Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2006 > November > 22 > Entry
It’s not you, it’s the turkey
It’s not that I don’t want to talk more with you (or “rap,” as the kids call it) about the PS3 and Wii anymore — it’s just that the sooner I get out of here, the sooner I can go to sleep and wake up to a turkey Thursday! Turkey, you see, is one of the analog things I love most.
But let me hit you up, real hungry like, before I go brave I-35 southbound:
We’ve talked about the game consoles (I even talked about them out loud).
“Genji” for the PlayStation 3: Supposedly this isn’t the worst game out so far for the PS3, but I bet it comes pretty close. Lame storyline involving swords and honor and stuff. Very muddy graphics (although the cut scenes are all right). Characters awkwardly flirt with each other while waving swords around. Sometimes when you say a game is “Very Japanese,” you mean it in the coolest sense of the words — “WarioWare Inc.” is very Japanese and it’s fantastic fun. This game is feudal in pace and brainless in execution. It’s one of those games where you wander around smashing pots and fighting 100,000 bad guys in order to get a crystal that increases the potency of your smash staff by like 2 percent. Yawn. “Genji?” More like “Gigli!”
“Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” for Nintendo Wii: Maybe I’m just the wrong person to review this because I’m not willing to spend 8 hours to get past the boring first part of the game. I’m sure it gets better. I’m sure this adventure becomes epic and grand and is measured to scale. But given the spoils of the holiday season, I have become an impatient gamer, and very little about this game screams, “Play me now!” to me. I’m going to give it one last go, but right now this one just isn’t my cup of green tea.
“Need for Speed: Carbon” for PS3: This game looks very, very good and plays well. It also has a lot of motion-captured actors who are then animated for a very creepy effect that I guess works with the game’s dark, illegal driving theme. The game goes from cutscene to straight racing smoothly and, although it may not be the best-looking racing game ever, the graphics are no slouch and the menus move along with zip and verve. Just don’t ask me whether zip and verve are engine parts of not. This probably needs some more playtime, but so far it’s one that I’d like to go back and explore some more.
Gears of War for Xbox 360: I kept putting off playing this even though it was in my living room, growling for attention, because of the PS3 and Wii launch. I finally unwrapped it and tried it last night and it’s everything that was fantastic about Unreal with the play mechanics of the excellent Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. I only got to play for an hour or so, but in that time, the game completely sold me. Its graphics are stunning. The controls are marvelous. The weapons feel chunky and delicious. I want to play this some more and the though that there is a whole multiplayer and co-op version of this game also waiting take it to the top of the heap. It does everything right that the PS3’s rival Resistance: Fall of Man is going for.
Resistance: Fall of Man for PS3: I kept getting killed on the first level and then went back and tried again and got much further the second time around. But to what end? The game feels like a mix between all the WWII action games that have flooded the market with the aliens from Halo thrown in to mix things up. It looks good and sounds fine (when you can get the sound to work; I had to disable Dolby Digital sound to get anything to come out of my speakers). But it doesn’t feel particularly innovative or fresh in the way that Gears does. That it’s the PS3’s top-selling game so far is evidence that the system launched without enough great games to choose from. I’m going to plug on in hopes that the story or the action picks up, but so far this feels like a game that wouldn’t have made much of an impression if it wasn’t being launched on a new system. Again, I may be missing something, but so far this one just isn’t grabbing me.
And I’m out (for now).
Happy Thanksgiving, folks!
Permalink | | Categories: Food, Videogames
