Tag Archive for ‘Xbox 360’

Tag Archive for 'Xbox 360'

‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ Game of the Year

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on December 22, 2008

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Grand Theft Auto IV nabbed the 2008 Game of the Year slot in Time magazine, the New York Times, the Spike TV Video Game Awards, and in other critical lists, and for good reason.

Rockstar’s newest crime simulator definitely attempted something different than its predecessors. It cast off the minigames and bicycles of San Andreas in favor of realism and immersion. Instead of playing off the strengths of the series, it tried something new and risky.

A lot of what Rockstar attempted with GTA IV failed — the relationship building aspect was distracting and the open world did not fit with the linear storytelling, to name the largest flaws — but it failed in a fantastic way.

Even though your interactions with the world are fairly straightforward, they involve and engross the player. Driving and shooting through the beautiful, vibrant, living playground of Liberty City feels fun and strangely realistic.

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‘Left 4 Dead’ and the Cinematic Tutorial

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on December 16, 2008

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Last month’s zombie apocalypse game Left 4 Dead offers one of the best co-op experiences of the year in one complete and functional package that the team at Valve has gained a reputation for.

Unlike most Valve games, however, this one includes a very cinematic cutscene at the beginning of the game. An article by John Brownlee on the Offworld gaming blog explains how this cinematic is actually a tutorial which combines storytelling with the utilitarian function.

Left 4 Dead’s opening cinematic is a shockingly complete primer to the rest of the game. With only a few exceptions, almost any player going into Left 4 Dead for the first time will know exactly how to play the game: they already know the gameplay, the weapons, the enemies, the win scenario and the strategies they need to get through the game alive… the only thing not covered in the opening movie is the specifics of the interface.

It is one of the most useful tutorials ever put together: both broad in scope and minute in detail, with no strategy or major gameplay element overlooked. And as much as I love Left 4 Dead, I think the opening movie is probably the most brilliant thing about the game. While other developers put together opening cinematics that ignore the elements of the gameplay to tell a story, Valve made theirs a tutorial… one so subliminal that almost no one realizes they’ve sat through one.

In the article, Brownlee says point-by-point how Valve demonstrates game mechanics — like special infected behaviors and the use of pipe bombs — unintrusively through the opening cinematic, and how gamers naturally understand all these mechanics when they start the game.

One thing I liked about the cinematic is that it leaves the four characters on top of the building where they start the “No Mercy” campaign. It has a context within the story of the game, establishes the characters, and shows how the gameplay works. This is how game stories should be told, and it’s not surprising that the move came from Valve.

‘Fallout 3′ Procures Mods and DLC

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on December 13, 2008

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Bethesda’s Fallout 3 mod creator, nicknamed the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, went online this week.

The new Web site has the mod tools available and a library of how-to articles. Fallout 3 Nexus is a good community source for new content.

Bethesda has a history of good mod support for Morrowind and Oblivion as well as downloadable content, and Fallout 3 is getting the same treatment.

Three downloadable packages have been announced — “Operation: Anchorage,” which simulates a battle between the US and China, will come out next month, followed by “The Pitt” and the new city of Pittsburgh in February and “Broken Steel,” a continuation of the main quest, in March.

IGN has an in-depth interview with Producer Jeff Gardiner about January’s “Operation: Anchorage.”

“The Chinese red army is everywhere, and the player will first have to secure the surrounding mountain side and then fight their way into the Chinese base,” summarized Gardiner.

“The player will have to use a lot of their standard combat skills, along with several new tools that will only be available in the downloadable content. These include interactive Strike Teams under the player’s command and unique armor, weapons, and other exotic gadgets.”

The packs are exclusive to the Xbox 360 and PC, and they will cost $10 a piece.

Despite the price tag, I think Bethesda’s new DLC is exactly what it should be: four to five hours of content that supplements the main quest and expands on the story and gameplay of the core game. They are substantial, experimental mini-expansions rather than superfluous aesthetics like Oblivion’s infamous horse armor.

As Gardiner said in the interview, “It’s important to our team to use DLC as a way for us to flex our creativity, to try new things and answer the ‘wouldn’t have been cool if we did this?’ question that always comes up towards a games completion — when it’s too late to try them!”

REVIEW: ‘Far Cry 2′ Falls in the Uncanny Valley

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on November 26, 2008

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Far Cry 2 features a number of inventions and improvements on first person shooters and attempts to bring more realism to the genre. By doing so, it slides down into the uncanny valley where any artificiality stands out as fantastic.

The game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, the same studio behind Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and Far Cry: Instincts, but shares nothing with its predecessors. No Jack Carver, mutagens or feral powers.

Gameplay in Far Cry 2 is more like Assassin’s Creed than anything. Chose from nine different mercenaries and make your way through an wide open African nation fired up in civil war, doing story missions for different factions or finding side quests and blood diamonds.

