New Blog
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
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
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
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 3.1Xzi (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 OdysseyI'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.
ShadowrunI 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 DeadEven 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 AngelesWhen 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
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
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 2Trials 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.
EetsEets 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 2Gravitron 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.
MultiwiniaI 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-FluidWTF? 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
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. :)
