DS Lunch

Monthly Blog Post

2012-01-25T19:27:00.004-06:00

Looking back at my last few posts, they seem to be no more frequent than about once a month. Since it's the end of January, I guess I'm due. Thing is, not much has changed since the last time I wrote. I'm still making my way through a bunch of those games, and haven't started anything new or finished any of them. I was on the beach for a week last week, which would make you think I played a lot of 3DS, but that wasn't really the case. Bright sun and bad battery life had something to do with that I suppose. I rediscovered a lot of books I've been meaning to get to, whether in actual paper (useful on a plane when they make you turn everything off or on a beach where I'd rather not risk an iPad) or on the Kindle app. I guess I did pick up the 3D version of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and made my way through a bit of it, enough to get the bow and arrow anyway. The re-release looks pretty good, and still holds up well in 2012.

I've been making my way through Sword and Sworcery on the iPad. Remember how I said that the bigger screen makes it easier for games? Well, since the art style of this is all pixelated it would probably look fine on the smaller screen. But that's not been my problem with it. For a mobile game, it really demands a good solid 20-30 min. per chapter. And don't even think about app switching over to the browser to get you out of a jam. You tend to lose progress. I'll get through it eventually if only for the great atmosphere and humor.

Game Over(load) continued

2011-12-25T14:04:00.004-06:00

I usually like to post here after I finish a game. I've been starting a ton of games but have only finished one. Even if I don't write about every game, I try to keep the list to the left current for what I'm playing (click through if reading through Google Reader).

For mobile games, Mario 3D Land is still pretty cool, but gets fairly tough after the first "ending." Mario Kart 7 is a great upgrade from the last DS game, and our DS Lunch group has been playing it for a couple weeks now. The only big complaint is that multiplayer matches are divided up into sets of 4 races. The last game let you play as many as we wanted and tallied the points as we went. Now we have to keep an eye on how many "sets" of 4 we think we can get in over lunch, and don't know who's the overall winner because we'll probably forget to keep track of who won the most of the 4 sets. My wife asked me how I did the first week we played and I didn't have a clear answer because of this. Did I "win" or not? Yes and no. (Also, yes, I realize she probably didn't care and was mocking me for playing a game over lunch anyway.)

Speaking of mobile games, I guess I could mention a couple iOS games I took for a spin. I say iOS when I really mean iPad; I find an iPod/iPhone too small to really see much of anything. For instance, I tried Jetpack Joyride on the smallscreen and thought it was dumb. On the iPad though, it's oddly addictive. Also, Mirror's Edge was pretty well done and is completely worth the 0.99 it's on sale for now. It makes good use of tablet controls like swipe and tap and doesn't make you deal with a stupid onscreen joystick.

I did finish one game, like I mentioned at the top. That was Rage for 360. It looked great and was a pure shooter. There was a story and some side stuff to do, sure, but it really shone when you were blasting through a bunch of crazy dudes with the fluid controls. I had a lot of problems keeping stocked with my preferred kinds of ammo, especially on levels where you only fought mutants, who don't drop anything. I had heard it was short, around 12 hours or so. Well I was about that far in, but only on disc 2 of 3. I got to what I realized was the end and was a bit confused. So after the credits rolled I popped in disc 3. Oh that's where they keep the multiplayer stuff. No thanks, I don't have XBL Gold and I had enough trouble with the computer controlled crazies.

No if you'll excuse me, I have to go spend more time with Skyrim. Or maybe Zelda. No, Skyrim...

Game Over(load)

2011-11-30T10:18:00.000-06:00

About this time every year, every publisher on every platform decides they need to release every game they have in development. So we go from the summer doldrums to the fall overload. In the past few weeks I've picked up Rage, Skyrim, Gears of War 3, Zelda, and Mario 3D. And I'll be back to get Mario Kart 7 in less than a week.

Skyrim and Zelda were the ones I've been looking forward to for more than a year and they certainly haven't disappointed so far. The reviews of those two have been near perfect and from what I can tell, they've earned the praise. Zelda starts off extreeeeeeemly slow and assumes you've never played a videogame before, let alone a Zelda game. Also that you like reading lots of stupid unecessary dialogue. But once they introduce the controls, it seems to pick up speed. Skyrim builds on the great foundation that Oblivion built. The worst stuff is fixed and the best stuff is improved.It's an MMO without all those other pesky people.

Rage and GoW3 I picked up because they seemed like good games and they've been entertaining. Rage, in particular, is a lot of fun, moves quickly, and looks gorgeous.

Mario 3D Land should have been a launch title to really show off the 3DS' capabilities. It's pretty entertaining and finally gives me something to do with that system. I'm looking forward to next week when DS Lunch gets an upgrade to the new version of Mario Kart. Should be fun.

Zelda: Four Swords

2011-11-17T07:22:00.003-06:00

Some of us took a very rare break from Mario Kart DS at yesterday's DS Lunch to play Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. Four of us, actually. Nice how that worked out. This was either free for everyone to download or part of the 3DS shambassador program, I don't remember which. Anyway, there were four of us with 3DS's today and that's what we played.

I had played through it on my own, beating each of the three levels to get a key that unlocks the last palace thing. It was basically a lobotomized version of Zelda when you play it this way. Sure you run around as Link with a sword and collect all the familiar items. But you can only have one at a time, and the whole goal was to get enough money so some chick (Zelda, I assume) will like you. That was about it for story, which made it kind of boring. Where it becomes a bit more fun is when you add 3 other live people, all racing to get the same rupees as you, while hacking at you and tossing each other off cliffs.

This was chaotic and sort of fun, but not very satisfying from a control standpoint. You move Link around like a slow tank and hope you get to the treasure first. It's not nearly as fun/chaotic as New Super Mario Bros. Wii, but it also came out much earlier than that game originally. Anyway, I didn't win any rounds and we can all agree that Kyle is a rupee-stealing jerk.

Rochard (PSN)

2011-10-10T10:08:00.000-05:00

I picked up Rochard based on this review. And I haven't been disappointed at all. Also, when family walked by and asked what I was playing, I got to say that it was a game where you're sort of a "space trucker." Think Lonestar and Barf from Spaceballs flying around in their space Winnebago and you pretty much have the opening scene.

Once you actually get down to it, it's a sidescrolling platformer with physics-based puzzles. Really fun ones.

Deus Ex update

2011-10-10T10:06:00.000-05:00

I've still been playing Deus Ex off and on. Mostly off. I can't seem to find time or motivation to play this one. Although I'm starting to get comfortable enough with it that it's clicking. I'm having a much more enjoyable time on "Tell me a story" difficulty setting (Easy). This makes it so I still need to sneak around, but if I mess up and someone sees me, I can probably get my way out of the ensuing firefight without dying.

Some other things that I've noticed: It can be very "video-gamey" since you can sort of see the programming in the AI. I can get X distance away from a guard before he'll hear me.They have almost no peripheral vision.You can be almost 90 degrees from them and they won't notice. They also don't notice doors that have mysteriously opened or closed when they weren't looking. All of this aside, I like the ambient music and sense of tension when you may be caught at any time.

I made it past my first boss battle, which I've heard a lot of people complaining about. I gameFaq-ed my way through it and don't feel bad about that at all. Especially since the entire rest of the game nudges you toward stealth and these boss battles are the opposite of that.

3DS Shambassador

2011-09-24T15:13:00.001-05:00

So I got a 3DS. Surprising, I know, since I talked a lot about how worthless and overpriced it was. Well then they had a huge price drop within a few months of release. Basically something that's unheard of in this market. No one expected it. To appease the early adopters that paid full price, they promised 20 free downloadable games from the eShop. To get this, you had to connect to the eShop by the date that the price drop occurred. Sounds fine, right? Well, Wal-Mart, and later others, broke the date for the price drop allowing myself and other internet-savvy gamers to snag one at the new price and still get the free games. Hence the title of the post. Which I stole from the Giant Bomb (the site that I always link to for game descriptions) podcast guys.

Anyway, I spent some time with a few of the downloadable games.

Metroid:
I was excited to jump back into this one. This is probably the one game that I've beaten more than any other. In fact, I used to keep track of that very stat. On a file on my Apple IIc. I was up to over 30 on this game thanks to everyone's friend JUSTIN BAILEY. What? You don't know what that means? Basically it was part of a famous code to start you fully powered up near the end of the game. From there it was somewhat of a cakewalk to the end. Also, she was only wearing a swimsuit instead of the normal power suit. Saucy!
But it's a tough game. And sometimes it goes beyond "tough" to "just plain mean." For instance, it teaches you that lava is bad and will kill you. Except when it's used to hide a secret passageway later in the game. Also, there are several rooms where you are guaranteed to get hit by an enemy immediately after you enter based on the timing and pattern of them. And Tourian is just mean. It makes you go back and forth down a staircase type thing while avoiding those stupid Cheerios that keep appearing. Sure you could freeze a couple of them, but that doesn't last very long, and it's such tight quarters that you often can't get around them once they're frozen. And I haven't even mentioned how those damn Metroids love to pop up and swarm on you just as you're distracted by Cheerios. Also Zebetites. Screw them. Anyway, I thought I had plenty of energy tanks and missles to take down Mother Brain, but I died right before she did. Whatever, I'm done with that game.

The Legend of Zelda:
Have I said before that this is the best game ever made? Well it is. I need to write a post on why that is someday, but I grew up loving this game. The control pad on the 3DS isn't the best representation of the original NES controller. It's a bit spongy in comparison. And that's key when you're forced to make quick adjustments to get around pesky Ironknuckles or Wizrobes late in the game. But overall I found that I could breeze right through the game and I was pleasantly surprised how many of the secret locations I remembered.

Ice Climber:
This game sucks. Probably because I never played it when it came out and I'm not looking at it with the nostalgia-tinted glasses as some of the others. But really, the controls are slow and terrible.

Zelda II, The Adventure of Link:
I'm only through the first dungeon on this one and I don't know that I'll play it all that much farther. It satisfies the nostalgia itch like the others but I remember how difficult it gets later on. That might not be something I want to put myself through with the 3DS control pad and my age-reduced reflexes.

P.S. I typed this post using the iPhone Blogger app on an iPad with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard. Mainly just to see if I could. Not bad. I think if it was an actual iPad app it might be a bit better because then it could take advantage of the landscape mode and get rid of the onscreen keyboard that takes up half the screen.

Deus ex

2011-08-31T10:32:00.001-05:00

I got this yesterday for 360. Played for an hour or so. It's incredibly difficult.

Red & Blue

2011-08-28T15:56:00.002-05:00

Outland was an XBLA game that I picked up a while back and have been slowly making my way through. I finished it not long ago and thought I'd mention it on here since it was really good and as far as I can tell, hasn't gotten a ton of press. It has a really cool visual style and the sound design fits in really nicely with it. In fact, when I started thinking about the game to decide what I'd write, the "starting a new section of a level" sound played in my head. You hear that a lot. This game also got my wife's approval as far as sound goes. She said it was "soothing" and didn't mind being in the room while I played.

Basically it's a side scrolling platformer (the controls are really tight) where a huge part of the game is based on switching your character from red to blue and back again. When you're blue, blue bullets don't hurt you, likewise with red. And you have to be the opposite color of enemies in order to do any damage to them. The difficulty scales really well, starting at super easy and getting to be pretty tricky towards the end. It's not uncommon to be toggling colors in mid air to get through some bullets and kill an enemy of the opposite color. Fun stuff.

My only minor complaint are a couple of the boss battles. They can be fairly long and you have to memorize lots of patterns. So you end up fighting them multiple times in a row. Well, I did anyway. If you have a PS3 or Xbox, you probably ought to at least check out the demo. I think it's something like $10 or $15.

Little Big Planet 2

2011-08-06T08:58:00.004-05:00

So this post has been a long time coming. I finally finished Little Big Planet 2. I'd say 98% or so was done co-op with my wife. But the last level which is entirely fighting the last boss, is a pain in the ass. We tried probably 10 times and it was incredibly frustrating. You could tell what you were supposed to do but the crappy, imprecise, and floaty controls often prevented you from doing it. I finally decided to just finish this part on my own and not subject her to this bullshit.

So after another 10 or 15 attempts that involved a lot of yelling and smacking the table in front of me, I finally finished it. The ending briefly trotted out all the characters you'd met along the way and went right to some silly voice over and music while the credits rolled. The first song was one I actually recognized, Sleepyhead by Passion Pit and it fit in with the rest of the music for the series. Although after all the great music from 1, I was sort of disappointed with the comparatively bland stuff from 2 other than this song.

The big new addition in this game are the more varied creation tools, which I never used directly, but got to experience second-hand since they allow you to play mini-games that vary greatly from the normal platforming. The instances of this in the main campaign did a great job of being immediately understandable. Often your Sack Thing is piloting some sort of vehicle and the mechanics approximate an old school videogame like Space Invaders or Breakout. Also, note that they always refer to your character as Sack Thing instead of Sackboy like the previous. Sure it makes it open to be either a boy or a girl and the character is pretty androgynous anyway, but it's sort of jarring when you're used to one way from the old game.

The story in this one is even weirder and disjointed than the first. You meet several odd characters along the way, one for each group of levels. None of them were very memorable compared to the first game. In fact, it feels like they spent all their time making the new game creation tools (which I didn't bother to use), did a bunch of drugs to make a weird half-assed story, removed the cutesy stuff and called it a day. All of this together makes it sound like I hated the game, which isn't accurate. There were just some frustrating things and I guess I was just expecting more from a sequel to a game that my wife and I loved to play.

