Biggest story of the day was obviously the Call of Duty: Elite announcement that you’ve doubtless already seen here on The Average Gamer ;) What you may have missed was the Wall Street Journal publishing it a full 14 hours before the internal online and print embargo that the rest of us were given. Cue this cathartic rant by MCV’s Ben Parfitt:

Of course, if the press really wanted rid of this practice we’d refuse to cover any games or information protected by an NDAs. Perhaps if Activision had told us all that WSJ was getting special treatment a few of us might have torn up the agreement and left the Elite event right there and then.
But who’s going to do that? Gotta get dem clickety-clicks, innit.
– Ben Parfitt, OPINION: Who’s the more foolish?

And because I’m a shameless self-promoter, I shall point out that this is just another ugly side to the gaming press’s dependency on PRs for content that I talked about in my personal blog last week.

That’s the elephant in the room, isn’t it? …Who advertises on games websites? Games companies. Who provides the content? Games companies. Everybody knows this.
– Debbie Timmins, Am I Destroying Games Journalism?

In other news:

The Official PlayStation blog announced that the PlayStation Network will be fully functional again by the end of the week. It’s not quite the previously-reported May 31st but it’ll do.

This beautifully strange live-action Portal video has been making the rounds:

RockStar and/or Xbox announced an L.A. Noire Rockstar Pass which gives you all forthcoming LA Noire downloadable content but at half the individual price.

GTA.net have released an amazing map of Liberty City made in Google Streetview.

And finally, Falmouth-based café Loading has created a fabulous Resident-Evil-inspired cocktail.

[hat tips to Joe Barron and Sinan Kubba]

The current crop of dance games is much more my thing – prance about the living room looking like a fool with just enough positive feedback to convince yourself that you’re really dancing. Fancy footwork is largely optional and there’s loads of opportunity to clobber your high-scoring friends in the face “by accident”. I reviewed Just Dance 2 on Tuesday and Michael Jackson: The Experience works very much along the same lines – hold the Wiimote, copy the dancer on the screen. The choreography is technically much more difficult (that Michael could really dance, y’all) yet because his routines are so familiar, I find myself far less frustrated by the obscure pictograms.

Yeah, good luck with that one.

Being a child of the 80s, Michael Jackson’s music is way up there on the list of nostalgia triggers for me – hell, back in 2003 I convinced my then-boyfriend to buy a Playstation 2 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City purely because Billie Jean was in the soundtrack. The track list for The Experience covers more than 25 of MJ’s greatest hits, including all the brilliant songs you would want:

• Bad
• Billie Jean
• Beat It
• Black or White
• Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
• In The Closet
• Rock With You
• Smooth Criminal
• They Don’t Care About Us
• Thriller

And some you wouldn’t – like Earth Song. Yes, seriously. Lots of overly emotional floor-pounding and tearful pearl-clutching make this routine as melodramatic as a day in the life of Blair Waldorf. It’s hilarious to dance through once (but only once). Strangely enough, the choreography doesn’t include the memorable arse-waggling step from the most famous rendition of Earth Song.

As with Just Dance 2, you can play with up to 4 players and there is a competitive mode for 1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2 dance battles. The Wii detection is based primarily around the accelerometer, so you can stand pretty much anywhere in room – no need to rearrange the furniture just to have some fun. Most songs offer 2 levels of difficulty that allow you to dance to Michael’s routines or as one of his backing dancers.

As you progress through the dances you’ll also unlock training videos that will teach you how to pull off his signature moves in real life. Yes, I’ve always secretly wanted to dance like Michael and yes, I’ve always been far too lazy to do all that copy-pause-rewind business to actually learn the moves. This game could be the trigger that finally lets you bust out the entire Thriller routine next Halloween.

The Wii, DS and PSP versions of Michael Jackson: The Experience will be out in the UK next Friday, 26th November 2010. Play.com also has Move and Kinect versions listed for next February. We’ll post more info on those as we hear it.

From memory, it took me about 50 odd hours to finish GTA IVs story missions, so I’m expecting this expansion to keep me occupied for at least another 10-15 hours. Given that some full price games have less than 10 hours gameplay (Halo 3) anyway, 1600 MS points doesn’t seem so bad.

