As Reflected in the Screen

TV and Crazy People

2011-07-16T22:29:00.000-04:00

Here is the message I tried to leave on Netflix's blog bu couldn't because apparently you have to have a Facebook account:

"It galls me to see the sense of entitlement people have. Netflix is a business. They offer a product for the price of their choosing. If that product for that price does not satisfy you, then don't buy it. Those people saying they will do that in a rational manner, you are fine. People who are freaking out about this calling Netflix "greedy" need to calm down. A few years ago you didn't have this service at all. You had to pay 50 to 100 dollars a month for cable or satellite and only got to watch what they put on the air. You had to pay 5 or more dollars for a SINGLE new release at a video store. Our selection today via services like Netflix and Hulu is huge and instantly available. For me they have completely replaced cable in my home. Even at 16 dollars a month I can watch more movies and TV shows than I ever could before, and they add more content every day. It sucks that costs a little more but it's still well within tolerable levels for me."

I never fail to be amazed at how pissed off people get over stupid shit like this. Netflix for 8 dollars a month is not some inalienable fucking right handed down to you by the founding fathers. People are acting like Netflix killed their mother! Get over it.

The 6 Most Ominous Trends in Video Games - Cracked.com

2011-07-11T10:04:00.000-04:00

This is a great article on the future of video games. It's mostly pessimistic, as you can tell from the title. He's editorializing a bit but I found this to be one of the most thoughtful articles on the topic that I've read recently. I'm a bit more optimistic than he is but I agree with a lot of what he says.

Art Part 3

2011-06-20T22:46:00.001-04:00

Part three of my Black Ops emblem gallery!

Dead Man's Hand

(Aces backed with eights)

I made this one a couple weeks ago and forgot about it. This was the very first idea I had for a Black Ops emblem but I didn't have all the parts unlocked that I needed so my first emblem was a lamer version of this with just the A, 8, spade, and a club. I kind of wish I had saved this because I actually like it better than the Death Card emblem. That's OK though because tonight I made a new emblem...

Ghost Recon

As simple as this looks it actually took me a while to figure out. I'm not really a long time fan of the Ghost Recon series, but recent developments have given me a vested interest in it. I think it's cool that you can duplicate the logo for a more-or-less competing game and nobody gives a damn. Well there's probably some lawyer or bureaucrat who's chaffing at it but they haven't been jumping on people for this kind of thing as far as I know. It makes the industry feel more like a community when everyone gets along. GRFS represent!

Art: Part 2 and Black Ops Tarot

2011-06-04T15:50:00.000-04:00

Time for more Black Ops emblem fun. First up is an idea that came to me one night lying in bed trying to sleep, as the best ideas often do:

The P0wn Shop

(Open for business)

I was pleased to no end when I got that one to work! I also had the desire to make a more aggressive emblem that would put forth the enormity of my bad-assedness. But I wanted to do something a little more high-brow. Then I thought of this:

Death

Look familiar? It's my interpretation of the Death card from the classic tarot arcana. "What the hell is that"? you might ask. You can read about it here. Each tarot deck has a little different image for each card but all of them are variations on the same theme. Basically this depicts death trampling a king, and shows that death comes for us all. Now that I've made this I kind of want to do one for each major arcana. I'm up to level 29 first prestige so I've got plenty of cash for a project like that.

Why Brink Sucks

2011-05-15T12:35:00.000-04:00

1. Implementation of menus:

They really tried to reinvent the wheel here. My biggest problem is that it's too hard to figure out what's going on. In campaign mode if you are at the mission select screen you can see little dots next to each mission. If they are filled in it means you completed the mission. That's great but there is nothing to tell you what difficulty they have been completed on, which is important since they put an achievement in the game where you have to beat every level on hard or in adversarial. The challenge menu doesn't even tell you which challenges you have beaten.

2. Speaking of challenges:

In order to unlock any weapon or weapon related attachment you have to complete challenges. Each challenge has three difficulty levels. Levels one and two unlock weapons and attachments while level three will unlock the privilege of being on the leaderboard. Wow, I get to be on another leaderboard where I can be 349745th? Sweet. That's a great incentive to sit through this frustration. The challenges are punishingly hard. You really have to level up your guy a lot before you can do well in them. That's not the stupid part though. Brink is a game designed to be multiplayer co-op. The challenges can be played with friends and are much easier if you do so. But you don't unlock anything unless you play solo! What the hell.

3. Multiplayer implementation:

Playing the game with other people is actually fun. But getting the game set up right can be tricky.

Here is how the rest of the world does it: Start a multilayer lobby, invite your friends, pick a map/game mode, the game then matches you with other parties and individuals, play the game.

Here is how Brink does it: Pick a map/game mode, load into a match, bring up the lobby menu, hit the "invite party" button, realize that you are already in a full game and your friends can't get in, back out to the main menu and try again.

4: Bots. Oh sweet Jesus the stupid, stupid bots:

This isn't a problem with just Brink. A lot of team based multiplayer games have this problem. You need bots to fill in when you don't have other people. Bot's are great at doing exactly what they are programed to do, which never includes strategy or thinking intuitively. This is a problem in a "thinking man's FPS" as Brink likes to style itself. FYI bots, if I'm sprinting towards an objective to get there before the enemy does and you are supposed to be escorting me, it might be a good idea if you sprinted too! And I don't know, maybe get BETWEEN me and the enemy while I hack the door or whatever, you know, so I don't get shot?

Brink isn't a bad game necessarily but it's designers made some decisions that were questionable at best. I do enjoy and applaud the character creation. It's deep an well executed. I was running into a bug though were my friends an I were seeing default models instead of our own for about half the match. Even so, well done on the characters.

Art

2011-04-30T10:22:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to post some Black Ops emblems for a while now. Here are two that I made.

I was rocking this one for a long time. I didn't set out to make it, it just kind of sprang fully formed onto the screen.

Donky Kong

This is the one I'm using now.

DJ Barebones

That one also just kind of came together out of no where. I have some great ideas for future emblems. If and when they come to fruition I will post them here.

Oh I Almost Forgot...

2011-03-08T15:09:00.000-05:00

...I am now employed in the game industry. The next step on my journey to total awesomeness has been taken.

I think I'm now at TOTA. Only 12 more steps remain.

Saw That Comming

2011-03-08T14:31:00.000-05:00

I beat Castlevania: Lords of Shadow today. The ending was fairly epic. As I mentioned before the story is very well written and has plenty of twists to it. I knew there was supposed to be a big plot twist at the end because of a Game Informer article about the top ten moments in 2010. Number one on the list was an entry for LoS subtitled "Didn't see that coming". I immediately screamed and shut the magazine. I HATE spoilers or even hints about spoilers, or even knowing that there is something to spoil. I'm rarely surprised by movies/games/etc. and I like it when I get the chance to be. I had a feeling I knew what it was but I wasn't certain. About half way through the game I started to get a feeling about where certain things were headed. But then I accidentally found out who the last boss was which would have been a great surprise! I thought maybe that was what they were talking about. Turns out there are two big ending surprises, and the final boss was not the big one! It also turns out I was right. I love being right.

Vampire Killer

2011-03-02T22:29:00.000-05:00

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is turning out to be a really good game. I have discovered that the key to its enjoyment is to play on the lowest difficulty. I was originally playing on "warrior" but I was pulling my hair out with frustration, so I dropped down to "squire". I know, kind of embarrassing to be a mere squire but that's how it is. The difference as far as I can tell is how much damage enemies do to you and (most importantly) how much life you restart with after a death. On warrior if you restart at a checkpoint you have as much life as you had when you got there. The problem is that I was being pushed into boss fights with 30% health and dieing almost instantly, over and over. Add in the fact that I had to look at a goddamn load screen and have to pause and select "skip cut-scene" every time and a controller throwing event was imminent.

Lords of Shadow handles health in such a way that the better you do the more health you can recover. Let me see if I can explain. Initially, the only way to heal is to find a health shrine and absorb all of its glowy green goodness. These are few and far between however so in the beginning of the game you're really playing to survive between these shrines. This wasn't too much trouble though because they place them before major encounters. Then you get light magic which you can use to heal yourself but it's not as simple as just casting "heal". Here is were it gets complicated. For most of the game you have two gauges, one for light magic and one for dark magic. These magics let you perform certain moves and abilities buy activating the magic and then performing the move. You have a limited amount of magic and you have to replenish your magic by absorbing neutral energy orbs. These orbs are dropped by enemies and can then be sucked up into either magic gauge with the left and right stick buttons. The problem is that you can't just defeat the enemies, you have to have a high focus. Focus is yet another gauge that fills up the more you hit enemies without getting hit yourself. It fills faster if you use a variety of combos. The higher the focus the more orbs the enemies drop. If you want to heal you have active your light magic and then hit an enemy. Some of the damage you do will be converted into health.

See the problem yet? If you want to heal yourself, you have to hit enemies without getting hit yourself long enough to make them drop orbs, stop to absorb the orbs (which makes you vulnerable for a second), then active light magic and hit some more enemies to actually get the health. And no, enemies hit while light magic is active will not drop more orbs. So you can see where entering a boss fight with low health and no light magic would be an issue.

Anyway, on "squire" the game feels right and balanced. All that bullshit I just explained above flows more naturally and is actually kind of fun. A lot of people point out (our maybe even complain) that this is a God of War rip off. I can see why people would say that, both games are overhead action games involving a chain weapon. But that's like saying Sonic the Hedgehog is a Super Mario Bros. ripoff because you run from left to right and jump on enemies' heads. God of War doesn't own the bloody action game genre. I would also point out that Castlevania has been around since 1986 and has always involved a whip. So who's copying who? Another comparison people make is Shadow of the Colossus. This is because of the Titan bosses that you have to climb up to defeat. I think it's also an apt comparison because both games are beautiful! Really both GoW and Shadow are great games so who cares if LoS is similar? That to me it's a good thing.

I do want to mention the story before I wrap this up. Much like Black Ops I didn't expect the story to be as good as it is, but finding out what happens next has become a real motivation for me to keep playing. Just like Black Ops I feel like I know how it's going to end, but at the same time I'm not sure. It seems like anything can happen. Lost did that very well, baiting you with little bits of subtle foreshadowing that you knew were somehow important but it wasn't clear how. I watched that show rabidly. I wanted to find out if my theories were correct. We've reached a point where more and more video games are able to deliver that same kind of storytelling. Having read comments from others I know I'm in for some surprises with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I can't wait to see what they are.

February Made Me Shiver

2011-02-09T02:40:00.000-05:00

Almost a month since the last post. School has been kicking my ass. I really bit off more than I could chew with this semester and I've already had to withdraw from one class. So that's more of my money that Wake Tech gets for nothing.

Last month just kinda sucked. My new (to me) car broke a week after I got it and it's been in the shop since, getting one transmission part or another replaced, my mechanic's shoulders hung in a perpetual shrug. Then my computer got fried. Like the mother won't boot to BIOS fried. On the up side I bought this to replace it:

Samsung RC512. I spent waaay more than I wanted to but my desire to finally have a machine that could handle everything I needed outweighed my usual obsessive thriftiness.

I'm sure there was some other January bullshit but I'm too tired to remember any of it right now which I suppose is good. The TV and headphones (see last post) are awesome. I had heard some recommendations against the wireless version of the X11s but I'm kind of wishing I had gotten them. The cord is really long which is awesome but it gets in the way sometimes and I end up bumping the volume knobs accidentally. Also I have to take them off to go make a sandwich or take a bathroom break. That's right, I used to party chat in the bathroom. It happened and I'm not sorry.

So despite all the work I have to do I've made plenty of time for my habit. Lords of Shadow is an impressive game but it's god-awful hard. I have yet to turn that game off in a fashion that didn't involve screaming. The free download of Symphony of the Night was way more fun. I'm still trying to beat the game as Richter. Difficult but not to the point where I want to stop playing.

The last couple of days I put my borrowed copy of ES4: Oblivion in and quickly sacrificed some hours of my life to its beautiful altar. It really is a fantastic game! I never want to turn it off, to the detriment of sleep (always badly needed at this point) and food. I don't even know who's game it is. One of my wife's co-workers lent it to her months ago thinking she might play it (yeah right) and I tried it out. Thinking they would want it back I didn't let myself get too into it but it's been a while and they never asked for it back so... YOINK! Maybe It's like the monkey's paw, and they were just trying to get rid of it on some other doomed soul with a wish in their heart. A wish for awesome video games.

December Recap part 4

2011-01-15T06:12:00.000-05:00

ALMOST FORGOT!!!!

I got this:

And this:

YAY CONSUMERISM!!!

December Recap part 3

2011-01-15T06:05:00.000-05:00

Also I got Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

I got the duluxe package which came with a very nice art book, a CD with the game's soundtrack, and a free download of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for XBLA. I had some things to say about C:LoS but cares? I got Castlevania: Symphony of the Night! It's all I've played. I've come to the conclusion that there is no reason to make more Castlevania games. This is it. I have no problem putting it in the top ten best games ever made. EVER. How much do I like this game? I've played through it three times on the original PS1 version. This is my fourth playthrough. I spent eighty bucks on the collector's edition of this game. Every dollar worth it just to play SotN.

OK Enough gushing, it's pretty good but.... grklhrk... cruun!!...hruklemurrkk!! I WOULD HAVE THIS GAME'S BABY!!!! I WOULD GET DOWN IN FRONT OF IT ON MY KNEES AND SERVICE.... No! Focus! Control! Get a hold of yourself! You swore to leave that life behind you and you're not going to mess it up now!

So yeah Lords of Shadow is a game that I have, the end. Actually funny story, my wife had intended to buy it for me for my birthday. I had not asked for it nor even mentioned its existence to her. She was annoyed that I bought it but I was very impressed that she's learned my tastes to that extent.

December Recap part 2

2011-01-15T05:40:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to write a full review of Black Ops. It's sold a bajillion copies and it's a great game. This you already know. I do want to talk about it though because a bajillion-selling game needs to be spoken of, the way an exploding gas main or nude co-worker needs to be spoken of. The situation demands commentary.

First I'd like to praise the campaign's story. It's not often I want to keep playing a game to find out what happens, and it's certainly rare for an FPS. It's not that Black Ops wasn't predictable. I had an inkling of the outcome and I wasn't far off. I think I wanted to keep playing to find out if my theory was right. The campaign itself had some bumpy spots where fun gave way to frustration but for the most part I enjoyed it.

I was disappointed to hear that titles and emblems would not be unlocked in multiplayer via the completion of challenges. One of the things I liked most about MW2 was that not only could you customize your title but you got those titles by feats of awesomeness. In this way your title/emblem was both an expression of your personality and a way to show off what you'd accomplished. My title/emblem combined the following:

"Kill every member of the enemy team without dying (at least 4 enemies)."

with

"Kill an enemy, Pick up his weapon, then kill him again with his own weapon."

I felt that was a combination that both spoke of who I was and what I was capable of. While I was disappointed that you would be able to have whatever you wanted I was excited that emblems would be custom creations using a layer system similar to Forza's. Once I unlocked the emblem feature I went strait to work to create my dream emblem... only to find out how limited it was. You only have 12 layers, the color pallet is shallow, you have to buy layers AND shapes, and shapes cannot be skewed or warped, only turned and resized. Even as limited as it is it's fun to create emblems, and there is a prestige element in that you have to pay for everything, and shapes are unlocked by level a little bit at a time. So you can't have a bitch'n emblem without spending some time in the game. I've seen some pretty impressive emblems, and I'm going to try to take some pictures and post them here.

Gun Game. The wager match thing is a cool idea but it's overshadowed by the best of its 4 gametypes, gun game. Holy crap this game is fun. It's got the raw feel of bare bones deathmatch but you get to use 20 different guns in one match (assuming you do well)! There is no thrill greater than scoring that final tricky kill with the ballistic knife. There is no agony like the sting of someone's backstab sending you back to the crossbow at the last second. The first time it happened to me I howled like a grieving mother over the corpse of her child. It was... bone chilling, unreal, amazing.

Also, glitchy networking. Fix it.

Finally, how cool is it that you can play with the old DOS-esq computer? It has ZORK!

cd C:FUN

Deep Thoughts

2011-01-12T03:44:00.000-05:00

I started this post a month ago and then forgot about it, but I felt like it would be good to finish it today.

I am sometimes afraid to tell people that I play video games, or any game for that matter. In my mind the public still views video games as childish and if I reveal my activities to them I will be diminished in their eyes. Some times even I see myself as a child, sitting cross legged on the floor gripping a controller. But the truth is I am a child. Foolish and naive, I am brand new over and over again. I am deaf to the hidden language of the adult world. I am helpless, dependent, always grasping to suckle from any and all passing source of nourishment. And I am blind, floating in utero, unborn, waiting for the promise of life.

Wow, that got heavy.

When I find myself questioning the value of games and my never ending obsession with them and whether or not I should be wasting my time on them, I have to also ask why not? Is there some better way to waste time? If my brain cells are occupied what does it matter the focus of their attention? Why do we have hobbies if not to pass the time between the necessary tasks of our life?

What I worry about is that I spend too much time on this one thing, rather than some other avocation. I could be reading the classics or cultivating wild honey bees. I could be spending more time balancing my checkbook or cleaning my home. I could be on Conney Island bird-dog'n chicks. I give myself a lot of grief for not having achieved more in my life, and I know that my dedication (or addiction) to gaming has taken thousands of hours away from other pursuits.

