This weekend marks the first time in a long while that I’ve been able to catch up on any gaming, so I dimmed the lights, put on some Barry White and cracked open a bottle of my Xbox 360’s favorite wine. Then I spent a half hour or so downloading the demos for both Stranglehold and Bioshock, and as much time as possible playing. Here’s my initial reactions to both:
Stranglehold
OK, so it’s based on Hard Boiled, which is probably my favorite John Woo/Chow Yun Fat flick ever. It’s got everything you could want out of an action flick. Blood, Jackie Patch, and piss putting out a fire. The game, however, has a flaw from the first minute you start playing: there’s no jump button.
Yeah, there’s a leap feature (that enters you into “tequila time”), but honestly, if a guy can leap forward face first, shouldn’t he be able to get a little bit of vertical gain out of it? If you’re up high and want to cross some sort of gap, you essentially have do the fall technique and hope that the bastard doesn’t splatter when he hits the ground flat. I seem to recall that Chow Yun Fat had Yao Ming kinda ups in many of his movies, yet he can’t have his feet leave the ground without collapsing chest first into it again.
Other than that, the game seemed fun. I appreciate any game that shoves me into situations where I’m surrounded by 20 armed gunmen, and the solution is to dive onto a food cart and roll my way through a savage killing spree. Still, I probably won’t buy it because of the lack of any kind of jump button. I’m not kidding. Any third-person game without the ability to jump just pisses me the fuck off, and I can’t play it for more than a few minutes.
Bioshock
OK, this makes up for it. Aside from giving my girlfriend nightmares and a bit of FPS-induced vertigo from watching me play, this game did just about everything right. It even has a jump button, fancy that.
I liked the various special abilities that they give you, and it seems like it’ll be a good blend of FPS and mild horror-themed gameplay. I do not, however, like the fact that there are 8 billion things to pick up and potentially harm yourself by “ingesting.” There are cigarettes, booze, potato chips, and all kinds of various comestibles littered around the area, and frankly I don’t want to have to stare at each fucking one of them so I can figure out if it’s worth tapping “A” for or not. I wound up drunk in the demo about 10 times because I got bored looking at all of the items, and just started accepting everything my character came across. I won’t be able to handle it if they throw some seriously harmful shit into the mix later.
The graphics are fucking amazing, the controls are pretty decent, and I’m pretty sure you’ll get to kill at least a few evil/possessed children along the way. That’s pretty much all I need in a good game these days.
Well, that and a jump button.
