Category Archives: ps3

Nap Time For Tony

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 9, 2008 – 2:01 pm

So I saw this on Joystiq this morning, but after clicking through all of the “we saw this on this other site” links it traces back to a UK game site called DarkZero, who apparently did some actual listening during Activision’s quarterly earnings call and discovered that the company is giving Tony Hawk the year off.

Some people are taking this opportunity to mention EA’s Skate, which was able to enter the skateboarding genre and clean up in its first year, while the Tony Hawk series has been shambling on like a zombie for awhile now. Personally, my first reaction was one of abject stokedness, which isn’t even a word!

As a longtime Tony Hawk player, I’ve thought that the series has needed some more-serious changes for awhile now. I don’t think any of the games have been bad, but every year certain things just started to feel more and more tired. Sure, the game delivered a large, mostly-new world to skate in every year, but the handful of new mechanics introduced every year always fall a little flat. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Nail the Trick, but the last huge and 100% successful game-changing thing to happen to Tony Hawk was the addition of the revert. And that was added in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.

Hopefully giving Neversoft an additional year will return the series to its former glory. Also, hopefully Neversoft isn’t just looking at EA’s game and thinking of ways to emulate it. I thought Skate was a good first entry that provided a different take on skateboarding, but it’d be a shame to see the leader-to-follower transition happen that fast.

I think I already know the answer to this question, but do you still care about Tony Hawk? Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one left.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Fight Night Round 4: Crazy Rapin’ Edition

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 7, 2008 – 2:59 pm

We found this WORLD EXCLUSIVE footage of Fight Night Round 4’s all-new Classic Interview mode… OK, whatever, I can’t keep up the lame joke. This amazing Mike Tyson footage speaks for itself. But keep in mind that it frequently speaks in shocking slurs and filthy curses before you hit play on it.

So, given that this is how most people see Mike Tyson now, don’t you think EA’s press release, which opens with…

The Champ Is Back! EA Announces EA SPORTS Fight Night Round 4
Mike Tyson Featured in First Boxing Videogame in Nearly a Decade

…is a little crazy? I guess you could argue that by “champ” it’s referring to the Fight Night series, which is the best (and only) boxing series around. Anyway, Fight Night Round 4 is being developed in Vancouver right now for PS3 and 360, and it’ll feature Tyson, Ali, and an “all-new physics-based animation system.” That sounds hot, but hey, I was already pulling my wallet out at “dude, we’re making a new Fight Night.” It’ll be available in 2009, at which time I will eat all of your children, impregnate you, fornicate, and probably get a great face tattoo all at the same time.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Niko Bellic: A Real American Anti-Hero

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 5, 2008 – 4:25 pm

In your first several hours with Grand Theft Auto IV, it’s easy to want to approach it with a checklist of expectations and start comparing it to what you think a “next-generation” Grand Theft Auto game should be.

- New carjacking animations? Check.
- Improved gunplay? Check.
- GPS on the map? Check.
- Corny-yet-still-somehow-funny jokes? Check.

It’s natural to want to take that sort of clinical approach to a sequel, but as I moved through Liberty City and became more entrenched in its story, that stuff simply ceased to matter. At that point, and for the rest of the game, the only thing that mattered to me was Niko Bellic, the game’s protagonist. Is he going to survive this time? Are his new-found friends going to make it out alive? Will he ever find what he’s looking for, and will finding “that special someone” bring him the inner peace he needs? How did every single person he encounters end up so psychologically damaged?

That psychological side to the game translates into characters talking about how they feel, and about what they’re going through. It’s extremely well-written and made a serious impact on me. This isn’t the carefree killing-and-carjacking romp you might have expected. The way the characters act made each life harder and harder to take until I found myself rooting for Niko, hoping that he’d find what he was looking for and finally get some peace. Of course, once you’ve gone on a crime-spree that has you working for just about every different criminal in Liberty City, getting out unscathed simply isn’t an option.

To say too much more about the specifics of the story would start to detract from your own personal enjoyment of discovering it for yourself. It made a serious personal impact on me, and there were some plot twists that simply made me stop playing for a few hours because it started to hit a little too close to home and started reminding me of people in my own life. Seeing these virtual lives getting torn apart by heroin addiction, depression, or forces beyond anyone’s control made an emotional dent on me that no other game has done before. That makes being the man in charge of who lives and who dies even tougher. Later in the game, you’ll start to make very tough decisions, where you’ll have to kill one of the people you’ve been working for at the request of the other. By that time, I was so invested in these characters that the choice felt like much more than pushing a button on a game controller.

Though you’ll make choices at critical points in the game, the impact on the overall plot is mostly minimal. One choice you make near the game’s conclusion makes the most impact of any of Niko’s decisions, and the choice you make here determines how some of the final missions go, leading to one of two possible endings.

One last thing about the way the story and characters play out: unlike most GTA leads, Niko is no pushover. He’s got a sharp, sarcastic tongue and he doesn’t just mindlessly follow whoever is giving the orders. This helps acknowledge the insanity that’s going on around him and makes him a likable character. Yes, he’s out there doing horrible things, but he’s not doing it to run some Tommy Vercetti-like empire. He’s doing it to survive and to hopefully find some closure along the way.

So if you’ve read this far, you’ve probably figured out that this is a much darker game than the previous GTA games. Though the tone borders on nihilistic at points, the game is still filled with a bunch of lighthearted humor that exists at the periphery. The game still has a bevy of radio stations, each with its own DJs and commercials that make all kinds of jokes at the expense of American society or the culture of New York City. You can also watch TV in many of your safehouses, and there’s a collection of shows there that also provide the same type of humor. News is delivered by the Fox News-like Weazel News, which provides a slanted view of the things happening around town, calling almost everything that occurs a “terrorist threat.” The tone of the humor is exactly what you’d expect from the series, though the modern setting makes that humor feel a little more biting. Either way, this time around it also serves the purpose of preventing things from getting too dark and serious. It makes for a nice balance.

The majority of things you associate with Grand Theft Auto’s gameplay haven’t changed too much in GTA IV, though many of the familiar things you expect to see in a GTA game have been refined a bit. Combat, both armed and unarmed, is probably the biggest overhaul. When unarmed, you have two punches and a kick, as well as the ability to block and counter when necessary. But more often than not, you’re going to be strapped with a melee weapon or a gun of some kind. The game now has a cover system, letting you stick to walls and other objects, blind fire, and pop out to take a few aimed shots before getting back behind cover. This addition alone makes shooting much easier to deal with than it’s been in the past. The game’s lock-on targetting has also been tweaked. Overall, most of the people who have had serious complaints about the way GTA handles shooting shouldn’t find much to complain about this time around. If anything, it makes things a little too easy, as popping off headshots is a breeze now.

