Gamer Journal Ep 5 : Rage Update - What do you know? It runs! On a laptop!.

Finally got Rage to run - on my wimpy laptop with a 512 MB NVS 4200 graphics chip, no less.

It ran surprisingly well - looked pretty good at 1900 x 1200 at what seemed to be medium settings with no AA. It ran at a rock steady FPS too - didn't measure it but I'm sure it was 60 or more.Yes, the world-famous texture pop-in was there. But it only bothered me while sightseeing - I barely noticed it during gunfights.

And I played through the first few minutes - completed the first mission. Quite fun - ID clearly knows their shooter basics, so the gunplay feels pretty solid, visceral and satisfying. Nothing brilliant in the first few minutes, but nice, familiar shooter ground. I enjoyed using my reasonably well schooled shooter ploys and tactics to get rid of some garden-variety pesky bandits and stuff.

Will install it later on my desktop PC and check out how it looks and performs on a real graphics card. And play a few more hours to see if it offers anything more.

Bigfatphoenix's Gamer Journal - Ep 2 : Cave Story, NOVA 2

Caught up with an old classic last week - Doukutsu Monogatari's astonishing platformer, Cave Story. It's an all-time classic, and the PC version is completely free, so you have no excuse not to try. Grab it here - and don't forget to install the English translation.



It looks like a fairly innocuous 2D platformer at first, but stay with it for a while, and Cave Story offers an excellent experience - an austere, surreal and emotional story that is quintessentially Japanese, rock-solid platforming mechanics that make it great fun to run around and shoot all sorts of weird monsters, and some very imaginative level design.

However, the take-away mechanic for me from Cave Story is the run-and-gun leveling mechanic. Your gun levels up as you rack up more kills, and starts firing off increasingly powerful kinds of blasts. However, take damage and it will lose levels, and get back to firing wimpy pellets. It's a mechanic that rewards 'being in the zone', something classic skill gamers will instantly recognize. You grow more powerful as you play more dexterously, evading scores of enemies and racking up kills. Lots of games do offer similar ideas - the special meter in fighting games, for instance - but the powered-up weapons in Cave Story are so much fun to use, it's a genuine incentive for high-skill play (Man, the return of classic skill gaming is something that delights me no end.)

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Also tried out NOVA 2 for Android on my Motorola Xoom. The Tegra 2 powered graphics make this unabashedly Halo-like FPS look pretty stunning. Take a look :

But crap controls. All three control schemes provided are simply too unwieldy on a tablet device, at least for me. It's clearly been designed for smaller phone screens, where I can see the twin-touch or the gyroscope controls working fairly well (due to the smaller screen real estate, as well as the device being far lighter) - but it's a horrible mess on tablets. I've seen a bunch of reviews on the Intertubes that rave about how great NOVA 2 is on tablets, but I simply cannot see why. I'll try again a few more times to get the hang of it and see if there's something I'm missing (also because the game itself looks like it could be a lot of fun) - but colour me skeptical for now.

A couple of points, then :

1. I hate on-screen analog sticks. They suck. They're a cop-out. Deal with it.
2. I'm not sure about shoehorning existing game designs control schemes from one platform on to others which use completely different control paradigms altogether. Shouldn't we be thinking "how do I make games that would be fun on tablets?" instead of "how do I put Halo on a tablet?" ?