L.A. Noire Mini Review. Initial Impressions.
I picked up L.A. Noire at midnight and just finished about 4 hours of play. My initial impressions are definitely very positive. The game does a GREAT job of making you really feel like you are heading up the investigations and making a name for yourself. I’m INCREDIBLY impressed with the facial capture technology they used. It’s amazing the level of realism you get when it’s not just the mouth and eyes that move on a face. Every tiny detail of an actors face is captured and translated into the game beautifully. I could just watch the characters speak all day long. It’s a good thing too, because a large part of what you have to do is really watch people talk to you. I loved the idea from the first time I heard about the game but I was really afraid that the “tells” would be extremely easy to decipher. They really aren’t. And on top of that, if you suspect a character of telling lies, you have to have the evidence to back it up so it makes for some very challenging puzzles.. And it’s still quite early for me! Combat is pretty fun. Hand to hand seems a little easy so far but it Is still fun to watch. Ranged combat is a whole lot of cover based shooting but I found it pretty easy to line up enemies while in cover. Overall, so far, I’m loving the game and a can’t wait to get back to it tomorrow.
E3 2009: Microsoft’s Conference (and Nintendo’s innovations)
I just finished watching the Microsoft press conference for E3 2009 and I have to say that I’m pretty pleased with their offering. They had some really solid looking games coming soon. Social networking ties. Video upgrades. A whole new way to interact with your Xbox360. I’m happy Microsoft is bringing all this to my Xbox 360, but what I thought after I was all done is about how much I respect and will ALWAYS own a Nintendo console. Let me explain real quick..
I can quote the famous South Park episode in which everything ever done is responded to with a simple “Simpsons Did It!”. It just amazes me that every large innovation in video gaming was initiated by Nintendo. I think about the first gamepad most of us played with with the NES and think about where Sega went with it shortly after wards. They made it a little curvier and added an extra button. The basic idea was the same just slightly modified. Then came the N64 which brought a multitude of new innovations to gaming that were soon adopted. That analog stick you see on every major console in production since the N64. Then there was the Rumble Pack that was released for the N64. How many of us gamers have a hard time playing a game without that feedback that was introduced into every console as a standard feature after that? 3D games were also a very big step forward coming into the N64 and now you’ll be hard pressed to find games that aren’t. Now, this is a lot of Nintendo love for 1 paragraph. I’ll admit that I can’t think of much in the world of innovation when it comes to the GameCube, but I also can’t think of anything done by Microsoft or Sony that pretty pushed the envelope either. The latest innovation is getting us lazy gamers up off the couch to actually move around a little bit while we play games. Sony soon tried to follow suit with a really awful implementation in the SixAxis controller and now Microsoft is following suit by offering their own ‘get up off the couch’ solution. One that I’m certain they would not be showing off right now if the Wii wasn’t doing as well as it is. I’m not hating on anyone here. It’s the nature of the beast. You invent something amazing that everyone wants and you’ll find all your competitors trying to one up you. The main point I’m trying to make, is that Nintendo always seems to be ahead of the curve on a very consistent basis. For this reason, I don’t care what their next console is, I will own one. Back to Microsoft..
Halo 3: AutoUpdate Released. What still needs fixing?
The first AutoUpdate for Halo 3 was just released last night (or morning, depending on where you are and what you consider ‘night’) and addressed a few issues people were having with Halo 3. The largest and most noticeable change has to do with the melee system. The short answer says that, in Halo 3 v1.0, if 2 people both tried to melee within 100ms of each other, whoever had the most health would survive and the other person would die. Some cases would seem partially random because if one player took even 1 extra bullet, he would lose the melee contest and the other would walk away. In v1.1, there’s some lea-way that says if you have considerably more health than your opponent, you survive and they die. If the health is too close to call, you both die. I was able to notice this in the first couple of games I played but it really didn’t change much as far as how I play or anything. It’s a good fix. Other than that, not much will be noticed.
Since this update is out of the way, all we can do now is look forward. What still needs to be fixed for the next update? I’ll start my saying that some of these things I was hoping would be resolved in this first update, but I won’t be too picky about that. Bungie does good work and I’ll patiently await v1.2. Please note, these probabilities are just my own little estimates and really have no weight to them at all.
Halo 3: The Forge
This review is going to be a little shorter than the previous reviews about Halo 3. I’m going to talk a little bit about The Forge in Halo 3. In the simplest term, The Forge is just a stripped down level editor. Instead of changing the geometry of the levels, you change positions of things or add new objects. It’s nothing jaw dropping, but it works well.
