GTA IV

Well, this isn't a video, but I thought I'd get my own thoughts down first before today's Zero Punctuation video. I'll try making a video for it later today, though.

The first reason I haven't posted this review already is because I was planning on having a system link multiplayer on GTA IV, only to discover last night that for some reason this isn't possible, only allowing you to play multiplayer on Xbox Live. Well, that pissed on my day like an incontinent puppy while also leaving me as confused as I was earlier that morning when I ran into someone who I know lives 40-something miles away and couldn't think of any reason for them to be where they were. Surely it's a lot simpler to make a system link multiplayer feature for a game rather than online multiplayer, so why the shitting hell can't you system link GTA IV?! Probably the same tepid reason there's absolutely no local multiplayer for Burnout Paradise.

In the same way that it's only polite to let someone know you think they're a complete bastard before engaging them in conversation, I have to admit I've been eagerly looking forward to GTA IV since I knew it existed, even more so after the first trailer showed me how pretty it was. I mean seriously, as far as I was concerned, the box could be made out of a special plastic that give you penile cancer and I still wouldn't mind as long as it looked as good as the trailer showed. Although in the games industry, admitting to enthusiasm is like holding up a big sign outside a developer's offices saying "please god disappoint me".


Considering this is a review, which typically involves seeing the credits rolling at least once (unless a game proves itself to contain a fantastically impressive amount of shittiness), I really think in all fairness I should put a spoiler warning here.

That said, clocking GTA IV this fast was a hell of a task; I've become accustomed to getting hold a game and finishing the single player campaign within a week. This time around, I had to sacrifice a lot of time I usually devote to sleeping. And Sod's law dictates that the week or so it took me would be the week this part of England gets the best weather ever motherfucking recorded. Well, it's not that bad, seeing as it left my room hovering around the 40 degrees Celsius mark over night, so I had something to do because sleeping sure as hell wasn't an option.

I doubt I have to remind you what the game's about; but I'll do it anyway to be fair for the one person who (statistically speaking) hasn't bought GTA IV yet. You are Niko Bellic, a man with the world's largest nose and coolest name, fresh off the crummiest boat ever to sail into America with the idea in your head that your idiot cousin is loaded and getting laid a lot and you want in on it. After about 20 seconds it becomes apparent that Niko has a broody past and the main reason he's come to Liberty City (which is in no way remotely similar to New York, honestly) is to kick some particular ass and chew Release Gum, because remember: you chew, you suck, then POW! Life dumps a load in your mouth. Niko may well be broody, but as far as massive balls go, I can't think of anyone who tops him. I mean come on tied up in a basement by a man with a hacksaw and this comes out:

"Talk, Polak!"
"OK, OK, your dad likes it up the ass. ...what do you want me to say?"

Brilliant.

Aside from having a nose able to sustain small land mammals, Niko also has the hairiest face know to man. And trust me, I've seen some damn hairy faces. This sounds racist, but Niko is "eastern European" after all, so he is genetically inclined to grow an amount of facial hair that would be little other than worrying elsewhere. If you don't believe me, talk to someone from Ukraine.

I'd love to start picking the story to pieces, but it's really quite good. Screw it, I'll give it a shot anyway. Niko comes to Liberty City (definitely not New York still) in search of revenge and a normal, peaceful life. Yeah, that's a bit of a contradiction, but life wouldn't be interesting if everyone was perfectly logical and consistent. Anyway, Niko decides that the best way to obtain this peaceful life is to start off beating the ever living shit out of a bunch of loan sharks hassling Roman (his cousin, for you Mr Cheapskate). Fair enough, but personally, I'd rather find a way to pay them their money and get them out of my life that way, rather than pissing off the Russian Mafia. As the game progresses, Niko constantly lands himself in different situations wherein people can shit on him from varying great heights, while occasionally standing up only to realise that while he busy sat down being shat on, someone else had tied his testicles to a tree - thus leaving lots of people having him by the balls.

