PAX 08
Sunny and I just got back from PAX 08, which was our second PAX. I don't have much of a basis for comparison since I can only really compare PAX 08 with PAX 07, but this year's PAX felt a lot like more of the same to me, except for being more crowded.
One of the high points this year was watching
The Gamers: Dorkness Rising on a whim (we haven't seen the first one). For the first five minutes or so I thought that Sunny and I might end up having to discreetly leave, but the show turned out to be very entertaining and even made me nostalgic for table-top role playing. It's nice to get blind-sided by something that I assumed wouldn't be for me and end up having some stuff to think about afterward.
On the exhibition floor, Sunny got her first exposure to Little Big Planet (I'm already bored with all of the hype surrounding it and just want the damned thing to be released already, but Sunny hadn't seen a demo before), and I got to see a bit of Left 4 Dead. Both of us were wide-eyed and giddy at our respective eye candy of choice. There was other cool stuff happening too, but I didn't get my picture taken with anybody, whereas last year I had my pic taken beside a Big Daddy statue for BioShock, and with a Parappa the Rapper mascot. I also didn't score much free stuff, but Sunny and I did get a couple of free MtG booster packs--which is to say that we lost in a pair of demo matches to other people, who got free tournament packs instead of mere boosters. At one point I was tempted at a $45 copy of Seiken Densetsu 3 (cart only) and at another I saw a $50 copy of Guardian Heroes (box, no manual), but in the end I couldn't shake the feeling that if I really wanted that stuff I'd just order it on the internet.
I can't emphasize enough just how much the increased population of PAX changed the event. Last year when we lined up for Console Freeplay, there were only four people ahead of us. This year we had to take a number, go do something else for an hour, and come back before our number was called. (We ended up playing Lego Indiana Jones. It was alright, but not any better than Lego Star Wars--maybe not even as good.) I suggested that we go watch a screening of The Guild, and when we got to the Raven theater room, the lineup was so massive that we decided to go find something else to do.
And yet even with the drastically increased population, it didn't seem like people had discovered Juice It, which is seriously the best place to grab a snack or even a light meal anywhere in downtown Seattle. The guy who runs that place is the closest person to a living saint that I know of, and it was the only place open in the convention center where one didn't have to wait in line for half an hour to get something.
I should explain that one of the mandates that Sunny and I had for this year was to spend less time at PAX and more time trying to see Seattle. This was a good year for it too, because PAX was busier and it already felt like we'd seen a lot of it from last year. On top of that, we hadn't been to Seattle before (except the year before, when we barely ever strayed from PAX) so this year we ventured out a little.
Sunny and I aren't huge on "touristy" things when we travel. Generally what we want is to find some good restaurants, check out the local shopping, and try to get a sense of the urban culture where we're at. It's a little hard to describe what we do, honestly, because we're mostly home-bodies, but for the few things that we tend to get out for at home (eating out being chief among them), we generally try to do the same things when we travel. There are often exceptions to this rule.
The reason I explain this is because we ate out at three different restaurants and the best of the three was merely good, not great. The first of the three was by far the most expensive: Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. We had a fairly pricey steak dinner ($60 per plate), and they drenched everything in butter. I'm not exaggerating for effect: we were truly assaulted by a barrage of butter, sour cream, and hollandaise sauce. It was as if they measure the economy of their food in calories.
We were still recovering from the massive dinner the night before when we decided to hit up a "French" restaurant near the Pike marketplace for lunch. We ordered some croque monsieur sandwiches and they were absolutely caked with cheese (if they'd only been able to layer on the ham to match, I might not have minded). Our salads were also drenched in oily dressing, to the point where the lettuce collapsed under its own weight. Again, it was a case of the food being much heavier than we were prepared for, and I started to feel a little ill. My body was clearly telling me that it was fed up.
As we started to look around at various other lunch places, I started to get the sense that it was the same story all over the place. There were potential exceptions that we didn't get to explore, like a promising looking chowder spot. Still, I had the sense that there were more places we'd want to avoid than places we'd want to eat, and that surprised me given that we weren't far from home. Juice It became our lifeline with their remarkably un-heavy food.