The world feels natural and realistic, especially from the player’s perspective. You never leave the first person view, even during cinematics or when driving a vehicle, and you always have a visual representations of your actions.

The mercenary’s hands pick up uncovered diamonds and knock on doors. Lose to much health and you have to pry bullets out of your leg or snap bones back into place. There’s no on-screen radar, just a map and GPS that function as part of the mercenary’s inventory.

This style of gameplay eschews a detailed HUD in favor of immersive elements. Its very detail oriented but it works and brings a high degree of realism to the African world of Far Cry 2.

But however realistic, Far Cry 2 is a flawed picture of reality and enters a sort of uncanny valley where every deviation from expected realism is a glaring error. When the normally inventive enemy AI stops and stands there looking dumb it breaks the illusion even more than in an average video game.

Even devices that make gameplay more convenient — like universal ammo for all assault rifles, fixing a shot up jeep with a few twists of a socket wrench, or the helpful moving icons on the your map — seem out of place.

The writing for Far Cry 2 isn’t bad, but the voice acting is horrible. Most characters sound like robots and their sentences are clipped together. It sounds unnatural and kills the otherwise realistic mood.

This expectation of perfect realism is a problem for games that strive for immersive verisimilitude, and something that future titles which attempt to put fit gameplay elements into the game world will have to overcome. Still Far Cry 2 is a big step in a good direction for FPS games and a worthwhile experience.

REVIEW: ‘Fable II’ Needs More Than A Hero’s Sandbox

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on November 14, 2008

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Michael the Farmer has a bag of gold for you. Do you a) slice him in half, b) shoot him in the groin, c) light him on fire, or d) fart and do hand puppets until he gives it to you.

Fable II is made up of choices like this, all of them part of a long process of defining your blank slate hero, and the game is a major improvement over Molyneux’s first fairy tale simulator.

Combat is fun and occasionally strategic, with combat, ranged, and magic attacks. Quests offer diverse, story-driven objectives, from “clear the mine” to “break the girl’s heart.” Minigames, town interactions, and a robust bartering and land-buying economy fill the gaps and make Fable II’s world of Albion feel complete and realistic.

This world is a sandbox for your hero, who starts out an orphan and is raised by gypsies. Through actions and behavior — what you eat, what you wear, how you deal with an angry ghost or a group of slavers — you define what that hero is like and how the world views him.

Your actions swing you between good and evil, pure and corrupt, with many possible variations, and your appearance changes along with it. You also become funny or frightening depending on how you deal with people, and attractive or ugly depending on your clothes, tattoos, scars, and purity.

It’s a complicated system, but so’s life. In the end you’re left with a character who feels entirely unique and who was slowly simmered over 20 hours of gameplay and choices rather than 10 minutes in the character generation microwave.

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Can the ‘Mirror’s Edge’ Experiment Go Mainstream?

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on November 8, 2008

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Mirror’s Edge is proof that publisher Electronic Arts can still innovate, but will the unique take on FPS gameplay pay off?

“Executing an unbroken flow from A to B is what Mirror’s Edge is all about,” says Edge Magazine in a staff preview of the new game. “Stringing together a few moves increases your speed, and there’s a purity and zing to bouncing between surfaces and popping over a low handrail in one smooth motion.”

The gameplay, especially the focus on weapon-less combat, that has drawn so much critical praise could turn away casual FPS gamers used to running and gunning tactics that won’t work in Mirror’s Edge. Instead the game asks players to sprint past enemies and over obstacles and to leap without looking.

This style immerses you in the world and the adrenaline-rush of its main character, but it runs contrary to a generation of FPS instinct. “Overcoming inclinations toward caution and inertia in first-person should perhaps have been one of the tutorial’s priorities,” the Edge article comments.

It’s a self-perpetuating cycle — gameplay conventions become instincts among gamers and hard to break. A steep learning curve accompanies any deviation from the old ways, and experimental games often seem unpolished by comparison to the tried-and-true.

This makes Mirror’s Edge confusing initially. “Your first steps are bewildering, but they soon become bewitching and even oddly familiar,” says the Edge preview. “It isn’t an FPS, not as we think of them. It’s a Full-on Platformer, Stupid.”

Mirror’s Edge comes out next Tuesday on Windows, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360.

Tales of Gaming Horror and Woe

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on October 31, 2008

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Few know the dark history of the gaming industry — linked to terrorism, cursing gamers with bad hardware and athletes with bad knees, only to be buried deep in the New Mexico desert. These are button-mashing tales to chill the HP in your veins. Happy Halloween!

Saddam Hussein’s PS2-powered missiles

The holiday season in 2000 brought severe shortages of newly released Playstation 2. Some would say criminally severe.

According to a World Net Daily story later picked up by IGN, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein purchased 4,000 PS2 consoles to use their powerful graphics processors to guide missiles. Hussein chose the console in order to get around UN sanctions prohibiting the sale of computers to Iraq.

