The Arts & Crafts of War

posted by Ryan Davis on May 16, 2008 – 3:33 pm

Defend Your Castle, one of the first titles released in North America through Nintendo’s newly minted WiiWare service, is less a game than it is a distraction, a simple and clever-looking novelty that baits you with some simple strategy that ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere. You might call it a time-waster, but not a complete waste of time, due largely to Defend Your Castle’s endearing, seemingly improvised visual style.

Like so many classic time-wasters, Defend Your Castle began its life as a web-based Flash game–in fact, you can totally use the Internet channel to play the original Flash version on the Wii, if you care to. From a gameplay perspective, the WiiWare version is virtually identical. You’ve got a static screen with a simple, four-cornered castle on the right, and little stick-figure invaders charge towards it from the left. You can deal with basic foot soldiers by grabbing them with your cursor and flinging them into the air, allowing gravity to do the rest. Once you’ve accrued enough points from killing enemies directly, you can spend those points to upgrade the defensive and offensive capacities of your castle.

In between rounds you can repair damage taken, increase the amount of damage you can take, and build towers for archers, magicians, masons, and bombers. Perhaps most important is the conversion pool, which you can drop enemy soldiers into, turning them into friendly soldiers that you use to fill your various towers. How you choose to allocate your soldiers is the most strategic thing about Defend Your Castle, though it’s often easy to compensate for poor allocation choices with some speedy soldier-flinging.

So you’ve got some real-time combat, and some simple resource management, but the basic gameplay remains mostly static from one round to the next. Rounds get longer, enemies become faster and more numerous, and you can unlock some additional spells for your magicians, but it’s not much. Also, pro tip: the game takes its sweet time ramping up the difficulty, to the point that you’re probably better off just ignoring the normal difficulty and going straight for heroic. There’s four-player support in here as well, which adds the fun little kink of rewarding the top-scoring player in each round with the sole ability to allocate soldiers and activate magic attacks in the following round. Really, the best thing about the gameplay is just how seemingly manic it can get at higher levels.

If all you want is gameplay, then Defend Your Castle isn’t really worth the 500 Wii points they’re asking. But much of the game’s charm comes from its visuals, which also helps set it apart from its Flash-based predecessor. Defend Your Castle looks like an arts & crafts collage made from whatever the artist had around, giving the whole thing a tactile, hand-crafted quality. The background looks like construction paper laid over a cork board, with passing clouds dangling from bits of yarn. Your cursor looks like a bread-bag clip. Soldiers appear to be crayon drawings topped with shirt buttons or bottle caps and googly eyes, with some being armed with broken popsicle sticks or explosive rings of cap-gun caps. Even the explosions just sound like someone making an explosion sound with their mouth.

The presentation goes a long way towards making Defend Your Castle a worthwhile experience, but after a few hours of fending off hordes of DIY enemies, I was done with it. There’s a much more involved, much more interesting game to be made here, though I suppose part of the appeal of Defend Your Castle is that it’s relatively low-impact gaming.


systems: wii games:

Dracula is Still a Threat!

posted by Ryan Davis on May 15, 2008 – 4:16 pm

There’s something to be said for knowing your limitations and just doing what you do well. While it has taken a few forays into the polygonal realm, it seems that the Castlevania series has found its home on handhelds, having had success in recent years on both the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. Series producer Koji Igarashi took the stage at Konami’s San Francisco press event last night to give us a first look at Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, which looks to make some interesting deviations from the formula, but without sacrificing the stuff that makes Castlevania what it is.

For starters, no Belmonts. The famous vampire hunting family has apparently gone missing, leaving Dracula to cause a loud ruckus without anyone to whip him to death. A number of organizations spring up to combat Dracula, though the only one that’s found any success is the titular order of Ecclesia, which harnesses the power of glyphs to fight Dracula’s undead scourge. In particular, there’s a raven-haired woman named Shanoa who belongs to the Order, who is able to absorb the glyphs into her body, and it’s as Shanoa that you’ll fight the forces of Dragula. That’s right, a lady!

The glyph system will represent a fundamental change for Castlevania, as it seems to replace any traditional weapons or magic attacks you might have. So instead of arming Shanoa with an actual, physical rapier, you’ll arm her with a rapier glyph, which she can use to summon a rapier for the duration of her attack. The upside is that you can arm multiple glyphs at once, with different combinations revealing different, sometimes devastating abilities. Igarashi showed that if you arm that rapier glyph to both her right and left arms, she can attack much more quickly, or if you arm her with both a light and a dark glyph, it can create a huge explosion.

He also showed off a special glyph that created a magnetic ring around Shanoa, allowing her to gravitate towards special metal pegs, and then slingshot her way from one peg to another, which he made sound like a significant gameplay element. Most of the glyphs we saw were given to Shanoa by the Order, but certain enemies carry glyphs with them, which you can absorb directly. The catch is that using glyphs will drain your magic meter, and once it’s tapped, you have to wait for it to regenerate, which could be mighty inconvenient in the middle of a fight with a giant crab or Frankenstein’s monster.

Beyond the glyph stuff, Order of Ecclesia promises online support in the form of head-to-head competition, as well as the ability to buy and sell gear collected in the game. While Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia wasn’t playable at the event, but with the game’s Fall 2008 release date, I don’t expect we’ll have to wait too much longer.


systems: ds games:

The Hills Are Alive

posted by Ryan Davis on May 15, 2008 – 2:50 pm

Konami showed off a fair amount of Silent Hill: Homecoming (or as I like to call it, SHH!) at its press event last night, and as a bit of a Silent Hill outsider, the differences between SHH and past entries weren’t immediately apparent to me. Running on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware will certainly make for improved visuals, but the game still seems to evoke that same Silent Hill feel, with pallid, bloodshot characters trudging through desolate, foggy streets and grimy, poorly lit corridors, wrestling with their own sanity, and having occasional run-ins with skinless dogs. For fans, this is all probably very reassuring news.

SHH will revolve around Alex Shepherd–a character whose appearance I’m convinced is based on Angel’s David Boreanaz–an ex-soldier who, after some disturbing dreams, returns to his hometown of Shepherd’s Glen to search for his younger brother Josh, whom Alex senses is in trouble. We were shown a cutscene from early in the game where Alex finds his mother sitting at home with a gigantic handgun in her lap, and while she was there, it was pretty apparent that she wasn’t actually there. For as little that actually happens in the scene, I was honestly impressed by how effective it was in building a sense of unease, something that carried through a handful of other cutscenes that were shown.

As a total aside, the press release for Silent Hill: Homecoming states that you will “Enter the next chapter of Silent Hill as you delve deeper in the tormented history of the town and learn of the evil that surrounds Toluca Lake” which is either a hilarious typo, or a hilarious design decision.

While the atmosphere of dread the series is known for seems fully intact in SHH, Konami is making some significant changes to the way the game handles, particularly the combat, which promises more fluidity and less frustration. When it’s time to fight skinless dogs, sexily disfigured nurses, dudes with pyramids for heads, and other oozing, disturbing monstrosities, you can go into “stalk mode”, which changes the default third-person camera into an over-the-shoulder, Gears-of-War-style perspective, presumably giving you a better view of the action. You’ll have light and heavy attacks that can be strung together into combos, and your attacks can be charged up as well. What I’ve seen of the combat so far has been strictly melee, with Alex swinging axes and lead pipes. You’ll be able to dodge incoming attacks, with dodges coming in perfect and imperfect varieties. It seems that your timing will determine the type of dodge you perform, and a poorly timed dodge will result in you still taking some amount of damage.

