DavidGoodman.Net

First off, GTA IV is… well, it’s bloody amazing. Filmic in its visual quality, hilarious as usual and the gameplay is a completely different beast to the older games. Superb. I’m maybe five or six missions in and loving it. A more detailed impressions post to follow, once I’ve had a good explore. Oh, and once I’ve given multiplayer a try.

In other news, some spamming fucker hacked my old blog, Happy Dave, so I’ve had to nuke it, and my photoblog along with it. Four years of posts gone. Seriously kids, keep those Wordpress installs up to date, even for blogs you don’t work on actively anymore. In a way I’m sort of glad - starting this new site on the main davidgoodman.net domain was meant to be a clean break, and now it really is - all gaming (and the odd bit of politics) all the time. Plus I’ve saved the pieces of writing I’m really proud of from Happy Dave over there in the essays section. Still, very annoying. I spent a lot of time building the 200-odd posts there. I think they’ll still be available in the database, if they haven’t been overwritten with spam. One day when it’s not nearly midnight I’ll have a go at recovering them on a vanilla Wordpress install.

Well, when I say here, I mean at home. Amazon has come up trumps and delivered my game on release day - unfortunately it arrived after I left for work, so I’ve yet to give it a go. Just a tiiiiny bit excited about this one.

I’m a big GTA fan. The series was one of the first that non-gaming friends of mine quite enjoyed watching me play, and I spent hours enjoying the at-the-time unheard of freedom that GTA III gave you. The reviews are glowing, and the gameplay videos are looking amazing. The GameTrailers.com review seems to be the best summary I’ve seen so far.

A first impressions post will be up later today, if I can tear myself away.

It’s been a few weeks since the new ‘Variety Pack’ maps were released for Call of Duty 4 on the 360, so the time is ripe to take a quick look at these maps, what makes them tick, and, most importantly, how they play. First up is Creek, a brand-new map set in the Former Soviet Republic of the Week that the SAS campaign from the single-player campaign has as its playground.

What that means is lots of burnt out Soviet APCs, ruined farmhouses and foliage, as well as the ever-present rasp of either a grizzled SAS chappy or Boris, your friendly Spetsnatz announcer. Nothing quite like losing to be told you ‘just got your arse kicked’. Fantastic, especially when it drowns out the 12 year old Ritalin addicts who just slaughtered you.

Like Killhouse, this map is not based on any particular location from the single-player campaign (by contrast, Chinatown is a re-skinned Carentan multiplayer map from COD2, and Broadcast is lifted pretty much straight out of the main game). While this makes for a tougher learning curve, it also makes it a uniquely balanced and fun map to play.

With a large, dominating ridge in the centre, a gentle slope up to a small village at one end and a cluster of farm buildings at the other, you would think that this game would turn into a sniper camp-fest, with the spawn-die-spawn-die gameplay that makes so many user-created maps unplayable. In reality, the map only becomes sniper-driven with very small teams, four or less on each side, when the sheer size of this enormous map gives snipers time to get a good position and rain lead death on anyone stupid enough to poke their head above the ridge line. Even then, it’s tough to find a really good sniping position - experienced players will nip quickly through the connecting cave system or lob a smoke grenade to cover movement, and you’ll quickly find a knife in your ribs or a Desert Eagle round between the eyes.

With larger teams, the map quickly becomes brutal, but definitely not sniper driven. A really good sniper who changes positions frequently might be able to rack up quite a few kills, especially if there’s a high number of newbies who don’t know all the nooks and crannies, but heavy machine guns win out for sheer weight of fire in the open places, and shotguns, grenades and assault rifles will carry the day in the claustrophobic caves, roof spaces and ravines. The claymore is your friend, and ‘Noob Tubers’ will find that the old M203 will work nicely when someone skylines themself on the ridge.

All in all, a very fun map that lends itself to strategic games, especially Sabotage and Search/Destroy. Do a few objective games to learn it, then throw yourself into some big Team Deathmatch games.

I’ll start right out by saying that I’m a big military shooter fan. I’ve played a heck of a lot of them over the years, starting right back at Operation Wolf on the Atari ST. I love the settings, the story, the action, all of it. In fact, I’ll be doing a series shortly - Shooters I have known.

The Call of Duty series has nearly always been a safe bet from the first installment, although it has flipped between developers Infinity Ward and a number of others including Treyarch and Grey Matter. Call of Duty 1 and 2 were Infinity Ward Games, and received markedly better reviews and player plaudits, so it was a smart move on the publisher Activision’s part to give the tricky fourth game to a safe pair of hands. Infinity Ward have, in short, utterly excelled themselves.

CoD 4 has been out for quite a while now, and has become game du jour on xBox Live, overtaking even Halo 3 in the passions of teabagging multiplayers everywhere. It’s the multiplayer game that I’ve played the most of, and I’ll be doing some map reviews of the new downloadable content over the next couple of weeks, but today I’m going to take a look at the single-player campaign.

