Obligatory Game of the Year Post

So it’s been almost exactly a year since I started this blog. I started it on New Year’s Eve 2008 with a post about why I read game blogs, but being the end of the year it only made sense to follow it up with a Game of the Year post. Anyway, here’s one for this year with hopefully many more to come. Maybe next year I'll have some readers.

I find it amusing that of the 70 or so games I played this year and the 63 I played last year, only 17 were on the PS3 (and half of them were small downloadable games), yet my favorite game in ’08 and ’09 were both on the PS3. Of course part of that is because I play all my multi-platform releases on the 360, but it’s still interesting that I only use my PS3 every month or two and am almost always impressed with what’s on there. Sony definitely has gone all out with first and second party development this year. Except for Killzone 2, that was an overrated piece of crap.

Moving along, you can probably already guess my game of the year. What’s the one PS3 game that everyone’s been raving about since its release two months ago? Better yet, what's that a picture of at the top of this post? Why Uncharted 2, of course! It has already been said all over the internet why this game is so great, so I won’t add fuel to the fire. I will say this however, I knew it was my game of the year by about the half way mark and it just got better from there. I don’t think any game has ever resonated with me that strongly and immediately. If you haven’t played it yet, then go buy a PS3, or use your friends, or send yours to be repaired, Slevin!

Looking back on the year, there were a lot of great games, but picking Uncharted 2 wasn’t a difficult decision to make. Assassin’s Creed 2 would probably be my next runner up, but it had too many problems early on to be GOTY material. Does anyone else think “goatee” when they see that acronym? No? Ok, well the only other games I’d consider would be Flower and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Flower was an incredible game that showed the world what games could be, or it would have if any non gamers played it. Hell, I don’t even think many gamers played it. I loved it, it was short and sweet and I still go back and play a level or two sometimes when I’m bored. In fact, I might even say Flower trumps Assassin’s Creed 2 for the number two spot. Not really sure, ranking these things is kind of dumb anyway. I think I’m digressing, where were we? Oh right, Batman was good, but it got too repetitive by the end. I think I did the Bane style dodge and batarang boss fight four times by the end and the combat was awesome, but it was a little too simple. However, like I said in a possibly confusing manner after I played it, the stealth sections were awesome and just got better as more abilities became available.

So there you have it, the Noise Tanks: Official Game of the Year goes to Uncharted 2. Unless Slevin or Squash make a GOTY post, but that’s about as likely as Naughty Dog putting my commendation on the back of the Uncharted 2 Greatest Hits box. See yah guys next year.

Opinions over Time: Assassin's Creed 2 (Final Thoughts)

It’s rare for me to feel sad at the end of a game because I want more. I think even most good games wear out their welcome by offering tens of hours of gameplay. Every now and then however I’ll be watching the credits roll and be thinking how I want more. Of course nowadays there is downloadable content, so I’ll have more to do in Assassin’s Creed 2 within the month I believe.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised already using your incredible deductive reasoning, I’ve finally beaten Assassin’s Creed 2. The reason it took me so long is because I think I was actually trying to savor it. Each time I’d play I would spend hours wandering around the world working on various tasks. I’m not even sure I was working towards any specific goal a decent chunk of the time. Simply put, the world Ubisoft crafted for Assassin’s Creed 2 is remarkable. Venice specifically is the coolest virtual town I’ve ever been to.

The strange thing is I thought the story of the game was pretty weak, the gameplay and controls had a few glaring problems, and yet it was hands down one of my favorite games of the year. Didn’t beat Uncharted 2 for my love though, maybe next time. I should probably clarify what I mean by the story being weak. I thought the whole revenge and redemption thing was fine, if not a little hard to keep tabs on, but the future science fiction aspect of this series is starting to piss me off. In both games it is so vague that I almost don’t see the point in including it at all. This time you only even see the “real world” for maybe 20 minutes of game time, but the ending practically invalidates Ezio’s entire story. And if one more game ends with a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved for at least 2 years I’m going to stab something. It’ll probably just be a tomato or something, but it’s going to be brutal.

