Cathie Jung: Queen of the Corsets. Not related to this post, but possibly related to Jung from Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2.


The last two days of my life have been devoted mainly to avoiding my friends and family, as well as completing Rainbow Six:Vegas 2. I have chosen to do this on Realistic difficulty so I have not quite finished yet, however I do have some impressions of the game that I would like to share with you all so if you don't mind:

*The first thing I noticed is that all of the adlibs of the terrorists and what not are almost exactly the same. And what's more, they still aren't applicable to the situation. For instance, when I frag and enter a room, the dude around the corner shouldn't say "I guess it's nothing.." It's a small annoyance but still very telling of how little this installment has been improved from its predecessor as far as AI and other elements.

*The second thing I noticed is that, while for the most part non-intrusive, the product placement in this game is a little excessive. From the Cicso systems interface, to all the comcast shit they have everywhere. Comcast has its megahuge evil corporate dick all the way up in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2's ass. Ubisoft do slip in some sly self promotion during the gaming convention, which is a level I did enjoy despite the fact that it seemed to be based around making it a Comcast commercial. Product placement should be more of an afterthought.


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*The next thing that hinted at the rushed quality of Vegas 2 was some of the level design. A lot of times I found my self blasting (and being blasted) down long corridors with conveniently placed tree pots or upturned tables or other various short walls, go up/down the stairs/rappel, helicopter, repeat. It started to get kind of tedious. Some of the locations we were in were quite interesting (the aforementioned Gaming convention, also the rec center room with the climbing walls) but really didn't seem to have anything to do with anyone's idea of Las Vegas. Sure there is a slot machine here and there, but you spend a lot of time indoors in really nice buildings that could be anywhere in the world. They should have just called this Rainbow Six 2 and had every Act be in a different part of the country, or world, so at least there would be a different feel to different areas of the game.


*I would even go so far as to say that the saving grace of the single player campaign is the online co-op mode. Without it, the story mode would be downright mediocre rather than merely flawed.


*The other feature that brightens the the campaign somewhat, is the persistent elite creation system thing, which allows the player to rank up his/her character during both single player AND the online versus modes. Actually, it seems that everything you do gives you experience points, which is nice because you feel like all the hard gaming work that you are doing is going towards something. However, in addition to the obvious larceny from Call of Duty 4 (yes I know the XP points system was actually in the first vegas, and that CoD4 probably stole the idea first, but IW did it better, and therefore there is more emphasis on it here) I am not sure how I feel about this trend that seems to be emerging of players having to micromanage and classify all their weapons and types of kill and what not. People are always going to cheat to get their precious stats and ranks up, and there is already an "Unlimited XP glitch" that I am sure no one on Xbox Live would ever take advantage of.

After playing through what must have been half the campaign though, I started to enjoy the game on a different level. It almost started to become like watching a movie which so bad that's its entertaining in itself. That is if you are the kind of person that likes to sit and make fun of bad movies.

The thing is, for a shooter, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 is not a bad game. Its just a shiny yet bland and mediocre version of a good game that was released a couple years ago. This game is so clearly rushed, that its true intention to capitalize on the success of the first Rainbow Six: vegas, as well as take a share of the market away from Call of Duty 4, becomes glaringly obvious. I expected better from Ubisoft, but after this and the bloated mess that was assassin's creed (and I am just talking about the tutorial) I am beginning to lose respect for one of my favorite developers. I just hope Mr. Clancy is happy with the amount that he sold out for.