L.A. Noire Review

So back when L.A. Noire came out, I was a little reluctant on purchasing it for reasons I don't exactly know, all I know is that I really wanted to play it and I had just finished Grand Theft Auto IV, so it was a great time to make the transition from GTA to L.A. Noire. So heading down to GameStop the day it was released, I let the store manager talk me into buying it with the incentives of the free DLC since it was a pre-ordered game that wasn't going to be picked up.

Taking the game home, I put it in and really enjoyed what I was seeing; the game was very familiar yet very fresh and it was a nice followup to the Grand Theft Auto series. The game had my attention for a little while, but I had stopped playing rather quickly due to the fact that I was getting annoyed with getting the interrogations incorrect, so I put the game down and moved on to other projects.

Much like I do with all of the games that I buy and ignore for a while, I eventually get back to them and learn to appreciate them the way I should have the first way through.

L.A. Noire is a Crime Fiction video game that is set in Los Angeles in 1947, the game is based upon being a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and the player is assumed to solve a range of cases throughout the game, each of which will promote his recognition throughout the city and the department which will permit him to receive a higher promotion each time. Players are expected to investigate crime scenes in which many clues are present and to use them to follow up on leads given to the player at certain times during the case. Interrogation of suspects is also required and the players success rate in these certain activities will impact how the cases and stories are revealed through the game and at the end of it.

The game starts you off as generic grunt cop, Cole Phelps, in downtown Los Angeles getting called in to investigate a crime scene of a recent shooting, using your character's natural intuition it is up to the player to find the clues necessary to make an arrest, and once done so the game truly gets under way. The game follows the player to increase in rank as certain cases are completed, allowing for the main story of Phelps' career to unfold.

The interrogation scenes are great for two reasons, it makes the user go back to the gaming roots of a mystery game and it allows Team Bundi to show off their fantastic facial animations with characters. Never before have I seen facial animations that were so much in depth, that delivered such a believable sense of realness that revolved around body language.

The controls seemed to flow pretty well, what annoyed me at first was the fact that I couldn't run without holding the R2 button, but this adds to the realism of the game due to the fact that players shouldn't exactly be running everywhere, but it can drag on a little walking that slow on occasions. Gunfights seem just as awkward as they did in Grand Theft Auto, and guns in general seem fairly limited, but since I am just a police officer not Niko Belic.

Los Angeles looks absolutely beautiful, it is a fantastic copy of the city in the 1950s and gives that real life charm that the city still contains. Driving through the streets of Los Angeles is extremely reminiscent of the real Los Angeles and makes me miss the city and has me wanting to make a weekend trip. Team Bundi really went out of their way to bring about the accuracy of the 1950's LA, even so much to give the Los Angeles Archives credit in the game during the credit scroll. Without the fantastic city for the player to wander in, the game definitely would have lost a lot of its character.

Mercenaries 2 "Review"

So attempting to follow up on the game Mercenaries 2: World In Flames, I load up the game and decide to give it another go since it had frozen up on me last time I attempted to play it, and what would you know.... it froze up again on me. So sitting here staring at the “Installing Game Data” screen I wonder if it's even worth trying to give this game another go.

After waiting a long ass time for this game to install, I finally make my way back to the Mercenaries 2 Title Screen and it is asking me to press Start.... so here we go.

While attempting to click Options, the “connecting to EA servers” text has stopped scrolling and has frozen once again, making this game unplayable to the extent of my knowledge. This really irritates me due to the fact that the game has never been opened prior to me purchasing it, and has only been taken out of the case twice to be placed into the Playstation 3 Console. I will attempt to contact EA and see what can be done about this, but we all ready know that nothing will.

Although Mercenaries 2 wouldn't work, this leaves me with a hole in my plans on video game reviews. I would really like to get a Playstation 3 review in since I have yet to do one, so this leaves me with the other PS3 games that I have at hand. Assuming that no one will care to hear about baseball since the game was released in February, I believe that I will give LA Noire another go starting from the beginning so that I can kill two birds with one stone.

