MS(g)B Played Games!- Haze, Bad Company, GTA4

Yeah, so it could be easily argued that the gaming industry has gone on an FPS kick and kept putting out ho-hum titles to appeal to an audience that thinks the FPS is the grown up platform game. Remember the days when platform games were hot? Like PSX days: Pandemonium, Skull Monkeys, One (that was a great game though), Armageddon, Crash Bandicoot. I guess it was Crash and Mario that really made gaming companies go, "That makes money. That's what we're making!"
And then that trend died out and there wasn't really only one main genre because people got tired of it, I guess, or just the fact that we got into a war and suddenly the military became more interesting and relevant made "kid's" games like Donkey Kong or Banjo Kazooie less appealing. Or FPSs just fucking look and feel much better nowadays and actually started putting in plots! I dunno. Millions of reasons could be drawn for the shift, but I think I can make the argument that the market is oriented towards First Person Shooters, and since I quit in the middle of No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R., and, especially kill.switch (oh, by the way, there's a VR concept like Assassin's' Creed's within kill.switch) I've really been tired of them.
An FPS is kind of inherently limited. You find cover. You aim for the head. You shoot, hoping to isolate the amount of enemies that can hit you while you hit them. Kill.switch and what I saw of Gears of War ground this formula into every level. You could call it Shoot-Grinding.
Granted, all video games could kind of be reduced to three or so elements. Ex: In GTA you drive to a location and shoot a target or chase a target and then shoot them then evade the cops what have grown an interest in you due to your sociopathy (love that the love interest in GTA4 constantly makes fun of you for being a sociopath). What's really fucking fun about GTA is the atmosphere, your character's dialog, the strategic choice of weapons, the fact that there's usually much more than chasing and shooting, or whatever. GTA is a blockbuster action movie. GTA is Die Hard, Reservoir Dogs, all the really choice bits of cinema fall into your hands.

So, what is Haze? From the other reviews I've read, Haze, in terms of its plot and character development, is Last Action Hero. Just like Last Action Hero parodied all the top detective action movies but was panned for being a bad action film, Haze is a game so satirical of other FPSs that it ends up reinforcing their cliches.
It starts off really well. You, a directionless college student, have joined up with a Private military corporation that essentially acts as world police, and you juice up with your fellow comrades, who would fist-pound after they raped and shot your mother, to take down the rebel troops in the area. Gameplay relies on you juicing up because you're fighting in a jungle and working for a corporation that doesn't favor camouflage like the rebels you're fighting. The magical Nectar somehow makes you shoot better while fading out all the nasty bits like the blood on your hands.
Arguably, the best sequence in the game is when this system breaks down and you are forced to deal with Nectar withdrawal (similar to GTA4: DUI or the many alcoholic withdrawal sequences in Condemned 2) while rebels still try to kill your brainwashed ass, and in a moment of clarity, you realize that you are committing unjustified murder, and your superior officer has reduced all native human life to "animals" or "empty hands" (what is an empty hand? A hand that could hold a gun, but isn't at the moment) and deemed them all worthy of execution.
I mean, most of that was in the silly, live-action trailer . I should mention that small touches were made to the trailer's exposition and that the voice-actor completely changed, but it's all mostly there, so...what's left?
Well...like ten hours of pretty uninteresting gameplay. As a rebel, your accuracy is better, you're faster, and you no longer rely on Haze to extend your life a little longer so you can recover, your health just comes back at a quick and steady rate. You are an unstoppable killing machine. How boring.
Even if somehow you die, it's probably just 'cause you were fucking around for a little entertainment. As a Mantel trooper, there was plenty of entertainment shooting your squadmate's Nectar regulator and watching the dude flip out, shooting, sometimes blowing themselves up, and screaming things like, "I'm gonna kill them all! I'm gonna kill the world!" or "I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!" As a rebel, your teammates are morons and say the same four things over and over, "Remember your promise to Merino!" or "Mantel dies today!" or "As Merino says, today is the day Mantel dies!" As a rebel, you never talk with any of the rebels besides the leader, so you don't get the same sort of awkward bonding experience you got working for Mantel. Your only social contact is with Merino, and he mostly just preaches at you or yells at you for fucking up. At some point you realize that working for the rebels is just as morally questionable as working for the Mantel troops (see the Zero Punctuation review ), but your character is too much of a pussy (which I like, actually, because it makes sense and it's different from the usual FPS trooper) to tell Merino off, so the storyline just kind of stops until the end where it's abruptly halted by Merino using the same line your commander back at Mantel did: "[Mantel] were just animals!"
And, no, they weren't. Yeah, some of the boys who signed up for Mantel were jocks or whatever, but others, like your character, were just confused and looking to do some good for the world. It's Iraq. It's Vietnam. It's Korea. It's Bay of Pigs. It's Salavador Allende and Chile.
And so, Haze just kind of reiterates the lessons learned in those conflicts, and applies them in a way meant to satirize first person shooters, but the game is still just like them. You still kill people for questionable reasons, enemies still kind of disappear, and it isn't even fun to play after a while. John Fu and I kept trying to fall asleep.
I had a similar problem with Bioshock because the enemies in Bioshock are just people. Your average, everyday Joe who just wanted to make a buck but got dragged into a violent world of harvest adam or be harvested. They say depressing things. You can tell they're morally conflicted by their calls to you, ex: "Jesus loves me, this is so. For the bible tells me so." or "Why don't you think I'm pretty anymore?" It's haunting to kill people this emotionally damaged for your own survival and revenge. I was really upset.

