What happens when Blockbuster give me tokens to rent games for free?
Rainbow Six Vegas 2
I dislike Marcus Fenix. My main objection to the man is that he falls in love with every girl who shows him the slightest bit of attention, which a...no, no: that was Jim Carrey's character from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a character with whom I could empathise. My main objection to Marcus Fenix is that he's a lumbering sub-caveman, a chest-beating ape beast and very possibly the least sympathetic protagonist in the history of fiction. I'm more enamored with Bishop from R6V2, in spite of some of his more esoteric character flaws.
When barking staccato orders to his men (the voiceover work on one of whom, Jung, surely borders on constituting an ethnic slur in itself) Bishop is fond of saying "go!" Or to mix things up, "go, go, go!" Perversely, though, he sometimes also says "go, go!" It's abnormal: I mean, who the heck says "go, go"? Years of paintball and laser-quest experience has taught me that, if you want to sound like know your lingo, you say "go, go, go!" A singular "go!" could be justifiable if you're out of breath, but you run the risk of sounding a bit brusque and your friends might say rude things about you. If you really want something done urgently you could conceivably stretch to a "go, go, go, go!" This has a twofold risk: blurt it out too quickly, and it will emerge as "go-g-gogo!" which sounds silly and risks your comrades pointing at you and giggling: enunciate each "go", however, and you'll have spent so long speaking that you'll probably have been shot dead before finishing the sentence...
"What the fuck are you talking about? Are you drunk?" A little, but only on enthusiasm for gaming*. Mostly I'm just abusing periphrasis to delay the inevitable. Reviewing R6V2 puts me in an awkward position because, as a card-carrying Xbox Live non-subscriber, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that a lot of content in the game remains roped off due to my stinginess. Therefore the impressions mired in the swamp of prose below will be based on the single player portion of the game alone. If it pleases you to complain that any or all of my criticisms are addressed in the epoch-defining, orgasm inducing multiplayer component, or that I would understand matters better if I played co-op for two hundred hours, then so be it.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter; Gears of War; Rainbow Six Vegas; Dark Sector; my, what an incestuous little family reunion this is. What connects these third/ first-person tactical action shooters, beyond the fact they all have the letters "ar" in their name (except Rainbow Six, with it's aberrant "ra" construction) is obviously their use of a similar cover system. Purists will tell you this system was invented by kill.switch; those paying slightly less attention will tell you it was coined by GRAW; the general public whom we all deride and mock so will attribute the system to Gears of War. R5V3 logically extends this cover system, providing enough flexibility to allow the player to kill every terrorist in the world and still have time to fret over whether they should wear a tank-top or a long-sleeved shirt to the bloodbath.
The plot, and I'm told this by people who've played the first game more extensively than I have**, runs prior, parallel to and immediately after the events of the original. It seems to consist of a worldwide terrorist convention held in Las Vegas to which the R6 team were not invited. Pride injured and craving buffet food they storm the convention center and poop the party somewhat by killing all the attendees. They then embark on some sort of roadtrip, culminating in a showdown with Bishop's long lost evil twin. I'm extracting the Michael here, although I stand by the sentiment. The plot is hokum, a series of battles through corridors and car-parks culminating in your team finding something bomb-shaped to defuse. Then someone calls in over the radio and says "Bishop, I've got bad news...that wasn't the real threat." "Really? I was sure the game would be over after two hours, but if you're sure..." Randy Marsh says "Oh my God" and off they trot. The plot does its job in that it functions well enough to funnel the player into confined spaces, and gives us a convincing reason to machine gun everything in sight until our thermal goggles stop showing body heat signatures.
