So after a work-induced week away from gaming last week, I’m back into it. And by it, I mean Crackdown 2.
There’s something about the game that isn’t gelling with me. It’s either open-world fatigue after Just Cause 2, Saboteur, Assassin’s Creed 2, Borderlands, etc or it’s just a little lacklustre compared to the original. For me it’s not the similarity to the original, it’s the lack of similarity that gets me. I loved having to work my way through the waves of gang members before attacking the boss in the original and here, the ‘enhancements’ aren’t as much fun. The games’ fun, it’s just not as compelling. I’m a fair way through the game and fully intend on finishing it soon (certainly before Halo Reach), but I’m not getting the urge to play in the morning before work (my metric for HOLY FUCK THIS GAME IS AWESOME).
I live in Australia and of course, aren’t able to buy the same version of Left 4 Dead 2 as the rest of the world due to classifications issues. A friend gifted it to me after it was more or less being given away by Valve in a sale. I mean they almost paid me to download this game. Somehow receiving the game from someone with a US account means you can DL the normal version in Australia and play it without Zombies disappearing before your eyes.
It’s also a case of too little to add to the first game and I do agree with the critics of L4D’s releases so soon after the original- apart from a few enhancements- why wasn’t this DLC or an expansion like HL2 episodes? The new crew don’t have as much charisma as the original crew and yada yada yada.
Grumpy George continues grumpily with a some Grumpy Theft Auto IV. I’ve perhaps played 90 minutes of the PC version multiplayer- and seem to play once every few weeks. I like a bit of structure. this has none. There are several modes and for some reason they always end up with everyone having Bazookas or Helicopters, even if it’s a race.
So two weeks before Halo: Reach and I’d loooove to play some Halo 3 or ODST in the meantime. Approximately two weeks after H:R turns up, I’m off overseas for a few weeks so chances are I won’t feel like playing Halo when i get back. When you were a kid, did you ever have this thing that any fads or lunchtime activities would always be bookended by holidays? In Year 6 Term 2, everyone was into Marbles but gave up in Term 3. In Year 9, everyone was playing cards on the bus after Easter but that stopped the next holidays.
I therefore expect two weeks of concentrated Halo Reach from mid September. If you hate Halo, this site might be one to avoid till October.
My Crackdown 2 review by Cam (aged 35)
To nobody’s great surprise I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Crackdown 2 in those horrible, cold hours that are the time I am not playing Crackdown 2. It wasn’t until Ravi forced me to explain my rabid defence of the game that I was able to really wrap my head around how I feel about the game. And it is thus:
Crackdown 2 magnificently succeeds in the areas that are the most important to me. Thus, to me, it is an absolutely incredible game.
All I wanted, at the end of the day, was more Crackdown. Now for different people more crackdown means a lot of different things. All I wanted was jumping off buildings, COLLECTING ORBS, and blowing people up with a homing missile. That’s it. To me, Crackdown is the never ending joy of finding an enemy, jumping, pressing LT to lock on and, while you’re still in mid air, pressing RT and watching the enemy blow up real good like. I swear I have a Povolv-ian reaction to this, just sitting there like an idiot drooling doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then to top it off I jump off a building and get vertigo and land SO HARD on the ground that NEARBY CARS EXPLODE.
That’s Crackdown to me. Crackdown 2 has more of that. Therefore it’s great.
Crackdown (left) compared with Crackdown 2 (right)
For the life of me I couldn’t understand the backlash. It’s bad because it’s more of the same, but different? Who the hell complains about following up the best steak you’ve ever had in your life with ANOTHER STEAK BUT THIS TIME WITH EXTRA SHRIMP IN THE MIDDLE OF IT?
I have to admit Ravi had a point. For a lot of people ‘more Crackdown’ is about watching different factions fight each other for control of a city, or it’s about watching a working, vibrant city that is desperately trying to cling onto normality getting screwed up by crime. Some people spent most of their time in the vehicles, which I never really was interested in. And…OK, I’ll admit, Crackdown 2 doesn’t have that. The visually unique areas are replaced with a uniform desolation, and because everywhere is so broken you can’t enjoy being anywhere as much. I thought the Peacekeepers, Cell and Freaks would be the three factions that fight each other, but they’re all just everywhere and you never get the sense you’re in Freak territory or whatever. Everywhere is the same as everywhere else really, and that’s a shame. The city isn’t what it used to be.
I kind of miss it.
But, like everything else in life I miss, I try not to think about it and just play more Crackdown 2 and start grinning like a God damn lunatic again.
