August 2003
I'm still here
Don't worry, I haven't given
up on the Internet. I still spend a lot of my time on here, looking
at message boards and webpages, and sometimes I download demos and stuff
with my 56K modem. These days, most demos are around 100 to 200 megabytes
in size, so I have to spend an entire day or two downloading a single one.
I was going to do another Demo Days feature but time is running short,
so I'll just tell you about the demos I've downloaded this summer.
I got the Unreal Tournament 2003
demo and it was pretty good, sort of like the original UT but with Quake
3-style graphics and gameplay elements. It was pretty good, and I
enjoy that style of play so I ended up getting the full game when it was
down to $30. I also downloaded the demo for Unreal 2, the single-player-only
counterpart to UT2003, and I didn't like it as much. Like most first-person
shooter demos, there were only a few short levels to play through, and
while the graphics were great, the gameplay wasn't very different from
a lot of other games I've played. Also, it had the annoying tendency
to crash my computer or destabilize my video card functionality after I
finished it, and that plus the fact that it was still $50 in stores kind
of turned me off getting the full game. I guess I didn't learn my
lesson from the Unreal 2 demo because shortly after that I downloaded the
Will Rock demo. There was more action and content in that demo than
in the one for Unreal 2, but it seemed like such a blatant ripoff of the
Serious Sam games, and the mouse control was kind of screwed up.
Now, I enjoyed the Serious Sam games as far as mindless shooting action
goes, but I don't think I need to play any more games like them.
Then I downloaded the demo for some game called XIII, which is another
first-person shooter (notice a pattern here?), but this one uses cel shading
and panels on the screen so that it has sort of a comic book style.
Beyond that gimmick, it's your standard FPS with stealth elements, but
the panel system looks like it would be a good feature to use in other
games, perhaps for a side or rear view camera like the one Descent 2 had.
After I got the XIII demo, I got the demo for another game called Tron
2.0. It's based on the movie Tron, which I hadn't seen before I played
the demo. Tron 2.0 is primarily a first-person shooter, which I guess
completes my demo-downloading pattern, but it also has a variant of the
light cycles game where you draw a trail behind your cycle and try to get
opponents to crash into it. In the first-person sequences, you can
find upgrades and extra program components to help you defeat enemy programs,
and you can search the levels for secrets and information about the computer
system and its users. The demo only had one FPS level, a training
session, and a few light cycle courses, but it was still fun to try out
new things.
One real problem I've noticed
with these first-person games, and even all 3D games in general, is that
there's never any way to achieve full 360 degree vision with only one camera
because the lateral field of sight is planar instead of spherical like
it is in real life. In other words, if you look at an object that's
50 feet in front of you, it looks just as big as it does when it's 50 feet
in front of you and 20 feet to the right. With a planar system, there's
no real way to have a field of view that's 180 degrees or greater, and
objects start to look skewed if you raise it above 100 or so. I suppose
that's not going to change anytime soon because of the limitations of real-time
polygon rendering, but it would be nice to have greater peripheral vision
in games in the future.
My birthday was this month, and
I got the Gamecube with the games Metroid Prime and Zelda: the Wind Waker.
I decided to get the Gamecube because I could think of at least six games
I wanted for it, and that's enough to justify buying it. Metroid
and Zelda were my two top choices, and I've really been enjoying them.
I just beat Zelda with all the heart pieces, but I haven't gotten all the
figurines yet so I guess I can do that on my second quest. I also
finished Metroid, but I only had 79% of the items and I didn't get all
the log entries so I'll be playing through it another time as well.
Another game I want to get is Mario Sunshine, and I've also been looking
at Starfox Adventures and the Sonic games, and maybe that Star Wars game
as well.
I'll be heading back to Madison
in a few days. Sorry I haven't finished any more of Azenera yet;
it's just that the more I think about Drakan and what I can do with the
game, I think even more about all the things I can't do, and about how
the editing possibilities are limited because so much is hardcoded into
the game with no way to change it in the editor, and about how the Drakan
engine's performance is for some inexplicable reason just as poor at rendering
polygon-intensive levels on modern hardware as it was on computers 4 years
ago, and I become a little discouraged. I just wish Surreal had designed
Drakan to be moddable right down to things like the AI scripts, the MIDI-style
music, and interface graphics such as level maps and inventory icons.
As it is, Drakan is only a semi-editable game, and I just want to be able
to do a little more with it.