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Game consoles, like Ouya, aren’t going anywhere, Seamus Blackley says.
(Credit:
Ouya)
Game consoles aren’t dying anytime soon, the original
Xbox‘s co-creator claims.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz in an interview published yesterday, former Microsoft employee and current head of mobile startup Innovative Leisure, Seamus Blackley, says he’s had enough of the “histrionic articles” suggesting the death of game consoles. Today’s consumers, he says, still want the high-end experiences made available in console titles.
“You have to remember that people want to play console games because they want to have a super premium high-end experience — it doesn’t really have to do with anything else,” Blackley told GameIndustry.biz in the interview. “When you say, ‘Do you still want console games?’ – people aren’t saying that they want a dedicated device hooked up to a television. What they’re thinking is that they need to have a super premium entertainment experience in the living room. They still want that really badly.”
Consoles have come under fire a bit as mobile devices, such as iOS-based products and
Android-based devices, become go-to gaming platforms for players. In addition, cloud-based services are starting to make some inroads into the space. However, for now, the only surefire way to get that “super premium entertainment experience in the living room” is to opt for a console.
To Blackley, one of the folks at Microsoft who wrote the original Xbox proposal, hardware, at least for now, is necessary. And to prove it, he pointed to recent Kickstarter hit, Ouya.
“I think if we look at the Ouya as an example, aside from being an awesome, ballsy project, it’s a great litmus test for the enthusiasm of the audience for console content,” Blackley said.
Ouya made gamers’ hearts flutter last month when the Android-powered game console made waves on Kickstarter. The console costs $99 and offers titles that are all free to play. To get off the ground, Ouya’s creator Boxer8 needed some help from the Kickstarter community. In just 30 days, it raised nearly $8.6 million from over 63,000 backers.
If Blackley is right that consoles are here to stay, that’s good news for the three companies offering them. Nintendo is expected to launch its
Wii U later this year. Microsoft and Sony will follow that up with new console launches in 2013 or 2014, according to rumors.
The 13-year-old Texas girl who stole her brother’s car and drove 800 miles to visit a boy she supposedly met playing Xbox may have been lured into the stunt by a sexual predator, her parents feared.
Tressa Robinson said she and her husband have not tracked down a 12-year-old video game Romeo known only as “Dylan,” whom their lovesick daughter, Beth, was apparently driving to visit when she was pulled over in Nashville on Thursday, according to ABC News.
“We’re trying to confirm that the person was on the other end was actually a 12-year-old,” Tressa Robinson told ABC News.
“There were texts and voicemails sent by him, and they’re very alarming.”
EARLIER: TEXAS GIRL SNATCHED CAR, DROVE 800 MILES TO SEE XBOX BOYFRIEND
Beth Robinson fled her home in Cypress, Tex., near Houston, sometime around 4 a.m. on Thursday morning, her parents said.
The Robinsons discovered her missing when they went to wake her up for school.
Their son’s car and Tressa’s ATM card were also gone.
Emails, voicemails and text messages led them to believe that Beth was visiting someone named “Dylan,” whom she met playing the Xbox game “Call of Duty” online.
As Beth’s father, Robbie, hit the road in pursuit, Tress Robinson said she worried about her baby encountering any sickos while on the run.
“Could she be abducted, could someone lure her into their vehicle, could they get into hers?” Tressa Robinson told ABC News.
“If anything like that would have happened I would have been devastated.
Police tracked the girl after she used the ATM card, and she was eventually stopped by a Tennessee state trooper who had been given a description of the vehicle.
Robbie Robinson arrived a short time later to pick up his daughter, and agreed to take her to see her “Call of Duty” suitor if she agreed not to take off again.
“I’d rather we be there to witness, chaperone, and just be there with her than her try to do this again on her own,” he told ABC News.
But a search for Dylan’s house in Hodgenville, Ky., about 120 miles north of Nashville, turned up nothing, they said.
The Robinsons said they suspected “Dylan” might be an adult because their daughter’s plan — which included switching the plates on her brother’s car — was too crafty for a 13-year-old.
“That had to be coerced. I don’t believe that my daughter would have been able to think of that on her own,” Tressa Robinson said.
Beth also told her folks she felt duped by someone pretending to be her video game beau.
