Developed by Free Radical, published by Ubisoft and released on May 20th, 2008, Haze is a PlayStation 3-exclusive first person shooter. The game received a lot of hype from gamers before release but around the release date when the first reviews were starting to appear, it seemed as if the game was rather mediocre. As of writing, the Metacritic score for the game is 56/100.

Haze had lots of potential. In the game, the Mantel soldiers make use of a drug called nectar which enhances the soldier’s speed, accuracy and strength. It can also control the minds of the soldier, similar to the effects of a real-life hallucinogenic drug. When used, enemies stand out as bright orange silhouettes against the darker background. On the other hand, an overdose of the drug is very dangerous. Loss of mental control and death are some of the side effects. This all sounds refreshing to me after what seems like hundreds of generic World War II first person shooters that have been released this generation.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the introduction, things didn’t turn out right for the game. Large gaming news and reviews sites like IGN, Gamespot, 1up and Eurogamer all gave less than stellar scores.

Here’s what some sites had to say:

1up: On the whole, Haze isn’t outright terrible or broken — it’s just unsatisfying and misguided and would have been merely average on the Xbox and PS2. Its campaign, with or without friends, is a typical, sometimes offensive six-to-eight hour hodgepodge of gameplay that’s been done better many times over, co-op or not. Multiplayer, meanwhile, has glimmers of potential and can be fun, but it has nothing that approaches an addiction level of replayability (and it’s sad that last-gen’s TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, for one, had many more multiplayer options). Kicking this habit won’t be hard; better yet, don’t even take the initial hit.

IGN: Haze was touted as a great PS3 exclusive from a developer well versed in first-person shooter mechanics. While Free Radical does have a solid pedigree, Haze does not live up to the company’s reputation thanks to a horrible plot, weak gameplay mechanics and visuals that are truly underwhelming. While playing with friends is enjoyable, not even those are enough to bring this lackluster title around.

Gamespot: A seven-hour campaign and uneventful multiplayer modes just don’t cut it in light of the far better modern shooters available on the market. The patchy quality of the entire package is surprising, considering the developer’s fine pedigree. Yet Haze is a roller-coaster ride made up of tall peaks and unfathomable valleys, and it won’t leave you so much breathless as disappointed with its squandered potential.

Eurogamer: You really have to wonder how it all ended up this dreadful, especially after all the time and resource Ubisoft and Free Radical expended telling people the opposite. The combat’s weak, the storyline’s excruciating, it’s technically deficient - Haze really is this year’s most significant gaming disappointment. The fact that the creative forces behind this moribund excuse for a blockbuster feel that it is BAFTA-worthy has to be one of the most tragically comic examples of self-delusion we’ve ever witnessed.

Game Informer: Like the band Metallica, when the game abandons the only feature that made it interesting — drugs — it leaves you with a drab experience akin to watching Lars Ulrich complain about his band mates; that is, repetitive, uninteresting, and intolerable. The poorly implemented threat indicators make it tough to figure out where fire is coming from, and enemies display the intelligence of raging bulls, relentlessly charging you with total disregard for tactics — it’s a wonder Mantel ever comes out on top in a fight. Your comrades are equally moribund; you’ll spend so much time healing them that it’s often best to let them die and go it alone. Haze also features the worst variety of weapons I’ve seen in a long while, and you’ll only fight variations of two enemies over the course of the campaign. Players won’t find solace in the neglected multiplayer, either, which offers all the excitement of a St. Anger b-side. Haze’s saving grace is its co-op gameplay, which can be fun when you shoot a friend’s Nectar tank from behind to watch him freak out. But these short experiences do nothing to offset the major disappointment the rest of the game delivers.

Ouch. Some of those closing paragraphs don’t look too promising. Not all is negative though - Games Master UK gave Haze a score of slightly higher yet still not stellar 79 in their July 2008 issue.

More reviews of Haze are available at Metacritic.

I’ve noticed lately that when I want a game that’s been out for a while, I tend to go to EB Games and try to find it pre-owned rather than purchase it new from Amazon or Wal-Mart. There are obvious positive and negatives to purchasing pre-owned but the positives seem to outweigh the negatives in most cases for me. I haven’t read much commentary on this elsewhere so I thought it might make an interesting editorial.

Buying Used - The Positives

• Savings: Sometimes you can find games that have been out for a few months considerably cheaper used than you would new. Going out to find Grand Theft Auto IV used on release date probably wouldn’t save you much (if at all) but in the cases of games that everyone has already enjoyed and brought back, buying used can provide considerable savings. At EB Games, you can also save an additional 10% if you have one of their “EB Edge” cards that only cost $5 per year in the first place. If you are planning on spending more than $50 on used games from EB Games in a year, it’s definitely worth it - even small savings add up eventually. Buying from auctions on eBay, locally or on Craigslist can also save you money.
• Selection: I haven’t been to a whole lot of video game stores so I can’t really comment on this worldwide but I’ve found around here if you are looking for a rather unknown or older game, you have a much higher chance of finding it used than new in stores.

