2 New Demos, And Some Other News

The Incredibles Demo
The new demo for the upcoming The Incredibles game has been released on FilePlanet. At first, I was reasonably impressed. The game looks quite good, and after I pressed most of the keys on the keyboard, I figured out the controls. Fairly clunky, I found. The mouse look wasn’t the greatest, and the camera was frequently not behind the character (Mr. Incredible), making it harder to navigate. However, his attacks (mainly punches, and a cool slam into the ground when you jump and press what I’m calling Heavy Attack [E, Right-click]) were okay. The best bit about it was that lots of the stuff in the game was destructible, which of course I set out to prove. I love punching up a virtual world. It makes up for my puny size in the Real World. :-) Then I got to some strange bit where Mr. Incredible hops on a flying saucer and tries to defeat this room full of enemies. So frustrating! The controls are a nightmare, and I could barely control the darn thing, let alone hit anyone with the lasers. Annoying enough that I quit to try the other demo I got…

Flat-Out Demo
Wow! This one is very impressive! It plays like a wonderful hybrid of GTA3, Colin McRae Rally (not that I have played that much at all), and Need For Speed: Underground. The best thing(s) about this game are: the awesome damage modeling, the interactive environments, and the ragdoll physics of the driver. This game is unique in that no longer do you have an indestructible driver that somehow survives any crash of the car, even if the car doesn’t… no! If you hit a tree, and you don’t have a windshield (most likely), the natural progression is for your driver to go flying out of the window in a flurry of limbs and sickening bounces along the ground. After watching enough limbs snap, the option comes up to ‘Reset’ and your driver and car (although still just as damaged as before) are placed back in the middle of the track, heading in the right direction. And the damage your car can take is insane. You start off with a sort of old-bomb type “muscle” car with lots of stickers on it to make it look pretty, and you end up with (after at most 1 lap) a twisted metal wreck with 4 wheels vibrating like crazy, a flaming engine that thankfully never seems to blow up, no bonnet, doors or other such niceties, and a car that does more doughies than an alcohol-fuelled teenager in an empty lot.

Oh, and did I mention the environments were amazingly interactive? Virtually everything you see will be destroyed in amazingly realistic ways. See a pile of logs stacked neatly up? Cannon into it, and you will damage your car, and send all the logs flying (not too far… they more roll, since they are heavy). Smash into that fence, and no longer will you rebound unscathed, but you instead go straight through it, splintering it into pieces if it’s made of wood, and so on. A lot of fun can be had by deliberately hooning round the environments, trying to see what you can spectacularly crash into, and see how many rotations your driver can do before he skids to a stop.

There are 2 race tracks, neither of which I did very well in, but both of which were great interactive tracks that even had long roads that weren’t part of the track that were just as lovingly detailed… I hate how in some other games, it’s as if the only part of the world that exists is the track you race on, which just isn’t the case.

But it’s the 3rd mode, called ‘High Jump’ that is just the best. This is where you get 3 attempts at driving down a ramp and pressing the Nitro button [Ctrl] to launch your driver through the air and try and get as much height as you possibly can, measured against this massive vertical ladder with height markings on it. I just love the ragdoll physics, and how much this reminded me of Stair/Truck Dismount except looking soo much better, and being more fun. It’s what I dreamed Truck Dismount would be like. Funnest is when you can launch the driver painfully into the ‘rungs’/horizontal bars in the height measurer thing, and watch him spin to the ground. Or launching him far enough to smack into the wire mesh that protects the crowd and watch him slide down slowly and excruciatingly as the physics gets a bit confused (it does an admirable job, though, and except for where it gets stuck in certain bits, looks remarkably realistic). Or having him smack into the solid side of the ‘ladder’ and come tumbling down. The replays can be hilarious. My best height was 102.something metres, and my best score around 250 or so. Give or take. And if you press ‘up’ during this mode, you slow the time of the game down a lot, allowing a sort of ‘bullet-time’ effect to appreciate the awesome ragdoll effects. A very fun mode that just exploits the best features of the previous levels. You should definitely try this game, and let me know what you think in the comments page!

Other News
Been working a fair bit recently. They have finally learnt, I think, that Layby is usually a busy area and in need of more than 1 person at a time. So I have been that extra person for quite a few shifts, as opposed to having to contend with the 2 – 3 others for one of the 5 shifts available for casuals (Thursday night, and 2 per weekend day). I worked out I did about 16 hours this week, and will do 16.5hrs next week. This is fantastic, as I desperately need the money at the moment, with, amongst other things to afford:
1. A PlayStation 2. Wanted one for aaages, I have a PS1 and lots of games for it, all of which will still play on the PS2, and of course, the games it has are even better! $244 for the new slimline version, which includes online adapter and stuff… have convinced my bro to go halves with me in this and San Andreas (below). We will both benefit from it, and we both really want San Andreas after loving (Grand Theft Auto) Vice City.
2. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. With awesome reviews, this game looks to be fantastic, and wonderfully huge in scale. $87 from Target.
3. A new 17” monitor, for around $175. I need one, my current one is crap, has dodgy colours, a max resolution of 1024x768, which is fine for games, but too small for a desktop work area. It will finally complement my graphics card a bit better, which is a Gigabyte 9600XT, which still copes well enough with most new games. Tank has generously offered to put $100 towards this, since he bought Neil a new hard drive, and reckons he has heaps of money. Who’s to argue? Makes me feel kinda guilty though… I’ve done nothing like that for him…
4. Blackadder DVD Box Set, all 4 seasons - $85 from Target. I love BlackAdder, but have only seen a few episodes, and it’s wonderful (if slightly bawdy) English comedy, which I love. Plus, it’s got Rowan Atkinson in it, which is awesome, and he’s distinctly less mute, another plus. Not that Mr. Bean wasn’t so much more funny due to the limited dialogue.
5. Want to get a router sometime soon. At the moment, I have to connect to the Net through my parents’ machine, via ICS (Internet Connection Sharing), a feature of Windows 98SE onwards (I think). However, when they go to bed early and turn their computer off, it means I get disconnected from the net. And they often just switch it off without thinking, leaving me wondering why I suddenly got shafted from the net. These are sub-$100 from MSY, which I’m hoping are of sufficient quality for my needs, and not too security compromising :-).
6. Day to day impulse spending. I’m not too bad, I suppose, but I could be more stringent with my money. All those $20 from the ATM take sizeable chunks out of my pay.

So, yeah. I need lots of money to pay for all this. I should have enough, but how dangerously close my account dips to 0, I have no idea. Hopefully not too close.

Oh well, there is other stuff to tell, like my younger brother’s girlfriend coming round for dinner tonight… sigh. She was nice, though. Not much to tell here without saying too much in too public a place. And I still have to type up the first of those articles in the Why I… series. I think I’ll do that one on Why I like/use my Palm. Stay tuned, and sorry for the extremely long post (2.5 pages of size 12 font in Word). Oh well, if you wanted extra content, you sure got it! And if you didn’t, you got it anyway!

~Greg out.