I enjoyed the SP component of Halo 3 and felt Bungie was going in a good direction and so I didn’t feel any trepidation in picking up ODST. This new installment in the Halo franchise is also a new direction for Bungie and from a production and design standpoint that transition is a [...]
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When I purchased the new Monkey Island Adventure I got a free copy of the episodic Wallace & Gromit game, Episode 1: Fright of the Bumblebees. I played through it tonight and I wanted to post my thoughts before the recently generous helping of delight fettered away. Liked: Ease of use: The mechanics were [...] It came down to Ice Age 3 or Transformers 2 and after a quick thought we went with Ice Age 3. Not a regrettable choice I must say! I don’t recall having watched Ice Age 2 so I wasn’t fully up to speed on the character development in this latest installment. However after a [...] I beat it in around 12 hours, what a great and memorable experience. One of these days I’ll get around to playing Round 2. I loved every minute of it and with the message and video logs I’m even having System Shock 2 flash backs, which is one of my favorite games of all time. The HUD system/integration is incredible, the sound effects are fabulous, especially in 5.1, the control schemes feel nice and intuitive, though I tend to over shoot targets at times when spooked. I also really enjoyed the little details put into the various levels, while linear, the level design was very good. More writing after the jump, beware of spoilers though! I’m still playing TB, but for how much longer I can’t say. I can say that for the most part I’ve enjoyed my game time. I’ll just post a thought dump below covering my experiences with various aspects of TB. Open World: This is a must for me now when it comes to MMOs so exploring TB’s open world has been pretty fun. They did a good job of keeping the zones fairly large and expansive. The game also looks really good for an MMO so wondering around the areas has been a visual treat. Instances: The instances in TB have been really good, definitely one of TB’s strong points, unfortunately given the way the dungeon loot system is setup, bosses them selves don’t have a set loot table, so there’s nothing to farm, thus I have no reason to go back and play through them again. Farming a dungeon, like in WoW, for an item you really want might not be fun in and of its self, but if the instance is well designed and fun to play and you group with good people, then it wont matter if I have to play through it over and over again. Combat: Combat has been pretty fun to a degree. The game has been pretty easy for the most part, I’ve soloed most of my 32 levels. Some highlights would be the enemy raids on outposts, which are always pretty wild and harry, so many Bane attacking an outpost at once is simply cool. If the Bane succeed and take control of that outpost it will result in some quest givers not being available or a warp point being unavailable which means you’ll have to run a lot further to where you might want to go. Players will have to band together and recapture the outpost. My new LifeBook T4220 arrived yesterday and so far I’m really impressed with it. The SXGA+ screen is working out as well as I had hoped, I dig the 1400×1050 resolution. Writing freehand in tablet mode with the stylus was awkward at first but thanks to the learning algorithm in the software it’s not effortless. The reasoning behind this new purchase is that I wanted a laptop that was more conducive to my career as a Game Designer and designer in general. I’m not a huge fan of keeping note books as I lean more towards the tech side of life and this 12.1″ Tablet seemed like the ideal choice. Like a note or sketch book I can take notes during meetings as well as draw out design sketches. Unlike a note book though I have them all saved and cataloged digitally which allows me to print them out or put them into design docs, etc. |
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