Anyone get a chance to play through these last week? I’ve got some quick impressions:
Blue Dragon. I didn’t spend much time on this because… well because it turned me off from the start. Basically if you’re not a hardcore JRPG fan then stay far away. Personally I enjoy a high quality one from time to time but this one didn’t appeal. I’m not a fan of the cartoony DBZ style graphics with atrocius voice acting. I don’t like the idea of fighting indirectly through dragons that appear above your characters. Also the demo was presented with way too many opitons and wordy tutorials from the start and just didn’t do well enough in getting me to the good parts quickly.
Ace Combat 4. This game seems to play very similarly to every other Ace Combat game, which isn’t a bad thing per se. Graphics are good, combat is fun. I don’t think the gameplay appeal will hold for me with this game though. I’ll need to put in some more time to be sure.
Stuntman Ignition. It plays almost exactly like the original Stuntman with much less load times thankfully. It’s definitely a game for perfectionists that enjoy the rewards of practice. Personally, I had more fun with this game then the rest of the demos.
Harry Potter. Well after levitating the park benches for a bit I had no clue what to do next and got bored really fast. Maybe more fun with a Wii-remote.
There were some other opinions over here. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet though, so…
Blue Dragon: I didn’t want to wade through that ton of tutorial material either, so I just charged straight in to the game. Basic combat was easy enough to figure out, but then the robot boss battle wasted my party pretty quickly as I tried to figure out what the more advanced attacks, status effects, etc. were. What annoyed me the most was that the attack charge bar moved way too quickly to be precise. Even if you only wanted a mild attack for lower risk, it was way too easy to overshoot and wind up taking your turn after all the enemies, significantly raising your risk instead.
I didn’t really mind the art style or 'old-school’ness of it, but I’ll probably pick it up only if I run out of other RPGs to play (which is unlikely in the near future thanks to my PS2 and PC backlog).
Stuntman Ignition: It was fun at first, but I gave up after a few tries. I guess I’m just not a big fan of games that are heavy on the expected failure and trial-and-error.
Ace Combat 6: I liked what I saw a lot, as someone who’s never played an Ace Combat game before, but the demo is way too easy and short, so I don’t know how well it really represents the rest of the game. It strikes the right balance between being arcadey and realistic for me, though.
Only put a few minutes into Blue Dragon, but I just resigned myself to waiting until the full game since the demo seemed like nothing more than a visual tour of the spells and abilities overriding proper play balance.
AC6 was great, looking very forward to it.
Still have yet to download Stuntman. I enjoyed the original, so I expect the same here.
Blue dragon immediately turned me off with the DBZ visual style and I didn’t like the combat at all. Ace combat seemed like Ace combat, which i guess is nice if you like the idea of flying in a fighter jet with like 400 missiles on it. Stuntman didn’t actually sound interesting enough to download :/
I can see myself picking up Stuntman if it shows up in a bargain bin in the future. I did like how fast the levels loaded on restarts. I can’t imagine playing something like that if loadtimes were slow when you’re restarting and restarting and restarting.
Ace Combat was very pretty, but didn’t grab me at all.
Blue Dragon was a disappointment. Weird camera angles in combat, kind of bland, poor voice acting. Liked the background music a lot though.
My main problem with Ace Combat 6, and it’s a problem I have with a lot of flight combat games, is that I generally feel that if I’m playing them properly, my opponents are squiggly dots in the distance. Not a very interesting experience, destroying things right at the edge of visual range, realistic or no.
Not really worth a new thread, but some more demos of titles shown at E3 have been released.
Dynasty Warriors Gundam: As expected it’s, well, Dynasty Warriors, just with a new paint scheme. You get guns as a projectile attack, but it didn’t seem very effective, so you’re still best off just wading in with the melee attack. The demo doesn’t really let you see what the pilot/mech levelling and upgrades will be like.
NASCAR 08: I’m not really a stock car fan, but I thought I’d at least give it a try. Unfortunately it controls fairly poorly with the regular controller; it’s hard to do the smooth moves necessary for banked turns, so you wind up overcorrecting and sliding too much, losing momentum and the AI just shoots right past you. You’ll probably really need the wheel to enjoy this one properly.
Has anyone given the MotoGP 07 demo a spin yet? I used to love that series so much. But I really didn’t think MotoGP 2 was as good as the original. The graphics were the same, the courses were nearly all the same, the training missions weren’t as good, and they got rid of the “Wolverine Mode” where everything becomes blurry when you go past 160 mph. I loved that effect, it really made you feel like you were going super-fast. I rented MotoGP 06 for the 360, and it was just more of the same. Basically just MotoGP 2, with all its flaws over the original, but with “Extreme” fictional courses added that weren’t very good.
Hopefully in this latest iteration, they’ll have better training missions, like in the original, bring back Wolverine Mode, bring back those awesome MotoGP season footage that shows you what happened on each course in the game in the REAL MotoGP season that year. I missed those videos, I can’t believe they got rid of those in MotoGP 06. Just their yearly naming convention seemed to indicate that they’d keep the footage from the real MotoGP seasons now more than ever.
Ooohh…I might have to check out the DWG demo. I love that series. I think Bob and I may be the only ones who consider it to be a superior game series, but whatever.
Yeah the DWG demo is up on Live. 485megs. I’m a fan of the games… although they haven’t done a next gen worthy one yet. Someday the games will look like they aren’t just high resolution versions of PS2 games.
Robert: it is pretty swanky if you like gundam 'bots even atiny bit and like DW. It is ugly though, same old crap environments and textures. Makes your HDTV a huuuge psp.
Only one I tried was Ace Combat 6. While it was decent enough, I was really hoping for a better sense of speed. Even when you’re only a 50 feet above the ground, it feels pretty sluggish
I sort of liked DW:Gundam. But it was very limiting in that I was level 1 with no advanced weapons, so I had no advanced attacks (that I could figure out). I just kept pressing the X button. wtf?
It was nice to see how the DW engine has advanced in the last few years.
If you hit start and character info you can get access to a move list. It isn’t spectacular, but it is there and adds some fun and variety to the fighting.
Most of the combos are X 1-4 times then Y. You can also hit A after Y to add a dash attack into the mix.
You almost have to slow down modern jet combat to make it into a sim. It’s not very fun to shoot people from miles away, so to get the sense of doing damage to things, you’d have to slow the game a bit.
Ace Combat: Love the series and I love the demo. I thought the graphics were amazing. It’s on my must buy list.
Blue Dragon: Just not my cup of tea I guess. Plus I really really don’t like the dragon ball Z character designer.
Harry Potter: I moved benches around then went into the great hall, down some stairs, fixed a bunch of trophies or something. Eh…boring
Stuntman: I finished this twice. I never played the original. Very much trial and error memorization but I didn’t mind too much due to all the pretty explosions. I found this a bit frustrating but some how addictive and fun. Yeah I was a bit surprised how much I liked this game.
Just gave it a try, but unfortunately it doesn’t really look like a huge improvement. Graphics are a bit better, but it plays pretty much the same. About the only new things I noticed are that the rear wheel seems to kick out much more noticeably if you’re on the verge of tumbling, and it looks like they track some more stats like clean laps and races (for achievements, perhaps).
And the demo track is Laguna Seca, which only shows off that they’ve stuck with the highly-neutered corkscrew change…
I’ll stick with '06, as I’ve still got plenty left to do in it.
