12.12.05

Recent Gaming

Posted in General at 12:57 pm by jw

Psychonauts was a fun diversion.  I definitely enjoyed the twisted sense of humor the developers put into it, but as is usual for a PC port of what is essentially a console platform game it ignored the fact I had a controller that I was happily using and instead kept prompting me to press “F” (or some other key) to perform moves.  Having to figure out all the time which controller button “F” meant wasn’t a great way to start off with the game but once I had the controls memorized and remapped to something a little more intuitive than the standard mess PC games make of controller buttons the whole thing flowed very well.

As far as platform games go, I’m not a huge fan and tend to get bored pretty quickly so this game definitely stood out of the crowd in that it kept me hooked to the end.  It was easy enough to follow that I think I only got stuck at one point (how to kill the first incarnation of the butcher in the meat circus) but challenging enough that I certainly couldn’t just waltz through it without thinking about how I was going to make my way through stuff.  Using the controller made life a lot easier than a keyboard/mouse would have been – most notably the ability to move the camera and run independantly with the two analog sticks.

Far Cry I bought specifically because it was the first 64 bit native game to come out – something I thought deserved supporting.  Being able to play the native 64 bit version was also great, especially the increased graphic resolution and depth of view over the original 32 bit programming.  It really was a visually spectacular game and one that kept me enjoying the scenery and environments right up to the very end.

I have to say I enjoyed Far Cry a lot, right up until the final missions which really got a bit silly in the number of bad guys and rockets that were headed in your direction (it just gets tedious picking them off and dodging incoming fire).  The combination of stealth and frontal assault options really made the game more than a simple first person shooter and the idea of crawling through undergrowth that is thick and properlly modelled in 3d to sneak up on bad guys was a lot of fun.  Definitely a good game to play if you have a 64 bit machine running the x64 version of XP.

I also have the DVD version of F.E.A.R. that I’ve yet to play, mainly because the atmosphere really didn’t go well with my wife playing Demonstone on the PC next door.  With my new headphones though, I should be able to work on this when I get some spare time.  Of course, now I’m a little behind in questing in EQ2 which I also have to catch up on so this one may take me a while to get through.  I’ve played up to the point of the room that explodes in fire, which was a brilliant piece of game cinematography and definitely want to see more!

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