PC demos of the week
Dec. 18th, 2003 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solipsistnationDownloaded a couple of shooter demos last night, and played them long enough to get annoyed.
Breed is a huge festering pile of crap. Think Halo-wannabe. Not worth the download or the disk space. The voice acting makes it sound like everyone has their jaws wired shut. Come to think of it, the (lack of) character animation makes it _look_ like everyone has their jaws wired shut. Hm, perhaps it's a subplot or background or something. "In the year 2385, everyone had their jaws wired shut. Then aliens invaded." Irritating non-skippable cutscenes. Aliens all walk in perfect unison. In fact, everything happens in perfect unison. Three turrets? They all rotate (constantly) in unison, perfectly synchronized. Row of alien fighters? They all fly in perfect formation. Cheap lazy programming. Might have been cool a few years ago, but now it's just another would-be Halo rip-off. The character and vehicle designs, incidentally, are as close to those from Halo as they could get without being sued.
Chrome is okay, but just okay. It still looks dated, although the trees and grass and stuff are nice. I didn't find it compelling enough to really get into it. It had a slightly neat inventory system, but the tutorial was broken. Didn't engage me enough to make me want to play on beyond the point where my character got shot the first time, though. The cutscenes were skippable, thankfully. The female character looks freakish and deformed. She makes the female character in Unreal 2 look positively realistic. Somebody needs to look at some real women at some point.
Anyway, that was how I spent probably half an hour last night. Demos that get annoying (or stupid) in less time than it takes to download them usually bode poorly for the actual game. In these days, when demos are 180MB and up, that means it'd REALLY better be a pretty damn good demo.
Breed is a huge festering pile of crap. Think Halo-wannabe. Not worth the download or the disk space. The voice acting makes it sound like everyone has their jaws wired shut. Come to think of it, the (lack of) character animation makes it _look_ like everyone has their jaws wired shut. Hm, perhaps it's a subplot or background or something. "In the year 2385, everyone had their jaws wired shut. Then aliens invaded." Irritating non-skippable cutscenes. Aliens all walk in perfect unison. In fact, everything happens in perfect unison. Three turrets? They all rotate (constantly) in unison, perfectly synchronized. Row of alien fighters? They all fly in perfect formation. Cheap lazy programming. Might have been cool a few years ago, but now it's just another would-be Halo rip-off. The character and vehicle designs, incidentally, are as close to those from Halo as they could get without being sued.
Chrome is okay, but just okay. It still looks dated, although the trees and grass and stuff are nice. I didn't find it compelling enough to really get into it. It had a slightly neat inventory system, but the tutorial was broken. Didn't engage me enough to make me want to play on beyond the point where my character got shot the first time, though. The cutscenes were skippable, thankfully. The female character looks freakish and deformed. She makes the female character in Unreal 2 look positively realistic. Somebody needs to look at some real women at some point.
Anyway, that was how I spent probably half an hour last night. Demos that get annoying (or stupid) in less time than it takes to download them usually bode poorly for the actual game. In these days, when demos are 180MB and up, that means it'd REALLY better be a pretty damn good demo.