Crossing The Same Bridge Twice

The period from February through to August this year was a gaming drought of unprecedented proportions. I'm hard pressed to cite anything from that season that made me excited to own gaming hardware. Eventually September unfolded like a wonderful and exotic flower and since then the nectar has flowed with overwhelming sweetness, but in the wasteland that went before I was forced to go back to some old titles and enjoy them that little bit harder.

Crackdown

Theoretically the goal with Crackdown was to take my points for the game from an anemic 620 up to its current height of 1050. But really it was completely rediscovering what I had already considered to be one of the greatest games produced this console generation. Just moving around in Crackdown is a pleasure that plays on the animal parts of one's brain; it's a symphony of acceleration and exhileration that no game before or since has really managed to nail.

On my first trip though Crackdown I'd noted that it was able to stimulate real-life vertigo when I ascended to particularly high locations; this time I was able to realise the role that the excellent environmental sound effects play in that achievement. I also discovered that the game's driving systems, horrible for the majority of the game, suddenly become intensely enjoyable when you level up the protagonists's driving skill to maximum levels, unlocking a wall-climbing SUV, a missile-spewing APC, and a sleek, elegant racer able to devastate vehicles in its path merely by touching them. Rather than grinding completed content to achieve the game's remaining goals, I found myself using the goals as an excuse to keep interacting with the content. Crackdown is a sublime argument enjoyable process making the idea of meaningful rewards irrelevant.

Saint's Row

There are no words for how much I love the single-player portion of the original Saint's Row but it had frustrated me how many of the game's achievements were tied to multiplayer content. On my first interaction with that content I had no fun, and assumed I was simply over the game; too saturated in it to enjoy this online extension. A more recent attempt to go bareknuckle with the online play has corrected me - the multiplayer is hideously designed, inherently terrible, and to the extent that matches can be found at all in the barren wastelands of XBox Live they are dominated by the kind of spawn-camping software-assisted griefers who flourish in such carelessly-created environments. After an hour or so of being farmed for someone else's achievements I gave it up forever as a bad idea. In turns out the same people who created the majesty of the single player game ARE perfectly capable of designing multiplayer that efficiently murders babies.

Left 4 Dead

Every time I say that quality trumps quantity, Left 4 Dead laughs at me. I came back to it to sample the new Crash Course DLC and the Survival mode. Crash Course, naturally, is great. It's only two levels but they're longer than what came on the disc, which makes for an interesting variation to the game's pacing. There's more of the hilarous off-handed dialogue and a couple more memorable set-piece battles. But once you start replaying it (and particularly if you're going for the Littlest Genocide achievement which involves killing 5,395 zombies exclusively within Crash Course's two maps) the deficiencies of the "director AI" once again become clear, and you find yourself learning possible witch and tank spawn points off by heart and slaughtering the same zombie hordes with mind-numbing regularity.

I ran right into the game's brick walls again, as well. To tackle Expert difficulty you need four players - no ifs and no buts - as the AIs just aren't up to the task. With no guild play or team persistence, attempting to educate random strangers on how to not play like douchebags is a thankless exercise in frustration, and as far as playing with friends either you have three friends with the game and a Live Gold subscription or you don't, and even then getting them online at the same time can be epic. The other DLC - Survival mode - quickly convinced me it was a waste of time. Nothing's less fun than losing because a team member screws up, and Survival mode, with its "fight until you drop" mentality, makes that an inevitability rather than a possibility.

Crackdown

While the rest of the world was busily getting to second base with Grand Theft Auto IV, I've been spending some quality time with a much earlier open-world game for the XBox 360 and finding that it's quite possibly the best thing since the invention of sherbet.

And by sherbet, I don't mean that frozen-dessert American nonsense. I'm talking about the sweet, sweet bicarbonate powder that bubbles on your tongue and makes small children twitch with pleasure. Crackdown is full of it.

Those who know me will be aware that I've become a bit blase towards Grand Theft Auto and its ill-begotten spawn. My complaints largely boil down to annoying missions, a poorly told story, and some interface issues. Plus I'd rather gargle nails than complete another set of ambulance side-jobs.

The genius of Crackdown is that it strips out all of that silliness and gets right down to letting you leap from building to building and blow up cars with rocket launchers. Let's face it - the unfettered interaction of rocket launchers with cars was easily the best bit of GTA, and here it's like they've built a theme park around the concept.

