The Video Game Revue

New Blog

2009-08-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, I'm writing for a new gaming blog now, spearheaded by my buddy Matt: Nerdgasm. The tone of it is going to be rather different from The Video Game Revue. In particular, you'll find more frequent, shorter posts there than you will here, and it's not all strictly about video games. Whether or not I continue writing for this blog at all is uncertain at this point, but I may decide to post the occasional wandering rant here--who knows.

PS3 Disk Usage Boggle

2009-05-27T23:16:00.000-07:00

I had a bit of a shock today when my PS3 reported during a download that I only have 5 gigs free on it. I don't generally keep close tabs on how much disk space is left on my PS3 because a) you have to visit "System Information" under the settings menu to find out, and b) my PS3 has 40 gigs, which seems like overkill given that I only own 5 PS3 games on disc (not including another five or so downloaded games like Noby Noby Boy, Tekken 5, and Wipeout HD). A quick visit to the Game Data Utility revealed that my games have been installing a lot more data than I supposed.

For instance, Fritzkrieg brought over Fallout 3 one day and we played for about an hour, maybe two. Fallout 3 quietly installed 4 gigs of data in the background--data which has sat idle since. That's 10% of my total disk space used up without me knowing about it. Games like MGS4 and GT5: Prologue tell you when they're installing data to disc, and they aren't shy about taking up quite a lot of space (several gigs apiece).

By contrast, my Xbox 360 only has a 15 gig drive, and I own over 55 Xbox 360 games on disc (I was somewhat surprised by my tally, and that doesn't even include the roughly 20 Xbox Live arcade games that I own), but I currently have roughly 3 gigs free, and that's after using the install-to-hard-drive utility on Left 4 Dead to work around the annoying disc drive noise issue that I was complaining about earlier. It's easy for me to keep tabs on how much space is free on my Xbox because it reports the amount of free space right in several navigation menus that I see frequently, such as when I select a device to save a game to.

What freaks me out a little about this whole situation is that, at this rate, if I bought just a handful of other PS3 games, I'd run out of disk space. Presumably the system is smart enough to start uninstalling older game data at this point to make room for the new, but I still find it odd that on a home gaming console with a 40 gig drive, well over half of that could be consumed by as few as five games. I had expected space to feel very tight on the Xbox 360 and over-abundant on the PS3, but that hasn't been the case.

On a loosely related note, what's up with Empire: Total War being a whopping 15 gig install? Not only does that take quite a while to download off of Steam, but once I fired up the game, I honestly couldn't tell what all of that disk space is really being used for. Perhaps the problem is simply that I can't run it at full spec, but still... 15 gigs!

Latest Kotaku News

2009-05-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Meh. Usually I just email this stuff out, but it seems like all of the people I email are subscribed to this blog anyway. There have been some exciting stories on Kotaku recently:

Capcom confirmed what was thought to be impossible: Tatsunoko vs. Capcom will be coming to North America, and the new version will have a playable demo at E3. Previously it was said that licensing issues would make a localized version of this game excessively unlikely, but perhaps Capcom was swayed by the wild success of Street Fighter IV. I'm simply speculating here.

Yet another Lunar remake is coming, this time in the form of a PSP game entitled "Lunar: Harmony of the Silver Star." Assuming that this is to be a straight-up adaptation of the original Lunar: The Silver Star, which was a Sega CD game, it will be the second remake. The first remake was Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for Sega Saturn and the original PlayStation. If history continues to repeat itself, we can expect to see a remake of Lunar: Eternal Blue for the PSP before too long. This time, however, Working Designs is no longer around to handle the localization effort--although perhaps some of their employees are still available. Again, this is all speculation.

There's a new KoF XII trailer, which is very Japanese and rather entertaining. In related news, a detailed analysis shows that it will be impossible to look up Athena's skirt in KoF XII. I suppose that it is important to get the facts. o_O

Valve is going all-out with their "Meet the Spy" promo for Team Fortress 2, including an excellent animated short and some gag posts on their blog.

And finally, the survivors from Left 4 Dead were seen in Rock Band.

Now you're all up-to-date. :)

Lost Odyssey, Shadowrun, Midnight Club LA

2009-05-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

I took a bit of a break from blogging there... work stuff, mainly. I've covered a lot of gaming ground since my last post; probably too much to talk about here. I'll make this a long post. :)

World of Warcraft: Patch 3.1

Xzi (my World of Warcraft main) is finally level 79 as of yesterday (technically it was very early today, since it was after midnight). I've found that the WoW players among my friends fall into two distinct camps: those who are shocked that I'm only level 79 and it's the middle of May already, and those who are surprised that I could get so far so soon. Needless to say, these groups represent very different types of WoW players, and I find that I don't fit in well with either group.

I'm particularly happy about the new dual-spec feature. Xzi is a Priest (Undead), and through his first 40 levels I imagined that some day he'd be a formidable raid healer. Then I discovered PvP (Battlegrounds primarly; I'm not hardcore enough for Arena) and respeced Shadow. Xzi remained a Shadow Priest for three years. But now, thanks to dual-spec, I can finally have it both ways. Xzi's alter ego is a Holy spec healer. He's not quite up to doing raids yet, but he may get there eventually.

Sunny and I are in an excellent guild, which is entirely her doing. Unlike myself, she has reached a level of play where she can get the attention of a serious guild and make herself useful. They let me in only because I'm her husband and she insisted on it. With these people, I don't talk about the fact that my main just hit level 79. Most of the others hit level 80 with their mains more than four months ago, and many of them have also hit 80 with their Death Knights. I'm pretty sure a few of them have more than three level 80 characters now.

Lost Odyssey

I've cleared the first disc and then some of Lost Odyssey, and it's clear to me that this is a fine JRPG. It has a few hiccups; for instance, I found some of the boss battles and dungeon areas tedious. These parts of the game pass quickly, however.

Lost Odyssey is light on gameplay and heavy on story. The equipment system appears very simple since each character has only three equipment slots, but there is some equipment crafting involved and equipment ties in with learning magic, so there is some complexity there. Exploration is fairly linear (in Final Fantasy X style) and combat leans towards fewer and more difficult encounters (some of the combat mechanics remind me a little of Digital Devil Saga).

The story has a particularly heavy contemporary anime style to it and perhaps resembles shows like Fullmetal Alchemist or Scrapped Princess (I've only seen a handful of eps for these shows, so I'm reaching here). This actually hindered my enjoyment of the game initially since I was skeptical of that style being able to deliver much excellent content, but Lost Odyssey (not unlike Fullmetal Alchemist) does manage to hit some dramatic high notes despite often being corny.

Lost Odyssey occasionally manages to be genuinely beautiful--not just in its visual style, but in its storytelling and gameplay elements as well. It is in those glimpses of excellence that I've been able to find the motivation to continue playing the game. I may even be able to finish it.

Shadowrun

I picked up an Xbox 360 copy of Shadowrun recently for $12. I knew going in that the game has a strict multiplayer focus, and that there really isn't a single player campaign to speak of (there are only bot matches). Many critics slammed Shadowrun for this, saying that it feels like an incomplete game, and perhaps compared to Halo or Gears of War, this much is true.

What immediately surprised me about Shadowrun is how good it is. The gameplay is solid and there are many subtleties to the game design. It has the class-based feel of Team Fortress 2, except that the classes are customizable. I was initially skeptical about many of the weapons and powers, but there are many surprisingly viable combinations to play with.

For example, I was convinced upon trying the katana that I would have to play Shadowrun obsessively for days in order to start getting kills with it. This was not the case at all: I was a threat pretty much as soon as I picked the katana up. This is not to say that the katana is overpowered, either; not everybody was using it, and I found myself easily able to fend off katana-wielders with an SMG or shotgun.

One thing that I was relatively sure of was that the online community playing Shadowrun would wreck the game for me. When I've tried to play games like Battlefield: Bad Company or Rainbox Six: Vegas online, my experience is generally ruined by the concentration of elite players who don't leave enough slack for novices to do much good. By some miracle, this is not the case with Shadowrun.

Perhaps it is because the multiplayer focus of the game forces even novices to play online rather than satisfying themselves with a single-player campaign. Perhaps it is a cultural thing and Shadowrun is not considered a hardcore gamer's game. I honestly can't say; all I know is that my experience with Shadowrun, as a first-day player, was overwhelmingly positive. Even the presence of Windows players did nothing to ruin the game for me.

This game was definitely worth the $12. It's one of the best multiplayer games that I've played on the 360 yet.

Left 4 Dead

Even though I already have L4D on Steam, I picked up an Xbox 360 copy. Partly I wanted to play it on my big TV screen. Partly I wanted more experience with console FPSes. Partly I wanted to support Valve for making such an excellent game. Partly I was curious as to how well the port stands up. Partly L4D is a cheap enough 360 game to make this option tempting. And partly I just wanted an easy source of achievement points (which L4D definitely is).

L4D on 360 is a nearly flawless port of the Windows game. The only problem that I have with the game at all is a hardware problem: it makes the disc drive in my 360 console buzz like a propeller plane. I don't know if this is a manufacturing defect with the disc itself or if its more of a software problem with the game asking the drive to spin at a particular speed. In any case, playing L4D makes my Xbox much, much louder than it normally is, and I worry that I'm shortening the lifespan of the hardware every time I play the game. I don't have this problem with any of the other games in my Xbox 360 library. Perhaps I should use the "install to drive" feature so that L4D doesn't have to load off of the disc at all.

One of the things that I like about L4D on Steam is that the player community is somewhat more casual than the community who plays Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike. I say "somewhat" because there are still a lot of obsessive douchebags playing L4D, but at least sometimes you'll wind up in a party of people who just want to enjoy the game. I've found this to be the case on Xbox Live as well: not everyone playing L4D is an elite nutjob, and that's refreshing (as per my Shadowrun rant above).

Midnight Club: Los Angeles

When I first fired this game up, I had a momentary crisis where I'd forgotten why I bought it in the first place. Then I realized that I was still playing in chase cam view, so I switched the camera to the cockpit setting and experienced immediate relief.

Yes, Midnight Club is a stupid street racing game. Other than the presence of licensed real-world cars, there's little reason to recommend it over, say, Burnout Paradise. The blatant culture of The Fast & The Furious is likely to drive away any intelligent player, unless that sort of thing is a guilty pleasure for you (welcome to the club). But Midnight Club LA has a cockpit view, and that, believe it or not, is a big fucking deal.

My first experience with cockpit cam in a racing game was Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. Initially I didn't like it because it made an already difficult game even harder: one can't see the road nearly as well (especially compared to the bumper cam), and I even found the movement of the in-game driver's hands on the steering wheel to be confusing. However, I toughed it out for a while and came to be hooked on this way of playing racing games.

Since then I've experienced cockpit cam in GTR: Evo, Grid, Race Pro, and now Midnight Club: LA. It immediately makes any racing game fully three times better. Racing games without cockpit cam are still playable, but it's like eating french fries without salt.

So my review of Midnight Club: LA is that, yes, it has cockpit cam. The game sucks in most other ways, but those ways don't matter as much as the fact that it has cockpit cam and you can almost feel like you're in an actual car when you play the game.

Resident Evil 5, Final Fantasy: Crystal Defenders

2009-03-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

Matt was asking me how RE5 is, and mentioned that he heard it was more of an "action" game than a survival horror game. There is some truth to that, but it's not quite accurate: aside from the co-op play aspect and the changes to inventory management, RE5 plays the same as RE4. What makes it more action and less survival horror has, so far, been the level design. I find that scrounging for items and fending off zombie hordes is roughly the same as it was in RE4, but exploration has been de-emphasized.

RE5 also has more of the style of an action game. The main characters are typical action hero stereotypes, whereas Leon Kennedy had a softer edge to him--by which I guess I mean that he looked like somebody you might bump into in a shopping mall (in his default outfit, that is). Chris Redfield would look right at home in a Predator movie. These stylistic differences go beyond the characters to encompass the setting, the dialogue, and the overall premise of the game.

The thing that originally struck me about RE4 was how shamelessly campy it is, but in a way that really works. It could be almost laugh-out-loud goofy at times while piquing my interest all the same. RE5 tones that factor down a great deal, which may be a refreshing change, but I still manage to be disappointed. I get the sense that RE4 will still be well worth looking back on in ten years, while RE5 won't be particularly interesting. It's pretty much the same feeling that I get when comparing Devil May Cry 3 (an utterly amazing game that propelled the series forward in a big way) to Devil May Cry 4 (more of the same with an upgraded graphics engine and not enough of a twist to really distinguish itself from its predecessor).

Another game that has been eating up hours of my life lately is Final Fantasy: Crystal Defenders, which is, from what I understand, a port of a cellphone game that borrows its theme and most of its artwork from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill tower defense game, but a well-made one; as such, it manages to be extremely immersive and addictive. It's a little on the pricey side at 800 MS points given that a) obviously not a resources went into producing it (no flashy 3D models or epic musical scores here), and b) similar experiences can be had for free with online Flash games and the like, but still, I'm glad that I picked it up.

I've been playing a ton of other games lately. In particular, I played all of the way through Bully: Scholarship Ed., I got back into Mirror's Edge for a couple of evenings, and I picked up Noby Noby Boy from the PlayStation Network Store. I'm also continuing to make gradual process through Final Fantasy VII (my long overdue second play-through) and Lost Odyssey. The primary reason that I haven't written more about these is simply that I've been busy.

Indie Games on Steam

2009-02-20T21:46:00.000-08:00

Steam has continued to have amazing sales every weekend, with last week's being every Ghost Recon game for $20, and the week before being a big discount on Left 4 Dead that reportedly increased sales by 3000%. This week's sale gives gamers a chance to support the little guys by offering five indie titles for a mere $10. Naturally, I wouldn't be writing this post if I didn't succumb to the temptation to take Steam up on their offer.

I've already tried all five games and they make a nice little ensemble. Four of the games are well suited for playing in a window, which can be a nice feature if you want to grab a quick game while doing something else on the side; I exclude Multiwinia in this regard because, well, it's a pretty freakin' intense RTS and really deserves to be played fullscreen. The overall verdict is that the package is definitely worth $10 if you feel like trying something new, and there's even a chance that one or two of the games will strongly appeal to you. Read on for particulars.

Trials 2

Trials 2: Second Edition is one of the strongest titles of the bunch, in my opinion. It's a motocross stunt racer--a cross between Excitebike and Trackmania. There's a pretty steep learning curve involved, and I didn't make it very far in the roughly 30 minutes that I played, but it seems like a worthwhile game if you stick with it. I'm likely to revisit this one from time to time and may even get hooked on it.

Eets

Eets is a Flash-based puzzle game that's a little bit like Lemmings crossed with The Incredible Machine. I only played this one for about 15 minutes because it didn't particularly grab me. The concept is good, but unoriginal, and the visuals are on the loud side, although the fun animations are certainly a plus. It's not a bad game, but I can't see myself investing much time in it.

Gravitron 2

Gravitron 2 must have started out with somebody writing their own clone of Lunar Lander and deciding to throw guns into the mix. It's a fun concept and reasonably executed, but this is easily the lowest budget title in the mix and it shows. I had fun with it for about 10 minutes, but I'd be hard-pressed to play this game for very long even if it was free. On the plus side, I'm glad that I tried it, and it's not a bad option for some quick, simple fun.

Multiwinia

I didn't expect much from Multiwinia because I played the Darwinia demo years ago and decided that it wasn't for me. Since then I haven't paid much attention to all things Darwinia related, so it was surprising for me to see how far the series has come. The controls are still awkward but not as bad as I remember, and the variety play modes and levels is appealing. I easily lost an hour to this game without batting an eye. So far this is the strongest game in the package and possibly worth the $10 on its own.

I-Fluid

WTF? There's another game? Shit... I forgot to play this one. Well, I can't very well review it without even having seen the damned thing, but check out the trailer video for some idea of what I-Fluid is all about. It shows promise. If I'm strongly impressed by it, I may even post a follow-up about it. Right now the Steam servers are complaining about being too busy, so I can't install it.

Time to go play Street Fighter IV. :)

Street Fighter IV

2009-02-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

I sat down to play Street Fighter IV yesterday thinking that I'd get in an hour or two before moving on to something else... some Warlords III: Darklords Rising, some Final Fantasy VII, some Skate 2, some Bully... something else. My gaming focus has been spread out of late. But it turns out that Street Fighter IV had other plans for me: I played pretty much four hours straight.

Initially I was put off by SF IV's visual style. It didn't look as good on my home TV as it did when I first saw trailers of it on the web last year. But the solid gameplay was enough of a hook that I stuck with it, and as the hours went by the visuals bothered me less and less. They've even started to grow on me.

Two massive hooks kept me glued to my Hori Fighting Stick EX2 last night: the first was the variety of play modes available, and the second was how rapidly I found myself climbing the learning curve. Initially I tried playing a standard Arcade game on Normal. I have some Street Fighter experience--although not a lot--so I figured I could handle it, but I was wrong. In order to beat the final boss, I had to dial the difficulty back to "Very Easy," which was discouraging.

Once I got warmed up, I decided to try the online play. SF IV has a great idea on how to manage online matches: you can configure the options to let you play a standard Arcade game and interrupt you when an online opponent is available. These options are accessible using the RB button from the main menu, and at first I was rather confused by them. Turning this mode on basically means "interrupt me every 10 seconds with a new online match," although it did once happen that I went about 15 minutes without a new match coming up, which made me wonder if the matchmaking servers were experiencing an outage.

I also found that going into the Xbox Live Game menu and trying to join an existing game lobby was futile. Every game I tried to join was gone by the time I selected it, which suggests to me that most of the players online are in this menu hammering away on existing game lobbies rather than using the option to play Arcade mode while they wait for an opponent to challenge them.

The other thing I found, unsurprisingly, is that there aren't a lot of Street Fighter noobs on Xbox Live, at least not by my rather low standards. Out of about twenty matches, I had about two opponents of clearly lesser skill (these would be your basic noobs), and maybe five others of comparable skill (relative noobs). All of the others beat me easily.

After the online play, I ventured into the Challenges mode, which is really where I should have started. The challenges essentially teach you how to play the game, with the lowest level ones being extremely easy. A combination of it being bedtime and finding myself losing my focus stopped me from playing challenges for what could have easily been another couple of hours.

The most frustrating thing about stopping is that I was just getting good enough to be able to beat Arcade mode on Normal difficulty.

In other news, I borrowed a copy of Bully: Scholarship Edition, which is great because I've wanted to try it but find it hard to justify buying since I already have the PS2 version. Scholarship Edition is roughly the same excellent game, but at higher resolution and with a better framerate. Bully really is a terrific game: the writing is excellent, the concept is novel, and the gameplay is as solid as GTA IV's. It has that "just one more mission" quality that keeps me playing for hours, and in some ways I find the smaller setting (compared to GTA games) and carefree theme (schoolyard pranks) to be a liberating change of pace.

Bully is also a good length. I've played maybe 10 hours of it and only finished a third or so of the game. By the time I've hit 100% completion--if I even get that far--I'll be ready to shelve it indefinitely. I will be nagging Fritzkrieg to play it, however. :)

R-Type: Dimensions, FF VII

2009-02-05T17:11:00.000-08:00

At the price point of 1200 MS points, I was wary enough of R-Type: Dimensions to try the demo before buying it. It didn't take long for me to decide that it was worth the 1200 points, but then I am a sucker for classic shoot-em-ups, and R-Type is one of the most classic there is.

R-Type: Dimensions offers two features in particular that make it worthwhile. The first is the ability to toggle between updated and original graphics at any time simply by hitting the Y button. The updated graphics look fantastic and are very true to the source material, which creates a neat effect when you toggle between them. The toggling uses a cross-fade effect rather than an instant switch, so right before your eyes you see the next gen R-Type engine morph into a retro title.

The other great feature is the ability to choose between "Infinite" and "Classic" game modes. Infinite mode gives you unlimited lives and has you respawn immediately when you die rather than going back to the last checkpoint. How many times you die in each stage gets posted to the leaderboard along with your score, which gives you a strong incentive to improve at the game. At the same time, having unlimited lives allows you to easily experience all of R-Type's brilliant stages without having to become a slave to the game. Players who want to play R-Type with the traditional rules can use "Classic" mode for that.

Overall I am very impressed with R-Type: Dimensions. It's exactly the kind of remake that I wanted, and failed to get, from Galaga Legions and 1942: Joint Strike. Perhaps the only better XBLA titles in the same genre are Ikaruga and Geometry Wars 2.

In other news, Battlefield 1942 is getting a remake using the Battlefield: Bad Company engine. So far, BF42, BF2, and BF:BC are the only entries in the series that I've enjoyed, and I am hopeful that this one will be a goodie.

I should mention that I've started a long overdue (about ten years overdue) play-through of FF VII. When I originally played through the game, I got within a few hours of the end and then watched the ending when my brother beat the game, so I never actually finished FF VII. Additionally, I was a university student at the time, which made it difficult to focus on the game's story. I've been on a strong RPG kick lately while simultaneously being on a World of Warcraft break, which makes this the perfect time to revisit FF VII. So far I am twelve hours into the game and thoroughly enjoying it.

Fritzkrieg and I often discuss how way-ward JRPGs have become, and it comes up from time to time on this blog. The general trends we've noticed include the spread of gimmicky combat systems that aren't much fun, characters becoming shallow and/or jaded to the point of being uninteresting, and plots becoming vapid and pointless. The stereotypical JRPG these days would be about a young man with a head full of haircare products who is chasing his ambition to become more powerful for power's own sake in a troubled world where people are generally only out for themselves. Also the combat system would likely involve something like spinning slot machine dials or awkward button combos, while lacking tactical challenge.

Twelve years ago, the stereotype I just described did not exist, although JRPGs were very much alive. Then came games like FF VII and Grandia, and it's been a continual downward spiral from there. For years I resented FF VII for that, and for years after the resentment faded, I just didn't care about FF VII. The thing that surprises me going back to FF VII now is just how much heart and soul are in it. Compared to some of the major JRPGs before it (like Chrono Trigger and FF VI), FF VII comes across as jaded and a little shallow. Compared to the decade's worth of JRPGs that have followed in FF VII's footsteps, FF VII is bursting with creativity and feeling.

One factor at play here is certainly that I only now finally have the attention necessary to truly appreciate FF VII, but there's also definitely something to be said for the fact that so many JRPGs these days try to copy the superficial elements of FF VII while missing out on the core of the game. Taking the time to go back and revisit FF VII has been a very interesting experience for me in that context.

RPG Madness

2009-01-24T17:27:00.000-08:00

My RPG adventures continued this week, as I played the first couple of hours of Lost Odyssey, succumbed to an impulse to assemble a CD wallet collection of classic PC RPG discs, and spent about six hours playing Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Let's review.

The first thing I have to point out is that Mount & Blade is only $7.50 on Steam this weekend. They're having a sale. It's unlikely that this news will reach anybody who cares through this blog post, but whatever: I've had far too much fun with Mount & Blade in the last month to fail to point this bit of news out.

Lost Odyssey is so far better than I expected. It has a solid combat system, the visuals are excellent, and story is surprisingly good even though the characters so far haven't been. I was well aware that Lost Odyssey got better reviews than Blue Dragon, but I somehow expected to prefer Blue Dragon--perhaps because Blue Dragon is a more traditional JRPG, or something like that. To the contrary, Lost Odyssey is fast becoming the most engaging JRPG that I've played since FF XII. I'm still pretty early in, however, and I don't know yet if the pace will start to become drawn out.

The idea to organize a CD wallet full of PC RPGs came to me as I was cleaning out part of my game collection. I had a CD wallet full of various PC game disks (stuff like F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Rome: Total War, and Quake IV) that wasn't doing me much good, and I felt that it would be useful to have a bunch of Blizzard discs in one convenient location. The project started with the install DVDs for World of Warcraft (that is, a trial DVD, the Burning Crusade Collector's Edition install DVD, and a Wrath of the Lich King DVD), as well as the contents of a WarCraft Battle Chest and a Diablo Battle Chest all neatly arranged. (These titles are especially useful for office jobs, by the way.) But this only filled half of the wallet.

For the other half, I organized the following:

- The four discs out of a Game of the Year Edition copy of The Elder Scrolls III, including Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon, and the construction set tools
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (I don't have The Shivering Isles, though)
- Neverwinter Nights: Diamond DVD (includes both expansions), Neverwinter Nights: Kingmaker (official collection of community content)
- Warlords III: Darklords Rising
- Ultima Collection (that's Ultima I through VIII)
- Quest for Glory Anthology (QfG I through IV)

That's a concentrated dose of classic CRPG goodness, and I've been savoring the collection for the past thirty hours or so. Having so much RPG content in one place makes me euphoric.

The funny thing is that I get nostalgic for many of these games even though I never actually had the time to play some of them. Out of the Ultima series, for instance, I barely touched V, VI, and VIII, which are some of the better ones (my Ultima experience is primarily with III, IV, and VII--and even then I didn't play them heavily). I thoroughly played Quest for Glory I and II back in the day, but barely played III and IV. Sunny did most of the BioWare RPG gaming back when Neverwinter Nights came out; she finished the entire main campaign and both expansion packs, while I didn't even get past Chapter III of the first game. Worst of all, much of the Blizzard content remains untapped (including the expansions for both WarCraft 3 and Diablo II). Finally, although I played enough Oblivion to get familiar with it, I'd only played a few hours worth of Morrowind and never any of the expansion content. For shame.

But, as my buddy Matt once pointed out to me, it's often more useful to have a collection of books (or games, in this case) that you expect to enjoy and haven't read yet than to have a collection that you're already well familiar with. It was in that spirit that I fired up Morrowind to dabble around in, and I quickly found myself drawn in.

There's a bit of a learning curve involved in Morrowind, but my previous experiences trying to play both Morrowind and Oblivion came in handy. Overall I would say that Morrowind is an excellent and classic RPG, but one thing that grates is how sparse the content is. The world of Morrowind is vast but mostly all looks the same and doesn't have a lot going on by today's RPG standards.

What's especially painful is how long it takes to travel from place to place on foot, which is frequently required. It's a shame because I found Morrowind to be both immersive and challenging, and yet I keep getting snapped out of my suspension of disbelief by long stretches of walking in a straight line. Occasionally I just aim in a direction, hit Q (auto-walk), and get up to fetch some water or prepare a snack. There should at least be siltstriders (transport) between each of the towns instead of only between the major cities.

The funny thing is that I remember Oblivion (Morrowind's sequel) being criticized for its travel system being too convenient. In Oblivion, one can simply use the world map to select a destination and effectively "warp" there (in-game time still passes). This removes most of the incentive for the player to explore the land on foot, but having seen how tedious walking in Morrowind gets to be, I have a better understanding of the decision to make travel so quick in Oblivion.

And yet Oblivion still suffers from the problem that walking around in dungeon areas can be quite slow, which makes the player all the more aware of how repetitive many of the areas in-game are. What Elder Scrolls games need, perhaps, is a time acceleration feature like many flight simulators have, so that the player can fast-forward through dull parts of the fantasy experience. Alternatively, the game content could be less spread out--but then The Elder Scrolls might not feel like The Elder Scrolls.

Combined with my recent RPG acquisitions on Steam, I'm now doubly reassured that I have more RPG content at my disposal than I reasonably have time to play, and that's not even counting the numerous handheld titles that I picked up last year. :) It's good to be a gamer.

The Sorry State of JRPGs

2009-01-12T12:04:00.001-08:00

Having noticed the price cut that The Last Remnant has gotten both on Amazon and GameStop / EB Games, I went to my local EB Games yesterday with the intention of picking up a copy. In addition to there being $40 copies of The Last Remnant available, there were $40 copies of Infinite Undiscovery and $45 used copies of Lost Odyssey as well. I already have Blue Dragon, but for those paying attention here who don't, it's under $20 for a new copy. Finally, I did notice a used copy of Eternal Sonata, but I didn't check the price.

As I approached the counter and handed the copy of The Last Remnant that I was holding to him, I asked the EB Games employee if he recommended it. He had been talking about Final Fantasy XIII's release date and obviously cared about JRPGs. In response to my query, the clerk made a minor production of throwing The Last Remnant to the floor in disgust, announcing that it had utterly wasted valuable hours of his life. He then handed me Infinite Undiscovery, saying that it wasn't great either, but it was certainly better than The Last Remnant.

I haven't been keeping up on JRPGs as I ought to have. For the last couple of years, I've been strangely resistant to their lures--with the one big exception of PSP and NDS games. Even then, while I've collected a few portable JRPG titles, I haven't spent much time with them. Yesterday I found myself wondering how things got this way.

World of Warcraft has been a factor, no doubt. As I've mentioned in previous posts--and as my friend Ace-High commented on--Blizzard RPGs really are great productions. I've never been able to really stomach BioWare RPGs en-masse; I can only appreciate them in doses. Blizzard is really the only North American RPG company whose games I find genuinely enthralling, and that wasn't even until a few years ago. But I only really turned to Blizzard games in the first place because the JRPGs of recent times weren't able to properly hook me.

A couple of bizarre and potentially disturbing trends emerge if you look at the major console JRPG releases of the past two years: this includes Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata from 2007, and Lost Odyssey, Infinite Undiscovery, and The Last Remnant from 2008. I've been neglectful of these games and have only played Blue Dragon and (as of yesterday) Infinite Undiscovery, but there are still two clear trends that haven't slipped my attention:

The first trend is that all of these games, with the sole exception of Eternal Sonata, have been Xbox 360 exclusives. It seems to me that the majority of JRPG fans on both sides of the Pacific would naturally be Sony fanboys, since the Playstation brand has dominated the JRPG market ever since the last days of the SNES, starting with Wild Arms and Suikoden, with the release of Final Fantasy VII as its grand coronation. I have been well aware these past two years that Sony is largely losing the console war, but if the PS3 is a viable platform for anything, it ought to be viable for JRPGs, right? This line of reasoning is consistent with the profiles of the various PS3 owners that I personally know.

The second trend is that all of these games have Metacritic scores in the 70s (except that the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata, for whatever reason, scores an 80). My own experience having watched video reviews of these games and played a couple of them is that they're all fairly lukewarm, with some of them (The Last Remnant, for instance) clearly being more tepid than others (Blue Dragon). I think it's fair to say that none of these games has really lit a fire under the fan base out there. How can it be that for two long years we haven't seen any JRPG excellence?

I'm planning to pick up Lost Odyssey in the not too distant future, and The Last Remnant at some point much later--the line of reasoning here being that this early price drop on The Last Remnant is possibly the first of several price drops, and that I'll eventually be able to snag it for $20. I'll probably have to get Eternal Sonata eventually as well, but as much as I'm able to handle anime-style artwork, that one looks so kiddie and cartoonish that I'm afraid to merely touch it. It is supposed to be good, somehow...

In the meanwhile, I'll quickly compare my Blue Dragon experience (roughly 12 hours of playtime) with my Infinite Undiscovery experience (roughly 2 hours playtime). In a nutshell, Blue Dragon is like a weak-sauce version of Dragon Quest VIII, and Infinite Undiscovery is like a weak-sauce version of Final Fantasy XII. Each one clearly benefits from being a next-gen title and is capable of producing some gorgeous screenshots, but at times they don't look much better than their PS2 counterparts.

Blue Dragon's biggest failing to me is its generic characters and uninteresting plot. When I play Blue Dragon, it's as an RPG combat game with an Akira Toriyama art style. Over the course of 12 hours, what little plot and character development I was treated to in the beginning has rapidly atrophied into nothing important. Even given this major failing, there's enough appeal left to make Blue Dragon a decent JRPG. It's just a shame that it doesn't truly excel at much, apart from some of the visuals.

Infinite Undiscovery's biggest failing is the awkward gameplay. The are certain design decisions here that I can't reconcile at all, like spacing out save points too far apart and not providing the player with an opportunity to save before some boss battles. Much of the game is clearly FF XII in style, yet FF XII's excellent combat system has been replaced with fairly weak action combat that strips out a lot of the RPG appeal. Fritzkrieg had a look at the game, and he commented that action combat systems are a hallmark of Tri-Ace games (Tri-Ace being the developers of Infinite Undiscovery). It's too early to tell whether or not there's enough appeal in Infinite Undiscovery that I'll be able to muddle through the game in spite of its mediocrity, but early signs are promising.

In the meanwhile, I continue to pour hours a week into World of Warcraft. I hardly played at all over the Christmas break, so my character is still only level 75, but I should hit level 76 today. I still haven't rolled a Death Knight yet, so there's plenty left to do in Northrend.

The Secret to Enjoying Bionic Commando: Rearmed

2009-01-11T23:40:00.000-08:00

...is to play it multiplayer. I've known for a while that Bionic Commando: Rearmed has a 2-player co-op mode, but it wasn't until today that I realized there's an arena battle mode as well (which includes play modes such as Deathmatch). It supports up to four players at once, which makes for a decent party game.

The 2-player co-op mode does a lot to make the game more palpable. There's so much about Bionic Commando: Rearmed that I like, such as the visual style and the old-school challenge, but I'm rarely in the mood to play it because it's somewhat too challenging. The co-op mode does a lot to make the game less tedious and more exciting, assuming both players are able to get the hang of the game and stick together.

Now if there was only some way to make 1943: Joint Strike worthwhile. :(

Controller Showdown: Conclusion

2008-12-30T19:58:00.001-08:00

It's about time I wrapped up my comparison between the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers.

