Woohoo for SoE stepping up to the plate and converting this and releasing it first. Just played about an hour. I was going to do a thread but there's one right here, so I thought I'd take the novel approach and just add to this one.
Graphically it is lovely. All sparkly and bright. Although in the pre-event donut close-up I get this weird, I'd wouldn't say artifacting but is similar, like a bastard offspring of artifcating and aliasing. I suspect if I hooked my Xbox up with a scart cable it'd improve. Actually racing is fine. And so far I've noticed one tiny little instance of miniscule slowdown, but then there were about 20 buses on screen at the same time.
Enough with graphics gameplay. Lovely, lovely gameplay. I had two attempts at the arcade mode, one I took the hard fork first (it kinda crept up on me so I wasn't ready), and only managed up to 97% of the third stage. Second time took the easy fork all the way through and completed it. Also did an easy fork run through Heart Attack mode, got a C
.
While I do like the drifting, I have to wonder how it'll go over with casual gamers, because it's kinda weird, not really like drifting you see elsewhere. It's special OR2 drifting. It can take some getting used to even doing, let alone getting the technique down.
Mission mode is probably the meat of the game, and so far I'm liking the idea. Don't know how varied it'll be but I haven't felt like I'm just repeating myself yet (two stages in albeit). The mode is divided into stages and each stage contains 6 missions (so far), which can be attempted in any order. The stage select is layed-out like the map screen. Completing a stage unlocks the next one, and I think, although I'm not far enough to confirm it, that it'll unlock both stages it branches off to. Basically it's like this. You start on stage 0, and finishing that unlocks stage 1 which is like the opening beach section of the normal races. Now I think when you beat stage 1 it'll unlock both stages 2 and 3.
The missions so far that I've tried have been drifting, cones (knock down blue ones avoid yellow ones), convoy (you start with 100 hearts hitting stuff knocks hearts off, timer counts down and there's an unusually high amount of traffic - this incidentally is where the slowdown was), knockout (race against 5 opponents, last place at the checkpoint is eliminated), a single race and driving within certain colour patches on the road, in stage 0.
Of Stage 1, I 've done one where like the heart attack mode there are a variety of missions within a race (drifting, cones, etc.), high speed (where you've got to keep your speed above a certain level for certain section of the track), maths (you are given a number then periodically along the track you're told to +/- numbers - I think divide and mulitple will come later as well - at the divide each route is assigned a number and you choose the right answer based on your calculations) and love courier (lines of 5 hearts are followed by a love zone, you have to drive through as many hearts as possible and then into the zone to deliver them, then into the next line of hearts and so on). The latter two (maths and love courier) are probably my favourite of the bunch so far.
All in all I very impressed after an hours play. It's definitely given me the incentive to get Live. The 2 month free trial should cover Halo2 launch (I pre-ordered my LE set as well today). Hopefully I'll get a chance to play against some of you lot.
