Compulsion

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

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.

Odama for President

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.

Tetris Attacks My Wallet

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.

Stuff that's not Final Fantasy

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.

A Long List of Games

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.

The New Toy part 2

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

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.