Form Factor

An important element of console controllers is their shape. For example, the corners of the NES controller had a tendency to dig into one's hands when tightly gripped--a problem which the SNES controller design effectively countered. The Playstation controller introduced "handles" that rest in the palms of one's hands, making the controller easier to grip overall. Gamers have been reaping the benefits of these advances for over a decade now.

Neither the PS3 nor the Xbox 360 controllers do anything radically new in terms of form factor. The Xbox 360 controllers have wider handles than the original Xbox controllers, which makes them more similar in shape to the Playstation controller design. The X360 controllers feel bulkier, but not terribly so.

When I hold the PS3 controllers, my pinky and ring fingers naturally wrap around the handles and provide a sturdy grip. These fingers to the same on the Xbox 360 controllers but seem to have to work a little harder to maintain a solid grip. This is one detail that contributes to overall hand stress when playing the X360.

Pad Buttons

Although I do not find myself noticing it while playing, the pad buttons on the X360 and PS3 controllers are quite different. The X360 buttons have a distinctive "pop" while the PS3 pad buttons feel mushy by comparison. The result is that the X360 pad buttons give a satisfying tactile feedback at the expense of being more work to press.

I tend to forget that the X360 pad buttons have some analog range to them. Most games treat them as pushed or not and turn to the trigger buttons when something requires a range of input (eg. acceleration in a racing game). The PS3 buttons, however, have a more definite feel of analog range. It's easier to consistently perform a soft push versus a hard push on the PS3 pad buttons than on the X360 pad buttons, largely because the X360 pad buttons have the initial resistance of that "pop". Not many games actually use this functionality, but there are some notable exceptions such as Metal Gear Solid 4.

It's worth noting here that between themselves, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have managed to nearly maximize the amount of confusion generated over their pad button naming schemes. Between the SNES, classic Playstation, and Xbox controller designs, each one manages to put the X button in a different place. The SNES and Xbox "A,B,X,Y" button layouts are mirror images of each other, where on the Nintendo designs the A button goes on the right-hand side while being on the left-hand side of the Xbox 360 controller. Sony does it's own thing with square, circle, and triangle buttons, which takes some getting used to, but over a decade of Parappa the Rapper doesn't leave one with much excuse for not knowing them.

Conclusion

I don't usually notice much difference between the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers while actually playing a game. The trigger buttons and analog sticks feel different, but my fingers naturally find the position of everything. Generally speaking, I would say that it's a close race between the PS3 and X360 controllers in that they are both excellent designs.

If pressed to pick a winner, I would have to give marginal judgment in favor of the PS3 controllers. The most obvious failing in the Xbox 360 design is the crappy d-pad, but another problem is that the X360 controller seems to contribute to hand fatigue. Sometimes my wrists and/or fingers bother me after exhaustive gaming bouts, and these symptoms are noticeably worse on the Xbox 360 than on the PS3. This problem is created by a combination of form factor, corners on the trigger buttons, stiff analog sticks, and weight.

However, a major point in the X360 controller's favor is that the convex design of the trigger buttons is superior. My right index finger is strained while playing games that make heavy use of the R1 button on the PS3, including racing games and FPSes. This difference is nearly enough to make it a draw between the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers, but after much soul-searching, it is my conclusion that the PS3 controller is slightly superior, although both designs leave further room for improvement.

Mount & Blade

2008-12-30T18:22:00.001-08:00

I've been taking advantage of the holiday sale on Steam to stock up on cheap games. Since the start of the sale I've picked up Mount & Blade ($15), Jade Empire ($12), Arx Fatalis ($5), and Sacred ($5) (actually "Sacred Gold" but the title is meant more like "Sacred: Gold Edition" than "sacred gold"). Given that a little over a month ago I picked up Titan Quest: Gold Ed. (now $15) and Spellforce 2 with expansion pack (now $23), that's a ton of RPG stuff.

You may be wondering how many of these purchases have actually been worthwhile. The best buys for me have been Mount & Blade and Titan Quest. Both of these are solid games that would almost have been worth paying full price for, so they're a good deal at the $15 price range. Spellforce 2 is also worth picking up if you're in the mood for something with a Warcraft 3 flavor, although I'd say that $20+ is pretty steep; at that price point, I'd rather take a chance on The Witcher (now $30). Most of the other games I haven't spent a whole lot of time on, partly because none of them has particularly grabbed my attention.

Mount & Blade is particularly interesting for its sandbox gameplay style. Try to imagine a cross between Elite (or, if you prefer, X3: Reunion) and Medieval: Total War. The goal is to make a living in an open-ended, middle-ages fantasy kingdom. You can live as a merchant, a bandit, a soldier, a gladiator, a warlord, a do-gooder hero, and many combination-hybrids thereof. Although it seems possible to play the game as a pacifist (I haven't actually tried), the game is heavily combat-centric and assumes that you'll make yourself out to be a warrior of some sort.

If you're looking for an RPG to compete with the likes of Oblivion or World of Warcraft, you're unlikely to find much of interest here. The visuals are crude, there's little in the way of a storyline, the game world itself is sparse and repetitive, and the gameplay can be tedious. There's not much to explore nor any guided path to follow through the game. Mount & Blade pitches itself as a sandbox experience, and that means that it does very little to hold your hand.

Of course, the lack of hand-holding could be considered an asset by those seeking a challenge. I had no trouble finding things to do in Mount & Blade, and it was difficult to tear myself away from it even after five hours. There's a fortune to be made, combat techniques to master, and even status and fame to chase after. Getting stuck-in on the battlefield where there are 30+ combatants fighting in your immediate vicinity is a very satisfying experience. It's also appealing that one's actions in Mount & Blade have a very real impact on the in-game world: you can help to save or destroy a village, castle, or kingdom. The fact that none of these feats is easily accomplished helps to make them worthwhile. If you're looking for that kind of Elite-style experience, Mount & Blade will deliver.

Mount & Blade provides some very useful options for tweaking the game difficulty. The default settings lean toward the low difficulty side, which helps a great deal to alleviate some of the tedium of building up a character in the early levels. It's nice to have the option to crank things up to balls-out hardcore, however. Also provided is a "realism mode" that forces you to save every time you quit the game. This means that if your character gets taken prisoner, your equipment gets stolen, or you lose the final round of a tournament, to name a few examples, you are forced to live with the consequences and keep playing. (An important detail that I haven't checked into is whether or not Mount & Blade actually deletes your save file after loading it, the way that Rogue does. This would make it more difficult to cheat, although still not impossible.)

Mount & Blade is a refreshing, un-tamed RPG experience that first piqued my curiosity and then exceeded my expectations. It has an old-school appeal, and yet it's not entirely like anything I've ever played before. Above all, M&B is both addictive and immersive--qualities that trump its shortcomings to make it a solid game. I strongly recommend it.

As for Jade Empire and Arx Fatalis, one thing holding both of these titles back is that they are both obviously Xbox ports. Jade Empire's UI is a little on the awkward side, but easily manageable (Arx's UI fares much worse).

One thing that I find jarring about Jade Empire is that the pre-rendered cutscenes look worse than game itself. Other than that, Jade Empire is clearly a BioWare style RPG, which shows in its writing and gameplay. I can't say much more about it until I've spent more time playing Jade Empire, although it has reminded me that I never did get very far in Knights of the Old Republic (or Mass Effect, for that matter) and I really should give it another go.

Arx Fatalis is a bit of a wreck. The UI is awful and I couldn't get comfortable with it even after 30 minutes of play time. I did see some promising exploration and puzzle elements, but combat was painful and I found myself getting stuck too easily. The game has mood and an old-school appeal going for it, but I'd choose it as the weakest of the RPGs that I listed in my introduction. I'd have to be pretty bored to really sink myself into Arx Fatalis.

I've barely touched Sacred, but it's obviously a Diablo clone, which I count as a good thing. Sacred is rough around the edges to say the least: the game has such a wildly chaotic style that I was reminded of those free-to-play Korean style MMO games. Some of the visuals are impressive, but at the same time I feel bombarded with useless information while playing it. I also got the sense that the game's combat system is awkward and lacks challenge, but that could simply be a function of not having played enough of it. I need more time to make a real assessment of Sacred, but on first impression I don't see how it will provide anything beyond what Diablo II and Titan Quest already offer.

Cheap Gaming on PS3

2008-12-20T22:18:00.001-08:00

Earlier this year I ranted about how it's just not possible to walk into a store with under $100 and walk out with a satisfying load of PS3 games. Today I defied that assertion by purchasing three PS3 games for only $40 on the online Playstation Store (although one of those games is actually a Playstation One game): Soldner-X, Castlevania Chronicles, and Wipeout HD. I've only spent a handful of hours with these games collectively, so I can give only quick impressions on them--but the bottom line is that none of these titles is a serious "must have".

Soldner-X is a classic side-scrolling shoot-em-up in the same vein as Gradius and R-Type. It looks nice in HD, but it doesn't seem to do much to distinguish itself within this decades-old genre already saturated with classics. While playing it, I found myself considering switching to the PS1 game R-Types (definitely recommended) and wondering when they'll finally bring Einhander to the Playstation Store in North America. That said, I have to cut Soldner some slack since it is only $10. I will probably get my money's worth out of it before tiring of it, but it hasn't got much chance of cracking into my top 10 list of favourite shooters.

I was pretty excited about Castlevania Chronicles, but it turns out that my enthusiasm was somewhat misguided. The good news is that the X68000 version of the original Castlevania is pretty good, and the bad news is that the extra "Arrange Mode" manages to be pretty freakin' ugly. At least, that's the impression I was left with after playing the first couple of stages of the Arrange Mode and then switching to the classic version.

If you're the kind of Castlevania fan who can still sit down and enjoy the original NES version so much that you'd like to see more of it, then Castlevania Chronicles will be a slam dunk for you. If, on the other hand, the idea of sitting down to play the original Castlevania makes you cringe, Castlevania Chronicles isn't going to have anything for you.

As for Wipeout HD, it's a rock-solid entry in the Wipeout series. I've never really been much of a Wipeout fan; I find the gameplay to be awkward, although it's possible that I'll warm up to it with time. Wipeout HD is pretty enough that it may be up to the task, so I'll give it some time.

On a different note, one game that I've been spending some time with this week is Diablo II. I hadn't really played it before this year, mostly because I wasn't really a Blizzard fan for roughly ten years after I got sick and tired of WarCraft II back in, what was that... 1996? (December 1995 according to Wikipedia.) I'm not really sure what happened there. I thought StarCraft was good but overhyped, and I was too busy to play Diablo.

Fritzkrieg and I have talked a lot about how JRPGs just aren't as good these days as they used to be. Final Fantasy XII was really good, and I'm getting some entertainment out of Blue Dragon, but even titles like these can't compare with old-school classics like Chrono Trigger. And speaking of Chrono Trigger, it seems like Square-Enix is doing better with a re-release of a decade-old classic than they are with new ventures like Infinite Undiscovery and The Last Remnant. This just goes to show how far they've slipped.

One difference between Fritzkrieg and myself is that I've turned to Blizzard to fill the gap. I've come around to realizing that not only is World of Warcraft an RPG masterpiece, but Blizzard's other games (including Diablo II and WarCraft III) are also truly great. I've just been too busy looking the other way this whole time.

One of the things that occasionally grates on me about World of Warcraft is that it demands so much time. Such is the trade-off made in exchange for WoW being the epic experience that it is, but I sometimes find myself unwilling to fire up WoW because I know that it's difficult to only play a quick 30 minutes of it. Diablo II makes a nice compliment to WoW in this sense because a short session of Diablo II can still be enough time to cover a lot of ground. I find myself turning to Diablo II when I need a quick fix of Blizzard action.

More ranting later, more gaming now. :) Family's coming to town for Christmas, so I'll be unable to game-it-up for a while; gotta do some questing now while I still can.

Torture Quests in WoW

2008-12-10T08:20:00.000-08:00

I recently noticed the news story on Kotaku about Richard Bartle's arguments on why torture is inappropriate in WoW. It hadn't escaped my attention that there are Horde quest chains involving torture in WotLK--in Dragonblight especially. Bartle's arguments got me thinking about whether or not they're appropriate.

I most want to address the following argument:

When I signed up to play WoW I knew it had fireballs, so I expected killing. I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture. This does not fall within the parameters of what I was expecting.

Contrary to what Bartle says here, I don't believe that torture quests are a new thing in WoW. Players who've done certain quest chains for the Undercity already know that certain Forsaken NPCs do things like intentionally infect captive Alliance NPCs with horrible plagues for the purposes of experimentation. These quests have been around longer than either of the expansion packs.

Another thing to consider here is that Blizzard is using these quests as a means to establish that a certain faction within the Forsaken is, in fact, evil. On this point, Bartle has the following to say:

I wasn't complaining about some Death Knight quest that involves torture. See, at this point Death Knights are evil — so evil, they torture people — so it makes sense. It's in context.

It's my experience with WoW that the characters who give the Horde torture quests are also evil. Not that the Horde is evil, of course, but certain characters and groups within the Horde are. These torture quests are used as one means of establishing that.

I don't entirely disagree with Bartle's main points, but I do disagree that the torture quest The Art of Persuasion is as bad as Bartle makes it out to be. Torture commonly plays a prominent role in fantasy storytelling (see Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride), and I didn't find Blizzard's treatment of the subject to be an endorsement of torture at all.

Sam & Max, Titan Quest, Spellforce 2

2008-12-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

Steam has been having great deals on games lately. These past three weekends I've picked up Sam & Max Season 1 for $12, Titan Quest Gold (that's with the expansion pack, The Immortal Throne) for $10, and Spellforce 2 with expansion pack (Dragon Storm) for $15. Each of these has been worth the money.

Sam & Max is a quest game in the style of the LucasArts SCUMM engine classics (the one that I'm most familiar with is Full Throttle), which is not surprising given that Telltale Games was started by some of the same people that worked on those old LucasArts games. It also plays out a lot like a graphic novel--which happens to be what the original Sam & Max is. Go figure.

I've only played through about the first episode and a half of Sax & Max. The highlight so far has been the writing; the grand achievement of which has been getting me to laugh aloud, which games these days have rarely been able to do. The low point of Sam & Max has been that there's not as much of an exploration element to it as I'd like.

Each of the first two chapters is short (takes only a few hours to beat) and takes place within a relatively small geographical area. What I've found is that there's a lot of walking back and forth within that area which makes the game feel tedious at times. This effect is compounded sometimes when the solution to various situations is both obvious and requires backtracking to a prior location, thereby creating the effect of a dull errand.

That having been said, Sam & Max is excellent, and a bargain at any price under $20. On top of that, it's nice to see that the quest game genre hasn't fallen completely by the wayside. Sam & Max is a must-try for players who have never had the opportunity to play classic LucasArts or Sierra quest adventure games from the 90s.

Titan Quest is, basically, a Diablo II clone set in ancient Greece. As such it has addictive, fast-paced gameplay, and powerful multiplayer potential. On top of that, the game has good visual appeal and a decent atmosphere. I was really excited to get this for only $10.

After playing about 11 hours of TQ, I've found that the game is--unfortunately--flawed. I progressed through single player with a Conquerer class character (Warfare and Defense masteries) to level 9, and then through 2-player co-op play over the internet with a Ranger class character (Nature and Hunting masteries) to level 11. I'm not finished with the game yet, and may end up playing it for a long time to come, but there are definitely things that grate on me.

Like Diablo II, TQ just isn't as much fun single player. It's a good experience, but you can practically taste the great experience just around the corner if you could get somebody to play with you. That's why I twisted Matt's arm into it, and he was happy to oblige. Together we've had a great time playing the game, and it was easily worth the investment of both time and money. The single player experience just can't compete.

The flawed part of the game is simply that there's not enough polish put into it. Multiplayer play sometimes lags, and it gets frustrating during the heat of battle. Looting items is unnecessarily painful, as quite often items are stacked over each other on the ground and you have to hunt for the right pixels to click in order to get what you want. Targeting spells and abilities could be a lot easier and more responsive. The framerate is sometimes noticeably bad, and one time Matt and I had multiplayer connection issues that were fixed by restarting the game. All of these are flaws that are made glaring by the ever-present World of Warcraft, and all of them are things that could have been addressed with more technical production resources put into the game.

On the up-side, there's a massive amount of content in Titan Quest (not when compared to WoW, but still). There are thirty-six distinct classes defined by choosing among the game's eight masteries, and another nine classes are added by the Immortal Throne expansion pack by introducing one additional mastery. Each mastery has its own skill tree (the equivalent of WoW's talent tree), the gear system is classic Diablo II style, and the game world is nice and large. The only thing I'd like to see is if the world was less linear in layout and allowed for more open-ended exploration (that reminds me, I picked up a bargain bin copy of Dungeon Siege long ago and never did play very much of it; I wonder how it stacks up).

I also have to wonder what kind of balance issues are lurking within the character leveling system, but that may end up being part of the game's appeal for many players. In fact, playing Titan Quest reminded me of just how polished and somehow "tame" World of Warcraft ends up feeling. You never really get into a situation in WoW where a boss fight, a loot drop, or some such event is ridiculously unbalanced; everything has been fine tuned. TQ seems to retain a bit more of a wild edge to it, which is refreshing.

The end result is that TQ is a really good game that could have been a great game except that it feels somewhat cheap. I've had excellent fun playing it and I do recommend it, but if you're a Blizzard fan you will notice the difference in quality. On the plus side, Titan Quest may help to sharpen your appetite for the looming release of Diablo III.

And then there's Spellforce 2, which is as much a Warcraft 3 clone as Titan Quest is a Diablo II clone. I was actually surprised to find out just how much of an RTS game Spellforce 2 plays like, given that what little I'd read about it described it only as an RPG. It certainly emphasizes RPG elements--in much the same way that the WC3 expansion, The Frozen Throne, plays like an RPG.

I've only played a couple of hours of Spellforce 2, and I'm happy with it but I'm already questioning whether or not it can hold my attention. It's very polished, the writing is surprisingly decent, and as an RTS-RPG hybrid it has managed to raise my curiosity. But it requires more than solid execution for a game to sink its hooks into me.

One issue with Spellforce 2 so far is that the game has been too easy (I'm playing on "Normal" difficulty) and the levels have been extremely linear. Titan Quest captured my imagination because within minutes of playing it I'd already gotten in over my head and died--that's part of the "wild" aspect about it that appeals to me. I hope that Spellforce 2 manages to incorporate that somewhere, but so far I haven't seen it.

Another thing about Spellforce 2 is that the character leveling system seems to be dumbed-down. This is in keeping with the game as an RTS style game rather than a true RPG. There are many levels to play and areas to explore, but they have the feel of Warcraft 3 style maps rather than a proper RPG world. I find all of this disappointing because I bought the game hoping for an RPG rather than an RTS, but when I'm in more of a RTS mood I may not find these things to be such a problem.

I'm already starting to wonder if Steam will manage to keep the ball rolling next weekend. Will there be yet another $10-$15 deal up for grabs that's just too good for me to pass up, or will I be able to content myself for now with what I've got? If there's a lack of tempting budget gaming available, I may hunker down with something a bit pricier, like Fallout 3 or The Witcher.

Controller Showdown: Part 2

2008-11-21T21:58:00.000-08:00

Picking up where I left off...

D-Pad

The story of the directional pad or "d-pad" is pretty much the inverse of what happened to the shoulder buttons: the d-pad was once the single most important feature of a console controller, and has since languished to the point where it is typically used for in-game menus or similar auxiliary functions. Modern console games have gravitated toward the use of analog thumb-sticks and left the d-pad in the dust.

That having been said, the d-pad is not entirely unimportant, since some popular games do make good use of it. It's often used for weapon-swapping in FPS games like Gears of War, and some players prefer it over the analog stick for old school fighting games like Street Fighter II and Soul Calibur. The d-pad is just important enough to matter, but not enough to make or break a system.

This is fortunate for the Xbox 360 because it has one of the most finicky and difficult d-pads of perhaps any popular console since before the NES--more than twenty years ago. Between the 360 and the PS3, there is no contest here: the PS3 d-pad is flat-out superior in every way.

Tilt Controls

The PS3 offers some motion controls built-in to the joystick, while the 360 does not. However, the PS3 tilt controls feel laggy and inaccurate, and I have yet to see them used for much more than novelty purposes. Most of the time I forget that this feature of the PS3 even exists, so while this is another victory for the PS3, it's a hollow one.

Weight

One of the nice things about the PS3 controller is that it's nice and light. The DualShock 3 is significantly heavier than the rumble-less Sixaxis, but the 360 controller is heavier still--particularly with those battery packs that the wireless controllers rely on.

In all my years playing console games to date, I've never really thought about the weight of my controllers before. This is because it's never been severe enough to make me notice the weight contributing to fatiguing my hands until now. That is, in a nutshell, how heavy the 360 controllers are.

Don't get me wrong: this is not a serious problem. I hardly ever notice the heft of my 360 controllers, but it's one of those small factors that combines with other things like a slightly uncomfortable R-Trigger and stiff analog joysticks that makes the 360 controller a little hard on the hands. Honestly, most players will never notice or care, but since I'm going into detail to compare the 360 controllers against the PS3 controllers, this is worth mentioning.

Analog Sticks

This is by far the most important aspect of the two controllers, since they are heavily used in all kinds of console games these days. It's only over time that I've noticed much in the way of differences between PS3 and 360 analog sticks; when one is "in the zone" and not thinking at all about one's hands, there doesn't seem to be much difference.

The first thing to notice is that the placement is different. The PS3 analog sticks are aligned horizontally, while the 360 controllers place the left analog stick higher up--in a spot where the D-pad traditionally resides. At first I expected for this to make some kind of significant difference in how the controllers handle relative to each other, but I haven't been able to notice any.

The shape of the tops of the analog sticks is another story. I initially found that the 360 analog sticks tend to dig into my thumbs, partly because of the concave design of the tops, and partly because the analog sticks themselves are stiffer (provide more resistance). Over time I got used to these features of the 360 controller and sometimes I even feel like I can get a slightly better grip on the 360's analog sticks than on the PS3's. However, I would say that the convex design of the PS3 analog stick tops is more comfortable and works well.

The difference in resistance is the biggest factor in how these analog sticks affect my gameplay. I find that because the 360 controller requires more force, it is easier to snap to a certain direction accurately with the 360 sticks. That is to say that if I suddenly need to make a hard motion in a certain direction, the extra resistance seems to make my motions more accurate once I've adjusted to using the 360 controller. The PS3 controller, by contrast, requires more finesse.

There is a trade-off here, however: not only does the PS3 controller require more finesse, but I find that it allows more finesse. It is easier to hold the PS3 stick in place only a small way from center than on the 360 controller--in other words, it is easier to make soft movements.

The general gist of all of this is that I find that the 360 controller works a little better for twitch action titles like fighting games and FPSes, while the PS3 controller works a little better for games with more sim style controls like driving and flying games. That having been said, any game that appears on either console should be tuned with that platform's hardware in mind and will therefore account for the particular strengths and weaknesses of that system's controller.

Overall, I would call this category a tie. I started off liking the PS3 analog sticks better, but I've gotten so accustomed to the 360 controller for certain titles that I think a PS3 controller would throw me off. If there is any victory to be had here one way or the other, I think it is marginal and would play a distant second to individual taste.

Coming next... still more?

Controller Showdown: Part 1

2008-11-15T19:44:00.000-08:00

Fritzkrieg got me thinking about which console has better controllers: the PS3 or the Xbox 360. My initial reaction to the issue was to declare that I prefer the 360 controller flat-out, but upon further reflection this isn't entirely true. Over the course of a few posts, I will share some observations on how the controllers differ and why it matters.

R2 vs RT

Consistent with the button naming convention started by the DualShock controller for the original PlayStation, the lower shoulder button on the right side of the PS3 controller (either the DualShock 3 or the regular Sixaxis) is called the R2 button. For the first time in the PlayStation line of controllers, this button has a great deal of analog range, which makes it consistent with the Xbox 360 contoller, which calls this same button the "right trigger" or RT.

Shoulder buttons have become a big deal. When they were popularized by the Super Famicom or North American SNES back in the early 90s, shoulder buttons were not widely used; some games flat-out ignored them, while others relegated them to seldom-used functions. Street Fighter II actually had use for 6 buttons, yet many players re-assigned the strong punch and attack actions to other buttons so as to minimize the use of the shoulder buttons. Simply put, the shoulder buttons didn't get much respect.

The N64, PSX, and Saturn continued to provide shoulder buttons, and the shoulder buttons continued to not be heavily used for the most part, even though the PlayStation decided to double-up the number of shoulder buttons to make four (L1, L2, R1, and R2). The tide began to turn when racing games like Gran Turismo and FPS games started using dual-analog functionality of the DualShock controller.

Normally when you use a gamepad style controller, your left thumb is on the D-pad and your right thumb is used to hit pad buttons. When you use a dual-analog controls, however, both thumbs are on analog sticks--so how do you hit pad buttons? The shoulder buttons solve this problem since you can hit then with your index fingers.

With the current console generation, the shoulder buttons have become some of the most widely used buttons on the controller--particularly the R1/RT button. The reason for this is simple: R1/RT is the gas pedal for most racing games and the gun trigger for most FPS games. There are notable exceptions to this rule (the default for gas in Gran Turismo 5: Prologue is still X), but you'll probably find that when you're playing modern console blockbuster titles, your right index finger is used a lot.

So which does a better job--the 360 or the PS3? I've found that the outward curved design of the 360 controller is easier to grip, which makes it easier to hold down over extended periods and somewhat easier to get a range of input out of (eg. only holding it half-way down versus holding it all of the way down). By comparison, I've heard comments that the PS3 R2 button feels "mushy," and this is fair to say.

In this category, I would award my preference to the 360 controller, but there is a trade-off: I find that the 360 controller's outward curved triggers wear on my index fingers after prolonged play. This is one factor (and not the only one) that contributes to the 360 controller tiring out one's hands during a marathon gaming session.

Coming up: talk about the analog sticks, vibration, motion sensors, and weight.

Sunny Tried Halo 3

2008-11-14T15:24:00.000-08:00

Jeepers, Friday already! Time flies...

Fritzkrieg was over for some gaming last Sunday, and he, Sunny, and I ended up playing three player Xbox 360 games. We warmed up with some Geometry Wars 2 before putting in some time with Castle Crashers. Following that, I decided that we should try some 3-player Halo 3 deathmatch.

Two minutes into the fight, Sunny was bored. It seems that nothing could be more tedious for her than pointing and shooting at things, so she occupied herself for several more minutes with exploring the level and literally looking to see if there was any fun to be had at all. She didn't find anything satisfactory.

Afterward I found myself wondering what sets Halo 3 so much apart from the likes of Castle Crashers or World of Warcraft. Is shooting at things that much more tedious than beating them with a stick or zapping them with a spell? Then I realized that the co-operative aspect of it was missing. In both Castle Crashers and WoW, we are playing as a team to beat up other guys, rather than fighting among ourselves.

I did once get Sunny to play--and briefly enjoy--Unreal Tournament 2004. It was a match where she, Matt, and I were playing together on a team against bots, and we were playing CTF. Sunny's comment at the time was that it was rather like Warsong Gulch, but with shock rifles.

Given that, one might think that I could get Sunny into other co-op FPS experiences like, say, Gears of War. No dice, though. The co-op factor helps, but ultimately Sunny wants something... I dunno, cute and kinda girly, I guess. Castle Crashers and WoW qualify. GoW is a shameless testosterone fest.

The next time I get Fritzkrieg, Matt, and myself together, I want to try the Halo 3 thing again--without subjecting Sunny to it. :) I only have three controllers anyway. Matt is the biggest FPS fan among us, but like any true FPS fan, he shuns the console variety in favour of PC games. I expect that he'll resist playing Halo 3 for exactly this reason, and I've figured out what to say in response:

Less QQ, more pew-pew.

Remebrance Day, Mirror's Edge, WotLK: Day 1

2008-11-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

I try to take note of Remembrance Day each year, as I feel that it is important to honor the memory of soldiers in various conflicts throughout history. In years past I've often set time aside to play something WW II themed, and this year was no different: I logged a total of 7.6 hours of Day of Defeat: Source on Nov 11th, according to my Steam community page. This would have been a satisfying way to mark the occasion in itself, but I managed to top that by finally convincing Matt to partake of DoD, which lead to him becoming a fast convert. He tells me that he plans to play DoD regularly from now on.

Between Day of Defeat: Source, Gears of War 2, and Wrath of the Lich King, I had just enough time to squeeze in an hour of Mirror's Edge. I've heard that it's very short, but that doesn't bother me so much--the game is very good, perhaps even excellent. It's an immersive, cinematic experience with a novel visual style and solid gameplay mechanics. It may not be the kind of classic game that will be remembered decades from now, but for a seasonal hit, it is very satisfying. I need to play more of it before I can decide if there's anything about it that I really don't like.

Actually, as a quick aside, there is one thing that I don't like about Mirror's Edge: the writing. It's easy for me to forget that the writing is even there because, like Battlefield: Bad Company or Gears of War 2 before it, I'd given up on the writing in Mirror's Edge before I'd even started with it. The dialogue is generally painful in the few spots where it isn't bland, and the story arc in general does not aim to be very challenging. I was both taken aback and shaken out of my suspension of disbelief at one point during a cut-scene where one of the characters stops to explain (obviously for the benefit of the player) what the legend of Icarus is. A note to the game directors: fans of the game who are gripped by the story and don't get the reference to Icarus will look it up--don't insult the intelligence of everyone else by spelling it out.

So, Wrath of the Lich King. 'Tis a big deal. Sunny and I lined up at the local EB Games for the midnight release, which went smoothly and was fairly quiet. When we got home we played for a couple of hours and powered through many quests in the Howling Fjords. Unfortunately, I need to work today, or I'd be playing right now. :) I don't know if there's really much to say about WotLK. It's WoW, it's more of the same with a lot of new stuff, and it's totally fucking awesome. Even the mere intro movie blows me away.

So sorry, Little Big Planet and Gears of War 2. I'll be back for you someday.

How To Fix World of Warcraft Config on Mac OS X

2008-11-05T21:41:00.000-08:00

I just ran into a little trouble with World of Warcraft on Mac OS X. Sunny and I have separate user accounts, but mine has admin privileges and hers doesn't. (Actually, I'd feel better if neither account was an "admin" and there was a separate root account entirely.) What Sunny found was that WoW wasn't saving her Interface Options configuration, such that if she enabled Auto Loot, for example, it would be turned off again the next time she started WoW.

Finding information about this issue on the web was difficult. There are more articles out there discussing how to run WoW on Ubuntu than talking about Mac OS X issues. I even managed to find a thread where some Windows Vista users were having the same issue while running WoW with a non-admin user.

It didn't take much digging around to figure out where WoW writes it's config files in Mac OS X:

/Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/WTF/

There's a simple Terminal command that you can use to make all of the files in this directory write-able for all users:

chmod -R a+w /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/WTF/

Having made this change, I now find that Sunny's user can save config data. She's still not able to install patches, though, but I won't try to tackle that issue here.

Game Meanderings

2008-11-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

There are a few people at work who know enough about me that they occasionally ask me what I've been playing lately in the hope of hearing some kind of amusingly esoteric answer. Once it was Disciples II, once it was Barkley Shut up and Jam Gaiden, once it was Daisenryaku VII, once it was Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, once it was X3: Reunion, and once it was IL2: Sturnovik. Those are all since the start of 2008. One time I answered with something completely mundane like Mercenaries 2 and drew a decisively disappointed reaction.

Yesterday was one of those glorious "random gaming days" that helps to solidify my reputation as somebody who plays a lot of games seemingly at random. There's not much rhyme or reason to what I choose to play--I just get a gaming itch that needs to be scratched, and sometimes it leads me in chaotic directions.

Things started out innocently enough with a desire to play Team Fortress 2, which I did for the better part of an hour. I had a great time playing primarily Soldier and Medic, with occasional forays into Demo and Heavy. When I had had my TF2 fill, I briefly considered playing some Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, or Unreal Tournament 3, but something a little less common caught my eye.

It is strange for me to contemplate now that although I was a total addict of id Software games back in the mid 90s, it wasn't until later that I was old enough to afford copies of most of them. As a consequence of this, for the longest time the only id Software games I had were copies of Quake, Quake II, and Quake III: Arena without any of the expansion packs. When the id Super Pack was released on Steam, I officially filled in all of the blanks.

Because of this, I happened to have a copy of Quake III Team Arena kicking around that I'd never actually played. And so it came to pass that yesterday I had my first duel against Fritzkrieg, the Q3A bot that is, not my buddy who goes by the same alias. Although the graphics are dated and the gameplay feels awkward now that I'm accustomed to more modern FPSes, Q3A has aged well and I probably could have played that for the remainder of the day if I'd really wanted to.

World of Warcraft interjected for a little bit and then I took a break. I'm pretty sure I also played Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection on PS3... or was that the night before? I remember contemplating Dead Space at one point, but I ended up playing GTA IV instead. Then Fritzkrieg came over and the Little Big Planet started.

LBP would have dominated the remainder of the day, and for Fritzkrieg it did, but at some point I got tired and passed the controller off to Sunny. I then decided to fire up some old SNES games.