The bulk of the story is spent with you approaching mission start points, which triggers a cutscene to set up the mission. Then you’re off on your task. The things you do in GTA IV aren’t dramatically different from what you’ve seen in previous games, but it feels a lot more grounded in reality this time. You aren’t learning how to use a jetpack, or helping someone take over the music biz or anything like that. Instead, you’re overseeing diamond heists, shaking down people for protection money, or following gangsters back to their bosses so you can clean them all out at the same time. Throw in some dirty cops, some New York crime families, a shadowy government agent, and a whole lot of Russian mobsters, and you’ve got a lot of work to do. Failing missions is no big deal, either, because you can easily warp back to the start of a mission after you fail, die, or get arrested. Also, you don’t lose all your weapons when you fail, so the time it takes to get going again is pretty minimal.

But what if you need some more firepower before taking on the next mission? You’re given access to underground gun shops, but it’s even easier to get in good with Little Jacob, the friendly neighborhood rasta/dope dealer/gun seller. If you’re friendly with him, you can give him a ring on your cell phone and he’ll roll through with a trunk full of toys at discounted prices. That’s one of the many benefits of maintaining friendships in GTA IV.

While you can date girls with mostly-predictable results, you can also cultivate friendships with a handful of the guys you meet throughout the game. You’ll occasionally get phone calls from them, wanting to hang out, or you can initiate a play date with your dudes with a call of your own. You can visit strip clubs, go out drinking, play darts, go bowling, take in a set at the local comedy club, play pool, and so on. Getting to know these characters a bit more makes them seem a little more human, and you get some real insight into some of the characters’ stories, as well. Or maybe you just want to keep hanging out with Brucie, the genetically jacked steroid monkey who loves cars, VIPs, staying alpha, and “putting bitches to the sword.” If you and Brucie become close buds, he’ll hook you up with a helicopter. The other bonuses, such as being able to call a cab that will take you anywhere in the city for free, or the ability to rig cars with explosives, certainly make things easier for you.

In addition to all the single-player stuff you can do, the game also has an online side that lets up to 16 players join in a variety of modes. Most of them seem fairly standard, like team deathmatch, a pair of racing modes, and an objective-based mode where one team of thugs tries to escape while a team of cops tries to take them down. There are also a few co-op modes for up to four players, but calling these “modes” is a bit of a stretch. They’re more like individual missions that you can play again and again. They’re fun, but they feel like a tease because there are only a few of them and they don’t change much, so once you get good at them, they’re a breeze. All they do is make me wish that the game had a larger co-operative component to it, because they’re probably the most interesting part of the multiplayer mode. There’s also a free mode that lets you and 15 other players run around the city with no real objective, which can be fun if you just want to screw around.

Getting into and out of the multiplayer mode is done via your in-game cell phone. It’s a pretty slick integration, but it’s not without its issues. For example, if you run into any network trouble and can’t join a match, you’re kicked back to your single-player game, where you have to pull up the phone and try again. If you set up a game and realize you want to change modes, you have to quit all the way back to your single-player game and try again. Switching to some kind of multiplayer menu once you get into the multiplayer side of the game would work better.

All of this stuff is put together into a great-looking package. Liberty City really comes alive in GTA IV, thanks to some terrific building design. The environment looks rich and realistic, and makes the GTA III-era Liberty City look like a bunch of flat facades by comparison. The visual quality also really helps in the cutscenes, because the facial expressions of the characters can effectively convey emotion as they deliver lines, which helps give the story its impact. Animation-wise, the characters move well and there are lots of little touches, such as the over-the-top stumbling that Niko and friends do when they’ve been drinking, that help make the game look great. The frame rate is mostly stable and it runs at a playable speed, provided you aren’t getting too crazy. When piling cars together in an attempt to make a huge explosion, I managed to get the frame rate down into what looked like single digits. Also, the game doesn’t always convey a great sense of speed. When you’re in the faster cars, the whole game seems to skip along, rather than giving you a fast, smooth look at the world. It never gets so choppy that you can’t handle your vehicle, but it’s very noticeable, especially on the 360.

The game is backed by some terrific audio, from character voices to the soundtrack, to the sounds around you. Niko’s footsteps are especially well-done. They’ll echo off nearby buildings if you’re running across a quiet street, and they’ll generally reflect the surface you’re running on–like the metal walkways of a cargo ship, for example–really well. The gunfire sounds great, car engines are appropriate, and plenty of pedestrian dialogue helps make the city feel complete.

The soundtrack is, once again, all over the place, with enough variety to keep you hearing new things for quite a long time, provided you’re open to scanning around the radio dial a bit. At some point during my time with the game, I discovered that I sort of like dance hall. Weird! The DJs, commercials, and talk radio stations are great, and deliver the perfect level of ridiculous satire mixed with dick jokes.

This is the first time in a long time that a GTA game has debuted on multiple platforms, and of course, people are going bananas trying to dissect every little difference they can. From my time with both versions, I found the PS3 version to run a little smoother, though neither version is immune to drops in the frame rate when things get crazy. The PS3 version installs up front and seems to load and stream a little better as a result. The 360 version’s loading and streaming is entirely dependent on the quality of your hardware’s DVD drive. On one system, I had no problems, the loading seemed perfectly snappy, and it generally wasn’t a thing. On the Xbox 360 Elite I have at home, though, I could hear the disc thrashing about as it tried to load, and occasionally objects and roads would appear a second or two too late, causing me to ram my car into invisible objects, in one case. Thankfully, I had another 360 at my disposal, but if your drive is already a little iffy, just know that you might run into some occasional streaming issues.

Of course, the 360 version has achievements and will apparently have downloadable content down the line, so if I were choosing, that’s the direction I’d lean in. But the story is just as great on both platforms, and you really can’t lose either way.

It was difficult to anticipate how Grand Theft Auto IV would turn out, given the way that the whole “open-world game” thing is being done to death across as many different games and settings as possible. Rather than try to out-do the Crackdowns and the Saints Rows of the world with bigger land masses and more missions, Rockstar went the other way, and managed to craft an amazingly impactful story and weave it into an open-world game in an incredibly meaningful way–all without losing the heart and soul of what makes Grand Theft Auto so popular in the first place. The end result is absolutely masterful and absolutely worth your time and money.


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

The Price of Gas

posted by Ryan Davis on May 5, 2008 – 4:03 pm

The things about Polyphony Digital’s driving simulation series that have kept me at bay over the years–the self-serious tone, the unapologetic driving model–seem to have been softened up a little bit with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, at least enough to allow me to appreciate the painstaking detail that goes into making what is essentially a car commercial in motion. As a taste of what the full version of Gran Turismo 5 will offer, GT5 Prologue is successful–I’m now more excited about the release of Gran Turismo 5 than I’ve been for any other Gran Turismo release. The thing is, Sony’s charging $39.99 for what is essentially an elaborate demo. As pretty as everything in GT5 Prologue is, there’s just not a whole lot to it.

The game includes six race tracks, featuring well-known real-world locations such as Suzuka and Daytona, and around 70 cars provided by a host of different manufacturers. From Daihatsu to Ferrari, there’s a pretty good cross-section of car-makers represented here, but don’t expect to find much depth to any individual manufacturer’s lineup, as most feature only one or two cars. The cars look absolutely stunning, easily some of the most detailed and realistic-looking cars I’ve seen in any game. The tracks all look great when you’re in motion, though if you come to a complete stop you might notice some blurry textures or cheap-looking onlookers. The rough edges only stands out, though, because the majority of the visuals here are so neat and tidy, so impossibly idyllic. With such an apparent obsession with creating clean-looking visuals, I now kind of understand why Polyphony Digital has shied away from including car damage in a Gran Turismo game.

