Starhawk Review

Since the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare way back in 2007, there hasn't really been a lot of room for innovation in the console shooter. Developers have sought to replicate COD as closely as they could to attract the brain-dead masses. For the discerning gamer, like you, dear reader, this is not good. As such, it gives me pleasure to report that Lightbox Interactive's Ps3 exclusive Starhawk breathes some much-needed new life into the sector.

Set in a space-faring sci-fi western universe that owes a lot to Firefly, Starhawk is a third-person team-based shooter  with open maps and vehicle gameplay in the vein of Battlefield, outwardly similar to its spiritual predecessor Warhawk, a decent third-person shooter that was sadly completely overshadowed by being released about 3 weeks before the original Modern Warfare. Two teams square off across a wide, open battlefield in objective based-gameplay, as you might expect, but there's a twist- players can summon structures to be dropped into play from orbit, changing the face of the arena in real time.

Turrets, vehicle spawners and fortifications are all available from this so called "Build & Battle" mechanic, and this is what sets Starhawk apart from the crowd. It demands more thought from players than the average shooter- correct use of it is vital for both team and individual success. You spawn with an assault rifle and a handful of grenades. This is fine for fighting some other punk that just spawned, but to mount a serious assault on the enemy base, or a concerted defense of your own? No chance. Call in a a siege tank depot or a supply bunker, though, and maybe you can have a go at it. Building is done with a straightforward radial menu, usable enough that it doesn't get in the way, and can be done by anyone- there's no commander or support role in charge of it. And it works, even in an uncoordinated public server team- walls go up, turrets placed strategically and vehicle structures placed where they can be readily accessed. I'm impressed that a mechanic like this has ben made to work as well as it does in the notoriously anarchic console shooter environment, probably down to the design devotion of the developers- improvements have been made from beta, and more are promised.
The broader gameplay is pretty good- while unmodified infantry combat can be a little flat, things get much more interesting when structures and vehicles are involved. Genuine excitement comes from the constant shifting of a match's dynamics as buildings are alternately erected and obliterated- you gotta keep on your toes. Infantry weapons are pretty standard- general purpose assault rifle, close range shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher- but all have their uses. Vehicles play a big part- the firepower of tanks and aircraft is needed to break a siege and the speed of jeeps and jetbikes to whisk the flag away- and handle well.

To my surprise, there is a singleplayer, and even more surprisingly it doesn't feel completely divorced from the multiplayer. Story hinges around the precious so-called "Rift Energy"- space-crude-oil, essentially. Out in the space frontier, there's a constant battle between Rifters (roughneck space cowboys) and Outcasts (once-men mutated and consumed by the energy). Our player-character is somewhere in between; a rifter with just a hint of outcast glow. It's a pretty decent space western, with colourful characters and animation cutscenes, but nothing earth-shaking. Starhawk does, however, buck the shooter trend once more by using largely the same mechanics in singleplayer as multiplayer- success rides on the use ofbuildings and vehicles just as much in both  cases. This lends a good chunk of player choice to what might otherwise be a fairly dreary campaign. The setting is really cool, though, with a real frontier vibe and great artstyle.

One thing that does strike me about Starhawk is the amount of really neat design features incorporated; I get a feeling that a lot of love went in from the designers, who were dedicated to do the shooter thing a little differently. Instead of just popping on to the map as if by magic, players drop in from above in a pod, able to make subtle flight adjustment to land exactly where they please. It's not just show, either- land your pod on an enemy player or vehicle for an instant (and hilarious) kill. Bunkers have team-exclusive doors and one-way shields on the firing ports to allow occupants to fire out safely- to take them out requires serious firepower or a daring dash up the external ladder to drop in and butcher those within. The "Hawk" aircraft is suited not only to dogfighting as is so often the case with air vehicles in shooters, but bombing as well, and can transform to a walker form to really take part in the ground fight. These things and more are real sparks of creativity and are very welcome indeed in the stale shooter market.

It's so easy to make an average shooter in today's market- just copy Call of Duty. Starhawk shies well away from this approach and does its very best to do something very different from the norm, and manages it, providing a unique action experience with its unconventional design approach. I like it quite a lot, but there are a couple issues I must mention; were it not for the dynamicism offered by the building mechanic, I don't think the shooter gameplay would work- it doesn'y play as well as a conventional shooter as a good conventional shooter does. Additionally, there are a few balance issues lingering still, particularly with vehicle spam- every player on a team can build himself a heavy tank, and if they all do it stops being much fun for the enemy. Nonetheless, Starhawk is living proof that different things can be successfully done with console shooters- take note, developers.

This article was originally posted on www.invalidopinions.com - check it out, it's totally awesome. 

Gran Turismo 5 review

Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo 5 is the latest in the very long running series of Playstation driving-sims. After a protracted development with repeatedly delayed release, the game finally came out in November, 2010. Why am I writing about it in April 2012? I don’t know, whatever, shut up. I’ve been playing it a bunch recently, and maybe you want to hear my thoughts on it? Well you’re in luck! Here they are. 

