GT5: the other shoe drops

I didn't necessarily come right out and say it in yesterday's post, but at the time I wrote it I was still feeling optimistic about Gran Turismo 5.  I had legitimate issues with how the game was letting me progress, and how inadequate I felt about picking an appropriate vehicle, but I also knew that I hadn't really given the game a truly fair shake - I knew what I did not know, so to speak. 

And so last night I spent another hour with it.  I did some of the Special Events; I raced some go-karts, some NASCARs, and did some time trials on the Nurburgring with an old BMW.  I raised my level from 2 to 7, and raised my bank account from $6000 to over $100,000. 

And you know what?  For all of its positive qualities, GT5 is downright aggravating.  It's obnoxious and arrogant.  It's emasculating and frustrating.  I turned the game off because I didn't want to break my controller in half, and because I didn't want to go to bed angry.  A driving game should not make you angry. 

I am still in the beginning areas of the career mode, and I will apparently remain unable to participate in at least half the races available to me because I have no idea what kind of car I should be driving - and, indeed, there are a few events in this beginner tier that require cars that I don't even have access to.  This makes no sense.  The information that the game gives out on each car might as well be copied and pasted from the sales brochure; it doesn't actually tell me anything objectively.  The used car market does not offer any information as to what cars are available for a given event, and the process of backing out from the market to the event itself is laborious because it takes between 5-10 seconds to load each menu.  One could argue that I could alleviate this problem by going to the desired event and writing down the necessary requirements with a pen on a piece of paper, but I would counter-argue by saying that I'm playing a fucking driving game and writing shit down should not enter into the equation.  It's one thing to write something down if I'm playing an adventure game and I need to solve a puzzle or remember where something is.  But when I put in GT5, it should be obvious that all I want to do is get in a car and drive. 

This could be a long winter.

Weekend Recap: the holiday that wasn't

If all had gone according to plan, this post wouldn't exist.  The plan was to leave Thursday morning to go up to my dad's house for Thanksgiving, and to eventually return to the apartment on Saturday night, and Sunday would be a day of holiday decorating and football.  Instead, my wife had the flu and I had a nagging head cold, and we stayed home.  And so I played a lot of video games. 

In list form, in descending order of time played:

• finished Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
• got a few hours into Gran Turismo 5
• kept dabbling in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
• went and bought Burnout Paradise on the PC thanks to yet another ridiculous Steam sale and got back into it very, very quickly
• Train Conductor 1/2 on the iPhone is insanely addictive
• played 2 games of NBA JAM HD with my brother, for old time's sake
  
• and some Pinball FX2 with the wife.

I will give AssBro a more thorough examination later, once I've had a bit more coffee.  But I can say, now, that I think it's the best game in the franchise, and it will most likely wind up at #3 in my Top 10 of 2010. 

As for GT5; I'll be the first person to admit that what I know about cars could be inscribed on the rim of a shot glass with a dull Sharpie.  But I really love driving games, strangely enough, and while I tend to prefer crazy, insanely fast stuff like Burnout, I have been known to get sucked into a Forza game for hours and hours.  (I do have an aversion to NASCAR, though, which is probably similar to my aversion to country music and the tea party movement.)  I needed to see what GT5 was all about for several reasons:

1. I haven't played a game on my PS3 since I finished FF13;
2. The last time I played a GT game was on my friend's PS1;
3. I am a graphics whore (which reminds me, at some point I need to talk about this fascinating article, which I got from the lovely and talented Caro), and if there's one thing that the GT franchise is famous for, it's graphics; 
4. I loved the hell out of Forza 3, and felt obligated to see if GT5 was better; and
5. After 5 years of development and endless delays, the curiosity was killing me.

After 2 hours of playtime, here's what I can say about GT5.

1. It's prettier than Forza 3, generally.  I've read lots of people who have been complaining about how horrible some of the cars look; to my eyes, it looks great.  It's worth finishing a race in last place just so that you can watch the pretty, pretty replays, which are utterly convincing and gorgeous.  Some people complain that it's bland; I've only been on a few tracks, and driven a handful of cars, so I can't quite speak to that.  One could maybe argue that it's a little sterile, or perhaps a little too pristine.  
2. Is it as fun as Forza 3, though?  Not sure.  It's certainly more accessible than I was expecting it to be, but that's relative - when you're buying a new (or used) car, the game doesn't tell you what the car's Top Speed is.  When you're like me and know nothing of horsepower and weight and acceleration, not giving out a car's Top Speed is basically a slap in the dick, and I ended up losing a ton of races because I had unwittingly bought the wrong car.
3. Further to that last point, the game doesn't really dole out new cars and rewards the way Forza does.  I'm still only in the beginner tier of races in the career and at least half of the events I'm looking at require vehicles that I don't have, and I'll have to retry events I've already won just to earn enough coin to afford an applicable vehicle - a vehicle that I'll probably only drive once or twice until I get something better.  Seems odd.
4. I haven't raced online, but the fact that the game's single-player campaign was so horribly fucked up because too many people were crushing the game's servers is absolutely unforgivable, especially for a game of this magnitude.  And if the game's developer is telling you to pull your PS3 offline so that you can play single-player without running into problems, that's just absurd.  PlayStation fanboys love talking shit about Xbox Live and how you have to pay for it when PSN is free, but file this under "You Get What You Pay For" as Exhibit 375. 