‘Applications for this system are potentially frightening,’ said an intelligence source. ‘One expert I spoke with estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV — a pilotless aircraft.’

Fearful western critics were quick to decry this warning as false. PS2s cannot be linked and used together without very complex programming, and UK intelligence dismissed World Net Daily’s claims.

Still, one can’t help but wonder if there really are 4,000 Playstation 2s stockpiled in the Iraqi wastes alongside all those missing weapons of mass destruction. Slowly their hive consciousness gains self-awareness and waits for the cold day of robot judgment.

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Sleep With Everyone In Obsidian’s ‘Alpha Protocol’

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on July 29, 2008

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Obsidian Entertainment has always been in BioWare’s coattails. They followed BioWare releases with sequels for Knights of the Old Republic in 2004 and Neverwinter Nights in 2006.

Their upcoming action-based CIA yarn Alpha Protocol is the companies first new intellectual property, marking a break from BioWare and outdoing the RPG behemoth in an unusual respect: sex scenes.

Alpha Protocol promises explicit sexual relations with not just two, but all of the game’s female characters. MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John talked with Senior Producer Ryan Rucinski about Alpha Protocol’s explicit intimacy.

There are several factions in the game that you can ally with or fight against, so the women Thorton meets can become collaborators or enemies. As a government operative, the player can acquire missions and assistance from the ladies Thorton’s wooed. But piss them off — by dating other girls, for instance — and there’s hell to pay.

‘It all depends on how you treat them,’ Rucinski said. If you have a strong relationship with female characters, they may help with missions. However, he told me that some of them are ‘bats–t insane’ and can get you into trouble. ‘One may ask you to assassinate a high-level person,’ he added. ‘Maybe that’s not something you want to do, but she’s really hot. But there are obvious repercussions.’

[Thorton] can ‘get’ all of the game’s women if he wanted to. Rucinski told me it was possible to have sex with all the females, and that the sex scenes were similar to how Mass Effect treated its intimate moments. But he was quick to assure me that, ‘It’s a mature game, it’s not [adults only].’

Alpha Protocol, which comes out next February, has achievements for being a ladies man, and for avoiding relationships altogether.

Like a good Hollywood flick, relationships in Mass Effect were well told and treated respectfully before things got dirty. Alpha Effect has a lot to live up to if it wants to avoid being written off as unnecessary smut as BioWare’s space opera almost was.

‘Fallout 3′ A Modern Flavor For the Cult Classic

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on July 27, 2008

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The upcoming Fallout 3 can’t be just like the decade old originals, so get over it. But Bethesda, who got rights to the game from worn-down original studio Interplay, looks like they’re doing a good job of adopting everything that made the originals so unforgettable and putting it in a next-generation title.

Some have made a rabble-rousing hubbub over changes to the design. A shift in perspective from isometric to first person or behind the head, unkillable children, and a reduction in party size from four to two have all drawn venomous ire from the franchise’s cult followers.

Fallout 3 definitely looks different than its predecessors, which were rendered in 2D sprites and came out about a decade ago. Even as a big fan of Fallout, I don’t mind the changes and am happy with the new game’s presentation so far.

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‘Chrono Trigger,’ ‘Final Fantasy,’ And More At E3

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on July 17, 2008

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SquareEnix spilled some juicy news at this week’s E3 with heavy implications for the console front. Their game line-up indicates a shift away from Sony and the Playstation consoles. AgtFox at Evil Avatar has the press release.

First on the list is a re-release of the RPG classic Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS, with a new dungeon and wireless play. That game never gets old, and I look forward to playing it when its released towards the end of the year. SquareEnix is also porting Dragon Quest IV to the DS in September.

The release also provides more information on the strangely titled Infinite Undiscovery, an Xbox 360 exclusive tailored to more Western RPG sensibilities. The game, to be released in September, boasts a medieval setting and real time combat, as well as a dynamic world and situational battles that change depending on player choice, an unusual feature for SquareEnix.

The Last Remnant also differs from the classic RPG formula and centers around large-scale battles. This game will come out on both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, although the PS3 release date has yet to be announced.

Two Star Ocean games appeared in the missive with 2009 release dates: Second Evolution for the PSP and The Last Hope, a prequel that sticks to the franchise’s traditional mechanics and is exclusive to the Xbox 360.

Earlier this week, it was announced that Final Fantasy XIII will be released on the Xbox 360, and on the same day as the Playstation 3 release. There has been no other news about the upcoming game so far. The loss of exclusivity is a severe blow for Sony, for whom Final Fantasy has been a core franchise since the birth of the Playstation.

With major releases scheduled for the DS, PSP, and especially the Xbox 360 and an absence of Playstation 3 news, other than the loss of exclusivity, SquareEnix appears to be moving away from their classic ally, or at least going multiplatform. This is good news for anyone who wants to enjoy J-RPGs without a Playstation.