Make no mistake, that lengthy development wasn’t the sign of struggling design, financial troubles or creative incompetence, á la Duke Nukem Forever; the game took eons to make because it is fucking outrageously enormous. GT5 packs over a thousand faithfully recreated cars, 70 tracks both real and original and chillingly accurate physics. This is the psychotic autism school of game development, but the obsessive attention to detail cuts both ways- it’s abundantly clear to play the game that while it soars close to perfection in some areas, others have been left by the wayside somewhat. Car handling, for example, is basically as good as it is possible to be (and I can’t stress enough just how good the physics and handling feel), but AI drivers are soulless automatons, often seeming oblivious to the player’s car. 

 Race physics are top notch.

The career gameplay is fairly open ended. Basically simple, too- buy cars, race cars, use winnings to buy more cars. Most events have some kind of theme, often emulating a real-world race discipline such as NASCAR or Super GT, but many simply confined to a specific nationality or period of car.  There’s an experience level system that places restrictions on the cars you can buy and the events you can enter- family hatchbacks are level 0, while dedicated race cars can be level 20 or even higher. I guess the idea is to give the gameplay some structure and a sense of progression, but it can feel artificial and forced at times- for me, filling a virtual garage with ever more exotic driving machines is progression enough. There’s also B-spec racing, which trades the hands on approach of A-spec for an indirect driver management experience. It’s a little clumsy, and I’m far too fucking ADD to enjoy handing the wheel to some AI chump, but it’s a pretty neat feature. Licence tests, a series staple, return, though they aren’t quite as vital to advancement as in previous editions, but these coupled with a variety of academy-style special events do provide decent instruction to new drivers.

 There's a Photography mode which lets you dress up and parade your car like a daughter you don't really love.

Where GT5 shines, and where all that development time and funding has gone, is in the technical stuff. Gran Turismo always was a good simulator, and GT5 has the best physics yet. Every car sounds and drives just right. Visuals are a little bipolar, however- only about 200 of the cars on roster are so-called “premium” models, with full detail and interior views. These look fucking amazing. “Standard” cars, which make up the rest of the roster, though notably mostly older and unremarkable cars, take a hit to graphical fidelity (most of them seem to be lifted from earlier games), but are nonetheless accurately modelled in their behaviours. Damage, both visual and mechanical, appears for the first time in the series, and works adequately, though most events don’t have it enabled- cars get scuffed and crumpled from collisions, bits fall off after several hits, and the behaviour of the car reacts to the ruination your shitty driving has brought to steering, drivetrain and aerodynamics. 

 This shot looks exciting, but I'm actually driving the van.

If I’m totally honest, there is a slight out-of-touch-ness here, but in an endearing way; few to zero concessions have been made for accessibility, refreshing in today’s market of brain-dead Call of Duty clones. GT5 is a simulator, in the purest sense, and as such it’s a game for car people rather than for game people. Car geeks will find no end of entertainment in the automotive cornucopia that’s on offer here, between collecting and tuning hundreds of cars and driving them in the games very varied selection of tracks and races. I think even non-petrolheads will be somewhat taken by the meticulous attention to detail on display, and I defy anyone not to crack a grin when they open the throttle on a Plymouth Cuda down the back straight, but like I said, this is really for the car guys. That being said, some added usability would definitely be welcome- the game does feel a little obtuse and awkward in places. Since, by now, prices should have dropped dramatically, I would recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in cars- there is so much raw content here that, with a little patience, it becomes the ultimate motoring toybox.

SSX Review

SSX is a game you’re probably aware of- I’m sure everyone has played at least one of the great PS2 releases. It’s a high-speed snowboarding game, with greater emphasis on crazy stunts and big air than on pure simulation. The series has been rebooted for the current generation with a new game simply titled SSX, just like the first one to make sure it’s hard to Google search. I played a lot of the older games, particularly the brilliant SSX3, so I’m pretty well placed to assess the latest; does it deserve the weighty legacy of the series? 

The core gameplay is just about what you might expect- ride a plank down a mountain. Slap the face buttons or twiddle the right stick to do tricks to earn boost fuel, which you can expend to increase your speed, somehow- max it out and you enter “Tricky” mode, temporarily giving unlimited boost and permitting even more improbable stunts than usual. Controls are smooth and responsive- ripping down the slopes looks and feels great, and the player can pull sick tricks with ease. Maybe too much ease, in fact- mashing buttons and sticks as soon as you get airborne is a sure way to a spectacular jump, without a whole lot of thought. SSX was never a simulator, but I’m pretty sure being able to do 1260 degree spins without a ramp is something only Marty McFly could dream of, and, though I can’t really remember SSX3, I think that game offered greater variety of tricks. Nevertheless, technical proficiency and strategy is required to succeed; in race events, big air slows you down but generates vital boost, so a balance must be struck between getting the right line and keeping up the boosting. There’s a level progression for each boarder from 1 to 10, and each has their own inventory of equipment bought between runs. Higher levels unlock more and better equipment items for purchase, so there is incentive to keep at it, but it does mean shut-in nerds like me will be able to outperform casual scrubs like you by merit of play time. 