“[Beth] said, ‘I feel deceived right now, and I feel hurt. Everything that was told to me was all lies,’” Tressa Robinson told ABC News.
The family said they moved the Xbox out of Beth’s bedroom and shut down her Facebook account.
The teen isn’t expected to face any charges in Tennessee or Texas.
PCaulfield@nydailynews.com
“You’re a regular, huh?”
Look, you know I’m an Xbox guy. So you know how much it pains me to say that I’m kinda sick of seeing Microsoft’s hardware at the top of the NPD’s sales list for the eighteenth consecutive month. That’s right, The Xbox 360 has been the best-selling console in North America for the past year and a half, essentially since FleshEatingZipper started. I’m not saying that the Xbox 360 is a bad console by any means, but this is hardly the ‘comeback kid’ win that the original Xbox enjoyed in 2004 up to and following the release of Halo 2, winning in thin margins over the dominant PlayStation 2. No, this is the sign of some deeper woes.
The Other Guys Gave Up
As disappointed as I am now, watching the Wii dominate the sales charts as a persistent sell-out for years on end was irritating. The other console makers have adapted motion controls to their own platforms to various degrees of success. In the case of Sony, none at all, and even with the success of Kinect, motion controls haven’t completely overridden the function of the controller, unless you’re just dying to play Dance Central. But the Wii’s biggest strength for Nintendo was also its greatest weakness: making bank on cheap hardware limited its future potential, so now they’re rushing the stage with the Wii U and ditching motion controls almost entirely in favor of getting a head start on their competition, not rumored to release until next year. Sony had the opposite problem: they launched hardware that was too ambitious for the wallets of most gamers with hardware that more expensive and games that didn’t look any better than their Xbox counterparts. Sony’s had some great games since then, but they’ve all lacked the blockbuster appeal of Gears of War, New Super Mario Bros, Halo, or Wii Fit. Now it appears they’re fine with settling with a third-place finish.
Microsoft Has Stopped Living Dangerously
With the original Xbox, it felt like Microsoft executives were working paycheck to paycheck trying to sustain their distant second-place finished with edgy ads, radical price drops, and crazy leaps in technology (see: Xbox Live). Even in the earliest days of the Xbox 360, no one was quite sure how well they’d fare with the specter of the PlayStation 3 looming on the horizon, a similar situation that wound up dooming Sega’s Dreamcast and driving them from the hardware business entirely (yes, I get that Microsoft had billions of dollars and Sega was limping along). But Microsoft ‘figured it out’ through incentive means of building an audience with a brighter identity (and a white console to start) and more content to impress people who weren’t the traditional hardcore gamer that usually bought the console at launch. As the years went on, Microsoft focused on blockbusters instead of weird and new ideas, they introduced avatars and Kinect to get the kids involved, and slowly they didn’t need to have the tight community connection built on the backs of hundreds of fan sites. The Xbox 360, despite its successes and use of technology, is a more homogeneous experience than ever: a platform designed to appeal to everyone with a clumsy interface to match.
Watching the others fall behind or give up has softened the Xbox’s approach and so long as Microsoft remains on top, they’ll have little incentive to change. It seems odd that a decade ago, I thought it would be bizarre for Microsoft to be the big man on campus, a stuffy figure that knew how to lace his shoes in a fancy way and told the audience what to expect, rather than asking what they wanted. Well, here we are.
This peaceful haven shall see no adventure… for a bit longer.
While Minecraft has sold millions of units on the Xbox Live Arcade and broken every sales record there is to have on that platform, PC Minecraft players (browser alpha FTW!!!11!) have known for a while that the Xbox 360 version of the game is considerably gimped. Now the promised Adventure Update, uh, update, will land on the Xbox in ‘a few more weeks’ rather than the previously imagined sooner than that. The aptly named release will introduce villages, villagers, and the PC version’s quest line, all of which were introduced last year for the primary version of the game.
Developer 4J pins a lot of blame for the delay on the Xbox 360′s limited hardware spec and the testing required. It’s hard to believe, but the console that powers Gears of War and Halo is still seven years old and only features a paltry 512MB of RAM. Yeah, that was a pretty tough number in 2005, but not so much in 2012. It seems ironic that Minecraft, such a seemingly primitive game, would struggle so much compared to more intense titles, but I’m no programmer! On the flip side, Minecraft for Xbox 360 must be gussied up and pretty, something the PC version still struggles a lot with. No doubt a huge reason why people have hopped on the Minecraft XBLA train was to avoid all the malarky with finding server IPs, keeping up with patches, unkeeping up with patches, etc.
Well, no sense in revealing to the XBLA crowd what they’re missing.
Source: Joystiq
As a branding exercise, the recently unveiled “Xbox Games on Windows” is more than a little confusing. The “Xbox” name has previously been exclusively reserved for Microsoft’s console gaming efforts. With the launch of Windows 8 next month, that name will also be associated with a related, but totally separate product on the PC.
Despite the name, you won’t be able to just insert an Xbox disc into your PC and play it using the Xbox Games on Windows app (if only!). In fact, the Xbox Games on Windows branding won’t be used for retail games at all, but only for downloadable games on the Windows 8 Store. But not all Windows 8 downloadable games will be Xbox on Windows games—only a small subset will be integrated into the service. And if you own a downloadable game on the Xbox 360, you won’t necessarily have access to the PC version of that same game through Xbox Games on Windows.
Confused yet?
The best way to think of the Xbox Games on Windows is as a PC-based version of Xbox Live Arcade. Like the console-based game download service, Microsoft will directly control game approval and release scheduling on Xbox Games on Windows. Developers will still be able to submit normal downloadable games for sale through the regular Windows 8 Store, of course, or just release PC games on their own. But those titles won’t be launchable through the preinstalled Metro-style (sorry— Window 8-style UI) Xbox on Windows app. Nor will they be integrated with existing Xbox Live features like Achievements, friends lists, Avatars, leaderboards and in-game rewards. A representative told me that Microsoft hopes to roll out games regularly every week, just like it does on Xbox Live Arcade, but that the company hopes to speed up the release process down the line.
While some of the Xbox on Windows titles announced last week are already available on Xbox Live Arcade, console players won’t just be able to re-download their existing purchases on their Windows 8 PCs and tablets. That sort of PlayStation-style “Cross Buying,” as well as the ability to play, pause, and resume cross-platform releases across all your Windows and Xbox devices, is “part of the eventual plan” a spokesperson told me, but these features won’t be available when Xbox on Windows launches.
Still, there will be some level of cross-platform integration built in to the initial lineup. Pinball FX developer Zen Studios is working to allow purchased tables to be downloadable across the Windows and Xbox 360 versions of the game, for instance, and Skulls of the Shogun will allow for asynchronous multiplayer between players on the two platforms. Some games will also be optimized for both mouse and keyboard controls on a desktop or laptop, as well as touchscreen and gyroscope controls for play on Windows 8 tablets, obviating the need to buy a new version for a new interface.
Many Xbox on Windows games will also be experimenting with some nontraditional revenue models; almost half of the service’s launch titles will be free-to-play games that make money through ads or add-ons. Microsoft Solitaire Collection, for instance, will include puzzle-like daily challenges that are playable only after viewing a video ad. Myst-style exploration game Adera, on the other hand, will see its free first episode preinstalled on many Windows 8 machines, but players will be charged to download further episodes.
On the whole, the “Xbox Games on Windows” service seems a lot less ambitious than Games for Windows Live, Microsoft’s much-maligned and recently ditched effort to unify the Windows gaming ecosystem into a more coherent whole. Instead, this seems like a much more direct effort to let certain developers work with Microsoft to easily and cleanly integrate popular Xbox Live features into their PC games. But the confusing branding and limited, slow-drip selection of games seem unlikely to transform a Windows 8 gaming environment that Valve’s Gabe Newell recently called a catastrophe.
Xbox gamesA first wave of 40 Xbox games is headed to Windows 8 PCs starting October 26, which is the launch date for Windows 8.
Microsoft said the list includes titles familiar to any casual gamer from companies such as Rovio, Mindclip, Gameloft, ZeptoLab, Glu Mobile, Halfbrick Studios, and of course, Microsoft Studios.
Some of the games announced today are already available in the Windows 8 Release Preview via the Xbox Live Games app. These include Wordament and Pinball FX 2.
Microsoft has been promising Xbox would be a big part of Windows 8 ever since announcing Windows 8-Xbox integration during E3 2011. The new Xbox games in Windows 8 will feature Xbox Achievements, leaderboards, as well as some multiplayer games.
