Friday, December 30, 2005

Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360


While I was at Future Shop, I got to try out their demo Xbox 360 with Call of Duty 2. I only played it for a couple of minutes, but here are my impressions:

The Xbox 360 looks nice. I'm not just talking aesthetically, but the graphics featured in Call of Duty 2 were crisp and it has some great particle effects. Not sure what resoultion it was, but the game was featured on a widescreen high def. TV. My only graphical gripe was that the character models seemed to have a hint of a black line around them, making them look somewhat like comic characters, and this clashed with the desert backdrop.

The sound was turned down, so I couldn't really hear the audio.

Control wise, I honestly don't recall if it was a wireless controller or not (I don't think so), bit overall the controller felt nice. Once I finally get around to getting an Xbox 360, it'll take me a while to get use to the relocation of the White and Black buttons to two shoulder buttons, but that shouldn't be too bad.

The default config for Call of Duty 2 was awful though. They didn't follow the standard (Halo) console FPS controller setup, so clicking the left thumb stick would Zoom instead of Crouch, Crouching was on "B," and clicking the Right Thumbstick would Melee instead of Zooming. Needless to say, I died real quick and for this demo the controls were not re-configurable.

Overall though, my impressions were positive. Not positive enough to want to spend $499.99 on a system for such a limited game selection (Call of Duty 2 in brief was fun, but not that fun), but there's certainly potentional. I do wish they had a Quake 4 demo though.

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