Maybe; however, I believe the following portion thereof merits some discussion:
Still another can 'o worms is when someone sells a modded box on eBay without mentioning that it's banned from XBox Live. Who gets sued now? Is MS doing all they should be doing to warn people that all XBoxes are not treated equally?
If the seller does not disclose both facts (that it is a modded 360 and it is exiled from Live), I believe that's sufficient fodder for a lawsuit. Where the first, but not second, fact is disclosed, ther might be less of a case if it is widely known that such 360s get exiled.
Back to the first case: aside from getting out of the suit funds sufficient to buy a new 360, what recourse does this notional plaintiff have? Would it be practical for Microsoft to set up a system where such individuals can send the offending console along with apporpirate documentation and get a new unit in exchange?
More generally, I am curious as to the false-positive rate of whatever mechanism is used to determine 'is this a modded 360?'.
I'm with you here. What I also appreciate is the fact that limb hits actually mean something - bosses are easier to manage after you've shot that HMG out of their hands, and when you're starting out leg shots make great setups for grenade/thrown object kills...
A shame that each gang doesn't have a 'Clean Kill' achievement (wipe out the gang without causing any civilian/Peacekeeper casualties.
I never got deeply into 2 but I think it had a lot more flexibility in what missions you took and which gang you sided with. I know some people who say 2 is better than 3 for that kind of reason.
Which begs the question: why was this flexibility removed entirely from subsequent iterations? It can't be a technical reason - the Pandemic crew were able to incorporate this sort of mechanic into Mercenaries...
Ah yes, that mission; fortunately, it's only required if you want to complete the Zero strand. Oddly enough, the last mission in the strand - 'New Model Army' - could actually be easier: someone suggested going around and bombing all of Berkley's tanks before laying the bridges.
I, too, found it much less stressful to simply leave that job on the shelf. In an attempt to provide some perspective, here's a short list of gaming challenges I've run across recently:
fighting the final boss (the supership Ragnarok) in Warship Gunner 2's campaign without a wave cannon;
the final battle in Black; and
many of the (sub-)boss battles in The Red Star - yes, the game is finally out, but has not to my knowledge been shipped in great quantities
Where are you having difficulty? I might be able to offer some specific pointers. More generally, though...
For weapons, there're a couple of good maps on GameFAQs detailing where various weapons and vehicles spawn... for example, there're three spots in Los Santos where the MP5 spawns and two each for the AK-47 and sawn-off shotgun. Another set of maps details the locations of tags, horseshoes, photo opportunities, and oysters.
before getting into the storyline missions in a given area, take the time to complete the delivery jobs. Each nets a recurring $2000 plus whatever you made on the deliveries.
it's possible to unlock the airports early: use a car as a step to get onto the guard shack at Los Santos International. Take any plane there and fly it in circles for a stretch (or several) until you get your pilot's license. Note, though, that most planes at the other airports remain locked until you complete 'Learning to Fly'.
the airports are also great places to work on your firearms skills - just stock up, find one of the baggage trucks, and keep shooting the tires.
another reason to unlock the airports early: there is an M4 spawn near the western end of Los Santos' runways; out on the tarmac at Easter Bay (and incidentally next to one of the photo opportunities) is a missile launcher (not RPG). This latter comes in very handy for certain missions.
drug dealers (the chaps wearing black muscle shirts and chains, or grey hoodies) drop about $2000 when flatlined.
the gym on the beach is available from the very beginning of the game.
...our refusal in some cases to "dress for success"...
A Pertruchio quote ('The Taming of the Shrew') seems very apt here: "She's marrying me, not my clothes!" Quite aside from (say) an Armani suit and expensively styled hair not being a reliable indicator of competence.
It always helps when people assume that instead of spending all of your free time memorizing Battlestar Gallactica scripts, that you might actually have time for a girlfriend.
It seems to me that it would be worth the trouble for a virus scanner to try every word in the file as a password, and then scan the results.
Not a bad try, but it'll choke in a case like this:
Very often in the history of human endeavour, occasions arise which require from each of us some measure of sacrifice, for the benefit of the community as a whole. Though such action is more often than not difficult...
Along with this text, of course, is a note to the effect of 'concatonate bold characters to get password'. Slightly subtler is a scheme where seemingly random letters are omitted, and it is those which are the password's components.
Say hello to Falling Star (from Act of War: Direct Action; it's the Consortium superweapon). From the entry:
Their trademark weapon is their tactical weapon, the "Falling Star", a project originally started by the US government, in which a communications array forces satellites to fall upon a targeted area. It can be upgraded with ebola, causing more injuries to infantry units.
The ingame plausibility of that 'Ebola upgrade' is suspect, I believe.
