I was lucky enough to get 4 great xbox games for Christmas this (I mean last) year. They were on my wish list as I had not got around to some of them in the whirlwind of 2012.
The games were Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Need for Speed : Most Wanted and Forza Horizons. So at face value and in the “let classify everything into a genre” categories there are two first person shooters and two driving games. They are however very different. To a non gamer (assuming there are any left) it may seem like duplication if things are resolved to being “just a game” and not a complete experience.
Take Forza Horizon.

It is a free roaming driving game and a follow up to Forza 4 where up to now all the Forza games have been track based. It has given a different feel and a background story to the reason you are collecting fast cars and razzing them around some fantastic Colorado scenery. Forza has always had very convincing physics models for the cars and this is greatly enhanced with a force feedback steering wheel. The wheel also makes life more interesting in making manual gear changes feel right. Driving around the cars feel big and substantial when you slide or drift you feel you are probably on the edge of something bad about to happen so you try and drive just right (at least with the steering wheel). It is actually just nice to drive around the huge area in your favourite car listening to some tunes. Having oncoming traffic and other road users makes it a bit more tricky to go flat out without wrecking. It feels like driving and racing. For me it makes drags me into a reality. I am sure you can sit back and play it like bumper cars but that does it a dis-service.

Need For Speed : Most Wanted on the other hand is a free roaming driving game that instills a very different yet equally enjoyable feeling. in NFS you go flat out most of the time, skitting around cars, performing drifts to earn crazy nitrous boost flicking in and out of traffic working on pure reactions. Pretty much every bit of driving has you diving left, right left, thinking yes I am in the zone, then kaboom a massive crash with sparks and shards and physics engine components working over time. Recompose yourself and then blast off again. It is a game where you look for unusual ramps and signs and work out how to get to crash through them like a hollywood stuntman. It is of course really just Burnout Paradise II but as that was such a fun and amazing fast experience thats no bad thing. I do remember the original Need For Speed games way back that were actually more like Forza in their realism. It was the first game I remember hearing the thud thud of running of the cats eyes as you crossed the white line in the centre of the road to overtake a slow moving car whilst being chased by the police. Now we have the police chases but it is not one or two cars but an army of them like Blues Brothers or Smokey and the Bandit.
So they are both very different experiences, invoking very different emotional responses. Of course if you don’t like cars they probably will invoke the same eye rolling not again response.
There is one similarity though that is a bad attribute. That is the way having bought the game you are constantly bombarded in game with the opportunities to buy new DLC (downloadable content). Clearly with cars and car models wanting to collect more makes sense to a fan. However Forza on its main menu has an option for Horizon Rally, this makes it look like it is part of the game, but click it and it guides you to buy quite a pricey extra add on. It’s another £14 and is already there. It is worse in NFS though. As you drive around you discover new cars to drive, that is part of the game mechanic, however sometimes you arrive at a car and there it is, the model is already in your game sat there but it then says you can go and buy this form the shop to unlock it.
Both these tactics are annoying, they probably work a little but it seems that the concepts of freemium are being applied to things that are already full price. That’s not really very fair. When predlet 2.0 plays NFS which he loves he is playing on his own non xbox live account. i.e. he is not connected to the shop. Playing NFS he still sees these cars so he is being shown something in game that he can never really attain.
I know these things cost a lot of money, I do buy DLC to extend games but it seems just a little bit shabby when the rest of the experience is so much fun.
On a positive note both games use Kinect voice recognition to let you engage with menu’s whilst driving though it does seem a little bit sensitive when other people are in the room talking and it triggers thinking you have said “rear view”… crash….
Also Horizon has a Smartglass application with it which means on my iphone (or on another tablet) you can get the GPS map up on the phone whilst driving around in the car. This second screen type of experience is becoming more popular and accessible. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
What abut Halo 4 and Far Cry 3? well so far I have only played a little bit of Halo, but it seems pretty much business as usual, wandering between set pieces in a defined order. It does look fantastic. Far Cry 3 though is proving a much more interesting experience, but I think that needs a post of it’s own next time 🙂
****Update

I am not sure if this is NFS being clever and looking at names or if this is built in and just a coincidence but I was pleased to see Hughes Park in NFS:Most wanted and equally surprised that there was Reynolds avenue leading to it. The reason for this resonating was that back in 06/07 @rooreynolds and I, and quite a lot of the eightbar members had areas names after them in Second Life. We had adjoining marina’s 🙂 It was a great honour for that to happen. So this was a great gaming flashback 🙂

Amongst all the other features of the current game of the moment Call Of Duty : Black Ops II there are some great tools for exploring replays. Every game that you play is stored away on servers somewhere. In game you can pull one of those games as a replay. In the replay you have full control over the camera views, and can zoom back an forward through time. This replay is a reconstruction from the player data, so it needs the game to be able to see it (or anyone else’s shared replays). It does however allow you to render the replay to an actual movie and put it on youtube. Of course just a first person or 3rd person view of the game might get a bit samey, so hidden away is the ability to set camera positions and have cameras follow a virtual dolly to let us budding action movie directors create this sort of thing.

It seems to be having a few teething troubles as this was twice as long as this when I rendered it 🙂 However you can see the sort of control you can have over the cameras to make mini action machinima 🙂
The Elite web side used to be a subscription only extra add on, but is now open to everyone, this lets you explore the data in more ways. Things like the heatmap view of a level that shows a map view of where things happened and when. With the ability to drill down into the data and see what happened where. Of course this is not for everyone but it is interesting as it gives an insight into what gets captured and stored. Whilst it is just player positions and status over time, that is used to reconstruct the visuals it is a huge amount of data, given the millions of games that have happened already.

As you can see in this example I tend to die more than anything else 🙂 It is still great fun though.

Ok so it’s a dramatic title, but it is not about any 2012 apocalypse of the breakdown of our social structures because of the greedy few absorbing all the money in the world. No this is just an observation I got to make on the current incarnation of Assassins Creed, number III in the series.
The game is certainly a mammoth production, I have definitely enjoyed exploring the environment, as you should with a free roaming environment. Of course this means hitting the edges of the world. Quite often this is a message that an area is not yet available. However I was a little surprised when I leapt to climb one particular cliff and fell right through it. The great thing about rendering engines is that they obviously have no idea if something is right or wrong. If the collision constraints fail you can end up in some very unusual places.

I ended up in an ocean, but is clearly ended where the wall I feel through was. With the occlusion rendering backwards it looks like you can see the paths in the trees that are normally branches you leap to and from.
The water simulation was still running, but had a spooky drop off. The world was flat indeed and I had fallen off.

It’s not really witch space in Elite 🙂 but it was fun for a few minutes. Bugs FTW