One again I appologise that Mercenaries 2 won't work, but there isn't much I can exactly do about this without cheating GameStop out of a “used” copy, and even then who knows if it will work since it could have been an installation error from my first attempted play.

Mercenaries 2: World In Flames
GRADE
F[uck this game]

Frys Electronics Purchase - Mercenaries 2: World In Flames

Now it’s been a little while since I did a video game review, but I’ve had this one sitting on my shelf for a few months now and it’s been relatively untouched since its purchase. The reason I own this game isn’t because it was something that I exactly wanted, but taking a trip through Frys Electronics can get you to buy stuff you don’t exactly need. My trip through Frys consisted of the desire to purchase Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune for the PS3, and bundled with it at the same retail price was Mercenaries 2 and Tomb Raider: Underworld, so 3 games for the price of 1 was definitely up my alley.

A few weeks ago, I attempted to play this game, but after putting the disc in and letting the PS3 load it all up, the game decided to freeze on me and I had no desire to restart my PS3, and I went onto playing something else. Although I have heard from many people that this game is beyond awful, I just can't help but check it out and see for myself, I often appreciate aspects of games that others find irritating or just plain bad, but poor words spoken from others won't hinder my playthrough of it. I believe that it may be time to give this game another go because I believe that all games require justice.

If you have played Mercenaries 2, go ahead and post some comments on what you think of the game, I'd love to hear the opinions of my readers prior to my own playthrough.

*Post-Play* Crackdown 2

After a recommendation on a previous blog post, I decided to pick up Crackdown 2 and give it a go.  When I first started playing, I noticed immediately that the game took place in the exact same city and all of the game models were the same, not a huge problem though.

The plot was just beyond weird, it started out with you as an Agent going through the city and then you're introduced to the Mutants.  Basically, the mutants have taken over the city and rule it by night, the only way to destroy the mutants are to visit different stations to enable them, and when 3 of them connect you are to protect a beacon until it is fully charged and releases its power destroying all mutants in that district.  Mutants were also in the first game, but they are in the game for like half of a second, but they aren't in any strong numbers.


The occurrence of the mutant is basically being blamed on a terrorist organization called "Cell," and these people are basically just dudes with guns in the game, you don't really learn much about them at all.  During the entire game, you really don't learn much at all about them, which was kind of lame since I kept doing the same shit over and over again.  Near the end of the game, their female leader Katalina Thorn attempted to contact me on the headset, and said that I was a pawn or some shit, but I don't even fuckin know who was bad or not.  I assume the game wanted the Agency to be bad and Cell be good, but since the game also tried to force a plot twist on you it was impossible to really tell good from bad.  Basically, Cell released the virus which turned a shit ton of people into Mutants, and the Agency wanted to kill the mutants and take back the city, which sounds worse to you?



Agility
Just as before, this traits is what causes you to run faster and jump higher.  This trait has basically zero change from the first game, there are still the 500 agility orbs and rooftop races that help increase this skill.  The one addition to this, is that once you reach level 5 you can do a "Wing Suit" which is basically a suit that allows you to glide through the air, there are certain rings that you can maneuver through, but I honestly didn't care enough to even try to learn those controls.  As before, this is definitely the easiest trait to level up, since you're constantly jumping around on top of buildings and suck, it's impossible to avoid the green glowing orbs.

Driving
In my opinion, this is the skill that they increased the most when it came to the sequel.  Just as before, you can drive and steal cards just like in any GTA game, but I hardly drove cars in the 1st game because it was basically useless.  In this game however, any time you die you are spawned at a destination of choice with a vehicle, unlike the 1st game where you could only get Agency vehicles from the Agency Tower.  Driving was much easier and people were also a hell of a lot easier to hit.  You couldn't believe how frustrating it was to try to run someone over in the 1st game, it was impossible to get that skill up to its peak.  This game at least lets you have fun with the vehicles, and you will most likely be driving around a lot more than you did in the first game.

