Much hay has been made of Shiny's tie-in Matrix game, which was apparently also written and directed by the brothers Wachowski. And I want to like it, I do. Unlike many others, I really enjoyed the second movie (more so than the first), and I am really intrigued to see what if anything they've acheived in terms of parallel storytelling.

But the damn game keeps working against me.

First, there's the fact that TWO patches have come out in the past few days since release.

Then, there's the fact that you can't control and of the video options inside the game itself.

Next, the brightness control seems to do NOTHING. The one that I have to restart the game in order to even change.

Then, there's the way the character models look incredibly stupid when they run. Those arms, they're a-flailing.

Then there's the hacking mini-game, which I was very much looking forward to. And which seems to be interesting, as far as I've pushed it. But the multimedia stuff doesn't seem to work -- I'm supposed to be able to view IMG files and play back FMV movies -- and NOTHING HAPPENS. Fry's was selling the game with a free game guide, which I then checked, and it says NOTHING about this failure being some planned mini-game obstacle. So I think it's just a big honking bug.

And so then I went and did that thing where I upgraded all of my video drivers and software subsystems. And it changed nothing. And it's not like my GeForce 4 is some weird random card.

This is why I'm starting to prefer games on consoles. ARGH.  4:53:38 PM  (comments [])