Dead to Rights is a Timeless Masterpiece

Shooting is not a good idea right now, okay ladies, I'll get you out of here and return you to your families. Hey, I'm trying to save them

dead

from the riots. He is the best bad Max Payne clone of all time. Developed by Namco and released for Xbox in 2002 and then for PC, PlayStation 2 and GameCube later, it is a story about a man named Jack Slate and his dog who go on a quest to kill thousands of people while discovering the reasons behind the death. of a single person set in the context of Grant City, the toughest place in the world, the big city, the toughest place in the world, was also followed by two other games, Dead to Rights 2, Dead to Rights Reckoning and Dead to Rights Retribution, and I had actually planned to talk about all of these games here, something I might still do in the future, but after I got knee-deep into the first one, I started to realize that there's more than enough material here alone to keep me busy just in this first game.

Wow, Officer Slade, what brings you on a night like this,

dead

for

rights

, is really just one of those games that's a relic of its time, something you can play that instantly takes you back to that time. , when you play something like this you know you're playing something from the early 2000s and if you don't have a real context or foundation for playing games like this then you'll probably find it dated and frustrating, but it's one of those perfect examples from a bygone era and features the kind of writing and content you don't see anymore, there's a term you may have heard before also called ludo narrative dissonance, which basically means a character acts in a way in a narrative sense that also conflicts with the way he acts. during the game and the debt to the

rights

, I think it's a perfect example of that because here you have Jack Slate, just your run-of-the-mill k9 officer and a supposed good guy who kills hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the road and in many cases, they kill them in a quite brutal way, but hey, I guess it's all in the name of justice.

In comparison, I think that's why a movie like Die Hard works so well, something I think development rights have a lot of influence over. in the first hardcore movie, john mcclane kills like 10 people in total, one of them you could argue was unintentional, two of them almost in an accident and technically it was the four that killed hans grubert, not mclean in 1.2 , I didn't even want to. shoot these guys, he just tried to get them to drop their weapons anyway, although it was a realistic kill count and made the threat seem genuine but also believable as something a normal person with John's training could overcome now, back to Jack .

Slate, on the other hand, the guy pulls off a kill count that makes even Rambo look like an amateur Rambo, and he does it with so little restraint that you almost forget that you're now supposed to play as the hero. Before we get too deep into things, I also want to mention that this video is sponsored by Steelseries. These guys make really good keyboards, gaming mice, pads, and gaming headsets. Right now I'm using the Apex 7 keyboard. I have the Rival 5 mouse. Not to mention they are huge LED prism fabrics and I'm so excited to be able to offer a discount on all of these products along with everything else in their catalog for really easy discounts. , just use the promo code g-man. at checkout and you'll get 12 off your next order, which means you know 12 more than you'd save otherwise, so head on over to steelseries.com to get started and yeah, enjoy the rest of the video, apparently this whole game was originally supposed.

Being based on the movie Escape from New York, there is even a video on YouTube showing a lot of gameplay that is practically unchanged from the finished product, only instead of Pliskin snake it has Jack and I could see what it would have been like this. I worked on that, shooting people without a second thought and then executing them would feel a lot more natural when playing as Plisken, it doesn't help that this actually has some of the worst dialogue and voice acting I think of all time. Something smelled bad and it wasn't the sushi bar listening to Jack's voice actor read all this narration reminds me a little of listening to Harrison Ford giving that performance over the phone in that original cut of Blade Runner, don't do anything stupid, justice of board.

He may not be smart, but he should be honest. He was about to do something really stupid, at least Harrison was doing it for a paycheck, although I mean, I can't imagine there was much money doing voiceover work in 2002 for an Xbox game pilot. Go to the parking lot, you got it buddy, take it easy. The way some of these lines are read is also very funny, like listening to Jack talk about the death of his father literally minutes after finding out that you won't tell him. Would you probably kill him? Don't worry, he's already dead.

What's coming again? There's a character you have to fight later in the game called Diggs who's like a retired heavyweight boxer or something and I honestly couldn't tell if this guy is supposed to be a South African Australian or a fucking Pommy. , take it back, I'll break your damn crosstalk and don't worry, we'll get to that guy soon during Christopher Walken's impersonation, although it's all about family and that's what So powerful should put you off as well as your partner and I think overall, You're not supposed to take the story that seriously anyway. Clowns with weapons.