Editor’s Note: A less mentally unstable review of Crackdown 2 is coming in a few weeks
Mario is just one of those things in gaming. I’ve always enjoyed Mario platform games (right back to Donkey Kong being one of my top 5 arcade favourites), but I have gotten to the point where I’m just not finishing them. Sunshine on the Gamecube was the last Mario game where I faced the final boss, and that was by getting the bare minimum shine requirement.
I may have only gotten half way through the original SMG and barely 25% of the way through New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii. But I still bought SMG2. Thankfully, I am enjoying it.
I felt that although SMG was a good game full of ideas, too much of it felt a bit like they were reaching for new things to do. SMG2 (so far) feels organic. It feels right. It feels good. wait, that’s caffeine. well, anyway, it’s a good game.
There are two wrinkles to me getting too far into this game. One, is Crackdown 2. Having only played the demo and the first 15 minutes of the game (Most of which is the demo), I think I can say it’s comfort food. But then, most of my gaming is comfort food. Mario games and platformers USED to be my comfort food, replaced first by shooters and now it seems by open world mayhem games. Games like Heavy Rain and Mario are me straying outside those confines.
Crackdown 2 is that burger I have from Grill’d every Friday lunch. I order the Bombay Bliss Veggie Burger most weeks, and occasionally have a Beef Burger with egg and bacon (To make any fast food ‘Australian,’ add egg. Don’t ask me why, just be glad it’s not vegemite)
So Crackdown 2 is expected to offer few surprises, but then, I didn’t really expect it to. I didn’t expect a Mass Effect style rewrite where the developer took to heart any and every minor complaint from the original and offered up a massively different sequel. SMG2 feels like Miyamoto and co may have looked at the feedback from the original (and sales figures- while healthy- were under expectations for a marquee game like a Mario platformer) and tightened up the graphics on level 3 as well as the gameplay. Ruffian havn’t done this, possibly down to a very short time constraint and likely small budget. I’m guessing the guys who replayed the first game and/or hunted down the collectibles will be the ones who notice the similarity more. It’s the same city, which is the kicker, unlike say, Vice City which was GTAIII tech with changed art.
The other big news, I have my iPad. I didn’t expect to pick on up for another week but as my Wife and I are heading interstate for a few days, we thought it would be a good opportunity to see if an iPad would be all the computing we’d need away from home in preparation for an overseas holiday later in the year. That said, I’ve got all of my iPhone games to try like Canabalt, Attack Force and Poker Smash and have picked up Angry Birds and Plants VS Zombies. I’m considering Mirror’s Edge as well as some Popcap puzzlers. I’m open to suggestions…
I used to be adverse to really long games. I’d play at best maybe one RPG and one open world game a year. In the last year I’ve played through and loved Assassin’s Creed II, Red Faction Guerrilla, The Saboteur, Red Dead Redemption (and to a lesser extent, Borderlands) and am looking forward to Crackdown 2 more than any man not named Cameron. I was looking forward to Just Cause 2 based on the positive word-of-mouth and fun demo- despite me hating Just Cause 1 when I picked it up cheaply on Steam earlier this year). I waited to get it cheap and in the end got it on PC. It’s a great game in what seems to be my new favourite genre.
And I’m just not feeling it.
So your job is to destabilise the government of south Asian country Panau. Armed with your grappling hook and parachute, you can go almost anywhere, carry out missions for various factions and cause chaos (i.e. blowing shit up). So the shooting is a bit simplistic and the blowing shit up and using the grappling hook is fun. What’s not is constantly running out of ammo, being shunted back literally miles when you die far away from a checkpoint and the generally long travel times, possibly even more monotonous than those in RDR.
After finally adding a wired 360 controller to the mix (a Play and Charge kit doesn’t turn a 360 into a wired controller, merely a wireless controller powered by a wire), things improved. But not enough. It’s just not that compelling experience. And at the time of writing, I haven’t touched the Crackdown 2 demo. Speaking of which, let’s wrap this up so I can go and give that a try.
LATER THAT NIGHT….
So Crackdown 2. Hmmm So I love the gameplay. It’s seems so much more immediate (probably due to the fact the gameplay arena is so much smaller). Agility orbs are back and there’s Crackdown Dude’s voice. It’s like sipping on a comfy pair of slippers. The game doesn’t look that pretty though. It looks rather ugly in fact, but it runs smoothly and that’s more important when you’re pumping as many characters on screen at one time as they are doing here. It’s hard to know what exactly is going on with these infected guys so hopefully that will be made more clear in the full game. Not long to go now…
If you see this article twice, it may be due to some wordpress upgrade shenanigans. Or not.
