I’ve gotten Doom 3 last week on Monday and have played it quite a bit (but I am nowhere near finished) and it looks very nice and it has made me jump more often than I care to remember.
Unfortunately, it is very CPU limited. Whether I play it at 640×480 or 1280×1024 on my Radeon 9800XT makes no differences whatsoever as my (dual) Athlon 1800+ cannot keep up with skinning and shadow volume extraction.
(to be watched in the dark, with plenty of subwoofer — tested yesterday):
What I don’t understand is why Planet Risk only made second place at Assembly 2004; the first place did very little for me. Overall the competition seems to have been of a rather low quality. 🙁
After a thoroughly relaxing two weeks, I am back in Germany. I have gotten only slightly sunburnt (on the second day) while swimming (which we did quite a bit of).
Also made some nice trips to caves and spent 1.5 days driving around the island of Mallorca itself.
I also finishing my “pending” queue of books (reviews will follow seperately).
I’ll be gone for the coming 2 weeks — I am visiting my grandmother in Mallorca, Spain. First “proper” vacation in 8 years… 😀
Little warning: Bought FSW this Saturday and for the first time the German version seems to be German only (i.e. I cannot change the language of the menues / subtitles to English). This pisses me off somewhat as you cannot return an opened game; and I have thus ordered a copy from the UK.
Anyone want to buy my German copy of the game off me? 🙁
I had an extended romp through the newly opened (in England, France and Germany that is — not really an “European” launch) iTunes music store. It is now obvious to me why there is quite a bit of buzz about it. The prices (and more importantly the terms of use) are fair, the selection is decent (by far not perfect — especially the omission of independent labels hurts. Also some artists only seem to feature a subsets of their albums); but what is IMO most important is the ease of use and the excellent integration with iTunes: It is actually fun to buy music. To proove the point, I ended up buying Natalie Merchant’s “Ophelia” album (which I found via the “Thick as Thieves” track in my library)…
I’ve been trying to get my hands on “Dancing Stage Unleashed” (or “Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix” as it’s called in the US) pretty much since it was supposed to be out in the beginning of March. But is is very hard to get a hold of a copy (and don’t ever think about believing Amazon’s 1-2 weeks dispatch estimate). Finally, somewhen in May, a local shop had a copy of the game — but no dance mats.
I then decided to import the game (and dance-mats) via Amazon.co.uk. They even had a package deal for the game and a dance mat for 30 quid. Unfortunately, the estimated 1-2 weeks turned into 4-6, and then 2-4 months. Which brings us to last week, where I decided to order the game and two mats separately (“usually dispatched within 24h”). They managed to send the stuff three days later, and I actually got a copy of the game on Saturday. But no mats! I just hope they turn up soon so that this odyssey will end! 😉
Moral of the story: Konami Europe has major supply problems, the game is too low-key outside of the US and Japan or Amazon just can’t get their shit together (unfortunately no other online-stores had the mats or they wouldn’t deliver to Germany). Or maybe all three of them.
Update: The mats arrived the same day (Monday). And I’m a lot worse than I thought… 😉