My Time with the Helicopter Ride Simulator
I've never been in a helicopter. At least not for real. One time I was in a very small plane. That was pretty cool, but then we landed and they actually let me get out of the very small plane and then I wasn't in the very small plane anymore. Which inversely reminds me of a game I've been playing called We're Going To Make You Sit In a Helicopter and Give You Control Of Only Your Head In Order to Torture You By Reminding You That Yes This Is an Interactive Medium But We're Only Going To Let You Interact With It In the Most Minute Way Possible and Oh Yeah Now Here's Some Guys To Shoot; What You're Dead? So, Now We're Going To Make You Sit In a Helicopter and Give You Control Of Only Your Head...
That was the working title. Unfortunately for Ubisoft, and infinite, looping, run-on sentence didn't fit on the box, so they had to call it Rainbow Six Vegas. Also: calling the previous a “working” title was a bit of a misnomer, as none of the development staff could get any work done due to the fact that they were all still repeating the title. For the first few years of development, the game consisted of only these few lines of code:
10 IF player_position$ <> “helicopter” THEN player_position$ = “helicopter”
20 player_position$ = “somewhere fun”
30 GOTO 10
After the project was renamed and people could think about things other than infinite loops, somebody realized they had written the code in BASIC, which is totally retarded, so they had to start from scratch. Development costs being what they are, “scratch” in this case consisted of porting the existing code to C++. (Aside: don't let XNA fool you, when real devs make real games, they don't use C fucking #.) (Aside to the aside: the only real reason I put that sentence in here is I really wanted to put the F word between C and #.) (Aside to the aside of the aside: is there a proper MLA style for placing multiple parenthetic groups together? Asking the reader for grammar advice is so professional it hurts.)
Just like the “working” title states, after the massively realistic simulation of sitting in a helicopter, turning your head at weird angles, and being totally bored out of your fucking skull (which is such an amazing simulation that you'll swear you're actually sitting there being totally bored out of your fucking skull!) After that, you get to shoot some guys for a while. This part of the game is actually pretty fun.
Oh, except when you're not shooting guys but instead telling your AI squad mates to shoot guys... which is actually pretty much all the time. So, in Rainbow Six Vegas, you sit in a helicopter and wait for a game to happen. When it does, the game plays itself. Sure, you can tell your dudes to sit in a corner on the other end away from all the guys what needs to be shot, but they are far too good at the shooting of the guys what needs to be shot. They are so good they will shoot them even from that corner on the other side of the level. They will shoot guys before you even know guys are there. They are so godlike in their powers that they will actually sculpt guys out of the digital dust of the digital ground and breathe into his nostrils the breath of digital life and then shoot said guys before you even know guys are there.
Co-op though is completely awesome and entirely where it's at. There, your A.I. squad mates are real I. squad mates. They suck just as much as you do. Co-op is like chocolate: it automatically makes everything better.
For instance: when playing single player you can totally construct very elaborate strategies of engagement. You can sit and agonize over the map, watch the now standard Tom Clancy game under-the-door snake cams in the now standard Tom Clancy game thermal and night visions, set up breaching charges on doors, outfit your arsenal with a stupid amount of guns, each with a stupid amount of scopes, adjust your rate of fire, and etc etc. But! Every single time your AI squad will fuck up your horrible plan by being god. In co-op, you can do the exact same thing. But! Then you can all laugh like giddy morons when it all blows up in your face, or high fives all around if it doesn't.
Laughing and high fives are a lot of fun, so I give this game four stars: two for each.
