Monday, November 20, 2006

Gears of War

If this eventually comes out on PC, I highly recommend it.

Some of the things I liked about it:

- Realistic use of cover: this is one of the few shooters I've seen that allows, actively encourages you, and indeed requires you to take cover (the other would be GRAW). The mechanism for taking cover and using cover to shoot is simple and intuitive, with one button doing all the work. Depending on the situation, that one button activates a variety of ways of taking and exiting cover, so there's plenty of variety: you can back out cover, stand up from it, exit by climbing over the front of it, jump and roll to the side, or do a fancy stand and spin-around to an adjoining cover. Very easy, very well-executed.

- Realistic shooting: this game saw me waste ammo shooting blindly at half-glimpsed vague shapes of enemies, missing most targets at long range, hitting only when I took several seconds to acquire targets and aim properly ... in other words, very realistic. There's no gun wobble, which makes it slightly arcade-ish, but the other things make up for this. Overall, it was very difficulty to spot and shoot enemies in the grim, grimy, and dark environments of this game.

Things I didn't like so much:

- I still don't like playing shooters on a console. Keyboard and mouse is so much more intuitive than joystick controllers.

Other than that, a great game, and a great shooter

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Gamer Portraits

Here's an interesting page:

link

A set of portraits of people playing video games

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Someone try it...

And tell me how it is before I get my laptop back...

Link