The Old Man and The Kid

2011-08-03T22:09:00.001-05:00

I mentioned that one of the XBLA games I've been playing was Bastion. At first I thought I was more taken with Outland, which I bought at about the same time, but Bastion is really growing on me. I guess that makes sense, it's a game that relies heavily on your desire to collect!, upgrade!, and replay! The replay part of is actually my favorite so far. I started a New Game + immediately after I finished it because you get to start over with all your weapons and upgrades. Also, you make a couple binary choices at the end of the story that I'm sort of curious to see the effects of the opposite choice. Also, since I spent a good chunk of the original playthrough feeling underpowered and confused on which weapons (there are a lot) to use, I was excited to give it another go with a more powerful character and the knowledge of what weapons and upgrades I wanted to move towards.

Oh right, what kind of game is this? It's basically a top-down hack and slash with some RPG elements. The art style looks more sprite based than 3D-heavy, but it looks great. The story is purposely left pretty vague. You never even learn the name of The Kid that you control. The Old Man is your constant companion. Well, his voice is anyway. Think of it as a gravelly Tom Waits sound that narrates your almost every move. The amount of lines that guy had to record must have been insane. He'll often make reference to the fact that you have full health, what weapons you have equipped and sometimes just references to stuff you're doing. My favorite was him pointing out that "the Kid's smashing every bush he sees like there'll be some sort of prize." Basically pointing out the stupid video gamey concept of something like that.

This game is rich with different ways to play it based on all the weapon and upgrade combinations and it's as good as everyone says.

More Dead Space

2011-07-23T12:33:00.002-05:00

You'd think, by all the posts about it, that I'm like, OMG so in lurve with the Dead Space series. That's not really the case. But since it's an EA property, they have the $ to put it on every platform out there. Anyway, I've really enjoyed 1 & 2, thinking they're some of the tightest, most polished games to come out on consoles in recent years. The concept of strategic dismemberment adds a new wrinkle to the tired "always aim for the head" strategy of most first person shooters. The weaponry is usually interesting and more inventive than "machine gun" and "bigger machine gun."

But outside of the core game series, there have been a few missteps with respect to control scheme. I mentioned that I played through the iOS version, and fought the touch screen the whole way.

Now I'm doing the same thing with Dead Space Extraction. This is a light-gun game, pure and simple. You have no control of where your character looks or goes. You just need to shoot and pick up powerups. Picking these up can be really frustrating because I'm used to being able to take my time and make sure I pick up every single bit of ammo. Often, the guy jerks his head (and your perspective along with it) around so much that you have a fraction of a second to pick up stuff. I'm not doing myself any favors by playing it without a light gun too. Oh, let me explain. This game just happened to be on the disc when I bought the PS3 version of Dead Space 2. It's a port of the Wii version of the same name. You're supposed to use it with the Playstation Move controller, which is pretty much like a Wii-mote, I guess. But I'm not gonna buy that thing just to play an essentially free game. So I mainly get by with a mixture of playing it on the easiest difficulty setting and cursing a lot.

Since it's on rails, I've run into a couple of spots where it got confused about whether I should continue on the path or not. Normally you don't move on to the next area and set of monsters until you kill all the ones in the area. But I've seen it get messed up where it tries to continue on but there's still a monster around that will kill you slowly from off screen. Since you're no longerlooking at it, you have to use area attacks like a flamethrower or similar that do damage to the area all around you. So there are a few bugs. Thankfully, the invisible checkpointing scheme is pretty good. When you get killed by stupidity like this you don't start very far back from where you died.

I was playing this a lot for a while, but lately I've been distracted by a couple of XBLA releases (Outland and Bastion) that I'll talk about in a future post.

Looking forward, not back

2011-07-05T21:12:00.000-05:00

Usually how it works on here is that I play a game, gather my impressions, then write a bit about it on here. Since I haven't been playing nearly as much I can't really do that. Plus, since we're sort of in the dead period of game releases (seriously, no sports I care about and no games coming out?) I start to think about what I'm going to play next when it finally comes out.

Tops on that list is Skyrim. The fifth in the series and I only started at four. But that one was Oblivion and it sort of blew me away when I first played it. Coming from a Zelda background where you had a ton of freedom to go wherever you wanted in whatever order you wanted, this game took that and brought it to a whole new level. You could interact with just about anything in the world. I quickly found that I could pick up any of the items I found laying around. I held on to the rusty dagger or wooden spoon I found in a cave because I may just need that! Anyway, the game had some issues, but it was lovable all the same. Some of the videos for Skyrim look like a huge graphical leap, which is sort of impressive considering it's running on the same Xbox 360 as the previous.

Speaking of Zelda, Skyward Sword is coming at some point and I'm excited because it's more Zelda, and it will be something to play on the dust-covered Wii. Looking at those trailers for the first time just now I'm pleased with the art style. Looks like they took the semi-realistic look from Twilight Princess and threw in the bright color palette from Wind Waker. But nothing in there makes me salivate or anything. It will be more Zelda I suppose, no more, no less.

Rounding out the list are the 3DS versions of Mario Kart and Super Mario. But Dave, you say, you don't even have a 3DS and have been calling them "stupid expensive wastes of tech" or something like that. That may be true, but this blog is called DS Lunch for a reason and I'm pretty much obligated to get the next portable Mario Kart based on the hours and hours I've gotten out of the last one. Surely I'll be able to find some kind of a system/game bundle or something for cheaper by the time that comes out, right?

iOS games

2011-06-26T22:40:00.005-05:00

I thought it might be neat to list a few of the games I've loaded up on my iPad. I haven't given up console games by any means, but sometimes a different sort of game will show up on iOS that I'll try out for a while. Most of the things I've found are the "play for a few minutes" type of game rather than "spend an hour or two" type of game. Except for Dead Space, I guess. That one encouraged longer play sessions like the console game. Unlike the console game though, the controls were frequently frustrating. I'm glad I played it though, especially since I happened to catch it on sale.

Tiny Wings, Fruit Ninja, Current, Simon Says, (couldn't find links), and Bumpy Road all sort of operate on the same concept of "play from the same beginning point and try to see how far you can make it." The better you do, the higher you score and the longer a play session lasts. There are no checkpoints for levels, really. This sort of game is unusual for me coming from the console space, where games haven't done this since the NES days. But it can be a refreshing change if you're expecting it. These three have great art style and sound design, just don't expect to be entertained for more than a few minutes at a time.

Continuity 2 and World of Goo tend to have "levels" and your you can only access higher levels by completing the earlier ones. Also these two are interesting little brain benders at times.

Words With Friends is unique in that it's the only one I play with other people. Even if it's asynchronous. It's really a perfect concept for a mobile game. I just wish it didn't make me feel so dumb sometimes.

Lastly, The Final Hours (of Portal 2) isn't a game, but rather an interactive article about a game. I loved Portal, so I got a kick out of this. It's also neat to see what's possible with this new medium of an internet enabled device that you're actually touching. The Wired.com app similarly lets you see a somewhat interactive magazine issue. Some of it is gimicky, some is neat, but it's interesting to see what designers do when they can actually can make the moving pictures newspaper that you see in Sci Fi all the time. Welcome to the future.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit is the devil

2011-06-05T17:15:00.004-05:00

I just realized that I was racing a course that I hated, in a car that I hated, in a race mode that I hated, while a song played that I hated. But I kept playing it because i wanted to get to other portions of the game that i really like. Well done NFS, well done.

L.A. Noire Incoming

2011-05-31T08:36:00.001-05:00

Haven't spent much time with any one game lately, but I have a feeling that this might change that...

iPad Vs. Android tablet

2011-05-17T21:17:00.000-05:00

I've been keeping an eye on tablets ever since my wife got an iPad last December. Sure, there's the venerable iPad; it's selling like crazy and legitimized a whole new product category. But I've really been rooting for an Android tablet to compete with it. The Galaxy Tab was an interesting size, but sort of a joke since it's just a slightly larger screen version of the phone I already have.

The Xoom and G-Slate sound great on paper since they equal or beat iPad on most all the specs. But I went and tried them, and came away unimpressed. While Honeycomb (the tablet-optimized version of Android) looks promising, there's almost no (non-Google) apps optimized for it yet. It feels very much like when Android 1.5 was only available on a G1 and trying to compete with the iPhone. But Android's main selling point has historically been that it was available on carriers other than AT&T. With most tablets sold being WiFi only, the carrier is largely irrelevant. I know there's no way I'm going to pay for a second data subscription when my phone (MyTouch 4G on T-Mobile) works really well as a wireless hotspot for free.

Another trend I've seen is that apps and games tend to hit iOS first, then Android later if there's enough demand. This is even more prevalent in the tablet space since iPad has such a head start. I think it has more than 70% of the market share at last count. I've played and enjoyed several great iPad apps while I've been waiting for anything compelling to come to Honeycomb.

A weird side effect of Apple's head start in market share is what it does for component prices. Since most tablets sold are iPads, they get better deals from component manufacturers, and can sell the device for a lower price. The Xoom was famously lampooned for being more expensive than a comparable iPad. While upcoming tablets from Samsung and others will soon fix this, as I write this, the iPad is sort of the "bargain tablet." If you can say that about a $500 toy that you probably don't need.

Finally, I've been able to compare Apple and Android WiFi implementations in a lot of different devices. In short, iOS devices do a much better job of finding and connecting to networks quickly and reliably. I'm actually surprised you don't hear more about this in the media. I doubt I'm the only one seeing this.

So you can probably tell where all of this is leading, but in the next day or two a new iPad arrives at my door. Actually, I'm taking over my wife's old one and she'll take the new one because I'm cheap and don't care about cameras. I may write another post about why I decided to get a tablet instead of a laptop, but it mainly comes down to portability, battery life, and instant-on. Also, I realized the only thing I need out of my laptop is to be an internet machine in my living room, not to run any specific software or games.

Image really has nothing to do with post

2011-05-17T20:42:00.005-05:00

Since I'm sure you're wondering, "huh, what's that Dave guy been playing?"

I'm playing through Dead Space 2 again on a New Game+ so I can keep on using my powered up weapons and stuff. I started off strong but have been sort of losing interest in that one. Probably has something to do with playing the iPad version. Not nearly as good, mind you, but excellent for a tablet.

On the DS I've been playing Plants Vs. Zombies and Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes. Which is quite a mouthful, but really a lot like Puzzle Quest set in a bad Lord of the Rings knockoff story. It's fun and challenging. I actually found myself having to grind a bit to make it past some demon dude when I was only a few hours in. Most games these days do a lot more hand holding than that, so I was sort of surprised. And not necessarily in a bad way.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is nice. I can see Criterion's fingerprints on it. They made Burnout Paradise, which I absolutely loved. I don't love this one quite as much, but it's growing on me. I really miss the open world and the absence of loading times from Paradise. I'm starting to like it more since I'm slowly getting to the point where I'm unlocking the good cars which are a lot more responsive and fun to drive. In general, musclecars suck and Lamborghinis rule. But everybody already knew that, right?

For some reason, I decided to get a PS3 copy of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and play through it again even though I played the Xbox 360 version when it first came out. What can I say, I'm a sucker for SW even if the game itself gets ridiculously difficult and frustrating towards the end. That I found a copy for $5 didn't hurt, either.

So I'm splitting my time between whatever game grabs me at the moment. Oh wow, I almost forgot to mention that I also grabbed Portal 2 and played through the single player stuff while PSN was down. That game is fantastic and really deserves its own post. I played splitscreen co-op with my wife after she got tired of me asking her to play. Her arguments against it were that she "gets confused just watching me play, how is she supposed to figure it out actually playing it?" and that that she's really bad at using dual joysticks to move around in a 3D space (even without portals). She did fine, and the pointer system that Valve put in place for the multiplayer works really well. I don't know that I'd want to try it without at least voice chat though. I'm looking to finish out the co-op but I don't know if she'll be willing to play much more, so let me know if you want to play on Steam or PS3 now that it's finally back online.

Monster Tale

2011-04-19T21:17:00.003-05:00

Yep, been a while since I canceled GameFly huh? Don't think I've stopped playing games. No, not at all. But I have been playing shorter amounts of lots of games. The one I've spent the most time with is, surprisingly, a 2D DS game that everyone seems to have missed. It's called Monster Tale, and I would have missed it too if it wasn't for it being highly praised on the last Brainy Gamer Podcast. He later wrote about it and said most everything you need to know.

Why do I enjoy it so much? Mostly because of the simple, Metroidvania gameplay, but also because you can tell it was developed by the same people that did the great Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure that I loved from a few years ago. I noticed the same juggling punch moves that Hatsworth had a lot of. You can make the monster guy take lots of different forms, but that's sort of overwrought since usually just punching a lot also gets the job done. Also, all the kids you run into and the art style can be a bit cutesy, but it won't get in your way of enjoying it.

So if you have a DS that hasn't been getting much use like mine was, this game might just solve that for you.

Cancelling GameFly

2011-03-01T21:03:00.003-06:00

I've finally finished my silent fight with the USPS. Today I mailed back my last game from GameFly. I'd been thinking about making the split for a while, but looking over my queue finally convinced me to do it. I had only one or two released games on there that I was actually excited about playing. Other than that, the rest aren't coming out until much later this year. In the past, I'd use this time when nothing good is released to catch up on great games I've missed. There, uh, don't seem to be any.

In a recent post I talked about how I've gotten several new games lately, and I've been keeping myself busy with those. I actually love being free of my self imposed "YOU HAVE TO FINISH THIS SOON AND SEND IT BACK BECAUSE EVERY DAY IT SITS HERE COSTS YOU MONEY!" b.s. I suppose the bad part of this is that I sit and stare at my shelf trying to decide what I want to play for probably too long.

So long, GameFly. Surprisingly, I had been with them longer than I've been w/ my wife!

