Burnout Paradise

In Burnout Paradise, you can end an event at any time by stopping your car. Did you know that? I didn’t bloody know that. Possibly it’s in the manual, but that’s not the point: the point is that I played Burnout Paradise for twelve hours without ever discovering what happens when a car’s wheels stop spinning. This, brilliantly, is a game specifically designed to inundate you with a constant flow of vehicle-based insanity, and I never had time to stop.

Burnout Paradise is essentially all the driving from GTA, ripped out, made faster and more vicious, and then plonked into a sprawling utopia of ramps and things to break. You have five events, which can be activated at every crossroads in the city: straight up races to a specific point on the map; Road Rage, in which you smash people up; Marked Man, where you avoid people smashing you up; jumping off ramps and doing handbrake turns in Stunt Run; and car-specific time trials called, for some reason, Burning Routes. None of the events have prescribed routes, which is great if you know all kinds of fancy shortcuts – and when you skip out a huge loop of road by jumping off the roof of a building and over a ravine it is pretty awesome – but terrible if you don’t know the layout of Paradise City initmately. I ended up spending most of my time peering intently at the minimap, until I inevitably ploughed into a Gillette-branded van coming in the opposite direction. This triggers an unavoidable, unskippable, occasionally impressive but all-too-often boring crash sequence where you get to watch your car tumble about a bit trailing shrapnel, with all of your competitors flying past in the background. This, believe it or not, is kind of annoying.

The events are only important in that they let you unlock more cars, though. The real pleasure of Burnout Paradise is racing at breakneck speed around a huge, beautiful city for no particular reason: doing barrel rolls off ramps at the beach, jumping off the roof of a carpark to smash into a bright red billboard, seeing how spectacular a crash you can create. It’s fortunate, then, that the multiplayer lets you do just that. Paradise City is a playground, and therefore goes from entertaining to utterly intoxicating in the always-pleasurable company of random strangers from the Internet. All the events from the single-player are present and correct, save Burning Route,  but better still is the inclusion of hundreds of challenges, tailored to the number of players you have, ranging from ‘Use your boost’ to ‘Jump off the broken bridge and crash into each other in mid air’. It’s entertaining simply by virtue of how completely pointless is it is: there are, probably, achievements tied to the challenges, but there is no in-game gain from doing any of them. Awesomely, it’s just a laugh.

San Andreas has long been my go-to game of choice for when I just need to cruise around listening to music; and while Paradise City never feels as well realised or alive as Rockstar’s masterful creation, it has managed to usurp it for a single simple reason: enthusiasm. This is a game that is in love with driving ludicrously quickly and crashing into things, and even someone as utterly apathetic towards cars and driving games as I can’t help but be caught up by the sheer breathless excitement of it all. Smash this! Beat this time! Take this guy down! Jump off this! Your friend’s just come online! I have now played Burnout Paradise for much longer than that first twelve hours, and not once have I thought: what shall I do now? You start your engine, the game gathers momentum, and then you never stop. The forced-slow-motion crash mechanic is sometimes completely infuriating, but at the very least it dumps you straight back onto the road with your engine running, rather than making you spend ten minutes trying to extricate yourself from a bollard; being forced to stop would be much, much worse. Burnout Paradise isn’t perfect, but it’s brightly coloured and fast and constantly trying to please, and it’s hard not to find its giddy enthusiasm infectious.

(this has been an attempt at writing a slightly more ‘reviewy’ review. Let me know what you think)

Fallout 3 – Operation: Anchorage

Before you read my long, directionless thoughts about this first piece of DLC for the actually rather amazing Fallout 3, I need you to remember one thing: £8.50. Have that fixed in your mind the entire time you’re reading this. You could also try to remember “Five Reinstalls”, but anyone who cares about the overpowering awfulness of Games For Windows Live can probably imagine the hell I went through to slot three hundred megs of content into a highly moddable RPG anyway.

£8.50. Okay? Let’s go, then.

Operation: Anchorage, brilliantly referred to as Operation: Anchorage! in-game, is a great big lump of barely-downloadable content that is crowbarred somewhat brutally into the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3: the Brotherhood Outcasts want to open a door; the only way to open the door is, for some reason, to participate in a training simulation of the Chinese invasion of Alaska; the only people that can interface with the simulation are those with a PipBoy clamped permanently onto their forearm; the only one of those not cowering underground behind several feet of steel is, well, you. Which is fine, really, because the second best thing about Operation: Anchorage is the fact that there’s a whole bunch of new textures and new stuff to look at that would have been very difficult to fit into Fallout 3’s ‘real world’. Wartime Alaska is a very different place from post-war DC; where the latter is mostly a brown, open plain studded with run-down shacks and ruins, Anchorage is full of jagged outcrops, sheer cliffs and monolithic fortresses, with bombers flying overhead and shells exploding in the distance. It’s a genuine departure from the rest of the game, and in this respect at least, Operation: Anchorage is more of a bonus extra than a deleted scene.