I got some hands-on time with SHH following the presentation, and while I didn’t get to experience any of the combat, there was still plenty of unpleasantness. The sequence I played opened with Alex strapped to a gurney being rolled through a nightmare vision of a hospital by a blood-spattered orderly, eventually ending up in an operating room equipped with some very rusty, very nasty-looking instruments–the kind you could pick up TB or Hep C off of. Before anything too painful could happen to Alex, the creepy guy in scrubs gets run through with a gigantic blade and dragged away, leaving me to jam on the X button to break loose from the binding leather straps.

Equipped with the Silent-Hill-standard pocket flashlight, I roamed the hospital, eventually finding Alex’s kid brother Josh, who didn’t seem at all freaked out by the fact that he was locked in a jail cell in this haunted house of a hospital, instead acting a bit standoffish towards Alex. As I scoured rooms littered with body-bagged corpses and bloody, disused medical equipment for clues to opening the cell, I found the ambient nastiness to be pretty convincing. There were some jump-scares, such as when a mangled corpse fell from the ceiling right in front of me, but mostly it was the sound design that got under my skin. Using the sound of a crying baby might be a little easy, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t effective.

Personally, I’ve always found the pacing of the Silent Hill games to be too plodding, but I’ve also always admired their acutely unsettling tone. With Silent Hill: Homecoming, I get the impression that it’ll be picking up the pace, without sacrificing that impending sense of dread that all but defines Silent Hill.


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Last Night I Listened to My iPod, Looked at Playboy, and Shot Several Dudes in the Head

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 15, 2008 – 12:34 pm

With E3 around the corner, publishers are getting their lineups together and holding a collection of pre-show events. Konami had its pre-show event last night, and took the time to make a couple of new announcements. But the game that’s already finished and almost out the door cast a long shadow over the entire event. And rightfully so. After years of development, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, is finally complete and will be hitting stores soon. Konami’s Hideo Kojima was present to show off the early moments of what’s said to be Solid Snake’s final mission.

As soon as Kojima picked up the controller, part of me wanted to run from the room. While I’m typically not very sensitive to spoilers and plot details, something about the magnitude of MGS4 makes me want to play it on my own terms, in a dark room somewhere, after it’s already hit stores. But Kojima was skipping all of the cutscenes and codec conversations, making exposure to the game’s particulars minimal. Instead, it was much of the same stuff we’ve already seen, with Snake making his way through a Middle East battlefield, where PMCs face off with a militia. A lot of the early part of the game is about getting used to the environment, understanding how all the different camo options work, and blowing some stuff up along the way.

He also showed how Drebin’s Shop will work. Drebin, if you haven’t been following along, is the arms dealer with a pet monkey that you’ve seen in some of the trailers. Since all of the PMC weapons are ID-tagged and locked to outsiders, you can’t use them. But Drebin can provide you with plenty of guns, if you have enough Drebin points. As you pick up guns around the battlefield, you’ll see that your point total keeps rising, and you can access a weapon purchase screen at any time from the pause menu. You can also customize your weapons with flashlights, laser sights, grips, grenade launchers, scopes, and so on. The last thing we saw was a special gun with an extremely high cost. Kojima stated that most players would need to play the game three times through to get it, but the payoff is a weapon that calls in a huge tornado that destroys everything in its wake.

He also showed off some of the product integration that MGS4 will have. Remember how you could find bikini magazines and leave them laying around to distract soldiers? Now they’re actually branded with the Playboy name. You’ll find music tracks hidden around the game, and Snake can play them on his 30GB iPod. You can then equip the iPod to listen to any of the music you’ve found while playing the game. That’s weird and I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

After the demo, I took the opportunity to play a little Metal Gear Solid 4 for myself. This just reconfirmed that it isn’t a game you can play for ten minutes and really get a feel for. Besides, my interest in the game is more about seeing how this long, weird saga finally wraps up than in the particulars of its gameplay and control.

Lastly, Konami announced that it would be taking pre-orders for what it described as a “very limited” PlayStation 3 bundle for North America. This is the gray metallic PS3 and Dual Shock 3 that we’ve been seeing bandied about for the past few months. Pre-orders will open on the 19th of this month. From the way they kept saying “very limited,” I’d expect that it’ll sell out on the same day. So get your web browsing hand ready for action if you hope to pick one up.

systems: ps3 games:

Hey, No One Ever Wants to Sing, Anyway

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 15, 2008 – 12:05 pm

You may not realize this, but Konami actually invented this whole Guitar Hero/Rock Band craze around a decade ago with a pair of Japanese games called Guitar Freaks and Drummania. Outside of some occasional arcade appearances, the two games were usually only known to importers and crazy people back then.

As an importer, and an occasionally crazy one at that, I have fond memories of both games. I’d occasionally pester people at Konami about the games, and how they should be released domestically, even though I never thought they’d catch on. A couple of people would smile and nod at me like I was insane. One or two people would meet my fervor head-on and say something along the lines of “dude, I know! I keep telling them we need to do Guitar Freaks here!” This year, Konami will re-enter the plastic guitar and drums genre with something called Rock Revolution.

It can be played by a maximum of three players, just like Drummania and Guitar Freaks could when you linked it all together. You can have guitar, bass, and drums–no vocals. It’ll have 40 songs on the disc with plans for downloadable content. I skimmed the song list and saw these, among others:

Blitzkrieg Bop
Magic Man
Round and Round
Sk8er Boi
Walk
We’re Not Gonna Take It
Run to the Hills
Cum On Feel The Noize
All the Small Things
Spoonman
Still of the Night
Dr. Feelgood

All of the songs in the game are cover versions. In a world where the heavyweights in the genre are working to get the real versions of songs, going all covers seems totally nuts.

Konami reps hinted at a guitar controller of its own being in development, but they were using a wireless Guitar Hero III controller to demo the game. While no images of it have been released and we were told that photos weren’t allowed, part-time courtroom artist and full-time nudist Ryan Davis did up an artist’s rendition of the drum controller, which has six pads up top and a kick pedal down below. Rather than orienting them in a straight line, or altering the height of the cymbal triggers like the Guitar Hero IV drums apparently will, Rock Revolution uses drums of different shapes and sizes. A large, round pad sits bottom center and acts as your snare. Smaller circular pads sit to the sides and above the snare trigger. In the upper-left and right sides, triangular-shaped cymbal pads. Down below sits a single kick pedal. The drum controller felt sturdy, but also sort of confusing.

Granted, I only played two songs, but the drums feel a lot less intuitive than Rock Band’s, even on the easy setting. That’s because the game presents the pads you’re supposed to hit as a straight line of seven different colors that fall from the top of the screen. The kick pedal is treated exactly like the rest of the drums, but the icons that fall are shaped a little differently for the kick pedal. It’s in the middle, with three drums on either side of it on-screen. The guitar seems to be the same five-button action you’ve seen in other games, with long bands of color signifying held notes, and so on.