On the other hand if I abandoned gaming would that not be like abandoning part of myself? And shouldn't everyone have that one thing that they are "all about"? People are always saying how the world needs specialists more than it needs generalists. But does the world need a guy with a collection of old consoles, an in-depth knowledge of the Castlevania timeline, and a really strong thumbs? No one throws awards banquets for people with big gamerscores.

I'm 29 years old today... who am I and what the hell am I doing here? What are ANY of us doing here? Has anyone else noticed that this shit is crazy?

Decades

2011-01-12T00:20:00.000-05:00

December Recap Part 1

2011-01-01T06:28:00.000-05:00

Lots of new games acquired and played last month.

Lets start with Halo 3 ODST and Forza 3. About every year Microsoft makes a double pack of games to put in with their new systems. I got Lego Indiana Jones/Kung Fu Panda with my system. Those seem like an odd choice when you look at the other options but they're decent so whatever. I also got the Froza 2/Marvel Ultimate Alliance bundle which is way better. The funny thing about these packs is that they usually go for less (used) than buying the games individually (also used). I got the Forza/Marvel pack for $9.99. Can't beat that.

I was thinking about getting Forza 3 for a while but since I never finished 2 to my satisfaction I held off. After speaking with my brother-in-law about hanging out over the Christmas weekend, I got the idea that I would buy 3 and bring it with me and we could have a Forza marathon. Those of you who are fans of racing games know the special joy that comes from starting with an empty garage and working your way up the ranks until you have millions of credits and a fleet of supercars. We didn't end up playing as much as I wanted, mostly because we had to leave early but we still got some racing done. Forza 3 is pretty phenomenal. BIL has Gran Tourismo 5 and was constantly saying how much better Forza is. There aren't much differences from 2, just more of some things and tweaks of others. The thing I like the most is how they organized the career mode. Instead of moving up a ladder of unlocking events you play though 6 "years" of a career. Each week you pick a race event with 3 or more races each. The events offered are somewhat random but are based on the car you are in, and what you have in your garage. Then on the weekends you do one race from a championship event. At the end of the season you will have completed the last championship race. The cool part is that you don't have to win to continue, just like in real life. If you do loose a race you can go to the event menu at any time and race any of the events you've unlocked at that point. Basically you could just play though the seasons to unlock all of the races and go back and play through in any order you want. There are a LOT of events, way more than Forza 2. This is one of the problems I've had in the past. I think it would be great to be able to make custom events to see what a showdown between cars X and Y would be like. Well you still can't do that in Forza 3 but with the number of events they have, most of your fantasy scenarios are covered.

I didn't play Forza until I got to my wife's parents' house, but I did dig into ODST right away. This is actually my first Halo game. I don't know how I've avoided the series until now. I guess I initially had some distaste for Halo early on, and since I've had an Xbox I've been more interested in military shooters like COD. Anyway ODST is a pretty good game. I played through the campaign in about three sessions and it felt a little short but the gameplay was solid and I liked the way they told the story. I heard that a lot of hardcore Halo fans didn't like it. Maybe it's good that this is my first one? I haven't played online yet, not that interested really.

In part two I'll talk at length about Black Ops and Castlevania and another big Christmas gift I got.

Happy New Year!

What does a scanner see?

2010-12-19T03:46:00.000-05:00

Whatever it is that's watching, it's not human. It doesn't ever blink. What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I do, then we're cursed and cursed again like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

- Paraphrased from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Holiday 2010

2010-12-12T03:18:00.000-05:00

I'm getting Black Ops for Christmas. That has been prearranged with my wife. For adults most of the magic is lost from the Christmas experience. If I were a child I would "ask Santa" and then spend December with my fingers crossed. You can drop "subtle" hints as an adult, but I don't have the patients for that. If by some chance she doesn't get it for me I'll just go buy it myself, so either way I'll be playing it before the new year. Yay Christmas.

Until then I'm trying to prestige a second time in MW2. I seem to be leveling up crazy fast as compared to my first time though. less than two months and I'm lvl38. It took me 11 months to Prestige the first time.

How Do You Spell Awesome?

2010-11-24T11:58:00.006-05:00

With an M and an E.

I beat it. I beat Mile High Club on veteran. I feel great. I am great. I am the man.

Sure I'm not the only one who's ever done it, but if you want a challenge in gaming this is it man. This is the one. And I did it in about 40 min today. I spent probably around 3 hours on it yesterday with no luck. That's always the way it is though isn't it? You have to step back from a problem, come back at it refreshed the next day, with newly grown brain cells specifically designed for the task. Neuropathways mapped out for your eventual success.

This feels like the kind of rush I used to get after a really great race. It feels like setting a new PR in the 800m. It makes me want to go for a run.

So now I have my first 100% complete game.

Technically Borderlands was my first with 1000 GS and 100% of the main game's cheevos (Fallout 3 was my first with 1000). But Xbox doesn't recognize 1000 as 100% if there is any DCL achievements (weather you have the DLC or not!), so it doesn't show up. So I will have to buy two more expansions for Borderlands if I want an official 100%. Which of course is bullshit. Same thing with Fallout 3, but I'm not going to bother playing through with a third character just to get the neutral-alignment achievements anyway so oh-well.

I'm going for a run.

Also, Happy Birthday to my love!

Buck Futter

2010-11-23T19:47:00.006-05:00

I have been playing this level for about 2 hours. Or more. Time sort of slips away with this kind of thing. I know that when I started it was light out, but no longer. Fuck this level. Fuck This level too. I'v been trying to beat that one for a while now. Some say it's the hardest COD level ever. But maybe they don't know about Mile High Club because they havn't beaten the game? The video I put in the last post makes it look easy, but I guarantee you the person who made that spent a significant segment of their life force to create that. Not life TIME, life FORCE.

I've come soooo close to beating this level. I know it's possible and that only makes it worse . I'm going to have to quit for the night. I want to soldier on (like I did through War Room) but I've been playing this shit for about 5 hours strait now and I can feel my brain swelling. This is the kind of psychological "treatments" they give prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Just one goddamn achievement to go...

OH and did I mention the worst part? MY OWN FUCKING TEAMMATES KEEP SHOOTING ME IN THE BACK!!! LIKE 50% OF THE GODDAMN TIME! I walk down the first hallway and there is no one to shoot me from the front, it HAS to be them. AAARRRGGG!!!

Fuck.

2010-11-23T19:45:00.001-05:00

FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK.

Fuck.

The Prestige

2010-10-19T00:48:00.003-04:00

Last week I finally reached Prestige in MW2. It felt good to finally get there. My rise through the ranks since then seems to be going much faster than it did the first time. I'd like to think I'm better at the game than I was 11 months ago, but I'm pretty sure the enlisted levels require a lot less XP. We'll see haw fast I can get to Prestige 2.

My wife asked me if I wanted a game for Christmas and I told her I wanted CoD Black Ops. I don't usually think of myself as a primarily FPS player by it's the only new game I'm genuinely excited about. Fallout New Vegas should be a great game, but I still have 2 expansions for Fallout 3 to get through so I won't be playing F:NV anytime soon. I'm going to try really hard not to buy any new games for the rest of the year, partially to save money but mostly because I have a ton of great games I haven't given enough attention to.

Next up: Even more Borderlands. I'm lvl 38 and just started playthrough two. The new DLC bumps the level cap to 70... time to roll up my sleeves.

If Missiles Opened Doors

2010-09-28T18:33:00.007-04:00

What I'm thinking about now:

Going out and buying all three Etrian Odyssey games... and a DS to play them on. Why? Who the fuck knows. I barely knew they existed until an hour ago when I read this. That led to a visit to the games' websites. Which led to me wanting them. I don't necessarily like this kind of long winded, sadistically difficult JRPG, but I like the idea of them. I want to like them. I may have spoken before about my attraction to Atlus games. The two most recent for me were Disgaea and Odin Sphere. They are two phenomenal games but they are deep-fat-fried in the 'ol grind aesthetic and Odin Sphere has that punishing difficulty that is so typical of Atlus. The bottom line is, I just don't have enough days in my life to dedicate to these pursuits. Perhaps if I were sickly and could not leave my bed.

I finished Shadow Complex yesterday in what I think was a five hour stretch. Lack of sleep had me in a fog so memory of the event is blurry, but I have the achievements so I know it happened. If I were to review this game I would use a single word: Metroid. Or if I used two words: Super Metroid. You can tell these guys have played that game before and you can tell it's been on their minds quite a bit since. There are sections of the map that are almost direct translations. As a fan of SM myself Shadow Complex grew on me more every time I was reminded of it. If we had never made 3D games, if sidescrollers were still king and continued to progress graphically this kind of thing would have sold millions. A part of me wants to live in that world.

Lord of the Rings Online is now free to play and that has spurred me to play it just as it did a year ago. There is still money involved to be sure, but it's involved via micro transactions. This idea I really like. While I haven't spent any money on the game yet, I feel I'm much more likely to spend a few dollars for some extra content than I am on a subscription fee. It just never made sense to me to pay over and over again for the same game. When you don't know how much you are going to be able to play in a given time period, you don't really have a clear idea of what you are paying for. But if some super-special armor costs one dollar American then I know exactly what getting and what it's costing me. I really hope this business model works out for Turbine and other developers because it sure works out for the consumer. I also want to point out how cool it is to play in Middle Earth. LOTRO as a game hasn't shown me any real stand-out moments yet, but the ability to explore all the locations from the books is very cool. Game enthusiasts are always talking about immersion. LOTRO doesn't make me float out of my chair or anything, but it makes it easier to imagine myself a traveler in Tolkien's world.

Friend Request Pending

2010-09-20T21:46:00.004-04:00

Two years ago when I first got my 360 I set to the task of populating my friends list. Two of my friends, being in the military were not able to immediately accept. The worst was my friend Dan who only now has gotten around to getting back online. It's weird not having him at the top of my friends list with "pending" next to his name.

Four of us had been talking for two weeks about a game night. We had to badger Dan into renewing his gold membership. As usual there was a lot of email chatter about what we would end up playing. At some point someone mentioned Doom II on XBLA and somehow that's the idea that got latched onto. So when Dan did get around to renewing, he downloaded Doom II as well. It turned out to be the only game the four of us had in common. So there we were, four dudes on different corners of the Earth, connected trough miles of high-speed fiber optics and networking equipment, with thousands of dollars in state of the art entertainment systems, running a game that was made over a decade ago.

It was fun.

How the Hell is it September Already?

2010-09-03T19:14:00.000-04:00

In my last post I wrote how I was listening to two great progressive rock albums by Steely Dan and Supertramp. Continuing in that tradition I’m now listening to Closer to the Edge by Yes. Wikipedia says that this album is considered by many to be the high point of the prog movement. It certainly is out there. The title track is 18 minutes long, and has recordings of birds. It’s not as lame as it sounds though. Maybe by the end of this post I’ll be able to give you a full impression.

Soooooo, lets see, what’s happened since August 19th? Shit. Let me distil this into micro sound bytes:

Devil May Cry, Sins of a Solar Empire, FIFA ’08, Gears of War, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Ghost in the Shell.

Mmmm, that was fun.

The big surprise of the last few weeks has been my quality assurance class. I thought it was going to be pretty easy, and I suppose it is, but our homework has consisted of finding bugs in games. These are existing games, not games in development. This is actually really hard. For the first assignment I was able to find five bugs in Fallout 3. I didn’t find them after the fact, I knew about them before hand. Some of them I had experienced only a couple of times and only knew about only because I had logged well over 200 hours in the game. The second assignment tasked us with finding 10 glitches in a different game. I managed to find only three in Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Regardless of what grade I get at least I was reminded of what a fun game it is. I think I’ll try to beat it this weekend.

The real cool surprise is that my teacher may be getting us “field trips” to play test real games at local game companies. Some of these will be companies you would have heard of, and games you are anxiously waiting to play. When I heard this news I kept it cool of course but inside I squealed like a girl. An excited young girl.

So here we are at the end of the post and I haven’t finished the album because my wife started watching Lost. I didn’t want to interfere with her experience, so I’ll let you know how it is next time.

Stowing Away the Time

2010-08-19T03:30:00.005-04:00

Maybe it's the fatigue but I've been extra responsive to music tonight. Physically responsive. Goosebumps, hairs on end, shivers, eyelids drooping.

Listening to Supertramp's Breakfast in America, followed by Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill. I got both albums back in February and they have yet to wear out their welcome, in fact they seem to get better every time I listen to them. While I'm not the type of person who likes to hear things over and over within a short period of time, I find that if I give an album about three good listens and then put it a way for a while, when I come back to it the music is much better. Maybe my brain is just set to receive it. I need time to grow the appropriate neuron receptors.

I've been feeling very creative too. I think the stronger my ADD symptoms the more I'm able to find the muse, and lately I've been a scatter-brained mess so the creative juices are certainly flowing. I've been writing lyrics, something I've not felt like doing in over a year. I've dabbled with songs all my life but never felt like I could find my lyrical voice. I think maybe I need to determine what kind of music I'm keyed to writing for. I may have been trying to hard to write for hard rock, when I should have cultivated a move progressive, even pop mindset. Another possibility is that I just haven't worked hard enough at it.

You know, let me better express how awesome Breakfast in America is. I'm giving it an early nomination for my favorite of 2010. It really is an amazing album.

Borderlands

2010-08-06T06:08:00.003-04:00

I had two days off this week. In those two days I logged about 16 hours on Borderlands. Christ that game just sucks time like a black hole. I feel like I should pack an over-night and feed the cats before I start playing. Hella good fun though. Will and JT accompanied me for a good part of it. I havn't touched the DLC yet. I can't wait to play it more. I got the shakes baby, daddy's got the shakes baaad!

Planning a ho-down for some time this weekend. If I can get enough people I want to have one last Modern Warfare 2 party before the world forgets about it and gets involved with whatever the holiday lineup has to offer. If I can't get enough people then maybe we can get a fourth for Borderlands. If nobody wants to play with me at all then I'll sulk and read a book or something. Who I am kidding, I've got way to much single player crap to finish up to waste time on books! Silly books. And their pages. Silly.

Compulsion

2010-08-02T03:26:00.004-04:00

I bought Blacklight again goddammit.

They got my money. They got my money twice. Curse this affliction of a hobby!

I also bought Preemptive Strike by DJ Shadow. I got it for the song Organ Donor which had been teasing my brain cells since I first heard it on Pandora. I can't stress enough how utterly fucking mind-blowing this song is. It's why we have techno. It's what Willis was talking about. You're listening to it and right away you think, "this is a cool song" and then it stops fucking around and throws 26 layers of incredible on your eardrums and you think... nothing because the part of you that listens to things is busy visiting the holy land.

Reasonably I thought that the rest of the album would be just as stellar. I had heard of DJ Shadow but hadn't really heard him before this song. If that was the kind of quality song I could expect I would gladly pay $9.99 for an album. I'm not going to say the album is bad, or even disappointing, it's just not what I expected. It's sort of a chillout album, very low-key and loungy. Organ Donor is the black sheep here. I imagine if you had not heard it and listened to the album all the way through, that when you got to Organ Donor (the last song) it would have an even greater impact. A sonic-ninja-skullfuck kind of impact. The rest of the album lulls you into a false sense of security before the kung-fu-grip-happy-ending you didn't know the Chinese lady already charged you for.

My Discount Goes to Eleven

2010-07-30T23:51:00.003-04:00

This week's special offer on XBL is all the DLC for Borderlands at half price (400 ms points each). This is fortuitous since I just bought the game. I've already grabbed The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, and I've sent out the call for my comrades to do the same. Gamespot has said some very nice things about this expansion, even giving it an Editor's Choice award. It raises the level cap by eleven (hence the title) which of course they make a big deal about. "Hey check us out we saw that rock band movie too!" Actually I've noticed that pretty much everything in Borderlands is some kind of pop culture reference. I'm not complaining. It's like MST3K was a video game... and had more guns.

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned also looks good and if the sale is still going on I might grab that too. Not to sure about Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot however.

Now I just have to wait a few more painful days before I can dig into this with my friends.

Welcome to the Wasteland

2010-07-27T21:28:00.003-04:00

I finished no less than three games this weekend. Red Faction: Guerrilla, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Fallout 3 all rolled their credits across my TV before the Monday morning dawn. Coincidentally all three of these games came out around the same time in late 2008, but I bought them at different times, and then finished them within days. Friday night I spent about 6 hours playing Red Faction’s multiplayer with Will and JT. They live in Hawaii now, and being 6 hours behind me actually works out well. Once they went to bed I dug in for end of the campaign. Red Faction was a great game and the last mission was particularly satisfying. You square off against a whole army of baddies, but it’s OK because you get to drive a big ass tank.

The Force Unleashed was a disappointing game only because it was hyped so much. I got it for Christmas and I’ve spent less than 10 hours with it in the intervening 7 months. It’s not that it wasn’t a fun game, it was, it just wasn’t as good as it could have been. I might play through it again on a harder difficulty or mine for achievements… or I might forget about it entirely. I had heard that there were two endings and going into the last stage I fully intended to get the “evil” ending but when the moment of truth came it was unclear what I was supposed to do and I ended up with the “good” ending simply because I walked in the wrong direction.

