Alien Breed Evolution

Well, today I downloaded and played Alien Breed Evolution from the Xbox Live marketplace.
Beeing a HUGE fan of Alien Breed on the Amiga, I was pretty excited to try out a new installment of the series (especially since the announcement of such a game has been done several years ago, I believe 2004 or so).
After I donwloaded it, I called the wife to support me as a second player, casue ya know, AB is played best ina team.
When I heard the "Intex" computer voice again, it felt really cool, its been a loooong time.
So the game started, Anna joined me, and the first thing we noticed: its dark, and its hard to tell the characters from the environment.
Ok, dark and moody is good, but we felt its a bit too confusing, and no, we didn't play on an old CRT, we play on a 40-inch Samsung.The perspective is slightly isometric, I feel a straight topdown would have worked better.
Of course, there is the problem with the camera if Youn play 2-player coop locally on the Xbox, but that probably can be avoided by playing the game on-line so that each player has it own screen.
Secondly (and that You can accustom yourself to): the controls are not THAT easy.
The aiming is a bit difficult, as you aim while standing still by using the right stick.You move with the left one, so strafing is pretty cool, although difficult.
Third: you fire away at an incredibly high rate, because precise aiming is difficult (see above), bruing through those ammo packs faster than You would believe.
Fourth: the environment(in the demo) is pretty indestructible, and if there are things to shoot, they explode and may harm You.
So our first impression is just average.The original Alien Breed didnt allow for environmental destruction either, but I thought this would be includede now, especially when using the Unreal 3 engine.
The graphics are nice, though :)

Voice cast for Mass Effect 2

This is pretty cool: see who has been voicing the characters in BioWare's upcoming Mass Effect 2 !

OUTLANDER mini review

Yesterday we watched "Outlander" with Jim Caviezel.I checked back with boxofficemojo, and was very surprised to see that the movie is what You can call an epic failure at the box office.
We actually liked it very much.The story is not beyond awesome, but it is pretty interesting:
A space soldier crash lands on Earth (which in the movie is an abandoned human seed colony), 700 B.C., and an alien creature lands with him, starting to feast on the people living in the area.
Although he loses his futuristic weapon, he tries to protect the people and kill the alien beast, feeling guilty to have it brought to the rather primitive culture.
The special effects are really good, with an truly vibrant, living and original creature, some spectacular space scenes, alien planet backgrounds and vistas.
Caviezel does a great job, on par with Christian Bale I would say, and the rest of the cast including John Hurt and the great Ron Perlman is more than involved.
I would say its a good rental, much better than for example "Public Enemies", and it should have done better in the theaters....

Code cats....

Next time I wanna be a cat, dammit !

Mass Effect 2 Cinematic trailer

Now thats an awesome trailer, especially the woman is outstanding.They are getting away from the plain, puppet like looks finally :)

Interesting "Making Of..." articles

EDGE has a few interesting articles on the Making Of Syndicate, IK+, Populous and Cannon Fodder.
Always nice to read those.Populous was awesome, is awesome and will ever be, and Syndicate is just even awesom-er ! Especially for a BladeRunner fan such as the writer of this blog !

But all things considered...

...there is only one truly timeless pixel program, and that is:




Happy me has WinUAE running along with Cloanto's "Amiga Forever", and uses his original version of the classic tool.
If it aint broke, dont fix it :)