K
knowsleyroader
Guest
As our friend Lloyd would say. Well to a point anyway. The fact was after spending time installing dongle drivers, dongle's, install discs, play discs and then trying to coax our ps2 adapters into life, we didnt get to spend as much time with the game as we would have liked.
Yes we played it. Yes we got a taste of Rl2, but I think its fair to say that RL2 isnt a game you can just pick up for an hour or two and get anywhere near the full picture.
BTW before I go any further I would just like to thank Roger at Alternative for his hospitality. He was great and helped us in any way he possibly could and it was extremely generous of him to invite us down to play the game. Thanks Roger.
So how does the game run on pc ? Well we first saw the game running on a lowly office pc and it was struggling to say the least. It soon perked into life when I whipped out my laptop which is a fair spec for a laptop at least.
AMD 64 3000, 512 ram, Radeon Mobility 64 Meg 9600.
The game ran on 1024x768 with all detail on at about 50 frames per second. Sometimes it dipped a little sometimes it peaked at over 60 frames. The upshot was it was really smooth and you certainly couldnt fault the game on this kind of spec. Make of that what you will.
So you pick it up and you start to play and well for me it felt a little strange. I am still an avid RL1 player on the xbox and I would say that the speed of RL2 has been turned down a notch. To be after playing RL1 constantly since its release it felt a little sluggish but I dont think Lox had any problems with it at all only maybe on defense when you really felt you needed a bit more get up and go.
So maybe the people who still play RL1 will take more time to get to grips with RL2 than people who dont play RL1, maybe it was just me.
Brief impressions :
Its a lot more control - able on attack than RL1 and it takes no effort at all to have your first receiver charge the line from every play the ball. No standing still, they always run onto the ball at a reasonable pace.
Defense I think will take some mastering as I mentioned before its a bit slower than RL1 in my opinion and this means you have to time your defense right or you may over run and then you would have to change player as by the time the player you were controlling changed direction etc the attacker would be well gone.
I think thats a point to make at this stage, RL2 is not a game you can pick up and just have a blast on. Not from first play anyway, once you are well versed yes, but I think there is a definate learning curve here that is maybe missing from games like wcr and rugby 2005. This seems to take some real skill and I could have imagined someone from SIDHE making absolute mincemeat of people on their first plays because of the improvement you would gain from repeated play. This is a good thing on sports games as far as im concerned.
The graphics are fantastic and the kits and grounds look amazing. We also had a couple of rain matches and were I thought it was impossible to play in the rain on RL1, I found it perfectly playable on RL2 so I was really pleased about that.
We didnt play any multiplayer games as numb nuts me forgot to take my pad and we couldnt be bothered going back to the car to pick up Lox's second pad so we just played AI games. The AI was REALLY good and they managed to *FARAH* score some great tries against us even on the easy difficulty setting.
There are some great animations in the game and at one point when a player was ankle tapped it almost looked like he was continuing to crawl along the floor but maybe that was just me. A kick through from the AI sparked Jamie Lyon into life who decided that he would jump up to take the ball rather than just let it come to him and both me and Lox looked at each other as it looked class. Not sure if we did it with a button press of if the AI did it for us though.
Had a quick go of player creation and if lox gets the go ahead to put some footage up ( we have 2.74 gig worth of it ) you would be able to see how it works. Its actually quite nice. I could also tell you how much the most expensive player in the game would theoretically be and the cheapest ... but im not going to tell you
Anyway I cant do the literary classic reviews like lox can ( mainly because I cant be arsed ) and im rambling now.
If you have any specific questions then I or Lox will try to answer them.
An hour or so was no where near enough time on the game and by the time we had had a few games and gone through all the menus it was time to go.
I feel a bit dodgy giving RL2 a score until I have played it properly because it wouldnt be fair. We only scraped the surface of the game and it would take at least a full days play to give a fair rating. At this point I will give it a provisional 7 and adjust my rating when I have played it enough.