Now, if you've played a GTA game since GTA III, you'll be very familiar with the concept of the antagonist being introduced early in the story, with the game ending after a very long time playing and a few hundred bullets in the head of said arsehole (GTA III: Catalina, Vice City: Sonny Forrelli, San Andreas: Tenpenny and no-one gives a crap about the PSP ports, although a trio of these games based on the three cities from San Andreas would have been interesting). You've had your spoiler warning, so I'm free to mention that while the game has multiple endings and in the ending I got, I'd already killed the antagonist, and then was sent on a revenge mission on some random prick I'd seen only about 4 times - all during the last two hours of the game.

While interesting deviations are always welcome in games, this deviation felt more like going on a trip with a friend you haven't seen for a few years, everything's going really well, you're both a lot more interesting, then towards the end of the trip your friend jumps into a bush while someone else jumps out of a tree and mugs you, before cockslapping you and running off with your friend, leaving you alone in a foetal position in the middle of Wales. Sorry, but that pissed me off. After such an anticlimactic end to someone who'd managed to ruin each of my days in Liberty City (because New York was full), I was annoyed that the most intense chase in the game involved Niko chasing someone who'd just pissed him off, although I honestly didn't give a toss about him at any other point in the game. I'd spent so long trying to empty an assault rifle in the real antagonist that the only things satisfying about the last mission were a) knowing I'd never have to chase someone on wet sand again and b) getting the outfit from GTA III as a reward.

I'd also like to point out that Rockstar's obsession with keeping the story completely under wraps (i.e., my job was threatened if I bought GTA IV before the launch day or even if I opened the box containing the strategy guides - seriously!). It's basically a story of revenge that doesn't go away. Each major kill you get generally reminds you there's someone else who's pissed you off, so you have to trundle along to them and kick some more arse. That's not strictly true, seeing as there's a pretty pointless system of letting some people live or die. Such a thing is Fable territory, wherein it affects your alignment, appearance and the world around you. Aside from being able to occasionally being able to run into the people you've spared on the streets, there's no real difference. No one finds out you haven't killed them, and if you do kill them you get to see a cool, gritty and rather gruesome execution.

I'd like to take a moment to criticise the way Niko moves at slow speed. Yes, it's all well and good making him move like a real person in a straight line, but my god, who the hell leans like that when turning?! With the Euphoria engine in action, you'd imagine that every time he leaned that much he'd stop and rebalance himself. Other than that, I'm really impressed with the way Niko moves. Something I always notice about games is how fast the characters always move. In the past, it seems that every character from a console is quite happy to jog perpetually without breaking a sweat, but only being able to sprint for a short time. This time, Rockstar finally realised this isn't exactly realistic, so the left stick alone with only make Niko walk. Not run, jog, or sprint, but walk, hike or ...yomp? Despite being very impressed with this observation and making Niko more human than any other character (aside from possibly the Mudokons from the Abe games), combined with actually having a past which he acknowledges and can't escape from, this whole "your own marching pace" thing started to piss me off around the time I had to start chasing things, which was, I don't know, after about 2 FUCKING MINUTES INTO THE GAME.

You'll have taken note at some point over the last year or so at missions involving dicking around with the internet, or your phone, but don't be fooled. Niko automatically answers important phone calls as ever and there's only a handful of missions you need the internet for. The rest are generally more of the same stealing stuff, killing stuff and chasing stuff (which you either have to catch and kill, or follow somewhere - the only noticeable difference being that on the latter your target moves at Mach 4).

There are a number of brilliant touches in GTA IV, starting with an eye-boggling attention to detail - like the tread of tires, the ground looking perfect when wet, Niko smashing windows to cars instead of just giving up on them, getting arrested for drunk driving, being able to start fights with people, then get them arrested by phoning the police - I could go on for a few months. All I'll say is I feel sorry for the people who had to go over every inch of Liberty City (no even New York's bitch, it's really that dissimilar) to make sure it was perfect. It's the only way I can imagine why everything looks so damn good.

