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In a city where information is heavily monitored, agile couriers called Runners transport sensitive data away from prying eyes. In this seemingly utopian paradise, a crime has been committed and now you are being hunted. You are a Runner called Faith - and this innovative first-person action-adventure is your story. This is not exactly a review, but rather a ramble. I'm about to give thumbs up for this game anyway The crown jewel of Sweden's game development industry have been DICE for the last eon or so... I first encountered DICE in their wonderful pinball games that I played like a madman. However, slowly but surely, the soul disappeared from their games and as many other Swedish made games they tasted of dust and mud. I've always been a candy man myself That's until Mirror's Edge! The game has got some critique for being too linear, and I think they could have made the ingame graphics even more stylized. But hell, finally something that resembles a game! Thumbs up for this one DICE! P.S. |
Submitted by hObbE
Tue, 11/18/2008 - 21:47
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As a Swede I'm of course not shy of bashing our gaming industry 
, if you can call some 1000(?) people an industry. Swedish gaming industry is quite bleh, pumping out over engineered, technically advanced but alas no fun games (contrary to Swedish indies, with Nifflas and Cactus as examples).
I've only briefly tried the XBox360 demo version, but hooraaah, finally a GAME from DICE! I think it's great that they have been able to break free from the Battlefield franchise and make something that actually stands out both in terms of game play, and art direction.
Tech details
As a former DICE employee, I'm totally into bashing them
I will however admit that I think this game will be worth buying; also looking forward to the PC release.
For you software-heads out there, I don't know if you know that this game uses Unreal Engine 3 and NOT DICE own superfreaky FrostBite. The scoop is that they tried to use FrostBite but quickly gave up and switched to UE3 with really good results and dev-speed.
I can't help but chuckle
/johno
"you can't stop the change"
That's actually a bit fun
That's actually a bit fun
The all new FrostBite engine was/is all the rave in Swedish gaming press. You just have to say the word "game engine" to Swedish gaming media and they will be drooling...
Anyway, so much for Swedish Engineering
, Germans win... again...
Speaking about middle ware
Speaking about middle ware it seems as Mirror's Edge uses NVidia PhysX. So no Swedish engineering on the physics either
hi hi hi
Seems as the PC version is scheduled for January and that it will take "additional advantage" of the PhysX api, to include realistic effects from wind, weapons impact, and in-game movements.
Totally worth waiting for... must have realistic wind... must... wait a minute... if I wanted that I could just go outside in the blistering cold wind... hmmmm...
To all you bashers and ravers out there...
Isn't Battlefield Heroes gamish enough for your indie flavoured taste? Happy faces, bright colors and a sky that is ripped straight from My Neighbour Totoro. Candybars for everyone!
http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/
Trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYQP-uBijWg
No mud or dust anywhere in sight. The industry is changing boys and girls...
Yep, I think it looks great,
Yep, I think it looks great, looking forward to it
/johno
"you can't stop the change"
OOhhhhh! Gief that! Or...
OOhhhhh! Gief that! Or... then I got to go buy myself a new computer. Hm hm. Gonna be an expensive game for me then
______________________________________________
"The time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time"
Hasn't this game been
Hasn't this game been announced a loong time ago? I remember reading about it in some PC Gamer April 2008... and still no playable stuff?
Oh my... maybe it's yet more vaporware
Anyway though it looks gamish it also feels like a Team Fortress 2 ripoff... at least stylewise... so I'm not that exited
especially since TF2 rules in gameplay and leveldesign 
I think dice needs to do better (and mirrors edge is definitely better), though releasing for free is cool.
For a hands on experience
For a hands on experience I'm getting you beta keys for this "vaporware". The keys will be sent out when the Beta opens up again.
And most likely both TF2 and Heroes were inspired by the art design from The Incredibles.
mmmh secret beta key gimme
mmmh secret beta key
gimme gimme gimme
Ahh yes, the Incredibles, good movie.
BattleField Heroes Beta keys
Yay, I just got my beta keys, so I'll check this out soon and tell you what I think!
Weeeeh... secret beta program here I come... sign up seems to be a bitch though:
"To access the Battlefield Heroes Beta site you need a 'Security Layer' login." and then I need to go get me an EA account
If the game is supposed to be free... why not release it from the start...
Haven't actually played yet...
But I registered (a pain) installed a browser plugin (felt evil), downloaded the game, had to update my account, started the game, and was kicked out because of a server error
Will try more later.
/johno
"you can't stop the change"
Swedish game engineering
Swedish game engineering *lol*
Ok trying again...
There is significant crap...
I had all the plugins and stuff installed since last time.
The website is quite heavy, and I had to login twice with different logins (once for the site, once after I clicked on 'play now'). After that, I actually had to reload the page and press 'play now' again.
Being an impatient gamer, I sort of ignored the web portion of all this, to my detriment, because once in the game, I had no heros to choose from (of course) and had to use the web thingy to do that. Pressing the wrong buttons in the game caused it to hang, so I had to taskmanager-kill it.
Trying again...
/johno
"you can't stop the change"
My two cents
The game itself looks nice, again, similar to Team Fortress 2, but I personally think that there are too few games in that vein so I'm all for it.
There are some issues with switching between fullscreen and windowed mode, which the game seems to want to do so that the menu part of the actual app feels more "webby". All in all that is kind of jarring.
The whole flow of the matches is very typical to BF games, nothing new there. The post match scoreboard is completely dead and irritating; no interaction there at all, and the game feels frozen.
Of course, this is a beta, but I really think that they could have integrated things more tightly into the game. Since this is an exe I don't really see the point of launching via the browser; maybe they haven't thought the whole update thing thru or think that they need web tech more than they do...
...or probably the game doesn't grok HTTP
All in all I have to say that the hUb works better than this.
/johno
"you can't stop the change"
Sounds bad But cool that we
Sounds bad
But cool that we have the combined efforts of EA and DICE beaten in hUb 
I'll have a go at it this afternoon, but reading your post it seems as it will take quite some time to get into the actual game
Mirror's Edge PC
Back to ME...
I bought the game for PC via a contact at DICE, significantly reducing the price from 699SEK to 100SEK. Yay EA employee benefits!
First off I was REALLY disappointed, because after installing the game (and the patch) the game crashed no matter what before the main menu
Being a game developer I started speculating and trying different things, including reinstalling everything GPU related, updating .NET, etc, etc.
After finally giving up and uninstalling the whole thing, I found a post relating to "turn of multisamplingx2 in the Unreal Engine config file if you have a GeForce series 7 GPU", which I do...
...so I reinstalled, and tried it again, and it worked (I didn't mess with the config file, but I can confirm that the value for multisampling is now 1 instead of 2. My contact at DICE speculated that the problem was actually installing the patch before running the game, and gosh, why would anyone who buys the game late ever do something like that!?!?!?!?
Well, now I've played it a bit (but haven't dared install the patch) and I have to say that it is a very bold move by DICE, and I really like what they are trying to do. I'm a big fan of Prince of Persia : Sands of Time, and this feels a lot like that. I'm also a big fan of radiosity lighting - the game looks wonderful, and the art direction is really good.
I can't really say whether or not the game is worth 699SEK, but I'm liking what I've seen so far (a few levels). Pity there is no PC-demo...
/johno
"you can't stop the change"
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