At first glance, the decision to abandon the WWII setting that made the CoD series what it was in the first place appears to be pretty much a gamble, but in fact it’s quite the opposite. What would have been a gamble is to assume that fans of the series would happily shell out a couple more twenties for anything that wasn’t some kind of departure from the mileau of bombed-out Europe, the thunk of bolt-action rifles and screams of ‘Achtung, Amerikaner!’. In truth, the land campaigns of WWII have been heavily played out in FPS-land, and the genre was crying out for something new.

It’s tough to set a good ol’ dust-up in a modern setting without being crass (like recent whoop-fest Army of Two), unlikely (looking at you Splinter Cell series) or just dull (*cough*Full Spectrum Warrior*cough*). But these guys have done it, and big-time. From the ‘pre-credits’ attack on a cargo ship to the incredibly atmospheric interactive cutscene that opens the game, this feels like the start of a bloody good military film, and not any old Steven Seagal nonsense either. Think Bravo Two Zero crossed with Jarhead, but more the action bits rather than the sitting around.

From the start you’re thrown into a series of missions with a fairly forgiving learning curve, teaching you the basics as you knife, grenade and snipe your way to more and more complex tasks. There’s no hand-holding or stop-the-action puzzle-solving like you might find in the Half Life series - generally someone barks an order at you and you’ve got a few seconds to shift your arse and get it done. Huge visual setpieces abound, like the sprint across a bridge past burned-out tanks, rescuing downed helicopter pilots, or the vaguely unsettling experience of flying in an AC-130 gunship, firing a weapon through a TV monitor - playing a game about a war where the war itself is like a game. Head spinning stuff. And all accompanied by splendidly mustachioed SAS chaps with dry-as-a-bone humour and shouty US Marines with a whole lot of hoo-rah.

Gameplay is fast, fluid and fun, although many people have come across the infamous TARDIS houses that will spit out as many screaming fanatics or Russki baddies as you can shoot until you twig that they won’t stop until you take them. In some cases this makes the game an exciting series of dashes and frenetic grenade and knife room clearances, but in others it can result in a string of frustrating deaths, especially at the higher difficulty levels.

All in all, it’s the most polished FPS I’ve ever seen, and has been my game of choice since I bought it. It gets whacked in the disc tray any time I get bored in Mass Effect or come across another physics puzzle in Half Life 2, and it never fails to disappoint. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be looking at some of the new multiplayer maps in detail, but til then, keep blasting, and add me on Live if you fancy a match.

Michael Zenke at Gamers with Jobs has an interesting post about games writing, the basic point of which is that gaming needs a ‘Battlestar Galactica’, where he uses Galactica as a byword for a mould-breaking game with crossover appeal.

I think attempts to broaden the appeal of gaming through story will likely run up against the same obstacles encountered when broader society looks at genre fiction, especially fantastical genres like SF, fantasy and horror. In the wider public imagination, books, films and tv shows set in these genres couldn’t possibly contain depth or real human emotion - it’s all just wizards, pixies, rayguns and aliens, right? Just like Grand Theft Auto, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty couldn’t contain anything truly emotive. Right? Right?

My wife was reluctant to watch Battlestar, but is now a hardcore convert. But she only took the chance on it at my (frequent) urging. I’m going to try a similar thing with Portal, a triumph of storytelling linked to a fantastic gameplay device that makes playing it both fun and emotionally engaging. I’m already halfway there because she loves to watch me play Bioshock - the setting, implicit narratives and dialogue fascinate her.

I’m not sure what the broader point in the GWJ article is about casual gaming - how much emotional depth and storyline can you really get in a Flash game? Most of the time, the ’storylines’ in these games remind me of the incredibly simplistic writing and ideas of old-school Commodore 64 and NES games - they’re there as MacGuffins, simply to advance the action, and don’t mean anything in and of themselves.

I remember the first time I got emotionally invested in a game - it was playing the original PC version of Dune, when I got to the kiss scene with the female lead character. As an archetypal geeky kid, the fact that I had been successful with a girl in this 16-bit, 256 colour 2-D sunset kiss scene came as an unexpected and quite powerful punch in the gut (a good one). I became more open to narrative as an attraction in itself, not just a framework to hang the game off, coincidentally around the time that point n’ click adventures were just getting popular (Grim Fandango took this to whole new levels). I think the key is not necessarily web-based or simplistic casual games, but simply a low barrier to entry for novice players. Someone new to RPGs or FPSs (or RTS or any other type of complex game) can often be overwhelmed by the numerous controls, bad guys coming from all directions or, in some more complex games, lack of a clear initial goal.

Perhaps the answer is some kind of ‘newbie’ mode, something that goes beyond the near-universal ‘Easy’ setting towards real (turn-offable) hand-holding. When we combine that with good writing (and here I agree with Michael Zenke, games writing needs to take a similar approach to pushing storytelling boundaries and more directly reflecting the real world if it is to have a broader appeal), we may well get a ‘Battlestar Galactica’ of gaming - a game that you can discuss down the office, at the pub or with your Auntie.