First of all, I want to add an addendum to my last blog entry. First, I tried a bit of the Halo Wars campaign, at least the part of which is available via the demo. It seems alright. To be honest, the more I think about it the more I realise the campaigns aren't what I love about RTS games. I'm more into creating and playing different skirmishes, scenarios and random maps. I played a couple more since my last entry. It seems to have a strange difficulty setting; I played one game as the UNSC where I totally got my ass handed to me by the Covenant, but then today I play again and just destroy the Covenant. I don't think I did that much different this time, and looking at the map after the fact the Covenant hadn't taken over their adjacent second base; it was just there, lying empty. So I'm wandering if this is stuff that'll be in the final game, or some stuff that'll get patched when the game comes out, or it's just in there by design to make the games different. We shall see.

Secondly, since I've been talking about and thinking about Age of Empires II recently, I had a look through my old PC game collection. When I say old, I mean really old. Like, still sold in CD cases rather than boxes. And once I had pushed aside my old burnt out copies of SimCity 2000 and RollerCoasterTycoon, I found my copy of AoEII. Sadly, my Conquerors Expansion case contained no CD. Still, I decided to see what was what. I installed the game on our home computer which still runs XP, and got it to load super fast, and played a map. And I got owned. I think maybe the AI teamed up to kill me, though, as I was playing with more than one AI opponent. Still, I had fun. It looks crappy by today's standards, but seems to run ok, and obviously has a huge nostalgia factor for me. It's insane to think that this game is 10 years old already. I was 9 when this game was released. That is madness. Anyway, I think I'll play more AoE in the next couple of weeks, at least until Halo Wars comes out. It could be a really fun diversion; I enjoyed sitting at my computer playing a game again, since I've pretty much been all consoles since I got my 360, and I really enjoyed being able to listen to my music while playing a good old strategy game. It was a lot of fun.

And so recently I placed a couple of Amazon orders. One was a pre-order for the standard edition of Halo Wars, and the other was for the Age of Empires II Gold Edition, which has the advantage of replacing my hella old AoK disc, and will replace my lost Conquerors Expansion disc. I really feel like Conquerors Expansion is really what brought that game to life, and the original feels a little hollow and empty without it. It wasn't so much the new civilisations because they were cool (even though my three favourite civs were Britons, Byzantines and Chinese, all of whom were in the original game), but the little game tweeks, raised population limit and extra map options really enhanced the game, so much so that now without the expansion, it doesn't feel right anymore.

So now onto a fresh topic, although I may have some extra AoE and HW thoughts in the coming weeks. But now I want to talk about a game that I recently rented online and have been playing a bit of; Mirror's Edge. And I guess the first thing I should say is that I've had this game on rental for a week, haven't finished it, and am thinking about sending it back unfinished.

Mirror's Edge is a game with a lot of problems. The combat seems like a good place to start, and then there's the leap-of-faith gameplay, and some fairly obnoxious level design, and some of the clipping and physics issues, and the lame story. But you know what the worst thing about Mirror's Edge was? It could have been an awesome game. I'm not sold on the first person parkour idea being broken, I just think that if DICE were to make a sequal some things would have to be addressed. By far the most impressive thing about Mirror's Edge is just how well it looks. Faith and the world in which she inhabits are both extremely well designed aesthetically, and the usage of colour and light affects throughout really make a good impression. It may have the best artistic design of any game I've played since Eternal Sonata.

The other big thing that Mirror's Edge has going for it is that a lot of the time the parkour works well. During the moments when you have to leap across rooftops to get to your next objective, the game is at it's best, as it is a lot of fun to just run around looking for the next route and just admiring the visuals. The problem is, too often the game takes you into an inclosed environment giving you limited freedom of movements, or throws at you a number of obnixously difficult enemy soldiers who you can't run past, or has a jumping puzzle that is crippled by weak physics. I don't think I've ever seen a game be so good at doing one thing and so appalling at another. It's amazing that no one at DICE just looked at the game and suggest it be made an open world game, or an Assassin's Creed clone, because then we would have had a much better game, in my opinion.

So Mirror's Edge failure is a heartbreaking one, as it was a game that had a lot going for it before it started falling off a cliff. However I agree with Ryan when he says that given a chance at a Mirror's Edge 2, DICE could make a good game from this template. But that doesn't give me any more desire to finish Mirror's Edge, because it's so stodgy and frustrating to try and get through, and the visual style and parkour sequences aren't enough to make up for these crippling flaws. In short, everything I read about Mirror's Edge when it came out is true. I tried to like it, I really did, and I was very impressed by the demo, but the actual game just cannot live up to the bargain. I found Mirror's Edge to be one of the biggest disappointments of 2008, and am glad that I rented it rather than bought it. That being said, were DICE to make a new game and address some of the game's key flaws, I would give the world of Mirror's Edge a second chance, because I liked enough about it to come back for more.