I'll have nightmares about this for months, racking up kill counts where most Much of your time will be spent here due to too much dead right, it actually has some pretty decent shooting controls. I mean, all things considered, I also think it's a really good example of one of those games that comes from that time period. max payne clones now i know these types of games also take influence from things like john woo movies but there's no denying the fact that after max payne came out we got this plethora of bullet time shooters that really They seemed to prioritize the style of weapons. play as a key feature, there was even a really good port for Max Payne on Xbox around the same time, so people were definitely in the mood to slowly jump to the sides and shoot things, in that sense I think the riots Outside they are no different.

Of the whole bullet time mechanic, I mean, even the basic setup of the story is somewhat similar in Max Payne, he takes on the mafia before uncovering a larger conspiracy involving all these powerful government figures beholden to the right, it's all these gang members before they discover a plot involving the man about town, they both have the same main character and their rating frequently, although max payne definitely does a better job vinnie cogniti was running scared, he could run, but with the ball in my stomach like a broken bottle of Tabasco, I was quickly out of time and they showed me to a room and told me to stay still, but I didn't have time for that.

Plus, there's a femme fatale in both that works with the main character. How do you like your Max Payne whiskey? mona saxon indebted to the riots is an ambiguously asian sounding woman named eve and at one point they are both killed sorry spoilers no you want to go crazy let's go crazy both games also have a jackhammer shotgun and both characters wear stylish jackets leather, but that's where I think the similarities end because outside of bullet time, shooting feels worlds apart for Max Paynes, although there is a manual aiming mechanic, most of the shooting will be done here by holding down the trigger left to lock onto enemies and then shooting. with the a button may seem like some kind of cop-out or that it'll make the game too easy or something, but you'll choke on those words later in the campaign, almost at the same time as you choke.

The game's penis as it proceeds to rape you with its difficulty spikes, you can switch between targets with the right stick and more importantly if you hold down the white button you can do a slow motion jump in any direction shooting at the enemies at the same time. One of the most useful mechanics in the entire game and I think it's definitely one that makes combat a lot of fun if you ever run out of ammo, which will happen a lot because some genius thought it was a good idea. to give you just one magazine for most of your weapons, well if that happens you can run up to enemies and disarm them, many of which come with pretty impressive animations.

There is also a human shield mechanic where you can grab an npc and use it. They block incoming bullets and this becomes an essential feature later in the game just because of the sheer amount of bad guys you have to deal with almost to the point where I think it starts to change the style of the game as you progress . Slow motion jumping around rooms starts to become a little less effective with the weapons you have, pistols and submachine guns, which are pretty useless at long range along with rifle launchers and probably best of all are shotguns, there are now three shotguns in dead right and they all tear the absolute ass, you have a serrated of a spaz 12 and then an automatic shotgun similar to that max payne jackhammer and if they sure achieved something in this game it is the way these weapons they make you feel like a literal screenshot every time you fire one of these, plus they do the right amount of damage and destroy enemies at close range like they should, it's also a little broken in the way you can do one of those slow motion jumps and easily annihilate like three or four guys before you've even hit the ground at the beginning of the game, you can also move by throwing explosive canisters at enemies and then blowing them up with a subsequent shot, but I found this becomes less useful the further you go.

You only get into the game because you get killed so quickly that, like standing outside trying to fixate on one of these things, it's like signing your own death warrant, but it makes for some nice explosions in these earlier chapters. Finally there is a cover mechanic where you can join walls and look to shoot enemies, although this is not that useful, mainly because enemies are usually quite mobile and don't really stand still waiting for you to lean out and shoot. them, but I definitely think it's ahead of the curve here and might even be one of the first Xbox games to have this feature.

I guess I can live with that, the other new mechanic is Shadow the Dog, which would be confused with Shadow the. The yikes and shadows of the hedgehog are a pretty obvious homage to Shadow Dancer, an old arcade and Mega Drive game that, by the way, I've owned or played as a ninja with his own attack dog. He doesn't actually do much during the overall game. although apart from being a simple free kill button because every time the meter is charged you can send a shadow to attack a single enemy, killing him instantly and returning his gun to Jack like a good boy, all the bombs in place, there are a chapter. where you need to use shadow to detect a bunch of bombs, something that happens not once, not twice, not three, but four times.

