Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category
Sunday, March 30th, 2008 |
If the original Rainbow Six Vegas felt like the first night of a trip to Sin City, its recently released sequel feels like the second; a little worn, but still a lot of fun. There’s still a casino’s worth of content and the best gameplay this side of Caesar’s Palace. Plus, the introduction of a sprint button not only increases your speed, but also quickens the pace of the entire game. On the other hand, the cooperative play has been pared down a little and the expanded experience gains are about as glamorous as pillow mints–even if you are grateful for them. A third night of this might be too much to handle, but if you like to place bets with bullets at all, you’ll definitely want to put some money down on Rainbow Six Vegas 2.
Despite the name Tom Clancy in the title, the Rainbow Six games are hardly known for their ace storytelling skills. Having said that, the way the original Vegas ended on such a terrible cliffhanger ending, when all it really had to do was give you a reason to kick some terrorist butt, was especially disappointing. Fortunately, the campaign in Vegas 2 makes no such errors. You no longer play as Logan Keller. Instead, you hunt terror and save hostages as a custom character referred to as Bishop in the campaign. Although the specifics of the overarching story are pretty easy to lose track of, one thing is clear: There are terrorists and you have to get them before they get Vegas. However, there are a couple of great scenes in the campaign. For example, there is one where you’re supposed to meet up with a guy to find chemical weapons, only the terrorists meet up with him first. Because he’s wearing a communication device, you can hear the proceedings as you make your way through the level. First, the terrorist in charge rails angrily, then the guy pleads with him, then the terrorist rails some more, and then the guy starts screaming “NO, NO, not THAT!” Then there are no more words, just animal noises of pain, fear, and more than a little loathing. Other moments don’t seem quite as authentic, especially those that involve civilians. While it’s nice that they’re in the game, you’ll occasionally lose if you fail to prevent the terrorists from executing one of them. That’s just plain silly because it’s unlikely that a group of commandos would leave a bunch of terrorists and weapons behind because Hank the Hostage bit the dust. Also, it’s so easy to die in Vegas 2 that you really don’t need the extra “game over” screens.
Just like in the previous game, you play through each stage with your two not-so-trusty sidekicks. They’re like roulette wheels in the way they oscillate between deadly efficacy and utter helplessness, though the odds are actually stacked in favor of them doing the right thing. Their normally smart, super-effective behavior actually makes it even more striking when they get stuck behind the occasional box. The campaign isn’t very long, but it has its share of awesome firefights and is a good way to warm up for the online play.
Although many of the locales aren’t the first ones that would come to mind if someone asked you to imagine a shootout in Vegas, they are inventive, nonetheless. There are a few nondescript warehouses, generic loading docks, and lame industrial areas that could just as easily be in Rainbow Six Fresno. But, then, there’s also the theater level. This is a full-on replica of a decadent theater complete with stage, backstage, seats, and a balcony. The tricky thing about it is that one team has easy access to the balconies, while the other is pinned by the somewhat open stage. If a player from the latter group can make it across and exit stage left, hopefully with a close-range weapon like a shotgun, he can get all No Country for Old Men on the snipers watching the action below. How quickly the hunters become the hunted.
The best way to cross any open space in Vegas 2 is to sprint, and that can now be accomplished with the push of a button, which is similar to what you’ve done in nearly every shooter that’s come out since Gears of War. But unlike the reckless and half-blind dash in that game, Vegas 2’s version is easier to control. It’s also more versatile because you can sprint sideways, as well as forward. However, when you see a grenade rattle on the ground in front of you, you’ll wish you could also sprint backward (you can’t); realism be damned. Sprinting is a small, minor addition to a great big game like this, but it has a major impact on Vegas 2’s pace and gameplay. It’s obviously a good thing to be able to run a little faster when you’re trying to close in on a flash-blind enemy, and it goes with the shotgun like peanut butter goes with jelly. Sprinting around a corner while pulling the trigger on a shotgun blast before the gun is even half on the screen and catching your enemy with a mouthful of buckshot is one of the sweetest kills the series has seen. Less obvious and less gory is the overall effect on the pace of the play. Sprinting provides a welcome shot of adrenaline, especially online.
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Sunday, March 30th, 2008 |
We thought Wipeout Pulse was great, but a quick glance at the UK charts makes it look as if we might have been the only ones. When it came out in mid-December 2007 on the PlayStation Portable, the game limped into the UK PSP chart at number 20, and it’s managed to climb only to number 15 since then. And when it comes to the all-formats chart, it never even entered the top 40. These are worrying signs for Sony, especially considering that the franchise helped launch both the PlayStation and the PlayStation Portable in the West. Thankfully for us, this poor performance hasn’t put Sony off the series just yet, and it’s readying a PlayStation 3 update for a PlayStation Network version of the series. Wipeout HD, as it’s called, will contain tracks, ships, and music from previous games in the series and will polish it off with shiny new 1080p graphics.
