So, I've just completed Perfect Dark Zero on Secret Agent (as well as PGR3), yes it was fun for a while but I started getting a *little* tired of the same pop and take a shot gameplay, and I find the forest levels a little tedious as I tend to just sit at a distance with my RCP90 heat vision and poke my head out now and again. I don't know if its the mood I was in or its the fact that I've been playing Project Gotham Racing 3, with its brilliant smooth gameplay, I don't recall ever seeing any slow frame rates and also(I forget the technical term..I should really know..) seeing the split you get in the middle of the screen between two frames,something to do with writing to the graphics card's backbuffer too late.
Perhaps its mostly me, I'm a sucker for having a smooth frame rate, as drops ruin the immersion for me. Though we seem to be constantly reminded that they didn't have long to develop the games, not utilising three cores all that good ... its seems shame that the same company that produced Goldeneye.. Goldeneye! for godsakes couldn't make a better game with all of today's technology, perhaps they just couldn't pull it off. I don't find the levels as immersive, interesting or exciting, though now I remember it Goldeneye had frame rate drops, so perhaps its just my dashed expectationm I don't know. I prefer the theme and artwork of Goldeneye as PDZ seems a bit too fluffy at times.
Some other gripes I've have with PDZ are the dodgy physics.. ok perhaps they were only included on the advent of the developed 360 version, but sometimes it looks like a playful invisible giant has one of the characters legs, which it begins to spin and fling around, well like a rag doll in mid-air. Sometimes a hit with the plasma rifle will cause a character to spin and bounce on the spot indefinitely. The physics have seem to have gotten worse since I've started to use my Joytech vga cable into my widescreen monitor, unless its my imagination. Its likely that I'm comparing the physics to Half-Life 2, FEAR and the like, which are pretty dam good, perhaps I shouldn't excpect that a new game's technology will be better than a game nearly a year old running on my decrepid(! .. well..) 4 year old PC. As well as the physics ome of the animations when characters are shot also look very familiar....
While I've brought up Goldeneye again, where are all the options that Goldeneye had for multiplayer, the personal reward you recieved from unlocking those options were immense.
Its not just PDZ that has frame rate problems, everything with an ingame looking cut-scene (ie. All the bloody checkpoint intros in PDZ!) skips every half second or so (check out the kameo game intro, Need for speed and Quake 4). Though I have to admit apart from the in development bugs, the Fight Night 3 demo doesn't have any frame rate problems.
But I can't help thinking that developing games is such a
Mammoth task, its kind of luck whether development goes smoothly or not. Perhaps we should be congratulating Rare on making a very good game with the time with dev kits, and pulling off the amount of fancy graphics... though still the length and quality of gameplay vs. the total develop time seems a bit off.
Though if you've read this, don't take it too much to heart as PDZ is a good game, the 360 is a good console, just don't expect too much from PDZ and from the 360 .. just yet.. and after all I've managed to get some of the gripes of my chest :)
