These past few months have been FULL of good games coming out : I still have to play Star Ocean (the PS3 version), I had a blast with Heavy Rain, I dived into Final Fantasy XIII as soon as it was available, I recently got Sands of Destruction on the DS, I've yet to complete Silent Hill Shattered Memories...
That's a lot to do.
Yet all those are going to sit on their shelf as I'm indulging in a game I've been waiting for since I first heard of it, more than a year ago. It's release date is this friday, but I managed to find a copy in a store where it had been delivered already.
So I put the disc in my console as soon as I could, but unfortunately only had half an hour to try it out. But even in such a short time, the game delighted me more than FFXIII's awesome graphics or Heavy Rain's realism could.
But which game is it, I hear you ask ? It's "Fragile Dream ~ Farewell ruins of the moon" on the Wii.
That game has it all : As Seto, you're bound to explore a derelict post-apocalyptic world from which humankind seems to have vanished entirely. Except for a silver-haired girl you meet at the start of the game, and who runs off just as quickly. And you guessed it, our brave young man will try to find her again, all the while traveling through an eerie abandoned Tokyo in the direction of the only place that shines in the cityscape : Tokyo Tower.
This plot looks almost like someone tried to make my perfect game! And seeing the beginning of the adventure only confirmed what listening to the soundtrack and watching the trailers indicated : the dreamy quest will be enchanting every step of the way. The setting oozes a strange kind of magic, the kind of which you can find in ICO or Shadow of the Colossus.
Fragile Dreams is at heart a "survival-horror" game, but from which you would replace the "horror" part with something far more dreamy and eerie (I'm gonna wear those two words out if I'm to write more than one post about this game...). And the "survival" part ? Well, looks like Seto's adventure will be more about exploring than surviving... So I guess the game is an "Exploration-Dream" after all ? Sounds about right...
Showing posts with label Digital rooftop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Digital rooftop. Show all posts
2010-01-13
Digital rooftop: Prelude to the war (Tom Clancy's EndWar)
(Tom Clancy's EndWar review, Part 1 of 3)
So, today I bought Tom Clancy's EndWar on PS3 (found it for a tiny 15€) and invested about 45 minutes in it, just enough to see how it played like. To be fair, the test conditions where far from ideal: small SD screen, and much worse no headset.
Which is a shame, because I'm sure this is going to get a thousand times more awesome played with speech recognition. It will...
What ? What do I mean with speech recognition ?
Well, EndWar is a real-time strategy game, which is a genre that always struggled on console. So, as it became clear that a gamepad would probably never trump a good ol' keyboard-mouse combo, Ubisoft sat and thought about a new way to control the units on the battlefield. And they came up with a speech control scheme that, I read, works flawlessly. It's one of the two things that made me buy this game.
The other is the setting, World War III (well, more like Northern Hemisphere War III, but I guess it doesn't have the same ring to it). I must say the perspective of playing the role of a commander uttering commands to his troops on near-future battlefields sold me pretty fast.
And as I tried the first two missions, I quickly saw how speaking instead of navigating menus would make for a much more dynamic experience. It's a thousand time faster to say "Unit 5, Attack Hostile 3" than to click through 4 or 5 menus to achieve the same thing.
That being said, the game promises to be quite frantic, even a bit too frantic for me, but ultimately it promises a great deal of fun. The battlefields are large enough, the rock-paper-scissor mechanic for a relatively easy decision-making process, and everything looks rather good.
Should the speech recognition system live up to my expectations, this may very well become the first console game I try to play online. Its semi-persistant World War mode looks like a lot of fun. But first I'll need to invest quite a bit of time in the single player modes, and we'll see how it goes. See you for part 2 !
Part 1 score : 7/10
So, today I bought Tom Clancy's EndWar on PS3 (found it for a tiny 15€) and invested about 45 minutes in it, just enough to see how it played like. To be fair, the test conditions where far from ideal: small SD screen, and much worse no headset.
Which is a shame, because I'm sure this is going to get a thousand times more awesome played with speech recognition. It will...
What ? What do I mean with speech recognition ?
Well, EndWar is a real-time strategy game, which is a genre that always struggled on console. So, as it became clear that a gamepad would probably never trump a good ol' keyboard-mouse combo, Ubisoft sat and thought about a new way to control the units on the battlefield. And they came up with a speech control scheme that, I read, works flawlessly. It's one of the two things that made me buy this game.
The other is the setting, World War III (well, more like Northern Hemisphere War III, but I guess it doesn't have the same ring to it). I must say the perspective of playing the role of a commander uttering commands to his troops on near-future battlefields sold me pretty fast.
And as I tried the first two missions, I quickly saw how speaking instead of navigating menus would make for a much more dynamic experience. It's a thousand time faster to say "Unit 5, Attack Hostile 3" than to click through 4 or 5 menus to achieve the same thing.
That being said, the game promises to be quite frantic, even a bit too frantic for me, but ultimately it promises a great deal of fun. The battlefields are large enough, the rock-paper-scissor mechanic for a relatively easy decision-making process, and everything looks rather good.
Should the speech recognition system live up to my expectations, this may very well become the first console game I try to play online. Its semi-persistant World War mode looks like a lot of fun. But first I'll need to invest quite a bit of time in the single player modes, and we'll see how it goes. See you for part 2 !
Part 1 score : 7/10
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