Of course a consequence of all those cliffs and canyons is that you never really get any choice of where to go. There are some open areas, but you’ve still only got one place to get to and, generally speaking, that is towards more enemies. If you put all your skill points in Barter, Speech and Lockpicking then you will not enjoy Operation: Anchorage: it’s shooting, perhaps mixed in with some punching and exploding, from beginning to end. I can think of one Speech check, a handful of locked doors (all with ‘Easy’ locks and achievement fodder ‘Intelligence’ briefcases behind them), and a couple of hackable terminals, although all you could do with those was deactivate some weak turrets. On the other hand, there are hundreds of Chinese soldiers, always shooting at you. Even the Sneak skill – and my character is a catlike ninja with a hundred Sneak skill points – proved mostly useless when fighting through Anchorage’s narrow, brightly lit trenches. Compared to the dizzying scope and scale of the base game, Operation: Anchorage just feels a bit limited and confined; and never more so than when my decidedly female Wasteland wanderer was referred to as ’sir’ and ‘him’.

Fortunately, the combat is pretty fun. The Chinese soldiers are fairly ordinary, and you will find yourself slaying them by the bunker-load, but the Crimson Dragoons – some kind of elite special forces unit clad in stealth armour – are completely unlike anything else in the game. They have a similar invisibility field to the Stealth Boy, and, where every other adversary in Fallout 3 essentially runs at you screaming, the Crimson Dragoons are predatory, silent killers, lurking quietly until you’ve passed them before opening fire with a sniper rifle or jamming a sword into your spine. Plodding through the corridors of the Chinese-occupied buildings, I found myself peering carefully into darkened corners or warily avoiding spotlit areas, even occasionally firing wildly into thin air in the hopes of uncovering them. They’re a disciplined, efficient fighting force, and they make a happy change from the merry chaos of the Capital Wasteland itself. As well as the Crimson Dragoons, there are a couple of boss fights, one passable and the other wretched, especially considering the limited arsenal afforded to you as a foot soldier in the US Army.

Operation: Anchorage does well at evoking the atmosphere of a larger war taking place, with grease-monkeys and medics wandering around the base camp and soldiers cowering behind cover out in the field, but it also does well at evoking the atmosphere of a simulated war taking place. Interactive objects flash red, dead soldiers fizzle out of existence after a few seconds, you occasionally teleport to your next objective, and attempts to shatter the fourth wall by asking questions about the simulation itself are met with confused or uncomprehending responses. Which is all pretty great in its way, although it may perhaps have benefited from some more ‘Hey! This isn’t real!’ moments, but of course it also means that you can only interact with flashing red objects, you can’t loot corspes, and you can hardly ever just do your own thing. That word again: confined. Just about the only RPG-ish aspect of O:A is the constant drip feed of experience – my character went from low level seventeen to almost level nineteen in the three hours or so that I spent playing it (for those that don’t know, Fallout 3’s level cap is twenty, so that’s a fair  amount of XP I got from offing those pesky Commies).

So: Operation: Anchorage is an entertaining diversion from the main game, with a very different feel and focus and some entertaining-if-shallow combat. But do you remember what I said at the beginning of this post? £8.50. Atmosphere Trailer is by no means a buyer’s guide, and I’m hesitant even to be writing this paragraph, but … Christ. Operation: Anchorage costs 800 of Microsoft’s supremely idiotic and obfuscating ‘Points’, presumably used because we can’t be trusted with real money, which weighs in at about £6.80. But, of course, I can’t buy 800 points, or indeed pay in any other currency; instead, I have to pay £8.50 for a thousand points and then spend my days glaring viciously at the two hundred points I have left in my regrettable Games For Windows Live account, which I can spend on precisely fuck all. The end result of all these shenannigans is that Operation: Anchorage effectively costs more than its already high price. The only other time I’ve paid three pounds per hour of play time is Portal, and I think I can say with some confidence that Operation: Anchorage is not as good as Portal (and I’ve played through Portal about eight times now anyway).

There’s a but. I don’t really regret spending my despicable Points on O:A, because I have a weakness for something that Operation: Anchorage does well at: stuff. I adore stuff in RPGs, to the extent that my apartment in Tenpenny Tower is crammed full of very carefully arranged weaponry and armour, and the new items introduced in Operation: Anchorage prod viciously at all the right buttons to make me go ‘Oooooh’. The Gauss Rifle is fantastic, the Stealth Armour is fantastic, the Winterized T-51b Power Armour is amazing and nostalgic for a past I never experienced … there isn’t that much of it, but what is there – lining the shelves of the secret vault I spent so long trying to open – I found tremendously exciting. It’s new things! For me! It is for this reason that I will never attempt to play World of Warcraft, and it is for this reason, despite the ludicrousness of the pricing, the horrible-ness of the download service and the relative slightness of the product, that I liked Operation: Anchorage.