A quick note: for some reason, all of the released screens and video of Rock Revolution imply that the drum controller only has five different buttons on it, including the kick drum. Maybe they’re just out of date or something, because even when playing on the easiest of the five difficulty settings, all seven triggers were showing, even though you don’t have to touch the kick pedal at all until you hit medium.

Though it wasn’t shown during the announcement, the game will also have something called jam mode, where you’ll be able to use the drums and guitar to record your own tracks. Up to eight individual tracks can be recorded and saved. The game will also appear on the Wii, and the press release makes it sound like there won’t be any instruments in the Wii version, and that you’d just play guitar and drums using the Wii remote and Nunchuk. A DS version is also in development.

So, yeah, I’m skeptical, and I was left feeling a little sorry for Konami in the process. Sure, they may have invented this style of gaming, but a lot has changed since then, and the feature list of this game doesn’t seem like it meets what the other guys are already offering. Rock Revolution makes me feel like Konami is bringing a knife to a gun fight.


systems: xbox 360 games:

Landown Chainsaw Massacre

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 14, 2008 – 11:29 am

The best thing about the way everyone involved with Gears of War 2 keeps calling it “bigger, better, more badass” is that it makes me think we’re all talking about the Neo Geo, which everyone knows is “bigger, badder, and better.” After all, it’s 24-bits. I have no segue here. Let’s talk Gears 2.

You’ve probably all seen the video of Gears of War 2 that was released last week, which finally shows a bit of gameplay involving big derricks full of armed humans against the Locust horde, including a couple of brumaks and a whole mess of your regular soldiers. At Microsoft’s recent Spring showcase event, The Unsinkable Cliff Bleszinski was out west to show more of that same encounter to the press. It was my first time seeing the game in motion in something other than a streaming window. And yeah, it looks pretty amazing.

The huge battlefield we were shown makes “bigger, better, more badass” seem like an actual development mantra, not just slick talk. The core things about Gears of War appear to be roughly the same, like the ability to find cover, active reloads, and the way the game constantly points out objects in the environment and lets you press the Y button if you want to swing the camera around and see it for yourself. Though the game obviously isn’t final, and there’s still a lot that could change, things like the little gong-type sound that plays when you complete an objective or hit a checkpoint are the same. Overall, a lot of the things on display already felt very familiar.

The difference is that these defining mechanics are being placed into a game that, from hearing what the people working on it have to say, is much more ambitious than the first. It’s easy to see that the game operates on a much larger scale than the corridor-heavy action of the first game. As you’re rolling around in these huge derricks, you’ll see swarms of Locust soldiers rushing over to another vehicle and busting out grappling hooks in an attempt to hijack it. Only they’ll be tiny because they’re far away. You’ve seen the brumaks attempting to stop the human advance in this level, well there’s also a corpser–that’s the giant spider thing that you sent flying into the lava-like immulsion in the previous game–that pops up and impedes your progress, too.

At one point, your derrick breaks down and you have to guard the pilot, a conscripted Stranded named Dizzy, as he attempts to fix things up. This means you get out of the derrick and hit the ground, slide behind cover, and close up some old-fashioned emergence holes, just like they did back in the old days of Gears 1. After providing some cover for the repairs, you hop back on-board and seamlessly get moving again. It’s a small, but solid example of how the game will provide some minute-to-minute variety, something that representatives said would be a big factor this time around.

Of course, there are some new moves to play around with, as well. There will be new execution animations for the different weapons, and new weapons, like a burst pistol that seems to pop off five shots every time you pull the trigger. Vehicles will play a larger role, and you’ll be able to ride around in more of them, as well has use some of them for cover, from the sounds of things. You’ve probably seen the new chainsaw clashes, where you’ll need to mash the B button to come out on top. Players are no longer invincible when sawing enemies, so you’ll be happy to know that the chainsaw clashes don’t leave you exposed any longer than an unopposed sawing would.

That sounds like the sort of thing that would come up in a conversation about multiplayer balance, but no one’s getting too specific about multiplayer plans just yet. I will say that the demo we saw was launched from a menu screen marked “campaign lobby.” This is just me speculating here, but two-player games don’t need lobbies, you know what I mean? So my guess is four-player co-op. The one bit of info we did get is that co-op players will be able to play on different difficulties, which sounds a little weird. The player playing on the harder setting might have less health, or weaker weapons. Also, this would have an effect in sections of the game where the players split up.

So there’s plenty that we still don’t know about Gears of War 2, but if the whole game offers that sort of “big battle” feeling shown in the level on display, it’s probably going to be pretty rad.


systems: xbox 360 games:

Mis Pantalones son Llenos de Pinatas

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 13, 2008 – 11:51 pm

I had convinced myself that Viva Pinata was going to slowly fade away after Party Animals, a minigame collection that I managed to completely avoid, came and went extremely quickly. So I was pretty excited to see word of a true sequel to the original game. That game, known as Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, looks like it’s taking everything from the first game, adding a bunch of new stuff, streamlining some things, and delivering more of the same occasionally-stressful garden building action.

But if the stress of maintaining a garden, attracting pinatas, and keeping sour, evil creatures out of your space is too much to take, the sequel has a new “fun mode” that removes all of the obstacles and progression. So you can just fill your garden with anything you want. It seems like it’s designed for kids, though anyone who wants to just relax and watch pinatas interact (and who doesn’t?) would probably be into this mode.

All of the existing pinatas from the first game will return, and they’ll be joined by 30 new species, making for over 100 total species. A lot of the interactions between the different pinatas have been changed up to account for the new species, and mating requirements have also changed. The romance maze has been switched up with the new option of a closer camera angle, and hearts that can be collected to increase the chance of twins or a wildcard bonus.

One of the things that made me crazy when I would play the original game for hours at a time was all the trips to the menus and shops, each of which kicked off a brief loading time. This has been streamlined in the new game with new tools that prevent you from having to visit the store as frequently. A seed bag lets you buy and plant seeds directly from your garden. A fertilizer bag lets you do the same with fertilizer. I’m a grown man excitedly talking about a seed bag that lets me plant virtual seeds in my virtual garden filled with pinatas. STOP LOOKING AT ME!!!!!

Sorry, sometimes I get all self-conscious when it comes to Viva Pinata. Anyway…

If you’re into the whole co-op thing, a second player can jump into your garden at any time. While the first player still has control of the budget and all the meaningful stuff, the additional player gets slightly better tools and, if the player performs good deeds, more upgrades become available. The game will also have new Xbox Live features, but the developers on-hand to discuss the game with the media weren’t talking.

There will be a lot of new objects to place in your gardens, like spooky item sets, or a space item set that will let you buy UFOs and the like. In addition to planting grass, you can also lay out sand and snow. Having a snowy garden makes you susceptible to blizzards, rather than rain. You can plant down tracks for trains, and if bird-type pinatas land on your train and ride it around, they’ll become more valuable. Pinatas can also do tricks under certain circumstances, and a new “trick stick” tool lets you coax your pinatas into performing tricks more frequently.