Buying Used - The Negatives

• Helping the store, not the developers: Obviously this is not a negative for those who would rather support the store than the developer. However, if you like a certain developer, buying a game used in a store or online probably isn’t going to help them financially much. The person who originally purchased the game new would have paid the standard $40-$60 and part of that would go to the developers but if you are the type of person who likes to support quality developers, buying new whenever possible would probably be a better option. On the other hand, I guess you could also consider this a positive. If you would rather support the local business or person you are buying from, that’s exactly what you’re doing by buying used.
• Condition: This is a big thing for me. Before handing the store my cash or credit card, I usually ask to see the disc to make sure there aren’t any significant scratches. I learned from previous mistakes there. I bought a game from EB Games first when they opened in my district and came home with a game that worked fine but was in horrible condition. Since I’m the type of person that likes my stuff in optimal condition, I wasn’t pleased. Sometimes you’ll find that the case or manual is damaged or tampered with in some way as well.
• Completeness: When buying used online, you should always check to see exactly what is included in the sale or auction. I always like to have the game case and manual as well as the actual disc but sometimes the case and manual aren’t included. This isn’t an issue for everyone but it is for me.

Buying New - The Positives

• Condition - You usually know that, with the exception of a few items that may have manufacturing defects, what you’re getting hasn’t been touched by anyone else and is generally in optimal condition. You know that you are the first person to unwrap the game, open the case, read the manual and try it out.
• Completeness - Obviously when you buy new and the game is factory sealed, everything that the manufacturer/publisher intended to include is included.
• Supporting the developers - Everyone knows video game development isn’t cheap. It takes loads of time and money to develop a solid game. When you buy new, a portion of the cost of the game will go to the publisher and developer and will influence them to keep working hard on future games to get more sales and more money.

Buying New - The Negatives

• Cost - This isn’t an issue for everyone, but sometimes when you don’t have a lot of money to spare, the $5-$10 or more you could save by buying used makes a difference. For instance, I picked up Guitar Hero III for $4.49 in EB Games a few days ago. That’s an amazing deal and I noticed Wal-Mart still had the game for sale for $54.99. Obviously neither one included the guitar but even after you factor in the price of the guitar, you are still saving money that could be used on something else.
• Stores get less - This is another subjective negative; on the other hand the developers would get more by buying new. It all depends on who you would rather support but if you are a fan of your locally-owned mom and pop game store, they’ll probably get a bigger profit if you buy used - especially if that store rips traders off like EB Games. ;)

There you have it. Those are my opinions on the positives and negatives of buying used and the positives and negatives of buying new. What are yours?

Straight from Joystiq:

“Right now, in the development process we’re about 60 percent of the way through,” producer Jun Takeuchi said through a translator. “We’re figuring that the total play time in the game will be over 20 hours. As you can probably see from the trailer there’s a lot of different content and materials in the game for you to enjoy.”

Twenty hours sounds good to me. It’s been a while since any new news on Resident Evil 5 has been released so it’s good to see at least something on the game.

It’s been a while. A long while at that. Just when I thought life couldn’t get any more hectic, it did. I haven’t forgotten about the blog, though. In fact, I’ve been tying to cut away time to make some more quality posts but I just haven’t been able to do that. From the pre-summer work crunch to my increasing time away from access to the internet, I’ve just been overwhelmed with everything in the past few weeks. I think I’ve played Grand Theft Auto IV once since I made that post on the 2nd of May. Once. I spent a few hours late at night lying down on my bed playing Mario Kart Wii too but that’s about it. Nothing much new in the world of the internet and gaming for me.

Unfortunately, things don’t look like they’ll improve anytime soon. I’m heading into final exam time and still in that late April-June “crunch” where I’m constantly trying to wrap my head around my studies so I can achieve at least some academic success. I’ll be abroad for part of the summer so I may not be able to post much then either. I can’t believe how much I’ve left this blog die in the past 6 months. For a while things were going great. I was posting almost every day, I was getting some dedicated readers and commenters. Then things fell apart. I guess I don’t have time to update the blog as much as I wish I could. Nowadays it feels like the only emails I get notifying me of new comments are spam comments that Askimet didn’t catch.

All sad news aside, I’m going to try to make every attempt to post as much as possible from now on, but again I can’t make any promises about daily content. I just ask that you guys can bear with me through this insanely stressful time of my life because better times will come.

If anyone has any ideas on what I can write about to keep the blog fresh through these times, send me an email. If it’s not spam, I generally respond to every message I receive within 24-48 hours, sometimes sooner.

NeonFire out.

I received my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV in the mail today. I really liked the special edition. When I opened up the box that had Amazon.ca written all over it, I found another rather large box marked Grand Theft Auto IV: Special Edition with a picture of a girl and a lollipop on it. Inside that box was another box. This box was black, heavier and contained the rest of the special edition. I guess it was a lockbox or safe of sorts. I opened up that box and found two keys, a Rockstar keychain, a Grand Theft Auto IV art book, a Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack, a neat Rockstar-branded bag, French versions of the map and manual (all games in Canada have French/English cases and French/English instruction manuals) and - finally - the actual game in it’s case. I ripped the plastic wrap off that (by this time a lot of plastic was on my bed) and found more French material and more plastic that I needed to tear off. Wow, Rockstar really packaged this one. I anxiously tore that off, felt the awesomeness of the case and opened it up. Inside the case was an English version of the map and manual and the game disc. The first thing I did was look on the bottom of the disc to see which batch it was. I read a theory on a forum that AO3 discs were the most likely to have freezing problems and even though all discs were reported to have a problems and that was just a theory, I still felt the need to look at mine. Mine was AO4 so a little bit of reassurance came back to me at that moment.

On to the game! I put the disc in my PlayStation 3 and waited for it to load. I already knew there would be a mandatory install so I prepared myself for the minutes of sheer anxiety that come with waiting before being able to play one of your most anticipated games of all time. I waited for the installation and finally got to play the actual game. The first thing I noticed was it was extremely dark and I couldn’t see anything. That was fixed with a quick press of the start button and the brightness turned up as high as it could go. My first task was to drive a short distance. As a veteran of the older, more arcade-style Grand Theft Auto games, that was easier said than done. I had a little trouble steering the car and braking correctly and I think I’ve hit just about every possible object I could hit in the city but eventually I got there and got used to it. Within approximately 20-30 minutes, driving went from being a chore to something enjoyable. I found that the standard controls (using triggers for acceleration and braking) worked better than the series’ classic X for acceleration and square for braking. I didn’t get a gun until further in the game, though the hand-to-hand combat was somewhat enjoyable. The new way of targeting - pressing L2 all the way in to target a particular enemy or pressing it half way to enable free-aim is an improvement over the targeting in the previous games.

I’m really enjoying the story of the game so far. The characters are lifelike and I’m really starting to care for them almost as if I’m actually Niko. The city is also vibrant and unlike in the previous games, pedestrians and other drivers actually react to what you do to them. When I kicked up a little riot just outside an alleyway and then stole a bike, the guy next to the bike actually hung on to the back of the bike as I rode off. I got rid of him quick when I took a sharp turn though his responsiveness and actions to get the bike back/hurt me were impressive. The cell phone was an added touch and really made me feel more connected to Liberty City.

One thing I found that took me away from the more serious, gritty storyline were the side missions and extras in the game such as girlfriends. By the time I was finished hanging out with my first girlfriend, Michelle, I felt like I almost knew her in real life. Characters have so much personality and it’s so much more genuine then in the previous games. We went bowling and I actually enjoyed the controls Rockstar had set up for the minigame. You would choose a position with the left analog stick, hit X and then actually perform the bowling action with the right analog stick by pulling it back and pushing it ahead, tilting it slightly left or slightly right to adjust the curve of the ball. Michelle was a good bowler but I won the game.

Taxis were another convenient feature though when the cops aren’t looking, I found just jacking a nearby taxi quicker and cheaper than actually going for the ride. If you feel bad jacking a taxi, you can hit L1 and a nearby taxi driver will pull over for you to get in. Hold in triangle and you will open the back door and once inside, you can select your destination. Since taxi drivers abide the law more than I do when I’m driving in the game, the ride took longer than I expected but you have the option to completely skip the ride (for a fee) or just look around with the analog stick and enjoy the sights and sounds of Liberty City.

I’ve only played for about two hours so far though those two hours were definitely the most enjoyable gaming hours I’ve ever experienced, minus the first 20-30 minutes where I was just crashing into everything due to the fact that I’m so used to the arcade-like driving in the older Grand Theft Auto games. If you’ve been on the fence about purchasing Grand Theft Auto IV, get off that fence and get out to your local video game store and buy the game. Seriously, go. Right now. You won’t regret it.

Burnout Paradise for PlayStation 3 owners will soon be getting another surprise. Criterion Games announced on Tuesday that players with the new Bogart update installed will be able to import their save game file via a USB flash drive or a memory stick onto their PC, go to CriterionGames.com and see an interactive map with everything they haven’t completed laid out. According to Criterion, that includes jumps, smashes, billboards, junkyards, body shops, paint shops, gas stations and car parks.