I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for almost a year now. I had played through to the very end with one character, Ilsa, who I played as a good-guy (or good-gal). I only had one side quest and the last main quest left when I stopped and started a new game with a character named Norman. The side quest was “Strictly Business” where you are tasked with enslaving four denizens of the waste. I had a very clear idea of who Ilsa was at that point and while she’s an opportunistic bitch she’s not a slaver. Slavery is not her bag, baby. Norman is a different animal. He’s a sociopath at best and a homicidal maniac at worst. He had no problem enslaving those people and shooting his way out of Rivet City in the process. I started Norman’s game out with the Operation Anchorage DLC, which I wrote about in a previous post. Anchorage is a very easy campaign made for low level characters and playing it first completely changes the main game. I basically started with a level 8 character, power armor, and advanced weapons. My goal for Norman - his entire purpose really - is completely different from Ilsa. While Ilsa was created to play the game, Norman was created explicitly for evil. I needed him to get the bad karma achievements that Ilsa never could. His story arc has nothing to do with finding his lost father or combating the Enclave. His story is about getting to level 30 as fast as he can, as brutally as he can. As you can imagine this makes for a very different gameplay experience. I don’t usually spend this much time with a game this dynamic, investing myself in multiple playthroughs. I can’t think of another game where I’ve played it twice and played two different games. My hat’s off to Bethesda on this one. All that’s left now is the Broken Steel expansion, and perhaps Mothership Zeta.

Will has been cajoling me to get Borderlands for a while now. He and JT have already played through it but he promised me that he would play it again if I jumped on board. I grabbed the game Sunday morning and we spent a couple hours with it. I’m liking it so far. The description “FPS Diablo” was thrown around a lot before it came out. I can’t argue with that. Level grind + loot orgy + guns, that’s Borderlands. Will is out of town all week and I’ve got to work all weekend so the earliest we’ll be able to play it again it next week, probably next weekend. I think it was this kind of agonizing waiting that made me reluctant to get the game. I wasn’t worried that I wouldn’t like it, I was worried that I would like it too much.

I guess in the meantime there’s Midnight Club LA…

Blacklight Reactive

2010-07-23T00:42:00.008-04:00

Attention: Blacklight: Tango Down is on XBLA. You don't have to be a dumbass like me and buy it for PC! You have been warned!

Yeah I had one of those stupid impulse-shopping moments and bought Blacklight, ironically enough, via Impulse. Actually it's not ironic at all. Stardock named it that on purpose knowing that people will buy shit from their house if they think they can play it right away. Well think again assholes! You still have to download it, and then download Windows Live (why doesn't Windows Live come installed on Vista?) and then install both of them, and then realize that the two programs are somehow smelted together, and then wrestle with Windows Live's idiotic interface. I still don't know if I can play Blacklight offline. It certainly won't let me play it without logging into my profile. Not that you would want to play the single player game.

The PC version isn't necessarily bad, it just doesn't run as well on my PC as it does on the 360. And while a twitch shooter like Unreal belongs on the PC, a more tactical game like Blacklight demands the button layout of the modern controller. Let me demonstrate with a mathematical expression:

WASD + mouse = Awesome

WASD + QERFCV1234 + Shift + mouse = Frustration

I'm sure there are some hard core PC jocks out there who can handle it but I'm not one of them. The 360 controls are practically identical to Modern Warfare's (which I'm sure wasn't an accident) so they fit me like a glove. So now I have to decide if its worth buying twice, or rather worth paying $30 for. $15 yes, go get it, $30 I'm not so sure. I suppose I could chalk it up as a donation to a struggling start-up. Maybe I can score some karma for when I am (hopefully) in the same position.

Anticipation 2010

2010-07-22T21:52:00.003-04:00

For me summer is all about waiting for the fall blockbusters. By this time we’ve had E3 and we know what will be coming out for the Christmas season, and we’ve had a glimpse at what lies beyond. I thought it would be a good time to list my top ten most anticipated games.
…But then I could only think of five:

5. Warhammer 40,000 Dark Millennium Online
Publisher: THQ, Developer: Vigil, Release: TBA

I Don’t play MMORPGs. This game might change that. E3 brought us the first trailer but no real gameplay demo. I wasn’t impressed with the trailer but it’s still early on. At this point I’d love to just get some details. Basically, if they make a game where I can grow from a mewling heretic into a civilization-crushing Chaos Lord then I’m in.

4. Rock Band 3
Publisher: MTV Games, Developer: Harmonix, Release: Octoer 26th

Music games aren’t as hot as they were two years ago when Rock Band came out. Back then every party I went to had people playing Rock Band or Guitar Hero. I never got Rock Band, mostly due to the price and space requirements of all those damn peripherals. I’m thinking of jumping in with both feet this time. Rock Band 3 will support 7 players. It will have a two octave keyboard and a Pro guitar with 102 buttons for every note on a real guitar. It will have a Pro mode, a setting above expert were you can play the real notes. It will support all the songs from RB 1, 2 and RB: Green Day, as well as all the DLC. This is the Cadillac of music games. They are pulling out all the stops, and my prediction is that this will be the game that decides if music games stay in the spotlight or prove to be just a passing fad.

3. Fallout: New Vegas
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks, Developer: Obsidian, Release: October 19th

I’m a longtime fan of Fallout. I played the first game on a 133 MHz Pentium Uno. It was a serious time investment because moving from one screen to the next took a full minute or more to load. I’ve spent more time with Fallout 3 than I did with the first two games combined, and I still haven’t finished with it. I’ve got DLC for it I haven’t even touched. So I’m fairly psyched about New Vegas. Two points of interest: One, it’s being developed by Obsidian, a developer with members of the original Black Isle team than made the first game. Two, they are revamping the NPC system. That second point might not seem exciting, but as I may have mentioned before, the ONLY significant problem with Fallout 3 was that your NPC companions were drooling idiots who consistently ran head-long into flaming death. Keeping them alive became a whole game in itself and it made having companions more of a liability than an asset. New Vegas is supposed to fix that by making the AI more robust and giving you more command options as well. For me the idea of putting together an actual team rather than deploying living SCUD missiles is very appealing.

2. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
Publisher: Konami, Developer: Mercury Steam, Release: Q3 2010

3D Castlevania games have not done very well in the past. There have been decent 3D offerings from the series but they never stood up to the pedigree of the 2D games. I enjoyed Curse of Darkness on PS2, but I have to agree with the vocal majority that it was missing that spark of greatness. It just seemed like it was made by a second-rate studio, not a giant like Konami. Lords of Shadow is supposed to change all that. It’s hard to say exactly why I’m so optimistic about this game. All I’ve seen are a few trailers with gameplay footage… but it just looks awesome! I’ve got a good feeling about this one.

Side note: In a few days I’ll get a surprise summer gift in the form of Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. I love the 2D “Metroid style” Castlevanias. While the series has faltered on consoles it has flourished on handhelds. While I enjoyed my time with titles like Circle of the Moon, I always found myself wishing I could play them on a TV with a controller (the Game Boy Advance SP was not made for giant man-hands or old people eyes). Now just yesterday I found out about Harmony of Despair, a 2D side scroller for XBLA. The game will have a co-op element and a new way to explore the castle. Instead of uncovering little bits at a time you can zoom out to see the entire thing including where the boss is. You then have to figure out the best way to reach him. And it comes out in two weeks!!!

1. Brink
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks, Developer: Splash Damage, Release: Q1 2011

I seem to be starting a trend where I have one shooter per year that I play the hell out of. In 2009 it was Rainbow Six Vegas 2, 2010 is the year of Modern Warfare 2, next year it will be Brink. Probably. This game looks sick. I saw it played at PAX last year and was very impressed with the whole package. It has:

- Progressive character development and customization
- Adaptive mission system within competitive multiplayer
- Some sort of new movement system that allows previously unseen agility and obstacle navigation

It’s going to be hot, I can’t wait. Have a great summer everyone!

Odama for President

2010-06-21T01:58:00.004-04:00

The day after I got all those games I drove up to my parents house. They live in the Shenandoah Valley in this little Virginia town. They moved there to get away from civilization and they did a pretty good job. This is one of those towns where people are proud of their Walmart. Not a Walmart, not even the Walmart, their Walmart. As if they built it themselves. Bumper Sticker: "My Walmart is an honor-roll student at..."

Anyway I was surprised to find a game store there that was very well stocked. It was attached to some video rental chain I had never heard of, kind of a Hollywood Video/Game Crazy kind of thing. They didn't have anything older than last generation but they did have a great selection of Xbox/PS2/GameCube games. In my zeal I bought two games for the Cube: Odama and Viewtiful Joe. In a previous post I stated that I was mostly done buying Cube games, but I guess with me "done" is relative.

Odama (NOT Obama) is a game that always intrigued me, both because of its premise and because my wife wanted to play it (again, see previous post on Tetris Attack). I had heard that the game sucked due primarily to awkward control. This rumor is entirely true. I'm not going to say that the game sucks but saying the control is awkward is like saying the ocean is wet. Here is the idea: you play as a general in a medieval Japanese army. The battlefield is a pinball machine and you control a giant ball with pinball flippers at the bottom of the screen. You use the ball to complete objectives and run over the enemy. You also control your army by using the GameCube microphone and issuing voice commands. If you don't have the little bracket that holds the mic onto the controller then you are screwed. What we did was my wife played the pinball part with the controller and I used the mic to control our men. Even with two brains to keep track of things it was, um, a clusterfuck. You've got to get your men to pick up these things, and fight the enemy, and open gates, and the ball is rolling over you and... yeah. I'm willing to give it another try but I have a feeling this one's going to be more collectors item and less actual game, that you know, I play.

I haven't spent enough time with Viewtiful Joe to say anything important about it. So I won't.

Lastly I got Doom 2 and Shadow Complex from XBLA. They are fun. That is all.

What Ninten-Don't

2010-06-21T00:42:00.004-04:00

Whew, a lot's happened since last post. A friend gave me a box with three classic systems and a shit ton of games, I made some odd impulse buys, and... crap I hate it when I can't come up with three things.

A co-worker of mine heard that I collected games and told me he had some old stuff that I could have if I wanted it. Of course I said yes, but some time went by and I forgot about it. A while later I was coming out of work late (stupid work) and he was still waiting in the parking lot with the stuff. So that was cool of him on two counts. He hands me this box and in it is a NES, SNES, Genisis, 32X, controllers, cables, and a crap load of games. I did NOT expect him to have that many games. Rather than explain everything here you can just watch the video.

-video upcoming-

I haven't gotten the NES to work yet but the Genesis does. I've played a few games, most of which suck. I'll let you know when I get everything shiny and I've tried all the games.

Lost and Dissasembled

2010-05-27T04:33:00.018-04:00

In this installment of "How I Waste My Time and Money" we talk about modern classics of the Marvel Comics Universe and mainstream television, Oh the HUMANITY!!!

I saw the finale of Lost. I'm just glad I didn't spend the last six years waiting for that. I started watching the show on Hulu back around the beginning of the year and finished season five just in time for season six to start in February. It wasn't a bad ending per say. It just left to many things unanswered; answers I'd been waiting for from the beginning of the show. The final big reveal only has to do with season six, not the rest of the show, and when you find out what has been going all all season it's a big WTF moment. Frustrating.

On a more positive note I picked up the TPB of Avengers: Disassembled. This story is supposed to be the beginning of all the major Marvel Universe events that took place over the last seven years, culminating with the Siege storyline that just came out. I had heard that this was a great story and I was not disappointed. I'm not really a big Avengers fan. I know most of the characters but as a team I wasn't really aware of their backstory. My lack of history with the franchise didn't matter, it turned out to be the best comic I've read in a long while. This book starts off with a bang and the shit just doesn't stop hitting the fan until the last page. It sets up the events in the reality-altering House of M storyline which is next on my list. I'll let you know how it is.

Tetris Attacks My Wallet

2010-05-27T04:33:00.008-04:00

Went to Play N Trade the other day to satisfy my hunger for old-ass games. In The Human Animal Desmond Morris says that people collect things to satisfy an innate instinct to hunt. I'll buy that. Haha, pun! Anyway, PNT had just received a wealth of trade-ins and were fully stocked in the awesome classics department. I picked up Tetris Attack for the SNES and Crimson Skies for the Xbox.

Crimson Skies is the first game for the original Xbox that I've acquired. A while ago I made a short list of titles that I would consider buying. I looked for titles that I felt were icons of the system, highly acclaimed, and held at least some game play appeal (I didn't want to just keep them on the shelf after all). Also I wanted to make sure they were known for working well on the 360 (since I don't have an actual Xbox). The list was short primarily because like the current generation, the last one saw most AAA titles come out for both Xbox and PS2. Since the PS2 is my primary system for that generation (again, I don't even have an Xbox) It makes sense to me to buy dual system games for the PS2. Here are a few notable titles from my wish list:

Jade Empire
Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2

... um actually that's it. I told you it was a short list.

Crimson Skies is pretty fun. For about and hour. The air combat is fun but you follow a fairly linear set of missions, and they degenerate into bullshit fairly quickly.

Tetris Attack on the other hand is a true classic. I wasn't really aware of it as a quality title until recently when I was looking over a SNES top 100 list on the net. The authors were hailing it as one of the best puzzle games on the system, so when I saw it at PNT I gave it a chance, despite the $15 price tag. The game play is solid. It's a match-three game like Bejeweled, but your moves don't have to result in a match, so there is a lot more strategy involved as you set up big combos. On top of that there are a crap load of modes and even tutorials, which was pretty unheard of back then. My questions is, how is it they got to call it Tetris Attack when it had nothing to do with Tetris?

The best part of the game is the multiplayer. I say this for one big reason: MY WIFE WILL PLAY THIS WITH ME. In case you don't know my wife let me assure you this is huge. She'll play games every once in a while but her attention span for them is like my attention span for everything else. After about 15 minutes she's had enough. I got her to play Tetris Attack with me... FOR OVER 2 HOURS! That's right, 120 whole minutes. Amazing.

It's not surprising that the game is so good. It came out in 1996, the end of the system's life cycle, and was made by a first party developer. The developer, Inteligent Systems also programed Super Metroid, and were the developers behind the Fire Emblem series.

On a side note, apparently someone had come in to PNT a few days before me and traded in their N64 and all their games which included pretty much every good game for the system. It was very hard for me not to drop the cash and walk out with it all. Maybe next week.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 4: Finally Finished

2010-05-09T00:49:00.004-04:00

With story mode anyway. Story mode... not sure why I called it that, but now that I think about it, it makes sense. FF13 is two games. First you play through the linear story going from chapters 1 to 13, and after you beat it you get to play the second game. You can play the "other game" a little bit in chapter 11 but you aren't really supposed to. What you are supposed to do is wait until after the credits have rolled, and only then can you play what sometimes seems like the REAL Final Fantasy.

I knew from the beginning that you could continue playing after defeating the final boss. I knew this because the strategy guide told me from the very beginning. It's authors went out of their way to tell me not to bother power leveling my characters or items until "much later in the game" (Chapter 11). Once I got to "much later in the game" they encouraged me to quickly return to the main plot. It's not until after you beat the game that you are supposed to do the side quests.

Why wait? Because the final level of the crystarium isn't unlocked until after you beat the last boss. I knew this, but I was under the impression that the game just continues after the credits. I thought it would let you keep on running around doing shit and explain it as, "you beat the evil boss and your reward is to run around Pulse killing shit." This isn't the case however. After the credits you are asked if you want to save your game. When you do, you are transported to a save point just before the last boss, and it's like you never fought him! There's nothing wrong with this I guess, it's just so ass-backward. Why did they do it that way? Maybe they wanted you to be only so powerful for the last fight. It's a little jarring that's all.

Anyway the game is great. Not GREAT great, just regular. I've had fun with it and I'm sure I'll put just as much more time into it as I already have.

2010 Triangle Game Conference

2010-04-22T02:41:00.004-04:00

For the last couple of years there has been a gaming conference here in the Triangle area (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) aptly named the Triangle Game Conference. It's put on by my school Wake Technical Community College (where I'm studying game design) and some of the local game companies like Insomniac and Epic. Not many people know this but this area of North Carolina is home to more than 40 game or simulation companies.

I meant to go in previous years but was to busy. This year however I had a chance to go. I was impressed with the size of the conference. It's no E3 or GDC by any means but for only being around for 3 years I think it's doing quite well. I think what sets this conference apart is its focus on students. All of the seminars held throughout the two days were aimed at the burgeoning designer/programmer/artist. Most of the attendees were students which initially surprised me but makes sense since its put on by Wake Tech and there are a lot of colleges in the area (NC State has a top rate computer science department, so I've heard).

I only went for the second day but I had a lot of fun and learned a lot as well. The best seminars I attended were given by writers. Writing is one of the avenues I'm looking at for getting into the industry so they were relevant to me. But I found that writers also make the most engrossing speakers (duh). On the other hand I should have known better than to expect to get anything out of a 50 minute seminar on advanced physics engines.