Trouble in Paradise also makes use of the Xbox Live Vision camera in a pretty interesting way. Much like Sony’s Eye of Judgment, you can hold up cards with special barcode-like markings on them to scan objects into the game. A collection of pinata cards were on-hand, and sure enough, holding them up to the camera dropped said pinata directly into the garden. But cards can have different uses, like advancing time, or changing the weather.

The catch is that these cards aren’t coming to a retailer near you. They’re not for sale. Instead, you can make them yourself using an in-game camera. So you can snap a picture of your best pinata and upload it to the game’s website. From there, the site will add the proper markings to make the image scannable. From there, it’s up to you. You can print it out and pass it out to friends, or you could even put it onto an iPod or a Zune and hold those up to the camera for a scan, according to Rare. Not to get all preachy, but it’s kind of awesome to see a blatant-looking opportunity for additional revenue streams being turned into a potentially rad and free community feature.

While the first game had a rough story, the sequel will attempt to give you more of a concrete goal. It seems that the pinata computer records have been destroyed, and by breeding new ones and sending them off to parties, you’re slowly regenerating the records.

I don’t care what you think of me. I am crazy excited that there’s a new Viva Pinata game coming out this September, and so far, it looks like it’ll be better than the original.


systems: xbox 360 games:

Licensed to Drive

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 13, 2008 – 10:30 pm

People have been speculating about what a third Banjo-Kazooie game would look like, and some of the guesses got pretty wild. But I don’t think anyone was quite expecting this. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts seems like it’ll have plenty of actual, honest-to-goodness on-foot platforming in it, but the series is going in a pretty different direction with the addition of vehicles.

Obviously, adding vehicles to a game is rarely enough to make things feel totally different–video game characters have been hitching a ride for years now. But Nuts & Bolts is sort of crazy, because it lets you build your own vehicles, and you’ll often use these to complete the challenges that stand in your way.

When playing for myself, messing around with the vehicle builder was my first order of business. You can pick a pre-fabricated ride or start from scratch, and you can save your creations, as well. You’ll use various blocks to piece together a body, slap on some seats, and probably some wheels, if you want it to roll. Or you could always snap on some propellors up top for a chopper. Maybe add some wings and a jet engine for a plane? Or, hey, plop those props onto the rear of the craft for some water-based propulsion! While there’s a whole game in Nuts & Bolts, I got the impression that snapping together the different parts to make weird cars, boats, subs, planes, and choppers–or some unholy combination of them all–was something I could lose some serious time with. Beyond building a body and making it move, you can also slap on some weapons, or other objects, like a spring, which you can slot on the bottom to make your car jump, or balloons for floatation assistance.

Some multiplayer modes will be all about the vehicles. I caught a quick glimpse of a sumo mode, where players use their contraptions to force each other out of the arena. It’ll support up to eight players. In the single-player, though, it’s all about getting jiggy. Jiggies. Remember those? Yeah, jigsaw puzzle pieces, the objects that make the world of Banjo-Kazooie go ’round are very present here. There will be five worlds to visit as you quest for puzzle pieces and prepare yourself to stop Gruntilda, still the series’ heavy after all these years in a story that involves someone known as The Lord of the Games, who claims to have created every video game ever made… even Target: Terror? Wow.

We saw one single-player task, where you’re challenged to collect 15 coconuts in a vacuum-equipped barrel. It seemed like the right way to do things was to take a vehicle, drive it down to the coconuts, fill it up, and drive it back, making as many trips as needed to get the required amount. But another nearby vehicle could fly, and it also had a sort of sticky ball on it you could use to pick things up–including the barrel you’re supposed to be filling. The Rare representative conducting the demo grabbed the barrel, flew it down near the coconuts, and completed the task with ease. It’ll be interesting to see how many of the tasks change depending on what you’re using to do the job.

Another interesting thing is that you’ll find additional car parts in crates around the world. At any point, you can freeze the action and go into a workshop mode that lets you pick up these new objects and bolt them onto your vehicle. All this vehicle stuff seems like it could be totally awesome.

While we did see some on-foot stuff, and it’s clear that Banjo and Kazooie will have plenty of platforming moves at their disposal, it seems pretty obvious that the vehicle creation stuff will be the heart of the game. Microsoft is pegging this as a holiday release, which in my mind means “November.”

As a footnote, I just got a text message from one Ryan Davis, who claims “Banjo is effin sick.” He then went on to curse for reals, so I think you can safely say that we’re both pretty impressed with it.


systems: xbox 360 games:

Microsoft Shows Games and Giant Bomb is There

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 13, 2008 – 8:56 pm

Good evening, party people! If you’ve listened to the podcast already, then you know that there was a Microsoft event today, known as the “2008 Xbox 360 Spring Showcase.” I have returned from said event and am about to start writing articles about the games I saw. Actually, I’m about to blow my nose, then turn on the television for some background noise. Then I might slip these shoes off. Yeah, definitely going shoeless. But before we get to that point, here are quick impressions of what was there and what I saw.

For starters, there were no new announcements at the event. All the talk about “Lips” and “Ninja Blade” that we saw yesterday are still secrets. No new motion controller was there, either.

But there were a handful of games there, and Microsoft’s Shane Kim presented them all as games that would be shipping this year. Here’s the list, along with q quick sentence or two, just to get you going while I collect my notes and thoughts into more meaningful text:

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts - The vehicle-building stuff is really cool and works surprisingly well. I was quickly able to take a big, bulky vehicle and slap jets, propellers, and wings onto it, making it some kind of crazy jet. Potentially very rad.

Viva Pinata: Trouble In Paradise - Dude, they are making a sequel to Viva Pinata and it looks awesome. More pinatas, streamlined controls, crazy card-scanning without the awful exploitation that usually goes with collectible cards. Sold. If you didn’t like Viva Pinata, you’re a Bad Person.

Ninja Gaiden 2 - You’ve probably already read a ton about this, as most press outlets have had preview discs for awhile. I’m not a huge fan of the original game, so I’m not the best judge for this one, but it’s got multiple difficulty levels and the combos and blood effects that result from said combos look impressive. I briefly spoke with Tomonobu Itagaki in a group interview setting to learn a bit more.

Fable 2 - Peter Molyneux was on-hand to give a quick taste of Fable 2. The ideas seem sound and he comes across as completely sincere when he tells you that he wants to make one of the top ten game stories of all-time. I’m left wondering if it will be able to attract the “casual” audience he’s going after without alienating people who have been playing games for years, as that’s probably the riskiest thing he mentioned about the entire game. Ambitious and potentially amazing.

Gears of War 2 - Cliff “Young Clifford” Bleszinski on was in the building to show more of the level that last weekend’s gameplay clip was culled from. After seeing him demo the game, I am officially excited about Gears of War 2. Kudo Tsunoda was also up in there to talk about Gears in a group interview-type thing, where I was the ass who made the Def Jam Icon joke. Come on, if Marcus Fenix could make air turntables to gain momentum against the Locust, that would be awesome.

Too Human - Unless they slipped something into the ventilation system and I’m dreaming all this, I totally played Too Human. Which implies that it is, indeed, a video game that can be played and potentially enjoyed. Story-driven RPGs and loud rooms full of people who are too busy trying to order drinks to play games don’t mix, but the combat seems interesting and at times I was reminded of Diablo.

