Next up will be Beyond Good & Evil, a game that I started playing on the PS2, but repurchased for the PC when it came out on Steam recently (I hadn’t gotten very far anyway). It took a bit of experimenting to get it to run well on Vista, but it seems to be stable now. (For anyone else having similar troubles, the trick is to turn off “HW Vertex Processing” in the config program.)

It’s an action-adventure in the Zelda vein, where you play a female photojournalist named Jade on an alien planet, getting caught up in some kind of conspiracy about the aggressive DomZ that are constantly attacking the planet, and the Alpha Section troops that are protecting the population from them. Or are they… A resistance group seems to think something fishy’s going on. It’s a colourful world, both literally in the fairly bright colour schemes all over the place and in the various characters around, like Pey’j, the gruff pig-guy assistant of yours, or the Jamaican-sounding rhino-like black market parts dealers.

I’ve played the first ‘dungeon’ so far, and although there was some combat, it’s mostly exploration, puzzle-solving, and photography. Yes, your career as a photojournalist does really matter, and taking pictures of the various animal species, including a lot that are off the beaten path or in the middle of attacking you, can net a lot of cash and bonus equipment. You can also capture maps with it, and I’m sure there will be other uses later on. Pey’j also follows you around and helps out in combat and in some of the puzzles.

There’s also an open world element to it, where you can just roam around the world in your hovercraft. It’s not exactly GTA-ish in its breadth or size, but next up I’ll probably do a bit of exploration and see if I can find any interesting secrets or more animals to photograph before continuing on with the story.

The only annoying things so far are some interface quirks, like how it asks what language you want every single time you start it (what, in case I suddenly go multilingual between sessions?), and how the default controls are split up so that you have to use the keyboard to move the menu cursor and the mouse button to select, not just one or the other.