Alan Wake, five years in the making and slowly turning into a joke the same way Too Human, Daikatana and GT5 are, is finally out. Remedy’s first game since Max Payne 2 shows these guys have still got it. While most people would have been happy with a clone of Max Payne, the funny Fins have instead given us with their take on Stephen King.
Mixing shooting with burning things with light, as you do, Alan Wake shows Xbox gamers something they rarely see these days- a slow paced game that’s as exciting as the more action oriented titles on the console. It’s central mechanic takes some time to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a pretty addictive game. If you enjoyed Resident Evil 4, you should have some fun here, but the game is its own beast.
I don’t know why I like, I just know I’m enjoying this game much more that I expected to. It’s deliberate pace is probably soothing after all of the faster-paced games I usually play, not boring in the way the travel in RDR turned me off.
It’s a pretty game and sounds fantastic. Voice acting is either ordinary or genius, possibly due to the writing and whether you think Stephen King is a great writer or not. I have met in real life the guy they based Rusty, which is kind of neat, so that’s nice in a personal way.
What’s not the greatest? Lip Sync in cutscenes is atrocious and while the part of the story unfolds in the form of manuscript pages you collect (similar to the logs in Doom 3, Bioshock, et al), you have to go to a menu to play them, rather than just press a button to read them while you keep playing. One thing about working on a game for so long is sometimes developments pass you by.
Thankfully I have a long weekend coming up that will be used to savour this game. Like a fine wine.
Also released at the bargain price of a buck or two is XBLA title, Poker Smash for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. It’s great, providing you have an iDevice made in the last year or so. I managed to compare the performance of this on my 3G iPhone with Cameron’s newer and not quite superceded 3GS and the 3GS flies while the 3G is a little sluggish. Only one music track is included but then, you have a frickin iPod!
Get it! Stat!
Next up is Just Cause 2 (PC) and SMG2 (Wii)
It’s fair to say that GTA has become a little stale of late. And since the engine developed for RDR was later used in GTA IV, you can see how the improvements to the open world genre suggested by games such as Red Faction: Guerrilla have bypassed Rock Star. But it has at least learned some of GTA IV’s lessons in not forcing man-dates on you.
So after about 6 hours, I’m not quite ready to render a verdict, nor am I ready to hang up my spurs. But after going to a mission start only to find it is literally a cowboy misson, the influence of Nico and Roman can be felt everytime you realise you’ve been gazumped into a side mission that involces no mayhem of any description. Side missions in this game include races (grrr), herding cattle, breaking horses, following a dog around, hunting animals, skinning animals, looking for herbs and bounties. The missions themselves features large periods of riding to a location, often having to have a conversation with someone along the way.
Thankfully, fast travel turns up later and makes a big difference. Of course, being Rockstar, you can’t just select fast-travel from a menu, you have to wait for some nice motion capture work to play out. It’s atmospheric to be sure, but the point of fast travel is I’M IMPATIENT!
Shooting controls, important in a western are mostly well done, even if the auto targeting makes it a mite easy (at least in the first third or so of the game). You have your dead eye mode (bullet time) which makes this game automatically better than the just plain broken duels which totally ruined Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
It’s an attractive game with great presentation. I’ve also decided the story is unimportant so I’ve taken to skipping most cutscenes. I don’t know why because Rockstar usually does these well. But they just seem to drag out to the point that skip button looks so attractive. So very, very attractive.
RDR doesn’t regain Rock Star’s crown for the best open world games. The world has moved on from San Andreas, even if Rock Star sometimes forget the fun bits. If you’re an OCD type, then you have many collectibles and challenges to keep you entertained.
This week, I have played a little bit of the multiplayer beta for Bungie’s Halo Reach.
It’s Halo 3 with some enhancements. Apart from one small thing, for the life of me, I can’t really tell what they are yet.
Reach is a prequel to the Halo games starring MasterChief and as many know, it’s Bungie’s last game for MS and the last time they visit the world they unleashed on gamers nearly a decade ago. Halo redefined console multiplayer for many, made console FPS acceptable to all but a few cranky people with superiority/impotence issues and despite several iterations, hasn’t changed all that much. You still have a red team and a green team, with some customisations of armour available. You can change your armor’s color yet you always end up as red or blue in a team game but there’s not a huge visual difference in classes, which is a bit of a shame these days.
But here’s what’s new, armour abilities. You pick one of five nearly identical loadouts but you can access camo- which sends you semi-invisible in the same way as the camo powerup from the earlier games; a powerful ground attack which locks you do the group while you let off a powerful shockwave attack; a super sprint move; and jet pack. Jet pack is the most fun, and the one open to the most early abuse so be prepared for lots of shouting. Unless you’re like me and mute everything.
