Keepalive: Watchmen, The Maw, Monsters vs. Aliens, Thief: Deadly Shadows

written on Sunday, April 5, 2009

A while back I played some demos and didn't write them up because I was busy with Heart of Evil stuff.

The Watchmen brawler seemed competently done. I didn't really care, though.


The Maw was surprisingly dull. The movie at the end of the demo made it look like there could be fun stuff to do later on, but without anything fun in the demo, I'm skeptical. And the morality of feeding every animal in sight to your gluttonous alien friend / pet was dubious at best.


Monsters vs. Aliens was also competently made and features brawling, shooting, puzzles, and obstacle course segments (pictured). But it's definitely targeted at a younger demographic. My assumption is that it would rock the socks off of elementary school kids.


After wasting some more time killing Templars in Assassin's Creed, I decided to go back to my favorite stealth game, Thief: Deadly Shadows. My understanding is most people prefer the earlier Thief games, but I tried them and didn't enjoy them.

So far I'm not having as much fun as I remember with Thief 3. But the early missions are pretty basic. Maybe I'll remember where the fun is when I've unlocked some abilities.

I'm at least able to say that the graphics tech in the game is just as nice as I remember it. They put a lot of work into making the textures appear to have a lot of detail and depth (using bump mapping, I think). When a guard walks around with a torch, stuff looks good.

(The following images are brightened about 70% for people with darker monitors.)



The way the torchlight hits the stone gives a sense of depth and detail where there aren't many polygons at all. And the mottled light coming in through the fancy windows provides some extra texture.



The effects on the guard with the torch work well. You can see the details on his armor and the folds of his clothes. You can also see the shine of the torchlight reflecting off of his armor. And he casts shadows on himself. You can see where his chest casts a shadow on his free arm, and most of his back leg is totally dark. Modern characters may have higher resolution textures and procedural animation that makes their movements more believable, but for a game that came out before the current generation of consoles, Thief 3's visuals hold up surprisingly well.