More thoughts from my almost obsessive playing of Crackdown. (It’s one of those games that when I’m not playing it, I’m thinking about playing it, and the hours just melt away while I’m running around its slightly gaudily-coloured city. I haven’t been this engrossed in a game since Oblivion.)

I think I actually enjoy unfocussed co-op in this more than doing the missions in co-op. Just two superhero cops messing about and occasionally pausing in their stunting japes to shoot the bad men who are inconsiderately hassling them.

I finally managed to get my driving skill up to 4 (the maximum), which was a feat in itself given that vehicles are by far the least interesting thing it has – they really should have made this skill increase more quickly, or allowed the agency vehicles toned down special abilities at lower skill levels.

The fully leveled agency cars are a bit disappointing overall – they’re even bigger, so they have more trouble fitting into narrow places. The batmobile (supercar) has a very low ground clearance so it gets stuck on ramps, and the guns are very dangerous to use – they don’t seem to aim properly so I ended up killing lots of civilians by accident. The SUV’s wall climbing isn’t as fun as it sounds, and I haven’t managed to work out the truck’s ability yet (so far I’ve got that it makes a sort of whooshing noise, but I imagine there may be more to it) – but the accleration and turning circle are so bad it’s no fun to drive at all.

Overall, cars in Crackdown are a wasted opportunity.

(The first in what will probably be an irregular series.)

G-Police suffered from an unnecessarily complicated control scheme, and from trying to push the PlayStation too far (a console game with frame-rate / draw distance settings?) On modern hardware, with a simplified flight model, it could be great. They might want to mix the missions up a bit too make them more interesting though, maybe steal a few bits and pieces from Zeewolf (a very nice Amiga helicopter game, also hampered by the target hardware).

There aren’t enough free-roaming city games with helicopters in these days – an Airwolf-style agency chopper would fit nicely into Crackdown’s already very 3d city, for example – which is a shame.

And that concludes today’s “Games I wish someone would do a new version of”.

Marketplace content on the Xbox 360 comes complete with its own digital rights management (DRM) in place. The content knows which user profile downloaded it, and also – this is the important bit – which Xbox it was downloaded to. The content will work fine for any user profile on that Xbox, but will only work for the original user profile on a different console, if you take your harddrive around to a friend’s house, for example.

This system works fine until your console decides it’s had enough of playing Gears of War and gives you the fabled red ring of doom – telling you that you’ll need to send it to Microsoft to be replaced (or buy a new one if it’s out of warranty). Apparently this is quite a likely event for a 360 user (my own anecdotal evidence seems to point to something like a 30% failure rate), and it’s at this point you’ll realise that any marketplace content you bought is now restricted to just the original user profile that download it – since the console you’ll get back from Microsoft won’t be the one you sent them.

If you have other profiles on your console who play the content then your options are either to suck it down and buy it again, or phone support and try and argue them into giving you marketplace points or vouchers.

Sony has obviously been regarding this whole situation, and has come up with its own clever solution (the obvious one of ‘make your hardware unlikely to die’ is too much of a pain, it would seem). Any premium content or electronic distribution (eDist) games you download on to your PS3 come with 5 ‘re-downloads’ for free – which do exactly what you would expect and allow you to get the full content for free again in the event of something going horribly wrong.

Except in their eagerness to please it would seem they’ve overlooked the ingenuity (read: greed) of gamers.

By sharing some of your account details (though nothing too unsafe, like credit card numbers) you can allow other trusted gamers access to your five free copies, giving them premium content and eDist games for nothing but a ‘thank you’ to the original buyer. That’s full content, not time or content limited demos.

Which means that any developers of this content can expect their sales to be up to a fifth of what they otherwise could be.

Now, this way of copying games isn’t exactly easy – the need to share some details will obviously put off a lot of users from trying, and it needs a fair amount of co-ordination – and people will always grab freebies they weren’t otherwise planning on buying, just because they’re free.

Because of these factors I don’t think that you should assume to multiply up all sales figures by five to get a ‘true’ rating, but I do find it rather worrying that it’s possible at all, and that it doesn’t require any software hack or trickery to activate. As it’s a feature that the manufacturer themselves has put in place, it seems to be in a bit of a grey area of DRM piracy which allows it to go unchecked in communities that usually don’t allow discussion of such things (I first heard about this on the SomethingAwful forums, where the thread still exists).

Overall, while it’s a nice present from Sony to gamers, it may be a bit of a nipple-twisting to developers.

I really wasn’t sure if I’d buy Crackdown, up until about two days before release. I’d played the demo a few times, and enjoyed it once my character built up to a suitably super-hero level of ability, but I’d always had the nagging feeling that maybe I’d already seen everything the game had to offer.

