If ever there was proof of a game not needing a story, then surely Crackdown is it.
There are a whole two elements to the story:
1- It's the future, there are gangs. They're not nice.
2- Someone's been playing with genetic engineering.
End of story.
Not a promising start to my current all time favourite game, I grant you, but it's the most fun I've ever had in a game. The only drawback I have about it is that it was the first Xbox 360 game I owned and it set the bar really damn high.
As an "Agent" of the, um, "Agency", you have lots of really cool superpowers - that need working on. And to show that you're a superhuman but not really that super yet, you start the game in what appears to be a set of pajamas and a really big pair military boots. Where would the fun be if you actually started a game with a set of cojones big enough to use as a spacehopper?
You're then set out into the big wide world of Pacific City with access to a handful of guns, a supercar, an SUV and of course a truck cab. Everyone knows how useful a truck cab is. The first thing you will probably notice, after you've caught at least one of every bullet using your torso (which will take no more than 30 seconds, thanks to the very nice gang members being heavily armed), is that you're able to jump really quite high. After you catch every kind of rocket in Pacific City (again, heavily armed gang members, who want to become your friend, probably about the hour mark), you'll notice you can jump stupid distances. Get used to it, it's great fun.
Basically, when you've finally got people to stop using rockets as suppositories on you, I guarantee you'll spend all your time jumping off the tops of buildings for no apparent reason. There's just something about that whole Matrix meets Robocop thing that will steal your life and your friends.
It's even better if you're an achievement whore, because even you will have fun! Yes! You who spends in excess of £40 a week in an attempt to add another 1000 points to your Gamerscore just to make up for the fact you have no friends! The achievements are actually fun to do, and some are pretty skillful - such as using a harpoon gun to nail 5 people to one car (after you download the Gettin' Busy pack). Others, not so fun, like hijacking 100 gang cars for a measly 10 points.
That blasted thing took me 3 days of solid carjacking to do get it, then when it came up to only 10 points, I got angry and threw a few gang cars at fellow agents. And civilians. Then I was asked to stop.
By now (surely), some of you will have criticised the graphics, mostly because you're probably not all that bright... or you bought a PS3. Which accounts to the same. If you want to say "oh no, the graphics look crap and cartoony, I'm never playing that", well, then good sir, I have this to say to you. If you want a game that reflects reality, why the hell are you playing a game where you play a superhero cop who can clear buildings with a single leap, hmm?
Exactly, it's a stylised game that's fun to play, and comics are probably the best way to reflect it. If you don't like Crackdown because the graphics are a little too cell shaded for you, then you're also the kind of person who complains about Star Wars having lightsabers that can cut through anything like butter. And thus, you have no soul. And you're really dull.
Now, prior to release, the hierarchy of the gangs was explained, stating that if you take down a gang's recruiting officer, their numbers will dwindle; if you take down their arms dealer, they'll be stuck with pea shooters etc etc. This sounded really cool and not really that hard to pull off. So why the hell doesn't it work? If it was true, then taking down a gang's arms dealer with a big, veiny penchant for explosives, and everyone and everything for half a mile around him would result in quite a blow to a gang's weapon distribution. It's clear we were lied to, because even after doing the aforementioned, I've still had to stop and pull Renault Clio-sized pieces of shrapnel out of my supercop arse.
Similarly, I've been swarmed after destroying every trace of "Evil Gang Job Centre Plus" man and then run over by a turbocharged pickup after dissecting the gang mechanic using half of Italy's stock of grenades. I understand marketing, I do! I spent the equivalent of 5 years studying the ins and outs of it for reasons I don't understand! But I don't understand why these damned developers keep feeding us such lies about their games.
Take Fable 1 for example, now, I liked it. A lot. But Peter Molyneux promised the world and was appropriately bitch-slapped by everyone else at Lionhead and forced to not talk about anything they haven't already got working in Fable 2. For a similar reason, I'm looking forward to Duke Nukem Forever, just to watch 3D Realms walk onto the stage at E3 some time in the future and admit they haven't actually known they were still a developer anymore, then show us an Xbox Live Arcade version of Duke Nukem 3D.
