The Past and Times of Yore: Half-Life 2, Episode 2, caves, bugs, slugs and the great outdoors

Release Date: October 10th 2007
Genre:First-person Shooter
Developer: Valve
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac OS X, Linux, Shield Portable
Players: 1
Classification: M (Mature)

I hadn’t realised it had been so long since I reviewed Half-Life 2 Episode 1 as it’s been a whole year and a bit since (7 years since my Half-Life 2 review) so I guess it’s High time I get the series review finished though to be perfectly honest the way things are going with the mysterious third sequel I think I’ll have more than enough time before that comes along. As you can probably guess Episode 2 is a direct continuation of Episode 1 running with the same story (and game engine) of Half-Life 2, this was the last of the ‘Episodes’ of Half-Life 2 and the ending has sparked huge anticipation of a supposed Half-Life 3 as well as much quarrelling, complaining and speculating of when it will finally arrive. I’m not going to comment on much about the gameplay or graphics as we all know this is the same as Half-Life 2 so I will concentrate on the adventure inc the story, location and new friends and enemies.

A Hunter, one of the new enemies in Episode 2

So we when we left previously our two heroes Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance they were speeding away from City 17 on the caboose of a train watching the Citadel after the events of Episode One, the citadel then explodes and everything goes black, Gordon then wakes up to Alex freeing him with the Gravity Gun  out of the wreckage of the train, miraculously alive again. The storyline for the game as before is divided up into chapters of which once completed you can re-do at any time. The first chapter To the White Forest  has Gordon and Alyx setting off to the White Forest base to deliver a data packet to Dr Kleiner and Eli Vance who are there currently. I must admit it was good to get outside after being indoors for most of Episode 1 and also in the great outdoors too similar to the coastal run you did in Half-Life 2. 

The spectacular view of the Citidel from the train wreck

 Though this scenery was short lived as after battling through a Zombie infested mine Alyx is injured by a new Combine Hunter enemy which you don’t get to fight just yet and then you are saved by a Vortigaunt who takes you through the beautiful Antlion caves, these caves are quite a sight to behold as they are beautifully rendered and lit with the light shining off the rocks. It’s here that you first meet Antlion Grubs and Workers, the grubs being like fireflies as their glowing bodies serve as the primary source of light in the caves and they are pretty disgusting as you have to hit them with your crowbar or step on some to get past, the workers are new version of Antlion that hurls acid at you that was easy enough to dodge, I had great fun playing hunter with my shotgun and watching them explode when shot was very satisfying.


I go hunting through the Antlion Caves

The next chapter has one of my favourite moments in the Half-Life series, you are led to a resistance outpost in an abandoned mine where you and two other resistance fighters have to defend a group of Vortigaunts who are trying to heal Alyx who is lying on a table. The resistance fighters have a sort of Antlion Detector system going which uses red lights to tell how many Antlions are approaching, the more lights, the more antlions and there is four tunnels they can come from, why they chose this place to heal Alyx I would not know. You are given access to reprogrammed Hopper Mines and Sentry Guns though not quite enough to hold off the antlions by themselves though I was still pleased by this as I love Sentry guns with their auto-firey goodness and I had lots of fun repositioning them accordingly until they both exploded L. It looked bad but then a whole party of other Vortigaunts came and you kicked ass with them, truly a great moment.


Hold the Line! man watching this makes me want to do it again, need more sentry guns

You then follow your Vortigaunt companion deeper into the mines to find an Antlion Larvae to save Alyx and I saw quite a few sights along the way as well as doing a brilliant cat-and-mouse sequence with an Antlion Guardian, when you get back you get a brief visit from The G-Man just before Alex is revived as he says that the was waiting for a time when the Vortigaunts were otherwise occupied (as per their previous hinderance of him in Episode 1) and gives a cryptic warning to the sleeping Alex before she wakes up.

The Antlion Spawning Cave

The next chapters involve exiting the mine and another car driving and stopping sequence similar to the coastal “Highway 17” chapter in Half-Life 2 except this time you have Alyx with you. There was a sequence I liked in “Freeman Pontifex” where you searched through a mining town with Alex supporting you from above with a sniper rifle, really saved some ammo that time hah. The “muscle” car you eventually find has more bodywork this time and room for two people and boy was that thing fun to drive, jumping over bridges and hills though it was only in short bursts as it was always over so quick.

Shotgun!, oh wait I'm driving

 The “Riding shotgun” chapter was good as this was the first time you faced Hunters which are bloody fast and tough to kill though not when you run into them of course :D, you also have probably the closest encounter ever with an Advisor where you can see what they do to humans first hand. You fight more combine soldiers and Hunters and a Hunter-Chopper along the way. The next chapter has a scene where you duck-and-cover through a junkyard with an autogun firing over your head and then get in a massive fight with combine soldiers and Hunters in the White Forest Inn, you also meet Dog again who defeats a strider for you.

The Combine Advisor in the barn

Dog wrestles a Strider

Once you finally get to White Forest you are reunited with Dr. Kleiner and Eli Vance and also a new character Dr. Magnussen, another former Black Mesa Scientist who you saw previously through radio/visual contact, I almost liked him as much as Dr Breen with his grumpy and aloof demeanor. White forest is a large Resistance base where Dr. Kleiner and Magnussen are organising the launch of a special rocket which they plan to use, in conjunction with the satellite array launched during the events of Half-Life and Alyx's data packet, to close the Combine superportal. This part has a lot of speculation for the supposed sequel, Kleiner and Vance decode the message that Gordon and Alyx brought and it appears to be a message from Judith Mossman in an arctic location saying that she has found the Borealis, which is a ship that contained a secret project started by the Aperture Science company who we know from the Portal series. Kleiner and Vance are at odds for the first time, the former saying they should use the technology to fight the combine, the latter saying they should destroy it to avoid another Black Mesa Incident, I feel like this may be a choice in the future, woo that’d be a first for Half-Life. 

The crew discussing Dr. Mossman's discovery iof the Borealis

This is where Alyx speak the “unforeseen consequences” line to Eli without knowing it and then Eli privately tells Gordon that the G-Man spoke those same words to him just before the Black Mesa Incident.  You then have to defend the base from a huge combine attack of Hunter and Striders and combine troops in which I used the muscle car to run over the hunters and the special Magnusson Device which is a sort of sticky bomb that needs to be shot to blow up, in order to defeat the Striders which is difficult to do and had a bit of trouble this time with a Strider almost reaching the base but managed to finish it.


Defending the base from Striders using the Magnussen Device and running over Hunters.

The rocket is then launched and successfully destroys the combine portal effectively stopping the remaining combine from receiving any reinforces from other combine worlds. There is a brief celebration then comes the very climactic final scene where Gordon and Alex are about to embark on a journey to the Borealis in a helicopter and we all know what happens then, if you don’t then play the damn game, all of them if you haven’t, play the entire series do it now! I can’t stress this enough if you haven’t played any of the Half-Life series you should definitely play through the original Half-Life, then 2 then the episodes as it’s a brilliant experience.

