Mirror's Edge

Shep wanted to know about Mirror's Edge, so, here we go.

IIIII like it a lot. It's far from perfect, but, I still had a lot of fun with it. It's a refreshing change from all the FPS games.

It's crazy short though. I beat it twice in two days, once on Normal last night and I beat it a little while ago on Hard. The Story Mode, anyway, the Time Trials and Speedruns are a whole other matter entirely.

Some issues with it, though. For one thing, the cutscenes look like butt. I just don't dig the style of animation, it looks cheap and poorly-made, I don't care if it's supposed to be stylized. It looks great when it's still, but as soon as it animated, ew. Looks like one of those crappy cartoons on Adult Swim.

In addition, the controls sometimes just don't work. There's a few instances where you will not be able to figure out why Faith isn't grabbing the fucking ledge. Specific moments where she'll only do what she's supposed to three or four times out of ten. And you won't even know why you can't make it, it just seems random. But there're just a few instances of that, so it's not a huge deal, just worth mentioning.

A couple minor issues: all the white can sometimes blur together and make distinguishing things difficult. That may be just on SDTV's, though, I imagine it's clearer in high definition. And, of course, there are some instances of cheap deaths, but, what platforming game doesn't have those? It's certainly not rampant, just mildly annoying.

Oh, I almost forgot my biggest problem! The load times. When you first start up a level, I don't mind a long load time. And the load time for your last checkpoint after a death is remarkably short, usually. But each chapter has at least two, I think, moments where the game stops and it reads "Loading Level" at the bottom left of the screen. And it'll sit there for a good 10-30 seconds. It's annoying as hell. Maybe this isn't such an issue with the PS3, and won't be for the PC, I don't know. But it's certainly present for the 360 version.

Some good things? The score, I like the music a lot. The voice-acting's good, as well, though the story itself is kind of meh. Not bad, just unsurprising. The gameplay itself is terribly fun, the parkour aspects of it especially, and the gunplay isn't bad. Nothing really broken or poorly-implemented that I found in my two playthroughs.

And there you are, some of my quick thoughts on Mirror's Edge. Final summation: if you have a PS3 or 360, play this game. If you've got a PC, give it a little time, it'll be out in about a month.

I need to stop being gone all day.

So, hey, another long day wherein I wasn't at the computer much. I spent most of the morning clearing out some of the shit off of my computer because I desperately needed more space [which I'll get into later] and then ran the defrag for the main HDD. Whee, so, that kept me from the computer most of the day. Then, I was helping [mostly watching] Tim, the maintenance guy, fix our bathroom floor [which I'll also get into later in this since, like, two of you even know what the fuck I'm talking about XD].

And! I got Mirror's Edge today, squee! (^______^) So terribly excited, and really, really hoping it doesn't turn out to be an awful game. Haven't been able to get into it, being busy all day and such, and I'm putting it off for tonight because I want to try and get to bed early. But, more importantly, I'd much rather talk with what few friends are still online by this point in the day, and if I start playing my new game I'll become engrossed and start unintentionally ignoring them. Not good. But tomorrow, I'm playing the shit out of that game, let me tell you.

So, the bathroom floor. While we were looking over the new place before moving in, the first thing I noticed was that the floor in the bathroom was damaged as hell from water. The toilet was sinking into the floor on the right side and was leaning far enough that it made the tank drain drip by drop and refill itself repeatedly all day long. No fun. Long story short [too late], the front end of the tub, the end with the faucets, had settled into the floor and tilted the wrong way so that instead of the water running to the corner of the tub where it can sit and drain back into the tub and not cause problems it was running to the other edge out on to the floor and soaking into the floor. This probably would not have been such a big deal, but, instead of plywood the floor had been cheaply redone at some point and they used OSB [Sterling board] which acts like a sponge as soon as it gets wet, apparently. So, instead of the water drying up, it was trapped in the OSB and just causing as much water damage as it could. But, anyway, replaced the floor where it was damaged, and now my toilet is level! And, we replaced the toilet seat, which bit me a couple times, so, yeah! No more bitey toilet seat!

Okay, the space issue on my computer is next. As I was looking through my music files today, deciding what could go and what I really didn't want to ever delete,I came to the realization that my packrat tendencies extend to the internet. Specifically when it comes to downloading music. It's far too easy to find and download an entire discography of a band via torrents. XD So, I'd hear a song I like, look 'em up, then download their entire discography and keep it around. Maybe listen to it once. As you can imagine, it put quite a strain, especially since this computer's shit and does not have very large HDDs. A short explanation for that one.

So, to conclude this, I'm going to try and post here more often and treat it like an actual blog. The reason I don't is because I either can't remember all that happened by the end of a day, don't think it's really worth typing about, or don't have anything worth saying. So, no way in hell is it ever going to be a day-by-day rundown of everything I do, but, I'll try to post the more worthwhile or interesting things instead of never getting around to it. Like the bathroom floor thing, I could have posted about that weeks ago, just, didn't feel like it. Well, no more of that!