I remain intrigued, though, and there's so much content that it's sure to get me through the winter.  Although I may pull out Forza 3 again, just to compare/contrast.  My gut reaction right now, though, is that Forza feels more generous and accessible; GT5 feels more authoritative and legitimate. 

I was really looking forward to NBA JAM HD, and when my brother came over we finally got to try it out.  My brother had a Sega Genesis as a kid and we played NBA JAM endlessly.  The new game basically feels like the old game, which is great.  The problem is that it's really meant to be played with someone sitting next to you on the couch, and my brother lives in DC (and doesn't own an Xbox).  So, while it's tremendous fun in the right conditions, it seems pointless on its own.  I felt a little sad sending it back to Gamefly, but it is what it is.

AssBro final thoughts will go up either later today or tomorrow.

Disappointing Sequels, and a Rock Band Wishlist

I've done just about everything I can do in Beatles: Rock Band without losing my friggin' mind, which is good, because there's other stuff out there that needs to be played.

The good:

DiRT 2

The first DiRT is still one of my favorite driving games, ever. As a confessed graphics whore, it was (and still is) jaw-dropping; it's the game I was playing both before and after I bought my 40" HDTV, and for a long time was the game I put in when I wanted to show off the TV. But that aside, the game was a complete package, oozing with polish; the career mode was well designed, the driving model was fun and accessible, the course design was varied and plentiful... even the menus were interactive and fun to play around with. And the replays... wow.

DiRT 2 has some mighty big shoes to fill, then, as far as I'm concerned. And so even though I've played quite a bit of it over the last few days and I've enjoyed my time with it a great deal, I'm not entirely sure that it fills them. It's not a bad game, by any means; it's still incredibly polished, the graphics are even better, the driving model is still fun.... but the package itself feels a bit... small. I haven't done a count, but it certainly feels like there's a significantly fewer amount of tracks to race on than in the first game, which is a bit of a bummer. With a graphics engine that gorgeous, I want to see more than the same tracks over and over again. The addition of an in-game rewind - in order to correct mistakes that would otherwise cost you the race - is really the biggest change to the game, and it does come in handy although most of the time I still end up just restarting the whole race if something catastrophic happens. The game has an achievement tracker and also keeps track of other statistics that can reward you with extra XP, and that's certainly much appreciated. I'm just... I don't know. Perhaps my expectations were a bit too unreasonable.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2

Speaking of sequels with high expectations, I played M:UA2 last night for about 20 minutes and got thoroughly depressed with how shitty it was. I suppose I could've soldiered on, but my gaming time is at a premium these days and I'd rather have a good time instead of slogging through something that ought to be much better. The camera is frequently pulled out way too far, making it hard to see what I'm doing (or even what character I'm playing), and there are certain glitches in the special powers that drove me crazy - there's an Iron Man/Wolverine combo move that I tried using, and each time Wolverine automatically faced the wrong way, resulting in a waste of accumulated power. Right now this is in the running - along with Puzzle Quest: Galactrix - as my biggest disappointment of 2009. Sometimes you only need a few minutes with something before you realize that you're wasting your time.

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Was on a forum the other day and the topic du jour was guessing the next band to receive the full deluxe Rock Band treatment. It seemed pretty obvious to everybody that the answer to that question is Led Zeppelin. Having seen now how both Rock Band and Guitar Hero treat their special packages, one would hope that the surviving members of Zep would steer towards Rock Band, but I'm sure it'll ultimately come down to the franchise that pays them more up front. But it got me thinking about what other packages I'd pay money for:

• U2.
  U2 is the reason why I decided to teach myself how to play guitar in the first place. But leaving my personal preference aside, U2 is still one of the biggest bands in the world, they have a recognizable mythos, they have a vivid and memorable visual style, and they have an incredibly solid catalog of work; I'd easily be able to find 45 U2 songs worth playing.
  
  
• Pink Floyd.
  Another mythic band with beloved albums and distinct visual flair. That said, there's a few things standing in the way - for one thing, I'm not sure that David Gilmour and Roger Waters will ever agree on anything ever again, and for another, a lot of their music is on the mellow side; it might be hard to stand up and play Pink Floyd songs for a few hours, even if you're on the right drugs.

• The Smiths / The Cure.
  Johnny Marr is one of the most criminally overlooked guitarists of the 20th century, and I would kill to be able to pretend to play his guitar parts, mostly because they're so difficult to play on a real guitar. Morrissey sings out of tune all the time, though, so I'm guessing it might be difficult to score. But whatever - they're the Smiths, they fucking rule. And as long as the 30+ crowd is looking to get nostalgic and depressed via plastic instruments, they might as well go all the way and throw in a bunch of Cure songs as well, to keep both sides of the Atlantic satisfied. I suppose I could be satisfied with a gigantic 20-song DLC package with all the great late 80's / early 90's "college" music, though, so let's just leave it at that.