Mirror's Edge
I'm currently playing through Mirror's Edge, after seeing it on a BBC video clip with some guy and an insanely over-clocked computer. It looked pretty.
Indeed, it is. Very pretty. My stock bottom of the range Core i7 920 and GeForce 260+ copes with it easily. Keeping an eye on my CPU resource usage shows that it's another poorly written game stonking through just the one CPU.
The game itself is pretty. But I'm restricted to viewing it's prettiness by two massive black bars. Yes, that's right. The game is forced onto you in 16:9. Personally, I prefer the richness of colours I get from my CRT. If I had a widescreen monitor, it would likely to be 16:10, as most monitors are. It's clearly just been ported from a console.
Which is very annoying. The game interface is very "consolish" - which I despise. Having to wait until I can press the start, sorry, any - key before even getting to the main menu.
It smells of EA, with the forced EA splash screen at the front, and stupid unlockables. Oooo I've got some concept art unlocked, the nice people at EA have scanned in some rough drafts and passed it off as an achievement.
The game itself is what a lot of computer games have been trying to do since 3D left Mario World in the past. 3D platform games are generally rubbish, but this is all this game is. And it's done very well. There are a couple of controls to remember, all bread and butter to any seasoned gamer.
And you just run about trying to time that jump just right. Press space fraction of a second too quickly and you fall to your death. It's all about pressing the buttons at the right time and looking vaguely in the direction you want to go. Immensely frustrating as I remember Sonic being all those years ago. At least you only get rewound to the last save point and not the beginning of the game.
Still, I don't think I'll be playing much more of it, it looks pretty and all, but at the end of the day, you're jumping around the roof tops with the Police turning up everywhere and shooting you for some reason.