Enginerd

2011-02-20T21:44:00.003-06:00

I mentioned that I was playing Dead Space 2, right? Well I'm really loving it. The zero gravity sections are fantastic, and somehow manage to not be confusing once there's no longer any up or down. But one little thing that made me laugh was this. See, you play as a fairly normal dude, not some amped up Space Marine. In fact, you're some kind of Space Engineer. And at some point in the game you're talking to this girl (I know, right!?) and he says, "no I'm not with the Space Marines, I'm an engineer." To which she replies "Heh! Nerd."

Love it.

PS3 explosion

2011-02-18T18:52:00.004-06:00

In the last week or two, I've acquired several new PS3 games. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Little Big Planet 2, and Dead Space 2 are the new ones, and Fallout: New Vegas has only been on my shelf since Thanksgiving. Add that all up and I'm spending a lot of time with a Sixaxis DualShock3 in my hands. Between those (and using the PS3 for netflix blue rays and streaming) I've gotten so used to reaching for it that, other than a quick glimpse into Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 on XBLA, I haven't turned any of the other systems on. Well, unless you count my Android/iPod distraction with Words With Friends. And I don't.

New Vegas took hold of me slowly. I got bored in the much hated Freeside for a while, but after that I sort of found my groove with it. I was even ignoring my Gamefly game for one that I owned. Something I try not to do, since TIME IS MONEY when it comes to rented games. Speaking of that, I think I'm cancelling my GF account at the end of the month. As I looked over my queue, there's just not much I'm really excited about in the next year. And there's always the infernal USPS that hates me.

LBP2 is one of the few games that my wife asks to play with me. In fact, if I ever played it without her signed in as player 2, she'd probably divorce me. I don't think she could stand it if she knew I was collecting new costume pieces or changing my sackboy outfit without her.

Dead Space 2 is fantastic so far. I loved how polished and tight the original was, I figured this wouldn't disappoint either. I'd forgotten how bloody and gruesome it is though. Good thing there aren't any impressionable little eyeballs around when I play. As a bonus (and the main reason I got it on the PS3), Dead Space Extraction came included on the disc. I had that in my queue for the Wii anyway. It suffers quite a bit only using the PS3 analog stick instead of a real pointing device though. Maybe I could be convinced to buy a PlayStation Move if I can find any other decent software to play with it. Suggestions?

Finally Uncharted, the game that's been on pause for the last 20 minutes as I typed this. I was a bit worried that it would feel dated and wouldn't live up to the stellar quality of the sequel that my archives tell me I played about a year ago. No such worries should have bothered me. It's still a top notch PS3 game, so it looks and plays great. Fun stuff.

AssBro

2011-02-05T09:53:00.004-06:00

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood looks great, and your character moves fluidly and intelligently. It's very closely related to Assasin's Creed 2, which was great, if not a little tedious at times. Too bad this one felt more like work than fun.

I think part of my problem with this one was that I was always a bit confused on what was the main storyline. I was dumped into the middle of a huge open world map (Renaissance Rome) with icons everywhere. I think the main storyline involved taking control of about a dozen Borgia towers, but I wasn't even completely sure of that. Taking control of these smartly combined stealth assassination of a certain person, then climbing a tower (and burninating it). This combines two of the main things you think of when Assassin's Creed is mentioned. But there were so many of the damn towers and they were spread out all over the place. I also seemed to spend way too much time fleeing to lose my wanted level before I could do just about anything. Another similarity to AC2 was my general confusion and lack of interest with the storyline. Go here, kill that guy, repeat. Whatever.

So, some of the new features of this one were the ability to command a group of assassins to do your killing for you, and an odd mix of stealth and speed for the multiplayer. I played for several hours, but didn't make a whole lot of progress towards the first, and got frustrated with the game before I got to the multiplayer. Sorry, AssBro multiplayer, I hear you're cool, but I couldn't stick around long enough to care.

blur

2011-01-18T21:19:00.005-06:00

It's like Mario Kart. But with real cars.

Blog post done. Sweet!

You're still reading? Ok, I suppose I could say more about it. Sure there are Mario Kart similarities, heck, most of the powerups have direct equivalents to MK items. But since the game has a more realistic look, the powerups have more to do with electricity or technology than mushrooms or stars. But the use of real cars is a really nice touch. I've seen Ford, Dodge, Chevy, BMW, and a few others thrown in. I'm not sure how they get around not showing "damage" on these, but I guess it's mostly done with a health bar, smoke, and a dragging rear bumper than actual scratches and dents. From what I understand, game makers don't usually get to show licensed cars with a banged up frame, the driver's side especially.

The cars have stats that are either drifty or grippy and off-road or racing. The right or wrong car can make a world of difference on some tracks. And that's one of the things that make this game tough. I couldn't find any sort of preview for the tracks, so I mainly just guessed until I'd gotten last place a few times and knew what the course needed. Another thing that makes it tough is that you always start in the back of the pack in career races. You spend the entire time trying to catch the leaders. Then if you somehow manage to get to the front, you frantically try to use powerups defensively to hold onto your lead. Yet another tricky part is that the powerups aren't nearly as helpful as what you'd find in MK. This makes the game more based on skill rather than luck, but it can also suck out quite a bit of the fun if you're continually on the loosing end.

There are some other modes besides racing that give you a bit of variety, but they're tough too, and I didn't think they were as much fun. Believe it or not, I actually played a bit of multiplayer on this one. They have a decent matchmaking system where you're paired up with people that are theoretically as inexperienced as you. I didn't jump into this until after playing quite a bit of the solo career so I knew my way around some of the tracks and powerups, which helped me pwn some n00bs. Well, not really, but I did manage to win one, I think.

After writing all of these negative things, I've just about convinced myself to send it back to GameFly, but I may forge ahead a little bit more. When this game works, it's a lot of fun. I just have to slog through lots of frustrating and confusing stuff to get there. I just went and read Ryan's review and it convinced me to give up on the single player career (it is, as he says "freakin' hard") and stick with the multiplayer. Mostly because it has the Modern Warfare style level up system.

Next up is Little Big Planet 2, which should show up in the mail soon. My wife has been pretty anxious to play this one together. And she doesn't even know about all the crazy new game modes that they're making such a big fuss over. So it should be pretty cool.

UPDATE: After somehow winning 4 in a row on the easy leagues, I got a message from a guy I was racing.

"dude ur rlly good"

My response:

"nah, just played lots of Mario Kart"

Because a lot of the racing is countering others' attacks and MK teaches you that very well.

Bond, James Bond

2011-01-06T21:21:00.003-06:00

GoldenEye 007 for the Wii is a strange game. It's based on a 1997 Nintendo 64 game that was based on a 1995 James Bond movie with Pierce Brosnan. This remake uses Daniel Craig, Bond for the current generation flicks, in a storyline that only hits the major elements of the previous game/movie. To say I played a lot of the original game is a bit of an understatement. That game and Mario Kart 64 were about the only games I played with my roommates at the time. Back then, split-screen multiplayer with only one analog stick was all we had.

Playing through the single player campaign after not playing the original for a long time was a bit strange. There were only a handful of times that I ran into a situation that seemed really familiar. The rest was mostly just generic shooter stuff. The exposition scenes happen mainly through a 3D computer display thing where M describes things that you need to do. Bond's smart phone plays an annoyingly central role in all of this. At one point I was walking around a dark nightclub looking at my phone's screen using a "facial recognition app" to find the person I was searching for. Snore.

I was intrigued by the Wii remote controls at first. It seemed to work pretty well, but I was having to try too hard on the first level to do basic tasks. Plus it forced me to hold my right wrist in a stationary position for too long. Propping it up on the pillow and leaving the remote pointed at the TV helped, but it was still a bit much. Then I spent a few minutes digging out my Gamecube Wavebird and controller plug ins. After some X and Y configuration in the settings, I had it functioning like pretty much any Xbox 360 first person shooter game. So, in short, I thought the Wii controls were neat, but to play the game for very long, I wanted something I was used to. And the ability to customize all of this to my heart's content was a really nice touch.

As I got towards the end of the campaign I started comparing the game to other shooters I've played on the 360 or PS3. As fun as this game is, it just doesn't hold up to even mediocre games on other platforms. The graphics suffer, of course, due to the Wii's less than favorable hardware. The AI of the computer players is pretty dumb. Or their movements are slowed down on purpose since the developers realized you'll have trouble hitting them with the Wii remote you're probably using. They pulled the classic trick at the end of the game: increasing the difficulty by throwing more dudes at you instead of adding any new gameplay mechanics or enemy types.

If I hadn't ever seen any 360 or PS3 games, this game would be pretty impressive. It even has a decent online multiplayer mode. And, as an added bonus, since the Wii has no voice chat you don't have to listen to squeaky-voiced 12 year olds going on about how they just pwned you. I don't know about you, but this happens to me a lot. My goal in an every man for himself battle quickly became to kill just one person before the round was over. My final count was something like 28 deaths and 3 kills. Woo hoo.

So it's a bit strange, but certainly worth playing. Even more so if you only have a Wii.

iOS & Android

2011-01-04T20:47:00.003-06:00

Warning, there's very little videogame content in the following post. Just tech toys. There, you've been warned.

The only thing that I really wanted for Christmas this year was a new iPod. Of course, I was a bit more detailed than that on the link I sent my wife. I knew I wanted a refurbished 3rd generation 64Gb iPod touch (with a compass in the stock) since I have a lot of music and didn't care about a camera or higher resolution screen. I weighed several options over the last couple of months to come up with this, even considering sacrificing music storage for the convenience of only carrying one device, in a phone/music player. I've used an Android phone for a couple years now, and have messed with several different models, so I'm pretty familiar with the little green robot. But music is not something that Android does well at all, and I've always been impressed with the software and hardware on my click-wheel iPod.

Other than a bit of time with my wife's iPad, I hadn't really had much experience with iOS. Really, I can rarely ever pry that thing out of her hands because she's usually glued to Words With Friends and her Dragon Tattoo books on the Kindle app. I thought it might be kind of neat to write down a few impressions of iOS Vs. Android now that I've played with both.

iOS pros:

several apps that appear on both platforms are better here (ESPN scorecenter, FB, Twitter)

Official Twitter app rules (instant notifications, timeline postion saved, multiple accounts)

keyboard accuracy

touchscreen accuracy

iPod (much better music player and easily syncs with my > 100 iTunes playlists)

market and innovation leader (# apps in the market, interoperability with more sites/products, apps to Apple App store first)

more and better games (previously mentioned Words w/ Friends and Fruit Ninja are my favorites)

WiFi and sleep mode work perfectly together to give you an "instant on" internet device

"magical" (Heh, not really, but the UI is consistently easy to use and pleasing)

Android pros:

Notification system

Latitude & maps integration

Google integration

Best version of gmail

Reader app

Free navigation

replacement keyboards

replacement launchers

Back button (I hate that iOS has to use screen space at the top left to accomplish the same thing)

larger screens

choose your hardware

higher chance of finding a free app in the Android market than Apple app store

So this isn't mean to be an end all comparison post over which phone OS is better, and I'll probably be looking for a newer, faster Android in the next few months. Let me know if I've missed anything or have any questions. I could talk for hours about this stuff.

Insufferably Cute

2011-01-04T20:33:00.003-06:00

"This game is insufferably cute."

"Be sure to blog those exact words" she says.

My wife is so helpful.

As soon as you land on the ground in Kirby's Epic Yarn, your see through character makes a slight divot in the fabric covered ground that you're walking on. This persists throughout the game. Whenever you go through a door Kirby makes the cloth bulge out like he's inside of a pocket. Cool looking stuff.

One of the neatest things about past Kirby games was the ability to copy your enemies abilities and use them as your own. In this new one you're given a nice set of things to change into, but you don't ever really gain any new ones as the game progresses. Outside of turning into specific vehicles in very confined areas, that is. Probably my favorite part of the old games was deciding which abilities I liked the best, then trying to hold on to it for as long as I could. If I had a rare ability somewhere that it felt like I wasn't supposed to, it sometimes felt like I was "breaking" the game. In a fun way. But it only happened if you were good enough to hold onto the ability by not getting hit by anything. So your excellent play was rewarded with being able to play the game however you wanted. That's something that feels missing in this game. Since you only have a limited set of powers I got bored after a while despite the unique and charming visuals.

I got to a point where I was sort of bored with the game, but continued on since A: I wanted to have more to write about and B: It was Christmas card season and I'm sure the USPS appreciated me not dropping another piece of mail in their box when I sent the game back to GameFly. But then again, screw them. They can't seem to get a game to me from Austin in less than a week.

Anyway, I hit a level that made me glad I'd kept playing. It was Melody somethingorother and it was all music-based. Jump on a giant drum or a symbol and a music note pops out with a gem to collect. Travel through a wind instrument and collect gems in a pattern based on a musical scale. Swing Bionic Commando-style on certain attach points to make a harp release it's notes. Interesting stuff.

I suppose this game could grab hold of you if you were playing it with kids around or were obsessive about collecting every little thing they threw at you. Neither were true for me.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that this game was made for four year olds. The visuals, the ridiculously easy play, and the very excitable narrator that sounded like he was reading a picture book to, well, a four year old all made me get a bit annoyed with it.

Alan Wake

2010-12-16T20:05:00.003-06:00

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

2010-12-15T21:50:00.003-06:00

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

2010-12-14T18:30:00.004-06:00

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

2010-11-21T20:44:00.003-06:00

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

2010-11-04T21:02:00.002-05:00

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

2010-10-21T21:09:00.003-05:00

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

2010-10-06T21:32:00.006-05:00

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?

