Crack of Dawn

I suppose it doesn't bode well for new blog when half the entries posted have been about one game. Does it matter that the game happens to be Crackdown, one of my most anticipated titles of '07? Truth be told, my knowledge of this game, along with Gears of War, played a large role in locking down my decision to buy a 360 in the first place. I've been enamoured with anti-social "sandbox" games since the early sprite-based incarnations of Grand Theft Auto. Back when I was enrolled in my easy-as-pie Multimedia Studies program, I even wrote a treatment for a sandbox-styled game for my Interaction Design class (don't worry, it's not nearly as Digipen-cool as it sounds). It was a pretty sweet concept. My gameplay document wasn't terribly fleshed out, but the potential was there. Think game journalism a la Dead Rising, mixed with GTA and Bad Day L.A. sans gang-banging, mass murder and ho-slapping.

But I digress. So there I was, suckered into playing another late weeknight session of Rainbow Six: Vegas. I had finally passed that maddening sequence in the slipway dam; you know, the one involving Jung strutting his computer hacking skills in the shed while half the world's terrorist population descends upon you. I must have played that section 20 times. It took my first attempt to realize Jung gets flanked by 2 sneaky enemies in a garage and the next 19 tries to get a lucky break and not: a) catch an errant grenade, b) not have Michael die on me too early, c) not have Jung catch an errant grenade or bullet or d) all of the frickin' above.

So I finally passed that bloody sequence. I was too relieved and exhausted to celebrate when I saw the magical "Saving Progress" notification on my screen. Thankfully, for the next twenty minutes it was a smooth succession of checkpoint completions, not dieing again until later in the scientist-rescue portion of the mission.

I figured it was time to stop. I had enjoyed a couple beers with a friend earlier and the buzz was still lingering, making me rather sleepy. I checked the clock and saw that it was already 1:35am. Wait a minute, doesn't the Crackdown demo drop at 2:00am? Indeed.

By 2:05, I had the demo streaming down the pipes and crawled into bed, happily thinking about the game and secure in the knowledge it would be waiting for me when I awoke. Waking up today was a bit like waking up on Christmas morning. Bleary-eyed but excited, I fired up the Box and there it was, my precious, my Crackdown demo. It was a hefty file, weighing in at 1.24GB. I was surprised it finished downloading overnight. The Marketplace servers will probably get slammed later this afternoon when all the kiddies get home from school. Meanwhile I'll be sitting pretty enjoying the game. Chawesome...

I played the demo for all of 5 minutes. I already like the feel of controlling your Agent and the graphics, while terribly cartoonish, are very striking and unique. I'm not sure I liked the feel of the driving. I hopped into a squad car and was turned off by the camera control and sluggish turning. Here's hoping that was only characteristic of the particular vehicle I was driving. Another sticking point of course was the total lack of story and cinematics. Yes, watching an introductory gameplay montage is cool but would it have killed Real Time Worlds to add that final bit of polish to their game? Hopefully they did for the final product.

Heero and I have already made a Crackdown appointment for tonight. There's word from Kotaku that the demo has a 30-minute time limit once your Agent reaches Level 2 in any skill. That seriously sucks, but for a open-ended sandbox game like this, it was probably the most sensible option method of implementing a "cut off" point.

Full first impressions of the demo to come.