Wipeout HD contains eight tracks in all, six from Wipeout Pure and two from Wipeout Pulse. Although their layouts remain the same, the extra power of the PlayStation 3 allows for plenty of visual enhancements to these familiar courses. Another reason to play the PS3 version is the new motion-sensitive control. Long-term Wipeout fans may remember that the series is no stranger to alternative control systems, given that it was compatible with Namco’s neGcon controller back in the day. You might think that the floating ships of Wipeout would be a perfect fit for Sixaxis control, but it currently feels loose and unresponsive compared to the standard controls. That said, it has been implemented fairly well, and you can choose to apply motion control to just the pitch of your ship, or to both the pitch and the steering. Sixaxis motion control is set to off by default, but Wipeout fans may get a kick out of trying the control system.
Running in 60 frames per second up to 1080p resolution, the game is smooth and detailed, and both factors contribute greatly to the atmosphere of the game. Adverts for racing teams and futuristic products are now much more visible on the track, and background details such as cameras and buildings are much easier to pick out. There are some really nice incidental details too, with the vehicles having a grimier look than we’ve seen before. We particularly like the ghosts that appear once you set a lap record; they appear on the track thanks to small, floating projection units.
Wipeout HD’s visual design is just as sharp as you’d expect from the series. The menu system has a beautiful balance of white space and clean lines, and the race information is presented in an accessible and informative manner. As with Wipeout Pulse, the campaign structure is split into lots of small events, with race types such as Single Race, Speed Lap, Time Trial, and Zone within each category. Single Race pits you against seven other ships, with weapons on the track to pick up and destroy the competition. All the weapons from Wipeout Pulse have been brought over and given a visual makeover, so a hit from a rocket now produces a beautifully honeycombed explosion. The Speed Lap requires you to beat a record time over the course of seven laps, whereas the Time Trial asks you to beat the course under a specific time. The Zone mode isn’t new, but it looks better than ever on the PlayStation 3. As you guide a reinforced craft through zones at ever-increasing speeds, the track changes colour while billboards display visualisations for whatever music track you’re hearing.
The campaign structure is well set out, and you don’t have to place first in every single race to progress; you can even choose to skip some completely if you prefer. There are also other unlockables for completing races, such as new tracks to play in the single-event mode, whereas staying loyal to the same team will unlock new skins for that craft. However, we were unable to see an option to either create or download custom skins from the Wipeout HD Web site at this point.
If you did play Wipeout Pulse, then all of this should sound like familiar territory. In fact, the games even have the same soundtrack, with standout tracks being Mason’s “Exceeder,” Booka Shade’s “Steady Rush,” and Kraftwerk’s “Aerodynamik.” Thankfully, you can also use custom soundtracks in the game by importing tracks into a soundtrack on the PS3’s dashboard and creating a playlist. From there, you can choose to listen to your playlist in the order that you created it or randomized.
The photo mode also makes a return, allowing you to pause the action during any race or replay to take a picture. Although the photography options aren’t as plentiful as they are in Project Gotham Racing 4, you can add speed blur to your photos, zoom in and out, or opt to show the heads-up display. Once perfected and taken, images are saved onto the PlayStation 3 hard drive as JPEGs that you can edit and export later.
Like Wipeout Pulse, HD is a difficult game, with clever enemy opponents that use shortcuts, and some harsh times to beat in the other modes. In another similarity to Pulse, HD’s campaign is huge, with eight events consisting of about 6-10 races each. Though we’ve seen all of the eight tracks and teams in the previous PSP release, downloadable content has been promised. There’s no word from Sony yet about whether the new content will cost money, but given that Wipeout Pulse has followed the premium-content route, we’d guess it’s inevitable. We can only hope that Sony will do something along the lines of the free sponsored content that they created for Wipeout Pure.
Unfortunately, our preview build of the game didn’t feature online play. We understand from Sony that the game will support eight-player online races in the final product, along with leaderboards that show the best lap times and race records. We have no reason to doubt any of those claims, given that Wipeout Pulse on the PSP also has all of those features. Wipeout HD will have a one-up on its handheld brother, though, because the PlayStation 3 supports voice chat online.
