Rantings

While waiting for GarageGames to QA Determinance I’ve been taking a mini-holiday, doing very little apart from drinking beer, ******* **** ** **-**********, watching Diagnosis Murder, and, um, playing Bridge. Here are a couple of subjects I wanted to briefly bring up though.

42 all-time classics

This DS game has got some deserved praise from Eurogamer, but I have a couple of problems. The first is a general one – I don’t like the presentation much, information boxes moving around the screen too fast in a NOT RELAXING manner. Forty of the forty-two games are done well. The other two games are Chess and Bridge. Now, I haven’t played the Chess game and I imagine they just bought a chess AI and it plays ok. I can’t comment. But the Bridge implementation is horrible – you can’t see who’s bid what, Dummy is placed in a ludicrous position on the screen, you don’t have the option to play for your (AI) partner when you’re Dummy, and the AI is absolutely terrible. Oh, and it doesn’t use proper Bridge scoring.
Including Chess is understandable – apart from anything else being able to play chess with someone else without a Chess set is worthwhile. But the Bridge AI is so terrible that the only possible use would be with four human players. And I do not think it’s more likely you’d have 4 DSes than you would a pack of cards.

Come on Omar Sharif – bring your excellent Bridge implementation, and your leering face, to the DS.

Eastside Hockey Manager cancelled due to piracy

I go for long periods of time forgetting that piracy actually fucks PC games very very badly. ESHM 2 sold too poorly to get another sequel because all of it’s fans pirated it instead of buying it. I can’t imagine ever pirating a game I love. Frankly, the fans are getting what they deserve, but the devs certainly are not.

Console manufacturers deny console price-drops until ten minutes before price is dropped

Some people get annoyed at the companies for lying to them, but honestly there is no alternative. It sucks for the guys who buy the console in the month before the price-drop, but I think it just has to happen.

Cut-scene sub-titles – worst videogame crime ever?

Sub-titles in cut scenes literally RUIN them for me. I just don’t understand why anyone would leave out the option to turn them off, and in fact not have them turned off by default. Obviously this is good for deaf people, but I just do not understand how people under-estimate the atmosphere-killing nature of reading sub-titles quicker than the line is spoken.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Rantings”

1. Paul:

   § January 31st, 2007 at 9:25 pm

   As a really pointless footnote, a certain Mr Gillen has made it widely known that he likes to read the subtitles in a cutscene (to get the narrative) and then skip through the voice acting. I believe he makes reference to that in his VERY insightful (and indeed revealing) Eurogamer Vampire: Bloodlines review. Obviously the game isn’t called “Eurogamer Vampire”…(That’s enough Eurogamer Vampire – Ed.)

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