Preliminary thoughts on Oblivion
Mar. 7th, 2007 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseThought 1: Holy crap, the reviews I read weren't kidding when they said the visuals in this game are worth making the upgrade to a high-definition TV. The opening cinematic sweep of the Imperial City is nothing short of stunning on our 62" display - no jagged edges or artifacting, just a beautiful flyover of the city and some of the surrounding scenery. (Unfortunately, after the grandiose opening, the game promptly deposits you into a prison cell, connected to the sewers. Still nicely rendered, just nowhere near as impressive.)
Thought 1a: Soundtrack is pretty awesome too. The opening music and a lot of the ambient sound effects give me kind of a Pirates of the Caribbean vibe, of all things. The generalized-fantasy setting probably contributes to that, too.
Thought 2: Yay Patrick Stewart and his Sonorous Shakespearean Voice™! Yay also for halfway decent voice acting!
Thought 3: Points for effort on the face modeling, but a lot of these faces fall right into the Uncanny Valley for me - almost human-looking, but not quite (and kind of creepy as a result). Some are better than others, though, and fortunately you can mess with the details of your own character's face pretty much ad infinitum. After about fifteen minutes I was able to come up with something that looked reasonably human (though not entirely, since the character was part Elf and all).
Thought 4: Boy, my lack of experience with first-person-type gaming is showing. Fortunately there's a fairly large introductory dungeon-crawl - hopefully I'll be able to get the hang of the controls by the end of it.
Thought 5: Damn, not being able to carry a torch and a weapon at the same time is annoying. See following Representative Example Battle from the introductory dungeon:
"Oh noes, a rat!"
*switches to weapon-holding set*
*is immediately plunged into pitch black*
"Ha, rat, eat rusty iron short sword!"
*swings at empty air*
"Where TF are you now?"
"Ouch, that hurt! How am I supposed to block when I can't see where the enemies are?"
*blindly swings sword in front of her until the appropriate controller-vibration is matched by the rather convincing sound of sword-hitting-organic-matter coupled with rat-death-rattle* *pulls out torch again*
"Oh look, a dead rat."
*shrugs, grabs rat meat from body and heads off into next area*
I'm halfway tempted to restart the game with a Khajit (feline beast-race) character just for the night vision ability...
Thought 6: Aw, crap, it's 1 AM already? Guess I've got to go to bed...
---
In other news, I have several seeds for a review of the musical version of The Producers germinating in my head. I'm not sure if it'll actually come to anything - it's not like the movie hasn't already been reviewed quite a bit, after all - but we'll see. A lot of the seeds come from various comments Brian and I have made during the several times we've watched it, that I'd like to get down in some cohesive form...
Okay. Back to work, dammit.
Thought 1a: Soundtrack is pretty awesome too. The opening music and a lot of the ambient sound effects give me kind of a Pirates of the Caribbean vibe, of all things. The generalized-fantasy setting probably contributes to that, too.
Thought 2: Yay Patrick Stewart and his Sonorous Shakespearean Voice™! Yay also for halfway decent voice acting!
Thought 3: Points for effort on the face modeling, but a lot of these faces fall right into the Uncanny Valley for me - almost human-looking, but not quite (and kind of creepy as a result). Some are better than others, though, and fortunately you can mess with the details of your own character's face pretty much ad infinitum. After about fifteen minutes I was able to come up with something that looked reasonably human (though not entirely, since the character was part Elf and all).
Thought 4: Boy, my lack of experience with first-person-type gaming is showing. Fortunately there's a fairly large introductory dungeon-crawl - hopefully I'll be able to get the hang of the controls by the end of it.
Thought 5: Damn, not being able to carry a torch and a weapon at the same time is annoying. See following Representative Example Battle from the introductory dungeon:
"Oh noes, a rat!"
*switches to weapon-holding set*
*is immediately plunged into pitch black*
"Ha, rat, eat rusty iron short sword!"
*swings at empty air*
"Where TF are you now?"
"Ouch, that hurt! How am I supposed to block when I can't see where the enemies are?"
*blindly swings sword in front of her until the appropriate controller-vibration is matched by the rather convincing sound of sword-hitting-organic-matter coupled with rat-death-rattle* *pulls out torch again*
"Oh look, a dead rat."
*shrugs, grabs rat meat from body and heads off into next area*
I'm halfway tempted to restart the game with a Khajit (feline beast-race) character just for the night vision ability...
Thought 6: Aw, crap, it's 1 AM already? Guess I've got to go to bed...
---
In other news, I have several seeds for a review of the musical version of The Producers germinating in my head. I'm not sure if it'll actually come to anything - it's not like the movie hasn't already been reviewed quite a bit, after all - but we'll see. A lot of the seeds come from various comments Brian and I have made during the several times we've watched it, that I'd like to get down in some cohesive form...
Okay. Back to work, dammit.