I nearly started playing F-Zero but quickly switched to Donkey Kong Country (and got my ass handed to me by the barrel canyon stage). Following that was a fair sized helping of Super Mario All-Stars, which segued into a taste of Seiken Densetsu 3, and I finished off the night with a bit of Chrono Trigger.

Days like that make it hard to go to work in the morning.

Little Big Planet - Day 4

2008-10-31T23:28:00.000-07:00

Only now is LBP starting to lose some of its awe and wonder on me, and what's left is still a very worthwhile game--particularly as a creative outlet or a party experience. Sunny has finally warmed up to online play and asked me to set up a keyboard for the PS3 (it's not much of a setup, really: plug in pretty much any USB keyboard and it'll work auto-magically).

An important detail that I forgot to mention about the God of War level in my last post is that it involves some gratuitous violence. At one point a prisoner begs you not to kill him, but you can't progress past that point in the level until you've dragged his cage over to an open, flaming pit and dropped him to a gorey doom. This gruesome endeavor is made all the more absurd by the cutesy general atmosphere of LBP, which does not let up even in such situations.

The viral nature of LBP became clear to me when Sunny grouped up with a random goof online this evening, and they proceeded to share entries from each other's "Hearted" (favorites) lists of online levels. Sure enough, Sunny had the other player running through the God of War themed level with her.

In other news, I was playing WoW last night, trying to get the Anti-Undead armor sets for the Scourge Invasion event. All in all I took out six rare mobs and, being alone, collected all six drops of the pants. Two of them were plate, two were leather, and two were mail. Needless to say, as a Priest, I was frustrated by this turn of events. I want that gear for grinding Argent Dawn rep in Stratholme and Scholomance.

Video Games Live, LBP Day 2

2008-10-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

The Video Games Live concert last night was excellent--better than I expected, even. One thing that I wasn't prepared for was the PAX-like atmosphere of the event; it was crowded with the same kind of gamer mentality. In hindsight I should have expected that, but I was anticipating a more typical concert experience. Sunny and I were glad that we went.

Now that the Little Big Planet servers are back online, Sunny and I got to experience some of the community content. One particularly impressive level was a God of War themed one that Sunny played. It was so high quality that it could have been a level that shipped with the game, and there's no way that somebody created that since LBP's release unless they were in the beta or they're somehow professionally involved with LBP.

Sunny found online play to be too high latency for her taste, and I don't know if the bottleneck is more on the server side or if it's my wireless network at home that's the culprit. Sunny has obviously been spoiled by the high quality online experience of WoW. :)

I did find that downloading levels goes quickly, and it's nice that when one gets stuck in the single player Story mode (which is likely to happen), one can jump online and explore the user submitted content.

On a different note, I've been reading a bit about Fallout 3 and have decided that I need to pick up a copy at some point, however I'm pretty swamped with other stuff so that might not be anytime soon. I haven't decided yet whether it will be an Xbox 360 copy or a PC copy, but I'm leaning towards PC--perhaps even Steam. Speaking of Steam, I've already pre-ordered Left 4 Dead and I've been tempted to order Empire Total War. Steam is hotter than usual lately.

Little Big Planet - Day 1

2008-10-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

Finally picked up LBP yesterday. Sunny and I started playing around 7 pm, had a short break for dinner, and played pretty much until midnight. I went to bed. Slept in, found out Sunny had pulled an all-nighter to play more LBP. She was still playing when I left for work.

We couldn't connect to the LBP online servers last night; I assume that the heavy traffic is causing or exposing technical difficulties on their end. We also toyed around briefly with the tools for creating levels, but we were mostly too impatient to stick with it and do much. The level-building experience so far has been very reminiscent of Gary's Mod: it's very easy to do hilarious things, but requires practice and patience to create something of lasting appeal.

LBP so far has reminded me of just how dormant the "platformer" genre has been. It is fully worthy of the legacy left by classics like Mario Bros., Sonic, and Wonder Boy. You've probably heard ad-nauseum by now about how fantastic the multiplayer experience with LBP is, if not experienced it first-hand, but I'll reiterate it here: Sunny and I had many moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, reverant wonder, and edge-of-your-seat drama while playing LBP last night. The experience provided by LBP is right up there with Portal; it is a perfect game.

Video Games Live is playing a concert in Vancouver tonight, and Sunny and I have tickets. We'll probably manage to squeeze in some more LBP as well; it's the first video game in what seems like ages that we've been able to play together apart from Castle Crashers and the ever-present World of WarCraft.

Brief Mash-Up on Motorsports Games

2008-10-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Over the last year I've played a bunch of different motorsports games varying in their level of sim or arcade style. Not all of them have received much attention (and the level of attention has varied wildly between them) but I have played at least enough to form impressions on the following titles:

- Gran Turismo 5: Prologue (PlayStation 3)
- Forza 2 (Xbox 360)
- PGR3 (Xbox 360)
- Need for Speed: Most Wanted (Xbox 360)
- Race Driver: Grid (PlayStation 3)
- MotoGP '07 (Xbox 360)
- Ridge Racer 6 (Xbox 360)

Without further ado, I'll give a quick n' dirty review of each title. It's worth noting that I got most of these games either used or on sale, and I make note of two games (PGR3 and MotoGP '07) that were especially cheap.

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue

GT5:P is, as its predecessors, pristine. While GT5:P lacks the abundance of cars and tracks that GT4 has, there is a great deal of depth to what is there. Each car has a distinctive feel--a personality, even--that comes across in the game. The lack of damage modeling is considered by some to be a good thing. There's a lot of challenge to be had here, but the challenge curve isn't very flexible which makes the game daunting to casual gamers. Overall, an excellent game.

Forza 2

Forza 2 doesn't have the best graphics, but it does have a potent combination of rich gameplay, a vast career mode, and satisfying car customization options. I've found Forza 2 to be among the most addictive racing games that I've ever played. One of its best features is the ability to tweak driver assists in order to customize the gameplay experience to suit one's skill level (now a common feature in racing games, it seems). Another excellent game.

PGR3

I bought this game used for under $10. It's a good deal at that price, and casual gamers who are looking for a more arcade-y experience may prefer this game to more serious racing sims, but in the end I found that it didn't do enough to satisfy my hunger for a challenging racing experience. PGR3 isn't entirely without depth or merit, though; I would say it's a fair game.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted

This is the most arcade-style title on the list (oops, I forgot about Ridge Racer 6), and completely lacks any sim elements to its gameplay. As an action title, it holds up very well, especially considering that it's now several years old. Graphics and gameplay have moved along, but NFS:MW is still fun to play.

Race Driver: Grid

Grid is an impressive game that mixes up sim elements with action racing. The gameplay is customizable in a manner similar to Forza 2, but I've found that the difficulty level of Grid varies chaotically between events, with some events being too easy and others being too difficult with the same settings. Grid doesn't offer a lot of cars, but what it does offer is a variety of event types (including racing modes such as Drift and Destruction Derby), a great cockpit view, and spectacular crashes. Grid also offers the Prince of Persia 3D alike ability to rewind time using instant replay and then restart the race at some point in the recent past up to a limited number of times per race. Overall, Grid is challenging and novel.

MotoGP '07

MotoGP '07 is another game that I picked up on the cheap ($10) and is marginally worth the cost. It has sparse graphics and reasonable gameplay, which makes it worthwhile simply to throw motorcycle racing into the mix (I wonder how PGR4 holds up), but I haven't enjoyed it as much as Tourist Trophy. The controls are tricky and the race courses are demanding, so this isn't one for casual gamers.

Ridge Racer 6

Ridge Racer is what I like to call a "combo racer" since the series is extremely arcade-y, to the point where the controls only barely resemble driving. Seriously, Ridge Racer 6 has more in common with Soul Calibur 4 than it does with other driving games. With that in mind, the game isn't too shabby, although it's nothing special either. If you're expecting a real racing game, you're likely to be bitterly disappointed. If you're expecting a Namco game, you may find this to be worth your time, although I wouldn't count on that either.

Geometry Wars 2 Scores

2008-10-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that over on mygamercard.net, you can generate a scorecard for Geometry Wars 2:

Game Design - Using Limitations

2008-09-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

When one looks at what makes a given game compelling or unique, one often points to that game's features. GTA lets you steal cars. Mirror's Edge provides a free-running system. Portal lets you break one of the laws of physics with a new tech. However, games are also often defined as much by what they don't do or don't allow as by what they do.

A simple example of this are the different game modes in Geometry Wars 2. Underneath all of these modes is the same core game: you fly in one direction, shoot in another direction, and try to survive while racking up points. What makes each mode different is the set of limitations that it places on the player. In Deadline, you get unlimited lives but only three minutes to build up your score. In King, you can only shoot when you are in certain zones. In Pacifism, you can't shoot at all. These limitations sculpt the core game into specific, worthwhile challenges.

In the past, I've tried to defend the position that Resident Evil 4 isn't really an FPS, and one of the arguments that I've used is about the limitations that RE4 places on the player. The control scheme of RE4 isn't a "broken FPS" control scheme--it is different by design. RE4 presents a combat system where moving while shooting is extremely difficult, if not impossible. The game also emphasizes exploration and resource management over action.

Somebody who is critical of RE4 might point out that a crippling control scheme is an arbitrary challenge. What is to stop somebody from, say, making it impossible to shoot while moving in Unreal Tournament III and call that a new game mode? What indeed. I would argue that essentially all video game challenges are arbitrary. What's the point of shooting things in UT3, RE4, or Geometry Wars 2 at all? The real question isn't whether or not the challenge is arbitrary; it's whether or not the challenge is fun.

Personally, I find Resident Evil 4 to be extremely fun. I don't play it for the same reasons that I play Unreal Tournament or Counter-Strike at all. Right from the very beginning of the Resident Evil franchise, I've taken the games for what they are rather than what they're not. A comparison against RE4 and FPS games didn't even occur to me until other gamers I know brought it up.

It's important to recognize that criticizing a game for what it doesn't provide isn't always rational. What matters is whether or not the game is more fun because of its limitations, and on that issue there will tend to be a lot of disagreement. One of the reasons that video games are so diverse is because players look to get different experiences out of them. A limitation placed on the player may be the very thing that shapes the game into something worthwhile.

Disgaea 3

2008-09-07T14:33:00.000-07:00

Oh the hypocrisy! In my previous post about Battlefield: Bad Company, I said that I can't stand the stereotypical spiky-haired anime style protagonists of JRPGs. Then I promptly went out and bought Disgaea 3.

I haven't gotten very far yet, so these are just early impressions, but Disgaea 3 seems to carry forward the Disgaea formula well. There are some changes to the game that distinguish it from Disgaea 1 and 2, but overall it's simply the next iteration of the same deal. Disgaea was one of my all-time favourite PlayStation 2 games, so this is definitely a good thing.

The characters and story aren't bad by Disgaea standards. Let's face it: the original Disgaea has the best characters that any Nippon Ichi game is probably ever going to have(*). Laharl and Etna are classic, and frankly, I'm glad that they're not the stars of every Disgaea game, because that would just get tiring. As it stands now, I enjoyed those characters, and I want to keep it that way.

So when I say that Disgaea 3 has good characters by Disgaea standards, what I really mean is that I was relieved to find that the little kid with spiky hair on the cover of the game box turned out not to be foreshadowing that the game itself is terrible, which is what I had feared. Instead, Disgaea 3 happily joins my slowly growing library of quality PS3 games.

The PS3 count is now up to four disc games and two Sony Store downloaded titles:

- Metal Gear Solid 4
- Gran Turismo 5 Prologue
- Ninja Gaiden Sigma
- Disgaea 3
- Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection
- R-Types (PS1)

Excluding the PlayStation original game, I can count my PS3 titles on one hand, but that is one happy hand. The great thing about the PS3 is that I had only moderate-to-fair expectations for each of the titles on that list, and they all surprised me in some way. In comparison, my Xbox 360 library is bursting at the seams, but a lot of the 360 games that I play are throw-away fare--titles that are fun for a couple of weeks and then tossed aside. Within that library of mostly mediocre games, the 360 has a respectable selection of essential classics, so it's not as if the PS3 has it beat. Still, the PS3 has something going for it, and that's nice.

(*) The cast for La Pucelle Tactics was good too. It should go without saying, but turning on the Japanese voice acting is a must to get the proper characterization out of these games. Prier is a fucking badass.

PAX 08

2008-08-31T23:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-28T16:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Final Fantasy XIII coming to X360

2008-07-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

According to a 1UP Breaking News article, Final Fantasy XIII is bound for the Xbox 360. This certainly strikes a blow to the PlayStation 3. It also has me wondering if Square-Enix has any bigger plans for the 360, such as porting over some old classics. It would make sense to release the PlayStation Final Fantasy games as PS3/PSP Sony Store titles, but could we potentially see such a treatment for Xbox Live?

It's difficult to compare the current to earlier console generation bouts because of the spread of cross-platform releases. When the N64, PSX, and Sega Saturn went head-to-head, each contender brought primarily exclusive titles to the fray. The N64 had Mario 64, Wave Race, and Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (lived up to the hype? I think not). Other N64 classics such as Zelda 64, Goldeneye, Smash Bros., and Mario Kart didn't come out until later--when the fate of the console had already mostly been decided. The PSX had games like Tekken 2, Resident Evil, Suikoden, and Vandal Hearts. Shortly after the N64 arrived, the PSX strengthened its position with Soul Blade and the promise of an exclusive Final Fantasy VII. Eventually it would solidify its place in history with titles like Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid. All of these titles were exclusive releases at the time, although the PSX and Saturn did exchange games on occasion (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, for instance, was a Saturn game first).

Compare that picture with today: blockbuster releases such as Assassin's Creed, Devil May Cry 4, and Grand Theft Auto 4 see simultaneous release on both the PS3 and the 360. Even some of the major exclusive releases eventually get ports to the other side, such as Oblivion and BioShock. The field of exclusive releases is comparatively limited, although they include some of the real giants in the industry: Gears of War, Halo 3, Gran Turismo 5, and Metal Gear Solid 4. But the general feeling is that whether one has a PS3 or an Xbox 360, there is a solid library of games available.

So I hesitate to say that the arrival of FF XIII on the 360 spells doom for the PS3. It seems unlikely to me that the big publishers are going to ditch either of these platforms so long as there's money to be made by targeting both. But as I see titles like Final Fantasy slip over to the Xbox 360 side, while PS3 exclusives such as Metal Gear Solid 4 consistently fall short, it becomes increasingly clear to me who is winning the console war.

"@ Play" Looks at Izuna

2008-07-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

@ Play is a regular column on GameSetWatch dedicated to Roguelike games. It also happens to be one of the better series of articles I've bothered to read about game design. I mention it here because this week the column critiques Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, which is one of my favourite Nintendo DS RPGs.

One thing to take away from the GameSetWatch article on Izuna is that being a connoisseur of Roguelikes is the wrong reason to play it. When push comes to shove, Izuna is a very casual RPG experience compared to Rogue or any respectable descendant of Rogue.

Personally, I can't claim to like Izuna for any truly rational reason. It's not that it's a great game, or that it has some killer feature, or anything like that. I just happen to like it. It's light-hearted, it appeals to the part of me that used to kill fifteen minutes with a quick game of Rogue, and I can pretty much shut my brain off while playing it but still be challenged enough to enjoy myself. I'm even planning to buy the sequel when it comes out.

Peter vs. Homer

2008-07-10T14:05:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine linked me some old-school Mugen action: Family Guy vs. The Simpsons. Lots of good stuff going on there.

Soul Calibur XBLA

2008-07-09T13:33:00.000-07:00

I spent a few hours with Soul Calibur on Xbox Live Arcade last night, and holy shit is it ever good. I don't have a copy of the Dreamcast version to compare it to, but the high resolution graphics are nice even though the character models are crude, and the gameplay is exactly the kind of fast and furious experience that I want out of a Soul Calibur game. The practice mode works well, and the inclusion of bonus art galleries was more appealing than I expected (old school stuff happening there).

One huge feature is missing, however: online play. What could have been an absolutely epic XBLA release is, instead, merely worthwhile, at best. I'm hard-pressed to recommend it to any of my Xbox 360 owning friends because, well, what's the point--we have to meet up to play it anyway. But we'll have Soul Calibur IV for that, I guess.

I also had the chance to try Guilty Gear X2 on Xbox Live last week, which is available via the "Xbox Classics" store. It was a lot like sitting down to play Guilty Gear with a buddy, except that we didn't have to leave our respective couches, and there was a ton of lag in the character select screen. Overall it was an excellent experience, but I can't shake the feeling that somehow my PS2 version of Guilty Gear X2 looks less pixelated. (shrug)

While I'm on the subject of fighting games, I caught the Tatsunoko vs. Capcom promo vid over on Insert Credit. The quality of the video is poor, but holy crap does that game ever look gorgeous! I want to see the Capcom vs SNK series get that kind of treatment!

Metal Gear Solid 4, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue

2008-07-05T14:19:00.001-07:00

Exploring all of the differences between the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 would make for a larger rant than I have energy for today, but in the past week I have been getting a lot of experience with those differences. Owning a PS3 has more-or-less confirmed my suspicion that the 360 is a better "gamer's" console, but the PS3 did have a few surprises up its sleeve that I didn't expect. Perhaps the biggest shock was the fact that it would obligingly play DivX movies--no hacking required.

Why do I say that the Xbox 360 is a better gamer's gaming console? It has a larger line-up of games (for now, at least), the games are cheaper, and quite often the 360 version of those games have better features (particularly Xbox Live features). The market for used 360 games is thriving, and that's pretty much the only reason I bother to go to EB Games anymore. Since buying my PS3, I've bought twice as many 360 games as PS3 games.

The general trend among people I know is that gamers who have already bought a next-gen console tend to have a 360, and gamers who are still waiting to buy a next-gen console are waiting on the PS3. I know the feeling: my original plan was to wait on the PS3, but I cracked and bought a 360 first. The longer I had my 360, the more I started to realize that it was giving me a lot more than I expected. It's not an exaggeration to say that in some ways the 360 has helped put some of the magic back into console gaming.

The Xbox 360 has a lot of cons too. I got one with HDMI output (the Halo 3 ed, not the "elite"), which should be standard on all 360 models, but sadly isn't. Another thing that should definitely be standard is a 360 hard drive, and in my experience gamers never even consider buying a 360 package without it. Also, although I praise the Xbox 360 line-up, some console gamers may find it to be a story of many good titles rather than a few great ones, and that can be frustrating.

I was in a PS3 vs 360 group discussion one day where there was one PS3 defender debating the issue with about five 360 owners (none of whom are Microsoft fan-boys, in my opinion--they just happen to be gamers, and in this gen that just happens to typically involve owning a 360; most of these guys--myself included--never even had an original Xbox before, just a PS2 and maybe a GameCube). The PS3 guy said something like "the 360 doesn't even have a hard drive, and that really bothers me." The 360 owners all looked at each other in confusion. I'm still not sure I understand why this PS3 guy thinks the 360 doesn't have a hard drive; the best he could explain it to me was simply that there's the option to buy a 360 without one. But, like I said, most gamers don't even think twice about getting a 360 with a hard drive.

The fact that PS3 games require an install is probably a worthwhile benefit over the long run (reduced load times and all of that), but it is still a massive pain in the ass. It sucks having MGS4 interrupt the game every few hours to do a three minute install for the next chapter of the game (although I have to give Kojima Productions credit for doing that instead of having a huge half-hour install before you can even start playing the game), and including the time that it took GT5 Prologue to patch, it was well over a half hour before I was able to start playing it.

I was also debating the 360 vs PS3 issue with Fritzkrieg one day, and he mentioned that the 360 loses a lot of its appeal for gamers who don't plan on getting Xbox Live or even having their console connected to the internet. This is true, but then, the PS3 loses a lot of functionality without the internet as well. I would agree that it doesn't lose as much as the 360 does, but not necessarily enough to put it in the lead.

At least the PS3 doesn't have a tendency to croak suddenly and need to be sent away for two months to be repaired. So far my Xbox 360 hasn't broken down, but now that I have a PS3, I at least feel some reassurance that I won't be stuck with just Nintendo DS and PSP games in the case that something does go awry with it. Still, I can't shake the feeling that any console gamer who doesn't own an Xbox 360 by now is missing out. I'm not sure I can say the same for the PS3.

I bought the PS3 for Metal Gear Solid 4 and, as a distant second, for the Blu-Ray player. While this decision arguably made some sense for me, it certainly won't for most sane people. Overall, MGS4 is disappointing; it is a 3 out of 4 stars game, at best. That having been said, if you're into Metal Gear, you've got to play it.

The biggest problem with MGS4 is that the story sequences are far too lengthy. This isn't a misguided criticism that's thrown around by critics who aren't Metal Gear fans; MGS4 really does have far, far too much story time. Gamers who aren't huge MGS fans will probably also think that the story sucks, as will some gamers who are Metal Gear fans. But the senseless length of the cut-scenes is the prime issue here. It's ridiculous.

What MGS4 has going for it is that the gameplay is good while still being consistent with the MGS style (some non-MGS fans may complain, but mostly because they don't "get it"), the plot does an entertaining job of stitching together the entire story arc from the five previous Metal Gear games (Metal Gear, MG2, Metal Gear Solid, MGS2, and MGS3--every one of these games contributes in a non-trivial way to the MGS4 plot), and there is the occasional "wow" moment where something amazing happens that just completely blows me away. The bottom line is that MGS4 is about as good as MGS2--give or take a little--which is to say that it falls short of both MGS3 and the original MGS.

There's also Metal Gear Online, which is best thought of an entertaining bonus rather than a full-fledged online game. If you don't like console FPS games (stuff like Halo and Gears of War) but do like MGS games, then Metal Gear Online may have extra appeal for you as an online experience that you can't easily get elsewhere. Personally, I was only able to play it for about half an hour before I started feeling like it was a waste of my time. I may give it another chance sometime, but my initial impression is that it's too awkward and just can't compete with the single-player experience.

If there's some kind of MGS4 re-release with additional VR mission content or something of that nature, it could make for a very appealing game. With the exception of some tedious sections from Act 3, I enjoy playing MGS4 a great deal; the main problem with MGS4 is that every hour of gameplay is interrupted by an hour of cutscenes. There are some other level design issues worth mentioning: I have found the boss battles to be unnecessarily tedious, and quite often it is disappointingly easy to shoot my way through a situation rather than sneak through it--which is something that the other MGS games did a better job of promoting. But even with all of its flaws, I have found MGS4 to be a worthwhile game.

To recap, I'd rate the entirety of the Metal Gear Solid series as follows:

Metal Gear Solid - A perfect game.
Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions - Fun expansion pack.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - Bad story, great gameplay.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance - VR missions make this one of the best Metal Gear games to own.
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes - Entertaining remake, loses some of the appeal of the original, worth trying.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - Great story, great game experience for Metal Gear fans.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence - Excellent package for Metal Gear fans; includes original Metal Gear MSX games.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - Worst pacing problems in the series, good gameplay.

Among those releases, MGS4 ranks near the bottom, but that's not bad company to be in.

I was forewarned not to expect much from GT5 Prologue, but I've actually been quite happy with it. The selection of cars and tracks simply does not compare with a full-fledged GT game (GT4 is so epic for content that it competes with World of WarCraft), but given that there is a wide variety in how the cars handle and the tracks feel, in some ways GT5 Prologue has more content than a racing game with lots of levels where everything feels the same (*cough*PGR*cough*).

The single player career only contains thirty events--that is, thirty single races, some of which make up familiar series such as the Sunday Cup and the Clubman's cup--and is so short that it could be played through in a single sitting by a skilled player. This is compounded by the fact that a typical player may not even be skilled enough to reach the top tier (one-third of the events), thereby limiting the field to a paltry twenty races to grind for career cash.

I was also shocked by the lack of car upgrades. I'm used to being able to buy new car parts in GT, and missing this aspect of the game actually bothers me more than the limited selection of cars. On the plus side, the lack of customization options greatly simplifies the online experience, since everybody using the same make and model of car is pretty much using the exact same car. On the down side, if you get stuck on an event requiring a specific model of car, there's no hope of being able to brute force your way through that event by simply buying car upgrades.

Online play does make up the bulk of the experience, as I'd heard. Online leaderboards are an exciting addition to the Time Trials mode, and online events make it possible to earn career cash while competing with other players. It's possible to get some coaching by downloading replay data from the online leaderboards and watching how other players tackle a particular track with a particular car.

Another exciting new feature is the addition of drift events, which I haven't tried yet. I was, however, pleasantly surprised when I left the game running and it went into a demo mode where it quietly downloaded a drift event replay from the leaderboards and started playing it automatically. I left my TV unattended for a few minutes and when I came back it felt like I was watching the GT channel.

Speaking of GT TV, there is also a feature to download free video content for GT5 Prologue, but on my connection it took roughly an hour to download a single video, and there was no option to let the download run in the background. While I appreciate having this feature, I hope that they find some way to improve it for the next release.

I'm easily going to get enough play time out of GT5 Prologue to justify having bought it. In a way, it's actually kind of refreshing to play a GT game so limited in scope that I can actually experience the majority of what it has to offer; I've tended to lack the dedication necessary to complete much of the earlier GT games. That having been said, I can scarcely wait until the full version of GT5 is released.

Ye of Little Faith

2008-06-28T09:21:00.000-07:00

Blizzard has finally unleashed the video game announcement of the year. I have to admit that I was stunned when I first saw it; for the first moment, I suspected that it may even have been some kind of cruel joke. But after watching the 20 minute gameplay trailer (easy to find on the site), I'm more than convinced that Diablo III is real.

It's also amusing to reflect upon Kotaku's reactions to the teaser back when it was still in progress:

When Blizzard started up with the teasing again, plastering the official site with a frosty teaser, Diablo III desperation got the better of a few folks who were interested in having their hopes crushed under the boot of the house that World of Warcraft built.

At the time, these words did sound reasonable to me. Diablo III was hardly the first thing that sprang to my mind when I saw ice breaking away, especially with the Wrath of the Lich King still needing a release date. Looks like the Diablo fan-boys were spot-on, though.

Looking Forward...

2008-06-26T14:41:00.000-07:00

Let's explore some miscellaneous news that I have the impulse to post about. MGS4 aside, I've been somewhat in a gaming lull lately, not that I'm unhappy about that. It's given me the chance to dive into some random stuff like Monster Hunter Freedom and Etrian Odyssey. Fun fact: I bought Etrian Odyssey when it was still relatively new and only just started playing it last week--that is, just before the release of the sequel. I probably would have started it a lot earlier if I'd ever gotten around to finishing Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja. At least I made it pretty far with that one.

News item #1: Dunno if I mentioned this earlier, but Left 4 Dead looks amazing. I love Valve's products, and I tend to love zombie-themed action games (although I haven't played Dead Rising yet... wtf!) so right there I'm already pretty excited. What really drives me over the top here is that Valve sounds serious about trying to be innovative and refine the mechanics of multiplayer gaming with Left for Dead, so instead of getting Half-Life 2 deathmatch with zombies, we may actually see something special here. I'm stoked.

News item #2: Schizoid. It's a psychological disorder, but also the name of a new Xbox Live Arcade game. Looks like a trippy knock-off of Geometry Wars, but with co-operative gameplay. There's potential there.

News item #3: Not so much a news item here as a question: is Final Fantasy Tactics A-2 worth my time or not? A large part of me thinks, "meh, I'm disenfranchised with new Final Fantasy games, especially this one." A small, but still loud part of me says, "it's FINAL FANTASY." Gabe (from Penny Arcade) seems to really like it. I guess I'd better wait to see what Fritzkrieg says about it.

News item #4: Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD is out as a beta release on XBLA. I'll be trying to grab it soon. I doubt that I'll be able to keep up with the level of competition online, but it sure looks amazing.

News item #5: Blizzard sure is cruel with their latest teaser campaign. Personally, I think they're going to announce the release date for WotLK. I do hope that they're listening to the community, though, and realize just how desperate some people are to hear that the next Diablo is on the way.

News item #6: Tycho (from Penny Arcade) brought up Instant Action and their browser plug-in based game, Fallen Empire: Legions. If you're into tribes, then this is indeed worth your time as Tycho suggests. I love how simple this game is to start playing, and it really shows the potential that a web-based Quake could have.

News item #7: Gamasutra reports that Xenogears and Einhander are coming to PlayStation Network. Of course, this means that there's some real hope of seeing these games become available in North America once more.

I probably missed a few things, but that's enough for now. :)

WotB: Commando 3

2008-06-24T15:49:00.000-07:00

Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 hasn't fared to well in its Metacritic score, which currently sits at 65. I haven't played the game extensively yet, but I did pick it up, and 65 is pretty harsh. Triggerheart Exelica managed a score of 63, and I was much less impressed with that one.

The standard disclaimer applies to both of these games: how much you enjoy them depends heavily on your personal expectations. In my case, WoTB:C3 was pretty much exactly what I figured it would be, and I was even pleasantly surprised by the level of polish that went into it. It doesn't have high production values or particularly fancy online play, but then, it is just a $10 XBLA game. If you're looking for an experience on par with Halo 3, GTA IV, or BioShock, you aren't going to find it here. This is a much lower league of gaming, and whether or not you figure it to be worth your while is partly a matter of taste.

Triggerheart Exelica, on the other hand, left me wanting. I didn't buy the full version, thankfully. Based on what little I've seen, I would have difficulty finding reasons to keep playing it even if it were free (achievement points aside, heh). It's basically a shameless Raiden clone with some smutty anime panty-flashing thrown in as a kicker. Which is to say that it's not all bad (heh), but definitely isn't up to competing for my attention when I already have stuff like Ikaruga or even Commando 3 to play. Triggerheart Exelica doesn't "pop."

Speaking of Raiden, the fourth installment is on the way, and it's said to be a full release rather than a mere XBLA game. I was pretty happy with Raiden III on the PS2, so I have some hope for this one.

I'm much more excited about BlazBlue, a new fighting game by the makers of Guilty Gear (and it shows). Combined with the upcoming release of Samurai Shodown Anthology for PS2 and, naturally, Street Fighter IV, I think that the next 6 to 12 months are going to be pretty hot for fighting games. Soul Calibur is coming to XBLA, Tekken 6 is going to hit the PS3 eventually, and King of Fighters XII is in development. Who knows, maybe Soul Cal IV will even manage to not suck.

I guess that while I'm on the topic, I should mention that I've played some Arcana Hearts and found it kinda lacking. It's entertaining for its fringe value, and feels a lot like a good quality doujin game that somehow managed to get published. (Maybe that's what it is?) But I'm not nearly tired enough of my other PS2 fighting game staples (Capcom vs SNK 2, Street Fighter III, Street Fighter Alpha Anthology, King of Fighters XI, Guilty Gear X2, and Neo-Geo Battle Coliseum) to make much room for Arcana Hearts. It is better than Triggerheart Exelica, however. :)

1996 in Video Gaming

2008-05-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

Recently I was thinking of trying to re-create what it was like to play Resident Evil for the first time. In trying to remember what PlayStation games were out around the time of Resident Evil, I came up with Ridge Racer Revolution, Tekken 2, and Vandal Hearts. I wanted to check the release dates on Wikipedia, and that lead me to the page on 1996 in Video Gaming.

It turns out that Resident Evil, Ridge Racer Revolution, Tekken 2, Vandal Hearts, and Suikoden were all released in North America in 1996. So my memory was pretty decent in that sense. Interestingly enough, Resident Evil came out in March and was out before any of those other titles in North America, although some of the titles were out much earlier in Japan (including Ridge Racer Revolution and Suikoden, which actually came out in 1995).

What surprised me, though, is what a fantastic year 1996 was for PC gaming. Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Diablo, Daggerfall, Master of Orion II, Rebel Assault II, and C&C: Red Alert all came out in 1996. Other noteable console games included Tomb Raider, NiGHTS into Dreams, and Mario 64. For a dedicated gamer, 1996 was a busy year.

Is there substance to the claim that games used to be better in the 90's? There's some pretty strong evidence happening there.

R-Type Command, Penny Arcade RPG

2008-05-23T22:54:00.000-07:00

R-Type Command is pretty much exactly what it claims to be: an R-Type themed hex-based tactics game. I'm not a huge R-Type fan, although I do own a copy of R-Type Final. My allegiance lies more along the lines of Gradius, frankly. But there is a pretty big tactics and war-gaming junkie in me, so R-Type Command really didn't have to be that great in order for me to like it, and I do. It would have been cooler if they'd kept the Japanese name of R-Type Tactics and the Japanese cover art, though.

Earlier today I read an import review of Final Fantasy IV DS over on RPGFan.com. I was utterly horrified to read remarks such as the following:

Is FFIV really just that amazing? I don't think so [...] the game was hardly revolutionary in its time.

What... the... fuck! James Quentin Clark obviously has a different opinion on Squaresoft RPGs than I do.

For one thing, Final Fantasy IV had the strongest narrative of any console RPG at the time of its release. I suppose one could make an argument for a few others like Dragon Quest IV or Phantasy Star, but in my experience FF IV was clearly the king of its day as far as story and character are concerned.