Still, "hokum" is a term loaded with pejorative connotations, which is a shame. The gunplay is the star here, and it works very well, largely because the guns are a lot of fun. Big, loud, scary and kinetic, slamming bullets all over the place and flinging terrorists into walls with the impact. A measure of my professionalism is that I always select guns on how loud they are and how nice the muzzle flare looks, statistics and attributes be damned. In most games this can prove quite a restriction on one's arsenal: the shotgun in Gears, for instance, has a muzzle flare which always reminds me of a flower protruding limply from the end of a magician's wand, rather too dangley for my taste, so that's crossed off the list immediately. But R9V4 has a thoroughly enjoyable selection of noise making bullet propellers which sound powerful even with silencers on. The viciousness of the game's artillery pieces cuts both ways, though, because just as efficiently as the player's bullets will shuffle his or her antagonists off their respective mortal coils, so too will the player die a thousand deaths before they witness the end credits.
The game's checkpoint save system seems to cater specially for increasing the blood pressure of players such as myself. Prolonged concentration on a task always makes me screw up in the end, and as a result most of my deaths could be chalked up to careless, vaguely comic errors. You know in a zombie film where the protagonist shoots his way through a posse of the undead and then sits down on a bed, and lets out a big sigh of relief, then...BAM! Head chewed off from behind. Same thing, but with terrorists. I spent a lot of my game time watching the "reloading from last checkpoint screen." I'd run into a room, guns blasting, and die straight away. So I'd sneak in from a different door, silencer equipped, pick off all the terrorists, breathe a sigh of relief and then die as someone hiding behind the door shot me in the back of the head with a shotgun. Then a zombie would eat him, so that's karma.
R6V6 can be extremely frustrating. The good times are good enough to make it worth returning to, but sometimes you'll find yourself having to turn the console off and going to have a nice cup of tea. I'd find myself dying a dozen times and screaming petulant, wholly irrational insults at the screen: "oh, come on! It's just a few fucking bullets! What kind of pussy are you? Get up!" If nothing else these constant deaths would have made a good video with the Benny Hill music playing over them. But then something cool will happen, and all is momentarily forgiven: an enemy sees me and runs up some stairs, so I track where he should be, aim at the wooden ceiling and spray it with gun fire. The recoil drags my cursor above my head until I hear an explosion, and the bad guy's body flies down the stairs and crashes into a wall. If you will insist on leaving explosive barrels in your bedroom, accidents will happen. Then another terrorist would jump out of a bin and empty a shotgun into my crotch...
Tea. Chillax. Breathe.
Checkpoint to chokepoint ratios appear sometimes misjudged. The spacing can be such that you'll have a lengthy easy bit to get through, then a chokepoint with a wave of enemies to dispatch, then you'll think things are all clear and be killed by someone dangling from the ceiling. Your team-mates, "Mr Is The Voice Actor Taking The Piss or What?" and "Some Clearly Not Too Charismatic Dude Whose Name Escapes Me" alleviate this a wee bit, being quite efficient terrorist killers in their own right. They also sometimes get stuck on scenery, forcing a reload from the last save to unstick them- it would be nice if that sort of thing didn't happen.
BISHOP: Jung, let's go. There's only two minutes left on the timer!
JUNG: I can't, Bishop. I can't go on.
BISHOP: Are you hit?
JUNG: My leg. My leg is caught on this door.
BISHOP: I see. Have you tried walking backwards?
JUNG: Dammit Bishop! What am I, a computer specialist or a walking expert?
BISHOP: Oh. Perhaps if I...
JUNG: Stop walking into me! I can't move!
BISHOP: Okay...what if I...
*BANG!*
JUNG: OW! What the hell?! Are you trying to push me along with bullets?
BISHOP: My normal approach is useless here.
Just like real special forces, I'll wager. Other times they'll stand out in the open and get a bit too cosy with machine-gun fire or shuffle about on the spot when I want them to throw a grenade at someone. It's times like this I need real people to order about!
