| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Wednesday 21 January 2004: |
| And yet another review. Who's been spending too much time with entertainment products recently, eh? Today it's Max Payne 2. I quite enjoyed the original Max Payne - the bullet-time and fancy diving made it more fun than your usual first person shooter. As well as being its selling-point gimmick. So, of course, the most important thing for the company to do for Max Payne 2 is make the bullet-time relatively crap and ineffectual, prevent the player from diving into rooms in slow motion as a means of assault by firstly preventing forward dives, secondly making the dive motion change direction if you look around while diving, thirdly making the bullet-time not slow enough that you could turn and shoot while diving anyway, and finally making it so that the player isn't even allowed to shoot while diving. So now it's a really fun game because you can, er, run into a room and then shoot. The same as any other first-person shooter. Except crappier. Still, it retains the comic-esque plot telling which is nicer than the more common cutscenes that games use these days, and the plot remains amusingly self-deriding and Dick Tracy flavoured. Oh dear, I mentioned cutscenes, which brings me to another point. While it doesn't use cutscenes to advance the plot, it does use them for dramatic effect. The dramatic effect of really getting on my nerves, by having a cutscene in the middle of a delicate combat situation, which ends with Mr Payne standing in a more dangerous position than where I left him before the cutscene, facing a different direction so I don't know which way I want to run, and getting shot at from an unknown direction. Several times throughout the game. Dollar value of this game: $5. Maybe $10 if you liked the look of Max Payne but never got around to playing it, and somehow find the sequel available and the original not. [04:19] |
| Sam |
| But have you tried Battle Construction Vehicles? Reviewed in today's blog (and that would be 21/01/04). I think you might like it. |
| Rachel |
| Oh, well... I really like the look of FFXI... I've always wanted to play an online game, but I'll have to get a better connection if I want it to work any good. *sigh* I hate my modem. *puts magnets up to it* Yes, the death penalty to you, Mr. Not-Workie! I want a good speedy connection, but I can't afford it. DSL would be nice. |
| RavenBlack |
| Battle Construction Vehicles sounds a lot like Evil Zone in many respects. A horrible Playstation-1 game from days of yore, which, much as BCV is described, has the playability of a rotary chicken, but plot surreal and stupid enough that it's not only worth playing, but worth playing through with *each of the characters* just for the insane badly-dubbed story. |
| Jebus |
| Actually, I play FFXI on dial-up and get very little lag. The game is huge and everything is stored on the comp. so you can play on a slow connection. The only bad part is the huge updates that you'll have to get at first. |
| AttackOfTheSpam |
| Blah. Dial-up is for thirtysomethings with early-onset male pattern baldness. My dad got a modem when I was about eleven - of course, my father has had something of a nerd lair since I was eleven. We've got a router, a very small switch, four PCs, three monitors, a server built from one of my old computers, two printers, and two and a half scanners. He's currently rebuilding the half-a-scanner, so it doesn't really count as one. I have grown up computer-illiterate in a computer-saturated home. How did this happen? |
| Jebus |
| Well it's not like i choose to use dial-up. My family is actually quite computer literate too. They also unfortunately like to live in the middle of nowhere arkansas where no other form of internet access is available. |
| AttackOfTheSpam |
| Arkansas... damn. That's just as bad as Texas. The only person in my family that's in any way computer-literate is my dad. I know how to use the Internet, and I know how to turn things on, but that's about it. I still can't hook up my own monitor. But still, dial-up is squicky. I love my dad's modem. Online in one and a half seconds is very nice indeed. |