Speaking of which, I've also discovered something interesting on the answer to all of life's problems, Wikipedia.
"Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) is a first-person shooter video game being developed by 3D Realms"
As anyone who's ever played a racing game since Gran Tourismo 1, and crashed in one, will know, DNF generally stands for "Did Not Finish" ... interesting.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
Wednesday, 20 February 2008
Burnout Paradise
In preparation for another part of the assignment (uploading a video to Youtube), we've been asked to go out and acquire video footage for editing. I unwittingly blurted out "Superheroes" when asked to pick a topic - much to the delight of the rest of the class. I blame Facebook, because I was busy looking through my notifactions only to find about 6 from "My Heroes Ability", and that was the first word that came to my head. Seeing as how everyone had left the room really quickly, I was left working on my own, so I made a still-image montage using the PG Tips monkey and Mr Flibble. It does not look good.
In yet another attempt to "revolutionise" the racing genre in gaming, EA have presented the world with Burnout Paradise; where all the track racing has been replaced with one single city, the idea being you can drive and play around as and when you please.
Being allowed to play and drive as you is please, is as you obviously all know, a fantastic new feature which I personally welcome with open arms having spent the last decade or so being forced into playing racing games at damned inconvenient times against my will. Sarcasm aside, Burnout Paradise is in a nutshell a racing game with free roam. And big crashes.
I remember playing the first Burnout on the PS2 and found myself ooing and aahing at the, well, ability to crash into stuff. Lots of stuff. After failing to scrounge enough cash together to buy the game, I only briefly looked at a demo of Burnout 2... oohing and aahing quite a lot more. Again, no money. Then the third was released and made me cry. From past experience, I knew I'd never actually own it, but always want to. But no! I actually managed to buy my first Burnout game! And Takedown was by far the most insane take on racing I'd ever experienced - being encouraged to crash and do so spectacularly.
I somehow missed the launch of Revenge completely, so I was never actually too bothered about it. And that's that for a brief history lesson.
I think I should get it out of the way now, this is the first and (God willing) only time you'll catch me comparing the same game on the PS3 and 360 with any level of praise for Sony's blasted monolith.
Having managed to completely overlook Revenge, I wasn't psyched about Paradise at all, probably down to the fact that at this point I'd realised they'd given up with simple names like Burnout 4, 5 or 18 trillion and 3 point 2. Alright, not that simple, but God dammit, the weird new names just keep reminding me of the world's most irritating radio DJ. And I swear, Mr Automica, or whatever your real name is; if I ever see you walking down the street, I will bludgen you to death with a damp cricket bat.
Where was I? Ah yes, I wasn't psyched about Paradise, even after it was released, until I saw my flatmate playing it on his PS3 (forgive me while I go brush my teeth) and it looked amazing (and now I feel unclean). Now, let's put things into perspective here, while my flatmate has a pretty decent Samsung HDTV, my poor 360 is hooked up to my relatively measly 19in PC monitor. And I will admit, from memory, the P...S... I can't do it. From memory, the Monolith version did actually look marginally better, but I firmly grasp to the hope that it's down to the better TV... even if there appeared to be more debris.
That felt sick and wrong, and I will never do it again. Promise.
As anyone who has played the game (at all) will have noticed, while Paradise City is a very lovely and diverse place, with only an obscure desert of some description finishing the illusion of "micro world", it's not actually that big. And to silence your protests, here's some perspective. A "burning route" involves taking your car from one random corner of the map, to what usually works out as the opposite corner in a time limit... of about 1 min 30 secs. Yes yes yes, the cars are very fast, but that still means that when you think about it, the city is only about 3 by 2 miles. That's only 6 miles of city, before taking into account all the places you can't go (most places with grass, quite a lot of buildings...), and this is sold to you as "over 250 miles of open road".
Excuse me, 250 miles? If that's true, then about 200 of those miles are the bloody shortcuts littered across the city as if an executive's child was given string and a paper shredder to play with while he walked around a scale model of Paradise City. Then got bored and took a massive dump on the western side, leaving the finished game with about 4 roads in total on the entire western side of Paradise City.
