July 2007 Archives

I was a bit bored today so I checked out Transformers, The Game. I played a grand total of about 3 minutes of it before I threw my hands up and uninstalled.

If you're going to buy this game, don't. If you're going to warez this game, don't.

Things that were wrong:

• An obvious conversion from a console game, meaning that all the menus had overlay text of "Press ENTER to select. Press backspace to go back.". They had to have this because there wasn't any mouse control in the menus. I haven't had a game without mouse control in the menus since the days of Doom.
  
• It would detect a joypad about every 10 seconds while I was in the menus (possibly my joystick) and ask me to hit a button on the device. Very annoying.
  
• Default mouselook was wrong... I'd assume you could go into the controls menu and change it, but when I went into the controls menu, my controls stopped working, and I had to alt-tab out of the game and end the process.
  
• Graphics were 'meh'.
  
• Gameplay was obvious in it's console heritage, with simplistic, small maps (the two I saw) and boring play.
  
• Game menus sucked due to aforementioned console heritage.
  
• This was the biggest for me... Every time the game was started you have to sit through the logos for activision, Travellers Tales, Hasbro, Paramount, then two pages of trademarks and copyright for helicopters and vehicles. Every time. I figure it was about a minute and a half of material, which is fine once, heck, I put up with the logos at the start of BF2142 and BF2 each time it starts up, but it's one, maybe two logos and maybe 20 seconds of time. It bugs me even more that the game doesn't seem to use this time to load the menus or game maps or anything because after you sit through them (no keypress will shortcut this it appears), then things still have to load up for the menus.
  

Yea, got married last Saturday to my love of 8 years now. Go me!

The last two or three months before the wedding were busy, the last two weeks were insanely busy. I am at work most days most of the day, so my huge thanks and appreciation to Firefly, my family and her family for all the work getting together things... tent, food, more food, location, decorations.... lots of stuff.

The Thursday before was my bachelor party, Cat5 did a great job doing a half a day of laser tag, sushi, pool, booze, and absolutely no debauchery at all. No really, you can ask anyone there. It'd be funnier if it wasn't true :)

Anyway, the Friday I took a day off and we got all the last minute details going. Since we had almost no input on anything on Saturday from about 9:30 in the morning till the ceremony at 4:30 (due to doing as many pictures beforehand as possible so the wait between ceremony and reception was as short as possible (sorry if it was long to anyone who was there)), we had to get all our ducks in a row and then rely on everyone else to make sure things went smoothly.

That day I got another tent, the sound system, had a rehearsal, took everyone to dinner, and was setting up music at 11pm the night

The day of went just about as perfectly as you could ask for. The rain that was predicted for the last two weeks didn't arrive and instead it was beautifully sunny (almost too sunny, I burnt the top of my head). The ceremony setup was great, and everyone seemed to show up and hopefully had a good time.

More after the clicky clicky link....