There’s still no damage model in GT5 Prologue, though the gameplay seems to have been made much more accessible since the last time I checked out a Gran Turismo game. The driving line is now always on by default, and it can change color on the fly to let you know when you need to slow down in order to maintain an ideal line, but perhaps more importantly, the handling just seems more forgiving. It still requires a certain type of smart, technical driving, so you’re not going to be drifting your way through every corner, but first-timers are less likely to end up in a spin at the first bend in the road. As welcome as these adjustments are, the Gran Turismo driver AI is still pretty dull, and when combined with the lack of car damage, it’s very easy to use the other cars as cushions and just bang your way around corners, effectively stripping away the game’s realistic veneer.

The single-player progression helps to ease you into things with class-based challenges that start you off with slower, more manageable cars. Each of the three classes consists of ten different challenges, most of which simply require you to finish a quick race with bronze or better, though there are also a few challenges that task you with going from worst to first in a single lap, or achieve a specific lap time against a rolling field of drivers. You’ll regularly find restrictions on the cars you can use, whether it be based on performance, region of manufacture, or on a specific model of car, often forcing you to spend some of the money you’ve earned competing in races on the right car. This can lead to situations where you have to repeatedly replay past events in order to raise the money you need in order to buy the car you need in order to advance to the next challenge.

Even with alternate versions of the six tracks included in the game, track repetition is a big problem in GT5 Prologue, and the fact that these are mostly tracks that you’ve probably already played in numerous other racing games doesn’t help. The thing that probably has Gran Turismo fans most excited about GT5 Prologue is the inclusion of online multiplayer, a first for the series. It’s functional, but unless you’re specifically excited about being able to play Gran Turismo over the Internet, there’s not much particularly unique or exciting about it.

Generally speaking, though, I like what Gran Turismo 5 Prologue offers, I just don’t care for the decision to monetize it. Gran Turismo 4 featured more than 50 tracks and more than 700 cars, so if $39.99 buys you just six tracks and 70 cars in 2008, I don’t even want to imagine how much Gran Turismo 5 will cost.


systems: ps3 games:

29:46:17, 64.67%

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 3, 2008 – 2:34 pm

29 hours, 46 minutes, and 17 seconds later, and I’m finished with Grand Theft Auto IV. Well, the main story, anyway. I’ve barely played any multiplayer, and of course my game progress is 64.67%. So there’s more to do, more to see. That’s always the way, isn’t it? I doubt I’ll try to see it all, to reach that 100% mark. Hunting down 199 pigeons doesn’t sound like too much fun to me.

The story is what I came to see. And I’m having trouble putting my feelings for this game’s story into words right now. I’ll spare you the fumbling and just say that it’s probably the greatest game story of all time, both in content and how it’s integrated into the rest of the game.

All those early reviews, where everyone tossed out the highest score they could give, left me scratching my head a bit in the game’s early hours. But I get it now. I understand.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Bros Before Dough

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 1, 2008 – 5:25 pm

I’m writing to you from Alderney, the final area to unlock in Grand Theft Auto IV. It just opened up after I completed a particularly lengthy and lucrative mission working for… well, I guess I should leave the specifics out, just in case you haven’t cruised past me yet. I’m 18 hours in now, with a game progress of 37.19%.

Over the course of the day, the game, and the big differences between this and previous games in the GTA line are really starting to sink in. On a mechanical level, GTA IV doesn’t seem like a revolution–you’re still stealing cars, tailing people, and doing many of the same tasks you’d expect to see in a game of this type. It’s a slower burn that happens on a deeper, more emotional level. Grand Theft Auto has always been about morals, but this time, the game shifts a bit of that moral weight onto you. You aren’t just along for the ride, doing whatever the game tells you to do. In a few cases, you’re making specific choices about who lives and who dies. It’s something that pops up early on and doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but as you keep playing and get deeper in the story, and as you become attached to various characters, you’re forced to make some tough calls.

Again, I’ll try to talk around it a bit, for those of you who haven’t gotten here yet, but when faced with a tough choice, I actually had to pause the game and think about it. I got up and took a walk around the block, went upstairs and sat on the couch for a bit. My mind was mostly made up, but was it the right move? What was more important to my version of Niko–money or loyalty?

I chose loyalty. Or, at least, that’s how I interpreted the decision.

Choices like this are the real reason why the game has autosave, I think. Sure, you could go force a manual save and split the path, try it both ways, and come back to it. But there’s something about the finality of your actions that I really appreciate. Along with its more-contemplative tone, that gives the game a weight that the previous games lacked.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Giant Theft Auto

posted by Ryan Davis on April 29, 2008 – 12:29 am

We’re back from the Best Buy with GTA4 in hand, and we’ll be starting our live stream shortly.

[UPDATE] And the marathon is over! Big thanks to everyone who stuck around, hope you enjoyed what you saw. Now, time for sleep!

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Get Innocuous!

posted by Ryan Davis on April 28, 2008 – 12:46 pm

Just because we haven’t been talking about it non-stop doesn’t mean that our brains aren’t currently overrun with thoughts about Grand Theft Auto IV. Personally, I’m on a strict regimen of watching that totally bitchin’ GTA4 UK TV commercial every 45 minutes, which has the side-effect of causing Jeff to twitch violently in anticipation. I’ve managed to avoid most coverage of the game, including the deluge of reviews that hit on Sunday, though I couldn’t resist Kotaku’s meta-review of all the different GTA4 reviews that went up. Looking at those scores and review excerpts, it’s hard not to wonder what good a GTA4 review serves at this point other than to let you know “yo, they didn’t screw it up,” but I’ll save that for the podcast.

Speaking of which, Jeff and I wanted to let you know what our immediate plans surrounding the impending release of GTA4 are looking like. We didn’t go to any review events and we didn’t get any early copies, so we’re in the exact same boat as everyone else–which is kind of a nice change of pace, honestly. We’ll be rolling down to the Marin City Best Buy at midnight tonight to pick up our copies, so if you’re in the area and you’re lookin’ to get your GTA on, or you just wanna go get some steaks at the Outback, come give us a shout. Since tomorrow will likely be consumed by our collective displays of Liberty City good citizenry, we’ll be recording our podcast tonight in two parts, providing you with our world views before and after playing GTA4. Needless to say, we expect paradigms to be shifted and worlds to be rocked.

[UPDATE] Hey, wanna help us test something out? Check this out. Not much to watch just yet, but it’s a chat room and some music. Let us know how the performance is, we might put it into play later tonight if it’s any good.

[UPDATE] [UPDATE] The test has ended, and Giant Bomb has settled on Justin.tv for our streaming Internet video needs…for now. We’ll give you guys a shout when tonight’s GTA4 marathon begins in earnest.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Ball ‘Til You Fall

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 28, 2008 – 10:34 am

NBA Ballers: Chosen One feels like a relic, like an old arcade game that’s been given a fresh coat of paint, but no additional gameplay depth. Like an old arcade game, it’s fun for awhile, but unless you have nostalgic feelings for, well, the other two Ballers games, you’ll probably get fed up fast.