The Suck of Anchorage

2010-04-21T04:45:00.004-04:00

So I finished Operation: Anchorage. It started off as a fast moving diversion, but the ride was too short and the scenery along the way wasn't that great. Things went down hill when I realized I had missed one of the intel items and upon walking all the way back to get it I realized it was in a section of the map I couldn't get back to. It let me go back to the long section right after it so that I wasted 10 min walking through it, but no, not the section I needed to get to. Why didn't they block off all the past sections so I wouldn't waste my time? Or better yet, not block off sections at all? There was no reason to do it in the first place. Anyway, being the tight-ass completionist that I am, I had to revert to a previous save and wasted yet another hour.

After the opening part of the Anchorage simulation you have all your guns taken from you and you have to requisition equipment kits as if you were playing Battlefield or something. Why??? Carrying a variety of weapons is one of the things that makes Fallout such a fun game! None of the loadouts includes the coolest weapon in O:A, the Gauss rifle. You can get the rifle but only if you pass a speech test which I failed because I was only level 4. Why would you make an expansion with only one interesting new weapon, and then make it really hard to get? I should get to play with it the whole time! That's what I paid five dollars for!!! Stupid.

The coolest part is that you put together a squad of AI companions from a list of the usual soldier archetypes, a mister gutsy, or a sentry bot. I picked the sentry bot. This is cool until you realize that Fallout 3's weakest point is its piss-poor companion AI. You have no control over your team. You tell them when to attack and they do it until the mission is done. They kill things well enough, almost too well. The game is so easy I could have gone without them; there are health and ammo refills all over the place.

It didn't actually get hard until the end when you fight the Chinese general.

**Kinda Spoiler Alert**

The last part of the simulation is a raid against the Chinese stronghold. You run in to this last area together with a few U.S. soldiers in power armor (who's presence makes the game even easier) and in front of you is this general and some elite Chinese soldiers. You exchange some meaningless dialog and then the general attacks you, head on, with a sword. Well hes going to have a hard time against my gun! No, it turns out he's got more hit points than a whole pack of deathclaws. So I start shooting him but I don't have a lot of action points so I'm forced to fire outside of V.A.T.S.. I realize I'm taking a lot of damage but it doesn't look like he's hitting me. Suddenly I'm dead. I figure that maybe the Chinese soldiers are shooting me but when I target them they are green (friendly). I finally realize that it's my own fucking men shooting me! As I attempt to shoot the general they keep running through my line of fire, and when they get hit they turn on me! What kind of STUPIDMOTHERFUCKINGSHIT is that!? WHY ARE THEY EVEN THERE!?!? The Chinese soldiers aren't shooting at me so its not like they are protecting me. The whole thing is just to create the illusion of a battle. Sorry, but the illusion was shattered when a hand full of frag grenades failed to scratch the tiny oriental man who's only protection was a cotton uniform!! In order to beat it I had to run in circles around the battlefield so that the general couldn't hit me, waiting for my AP to recover so I could shoot him in V.A.T.S., so as not to accidentally hit any of my own men. If I were to summarize the experience it would be: Not. Fun. At. All.

Basically Operation: Anchorage takes all the things that makes Fallout 3 great and trows them out while accentuating the few crappy parts. If you think about it, an expansion where you get to go back and fight one of the pivotal battles of the war that destroyed the world should have been Amazing! Instead it's just a big disappointment. Just to make up for it I blew up Megaton three or four times. Awesome. Every. Time.

I'm taking a Fallout break and going back to Final Fantasy 13 for a while.

The Guns of Anchorage

2010-04-07T06:54:00.006-04:00

Don't remember if I mentioned this but I grabbed two of the expansion packs for Fallout 3; Broken Steel and Operation: Anchorage. It appeared as though all the expansions were part of the weekly discount on XBLA at %50 off. Believing the discount to be temporary I readily added 1000 MS points to my account and picked two. I think it may be a permanent thing though because I checked the next week and they were still at the discounted price. I hadn't yet beaten the main game (I still haven't) so I put in a few hours with my main character who I plan to use for Broken Steel. If you are not aware it is a continuation of the main game, letting you play past the ending and raising the level cap to 30. For Operation: Anchorage I chose to use my evil character, and go strait the the expanded content right away. Making it across the map to get there was challenging at level 2, especially since I was used to playing at level 20+. It was actually refreshing to have a lone raider with an assault rifle be a credible threat and gingerly negotiating such an obstacle was actually fun. I'm at a point with my main character where I'm more or less moving down a checklist tying up loose ends before the last mission. It can be tedious.

Anyway the little bit of Anchorage that I've played has been fun. The whole thing is a simulation, a game within a game. The mechanics are stripped down for a faster moving experience which again is refreshing. you don't have to mess around with item management as much because it's a "game" so you refill your ammo and health at stations along your path. There are intel items to find as well, and grabbing all ten before the end of the simulation grants you a special perk.

I'd really like to get all the achievements for this game but that puts me in a position to have to buy The Pitt. They did that thing that they sometimes do to games with DLC. They added the achievements to the game whether you have the content or not. So you could get all 1000 points from the normal game and still have an annoying 250 keeping you from %100 completion. I guess most people don't care but I'd like to see %100 for certain games and now I have to pay extra for it. I don't really want to play The Pitt either, out of all five of the expansions it seems to be the least interesting. I'm much more interested in Mothership Zeta since it's the most different, and Point Lookout looks cool because I grew up in roughly that geographic area so it would be like playing in my post-apocalyptic back yard. Whee.

PAX East

2010-03-29T04:35:00.004-04:00

So I missed the inaugural PAX EAST this weekend. It would have been nice to go but with all of the traveling and car repair lately it was just not financially feasible. I'm planing on going to PAX10 in the fall though. Hopefully I'll have a new job by then that isn't hourly so I don't feel each tick of my off-time like a stab to the wallet. No I don't get vacation time. No not sick leave either. >:-(

Anyway I am going to the Triangle Game Conference next week. I don't know what kind of people attend this thing but let me tell you, if you aren't a student be prepared to shell out for this one. I got a one day pass for $25 but that was with my student discount AND my IGDA discount. Without those I would have paid $120 for a one day pass! Well I wouldn't have paid that but that would have been the price.

Stuff that's not Final Fantasy

2010-03-27T07:29:00.003-04:00

Taking a break from Final Fantasy this week. I've been playing a few rounds of Modern Warfare 2 each morning when I get home from work. I feel like I'm getting better at it. I play mostly free for all deathmatch and I manage to get a "kill-cam" win about once a session now. It may sound noobish to get excited about such things but the feeling of improvement is one of the best feelings a human being can have and it's one that "1337" players seldom get to enjoy. I've found tremendous success with the care package and sentry gun kill counts. Using a care package as camping bait is an old strategy but I like the twist of planting a sentry gun and letting it do my camping for me. The 4 and 5 kills necessary to get these makes it easy to do.

I had to go to the doctor the other day which required me to drive to a part of town with a Play N Trade nearby. Proximity to a Play N Trade almost guarantees a purchase. I went in looking for SNES or PS1 games as usual but ended up with copies of KOTOR2 and Twilight Princess in my hands. KOTOR2 was less expensive but I've been eyeing the Zelda game for few years now. Damn Gamecube games are still hella expensive for their age but you know you're buying quality. Plus if they haven't gone down in price buy now they're not going to later, or get any easier to find. Although I'm not likely to play through the whole game (much like Metroid Prime) I'm glad I grabbed it and now I'm considering TLoZ: The Wind Waker and Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door to round out my GC collection.

...OK and Starfox Assault. But that's it!

So I had a scare the other day. I was tidying up and accidentally dropped my wife's 14 year old Game Boy Pocket. I guess the glue had worn out because the plastic shield over the LDC screen popped right off. There was a moment of panic but it turned on just fine. A light application of modeling glue and a few hours later the shield was back in place. My Spring cleaning endeavors also resulted in me moving my SNES and old 13" TV into the office. This opened up a lot of space on my dresser which is cool because I had some framed photos I needed to find a place for. I had to store all my modeling supplies to make room for the SNES and TV but I play way more video games than I do modeling.

Lastly I mentioned Brink in a previous post after seeing it at PAX last year. I saw the most recent videos for it yesterday and it looks like it's going to be a fantastic game. I have a feeling I'll be doing some campaigning among my friends come fall to get them to buy it.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 3

2010-03-27T06:04:00.004-04:00

Warning, minor story spoilers!

40+ hours in:

So I've reached the part of the game where things branch out a bit. I'm on chapter 11 where the party has finally arrived on Pulse, the giant world that the much smaller Cocoon floats above. There is a very nice cut scene involving an airship just before the party gets there, and then another impressive one right after that. The second is a montage of Pulse with some voice-over exposition that showcases some of the world's more fantastic features. So that was fun. Pretty soon after getting to Pulse you get to the first real open area in the game. There are some monsters here that are gargantuan and are not meant to be taken on at this point in the game. It's cool to see what you have to aspire to in the late game. This area is also the first opportunity to take on a sidequest and go somewhere other than the next checkpoint. The game has missions that are a lot like XII's hunts. You track down a specific beastie, subdue it, and receive some high quality rewards. You can do the missions more than once but you'll only get the reward once.

In my last addendum I mentioned that at the beginning of chapter 10 you get to choose your party. Well right after I posted that I got a little further and the "crystarium" opened up so that all characters can learn all job rolls. This diminishes my earlier criticism of the linearity of the progression system but only a little. First it sucks that it took 30+ hours of play before I get to choose who does what. Second it's still pretty linear, you're just choosing between 6 lines now instead of three. Third the three extra rolls each character has are much more expensive to develop that their primary rolls, encouraging you to stick to the primaries. Finally each character's primary rolls offer a much better spread of abilities. For example, Snow is designed to be the best sentinel as he gets great stats and all of the sentinel abilities. However if you wanted to make him a healer and developed his medic roll you would find that he gets much fewer abilities than Hope does. The characters are designed to be specific things, so there isn't much point to developing their extra rolls until you've completed the primaries. So mad about that.

Also a little irritated by the eidolons. In order to get them you have to fight them. Nothing new there, it's a standard of the series. Only now you're not so much fighting them as you are auditioning for them. It's like a summoning tryout. You have to figure out which abilities they like and then use those abilities in the battle to fill a Gestalt gauge (this game is big on gauges). Fill the gauge and hit the X button and it transforms into these awkward "vehicles" that look like they were made from K'nex, and you get to ride them. That's a cool idea in theory but there's nothing I hate more in a game than not knowing what to do. Maybe it's just my personal psychology but I don't want to fight a battle AND solve a puzzle, that's not fun for me. I realized that the whole thing is kind of like a mating dance. You're trying to discover how to attract this strange and wondrous creature to you before it bites your head off. Of course I was never good at that sort of thing... WHICH IS WHY I PLAY VIDEO GAMES. Or maybe it's the other way around. My failings at social interaction aside I like the idea but it still feels a little to trail-and-error-ish to me. The last one I fought I more or less knew what I had to do, but finding the perfect paradigm to fill the gauge in time (did I mention there was a time limit?) took me about seven tries. I was at the controller throwing stage by the end of it.

Did I mention this game is hard? It's freaking hard.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 2

2010-03-21T13:01:00.005-04:00

I'm at 30+ hours now, and at the beginning of chapter 10. Just got to the point where I have everyone together and I can choose who is in my party, so I'm excited about that. Got to pick who I wanted for the boss fight at the end of chapter 9. I decided I wanted to switch out Fang and bring in Sazh to join Lightning and Hope. This allows me to have a Commando and two Synergists for the openings, a Commando and two Ravagers for offensive chaining, Two medics and a Synergist for when I get in trouble, and two Commandos and a Ravager to finish things off. It's worked out pretty well so far.

In my review I don't think I made it clear just how gorgeous this game is. I don't usually care to much about graphics but it's hard not to be impressed by every environment and model. The battles are really spectacular. They did a great job with the spells, which are flying around constantly. The fights are chaotic and because of the speed at which they progress and the prevalence of flashy spells and attacks they are a joy to watch.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 1

2010-03-17T23:44:00.008-04:00

So It's been out for 10 days. I've had it for 9. A lot has been said about it in that time, some have spoken praise and some have spoken words of derision, including people who's opinions I hold in high esteem. But now I'm going to have my say. The following is my initial impression of the game. I'm currently about half way through the main story (chapter 8 of 13) and have logged 24 hours of play time.

The curse of the Final Fantasy series is that it's never really final. There are 13 of them (including X-2 and excluding XI) and every new installment has to been held up to all those that have come before. As perhaps the most celebrated RPG series in the world, living up to your predecessors is no small challenge. There is folly in comparing the games however because each one stands alone as its own complete experience, the installments having only token similarities that are really more like traditions than rules. Perhaps the greatest Final Fantasy tradition is to break with the standards of previous games. What makes a Final Fantasy game then isn't so much what it has in common with the others but what it does differently. Invariably fans will cry foul, declaring that the series has been ruined, screaming of sacrilegious changes to familiar formulas and calling for designers' resignations. I believe the whole point of Square Enix's flagship series is to push the company to produce something that is both familiar and totally new at the same time. Well with Final Fantasy XIII they have certainly done that.

So I know it's ironic given what I just said, but I'm going to start of by comparing XIII to another game. More than anything else this game reminds me of FFX. The story is similar. It’s about a small band of people who's mission will likely spell their doom whether they succeed or not. They both have a progression system that abandons traditional levels in exchange for a branching path that increments attributed one at a time. They are both highly linear games with limited opportunities for sidequests or exploration. Finally, they are both the first Final Fantasy games for their respective console generations, setting new standards for graphical excellence.

So there's that comparison. Now lets talk about what makes XIII unique, and we'll start with the obvious, the battle system. Back in 1991 Square put out FFIV and with it a new battle system called the Active Time Battle system. ATB changed the way we fought battles from a turn based system to one in which time "flows" and characters act when their individual ATB gauges fill, usually a function of their speed stat. Since FFIV every game since has had some variation of the ATB system (with the exception of FFX).

FFXIII's variation is the most radical yet. Your character has a bar that fills like normal only now the bar has segments and different actions use up different numbers of filled segments. This means that you don’t have to wait for your bar to fill completely before executing an action. For example a basic attack only costs one segment. If you had a bar with two segments filled you can hit a button and use up the first two segments to instantly perform two attacks. If you had the third segment half filled it would carry over to the first segment, so you it wouldn’t be wasted. This can be useful if you know an enemy is only going to take two more hits to kill. You can finish it off quickly and move on to the next without having to wait for the bar to fill.

It doesn’t stop there. Did you notice before I said “your character” has a bar? It’s singular for a reason. In battle you directly control one lead character. The other characters in your party (max party size is three) are controlled by the computer and their actions are dictated by whatever their paradigm roll is; more on rolls in a moment. So what happens if your one controllable character dies? Game Over. This means that paramount to anything else is your lead character’s health.

So what are rolls and paradigms? Rolls are like the job classes of the past, only instead of a job with a mix of actions that could span attack and defense the rolls are strategic foci and are highly specialized. When assigned to a roll a character will do one specific thing; a commando attacks, a medic heals, a sentinel defends, a synergist buffs, etc. There is no crossover. A medic cannot do a simple weapon attack for example. The paradigms are pre-set roll assignments for the characters in your party. Paradigms can by shifted on the fly during battle. So you can go from having a commando and two ravagers (a second attacking roll used to drive up a chain gauge, more on that in a moment too) to having a sentinel, medic, and synergist with the push of a button (OK two pushes and some stick work). This would be useful if you were low on health and needed to shore up your defenses.

So what then is a chain gauge? Each enemy you fight has a chain gauge along with their health bar. Buy damaging the enemy their chain gauge will fill up. When the gauge is full the enemy becomes staggered and will take more damage. Staggering enemies is a vital part of FFXIII’s battle system. The whole thing works like this. Enemies have weaknesses that when exploited will drive their chain gauge up faster. Ravagers can cast elemental magic and perform elementally charged physical attacks. You either use a librascope (an item) to scan the enemy’s weakness or let the AI figure it out by trail and error. The ravager’s pound the enemy with its weakness element while a commando, just by being there, slows the chain gauge’s recovery. The enemy gets staggered and the commando starts doing beaucoup damage until it is dead or it recovers from the stagger. Rinse, repeat. And that’s your combat system folks.

So I mentioned that the progression system is like FFX’s. There are no character levels, just stats that are boosted one at a time. FFX had the sphere grid which let you occasionally choose which path you wanted your character’s development to take. FFXIII is similar but instead of a grid you have this weird crystal lattice thing. Each character has three rolls that they can be assigned for the main portion of the game (you get more after you beat the story). Each roll has a path with stat nodes on it. Spend Crystal Points (experience points basically) and you can move along the path from one node to another. Occasionally you can choose whether or not to branch off the main path but this usually only leads to one side node and then you’re back on the main path again. At first glace it has the appearance of giving you a choice but it’s really pretty linear. The only choice is deciding which roll to level up first. The crappy thing is that you can’t power level at all in the main story. Your crystal paths will come to an end and you have to wait until the next chapter of the game before more of the path opens up.

The third big change is the way you get equipment. Every save point is also a store. It’s like a futuristic shopping terminal. You can access stores virtually through the terminal… and I guess they beam you the products you buy Star Trek style. It’s a neat idea that doesn’t make a lot of sense but whatever. There are no traditional stores in the game, you just use the save points. You can equip a weapon and at least one accessory to protect you or confer some ability. Weapons and accessories have levels, and herein lies the true method of power leveling. Enemies you kill drop loot instead of money. You can sell the loot or you can use certain types of loot called components to upgrade your weapons and accessories. This is a game in and of itself with a complicated system for determining how much a component improves an item. Since you can keep fighting enemies and collecting loot you could theoretically build up a really strong character early in the game. However, because of how long this would take it’s really not worth investing a lot of time on loot farming until later in the game.