SWAT 4

SWAT 4! Man, it even sounds exciting. One day I’ll do a negative review on this blog, I promise, but those that are hoping that I’ll finally crack out the gently ironic bile will have to wait a little while longer while I get super enthusiastic about a police simulator from 2005. (To be fair, I don’t buy games that I don’t think I’ll like, which pretty severely limits my choices for game-hate. For some reason I haven’t got to the point where publishers will send me their games for free to review).

SWAT 4 is a no-nonsense tactical FPS in the vein of Rainbow Six, or at least what I imagine Rainbow Six to be like, which is full of shouty men, jargon and flashbangs. And by ‘no-nonsense’, I mean ‘SWAT 4 is a game about shouting at people until they do what you want them to do, and hoping they don’t just say “Fuck off” and shoot you in the face’. It’s a game where it’s illegal to kill someone who hasn’t directly pointed a gun at you, even if you know – from replaying the level ten times and recognising the character model – that they’re about to pull out a MAC-10 and spray bullets over everyone in the room. I almost failed a mission for that very reason; while my squad were securing one room, I rather foolishly wandered into the next, to be confronted by three terrified hostages – or, rather, two terrified hostages and one grey-suited suspect pretending to be a hostage, who staggered towards me mumbling for help. I had played this level many times, and, even though it’s populated differently in every playthrough, I recognised a perp when I saw one;  lacking any kind of non-lethal weaponry, I fired a single bullet into his leg, while mashing the shout button – “POLICE! Get down on your knees! NOW!”. He kept coming towards me, now dragging his useless right leg behind him. I put another bullet in his leg. He kept coming. I fired again, and he fell backwards, dead. And, sure enough, there was the SMG he had been a few seconds from pulling on me, lying next to his body. I reported the death, took his weapon as evidence, secured the hostages for extraction, and rejoined my squad.

I completed the mission, and received by far the lowest score on completion that I’d ever had – 57%. Normal difficulty requires that you get 50% or higher to progress. Why was it so low? ‘Unauthorised use of lethal force: -10 points’. I had killed a man without knowing that he was a threat to me, a fellow officer, or a hostage, and that is not a thing that the police do. In the next mission, I outfitted my team with pepper spray and ‘less-lethal’, beanbag-firing shotguns, and subdued an entire tenement’s worth of crazy, M4-wielding cultist-martyrs without a single injury (after numerous times of being shot in the face and starting again, obviously). It’s a great to play a game where you are, utterly and unambiguously, the good guy; any game that features widespread slaughter of living things is always going to be morally dubious to some degree, even if it’s just my dad wandering in and asking if I have to shoot all the aliens, but in SWAT 4 it’s your job to save as many people as possible, and it’s brilliant.

(I’ve just trawled Wikipedia, and ‘beanbag rounds’ are bags full of lead shot that are fired out of a shotgun at a person. Man! No wonder it’s ‘less-lethal’ and not ‘non-lethal’.)

The AI for the squad mates is fine – they get stuck on each other sometimes, but get into a reasonable position when clearing a room, and know when to shout at someone (all the time). The system for ordering them about is smooth and fairly intuitive, and they’ll almost always do what you say immediately. Sadly, though, they don’t realise that one of the best things about playing a no-nonsense tactical FPS is when you accidentally hit yourself in the face with a flashbang and then tase the officer in front of you, all the while hitting the shout button over and over again. It’s fortunate, then, that SWAT 4 allows you to play through all the single player missions – there’s no story, just “We need a SWAT team! NOW!” situations – in co-op, with people that appreciate the funny side of a CS grenade bouncing off a door frame and back into the room you’re standing in. Fortunate, and amazing. Alternating between giggling hysterically at some unfortunate mishap – on one mission I never once managed to deploy a sting grenade without bombarding everyone in the team with rubber pellets – and this-is-serious-business breaching and clearing, the co-op mode in SWAT 4 is, quite simply, brilliant gaming. Pulling off a perfect arrest – checking for hostiles with the Opti-Wand, blowing the door open with a breaching shotgun, lobbing a CS grenade into the room and then stomping in, finger poised over the shout key – is great fun in single player, but doing the same with a friend or two over the Internet is vastly more rewarding.

SWAT 4 is, in its hardcore way, a very rewarding game. Not the first few times you play it, and not when the first suspect you see shoots you through the eye within seconds of starting the level; but it’s a game that rewards patience, consideration, tactics, and the kind of compassion that only capsaicin to the face can deliver. There’s a common conception in games, and it’s what I told my dad when he asked about my mass alien slaughter, that it has to be them or us. Them or me. Yes, I have to kill them all, because otherwise they’ll kill me. SWAT 4 feels like a breath of fresh air, or at least it would if it wasn’t from 2005, because it says: Yes, they’ll kill you, but it isn’t you or them. It’s both. Every death in SWAT 4 is a genuine defeat, and it feels like it. For the most part, the people you fight in SWAT 4 aren’t evil; they’re misinformed or brainwashed or terrified or high or have genuine grievances, and when you save them, you win.