Like the previous games in the series, NBA Ballers is a fast-and-loose basketball game, with fewer rules and fewer on-court players than your typical basketball sim. Usually, the game is one-on-one on a half-court, though the game plays around with the rules a bit to create a lot of weird variations, especially in the single-player story mode.

When you’re playing alone, you can create a player and go into the story mode, which is broken up into six episodes that are done up with video intros to make it seem like you’re watching some kind of sports reality show, where we’re following a bunch of NBA players and you, a street ball phenom who secures a last-minute entry into the proceedings. It doesn’t get much deeper than that as you play–each episode is set up with a video from the game’s announcer, Public Enemy #1 himself, Chuck D. While Chuck’s love of basketball is probably as deep as it can possibly get, hearing him shill for Sprite throughout the game’s fourth episode made me die a little inside. Oh well, at least he isn’t making a fool of himself on VH1 or anything like that.

Each episode is broken up into chapters, each of which has a fighting game-like ladder of matches you must win to proceed. Most of these are pretty standard, though the game starts throwing in weird rules later on, like games where you have to complete combo moves before you win, or games that can only be won using a game-ending level 3 super dunk. It sort of keeps things fresh, but the real problem is that no one bothered to teach your artificially-intelligent opponents how to perform properly in any of these special rules games. Games where you lose if your opponent sinks a three-point shot are never a hassle, because the AI players almost never attempt threes in the first place.

I eventually got to a point where the game wanted me to complete three “pass-to-the-crowd” alley-oop dunks to win. After an hour of trying to get the crowd member to pass me the ball fast enough to complete the oop, I turned to the manual, which doesn’t offer any assistance at all. A later challenge has you trying to stop your opponent from scoring at all, which hinges solely on if he counters out of your super steal move or not, making it feel more like luck than skill.

Aside from these special rules, though, the game is a total pushover. You have a lot of moves at your disposal, but you really only need to trigger the act-a-fool combo every time you get the ball. This brings up a little button-pressing minigame, where you try to hit a button to complete the combo before your opponent can counter by pressing the button faster. If you complete a five-move combo and quickly score, you get three bonus points for that basket. Considering most games play to eleven points, a five-point play is totally crippling, and the AI can never seem to pull it off to stay competitive and rarely breaks in and counters your combo.

With the single-player’s group of problems, it’s tempting to turn to multiplayer, and the game does have online play. Online, though, it feels like there’s just enough latency to make the act-a-fool combos more difficult to counter, which changes the game for the worse. Playing against a local opponent levels the playing field a bit, but you’ll still encounter crazy stuff, like the level three super dunk, which ends a game if it hits and can only be stopped by a level two super block. All of the super moves trigger flavorful animations, but there aren’t enough of them to keep things flashy or entertaining, and some of them, like all the super shots, which have the ball making 45-degree turns in midair to swish through the net, just look messed up.

It has some nice animations and the player models look great, and it’s actually pretty decent, in small doses. But everything about the gameplay feels really mechanical and absolutely inorganic, like nothing you’re doing with the controller feels connected to the moves that are coming out on the other end. Chosen One’s canned moves and button-mashing minigames make it feel like a relic from the PS2 and Xbox era. It’s going to take a pretty serious overhaul for Ballers to get up to date and compete.


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Gears of War + Krull - Awesome = Dark Sector

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 25, 2008 – 3:12 pm

Dark Sector is notable for being the first “next-generation” game announced all the way back in 2004. Back then, it sort of had a stealth-action look to it, like a futuristic version of Splinter Cell. It would have been interesting to see how that game would have turned out, but I have a feeling that the 2006 release of Gears of War made a pretty deep impact on Dark Sector’s development, because the final product takes several cues from Gears. Unfortunately, it doesn’t clone it well enough to actually be a clone worth playing to completion.

On the surface, Dark Sector seems pretty cool. The character you control, Hayden, is sent into an area that’s been infected with some kind of hideous, post-apocalyptic disease, but he’s quickly pinned down and infected himself. As you play, the disease takes hold and you unlock new abilities. The first thing that happens once you become infected is that the game goes from being guns-only to giving you a boomerang-like glaive that you can use to chop off the heads of enemies, if you’re a good aim. You eventually get a shield, the ability to control the glaive in mid-flight, and the ability to turn invisible for short periods of time.

The game also tosses some light puzzle-solving at you here and there. The glaive can be infused with fire, ice, or electricity by throwing it into fire, something frozen, or a power box, respectively. You’ll occasionally need to burn things to clear a path or charge up a jammed door with power to proceed.

Once you’re fully powered up with all the different abilities, you have some options for how to best deal with enemies, but you’re always stuck with a few nagging problems. Hayden moves extremely slowly, plodding around the environment like a man twice his size. For a guy who looks like he should be flipping out and beheading enemies like a ninja, the movement speed doesn’t make much sense, and it really makes things drag. You can sprint for short periods of time, but the sprint is Gears of War-like in that you lose a lot of lateral control. Again, that’s something that makes sense for a linebacker-sized dude like Marcus Fenix, but when applied to a lithe operative like Hayden, it doesn’t fit.

While you’ll be inclined to do most of your fighting with the glaive, you’ll also get some guns to work with. You start with a pistol, and as you collect rubles and briefcases with weapon upgrades in them, you can make your weapons better or replace them at black market checkpoints found in the levels. The weapon purchasing and upgrading systems don’t seem to be a major part of the game, and you can make it through with limited purchases.

Most of the game has Hayden running from place to place, occasionally stopping for an encounter with gun-toting humans or pipe-wielding zombies, neither of which are very smart. Humans will randomly shoot into your cover point without ever getting tactical, and the zombies move too slowly to ever be a serious threat. This reduces most encounters to an easy shooting gallery where the only occasional problem is the range of your glaive and the general lack of ammo for your weapons. Once you earn the power to turn invisible, the game gets even easier, since you can just blink out, run up behind a guy, and take care of business.

The game has a basic cover system, letting you pop in and out of cover to take shots or toss your glaive at distant enemies. Up close, you have a melee attack, and if you get behind someone–which is super-easy with the slow-moving zombies–you can execute them with a finishing move, which triggers a canned animation that shows you snapping a zombie’s neck, slitting the throats of some enemies, or just jamming your glaive into the skulls of some creatures. The finisher animations look great and do a nice job of showing off the game’s detailed character models, and it’s a shame that there aren’t more of them, because they get really repetitive. The rest of the game looks pretty good, too, with decent-sized environments and nice blur effects. Hayden’s face is probably the only thing in the game that doesn’t look so great. It’s too flat, maybe? I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about the way it looks and animates just seems totally wrong.

There’s a multiplayer option in Dark Sector that lets up to ten players play one of two modes. One has two teams, each with one Hayden that must be protected. The other puts one player in the Hayden role, with the other players trying to bring him down for the right to be Hayden in the next round. Neither mode is much fun, and the whole game can be a mess if everyone isn’t using a good, fast connection. Dying for no visible reason, warping around the map, and other glitches came up pretty consistently in every match I played.

