Gareth Jones

Having completed Batman: Arkham Asylum around two weeks after I started playing it, I decided that the next game that I should play and complete was Activision’s Call of Duty 3. This game was developed by Treyarch back in 2006, and I’ve had it for ages but never really got round to playing it. I loved the 360 launch game Call of Duty 2 (developed by Infinity Ward, as was the original) so I was looking forward to finally continuing the series with 3 before moving onto Modern Warfare 1 and 2, World at War and then Black Ops.

I completed Call of Duty 2 back in 2005 sometime on Veteran difficulty. This is normally my difficulty of choice, as you don’t want the game to be over too quickly and you tend to unlock more achievements at that level than on Normal. So, at the beginning of Call of Duty 3′s single player campaign I selected Veteran and looked forward to another round of top-quality entertainment.

It’s a shame then that I wasn’t playing a different game. Call of Duty 3 is disappointing on almost every level. As anyone who has seen my games collection can tell you, I love FPS games and as such I’m willing to put up with the odd niggle here and there if the remainder of the experience is worth it, but unfortunately Call of Duty 3 is not – read on to find out why.

After a few hours of playing, it became painfully obvious that back in 2006 Treyarch’s idea of increasing the difficulty level was not in making the enemy AI more intelligent or brutal or giving you fewer squad-mates to help out. Instead, Treyarch increased the “difficulty” by giving every German soldier God-like aiming abilities, X-ray vision and a hate for you that is so strong that they are willing to shoot at you in unison as your squad-mates (who are often closer to them than you are) clumsily open fire on their position. With their X-ray vision and seemingly laser-guided bullets, the Germans can spot you from hundreds of feet away in thick foliage even if you’re crawling and tear you apart with pin-point accuracy before you’ve even spotted them. Treyarch’s detection routines obviously don’t get any more complex than “Is the player within a mile of the German? If so, open fire with 100% accuracy irrespective of whether or not you can actually see them”. This is neither realistic nor fun and it all makes for an incredibly frustrating experience as your countless, repeated deaths are caused not by any foolish decisions, delayed reactions or lack of experience – they’re caused simply by broken game mechanics. I got around a quarter of the way into the game before deciding to restart on Normal difficulty as the game had become too frustrating.

On Normal things are only slightly better. The Germans no longer possess their God-like aiming abilities or X-ray vision (although stealth play is still impossible in this game because they still seem to have eyes in the back of their heads apart from one scripted scene where you’re tasked with sneaking up to a German who is answering the call of nature), but plenty of other bugs, glitches and other issues exist to ensure that the game remains a challenge albeit for all the wrong reasons:

• Countless invisible walls prevent you from performing any flanking manoeuvres and funnel you down a single narrow path into the line of fire. And I don’t just mean short walls or fences that are strategically placed to block your path (although there are plenty of these as well), but literally invisible walls. The walls that aren’t invisible are so short that even an old woman should be able to jump over them, but you can’t despite being a young, fit and healthy soldier.
• Enemy AI is happy to break cover and run around like a headless chicken before being put out of its misery by a well-aimed bullet. This actually happens in Veteran as well.
• Your squad AI is happy to stand by and watch as fellow squad-mates are shot and killed mere feet away. Your squad-mates will also do their best at every possible opportunity to get in your way, either blocking your line of fire or preventing you from entering/leaving an area. A rifle butt to the face convinces them to get out of your way most of the time, but not always.
• From a distance, enemy turrets seem to be unmanned as they rain down bullets on you and your men. This makes them impossible to take out until you get close enough for an operator to spawn, who you can then kill in order to disable the turret.
• You can walk into a room inside a building and initially find it empty, only for a German to spawn before your very eyes as if by magic. If the German spawns as you’re leaving the cleared room and shoots you in the back, well that’s just your problem. The best thing to do is wait in each empty room for a second or two just to make sure everything that is going to spawn has done so before you turn your back.
• I had to restart one of the early chapters from a checkpoint because although I’d taken out everyone in the house, my squad-mates were stood in the cellar and were unwilling/unable to leave in order for the story to progress. After running around the entire house no less than four times looking for some kind of trigger, I gave up and restarted. My squad-mates then remembered what they were supposed to do and gave me orders to progress to the next area.
• Similarly, you’ll frequently be left waiting for the game to catch up with your progress as you patiently wait to be allowed to do the next thing in any given area. Only when the game finally catches up and decides to let you proceed will you be able to interact with whatever it was that you were trying to interact with earlier. The worst example of this was when I rescued a squaddie from a cellar. There were four of us in the cellar and after waiting at least 10 seconds to be told to proceed I tried to open the door but it was locked. I then walked to the rescued squaddie and smacked him with the butt of my rifle a few times before the game told me to exit the cellar by opening the door which had magically unlocked itself.
• There have been several instances of soldiers running on the spot as they try (and fail) to run through scenery/walls.
• On two occasions I’ve fired at least 20 rounds into a German through a window from outside, and despite seeing the resulting blood clouds as the bullets hit (and presumably pass through) him, the German has refused to die. Do the same from inside the room however (but employ the same angle of attack and from the same distance) and he will die as normal.
• A German that I killed as he stood on top of a moving half-track stayed exactly where he was when the half-track drove away, suspended horizontally in mid-air around 6 feet above the ground. Here’s a photo.
• In one chapter I had to capture a factory and then defend it from a counter-attack. At one point two of my squad-mates were stood outside of a building aiming their guns at the wall without firing, while a German who was inside the building was glitching half-way through the wall and shooting at them from inside. Clearly he was far enough through the wall to be able to see my squaddies, but not quite far enough through it for them to decide to shoot back. I fired some shots at the wall/glitch and he died, and then my two squaddies proceeded to their destination.
• Sometimes when you perform a head-shot, the victim flies up about 15 feet into the air as though you’ve just delivered the mother of all upper-cuts.
• With the rifles and the MP40, you can shoot a German from a few feet away only for him to get back up and continue running after a brief pause. I realise some guns lose their effectiveness at range, but surely the victim would at the very least be injured? And surely a soldier wouldn’t instantly die if you shot him in the foot at close range? This is more of a game design issue than a glitch though, and as the game is 4 years old perhaps it’s an unfair complaint to make, since most other games (but not all) from the same period handled injury/death the same way.