The Portal is finally closed

Saying that I can’t remember whether that was the second or third time I’ve done that, possibly the third and although sometimes it can be a bit of a grind, I purposefully play it on easy to get through some of the repetitive shooting of mass amounts of combine soldiers quicker but it’s amazing each time as the graphics are great and the menu design is so click that I sometimes wanna play it just to use it again as there’s nothing like it in other games really.

That slick menu

 So that marks the end of the Half-Life 2 series of games with the exception of Lost Coast but that’s barely worth a mention, now we sit back and wait (patiently) for the next installment. Frankly I don’t know which I’d prefer, for it to be the last in the series and explain everything or fore there to be many, many more but I expect the latter.

JD

Hurry up Mr. Freeman

The Past and Times of Yore: LittleBigPlanet, multi-lane 2D platforming fun with friends

Release Date: November 3rd 2008
Genre: Action, Platformer
Developer: Media Molecule
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Platform: Playstation 3
Players: 1-4
Classification: E (Everyone)

If I could think of a list of the most well-known Playstation 3 games or characters, Sackboy and the LittleBigPlanet (LBP) series immediately comes to mind. I was no latecomer to the series mind you, I did play the original LittleBigPlanet game over a long period of time at friends houses or anywhere else there was a Playstation3 as they seemingly all had it. But as you know I’m not much of a console gamer and only played the game rarely until I got my own PS3 and decided to play the damn thing by myself finish the Story mode once and for all. Of course I knew this was supposed to be a game you played with friends as throughout the game there was always these various challenges that you needed two or more players to do and I have had to get anyone around, housemate, friends etc to help with them. But I was determined to do it in any case as I had really wanted to see the whole game for a while and at least finish it myself and get some closure. I don’t have many games on PS3 as it will possibly be the last console I’ll ever own though I really need to spend more time off the computer whether it’s movies or console, my love of Emulators keeps me from going back to the Playstation and Super Nintendo, my dislike of the Nintendo 64 controller keeps me from playing that console, and of course you know from my last post I have tried twice to emulate the Playstation 2 to no avail. There’s also Skate 2 which I am trying to avoid playing again as it’s one of those games you have a love/hate relationship with and all of my other PS3 games I’ve now played many times through or had enough of so that just left LittleBigPlanet.

The "first Steps" level in the Gardens, unfortunately I am unable to get any screenshots or videos from the game so the majority of the media you'll see on the page is courtesy of Zebra Gamer's Youtube playthough which was incredibly helpful

Anyway so in case you haven’t heard LittleBigPlanet is an action platformer set in a 3D world where you move to the right in a 2D platformer fashion while avoiding obstacles including traps, pitfalls and other objects which can impede your progress. The difference between the traditional 2D platformers such as the Mario games is that LBP actually has 3 or 4 different “lanes” that you can run and jump in, for example on most long flat surfaces where you start a level you can jump to the background or foreground path which is necessary to pass many obstacles and complete many puzzles. Another difference is LBP introduces and makes heavy use of the characters ability to “grab” things like felt and sponge type objects and also other players using the R1 button. This allows you to pull objects and jump and swing from ones that are dangling from strings, they also provide a way of holding on while you are on a moving object. The story behind the game is that when people dream their dreams get stored in a world called LittleBigPlanet which is maintained by the Creator Curators, one of which The Collector has turned against the rest and is stealing the other curators creations and not sharing them with the world. Throughout the game you help the various curators across the world of LBP which is basically a miniature version of earth made out of felt. 

LittleBigPlanet, in all it's felt glory, this shot was taken from the intro so I'm not quite sure what the arrow is for.

Each of the Curators worlds is set in a particular region for example the first curator The King’s domain is the The Gardens and it is located in Europe, the second Curator Zola is a lion and his domain is The Savannah which is on the African continent, I was hoping there would be domain in Australia but I was unfortunately disappointed, I guess an ‘outback’ themed domain would be too much like the savannah. Each domain has three mains level and 2 or 3 mini-games which are unlocked by finding keys in the main levels, the mini games include endurance tests like skipping and see-saws, races where you have to get to the finish in the fastest time possible and obstacle course which you must complete before the time runs out. LittleBigPlanet has a big emphasis on playing and sharing with others and that is shown by the various puzzles throughout the game which require 2 or more players and the ability to create and share you own levels with others around the world.

Grandmaster Sensei, the Creator Curator of the Islands domain

The game starts in a very unique way, your Sackboy character pops out hole in the darkness onto a bench or something and you have full control over them right off the bat. You then are privileged to hear Stephen Fry’s voice as the narrator and he instructs you on the basic controls of your sack person and how you can change their facial expression and wave your arms around with the bumpers. You are soon on you way to one of the best intro’s I have ever seen in a game. You basically run along a linear path while the main credits for the game along with the faces of the developers appear above you while you run and jump and push obstacles around. I can’t explain the joy I had when doing this for the first time, it was sublime, one of those moments where you are like  “this is amazing, I just can’t describe it”. You also get introduced to your Popit which probably the most important tool in the game, this is where you can access and use stickers and decorations that you have found in order to attach them to certain places in the world to gain more Score Bubbles, Prize Bubbles and Keys, this is also where you can customise your character with the material and costume items you have found along the way. You also have the ability to chat with your online friends, ‘suicide’ in order to respawn at the previous save point and change your poppit colour which actually changes the colour of the Score bubbles you collect and changes your characters clothes colour slightly, I thought this was pretty damn cool when I discovered it.

The intro and first steps done by Zebra Gamer

This basically followed on into the main game but first you were dropped into your Pod, which is some sort of cardboard spaceship where you can see littlebigplanet from afar, this is where you and friends (or in my case just me :’( can run around in before you start a game or when going back to the menu. Apart from you there is basically only one thing inside the pod and that is your Pod Computer which is a replica of a PS3 controller and what’s even cooler is that when your click to use the pod computer your Sack person moves the joysticks and hits the buttons mimicking you which I thought was pretty damn cool. From your pod computer you can access the story mode which is LittleBigPlanet itself, the Info Moon where you can view your info and progress, see your friends list and news and where you can view and try other players level creations, and the “My Moon” where you can create and play your own levels.

The main screen with your Sackboy at the controls, you can see the Infomoon and My Moon in the picture too

 You start the story mode in the King’s Garden and it’s a good introduction to the basics as you would assume, running, jumping, grabbing and pulling and collecting Score Bubbles which are one of the three collectibles found throughout the game as well as Prize Bubbles and Keys. Score bubbles are simply that, a way of keeping score on the levels you complete and comparing to other players similar to the coins in the Mario series though from what I can remember you don’t get an extra life. Prize bubbles have stickers and character customization items in them and keys give access to the mini games. It was fun enough running and jumping over obstacles and enemies and I truly loved grabbing and pulling items and swinging and jumping was great, it was like the old Donkey Kong Country except everything was so much more detailed obviously with the realistic character animation and sewn felt and sponges and wood and pretty much everything. I loved your how your sack character jumped and flailed around realistically while they bounced off objects with blocks bouncing and falling around them with almost perfect physics, it’s all very beautiful to watch.

