“Gears of War II is what GeoW should have been.”
” ‘Gears of War 1.5′, not ‘Gears of War 2′ ”

A tech demo is defined by wikipedia (who else?) as being:

“a prototype, rough example or an otherwise incomplete version of a product, put together with the primary purpose of showcasing the idea, performance, method or the features of the product.”

The original Gears of War was lacking several major features listed in the INX Gaming Manifesto, most noticeably a lack of an offline Instant Action game mode. It also lacked flexibility: there was no skirmish mode, there were in total only 14 enemy types (including Raam and set pieces such as Corpsers, Reavers, Nemacysts, Seeders and Kryll, which don’t really count). It also lacked a fleshed out story line, and balanced multiplayer. But that was a different “article” (rant).

There was no good reason not to include a “horde” mode in GeoW, even a stripped down one would be better than none, although I realise that optimisations to the UT3 engine made it easier to do the way it was done in GeoW2. There was no good reason not to allow us to do multiplayer skirmishes offline. Gears of War 2 doesn’t feel like the sequel to Gears of War, it feels like the game it should have been. Gears of War acts as a tech demo, a sample of the potential that a Gears of War game could have, and Gears of War 2 feels like the game it should have been.

Where were the chainsaw duels in GeoW 1? Where was the horde mode? Where was the variety of scenarios in the story mode that GeoW 2 produced? And above all, where was the flamethrower?

- John

T**s

S**t

F***ers

Apparently Ubisoft’s Scrabble Game has been using offensive language to beat an 8-year old at scrabble.

How did no one on the Dev team think “Hey, we should pop a word filter on this beast, yo!”? Come to that, why wasn’t it sufficiently tested by Ubisoft and Nintendo?

If you don’t test your games, then mistakes will get made. Sometimes very embarrasing ones.

- John

With the web-rumour mill churning away about the possibility of a COD VI being developed by Infinity Ward (COD IV’s developers), it seems that Treyarch really had to be good to get COD V noticed, especially after the disappointing COD III. As a primarily single player purist I’ve completed both campaigns, and the truth is, they are surprisingly similar.

I ought to say at this point that most of this article won’t interest the 50% of COD 4 players who never even completed the campaign’s tutorial.

You could in fact be forgiven for thinking that COD 5 is just a reskinned COD 4. After all, they use the same game engine, the same control system, the same spawn-enemies-until-player-runs-to-an-arbitrary-point method of enemy supply, the same smoke grenades… And Treyarch can be forgiven for doing so, after all, if a formula works so well, why change it?

There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that, after COD III, the franchise needed a fresh angle. Too many games have had the same rehashed Normandy beach landings. Too many games have had the same trench style bunker attacking warfare. COD IV was a welcome relief from the tired European theatre of war, by taking us into a theoretical future and updating the weapons, tactics, and support to things that modern day gamers are familiar with hearing about in the news.

COD V went back to the Second World War, but took us (finally!) to a different theatre: to the savage Pacific theatre. These aren’t the “gung ho” American soldiers of COD IV, they’re conscripted teenagers, far from home and far from welcome. Their enemy are the aggressive and zealous Japanese soldiers who hide in trees, murder holes, and the dense jungle to ambush the invaders with vicious bayonet charges. As an American soldier you pilot gun turrets in aeroplanes, attack fortified positions, and support tank advances. The gameplay here is visceral and exciting. The Pacific theatre is an ideal setting for a balls-to-the-wall shooter, and Treyarch should be proud of finalling lifting us out of the trenches in such a perfect way.

COD V followed COD IV’s formula of switching between two countries’ soldiers. As well as the Americans, you play as a member of the Russian army on the march to Berlin. Sadly, these bits aren’t anything that we haven’t seen before. These parts are set in cities, corridors, and subway stations (other than when you drive a tank towards Berlin). And while the levels are impressive there are too many occasions when you have to progress to an arbitrary point, under exceptionally heay fire, while destroying wave after wave of the same enemy troops. However, the storyline is one of pride and sacrifice, and strikes the right balance. But it’s not new, unlike the Pacific Theatre levels. Those are nothing short of amazing. If more of the game had been set there, I would most likely be complaining that the game on the whole didn’t have enough variety. But I feel that more effort could have been put into the European part just to make it different to everything we’ve seen before.