2010-10-06T21:08:00.003-05:00

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

2010-10-05T20:08:00.003-05:00

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

2010-09-27T21:03:00.003-05:00

"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

2010-09-27T20:19:00.004-05:00

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?

2010-09-06T21:06:00.004-05:00

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)

2010-08-29T22:42:00.003-05:00

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

2010-08-26T19:09:00.005-05:00

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

2010-08-14T18:01:00.003-05:00

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

2010-08-14T17:48:00.003-05:00

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

2010-08-11T22:29:00.002-05:00

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

2010-07-26T21:54:00.011-05:00

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

2010-07-07T23:11:00.002-05:00

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

2010-06-26T11:34:00.004-05:00

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

2010-06-12T21:08:00.008-05:00

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

2010-06-05T10:15:00.002-05:00

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

2010-06-03T21:14:00.007-05:00

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

2010-05-28T10:25:00.011-05:00

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

2010-05-26T22:07:00.007-05:00

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

2010-05-03T18:27:00.007-05:00

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

2010-04-26T07:29:00.002-05:00

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!!

2010-04-13T20:31:00.007-05:00

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

2010-03-23T20:29:00.005-05:00

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?

2010-03-04T19:53:00.003-06:00

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

2010-02-26T22:14:00.005-06:00

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

2010-02-10T21:12:00.002-06:00

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

2010-02-06T13:14:00.006-06:00

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

2010-02-02T21:27:00.004-06:00

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

2010-02-01T14:50:00.003-06:00

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

2010-01-26T21:19:00.005-06:00

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.

Infamous

2009-12-21T21:03:00.007-06:00

Thought I'd drop in and leave a few words about my latest crush, Infamous. Although I think it's always written "inFAMOUS" in the game for whatever reason. Honestly, I didn't think I'd spend much time with this one after the first half hour or so. I wasn't impressed with the combat & controls. Not that it got any better, really, I guess I just got used to it. The main problem is that your basic attack that you use throughout the entire game just isn't much fun. You're presented as this guy with incredible electricity-based super powers, but you're stuck moving this tiny cursor around and shooting little wussy bolts at people. All the powerups I got (I played the good side of the coin, which may have been part of my problem) are too cumbersome or limited to really help. So you're stuck with your stupid peashooter-equivalent.

So why have I played it so much in the past few days? Not sure, really. The story is just okay and the open world city is drab, grey, and forgettable. I guess the draw is just the new twist on super powers and decent progression of events. Also your buddy Zeke provides decent comic relief. At one point he says that something "sucks donkey balls." So you've gotta love that.

So I mentioned that I picked one path of the whole karma/morality thing. Which you basically have to do if you want to make any progress on the upgrades. But the two things I really wanted to upgrade I couldn't. The peashooter that I already mentioned and your basic jumping ability. The city is so big that you want to get from point A to point B quickly. Surfing on powerlines and train tracks is new and sort of neat, but I found myself missing running up buildings and gliding like Prototype.

I know it sounds like I hated this game, but that's not the case at all. I'm just doing a much more thorough job of listing the things I haven't liked than the more difficult to describe parts that I did like. It's like Arkham Asylum in that I have a hard time finding a good stopping point. There's always "just one more thing" to do before I shut it off for the day.

So this is probably the worst blog post ever. I'm sort of distracted by The Jersey Shore on in the background, which I've never seen before. Okay, really distracted. This show is nuts. I gotta go.

Recap of several games after not posting for way too long

2009-12-16T21:01:00.005-06:00

I just set down Zelda: Spirit Tracks for DS after the first couple hours of it. Not bad. It's whimsical. I'll give it that. And it's not overly heavy on the tutorial either. Since I'd played the first DS Zelda, I was happy to see that when you first get your sword, the trainer tells you to go do a basic attack, swipe attack, and spin attack. Come back and see me if you have questions. The developers obviously realized that there were a few people that have done this before.

What else is new? Well I finally got that PS3. I was planning on waiting until Christmas or later, but a deal came along. I got Metal Gear Solid 4 since it was one of the greatest hits or something and now half price. I figured that would be a good long single player thing in between GameFly titles. Speaking of that, Infamous is on its way. I hear it's like Prototype but much better. But back to MGS4. I haven't played a whole lot of the series, but I catch references they make here and there. I was worried about the reportedly long cutscenes, but after several hours in, I can't really remember ever wishing they'd shut up. It has the sort of pacing that makes you think "oh, I'll just play a bit longer"...and then stay for longer than you intended. That's good.

I played through Batman: Arkham Asylum and liked almost everything about it. The dark and twisted treatment of the franchise was fantastic. Can't wait for the inevitable sequel which they left themselves wide open for at the end. My main problem with the game was the controls. Specifically on the 360, the trigger buttons have a fairly long travel. There were times when I was supposed to press it quickly to throw a batarang at somebody, and it just wasn't happenin'. Maybe that's better w/ the DualShock 3? Anyway, I loved it overall and it had me thinking that I wish they'd let this development team get their hands on Zelda. A dark, mature, well done entry in that series could be just what we need. But I hear that's sort of the direction the next one for the Wii is taking anyway, right?

Lest you think I only play single player stuff, please note that I really enjoyed going through almost all of New Super Mario Bros. Wii with my wife. When she first jumped in, I had already made it to world 2 and she was having trouble getting back in the Mario swing of things. I don't think she's really played a Mario game since the NES days. Once we restarted on world 1, she was right with me all the way to the end of world 7 (no warping). I got her the New DS version a few years back, but I don't think it really grabbed her. And the competitive/cooperative nature of the Wii version just makes it a lot more fun. I only had to carry her (seriously, how cool is it that I literally carried her?) a few times. The unlimited continues were kind to her and the game is set up perfectly for people in our situation. Mario Galaxy tried with the "girlfriend mode" where she was my "star helper" but she quickly lost interest. Anyway, we had a blast. I can't wait to see how chaotic it gets with four players.

I think that's it for the game recap. I spent a few digital dollars on Flower and Critter Crunch on the PlayStation Store. I really liked the demo for Trine too. I may give that a try once I find some time or it goes on sale. That's all for now. Will I post again next week? Next year? Keep your Google Reader tuned in.

Games that I can't stop playing & games that are just okay

2009-10-20T21:11:00.006-05:00

It's been so long since the last post that I actually had to go and look at my GameFly e-mails to see what games I've had lately (Little King's Story, Beatles Rock Band, Punch Out!!, and Oblivion Game of the Year Edition). There's also been more Shadow Complex than I care to admit. That, Oblivion, and Burnout Paradise are games I keep coming back to. We have one of those unhealthy relationships where we know we're bad for each other but we keep coming back. What's that called? I googled it but couldn't think of the right search terms. Also, Google now thinks I'm headed for a divorce. Great.

So the "Game of the Year Edition" part of Oblivion is important. It seemed to be a cheaper route to getting the expansion content (Shivering Isles) that's still pretty expensive for some reason. I've played the crap out of the original game. I saw a 59 hour save for my main character. I think my secondary character has several hours invested too. And then I started a new one so I could try my hand at archery. After I figured out that the new content lives on disc two and gets installed to your hard drive I was able to send the discs back and use my own copy for the main game. Marginally legal but hey, lets run with it.

The Shivering Isles content is different enough from the main game to make it seem fresh and interesting. The prince that you do tasks for is insane, and pretty amusing. The developers seemed to take the DLC as an opportunity to change up the visual style for the world a bit too.

I've played through Shadow Complex several times now. Once for the story, once for the minimalist achievement, once for the completionist achievement, and I started again to keep on the way to the level 50 achievement. I'm obsessed. I know.

I spent a little bit of time with Little King's Story and didn't hate it. It had a neat art style that was almost cartoony, but semi-realistic too. I played it on the Brainy Gamer's recommendation but didn't fall in love with it the way he did. Fun for a while, but I don't often get into real time strategy games, which is what this sort of was.

Punch Out was fun for a day or so, but I quickly realized that it was exactly like the old one. Which I was terrible at. I could never get past Bald Bull back in the day, and couldn't even make it past Great Tiger in the new one. I suppose I should be shamed, but I realized I wasn't really enjoying myself, so it got sent back too.

Beatles Rock Band was absolutely beautiful and really pleasant to play. Also really short. Which is fine when you're paying by the day. A neat little tweak to the Rock Band formula was the carry over of your multiplier and star power from song to song when you play a set. I think they were called Challenges in the game. Basically, you'd play 4-6 songs back to back at a particular venue. This was after you played through the chronological story mode. Playing through this, I could have used more educational factoids or interviews like in Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, but I still managed to learn a bit about Beatles history. Like I didn't realize they stopped touring and started doing a lot of drugs in the late 60's. Granted, there seemed to be some bonus content that explained the history a bit better but you had to seek it out.

Games I can't get out of my head

2009-09-23T20:51:00.003-05:00

Since the last post I've spent some time with Saints Row 2, Scribblenauts, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and finally finished Shadow Complex. Reverse that order for my favorites. But lets start with SR2. I can't avoid the inevitable comparisons to Grand Theft Auto on this one. My favorite parts of GTA4 were the story and the world, both of which are just sort of mediocre on SR2. I got my fill of ridiculous gangsta fantasy though. This game doesn't take itself very seiously, which makes it fun. But I kept finding myself more drawn to the other games I mentioned, so it got sent back after a bit.

Scribblenauts is pretty neat. It's probably best when you can share your crazy solutions to the puzzles with other people playing it too. That's been my favorite part, anyway. This is a game you need to play around other people to have fun getting ridiculous ideas from them. Or at least compare notes with another player later. In fact, I think I'll play some when I'm done writing this.

Red Faction: Guerrilla didn't make that big of a splash but a few bloggers I follow really liked it, so I gave it a try. I'm really enjoying running around destroying stuff in a world straight out of a great Mars Sci Fi book. It's gritty, it's barren, and it's wonderful. I'm leaning more towards the 'destruction targets' rather than the 3rd person combat or other missions though. You've gotta love a game where your main weapon is a sledgehammer and you're encouraged to destroy everything you come across.

Finally, Shadow Complex is one of those rare games that I'm gonna keep coming back to. There's always more to collect or a new goal to shoot for. It certainly helps that just moving around in the world is at the same time effortless, familiar and enjoyable.

Catchup, GameQ, PS3

2009-09-09T20:47:00.004-05:00

I've mentioned before that my blogging directly correlates with my wife's bad tv-watching. Since ANTM and SYTYCD are back on the air tonight, I'm back on the net tonight. The trouble is, I don't really have much to say. I've been playing Shadow Complex when I can, and loving it. I agree with pretty much everything Matt said earlier about it. It gets the MetroidVania label quite a bit, but there's really very little backtracking that Metroid is so famous for.

Speaking of Metroid, I'm a little bit excited about the Metroid Prime Trilogy being released on Wii. Maybe I'll actually play through the second one with the new Wii controls. I loved them in MP3. We'll see when I actually get it from GameFly though.

Speaking of that, I figure an easy way to show you what I'm looking forward to is to post my queue. Some explanation is in order, I'd say. After the top 10 or so, everything is unreleased and sort of in order by release date, but not quite.

On another note, I'm thinking it's only a matter of time before I get a PS3 now that they've finally dropped the price to something reasonable. Today I bought a spare HDMI cable. You know, to get ready. For the inevitable. Similar to what I did w/ buying a 360 late, I'm keeping a list in my head of PS3 exclusives that I've missed in my head. Let me know if this list is missing anything.

Flower
Uncharted
Resistance
Infamous
Killzone 2
Little Big Planet
Metal Gear Solid 4 (maybe...the thought of 90 min. of Kojima cut scenes make me cringe)
Heavenly Sword
Warhawk
Noby Noby Boy
PixelJunk Eden
Trine

Prototypical

2009-09-05T05:51:00.001-05:00

I've had Prototype for almost a month now. I haven't really been playing it for a month though. There has been all kinds of other stuff going on so I haven't had as much time for videogames as I'd like. Come to think of it, the only time I can remember having enough time was winter break in college. Ah...a whole month of nothing to do.

While I was jumping from rooftop to rooftop and running up buildings I got the sense that I'd done this before. It reminded me a lot of Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction from a few years back. That's not a slam. I loved that game. It made more sense once I learned that the same developer worked on both.

Prototype has an impressive array of stuff that it tries to accomplish. It's successful at most of it. The combat is varied, you can go anywhere, and there's even some stealth elements if you choose to play that way. Every once in a while I'm reminded that it's an open world game though. The only time you're ever allowed to control your character indoors is in one of several identical stadium-sized military complexes. Otherwise it's a cut scene.

The story isn't anything special but the video flashbacks you get when you consume another character and their memories are well done. Something about a huge military conspiracy with a crazy virus. It doesn't matter. Oh, speaking of the military, they're very early on painted as the bad guys. It's you and the virus versus them. Not you against all the crazy zombie mutant things, but you against the evil, lying Black Watch military dudes.

I'm not entirely sure how far into the game I'm in. Day 13 of 18 if that matters. But I'm starting to get bored with the repetitive missions. Go here, consume this person. Go there, kill that person. And I'm not even doing any of the non-story side missions. They give you experience points to spend on upgrades for your character, but there are so many you don't really need all of them. I spent mine on running and jumping upgrades since the complete freedom of movement was my favorite part of the game.

Part of the reason for this post was to help me decide if I wanted to keep chugging along on the story or send it back to GameFly and start on Saints Row 2. And Shadow Complex. And my new copy of Mario Kart Wii to replace my unplayable scratched one. Ok, so...to the 360!