The Sensei's Lost castle level, damn those rollers haha

The Creator Curators and other characters help you throughout the game with hints and tips and sometimes come in the form of vehicles such as wheeled wooden horses, skateboards, toy cars or odd things such as Don Lu’s Dog from the The Wedding's level, The Darkness in South America. It seems that apart from your Sack person all the other characters are made from art and craft materials like cardboard, paper and wood and speak in a sort of gibberish voice similar to the original Banjo-Kazooie game. Controlling your Sack person is relatively easy, as I said before you can run, jump with the x button and grab with the R1 button, sometimes I found a slight delay on jumping but that may have been because my character was not full on the ground or the particular objects I was on. The base game revolves around making it through the level avoiding traps and obstacles and solving puzzles in order to continue and it’s masterfully done, Some bits I found I enjoyed in particular was flinging myself from object to object like hanging lanterns or spinning windmills, riding characters and vehicles such as the skateboard in the gardens and the car in The Metropolis and dressing up my character of course as I loved how you got a whole new (male and female) outfit for each new world you went to.

Don Lu's Faithful Dog!

I usually don’t have too much to say about the graphics and music but in this case they were both absolutely marvellous. I loved the way the worlds were made up of everyday art and craft materials like cardboard, paper, wood, felt, sponge, plastic etc and how they all looked so realistic, there was so much detail there in the foreground, the background, it’s funny that a game that mimics so many 2D platformers looks so good in 3D but it just does. The detail of all the levels is just amazing especially the European medieval themed The Gardens, the South American Day of the Dead themed The Wedding and the oriental themed The Islands and I remember seeing it for the first time on PS3 and just going “whoa” though funnily enough playing it again much later I can appreciate it more. The music is great as well one of the main ones that stood out was the music from the Wedding world’s “The Wedding Reception” level which introduced you to the day of the dead theme and sounded fantastic along with the beautiful visuals. The sound effects including all the bounces, pops and springs all sound great too, though I would have appreciated actual voices in the game but I guess it’s ok how it is also when you get new items the “You got new item!” popup can be annoying when you get a few at once as it can block your view.

The Subway level in Metropolis, note the found item popup, now imagine it with like 5 of them XD

I didn’t dabble too much into the multiplayer aspect of the game with this playthrough as it was the first few games I played with friends where the multiplayer really shined though I didn’t appreciate it as much then as I do now and getting people to play it now is kind of hard apart from the times I could do the 2 player ones when there was someone around but haven’t done more than two people for a while but I remember it being fun pushing and pulling your friends around. Doing the two player challenges was fun when I could get someone unfortunately I had to skip the 4 player ones and some two player ones as well though I admit the game would be more fun with friends. When playing through the story you actually had the option to “Play online” meaning someone could join you when playing though I found having another person from the internet just annoying as you couldn’t communicate and they just rushed ahead. I had a look at the level creator but didn’t fiddle around with it much, I had much more fun trying out other players levels via the info moon, they were pretty cool, one was even based on Minecraft! and another was a racer which was fun. I must remind myself to go back in and try more of them.

The very explosive Mexican-themed canyons world

In the end there’s not much more I can say about LittleBigPlanet just that it was a great modern platformer and reminded me that we can still have them in these days of Triple A, MMORPGS, RPG’s and FPS’s. LBP was a game that was done incredibly well and with such dedication and love put into it it’s hard not to appreciate it, everything from the gameplay to the visuals was spot on and with the right amount of challenge to not be frustrating. The only reason I could not give this game a 10/10 as it isn’t a game I can continue playing it was perfect enough as is unless of course I went crazy with the level creator but it just didn’t seem appealing enough and doing user made levels is fun but gets boring after a while. But as always I encourage anyone to give this a try, I have not actually played the sequels (of which there are two) but might try to in the future, and maybe even try the karting game if it gets cheap enough, I can never get enough of themed racers hah.

JD

9/10

Things I liked:

Immaculate presentation, great graphics.

Easy learning curve.

Terrific music and sound effects.

Lots of fun with friends

Just challenging enough to be fun.

Things I didn’t like:

Player controls can be a bit fiddly at times

No voice acting just gibberish speak and reading text.

Limited replayability

The LittleBigPlanet Official Trailer

p.s special thanks to Zebra Gamer for his excellent playthrough on Youtube

Might as well jump

My Usual Spiel - Grand Theft Auto 5 PC Online, let's get dangerously communal

Release Date: October 1st 2013(PS3/XBOX360)
November 18 2014 (PS4-XBONE)
April 14 2016 (PC)
Genre: Third/First-person shooter, Action adventure
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar North
Platform: Windows, Playstation 3 & 4, Xbox 360 & One
Players: 1 and Multiplayer
Classification: R (Restricted)

Multiplayer Grand Theft Auto… who wouldn’t jump at the chance? I remember back in the days of the first GTA in the late 90’s playing at school and at friends’ houses where LAN gaming was a very new thing, until GTA became available on consoles and multiplayer was largely forgotten about. When the PC versions of GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas came out and there were many player-created mods that allowed for “Multi Theft Auto” as it was called though I didn’t get involved as I thought it would be much too complicated to set up. It wasn’t until GTA4 came around that after finally finishing the singleplayer I decided to delve into the multiplayer, and despite some issues with that awful games-for-windows-live system it worked out ok. Free-for-all was fun where you just drove around the city and shot each other though you always just ended up going to the airport anyway, I loved doing races especially boat and helicopter races, one of my favourite activities was the “Team Mafiya Work” which involved doing ludicrous things for a Mafia gang boss like blowing up vans around the city or finding disembodied heads and throwing them into a body of water. Then of course all that died down and there were less and less people playing in anticipation of course, of GTA5.

The online mode even had an intro similar to the story mode except it was at night and with different camera shots. I especially like this shot of spaghetti junction at night

In this case GTA Online and the GTA 5 Story mode were almost two separate games altogether as such I decided to review them separately as well, as the review would have been much too large if I included both of them. Having finished the story mode and also my review of that part, I was eager to see what the multiplayer had to offer and indeed it looked good. When starting up GTA5 you basically choose whether you want to play online or story mode then still sign in to your Rockstar social club account. I had an interesting time creating my character as it seems as well as the usual array of options and sliders to change your appearance you have an option your parents between a male and a female character and use slider bars to switch the resemblance (some of which I recognised namely GTA3’s Claude, Nico Bellic and Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston). I chose Claude as my father and some other woman as my mother and ended up with a reasonably skinny pasty looking dude, but meh he kinds looked like me and that was fine.

Creating a new character.

Starting the game I actually found that it had a semi-storyline in itself as there was an intro and everything, you’re apparently a friend of Lamar Davis who you’ll recognise from the story mode and he starts you off on a tutorial where you learn the basics of online play, I almost thought there was going to be a story which you could play by yourself if you couldn’t find anyone to play with but this was unfortunately not the case. It turns out that the events of GTA online actually occur before the events of GTA5 as the GTA Online Protagonist is actually referred to in the main story, so you meet some characters like Gerald who you haven’t seen before in the story mode, and Simeon Yetarian who you have seen before. Simeon guides you through the process of fitting a stolen car with a GPS tracker and insuring it which is really helpful as if your car gets blown up or stolen you can get it again, and also being able to find your vehicle on the map is invaluable when you lose it. The last thing you need to do is take part in a ‘last team standing’ style activity which is called a “job” which I’ll explain more about later, where you face off with a friend or random player against another team of two in a shooting match around a particular area.

