Category Archives: xbox 360

UT360 Looks Good, Might Not Have Mods

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 20, 2008 – 11:13 am

Do you, the game-playing public, care at all about Unreal Tournament anymore? That’s a question I had to ask myself when I started playing the PC version of Unreal Tournament III after its release late last year. Personally, I was thrilled to see the UT formula updated with a new engine and new potential for modification. But in the months ahead, something didn’t quite feel right. The servers felt a little emptier, and the mod sites felt a little more barren, as well. Had the once-thriving UT community splintered off and gotten into different games?

Checking back in on the PC version of UT3 today, things seem to have picked up a bit on the mapping and modding side. It might not be as hot and heavy as it has been with previous UT games, but there’s a good chunk of interesting content out there already, with more on the horizon.

All of this, from the still-forming mod scene to the lack of players on the PC makes me wonder how well the game will do on the Xbox 360, where it’s scheduled to land this summer, with retail sites reporting the specific, but unofficial date of June 30. After playing an early 360 version, it definitely seems like almost all of the pieces are in place for it to be a great version of a great game.

The game already performs just fine, with a good, sharp frame rate, good control, and plenty of available content. The 360 version has a new split-screen mode, allowing two players to get together on one machine. Also, you’ll get five new maps and two new characters, giving you more out of the box than the game has had on other platforms.

But, of course, there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s the ongoing discussions with Microsoft about user-generated content. The Unreal series has thrived on the PC due to an extremely active community of people making new maps, character models, and mods for the game, and PS3 users have been able to benefit, as UT3 on PS3 does have the hooks in place to use mods and other unofficial content. While representatives for Epic and Midway have indeed said that the talks continue, Microsoft officials have made their stance fairly public: allowing users to download content from the Internet and place it into an Xbox 360 game is too big of a security risk. Without that expandability, the 360 version would be way less exciting than its PC and PS3 counterparts.

Assuming that Microsoft doesn’t change its position, the 360 version of the game will be crippled in a way that the other versions aren’t. 360 players be stuck getting all of their UT3 updates directly from Xbox Live Marketplace. Perhaps Epic and Midway will try to license and collate the best user stuff from the other platforms and release them as regular updates in lieu of handing us the keys directly. But if you’ve been playing UT for any length of time, you already know that isn’t the same thing.

Either way, it’ll be interesting to see how this one turns out.


systems: 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:

Needs More Curry Man

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 19, 2008 – 10:35 am

Wrestling games are weird. While actual professional wrestling places a lot of importance on the stories and feuds between wrestlers that set up the actual matches, most of the wrestling games we’ve seen over the past few console generations have been little more than clumsy fighting games with deliberately-obscured health meters. Midway’s TNA Impact might not be the crazy wrestling action-RPG that still sits in the back of my mind, waiting to be made, but after having played an unfinished version of it at Midway’s annual showcase for the press, I can say that it certainly doesn’t feel clumsy.

It doesn’t feel sluggish, either. The first thing you notice when you pick up the controller is that TNA Impact is fast. It makes sense, considering that TNA’s more exciting matches revolve around what they call the X Division, a group of sometimes-smaller guys that can flip out and go absolutely nuts in the ring. But the game doesn’t seem to sacrifice all of the depth you expect from a wrestling game in favor of raw speed. The controls feel responsive, and they make sense, with buttons for punch, kick, grab, and an action button, which is used to leave the ring, climb turnbuckles, and so on. The left bumper on the 360 controller is used as a modifier to give you regular and “strong” versions of most actions, and the right bumper is used for blocking and countering.

TNA’s single-player takes the form of a story mode, where you create your own wrestler, insert him into the world of TNA and fight your way to the top. There will be multiple match types in Impact, including the basic rule set variations, tag team matches, and so on. At the recent Midway event where I got to play the game, I was able to see the Ultimate X match, which is sort of like a ladder match without the ladders. Instead, a large X hangs from a chain that’s tied to two cables that cross each other high above the ring. So you’ll have to hop up onto a turnbuckle, shimmy your way up some metal rigging to reach the cables, and then make your way out over the center of the ring to try and grab the X and win the match. There are plenty of ways to stop your opponent from reaching this goal, such as climbing out there yourself and grabbing hold of him, or if he’s close enough, a drop kick from the top turnbuckle can also do the trick. If you get out to the X, a little timing-based minigame pops up to make grabbing the X something that takes a bit of time to accomplish.

The game seems to do right by the TNA license, with graphics that accurately reflect the look of TNA, from the Orlando-based Impact Zone to the character models and ring entrances. 25 wrestlers will show up in the final product, including Kurt Angle, Sting, Booker T, Christian Cage, Samoa Joe, AJ Styles, Rhino, Christopher Daniels, Eric Young, Homicide, Hernandez, Tomko, Chris Sabin, Alex Shelley, Jay Lethal, Abyss, Jeff Jarrett, Sonjay Dutt, Robert Roode, Petey Williams, and Scott Steiner. Interestingly, the team at Midway LA is also planning to add additional wrestlers as downloadable content, which could really help keep the rosters up to date. Additional locations to wrestle in and more moves to use with your created wrester are also in the planning stages as future downloads.

On top of showing all this stuff about the game, Midway also took the opportunity to give the game a new release month. It’s now on for September, which replaces the late-June date that had been floating around previously. After playing the game for myself, it feels like the developers are on the right track to provide a solid alternative to the WWE-licensed games we’ve been seeing recently, which seems about right, considering that TNA is providing a solid alternative to WWE on television and pay-per-view.