So what’s included in this expansion then:

• New main character – A Jewish biker called Johnny Klebitz
• New weapons – Pick of which is an automatic 9MM pistol
• New vehicles
• New missions
• New radio, internet and TV content
• New interiors – Ooooh!
• New mini-games – Including arm wrestling
• Bike handling has been tweaked
• Gang members accompany you on missions and level up if they survive

Everything still takes place in Liberty City, so don’t expect any Burnout Paradise Big Surf Island type update. Still, at least I know my way around and I’ve still not “collected” all those damn packages so plenty of exploring still to do.

GTA IV: The Lost and Damned expansion will be available from the 17th Feb 09 only on Xbox 360 (for 1600 MS points)

In part I of my GTA 4 review I focused on the in-game AI. Now I’m going to concentrate on the look and feel of GTA 4.

The graphics – Not bad, not bad:

The initial visual impressions when you first play GTA 4 are really very good. The whole Liberty City environment oozes detail, with the streets populated with lots of cars and pedestrians. The sky is alive with aircraft and helicopters, even at night. The weather can be really spectacular at times, I’m thinking of the thunderstorms here. Torrential rain with flashes of lightning accompanied with huge claps of thunder make driving a lot of fun. As the weather can affect the handling of the cars, you do start to consider the weather conditions before attempting another mission. Driving in fog, is well, like driving in fog, i.e. a real pain. When you couple this with the stupid drivers (rubbish AI) and the words automotive carnage spring to mind.

Then as you really build up the hours of game time, you begin to become less impressed (?used to) by the look of this next-gen GTA. For instance Liberty City’s trees are just terrible. They are particularly poorly drawn and rendered by the 3D engine as they frequently poke through walls and buildings when they really shouldn’t. Or they just appear out of nowhere.

Pop-up appears to be a fundamental problem with the 3D engine as it (at least on the 360 version) happens an awful lot. I can cope with pop-up when it occurs in the distance as you tend not to notice it too much, as is the case with the Burnout games. But when large chunks of the environment suddenly appear around you it looks, well, just rubbish. Certainly not next-gen graphics. A little bit more 3D engine optimisation wouldn’t have gone amiss. The pop-up becomes even worse when you steal obtain airborne transportation. It’s a mixture of awe and disgust (or should that be shock and awe?), as you marvel at the size of Liberty City as it literally pops-up in front of you! I’ve even crashed my car into thin air only for a bollard to appear before my very eyes seconds after the accident. Lovely.

Even with all its faults, glitches and sloppy AI and frequently dodgy graphics, GTA 4 is a fantastic game. It’s the best GTA game I’ve played by a long way, and a game I’ll be playing for quite some time to come. I’m still playing it now some 3 months after it’s release. It’s rare that I play a game for quite this long, so that’s really saying something. You can read some other points of view on GTA IV at TestFreaks.co.uk and other Xbox 360 game reviews too. But then again, you’ve all probably bought GTA 4 by now!

Finally, towards the end of the year we get to experience GTA 4 on the PC. I hope Rockstar take sometime to fix the awful graphics pop-up and the iffy AI. Even DS owners will be able to get in on the act with GTA: Chinatown wars. The GTA franchise is showing no sign of stopping just yet.

GTA 4 is a great game, but not the perfect game that many reviews would lead you to believe. It’s extremely playable and great fun, with multitude of different gameplay elements crammed in there. You’ll also get somewhere approaching 40+ hours of entertainment from just completing the core missions (i.e. following the main games plot). I haven’t even factored in the multiplayer aspect, which is another game itself and a very welcome addition too. But there are a few unsavoury bits in GTA 4, and I’m not talking about the dodgy characters! I’ll discuss these bits as part of my look into 2 of the main elements of GTA 4; in-game artificial intelligence (AI) and in my next post the in-game graphics.

The AI – A bit dim, me:

If GTA 4s AI was asked to hand over its end of year report to its parents it would show a D+. Shows glimpses of intelligence but spends too much time asleep in the corner, dribbling.

Although to be fair, the GTA 4s AI had a mountain to climb to be anything remotely good when all the previous games were a bit thick. That’s not to say that the AI hasn’t improved. It has, but not as much as I’d expected, or even felt was needed. I can’t help but feel that Rockstar has been a bit lazy in this department. Given the ridiculous budget ($100 million depending on who you believe on the internet) that was available to develop this game we should be marvelling at the realistic, living, breathing, sprawling metropolis populated by realistic inhabitants. Instead, we get a bloody great city populated by idiots. As such I present to you 2 examples of GTA 4s rather stupid behaviour:

It wasn’t me Officer
There I was sitting in a taxi, enjoying the sights and sounds of Liberty City, when my ride came to an abrupt halt. I could see that we’d stopped because of all the traffic ahead waiting to get over the bridge. Fair enough, citizens dutifully paying their tolls. But as the minutes ticked past, and we failed to move an inch, I became just a little bit board. So I paid the nice taxi driver and decided to go jack the car at the front of this toll booth queue. It’s the done thing in GTA, trust me. However, as I got closer to the toll booth the actual cause of the gridlock became clear. A police cruiser. I stood there and watched the pathetic sight of this cruiser gently rocking back and forth stuck between a concrete wall and a toll booth. It was mildly funny until I realised that it never looked like it was ever going to escape. I hadn’t expected the games AI to trip itself up so easily. All very disappointing, even if a little funny to watch.

I seem to be missing a gear
Your character is the only person in the whole of Liberty City that is able to put any car into reverse. I’m serious. I’ve not seen a single, damn car try to reverse itself out of a tight spot/pile up/around an obstacle. Due to the AI being generally rubbish, these situations occur all the time. Also there always seems to be one of these traffic jams when you’re trying to outrun the cops or tail/chase/kill someone. Mmm, suspicious. Couldn’t Rockstar have engineered with a better way of challenging the player than using lazy AI?

Here’s a video illustrating some of the more interesting “features” of GTA 4. As you’ll see it’s not just the AI which is a little bit buggy, its affected many of the vehicles in Liberty City as well:

So that’s the AI covered; lazy and frequently buggy, but hey that’s part of the GTA charm! For my next post I’ll cast my eye over GTA 4s graphics. Next-gen lovelyness or another case of Rockstar being lazy?

However the reality is likely to be much less doom and gloom. The homebrew software is made up of a mix of game emulators (like the ones you can get for the PC), homemade games and software tools (like movie players). The emulators on the whole run pretty slowly and are a fun novelty for most people, much as on the PC, and shouldn’t harm game sales (especially as the games emulated tend to be from the 1980′s to mid 1990′s). Homemade games fall into the same no-retail-impact area as emulators. The application software however is much more useful stuff, DivX movie players and e-book readers make the PSP a much more user friendly device, which is great for the user (making the iPod video look prehistoric by comparison) but could hurt UMD film sales. Remember though, Sony happily lets you play ripped music from 1Gig memory sticks on the PSP, so it could be perceived a little odd to expect you not to do the same with your dvds.

Finally, when it comes to the scary concept of free-for-all game piracy, well… it’s not all that scary for the moment at least. Yes game rips would load faster from a memory stick and draw less battery power than the original UMD version, but for starters most won’t fit onto 1Gig cards (costing about £60) and for those that do they actually contribute strongly to the death of the memory stick (the constant read-writes). Most importantly the current hack requires the user owning a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories for their PSP, and it’s a slightly awkward process to get things running (see this how-to: http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=35463 ). Popping a retail game in the drive beats that sort of hassle anyday.

There will doubtless be more hacks and exploits to come in the future, but in the meantime the PSP should safely continue to grow its userbase, which once large enough should be impervious to piracy. Much like its older brother, possibly the most pirated console currently available, which happens to also be the most successful, the PlayStation2!

“…an A-Z of gaming from 1972 coin-operated classic Pong to the latest Grand Theft Auto game for the yet to be released Sony Playstation 3…

… Nintendo general manager David Yarnton said: ‘This exhibition means not only can we celebrate the great history of gaming but also inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers to get involved in what looks to be an exciting future’…”

It should open later in the year and run to 2007. From 2007 to 2009 there will also be some sort of gallery to inspire people into programming games, so they say.

So yay! A games corporation is finally following other industry sectors and making some effort to kids into thinking about games development as a career :) I mentioned the complete lack of this in my November post on Attracting Women into Game Development.

What is it?

Driving, kill-em up through the medium of cars, bikes, trucks, guns, emergency vehicles and even a helicopter!

Is it fun?

Yes, apart from the frequent annoying bits.

Is it worth the money? £29.99

Yes, if you like GTA games, otherwise try before you buy, and yes it’s most definitely an 18 rated game.

Why?

It’s all about stealing cars, shooting/stabbing/beating up anyone, doing anything you want in a totally free roaming environment and the bad guys are the cops!

The graphics are pretty good, not stunning but GTA games never looked great as far as looks are concerned. If truth be told the graphics do look a little bit gay. Check out the screenshots below to see what I mean.

