Alan Wake

I picked up Alan Wake for a heck of a deal. It was a new, unopened copy and probably had something to do with it being a pack-in game for new 360 bundles these days. I only mention this since it had a code for the DLC "The Signal" included as well. I hear that's another hour or so of gameplay. Which I'll get to at some point. As it is, I'm most of the way through the main game. I usually try to finish games before writing about them, but I feel like I've got a good feel for the game and I wouldn't spoil the ending for you anyway.

This game is all about light and dark. Other people have groaned about the title character's name being such a blatant reference to this, but honestly I didn't get it until about halfway through the game. Maybe I'm just slow. Stop smiling, you. Anyway, light and dark. Your flashlight plays a big role in this one. You use it to sort of stun enemies so you can take them out with your gun. Or it illuminates light sensitive paint that tells you which way to go for hidden supplies or helpful little crazy person ramblings about what's going on. You see, the whole area of the secluded mountain town is taken over by this darkness thing and you have to fight it.

Alan is a writer, which may be a first for a video game protagonist. Stephen King is referenced more than once, since Alan is a popular horror writer in this world. He's basically living in one of his stories come to life, that he doesn't really remember writing.

The environments are incredibly detailed. I found myself exploring them just to look around. I almost never do that in a game. It has to be pretty well done to make me want to not just blow past it. I've heard people complain about the collectible thermos's that seem kind of thrown in just to give you a reason to walk around and explore. But I never felt they were too much of a distraction. One place in particular that I thought was really impressive was his New York apartment that you visit in a flashback. I might have just been really into it because I played it right after I got back from my first trip to NYC though.

The music at the end of a chapter is usually pretty good. The delayed title sequences are nice and dramatic and every chapter starts with a "Previously on Alan Wake" section that catches you up. Which I liked in theory, but I was usually just going from one chapter to the next in one sitting, so I already knew what I just did. But I could see something like that coming in really handy for a serial downloadable game (which this is not).

The general progression of the game is a lot of you walking on a fairly linear path with occasional combat. Most times you're better off just avoiding the enemies and running to the next safe haven. This is completely at odds with my preferred play style that the original Zelda taught me long ago: kill everything in the room and move on. But it makes sense for this character who often only has a flashlight or a gun that he just found. Oh, and you can only run for about 10 feet before having to stop and pant for a while. Wonderful. Lots of games throw in an abilitease but this game somehow manages to let you gain and lose a bunch of weapons about six times.
"Oh no, your car crashed and you have to leave all your stuff behind!"
"Oh no, you woke up hours later with no memory of what happened and all your stuff is gone!" etc.

But this has been a great game to tide me over between rental games. I like it. I'm just starting in on Kirby's Epic Yarn, which is really cute and I'll post more on that later.

Portable games

I just got back from a week on the beach, away from the cold weather in Kansas. It was fantastic. All I was expected to do every day was lay in the sun, read, drink, and play games. Really, it was fantastic.

My wife had just gotten an iPad so we got a few apps for that. I also had my DS, of course. I spent more time with the Hootsuite twitter app than most anything else, but I had a bit of fun with Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds, Words With Friends, and a book or two on the Amazon Kindle app or CloudReader comic book reader.

On the DS I've been very impressed with Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. This might be the best looking DS game I've ever played. Some of the cut scenes are fully animated and voiced. They look like they could be a cartoon I watched growing up. I thought I was through with this sort of game after the first one, but the new sets of puzzles keep things fresh and I'm still playing after a few hours with it.

I've tried off and on to get into Dragon Quest IX. It's okay I guess, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm rehashing the same JRPG story while continually pressing A (over and over and over). But as far as leveling up and starting off easy, it's great!

Donkey Kong...Returns

There's one thing that I take as a constant in video games. And that is that moving platforms will continue to move at a constant pace. Donkey Kong Country Returns, stage 6-1 Sticky Situation takes this constant and mocks it. The platforms that slowly fall down the screen move at one speed, slow up for a second or so, then continue at the previous speed. I can't tell you how many times that got me. I'd jump to one right before it slowed up and I'd miss it, falling to my death. At least my wife didn't seem to recognize the death music and comment on it. I really hate that.

"Yes, I KNOW I just died 10 times in a row. LAY OFF!"

And the little pig with the spastic waving white flag telling me that Super Kong can come in to save the day doesn't help much either. But he's at least easier to ignore. :)

I think another part of what makes this game tough is that it really screws with my depth perception. I'd often completely miss seeing ledges or enemies because they were on a different plane than I was focusing on. I don't know if it's a color contrast problem or just the insane amount of focus this game demands to not die (over and over and over again).

On a positive and nostalgic note, the music has lodged itself into my brain quite a few times. I can't tell how much of that is due to my remembering the original and how much is due to it just being very well done. In general, the first few worlds were a fun little romp that reminded me why I loved the original game on the N64. Then they slowly started to get a bit sadistic. And I swear you used to just have to hold down the jump button when bouncing off an enemy's head to get a little jump boost. Now you have to hit the jump button again right at the same time you're landing on its head. Which isn't too tough if you're really thinking about it. But you're soon required to do it with split second timing or you risk falling off the mine cart. Oh the mine cart. Don't even get me started on those things.

Halo Reach & NBA Jam

Halo: Reach

I was really impressed with this game. Sure it was short, the campaign is only around 6-8 hours (I think?) and was over before I knew it. But it was a perfect rental for me since I have really no desire to play multiplayer. I started it on a Sunday, played a bunch that day and next, then finished the last 30 min. or so on a Tuesday. I had gotten myself to a point right before the end when I quit on Monday for the night without even really realizing it. I blew up a big ship thing, and then, boom, roll credits. There's an interesting little segment after the credits that I couldn't really tell how much of an input I really had and then it was really over. I guess I was used to Halo 3 where the sections just seemed to go on and on, and on. Not that it was bad, but this one was much more trimmed down.

All the familiar enemies from the Halo series seem to make an appearance. The only new things I remember are some non-violent ostrich-like things (that were fun to shoot and I later learned that there's an achievement for killing 7 of 'em) and the dudes with purple energy shields. They're a real pain in the ass. I think Bungie realized this though, as there aren't usually too many of them all together and they don't have too great of weapons. Unrelated to anything, I swear I heard one of my squad mates say "Just like shootin' swamp rats back home!" in a thinly veiled Star Wars reference.

Another new thing that I liked was the section where you take control of a fighter plane in space. Halo has always had you trying out different vehicle types, and this is a welcome new one. How can I tell they did a really good job? Moving around in three dimensions and tracking enemy fighters wasn't difficult at all. This is often where dogfighting flying games fail for me.

So it seemed a well done and fitting end to the Bungie-designed Halo games. The text from the developers at the end was a nice thank you to the fans, and since I've now played at least the single player for all of them, I consider myself firmly in that camp.

NBA Jam

To be brutally honest, I didn't like this one at all. I vaguely remember playing this in the arcade and the SNES & Genesis. At the time I was at least peripherally aware of NBA stars since I played basketball. This time around, I hadn't even heard of many of the teams, let alone nearly any of the stars. I mean, seriously, Oklahoma City has a team!? Who knew? My second mistake was getting this one for the Wii, when it would have probably been better for me on the Xbox or PS3. At least then I might stick around a bit to try to pick up some achievements. Originally the Wii version was supposed to have more game modes and come out first, but that all got changed at the last minute, I think. I don't know, I only sort of keep up with that stuff. So I had put the Wii version in my queue and forgotten about it.