Now that you’ve read two paragraphs praising AC2 and another hating on it, let me try to explain why I liked it so much. As games tend to be more and more sandbox style with emergent narrative techniques being employed, the worlds we play them in have to be immersive, believable and most of all interesting to interact in. That’s what makes games with insipid storylines like Crackdown so freaking awesome. Assassin’s Creed 2’s story wasn’t as bad or as pointless as Crackdown’s, in fact if you ignore the science fiction it was pretty good, but if I had nothing but the world and guards to mess around with I’d still probably have fun for more hours than I’d care to admit. That's what I loved about it, if they can nail down some of their storytelling techniques for the third we'll have something truly special.

Check it out if you’re on the fence; just remember the first three or four hours are pretty dry. You must endure, it's worth it!

Legendarily Brütal

I, like every other self respecting gamer, played Psychonauts and like most of the fifteen people that played it, I loved it. I have to admit it was my first Tim Schafer game. As I’ve said in the past I’ve always been more of a console gamer so I missed all the old Lucas Arts point and click games. Though as you probably guessed from the title, this post is going to be about Tim Schafer and Double Fine’s newest game, Brütal Legend.

I’m not a huge fan of metal music, but I was still excited about this game solely because it was the next thing out of Double Fine. Sadly, I’m not so sure it lived up to Psychonauts previous greatness. The game is by no means bad, but the entire thing just feels unfinished. Well, maybe unpolished is a better word. The game is definitely complete, but there are tons of little instances of shoddy craftsmanship that I would never have expected after playing the highly polished Psychonauts. For example, often times a line of dialogue that was triggered by some in game event would get cut off by the start of a cutscene or a load zone. These situations weren’t caused by me completing the games tasks faster than the developers thought I would. Sometimes the dialogue would continue for another twenty or thirty seconds if I knew ahead of time to wait and let it finish. In one instance the Guardian of Metal was saying his goodbye quip as the game played the animation of my character exiting his lair and even then he was cut off. That means someone recorded a line that was longer than the non-interactive sequence it was intended to be played over.

This might not sound like a big deal and I guess it isn’t, but the game is full of little problems like that and it started to get to me. These guys are known for their stories and characters as much as they are for their gameplay and level design. How can you appreciate the story if important pieces are constantly being cut off?

I also ran into a decent amount of glitches, including one where my car did a U turn in mid air and then landed sideways in an impossible to drive out of location. The game must have realized its error because my car spontaneously exploded fifteen seconds later, either that or the thing I was running from finally caught up.

As far as gameplay goes, it’s actually a pretty cool and rather unique set up they created. It’s an action game that slowly turns into a simple RTS where you control what I would call a hero class while still building and managing an army. It works fairly well, but the controls for getting your army to do anything but gang up in one spot is pretty cumbersome. Also, the game goes from being painfully easy to quite difficult right before the last three RTS battles. I actually enjoyed the difficulty spike, but it was unexpected and I think probably the cause of a somewhat defensive blog post by Tim Schafer.

Luckily all the humor of a Tim Schafer game is there and amplified significantly by Jack Black and some excellent facial animations. It’s not often a game causes me to laugh out loud and this one did on multiple occasions.

Overall the game isn’t bad; it’s just not up to the caliber I’d expect from Double Fine. A few more months probably would have done the game a world of good, but after reading their post mortem I can understand a bit better why the game ended up how it did. What happened was a shame, but I guess it gives me a wonderful excuse to blame all of Brütal Legend's shortcomings on Activision, so let’s do that.

Opinions over Time: Modern Warfare 2 (Final Thoughts)

Well I finished Modern Warfare 2 a week or two ago, but never wrote up my final impressions. That was largely due to the fact that writing three articles about a six hour game is a bad idea. That and everyone and their grandmother had already bought MW2 by that point anyway. If you must know, MW2 was an intense, almost over the top romp through an interesting yet incoherent war. It did all the cool first person tricks MW1 did, but better. Still, the whole thing felt lacking in the impactful department. Aside from the “No Russian” level, nothing in the game really resonated with me about the horrors of war. MW1 did that fairly regularly, while still maintaining a healthy dose of epic.

