Monday, February 22, 2010

Expedition 8: Looking for Miss Adventure

0553 5-1-2012
Well, don't look too pleased to see me or anything

OK, so I got caught by one of the meanest traps the game throws at you in the early stages (hah! It's not early anymore!).  The waves of bandits in that vehicle yard fight are notoriously brutal to even the casual player in the unmodded version of the game.  The power of the guns in this thing does give you a certain confidence, particularly when you appear to be doing alright.  Stupid confidence is still confidence.

There's also something just not right about turning your back on people trying to kill you.  Frankly I blame whoever put our arms on backwards.  More eyes wouldn't hurt either.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Call of Pripyat

I believe it's customary when you get cool new stuff to take picture of the box or whatever and post it.  But there isn't one!  So here's a picture of my modem looking slightly ominous across a field of mixer knobs.

For it is by that road from whence it came.

I'm pretty new to the whole digital downloading thing, particularly when it comes to games.  Given the state and cost of Australian bandwidth that's really no surprise.  It took several days of careful offpeak downloading to get Call of Pripyat (which is quite small and well compressed.  Ask me how much fun it was getting GTA 4 recently...).  On the other hand, given the state of Australian game prices and release schedules it's no surprise that I and probably everyone else are jumping ship.  I feel bad for a couple of nice game retailers I'm stiffing by doing this more often.  I'd tell them to get into the downloads business ASAP, except Gabe Newell kinda got there before them, not to mention a few others.  Maybe if they hitched themselves to my ISP and they came up with some deal so downloading the stuff is not counted towards your quota (which they already do a lot of with other stuff).  That'd be nice.

Anyway, impressions.  I only played it for a little while but it seems so different already.  Truly a lot closer to the old 'Oblivion with guns' notion.  You're dropped in without much intro and have to make your own way.  A bit confused, you chat with the first guys you meet and they'll send you to the nearest camp and tell you about interesting stuff.  Then there's bandits who don't shoot you on sight and guys conspiring against each other from opposite sides of the room in the same bar.  Visually it's a little too brown so far.  The short-ish vegetation rendering distance becomes a little too obvious for my liking in this colour scheme.  Hopefully it gets more green and blue as we go along. 

They seem to have really pulled out all the stops this time though, so far.  It's going to warrant a lot of attention, if I can find the time.