Okay, downloaded... my experience thus far with the demo:
As always, fifty thousand logos at the start. One of the things I like about Nintendo's first-party software like Nintendogs is that they generally don't waste any time with those logos. They seem to be alone with that trait.
As I skip past logo after logo (I think I missed the actual introduction video for the game in the process, of course. I hate those things, though), I wonder how the menu looks, being that the game is running in Source.
Behold! It's an ungodly mess.
They used Valve's GUI for it, but they used their own skin. This skin has absolutely no contrast between focused and unfocused windows, and buttons are practically invisible. Popping up a dropdown menu to change my screen resolution (inexplicably set to 1024x768, which is neither the recomended value nor the value used in Windows) was a disgusting experience where the options were barely visible and appeared... distorted... by the effect that is supposed to highlight them when I drag the mouse over them.
All of the settings menus are identical to those seen in a MOD of Half-Life 2. Not even the note under the HDR option has been changed, so it still says "*Only works with HDR maps" or something to that extent. In the case of a game that attempts to be user-friendly and shouldn't really expose the idea of there being more than one map, that should not be there.
Did I mention that the 3d background looks like garbage? It's a character standing around doing nothing. What a waste.
Now, I don't know much about Source, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the engine forces developers to use Valve's own menu system and the only customization the makers of M&M could do was to make everything the same tone of blue.
Oh well, at least the New Game button is visible.
Settings tweaked, so I press it.
OH, The Horror!
Loading screen looks nice at first. A nice loading bar at the bottom and a little blurb in the middle.
Looking closer (you know, reading the blurb?!) reveals that the writing on this blurb is white. Unfortunately, parts of the background are also rather white, making it difficult to read. I can't imagine what I would do if I had a CRT monitor. I guess I just wouldn't bother.
Thanks to slow load times, I could read to the end of this blurb where it inexplicably ended in the middle of a sentence. Looks like someone slacked off... and I guess the testers all had computers that loaded it too fast for them to be able to read the little blurb.
The blurb didn't sound much like an introduction... I suppose it could be if they did it right.
Game begins. Immediately it dawned on me: They didn't do it right.
Okay okay, it's a cutscene in which camera control is taken over by the game. I guess that's fine since everything does it, but considering how they can't make their menu any different from that of Half-life 2, I would like it if they stuck with that for things that people do make a point of appreciating.
Now, as we all know, Source has a brilliant animation system. This custscene, however - apparently the first cutscene in the game - does not harness it. Allright, it's not really something to complain about... the character's face doesn't show a lot of expression, and he folded his arms for no reason within a second of meeting me... but he does have a bit of extra movement in his face and the mouth movements are excellent. So, the problem is just that the artists had to do a lot of characters. They had to back off a bit.
Okay, that I can excuse. Mediocre game acting quality... oh, well. With Prey, Oblivion and Half-Life 2, I thought we'd gotten over that. Not really terrible acting, so I'll let it pass.
Oops, never mind!
This cutscene lasted about... 5 seconds.
Wait, it wasn't a cutscene, it was just this guy talking. Dialgue was as follows:
I say: "[Forgettable name 1]Where are you?"
He says: "I'm here. I need you to [blah blah blah]"
The end.
He seems to be giving me orders without introducing himself at all.
Hell, I don't even know how to move yet!
I don't know where I am, and it's not in the good way. For the first moment of this game I have ever played, and for the beginning of a Demo (remember how they are used to sell games?), I do not feel very welcome.
The game looks nice; the usual Source engine stuff with fancy spec maps and the like... an interesting swaying camera effect when I turn, but perhaps it is a bit excessive; my character is moving around like a drunk.
The game seems to have begun with me being assigned a mysterious quest; Get a key and unlock a door. I found the key on a table and I unlocked the door.
Now I have to kick a support and climb a chain. Well, that's kind of cool. Nice use of physics, and nice self-visibility.
Upon climbing this first chain, I am given an impossible task: I must jump off the chain and climb/do something to another object by holding Space and aiming. Aiming at what, I do not know. I swear, it didn't tell me, and there are a lot of possibilities here.