The most remarkable level of the European theatre set is when you play as one of a pair of snipers attacking specific targets while evading capture. Sound familiar? Almost everything about this level was reminiscient of the Pripriyat level (“Ghillies in the Mist”) in COD 4. Except it was far more clear what you were meant to do, and how to do it. It was also far less tense, I rarely felt in real danger.

It would be possible to write a review that did a tit for tat analysis of which parts were better in which game and ignore the major point that the games are so similar that it’s pointless arguing about it: COD 5′s opening was far better (it got you straight into the action, rather than making you shoot targets), and it’s got flamethrowers, but COD 4 has better variety of levels, weaponry, and characterisation… but I won’t do that. I recommend both games. If I had to pick one of the two it’d probably be…

I’ll get back to you on that.

- John

You can get back to INX first! Either post in the comments below or cast your vote in our forums!

I was aware of a massive new XBox Live update that night, and I thought I might as well go along with it so that I could watch the video. This is the update that allows you to copy games onto your hard disk.

I regretted it later obviously, when I had to watch an awful pseudo-artsy video of… something. I’m not entirely clear what it was trying to convey but it was pretentious. Here’s a youtube link. Whatever, I ignored my instincts and pressed on. Until I got to the “Choose an Avatar” screen.

No thanks. They all looked awful, cutesy and anorexic. I pressed the “B” button to go past it.

“Are you sure you don’t want to select an avatar?”

Yes, quite sure thanks, I want to watch my video.

Then I was taken to the new interface. Not only is the bottom two fifths of my background taken up with a horrible lime green… what is it supposed to be anyway? But in order to look at a friend on my list I have to scroll through every single friend I have. Wonderful. Microsoft have tried to take two aspects of their competitors’ work and have mashed them together and the effect is horrible. The whole interface is difficult, unintuitive, ugly, and just plain unnecessary. And the worst part is that it’s mandatory.

But at least I don’t have to choose an avatar, right?

Wrong! Last week Microsoft made it impossible to sign into XBox Live without selecting an avatar. Why?

Why do I need to have selected a cutesy and stupid looking avatar in order to play games online?

Why can I not select the interface that I preferred?

Why is this new attempt to appeal to younger players being forced on the older ones without them having a choice?

Who made this decision, and who thought that it was a good idea to force it on gamers who don’t want it?

- John

It’s just plain wrong.

Every time I play a game to completion I think “Man I can’t wait to review that for INX! But first I’ll have a nap because I’ve got work in 3 hours.” Then by the time I get back from work, tired and hungry, I go to bed to catch up on lost sleep. Then I never actually get round to writing the blog, because there are more games to be played.

So that’s why I haven’t completed Saints Row 2 before writing a review on it. But I’ve played it for just under ten hours and I’m going to play it for plenty more than that so here it is: Saints Row 2 is not a Grand Theft Auto clone. What it is is a vastly superior spiritual successor of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

While Grand Theft Auto IV is dark, gritty, and eerily serious in places Saints Row 2 is light-hearted and fun throughout (the exception being when your friend Karlos was killed by a rival gang and he died shaking your hand, in a strangely stark moment which effectively gives your character motivation). My avatar can’t even be bothered to shave every morning, or lose weight (or his cockney accent – you get to choose one of three voices per gender) but he finally has motivation to steal nuclear waste to have tattooed into a rival mobster’s face. I didn’t make that up. That actually happens.

Saints Row 2 doesn’t wait. You start by breaking out of prison, thankfully being allowed to skip the tutorial GeOW style, and continue escaping until you reach the mainland to find that your old gang, the Third Street Saints, have been wiped out by rival gangs. Old characters soon return, and the player can proceed with the storyline(s) or play around with the diversions, new ones of which include Fuzz (dress up as a policeman and get medieval on crime for the cameras), and car surfing (literally, jump on a car and try to keep your balance).