But let me get back to that 3 by 2 miles lark. I specifically remember playing GTA San Andreas a couple of years back, and I had to get from somewhere in the middle of the map, to the south east. Even travelling by motorbike, as the crow flies, it still took me about 3 minutes. So EA, remember that next time you try using the words "massive" and "open".
I degress. Burnout Paradise is in fact a fantastic looking game, with crashes more eye popping than the 30 bloody second car chase in Casino Royale. The idea of having every even start from intersections not only gives the impression that the councillors for Paradise City hired an eight year old as their transport minister, presented him with a bag of cheap lollies and told him to come up with a traffic solution. I suspect that poor child is still bouncing around a room somewhere shouting out "TRAFFIC LIGHTS!" day and night. ...but this whole event fiasco also means you pick one route and go like stink, some back, go around the corner and do pretty much the exact same route again, only you inevitabley get cocky and are immediately punished by the game sending a rather large bus in your direction/face.
To sum up this game, all I can say is...
CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS CRASHY CRASH CRASH.
Enjoy.
In yet another attempt to "revolutionise" the racing genre in gaming, EA have presented the world with Burnout Paradise; where all the track racing has been replaced with one single city, the idea being you can drive and play around as and when you please.
Being allowed to play and drive as you is please, is as you obviously all know, a fantastic new feature which I personally welcome with open arms having spent the last decade or so being forced into playing racing games at damned inconvenient times against my will. Sarcasm aside, Burnout Paradise is in a nutshell a racing game with free roam. And big crashes.
I remember playing the first Burnout on the PS2 and found myself ooing and aahing at the, well, ability to crash into stuff. Lots of stuff. After failing to scrounge enough cash together to buy the game, I only briefly looked at a demo of Burnout 2... oohing and aahing quite a lot more. Again, no money. Then the third was released and made me cry. From past experience, I knew I'd never actually own it, but always want to. But no! I actually managed to buy my first Burnout game! And Takedown was by far the most insane take on racing I'd ever experienced - being encouraged to crash and do so spectacularly.
I somehow missed the launch of Revenge completely, so I was never actually too bothered about it. And that's that for a brief history lesson.
I think I should get it out of the way now, this is the first and (God willing) only time you'll catch me comparing the same game on the PS3 and 360 with any level of praise for Sony's blasted monolith.
Having managed to completely overlook Revenge, I wasn't psyched about Paradise at all, probably down to the fact that at this point I'd realised they'd given up with simple names like Burnout 4, 5 or 18 trillion and 3 point 2. Alright, not that simple, but God dammit, the weird new names just keep reminding me of the world's most irritating radio DJ. And I swear, Mr Automica, or whatever your real name is; if I ever see you walking down the street, I will bludgen you to death with a damp cricket bat.
Where was I? Ah yes, I wasn't psyched about Paradise, even after it was released, until I saw my flatmate playing it on his PS3 (forgive me while I go brush my teeth) and it looked amazing (and now I feel unclean). Now, let's put things into perspective here, while my flatmate has a pretty decent Samsung HDTV, my poor 360 is hooked up to my relatively measly 19in PC monitor. And I will admit, from memory, the P...S... I can't do it. From memory, the Monolith version did actually look marginally better, but I firmly grasp to the hope that it's down to the better TV... even if there appeared to be more debris.
That felt sick and wrong, and I will never do it again. Promise.
As anyone who has played the game (at all) will have noticed, while Paradise City is a very lovely and diverse place, with only an obscure desert of some description finishing the illusion of "micro world", it's not actually that big. And to silence your protests, here's some perspective. A "burning route" involves taking your car from one random corner of the map, to what usually works out as the opposite corner in a time limit... of about 1 min 30 secs. Yes yes yes, the cars are very fast, but that still means that when you think about it, the city is only about 3 by 2 miles. That's only 6 miles of city, before taking into account all the places you can't go (most places with grass, quite a lot of buildings...), and this is sold to you as "over 250 miles of open road".
Excuse me, 250 miles? If that's true, then about 200 of those miles are the bloody shortcuts littered across the city as if an executive's child was given string and a paper shredder to play with while he walked around a scale model of Paradise City. Then got bored and took a massive dump on the western side, leaving the finished game with about 4 roads in total on the entire western side of Paradise City.
