[bad soda]

[PS3] Grand Theft Auto 4 – FIRST IMPRESSION:  The best GTA yet, but perfection?

I have only played about four hours, tops, across the entire GTA franchise.  Most of it was Liberty City Stories and GTA III.  I think the sandbox genre is wicked, I love Mercenaries and Gun and pretty much conquered all of Bully but GTA has awful driving and worse shooting.  Why would I play a game primarily made up of driving and shooting when doing either was like playing any other game with my feet?

I’m completely at odds with the recent reviews that say the word “perfection.”  A top score of 10 (or its equivalent) doesn’t need a perfect game, but when the reviewers in Game Informer actually use the word perfect I have a hard time not criticizing.  The graphics are finally up to PS2 standards, and the shooting is still worse than any other game in its league.  I’m finally getting better at driving, and honestly: the game is awesome.  It’s finally got me into a GTA where I’m going to buy and beat it.

I’m most impressed with the characters and the story; T was actually kind of wondering why I didn’t head off immediately and start wasting cops but I wanted to see what my cousin Roman was up to, and my new asshole “boss” Vlad.  Maybe that’s where this game gets it’s positive scores, and I’m not ready to say I wouldn’t give it such a high number with only a few hours in, but I would never say perfect to a game that looks and plays like this.

I’m sure that Xbox Live has the demos also, but seeing as Live only makes new content available to Gold members for the first week I’ve decided to not bother with it, Gold member or not.  Real quick: you know what my problem with that is?  It doesn’t actually give us Gold members anything, everything remains exactly the same.  If I didn’t bother checking, I wouldn’t even know that “perk” was there.  Actually, if you see the date of the article I’ve linked, you’ll notice it’s 6 weeks old because I had no idea I was being granted such a virtual boon.  Now I am apparently more privileged than others.  Woo-f!@#ing-hoo.

edit: From the wording of Major Nelson, it’s possible that Live has always been like this, but they’re kind of restating it because we Gold members seemed somehow unsatisfied with our silent superiority.  How dare we have something unless others know they don’t?  I can’t remember waiting a week for my downloads when I was Silver, so I don’t know how long it was supposedly this way.  Either way, taking something away is a punishment, doesn’t count as a perk even to those left unscathed.

ANYWAY, the games:

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Watch how fast I can do this:

[XB360] Kane & Lynch – An ugly, bad imitation of every good shooting game.

[XB360] Call of Duty 4 – One of the best FPS games ever, but in the end remains just an FPS with obvious enemy spawns and checkpoint abuse.  If I just want to run a few rounds on my own I’ll stick with Halo, but with friends I couldn’t imagine a better multiplayer than CoD4.  So where’s the co-op damnit?

[PSP] Warhammer 40,000 Squad Command – Mind-achingly original strategy that makes traditional grid-based games seem like so much old men.

[XB360] Naruto: Rise of a Ninja – I thought of a dozen ways of saying it, but here’s what I ended up without after I took out all the lame jokes about anime fan service games, all the moans of massive missed opportunities when compared to Ubisoft Montreal’s other recent project: the masterpiece Assassin’s Creed,  and the dropped hits and blatant references to how good Ultimate Ninja was:  THIS GAME IS BORING.

[XB360] Mass Effect – SCORE: 8.75
Highest Level Achieved: 25 hours flew by in just a weekend and I haven’t even made a bit of progress on any of the first “main” missions as an official Spectre.
Description: Also known as KOTOR 3.

In a life I now call “Post-Assassin’s Creed” it’s hard to not expect too much from my games, so for a few hours Mass Effect was a real disappointment. After all, here we’ve got a hero who is blocked by walls and must enter through doorways; even going as disgustingly far as being herded like livestock from one place to another by means of conveniently placed barrels and boxes.

Mass Effect, however, is quite at home in that genre of Western RPGs That Aren’t Oblivion. Its epic, sci-fi story is expectedly full of itself and long-winded, telling thousands of years of history among a dozen races that are each populated by a single stereotype with predictable mavericks, and yet the future of the explored galaxy is being threatened and/or saved by a half-dozen major characters. The human race has recently joined an interstellar committee of civilized aliens; and in our young, head-strong way we apparently have bullied our way into having one of us number be named a Spectre, the Jedi Knights of Mass Effect. Unlike their Star Wars counterparts, the Spectres do not have any kind of code, as both noble and vile Spectres co-exist as allies and take orders from the same leaders. In what appears to be a surprise, a notoriously murderous Spectre has gone rogue and is attempting to kill everything. Your character, Shepard (designed both visually and emotionally by the player in a nifty twist of character creation), is charged with taking down the said bad guy.

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[PS3] Assassin’s Creed – SCORE: 9.50
Highest Level Achieved: Played through the game once on normal mode. I scaled all the towers, and completed every mission objective that was opened up in each city.
Description: A third person action-adventure game that takes cues from The Prince of Persia, Metal Gear and Splinter Cell. It combines stealth, action, adventure, and wall scaling to make one of the greatest games on the market.

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[PS3] Assassin’s Creed – FIRST IMPRESSION:  As good as we all hoped
So, uh, wow.  I want every game, ever, from this day forward to have a little of Assassin’s Creed in it.  Somehow.  With a story that somehow breaks the third and one-half wall and masterfully pulls the player deep inside, controls that perfect the now-hip trend of dropping long-time conventions like the “jump-button” in favor of contextual “puppeteering,” and a visual presentation that is possibly only rivaled by it’s own auditory presentation this has to be the game of 2007, and until I see otherwise I’m calling this the game of this gaming generation.  I think that I won’t even bother saying anything more, but leave that up to Stuart, who has played more than I have anyway.

Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to put Call of Duty 4 to the test this week, as it netted higher scores than Creed in nearly every place I’ve checked.

(I didn’t get the chance to play the 360 version of Assassin’s Creed, and I’m not sure if I’ll need to; I’ve heard from buyers there’s a framerate difference with the 360 being the superior party, but I didn’t run into any kind of problem with the PS3 so it’s hard to imagine anything being better than not having the problem in the first place)

[Xbox 360] Portal – SCORE: 10
Highest Level Achieved: Played through the game one time, and then beat the advanced levels.
Description: A first person shooter puzzle game. Yes that sounds weird, but thats what it was.

Portal starts out in a testing facility where you begin to learn how the portals work. as you progress, the tests of course get more difficult. To navigate through the different tests you have a portal gun that shoots out two different portals, a blue and an orange one. When you walk through the blue portal you come out wherever you the orange portal is. This is a very unique idea for a game that could have gone wrong, but it was amazing to play.

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Just got emailed a link to an amazing article from next month’s Game Informer.  Don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder, so I’ll just post the link and let you check the scans yourself.

Brütal Legend.