Tag: red dead redemption

>Weekend Recap: Assassin Down the Avenue

>”I am an American aquarium drinker /
I assassin down the avenue.”
 – Wilco, “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

According to Raptr, I’ve spent 15 hours with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and another 5 hours in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.  Both games are excellent and well worth your time.

Ah, but you want details!  You want experiences!   You want in-depth impressions!  (Do you?  I don’t know who reads this thing anymore besides Russian search engines that keep bringing up my best guess at the Beatles set list in Rock Band.)  (That sentence right there, the one you just read, will have already generated 20 more hits before I even finish writing this post, so let’s move on.)  (*Sigh*  Remember Rock Band?  I still really like RB3 but haven’t touched it in weeks.)

Let’s start with Need For Speed, then, since I got pulled out of AC:B and into a lot of NFS multiplayer this weekend with a lot of the same crew that used to play Burnout 3 every night for hours. 

Yes, it feels a lot like a Burnout game.  (Which is great.)  But you know what?  It also feels a lot like the old Sega classic Outrun, in that there’s a shit-ton of drifting that you do, and all the cars seem to be superglued to the road, and they all have fat asses that always feel like you’re about to spin out of control in a drift, but you never do.

The star of the show is clearly cops v. racers, and pretty much everyone that I’ve played with acknowledges that while both sides are fun as hell, it’s playing as the cops that’s really fun as hell.  That’s as close as you get to the classic Burnout style of craziness, but now with spike strips, roadblocks and EMPs.  There’s not a tremendous amount of depth to the gameplay, but that’s OK – every race is different, and each track has a lot of side routes (as not all of the shortcuts are actually shortcuts) and, well, shit gets real crazy quick.   (Or, alternately, shit gets crazy real quick.  This game moves too fast for comma placement.)

The Autolog is also a pretty neat feature – it’s essentially a real-time Facebook wall with all your friends’ activity, so if someone beats your time in a race, you can very easily try to retake your position on the leaderboard.  It’s very easy to get sucked down that particular rabbit hole.  At all times, you are aware of what your friends are doing (and have done) in relation to what you’re doing, and before long another hour has gone by while you try to beat your friend’s time.  I haven’t played a game with this much “just one more go” in a while.

Although, now that I think about it, there’s a lot of that “just one more x” in Assassin’s Creed, which is partly why I racked up 15 hours without even really meaning to play that much.  And I’m not even a third of the way through the actual story. (!)  If the first Assassin’s Creed was (fairly) criticized for not having enough to actually do, AC:B is possibly guilty of having too much.  My last 2 hours of gameplay yesterday was basically me trying to level up the 4 members of my brotherhood, which scratched my Farmville itch like crazy.  Is this a spoiler?  I don’t think this is a spoiler – it’s a feature, that’s partly spelled out in the game’s title.  A few memories into the game, you start recruiting fellow Assassins.  And you level them up by sending them out on all these little missions – you don’t actually see them do this, and it doesn’t affect you in any way, other than that your assassins will be unavailable for the 5-10 minutes it takes them to do their missions.  And so, while they’ve been doing that, I’ve been finding hidden flags and hidden feathers and doing all sorts of sidequests, and once they are sufficiently leveled up – or, more accurately, once I’m bored of flag finding – I’m probably going to start burning down all the remaining Borgia Towers that I currently have access to.  And then, maybe, I’ll get back to the actual story.

The AC:B graphics engine isn’t as bad as, say, the Gametrailers video review made it out to be.  I mean, my Best Games of 2010 – Best Horses award will still be going to Red Dead Redemption, but there’s a lot about AC:B that’s simply staggering.  The city of Rome is absolutely gigantic, and while it maybe lacks the variety that was a high point of AC2, it also feels a lot more cohesive.  (That being said, the engine is a bit old – and the more I think about it, the more I’m curious to see what an AC game would look like in the Red Dead engine.  Both games feature huge open worlds with wide open spaces – Red Dead doesn’t have lots of buildings, of course, but its terrain is a lot more varied and textured.)

Anyway.  You get the idea.

