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Saturday, March 18, 2006
Saturday, March 18, 2006
PGR3 and squishing the image when displayed on a PC monitor: yes, it does. It pushes it in at the sides, making everything look taller and thinner than it should. The steering wheel becomes a steering oval. The cars end up looking like the Buggy Mode from Ridge Racer Revolution (think Penny Racers). It's a fucking joke, to be honest, and further indication of just how rushed the entire 360 launch has been.
Halo 2 suffers from it in emulation, too.
The VGA cable I ended up getting was a Joytech one - £12.99 on Gameplay.com, if anybody else is still searching. It does the job, but as I said last post, my monitor isn't the best around - it has a habit of automatically filtering any image that isn't at a resolution it likes, so every 360 game I've tried on it has buttery covering to the visuals. The contrast is pretty bad on them, too, which is a problem when only DOA4 contains its own brightness settings. Difficult to tell whether that's an issue with my monitor or the cable itself. Oh, and Amped 3 looks fucking awful through it - every single aspect of the game is made blurry and indistinct.
Looks like a proper HDTV will be an essential purchase somewhere along the line, then.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 13:41
Project Gotham Racing 3 review now up.
On the Xbox 360: I've had mine crash twice tonight, both times when playing Live Arcade games off the hard drive. This is a first for me, as previously the crashes have happened when I'm playing a DVD-based game, and makes me think that it can't be all that long before my console gives up the ghost completely. It's also displaying the wrong quadrant in the ring of light - it seems to think that I've laid the console down horizontally, whereas in reality it's standing upright. To be honest, I kind of hope that it *does* die on me, and soon, because at least then I'll be able to send off for a replacement. A new machine (or a refurbished one, seeing as that's what most people appear to be receiving as replacements) would at least mean I'd be less likely to fret about every little click or whirr that seems to come from the wrong place.
That's something I may well do anyway, because *any* crashes are unacceptable. I've got Dead or Alive 4 arriving soon - tomorrow, hopefully - and will see how that fares. I'm likely to be spending some extended periods playing it, so it should help me discover whether the console is truly fucked or if every problem I've experienced with it so far has been software-related.
Should also be getting a cheapo third-party VGA cable so that I can link it up to my PC monitor for some high def goodness. If my monitor likes it, that is - I've got a nasty feeling about this one. And it's still not going to be how the games are supposed to be viewed - it won't cover the widescreen requirement (plus, it sounds as though PGR3 doesn't like being displayed in high def on a 4:3 screen and decides to squish the image down - will check and confirm).
But yeah. All in all, I'm really quite annoyed by the way Microsoft have fucked this launch up. Even those people whose consoles aren't defective must be terrified every time they turn theirs on, the number of faulty ones has been so high. You've almost got to give them credit for throwing away the good reputation they'd built for themselves with the original Xbox so quickly and in such stunning fashion.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 00:37
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Getting to the end of a week off work and have been spending a large chunk of it in the world of Squenix's Dragon Quest VIII.
Initial impressions weren't great. The localisation is excellent, sure - the orchestral soundtrack works very well indeed (I can't even begin to imagine what playing the Japanese original was like, given that it supposedly has a synth soundtrack) and the voicework sets a new standard for translations. And yes, the characters look fantastic - almost indistinguishable from their 2D, sketched inspirations. This is something that a lot of commentators have missed the significance of, unfortunately - that regardless of the angle you're viewing them from, they always look hand-drawn. (Btw, just in case any of you lazy hacks manage to trip over this, the technique used here is *not* the same thing as cel-shading.) Compare it to Psychonauts, where there's a clear gulf between the design sketches and the final character models as they appear in the game.
But the world itself... well, in those first few hours it's nice, but nothing stunning. The detail in the characters isn't carried through to the world they inhabit, which all looks a bit basic (if very colourful). And that's about the best way of describing how the game actually plays: basic. It is, as has been mentioned pretty much everywhere by now, a game that plays exactly like those old 8 and 16bit console RPGs that were virtually identical to each other. No real depth to the battle system, no imagination in the overarching storyline. A series of 'towns' (which are generally made up of about five houses each) linked together by an overworld map, which you must spend hours traversing in order to get from point A to point B. Random enemy encounters. The usual.
