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On the 29th of November 2007 Harvey Smith, lead designer of Midway’s BlackSite: Area 51 project, announced at the Montreal International Game Summit that the project was “so ****ed up” and that he was not excited about making it. On the 30th of November 2007 Midway announced that he was no longer in their employment.

The result is a game that had a truly staggering amount of potential, but that has so much lacking – not least collision along the cliff walls beside the gas station in the first episode. In Harvey’s own words the game “went straight from alpha to final”. It also seems that the game was made in reverse order to how it’s played because the game seems increasingly more polished the further you progress through it. The first episode feels like a prototype and the last like a game that has been polished with pride.

Putting someone who isn’t keen on the project in charge of it’s design and development is a software development atrocity because it’s bound to murder it. If another designer is capable of that role isn’t it better for them to do it? And if you can’t convince another designer to take the role then is the project worth making at all? If you then run into problems but don’t have the time available to account for them because you’re crunching for Christmas then something has got to give and it’s almost always the game that suffers.

Look at the worm-like monster on the bridge as he swipes at your helicopter. Now remember that they called the other monsters “octopus-dogs”. Look at the detail in your team mate’s models for a text book example of good modelling. Then watch him get stuck as he’s unsure which way to turn so (to please everyone) he turns and moves in all directions. Look at the eerie debris-strewn corridors in the last episode and remember that you got lost on the way there because there are no arrows or pointers to guide you. The final boss’s speech is empassioned and furiously articulate, but it’s not good enough to account for all the “filler” speeches trail up to it.

Much fuss has been made about how short the single player campaign is and how BlackSite as a whole is not nearly as good as Call of Duty 4. The vast majority of first person shooters aren’t as good as Call of Duty 4 but we’ve got to move on at some point guys and BlackSite had a lot of cool things in it that Call of Duty lacked (the ability to drive vehicles and a variety of enemies for instance). In fact this game would probably have been in far greater demand if it hadn’t have been for Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 which dominated the market this Christmas.

If you’ve played Call of Duty 4 to death then this is worth picking up. The BlackSite game can best be summed up as a marriage between Call of Duty 3 and Gears of War that didn’t work out but I enjoyed playing it all the same. Sadly when a project fails it rarely gets a sequel, so the true potential of this intellectual property will probably never be realised.

- John

john@inx-gaming.co.uk

Play nice. This one’s better than most FPS (that aren’t Call of Duty 4).

Codemaster waded into this season’s computer game battles with this gruesome offering at an unfortunate time to be competing in the FPS arena. Call of Duty IV, Half Life2: The Orange Box, Timeshift, and Blacksite Area 51 are all fighting for the title of best Christmas Shooter and none of them are to be taken lightly.

But Jericho can hold its own against that competition. For one thing its build quality is fantastic: exquisite modelling is brought to life by top quality animation and has a consistently smooth framerate, the visual effects, game script, and sound are done properly but not overdone (except for the intro voiceover sequence), and it’s plain that a lot of perfectionism went into this production. A lot of the levels are just magnificient. Unfortunately, rather than just cash in on this modelling prowess in the conventional and successful way, Jericho’s levels are swamped in gore: mounds of what look like raw flesh and dead people cover the ground in places, and what at first was strikingly gruesome soon becomes ignored. Gore is one of those things which if done properly and infrequently can completely change the entire experience – here it just marrs the scenery. Sadly it just undermines the effect of the horror that they’re trying to create. The same can be said of the enemy models: the mutilated cultists disgust, not horrify. The Jericho team should take a lesson about using gore to horrify from F.E.A.R.

In Jericho you take possession of different members of your squad. Codemasters did an excellent job of balancing these: while you will have favourites, each character feels different and there is no individual one that is clearly superior. In any given fight you can switch to Church (has a sword and a spell that holds enemies powerlessly in place) Black (a sniper with a rocket launcher) Delgado (a huge ass chaingun and a spell that wooshes round the room setting enemy on fire) and Cole (whose can slow time and increase your firepower). If one goes down, you can switch to another, until the character that you’re possessing or another character (Rawlings) heals them.

In terms of level design, XBOX 360 official magazine claims that it is “ridiculously linear”. Jericho was just as linear as Gears of War was, and while that’s not a good thing it doesn’t affect the enjoyment of the game. The levels in terms of looks and the way they play, and the monsters you face, are far more varied than GoW’s were. But they’re all covered in red sticky.