A 5 minute long struggle then led to my sad fate: I fell and became permanently lodged between a pile of dirt and the ground.
Unable to escape, I took the easy way out and quit the game.
Well, that was fun.
Edit:
Trying again, the little blurb in the loading screen is fully visible.
Some weird glitch associated with changing the screen resolution, I guess.
I noticed a screen telling me that this is not to be taken as a demonstration of the game's final quality, and that it is rather a release created to show everyone how many weird glitches and messy details they can clean up before release, and how these people can't test their own games anymore.
I figured out why the GUI skin is so weird looking, too: The menu highlight text colour is very similar to the menu highlight background colour, so the text nearly disappears when an option is highlighted. Also, the menus are very translucent, which means that they are unreadable if they unfold above another gadget.
It's weird how some of this (including the pointless introduction video) looks so ugly; the loading screens look really nice!
It's nicer this time round, so I will happily give it another chance. It appears to get better; I just hope there is some sort of story here.
Regular K:
Heh, that's nothing.
Have you ever tried configuring wireless networks with the MacBook setup program?
I was doing that just today. It kept telling me, simply, that it didn't work. That is all it told me. Every other wifi network setup I have ever used has been able to give me some hint at what is wrong by at least giving me a log of what it did! This one, however, saw it fit to simply say that Something Failed.
Of course, Mac OS is designed under the mean assumption that I am a moron who hates anything that dares to tell me technical information :P
Configuring wifi after setup led me to many irritating attempts by Apple to sell their bloody Airport routers until I finally found the config for everything else, at which point it turned out that I was connected to the Internet. (Though the setup program quite firmly disagreed and I quite explicitly and definietly told it: "Do Not Connect To A Network"). So first it gave me a stupid error message, then it tried to sell me Apple's routers with no clear alternative (turned out I had to click on the little network status icon in the status bar to access that particular utility), then it secretly connected to the Internet without my knowledge, and it broke an unwritten rule of politeness in the process, which is that it had actually connected to my neighbour's unprotected but clearly intended to be private wireless network.
I Hate Computer Software.
Beat that :P
As always, fifty thousand logos at the start. One of the things I like about Nintendo's first-party software like Nintendogs is that they generally don't waste any time with those logos. They seem to be alone with that trait.
As I skip past logo after logo (I think I missed the actual introduction video for the game in the process, of course. I hate those things, though), I wonder how the menu looks, being that the game is running in Source.
Behold! It's an ungodly mess.
They used Valve's GUI for it, but they used their own skin. This skin has absolutely no contrast between focused and unfocused windows, and buttons are practically invisible. Popping up a dropdown menu to change my screen resolution (inexplicably set to 1024x768, which is neither the recomended value nor the value used in Windows) was a disgusting experience where the options were barely visible and appeared... distorted... by the effect that is supposed to highlight them when I drag the mouse over them.
All of the settings menus are identical to those seen in a MOD of Half-Life 2. Not even the note under the HDR option has been changed, so it still says "*Only works with HDR maps" or something to that extent. In the case of a game that attempts to be user-friendly and shouldn't really expose the idea of there being more than one map, that should not be there.
Did I mention that the 3d background looks like garbage? It's a character standing around doing nothing. What a waste.
Now, I don't know much about Source, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the engine forces developers to use Valve's own menu system and the only customization the makers of M&M could do was to make everything the same tone of blue.
Oh well, at least the New Game button is visible.
Settings tweaked, so I press it.
OH, The Horror!
Loading screen looks nice at first. A nice loading bar at the bottom and a little blurb in the middle.
Looking closer (you know, reading the blurb?!) reveals that the writing on this blurb is white. Unfortunately, parts of the background are also rather white, making it difficult to read. I can't imagine what I would do if I had a CRT monitor. I guess I just wouldn't bother.
Thanks to slow load times, I could read to the end of this blurb where it inexplicably ended in the middle of a sentence. Looks like someone slacked off... and I guess the testers all had computers that loaded it too fast for them to be able to read the little blurb.
The blurb didn't sound much like an introduction... I suppose it could be if they did it right.