I find Halo a relaxing game to play since I never have been great at it. Since I never expect to do well, I enjoy it more. No headset means I don’t listen to all the whining brats and hence the game is fun. If I stick at it, I will generally do better but I expect final Halo Reach will be something I play online for a month or so until Medal of Honor comes out a month later.
I’m also playing Splinter Cell Conviction with its annoyingly vocal guards. They’re even tweeting GuardFromSCC
The game is brief. ODST brief. I’ve barely touched it and seem to be close to the end. It’s also very good. Since the end is near and the review won’t be far off, I’ll leave it at that.
Medal of Honor’s trailer, showing an emotionally mature storyline seems to have confused many weaned on Infinity Ward’s teen-baiting shenanigans of late, but MoH was always po-faced and reverential of soldiers when you consider it came out of Steven Spielberg’s continuing fascination with World War II even after making Saving Private Ryan. CoD 7 looks to be more of the same- no bad thing for fans, but the law of diminishing returns will hit Activision’s franchise the saw as it did for EA years ago.
Also, we’ve got a Podcats coming tomorrow. Don’t clap just yet…
So a few choice bits from some recent gaming.
A few weeks back, Mrs Controller1 wanted to play Flower so we bought it off PSN and 2 hours later we played it. I don’t have the remotest idea what it is you do with this six-axis controlled relax-o-tron. You wave the controller around in the same way people move controllers in TV advertisements and things light up. It’s a game in a way that games normally aren’t. My wife, who never plays games, played this for three hours straight. Three hours.
Perfect Dark, back in the last days of the N64 as a viable system was a great game hamstrung by ambition on a system that couldn’t handle Rare’s last great game. 10 years later, it’s been ported to the 360 and the results are positive. It’s a relic of a bygone age but still fun to play despite the advances of the intervening years.
Boom Blox Bash Party is the sequel to a game no one played which was a pity since BB was quite a fun diversion. BBBP builds on the original and I, with two friends, spent a good few hours playing this recently. Alls I can say is, the puck levels suck, but the rest was a great way to pass time and grief people at the same time. You can smack talk in any game these days. I remember played Tetris once and getting called a n00b for using the long block. Tetraminos, bitch!
Of course, I am looooving Bad Company 2 despite it’s server issues. DICE have a game that offers the intensity of old Battlefield games, and trumps Call of Duty and is a hell of a lot of fun to boot. You can play as an infantryman and not have your game ruined by guys camping for choppers and tanks. Snipers are the bane at the moment. In a game where objectives are the order of the day, having snipers just sit back and pick off the enemy doesn’t mean victory. for the sniper’s team. EA have been slowly patching the game to improve it but by slowly, I mean 1000 times faster than Infinity Ward and Activision. There’s a single player mode in there at some point but, pffft.
I picked up some cheap games on Steam and Just Cause (the original was one of them). The sequel’s been getting some good pre-release buzz so I though the price was right. I guess my original dismissal of the 360 demo a few years back was correct. It is shash. Best avoided like a DoA Cosplay event at a Weight Watchers event.
Batman: Arkham Asylum was also purchased and installed and apart form the cool intro, I haven’t played it much. It looks so cool but I am seriously regretting not getting a console version. It’s just not the sort of game I like playing on a PC. This is one seriously well put together game. I just need to get around to playing it.
Next up; Bioshock 2 and maybe, just maybe, God of War III.
Currently, I’m playing BBC2 on PC (well, a Mac running Win 7 in its spare time) and despite the typical “EA can’t get their server shit together at launch” deal, it’s quite a blast.
I did play the original Bad Company online quite a bit back in 2008 (on PSN/PS3) and has a great time. I actually am a bit dirty having bought the PC version since I was aiming for a console version this time but several of my now former CoD4 colleagues were preordering with the intention of playing the PC versions on our machines at work during our lunch hour. Away I go to pre-order, ignoring the beta, but these two PC diehards hated the beta so much they went to the trouble of getting a refund from Steam.
So I’m playing the PC version, and it’s a great game. It runs well on my machine but I can’t help thinking some of the issues I’ve had with MW2 are just as prevalent here. We have dedicated servers again, something that MW2 proves is a must for PC games (Hell, they really make online console games light up). But the server browser is a tad ungainly with pings not currently showing up (for me at least) nor is there any way to filter by geographic location (if say, you were sick of being stuck with a US host on MW2, you could stick to servers in or near your country). So in the end I use the quick match option and see where I land. It’s literally Russian roulette since the lat few games were on servers in Europe and one was in Montreal. It was hard to tell because the people who did type messages, typed them in perfect English. No writing as if a text message, 1337speak or barely comprehensible babble. It was a bit hit or miss as far as lag goes (the game seems to cover it up quite well most of the time). You can either hit people or you can’t.