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - What’s worse than trying to play an RPG for 20 minutes in a loud room? Trying to play one that’s trying to tell you jokes along the way. I didn’t even try to play this one, as I’m saving myself for its actual release. Though I saw someone collect an orange, which can be used in combat to “distract robots.” The potential for robot-on-fruit fornication as an in-game animation left me with a warm feeling inside and hope for the future. Also? Dialogue trees.

Remember, Shane Kim opened the event by saying that all of these games will be out this year. In case you didn’t notice, Halo Wars was not on the above list. It’s a game without an official release date, though GameStop’s retail database has it pegged at a totally-made-up date of October 1. I was left wondering “will Halo Wars ship this year?” Then I asked myself “will Halo Wars ever ship?” I sort of half-heartedly posed the question to a Microsoft employee, but his extremely large, extremely dark sunglasses made an already-good poker face even better, so no answers there. However, the game’s official site is still seeing frequent updates, so it seems pretty clear that development continues.

systems: xbox 360 games: , , , , , , ,

Giant Bombcast 05-13-2008

posted by Ryan Davis on May 13, 2008 – 6:45 pm

We give ourselves heart murmurs with too many energy drinks as we discuss the nuts and bolts of Banjo-Kazooie, the mashup potential of Guitar Hero IV, Super Mario Bros. 4, Lego Pulp Fiction, the semantics of Hell, and more!


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systems: podcast

We Like the Blox, the Blox That Go Boom

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 12, 2008 – 6:14 pm

Boom Blox is one of those products that blurs the line between game and toy. While it has the levels and general structure needed to provide you with a clear sense of progression through its challenges, there’s something to be said for just tossing bowling balls into huge towers of blocks and letting physics take it from there.

The game gives you a lot of different ways to play around with that basic concept, both alone and with up to four players. Once you’ve gotten over the game’s built-in variety, you can get into the level editor and create some wild stuff of your own, then share it with your friends via the internet.

The key thing about Boom Blox is the level of control you have. You mainly interact with objects by tossing or shooting things at them. Shooting is a point-and-click endeavor, but throwing things has a lot more finesse to it. First you point at the screen and use B to rotate the camera, then hold A when you’ve lined up your shot. To toss, you cock back your arm, make a throwing motion, and let off the A button to release. The harder your throwing motion is, the harder your toss. While getting used to how fast you need to move your arm to throw hard can take a little time, it’s pretty easy to pick up.

The grab tool gets a bit trickier. Instead of just lining up a shot, locking on, and tossing, the grab tool lets you get your hands on individual blocks and pull them around. Sometimes you can be wild with this, but it usually requires a very steady hand and some slow, even movement on your part. That’s because most of the grab tool games in Boom Blox are effectively Jenga, where you’re trying to pull objects out of a mess of blocks without disturbing the pile too much.

The Jenga-style games, which you can play alone or with others, is probably my favorite thing to do in Boom Blox, but there’s a lot of variety to be found. The game starts you out trying to use the fewest number of baseballs to knock down all of the gem blocks in a level, and as you go deeper you’ll discover how the different block types interact. There are bomb blocks that explode when hit, chemical blocks that explode when two of them connect, vanish blocks that disappear when you strike them, and so on.

The game’s adventure mode brings a collection of cute, block-shaped characters into the proceedings, some more directly than others. This sets up games where you’re helping a little mustache-wearing critter “mine for gold” by blowing a hole in a structure with a bomb ball, then tossing rubber balls into the hole. Any blocks touched by the rubber ball light up gold and count for your score. The last couple of games in the adventure mode ended up being my least favorite. Both of them have you protecting kittens from skeletons, one set using the grab tool to place obstacles to slow down the enemies and clear a path for the kittens, and another where you can shoot or toss balls at the skeletons to keep them away from the kittens. They both can get pretty frustrating, and it shines a bit of a light on the way the game’s progression keeps things pretty inflexible. If you get hung up on a puzzle and you aren’t willing to switch over to multiplayer mode or go create a level, you’re basically stuck.

The multiplayer offers co-operative games, competitive games, and attack games. The Jenga-like mode counts as a competitive game, where players take turns removing blocks from a pile and attempt to keep the whole thing from toppling over. The castle attack games are neat, too, giving players big castles with gem blocks in them. The goal is to knock out all of your opponents’ gem blocks before you get taken down in kind. With a good amount of variety to it, the multiplayer mode can really take you a long way.

Of course, if you do get tired of what Boom Blox has to offer by default, you can go in and edit existing levels or create new ones from scratch. The creation tools aren’t much different from the grab tool you use in the main game, so it’s somewhat intuitive, but it requires a steady hand if you want to make something specific. I found that I didn’t really have the patience to make anything too elaborate, but if you’re into level creation, you’ll probably like what Boom Blox delivers in this area.

Boom Blox would be a shell of a game if it didn’t have the graphical prowess to back up its concept. The game has a charmingly simple look to it that might not wow you right away. But the game doesn’t fall apart with a lot of objects are moving around on-screen, and that’s what really matters in this case. When you start setting up elaborate, bomb-filled levels that send everything flying all at once, it’s good to know that the game can usually keep up with you, and that’s what makes it look great, overall.

While some of the trickier puzzles may take some real time to master, especially if you want to get a gold medal on every challenge, it doesn’t take a lot of time to acclimate yourself to Boom Blox and whip through most of what it has to offer. The lasting value, then, comes from the multiplayer, which is an absolute blast, and the creation aspect, which, to be fair, isn’t for everyone. Still, with so many different things to do and so many different ways to do it, Boom Blox seems like the sort of game that just about anyone can have a great time with.


systems: wii games:

Unprofessional Friday Continues Unabated

posted by Ryan Davis on May 9, 2008 – 4:35 pm

So yeah, we got a copy of The DOG Island for the Wii in the mail today. Apparently it’s pretty good.


systems: wii games:

Nap Time For Tony

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 9, 2008 – 2:01 pm

So I saw this on Joystiq this morning, but after clicking through all of the “we saw this on this other site” links it traces back to a UK game site called DarkZero, who apparently did some actual listening during Activision’s quarterly earnings call and discovered that the company is giving Tony Hawk the year off.

Some people are taking this opportunity to mention EA’s Skate, which was able to enter the skateboarding genre and clean up in its first year, while the Tony Hawk series has been shambling on like a zombie for awhile now. Personally, my first reaction was one of abject stokedness, which isn’t even a word!

As a longtime Tony Hawk player, I’ve thought that the series has needed some more-serious changes for awhile now. I don’t think any of the games have been bad, but every year certain things just started to feel more and more tired. Sure, the game delivered a large, mostly-new world to skate in every year, but the handful of new mechanics introduced every year always fall a little flat. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Nail the Trick, but the last huge and 100% successful game-changing thing to happen to Tony Hawk was the addition of the revert. And that was added in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.

Hopefully giving Neversoft an additional year will return the series to its former glory. Also, hopefully Neversoft isn’t just looking at EA’s game and thinking of ways to emulate it. I thought Skate was a good first entry that provided a different take on skateboarding, but it’d be a shame to see the leader-to-follower transition happen that fast.