SSX includes straightforward trick and race events, just as you would expect, but also a sweet survival mode. These “Deadly Descents” survival events, where players attempt to go down a completely fucking impossible run without being killed, were actually reminiscent of my efforts in real-world snowsports as a kid, perfectly capturing the technicality and slippery battle with gravity and velocity I experienced. The effortless superheroism of trick and race runs is gone- slipping and sliding, you try to inch your way to the bottom down a nightmare path. Each has some unique hazard that requires specialised equipment to traverse safely- yawning chasms that need wingsuits to cross, freezing temperatures requiring thermal suits and low oxygen environments that cause blackouts without oxygen supplies, among others. The Deadly Descents provide the best moments in the game, by my reckoning- heart stopping moments before the wingsuit opens or as the screen fades to black from oxygen starvation, and these stages provide a great counterpoint to the standard, run-of-the-mill trick and race game modes.

The singleplayer campaign, though showing promise early on, isn’t a whole lot of good. The premise is thus- a team of the world’s top snowboarders, most of whom featured in past SSX games, have united as “Team SSX” to ride the nine wildest runs on the planet- the “Deadly Descents”. One, the now-grown little twerp from SSX3, decides those guys suck shit and resolves to make the descents himself before the SSX team can- suddenly, we have a god-damn race. What this means in gameplay terms is a pretty straightforward progression from rnage to range, doing a handful of events in each locale before tackling the big scary finale. Each range has you take on a new character from the roster, and each character has a comic-book style intro sequence that theoretically gives a little background on them, but which only really serve to embarrass and confuse the player with their absurd lameness. I’m not asking for a serious-face character study in my plank riding game, but zero background would have been better than the horrible fucking caricatures the comics gave. The campaign is really just a platform to get some experience points with each character and familiarity with the core mechanics- in this role it works, but it's short and pretty simple.

It’s the “Ridernet” online functionality that makes SSX really worth looking into, though there are some puzzling design choices. Every course in the game can be raced or tricked down- Ridernet keeps track of your best times and scores and, more importantly, your friends’, in a fashion very closely mirroring the “Autolog” system in recent Need for Speed games. The rivalry this inspires is simply awesome. Drops are restarted again and again, angry messages exchanged, and equipment constantly changed up in an arms race for that top spot. Players feel hatred, true hatred, for close rivals, and awe at those tens of seconds or millions of points ahead. At bottom, this is a slick and compelling leaderboard, though, and the surprise is that SSX doesn’t have a conventional lobby multiplayer. That’s right- you can’t start a race with a couple buddies or strangers and compete with them in real time; a bewildering gap in the feature set. The closest we get is ‘Global Events’; player-created events with fixed parameters imposed on factors like buy-in cost, run time and permitted equipment, where participants compete to make it into brackets ranked from Bronze to Diamond. These can be really cool, especially with rules like “no ice axes” on runs that need ice axes to really spice up the competition, and thousands of players can take part. While you see other riders in real time while participating, it’s really just eye candy- it’s still basically a solo trial. I’d recommend ensuring you have plenty of friends to play with- I added a bunch of people from online forums to help fill out my leaderboards, and without that competition I could see the game getting pretty goddam old, and fast. 

The new SSX, then, is a pretty great game. It’s mechanically sound, very compelling and with a good balance of depth and accessibility. Visuals are crisp and sharp, and while anything with a central theme of snow has an upper limit on graphical variety each range does have its own flavour and style, a commendable feat. The online functions are critical to the experience, and though the game suffers from the omission of lobby multiplayer it is by no means crippled. SSX deftly avoids the classic reboot pitfall of completely ruining the franchise and retroactively souring past instalments- though it has definitely moved on from the old games in terms of style and gameplay, it represents more of a natural evolution than a jarring shift, preserving the raw excitement of its forebears. It’s thrilling, competitive, slick and very cool, if a little goofy in places, and comes with my recommendation as an old fan.  

Portal 2 Review

Back again, long after the last post, long after the release of the thing in question, but hopefully not long after my few readers have withered and crumbled to dust awaiting more of my exquisite prose. More video game shit; I don’t know if the few people that I know read this want that or other stuff, but this one’s a biggie. Portal 2- the latest release from industry legend Valve Software- came out, er, embarrassingly long ago, in a time when the Playstation Network was still a thing people talked about as something that worked, and now you get to read my thoughts about it.

Surely everyone knows what Portal is? That first person puzzler bundled in the Orange Box alongside Half Life and Team Fortress as filler, but became a smash hit. You know, the game where the player used a special gun to apply mind and physics bending portals, functioning as tunnels through spacetime to one another, to surfaces and solve increasingly inventive puzzles, set within the bowels of dubious corporation Aperture Science’s enormous research facility. There was that supercomputer, GLaDOS, whose coldly delivered lines were so constantly entertaining, those charming but deadly robotic turrets, that companion cube thing. Yeah, I knew you’d remember. This is the sequel, promising to be a full-length experience to the original’s taster course.