Microsoft’s Xbox announcement is the second gaming launch the company made this week. On Wednesday, the software maker announced a partnership with Atari to reboot some of the game maker’s classic games such as Asteroids, Centipede, Combat, Lunar Lander, and Missile Command.
Atari ArcadeThe classic Atari games are available at Atari Arcade and feature updated graphics and a touch-friendly design. And (surprise, surprise) the games work best when you use Internet Explorer 10, especially the formerly-known-as-Metro version in the Windows 8 Release preview. When you use IE 10, you also get an ad-free experience with Atari Arcade.
In addition to games, Microsoft is also adding the Xbox SmartGlass app to Windows 8 in the coming months. SmartGlass will let you control some video games as well as feature supporting information such as current game statistics and maps.
The first 40 games headed to Xbox on Windows 8 include well known titles such as Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Fruit Ninja. All the games are designed for touch as well as mouse-and-keyboard PCs.
Here’s the full list:
Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul) on Twitter and Google+, and with Today@PCWorld on Twitter for the latest tech news and analysis.
Xbox gamesA first wave of 40 Xbox games is headed to Windows 8 PCs starting October 26, which is the launch date for Windows 8.
Microsoft said the list includes titles familiar to any casual gamer from companies such as Rovio, Mindclip, Gameloft, ZeptoLab, Glu Mobile, Halfbrick Studios, and of course, Microsoft Studios.
Some of the games announced today are already available in the Windows 8 Release Preview via the Xbox Live Games app. These include Wordament and Pinball FX 2.
Microsoft has been promising Xbox would be a big part of Windows 8 ever since announcing Windows 8-Xbox integration during E3 2011. The new Xbox games in Windows 8 will feature Xbox Achievements, leaderboards, as well as some multiplayer games.
Microsoft’s Xbox announcement is the second gaming launch the company made this week. On Wednesday, the software maker announced a partnership with Atari to reboot some of the game maker’s classic games such as Asteroids, Centipede, Combat, Lunar Lander, and Missile Command.
Atari ArcadeThe classic Atari games are available at Atari Arcade and feature updated graphics and a touch-friendly design. And (surprise, surprise) the games work best when you use Internet Explorer 10, especially the formerly-known-as-Metro version in the Windows 8 Release preview. When you use IE 10, you also get an ad-free experience with Atari Arcade.
In addition to games, Microsoft is also adding the Xbox SmartGlass app to Windows 8 in the coming months. SmartGlass will let you control some video games as well as feature supporting information such as current game statistics and maps.
The first forty games headed to Xbox on Windows 8 include well known titles such as Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Fruit Ninja. All the games are designed for touch as well as mouse-and-keyboard PCs.
Here’s the full list:
Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul) on Twitter and Google+.
It’s nice when the annual iteration of Madden feels less like a retread and more like a refined, fresh experience. While the core game might not seem unchanged to non-players, I think that the fan base will appreciate some of the changes in Madden NFL 13.
First and foremost is the inclusion of EA’s Infinity Engine. It’s the most talked-about feature in this iteration of Madden, and for good reason. While the other current-generation titles have looked pretty good, the animations, player collisions and overall feel of the gridiron game have always felt a little … off. The Infinity Engine looks to correct that by applying a more realistic physics model and allowing players numerous ways to interact with the character models on the field.
For instance, previous versions of Madden featured canned animations for character tackles. With the Infinity Engine, characters have actual weight to them, so you’ll rarely see the same collision or tackle play out the same way twice. When a character hits another character, there’s an impact that feels as if the athlete actually put his weight into the hit. However, if the character is a little off in the tackle or merely brushes against the other player, there’s a good chance it won’t result in a successful tackle, as it had in prior years. You might throw the other player off balance, and he may even stumble a bit, but it won’t result in an automatic hit.
On the flip side, while playing offense, the rushing game turns into a more interesting affair — especially when rushing up the middle, which was generally a hit-or-miss fiasco that required your offensive line to provide a nice, open spot. Now you have the potential to rush toward oncoming defenders with the possibility of coming out upright, provided you can shrug off the resistance and maintain balance, which is relegated to the right thumbstick. It makes for a more interesting and varied experience than previous Madden entries, and the Infinity Engine is a welcome addition.