But let me get back to that 3 by 2 miles lark. I specifically remember playing GTA San Andreas a couple of years back, and I had to get from somewhere in the middle of the map, to the south east. Even travelling by motorbike, as the crow flies, it still took me about 3 minutes. So EA, remember that next time you try using the words "massive" and "open".
I degress. Burnout Paradise is in fact a fantastic looking game, with crashes more eye popping than the 30 bloody second car chase in Casino Royale. The idea of having every even start from intersections not only gives the impression that the councillors for Paradise City hired an eight year old as their transport minister, presented him with a bag of cheap lollies and told him to come up with a traffic solution. I suspect that poor child is still bouncing around a room somewhere shouting out "TRAFFIC LIGHTS!" day and night. ...but this whole event fiasco also means you pick one route and go like stink, some back, go around the corner and do pretty much the exact same route again, only you inevitabley get cocky and are immediately punished by the game sending a rather large bus in your direction/face.
To sum up this game, all I can say is...
CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS CRASHY CRASH CRASH.
Enjoy.
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Fun with Photoshop
I was asked to get 2 pictures, play with them in Photoshop and explain my interpretation when I'm done. So here goes:
Image 1 (real)
Image 2 (also real)
The first image is a photo taken on a mobile phone during my second year of sixth form. Yes, it's a human pyramid. Why? We got bored and it was sunny. The second picutre is none other than Chuck Norris. By combining them, I have aimed to show that our inspiration for randomly making a human pyramid in our free time was the the philosphy, WWCND?
Image 3 (not so real)
I've been asked to talk about and justify my decisions regard my photoshopping of these photos. Well, the ethics behind it are that I'm not actually trying to fool anyone. Judging by the fact that Chuck Norris appears to be about 8ft tall by comparison in this picture, I think that should be obvious enough. The inspiration for manipulating the picture to include Chuck Norris comes from sites such as this. Those of you wondering which one I am, I'm the one second from the left (not including Chuck) looking at the floor. This is because of two reasons, first, I wasn't going to let my mate's rogue hand out of sight, and second, the weight of four people was being channelled through the elbow belonging to the guy on top of me. That elbow that's dead centre on my spine.
As such, our beloved pyramid collasped moments after the picture was taken, with me at the bottom.
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
The Simpsons
We have been asked to take some photos with the themes of "education", "computing" and "student life". To which I replied with the library, a local Gamestation and 25p. Job done.
It may have been released a good few months ago now, but if you've been paying attention, I'm not particularly concentrating on new releases. I have a good reason for this, not that I'm worried about being overshadowed by professional and more successful reviewers - if I was, I wouldn't have bothered in the first place. But no, my reason is quite simple. "Meh".
Anyway, The Simpsons Game initially struck fear into my very soul because of how badly I thought the Movie went, and the last half decent Simpsons game was Hit 'n' Run (or rather, Grand Theft Simpson), which was about as long as the average person takes to get annoyed at a bus stop in the rain. With someone using the loudspeaker on their mobile.
Although Hit 'n'... screw it, I refuse to use that abbreviation anymore. Although GTA Simpson was generally actually pretty fun to play, it was stupidly short, a little confusing and desperately trying to be a racing game in disguise. Not a decent racing game, but a budget bodge-job. Think Mario Kart, only without Mario or any weapons. Yeah, everyone knows how fun the time trial mode was.
After seeing a clip of the movie on a big TV in Selfridges, something possessed me to buy the DVD and somehow it was a lot better than I remembered, so I decided to give the game a chance. At this point you would assume the game would be a tie-in with the movie at some level, but no. It's basically an episode (albeit long episode) where the Simpsons world turns out to be a video game.
My first word of advice with this one is do not, under any circumstances, play the demo available on Xbox Live, or your inferior console's equivalent. All you'll do is waste time and get angry. For some reason, EA decided that the best level to demo was one more or less half way through the game. And it's easy enough, if you've had half a game of practice, not so much when you're dropped into a situation wherein Lard Lad is running around trying to kill you for no apparent reason.