The third big dinner we had was at a place that will be familiar to many PAX attendees: the
Dragonfish Asian Cafe. The food there was pretty good, and I would gladly eat there again. One of the things we ordered was the seared Ahi tuna, which was great (be prepared for raw fish, of course). We also ordered the Singapore Noodles, which in my opinion didn't have enough curry and should have some kind of spicy sausage in them. The whole experience was a welcome change of pace from the steak dinners from the night before.
One thing that surprised me was the lack of sushi restaurants in the area. Where I live, sushi joints are as numerous as coffee shops (and the coffee shops are almost as numerous as they are in Seattle). I thought that the Dragonfish Cafe would qualify as a sushi restaurant, but while they do serve sushi, they were much more generically Asian-American than west coast imitation Japanese. Where downtown Seattle dwellers go for udon noodles and raw salmon remains elusive to me.
We concluded PAX by watching the Omegathon final. I was impressed by the choice of Vs. Excitebike as the final event, but it took too long to start (they ran rather late) and was over all too soon. Last year's Omegathon was definitely more exciting, even if the unveiling of Halo 3 did add a commercialized tinge to the proceedings. Sunny also got bathed in body odor from a tubby guy who appeared out of the crowd in front of us very suddenly after we'd already been standing in our spot for quite a while. I considered saying something to the guy, but in the end I felt too sorry from him--I imagine that he had probably wandered our way after being ridiculed in some other part of the crowd. Smelly geeks are, unfortunately, a common reality at these sorts of conventions, and it's better just to bear with it sometimes. Sunny and I still joke about the "dancing hobbit" who wafted an unpleasant breeze of body odor through our general vicinity during one of the concerts at PAX 07.
Overall I had a great weekend and many fun experiences, but I'm reluctant to predict that Sunny and I will go again next year. PAX is fun, but it can also be a stressful assault on the senses with its long waits in line, bombardment of advertisements, flashing lights, loud noises, and funky odors. There's a low level of culture shock involved too: as much of a gamer as I am, my experience with gaming hasn't been shaped by PAX nearly as much as many of the other attendees, and the gaming culture that I call home isn't always compatible with what a stereotypical Penny Arcade fan considers to be gaming culture. I also haven't warmed up much to Seattle, although most likely I simply haven't had enough time. Maybe we'll just take a break from PAX next year and see what it evolves into in the meanwhile. PAX continues to undergo some growing pains, and I hope that it doesn't lose any of the distinctive character that makes it such a great community.
Battlefield: Bad Company, Castle Crashers
I've been busy with work lately, so I haven't had much time for gaming lately, but I've still managed to keep up on a few things. I will also be attending PAX this weekend, so that should help keep me somewhat in touch.
Two games I've been playing lately are IL-2: Sturmovik and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. I haven't been playing a ton of these games--just the odd hour or two--but I've spent enough time with them that it's worth mentioning, especially since both are such excellent games.
Sturmovik is now available on Steam at the bargain price point of $10 (flight stick not included, of course). There's an active online community that you can find if you download a somewhat obscure tool called Hyperlobby, and that adds a great deal of playability to the game. But the true appeal of Strumovik is in the wide range of realism settings: on "easy" it plays like a fairly arcade-y WW II flight sim, and on "realistic" it's arguably more difficult than flying a WW II era plane in real life. The learning curve is steep, to say the least; in order to get into it, I had to have a buddy present to tutor me. There are some tutorials included with the game, but they're non-interactive and fairly slow paced. Once you get accustomed to the game, it's extremely addictive. Easier flight sims cannot satisfy the cravings that IL-2 Sturmovik leaves one with, which is why people are still playing it roughly seven years after its release.
The onslaught of new Xbox Live Arcade games continues with Castle Crashers, Bionic Commando: Re-armed, and Galaga Legions. All of these games have impressive pedigrees: Castle Crashers is by Behemoth, the developers of Alien Hominid, BC:R is of course a Capcom remake (joining other recent Capcom throwbacks including 1942: Joint Strike and Commandos 3: Wolf of the Battlefield), and Galaga Legions is by the same developers as Pac-Man Championship Ed. I haven't played any of these games in much depth yet, but I've spent some time with each of them (in the case of Galaga Legions, I only played the demo).