Shadow Complex

2009-08-29T20:00:00.003-05:00

I finished Shadow Complex this weekend, so I thought I'd devote a few blog-bytes to it. I won't repeat what other reviews of the game have said, but I will echo the consensus opinion that the game is definitely worth the fifteen bucks it costs to download it. If this game had come out twenty years ago, we all would have thought it was the most awesomest platform game evar. Ten years ago, it would have been a relic from an ancient era. Today, it's an awesome retro entry in a classic game genre that hasn't gotten a lot of lovin' since FPS and MMOMGRPG games came along. I guess everything is destined to get the "reimagning" treatment eventually these days.

Amongst the specific things I liked were the way it shows you a real-time comparison of your score versus your friends' scores (You have punched 30 dudes in the head. Dave has only punched 26 dudes in the head. Go you!) and the way acquiring new powerups gives you the ability to solve puzzles in rooms that you've already passed through; this latter feature could have made the game annoyingly repetitive, but they managed to pull it off. One thing that's been said in reviews is that the novel "play in 2D but aim in 3D" shooting style is too hard to use - I found it a little tricky at times, but it didn't really bother me, and I appreciate that they're trying to innovate. I also found it weird that the cutscenes were all about "Hurry and shut down the reactor before it's too late!" but the on-screen text would then encourage you to noodle around looking for hidden objects. But really my main complaint about Shadow Complex is that it was too short - I got about five hours out of it, and it seemed to end pretty quickly. Maybe I'll have to start a new game and try to collect all the hidden powerups.

Oh, something else weird: The game has almost no plot other than "average guy accidentally discovers Cobra's secret hideout and becomes Iron Man", but apparently it is set in the world of Orson Scott Card's novel Empire. Reading the Wikipedia article reveals that the bad guys are some kind of ultra-left-wing faction out to overthrow the US government. Okay, whatever... but the thing that really bugged me was that their master plan was to nuke San Francisco. If you ask me, if the world was really going to be taken over by vegans with combat mechs and tofu-powered armor suits, don't you think that San Francisco would be their headquarters, not their first target? "Oh, fabulous plan Trevor, we just blew up the only place where you can get a decent organic soy latte. Now where are we going to put our base, Philadelphia? Hipster, please."

Okay, cheap joke, but still you have to wonder.

Why Ghostbusters is so damn frustrating

2009-08-23T15:46:00.002-05:00

Ok, so I was kind of excited about this one. From everything I'd heard it sounded like a winner. The whole cast was back to lend their voices and it was written by the original writers of the movies. But the gameplay is repetitive, the saves and checkpoints clunky, and other than the occasional decent joke...not much fun.

Instead of the traditional "30 bullets in a clip" and then you need to reload system, you can only use your proton pack for a set amount of time before having to "vent" it with a different button press. Kind of neat and different but it also highlights another failing. The overheat status and your character's health are displayed on the pack which you can see because of an over the shoulder 3rd-person perspective. This worked very well for Dead Space, but here the displays here are tiny and nonsensical. I can never see what they read in the heat of battle, when I need them most.

Every location has it's own set of ghosts to kill and trap but they end up just being the same type of enemy with a different "skin." I quickly got bored with this. And then when you finish fighting with them, you find yourself waiting (too long) for the other characters to finish their dialogue so you can get on to the next part. I never know if I have to get to the next invisible checkpoint or just wait for them to stop rambling. So I guess my complaint is that there's too much of the excellent voice work.

I said the save system is bad because I can't ever tell where I'll be when I shut off the game and come back. I've always thought it was dumb that the 360 can't see that I only have one storage location (hard-drive) so yes, that's where I want to save stuff. Why do I have to pick it myself? But this game is even worse because of the annoying (and dire) warning every time you start the game that save data will be overwritten when I pick my hard drive as the storage device. It's confusing but it seems to be the only option if I want to continue my career.

This leads me to another rant about 360 games in general. Why do I have to babysit them by pressing A about 10 times just to do what I want to do 90% of the time and continue my solo career. Press A to start. Continue Career. Load Data. Yes, from the hard drive. Yes, I'm sure. Yes, I know it will automatically save and overwrite it. The only game of recent memory that bypasses all this stupidity is the Grand Theft Auto series. You pop in the game, go make a sandwich and when you come back your character is all loaded up and ready to go. How hard is that?

But back to Ghostbusters. I'm not sure how much more I'll stick with it when I have Prototype and Shadow Complex calling me.

Bits & Bytes

2009-08-06T22:04:00.007-05:00

So, lots of stuff piles up when you don't write for a while. Sorry if this post is a bit disjointed. I've got a lot in my head.

I got a new Android phone and one of my favorite apps so far lets me be an Xbox Live voyeur. It's got the unfortunate name of 1337pwn but it lets you add anyone's gamertag and see their online status and recent history. Sure you can do that all on the xbox.com site but this app uses the Android notifications to let you know when people sign on in more or less real time. Do I really need to know when people sign in? No, but it's sort of neat. Also, since you can add anyone (even people you're not XBL friends with) I added stephentotilo and giantbombing, two of my favorite game writers from Kotaku and Giant Bomb, respectively.

I've noticed lots of bloggers cheating by reposting stuff they've seen on Twitter and thought I might do a bit of the same. Oh, and I got on MTV Multiplayer again. I think Russ Frushtick over there must have a similar sense of humor as I do.

Speaking of Twitter, here are some of my thoughts from there on Guitar Hero: Metallica

In case you're wondering, Guitar Hero: Metallica is about 100 times more awesome than the Aerosmith one. Now back to rocking...
Odd that my favorite part of Guitar Hero: Metallica so far is PLAYING SOME SKYNRD! ...(man)

And really, this game is pretty cool. I'm almost finished with the guitar career, I may play around with the drums or vocals. It's nice to have that option since I have the original Rock Band kit that works with it...I think. Come to think of it, I'm not sure.

I also briefly played Pikmin for Wii. This is a remake of the original Gamecube game that adds some new Wii-specific controls. Since I never played the original, I can't say how much it added. It seemed like a neat concept and nice art style. I actually felt like I let the little guys down when it told me I lost a few pikmins in battle at the end of the day. Maybe I just didn't give it enough time, but the game didn't really grab me. So I sent it back.

Speaking of disjointed, the reason I'm writing tonight is because the wife is using the game TV to watch the So You Think You Can Dance finale. I will never understand why this show is on two nights a week. For an hour or two. Every week... It's not that I hate the show or anything. There just seems to be way too much TRL-style Woooo!!!-ing.

I took a trip recently and played a bit of DS. I'm stuck on the fiend lord in Chrono Trigger so I played a bit of Geometry Wars: Galaxies. I think I like that game. To paraphrase a friend: "Get these shapes off my Euclidean PLANE!" The worst thing about it are the controls that make my hands hurt. So I may need to get one of them on the Xbox.

Old Zelda

2009-07-14T22:07:00.003-05:00

Just a quick note on something that's going on over at the Vintage Game Club. They've picked The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask as the latest game to play through. People play the chosen game at their own pace and post in the forum for whatever section they're on. Just another cool thing that one of my favorite game bloggers is up to.

I started on MM over the weekend since I had a GameCube disc with lots of old Zelda games on it that I could play on the Wii. I only made it to the first dungeon, but it's nice to relive something from soooooo long ago (2000). And I love me some Zelda.

Unrelated: I seem to be becoming a regular on MTV Multiplayer blog via Twitter. If you can't tell from the neat little gizmo to your left, I'm dave_haas

A tale of two Wiis

2009-07-14T21:43:00.008-05:00

I just got two Wii games in the mail today and they couldn't be more different. The zany, Japanesy family fun Excitebots: Trick Racing and MadWorld, the game that shouldn't be played within half a mile of anyone under 18.

I didn't immediately go for Excitebots. The graphics are underwhelming and the controls are a bit chaotic. Meaning that you're flailing your hands all over the place. You hold the Wii remote like a steering wheel, but there's very little steering involved. The bots I used on the opening tracks required very little left and right movement. It was more about knowing when to jump, boost, and wave around like an idiot. Maybe that changes later, I don't know. But once you get a feel for this, it's a little entertaining. Still, I won't be keeping this one for long.

MadWorld is f'ing nuts. And it is on purpose. It's sort of a take on Running Man where your grizzled character is supposed to kill dudes in the most inventive way possible to get points and please a TV audience. I'm really loving the running commentary from Greg Proops, a Who's Line is it Anyway? alum. You also may recognize his voice as one of the announcers from the pod race scene in Episode I. The art style is all black and white with splashes of red for blood. And there's a lot of blood. You'd think that depth perception would suffer but I haven't had any problems with that just yet. Everything I've seen so far has been over the top, vulgar, violent, and ridiculous. I love it.

Now Playing: Skate 2 and Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

2009-07-08T20:53:00.002-05:00

Skate 2 is one of those games with a pretty steep learning curve. I figured I'd pick right up on this one since I played a few hours of Skate. Not true. I've already had a few challenges that I tried probably 20 times in a row before I passed them. I apparently can't railslide worth a darn. So maybe I'll shy away from challenges that include that. Anyway, I'm getting the hang of it and am appreciating the open world style of "do whatever challenges you feel like."

Oh, get this. I got an e-mail from the local library yesterday that the game I reserved was ready. Huh? Oh yeah, I scanned their list last year and put a hold on Lego Star Wars. And then forgot about it after several months. Either they don't have many copies or borrowing free videogames is a really popular thing. Or both. Probably both.

I've played both of the previous Lego Star Wars games before on PS2 and Gamecube. I figured I'd try all episodes I-VI on the 360. You know, since it was free. And, I'm ashamed to say, for achievement points. But whatever, the cut scenes (especially for IV-VI since I've seen those many more times) are great. These Lego games are great to play with kids or inexperienced gamers. I convinced my wife to play this with me years ago, maybe I can do so again. Wish me luck!

Catchup: Quantum of Solace and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

2009-07-08T20:43:00.003-05:00

I mentioned that I was getting 007 Quantum of Solace and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. I did, and I played them. I tried, but just couldn't get into N&B. It's all about customizing vehicles and I never had much fun doing that. And I didn't put in the time to get to where the vehicles available were anything more than clunky pieces of crap. The helicopter was sort of neat and the game was occasionally chuckle-worthy, but...meh.

Quantum of Solace was also mediocre as shooters go, but at least I finished it. They had enough variety in "ways to kill dudes" and level design to keep my interest at least. Is it bad that I was glad that it was so short? Okay, I haven't seen the new Bond films it was based on, but I was COMPLETELY confused by the cut scenes with M tracking Bond via his phone. They're talking about where he is and what he's doing, then they suddenly decide to fast forward? Whatever, just let me shoot some more dudes.

Why I'm not getting an iPhone

2009-07-08T07:23:00.010-05:00

They've been impossible to ignore lately with the launch of the new version, ads everywhere, and the tech press talking about them nonstop. They're even taking up a larger share of the market as people decide for whatever reason that they need one too. But I'm not getting one.

Why not? Mostly it comes down to carrier exclusivity. Since you can only get it on AT&T that really limits a lot of peoples' options. I'm technically out of contract with T-Mobile so that's not really the issue, but I've had them for almost 8 years with very few problems. Any small issue gets resolved quickly by their excellent customer service. T-Mobile doesn't get its reputation as the low-cost carrier by accident either. I'd be paying about $20 more per month for comparable amounts of voice, text, and data with AT&T and an iPhone.

Why not just get an iPhone and haxx0r it to work on T-Mobile then? While I'm sure I could manage this, it cripples the device in two big ways. There's always the chance that you could brick your shiny new toy by doing something wrong, and the 3G spectrums aren't compatible between the two carriers. So even if I got a 3G iPhone, it wouldn't be 3G on T-Mobile.

I don't know if you've noticed, but Apple makes some great music players. One of the motivations for an iPhone would be to consolidate my 60GB iPod with my phone. Now that they have a 32GB model that's solid state, that's awfully tempting. But I have about 38GB of music alone. I'd have to pick what gets on there and what doesn't. And still worry about leaving room for all the crazy apps that people seem to love. That just sounds like a nightmare where my OCD could flare up often.

If this reads like a list of rationalizations, that's because it is. These things are beautiful, and I've always had a certain respect for the great design that Apple manages to put into both its hardware and software. In fact this all came up again after my wife made the switch this week with a new MacBook Pro.

But no, I'm gonna do the sensible thing and stick with what I've got. But ask me again in a few years when the AT&T exclusive thing is up and maybe I'll have a different answer. :)

Quick update

2009-06-18T23:39:00.004-05:00

I should post more often. But I haven't because I haven't been really playing anything new or interesting. I played F.E.A.R. 2. It was 'meh.' It actually made me jump a few times but I got fed up with enough little things that I sent it back.

I picked up the Big Surf Island expansion for Burnout Paradise. Actually I got it on the day it came out last week or whatever. I figured that I'd been playing a ton of that game anyway, I might as well have new stuff to jump off of. Oh, and more delicious achievements. They've been throwing us so much free stuff over the last year or so, I didn't mind giving them a few bucks for new areas and so they keep doing what they're doing. Between all the time I've spent in this game and SSX3 for the Gamecube, I feel like I know DJ Atomika very well. I like his style.

Other than that it's just been a bit of Galactrix on XBLA and GTA on DS. That last sentence NMA (needed more acronyms).

I've got Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts and Quantum of Solace on the way, so I'll be sure to post some thoughts on those.

E3 "coverage"

2009-06-02T19:31:00.006-05:00

So E3 is happening this week and while I won't pretend to be your comprehensive news source, I've kept an eye on a few blogs in Reader and I can tell you what I'm looking forward to. Keep in mind that I'll be renting most everything from GameFly, since I have a fear of commitment. And of spending a ton of money on games that I'll only really play for a few hours. Anyway, here goes.

