Half-Life informs me that I am
Nov. 23rd, 2004 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemack... but an engine that moves in predestinate grooves.
I'm not even a bus. I'm a tram!
The graphics are indeed impressive; at last, shiny things (water, corrugated metal, wet paths) reflect the scene around them [except, that is, for the player]. Textures are still filtered to fuzz well before the vanishing point (apart from thin lines, which appear aliased and flickering), but nearby walls have enough bumpiness not to look like perfectly flat marble expertly painted to look like cracked concrete.
But (as in, well, pretty much everything since System Shock 2, and that was long ago) the player, whilst in principle in control of his destiny in two and a half dimensions (or three, underwater), is constrained to move in a fixed path. For the level set in a boat along a river, that's fine. For the level set in a sewer, where every intersection is a T-junction and one or the other turning leads after ten paces to a blank wall, this is getting silly. For the level set in a trainyard, where all the tunnels and at least one piece of outdoor road are blocked off with transparent, uncrossable, bullet-permeable, train-permeable force-fields, the trains constructed in such a way that you cannot scramble across couplings or lift yourself into trucks, and artfully arranged to oblige you to zig-zag from one side of the level to the other and back, it has reached absurdity.
If I wanted to watch a predefined series of events unfold in computer animation, I'd see The Incredibles again; and their animation is infinitely better than my PC can manage. There really doesn't seem to be much more to this awaited-for-six-years game, exploration-wise, than there was to the games in the JCR at college, where you moved along an absolutely fixed path whilst shooting at irregularly-appearing villains with a lightgun: you can move to a limited extent from side to side, and go backwards if you insist.
I'm not even a bus. I'm a tram!
The graphics are indeed impressive; at last, shiny things (water, corrugated metal, wet paths) reflect the scene around them [except, that is, for the player]. Textures are still filtered to fuzz well before the vanishing point (apart from thin lines, which appear aliased and flickering), but nearby walls have enough bumpiness not to look like perfectly flat marble expertly painted to look like cracked concrete.
But (as in, well, pretty much everything since System Shock 2, and that was long ago) the player, whilst in principle in control of his destiny in two and a half dimensions (or three, underwater), is constrained to move in a fixed path. For the level set in a boat along a river, that's fine. For the level set in a sewer, where every intersection is a T-junction and one or the other turning leads after ten paces to a blank wall, this is getting silly. For the level set in a trainyard, where all the tunnels and at least one piece of outdoor road are blocked off with transparent, uncrossable, bullet-permeable, train-permeable force-fields, the trains constructed in such a way that you cannot scramble across couplings or lift yourself into trucks, and artfully arranged to oblige you to zig-zag from one side of the level to the other and back, it has reached absurdity.
If I wanted to watch a predefined series of events unfold in computer animation, I'd see The Incredibles again; and their animation is infinitely better than my PC can manage. There really doesn't seem to be much more to this awaited-for-six-years game, exploration-wise, than there was to the games in the JCR at college, where you moved along an absolutely fixed path whilst shooting at irregularly-appearing villains with a lightgun: you can move to a limited extent from side to side, and go backwards if you insist.