Looking forward to release and getting my mits on it. Was well worth the visit to Alternative.
Now just wait for Lox's verdict. ( I am always harsher on games than him )
Yes we played it. Yes we got a taste of Rl2, but I think its fair to say that RL2 isnt a game you can just pick up for an hour or two and get anywhere near the full picture.
BTW before I go any further I would just like to thank Roger at Alternative for his hospitality. He was great and helped us in any way he possibly could and it was extremely generous of him to invite us down to play the game. Thanks Roger.
So how does the game run on pc ? Well we first saw the game running on a lowly office pc and it was struggling to say the least. It soon perked into life when I whipped out my laptop which is a fair spec for a laptop at least.
AMD 64 3000, 512 ram, Radeon Mobility 64 Meg 9600.
The game ran on 1024x768 with all detail on at about 50 frames per second. Sometimes it dipped a little sometimes it peaked at over 60 frames. The upshot was it was really smooth and you certainly couldnt fault the game on this kind of spec. Make of that what you will.
So you pick it up and you start to play and well for me it felt a little strange. I am still an avid RL1 player on the xbox and I would say that the speed of RL2 has been turned down a notch. To be after playing RL1 constantly since its release it felt a little sluggish but I dont think Lox had any problems with it at all only maybe on defense when you really felt you needed a bit more get up and go.
So maybe the people who still play RL1 will take more time to get to grips with RL2 than people who dont play RL1, maybe it was just me.
Brief impressions :
Its a lot more control - able on attack than RL1 and it takes no effort at all to have your first receiver charge the line from every play the ball. No standing still, they always run onto the ball at a reasonable pace.
Defense I think will take some mastering as I mentioned before its a bit slower than RL1 in my opinion and this means you have to time your defense right or you may over run and then you would have to change player as by the time the player you were controlling changed direction etc the attacker would be well gone.
I think thats a point to make at this stage, RL2 is not a game you can pick up and just have a blast on. Not from first play anyway, once you are well versed yes, but I think there is a definate learning curve here that is maybe missing from games like wcr and rugby 2005. This seems to take some real skill and I could have imagined someone from SIDHE making absolute mincemeat of people on their first plays because of the improvement you would gain from repeated play. This is a good thing on sports games as far as im concerned.
The graphics are fantastic and the kits and grounds look amazing. We also had a couple of rain matches and were I thought it was impossible to play in the rain on RL1, I found it perfectly playable on RL2 so I was really pleased about that.
We didnt play any multiplayer games as numb nuts me forgot to take my pad and we couldnt be bothered going back to the car to pick up Lox's second pad so we just played AI games. The AI was REALLY good and they managed to *FARAH* score some great tries against us even on the easy difficulty setting.
There are some great animations in the game and at one point when a player was ankle tapped it almost looked like he was continuing to crawl along the floor but maybe that was just me. A kick through from the AI sparked Jamie Lyon into life who decided that he would jump up to take the ball rather than just let it come to him and both me and Lox looked at each other as it looked class. Not sure if we did it with a button press of if the AI did it for us though.
Had a quick go of player creation and if lox gets the go ahead to put some footage up ( we have 2.74 gig worth of it ) you would be able to see how it works. Its actually quite nice. I could also tell you how much the most expensive player in the game would theoretically be and the cheapest ... but im not going to tell you
Anyway I cant do the literary classic reviews like lox can ( mainly because I cant be arsed ) and im rambling now.
If you have any specific questions then I or Lox will try to answer them.
An hour or so was no where near enough time on the game and by the time we had had a few games and gone through all the menus it was time to go.
I feel a bit dodgy giving RL2 a score until I have played it properly because it wouldnt be fair. We only scraped the surface of the game and it would take at least a full days play to give a fair rating. At this point I will give it a provisional 7 and adjust my rating when I have played it enough.
Looking forward to release and getting my mits on it. Was well worth the visit to Alternative.
Now just wait for Lox's verdict. ( I am always harsher on games than him )
