At the end of February, Steam had a special where they sold Lost Planet: Extreme Condition for $5. I figured that for $5, I couldn’t go wrong. Ha ha. Boy, I wish I’d bought a couple cartons of Ben & Jerrys instead.
I suppose what I’d expected was a mediocre shooter, maybe something like Prey or Condemned, both of which I disliked. But they had their moments, and would both have been worth the $5 purchase. And Lost Planet is a DirectX10 game, and the only DirectX10 game I’ve played since getting this fancy Vista system is Crysis, which I couldn’t ever even finish playing due to terminal bugginess.
When they said you’d be fighting bugs in this game, I think I mistook their meaning. The game’s first annoyance was that when I looked at the key-mapping screen, I couldn’t use my mouse’s 4 and 5 buttons. Also, you can’t adjust the mouse sensitivity. I decided that at some point, I’d have to go back and use Logitech setpoint to adjust the sensitivity and hack in mouse button functionality like I’d done with Thief: Deadly Shadows.
When the game started, I was treated to a number of cutscenes, the length of which I’ve not seen outside a Final Fantasy title. I’ll admit that here, the DirectX10 showed: the cutscenes were great-looking. But I thought they’d never end. When they did end, I wished they hadn’t. The gameplay has characters moving around like in an early Metal Gear Solid game, except much more slowly. I’d expected a shooter. You can click a button to switch to first person perspective, but as soon as you take one of a number of actions, such as firing your grappling hook, it automatically reverts to third-person perspective. And although the game should know that I’m not using a XBox 360 controller, it still shows me every time I should hit the X or Y button or move a thumbstick.
In truth, the game reminded me of Metal Gear Solid in a few ways, and none of them good. I played MGS2 on the PC, which was until now the worst port of a game I’d ever seen. But I got about 85% of the way through Metal Gear before I had to quit. After an hour with Lost Planet, I realized that there were about a half dozen other games I’d rather be playing. So I tried to quit the game. For ten minutes. From what I can tell, they expect you to power off your XBox 360 to quit the game. Eventually, I tried Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but was having spotty success with it. So I had to use the PC’s power button to turn it off. And I went and played Dead Space instead. When I eventually powered my PC back up, I uninstalled Lost Planet.