Castle Crashers is very hyped, and well worth that hype. It's an excellent multiplayer game with only one catch: the online game needs some serious debugging. I played online with some friends for about an hour and we lost our connection several times--sometimes even losing progress (XP and gold) as a result. Even with this flaw, Castle Crashers is a worthy XBLA game, and one of my current favorites even with the likes of Geometry Wars 2 competing for attention. I do hope that the technical issues get addressed soon.
Bionic Commando: Re-armed is also hyped and also excellent. It has a hardcore appeal--certainly much more than a typical XBLA game--and that gives it a great deal of replay value. Depending on your preferences or familiarity with the original Bionic Commando NES game which BC:R is an adaptation of, you may find the controls frustrating, bordering on unplayable. The thing to understand here is that the difficult gameplay is by design; it is what makes BC:R worth playing in the first place. There's plenty of content here and the game is well made, but make sure you know what you're getting into before committing to it. I would expect some players to find BC:R more tedious than entertaining, but it is still an excellent game.
I had high hopes for Galaga Legions since Pac-Man Championship Ed is one of my favourite games and so is the original Galaga. Unfortunately, I've found that whereas Pac-Man CE is a modern re-imagining of Pac-Man that is still very identifiable as Pac-Man, Galaga Legions is not much like the original Galaga at all. I respect the fact that the design of Galaga Legions is trying to be original and re-invent shoot-em-ups, but its efforts seem misguided, and in this respect it is more like Schitzoid (ugh) than like Ikaruga (woot). I will probably revisit Galaga Legions at some point and try again to get into it (I really
want to like it), but on first glance it doesn't even come close to stealing the limelight away from Geometry Wars 2.
And finally, I've been playing Battlefield: Bad Company, both single player and online. I'm not a hardcore Battlefield series fan, but I've played most of them, and the only ones that I really liked in the past were Battlefield: 1942 and Battlefield 2. Turning Battlefield into a console game seemed like a bad idea to me, so I was surprised to find that BF:BC is as good as it is. The online game feels like the old Battlefield experience that I know from playing Battlefield 2 online on PC, and the single player experience is decent.
After about the first half-hour of the single player campaign, I started relentlessly skipping as many cut scenes as I could and not bothering to listen to the dialog even for the few short cinematics that I couldn't skip. There's some humor to be had there, from what I understand, and the writing is better than Army of Two, but that's not saying much. Frankly, the plots and characters from every Xbox FPS from Gears of War to Halo 3 are all utter shit to me (the settings, however, are often excellent). They all have a similar tone, and I can't tolerate them any more than I can tolerate the spiky-haired emo protagonists of cliched JRPGs. That having been said, my disgust with the writing in BF:BC (which is roughly above par for the genre), has not detracted much from my enjoyment of the game. I didn't expect for the story to appeal to me, so I wasn't disappointed when it didn't.
I'll throw in here that Rainbow Six: Vegas follows the "shit story, awesome setting" pattern. I was once a pretty big R6 fan, and I really enjoyed the storyline from the original game (I may have enjoyed the story from Rogue Spear as well, but I don't recall how it went). R6: Vegas has an okay storyline--it doesn't really offend me--but I didn't end up caring much about it. The gameplay and levels were so interesting that the bland plot was completely eclipsed.
Anyway, getting back to BF: Bad Company, one thing that concerns me about the game is that it is likely to baffle new-comers to the Battlefield series. The control layout isn't as tight as Halo 3 or Gears of War, because the game tries to preserve as much functionality as it can from the PC games. Figuring out what to do in multiplayer games is much easier if one has played other Battlefield games online before, and I can't confidently say that BF:BC is a great way to be introduced to the series, although playing through the single player game will help a new player to become more familiar with the basics. Whether or not a new player understands that BF:BC is the way it is because it's based on a PC FPS and adapted to the console world is another matter.
BF:BC has been hyped as a technological marvel, and while it does have reasonably impressive graphics and destructible environments, it didn't impress me all that much. The fact that it's fun is more impressive than any technical marvels that it presents.
Relatively speaking, I would not put BF:BC on the same level as Rainbow Six: Vegas, Gears of War, or Halo 3. It doesn't strike me as a classic; it is simply a strong game that's worth a try if you are either a console FPS or a Battlefield fan.
Setting the Record Straight
From an online chat that I just had with Matt:
Okay, I've got to get this one off my chest, just to be clear (don't worry, no hostility coming):
One of the highlights of my gaming life is going to EB Games or some similar shitty store with about $50 in my pocket and looking for two or three used games.
