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Topic: Anyone Played Black?

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Gforce
rank 27
Posted:
Sat Sep 13, 2008 11:52 pm
quote : #1
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I'm on the second level of it and it's a fun game, but theres one problem. This aim sensitivity! It's so slow and it sucks even more that they won't let you adjust it.
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lazybum
rank 24
Posted:
Sun Sep 14, 2008 12:34 am
quote : #2
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Posts: 499
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nah, i havent played it yet. I want to tho even though I heard its kinda repetitive, but ther is supposed to be lots of explosions so that should be cool hehe.
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Gforce
rank 27
Posted:
Sun Sep 14, 2008 12:50 am
quote : #3
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Posts: 564
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Yup, theres definitely a wealth of things to blow up, plus things go boom nicely as well. Mr. Green
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lordnikon
rank 59
Posted:
Sun Sep 14, 2008 7:32 am
quote : #4
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I played through a few missions of this, and it was one of the few games I owned, played, and actually got rid of. You shoot clones of the exact same dude sprinkled all over different maps. There are no bosses or climactic moments in the game. The unskippable cut scenes were grossly unecessary.

In the end its really just a big tech demo. Sure the guns fire awesome, but they were supposed to make an actual game to go along with those guns. Not a big firing range demo under different locals.
  _________________
The most effective, in this war?
The Bydo have it... and they control it.
Gforce
rank 27
Posted:
Sun Sep 14, 2008 10:12 am
quote : #5
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Posts: 564
Type: NTSC-U/C
LOL! Those cutscenes are the other things that get to me. They have me pushing all the buttons like 4000 times trying to skip through the crap, but to no avail Confused .


I'll excuse the mindless action though.
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shrap
rank 8
Posted:
Sun Sep 14, 2008 4:00 pm
quote : #6
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Posts: 81
not the worst game i've ever played but god those cutscenes will drive you to hunt down the developers. love the explosions and there are a few moments when it can be pretty adreniline pumping. when you get into the lowest level of the prison i believe it is there is a moment that reminds me of the first time you run into the soldiers in half life. but other than that i don't feel depressed for never finishing it. oh god and if you die and go back to the begining damn i could just go and find a programmer. Laughing
 
mcmonkey
rank 7
Posted:
Mon Sep 15, 2008 4:59 am
quote : #7
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Posts: 69
Wow, a lot of hate in here for this game. When it came out it got really good reviews in the brittish gaming press...
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lordnikon
rank 59
Posted:
Mon Sep 15, 2008 7:01 am
quote : #8
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Posts: 2839
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Black is an instant rush of fun, but after about 5 minutes, it wears off very very quickly. There is no variation in the enemies. It's like fighting the same clone army on every single map. It really is like a tech demo and nothing else. They forgot to sit down and look at this as a VIDEOGAME and not a gun firing simulator.

If I were involved I would have stopped everyone on the very first project meeting, and started to school them on arcade gameplay mechanics:

  • Imagine busting into an office building. There is a copy machine, that if you shoot it, tons of paper shoots out into the air. You can get bonus combos by shooting the paper in mid-air. However in the next room, there is a slow motion powerup that gives you 2x bonus and greater accuracy for 8 seconds.

  • Maps could be laid out in huge wartorne battlefields that extend farther and farther out after each round. These could even be bonus stages at various points throughout the game. Standard kills could yield average points. Kills farther out, with rifles or bazooka's could yield score multipliers based on distance. Then there could be a close quarters kill bonus for brutality by using sub machine guns, or grenades, knives or detonator charges.

  • How about 1 building, 50 refugees are held up in the basement. You have an arsenal at your disposal. 250 SWAT outfitted soldiers are closing in on your position. You have 3 minutes to booby trap the area with trip mines, and prep for the impending attack. (Sort of like the movie Assault on Precinct 13)

In Black, there just isn't any substance. They got the guns working, modeled the maps, sprinkled in some enemies and strung it altogether. Every single mission is identical to the previous one, where you fight the same dudes, in a different area, finding little envelopes and pamphlets in buildings to satisfy the mission objectives.