Our build of Wipeout HD was clearly approaching a finished state, and there were relatively few bugs to be seen. The only problems that we encountered were the occasional bits of slowdown when a lot of ships were onscreen, and one funny bug on the Chenghou Project track that let us crash into a magical billboard to complete a lap. There’s still plenty of time for Sony to fix all of this before the game is released on the PlayStation Network sometime in the next three months.
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Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 |
Is there any developer buzz term more meaningless these days than “open-world gameplay”? Let’s face it, it’s kind of been done to death at this point, so you have to look on with a bit of skepticism when a developer touts the concept as the next big thing for its franchise. It’s understandable, then, if Burnout Paradise’s concept freaks you out a little bit. Burnout has, by tradition, been a fairly structured arcade racing game up to this point, and one would have to wonder exactly how well an open environment would serve the series’ crash-happy gameplay methodology. Evidently, the answer is quite well. Developer Criterion has invented a world wonderfully suited to Burnout’s nature, a city built exclusively to cater to your destructive whims. And while a few design hitches here and there get in the way now and again, by and large Burnout Paradise delivers an experience that is both true to the Burnout name and wonderfully fresh-feeling all at once.
The star of the show is Paradise City itself. Coming complete with the titular Guns ‘N Roses song (because Burnout: Night Train or Burnout: Mr. Brownstone probably wouldn’t have been as catchy), Paradise City is, at first blush, a pretty standard racing game city, complete with all the usual landmark locations and boring background traffic. But it quickly becomes evident that Paradise City is meant for a greater purpose than just being a simple city to race around in. In effect, the city is a blank slate, a pristine canvas on which to paint your own obliterative masterpiece. The simple act of driving aimlessly around the city constantly presents new roads, shortcuts, and destructible objects for you to experience and, often, destroy. Nearly every intersection of road hosts a new event of some kind, and even after you’ve worked your way through the game’s progression of driver’s licenses (the only specifically linear portion of the game design), you’ll still be finding new things you didn’t even know were there.
That might sound a little overwhelming, especially if you’ve grown accustomed to the rather specific brand of racing that Burnout has always subscribed to. And at first, it most definitely is. Though the in-game tutorials do a decent job of explaining the event types and basic mechanics, you’re initially left to your own devices and only have the small minimap to guide you through the many twists and turns of the city as you race–unless of course you want to hit the pause button regularly and use the larger map, which is a bit annoying to do. Those well accustomed to Burnout’s previously track-based racing model might find having to explore to find the best route to the finish a bit frightening, but the good news is that it doesn’t take a great deal of time to get a feel for the city’s various ins and outs.
Until that time, you will experience some trial and error (with a heavier focus on the error), but the funny thing about that is that while you may initially find yourself failing races, it’s not often you have to just go back and keep doing that same race again and again. The focus of Burnout Paradise isn’t on doing specific events so much as it is about doing whatever you feel like. If you fail a race, odds are that there are roughly a dozen starting points for other races near the finish line of that previous race, and unless you’ve done them all, you can just hit up any one of them to get another notch on your license. Toward the very end of the game, when you’ve bested the bulk of the game’s events, you may find yourself lamenting the lack of a quick return feature to get back to a race’s starting point. But for the majority of the game, it’s not really an issue.
It’s a strange design to get used to initially, but once you do, it becomes incredibly rewarding. You can spend hours at a time just dawdling around the city and still make forward progress within the game. Don’t feel like racing? Just go break through shortcut gates or bust up billboards, which are tallied up as you break each one. Or, track down one of the cars you unlocked on the road and take it down to add it to your collection. Or, you can opt to pick a road and attempt to “own” it. There are two types of events associated with each of the major roads in the game. Time trials are as you’d expect–you simply start at one end of the road and start driving down it, attempting to get the fastest time you can. Secondly, there are showtime events, which are the game’s effective replacement for the crash mode found in previous installments of the series. Whereas crash mode was sort of like a puzzle mode in the way it made you create elaborate car crashes out of painstakingly built traffic designs, showtime is the polar opposite. These are elaborate car crashes born from little more than a bunch of nearby cars and your ability to control what is, in essence, a sentient car wreck.
In a word, showtime mode is absurd. The goal is similar to crash mode in that you’re aiming to create as much damage as humanly possible, with various types of cars offering up different cash bonuses that feed into your final score. All the while, you can move your busted husk of a car around by pressing the boost button, which causes you to bounce around like a rubber ball. Again, totally absurd, but also totally awesome. It might lack the puzzling nature of the crash mode, but for pure visceral thrill and laughs-a-minute wrecking, showtime mode delivers in spades. It would have been nice if Criterion had found a way to have both the crash mode and showtime mode coexisting, as neither would make a particularly good replacement for the other; but on its own, showtime is a great deal of fun.
