A Gaming Diary
Posts tagged hitman
Hitman: Blood Money
May 29th
Right, it’s 1:04am, but I’ve finished the ‘Curtains Down’ mission.
Not only did I finish it, but I got a Silent Assassin rating for it. That netted me two Achievements – one for getting a Silent Assassin rating and the other for doing a kill that looked like an accident.
A wonderful night at the opera, then. I wonder where I’m going next?
Hitman: Blood Money
May 28th
Been playing “Curtains Down”, the second proper mission. Just trying things out. Not close to finishing it yet. I’ve got an idea of a couple of times that I could kill one of the targets, but the second target is proving tricky to get near.
Hitman: Blood Money
May 27th
I finally finished the first proper mission! Yay!
However, the newspaper headline after my mission was “Hoodlum Massacres 18!”, which shows that I didn’t quite manage to become the silent assassin that I was going for…
Hitman: Blood Money
May 26th
So, I started it on Expert difficulty, which is the third of four difficulty levels. (Unlike the second of three as it is in Contracts.)
Uses a slightly different control system to Contracts, which threw me. Looks much, much nicer, though.
I died doing the tutorial. Twice. Right at the end. That was annoying. And should have been a sign to me to change the difficulty level, I guess. But I didn’t.
I’ve been playing around in the first real mission today. It’s not going too well, but I think I’ve got a plan on how to dispose of my first target. I’ve tried it once and missed, but I think it’ll work.
Tomorrow.
Hitman Contracts
May 24th
Hooray!
I just finished Beldingfield Manor and got a Silent Assassin rating.
Kill a guard near the start, take his uniform and gun. Walk to the front of the house, up the ladder, in the window. Pick up poison. Save. Syringe the weird woman wearing underwear in the shower (could have turned it off, I found out later), smother the old guy with a pillow. Downstairs, to the basement, poison the cask of whisky. Save. Wait for target to be served and to drink whisky. Out the front doors, over to the stables, poison the horses, turn off the telly, steal the key, free the academic bloke, run straight back out the level.
Died quite a few times and it took about two hours in total, but got there in the end. And dying’s good too, because you get fun shootouts beforehand. As the colour bleeds away and the speed falls I always try to get the man that killed me.
Excellent stuff.
Hitman Contracts
May 23rd
Finally finished the third mission, the one I started yesterday. That’s two evenings play it’s taken me.
I had a great idea of catching my two targets in an explosion, but it kept only killing one of them. The survivor would then go and sit in a car in fulll view of about eight guards, meaning that killing him was impossible. Eventually I just had to run to where the targets were when I’d saved, gun them down and then run out of the level.
Got a mass murderer rating from that level, not quite the silent assassin that I was hoping to be. Oh well, job done, however messy.
Only having two save points per level is a bugger when you get them. That level seemed to take ages to do, but the total time (not including reloads after deaths) was only twenty minutes. A few hours actually including those retries, of course.
Phew. Maybe I should have swallowed my pride and played on Normal difficulty, but I don’t want the game to be easier, I want to be better.
Hitman Contracts
May 22nd
I started it again tonight, this time on Expert difficulty, when I noticed it was on the backwards compatibility list. Plays fine on the 360, though there is some very slight graphical glitching here and there. Very, very slight.
I’m currently having a very, very hard time doing The Bjarkhov Bomb mission after a really, really sloppy Meat King’s Party. Can I find a radiation suit? Can I fuck. (Though my Asylum Escape was textbook.)
And I’m glad nobody reads this diary, because I noticed tonight that Contracts does have a suspicion meter. A big one, right next to health meter. Yes, it has one of those things I was praising Blood Money for introducing. I’m an idiot. Like I said, I’m glad nobody reads this. This is where I write the stuff I assume nobody wants to read – but it’s stuff I somehow have an insane need to make public record. The Internet does weird things to a man sometimes.