The Forge isn’t a full featured level editor by any means. It’s more of a level TWEAKER than anything. The only thing The Forge lets you do is add, move or delete items (weapons, vehicles, crates, etc) on any multiplayer map. The dynamic of a map can change so greatly by just moving a few things around. Put the rocket launcher in a new spot. Add a tank. Move the flag to the other side of the map. All these things completely change a map without changing the look of it. This is what The Forge does best. When your done creating your masterpiece, you can save it and share it with your friends.
The cool things you can do with The Forge that extend further than just editing a level is that The Forge is another game mode. You can play with your friends. You can design a new map with them, or you can just use the forge as a new way to kill them. On the fly, you can press UP on the D-Pad at any time and enter or exit Forge Mode. If you need a new weapon, create it and go back to hunting your friend. This is made even more fun by making a team game out of it where one player plays as The Forge while the rest of your team tries to kill. Just the fact that you can swing in and out of Forge Mode in the middle of a match makes the possibilities nearly endless.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t played all THAT much with The Forge, but the little bits I have played with were really fun and although I don’t think this mode is the reason people are going to buy Halo 3, it’s definitely a nice little addition when you need a break from matchmaking and the theatre.
Halo 3: Campaign
I’ve decided to make a sort of ‘series’ of Halo 3 reviews. This time around, we have the campaign. I beat the campaign late last night. Wasn’t really trying to beat the game in 1 day or anything, I just did. I’m rounding my play time (by adding up all the film lengths) to about 8 and a half hours. Not too bad. I wasn’t rushing or anything. It’s a short campagn. I’m not going to lie about it. I also think that’s a good thing for a couple of reasons. Halo (for me) has never been ALL about the campaign. It’s a great multiplayer game. The campaign is almost just a bonus for me.
The main reason I’ll be playing the campaign a few more times is that there are a lot of reasons to play the campaign more than a couple of times, so keeping it short doesn’t overwhelm you when you think about how much work you have to do to beat it again. If you want all the achievements, your going to have to play the game at least 3 times all the way through. You get 125GP for beating it on normal, heroic and legendary. I beat it on normal in 8 and a half hours and just started it again on heroic. Heroic doesn’t fuck around. It’s tough. Much tougher than normal. So I can imagine each level increase as adding a couple extra hours of play.
On top of that, there are a few other bonus things if you want to get all the achievements and unlock everything in the game. Skulls (and I think terminals) are hidden throughout each level. If you want to actually spend the time searching each and ever nook and cranny of every level to find the skulls, have fun. They’re hidden pretty good. There are also plenty of guides out there already that tell you where abouts the skulls are. Each skull has a special ‘power’ that you can enable when playing the campaign to change it up. Things like disabling your radar, turning off auto-recharge on your shields, dropping less ammo, or having confetti pop out of brutes when you head-shot them. Most of the skulls increase the difficulty of the campaign in some way. One skull in each level is gold and also has an achievement attached to it.
I’m not going to talk about the story too much because I don’t want to spoil anything. Let’s just say that I felt like I was watching an incredibly long movie when playing. And on top of that, the campaign felt even shorter than it actually was. The battles are epic and large and the cut scenes are very well scripted. I heard some people weren’t happy with the ending but I thought it ended just fine and again reiterate that I play Halo for it’s multiplayer games, and not to be wowed by the plot twists or ending of the story. It was good.
The last, and best, part of the new campaign is the addition of co-op play mixed with their new point system. It’s recommended that you leave points off for the first time through the game so you get the story the way it was meant to be told the first time through. But after that, turn on points and see how you do. You get a certain amount of points for killing certain things depending on your difficulty level and what you killed. There are achievements attached to getting a certain score on certain levels. On top of that, you can play the campaign with a couple of friends and see who gets the best score on that level. This addition is what I think is going to take the campaign of Halo from just a ‘finish it once’ kind of game to a game that you play over and over again with your friends.
That’s about all for the campaign part of this review. Check back later for a new section when I play around with something else for a while. Not sure what my next review is going to be about just yet but I’ll start writing as soon as I figure it out.
Halo 3: Initial Review, Saved Films
it’s September the 25th and that means that last night I picked up Halo 3 at midnight! I played a few multiplayer matches and a couple of missions of the campaign and felt like sharing some of my thoughts about my first moments with the game.
For starters, I’ve been extremely excited about this game and so far it hasn’t disappointed me too much at all. The multiplayer games are still some of the most fun you can have playing strange 14 year olds over the internet and the campaign is also as fun (if not more so) than the first 2 were. The mechanics to the game are very similar to Halo and Halo 2 with a couple of exceptions. A couple of the buttons have been moved to places where they make more sense so if you played Halo 2 24/7 for the last couple of years, your muscle memory might take a few sessions to get used to the new placement. It didn’t take me too long to get used to though.
