Grand Theft Auto and Killzone



My best friend and my girlfriend got me a PlayStation 2 for Christmas, increasing by one the numbers of reasons I need never interact with the outside world. I’ve had a GameCube for a while, but the sheer variety of games on the PS2 makes it a completely different experience. In an attempt to get myself up to speed on the console as quickly as possible I went to Hollywood and rented the two most popular games the PS2 has to offer currently; Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Killzone.

If you believe the news media the Grand Theft Auto series has, along with Mortal Kombat, been the moral compass our young people look to when they need the guidance their parents can’t provide. In San Andreas you’re essentially the main character in a L.A. street gang movie. You can steal any car you see driving by (nobody ever parks in the fictionalized Los Angeles known as Los Santos); kill any pedestrian; eat at any of the approximately four fast food establishments that exist in this city of 6 million people. The plot, at least at the beginning of the game, has you returning to Los Santos after five years away to help your brothers, the Grove Street Gang, fight the rival Ballers Gang.


In this game you can eat pizza! Does the fun ever start!?

The game prides itself  on being “open,” which is to say that any time between missions you can go anywhere in the city and do anything you want. The problem is that wandering around urban blight looking for a fight isn’t really my idea of fun. The game is an impressive technical achievement. The feeling of walking around the streets of a real city is convincing, but I like a bit more escapism in my games. After a while I got bored with the “missions” (drive here, drive there, flail around when you get there, drive back), so I decided to become a serial killer. I beat up a woman and stole her knife, and then began stalking the streets looking for women identical to her (there aren’t that many character avatars in the game) and killing them when I found them. Eventually an ambulance showed up to the scene of one of my murders, so I knifed the paramedic and stole the ambulance. Then the game informed me that I could engage in paramedic missions by driving the injured people in the back of the vehicle to the hospital by a certain time. I did so and received money. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a lot like Cirque de Soleil show; it left me feeling a little dirty and very confused.

Killzone’s moral universe is much simpler: Kill everything that isn’t like you. It’s a first person shooter, a genre I haven’t really enjoyed on console, basically because it’s tough to control movement and aiming with a controller. “Run and Gun” type games like Quake and Doom only really work for me with a mouse. Killzone was designed by Sony specifically for the PlayStation, so it works somewhat better. The emphasis isn’t on moving around quickly, but on finding cover and flanking enemy positions. Once I got that down and got used to aiming with the control stick I began to have a fun time. It also helped to turn the difficulty down to “Easy,” which seemed to slow the enemy reaction time down to the point where I had a fighting chance to target them before they shot me more full of holes than a Paul W.S. Anderson script.

Killzone is set in some indeterminate future. A race of alien Nazis called the Helghast have invaded our planet. You start out playing Capt. Temple. Your job is to find a security key that’s been lost in transit inside the Hellghast-compromised military headquarters and return it to General Vondel so he can take it up to the orbiting SD platforms. SD? Super Deformed? South Dakota? Probably Strategic Defense. Eventually you’re forced to leave the headquarters and make your way across various bombed out locations in service of some vague objectives. Along the way Temple is joined by three other soldiers, and together the four try to cross heavily occupied territory.


Time to get serious about mall security.

The ability to play each level as different characters adds a little variety. However, most of that variety is in the weapons that each character gets initially. Temple gets the ISA assault weapon which has good penetrating power of distance. Lugar, a female assassin, gets a silenced weapon with even better penetrating power. Rico gets a big-ass machine gun with a cool rocket launcher. But 90% none of this matters because there is very little ammo for the specialized weapons. Instead you have to make do with the Helghast rifles, which at a distance have the penetrating power of a waterpik. Prepare to spend a lot of time emptying clip after clip at some target at the edge of your range hoping you get lucky and kill it. That's why I usually play as Hakkar, a half-Helghast spy. He can carry more ammo for Helghast rifles.

Perhaps the only real downside to Killzone is the story. The cut scenes are well produced, but man are they cheesy. It seems like the writers identified every awful cliche from bad sci-fi movies, and then decided to use all of them. Really, every one. Temple and Lugar are ex-lovers. (groan) Rico hates aliens but develops a grudging respect for Hakkar. (groan) The slightly sinister-looking general of the SD platforms turns out to be a traitor. (groan) All this badness, and it never bothers to explain why the Helghast looks exactly like humans, or why Hakkar has a British accent. Granted, most of the time Killzone is a blast, but I wish Sony had spent more on the script.

Posted: Mon - January 3, 2005 at      

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