Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony

Luis Fernando Lopez has escaped from a life of drug-dealing to gain respectable work as a bar manager for Anthony 'Gay Tony' Prince, one of the most famous club-owners in Liberty City. However, Gay Tony's business is not going to plan and he has been forced into some shady deals to keep things afloat. Lopez's skills are called into use to help Tony survive a brewing crime war...and resolve the mystery of some missing diamonds.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is the second of two self-contained expansions to Grand Theft Auto IV and - as of this time of writing - is the most recent entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. As with The Lost and the Damned before it, The Ballad of Gay Tony pursues its own storyline whilst also being a supporting part of the storyline of GTA4. Several missions cross-over with the events of both GTA4 and The Lost of the Damned, so players will finally get the full story to what's been going on in all three titles.

As is standard in the GTA franchise, the game casts you in the role of a guy of dubious morality who must fulfil a series of missions to complete the game. These missions are given to you by various characters, some of whom you help willingly and others more reluctantly. Between missions you can chill out, drive around the city, watch a bit of TV or engage in social activities such as playing golf. Later in the game other activities are unlocked, such as base-jumping from buildings or engaging in multi-vehicle races. You also interact with other characters through your mobile phone, from being able to call in favours (such as having cars or weapons dropped off at your location) to socialising with them in bars or clubs. However, unlike GTA4 where it famously got rather annoying after a while, characters rarely call you to ask you to hang out.

The meat of the game, as always, lies in the missions. Tony has gotten himself into debt with several gangsters, and to help pay them off Luis has to do various jobs with them. In several cases this backfires badly, but Luis does make one genuine friend in the form of the ludicrously OTT Yusuf Amir (voiced with ridiculous enthusiasm by comedian Omid Djalili), the son of a multi-billionaire with a curious predilection for stealing unobtainable vehicles (a tank, a combat helicopter and a subway car, which he plans to turn into a submarine). As the game continues, the self-contained narrative with Luis trying to save Tony's business entwines with the story of the previous games, with the fate of the famous diamonds finally being revealed.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is great fun. After the previous two games were criticised for being, by normal GTA standards, po-faced and restrained, The Ballad of Gay Tony brings back the crazy. The game features missions involving shooting up the harbour with a helicopter and throwing a nasty blogger out of an aircraft and then base-jumping to rescue him before he hits the ground (I guess some of those critical GTA4 reviews hurt Rockstar's feelings). Those who've missed the series' more demented sense of humour will likely welcome the lighter, funnier approach to this game.

Unfortunately, despite being a bit lighter than previous entries to the series, the game is not as successful as The Lost and the Damned in integrating the optional between-missions stuff with the main game storyline. In The Lost and the Damned the gang wars and bike races linked in with the central narrative, but in The Ballad of Gay Tony there is a bit of a disconnect between the base-jumping and multi-vehicle races and the main storyline. More connected are optional sequences where Luis has to manage the club overnight, but these get rather dull and repetitive quite quickly.

As a result, The Ballad of Gay Tony is dependent on its missions to succeed and they are pretty decent, with some great voice acting. The game's biggest success is developing a genuinely warm relationship between Luis - a heterosexual Dominican-American - and the gay Anthony Prince without descending into the cliches the Grand Theft Auto franchise gleefully normally employs. This relationship is explored in some depth and is surprisingly effective. This is in stark contrast to the game's failure to employ any female characters of note in the game, which is a bit more inexplicable.

The Ballad of Gay Tony (***½) is a fun game with some unexpectedly good development of character and relationships. The missions are entertaining, although the optional game elements are a bit less successful this time around. Overall, however, it sees out the Grand Theft Auto IV era in style. The game is available now in a collected package with GTA4 and The Lost and the Damned on PC (UK, USA), X-Box 360 (UK, USA) and PlayStation 3 (UK, USA). Grand Theft Auto V will be released in mid-2013.

Planes and automobiles in GTA5 (no trains yet)

Rockstar have revealed three more screenshots from Grand Theft Auto V.

It looks like push-bikes will be back in the game.