There are a couple of new features that sounded very promising before the game released, too. There’s the Forge and Saved Films. The Forge is a level editor of sorts. Instead of working with the geometry of the level, though, you work with the entities in the level. You can change the placement of most things or add new things to the level which could completely change how the level is played. I haven’t tested this out yet so I can’t really tell you how it is but I’ll post about it later when I get a chance to use it. The Saved Films is great for the photographer and cinematographer in all of us. Because Halo 3 is such a gorgeous game, it’s extremely fun to fly around the replay of your last game and find that perfect head shot or just a cool picture. I’ve played around with this and for the most part it works really great. There are a couple of quirks that I would love to see fixed up with a patch in the near future, though.
One of the most annoying parts of the saved films is the rewind. Or lack there of in some instances. For whatever reason, any campaign saved film you are watching can not be rewound. I don’t understand why this limitation exists but it makes finding that perfect frame to capture a lot more difficult because your pretty much screwed when you pass it up and are already 30 minutes into the film. In multiplayer saved films, you can rewind though (which is why I think it’s really weird that you can’t in campaign) but the rewind just jumps back a few seconds. Currently, if you press A, the film will just play. If you press the Right Trigger, the film will play at a variable speed depending on how hard you press the Right Trigger. This makes you naturally feel like pressing the Left Trigger will rewind at a variable speed. Not the case. Instead, the left trigger is for moving your camera faster than normal. I would really like to see this fixed up in a patch or at least an explanation as to why rewinding can’t happen in a natural, fluid way like going forward. At the VERY least, I would love to be able to rewind in campaign films.
A couple other things I would love to see fixed soon with saved films are saving clips in campaign films and the quality of the screenshots. Again, I’m not sure why this is, but you can not save clips of your campaign. Just seems weird that there’s that much of a difference between multiplayer and campaign films that these limitations are in place. Also, I’ve noticed that the so-called “Hi-Res” screenshots appear to look worse than in the game. Kind of blurry almost. Like some post processing tries to make the image look more cinematic or something, but, to me, it just decreases the detail and quality of the image I’m trying to capture..
For the most part though, Saved Films work great. I love them and I can see myself spending countless hours searching through games I play to find those great shots I made, or to learn from my mistakes and see how I died, or to learn by watching the group of people who just kicked my ass 25-1. The greatness of this new feature, by far, outweighs it’s short comings. It’s still early and I’m sure they’re still working on things. I just really hope they release a patch in the future that cleans it up a little more so that it’s perfect.
12 More days…
Why Wii Sports was a Brilliant Move
Nintendo’s brand new Wii came out yesterday so I figured it was only fitting to blog about it. For the first time since the Super Nintendo, you get a game packaged in with the new Wii. Wii Sports is a very very simple game. There isn’t a lot of depth to it. It’s just fun. Wii Sports is getting mixed reviews, but I can already tell why Nintendo packed it in with the system. Because it’s going to sell systems AND games. Let me explain…
Nintendo wants the non-gamer market. This means that all those people who have never played a game in their lives need to see a game that they can instantly pick up and play without a problem and have a blast with. Wii Sports is perfect for the non gamer because of it’s simplicity. There are no complicated controls. You don’t have to worry about making sure your fielder runs to catch the ball, all you have to do is pitch. You don’t have to worry about setting power and curves and angles and what not on little meters when you go to bowl, you just bowl. This is going to sell systems to the non gamers.
These non gamers obviously had to find out about Wii Sports somehow. You can ask any hardcore gamer if they dislike ‘recruiting’ gamers and none of them will say they do. So Wii Sports gets to be the game that the hard core early adopters show off to their non gamer friends to get them to buy a system. But there is another reason Wii Sports is a great pack in. Because all those hard core gamers will play it. These games are teasers for those of us who want depth in a sports game. When we play Wii Bowling and love how great it feels to bowl, it makes us wish there was a better looking bowling game. Maybe some better pin physics. So when Mario Bowling (or any more full featured bowling game, for that matter) comes out, we’re definately going to look twice at it. When we swing the Wii-mote like a bat, it just wets our appitite for MVP Baseball ‘07 or ’08. When we swing the racket, we can’t wait to have more control when playing a new full featured tennis game. The few punches you can throw (and the pretty good workout you can get) from boxing just makes us want to be able to have that many more options in our fight.
Every one of the Wii Sports is intentionally simple. The graphics are all pretty clean, but they’re far from gorgeous. The games are all pretty polished, but they leave so much more room for more. This is why I think that packing Wii Sports in with the Wii was the best move of this generation as far as selling systems. No one’s left out. Keep it going Nintendo!