I'm at a bit of a loss now, because the last line of attack a reviewer has always had in the past when it comes to GTA is the aiming. In the originals, it involved just looking in the direction you wanted to shoot, then hoping for the best, and it didn't change much until San Andreas gave you a free aim option which was still a bit shit anyway. Now you see, GTA IV uses an aiming system which is (and I know everyone else has said this already, but it's true) very similar to Gears of War. Take cover. Aim. Shoot. Try not to die. Well, it's not as good as Gears of War, because you can't just hold down the cover button and push different directions to climb over stuff or dive out of the way. If you're lucky, however, you can run in the direction of cover during a shoot-out, hit the cover button and watch Niko slide to your chosen hiding place, and if you're in the right place, you can switch to somewhere adjacent really fast without getting hit. It's... it's... it works. OK, GTA IV has a damned good aiming system and it - no, I'll leave that for next time.

I feel I'm perfectly fine in saying that while GTA IV follows the tried and tested idea of "three islands" (don't get started, Bohan and Happiness Island don't count as separate islands), and it also follows the idea of "the third island is pretty shit". Seriously, not much happens in Alderney and it generally looks like a landfill fell on it too. Hopefully some of the downloadable content will make Alderney more interesting. If you don't believe me remember that in GTA III, Shoreside Vale was small and boring, even though it had an airport. You only went there to prove you've got that far in the game. Yeah, it had the airport, but you couldn't fly anything, so it doesn't matter. In Vice City, they realised how bad the third island was and decided to ditch it all together. In San Andreas the third island had an abandoned airfield, and only two casinos you could go in. You get the jetpack there too, but you only use it afterwards to collect the horse shoes on the roofs of casinos and hotels which thinly veiled the fact there was nothing actually interesting in Las Venturas.

I could keep ranting on aimlessly about your phone going off every few minutes because your friends want babysitting, but I seriously doubt that even saying that the pool mini game just as crap as in San Andreas only looking a bit better is worth mentioning. In fact, I strongly doubt there's anything a small time hobbyist reviewer like myself, of even the ballsy phenomenon that is Yahtzee Croshaw can say or write that'll make any difference to the sales figures for GTA IV. To put that comment into perspective, read up on the total perspective vortex. Something like that.

Dead Rising

I know, I know! I promised you a GTA IV review this week, but the heat has been doing weird things to me, and I'm not ready to review it yet. I assure you all, the instant I am ready to do so, I'll put my review up, and I'm planning a video review on YouTube as a technical exercise. That smell? Oh, yeah, that's the smell of plagiarism - it's likely to be another Zero Punctuation rip-off video, if I manage it at all.

With that in mind, let's get cracking with my little stall. When the 360 first came out, I wasn't all that psyched about it because I was still having plenty of fun with my Xbox and the only games announced that interested me even in the slightest were Halo 3 and Fable 2. Seeing as Halo 3 was worryingly mediocre in relation to Call of Duty 4 but at least managed to bring back some of the spark lost in Halo 2; and Fable 2 being announced as being "definitely" out this year but we're in May and still no hint at when exactly that will be - getting back to my point, basically I didn't have any reason to buy a 360.

Well luckily, Capcom came up with the little gem that is Dead Rising which neatly caught my interest like a barbed hook shaped like a pair of breasts. I mean come on, this is a game where you're surrounded by zombies and you're free to kill them using anything that isn't nailed down. I didn't even care if it had a story, I could spend hours just walking around killing zombies with shopping trolleys and bass guitars etc. etc. But, I suppose as this is a review, I can't just keep talking about my obsession with killing zombies just because I was free to do so, rather than hide in a corner and soil myself.

And like a pair of car thieves stealing your shiny and pretentious BMW without checking the fuel gage before setting off on an uncharted joyride, I move onto the rest of the game mechanics to see how it holds up.

To say it was more or less "take one" in the wave of 360 games, you have to admit from any angle, it's remarkably handsome, especially considering your screen leases most of it's space to an impressive number of crumbly, pale simpletons. Somehow, it's an RPG from a very Japanese company but cleverly disguised as a western action game. Which is for the best, as my Lost Odyssey review mentioned, I'm no fan of JRPGs. That nicely leads me to the first bone I have to pick with Dead Rising though.