Ryan and I will further discuss Midway’s upcoming games and its recent Las Vegas-based event on next week’s podcast. In the meantime, here’s Curry Man!


systems: 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:

You Must Think First, Before You Move

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 8, 2008 – 3:50 pm

So, after recording the podcast (which will be up later today), I sat back down at my desk and prepared to dig into some more Dark Sector. Upon getting my 360 dashboard on, I was greeted with a new contest that I was not prepared to handle at all.

Yes, that’s right, it’s the CHESSMASTER LIVE: HIP-HOP WEEKEND. There’s a free gamer picture, which I was hoping would just be a bishop wearing fat gold ropes, but alas, it’s the logo of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation, which apparently actually exists. As expected, their website features a photo of the RZA holding a wrestling-style championship belt.

Seeing the amazing dashboard graphic left me totally incredulous, and I immediately grabbed a camera to snap off a few shots, just to make sure it was really happening and so I could prove I saw it when people started calling me crazy. I was all prepared to get all snide about it, but between seeing the picture of RZA with that belt and seeing that they’re doing it for the youth, I think I’m going to not just run off at the mouth like a total ass.

What other games do you think would benefit from a Hip-Hop Weekend? Aside from free Method Man skins for TiQal, obviously.

systems: xbox 360 games:

Mr. Driller Online - Review

posted by Ryan Davis on April 7, 2008 – 5:54 pm

You’d think that a game about the trials and tribulations of an underaged miner whose primary concerns are avoiding being crushed by the countless tons of cascading rock above his head and praying, oh sweet baby Jesus, that he’s able to find enough pockets of oxygen to extend his relentlessly grim existence would be a little bit more, I dunno, bleak. But Mr. Driller, and by extension, Mr. Driller Online for Xbox Live Arcade, is about as bright and cheery as video games get. Unfortunately, Mr. Driller Online is plagued by a meager selection of gameplay modes and bug-ridden online play that keep it from being worth the $10 price tag.

Mr. Driller is, both philosophically and literally, the child of another subterranean Namco franchise, Dig-Dug. But, rather than hunting down fire-breathing dragons and goggled tomato monsters with a bike pump, your objective is to drill down through a field of odd-shaped, multicolored blocks as fast as you can. As you descend, you’ll have to dodge the falling un-drilled blocks left above you, and you’ve also got a constantly depleting air meter to concern yourself with, which you can replenish with air capsules that you’ll happen upon randomly.

There are a few other concerns, such as blocks that take multiple drills to destroy, blocks that disappear on their own accord, and power-ups that can increase your speed, provide you with a protective bubble shield, or automatically replenish all of your air meter. In addition to Mr. Driller himself, you can play as a variety of other characters, including Taizo–Dig-Douglas to you and me–and each comes with unique stats. The pacing is manic, and it’s definitely more action than puzzle.

One of the problems with Mr. Driller Online is one that is endemic to the entire franchise. Despite the fact that there have been no less than six ostensibly different Mr. Driller games over the past nine years, Mr. Driller Online isn’t terribly different from the 1999 Japanese arcade original. Some franchises can get away with this kind of recycling, but the gameplay in Mr. Driller is a little too thin to justify it. The problem extends beyond the gameplay, though, as Mr. Driller Online employs fuzzy character sprites that look like they date back to the start of the series. The game itself emanates the kind of sharp tones that you only hear in video games, though the background music is surprisingly organic and catchy, with lots of live instruments and some simple vocals. It almost sounds like a b-side from a Katamari soundtrack, though it’s not the only reason you’ll want to linger at the menu screen.

Perhaps the straightforward gameplay wouldn’t be such a problem if there were plenty of levels and modes of play, but in the single-player game there are only two modes, each with five levels that only seem to really differ in background theme. The standard driller mode just has you working your way to the bottom of increasingly deep mines. The quest driller mode does the same, though every hundred meters you’re given a new secondary rule that you must abide by, lest the game end automatically. You’ll have to drill through sections with a time limit hanging over you, only using a number of air capsules, not using any power-ups, and so on. The quest driller mode provides a nice twist on the standard gameplay, but it’s simply not enough.

At this point I’d talk about the online component of Mr. Driller Online, though in the greatest of ironies, it’s currently busted beyond use, and nearly a week after its release, there are no apparent signs of a patch. It’s kind of heartbreaking for me, because I have extremely fond memories of the original Mr. Driller, which, during an era rich with insane Japanese games, was one of the most charming. I would gladly welcome a Mr. Driller game with sharp, HD-friendly graphics, a robust single-player game, and functional online play with open arms, but this isn’t it.


systems: xbox 360 games:

Call of Duty 4 Variety Map Pack - Review

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 7, 2008 – 2:37 pm

The concept of paying for map packs has never sat particularly well with me. Part of that is the PC game player in me talking, who is used to getting maps and mods for free. The other part is that by the time a developer gets around to putting out maps, I’ve usually moved on to another game and don’t really see a great reason to go back.

I’ve stuck with Call of Duty 4–Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year for 2007–going back to it pretty regularly since its release. And the multiplayer is so enjoyable that I didn’t hesitate when it came time to drop 800 points ($10) on four new maps, known collectively as the Variety Map Pack. The good news is that these new maps are easily as good as, if not better than many of the maps that come with the game, making it a terrific addition for players who have stuck with the game, as well as an awesome reason for any fans who have since drifted off to other shooters to come running back.

Killhouse is the smallest of the four maps, and if you stick to the larger team-based playlists, you may never encounter it. Right now, it’s tucked away in the Cage Match and Team Tactical playlists. Its size makes it most comparable to Shipment, another small COD4 map. That means if you decide to pack it full of players, it’s completely insane, with explosions and death surrounding you at all times. Used as probably intended–as a map with no more than four players on it–it becomes a slow-moving game of staying quiet and trying to catch the opposition slipping. The theme of the map is graphically similar to the single-player’s training map, though layout-wise, it’s more like an indoor paintball arena, with lots of plywood walls and basic cement cover to hide behind.

