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Aug. 11th, 2010
Gimme Steam? No, thanks ...
Aug. 11th, 2010 10:22 pmSo I read about the Mafia II demo being available. I liked the first one, and the second is one of the few games I'm currently looking forward to.
But first, in order to even be able to download the demo, I had to install Steam.
I've read a lot of good things about Steam, on /. among other places, in particular about the DRM being considered non-intrusive and therefore acceptable.
Anyway, I'm tempted to just go right ahead and uninstall it again. What a piece of bloatware that is. First of all, after installation, the first thing I saw was an error message. Couldn't connect to server, couldn't update, aborting, etc.
Not a good start.
A few hours later it worked, and I set up an account. Subsequent attempts to launch it mostly resulted in it not logging me in. When I cancelled, and closed it, the task remained, seemingly zombified. Occasionally, it would pop up suddenly logged in a few minutes later (stealing focus an thus crashing Fallout 3 which I was playing at the time).
When I then tried launching the demo it sat there "preparing to launch". Turns out it was downloading parts of the demo, and being very slow about it.
Anyway, Steam will be kicked off the system as soon as Chrischi has seen the Mafia II demo.
As for the demo itself ... How long did it take to play through it? 15 minutes? Not much of a demo IMO. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure yet whether this will be as much fun as the first one. There're certain things about the first one I disliked (some controls, sneaky missions, gameplay quirks etc). The second one seems to be "Mass Effect"'ified, same as many games lately. You have basically the same cover system which to me still feels unnatural. Maybe I've been playing games for too long, but when I want cover I run behind cover, I don't press a "use cover" button. Just as bad is being unable to leave cover by trying to walk from it - you have to press the "use cover" button again. And let's be honest here: The only real point to this is so that the developers can have cool looking, realistic, cinematic animations of the characters ducking into cover. If you didn't have to press a button for that they wouldn't know when to trigger the animations.
Other than that? The game looks really really good. And feels very console'y, but I guess that was to be expected.
Is StarCraft II being released for PS3 or XBox 360 anytime soon?
But first, in order to even be able to download the demo, I had to install Steam.
I've read a lot of good things about Steam, on /. among other places, in particular about the DRM being considered non-intrusive and therefore acceptable.
Anyway, I'm tempted to just go right ahead and uninstall it again. What a piece of bloatware that is. First of all, after installation, the first thing I saw was an error message. Couldn't connect to server, couldn't update, aborting, etc.
Not a good start.
A few hours later it worked, and I set up an account. Subsequent attempts to launch it mostly resulted in it not logging me in. When I cancelled, and closed it, the task remained, seemingly zombified. Occasionally, it would pop up suddenly logged in a few minutes later (stealing focus an thus crashing Fallout 3 which I was playing at the time).
When I then tried launching the demo it sat there "preparing to launch". Turns out it was downloading parts of the demo, and being very slow about it.
Anyway, Steam will be kicked off the system as soon as Chrischi has seen the Mafia II demo.
As for the demo itself ... How long did it take to play through it? 15 minutes? Not much of a demo IMO. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure yet whether this will be as much fun as the first one. There're certain things about the first one I disliked (some controls, sneaky missions, gameplay quirks etc). The second one seems to be "Mass Effect"'ified, same as many games lately. You have basically the same cover system which to me still feels unnatural. Maybe I've been playing games for too long, but when I want cover I run behind cover, I don't press a "use cover" button. Just as bad is being unable to leave cover by trying to walk from it - you have to press the "use cover" button again. And let's be honest here: The only real point to this is so that the developers can have cool looking, realistic, cinematic animations of the characters ducking into cover. If you didn't have to press a button for that they wouldn't know when to trigger the animations.
Other than that? The game looks really really good. And feels very console'y, but I guess that was to be expected.
Is StarCraft II being released for PS3 or XBox 360 anytime soon?