A lot of people were put off by just how broken the original Saints Row was in places, not that it actually spoiled your enjoyment of the game, but gamers are demanding and spoiled on the whole, and if you release a buggy game you will suffer. Volition clearly learned this and the results are easy to see: after nearly ten hours of play I’ve only seen one civilian “pop” out of existence when I turned my back on him. Cars no longer stream out when you’re feet away from them and, while the AI still leads to some strange behaviours from the police especially, it on the whole manages its job well enough.

Thanks to an absent, RRODded XBox 360 I played this particular gem on my PlayStation 3, so I don’t know about the achievements. But it doesn’t matter, Saints Row 2 rocks on anything.

- John

john AT inx-gaming.co DOT uk

I recently tried to play Flatout Ultimate Carnage with a friend. I’d been telling him about this slicker, grittier version of Burnout and we were both looking forward to it. Oh, wait, no splitscreen multiplayer.

That’s right. A game that does XBox Live multiplayer to the nth degree (8 players) doesn’t allow a couple of buddies to kill some time on the one console. So we ended up playing Burnout: Revenge instead.

As a result of my disappointment at this, and the desperately cut-down Unreal Tournament 3 (which was in many peoples’ opinion, steps backward in gameplay from Unreal Tournament 2004), and many other instances of glaring omissions that I’ve seen in games lately, I’ve drafted the following manifesto for games to be considered “next-gen” in what actually matters: the gameplay and usability.

Gameplay:

1) Games which offer “Deathmatch”, “Team Deathmatch”, “Capture the Flag”, and “Last Man Standing” game modes have to include other game modes as well to offer a variety of gameplay – too many games are offering these four as the bare minimum. Other popular ones include Assault, Conquest, Assassination, and Mutation (UT 2004).

2) Flexibility in multiplayer. These may include (the following are examples, not specifics) an optional regenerate health setting, an friendly fire setting (including friendly fire modifiers such as 50% of damage), an optional penalty for winning players, etc.

3) Games must offer an offline Instant Action mode. Too many gamers don’t have online access either temporarily or permanently to not allow this. S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl, one of my favourite games of recent times, has this problem.

4) Games that include blood should include a “no blood” feature, regardless of age rating.

5) Missions in story or campaign driven game modes shouldn’t be simply “walk from A to B then back to A”, even if this is disguised as “fetch x for y”.

Interface and accessibility:

6) Plenty of gamers are deaf or play with the sound off. All in-game speech must have subtitles.

7) All subtitles and onscreen text must be clearly legible on Standard Definition televisions, widescreen or otherwise. This includes making sure that the text is on screen for long enough! A lot of people found Dead Rising’s missions difficult to complete to play well because mission critical instructions were given in unreadable text.

8 ) Loading screens should have something interesting for the player to watch, read, or do, as well as clearly showing the relative amount left to load.

Multiplayer:

9) Games that offer online multiplayer have to provide it in such a way that an inexperienced and spoilt child can set it up without a tantrum.

10) Console games that allow network multiplayer modes must allow splitscreen multiplayer modes to either the same amount or the maximum amount offered by the console.

Are you getting annoyed with next-gen games not being up to par? Anything you think should be added to the manifesto?

- John

john@inx-gaming CO UK

Jack Thompson has been permanently disbarred. He’s got 30 days to get his affairs in order, and then he’s out. Oh, and he’s also got a fine of over $43,000.