Good guy, after that, although I don't think you control him directly for the rest of the game, he just appears. during cutscenes and when you want to use him for that easy kill too, yeah, and what a sight it's too man, seeing this cute little dog jump on someone and rip out their damn throat, I mean, really good guy now dead, he definitely shines. At first here, when it's just moving around these rain-soaked streets and shooting guys like you're in a John Woo movie, but unfortunately that doesn't last the entire campaign and I guess we should probably talk about that because this campaign is An amazing trip, you'll be smoking up to your ears while we drink fruity blender drinks on the beach, maybe I'll tag along and run after you kicking your butt all the way.

I was honestly expecting this to be like a five or six. An hour long game where I just smash a bunch of brain dead bad guys and call it a day and honestly if that was the case I would have been fine with it, what I got was a fever dream that lasted almost twice that time. I actually did some research on the internet about this and found that apparently the Xbox version was the hardest of all these four platforms at first, this was a temporary release for Xbox with the Playstation 2 and GameCube version released. shortly after and those two versions supposedly got a lot easier, so I guess that makes the Xbox version ultra violent while the Playstation 2 and Gamecube ones hurt me a lot either way, although I wish I knew that when I started play this, but I still don't think that would have changed how far they can gosome of the aspects of this game, so it all starts with a pretty standard tutorial level that gives you a good rundown of how everything works before it's handed to you.

Free reign for a moment to kill a group of enemies, just so you know, make sure you have the controls under control after discovering his father's death, which is really the beginning and end of the entire plot. He heads to a nearby strip club to talk to a former colleague of his named Hildy who went from working as a private investigator to this, what are you doing here? Because I guess those are the only real career options for women living in the toughest place on earth. Anyway, the big city is the hardest place in the world, after that you start the first proper level of the game, not playing as Jack, but as Hildy the stripper, in a minigame where you have to pole dance to distract algorithms so that Jack can sneak past and enter a nightclub, okay, and this was the point here where I immediately understood why so many people liked this game in the past, people who are now adults but who conveniently They would have been the right age for that. a half-naked woman dancing on a stripper pole would have seemed like the best thing they'd seen since sliced ​​bread, don't you think there are always these kinds of levels in these otherwise harmless games when your mom or dad just happens? walking into the room in the middle of all that, what are you doing here anyway?

After that, once Jack enters the nightclub, his whole act of subterfuge means nothing because the first thing he does is set off a damn fire alarm and clean the place up, but also alerting all the security guards inside a 5 mile radius of his presence, all of whom he has to punch or shoot in the face after this, then you're back out on the streets trying to find someone named orgy blitz orgy blitz which is apparently a real name and shake this guy for information org has the voice of someone who does the worst or the best i can't decide christopher walken impression ever heard you want to join us 100 aunty or is he too rich for your police salary i have to wonder how This guy gets He got away with it like they were in the recording booth one day and the voice actor said, "You know what I think, I'm going to read my lines like Christopher Walken.

Damn, did someone get this crazy cop off my back?" I don't know, I guess the guy is just a poor shmo who got lucky, so I, if I want to give something back, hey man, you're dead, if that's not weird enough for you, shortly after this, you made another craziness. This world character, a guy named Patch, a guy who looks Japanese, has purple hair and an eye patch and speaks with a British accent, for some reason you probably don't realize how much skill it took to not paint the floor. with the meat of your brain a point later.

In the game too, Jack describes him as the person with a golden luger and it's like, out of all the features this guy has, you go with his choice of weaponry. The golden luger sounds like a patch, there are only a few chapters, although that was actually a bit testy these first few chapters, although they are actually quite good, that was another one. These first few chapters are actually pretty good, most of the combat takes place at close to medium range so you can shoot these enemies pretty easily in addition to the environments. allows you to make good use of dodging gunfire to deal with the influx of bad guys.

