It's available now for 8 euro (or 10 dollar?) at Desura.com for PC & Mac. I've played it up until level 2.7 and the family of blocks expands even more than what we've seen in the QL. Also physics and water come into play later on, making it a little bit more difficult every level. I really like the atmosphere, music and narration. And the fact that you're actually starting to care for a couple of blocks is kinda funny.
Really loved the first LOS; great atmosphere, fantastic level design, beautiful soundtrack and interesting story with great ending. I only found the game to be a little bit too long, 2-3 hours shorter would have been perfect for my taste.
I also never played any of the earlier Castlevania games, perhaps that helps in appreciating the game more than those familiar with the original Castlevania games. I remember Vinny talking about this game in a podcast, it was in his backlog but don't know if he actually played the game. I think he'd really like it.
My overall experience is that ME3 doesn't look as polished as ME2 does. Especially the thirst half of the missions all look like they rushed the level-design and cutscene animation. Compare that to the ME2 Shadowbroker DLC; that is one good looking expansion with a lot of detail in every scene. The difference with ME3 is pretty large. Although I have to admit the filmgrain in ME1 and ME2 covers a lot of these shortcomings. Also the framerate in ME3 seems worse.
Still a very good game, just not as good as ME2 imo.
Let me put is this way; Scott will make both a PG-13 and R rated version, but 20th Century Fox has the final decision. Looking at other 20CF movies I would be surprised if they'd prefer the R-rated version over the PG-13 one. Good thing is we'll see an R-rated version on Blu-Ray anyway, so I can live with that.
The budget for this movie is reported to be $160 million, but Scott originally requested a budget of $250 million and an R rating. Apparently Scott will also release an R rated version, but the version in the cinemas will be PG-13. There's also a 2nd viral released last weekend together with the full trailer:
The 720p version is an improvement over the 360p but, as Dave and Vinny already stated in the last WM Radio Show, the bitrate and overall quality is still lower compared to the HD videos on the site.
@gpbmike: 1 or 2 minute trailers usually play fine but if its longer it can still stop playing after 2 or 3 minutes. I'm in the HTML5 Youtube trial and I can play the videos fullscreen there without any issues. Same goes for the Vimeo HTML5 player. No issues there either.
It's a weird issue, you'd think more Safari users have this problem so i'm wondering if it's something on my system. Did some more troubleshooting and found a workaround that works for me for now: When i run Safari in 32-bit mode the HTML5 videos run perfect in fullscreen. I'm 30 minutes in the FusionGenesis QL now and it works great :)
@gpbmike: Ok, I tried that. When I download the video first and open it with e.g. Quicktime it plays fine. When I click on the HD download button, it opens the video in the browser and after going to fullscreen it stopped playing after approx. 2 minutes. The fullscreen button also doesn't work anymore after that. If I leave it on the default size however (so no fullscreen) it plays the entire video without issues.
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