I find it rather amusing how this can’t be shown in-game on the actual map but it’s an interesting feature to look into trying when it’s released nonetheless. As for a release date, Criterion says their technicians are working on the final touches of the feature and they “except it to go live imminently”.

[Criterion via Joystiq]

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) wants Grand Theft Auto to be re-rated by the ESRB and be changed from a Mature (M) rating to an Adults Only (AO) rating.

Each year nearly 13,500 people die in drunk driving crashes and another half a million are injured in alcohol-related traffic crashes. This is why MADD is extremely disappointed by the decision of the manufacturers of the game Grand Theft Auto IV to include a game module where players have to drive drunk.

Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke. Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime and it is also 100 percent preventable. MADD is calling on the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to reclassify Grand Theft Auto IV as an Adults Only game, a step up from the current rating of Mature and for the manufacturer to consider a stop in distribution – if not out of responsibility to society then out of respect for the millions of victims/survivors of drunk driving.

[from MADD website - via gamepolitics]

Thanks to a strengthening Canadian dollar and a weakening US dollar, Canadians will be able to enjoy slight price drops on PlayStation Network downloadable content by tomorrow, according to a statement by Sony Computer Entertainment of America via Kotaku:

“We are continually looking for ways to enhance the player experience on the PLAYSTATION®Network, and downloadable content through the PLAYSTATION Store is just one of our areas of focus,” said Grace Chen, Senior Manager for the PLAYSTATION Store. “We anticipate that this price adjustment will meet the expectations of our Canadian consumers and provide them with a better PLAYSTATION Network experience.”

Great news for people in Canada who think it’s unfair that previously we had to pay more for content than they do in the United States. They plan to have the prices changed at least by tomorrow’s weekly update. On a side note, I’m still waiting for Grand Theft Auto IV. Canada Post delayed it due to flooding (though I think they picked the wrong province since I don’t live in New Brunswick) and now the service standard delivery date has been pushed to Monday, May 5th, 2008 from the original date of tomorrow - Thursday, May 1st. *sigh*

Of all the scary pictures I’ve looked at on the internet, this one takes the cake. Yeah, no comment necessary.

[GamePolitics]

Were you waiting to see how long Jack Thompson could hold out before jumping back on the bandwagon of people that think Grand Theft Auto is ruining the minds of children everywhere? The wait is over. Jack’s back.

As reported by Ars Technica via GamePolitics, Thompson has already written a letter to the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, R. Alexander Acosta, demanding legal action against Take Two Interactive as well as Microsoft and Sony for allowing the game to be available on their system to minors and retailers for selling the game to minors. If you’d rather read it from Jack himself:

Indictments should be returned against Take Two corporately and its Chairman, Strauss Zelnick, along with other Take Two officers. Indictment should also be against Sony and Microsoft which are making this pornographic game available to minors, and openly so, on their PS3 and Xbox systems.

Further, indictments should be handed down against Wal-Mart, Best Buy, GameStop, and all other retailers distributing this game to minors at their retail stores, openly, to kids who are only seventeen.

Apparently we should just lock everyone up. I thought there were these things called “ratings” - call me crazy - assigned by these boards like the ESRB that show what age groups games are appropriate for. Maybe I dreamed that or something. I guess it’s much easier just to prosecute everyone and censor media even more than it. After all, only children play video games, right Jack? He also mentioned that Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio and tops it off with some other friendly words about his favorite game.

We now have vaccines for that virus… The ‘vaccine’ that must be administered by the United States government to deal with this virtual virus of violence and sexual depravity is criminal prosecutions of those who have conspired to do this. If you doubt me, look at the aforementioned streaming audio/video. It will make you sick.”

The aforementioned streaming video is a video from IGN, “Ladies of Liberty City”. I’ll let you find that one yourself, it’s not exactly safe for work. According to Ars Technica, “The video strips the game of all context and merely shows scenes of sexual content and violence, one after the other. In fact, it can be hard to watch for that reason, and it’s a rather numbing experience. The game’s lead character, Niko, drives up to prostitutes, honks the horn, then shoots them. You see a simulated sex act, only to have Niko run the hooker over afterwards with his car. The video shows graphic lap dances featuring one, and then two, girls. The language is even worse, including—and excuse the stars, “F*** the s*** out of it, you nasty f******.”

Great going IGN at giving the media and Jack Thompson some ammunition with a convenient video showcasing the game’s worst content. I’m sure this won’t be the last thing we hear from Jack and you can rest assured that I’ll be all over his future comments too. NeonFire out.