Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Watchdogs,Game of the Year?
In the modern uber-connected world, Chicago has the nation's most advanced and integrated computer system – one which controls almost every facet of city technology and maintains critical information on all of the city's residents. You assume the role of Aiden Pearce, a notorious hacker and
BattleField 4
Fortunately, the online stage is expertly set for some exhilarating moments. One of the best new things about BF4 is Obliteration mode, in which two teams fight to gain control of a bomb and use it to blow up three enemy positions. Unlike returning standby Conquest mode, in which the battle ebbs and flows between a handful of set positions, Obliteration boasts conflict zones that can change in a flash with the timely use ofland, air, and sea vehicles. Motorized transport has always been a pillar of combat in the Battlefield series, and Obliteration mode makes mobility more important than ever. (Thank goodness for the new test range that allows you to practice piloting every vehicle!) A skilled helicopter pilot can swoop in to pick up the bomb carrier and then zip off to an objective point, leaving enemy infantry in the dust. Escaping the chaos to grab a personal watercraft can turn the tide, but perhaps it's better to blow it up so your enemies don't grab it for themselves. Plotting your own dramatic maneuvers while defending against the enemies' is a lively challenge that takes on new urgency in Obliteration.
Matches without vehicles, however, have a different pace. Victory comes from solid squad support and sharp shooting. Battling for bomb possession in winding prison tunnels is a brutal close-quarters affair, and well-balanced matches run the risk of devolving into lengthy scrums in which neither team can make headway. Keeping your squad alive is crucial here, not just as mobile spawn points but also to preserve your field upgrades. These are new attribute bonuses that you gain through squad-related actions, bestowing you with resistance to suppressing fire or better flak protection, for example.
Being able to shoot a little straighter or survive a nearby grenade blast can make a difference in these fast-paced, infantry-heavy matches of Obliteration, as well as in small, speedy matches of Domination (small-scale Conquest) and Team Deathmatch. The other new mode also involves bomb-carrying, but because it has bite-size maps and no respawning, Defuse demands a more careful kind of infantry combat. Weapon choice and enemy detection are key in these short, fraught encounters, and while the heightened tension can result in some very satisfying wins, smaller arenas are not where Battlefield 4 is at its best.
The standout action comes in large-scale conflicts that take advantage of the 10 large, well-designed maps. Richer color saturation makes them a pleasure to look at, from the lush alpine fields surrounding a massive satellite dish to the sparkling neon lights of a coastal city. Buildings frequently have stairs or elevators that allow access to upper stories, giving snipers long sight lines and providing parachutists with jumping-off points to better traverse the map. This increased verticality adds some strategic options, but the bigger change is the greater prevalence of water. Marine combat is a much bigger factor in Battlefield 4, whether you're zipping down the narrow canals of a seaside resort while your passenger mows down infantry or patrolling the lanes of a small archipelago and shooting helicopters out of the sky with a fully crewed attack boat.
Naval dominance can help you control a match, but water-based mobility is another huge consideration, as anyone who has trudged across a large empty field instead of hitching a ride knows. Swimming leaves you vulnerable, though you can at least pull out your sidearm, so it's best to secure transport when you can. This much is obvious when fighting in a stormy island chain, but until someone blows the levee on the slightly waterlogged urban map, you can do just fine scurrying around on foot. When the water does rush in, the whole place gets submerged beneath ten feet of water and things change significantly. If you don't stick to the rooftops or hop in one of the newly spawned boats, you're in trouble.
This deluge is the most drastic of the marquee environmental events that you can trigger on each map. Some of these occurrences bring significant change, like the destruction of a skyscraper, while others are more subtle, like closing jail doors to shut off a hallway or raising bollards to block a road. These special events are complemented by the wide range of destructible structures and deformable terrain. Blown-out walls and collapsed buildings have a hard time hiding enemies, and roads pitted by bomb craters are more difficult to navigate smoothly. Destructibility has been amped up from Battlefield 3, and being able to blast your way through certain obstructions is a liberating and empowering experience.
In most cases, you must supply the ordnance to take advantage of this destructibility (some maps have large triggered bombs that do the job on their own). Among the weapons and gadgets for each class are a number of explosive options tailored to take down threats on land, at sea, and in the sky. There are also items that support your allies in a variety of ways, from keeping them alive to alerting them to nearby enemies. Thanks to some loadout shuffling and the presence of weapon classes that unlock for every soldier type, there are more ways than ever to customize the four basic archetypes to fill a multitude of combat roles. Of particular note is the new ability to zero your scope, a trick that lets you quickly set the distance at which your bullet will hit the center of your sight, providing a valuable aid for long-range sniping.
Between vehicle and soldier customization, there are a ton of ways to be effective on the battlefield and rack up the points that increase your rank and unlock new stuff. You can intermittently earn battlepacks that provide small rewards, and new map-specific battle pickups like sniper rifles, automatic shotguns, and grenade launchers give you powerful ways to adapt your strategy on the fly. If you prefer to take a broader strategic view, you can join a match as a commander once you hit the requisite level. With a bird's-eye view and a chat line to every squad leader, this mode lets you set objectives for troops, scan for enemies, and reinforce your team in a few other ways. Vehicle and supply drops can conceivably be a great boon to your grunts, but the tools that become available to you depend largely on how well those grunts accept and follow your orders. Oblivious players can make Commander mode drag, so it's a hit-or-miss experience.