It's all well and good utilising "levelling up" in games, and when it does it on it's own without pestering you to drop what you're doing and spend a good few days working out which skill to spend your new experience on - aside from being time consuming, it's inevitably futile because when you finally come back to the frigging game you're reminded that you weren't in an exactly favourable situation - but that said I don't think it's exactly fair having you play as the world's burliest journalist who happens to have all the physical prowess of a newborn calf. Then deciding said burly bloke is going to turn into Rocky (circa Rocky IV) over the space of 72 hours if you intend to advance at all only adds to weirdness and that lovely difficulty cur- no, wall.

Now, this is, was and forever will be the first thing anyone ever says/said/in going to say to me after they played Dead Rising for the first time. I can see where they're coming from, but the next thing they complain about only demonstrates their intelligence of lack therefore of. It's the save system. Somehow when I started out on it, I ran into a glitch and I thought that was what everyone else was talking about. What I thought happened was if you save, it only works as a save for you to carry on with after you finish a session by your own accord, not by being killed. I thought this because when I played it first, I saved, got eaten by a large crowd, then got kicked to the title screen with all my progress lost aside from my level. So, I started the game again at level 5 and decided to beat this glitch by resetting my 360 every time the dying animation started.

I also accidentally figured out the easiest way in the world to get the "Unbreakable" achievement, much to the disgust of all my friends who'd been trying for months on end to get it and didn't even consider my method.

Back to the save system, people basically complain because they don't understand the point of saving your character stats and allowing you start a new story mode with it. Or something along those lines. What those fools didn't know was they could turn the difficulty wall into a small mound of upturned soil by playing the game trying to rescue people until they fail the story, then start again having learned some special moves and developed an immune system strong enough to cope with more than a slight winter breeze.

Look, I'm as disappointed I'm not writing a GTA IV review right now as you are, but I want to do it properly, and I've got a multiplayer game waiting for my next week, so I can give it a proper full run down.

You'd have to be completely blind not to realise that Dead Rising is a blatant rip off of Dawn of the Dead, but that's only a bad thing if your one of Capcom's lawyers. Since I first saw it, all I thought was "it'd be so cool if someone made a game like this where you could just kill zombies". Sadly, the result is that the story is one long excuse to drag you out of your comfort zone wherein you're dressing zombies up as Lego characters then skewering them with showerheads, and you're frequently sent off to hobble your fat ass to the other side of the shopping mall, for an inevitable boss fight. And for some reason, your standard katana is not only readily available in Texan shopping malls, but also quite capable of providing 007 with more "split personality jokes" than one can sensibly fathom, yet pretty much useless in a fight against a healthy human being. For some reason katanas only seem to do about as much damage as peanut butter to people, but even that's a damn sight better than pretty much everything else.

Using no logic whatsoever, this takes me to a spoiler warning. I think that's adequate.

In standard mode, things go tits up after the 72 hour count down, unless you fuck things up beforehand, in which case you can get out fine and dandy. However, do things right and the end of the game goes off on an impressive tangent. From being barricaded in a shopping mall for your own protection, to a helicopter crashing into a clock revealing some really old sewers and finally a fist fight with Action Man: Mental Condition atop a remote control tank; you probably wouldn't have seen it coming. It's almost as if they got bored of pissing off George A. Romero, and decided to push their suicidal lawyers over the edge while they went on mashing up 80's action movies with Indiana Jones. As a matter of fact, I'm now certain that Capcom's HQ is an overly tall building with one side covered in the blood of lawyers. And zombies.

Even when you master Dead Rising, it still finds ways to be infuriatingly difficult. For a start, there's an achievement for rescuing 50 survivors. 50 shitting survivors! Can Frank Burly West move fast enough to reach 50 survivors? There's another one for saving 8 woman at once. Aside from the obvious mental stress of having to save 8 hysterical woman when surrounded by zombies, it's frigging difficult to have even 4 followers before they start "accidentally" knifing each other and then getting trapped in the jaws of every single zombie between you and where you want to be.