It's just a fun, fast-paced opening that goes from beating up guys on the dance floor of a bad-sounding nightclub to shooting more of them in the streets with your trusty dog ​​companion. So what a fantastic idea it was at this point to stop doing that completely and then throw yourself in prison for the next hour, yeah, you see, at this point after being blamed for the death of Orgy, who was apparently a philanthropist in the public eye. then they send him to jail horny it's like tango and cash only without cash or robert zadar you don't look so tough now do you? and what follows is honestly one of the worst sequences in the entire game where you have to spend all this time running around this prison completing mini-games to collect packets of cigarettes while getting into fistfights with all these other inmates.

I hope you've mastered hand to hand combat before because if you didn't get it right by the end of this chapter you will have needed it, it's not that hard to learn although you're really only able to punch or kick and perform some basic combos using imports alternatives, although I found that pressing the slam button alone seemed to work fine for me most of the time, but it's honestly not a very good system. Or you just hold down the block button, wait for an enemy to finish their combo, and then hit them back. You are often so overwhelmed by enemies at once. although that gets a little complicated and the camera can often be your biggest enemy here, you talk about clichés too, man, I mean, one moment you're in a fist fight in the prison showers fighting over who has to stop and bend over.

I went over to pick up the soap but I think it's these mini games that suck the most and Dante loves to throw his own to mix things up like picking locks, diffusing bombs and pole dancing, well I don't care so much about the last one, this one in prison where you have to time button presses to hit a speed bag might be the worst thing ever designed by another human being and watching the fully muscled citizen of the toughest place on earth struggle to clean and shake 135 pounds is one of The Funniest things I've ever seen in my life, how about this one?

Later, we have to fight with another inmate to see who has to prepare his salad and wait a minute. That growl sounded familiar. Come to think of it, there was a sound. I heard it later in the game, which almost sounded like a snake's death cry, as it will be solid. You'll even get into a fistfight with the warden at one point for more than just being a jerk to your dog, who for some reason. They're also still locked up in prison, which doesn't make sense. A dead man walking like this line. The warden tells him later he is on the board.

When you get to hell, he mentions my name and they will give you a discount. I mean, that doesn't help. It also doesn't make sense, thankfully it doesn't make any sense, although at this point you finally escape from prison after the electric chair is sabotaged by a preacher who likes Jack, yeah, and I love that they show four close-ups. of this liquid hitting the machine, you know like we wouldn't see it the first second or third time, then in the midst of all this resulting chaos, Jack escapes with the sewers beneath the prison showing what might be the slowest ledge of all . time, I'm serious, dude, I think I can do this faster in real life, luckily after this, though dead right starts to find its rhythm again, putting you back in the middle of these rain-soaked streets as You shoot gang members with double shotguns. and assault rifles and anyone who knows me knows that I love my rain soaked streets, especially on the 6th generation console, and this is absolutely perfect, it's also a little strange because Dental Rights really isn't a very attractive game, although not even for its time. but whoever worked on these environmental effects really earned their paycheck because this looks great and just adds a lot to the immersion and world building.

From this point on I really started to notice that the game had stopped and starting on the next graveyard level. and you'll start to notice these random sections that just have these crazy difficulty spikes during the graveyard, for example the game frequently places enemies on ledges in the distance and while you've never had to use that manual aiming mode before in En At this point, it becomes almost essential because most of your weapons won't hit Jack unless you aim at someone within arm's reach. Also, throughout this entire level you're fighting guys dressed as clowns and this whole chapter just kicked my butt. especially considering that for most of what comes after this I've never had this problem, I guess it makes sense, though considering this game is set in the hardest place on earth, the hardest place on earth, for true, although let me tell you from this point.

It took a lot of willpower and single malt whiskey to stay clear and now I can really understand how some people might have been polarized by the increased difficulty of this Xbox version. It also seems like there's always some kind of new trick from chapter to chapter. Chapter at this point, as it happens in the chapter right after this, you are in the machine gun in a helicopter defending Eve several times by shooting the enemies before they can finish her off, a mechanic that never returns for the rest of the game, even if you get to all this too, she still dies in the most abrupt manner after taking a knife to the back from the patch, so yeah, all that work for nothing, nothing, take it easy.

I kept thinking she'd come back later in the game maybe it's as an antagonist after faking her death or something, but no, that's it, she takes him from behind like Julius Caesar and then she's never seen or heard from again. her. In the next chapter, you're in a building and you have to use the shadow to find all these hidden bombs and it's the same routine over and over again controlling this little guy while he sniffs the bombs, then this really easy but mind-blowing minigame. time you must guide this ball bearing around the outside of the pumps to take it apart.

