Phew, no Bryan Adams so far!
Such is the whirlwind life of working for HEXUS that no sooner had my feet touched the ground back in Blighty after our foray into Hannover for CeBIT, I find myself whisked off abroad again, this time to Montreal to the Ubisoft offices.As I write this it’s 5.30am in Montreal and despite owning a few beers and not sleeping much on the flights over here, my body clock insists I should be up, so I decided to write the first part of this rather groovy bloggette on Rainbow Six Vegas 2.
Ubisoft have flown me out here to have a look at the game which hits the shelves next week and I have to say I’m now pretty psyched about getting me some tactical shooty action… even though I invariably lose my patience and end up dead in all but the simplest of missions.
My flights over here were fairly uneventful, but such are the vagaries of air travel, and probably because it was me, that something had to go wrong… And so it was with my connecting flight in Amsterdam to take me to Montreal. We ended up taking off just over 90 minutes late due to a problem with the cockpit door not closing properly. Not the exterior door, the interior one. I asked if we could take off without fixing the door if I got all the passengers to promise not to peek into the cockpit but my proposal fell on deaf ears…
So we landed in Montreal ages later than planned and then joined the most immense passport control queue I’ve seen outside of the bun-fight that is Gatwick passport control. Still, once through there it was simple matter of strolling through to the exit as I only had carry-on baggage… something the poor guy from Eurogamer is probably now wishing he had done too. It seems the chap was delayed for an hour at Heathrow because of some strong winds but he finally made it to Montreal… except the curse of British Airways has struck again and though he is in Montreal, the whereabouts of his luggage is anyone’s guess.
So that’s three consecutive BA flights I’ve had some sort of link with where they’ve lost someone’s luggage… I wonder if they’re still the world’s favourite airline?
Anyhoo, Korina from Ubisoft was there to pick me up along with LevelUp, as he wishes to be known, the Community Dev Manager for Rainbow Six Vegas 2. In the cab to the hotel we did a bit of chatting and sure enough, LevelUp used the superlative ‘awesome’ to describe Rainbow Six Vegas 2. I asked him why Vegas again? Why not New York? In fact, why not localise the franchise? All you need is a party town location with casinos and lots of people out for fun and a good time… but I guess Rainbow Six Blackpool doesn’t have the same ring to it.
So we landed at the hotel which is very nice, a place called Opus, which is right opposite the Just For Laughs theatre where viewers of late night telly will have seen the Montreal Comedy festival shows being filmed from. Montreal itself, what little I’ve seen of it, is a cosmopolitan city… very much like London but more laid-back. Oh yeah, and it’s under a couple of feet of snow.
And that’s probably the biggest contrast between Canada and the UK… we get a few inches of snow and the roads are closed, the trains stop and life grinds to a halt. Here, life carries on… to the extent that I watched in horror and admiration as a bloody great 12 wheeler dump truck did a perfectly executed 12 wheel drift around an intersection, the six inches of snow and ice nothing more than a minor inconvenience to the driver.
We headed to a local bar for a quick beer and a bite to eat where I was introduced to the local dish, Poutine. This is the speciality of Montreal and basically is a bowl of French fries smothered in mild curry sauce and topped with grated cheese. Yes, sounds pretty rough but is actually damn tasty. Apparently there’s loads of variations on this theme to be found all over Montreal… one place fills there’s with bacon bits, shredded beef, peppers etc… After have had a small portion of one bowl I can’t help but wonder what the heart bypass queue in Montreal looks like…
Whilst I let the Poutine go to town on my arteries, LevelUp filled me in a bit more on what would be happening today. Of course, there’s going to be masses of game playing, where I fully expect my less than uber joypad skills to show me up. The first session is a thorough attack on the story-mode section of rainbow Six Vegas 2, which I’ve been promised, has been written by an avid Tom Clancy fan. This was one of the criticisms of the first game in that the story was pretty thin and the less social among us were left with not all that much of a game to play through.
So this has been thoroughly addressed. In fact, I’ll probably be carried through most of the missions by my gaming partner as we’ll be indulging in some co-op story-mode sessions too. And for fans of the game, I did ask about four layer online co-op but the answer was an enigmatic “Rock Band!”… which, given that there’s nowt to say anything about four player, can be deduced as being a “no”. Bugger.
After lunch, (more Poutine?), we’ll be settling down for some multiplayer action and make no mistake, I fully expect my online arse to be handed to me by the dev team. Which kinda makes me wish there was a Rainbow Six Blackpool, at least the tower would let me snipe for a bit… But the message from Ubi regarding Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is clearly that they’ve tweaked and fiddled with the original to work in all the feedback from the community. Today’s playtest will be test of how well they’ve done.
And so, full of cheesy curried chips and Molsons, we slithered our way back to the hotel. Yep, thanks to global warming it’s damn cold here. Today’s forecast, on one of the many chat show and news channels on my TV, reckons it’ll be -23 today, including the windchill factor. And just to make me happy, Ubisoft are filming the day’s events for ‘as it happens’ reactions from me. So I’ll be the one looking like Kenny from South Park… except older, fatter and balder, with muffled responses from beneath my many layers.
If you’ve any questions you’d like me to ask the dev team, post them on the forum thread and I’ll pass them on.