My rental copies of Donkey Kong Country Returns and Gran Turismo 5 will most likely arrive while I’m away for Thanksgiving; I don’t know that I have any time in my life for either of these games, let alone Disney Epic Mickey next week.  I’d very much like to be able to finish AC:B by the end of the year, and considering how massive the game is and how much there is to do, I wonder if that’s possible, considering how busy I’m about to be…

>feast or famine

>I can’t remember the last time I had so much good stuff to play, all at the same time.  It’s a little overwhelming, but I’m not complaining.  AT ALL.

We covered Rock Band 3 and Fable 3 on Friday; RB3 is still excellent, and F3 is maybe not as excellent but certainly absorbing.  It’s very easy to get sidetracked, which is sort of the point, and even though it feels incredibly artificial and “game-y”, it’s the sort of thing where you get used to that feeling pretty quickly, and it ceases being a concern.

I finished the first mission or two in the Red Dead Redemption Zombie DLC; man, that game continues to be awesome.  I’ve had RDR flip-flopping with Mass Effect 2 as my Game of the Year pretty much since the get-go, but RDR seems like it’s the more complete package, at this point.  Every time I fire it up I’m immediately back in the swing of things.

My Gamefly copy of Kirby’s Big Yarn finally arrived, and it’s as charming and adorable as can be.  My wife is very much into crafting, and she took a shine to the art design immediately; I’m hoping I can get her to play it.
 
Your mileage will vary depending on your predilection towards video pinball, but if you’re in any way inclined towards it, I would highly recommend FXPinball 2, which took up a number of idle hours this weekend.  For my money, it’s the best home pinball solution outside of actually owning a machine.

And I finally caved and bought Game Dev Story for my iPod Touch.  I’m generally not one for these kinds of simulation games, or really any kind of sim game, but I’d heard too much good stuff about this one to ignore, and lo and behold, it’s totally sucked me in.  VosstonVisions is about 4 years in, now, and while we’d like to get beyond ninja adventure games, we’re starting to make some money.  Highly enjoyable, and highly recommended.

>the post-vacation rundown

>I’m back from vacation and I have a lot to talk about, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to say it all at this particular moment. So, then, the short versions:

1. Red Dead Redemption was amazing, and among the other superlatives I could throw its way, it has (possibly) the most satisfying ending I’ve ever seen. I’d have to think about it a little just to make sure, but, I mean, GODDAMN.

2. Alan Wake was good, but not quite as good as it could’ve been, and its ending was as WTF as any I’ve seen. Some games take themselves a little too seriously; this game might be near the top of that particular list. Let me also say that for a game that goes out of its way to instill a sense of dread, the beyond-creepy facial animation is a nice (albeit unintentional) touch.

3. Does it mean that I have no soul if I admit that I can’t really get into, or care about, Super Mario Galaxy 2? What if I qualify that by mentioning that I never had a Nintendo system as a kid, thus stripping me of any Mario-related nostalgia? I still probably have no soul, right? Figures.

4. Picross 3D is one of the best DS games ever made, and I”ll be a little bummed out when I finish it (which will probably happen by mid-week).

>Weekend Recap: here comes the hyperbole

>Are you ready for some outlandish statements? Good, because I’m really tired after watching the Lost finale last night and work is slow today and I can’t stop thinking about Red Dead Redemption, so here goes:

1. Red Dead Redemption might just be my favorite Rockstar game ever.

Let me qualify that a bit.

RDR is not the groundbreaking, industry-shifting watershed moment that GTA3 was. But there’s a difference between being groundbreaking and being a truly great game. My affection for GTA3 – more specifically, for the times I personally spent in GTA3 – helps me overlook a lot of that game’s glaring problems, of which there are many.

As with each subsequent Rockstar open-world game, RDR, then, is simply the latest refinement of the ever-evolving open-world platform. In this particular case, it most clearly resembles GTA4. But it’s where it differs that gets me all hot and bothered.

GTA4 was a staggering achievement; it managed to create the most immersive city ever seen in a game, while also creating a truly fascinating narrative around a singularly unique protagonist. But GTA4 still suffered from old ideas; the game’s gunplay was still a bit tricky, even in spite of being retooled, and the punishment for mission failure was still brutal.

