I don’t like talking head documentary framing devices in fictional stories
I guess the talking head thing isn’t as annoying when it’s fake digital people doing it instead of real actors in a fake people pretending to be in a real documentary acting like non-actors
you can go in the options menu to select whether you want lethal or non-lethal take downs. that’s great, I always hate magical knockouts and tranq darts. though in this type of game the volume of goons to mow down is always going to be too high anyway too.
for some reason when I got in a car to go somewhere I couldn’t get the engine to turn over lol. it just keep making a whirring noise for like a whole minute. it was a plot car on the way to a plot place so it wasn’t like some random vehicle off the road.
I guess the bare mechanical bones of the game aren’t really much better or interesting than the last couple asscreeds or watchdogs or whatnots I played for an hour then quit but those games weren’t about playing as a unkillable black pulp hero going around murdering racist and exploitative white people and collecting communist propaganda posters, while listening to the guy on the radio talk about the war that’s been waged on black people for 400 years inbetween news bulletins about cops shooting black people with impunity etc. I hope your white cia buddy ends up being the final boss.
I think the open world experiment has failed though. when we were younger and foolish we all thought how great it’d be if you could only just have an entire city to run around in a game but really it turns out it’s not so great. like mmos nobody is taking advantage of the concept to make anything actually interesting. this is another one where the city is always just some giant blur around you while you speed your way to the next checkmark on the minimap. I don’t know what rockstar’s special powers are that they can make cities that are actually interesting to drive around and look at, for a while anyway, if it’s just their infinite budget or what, but it isn’t happening here for me, it’s not grabbing me. there’s some stores you can go in but all you can do is rob them. to me the city from baldur’s gate 2 still sticks out in my head more than any of these non-rockstar open world cities. also they didn’t learn from rockstar to make almost anything climbable. I’m always getting boxed in places and having to run around an entire block to get through to some area.
I like france in The Saboteur even though its decidedly a real budget game. it feels like a real place and so does exploring the French countryside! likewise, The Witcher III has a bunch of cities that feel like real places especially with being able to go in some places and finding quests that and stories that aren’t really part of the main or even side missions that force you to go wildly out of your way to explore
oh yeah, witcher 3 was pretty good about it
in la noire when your up in the hills at some crime scene you can look down on the city and realize it’s all actually out there and the killer is out there somewhere right now in some anonymous apartment, which is neat, but that was kind of the only purpose it ever served. it was too real, too sprawling and boring to drive through. but it was nice a game outside the open world game type genre got to have an open world setting
we did a whole podcast about this! haha, good times. That reminds me that for as real as Sleeping Dogs Hong Kong feels, it’s not really based on the real city at all (at least in layout) besides some landmarks and sutuff. kind of makes me want to visit the real city though, which like, none of rockstars cities have ever made me want to visit the place that they’re based on. like there’s no part of grand theft auto any game or la noire or anything that made me want to actually visit those cities or anything like that.
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crackdown doesn’t even pretend to be inhabitable space and is all the better for it
on one of those podcasts I talked about how crackdown has the most blatantly racist architecture and this is a good thing because it contributes to the cynical comic book narrative of the setting if russian gangs kind of obey a lamarckian impulse to spring into existence anywhere the architecture looks particularly soviet realist and industrial
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