Gerald and Lamar from the game's intro

After that you are free to roam around the city, which is covered in icons of different things you can do, there are also some very fun random events that you compete with other people in the session, things like a player becomes the most wanted and you have to kill them, or vehicle challenges like how far you can drive without hitting something or who can make the biggest air time. There was even this weird one where everyone had to stay in a circle which got smaller and smaller though I had no idea how you won. As I walked around I found you had most of things you did in the story mode, there was still clothes shops and garages where you could customise your car and tattoo parlours and fairground rides and car washes and barbers etc all the usual amenities stuff, though there was some notable differences like the streets seeming more sparse with cars and people probably because of the overload that players would cause. I noticed that you have character stats similar to story mode like stamina and skill with certain vehicles, I’m glad to say that now my driving stat is up to pro-racer, was probably all those races haha.

The Job setup screen in the middle of searching for players, you can see my stats on the right

 As I spent a bit of time walking and driving around, going to stores and purchasing some new clothes getting used to the controls and options etc, one of the things I had to get used to in this new GTA that I may not have mentioned before was the interaction menu which is separate from the pause menu that has been there since GTA3. The interaction menu was introduced in GTA online and is accessed by pressing the M key, it’s basically a menu to customise your GTA online character and your vehicles. You can do things like change the armor you’re wearing, put on a saved outfit, set your motorcycle helmet and set it so you automatically put on a helmet when you get one a bike (this took me a while to work out) looking it up on the wiki I had no idea you could do that much in the game, it’s also got options for parachutes, fireworks, eating snacks, your character actions when winning/losing, your current facial expression, even your walk which I had fun looking at as they have styles like posh and feminine. Your car options include having it delivered by your mechanic and things like ejecting people from your car or remote controlling the doors/lights plus a whole host of other things from voice chat to killing yourself, truly a powerful tool which I had almost no idea about cause you didn’t use it much in the story mode as it only had a small amount of options including quick GPS, inventory, objectives and mission briefing.

The interaction menu on the top left

You can freely run around the city killing pedestrians or other players, robbing stores and doing random events as all of this gives you both money and reputation points aka “RP” RP is what makes you gain level or rank up and basically allows you to buy more things by unlocking them in stores and also allows you purchase higher end houses and start more jobs. Jobs are the main source of money and RP in the game, you could call these equivalent to the game modes in GTA4 whereas Race is still my favourite kind of “Job” in GTA5, as well as this include your usual simple modes such as Deathmatch, Last Team Standing as like in the intro tutorial. You also have Missions which to make things even more complicated are part of the jobs category, they are basically like the singleplayer missions you do in GTA5 but with other players (maximum 4). They are started by characters such as Lamar, Gerald and Simeon as well as Ron Jakowski , Trevor, Lester and Martin Madrazo, so basically mostly characters from the main story many of which have their own personal introduction to you.

A mission for the new Lowrider series with Lamar

 The missions generally have an ongoing story to them unique to each mission giver and I’d love to be able to do them all in a row but it’s require a lot of time gathering friends or trying to do it with people online though I did manage to do at least some. When not playing with friends I spent most of my time joining jobs that other players had set up and advertised via my job list on my phone , this is a great feature as you can set up a job and invite everyone in the session to join, from the main job menu you could purchase ammo for your weapons and also purchase more body armor. You also had Versus missions which were basically PvP and pits teams of players against each other, these were similar to the Adversary modes added later in the Heists update which has different scenarios, two of which Come Out to Play and Siege Mentality I had a go of.

I play a game of team deathmatch and do ok

Throughout GTA Online’s run since its inception on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013 it’s had quite a bit of downloadable content which introduced various new content into the game such as, weapons, vehicles, clothes, tattoos and with some such as the High Life Update introducing new jobs and contact missions. So when I finally got into GTA online in 2015 there was already quite a bit there including one of the biggest updates which was the Heists Update which as you’d guess introduced Heists and Adversary modes into the game, something that I actually didn’t realise wasn’t in the online mode from the start. There are actually only 5 heists, but each include a number of missions as part of them so they do take quite a bit of time, especially the later ones. I have done three of them in my time playing and they were all with friends, which is the best way to do it really, as heists require a lot of communication and doing this with people over the internet who you often don’t have voice communication which really doesn’t work. These heists bring out the best experiences in GTA as they are a huge amount of fun when you were with friends or just people who were organised and knew what they were doing. Heists are introduced by Lester Crest who sets you up with The Fleeca Job heist which is basically just robbing a small bank similar to the intro mission for GTA though it only needs two people, after viewing the intro you choose your role of who is going to do what for each . In this heist I was the driver and designated to keeping the hostages in line, in the end we pulled of the job and it felt awesome.
 

Preparing in the lobby for a heist setup, I was a lookout. You can usual see more people in the picture though we were in different setup groups.

 The other two heists I’ve done were much bigger and involved more setup missions, but were ultimately more rewarding and gave me immense satisfaction to actually finish after playing online and failing most of the time with other online players. Of the Heists I’ve done the Humane Raid which led to the The Humane Labs Raid was quite fun as I was in the ground team and had to skydive and parachute into the Humane labs building and “raid the lab” then get out while the air team held off the reinforcements though probably the most memorable part of that whole heist was the Humane Raid - EMP setup which had us sneak onto an aircraft carrier and steal a Hydra jump jet so one of us got in the Hydra and the rest of us got into P-996 Lazer fighters and then we had to defend ourselves from the other fighter jets and man, when Kenny Loggins ‘Danger Zone’ came on while that was happening I didn’t think the game could get any better, it was one of those golden gaming moments and I just wish I knew what I was doing as it took me ages to get to grips with the controls. The other heist, the Prison Break I had a very specific role as the pilot, I just basically had to go to the airport and grab the plane then fly to Sandy Shores airfield and await the ground team as they break the prisoner out, I also had to avoid enemy jets that came to shoot me down but that was done easily by flying behind them though after reading the wiki I noticed all I had to do was not leave Los Santos and the fighter jets wouldn’t come, derp oh well. The mission was pretty hectic as I had to land and take off several times in order to get enough of a window to pick up the ground team while the demolitionist held off the cops in their helicopter. We ended up making it but it was pretty tight, both of these heists were done at the Bluewire LAN party which is the only way to do it I reckon though you do need internet which is a bummer, perhaps with friends on skype would be best.

Stealing the Jumpjet and other with the EMP in one of the setups for the Humane Labs Raid Heist. Fly into the Danger Zoooooooone!

Missions and Heists in particular had a difficulty rating which the session host could change. The difficulty of the job was obviously the biggest game changer of how many attempts at the mission you’d have you’d have as when doing a missions you’d have a set amount of “lives” shared by everyone in the group and when they ran out and someone died then you’d need to start the mission again. on easy you had two lives but got no extra RP or cash for the mission, on normal you get 1 life and a 25% bonus and on Hard it’s a 50% bonus but no lives so if someone dies it means a restart from the last checkpoint, I swear one mission I did we ended up doing it about 10 times before giving up. It really depends on the difficulty and how good you and your teammates are but to be honest I think I’d think I’d rather have unlimited lives to be able to finish the damn mission, sorta like playing Guitar Hero on easy just to listen to the song. There are still ways you can fail the mission apart from being killed, destroying a vehicle or killing an npc that was vital to a mission etc but 8/10 mission restarts were because someone had died. I swear on the hardest difficulty the enemies have much more health and take a large amount of bullets to go down, I can’t remember how many times I was shooting an enemy NPC from afar and hit them in the shoulder etc then they fall down get back up and I’d go for their head again then miss then have to wait for them to fall down and get back up yet again. I mentioned this in my story mode review as well as I swear that blue flash telling you they are dead is a godsend as how many times have you shot an npc then wasn’t sure if he was really dead?

I like this shot of me waiting on the roof above a deal which is going down, ready to ambush

Throughout most of the start of when I was playing I had basically only the weakest type of body armor and a pistol to my name but as I gathered up my money and more levels I found (through the helpful messages you receive) I unlocked more items and I purchased more as I went on, lots of clothes were already available though most were quite expensive so I didn’t really bother I just went with some normal streetwear though I do need to think about buying some gear that’s more suited to dangerous combat in the future. With the weapons as I said before I started off with only a pistol and not even able to purchase the upgrades for it, but now I am up to level 25 and now have access to the SMG, Pump Action Shotgun and Assault Rifle making me a bit more of a force though sometimes the pistol is all you need if you can get headshots well enough. I also got myself some upgraded body Armor which helps a lot though it seems you have to purchase it for each mission which is weird maybe it wears over time. I must also mention that there was quite a bit of DLC weapons available as well but they could all be purchased at once, I wanted to level up before I got access to stuff like that so I just bought the regular weapons which were unlocked over time, I did indulge myself to the Vintage Pistol and a Hatchet though. Having more weapons available does help in missions but if you need something specific it is usually always given to you.\

Err that wasn't me, really!

 I also thought that I’d need somewhere to park my car, so by this time I had made up enough cash to purchase a safehouse through that Dynasty 8 site. I had the idea that my character like me was middle-class so I got a pretty good mid-range house at 4 Hangman Ave in the Vinewood Hills for $175,000 which was a pretty good price, a goddamn bargain by today’s standards. Even though the actual advert says it was astronomically overpriced and it was the most expensive mid-range house, it was an actual house not an apartment and was in a prime location close to one of the high-end apartment buildings where a lot of people lived. My character also preferred classic vehicles inc muscle cars like the Sabre Turbo, street racers like the Ruiner and motorcycles like the Daemon. I also got the Futo as it’s a crazy drifty little compact and also one of my favourite cars from GTA4, I even painted it in the same kind of colour that I always saw it in in that game, and I got the latest version of that classic car the Injection for some off-road madness. So looking at the property on the GTA wiki it lists as having space for 6 cars and two bikes so woo I got two more car and one more bike option available. All my cars I’ve come across by accident and have stolen them myself, I might try and find a Hexer and Sandking XL for my next two.

My "modest" house

My (not yet full) garage of old school classic

I saw huge potential in GTA online, and it’s true I loved creating my own character and buying clothes and weapons and cars and having a house and doing races and missions and heists and riding around with other players. But there was a major issue that encompassed everything about playing with other people, it’s just there was so much waiting and failing, I sometimes had to play for hours before I felt I had achieved anything. There was a few reasons for this the first was that unlike story mode where you usually just loading the game at the start then that was it, the game did a lot more connecting and loading in between, for example when joining a job from a random person you had to first connect then wait for them to get enough people to join and often this took awhile and then if you did eventually get to the job continued failure (i.e. someone dying, especially on hard mode) could break the group and then you didn’t really end up finishing it. It wasn’t all bad of course you still got money and RP even for a half-finished mission or heist but it just had no closure, I’d feel like I had done nothing compared to story mode where if I played for the same two hours I could get a crapload done.

"Please don't let me die, please don't let me die, please don't....." etc

 It didn’t help that the autokick for being idle is pretty damn short and often during playing sessions my game had trouble connecting and I was booted out to story mode though it seems to be better during the last few sessions. Of course you could argue that If I played with friends where we were all communicating with each other the majority of issues wouldn’t happen, though you still have to be good enough to finish the damn thing, also organising friends all the time is quite time consuming these days. I seem to not play that many games with friends these days as you have so little time to play and it’s just not convenient, to be honest I only really get going with friendly multiplayer at LANs as it’s super easy and organised and fun enough, at home it’s an issue of time and whether people want to play the same games.

This is the view you get when GTA is connecting to another session or job, it's like your hanging above the city, pretty, but I I've been waitin here for far too long most of the time.

I won’t deny it, GTA5 online is great fun and I love being able to make my own character in the GTA world, and have my own house and buy my own guns and cars and clothes though to be perfectly honest in a perfect world you could do all the missions and stories on your own and had the option to do it with friends, I would be more than happy to have npc’s with me on the team as long as they couldn’t die or it didn’t matter if they did as there is a huge amount of cutscenes and dialogue and mission content that that is very similar to story mode missions and you don’t have to put up with playing an annoying character. I’ll admit doing the heists with NPC’s would be a bit weird and would require a lot scripting so I guess that wouldn’t be possible it’s just that I want to see more and do more without being hampered by the availability of other players. That said though the PVP and race events/jobs in the game are great as they don’t require you to be staying alive or needing to restart all the time and are great once they get going apart from all of those freakin annoying custom race maps and obstacle courses that I see everyone playing now, so I guess I can always go back to the likes of GTA4 style multiplayer modes if ever I’m feeling frustrated.

Races with this many people were pretty damn epic

 So I concede my qualms with the game are few and could possibly be fixed and my suggestions relatively unrealistic in the long run, I’ve still got a long way to go with the game and I’m sure it has a long way to go in itself but rest assured I will still be playing it well into the future, whether online with strangers, friends, or at LANs and I recommend anyone who had GTA5 to give it a go, you might just have a ton of fun.

9/10

Things I liked:

Creating my own GTA character

Purchasing and owning things such as clothes, houses cars and weapons

Collaborating with others players (when it worked)

Fun and exciting PvP and race modes

Things I didn’t like:

Unforgiving idle disconnecting

Connection dropouts booting you to Story mode

Lots of waiting in general for loading/connected and other players to join

No Solo mode option for most modes of play

JD

Till now I always got by on my own.

The Past and Times of Yore: Mercenaries, Playground of Destruction, a truly great sandbox RPG

Release Date: Aus 2006
Genre: Third-person shooter
Publisher: LucasArts
Developer: Pandemic Studios
Platform: Playstation 2, Xbox
Players: 1
Classification: T (Teen)

Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction was originally a suggestion then a birthday present if I remember correctly from my housemate Brok who praised it as an awesomely fun modern combat style third person sandbox game which he had played on the original Xbox and then bought it for me on Playstation 2 which was very nice indeed. Mercenaries was a creation by Pandemic Studios an LA based developer with an office based in Brisbane who had created games such as Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 and Destroy All Humans! and interestingly published by LucasArts. I had never heard of this game before but was interested and said I would give it a go.

Mercenaries tells a fictional story of in the Korean Theatre of War called the Song Initiative where the president Choi Kim actually offers peace to South Korea which angers his son Choi Song who stages a violent coup storming the capital and killing his father before the country goes “dark” expelling foreigners and giving no communication to the outside world. After it’s discovered by the Australian Navy that North Korea is creating and selling Nuclear Weapons, the Allied Nations led by Colonel Samuel Garrett forms and heads off to North Korea on the offensive and is soon joined by the South Korean Union led in secret by the American CIA operative Agent Mitchell Buford, the People's Liberation Army led by Colonel Zhou Peng and the Russian Mafia led by Sergei Voronov.

The very epic title screen and intro

You are a Mercenary working for Executive Operations, or ExOps who are apparently the league of kick-ass mercenaries and you are basically tasked with capturing or killing the Deck of 52 for a handsome sum of 100 million dollars no less. The Deck of 52 is basically a full deck of cards each one representing a person of interest to the Allied Nations with the number cards being the lower ranked and the royal cards being the more powerful VIPs with Song himself included as the ACE OF SPADES! You have a choice of three different characters Mattias Nilsson, Jennifer Mui and Christopher Jacobs with Brok suggesting I use Jennifer as she has some pretty good one liners and also because I hardly ever use a female character so I thought what the hey.

The Deck of 52 from the Exops initial briefing screen, please excuse the subtitles it was the only one I could find.

This initial story is shown to you via actual live footage pieced together then has one of the most terribly acted dialogues between one of the officers in Exops and Fiona Taylor who is your main contact in the organisation though unfortunately she sounds like she’s come straight from an episode of Round the Twist as her high pitched lighthearted sounding Australian accent is annoying and not suited to the role, what I’d give for someone with a posh British accent either male or female similar to M in the Bond films rather than this bimbo who would be perfect on the set of Playschool. And having to listen to her updates every so often was still draining but anyway. As well as the Deck of 52 you also do various other mission for each faction sometimes attacking another faction that you were previously working for resulting in your standing to drop with them. The Chinese and South Koreans were the biggest enemies with the Russian Mafia antagonising both and the Allied Forces being enemies with no-one except the North Koreans of course which were permanently hostile.

The game intro was partly made of real-life footage

The game world is basically set up as a sandbox where you start at the Allied M.A.S.H, this is your default starting area for the game and also the place you end up when you die. From there you can basically go anywhere, “commandeer” a vehicle and go visit any of the 4 factions, search for the number cards or collectibles such as the national treasures, or just cause destruction such as destroying North Korean Monuments, South Korean listening posts or just random mayhem. One of the favourite things my friend Brok used to do was come across a group of NPC’s from any particular faction fighting and basically watched the action unfold, often with hilarious circumstances as this unpredictability makes up the beauty of the game. Some faction missions involved going after number and royal cards themselves though most show up as emails on your PDA which hint of their locations and you go and search for them. There are also some “Car challenges” represented as dollar signs on the map that you can enter and race to a particular area though most of the time I didn’t want to go wherever it went.

You're just driving along then all of a sudden you come across a heated battle

 Your PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) is basically your access to intelligence and support during the game featuring different screens including a map, your email inboxes, the Merchant of Menace shop which is provided by the Russian Mafia selling everything from guns, to vehicles to airstrikes. There is also screen which has four sections involving Deck of 52, bounties you have found such as Monuments, WMD blueprints, National Treasures and South Korean listening posts, and statistics of all the things you have done, such as soldiers killed, distance travelled, favourite choice of vehicle and other information about their exploits and a screen which shows the players diplomatic stance with the various factions. You gain this and two other generic weapons including an Assault Rifle and M67 Frag Grenade before driving backwards out of a low flying plane into North Korea’s southern province which provides the theatre of war for the first half of the game. So basically my goal was to just finished the game, being the first time I wasn’t going to go for %100 completion, it looked pretty good fun, sort of like a military version of GTA.

Your PDA screen showing you diplomatic stance

Unfortunately when I first started playing the game there was one major issue, as I’ve probably mentioned before I don’t play any first or third person shooters on console anymore with the exception of Red Dead Redemption which had the lock-on feature most of the time but still got annoying in the parts where you didn’t even if they were few. In Mercenaries you don’t have the lock-on feature at all and it makes aiming and shooting and general movement somewhat difficult and annoying when you are trying to shoot specific enemies. This was especially annoying when trying to use a sniper rifle and set aim on a  target but I couldn’t get the thumbstick to line up as the feedback made it move too far to one side or not far enough and this was even worse if you were under fire at the time, I often had to resort to firing the sniper rifle from the hip which was actually pretty effective with practice. Strafing while firing also took some practice too

Daring frontal assault on a roadblock

This led to me delving into the realm of PS2 emulation again which I had previously been unsuccessful at, I thought that If I could get the emulator to work I could then be able to configure the controls to aim with my mouse but unfortunately I could not get the game working properly. It had a setting to use either the system memory or video memory and every time I had it on system memory the screen would go all white with some sort of bloom issue and on the video memory it worked but had massive slowdown especially when there were a lot of particles (like dust) I made a video of my attempt to play the game like this and it’s pretty damn hilarious.

My attempt to emulate the game, it ran a leeetle bit slow XD

The other problem was in cars the button for accelerating was the X button and it was the same for reloading while on foot, so I couldn’t use the W key for example to both walk forward and accelerate in vehicles. So I don’t think I’m ever going to try and emulate PS2 anymore it just never works properly which is a shame cause there’s a heap of games on PS2 I’d like to get going via emulator to see what they look like. Failing this almost made me refuse to play the game altogether but I decided to soldier on (literally, or maybe mercenary on) and continue with the game, and I admit even with this flaw it was still pretty good. I did dabble at first with an invincibility cheat from the action replay but stopped using it when I realised it affected vehicles too, so from then on it was gung-ho going the way it was meant to be played… mostly. 

It’s hard to a judge a game that was made in 2005 by today’s standards but I’ve got to admit the gameplay was pretty good, even with my old worn out PS2 controllers and the slightly jerky gameplay and having to move and aim using the joysticks, I found that Jennifer the character I chose to play as moved quite fast, probably the fastest of the three. I did have a bit of trouble learning the controls as they were more complicated than most of the PS2 games I used to play, you can jump and reload of course, and melee using bash, which is one of the most important abilities I feel as unless you use a stun grenade it’s the only way to stun a number card in order to perform a takedown and handcuff them. There’s the action button which is mostly used to get in and out of vehicles, there’s the L1 and L2 button which are used to throw/select grenades which I managed to muck up under pressure several times and then there was the R1 and R2 button which was used to fire your current weapon or switch between them. The L3 and R3 buttons were for crouching and using binoculars/weapon scope and the DPAD had a variety of functions.

This guy's gonna get it

Pressing up and down on the D-pad cycled through you support options, these were often the difference between failing and completing a mission depending on the difficulty. Support options include supplies such as health, ammo, repair kit and weapons, vehicles inc jeeps, trucks and even tanks and helicopters further into the game, and finally artillery and airstrikes which were great fun to use. You obtained most of these when starting a mission as they were given free of charge or cost a certain amount but could pick them up on your travels or unlock them through completing the main game or various challenges. The most important support item is the extraction beacon as this is used to evacuate your subdued number cards. I found entirely by coincidence that you get credit for capturing the number card alive as soon as you get them on the chopper, if it is destroyed after it takes off you still get credit you just lose money for the destroyed support chopper this led to me being very sloppy and calling the chopper into some very dangerously hot areas though funnily enough it never got destroyed by the enemy on the way in just on the way out, I guess they just allow this so you can get credit for getting the number card in alive. Another problem I had was that bashing an enemy once stunned them bashing them while they are stunned kills them which led to me accidentally killing a number card on several occasions.

I swear getting them on the chopper was a huge relief most of the time.

Other common support items are the Medivac which sends a helicopter to take you back to the Allied M.A.S.H the mash is always your starting point when you load the game after having saved and it always has some jeeps and soldiers around to start you off again, this is also where you can change your outfit when you acquire new ones. Another item that you pretty much always have access to is C4, C4 is always useful for blowing up stuff provided you can get close enough to set it and works on pretty much anything. Most of the time I only brought in heavy vehicles and airstrikes when there was just too much military presence to deal with or too many things to blow up with C4 though it made things difficult when a number card was in the thick of it leading to me to decide it was just too hard to get bring them in alive and carpet bombing the area was the simpler solution. I must admit It was only the extra money that made we want to bring them in alive (you only got half the bounty for them being dead) it was pretty much always the easier option to shoot them or blow them up from afar but of course you want to strive for that record as every time to jail or finish off a  number card it is reported on the number card screen of the PDA.

A video showing some of the airstrikes and vehicles you can purchase from the Merchant of Menace shop. This player is using the unlockable North Korean Elite model

Pushing left on the D-pad toggles the flags above friendly and enemy soldiers heads allowing you to easily see which faction they are from which is useful in a few cases. Soldiers which have a flag on their heads permanently are officers who have the special ability of seeing through your disguise. You “disguise” as I put it is one of the most powerful and useful ability in the game I think, cannot count the number of times I used it. Basically when you get into a north Korean vehicle out of view of any NK soldiers or any kind of officers it shortly flags you as “disguised as North Korean” and you are able to travel safely among them without fear of being attacked, you can also do this in a civilian vehicle as the North Korean Army will not attack civilians seemingly no matter where they drive. This feature is obviously very powerful when used properly though there are a few things I could nitpick like I’m driving around in a jeep with no doors and windows and I’m still disguised apparently, and if I’m in a fully enclosed tank somehow officers can still spot me. And how can civilians drive almost anywhere they want, I swear I drove a civilian car into that many fortified military bases and even crashed into a tank at one point but still my disguise was safe.

I'm a civilian news reporter! yes really. In case you didn't know these journalist trucks were regularly parked inside the M.A.S.H and you could listen to the news reports of what you had accomplished.

Playing the game felt relatively ok once I got used to the controls and it did take me awhile as I had to have the instruction book open sitting there so I could refer to it, but once I got that down it was all good. The vehicles were quite fun to use with the ability to honk your horn to load up your vehicle with friendly soldiers and with three different options for example you could exit by yourself with everyone still inside, command everyone else to exit or everyone gets out at once which was really helpful especially when you were driving into the danger zone and wanted some cover for when you got out though often I just led my allies to their untimely deaths which is why I was glad the word doesn’t spread around and others refuse to get in for the next mission.

Having allies in your vehicle is helpful as they can attack enemies with the mounted guns available, Brok quickly pointed out that a certain type of the South Korean Jeeps had a rocket launcher mounted on the back and had unlimited ammo when used by an npc, this really came in handy and was a hell of a laugh when I was driving along and watching the trigger happy npc obliterate any North Korean vehicle that I drove past. The vehicles handle pretty damn tightly, those jeeps I swear have uncanny handling, I was driving like a bat out of hell and could still take corners like I was stuck to the road whereas if this was any kind of realistic car game I would have been wrapped around a tree long ago. Tanks and helicopters were easy enough to drive (and fly) apart from the joystick aiming difficulty of course, I must have driven dozens of tanks and heavy vehicles over the most ridiculous of terrain and used helicopters numerous times to try and speed up a mission or just make it easier. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t but it was all part of the fun in Mercenaries.

Hold the line friends!

 Accepting contracts and capturing or killing number cards is the main part of the game obviously, the missions ranged from destroying an enemy base to escorting or rescuing VIPs and even delivering a sports car to the docks. The different factions often plot against each other and many missions involve attacking another faction which is currently friendly to you, so it helped to do all one factions missions in a row though they generally increase in difficulty as you go on. If I had previously completed a mission that involved antagonising a faction and they could change to unfriendly or hostile and would attack on site. I had to somehow make a furious dash into their base and then go to the guard outside the HQ and give him a bribe of a certain amount so I could start receiving missions from that faction again.

Oops wrong tower

 Entering faction bases involve going up to a soldier outside the HQ and then you can go into the building/tent etc, the faction leaders themselves are generally quite funny to listen to especially if you walk around while they are talking. I noticed that they voiced their displeasure if you had previously completed a mission from another faction that involved attacking them. One neat thing I noticed was that Jennifer could understand what the Chinese were saying when they spoke in their native language. After a mission is passed you usually get a message of the whereabouts of another number card which can actually be found randomly on the map even if you don’t have the message, most of the royal cards are included in missions for the factions but some are also found on the map. 

"Well if it isn't the Mercenary who destroyed my tanks and killed my men, well that money helped so I'll instantly forget about it, here's some more missions. Oh and did you know you can press the Triangle button to STAND UP?"

Working through the Deck of 52 is obviously a long process as I took three breaks from the game while playing as it took a lot of playtime to get through, sometimes when trying to finish a hard mission I only got that done for the entire play session for one night. Capturing or killing a card can be as easy or as hard as you make it, often I tried going in with just what I had but obviously the more you spend on extra vehicles, supplies and aerial support the easier it is. I’ve had some trying times, losing cards to trigger happy allies, wayward bullets or explosions, poorly aimed tank shells or airstrikes, one of the most common ways I fudged it up at early game was accidentally smacking them twice killing them. Of course once you do have them captured and cuffed it doesn’t end there, getting the chopper down safely requires either escaping the area or ridding it of enemy presence, and even then you need to find a reasonably flat spot so the chopper can land, man the amount of times I saw that freakin “landing zone not clear” warning was hella annoying, I’ve even gotten impatient and sloppy at times and ended up getting credit for the capture then seeing the evac copter blown to bits because I hadn’t made the area secure. Going After the Aces is an entirely different kettle of fish as when you start an Ace contract you are helicoptered to a different location as the Ace’s have their own area which count as one big mission.

Gotcha!

I was impressed with the amount of weaponry and vehicles and general resources available in the game, you’re able to carry a primary and secondary weapon, most of the time I had an automatic weapon such as an M4 in the first slot and an RPG or Sniper Rifle in the second and man did I have times where I wished I had one or the other, at least at times when I had the sniper rifle I usually had C4 to use. I spent most of my time purchasing jeeps and helicopters from the Merchant of Menace as I often found tanks or knew where the friendly factions kept theirs but man those airstrikes were oh so fun to use, the smaller ones like the surgical strike were great for blowing up things such as tanks while the larger strikes were for when you were just like screw it I’m, just gonna blow everything to the moon. The way these were called in varied, the airstrikes were usually way of satellite or ground laser. With the satellite strikes you took control of a birds eye view camera to pinpoint the location and were very accurate, the ground laser was done by a vertical laser aimed from your location that you had to make sure that nothing was in that way to block where you were pointing. The artillery strikes however had a very dangerous way of marking as they were done by throwing a beacon onto the ground, and did I mention that you couldn’t throw particularly far and after that beacon was thrown you had to get the fack out of there fast as it didn’t take long for the bombs to start falling, I hardly used artillery because of this.

Calling in a surgical strike via ground laser.

 The size of the map in mercenaries was fairly impressive, there was heaps to explore intentionally or unintentionally. Mercenaries is a true sandbox in a way that there’s so much stuff happening around you, more so then Red dead redemption and GTA for example as in those games the random events seem to revolve around you, but in this game it seems you’re just driving along and you all of a sudden drive into a full on pitched battle between two factions with tanks and everything, sometimes I just screamed and got the hell out of there as fast as I could, this was usually when I was on a difficult mission and didn’t want to die, but other times listening to the recommendation from Brok I just sat at a safe distance and watched the carnage unfold and it was lots of fun to see out, who’s going to win? etc There are places on the map that are permanently under control of one faction and you are attacked no matter what you’re standing with them, there are places on the map which seem to be constantly besieged by conflict, and then there are the edges of the map where if you stray too far are identified as a deserter and are bombed by allied planes. Goddamn that was annoying as it was usually by accident and I was all like “Wait sorry, NO I’LL GO BACK NNONONONONONO AAAHHH! ‘BOOM!’ resulting in a  failed mission. Random things happen on missions too, mostly scripted but they are still good, like when I was delivering that sports car for the Russians, you’d think it’d be easy but no the game throws everything under the sun to try and block your path and there’s also a lot of random funny things happening like npcs crashing helicopters and falling from the sky.

Oops that wasn't supposed to happen

Regarding the collectibles Brok had to continually remind me to look for them as sometimes I was just so intent upon completing the missions I didn’t think of it, I ended up collecting a few though, enough to unlock some extra features like new weapons and supply drops and the ability to use other characters models such as Agent Buford of the South Koreans and even Indiana Jones for some reason. Had a lot of fun with that and also destroying the statues was pretty fun. Sorry if I spoil it but for those who don’t know it there are actually two maps, you start off in the relatively warmer southern province with more vegetation and then after the first two Ace contracts you move to the colder more snowy northern province. The map change doesn’t change too much, just continues the story with new missions in a different environment and the bases are all in different spots to change things up a little, also there seems to be a bit more warfare happening then the last map and of course more collectibles to er, collect.

Your PDA showing part of the Southern Province, you can see the South Korean base on the map.

The Ace contracts as I said before are each set in entirely different instance on islands away from the main map, I was impressed by the scenarios as they had some pretty impressive moments which I’ll describe. In the Ace of Diamonds contract I was running through the jungle then the a nearby car exploded and I was ambushed by covert jungle marines in camouflage and at the end of the mission I had to blow up the base as it was the only way to kill the Ace and a crane actually landed on him. Another moment was when I was doing the ace of Hearts contract and had to fight through all these enemies around cargo crates until from watching a video I realised I could just summon an enemy jeep, put on a disguise and drive all the way to the end bit, several moments like that got me shaking my head at the way you could make things indefinitely easier with just a small change.

The Ace of Diamonds mission done on Xbox360, which features the covert jungle marine ambush i mentioned, though this player manages to get the Ace of Diamonds out alive even with enemy soldiers and tanks shooting at him no less, whereas I just blew up the base with him in it.. Interestingly enough someone made a comment on the video saying "The cheat way is to clear that base first, where the ace will appear.  Then go up and destroy the supergun, then you find the ace on his own" *facepalm* wish I'd thought of that.

The graphics in the game obviously look dated by today’s standards, but it looked pretty damn good for a game made in 2005 as when the PS2 was released the industry thankfully had gotten over that awful transition to full 3D phase in the late nineties and early 2000’s, sure textures were muddy and the view was blurry and hard to see into the distance but it was workable.  I didn’t have too many qualms with the interface, the icons were relatively easy to see and things such as circles which showed you where to get into vehicles which really helped. The game’s graphics were fine not much more to say, I liked the little details like the soldiers milling around in the faction bases and things like the miniature map of the area in the Chinese base and some of the explosions were pretty spectacular with almost no slowdown.

Good time to leave I think

The sound and music was pretty good, the soundtrack at the start was quite memorable and the sound effects were spot on apart from a few annoying voice actors and some acting in parts. I swear there’s this bit in the final Ace Contract the Ace of Spades General Song who I’ll add is fleeing with the codes for the country’s nuclear arsenal and a captive you’ve saved says “you must stop him!” and she’s like “stop who?” and I’m like “fackin General Song the Ace of Spades you dumb bitch! who do you think?” and then the guy is like “he has the codes” and she’s like “the launch codes?” Fuaaaarrrr! but yeh anyway otherwise it was fun to listen to. The troopers themselves yelled different things and the allied were the funniest obviously being in English telling you to get moving before they were even in the vehicle and other things like “let’s see what this tin can can do”.

"Stop Who?"

Despite my issues with the game is was enjoyable overall, sure there was the stick aiming using my slightly worn controllers, the confusion of which button to press resulting in me flailing around, the sometimes muddy graphics making long range sniping difficult and the fact that I just don’t think I could go through that again for fun. Despite all this the game damn fun and entertaining enough as Brok sat down with me to watch almost every session I did, this was the beauty of this particular game, as if he was watching me play Star Wars the Old Republic for instance he’d probably be bored shitless. Having him there helped a lot though, having played the game through before had a lot of advice which helped immensely, I never thought how useful it was to have someone watch you play as they saw and suggested things that you would never think about.

On to plan B!

 A sequel Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was created in 2008 though Brok claimed that it was not nearly as good apart from the upgraded graphics. I was talking to Brok about the ideal situation where Mercenaries Playground of Destruction was remade on PC with full mouse and keyboard support and how awesome that would be, if this actually happened I would be ecstatic and would definitely try go through it again and would place it in a much higher regard then I already do. Though we can dream can’t we?

JD

Mercenaries Playstation 2 Trailer

Just another day in the North Korean Army