What didn't I like about it? Well, I guess I'm just not really looking for an arcade style game like this anymore. Another problem was the control scheme on the Wii and how the shooting and jumping is mapped to flinging the remote up and back down. Much less involved than they could have made it, sure, but I kept doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. And I couldn't figure out how to JAM instead of make jumpshots and lay-ups. That just seems wrong in a game called NBA Jam.

Splinter Cell: Conviction

I didn't love or hate this game so I won't spend much time on the write up of it. I had it for a little over a week, completed the story, and sent it back. There's another gameplay mode that allows you to sneak around in new environments and stealthily take out a bunch of bad guys. Basically what you've been doing throughout the whole story mode, but now with little to no story. I tried one of these after I finished the game but just couldn't stay motivated to keep going. So it's a decent stealth shooter game that didn't try to make things too complicated, but failed to hold my interest for long.

One of the greatest parts of this game? The little noises that play when you interact with the menu items. Which sounds really odd, I know. But they're so unexpectedly different and yet they're familiar and somehow right.

A short time with a lot of games

I accidentally got Castlevania: Lords of Shadow in the mail. Accidentally because it was one of those games I added to my queue when I first heard about it, and then forgot about it. It happened to come to me shortly after release and I thought "huh, I know almost nothing about this one." Don't look at me like that. You know you've done it with Netflix.

This just about sums it up perfectly, since I didn't really enjoy this game. And the thought of slogging through two discs worth of stuff that I didn't really enjoy made me a little bit sad. So I took the opportunity over a few days out of town to send the game back and have a new one waiting for me when I got home.

The new one was ModNation Racers and it's already in the envelope to go back. Not because it's bad. I sort of enjoyed the Sony take on Mario Kart. But because the game is broken. I think it's just my copy, because surely other people would have noticed if it locks up any time you try to go to anything but career race, right? I spent a ton of time downloading updates and patches for the game. It's a shame I didn't get to play it more.

On my trip I tackled a few newer DS games. Super Scribblenauts won for "most time consumed." I like it. But I cringe every time a level starts by flashing up "Adjective Level." I feel like you have to do some trial and error to get one of the three or four words the developers were thinking of to pass those. I need to try a few more of the action levels and try out the new, non-stylus based controls a bit more.

Alice in Wonderland (for DS) surprised me a bit. The art style is really original and the gameplay is mostly not boring. I probably need to put in some more time on that one.

Splinter Cell Conviction is on it's way next. Mainly because I hear you can effectively play the entire game by sneaking around and poppin' dudes in the head with a silenced pistol. Good times!

DS Lunch

Depending on who you are or how long you've been reading this blog, you may or may not know what the title signifies.

A FEW NERDY ENGINEERS GET TOGETHER TO PLAY NINTENDO DS OVER LUNCH AND TALK ABOUT VIDEO GAMES. I STARTED THIS BLOG THINKING WE'D ALL POST TO IT. BUT NOW IT'S PRETTY MUCH JUST "DAVE'S PLACE TO POST ABOUT GAMES."

That's how it started, of course. But it's sort of turned into my creative space to talk about something that I care about while emulating the style of some people that I admire. Lately I seem to have gotten in a rhythm of doing a quick recap of the game I just finished from GameFly. Maybe I feel some kind of need to justify the subscription cost in addition to playing the games? Anyway, I thought it might be fun to walk you through a typical day of a real DS Lunch. I don't even remember exactly how or when it started, but it's been going on for probably five years.

Every Wednesday, it starts by me remembering to bring both my DS and my lunch to work with me in the morning. Then at noon, we meet in a conference room, eat our lunches, talk about games we've been playing at home in the last week, and play DS. Typically it's about four or five of us (mostly engineers) but we've had as many as 8, which means all human opponents and no brain-dead CPU players in Mario Kart. Ninety five percent of the time the unspoken choice is Mario Kart. There have been a few other games that we try out, Tetris or Bomberman sometimes, but we always come back to Kart racing.

It's a rare game that has the perfect blend of skill, luck, and fun. It does lots of things right. I'm not gonna tell you that the DS version is perfect, far from it. Just today we were saying that the next version really needs to have a replay feature. Some crazy, improbable stuff happens when you have several people all out to get each other.

We do a lot of yelling at each other. Celebrating last second wins. Banging our heads against the walls because of last second defeats. For all of the people that schedule meetings in conference rooms nearby over lunch, or have offices nearby...I'm sorry. Well, not that sorry. We do keep meeting every week.

Prince of Persia: Forgotten Game?

I've mentioned to a few people how much I enjoyed Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. I must have since I got it in the mail, played all the way through it, and sent it back in just over a week. That's some kind of record for me. The platforming and combat were lots of fun. The difficulty was just right, and the story wasn't terrible.

I've heard some comparisons to Sands of Time thrown around, but I think I like parts of this one even better than that game. The combat from SoT seemed really frustrating at times. In this iteration, a lot more enemies are thrown at you at once, but you're also a lot more powerful. Plus, you're given lots of options on how you can dispatch them. So you can pick your favorite combinations. But speaking of combinations, this game's not too heavy on it. You aren't forced to remember ridiculous button combinations so you're freed up to hack and slash, use magic, or whatever works for you.

The level design is pretty neat, but you have to suspend your disbelief that all of the obstacles just HAPPENED to line up perfectly. You really can't spend too much time thinking about it, and just go where the game (not so subtlely) directs you. I found very few spots where I was confused on where to go next. And it does this without falling into the "rhythm game" mentality of the last game.

This game gives you a great mix of "do whatever you want" combat and "extremely directed" acrobatics. It also was hard to stop playing. I often found myself playing "just to the next checkpoint." Only to find myself saying that again when I got there.

Late in the game, the timing puzzles tighten up a bit and leave you less room for error. They don't seem impossible. Rather, they're just reminding you how far you've come. As an example, late in the game right before you open Solomon's tomb, I got to a series of jumps that seemed fairly easy for what I was used to. Of course, I had to back track and was now on the clock. It was ticking down while I retraced what was easy the first time through. Well played, Prince.

Of course, the big mechanic for this series is the ability to rewind time when you mess up a jump. You acquire that fairly early on, but it really takes a back seat to being able to flash freeze water. Horizontal water fountains become bars to twirl around, and waterfalls become solid walls to run across. Later on, it leads to some of the trickiest sequences of having to quickly freeze and unfreeze as you make your way across the obstacles. Almost as an afterthought, you get a "recall" ability to fill in sections of wall that are all Matrix-code-looking. But you can only do one section at a time. Often I'd forget that I had to use this on the thing I was standing on, turn it off and drop to my death. Whoops. I could have used some kind of slight visual indication that "this ground might not be entirely stable."

The title of this post refers to my sense that this game was largely ignored when it shouldn't have been. But I loved it. You might want to give it a shot too.

Port & Starboard

Whenever I go to an actual arcade, I end up spending most of my time playing something Star Wars-related or Hydro Thunder. It's basically a silly, over the top racing game. On the water. With ridiculous looking boats and locations. And I love it.