Since this is the first year of its use, it’s not without issues. I expect YouTube to be filled with clips involving some of the wonky collisions that plague post-play results. When you’re viewing animations under a microscope via the replay system, there are often hilarious results. Some of this comes from players getting up in odd ways or having their limbs bent back in clearly uncomfortable situations. Some of it comes from a slightly robotic look in the running and catching animations that aren’t clear when playing but become more pronounced during replays. I’m willing to look past these issues in light of the engine’s benefits, and I hope that upcoming versions will improve.
Beyond the major benefits of a new engine, there’s a variety of other changes in Madden ’13. Gone are the on- and offline Dynasty modes, which are replaced by a cohesive Connected Careers mode that is also available on- and offline. Connected Careers allows you to manipulate and drive the career of a player, created or real, or a coach for any given team. As a player, you’ll come up from the draft and try to create your spot in the limelight, smash records and drive home victories for your team. As the coach, you’ll do the same but with more hands-on control for rosters, including the ability to scout players throughout the season, deal with contract negotiations, and potentially switch teams for better contracts. There’s even a hefty, commentary-filled draft that allows you to deal with other teams, trade up for their picks and fulfill your own draft picks.
Connected Careers mode also involves an experience system. You earn points by playing in games, fulfilling certain career goals and participating in practice drills. These drills are pretty expansive, providing you with a variety of challenges, but the earned points don’t always match the challenge. There are easy, medium and hard challenges in practice, but the experience points doled out by the system seem almost random, with some hard challenges yielding far less experience than tasks of a medium difficulty. Part of this seems to be tied into the time commitment of each, with some taking two minutes of the last quarter while others involve an entire game, but a little more consistency would’ve been nice.
The things you can purchase with experience — such as personal character stat improvements for players or increased chances in contract negotiations for coaches — are on the pricey side. Stat increases are particularly expensive, considering an increase only provides one stat point. It’ll take multiple games and practice sessions to make a miniscule advance, so it doesn’t seem worth it from a reward perspective.
Aside from Connected Careers, you also have an online versus mode, which allows for lobbies, ranked, unranked and player-run communities you can join. Ranked matches have certain restrictions, like six-minute quarters on All-Pro difficulty only, but matching up with other players has been a breeze. EA’s personal servers are another matter altogether, but it is prior to the official launch, so hopefully, that inconsistency will get ironed out.
Unranked matches and lobbies go hand in hand and allow for more customization, such as control over AI difficulty, the length of each quarter, stadiums sliders, weather effects, etc. This is basic exhibition mode stuff that you’d see in just about any sports title. Communities also are self-explanatory, allowing you to create a space for you and your friends to play while tracking stats, wins and losses.
Online play has felt pretty smooth, and while I’ve run into the occasional lag spike, it’s been quite solid. I’ve played prior to the early three-day access that EA rolled out for Season Pass subscribers, which saw about 60 players online at once, and I’ve also checked in this morning, when there were about 6,000 users online. Either way, the connection was pretty good, but that’s subject to change after the floodgates really open. Based on the time I’ve spent online with the game thus far, I don’t expect any real problems.
Finally, the last substantial mode is Ultimate Madden Team, which returns this year. Ultimate Madden Team is one of my favorite aspects of the series, and I still enjoy it this year. Essentially, this mode allows you to create a team from a limited selection of players from a virtual trading card pack. These players are culled from the current season or from past seasons, featuring all-time greats like Joe Montana, Emmitt Smith, etc. Once you open your card pack and build your first team, you’ll participate in one-on-one games against the CPU and other players, and victories can net you credits to spend on new packs of cards, which can potentially contain cards of extremely rare players for your team. You can also unlock new coaches, team colors, playbooks and stadiums.
I realize that a lot of folks will appreciate a more traditional fantasy football approach to creating a team, but I really love the randomness of Ultimate Madden. It’s almost like playing an RPG with random loot drops.
For Kinect owners, there’s a little incentive to plug in the peripheral, as there are some enhanced voice controls for pre-snap options. Prior to the snap on both offense and defense, you can call a timeout, call out audibles, hike the ball, set hot routes, reposition your offensive and defensive line, and even skip play selection. With the Kinect enabled, you can call out most of these functions via voice command, and it works pretty well.