Broadcast is, like some of the other multiplayer maps that come with COD4, based on a portion of the single-player campaign. Here, you’ll be able to run around the TV studio which has a large open newsroom area that you can hide in if you keep low and stick to the cubicle walls. But it’s not the most effective hiding spot, because it’s easy to set up overwatch on that entire room from the second story. Like Vacant, most of the fighting takes place indoors, but at a longer distance, making shotguns less effective here. There are a few outdoor spots and other external buildings, though, so airstrikes and choppers aren’t completely ineffective.

Creek is the map pack’s largest map, and it feels like it’s the largest map in the entire game. It’s an outdoor area with a creek running through it, with a handful of small houses and a cave. There are two high, flat areas in this map, making it possible for teams of opposing snipers to go at it while guys with assault rifles and SMGs attempt to work their way through the caves or around the outer creek edge in order to get around behind the enemy. This map feels the most unlike the other maps in COD4, but the outdoor/indoor play reminds me of Overgrown in a few spots.

Chinatown is probably the most exciting map for long-time Call of Duty players, as it’s a remake of a map called Carentan, which appeared in both of the first two games in the series. Visually, the French look of Carentan has been replaced with DVD shops, laundromats, and so on. This map is all about multistory buildings, and players that spend too much time running up the middle of the streets are just going to end up getting plinked by an enemy poking out of a window. A few turrets are dropped around the map to keep things honest, including one that’s set up right next to where bombsite B is in Search & Destroy games. With its good mix of tight indoor areas and the streets, which are peppered with plenty of opportunities to take cover, Chinatown feels seriously unlike anything found in the rest of the game. Thematically, it’s also the one environment that doesn’t feel like it could be dropped into some part of COD4’s campaign.

Of course, part of why these maps work so well is that they’re Call of Duty 4 maps. COD4’s multiplayer is a tremendous success because it already has some terrific maps on the disc, as well as a well-thought-out rank advancement system, perks that let you customize your loadouts a bit beyond the standard weapon configurations, and a variety of modes to play, too.

Tossing in four more high-quality maps only makes the whole thing that much better. Whether you’re still playing COD4 or are looking for a reason to come back to it, these maps are most definitely worth your time and money.


systems: xbox 360 games: ,

This Week’s COD4 Map Pack Still On, Popping

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 2, 2008 – 3:47 pm

The reports starting flying yesterday, claiming that the upcoming Call of Duty 4 Variety Map Pack was going to get bumped off a week and release on the 10th. Not so, claims Infinity Ward through its Director of Communications, Fourzerotwo.

From his blog:

“As of right now we’re pushing certification for an on-time release for April 3rd or 4th. As of right now though, I’m being told that it’s a good chance it will be released worldwide (except for Japan) tomorrow night / early-Friday morning.”

This is, of course, for the 360 version. PS3 is said to hit in a few weeks, and the PC plans are still sneaky secrets.

I would like to just thank/curse Infinity Ward in advance for ruining my weekend. I was so totally going to go outside, too.

systems: xbox 360 games: ,

Viking: Battle for Asgard - Review

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on April 1, 2008 – 2:32 pm

Viking: Battle for Asgard has some really great things going for it, mostly on the mechanical side. The combat is just deep enough to keep you engaged, and the character upgrades you get feel meaningful. The problem is that everything is counterbalanced by a quest that quickly grows stale and repetitive after its first third. Even the final boss fight is just a minor twist on an encounter you’ll have done at least five times before. It all averages out into a likable action game that could have been a lot more.

You play as a burly viking named Skarin, who has been brought back from the dead to be a goddesses’ champion. In doing her bidding, you bump up against evil Legion forces controlled by the goddess known as Hel. The entire game is spent with you trying to push back Hel’s forces and reclaim territory by freeing trapped humans. Once you’ve completed all of the tasks in a given area, it’s time for your newly-massed forces to rage into battle against a Legion stronghold. These large-scale battles recall some of developer Creative Assembly’s previous work with the Total War games, but make no mistake, there are no serious tactics or strategy to be found here. This is strictly action.

That means your main way of interacting with the world is by hacking it up with the sword and axe that Skarin always has at the ready or by hammering on a button to untie viking hostages, unlock doors, and open chests. The combat uses a light and strong attack button, and as you play and earn gold, you can spend it at an arena to learn a host of more devastating maneuvers. The combat never gets too tricky, but some of the moves you’ll purchase make Skarin a much more survivable guy. It’s less combo-oriented than something like God of War, but the handful of Quick Time Event sequences certainly make for some similarities.

You’ll also upgrade your magic abilities, which come in the three flavors of ice, lightning, and fire. As you kill enemies, you collect red orbs that fuel your magic meter. Activating it drains the entire meter over time, giving you access to the elemental power of your choice. Here’s a tip from me to you: choose ice. It freezes enemies when you slap them with your sword, making a second attack a death by shattering. It’s the perfect ability for crowd-control, and the other two powers felt entirely useless to me, even with them upgraded all the way. Since money is easy to earn, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to upgrade everything and purchase every move before the game’s end, so don’t worry about making upgrade mistakes.