Dark Sector feels OK for the first two chapters, but there are eight more to slog through after that, and if I wasn’t working on a review of the game, that’s probably where I would have stopped. The occasional variety of a boss battle or vehicle sequence doesn’t break things up enough to make the campaign an interesting one, either. Between the dreary action, the sluggish movement speed, and the seemingly tacked-on multiplayer, you’ll probably want to pass on the whole thing.


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Metal Gear Online Patches Now Available

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 24, 2008 – 9:58 pm

In case you’re waiting for the Metal Gear Online beta to begin (it’s supposed to start sometime tomorrow), you might want to connect up and start downloading the 1.01 and 1.02 patches that are now available. Maybe you’ll have better luck with the download speeds than I have… I’m a couple of hours in on the 1.01 patch and I’m only at 35 percent completion.

Maybe the direct download is a faster option?

systems: ps3 games:

A Variety of Downloads for your PlayStation Platforms

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 24, 2008 – 2:37 pm

For those of you waiting long and hard for the PlayStation 3 version of the Call of Duty 4 Variety Map Pack, today is your lucky day. The maps are now available via the PlayStation Store for $9.99. That’s a full penny cheaper than the 360 version!

The pack contains four maps, and I happen to like it a great deal, so if you’re already playing COD4 or are looking for a reason to go back to it, I recommend you pick them up. Check out the review I wrote recently for the 360 version of these maps for more details.

Other paid stuff hitting the PlayStation Store today includes the PS version of R-Types, an expansion set for Eye of Judgement, the Army of Two SSC Challenge Map Pack, and a mess of songs for Karaoke Revolution, Guitar Hero III, and Rock Band.

Think that Army of Two download will breathe some life back into the PS3 version of the game? I was trying to find an online game of that earlier this week and it was D-E-A-D. Couldn’t find anyone in any mode. Can’t say I found that too surprising.

You can also find a PS3 demo for Iron Man and a PS3 and PSP demo of echochrome, the rad-looking Escher-style puzzle game. Download away!

systems: ps3, psp games: , , , ,

Family Values in Video Games

posted by Ryan Davis on April 23, 2008 – 2:19 pm

On its own, Haze looks pretty alright. Developer Free Radical Design has made some intermittently solid first-person shooters with its TimeSplitters series, and the angry teenager in me still finds some appreciation for the game’s oppresive Huxleyian setting. Also, drugs.

But then Korn got involved, and now whenever Haze is mentioned, my mind immediately wanders to one of the world’s greatest press releases. Things only got worse today when Ubisoft announced that “Haze”, the Korn single recorded for the game, is now available for money.

They’ve also released a video of a live performance of the song, synergistically inter-cut with footage from the game. Sadly, Ubisoft is requiring age-gate nonsense to post the video, but all you really need to know is that Jonathan Davis appears to be wearing a skirt. Which is, you know, edgy. I wonder what his parents must think! As an alternative, here’s a bootleg-ass “video” of the song that Jeff found on YouTube, complete with custom intro. Enjoy!

Like Serjery15 says “This is definitely…Korn.” I guess I should just be grateful that there’s never been a Korn/Mortal Kombat krossover, as sickeningly logical as that seems. Knock on wood!

systems: ps3 games:

Burnout: The Flaming Car Crash That Keeps On Giving

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 23, 2008 – 11:40 am

It’s certainly not rare for developers to support their game post-release, especially in this day of downloadable console content, where popular map packs can bring in millions and millions of dollars in their first week of release. But most of what we’re getting is pretty standard stuff, like map packs, new skins, a mode or two… nothing all that earth-shattering. The other thing is that we usually don’t know too much about upcoming add-ons until they’re just about ready for release.

Maybe that’s why Criterion’s approach to Burnout Paradise add-ons seems so crazy. The team has already announced plans for four different patch/add-on packages for Burnout Paradise. And to slide in some extra cool points, they’ve given them all codenames.

The Bogart release is the first big update out of the gate, though it’s been a bit of a clunker so far. It hit for the Xbox 360 version last week, but after some users started reporting frame rate issues, the patch is apparently going to get recalled and re-released in around a week. The PlayStation 3 version of this patch is apparently still on for release tomorrow.

Bogart is mainly dealing with issues found in the initial release of the game, fixing a few things that would cause the game to hang, remixing some of the surround sound, giving people more time to pose for photos, and so on.

The next update, currently known as Cagney, starts to get a little more substantial. Three new online modes will be added, letting you compete in Marked Man, Road Rage, and Stunt Run events against other players. A few new cars will also be added, including a couple of paint jobs that were submitted by fans of the game. Then there’s the Hunter Olympus, a big SUV that Criterion says is “the first vehicle without Boost in a Burnout game.” That just sounds like crazy talk. Cagney will also add a live news page to the front-end of the game. It’s planned for release at the end of June.

Today, Criterion announced some details for the third update, known as Davis, and it’s totally blowing my mind right now. Motorcycles in a Burnout game? Considering how detailed the wrecks in Paradise look, I can’t wait to see what happens when there’s an human body involved… but considering the game probably isn’t going to delve into M-rated territory now, I can’t imagine things will get too crazy. The Davis update will also include nighttime–the game currently only lets you race during the day. A day/night cycle would be pretty cool, hopefully that’s how it works. Davis is scheduled to be released in August.

Past Davis is Eastwood, and this is the update that will add new areas to the game, among other things.

It’s neat to see developers be more forthcoming with their future plans, especially when it’s a game that I’ve already played the hell out of and want to keep playing. If you’re interested in more detail, I recommend checking out Criterion’s site, where you’ll find a blog that’s broken up to include info on each update, and a podcast where the team at Criterion gets crazy deep on the science of crashing cars.


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

I’m Lookin’ for a Jawb

posted by Ryan Davis on April 21, 2008 – 12:53 pm

While most Hollywood stars wouldn’t think twice about signing off on a crappy movie tie-in game, Vin Diesel takes games seriously–perhaps more seriously than his films, seeing as his virtual performance in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay was much more well-received than the movie upon which it was based. Now, Midway and Vin Diesel’s Tigon Studios are teaming up for Wheelman, a criminal mission-based driving game, and Midway gave the press a look at the game at its recent Las Vegas event.

Virtual Vin Diesel will play the part of Milo Burik, the titular Wheelman who appears to be your typically stoic, guttural, and tough-as-nails Vin Diesel character. Little specific detail about the story, though we know the game kicks off with an explosive escape from a bank robbery, and you’ll end up involved with some salty Romanian gangster. The game will take place in Barcelona, and while the city will be dotted with recognizable landmarks, the actual geography of the city will be different, ostensibly for the sake of playability. The structure of the game itself seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Atari’s Driver series, though a nice sense of speed and some over-the-top physics already set it apart.

