Crackdown As You've Never Seen It Before Comments by Richard Leadbetter

Picked this up used from CEX for about £10 a couple of months back, and I still haven't got around to sticking it in my 360... Shame on me.

But I think my response is kind of symptomatic of why Crackdown failed to have as much impact as it (apparently) deserves, maybe its the box-art, or the title, but I haven't felt compelled to put it at the top of my "to-play" list for some reason.

I suspect if Ruffian are at work on some kind of a follow-up, it may not be a sequel in name, more in spirit.

Great game, great achievements.

Great article :D

The only slight niggle is Renderware isn't really the rendering engine for the game. It was completely gutted and replaced with bespoke code. My understanding is that car rendering tech is mostly Renderware but just about everything else was replaced. The company I previously worked at did a lot of the core tech work under contract for Microsoft, replacing a lot of Renderware and optimisation in general.

But apart from that awesome stuff :D

This game looked pretty bad and the gameplay was mediocre.

Fuck me.
So the day after InFamous is released, Eurogamer publish an article about how amazing a two year old Xbox game that is similar in theme to InFamous is, and said article even has a sly dig at Killzone 2 in it. Fine. But please don't whine when you're called out for being 360 fanboys, it's so blatant it's embarrassing. Especially as it's written by the same spotty turd that publishes the fan baiting face-off articles. Richard Leadbetter, you are a microsoft loving, talentless hack. It must be nice for cunts like you to look back to 2007, at least the shit60 had some games coming out for it then. Honestly, why don't you all just fuck off.

get ya ps3 out with it's no games.

^^

And here we have the typical 360 owner. I would argue with it, but it can't even type a coherent sentence so whats the point? I mean, seriously, does anyone know what the fuck it's saying?

Funny - I saw the best five games thread and chucked this in. Uncanny how many other people agreed. Along with Mario Galaxy this was one of the most popular choices. Not sure what to say as this was one of the first next gen games I played. In the long run I think things like Halo 3 are better due to multiplayer longevity; this was shortlived fun. But when i first saw the skyline in glorious HD and jumped around with wanton abandon I remember feeling that this was what I had always hoped games would end up like. It was about a week of gaming heaven, and it will always hold a place in my heart for that.

I could never get into Crackdown. It could have very well come down to the disinterested voice of your commander, but it just never grabbed me, which was a shame, because I felt like I should like it.

Oh please! This is clearly a feeble attempt at coming back on inFamous harder and stronger.. Yet it fails because - it's a feeble attempt at coming back on inFamous.

inFamous isn't really that good of a game, way to waste your time MS, cuz' SuckerPunch/Sony are already done with that genre for now.

So, is it as good as Uncharted?

Cretin rush! Duck!

[_]D

This is the bitter tear cup.
It's nearly full.
Now cry harder you screaming little bitches.

Nope there is no way 'Patchbox360' isn't biased against the 360. Not at all.

:awesomeface:

It is a good game, but Eurogamer's agenda is pretty transparent here. It always has been.

i owned a 360 from near to its launch up until my 360 broke (for a second time) on my first attempt to play steet fighter 4 , yes i am bitter but not biased. fact is the 360 is a pile of shit hardware with some really decent games, but the tide is changing and with technical masterpieces like killzone2 and uncharted 2 moving gaming forward, reminising on crackdown is utterly redundant.

Crackdown article on Eurogamer, Crackdown NXE Theme released few days ago, E3 starting tomorrow ... could it be?

@patchbox360:

I can only assume that you didn't *actually* mind the "pile of shit hardware" while whoring that 40K gamerscore of yours :-s

Richard could go a bit deeper with his analysis. So far these articles have been just more detailed and longer versions of a visual part of a regular analysis. Just things anyone who actually has played the game and looked around could tell you. Good idea this technical retrospect thing, but the execution so far is lacking.

Crackdown really wasn't that great and I really don't know why you guys wank off about it all the time.

It was small, it was short and it got boring really quickly. Where's the fun in that?

@garyliddon
The only slight niggle is Renderware isn't really the rendering engine for the game. It was completely gutted and replaced with bespoke code

In terms of Crackdown's use of Renderware, it was eventually pretty much just an art export pipeline and model format. All of the lighting and shaders were written by the Crackdown team (as largely detailed in Hugh's ShaderX article), the particle system and character rendering (which could render about a thousand on screen at one time, as you can see in the first video) didn't use Renderware at all.

A customised Renderware Studio was used for the basis of level editing, but that didn't really have any effect on the rendering.

The slowdowns in the second video are largely to do with the amount of physics calculations (as handled by havok) at the beginning of the explosions due to large numbers of separate objects in very close proximity to one another. Without a lot of clever tweaks by Crackdown's gameplay programmers, the engine wouldn't have been able to handle massive pile-up explosions as well as it did.

Ascending the Agency tower as night falls, gazing down at the city around you and then jumping off into the water is one of my defining moments of gaming for this generation of consoles.

I can't understand people who said it was boring. With even a hint of imagination you can keep yourself entertained for hours outside of the core elements of the game, which are great fun in and of themselves.

I enjoyed Crackdown tremedously and was one of the first games I bought having upgraded to 360 fairly late. The game is alot of fun and free running across the roof tops was a fabulous time waster.

The only thing that peeved me was coming up 2 agility orbs short of the 500.

i have much love for crackdown
played through it twice, brilliant game IMO

just hope that the sequel doesn't lose any quality if it's changed developer

also looking forward to APB (perhaps something to do with this article going up?)

N@ : I'd buy Crackdown again and give it another go but it isn't exactly cheap for an oldish game. Thought it'd be about 8 quid by now!

Um, it is about 8 quid now - http://www.simplygames.com/info/14700/

The sequel needs to follow the first one. Now that we know who created the gangs and set up the whole deal in the first place. Our hero should be on the war path. You'd get to face off against super cops loyal to the organisation and create some real mayhem in the city. Imagine two titans battling it out, throwing cars and shooting rockets at eachother!

Instead it sounds like Crackdown 2 will be some stupid multiplayer rampage with zero story!

I wouldn't expect a sequel to Crackdown to be multiplayer-only. I believe the multiplayer-focussed rumour was started before the end of the origional RTW/Microsoft discussions, before RTW announced in 2007 that it wasn't working on the sequel.

Now everyone is looking to Ruffian (who are comprised of maybe a third of the original Crackdown team), to do the sequel (or a non-Crackdown-franchise followup), knowing the people involved, I seriously doubt they'd be making either an MMO or 'Crackdown Tournament'.

Edit: I don't work for RTW (any more), Ruffian, or Microsoft, by the way, nor have I heard any of this from their employees, it's all conjecture on my part. I give it 60/40 that we'll hear something about a post-Crackdown action game at this evening's press conference, though.

I wouldn't expect a sequel to Crackdown to be multiplayer-only

Ok, alright, I shall eat my words.

What a great game this was. Not everyone's cup of tea I know, but I loved just messing around on my own and in coop on this game. My best 360 chevo is still climbing to the top of the Agency tower (god that was high)
The only bad thing for me was that it ruined GTA4 - it felt really limiting not being able to climb everything or blow it all up.