So when I heard about Hydro Thunder Hurricane coming to XBLA, I was immediately interested. I played the demo and thought about it for a few days. Was it really worth $15 even though the demo only let you try one track? Eventually I decided it was and I haven't regretted it.

The best part of the game are the controls. Everything just feels right when you're turning, jumping out of the water, and slamming back down. Some of the boats have quirky handling, but I mostly tried to stick to the one or two that I liked.

I hear the online play can be fun, I should probably try that at some point. But I have a feeling I'd get steamrolled by 12 year olds. Plus I'd have to listen to all of them. So maybe not.

Guns & numbers

"Sweet! I got a new gun!"
"Is it any good? Is it better than one I already have?"
"I...um...well, I'm not sure." (lots of number checking & experimentation follows)
"OK, technically, yes...but only in certain situations."

This is a conversation I have with myself far too often in Borderlands. It's a good bit of fun. RPG elements and leveling make you want to stick with it. Same with the quest system. And on top of that, it's a very good shooter. The controls feel perfectly mapped and responsive. I guess that's a very good thing when shooting and moving is what you'll be doing more than 95% of the time in the game. It suffers from the same problem as Bioshock 2 however, because you constantly have to look at the ground to see what kind of goodies and loot are down there. Visually, you can see 'em from far away, and they're even color coded, but to actually decide if it's worth picking up you have to look at your feet, then exactly in the right spot to determine if it's something you need or want. The potential of incredible loot is almost enough to make you check it before you've even safely cleared out all the bad guys in the area. So I often end up taking damage while I'm staring at the stuff on the ground. Whoops.

I actually bought this one, and that seems like the perfect situation. There's not much story at all that would keep you wanting to play it all the way through, but it's addictive enough to keep pulling me back in every few weeks for an hour or two.

Other (M)etroid Game

So Metroid: Other M was really...interesting. I felt like I couldn't skip it since it had Metroid in the title. But I'd heard a lot about how it was such a departure from previous games.

The combat is mostly great. But I see too much Ninja Gaiden in it from developer Team Ninja. For that game I only played the 360 version for a few hours since it was too hard and frustrating. Other M also has more cheap "instant death" scenarios than I cared to count. This is quite a departure from the hand-holding fair world of Nintendo-produced games.

I really hated the third person slow walking sequences. I don't remember one where I actually find anything interesting while forced to walk around like this. Sometimes for far too long. Come on. I just wanna run around and shoot stuff! And speaking of that, I miss not getting health and missile drops from dead enemies. It changes the whole dynamic of the game. Where in other Metroid games I'd proceed slowly and take out every enemy, this one rewards me for rushing through and avoiding unnecessary enemies. That, coupled with the lack of much exploration changes this game quite a bit from the Prime or Fusion series. Mitch over at Insult Swordfighting talks about how the game changes after you've finished and you can do this kind of quiet exploration, but I wasn't motivated to stick around after the finish.

Much has been said about the lame cut scenes, terrible voice acting, and the character assassination of Samus. Really, that stuff didn't bother me too much. Sadly, that's because I've played a ton of other games that were just as dumb.

For the last hour or two you pretty much have all the upgrades and get to run around like a badass swatting aside any small enemies they throw at you. This seemed nice, mainly because they're often the same enemies that annoyed the crap out of me earlier by jumping in front of me and taking way too much health away when I ran into 'em.

So it's not a game I recommend you run out and buy, but it's a decent rental.

Soon?

I said I'd post more "soon." Soon is a relative term. Please know that I've got two drafts for posts going. One for Metroid: Other M and one for Borderlands. I'll post Metroid when I finish the game. I'll post Borderlands when I...uh...you know, Borderlands doesn't really seem like a game you ever really finish since there's very little story. It's just about level grinding and shooting things. Which is tons more fun than it sounds. Anyway, I'll post that when I feel like I've got a more complete sense of the game. I'm at level 20 if that means anything to anybody.

Weekend Update (not with Kevin Nealon)

I played a lot of Borderlands this weekend. Even some (gasp!) online. I like it quite a bit. The quest system and leveling up is pretty addictive. Also might get back into Little Big Planet. Will post more later.

Zelda 2.5

I'm sitting here watching the credits roll on one of the strangest games I've played in a while, 3D Dot Game Heroes. It may have well been called The Legend of Zelda Tribute Game instead. But this is the most fantastic Zelda tribute game ever. They get the music right, the enemies, the story, everything! I made it to the first dungeon and got (of course) the boomerang. And I just KNEW that bats would be killed with one hit of the boomerang while other enemies would only be stunned.

There's some weird humor in there too, including a few caves where videogame designers toil away on a game that they hope you like. No joke. Of course, there's the thinly veiled Zelda references, but there's also the slight sexual references that catch you off guard if you get to thinking you really are playing an old 8 bit Zelda game.

Some Annoyances:
The not-quite-overhead-view in dungeons leads to you running into enemies or falling off ledges quite often. The ridiculous but badass huge sword is only available at full health and w/ temporary upgrades. Swinging your sword in anything other than a straight jab is tricky and hard to consistently do correctly. This is eventually helped by other swords with better "swing" rating. I couldn't quite decide if using the D pad or the analog stick to control the character is the right way to go. D pad feels more classic, but I end up pressing it really hard and my thumb ends up hurting, so the analog stick is a welcome relief. But it feels sort of "spongy" compared to the precise control of the D pad. Item selection is cumbersome. You have the traditional Zelda method of a pause screen and a grid, but you can also cycle through them with L2/R2. You end up getting quite a few items, and rather than use all the buttons of the PS3 controller, you're mostly stuck with the classic A and B configuration familiar in Zelda.

I hate Magis. I really really hate them.

Character selection is fun, but what I really want is a normal sized character that doesn't blend into any of the backgrounds. I ended up playing most of the game with the green dragon, partly because it reminded me of Link's green clothes and partly because there weren't any green dungeons that I could remember.


Going back the the 3D perspective thing, I was able to get it the way I liked it with an almost bird's eye view for the overworld. But you spend 80-90% of your time in endlessly repetitive and overly complicated dungeons which force you into a not quite bird's eye view.

I made notes as I was playing through this game and it made this post much easier to write. But I noticed that as the game went on my notes got more critical and less glowing. As a huge Zelda fan, the game blew me away at first. But once I got used to that I started noticing more annoyances. I almost quit on the last boss since he does ridiculous damage. Once I did some reading I found that if I did a quick little side quest to upgrade my shield I could block almost all of his ridiculously damaging attacks. And I did a lot of reading for this one. I think I had the GameFaq's page open in a tab on my laptop for over a week while I played through this. After the 3rd dungeon or so, the paths you have to take to get through the dungeons just get ridiculous. There's a lot of backtracking and one way paths that if you miss, you'll have to do all over again. Also, saving and reloading became sort of an art since you knew you'd start at the beginning of the dungeon, which might just be closer to where you needed to go next.

So anyway, it's a fantastic rental. Depending on how big of a Zelda nut you are, your mileage will certainly vary. Enjoy!

Experiments with gravity, edition 2

Super Mario Galaxy 2 was my latest little diversion. I had actually forgotten that it was "Super" until I went to get that link. Nintendo kind of gets stuck with that sort of thing since they've been making these things for over 20 years. Anyway, it was basically the same game as Mario Galaxy 1 (and that's not a bad thing) with a different way to navigate the overworld map.