I think I already know the answer to this question, but do you still care about Tony Hawk? Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one left.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

I’ll Bring The Green Screen, You Bring The Beers

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 7, 2008 – 4:55 pm

In some weird alternate dimension, arcades still matter in North America and the classic quarter-sucking games of the 80s and 90s are still absolving us of our pocket change while simultaneously keeping us out of the house under the guise of “going out and doing stuff.” In that reality, Target: Terror came out and was lovingly received by a gaming public that still cares about things like full-motion video and light-gun games.

Here in our dimension, though, Target: Terror came out to today’s arcades: empty, lifeless places full of the damned and people who just don’t know any better. There’s probably some sales chart somewhere that pegs this game, which you might as well call “Area 51: Dudes With Shirts Over Their Faces Instead Of Aliens… Gold,” as a success in today’s arcade market. Someone somewhere probably considers it “a real earner” in their bowling alley or laundromat or wherever it is that people are hiding arcade games in this day and age. But then Konami somehow decided to pick up a Wii port of the game. And it’s, you know, bad?

Or maybe Target: Terror is great. At the very least, it looks like it was a lot of fun to make. The game is mostly comprised of dated-looking pre-rendered environments that scroll around on a track as a piece of full-motion video in the background. Terrorists and civilians are superimposed on this footage, and you need to shoot (or not shoot, in the case of innocents) them before they shoot you. If your gun is empty, you reload by firing while pointed off the screen. The part that looks like fun is that all of the people you can shoot are digitized humans, who go through a little animation routine, switch into another one if shot, and make their way off screen. My favorite is “guy with dynamite under his jacket,” who pops up close to the screen when you aren’t paying attention and rips his shirt open with a zest for living that I haven’t had in decades. Actually, my favorite is the girl who plays the newscaster at the beginning of each level. They shot her against a green screen, as well, but apparently they didn’t have any actual microphones, so she’s just reading fake news in some echoey room, probably using whatever mic was built into whatever camera they were using. This game feels super low-budget across the board, but in a sort-of-funny way.

But being hella budget doesn’t excuse Target: Terror. It’s way pixelated, the Wii Remote doesn’t do a great job of simulating a light gun, it doesn’t even run in 480p, and as a game meant to extract as many quarters from your pockets as possible, it’s jittery and fast, making it really tough to avoid damage as you work through the game’s scenes. Someone, somewhere is able to play the arcade version of this on one quarter. If you encounter him, do not take this gentleman on his up offer to give you a ride home! It will only end in tears, several years of forced servitude, and a shallow grave near mile marker 117.

You’re given 30 continues on your first attempt, and when you discover that isn’t enough, the game lets you start over with 40 continues on your second attempt. That probably won’t be enough, either, but by that point you’ll have played way more Target: Terror than you should have played, whether you’re playing alone or with a friend.

As I played Target: Terror, the thing I realized is that I’d rather be watching a “making of” video for all of the terrorists. I have a feeling it involved a lot of people hanging out near a green screen, slapping on sunglasses, tossing on a bubble vest, wrapping a T-shirt around a head or two, and acting like lunatics in front of a video camera. Instead of spending the $40 on Target: Terror, I recommend you wrap a T-shirt around your head and film yourself pretending to be a ninja, a terrorist, or a ninja terrorist. Then post it online and send it to your friends.


systems: wii games:

Yeah, That’s Mario Kart Alright

posted by Ryan Davis on May 7, 2008 – 4:39 pm

During my time with Mario Kart Wii, the theory was proposed to me that Nintendo has ceased trying to evolve its franchises, opting instead to simply remake their trademark games for each new generation of players, and I think the Mario Kart franchise serves as a powerful Exhibit A for this argument. In my experience, if people have a favorite Mario Kart game, it’s usually the first one they played. Mario Kart Wii is by no means bad, but it seems built for first-timers, and those looking to recapture what it felt like to be a first-timer. It delivers just about everything you expect from a Mario Kart game, both good and bad, making for an experience that can be fun, but never surprising.

So expect to see your usual roster of Mushroom Kingdom denizens power-sliding their way around serpentine courses peppered with jumps, boost pads, and crazy obstacles. There have been some modifications and some additions to the stock Mario Kart experience, but these are minor refinements, not evolutionary jumps. There’s a whole host of different control schemes, including a motion-control option that makes use of the little plastic steering wheel shell that comes packed-in with the game. I could see the Wii wheel being fun if I had never actually driven a car, but the novelty doesn’t make up for the lack of precision for me. I personally found that a GameCube controller or a remote-and-nunchuk combo produced the best results, and if I didn’t have an irrational distaste for the Classic Controller, that’d probably work pretty well, too.

In addition to the different character weight classes, there are now a number of different karts and motorbikes to choose from, each with a unique handling profile that can have a very dramatic effect on how the game handles. If you run a couple grand prix races in a kart, then switch over to a bike, expect to bring up the rear for a couple races. Both bikes and karts can perform stunts in mid-air, resulting in a little shot of boost when you hit the ground. Bikes are essentially two-wheeled karts, though when you’re on a bike you can pop a wheelie for extra speed on a straightaway, and bikes don’t get the second level of yellow sparks that karts can get by holding an extra-long power-slide. Despite all these variables, the basic Mario Kart rule of “Always Be Drifting, Except When You Shouldn’t” still applies across the board.

The structure of the game is predictably familiar. Single-player revolves around grand prix races that come in 50cc, 100cc, and 150cc varieties, though you can also run time trials, create custom races, or partake in the consistently tedious battle mode. I found the grand prix stuff fun, right up until I got to the 150cc level, at which point my Mario Kart skills buckled under the crushing force of random chance. With inherently solid controls, Mario Kart Wii, and by extension, every other Mario Kart game, could be an accessible, skill-based racing game, if it weren’t for all those goddamn power-ups, and the game’s serial habit of giving the most potent power-ups to last-place players. What’s the fun in skillfully outmaneuvering 11 opponents for three laps only to wind up in 12th following a barrage of blue shells, POW blocks, and thunderheads in the final stretch? It’s always been frustrating, and it remains frustrating.

The multiplayer options are bolstered by the inclusion of online play, which kind of alleviates the sad fate of playing Mario Kart all by yourself, albeit in the silent, heavily insulated world of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, where it’s difficult to play with friends and strangers at the same time. Maybe I’m just jaded, but it’s 2008 y’all, the simple inclusion of online play is no longer enough to set my world on fire. I’m also a little bothered by the track selection in Mario Kart Wii. There are 32 different tracks here, a full half of which are straight-up remakes of tracks from past Mario Kart games. To be fair, a number of the new tracks are fun and inventive, and I understand why some people would be excited about the inclusion of so many tracks from past Mario Kart games, but for me it just reinforced the feeling that, yup, I’ve totally already played this game before.

Mario Kart Wii is a good game stunted by its audience’s apparently insatiable appetite for the exact same thing, over and over again. The addition of online play and motion controls are good, but they’re also the most predictable choices possible. Personally, I’m completely tired of getting exactly what I expect.


systems: wii games:

Fight Night Round 4: Crazy Rapin’ Edition

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 7, 2008 – 2:59 pm

We found this WORLD EXCLUSIVE footage of Fight Night Round 4’s all-new Classic Interview mode… OK, whatever, I can’t keep up the lame joke. This amazing Mike Tyson footage speaks for itself. But keep in mind that it frequently speaks in shocking slurs and filthy curses before you hit play on it.