There might be some spoilers, but it’s so damn long since it came out I doubt that bothers you.

Portal 2 begins an indeterminate but seemingly quite long period after the original- Chell, mute, jumpsuit-wearing heroine has, after defeating GLaDOS, been seized by one of the laboratory’s robotic caretakers and placed in long-term stasis; too long, as it turns out. Aperture has been falling apart in the interim without its supercomputer overlord keeping the place neat and tidy, despite the efforts of various other automated personality systems. One such system is Wheatley, a little white sphere with a big blue eye, who awakens Chell on the basis that they could work together to get free of the facility. Voiced by Stephen Merchant, long-time collaborator of Ricky Gervais and all round funnyman, Wheatley busts Chell out of her stasis chamber and the adventure begins.

Wheatley is an amicable, if breathtakingly incompetent, little fellow.

I have to admit, I wasn’t so great a fan of the original Portal. I enjoyed it, sure; it’s a clever little game, but I didn’t go as wild as some of the rest of the world about it. Portal 2 is a big step up as far as I’m concerned, I’m happy to report. The puzzles have retained the entertainment value, a commendable feat, given the considerable novelty value of the original and the sequel’s vastly increased length. The new elements to the puzzle play are all welcome- gravity defying excursion funnels, movable light bridges and motion-inducing gels are all fun and add more depth to the portal-based gameplay. One complaint more professional reviewers than myself noted was that many puzzles had far fewer portal-able surfaces than counterparts in the original, giving a notion that the player was simply carrying out a prescribed solution rather than finding their own. While this is at least partially valid, it seems to me that most of the original game’s puzzles were similar, but just allowed more goofing around. The challenge level could maybe be higher- only a couple took more than a little thought on my part, but I still enjoyed them, and even though this was a far longer game than the original, the core mechanics didn’t get tiresome, a good indicator of their solidity.

While the puzzling was good, to me the real charm of the game came from the storyline. Portal had GLaDOS’s taunting throughout but most of the storyline coming in the last half hour or so, but P2 has brought in a whole lot more. Ellen McLain reprises her role as the icily polite GLaDOS, but she’s joined by some celebrity names in the form of the brilliant Stephen Merchant, playing Wheatley, the venerable J. K. Simmons of J. “PARKER I NEED PICTURES OF SPIDERMAN” Jonah Jameson fame, voicing the charismatic, shoot-from-the-hip CEO of Aperture Science, Cave Johnson, and legend of video-game-voice-acting Nolan North voicing various robots and such like. The presence of such talent shows the extra attention to narrative. Characters are chattering away often, really making them come to life; GLaDOS, understandably upset at having been torn asunder and partially incinerated, is on murderously cutting top form, Wheatley’s general babbling, though sometimes inane, is amusing and endearing. I’d like to give a special nod to the Cave Johnson character- I was genuinely moved (as well as hugely amused) by the voice recordings he’d left behind in an older part of the facility, charting his fall from fame and fortune to bankruptcy, deathly illness, and, worst of all, obscurity. At the risk of sounding like some sort of pretentious literary nerd, there was a distinct Heart of Darkness-y vibe to witnessing the downfall of this brilliant, but ultimately monstrous, individual. Portal 2’s excellent voice acting and inspired writing conspire to make it one of a very few genuinely funny video games.

Aperture's janitorial standards have gone way down in our absence.

The voice actors are only half the story as far as story is concerned, however; Valve, masters of atmospheric storytelling, have included so much detail in the game world itself. In the early stages, chambers are overrun with vegetation, walls fall apart at your approach, and what automated systems persist are on post-apocalypse self-preservation mode; as GLaDOS regains control of the facility, the walls are alive with movement as hundreds of robotic arms try to repair themselves; later, when Wheatley has assumed operational control, the sheer scale of Aperture is revealed as he smashes the facility’s huge movable chambers together in a fairly ghetto attempt to construct functional test chambers. It’s all very clever and very cool, but, honestly, I’d expect nothing less from Valve.

Something totally new to Portal 2 is the cooperative mode- here, two players team up as a pair of portal-gun toting robots for cooperative test chambers. I’ve played this twice, in splitscreen due to the PSN’s continued nonexistence, and it was damn good. While it wouldn’t be unfair to say that some of the original game’s puzzling purity was exchanged for enhanced narrative in the singleplayer, the coop campaign, while noticeably shorter, probably has more puzzling value; while GLaDOS is still present, the story format is far closer to the original’s. We have here a seriously well-designed mode, where the two players must use their four portals together to find a solution. Despite the very streamlined suite of interactions, such as a ping tool to mark out a portal location for a partner and a three-second countdown shown to both players for those timing critical puzzles, some of these are definitely trickier than anything found in the singleplayer. One had my buddy and I totally stumped for almost an hour, and when we finally looked up the solution we, naturally, kicked ourselves- seems to me like that’s good puzzle design. The final chamber in this mode is a masterpiece, the staged design and multiple elements taking a solid but hugely enjoyable bit of work to get through. I’m not normally all that wild for cooperative gaming, being a lone-wolf/anti-social narcissist type, but this was a damn good one.