But perhaps even more significantly than that is the fact that FF IV introduced Active Time Battle. Prior to that, there was no real-time element to the Final Fantasy combat system--or, for that matter, to any earlier RPG combat system that I know of. Even in widening the field to include PC RPGs I can't think up any RPGs that were around in 1992 with a real-time combat system. The RTS genre wasn't even in its infancy yet; the first WarCraft game didn't come out until 1994, for instance. (source: Wikipedia)

Final Fantasy IV played unlike any other RPG known at the time. It's combat system was fluid and engaging, and still holds up relatively well today. The narrative is crude overall, but there are parts of it that are among the best story-telling in the entire Final Fantasy series. To hear James Quentin Clark tell it, Final Fantasy IV just happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch the attention of fans. In my opinion, Final Fantasy IV fought hard to earn its place in RPG history.

That having been said, I do see the logic in that somebody with a lot of modern RPG experience under their belt who is looking for sophisticated RPG experiences could easily be let-down by a remake of FF IV. I just don't think it's fair to say that FF IV is over-rated. The fact that it's one of the most important games in history doesn't necessarily make it fun for everyone, but FF IV is nothing if not amazing.

Speaking of RPGs, I've played some of Penny Arcade's "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - Episode One." It's pretty good. Sunny is completely hooked on it too, which is a good sign.

The good news is that PA:OtR-SPoD (mercy!), hereby referred to as the PA RPG, stacks up well against my recent rant on RPG design. The writing is good (particularly if you're a fan of Penny Arcade), the combat system is lively and engaging, the game moves along at a satisfying pace, and it's fun to explore new areas. Overall I'd say this is one of the better RPGs that I've played in the last few years, although I should qualify that with the disclaimer that I haven't played a whole lot of RPGs recently.

On the bad side, the PA RPG really shows its indie gaming roots by lacking polish. It's a budget game, which makes it easy to forgive the small interface glitches and the not-so-next-gen graphics, especially since the game is bursting with so much creativity. One problem that rears its head repeatedly is how difficult it can be to target a specific NPC to talk to, but these sorts of things haven't done much to deter me from enjoying the game.

The worst thing that I've found about the PA RPG is that the combat system is frantic. I would have preferred a game with slower-paced combat that focused a bit more on tactics than on timing one's button presses. In a battle involving five or so enemies, things get crazy enough that it's difficult to keep track of everything all at once. This style of gameplay does make the combat challenging and interesting, even if it is a bit much, so once again I find myself enjoying the game and accepting it for what it is.

I should also mention that I'm playing the PA RPG on Xbox Live, rather than the PC version. I'm curious as to whether the PC user interface is better or worse.

Have a good weekend, at any rate.

Braid

2008-05-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

There's an Xbox Live Arcade game in development called Braid:

http://braid-game.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game)

It isn't out yet, but I've had the opportunity to play an in-development version of it on PartnerNet and it is good... in fact, excellent. What is particularly interesting is why it's excellent.

Braid is a puzzle/quest game wrapped in a stock platformer shell somewhat reminiscent of Super Mario Bros. 2--the American SMB2, not the Lost Levels. It has a gutsy art style and a surprisingly compelling fairy-tale like plot. It features quirky time-manipulation mechanics not unlike the ones in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Gamers interested in the independent developer scene will immediately be drawn to Braid, but that's not why it's excellent.

What really caught me off-guard about Braid is how well paced it is. It is rich enough in flavour that it can unfold at a leisurely pace and still keep the player engaged. The result is a cinematic experience that reminds me of Out of This World. Playing Braid for a half-hour invoked a nostalgia in me for exactly those kinds of old PC quest games. Perhaps I happened to just be in exactly the right mood for it.

The soul of Braid is not its tech or trendiness, but its design and core themes. It's been said that while games of old had high design standards and low production standards, modern games have low design standards and high production standards. Braid is one of those brave vanguard games that flips this ratio back. It makes effective use of a more modest development budget and focuses on being an interesting _game_ rather than being a flashy video game. The world needs more games like this.

Xbox Live Arcade seems to be on the verge of exploding this year. Previously I ranted about the great Capcom games coming to XBLA this year (including 1942: Joint Strike, Commandos 3, and SSF2T HD), but other titles in development include Soul Calibur, Castle Crashers, and Braid. It's difficult to keep track of them all. I haven't nabbed the just-released Penny Arcade game on XBLA, but I will as soon as I can get a break from work.

Up until the start of this year, I don't think it would have been entirely unfair to describe XBLA as a wasteland of mediocre game experiences. There are some particularly great experiences to be had for fans of a specific title--for instance, the Prince of Persia remake on XBLA is good, if you happen to be a fan of Prince of Persia. It's not the kind of experience that just any serious gamer can pick up and get lost in, in my opinion, but it is a nice throwback to the old-school PoP.

These days there are three XBLA games that are core staples for me. I manage to play these games almost every week, if not several times a week, and they provide an excellent break from the typical next-gen game experience. This is my Top 3 list of the best XBLA games to date:

#3. Geometry Wars

Geometry Wars will certainly go down in history as an XBLA classic, as it is one of the titles that XBLA is best known for. There are few better games for killing just a few minutes. This one is also available on Steam for non-Xbox gamers.

#2. Ikaruga

Ikaruga is a masterpiece shoot-em-up by Treasure and perhaps the greatest game of its genre. Originally it was available as a Japanese arcade game and an import Dreamcast title. Eventually it made it out in America as a GameCube game, and now it has been ported to HD on XBLA. What makes this version of Ikaruga especially great is the ability to download replay data from the Xbox Live leaderboards and see how the world's best Ikaruga players play.

#1. Pac-man Championship Edition

This is a true Pac-man sequel not to be confused with regular Pac-man (which is also available on XBLA, separately). It is an impeccably designed update to the original and is easily one of the most addictive games that I've ever played. My respect for this game is so great that it was actually an influencing factor in my decision to buy an Xbox 360 in the first place (rather than having just a PS3; not that I have a PS3, yet).

Final note: there's an awesome editorial on The Escapist called Game Design Sketchbook. It's worth a read:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/gamedesignsketchbook/

PS3 Performance Critiqued

2008-05-13T16:10:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across the following post (from a game developer's blog) about the PS3's hardware:

http://jbooth.blogspot.com/2007/10/ps3-misconceptions-and-spin.html

A lot of what he is saying is new to me. In brief,

- The Xbox 360 has significantly better fill rate than the PS3.
- The PS3 Blu-Ray drive is slower to load data off of a Blu-Ray disc than the 360's DVD drive is to load data off of a DVD.
- Multi-threading game code to take advantage of the cell processor is challenging for game developers.

The general point that he's trying to make is that the common belief that the PS3 has much better hardware than the Xbox 360 is, in his opinion, misguided. I have to admit, I still have some trouble letting go of the idea that the PS3 is easily more powerful. :) But then, I haven't seen a PS3 game yet that looks much better than the best looking Xbox 360 games.

Notes on RPG Design

2008-05-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

I used to consider console RPGs my favourite genre of video game, and in many respects I still do. But RPGs have changed a lot since the days of Lunar and Lufia, and I've constantly struggled over the last five years or longer to maintain an interest in them. The exact reasons for this have often been difficult to explain, but there are some cases in which I can put a finger more-or-less on some of the problems that keeps me from fully enjoying the latest console RPGs.

Tedious Gameplay

One of the most potent kill-joys of the RPG genre is when the gameplay falls flat. Generally speaking, there are two types of gameplay that an RPG should focus on: exploration and combat. RPGs can often live without one of these elements, but at least one of them has to be done right in order for the game to be any fun.

There are lots of different ways to do RPG gameplay mechanics; in fact, a large draw of the genre is that it is so varied. That having been said, some elements of exploration and combat are fairly universal. The goal of the exploration element of an RPG is to make the user feel good about discovering and searching new areas. The goal of combat is to challenge the user's tactical decision making skills and add an element of strategy to the game.

For example, a simple RPG formula is to have a town and dungeons to explore. The town is where the player acquires supplies and upgrades, while the dungeons are where dangers are encountered and awards are earned. A typical challenge is to have consumable resource (MP, potions, etc.) that are used during combat, which occurs in the dungeon areas. The player's skill influences how quickly these resources are consumed, which in turn affects how far the player can proceed into the dungeon before getting into trouble. The player must also decide when to turn back to town in order to avoid getting killed and suffering whatever penalties are associated with that.

Even in this relatively simple game design, there are many ways to ruin the fun of the game:

- Broken Economy - The rewards from the dungeon are so great or so little that either there is no challenge in managing resources or the game becomes a tedious grind because progress is so slow.

- Boring Environments - The user is not motivated to explore new areas because there's seemingly nothing of interest in them.

- Slow Combat - Battle encounters unfold at such a slow pace that the user cannot remain in the mood to explore the dungeons.

- Over-Simple Combat - Battle encounters provide no real tactical challenge, so they feel like a waste of the player's time.

- Broken Learning Curve - The game introduces too much needless complexity too quickly, so that newcomers to the game are hard-pressed to make sense of it. Conversely, the game ramps up so slowly that the player loses patience while waiting for it to get interesting.

A lot of balance and design effort is required to make even a simple RPG formula work, so one can see how matters become much more complicated as the RPG genre strives to push the envelope for more sophisticated designs.

Over-Abundance of Story Sequences

In the 16-bit era, story sequences in video games tended to be so few and far between that players relished them. These days some games--particularly RPGs--have bounced back so far the other way that in the first hour of a game it's not unheard of for more than half of it to be taken up by story sequences, including pre-rendered movies, scripted scenes, and even cage-like areas where the player must trigger some event to proceed.

RPGs shine as a story-telling medium, and when they get it right I am enthralled with them. But some RPGs are so over-eager to cram story down my throat that they become a waste of my time. Story-sequences have long since ceased to be exciting by default (that is, impressive just by existing), and in order to be effective they should meet certain criteria:

- Consequential Developments - A good story sequence should advance the plot or develop character. A story sequence that spends several minutes showing the main character making small talk with a supporting character is going to bore me just as much in a video game as it would in a TV program.

- Good Dialog - A common turn-off for me, personally, is when I have to sit through a lot of dialog that makes one of the characters sound like a fifth grader (unless, of course, that character is supposed to sound like a fifth grader). In real life, people who articulate themselves poorly and/or have nothing interesting to say are boring. This is true of RPG characters as well.

- Short and Sweet - RPG story sequences sometimes drag on in a way that tests my attention span. Stop doing that.

Weak Morals

I once had a discussion with a non-gamer about the inherently violent nature of RPGs. It's true that a typical fantasy universe populated with monsters and the heroes that slay those monsters is violent. Given that, it's important for the characters in an RPG to have some moral fiber--something that offsets the psychopathic nature of venturing out into the wild in order to slay things.

Many RPGs tell a variation on the classic "coming of age" story of a young person who ventures out to find fame and fortune while growing and becoming stronger. There is nothing wrong with this, however it should be recognized that the motivation of seeking power for its own sake is more fitting of a villain than a hero. It seems that too many RPG protagonists are inclined to make statements like "I want to be the best!" or "I have to prove that I'm the strongest!" This works well for certain characters with some complexity to them (eg. Naruto), but for others it comes off as making them seem like a bratty sociopath.

Consider "The Lord of the Rings". That's a pretty kick-ass, epic story, wouldn't you say? Not one of the "good guys" in that story is interested in attaining power for its own sake or proving their strength by imposing their dominance on others. In fact, that is exactly the behavior of the villains in that story. The only thing that the heroes really want is attain happiness, which they are certainly willing to struggle for. This is a powerful theme that many classic RPGs follow, and one that many bad RPGs neglect.

It's easy to misunderstand the point of RPGs to the extent of thinking that they're essentially about ambition, but it deeply bothers me when the protagonist of an RPG doesn't seem to want anything more than to become more powerful. There are other ways in which the moral values of RPGs as a story-telling medium may falter, but I find that this one in particular is very common and doesn't seem to bother most RPG fans. I would hope for RPGs to carry exactly the opposite sort of message: that blind ambition tends not to end well, and that there are more important things in life than the pursuit of power.

Story-telling works best when it imparts valuable messages about the world. RPGs about simple-minded characters who are on a quest for personal glory and power for its own sake generally fail to accomplish this.

Failure to be Epic

During the 16-bit era, and particularly during the height of Squaresoft's classic SNES RPG trio of Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2), Final Fantasy III (FF VI), and Chrono Trigger, I remember Nintendo Power throwing the word "epic" around a lot. The Nintendo Power reviewers had a mind that the end goal of RPGs is to provide the player with an epic experience, and I wholeheartedly agreed with them. The high points of RPGs are when the sense of drama and adventure are overwhelming--those are the moments that players revere.

It seems silly to me, then, that many RPGs these days strive to be "hip," "edgy," or maybe even "emo" rather than "epic." The stereotype of what console RPGs represent has become seriously corrupted by the influence of spiky-haired kid protagonists with obvious insecurities. Is this seriously what players want?

The art direction of an RPG is crucial in making the game epic. This applies to the visuals, the musical score, the storytelling, and even to little touches like the user interface and sound effects. Being a big budget title helps a great deal, of course, but I find that even more modest RPGs benefit a lot from taking themselves seriously where it matters.

Some RPGs are made for kids, and I'm fine with that. Some RPGs are maybe even reacting against the stereotype of the typical "dark fantasy" universe that is so derivative of Tolkien's work. But lately I've sometimes felt like there aren't many developers still trying to create classic style RPGs, and that leaves me wanting. World of WarCraft is successful in large part because it puts its emphasis on being a simply epic experience. Other MMOs that put their focus on being hip or cool may appeal to younger audiences, but it's hard to take them seriously.

The simple idea behind "be epic" also ties all of my other points together. A tedious game system that keeps the pace of the game too slow or fails to provide enough challenge isn't epic. Dull environments or little content to explore isn't epic. Watered-down story sequences where little of consequence occurs aren't epic. Characters whose motivations are shallow or selfish aren't epic. A bag full of gimmicks designed to draw players in and leave them little of lasting value is not an epic game. RPGs are the game genre that's all about being epic, period.

Ridge Racer 6

2008-03-28T00:12:00.000-07:00

I picked up a used copy of Ridge Racer 6 today, along with House of the Dead 2 & 3 for Wii. There's little that needs to be said of House of the Dead; it's brilliant, and the Wii can use more games like this (note to self: shame on you for not getting Umbrella Chronicles right away). One thing I did find is that playing a light-gun game with a nakes Wiimote sucks because it's like using a pistol that has a trigger and no grip. Playing with my hand tilter forward not only strains my wrist and cripples my accuracy, but feels wrong in the context of a game like House of the Dead. I'm going to pick up a copy of Link's Crossbow Training (with the Wii zapper dealie) as soon as I have the chance.

Anyway, Ridge Racer 6 has been really good so far. My biggest worry was that the game wouldn't resemble earlier Ridge Racer titles, particularly in terms of gameplay, and that it would end up being merely a bland, weaker version of Project Gotham Racing. Ridge Racer Revolution, Rage Racer, and Ridge Racer Type 4 were among the most fun PlayStation games that I've ever played, and I wanted Ridge Racer 6 to be like those. Thankfully, it is.

One huge complaint that I have is that the audio in the game sucks. What really drives it over the edge is are the frequent interjections from your "sidekick," who gets to be pretty obnoxious after a while. They really should have toned that down. I'll be looking for an option to turn it off the next time I play.

Also important to note here is that Ridge Racer 6 has a very unconventional control scheme compared to games like PGR and Gran Turismo. As my buddy Fritzkrieg says, Ridge Racer games play more like combo-based fighting games than proper racing games. Knowledge of cars and road physics are utterly useless here, so hardcore racing fans may be turned off. I doubt that anyone like that reads this blog anyway, but it doesn't hurt to be clear about that.

I've also only just scratched the surface of RR6, but if my opinion changes much (in any interesting way, that is) I'll write about it some more.

By the way, if you're looking for some fun, free PC games on the web, here are a few that I've found worthwhile lately:

Harpooned
Every Extend
Tetroid 2012

I have yet to start playing Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core. :/

Warlords Online

2008-03-14T14:01:00.000-07:00

Did you know that the classic PC fantasy wargame series Warlords and the popular multi-platform puzzle RPG fusion game Puzzle Quest are directly related? I didn't, until Warlords Online recently hit the web.

My initial reaction was "yes, Warlords!" Then I realized how much it was like Puzzle Pirates or some such, and I started to think "how could Warlords have come to this?" And then I recalled Warlords IV and what a travesty that was...

I was introduced to the series with the rather late title, Warlords III: Darklords Rising, after it was already years old. Even though the game was quite dated and didn't run properly under Windows XP without some coaxing, I was blown away by the addictive simplicity of it. It wasn't long before I'd also tried out Warlords I and II, and I found that the whole series up to that point was brilliant. I pretty much ignored Warlords Battlecry on principle, since I wasn't looking for another RTS to play.

I was stoked when I first heard about Warlords IV and eagerly awaited its release. Unfortunately the game pretty much sucked ass owing to many problems that, in my opinion, stem from one common theme: the game had lost its vision of simplicity. From the look and feel of everything to the functionality of the world map, menus, and combat system, Warlords IV felt busy and cluttered. Earlier Warlords games had the simple elegance of Advance Wars and emphasized exactly those properties that make 4X games so gut-wrenchingly addictive, whereas Warlords IV felt like one of those myopic fantasy strategy games that uses layered and arbitrary complexity to mask the absence of compelling content. I still sometimes force myself to play Warlords IV because I just can't get over what a huge letdown it is and I keep expecting to someday "get it" even though I can't say what "it" is. (I have similar episodes with Master of Orion III.)

In a sense, Warlords Online is a step in the right direction because it takes Warlords closer to its roots of simplicity and addictive gameplay. That said, I just don't feel right playing a Bejeweled-like game when I could by playing Warlords II or III. (I've also been known to play Disciples II, which I bought on Steam last year. Fucking righteous game, that one.)

Capcom!

2008-03-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

It's a fucking sweet time to be a Capcom fan. First off, you've got the recently released Devil May Cry 4 along with a Devil May Cry anime series. Lost Planet is being released as a greatest hits title dubbed "Lost Planet Colonies" with additional content. Street Fighter IV seems to be nearing completion, as is Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD being produced by Dave Sirlin. And finally, there is a veritable feast of forthcoming XBLA Capcom projects including Bionic Commando Rearmed, Plunder, Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3, and 1942: Joint Strike.

Capcom is killing me--just killing me.

Super Smash Bros Brawl

2008-03-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

How many hours have you spent playing Brawl so far this week? I'm only up to three, since I haven't been dedicated enough to skip work or anything like that.

Contrary to the VG Cats strip from a few weeks ago, Captain Falcon is present in Brawl as a playable character. I also found Joystiq's Nega-Review of Brawl amusing. A lot of those Nega-Review observations strike me as criticizing Smash Bros simply for being Smash Bros--it would be roughly the same thing to criticize Final Fantasy X for having a turn-based combat system and linear storyline.

Personally, I can't claim to be a real Smash Bros fan. I've never played the original, and I've only played Melee at friends' places. I do like the game, but to me it isn't as satisfying an experience as fighting games like Capcom vs SNK 2 or Tekken 5. I'm sometimes confused as to what makes Smash Bros such a huge phenomenon in the first place, since so many other excellent games barely get a second look. Case in point: I would have thought that Mario Galaxy would be a much bigger deal, but people have been way more fanatical about Brawl, it seems.

On the other hand, Smash Bros does manage to tap into my inner Nintendo fan--that kid who lived for NES and SNES games back before it all went wrong. I also have to commend it for having an unconventional fighting system--something quite different, in my experience, from the standards set by Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Virtua Fighter, and Tekken--that works so well. When I say that I'm not a real Smash Bros fan, I only mean that I've tended not to make enough time for it in the past, and that I'm not nearly as into it as the hardcore players. It will always be one of those classic game series that commands respect and revisiting. And if the series goes awry after this, I'll just keep playing Brawl.

Sins of a Solar Empire, Army of Two

2008-03-07T10:47:00.000-08:00

I'd almost resolved to let this blog die, but I keep thinking of stuff to talk about. Maybe I should just admit to myself that nothing I have to say is very interesting. Anyway...

Sins of a Solar Empire is the best 4X game I've played since Master of Orion 2. The biggest thing that it lacks is the ability to design your own ships, which is a fan favourite feature of games like Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations. Personally, I don't miss it all that much.

Other aspects of SoaSE, aka "Sins," resemble WarCraft III. Capital ships act like hero characters in that they gain experience and levels which lead to ability upgrades. Sins even uses the term "autocast" to refer to having abilities set to go off automatically, which is definitely WarCraft III terminology and seems anachronistic given that we're talking about spaceships consuming antimatter rather than spell casters consuming mana.

Fortunately, Sins lacks the frantic pace of a typical RTS. Individual units behave intelligently enough on their own to not need constant babysitting, and build queues are sophisticated enough that you can even queue something that requires, say, a tech that is still being researched. Every design decision is geared towards making the game playable at an immense scope (the smallest game maps involve six planets around a single star, while the largest involve over one-hundred planets in five different star systems) while allowing the player to enjoy the 4X nature of the game (exploration, development, epic fleet battles).

Sins also has multiplayer. I've read Galactic Civilizations: The Case for No Multiplayer and I'm not really convinced. Sure, I understand that multiplayer development takes a great deal of development effort to implement, and yes, I agree that a developer could potentially craft a better single-player experience by ditching multiplayer. But 4X games scream for multiplayer, especially in a game as close in form to Master of Orion as GalCiv is. At the very least they could develop a multiplayer version of GalCiv that lacks AI altogether. I'm pretty sure people would buy that. People have certainly bought Sins of a Solar Empire: 100k copies in two weeks, in fact.

On the shallow front, Sins doesn't have cutting edge graphics, but it does have a certain visual appeal that sci-fi fans will easily appreciate. I don't usually give a crap about audio, but Sins is an affront to my ears (awkward, repetitive verbal cues) and I prefer to play it while listening to something else entirely.

Army of Two is obviously EA's attempt to tap into the same market that holds Gears of War aloft. I haven't played Army of Two extensively, but it strikes me as the kind of game that would be better if it were a touch more respectable. Some of the tactical elements are satisfying and remind me of Full Spectrum Warrior. This element of the game is all but buried by the jockish thuggery of "pimped out" weapons (they seriously use the phrase "pimped out" in the weapon upgrades menu) and fist pounding. By comparison, the heroes in Gears of War seem down-right intellectual.

Still, the gameplay in Army of Two is surprisingly solid, and as a co-op FPS it has me hooked. I do have friends who will probably never play it with me because of its crass attitude, but I am pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of this game. It's likely to succeed in the marketplace, but unlikely to steal any thunder away from Gears of War 2. If anything it will probably serve to whet gamers appetites.

Finally, I'd like to mention Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, which is one of my series of cheap PS2 games being revisited. I'd heard many times that Lament of Innocence is awful, and it is. However, I'm also surprised by how close it is to being good.

The visuals are somewhat bad but, I think, good enough, and the soundtrack is good Castlevania material. Lament of Innocence seems to understand that exploration and combat are the soul of Castlevania, but somehow manages to screw both of these elements up to the point where the result is barely playable. Navigation and moving around the map is tedious, while combat is sluggish and quite frustrating. If this game had been some new and unknown franchise it would not seem so bad, but as a Castlevania fan this title is somehow insulting.

Lament of Innocence seems to get worse the more you play it. I'm about 20% through the game and I'm having a hard time continuing--basically, I can only bear to play the game when I'm feeling brain-dead and want to play something bland. In some ways, God Hand is a better game.

Daisenryaku, God Hand

2008-01-29T16:06:00.000-08:00

I have some gamer friends who find it surprising that I still buy and play PS2 games even months after having made the "switch" to Xbox 360. In response, I've occasionally said that this is an ideal time to catch up on old PS2 games, since second-hand titles are now both cheap and abundant. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about a few PS2 games that I've enjoyed recently for very little investment.

Dai Senryaku Exceed VII: Modern Military Combat - $20 (new)

The first is "Dai Senryaku Exceed VII: Modern Military Combat" which, as far as I can tell, is a distant cousin of the Sega Saturn game Iron Storm. Information about the Advanced Daisenryaku series is surprisingly sparse, even on the web, and this apparently seventh installment of it is my first exposure.

Daisenryaku VII, as I'll call it for simplicity, was previously released on the original Xbox back in 2004 and made its way on the PS2 in 2006 (2007 in America). The PS2 version is what I'm playing. My initial impression is that the game is a clone of Advance Wars only on a hexagonal grid playing field and with a greater variety of unit and weapon types. The game is definitely not as user-friendly as Advance Wars, however, and the tutorials provided with you are fairly inadequate although they do provide a starting point. Gamers who are easily frustrated should be wary of this one.

I have a strong soft spot for turn-based war-games, however, and Daisenryaku VII is very appealing to me. It's addictive, satisfying, and not cryptic enough to drive me away. As is often the case with games that I talk about here, I haven't played enough of it to form a definitive opinion, but so far I'm happy to have this game. Initially I thought that since Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is already out, Daisenryaku VII would turn out to be an entirely redundant purchase, but surprisingly I've made time for it anyway.

God Hand - $15 (used)

God Hand is a hilarious PS2 game that I initially read about in a Hardcore Gaming 101 article about it. This game is bad in all of the right ways and elevated by the fact that it doesn't take itself the least bit seriously. It's something of an awkward third-person perspective brawler with awkward controls and level design, and the main objective is basically to string together long combo attacks as furiously as possible. The game gets significantly more complex by allowing the player to purchase new moves and edit not only which buttons perform which moves but also which moves chain into which other moves. In other words, you end up building your own combo chains from various jabs, hooks, kicks, and uppercuts that you unlock yourself.

What really makes God Hand worth playing is the Capcom charm that it exudes. It's not a quality game, and yet there is a sort of quality hidden in the specific way in which God Hand sucks. I think that it's best described as a "raw" game that's unfriendly and unlikely to appeal to most players, but hardcore brawler fans will get a kick out of it and appreciate its sense of humor. I whole-heartedly recommend this game.

Zone of the Enders - $5 (used)

Fritzkrieg recently realized that I haven't played ZoE and absolutely need to, so he lent me his copy of ZoE2 along with the specific instructions to forget about the first one and just play ZoE2. A week later, having not even tried ZoE2 yet, I had already purchased a cheap used copy of ZoE (with the MGS2 demo disc!) and started playing it, much to Fritzkrieg's frustration. :)

ZoE is a pretty sparse game in much the way that a lot of early PS2 games were. It's a relic from the time before the PS2 hit its stride, but as such, I'm actually quite impressed with it. I'm glad I didn't pay more than $5 for it, but given that I'll get at least 10 hours worth of entertainment out of it before I shelve it for eternity, I'd say that was $5 well spent.

As for why I'm actually going to be able to play it for 10 hours before getting bored, I really can't say. It must be the allure of Kojima Productions or something. Fritzkrieg assures me that ZoE2 is a huge improvement, so we'll see how I feel about that when I get around to it.

Persona 3

2008-01-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

I've been making the occasional effort to play Persona 3, specifically when Fritzkrieg is over. On the surface it's an appealing game, and I'm sure I could get into it with a bit more of a time investment, but overall I'm disappointed with this game. It's slick and daring, but fails in some critical ways.

The biggest failing in Persona 3 is its confused gameplay balance. On the one hand, Persona 3 positions itself as an accessible RPG suitable for younger audiences and new-comers to the genre, and on the other hand it is deliberately cryptic and frustrating at times. If you're a fan of games like Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, you're likely to find the gameplay stripped of its hardcore appeal, such as how you only control one character in combat, and how short the dungeon sections of the game are. On the other hand, if you're new to RPGs and looking for an easy entry point, you'll likely be put off by the obscure names of enemies, spells, and abilities, and you'll be frustrated by how suddenly and easily you can die and lose your progress, as well as how tricky the boss battles can be.

In most areas of the game--such as its story, its presentation, and the overall flow of the game--Persona 3 does an excellent job of striking a balance between accessibility and traditional RPG challenge. The story progresses at a steady, easy pace, and the combat sections are broken up by lots of NPC interaction that isn't vapid or tedious. The graphics and artwork are great, and the overall game design feels very polished. It's only once the dungeon areas of the game start that I feel like I'm being cheated of a good time.

Persona 3 would definitely benefit from an auto-save feature. I've found that the game's non-threatening tone can lull one into a false sense of security that is rudely interrupted at intervals when one realizes that it is, after all, a Shin Megami Tensei game--which is to say that it's easy to die and be forced to start over from your last save. While playing Digital Devil Saga, I enjoyed the challenging combat system in which even random encounters could suddenly take a turn for the worse and wipe out your party, but that Persona 3 shares this characteristic of other Shin Megami Tensei games while discarding so many others strikes me as simply awkward.

It's possible that Persona 3 simply maintains those hardcore challenge aspects that it feels are necessary to prepare newcomers for other, more serious Shin Megami Tensei series games. It's also possible--perhaps likely--that I simply haven't played far enough into Persona 3 to get to a point where the game world opens up and things start getting truly interesting. It pains me to write about not liking Persona 3 because I had high hopes for it and at first it played right into the ways in which the Shin Megami Tensei series is enchanting to me, but the grim reality is starting to set in that I am likely already finished with Persona 3. It's at that juncture now where I'll probably just read ahead about the game in a FAQ to decide whether or not it's worth any more of my time. As for the next time Fritzkrieg comes over, we may end up starting a play-through of something like Okami or Dragon Quest VIII instead.

Mercury Meltdown Revolution, Medal of Honor Heroes 2

2007-12-04T10:50:00.000-08:00

Strangely enough, I've let a couple of the more exciting Wii releases slip past me so far--Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles and Trauma Center: New Blood, both of which I'll probably get sometime after the holiday rush dies down--but I've found time to try out a couple of more obscure (by my personal standards, at least) games: Mercury Meltdown Revolution and Medal of Honor Heroes 2. Both of these titles made it into my library primarily because I was able to pick them up cheaply.

Mercury Meltdown Revolution is a lot like Marble Madness or some such action-puzzle game, but with novel Wii controls. Having played this for nearly an hour, I didn't see anything in it that couldn't have been done with conventional console controls, but the Wii control scheme certainly adds intrigue. Had this been a Wii launch title, I think it would have been a pretty big deal; as it stands, it's still worth checking out, especially if you like puzzle games. I expect myself to keep coming back to it, and it's definitely a fair deal at bargain-bin prices.

Medal of Honor Heroes 2 actually sat un-opened on my shelf while I played other stuff such as Mario Galaxy (fair enough!) It's not much of a secret to those who know me that I don't much care for Medal of Honor, or even Call of Duty, in spite of the fact that I have a bit of a soft spot for the World War II genre. Given all of that, MoHH2 impressed me a great deal.

As you've probably heard, the graphics in MoHH2 range anywhere from weak to terrible, unless perhaps you're comparing it to games on the PSP. The level of detail is comparable to similar games of the previous generation (PS2, Xbox, and GameCube.) One noticeable strength is the smooth frame-rate, which is not rock steady but seems to be above 30 fps much of the time (based on my highly approximate naked-eye assessment.) Aside from helping the bland visuals a little, the smooth frame-rate also boosts with the game's real selling point: the gameplay.

The control scheme for MoHH2 is excellent. It's certainly not as powerful as the standard WASD + mouse scheme, and I'm not even convinced that it would beat a standard dual-analog gamepad controller for overall speed and accuracy, but these comparisons are somewhat beside the point. MoHH2's control scheme is both innovative and immersive, and because the controls are so fluid and fun, I found myself drawn into the game right away. It was a genuine "wow" moment.

In fact, the intense gameplay managed to keep my attention away from the uninteresting level designs and the rather shoddy enemy AI. My main gripe about the levels (given that I've only played the first two, so have your grain of salt ready please) is that they are so blatantly linear and contrived in feel. When I play a modern FPS, I like to feel like there's a bit of an open world element--ie. that I'm not simply running an obstacle course. My main gripe about the AI is that enemies don't react believably in melee situations: for one thing, you can get right on top of them and they hardly even bother to face you until you start hitting them. Combined with the graphical shortcomings of the game, these flaws really make MoHH2 feel like a port of an FPS from five years ago.

And yet in spite of all of that, MoHH2 is still a great deal of fun, and I still look forward to playing it because of the awesome control scheme! I didn't think that it would stand a chance given all of the other FPS games I've been playing (Orange Box, BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 3, Gears of War, The Darkness) and all of the much more exciting FPS games currently available that I don't have yet (Call of Duty 4, Unreal Tournament III, Crysis, Quake Wars: Enemy Territory), not to mention the other non-FPS Wii games that I want to play, but I honestly think that I'm going to come back to it and maybe even bother to finish it, which would be a first among all of the Medal of Honor games that I've played. It's all thanks to those amazing Wii controls.

At this point you may be thinking that I've become one of those Wii-nuts who always rants about the innovative technology of the Wii thinking that somehow it makes me more hardcore than the "hardcore" console gamers who play Halo and blah-blah-blah. I've gotten that attitude a lot, personally, and frankly I've grown very skeptical of the Wii. I've heard about how, say, it's really fun to grab and shake enemies using the Wii controls in Godfather: Blackhand Edition, and my general response has always been to the tune of "yeah, great, but it's still just a really weak rip-off of GTA3, which I was already sick of back in 2002." (To be fair, I haven't played the Godfather game at all, so my opinion doesn't count for much.) I like Wii Sports but I also find it tedious and hardly ever play it, and my favourite features in the Wii Zelda and Mario games have had little to do with the "revolutionary" Wii controls. I'm not on the Wii's "side" here, although I do like the system overall.