Also, someone pulled this off a few months back in the current G.I. Joe comic run. A related weapon is the Satellite Rain from Syndicate Wars; this, though, is a purpose-built system. From the Wikipedia entry for orbital weaponry:
The Satellite Rain weapon from Syndicate Wars fires rods of tungsten from an orbiting satellite. The heat of reentry causes them to melt into plasma, peppering the target area with deadly explosions.
I suspect that the real reason might be that the setting, this time, it Liberty City. Being based loosely on NYC, there would probably be a big uproar if they let you fly planes into the skyscrapers.
A big uproar raised by folks who utterly fail at distinguishing game from reality, you mean.
Yeah right, like Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas don't have such things (or other major landmarks)... and how about that large dam (whose name escapes me at present)? To address a point raised elsewhere in this thread: no helos would, indeed, be a major drag; assuming it's true (and not just the result of someone thinking 'aircraft' and 'helicopter' are two different things), I'd love to hear them explain that away given that both Vice City and San Andreas have them.
The op you're referring to is 'Up, Up, and Away', and while HALO-jumping into that facility is impressive, it's much easier with a jetpack and missile launcher (not the RPG).
A pair of potential hitches I can think of, actually:
the monitor imagery is presented as though it is sheets of paper atop the desk - this might not be comfortable for extended viewing; and
with no tactile feedback with respect to where your fingers are, it's possible for an inattentive typist to find said extremities drifting from the 'home row'...
The first of these can be corrected by altering how the imagery is presented: for a quick-and-dirty representation imagine, if you will, a glass-topped desk with an actual CRT suspended beneath it in such a way that when you look down at the desk, you see the monitor face-on, instead of at an angle. Examples of such a setup can be found here and here.
Note, too, that in the case of Dillinger's desk, only the 'keyboard' seems to be a touchscreen. If one were to recreate it today, one would need to either make the whole combination of 'keyboard' and 'monitor' a touchscreen, or add a concealable trackball... in either case, a 'screen lock' button (much as the buttons on portable MP3 players and mobile phones can be locked to prevent accidental actuation) would be a good idea.
Having said all that, I think we are not far away from the "Your desk is your monitor" systems with six 1920x1200 or four 2560x1600 LCDs -- touchscreened, of course, with one keyboard to control them all!
Hmmm, take another look at Tron; take specific note of Dillinger's desk I wonder how viable such a thing is...
I was thinking more along the lines of Metal Gear Portable Ops or Ace Combat X - these games, while they are easily played by children, have a more serious tone and artistic style that isn't insulting.
Those are two of the reasons I've considered getting a PSP now and again; others include Killzone: Liberation, the Metal Gear Ac!d titles, and Pursuit Force. The price drop just validates the theory that, at least with game systems, all good things come at reasonable prices to they who wait.
On the other tendril, I think it would be nice if Sony released an external UMD player that would allow folks to play said games on their PS2/3.
Re:...allows an unauthorized attacker...
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And let's not forget Sega. "Why?" you ask.
Answer: Gunblade NY
The game's graphics are on a par with the Virtua Cop titles, but the various NYC locales (Times Square and the area around UNHQ, to name two) are quite recognizable. And I don't recall anyone up in arms about this, either...
There was the one in San Andreas where I waste a bunch of National Guard I suppose, so perhaps that's semantics, but it wasn't cops. Anyone know of a cop-killing mission?
To specifically answer your question: 'Reuniting the Families' comes to mind, along with 'Are You Going to San Fierro?', and 'High Noon', along with 'Vertical Bird' and 'End of the Line' (I think that's what the final storyline mission is called). The mission you mention is 'Robbing Uncle Sam', and if you're going to mention that, there's also 'Green Goo' and 'Black Project', as well as 'Up, Up, and Away'. There's one where Tenpenny asks you to go take out a reporter and his contact (the latter presumably a member of the LSPD's Internal Affairs division), but its name escapes me at present.
Special notes: 'Stowaway' and 'Interdiction' are not included becuse of ambiguity about exactly who those guys with the cargo plane (or the many choppers) are; 'Witness' (at least, I think that's what the mission requiring you to take out the witness cached up in the neighborhood of Mt. Chilliad) is quite possible to pull off without killing any of the guards.
Storyline-advancement needs aside, going around picking fights with the police (or FBI, or National Guard, or Army) in the GTAs isn't worth the trouble - continuing to use San Andreas as an example, hunting the Ballas, Vagos, and drug dealers gives much better returns for the effort. As for the cool FBI Ranchers: as I've mentioned on occasion, there is a way to get them reliably without firing a shot.