While Midway was happy to reference films like Ronin, The Bourne Identity, Bullitt, and Vanishing Point as inspirations for Wheelman, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Burnout during my time with the game, mostly because of the prominent vehicle melee system. Rather than just grinding enemy vehicles into walls or knocking them into oncoming traffic, though, you’ll use the right analog stick to violently slam your car into enemies. The movement of your car in the vehicle melee attacks is distractingly severe at the moment, but it seems like a pretty novel take on vehicular combat.

You will also be able to perform some vehicle super-moves, one of which will be the cyclone. When triggered, the cyclone will cause the action to slow down and your car to spin around, with the perspective dropping inside the car and your control switching to Milo’s gun hand. As you spin, targets will appear on nearby enemy vehicles that, if you can hit them, will disable the vehicles. While the bulk of the action in Wheelman will take place behind the wheel, you can also expect some on-foot action, which I’m told is based on the same tech used in John Woo’s Stranglehold.

Save for the plastic-looking character model that makes Milo Burik look more like a Vin Diesel action figure than the actual dude, Wheelman looks pretty good, and I see some good potential in stuff like the vehicle melee and super-moves. Wheelman is currently slated for release on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 this fall.


systems: pc, ps3, xbox 360 games:

This Is 99-Cent Steak & Egg Breakfast

posted by Ryan Davis on April 19, 2008 – 7:41 pm

As hard as Las Vegas tries to sell itself as some kind of exotic, chic, adult wonderland, the truth is that–perhaps now more than ever–Vegas is a corny and absurd assault of the senses, like an episode of Entourage with the volume and contrast turned all the way up. Maybe that’s just my own residual sins talking, having recently returned from a Midway press event held in Las Vegas, where the publisher showed off what it referred to as a “full house of great games.” One of the games included in that cringe-inducing play on words was This Is Vegas, an open-world lifestyle game that plunges you into the glitzy, neon-soaked world of what developer Surreal Software refers to as Hyper Vegas. While I might not buy into the whole Vegas mythos, I think This Is Vegas just might be ridiculous enough to make a fun time out of it.

You’ll enter the world of This Is Vegas fresh off the bus as a small-town nobody with $50 in his pocket, looking to get a piece of the Vegas lifestyle. You’ll hook up with a sketchy dude named Joey Nissan (Note to self: avoid involvement with dudes with automotive last names. They will always be sketchy.) and take on an ambitious real estate mogul named Preston Boyer as you also try to make a name for yourself in this glittery, deep-fried desert pearl. The game promises lots of “Vegas moments”, such as rounding up strippers for a bachelor party, or trying to reunite The Chairmen, a marginally fictionalized Rat-Pack-type group of entertainers. While you can expect the usual open-world structure of cruising around in cars and on foot, taking on missions, and dealing with various factions, This Is Vegas seems more hedonistic than criminal, though the game will give you plenty of opportunities for trouble.

There are four basic activities in This Is Vegas–racing, fighting, gambling, and partying. Not much was shown of the racing aspect of This Is Vegas, though it sounds like the main focus will be illegal street racing. Fighting also seems pretty straight-forward, allowing you a few different punch combos, grapples, and the ability to charge up an attack by holding the button. The most interesting part of the fighting that I saw was a super-move you could trigger that would send your opponent comically flying through the air. Though most of what I saw was down-and-dirty street-fighting, it appears that you’ll be able to compete in some kind of mixed martial arts cage match, and there promises to be some gunplay as well.

Gambling will take place in the many marginally fictionalized casinos in This Is Vegas, such as Mayan, Olympus, and Big Top, though to spice things up, you’ll be able to use what they like to call “advantage play”, or in other words, cheat your swindlin’ black guts out. I got to play a few hands of blackjack where I could tap a button to activate my special sunglasses that revealed marks on the cards that gave me a ballpark idea of what card was coming next. Every time I used the glasses, though, it raised my suspicion meter. Of course, there are consequences for cheating, and if that meter gets too high, you’ll get tossed out, beat up, or worse, depending on the casino that catches you. One of the fundamental problems with all casino video games is that there aren’t any stakes, which I think This Is Vegas addresses pretty smartly–there’s few higher stakes than getting your ass kicked.

The bulk of Midway’s presentation of This Is Vegas was spent focusing on the party aspect, with a sequence where your character promises to “get it started” at a club called Aqua for a friendly female DJ. Apparently simply slapping on some Black-Eyed Peas isn’t enough, and instead you’ll have to perform a few different activities to liven things up and get more people in the club. You can hit the dance floor using a Tony-Hawk-inspired dance-move combo system, where you can bust some hilarious moves. Right up until they started showing the dancing, I couldn’t tell if This Is Vegas was in on the joke or not, but once I saw that there was a button dedicated to doing the Running Man, all my doubts evaporated. There doesn’t seem to be much to the gameplay from what I played, but it’s fun just to watch the stupid cocky strut your character switches into every time he touches the dance floor.

Tending bar can help liven things up, which takes the form of a minigame that reminded me quite a bit of a remixed version of Tapper. When people approach the bar, they’ll want one of four things–a cocktail, a beer, a light for their cigarette, or trouble–and there’s an appropriate response for each mapped to one of the controller’s face buttons. You’ll see an icon over their head that will immediately start draining, giving you a limited amount of time to respond. I played through it a few times, and it’s a decent little minigame, though my favorite part is when you mismatch responses, slamming the head of a girl who just wanted a cosmo into the bar, or lighting some rabble-rouser on fire. You’ll have to bounce corny bachelors, like the dude in the football jersey with the crooked visor referred to in the presentation as Gun Show, when you aren’t behind the bar as well.

At a certain point in the party, you get to use your bar gun to administer a wet t-shirt contest, at which point I started to seriously doubt this game’s chances of receiving a T (for Teen!) rating. You can have some drinks yourself, too, though if you don’t pace yourself, you’ll end up stumbling around, making a fool of yourself on the dance floor, and eventually puking up all that overpriced club booze. If you’re feeling a little too close to the edge, you can sober up some by hitting the can…just like in real life.

Like Las Vegas itself, This Is Vegas looks like fun, in theory. Having played through a party sequence in the game, I found an odd appreciation for the commitment to really amplifying all of the stuff that makes Las Vegas so trashy and unrelenting, though some repetition made it feel like the party sequences either need to be tightened up or feature more stuff to do. With the game not scheduled for release until this holiday season, it’s still got a ways to go, but there’s certainly the potential that This Is Vegas will be a royal flush of excitement!


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Hold Down And Hit Start When Superman’s Head Appears To Fight Smoke

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 18, 2008 – 4:59 pm

So I’m sitting here in Las Vegas, less than 24 hours after seeing Midway announce a real shocker: Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. After seeing the trailer, which doesn’t feature too much gameplay, and talking to a few people at Midway, I’m optimistic. But the shocks don’t stop with the crossover.

To get this out of the way up front, this game is likely going to be rated T for Teen. That means the gruesome fatalities that have served as a calling card for the MK series since the early 90s are going to undergo some serious rethinking. It sounds like this is really pushing the team’s creativity, as they definitely want to come up with impressive new finishing moves and figure out exactly where the line between T and M lies, and plop this game’s content as close to the M line as possible.