So, given that this is how most people see Mike Tyson now, don’t you think EA’s press release, which opens with…

The Champ Is Back! EA Announces EA SPORTS Fight Night Round 4
Mike Tyson Featured in First Boxing Videogame in Nearly a Decade

…is a little crazy? I guess you could argue that by “champ” it’s referring to the Fight Night series, which is the best (and only) boxing series around. Anyway, Fight Night Round 4 is being developed in Vancouver right now for PS3 and 360, and it’ll feature Tyson, Ali, and an “all-new physics-based animation system.” That sounds hot, but hey, I was already pulling my wallet out at “dude, we’re making a new Fight Night.” It’ll be available in 2009, at which time I will eat all of your children, impregnate you, fornicate, and probably get a great face tattoo all at the same time.

systems: ps3, xbox 360 games:

Mass Effect? More Like Mass ACTIVATION Effect, Am I Right?

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 7, 2008 – 2:05 pm

Some portions of the Internet are ablaze today, as the news of how the protection schemes used to stop people from bootlegging Mass Effect and Spore on the PC will work has come out. Most of the reporting sites are tracing the news back to Derek French, a technical producer at BioWare, who posted the info on EA’s plans to use SecuROM in both releases.

Here’s what French had to say back on May 3:

“Mass Effect uses SecuROM and requires an online activation for the first time that you play it. Each copy of Mass Effect comes with a CD Key which is used for this activation and for registration here at the BioWare Community. Mass Effect does not require the DVD to be in the drive in order to play, it is only for installation.

After the first activation, SecuROM requires that it re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez’d and gets banned). Just so that the 10 day thing doesn’t become abrupt, SecuROM tries its first re-check with 5 days remaining in the 10 day window. If it can’t contact the server before the 10 days are up, nothing bad happens and the game still runs. After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run.”

So not only will you need to be online to activate your copy of the game, you’ll also have be online at least once every ten days to prevent your copy from deactivating. Now, I’m sure most of you out there planning to play either game will probably be doing it on machines that are always connected to to the internet, so it’s probably not going to be a hassle for most players. But that doesn’t exactly make it right, either.

Personally, I’d feel a lot better about protection plans like this if they actually worked. But these days, that stuff doesn’t even seem to slow down the cadre of shady dudes looking to crack software and set it free for the bootleggin’ masses. So the pirates still win, and all we’re left with is a protection scheme that annoys legitimate users. Well… at least they aren’t using Starforce, right?

So I put it to you, the people out there actually playing PC games in 2008. You’re always complaining when consoles get games first, or bitching about how PC games are getting dumbed down for “the console kids.” But can you really blame developers for turning to consoles, when putting out a PC version isn’t much different from just releasing your game for free, and your effort to protect your investments with a protection scheme is met with forum posts about how dudes are going to boycott your game?

What would you do to reverse this? How much over-your-shoulder spying are you willing to put up with to stop pirates from torrenting the market for single-player PC games out of existence?

My solution: Everyone who purchases the game must submit a photo containing the person who purchased the game, one photo ID for said person, the receipt for the game, and a newspaper with today’s date on it. Every five days. Oh, wait, that’s right, I wanted you to try to make this easier. Never mind.

systems: pc games: ,

Giant Bombcast 05-06-2008

posted by Ryan Davis on May 6, 2008 – 9:39 pm

We hit the redline with the latest from Sony, a treatise on Card Sharks, free Rock Band songs, modular solutions for virtual modern living, the future of X-COM, Dr. Dre Kart Racing, and plenty of GTA4. That’s how you play the game!


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systems: podcast

Niko Bellic: A Real American Anti-Hero

posted by Jeff Gerstmann on May 5, 2008 – 4:25 pm

In your first several hours with Grand Theft Auto IV, it’s easy to want to approach it with a checklist of expectations and start comparing it to what you think a “next-generation” Grand Theft Auto game should be.

- New carjacking animations? Check.
- Improved gunplay? Check.
- GPS on the map? Check.
- Corny-yet-still-somehow-funny jokes? Check.

It’s natural to want to take that sort of clinical approach to a sequel, but as I moved through Liberty City and became more entrenched in its story, that stuff simply ceased to matter. At that point, and for the rest of the game, the only thing that mattered to me was Niko Bellic, the game’s protagonist. Is he going to survive this time? Are his new-found friends going to make it out alive? Will he ever find what he’s looking for, and will finding “that special someone” bring him the inner peace he needs? How did every single person he encounters end up so psychologically damaged?

That psychological side to the game translates into characters talking about how they feel, and about what they’re going through. It’s extremely well-written and made a serious impact on me. This isn’t the carefree killing-and-carjacking romp you might have expected. The way the characters act made each life harder and harder to take until I found myself rooting for Niko, hoping that he’d find what he was looking for and finally get some peace. Of course, once you’ve gone on a crime-spree that has you working for just about every different criminal in Liberty City, getting out unscathed simply isn’t an option.

To say too much more about the specifics of the story would start to detract from your own personal enjoyment of discovering it for yourself. It made a serious personal impact on me, and there were some plot twists that simply made me stop playing for a few hours because it started to hit a little too close to home and started reminding me of people in my own life. Seeing these virtual lives getting torn apart by heroin addiction, depression, or forces beyond anyone’s control made an emotional dent on me that no other game has done before. That makes being the man in charge of who lives and who dies even tougher. Later in the game, you’ll start to make very tough decisions, where you’ll have to kill one of the people you’ve been working for at the request of the other. By that time, I was so invested in these characters that the choice felt like much more than pushing a button on a game controller.

Though you’ll make choices at critical points in the game, the impact on the overall plot is mostly minimal. One choice you make near the game’s conclusion makes the most impact of any of Niko’s decisions, and the choice you make here determines how some of the final missions go, leading to one of two possible endings.

One last thing about the way the story and characters play out: unlike most GTA leads, Niko is no pushover. He’s got a sharp, sarcastic tongue and he doesn’t just mindlessly follow whoever is giving the orders. This helps acknowledge the insanity that’s going on around him and makes him a likable character. Yes, he’s out there doing horrible things, but he’s not doing it to run some Tommy Vercetti-like empire. He’s doing it to survive and to hopefully find some closure along the way.

So if you’ve read this far, you’ve probably figured out that this is a much darker game than the previous GTA games. Though the tone borders on nihilistic at points, the game is still filled with a bunch of lighthearted humor that exists at the periphery. The game still has a bevy of radio stations, each with its own DJs and commercials that make all kinds of jokes at the expense of American society or the culture of New York City. You can also watch TV in many of your safehouses, and there’s a collection of shows there that also provide the same type of humor. News is delivered by the Fox News-like Weazel News, which provides a slanted view of the things happening around town, calling almost everything that occurs a “terrorist threat.” The tone of the humor is exactly what you’d expect from the series, though the modern setting makes that humor feel a little more biting. Either way, this time around it also serves the purpose of preventing things from getting too dark and serious. It makes for a nice balance.