I attempted to use the function in a variety of settings, with background noise provided both by the TV and other devices as well as in a quieter environment with noise muted. Either way, the Kinect did an exceptional job of picking up the commands, and the game also helpfully displays voice commands whenever they’re available.
If you’re wondering about picking up another iteration of the Madden franchise, it’s safe to say that Madden NFL 13 is the best the series has seen in a few years. The new physics engine is a step above what we’ve seen thus far, and it adds an element of realism. The cohesive approach to Connected Careers feels like a better direction than the Dynasty mode, and the online functionality works really well. Ultimate Madden Team is sort of like the cherry on top. Madden NFL 13 is worth picking up since it’ll appeal to longtime fans as well as the intermittent football aficionados.
Score: 8.5/10
More articles about Madden NFL 13
Sleeping Dogs doesn’t break new ground. It’s actually quite happy with the ground it’s on, choosing instead to rely on storytelling and the mythos of Asian criminality (especially to the kind of people whose knowledge of such things is limited to movies) to draw in anyone who plays it.
The Asian underworld has always been an enticing and popular canvas for entertainment, whether it’s been in the form of wild gunfests starring the likes of Chow Yun-Fat or Beat Takeshi or morose, subdued dramas designed to add dimensions and educate viewers on the traditionally laced — and still mystical — workings of groups of individuals with cool cars, shades, tattoos and a lot of history behind them.
Sleeping Dogs lies somewhere in the middle, taking itself seriously enough to invest plenty of time in its characters and dialogue while also making sure plenty of blood flows. Let’s face it, no game with either Chinese or Japanese gangsters can go too long without a group of them eventually screaming and trying to shoot or kick each other in the face.
Wei Shen, the game’s hero, is charged with making sense of the chaos as an undercover cop sent in to investigate the Sun On Yee, the largest fictional faction of Triads in Hong Kong. It’s through Wei’s eyes where we start to see how United Front did some of its homework as far as its depiction of Chinese criminal circles.
Those who’ve chosen to research anything on the subject will notice that the “Sun On Yee” is a not-so-subtle reference to the Sun Yee On, the real-life Triad gang. In the game, the Sun On Yee’s bitter enemies are 18K, which is just a few numbers up from the real-life 14K. United Front also tosses out terminology most can assume is unique to Triad hierarchy — lieutenants are known as “red poles” and the leader of the crime family is known as a “dragon head.” Even the names of some of the red poles seem to follow a certain kind of Asian lingual gangsterism with monikers like Broken Nose Jiang, Dogeyes or Big Smile Lee.
United Front seems to balance out this infusion of new criminal culture by molding its characters out of recognizable archetypes. Wei (voiced excellently by Will Yun Lee) is the classic ass-kicking hothead, determined to see his mission to the end. His handlers are stick-in-the-mud types who say things along the lines of, “You’re in too deep!” or “You’re making a mistake!” Even the criminal personalities will feel familiar. The dragon head of Sun On Yee is Uncle Po (James Hong), who blankets the room with his grandfatherly (or godfatherly) energy, while Big Smile Lee (Tzi Ma) is your typical insidious powermonger warding off the likes of Jiang, the brainy, analytical “aunt” of the Sun On Yee.
All of these characters inhabit an interpretation of Hong Kong that is alive with detail and culture, the kind of place worth exploring in any setting, especially an open-world game. That kind of environmental allure was a draw of Sleeping Dogs‘ distant forebears, the True Crime series of games, which focused on replicating real-life cities and placing them before the player. Sleeping Dogs was originally supposed to be another True Crime installment, but Activision squashed the project until Square Enix picked it up and repackaged it in its current form and name. It ended up being for the best.
I’m not going to outline absolutely everything Wei can do in the game’s world with great detail because there’s a fairly good chance you’ve already done it in other open-world titles. United Front follows the open-world playbook closely, offering Wei a set list of story-related missions that range from beating up a few thugs for the Sun On Yee to bugging the apartment of a Chinese pop superstar to a full-on armed assault against your enemies. There are plenty of side missions with a by-the-book Chinese detective, along with street races and ancillary missions (or favors) to help various people around the city. Some of them are off the wall, such as one man wanting you to free-run while he tapes you.