Is that to say that MoHH2 is truly all that great and you should rush out to buy it immediately? No, not really--unless perhaps you're bored and have some money to burn, I guess. But you definitely should make an effort to try it, whether that means renting it, borrowing it for a friend, or maybe even buying it (especially if you can get a deal on it, like I did.) I find it amazing that such a bland and stale FPS series has managed to deliver such an exciting and innovative game experience on the Wii. Any serious Wii owner must try this game, and I look forward to future Wii titles that learn from what MoHH2 has accomplished.

Zapper Games on the Rise

2007-11-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the Wiimote, "zapper" shooters are making a comeback. So far I've heard of Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (recently released), Link's Crossbow Training, and Sega's House of the Dead Collection. I find this personally exciting because this genre of games has been a favorite since the days of Operation Wolf and Duck Hunt.

I'd like to correct a slip made by the GameTrailers.com review of RE: Umbrella Chronicles. These games are not "rail shooters," which is a term that generally refers to a particular style of fly-and-shoot style games where the user has heavily limited control (if any) over the flying aspect. Classic rail shooters include Panzer Dragoon, Sewer Shark, and StarFox. Please refrain from calling Wii zapper games "rail shooters;" prefer the term "light-gun games," if you must.

Now what would truly make me happy is to see the likes of Virtua Cop, Time Crisis, and--especially--Point Blank make it to the Wii. Silent Scope is another great title, but doing it properly on the Wii might be tough; it would require an expensive peripheral to properly emulate the game's scope mechanic. Several Time Crisis series titles have already been ported to the PS2, and an adaptation of Point Blank was made for the Nintendo DS (a briefly amusing little game, but can't do justice to the original), so bringing these games to the Wii seems like a no-brainer to me. I'm not sure how many Virtual Cop fans are left out there, but I've considered it one of the finest examples of the genre ever since its release; everyone else seems to prefer Lethal Enforcers, which itself is a solid game.

Are we going to see the a renaissance of this genre whose popularity has waned with the decline of the arcade? Time will tell.

Assassin's Creed, Super Mario Galaxy

2007-11-16T21:15:00.000-08:00

Amidst the current flood of new releases, I've been trying to confine myself to the essentials. In the spirit of that, I want to talk about some of the very best games that I've been playing lately.

Assassin's Creed is fucking intense. I was expecting it to be like Prince of Persia (the modern ones, not the classics) meets Metal Gear Solid, and that turned out to be fairly accurate, although there's also a stealth assassin quality of the game that touches on Tenchu, and an open world quality that's not unlike Grand Theft Auto. Any way you cut it up, Assassin's Creed is at home alongside some of the finest games made this decade to date.

Leading up to the launch date I'd read that the controls were clumsy, and there is some truth to this, but that doesn't pose much of a problem for me. Both Prince of Persia and Metal Gear Solid feel similarly "sluggish," but it's a matter of design: these games are meant to play with a more technical feel--think of how Soul Calibur compares to Kingdom Hearts. Overall, I like the controls the way that they are just fine.

Assassin's Creed is extremely immersive and has that addictive "page-turner" quality to it where there's always just one more bit of the adventure that you want to finish before putting it down. I've only played maybe eight hours of the game so far, but I absolutely love it. For everything that Assassin's Creed does poorly or wrong, there are easily three other things that it excels at. In a weird sort of way, this game reminds me of what Spider-Man 2 (the game, not the movie) could have been if it wasn't nearly so dull and repetitive.

I have to admit that upon arriving home with Assassin's Creed in-hand, I had something of a dilemma: I'd also purchased Super Mario Galaxy at the same time. I've looked forward to both games for a while, and in recent times I'd been more excited about Assassin's Creed then Super Mario Galaxy, but on finally facing the critical juncture where I had to play one or the other first, it was my curiosity for the new Mario game that won out.

The first few hours of Super Mario Galaxy have been excellent. It's very much in the same vein of Mario games as Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. In fact, if you thought that Mario Sunshine was pretty good aside from the over-emphasis on the water nozzle device, you'll find Super Mario Galaxy right up your alley. There is one thing to be aware of, however: Mario Galaxy is quite a head trip.

I mostly say that Mario Galaxy is trippy because of how often one finds oneself running around upside-down and at other odd angles, which is due to how the game plays with gravity and sudden shifts in perspective. While this took more than a few moments to get accustomed to (during the process of which I complained to my wife that Mario Galaxy was giving me a headache), it's also this aspect of the game that makes it so refreshing. If you're like me, you watched the trailers for Mario Galaxy a year ago and got excited over how funky and freaky it looks; now that the game is here, I'm happy to report that it lives up to that hype.

Super Mario Galaxy adds greatly to the health of the Nintendo Wii, but what it doesn't do is rescue the Wii from it's current status as a GameCube 2.0. Where are the third party titles? I want to see much more from the likes of Atlus, Capcom, Konami, and Square-Enix. Let's see some developers capitalizing on that install base! I love the Wii, and I love Super Mario Galaxy, but the direction of that console has to change if it wants to compete with the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Just a little aside there.

Ace Combat 6. Fucking... wow. I've never really given the Ace Combat series the attention that it deserves. Fritzkrieg is a big fan, and I did buy Ace Combat 5 under his recommendation. It's a fantastic game, but I got kinda busy and, yeah, I'm sorry to say that I never finished it. I also never got around to picking up Ace Combat Zero because, well, I never even finished Ace Combat 5. Still, I'm trying to redeem myself with Ace Combat 6, and I'm about half done the single player campaign now. I hope they did a good job on the online multiplayer--I haven't tried that feature yet, but I plan to. The fact that this is out for Xbox 360 also blurs the line somewhat between the Xbox and the PlayStation camps, which is a good thing... for the Xbox side, that is. (Ditto on Devil May Cry 4 for Xbox 360.)

On the PSP I'm having a lot of fun with Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles. At first I was absolutely stoked to get it, but I thought it was going to be a compilation release including a remake of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. As it turns out, that's not the case: Dracula X Chronicles merely includes a straight port of SotN as unlockable content, as well as an unlockable straight port of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. The main game itself is a remake of Rondo of Blood, which I found very disappointing because it follows the challenging arcade-style Castlevania format rather than the exploration-driven quest-style format that has made Castlevania so great in recent years.

However, I came around and have started really enjoying Dracula X Chronicles. One reason for this is because the game isn't overly challenging. Beating each level does require playing it multiple times and enduring some disheartening setbacks, but the levels themselves aren't very long, and there are many secrets to discover that help in the struggle. Once I started to get the hang of it, Dracula X Chronicles became a little more exploration-based and a lot less tedious; it's a far cry from the likes of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, but it's still a good Castlevania game. And the inclusion of Symphony of the Night is definitely a welcome thing, although I haven't unlocked it yet.

An older PSP release that I only started playing recently also caught me off guard: Final Fantasy. I expected it to be more of a port of the WonderSwan version (which was ported to the original PlayStation as part of Final Fantasy Origins), and in places it certainly looks like one, but a lot of work has been done to retool this game for the PSP format. The visual style may offend some purists, but I think it looks very much like a classic JRPG. The game system has been changed somewhat too--for example, spells use an MP system which is consistent with the Final Fantasy series as a whole, but totally unlike the system used by the original Final Fantasy. Again, purists may object, but I appreciate the change. I've seen enough of both the original Final Fantasy and the WonderSwan versions, which is why I dreaded cracking into this latest version, but it actually ended up feeling fresh and new to me.

As for PC games, I thought about getting Quake Wars: Enemy Territory, and I thought about getting Call of Duty 4, but I have neither. Right now it's still all about the Orange Box and World of WarCraft. Xzi finally hit 60! My wife, Sunny, also hit level 60... for the third time, that is. Her second alt is a frost mage and she seems to love playing one.

Oh yeah, one final note: Guitar Hero III. Hell yes, but damn those guitar battle levels are hard.

Portal, World in Conflict

2007-10-25T17:13:00.000-07:00

I've done a lot of gaming in the past six weeks or so--just not a lot of writing. Among the games that I've finished recently are BioShock, Halo 3, Skate, and Stranglehold. I'm not going to go nuts on trying to cover everything here. Remarks may leak out about various games gradually, but to be honest, my interest in writing is waning lately and I'm not sure how long it'll be before I feel like blogging again.

I've tweaked my blog template to include a Flash version of my Xbox Live gamercard courtesy of mygamercard.net. As unexciting as that may be, it's a fairly convenient way to tell what I've been playing lately (on Xbox 360) even if I don't bother to post about it. Here's an image embedded version:

So, Orange Box. Team Fortress 2 is awesome. Half-Life 2 is old news, but still awesome. I haven't played Episode 2 yet. What exceeded my expectations the most, however, is Portal. What I expected was a clever and very polished puzzle game with mind-bending physics tricks. What I got was something of a psychological thriller.

Portal hinges on narrative. You aren't merely playing yourself trapped in a twisted lab experiment turned puzzle game: you seemingly play a specific, yet unknown character. Unexpected twists in the setting reveal that much more is happening plot-wise then you might first think. I don't want to go into specifics because it would be a terrible shame to ruin this experience for anybody with spoilers, but suffice to say that it really draws you into the world that it creates.

In a way, it's a shame that Portal is so short. Assuming you don't get stuck for too long on any given level, your first play-through will be over in three or four hours, not including the optional challenge levels provided under the Extra Content options. However, I thought that the game's brevity was one of its strengths: it leaves no room for filler, which makes the setting and plot all the more potent. Portal is to a regular game what a short story is to a novel, or what a short film is to a feature length production, and in some ways this is definitely a benefit.

I feel so strongly about Portal that I would call it a perfect game. It doesn't fuss around with trying to be everything to everyone, thereby avoiding any awkward attempts to be something that it's not. It has all of the atmosphere, attention to detail, and innovative design work that went into Shadow of the Colossus, and I think that both games appeal to the same type of audience. Portal absolutely blew my mind, and it left me wanting more, which is something that not nearly enough games these days do.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have World in Conflict. As is documented in this blog, I was completely won over by Company of Heroes--it went so far as to revive a great deal of interest in RTS games that had been dormant in me since I finished WarCraft II years ago. It was with this attitude that I approached World in Conflict, and in many ways it didn't disappoint, but in some crucial ways it has.

I haven't gotten very far in World in Conflict and my opinion is certainly in flux, but one immediate let-down was the heavy-handed storytelling in the game. It tries very hard to be epic and seems to land in the same camp as the movie Independence Day that way. The single player campaign for World in Conflict ends up feeling nearly as cheesy as the one in Command and Conquer 3.

I haven't been impressed by the UI either. It's not bad, but it's not as good as what I've become accustomed to from Company of Heroes and Dawn of War. It's easy enough to select units by type and get them to move in formation, but don't expect them to be particularly smart without your constant attention. Several times I've found myself wanting to form task groups of, say, some light armor, one heavy armor, and a repair vehicle for support, and it can be frustrating trying to cherry-pick individual units out of the mob for something like that. Some innovation here would have been welcome.

One thing that struck me as kick-ass in World in Conflict is the use of artillery in the game. Off-map artillery plays a huge tactical role (as it should) and is graphically very appealing as well. The smoke effects in particular are nice.

Further mini-reviews to come, maybe.

Console Biases

2007-09-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

I've had some interesting conversations about the Xbox 360 and its place in the industry lately. There's been something of a revelation bubbling up in me, and I've finally found the words for it. For a long time I was biased against the Xbox (for good reasons), and when I finally cracked and got my 360, it was with the realization that the Xbox 360 isn't a cultural or political movement--it's just a console.

This is a powerful idea. Microsoft has spent a tremendous amount of effort making the Xbox into a cultural establishment for "hardcore" gamers--aka. jock gamers. The original Xbox was the console to have if what you wanted was primarily shallow, military-themed shooters and sports titles (or if you were a modder and wanted a cheap, easily cracked PC.) But recently I've started to meet Xbox 360 owners who are more the kind of gamer that I can relate to. These are people who don't like Halo, don't like most sports games, and openly embrace JRPGs and other kinds of games that jock gamers think of as "gay." The existence of such Xbox 360 owners challenged my notions of who the system is meant for.

Leading up to recent releases of Eternal Sonata and Blue Dragon, I thought of these games as flimsy attempts by Microsoft to woo the Japanese market, but now another possibility to apparent to me: maybe the Xbox 360 is out-growing its image as a jock gamer platform and becoming something that people simply play good games on. In other words, the Xbox 360 is becoming less of a "hardcore" accessory and more of a real gaming platform; hence, just a console.

There's something else strange going on here as well: the console FPS genre is maturing. For most of their early history, FPS games were PC-only affairs, with console versions being lame adaptations. The development of mouse-look controls is what sealed the deal, and ever since the likes of Quake 2 and Half-Life, consoles have been playing catch-up.

Lately, however, we're seeing more FPS games tuned specifically for play on consoles. In this category, one could include such games as Metroid Prime, Resident Evil, and Gears of War. These games are generally only barely FPS games in important ways; they have funny movement schemes or lock-on targeting controls that defeat what the genre is generally all about. In spite of that, these games are good in their own right.

I've had chats with my buddy Matt, who is a big fan of the great PC FPS classics, about what makes Resident Evil 4 great. One of the arguments that Matt has made (directly or indirectly) is that RE4 could be considered something of an FPS with a crippling control scheme and really easy computer opponents to balance that out. But RE4 isn't really like that; the controls are actually really good, even though they're not nearly as efficient as PC mouse-keyboard FPS controls.

The analogy that I made was to sports. Sports are often defined by the limitations that they impose on their participants. Consider basketball: one of the rules of basketball is that you have to dribble the ball while you move. Once you pick the ball up, you have to pass it before you can move again. These rules are very restrictive; obviously, it would be a lot easier to not have to do these things. But without these rules, the sport wouldn't be basketball anymore.

To consider a simpler example, look at water-skiing. Why would one bother with water-skiing when one can go faster and have better control from within the boat? Because then you wouldn't be water-skiing anymore: you'd be driving a boat. Being on skis is what makes the sport, even though it's not the fastest, most efficient way to get around.

Resident Evil 4 is like that. Certainly players could aim faster and move much more easily with PC FPS controls (think wasd + mouse), but then it wouldn't be RE4 anymore. For that matter, PC FPSes would be easier if everyone had aim-bots; then you could really crank up the AI difficulty. Why even require the player to navigate? Try turning the game into an aim-bot rail shooter and see how fun that is. While you're at it, maybe just code up a game where the user clicks the mouse once to see a huge "you win" flash across the screen. Yay!

I bring this up largely because a lot of worthwhile console-style FPS games are coming out, and for the first time I'm really seeing the benefit to these games being console titles as opposed to PC titles. All three of the current-gen platforms (Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3) are seeing this happen, and I think that it's a positive trend overall. I just had to get over my bias about what console FPS games are in order to see it. And now the Xbox 360 isn't just a console for jock gamers who don't realize how terrible console FPSes (like Halo) really are because the console FPSes aren't quite so terrible anymore (Gears of War, BioShock.)

While we're talking about console bias, I want to point out a very annoying trend in Wii games. Many developers and publishers have lamented missing out on the Wii launch because they underestimated the console. The Wii now has a massive, and still growing, install base, and there is little doubt that it will remain a driving force throughout the current generation of consoles. But because of a lot of preconceived notions about what the Wii represents, I think that developers and publishers are still missing out on the Wii market.

Look at EA, for example. They're convinced (and hardly alone in this) that the Wii is a "casual" and "family" platform for games like Boogie and EA Playground. While they've recognized that the Wii is a very popular system that needs to be capitalized on, they're still assuming that "normal" gamers will still have an Xbox 360 or PS3 which is the preferred platform for "real" games. And while it is true that the Wii has attracted a record-breaking amount of attention from "non-gamer" consumers, the simple fact of the matter, from where I stand, is that the Wii was chosen by gamers and it is still just a console.

The big hits on Wii aren't going to be cute family games like MySims, or dumbed down physical activity games like Wii Sports. The real hits are going to be deep, emotionally involving games; not necessarily ones that require a huge time commitment or are difficult to learn, but ones that players can get lost in nonetheless. People want to see another breakthrough in presentation and storytelling like Final Fantasy VII, with provoking themes and challenges. In spite of its lacking hardware and current marketing image, the Wii is the perfect platform to deliver those experiences because of its install base and the frenzy of attention surrounding it. Everything else is just glitter and fluff, and publishers like EA are missing the boat just as much now as they were last year at this time.

Of course, I'm just a gamer, and these are just my opinions. :)

So I got an Xbox 360

2007-09-22T15:39:00.000-07:00

The real question is, why? I've been rationalizing to myself for a while now why I don't need a 360. Geometry Wars is available on Steam and coming to Wii. Xbox 360 wired controllers work on PC. Gears of War is coming to PC, Bioshock launched simultaneously on PC and Xbox 360. Stranglehold and Skate are available on PS3. What does that leave for exclusive 360 titles? Halo 3 and Blue Dragon? I could live without those. Recent PS3 price drops have brought it down quite a bit too. So why would I go out and buy an Xbox 360 now, when I could have either waited or chosen a PS3 instead?

The short answer is "because I could." I still intend to get a PS3 eventually--probably when Metal Gear Solid 4 and/or Devil May Cry 4 become available. In the meanwhile I hope and pray that the hardware revisions will get better and better. Of course, I could have waited on the Xbox 360 as well, and it might have been wise to do so. But that's just the thing: I don't care as much about the Xbox 360 in that way. It's more of a casual gaming console for me. In a sense, I only bought the Xbox 360 to tide me over until the PS3 is ripe. I've got some money saved up and I've got some time off coming my way, so I just went for it.

I know from recent experiences that Xbox Live has become a really cool thing. Online services in many Xbox 360 games are pretty good. The achievements system is excellent, and Xbox Live Arcade is one of the better digital delivery systems for cheaper games. (By the way, Ikaruga is coming to Xbox Live, if you haven't already heard.) The ability to link up with other Xbox 360 owner's gamertags and compete on leaderboards is very appealing, since many of my friends at work have Xbox 360 consoles at home. This was certainly a factor in my decision.

The real reasons are more subtle though. There is the very real chance that the Xbox 360 could win this round of the console war. It's far from a lock, but it is possible. My closest gamer friends believe that this is not so, and I don't blame them; I too hope for an eventual PS3 victory, or even to see the Wii take gold. But the Xbox 360 is undeniably good. One evening with Skate, Bioshock, and Stranglehold brought me to the stark realization that the Xbox 360 now is as exciting as any other console has been at the time that I purchased it. There is some real power there--and it's not just the "hardcore" brand image that Microsoft has been whoring to the public, or the fancy hardware. The Xbox 360 actually has things to offer to real gamers.

Skate and Stranglehold could have been PS3 titles for me, and this thought haunts me a little. But I also know from first-hand experience that North American developers take the Xbox 360 more seriously than the PS3, and for this reason many such games end up being just as good or slightly better on the Xbox 360 than on the PS3. Only time will tell for certain if I've made a blunder here or not, but right now I'm feeling confident that I won't look back and wish that I'd gotten the PS3 version instead. (Classic example: I once foolishly chose the GameCube version of Capcom vs. SNK 2 over the PS2 version. Whoops.)

For Bioshock and Gears of War, I could have made due with the PC versions. But having talked with gamer friends about this and seen some of the differences first-hand, I know in my heart that these games are truly meant to be played on a console. FPS games like these that were made for console gamers always lose something in the transition to PC, and what I ultimately realized is that I won't make time for these games as PC titles. I will, however, get a lot of mileage out of them as Xbox 360 games, and so these games are Xbox-exclusive to me, in a sense, even though technically they are not.

Finally, while I was watching the final round of the Omegathon at PAX, my heart did warm a little to Halo 3. I have known for a long time now that Halo really is a pretty cool multiplayer game, even though it is a console FPS (which I consider to be a second-rate genre alongside PC FPS games, although even that opinion has softened in recent times.) There was just something about it that made me eager to play, which is a feeling that I've never felt about Halo before. I actually plan to buy it and expect to enjoy it. Who knows, I might even try to get respectably good at it.

Skate really is an amazing game, in my opinion. I've wanted to get into the Tony Hawk series before because I find the idea of a skateboarding game very appealing, but one of the barriers to entry was how artificial Tony Hawk skateboarding games feel. Skate has taken a lot of criticism for how difficult it supposedly is to land tricks, but personally, I really like having to land on a rail to grind it (as opposed to just standing near it and holding a button to jump on), and I like having a more realistic feel to the game. Skate feels like the kind of game that actually teaches you things about real-world skateboarding (if only a few things), whereas Tony Hawk series games are obviously forays into utter fantasy. Simply put, I've been waiting for a game like Skate to come along for years now, and it delivers in a huge way.

What it all boils down to is that I've put a vote of confidence in the Xbox 360, and it seems to have been well deserved. Hopefully I don't experience the "red ring of death" issue and have my trust shattered. :)

PAX 2007, PSP

2007-09-04T12:39:00.000-07:00

Busy! Pretty much the only time off I've had (and am going to have) in the last while is to attend PAX 2007 with Sunny. I've been meaning to post about the Sumo chairs, demoing cards games (including Eye of Judgment, which was much better than I expected), free Bawls, etc. etc. Suffice to say that it was an intense and amazing experience. I'll summarize some interesting bits in points form:

- Nintendo DS users out-numbered PSP users something like 20:1.
- Halo 3 looks good!
- It's frustrating to demo BioShock in 20 minutes given that the opening cinematic can't be skipped.
- World of WarCraft: The Trading Card game is mostly a rip-off of Magic the Gathering with a less elegant combat system.
- Rockstar Games had a really unimpressive showing (Midnight Club LA? What about GTA4 and Manhunt 2?!)
- Pink Godzilla will happily sell you a factory sealed copy of Suikoden II for $250, among other rarities.
- Sunny discovered Trackmania Nations.
- I discovered Quake 4 multiplayer.
- "Sumo" turned 180 degrees spells "owns."
- One can easily stuff a whole backpack full of freebies from the exhibition area (assuming one isn't too picky, of course; but there is good stuff to be had.)

I do have more to say about PAX, but I lack the time and energy to get into that right now. :( With any luck, I'll be able to revisit the topic later. What I do quickly want to talk about now is the PSP.

I bought a PSP to take to PAX, which turned out to be a really good idea. Three games in particular have shaped my PSP experience to date: Loco Roco, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, and Jeanne D'Arc. Sunny got hopelessly addicted to Loco Roco and I was barely able to pry the PSP out of her hands over the course of the weekend. :) Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops has so far exceeded my expectations, particularly in terms of story intensity and relevance to the Metal Gear saga. Portable Ops also exhibits the same addictive gameplay that has made the Metal Gear Solid series great. Finally, Jeanne D'Arc is a masterful blend of the gameplay styles of Disgaea and Fire Emblem, with some of the same stunning visual style of Dragon Quest VIII. In short, all three of those games are extremely powerful titles, especially for a hand-held system.

I have been completely blown away by the raw power of the PSP and the quality of its best titles. Since the release of the DS Lite, I'd whole-heartedly supported the DS as the best of the hand-held platforms, and lamented the PSP's spotty library. This trend seems to be turning back the other way: although the Nintendo DS is still an amazingly strong platform, the majority of the up-coming handheld titles that I want to play are PSP games. The hi-res display of the PSP also makes it a particularly potent platform for RPGs. I can hardly wait until Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness comes out, and I still haven't played Tekken: Dark Resurrection. To put it another way, I've had my Wii since launch (last November) and my PSP since PAX (a week and a half ago), and already my library of PSP games is as large as my library of Wii games.

Speaking of Wii games, I've been sitting on a copy of Metroid Prime 3 for a whole week now and haven't had the chance to play it. :( And don't even talk to me about BioShock--by the time I get around to that, it might even be a "Greatest Hits" release. However, after another month or so of stress at work, I should have some time off coming my way; the plan it to catch up on gaming in the fall.

Trackmania Nations and Other Developements

2007-08-18T18:04:00.000-07:00

Sunny and I are headed off to PAX next weekend. It's our first time going and we're really psyched up about it. Unfortunately, I've been working some pretty heavy overtime at work lately and it's interfered with my personal life quite a bit. PAX will be a short break from that.

Matt got me hooked on Trackmania Nations, which is a free PC racing game with some simple rigid-body physics (no damage modeling, though), modern graphics, and controls that are reminiscent of F-Zero. I'm really, deeply impressed by this game so far, although I've only just started playing it today.

I was making pretty good progress in RE4: Wii Ed. and the ever-present World of WarCraft (Xzi recently hit level 50; only 20 more to go!) until work started to ramp up. When Steam unveiled Id Software's classic lineup with an option to buy the whole lot for $60 (we're talking Wolf3d, Spear of Destiny, Heretic, Hexen, Hexen 2, Quake I through III, Ultimate Doom, Doom II, Final Doom, Doom III, all of the expansion packs for all of those titles, and even the complete Commander Keen) I jumped at it. I don't really have the serious intention of playing through every title, but I like to think that I will. I've started with Wolf3d and have already finished the original trilogy of Eps 1-3. I'm now about half-way through Ep 4, the first of the Nocturnal Missions expansion pack. That represents about four hours of gameplay so far, and a whole heck of a lot of 1990s flashbacks. :)

Today I picked up my pre-order for Persona 3. God only knows when I'll get around to that. I also have Heroes of Mana which I expected to suck utterly, but the first half-hour was really good. I need to play further, obviously, before forming a solid opinion of the game. Finally, I have Metroid Prime 3 and World in Conflict on pre-order. My only consolation here is that when my crazy crunch-time at work is finally over, I'll have some vacation time and, theoretically, enough time to play all of those awesome games.

I'm also a hair's width away from buying a PSP. As if I didn't already have enough in the way of tantalizing reasons to pick one up, I just read the news about Level 5's latest production (those guys made Dragon Quest VIII), Jeanne D'Arc, and aside from being almost too anime-style for even me to stomach, it looks like a solid game with the potential to be truly great.

The State of the Industry

2007-07-29T19:11:00.000-07:00

In a nutshell,

- Nintendo is kicking serious ass, and its execs are giddy with joy.

- EA admits that they should have backed the launch of the Wii rather than focusing on development for the PS3 and Xbox 360. Undoubtedly they, and many other large publishers, have already shifted their focus.

- Sony execs are in denial and seem to be hoping that consumers will yet "come around" and realize that the PS3 is the only serious platform for real gamers.

- Microsoft's Xbox 360 platform is popular, but the red ring of death defect is costing them dearly and it shows.

- All of the PC gamers are still playing World of WarCraft.

Labels for Gamers

2007-07-26T16:13:00.000-07:00

Just a bit of reaction here to a post over on Infendo:

Jack: my wild prediction is that MGS4 and Halo 3 are going to be considered colossal duds
comparatively speaking
then the industry will go into this huge insecure era of self retrospection
David: bah .. just look at EA .. they’re getting into new games, moving away from ports-only, and embracing Nintendo’s philosophy
there are no more “gamers”. that term is dead.
you don’t say “oh, that person is a cell phone user” .. it’s just becoming a ubiquitous term
Jack: true. i was thinking back on the 80’s and 90’s, as i am wont to do, and i remembered there was no such thing as a hardcore gamer
hardcore gamer = what you get when your audience is shrinking and becoming an obscure niche
David: hardcore, to me, is a person who plays any game they can get their hands on.
but to most people, it’s a guy who plays Halo/GTA/MGS/etc
[...]
David: it’s the opposite in the film world, where a movie buff generally likes the smaller, independent films .. oddball stuff
a “hardcore” movie buff wouldn’t be used to describe someone who is generally interested in blockbuster movies.
I think perceptions will change soon ..
and they’ll have to
terms like “hardcore” or “gamer” no longer mean anything, at least to me
Jack: i’d call it the myth of the hardcore gamer
a marketing term drummed up by people like Microsoft to sell Xbox’s
to a certain demo
unfortunately, it was responsible for shrinking and alienating the market

For my two cents, I absolutely agree about the terms "gamer" and "hardcore gamer" as they're talked about here. Video games are mainstream media now, like television or pop music; there's scarcely a need to label people who are into it because it's no longer an eclectic activity. And yes, there is a perception out there that "hardcore" gamers are into stuff like Halo and GTA, and if they're really daring, maybe Metal Gear Solid or Ghost Recon. To me, a hardcore gamer is somebody who cares about the stuff that's difficult to appreciate--not the mainstream blockbusters.

I don't doubt that the industry will go through some adjustments in its handling of the "gamer" demographic in the coming years. Nintendo has already started a potentially huge trend here; I think that one of the secrets to the success of the Wii is that between the Wii, the Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3, the Wii is the only console that doesn't market itself as being for extreme and/or hardcore gamers. This could be considered evidence that the majority of the market for video games is not made up of insecure elitist seeking ego validation from the marketing machine of their favourite brand. Now there's a thought that should strike fear into the hearts of the marketting minds at Sony and Microsoft.

Sportsmanship

2007-07-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it, Gabe posted an inspiring story of sportsmanship on Penny Arcade the other day. The following short excerpt is only a portion of his tale:

Each of these kids when they lost shook the others hand and thanked them for the match. The winners complimented the losers Pokemon and strategies while impressing on them that it really was a very close game. I know they weren't my kids but as a thirty year old gamer with a kid of my own I could not help but be extremely proud of all of them. Their passion for the game was totally infectious and I've decided to throw away my spreadsheets.

It's pretty freakin cool that Pokemon inspires that kind of sportsmanship. Unfortunately, according to Gabe, there are also those players who equate taking the game seriously with sanctimoniously crushing lesser opponents to inflate their own fragile egos. This is hardly surprising--I can't think of any multiplayer activity that doesn't suffer from this dark flip-side to the sportsmanship coin. Some people simply don't try hard enough to balance the demands of the game against being a considerate person.

I can't tell you how many times, for example, I've joined a party in World of WarCraft and quickly noticed that one of the players is loud-mouthed, bossy, and ultimately incompetent. One starts to suspect a problem when something isn't quite right about the tone with which the guy demands to be summoned, or perhaps tries to volunteer somebody else to run to the instance with him to summon. Maybe he asks for party leadership so he can invite his friend; maybe he even gets it and neglects to offer it back. Maybe he starts making sloppy pulls, or fails to let the tank draw aggro. Maybe he's even single-handedly responsible for a wipe. The cherry on top is always when, at the end of the instance, this guy needs a BOP that obviously isn't useful for his class, and then claims to be a noob or simply falls silent to the cries of outrage from his party members. I wish that I were merely inventing this example, but those of you who play WoW know that I am not.

One thing to realize about WoW is that a character's abilities are not solely determined by their level, talents, and gear: the attitude and alertness of the player can count for more than all of those other things combined. I've out-healed Priests five levels above me simply because I was paying attention and they weren't. People tend to forget that being arrogant can actually seriously cripple a player's abilities in any multiplayer game if that player fails to be a team player because of their attitude.

I've also had experiences playing Magic the Gathering where conceit and self-righteousness have hindered the process of players learning from each other. Here we have a very information-rich game with great potential for players to express themselves and be constantly forging new territory, and yet I find that something about the culture of it tends to drive egos towards their most fragile state. When everybody is bitterly defensive and out to put others down, a game is bound to have a dysfunctional culture surrounding it. As is the case with WoW, some of the coolest people I know play MtG, but there is also no shortage of petty assholes playing it as well.

I just one to make one quick point, and I know with every fiber of my being that it will go unheeded, but nevertheless it is a simple point to make: if one really does fancy oneself as being a "hardcore" player of any game, then one has no burning need to prove it--least of all, to prove it by acting like a dick. There's a world of difference between simply being a great player and frantically scrambling to get other people to acknowledge one's greatness. However, by the time that any given player grows up enough to realize this, somebody else has already been born to take up their old habits, so I guess we're perpetually stuck with shitty sportsmanship.

Too bad there aren't more Pokemon fans out there; they would probably make great WoW players.

Jagged Alliance 2 for Cheap on Steam

2007-07-12T23:05:00.000-07:00

Jagged Alliance 2, which is something of an old classic in strategy war-games, is available at the discount price of $5 on Steam. Better yet, for $8, you can get it packaged with Disciples II, to make a huge stockpile of turn-based mayhem. I could scarcely hold myself back.

I also downloaded and tried the Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions demo on Steam. On the minus side, it holds up poorly by PC gaming standards (this isn't exactly Battlefield 2142 in terms of depth) and it's a system resource hog (likely the result of a lazy port.) On the plus side, it's a Capcom game, and my Xbox 360 Wired Controller for Windows XP was much cheaper than buying an actual Xbox 360. :) The PC port isn't a seamless experience, but Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions is a solid game (although not a particularly remarkable one) and I definitely enjoyed the demo. There's a reasonable chance that I'll buy the full game.

I've also been tempted to get Devil May Cry 3 (Special Ed.) on Steam since I have, and extremely enjoy, the PS2 original. I've heard conflicting reports that DMC3 on PC is a disappointing port that doesn't play as well as its PS2 counter-part, although some people say that with a good game-pad it plays just fine. I'm reminded of the PC version of Resident Evil 4, however, which looks worse when the screen resolution is cranked up because the textures are suddenly inadequate. I don't know whether or not this is as much the case with DMC3 but I wouldn't be surprised. Frankly, I'm half-tempted to pay the $20 just to find out. It's a shame that there isn't a demo for it.

