(Electronic Arts; PS2, Xbox, Windows XP)
GAMER This game is not bad. It’s no God of War, but really, nothing is or ever will be. Godfather is Grand Theft Auto with bits from the beloved Coppola movie used as story line guidance and inspiration.
You play a character who lives on the periphery of the Corleone family, making his way up the Ragu-stained mafioso ladder. Fully immersed in the ravioli-gorged dimension that is Little Italy in 1947, you track down Luca Brasi’s assassin, go to movie producer Woltz’s house and sneak around with the severed horse’s head, protect the Don at the hospital, etc. These things don’t happen on-screen in the movie, but do happen in some way in this universe. Some things are just thrown in, like your character’s love interest.
Your character is the coolest part of the game. You can choose how he looks: his hair, facial hair, eyebrows, eyes, lips, body type, height — everything. There are, like, 25 faces to choose from and the facial hair–hair combos add up to an almost endless array of possible greasy Italians. There is actually a “grease” setting you can toggle to make your goombah more, or less, greasy. Up to you. At first I tried to make my guy look as much like Sonny Corleone as I could, since he was always my favorite character in the movie (yelling all the time, hitting women, etc.), but he came out looking more like Michael from Mean Streets. (“Do I look like a jerk-off to you?” That guy. He shoots Robert De Niro at the end.) I had to start over and I came up with a guy who looks more Latino knife-thrower than Sicilian. I named him Rico Brogna. Now I really like my guy.
The only problem is that playing the game itself is kind of boring, at least at the early stage. There are a lot of shoot-outs (fine), but your character dies after getting hit, like, twice (enemies have a tendency to materialize out of nowhere with fucking bazookas and just blow you away), and there is much repetition. I don’t need a game to be easy, but Jesus, I go nuts when it seems like the AI is geared to making me miserable on purpose.
But I am having fun playing it — I am approaching the halfway mark — and would recommend it to fans of both GTA and The Godfather. It’s got the same massive scope of GTA, city-wise, and the creators really chose the right characters from the movie to have big roles: You deal with Luca Brasi, Sonny Corleone, Clemenza, and Tom Hagen — all the coolest characters. It’s fun. I didn’t realize I’d been waiting all my life to interact with a video image of Abe Vigoda, but apparently I was. When he came on the screen and told me to go whack Spaghetti Righetti, or whomever, I got really excited and yelled out, “Whatever you say, Tessio!” (Mike McGuirk)
Gamer
Grand Theft Auto with goombahs
Shooting the shit
(Electronic Arts; PS2, Xbox)
GAMER Black is a first-person shooter game in which you play a soldier killing for some kind of shadowy government "special ops" group. Games like this are a little strange politically. They always seem to have some kind of subtext geared for Ruby Ridge types. Creepy. The makers of Black, however, were good enough to make the enemies white, at least. Apparently Russia is still some kind of threat to America. Whatever.
After getting past the weird ideas behind such a game, Black has a lot going for it. It’s easy enough to play, so that within minutes you are wasting the bad guys and surviving long enough to make it to the next mission with a minimum of learning and relearning. It’s all pretty intuitive. More important, basically anything you shoot — anything — either gets damaged or explodes. It’s awesome. I’m always disappointed with these games when I shoot a building and nothing happens. Here the shit falls down. Walls cave in, oil tanks explode, huge plumes of flame shoot up into the sky. Also, when you kill a guy, his body stays where it is — it doesn’t magically disappear, like it usually does in other games.
I like first-person shooter games a lot. A good one has to have
1. Carnage factor. This includes spurting blood, killing, the way characters fall down when hit, environmental destruction (as mentioned, Black has an unprecedented amount of this), killing, the occasional disorientation or overwhelming of the player, and killing. The first level of Medal of Honor: European Assault, where there are fucking planes crashing and you die like a hundred times before getting five feet (it’s D-Day) set the bar for carnage factor.
2. Guns, guns, guns. The key ones are the shotgun and the sniper rifle. The shotgun is almost always the best weapon in any game in which the point is frequent and gruesome killing. For some reason, Black has two types of shotguns and both are virtually the same. I am pretty sure this is just a gun fetishist marketing ploy. There are, like, two dozen guns, including all kinds of machine and submachine guns. Good sniper rifle action is important, for the satisfaction of head shots. Black has it. But Black also has this Magnum revolver that’s a cross between the shotgun and the sniper rifle — it’s superaccurate, has a long range, and kills guys with one shot. It’s awesome, awesome, awesome.
3. Mission failure. When you die, how far back do you have to go? This game sucks here. Let me say that again: This game sucks here. There are a ton of missions I had to repeat 50 times, going back farther than I should have had to each time, doing all this easy stuff over and over again, but dying again right away at the hard part, which is, like, 15 minutes down the road. You end up screaming at the game a lot.
A pretty cool feature is an autosave function that I’ve never seen before, and it actually may be the reason the missions restart so far back. The game saves your progress for you without any "Would you like to save your game?" crap. This is good in that it means you can play until your eyes are bleeding and not even notice it. But maybe it screws up the mission length. I don’t know. I said "yes" to the option, and now I can’t turn it off.
All in all, Black is a really good game, if maddeningly repetitive at times. I played it for so many hours straight that my back fell asleep. I didn’t even know that was possible. And that’s all I want from a game, really. I want days, even weeks, to pass before me while I engage in the least possible amount of reality. That and the killing. I do love the killing. (Mike McGuirk)
Use that Star Power wisely
GAMER Rhythm games are a mixed bag, but the good ones are great. Games like Karaoke Revolution, Dance Dance Revolution, and now Guitar Hero (PS2) set the standard. This game is so much fun it makes jerks explode.
The controller is shaped like a guitar — a Gibson SG to be exact — and it features five colored buttons on the fret board, a whammy bar, and a little flicker lever where the strings would be. The SG, for those who don’t know, is the guitar Angus Young from AC/DC and Mick Barr from Orthrelm play — it is attractive. Guitar Hero features 30 famous guitar-heavy rock songs, most of which were originally recorded by longhairs.
The game has several difficulty levels, and the hard setting is too difficult to begin with, even for guitar lords. A well-designed tutorial will get you started and show you the ropes. You watch colored notes float down the screen, then have to hit the corresponding buttons on the fret board and strum the flicker button on beat to get points and hit all the notes. Star Points can be earned by playing the star-shaped notes when they appear. When you’ve filled your Star meter, you can engage Star Power and get double points! To engage Star Power, point the guitar toward the sky and continue shredding.
A career mode moves you through the game nicely and eases players from easy to medium to difficult songs. The easy setting only asks you to hit three fret buttons — songs get progressively more intricate and even demand that you use real guitar techniques like hammer-ons and pull-offs. If you miss a note, you’ll hear a realistic muted pluck — just like when you miss a note on a real guitar. A quick-play mode allows you to jump in and play any of the 30 songs (more songs can be unlocked), and a two-player mode enables you and a friend to trade solos. You’ll need a second guitar controller for the two-player mode to be mega, but the game can be played with a standard controller. Devo would probably have liked a controller-shaped guitar.
While most rhythm games focus on game play and ignore graphics, Guitar Hero comes correctly with solid game play and impressive graphics. The backing band is legit, environments like the stadium and the basement look great, and the game includes a giant Viking as well as songs by Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Franz Ferdinand, Sum 41, David Bowie, Queen, and Pantera. Guitar Hero is terrific and worth buying. (Nate Denver)