What makes it worth playing as a single-player experience? R3V5 has a tangible "cool" factor. The over the shoulder gunplay, upside down rappelling and hushed whispers accompanying hand gestures all serve to make the player feel like a full-on killing machine. All it lacks is the Splinter Cell SWAT door roll, which would have some genuinely useful applications in R9V1. Apparently Sam isn't too keen on sharing his moves. I particularly enjoyed the Jingoistic special forces elitism the game instills in the player: there's a point where you come across a friendly SWAT team under fire. You kill the bad guys pinning them down and ask if there's a control room nearby- someone needs to save the day, after all. The SWAT lady replies "It's on the second floor, but my SWAT took a pounding when we tried to push to it." Ooh, matron. You feel like putting on a cocky smirk and saying "well, your SWAT team might have struggled, but we're here now- and in Rainbow Six... we play hardball." Then you put on a pair of sunglasses and stroll nonchalantly forward and get sliced to ribbons by machine-gun fire.
"That didn't work" you think. "I need some new sunglasses!" A lot of attention went into creating a persistent, customisable avatar for the player. Exp. points are awarded for killing terrorists, with the cause of death (close range shotgun blast, sneaky C4 explosion) adding to the tally for various stats. Every kill pushes the player a bit closer to unlocking a new sniper rifle or a fetching new scarf. There's piles of different guns and armour to unlock, even if I always do just go with the loudest and shiniest one respectively. Honestly, I was more focused on finding matching trousers and sunglasses. It's nice not to be a faceless, characterless avatar, and this level of personalisation goes a fair distance to making things more fun. I'd like to see the option of choosing more things, like posture, running and peeking animations, missing fingers- really go crazy with the customisation idea. All in all, what there is acts as a compelling motivation, and it encourages replay in a way which Gears or GRAW never really did for me. That could just be my Fenix prejudice manifesting itself, though.
A rent or a buy, then? For the ardently friendless single player, a rent. But the more I've written about the game, the more I'd like to try the multiplayer suite. Being as I'm going to urgently need Xbox Live come April 29th anyway, it couldn't hurt to join up with some friends and "give some SWAT a good pounding when we try to push to it." As the vicar said to the actress. Hell, I can always roleplay the AI and rotate on the spot and get stuck on doorways- they'll bloody love that online, you mark my words.
* And Tanqueray No 10 Gin. Yum!
**i.e. At all.
What happens when Blockbuster give me tokens to rent games for free?
Rainbow Six Vegas 2
I dislike Marcus Fenix. My main objection to the man is that he falls in love with every girl who shows him the slightest bit of attention, which a...no, no: that was Jim Carrey's character from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a character with whom I could empathise. My main objection to Marcus Fenix is that he's a lumbering sub-caveman, a chest-beating ape beast and very possibly the least sympathetic protagonist in the history of fiction. I'm more enamored with Bishop from R6V2, in spite of some of his more esoteric character flaws.
When barking staccato orders to his men (the voiceover work on one of whom, Jung, surely borders on constituting an ethnic slur in itself) Bishop is fond of saying "go!" Or to mix things up, "go, go, go!" Perversely, though, he sometimes also says "go, go!" It's abnormal: I mean, who the heck says "go, go"? Years of paintball and laser-quest experience has taught me that, if you want to sound like know your lingo, you say "go, go, go!" A singular "go!" could be justifiable if you're out of breath, but you run the risk of sounding a bit brusque and your friends might say rude things about you. If you really want something done urgently you could conceivably stretch to a "go, go, go, go!" This has a twofold risk: blurt it out too quickly, and it will emerge as "go-g-gogo!" which sounds silly and risks your comrades pointing at you and giggling: enunciate each "go", however, and you'll have spent so long speaking that you'll probably have been shot dead before finishing the sentence...