That’s not to say the world is boring. Hong Kong offers plenty of cultural nuggets, such as heading to the club to sing some karaoke or walking through a marketplace that’s teeming with the noise of people pitching Wei their wares. You can get pork buns from a food stand or “massages” from one of numerous parlors around town. Stopping by at prayer shrines can increase your health, while checking in to the local martial arts fight club can help sharpen your fighting skills.
Action is where Sleeping Dogs attempts to makes its mark, investing a lot into hand-to-hand combat. Every altercation morphs the experience into a relatively intricate beat-’em-up, with blocking, combinations, countering and grappling. The X and Y buttons handle the striking and countering while B handles grappling. Holding down the X button at certain moments can lead to throws or instances where you can “break” the opponent’s leg or arm. I say “break” in quotes because, well, the same dude whose arm you just mangled can still block and punch you with the rest of his buddies.
The countering system will remind players of the newest Batman games, where enemies glow a certain color before striking, offering up a visual cue for the player to act. It’s especially effective against people with melee weapons, which can instantly put momentum on your side if you get your hands on one. The system takes some adjusting for those used to fighting in Yakuza, which carried a faster pace and was more open to letting players blow away everyone with kicks and punches. Fight like that in Sleeping Dogs, and you will die. It’s that simple. However, I managed to beat down masses of enemies simply by grabbing on to them and mangling them with tosses and punches as best I could before disposing of them. Apparently, judo and jiujitsu philosophies are completely alien to the fictional criminal denizens of Hong Kong.
The most entertaining aspect of hand-to-hand combat is the environmental kills, which can be extremely brutal. These can be achieved by, again, grabbing on to an opponent, pulling him to a glowing object and pressing one of the face buttons. Some of them are simple, such as tossing someone into a dumpster. Others are grisly, such as mashing someone’s face onto a stove or a buzzsaw, or hanging them on a big fishhook. Doing all of these things can fill up your “face” meter, which can automatically refill health and make everyone a bit easier to fight (they start backing away from you in fear) when it’s full.
But when guns come into the equation, the game loses some of its luster. It’s an extremely minimalist aim-and-shoot system with some cover elements (just push one of the shoulder buttons), with enemies all too eager to feed themselves to your pistol or assault rifle. You can zoom with the left trigger and fire with the right. There’s even some “bullet time” mechanics thrown in there for good measure, as it activates when Wei vaults over his cover. Anyone who’s played Max Payne 3 will be able to dominate any gunfight — a little too easily — in Sleeping Dogs.
There’s some creative agility to Wei’s abilities other than shooting and fighting. He can also hack into computers with his phone, which enacts a nifty number-guessing minigame. He can also pick locks and break into safes with some interesting uses for the left and right thumbsticks. Some missions require him to do a lot of these things under the pressure of time, which can offer a decent break from kicking and shooting hordes of foes.
Another intriguing feature about the game is leveling up your abilities. This generally happens with the progression through story and alternative missions, with players earning “police” and “Triad” experience. The police stuff focuses a lot on guns and vehicles, while the Triad experience can bolster your fighting abilities. Fighting gets a little extra love from the discovery of lost jade statues around the city. If Wei returns these to the kung-fu school, he gets to learn a new technique in return.
While I enjoyed a lot of the Hong Kong splendor, I was distracted by bits of choppy animation and some bland-looking visuals in cut scenes. Character faces seem to lack the detail we’ve come to expect in other games (most notably offerings from Rockstar). While I generally enjoyed driving around the city, racing and pursuit missions had a tendency to dissolve into vehicular slugfests. Pressing the thumbstick in a direction and hitting the right shoulder button makes your car charge in a specific direction, so you can bash cars out of the way. This was useful (and welcome) during annoying jaunts away from the cops, but the racing aspect of the game seemed to lose some of its art to me. There’s a distracting feel of a lack of polish in the entire package, but it wasn’t enough to keep me away from finishing the story, which by comparison other open-world contemporaries, felt short and wrapped up a little too quickly. I’d have liked to have undergone more missions with the different red poles and seen more development in their roles within the Triad hierarchy. I even thought Wei would meet leadership of 18K and end up having to run some missions for them. Perhaps it’ll happen in the next one.
From an artistic and technical standpoint, Sleeping Dogs is not a marvel, but it is perhaps my favorite summertime game. It’s a game that fuses together some of the best parts of other open-world titles and then mixes in Hong Kong Triads. In many ways, that’s all I wanted.
Score: 7.8/10
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