Beyond Good and Evil HD

While Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) isn’t my “most favouritist game ever” it’s certainly near the top of the list somewhere.  The release of the ‘HD’ version on the XBox 360 seemed a good time to revisit it.

I admit to being a little disappointed, as there’s no obvious differences between the old and HD versions.  All they seem to have done is make it so you can now view it in High Definition, rather than Standard Definition.  There doesn’t seem to have been any effort made to tidy up a few things that date the game a little.

Don’t get me wrong, replaying the game sucked me back into the world that grabbed me years ago.  The graphics, though seemingly unchanged, are mostly beautiful.  The background score is incredible.  The story and characters are still compelling, and the game is still fun to play.

There are two things I wish they’d fixed.  One, I’m pretty sure they could have.  The other … might have cost more than it was worth.

The camera is the most irritating thing to me.  Having played a lot of third person games, most of which allow you to change how the camera moves, I’ve got used to the camera behaving in a particular way.  Returning to BGE is awkward,  because the camera and my muscle memory don’t get on. There’s no option to separately invert the X and Y axis on the camera view, and so I can either get the vertical or horizontal ‘right’, but not both.

The second is that while characters are fully voiced during cut-scenes, they’re not during dialogue which is jarring.  To fix that, they’d have to get the voice actors back in, and I can’t imagine that would be cheap in terms of dollars, or time.  It’s a pity, though.

Those quibbles aside, I really love the story and atmosphere of Beyond Good and Evil, and I keep hoping for a decent sequel.  Or, really, any sequel right now.

About Lisa

A Geeky Gamergrrl who obsesses about the strangest things.
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