So the bulk of the game is spent setting up for the large-scale invasion missions, and you’ll do this by running around to free trapped vikings. Then you’ll often have to perform a simple task for them before they’ll realize that you’re down for the cause and join forces with your army. Sometimes this means taking out a roaming enemy force. Usually it means running a very basic fetch quest. The repetitive action of freeing vikings from different camps by hacking up enemies is Viking’s downfall. This might have been a bit easier to take if the game’s terrain was more action-packed, but there’s nothing to see or do when you’re running between points of interest on your map. Enemies don’t roam around randomly or anything, making the whole game feel like you’re playing delivery man, whether you’re delivering death to Legion troops or delivering honey to heal a camp’s soldiers.

Visually, though, Viking’s world is done nicely. There are plenty of instances of good lighting and quality shadows. And despite the fact that there isn’t much to do in the world, the world itself does look good, and it’s neat how areas transform from dark to light as you free them from Legion control. The lone graphical issue is that when you get into the larger battles, where armies clash around you, the frame rate can take a serious dive. The sound effects leave a lot to be desired, as well. I prefer my vikings to shout and shriek more than the mostly-silent Skarin does, and the death cries from your foes aren’t so great, either.

Viking: Battle for Asgard has good graphics and some solid ideas at its core, but the lack of content and variety really holds it back. I immediately liked Viking, but as the repetition set in and made it clear that I was in for another six-to-eight hours of the same few activities, my initial impression gave way to disappointment.


systems: xbox 360 games:

TiQal - Review

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on March 31, 2008 – 11:39 am

Here’s that Mayan-themed Xbox Live Arcade puzzle game you’ve been waiting for. Oh, what’s that you say? You already have Luxor 2, Jewel Quest, and Zuma? Oh. Well, technically, isn’t Jewel Quest set in Egypt? Totally different, dude.

All kidding aside, TiQal is a bit different from the other pyramid-and-human-sacrifice-friendly puzzle games available on the 360. But the gameplay can be summed up as Lumines for lazy people, and presentation is so rote that you’ll have to pay close attention to prevent yourself from thinking that you’re playing one of the other Live Arcade puzzle games based on an ancient culture.

TiQal gives you a widescreen block pit to work with, and the removal rules work like Lumines, so when you create a two-by-two block of the same color, it lights up. You can expand these shapes by dropping more and more of the same colored block, making for large block explosions. Rather than work rhythmically, like Lumines, active blocks in TiQal stay in the pit for a bit, lit up for easy identification. If you can keep dumping blocks onto that combo and extend it, it’ll stay in the pit. Leave it alone for too long, and it’ll burst, giving you your points and, if it’s a big enough break, a power-up or two.

The blocks you’re given at the top of the screen vary in shape, and you’ll unlock more complicated shapes as you proceed through the game. The blocks don’t drop on their own. Instead, the pressure comes from the rising of the pit itself. But it doesn’t seem to get so fast that it becomes too challenging, and by the time you’ve advanced far enough in the game to see it get difficult, you’ll have accumulated so many extra lives that it won’t be much of a hassle to deal with. A meter at the bottom of the screen fills as you break blocks, and when it’s full, you move on to the next level.

Between levels, you’re shown a quick page of text detailing how you’re trying to get jaguar teeth or corn or something to offer to the gods of the pyramid you’re trying to enter. I’m really not sure who wrote the memo that puzzle games need some kind of half-hearted story, but it feels like a real waste of effort, considering nothing in the gameplay actually changes or plays off of those story bits.

If you like, you can play the game with a friend, cooperatively, online or off. This just lets you drop twice as many blocks into the pit and doesn’t seem to set up any interesting strategic differences.

It’s thoroughly unexciting and visually uninspired, but that’s more the fault of TiQal’s place in history. If it had been one of the first puzzle games on the service, it might stand out a bit more. But now, despite its passable gameplay, it’s hard to not just say “wow, they made another one of these?” and move on.


systems: xbox 360 games:

Top Ten Weapons We’d Like to See in Condemned 3

posted by Ryan Davis on March 29, 2008 – 8:01 am

Feather Pillow

Blender

Ice Cream Scoop

“Back Massager”

Rake

The Stanley Cup

Booger from Revenge of the Nerds

Sarcasm

Busted Xbox 360

Piñata

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Condemned 2: Bloodshot - Review

posted by Ryan Davis on March 27, 2008 – 4:03 pm

Bowling pins. Toilet seats. Drive shafts. Deer antlers. These are just a few of the makeshift weapons that you will beat your deranged, uncontrollably violent opponents to death with in Condemned 2: Bloodshot. This first-person action adventure game is far and away the most unflinchingly sadistic and gruesome video game I’ve ever played, outclassing its predecessor in virtually every way possible. This is a game that puts faint hearts and weak stomachs through a battery of tests, but if you’re up for it, Condemned 2 is thoroughly and brutally entertaining.

Special agent Ethan Thomas, the two-fisted protagonist from Condemned: Criminal Origins, is in bad shape after the events of the first game. Having quit SCU, the law enforcement agency he was previously working for, Ethan now spends his time drinking in dodgy bars, hiding from the creeping darkness and twisted hallucinations that haunt his every waking moment. However, it would seem that the case from Criminal Origins still has some loose ends, and you end up getting dragged back into the investigation of the nefarious forces behind the widespread madness that chokes the city.

While the story in Criminal Origins was deliberately disorienting and brimming with unanswered questions, Bloodshot makes a point of explaining the seemingly unexplainable insanity that has been a driving force in the series so far. It’s not necessary to have played Criminal Origins to appreciate the grimy setting and relentless brutality of Bloodshot, though the story revelations probably won’t resonate if you haven’t. If nothing else, the conclusion of Bloodshot leaves you with the promise of something exciting and different in Condemned 3.

