The open world train keeps on a-truckin' as I go to Mordor instead of a city. Might keep this review a bit briefer, as not only has it been talked about a lot already, but I just don't have that much to say, probably because this game just does so much so okay.
The world is fairly big, but not too big. It's not a terribly long game, unless you wanna smack around Uruk captains all day (which is pretty fun, I'll admit). There are plenty of quick-travel points, and even on foot (as I didn't realize how quick-travel worked for a while) things never took too long to get to. This is really another game where if you don't like the core gameplay loop, you're not going to enjoy the game. The sword, bow, and dagger quests were unique enough on their own that they were fun diversions, but rescuing the slaves is REALLY samey for something that has 24 missions. They're optional, sure, but it really felt like content padding. That combined with things like how (about) all of the characters are, and how lame the final confrontations are compared to the boss fight at the half-way mark really makes the game feel unfinished in terms of scope. Thankfully, the gameplay itself is serviceable enough to be quite fun. The nemesis system, where your deaths are recognized by the orcs that kill you and they level up by completing challenges against each other as well as killing you, is quite cool. Even if the game were just messing with Uruk hierarchies, that'd still be lots of fun for me. My biggest complaint with the nemesis system, frankly, is that the game is just too damn easy for it to work. Like, it's really hard to have a persistent nemesis unless you just suck so much at the game that the same guy gets the drop on you like 4 or 5 times. I don't think I ever died to the same guy more than twice, and that was only one guy. The biggest time it comes up is with someone you didn't permanently kill comes back to taunt you yet again only to get butchered because he still has all the same weaknesses that led to his death the first time. For how much it had been talked up to me, it didn't really impress particularly. There is some good fun to be had though. If you want Arkham City-type open world exploration (albeit in fields not a city) with Arkham-y combat in a Lord of the Rings setting, you're gonna absolutely love this game. The story is entertainingly presented enough that it's not boring, but it's hardly a masterwork of storytelling. The dwarf character is probably the best written character in the game, but that's partially along with the backstory you can pick up on via the collectible items, so take that for what you will. The setting, though, is very charmingly presented. The Uruks are just as surly and kinda cruely campy just like they are in the films, and any interaction with them is by far the highlight of the game (which is good, considering its the vast majority of it). The game does run really well though. On my normal PS4, I saw no loading or performance problems, at least that I remember (which is a nice change from the usual as of late, quite frankly ). Verdict: Recommended. It's not the best paced or best planned video game in the world, but it's a pretty damn fine video game. You can generally get right into the action, don't gotta get too bogged down in the combat, and the Arkham-style combat fits well with the other combos and special moves you can do. It's a pretty fun way to spend a weekend, especially if you're a LotR fan.
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I thought I might as well round out the last of the Saints Row games I haven't played considering I've owned it for so long and that it's fairly short compared to the other ones. It's actually quite well crafted for a budget game, and brings some very welcome improvements from Saints Row 4, the game with which it shares most similarities on an engine-level.
For a budget game, this actually has a LOT of what SR4 should've had in the brand new city it brings to the table. Steelport was never designed to be traversed with super jumps and super speed. It feels very out of place in SR4, and SR4 changed far too much of the pacing and game design without abandoning many of the old trappings of the non-super powered games. In GOoH, we finally see the long awaited abandonment of those old trappings. Any nonsense to do with cars is finally gone. There aren't any car jacking missions or a garage to maintian, because the game knows that cars are for plebs who don't have flight and super speed. The city of New Hades, located in the middle of a horrible abyss of lava, actually makes for a fantastic world-location for one that is best traveled in GOoH's ways. In this game, you don't quite have the super jump and super glide of SR4, but instead you have angelic wings, which allow you to act like kind of a glider after you do your super jump. This glide/flying feels oodles of fun, and it's super responsive and intuitive to use. I actually went for most of the collectibles, something I never do in these games, just because gliding around the crazy arcane city was so fun. The power-up nodes that are scattered everywhere were actually fairly fun to glide through after I got my flight al ittle powered up, because it was like the whole game was a flight-trial. New Hades isn't nearly as big as somewhere like Steelport or Stilwater, more like maybe half the size or less, but it feels much larger than it is because of how well its space is used. Only a handful of challenges and missions, but the ones that are there are fun. The usual insurance fraud is now "torment fraud," as you take control of a husk of a sinner from a previous Saints game (from 1 or 2) and try and rack up punishment to speed up their purgatory (or some other). There are a lot of little callbacks to older Saints games, and Johnny and Kinsey both have charming quips between them about the city and everything in it. Quips are actually a kind of collectible, as some specific ones will activate when you stand in certain marked places and stare at certain things. There aren't many actual cutscenes, as most of them are replaces with a kind of literal story book flipped through and narrated by their version of Jane Austin, but it works. It really trims the fat of what could've taken away a lot of resources from what's otherwise a fun world to play around in. The world itself is just oozing with charm with the usual great Saints writing. Joined by a cabal of some of history's greatest sinners: Dean Vogel (the head of Ultor from the 2nd SR game), Blackbeard, The Winterhead Twins (from SR3), Vlad the Impaler, and Shakespeare (he sold his soul for fame and fortune), you work to take control of Hell away from Satan to rescue the Boss of the Saints (i.e. the usual main character of the series). This goes on the trope(?) of Hell being run more like a business or a bureaucracy, so it works within a pretty good suspension of disbelief. It's cool seeing so many previously dead faces of the series and getting so much more Johnny Gat time (something was so sadly lacking in SR3 and 4), not to mention Kinsey in a combat role! One of the several silly endings you can pick even canonically leads into Agents of Mayhem, so I guess you could call that a kind of spiritual successor to the series (and god did it need it because I have no idea where it'd go from here). My favorite specific touch had to be the weapons based on the 7 deadly sins. The Sloth weapons is literally an armchair you ride around in with Gatling guns mounted inside each arm and a series of rocket launchers under the recliner. I got a LOT of use out of that glorious nonsense Verdict: Recommended. Even if you didn't like SR4, this is a much better polished bite-sized version of SR4 that takes all the best ideas from that game and puts them in a weekend-sized package. It starts off a little weird and slow, but give it an hour and you'll be flying and blasting away stuff in no time And so ends my runthroughs of the numbered Saints Row games. Perhaps this is really where my journey should've started, but for a variety of reasons, it ended here. Despite some flaws here and there, this is one I really enjoyed, and it definitely one of the best in the series. I took like 35-40 hours to do just about everything (95%, and I did just about everything except the really hidden collectibles and the non-labeled activities like taxi stuff). I also played on Normal mode, which I felt was very fair. Reminded me of Binary Domain a bit in that you COULD rush in and fight like a tanky badass if you wanted, but knowing how to efficiently take down enemies made those result in not-death much more frequently
The premise of this game is similar to what they'd do with the 4th game. Take some big event as an excuse to totally re-do the previous game's city in a much shinier way, and they did a much better job here than they did in 4. Stilwater feels like a totally new city. Even with the 30+ hours in it I spent in the first game, there were only a time or two where I'd recognize that two stores were still close by like they used to be, or that a certain intersection was similar. It really feels fresh despite the reused map, and that's impressive as hell to me. You even have the "You vs. 3 other gangs" trope again, but they redo it in such a way that it feels totally different from the last game. Giving the main character an actual character in their puckish-rogue kind of way makes the whole experience feel so fresh, and adds a wonderful new dimension to the storytelling, but more on that later. First up, I'm gonna get this out of the way before I forget, but this game runs like ass. it looks pretty good for an '08 360 game, but where I gave SR1 a pass on its lousy performance, this game brings it to a whole other level. The horrible framerate drops during high-action scenes are still very much here, as well as whenever you're using a water vehicle (usually a jetski). But much more egregious are the horrible world loading problems this game has. You'll be driving along, and suddenly the gameplay will just freeze, but the sounds still continue. This is why having a radio helps, because it helps you distinguish loading hiccups, which the game recovers from in a few seconds, from full-blown crashes which have no sound and gotta be hard-reset from. I only had 3 or 4 hard-crashes (mostly during the insurance fraud game, oddly enough), but these loading hiccups happened at least once every hour or so. During a leisurely drive, during a high-speed car chase, during an airplane race, whenever. Saints Row 1 and 2 were both clearly never developed to be run on an Xbox, and everything from their gameplay to the performance on the hardware shows that in spades. What does improve a little bit on the "not actually a console game" front of SR2 is the controls. You now have a cruise-control feature on your car, and while that doesn't make car-combat nearly as easy as it would be with a mouse and keyboard set-up, it does make things far more easy than the first game where you HAD to take your foot off the pedal in order to aim a shot. Speaking of driving, this game adds new stuff, although not entirely for the better. You get sea and air vehicles now, but I had very mixed feelings about them. The boats and waverunners are just that. They control like shit because it's water, but the framerate death-spiral you get on waves makes them EVEN less fun to use. On top of that, helicopters handle like fucking trash for the most part. There's one single-man helicopter that feels like it's constantly trying to crash YOU when it just decides to start plummeting downward whenever the fuck it feels like. Cars handle fuckin' great though. No longer is EVERY car you drive a fucking Styrofoam block for the AI to push around. Big cars feel heavy, little cars feel light, and power-sliding around corners feels AWESOME However, that said, this game still commits some very stupid mistakes that should've been learned after the first game. For a good point, all types of a gun now share the same ammo! Bad point: There are still 4+ types of each weapon slot, types which are clearly different, but the game tells you NONE of the actual stats of each gun. Same goes for vehicles too. You've gotta go purely off of how each one handles in your personal experience to say how good or bad each one is in anything other than clip size. Now, I guess that does resemble some element of realism, but this is a fucking video game: Tell me which guns are better dammit! Further, there is STILL no way to back out of or retry an activity once you have started it. Only dying will give those prompts. Sometimes I fuck up and wanna just restart, but I can't. Or even more occasionally, I've gotten in an unwinnable situation with no explosives to kill myself with (I got the escort car super stuck) and had to throw myself off of a cliff repeatedly to die to restart the activity. Especially after they did the SAME thing in the first game, that's awful game design, pure and simple. Activities are actually beatable now, and you won't need to throw untold hours of failure to actually exhaust one like you had to in the first game. Additionally, after beating the 3rd and then 6th (which is the last) instance of a particular activity, you unlock a passive for your character. This can be anything from police/gang notoriety going down faster, to unlocking new exclusive weapons, to infinite ammo for a specific gun type, to discounts at certain types of stores (never better reload speeds though, sadly). However, each activity has a pre-set set of passives it will unlock at each tier. You have NO way of knowing what these will be until you've unlocked them already. Part of the reason I even did some of the more frustrating activities I didn't like as much as the other ones was because I just wanted to see what passives they'd unlock (Like the 2nd to last one I did unlocked infinite sprint time ;_;, and I also wanted to make absolutely sure that none gave you better reload times). Time and time again, SR2's biggest design failing is not giving the player adequate information. Now, for all the shit I've given this game, you may wonder why I played the shit out of it. That's mostly due to the fact this game is just fucking fun to play. You can actually aim down sights now on EVERY gun, which makes the gunplay actually enjoyable to partake in. The activities have benefited immensely from the revamped controls, and it really shows. Activities like Snatch and Escort, things that used to be bogged down by terrible enemy and vehicle balancing, have been reworked to actually be doable and fun. You do still need to do activities to earn respect to do story missions, but you get FAR more than you used to per activity to the point where that system kinda feels like a waste of time. On top of that, I was having so much fun doing activities, I actually got it past lvl 99 and just up to infinity, even though there are far less than 99 missions you could actually do in the game Xp The story is definitely one of the best they've ever done in terms of how it relates to gameplay. In contrast to the later games, especially 4, where the high-stakes story had some serious ludo-narrative dissonance with how incredibly fucking powerful you are, this game actually feels like it has stakes. The Sons of Samede are okay and feel a bit more token-weird than anything else, but the Ronin and Brotherhood storylines are actually fantastic with some really great villains who you just love to hate. I was shouting "oh FUCK that's brutal!" far more than I usually do with these games just because of the level of tit-for-tat shit the gangs throw at each other. Some parts of the Brotherhood line especially had me absolutely speechless. This game definitely could've told a much more serious spiral-of-violence/madness story if it wanted to with a lot of these settings, but it still keeps the overall tone of the world very parody. To be honest, even more than the first game, this feels like a much more subtle attempt at parody than anything. Certainly far more subtle than SR3. I'd even forgive someone who thought it was actually taking itself quite seriously at times. The only slight qualm I have with the story is another booboo they've carried over from the first game (in my opinion). In SR1, you had Los Carnales, a largely Hispanic group whose leaders worked extensively with Columbian drug cartels, and all of whom spoke quite a lot of Spanish that was in no way subtitled. In SR2, you have the Ronin, a Japanese organized crime group whose leading members speak quite a lot of Japanese which isn't subtitled. Now, where I have only knowledge of a few base words in Spanish, I have a much larger training in Japanese, and can mention that there were a decent handful of lines that I felt could be very easily translated and would've added to fleshing out those characters a bit more. It's just not a narrative presentation choice I agree with, and I'm glad they dropped it in later games. One thing I will note, though, is that this game and the first are quite good at depicting these other cultures in ways that are tropey but not outright stereotypical to the point of nonsense. I think Los Carnales did a better job of that kind of portrayal than the Ronin did, but aside from one joke, they damn near never even mention that Johnny Gat is Asian (although one of my bigger complaints of the later games, especially Agents of Mahem, is how un-Asian Johnny looks). For better or worse, for a series that started largely about inner-city gangsters, SR is a series that mentions race far FAR less then it mentions socioeconomic class. Verdict: Very Recommended. This is where Saints Row really starts finding its apex. It's a little bit of a confused teenager in the first installation, but this is where it begins to find its identity and runs with it. It is definitely one of my new favorite open-world city games, up there with Watchdogs 2 and Saints Row 3. My only caveat would be that you should definitely play it on PC, not console, as previously discussed. I'm a big fan of the 3rd and 4th games of the series, so I thought it made sense to go back and play the original two. I'm fiiiinally getting around to that. I'm a big fan of open-world big-city games like this, so I figured I'd enjoy it at least a bit no matter what, and that's more or less what happened. This game has some clever and at points quite chuckle-worthy writing, but the gaping holes in the gameplay just really hold it down.
I was genuinely engaged in the story. It's a lot of the tongue-in-cheek humor and writing the series would later become infamous for, but here it comes off more like a slightly more silly and quippy Grand Theft Auto. Of the three gangs you gotta take down, I liked the Vice King's plot the best, mostly just because Ben King is a really cool dude. I thought the other two gang's stories were quite fun as well, but I felt they were a little short and underdeveloped compared to the VC's. It came off a bit like they were trying to have too many characters in those, and ended up having to cut out more exposition bits that really fleshed out the characters a bit more between each other. It seems like you meet people just to watch them die a mission or two later at times, especially for the Los Carnales missions. The comedy is often very well done though. The way they handle your (mostly) silent protagonist always had me giggling to myself, even though it might come off as eventually getting a little old to some. No really big complaints here. Then you have the gameplay, oh GOD the gameplay. This game REALLY goes out of its way to make you do missions that really aren't that fun just for the sake of diversity of mission objectives, which is a design philosophy I really can't stand. It makes a lot of missions (like several that involve moving a big truck or bulldozer around very quickly before the relentless tide of baddies blow it up or get it stuck) just a miserable slog to do because of how difficult they are. The enemy cars can push you around SO fucking much, no matter how big the car you're in it. The FBI cars especially can fling you around like no one's business. Not to mention you NEVER get checkpoints in the middle of a mission, so a LOT of this game is failing a mission and then driving back to the location of that mission. The game very frequently thinks it has better mechanics than it actually does, and bases missions around you fangling through those. Basically every single mission you do to take down the Riders involves some car-to-car combat, something this game really struggles with. You can ONLY use pistols, SMG's, and grenades from your driver's seat. With SO many missions that involve incapacitating or taking out an enemy vehicle as it flees from you, that just got so endlessly frustrating and tedious. A last nail in just the poor mechanics making the game worse is there's no aim-down-sights at ALL. One rifle has a scope. Other than that, you're hip-firing absolutely everything, and there are some missions where this REALLY sucks ass (including one where you gotta do a 2 minute drive to the airport to then struggle to AK-fire down an ariplane only with hip-fire from a moving vehicle. That sucks ass). You also gotta do "respect" activities to earn a kind of non-exp, whose only purpose is to unlock your ability to do more story missions. This wouldn't be so bad if a lot of the side activities weren't so arduous. With how bad the gun-play and car-combat can be at times, it makes the higher levels of these things absolutely impossible, and I have no idea how some were ever intended to be accomplished in single-player. They're okay fun though, and a decent enough way to break up the action. I'd much prefer they just be optional ways to earn EXP or cash and you could just spam story missions as much as you wanted. Those babies are the real highlights of the game for the most part. Granted, money doesn't really serve that much of a purpose. You're more or less as powerful as you'll ever be as a character when you start the game. Other than which flavor of gun you like most, there's really nothing power-wise to spend money on. Guns are crazy expensive and not usually actually different enough to matter, so I never spent money on guns (especially as you can't just buy ammo, you've gotta buy many of the same gun to get more ammo for that gun). Given that you lose like 20% of your cash every time you die, I found it prudent to find SOME way to get value of my money before I lost it dying (for every time you fail a respect activity, it counts as a real death, and even a cop pulling you out of your car will instantly kill you). The only way I found to do this was pimping out my character. Now you can buy and upgrade cars and such, but there's no phone service to call them like in later games, so it's SUCH a bitch to go out of your way to get your custom cars, I always just stole one. It's easy and harmless enough. Literally, unless you do it within a foot of a cop, you'll never get in trouble for it (this ain't Mafia II, folks). As you buy clothes and jewelry for your character, you'll get more style points. These style points give you a respect multiplier for the respect activities you do, so I found it very prudent to invest in them so I could get to story missions faster. The best way to accumulate these bonuses is through jewelry, as you can wear a LOT (like 6 ear piercings, 3 nose, 2 eyebrow, 4 lip, 4 rings, 3 necklaces and a separate pendant on each, a watch on each wrist). If you opt for the most expensive option on each, you'll get those extra bonuses rollin' in quick. But this does kinda force you to have a piercing-happy character to actually play most optimally, which I felt kinda sucked (I never really wanted any ). As a final note, the game also runs pretty poorly. The Xbox ain't the biggest powerhouse, and this game didn't try to hide that. The game's framerate is linked to how fast it runs, so it just feels like the game gets slowdown occasionally. This is really present when you have several cars with aggro'd passengers inside fighting at once on the screen. Not something that's a problem all the time, but given you gotta do every mission to beat the game, enough missions have this problem that it becomes very hard not to notice. The game also has some problems loading in textures and, at times, entire buildings and city-blocks. There was a time or two where I'd be followed by a bunch of dudes, just to turn the camera to see that the city block I was approaching was just a flat texture on the ground, and it took a second for the city itself to pop in. Speaking of pop-in, this game has it SO fuckin' bad. If ANY non-aggro'd car gets behind you for any length of time, you better kiss that bitch goodbye. Not only is that pop-out really annoying, but you can see enemies pop-in well inside your line of vision a LOT. It's not game-breaking, but definitely immersion breaking and annoying more often than not. Verdict: Not recommended. If this game had really repetitive on-foot gunplay missions, I'd honestly think it'd be a lot better. It focuses too hard on things it doesn't do well, and it really suffers for it. No amount of clever writing can save it from that. I'd only play this one if you're both a big fan of city open-world games AND a big Saints Row fan, because that'll be the only way you'll be able to trudge through all the sins this game commits :/ I like me some Dynasty Warriors, that's no secret around here. This was one of a pile of cheaper older ones I picked up last year when I first got into the series. So far, it's up there with Hyrule Warriors as one of my favorites in the series. Actually, while it may not pass Hyrule Warriors in term of sheer fan-factor, mechanically this is my favorite I've played so far in the series. I finished all 6 possible campaigns in the Official Mode and beat Original Mode with 10 out of 16 characters. I finally unlocked the ability to play as the final boss (which I misunderstood the conditions for so it took me WAY longer to do than it could've) as a playable character, so I call that beat. All in all, I spent about 32 hours with it and damn well enjoyed them.
