By: Joel Johnson

The only thing worse than a PR hack trying to sound excited about a bad game is a PR rep who isn't excited about a good game. I do not envy either position.

Midway held a press preview event today in Manhattan, showing off several games, most of which will be released in the first half of the year. Most games were approaching completion , but don't mistake my off-the-cuff impressions for a final review.

BlackSite: Area 51
There is absolutely nothing new in BlackSite to differentiate it from any other first person shooter. It is a pastiche of two of the three default FPS backdrops, near-future infrantryman meeting slight-less-near robo-alien.

That is not to say that BlackSite is going to be a turd to play. Its controls seem logical, the Unreal Engine ever-capable, and the shootouts just up to snuff. And the art direction, while a kissin' cousin thematically to F.E.A.R. and Crysis, is attractive. The whipping chrome spines of the robo-alien walkers filled me with industry-standard dread. (There is no bot more terrible than the ISO 9000.)

That BlackSite does so little to distinguish itself was made squirmingly evident by my PR attendant, who talked blithely of how Midway Studios Austin had "really wanted to do something different" while a platoon of genetically-modified zombie soldiers began flanking my character. Nice-looking soldiers, mind you, with seemingly adequate duck-and-cover routines, but borne of sadly timid imaginations.

For a title based on a tepid arcade light gun franchise, BlackSite is a hell of a lot better than it has any right to
be. It played like a champ on the 360 (PS3 and PC versions are also coming), looked sharp (although not Gears of War sharp, no matter how many times they mentioned it), and would not be a game I would be upset to be assigned to review.

Unlike...

Hour of Victory
Yes, I nodded to the PR man showing me the first-person shooter Hour of Victory, I understand that games set in World War II continue to be popular. Who is buying them? Jim Louderback, Editor-in-Chief for PC Magazine, for one, exclaiming his love for the genre a few minutes later when getting the same apologetic spiel.

Developed by New Jersey-based nFusion, described to me as having a history of "budget" WWII titles, Hour of Victory could use some more time in the oven.

The aiming assist is a necessary evil in console-based FPS, but Hour of Victory would often allow me to spray bullets in the general direction of an enemy and score a kill, as if the fright of a passing bullet was enough to cause one of the identical beanpole krauts to get eternal vapors. nFusion should and almost certainly will
fix this before launch.

What they may not have time to fix is their ability to wring a good-looking game out of the Unreal Engine. Characters, specifically their textures, looked like melted plastic. Higher resolutions would swap in with a pop. I spent 30 seconds in front of a particular carpet hung from the side of a North African building stepping in and back to try to determine exactly what about it made my testicles torque.

Hour of Victory's claim to obscurity are opportunities to switch character classes between levels, allowing you to approach each map as a scout, say, picking locks into secret cubbies, or as a commando. Despite claims to the contrary, this isn't the first time a game—let alone an FPS—has allowed a player to do that. (System Shock is one of many examples.) Nor is the ability to drive vehicles like tanks a new feature, although Hour of Victory's implementation is more Battlefield than, say, Half-Life 2; you can drive vehicles pretty much whenever, no special mission required.

I was over WWII FPS right around the time that I saw an ad for Call of Duty 3, turned around to pull my copy off my shelf, and realized I was reaching for Call of Duty 2, still in its cellophane. I realize the inherent genre limitations to the FPS—the "S" specifically—but for Ike's sake, let's keep it socked away only for special occasions, like fine china, or actual World War II veterans.

Oh, and the name? I'll let Rob Beschizza's Ode to Banality in Flash address that one. (See his other projects hereabouts.

Hotbrain
Soulless "brain teaser" title for the PSP with boring puzzles, insipid FMV backgrounds, and the yet-to-be-added voice talents of Fred Willard. Wha happan?

Also, fuck you freestyle, "Rhyme Game," if you think that "steam" rhymes with "scene" but not with "scheme."

Lord of the Rings: Online
Abbreviated "Low-tro" by Turbine's Adam Mersky, Lord of the Rings: Online, being an MMO, is hardly the sort of thing that can be judged in a half-hour preview session. But that won't stop me.

Rather than playing one of the existing level-50 characters available, I decided to take a few minutes to play around with the character creation process.

LOTRO may end up being too austere for its own good, at least if the choice to make the label for humans, in the "Race Selection" screen, "Race of Men." Yes, I get that it's a Tolkien reference, but come on.

Soon Lady "Omg" the hobbit minstrel—complete with special healing music-playing move, including mid-battle lute strumming—was prancing past Nazgoueaauraral or whatever. Turns out the Dark Riders don't mind hobbits after all, happily turning a blind eye even when attacked by lute. But wood spiders on the other hand...