The single-player campaign has its ups and downs as well, though alas, more of the latter than the former. It's good when you're fighting your way through a village, using scattered weapons and the odd vehicle to carve a path to your allies. Sections like these approximate the combat diversity of multiplayer and are genuinely fun, while other sequences aren't as successful. Fighting through streets and buildings evokes nothing more than the dozens of other shooter campaigns in the same mold, and though the gunplay is competent, it lacks a spark to sustain it. A difficult tank battle and some dramatic moments might manage to get your blood pumping, but on the whole, the action feels lifeless.
COD: Ghosts Reviews
There are no UAVs to shoot down. Strike packages are back, and the dolphin dive has been replaced with a knee slide. You can leanout from cover. All of the launchers are free-fire, and knife kills now come with an annoyingly forced kill animation that leaves would-be stabbers open to counterattack. Theater mode is history. Headquarters mode is nowhere to be found. Same with Hardpoint.Call of Duty: Ghosts continues the weird trend of reversing/removing changes made by the other development team(s) that ensure thatActivision's dominating shooter franchise makes it to shelves every November, but it also represents some of the largest multiplayer changes the series has seen since Call of Duty 4 redefined console-based first-person shooters for the previous generation of consoles. Here's the catch, though: many of those changes just make me want to play Black Ops II, instead.
In some cases, Call of Duty: Ghosts provides similar items in an attempt to iterate on existing ideas. UAVs, for example, used to fly around overhead (which then provided a clear need for lock-on rocket launchers). Now, the baseline killstreak item is the SAT COM, a ground-based deployable that, by default, paints enemies on your minimap if they're in your team's direct field of vision. Placing multiple SAT COM units eventually gives it a UAV-like "sweep" effect. Since they're on the ground, enemies can shoot or stab them out of service pretty easily--if they can find where you put them. I hated the move away from UAVs at first, but eventually warmed up to it. There's an overall reduction in airpower going on across most of Ghosts' killstreaks, which shifts the focus back down to the ground where you once again need to aim carefully but quickly to take out your targets. Compared to Modern Warfare 3, the last game to come out of Infinity Ward, you'd think that Ghosts took place in one big no-fly zone.
You'll also have some new modes to play in multiplayer, like Cranked, which gives you a speed boost and a timer when you get your first kill on every life. Once you're in this "cranked" state, you have to keep getting kills to reset your timer or else you blow up, respawning as normal. Search and Rescue replaces Search and Destroy in playlists, though the old mode is still available in private matches. S&R mixes S&D with Kill Confirmed, causing dog tags to pop out of players when they're killed. If your team recovers your dog tags, yourespawn. If the enemy grabs them, you're out until the next round. Hunted starts everyone with pistols and drops low-ammo weapon cases onto the maps over the course of the match. That means you must fight your way to a crate to get a temporary crack at some random, potentially useful equipment. Blitz is a team mode that gives each team a goal point. Players try to run into the opposing team's goal to score, resulting in a ton of monotonous pistol runs from one side of the map to the other. Infected is a pretty standard "regular guys spawn with shotguns, but if the fast-moving zombie kills them, they're infected and swap to the other team" mode that feels like it fell out of a Halo game. The inclusion of some new modes is a nice touch, but none of them are as much fun as Hardpoint or Headquarters, both of which are missing from the game.
Orange is The New Black
Vice president of product innovation Tom Yellin confirmed that bonus material could be added to third-party shows should the trial prove popular.
"The core of the experience is watching the story that the directors and writers contended, and that's like 99% of what it is," CNET quotes him as saying. "But supplemental content, whether that's extra features or so forth, we're going to test that around our own originals.
"We'll experiment around our originals, and if that goes well, then we'll go back to our partners that we license a ton of content from, and I can see possibly doing some extra or supplemental content around that."
Netflix last month announced that "Super HD" video streams have been made available for all subscribers.
Watch a trailer for Orange Is the New Black season one below:
"The core of the experience is watching the story that the directors and writers contended, and that's like 99% of what it is," CNET quotes him as saying. "But supplemental content, whether that's extra features or so forth, we're going to test that around our own originals.
"We'll experiment around our originals, and if that goes well, then we'll go back to our partners that we license a ton of content from, and I can see possibly doing some extra or supplemental content around that."
Netflix last month announced that "Super HD" video streams have been made available for all subscribers.
Watch a trailer for Orange Is the New Black season one below:
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Orange is the New Black
"The core of the experience is watching the story that the directors and writers contended, and that's like 99% of what it is," CNET quotes him as saying. "But supplemental content, whether that's extra features or so forth, we're going to test that around our own originals.
"We'll experiment around our originals, and if that goes well, then we'll go back to our partners that we license a ton of content from, and I can see possibly doing some extra or supplemental content around that."
Netflix last month announced that "Super HD" video streams have been made available for all subscribers.
Watch a trailer for Orange Is the New Black season one below:
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