Well there’s the synopsis of the game. So what are my impressions of FFXIII? For starters let me just say that bottom line, it’s a good game. Is it an amazing, perfect 10? No. What I think Square Enix was trying to do was create a more cinematic and action-oriented game than Final Fantasy games of the past. The battle system is designed to be streamlined and fast moving, and it is! There are times when the flurry of attacks and the rapid shifting of paradigms create a truly exciting game play experience. The thing I don’t like about it is not being able to control all three characters. It was a cool idea and most of the time I dig the paradigm system. But sometimes I just want a character to do a very specific thing and I can’t tell them to do it. All I can do is paradigm shift and prey the AI figures it out. I wouldn’t mind it so much except you can’t dictate who your leader is, that’s determined by where you are in the story. I’ve always found it annoying in FF games when I’m stuck with a certain group of characters but at least in past games I could control those characters. So, it’s an interesting idea SquareEnix but next time no thanks.

The second problem I have is the pacing of the game. Like I said, they made it very cinematic. There are tons of cutscenes! These scenes tell the story at regular intervals throughout the game. The trouble is that they tend to break up the action too much. In past FFs you would enter a new area, have a cutscene, play through the area having many battles, get to the boss, cutscene, boss fight, cutscene, next area. In FFXIII you’ll have a cut scene at the beginning and end of each area but you’ll also have three or four during passage through the area. That could actually be pretty cool except that you only get two or three battles between each cut scene. At first this was OK but as I got towards the middle of the story I found that both the cutscenes and the battles were getting tedious. The battles would get really long because the enemies were stronger but they weren’t interesting enough to justify the length. The cutscenes stopped being impressive around chapter 6. I wish they would just put it all in one big scene and sum it up so I can get back to playing the game. I’ve read elsewhere that the momentum picks back up in the latter third of the game. We shall see.

Hands down, the weakest part of the game is the crystal leveling thing. Like I said before it doesn’t give you the freedom to develop your character as you might think it would. Really it just feels like work. Instead of leveling up my character automatically they make me do it, but the experience doesn’t have any appeal or feel rewarding. I’m just holding a button while watching a line and some crystals light up. On top of that the whole thing is presented in this 3D crystal model which is pretty to look at but unwieldy to use. It’s just too much trouble when I have to use the thing every ten minutes. Something like the sphere grid from FFX or even better the license grid from FFXII would have been a better choice.

That’s the bad stuff. On the plus side the graphics and amazing; even on my dinosauric standard definition TV. The story is pretty good. It’s your standard Final Fantasy story. It’s not going to win any awards but it’s engaging none the less. It’s interesting enough that I’m anxious to see how it turns out. OH! And they get a big thumbs-up for putting a story summary in the game that you can read at any time. I love it when RPGs do that, and they really went all out creating an encyclopedia with people, places, history, and the game summary that updates as you go. The characters are your typical Final Fantasy characters. They can be annoying but none of them are as obnoxious as Brother from FFX/FFX-2 so fear not.

I really do enjoy the battle system despite its flaws. The paradigm system is fun and exciting. The biggest impact of the new battle system is that it increases the difficulty of the game. Having the loss of one character end the game creates plenty of opportunities for failure. I don’t think I’ve ever died this much in a Final Fantasy and that’s a good thing. Finally, I like the weapon upgrade mini game a lot. It’s fun the way the bazaar from FFXII was fun, but it’s a little more straight forward too which is nice. I just wish it played a bigger roll in the early game.

I don’t give games number ratings because I think they’re misleading. All I can say is that I have had fun with the game and plan to spend a lot more time with it. I would recommend it to fans of Final Fantasy and RPG fans in general provided they take into account the negatives I mentioned. If you’re too much of a traditionalist you may just want to go back a play an early FF over again. I can’t say that I’d recommend paying $60 for the game either. It’s $60 worth of game no doubt, and I don’t feel like I wasted my money. However, I’ll bet most folks could stand to wait a while longer until the price drops. If you’ve never played an RPG before this may be a good place to start. It’s simpler than a lot of other RPGs out there, and it might appeal to a more action oriented player.

As I continue to play the game I’ll add updates and let you all know how I enjoyed the latter half of the game.

It's Been Four Years, I Can Wait Nine Hours

2010-03-10T00:58:00.000-05:00

So It's 0100 on Wednesday the Tenth of March, which means two things. First my Dad is an hour into his birthday, Happy Birthday! WOOO! And second Final Fantasy XIII has been available in North America for a day and an hour. Due to the cancer in my life that is my job I have not been able to pick it up yet. The Universe is testing me... but I shall prevail. I've been waiting for this game since 2006, I can wait until GameStop opens at 1000 this morning.

A Public Service Announcement

2010-03-09T23:28:00.000-05:00

::Attention::

If you are a dirty redneck slut and you are at a party stoned out of your mind, please do not randomly bite me or my friends. Seriously, it will just work out better for everyone if you don't.

Great, now that we've got that out of the way I can tell you about the weekend, or rather three weekends ago. Last weekend contained very little video game time. It did contain a trip to Texas, a last minute wedding, being awake for 56 strait hours, and a strange series of events which prompted me to make the above statement. And that's all we need to say about that weekend.

Three weekends ago I had the pleasure of driving up to my old home town in northern Virginia to see some old friends and play some old games. Er, new games. When I arrived the host (who I shall call "David") was busy pulling a new TV out of the box. This modest 46" was going to go in his bedroom eventually, but for the festivities we set it up on his kitchen table. In the dining room (or what was intended to be a dining room) there was a second set-up. Will brought a projector from work and aimed it at the blank wall. The host had his own not-so-modest TV in the living room and Will's little brother had yet another spare TV next to him. We all had 360s and the 5 of us (my other friend who I shall call "Vlad" was there but systemless) spent the next 48 hours playing all sorts of shit. Highlights included Modern Warfare 2 (which is great when you have everyone in the same room), a rousing 4 player run through I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT, and a 2 hour push into Gears of War 2's horde mode.

I also found time to play a little Forza 2 and over the course of those sessions I finally reached career level 50. So that was cool. Got to try out the first 15 or so minutes of Bioshock 2. It seemed like a great game but considering I've spent the same amount of time with its predecessor I wasn't inspired to go out and grab a copy. I did however pick up Red Faction Guerrilla, which is hella fun. It has some issues no doubt but played about 15 hours of it over 2 days so they must be doing something right. I'll put up an Impressions post about it later.

Needless to say that weekend kicked ass despite the drive and sleep deprivation, which is becoming old hat for me at this point. I'll try to throw up some pictures once I figure out how to pull them off my phone.

The Price of War

2010-02-16T14:35:00.000-05:00

I beat Modern Warfare 2 on veteran yesterday, leaving me with just Fallout 3 to finish before I feel ready for Final Fantasy XIII. It was a satisfying win to be sure but I was surprised that it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. There were certainly some really hard levels. I mentioned Takedown in the last post and I feel I must bring up Contingency and Loose Ends as well. These three levels are exercises in pain. In a lower difficulty Contingency isn't that bad but on veteran you have to finish a certain part in a 3 minute time limit. This negates the essential strategy for beating veteran which is to go slow and take your time. For a level like Takedown it's a strategy you must employ but in Contingency you have to run through as fast as you can and I found myself doing something that bordered on trial and error, running through it 20+ times trying something a little different each time. Loose Ends is a level that just pisses me off, there's no other way to put it. It was a pain in the ass on regular and it was a rage inducing shit-fest on veteran. The whole level is a paper cut and lemon juice festival but the last segment is just one big kick-in-the-balls-cake with a big fuck-you-cherry on top. I'm not going to spoil it for you, if you've played it you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't be prepared. I'm not kidding, the game literally gives you a big fuck-you at the end as a special thanks for playing.

Those three levels aside, it wasn't that hard. My basis for comparison is Call of Duty 2 in which every level is agonizing on hardened and up. I really like MW2 though. It may be the best shooter I've ever played. You feel like you are in a summer blockbuster, every second is a fantastic set-piece battle. Having gone through it twice I was still eager to go back and find all the intel items, which I did on recruit. Let me tell you, recruit is an entirely different game. Parts that on veteran would take you 30 minutes to slog through take 30 seconds as you execute a brisk walk through a raging firefight. The difficulty levels in a Call of Duty game are kind of like a spectrum ranging from arcade to simulation only instead of arcade having more enemies it has less which makes it not as fun. That's what they need for the next game, a mode with recruit level damage but a veteran or more level of enemies. I'd play it.

On a bitter-sweet note I just got 10 great cds for 30 bucks. The bitter sweet part is that it was from a going out of business sale for my favorite used cd store. Damn this recession, damn this recession to hell!

Preorder

2010-02-09T03:26:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I preordered Final Fantasy XIII along with the collector’s edition guide book. I know this goes contrary to my normal practice of buying games more than a year after they come out and at a fraction of the price but part of the reason I do that is so every few years I can afford to buy the newest Final Fantasy game. The total between the game and the book will be over $90. Well worth it (hey I could have spent $120 on Tony Hawk Ride). Final Fantasy is the exception to my rule. Which rule? All of them. I am not the kind of person who gets excited easily. Things that get most people worked up to a frothing frenzy of joyous anticipation usually only manage to induce from me a shrug and a muttered "meh". But for Final Fantasy I am what could be modestly described as a fanboy. And to be a Final Fantasy Fanboy (or F3 if you will) you pretty much have to be unimpressed by things. You have to have an unhealthy amount of patience and the uncanny ability to distract yourself from diabolically long development times. FF13 has been in development since before 12 came out. That was in 2006. That was four years ago. It's a good thing the games are so long you can spend at least some of that time hooked up to the Final Fantasy intravenous drip, a few precious months where the black muddy cloud of life can be diluted by a water-color rainbow. When you're chasing the dragon the rest of the grime smeared world fades away behind you, your vision tunnels as if approaching the speed of light, and the ground falls away beneath you while you float without effort suspended by naught but your neurons in the humming syrupy aether. At this point the existence of self is barely credible, an argument held aloft by a chorus of laughing sub atomic particles mankind will forever lack the fortitude of spirit to discover.
So yeah, March 9th, woo-hoo.

My task now is to complete all of my other self imposed gaming obligations so that my plate will be squeaky clean for the advent. This will mostly consist of trying to finish Fallout 3 to a satisfactory extent. That last sentence is a fool’s errand in and of itself. Epic poems could be written about "finishing" a game like Fallout 3. The word "sisyphean" comes to mind. On top of that I've decided to try and beat Modern Warfare 2 on veteran. If you've read previous posts you have an idea of my relationship with Infinity Ward and their venerable franchise. Challenging their dreaded hard mode is an act of suicidal self destruction that has produced in me fits of rage so pure they result in memory loss and permanent increases in blood pressure. These are periods of my life where I can only recall the aftermath; as if I awoke to stumble from my basement storm shelter and found that my home was no longer there. They call it "veteran" instead of "hard" because you come out the other side with post-traumatic stress disorder; like you've lived through something that will be read about in textbooks by bored school children. No man knows how he will die, but for me I would put money on a Call of Duty-induced heart attack or stroke. The description for veteran says, "You will not survive". They are not talking about the game.

I'm optimistic though. I'm already half way through it and the hardest level of the game, "Takedown" is behind me. As for Fallout 3, if I just concentrate on completing the official missions I could feasibly be finished by the end of the month. But then there are the expansions and the temptation to play through again as an evil character... and then again as a neutral one...

Top Gear

2010-01-28T02:40:00.000-05:00

I just watched the first episode from season 10 of Top Gear. What a great show! I'd only seen one other episode before where the host was in a little 4WD thingy and was being chased through the country side by a British hunting party with hounds and horses. That was pretty cool but this episode was way better. The three hosts each had a lightweight supercar and were driving around Europe looking for the perfect road. They ended up in the Swiss and Italian Alps on this amazing stretch. What impresses me the most about the show is the quality of the production and camera work. There were some incredible shots of both the cars and the country side. It's also fun to watch a group of guys who love cars and know so much about them given these awesome machines to play with. Also, the guys' witty banter keeps the pace nicely. I'll definitely be watching more of this show. So what does that have to do with video games? Nothing.

I'm gonna go play some Forza...

Impressions: The Maw

2010-01-02T05:44:00.000-05:00

So from now on any article that is a review will have the prefix title "impressions" because that's what the article will contain. I'm not really interested in doing a hard and fast review with a score and all that, primarily because a million other people do that and also because I would have to conform to some sort of format. I would prefer to do a more free form discussion as though I were speaking to a friend.

So a while ago I downloaded The Maw demo from Live Arcade. It had the first level which I found to be a pleasant diversion. This week's "Deal of the Week" was the full game for half price, so I grabbed it. In The Maw you play as a little alien guy in a yellow jumpsuit who escapes these other aliens when their ship crashes on a planet. The titular Maw is another alien whose body consists of purple ooze and a giant mouth. The gameplay revolves around guiding the Maw around by a leash beam and getting it to eat all the other animals in the level. Eating creatures makes Maw grow bigger which lets it eat even bigger creatures. There is a puzzle element that comes from eating special creatures. These creatures confer an ability to Maw like breathing fire or floating in the air, and are necessary to get past certain obstacles. So far there hasn't been anything I've gotten stuck on, it's all pretty much geared towards a younger audience. There have been a few satisfying head scratching moments though. So is the game any good? I would say it's amusing. The controls work and its got solid gameplay. I'm not screaming at for unfair deaths or glitches. In fact there aren't any deaths at all. Should you buy it? If you have kids this is probably a good game for them. It will exercise their young minds without being to hard, while providing some entertainment. As an adult I find it a good option if I want to kill some time without investing a lot of energy. I usually play it in a free half hour before I have to go do something else.

My biggest complaint with the game is that it's pretty short for a fifteen dollar game. There are less than ten levels and it takes about thirty minutes to finish a level. The production value is fairly high for a XBLA game but I still feel a little ripped off. The bullshit part is that there are three levels offered on the marketplace for 100MSP each so that's another $3.75 if you want all the levels. Why weren't these levels in the original release? The descriptions say they happen in between the normal levels and they are referred to as director's cut levels. So it would appear they were taken out on purpose just to squeeze me for another $3.75. Really $18.75 (the total for all of it) isn't a lot of money, but I expect more game for that, and offering cut levels for more money is just shady. It's the principle of the thing. It's like how the recently released Dragon Age Origins had an expansion pack released the SAME DAY. Why couldn't they have just put it in the full game? Because there are a bunch of dumb assholes out there who are willing to pay for it and the publishers know it. Smells like bullshit to me.

Brett Farve's Favorite System

2009-11-09T05:13:00.000-05:00

Is anyone else freaking amazed that the PS2 is still alive? They are still making games for the thing! And not just crappy movie games that have a version on all the systems but actual AAA games exclusively for the PS2! I've been watching Atlus put out a JRPG like every freaking month for the last 2 years so in my head I was thinking of them as just a fluke. But then I see that Naughty Dog is releasing a new Jak and Daxter on the system! What? In 2009?! I'm amazed. I think I might buy it (gasp, NEW) just to see what a AAA 2009 PS2 game is like.

The PS2 really is a great system, and although it is technically still active the games have plummeted in price. I'm going to launch a buying campaign (or "pogrom" if you will) in which I will hunt down a bunch of classic PS2 games to round out my collection. These are games that defined the system but that I never had interest in playing or just never got around to. I'll see if I can put together a list for a future post. I've already made a couple cursory Game Stop scouting trips and most of these games are under 10 dollars and almost all of them are under 20. I made a list of 7 of them and their total price was less than the cost of a new game for a current gen system. You know how I love value.

My Pogrom will preclude me from getting any new 360 games for a while. The last one I bought was Ridge Racer 6 last week. It was 6 bucks (again, value = <3), very reasonable. It was a launch title so its not state of the art but I can see how it got high marks when It came out. The graphics are very nice for 2005, and the game play is simple but fun. It's an arcade racer all the way, there are no simulation elements at all. After spending the last year churning through Forza 2 it feels refreshing to jump into a racer that's only concerned with fun racing. Ironically Forza 3 just came out. Most of my online racing buddies picked it up, I went in the opposite direction. As an observational aside I was impressed with Namco's ability and willingness to put a full sized instruction manual in with the game. A full 40 pages of info! This truly is the manual of a bygone era. Kudos to you Namco.

Never Rememer, Never Forget

2009-10-23T23:28:00.000-04:00

So I told you about my trip to Plan-N-Trade the other day where I bought a couple old Nintendo games (see last post). While there I saw that they had a copy of Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II. This was worth noting because it's an uncommon game, and the price was reasonable. Long story short I got it with the intent of playing the co-op game with my friend. I'll post on the details our adventure later.