The game play is a mixture of missions and general wandering around just doing stuff (mostly bad). The missions vary from easy, walk in the park (and then shooting someone), to being urber hard, requiring the reflexes of a chipmunk on speed due to the excessive police response (helicopters, SWAT teams). In addition, the police are truly psychotic drivers in GTA and come out of nowhere to smash your car into a little, itty-bitty corner of the map, and then your car blows up after some serious pummelling by the cops and then you’re dead. Mission over….Aggghhh….Restart.

This is the most annoying aspect of this game as you frequently become stuck on many of the harder missions, made all the harder by the slightly shoddy (or evil) driver AI giving you the feeling that sometime the PSP really doesn’t want you to complete a mission.

Overall Rockstar Leeds have done a great done in bringing GTA to the PSP with the slow loading times the only noticeable difference from the PS2 versions.

So basically if you like GTA games you’ll love this. Me, it’s a kind of love-hate mix.

Firmware version: 2.00 or greater (i.e. all UK PSPs, as these shipped with firmware 2.0)

Links:

GTA – Liberty City Stories

Screenshots:

“Oo, Narnia. Do you think she’ll like this?”
“Don’t know. What do you do?”
The woman read through the back of the box and proudly proclaimed “You have to play it and kill the White Witch and you win.”
“Hmm… sounds like something she could do. What’s the age rating?”

Yay, they knew about age ratings! :) Then again the rest of the conversation went like this:

“7+”
“Uh…”
Both look at each other.
“I’m sure she’ll be fine”

And they bought it anyway but hey, you can only educate so far. Maybe their niece was a particularly intelligent 6-year-old.

As for the gameplay… technically, yes, she’s right. But are you playing against the White Witch in a chess game, or fighting through her minions with a sword, or facing her in a singing competition to the death or what? There’s a huuuuuge difference that non-gamers simply don’t get (although I do appreciate that most kids and quite a few adult gamers will play anything). It’s like going “Yeah, she likes books, she reads Harry Potter” and buying someone a collection of literary criticisms on fantasy novels. Yes, it’s a book and it has Potter in it, but it ain’t a book she’s likely to enjoy.

I realise that most games websites target hardcore gamers, quite rightly requiring a certain amount of assumed knowledge, but that means that there’s very little information out there readable by the newbie or non-hardcore gamer. I’m trying to address that somewhat with this website, mostly by ignoring industry politics and speculation, but the fact remains that it’s a very inaccessible industry. AskAboutGames.com is a very good start but I think more needs to be done. For a start, their Useful Sites are still “Coming Soon”, which may just be a reflection of my point that they seem to be about the only site around accessible to non-gamers.

There are ads for Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and GTA: Liberty City all over tube stations but I haven’t seen a single story or ad for AskAboutGames.com in mainstream media. I saw plenty of ads in MCV leading up to their launch though – why would readers of MCV need to ask about games? I didn’t see them mentioned at all in the games shops I was in this weekend and googling shows that vitually all the coverage they’ve had is on games websites. They should be advertising wherever games are sold and newspapers and magazines that normal people read – The Daily Mail, maybe. Or the Guardian’s weekly magazine. (Have they done this? I don’t read print very often but I haven’t noticed it). Even better would be a wide-reaching campaign like drinkaware.com that turns up on most alcohol ads – slap the URL on the bottom of every game ad so it’s impossible to miss.

Finally… it’s called AskAboutGames.com but there’s nowhere to ask about games! Huh? Contacts and Links gives you links to places like ELSPA, PEGI and the aforementioned “Useful Links” is empty, but in a section marked Contacts wouldn’t you put some, oh, I don’t know… contact info? (I do appreciate they’ve only been up for a week but is an email address so hard?) I won’t have time over the Christmas period but from January I shall be answering any games-related questions in our new and shiny forum.

Edit 2nd May 2007: There’s still nowhere to Ask About Games! And the Useful Sites page is still “Coming Soon”. I have emailed ELSPA and will update if I hear anything.

“We ask that customers be patient because we will be shipping hundreds of thousands of PSPs into retail in the coming weeks.”

Just imagine all those happy little tykes on Christmas morning, sitting in the living room with all the family, playing Grand Theft Auto: Liberty Cities on their shiny new PSPs whilst screaming at the screen:

“F$%£^ing police, I was only delivering some hookers to the picket line! What’s wrong with that? Ha, ha, die you f$%^&&$%ers, have some of my uzi 9 millimetre!”

The thought of it beings a tear to my eye. Bless.