The game engine, sound effects, and performance is fantastic, but it seems thats all there is to the game. They really should have added multiplayer to this.
  _________________
The most effective, in this war?
The Bydo have it... and they control it.
shrap
rank 8
Posted:
Mon Sep 15, 2008 8:48 am
quote : #9
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Posts: 81
multiplayer would have added alot to this game. with the terrific sounding guns and resulting destruction would have been a blast. sneaking up on a guy and unloading an ak47 into there back. there would be lots of gamers out there with post traumatic stress disorder that they would be jumping and getting sweaty whenever a door closed behind them. Laughing
 
Gforce
rank 27
Posted:
Mon Sep 15, 2008 1:49 pm
quote : #10
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Posts: 564
Type: NTSC-U/C
Yea, online would've been an excellent idea. I didn't think they could pull it off though. The game seems like to much of a marvel to run smoothly online on the PS2.
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Yea, five years later, I finally changed the avatar....
lordnikon
rank 59
Posted:
Mon Sep 15, 2008 3:44 pm
quote : #11
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Posts: 2839
Type: NTSC-U/C
It would have run smoothly online. Black is developed by Criterion to created the Burnout games. If only they took some of the gameplay from Burnout and applied it to Black, since those games are all about high scores.
  _________________
The most effective, in this war?
The Bydo have it... and they control it.
Einhander
rank 11
Posted:
Sun Sep 28, 2008 8:39 pm
quote : #12
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Posts: 161
Type: NTSC-U/C
I don't think that Black multiplayer would have been feasible on the PS2. The game borderline chugs throughout it's entirety, barely holding on to a solid framerate. Imagine a PS2 trying to keep tabs on all of the explosions and flying debris and other effects from not only one, but eight or more systems, and I think the thing would have caught fire.

Black is like a big, loud punch to the face. It's really, really short, but it's extremely visceral, expecially if you have your console hooked up to a decent stereo system. I don't play Black very often, but wehen I do, it sounds like Normandy Beach circa 1945 in my living room.

Black is a great game to pick up for five bucks used and blow through in an afternoon, but it's not really something I would have wanted to spend fifty bucks on at release. I would have felt really, really cheated.
 
lordnikon
rank 59
Posted:
Sun Sep 28, 2008 11:47 pm
quote : #13
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Posts: 2839
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Einhander wrote:
I don't think that Black multiplayer would have been feasible on the PS2. The game borderline chugs throughout it's entirety, barely holding on to a solid framerate. Imagine a PS2 trying to keep tabs on all of the explosions and flying debris and other effects from not only one, but eight or more systems, and I think the thing would have caught fire.

This is incorrect. Black on the Playstation 2 runs somewhere between 45-55 fps. I have not played this game in a long time, since i decided to get rid of it. This is something that I rarely ever do, but it was a game I did not feel was worthy of my collection since it was at its core a tech demo in my opinion. When I did own it, and played through about half the game, the framerate for all elements of the game was rock solid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB4RBr3AtmM

Notice the camera panning above. The games performance on the Playstation 2 was one of the good things this game had going for it. All of the previous Burnout games on the PS2 like Burnout 3 and Revenge run superb, as did BLACK.

Now as far as multiplayer performance is concerned, our Star Wars Battlefront servers have in excess of 55 bots running on each. Which means the online matches are complete chaos. I remember playing in TribesAA matches with 32 players. So imagine a TAA match with 32 players, plus 14 remote turrets firing from each team, plus vehicles, plus base turrets.... yea. That has zero impact on the PS2's framerate when playing online.

Black could handle 16 player deathmatch on the PS2 no problem. A crumbling wall is going to perform the same online or offline. It all depends on what the developers are tracking as far as online positional data. If they are tracking every single element of a crumbling wall, and passing that to all users, then that would definatly generate more bandwidth resulting in lag on a user who cannot upload the data to everyone fast enough. However there is no way they would do that. Instead it would simply tell each console that Wall-A had been destroyed and the PS2's would render the desired result on the screen. The same way it would render a single bullet hole in a wall or a gas can blowing up.
  _________________
The most effective, in this war?
The Bydo have it... and they control it.
Einhander
rank 11
Posted:
Mon Sep 29, 2008 4:50 pm
quote : #14
profile : pm
Posts: 161
Type: NTSC-U/C
I didn't say that the framerate wasn't rock solid, I said it was barely rock solid. It's smooth as butter most of the time (Criterion has had a lot of time to work with RenderWare, after all), but there are moments when all hell breaks loose onscreen where you can see that the PS2 is struggling to keep up.

With EA publishing, I think that if multiplayer was feasible that they would have pushed for it, since it would be one more blurb on the box to boost sales and one more online game to cut before the (at the time planned) sequel was released.
 
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