of the more tedious stuff that turned it into an epic. It's a lot more straightforward and doesn't get me as a player completely bogged down in the arcane wonderment of a spacefaring battle story. In many ways, the tedium of Mass Effect plays directly into its appeal. You honestly get a good sense of, ho brother yet another planet we gotta deal with, as the protagonist.
Another thing that Mass Effect has got going for it is a broad assortment of characters to take with you as your battle squad. They do a good amount of work as AIs and don't need a lot of extra tinkering. Every once in a while, you point them at a particularly nasty baddie, but for the most part they handle their business. Additionally, most battles are a good deal more spontaneous than those of the Star Wars series. A rudimentary cover system, plus a basic squad control system add to the spontaneity. Good job on that.
The environments and characters are high quality as is the voice over acting. The fact of the matter is that if BioWare can crank out this level of quality on a regular basis, this kind of adventure will satisfy my sci-fi fix. Now I'm only about 15 or so hours into the adventure, and I find it highly unlikely that I'll ever do an Oblivion-length RPG again (But I said that about Morrowind) so this is about the right length. I'll probably double that time by playing it again at the fast pace, but because of the richness of the story I'm actually happy having played that relatively short period of time. Interestingly enough, I'm watching my boy play Half Life 2 for the first time and there is no way I could endure that full game.
The best thing about Mass Effect is its well-conceived plot and
well-integrated universe. It's really one of the best in RPG land, not
that I play that many. It feels very much like a television series
which is why I think of it as a sci-fi fix. I could come back to the
Mass Effect universe, and considering how little I interacted with a
number of the species of it, I'm guessing that the Bioware folks have
that in mind. If so, great. I'll be back.
The past month has been something of a bonanza for us on the 360. I must have grabbed about 800 gamerpoints just playing Halo 3, PGR4 and Assassin's Creed. But the most intriguing and fun game I've enjoyed in a long time is The Portal from the Orange Box. I knew this was coming. It was worth the wait.
The Portal is a challenging spacial puzzle game for the XBox 360 brought to you by the Valve folks who brought you Half-Life. It is part of The Orange Box, which contains all three sequels to Half-Life, the award winning FPS/adventure game. If you don't understand, it's your fault. The Portal places you in the shoes of a test human in a physics lab called Aperture Science. You are challenged, basically, to use a Portal gun to get through a series of mazes.
There are 19 mazes (so far as I can tell, I'm still working on #19) that go from the simple to the complex. Although they all have similar themes and are constructed with some fairly basic elements, they are the most fun and unique challenges I've seen in a video game since Myst.
When I first saw the Orange Box, I was somewhat disappointed that The Portal was its own game, and not part of some FPS. I originally considered the Portal in the context of Prey, another game in which gravity is a key player. Instead, everything in The Portal resembles tutorials of the sort you would think Morpheus would design in The Construct. The whole theme of the game is just that, a tutorial with a disembodied computer voice (every bit as distinctive as Guilty Spark) that becomes more and more sadistic and cruel over time. With each successive level, the puzzles get more complex and 'impossible'.
This is as clever a game as it gets. It's a great entertainment for everyone.
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