In Crackdown you play as, essentially, Supercop. The product of some sort of genetic tomfoolery, you're imbued with the ability to leap dozens of feat in the air, pick up and throw nearly anything that isn't nailed down, and nail criminals from astronomical distances using the most paltry of firearms.

It's awesome that you start the game as this kind of a demigod among men, but as you make your explosive progress through what's on offer you'll get even more ridiculous. Practicing your key skills (read: using them to kill criminals) will improve them, and before you know it you'll be ascending the outside of skyscrapers like a particularly nimble chimpanzee and crushing lawbreakers using their own stolen sports utility vehicles.

The conceit of the game is that your home of Pacific City is overrun by ill-tempered lawbreakers, and it's naturally up to you to dispense some brutal justice. There are three gangs, each with a leader and six underbosses, making for a total of 21 kingpins of the underworld to take down. The bosses are right there in the city from the moment you first enter the game world, and you can theoretically rough them up in any order you wish. Each is shacked up in a reasonably defensible position, like a housing project or a casino, with a small cadre of guards.

The game inserts structure by creating gang dependencies. For instance, one underboss of a gang may be that gang's gun-runner; take him down and you'll find the remainder of the gang is now poorly armed. Another leader might be in charge of recruits - once she's down there'll be less gangbangers on the streets and guards will respawn slower. In this way, the player is encouraged to work up to the well-defended overlords by eliminating flunkies and thereby kneecapping the gang's batttle abilities.

That aside, it's entirely up to the player how and when to tackle the 21 gang bosses. You can hit gang fortresses through the front door with guns blazing, wreak havoc from behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, or take the boss by surprise by leaping over the rank-and-file from the top of a nearby building.

There's a fantastic sense of freedom, but it comes with a price. Where a GTA game might typically clock in at over a hundred hours, you'll be done with Crackdown within twelve. Those are an excellent twelve hours, though. There's a clunky online-only co-op mode available to stretch things out, but that requires finding someone on XBox Live who's actually playing the game, and even then it's not as fun as you might think.

The game's greatest strength is probably its acrobatics gameplay. Leaping from building to building is absolutely thrilling - there's a real sense of height and gravity at work, and phenomenal draw distances mean that you when you're at the top of the city you'll be able to see anything under the horizon. It feels like they could have built the entire game just around this concept, and it's well-showcased by a number of optional "rooftop race" sidequests. As your leaping skill levels up you'll also end up running faster, to the point where you can eventually keep up with most vehicles on foot.

The "lifting-and-throwing" mechanic is potentially interesting; however in practice it's not very useful. The animation for lifting items is annoyingly long, and the way the game handles targeting means it's quite difficult to actually hit a criminal with anything you've lifted. There's really no good reason not to knock criminals off with your firearms, or even just deliver a well-placed kick to the face.

The weakest aspect of Crackdown is the driving. Firstly, it's not terribly useful for taking down gang members, as NPCs are quite adept at diving out of the way of fast moving vehicles. Secondly, the fast running speed that you'll quickly develop means that getting around on foot isn't much of a burden.

Car handling is squirrely at anything except the very highest levels of driving skill. It's almost impossible to stay on the road at any reasonable speed, and accidentally running down civilians will soon have your police-agency buddies out for your blood. What's worse, merely driving the car isn't enough to really advance your skills - to get better at driving you'll have to run criminals down, complete road races, or hit stunt markers. (Road races are often frustratingly long and hard, and most stunt markers are unobtainable without a lot of work setting up ramp-trucks and clearing roads of traffic.)

The whole game is narrated by an authoritarian "police contact", who turns in non-stop commentary on your exploits, praising you for daring maneuvers and amazing acrobatics, while brutally chewing you out when your mistakes lead to civilian deaths. It's an audio conceit that could easily have become annoying but yet somehow works well, partly because the comments on offer are varied, and partly through the high calibre of the voice acting.

Crackdown is a game that didn't get the commmendation it deserved at the time of its release; the most common complaint was "it's not GTA". Now that there's some next-gen GTA action available, I'd say it's time for 360 owners to revisit Crackdown on its own merits and appreciate just how incredibly fun this game can be.