| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Tuesday 13 January 2004: |
| And another game - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It was horrible in so many ways. How many ways? Let me count the ways. No, don't, let me just enumerate a few of them instead, it'll be quicker. First, the name. It's so long that even the acronym is too long, so it gets referred to as KotOR, not SW:KotOR. I suppose it has to be, if it's going to squeeze Star Wars into the name, since every combination of words fewer than four is already used by some piece of Star Wars merchandise, somewhere. Then we have the substance of the game. It comes on four CDs. No game should come on four CDs, ever, for any reason. Even less so if it's only going to have about one hundred 3D locations many of which reuse textures painfully much, and none of which are at all intricate. If software pirates can compress it down smaller than three CDs, and you're going to be installing three of the CDs to the hard-drive so there's no question of compression making things too slow, then you can bloody fit it on three CDs. Aside from which, you should be compressing your data better than that in the first place. Make your audio mp3s, and make your textures jpegs, and the whole game should be fitting on a single CD. But, more important than that, don't take an XBox game and make it use mouse-and-keyboard for input, but remain in the same input format as you used on the XBox version. That's just stupid. Hold the right mouse button and move the mouse to turn is not nearly as convenient as using a joystick. How hard could it be to include gamepad support for a game that's a conversion from another system where it used a gamepad? Even less hard than it would be to make the interface not a bag of shit. They failed on both counts. More important, even, than that, how about not having the game be full of crash bugs, not having it be completely arsely slow and jerky even on a 2.4GHz machine with a stupidly good graphics card, and here's an idea, how about having the game be fun? I know, I know, I'm asking too much. Here's an easier task then - how about having it so that when you win, the game doesn't say "your entire party has died, click here to return to menu" after the completion sequence? Maybe it doesn't do that if you play out the light side rather than turning to the dark, but that would be even worse. My party didn't die, there was no conceivable way that the completion sequence could possibly have implied death for me, and, adding insult to injury, the completion sequence was crap, too. Apart from using the word 'doomed'. The only thing good about the game was that you could be rude to your companions, and tell them to shut up. But even that was tainted by the fact that they bloody wouldn't. Value of this game in dollars: play it only if someone gives you five dollars to. [14:39] |
| AttackOfTheSpam |
| I have a friend named Andrew that pretty much said the same thing about the game,except that he used fewer words: "This game is the electronic embodiment of a douche bag." |
| James |
| Gee Raven, there goes your "only saying nice things" trend of the year. ;p |
| AttackOfTheSpam |
| Fneah. Nice people give me hives, anyway. A blog of totally nice comments would be too boring for words. Scathing remarks are always more fun. |
| RavenBlack |
| Lucky that I tend to scathe more than I nice, then. |
| Andrew |
| I agree completely. I just plugged in my Gravis Eliminator Gamepad pro ... and to my absolute horror with freaking POS will not let me use if. You have to be kidding me!! I seriously have the inclination to never play the game again. I mean it is a console port for crying out loud!!! |