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Friday, January 25th, 2008 |
The FCC just approved the 40GB Ceramic White PS3 for US consumption. It’s apparently the same model announced for Japan back in October. Perfect for the living room laboratory if ever released this side of the Pacific.
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Friday, January 25th, 2008 |
Director Uwe Boll was more than a little unkind to the Alone in the Dark franchise with his 2005 Christian Slater-powered cinematic schlockfest, but Atari is looking to restore this seminal survival horror series’ good name in May with a new release, simply titled Alone in the Dark. The game will bring longtime hero Edward Carnby forcibly into the present day. In previous installments, Carnby was kicking it in the roaring 1920s, but now he’ll find himself alive in modern New York City, clothed in contemporary garb and fully aware of his past life eight decades earlier. Naturally, one of your goals will be to figure out just how in the heck all this came about.
On your way to discovering the truth about Carnby’s predicament, you’ll slog through a number of unpleasant and creepy scenarios, fight off various unsightly denizens of the night, and solve a number of environmental puzzles–at least, if our recent demo of the game was any indication. The first leg of the demo began in a level set inside one of New York’s sewers, which Carnby had to navigate from one end to the other. You’ll be able to play Alone in the Dark from either the first- or third-person perspective for most of the game, though we were only able to see from the third-person perspective in our demo–the presentation of which reminded us a lot of such games as Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War.
The sewer level showed off some ghastly enemies and shooting action, like you’d expect to see in a survival horror game, but we were more interested in some of the unique mechanics at work in Alone in the Dark. For one, the game simulates fire more realistically than any game we can remember. Flammable materials, such as wood, can catch fire and burn realistically, with other materials also catching fire due to its proximity. Once an object, such as a chair, is alight, the fire will slowly climb up to consume it, first charring it then reducing it to burning embers and ash after a few moments. We only saw a brief demonstration of this system, but we’re guessing it will figure into a number of puzzles in the final game.
The game also uses analog control more extensively than most action adventure games of this type. You’ll actually have direct one-to-one control of many of the objects that Carnby can pick up. For instance, we saw an example where the player grabbed a board and was able to move it around in very small, precise increments with the analog stick. The player was then able to pick up the end of an electrified cable and pull it out of a pool of water naturally with the board. Again, though we didn’t see a lot of examples of this kind of control, its puzzle-solving applications are obvious.
You wouldn’t expect something as mundane as an inventory system to be noteworthy in a game like this, but Alone in the Dark’s interface is unique from what we’ve seen. Essentially, your inventory exists literally within the lining of Carnby’s jacket. When you want to access the stuff you’re holding, the game will go to a first-person perspective where you’ll look down at your torso and pull out the flaps of your coat to look at the items hanging on loops or in pouches within. This means you’ll have quite a limited inventory because you can only care as many items as you can fit in your jacket. Surprisingly, the game doesn’t pause the action while you’re rummaging around in there; events proceed in real time around you while you’re accessing your inventory. This means you’ll want to wait until things are calm before you take a break and try to reload or stock up.
You’ll also be able to combine some inventory objects to make more useful devices. The example we saw involved taking a roll of scotch tape and wrapping it around a can of toxic spray. This would essentially create a sticky bomb that you could then throw and stick against a wall. After throwing the bomb, you could take aim with your pistol to shoot the can, causing it to explode and release all its poisonous contents in a cloud to trap a pursuing or unsuspecting enemy. Makeshift items like this may come in handy when combating some of the game’s less orthodox enemies. In one sequence, some form of monstrous dark water started to fill a sewer corridor. The player then had to create and move light sources near this apparently sentient liquid to make it shrink back.
After the brief sewer demonstration was over, we saw a very short segment of a driving level from later in the game in which Carnby commandeered a taxi cab and barreled down 59th Street as something wreaks absolute havoc on New York. This chaos went way beyond a simple earthquake–massive chunks of the street were exploding upward, fissures were opening in the ground, and even the top halves of skyscrapers were crashing down to street level. Of course, your job here was to drive down the street as fast as possible to avoid the destruction and drive around any developing pitfalls or obstacles in your path. Atari reps at our demo wouldn’t comment on the nature or cause of this disaster, but it made for an impressive (if ostensibly highly scripted) action sequence.
Atari recently delayed Alone in the Dark’s release date to May of this year, which will hopefully give developer Eden Studios the time it needs to squash the handful of bugs that were evident during our demo. Stay tuned for impressions of a more complete build in the coming months.
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