Unlike with Call of Duty 3, this time I was sort of right.

It’s a game designed with Halo’s “30 seconds of fun repeated” mantra firmly in mind. The little things keep you amused: seeing an agility orb and working out how to get to it; throwing objects (or maybe even their own cars) at attackers; dropping down on an unsuspecting enemy and kicking them off the building they’re guarding; even jumping towards a building and just falling short then plummeting to the floor is fun.

My main pre-release worry was that, in the demo you’re able to increase your abilities quickly, and can end up with many of your skills at level 4 by the end of the 30 minute cap. With slowed-down progression, would the game be as much fun? Thankfully the skill system seems to be weighted almost perfectly for me – within a couple of hours I was at level 2 (moderately-superhero, if you like) on all skills, and reaching levels 3 and 4 takes more dedicated carnage.

The actual content of the game is a bit less interesting, though. Once you’ve fought your way to one gang warlord, you’ll realise that most are the same thing just in different locations. Occasionally you’ll have to perform another task (such as destroying some switches) before the target will present themselves, but it’s never anything too far out of the norm. Successful tactics for assaulting their fortresses are quickly established too – go around the back and then jump in, avoiding the bulk of their guards as you make a bee-line straight for them, then kick them until they die (while being kicked they can only rarely fight back). Each encounter quickly melts into the next.

There are a few side missions in the game – on-foot and in-vehicle checkpoint races, and some stunt markers to drive a vehicle through – but they seem fairly poorly thought out, especially in the case of the on-foot races it’s possible to undertake a race that you simply don’t have the agility to complete, so you’re left minutes into your endeavour getting frustrated at a checkpoint that’s out of your reach while the race slowly times out.

Co-op seems like a bit of a mixed bag, too. I’d read somewhere that it was drop-in, drop-out, but that seems not to be the case, which is a shame. The host’s city is used for both players where gang targets are concerned, and any killed will also only register in their world. So the benefits for the client are just that they get to keep any weapons or skill upgrades earned during the jaunt.

The few times I’ve tried it both me and my friend experienced very bad lag too, with the game often pausing for 5 – 10 seconds to resynchronise, which made precision jumping quite frustrating. Edit: On further attempts it seems that this was down to the internet being busy on a Saturday morning. The next day it was smooth and very playable, which is even more impressive when you think of the amount of information it must be throwing about – players can be very far from each other, and the world keeps working as in single player.

The thing is, for all its shortcomings, you forgive it because the basic actions are just great fun to do, both in single player and with a friend. I hope for the promised downloadable content they come up with some truly unique missions, though – using your superhuman abilities to dash across town, pick up a missile truck just before it hits town hall, and then throwing it into the sea, is the sort of memorable moment that right now you have to invent for yourself.

…who’ll play anything as long as it has kanji on the box and they can drone away on every internet forum they can find about what an awesome and overlooked game it is, and isn’t it some kind of crime against humanity that the moron public bought Fifa instead?

Point 1.3 is a marketing strategy I could really get behind!

Still, is it just me or does that seems like one hell of a complicated puzzle game for something advertising itself as “easy to play”?

The worst-kept secret in the games industry is finally announced – Mercenaries 2 is multi-format.

I have mixed feelings about this sequel, on the one hand, I really like sandbox type games (no, really – I enjoyed Godfather enough that I keep looking out for a cheap 360 copy). On the other hand, I thought Mercenaries was a terrible execution of a good idea.

The vehicles felt too floaty (especially in collisions, they seemed to flop about in a very strange way); I always felt it was trying to restrict my use of big explosives (the game’s killer usp) by making the really cool ones so expensive that you didn’t want to waste them on a target that would just respawn again when you re-entered the area; it had an annoying habit of spawning enemy tanks behind me while I was on foot, and then made them shoot any vehicle I tried to jack the exact second I started the (admittedly ace) jacking animation with scant regard for their fellow soldiers; and the world felt completely lifeless and dull with the only scene-setting set-piece battles spawning in exactly the same places over and over again.

I played through the first two suits of cards, then gave up. And writing that reminded me that I didn’t like the structure either – having the targets and their entourages only spawn once you’d activated them felt very artificial. Will this next-gen sequel take a page out of Crackdown’s book, making all of the target enemies exist from the start and relying on the player character’s abilities and equipment to restrict access?

I’ll be very interested to see how it turns out.

You might not remember from my update about CoD2, but I’m not really into the WW2 thing. I played CoD2 because lots of people had said it was good, and I enjoyed it enough that I thought I’d give this a try too (even though it’s by a different developer I figured they would keep enough the same that I’d enjoy it).

I was sort of wrong. Like FEAR, I go through periods of liking it, and periods of hating it, often within sections of the same level, and overall I just can’t tell if I think it’s any good or not.

The main thing it has going for it over CoD2 (and I say this having absolutely no intention of playing the multiplayer of either, so maybe a lot of work went into making that deeply awesome), is that it’s a lot prettier. The effects are nicer, the levels have more detail, and there are some swanky visual tricks like dynamic god rays (though those can often cock-up and look a bit silly). The tank levels are much improved too, thanks to the setting they aren’t in featureless deserts with ambiguous ‘minefields’ all around – you’re in nice French countryside villages. Methodically crushing a whole field’s worth of crops took up a pleasant couple of minutes.

The setting does have it’s downside, though. Since the whole game this time is based in one ‘theatre’ (as I believe the war nuts call it) you get much less variation of scenery. It’s all French villages, towns and supply depots. You still swap between different nationalities throughout, but you lose the interest of seeing where you’ll end up next.

There are other noticeable differences between this and Call of Duty 2, and to save on typing and having to construct proper paragraphs, I shall present them in list form:

• This game is buggy. I’ve seen flying Germans and Germans flying backwards as well), hovering crates all over the place, and invisible collision that looked like a walls were meant to be there. The game uses the same ‘infinite Nazi’ engine as CoD2 as well, which allowed me to pass a few difficult sections because the enemies got stuck on each other, blocking up the exit to their respawn point.
• It’s full of boring non-interactive unskippable cutscenes. My mind might be playing tricks, but I remember CoD2 not having too many places where control was removed. It also had nice classy level intros. CoD3 has horrible accents and loads of places you’re forced to stand and watch people slowly arguing. Its worst cutscene crime is that whenever you load a saved game you have to watch the intro to that level again (presumably while it loads). Except I’d rather watch a short loading screen than a long (bad) cutscene again, no matter how much it might break immersion.
• There are masses of sections with you in a jeep, either driving or on the turret. The driving controls are horrible, and although the sections are filled with explosions and tanks chasing you, they just never feel exciting.
• They’ve added quick time events (cutscenes where you have to press the right series of buttons or repeat and action to get the right outcome), which are shit. Planting charges isn’t just a case of holding one button for a while, you have to perform a series of simple actions instead. But since they’re so simple it feels like you shouldn’t have to bother. The events involving a Nazi grappling with you just don’t fit with the rest of the game – a melee hit in normal play is a one-shot kill, but these guys need an elaborate fight scene.
• They’ve put red barrels everywhere. That explode when you shoot them. The design of this game is actually going backwards through first person history!

Still, it’s not all bad though – it retains the excellent “holy shit I’m in a war with a lot of people and there’s a lot of stuff going on” feeling of the previous game, with lots of set-piece things going on around you. And they’ve done a great job with the achievements – you get a steady stream just from completing the single player missions, and it has some not-entirely-impossible-to-do ones for playing levels using subsets of weapons, or not taking too much damage.

But overall I’d recommend anyone interested gets Call of Duty 2 instead of this. It’s probably a lot cheaper too.

Ben Schneider has recently had an article published on Gamasutra, on scripting player defeat into gameplay.

It’s an interesting read, but I don’t agree with his idea that “we need to invent a language of game drama … we need to teach gamers to speak it fluently”, since that sounds to me like anyone who doesn’t play games often won’t have a clue what’s going on.

Surely as gaming strives to expand to new markets we should be moving away from these sorts of arbitrary conventions?

I once watched someone play their first FPS – Half-Life. They didn’t realise that creates were smashable and would provide consumables, and they didn’t realise they could use the health & armour stations to recharge (it seems the innate desire to run around and click ‘use’ on every piece of scenery is a very gamer thing to do). Consequently they died often, because the game assumed they would understand the conventions that would allow them to regain lost health.

Moving about will burn calories, or so say boffins at Liverpool John Moores University. Good work, eggheads – now that these pressing issues have been resolved, maybe you can move on to that ‘cancer’ thing.

US troops finishing their stint in Iraq are being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder using some kind of fancy computer game. I could be flippant and suggest they just sit them down with an Xbox and a copy of Ghost Recon to save themselves a bit of cash, but obviously this game is much more advanced.

“the system pumps in smells such as gunpowder, burning rubber and body odour”

My 360 makes 2 of these during any 4-hour playing session. And I make the other. So maybe my jokey suggestion is a possibility after all.

Or so I thought, until I read this:

“Speakers provide the sound”

Truly, the next generation of immersion is upon us.