|
|
Video Game Reviews: True Crime, America's Army, The Warriors Just too late for Christmas, Loosie takes a gander at a few relatively new video games. True Crime: New York City Sporting a plotline slimmer than that chick in Calvin Klein pantses, True Crime: New York City is a simplistic saga of a street thug who, after bodying about 20 dudes on a Christmas Day rampage, cleans up his act by becoming a dirty undercover cop. With open-ended gameplay and mondo-violent civilian carnage, it’s a clearly a Canal Street version of Grand Theft Auto series, but the unapologetic knockoff does have a couple strong suits. Most notable is a fantastic soundtrack stuffed with anthems by the likes of Nas, Mobb Deep, The Ramones and Interpol – all bullshit aside, this might be the best video game score ever. It’s also superficially ill, at least from a New Yorker’s biased and masturbatory perspective, to drive around Manhattan at high speeds while swerving past digitally-rendered landmarks and sending slugs whistling through Rockefeller Center. But once the novelty of pumping “Protect Your Neck” while spraying the Bridge & Tunnel guidos populating West Houston on a Saturday night wears off, the arcade-esque missions quickly become redundant and the game’s myriad faults rear their glitch-ridden domepieces. Needlessly complicated by a good cop/bad cop points systems (make a collar: +15, grease a pedestrian: -10) and an array of options for extorting, frisking and pummeling perps, True Crime lacks the layered depth of GTA’s whore-killing havoc and usually culminates in the authorities just shooting your car until it explodes. It’s undoubtedly too much to ask for, but we found it kind of lame that Activision did such a thorough job on the street mapping but didn’t make an equivalent effort at duplicating famed Gotham locales – pulling up on 6th Avenue and 8th Street to find a record store instead of Gray’s Papaya is just shameful. Also, you can’t take the bridge to Brooklyn, which thwarted our schemes for wetting up the Yemeni grocery on Classon and making off with armfuls of Utz chips and Crazy Horse.
We’ve all dreamt of killing Iraqi insurgents while simultaneously bestowing them with freedom, democracy and Qaeda-sympathizing bastard children. Those visions of sweet regime change blossom to fruition in America’s Army, a game originally designed as an online recruitment tool for the US military. It’s roots as a propaganda tool are hardly subtle: besides training Yoohoo-suckling gamers in the proper techniques for operating a grenade-launcher while storming a mosque as part of Alpha unit, there are plenty of “Yo, Joe!” scenes of hardworking troops doing courageous manly things while Rock music swirls. Like most first-person RPG’s, America’s Army allows you to blow up and shoot swarms of people you don’t know personally – except now it’s in the name of real live patriotism and not just defending against mantis-limbed aliens who drop from the heavens in condom-shaped hovercrafts intent on enslaving the human race. Unfortunately, like apple pie with a scoop of heavy-handed foreign policy, the combat is also traditional and, consequently, often slow-moving; you maneuver around dusty fields with caution, take cover from rampaging jihadists by lying prone on the ground and primarily employ unglamorous small arms. Plus, we never managed to unlock the levels where you lose your legs to a roadside IED or stack up captured insurgents into homoerotic naked pyramids. A reasonably enjoyable and realistic game, players of America’s Army nonetheless run the risk of a someday snapping out of a brainwashed catatonia with the realization that they’re crouching in a Tikrit sandstorm with half their skull spread out across their right shoulder like an eggshell and currant preserve pate. Still, this is a wise investment as a historic novelty to look back at in 10 years when America has been turned over to U.N control and fifty-foot banners of Kofi billow from every building.
Props to Rockstar Games for creating the perfect marketing storm for their The Warriors title (not to be confused with Ron Artest’s Allure-laden label, Tru Warier); Williamsburg hosted a Warriors-themed Halloween jamboree, artsy theaters screened the remastered film and everyone and their Baseball Fury-loving mother had the shit lined up on their Netflix queue. Living up to the hype, the video game adaptation starts with the glorious “Can you dig it” assassination of Cyrus in the Bronx before flashing back to the gang’s formative years as a small Coney Island outfit. With sort of a 3-dimensional Double Dragon steelo, you switch between different members of the crew to beat up cops, jook pedestrians for their ducats, steal car radios and generally engage in grimy-ass, lowbrow crime scenarios, many of which take place in the outer boroughs (holler at the Yemenis on Classon). The main benefit of swapping characters at every level is that you don’t have to always play with flour-faced Charli Baltimore-look-a-like artfag Rembrandt, who has no hand skills to speak of. The game’s strategy rarely gets more complex than smashing shit and instructing your minions to also smash shit, but it’s dope regardless. Read more articles in Life » |
What if Rupert's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal is just the beginning? Coming to grips with being famous on the world wide web. A reexamination of St. Patrick's worthiness as the don dada of Irish sainthood. The War Report: Storch versus Timbaland, Chimps versus Humans, Dick Cheney versus Iran. Compared to the thrill of going to war, getting out of one is a tiresome and humiliating business. The Game's new album is pretty good, Fabolous hires a private gumshoe and all Republicans are gay. |
