For some reason last week triggered off a wave of game acquisition. Ninja Gaiden was understandable - as it just came out. However, I also laid hand on Everything or Nothing (the latest James Bond game), and finally installed and patched Deus Ex: Invisible War. I'd had Deus 2 for a while - but I had decided to play through the first one (which I had never finished) - so I just finished it a week or so ago.
Of course with three games, and only one weekend my opinons of all three is still rather cursory. Super short-takes:
Ninja Gaiden is stupidly hard (all of my designer friends - even the Exile - are complaining about how hard it is). The camera reaches new lows in bad camera-ness, and it's the third level before you start learning the useful attacks. But so far it's had just enough really cool moments for me to keep plugging at it.
EON is super-polished, but really about as expected. The demo level from the fall Jampack (which I thought was too difficult) has been toned down. And the presentation so nails Bond movies - it's really nice in that regard. The gameplay . . . seems fairly par-for-the-course.
Deus Ex 2 is slow starting. I've played it for about two hours - only had some very sketchy combat and the plot is still lumbering out of neutral. Interesting note - I've already maxxed one of my biomods (the Hacking one). That struck me as quite fast compared to the skill/biomod development pace of the first game. Since I recently snarfed up the ATI 9800 Pro Radeon I left the fancy "Light Bloom" on and my frame rate stays pretty solid. My major knock so far is I've had it crash twice while picking up a new item. I actually quick-save before grabbing weapons now.
Jeff and I also finished Champions of Norrath on Sunday. The ended seemed rather anti-climatic to me. Snowblind needs to do three things for the sequel. 1) Improve the quality of the cinematics - extreme closeups for several minutes of the same looping "chatting" animation does not equal high quality. 2) The story was convoluted, while being extremely stock fantasy. Get some twists in there or just go the Doom route and pare it down to the killing. 3) I'm all for the booby eye-candy, but somebody at that developer is obsessed It got pretty ridiculous - culminating in the "Hot Goddess in bondage" finale.
Of course with three games, and only one weekend my opinons of all three is still rather cursory. Super short-takes:
Ninja Gaiden is stupidly hard (all of my designer friends - even the Exile - are complaining about how hard it is). The camera reaches new lows in bad camera-ness, and it's the third level before you start learning the useful attacks. But so far it's had just enough really cool moments for me to keep plugging at it.
EON is super-polished, but really about as expected. The demo level from the fall Jampack (which I thought was too difficult) has been toned down. And the presentation so nails Bond movies - it's really nice in that regard. The gameplay . . . seems fairly par-for-the-course.
Deus Ex 2 is slow starting. I've played it for about two hours - only had some very sketchy combat and the plot is still lumbering out of neutral. Interesting note - I've already maxxed one of my biomods (the Hacking one). That struck me as quite fast compared to the skill/biomod development pace of the first game. Since I recently snarfed up the ATI 9800 Pro Radeon I left the fancy "Light Bloom" on and my frame rate stays pretty solid. My major knock so far is I've had it crash twice while picking up a new item. I actually quick-save before grabbing weapons now.
Jeff and I also finished Champions of Norrath on Sunday. The ended seemed rather anti-climatic to me. Snowblind needs to do three things for the sequel. 1) Improve the quality of the cinematics - extreme closeups for several minutes of the same looping "chatting" animation does not equal high quality. 2) The story was convoluted, while being extremely stock fantasy. Get some twists in there or just go the Doom route and pare it down to the killing. 3) I'm all for the booby eye-candy, but somebody at that developer is obsessed It got pretty ridiculous - culminating in the "Hot Goddess in bondage" finale.