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San Jose Mercury News, Calif., Game Review Column

Posted on: Friday, 14 October 2005, 15:00 CDT

By Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Oct. 14--GREAT XBOXTATIONS: Much of the success of the Xbox 360, the new Microsoft video game console that makes its debut on Nov. 22, will rest on a few new games. Every console needs some kind of killer application to get it off the ground, and many of the best games of the season will arrive on the 360. But not all of them deserve to be deemed true next-generation games.

If you're going to spend a lot of money on a new console, you expect something tangible when you buy it, not just a promise of better games to come. Even with only a promise, Microsoft will sell out every machine it makes this fall. Still, it needs riveting games like "Halo," which will be noticeably absent this time, to sustain sales.

Going into its preview event in Amsterdam last week, Microsoft promoted "Perfect Dark Zero" as its next "Halo." In my view, Microsoft's "Gears of War," an action-horror sci-fi game developed by Epic Games, looked better than "Zero," but it won't be appearing until 2006.

So, at the outset, my pick for the best Xbox 360 game is Activision's "Call of Duty 2," a World War II sequel developed by Infinity Ward.

Let's first look at "Perfect Dark Zero," the prequel to Nintendo's "Perfect Dark" game that was a hit in 2000. Starring heroine secret agent Joanna Dark, this game has been billed as the mass-appeal "stealth shooting" game for the 360, and it ranks behind only "Halo 3" in terms of anticipation by Xbox fans. Microsoft showed off the "rooftops" level in the city of Hong Kong, and the graphics look good.

In cooperative play, Joanna's father, Jack, takes out the enemies on the street level, while Joanna takes out the snipers on the rooftops and balconies. The scene has lighting effects such as rays of sunshine streaming through the skyscrapers and shadows that look realistic. When Joanna rounds a corner, a few pigeons take flight, adding to the realism. When she draws a sniper pistol and starts firing, the action is smooth and flows as it should.

But there are turnoffs in this level. The pigeons, for instance, don't alert the enemies around the corner that Joanna is coming to greet them. As Joanna picked off snipers on the rooftops, the exposed enemies didn't try to hide or otherwise start taking aim at her. This weak artificial intelligence is so last generation. The game's designers say that tougher enemies appear later in the game. But this is one of those games where I'd have to see a lot more to be impressed with it. I sat down to play several more levels this week, and it confirmed my disappointment.

By contrast, "Gears of War" combines cinematic graphics and a compelling story to effect what I refer to as "seamless realism." It uses Epic's Unreal Engine 3, giving it unparalleled graphics quality that is much better than that of "Perfect Dark Zero." The consistent execution of the story line and the scenery creates a believable illusion. "Gears of War" uses scripted events that convey elements of the story without interrupting the flow of the game. And it has a theme of "destroyed beauty" as the human survivors of an attack by a subterranean horde of monsters cruise through a demolished city.

In the level that Epic showed, a squad of soldiers arrives at an abandoned refinery in the middle of the night. As they approach the site in the pouring rain, a bolt of lightning illuminates the darkened areas to reveal some shapes scurrying away like spiders under a flashlight. As they move inside the refinery, they get a glimpse of a group of dead bodies that have been left by the horde of monsters.

In contrast to "Doom 3," where the walls are indestructible, these soldiers can shoot at anything -- objects or the ground -- and the shots can cause damage. They move through the refinery, where the lighting is intermittent because the electrical power is failing. The soldiers pick off screaming monsters, then mount up on rail cars in a sequence that the lead designer, Cliff Blezinski, calls "Space Mountain with guns."

On the rail cars, the soldiers have to protect each other's cars as monsters drop onto them from the ceiling. This action-horror sequence is every bit as well done -- with seamless realism -- as the beginning scenes of the film "Aliens."

Since "Gears of War" won't arrive until sometime in 2006, the game that I want to play most on the 360 at launch time is "Call of Duty 2." This sequel to the original game takes you back to Normandy and other famous battles of World War II.

The first thing I noticed in a demo of this game is that the enemies are smart. You can take the German soldiers by surprise, but they regroup and come back at you in an organized way. In an attempt to take out some coastal guns, I was shooting at some soldiers with a machine gun from behind a wall and found that they started throwing grenades at me.

The Germans will stake out high ground in buildings or take cover as they shoot. This makes advancing into the open dangerous and forces you to figure out a way to go around obstacles. You can charge head-on into your objective or methodically take out the Germans by outflanking them. My own squad members were also smart, positioning themselves to take out Germans using tactics such as smoke. I played through an entire level, and there was so much close combat it was an exhausting experience.

While the graphics may not be as well done as those of "Gears of War," they look better than most of today's best games. The Infinity Ward folks tell me the Xbox 360 version is going to look better than the PC version for some time to come. That's because the newest PCs don't have the three processing cores and the latest graphics.

Not everyone likes this kind of game. But as far as World War II shooters go, it is the best I've seen.

So there's your answer.

The Xbox 360 may not yet have the most astounding games worthy of the next-generation moniker, but if it has your game, that's a reason to go and pick one up.

Contact Dean Takahashi at dtakahashi@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5739.

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Source: San Jose Mercury News

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