Along with, unsurprisingly, cars. This is the GTA5 version of perennial series favourite, the Cheeta. The 'San Andreas' plates have gotten the Internet worked up, before it was pointed out that Los Santos is still in San Andreas State and would still have San Andreas plates, regardless of how much of the state actually appears in the game.

Also, jet fighters laden with missiles. Something tells me that GTA5 is easing off on its predecessor's slightly more realistic take and might be headed back to the wackiness of San Andreas.

Rockstar have also said they will be releasing more pictures later this week, along with a new trailer in the near future. However, they have still not mooted a possible release date for the game (though May 2013 is widely speculated).

Minor update about GRAND THEFT AUTO V

Rockstar have released a tiny amount of additional information on the upcoming Grand Theft Auto V.

They have released two screenshots. The one above is the more interesting, depicting the sprawling city of Los Santos (apparently the biggest city in a GTA game to date) from what appears to be a commandeered police helicopter. Does the presence of large suspension bridge hint that GTA5's version of Los Santos will be more of an amalgamation of Los Angeles and San Francisco? Possibly. The other screenshot is rather more chilled out:

A release date for GTA5 has not yet been mooted. However, Rockstar are adamant that they're not going to talk about the game too much in the near future. This to me suggests that a 2012 release date is now impossible (compare the amount of attention that Dishonored, not due until October, is now getting in the gaming press) and we will most likely see the game in May 2013. The spring is a more favoured date for Rockstar and is perfectly situated so as to catch the largest amount of attention before Sony and Microsoft wheel out their new consoles at the end of the year.

Max Payne 3

Several years have passed since Max Payne's last adventure. He has left the NYPD and now spends his nights drinking in seedy bars. He is recruited by a former colleague to work security for the rich Branco family in São Paulo, Brazil, in what appears to be an easy job. When Max's charge, his employer's wife, is kidnapped by a gang, he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy which will lead him into some very dark places as he tries to redeem himself and find out what's going on in this city.

Max Payne 3 sees the return of the titular hero after a break of nine years. Remedy Entertainment, who made the first two games in the series, have moved on with their Alan Wake series of games, leaving Rockstar (best-known for the Grand Theft Auto series) to carry on their work. Whilst fans of the earlier games were dubious of this move, it was actually reasonably logical. Rockstar games often feature damaged protagonists trying to live better lives but being drawn back into a life of violence by circumstances, which is a perfect fit for Payne.

The game acts as a reboot of the series. References to the events of the first two games are minimal and, aside from a couple of flashback missions set in New York, the game is set in a different city in a different country with a very different culture (not to mention a different and un-translated language). The only constants are Max himself and, of course, his ability to slow down time to engage in combat.

Max Payne 3 is overwhelmingly impressive from a production values standpoint. The graphics are fantastic, with the game employing a vivid visual style. Keywords from conversations flash onto the screen and sometimes the action dissolves into line breaks and the colour desaturates, almost like you're watching the action on an old 1980s TV that is about to expire. The game's colour palette tends towards the bright and colourful, but there is a dark hue to everything. Sections set in crumbling warehouses or an abandoned hotel contrast the light and dark elements of the game's style. Animation is astonishing, with Max storing his weapons on his person and moving them around naturally to swap guns or take painkillers. The game feels like it's had a million dollars spent on every single minute of it (in sharp contrast to the low-budget feel of the first game, with its amateur cut scene actors).

The game's centerpiece is action and gunfights, and the title impresses in these areas. Combat is hard, fast and furious, with effective use of bullet time necessary to proceed. The game also employs a cover system, one of the more tiresome elements of modern action gaming, but the use of bullet time and headshots makes it mostly an optional feature with only a few moments where its use is necessary to proceed. More satisfyingly, the ludicrous modern gaming concept of 'regenerating health' has been thrown out of the window and replaced by Max's more familiar use of painkillers, adding a great deal of tension to the action sequences and requiring the player to plan attacks more intelligently than just charging in, knowing you can hide behind a box to get your health back. Unfortunately, bullet time has been gimped since the second game. There's only one level of bullet time (you don't get additional slowdowns when you shoot more people) and, ridiculously, it doesn't regenerate when you make kills. Given it is fairly slow to regenerate, a fair amount of combat has to take place without the use of the game's central mechanic and main selling-point, which seems strange.