The final, perfectly executed kick in the bollocks comes from the reward of unlocking infinity mode. I must explain that this is the kind of kick in the bollocks you'd usually receive if you volunteered to help someone practise their kick boxing by holding up a plank of wood. It's and idea that will look really cool, but when you miss the mark, someone's going to be upset about it. As the name suggests, the clock doesn't count down 72 hours so you can wait to be picked up, but counts how long you can survive. Fine. If only they hadn't decided your health drains, forcing you to eat every 20 seconds. You could get away with that if only all the other survivors weren't trying to kill you.

I'd like to express my final irritation about Otis and his walkie talkie fetish, but I'm sure that you stumbled across at least 3 references to it on your way here.

Bully: Scholarship Edition

Very few of you may have noticed that this post is just a wee bit late. The rest of you wont give a toss. I'd like to apologise for that, I've been busy setting up my new TV, loosing control of it to my brother and his girfriend and having no internet access. There's also the eating of chocolate between shifts at work. Trust me, it has absolutely nothing to do with the length of Bully: Scholarship Edition keeping me away from daylight, or the warm glow of a PC monitor.

Enough of my F1 driver excuses, let's get down to the business of Rockstar's latest attempt at stalling the gaming community from burning down their offices in anticipation for Grand Theft Auto IV (or "Grand Theft Auto Eye-Vee" as half the bastards who come into my shop call it, immediately before asking if they can preorder it for the Playstation 2). Speaking of which, if you ever wanted me to give a decent reason for not liking the PS3, it would be the fact that it's the only reason the best looking game of the year isn't fucking out yet.

Bully: Scholarship Edition is a remake of Bully / Canis Canem Edit (depending on which country you're from) which came out for PS2 in October 2006. Interestingly enough, there are some pants in my room I've not worn between the initial Bully and the remake, but hell, there are plenty of people out there with too much money or too much respect for their Gamerscore. I ask those of you confused about the name if I can join you for a picnic of cup of tea some time, because for a quite obvious reason, the BBFC or some gang of protesting mothers decided "Bully" was a really bad name for a game set in a school by the people who make the fantastic role model that is the Grand Theft Auto. I'd personally have to agree with the move, as it's the dumbest way imaginable to condemn the theory that violent video games are made for children and they're the reason people die. Why they were able to release it as "Bully" two years later just by using the word "scholarship" in the title is an insult to logic in the same manner that insult to fine cuisine is a 3 year old can of Irn Bru being used in a pasta recipie.

Admitting that it's a remake of a PS2 game on the Xbox 360, Rockstar decided that the best way for this to not matter was to whitewash the back of the case with the word "enhanced" in a similar manner one would find in their inbox regarding herbal viagra. There are also some extra minigames, but I personally have never decided that a good reason to part with £35 was because I wanted two minute intervals of entertainment. There are plenty of people suffering from that condition, and they don't have to pay £35 for it - unless they happen to be driving around slowly in the middle of the night. I can't help but think the game was just the original game revised for the Wii and awkwardly shoved onto a 360 disc in the process, because when I finally decided to try the "enhanced gameplay" (ahem, the minigames), I found myself crippled by a lack of Wii Remote.

So, with that argument, we are left with a port of a PS2 game on the Xbox 360 (and Wii) which promises enhanced graphics and gameplay. The good news is that the frame rate is really good, which isn't that bloody suprising seeing as how the PS2 is almost a decade old now, while the 360 is somewhere around it's second year. And it fires out enough heat to ensure a Greenpeace protest, should you get carried away playing games all night long to soothe your aching social life. I can't really say much about choppy edges easily spotted on most PS2 games these days, because I've just managed to afford a new uber-penis-extension-TV by calling in a few debts.

I guess it would also would have been a good idea to have played the original game beforehand, but screw it, it looked like a bad idea when it came out in the first place. Either way I doubt the frame rate would have been that good on the PS2. Sadly, that's the only improvement I can imagine the new version has over the old, so let's ignore the fact it's actually a game that's about a year old, and start looking at it like a new game, seeing as that's what Rockstar's marketing department really want us to. OK, OK, I don't like doing what marketing pricks want, but it's the best way I can think of reviewing this game.

