I played the demo of Skate, the game I didn’t like the first time I glanced at it. My experience went something like this:
- Start game. Do I want to do a tutorial? Sure, sounds good.
- Learn controls. Hey! This actually seems kinda logical.
- Randomly fumble my way through the tutorial stages. The tutorial dude, who from the audio quality appears to be calling me on his cell phone from somewhere on a small island in the Pacific, bids me to perform ‘ollies’ and other bizarrely-named moves I cannot remember. I flail around like a madman. I have no clue why tutorial dude accepts certain moves and not others. His comments are repetitive and make no sense to me. (”Keep that pressed just a bit longer” - dude I hit the ground.)
- I somehow get through this Kafkaesque ordeal to get to the final stage of the tutorial. I have to do 3 precise moves in fifteen seconds. Reading the list of moves takes me about 5 seconds. Remembering what they are, let alone planning how to execute them in the given space and time, then practicing until I get it right, might take, I dunno, more like fifteen minutes.
- After failing twice, I decide I just want to play the demo and free-form around a bit and bring up the main menu.
- “Retry” / “Quit Skate”. What?
- Quit Skate.
- At least a minute of non-skippable video sequence and marketing barf. Are you kidding me? I want my Xbox back!
- I now hate everyone even vaguely associated with this godawful piece of crap (sorry Mark).
The Burnout Paradise demo didn’t go much better. After driving around for 5 to 10 minutes, looking for fun, I realized I had better things to do with my life. Honestly, I don’t get it. Was there a bug in my demo or why were the races and stunts missing? Woo-hoo, drive around and go to gas stations and repair shops. I can do that in real life.
(Editors of game magazines: Contact me for game reviews. I am way more efficient than other reviewers. You won’t regret it.)
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Do a rant on BF:Bad Company… I am loving the game so far but in SP campaign you spawn like in multiplayer. It goes something like this:
• 3 russian tanks vs. me, head to head on a golf course fairway. I somehow manage to destroy 2 of them before some foot soldier takes me out with an RPG. “You have been killed.”, the screen says! Seconds later I am in my spanking brand new tank right where I was blown up only to find that my opponents only consist of 1 badly damaged enemy tank and 1 foot soldier who is still reloading his RPG launcher. It is 1 step away from god mode really.
In Burnout Paradise, it helps if you drive to those places that have funny icons on the map… :)
Gas stations? Repair shops?
They explain everything to me, but not how to actually start the fun? :P
Man, I love Skate so much. Ah well. Different strokes.
Maybe I would love it too IF I COULD GET OUT OF THE TUTORIAL :P
Try the blue icons with white stars, those are race starting points.
I think there’s just one in the demo though…
The platform demo of Burnout Paradise is extremely limited, with about 3 or 4 races / events available. The main idea of the demo is to get a feel for the cars, driving around, jumping, crashing. The events happen at stop lights, but because of the limited score of the demo’s game world, events that finish in places other than the Country Club or the Coastguard HQ can’t be reached and are therefore disabled. I myself was slightly disappointed by the demo, but not disappointed at all with the full game. The full game (just $20!) fills in the gaps nicely - races are entire-city affairs and the new cars that are released occasionally into the streets that you can take down and own are like an IV drip of your favorite addictive substance. -22 (a BP addict)
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[...] Skate and Burnout Paradise, where I respectively got stuck in the tutorial and failed to find the game. [...]
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