Watchmen demo impressions

[Click on the screenshots for a bigger view.]Firstly I am new to Watchmen. I haven't read the graphic novel, but I will someday; I'm not familiar with the characters, but the game lets you play as Rorschach and Nite owl. I haven't watched the movie either and nor have I read the motion comic yet but I intend to check them out soon. So here are my impressions on the Watchmen: The End is nigh demo.

The game uses the "Kapow" engine. I mistook it for the Unreal 3 engine. Hehe. When you get something dark, cinematic with plenty of eye candy, one thinks its Unreal 3 engine. Remember when the Doom 3 engine used to be the talk of the day? Anyway back to topic...

The story in the demo has Rorschach and Nite Owl visiting some prison where the prisoners are wreaking havoc and having a party inside. The cops are fools as always and refuse to cooperate with the vigilantes. Dumbasses...so anyway, the vigilantes land there to help tame the crazy criminals inside. The cops threaten to shoot the vigilantes instead of taking care of the criminals. Man why are cops so stupid? They hardly thank superheroes for helping them bust crime. Instead of thanking them they decide to shoot them down. Wow! What a bunch of incorrigible stupid bums! So the criminals are set free while the cops chicken out, leaving Rorschach and Nite Owl to do the dirty work for them. So you beat up thugs using various combos, move ahead to a new part of an area, more thugs show up, you kick their butt and so on. I played as Rorschach and pretty much had a good time doing so. Didn't feel like trying out Nite Owl.

So the game has you punch, kick, throw enemies (the wiser option). Its fun when the thug you throw falls on the other idiots. Its pretty satisfying. Its also fun when you fling them off and they fall to their deaths. The game has plenty of eye candy and some good physics, but seriously...does a dirty prison actually shine that much? The floor seems to be so shiny that no matter how dirty things get, you can always see the reflections. Shiny floor with reflections lol. That's what eye candy often boasts about. There's also a lock picking mini game in the demo for Rorschach to do which seems pretty easy. Rorschach has a rage meter which increases as he fights enemies and by pressing RT or R1, makes him charge at enemies. Sweet. After you clear out one phase of crazy whackos, you can
wait a bit while you regain your lost health. As a beat em up game, it gets pretty repetitive but hey its fun. I've enjoyed beat em ups since school days. Remember TMNT?

The plot in the demo gets more interesting as you go on and then bang! End of demo. Damn. I look forward to playing the full game.

If you enjoy playing beat em ups, get the Watchmen. Its available for PC, Xbox360 and PS3. Also make sure you have a friend to join you. That makes it more fun. Later.

An old friend arrives...

Tejas, the little kid who used to live next door. The kid who used to love watching cartoons, playing games and showing off his action figures; its been 7 years since I last saw him. He had moved to Mangalore and has come here recently for a brief visit, say 15 days. Its surprising and amusing. You see a little kid and after those many years; you see a grown, or rather,  growing-up version of him. Its an amusing experience - "Aww, the little kid has grown up". Goodbye kiddy days, hello Warcraft.

He has just given his 10th std board exams. Wishes to continue his studies there. Fine by me. Though his other childhood friends wish he'd stay. Can't blame him though. Life's changed for him. A different friend circle, a different phase in life, one must move on. He says it feels like it was yesterday that he lived here. Agreed. I remember the dreamy experience. I always feel that when I go to Mumbai, Tardeo, where we used to live earlier. It feels strange - that world you used to live in moves on and so do the people there. Things change. Its obvious, but it feels strange.

Enough of pondering lol. Tejas is a gamer which is a good thing for me. He has a Logitech Cordless Rumblepad2. Whoa. Doesn't that thing cost around Rs. 3k? Nice toy.

A next door neighbour of mine - a gamer? Too good to be true, but I intend to have fun while it lasts. We play Smash Bros, Soul Calibur 2 and many other games. He loves Warcraft 3, which tends to make me sleepy whenever he starts playing. Ha ha oh well. You can't win em all. Yet I'll beat you in Smash Bros, Mr Ike. Ha ha ha!

Game Set and Match!

The Vishals are back (after a long time and hence this blog post!), but I think I'll also mention what happened yesterday.

I got a call at around 9:30 AM from Kunal saying that if I was free he would come along. I wondered if Kunal would ever come if he didn't have work on the internet. Its always been that way lol. "Hello Abhinav, if you're at home, I'll be coming to your place." In other words it meant: "Hello Abhinav, if you're at home, then I have some work on the internet. My money for the cyber cafe will be saved and after my work's done, let's download some stuff I want. And maybe while that's happening we could watch some WWE videos on youtube? Or let's play Dynasty Warriors 6." How convenient is that!!?!

So in a couple of hours, Halo-man showed up. I was watching some DBZ when he showed up. Wow, he actually watched a bit with me? Knowing him, he's never had the patience to watch anything! I'm talking about dialogues! Skip the dialogues, skip...skip...skip; with the exceptions being love scenes and fighting scenes. Seriously, Kunal! You need to be tied up in a theatre and watch some 'pakao'(boring movie with lots of speech) movie!

My online bud Hoodcom was online, so I asked him to show us his gaming accessories on MSN. I had seen them before. He has a lot of awesome stuff there. But I wanted it to impress Kunal so I asked him to show how he connected his Dreamcast, Gamecube, N64 and PS2 controllers to his PC. Hoodcom happily agreed. Kunals' face was a sight to see!

Then it was time to get to work (yeah, right!). Kunal had brought Ghajini over. He was asking me if I could find a tool that could convert it into DVD format. It was in codec format and wouldn't run on his DVD player. So while searching around, I installed the latest version of DivX. Holy s***! DivX rocks! The video quality you get is so good! Impressive. Its like an HD player. :D

So anyway, while the stuff he wanted was being downloaded, we played Dynasty Warriors 6. Here's an update, Kunal returned Twin Shock back to me. He said he had only wanted to try it for a few days. He also felt that the keyboard owns controllers. N00b!! Well, anyway, good thing I got Twin Shock back. :P He had also cleaned it for me. That was nice of him. Muhahahahaha!

So in DW6, there is this annoying mission where you have to save the refugees from being killed. But how? Its easy to do it for perhaps, during the first half of the mission, but later on, you have to run across the entire map since there will be refugee camps in places all over the map. We just couldn't complete this mission. If its hard in 2p mode, its hell doing it alone. We decided to skip that particular story mode and play a new one. That's how we spent our time.

Coming back to Ghajini, I used this tool called A-one converter (the full name's actually pretty big!). I converted it to DVD format for Kunal. While it was converting, I felt it would be better to watch something rather than playing. "Open Youtube! Watch WWE!" Oh boy, here we go! Hey, I actually enjoyed a few matches, especially since most of the matches had old wrestlers and that took me back to childhood days. Lex Luger, Bret hart, Ultimate Warrior, Yokozuna, Papa Shango, Kamala...lol.

After the file conversion was done (I admire Kunal's patience!), I opened the output folder to check the video. There were 2 DVD video files. Weird. Shouldn't it have been only 1 file? Here, this was part 1 and part 2, and both wouldn't fit on a normal DVD. "Convert it to VCD format now Abhinav". You're killing me!

The Vishals came to the rescue. I was happy and relieved to see them. Now we could actually have some multiplayer fun. Another friend was gonna show up too. While all this happened, I got a call from my sister saying there was this limited scheme offer of getting Rs 900 talktime for only 25 bucks, and valid upto 6 months if you got a Reliance GSM card. The offer was upto 6 PM only and it was 5:30 PM. I was annoyed at first. I mean, my friends are showing up and I have to go out and do this. -_- So I reluctantly left and registered for a new Reliance GSM card.

By the time I got back, Kunal was ready to leave. After he left, I was told he had a nasty virus in his pen drive and the Vishals didn't let him access my PC. Wow good going guys. Lol. We had some bhel and we watched a bit of the third Mummy movie. After that I showed them the Dolphin emulator and showed them Twilight Princess and the Windwaker on it. They were impressed. We played some Mario Tennis. I recorded a match while playing. I'm playing as Mario with the computer partner Pattapatta while Vishal 2 is Wario and Vishal 1 is Waluigi.

Part 1:

Part 2:

That's it for this blog post now. See ya!

Let's rumble!

"If Kunal can fix my gamepad, he can keep it!" Oops! Did I actually say that? Me and my big mouth! Seriously, what was I thinking?

Anyway, here's what had happened. I had taken my Twin Shock controller to a friend's room for some smash bros multiplayer. One of my friends got careless and pulled the wire real hard. Darn it! My controller had this annoying loose connection problem since then. Move the wire a bit, accidently or deliberately and the gamepad would stop responding for 1 second. Finally, Windows stopped detecting it no matter how much I shook the wire! Frustrated, I took Twin Shock to an electrician. I thought he would fix the problem. Hmm not quite...Windows still wouldn't detect it. I had given up hope. Then came Kunal. Kunal told me he had the right equipment that could fix my Twin Shock. I had given up so I told him that if he could fix it he could keep it. He grinned. Uh oh.

A couple of days later I went to his place. Kunal took out his soldering rod and other stuff. I watched in awe as he tinkered around. He is a genius! His parents are very experienced in electrical stuff so I was impressed. Kunal's dad also offered some advice during the post mortem and resurrection period. There was a ray of hope. After plugging the gamepad to his PC, Windows detected it. Alright! Way to go buddy! Uh...now Im supposed to give him my Twin Shock. -_-'

I decided that Kunal could keep Twin Shock as soon as I get another controller. He agreed. He also asked me to keep it reserved for him at my place. (We usually play multiplayer at my place.)

Right, now the hunting would begin. I opened Justdial.com. The site rocks. Search for something and select a city (India only). I got the contact details for Compuciti. I called em up. I had been to the one at MG road so I know they didn't have it. I called up the one at JM road (at least that's what Justdial had said.) The controller was available but they had shifted to a place that seemed pretty far away. So I called the Aundh branch. The one at Aundh had it available. I was about to leave. Oh, what's this? The pups were causing havoc. Some Archie comics were torn apart, 'slaughtered' I'd say! Thanks to my sister for leaving them around carelessly! They had pooped too. Sigh. After cleaning stuff up I quickly left. Had to wait at the bus stop for about half an hour. Finally I was on my way. I felt like listening to some music in the bus so I put on my earphones. No sound was coming from the left earphone. I opened to see that there was no wire there! It was broken. I remember my sister had last used it. Grrr! Well at least the right earphone works, but that still had me grumbling.

Reached Compuciti, Aundh. Went in. Got the controller for 400 bucks. A Dualshock USB clone from SVB. Mission accomplished, I headed home.

I tried Okami, Devil May Cry 4, Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters, Dead or Alive 2 and DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 3 on it. Rocks. Now I look forward to beating Kunal to a pulp in multiplayer. Keyboard owns eh? Now let's see you sing a different tune!

While I was typing this blog post, my very good online friend Hoodcom (we've been buds since 2001) showed me his awesome Sega collection on MSN. Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Sega 32X, Sega CD, Sega Dreamcast. Man, I think the Dreamcast controller's sweet! I would like to try it out someday.

And now to conclude this wonderful blog post, "Kunal, I vil own j00 in Budokai yoooooooooo!"