Gosh, who knows about this one. Dungeons & Dragons: Online, a Turbine MMO I had even higher hopes for, ended up plinking off World of Warcraft unnoticed. LOTRO is clearly their mainstream play, unabashedly modeled after Blizzard's frost giant, along with the requisite tweaks and upgrades.

There are about a hojillion ways to get into the closed beta next month, so if you're interested—and I still am, mind you—let me just leave you with these two thoughts: the ability to play actual player-created music with crafted instruments in the game will be awesome, but I am claiming dibs on the story about ASCAP royalty claims in an MMO; saturated as I am with Peter Jackson's vision of Lord of the Rings, I am actually looking forward to
playing in someone else's interpretation.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
I accidentally insulted one of the developers of this game by saying I was familiar with the previous, non-Wii versions, but did not actually own it—a subtle dig I am not capable of doing consciously and on demand, sadly.

It looks fine. It's Mortal Kombat. It's on the Wii, which even the developer acknowledges encouraged them to make it easier to execute special moves, because Nintendo consoles are for kids and retards. (Love mine.)

I could really give a flying, spinning, spine-dislodging fuck about fighting games these days; The entire genre has either fallen into its navel or is Mortal Kombat. At least Mortal Kombat doesn't have any illusions of grandeur.

John Woo's Stranglehold
I can't pinpoint the first time I realized Crecente was an idiot, but I do recall being reminded of it when he almost blew the butterfly collars off his shirt with excitement over this game at E3.

Everything about this game that is a back-of-box bullet point is misleading. The "destructible environments" don't really matter to the gameplay in any appreciable way (although the A.I. will try to take cover behind fallen furniture and other set pieces); I can model a few extra pieces to blow off of the model in Maya, too, but if those explod-o-bits don't affect the gameplay, it's all chrome. (I want to build my throne of skulls, damn it.)

That's what Stranglehold is all about at its core: the chrome. It tries to give you the feeling of being a Hong Kong badass, but dilutes it across a collection of set pieces, somehow doing the same thing Max Payne did years ago, but with less personality.

Movie special effects are cheap to reproduce in a game world, but that doesn't make them good gameplay.

I don't know, it's okay. I feel like I'm writing a review here, which isn't fair. I just played one level. But I just wasn't feeling it.

Unreal Tournament 3
I'm old enough to remember the first Unreal Tournament. Before it was released, many of us thought of it as an also-ran to iD's Quake series. How quickly that changed! UT was a better deathmatch game than Quake 3, at least for the casual player like myself.

Unreal Tournament 3 looks fantastic, or will, once we all have computers powerful enough to fully pump it out. (Although Epic Vice-Honcho Mark Rein mentioned—between complaints about how Microsoft was screwing over developers with the new Games for Windows Live by requiring that features like voice chat be disabled in games that were going to be part of the platform—that the 360 version of UT3 looked damn-near as nice as the PC version, to even his surprise.)

The test machines were quad-core Intel boxes with SLI'd Nvidia 7900s—nobody knew the exact model numbers—driving 1,920 by 1,200 pixel LCDs. I mention all that to note that while the game played with nary a hitch or stutter, the graphics were aliased to all get-out. It was disconcerting. I was at once marveling at the art
design and engine capabilities while wondering why everything looked so smooshy. (Tech term. Ask your father.)

I don't know how to describe it, exactly. It looked like everything had been rendered at a lower resolution and upscaled, but without any smoothing.

Anyway, whatever. It's Epic and it's Unreal Tournament—it'll be fine. The art direction was really nice,
though, if a typical mash of disparate influences, from the Far and Near East, to writhing insectoid parasites. (Revenge of the Writhing Chrome Spine, yes, but oh! what a chrome spine!)

There is a walking tank vehicle—one of 22—that actually uses tentacles to amble, which is even cooler when you realize it can walk up the sides of rocks and other irregular environment—they're actually animating its flappy legs slapping down on the rocks.

Each player now has a built-in hoverboard as well, adding a little bit of a Tribes feel, although even a single point of damage will send you flying off your board leaving you momentarily stunned. It helps you get to the action quickly, though, even if there are no vehicles around. And hoverboarding away with the flag is a gratifying,
if risky thrill.

The weapons have been slightly upgraded, although most of the old favorites remain. I'm not enough of a hardcore UT player to tell you if the spray patterns are ever-so-slightly different or if the goop gun has a 0.4 range increase—I just know they old favorites are there and they are still kill-enabled. Player movement is less floaty than previous versions, too, feeling more like UT of old.

One to watch, for sure, and I don't particularly give a rip about deathmatch games anymore, having graduated to more refined multiplayer experiences like Battlefield: Unchecked Expansion and Puzzle Quest: Don't Let My Girlfriend Know I'm Still Playing.

Contact information for this author is not available.