Portal 2 uses the same Source engine that has been Valve's workhorse since Half-Life 2 way back in 2004, albeit souped all the way up. Despite the almost archaic tech under the hood, the game manages to look good. It's not stunning, but the engine has aged very gracefully, not least due to the constant updates and tweaks Valve has been adding with every new release. The clever art direction definitely contributes to the game's visual appeal- I've always held that a game doesn't need to be a technical powerhouse to be graphically pleasing, and I think Portal 2 proves it.

Complaints with Portal 2 are few and far between. A little extra challenge to some of the puzzles would have been welcome, but it was still no cakewalk. I’ve not felt too compelled to replay, though the presence of heaps of easter eggs and a developers’ commentary will probably tempt me to doing so eventually. In truth, my only real issue is a petty and possibly even irrelevant one; despite being within the setting of Valve’s benchmark Half-Life franchise, Portal 2 includes precious little reference to the overarching events of the HL games. Aside from a nod to the Borealis, Aperture’s mysterious research ship set to be featured in the possibly non-existent Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and a cursory mention of Black Mesa, the shared universe is barely mentioned. I realise criticising a game because it isn’t a different game from a different series really shows the HL fanboy in me, and I can understand Valve’s apparent wish to keep the two series distinct, but come on! It’s been four god-damn years since we had any Half-Life, Valve, throw us a fucking bone. I hope and pray that we see something from the series at next month’s E3, but that’s by the by. Portal 2, standing on its own, is damn good.

You weren't there, man! Battlefield Bad Company 2 Vietnam Review

Another expansion to review. This one's only what, three months old? I'm getting better at this, most definitely. This time, instead of the grim darkness of the far future, we are heading to the jungles of Vietnam, with the aptly, if rather extensively, named DLC for Battlefield: Bad Company 2- Battlefield: Bad Company 2- Vietnam.

No screenshot utility, I'm afraid, so it's blurrycam time.

My fondness for the original game has already been discussed, and my love of combating communists is no secret, so I was super excited for this expansion, awaiting eagerly its release in December. A week beforehand, however, possibly in protest at being forced to play the abomination that is Black Ops, my PS3 gave up, the disc drive failing and denying me my prize. Now it is repaired, and the first thing I did upon retrieving it was download BFBC2-V. Loading up the base game, I saw the new main menu option and highlighted it. Upon doing so, the whole menu twisted and reshaped itself- the crisp, modernistic aesthetic of Bad Company 2 shifting to a dirtier, brownish theme, the militaristic background music giving way to Creedence Clearwater Revival. This thematic shift is representative of the whole expansion, really- Bad Company 2 was very definitely a modern combat experience, with its homing missiles, optical sights and high-tech vehicles. Vietnam, however, strips this away- in my first match (where I was top player, naturally) I was struck by how crude and brutal the combat was in comparison- without red-dot sights and motion sensors, fighting is done at close range with nothing but rifles and brawn. It's refreshing, in a perverse way, to have this almost rustic style of game, especially in comparison to Call of Duty, where being set in the Cold War instead of near future changed... nothing at all. BFBC2V does it right, though, with '60s style news reports playing over hippy riffs at the loading screens, it feels like a 'Nam game.

The gameplay of the expansion is similarish to the base game- it's still a squad based shooter, with different classes bringing different equipment and abilities to the fray, and an emphasis on vehicles and objectives. The base game's much-vaunted destructible environments feature, but are less prominent. Though this is, I suppose, thematically suitable (and y'all know how much I like stuff that is thematically suitable), with a limit to how much destruction can be done on a map consisting of some flimsy wooden huts and a hill, it would have been nice to see this feature return more prominently- one of my fondest memories of Bad Company 2 was tearing out the back wall of a building with a Black Hawk's minigun, collapsing the whole structure and crushing the enemies and objective within for an extraordinary number of points, but such a thing is not really possible here.

I love the smell of clichés in the blog post.

As you would expect, the equipment available has lapsed to what GIs and Viet-cong would have had access to- you've got your M16s and AK47s as well as the thunderous M60 machine gun and notorious M14 battle rifle. Vehicles have gone back a few numberplates, too, though the tanks and jeeps are really different only aesthetically to their modern counterparts. The new chopper, the UH-1 Iroquois, known affectionately as the Huey and iconic for its extensive service and appearance in limitless 'Nam flicks, has undergone some changes, though. Bad Company 2's Havocs and Apaches were, essentially, winged fortresses of fire and steel, spitting high-explosive death from above, but the Huey lacks the armour and avionics of these beasts. The lighter bird is more maneuverable and feels less clumsy than these, but small arms fire will damage it and heavy machine guns will tear it apart like paper. While its rocket pods and door mounted machine guns pack a punch, the Huey's coolest weapon is the speaker rack- as it swoops over the battlefield these blare out '60s classics, as well as Ride of the Valkyries, which is, frankly, awesome. Lamentably, you rarely hear the whole track, as every NVA regular for several miles will take a pot shot at it. Maybe they want the chopper destroyed; maybe they just really hate '60s music.