The storyline is also more deep. I haven’t researched how much of this is true and how much came from Clive Barker’s (seemingly twisted) mind, but the premise is that gnostic texts make reference to a creature that God made before he made humans, called the Firstborn. This being was so terrible that it had to be locked away from the earth (God didn’t want to kill it. Given what happened to the dinosaurs this is slightly surprising). The firstborn is now pretty cheesed off by this and every so often someone who wants to become a god tries to free it so that it destroys the earth. Every time it breaks free it takes a little bit of the world back with it. Meeting the cockney WW2 soldiers is pretty cool, but going back into the roman times just revealed a stack load of people getting crucified. Better than the storyline behind the game events is the background of each character: these are released as bonuses for in game progression.

Jericho is a great game for fans of squad based FPSs, provided that you don’t crave horror and don’t mind liberal amounts of indiscriminate gore. For the rest, there’s Blacksite Area 51 and FEAR Files.

- John

Play nice. Play Jericho.

Socks. Socks, socks, more socks. Always with the socks.

OK, it’s not as bad as that really, but a good habit is to buy yourself a game that you like for Christmas. Or that dull but stressful bit of pre-Christmas December where you’re waiting for Christmas to arrive.

I was scouring Amazon when I realised that we have got an impressively good lineup ahead. An annoying facet of the games industry is that there are far more sales at Christmas than any other time of year, that the same game released in January will simply not do as well as the same game released in November. If you release in February may god help you. If you release in March god cannot help you.

Did I say annoying? I must have meant for the developers. Surely not for die hard horror fans: this month alone we have Jericho (cross platform) and Hellgate: London (PC only). FEAR Files will finally be bringing the FEAR Extraction Point and FEAR Perseus expansion packs to the Xbox 360. Sci-fi roleplaying games are also going to leave their footprint with Mass Effect.

For something a bit more mainstream, anyone who has played Midway Games’ Blacksite: Area 51 demo will testify that it’s a squad based FPS done really, really well: it looks, plays, and feels like a fantastic example of the genre. If shooting aliens doesn’t appeal as much as gunning down terrorists then Activision’s Call of Duty IV is all set to bring the franchise to an all time high. And what if Assassin’s Creed lives up to the considerable hype surrounding this… first example of a “free runner”? Assassin’s Creed looks like it will combine the best bits of sneaking games with the leaping and climbing associated with the Prince of Persia and Devil May Cry games. If you think that running away after a kill is too wussy then you can ruin their day (and probably their lives) in Eidos’ psychotic squad based combat game Kane and Lynch: Dead Men.

Of course if you want to be a more traditional hero then just strum away in Guitar Hero III.

- John

Play nice. Because it’s Christmas

I am about to do the unthinkable. I am about to utter ghastly words of sacriliege, the likes of which have never been heard before. My blasphemous cries will rouse anger, hatred, and condemnation from the entire world. I will be shunned by the gaming community. I will be flamed as an enemy by my entire 360 friendslist. I will become an outcast by my public declaration of hatred of Gears of War.

“Wtf!?” you cry. “It’s the most awesome Third Person Shooter out there, and one of the best 360 games!” Those I cannot disagree with. But if you’d have just been on a 4 man team that dropped to a 2 man team when the turncoat buggers discovered that the other 4 players play like world champions (I mean how else could they do that with the shotgun?) you’d feel the same way too. If this happened twice in a row, you’d be up in arms.

Now I am no n00b. I am on chapter 4 of insane difficulty of the campaign, which I think merits itself. I can active reload, and roll out of harm’s way at precisely the right moment, throw frags accurately and get the odd headshot. I also once on XBox Live took out the entire opposing team using only my chainsaw (yes I was trying for the achievement).

The problem with Gears of War’s Live games is that there’s no balancing. You can get put on a team of first timer French people (nothing’s worse than being on the losing team if you can’t tell your team mates that it’s because they’re n00bs) against a team of 4 professionals who spend their after-school lives doing this instead of homework. Gears of War Live should be redesigned to include a ranking system, and a redistribution system for if 2 players on one team leave. In fact, why not a team redistribution system between rounds regardless of dropouts? Although I realise that that would decrease variety, give the more skilled players a challenge, and make it less frustrating and addictive for the rest of us…

I’ll finish this rant later. Right now I’m off to try to get the Down with E.P.I.C. achievement.