Explosives
Grenades in this game wasn't exactly the most fun thing to do.  In the previous game, I was using them all of the god damned time, but this time your skill doesn't affect the blast radius or strength of a grenade, all leveling up does is unlock other grenades.  Now let me tell you, the grenades that you unlock really aren't that great, the best grenades there are, are the ones that you pick up off of fallen enemies and bring them back to a drop zone to unlock them.

Fighting
This trait just wasn't as fun in the sequel, maybe because they really didn't do anything to improve on it.  The moves are all the same, the build up is all the same, zero improvement.  The stronger you get, the faster people die when you kick them and you can pick up and throw larger objects.

Guns
The improvement on the guns skill isn't exactly an "improvement".  Just as the grenades, your skill has no affect on your aim or strength of the weapon, all it does is unlock other weapons when you get to a drop zone.  The weapons were pretty cool though, if you play it I recommend trying out the Harpoon Gun, that thing was awesome.



If you're a fan of the 1st game, you might as well pick this up to at least give it a try, but don't expect a fantastic game that will blow your mind like the first one.

GameStop Purchase - NHL 12 and Crackdown 2

Yesterday after another trip to GameStop, I rewarded myself with two gifts <3

What made mt go to the store to begin with was the fact that I had a reservation for NHL 12, which I am really excited for. My friends all played NHL 11 last season, so after they kept bugging me I finally dropped the coin to get the game, so after about 10 minutes on Craigslist, I found myself a copy and began my obsession. Prior to last year, I hadn't played a Hockey Game since Blades of Steel on the Nintendo, and I was extremely happy with the results of NHL 11, so I was able to look past all of the glitches. After playing 2-3 games of NHL 12, I can say that it's still an extremely fun game, a few tweeks here and there but it's generally the same game. One odd thing I saw was that you have the option to make a female hockey player, problem is she has a male body but a female head, so whatever.

My other gift to myself was purchasing a copy of Crackdown 2. The first Crackdown was an extremely fun game, as you can read in my previous reviews, but this game just doesn't have the same feel to it. Sure it's a sequel and they can't re-hash the same game, but it just doesn't exactly have the same feel to it. Currently I'm a few hours into it, and they've definitely made some improvements but I feel they regressed in some places. Remember in Crackdown when there would be a random mutant? Well there's 8 million in this game, basically a terror organization releases a virus that causes everyone to turn into a mutant..... guess their goal here was to zombify the game which seems to be the norm lately.

*Post-Play* Crackdown

As posted in my previous blog, I noticed this game on a recent trip down to GameStop and thought I'd pick it up.  Originally I played this at a friend's house long, long ago, and enjoyed it quite a bit; never followed up on it since I never had an XBOX until years later. When I first started playing, I noticed how heavily the game borrowed from elements of Grand Theft Auto such as the targeting system, the sandbox like cities, and the ability to commandeer vehicles through theft or picking them up from a dealer. Turns out that my suspection of the game borrowing from GTA was true afterall, being that Realtime Worlds' founder, David Jones, was also the creator of the Grand Theft Auto series.

When you start up the game, the menu just wreaks of old XBOX, but don't let the menu fool you... the game itself is fantastic. The basic story of the game is that there are 4 different islands, 3 of which are over-run by their respective gangs: Los Muertos, The Volk, and Shai-Gen Corporation. Your job is to wipe out all 21 of their gang leaders, then wipe out the top leader in order to clean up each faction of the city.

There are different online options for the game, such as your friends or even random people can join in your game at any time (with your approval) and help you fight off the gangs or help you do missions; even simultaneously.


The game, you basically play as a super soldier in the future and have 5 traits that you can level up and "evolve" as the game progresses.

Agility
This trait helps you run and jump, this trait is enhanced by finding upwards of 500 Agility Orbs hidden on rooftops or by doing rooftop races. This is by far one of the easiest traits to level up due to the fact that you're running and jumping around constantly, and it's way too hard to avoid glowing orbs.... hah!

Driving
Driving is a trait that I guarantee you won't level up to max unless you aim for it. You can drive and steal cars just like in any Grand Theft Auto game, but when you're given super speed and super jumping, along with the ability to warp to ammo stations, it is extremely unlikely that cars will be an asset to you. The only way to level this up is to do tricks in your car and to run over gang members, but still pretty useless IMO.

Explosives
Fuck yes. You have Grenades of several different types, depending on what you stock up on. The more enemies you kill with grenades the higher your skill increases, it's so fun to blow shit up.

Fighting
You kick someone, they fuckin FLY. The more you kick, the higher this goes....fuck yeah. The stronger you get, the bigger object you can pick up too. You start out only being able to pick up people, but the higher level you get your fighting skill you can eventually pick up cars or even larger objects to throw at your enemies.

Guns
Self explanatory. Aim, shoot, die. Level up. The only difference with levels seems to be the accuracy and how long it takes to reload, but other than that it's just run and gun.



To my surprise, the game does end with quite a twist that I wasn't expecting what so ever. So this makes me want to play Crackdown 2 even more to see what exactly the story is about.

GameStop Purchase - Crackdown

CRACKDOWN!!!!

Just picked it up, never really played this before other than an hour or so at a friends house back when the game was pretty new......  Going through GameStop I saw that it was like $6, so I figured, "Fuck yes, why not?"

So anyways, It is 7am and I have class at 1pm, problem is... I've been up all night playing this, fuckin awesome!  I really like it so far, I'll have to give more insight when I'm done with the game.

Until then.....

BUY IT!

*Post-Play* Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

CONS:

So with The Force Unleashed completed, I'd have to say that I was sorely disappointed with the game. Now back when this game came out, I got two copies for free because I worked some media events with LucasFilm but I was only given the version for the Wii and the Playstation 2. The PS2 game went to Wal-Mart, and the Wii game was the one I kept, and I had a lot of fun with it. It wasn't a great game, but it was at least playable and enjoyable, and probably one of the better 3rd party games for the Wii that you're going to find. A little over a week ago, I was walking through my local GameStop and saw the XBOX 360 version of this game laying in their used selection for only $10, I decided that I'd pick it up and give it a go since I had never played it outside of 5 minutes at a friend's house. When I finally put the game in, I was a bit disappointed with it overall....

The first thing that got to me was the loading times, holy shit it took forever to get anything going. Even from going to your Options it took at least 5 seconds to load and get back to the main page, and I don't even know why... the main page shouldn't have to load what so ever when entering it from a subfolder. In game loading is also a disaster when going from mission to mission, it takes much longer than you'd prefer; while running from area to area, you actually get to see the buildings and terrain growing around you, awful.

Now the controls.... whooooo doggy, fuck them. The controls are so clunky, that you will kill yourself by slipping off ledges and cliffs more than any enemy would. Often I am attacking a stormtrooper or something and my combo of repeatedly pressing the X-Button makes me take steps forward which launches him off of a ledge, which means you start the fuck over. The controls are also quite unresponsive, in the middle of a battle you'll be trying to target onto someone but can't, and if you target onto something you'll often grab onto some rock or boulder. Pressing your Force Attack buttons like lightning often won't work unless your character is in zero motion, same with the enemy you're attacking.

The combos are also an awful part of the control scheme, there are about 20 different combos that you have to memorize, but they're not easy.... often it's like "x,x,x,b" but then you get to some complicated ones like "x,x,x,x,LB(a+y)"...srsly....wtf is that. I honestly don't have the patience to figure some of these combos out, so I just unlock them for the shit of it because I have the points, so whatever; never used 'em.

The level designs are also a flaw, with a jumping/platforming game like this, you'd think there would be a shit-ton of things to land on...right? Well no... instead you just slip off something if the game doesn't want you to land on it. The level designs are way too linear, really doesn't give you much room to explore; other than to go find Jedi Holocrons to give you more force points or lightsaber crystals. Often times stormtroopers will get stuck in the layout, you'll think you cleaned an area but you will still hear "ptew...ptew....." but can't find the motherfucker, so you can't just leave him there.