Halo 3: ODST comes first since it was already on my list (as a draft in Gmail called "games to get") and just got some more information released. I'm not a rabid Halo guy, but I was extremely impressed w/ what they did w/ 3 and I'd like to see more.

A bunch of 2's are next. Red Steel 2 was entertaining enough the first time around and I'm interested to see what they can do with MotionPlus.

Crackdown 2 should be a blast. I didn't even make it through the whole game the first time since it got pretty tough, but I loved jumping around in the open world of the city and destroying stuff. It was pretty much GTA on steroids. The Hulk game had a lot of this too.

Left 4 Dead 2 should be fun. I had a blast with the first and I could use some more. I was sort of curious just to see what they'd name it since there was already a number in the title. I think the whole minimal storytelling part of the game really works for it. You can have an endless number of settings of 4 people all around the world just trying to survive despite the zombies.

Mario Galaxy 2 makes sense. Why wouldn't you make a sequel to the best platformer in 10 years or so? Super Mario Brothers Wii is even more interesting. Now you can finally make Mario jump higher when you lift the controller like we've all been doing for 20 years (you know you have). Nintendo completely understands its roots. And how to make money off them. I can't complain when the games are so dang fun, though.

Metroid: Other M seems like an odd title, but it's a good direction for the franchise to go. 2-D Metroid games are still fun. I enjoyed the heck out of Zero Mission and Fusion.

Finally, and XBLA game that piqued my interest: Shadow Complex. Mention Metroid and Contra in the same breath and you've got my attention.

I've certainly missed some things, but these are just what stood out from the coverage I saw. Enjoy!

All day game session

2009-05-23T17:49:00.004-05:00

I've gotten in a good amount of game time today. I've been switching between RE5, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, Burnout Paradise, and the new Bionic Commando. I've talked about all but the last two, so I'll make a few observations about those.

Bionic Commando is a pretty spiffy translation of an old 2D game into 3D. A lot of the sounds and items will be familiar especially if, like me, you just played through Bionic Commando: Rearmed not too long ago. Since the same company is responsible for both, they put some nice little design cues in to tie them together. Perhaps David Jaffe says it best:
@djaffe Keep coming back- time and again- 2 Bionic Commando. Cool lvl design structure; good viz; just fun. Feels old skool but new! Dig it!
It's got a few knocks since I can't always tell how much damage I'm taking and tend to die a lot. Maybe I'll get better as it goes along. And I really think they gave the guy dreadlocks just so it looks cool flapping in the breeze as he swings all over the place with the bionic arm.

Burnout Paradise, I don't know how to quit you! I had a blast with the demo when it came out, so I rented it and played a bunch. I even ventured online and played with random XBL dudes (I know!). I think I like it so much because it takes my favorite part of the Grand Theft Auto games (driving really fast and jumping off stuff) and makes an entire game around it. So when I found a copy for only $10, I had to pick it up. I've been picking up some achievements that I missed the first time around and enjoying the new free content that's been added. I hear the new expansion next month is all about big air, so I may have to buy that.

Resident Evil 5 is still good, I think I'll go play some more...

Fiiiiiive

2009-05-21T20:54:00.005-05:00

So it's been a while since the last post. But apparently one season ended and another began so maybe now my blogging night will be Thurs.

I spent as much time as I felt was necessary with MK Vs. DC and am on to Resident Evil 5. I'm really liking it so far. The controls took me a few minutes to get used to, but once I remembered how things were in RE4, I felt right at home. An over the shoulder view where you move like a tank and can't shoot and move at the same time certainly isn't what I would have asked for in a shooter, but in this game it just works. It seems like all the familiar RE4 sounds are there except the classic "what are ya buyin!?" guy. I miss him. Arranging and buying items without him works just as well, but seems a bit sterile.

I think I'm still towards the beginning of chapter two and I'm already seeing a lot of variety in level design and pacing. I actually had a ton of trouble in the very first segment where you have to fight off a seemingly endless stream of zombie dudes. It's such a departure from the plodding, slow corridor-fest of RE4. I didn't quite know what to do. My stupid AI partner kept getting herself killed since I thought I needed to camp out in one spot and kill everything I saw. I fared better once I started moving around and hunting for ammo. But I had to learn that by trial and error.

I mentioned my stupid AI partner which means I'm soloing this game that's supposedly designed for co-op. I want to go through it the first time on my own and soak up all the details. That seemed to be the right thing to do after my time with Left 4 Dead co-op. Not that I didn't have a blast then, it's just a very different experience. I seemed to get thrown in with guys who knew the levels really well and I was always running to play catch up. I think if I had a friend to play RE5 with rather than some random Xbox Live person, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about it.

I should get in some quality game time in over the long weekend. I'll be travelling for part of it, so I'll play a bit of DS as well. I recently started up a game in Zelda:Phantom Hourglass again. I seemed to have waited the perfect amount of time for me to forget most of where I need to go, so it's like a new game all over again. Plus I'll be ready for the new one at the end of the year.

While writing this, I kept hearing the Idle Thumbs guys say Fiiiiiive over and over again in my head (from one of their older podcasts). So that's what you get for the title. If you've never heard them, you ought to. They're damn funny.

Silly games

2009-05-12T20:05:00.006-05:00

That's right, it's Tuesday again. When my wife takes over the TV and I sign into Blogger. I just finished De Blob a day or so ago. I mentioned before how much I liked it. That I decided to stick with it to the end says volumes for the game. Sure it had a few minor control quirks, but the designers must have sort of realized that since there were relatively few sections that relied heavily on precise jumping. The difficulty at the end ramps up and offers a decent challenge. I eventually welcomed it after the very easy, lazy first levels where I mostly just wandered around in a 3D coloring book. One thing that did strike me as odd was that since there are so many challenges, you can finish the level without really accomplishing the main objectives that the guide characters keep telling you to do. Towards the end I'm supposed to go take down some big structure and free all the citizens (or something...I don't know, it all sort of blurs together after a while) but if you happen to get enough points through other means to open up the end gate, you can finish the level without actually doing that. "You're our only hope to save our world!...Or, you know just paint some stuff and find the exit and that'll work too." Anyway, since I'm not the sort of person that feels like I have to get 100% on every level (and due to the fact that it was rented) I sent it back and am on to the next thing.

The next thing turned out to be Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe. This game is just as silly as De Blob, it just doesn't realize it. There's at least a little bit of explanation why all these people would be fighting each other but I guess story isn't really necessary in fighting games. Which I don't ever play. The graphics aren't that impressive and the character models are odd and exaggerated (think way larger than necessary boobs and incredibly muscular limbs). All of this aside, I'm sort of enjoying myself with this one. I guess that's the beauty of low expectations.

de Blob

2009-05-05T22:23:00.005-05:00

I threw this game in my queue on the strength of a few good reviews from some game critics. The premise is offbeat, different, and a whole lot of fun. It's pretty simple, really. You start with black and white world that the evil dudes have come and sucked all the color, life, and fun out of. Your job, as an animated paint blob, is to color it back in, thereby free the residents from a boring, colorless life. You do this by moving your character in a 3D space using the Wii nunchuk, occasionally flicking the remote to jump. You collect paint and everything you touch turns your current color. Also, when you touch something paint-able it adds an element to the current music.

The cut scenes that explain the ridiculous story look amazing. Think Monsters Inc. I have no idea how they get it to look so great on the underpowered Wii. They're actually sort of funny too, and give you at least a flimsy reason as to why you're painting this section of town or landmark. There are tons of mini challenges in each level which are sure to keep the OCD collector-types busy. But there is also a main goal that you need to accomplish to make it through to the next level.

My two complaints are one minor, one major. As far as I can tell, there's no way to quickly save your progress, it only saves after each level, which can take a while if you happen to get turned around. Not a big deal. What is a big deal is the stupid waggle controls that developers feel they have to use when a game appears on the Wii. There's a huge A button right on there that's a perfectly acceptable solution for jump. Use it! But you can't, and the combination of this unresponsiveness and the less than ideal camera makes technical jumping sections needlessly frustrating. Luckily, these sections don't seem to happen all that often in this fairly kid-friendly game.

Speaking of kid-friendly, this would be an excellent game to share with a youngster, and it sort of reminds me of the Lego series. There are tons of little objectives, bright, shiny objects and little penalty for failure. So, in short, it's a fun little game that you ought to take a second look at.

Tomb Raider: Underworld

2009-05-02T22:39:00.005-05:00

I finished this one up earlier today after a long session of co-op last night at a friend's. There's no co-op item in the menu, but that's basically what we did. I played and he was my navigator and second pair of eyes. He'd watch the walkthrough on YouTube if we got stuck and point me in the right direction. He said he didn't mind doing this since he'd played all the original games on PS1. It was good for me to get some historical perspective on the series, actually. I started with Legend, so I'm relatively new to the series. I was complaining about glitches and bad controls and he said with a smile, "that's all a part of the fun!"

I can't help but compare this game to the new Prince of Persia. Underworld gives you so many more moves and freedom of movement, but with that comes lots of problems. There were several times that I fell to my death because I was angled just a little bit wrong on a jump. PoP simplified and streamlined things so much that a failure of that sort almost never happened. You had a good two second window where you only needed to push a single button to pull off some crazy looking manuever. Assasin's Creed was forgiving in this sense too. You just pointed your character in the right direction and he figured it out. I'm not sure I prefer this "easy mode" but maybe a hybrid of the complex controls of Tomb Raider and the forgiving ones of those games could be just what I'm looking for.

There were a few times where I was so frustrated with this game that I almost quit. While each level is very visually unique, within a level it's easy to get lost. Every corridor looks the same. And when you're in an open area of ocean, it's very easy to get turned around in a 3D space. I read somewhere that the designers were trying to make this game with less hand holding and more of a "figure it out" sort of vibe. I think they succeeded. So much so that it was frustrating at times. My old standby, GameFaqs.com wasn't much help since it was all text-based, so I had to actually see it on YouTube.

So this one was interesting to see, it looked great, and for the most part pretty good. It can just get frustrating in the controls department. Another thing that surprised me was the title. I assumed it meant that the whole game took place underwater, which wasn't exactly the case. It was more of a reference to the Norse underworld. But whatever, that just means more jumping and less swimming.

Quick thoughts

2009-04-21T21:41:00.003-05:00

I'm thinking that you could start overlapping my blogging schedule w/ my wife's crappy reality TV show watching schedule. It's Tuesday and that means it's Biggest Loser night at this house. And not Tomb Raider: Underworld night. I started this yesterday and I'm liking it so far. The wide open ocean sections look like they might be a bit overwhelming, but we'll see how it goes. Endless Ocean is also on it's way from GameFly, so I'll have plenty of opportunities to get lost in the deep blue sea.

It's not really worth it's own post, but I've noticed lately while playing some Guitar Hero: World Tour that rhythm games can put me in sort of a trance. I suppose that's not that uncommon, due to all the repetitive motions and your zoned-out state concentrating on the music. For me, I'll remember random events from the past that have nothing to do with the music. They're usually good memories, and I get to smile to myself and think of what we did on that canoe trip years ago, or old friends I haven't thought of in years. Anyone else do this?

Me and game consoles: a short history

2009-04-15T20:03:00.005-05:00

I've had an idea to run down a history of what consoles I've owned for a while. I just never bothered to write it all down. But the wife is preventing me from playing more Galactrix on 360 with ANTM, so I'll sit here and type.

It started, as it did with many others, on an Atari. My much older brothers had an Atari 7800 in all it's fake wood grain glory. So I got my start on Missle Command, Space Invaders, Pac Man, and Donkey Kong, which came on a crazy white cartridge by some company named "Nintendo." When that old hardware eventually crapped out, I asked for an Atari 2600 for Christmas. There were rumors and commercials of a new system but I had done my research (you know, in the JC Penney catalog that passed for the "internet" back then). That Christmas (1985?) I rocked out with a new 2600 and great new games like Pole Position and Battlezone. It only took me a month or two to figure out that I'd made a terrible mistake with my Santa Claus request. The new NES was awesome and I had to have one.

So just a few months later my birthday rolls around and I have a new Nintendo. I soon had what I still consider to be the best game I've ever played, The Legend of Zelda. This dude had a sword! And he could go anywhere he wanted! And fight Octorocks and stuff!

The NES kept me occupied for quite a while. During this time the seeds of my game madness were sown. I subscribed to Nintendo Power. I read every article. I played something new and awesome called "two player simultaneous" games. Before, my friends and I had to take turns on levels or something. Now we can beat up dudes at the same time! Totally rad.

Since I read Nintendo Power all the time I was understandably excited about the Super NES. The painful months between its release and the next birthday or Christmas nearly killed me. I had to make do with my stupid regular Nintendo and play Super Mario World at friends' houses. But I eventually got one and the next Zelda came shortly after that. The Super NES brought with it incredible digitized graphics, one of the best entries in the Metroid series, and a great (looking) Star Wars series.

A similar process repeated itself for the Nintendo 64 even though I was in High School by that time. Let's just...not think too much on that. The 64 upped the graphics again and brought with it the craziest controller I've ever seen. The standouts for this era were Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. My college roommates and I spent waaaaay too much time playing Goldeneye and Mario Kart.

Nintendo took their sweet time coming out with the next console and I'd already gotten a Playstation 2. I rationalized the expensive box saying that I needed a DVD player anyway. To my credit, I still have never bought a standalone DVD player. The PS2 had great realistic sports games and a completely different focus than what I was used to with the Nintendo systems.

Metroid, and the promise of an upcoming Zelda pushed me over the edge and I got a Gamecube. So I split my time between the 'cube and the PS2. They actually complimented each other nicely because of their different focus. I had two systems for the first time and was lovin' it. Later, the new Zelda went in a weird direction that took me quite a while to get used to, but I think I eventually started to like it.