John

Play Nice

Recently I downloaded the XBox 360 demo of Codemaster’s Overlord. And I was hooked from the very first line. After all, I think that we can agree that “Rub some acid in his eyes: That’ll freshen him up!” is an awesome opening line. The rest of the demo followed the same style: well-scripted, with tongue in cheek minions encouraging you to be evil, and damn good fun.

After purchasing the game I thought I was onto something. After all, if I’d have played a demo of Dead Rising I’d have known before purchase that the mission-critical text was impossible to read on my Standard Definition screen. So I decided to download more game demos to evaluate. Please note that the following are not meant to be in-depth reviews of the game, they are deliberately very short and non-exhaustive reviews of the game demos.

Lego Star Wars II: Lego and Star Wars based adventure game. Another comedy game: characters falling over and getting hit by vehicles has never been this funny. The puzzles are interesting and satisfying to solve. I’m holding back from purchasing this one because I don’t think that it will hold any real lasting appeal for me; it’d be good for dropping in and out of, similar to Spiderman 3. But I still haven’t completed that yet so…

Quake IV: Classic Alien Shooter. Good graphics, good dialogue, good weapons, interesting story and monsters, but there’s nothing new here. Making a shining pinnacle of a classic genre is always a worthwhile thing to do, but there’s nothing in terms of concept or gameplay that really make this stick out. When I have completed F.E.A.R and want another FPS I will probably make this investment.

Ninety Nine Nights: Fantasy hack ‘n’ slash. N3 is a very impressive game which has vast numbers of beautifully rendered ally and enemy soldiers battling it out on screen while you hack and slash with an effortlessly graceful style in the middle of them. N3 seems to suffer from the same problems that most hack and slash games do which is that rather than learn all the complex controls for combos it’s easier for the player to just repeat the same ones over and over again, which undermines the variety of moves and makes gameplay repetitive.

Shadowrun: Shoot ‘em up with magic. Shadowrun was a really fun demo to play. The magic element really sets this game apart – your character can teleport through walls away from people while firing at them. You can run, leap, glide, teleport, throw up destructible but hindering walls… there’s tremendous variety. Even among all this chaos the game appears to be well thought out and balanced: no one magic spell seems to be dramatically more useful than any other. The tutorial is well-made and not boring as most demos are. Best of all the demo sets up an intriguing background story that I would really like to explore and progress through. What’s that? There’s no single player campaign? Only single player skirmishes? Ah forget it. Single player story driven FPS are my favourite. I’m partial to multiplayer as much as anyone else, but the campaign really drives the game forward and gives you something to progress through, and it’s a huge lost opportunity that it’s not present here.

The Outfit: WW2 squad based shooter. The game comes with a single player campaign mode. Sadly this demo didn’t. This is the XBox 360’s answer to the Battlefield series (while it looks different it has in common most aspects of gameplay), and it makes a fine job of it: within minutes of playing a Nazi approached me from behind, stamped on the back of my knee, and attacked my throat with a knife. You can call for a variety of vehicles to be dropped from the sky (literally dropped, I got crushed by one), but whatever you do don’t try to run towards them if there’s a river in the way. Your “Outfit” has been given all the training and equipment necessary to conduct vital attacks behind enemy lines, but they haven’t been taught how to swim, and are dead from the moment their toes cut the water. At £22 from Amazon this is a game that I will make an investment in. There’s one “small” problem: the text is tiny on my Standard Definition TV. There’s no good reason why this isn’t a PC game and frankly it should be: mouse and keyboard are far better for this genre.

Project Sylpheed: Space Combat Flight Simulator. Perhaps because I haven’t played a flying game in a while, or perhaps because the background is mostly black with stars it’s very difficult to know just which way up is. It’s also hard to guage your speed and distance from the spacecraft that you’re attacking. The Microsoft Combat Flight simulator had an option of writing the distance away from the other planes above the aircraft, and that would have been useful here. I think if you’re a fan of the genre then this is probably a good one, as the spacecraft control well and there seems to be a variety of weapons, but this just isn’t the one for me. Another problem is that I was getting eyestrain from the text on the briefing screen, probably due to the light blue on blue text in Standard Definition. The names of the planets on this screen were illegible because the font was too small.

Having had that marathon session I’ve reached the following conclusions: that I will buy The Outfit.

And a High Definition TV.

- John

Play nice