With respect to firearms targeting, perhaps the developers should take a look at Scarface: The World is Yours (TWiY hereafter; whose develoeprs, in turn, might have been inspired by Everything or Nothing). Quite simply: when you lock onto somebody, you have the option of refining your aimpoint while retaining that lock. The Crackdown team took it a bit further: an arm hit will make someone drop their weapon, and they'll either try and recover it or pull their backup; shoot someone in the leg, and they'll be temporarily out of the fight (on the ground, clutching the wounded limb). As a bonus, not only does the system in TwiY also works when you're firing from a vehicle, but it applies to vehicles as well - pursue-and-kill missions are much easier when you can nail the driver as opposed to shooting/ramming the vehicle until it explodes.
By 'close fights' I assume you are referring to melee engagements. What they did in San Andreas was a good start, but it sounds to me like you want this dev team to perhaps take pages from Yakuza, which wouldn't be a bad thing. Related: you should be able to perform stealth takedowns bare-handed or with any melee weapon (with the obvious exception of the chainsaw).
The voiceover seems to point at some Russian/Eastern European immigrant moving up the ranks in American crime.
Interesting... I cannot help but wonder if one of the people you might do jobs for in this game will be anything like Balalaika.
(Although, as I've said, a Black Lagoon game, probably based on the Everything or Nothing mechanics, would rock in its own right)
Plus, I think FPS games are better on consoles because the controllers are innacurrate...
Right, that statement went and set off all the 'this man must be kidding' flags in my head. Then you explain yourself... the explanation is strange, but it apparently works for you, so 'nuff said there.
My experience with gamepad accuracy and FPSs comes from the likes of Black and Killzone; I've found that the very same relative inaccuracy makes headshots all the more satisfying... especially with weapons that aren't exactly the most tack-accurate in the game (the M249 in Black; the Helghast assault rifle and squad MG in Killzone).
A bit earlier, you mention C&C3. Now there is an example of a genre that isn't gamepad-friendly (AvP: Extinction on the PS2 manages to work more due to scale than anything, but suffers from camera issues).
I know that I have dreamed of building a system into a desk...
Hmmm, combine with a sufficiently rugged large touchscreen (that can be 'locked' ala the buttons on a Discman/MP3 player/what-have-you) and it sounds like you'll have Dillinger's desk from Tron. Not a bad idea, that...
In the real world, lessons at driving schools do not prepare people for advanced driving at all. I believe that if in order to obtain a driving licence, people had to pass advanced driving tests (driving in adverse conditions, overtaking, sliding, handling a vehicle at high speed), the rate of accidents would reduce dramatically, even if speed limits on motorways and country roads were to be dropped completely.
This begs the question of why passing said advanced driving tests isn't a requisite for a license in the first place. At least here in the United States; as I recall, such tests are requisite for licenses in various European countries.
I did have a concrete experience of a game changing my behavior while driving though. Battlezone II involves driving around in tanks, with the fun option of hopping out of your tank, sneaking around on foot, and blasting your opponent out of his tank with a sniper rifle.
I have the previous iteration (you know, the one about the Cold War heating up off Terra); it, like the X-Wing family, is one of those gems I wish we'd see remade using current tech. Yes, the idea of 'first-person RTS' sounds like it'd be difficult to implement, but the dev team pretty much nailed it (having a joystick with a high-hat helps). And yes, sniping can be fun in this game (is this where the Generals devs got the idea for Jarmen Kell?); here're a trio of examples from the NSDF campaign:
in the very first (or was it second?) mission, it's easy to get 'free' tank support: snipe one of the two scouts that make up the first enemy wave (the other will flee), then park your tank near the barracks and run for the now-derelict scout;
in the first of two missions taking place on Europa, you have to snipe a patrolling scout so you can infiltrate the CCA base to plant a data tap;
in the very next mission - where you have to clean house - a bit after you repel the initial assault, a quartet of howitzers will motor to a cliff overlooking your base and proceed to rain on your parade. If you're quick, you can snipe all four of them on their approach... then push them down to your barracks. Trashing the CCA base with their own artillery was so very amusing...
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Back to the first case: aside from getting out of the suit funds sufficient to buy a new 360, what recourse does this notional plaintiff have? Would it be practical for Microsoft to set up a system where such individuals can send the offending console along with apporpirate documentation and get a new unit in exchange?
More generally, I am curious as to the false-positive rate of whatever mechanism is used to determine 'is this a modded 360?'.
I'm with you here. What I also appreciate is the fact that limb hits actually mean something - bosses are easier to manage after you've shot that HMG out of their hands, and when you're starting out leg shots make great setups for grenade/thrown object kills...
A shame that each gang doesn't have a 'Clean Kill' achievement (wipe out the gang without causing any civilian/Peacekeeper casualties.
I, too, found it much less stressful to simply leave that job on the shelf. In an attempt to provide some perspective, here's a short list of gaming challenges I've run across recently:
For weapons, there're a couple of good maps on GameFAQs detailing where various weapons and vehicles spawn... for example, there're three spots in Los Santos where the MP5 spawns and two each for the AK-47 and sawn-off shotgun. Another set of maps details the locations of tags, horseshoes, photo opportunities, and oysters.