The best way to describe the game itself is that it's like playing a cartoon, only entirely in co-op mode. Great if you have a friend (ok, I wont make that comment, too easy), but kind of annoying playing solo because there's no form of "sit" command, allowing the computer to occassionally guess where you want it to stay. And it's usually wrong. There are no stupid detailed textures that you wouldn't find on TV, the sky is bright and blue and the cutscenes are actual recreations of the TV animation. Nice. Another cool and quirky thing is that should you do embarass yourself by being a bit of a spanner, your teamate will probably laugh at you.
OK, so that doesn't sound very good, but I challenge you not to react when you, as Bart, miss a ledge by mere inches, sending you plumetting towards a spikey failure, and in the background you hear Homer giggling at you for being thick.
I guess the only bad things I can think of is that while the camera angle makes the best of the cell shaded graphics so that the characters actually look like the real deal, it is in fact allergic to walls. Your best bet is to avoid walls where possible and cry when you can't. Another let down is that some cutscenes use the game engine to save a bit of time - I guess - but realistically, the pay off isn't good enough to constitute highlighting blocky, rigid mockeries of characters.
It may have been released a good few months ago now, but if you've been paying attention, I'm not particularly concentrating on new releases. I have a good reason for this, not that I'm worried about being overshadowed by professional and more successful reviewers - if I was, I wouldn't have bothered in the first place. But no, my reason is quite simple. "Meh".
Anyway, The Simpsons Game initially struck fear into my very soul because of how badly I thought the Movie went, and the last half decent Simpsons game was Hit 'n' Run (or rather, Grand Theft Simpson), which was about as long as the average person takes to get annoyed at a bus stop in the rain. With someone using the loudspeaker on their mobile.
Although Hit 'n'... screw it, I refuse to use that abbreviation anymore. Although GTA Simpson was generally actually pretty fun to play, it was stupidly short, a little confusing and desperately trying to be a racing game in disguise. Not a decent racing game, but a budget bodge-job. Think Mario Kart, only without Mario or any weapons. Yeah, everyone knows how fun the time trial mode was.
After seeing a clip of the movie on a big TV in Selfridges, something possessed me to buy the DVD and somehow it was a lot better than I remembered, so I decided to give the game a chance. At this point you would assume the game would be a tie-in with the movie at some level, but no. It's basically an episode (albeit long episode) where the Simpsons world turns out to be a video game.
My first word of advice with this one is do not, under any circumstances, play the demo available on Xbox Live, or your inferior console's equivalent. All you'll do is waste time and get angry. For some reason, EA decided that the best level to demo was one more or less half way through the game. And it's easy enough, if you've had half a game of practice, not so much when you're dropped into a situation wherein Lard Lad is running around trying to kill you for no apparent reason.
The best way to describe the game itself is that it's like playing a cartoon, only entirely in co-op mode. Great if you have a friend (ok, I wont make that comment, too easy), but kind of annoying playing solo because there's no form of "sit" command, allowing the computer to occassionally guess where you want it to stay. And it's usually wrong. There are no stupid detailed textures that you wouldn't find on TV, the sky is bright and blue and the cutscenes are actual recreations of the TV animation. Nice. Another cool and quirky thing is that should you do embarass yourself by being a bit of a spanner, your teamate will probably laugh at you.
OK, so that doesn't sound very good, but I challenge you not to react when you, as Bart, miss a ledge by mere inches, sending you plumetting towards a spikey failure, and in the background you hear Homer giggling at you for being thick.
I guess the only bad things I can think of is that while the camera angle makes the best of the cell shaded graphics so that the characters actually look like the real deal, it is in fact allergic to walls. Your best bet is to avoid walls where possible and cry when you can't. Another let down is that some cutscenes use the game engine to save a bit of time - I guess - but realistically, the pay off isn't good enough to constitute highlighting blocky, rigid mockeries of characters.
Oh yeah, there's also the drawback of the price. It came out in about November and it's just been hovering around the preowned £30 mark. Pretty damn pricey when you consider that Halo 3 came out only a month of two earlier and it's about £10 cheaper.
And if for no other reason, try this game for the world's easiest achievement, even easier than on PGR3. Trust me, try it!
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