"What the fuck are you talking about? Are you drunk?" A little, but only on enthusiasm for gaming*. Mostly I'm just abusing periphrasis to delay the inevitable. Reviewing R6V2 puts me in an awkward position because, as a card-carrying Xbox Live non-subscriber, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that a lot of content in the game remains roped off due to my stinginess. Therefore the impressions mired in the swamp of prose below will be based on the single player portion of the game alone. If it pleases you to complain that any or all of my criticisms are addressed in the epoch-defining, orgasm inducing multiplayer component, or that I would understand matters better if I played co-op for two hundred hours, then so be it.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter; Gears of War; Rainbow Six Vegas; Dark Sector; my, what an incestuous little family reunion this is. What connects these third/ first-person tactical action shooters, beyond the fact they all have the letters "ar" in their name (except Rainbow Six, with it's aberrant "ra" construction) is obviously their use of a similar cover system. Purists will tell you this system was invented by kill.switch; those paying slightly less attention will tell you it was coined by GRAW; the general public whom we all deride and mock so will attribute the system to Gears of War. R5V3 logically extends this cover system, providing enough flexibility to allow the player to kill every terrorist in the world and still have time to fret over whether they should wear a tank-top or a long-sleeved shirt to the bloodbath.
The plot, and I'm told this by people who've played the first game more extensively than I have**, runs prior, parallel to and immediately after the events of the original. It seems to consist of a worldwide terrorist convention held in Las Vegas to which the R6 team were not invited. Pride injured and craving buffet food they storm the convention center and poop the party somewhat by killing all the attendees. They then embark on some sort of roadtrip, culminating in a showdown with Bishop's long lost evil twin. I'm extracting the Michael here, although I stand by the sentiment. The plot is hokum, a series of battles through corridors and car-parks culminating in your team finding something bomb-shaped to defuse. Then someone calls in over the radio and says "Bishop, I've got bad news...that wasn't the real threat." "Really? I was sure the game would be over after two hours, but if you're sure..." Randy Marsh says "Oh my God" and off they trot. The plot does its job in that it functions well enough to funnel the player into confined spaces, and gives us a convincing reason to machine gun everything in sight until our thermal goggles stop showing body heat signatures.
Still, "hokum" is a term loaded with pejorative connotations, which is a shame. The gunplay is the star here, and it works very well, largely because the guns are a lot of fun. Big, loud, scary and kinetic, slamming bullets all over the place and flinging terrorists into walls with the impact. A measure of my professionalism is that I always select guns on how loud they are and how nice the muzzle flare looks, statistics and attributes be damned. In most games this can prove quite a restriction on one's arsenal: the shotgun in Gears, for instance, has a muzzle flare which always reminds me of a flower protruding limply from the end of a magician's wand, rather too dangley for my taste, so that's crossed off the list immediately. But R9V4 has a thoroughly enjoyable selection of noise making bullet propellers which sound powerful even with silencers on. The viciousness of the game's artillery pieces cuts both ways, though, because just as efficiently as the player's bullets will shuffle his or her antagonists off their respective mortal coils, so too will the player die a thousand deaths before they witness the end credits.
The game's checkpoint save system seems to cater specially for increasing the blood pressure of players such as myself. Prolonged concentration on a task always makes me screw up in the end, and as a result most of my deaths could be chalked up to careless, vaguely comic errors. You know in a zombie film where the protagonist shoots his way through a posse of the undead and then sits down on a bed, and lets out a big sigh of relief, then...BAM! Head chewed off from behind. Same thing, but with terrorists. I spent a lot of my game time watching the "reloading from last checkpoint screen." I'd run into a room, guns blasting, and die straight away. So I'd sneak in from a different door, silencer equipped, pick off all the terrorists, breathe a sigh of relief and then die as someone hiding behind the door shot me in the back of the head with a shotgun. Then a zombie would eat him, so that's karma.
R6V6 can be extremely frustrating. The good times are good enough to make it worth returning to, but sometimes you'll find yourself having to turn the console off and going to have a nice cup of tea. I'd find myself dying a dozen times and screaming petulant, wholly irrational insults at the screen: "oh, come on! It's just a few fucking bullets! What kind of pussy are you? Get up!" If nothing else these constant deaths would have made a good video with the Benny Hill music playing over them. But then something cool will happen, and all is momentarily forgiven: an enemy sees me and runs up some stairs, so I track where he should be, aim at the wooden ceiling and spray it with gun fire. The recoil drags my cursor above my head until I hear an explosion, and the bad guy's body flies down the stairs and crashes into a wall. If you will insist on leaving explosive barrels in your bedroom, accidents will happen. Then another terrorist would jump out of a bin and empty a shotgun into my crotch...
