Another day, and more demoes to catch up on.

Overlord

There is a guilty kind of pleasure in marching well-armed goblins against rock-throwing halflings. Even if the halflings of Overlord don't seem to be so innocent as the kind that have appeared in... other... fantasy realms. My initial impressions are quite positive for a game where you play as the bad guy. At least I didn't hang anyone as a scare crow... yet.

The same things that make the game fun, however, are also where I'd be concerned of missing depth. The meat of the game was basically telling your hordes to go attack one thing or another, then wait for them to return with treasures and other loot, "for the master." It strikes me as having the same depth and involvement as, say, Gauntlet. Now if only there was a way to make a party game of this idea...

Perfect Dark: Zero

Yeah, yeah. Berate me for being a little late to the party... sometime later. I can't help but feel that I've played this game before on an earlier console, as a different spy, only with lower-rez graphics. I'm not bashing Goldeneye at all; far from it, I simply can't help but feel that we should have been able to move on by now. Or, certainly, I was at least hoping that there might be a next-gen feel to this game, and it simply lacks.

One thing that I did note was that this game is very dark and each new room often presents targets in all directions, up high, in corners, in dark-colored clothing, and they pretty much all seem to zero-in on you. As such, I basically swapped to the P90 and never left its aboslutely crucial color-coding secondary option, except to snipe out targets at range with the rifle. I tried the several other weapons that were dropped by the bad guys, but was non-plussed. Least useful, perhaps, was the radar offered by the shotgun, which might have been useful if we'd been talking about close-quarters combat instead of open areas of ambush. Even then, though, the radar seemed calibrated to help spot medium-range combatants, which is an utterly foolish proposition with a close-range weapon. If I had been calling the shots, I would have swapped the secondary abilities of the shotgun and the P90.

This makes me want to play Halo 3 with its superior HUD functionality and better visibility. Avoid PDZ.

Stranglehold

I was surprised by how much fun I had with this game. This is definitely a John Woo game. Once you get used to the slip-and-slides that are set up every 6 inches in the level, you start having a fair amount of fun blowing the nuts out of people while diving off of an elevated beam of scaffolding onto exploding watermelons. Have I mentioned the watermelons yet? They explode with more liquid gore than any hard-core shooter has ever done.

The thing I'm not so keen on is the Unreal engine. Maybe I'm just a bad person, but I just don't think the Unreal engine does that great a job, or at least that the people using the engine (Epic included) don't really know how to make sharp-looking, realistic graphics. They want to do things that no engine in the world can presently do, let alone the Unreal engine.

If that's my biggest complaint, however, then I have to give this game a thumbs-up, because it's still fun run-and-gun action, and nothing wins quite so much as a game that lets you zoom in on a bad guy's balls, pierce them with a slow-motion bullet, and reward the player with a custom animation of the poor shmuck stumbling around for a while before finally falling over.

Well, the bullet-dodging was also pretty cheesy, but I think I can forgive it that.