You are correct; it seems I was remiss in not including a link to the Wikipedia article containing that particular excerpt.
Also, someone pulled this off a few months back in the current G.I. Joe comic run. A related weapon is the Satellite Rain from Syndicate Wars; this, though, is a purpose-built system. From the Wikipedia entry for orbital weaponry:
Yeah right, like Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas don't have such things (or other major landmarks)... and how about that large dam (whose name escapes me at present)? To address a point raised elsewhere in this thread: no helos would, indeed, be a major drag; assuming it's true (and not just the result of someone thinking 'aircraft' and 'helicopter' are two different things), I'd love to hear them explain that away given that both Vice City and San Andreas have them.
The op you're referring to is 'Up, Up, and Away', and while HALO-jumping into that facility is impressive, it's much easier with a jetpack and missile launcher (not the RPG).
- the monitor imagery is presented as though it is sheets of paper atop the desk - this might not be comfortable for extended viewing; and
- with no tactile feedback with respect to where your fingers are, it's possible for an inattentive typist to find said extremities drifting from the 'home row'...
The first of these can be corrected by altering how the imagery is presented: for a quick-and-dirty representation imagine, if you will, a glass-topped desk with an actual CRT suspended beneath it in such a way that when you look down at the desk, you see the monitor face-on, instead of at an angle. Examples of such a setup can be found here and here.Note, too, that in the case of Dillinger's desk, only the 'keyboard' seems to be a touchscreen. If one were to recreate it today, one would need to either make the whole combination of 'keyboard' and 'monitor' a touchscreen, or add a concealable trackball... in either case, a 'screen lock' button (much as the buttons on portable MP3 players and mobile phones can be locked to prevent accidental actuation) would be a good idea.
On the other tendril, I think it would be nice if Sony released an external UMD player that would allow folks to play said games on their PS2/3.
Yes; Tiger Teams and the OPFOR in Red Flag exercises come to mind.
And let's not forget Sega. "Why?" you ask.
Answer: Gunblade NY
The game's graphics are on a par with the Virtua Cop titles, but the various NYC locales (Times Square and the area around UNHQ, to name two) are quite recognizable. And I don't recall anyone up in arms about this, either...
Special notes: 'Stowaway' and 'Interdiction' are not included becuse of ambiguity about exactly who those guys with the cargo plane (or the many choppers) are; 'Witness' (at least, I think that's what the mission requiring you to take out the witness cached up in the neighborhood of Mt. Chilliad) is quite possible to pull off without killing any of the guards.
Storyline-advancement needs aside, going around picking fights with the police (or FBI, or National Guard, or Army) in the GTAs isn't worth the trouble - continuing to use San Andreas as an example, hunting the Ballas, Vagos, and drug dealers gives much better returns for the effort. As for the cool FBI Ranchers: as I've mentioned on occasion, there is a way to get them reliably without firing a shot.
With respect to firearms targeting, perhaps the developers should take a look at Scarface: The World is Yours (TWiY hereafter; whose develoeprs, in turn, might have been inspired by Everything or Nothing). Quite simply: when you lock onto somebody, you have the option of refining your aimpoint while retaining that lock. The Crackdown team took it a bit further: an arm hit will make someone drop their weapon, and they'll either try and recover it or pull their backup; shoot someone in the leg, and they'll be temporarily out of the fight (on the ground, clutching the wounded limb). As a bonus, not only does the system in TwiY also works when you're firing from a vehicle, but it applies to vehicles as well - pursue-and-kill missions are much easier when you can nail the driver as opposed to shooting/ramming the vehicle until it explodes.
By 'close fights' I assume you are referring to melee engagements. What they did in San Andreas was a good start, but it sounds to me like you want this dev team to perhaps take pages from Yakuza, which wouldn't be a bad thing. Related: you should be able to perform stealth takedowns bare-handed or with any melee weapon (with the obvious exception of the chainsaw).
(Although, as I've said, a Black Lagoon game, probably based on the Everything or Nothing mechanics, would rock in its own right)
My experience with gamepad accuracy and FPSs comes from the likes of Black and Killzone; I've found that the very same relative inaccuracy makes headshots all the more satisfying... especially with weapons that aren't exactly the most tack-accurate in the game (the M249 in Black; the Helghast assault rifle and squad MG in Killzone).
A bit earlier, you mention C&C3. Now there is an example of a genre that isn't gamepad-friendly (AvP: Extinction on the PS2 manages to work more due to scale than anything, but suffers from camera issues).
Does this ring any bells? Here's a hint:
"The world's greatest cash card.""It had better not be rejected."