News from Great Castle Wilson

Deb and I went to see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time on Sunday. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was great art, but it was everything it needed to be in a summer blockbuster: action, sexual tension, comedic relief, and a happy-but-not-trite ending.

The two main thoughts I had about this flick were:

1. This was the best live action fantasy movie I’ve seen in quite a while. The lines were delivered with a seriousness that overcame their silliness, even if the lead couple did struggle with some of them. The special effects generally worked, and did homage to the game. Speaking of which…
2. They really did an excellent job of capturing the gameplay. The Prince of Persia games are action platformers, with much climbing of walls, swinging from conveniently placed poles, and running along walls. This happened often enough in the movie to be strongly evocative, without getting tedious.

Capsule summary: Not a must see, but definitely fun.

Rating: 3.5/5

At CES, Microsoft announced “Game Room for XBOX 360″, which is purported to “recreate the old school arcade experience for you (and your avatar)”.

(Image courtesy Engadget)

For Pete’s sake people, can we please stop finding yet another way to re-deliver games that we got bored of twenty years ago. If we ever want the world at large to treat games like a valid art form, we’ve got to stop glorifying trivial gameplay and graphics so stupid-ugly that they can be implemented by emulating the whole bloody machine in JavaScript.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is the sequel to the 2007 game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. At it’s core, Uncharted 2 is an “action adventure” game — think Tomb Raider — with all the standard features: run and gun levels, platforming, environmental puzzles, etc., but what really sets this game apart is the cinematic quality of the ultimate experience.

To give you some idea of what I mean, I can tell you that I happened to be watching the latest Indiana Jones movie on the day after I finished Uncharted 2. Hands down, the game beat the movie at every level — action, story, characters, even emotional impact.

This is a good game. It’s definitely the best PS3 game I’ve played in 2009, and I’d put it up with the “greats” like System Shock and Mass Effect in terms of how much I enjoyed the experience. If I had to complain about anything, I’d say that the strength of the story ultimately limits the replayability, but even at that, I suspect that I will play it again at some point.

Click the picture above to get to the official game site. If it doesn’t start automatically, check out the “E3 Trailer” to see what you are getting yourself into.

Summary: Get it.
Rating: 9.5/10

A reasonably good timewaster, for a reasonable price ($20 US), but not much more than that.

Torchlight adds a couple of minor additions to the Diablo formula but they don’t enhance the gameplay significantly. Graphics are definitely better than Diablo II, but are still stuck with the same isomorphic perspective. Finished in about 18 hours and, with no chance for multi-player, unlikely to have much replay value.

Summary: Don’t buy this, unless you need a Diablo fix.
Rating: 7/10, but it gets an extra point for being a budget title.

Like a whole bunch of other people, I tried to get into the Champions Online open beta tonight. After carefully pre-loading the files from FilePlanet at one point last week, I waited patiently for them to unlock today. Then started the launcher, and…

…was immediately told I needed to download a 3Gig patch. Apparently, the pre-load had put some of the files in the wrong place, and the launcher assumed it needed to download them all again.

Not an auspicious start.

It seems like they’ve got a new version of the launcher up that moves the files locally, but now that one seems to be constantly hanging while getting the content for the things that do need to be patched.

Anyway, it’s a beta, so you get what you pay for, but let’s hope they do better on launch day, or we’re going to have another Anarchy Online on our hands. Ugh.

Grisli makes it to the level cap in Warhammer Online…

Ken asked me to post some pictures of Camile’s new home in Lord of the Rings Online. Here they are:

Outdoor shot with falls in the background
 

Camile practicing her lute by the fire

The house is very small inside — small enough that I had to decide between having a table or a bed — but it’s home.

Here’s a link to the list of changes in the Shores of Evendim patch for LotR Online:

Shores of Evendim: Patch Notes Part 1        

Follow the links in each part to see parts 2 and 3.

[Aside: Has anyone else seen a horde of ravenous, brain eating zombies go by?]

Lots of new stuff to talk about…

DS Browser

I picked up the Opera web browser for the DS a couple of days ago. It’s an odd mixture. I think they’ve done an excellent job of tuning the experience for the DS’s two small screens + pen. However, it can’t handle a lot of content (Flash, PDF, etc.) so it’s still closer to being a “mobile” browser than a real one. It’s no fun entering data on the tap keyboard either; I haven’t tried using the character recognition. Over all, it’s an acceptable tool for light browsing in the bathtub — yes, I do this — but that’s about all.

Level 70

Last night, while helping Heila grind some quests, I ding’ed 70. I’d love to say it was at the end of some extremely heroic effort, but it happened while killing yet-another-Ogre. Heila didn’t even notice until I pointed it out when we were logging off. Oh well, time to start saving for my flying mount.

Missing Sync

I sprung for Version 6 of Missing Sync for Palm OS last night. It has a few nice tweaks that together added enough value to make it worth the upgrade for me. The highlights are mostly new features for Treos: video import and export, call logging and SMS message history. The biggest win for me is the new Notebook app, which finally gives us Note import/export on the Mac.

Parallels Desktop

I have been using Parallels at work for a while now, so that I can run Lotus Notes on Windows, but use the Mac for everything else. There’s a new version out which again adds some nice tweaks, plus one huge win: 3d acceleration. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but my friend Pookzilla has tried Half-Life 2 on it and claims very positive results. I’m going to have to grab some of my back catalog of old games and try them out; It will be interesting to see how compatible it is.

Pros:

• best CPU (”‘jou see doz folding@home stats!?”)
• BlueRay player
• backwards compatibility with my existing PS2 library
• excellent media center functionality (I didn’t even realize it had CF/SD/MS slots until I got it home. )

Cons:

• too expensive
• BlueTooth remote, with no IR option
• not as many games as XBox360
• noisy (but not as noisy as the 360 — man those things howl!)

Of the Cons, the only one that really bugs me is the remote. It means that if you want to use this as your main media center, then you can’t use the same remote you use for everything else. Or at least, I can’t, since I’m hooked on my Harmony. Time will tell how much that pisses me off.

I “solved” the problem of it being too expensive by turning in my old PS2. They gave me $100 in trade for something I only paid $169 for — not bad. The rest was just the little bit of “mad money” I got for my year end bonus.

The noise problem I solved by mounting it in a small end unit that faces away from the viewing area. That’s one good thing about the BT remote: no need to point the front of the PS3 in the same direction as the TV. On a related note, since the controllers are all just USB devices, I could use one of the 10′ USB extension cables I had to reach to my favourite spot on the couch.

You can’t, of course, enclose the unit since it would cook itself. It definitely runs warm to the touch, even with lots of ventilation. Oh well.

As to the games, well I picked up Resistance:FoM, which seemed most like something I would play, given the available titles. It’s a good, if not particularly inspired, FPS. I’m having enough fun that I’ll probably continue to play it, which is all that counts. I must say that on the HDTV, the graphics are almost as good as I could get out of my PC, which given the box I run, is quite a compliment.

I also got Underworld:Evolution on BlueRay. I’m very pleased with the resulting image quality. I guess those of you who borrow from my video collection are going to have to start upgrading too; I’ll probably be buying BlueRay versions of anything new that comes out, from now on.