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

World War II is the thing in games these days. It was nice and clean cut, Americans good, Germans bad, the rest just follows automatically.

In COD2 - BRO we get to follow the Big Red One, a legendary Army Unit across North America and Europe in a attempt to defeat Nazi Germany.

The game itself is clearly a first person shooter with a military theme and unfortunately quite limited in what you can do. You fight with a squat which is mostly invulnerable to enemy fire unless their deaths are scripted. This can be a bit irritating as they are also quite bad shots, mainly in the idea that you as the player get something to shoot at, but it can be rather irritating when you have them crash down a door, start firing and not hitting anyone. So it is not so much a squad based game than a first person shooter with some dressing.

More problematic though is the stupidity of some of the enemies where you don’t “trip” them if you don’t follow a path. On more than one occasion did I end up coming up behind them they not reacting even when I was shooting them. This is utterly irritating in 2005.

Then there is also the “magic well” of never ending opponents who “materialize” without any understanding on where they came from (I am still stuck in a mission where I can’t break to the target zone because I have re-spawning enemies and my own squad isn’t even following.

The balance of weapons is a bit off as well, the sniper rifle is so overly powerful that you hardly get it, and in multiplayer it is just devastating (one shot, you’re dead, regardless on where you’re being hit).

Overall the game is fun, but there are some decisive flaws in the logic and flow of the game that make prevent one from suspending disbelieve and get emerged into the game.

Rating: 2.5/5

In 1997 the first person shooter genre took a leap into the future with the release of Half-Life. Half-Life was revolutionary as it put an emphasis both on story and action and didn’t sacrifice one for the other. It was probably the closest we had come so far to have an interactive movie played out for us. It featured the most dazzling 3D animations and overall was a huge leap forward.

Six years later Half-Life 2 came out, and it was…. Good.

Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman. Rise and shine. Not that I wish to imply you have been sleeping on the job. No-one is more deserving of a rest. And all the effort in the world would have gone to waste until… well, let’s just say your hour has come again. The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. So, wake up, Mr. Freeman. Wake up and smell the ashes.

The man with the suitcase is back, and Gordon Freeman (our hero) is dropped straight into City 17, a “refuge” for humans and aliens. Somehow the world isn’t quite the same anymore as it was when we left it all behind. Soon we get to explore City 17 and quite a few other places in our attempt to get rid of the alien invasion and all the other things that have gone wrong since our last adventure, only to be rewarded with a cliffhanger in the end.

Time, Dr. Freeman? Is it really that time again? It seems as if you only just arrived. You’ve done a great deal in a small time span. You’ve done so well, in fact, that I’ve received some interesting offers for your services.

[G-Man picks something off the frozen body of Alyx]

Technology wise an updated 3D engine with ultra realistic physics engine immerses us in the world, unfortunately the interaction is mostly limited to shooting people or things, though in a truly amazing way. It is just too bad that there is no real interaction between you and other characters. Gordon never seems to say anything and the fact that the game is utterly linear is rather unfortunate. The game is very open, or so it seems, but much like Fable it puts you on tracks and the exploring is rather limited, this is maybe the biggest drawback on the game, that the illusion of freedom isn’t as good as it could be.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t contemplate them… but these *are* extraordinary times.
[the world around Gordon fades away, into the familiar "Star Tram" from Half-Life 1]

But is the game fun? Oh definitely, I finished it in two days from start to finish, it is very logical in the way it is structured and the weapons are utter fun (especially the dark Gravity gun). Fights at times are utterly intense, to a point where it becomes seriously frustrating but unfortunately the game engine at times really drives the XBOX too its limits with occasional slow downs that it becomes a slide show for a couple of seconds. It can be irritating at times though it has not really caused a lot of problems from the game play standpoint.

Rather than offer you the illusion of free choice, I will take the liberty of choosing for you… if and when your time comes round again. I do apologize for what must seem to you an arbitrary imposition, Dr. Freeman. I trust it will all make sense to you in the course of… well… I’m really not at liberty to say. In the meantime… this is where I get off.
[G-Man walks away from Gordon, adjusts his tie, and walks into a white opening

Rating: 4/5

I never played the first one, though according to a sticker on it the first one was the best selling Star Wars Game of all time. Guess that makes the sequel good too?

The game is heavy on the multiplayer aspect, both with Split screen and via XOBX Live which tends to be a blessing in disguise. My attempts at playing online so far have been rather crappy, basically kiddies killing each other, even if you’re on the same team, or you have to be a a member of a clan, yee-ha (yes, it is Canadian Finals Rodeo Week here in Edmonton).

So I ended up looking at the single player aspect a bit more and have to admit: It is actually fun.

The game concept is rather simple. You are either engaged in ground or space battle where you can chose from an array of ships or character classes. Unfortunatly the different classes pretty much behave the same way for all of the different factions (Empire, Republic, Rebels or CIS).

The game features two main game modes, campaign and galactic conquest.

In the campaign mode you follow a crack unit of the Republic, the 501st across the galaxy in a quest to establish the empire. The different missions are introduced by cut scenes taken straight from Star Wars III while the game play tends to be frantic.

Galactic Conquest provides three basic scenarios which set you up with different a faction each time and it is sort of a mixture between strategy and action.

The main goal in missions is to capture Command Points, which means basically you have to go to a pre-determined location and stay there long enough for it to change colour, this also acts as a re-spawn point.

The action can be quite frantic at times, with several dozen computer controlled players dodging it out. Different levels can feature up to 300 characters engaged in battle.

Overall it is a fun game, but unfortunatly also very limited in the way as what you can do, the “going out and capture CP” can get boring fast even the added strategy element in Galactic Conquest only does so much.

Overall it is a fun game, just be prepared to play it in small doses.

Rating 3.5/5