I have to say, I have hugely enjoyed my tour in Vietnam. The classic Battlefield gameplay is extremely solid, more so, I think, than people realise; maybe even better than the great Call of Duty leviathan. It's a game that lends itself to fantastic moments- once, on the NVA side, squatting in the bush with a sniper rifle I spied an incoming 4x4 with three GIs about to ford a river into our base. Quickly, I shot the driver- my exquisite marksmanship ensured the shot went right between the eyes- and the vehicle drew to a halt. The passenger, realising what had happened, leaped out and dived into the roadside trees, while the machine gunner fired wildly in the hope of neutralising the threat. Another precision shot brought him low, and a third killed the third American even as he desperately tried to spot me from his partially concealed position. Aside from being a demonstration in my consummate skill, it was a scene straight from a war film, and it felt very, very cool. I have more of these tales- charging wildly towards an endangered objective surrounded by NVA with naught but a shotgun and emerging the victor, smashing a Huey from the sky with a one-in-a-million shot from a tank's main gun- and I'm sure any Battlefield player would too.

I have it on good authority that chicks go wild for aircraft disguised as sharks.

I can't claim to have many complaints, apart from the aforementioned unwieldy title. There are a couple graphical issues, most notably a very noticable pop-in effect with objects far away- when the detail on that chopper suddenly and obviously ramps up as it approaches, it does rather spoil the moment, if not the bastard's aim. Additionally, there are fewer vehicles in this installment. Vehicles were always my favourite part of Battlefield since I am essentially a child, and their relative lack, especially on the NVA side (though crafty commies can redistribute them if they are sneaky), and the complete disappearance of mounted weapons, is a little disappointing. In the final (free) map pack for the base game they brought a map where both sides spawned with a gunship chopper, a transport chopper, two tanks, a couple 4x4s and some quadbikes- there were far more vehicle seats available than players on the map, and it was glorious- no such armoured affray is available. Sure doesn't spoil the game, though- it's a lot of fun, and even my black heart soars each time I strafe the socialists while blasting out Hendrix. While I'm not sure why DICE didn't release this as its own downloadable game in the vein of Battlefield 1943, it's certainly a welcome addition to a franchise that is going from strength to strength.

Something Approximating to a Black Ops Review

*checks watch*
*checks calendar*
*checks mysterious stone circle used by the ancients to measure the passing of aeons*

Six months? Time for a blog post!

Hello again, reader, if, contrary to my suspicions, you exist. After six months, one would assume I had been preparing some unstoppable megapost bursting utterly with fresh content, and one would be at least partially wrong. Y'all know I don't prepare posts; the actual time between decision to write one and it appearing on your screen is often a single day; that is simply how I roll. So, to the meat of the post.

As anyone with something that could be described as consciousness is doubtless aware, there is a new entry in the Call of Duty franchise. This is a fairly momentous event in the games industry, given the series has consistently sold numbers of copies approximately twice the population of Earth. So, being a blogger (and a fanboy), it is my duty and requirement to buy it and bore you with my opinions on it.

Named Call of Duty: Black Ops, this latest entry in the series ditched both the modern setting of the more recent games and the traditional WWII aesthetic in favour of exploring the grimy world of Cold War espionage. Instead of the usual heroism and apple pie, players would experience denied operations- assassinations, sabotage and mutually assured destruction. The single-player campaign promised to centre around one of the aforementioned assassins and saboteurs, being tortured for information, with the playable missions following his flashbacks as the interrogation slowly draws what is needed from him. The set up, then, was excellent, and the game looked ready to take on last years leviathan Modern Warfare 2, one of my personal favourites and the best selling game or possibly thing in the course of human history. But how was the execution? The game was developed not by Infinity Ward, creators of the Call of Duty franchise and later its excellent Modern Warfare subseries, but Treyarch, secondary developer and annualisation puppet of the Activision overlords. Could the game hold up to the hype? Well, no.

Completing the campaign of Black Ops was a bit of a chore, in truth, with a few notable exceptions such as the Vietnam missions, but that's probably more to do with my pathological love for the Vietnam War than anything. Perhaps it was nostalgia from the first Modern Warfare, but MW2's characters interested and entertained me so much more than Black Ops, though, admittedly, Woods is badass and awesome. The Cold War theme fails to quite hit home- at no point did I really feel like radioactive Russians were under my bed, as I understand was the norm in the ‘60s. Gameplay is standard CoD fare- shooting people, blowing up things. The covert nature of the so called black-operations also seemed ill-explored. The first Modern Warfare had an interesting duality going on- there were the US Marines, very much in the media eye, subject of news bulletins played over loading screens, and also the SAS- the hyper-competent, ultra-covert killers, battling the Russians without anyone apparently realising. There was a similar deal in MW2- bearded man’s man Captain Price remarks that the epic suicide revenge mission he planned would go unremembered, for instance. This all served to remind you of the global significance (or not) of the events portrayed in the game. Black Ops didn’t do the same, at least for this reviewer. It could be the repetition, but the set-pieces in Modern Warfare's storylines excited me more, the missions gripped more, the single-player maps were more interesting to me. Though I never thought of MW2's single player as its strongpoint, it managed to entertain me significantly more than BO's.

