Picked up Planetside, the new sci-fi MMFPS from Sony. Early impressions are very favorable. The game looks good, documentation is good (a sore point after the Shadowbane debacle) and it seems like the gameplay is rich enough to have legs. You can play it as a straight-up shooter, or you can specialize in being a medic or and engineer or a spy…lots of vehicles to drive or fly. A huge world…
Yup, it all looks great in theory. Be a few days before I can really sink into the gameplay, though.
Well, I rented Enter the Matrix for the XBox yesterday…and returned it today.
I really wanted to like it, but between an awkward control system, weird clipping problems, a dodgy camera and a feeling that you’re never really in control of the character you’re playing, it just wasn’t good. I’m sure Shiny got caught in a time crunch and didn’t have enough time to polish it to where they should have.
The game looks cool, with great Matrix-y fighting moves, but in fact you have very little control over them. Hit the Focus (their word for bullet-time) button and the Kick button and maybe your character will leap up and double-kick two nearby opponents, or maybe s/he’ll leap up, push off a wall and do a total round-house kick to one of them. As far as I could tell, the game decided.
You can use either a first or third person point of view, but you can’t move in first person and you can’t look up/down in third. When you’re fighting a helicopter that’ll cut you down in seconds, this becomes very awkward indeed. Either stand still so you can look up to aim at it, or dodge and not be able to target it.
In the driving sequences, we have crash physics that leave your car tumbling, clipping through building after building, for ridiculous amounts of time until you finally lodge against a building that is solid.
And the controls! Eeek. The little black button is your first button. Try to hit that in a panic.
You can do neat Matrix moves like a cartwheel while firing your gun, and the hand-to-hand combat sure looks neat. You can see what they were going for and it would’ve kicked major ass, but it just never got finished. Between this and the new movie, my Matrix fanboyism has dissolved in a matter of days. 🙁
OK, E3-03 is over and gone, I’m back from travelling (note to self: next year don’t travel on the weekend after E3) and its time to start sifting through the madness. Being a lazy bloke I’m delighted at how much TV coverage can be found. G4’s Pulse was probably the first show to hit the air with E3 coverage, and TechTV’s X-Play starts their coverage this weekend.
Given that I’ve just started digging in, my initial impression is that the XBox and PC are the platforms to be on this coming year. I haven’t seen anything mind-boggling on the GameCube or PS2 so far. Specifically, the two games that have wowed me so far are Halo 2 and Half-Life 2.
The most interesting sound byte I’ve heard so far is John Carmack on DOOM 3. Apparently they went with a linear, strongly scripted type of gameplay for D3. With games like GTA3 and BF 1942 making ’emergent behavior’ the current industry buzzword, its interesting to see id backing away from AI and relying on scripting. While DOOM 3 looks good, I’m skeptical about it as a game; in my opinion while id has made a lot of great 3D gaming engines, they haven’t made a lot of great games. That said, I can’t wait for it to come out, just so the DOOM 3 engine can start being licensed by other developers.
During my trip this past weekend I finished listening to Anne McCaffrey’s The Dolphins of Pern. The version I heard was narrated by Mark Rolston. Let the slagging begin.
I try to review audiobooks in two ways. From a technical point of view, and then from a content point of view. Technically, this audiobook was really sub-par. First of all, Audible didn’t have it in their highest quality format, so it sounded rather muddy. Second, Rolston was reading like a fiend…like he got X dollars to do the job and wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. If there are chapters in this book, I don’t know about them, and in fact even when a scene changed from one side of the planet to the next, Rolston didn’t break his cadance. He read the whole thing as fast as he could without a single pause. It was *really* hard to follow at times. Add in the fact that the titular dolphins speak in their own strange lingo and it just turned into 9 hours of aggravation. DO NOT BUY THIS AUDIO VERSION!!
Now, as a book…well, in all honesty its hard to be fair reviewing it for content when it was so hard to hear, but I just don’t like the direction McCaffrey is taking Pern in. Technology has returned to the planet, and the residents are building radios and computer terminals and it just ruins the feel of Pern, for me. That’s a highly personal opinion, though. I just like Pern as a fantasy world. But beyond that, there didn’t seem to be much of a story here. It was more a big long vignette focused on the dolphins and how they’re reintroduced to Pern society. I find it really hard to believe that the dolphins have been talking to the people they’ve saved from storms for 2500 years and only now did someone think to talk back to them, but oh well.
All in all, a major disappointment. I’ll go back to the early periods of Pern history next time, I think.
Another weekend on the road coming up. Bad, bad timing…I should be spending this weekend combing the ‘net reading E3 coverage. Oh well, what’s done is done. At least next weekend is a 3-dayer!
Eek! I could’ve sworn I posted this… Micrsoft followed Sony down to the $179 price point for the XBox. Thus far, Nintendo hasn’t budged. Pretty conservative price drops, but “pretty conservative” seems to be the theme for the big 3 console makers at this year’s E3.
Gamespy has a nice roundup of the three big console makers’ press conferences. Looks like Microsoft was judged “the winner” by all four editors: The Big Four on The Big Three
Got my first shipment from NetFlix yesterday. Nice to know it takes 1 day to get the films! The packaging is alarmingly flimsy (just a paper envelope) and disks themselves were very scuffed up, but the one I watched (Tomb Raider…which turned out to be a reasonably fun ‘turn off your brain and watch the imagery’ flick) worked fine. I sent it back today, so now its a matter of seeing how fast their turn-around time is. I’m thinking, though, that they’re going to be able to feed me movies a lot faster than I can devour them. So, all in all, pretty pleased so far.
OK, here we go. Looks like the PS2 has dropped to $179. Just a $20 cut. Now we wait to see what MS and Nintendo do…
Gamespy has a nice article covering the XBox conference held at E3. Some very good news for XBox Live! members inside. Basically you’ll be able to access your account from the web, see what your Friends are playing, and even send invites via MSN Messenger or any device that supports it (like cell phones). Sweet.
Read it here.