And so we follow the delightfuly and charming adventures of that little scamp, Jimmy Hopkins, as he begins his life at apparently the worst boarding school in the world. Before anything else I'd like to drag the question everyone else seems to have pushed into the corner of the room and slapped around a bit. If Bullworth Academy is the worst school in the world, why are there rich kids (all of which seem to be in their 20's, by the way) attending the school? Surely there's no amount of inbreeding that constitues picking the worst school in the world and paying a great deal of your expendable income to send your children to it.

As we, or rather I, because I doubt any of you will bother putting yourself through what I did after you read this, discover immediately, Jimmy is pretty much the exact kind of child that parents blame Rockstar for existing in the first place, only veiled with a layer of irony so thin, I doubt if it was rolled up and grated, it wouldn't even make enough to sprinkle on your morning coffee, should you be one of the sane people who doesn't believe it's necessary to own your own coffee chocolate sprinkler. While the irony behind the boy is bloody transparent, in stark contrast his motives are about as clear as mud stuck up the arse of a cat recently mowed down by a gritter truck.

Being the badass who's been expelled from pretty much every other school in America, you're encouraged to beat up everyone with glasses, shove them in lockers or bins, wedgie them and set fireworks off up their arses; while also having to do exactly the same to everyone else in the school because they didn't find it all that funny; and yet Jimmy doesn't want to get expelled again. There's some bollocks about taking over the school, but Rockstar's been flogging that idea of controlling everything since Vice City. We're promised something more intelligent in GTA IV, but only time will tell.

Should you be able to ignore the plot hole similar in size to the entire of Rocky Balboa (the newest Rocky film, but I wont call it the last because Rocky V was the last Rocky film as far as I'm concerned), we can move onto the gameplay itself. The game follows the tried and tested format of free roaming and starting missions as and when you please throughout the day, but somehow manages to clutter the radar up something rotten, and generally cock up a navigation system that's worked pretty well for Rockstar for about the last 8 years. I guess the simple reason is because all missions start with identical gold stars, and lead to the nearest door to the building they're found in, or the nearest exit if you're inside. It wouldn't be so bad if the map was more friendly, rather than being zoomed out to about 3000 miles in the pause menu and zoomed in so you can plot the best route between the hairs of you head should you be brave enough to press A when looking at it.

By now we don't know where we are, vaguely know what we're doing, but have no idea why we're doing it. Not exactly a good start. To top it all off, there's an attempt at realism being shoved into the game, which fits about as well as a golfer's glove being hastily forced onto a blue whale's face. You'll more than likely notice it's the glove is there, but still be able to see it's a whale you're looking at and wonder why the hell anyone bothered trying to put a golf glove on the bloody thing. You may also be wondering why there's a whale in your living room and how someone got a glove on it at all, but that's your own fault for living on the coast. The realism I speak of is of course that Jimmy is a 15 year old boy, and as such can't stay awake all night long, so you have to cart his sorry arse to bed every night. Which doesn't at all break up gameplay, what with the days being about 18 minutes long.

The missions themselves are basically the exaggerated antics of American school life, I imagine, which for me did little else that make me think I perhaps wasted my school life attending classes for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week for 13 years, rather than starting fights with everyone who liked the movie Grease perhaps a bit too much.

Just when I'd given up all hope for Bully and the poor cocky little shit that is Jimmy Hopkins, I managed to get him kicked in the bollocks by a girl he'd just annoyed, which gave me quite a giggle. Sadly, not nearly enough to save the game. Especailly considering that the game decided that it wanted me to repeat a part of a mission I'd just finished and watched the finishing cutscene. At this point I'd had enough and stopped playing.

You may think that this does not bode well for Grand Theft Auto IV, and I would agree had I never played State of Emergency. You see, I'm pretty certain the team who made the latter were the ones who made Bully, you know, the useless interns used just to keep making some quick money without being able to make a decent game, while the real talent work hard on their flagship GTA game and don't get to see the light of day until it's finished. I can support this with the fact the game starts by saying it is presented by Rockstar Games, but made by Rockstar Vancouver. Presumably their way of saying "it wasn't us".