East vs West
Two new demo's are available for Live-enabled 360 users: Ninety-Nine Nights and Saint's Row. Both are rife with cliches from their respective countries of origin; both try to trump the game they are deriviatives of. And they're both pretty good.
I hate GTA: it's ugly, boring and that type of micro-iterative game design normally resigned to sports games. Now I get to swim instead of dying when I touch water? Genius. SR is the same game, wrapped up in a (much!) better visual presentation, and with more ridiculous swearing. Some of the next-gen trickery is surprisingly bad: artistically blurred backgrounds look like the result of bad eye strain rather than a depth of field. The game controls pretty well compared to my experience of throwing the controller at the screen anytime I played GTA. Cars feel really responsive, and I feel like I can actually aim my gun with some sort of ability. I don't know if I'll buy it, but I'll definitely jump in with my roommate when he jumps online if there's some splitscreen action.
99 Nights is basically a juiced up 3D Gauntlet with second-rate FF looking characters. Again, another hyperdramatic Japanese plotline portrayed with emotionless husks of characters. Uggh. Please try to show some emotion when you spend half your budget on cinematics. That being said, there's nothing quite like telling your squadron of 50 or so soldiers to camp out as you run run head first into a valley of orcs all trying to kill you. The game certainly isn't deep, but it's damn fun to know that you can bang away at 200-300 orcs single-handedly. You can easily rack up multi-thousand combo's at a time. And the game celebrates your kills in a pretty terrific fashion. I'll wait for the reviews to find out if there's a bit more depth, but so far its great fun.
There you go, scially-redeeming video game analysis. So much for the real-world.
I hate GTA: it's ugly, boring and that type of micro-iterative game design normally resigned to sports games. Now I get to swim instead of dying when I touch water? Genius. SR is the same game, wrapped up in a (much!) better visual presentation, and with more ridiculous swearing. Some of the next-gen trickery is surprisingly bad: artistically blurred backgrounds look like the result of bad eye strain rather than a depth of field. The game controls pretty well compared to my experience of throwing the controller at the screen anytime I played GTA. Cars feel really responsive, and I feel like I can actually aim my gun with some sort of ability. I don't know if I'll buy it, but I'll definitely jump in with my roommate when he jumps online if there's some splitscreen action.
99 Nights is basically a juiced up 3D Gauntlet with second-rate FF looking characters. Again, another hyperdramatic Japanese plotline portrayed with emotionless husks of characters. Uggh. Please try to show some emotion when you spend half your budget on cinematics. That being said, there's nothing quite like telling your squadron of 50 or so soldiers to camp out as you run run head first into a valley of orcs all trying to kill you. The game certainly isn't deep, but it's damn fun to know that you can bang away at 200-300 orcs single-handedly. You can easily rack up multi-thousand combo's at a time. And the game celebrates your kills in a pretty terrific fashion. I'll wait for the reviews to find out if there's a bit more depth, but so far its great fun.
There you go, scially-redeeming video game analysis. So much for the real-world.