Not a particularly productive day, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Yet more screenshotting today, although today I thankfully got to play more than just adventures. As much as I love them three straight days would have left me never wanting to touch one again. First thing I did was to play Alien Breed on the Amiga (no idea why, but they needed screenshots so I got them). I used codes for infinite lives and infinite ammo and even then the aliens were swarming and overwhelmingly me, so I don’t know how anyone could finish that without cheats. I keep hearing that modern games are easier and I agree, but that was plain frustrating.
After that I found out that they still needed a few more shots of The Dig and Loom which I fired up ScummVM to grab. I didn’t go past the first screen of The Dig when I played it before but when I gave it some time I really got into it and ended up playing until I got stuck at around lunchtime. It has a Spielberg story credit and you can really see his touch in there along with more than a little 2001.
When I came back from lunch (Greggs in Bournemouth is always too damn busy – the staff speak crap English which means service is slow and queues are usually out the door) I didn’t really have a lot to do so I got to watch some FarCry Instincts which looks pretty good actually. The Xbox does a respectable job and even keeps a reasonable framerate, but there’s still something that looks slightly generic about it, and it was definitely more linear than the PC version – you’re tunnelled through ravines and valleys instead of given options on how to approach a scenario like in the original. Someone should also tell the developer that they don’t need to put bloom on everything as well. I swear that effect is becoming the new cel shading.
I also got to see a lot of the full version of Burnout Revenge on the Xbox (previous impressions of the PS2 version here) which looks very impressive. The PS2 version looked great but this is even better, and just as eye-bleedingly fast. I’ve seen it before but it still blew me away quite how fast it was going while remaining very playable, and we also managed to find a lot of alternate shortcuts that do cool things like send you flying over cliff edges and over rooftops. It should be great, even if I’m probably going for the PSP version first. Whether it will stay quite as fresh next year for the inevitable Burnout 5: Street remains to be seen because I can’t see much more to the formula.