Be Excellent To Each Other

Has anyone heard of this, or got it? There is a video of it on the dashboard right now. It has a current score of 83 on metacritic and sounds really interesting. It appears to be quite a short game but sounds lovely, with gorgeous looking visuals and music.
Thinking we might get it tomorrow so I'll report back with thoughts.
It can be played without Kinect but I don't know how much of a difference it makes.

I have it.

It's beyond awesome with kinect. However it makes my elbow hurt. However I am TEH OLDS so you may not experience such discomfort.

I will write more in depth words on the subject tomorrow as am in pub right now.

Brilliant, can't wait to hear what you think. That seals it then, I'll send the Wife girlfriend out to get it tomorrow.

Squid has been gushing excitedly over this recently, although I'm not sure how much of it he has got round to playing because he went to Amsterdam at an inopportune moment. I'm sure he'll be in here to paint you a lurid picture of all its pros and cons in his usual vividly obscene language when he returns

Does it come with a Trance Vibrator?

You've played Rez, right? Tell me you have. Please.

Yeah, get REZ HD, Gilly if you haven't already. It's on Live Arcade.

Oops.

Anyway,
This game is brilliant. You use your right hand to target enemies and destroy them by flicking your hand once they're tagged. You can also shoot a less powerful laser with your left hand which is more suitable for some enemies and collectables. Aiming at, and shooting particular enemies, makes different sounds to go with the music and the music gets more pumped up as the level goes on so that by about halfway through you're practically dancing and your hand flicks are getting more and more graceful and artistic, with you busting out spirals and figure of eights all over the shop.
It looks lovely, so much so that I'm happy to sit and watch when Jen is having a turn. It would be great to play when high, if you were into that sort of thing.
It's quite hard, I would be surprised if you managed to beat the first level without dying which means that the tutorial message will annoy you as they pop up every time you have to restart. They stop once you're past that stage, but it would be better if you could switch them off. I'm not saying you can't, but I couldn't find the option if it exists.
Overall, really pleased with it so far and it certainly looks like a game I'll be trying to get any and all visitors to the house to play.

/delurk

Hello!

It depresses me no end to see something as excellent as Child of Eden get bought by about 10 people, while festering piles of shit like Duke Nukem Forever get bought by the bucketload in the same week.

Well, I hope they're HAPPY. I hope DNF is EVERYTHING THEY EXPECTED.

Sadly, apparently, it appears most gullible, idiot gamers believe Eden is Kinect only, or something.

Bollocks to Kinect, I say. I'm fat... and unfit... and unwilling to waggle my hands about in the name of entertainment. The best way to play this game is sat in a very comfy chair with a standard controller, while 3 other connected controllers are strategically placed, vibrating your special bits.

Heh, brilliant!
I hadn't even heard of this game 'til yesterday, when my girlfriend mentioned it after seeing a video on the dashboard. It really is good though so I'd encourage those without Kinect to have a go as well!
It's also the first game I've ever thought I'd enjoy in 3D...if we ever got proper 'things floating about around you' 3D, this would be the Best Game Ever.

Aha! I was waiting for comments about how good it was sans kinect (as I don't have one) - pretty certain I'll pick it up next pay check...

If you've played Rez with a "trance vibrator", or more importantly Rez HD, which gave the added option to use one controller to play, and another 3 to vibrate yer bits, Eden is more of the same, with really, really lovely graphics.

Uncle Mentuss!

If it makes you feel better I'm a zillion times more interested in Child of Eden, but I am slightly dubious of paying top whack for a very short game. I'm not a time attack sort of dude, so I think I'll wait for it to get a bit cheaper. And this might be controversial, but has anyone tried the PS3 Move version yet?

Glykwbjwbwbdsnyjnnfwnnfsmmymsdwr!



If you ask me, people have got too complacent over getting eleventy billion hours of gameplay for 40 quid, but then again, I'll always be an arcade gamer at heart, and will gravitate towards any game that keeps that spirit alive.

I'm not going to go into how much money I've spent buying multiple copies of Outrun (I have a bit of a collection of different ports - it's a "special" game to me) - and the average game of that lasts 5 whole minutes.

It's a timed 360 exclusive, I think -- no sign of the PS3 version until August.

For the tl;dr crowd – it’s pretty much Rez but much prettier with ostensibly worse music.

Please be aware that the following point may colour my subsequent appreciation of Child of Eden - I fucking love Rez me. Rez is one of the few games I will always go back to. I don’t do it regularly like, every 6 months or anything but I will fire it up every so often and generally drink it in again rather than ‘play’ it. I was certainly one of those people that “got” Rez.

So bearing in mind the above – I fucking love Child of Eden me.

