More surprisingly good
2009-04-13
And again, it's mostly Xbox 360 games.
The Darkness is surprisingly deep for a first-person shooter, although strange in places. Quite a lot of emotion in that, which is a good sign.
Having avoided Civ games since II I was expecting some serious dumbing-down for Civilisation Revolutions but I was pleasantly surprised; it won't satisfy purist fans of the original but having got rid of some of the annoying obsessiveness of II it turns out to be a decent game. In fact, even given the choice I'd play it over Civ II, making it stronger than, say, SimCity Societies, which is a nice game in its own right but definitely not a replacement for a mainstream SimCity game.
The other one is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Picked it up because various friends play it online (same as various others, some of which I still haven't played with them) but finished the single player today and I was quite pleased. I don't think it's 'a work of genius' as one friend said, but it's pretty solid nonetheless.
One thing though: someone has gone to a lot of trouble to get the specs of lots of weapons and things, research military procedure and so on. Why is it, then, that people keep getting distances wrong? It's as though the people writing the dialogue didn't really talk to the level designers, because the distances explicitly cited in dialogue were quite often wrong. One example stuck out: someone at control told me that the transponder I was after was 'about half a click' to the south-west, then after they'd finished speaking the objective marker appeared 150 metres in that direction. Once there I found the missing man (and his transponder) within 30 metres, still around 160m from where I was when I had the radio conversation.
Sure, you'd probably have to use smaller distances than a real operation - SAS men driven by sofa gamers don't have the stamina of the real thing - but the lack of consistency between the dialogue and the UI was annoying, and pestered me in a way that the game generally otherwise didn't have the opportunity.
Although having said that, as game design goes if I'm picking holes in something that minor the whole must be pretty good.
If any of you folks have an Xbox 360 and a Live account, feel free to drop me a mail (contact form around here somewhere) with your tag.
I have a rant about how Xbox Live is essentially a world-wide PuG, but that can come another day.
The Darkness is surprisingly deep for a first-person shooter, although strange in places. Quite a lot of emotion in that, which is a good sign.
Having avoided Civ games since II I was expecting some serious dumbing-down for Civilisation Revolutions but I was pleasantly surprised; it won't satisfy purist fans of the original but having got rid of some of the annoying obsessiveness of II it turns out to be a decent game. In fact, even given the choice I'd play it over Civ II, making it stronger than, say, SimCity Societies, which is a nice game in its own right but definitely not a replacement for a mainstream SimCity game.
The other one is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Picked it up because various friends play it online (same as various others, some of which I still haven't played with them) but finished the single player today and I was quite pleased. I don't think it's 'a work of genius' as one friend said, but it's pretty solid nonetheless.
One thing though: someone has gone to a lot of trouble to get the specs of lots of weapons and things, research military procedure and so on. Why is it, then, that people keep getting distances wrong? It's as though the people writing the dialogue didn't really talk to the level designers, because the distances explicitly cited in dialogue were quite often wrong. One example stuck out: someone at control told me that the transponder I was after was 'about half a click' to the south-west, then after they'd finished speaking the objective marker appeared 150 metres in that direction. Once there I found the missing man (and his transponder) within 30 metres, still around 160m from where I was when I had the radio conversation.
Sure, you'd probably have to use smaller distances than a real operation - SAS men driven by sofa gamers don't have the stamina of the real thing - but the lack of consistency between the dialogue and the UI was annoying, and pestered me in a way that the game generally otherwise didn't have the opportunity.
Although having said that, as game design goes if I'm picking holes in something that minor the whole must be pretty good.
If any of you folks have an Xbox 360 and a Live account, feel free to drop me a mail (contact form around here somewhere) with your tag.
I have a rant about how Xbox Live is essentially a world-wide PuG, but that can come another day.
Comments