The almost comically awesome Frank Woods.

As for multiplayer, well; I loved Modern Warfare 2. I loved it despite the quickscoping, and the lightweighting, and the noob-tubes, and the nuke boosting. Again, maybe it was just me, maybe I naturally evolved my play style to the point that these things ceased to affect me overtly, but in any case, though they bothered me, they did not break the game. I loved the pace, I loved the killstreak rewards, I loved the challenges and rank progression, I loved the maps. Though I consider myself a serious gentleman and hardcore gamer, I rank this mainstream shooter among my favourite games of all time. As such, when I heard about Treyarch's attempts with Black Ops to remove much of the, frankly, bullshit, prevalent in MW2's multiplayer, I was ecstatic- the game I loved, streamlined, purified, and with a sweet Cold War setting to boot!? I was stoked beyond belief. I went to a midnight launch for Black Ops, which is not something I have done previously, and was among the first to buy the game. From here, however, everything went downhill.

The maps seem overcomplicated and poorly designed- sometimes, a minute can go by before a shot is fired in a standard match, as the maps simply do not allow the free flowing, fast paced action of MW2. I may be imagining it, but the core gunplay seems to have been altered, and, to me, ruined- the perfect gunplay the series has had since the beginning, gone. The progression system has been tampered with, too; but the new "CoD Points" system simply lacks the compulsion to achieve and improve that the challenge-based system of MW2 and its precursor had for me.

A Huey, swinging in to minigun most of downtown Havana to the ground.

The new, watered down killstreak rewards also fail to hold up for me- while I realise the cumulative element of MW2's rewards irked many, I felt it really enhanced the gameplay- the greater amount of choppers and fighters buzzing overhead made possible by this approach making the match that much more spectacular. Black Ops, by contrast, seems to have lost that exciting element of support. Now, we have legions of ridiculous, slightly childish, and damn near unstoppable toy cars screeching after dismayed Special Forces operatives, with the odd spy plane or attack chopper swooping in to lend some credibility to the notion that this is an actual conflict between factions armed with machines more threatening than those given to children. Being awesome, I am familiar with some of the more unobtainable rewards, such as the Blackbird (actually a good idea, giving real time information of enemy position and facing), Chopper Gunner (this time a bloke hanging out the door of a Huey with a minigun instead of MW2's monstrous Apache/Havoc chain gun) and Gunship (granting full control of an Mi-24A Hind attack helicopter to the player) and they just don't excite like the hovering Harrier, lumbering Pave Low or earthshaking AC130 on offer in MW2. Incidentally, the reward vehicles are the same for all multiplayer factions. While MW2 was not perfect in this regard (why some Brazilian gangsters were in a position to employ special operations gunships and bombers used only by the US Air Force always puzzled me), the Russians using a Hind where the Americans used a Cobra was at least a nod to the military aircraft enthusiast section of the playerbase, which might be populated by me alone. Here, doubtless aware that most players couldn’t tell a UH-1 from an F-15E (cretins), Treyarch has used the same visuals for every killstreak for every faction, a reminder of the apparent laziness I observed in my very first review feature.

My hard-earned Chopper Gunner being shot down by some mouthbreather with a missile launcher.

The game is not utterly bereft of virtue. What Treyarch has messed up has been unable to totally overpower all that Infinity Ward originally did so well- the game is still recognisable as Call of Duty, whether that name fills you with a fanboy’s excitement or a game-snob’s dread, and therefore the experience is intense and memorable, though, perhaps, not to the same extent as one of Infinity Ward’s offerings. Some of Treyarch’s additions are actually rather nifty, such as the Theater mode- unoriginal, but still entertaining, and very useful for adding screenshots to a blog post- and the Wager matches, where players are given some fairly obscure weapons and made to fight to the death. The single player, while a little railroaded, does have a compelling Cold War action thriller at heart, and a couple of delightful badasses in the form of Frank Woods (straight talking Commie slayer) and Jason Hudson (ice-cool, shades wearing CIA operator), and the occasional shining set-piece. The Zombie mode is fun, too, and the semi-secret level where players assume the roles of Kennedy, McNamara, Nixon and Castro to fight of the horde of undead is simply hilarious.

There's me! Defending my care package from a Cuban like a good capitalist should.

The conclusion that I am forced to draw in the end is that Black Ops is the product of a franchise that has become a victim of its own success. Obviously, I am no corporation-hating-commie-liberal, but I am truly concerned about what the dark council at Activision is doing to my beloved Call of Duty series. In a better, kinder world, Infinity Ward would produce astounding games at the rate they desired, and Treyarch would not be forced to produce annual entries into blockbuster franchises. Black Ops is a game that drives fellas like me to write long-winded blog rants, not because it is so bad, but because it should be something better.