The writing is okay, though Dan Houser's script is notably less funny, knowing or introspective than Sam Lake's work on the first two games. But it's reasonable and House deserves some props for moving Max on in his life, continuing his character arc and trajectory from the first two games. The other characters in the game are somewhat less successful, with no memorable equivalent to say Vladimir Lem or Mona Sax, but they do their job well enough. The change of setting is far more successful, with São Paulo (or, rather, the criminal underworld that is the main setting) presented as a dark, threatening city which is a perfect match for the semi-noir stylings of the series. This is backed up by the soundtrack (by American band Health), which is excellent.

So the game is well-made, with amazing production values, a decent story, some good characterisation and great action (if not quite as well-executed as the first two games). But there is a major problem. You see, the game doesn't actually like you playing it very much. For every minute you spend actually playing the game, it demands that you spend at least another watching it play itself, through intrusive use of lengthy, unskippable (as they hide loading sequences) and non-interactive cut scenes. Cut scenes are not just present at the start and end of each level with maybe a few reserved for major moments mid-level (the sort of structure the first two games employed), but they take place near-continuously. Frequently. opening a door will trigger a cut scene showing Max going through the door and taking cover before letting you resume control. This even happens if you've already flown through the door in shootdodge mode, resulting in frustrating (and continuity-breaking) moments where you could have wiped out a dozen bad guys in five seconds in bullet time but the game demands that you hide behind a counter instead and fire from cover. Cut scenes often kick in after you've dispatched the last bad guy in an area, taking you to a new area with no opportunity to loot the enemies for ammo (which is in fairly short supply throughout most of the game). There are also too many moments when the game has Max doing some really cool things (like diving between moving trains or jumping from an exploding rooftop onto a helicopter) when you don't have control.

Max Payne 3 is, of course, a linear action game and railroading is to be expected. Certainly the first two games had a lot of cut scenes and moments where player choice was taken away, but generally it was in areas where it made sense. They were also infrequent compared to the amount of time the player had control. Max Payne 3 actually seems to resent you doing anything other than what it wants you to, and punishes you if you try. During a shoot-out near a plane taking off, any attempt to jump onto the plane will result in a cut scene where a bad guy kills Max with a grenade, with Max standing there and unable to do anything. During a battle on a river dock, falling in the water will result in Max's instantaneous death, despite him being able to swim in a cut scene a minute later. Despite Max's ability to slow down time in gameplay, in a cut scene he runs into a room where a friend is being held hostage and is powerless to stop them being executed, despite the fact that if you had control you could wipe out everyone there in moments. The game also employs a checkpoint system rather than allowing quicksaves, resulting in the player sometimes having to repeat 10-15-minute long sequences if they are killed, which is simply unacceptable.

When it actually lets you play it, Max Payne 3 (***) features some intense and engrossing action sequences. However, the game makes the classic mistake of placing itself and its story (which is decent but nothing special) ahead of the enjoyment of the player. As a visual experience, Max Payne 3 is impressive and intermittently even brilliant, but as a game it's a let-down compared to the first two titles in the series. It is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3) and in the USA (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3).

GAME OF THRONES RPG's release clashes with year's biggest 2 games

Cyanide have released a docu-trailer for their Game of Thrones computer RPG. This trailer shows some gameplay with two of the game's developers talking about the title.

Game of Thrones: The RPG will be released on 15 May in the United States but, completely inexplicably, won't be out in Europe until 1 June (since clearly it takes two weeks for digital information to cross the Atlantic). The publishers, in their wisdom, have also decided the release the game on the same day as Max Payne 3 (one of the biggest games of the year on both console and PC) and Diablo III (probably the biggest game of the year on PC). In fact, they've somehow managed to cross with both dates for Max Payne 3 (which is out on 15 May on console and 1 June on PC).

I can only conclude at this stage that the publishers don't actually want anyone to play the game. There's some very strange decision-making going on there.