What's your game?

Yes, I’m a slackass

I’ll not waste your time with puny excuses for not updating.

Lately, I’ve been playing a nice mix of console games and PC games. I reviewed both Will Rock and Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic for the September issue of the magazine, so they absorbed much of my time. The remainder of my free game time has been spent playing Midnight Club II on the Xbox and Planetside on the PC.

I’m just about the only person in North America that thinks GTA III and Vice City are poorly constructed games. In theory, I really like the open endedness of an expansive city environment, but the GTA games just don’t deliver that. Instead you have a totally linear series of missions set in a large world. Really, GTA is more of a gangster rple-playing game disguised as a driving game. There’s a bunch of side quests, but the only way to advance the story is to complete the linear series of missions. If you get stuck on a mission, you’re screwed. There’s no way to move forward.

Midnight Club II takes the same type of large environment and adds true non-linear gameplay to it. At its heart, Midnight Club II is a basic arcade racer, but Rockstar set the racer in a large city and made advancement non-linear. Once you get through the first mission, you progress through the game by cruising around town and flashing your lights at other street racers to signal that you want to race. As you beat other racers, you unlock new cars and new special abilities for your car. If you have trouble with one race, you just go back to cruising around the city and avoid the racer that gives you trouble.

It’s an extremely enjoyable experience, and its easy for newbies and veteran racers to excel at. Setting the game in the underground world of illegal street racers lets you race everything from motorcycles to 70s muscle cars all over Paris, L.A., and Toyko. It’s extremely cool.

Planetside continues to entertain. I’ve picked up some better weapon certifications, and am enjoying the game even more. Because you can unlearn different certs, I’ve been able to try several different vehicles and weapon combos. I’ve just about settled on a combo that lets me haul my squadmates wherever we’re going in an air transport, and still do some pretty serious damage when we get where we’re going.

That’s about it for now. I’m going to sit down this week with the PC version of Midnight Club, and see what’s different. I’d really like to get an Xbox or Gamecube to PC USB adapter before then, so I can use a controller with analog triggers to control the accelerator and brake. Anyone have suggestions?