Like a Video Game Maze

2009-10-18T10:55:00.001-04:00

Like a Video Game Maze

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The Game Boy... err Man

2009-10-18T07:52:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid I didn't have a Game Boy, which I thought was a grave injustice. A lot of my friends had one though and I spent a good amount of time playing theirs. Most of that time was spent playing Super Mario Land, mostly because everyone had it and most of the other games sucked. When I met my wife she told me she had an old game boy that had belonged to her and her brothers and when I expressed interest it and she dug it out of their basement. She had a few good games like Metroid II and a few bad ones like Spider Man, but one game she didn't have was Super Mario Land. This surprised me since like I said before, everyone had it.

So fast forward a few years to yesterday when I got a hankerin' to brows for some classics at my local Play-N-Trade. They didn't have a great selection but they had a few I was interested in. I ended up getting Ken Griffy Jr. Presents Major League Baseball for the SNES and Super Mario Land. KGJPMLB is a really fun baseball game from '94 that one of my friends had. It's everything that a baseball game needs to be, lots of fun with little complication. It was nice to buy a SNES game, it's been a long time since I picked up a new one.

Anyway, so this morning I got up from a 6 hour LOTRO bender (my trail subscription is up tomorrow) and sat down for a little classic Game Boy action. If you've ever played SML you know what a great game it is, really an example of hand-held game design done right. Now I never beat the game as a kid. In fact I don't think I ever got past the third world because things got unfamiliar after that. World 4 has a Chinese theme with bamboo in the background and kung foo guys jumping around. Its really weird how uncharacteristic this game of a typical Mario game. It definitely doesn't take place in the Mushroom Kingdom. The worlds (or I guess lands) are: World 1 Egypt, World 2 Water World with Aliens and Robots, World 3 Easter Island, and World 4 China. I was surprised to find that World 4 is the last one. The game culminates with a flying shoot-em-up level and a two part boss fight. Then you save Daisy (This is the game that she comes from) and the credits roll. So that's it. I beat in an hour the game that kicked my ass my entire childhood. High score 276080 bitchez.

I can see where I would have had trouble as a kid, the game is challenging. I found... holy shit I just played it again! Sooo much fun! OH Daisy! Anyway the game is pretty hard but for me this was entirely because my hands are no longer child-size and I was playing it on my Game Boy Advance SP. If you don't know, SP stands for "really fucking small." The other thing is that the control feels a bit loose or slippery which can make a hard performer even herder. Like controller throwing harder. I found myself unexpectedly falling off of ledges and saying things like "no fucking way", and "that's fucking bullshit". I'm pretty sure I didn't say those things back in 1989. I'm not saying the control is bad, it's just not Super Mario World precision. Kind of like how Disney Land isn't a cool as Disney World. I also got an occasional feeling of bad hit detection but then, it IS a tiny screen so who knows.

Did I mention there are shooting levels? So cool. OH Daisy!

Relaps

2009-10-16T00:04:00.000-04:00

I gave the 360 a rest this week and played some good old PS2. Three games that I abandoned but would like to finish: Dirge of Cerberus, Odin Sphere, and Okami. Two of those, DoC and OS, I don't think I ever will finish mostly due to the frustration factor. DoC gets a bad rap. A lot of people would say that it sucks but I don't think that's fair. The problem is that it came out at the tail end of the platform's life but looks like a launch title. It's not a bad game, it's just that it's a Square game that isn't great. Expectations were high and it was unprepared to meet them. So now in October of 2009 when I play it I find myself wondering why I'm spending my time on it. My biggest beef with the game is the stupid-awkward control scheme. A shallow game like this should be easy to pick up. I shouldn't have to spend a couple hours re-internalizing the buttons. If you're unfamiliar with the game let me break it down for you: Left on the d-pad uses an item and Right on the d-pad cycles through your items. Enough said.

Odin Sphere is an entirely different situation. It's an excellent game made for (and I mean exclusively for) a particular subset of hardcore gamers. I can't imagine a casual player with this game, I have a feeling the meeting would be brief and unpleasant for all involved. Odin Sphere is a game in which every facet of your game play experience is a challenge. I have a feeling that if the designers could have made it harder for you to hit the power button on your console they would have. I think I'm working myself up for a full blown review/rant but that can wait for a future post.

Lets move on to Legend of Zelda.... I mean Okami. Zelda is a great way to describe the game. It's a bright colorful world where you run around, fight some things, solve some puzzles, repeat. Here I have something worth playing through to the end. It's designed well, it's moderately challenging, and there isn't anything tedious I have to spend an inordinate amount of time on. So yeah, I guess I'll be playing Okami this weekend.

New Temptations

2009-10-12T01:43:00.000-04:00

Downloaded the demos for Lucidity and Shadow Complex, two recently released games for XBLA. I got to play them for all of 5 min before I had to go to work. Oh and also a tower defense game called Defense Grid which I played for about an hour. I've been feeling a new XBLA purchase coming on. The barriers to acquiring downloadable games is frighteningly thin. I can, on my couch, simply keep pressing the A button and I will receive games. I don't have to move my right thumb more than a fraction of an inch, let alone get up and find my credit card. Scary. It's really surprising that I haven't given M$ more money than I have. I like to think it's a testament to my iron will and thrifty nature but that thought seems pretty suspicious. I don't know what else could it be?

Why is October the Tenth Month?

2009-10-06T01:15:00.000-04:00

Doesn't "oct" mean 8? That's always bothered me.

So I've been playing Fallout 3 mostly with small doses of MvsC2 and Monkey Island. I've gone through two play sessions of LOTRO now, both of which being multi-hour affairs. The second one I actually played with a friend. He had some characters on other servers but not the one I was playing on. You can't switch servers without paying a fee so he didn't want to do that. I didn't want to start over and play through the "intro" levels a week after playing though them the first time. I convinced him to play a new character on my server. So in actuality our time together was spent IMing while he went through the bullshit opening stuff and I walked around doing fetch quests. I never actually saw his character. Wheee.

These are the kind of multiplayer online hassles that I like to avoid by... well... not playing with other people. I remember as a youth a group of us doing a kind of gymnastics just to get a one on one game of Star Craft going. This was the time of dial-up so there was lots of hanging up and reconnecting and then disconnecting to use the phone to call the other guy to try to figure out why it wasn't working. These experiments always degraded into one volunteer running back and forth between houses to relay messages like some WW2 soldier running cable under enemy fire. It's amazing to think about all the physical activity and in-person social interaction that those early online games created.

Now we have a much more advanced infrastructure on which to place our virtual meetings. The games however seem to have a level of complexity that requires just as much work to create a satisfying online experience as it did back then. I'm not saying that I've never had fun online; I have, even with strangers. It's just that these experiences have never measured up to the feeling of playing in the same room with someone else. Over the years I've had tremendous fun playing "same couch" with people, even games that aren't multiplayer. I have particularly fond memories of tag-teaming RPGs like Final Fantasy 3 or Earth Bound, one person controlling and the other drawing maps, or taking notes, or flipping through guides, or just being there! How about four-player Goldeneye in a dark basement all summer, or hot-seating Soul Caliber 2 between 6 rowdy drunks until the early mourning hours? What about three friends buying Guitar Hero 2 and deciding not to sleep until they had played through it? You just can't get that from online play.

So I guess I'm whining. Online play does have its merits, particularly the ability to get large groups together in a short about of time... provided it's a popular game. This topic is timely because a good gamer friend of mine is moving back into the area and I'm looking forward to a return to the long sessions of beer and slaughter we used to indulge in.

Oh, and LOTRO isn't half bad really.

LOTRO or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love MMORPGs

2009-09-22T21:20:00.000-04:00

OK maybe not love. I'll just start from the beginning.

So at PAX they were giving out full copies of Lord of the Rings Online with the Mines of Moria expansion. I find it impressive that a company other than Blizzard is making enough money from subscriptions that they can just hand out full copies of AAA games. But then, maybe they should all be doing that. My biggest problem with MMOs is that you have to pay to keep playing a game you have already paid for... forever (unless you pay hundreds of dollars for a lifetime subscription). So really why charge for the game at all? I'm not certain but I think Blizzard gives away the base version of Wow, and has for some time. I can't help but think of a pusher on the street corner going "hey man, want to get your game on. Have a little taste, first one's on me!" Well actually the second taste is on them too because they give you a 30 day free trail, which in the case of LOTRO I am now using.

My second biggest problem with MMOs is that they never end. There is no discrete limit to the game. Potentially you could keep playing it forever and they could keep adding little bits of new content to entice you. What this means is that playing an MMO is a huge time investment. Or more like time sink hole. I already spend way more time than I should on the hobby. If I tried to play an MMO something terrible would happen: I'd have less time to play other games! There's just to many great games coming out all the time and an endless library of older games. I couldn't in good conscience dedicate myself to just one.

Anyway, lets talk about the game. Its cool I guess...

Yeah that's pretty much it. I like the story elements and the visuals for the setting. It feels like Middle Earth, which is exciting. The game play is actually kind of boring but again, this isn't my usual cup 'o tea . You click on a monster and your character starts trading blows. I imagine that as the game progresses the battles become more intense, requiring you to use your abilities in a tactical manner. I got to the point in the game where you pick a profession and can start making stuff. This is the part of the game I find most appealing. I have yet to discover how deep the crafting system goes but from the little I've done it seems like I could get pretty into it. I chose the Tinker job which involves cooking. I was very stoked to learn that I could brew beer. Beer and video games have always been a match made in heaven and now you're telling me I can drink beer while playing a game in which I'm drinking beer? You sir are a champion of men! ...not sure who I'm talking to there...

So I've got a month to play for free and I'll probably spend a few more sessions with it. My friend has an account so I'm going to try to play with him at least once in order to enjoy the MM aspect of my MMORPG... or maybe just the M... the second one... yeah. I'll let you know how it goes.

PAX Music

2009-09-20T09:59:00.001-04:00

So I didn't get to see Metroid Metal live at PAX because I was volunteering in another part of the con. I heard they killed everyone and then brought them back to life with nothing but sonic manipulation. Oh well. I did get to stop by their booth and pick up their album, Varia Suite though. I asked the guy at the table if he was in the band. He told me no, he was their producer or something. Poor guy must have been asked that constantly. The sucky part was that I didn't bring anything capable of playing CDs with me and neither did any of my friends. So I had to wait until I got home to listen to it. I have since listened to it about 10 times. This is significant because I don't usually listen to something twice in such short a span of time. With MM I can't help it. It gets stuck in my head (it is game music after all) and I must play the album in order to exorcise the daemons. So far my favorite song is "Item Room". I wasn't expecting that to be very cool, but they do this odd time signature thing with a staccato riff that hits to the core. THE MOTHER EFFIN CORE BABY!!! ::clears throat:: So if you like game music and/or instrumental mental then please give these guys a try. MetroidMetal.com

On a much less game-related aside, I ran into a guy standing outside the entrance to the convention center. He asked me if I had heard of Sir Mix-a-lot. I replied in the affirmative. He explained that just like Sir Mix-a-lot he was a rap artist from Seattle trying to make it big. He handed me his latest album and said they were giving them out in exchange for "donations", whatever I felt like I could give. Now I'm not really a fan of rap music. I have a select few groups that I like to listen to and it's mostly white-people-friendly rap like the Roots. But I do have a soft spot for a: sales people (having been in sales myself) and b: people trying to make it (also being in that position myself). I told him I'd give him 2 dollars. He said "OK but we are asking for 5". I gave him 2.
So I gave it a listen when I got home. Again I'm not a big rap person. I mostly find it hard to relate to the subject matter. I didn't grow up in "the hood", I never shot nobody, I'm not gangsta. I find that most rap is just the rapper telling everyone how much better at rapping he is than everyone else. It's this kind of circular self awareness that just seams sort of masturbatory. I feel like I'm watching clothes in a dryer. Anyway I'm getting off track. The album was pretty good. Like I said, I had a hard time with the lyrics but in the words of American Bandstand it had a beat and I could dance to it. The words are delivered in a rapid fire style that I found pleasing to the ear. I can see this guy getting pretty big in the next few years. The production quality was high and they seem to have a sense for the single.
Oh yeah, I never said who I was talking about! The guys name is Juga Hill and the album is called One Way (Pre-Album Chapter 3). I'm guessing there are Chapters 1 and 2 out there somewhere. JugaHill.com will take you to his myspace page which has a good selection of his work.

PAX09 For Realz This Time

2009-09-13T21:58:00.000-04:00

Oh all right all right! Fine. I'll write a proper post.

Lets talk about games shall we? I only played one hands-on demo: Darksiders. It was pretty fun I guess. I walked away feeling like I had just played a next-gen God of War. You run around beating people with a sword and climbing things. The coolest part is that you can pick things up like people or cars. Grabbing enemies buy the neck and insta-killing them was pretty fun. So you're supposed to have a horse in the game but that wasn't in the demo. So... yeah, God of War.

Best demo I watched someone else play: Bayonetta. This one's been on my radar for about as long as Darksiders has. It's another third-person action hack-and-slash staring a... um, yeah the plot escapes me... she's a gun... witch? Whatever, she runs around killing stuff. The first guy I watched play the game was pretty good at it. I watched him take down two bosses. I think they were bosses; they were pretty epic. As she fought these huge monster things they destroyed the environment in ways that completely changed the battlefield. There were at least four "oh snap" moments in the 3 min of gameplay I witnessed. The shifting environment during the boss battles were half of them. The finishing moves used to kill the bosses were the other. Apparently the player's character has the ability to use her hair and clothes to turn giant beasties into piles of goo, and in a ludicrously spectacular manner. I'm not going to go into detail because you really have to just see it, but wow. Wow.

Also impressive was Brink. They had a big screen set up and a guy with an English accent was giving live demos every hour or so. The game takes place on this floating island and you play as a soldier from one of two opposing factions. Your goal is to complete missions, but the twist is that the missions are generated by the AI. Your character class can be switched around during the battle and your missions are assigned to you based on the class you are playing. You can choose which mission you want to do from a pop-up menu, so you're not stuck having to do one thing. I think this is especially cool because I hate getting stuck on one mission! To me this approach could streamline and maximize the fun factor. There is an RPG element with your character as well. It wasn't made clear to me exactly what you would be improving stat-wise, but he did go over a pretty robust visual customization system. As your character progresses he (or she?) will have access to more armor and regalia. Also cool is this action button they built in where your character can intuitively move around the environment, traversing obstacles, and just not getting stuck on stuff. It looks pretty slick in action, and I can imagine it will be pretty important because the environments I saw were tangled, jungle-like mazes of metal and debris.

So PAX was sweet. There were a lot of great games there but Bayonetta and Brink were the two that really caught my eye.

PAX09

2009-09-13T21:57:00.001-04:00

So I went to PAX and had a great time. The end.

Seattle Bound

2009-08-30T05:44:00.000-04:00

So this week I'm traveling to Seattle for the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo. This will be my first time in the state of Washington and my first "con". I know it's an "expo" but con is pretty accurate. Nerd con to be exact. I don't know if there is a more general purpose meeting place for all things nerd. The primary theme is video games of course, but just like the comic for which it is named PAX is about more than that. It's about our culture (nerd culture). I mean it grew out of a COMIC so there is another nerd cornerstone right there.

Anyway I'm going and it's going to be fun. I had hoped to bring a working demo of a game to show people but laziness prevailed and I haven't gotten much done on it. I'll will be working as an Enforcer, the volunteer army that runs the show. I'm hoping it will help me make some new friends and gain some industry contacts.

Speaking of PAX I've heard some new music recently. Penny Arcade shared this link in their latest post: http://2playerproductions.bandcamp.com/ It's an album from the 2008 Blip Festival which is all about using unconventional hardware to make music. Hardware like the Gameboy. There are 32 songs and I listened to about 10 or so. It's worth a look. Also search for "Gameboy music" on YouTube to see some neat-o videos about the making of such things. So then later I was checking out Nuklearpower.com and he had a link to these guys: http://metroidmetal.bandcamp.com/album/varia-suite. Checking out THEIR site I saw that low and behold they would be playing at PAX! This is cool because as I discovered from listening to those three tracks, these guys rock my ASS!! I'm thinking of ordering the album because like Austin Powers, that sort of thing really IS my bag baby.

Murder Simulator

2009-08-29T04:39:00.000-04:00

So I've had time to log some hours on Fallout 3. I'm not going to speak about it from a review standpoint. It's enough to say that the game is more than sufficiently awesome. It is totally worth buying and playing. The only complaint I can think of is the jumping seems a little glitchy. But jumping really isn't an integral part of the game to the point where you could probably get through it without ever hitting the Y button. I guess I could also say that item collecting has become annoyingly repetitious. To explain, there is a lot of junk lying around for you to pick up and either use or sell. However, you have a limit to how much you can carry. This limit can be increased by raising your strength but ultimately it's still a limit. So really this boils down to a decision: do you take the time to run back and forth between the site where all of the items are and home base or do you grab only what you need and press on? Of course if you pass up the extra swag you may find yourself short on something vital later on, and if you do take the time you may find yourself at the end of a game session not much further than when you started. All of this just seems to add to the realism though. So I guess I have to go with "no complaints".

The cool thing about the game is what it lets you do. The Fallout series has always been great about giving you a lot of options in a world with plenty to do. Number 3 takes it to a whole new level. I could go on and on about all the nifty little things you can do, but instead I'm going to talk about killin'. Fallout is not a game about killing people. It certainly has a lot of features designed around killing and you can't really avoid it but that's not what the game is about. "Murder simulator" is a term I recently heard (read) used to describe Prototype, an action game that recently came out. From what I've seen, Prototype is about killing stuff, it's at the center of everything you do. In Fallout it's simply a means to an end. However, if your end happens to be killing people then you are in luck. The game can be converted from RPG to "murder simulator" with disturbing celerity.

