Sunday, May 13, 2007

Well, I turned 26 years old on Friday. GOOD LORD, I'm getting OLD! And I don't look my age. For example, I recently won a prize in a school raffle, and one of the items in the prize was a bottle of wine. But my teacher offered an alternate prize because she thought I wasn't of legal drinking age yet! Yeeeesh.

Being young looking blows. Obviously I don't want to look like Gandalf the Grey, but it can be hard to be taken seriously if people think you're still in high school. I mean, dang, I'd love to be considered for a Test Lead position at a game company some day, but who's gonna want to promote a tester to Lead when he looks like he just got his driver's license? :-P

Anyway, on to my impressions of CAPCOM's Lost Planet. Lost Planet puts you in the role of a guy, who has lots of cool guns that make cool explosions, on an ice planet full of aliens, who, when killed, freeze into ice then explode in cool ways. This gun-toting guy also has a cool grappling hook that lets him grapple up to higher areas. He can also climb into "Vital Suits" which are like 10 foot tall robot suits that have a lot of firepower and armor. Mmhmm. Good stuff.

So what's so great about it? Well, while the storytelling is a joke, the production values are really high, and the audiovisual experience is great. It's an exciting game, and has a lot of diverse and demanding challenges that I've rarely seen in shooter-style games. Each level has a boss fight which will remind you of the boss fights of CAPCOM games like MegaMan or Resident Evil 4. The bosses each have a unique pattern of behavior that require a great deal of concentration, reflexes, and memory to defeat. This is a big contrast to the combat of Gears of War, IMO. In Gears, each battle pretty much plays out in the same exact way every time: Take cover and shoot, repeat.