Like Criminal Origins, the action in Bloodshot is an 80/20 split between hand-to-hand combat and forensic investigation, though it expands on and adjusts both in a number of meaningful ways. First-person melee combat is an exceptionally difficult concept to pull off convincingly, due to the disconnect from your “body” that’s felt in most FPS games, where your presence in the world is defined by the barrel of your gun. While there are a handful of firearms in Bloodshot, ammo is usually scarce enough that you’ll be using your fists, along with whatever else you can pick up, to take on your enemies most of the time. Even when there are firearms at your disposal, you’ll likely opt for the hands-on approach, just because it’s so damn satisfying. The mechanic of guzzling bottles of hard liquor to steady your aim with firearms is an entertainingly morose idea, but you just can’t beat caving in a dude’s skull with a rod from a foosball table.

The basic combat assigns each of your fists to a different button, and pressing both at the same time will allow you to block or parry incoming attacks, almost making it feel like a no-holds-barred boxing game. There’s a new combo system that rewards you with more punishing attacks when you’re able to land a number of consecutive blows without getting hit yourself, encouraging you fight somewhat intelligently, rather than with pure, blind rage. You can activate chain attacks by double-tapping one of your attack buttons, which will slow down the action and prompt you with a string of button presses which, if done successfully, can result in some exceptionally savage attacks.

Opponents will drop to their knees when they’re at the verge of death, at which point you can grab them and execute them using an environmental kill, which can range from tossing them in a dumpster to crushing their head in an industrial press. Save for an awesome–if shamefully underutilized–late-game addition, the core combat in Condemned 2 doesn’t really change that much over the course of the game. The constant change of scenery and the regular introduction of new objects, new combos, and new chain attacks with which you dispense your murderous justice, however, are just enough to keep your attention throughout.

You’ll occasionally take a break from all the bone-crushing violence to do a little crime-scene investigating. You’ll use a UV light to turn up blood trails, take photos of evidence with a digital camera, navigate serpentine environments with a GPS unit, and sniff out the sonic emitters that are driving everyone totally bananas with a sepctrometer. The most interesting aspect of the forensics stuff is the way you’re rated on the quality of the questions you ask Rosa, your in-ear contact back at SCU, and the accuracy of the evidence reports you submit. The separation between the combat and the forensics still feels a little odd, though by forcing you to do a little quiet meditating on the net results of all this violence, it keeps the game from feeing too relentless.

A lurid, rundown atmosphere is a significant factor in what makes Bloodshot so engrossing. The environments are consistently filthy and busted, with either harsh lighting that creates lots of unnerving shadows, or no lighting at all, forcing you to rely on your flashlight to make your way. Bloodshot sounds as nasty as it looks, with a static-washed, screaming soundtrack that creates a perpetual sense of dread, sickening thuds and crunches punctuating the intimately punishing combat, and some of the most convincingly rage-filled epithets you’ll hear in a game. You’ll hear muffled movement and muttering from rooms away, reinforcing the sense that there’s someone (or something) right around the corner, ready to tear you to pieces.

The single-player game in Bloodshot is probably about as long as Criminal Origins was, though Bloodshot definitely maintains a better momentum throughout. Bloodshot also features some multiplayer modes that are interesting in theory, but in the plainest of terms, the melee combat just doesn’t work well in a multiplayer context. While I’m generally not much of a fan of gore-porn like Saw or Hostel, I loved Condemned 2 start to finish, despite it coming from a similarly depraved place. This game is all raw nerves and bloody fists, so if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll find plenty of both in the equally damaging Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Condemned 2: Bloodshot.


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 - Review

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on March 27, 2008 – 1:07 pm

With a campaign that’s more of a different take on the first game’s story than an actual follow-up, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 feels more like a mission pack with minor corrections than a full-fledged sequel. While that will probably leave some players feeling disappointed, the tactical action formula still works just fine, resulting in an occasionally-clunky but still solid tactical shooter.

The gameplay consists of the same sort of tactical shooting action that was found in the first game. You roll from checkpoint to checkpoint, taking cover behind objects and telling your AI-controlled dudes to bust through doors and gun down people for you. You’ll occasionally encounter a hostage situation, which requires you to be a bit more careful with your fire. But the game doesn’t rely too heavily on the tactical aspects of play, letting you solve most of your problems by shooting quickly and accurately. That’s not to say the game is especially easy, though. It requires a lot of patience, because if you go charging around, you’ll get laid down pretty quickly. Instead, you need to think about your squadmates, consider what’s behind every door, and act accordingly.

A lot of that slow play is removed by the game’s two-player co-op mode. While the game tells more of the story in co-op mode this time around, it’s still a very different experience. When a player goes down, he respawns in ten seconds, provided the other human player doesn’t get dropped during that time. Weirdly enough, the two AI squadmates are also present, and only the host can control them. This makes the second player feel disconnected from the action because he has no real tactical involvement–he’s just a shooter. He’s also weirdly silent–even though the second player can tag enemies while using the snake cam, there’s no dialogue to say “hit him first” or “he’s priority two” or anything like that.

The respawn feature makes the game way easier, as you can just run through blasting guys without any real care as to whether or not you stay alive. Depending on your personal enjoyment of stealthy tactics, this can either dumb the game down a bit too far or make things way more exciting. As long as the other player knows to back off when you go down, everything is fine. Making matters weirder, your AI squadmates still have to be manually revived. Seems like making the human players revivable the same way the AI guys are would make more sense and help maintain some sense of discipline, but then again, I had a lot more fun just running around blasting dudes without having to worry about a serious death penalty.

Regardless of how you play it, the story mode is tough to follow, especially if you didn’t finish the previous Rainbow Six Vegas game or don’t pay attention during the first mission. The game opens with a five-year-old flashback, then fast-forwards to the same timeline as the previous game, with most of the game running concurrently to the first Vegas. When I reached the end of the game–a dopey encounter that didn’t feel as smooth as the rest of the opposition–I had no idea who this guy was standing in front of me, or why he was giving me some long speech about why he turned out so evil.

