The holiday weekend wasn't a total washout in our area. One might call it a drizzle-out to be more accurate. It rained off and on for three days and made for a lazy, uninspired Memorial Day weekend. While the rain-induced sloth was not totally unappreciated, it would have been nice to have seen sunshine for more than 30 minutes at a time before the next cold breeze waved more clouds toward the lakefront.
Due to the rain, I was able to get in plenty of game time which was completely well spent. I've wanted to play the PC adventure game Sanitarium since it came out in 1998, but I've never got around to it. Once Windows 2000 and XP became standard operating systems for me, the 9x-based game was destined for a buggy run on any of my machines and I avoided it. After that, it promplty fell off my must-play radar. However, with it's new monkey-bin re-release, the game has been optimized to run stably under XP and Amy picked it up for my birthday. A full review will be forthcoming, but let me preclude it by saying that I haven't played an adventure game since The Curse of Monkey Island and while I don't find Sanitarium to be quite as engaging a game, it is a breath of fresh air to play an adventure game again. I miss that genre. Adventure games need a Baldur's Gate to pull them from the ashes and I will stay faithful that that title will come eventually.
With Sanitarium over two-thirds complete, I feel safe enough to review The Simpsons: Hit and Run despite the fact that I have only played five out of the seven levels that it offers. First of all, I had read a lot of reviews that proclaimed that this was the game that Simpsons fans had long awaited and deserved. While that statement is true in terms of references to the show and all the little inside jokes that go with them, it is not quite true about the gameplay. I had a blast with S:H&R for the first three levels. But, I began to realize at the start of level 4 (Marge's level) that I wasn't going to see anything new besides the cutscenes. As I played through the fourth level, it was obvious that the mission objectives were each identical to tasks I had performed before with other characters not to mention that the environments began to recycle as well. *yawn* To add insult to injury, the objectives were never that interesting in the first place. I would bet rather safely that nearly 50% of the objectives in the entire game are of the FedEx variety: go to the guy across town and get the special object. Then, bring the special object back here. *yawn* By the time I started level 5 with Apu, the novelty was gone, I recognized the same areas, and the mission objectives were only loose carbon copies of each other.
Also in the gameplay category, the controls are not configureable enough for a PC game. While using a WASD configuration is good for some things, it is not good for subtle steering movements that require any amount of precision. This is where the control scheme of S:H&R really falls short. For a game that is mostly focused on driving, it sure would have been nice if I had been able to assign the steering controls on my car to be controlled by the mouse with the braking and accelerating controlled by keys on the keyboard. But, in their infinite wisdom, Radical chose to limit me to using the alpha keyboard to steer the car, thereby further limiting my mouse to the task of braking and accelerating by pressing the mouse buttons. Now, some might argue that I should be using a gamepad to play this game. However, I would counter that statement by saying that I don't play PC games so that I can use console-stlye interfaces. I play PC games because of the amounts of configuration that one can acheive so that the interface can be adapted to one's personal style of play. In short, just let me configure the controls.
That's all I have time for today. I'll post the rest of this review at a later date.
Currently listening to: Robyn Miller, "Sirrus' Cache" from the Myst OST
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