The game offers a very intense dynamic but there are a few balance issues (as there is any game of this sort) as is typical with Battlefield games, some people lead charmed lives. Snipers are the bane of the game right now though this is from DICE, who thought Battlefield Vietnam would benefit from a kit that combined a super accurate M60 heavy machine gun with a grenade launcher.
I’ve not had a chance to play much of the single player, but boy does it feel like a slightly above average Medal of Honor game (oe a slightly below average Call of Duty game). Let’s say it’s a dead heat with World at War and be done with it.
If you’re sick of Modern Warfare 2′s quirks but want something similar, I’d recommend this.
For someone who’s not been much of a PC gamer at home, I’m finding the uber cheap (and ultimately devaluing) Steam sales to be a great way to A) Try out games I wouldn’t have taken a punt on and B) giving me something to do at lunch at work. Far Cry 2 a few weeks ago might have been a waste of $10 but undeterred, I picked up Batman Arkham Asylum and Just Cause today. I’ve been seeing a lot about JC2 that makes me curious so I figure the price is right. Batman AA is recognized as one of the last year’s best games so it can’t hurt if I give it a spin. Even if neither game doesn’t gel with me I can’t complain too much.
So Sony and Microsoft. This is directed to you. You both have the infrastructure on your respective online marketplace mechanisms to offer download versions of your games. Sony’s gone quiet here but MS’s Games on Demand is crying out for two things. Sanity in pricing- especially outside of the US, and sales. I’d buy Saint’s Row 2 as a 360 download in a heartbeat if it wasn’t double the price of the disc version. Both the games I just got on Steam would have been a no-brainer to buy on either HD console if the option had been there.
Back to some more BBC2 and hoping Bioshock 2 turns up soon.
It could be worse- it could be Morbidly-Obese Inclement Weather.
So, Heavy Rain, the PS3′s first big hitter of the year has the makings of a huge hit, particularly amongst non-gamers easily impressed by pores. Despite losing a day of “gameplay” due to the apocalyPS3 this week, I’ve put in a few hours into the game (stopping when it hard locked my PS3 last night) and have gotten a feel for what it’s about. But nearly three hours in- I have picked a fight with some random guy and that was the only action I’ve seen so far.
This means that so far, I’m not particularly impressed by Heavy Rain. The story, the defining element of this game, may not have spun into top gear for me yet- but if it hasn’t, why hasn’t it? And if it has- God help us all.
So far I like and not like bits of this “game.”
Liked:
- Graphics. Even though nothing is happening, what little that does happen is pretty and fluid. Of course, it comes across as one of the high end graphics demos you used to see running instores selling PC’s.
- Trying to do something new with quicktime events.
-sound is well done. Great musical score, even if it borders on the melodramatic. Melodramatic game sounds melodramatic.
Disliked:
story, gameplay, characters, voice acting, hype.
I believe the game will appeal to non-gamers in a way that the Wii does and that’s a good thing if gets people using PS3′s for things other than Blu Ray movies. In time they might move onto actual games like Uncharted 2. But to me, it’s one enormous cutscene that I CAN’T SKIP. Metal Gear games are often derided by people who don’t play them because of the ridiculous story portrayed in the codec screens and cutscenes, but you could always skip these if you just wanted to get to the action. Because HR is a game of cutscenes, that would defeat the purpose of the enterprise.
HR brings back mandatory six-axis motions to effect on screen actions. I won’t use the word control because that would be too generous. To say you control this game the way is offensive to my DS3′s left analog stick. Let’s just say you influence your character the same way the actions in Star Wars influence C3PO- ie reluctantly and like a gay golden droid. The first three hours ofter some mundane home life tasks, an optional fistfight and some SCIENCE FICTION detective stuff. Note to developers: Don’t talk about reality when you offer up The Matrix in Ray-Ban form.
Some the blur is from the game, some is from my camera
“How far would you go?” n my case it’s about 2 Kilometres to the nearest EB games. Trade it in before everyone else does by the end of the first month and clogs up EB/Gamestop’s trade-in exclusions list.
If you are a fan of French cinema or thrillers aimed at the over 40 crowd starring Jodie Foster or Sandra Bullock, you might think the story is riveting. In which case, you could rent a movie with them and use your Six axis as a remote for your PS3. It might be more fun. Maybe the thing that bugs me most is this a story in a genre I often avoid. Maybe I’m not ready for David Cage and company’s bold dream. Maybe it’s a shit game. Who knows?