There's also a pretty good chance that I'll get Gears of War for PC when it comes out. Basically I'm just doing whatever I can to avoid getting an Xbox 360 (and an expensive hi-def TV to go with it) since I have a perfectly good gaming PC already. PC games also have the advantage that they're easier to play at work during lunch breaks and the like. Most of all, however, I'm just stalling to try and get a better feel for whether the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3 will come out on top before I commit to either one (I still think that the PS3 is more likely to win out and I'm rooting for it.) Having one of each is an option that I'd like to reserve as a last resort.

Self-Help Through Gaming

2007-07-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that video games aren't given as much credit as a form of artistic expression or a medium for conveying ideas as other kinds of media such as mainstream print and film media. In my experience, any respectable gamer understands that a large part of the experience of playing a good video game stems from achieving things and attaining a sense of accomplishment. This aspect of gaming is easily misunderstood or unrecognized by non-gamers who see little more to the practice of gaming than slouching in front of a screen and adopting a zoned-out demeanor. Never-mind that reading books and watching TV programs is equally sedentary, if not more-so. The social stigma yet persists that video games are a lower form of entertainment, although this view is quickly starting to erode.

Finding inspiration and the drive to succeed is not an easy thing in life. Some people are in the right situations or have the right personality type to be able to seize the day and achieve things, but human nature is to settle into a comfort zone and to need a lot of prodding to be willing to move from that spot. Self-help books and motivational "how to succeed" presentations are popular resources that some people turn to when one feels compelled to do more with one's life and does not know where to turn, but I often wonder just how much good this sort of passive learning really does, aside from manipulating one's emotions and providing a fleeting rush of ambition. It's one thing to read about forming a plan, setting goals, working steadily, and dealing with roadblocks. It's something else entirely to actually set out to do those things on a daily basis and affect a lasting change on one's own life.

In my opinion, people should turn to video games to teach them about ambition and motivation. A good quest game teaches one about exploring possibilities and searching for a way forward. A good RPG teaches one about making steady progress and investing in the future. A good action title teaches that practice makes perfect and diligence is key to success. And in each of these cases, the player is learning these lessons through active participation. For instance, a quest game doesn't merely preach that one should explore possibilities; rather, it makes one explore possibilities and rewards one for doing well at it. These lessons are implicit in that the player succeeds through applying their ambition and finding motivation within themselves rather than merely reciting rhetoric and going through the motions. Instead of merely reading about what it is like to be ambitious and successful, the player becomes ambitious and successful, if only on a small scale.

There is, of course, a large difference between achieving things in a video game and achieving things in real life. A common trap that gamers fall into is becoming hooked on thrill of achievement in video games and not having the same discipline towards their lives outside of electronic fantasy worlds. Some individuals may even crawl into the escapist world of video games in a destructive attempt to blot out reality altogether. But perhaps there is less of a gap between actively making achievements in a video game and doing so in reality than there is between merely reading (or hearing) about how to make achievements and actually making them. Modern video games have started to reach a point where the line is blurring between social connections, skills, and occasionally even material wealth acquired in a video game and those same things formed outside of a game.

Online friends can become real friends--provided that they are real people, of course, and not merely scripted characters. Computer savvy acquired through gaming often translates well into a marketable workplace ability. And, incredibly, a small but growing number of people are actually able to create real-world wealth by selling services in massively online game worlds. As video games have become more sophisticated, the lessons that they offer in how to succeed have come to more closely mirror the nature of real world society. It is already the case that remarkable success in a video game (not unlike a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps, or some other impressive performance skill) is already recognized as a real-world achievement. As future generations come of age, this trend will take stronger root.

An important point to recognize is that not all video games are created equal. A common tactic employed by some publishers and producers in the video game industry is to make their games too easy (idiot-proof, in some cases) in order to provide players with a cheap sense of achievement that does not require true effort. In much the same way that if one is serious about self improvement through books, movies, or music then one must seek out those works that push boundaries and are challenging to appreciate, one cannot confine oneself to video games that are merely cheap thrills and expect to be moved by them. There are great video games out there which can be a source of personal growth for the player, just as there are great books and great movies which provide perspective-altering experiences for an alert audience.

My bias is obvious: not only am I a great lover of video games, but I enjoy reading, watching movies, and listening to music, and I feel that all of these activities can serve as routes to personal growth and self-improvement. For the purposes of my arguments above, I take this view to be a given, and scarcely even bother to argue that a moving piece of art can do more to motivate and inspire than mere advice on how to set goals and work towards them. In this sense, my argument is two-fold: for the art lovers, consider that much in the way that more traditional forms of media can be much more than mere escapism by contrasting the real world and providing new perspectives, video games have that same potency to convey messages and change how people think and feel. And for the self-help fans, consider video games as a potential source of exercise and a way to put principles of self-improvement into practice on a smaller scale as a stepping stone towards making real changes in one's life. Just make sure to do some research and try some of the true classics of gaming before giving up on the whole spectrum of what it has to offer.

Prey, Max Payne 2

2007-06-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

I recently took a break from ArmA (which I've only just cracked the surface of) to finish off the remainder of Prey and start a proper play-through of a long-neglected copy of May Payne 2. Other than both being high profile FPS games (although Max Payne arguably isn't; it's more of a third-person shooter) that lie on the opposite end of the spectrum from ArmA's simulation-style realism, both Prey and Max Payne 2 have the dubious honor of having been purchased by me as $10 bargain bin titles, and I adjusted my expectations of them accordingly. That having been said, both games have been rewarding enough to have justified the time that I've put into them. They've also made me realize that my new-ish gaming PC isn't getting enough attention lately (World of WarCraft and Company of Heroes aside), and I really need to make more time for more Oblivion, F.E.A.R., etc.

Prey is graphically intense, not unlike a fireworks display on-screen; it uses some of the graphics engine from Doom 3, or some such thing. What surprised me is that the story and premise of Prey (which I was vaguely aware of before starting the game) are more compelling than I initially gave them credit for, and the first hour or so of the game had me fairly stoked. I definitely felt like I'd gotten a good bargain at $10, and I would venture to say that the producers were hoping that enough hype would have spread about Prey on the strength of that initial impression to make it a mega-hit.

It isn't that Prey started looking any worse after that first hour--it's just that the game didn't change much, if at all, between that point and the very end of the game. The environments and gameplay both became monotonous as hour after hour went by with the game experience being essentially the same from one minute to the next. This complete and utter lack of depth condemned the game to be a slog, although not an unpleasant one. Having finished Prey, I see absolutely no reason to return to it, nor would I really be interested in a sequel, unless there's some evidence that it goes in a radically new direction. Overall, this game would make a good case study in how a game project can get no single element (graphics, gameplay, story & art) wrong, yet still be lack-luster. It needs some kind of crazy hook, like F.E.A.R.'s impressive enemy squad AI, to make the experience memorable.

I'm enjoying Max Payne 2 much more than I enjoyed Prey, but this is largely because it's been years since I played the original (which I was a big fan of) and Max Payne 2 has me tripping on nostalgia. I haven't fired up the original to compare, but from what I can tell Max Payne 2 has the same gameplay, art style, and level design that is similar but larger in scope. Max Payne 2 feels a lot like an updated version of the first Max Payne that takes advantage of the advances made in computer hardware in the meanwhile.

One element that is noticeably missing from Max Payne 2 is the writing. I'm not trying to say that the original Max Payne had great writing, but it was particularly good for what the game was trying to be, and it added a certain intensity that made everything else about the game shine that much brighter. Max Payne 2 has a lot of trying-to-be clever moments, but overall the story and scripting fall flat, which I think is largely what makes the game unsatisfying when held up against the original.

Other than the writing, however, I'm hard-pressed to say why anybody who likes Max Payne wouldn't enjoy Max Payne 2. Its biggest fault is perhaps simply that it doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from the first Max Payne, but while it has lost some ground and in that respect fails to impress, it hasn't fallen far enough to cease being the self-mocking film noir, John Woo style bullet-ballet that one wants to see in a Max Payne game. That having been said, I've only played through the first two-thirds of the game, and I might yet see something in the last few hours that will completely ruin the experience for me.

As a final note, I finally snagged a copy of Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, and I've found everything that I've heard about it to be true: the core game is the same and the new control scheme makes trade-offs but comes out ahead overall. I was pleasantly surprised to find that RE4:Wii is offered at a reduced price point of $40, which is a nice gesture given that many Wii owners probably already own the GameCube, PS2, and/or PC version. I've only played about an hour of this so far, however, so I don't have a great deal to say about it yet.

ArmA: Combat Operations

2007-06-27T11:28:00.000-07:00

Matt asked me a couple of days ago what's worth picking up these days, gaming-wise. I probably should have encouraged him to keep playing FF XII (did anyone in my circle of friends make enough of a commitment to actually finish that?), pick up Guitar Hero, Devil May Cry 3, Soul Caliber 3, Metal Slug Anthology, Resident Evil 4, or something such thing. There's no shortage of great console hits that Matt hasn't played.

But, knowing Matt, those answers didn't even occur to me at the time. He's more of a PC gamer than a fan of great console hits, and I knew that he was looking for something wholely new and boundary-pushing. I told him, "nope, nothing that I know of; let me know if you find anything."

And he did! ArmA: Combat Operations not only kick ass, but it kicks my ass with its uncompromisingly technical and challenging nature. There are many modern games that strive to be accessible and have a broad appeal; this one is the antithesis of that philosophy. As somebody who has been immersed in Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, and Battlefield games for years, I found that ArmA has made a complete noob out of me once more. The level of coordination and awareness that is necessary to succeed at this game stretches into the territory pioneered by the hardcore flight simulators of old. Anyone who thinks of FPS games as primarily an action game genre will be disappointed here.

I had a hard time pulling myself away from this game. ArmA is extremely immersive and all the more satisfying for its high challenge level. I've only been playing it for a short time, but it seems likely that I won't tire of this one for a long time. And that's good news since it'll take me a long time to reach a respectable level of skill at this one.

Speaking of games that kick my ass, I've been pretty frustrated with Art of Fighting and AoF 2. Those are some pretty cryptic fighting games, and my prior experience with the likes of King of Fighters doesn't translate well. Art of Fighting 3 is much more conventional, however. Although playing KoF hasn't helped me a lot with AoF, I'm hoping that somehow the reverse will hold true. If nothing else, I'm being educated somewhat in the ways of classic fighting games that I'd previously missed out on.

I'm also looking forward to Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core coming to the Wii. I don't play nearly as much Guilty Gear as I should.

Finally, I waited too long to get a copy of Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, but once I do manage to snag a copy, I'm planning on a thorough play-through... assuming I can find the time, of course.

Geometry Wars on Steam

2007-06-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

As per the title of this post, there is now one less reason to buy an Xbox 360. At only $2.50, this is arguably a better deal than X-Com: Terror from the Deep. :)

Console Wars Predictions

2007-06-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

Over the past six months or so I've had time to take a look at what the Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 all have to offer, and I've made some important observations that have lead me to make a few predictions for the coming years:

Observation #1: The current gen of "next gen" consoles isn't ripe yet.

Frankly, not one of the Wii, Xbox 360, or PlayStation 3 is worth owning right now. If your interest is strictly in real games appreciated by real gamers, the only console that is an absolute must at present is the PlayStation 2 (yes, two.) Aside from a handful of gems like Zelda: Twilight Princess and Gears of War, all that's really available for any of the new systems at this point in time are novelties. (You should also own a gaming PC and a Nintendo DS, of course.)

Case in point: in the time since the Wii came out (regular readers may recall that I bought mine on launch day), I've purchased more PS2 games than Wii games and spent much more time on my PS2 than on my Wii. I've been tempted to buy an Xbox 360 but every time I sit down to seriously consider it, I find that there aren't quite enough games available to make it worth my while yet (it is a close call, however; and oddly enough, a lot of the games that I do want are Xbox Live Arcade games.) The PlayStation 3 line-up as it stands right now is a complete joke, unless you're counting titles that are still in development.

Given all that, it's obviously too early to declare a victor in the console war. It may be tempting to say that the PS3 is bombing and the Wii is taking over, but we're still in the preliminaries as far as this battle royale is concerned.

Observation #2: The Wii is doing very well.

Nintendo has obviously hit upon a dynamite formula with the accessibility of the Wii and the hype surrounding it. The one thing holding this little dynamo back is that it isn't packing the kind of next-gen hardware under the hood that it's competition has; but frankly, gamers care about more than merely what games offer the best eye candy. Just look at how well the PS2 is still doing, and consider how visually appealing a game like Super Paper Mario is despite the fact that it lacks high-definition graphics.

From what I'm able to tell, the Wii has populated the popular consciousness in a way that the more hardcore Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 haven't. In addition to that, Nintendo isn't taking as big a risk on the Wii as Microsoft and Sony are on their products because each Wii sold pays for itself whereas the Xbox 360 and PS3 are both hefty loss-leaders. No matter how you paint the current picture, the bottom-line is that Nintendo is happy with their situation.

Observation #3: The Xbox 360 has been a bittersweet experience so far.

There are a lot of things that I love about the Xbox 360 experience, from the lineup of Xbox Live Arcade titles (including classic stuff like Geometry Wars and Pac-Man Championship Edition) to the excellent controller design and the overall look and feel of the console itself. This is a huge upgrade from what the original Xbox was like, in my opinion.

However, there are also a lot of stories about frustrated Xbox 360 owners who have had their consoles break down (sometimes repeatedly), and there's the spotty support for original Xbox games. These cracks disturb the otherwise elegant Xbox 360 experience in a jarring way, which reminds users that they are dealing with the sort of sloppily engineered, brute-force kind of products that Microsoft seems to be only capable of making. This state of affairs may turn around in time (I've heard anecdotal evidence that the Xbox 360 Elite doesn't break down as much as), but while Microsoft works on patching their products, their competitors are making additional progress as well.

Observation #4: Japanese developers are focused on the PS3.

The PS3 is doing so poorly so far with its games line-up that I'm almost tempted to believe what some of the critics are saying about Sony being in serious trouble this time. It troubles me to hear developers saying that PlayStation 3 development is so difficult while the Xbox 360 positions itself as a platform for casual games made by smaller developers. And as much as I'm looking forward to Devil May Cry 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4, those titles alone may not prove to be enough to justify the purchase of an $800 behemoth.

But the fact of the matter is that developers in Japan are dead serious about making PlayStation 3 games, and from where I stand, support from companies like Capcom, Konami, Namco, and Square-Enix is the most important factor. Games like Devil May Cry 4 and Metal Gear Solid 3 aren't rushed productions aimed to cash in and get out; rather, they are generally seen as long-term commitments by companies like Capcom and Konami to establish a lasting presence. It would take something of a disaster to bring the PlayStation 3 down, and in spite of what some alarmists might be saying, that disaster hasn't happened yet. (And yes, it's also true that the PlayStation 2 got off to a painfully slow start in 2001 and ended up being the clear victor of the last console war.)

Observation #5: Electronic distribution and retro game products are becoming a serious factor.

Each of the current consoles has an online service that gouges gamers for the ability to play old games. I've complained long and hard about how unfair it is that old games simply go away rather than being continually republished, and the current model of electronic distribution is finally stepping up to resolve that issue. These are also obvious cash cows for Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, as they are able to rehash old hits and make a fair chunk of change while bypassing the costly process of putting physical copies of games on actual store shelves.

In addition to making it a little bit easier for the major players to cash in on the video game industry (while creating some opportunity for little guys as well), these direct-download games also provide a big draw for casual gamers who are looking for simpler, more pure games that aren't encumbered by millions of dollars of production value and frustratingly complex game mechanics. This is merely one of the reasons why console gaming has attained a noticeably broader appeal in the past year.

Prediction #1: None of the new consoles is going to die off.

This is perhaps the least secure of my predictions, but I don't think that any of the current industry players (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft) will screw up badly enough to take them out of the picture. The last console generation (PS2, Xbox, GameCube) firmly established that there is, in fact, enough room for three major console platforms, and there is still plenty of brand loyalty going around.

Furthermore, each of the current console systems offers something that the others don't. The Wii is a great choice for casual gamers and family-oriented gamers (a formula that worked well enough for the GameCube), the PlayStation 3 has the appeal of Japanese producer support and cutting edge hardware (including the ability to play Blu-Ray movies), and the Xbox 360 still holds sway with the utterly un-influential, yet lucrative jock-gamer crowd. These consoles are only in competition with each other where they cover common ground, and it seems to me that they each still hold a large enough corner of the industry on their own to survive.

Prediction #2: Nay-sayers won't drag the Wii down (but Nintendo's history of family-oriented gaming might.)

I've heard rumblings that the Wii is over-hyped and that Nintendo's creative vision with the Wii is bound to plateau before long, which are points that I don't disagree with, but even if those things do become obviously true, the Wii can still enjoy a healthy lifespan and a lot of fan support if Nintendo can leverage their massive install base to get good titles from 3rd party developers. There are going to be lots of Wii users by next year--there can be no doubt of that--and it hasn't escaped the attention of the big game publishers that there's a lot of money to be made off of Wii games right now. That's bound to draw out some surprise hits and fuel even more popularity for Nintendo's products.

That's not to say that the Wii is a shoe-in to win the current console war. It's easy to see how the big picture could unfold exactly as it did the last time around, with Nintendo's product ultimately slipping to fringe appeal status and finishing in a lucrative (but un-sexy) third place. What Nintendo has in the Wii that they didn't have with the GameCube is simply an opportunity to make a much bigger splash than they did last time, and so far they've been succeeding brilliantly--so brilliantly, actually, that they may yet manage to become the number one console of this generation. But with the Wii's lack-luster hardware and shaky appeal for hardcore gamers, it's easy to see how reports of the Wii's imminent victory are grossly exaggerated.

Prediction #3: Owning an Xbox 360 may turn out to be unnecessary for hardcore console gaming fans.

As much as I've come to admire how elegant the Xbox 360 can be (when everything is working smoothly), it still has a primarily American appeal, and a lot of those kinds of sports games and FPS action titles (things like EA Sports titles) can also be had on the PS3 anyway. I am sorely tempted to get an Xbox 360--and will likely crack before the year is out--but I suspect that what will end up happening is that I'll get a great deal of enjoyment out of my 360 up until the point where the PS3 and the Wii are getting enough new releases every month to shut the 360 out of the picture. It is possible that the 360 will see enough exclusive titles to hold its own, or that the PlayStation 3 will do poorly and leave enough of a gap for the 360 to fill, but neither of those situations strikes me as the most likely scenerio.

Basically what I'm calling for here is for history to repeat itself, with a catch: it's possible that Nintendo and Microsoft will gain enough ground to weaken Sony's position and put the PS3 at some spot other than first place. If Sony can pull off a great line-up of PS3 games, on the other hand, I don't doubt that we'll end up with PS3 eventually dominating the market, just as its predecessor did. A more interesting question might be whether or not the Xbox 360 can keep up with the Wii given that Nintendo is so much stronger of a player this time around. My overall prediction is that by 2009 we'll have PS3 as the most desirable console for real console gamers, with the Wii in second and the Xbox 360 in third.

SNK on PS2

2007-06-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

It's a shame to admit, but my SNK fan-dom goes through phases, while my Capcom fandom remains rock-steady. When it comes to those domain where the twain shall meet (eg. the ever significant realm of Capcom vs SNK 2), part of me wants to walk the hardcore path of the SNK fan, but the draw of the Capcom side is too much for me to resist. I grew up with 1943, Mega Man, and Street Fighter II. I continue to love Resident Evil and Devil May Cry. The Capcom Classics Collection, and vol 2 thereof, are among my very favourite retro game compilations. By comparison, my affection for games like Samurai Spirits ("Shodown"), Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and Metal Slug is aptly described as wannabe.

It's because of this that when I saw the $60 price tag on Metal Slug Anthology for PS2, my desire for the title crumpled and I left it on the shelf at the store. Even now, this isn't really a decision that I regret, although I will likely yet end up purchasing this title at some point when the SNK fanboy wannabe within me wells up sufficiently. Since, while my affection for Capcom remains more steadfast than what I feel for SNK, when the pangs for SNK action strike, they strike hard.

Cue my having taken notice of a recent Scott Daylor blog entry on 1UP.com. It turns out that SNK has some exciting new titles in development, including an American release of Neo-Geo Battle Coliseum. Holy shit!

In addition to the Art of Fighting Anthology that was recently released, we're also going to be seeing Fatal Fury Battle Archives this summer, and King of Fighters XI is in the works. That's a whole lotta SNK fuel for the PS2. I'm bracing myself for the onslaught.

As an aside, I'm also excited about future Guitar Hero releases, particularly Guitar Hero III. In conversations with some friends about Guitar Hero, the subject of the music involved comes up. Yes, it would certainly kick ass to be able to play my favourite rock songs on Guitar Hero, and yes, it would make the game much better. One point that seems to often get lost in the discussion is that Guitar Hero is still loads of fun even when the music sucks; I can barely stand to sit and listen to stuff like Boston or Dire Straits, but playing their hit songs on Guitar Hero is not the same experience by a long shot. This is relevant because I'll certainly be picking up Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s even though I'm actively disinterested in a lot of the tracks that it contains. These days I'm so eager for new Guitar Hero stuff that I'll gladly play tracks ranging from annoying to mediocre just for whatever challenge those tracks has to offer.

Odin Sphere

2007-06-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

With plenty of competition for my attention circling around, Odin Sphere still manages to steal time out of my busy schedule, and so far has gotten nearly eight hours of it. It's an excellent piece of work, but a very challenging RPG (then again, I did select "Normal" difficulty rather than "Easy") that requires a lot of careful attention to progress through.

Odin Sphere is extremely item-heavy, with item farming and crafting taking the spotlight as the single most important element of strategy required to both level your character and survive difficult levels. Experience points are rewarded for eating food, which also regenerates HP; some foods are actually low in HP restoration while being high in XP or vice-versa, which requires making trade-offs when deciding which items to pursue.

To give you an idea of the kind of flow involved in this game, imagine clearing enemies and collecting seeds. These seeds may be planted in the ground to grow fruit which yields some HP and XP, or they may be fed to a chick to mature it into a hen which can be slaughtered for meat that yields more HP and XP, or the egg that hatches the chick may actually be cooked along with vegetables in order to yield still more XP back at the town. Now imagine that all three of these strategies must be employed all at once to ensure that you level efficiently while still having access to HP regeneration during combat situations when you most need it, and you have a pretty accurate picture of what the strategies in Odin Sphere are like. There's also an alchemy system in the game which I won't bother to go into here, but suffice to say that it makes things yet more item-centric.

One of the serious flaws of this game is that I found the menu controls to be very disorienting at first. It's not often that I play a game where I actually need to stop and think about the controls in order to avoid making mistakes, so I've found Odin Sphere jarring in that respect. One major example is that the circle button is used to call up the item selection menu, yet selecting an item and pressing circle again actually dismisses the menu; the X button is what is used as "accept" in all menus while circle cancels (during combat, X jumps.) This has lead me to accidentally dismiss the item menu when I'm trying to use something, and worse yet, to accidentally use items that I wanted to save. Another example is that one typically wants to plant seeds in the ground (press the X button to use the seed), but in some situations, such as when feeding a chick, one wants to drop the seed instead (press down and X.) I recently made a blunder where I planted three seeds in the ground when I intended to drop them, which was a complete waste since such actions cannot be undone (also I didn't have enough phozon generation stuff with me to make use of the seeds anyway, and even if I had, those seeds were useless to me--which is why I was trying to feed them to the chick.)

I've also been disappointed with the gameplay, but it's worthwhile in its own way. What I was hoping for is a very responsive system such as the control scheme that one finds in Castlevania games, but Odin Sphere has a much more technical feel with the timing being much slower and methodical. This slow pace of this system is emphasized not only by the main character's sluggish movement, but by the stamina meter that cuts otherwise long chains of rapid attacks fairly short. Button-mashing in Odin Sphere is a surefire way to lose, so if you're not up for some challenging gameplay, I would steer clear (this ain't no Kingdom Hearts.)

The scope of the game seems quite large, since almost eight hours of playtime hasn't brought me anywhere near the half-way point from what I can tell. Unfortunately, this raises concerns that I won't have the endurance to actually finish Odin Sphere, but there is some hope in that the game ends up presenting the same storyline from the viewpoint of several different playable characters, which could make for some good plot twists and refreshing gameplay variations. I'm still far too early into the game to make a lasting judgment call, but while Odin Sphere isn't going to appeal to every RPG fan, it is definitely worthwhile.

Game Series Gone Astray

2007-06-03T23:33:00.000-07:00

I was reflecting today on some game series that I deeply admire but have gone so astray that I don't expect much out of any new releases under their respective labels. It's a real heart-breaker to reflect on what massive influences these games were back in the day, and yet how little they have to offer at present.

Rainbow Six

R6 has fallen a long way--from the gritty action/simulation hybrid that it used to be to the edgy console FPS that it's known as today. The original Rainbow Six was much more than a glitzy triple-A title made to appeal to Xbox fanboys; it was uncompromisingly technical in nature, more than a little bit scary, and close to as epic as any video game has ever been. The storyline was great, the gameplay was solid, and the overall feel of the game was excellent. R6 picked up a little steam with the sequel, Rogue Spear, which had tighter level design coupled with the same great formula as the first game. Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield (the PC version) made massive strides forward with graphics and gameplay, but the storyline had gotten too cheesy and the overall feel of the game was compromised; still, it was every bit the worthy successor to the series, and I loved it to death.

Where has R6 been since then? Currently it's little more than a series of closed-ended action FPS titles designed to be accessible to Splinter Cell fans. The Xbox market has turned Tom Clancy branded FPSes into a mainstream phenomenon, and completely sucked the venom out of them in the process.

Wing Commander

The original Wing Commander (and it's gut-wrenchingly potent sequel) married Elite-inspired space combat sim gameplay with a level of cinematic drama that was extremely rare in video games of the era. Much like Rainbow Six, Wing Commander's was known for presenting immersive experiences with a believable sense of high stakes; in playing the game, one really feels as though one is making a difference, which is a potent thing for any game to offer.

Wing Commander had its ups and downs even during the glory days, with some titles diluting the series somewhat (Wing Commander Academy and Wing Commander Armada come to mind), but that just meant that there was lots of material for the die-hard fans to digest. The last good game in the series was Wing Commander IV, after which Wing Commander became something of an obscure relic, with a really bad movie adaptation being made--one which bears little resemblance to the world developed in the video games--and lately an Xbox Live Arcade title being branded after it which probably has more in common with Quake III Arena than it does with respectable Wing Commander games. As for the genre of space combat sims, there's not a whole lot of activity there at all these days.

Seiken Densetsu

Seiken Densetsu started as a daring action RPG on the GameBoy with some excellent artwork and level designs, considering the platform. This would-be Zelda-killer made the jump to 16-bit glory with its sequel on the SNES platform. Under the English title of Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 2 completely astounded everyone who played it, with its rich gameplay, intricate world design, and drop-dead gorgeous pixel artwork. Squaresoft went on to produce Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger to the same level of quality (and then some), and both of those titles were huge hits in America, but Seiken Densetsu 3--acclaimed as having truly topped its predecessor--arrived too late in the SNES life-cycle, and it was not released in America.

Since then, Seiken Densetsu releases have been lack-luster to say the least. Legend of Mana is a mockery, Sword of Mana is a mere remake, and both Children of Mana and Dawn of Mana miss the point of the series entirely. Fans continue to cry out for a proper sequel to a game that hasn't been satisfactorily reproduced in over a decade, and the RPG production powerhouse Square-Enix continues to be unable to deliver.

Conclusion

There are some fairly obvious and important parallels that can be drawn between these games, with some important lessons therein. All three games thrived on creating intricate fantasy universes with epic storylines that thrust the player into the heart of world-changing events. All three games took the time to develop simple, but effective gameplay that allowed the player's skill to be the center of attention in spite of all of the production value being built into the game. And all three games were developed within already established genres (FPS, Space Combat Sim, Action RPG/Adventure) while pushing the envelope within those genres simply by taking them in fresh directions. Basically, these were all high quality, original games, and they were recognized for it.

Where the series eventually went astray, I suppose, were from trying to be too popular. It doesn't make sense to try to expand on an original idea by dumbing it down for a wider audience; that is simply a tactic for cashing in on a brand's good name and losing that good name in the process. Similarly, one can't force originality by getting too fancy or quirky with the game (as Seiken Densetsu has), nor can one make a game that much more popular by carelessly expanding its budget skywards (as Wing Commander did with it's final title.) Sometimes all a fan-base really wants is for a series to stay true to its roots and deliver the same level of quality that made the series a hit to begin with.

Logitech G5, Super Paper Mario, Izuna

2007-05-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

I was pretty excited when I picked up a Creative Fatal1ty 1010 gaming mouse on sale roughly one year ago. The form factor was comfortable and it had some flashy features like the Jonathan Fatal1ty Wendel logo lit up by an LED on the side, but unfortunately this mouse was not meant to last: the right mouse button developed a quirk where a single click would spam multiple click messages app-side, thereby rendering the mouse useless for serious gaming (I can't afford to be dropping right-clicks in World of WarCraft or Company of Heroes.)

I've generally been a fan of Logitech's products, so I chose the Logitech G5 laser mouse to replace my crippled Fatal1ty 1010, and so far I've been happy with it. It has a nifty feature that's new to me in a mouse: you can actually choose between three different mouse sensitivity settings right _on_ the mouse. I'm not sure how practical this feature is because the three settings that you toggle between are quite far apart in sensitivity, and once you've found the right mouse sensitivity setting, how often do you really change it? (My favourite interface for setting sensitivity is typically to hit ~ to open a console and type /sensitivity 20 or some such thing.) Still, it's a nice thought. The stylishly airbrushed impression of caked-on geek hand oil, skin, and sweat is amusing as well.

I'm on Chapter 3 of Super Paper Mario and the game is surprisingly good. It's very much a quest game, with the focus being on squarely on exploration and puzzle solving, although there is some action gameplay to be had as well. The game comes together as a sort of mish-mash of impressive graphic design tricks and clever takes on old gaming conventions, which isn't enough to make this title a true classic, but it certainly is a fun ride. Sometimes the pace slows down significantly, especially during those sequences when the kiddie storyline is center stage, but generally speaking I've had a hard time putting the game down. I do often find myself wishing that Super Paper Mario was a "proper" Mario game with action-oriented gameplay, however. Speaking of which, I have been playing through Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land, as I threatened to do in a previous post, and it really is an incredible game.

I've also acquired Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja for Nintendo DS, which is--of all things--a Japanese Rogue-alike with a shamelessly anime style. I've only played about an hour of this game so far, but what I've seen so far has absolutely blown me away. However, if I hadn't already been familiar with the gameplay mechanics of Rogue (in terms of how movement, combat, and item management generally works), I would have been very frustrated: Izuna, like Rogue, has a steep learning curve (but nowhere near as bad as the one that Nethack has.) As a dungeon-grinder kind of game, Izuna seems to be exactly what I want: something that I can play in short bursts and gradually improve at--a perfect formula for a portable title. One important detail about Izuna is that you don't lose XP when you die (just your items and money), so although it seems like you're stuck at the start of the game, you really aren't. Another important aspect of Izuna is that the game always saves as soon as you enter a dungeon and as soon as you die, so--like Rogue--you can't use saved games to guarantee victory. The strange paradox about Izuna is that it is not a very accessible game (Rogue-alikes are pretty much inaccessible by definition), but it's strangely accessible and addictive in exactly the same way that Rogue is (with anime characters and a persistent plot.) At least, I find it accessible as somebody who has played (and enjoyed) Rogue before. Overall, I'm thoroughly happy with Izuna.

Later today I'm going to be picking up Etrian Odyssey for Nintendo DS. I don't know where I'm going to find the time to play it, but having watched trailers and read reviews online, I know that I must have it. :)

DOA2: Hardcore won't load!

2007-05-09T18:20:00.000-07:00

I recently acquired a used copy of Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore for PS2 (a game which I've played with Matt many times), and I've noticed an odd quirk: my newer style PS2 (the small form-factor one) won't play it. In fact, the PS2 has obvious difficulty reading the disc (which is in good condition) as the audio skips and jumps and the menus struggle to load. Getting into an actual game seems to be impossible.

The same disc will load on an older model PS2, however. I guess this early generation title simply wasn't tested when they rolled out the new PS2. I wonder how the PS3 will deal with it.

In other news, X-Com: Terror from the Deep is selling on Steam for $2.50! This sequel to X-Com (which feels more like a stand-alone expansion) is an old DOS classic, not to mention a critically acclaimed turn-based tactical combat game. This sort of stuff is exactly what makes digital distribution worthwhile, in my opinion.

Say What?

2007-05-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

One of my pet peeves is when an otherwise intelligent geek decides to showboat a little by undertaking to pontificate on a subject for which said geek has clearly overestimated his own level of familiarity. I was witness to such a train-wreck recently when conversing with a recently hired video game developer who made the following observation with a rather scholarly air:

(loosely paraphrased) "With the latest interface technology provided by the Wii (the motion-sensitive Wiimote), video games have come much closer to the level of simulating real-life activities such as sports. I believe that the next trend in video game design will focus on creating experiences which are not possible or not practical in real life."

As much as I can appreciate this guy's sentiment (that is, wanting to remark about the amazing properties of modern video game technology and the exciting potential for future advances), I've found that there are layers upon layers of ignorance driving his little rant (I didn't tell him so, of course, as I didn't want to find myself involved in a lively "debate.") I'll point out what I believe are the most obvious failings in the above statement.

Wiimotes are not particularly good VR gloves, and any truly experienced gamer who has spent much time with the Wii knows this to be true. What the Wiimote has done is enabled loose gestures to replace the role that button presses served in pre-Wii games, which is a far cry from translating a user's 3-D actions into a game world verbatim.

For example, consider a game such as Soul Calibur. Let's suppose there is a Soul Calibur game for Wii in development. What this game will not be able to do is have an interface where a user's swings are literally translated into Soul Calibur as accurate sword slashes. In a nutshell, this is because the Wiimotes simply aren't that accurate, from what I can tell, although it's possible that this situation will change as the software techniques driving Wii games improve (still, I am cautiously skeptical that the accuracy of Wiimotes will ever improve to the point of enabling a full-on sword fighting game.) What this hypothetical Soul Calibur Wii game will be able to do is to remap the controls of the old Soul Calibur series games (pad button Square for horizontal slash, pad button Triangle for vertical slash, pad button X for block, and pad button Circle for kick on the PlayStation control scheme) so that they are instead represented by hand gestures--horizontal swing for a horizontal slash, vertical swing for a vertical slash, A button for kick, and B button for block, for instance. The key point to note here is that variations in the user's horizontal swing, for example, would translate into the same horizontal swing in-game every time; each horizontal hand gesture is simply the equivalent of a pad button press. This is essentially how Zelda: Twilight Princess's control scheme works. Of course Nintendo enjoys creating the perception that swinging a Wiimote while playing Zelda is just like believable sword fighting, but the reality of the situation is that you can play the game just as effectively with a GameCube gamepad and not loose any functionality.

It's also important to note that while the Wii interface is certainly novel, it has a lot of disadvantages too. For a game like Soul Calibur, the extra time required to perform hand gestures (versus merely tapping a button) would cripple the game's interface--one which is particularly fast paced and sensitive to timing. A Wiimote-based interface has the potential to feel more realistic in spite of its arbitrary nature (many Wii Sports activities feel a little bit authentic, for instance), but such an interface is not necessarily more fun than a traditional game control interface. Any game producer who does not understand this is certainly vulnerable to making a crappy Wii game.

Okay, so maybe this geek guy is just optimistic about the future applications of Wii-like technology, which is entirely reasonable. What I find much more offensive is the notion that games can now turn to the realm of fantasy having sufficiently mastered simulating reality. Are you fucking kidding me? Not only has the idea of using software to construct impossible fantasy worlds, as opposed to merely emulating reality, both old and widespread, but in fact there are many, many more games that construct impossible fantasy realms than there are games that try to be truly realistic. Look at www.ebgames.com right now and see how many games on the front page are serious simulations versus how many are essentially make-believe worlds; there's a good chance that all of them are shameless fantasies. That would have been the case five years ago, and it very likely will be the case in another five years. Pong may have been a realistic simulation of sorts (or not--you could argue that the game intentionally creates an abstraction of table hockey that differs from the real life activity in important ways), but it was quickly overwhelmed by a history of blatantly surreal creations such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and so forth. To think that the cumulation of video game technology over the past thirty years or more has been to arrive at the point of being able to accurately simulate reality is utterly ignorant of what video games are all about.

Are there other, more subtle levels of ignorance behind this guy's statement? One of the things that rubbed me the wrong way was his implicit assertion that, as a game developer (albeit one new to the job), he was automatically an authority on video games, even though it was fairly obvious to me that he had little personal (as opposed to professional) interest in the subject. But I guess what I find so noteworthy about what he said is that it isn't a simple matter of him having said one thing while meaning another; the deeper you dig into what he probably meant to say, the more you find yourself mired in bogus assumptions and outright false impressions about video games. He truly and simply didn't know what he was talking about.

It's Raining XBox Games!

2007-04-29T15:27:00.000-07:00

I've moved. Not just a small move from one downtown apartment to the next, nor a medium move from one suburb to another, but a full-blown one city to another move. I just thought I'd get that out of the way so that when I start on this next bit about EB Games, you'll understand that I'm not referring to my old stompin' grounds, but to an entirely new stompin' grounds--for whatever difference that makes. This will also explain why I've got so much news and am packing it all into one disjointed post rather than making several smaller and more coherent posts.

EB Games has been liquedating tons of games lately. In fact, I've never seen "red tagged" products at EB Games until today, and man they are cheap. I cracked and bought Prey for $10, which I've played bits and pieces of before, and which I know will compliment my gaming PC nicely. As good as F.E.A.R.? Hell no. As good as Doom 3 or Max Payne 2? I'm not sure--I haven't played those. :) Worth $10? Obviously, I think so.

In addition to Prey, lots and lots of XBox games were red-tagged for anywhere from $10 to $15. These included games like Dino Crisis 3 and Silent Hill 4. In spite of the fact that I don't actually even have an XBox, I ended up getting two games: Capcom Fighting Evolution (yeah, I know, it's pretty crappy), and King of Fighters Neo-Wave. (If I'd seen Capcom vs SNK 2, I would have jumped all over that, even though I already have the GameCube and PS2 versions.) I was tempted to get more, but... well... it is kinda hard to justify given that, like I said, I don't have an XBox.

So why bother at all? Yes, I am something of a collector, but really, I'm buying these games because I do know other people who have XBoxes, I have access to XBoxes that I can play on at work, and it's likely that I'll end up owning an XBox 360 at some point in the not too distant future. So jumping on really good XBox game deals does make some sense, if only a little.

I should also point out that I once bought copies of Shenmue and Chu-Chu Rocket regardless of the fact that I didn't have a Dreamcast. I later acquired a Dreamcast and continue to get mileage out of it to this day.

Moving along, there is one last game that I picked up at EB Games today--not red tagged (although that would have been appropriate), but certainly not a budget-breaker at $20--which I've already played some with Sunny and will likely get to play through again with Matt: The Red Star (and yes, it is based on the graphic novel series of the same name.) It's an old-school style shooter meets brawler, with loose lock-on targetting controls, bosses that spew blankets of bullets (sometimes vaguely resembling Ikaruga), and a great deal of melee combat. Visually, The Red Star definitely doesn't look like a hit title, and gameplay-wise it's not offering anything that gamers haven't seen before, but these criticisms do little to detract from the hardcore appeal of what is a simplistic shoot-em-up extravaganza for one or two players. There is enough variety in the levels, the weapons, and the earned power-ups to make this title well worth playing. Sunny also approves of it.

Oh--and I pre-ordered Odin Sphere, which has been getting tons of buzz since Gabe of Penny Arcade started ranting about it. The footage of it on GameTrailers.com blew me away; it looks something like Valkyrie Profile 2 meets... Castlevania? Or maybe Guardian Heroes? At any rate, I'm going "all in" on this one and praying that it doesn't disappoint.

While in the process of unpacking a bunch of the stuff that made the move, I happened to gather together my library of hand-held titles and platforms into one convenient place so I could casually enjoy them more conveniently. One game that I briefly pulled out for fun is the original Seiken Densetsu, or Final Fantasy Adventure for GameBoy. That one is an old classic and resembles Zelda: Link's Awakening crossed with Secret of Mana (actually, that's pretty much exactly what Final Fantasy Adventure is, in a nutshell.) Another original GameBoy game that I popped in is Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land, which actually stunned me with how good it still is after all of these years. I may end up addicted to it and play it through to the end. And then I should go get Super Paper Mario, I suppose. :)

Speaking of Wii games, I finally put the wraps on Zelda: Twilight Princess. It only took about 90 minutes from where I'd left off, and that includes the time that I spent watching the end credits, putting my playtime total at about 42 hours, which is amazingly little considering I first got the game back in November. I really need to do better at sticking to only a few games at a time until they're finished.

Sunny and I have also just picked up our second WoW subscription, which is very exciting because it means that we can finally play together. In a somewhat cliched (but still romantic) move, we've re-rolled Nightelves on Rivendare. This playthrough is interesting because we've both chosen to roll our main classes (she's a Warrior, I'm a Priest) and because it's the first time for either of us on PvP server. The general idea is to take these characters the distance to 70 and then move on to other classes.

I'm not much for sports games, but recently I had the chance to play NHL 07 on XBox 360 and it is actually quite good. There's a new control scheme dubbed the "skill stick" under which the left analog stick is for movement (skating), the right analog stick is for shooting (stick handling), and the right shoulder button is for passing. Simply put, this is the best interface for playing a hockey game that I've ever played, and also the Oilers lineup that's in the game is the same that the team had when they went to the Stanley Cup final last year. I had an opportunity to get the game for cheap on PC, so I did just that, and was I ever dissappointed.

As it turns out, not only is the control scheme for NHL 07 completely different on the PC version than on the XBox 360 version, but the PC controls actively suck and are very difficult to configure. I've had an easier time configuring control schemes for emulators than trying to get my XBox 360 USB controller to work with my EA Sports game on Windows XP, which I think is safe to say is a common configuration for PC gamers trying to use a gamepad. The PC version says "join the skill-stick revolution" right on the back of the box, and I didn't see any information on EA's web site to indicate that the PC controls would differ so much from the XBox 360 version, but several reviews (including GameSpy's and GameSpot's) for the game have confirmed my experience that the PC control scheme is crappy. Dammit. EA, if you are listening, please patch this game.

Random thought: I wish I could get a copy of Einhander.

SSX Blur - First Impression

2007-03-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

I'm mildly hooked on SSX Blur for the Wii, which isn't to say that it's all that great, but it's not a bad game either. My experience with SSX is limited primarily to SSX 3, which both Sunny and I have gotten a fair bit of mileage out of on the PS2. In fact, we enjoy SSX 3 so much that our immediate reaction to trying SSX Blur after the first hour or so was to fire up SSX 3 and play that instead. There are many things in terms of production value and accessibility that SSX 3 offers over SSX Blur: for example, SSX 3 is less buggy (Sunny had SSX Blur crash on her--twice!), has an easier to master control scheme (arguably), and seems to me to offer a greater variety of tricks (one of my favourite features of SSX 3 are the grabs that are executed using shoulder buttons, which is something that SSX Blur lacks entirely as far as I can tell.)

What SSX Blur offers over SSX 3 includes better graphics--although I wouldn't say by a whole lot, especially since the framerate varies heavily. Fritzkrieg, who is also a fan of SSX 3, was definitely unimpressed with the new art style, so that may be a factor in which game you feel is better visually. SSX Blur also offers novel challenges over SSX 3; in particular, I like the control scheme of SSX Blur in spite of the lack of grabs. Steering with the nunchuk creates a nice feeling of really carving with your board, although I can't say that the Wiimote-based twists and flips interface is much to get excited about, and I've had a really hard time mastering the new uber-tricks system which involves drawing shapes on the screen (some players will undoubtedly find that feature annoying.) Still, the novelty factor hasn't worn off yet, and I find that SSX Blur is different enough from SSX 3 to be worth playing in spite of my overall preference for SSX 3. As for whether or not SSX Blur justifies its $60 price tag, well, I would say that if you're fairly desperate for something to play on the Wii and your SSX needs aren't already covered by one of the other SSX games, then SSX Blur is probably worth checking out. As with so many games, you'd be well advised to rent it first before buying.

In other news, I'm really tempted by a variety of old-school RPG experiences coming out of the Wii Virtual Console, including Beyond Oasis, Dungeon Explorer, and Double Dungeons (although that last one is reported to suck.) I have a really, really deep weakness for 16-bit era RPGs, especially the more exotic sort such as Japanese titles that either never made it to America or were released for relatively obscure platforms such as the TurboGrafix 16. Nintendo's Virtual Console is doing a good job so far of tempting me with nifty games that I've never had access to before, although the steep price point ($6 to $8 to download an emulated game that's more than 15 years old?) remains a heavy deterrent--combined with a general lack of spare time.

One old-school style RPG that I'm very likely to pick up in the near future is the Atlas published Nintendo DS title "Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja." The title alone is quite amusing, but the game itself is also something of a tile-based RPG Rogue-alike, including randomly generated dungeon content. It's supposed to have a fairly limited appeal (that is, only good for serious RPG fans, which makes it all the more interesting to me.) I'll be sure to keep you updated on whether or not I'm actually able to find this crazy title.

Another Awesome CoH Screenshot

2007-02-16T23:08:00.000-08:00

Civilization IV, Gary's Mod

2007-01-28T22:58:00.000-08:00

We are definitely in a game release slump at the moment. Aside from that massive bomb of The Burning Crusade, there's so little going on in the way of new releases that even that Hotel Dusk - Room 215 title for Nintendo DS looks exciting (honestly, I watched the review on GameTrailers.com, and it does look appealing.) Overall, I'm thankful for the lull because it's affording me the continued opportunity to keep playing games like Guitar Hero, Company of Heroes, Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Final Fantasy XII. I'd hate to see my interest in those games (among others) killed by pesky new releases that I don't have the willpower to stay away from. ("To Do:" need more willpower.)

However, the lull has also given me a chance to check out titles that I passed over earlier due to being too busy, and among those are Civilization IV and Gary's Mod, both of which have just joined the roster as "games that I play." Functionally, this makes them much like new releases, except that they're really only new to me. Perhaps you're in a hurry (or merely bored) and won't really read the rest of this article, in which case I'll simply say this: Civ IV and Gary's Mod are awesome. Now that I've gotten that out, I'm going to make the rest of this post super-duper long-winded (but entertaining nonetheless, I hope.)

My first experience playing Civilization was with a "modded" copy that Fritzkrieg got from his cousin back in the day. This was the original, original Civ, and the "mod" consisted of simply the fact that some of the dialogue had been modified, which you could do by loading certain game resource files in a text editor. I taught myself to play Civ mostly through trial and error with a copy of Civ that told me "way to go captain nemo" every time I sunk a tireme by straying too far from shore. That was back around 1995, and I would have been 15 at the time.

A while later (1996) I acquired CivNet, which is a Civ title that most people seem to have forgotten about these days. CivNet was the original Civilization game system updated for the Win32 platform (back when most people were still using Windows 3.1 and you needed to install a Win32 service pack to run Win32 apps, although obviously Windows 95 existed and was very popular) with multiplayer added. It was an ambitious product and very buggy, but I loved it. I loved the multiplayer aspect, and I loved the updated graphics. I played tons of CivNet. I even played some FreeCiv for Linux and OpenBSD when I started University in 1998 (back then, FreeCiv looked much like the original Civ.)

Then I basically ignored Civ for years. In 2000, when I was half-way through my undergraduate degree, my room-mate Phf reintroduced me to Civ through Civilization II Multiplayer Gold Edition, which is one of the finest releases in the Civ series. At first I didn't like the changes that Civ II made to the game, but eventually I came to prefer Civ II to the original, and it sucked away hours and hours of my life. On more than one summer afternoon, Phf and I started a multiplayer game at 4 pm, took a break for supper at 5:30 pm, resumed play at 6:00 pm, and finally stopped playing to go to sleep at 4 am. Even now when I merely think about Civ II, I feel a small urge to start a new game of it.

So you might think that I was on pins and needles when Civ III came out, but it was not so. As much as I resisted Civ II at first (and was quickly won over by it), I all but hated Civ III even well after its release. The game felt way too different--I didn't like the UI, I didn't like the new "worker" units, I especially didn't like the fact that enemy units could not move through tiles adjacent to my own units, and I didn't like the whole idea of borders and cultural influence. It's not so much that I felt that Civ had gone horribly wrong, but I just couldn't get into the "new Civ." Besides, I was still in University and too busy for new games. I didn't even get a PlayStation 2 until the summer of 2002.

Years passed. Eventually I bought a copy of Civ III (without any of the expansion packs) for $10, but I still couldn't get into it. Looking back now, I realise that that was only the second legal Civ product that I had purchased since CivNet, since I merely copied Civ II Multiplayer from my room-mate. It's a strange thing that I've always invested so much, yet so little of myself into the Civ series. Once in a while I thought about buying Civilization III Complete, but it always seemed so expensive.

Civ IV came out last year and I barely even noticed. Subcontiously, I was thinking that it was going to be "just another Civ," and somehow not special at all. But then the Civilization Chronicles package came out, and I was tempted. It's $90, but then, I was in a position where the only legal Civ products I owned were CivNet and the bare bones Civ III game, yet I considered myself a Civ fan. Being the "boxed set" sort of deal that it was, Civilization Chronicles presented an opportunity for me to make up for years--a decade, even--of Civ neglect all at once. Besides, Civ IV was $50 anyway, and Civ III Complete was worth another $30, so what's another $10 to get a fresh port of the original Civ, the complete Civ II, and a bunch of extras including Civilization: The Card Game and a DVD about Civ?

I didn't crack right away, but I did crack. And here's the amazing thing: I ended up loving Civ IV immediately. The visuals are refreshing, although I lament that the game runs so poorly on lower-end systems (I started off playing it on my Radeon 9600 system and quickly realised that even that computer was a bit too light to get the full experience.) The UI is fantastic--easily the best of any Civ game that I've played (which is to say, all of them), and a huge upgrade from Civ III. The Leonard Nemoy voice-overs for the tech tree are terrific and add a lot to the game. But above all else, the game system itself is intuitive to me as a long-time Civ fan, and the process of updating my Civ knowledge to become familiar with this latest incarnation was pleasant and fun rather than jarring.

I cannot emphasize enough how impressed I am that I have ended up initially disliking every single new Civ game ever since I learned how to play the original, and yet I loved Civ IV right away. Maybe it's simply that I was "ready" for a new Civ, or perhaps more likely I've simply grown and matured to the point of not resenting the "newness" of Civ IV as much as I resented other Civ sequels, but I think that the situation runs deeper than that--which is to say that I feel Civ IV does things right that other Civ games got wrong. Civ IV makes so much sense to me that I even now appreciate the direction that Civ III was taking and can see myself playing Civ III for fun (especially since Civ IV won't run well on my laptop), which is something that I'd been unable to do before. (In fact, I did start a game of Civ III after playing Civ IV for a few days, and actually started enjoying it.) In short, Civ IV is the most fun that I've ever had playing a Civ sequel for the first time.

I'm also really happy that Civ IV includes all of the multiplayer functionality of network play, PBEM, and different play modes such as a "free-for-all" play where everyone simply takes their turns as fast as they can (which, from what I understand, is a first for the Civ series.) I was extremely annoyed that Civ III didn't immediately provide multiplayer right from the first version, since multiplayer has always been one of my favourite Civ features, ever since CivNet. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, Civ is essentially a multiplayer-centric experience, and always should be. Yes, the single-player play is important, and the AI needs to be good enough to facilitate that, but I'm not a believer in the idea that good AI comes before multiplayer play. Civ IV is the first iteration in the Civ series to provide multiplayer play right at the time of its release, since Civ didn't turn multiplayer until CivNet, Civ II didn't turn multiplayer until Civ II Gold, and Civ III didn't turn multiplayer until Civ III: Play the World. Given my experience with the series as a whole, right there that's strong evidence that Civ IV speaks more directly to the kind of Civ fan that I am right out of the starting gate.

I still have a long way to go with Civ IV: I've only played it for, maybe, ten hours total, and my final impression of the game is still forming. I still need to play the scenerioes and get a feel for that aspect of the game, and then there's the new expansion pack (Warlords) that I haven't even looked into yet. But for now, I'm very happy with Civ IV, and I can best sum that up by saying that it has really brought out my inner Civ fan.

Then there's Gary's Mod. For a long time I resisted Gary's Mod as a frivilous purchase, and I've been cutting back on new games lately, so I was doubtful about getting it. But then I started reading a little more about it and watching videos... you probably know the drill. :)

For those of you not already familiar with it, Gary's Mod simply lets one play around with the Half-Life 2 "Source" engine as a physics sandbox. One can load any map (if you have Counter-Strike: Source and/or Day of Defeat: Source, you can use the resources from those games, including maps), spawn models into the environment, and move things around using the new "Physics Gun" (in addition to the more traditional, but far less accurate "Gravity Gun" from Half-Life 2.) One can tie objects together with ropes or bungee cords, add rocket thrusters or wheels, light things on fire, and even shoot stuff. There are lots of different options available, and the end result lets users intuitively build ad-hoc structures ranging from soap box racers, to massive catapults, to flying gun platforms, and all manner of devious traps.

One thing that I was initially very worred about with Gary's Mod was the UI. My concern was that I would shell out the $10 only to find it too laborious to be fun. And, I have to admit, the UI was a little initimidating at first--but the main hangup that I had was that the number of options was overwhelming, and it wasn't immediately clear as to how anything worked. Once I started to figure out how to use the Q and C keys and what some of the simpler constructs did, I made quick progress. A big revelation was realising that the game cleverly allows you to assign mechanisms like motors and thrusters to numpad keys, so you can actually build a device such that you can control it in real-time (eg. a car that you can drive, or a rocket that you can launch.) Having gotten the hang of the basics, I'm quite satisfied with how simple the UI for Gary's Mod is; it's certainly does not resemble the complicated sort of 3D modelling application that I was worried about (ever try putting together a scene in Blender?)

There are a couple of killer features for Gary's Mod that I find especially exciting. First off, there's the multiplayer play, which means that you can join an environment along with your friends and actually collaborate on building stuff, or just show off each other's inventions, or even have mad scientist duels. Playing with strangers isn't as exciting because getting people to play along is so difficult, however, although it is possible to have a good experience on a well-moderated server. The other killer feature is the Lua scripting engine, which makes Gary's Mod highly flexible. You're not likely to be using it for much other than installing other people's mods if you're not a programmer, but there seems to be a lot of potential for people to expand Gary's Mod with cool features or even make entire independant game projects with it.

As exciting as the sum of Gary's Mod's parts is, the whole is much more than that, however. Back in the early 90's, Fritzkrieg had a PC game called Stunt Island published by Disney Interactive. It was a flight-simulator/virtual reality type game where you could create your own 3D scenes, set conditions, and watch the whole thing play out from different camera angles. You could even jump in and control vehicles yourself, since the premise of the game was that you can be the director, the stunt coordinator, and the stuntman himself. For what this game was at the time, it absolutely blew my mind. It presented a level of open-endedness in a game that pushed the boundary of anything I'd ever seen before, and I still think of that game as revolutionizing my idea of a "sim" genre game.

Needless to say, Fritzkreig and I spent most of our time with Stunt Island screwing around. We would spawn an outhouse (although we certainly didn't call it "spawning" then, since this experience predates the popularization of that terminology) with The Statue of Liberty in the air a thousand feet over top of it and watch as the rectangular shadow cast by the statue grew until the outhouse was flattened in an instant. We'd set up The Parthenon as a flyable model and control it like an F-15 fighter jet to make strafing runs (you could even shoot as though the thing had a forward-mounted machine gun and rockets.) Once we had The Sphinx explode, just to make a big explosion. The stunt pilot theme of Stunt Island wasn't important because it was open-ended enough for us to create our own theme, and that's a kind of experience that Fritzkrieg and I have been yearning for ever since even though the graphics and controls of Stunt Island were unimpressive by today's standards. We also still talk fondly about games that don't try to hard to steer you into doing what you're "supposed" to do, which is one of the reasons that Shadow of the Colossus was such a big hit with us, for example.

Gary's Mod reminds me a great deal of Stunt Island, particularly in terms of its sandbox-like experience. It isn't so open-ended that you have no idea what to do, but it certainly is open-ended enough to give you that rush of being able to do whatever you want. And really, what I want is to do absolutely stupid, over-the-top stuff with it like Fritzkreig and I used to do with Stunt Island. I'm the kind of person who really enjoys the show Jackass in spite of its unbearably gross side because crude, slightly dark humor is very funny to me. Gary's Mod has much of that kind of bent to it, since a lot of what's possible with it involves horrific, cartoonish violence, such as floating exploding barrels through the air with balloons, or accidentally(?) crushing yourself with a monstrous spinning machine. Gary's Mod is an educational game experience (you get to learn about physics), but it's one with a very naughty attitude--where gore and fart jokes collide.

Think of Gary's Mod as being like Jackass meets Half-Life 2 crossed with Stunt Island (or perhaps The Incredible Machine, which is another game that I played as a kid) and you're starting to get a pretty good picture of what the experience is really like. I strongly recommend it, but only for creative people.

The Burning Crusade

2007-01-16T02:04:00.000-08:00

The Burning Crusade has dropped, and even as I write this, Sunny's adventures in Outland with her level 60 Warrior continue to unfold. Getting the game was something of a quest in itself: the local EB Games downtown had a midnight opening to give eager gamers the opportunity to get the game a little bit sooner, but I was shocked to find upon arrival that the turnout for this event numbered in the hundreds--literally, at least two-hundred customers were there, if not three hundred. Sunny and I waited in line for two hours (plus a bit) to get our copy of The Burning Crusade. We did get some free posters, at least. At this rate, there's no telling what time it will be when we finally get to bed. The catch-phrase for the intro movie to The Burning Crusade--"You are not prepared!"--seems particularly apt.

This seems like as good a time as any to mention the massive influence that WoW slang has had on the RPG world. Not all of this slang was necessarily coined by WoW players, but WoW certainly had major role in popularizing it. It's hard not to talk about "mobs," "pats," and "ads" when playing Final Fantasy XII, for instance, and I even recently used the word "drops" to describe equipment acquired from a fallen foe in Counter-Strike: Source (which, I admit, is something of a heresy.) I don't have the energy right now to dive into an exhaustive list, but I'll try to cover the basics.

"aggro" - the state of having trained the game A.I. to have enemies attack you; to "draw aggro" is to get the attention of an enemy such that it engages you in combat

"pull" - a controlled attempt to gain aggro; eg. a ranged attack with the intent of drawing the attention of one specific enemy

"mobs" - standard enemies that populate the game world (sometimes also called "creeps")

"pats" - enemies that patrol (hence, pat) as opposed to shifting around a limited space

"ads" - enemies that aggro along with a master enemy, such as minions, or simply enemies that are unintentionally aggroed during a fight

"dps" - damage per second; the basic measure of combat efficiency in an action RPG

"drops" - treasure or "loot" dropped by defeated enemies

"ninja" - a player who is zealous about collecting treasure, even at the expense of his other party members

"rez" - ressurect; to return a fallen ally to life

"oom" - "Out Of Mana;" often announced by healers to warn the party that heals are no longer available

"mats" - "materials," as in those used for crafting or enchanting

"kk" - meaning "okay"

"zomg" - meaning "omg," an acronym for "Oh My God"

"grinding" - repetative actions, typically performed for levelling up, items, money, or gaining skill points

"skilling" - grinding for skill points specifically (may also refer to building up one's own skill)

"toon" - a player's character

"main" - a player's primary character

"alt" - a player's non-primary character

"gank" - to repeatedly kill a character; typically a sign of great disrespect in MMOs

"bubble" - a spell that create a protective barrier temporarily shielding the target from physical damage ("Power Word: Shield" is one such spell in WoW, "Protect" is one such spell in Final Fantasy series games)

New Year's Resolutions 2007

2007-01-04T19:33:00.000-08:00

I don't really believe in resolutions for the new year. At least, I don't believe in the usual "get in shape" or "lose weight" type. :P What I can stomach are resolutions to get more gaming done, at least.

My primary resolution for the new year is to get Xzi to level 60. He just hit 45 last night, and I did finally get that mount that I was saving up for (a few levels back, even.) Most recently I was questing in Tanaris, running Zul'Farrak, and doing more questing in Feralas. There will be plenty more quests opening up for me in the next few levels--not to mention running Maraudon and The Sunken Temple--and I can hardly wait to hit the Plaguelands once I'm past 50. Hoo-ah.

Just for fun, I've rolled myself a new character: Zulji, the Troll Shaman. It's been a long time since I rolled a new char, because I started Xzi back in October 2004 (I remember because it was the Halloween season in-game), quickly got him to about level 14 and abandoned him for pretty much a full year before getting back into the game. So even though I've only really been playing Xzi for the last four months or so, it's really been well over a year since I've rolled a new char and I'd forgotten much of what the experience is like. I'm eager to try some different WoW character classes and learn more about the game in general, but my focus is still very much on getting Xzi to 60 and beyond.

Speaking of alts, Sunny got her Paladin alt to 60 several weeks ago and now she's playing a Hunter Night Elf. Shortly after getting her Pally to 60, she swore that she was going to stop playing at least until The Burning Crusade comes out (Jan 16th), but that resolution did not last long at all. I actually wouldn't be entirely surprised if this new alt hit 60 before Xzi does (although it would make me a little bit sad.)

I've been playing Guitar Hero II, of course, and damn that game is hard. There is an important feature of it that I neglected to mention in my last post, and that is the Practice mode. In practice mode (much like in the GameCube version of Ikaruga), you can play specific sections of songs at regular speed or in slow-motion to help you really nail those riffs. I've reached the 7th tier on Hard difficulty, and I've now basically hit my skill limit, which comes as a surprise given that I'd basically expected to whip the game off without any massive obstacles on Hard before moving on to Expert. Now I find that playing Guitar Hero II on Hard may very well be a greater challenge than the original Guitar Hero on Expert, but this new Practice mode feature gives me strong hopes for continuing to progress through the game. I will probably also start a career on Expert without finishing Hard first, and if I get really stuck I may even have to start a career on Medium just to unlock the final tier of songs.

There hasn't been a whole lot of Wii playing lately, but I am still keeping Zelda and Trauma Center in mind. I'm tantalizingly close to the end of Zelda and it would be nice to just finally finish it off. Trauma Center is one of those games that I'll likely revisit time and again at any rate.

And then there's Tetris DS. I took a good long break from it, and now I've back. The thrill of 4-Player Standard ladder play is as strong as ever, and just today I managed to trounce a 7300+ rated player. I still haven't reached 7000 yet, but I flirt with it from time to time and I'm often in the 6700-6850 range.

More resolutions:
- play TOAW3, Company of Heroes, and CS with Matt
- play the Shadow of War expansion set for WoW: The Board Game
- finish Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga?
- play more Nippon Ichi tactical RPGs
- apply for a job at a game company like BioWare or Blizzard

Here's hoping that 2007 is an awesome year.

Update: Ace-High sent me an awesome link:

http://www.gamerevolution.com/goodie/movies/guild_wars_vs_wow

Guitar Hero II

2006-12-28T12:50:00.000-08:00

The Christmas season has been good to me in terms of gaming gifts. Ace-High hooked me up with the expansion set for World of WarCraft: The Board Game (called Shadows of War), and Sunny's family set me up with Trauma Center: Second Opinion, Yggdra Union, and Guitar Hero II. So far I haven't gotten around to all of it, particularly since I'm still playing a lot of World of WarCraft and getting back into FF XII.

I did finally have the chance to play Guitar Hero and its sequel as multiplayer games. The original Guitar Hero doesn't benefit a whole lot from multiplayer, in my opinion. The only available play mode is a "dueling guitars" style face-off which forces both players to play on the same difficulty level. That's fine if all you're aiming to do is to settle a grudge with somebody over who's the better Guitar Hero player, but Guitar Hero II takes the multiplayer concept much further with a co-operative multiplayer play mode. In the co-op mode, each song has a lead track and either a bass or a rhythm track depending on the song. One player plays lead, and the other plays back-up; it's very satisfying and does a great job of maintaining that illusion of actually playing the song that makes Guitar Hero such a fun experience in the first place.

One thing that I don't like about Guitar Hero II is the line-up of songs. Taste in music is extremely relative and it's easily possible that you'll disagree with me on this one, but the original Guitar Hero features tracks by bands like Slayer, Motorhead, Bad Religion, Audioslave, and Queens of the Stone Age. There was variety, but there was also a lot for me, personally, to care about. Guitar Hero II has less of that. Yes, there's Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" and a kick-ass Rage Against the Machine track too, but overall the track list feels weaker. One pleasant surprise that helps to make up the difference is the inclusion of the Trogdor joke song as performed by Strongbad--the cartoon character from Homestar Runner.

While I am not as emotionally invested in the songs from Guitar Hero II as the stuff that the first game offered, there is definitely one aspect of GH2 that makes up for it: the heightened difficulty level. Guitar Hero only pushes one so far, and although I've yet to exhaust the range of challenge that it provides, I have gotten to the point where there's really only a handfull of songs that really tax my abilities. Guitar Hero II shifts the challenge spectrum up a couple of notches so that I now have a fair amount of material to "skill up" on. I even expect GH2 to be a big help in improving my ability to the point where I can finally polish off the final tier on Expert difficulty in the original Guitar Hero.

In my opinion, if you're looking to get into Guitar Hero for the first time--especially if you're more of a punk or metal fan and less of a cheesy power-rock fan--then you should get the original game first and move into Guitar Hero II once you've gotten a lot of mileage out of the first one. If you're more focused on multiplayer play, however, you definitely want Guitar Hero II. Although I've talked about the strengths of the tracks here, I should also stress that it's all relative to your own tastes in music, and that you really should investigate the track lists for both games on your own before deciding whether or not Guitar Hero really has better music than Guitar Hero II.