The Florida Supreme Court supported the accusations against Jack Thompson including that he:

* Made false statements of material fact to courts and repeatedly violated a court order
* Communicated the subject of representation directly with clients of opposing counsel
* Engaged in prohibited ex parte communications
* Publicized and sent hundreds of pages of vitriolic and disparaging missives, letters, faxes, and press releases, to the affected individuals
* Targeted an individual who was not involved with respondent in any way, merely due to “the position [the individual] holds in state and national politics”
* Falsely, recklessly, and publicly accused a judge as being amenable to the “fixing” of cases
* Sent courts inappropriate and offensive sexual materials
* Falsely and publicly accused various attorneys and their clients of engaging in a conspiracy/enterprise involving “the criminal distribution of sexual materials to minors” and attempted to get prosecuting authorities to charge these attorneys and their clients for racketeering and extortion
* Harassed the former client of an attorney in an effort to get the client to use its influence to persuade the attorney to withdraw a defamation suit filed by the attorney against respondent
* Retaliated against attorneys who filed Bar complaints against him for his unethical conduct by asserting to their clients, government officials, politicians, the media, female lawyers in their law firm, employees, personal friends, acquaintances, and their wives, that the attorneys were criminal pornographers who objectify women.

[source: gamepolitics.com]

His response was his standard threat: he sent an email to www.gamepolitics.com entitled “Now the fun begins”. I remember a similar scenario when he threatened to “deconstruct the Florida Bar”.

For a timeline of Jack Thompson’s demise click here.

- JForce

A wrestling game may seem like a strange choice. Cancel that, a wrestling game must seem like a strange choice: they’re traditionally very slow and robotic, difficult to handle, and very repetitive. They also don’t stand up to the same level of scrutiny in terms of variety and depth of gameplay that the Tekken and DoA legions demand.

TNA iMPACT! by Midway games has breathed new life into the genre and has changed my opinion of wrestling games for the better, although I’m not entirely sure why. The same combinations of buttons lead to the same moves that almost all wrestlers have in common, and after the first match you will have heard all of the commentry that the game has to offer. The handling is fairly intuitive (and very quick to learn) but still feels robotic in places, and there’s still no strategy other than to chip away at the enemy’s health bar and then try to pin him, regardless of the wrestler that you’re using and the wrestler that you’re fighting. The lack of strategy can be observed by watching the AI: sometimes they’ll block a punch, sometimes they won’t. Sometimes they’ll reverse a hold that you’ve put them in, and other times they won’t.

Given how little they could get away with it’s impressive to see the lengths that Midway have gone to polish the game. They clearly tried to make this game the best ever wrestling game and leave it in a position to hold the title for a while: there’s a story mode with an actually interesting and well-written story, with lots of colourful characters and good cutscenes. There’s a create your own player mode, and there’s four player multiplayer at one console. New characters, new moves for the create a player mode, and new arenas can all be unlocked (for the fans of collectibles). This isn’t a game for the hardcore beat ‘em up genre fans, in the same way that WWF isn’t for hardcore martial arts fans. This is a game for people who want a shallow but fun way to kill a weekend with a friend, or who enjoy the showmanship style of fighting. TNA iMPACT! is to DoA what Earth Defence Force 2017 is to Gears of War: simpler, brighter, but much easier to pick up and play. It’s also more addictive than any of them.

john@inx-gaming.co.uk
Laying the smackdown since 2007

Progressing through miles and miles of level to screw up for just pressing the jump button a bit too soon, then falling down a crevice, then having to go back and do the same thing again another 10 or more times isn’t my idea of exhilarating excitement, before I discover by accident that I wasn’t meant to be jumping in that direction at all. Any combat is shallow and pointless. It’s an exercise in timing and luck, and the gaming industry’s oldest enemy “Frustrator” rears his familiar face.

Tomb Raider Legend is the 7th of 9 titles in the series (the 9th being the eagerly awaited Tomb Raider Underworld). It’s gone a long way to address the issues mentioned above:

Your “backup” team give you advice. Constantly. Your progress is saved regularly. The combat has been given added depth by the addition of sliding tackles, jumps (with bullet time, of course, what did you expect, real time? n00b) and side kicks, as well as the staple shooting with infinite ammo.