I managed to get an elusive Wii on the day it came out. No, I didn't camp out all night. I just went to the store about 15 minutes before it opened that morning and got in line with all the other antisocial dudes. I was towards the end of folks that got one, but I wasn't about to camp out. Of course I played Zelda again and all the crazy waggle games.

Not too long after I got the Wii, I picked up a used Xbox 360 since I'd been keeping an eye on the games released for it and there were quite a few that seemed worthy. Once again, I had two systems that complemented each other very well. The crazy and different games have a place on the Wii, along with all the classic Nintendo franchises. The 360 (in beautiful HD) gets used for everything else. They've done a tremendous job with the online portion and I've already talked about how well they did points.

So that's it. Maybe some other time I'll talk about portable consoles (original GameBoy, then DS) or why I don't play PC games.

Healthy Living

2009-04-09T22:06:00.007-05:00

I was thinking the other day about how your character's health is represented in games. It's always been an imperfect mechanism, but if you're like me, you've played enough games to not really notice anymore. I came to this realization when I was upgrading my "hearts" in Henry Hatsworth. There's something about base-hearts but then you add silver-hearts? I don't know, it was kind of confusing. But why use hearts at all? Because Zelda did it ages ago? Don't get me wrong, the original Legend of Zelda is still my favorite game ever, but a bunch of hearts to represent how healthy Link is? Really? And if you hang out w/ a fairy by a pond you get more hearts? Thats...odd. But the other big franchises aren't any better. Sonic collects golden rings for some reason, and Mario eats strange magic mushrooms that make him bigger.

Should games strive for some sort of realistic representation of health? Doom did a decent job of this w/ a picture of your character's face that became more bloody and decrepit the more damage you took. But they also had the crutch of a 0-100 scale. Actually the ones that seem the most believable are the games with a sci-fi angle that introduce the concept of "shields." The sound of your shields recharghing in Halo is a very familiar and comforting sound. It's like "ah, now I can stop worrying about health and everything is aaaaaaall right." Dead Space attempted to make the health meter more realistic by showing it on the back of the suit with no accompanying 0-100 scale.

Lots of first person shooters now use an approach I first remember seeing in Gears of War, but who knows who actually had it first. Since you see through the characters eyes, the vision is obscured by blood as you take damage. Games like Braid and Prince of Persia take a unique approach where there's really no health meter. If you fall in a pit or touch an enemy you're dead, but no worries since you can just rewind time and go on your merry way. RPG's traditionally have hit points which is just a numeric variation on the 0-100 scale. I know I've seen an EKG meter in a game to indicate health, but it escapes me just what game that was. I'd guess that's the most realistic you're gonna get.

So you run low on health and you "die." Don't worry, if you've collected a few small versions of yourself or sometimes a crazy green mushroom, you can live again.

Hey look! Another actual post about the DS!

2009-04-07T21:38:00.008-05:00

So with the DSi coming out recently and a few people I know just getting regular DS's, I thought I'd throw together a list of recommended games. I tried to think about how to organize them and as I threw titles into a list, my mind somehow sorted them on a scale from casual puzzle stuff to really involved, nerdy stuff. So, stuff that my mother-in-law would play on hers to stuff that nerds like me seek out. The casual stuff is pick up and play, while the nerdy stuff is very deep and customizable.

Okay, first up we've got a bunch of puzzle games: Planet Puzzle League, Henry Hatsworth, Professor Layton, Picross, and Puzzle Quest (along with it's updated space version PQ: Galactrix). The gameplay between PPL and Hatsworth is nearly identical, well for the lower screen on Hatsworth at least. The top screen is a side scrolling Mario-type game that can be modified by going into the puzzle game on the lower touch screen with the X button. It's structured so that you never have to worry about both types of gameplay at once, and I'm completely addicted to it. I'll probably play it when I finish this post since Tues. is Biggest Loser night on our DVR and it doesn't seem to have the same strange gravitational pull for me that it does for the wife.

Next up are a few games that make interesting use of the stylus. Kirby's Canvas Curse is neat for drawing paths on the screen that your character interacts with. Even though it came out quite a while ago it's still unmatched in this type of gameplay. Felix & Felicity is an amusing little attempt at it, but not nearly as good. Soul Bubbles is a real sleeper hit. You move an air bubble through a maze using the touch screen. It's a great mix of puzzle & action gameplay. While we're talking about the stylus, it's worth mentioning the touch-controlled Zelda and Animal Crossing. They were some of the first to innovate the "touch where you want your character to go" concept on the DS and they're from Nintendo themselves, so they do it right. I could never get into Animal Crossing since it's basically the Sims, but I've heard that people like it.

Okay, now to the nerdier portion. The Castlevania series are great classic side scrolling action games w/ a ton of enemies, and weapon/item customization. I've spent a bit of time with Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown and have been very impressed. Think GTA3 adapted for the DS but done VERY well. Rounding out this list is the excellent remake Chrono Trigger for some classic Japanese RPG and the absolutely crazy The World Ends With You. Don't pick up this last one unless you enjoy keeping track of very different action on the top and bottom screens and keeping your characters in the latest fashions for the areas they're in. Ya, it was a bit much for me. But I enjoyed the concept that you got new items based on what WiFi connections you connected to or what other DS's wireless signals you came in contact with.

Wow, this is getting long so I'll wrap it up. I purposely tried to avoid all the big sellers on this list since you'll probably get those anyway. But don't take this to mean that they're not good. You can't go wrong w/ Mario Kart, New Super Mario Bros. and Zelda. I've probably played MKDS multiplayer for more hours than all the others combined. That's sort of how this little blog got started, we get together on Wednesdays and play and yap about games.

Starting a few new games

2009-04-02T20:03:00.003-05:00

I just started playing Zubo for DS this evening. It's kind of cute. Basically a traditional RPG with rhythm game fight sequences. Tap on the screen in time w/ the music to do damage, etc. Also starting in on Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars on Wii. The art style and 3rd person action stuff remind me a bit of Psychonauts. I'm not enjoying myself nearly as much as I did w/ that game though. Crap like this which I ran into at the beginning doesn't help anything.
I should be getting a copy of Guitar Hero: World Tour soon. Looking forward to seeing how it compares to Rock Band. Okay, and to play some Tool. Ya, mainly to play Tool.

ATV + videogames = how could you go wrong!?

2009-03-29T16:00:00.004-05:00

I like riding ATVs. It's up there with snowboarding as one of my favorite things to do. I actually rode earlier today in a soggy pasture as fast as I could. But I've never ridden quite like the folks do in Pure for Xbox 360. I'm okay with that though. Doing 200 ft. jumps and crazy tricks seems like something that's better left to the virtual world.

ExciteTrucks is about the closest thing I can think of to compare this game to. Lots of ridiculous jumps and stunts that you could never pull off in real life. The whole boost/trick system is well done but doesn't even try to be realistic. Which is where I was a bit confused with this game. The tutorial starts you off by teaching you how to pre-load to jump higher and what buttons to push to pull off the sickest tricks. Then you're set loose on a racing circuit. I was trying crazy tricks on every jump and often failing since I didn't have enough time in the air to do it. Or jumping really high just made me fall behind the other competitors. There's also a freestyle section of the game that rewards you with points and it doesn't matter who finishes first. But the race and freestyle sections are mixed together in the tour without much differentiation. You even run the freestlye ones on the same overused courses.

Once I learned to focus on racing or tricking, I did a bit better, but the game just doesn't seem to have enough to keep my interest for very long. I had almost the same reaction to playing Dirt last year. Maybe I'm just not into racing games? I dunno, I think I'll stick to real ATVs.

RE: Your Brains

2009-03-24T21:30:00.002-05:00

I was a little skeptical about Left 4 Dead when I first heard about it. It's a game designed around online play, something I rarely do mostly because I never seem to be playing the same things as people on my 360 friends list. And playing with random internet losers can be dubious at best. So it's a testament to the great job Valve did that I actually really enjoyed this game.

I was asked if I finished the game and the answer is...I guess? There are four unconnected scenarios with the same four survivors of a zombie apocalypse. The story in each is really no more than "Ok we're here, we need to get to that place far away and then we'll be safe. Go." I finished these four scenarios at least once. I think I only completed one of them all the way through with random others online. For the rest I relied on the computer AI to direct the other three survivors with mixed results. The computer didn't seem to get in my way too much but I was definitely voted the leader in this situation. They would never go first or end a chapter without me showing them the way.

Online I played with people that would breeze through the terrain since they'd obviously played it before and I was usually rushing to keep up. When I was able to save somebody it felt really satisfying. You almost get the sense that you're really the last people on earth and you've got to help out your buddies in this crazy situation. The voice chat was there to fall back on if I needed it, but most of the things you'd say to the others were said by the characters automatically anyway. Pointing out ammo, health, or special bad guys were taken care of. All that was left to communicate was strategy. I was told to stay at the top of the map at the end of the No Mercy campaign while we were fighting of endless hordes waiting for our escape chopper. Good advice.

Also, online or off, sticking together is a must. Cooperative play is really emphasized since survivors routinely get incapacitated and need saving. Another part that bears mentioning is the AI Director. If you seem to be breezing through a section, you'll soon have a massive tank zombie attacking or a huge horde coming your way. Often, you get through the chapters by the skin of your teeth, limping and bleeding to the safe rooms that mark the end of chapters. I usually hate not being close to full health when I play games, but in this one it completely fits.

So play this if you can. If you have a group of friends who'll play it with you, then this is a definite must-play.

Fallout 3

2009-03-18T00:02:00.013-05:00

Not withstanding my scathing evaluation of Kanenko's 1992 Chester Cheetah title - which is still widely recognized as one of the most baroquely literate uses of the word "sucks" ever to appear on Usenet - I don't often write video game reviews. However, it's not often that I play a game like Fallout 3... or to be more precise, it's rare that I play a game in the manner that I played Fallout 3 this week. Normally I have hardly any time to play games, but this week I worked my way through about two-thirds of Fallout's main plot during a period where my wife was out of town and I was stuck at home with the flu. In other words, I had no distractions, no responsibilities, and I was on drugs most of the time. That means I played Fallout a lot and I got really into it. Yes, yes, I'm talking about a game that came out in October 2008, which makes me the last person on earth to play it, but I'm betting that if you've come this far you're just going to keep on reading anyway.

The Good:

The size and scope of the game world in Fallout 3 is one of its most impressive aspects. I'm sure that Elite has a bigger game universe, but that hardly counts since most of it is procedurally-generated. I'm pretty far along in the game and I bet I've only been to a quarter of the game world so far. But in addition to breadth, there's also depth to it; the number of side-quests and random NPC encounters and strange little details they've filled the world up with is just incredible. This bodes well for replayability, too - maybe my next character will strike off towards the west, away from the areas my current guy has explored. I think that if you were so inclined, you could spend many hours of play time just walking from one end of post-apocalyptic Washington DC to the other, simply looking at stuff. In fact, the place is so huge and byzantine that it could get very frustrating if you couldn't alt-tab over to the Fallout Wiki to get a clue about where to go next. Still, they've managed to realize a very ambitious game world and I salute them for it.

On a related note, the whole retro-future timeline they've concocted is quite interesting, and I enjoyed picking up little bits of alternate history here and there in ruined museums and so forth. As near as I can tell, the Fallout world is basically the same as ours up until about 1950, at which point their world developed cheap nuclear power but skipped most of the advances in electronics and computers that we take for granted. Hence, in 2077 everybody was driving around in huge 50's-looking cars with onboard reactors (think Ford Nucleon) but their computers are primitive, there's radio but no TV, and most stuff still works off of vacuum tubes. Now that I think about it, the future of the Fallout world is pretty much what people in the 1950's thought their future would be like. What a neat design aesthetic.

Anyway, it's two centuries after the nuclear holocaust and things are bad all over. It's obvious as you play Fallout 3 that the designers made a conscious effort to make goodies scarce to keep you from finding too much loot too soon. Bullets, medicine, repairable weapons, and non-radioactive food are all in short supply, and it feels completely in keeping with the game world. You can't just rush into a firefight without being forever vigilant about your ammunition and health supplies, and you learn to target certain enemies who you know will usually be carrying something you can use. I found out very quickly that I had to do a lot of sneaking around, so I could ambush a bad guy or otherwise take him down with as few wasted shots as possible. In Fallout 3, you gain levels and skills but you never really reach the stage of Ultimate Badassery that you inevitably do in other games. Part of this is due to how the difficulty scales as you advance in rank, but scarcity also plays a big part: you may have found a l33t gun, sure, but what good is it going to be when you run out of l33t bullets?

Going hand in hand with the issue of limited resources is the way the designers let you make your own choices about what's right and wrong. Since you have to hoard your supplies all the time, when a situation comes along that (for example) requires you to give away your last bottle of clean water to help out some poor desert-dweller, you often have really to stop and agonize over it. They give you plenty of chances to do good or cause harm, and to be generous or selfish. Sometimes your character has to do bad things just to stay alive, which is certainly not something you see often in a Star Wars game. Even though I was trying to play my character as a good guy, it was surprisingly easy to start thinking "do I help these guys, or should I just shoot them and take their food?". Not often does a video game make me ask myself that, and I appreciate it.

Once the shooting starts, I found myself using the very handy VATS system an awful lot. They way they worked a turn-based combat system with action points and percent-chance-to-hit into a real-time FPS game is quite well done and feels very natural. The slow-mo cinematic combat effects are fun (it's like being in my very own John Woo film!) and popping up from behind some cover to land a headshot with a critical hit and blowing off some monster's head... well, it just never gets old.

