Archive for November, 2007
Friday, November 30th, 2007
Cowon’s been teasing us with its A3 personal media player for some time now, and it looks like the whole charade is now finally nearing a close, as the company has just announced the long-awaited US launch details for the PMP. According to Crave, the player will start shipping in early December, with it setting you back $349 and $399 for the 30GB and 60GB variations, respectively. If you’ve got a bit more money to spend, however, you may do well to consider Cowon’s just-released Q5W player, which adds some WiFi to the equation, among other things.
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Friday, November 30th, 2007
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles for the Wii marks the latest in a string of efforts to use the heavily atmospheric settings and gruesome undead abominations from Capcom’s number-one survival horror franchise for the purposes of a point-and-shoot action game. It’s also the most successful, due to a number of factors, including a more intuitive control scheme and more authentic locations. Umbrella Chronicles has the texture of a Resident Evil game, but it still basically handles like an arcade light-gun game. This means it’s easy to pick up, but it’s also got a fair share of tired genre conventions. Still, there are some exciting moments, and the Resident Evil minutiae it contains should thrill fans.
Much of the game’s authenticity comes from the fact that rather than tell an entirely original story, Umbrella Chronicles puts you through the events of the first few Resident Evil games, which the game presents as a report on the final hours of the now-felled Umbrella Corporation, the conglomerate responsible for all these gee-darned zombies. Over the course of the game, you’ll revisit the events of Resident Evil 0, the original Resident Evil, and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. The narrative is understandably truncated, and the game focuses more on establishing a grimy atmosphere and re-creating specific, memorable moments than consistent storytelling.
Topping it all off is an all-new scenario that takes place in 2003 and sees the reunion of the original Resident Evil tag team of Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine as they hunt down the last vestiges of Umbrella in a frozen industrial complex, which doesn’t quite live up to its exciting potential. There are also a number of side missions that often revisit environments from the main missions, showing you what characters like Rebecca Chambers and fan-favorite Albert Wesker were up to at various points in the series. Considering that most games of this nature tend to last a scant hour or two, it’s a little impressive that it can take more than four hours to complete a single run-through of all the missions.
Resident Evil: Survivor and Resident Evil: Dead Aim, the two US-released light-gun games that preceded Umbrella Chronicles, both made fair-to-middling attempts to cross-pollinate traditional arcade-style light-gun games and their more dynamic brethren, first-person shooters. There are still traces of this in Umbrella Chronicles, such as the ability to look around a little bit using the Nunchuk’s analog stick, but most of the touches that this game puts on the light-gun formula are for the effect of making the experience feel more Resident Evil. What really defines the action is its methodical pacing. There are still plenty of moments where monsters will appear out of seemingly nowhere and run at you at full speed, but a lot of the time you’re dealing with the predicament that’s key to all Resident Evil games: too many zombies, not enough ammo.
While your standard pistol has unlimited ammo, it becomes increasingly ineffective as the game wears on, forcing you to rely on other weaponry that can run out of ammo, including shotguns, automatic weapons, grenades, RPGs, and the like. These weapons can also be upgraded with stars that you earn over the course of the game, increasing their ammo capacity as well as their stopping power. There’s a slight kink in the upgrade system, though, in that a lot of the weapons appear in only one of the games, limiting the usefulness of upgrading any one weapon by more than one or two levels. The game tries to encourage precision over speed by giving every enemy a very tiny weak spot that, when hit, produces a one-hit kill, though it’s so small that the line between luck and precision becomes pretty blurry. Either way, it’s still morbidly satisfying when you’re able to pop a zombie’s head like a balloon and watch the body stumble around aimlessly for a second as blood spurts out of its putrid neck hole.
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Friday, November 30th, 2007
Renault hasn’t done much to tap into its Formula One successes, nor has it provided credible competition to the RX-8s and 350Zs of the world. That’s all going to change come 2010. Renault is expected to revive the much-loved Alpine name and slap it on the back of two-door coupe powered by a turbocharged engine mounted amidships. AutoExpress has it on good authority that designers are wrapping up the exterior and that a Megane-bodied mule caught testing on the Nurburgring is actually the new Alpine being put through its paces. Renault is confident that the new coupe won’t go the way of the Sport Spider that was dropped in 1997 after it was maligned for offering little refinement and even less practicality. We’re hoping to see the Alpine make its concept debut in Paris next year.
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Friday, November 30th, 2007
When you think of Silent Hill, what jumps to mind? A foggy town? Cryptic dialogue? Walls dripping with blood? Well, the good news is that Silent Hill Origins has all those things. That alone should please series fans who are looking to developer Climax’s prequel to provide plenty of atmosphere and further expand on the Silent Hill mythos. But in this case, the good news is also the bad news because from a gameplay perspective, Origins is exactly what you would expect, delivering an entirely conventional adventure that relies on eight-year-old franchise hallmarks at the expense of anything truly new.
