CalBear:
While we're on the subject of annoyances…. Kenn found that the game "looked like SiN," which apparently is not a good thing in his book. I also found that the load times between areas (it loads up textures as you travel between areas) were excruciatingly long also, like in SiN. They weren't quite as long as in Redline, but they certainly didn't remind me of the 3 second Half Life load pauses. Hopefully those issues will get fixed as will the chunking issues I noticed with my Voodoo 2. With fog and shadows on, I found the graphics to be quite good; you can definitely see the Quake 2 lineage, but as I mentioned before, the artists were pretty thorough in drawing a good ghetto looking feel. That, along with the catchy tunes (yes, the music is by Cypress Hill, the artists who brought you "Insane in da Brain") , and the background noises of police sirens, made the environment pretty immersive.

So you can see, it's not all bad. I liked how you can search dead bodies and gank their cash. It's also quite cool to go to the bar and hire some toughs for your gang. For a measly $25 each, you can get the pair in the bar and have a little mini posse. I was pretty impressed by the ally AI in some respects. While crossing a plank to get across roofs, one of my boys fell down to the street below. He was able to find his way back into the building we came in, go up four flights of stairs and get across the plank by himself. Pretty good. Now if they only wouldn't block your way in the narrow corridors of the housing project, they'd be perfect, because they make great sidekicks in pitched gun battles. One weird thing though - your gang minions are able to heal themselves over time if they get roughed up. I guess they've got some Zerg aspects to them (that was a Starcraft reference in case you missed it).