Even with all of the above issues, the game is too easy on Normal difficulty and you’ll rarely die if you’ve got any FPS experience under your belt. Because of the huge number of issues though, the game is more of a challenge than it otherwise would be (or that it should be) on this setting. If you decide to increase the challenge and select Veteran then the cheap way in which Treyarch increases the difficulty saps any fun out of the game by making the enemy totally unrealistic.

I’m still going to complete the game though now that I’ve started – if not for my personal satisfaction then for the achievements points – but unlike the first Call of Duty or its sequel Call of Duty 2, I don’t think I’ll be replaying this one out of sheer enjoyment of the game. I will keep it though rather than sell it because it does have a good split-screen local multiplayer, which of course is unaffected and unhindered by poor AI.

Treyarch has historically played second fiddle to Infinity Ward, but with the original Medal of Honour and Call of Duty released at the beginning of the decade surely even a B-Team could develop a good FPS in 2006? In Call of Duty 3, Treyarch emphatically answered that question with a big, fat “NO!”. Since Treyarch are also the team behind World at War and Black Ops (which broke sales records around the world on the back of Infinity Ward’s earlier work on Modern Warfare 1 and 2), I’m no longer sure if these are games that I should be looking forward to or dreading.

3/10
(7/10 for multiplayer)

I was asked a few days ago by a father of two if it was worth buying the PSPgo. He already had a PSP 3000 which his eldest had commandeered and wanted another so that his youngest could play as well.

The PSPgo was released in Europe and the US on October 1st, 2009 as an alternative – not a replacement – to the recently released 3000. At launch the unit price was £250 – around £100 more than the 3000 – though due to the substantial resulting backlash many retailers were discounting the machine to around £225 from day one.

The Go has exactly the same hardware specifications as the 3000 except that it can’t play traditional UMD games as it lacks a UMD drive and it has a smaller screen due to the console itself being half an inch smaller and 43% lighter than the 3000. Depending on who you ask, the smaller size is sometimes a positive and sometimes a negative – yes it’s easier to fit into your pocket but yes a larger screen is always better than a smaller one.

Sony’s decision to launch the original PSP back in 2005 with a UMD drive was quite controversial. Back in 2005, solid state memory was pretty expensive and the UMD allowed a cheap method of providing up to 1.8GB of storage space for its games which would have cost almost as much as the console itself in solid state. However, the drive was slow, it drained the battery and as soon as your games collection surpassed the grand total of 1 you had to find another pocket for your (cumbersome and delicate) UMDs. Some cases allowed up to 3 UMDs to be carried with the console but quickly got bulky – anything more than 3 and you were looking at a bag.

The UMD format shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone though as Sony’s history with bespoke formats is long and colourful. Among the success stories are the CD, the Memory Stick and Blu-ray, but on the flip side are BetaMax, DAT tapes and Mini Disk. Cynics were adding the UMD to the latter list as early as 2006.

At the beginning Sony seemed to have high hopes for the UMD format. As well as providing the medium for the PSP’s games, the UMD was also used for PSP versions of the latest blockbuster movies (the original PSP came with Spiderman 2) though this aspect was actually poorly thought out.

