Just a quick update, since I haven’t posted for a while:
- I’ve pretty much gone into hermit mode for the whole of March with 10 hour-days and six-day-weeks at the Labs because of an interesting new project. Pretty much everything I did falls under NDA unfortunately, so there wasn’t anything I could write about anyway… so that’s my half-assed apology for not posting anything. Although I must admit that it was quite relaxing to simply cut-off all non-essential communication and social contacts and just concentrate on the task at hand, almost feels like I just came back from a long vacation, even though I’m a bit exhausted physically ;)
- The Larrabee instruction set looks damn impressive, but I’ll withhold my enthusiasm until it’s actually available and doesn’t turn out to be just another fucking “onboard graphics chip”.
- Same for OnLive. Don’t have tech-journalists any fucking common sense to hype this shit up instead of looking behind the curtain? Even Xbox Live (the current Gold Standard) takes a nose-dive from time to time when a popular multiplayer game is released, and that’s just doing match-making over its servers with (probably) a few Kbytes of traffic per session. Maybe OnLive is capable to demonstrate a system which scales up to a million simultaneous players spread across the globe, running a taxing 3D game with “acceptable” lag and image quality. If that happens I would be truly impressed. I predict that OnLive will collect a considerable amount of money from eager investors (who seem to believe that little nuisances like the Laws Of Nature can be dealt with by throwing the right amount of money at them), waste that money over the next few years, while tech demonstrations become less and less impressive (even though they’ll be fabricated), and finally, if said investors are lucky, maybe one or two worthless patents and “yet another” video codec come out of the whole venture. It’s Phantom all over again.
- Drakensang won the new “German Computer Game Award” for “Best German Game” and “Best Youth Game”. Please excuse this uncommon display of enthusiasm, but let me just say: Yay!
I love Resident Evil 5. Capcom are my official kings of next-gen. Funny thing is: I almost skipped the game because of the demo. I haven’t played any previous RE’s (at that time I hadn’t converted to the dark side of console gaming yet), so I was completely put off by the strange “tank controls”. Also, the demo took place in “generic Middle-Eastern/North-African town”) which I already know well enough from COD4, MGS4 and FarCry2. No-but-thank-you.
But the actual game… I’d almost go as far to say that this is the best game of this console generation. The only little imperfection are those controls, but it took me only an hour or so to not even think about them anymore and use them just as automatically as the GeOW, or COD, or Rainbow Six controls. They are different from the “standard FPS controls”, but that’s the point, they are just different then the others, but with a little practice just as easy and intuitive in their own way.
The pacing of the game, the location design (there are some really breathtaking locations after “Generic Town”), the sound track, the story-telling, the characters, the cutscenes, the BOSS-FIGHTS (OMG the bosses are epic) – the way how coop-gameplay is implemented – everything is absolutely perfect. And RE5 is a console game through and through, not some FPS with more or less obvious PC heritage like COD or Gears. Little things like the “persistent inventory”, the massive amount of unlockables, the NewGame+ and Mercenary mode - every little bit of RE5 feels, tastes and smells like a 100% pure next-gen console game. Alright that’s it, I need to go play some RE5 now. Bye.
