[  Mood: Confused ]
[  Currently: Playing Rainbow 6 Vegas ]
I loves me some Tom Clancy. I have a lot of family in the military (namely: all of them except me), so I got switched on to his novels at an early age. The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, NetForce… I’ve been cover to cover with them all, mainly on cross country flights. While all the stories have been good, ghost written or not, the videogames written in Clancy’s name have been sort of a mixed bag.

I read Rainbow Six the novel long before I played Rainbow Six the videogame. It was a great story about the UN’s need to form an international team of specialists to deal with terrorist threats by sharing playbooks. Thus, cultural and strategic diversity gave the team its name, "Rainbow."

The Six of the title is actually a military nomer for team leader. And the team leader of Rainbow, the Six, is an iconic Clancy character, like Jack Ryan and Sam Fischer, named John Clark. Formerly a CIA spy and Navy SEAL, Clark is now an old man and has to stop the terrorists from the sidelines, sending his son in law and a bunch of European fruitloops after eco-terrorists and remnants from the IRA. Despite being full of diplomatic holes and unlikely terrorist team ups and leaps of logic in what foreign intelligence agencies are capable of piecing together, it was a great read and stank of foreshadowing to 9/11 – the first chapter takes place during a 747 hijacking by a group of Islamic suicide bombers, and back in the days when people in high places could get a permit to bring their gun on a plane.

This franchise inspired a series of videogames, titled after the books, but only the first few games included John Clark, the man who literally was Rainbow Six. I’m almost through the first level of the latest installment, Rainbow Six Vegas, and so far, there’s only five members of Rainbow, so its not really Rainbow, there’s no John Clark, so there’s no Six, and its taken place in Mexico, so no Vegas. Okay, that’s fine, it’s still early in, maybe things will change. But what I can bitch about is that the game has decided to take a more narrative approach, whereas earlier Rainbow Six games focused on tactics. This means that you can take one or, if you’re lucky, two shots before you keel over dead, whereas earlier games also allowed you to die easily, but it let you switch perspectives to your next team member in line to continue the mission and finish the fight. The character that died had a face, a name, a specialty and ranking in that specialty (demolitions, infiltration, assault, computers, etc.), a back story and a medical history. If they were wounded in the leg, they’d limp and could take a couple missions off to heal up. If they died on the mission, they were gone, and their specialties and utilities could no longer be used. You’d feel bad that not everyone made it home, even though the character development was minimal, if not non-existant. You’d become frustrated if you lost a team, especially if your failure meant that you’d lost someone who was the best at what they did.

Now things are frustrating in a whole new way.

The change in gameplay philosophy ensures that you’ll be constantly be going through the same process over and over – play for thirty seconds, turn a corner, get shot in the face, get pissed off, grow angrier as the game takes a full minute to reload, play for thirty five seconds, avenge your earlier death, get killed two seconds later, get pissed off, etc. Vicious cycle. It does not help that the friendly A.I. is borderline retarded, sometimes seeming to be waiting to be stumbled upon and killed, while the enemy A.I. is nothing short of genius and relentless.

In the end, whether this game is fun or good or not may boil down to how much work went into the story, since the strategy elements have been neutered. The last Rainbow Six game was not much better than a direct to video Jean Claude Van Damme movie, or maybe it was worse. So far in level one, things aren’t sounding too bad – something about Coyotes smuggling terrorists through the massive idiotic holes in the U.S./Mexico border. You know, the ones that someone can ride an elephant through preceeded by a mariachi band and not get caught.

Maybe things will turn around later. Who knows? If I can find my Zoloft, I just might be able to beat the first level before I lose it and drop the disc in the nearest gas station urinal.