_________End of review, this post is really long___________

In contrast, there's Bad Company, which is also kind of a satire in plot, but much tighter in terms of gameplay and kind of throws all morality out the window...in a fun way. Yes, you point and shoot, but fire too much and your aim goes to shit. Leave cover and get shot too much and you will fucking die. Get hurt, and stab yourself in the heart with adrenaline (or something) to regain health, but use it wisely because it takes a while to recharge, and get ready to fucking die because you deal with a lot of fucking tanks, and run your fucking ass whenever you see a helicopter. Oh, and also, navigate the huge terrain of Russia and surrounding lands, exploring to get collectibles and gold packages, but be on guard because enemies spawn randomly. All this reminds me of Assassin's Creed.
Bad Company also reminds me of .hack in the fact that it's structured like an MMO, but plays like an FPS. Add the fact that you have several choices of vehicles to navigate the whole of Russia, and Bad Company even looks like GTA. Whoa! Great! A military game that looks like you're actually part of a big war campaign like Market Garden or D-Day instead of being mission-based and all over the place like Call of Duty 4.
Now, on top of that, add the plot of Three Kings. Bad Company is the misfit outfit, the soldiers that no one else wants, and as the most expendable company, they get the shittiest, most dangerous orders, so...why put up with that shit? Why not steal the gold of an asshole, badguy mercenary whose sending troops against the US?
Why the fuck not, indeed?
Bad Company is fun in its gameplay, its story, and its characters' intermittently cavalier and incredulous attitude towards destruction and treason, and because it they seem like actual rational human beings instead of mouths for Uncle Sam's dick. These aren't the assholes in other military games who does his job for his country or to stop terrorism, no, these guys are Catch 22, they want to do good for their country sure, but their country better do good by them too.
The pacing's great. The scenarios are also great. The weapons are diverse and fun. In-game cinemas meld practically seamlessly with the gameplay. There are no continues, you just get moved back to the checkpoint like you got med-evac'd at the last moment, so everything you did just before you died stays, which is good or bad based on the situation (Ex: You killed a tank, but died while doing it or you tried to kill a tank and got your vehicle blown up in the process so now you have no vehicle to fight the tank with).
I really liked it. It was short, I guess. There's multiplayer, but I'm really picky about that shit , so I didn't try it. There was no co-op, but it was fucking fun, and, sorry, whoops, sorry. I forgot to mention that most everything is destructible...wait for it...EVEN TREES! Oh my god! Trees go down like a fat bitch on roller skates! You want to get at an enemy behind cover? Shoot that motherfucker's cover and it'll explode like diarrhea! Now you've got a shot, and your enemy's left holding his dick in the rubble that used to protect him.
What's bad about this? Well, apparently it's a trade-off. Cover blows up, but you can't shoot through it like you can in Call of Duty 4, and explosions look pretty ugly and you have to be pretty fucking precise to kill an enemy with explosives.
Finally, Bad Company also provides you with tools to use, which vary from power tools to repair your vehicles to C4 or an RPG to devices that call in air strikes! This adds another interesting element to the game as not only do the air striker caller thingies require you to take the time away from cover to target w/e thing you want to explode, but also, sometimes the air strike machines require you to guide the missile in to whatever you were trying to explode, which can be challenging as shit sometimes, so don't fuck up or that tank's got you dead.

________________3rd Review________________

JFU & LBJ also played GTA4, and I've mentioned it several times throughout, but I couldn't really do it justice to review it. The aiming system is much improved. The explosions are beautiful. The environments are beautiful. The character models are pretty ugly. The story has taken a Haze-esque approach in casting Niko as a sort-of reluctant anti-hero (WOW! What a cool concept!) in that he is a war-shocked human being, who would feel much better if people stopped asking him to kill others, but still wants to make it in the big city for himself and his family. Reviewers complained about the hanging-out system, but it's easy enough to turn it off, or enjoyable because the people are very likable, especially Little Jacob, or they're bitches like the Irish girl you date, and when they drink they break down into severely telling moments ("Just a stupid, self-indulgent, cunt!" or "I hate myself!"). Reviewers also complained about how easy it is to run from the cops, and fuck them 'cause it's not and I like the system better. Like Assassin's Creed, getting the cops' attention spans a perimeter search displayed on your radar. If you manage to escape that perimeter without being re-discovered by the cops or committing new crimes to get more attention, your warning level goes down, but the cops are everywhere. It is hard as shit to steal a car or fire a gun without them seeing you. Random crime really doesn't pay unless you're out for the cop rampage. Everything else is everything that the GTA series always delivers: hilarious radio, hilarious advertisements, billions of hair-raising scenarios (favorites were shooting cops or gangsters up in a public housing building or robbing banks), great characters, great dialog, great voice-acting, and a new take on the crime world.
And, finally, something new to GTA4: a conscience. Several missions let you choose whether to kill or leave a person alive, and anyone you've shot so they fall down to the ground can get back up begging for their lives, so even though you've just slaughtered a warehouse full of people, presumably they could still get medical attention and be OK. Your character has a conscience if you don't, and will often times express how numb he feels from his experiences in war and in Liberty City, and know that his actions are morally-reprehensible, but continue on despite...
It's a great game. One of the most moving games I've ever played, and, I would say, next to GTA3 is the best game in the series so far.

i'M Soon out of video(g)ames i wanted to Buy or play,

Lynny Boj

P.S.

"Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaa boiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee"