Media Recap Precursor (April 2012)

This time I’ll just be throwing up some random thoughts.

• The plan for the Linux Days 2012 of Graz is final. I’ve discovered that our workshop (with small presentation) will be held before noon. How do I put this… I don’t think that’s going to improve my performance.
• I’ve recently won a competition over at one of my two preferred Xbox 360 news sources and received two games. I’ve only looked into JASF yet, not into Birds of Steel. To be honest that might take a while since I’ve now received my copy of Mass Effect 3 and ordered Deus Ex: Human Revolution really cheap.
• I’ll be starting to catch up with my reading starting from Monday and might write a review of Susan Cain’s Quiet, a book which I think I learned a lot from.
• You might find me online playing Mass Effect 3 during the next month.

But before I jump head first into ME3 I need to elaborate on my initial thoughts of JASF so I won’t forget to post them.

Before I even begin I want to clarify that I’m aware of the difference in budget to AAA dogfighter titles like the Ace Combat or H.A.W.X. franchises. So far I’ve enjoyed my trip to Genericstan as Razor, a pilot from Generic Western Coalition. I didn’t pay that much attention to the story since the presentation is occasionally kind of poor. Where triple A titles would’ve placed a nicely rendered cutscene, JASF - which I continuously want to spell JANE - strikes you with a wall-of-text. It’s not as bad as it sounds though, as the WOT will be read to you by one of the voice actors which uses this accent where I’m never sure if it just sounds cheesy to me or if it really is. Also they are angry about the aggressive force but on the first opportunity to lash out all you hear is “glorious president” this and “glorious president” that even though he gave priority to snatching the enemy’s oil fields instead of disabling their WoMD.
One thing that caught my eye was the jerky scrolling of the WOT, even though it scrolled smoothly when in auto-scroll (voice is reading) mode. I’m not quite sure about the latest games from AC and HAWX but the last ones I’ve played (Ace Combat: Fires of Liberation and H.A.W.X. 1) didn’t have in-flight loading screens when updating mission objectives. That is an immersion breaking annoyance.
There’s one more thing. I’m not sure if it’s my eyes or if it’s a bug in the game but sometimes it looks if my cockpit doesn’t have a glass dome. It seems as if my head is out in the open during flight which would be bad.