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Rl2. We've Deliberated, Cogitated And Digested

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knowsleyroader

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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
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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 )
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ah cheers for that mate seems like it is living up to the hype. shame you didn't get more time on it but anyway your insight will still be valued highly i would say. learning curve sounds good that it will take a little while to master and the ai seems to be good as well. hopefully you can put the footage you got up somewhere. I think more people are interested in tha ai anyway so no loss that you didn't play multiplayer with lox. thanks again mate and thanks to alternative software for making this happen
 
Thanks for the info. What are the camera views like? what was side view like? cheers
 
whe u installed the game? was there a cd key?

Cos me and my bro wanna play online at the same time so just wanna know if we need to get 2 copies
 
sounds good,

how were the offsides implemented? the 10m rule in particular without a ref
 
Originally posted by woosaah@Nov 19 2005, 05:27 PM
sounds good,

how were the offsides implemented? the 10m rule in particular without a ref
It was easy enough to get back onside with your own defensive line and there not being a ref was no problem. In fact to my knowledge I dont think we were once caught offside although I believe the cpu was.

There was also no head high tackles at all
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Originally posted by Paddy@Nov 19 2005, 11:56 AM
whe u installed the game? was there a cd key?

Cos me and my bro wanna play online at the same time so just wanna know if we need to get 2 copies
It wasnt a retail copy so I coldnt tell you m8.
 
Knowsleyroader,

I posted this somewere else but since you have played too maybe you can answer?

What was the running and sprinting like? has the game been slowed down slightly or are they still flying around as tho they are skating? is it more realistic now?

Also, has the running gameplay been improved, e.g if you have a player (Albert) with a very high speed can he turn to catch players slower than him maybe on a 9 or 8 speed? basically is there now differences in speed between 9 and 10 as on the last 1 you had payers on 8/9 that cud catch people on 10 it didnt seem realistic at all.

Cheers
 
Did you fiddle around with the Franchise Mode?

and did you see multiple different reasons to go upstairs to the Video Ref? (by that I mean, did you see one for say wether a player grounded the ball while another time it was wether a player put his foot out e.t.c)
 
Originally posted by Ian2oo5@Nov 20 2005, 08:38 AM
Knowsleyroader,

I posted this somewere else but since you have played too maybe you can answer?

What was the running and sprinting like? has the game been slowed down slightly or are they still flying around as tho they are skating? is it more realistic now?

Also, has the running gameplay been improved, e.g if you have a player (Albert) with a very high speed can he turn to catch players slower than him maybe on a 9 or 8 speed? basically is there now differences in speed between 9 and 10 as on the last 1 you had payers on 8/9 that cud catch people on 10 it didnt seem realistic at all.

Cheers
The game has been slowed down and if your an RL1 player it will take some getting used to as on first impressions it feels sluggish. Hopefully it will prove the better system over time.

To be honest from the amount of time I played on the game, if anything there seemed to be little to tell each player apart. None of them seemed particulary lightning quick.

The good thing about RL2 though is you can adjust the stats on a global scale so presumably if you feel the game is a little slow theoretically I think if you +% on the speed stat then the game should speed up until you found your prefered speed.

Fingers crossed.
 
Originally posted by Ripper@Nov 20 2005, 05:05 PM
Did you fiddle around with the Franchise Mode?

and did you see multiple different reasons to go upstairs to the Video Ref? (by that I mean, did you see one for say wether a player grounded the ball while another time it was wether a player put his foot out e.t.c)
Did have a quick fiddle with the franchise mode. Wasnt impressed that Ade Gardner was sidelined for 8 weeks on the first training session before we even got to play again. Sadly it didnt look like you could turn off training injuries which could end up being a bum steer as it will be very frustrating if you pick up those kind of injuries in training on a regular basis.

All the video ref decisions we saw were just bounced ball and then Its just a case of heads or tails I think. Dont think the actual replay has anything to do with the decision.

There were also quite a few held up over the line no trys that just get called by the ref. If truth be known it seems quite hard to get over the line cleanly as there is usually someone hanging onto you and it seems when this is the case more often than not you get called held up rather than if you get to ground the try is called.

Again this could have just been a fluke and only after many hours of play could you make a decision if to these things are going to be a problem.
 
Locksley says its fantastic, and knowlsleyroader is not so sure, its interesting to see the differance of opinion. I think some will love and some hate it. I hope I love it, ive been hanging out for it.
 
Originally posted by umosay@Nov 20 2005, 09:55 PM
Another massively overhyped game then?
I dont think you could say its been overhyped. To be fair to SIDHE, they have always been on the realistic side of things regarding what they feel can be achieved with the budget and time they have. You certainly couldnt peg them in the same hole as EA who promice you the earth only to deliver a small rural area outside of Nuneaton.
 
Originally posted by CeeJay@Nov 20 2005, 10:30 PM
Locksley says its fantastic, and knowlsleyroader is not so sure, its interesting to see the differance of opinion. I think some will love and some hate it. I hope I love it, ive been hanging out for it.
Not so sure Lox things its fantasic exactly and there were certainly some things he ( and I ) were dissapointed with. I think he feels its more than playable at this point bearing in mind the time we had with the game.

Lox is far too easily excited by games initially and sometimes comes back down to earth with a bump after extended play
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From my point of view I hope this game really comes into its own after extended play and im sure SIDHE would allude to that being the case.
 
when your choosing whos in your team, does it show the postitions they play in? that was one of the most annoying things about rl1...
 
oh yeah that didnt make much sence did it lol

when choosing your lineup, does it say what positions the players are in?

eg.

sam bad : lock

cause if you didnt know where someone played in the first one, there was no way of telling.
 
Not sure but when creating a player you have to put three prefered positions so you would assume there is some way of recalling this data. In fact I think it comes up at the bottom.

Not sure if there are any negative effects of playing a player outside of those positions though.
 
Where you able to test out kicking the loose ball and contesting the high ball "jumping". There has not been much info on these topics.
Was there a marker showing where the ball will land on chips or bombs so you can contest it. Was the jumping in your opinion better, the same, or worse then Rugby 2005? Are there different animaitons for it or are they all the same?

Did you feel the kicking game was improved, did the AI kick more on last tackle?
 
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