Finally, no list of positives for Fallout 3 is complete without a mention of Dogmeat. Almost every NPC companion I've ever encountered in any game has been cheap cannon fodder at best, and a deadly hindrance at worst (I'm looking in your direction, Half-Life 2 squad members who block you from going through a door while alien soldiers are shooting you in the back). But this little guy is different - he's a genuine help in combat, he follows quietly without saying stupid stuff, he growls to alert you to nearby danger, and he usually doesn't get in your way. Plus, you can tell him to go fetch useful stuff for you (I think I once even saw him open a locked ammo box?!). I really liked having him around, in a definite Boy And His Dog kind of way. However, I must say that I wish they had done a little more with him. You can say things like "good boy" and "bad dog" to him, but as far as I could tell, there's no in-game effect no matter what you say. And, although you can tell him to "stay" so he doesn't go chasing after a too-strong group of bad guys, they missed an obvious trick by not letting you whistle to summon him again. And that leads us to...

The Not As Good:

It only takes about ten minutes of playing to recognize that Fallout 3's in-game map is terrible. Yes, I realize that computers in the Fallout universe are very primitive compared to what we have today - but did the map really have to be green-on-green like my dad's TRS-80? Not to mention, showing every story of the building you're in at the same time is so not useful. I can't count the number of times I got confused, thinking I was in the right room but actually being one floor above or below it.

Speaking of moving around - I know I gave props the combat system just a minute ago, but I need to call back a few of those same props. Allow me to un-prop thusly: I love the turn-based VATS system. I do not so much love the "freehand" real-time combat that you're forced to rely on once you use up all your VATS action points. Part of my problem is that I'm just not that great at FPS games, but I think I can legitimately pin some of the blame on the game itself as well. The first-person mouse controls are just kind of clunky and hard to aim. In the third-person view (the POV is switchable between the two) the camera is all over the place, the targeting reticule is often obscured by the back of my character's head, and the lack of any kind of auto-aim makes it even tougher to hit. Even when not in combat, I tend to switch back and forth between first- and third-person depending on the situation; neither one is ever quite right all the time.

Now, remember how I said the game world is super huge and the locations are varied? Well, that openness and lived-in feel has an evil, bearded counterpart called "I keep picking up the same ten items". I'm not saying I don't like my standard run-of-the-mill guns - they kill giant irradiated roaches real good, after all - but in thirty hours of play I've come across exactly two unique weapons. It doesn't have to be Diablo II (you find: Scintillating Ochre Longsword of the Dragon!) but some additional minor variation in the kind of stuff you pick up would be most appreciated. Or, let me do like KotOR and buy upgrades for my various weapons to make them deadlier or more accurate. I kind of hoped they were heading in this direction with the "buy schematics to make weapons" thing they do, but it's still not quite what I was looking for.

One thing that's not in short supply is in Fallout 3 is NPCs to talk to - there must be a couple hundred scattered across the whole wasteland. And that brings me to my last ding on the game: dialogue trees. It's funny, but after playing Mass Effect with its (genius) dialogue wheel, I just can't willingly go back to the same old "pick a response from these three choices" thing we've been doing for the last couple decades. In terms of suspension of disbelief, it is almost literally the difference between playing a part in an interactive movie and navigating the menu options at your ATM. Sure, you're given plenty of chances to have an effect on the outcome of the game by choosing to say one thing versus another, but it seems there are just as many times where the only thing you can do is exhaust every possible reply until they're all grayed out. Luckily you can click through most of the NPC speech.

Conclusion:

Wow, I didn't think this was going to end up being quite so long. Anyway, I'll wrap this up in an uncharacteristically simple way: Fallout 3 is a great game and you should play it if you haven't already. It has a few definite faults, which for the most part are both overshadowed and made all the more obvious by its many high points. Enjoy, and have a Nuka-Cola on me.

- guest blogger Matt

Restive Thoughts

2009-03-16T13:34:00.001-05:00

I used to laugh at other RPGs when I'd go into town during "night" and see all the NPCs standing exactly where they always were, and find all the shops still open. "Ha ha, as if the blacksmith would really be awake to sell me a new helm at 3AM!" I'd laugh, smugly. But now that I'm playing through Fallout 3, where people disappear and shops close up at night, I find myself longing for the old and unrealistic ways. For example, right now I need to buy some more ammo to finish my quest to rid the subway of mutated fire ants, but it's the middle of the night and I can't find anywhere that's open at this hour where I can trade all the useless junk I've picked up in the post-apocalyptic wasteland for some more bullets that I can use to keep playing the game! Argh.

Luckily you can press "T" to make your character wait for a specified number of hours, which is okay. However, I find this kind of clunky, and you also don't regenerate any hitpoints while you're waiting unless you're sleeping in a bed. The problem is, there are only a few designated sleeping areas, and so far my character hasn't found any that don't cost money to use. I'm too stingy (and my character too poor) to pay for a room in the common house, so when my guy comes back to town in the middle of the night, I have to make him stand still for eight hours. I also had a really cool suspension-of-disbelief moment ruined by this mechanism early on... I was travelling through the wasteland towards a town that I was supposed to raid for supplies. It was starting to get dark and I thought it would be easier to fight in the daytime, so I found a sheltered area that was protected by rocks, and made my little "camp" there. I was getting into the whole role-playing thing, but the sight of my guy just standing there like a tree while the sun set and then rose again was too stupid to not break the illusion and make me mad at the game designers.

They almost could have fixed this little problem, and in an interesting way too. Just let me buy a sleeping bag at the general store, which I could then use to go to sleep anywhere I want. Maybe it wouldn't let me sleep in the middle of the town square or inside the enemy base, but that's fine. I want to be able to camp out in the boonies to regnerate HP. Maybe sleeping under the stars would only regnerate a certain percentage of health, but that's believable. Maybe the twist would be that paying to sleep in a real bed is always safe, but when you're camping out you have a certain percent chance to be woken up by wild dogs or raiders or whatever. They could've even added a cool layer of strategic decision-making to it by giving the enemies a chance to totally surprise you while you're alseep, based on your perception stat... if you're caught unawares, you have to fight them off bare-handed.

See? That would have been a cool feature. Oh well.

- guest blogger Matt

Puzzle Quest is back and it's mostly okay

2009-03-15T22:46:00.002-05:00

I mentioned that I went snowboarding for a week recently and I got a chance to spend a lot of time with Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. In fact, I think it might have been the only game I played. My wife played a bit as well, but she was having a bit more trouble with it than the previous one, which she loved. In fact, there were a few times when we were both playing it on our DS's and I'd think, wow, we're super nerdy. Super nerdy and awesome!
Anyway, this one seems to be a bit more difficult since it's less linear. You can basically go anywhere you want and buy anything you want from the start. Which means you have several moments of "uh...where do I go?"
The familiar Puzzle Quest addiction is still there though. My wife and I seem to be in perpetual competition on what level our character is. There are lots (maybe too many) ways to upgrade your arsenal and customize your character. I've bought several items that sounded like a good idea but I quickly realized they weren't that helpful in an actual battle. So the game is deep and I feel like I'm just getting the hang of it after several hours.
The DS version, it seems, is not the one you really want if you have a choice. Load times are ridiculous, the touch screen sensitivity is a bit off, and you're frequently running into situations where you can't see all the information you want to even with two screens. So I may pick it up when it comes out on Xbox to see if that one's better.

WWII...again

2009-03-15T21:50:00.005-05:00

Since I've been back from snowboarding, I haven't had a whole lot of time to get back into console gaming, but that should change this week while the wife is out of town. It's just me and the dog, and he's pretty bad w/ a controller.
I've been playing some Call of Duty: World at War campaign and trying to decide if I like it. It's certainly no Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I think I really prefer the modern setting for better weapons and relevant settings. WWII has been way overdone in games. In fact, I keep getting this confused with the other ones I've played. Medal of Honor: Airborne comes to mind, but I'm sure there's others. Treyarch has certainly picked up a few few tricks from the folks that did Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward), but I don't ever remember being this frustrated with COD4. I know that endless streams of enemies and frantic action is kind of the thing for the COD series, but in this one it seems like I keep crossing an invisible line where the game decides "oh, okay, he made it past the checkpoint guys, everybody stop shooting!" It's sort of eerie, really. There will be crap blowing up everywhere and your vision is obscured by dust and blood but when you advance past a certain rock and the commander yells that it's all clear and the enemies seem to disappear all of a sudden. Ok, it's a bit more subtle than that, but still sort of annoying.
I also seem to find spots where I get killed about 5 times in a row but decide to try a slightly different strategy and get past it no problem. So I'm sort of frustrated with it, but I guess I'll push on through to the end. I looked it up and I guess I'm on mission 12 of 15, so the end is not too far away.
One thing that I do appreciate is that you play sections in the Pacific Theater and as a Russian soldier pushing into the heart of Germany. This, at least is sort of new for WWII games. Also, the cut scenes are great multimedia presentations that give you a sense of the progression of the war including real footage (which is sometimes surprisingly graphic) from the time. My wife told her friends about this and they thought it was terrible that a game uses these graphic scenes, but I think it's nice to remind you that this stuff actually happened.
I doubt I'll bother with the multiplayer much even though I just cashed in one of my One Free Month of Xbox Live Gold cards. I did that mainly to play Left 4 Dead, which I'm loving, but will talk about in another post.

Deadly Creatures: final thoughts

2009-02-28T00:07:00.003-06:00

Ok, now that I'm done I see a setting for input sensitivity for gestures and pointers. Maybe that would have helped. Whoops. I'm not sure how long it took me total, maybe 6-8 hours? But I flew through the second half in one sitting. I actually appreciate games that are not too long so I can finish 'em and send 'em back to GameFly.

Wow, I had the interview with Billy Bob Thornton that's on the disc playing in the background just now until I realized he was just going on and on (and on) about snakes. Shut up, dude!

Well, Left 4 Dead should show up in the mail soon, but I'm off to Canada for a long week of snowboarding, so it'll be just the DS for me. Galactrix came out just in time. Oh, and just last night, I had the exact same thought as Stephen Totilo did about Galactrix. Which, I guess I ought to mention that his Game Diary series is one of the reasons I started up this blog again. It's refreshingly simple well written. Sort of a "I played this and next up is that" type thing.

Setting up a new computer is sort of like a game

2009-02-26T22:09:00.003-06:00

Not much time for games today since my new laptop showed up and I've been customizing the heck out of it. I played Galactrix long enough to do the first battle and be confused on which way the gems are gonna fall. I miss gravity.

Since I made a list of things to do to set up the new laptop, I figured I might as well share. Let me know if I've forgotten anything.

1. Install Firefox

Hide shortcuts to Internet Explorer (can't uninstall since a few sites require it)
Extensions: Adblock, All-In-One-Gestures, Foxmarks, IE Tab
Tools::Options::Security::Master password enable

2. Install iTunes

I'd prefer something else since I only use about 10% of its features and it's a resource hog, but it works
Resubscribe to podcasts
Import music/playlists from external HD

3. Install Eset Nod Virus protection and buy subscription

4. Install SpyBot Search & Destroy

5. Install Audacity

6. Set up sharing w/ Xbox 360

7. Play around w/ Vista widgets?

8. Disable stupid stuff that automatically runs on startup

9. Profit!

A new record?

2009-02-25T22:48:00.002-06:00

I may have set a record for games played in a day today.
N+
MarioKart DS
Geometry Wars (DS)
Big Bang Mini (DS)
Deadly Creatures
Dr. Mario (Wii)
Ok, maybe not an all time record. Back in the day you'd play an Atari 2600 game for about 3 min. and then yank it out and repeat the process w/ a different game. I probably set the record on one of those days. But still, this is a lot of different games in a day for me lately.
I'll be traveling for over a week starting next Monday, so maybe I shouldn't be getting my fill of DS games just yet. I just need to find myself a copy of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix...

Gears 2 and some creepy crawlies

2009-02-22T19:22:00.003-06:00

So I finished Gears of War 2 the other day. It was pretty much what you'd expect from a sequel. More of the formula established in the first, but with crazier settings and more "character development." Or at least what passes for it in the testosterone-injected shooter. I enjoyed it well enough I guess, but as you can tell from the time since the last post, I wasn't rushing to the computer to write about it.
I started Deadly Creatures on the Wii as well. Two different people laughed when I told them the name of the game I just started, but it seems decent to me. Being able to crawl up on walls (and eventually, I hear, ceilings) is pretty neat until the camera that tries to follow you gets confused. I'm not sure what's messed up about it, but I don't remember having this problem in the zero G sections of Dead Space. Or am I comparing apples to oranges?
I'm amused by the roaring sound effects that accompany any spider or scorpion attack, and the the chittering feet sound is kinda creepy too. A few times I felt like there might have been somthing crawling on me. So job well done, I guess. But the Wii motion controls are a hinderance. Most of the special moves are mapped to moving the remote or nunchuk this way or that. But the timing and sensitivity of these are a bit off. So I end up flailing my hands around for no reason. Which is frustrating.
So in summary: neat concept, art, and sound...but bad controls.

Bow chika waow wow!

2009-02-02T23:09:00.002-06:00

So I forgot to mention my original idea for posting about Prince of Persia. The gratuitous sexual overtones (or is it undertones?)! I mean, think about it. This guy and this girl run around in the wilderness doing gymnastics and form a weird dependence on each other. The dialogue is always hinting that they want to hook up. And lets not even get started with the whole fertile ground thing. (Which for some reason they pronounce "fur tile" as two separate words). And when you get to the fertile grounds? You press a button really fast until the girl has an orgasm. Then the land is healed. Or something. But you have to go and clean up the white stuff. The light seeds.

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