Ed Oscuro
07-01-2005, 01:02 AM
Well, from what I've played it appears that Cold Fear is garbage. Reading GameSpot's previews (they're always so positive, you know) months ago had me primed for this release. Now I'm wishing I'd gotten one of the handful of other titles I'd been looking at (or thinking about) instead.
The background here is that I got Resident Evil 4 about four or five days ago; after almost two days I was able to play it. I'm well into my second round already, so you can tell I've been enjoying that.
Then I decide to get Cold Fear. CF was supposed to be Resident Evil 4 on a ship, and I'd assumed that an Ubisoft game on the Xbox should look relatively nice. You have two different modes, movement only and aiming/movement: one uses the left thumbstick to move you and has older-RE-style semi-fixed viewpoints. Of course, when you switch viewpoints you keep running whatever direction you were aimed at until you move the stick towards a different direction. The usual.
The other looks more than a bit like Resident Evil 4...actually, it looks like a carbon copy: targeting laser (with a large dot when you hit a target), character at the bottom left of the screen (Tom Hansen takes up much less of the screen than Leon did, however). Enemy targets are much smaller.
Okay, there's strike one. You can see off into the distance and see the huge swells that constantly roll your vessel approach, and there's some lousy rain effects (sea spray isn't nearly as impressive as I had been led to believe, and it doesn't show up when in the middle of an open deck anyhow). Characters are tiny on the screen, unlike RE4 - if you can actually see their face you are in deep trouble. The much-vaunted 57 Varieties (give or take) of Hansen animations for his poses when the ship is tilted a certain ways are...well, I don't even see what they did, really. I see Hansen suddenly start leaning one way when he'd been leaning another, I see him leaning into walls, I see dead guys sinking and rising into floors (the very first dead guy you see, check his boots). It's not all bad like this, of course, and there's some nifty stuff like hanging pots and knives, or large containers on the back deck literally flying back and forth through the air while suspended on ropes.
Textures are a bad point here. Imagine a rusted texture. That's your ship. I've seen a few good details here and here, like a little picture of a ship over a bunk in crew quarters. Dead guys have all sorts of neat details (for dead people, that is). Once a headless corpse fell out of a locker on me, and there were blood smears on the door where he'd left. Nice actually. For the three interesting things in the game, I saw approximately twenty things that weren't really interesting - gas valves, the omnipresent fire extinguisher or barrel, and lots of rusty or dingy metal walls.
The much-publicized "ocean is your enemy" stuff doesn't come into play much; mostly you need be concerned when you're on the deck when you can be swept off the side. Every time it's happened to me, Hansen caught himself and I could pull myself up - just once I pushed the joystick the wrong way and he entered the water cleaner than any diver - no splash, nice!
Oh, I see Gain Ground is one of the games on the 2nd "Volume" of the direct-to-TV Genesis plug-n'-play system. If you don't have that game, check it out.
So what does Tom Hansen do? Well, here's his list of favorite activities:
a.) Getting shot by paranoid Russians
b.) Instantly dying in fires
c.) Saying "damn thing." This one needs more explanation - it seems nearly every time you need something Hansen works a "damn thing" into it. The damn thing's stuck! The damn thing's locked from the other side! Do you know who...the damn thing ate all the doughnuts! And so on.
So far, gameplay has been a string of meaningless fetch quests, looking for codes (another Hansen favorite: "I've got to find that code!"), magnetic cards ("I've got to find a magnetic card!"), or door handles. Objectives so far come in twos: Within a few minutes of play I had put out two fires with red valves (that become blue once used), and later on I've found two door handles for mirror doors in cold storage areas.
Ah, now for discussion of the exocels.
Worst execution of a parasite creature in a game I've seen in...a while. The exocels, not to ruin it or anything, affix a sinister sneer to your face (one that I haven't been able to really see in-game due to the tiny size of characters onscreen). If caught outside a host (check out the silly "possession" scene where Tom gets to see one take over a dead guy...yeah, he's thinking about what I'd be thinking if I saw that), the exocel has four incredibly and inexplicably long tentacles/tendrils that it can use like a rope to go swinging across rooms Tarzan-style, or sort of stick to you and steal your health. These are the most foolish and gimmicky looking things I've seen in a 3D game for a while. If you manage to shoot one off the side a bit (not a direct hit) it will slide across the floor; when curled into a ball like this it's maybe more than half the width of a face. So this little thing can extend a single tentacle to at least ten feet, maybe more. Said tentacles don't come from anywhere; they just are...there, apparently. They appear.
Some of the music has been good so far; the short loop at the main title screen introduces the main theme, and so far I like the Armory room's version of it. Battle tracks haven't really impressed me.
Overall, on a scale from 1 to 10, how much do I like this game right now? About a three, if that. I'm definitely feeling cheated and a bit angry that I couldn't have known what garbage this is so I'd put $4 more into a game like the Minish Cap GBA Zelda game, or maybe Jade Empire, Psychonauts, Oddworld: Stranger, the GBA RPG that's been mentioned in another thread, or well...just about anything, really.