The majority of things you associate with Grand Theft Auto’s gameplay haven’t changed too much in GTA IV, though many of the familiar things you expect to see in a GTA game have been refined a bit. Combat, both armed and unarmed, is probably the biggest overhaul. When unarmed, you have two punches and a kick, as well as the ability to block and counter when necessary. But more often than not, you’re going to be strapped with a melee weapon or a gun of some kind. The game now has a cover system, letting you stick to walls and other objects, blind fire, and pop out to take a few aimed shots before getting back behind cover. This addition alone makes shooting much easier to deal with than it’s been in the past. The game’s lock-on targetting has also been tweaked. Overall, most of the people who have had serious complaints about the way GTA handles shooting shouldn’t find much to complain about this time around. If anything, it makes things a little too easy, as popping off headshots is a breeze now.

The bulk of the story is spent with you approaching mission start points, which triggers a cutscene to set up the mission. Then you’re off on your task. The things you do in GTA IV aren’t dramatically different from what you’ve seen in previous games, but it feels a lot more grounded in reality this time. You aren’t learning how to use a jetpack, or helping someone take over the music biz or anything like that. Instead, you’re overseeing diamond heists, shaking down people for protection money, or following gangsters back to their bosses so you can clean them all out at the same time. Throw in some dirty cops, some New York crime families, a shadowy government agent, and a whole lot of Russian mobsters, and you’ve got a lot of work to do. Failing missions is no big deal, either, because you can easily warp back to the start of a mission after you fail, die, or get arrested. Also, you don’t lose all your weapons when you fail, so the time it takes to get going again is pretty minimal.

But what if you need some more firepower before taking on the next mission? You’re given access to underground gun shops, but it’s even easier to get in good with Little Jacob, the friendly neighborhood rasta/dope dealer/gun seller. If you’re friendly with him, you can give him a ring on your cell phone and he’ll roll through with a trunk full of toys at discounted prices. That’s one of the many benefits of maintaining friendships in GTA IV.

While you can date girls with mostly-predictable results, you can also cultivate friendships with a handful of the guys you meet throughout the game. You’ll occasionally get phone calls from them, wanting to hang out, or you can initiate a play date with your dudes with a call of your own. You can visit strip clubs, go out drinking, play darts, go bowling, take in a set at the local comedy club, play pool, and so on. Getting to know these characters a bit more makes them seem a little more human, and you get some real insight into some of the characters’ stories, as well. Or maybe you just want to keep hanging out with Brucie, the genetically jacked steroid monkey who loves cars, VIPs, staying alpha, and “putting bitches to the sword.” If you and Brucie become close buds, he’ll hook you up with a helicopter. The other bonuses, such as being able to call a cab that will take you anywhere in the city for free, or the ability to rig cars with explosives, certainly make things easier for you.

In addition to all the single-player stuff you can do, the game also has an online side that lets up to 16 players join in a variety of modes. Most of them seem fairly standard, like team deathmatch, a pair of racing modes, and an objective-based mode where one team of thugs tries to escape while a team of cops tries to take them down. There are also a few co-op modes for up to four players, but calling these “modes” is a bit of a stretch. They’re more like individual missions that you can play again and again. They’re fun, but they feel like a tease because there are only a few of them and they don’t change much, so once you get good at them, they’re a breeze. All they do is make me wish that the game had a larger co-operative component to it, because they’re probably the most interesting part of the multiplayer mode. There’s also a free mode that lets you and 15 other players run around the city with no real objective, which can be fun if you just want to screw around.

Getting into and out of the multiplayer mode is done via your in-game cell phone. It’s a pretty slick integration, but it’s not without its issues. For example, if you run into any network trouble and can’t join a match, you’re kicked back to your single-player game, where you have to pull up the phone and try again. If you set up a game and realize you want to change modes, you have to quit all the way back to your single-player game and try again. Switching to some kind of multiplayer menu once you get into the multiplayer side of the game would work better.

All of this stuff is put together into a great-looking package. Liberty City really comes alive in GTA IV, thanks to some terrific building design. The environment looks rich and realistic, and makes the GTA III-era Liberty City look like a bunch of flat facades by comparison. The visual quality also really helps in the cutscenes, because the facial expressions of the characters can effectively convey emotion as they deliver lines, which helps give the story its impact. Animation-wise, the characters move well and there are lots of little touches, such as the over-the-top stumbling that Niko and friends do when they’ve been drinking, that help make the game look great. The frame rate is mostly stable and it runs at a playable speed, provided you aren’t getting too crazy. When piling cars together in an attempt to make a huge explosion, I managed to get the frame rate down into what looked like single digits. Also, the game doesn’t always convey a great sense of speed. When you’re in the faster cars, the whole game seems to skip along, rather than giving you a fast, smooth look at the world. It never gets so choppy that you can’t handle your vehicle, but it’s very noticeable, especially on the 360.

The game is backed by some terrific audio, from character voices to the soundtrack, to the sounds around you. Niko’s footsteps are especially well-done. They’ll echo off nearby buildings if you’re running across a quiet street, and they’ll generally reflect the surface you’re running on–like the metal walkways of a cargo ship, for example–really well. The gunfire sounds great, car engines are appropriate, and plenty of pedestrian dialogue helps make the city feel complete.

The soundtrack is, once again, all over the place, with enough variety to keep you hearing new things for quite a long time, provided you’re open to scanning around the radio dial a bit. At some point during my time with the game, I discovered that I sort of like dance hall. Weird! The DJs, commercials, and talk radio stations are great, and deliver the perfect level of ridiculous satire mixed with dick jokes.

This is the first time in a long time that a GTA game has debuted on multiple platforms, and of course, people are going bananas trying to dissect every little difference they can. From my time with both versions, I found the PS3 version to run a little smoother, though neither version is immune to drops in the frame rate when things get crazy. The PS3 version installs up front and seems to load and stream a little better as a result. The 360 version’s loading and streaming is entirely dependent on the quality of your hardware’s DVD drive. On one system, I had no problems, the loading seemed perfectly snappy, and it generally wasn’t a thing. On the Xbox 360 Elite I have at home, though, I could hear the disc thrashing about as it tried to load, and occasionally objects and roads would appear a second or two too late, causing me to ram my car into invisible objects, in one case. Thankfully, I had another 360 at my disposal, but if your drive is already a little iffy, just know that you might run into some occasional streaming issues.

Of course, the 360 version has achievements and will apparently have downloadable content down the line, so if I were choosing, that’s the direction I’d lean in. But the story is just as great on both platforms, and you really can’t lose either way.

It was difficult to anticipate how Grand Theft Auto IV would turn out, given the way that the whole “open-world game” thing is being done to death across as many different games and settings as possible. Rather than try to out-do the Crackdowns and the Saints Rows of the world with bigger land masses and more missions, Rockstar went the other way, and managed to craft an amazingly impactful story and weave it into an open-world game in an incredibly meaningful way–all without losing the heart and soul of what makes Grand Theft Auto so popular in the first place. The end result is absolutely masterful and absolutely worth your time and money.


systems: ps3, xbox 360 games: