f13.net

Crackdown comes out today. I was really excited for this, except I dont know how im going to break myself away from my BE Pally to have enough time for it.

I'll pick it up on the way home. I think I'm one of the 16 people buying it for Crackdown rather than the Halo beta.

I'm getting it for Crackdown and not the beta. I hate Halo. I hate the people it breeds. Fuck MS for attaching it to boost sales.

/agree

I like the idea of a GTA style game (do we have a better name for these yet? FRTPAD Free Roaming Third Person Action and Driving) being made with Coop in mind. I love me some coop. Nix, maybe we can get a game going.

I picked it up at lunch.  I had a lot of fun in the demo.

After playing the demo I don't understand the love for this game. Is being able to jump around a city really such a compelling gameplay mechanic that it compensates for the fact that there is really nothing else to do in the game aside from shoot hordes of braindead enemies with yet another generic lockon combat system?

"Ooh, I can pick up people and throw them! Even cars!"

There is practically no game here at all. Just an environment you can do stuff in. Fun for an hour or two maybe - the demo itself is really all you need.

I'm enjoying this game. It's a good diversion from the serious shit I'd been playing. I'll be playing for a few more hours. If someone on my friends list wants to hop in, I suppose that'd be fine. I don't know what it'll do if we're in different parts of the storyline though.

I thought the demo was ok, but nothing great.  I'll likely wait until a price drop or a sale somewhere before picking it up.

5 hours later, I'm 30% of the way through the main campaign. Fast paced. Good fun. Tons and tons of weapons. All slightly different, it can get pretty technical up in that shit if you want it to. The sniper rifle is amazing due to the draw distance in this game.

Played/watched the demo for about a week before launch, plus a bit on launch day.

This game just elicits a big "Meh" from me, though others seemed to have plenty of fun with it. The cell-shaded look was interesting; different if nothing else.

I played for about 4 hours yesterday and had a blast.  The gameplay is rock solid but the presentation could use quite a bit of work.  I can't help but think Crackdown 2 is going to rule.

I'm skipping it.  I loved the concept, hell, who wouldn't love a super-powered GTA?  The demo definitely underwhelmed me, though.  Maybe I just didn't give it enough of a chance, but it felt pretty weak to me.

I'll play co-op with you to make you see the fun! I WILL MAKE YOU SEE!

Can you even play co-op in the demo?

I bought it. I enjoy it. The driving is a bit wonky at first with a lot of random street cars, but the agency cars rock. I think this will get better as driving skill improves. I got my agility to *** and its really awesome. I just wish you had a bit more control while jumping. I do NOT like that hitting civilians while driving lowers your driving skill, that makes me angry.

All in all I really like it. Havent played coop yet, but I bet it will be cool.

Why do these game developers hate fun??

Yes, yes you can. Is it a date? :P

Okay, put I don't put out until I get dinner.  Saturday night?

Hrm, we'll see. I'm going out of town (with my 360. Don't ask) tonight. If I'm not too wasted and it's not too late, for sure. I'll let you know later tonight or tomorrow morning/afternoon.

Co-op is great.

"Hey look down over this building edge right here. Can you see that?"

*punt*

Never gets old.

We got a lot of the crazy stunts done, by having one of us in the car, and the other person, throwing the car.  Also, since you cannot shoot out from inside the car, riding around on top of the car is a good work-a-round. 

Popping gangsters in the leg then running up and George Washington kicking them apart is good stuff.

The mechanics, physics, gameplay, are all very well executed.  Little things like, leaving my agency vehicle on the other side of town, rampaging, and accidentally running back through that area to find my car is still there is great.  In Saint's Row, cars, remains, disappeared if I turn my back on them.  I picked up some huge cargo crate from an industrial place in the Big Lebowski gang area, kicked it all over town crushing things, and forgot about it.  An hour or so later, I was driving around, and the crate was still there, in post-crush position.

At the default difficulty, I am pretty much invincible at the moment, except for well placed explosives, and snipers.  Snipers, they are no good to me.  I am going to start over (haven't beat it yet) and up the difficulty.

Finished it. Was fun.

Already???  Doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement to spend 60 bucks.

I'll wait on this one.  I've got a long list of games I'll pick up eventually when the used price is down to next to nothing.

What difficulty did you play it on Schild?  I was playing on the middle option but bumped it back down to 'tough' after getting my ass handed to me over and over again.  I suck.

Middle option. Always. I don't like artifical easiness or hardness. I want what the game was designed under. My roommate and I sat and played pretty much the whole thing through.

It is definitely a VERY short game, if you power through the main storyline. You could probably finish it in around 5 hours or so if you don't do any thing else. This is just a guess though since I haven't finished it, but im about half way through, and I feel like I have barley started.

That's what the reviews said and it is the single reason I'm not buying the game. I'm not spending 60 bucks for 5 hours. Fuck that noise. Yes I know you can wander and do open game/sandbox type stuff but that'll get old fast for me.

I'm so weak. I bought the game. I'm hoping the sandbox elements keep me entertained despite how short it is.

Trading mine in today to get GoW2. The co-op was worth it, but not having anyone to play with ruined that.

Gold.

(http://www.ices.dk/marineworld/photogallery/images/jellyfish.jpg)

Although the game feels shorter than most, I have put in 8 hours and have only whiped out the first gang out of three.  I will concede that I have not been as efficent as possible since I like to jump from rooftop to rooftop in random style looking for agility orbs, but I woud think that most people would take at least 10-12 hours to finish the game.  While a bit short, the experence is worth it I think.  The controls are close to perfect.  You really get to feel like a badass, other games have let me have more power, but I never realy had such feeling for the the power they gave me as in this game.  For some reason the control layout on Crackdown spoke to me.

In my own defense I knew exactly what I was doing when I posted my second post. It's part of why I mentioned I was weak.

I really wished for a little more control while in the air. But other than that its not bad controls. Maybe the auto-aim could be a little smarter with not targetting already dead people.

The auto-aim targetting dead people thing is actually intentional. The developers made it that way because they said people like to do things to the bodies after they are already dead, like juggle them in the air with explosives and stuff.

Played the game for about 2 1/2 hours yesterday. Killed two subbosses for the Muertos. Wrecked more cars than I can count. Spent most of my time trying to find agility orbs and climbing buildings. Races are a PITA for me I discovered. And I have yet to raise my explosives skill despite killing lots of gang members with grenades.

Save your nades. You'll get a rocket launcher and a grenade launcher later (if you're smart enough to snag one off a corpse and take it back to an outpost) that make it SO easy to level up. 3rd and 4th island have so many guys you won't know where to start blowing shit up.

Yar. The grenade launcher and the 800 round machine gun are where it's at. I think that was all we used from the moment we got the items until the end of the game. They... Rape.

The magazine-fed rocket launcher is like...a little bit of explosive nirvana. That and the SAW will keep you going until the very end.

As for knowing what to do first on the the later two islands, that's not an issue since the natives will come looking for you very quickly. And when the natives drive around in armored personnel carriers, grenades and rockets are the order of the day. Needless to say, your explosives skill will take off after you starting using those things on the locals.

And speaking of locals. the so-called Peacekeepers are about as big a pain in the ass as the gangbangers. Anymore I treat them as yet another gang. They get in the way, they get what the Volk or Sheng-whosit get. Tired of these bozos blocking shots and parking cruisers right next to APCs carrying hordes of angry gang members. As that explosive skill levels up, the blast radius on rockets and grenades gets rather considerable. So confrontations with the police (and the citizenry...) get pretty frequent.

Considering the limited ingame goals, the game is stupid-crazy fun. Just what I need after a bad day at work or a bad day at WoW (virtural work). Theraputic!

Bought this last week, I'm having a good time with it.  Once you get to a certain level of ability though the game becomes really easy.

Three star agility, firearms and explosives while armed with the SAW and Grenade Launcher and I am pretty sure I can run through the remaining missions in pretty short order.  Fortunately I have a lot of fun just setting up big boom traps and climbing buildings looking for orbs.  I do wish the sniper rifles had more ammo though.  If the single shot one had 100 rounds I would totally use that over the SAW.  10 is just not enough to do anything worthwhile with.

It's a bit better GTA than GTA but still very similar.

I would strongly disagree. The game has no real missions. It seems very shallow to me. You basically have what, a total of 21 missions that are all "kill this guy". Think of the amount and spread of missions in GTA: SA and VC. This game has some cool features, but I was hoping for a bunch of story missions to go along with randomly killing bosses.

Gotta be honest. At least the controls in Crackdown were good. Very good in fact. GTA always played like shit to me (GTAIII through LCS).

Uh, there are any number of races and stunt objectives in Crackdown.  The story missions in GTA were either go here and kill that guy or just go here and watch a cutscene.  I don't see the gripe.  What else was in GTA?  Races and err, stunts?  A couple of collection quests I guess.  Delivering certain makes of cars to the chop shop in Vice City was a clever use of the mechanics but hardly a must have feature.  There are references to Rampages in the Crackdown docs but I haven't seen one yet, dunno if they are a triggered thing or if it's just when you go crazy and kill a bunch of peeps.

GTA had more stuff hidden around than just power-ups that made exploration a bit more interesting but for a first generation stab at the game I can give the Crackdown team a break there.  At least, I haven't come across a Tank or Attack Chopper hidden off in a corner yet.  At least you can swim in Crackdown.

You can run around whacking peacekeepers.  It's hard to keep the rampage going, because they will reset and forgive you rather quickly if there's a lull in the carnage.

I think.  I haven't been able to unlock that achievement yet.

Did you even play San Andreas?

Not counting the racing. Which in GTA is still much much more varied.

GTA (to list just a few)
-Follow that guy. Find out where hes going and get his briefcase.
-Take this chainsaw and kill that guy.
-Go pick up a hooker and take her to that guy, then take pictures of them, then escape the FBI.
-Tie this guy to your car hood and drive real fast until he is scared enough to talk.
-Go fly this plain and dump a bunch of porn flyers around the city.

Crackdown
-Go kill that guy.
-Agility missions
-Go to that node

GTA is filled with this kind of stuff. Yeah, a lot of it boils down to driving and shooting, but thats what the game is about. GTA makes it much more interesting. Saying the two games have basically the same mission is way way of base.

Now im not ragging on Crackdown, I like the game, but I was hoping for more story type missions where you do something other than "go kill boss". Like some semblance of a story.

Crackdown plays more like a tech demo. There is not much actual "game".

I bought it and was so MOTS'd out in the first 20 hours that I never really got anywhere.  I'll take your word for it that San Andreas had more going on but when I realized I had to deal with that same awkward ass interface again for pretty much the same series of actions I gave up.

Dress those missions up however you want there were still go here and kill this or go there and hit these way points.