With the difficult-to-follow story, it’s a good thing that the shooting itself is so much fun. Popping in and out of cover is easy and handled very well, making it more about lining up your shots and putting bullets into terrorists, rather than fumbling around with cover. Ordering your team around is really easy, too, with plenty of context-sensitive moments for getting them to use ropes, stack up on doors, and so on. There’s a real sense of satisfaction that comes from breaching rooms and taking out the opposition before they can even figure out what’s going on.

That said, it’ll take new players a little while to get used to all of the controls, especially because some buttons have multiple functions depending on if you press and release a button or hold it down. Plus, if you’ve been playing copious amounts of Call of Duty 4, expect to toss at least one inadvertent grenade at your feet when trying to duck. I learned that the hard way.

Beyond the campaign mode, there’s also a terrorist hunt mode, where you, either with your AI teammates or up to three human players, fight off a posse of terrorists in the game’s multiplayer levels. You’re stuck with limited respawns, forcing you to be pretty careful. There’s also a full-on online mode for up to 14 players on the PS3, and 16 on the Xbox 360. You’ll find the typical assortment of objective-based modes, as well as deathmatch options. The 360 version has a ranked game option that locks down the options to limit respawns. Unranked games on 360 and all games on the PS3 give you plenty of options to play around with, including the ability to limit what weapons players can use, should you decide that the game’s auto-shotgun is way out of control and overpowered.

The adversarial multiplayer is awesome when you’re playing with a group of similarly-skilled players, and the game’s maps offer enough variety to keep you interested for a good amount of time. The cover mechanics don’t always work quite as well when playing against humans, since any exposed body part will immediately get hit by a skilled player, but this just forces you to be more careful when taking on real people.

Vegas 2 puts a fat COD4-like experience bar at the bottom of the screen as you play, regardless of mode. This works just as well here as it did in Infinity Ward’s shooter, giving you a clear sense of progression as you play. Ranking up unlocks weapons, armor, and new clothing for your character. A new system called A.C.E.S. gives you more ways to level up by tracking your progress in three categories: marksmanship, close-quarters battle, and assault. When you eliminate enemies in a way that falls into one of these three buckets–such as getting headshots, killing enemies from behind, or using grenades–you’ll earn points in that category. When you earn enough points in a category, it will level up and you’ll either get a big bonus for your main experience points counter, or you’ll unlock an additional weapon. These simple goals make it very easy for Vegas 2 to sink its hooks into you and get addictive. It’s also great that every game type, from the campaign mode to unranked online matches, all feed into the same pool of XP. So you’ll always feel like you’re progressing.

The differences between the 360 and PS3 versions of Vegas 2 feel pretty minor. Both let you use the camera to map your face onto your character, both control just as well, and both have the same achievement set–though, obviously, only the 360 version will contribute to an overall score, the PS3’s set of ribbons and awards are entirely self-contained. The PS3 version of the game also opens with a mandatory install process that places around 2.5GB of data onto your hard drive. If you’re the sort of person who gets all up in arms over installing console games, this will be the sort of thing that gets you all up in arms.

There have been a lot of reports about the PS3 version having serious online problems, but I didn’t encounter anything too game-breaking in either version. The game doesn’t respond especially well to lag, making the action jumpy and unplayable if the player running the server doesn’t have enough bandwidth. There seem to be a few sound bugs in both versions as well. Online, I ran into cases in both versions where some effect would seem to get stuck, resulting in endless looping gunfire. Offline, I also ran into cases where bullets that were fired nearby would sound more muffled than they should, or spots where my weapon, or the guns being held by my teammates, stopped making noise entirely. I noticed a bit more of that on the 360 version than on the PS3. So the game is sloppy in a few spots, but overall, it never felt like a huge deal.

I ended up enjoying Rainbow Six Vegas 2 a lot more than the first game, even though they’re pretty similar overall. The online options really give you a healthy amount of things to see and do, and the XP and A.C.E.S. systems constantly egg you on every time you get a headshot or kill someone at range. If you played the first game to death and are absolutely ready for more, Vegas 2 is right up your alley, but all those similarities mean that you’ll probably burn out on this one a bit faster.


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Achievements We’d Like to See: Blood on the Sand Edition

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on March 26, 2008 – 3:38 pm

After eating a sandwich and taking a couple of hours to collect myself, I feel ready to deal with a world that will eventually see the release of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. To celebrate my newfound mental stability, we’ve compiled a list of achievements we’d like to see in this upcoming “banger.”

Take Nine and Smile - 45 points
Get hit with exactly nine bullets and finish the level without dying.

Get Rich… - 50 points
Collect 120 Vitamin Water stock certificates.

…Or Die Trying - 0 points
Die 20 times at the same checkpoint.

Currrrtiiiiis! - 55 points
Find the hidden pool area and smoke Cam’Ron.

Take Back Pun’s Rhyme Book - 50 points
Infiltrate Fat Joe’s apartment and leave with the key to his success.

Game Over - 50 points
Tattoo another butterfly on The Game’s face.

16+1 - 50 points
Time your Active Reload perfectly for a Fully Loaded Clip

Graduation Day - 50 points
Hijack 25 trucks to prevent Kanye’s new album from ever reaching store shelves.

Relevancy - 150 points
Shoot and get shot enough to maintain relevance with an increasingly-fickle music-buying public.

Real American Hero - 500 points
Take down Osama Bin Laden and shut down his CD bootlegging factory.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

My Mind!