The Official Mode follows the story of the original series story, through the One-Year-War with Amuro Ray through the AEUG conflict with Kamille Bidan all the way through Judau Ashta's brief encounter with Haman Kale. In traditional Warriors fashion, they REALLY skim through the details and give you only the briefest amounts of context you need, but it's enough to get you where you gotta. The Original Mode is an original story for this game. It's a crossover between the Universal Century arc's characters featured in the Official Mode as well as some characters from a few more recent spin-offs in a battle to stop a rogue planet from crashing into the Earth. It's a bit like Subspace Emissary from Smash Bros Brawl in how no one is really sure what they're fighting against at first other than whom they perceive as enemies amongst each other, but it's quite well written, all things considered. There are some characters with very conflicting philosophies about war who have to join forces, and I found their interactions very interesting. Official Mode has like 6 or 7 maps between the 6 characters' campaigns, and Original Mode has 5 maps that you'll go through with each character, although in different orders and with different missions in them. Not too many maps, but they're big enough that the varied mission goals and set-ups keep them from feeling too stale. My only real complaint, and this is something more or less every other Warriors game up to that point had done, is once you start unlocking extra characters, their campaigns can sometimes be exactly the same as one you just went through. Granted, this does seem a little obvious, given the characters you unlock are generally the companions of the guys you just used, but it was still a little dissapointing. Luckily, the bad guys' campaigns you unlock are great. In the Official Mode and in the Original Mode, they tend to be a harder remixed version of the heroes' campaigns, with harder mission parameters and extra boss fights in each mission. I really enjoyed those, even if some of them were fairly retrodden ground Now the mechanics of this game were what I liked the best. Like in other Warriors games, you can acquire items from fallen foes to equip between battles for passive buffs, as well as level up your pilot and mobile suits (aka gundams) as you use them. Each mobile suit acts more or less as its own character, having a unique move-set unto itself. Given that there are like 15 or 20 of 'em, there's quite a lot to choose from eventually (as everyone is locked to their specific suit in that scenario until you beat their campaign once). Unlike in other Warriors games, however, are your main face buttons. While one does do a normal attack, instead of the strong attack, that button fires your lasers/ranged weapons. Now that's not too impressive (I generally never used them save for chip-damaging scary bosses), what was impressive is what they give you in place of the dodge. Instead of the dodge or jump command found in (some) other Warriors games, you get a "boost," which fires your mobile suit's boosters to launch you in the direction you're currently pointing the left joystick. It allows for far more dynamic and agile fighting than in other Warriors series, and definitely makes for some really heated boss battles. My particular brand of fighting lent so heavily towards boosting and agility, I went 20 some hours without knowing the camera-refocus button was also your block button! I just assumed there wasn't a block command (which to be fair some other action games do, though I'm not 100% sure all Warriors games do). Any complaints I have are ones even I generally level at the series. With no tutorial, the barrier to entry is fairly high in terms of just learning how to play, although figuring out the best way to go about a mission isn't nearly so difficult as previous entries, as sub-missions throughout each battle are given often enough to give a general layout of a battle plan for you. However, there is no place to look at these submissions. Once they show up, you better fuckin' remember 'em, cuz they won't tell you again! This goes back to another complaint I have about the earlier games in the series: Lack of player information. In addition to the lack of any kind of tutorial, the stats of each mobile suit are very poorly displayed for you. It's sensible enough what "melee" and "shot" refer to, but what is the difference between "defense" and "armor?" I eventually found out that "armor" is just their word for health, and "defense" manages damage reduction, but there are even stats the game just never displays to you. Each mobile suit has a certain tendency to stagger after getting hit. Some tend to stagger more than others, although you'd never KNOW that without a fuckload of trial-and-error and paying really close attention (as I've done). MS's like Scirroco's 0 and Judan's ZZ-Gundam (and the final boss's MS) can take WAY more punishment than other, lighter MS's. However, they tend to move a bit slower, and default move-speed is another stat the player just isn't given. Not to mention some MS's can do a Transformers and have a jet mode they can do a prolonged airborne boost in, but you'd never know unless you happened upon it yourself. Verdict: Recommended. Even though some of the newer Warriors games (like Dynasty Warriors 7) have a much better introduction to the series in terms of showcasing the mechanics through things like intro levels and tutorials, this is still one of the best I've played so far in the series. Granted, I still have a long way to go in trying all the games, but the Gundam series definitely ain't no slouch entry in the franchise. If you've enjoyed any of the other entries in the series, this one is definitely worth checking out |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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