Sunday, August 7, 2005

Let's make fun of Vista some more.

Comment Commentary

James- You should make that your wallpaper.

Sara- Oh, the blinding kind of house.. Yeah.

Shin- Now that one's just crazy. You're CRAZY.

--

While we were out yesterday, I had the F.E.A.R. single player demo downloading over BitTorrent. It got done around 1 AM, and I was eager to play it, but it freaked me out about two minutes in and I turned it off.

My first impression of the game (aside from the first shock-creepy thing that happened) was "God damn, is my computer that outdated already?" The game runs like shit on this.. The automatic settings for the visuals was disturbingly low- everything at the lowest setting. Thinking that this was meant to be changed manually, I cranked it up to "moderate" settings, with 1024 x 768 resolution instead of 640 x 480, and tried it out.

It looked awful. Even with these moderate settings the aliasing was atrocious and it ran at a god awful framerate. So I put it back down to the minimum, and it was still very bad, but almost tolerable.

The combat is rather fun. The enemy AI is rather impressive, and they talk a lot, and actually have the ability to move around obstacles (they'll jump through broken windows and crawl under debris, which really does leave them open and shootable, not that I'm complaining).. And the slow motion is useful, especially when your computer can hardly run the game at a 20-fps framerate (everything smooths out when it slows). Damage levels are fairly accurate, too- headshots are headshots, and that makes me happy.

Like I said before, the game is meant to scare you. It aims for the suspense route instead of "GAAAH OMFG A GIANT BLOODY DEMON JUST JUMPED OUT FROM BEHIND A CORNER", though it breaks things up with typical FPS shootouts.

It's a bit of a bad thing, I think. There were moments (in the whole fifteen minutes that I was playing) where it seemed like I was playing two different games: A generic sci-fi shooter and a game more along the lines of survival horror (still in first person, of course). Sort of disjointed.

Though the presentation was very similar to Half-Life 2. Your character doesn't speak, everything is very scripted.. There's other things, but I'm afraid I would spoilerize it for people.

So yeah, it was fun, but I'll probably wait until it comes down in price a bit (and I get a much better video card).

--

We went to one of those theatrical cooking-in-front-of-you-while-lighting-shit-on-fire Japanese restaurants today. Our chef, oddly enough, was Hispanic, and he called himself the "Mexican Ninja." He was good with knives, but thankfully he wasn't too much of a showman. We were hoping to see a movie after.

The food was pretty good, too, though our sushi was messed up. It was wrapped very loosely, so you couldn't pick it up with chopsticks. The stuff was oozing out of the side, as well.

The movie we decided to go to was a sneak preview of "The Great Raid," a World War II movie telling the story of the rescue of five hundred American prisoners of war from a Japanese camp in the Phillippines.

Slow buildup, uninteresting characters, a very interesting (though overly indulgent in explosions) action sequence.. It was not good.

Though I could have sworn that uber-dork kid from summer school was sitting in front of me. It looked just like him from behind, and this was the kind of movie I'd imagine he would go to, so I paid more attention to that than the actual movie.

I need better posting material than this.
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