Then, about five hours in, it turns a corner. Just as you turn a corner, in fact - you're walking around the world map, trying to find your way to a new town, when you hit a fork in the road and come out onto a stretch of beach, a seafront that goes on forever. After having been running in and between fields and hillsides, with only the odd waterfall standing out, it takes your breath away.
And from that point in the entire game lifts. The fact that the main plot is dull as dishwater and easily guessable becomes less important as each new town that you visit brings with it its own, individual tale. Some of them are genuinely touching and genuinely amusing - the story of Baumren's Bell, in particular, is told with a subtlety and intelligence that comes as a surprise in amongst all the derring-do, good vs evil blandness that surrounds it.
The environments, too, suddenly step up a notch from relatively dull to awe-inspiring - you see a mountain miles away in the distance, you run to it, you climb it, you look out and see another one, you do the same again. The world becomes a joy to explore because it feels like a real place. It's got to be pushing the PS2 as near to its breaking point as anything else has so far.
For the next twenty-five hours, it was a really superb game. One of the best things about it is how smooth your sense of progression is - there may be one or two boss encounters that you don't get right first time, but the failing will be yours and will be obvious. You brush yourself down, acknowledge your mistake and try again - and succeed.
But. Butbutbut. The halfway point comes and the game decides that you've made too much progress. Time to stop you dead in your tracks with one of the most horrendous hikes in difficulty I think I've ever encountered. There are a number of reasons why the boss encounter at this point - and I'm being careful to avoid spoilers here - is so terribly unfair, but there's no real point in going into them here (I've banged on about this at length in both the GHZ Impressions thread on the game and the Barbelith "OBI" thread, if you're desperate to know). Suffice to say, unless you've either been extremely flukey with your character development, you ain't getting past here without hours of pain. The simplest solution is to abandon the storyline at this point and just roam around the overworld, trying to farm enough EXP to get your characters up to a level where they stand a realistic chance of success - again, though, this will take hours.
And then, when you do finally manage to win that battle, you're thrown stright into another one.
I appreciate that the developers wanted to make a game that revisited a classic form of RPGing, I really do, but some things should remain in the past. Things like sudden lurches in difficulty. Things like making the player become so annoyed with the game that ze puts it back in its box and goes and plays something less frustrating instead. Because that's exactly what I've done today - after two days of being stuck on this one section, I've done what I always try my hardest not to and abandoned a game.
It'd maybe be a different story if DQVIII made the process of increasing character levels enjoyable, but it doesn't. It makes it a fun-free grind. There's no depth to the battle system, none of the intertwining of various gameplay elements that makes power levelling in, say, the Nippon Ichi games so rewardable. All there is, is a repetitive process of running about in a field, waiting for a random encounter to kick in, then putting all your characters' AI onto auto for the duration. Then again, then again, for however many hours it takes.
I don't understand it. I really don't - my brain fizzles then farts whenever I try and figure out why anybody whould go to that much trouble to create a stunning game, then erect a fucking great brick wall in the middle of it that only the insane will try and climb over. It's such an obtuse thing to do. "You're enjoying our game? You want to carry on enjoying it? Right then - you fucking prove to us that you deserve it."
No thanks. Not for me. Not this week, anyway - maybe when I'm so depressed that all I can lift myself to do is press one button on a controller for three days straight. For now, though, there are too many other games out there for me to rise to your idiotic bait. Games created by people who actually want people to enjoy them.
It was going to be a Pixelsurgeon 9/10 up until that point, too. Maybe I'll still review it. Maybe it'll even get a decent score - I'm led to believe that one of the possible reasons I'm having so much trouble with this one section is that I've somehow found the rest of the game too easy, and have ended up at this point distinctly underpowered compared to the state most players arrive in. And hell, maybe that's true. It doesn't make it any less grating, though, because if true it only confirms that I *do* now have to go through the grind of experience farming if I want to get past this point.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 13:29
Friday, March 10, 2006
Friday, March 10, 2006
I am an enormous hypocrite.
Goodbye, bank balance! Parodius games are hardly the most expensive around - you're probably talking between a tenner and fifteen quid, at most - but there are a hell of a lot of different versions. The Hardcore Gaming 101 pages are a pretty good primer, although what they can't convey is just how much fun the games are to play.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 00:07
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Losing the fight against mediocrity for the last few years. Fire a volley |
