It Does Fail

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After finishing Lair today I have to say that most of the poor reviews for the game are pretty spot on.  If I had to review the game before they added the patch for analog controls and players were restricted to shaking the SixAxis controller up and down or tilting to move, I probably wouldn’t give the game a passing review.  But with the analog controls finally available (as well as the all important targeting reticle) the game becomes more managable but not a stellar experience.  There are just too many problems with the inherent design choices of the game that make it an unnecessarily difficult experience.  The guiltiest party is the decision to shoot for “realism.”  Factor 5, the developers have a long history of producing the excellent Rogue Squadron

shooters for the Star Wars franchise, and they got tired of science ficiton and wanted to go fantasy, but they wanted to go fantasy “all the way,” in the sense that they wanted you to feel like you were flying a dragon, hence the motion control, the doing away with a targeting reticle and perhaps most damaging of all, the lack of radar.

This means that in a game with multiple objectives you need to achieve most of the time you don’t know where the enemy is coming from, who’s shooting at you, where your objectives are, and a few other factors that all contribute to you either dying for failing the mission because people are screaming that your troops need protection and you don’t know where they are, let alone how to get there and protect them.

It’s really a shame, because I see the enormous amount of work and passion they put into the project; no one slacked, there’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears in the game, but ultimately, it’s more frustrating than fun, and they forgot that people aren’t playing games for realism, they’re playing it for pleasure.  Lair

fails to deliver that on many levels.

Still Playing

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Trying to slow it down, otherwise I may very well finish the game after only two days.

Tomorrow

Once again I jump into the fray with cautious (and likely vain) hope that ol’ George will somehow turn around the last few years of consistent disappointment with a once cherished part of my geeky nature.  By this point, my standards for Star Wars games are so low that I consider even a decent title to be a miracle, with an amazing title being one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Art Trade & Retro-Gaming
A visit to a decent little Queen Street West cafe heralded what the Wife refers to as an “Art Trade” which is exactly what you think it is; artists trading work. Too bad writers don’t really do stuff like that, but oh well…

Aside from that, the only other news of note is the release of Bionic Commando: Rearmed on the Playstation online store today. I haven’t played this game in years, and I still suck at it. But at least now they’ve included some current generation gaming conventions like life bars and the ability to save your game.

Blast From The Past

It’s funny how the little things can set you off.  The above picture is an image that is near and dear to the heart of the Wife, and, up until this evening, completely inaccessible.  Maggi chili sauce is to Singaporeans what ketchup is to North Americans, right down to the fact that it’s actually given out in little plastic packets at McDonalds instead of regular ketchup, which, if you are like me and living in Singapore, you actually had to ASK for, since they assumed you wouldn’t want the stuff.  Since arriving in Canada that Wife has gone without this familiar brand of chili sauce, but as of today, NO MORE.

Another semi-upscale grocery store opened up on Bloor and while we were wandering the rainy streets vainly searching for a video store that sold season DVD compilations of The Atlantic Paranormal Society’s reality TV show Ghost Hunters (don’t ask) we went into the store and a wave of nostalgia washed over the Wife almost as fast as her hands grabbed at the bottle above.  Maggi chili sauce is actually available in Canada.  Whether it tastes the way it does in Singapore (something I strongly doubt since even over there, I could tell the difference between beef and milk locally produced over there compared to stuff over here) is still undetermined, but I suspect a quick trip to McDonald’s tomorrow to score some fries will quickly settle the debate.  I myself was rather surprised to actually feel a bizarre sense of nostalgia myself at seeing the now incredibly familiar corporate logo sitting on the shelf of a Canadian grocery store.

Funny how these things work…