Petezah

Somebody, please help me understand why this is such a novel idea.

This month’s rental was Bullet Witch. I generally disregard the major game critics’ ratings and go with my own impressions of what I think I’ll like; so even though it got horrible reviews on most of them, I thought it was worth a look. It was, but initially, I could see why they said some of the things they did.

From the get-go, the lighting in the first level is really low contrast, making all of the actually decent models look flat. Going further, if you walk into areas with a lot of shadow-casting objects, the shadows start looking really bad—probably because they’re trying to fit too many objects into the light frustum, and it loses the detail. Though, these are all tuning and polish issues, and don’t really affect the game-play; and the lighting in the second level is much better, so the orange-laden first level is easily forgotten.

At any rate, it’s a pretty fun, though sometimes somewhat frustrating, shooter. Getting further into the game, you begin to appreciate the tradeoffs the developer made as you see that most of the environment is actually destructible. So, the scene shadows don’t make that much of a difference. I almost got to the end, actually, but after I fell through the terrain and died once, I was done. Ah well, at least it was worth a rent.

It’s a red-letter day for game news—for me at least. We’re getting a new Katamari, first of all; and there are finally a few screenshots of it. Secondly, I can finally play Jet Set Radio on my 360. That, for those who don’t know, was pretty much the only game—excluding some notable exceptions now, I suppose—that I wanted to play on the original XBox.

Huzzah!

Criminy, I’ve really been slacking on my weblog this year. For my XBox friends: I’ve lately been playing Super Paper Mario so I haven’t been online too much. It’s most entertaining; if you own a Wii you should pick up a copy. (and if you don’t own a Wii, you should get one of those too, but anyway)

Other than that, we discovered a new Chinese restaurant not far from the office in the Chinese cultural center. It’s possibly even better than the last newest one; though, I think I like the kung pao better at the Shanghai still.