Bioshock still sits there on the shelf, unopened, taunting me. Next week is the big move, after which I will happily delve into the watery depths.

In the meantime, I shall occupy my  free moments with other games. Two Worlds is not one of these titles. A few people asked me to elaborate on what I disliked about the game. I can do this.

First off, character customization is on the weak side. It’s there, you can edit, eyes, nose, mouth, etc, but really no matter what you do, you end up with the exact same character you started with. They could have just had skin and hair color options and achieved the exact same level of diversity. But this was tolerable.

Then there’s the voice acting. Everyone in Two Worlds emphasizes the most oddball words in sentences, so THEY all start SOUNDING like THIS. Forsooth, there is also an unnecessary amount of “Ye Olde English” in the dialogue. Again, not a huge deal, because you can turn the voices off and just read the subtitles. Tolerable.

The largest problem (for me) came from the fact that the game hitched every 3-4 seconds. I could not spin my character in a full circle without the game hiccuping for half a second. And this is a console game. And the graphics aren’t even very good.

Now, apparently there are certain methods you can use to improve the framerate of the game. I’m no stranger to .ini files, but I don’t want to have to mess with that stuff for a console game. And I don’t want to have to make poor graphics look worse just to get smooth gameplay.

All in all it’s unfortunate, because aside from repetitive one-button combat, and the fact that you can’t choose who you want to target (the game auto-targets a random enemy), which is especially frustrating when using ranged fire (you just have to start shooting until you get lucky), I’ve heard the story-line in the game is actually fairly decent. But there’s just too much junk to wade through to experience it.

On a side note, and because I really disliked Oblivion’s “all the monsters scale to your level, so you never feel like you’re getting more powerful” mechanic, I found it amusing that they put really powerful creatures in the “newbie” area of the game.

“Ahh, I’ve arrived. Now, where do I go for a ques– AAUUUGH A BEAR!”

I played a bit of Metroid Prime 3, and so far I like it. If Twilight Princess is any indication, you can expect to hear me say that I’ve picked it up with an intention to beat it sometime next year.

Tiger Woods 08 is promising though. Hopefully the massive load on the EA servers from everyone trying to upload/download their Gamerface pics will ease up in the next week or so.