Speaking of track lists and such, one thing I think that the producers of Guitar Hero seriously need to look at is releasing Guitar Hero titles focused on individual artists. For instance, if you took a single major band like, say, Nirvana, U2, or System of a Down (or Green Day, or Nine Inch Nails, or Soundgarden, or...), and produced a dedicated Guitar Hero title for that artist featuring their major singles and music videos, that game would sell like mad. One challenge I can see with that setup is that Guitar Hero and its sequel both feature a lot of tracks--Guitar Hero II has 55 in total--and it's hard to get so many from a single artist. One solution I can see working is to include a fairly exhaustive track listing for a single artist (like a boxed set) and charge more for it; I think Guitar Hero fans would still pay for it. Another simple solution is simply to include fewer tracks and maybe charge a little less for it. Even if such a game only included about 15 tracks, fans would still jump at it, especially for a little cheaper.

Of course, yet another obvious solution is to simply release genre-specific Guitar Hero compilations. "Heroes of Punk" or some such. Yet another solution is simply to get Guitar Hero III in the works already. :) As somebody who listens to music from time to time, however, I really like the idea of Guitar Hero releases centered around specific artists. I'd be mildly surprised if it actually happened, though.

Console Gaming Buddies Redux

2006-12-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

Fritzkrieg was over yesterday for one of the most intense gaming marathons that I've ever had. I can't even remember all of the games that we played, but suffice to say that there were more than a few unlikely titles thrown into the mix. The major focus of the day was definitely Capcom, and we spent quite a bit of time playing fighting games, a complete playthrough of the Capcom Quiz (Quiz & Dragons remix), and a quick playthrough of Final Fight. There was Zelda: Twilight Princess progress made, a demo of F.E.A.R. on my new PC, and Burnout: Revenge capped off the evening. I also found out that Fritzkrieg doesn't like Guitar Hero much at all. I don't know what lessons I learned about gaming yesterday (aside from, maybe, some trivia bits about Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and Onimusha), but I am definitely tired. :)

Phf and Ace-High were also over earlier in the week. I continued to put pressure on Phf to get into fighting games, which is somewhat funny because he still insists that he has little or no interest in fighting games, yet it's easy to pressure him into playing more than a few rounds, and he's certainly not indifferent towards the game once the action has started. I don't think it's even occured to him that most people who really don't like tournament fighters can hardly even be bothered to try to win once the game has started, especially when faced with a more experienced opponent. Like most painfully inexperienced fighting game players, Phf is a bit of a button masher, but he does have a strategic mind and he pays attention to what he's doing to the point where he can duplicate basic moves. I'm impressed by his reflexes and I'm impressed by how much he honestly seems to care about winning. If Phf's interest in the genre is lacking anywhere, it's probably in lacking a desire to improve his skills, and sometimes I get the distinct impression that he doesn't realise how much room there is for him to improve. He seems to under-estimate the true complexity and sophistication of good fighting games, and from what I know of his tastes in gaming, I suspect that if Phf understood the truth behind what these games are like, his interest in them would swell.

The fighting game rivalry between Fritzkrieg and I continues to burn. It's something of a shame that I have had more time than him in recent history to play these games and improve a little at them, but otherwise I would say that we are pretty evenly matched (which is to say that neither of us is particularly good.)

The Fall Gaming... Lull?

2006-12-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

A wild realisation has been growing in my mind since the glorious day of the Wii launch: it's been fully a month now and, for the most part, I've been playing the same handfull of great games this whole time. In fact, if you reach as far back as September, I've really only been given over to a select few games since then. Relatively speaking, at least.

Switching games too often is a personal problem for me. For one thing, it leads to not giving the great games as much time and attention as they really deserve; when one gets caught up in a cycle of starting a new game every other week, that generally means that no game gets more than a couple of week's worth of attention at the most. For a good long while, the problem was so extreme for me that even a game requiring only 10 hours to finish typically took me months to complete.

That's not how my gaming habits always were, and I've been trying to return to a habit of having only a few "core" games that I'm playing at any given time and really sticking to them before getting swept up in something new. But it's hard not to start switching up frequently because my willpower is not strong at all. New releases make me go weak in the knees, particularly if they're featured on Penny Arcade and/or get good reviews from the critics. I'm also interested in so many different genres and platforms that it's unreasonable for me to expect myself to keep up, yet somehow I still dread falling behind.

The remarkable thing is that lately there hasn't been as much of a problem in keeping up. Not only have I been able to hang on to the same core games (Zelda: Twilight Princess, Guitar Hero, Final Fantasy XII, and Trauma Center included) for more than a few weeks now, but even among the new releases that I haven't been able to get into, the same handful of titles keeps coming up: Gears of War, Guitar Hero II, Call of Duty 3, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and WoW: The Burning Crusade. These are the headliners on the EB Games web site right now, and it seems to me that there hasn't been a lot of change in the past month.

Okay, so the gaming industry is in a bit of a lull right now. That certainly happens--usually as a result of development teams recovering from the stress of putting together E3 demos, or in the wake of the over-commercialized holiday season. But aren't we smack in the middle of the holiday season? October and November in particular are often the time of year when new "must have" releases fall upon each other so rapidly that I get a little angry at the industry for hoarding all of the good stuff for this one particular season. How is it that right now I'm able to look back on the fall months and think that I was actually able to keep up for a change?

The release of the PS3 and the Wii are most likely to blame. I suppose that there are probably fewer game titles out because everyone is scrambling to get their PS3 and Wii game projects completed. Even given that, I'm surprised because the situation had gotten so out of control the past few years. It barely seemed possible to me that the game industry could get bogged down and overlook the Fall season. And I suppose that for some gamers, this December is no different from Decembers past: whereas I only have the Wii and only Wii Sports and Zelda to worry about, there are undoubtedly those who have a Wii and a PS3, or those who bought six or more Wii games and are frantically trying to get their money's worth out of those (even though there are only two or three good Wii titles available at the moment.)

It's also possible that my perception is simply skewed because I have been better about only focusing on games that matter lately. Of course, it's a little tricky for me to tell whether I've been smarter about my gaming purchases or whether there's simply just been fewer great titles around to tempt me. I tend to think the latter, but it's possible that the former has come into play. Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

Whatever the cause, I've found myself jonesing for new releases once or twice in the past month and scouting around only to find that there's been nothing new and notable since the PS3 and Wii launched. I'm definitely not complaining, especially since I've been planning to cut back on game consumption and focus more on just playing games that I already have. However, I do wonder how long it will take for the next gen console releases to start to ramp up. Historically, as much as the first year of a console's lifespan has been slow, which means that 2007 could be a slow year for console gaming in general. That sure would be a change.

Xzi Wallpapers

2006-12-17T21:35:00.000-08:00

I like to snap screenshots occasionally while I'm playing WoW, particularly if something strikes me as really scenic. The following are a couple of the better shots that I've taken recently; the first one is the night sky over Arathi Highlands, and the second one was taken from within Razorfen Kraul. The character in both shots is, of course, Xzi, my Undead Priest. Xzi is now level 40.

Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2

2006-12-15T18:40:00.000-08:00

Christmas is just over a week away, and while I've been pretty good so far about not buying anything for myself, I did break down a little today and pick up a cheap copy of Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2. As you might recall, I'm a sucker for those PS2 collections of old arcade games, and while my library of them is far from exhaustive, I have managed to cover a lot of bases.

In a nutshell, Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 pales in comparison to Vol 1, and while it's not a bad compilation overall, it only needs to be seriously considered for purchase by dedicated Capcom fans. I'm certainly glad that I picked it up, but if you don't already have and adore the original Capcom Classics Collection, you'd be well advised to start there. The original Capcom Classics Collection features many A-grade titles including Street Fighter II (and Turbo), 1943 (and Kai), Ghosts 'n' Goblins, Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, Gun.Smoke, and Final Fight. Right there you've got your bases for shooters, fighters, and brawlers covered.

What Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 offers, for the most part, are more shooters, fighters, and brawlers of the B-grade variety. The headliners for this collection include Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Strider, Knights of the Round, 1941, and Captain Commando. Of the various other games, there are many duds, and a few games that are more interesting for historical purposes than because of the gaming experience that they offer--such as the original Street Fighter, and Quiz & Dragons.

SSF2T is certainly nothing to scoff at. It was one of the pivotal titles involved in the development of the Street Fighter II series moving into the late 90s and the 32-bit generation of games, and it is still a viable option for tournaments today. As such, SSF2T one of the few "must have" games on this collection, but unless you're a 2D fighting game fanatic, that's probably not a big enough draw to sell you on the collection as a whole.

Strider is another great game, and a personal favourite of mine; I'm really glad to see it in this compilation. It may seem clumsy and awkward at first, but actually the controls, graphics, and nearly everything about this game are top-notch for the era in which it was made. Once you get the hang of it, Strider is an addictive and rewarding game experience that will draw you back time and again.

Knights of the Round is a solid brawler, and Captain Commando is even more-so, but although they are fairly good games, neither has the subtle genius that makes Final Fight such a classic. On the other hand, if you like old school street brawlers and Final Fight alone isn't enough to keep you happy, Knights of the Round and Captain Commando should serve you well. Because street brawlers are one of the most accessible genres of classic arcade games, I imagine that these two titles in particular will draw the attention of most gamers who rent, borrow, or buy this collection without knowing in advance what they're in for.

As for 1941, it's one of the best 1942/1943 series titles that I've ever played, but it remains lacking compared to 1943 and 1943 Kai. Like so many of the other titles in this collection, 1941 is a solid game that provides a few hours of quality diversion but doesn't offer much in the way of lasting appeal. There's a line somewhere between a game that's good and a great game that sticks in your memory, and 1941 lies squarely on the "good game" side.

One great thing about Capcom Classics Collection Vol 2 are the options and extras. The collection maintains separate high scores lists for different game settings (one for "normal" settings, one for "custom" settings, and one for "hardcore" settings), as well as allows the player to save and load the current game state at any time for any game in the collection. These two features alone are things that I've wished for in every other retro games compilation that I've played. One can also unlock tips, art, and music features for each game, which is a nice touch although not overly exciting.

There are two extras in particular that really go the extra mile in this collection. The first is a remixed version of the Trivial Pursuit style game Quiz & Dragons in which all of the questions are about games published by Capcom. So instead of being bothered about US Presidents and what movies from the 1950s through 1980s won Academy Awards, you get questions about Resident Evil, Mega Man, and countless other wacky Capcom subjects. The second is a short series of tutorial videos by David Sirlin on how to seriously play Super Street Fighter II Turbo. In a value priced retro games compilation such as this, these bonus features add a lot of value for a gamer such as myself.

Given all of that, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that I'm very glad to have picked up Capcom Classics Collection Vol 2. I recognize that the title has a very limited appeal, of course--it just happens to have exactly the right kind of appeal to be worth my while. Most gamers would probably be bored of this compilation within an hour, unless they're either big Street Fighter fans or especially patient with old games. Still, it's worth renting on a rainy day, or if you loved the original Capcom Classics Collection and are looking for more of the like, you may find this one appealing as well.

Gone Pro in Bowling

2006-12-09T18:46:00.000-08:00

I've set a new personal best in Wii Bowling: 221. I'm also flirting with the elusive 1000 "pro" mark, which I'm currently over but am close to enough that a single bad (or even average) game puts me below it again.

I also seem to be picking up steam in Wii Boxing, although I find it utterly chaotic sometimes. It feels good when I'm able to land accurate punches and mount a reasonable defense of blocks and dodges, but when a match starts to go awry, it's hard to regain control of the situation. I suppose that's probably by design rather than a flaw in the game.

After writing this afternoon's epic post, I did go and play an hour of Final Fantasy XII. Some major plot stuff has gone down and left me intrigued as to the role that the Judges play in the world of Ivalice.

More updates to come, pending more gaming. It is the weekend, after all. :)

December Updates

2006-12-09T11:55:00.000-08:00

My gaming landscape hasn't changed a whole lot over the past couple of weeks. I'm now over the 30 hour mark in Twilight Princess, and while my general interest in the game is still running strong, I'm no longer keen enough on it to play four hours at a stretch every day. Other games are starting to see attention, although so far no other Wii games. Wii Sports rarely crosses my mind, although I do find the occasional game of tennis amusing, and I did manage to bowl a 210 game once. I have yet to buy another Wii game, but the only one that seems to be a likely candidate at this point is Trauma Center: Second Opinion, which I've watched the GameTrailers.com review of to assure myself of its worthiness. Call of Duty 3 and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz are still tempting, but I doubt my own resolve to play them; I'll probably end up renting them rather than buying them.

On the PlayStation 2 side, the only game that's been in my console for the last full month is Guitar Hero. I've played through the entire campaign on Hard difficulty (and most of the bonus tracks too), and I've made it all the way down to "Crossroads" by Cream on Expert difficulty. I'm still practicing for roughly an hour a day on average, and I'm steadily improving towards being able to clear the game outright. Although the game remains addictive and alluring, I think I'm starting to burn out on it just a little. Eventually I'm going to get Guitar Hero II, but not while I'm currently somewhat tired of Guitar Hero in general.

Final Fantasy XII has been horribly neglected. I reviewed the Player's Guide about a week ago to refresh my memory of where I'm at in the game and all of the awesome story events that have unfolded so far. At literally any moment now I'm going to jump back into it and continue the adventure, but for complex internal reasons that I haven't been able to wrap my head around, I've been procrastinating. It's probably a simple matter of having spent too much time with Zelda and Guitar Hero to have energy left ofter for FF XII. I think that part of me dreads that once I'm back into FF XII, I'll burn myself out on video games completely.

Matt and I have been playing a fair amount of Counter-Strike: Source the past couple of weeks as well--roughly three or four hours per week, total. I absolutely love how the game looks and feels on my recently assembled gaming PC. Whenever I have a tinge of feeling like I'm missing out on the "next gen" (that is, the current gen) with the PS3 and XBox 360, I remind myself that I already have a decent PC gaming rig to rival that stuff, and fairly nice monitor to go with it. The visuals that I've been getting out of games like Counter-Strike: Source, Company of Heroes, and World of WarCraft still consistently manage to turn my head. (I really have to get F.E.A.R. installed and replay that sucker. It's on my "To Do" list.)

Speaking of World of WarCraft, there's been major developments there since the 2.0.1 patch (or whatever they're at) was released--which you're no doubt aware of if you've been playing it. I haven't been, but Sunny has been playing tons of WoW; her alt is now level 56 and she's been discovering the new Arena Battlegrounds system. I've been away from the game for a fair stretch now, but I can easily see myself getting back into it. I just need the time and energy. :)

I was reading some stuff via Penny-Arcade recently about the Firefly MMORPG that's being developed, and I remarked to Matt that MMORPGs are really fun, but I still find them to be too expensive for my taste. Guild Wars has a thoroughly acceptable pricing scheme: a one-time fee to buy the game and no subscription charges, just like a regular multiplayer game. The WoW client is a lot cheaper now (about $20) than it was only a few months ago ($60), but the monthly subscription charge of $15 is still a lot to take. If WoW was anything less than the greatest video game ever made so far, I wouldn't be willing to pay so much for it. Contrary to popular belief, WoW is not the greatest game of all time because it's an MMORPG, but rather because it's so well designed; to say otherwise is a lot like saying that the iPod is a huge success because mp3 players in general are great, which is obviously not the case when you compare how other mp3 players measure up against the iPod.

Speaking of iPods and the like, the hand-held world has been a hotbed of new developments as well. In the last month I've acquired Children of Mana, Final Fantasy III, and Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin in addition to continuing to play Trauma Center: Under the Knife and the occasional games of Mario Kart DS and Tetris DS (I've even been tempted to plug-in to Metroid Pinball and Resident Evil DS lately.) There are also two GBA games that I must have but have yet to buy: Final Fantasy V Advance and Yggdra Union. I also own a copy of Riviera that I haven't played, and I'm rougly half-way through a playthrough of FF IV that I want to finish--both of these being situations that need to be remedied.

I've made it to Chapter 6 in Trauma Center, which is the final and most difficult chapter. So far my skill level is not up to the task, but with regular practice I hope to eventually polish that game off, for now. One of the most impressive things about Trauma Center is what a deep emotional attachment I've developed towards it. Even though I don't find the specific characters or storyline all that compelling, the game design in general manages to create a strong draw, and I find myself getting emotional when I even simply hear musical scores from the game. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Trauma Center is among the finest Nintendo DS titles currently available.

I've only played a little bit of Children of Mana, but that's mainly because I don't like it. It's almost as big of a disappointment as Lunar: Dragon Song, although it doesn't suck nearly as much. My primary complaint against Children of Mana is that it doesn't feel like a proper Seiken Densetsu game. I was hoping for something to remind me of Secret of Mana, and although Children of Mana has a lot of the same sprite designs, it somehow manages to both look and, especially, feel like an entirely different game--and not for the better. I haven't played any multiplayer with it (it requires each player to have a copy of the game), and I can see how that would be worthwhile in much the same capacity that Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is worthwhile as a multiplayer game. But I worry that this game was designed too much with the multiplayer aspect in mind and it doesn't work as well as a single player experience.

The dungeons that I've faced so far have a tediously linear feel, and the game seems entirely too focused on hack n' slash and building up your characters. I don't think that there's a problem specifically with the characters, setting, or plot, but rather with the presentation and design work as a whole--essentially, the way that the whole game hangs together. Instead of feeling like I'm lost in a full-blown fantasy world (an illusion that Secret of Mana constructed masterfully), I feel like I'm simply warping from a simple base-camp style town to various dungeons that have more in common design-wise with the levels of Double Dragon than the levels of, say, Zelda. Games like this make me angry that there aren't more action RPGs harkening back to the likes of Illusion of Gaia or Alundra.

Action RPGs used to be one of my most favourite game genres, but games like Crystal Chronicles and Children of Mana have really sucked a lot of the joy out of them with their awkward play mechanics and tendancy to treat themselves as arcade-style games rather than full-blown RPGs. Just the summer before last, Fritzkrieg and myself sat down with my old (and still functional) SNES to play Secret of Mana from start to finish, and it was just as entertaining as it's ever been. I also played through part of Alundra only a couple of years ago--a game that I had neglected for years--and I was thoroughly enchanted with it. PC games with real-time elements like World of WarCraft and Neverwinter Nights could be considered Action RPGs, but while they are excellent games, they're not the sort that I'm talking about; I yearn for the console style action RPGs with their simplistic game mechanics and amusing sprites, rather than PC RPGs with sophisticated game systems behind them. The closet thing to the Action RPGs that I want to see these days are games like Zelda and Castlevania.

Speaking of Castlevania, I've started on Portrait of Ruin and it is wonderful. There are a lot of Castlevania games available for the GBA and DS platforms, and while none of them are bad games, some are better than others (Aria of Sorrow, for example, is particularly good.) Dawn of Sorrow was definitely solid, but there was something about it that bothered me a little; it seemed to lack the punch of it's predecessor, in spite of its superior graphics. Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin strikes me as a stronger title, and not simply because of the novelty factor behind its new dual-character mechanics. I'll need more time with it to be certain, but so far Portrait of Ruin feels very "right," and I'm having a great time with it.

I haven't played Final Fantasy III DS yet at all, but I'll get around to it. :) It's good to have options in terms of what you want to play next.

Bomberman '93

2006-11-25T13:06:00.000-08:00

I just picked up my second Virtual Console title from the Wii Shop: Bomberman '93. The first Wii Shop game that I downloaded was the original The Legend of Zelda which I've been playing bits and pieces of. I've cleared seven dungeons so far, leaving only the last two (and the most difficult two) to go. Of course, Zelda doesn't really start until you've beat the game once and started the Master Quest. Only the Master Quest is the true Zelda experience (hmmm... I wonder if the same goes for Zelda 64? I'll have to look into that.)

But what I really want to rant about here is Bomberman '93. Actually, that's not true--what I really want to rant about is the current lineup of Wii Virtual Console titles in general. :) Bomberman '93 comes out as the title for this post because I consider it to be one of the "must have" virtual console games right now. In fact, it may be the only "must have" virtual console game.

Bomberman '93 is a terrific compromise between old-school and modern Bomberman titles. I'm not much of a Bomberman conniseur myself, but with Bomberman '93, I definitely like what I see. The look and feel is definitively "Bomberman" and also screams of 16 bit graphics. I'm of a mindset such that the mere knowledge that I'm playing a TurboGrafx-16 game makes me a little bit giddy, of course. But the killer feature that makes this game so worthwhile is multiplayer support for up to five players. You can also use a combination of Wiimotes, Wii Classic Controllers (those plug into Wiimotes, though, so if you have only one Wiimote and a classic controller, you can use one or the other but not both), and GameCube controllers to fill the five slots (which is important, because Wiimotes aren't cheap and some of your friends may have GameCube controllers to spare.) I love it.

Granted, Bomberman isn't for everyone. It's an action-puzzle game with a relatively steep learning curve that can be frustrating for new players. The single player campaign is a good way to get a leg-up on the game, however, and there's no denying that Bomberman is one of those truly classic game experiences that is endlessly worthwhile. I definitely think that it's worth the 800 Wii points (that's $8 USD) to have on your Wii console.

As for the other Virtual Console titles, there are some good ones, but I find the prices to be sorta steep. I really want to play Bonk's Adventure for TurboGrafx-16 and I will likely pick that up eventually, but I'm in no rush to spend another 800 Wii points. The original Zelda is worth the 500 Wii points if you're a crazy enough Zelda fan to seriously play it (I am, because it reminds me of all of those hours that I put into it back in grade 5), but I have a hard time imagining that newcomers to the Zelda series will be drawn in by it--it's much better to start with A Link to the Past, which isn't available for Virtual Console yet. SimCity was one of my favourite SNES games back in the day, and F-Zero remains one of my favourite games of all time, but the 800 Wii point price tag on each seems a bit steep. I have no doubt that you could get enough entertainment out of these titles to be worth paying that much for, but one shouldn't be in any rush. Similarly, Donkey Kong, Solomon's Key, and Mario Bros. are all tempting NES titles, but 500 Wii points is a lot to spend for one of them. Nintendo needs to jack down the price on these items to encourage impulse spending. :)

The one other Wii Virtual Console title that's the most appealing to me is Mario 64, mostly because I don't have Mario 64 DS already (although I'm pretty sure that my Nintendo 64 is still in good working order, so if I really wanted to play Mario 64 again, I easily could.) I've played this one time and time again, and it's held up really well over the years, but the price on it is 1000 Wii points which is, again, too much to justify such a frivilous buy.

Other than reducing the prices for their offerings, I can think of a few plausable Virtual Console features that would really make the Wii exciting for me:

- Wii Points rewards for purchasing Wii games. For instance, if I earned a bonus of 500 Wii Points for having purchased Zelda: Twilight Princess, that would make the Virtual Console feature much more exciting. Maybe they could even give away some Wii Points rewards for finishing games or playing a certain number of hours.

- High score sharing online. Replaying F-Zero would be a neat blast from the past, but not much more than that--unless, of course, I could compare my time trial records against a world-wide list online. I was pretty good at F-Zero back in the day, and that sort of feature would definitely encourage me to buy it.

- GameBoy Advance games for Virtual Console. There are plenty of classic GBA games that aren't easy to track down anymore, and besides, GBA carts were always pretty expensive at roughly $30 each. If I could buy some old GBA games for 800 Wii Points each that I missed out on before, that would be superb.

- The ability to buy emulation programs for Sega CD, Sega Saturn, or Dreamcast so that I could put in one of the game discs that I still have for those consoles and play it on my Wii. Being able to use the Wiimote to emulate lightgun functionality for Virtua Cop 2 would be awesome. Sega could even republish some of their old games and rake in the profit (with Nintendo taking a healthy cut, I presume.)

I don't expect Nintendo to actually make all of these particular features available, but it's possible that as time goes on they'll upgrade the Virtual Console to include features like these. The idea of giving away Wii Points as promotions seems pretty likely to me; maybe they'll even put 500 point Wii cards in issues of Nintendo Power or something like that. I also don't see why GBA games for Virtual Console would be much of a stretch, since the GBA is a dying breed anyway.

As for the idea of buying old Sega emulators for Wii, one thing that I could imagine being a hang-up for Nintendo would be the fact that the old Sega games are so easy to pirate. There wasn't a single CD-ROM based Sega console that didn't suffer from piracy issues as soon as CD burners became affordable for home users. On the other hand, I could be mistaken but it seems to me that republishing old Sega games would be dirt cheap. Printing CDs definitely isn't expensive, and I doubt that you'd have trouble moving copies of Lunar: Eternal Blue, Nights into Dreams, or Shenmue for $10 each. Just put them in regular CD cases like music CDs and have them on the shelf at Best Buy. A lot of the old CD-ROM games were still over 500 MB in size, so having them available for download might not be practical--not only because the downloads would take a while (not a huge issue, actually), but because the Wii doesn't seem to have a lot of storage capacity for that kind of thing (and even a 2 gig SD memory card fills up fast when you have 500 MB files.)

As you can probably tell, I'm really hyped about the Virtual Console functionality and what it can do for the Wii. For the time being, however, the only Virtual Console game that I'm strongly pushing for is Bomberman '93. With new titles being added every week, I doubt that it will be long before there are many other good bargains available as well.

P.S. Everyone is invited to my place for multiplayer Bomberman.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife

2006-11-21T10:31:00.000-08:00

I played a nearly obscene amount of Twilight Princess yesterday--roughly 12 hours worth. Right now I'm at the 15 hour mark and am a little bit stuck having just acquired the hookshot. It's definitely the single best Zelda experience that I've had since A Link to the Past, and there's a good chance that I'll finish it before moving on to any other Wii games (aside from Wii Sports, of course.) The Metacritic score for it has dropped to a more reasonable score of 96, and some other scores have shown up (Trauma Center: Second Opinion - 81, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz - 77, Call of Duty 3 - 75, Red Steel - 68) although they are all in a state of heavy flux. I'm still wishy-washy on what Wii games to get in the near future--especially since I still have PS2 titles including Guitar Hero and Final Fantasy XII to fill time while better Wii games draw nearer to release--but Trauma Center: Second Opinion is emerging as a game that I strongly intend to pick up.

As I've mentioned before, I've been playing Trauma Center: Under the Knife for Nintendo DS and really enjoying it. I still have a ways to go before completing that game, but it has become one of the strongest Nintendo DS titles that I've played. The gameplay itself is certainly the highlight of the game. The action is fast and fluid, and the only real gameplay hiccup that I've encountered is that the zoom tool doesn't work if you draw too much of a circle (that is, if you loop more than 360 degrees around), which is not a big problem once you're aware of it. Generally speaking, Trauma Center takes the fullest advantage of the Nintendo DS's unique user interface capabilities, and after a while you really start to feel like a hardcore surgeon.

Some people seem to be annoyed that the game puts a lot of burden on the player to figure things out as one goes along, since there are many instances where precisely what you're supposed to do next is vague. Since the levels are generally very short and things speed up drastically once you know what to do, I don't find the trial and error type challenge to be a problem--in fact, I think it's fun and refreshing. It's satisfying to struggle through a level the first few times and end up being able to ace it by the time you're finished. There are definitely some levels in which a player could get stuck either due to confusion over what to do next or an inability to keep up with the action, but I haven't seen anything yet that isn't easily solved through persistent experimentation and practice.

The characters and story for Trauma Center aren't bad, but they're not particularly great either. The level of drama that is present between levels can't compete with what happens on the operating table, but the dialogue is kept fairly brief and can be skipped through quickly. Overall, I wouldn't say that the characters and story provide a huge motivation to play the game, but given the aforementioned superior gameplay combined with the drama and suspense of the operations themselves, the characters and story aren't really needed to motivate the player to keep going. They're only there to hold the game together, and they do a pretty good job at that.

I'm definitely going to be picking up Trauma Center: Second Opinion for the Wii, especially now that I've seen how well the wiimote behaves as an on-screen pointing device. There's a great deal of potential there for Second Opinion to expand upon the excellent mechanics introduced by Under the Knife, and I remain hopeful that Second Opinion will become a cult classic among early Wii titles.

Zelda: Twilight Princess

2006-11-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

Something that I neglected to mention in my post yesterday: Sunny smashed a glass of water while playing Wii Sports. And I don't mean that she knocked it over and it smashed on the ground; she literally punched it with the wiimote while bowling and it shattered in an upright position. Fortunately, Sunny wasn't badly injured, although she did cut her finger while picking up shards of glass. Let that be a warning to you Wii players out there.

I'm about seven hours into Twilight Princess, having just cleared the first ever horseback sword fighting sequence in a Zelda game. I hope that isn't too much of a spoiler for anyone; it's been well publicized that Twilight Princess has horseback fights. My impression of the game so far is that it's an excellent game all-round and well worth investing in the Wii for if you're a dedicated Zelda fan. I do not think that the outrageously high Metacritic score of 98 is deserved, but it does belong in the 90 range for sure.

As you've probably heard, the other Zelda game that Twilight Princess has the most in common with is The Ocarina of Time, and the resemblence is quite strong. Seeing as how Ocarina is one of the most beloved Zelda games ever, this is very good news for serious Zelda fans. Wind Waker was a bit of a different cup of tea (although still very good), and Minish Cap has more in common with A Link to the Past than Zelda 64, so fans of Ocarina have been waiting a long time for a follow-up (since Majora's Mask, if you enjoyed that one.)

Personally, I found Ocarina of Time to be frustratingly cryptic in many places--it's a very challenging game in terms of needing to comb over areas and experiment in order to find your way forward. If you don't like to get stuck in video games, Ocarina will frustrate you, and one of the things I said about Wind Waker when it came out is that, thankfully, it is much more friendly than Ocarina in terms of the challenge factor. In terms of difficulty, from what I've seen so far, Twilight Princess leans closer to Wind Waker than Ocarina, but it still throws some decent curve balls.

It's important to acknowledge that Ocarina's deep difficulty factor is by design and, in fact, largely in keeping with the roots of the series. If you go back and play the original The Legend of Zelda, you'll find that the game requires a lot of tedious exploration and experimenting with items to progress through the game. Back in the 80s, home computers were not nearly so common, and a lot of players didn't have access to FAQs and walkthroughs to explain the finer points of the game. As such a player, I found that spending literally hours upon hours toying around with different items in the game and memorizing large portions of the world map through sheer repition was part of the fun of the game, and it made such a lasting impact that even now I can pick up Zelda and clear the first five dungeons or so in short order. What takes me roughly an hour of play time to accomplish now is the cummulation of dozens of hours of exploration that I went through when I first played the game, and to me, Ocarina represents largely the same kind of gameplay. That's why when I'm playing a game like Twilight Princess, I actually enjoy getting stuck for short periods of time where I need to take a deep breath and patiently revisit my options.

Twilight Princess tries to strike a balance between being challenging without being frustrating, and I respect that. It takes a lot of guts in the current state of the gaming industry to truly make games hard. A couple of decades ago, the standard formula for most video games was that they could be finished in one sitting, but that they demanded many hours of practice to develop the skill to be completed. Over time, that pattern shifted so that games became longer and had much more gentle learning curves. Consider that Ninja Gaiden for NES takes less than an hour to play from start to finish, but it's so difficult that unless you've played it for 20 hours or more and have gotten regular practice, it's unlikely that you'd be able to finish it. Now consider Resident Evil 4, which took me 26 hours to finish, but where I spent very little time repeating any particular area. Ninja Gaiden quickly ramps up in difficulty to the point where you need to start over, whereas Resident Evil 4 also ramps up in difficulty but gives you plenty of time to keep pace with the game so that there's rarely much doubt in you're being able to finish it. Twilight Princess doesn't force you to play the same areas over and over again to the extent that Ninja Gaiden does, but it does make things difficult enough that you're likely to get stuck and spend some time exploring the same area over and over for a while.

The graphics for Twilight Princess are pretty sweet, but I don't know if they truly qualify as "next gen." Although the framerate is smooth and there are plenty of pretty effects, what you see here is really only a moderate improvement over the quality of visuals that Resident Evil 4 brought to the GameCube. Twilight Princess is certainly easy on the eyes, but at no point have the graphics been so impressive as to make my heart skip a beat. The artwork for this game is amazing, however.

The control scheme isn't bad, although there are so many buttons with the wiimote-nunchuck combo that occasionally I've found myself struggling a little. Shaking the wiimote to perform sword slashes is novel, but I find that it makes timing a little bit more difficult and a result the gameplay isn't as fluid as it was in Wind Waker. I'm starting to get to the point now where performing different motions with the nunchuck produces different combat moves, and I see a lot of potential there. Also very cool is being able to simply point the wiimote at the screen to aim items like the slingshot, bow, or boomerang--it's much quicker and more intuitive than using an analog joystick for the same task, which leads me to believe that there may be some serious potential for FPS games on the Wii. Overall, I find the control scheme to be a bit muddled, but it's not a big problem for this game. The novelty factor masks what little needless complexity there is here.

Between the graphics and the controls, I wonder how the GameCube version of this game is going to compare. I could imagine the GameCube version looking almost as good, but the control scheme is going to end up feeling quite different I suspect. I wish they would have included a feature for the Wii version to allow you to use a GameCube controller with it as if you were playing the GameCube version, but I likely would only have used that to see what the GameCube controls are like.

Twilight Princess is a welcome return to the Zelda series with a lot of classic Zelda mechanics present in full force, and what I've played of it so far has been thoroughly enjoyable. If you're an old hand at Zelda 64, I suspect that Twilight Princess will bring back lots of good feelings and likely make you want to fire up your Nintendo 64, if you still have it. And if you don't have your Nintendo 64, well, there's a good chance that Nintendo will release Ocarina of Time as a Wii-playable game at some point--probably by using their online store for downloadable games.