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on March 26, 2008 – 12:28 pm

We talked about the EGM cover on yesterday’s podcast, and today MTV has the details on the next 50 Cent game. The game will be called 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. Vivendi will handle publishing on 360 and PS3 this fall, and development is coming from Swordfish Studios, the company that brought you Cold Winter, World Championship Rugby, and Brian Lara International Cricket 2005.

I had started to steel myself upon seeing that there would be another 50 Cent game. But I was not prepared to deal with it so soon. I was also caught totally unprepared to deal with the game’s details, which actually make it sound kind of cool and as ridiculous as a 50 Cent game would need to be to work in 2008.

Here’s a quick burst of poorly-organized facts. According to the MTV story, the game will run on Unreal Engine 3 and will allow for online co-op with drop in/drop out capabilities. 50 will wear desert camo. Player 2 can play as Tony Yayo, Whoo Kid, or Lloyd Banks.

I know what you’re saying, you’re saying “what about Young Buck?” I don’t know, friends. I just don’t know. Maybe all those rumors from last year about Young Buck leaving G-Unit will come to pass in ‘08? Or maybe they just don’t have him confirmed yet.

The game will have cover mechanics. It will have a story that the game’s producer describes as “Three Kings meets Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.” It will have vehicle missions where one player mans the gun on a Humvee while the other drives. And so on.

My immediate sense of disgust at the concept has already given way to cautious optimism. The preview builds of 50 Cent: Bulletproof tricked me into thinking that game could be good. Have I already been tricked again?

Please, just leave me alone. I’m going to be in a fragile state for the rest of the day while I try to pick up the pieces. Go over to MTV for the original story, as well as a handful of screenshots of Polygonal 50 Cent poking out from behind cover to smoke fools.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Bully: Scholarship Edition - Review

posted by Ryan Davis on March 26, 2008 – 12:27 pm

It’s rare for a game publisher to have an immediately identifiable style, but there’s no mistaking Bully for anything other than a Rockstar game. The mechanical comparisons to Grand Theft Auto are fairly apt, though the tone isn’t quite as nasty, and your transgressions not as deplorable–if Grand Theft Auto were a felony, Bully would be a misdemeanor. Like GTA, Bully is an engrossing experience that showcases what Rockstar does best: create an evocative caricature of the real world with dark wit, then put you in the role of a thuggish anti-hero who’s unafraid of trouble. There’s something thoroughly satisfying about getting to play out your prankish schoolboy fantasies, though it’s the game’s excellence that makes the technical shortcomings specific to Bully: Scholarship Edition on the Xbox 360 so heartbreaking.

Bully takes place primarily at Bullworth Academy, which unmistakably evokes the brick-and-ivy feel of an upscale private New England school. Just beneath its picturesque surface, though, seethes a merciless clique system that has everyone bullying whomever they can. The faculty is no better than the students, consisting of perverts, drunks, bullies, and corrupt megalomaniacs. You get dropped into the middle of this ruthless sociopolitical microcosm as 15-year-old Jimmy Hopkins, a freckled fireplug of a kid who has a keen disrespect for authority, as well as a general distaste for being bullied. Based on his propensity for violence, as well as the ease with which other characters are able to lead him into doing their bidding for them, Jimmy could easily be a descendant of Vice City protagonist Tommy Vercetti. While Tommy favored automatic weapons and vehicular manslaughter, Jimmy tends to trade in schoolyard brawls and slingshots.

Though the story ostensibly revolves around your dealings with a conniving classmate named Gary, a medicated sociopath with designs on running the whole school, you’ll spend most of your time infiltrating and overthrowing the various cliques at Bullworth, one at a time. As grim as the setting and story might sound, Bully manages to maintain a cheeky sense of humor throughout, often evoking the slobs-versus-snobs tone of an 80s teen comedy. You’ll leave a flaming surprise in front of the door of the teacher’s lounge on Halloween, egg the rich kid’s house, go on a late-night panty raid in the girl’s dorm, sabotage the big football game, and eventually become the big man on campus. The storytelling itself can be a little clunky at times–you have virtually no contact with your nemesis for most of the game, and certain subplots are abruptly left to whither and die–but the tone is much more consistent.

Part of what really sets Bully apart from your typical open-world game is the greater sense of structure inherent to going to school. You’ve got classes twice a day, which play out as thematically appropriate minigames that can be fun, and which confer various bonuses when completed successfully. Of course, juvenile delinquent that you are, you can also choose to skip class, though if you do you’ll have to keep a keen eye out for school prefects and other authority figures keen on dragging you back to class. The same goes for if you’re caught outside your dorm after curfew. Unlike the apparently meth-addicted GTA protagonists for whom day and night are a single, uninterrupted blur, Jimmy needs a good six hours of sleep a night, and if he’s not in a bed by 2AM, he’ll pass out on the spot. While all this might sound restrictive, it’s loose enough that you have plenty of time to take on missions and get up to all types of no good.

You do plenty of scrapping in Bully, though what’s most interesting about the combat is the way it’s influenced by your current social standing. The cliques in Bully are much like the gangs in GTA–taking on missions for one clique will invariably affect your standing with another, which will affect how aggressive certain students are towards you. Jimmy’s good with his fists and can handle most one-on-one brawls with ease, though if you get overwhelmed it’s not hard to run away, hide in a trash can, or duck into a nearby locker. You can use diplomacy and bribes to keep antagonistic students and prefects off your case, and this same system allows you to court the ladies (and a few of the fellas) around campus, plying them with chocolates and flowers for a quick, health-replenishing make-out session.

