Saturday, November 05, 2005
XBOX 360 playable at Best Buy.
Had to run to Sam's Club for some Crystal Light Lemonade mix (it's one of the few things I buy in bulk now) and decided to stop off at Best Buy to try to spend my McDonald's Best Buy bucks. Figured I'd grab a video game or a good movie to burn onto my iPod. So I'm trolling the PS2 isle when I see a guy about my age playing at a kiosk at the end of the isle. His girlfriend/fiance/wife (I don't know, I didn't ask) was standing patiently nearby and seemed as mesmerized as he was. I rounded the corner and saw it....
There it was in all it's silvery white lusciousness. The XBOX 360. Had they been for sale right then I probably would have picked one up. Instead, I got to sit and watch this guy play King Kong. I have to say, the graphics are pretty damn cool. There's this scene where your friends are trying to get through some giant door on the island and you have to distract a monstrous T-rex for a few minutes using only spears while they get the damn thing open. The sense of depth was decent and the details were pretty cool. I saw a few bugs in the game that detracted from it, though. It suffers, like many other games, from polygon intersections (fingers disappear into the wood on a lever you are trying to pull) but it will probably be a while before some genius figures out how to fix that one. Also, there's a scene where Kong (played by you now) is fighting off another (presumably the same) T-rex. It's supposed to look like two giants fighting each other but the scene doesn't have the depth that the first one had and it winds up looking like a 3D version of Rampage World Tour. There are more polygon modeling problems as the T-rex's head and tail frequently disappear into Kong's midsection when it's turning and the huge amounts of water that are supposed to be getting splashed around end up looking very flat and artificial.
I'm hoping that the programmers get better at coding for the 360. If this title's rudamentary graphics are indicative of what the XBOX 360 has to offer, I think there's going to be a lot of disappointed kids at Christmas.
Had to run to Sam's Club for some Crystal Light Lemonade mix (it's one of the few things I buy in bulk now) and decided to stop off at Best Buy to try to spend my McDonald's Best Buy bucks. Figured I'd grab a video game or a good movie to burn onto my iPod. So I'm trolling the PS2 isle when I see a guy about my age playing at a kiosk at the end of the isle. His girlfriend/fiance/wife (I don't know, I didn't ask) was standing patiently nearby and seemed as mesmerized as he was. I rounded the corner and saw it....
There it was in all it's silvery white lusciousness. The XBOX 360. Had they been for sale right then I probably would have picked one up. Instead, I got to sit and watch this guy play King Kong. I have to say, the graphics are pretty damn cool. There's this scene where your friends are trying to get through some giant door on the island and you have to distract a monstrous T-rex for a few minutes using only spears while they get the damn thing open. The sense of depth was decent and the details were pretty cool. I saw a few bugs in the game that detracted from it, though. It suffers, like many other games, from polygon intersections (fingers disappear into the wood on a lever you are trying to pull) but it will probably be a while before some genius figures out how to fix that one. Also, there's a scene where Kong (played by you now) is fighting off another (presumably the same) T-rex. It's supposed to look like two giants fighting each other but the scene doesn't have the depth that the first one had and it winds up looking like a 3D version of Rampage World Tour. There are more polygon modeling problems as the T-rex's head and tail frequently disappear into Kong's midsection when it's turning and the huge amounts of water that are supposed to be getting splashed around end up looking very flat and artificial.
I'm hoping that the programmers get better at coding for the 360. If this title's rudamentary graphics are indicative of what the XBOX 360 has to offer, I think there's going to be a lot of disappointed kids at Christmas.
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