The puzzle solving has evolved too: it’s generally fairly easy to see what you need to do at a given time. There are exceptions, for instance when you’re doing battle with a giant black demon and you have to turn a gravity-gun on these four blocks on the wall that opens a container directly above you that you can use your grapple hook to pull a magical stone out of… I got somewhat stuck as to why the monster, that was taking damage, was just regenerating it. I had to take the stone out to progres! Of course! A bit of explanation would have been useful here.

If I seem unclear as to exactly what the stone, the demon, and the blocks are exactly it’s because I am unclear. That brings me onto my next point: the story has been revamped and includes all manner of arcane nonsense about King Arthur’s sword Excalibur and the cutscenes (skippable, thank God, they’re usually between a checkpoint and a hard part) are well scripted and executed. I say “arcane nonsense” but it definitely serves to drive the story forward and to a wide variety of locations: Kazakhstan, Nepal and Cornwall.

“As in take the M5 to the A30 Cornwall?” Lara asks incredulously, as I admire the improvements in script.

Tomb Raider Legend definitely still suffers from the problems that have always marred the series but the puzzles are original enough, the combat deep enough, and the game presented well enough to make converts of many nay-sayers and bring back the fans that were lost by the atrocity otherwise known as “Angel of Darkness”. If you liked the original Tomb Raiders then you’ll love this. If you want to try to expand away from your usual diet of shootyshooty action games and maimymaimy bloodandguts then pick this up and give it a try.

- John

And yes, I did a whole review without once commenting on her chest. Marvellous.

Part of the problem appears to be that it’s thought that making a game for the PSP is simple.

Step 1: Take parts of an existing well-liked distributed franchise and either port them directly or rehash them then port them, or tack a bit on then port them (Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell, and Prince of Persia respectively).

Step 2: When you’ve managed to compile them successfully, plunge the graphics and animations quality until the framerate rises to a barely acceptable level.

Step 3: Ship the game. Yes it looks tacky and is buggy and frustrating, but so are all games for the PSP so who cares?

The consumer does. And since it’s our money, we’re going to spend it on games that have been designed, and implemented from the ground up for the console. Silent Hill: Origins is such a game. Without doubt the best lighting we’ve seen on the PSP, and it can rival plenty of XBox 360 games. It can be noticed best when you’re wearing a torch on your chest and swinging your fists around: it looks incredible. Climax Studios has successfully managed to reproduce the defining gritty horror of the series and has brought it all to the smallest screen. The only problem is that the Silent Hill series is the sort of thing that you play alone at night in a dark room with the sound turned up for hours on end (as they recommend before the opening title screen that this game should be played). And most of my PSP gaming happens on a brightly lit bus while I’m trying to ignore screaming children, and screaming adults, come to that.

The best games for the PSP are “pick up and play” ones. The sort where you can make progress, or have a complete game, within 5 minutes, or at most under 10 minutes. The Burnout series is a great example of this. I know that Burnout Legends and Burnout Revenge use pretty much the same engine, and EA didn’t even try to make a pretence about Burnout Dominator (which was shipped under the same name for both PS2 and PSP!) but Burnout is perfect for this sort of thing: there is progress (so something to look forward to on those commutes) but short bursts of gameplay keep it fresh and entertaining and playable in short stretches. The same cannot be said of Dungeon Siege – imagine Diablo on the PSP – that had lots of progress but horrible story, and dialogue and graphics, and…

So far the best PSP game that I’ve had in terms of how addictive and entertaining it is while being able to play in short bursts is Worms Open Warfare 2. Maybe not only because Worms really uses the wide screen that the PSP provides, perhaps because it’s really easy to control and perhaps because it’s a low-tech game (so it doesn’t require development time to be spent on high-detail 3D graphics and animations which would be better spent on improving gameplay and fixing bugs), but this game alone is worth having a PSP for. I was in the middle of a really exciting match today, my third attempt against an enemy team on Hard difficulty setting, and I’d just used the Ninja rope to swing in over the opponent’s last worm and…

My PSP ran out of batteries.

- John