I've been recently playing Mass Effect, I have to say It's done really well, nice graphics, immersive environments...
Only problem is the combat, just feels... not fun to me, It's almost their and It's getting better as I find better weapons and armor. But I do tend to hate on games where it takes more than a few well placed shots to kill someone, I can excuse this behavior when It's robots/shields etc, but anything else should damn well die when shot in the head. It just doesn't feel like your shots are connecting with anything, It's a complaint I've got with almost all games made since the 90's really, It's really important that when you kill stuff.. it feels lie you killed it, not just.. wore It's body down with bullets and then it fell over. I find it very very annoying. Not to mention It's pretty dull facing an enemy who you have to shoot 100 bazillion times and shows no visible sign you even doing a thing till he just sudden decides he's had enough of being shot in the face. Perhaps if it was more visible you were damaging them it would be better, just need ot feel the connection is being made..no idea how that could
If it had a better more satisfying combat it would be fantastic, but right now success in combat is almost luck, and quite stressful (not the enjoyable kind) theres no suspense, no surprise monster's waiting in darkness to jump out, no real diversity in how you approach combat, no dodging projectiles really, too much being ambushed from all sides and death can sometimes mean being returned right before a cinematic, or right before a long elevator ride... or both.
It's kinda retarded that Marathon is still one of the only games I actually enjoy combat in, other games... it almost gets in the way of what your trying to do.
And the Bungie guys carried that knowledge forward to Halo too which has very good combat too. Epic nailed it on the head with a comment they made once, about games should be fun even when you get killed, weapons should be as fun to kill with as they are to be killed by, being killed should be done in a fun way... everything should be done in a fun way! and it can with some thought. Dying in Mass Effect is more stressful and surprising than anything.. like oh.. I died.. that was sudden, followed by.. oh shit I didn't save for like the last 15 minutes.
I've been busy playing all sorts of games since I moved to Intel Mac and thus could install Windows.
All the best games at my finger tips, having never played any of them before really. And most of them I've tired of quickly or simply been distracted by other games more.
Crysis has been the most distracting just because It's so friggingly gorgeous, but I've been over that already, now I have to report that Rainbowsix Vegas and It's sequel have been thoroughly entertaining me.
The controls and the way you can move the player around and shoot from cover and everything is fantastic. And the gameplay is solid, my only gripe is you need a reaction speed beyond human for the highest difficulty which IMO is unrealistic, unless all these terrorists are olympic athletes on the side. If a door opens up and there's a terrorist on the other side and he's looking straight at you, you will not win, you never shoot first... or at least I never do and I have a reaction speed of about 170ms at best... which seems unfair. So really you spend most of the game shooting people in the back or ambushing them, as head to head they really are bastardly quick.
CoD4 is also well worthy of mentioning as It's also fantastic if a bit linear feeling after playing Crysis
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And how badass is this car!
GeneralMotors went nuts after the war and designed tons of concept cars, the above is a rather touched up photo of one of them
Some bizarre stuff!
Link: www.worldcarfans.com --- gm-motorama-comes-back-to-life-at-pebble-beach
My New Shiny Computer!
I bought it from Apple refurb so t was discounting to begin with by a nice amount. Then on top of that I found out from Apple that I a user customized the machine by building to order, such as adding more RAM, it will have those addons for free but no way of knowing. A Rather awesome lucky dip in a way.
And low and behold, it came with 250gb more HD space and a better Graphics Card, the Nvidia 8800 which is $140 / £70 more I think and if it hadn't came with it I was going to go purchase it myself, Id bought it praying that it would come with that card. And to make things even better Apple said it would ship in 2 weeks, but it arrived but days later on my Birthday of all days!
The only feeling of sadness around the machine is I wanted a 3ghz Mac, just cus of the significance of the wholesome number 3 versus 2.8. That and my old G5 was a 2.7ghz chip,so moving from 2.7 to 2.8 seemed a bit lame, despite the fact that this Intel 2.8 actually performs as fast as 2 x 2.7ghz G5 chips (really)
But even that issue has been solved as a few days ago ZDNet released an over clocking tool for MacPro's and mycomputer is now a dizzying 3.1ghz x 8 Cores instead of 2.8ghz
I've also just added some more ram bringing it to a savory 6gb in total. This thing screams, the graphics card is amazingly fast (for games at least under Windows) and chews up anything I throw at it and asks for more please.
The only thing that upsets it is Crysis on ULTRA amazing OMG settings. And It's still playable which is outstanding given how lick-ably gorgeous that game is:
This new computer benchmarks with Vray a whole 6 to 7.5x faster than my Dual 2.7ghz G5 it replaced. And the Graphics card is 3-4 faster at least on basic polygonal models.
The only problem with it now is I find myself in Windows more than Mac (playing games) and that Windows is more disgusting vile and temperamental that id previously thought. Any crash (and you'll have many) can potentially ruin your partition or require a reinstall of the OS. And a reinstall of the OS is a BIG deal unlike Mac. Reinstalling not only takes ages but require you to nanny it thru each step as it periodically find ways to interrupt and ask you questions it could'nt wait till the end to ask. And worse, much worse than that is you have to reinstall EVERYTHING, as all your settings, all your installed programs are severely tied to the installation of Windows itself unlike Mac. It took my around 15 minutes to transfer my entire old comuter to my new one with all my Applications and settings working and intact. The only exception being server stuff like Apache installs and Adobe software cus they also employ an evil Windows like registry system that also.. just like Windows seemingly breaks and require
Finally!! 10 years I've been waiting
So now I just have to wait for it to be released.. some years later
I Can't believe things are still getting updated for Marathon!
Rubicon finally got updated to Aleph One:
