Tag: sandbox
Red Dead Redonkulous
by bacon on Jun.15, 2010, under RPG, TPS, Xbox 360
I can’t really put my finger on why, but I never got into Grand Theft Auto. I like mob movies, love sandbox games, tried most of the GTA games in the last 5-10 years and they just never grabbed me.
So for me, Red Dead Redemption was a bit of a risk. I might play it a bit and the lose interest just like with all the rest of its more modern ilk. Yet after a few hours I was legitimately hooked. The game is beautiful, vast, the characters deep, and gunfights abound. The combat system is great, though I still don’t have Expert targeting down just yet. There’s so much to do in Red Dead that it’s hard to get bored. Skin some bears, hunt some boars, fight a few duels, haul in a few bounties, all in a day’s work. Single player took to around 1.75-2 days play time. Not bad.
Multiplayer is better than I thought it would be, though worse in some ways too. Playing coop through gang hideouts is plenty fun, and the Outlaws to the End hasn’t even been released yet (plus it’s free DLC, gotta love that). On the down side, it’s a little too easy to get bullied by higher ranked players who just feel like constantly shooting you in the dome. Since the weapons get significantly better as you rank up, as opposed to MW2 where in general there’s a lot of parity, you can be held at the mercy of a guy that just lives to give you a hard time as he’s harder to kill with your cattleman’s revolver than you are with his high power pistol. I’ve blown a few hours being harassed in that way already. They can follow you if you go to a different Free Roam session too, so that kind of adds to it. The PvP modes don’t appeal to me much. Played some Gold Rush, thought it was okay. Maybe the experience there is better with a bigger crowd of friends.
All in all it’s a great experience. Well worth the current rental, likely to a buy in the not so distant future. Before Red Dead becomes too much of a time sink, I need to get into Alpha Protocol.
“Bender, being God isn’t easy.”
by bacon on Jan.12, 2009, under General Gaming
Having just been writing about Keflings, then watching the Futurama episode Godfellas, I started thinking about how I really want a new god game, or at least a more open-ended experience. Any word on Black and White 3? Gotta find a new (old) PC so I can fire up B&W or B&W2 and slap around my giant cow.
Actually, it wasn’t so much the animal cruelty that drew me in, but the relatively sandboxy nature of B&W that was so amusing. So take a break from smiting villagers and teach your creature to plant trees and stop pooping on the villagers, or alternatively set the trees on fire and fling poo at the villagers. There’s something sort of nice about making some small adjustments and letting the world do its thing for a while, coming back, tweaking again, then hurling some lightning. I’m guessing that there won’t be a B&W3 any time soon, if ever, simply because it wasn’t as commercially viable as some of the more open first person titles.
And here’s hoping that Mass Effect 2 will end up being more of an open environment. While ME’s story and gameplay were solid, as much as you could ignore the main story and play some optional missions, it was still largely on-rails. Perhaps that’s the wrong complaint. The failing of Mass Effect in terms of openness is that you’re a cop, and you shoot people, that’s just what you do. So while there are a ton of side-quests, you’re still somewhat limited to shooting people, just different people. So it’s that the character isn’t open, not the environment. You’re never going to become an arms dealer, or a massage therapist, though there was that one pseudo sex scene where I wasn’t so sure.
It’s terribly limiting that I’ve never been a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series. From the little I played GTA IV, it really did have that air of “I can do anything in here, can’t I?” Never did get a look at GTA IV’s multiplayer. The impression I got was that it was just going to be objective based shorts, while I’d have been hoping for more of a persistent online experience. Probably should bite the bullet and track that down, see what I’m missing.
