Weekend Gaming: Post Mortem
I accomplished everything I set out to accomplish this weekend. I think I deserve a metal. Episode 2 -- finished. Lieutenant rank obtained in Halo 3 -- I one upped it to a Lieutenant Grade 2. Portal begun -- yep. Friday night, while waiting for the engineers to check in some fixes I was able to play around with Tabula Rasa (beta) and Unreal Tournament 3 (demo).
Tabula Rasa is pretty bad. The concept is nice -- science fiction, a laser rifle in every hand and the promise of more action. The execution is pretty weak. The environments are pretty bland, instead of the awesome potential alien environments present artists. The action was incredibly boring after about 10 minutes. You move the targeting reticle over an enemy, hit Tab, then hold your mouse button. Then, the dice rolls take over. The cool abilities and strategy of games like World of Warcraft weren't present at all.
I found the UI pretty confusing and the quests iffy. One of the first ones I grabbed told me to kill 200 enemies. Sweet Jesus that's a grind. I spent about an hour or so with the game and uninstalled it. I don't think NCsoft has a hit coming with Tabula Rasa. It doesn't offer anything new, novel or special. It's just blah.
The Unreal Tournament 3 demo was a huge disappointment. It ran incredibly poorly on my work desktop, which has 3 gigs of RAM, a dual core processor and an nVidia 6800. The lag was so bad that sniping or fragging at all was pretty much impossible. Visually it didn't look that great (on my computer at least), though the guns looked fantastic. I don't agree with the design decision to link a huge tracer stream to every sniper shot, making it impossible for a sniper to hide. I also don't agree with them not letting us try out Warfare mode, but I agree that doing so could be risky -- I could have played the UT 2004 demo forever. Onslaught + Torlan is awesome. Also uninstalled.
Good news time. Half Life 2 Episode 2 ended incredibly well. The story that was presented was great and it really sets the stage for the sequel. I'm really excited to play EP3, even though I'm saddened by, uh, certain events at the end. It only took me 4.5 hours to complete, which was a bit disappointing. I thought they were going to make it 6-8 hours -- oops. I still love them. I actually bought an EP2 print, DoD: Source print and level design book from them this weekend. I'm hopeful.
I'll finish this in the morning over coffee. Bed time.
(posted by grant at 10/21/2007)
