Culture from the darker side

Aliens + guns + conspiracy….. How can you go wrong?

Well, ask Midway and their game “Blacksite: Area 61″.

The Story is told pretty quickly. In the opening you get to fight your way through Iraq into a bunker, where one of your team mates touches an alien artifact and promptly gets left behind.

Fast forward to the present day, something’s off and you and your “Echo Team” are sent in to investigate. Of course everything isn’t as it is supposed to be.

The Game

Well, it’s a first person shooter, as such it is straight forward, and you’d figure there isn’t much Midway could have fucked up…. Well, you’d be wrong.

The problem with Area 51 are numerous:

- Only a handful of weapons. What’s up with that? I mean seriously? The “high end” weapon is utterly useless.
- Not many enemies. You have the general foot soldier and a handful of exotics, but nothing in between really.
- Odd save points. I mean seriously, in the car elements which are sort of a crap shoot they put the distance between save points far apart, on foot, not so much a problem.
- You’d want the background? Well, you have to find the “Dossiers”. Stupid really, TELL me the story, give me additional background later.
- Is this a graphic problem I am seeing? Seriously, the amount of graphic errors is just amazing. People running through walls, Non Aliasing…. The list is endless.
- Repetitive anyone? There is no dynamic in the level design, it’s basically a rail shooter where you can dodge the bullets.

Overall it is just painful to see this game having been released. I got through it in less than five hours (on easy I admit, but hey), and I am severely underwhelemed with the game. There are some “nice” moments. Going through Suburbia and shooting stuff up is fun, the fact that a lot of the environment is destructible makes for fun moments (to a degree) but overall it feels very unpolished, like different pieces being put together without any consideration. If you watch the credits in the end that’s pretty much what you get confirmed, too many cooks in the kitchen.

Simply put: Don’t touch it.

Rating: 1/10

I admit, I have a “weakness” for arcade racers, they are pure fun and adrenaline. So I was giddy ever since I discovered the Burnout series on the original XBOX, lot of nights with too much booze and friends resulted in a lot of entertainment. Now after two years “hiatus” the new instalment is out.

In the past Burnout allowed you to unlock new events by winning races or challenges, you navigated over different maps and trying to best yourself and win different medals. With Burnout Paradise this is gone. You either win a game or you don’t. All events are open from the beginning and although you can call up a map for navigation purposes the game itself is “open”, simulating a city with traffic and all the other things you can find in a real city.

The upside of this is that you don’t have to “progress” through the different levels but rather you can pick and chose the kind of races you want to do. The downside is that you have to win each event, there is no second and third place anymore, additionally, there are no “do overs”, if you lose you are “stuck” where ever the finish line is. If you are deeply obsessed about re-trying the same race over and over again this is frustrating because you have to get back to the starting line, but if you have a laid back attitude you can simply drive on and find another event.

One of the great things about the series so far was the ability to play with other people in the same room. Nothing beats having some booze and buddies and laughing over the spectacular crashes that you get each other in. Too bad that with Burnout Paradise there is no more co-op mode. Yep, you read that right. The only way you can play against your buddy if they have their own copy at home. I guess you can use voice chat (together with a USB video camera you can see your buddies face) but maybe I am getting old, but it’s just not the same. Bummer really.

Other things have made it into the new version though, this includes the rather random behaviour of the crash detection, sometimes the car goes boom when it hits a wall, other times it just slides off. Likewise during Rampage Events it seems a bit hit and miss (no pun intended) when you take someone out or they take you out.

Overall, if you can overlook the “free roaming” feature and don’t mind sitting alone in your basement, Paradise is a solid evolution over past titles but not quite as revolutionary as they would like you to believe.

Rating: 6/10