Lost Planet play progress update

Peter — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:35:14 GMT

So it's been a few days since my initial impressions of Capcom's Lost Planet. I still haven't tried multiplayer, I finally finished the third level (without beating the worm), and died on the fourth. Overall, I still like the game, although it is definitely getting harder. Here are some more observations, both good and bad.

Lost Planet seems to follow the tradition set by many of Namco's XBLA games - it just doesn't remember where your save is located, even though the only place mine could be is on the hard drive. Yet I have to select it each and every time I load the game! What gives, Capcom (and Namco, and some others)? Is this some sort of API issue (where there is no auto-default-to-the-only-available-location option), or developer laziness, or something else? Seriously, this needs to go away right now! It just really takes away from the overall experience.

I still feel like I am moving around way too slowly, although I did learn that you can perform a dodge by essentially crouching (by pushing the left stick) and using the A button.

The enemy AI is not stellar, with not much teamwork happening, and yet they seem to fight really dirty, with almost every bunch having some guy somewhere high up lobbing rockets at you. On one hand, the rockets - and their smoke contrails - look and sound stunning as they go whooshing by (in my case impacting into me). It's just a very neat effect. On the other, once hit, the again gorgeous smoke and fire graphics totally obscure all of your vision, take away quite a lot of health/energy, and it takes you a while to get back up and recover, all while being vulnerable.

The great graphics also make things tricky whenever you are getting attacked by something massive (very often) and when riding the snowmobile VS (at which point all you see is the snow you kick up) - in both cases making it sort of difficult to see where you are going and what's going on. I'm not sure if I'm actually complaining about excessive realism here.

It's also interesting how Capcom made a lot of achievements optional, but available for perfectionists. For example, you can find and shoot sets of "targets" that spell out a word in at least some levels. You can also either fight or avoid certain enemies like the worm in the third mission and the moth in the fourth. If only I had known that before dying repeatedly and in vain. Oh well, that's what, ahem, "guides" are for.

However, so far I am not sure who wants my character more: Luka or that evil so far unknown chick that almost killed me at the end of mission three in her vastly more maneuverable VS. I'm betting on Luka, fingers crossed.

First impressions: Lost Planet (Xbox 360)

Peter — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 19:01:00 GMT

On Friday night we headed out to Best Buy to pick up a copy of Capcom's Lost Planet (Collector's Edition, of course). As an aside here, I have to rant about the totally broken pre-order process at Best Buy these days. I generally never preorder anything, since Best Buy always has enough copies of most games even after launch day, but sometimes there actually is some sort of tangible bonus for preordering: Gear of War had an extra game case and a T-shirt, and Lost Planet had yet another game case (extras of which really are nice to have), some sort of laser cell something or other, and the download code for the extra multiplayer map for the free demo available at the time. I never ended up playing the multiplayer demo or doing anything with the picture thingy, but hey, free game case!

Anyway, it used to be that when you came to buy a "preordered" game at Best Buy, the cashier would just deduct the deposit, ring you up, and off you go. Apparently that changed sometime last fall, because this was the second time I had to go buy the game at the customer service desk. This time it took me a good 20 minutes to wait in the typical holiday return line (one Xbox 360 Premium was being brought back for some reason, and a returned PS3 was sitting on a shelf) just to buy a game. Oh well, five dollars is five dollars, which I guess is way more than my time is worth to me.

Having said that, I was really pleased with the purchase (also due to the $10 off coupon that I used). The Collector's Edition packaging is very nice. It was already revealed in detail earlier on Brian Dunn's blog, but it really looks good in person. The box is close to a standard-sized DVD case (a little fatter), with the commonly used slide-off sleeve, and a nicely rough metallic box inside. The DVD holding mechanism is solid (if a little stiff), unlike, say, ahem, the Prey Limited Edition metallic box. The little art book isn't as nice as the one that comes with GoW CE, but I like the overall box packaging more - it's just easier to get to the game, the whole thing takes up less space, and things don't slide around in it.

I downloaded the extra multiplayer map from the Marketplace, popped in the game, and was treated to possibly the first zero-day update for an Xbox 360 game (did any other game ever have a patch on the day it came out?). I guess it's good that all the fan feedback made it into a patch so quickly, while at the same time underscoring the time rift between pressing final discs and the game hitting store shelves. You know what though, if developers want to release "beta" demos ahead of time, stress test online play, get people to report bugs, and make improvements without delaying the release date, I'm all for it.

The game itself seems well executed. The first 10 or so minutes are pretty much a long cut scene with a little playable section that doesn't really contribute anything, but gets you used to both on-foot and VS (mech suit) controls. What I found quite remarkable - and I didn't realize it until a little later - was that as I was watching, and playing, and watching some more, there seemed to be hardly any load screens. I guess it's a state sad of game design when I am just used to frequently seeing a (sometimes lengthy) loading screen between every little cut scene and every gameplay section. So far Lost Planet only seems to have very short load screens before each mission, and seemingly none for any of the cinematics. Well done, Capcom!

As far as gameplay goes, the controls take a little getting used to, what with the odd and somewhat slow system of moving your aiming reticule around a bit before the character starts to move to follow it. I may still need to tweak the control settings a little, because as it is, it feels a little sluggish to move around, despite the bumper buttons letting you quickly turn around. Even on my old SD television set, the game looks beautiful. Not quite like GoW, but still very pretty. The odd part is that it looks almost too good in one area - explosions and smoke, which are frequently so "realistic" that you just cannot see past a few feet in front of you. The blowing snow is also good enough to obscure vision at times.

I got through two missions in one sitting, and it was a fun ride. It's nice that you can choose how you tackle the bad guys - get in a VS, remove a weapon from a VS and slowly tote it around on foot, or just run around with the standard weapons. The boss battles at the end of each mission are not too bad (although I thought I wouldn't make it through the first one), but I can see the game ramping up in difficulty later on. Still, I seemed to do a lot better than I did last summer in the singleplayer E3 demo (both segments of which you play through during the first mission). That could be a result of the months of tweaking that Capcom has had since then, or me just sucking at it less. We may never know. At the same time, I totally could not make the jump in the little snowmobile/VS hybrid, and ended up ditching it in the hole in the bridge.

I haven't really gotten into the multiplayer portion yet, so given that I never played the multiplayer demo last year, I expect I'll be pretty bad when I finally hop on. Thus if anyone wants some easy kills, send me an invite.

Bottom line:

Looks really good: yes.
Plays well: generally.
Not hard enough to make me quit: not yet.
Makes me want to continue playing and try to finish the thing: definitely.

Playing on Easy : Lost Planet

Lost Planet play progress update

First impressions: Lost Planet (Xbox 360)