Tea. Chillax. Breathe.
Checkpoint to chokepoint ratios appear sometimes misjudged. The spacing can be such that you'll have a lengthy easy bit to get through, then a chokepoint with a wave of enemies to dispatch, then you'll think things are all clear and be killed by someone dangling from the ceiling. Your team-mates, "Mr Is The Voice Actor Taking The Piss or What?" and "Some Clearly Not Too Charismatic Dude Whose Name Escapes Me" alleviate this a wee bit, being quite efficient terrorist killers in their own right. They also sometimes get stuck on scenery, forcing a reload from the last save to unstick them- it would be nice if that sort of thing didn't happen.
BISHOP: Jung, let's go. There's only two minutes left on the timer!
JUNG: I can't, Bishop. I can't go on.
BISHOP: Are you hit?
JUNG: My leg. My leg is caught on this door.
BISHOP: I see. Have you tried walking backwards?
JUNG: Dammit Bishop! What am I, a computer specialist or a walking expert?
BISHOP: Oh. Perhaps if I...
JUNG: Stop walking into me! I can't move!
BISHOP: Okay...what if I...
*BANG!*
JUNG: OW! What the hell?! Are you trying to push me along with bullets?
BISHOP: My normal approach is useless here.
Just like real special forces, I'll wager. Other times they'll stand out in the open and get a bit too cosy with machine-gun fire or shuffle about on the spot when I want them to throw a grenade at someone. It's times like this I need real people to order about!
What makes it worth playing as a single-player experience? R3V5 has a tangible "cool" factor. The over the shoulder gunplay, upside down rappelling and hushed whispers accompanying hand gestures all serve to make the player feel like a full-on killing machine. All it lacks is the Splinter Cell SWAT door roll, which would have some genuinely useful applications in R9V1. Apparently Sam isn't too keen on sharing his moves. I particularly enjoyed the Jingoistic special forces elitism the game instills in the player: there's a point where you come across a friendly SWAT team under fire. You kill the bad guys pinning them down and ask if there's a control room nearby- someone needs to save the day, after all. The SWAT lady replies "It's on the second floor, but my SWAT took a pounding when we tried to push to it." Ooh, matron. You feel like putting on a cocky smirk and saying "well, your SWAT team might have struggled, but we're here now- and in Rainbow Six... we play hardball." Then you put on a pair of sunglasses and stroll nonchalantly forward and get sliced to ribbons by machine-gun fire.
"That didn't work" you think. "I need some new sunglasses!" A lot of attention went into creating a persistent, customisable avatar for the player. Exp. points are awarded for killing terrorists, with the cause of death (close range shotgun blast, sneaky C4 explosion) adding to the tally for various stats. Every kill pushes the player a bit closer to unlocking a new sniper rifle or a fetching new scarf. There's piles of different guns and armour to unlock, even if I always do just go with the loudest and shiniest one respectively. Honestly, I was more focused on finding matching trousers and sunglasses. It's nice not to be a faceless, characterless avatar, and this level of personalisation goes a fair distance to making things more fun. I'd like to see the option of choosing more things, like posture, running and peeking animations, missing fingers- really go crazy with the customisation idea. All in all, what there is acts as a compelling motivation, and it encourages replay in a way which Gears or GRAW never really did for me. That could just be my Fenix prejudice manifesting itself, though.
A rent or a buy, then? For the ardently friendless single player, a rent. But the more I've written about the game, the more I'd like to try the multiplayer suite. Being as I'm going to urgently need Xbox Live come April 29th anyway, it couldn't hurt to join up with some friends and "give some SWAT a good pounding when we try to push to it." As the vicar said to the actress. Hell, I can always roleplay the AI and rotate on the spot and get stuck on doorways- they'll bloody love that online, you mark my words.
* And Tanqueray No 10 Gin. Yum!
**i.e. At all.