After weeks of waiting, the double pack eventually arrived from Japan.
After about two and a half hours on it tonight, I feel that it's definitely worth the wait. Obviously it's difficult to work out the menus and weapons screens from the Japanese text, but a hardened EDF veteran can navigate the number clues with some ease.
There's the opportunity to invert the controls, adjust the control movement sensitivity, and the usual sound settings. There appears to be three or four control settings, and on the advice of VP I switched to setting A immediately.
This attached left/right strafing to the thumb stick, and crosshair buttons to the four face buttons. Triangle = up, x = down, etc. It sounds cumbersome, but I adapted within a level or two. Jump was assigned to left trigger and fire to right trigger. I could even nail the angled-sideways leap to move quickly after a short time. The only difficulties involved the inability to look up diagonally quickly, with made the flying ant/ufo sections slightly more difficult.
Visually, it's EDF. It's like the ps2 version, but with less detail. The framerate is similar in most areas, but possibly better in others. In other words, it varies between terrible and fine. The textures are a mixed bag - the ants seem more jaggy and certainly have less detail, but the spiders were pretty much indistinguishable from their ps2 counterparts. The draw distance isn't as far as the original, but it's still fine, and the depth-of-field effects remain intact. The levels are all instantly recognisable, and suitably frantic. The sound is spot-on. Voices, effects and music all have that cosy familiarity to them.
I haven't reached any of the extra enemies or levels yet, but we tested out the co-op in the interests of research. It's so easy. VP started a co-op game, and my psp detected it and joined it with absolute ease. It seems that up to four players can join the same level. We worked through to level 17, and it was just like playing on the ps2. We each had our own full screen, with everything running typically EDF. The other player is identified by a health bar on the player's screen. Weapons and armour appear to be handed out equally to both players. The co-op was very impressive - smooth and simple. No drop outs, no skankings. Good stats.
It'll take a while to work out all of the weapons, and thus develop strategies, but this is definitely the new Friday night game.
After about two and a half hours on it tonight, I feel that it's definitely worth the wait. Obviously it's difficult to work out the menus and weapons screens from the Japanese text, but a hardened EDF veteran can navigate the number clues with some ease.
There's the opportunity to invert the controls, adjust the control movement sensitivity, and the usual sound settings. There appears to be three or four control settings, and on the advice of VP I switched to setting A immediately.
This attached left/right strafing to the thumb stick, and crosshair buttons to the four face buttons. Triangle = up, x = down, etc. It sounds cumbersome, but I adapted within a level or two. Jump was assigned to left trigger and fire to right trigger. I could even nail the angled-sideways leap to move quickly after a short time. The only difficulties involved the inability to look up diagonally quickly, with made the flying ant/ufo sections slightly more difficult.
Visually, it's EDF. It's like the ps2 version, but with less detail. The framerate is similar in most areas, but possibly better in others. In other words, it varies between terrible and fine. The textures are a mixed bag - the ants seem more jaggy and certainly have less detail, but the spiders were pretty much indistinguishable from their ps2 counterparts. The draw distance isn't as far as the original, but it's still fine, and the depth-of-field effects remain intact. The levels are all instantly recognisable, and suitably frantic. The sound is spot-on. Voices, effects and music all have that cosy familiarity to them.
I haven't reached any of the extra enemies or levels yet, but we tested out the co-op in the interests of research. It's so easy. VP started a co-op game, and my psp detected it and joined it with absolute ease. It seems that up to four players can join the same level. We worked through to level 17, and it was just like playing on the ps2. We each had our own full screen, with everything running typically EDF. The other player is identified by a health bar on the player's screen. Weapons and armour appear to be handed out equally to both players. The co-op was very impressive - smooth and simple. No drop outs, no skankings. Good stats.
It'll take a while to work out all of the weapons, and thus develop strategies, but this is definitely the new Friday night game.
Comment