Then the end of this chapter has a whole sequence where you have to run from floor to floor to avoid dying from heat exposure or while putting out fires with a fire extinguisher and fighting mercenaries who I guess have no sense of self-preservation. It also marks the halfway point of the campaign, as you're on chapter 8 of 15. You've got to be kidding me, but what comes next is the absolute worst so far and makes the prison look like a damn vacation stop. By comparison, after clearing an entire dock full of workers and ending up in a fight with a docker, you can't make this up, Jack is reunited with his friend Hildy, who I'm only now realizing sports a damn seal and how does he do that?

I did? I didn't realize that before, I mean, it's not like I was distracted or anything, oh no, that's true, yeah, anyway, old friend Diggs shows up on his trail after being an extra in a movie from Richie, oh, look at these guys and I don't know. I guess he incapacitates Jack by punching him in the dick. A very bad fracture was detected to be fair, although getting hit in the cock hurts quite a bit. When I was 12, I caught a cricket ball with my testicles and I still wince in pain. Well thought out, then you have to survive this brief torture sequence where you have to hold your breath by pressing the a and b buttons while submerging yourself in a tank of gamma girl bath water that feels like something out of them.

It'll be a solid game, thanks, but in this country we usually just shower followed by more fistfights with every dockworker. I think across the planet, I'm not kidding, the amount of guys you have to beat in this level is just ridiculous and the only way to progress through these areas is to beat them all to a pulp. Fortunately, you have Shatter to help you get through, but this is still a very long and arduous sequence. At this point, this chapter has lasted longer than anything else. You've played before, previous chapters can take you 20-30 minutes to complete, but this one made it up to the 60 minute mark, when the game finally gives you back your weapons, the difficulty ramps up massively again and from this point on.

I pretty much had to use every person I could as a human shield or the enemies would turn my ass into Swiss cheese in seconds, and I lost count of how many poor guys I grabbed at gunpoint before having to execute them like a stone cold. killer, I mean look at this man, he's absolutely savage, these are again two where I saw a bit of the hardcore influence sneaking back into the story because at this point Jack is wearing nothing but a white t-shirt and the plot involves him discovering that the bad guy's main plan is to steal gold bars without the city finding out, I mean, it sounds familiar, it's not 140 billion dollars, all of this lands him back in prison again, but don't you Worry because it's not that bad.

This time, because you can now use weapons, I will say that it is insanely difficult, as your balls will be bursting with things like enemies who simply camp on the other end of the closed doors, ready to greet you in the face with their surprise spazz-12s, but no matter how crushing this level may be andHe's crushing it all, folks, compared to what awaits us at the end of the chapter, the boss fight with Diggs himself, take him back or I'll break your damn crosstalk like Now you might. I knew I would have to fight this guy from earlier in the game, when someone said he was a retired boxer.

As soon as I heard that, I said, "Yeah, I'm going to have to beat this guy to death." at one point and I wasn't wrong, but I still had no idea what to expect because the fight itself is pretty simple to explain, it's just one-on-one human digs in this mini arena and after you deal a bunch of damage , he runs. He shuts down and floods the area with a toxic gas, keeping the only gas mask available to him. At this point, you must hit him to remove his mask and grab it for yourself, otherwise it will blur your vision and affect your health, of course, not this.

Apply to him when he's not wearing the mask because yes, that's fair and he'll obviously try to get the mask off your face too. Now this fight sounds good in principle, but the problem is that Diggs just constantly breaks the rules, in fact, he doesn't. For starters, he doesn't even follow the rules, for example, in the middle of one of your combos against him, he can randomly start attacking by breaking your combo and launching one of his own because, again, yeah, that's fair, it doesn't seem like it. Up to this point, the game has taught you that after blocking enemy attacks you have about a second to attack them, so you think that after blocking one of Dick's combos, he'll be vulnerable for about a second, but it doesn't seem to matter and It actually seems like it's just pure rng, sometimes it blocks and sometimes it doesn't, what's more annoying is how we can often throw you after grabbing you.