Ludicrous Filler Post! or: Deathadder Review (of sorts)

Acutely aware of the recent post drought, I am going to attempt a review feature of my current mouse, Razer's lovely Deathadder. Stand back, citizens, this may be horribly unprofessionally written.

I mentioned in a previous post (not that anyone read that or will, indeed, read this) that I own and use for my daily browsing and nightly pwnage a Razer Deathadder mouse. If you remember, I claimed it was like a Space Marine's trusty chainsword. Although this may have seemed merely an idle bit of Games Workshop geek's classic excessive devotion (a right, nay, duty held by all those who have played any Warhammer tabletop game), there is a grain of truth in it. Like that chainsword, it is my ever-present companion. Like that chainsword, it has joined me for countless battles. Like that chainsword, it serves to defeat my foes, whatever form they come in, be it alien, terrorist, zombie, gangster, or, indeed, large russian man with minigun. The comparison was not as minor as it initially appeared (not least to myself).

So, Razer. Razer have been making gaming mice for uberpros (like myself) since the Boomslang, way back in 1998. This was the first ever 1000dpi gaming mouse and was, in many ways, responsible for the emergence of professional gaming as a phenomenon. Chaps like f4tal1ty basically became what they became thanks to the sponsorship of Razer and the pwnage channeled through their mice. Since then, Razer have been making sweet looking, high performance mice for gaming. One of the more recent examples is the Deathadder.

I bought my Deathadder shortly after getting a new computer and thinking to myself, "Novelty car shaped USB mice are entertaining enough, but something more effective would perhaps be appropriate." So, to Microplay, my local LAN centre and purveyor of tools of pwnage, where I picked up both the mouse and a corresponding Goliathus mat. To be honest, I am very pleased indeed with both. Admittedly, I have never owned a gaming mouse before, but as far as I can tell, the Deathadder is a goodun. The mouse will run out of the box, but it is rather sensible to install the supplied driver software. This installation was painless, and vastly empowering- it allows for customisation of the buttons, including the two side buttons. On mine, one is set to doubleclicking (purely due to laziness on my part) and the other is set to adjust one of this mouse's most intriguing features- on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment.

I say this is interesting, because it is something that had never occurred to me as necessary, but having it, seems a very good idea. On-the-fly sensitivity allows you, with the press of a side button and a scroll of the wheel, to change the sensitivity of the mouse. Upon doing so, a small, unobtrusive bar appears at the side of the screen, showing the current sensitivity setting, and allowing you to change it whichever way you fancy. This can be done at any time- on the desktop, in the midst of a firefight or even while writing a blog, with such great ease that it seems foolish not to adjust it. Switching between high-sensitivity for gaming and lower sensitivity for normal use is staggeringly simple. This is not the limit of the use, however- if, playing Scout in my beloved Team Fortress 2, I decide to switch class to Sniper, I can crank the sensitivity right down from the maximum (as needed for the rapid Scout's Scattergun) to a medium sensitivity (allowing me to miss headshots with huge precision). This is what makes this feature so useful to a gamer (obviously it does not only apply to TF2). My one gripe is that not all games will display the sidebar correctly- some show it with considerable flicker, for example. This does not render the feature unusable- it merely hinders the use.

Yeah, we got pictures now. This one shows how little effect adjusting your sensitivity has on batting people to death.

Onwards, brothers, to aesthetics. Allow me to assure you, reader (yes, I mean there is but one of you), that I would be prepared to stand up before a jury of my peers and assert that this mouse looks freakin' sweet. The rubberised palmrest arches gracefully up into two oversized buttons around the blue glow of the scroll wheel. Also glowing away is the three-headed snake of the Razer logo, bang in the centre of the palmrest. The steady pulse of this suggests to me a relaxed but great power, like the engine flares of an interstellar battleship at high orbit. This is never anything other than cool as hell, though, unless you have had a nasty accident, it is not visible while the mouse is in use.

Glowing merrily away.

The scroll wheel offers good grip for all your weapon switching needs, but is a click action type rather than a smooth one, betraying this mouse as a tool for gamers. Some may prefer a smooth scroll, but they aren't writing this, are they? Another matter of preference comes in the very shape of the mouse- it's for right hands only. This does not strike me, a left hander, as an issue- neither I nor any of the multitudinous lefties I know use their mouse in their left hand, but I felt I owe my readers the truth in these matters. The rubberised palmrest gives good grip, too, although the side buttons are glossy plastic and do not share this quality. This transition from gloss to matte does, however, add to the striking nature of the mouse's appearance.

Finally, performance. This is pretty impressive. The mouse is equipped with an 1800dpi 3G infrared sensor. Coupled with the high quality mat, this offers unparalled precision. Well, that's what a professional reviewer would say. I am not one, so I don't see enough mice to draw parallels. I can say, however, that since buying this mouse, I have not once felt that it has let me down. From a gamer, that is, someone prepared to blame failure upon mice, keyboards, routers, hacks or even the dreaded lag, that is endorsement.

En conclusion, if you are in the market for a tool of pwnage so comfortable, so precise, so downright potent that lesser beings will quake at your approach, you could do a whole lot worse than a Deathadder.