I used to do this all of the time with the PS2, and it was awesome.
I would pick up something like Virtua Fighter 4, R-Type Final, and Castlevania: Lament of Innocense.
All for under $50
Most of these games would suck and not even entertain me for a week.
But that's okay... when you're only spending $15, it only has to entertain you for a week.
That is a big part of what I enjoy about gaming.
Now here's the key part:
I can only get that experience on the Xbox 360.
The PS3 doesn't do it
at all
For two reasons:
first, PS3 games are more expensive than Xbox 360 games, period.
Second, even if they weren't, I'd run out of PS3 games to screw around with after a few months.
Only the Xbox 360 has a wide abundance of cheap console games that are worth playing for a few weeks and then chucking aside.
And to me, that is why it's the best console to have.
I've probably over-stated my position here quite a bit, but it's still fairly accurate.
Geometry Wars 2, Braid
We're currently in the middle of an awesome gaming rush, especially for Nintendo DS owners who are RPG fans: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2, Final Fantasy IV DS, Izuna 2, Etrian Odyssey 2, and Trauma Center 2 are among the recently released NDS titles for gamers who are into that sort of thing. I haven't even been trying to keep up on that front, mostly because Xbox Live Arcade has seen new releases such as Geometry Wars 2, Braid, 1942: Joint Strike, and Soul Calibur. There's also this little Soul Calibur IV thing going around--maybe you've heard of it. :)
If you haven't already done so, you should pick up Geometry Wars 2 and Braid as soon as possible. This may require buying an Xbox 360 if you don't already have one, as well as connecting it to the internet and registering for an Xbox Live account (a silver account, which is free, is sufficient for purchasing XBLA games). GW2 and Braid are probably not enough on their own to justify the purchase of an Xbox 360, but they do help to strengthen the case that the 360 is extremely worthwhile.
Geometry Wars 2 is one of those games the stretches the boundaries of perfection, like Portal or World of WarCraft before it. GW2 is not for everyone; some gamers find shoot-em-ups boring, I presume. But as a shoot-em-up, GW2 approaches the level of Ikaruga in terms of quality, and it is as noteworthy of an entry in the genre as Gradius, Galaga, or Space Invaders. I have been in love with this game ever since first playing it, and I'm confident that my admiration for it will stand the test of time.
Braid is similarly good and has the fearlessly gutsy appeal that Shadow of the Colossus and Psychonauts have. Braid is a puzzle game resembling a cross between Mario vs. Donkey Kong and a 2-D version of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (I refer primarily to the time-bending mechanics). There is a heavy platformer element to it, and it even parodies the original Super Mario Bros. in obvious places, but this format is somewhat deceptive in that Braid is thoroughly a puzzle game--perhaps even a quest game.
One thing to be aware of is that Braid is not for the faint of heart. The puzzles in this game are very hard, bordering on brutal; it is the kind of game where you convince yourself that collecting a certain puzzle piece is logically impossible, and have to sleep on the problem before stumbling across a solution. Of course, one could simply read the answers on the internet, but to do so is to utterly defeat the purpose of the game. Braid is meant to be suffered through, and I think that anyone who has the stomach for it will find it to be an amazing experience.
As for Soul Calibur IV, it certainly is pretty, but I need more time with it to tell if I will grow to like it as much as I like Soul Calibur and Soul Calibur 2. Absurdly enough, Braid and GW2 have kept me from sinking a lot of time into it.
I haven't been enjoying 1942: Joint Strike as much as I expected to, probably because it has been overshadowed so badly by GW2. 1942:JS is similar in quality to Commandos 3: Wolf of the Battlefield, which is to say that it is certainly worthwhile and will have a strong appeal for fans of both shoot-em-ups and Capcom, but it does struggle to compete for precious time on my gaming schedule at present.
As a quick, final note, I've been fairly addicted to Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. I expected to tire of it quickly, but for whatever reason this has not transpired. It's possible that I've reached some kind of critical mass in my enjoyment of motorsports games that has allowed me to truly appreciate a Gran Turismo game, or perhaps it's just that I find the limited scope of GT5: Prologue liberating in that I'm no longer overwhelmed by track and car choices. Whatever the reason, I've found myself returning to GT5: Prologue repeatedly.