Game begins. Immediately it dawned on me: They didn't do it right.
Okay okay, it's a cutscene in which camera control is taken over by the game. I guess that's fine since everything does it, but considering how they can't make their menu any different from that of Half-life 2, I would like it if they stuck with that for things that people do make a point of appreciating.
Now, as we all know, Source has a brilliant animation system. This custscene, however - apparently the first cutscene in the game - does not harness it. Allright, it's not really something to complain about... the character's face doesn't show a lot of expression, and he folded his arms for no reason within a second of meeting me... but he does have a bit of extra movement in his face and the mouth movements are excellent. So, the problem is just that the artists had to do a lot of characters. They had to back off a bit.
Okay, that I can excuse. Mediocre game acting quality... oh, well. With Prey, Oblivion and Half-Life 2, I thought we'd gotten over that. Not really terrible acting, so I'll let it pass.
Oops, never mind!
This cutscene lasted about... 5 seconds.
Wait, it wasn't a cutscene, it was just this guy talking. Dialgue was as follows:
I say: "[Forgettable name 1]Where are you?"
He says: "I'm here. I need you to [blah blah blah]"
The end.
He seems to be giving me orders without introducing himself at all.
Hell, I don't even know how to move yet!
I don't know where I am, and it's not in the good way. For the first moment of this game I have ever played, and for the beginning of a Demo (remember how they are used to sell games?), I do not feel very welcome.
The game looks nice; the usual Source engine stuff with fancy spec maps and the like... an interesting swaying camera effect when I turn, but perhaps it is a bit excessive; my character is moving around like a drunk.
The game seems to have begun with me being assigned a mysterious quest; Get a key and unlock a door. I found the key on a table and I unlocked the door.
Now I have to kick a support and climb a chain. Well, that's kind of cool. Nice use of physics, and nice self-visibility.
Upon climbing this first chain, I am given an impossible task: I must jump off the chain and climb/do something to another object by holding Space and aiming. Aiming at what, I do not know. I swear, it didn't tell me, and there are a lot of possibilities here.
A 5 minute long struggle then led to my sad fate: I fell and became permanently lodged between a pile of dirt and the ground.
Unable to escape, I took the easy way out and quit the game.
Well, that was fun.
Edit:
Trying again, the little blurb in the loading screen is fully visible.
Some weird glitch associated with changing the screen resolution, I guess.
I noticed a screen telling me that this is not to be taken as a demonstration of the game's final quality, and that it is rather a release created to show everyone how many weird glitches and messy details they can clean up before release, and how these people can't test their own games anymore.
I figured out why the GUI skin is so weird looking, too: The menu highlight text colour is very similar to the menu highlight background colour, so the text nearly disappears when an option is highlighted. Also, the menus are very translucent, which means that they are unreadable if they unfold above another gadget.
It's weird how some of this (including the pointless introduction video) looks so ugly; the loading screens look really nice!
It's nicer this time round, so I will happily give it another chance. It appears to get better; I just hope there is some sort of story here.
Regular K:
Heh, that's nothing.
Have you ever tried configuring wireless networks with the MacBook setup program?
I was doing that just today. It kept telling me, simply, that it didn't work. That is all it told me. Every other wifi network setup I have ever used has been able to give me some hint at what is wrong by at least giving me a log of what it did! This one, however, saw it fit to simply say that Something Failed.
Of course, Mac OS is designed under the mean assumption that I am a moron who hates anything that dares to tell me technical information :P
Configuring wifi after setup led me to many irritating attempts by Apple to sell their bloody Airport routers until I finally found the config for everything else, at which point it turned out that I was connected to the Internet. (Though the setup program quite firmly disagreed and I quite explicitly and definietly told it: "Do Not Connect To A Network"). So first it gave me a stupid error message, then it tried to sell me Apple's routers with no clear alternative (turned out I had to click on the little network status icon in the status bar to access that particular utility), then it secretly connected to the Internet without my knowledge, and it broke an unwritten rule of politeness in the process, which is that it had actually connected to my neighbour's unprotected but clearly intended to be private wireless network.
I Hate Computer Software.
Beat that :P