Origins is a prequel set before the events of the original PlayStation game. This time, you’re in the shoes of Travis Grady, a trucker navigating through a downpour of rain on an eerie, foreboding night. If that sounds familiar, well, that’s because it is. Like the previous Silent Hill games, Origins is light on scares but heavy on murky atmosphere and mysterious dialogue. In this case, it also relies heavily on nostalgia to set its mood, which may be fine for many fans, but the setup lacks the originality of prior series plots. In any case, Travis spots a little girl in the middle of the highway just in time to avoid hitting her. She runs off, and Travis, for no apparent reason, takes pursuit. If you’re a Silent Hill fan, you may already have an idea of who she might be.
What’s missing here is a clear sense of suspense. Unlike with previous series installments, Travis doesn’t have any pressing reason to visit Silent Hill, save for pursuing the strange child. A subsequent fire rescue adds some missing urgency, but the opening never gives you the sense that Travis needs to be in Silent Hill, which makes him the least interesting of the franchise’s protagonists. Nevertheless, how Travis fits in to the ongoing mystery of Silent Hill eventually becomes clear. If you’re here to fill in missing pieces to series lore, Origins has plenty of meat for you to chew on and plenty of familiar locales to explore.
You control Travis from a third-person view, navigating through the foggy streets of the titular town between destinations. There’s a lot to piece together here in the way of puzzles, many of which are entangled in other puzzles. For the most part, they are pretty clever, requiring you to explore every nook and cranny for scraps of clues and various items. They also require you to move in and out of the otherworld (an alternate dimension) at will by touching any of the various mirrors scattered about, which is a new mechanic for the series. It’s in the otherworld that Origins is at its most disturbing. Dirty, bloody asylum walls and ragged teddy bears are series standards that still manage to elicit chills. Random groans and sudden encounters with other characters are also appropriately creepy, if not exactly scary.
You’ll encounter your fair share of monstrous oddities–some new, many familiar. Unfortunately, combat is as weak as ever for the series. Melee is as plodding and unsatisfying as you remember, usually bloody but too measured and monotonous to be much fun. In all fairness, there are some attempts to spice things up. At times, an enemy attack will trigger a contextual minigame that requires you to hit the necessary buttons within a prescribed time limit to avoid taking damage. Of course, we’ve seen this mechanic in countless games this year alone, and Origins does nothing to make it any more interesting, so it might as well have been left out.
The other main combat addition is that of limited-use melee weapons. You can grab a television, radio, or hospital drip stand to bash your enemies with. You’ll get multiple uses out of some of them, while others are done after a single hit. As long as you avoid combat, however (usually an easy task), you’ll have plenty of weapons at your disposal. It begs the question, though: How can Travis carry a TV, a hatchet, a drip stand, a scalpel, a meat cleaver, a filing cabinet, and a huge plank of wood at the same time? It’s not that impossibly huge inventory space is new to games, but the extent to which it’s carried out here feels wildly out of place. Gunplay feels better, though again, it’s wiser to simply avoid combat whenever possible and save your ammo for the boss fights. This is where Origins is at its best: Boss monsters are huge, designed well, and a challenge to take down.
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Friday, November 30th, 2007
Truth be told, we’ve no qualms with a company unveiling nine new DLP projectors at once, but it is a wee bit overwhelming. From the top, we’ve got Optoma’s 720p HD65 ($999) and HD71 ($1,299), which aim to please HT enthusiasts and deliver 1,600 / 2,400 lumens, respectively, and offer up HDMI 1.3, component, VGA, S-Video and composite inputs. Upping the ante is the 1080p HD803 ($2,599), which features 1,200 lumens, an 8,000:1 contrast ratio and a three-stage video processing system. Taking things down a notch, we see the EP721 ($599), EP727 ($699), EP728 ($999) and EP7155 ($999) which top out with an XGA resolution and seem to cater to educational institutions and businesses. Those needing a WXGA resolution can check out the EP1691 ($999; pictured), which weighs in at just 3.2-pounds and packs 2,500 lumens. Lastly, the port-filled EP761 ($1,299) touts an XGA resolution, 3,200 lumens, a 2,000:1 contrast ratio and DVI, VGA (2 in, 1 out), composite, S-Video, RS-232 and USB connectors. The whole lot is slated to ship out right about now, and if you’re craving more in-depth details on any one in particular, the read links below should do the trick.
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