What free time I have, I typically spend playing games or watching anime, rather than developing on the game.
Speaking of games, I've been trying Project Gotham Racing 4 for the last week (I bought it together with a wireless steering wheel a while back). The sound track is awesome. The graphics are really nice. The car physics are good. But!
The AI cheats. You'll be driving full speed ahead on a straightway, and it will suddenly decide to zoom past you going 300 miles per hour. And once the AI is ahead of you, there's no catching up, no matter how well you take the corners. This makes for some very frustrating racing.
The controls are sluggish. I haven't used it with the wheel (turns out, I don't like the ergonomics of the Xbox wheel controller); I've used it with the controller, and there is a sluggishness in the controller that is really annoying. To get the vehicle to respond, you have to slam the stick one way or the other. And the dead zone is really big, so fine adjustments really don't work. This means that, when you break in front of a corner, you either will suddenly turn into the guardrail, or overshoot the corner by a fair amount, depending on how the stick chose to respond to your controls. This makes for some very frustrating racing.
Finally, the front end UI sucks. If I select a color scheme for my car, that color scheme is not remembered the next time I start the game. Selecting to re-try a race, versus re-trying at a different difficulty level, versus re-trying a previous or later race, are three different paths through the menu system. And, worst of all, the car selection list is totally unintuitive.
First, there's some wording above the list with an icon of the trigger beside it. It will say something like "(RT) Sorted by performance". Initially, I thought this meant that I should press RT to get the list sorted by performance, but now I think it means that the list is sorted by performance, and I should press RT to switch the list. (Why not the D-pad, like any normal UI?)
Second, in the list sorted by performance, there are initially four cars unlocked, and below them, some locked cars. You would then assume that the list is sorted from least to most performance (putting the locked, higher-performing cars at the bottom). But, no, that's not how it's actually sorted -- it's sorted with the highest performing car at the top. And while there are some metters for "speed" and "acceleration" and whatnot, those don't give enough information to understand how the car will perform -- what's wrong with real numbers?
This makes for some pretty frustrating racing.
So, all in all, not a great game.
Yesterday, I got a copy of GTA IV, which so far is very nice. Although the whole Serbs-as-bad-guys theme is a little tired, given how their regime acted in Europe, it's not particularly surprising. This game, too, has some problems, though. The handling of the default car ("Roman's taxi") sucks -- get a new car ASAP :-) (Although the missions will re-set the car to the taxi every so often). The game will hang my newly replaced Xbox 360 every once in a while, which means I lose progress. And the only way of saving will also advance time in the game, which is idiotic, because I can't dedicate very long times in a row to gaming, and need to do it in sessions.
But, all in all, GTA IV a great implementation. Liberty City is amazing in its detail, extent and variety. The character animation is also very well done, not very stilted or stiff at all (which is rare!)
9 years left :) hehe..