3/03/2012

03-03-12 - Stranger's Wrath HD

I just noticed that Stranger's Wrath HD for PS3 (on PSN) finally came out a few months ago. So I bought it and started playing through.

It seems fine from what I've seen so far. No major bugs or framerate problems or anything like that. It supposedly has some "HD" up-resing, but I can't see any, it looks just like the XBox, and that's not entirely bad. (actually the only difference I notice is that the menus seem to have been redone and they use a horrible janky-looking font; I don't think that we had such terrible looking text on the XBox). (maybe the content is up-res'ed and I just can't tell because the screen resolution is also higher?)

Anyhoo, I'm pleased to say it holds up decently still. Some of the realtime art is fantastic, for such an old game it still looks really good, mainly due to all the use of "decorators". The first 30 minutes of play are pretty terrible, but it gets better.

Every time Stranger jumps and does the Al Pacino hoo-ah I bust out laughing. WTF were we thinking? And lots of his monologues and his vocal pacing is just super bizarre. That's a good thing, bizarre is good.

In unrelated news, I tried Rage on PS3 ; holy texture popping batman! I do like the art style; the lighting is like super blown out, really flat looking; it looks cool, it reminds me of Anime. Actually the best thing about Rage is the menus; the menus are superb, really fast, responsive, circular, simple, no loading or unnecessary animation or whatever; every game developer should copy the Rage menus.

3 comments:

Tom Forsyth said...

Yeah, the PS3 version of Rage is by far the weakest. The on-demand texture streaming stuff just didn't work well - not sure the exact reason why.

cbloom said...

Running one the most demanding games ever made on the worst platform is an invitation for problems, I know.

ryg said...

I only saw Rage when Sean was playing it just after it came out on his work PC, and it was texture popping like hell there too (that was before new drivers came out, haven't seen it since).

What I saw really didn't sell me on the tech. It's got some great-looking set pieces, but so does every other "big ticket" game, and it's got worse popping and aliasing than most. It might just be conditioning from doing graphics programming for too long, but especially the aliasing from bad texture filtering on the ground and the specular aliasing really jumped out at me. Big kudos for the 60fps though.

old rants