Only four characters have been officially confirmed at this point. Two MK characters, Scorpion and Sub-Zero, will be in there. Representing DC so far are Batman and Superman. Midway released a brief trailer showing off the look of the characters and some of the fighting, and I’m pretty impressed, both with the technical quality and with the design of the characters themselves. Bringing Sub-Zero back to the masked, rounded head look is a nice idea, and his icy arms really complete the picture. And Batman is no joke, either, as the trailer shows him busting Sub-Zero in the face, drawing blood in the process. Yes, apparently there are ways to get a bit of blood into a T-rated game.

The fighting mechanics are being rebuilt, and it really sounds like the team is taking the chance to go over every single aspect of character movement and combat and see if there’s a better way to do things. A couple of new in-fight changes were shown or discussed, like Klose Kombat, which draws the kamera–sorry–draws the camera in closer and allows the aggressor time to pull off some wicked stuff while the defender attempts to counter, resulting in torn clothing and bruises if hits land. Freefall Kombat adds moves to the previously hands-off sequences that occur when a character gets knocked off of one part of a multi-tiered stage. So now you can fight and counter all the way down, which looks pretty neat.

There will be storyline reasons for bringing the world of MK and DC together, though there aren’t too many exact details just yet. The press release hints at a bigger force that will destroy everything, which will probably force the MK and DC guys to come together in unlikely combinations to save the day. Midway writers are teaming up with two comic writers, Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, for the narrative.

It’s been a lot for me to take in, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. For me, Mortal Kombat has always been at its best when it’s not taking itself super-seriously and not presenting itself as ultra-dark. This is the franchise that spawned friendship finishers, babalities, and exploding bodies that emit like five rib cages in the process. Certainly the minds behind this madness can come up with something rad to do that doesn’t involve ripping off heads and tearing out hearts… though I have to admit I’d really like to knock Superman’s head off, too.

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe will come to 360 and PS3 this fall.

[UPDATE] In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the MKvDC trailer:


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Bad Company Can’t Get Enough (Of Your Money)

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 9, 2008 – 2:08 pm

The topic of weapons-for-pay in Battlefield: Bad Company has been coming up a lot lately. I’ve been enjoying the closed multiplayer beta, which lets you plainly see what the weapons are, how you’ll be able to acquire them, and statistically speaking, how they’ll perform in-game. The graphs used to rate the weapons don’t make the paid weapons look any better than the stuff you’ll get just for purchasing and playing the game.

Naturally, the whole concept has stirred up a whole lot of Internet emotion, ranging from Sarcastic Gamer’s attempts to get a boycott going to somewhat-measured responses from people like Joystiq’s Justin McElroy and Sexy Videogameland’s Leigh Alexander. Honestly, after seeing that Sarcastic Gamer has ad banners plastered on its site that point to its Bad Company boycott page, this looks a bit like an installment of Sensational Headline Theater. But the site’s heart is definitely in the right place.

So I see both sides, but this isn’t a new argument because it isn’t a new issue. This is precisely the same argument we had when Oblivion added horse armor for pay, or when EA first started experimenting with downloadable unlocks in games like The Godfather and Need for Speed Carbon. If the concept of paying for additional guns in Bad Company gets you mad, what do you say to the concept of paying 200 points ($2.50) for a “Maxed Out Player” for Tiger Woods 08? Paying for cheats that automatically max your created player’s skills out to 110 percent? Sorry, but that’s waaaaaay filthier than anything in Bad Company.

I believe it was a famed Canadian economist, Bruce McCullough, who first introduced me to the concept of “dollar votes.” We vote with our money. If something outrages you, don’t buy it. Bang. Zap. Done. Move on! I know that sounds simple, but it’s way more effective than trying to feign outrage on the internet about something you probably weren’t ever going to buy in the first place. Or, hey, maybe you’re a big enough Battlefield fan that you’ll be willing to pony up for some more guns. I think that’s crazy talk, but dude, it’s your money.

Even beyond the basic outrage that a lot of people are feeling at EA’s various attempts to push the envelope on getting people to pay for the same cheats and bonus content that we were all getting for free just a few short years ago, we’re approaching a real crossroads of sorts for paid downloadable content.

Right now, it’s tough to really assess the actual value of any piece of content. Is $2.50 the right price for an additional multiplayer map in a game that you really enjoy? That’s what Activision is charging for COD4 maps right now in its $10 package. That same $10 can buy you Ikaruga on Xbox Live Arcade. Are those two packages of the same relative value? What about the Rock Band songs, some of which are going for a dollar each? Where do experimental microtransactions like cheat code golfers and additional cars or guns fit into all this? Boycott or otherwise, the power for all of this is in your hands, and we all have to come to our own decisions on this stuff.

I decided that $2.50/map was a fine price to pay for additional content in Call of Duty 4, a game I absolutely adore. I also decided that paying $5.00 for 13 additional cars in Forza Motorsport 2 was over the line, so I passed… but I understand why a Forza superfan would find that to be a great deal.

But I’m never going to buy access to more in-game money, or cheat codes, or anything like that. In my view, those things cross the line and I get a little frustrated that they’re even being offered in the first place. I’ll get over it.

Where do Bad Company’s guns fit into all this? Well, until we can try them ourselves, we won’t know for sure. There are two ways for this to go. If they’re perfectly balanced in with the rest of the game’s weapons, then they’re pretty much useless, only for people who want to show off and say “yeah, I totally like this game enough to buy the extra guns.” If they’re out-of-balance and more powerful than the standard weapons, that’s an arms race, where the haves play better than the have-nots. The have-nots probably aren’t going to stick around very long, and won’t be around to buy any maps or other, more substantial content that may be in the pipeline. And the sour taste of being bullied into that decision probably means that fewer of those players will buy the next game in the series. It’s not like we’re hurting for high-quality online first-person shooters these days, right?

In short, getting angry about paid offerings is pretty silly right now, because even though we’re a couple of years in on it now, it all feels super-tentative. Let companies like EA run their nefarious experiments, and have confidence that it’ll all work itself out in the end. Because if no one casts their dollar vote for more guns or extra Godfather dollars, at some point it becomes a waste of time to even offer it.

Also, while I’m at it, THIS is why we’re planning on reviewing (and allowing you to review) downloadable content, such as map packs and horse armor, here on Giant Bomb. This stuff costs real money, and I really feel like certain publishers are trying to pull a fast one on the public when it comes to how much this stuff costs. If we all sort of look out for each other, we can help get these prices to a place that makes the most sense, no boycott required.

Besides, we should really be saving our rage for in-game advertising, anyway.

[UPDATE] IGN did a bit of journalizing and got a senior producer from DICE to clarify Bad Company’s weapon unlocks. He stated that the paid “Gold Edition” weapons will unlock when you hit level 25. So now you can spend money on early access to those weapons, rather than exclusive access. In other words, now it’s only as bad as the Need for Speed car and upgrade package unlocks, which you could purchase if you didn’t feel like actually playing the game and earning them. Which, you know, is still sort of bad.