At that point you literally have like a nanosecond to press the b button and get out of it. Now try doing all this when your vision is all due to inhaling toxic levels of methane. There was 1.2 where I thought I found an exploit. It seemed like if he moved me back a little and then hit at just the right moment, I could hit him with an uppercut that I couldn't block, but he quickly learned from that and put me in my place. I have to say that I spent probably close to 45 minutes on this fight, at one point I started laughing hysterically like a real madman surrounded by padded walls because I simply had no idea what I was supposed to do.

I just stopped thinking that beating this guy was possible. Because it is not possible? It's just not why not, you stupid bastard. When I finally managed to beat him, even then, he wasn't really out. skill only because he glitched when trying to grab the mask and I was able to finish him off with barely a sliver of my own health, it honestly feels like a boss straight out of an old arcade. Em up like Double Dragon or Streets of Rage, the type of boss designed for two players to team up at once. I half expected to see an insert more coins message appear when I expired, I mean, that makes sense given.

Namco's pedigree as developers, I mean, these are the guys who created the Pac-Man and Gallagher arcade classics that people like my parents still enjoy to this day. Take it back, it's a little strange how the bosses in this game are actually very simple. little more than just shooting them until they submerge or crushingly hard and confusing to defeat like the digzi, like these two dumb blonde twins you fight later in the game, I mean, one has a grenade launcher that stings if it hits you like the cock of a bee. but the strategy really is just run, don't take too many hits and shoot them, run out of time and then the boss, after that, to prove my point, is the complete opposite: he's a big fat gangster looking guy with a suit called pinnacle, which is in no way influenced by kingpin from the marvel comics, that was sarcasm by the way, now to prove my point again, you don't even fight this guy in the traditional sense, you just have to surround him from a distance avoiding to these crazy freaks and inevitable guided attacks before he ties himself up, then you jump from behind to piggyback him and strangle him and after doing this like I don't know a dozen times he finally falls for good with jack and then breaks his neck since he's a fucking twig call us Stephen yeah this guy here this is our hero snapping the necks of people he's already subdued like a complete psychopath the next boss is also a pain in the ass he's a drunk shirt this guy running around spitting fire between destroying you with a fucking machine gun and when I say that I actually mean spit fire, don't drop fat rhymes or anything like that literal fire, I've used that joke before and don't even get me started on those enemies that spit shoot at you, not in the hip-hop sense, I mean spit fire because I spit high five, he also must somehow refill his health bar by drinking from a bottle of whiskey unless you can take it out of his hands and look.

Someone please tell Namco that's not how alcohol works. In fact, I think it's literally the opposite effect that alcohol has on the body. Then you have the final boss, which starts out pretty bad having to play the matador with this guy's right electric shield before. the final confrontation in freddy krueger's boiler room, which feels like the final commando fight when annie took down a skinny australian man wearing chain mail, well now the big shot will give up like your old man, but i gotta I have to admit that this whole ending fight is just badass, the guy's fists are on fire the whole time and you end the fight by throwing him into a fucking oven not once, not twice, but three times and besides, I've never been happier in my life. life of seeing a man. burn myself to death early because Dead to Rights was finally over and I would never have to play it again.

Can someone call an ambulance? It hurts me a lot. The thing is, Death of Riots is definitely an entertaining game. Nobody can argue with that. but it's also incredibly dated and comes from that period where game developers thought it was okay to just make a stupidly difficult game as a means of extending longevity and look, I get it, games were expensive back then, not always they were. having multiplayer or unlockable modes to keep people coming back, so making the game as challenging and crushing as possible if it extended the time the player could spend with it, while fortunately it was considered a perfectly valid justification in the years that have passed since the The industry has learned that it's a dumb idea, but games like Dead to Riot still serve as a testament to when the media used to go into the red and even now, with all my years of experience as a pin gaming professional , this still left me battered and bruised, I definitely said a lot of naughty words when I was playing this, the kind of naughty words that make it sound like I was doing a tourette scott impersonation, but you know what dead to right is about, a game that allows you to punch women of dubious moral fiber in the face, watch your dog cut the throats of countless gang members, and get shot dead for the fiftieth time.

A man dressed in a clown costume shoots you from a window the size of a matchbox and after all, that's what you'd expect from a game set in the toughest place in the world, the toughest place in the world, in In other words, it is a

masterpiece

.