Hitman Contracts
May 21st
For no reason at all I decided to stop playing on Normal difficulty and restart the game on Professional difficulty, the highest setting. Well, I say for no reason, but it’s because I was annoyed about being able to get away with too much. It’s too easy on Normal to start blowing people away when things go wrong. On Professional, if a gun fight starts then I’m basically dead. Much better.
There’s also less information on the map – which I like – and no mid-level saves, which I’m not too keen on. But as things tend to go differently each time I play a mission, it’s not so bad.
I did the first level after a few goes. Had to kill a few cops, but I did it. The second mission – The Meat King’s Party – took a lot longer. I almost did it cleanly, though. I would have done, too, if Sturrock hadn’t been too fat to strange. I had to run off and find a knife, all the while listening to him shout for his guards. Good thing he’s too fat to move, really. The other two targets I took care of very quietly, though.
I nearly got out all right, too, but the guards decided I was suspicious as I left, so I had to run through the last few rooms. Still got a Professional rating for it, though. I’m proud of myself. Though whether I should be proud of being a very good killer is another matter. Given how many times I died before getting it right, I don’t think I’ll be changing career paths soon, though. Being a programmer is a much safer occupation.
The game’s not without oddities. Sometimes the enemy AI seems to fall apart and I’m surprised none of the people searching me cared that I had a severed arm under my jacket, but it’s generally all works well.
I’m really looking forward to Blood Money now, as it should refine everything.
Hitman Contracts
May 21st
If it wasn’t for the times that it suddenly says “Your cover has been blown” without me knowing why I’d really love it.
As it is, I just really like it.
I’m trying to do “The Meat King’s Party” cleanly and I just got quite a way in and then a few seconds after talking to somebody it popped up the message about blown cover and everything went to hell.
Hitman: Blood Money Demo
May 12th
Ah ha!
A few days ago I was saying that I couldn’t quite connect with the Hitman games as they didn’t give me the feedback I wanted and didn’t quite understand why some things work and some don’t. Well, Blood Money looks to improve on that by quite a long way, due to a couple of relatively small changes.
Firstly, there’s a proper tutorial, which is the demo. This takes you through a linear hit step by step. Incredibly annoying for people who’ve played all the other games in the series to death, no doubt, but incredibly useful to me. Should even be good if I go back to playing Contracts.
It’s possible to get things wrong in the demo, despite it being a tutorial.
The first time I played I jumped down a hole before I should have done and alerted a load of people I was meant to sneak past, prompting a gun fight. (The demo is perfectly able to carry on when you bugger things up, which is nice.) Later, I had to take someone as a human shield and take down some guards in a room. I got my gun out, grabbed the human shield and walked him into the next room. Everything was going fine until I pulled the trigger and my gun made an empty clicking noise. Oh. Oh dear. That extra gunfight had used up all my ammo. I died and had to restart, but it was a great way to go. Sometimes it’s when things go wrong that you real start to fall for games. And that was one of those times.
So, yes, the tutorial is the first change. The second is the addition of two extra bars. One shows how visible you are, one shows how suspicious people are of you. Okay, so sometimes you might not be sure why someone sees through your disguise, but you’ll get a warning as you walk closer to them. Times when things go wrong won’t come out of nowhere quite as much.
Sometimes it’s still difficult to see why characters react the way they do, mind. I, in disguise, had to walk past a guard. He didn’t bat an eyelid as I walked past, opened a door and walked through. However, as soon as I shut the door behind me he decided I was up to no good and rushed in, guns blazing. Very odd. If the door had been open before I walked through that would make some sense as it would like I was hiding something. Still, in a game like this I suppose you’ve got to expect a few moments of that sort here and there. In fact, testing those sort of reactions is part of the whole game. It’ll make more sense when I can save mid-mission.
Anyway, I’m thoroughly looking forward to Blood Money now and would preorder it right now if, er, I hadn’t already preordered. Having to do the demo again will be a pain, but it’ll give me a nice way to compare the Xbox graphics in this demo to the 360 graphics in the full game.
