Who Watches the Watch Dogs?

Not much blogging going on here last week, but it wasn't for a lack of games being played. Quite the opposite in fact. My usual time for writing a blog post is when I get home from work after a night shift, usually accompanied by a little mining operation in EVE Online. The hands-off nature of mining means that, although I'm still at the computer to keep an eye on things and switch to a new asteroid when the old one is depleted, I'm free to do other things on my second monitor without too much impediment, namely drafting blog posts. The thing is though, despite the release of the Kronos update for EVE during the week, I've spent very little time in there thanks to the fact I'm having an absolute BLAST in Watch_Dogs.

My fear that the missions in Watch_Dogs might dilute the pleasure of tearing up Chicago was unfounded. The missions I've run so far have been just as fun as messing about in the open world playground has been. They are nicely varied, offer a decent level of challenge, and can often be tackled in a number of ways. Need to infiltrate an enemy stronghold to steal an access code? No problem! Go in all guns blazing, or maybe ram a truck through the front gate. How about sneaking in over the fence and silently taking out the enemies one at a time with a silenced pistol, or possibly even just using the enemy's own security system against them by hacking your way into their CCTV cameras and jumping from camera to camera until you find your target and then hacking his phone for the security code without ever setting foot inside the compound? While the missions can sometimes be a little frustrating in that if you die right at the end you need to start all over again, it's usually in a way which you feel is fair, you tend to feel you failed because you failed, not because the game is unfair or badly designed which is always a good thing.

There's also plenty to do in the city. I've been mainly focusing on the main storyline missions and 23 hours in I'm coming up to being about two thirds of the way through. Obviously that's not what has taken up all 23 hours because sometimes it's just too tempting to tear around the city in a fast car for a bit. There are also dynamic events happening all the time that draw your attention away from the main story. As you drive around you will often get an alert warning you of a potential crime in progress and a prompt to set a waypoint. When you get to the area you need to use the ctOS's facial recognition technology to find the potential victim or criminal and then watch until something happens, when it does you need to intervene before the victim comes to any harm. A non lethal intervention, while more difficult, will result in a bigger reward. These are very simple little distractions that only take a few minutes to complete and can be easily ignored if you want, but I find them very satisfying little mini-games between the bigger set pieces of the main arc. There are also countless side missions, jobs, games and challenges to partake in as you roam the city, more than enough to keep you going well after the main story is finished with. And that's before I even mention the multi-player!

First Impressions: Watch_Dogs

I picked up a copy of Watch Dogs yesterday on my way home from work and although I haven't spent a whole lot of time with it so far my initial feeling is that it's going to be a lot of fun. From Ubisoft Montreal, creators of the Assassins Creed series of games, Watch Dogs is the latest in a long and distinguished line of open world games set in a big city. Indeed it has the feel of GTA about it initially, running about, driving, shooting, a cell phone as your access to menus and in-game abilities & services... But it is the cell phone that makes Watch Dogs stand out from all the rest.

You play as Aiden Pearce, hacker extraordinaire and general bad-ass who is on a mission to discover the identity of the man who ordered a hit on him, which he survived, but which caused the death of Aiden's niece. The city that is your playground is Chicago, a nice change from the usual facsimiles of New York us gamers get to run around in, a city which is run on a central computer network called ctOS, a network that through your 1337 haxxor skills and your cell phone you have complete access to. You can use this ability to perform hundreds of different tasks, from hacking the network's facial recognition system to find information on the citizens you see in the streets to overloading electrical circuits to cause explosions, from changing traffic lights and raising bridges to stealing bank details and causing blackouts. The number of uses for the phone seem limitless, the city is huge and well realised and it seems like a great playground with a unique and fascinating tool to create amazing moments of gameplay. I just hope the missions are as well realised as the city and that they don't contrive to ruin what promises to be a ridiculously fun game.

Comedy moment of yesterdays play: using the phone to interact with a crane causing it to drop a huge steel crate on the two goons standing beneath it. I think I'm going to enjoy this!

Shouting at the TV like a crazy person

News broke yesterday of Microsoft's new plans for their rubbishly named Xbox One console. Right up until launch they were insistent that the Kinect was an absolutely integral part of the console and that it had to be plugged in and switched on for the console to even work. Shortly before the release they backtracked on that idea under the sheer weight of protest from press and fans alike, outraged at the thought of Microsoft's all-seeing eye sat staring at them 24 hours a day. Now it seems that the pressure from being consistently outsold by its much cheaper rival, the Playstation 4, has forced Microsoft to back-peddle yet again with their  plans for Kinect. Yesterday, amid a series of announcements, they unveiled the unbundled, Kinect-less Xbox One console. Weighing in at £350 the budget Xbox is about £80 cheaper than at launch, but less than £50 cheaper than the console is currently available for, putting it at the same price point as the PS4.

Is this a sign that Microsoft are desperate to claw some sales back from Sony? Well, yes, obviously. They badly underestimated how hard that extra $100 they were charging over their rival was going to hit them in the sales department, a lesson that should have been well learned from the last round of the Console Wars when it was the Playstation 3 that was prohibitively expensive, allowing the Xbox 360 to pull out a commanding lead in the sales figures, a lead it was never to lose. It's not all doom and gloom though. I think this move adds another layer of choice for the consumer, which is always a good thing. I just think that the loss of the Kinect from the package is worth more than a saving of forty or fifty quid. Hell, I'd gladly pay twice that for the ability to shout at my TV like a crazy person and actual have it listen!

I wonder if this means the Xbone's operating system will be updated to provide an automatic sign-in option? It's annoying to be able to shout at my console to turn on from two rooms away but then have to sit in front of it and wait for it to recognise my stupid face before it'll let me do anything.

Another announcement that was made was that using apps will no longer require an Xbox Live Gold membership. This leaves the way open for a BBC iplayer app to finally come to the Xbox One. The BBC's charter says something about it's customers not having to pay twice for their content, so anything on the iplayer, which has already been paid for with the TV license, cannot be included as part of a paid for service. This is great as it means I won't have to switch between devices if I want to go from watching something on Netflix to something on the iPlayer.

Full details of the upcoming changes can be found HERE on Major Nelson's blog