I will now play Black (2006), based almost entirely on that twitter thread from a while back that claimed it's actually a masterpiece

I'm not sure I remember who wrote it lol sorry

Also it's a late PS2 game (the 360 had been out for a couple months), and those are always super interesting from a technical standpoint

oh no I forgot about FPSs on the Dualshock 2

can't circle-strafe left bc your thumbs clonk together lmao

also I am Ass Garbage at aiming guns on controllers so I might not really be experiencing this as intended

staggeringly 2006 color grading

generic mooks in the first level take like 3 headshots to kill

this is.. interesting

It's got this weird "subtractive bloom" sort of effect that I've seen on a few games from the era. Seems akin to blurring a layer copy and setting it to Overlay in photoshop, i.e. bright pixels glow like bloom but DARK pixels also create dark halos

Really hard to get a good screenshot of it but you can kinda see it on the edge of the gun here

I think it might be somewhat more sophisticated than just thresholding dark pixels and subtracting bloom; it creates an almost SSAO-like softening effect

It's a bit easier to see in motion, although twitter compression might wreck it

check out the darkening on tree trunk and leaves as the gun passes in front of them

it rules that this predates the invention of the Cover Shooter so it's just like, you march straight through a door into an open courtyard and eight dudes each pop up from behind eight individual explosive barrels

this game has all the self-important Serious War Movie presentation of Call of Duty at its most cloying, and the actual gameplay of like Doom 2016

emotional war-documentary strings swell as I stride into an overgrown field

six dudes shoot me with hundreds of machine gun rounds as I calmly walk up to each of them in turn and shotgun them in the face

haha yeah this rules, because it's so obviously the devs going "loOK at THIS we can do GAUSSIAN BLUR on a PS2!! It's LIKE A FILM!!!!"

yooo those weird dark halos I was talking about? They're not from bloom, they're from VOLUMETRIC FOG (!!!)

Fog seems to be done on a small offscreen buffer and then additively composited onto the scene. Reads Z to calc how much fog to add, but since it's low-res it aliases around edges. Fog buffer's blurred to hide this, resulting in soft dark halos around anything in front of the fog

(obv this is ultimately speculation on my part; I don't have a PS2 debugger or anything, but that explanation accounts for all the behaviors/artifacts I've been able to notice)

and like, dude, *volumetric fog on a PS2*

BROWN!
AND!
BLOOM!

normal bullet potency

Thing that absolutely owns:

There is no Interact button, at all. There is only Gun. The only way to open doors is to blow them off the hinges with a shotgun. If you do not have a shotgun in your inventory, you cannot have whatever is behind that door

No matter where you shoot a dude from, their trajectory will always be redirected off the nearest balcony

sometimes bullets don't go through doorways

For all this game's weirdo macho gun fetishization (""G U N P O R N"") all the guns kinda... suck?

The sound design and environment destruction make them seem rad and powerful at first, but then they're all WILDLY inaccurate and even basic enemies just shrug off dozens of hits

also hilariously, the spread pattern for machine guns isn't random points in a circle, it's random points around an increasingly-large RING that SURROUNDS the cursor

bullets just stop going where you aim altogether; you get better results aiming to the side lol

this game is a mess I like it

Interestingly, despite being rated M for G U N P O R N and also a lot of poorly voice-acted swearing, there's no blood?

Kinda drives home the idea that the point of this game really isn't shooting dudes; the point of this game is FIRING GUNS

It's a beautiful sunny October day; time to pull every curtain in my apartment so I can find the enemies in this smeary illegible brownscape

Being mostly about Dude How Cool Are Guns Dude, one can't really argue that this game has GOOD politics, but it at least has the decency to make the player's role as Super Special Black Ops Guy be mostly covering up all the blatantly-evil disasters the CIA keeps causing

Time-honored videogame tradition of being unable to rectify "the military is cool as hell" with "the War on Terror is a moral disaster of incomprehensible scale" and basically shrugging and going "well the guys in CHARGE are evil, but the dudes shooting the guns are Cool As Hell"

I miss watching lods pop

this isn't a joke I am a big enough dork to mean this earnestly

distinctly remember walking around one of the arbiter levels in halo 2, watching an elite cycle through like 20 different lods spaced like a meter apart, just getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of WORK that had to take

you cannot flush the toilet in Black (2006)

uh
lol?

a lot of these intel collectibles are items you have to destroy, and they're all super edgy like this because you're supposed to be like doing the CIA's dirty work to cover up their conspiracies

I didn't get a screenshot but one of them was like "YOU DESTROYED EVIDENCE OF IRAQI WMD MOVEMENTS" which is.........

okay so this came out in 2006 right. this is implying the WMDs were real, and the fact that we didn't find any was ITSELF a government coverup?

...what

You can't cook grenades but you can SHOOT THEM to set them off early, which is way, way more fun

okay this one's good

wow that final level is Awful

So I finished Black (2006)

It's dumb and bad and also rules

also it's less than 8 hours long, which EXTREMELY rules

It accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do, which is make Shooting Guns feel ridiculously powerful

I feel like it... lacks ambition in most other respects? which kind of lets down what would have been an absolutely amazing foundation to build on

like it just doesn't even TRY to have art direction

there's some very fun shooting-gallery level design early on but the later fights mostly devolve into big open arenas with dudes shooting from all sides+above, so you just hide in a corner and poke at them, which takes FOREVER

there's flashes of brilliance in stuff like shooting doors open or shooting your own grenades, but the rest of the gameplay kinda never really rises to the level of audacity suggested by the THERE IS ONLY GUN BUTTON conceit

The stuff it does well, it does REALLY well, but I can def see why the game never really left much of a lasting impression. Def worth checking out if you wish to revisit the Goldeneye tradition of console FPS design

Solidly entertaining way to expend a weekend for like $3