PROS:

What was pretty cool was the fact that you could customize your character based upon lightsaber colour and outfit. When it came to the lightsaber colour, you could get "compressed, regular, or unstable" in any certain colour. Difference? Fuck if I know, I didn't see anything different about them, and I really don't care to google it. The outfits were pretty neat, about 14 or so in the game, but what sucked about them was that you couldn't change it during a level or else you'd go back to your last save point.

The alternate endings were pretty neat, the only choice you had at the end was to either attack the Emporer or attack Vader, one way is good the other is bad if that makes any sense.

GTA 4 - The Ballad of Gay Tony

With The Ballad of Gay Tony completed, I have now completed the entire GTA 4 series.  With Gay Tony, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect based on the title, and I didn't do any research into the game before I played it.  When I started, I felt like the game took one step back and two steps forward.

I enjoyed the fact that this game expanded the city and interactions with the other characters, my favourite new part of the game were the inclusion of many new weapons to purchase.  I loved all of the new guns, in fact I didn't use any guns from the vanilla GTA or from any of the gun vendors; I loved the sticky bombs, they were much easier to use and much more dependable than those stupid pipe bombs, same with grenades.

I didn't enjoy some aspects which I loved a lot in The Lost and the Damned however, I only did one gang war and it wasn't even that fun, so I never did any of the others.  The Base Jumping was too hard to land as perfect as the game was expecting, so I gave up on those near immediately.  The other part about the game I disliked was that I couldn't get two achievements because I was expected to get my "Completed Percentage" up to 80% for each mission, then 100%.  Now it's not easy to get yourself past 30% with some of those, you' can be getting attacked by 50 dudes and they want 20 headshots, 70% accuracy, 10% damage to your car, and only taking 15% damage yourself; do they think we're Rambo here?

Most of the missions were also extremely predictable, when starting a mission you can automatically assume that you have to fly a helicopter at some point, and when in the helicopter you know that you are assumed to either chase someone, land it (lol fuckin impossible), or jump out of it with a parachute... good times.   The missions didn't even seem that unique, to me it just seemed like we were tying loose ends with the main GTA 4 story.

The game is still recommended, but I would suggest playing this one before you play The Lost and the Damned.  To me, that game was more enjoyable and it really made you love all of the characters you interacted with.  About the only new character I liked in The Ballad of Gay Tony was Yusef, the Saudi Arabian rich dude, he was funny as shit and always made the dialogue awesome when he was in a scene.

GTA 4 - The Lost and the Damned

I just finished the first DLC for Grand Theft Auto IV, The Lost and the Damned, and wow.... what a great game.  For years, we've had to deal with the same old GTA with the same shit different game, but this DLC here took a style of gang and really did a great job with it.  Biker gangs have always been pretty badass, and I loved the idea of being able to play as one in a Grand Theft Auto.

The gameplay, as you'd guess it the exact same as the original GTA4, but the subtle changes are what I really liked the best.  Such as if you lost your bike, you'd just call up one of your buddies and they'd bring you a new one, seems a lot more realistic than just grabbing the nearest car you see and speeding off.  Also if you didn't have enough ammo for a certain gun, just call up another buddy and your gang supplies them for you!  It seemed like it really revolved around the biker's brotherhood which I liked a lot, in traditional GTA games you just don't seem to have a connection to other NPCs, but this one did a great job with it.

Now time to play The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues Review

Just completed Old World Blues, and I'd have to say that I'm pretty disappointed.  Now with these games, it all depends on your exploration that gets the most out of them, but when you're being attacked by enemies who have 100% accuracy and are a bitch to kill, it can get fairly unproductive to stray from the path as one would usually do.