Wow, if this posts strangely or twice it's because my dog just bumped my laptop which apparently caused me to click the Publish Post button...continuing on...

You notice that Yoshi appears on the front of the box with Mario, right? I was pretty excited about that. It seemed like a perfect thing to add to the second outing. But I ended up sort of hating most of the Yoshi levels. Fortunately he's only available in certain levels and won't stay with you even if you finish the level with him, much like NSMBWii. What irked me was that the mechanism for using his dino-tongue was pointing the Wii remote at the screen to pick where to hit. I wasn't too thrilled about this since it meant you had to hold the controller in such a way that you were always ready to point it at the TV. And maybe it's just my setup, but it seemed to take a half second or so before it recognized that's what you were trying to do. Which is sometimes too long when there are goombas trotting all around you.

This game almost completely dispenses with any kind of story. There wasn't much in the first, but this has completely given up. Bowser steals Princess, Mario must go on a quest to get her back. Yada yada yada, you know the drill. I actually sort of missed Rosalina. She's my go-to girl in Mario Kart Wii.

I mentioned the new overworld navigation. While it made things simpler to find and navigate, I kept getting to spots where I'd have to backtrack and collect more stars than I really wanted to before I could move on. You see, I'm basically a tourist in this game. I just want to see all the nifty worlds and gimmicks. When you force me to go back through places I've already been and look for new things, I get a bit stabby. The worst were when it seemed like the only unfound stars were the ? ones. Which meant you had to replay a certain track of a level until you found the hidden exit. Well, more than once I never found the hidden thing and ended the level with a worthless clear star. So I went through this game fairly quickly, but not as quickly as I would have liked.

In summary, lots of fun, worth playing, but I found a few minor annoyances. Wow, all my posts come to that same conclusion don't they? Good thing I don't get paid for this.

RDR

I won't spend too much time on this since it was already covered pretty well by Matt here and here. I also thought it ended strangely. The last series of missions when you're back at your house are a bit boring but I liked the tranquility of them. They seemed like a tutorial type of thing that should have been at the beginning of the game though, not the end.

I really wanted Uncle and John to shut up when I had to tame 3 horses in a row. In fact, the scenery was so great throughout the game, I could have used a lot less ambient dialogue like that. The developers seemed to abhor awkward silences when another character was around.

This was a game like the next one I'll be talking about, Mario Galaxy 2, where I went back and forth between thinking "OMG, this is teh greatest game ever!" to "is this over yet? I'm about to quit playing." I think the thing that made me feel like this in RDR is that I never had a good sense of how many more missions I needed to do to find the next former gang member dude and eventually finish the game. And I only found the true ending by accident. I just figured I'd go clean up some of The Stranger missions and that were closest to the farm. I didn't realize the wild goose chase I got sent on would take me to the "actual" ending.

Mario Galaxy 2 and Red Dead Redemption

I finished both of these in the last couple of days. I'll write more later. I sort if just wanted too see if I could post from my phone.

Rated M for...Massive amounts of blood

God of War 3 seems like something you sort of have to play if you own a PS3. I had played both of the previous games on my first Sony system a few years back. The series has been so well done that it's sort of spawned a genre of God of War clones. So how would GoW3 hold up compared to all of the imitators? Pretty well, I'd say.

Minor spoiler paragraph:
I don't remember the first two being so much like this, but in GoW3 Kratos kills EVERYONE he meets except for the lady he gets it on with. Even people that help him end up dead. Also the ending was a bit strange, but seemed like a pretty good cap on the trilogy.

If these next sections are a bit disjointed, it's because it's pulled together from the few sentences I jotted down during the 8 or so hours while I played through this over a couple of weeks. The first annoyance that I ran into was that New Game was the top option in the main menu, even after I had a save file. I mention this since it meant I had to interact with the menus more than I wanted to continue my game. Once I got going I had to start over shortly after since the difficulty was a bit weird. I picked the normal difficulty thinking I could handle it, and I'm sure I could have, but it was just frustrating dying without really knowing why if I wasn't blocking or avoiding hits all the time. This is the type of game I just want to sit back and enjoy being a badass without really thinking too much about strategy.

I ran into a few very video-gamey things that kind of amused me. More than once I was on an elevator of some kind where an endless stream of dudes to kill dropped down from the sky until the elevator got to the top. I had a heck of a time with the double jump mechanic. It took me falling into a pit about 8 times before I got it right (hint, it's jump, jump--HOLD).

But the strangest video-gamey moment was what I like to call Music Box Hero. To open up some passageway you have to push buttons in time with symbols that scroll across the screen. The symbols are the 4 iconic PS3 buttons. Nothing too weird there, but the controls that Kratos sees in the world are also the 4 PS3 buttons. Odd.

A big improvement from the previous games are the quick time sequences. If you have to press the top of the four PS3 buttons, it's at the top of the screen. The bottom button is on the bottom, and so on. So you can actually focus on the action that's being presented for you and the interactions are secondary. This made the great looking cutscenes much easier to follow.

So it was an enjoyable ride with great graphics. The environments were well varied and you certainly feel like a badass as you dispatch hundreds and hundreds of dudes in a shower of blood.

Dragons and aging

Dragon Age: Origins is your typical story-heavy RPG with obvious PC roots. It's the sort of game where you choose a class and start out killing rats as you begin on your long quest to upgrade your character. Later, other people join your party. Typical stuff. That said, it's fairly well done.

I played it on PS3 and could definitely tell that it would make more sense on a PC. I also wasn't all that impressed with the graphics. Not bad looking, but sort of your standard looking medieval settings and characters. I probably played somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 through the mage questline before I got bored and sent it back.

So not a great game for me, but not a terrible one either. I've also been playing Puzzle Quest 2 on XBLA and Red Dead Redemption on 360. More on those later.

That F*ing Flute

I've mentioned off and on that I've been playing the Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks on my DS when I get a chance. Well, I've finally finished it, but not in the traditional sense of completion. More like the "screaming expletives at it, throwing the cartridge across the room" sort of completion. Let me explain.

Spirit Tracks is a great successor to the Phantom Hourglass, the other stylus-based DS Zelda game. Some slight improvements are seen and the overworld map is now navigated by a series of railroad tracks rather than a boat in the ocean. It ends up being the same sort of thing, no complaints there. The same tap and swipe gestures return for sword fighting along with the excellent, "tap and hold where you want to go" control scheme. But this one has a #*%@ing Spirit Flute that you have to use the stylus & microphone to control. You need coordination between the touchscreen and (everyone's favorite) blowing into the microphone. That works fine when you have to play notes that are next to each other or don't need to be done in any sort of rhythm. Guess what you need to do to beat the last boss.

I somehow stumbled my way through all the other mandatory rhythm-game parts to enter each temple. But the last one was the last straw. To compound the issue, I had just done an elaborate series of fetch quests to power up my sword to be able to do a Super Spin Attack that helps a great deal with a different part of the last boss battle. While you could beat him without it, I could never get the timing exactly right in about 20 tries.

So I'll never know what happened to the Lokomos or if the world was ever saved from the...mysterious evil because I have no rhythm. you and die!

P.S. Here's another person that had the exact same problem I did but managed to give a better explanation of the microphone problem and use a few less expletives.

Mario Kart Junkie

I had a few days to kill between GameFly games, so when I had some free time I actually had to choose what I wanted to play instead of just unthinkingly turning on whatever rented game I had. Because time is money, ya know? Most times my choice was Mario Kart Wii.

Now, I've long ago filled up my scorecard thing with gold on the single player, so I always play online with strangers. One of the few games I do this with, I might mention. Probably because there's no voice chat and it's free. The system they've put in place for online Vs. matches is pure genius and pure evil, however. Everyone starts at 5000 points. You gain points by winning, lose points by losing. Do well in a match with people with more points than you and you gain even more points (and vice versa).

I'd made my way up to 7000 and hovered around there for a while when it came out. I got mad when I dropped below that nice round number, and I felt good about myself if I kept above it. Lately I've been hemorrhaging points. I dropped to 6000 and felt mostly apathy, feeling like nothing I did would make me stop losing. But then I won a lucky one and gained over a hundred points. My brain got excited and told me that if I just do that a few more times I'll be back on top in no time!

And this is where we realize I have a problem. I hear that gambling addicts go through something similar. They focus on their big wins and how good it makes them feel while ignoring the misery of the losses. Now, I'm not sure it's quite the same, since in online Mario Kart, the house won't win in the end, will it? But do I suffer through the game cheating and attacks on my self esteem by connecting my sense of self worth to a number? No. I'm through. No more Mario Kart for me.

Well, maybe just one more game.

Red Dead Revisited

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was essentially finished with the main storyline of Red Dead a couple days ago, when the progress-meter was at about the 70% mark. I'm not going to spoil the plot, but suffice to say that after you defeat the last boss, the story essentially becomes this weird sort of drawn-out and annoying episode of Lassie. I'm not kidding, you'll see when you get there. Then there's one more minor boss battle at the "actual" end of the plot, which left me saying "huh? that's it?" as the credits rolled.

Still, it's a really excellent game, and worth your time to check out. As I was playing along, I made a list of noteworthy things I did or saw:

• Saw better scenery, sky, and weather effects than almost any other game I can think of... but also realized that they haven't mastered the technology for animating women's clothing yet.
• Spent all my money on the best horse in the game, only to find I already had that horse.
• Spent all my money on an upgraded gun, only to find the same gun on a dead guy 30 seconds later.
• Survived dozens of bullet wounds, but died instantly upon touching ankle-deep water.
• Spent roughly half of the in-game money I earned just to unlock new places to save the game from.
  
• Played through half the game before figuring out how to fast-travel, then hardly ever used it since a) it's cumbersome and slow, and b) watching the scenery go by is so cool.
  
• Picked more flowers and skinned more animal carcasses than I care to count.
• Watched enough cutscenes to make at least three westerns.
• Gave up on the in-game challenges once I reached level 5: "Kill two cougars with a knife."
  
• Killed about 500 bad guys with a gatling gun, which was surprisingly tedious and non-fun.
• Saw two NPCs "doing it".
• Lassoed a hooker from off a porch, threw her on my horse, rode over to the tracks, dumped her in front of an oncoming train, and got an achievement for it. Yup, it's a Rockstar game.
• Drove my cat crazy whenever I made my character whistle to summon his trusty horse.
• Accidentally drove my trusty horse over a cliff to its death... but not to worry, just whistle and his identical clone will come running up so you can hop on (?!)
• Ran errands for an infinite number of NPCs who each promised to advance the plot (but hardly ever did).
• Got stuck on world geometry when trying to run through a door into a gunfight, and died (happened to me a lot).
• Pressed the wrong button and accidentally drew my gun on a lawman or bystander, thus turning me into a wanted criminal (this happened a lot too).
• Played a cow-herding minigame that was surprisingly well done.
• Saw an NPC grabbing a horse penis.

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

I was spurred on to play Heavy Rain because of some reviews that said it was a new kind of game that really just needed to be experienced. "Interactive Drama" was thrown around a few times, I believe. Let me back up a bit though. I played, and found a lot to like, with the developer's previous outing Indigo Prophecy. What you're asked to do in the two is similar. Walk around and find clues, then participate in quick time events while your character does things behind your button presses. Indigo Prophecy had the same problem with this that God of War does, I ended up focusing completely on what buttons I need to press next that I barely register what's happening in the "background" which is the entire story. Thankfully Heavy Rain makes the button prompts and controller gestures much less intrusive and it leads to a much more enjoyable experience.

This game deals with some dark, heavy stuff. Sure there's the mundane, everyday actions that people have complained about having to walk your character through, like shaving or making dinner. But you also encounter suicide, depression, serial killers, drugs, etc. I felt like I was watching a decent movie that I might have seen before but couldn't quite remember how everything ended up. Several characters are very well fleshed out and feel as real as any in a movie. The private eye, Scott Shelby, was my favorite. He's noble and a bit worn down by all his years.

There are some minor technical issues that attempt to get in the way of my enjoyment of the game, like the too close camera and wonky walking controls in tight spaces. But the overall feel of the game is fantastic. It's depressing sometimes, but it mostly feels real and alive. The story is very linear but you're given a few points where you can make it deviate a little. It doesn't seem to be enough to make me want to play through it again, but I'm about 3/4 of the way through. We'll see how I feel after I finish.

You shot 1153 pounds of meat

I told Dave I would write a blog post about Red Dead Redemption. I don't usually get worked up about unreleased video games, but something about the preview videos for RDR grabbed onto my brainstem strong enough for me to actually preorder it, which is something I hardly every do. Something about the footage of players riding through the high-poly-count southwest desert stimulated the same neurons responsible for my obsession with Fallout 3's wasteland, I suppose. Turns out that preordering was a smart move, since Amazon gave me $25 worth of kickbacks... thanks, Mister Bezos!

Anyway, I was all fired up to write down my thoughts on this game, but then I heard this Giant Bomb podcast and decided it would be a lot easier to make you go listen to that instead. I agree with pretty much everything said therein, which saves me a lot of typing.

I especially agree that the designers almost throw the whole world open for you to explore a little too soon... in fact, it was only from listening to the podcast that I realized I had skipped a huge part of the tutorial because I didn't visit the correct NPC before I went running off across the desert. In my several hours of playtime to date, I have barely made a dent in the main plot. That's because I've been too busy just riding my horse across the countryside, checking out the HDR-illuminated scenery and doing little random side quests. I'm probably missing all kinds of stuff, but it's still a lot of fun.

We were talking about this over low-quality Chinese food yesterday, and a pretty useful analogy was put forth: Remember playing Oregon Trail on the Apple II in third grade? Of course that game was a lot simpler than Red Dead, but it still had an end goal and a whole series of steps required to reach it... and all anyone ever remembers about it was how much fun it was to hunt buffalo. To me, RDR has the exact same thing going on: I'm sure I will eventually get around to making forward progress, but at the moment it's too much fun just messing around in the world. "Shoot coyotes and earn Master Hunter achievement" ranks pretty high up on my to-do list for Memorial Day weekend.

Come to think of it, not only is Red Dead a sandbox game, but when you are running around in the desert you are literally in a sandbox. Did I just blow your mind?!

Requiescat in Pace

If you put the Assassin's Creed 2 disc in your Xbox 360 and don't touch it for a while it plays a cinematic intro video that acts as sort of a trailer for the game. It shows Ezio sneaking into a masquerade in Venice and assassinating a rich dude in the midst of a crowd of people. It looks fantastic and gets you ready to play the game. Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn't look quite as good, even in cutscenes. Faces especially, looked a bit off in the actual game. But never mind that, this game is all about moving around the city undetected and dropping in for the kill.

This sequel picks and chooses elements from the first game to abandon or include. The excellent terrain traversal animations are still around. You just push the control stick in a direction and Ezio figures out how to get there for the most part. The same four or five types of tasks that you had to do over and over in the first game are gone. Because of this, I never got bored playing through the game. But the story missions that replace them aren't that impressive. I often found myself running off to kill a dude on the other side of town just because somebody told me to. The story wasn't really engaging enough for me to remember why I was doing this. I just liked traversing and killing.

Honestly, I waited too long between finishing the game and writing about it, but I have in my notes that there are "lots of new features, some work, some don't." None of the new techniques will hold you up. Meaning I didn't run into a situation where I wanted to stop playing because of some stupid unskippable task that made me mad.

One annoying thing that stuck around from the first game is that you walk by default. To run, you have to hold down the right trigger. Since I was running 90% of the time it was really annoying (and eventually painful) to have to hold it down all the time. Luckily I remembered my trick from the last game. I posted this on Twitter about it:
The only way to play Assassin's Creed 2: always running.

So I liked the game overall. I complained about the forgettable story earlier, but that's just the day to day missions. The whole story of Ezio losing his family, seeking revenge and looking for answers is sort of neat. Especially the ending.

Bioshock 2

Bioshock 2 is good. It got generally favorable reviews, and it's easy to see why. I kept playing longer than I meant to and I often played for long stretches at a time. It didn't keep track of hours for me, so maybe it was just a relatively short game, but I went through the single player very quickly. I played both it and the previous one on the 360 and got probably 70% of the available achievement points. I mention that because it illustrates how I played the game. I collected stuff.

I collected a lot of stuff. Not that I went out of my way tracking down every last hidden flashing thing to get 100% completion, but this game certainly strikes a chord with the loot collector type person. I often found myself picking through the fallen splicers' pockets while a battle was still going on. Or I'd be raiding all the cabinets without really making sure the room was safe to do so. This must have been an intentional decision on the part of the developers. You actually have to look down at dead enemies on the ground and push a button to collect their stuff. And they always have stuff. Occasionally you'll already be full of that type of ammo or whatever, but you never have to decide whether to pick up the new thing or keep your existing thing. Since there's no penalty for picking up everything, I almost would have preferred if you automatically picked up stuff as you walked over it, like lots of shooters do. Then maybe I would have spent more time devising devilish ways to dispatch deranged denizens of the deep instead of collecting crap (sorry, sentences are fun sometimes).

In the last game I was a bit schizophrenic with regards to Little Sisters. These are the young girls that help you along and collect genetic gunk from corpses. They're all about 9 (?) years old with identical brown hair and dresses. Anyway, I killed some and rescued some when the game gives you the binary choice. You are rewarded more if you pick a path and stay with it. So that's what I did in the second game for the Little Sisters. But you're also given a few chances in the game to either kill or spare some other story characters. The way they're presented isn't quite as black and white as the Little Sisters, so I ended up saving some, killing others. So I ended up getting the nice guy ending I think.

Some of the general sentiment about the game was that the original was a story masterpiece that stood on its own and the sequel was only made because they saw dollar signs. While I suppose that's partly true, the sequel never felt contrived and it gave me another chance to explore a beautiful and strange world again. I was happy to go back to Rapture.

The new addition this time around were the Big Sisters. A nice touch that fit in with the story well. But I had a lot of trouble with them on the Medium difficulty which was fine for everything in the game but that. Switching to Easy worked but I got bored with it as soon as I wasn't fighting them. So the difficulty is a bit uneven, maybe.

Once again I skipped the multiplayer portion and sent it back to GameFly pretty quickly. Although I was amused to get an e-mail from them saying I could 'keep Bioshock 2 for only $16!' while I was playing it. If I felt like getting into the multiplayer this would have been a steal. I see that Assassin's Creed 2 is on it's way next, so I'll be back with words about that eventually.

Wii and DS

The odds are pretty good that you or someone you know owns a Nintendo Wii or DS. These two systems are insanely popular. But to reach that large of an audience, they are in the hands of people who don't know about or even care about their full potential. How many of those Wii owners bought the system because they heard about this "bowling game" or "fitness board thing" and haven't done anything with them since? One study showed that only 54% of Wii systems have ever been connected to the internet. Since it's WiFi only, it might be a bit trickier to set up than just plugging in a cable. But once you get online, is there really much to do? You could buy old Nintendo games from the Wii Shop Channel or Wii Ware but then you have to deal with those stupid points. You could play games against other people. But without voice chat, it's sort of pointless. The only time I've tried to play MarioKart with friends we ended up using Xbox Live to be able to talk while playing.

And how many DS handhelds were bought to pet puppies or solve puzzles, only to be set on the shelf after the owners grew tired of those games? The DS is great, but other than some Brain Training games it can't seem to shake the stigma of being a kid's toy. What I'd really like to see is some Wii/DS integration. I think all they've managed so far is are demos of DS games that you can download from a Wii channel. The same sort of thing you can do from DS kiosks at stores and airports. No, I don't know what kind of integration would make sense. But I just think of all the people that have one of each and think there must be something that makes sense and would be fun.

So bring it on, Nintendo. Entertain me.

OMGsoCUTE!!

Little Big Planet seemed to be THE game to get a Playstation 3 for when it came out. The graphics, of course, were stunning. But it really showcases the connectivity of the box as well. Since I didn't play it until a year and a half after its release I had the fun of downloading and installing for almost 30 minutes before I could even play.

It's basically a different company's take on Mario. I'm sure it's much more than that, but I kept coming back to that feeling. Where Mario games have bright happy colors and simplistic levels, this has realistic graphics and sometimes somewhat dark story lines. It's not all run and jump. There are several "ride in this type of vehicle" segments that break up the familiar platforming. The hero's nature is really taken to heart. Your Sack Boy looks to be made of a tiny stuffed burlap sack and the physics keep reinforcing that. You can clutch onto soft materials or get catapulted across the level and land without a scratch like, well, a rag doll. You quickly start collecting costumes and accessories to make your sack person your very own. And this was the part that hooked my wife.

I went out and bought a second controller hoping that she'd play along with me. I had history on my side here, since she played through all of New Super Mario Bros. Wii with me. A similar thing happened here in that I was quickly banned from playing without her since she didn't want to miss out on collecting any of the OMGsoCUTE costume parts. The level progression and gradual sense of completion appealed to me where the collecting and cuteness appealed to her. After we were deep into this I asked if she wanted to jump in to NSMB Wii again, but I think the choice of Luigi/blue/yellow Toad just couldn't compare to the customization available here.

The co-op is very intuitive. It seemed very natural to figure things out as we went along. "You go down there and hit that switch while I hang on to the handle up here" sort of thing. We played a few user-created levels and there seemed to be a wide range of competence there as you'd expect. I didn't bother with any of the creation tools. Every time you start a new level you choose Play Online or Play by Ourselves. We played online a few times and for the most part the other players that joined our game were really helpful. I'm not sure if the game even supports voice chat, but without a headset we were forced to use text chat anyway. It's done well but it relegated all our conversation with other people to things like "sorry" or "thx good game."

So I'm happy to say we both had a blast with this game and were always looking forward to another chance to play. Now it's time for GameFly Roulette to see what comes next.

Darksiders wrap up, MGS4 moment

Looks like my last post was about Darksiders. I finished that up and am about ready to start in with Little Big Planet. I've heard that it's a great game to play co-op, so I got another controller today so I can play it with my wife. Did some searching and found it for $20 off. So there you go.

I guess I didn't technically finish Darksiders. I got 2/3 of the way through the last temple/area/whatever. I enjoyed my time with it, but some of the puzzles or sequences seemed needlessly tedious. I really hated walking through sand, trying not to disturb the sand worm. It was one of those parts that I wasn't enjoying, so I hurried through. Which led to lots of frustrating deaths since you really need to take your time with it. I remember some of the same thing in Mirror's Edge. But what made me send it back was the scale room. There are three huge platforms hanging from chains in a room. The scales move in some nonsensical way when you move blocks onto them in order to get up to the top. Even following an FAQ which told me exactly what to do I still had trouble. And when I had to backtrack and manipulate the scales again for something else I quit. I think there were a few bosses left between me and redemption or something, but the story wasn't really the best part of the game, so I didn't feel bad about calling it quits and moving on.

I had mentioned that Darksiders borrowed a lot from Zelda. It also took inspiration from various other games, but the most surprising one was Portal. Ya, towards the end you get a portal gun. Very weird for a game of this type. You shoot orange and blue portals on sections of the wall and ceiling to get around.

I'm still enjoying Zelda: Spirit Tracks on the DS when I'm on the go and have been putting in a few hours here and there with Metal Gear Solid 4. Both are great, and I'll try to dedicate a post to one or both later. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the fantastic throwback in MGS4. At the beginning of Act 4 you're headed back to Shadow Moses Island and you're thrown in to Playstation One graphics. You play the entire level this way. It takes a bit to get used to the slightly different controls, but they're similar enough to what you've been doing to get it. When you get inside the building it switches to Snake on a helicopter as it transitions again to crisp graphics. "I had that dream again!" he says as he wakes up and shakes his head. Fantastic. I didn't even play that original game, but I've never seen a better homage. You win Kojima. You win.

Zelda what?

So I got a little game called Darksiders. Largely based on the Giant Bomb guys' discussion of it on their podcast. They kept saying how blatant it was that Zelda was a big influence on it. A grown-up, darker take on it, if you will. You're a dude with a sword and you go around on quests. Sweet, I thought. Well, the opening sequence was about as far from Zelda as you could get. It's one of those scenes where you're thrown into a big battle fully powered up and kicking ass. You don't know all the button combinations for everything yet, but you don't really need to since you're kicking so much ass. Also, there are winged angel-demon dudes and people running in terror on a big crowded city street. It was in your face God of War style combos in a setting from Prototype. Zelda, what!?

But soon you're stripped of all this power and you're just a dude with a sword who has to go on a quest to save the world. There are a bunch of heaven/hell angel/demon things going on. Also, lots of macho guy-types with insanely deep voices. So throw in a bit of Gears of War, I guess.

But a funny thing happened about half an hour in. I started to really enjoy myself. I guess it's following the standard Zelda pattern of "there are 4 temples, you need to conquer the beasts in each one before you can go to the central...place." Also, you have what are basically heart containers as your health bar. So Zelda, it's not, but I'm gonna keep playing it and see where it goes.

A little Kingdom Hearts on the road

I did some quick (GameFly) queue management about a week before I headed out of town so that I could get a DS game for my trip. I had lots of time in airplanes, airports, and a hotel room where I mostly played Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. What an odd name. But it makes a bit more sense once you realize that it's the main character's time that he spends with Organization XIII. I dunno, the story is kinda weird. I made it to day 51 or so since I got frustrated and bored once they want you to start using magic attacks rather than just hammering away on dudes with your sword. Oh, sorry, keyblade.

This series has always had a bizarre mix of spiky haired Japanese dudes from Square-Enix...and Disney characters. Ya, you read that right. We're talking Mickey and Donald here. Strangely, it sort of works. This game is very Japanese though. Unless you get blue sea-salt ice cream after every mission with your buddies. You do, don't you?

I had played KH 1 and 2 all the way through, but I didn't have enough patience for this one. It being on the DS had a lot to do with that, I think. At least the other games had decent visuals on the PS2. I got sort of sick of DS polygons and repetitive missions.

I also picked up Mass Effect 2. I'm really liking it and am about 12 hours in. I love the focus on combat. I love that they've downplayed the inventory management in this outing. I got a bit sick of continually replacing Shotgun n with Shotgun n+1 in the first game every time I opened a treasure chest. So I may write more about it later or just be lazy and point you to Matt's impressions from earlier.

How to ruin a franchise

Resistance: Fall of Man was about the best thing PS3 had going for it when it came out. It was supposed to be really pretty and take advantage of all the horsepower of the thing. Since I just played it a month or two ago, it looked about on par with the current generation of games for late '09. Some things were better, some things were worse. But what was unique about it was the concept of an alternate past and the isolation in which you experience the story. After WWII some kind of crazy plague started in Russia and started turning everybody into zombie/alien dudes. They had access to all sorts of weird looking technology too. You eventually find out that they've been on Earth forever but were dormant or something. But the story plays out where you're a soldier that has some sort of resistance to their disease and he becomes super strong and able to kill them all. This takes place in England after the rest of Europe has been destroyed by the Chimera dudes. You learn all of this from your character's perspective and a pleasant British lady that tells you where to go. You seldom see other soldiers, and then only briefly. There are lots of quiet moments going across England.

So I expected more of the same with Resistance 2. Nuh uh. Not at all. They must have noticed that mindless military shooters like Gears of War were popular and decided to copy them. It's an endless progression of "clear out the LZ!" or "hostile down!" the entire game. You're also almost never alone, surrounded by a squad of mindless idiots who don't really help you kill much of anything. Oh, and it takes place in America, since apparently the alien dudes have gotten tired of mucking up Europe. Mainly, it just gives them an excuse to show more recognizable landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge or that famous theater in Chicago. Other than a few old cars and some radios here and there, you're never really reminded that the game is supposed to be set in the fifties, either. Wow, now that I've laid it all out like this, I don't think I'll be playing much more, since they've taken away everything I liked from the first one.

Granted, there are some welcome gameplay refinements. The crouch controls wisely took a cue from every other game out there and make you click to enter/exit a crouch rather than holding down a button. My fingers were getting tired! I hear there's a multiplayer mode that's decent. I'll probably skip that based on my past history of getting immediately killed by 12 year olds as soon as I start up the map.

Netflix, GameFly, and digital downloads

I signed for Netflix this week. Mainly because I realized that we have this fancy teevee and sound system that really only gets used for games. Not that there's anything wrong with that. :) My wife and I don't watch that many movies, but we always seem to have a list in the back of our minds of "oh yeah, I kinda want to see that." Now that list is in digital form.

But this has got me thinking about how a rental by mail service should be run. First off, a lot depends on that "by mail" part. I'm told we live in a city with a Netflix distribution center. Not true for GameFly. The result is that I have 2-3 day turnaround time on new movies versus about a week for games. Also GameFly doesn't ever seem to have any games ready to ship. Granted, most everything in my queue is fairly new, but come on!

Netflix also has this great thing called an Instant Queue. Basically, if the movie that's already in your queue is available to stream, it also gets added to the instant queue and is noted as such. You can watch it on your computer or via a Netflix ready device. Notice that PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii are on the top of this list? Since I already have these, it makes it a nifty way to get more out of both my Netflix subscription and the game systems.

So rather than waiting for GameFly and the cursed postal service to get me a game, why don't I have an Instant Queue? I could "check out" a copy of the fantastic Shadow Complex or Echochrome. That would save us unfortunate souls who don't live very close to a GameFly shipping center tons of time without a game.

Will digital game rentals become a reality? Apparently Sony is looking into it for PSP. And a bit of googling shows me that GameFly might be as well. I'm sure there are all sorts of problems this would create. But that's up to the game publishers and distributors to work out the details. I just want to play. Now.

Brutal Defeat

I was initially pretty excited about Brutal Legend. The 360 demo was fantastic. The heavy metal setting for the game had never really been done before. I had recently played Tim Schafer's other great, Psychonauts, for the first time. So it had a lot going for it.

Then the initial reviews came out. Lots of people were surprised how much of a real time strategy (RTS) game it was. It seemed to do a little bit of every type of gameplay and was only just okay at them all. But I forged ahead based on all the other things. Since the demo was just the first 15 min. or so, I still enjoyed that part of the game. As it quickly threw sqaud control and real time battles into the mix, I started to get bored and confused. I should have known. I've never really liked RTS games and consoles are sort of a terrible fit for them. I think the only ones I've ever really liked were the original Command and Conquer and the brilliant Lock's Quest on the DS.

So I played it for a few hours, but soon sent it back after talking with a friend that had played through a lot of it, heard my initial take on it, and figured I probably wouldn't grow to like it any more than I already did. So, sorry Tim, I tried.

Now I'm distracted again by the old favorites Burnout Paradise and Oblivion with some New Super Mario Bros. Wii thrown in.

Mass Effect 2

Marital harmony was a bit strained in our household this weekend, which probably has something to do with the fact that I spent, like, twenty hours playing Mass Effect 2.



Instead of writing a full-fledged review, I'll leave that to others (1, 2) and just list a few thoughts I've had while playing:

Story

• Mass Effect 2 is a better Star Wars movie than all three prequels put together. In fact, it's a lot like what you'd get if you combined all the best parts of Star Wars, Babylon 5, and Blade Runner. Their incredibly detailed and internally-consistent universe is a fun place to live (and blow things up).
• They kept the excellent "dialogue wheel" concept from the previous installment, and it continues to make all other games conversation scenes look primitive in comparison. The voice acting is really well done, and I was surprised by the number of famous or semi-famous voice actors they got (Doctor Evil's son! Charlie Sheen's dad! Trinity! Worf! That hot girl from that one show I don't watch!). The writing is pretty good for a video game, and these parts feel a lot like you're watching your own sci-fi movie, staring You as Heroic Space Guy.
• Like Fallout 3, you get a lot of chances to make "good" and "evil" choices - which they refer to as Paragon and Renegade - but I thought it was done a lot better here compared to Bethesda's offering, or even older Bioware games like KotOR. Instead of obvious differentiations like "save cute kitty / shoot cute kitty", they make it a lot more ambiguous, and if a "good" player takes the "evil" path now and again, it still fits well with the story. Hard to explain but if you play it you'll see what I mean.
  

Changes from the first game

• No more driving levels! This was one of the most tedious parts of the first game, so good riddance.
  
• The combat has been improved and the RPG elements have been toned down. Overall this makes the experience generally better, and I didn't really miss anything that they took away. It would be fair to describe ME2 as a shooter with strong RPG aspects, whereas ME1 was exactly the other way around.
  
• Each area is less spread out, and more densely packed with things to see, than corresponding areas in ME1. Again, this streamlines the experience and leads to less walking around.
• The texture popping issues from the first game are much less noticeable now.
• The new minigame that you do when hunting for minerals on uncharted planets is super annoying. This is easily the most tedious part of the whole game. Luckily you don't have to do it too often unless you're a completionist (o hai).
  

Combat

• The increased emphasis on use of cover during firefights suits the way I like to play RPGs... I've always been a "crouch and snipe" kind of guy. I do wish there was a way to stay undercover and go around the corner of an object you're hiding behind without standing up first, but that's a minor quibble.
• Allies are useful in combat, but they all seem to do pretty much the same thing - shoot or use their force biotic powers. I haven't yet had to use the squad-command features, or even really had to care about which two NPC characters I pick for my squad. Let's just say that the ally characters don't compare to what Valve did with Alyx in the Half-Life games.
• Sometimes Shepard gets stuck in the world geometry - usually on the corner of a piece of terrain, although during one battle I was blasted by a rocket and ended up with my head stuck in the ceiling like the Krazy Glue guy. To fix things that time, Ihad to reload from a save, losing ten minutes of progress.
• Does your guy even have a health meter? Occasionally I'm killed and am forced to reload, and other times I get the "omg u r about to die" screen effect and heartbeat-sound, but if I stand still for a little while my guy apparently heals back up and I'm on my way. Whatever, it's still fun and it keeps things from getting too frustrating.
• I was amused to find that hiding behind a glass wall gives you protection from rockets.
  

Anyway... look, a video!



Are you still reading this? Go buy/rent Mass Effect 2, already. You can thank me later.

Uncharted 2

I started thinking about all the videogame blogs that I like and realized most all of them focus on one theme per post. None of this rambling, distracted stuff that I tend to do since I don't post often enough. So this one is focused on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

I had heard several people say it was really good. And it didn't disappoint. The train level alone is worth the price of admission. Games have done train levels before, for sure. Run along the top, go from car to car, pretty standard stuff. But the way that your aim was distorted when going around curves and the incredible locations the train goes by make this one something brand new. I happened to listen to this podcast right before I got to the level. Manveer had some very glowing things to say about the level and how it will make future train levels hard for designers. The bar has been raised.

The single player story is the star here, and it's done extremely well. The characters actually seem human and the dialogue is entertaining. I felt like I really got to know Drake and the two ladies he spends most of the time with. When I thought I would have to choose between one of them to save towards the end, I would have had a really tough choice to make. Of course, there's some very cliché stuff in here. I really should have kept track of how many times one character was hanging off a cliff with one hand as another struggled to pull them up. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's right there on the cover.

I haven't played the first one yet. Does it blatantly plagiarize from Tomb Raider as much as this one? There's lots of ledge crawling and environmental puzzles to say the least. One level in particular took it too far. I pulled way too many switches, jumped across way too many gaps, and started up way too much ancient machinery just to open some silly temple. Speaking of that, big on the list of inspirations to the developers had to be the Indiana Jones movies.

I played a few rounds online. Just the co-op missions since I figured I'd just get killed immediately doing anything else. But they were well done and it seemed like the online stuff would extend the life of the game a bit beyond the single player campaign. So overall, it's a heck of a ride. If you have a PS3, this should be near the top of your list.