Okay, I played the demo for a couple hours yesterday. I really, really liked it. Here's a few rants and raves:
Rants
The text. I sit about 9 feet away from a 58" display, and I still found myself having to concentrate on reading-as-fast-as-I-could in order to absorb all the dialog. The (dialog) text is definitely a little too small, even on an HDTV. (The text in, say, the vehicle editor is fine.) It's also too close (IMO) to the bottom of the screen. It's well below where most sub-titles are positioned. Worse, some (not all) of the text goes by too quickly. I think all the dialog should have those 'Press A to continue" prompts, although perhaps that won't always be possible. If a character is playing out a little skit, I can see why you wouldn't want to pause them in mid-scene. But most of the time, just pause the dang text. Please.
All the in-jokes are lost on me, since I never played any of the earlier games. But that's my problem, not Rare's. In-jokes are cool in theory. (That wasn't much of a rant. Frankly, I really only had that one...)
Raves
The graphics. Lovely looking, and the performance seemed great. I didn't see any slow down in the water. Maybe I need to find a bigger chunk of water. I only swam in LOG's moat. The art style is a bit wacky, and really busy, but still nice.
The physics. I have no freaking idea what people are complaining about with respect to the controls and vehicle handling. Stuff handled precisely how I expected it to. Cartoon-realistic. It just felt right. Yes, the shopping cart handled like a... shopping cart. It was still perfectly controllable though. It was easy to drive anywhere in town, and the only race I tried (that "Land, Sea but not Air" one) was laughably easy, even in a vehicle shaped like an giant inflatable sea serpent. (Was there another race in there somewhere? Oh yeah, there was that one where you had to drive up onto the wall at one point. It too was super easy.)
The air vehicles were even more awesome, even with the crap parts available in the demo. The helicopter "flight model" is great. Very intuitive and controllable. Of course, this is coming from a guy that probably spent 100 hours flying choppers in "Desert Combat". (An PC mod for Battlefield: 1942.) I can hardly wait to build myself a cartoon Apache. Winged vehicles were also cool. I love that your wheels retract when you get airborne.
The editor. Very nice. Ridiculously easy to use. The only thing that doesn't feel completely comfortable at this point is the use-triggers-to-change-level function. I always hit the wrong trigger. Still, it seems like a good mapping. I just need to commit it to muscle memory. The only confusion I recall having was when I was done editing and wanted to get back out to the "shop menu". The way I ended up doing it was to hit B to get into the parts-store mode, and then hit B again to exit all the way out. This was non-intuitive. Is there a more direct way?
Random thoughts
The only challenge that I tried but didn't easily "beat" was the eyeball one. No problem, I just need to build a better vehicle, or just develop some skillz. I wonder if this would work:
Build a vehicle with a big honking box on the front. A fort, basically. Position the box so it surrounds one of the eyes. Hop out and go defend the other eye on foot. Extra points if you make it so the "fort" can be detached from the vehicle. (Leaving you in some sort of tank-like chassis.) Even more extra points if the fort section is itself armed, and those weapons can be fired remotely.
That's probably too complicated for its own good. But it's still fun to think about....
