Gas Powered Games have released a patch that removes the SecuROM copy protection crap from Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. The game was released this week, so the patch has taken less than 4 days to arrive. Another game to add to the neverending pile!
I also bought a PS3. I knew I would get one sooner or later, and with the recent price discounts and Ratchet & Clank now out, there just wasn’t any reason to delay the inevitable. R&C is fantastic: smooth, beautiful, fun, varied and uncomplicated. In a way it’s disappointing, because it feels pretty much the same as the PS2 original when it came out. This once again confirms Jason Rubin’s idea that graphics are going to get better but not really add anything new to games.
After the XBox Live experience, the PS Store seems incredibly limited and amateurish in comparison. A crisp but ugly interface, very few demos available, the installation process for these demos can take between 5 and 10 minutes, and it has already crashed once.
I checked out the Heavenly Sword demo, and now think that Zero Punctuation’s review was way too positive. Which might explain why the PS3 built-in web browser is unable to play it.
Another let down was the demo for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. This game sounds great on paper: Tomb Raider-style gameplay, great production and graphics, state of the art animation technology, well written story and characters. I didn’t see any of that in the demo. Animation in particular looked extremely poor to me, with things like very visible (and I mean VERY) skidding. A nice touch was the way the t-shirt wrinkles as the character moves, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $70 for THAT.
At least I can fill a coupon and get 5 free Blue-Ray movies. Edit: or install Yellow Dog Linux on it. In fact I’m typing this from there.
One final note: why do so many recent console games have such bad tearing? I’ve been looking forward to Switchball (now available on XBox Live) since I saw it at the IGF (2 years ago?), and I was ready to pay the 800 MS points, but the tearing in the demo turned me off instantly.