On that note, I did pick up Syphon Filter 2 for $3, yay.
The background here is that I got Resident Evil 4 about four or five days ago; after almost two days I was able to play it. I'm well into my second round already, so you can tell I've been enjoying that.
Then I decide to get Cold Fear. CF was supposed to be Resident Evil 4 on a ship, and I'd assumed that an Ubisoft game on the Xbox should look relatively nice. You have two different modes, movement only and aiming/movement: one uses the left thumbstick to move you and has older-RE-style semi-fixed viewpoints. Of course, when you switch viewpoints you keep running whatever direction you were aimed at until you move the stick towards a different direction. The usual.
The other looks more than a bit like Resident Evil 4...actually, it looks like a carbon copy: targeting laser (with a large dot when you hit a target), character at the bottom left of the screen (Tom Hansen takes up much less of the screen than Leon did, however). Enemy targets are much smaller.
Okay, there's strike one. You can see off into the distance and see the huge swells that constantly roll your vessel approach, and there's some lousy rain effects (sea spray isn't nearly as impressive as I had been led to believe, and it doesn't show up when in the middle of an open deck anyhow). Characters are tiny on the screen, unlike RE4 - if you can actually see their face you are in deep trouble. The much-vaunted 57 Varieties (give or take) of Hansen animations for his poses when the ship is tilted a certain ways are...well, I don't even see what they did, really. I see Hansen suddenly start leaning one way when he'd been leaning another, I see him leaning into walls, I see dead guys sinking and rising into floors (the very first dead guy you see, check his boots). It's not all bad like this, of course, and there's some nifty stuff like hanging pots and knives, or large containers on the back deck literally flying back and forth through the air while suspended on ropes.
Textures are a bad point here. Imagine a rusted texture. That's your ship. I've seen a few good details here and here, like a little picture of a ship over a bunk in crew quarters. Dead guys have all sorts of neat details (for dead people, that is). Once a headless corpse fell out of a locker on me, and there were blood smears on the door where he'd left. Nice actually. For the three interesting things in the game, I saw approximately twenty things that weren't really interesting - gas valves, the omnipresent fire extinguisher or barrel, and lots of rusty or dingy metal walls.
The much-publicized "ocean is your enemy" stuff doesn't come into play much; mostly you need be concerned when you're on the deck when you can be swept off the side. Every time it's happened to me, Hansen caught himself and I could pull myself up - just once I pushed the joystick the wrong way and he entered the water cleaner than any diver - no splash, nice!
Oh, I see Gain Ground is one of the games on the 2nd "Volume" of the direct-to-TV Genesis plug-n'-play system. If you don't have that game, check it out.
So what does Tom Hansen do? Well, here's his list of favorite activities:
a.) Getting shot by paranoid Russians
b.) Instantly dying in fires
c.) Saying "damn thing." This one needs more explanation - it seems nearly every time you need something Hansen works a "damn thing" into it. The damn thing's stuck! The damn thing's locked from the other side! Do you know who...the damn thing ate all the doughnuts! And so on.
So far, gameplay has been a string of meaningless fetch quests, looking for codes (another Hansen favorite: "I've got to find that code!"), magnetic cards ("I've got to find a magnetic card!"), or door handles. Objectives so far come in twos: Within a few minutes of play I had put out two fires with red valves (that become blue once used), and later on I've found two door handles for mirror doors in cold storage areas.
Ah, now for discussion of the exocels.
Worst execution of a parasite creature in a game I've seen in...a while. The exocels, not to ruin it or anything, affix a sinister sneer to your face (one that I haven't been able to really see in-game due to the tiny size of characters onscreen). If caught outside a host (check out the silly "possession" scene where Tom gets to see one take over a dead guy...yeah, he's thinking about what I'd be thinking if I saw that), the exocel has four incredibly and inexplicably long tentacles/tendrils that it can use like a rope to go swinging across rooms Tarzan-style, or sort of stick to you and steal your health. These are the most foolish and gimmicky looking things I've seen in a 3D game for a while. If you manage to shoot one off the side a bit (not a direct hit) it will slide across the floor; when curled into a ball like this it's maybe more than half the width of a face. So this little thing can extend a single tentacle to at least ten feet, maybe more. Said tentacles don't come from anywhere; they just are...there, apparently. They appear.
Some of the music has been good so far; the short loop at the main title screen introduces the main theme, and so far I like the Armory room's version of it. Battle tracks haven't really impressed me.
Overall, on a scale from 1 to 10, how much do I like this game right now? About a three, if that. I'm definitely feeling cheated and a bit angry that I couldn't have known what garbage this is so I'd put $4 more into a game like the Minish Cap GBA Zelda game, or maybe Jade Empire, Psychonauts, Oddworld: Stranger, the GBA RPG that's been mentioned in another thread, or well...just about anything, really.
On that note, I did pick up Syphon Filter 2 for $3, yay.