Firstly, a UMD movie could only be watched on the PSP – a rumoured UMD set-top box that would allow UMDs to be watched on your living room TV never materialised. Secondly, this PSP-only version of the movie often cost considerably more than a DVD copy that you could watch on anything. It was even possible to rip DVD movies to memory card and watch them on the PSP at no extra cost, though Sony artificially crippled the resolution of movies played back this way to 320×240 as a way of forcing people to watch their movies on UMD – which could use the system’s 480×272 screen to its full potential. With custom firmware removing this limitation however and UMD movie sales slumping, Sony eventually removed the limitation from their own firmware in revision 3.30 as part of a larger drive to try to stem the flow of custom firmware installations.

So, the UMD failed as a movie format and here in 2010 you can get memory cards of a higher capacity for next to nothing, so surely the PSPgo is a no-brainer and everyone should upgrade from their PSP3000, right? Sadly not, and the reasons are all down to yet more stupidity on Sony’s part.

First there’s the console’s price. Even today it has an RRP of £225 while you can pick up the PSP 3000 for just £130. In May Sony CFO Bill Glaser called the Go’s sales “a little bit of a disappointment”, so recently it has gone through a relaunch to an indifferent public and now includes 10 “free” games, though again all is not as it seems. The first and most obvious issue is that you’re paying for these “free” games in the inflated price of the system so they’re not free at all. The second issue is that while 6 of the games are either critically or commercially acclaimed, four of them are not and so are unlikely to be on your wanted list, and lastly, although Sony claims that there’s £200 of games being given out for free here, you could actually get all 10 for closer to £70 on UMD if you were to shop around. Still, if this offer is enough to tempt you, be warned that Sony fully intends to make back any money that it’s losing with this promotion as soon as you start buying more games.

Assuming you swallow the £70 higher price tag of the Go, you’ll then be wanting to buy some more games for the machine. The only place to buy games for the Go is on Sony’s online PlayStation Network (PSN), and for some reason nearly a year after the console’s launch there are still a LOT of great games that aren’t available on the service simply because they were released before Sony started selling games online.

When you do find a game that you want to buy on the service, be prepared to pay a premium. Despite having zero distribution costs, everything from brand new releases to bargain-bin golden oldies costs significantly more on PSN than on UMD. I’ve heard clowns make excuses for this, claiming that it costs publishers more to sell on PSN than it does to sell in shops and therefore the games simply have to cost more. Whether this is the case or not I don’t know, but I don’t think the average customer cares about the politics behind it all and I think they just want fair prices. Besides, I’m not sure how any of this is supposed to excuse Sony’s own games which also cost more on PSN than they do on UMD – are we to believe that Sony’s gaming division is charging itself extortionate rates to sell on its own platform? That seems to be quite a stretch for the imagination – even for a Sony fanboy.

Lastly, if you’re one of those people who sells their games once they’re completed or no longer played (personally I keep all of mine, unless the game is just total garbage) then you’re out of luck on the PSPgo. Games are digitally signed at the point of download to only work on your PSP, so you’re stuck with the game whether you like it or not. You can’t sell it to anyone and can’t send it back for a refund – this really is a one-way trip here. Of course, with a UMD copy (which cost you less in the first place remember), you can either sell it on eBay or part-exchange it for another game in your local games shop.

I said earlier I’d come back to why the PSPgo has so far sold so poorly that Sony felt it needed a relaunch. Unfortunately for Sony, it appears that the gaming public isn’t quite as stupid or gullible as Sony likes to believe.

When the PSPgo was first announced and the lack of a UMD drive was confirmed, thousands of PSP owners who initially wanted to upgrade asked the question, “How do I get all of my [UMD] games onto it?“. Sony promised a solution, though wouldn’t give any clues as to what the solution was until shortly before the release of the console. Speculation was rife, including – though not limited to – the idea that Sony would install booths into games shops all around the country that would turn UMD games into digital copies.

It turned out however that the “solution” was this: for people who had an existing UMD games collection, Sony was willing to give them an incredible 3 games for free with their PSPgo. That included those who only had 3 UMD games as well as those who had 100+. Also, the selection of games to choose from was very limited. Unsurprisingly, few took up their “trade-in” offer and most stuck to their older PSPs instead.

Those who were new to the world of PSP weren’t stupid either – why would they pay extra for a system that also forced them to pay extra for a smaller selection of games? And then prevent them from selling those games when they were done with them?

The result was, quite naturally, poor sales of the PSPgo which lead Sony to conclude that the gaming public “was not yet ready for digital distribution”. I’d say that on the contrary, digital distribution is doing just fine when done properly and that in fact what people aren’t ready for is to be ripped off three times over with a single console. Had the pricing of the console reflected the lower manufacturing cost and the pricing of the games reflected the zero distribution costs, then I think the PSPgo could have been a contender – even with the smaller games selection. As it is, to answer the question at the beginning of this article – is is worth buying a Sony PSPgo? No it isn’t – get the PSP 3000 instead.

Update: As of 21st of April, 2011 – just 18 months after launch – the PSPgo has been discontinued due to its failure to have any impact on the market. The full story is here.