As you progress through the story, you’ll start to explore the nearby city of Bullworth, which provides a cutting portrayal of a sleepy little town stratified by class, and you’ll also gain access to a skateboard, and later on, a bike that make travel easier. A well-realized open world is only really meaningful if there’s lots of fun stuff to do, and in this regard, Bully is a veritable playground of mischief. A quick look at the in-game stats screen gives you a good sense of what you can do, including, but not limited to, starting food fights, egging cars, throwing firecrackers into toilets, giving wedgies, competing in go-kart and bike races, hitting people with stink bombs, water balloons, and itching powder, take on a paper route, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, entering boxing matches, taking photos for the school yearbook, spraying graffiti, breaking into lockers, playing arcade games, and more. The individual activities aren’t always terribly engaging on their own, but the sheer volume more than makes up for it.

Bully: Scholarship Edition sports a few new bells and whistles not found in the original PlayStation 2 version, including eight new missions, four new classes, and four new characters. Based on the few hours of Bully that I played when it originally hit the PS2, their impact on the single-player game seem subtle. There are also a handful of two-player minigames that have been adapted from some of the carnival and classroom minigames found in the single-player game, but without the greater context they’re forgettable. The visual fidelity of Bully has been improved considerably in bringing it to the 360, with cleaner textures, better lighting, and HD support, though it’s still blocky enough that you can tell this is a slightly gussied up PS2 game. The music is absolutely fantastic, with an overall sound that I can only describe as sounding like a 1960s spy movie scored by Danny Elfman, before he completely ran out of ideas. I rarely care for video game soundtracks outside the context of the game, but the music in Bully is just so unique and catchy that it’s still compelling entirely on its own.

Sadly, a good deal of the goodwill that Bully: Scholarship Edition rightfully deserves is undercut by persistent frame-rate issues, long load times, weird draw-distance issues, and a general instability that caused the game to lock up a good half-dozen times on me. Rockstar has since released a downloadable update for the game that purports to address this stuff, though on the two relatively new Xbox 360s that I’ve tested the game on, it actually makes things worse, adding flickery textures and skipping audio to the existing problems. I’ve heard scattered anecdotes claiming that the patch does in fact smooth out the game’s technical wrinkles for some people, so it might be a bit of a crap shoot as to whether the patch will do anything for you or not.

As much of a bummer as the bugginess of Bully: Scholarship Edition for the Xbox 360 is, the underlying game is still extremely well-crafted, and I was happy to sink a good 20 hours into the game, though a good portion of that time was admittedly spent chasing after achievement points. Whether you’ll want to do the same will hinge on your tolerance for technical issues, and your desire to act out your misanthropic high-school fantasies.


systems: xbox 360 games:

If I Could Turn Back Time

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on March 25, 2008 – 10:47 am

You may or may not agree with what Jonathan Blow has to say about video games, their role as art, and their role in society. You know what? You may never have heard of Jonathan Blow at all. He’s a man that clearly takes games quite seriously, and you can find some compelling writing from him online. But all you really need to know for now is that he’s the man behind Braid, an upcoming release for Xbox Live Arcade and PC.

If you really want to strip it all down to its barest surface, Braid is an homage to Super Mario Bros. You jump on top of creatures to kill them, big plants pop in and out of pipes, there’s a castle with a flagpole at the end of the world, and so on. Of course, if that were all the game did, it wouldn’t be anything special. In fact, it’d probably be actionable. Braid’s big difference is that you have control over time itself. That lets you rewind your mistakes to prevent death, its first useful feature. But it only took a few minutes for me to realize that Braid isn’t primarily a platformer. It’s a puzzle game. You’re eased into the time controls, but each world makes changes to how things work. For one example, you’ll eventually encounter certain enemies, keys, doors, or other pieces of the world that are covered in sparkles. This denotes that they don’t move backwards when you rewind time. So you’ll need to account for that. From there, things get much trickier and very entertaining.

The game feels like it was at least partially inspired by all the tool-assisted speed run videos that are out there online, created by players using emulators and save states to rewind all of their mistakes and present a perfect run-through of classic console games. The game will have a speed runs option on its main menu, but it won’t be immediately available.

There’s also a story here, one that plays off of the gameplay’s concepts. Furthering the Nintendo homage, the lead character, named Tim, is on the hunt for a princess, and you’ll bend time as you attempt to find her. Along the way, you’ll collect puzzle pieces, which you can assemble into some story-related artwork.

Though that’s really all there is to Braid in a pure gameplay-and-story sense, I feel like I’m only scratching the surface. The unfinished PC release I played made an immediate impression, both because it’s well-made and because it tells its princess-seeking story in an interesting way. I won’t go on to ruin any of the puzzles or describe how the time mechanic is altered from world to world, because that seems like something you should see for yourself when the game is released later this spring.

Or, if you’re interested in seeing more, check out the game’s official site.


systems: pc, xbox 360 games:

TiQallion Stallion Comes Through This Wednesday

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on March 24, 2008 – 10:22 am

This week’s Xbox Live Arcade release has been confirmed to be TiQal, from the hilariously-named Slapdash Games. We’re not sure why Method Man would allow his trademark sub-nickname to be used in some kind of Mayan-themed puzzle game, or why he’d let them misspell Tical with a big, giant Q in the middle, but nonetheless, the staff here at Giant Bomb is extremely excited to see that Johnny Blaze, also known as The Iron Lung, The Panty Raider, Hott Nikkels, and Clifford Smith, is finally lending his likeness to a puzzle game.

I have to imagine there will be a lengthy and terrific TV and radio campaign for this release, centered around Meth appearing in a puff of smoke next to an 11-year-old boy shouting “What’s that puzzle game that you’re playin’? TiQaaaaaal! TiQaaaaaaal, TiQaaaaaaal!”