Tuesday 10 January 2012

Symmetry destroyed

2011 is over, 11-11-11 11:11:11 never again in my lifetime. Gonna have to wait for 22-22-22 22:22:22.

I never do New Year's resolutions, too much pressure. I accept failure from the beginning and keep doing what I always do.

Olympic Games in London, moderately interesting. I will try to catch the opening ceremony and the results afterwards.

Plugged my FGN strat into my Zoom yesterday and completely ripped the guitar to shreds. I wish I could play like that when people are nearby.

I wish Bethesda would narrow down their Elder Scrolls titles and go deeper. Skyrim is impressive, but the Radiant Story thing is pretty bogus for any clever gaming. I'm in principle running around, slashing things and ticking boxes. I am STILL haunted (in a good way) by my viewing experience of The Wire, Skyrim will not reside in that special place too. The games that still haunt me (again, in a good way) are Doom, Descent (mostly for nostalgic reasons I bet) and some clicky puzzly ones.

Got an opportunity to try Rage. Texture streaming was pretty bad, but some things looked incredible. I will never understand why so many vocal gamers prefer bling-bling graphics to crisp gritty things without running pixels that actually look realistic, whereas so many vocal "normal" people complain about all sorts of implants, surgery and photoshopping. Gamers are immature. Oh wait, nothing new there. Overall gameplay was pretty bad, but no developer makes shooting sequences like id does. No contest. Good action requires zero FPS dips during the whole combat (ALL RPGs need to learn and more than half of all shooters, srsly), blood that does not explode (unless you put a shotgun to a head at close range and blood covers all of your monitor, !YEAH!) and hyper aggressive enemies in body paint that want you dead. The way enemies staggered around after being shot or killed was pretty amazing, all the talk about Ant in BF3 was pretty silly in comparison. Auto-heal is a constant gameplay bummer these days.

Rage was almost exactly what I thought it would be actually, except the texture streaming was pretty bad and the action was darn good.

Doom 4 needs to be a masterpiece. Fix the streaming issues, go for the 3x detail level increase, don't grab at any bells and whistles, crank the insanity and speed beyond reasonable and show everybody how we slayed and slaughtered demons from Hell back in '93-'94.

Or I will >8D