RDR fixes almost all of what was bothersome in GTA4, and I would expect/hope that GTA5 will borrow almost everything that RDR gets right. The snap-to targeting might make the game a little too easy, but frankly, I’d rather have fun with the story than struggle with the controls. If you fail a mission, you can continue from the most recent mid-mission checkpoint, which is fantastic. There’s regenerating health and fast-traveling, which is crucial. You can save anywhere, at any time, which is essential.

And the world – oh, the glorious world – is a sight to behold. It’s easily the prettiest game Rockstar has ever made, and utterly convincing at every turn. I do wish that the game would let you take screenshots – and I’d buy the PC version if only so that I could. I’ve had to call my wife in from the other room just to have her look at something – like standing on a cliffside watching the sun rise over the valley below.

But it’s not just the graphics – it’s everything. The wildlife; the random people in trouble; the “ambient challenges” – there is always something to do. I’m not the first person to make this comparison, but I’ll make it again anyway – it reminds me an awful lot of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, because getting from Point A to Point B usually meant that you’d get sidetracked about a dozen times doing other things, which were always just as much fun as the actual missions.

According to Rockstar’s excellent Social Club, I am just under 19 hours in and just over 42% complete. I don’t know that I’ll be able to finish the game before I leave for Jamaica next week; as much as I want to be done with the campaign before I go, so that I don’t have to miss it, I kinda don’t want the campaign to be over with, either.

2. The new Prince of Persia game isn’t nearly as bad as I’d been led to believe.

Let me qualify that one, too – it’s certainly not bad, and indeed it’s the best-looking game in the series, and it easily has the best combat system. The problem is that it’s arguably the least essential. There’s nothing inherently special about it. It’s not magical. The story feels slight and flimsy. Too much work went into the game to call it a mere cash-in for the movie, but I finished it in 6 hours or so and haven’t thought about it since, other than to write this paragraph. It’s certainly worth a rental, if you’re a fan of the series and you’re not already sidetracked with RDR or Super Mario.

3. I really want to like Alan Wake, but the opening chapter didn’t grab me nearly as hard as I’d hoped, and RDR has pretty much overshadowed it for the foreseeable future.

That wasn’t really all that hyperbolic; it’s just the way the weekend went.

>Red Dead Redemption: the first 2 hours

>I am very much wanting to talk about Red Dead Redemption this morning, even though I’ve only played a little bit and don’t really have very much of substance to discuss. Here’s what I can say:

I was thoroughly sucked in from the moment the opening cinematic started rolling, and I only stopped playing because the hour was far too late. It’s absolutely Wild West GTA, but it feels a lot more important than that phrase might indicate. The world that they’ve created is a sight to behold; every thing you see might as well be a photograph. I remember being impressed by the level of detail in GTA4, and RDR pretty much blows it out of the water. Take a stroll down the main street in one of the towns and you’ll see what I mean – the way the telegraph wires wave in the wind, the way the tumbleweeds roll down the plain.

You can definitely feel the GTA4 engine in the way the game controls, and there are a number of subtle improvements that I’m hoping will make it into the next GTA. The biggest thing: regenerating health. Ignore that it’s not “realistic” – nothing in any of these games is realistic. Regenerating health answers maybe the biggest nuisance in the GTA games, which is that after you finish a mission, you have to buy a new bulletproof vest and eat a cheeseburger before you can feel comfortable that you’ll survive the next mission. Here, if you get in trouble, you take cover and wait it out.

Speaking of which – RDR also makes it a lot easier to tell if you’re getting shot. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a firefight in GTA and had no idea I was getting peppered until I was finally killed; here, the screen turns red. It’s maybe not as tactile as some force feedback in the controller, but it’s at least an indication that you should maybe get out of the way.

At some point this week I’m forcing myself to pull away from the single-player in order to try out the online stuff; I need to get a posse together.

Also, at some point this week, I’ve got to try Alan Wake, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Split/Second, and the new Prince of Persia. When it rains, it fucking RAINS.