Further caveat - I’ve only played it with the Kinect controls so far so cannot comment on how it plays with a normal controller but would imagine it’s like playing a driving game with a joypad rather than a wheel. (well for me anyway – I get slower times with a wheel but it’s just so much more fun, you know, but the joypad is perfectly acceptable and probably more accurate)

When you’re playing with Kinect it’s not a game that you can sit on your sofa and flap your arms about to play. You need to stand up in front of the screen and already this act brings you closer to the gameworld. Now this may be because I have spent some time with the Kinect ID system but each time I have stood at the menu screen it picks me up almost instantly, recognises me and loads my profile without me having to do anything other than show it my ugly mug. Moving your left or right arm around guides a blue pointer around the menu which is responsive and intuitive and with that small piece of finely honed interface design you’re not yearning for the comfort of an analogue stick and some cold plastic buttons.*

You get straight into the first level and a quick tutorial informs you that you can paint targets with your right hand (like Rez up to 8 at a time) and then fire by essentially throwing Blinking Powder at the screen. (For those not familiar with the ancient tradition of Blinking Powder; clench your fist, approach an unsuspecting mark and ask them what they think you have in your hand, they will either respond with a guess or that they don’t know at which point you thrust your hand towards them and open your hand yelling “BLINKING POWDER” into their face. This will inevitably make them blink and hours of hilarity will then ensue.) If you paint 8 targets at once and then fire in time with the music you receive a “Perfect” notifier and a score multiplier which increases with each successive “Perfect”. The left hand is used to fire constant stream of purple bullets which are much less powerful than your other shots but are the only means of shooting down enemy bullets and some targets.

The game leads you in very gently to these concepts but does expect you to work out the best strategies yourself without signposting which weapon is best for which situation. You can raise both of your arms at the same time to launch “Euphoria” which is effectively a smart bomb but in reality you want to be storing them up to get the best scores at the end of the level. The Eurogamer review stated that for him the act of initiating “Euphoria” caused his camera to go all squirrely. I suspect he wasn’t really getting into it as providing you quickly pop your hands up and back down the camera stays on track and stuff just gets splattered around you. I have a feeling that judicious use of Euphoria may be the only way to get 100% on each level unless you have some kind of Ikaruga-esque memory skills as to enemy movement and spawn patterns.

Once you are in the game proper it wastes very little time in assaulting your senses with a musical and visual deluge than washes over you at first as you simply gawp at the majesty of what has sprung forth. Once you catch your breath and start surfing the deluge you begin conducting your own merry tune with gracious arcs of your arms and the rest of your body starts moving unconsciously in time with the music. Your arms take the most graceful path to target enemies and they seem to spawn on screen in such a way that you’re never jerking from side to side but performing some kind of gaming induced Tai Chi to the game’s splendid soundtrack. Speaking of which the music is, upon first hearing it, cheesier and doesn’t seem as dominating as it did in Rez. This is primarily because the visuals are such that they tend to grab your focus but then you begin to realise that the music is much less austere and impersonal than Rez because it needs to be. This is Lumi’s personal journey through a more organic structure than Rez so the vocals and the snapshots of Lumi throughout pull you even further into the experience to which you are constantly contributing with your shots. Like Rez each of your shots, when painting or hitting, emits a note or beat which merges effortlessly into the soundtrack and yet you sometimes find yourself using the left hand rapid fire shot just to add a rapid drum beat or crescendo of chimes because it feels right, not because it’s the most effective weapon for the job.

I managed to make it to the 5th level with only one death and that was because I was too busy enjoying myself rather than playing it “properly” so It’s certainly not a “long” game. It is however going to be played for a very, very long time in my house.

I could write so much more on it but this is already far too long (sorry).

Overall Review Score 3578/10

*Kinect Sports has the most convoluted menu system going and it takes ages to register a selection – the sports themselves are pretty good but actually getting to the point where you can play them has you resenting motion control before you even start

I agree with all of that, including the bit about shotting with the less effective weapon just because you have forgotten you're playing a game and you're dancing too much.

I think I'll buy this as I loved Rez (I even have a cat named after it), our room is the wrong shape for Kinect though so it'll be joypad for me.

I will be buying this, but when it gets cheap. Which it will. Relatively soon I would imagine, as it has no cute puppies in it to stroke....

It's next on my Lovefilm rental list. Glad to hear you don't need to play it with Jazz hands.

I was going to make a thread about this last week but anyway...



It's Rez but much prettier. The bigger price tag makes it seem shorter with five main levels (each being overly long at ten minutes each) and a ten-part bonus level which seems impossibly difficult at the moment.

The main game is really easy (on Normal difficulty). I'm playing sans-Kinect but apparently normal controls are where it's at for the big scores anyway. There is a hard difficulty mode, I waltzed right up to level three's boss on it but then came a cropper. He's a cunt on Hard.

Downsides to it:

The levels are less memorable, with less of a travelling feeling and too many bosses. There's certainly nothing as iconic as Rez's final level on offer.

The music (and ending) are horrible. Trance meets J-Pop. It's all too summery and Japanese for my tastes and Lumi mugging to the cameras all the time gets tedious.

The achievements are 50/50 in terms of good and bollocksly difficult.

The game has a musical element to it - you release your lock-on on the beat for more points - which is fine but the music often doesn't have an easily identifiable beat and the control vibration doesn't emphasise the beat at all. A really stupid mistake.


So, Rez + pretty graphics + rubbish music + dull levels + bigger price tag.

Hmm, well at least I won't have to name a cat after it.

I'll probably buy Kinect at some point when I move to York because we'll (hopefully) have a living room large enough to use it properly, so I was planning on picking this up then.

So fount of good judgement trousers has created confusion in me. As I now want a kinect to play it on.

So... Buy now and play with controller or wait till I can find a cheapo kinect....