Archive

Cod and eyes

While I was in the US recently I took advantage of the exchange rate to buy a handful of goodies for my PS3 in the form of a PS Eye camera, Call of Duty 4 and a Bluray disc of Pixar short films. To get it out of the way quickly, the Pixar shorts disc is great - I've always admired the work of John Lasseter and it's nice to have all the classics in super high quality, all in one place. Disney suck for plastering adverts and trailers all over the disc and stickers all over the box, but whatever. The PS Eye camera is a nifty bit of hardware - it's a good quality camera with excellent framerate and no boring focusing requirements. The games I've played for it so far (Creature Feature, Trials of Topoq, Aqua Vita and Mesmerize) are either amusing, fun or creative and pretty. Clearly the PS3 has the hardware to do good motion detection in real-time, so it'll be interesting to see what other concepts people can come up with to take advantage of it. Last, but my absolutely no means least, is Call of Duty 4. I picked up the 3rd installment of this series when I bought the PS3 and I was a little disappointed by it. It was mildly entertaining, but single player games rarely hold my interest for long, plus the engine had obviously been slapped together hastily and some things looked really stupid (eyes and teeth particularly). Plus it's yet another World War 2 game, which we've had quite enough of. The 4th installment is a totally different beast though - gone are the crappy wooden rifles and anti-German shouting. Instead this is a game based around modern warfare and you alternate between different people (at least an SAS new-recruit and a USMC soldier). Great weapons, interesting missions (including somewhere you get to be a gunner in aircraft), very pretty graphics and a slick overall presentation. The online multiplayer is good fun too. I really really like this game!