I had been playing about 10 hours when I came upon a little house in a burned out neighborhood. Up until this point I had been playing "seriously", staying focused on the objectives and not really messing around. The house was the home of this woman who was living alone. I saw a knife sitting on the counter in the kitchen and thought, "I wounder if she'll get pissed if I pick it up?" She didn't do anything about it so I thought, "I wonder if she'll get pissed if I stab her to death with it?" Yeah, she didn't like that very much. Oh, she fought back of course but she was no match for my hit points and I just slashed away until she slumped to the floor dead. I searched her for loot and realized with surprise that if I stole her clothes it would leave her model lying in her underwear. A bit taken aback by this I did the only thing a decent person would... I stabed her a few more times. What happened? SHE KEPT ON BLEEDING! Even after being dead the models in this game continue to render damage and in gory detail. After a few more cuts her freaking arm came off!!!

Now I don't have a problem with this. In fact I think it's awesome. My question though is where is the public outcry over this game? Remember back when some guy made a big deal over the romantic elements of Mass Effect? I think he made up some bull shit about creating your own whore or something, and parents everywhere flipped their shit... and it wasn't even true! I have heard nothing about Fallout 3 being overly violent yet this is a game where you can murder someone, strip them to their underwear, and carve them up until they are nuggets! This is several steps beyond GTA. Has Jack Thomson seen this game? Am I just late to the party?

Anyway, great game. I look forward to logging a couple hundred hours on it and then playing through the game again as an "evil" person just so I can KILL EVERY BODY.

Update: Ultimate Sapphire Edition! pt 2.

2009-08-11T01:21:00.000-04:00

Oh yeah, and Marvel vs Capcom 2 finally came out. And I bought it. And it's just as stupid hard as I remember it. Nothing makes you feel like you suck quite like getting beat on the first match on the "easy" setting. Really, calling it "easy" is just plain disingenuous.

Update: Ultimate Sapphire Edition!

2009-08-10T23:56:00.000-04:00

Time for some updates! That title was supposed to be a play on the Pokemon naming scheme and not have anything to do with the actual post but I just realized that it does:

A couple weeks ago I finally bought that new video card I wanted. The Radeon HD4650 as manufactured by... Sapphire! How do you like that? Anyway it works great although I've had some problems getting it to work with one of my monitors. The other half of the story is that I finally played Unreal 3. It looks awesome, I'm able to run it on the highest settings just fine. That's about the best thing I can say about the game though. It looks great and beyond that it's pretty much the old Unreal with maybe a few tweaks. there is a single player story now, but I couldn't bring myself to care about it though. A game like that doesn't really need a story. Before each match you are looking at a map of the planet with icons that represent the different battle locations. This suggests some sort of strategic campaign but disappointingly there really isn't one. Occasionally you get to choose to do an extra mission but other than that the progression is completely linear. Still, it's fun to play and I'm looking forward to creating some maps for it.

I found a copy of the Castlevania Double Pack for GBA... and this time I actually bought it. The Double Pack is a reissue of the hard-to-find Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow. I justified the purchase buy telling myself I needed something for an upcoming trip I was taking. I responded by saying that I already have some GBA games I haven't spent enough time with. I responded to that by saying fuck you I'm buying it because I want it I don't need a good reason you jackass!

A few weeks later I used a remarkably similar justification (the "fuck you I want it" one) to buy Fallout 3. I may have mentioned that I tend to be about a year behind on new games. I don't like to drop $60 on a new release and I'm happy to play all the older (cheaper) games until the blockbusters come down in price. Speaking of Blockbuster, that's where I got it. Surprised? I was, when I saw it there for $40 used. I waited about a month before I actually picked it up, but once I saw that it was $15 cheaper there than it was at GameStop I was sold and it wouldn't be long until I found my way back there clutching a wad of bills.

That's it for now. I'll write up my impressions of Fallout 3 next time.

Gum

2009-08-07T02:15:00.000-04:00

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am almost always skeptical of marketing vectors (slogans, ads, promises and so forth) and when I saw that my newest pack of Dentine Ice said "better than ever" on it I was fully expecting it to taste exactly like the last pack. My friends, I was wrong.
I received it's "arctic chill" up my nose and directly into my brain like never before. Exquisite.

On another note I have a lot of game related stuff to write about which I should have done later this weekend.

Also: Space

2009-07-20T04:18:00.000-04:00

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing. Am I the only one who thinks that's cool?

I really hope we see a resurgence of the space program both here in the US and abroad in the near future. Obama has said that he wants to go to the Moon again soon but I don't see it happening any time soon since they are halting the shuttle missions for 10 years or some-such.

I think the next big step (or giant leap, whatever you want) for mankind will be establishing a permanent settlement on the lunar surface. Hopefully I'll see it in my lifetime.

That's OK, I'll walk

2009-07-20T03:33:00.000-04:00

You know, I was going to write a post complaining about Battlefield 2 Modern Combat, and then I saw this.

I don't think I can put it any better with words. And yes I know they are talking about Battlefield 1942 but it's the same thing.

Elite

2009-07-13T08:24:00.000-04:00

It only took me eight months but I have finally reached the Elite rank in Rainbow Six Vegas 2. Yay me.

The Tenuous Veil

2009-07-06T00:46:00.001-04:00

ARG! Why isn't Marvel vs. Capcom 2 out yet?! Not even a demo! ARG!

Sigh. I'm at work as I write this. My job allows a certain about of down time between tasks. Usually I spend this time surfing the net and reading about games. Recently though I've reached a saturation point were everything I care to read about has been read. Digested, regurgitated, consumed again. It feels very bovine. But my pasture has turned sour and the sweet veil of this distraction has been lifted. What it reveals is the harsh reality that I am at work, and as such I am not playing video games. I need to find some other sort of mind candy to suckle so I don't have to spend the next 9 hours facing this reality. To form an analogy (because I like analogies), I am like a small child being made to sit quietly through some long, gray, adult ritual, and I need some freaking crayons.

Wikipedia to the rescue.

Funny Man

2009-07-04T01:03:00.000-04:00

I've recently discovered a new tasty treat and it's name is Zero Punctuation. Now I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "How in the hell are you only now finding out about this?" I know, I know. It's been around for a while. BUT NOT A LONG WHILE!!! So I'm OK.

Anyway if you don't know what ZP is I will explain it like this. Imagine you are a tourist taking a tour of something that most people like yourself find fascinating and somewhat sacred (let's say the White House). On this tour your guide is an underpaid, bitter, jaded little man who hates his job, the White House, the president, the country, you, dogs, Halloween, carnivals, flowers, Kobe Bryant, and his brown bag lunch, and feels the need to share his opinions in an endless stream of vile commentary. Now imagine that every bit of what he says is riotously funny and more than a bit true. It's like that, only about video games.

The guy's name is Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, and he reviews games. The reviews are these animated videos that enhance his rapid fire criticism which plays as the soundtrack. This guy really puts the "critic" in game critic. Most of his reviews are scathing attacks, usually on games that receive high scores from more established reviewers. I love every second of it.

He gets a lot of venom from the fan community claiming he doesn't understand the game or is being overly harsh. But I think what he does is very important. It's easy to get sucked into believing that games are better than they are because you have fond memories of their prequels or because the magazines told you to. But it is dangerous to hold these things up on an untouchable pedestal. Maybe you love a game and maybe is really is a good game but to someone else it may not be enjoyable at all. It's helpful to have a reviewer who points out the shortcomings of even the best games so we can better know what we are buying (and so we can laugh at them). Despite the name of the show, what Croshaw really does is "punctuate" the never ending steam of media hype and nonsense designed to open our wallets. He pokes holes in the wall of noise and lets the light shine through. And he makes me cry sweet tears of laughter in the process.

I've added the link in the "Sites I Enjoy" section in the side bar. (Or whatever it is I called it)

OVER 5000!!!!!! (WHAT?! 5000?!)

2009-07-04T00:56:00.000-04:00

Attention readers:

I have achieved a gamerscore of 5000! Like all nerd pastimes, the many hours required to reach such a level of awesomeness are a testament to not-getting-laid. I'd like to thank my thumbs, my electric company, and my low self esteem. That is all.

A letter to Infinity Ward

2009-06-28T04:28:00.000-04:00

You sons of bitches are just the spawn of the very living devil you mother fuckers. I swear you’re a bunch of circle jerk baby killers. You slaughter them in their cribs and feast on their tender flesh. I’ll bet you even laugh at their mothers as you smear the blood all over your faces. You fascist shit suckers.

What the fuck made you think it would be a good idea to put a checkpoint RIGHT FUCKING IN FRONT OF A GROUP OF ENEMIES? Did you do it on purpose? Did you really feel it was necessary to force me to watch myself get gunned down over and over again and have to read some bullshit war quote every time?

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about here is the scenario. Call of Duty 2. Second mission of the second level. Veteran difficulty. I and my comrades (read: guys who run in front of my gun while I’m firing so I can be called a traitor and have to restart) have just liberated a station house in the middle of the train yard. As soon as I clear the top floor the enemy stages a counter attack. No problem! I just happen to be on the top floor with a sniper rifle. I’m happily picking off Krauts when suddenly I see checkpoint reached message in the top corner and about two seconds later I’m being shot in the back! I turn just in time to see four Germans who have ascended the staircase behind me pump me full of hot German lead.

So, first of all, WHERE IN THE HELL DID ALL MY GUYS GO?! Are they so fucktarded moron useless that they can’t hold a position for 60 fucking seconds? I don’t even see their bodies. They are just gone. Did they jump out? Did the Germans use a cloaking device and sneak past them? Did the thin third floor atmosphere cause them to pass out? And we just cleared the building! A building surround by open courtyard. So where did those soldiers even come from? Repel in from helicopters? Hide in a cardboard box?

So now every time I respawn I have about 3 seconds to turn around, throw a grenade and crouch behind a flimsy wooden table, shoot the guy who runs around the table, and then pick off any one else. I died about 40 or 50 times. Only twice did I… Wait I forgot one, I had to change weapons in those 3 seconds too because I got the fucking checkpoint holding a rifle instead of a machine gun and it only had ONE FUCKING ROUND LEFT! This means that I had to turn with the right stick, hit the b button to crouch, the right bumper to throw the grenade, and the y button to swap. Usually I died half way through the swap animation. As an aside, why is b crouch? Why isn’t it left stick down like many other games? That makes more sense since it’s movement oriented and frees up your right hand to do other stuff. Like STAY ALIVE. So anyway I managed to get past the initial 4 man onslaught only twice and when I did I found myself trapped on the top floor and when I moved over to the staircase I was immediately shot in the face buy the guy who was just waiting there with his gun pointed at the space where he knew my head would be. That wouldn’t have been such a bad challenge if I had a checkpoint right before THAT. Why couldn’t they have put it there? What did I even do to trigger that checkpoint? I all did was shoot a few guys, I wasn’t even moving! Did it trigger because some of the enemy made it to the building? That would be an example of BAD GAME DESIGN. You put a checkpoint somewhere safe. Somewhere the player can pause if he wants. Somewhere he is not going to get his head BLOWN OFF. You don’t put it right before the enemy kicks down my door, especially not while my BACK IS TURNED!

The checkpoint is designed so that the player doesn’t have to start the level all over again every time they die. This is a wonderful invention that some games don’t even have and for most of this game you do a good job with (this is especially important considering the difficulty level). All of that is ruined by this one experience. In this case the checkpoint did the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. I decided to just start the level over (I didn’t have much choice). As soon as I did I found that I no longer had the same weapons! Instead of the sniper rifle and machine gun I had from the previous mission I had a crappy iron sight rifle and a pistol. A fucking useless pistol! I guess you guys just had to have one more little laugh at my expense. Next time why don’t you just come to my house and stab me in the eye, it would be easier than making a game.

I Want the Chipper Chicken

2009-06-21T07:15:00.000-04:00

I am very excited that in 9 days I will be able to afford Marvel vs. Capcom 2. It is coming to XBLA and PSN, presumably for less that the $80 it goes for on ebay. It would be really funny though if come the 29th it cost 6400 Microsoft Points.

I rented this game quite a few years ago. It was fun to play against others because of the extreme button-mashiness of it. Fighting games are great when everyone sucks. I spent the one player mode screaming hurtful things that I will probably have to answer for in the after life. The game is hard. Yet I still want to play it again. If nothing else I'd play it just to spend hours getting my ass kicked, grinding out points to spend on unlocking the 300-some characters. I really like unlocking things.

*It's not really 300, it's like 50 something. Still though, FIFTY SOMETHING.

A letter to Valve: Addendum

2009-06-10T16:53:00.000-04:00

Addendum:

OK, I figured it out and it wasn't as bad as I made it out to be but you guys are still jerks.

PS:

I'm so glad that the AI in Left 4 Dead is better than the idiot followers in this game. I'm happy when they die because then they aren't in my FREAKING WAY.

A letter to Valve

2009-06-09T05:42:00.000-04:00

TO: Valve level designers
RE: Second turret stand off at Nova Prospekt

Dear Valve,

FUCK YOU. You are a sadistic bunch of inflamed assholes and I want you to die. Thank you very much for giving me three auto turrets to aid me in my defense (and by defense I mean futile attempt to survive your hopeless death trap). It's too bad that they are completely worthless. It's too bad that the endless waves of heavily armed soldiers can just run up to them and push them over. It's too bad that if I try to put them up again I am defenseless while I fumble with your awkward controls trying to get them upright. It's too bad that my own weapon runs out of ammo ridiculously fast even though I've worked painstakingly through the past ten or so levels to conserve every bullet I could, and it's nice that you've given me some ammo and extra health laying around but it sucks that I have to hack through a crate to get to it wasting precious time. I'm sick of your god damned game and it's boring endless stupid "puzzles" and cheap deaths and stupid characters. I hate that I have to pick off a shit-ton of little spider things to get to some action and once I get to some action its impossibly hard bull shit. FUCKING GOD DAMMED BULLSHIT!!!!

Love
-The Player

Radio

2009-04-30T05:52:00.000-04:00

Been listening to a lot of on line radio lately. I have an iPod with every album I own (and some that I don't heh heh) on it which is a lot of music. But I've been opting for internet radio because of the opportunity to discover tons of new music. Usually I listen to Pandora, and I have about 12 finely tuned stations made that I would link to here if I could figure out how to maintain my secret identity. Anyway, tonight I was in the mood for game music which Pandora does not do well. In the process of looking for a site that just streams game music I came across one that's probably even better. StreamingSoundtracks.com plays soundtracks from both movies and games. I find that as movies and games are representative of journeys so too is listening to this station. You would think that that all the different sounds and themes mashed together would be jarring but so far it works quite well. I started out hearing the dramatic main theme from Dante's Peak, then on to an impressive all drum piece from Drumline, then on to Macross Plus. How's that for range? Next up was the intro to Alien Resurrection and then the ending to Final Fantasy VIII. The transition between the two songs was so seamless (their ending and beginning so similar) I didn't realize it had happened. Kind of eerie. Anyway check it out.

Digging in pt. 2

2009-04-25T21:50:00.000-04:00

Part II: Playing with friends

So my brother-in-law finds out I have an XBox360 and generously decides to send me one of two games so that we can play online. My choices were Gears of War 2, or Left 4 Dead. I chose Left 4 Dead because the concept appealed to me more than Gears and because my friend (who I will call "William") had it and had been badgering me to buy it as well. So I had gotten together online with William and another friend with the game (who I will call "Jeff") thinking that we would play some L4D but the game had not yet arrived.

I initially convinced them to play some co-op Aegis Wing which is a delightful and might I add free little XBLA game. Bored with that Jeff convinced us to pick up Castle Crashers. I had not anticipated buying anything that night but he promised that if it sucked I could kick him in the nuts the next time I saw him. So we both downloaded the game ans spent the next 4 hours or so with it. Fortunately for Jeff's nuts the game doesn't suck.

If you are unaware Castle Crashers is an old school hack and slash (button mash) side scroller where you play as a knight or any of 20-odd unlockable characters. The fun comes from the frantic action and some small RPG elements. As you grind through the enemies you also grind levels which gives you points to put into speed, strength, defense, and magic. If you play through the story your character will end up around level 30 with probably one of your stats maxed out. You can then continue with that character up to level 99 or play through with someone else. This lends a high replayability to the game because you can choose to specialize in something different each time. There is also an "insane" mode that you can access with any character that's gone though the main game. The part of the game that really sets it apart are the comedic elements. The tone is akin to something you might see on Adult Swim (is that even still on?) with lost of mad-cap poop jokes and references to pop culture. The scene that sticks out in my mind is one in which you ride a deer through a saw mill trying to escape a monster. The deer (apparently due to fear) is propelling itself solely by explosive diarrhea.

So the next day my copy of Left 4 Dead did arrive. I'm not sure I have a lot to say about it. You play a "survivor" making their way through one of four levels going from safe house to safe house (the save points) on your way to some destination that ostensibly will help you escape danger on a more permanent basis. By danger I mean endless swarms of zombies or "infected". The game is fun but you really need 3 friends to get the most out of it. It's designed to be a co-op game and it does a wonderful job of it. Once you've played multiplayer though you really can't enjoy the single player game. At least I couldn't, it just feels... lonely.