The lack of ammunition was annoying too, sure they give you a ton of different guns and crap, but I'm the kind of person who prefers firearms and doesn't use energy weapons what so ever; I was pretty lost with them after my ammunition ran out.

If you're a Fallout: New Vegas completest, you might as well go for the DLC and download it, but if you're a casual gamer I'd recommend skipping this DLC because it left me feeling like I had wasted $10.

Grand Theft Auto IV Review

Grand Theft Auto IV

Completed.

Now that GTA4 is completed, I thought I'd little review on what I thought about the game.  Now I know that it's a bit old, but I was a bit slow to jump on the XBOX 360 bandwagon, so I'm a little behind on some of my gaming.

I've been playing GTA ever since the Playstation 2, but never having the console for myself it was hard for me to really play the game.  However, when I did some commercial and stage work for Sony they took care of me buy giving me a PSP and a half-dozen games along with a large sum of cash, so I ended up purchasing Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, both of which were great games in my opinion.

I'm not going to go into the story of the game, if you've played it you know it all ready so I'll save my breath. When I first put in the game I felt a little disorientated due to the many changes they did to the game, driving was VERY strange at first but the uncomfortable feeling went away soon after a few hours of driving, but luckily the game added difficulty gradually so I wasn't expected to do any crazy driving until later in the game when car chases and racing were required.  The amount of guns were limited in my opinion, and I was sort of hoping for a better way to categorize them, it felt a little clunky to change weapons mid-battle.

Not even midway through the game I noticed the flaw that irritated me most, which was the radio.  It's really fun to listen to the radio sometimes, but when it comes to having to hear a conversation on-top of it, it is almost impossible.  Such as when you receive a phone call, it's impossible to turn off the radio while the cell phone is displayed, it would be great to have the ability to shut off the radio during a phone call but that isn't a possibility.  The other flaw about the radio I discovered was the fact that you have to turn it off by holding the D-Pad Left or Right for a few seconds.  Now I'm sure that it doesn't sound that bad at first, but when you're trying to chase someone down you want that shit off quick, so having to take your thumb off of the L-Stick which steers your vehicle to get rid of the radio, it is extremely annoying; not sure why they didn't use the Back Button for this function.

All in all, I really enjoyed the game, it was a fun experience and I really liked the ability to interact with friends and having the ability to control your relationships with people.  The characters in the game were great, even those I didn't think I'd like at first such as Dwayne or Packie, but GTA always has a way to make characters unique in their own ways to make them fun to be around.

I have yet to play the two DLCs in order to complete the entire game, but The Lost and the Damned is my next game to play.

GameStop Purchase - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

All right, so I finally bought The Force Unleashed for the XBOX 360.  I actually owned two copies of this game once before, one on the PS2 which I sold back to Wal-Mart and one copy on the Wii which I still own.  From my understanding, three versions of this game exist, one being the 360/PS3 version and the other being the PS2/Wii verson, along with the Nintendo DS game.

I got the copies of the games originally for free as a gift from Lucasfilm for doing some commercial or stage show for them, I forget which, but that was prior to me ever owning the PS3 or the Wii, so my two free copies (why 2, I don't know) ended up to be the crappiest ones, guaranteed.

Now that I finally spent some hard earned $9.72 on the game, it is now time for me to give this game a shot.  The Wii version was all right for what it was, and it actually has different levels; guess we have to buy two versions of the game to get the full stories.  I will chime in again after I get started and complete the game, and give my insight on how it was.

New California Republic Veteran Ranger Costume

So I haven't built a costume in about 4 years, so I decided to bust something new out for San Diego Comic Con 2011.  It took me about 3 months of straight construction, but I completed my NCR Veteran Ranger outfit from Fallout: New Vegas.

The helmet was scratch built out of styrene and sintra, the armour was made out of high impact foam which was formed to my body and adhered to a foam vest.  The pants are just straight jeans with a boot cut, and the boots are some flat toed Wranglers.  The belts and duster were all home made using leather and duck cloth, and the flag was constructed by taking two California Flags and connecting them by chopping one up.