Paint it black

It's just as well the "no new games" policy doesn't kick in until the new year - there are just too many bargains around at the moment :-D

This week I've been playing demos of Civ IV (not my sort of thing, removed from the wishlist), Need for Speed Most Wanted (very decently done) and the full games of King Kong and Vietcong. The latter's just been uninstalled in a fit of rage. It's been out three years, has been patched a few times and yet it STILL features game-breaking bugs that won't let you finish missions. It'll be getting traded in at the earliest opportunity, but I'll only get a quid or two for it (if that).

King Kong is different. It's something truly special. It's very much only rental material (due to a playthru time of only 8-9 hours) but it features an incredibly well assembled graphic engine that enables massive, seemingly very complex yet cunningly simple, environments to be rendered with ease. The set pieces are absolutely jaw-dropping (I encountered a "migration" today that had me gasping in disbelief) and the level of immersiveness when playing as Jack is impressive to say the least.

I had the "pleasure" of playing on an Xbox360 today and I left the demo pod feeling hollow. I'd heard complaints levelled at Microsoft that the 360 doesn't represent enough of a leap and that they're forcing the market into a position it needn't be put in yet and today simply confirmed it. It might sound cynical of me to describe the 360 games as "slightly higher res with a touch better lighting" but that is indeed all that I encountered. The transition from Xbox to the 360 was never going to be as pronounced as, say the jump from SNES to N64, but the apparent lack of improvements was pretty shocking. As always it'll take some time to show off the machine properly but when you recall that the launch of the Xbox had people gasping at Rallisport and before that the PS1 had Wipeout to demonstrate quite ably what the move to 3D could mean for gamers, it's disappointing to see such a minor upgrade in this instance.

Ho hum, time will tell whether people actually like the 360 or not but I feel it might not quite turn out to be what gamers really need right now. It's a sad day when the only things on the 360 that I know long-time gamers are looking forward to are Xbox Live Arcade offerings and Jeff Minter's Neon