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

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

::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

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

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

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

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

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.