I will also point out that the competitive multiplayer mode is the most enjoyable of all. The game has special types of infected that have deadly abilities aside from the normal run-screaming-towards-you-and-eat-your-face attack. In the VS mode four players play special infected and four play as survivors. The survivors play the level as normal but the infected try to stop them. What's great about it that there is a high level of teamwork needed on both sides in order to succeed. Coordinating your abilities into an organized attack with devastating results is a real thrill.

Digging In pt. 1

2009-04-21T05:25:00.000-04:00

Ok so let’s dig in to that list I gave you last time.

Braid. Great little game. I say little when I really mean short. I suppose that if you really just couldn’t figure out the puzzles that the game could be very long indeed. To my credit I finished the game in a couple of weeks but I will admit to looking on line for the solutions to two puzzles and felt awful both times. I guess it’s inevitable but whenever I cheat on a puzzle I immediately go “ooooh, DUH!” I could and should have figured that out. One thing I did learn from looking online after I beat it was that there are 8 stars hidden through-out the game. This isn’t advertised in the game and I don’t know how anyone could have accidentally stumbled upon them because they are freaking HIDDEN. I started to collect them but got distracted by other games and haven’t been back. There is also a timed challenge that I have read is pretty nasty but would nab me the final achievement for the game. Time will tell if I go back to complete these herculean tasks.

The two things you hear the most about this game are the ingenious puzzles and the unorthodox story. Both of these things are great, no doubt, but what I enjoyed the most was the music. Music is always important for setting the mood in a game and Braid has mood to spare, in no small part to the music. It’s almost spiritual, I don’t want to use the word haunting, but spiritual, and makes you feel like this game is some sort of journey or pilgrimage, which I believe is one of its themes. I think I read somewhere that there was going to be a soundtrack available. Ah, here is a collection of links if one wanted to by the tracks individually. I spent some time on Jonathan Blow’s webpage, and I found the time to be well spent. He is a man of many interesting ideas, and I recommend his musings to anyone interested in the state of games, which I assume if you’re reading this that you are.

Unreal Tournament 3. Still haven’t played it. My current highest-tech computer has adequate RAM and CPU speed but is equipped with the Radeon X300 GPU. Not a bad card but older and not designed for games, at least not games that came out four or five years after it did. Looking at the Radeon 4650 HD as an upgrade, not top of the line by any means but more than enough for my purposes. Of course my purposes are ostensibly to use the level editor to practice my game design over the summer. But we both know I just wanted the game… and then an excuse to buy a new graphics card. Shhh, don’t tell my wife.

Final Fantasy Dawn of Souls. I had forgotten until just now that this game was made for the Play Station back in 2003 as Final Fantasy Origins. I passed up on it then, largely because I bought Final Fantasy Anthology in 1999 and was disappointed by the crippling load times. I'm glad I waited six years to pick this up and for a platform more suited to it. The Game Boy Advance has served as a system for the rebirth of great classic games, especially Final Fantasy. It makes sense, being that it's a cartridge system with graphics capabilities on par with the 16 bit systems. Also the game is something better suited to casual entertainment while traveling or sitting on a conference call than sitting down in front of a TV and logging hours.

Really I waited longer than six years to play this game (or games really since the long lost FFII is on there too). Final Fantasy came out for the NES in 1990. I did not have an NES in 1990 and in fact do not own one now. I spent many hours watching other people play this game. Later when I had acquired a SNES and had FF3(6) all to myself that the mystique behind the first game grew and I always meant to go back and play it.

Well now I can. I have to say that even though the game is 19 years old its is still fun to play. The addition of a bestiary is cool I guess. The best part is that you can save anywhere, not just at inns which is nice especially since it's on a portable system and you may be in a place where you have to put it down in a hurry... like traffic. I haven't played FFII yet. Looking forward to forgetting to do that.

A Long List of Games

2009-04-12T21:29:00.000-04:00

So I've picked up some games recently. Depending on how far back in time we can include as "recently" it's a lot of games. I kept meaning to write about them but I'd put it off and before I knew it I had bought another freaking game. They seem to come in pairs too. I'm just going to make a list and say a few words about each and I'm going to try to do it in order of acquisition starting from early March.

OK actually February... I think...

Braid: Just as good as everyone says it is.

Unreal Tournament 3: Haven't played it yet since I don't have a beast enough GPU

Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls: This is FF 1 and 2 on GBA. I've only played 1 so far.

Castle Crashers: A game I was talked into buying by a friend so we could play online.

Left 4 Dead: A belated Christmas gift from my brother-in-law.

Battlefield 2: Modern Combat: One of a few older FPS that I wanted to try.

Call of Duty 2: Another of a few FPS I wanted to try.

Penny Arcade OTRSPOD ep.1: Like Briad, this XBLA game was a weekly special and 50% off so I grabbed it.

So 8 games in about 2 months. I'm ready to admit I have a problem. I'll talk more about some of these games later.

More RSV2 online

2009-03-24T06:50:00.001-04:00

Getting a little tired of the bull that goes on in Rainbow Six muliplayer. Mostly I hate that selecting a match based on game mode doesn't always mean you'll be playing that game mode. I find that most of the "attack/defend" or "team leader" games that I join have been convened in disguise and are really team death match games. By this I mean that if you actually try to achieve the objective (such as reaching the extraction point in team leader) it pisses off everybody and gets you yelled at. They don't want to play that way they just want to play deathmatch with the respawn twist that team leader provides. That's fine I guess but it's not an excuse to cop an attitude when someone who just came in thinks you are playing an actual team leader match. Speaking of which, that leads me to my biggest issue. Certain people will host a match and simply have everyone in the room agree not to use a certain weapon. That too is fine, but if you have "allow join in progress" turned on newcomers don't know about the rule and again end up getting whined at. The thing is, you can exclude weapons from use in the game rules and then no one can use them, but no one takes the time to do this, they would rather whine after the fact. The thing that really makes me mad is how common this is. I bought a game with 40-some weapons in it and I'd like to play that game please. One time I got so fed up with finding nothing but pistol-only matches I decided to rebel and just use a sniper rifle... in close quarters. Hey, when you're not scoped in it’s like a pistol! Eventually the whiner booted me. But then I joined another match not realizing that it was the same game only on a different map! After walking up behind the host and executing him with a shotgun I was booted again but the parting shot (pun intended) was well worth it. OH! and speaking of getting weird about weapons, what the hell is wrong with using grenades!!! "Oh wow, you killed me with a grenade, how do you feel?" I feel freaking great knowing that you get pissed when I own your camping ass by being smarter than you. Thanks for asking. Then my absolute favorite is people who talk shit... to their teammates. I had one guy who had died and was spectating me telling me how much I suck. The guy who was DEAD telling me how much I suck. Let that sink in for a while. Oh well, he got to watch me make the winning kill... on a camper... with a grenade.

Cough Drop

2009-03-24T06:22:00.000-04:00

It occurs to me that the Brian Eno - David Bowie collaborations are like a cough drop. Eno is like the liquid medicine center, soothing relief but hard to swallow by itself. Bowie is like the menthol sweet candy shell, hard, chewy, and a little sticky, but tasty and head-clearing. You don't want to take one every day, only when you need it.

Ranbow Six Vegas 2 - Reviewed

2009-03-12T02:58:00.000-04:00

So I think I mentioned before how Rainbow Six Vegas 2 was a surprisingly good game. Or maybe not surprisingly good but surprisingly enjoyable for me as it is not the type of game I'm usually into (tactical shooters). Though, the elements that I enjoy are the ones that are less tactical shooter and more regular old run around blasting things shooter.

The game has several modes, a story mode, a terrorist hunt mode and several versus modes. The story mode is great, really top notch. There is just enough actual story in it to be worth having one, though you may have to play through a couple times to really get whats going on. Basically you and your team mates are pursuing these mercenaries through Las Vegas trying to stop them from blowing up buildings. The line between terrorist and mercenary is pretty thin here. I suppose the main bad guys are terrorists who have hired an army (and I mean a friggin ARMY) of mercs to basically hang around and shoot at you. There is no shortage of generic tangos to mow down. Where did they get all these guys? Who cares. One thing I will note is that certain points in the game allow you to overhear the enemies as they stand around talking. These conversation are hilarious and well written. I recomend waiting to hear the whole thing before you rush in and take them out.

The campaign will take you through a variety of buildings and streets. It's all urban but there is enough change to keep things interesting. The graphics are great, details are sharp and lighting effects um... light stuff... well. They did a good job delivering the flavor of Las Vegas. The game is an appropriate length, and it's paced well. There are opportunities for sneaking around and sniping, and there are 4 or 5 big set-piece battles. One part of the game has you trying to reach the top balcony of a tall square room full of climbing walls, while the enemy shoots at you from all sides. The final battle is just crazy. Crazy.

The story mode can be played solo or co-op. Co-op is a blast. I had the opportunity to play through the whole thing with a friend (in the same room) when he was visiting. We played for a day and a half strait. We couldn't put it down. Co-op online is pretty fun too. I've played both with people who are willing to talk and coordinate and jerks who don't understand the "cooperative" in co-op. It's a grab bag. Fortunately if you are hosting other people can join you or leave (or get kicked) on the fly, without interrupting the game.

Terrorist hunt, fills one of the many multiplayer maps full of bots and makes you go kill them all. This mode is also a lot of fun despite being quite hard. I found myself trying to figure out the zones that the AI was programmed to. Meaning, the bots will spawn and attack based on where you go with your team, so it becomes a game of fishing. You try to lure them out so you can drop them as they charge out into the open. Trying to through the halls Doom style will result in a quick and brutal end. Hunt can also be played in co-op, which is how I beat some of the levels. Let me tell you. there are some people out there who are VERY good at the fishing method.

Ah, mutiplayer. The adversarial modes are attack/defend, control point, team leader, team deathmatch, and deathmatch. I'm just going to come out and say that I don't like the team modes. As I stated in the first paragraph I'm not a big fan of tactical shooters. This is largely because it's team based and I'm never on the good team. Here is what happens:

"OK match started, now what I am I supposed to do? I guess I'll follow that guy I bet he knows where to go BANG! What?! who the hell shot me? Oh well, respawning. OK I'll go this way this time. Hey there's an enemy BANG! Damn that guy's good. OK, respawning. Maybe this time I'll BANG!!! WTF!!!! I didn't even last 5 seconds!!! Well I'll keep trying, oh wait, I'm out of spawns. Now I get to sit here for 5 min while the big kids play. Screw this."

For the most part I'm exaggerating, but that exact scenario happens more than I'd like. I understand that having limited spawns makes it more challenging and makes for interesting game play, but that's only true if you last long enough to enjoy it. I don't really hate team gameplay either, but it's ment to be a co-op versus co-op kind of experience and when no one works together it tends to suck.

Now deathmatch is more my style. The shift from one game type to the other is for me the shift from newbie to motherfucking specter of doom. I've played me some deathmatch. I understand the universal laws that govern it. One such law is, never stand still. Knowing this law has served me well in RSV2, particularly because most people are used to playing the other modes where hiding behind cover and camping is advantageous. Another thing that I love about DM is that you don't have to know where you are going. While it always helps to know the level, all you really have to do is run around and kill anything that moves. Beauty in simplicity. Of course the best part is that it can be set to unlimited respawns so I spend the maximum amount of time actually playing the game.

Team deathmatch can be cool, I'm not actually against team games (I may have given that impression). However, the host has the capability to put whoever he wants on his team. And they always stack their teams. This wouldn't be too bad (after all I like a challenge) if the spawn points weren't static. Instead of randomly placing you around the map, everyone spawns at their team's spawnppoint. In some levels this is OK but most of them are tucked away in a dead end with one, maybe two exits. So the game goes like this:

The match begins and both teams rush out into the map. Eventually the stronger team makes its way to the other team's spawn point. They wait outside and shoot people as they come out. If they game persisted the dead bodies the weak team would eventually be walled in by their own corpses.

So there are some things I like about this game and some things that really frustrate me but overall it's a great game. I have about 12 games for the system so far and I would place it in the top three. I've even considered buying RSV1 just to give it a try.

The New Toy part 2

2009-03-09T05:37:00.000-04:00

So why the 360? I'll start with the small reasons. Price really wasn't a big issue but I suppose it mattered. Obviously the 360 is cheaper, but it can be argued that the PS3 plays blue ray disks and the online is free. Still the price difference is pretty big, 100 to 200 dollars currently. I don't know I guess price really didn't play too big a roll since you can compare system features and bundles until your face turns blue. I spend several hundred dollars on games a year anyway so whatever.

I think one big thing that got me was that most of my friends had 360s already and being able to play with them was a draw. I'm not usually into doing the popular thing, but in this case it pays off. I have old school friends all around the country, California, Virginia, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, even a friend stationed in Italy (who's never friggin online). If they all had PS3s would I have a PS3 now? It would be more likely.

Another thing that drew me in was achievements. The community has grown to have a love/hate attitude toward achievements. Some people think too much emphasis is put on them and that they distract from gameplay. Other people say they create new reasons to play a game and provide more to do. Others are obsessed with bumping their gamerscore. Others hate the people who are obsessed with boosting their score and couldn't give a crap about their own. I think I'm somewhere in the middle. Back before the system came out I was reading about the features and the magazine that had the article described achievements as a way for gamers who aren't into climbing online leaderboards and prefer more single player games to show off what they have accomplished. At that time I wasn't really into online play (and was under-enthusiastic about the online revolution in video games) and I was intrigued with the idea of a gamerscore. Now I have to admit that I am one of those people who are obsessed with it. Getting an achievement is a great feeling and I like seeing my gaming habit tied to an ever-growing number. I even track my gamerscore in a spreadsheet, how nerdy is that? Very. So do I think achievements are ruining my gameing experience, distracting me from the gameplay? Can an addict admit he has a problem?

Getting off topic. A third reason I chose the Xbox360 is the games. Now most of the big games that come out now come out for both systems. There are few noteworthy exclusive titles (percentage-wise). However, It seems like the 360 exclusives are more frequent. I don't have numbers to back that up it just seems that way. I only own a couple at the moment, one of which is Forza 2 (which is awesome and I may have to do a post on why its better than the GT series). Shit, I'm beating around the bush here, allow me to knock that off.

The only game I really care about is Final Fantasy XIII. Originally this game was going to be exclusive to PS3. At E3 last year it was announced that this was no longer so. Coffin nail. In my last post I claimed that I was not a fanboy. This is true to the extent that it does not include Final Fantasy. I will always buy Final Fantasy games. Even if they came out with a really crappy one I would buy it blindly and the next one as well. I short, I like them. When that announcement was made I was already leaning towards the Xbox and that was the final deciding factor.

So now that I have had the system for a few months, what do I think about it? I shall evaluate it in a future post.

The New Toy

2009-03-05T01:09:00.000-05:00

So to start things out I'll talk a little about what is new in my gaming life. The most significant recent development is the addition of the Xbox360 to my arsenal of systems. I picked it up bright and early on Black Friday of last year, spurred on by a door buster deal. I got the Pro model with the 60gig HD and included double pack of LEGO Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda. The Black Friday door buster special was a free copy of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 with the purchase of a Pro or Elite system. At the time I was intending to buy myself the system as a Christmas present anyway and when I saw the ad online I decided that a free game is to good to pass up. I hadn't played a Rainbow Six game since... well the first one on the PC waaaay back in day, I'm gonna say '98? I didn't have any special interest in this game other than that it was free but it has turned out to be one of my favorites for the system so far. So I ended up with a new system and essentially three free games, not a bad start.

So why the 360? I feel obligated to explain myself given the rabid system war that plays out over the net every day. I don't want to be stuck under that dark cloud. I will start by saying that I am in no way a system fanboy, I am not beholden to M$, and I am not an XBot. I have pretty much zero loyalty when it comes to systems. If I did I would be playing a Wii right now and waiting desperately for some decent games to come out. The SNES was my first system and I loved it dearly but I proved to be a fickle consumer when I passed on the N64 in favor of a PS1 (even though all of my friends got the N64). Similarly while I love the PS2 and was initially rooting for the PS3 when it was first unveiled, I ultimately had to go with the Xbox360.

In my next post I'll go into the whys and wherefores.

Press Start

2009-03-04T15:04:00.000-05:00

Cliche title huh?

"Press Start" as if you were entering some new exciting cyber-world full of techno stuff and... excitement.

Well anyway this post will serve as the obligatory statement of intent to start a "blog" as it is called by the young folks. I solemnly swear to be good and post every day and write a bunch of interesting stuff and bla bla bla... Right, because that always turns out well. Three months later and only two posts, one about how awesome blogging is and another about why they never post. I'll avoid that then and just say what this is about.

My purpose here is to write about video games. I wanted a place to talk about what I'm playing and how I feel about it with out the need to start my own site (we have plenty as it is), and to be able to put in more detail than is appropriate in a forum (and to not have to argue with anyone). So that's what this is. I intend to talk about the industry and review some games, most of which will be old games you don't care about but that I'm just getting around to playing. I'll do my best to bring some insight that you wouldn't find elsewhere.

Alright then. Begin.