The other five weapons will unlock based on your participation in “EA marketing programs.” EA told IGN that it’ll be as “easy as signing up for a newsletter.” Great, now they’re trading in-game items for your e-mail address and personal data… not to get all privacy-paranoid here, but I think I might have liked this better when it was just money changing hands. Still, a rare and shining example of an angry internet making some kind of impact, so that’s kind of cool.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds - Review

posted by Ryan Davis on April 3, 2008 – 6:08 pm

Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds for the PlayStation 3 is a game out of time. While the technical sheen of the presentation and the robustness of the online component feel modern enough, the cutely Japanese characters (complete with poorly matched English voiceovers), the all-too-familiar swing mechanic, and limited number of courses and gameplay modes make it feel like 1997 all over again. While the new subtitle might suggest that Hot Shots is finally going to let its hair down, break some rules, think outside the box, incite a paradigm shift, etc., this is about as traditional as video game golf gets. Despite the dearth of much genuine evolution, though, Out of Bounds still manages a pleasant game of golf.

The most daring thing that Out of Bounds does with the gameplay is introduce a new advanced swing system, which isn’t much more than a new coat of paint for the three-click swing mechanic that dates back to Golf for the NES. You still hit the X button once to initiate the swing, a second time to determine swing power, and a third for accuracy, it just does it without cluttering up the screen with various meters. This requires you to play a little more by feel, though there are still plenty of hints provided to help guide the timing of your button presses. During the back swing you’ll see a yellow glint on the club when you’re at 50% power, then a red glint when you’re near 100% power, and as you swing forward, you’ll see a shrinking circular meter around the ball, and the closer to the center the circle is, the more accurate the impact is. If you’re a hardcore traditionalist that wants no part of all these scary, newfangled mechanics, the traditional, meter-based swing system is still included. It gets the job done, and there’s something to be said for going with what you know, but even the new advanced swing feels like a bit of throwback.

Out of Bounds doesn’t take many chances with the modes of play, either. The challenge mode represents the meat of the single-player game, challenging you to win a certain number of 9- or 18-hole tournaments before you can go head-to-head against a ranked pro. Win this match and you’ll advance to the next rank and begin the process all over again. Ironically, the challenge mode isn’t really that challenging through most of it–not to brag or anything, but I got to the fourth rank before I actually lost a match–though once the game decides it’s not kidding, it starts coming hard with heavy winds, convoluted putting greens, and opponents who can put up a real fight.

It’s in the challenge mode that you’ll unlock the lion’s share of the 15 playable characters and six different 18-hole courses the game has to offer. The characters are all ridiculous in that filtered-through-Japan kind of way, with my personal favorite being Fernando, the cocky salesman with rolled sleeves who will occasionally leave the course via helicopter. Everyone still has the oversized anime look that has defined the Hot Shots look, and though the PlayStation 3 allows them to look more detailed than ever before, there’s a woefully limited number of animations and voice samples. Additionally, the added detail, coupled with the exaggerated art style, gives everyone a weird kind of living-doll feel.

Characters are ranked, and each has unique stats, but individual characters will improve the more you use them, and the clubs and balls you unlock in the challenge mode can have such an adverse effect on performance that you’ll likely end up sticking to one or two characters. You’ll also gain access to new caddies, who do absolutely nothing. Watching the caddie run like a lunatic between shots is mildly amusing, but their advice when you’re on the green is usually painfully obvious, and occasionally downright inaccurate. The six courses in Out of Bounds aren’t quite as outlandish as the players, though expect to see plenty of wildlife on the course, as well as the occasional rally race or hot-air balloon. The courses are well-designed and tend towards a more subtly exaggerated realism, but even with mirrored and long-tee versions, there simply aren’t enough. This is especially apparent in the challenge mode, where you’ll play the same two courses over and over again for the first several ranks.

Live opponents certainly help spice things up, and you can play Out of Bounds locally against friends in either match or stroke games, and you can apply a few custom rules to your matches as well. There’s a rule that increases the size of the cup, a rule that adds strokes for landing in a sand trap, and so on. The online play has these same features, but is far more involved, with custom avatars, a full lobby system, and a tournament structure that allows you to reserve your spot in tournaments that happen at specific times in the day, as though it were a tee-time at an actual country club. But, in another turn that reinforces my theory that Out of Bounds was actually developed in the late 1990s, your character and course access in the multiplayer is determined by what you’ve unlocked in the challenge mode, which sucks if you’re just interested in some golf with your friends.

Hot Shots fans will probably be getting exactly what they want/expect from the series with Out of Bounds, which is a very tradition-bound golf game whose playful exterior belies some fairly sturdy and familiar gameplay. I’ve personally been pretty cool towards the Hot Shots series for a while now for these exact reasons, and while Out of Bounds has done little to change my mind, there are worse ways to spend a lazy Sunday morning.


systems: ps3 games:

Seismic Activity Detected

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 2, 2008 – 11:09 am

If you’re extra cool (or just extra impatient), you’ve probably been rocking an imported DualShock 3 on your PS3 for a few months now, at least. But if you decided to do the sane thing and wait it out, the wait is going to be over sooner than previously thought. Sony just posted up on its official blog to let the world know we’ll be seeing the $55 controller in stores as early as next week.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the controller Sony should have shipped with in the first place. It’s a little heavier, which gives it a substantial “this won’t disintegrate in your hands” feel, which is something I always feel worried about when handing a standard Sixaxis.

MTV’s king of the east coast game coverage, Stephen Totilo, did a little follow-up work and discovered that the Sixaxis, unsurprisingly, has been discontinued. Once the existing stock of old controllers has been sold out, they’re gone for good.

Sony’s also put together a logo that’ll live on the back of rumble-ready games, but I bet that logo goes away pretty fast, because now that it’s the standard, you can safely expect just about every game coming out to support it. Here’s the list of currently-available games that already have (or, if you see an asterisk, will have as soon as it’s patched) shakin’ support.

SCEA - Formula One Championship Edition* (PS3)
SCEA - MotorStorm* (PS3)
SCEA - PAIN (PSN)
SCEA - High Velocity Bowling (PSN)
SCEA - MLB 08: The Show (PS3)
SCEA - Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (PS3)
SCEA - Resistance: Fall of Man* (PS3)
SCEA - Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)
SCEA - Go! Sports Ski* (PSN)
SCEA - Folklore* (PS3)
SCEA - Heavenly Sword* (PS3)
SCEA - Warhawk* (PSN / PS3)
SCEA - Super Stardust HD* (PSN)
SCEA - Snakeball (PSN)
SCEA - Toy Home (PSN)
SCEA - PSOne Emulation (PSN)
SCEA - Piyotama (PSN)
SCEA - PixelJunk Monsters (PSN)
SCEA - Blast Factor* (PSN)
Sega - Condemned 2: Bloodshot (PS3)
Ubisoft - Lost: Via Domus (PS3)
Ubisoft - Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2* (PS3)
EA - Burnout Paradise (PS3)
KOEI - Dynasty Warriors 6 (PS3)
Capcom - Devil May Cry 4 (PS3)
Atari - Dragon Ball Z Burst Limit (PS3)
Disney Interactive - Turok (PS3)

Yes, friends, Piyotama has rumble support! The world is officially a better place. Hug someone you see on the street today.

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