Opinions over Time doesn’t work for this game though because it’s too short. I mean I guess you could say at first I didn’t like how much of a cluster fuck the first level was, then I was impressed by some of the themes Infinity Ward dealt with, but ended up enjoying the game solely for its presentation and overall epicness. As you can see that’s not really worth three articles. I just summed it up pretty comprehensively in one sentence. It might be considered a run-on by elementary school teacher standards, but I think my point still stands.

What we ended up with was a middle post almost exclusively about the “No Russian” level and a final thoughts post about how redundant this whole exercise has been. I don’t think the whole feature is totally worthless, but upon further reflection most games don’t result in a huge range of opinions. Generally I find games to be either consistent in their quality, or they start off slow and end up great. The latter type leads to at two articles I suppose, but not really three.

Well whatever, I’ll finish up the Assassin’s Creed 2 final impressions once I finally finish that game and hold off on trying this feature again until I play either a really lengthy game like FFXIII or maybe if one just screams out to me as being well suited to the format. Or maybe I’ll just call it a failed experiment and cut my losses. See yah next time!

Stop While You're Ahead

Anyone who reads this blog regularly could probably guess I’m a huge fan of the Prince of Persia series, then again, you two probably already knew that before I started this blog. I think I've written more articles about the last game than any other game on here. So naturally when Ubisoft announces something outrageous like the next PoP game being a continuation of the Sands of Time trilogy, instead of the story they ended with a cliffhanger less than a year ago, I’m going to rant about it.

A small part of me is excited if only because the characters from the Sands of Time trilogy are awesome and I’ve spent so many hours in that universe, but the rest of me knows that story is over. Ubisoft pushed their luck by giving Sands of Time a sequel when it was clearly a standalone story and somehow managed to tie it all together beautifully by the end of the third game. I sincerely doubt they’ll be able to pull off a fourth game with the same kind of grace and care that they gave Two Thrones. Hell, they almost killed all hope for the trilogy when they made the prince “dark” and angry in Warrior Within.

Then there’s the fact that this game is slated for May of 2010, that means that it has either been in development alongside the last PoP, or it is going to have less than an 18 month dev cycle. I know the two Sands of Time sequels were both made in a year, but they had all the assets from the previous games and didn’t alter an enormous amount of the core gameplay. This game however is probably not going to use a lot of last year’s game seeing as it was cel shaded and significantly different from the other universe.

The last thing that really makes me nervous is May is the same month that the Sands of Time movie is coming out. Based on the trailer, the movie seems to take bits from the entire trilogy, but will mainly focus on the story on the first game. Jordan Mechner wrote it, so it’s probably not that bad, but we’re still talking about a game movie here. What I don’t want to hear is this new game is going to be a movie tie-in because that would just be ridiculous. How could they possibly make a game that is based on a movie that is based on three other games and expect it to be better or even equivalent to the originals? The reason the movies story was changed so much (I imagine) is because games don’t translate directly to movies very well. The same is true the other way, so doing both is probably a recipe for disaster.

I’m always hopeful and I guess I’ll have a better grasp for what is coming once they release a trailer on the 12th.

Opinions over Time: Modern Warfare 2 (Midway Impressions)

I’m probably about two thirds of the way through MW2 now, rather than the half hour in I was last time I wrote about it. There hasn’t been anything remotely as crazy as the on rails sequence I mentioned. In fact the rest of the game has pretty much felt like Call of Duty, makes sense I suppose. There have been several of those moments, generally at the end of a level, where the game does something unique and cool with the first person camera while remaining playable, which is more than half the reason I was excited to begin with. Also, the now infamous “No Russian” level was a bit of a surprise, I had of course heard about it, but all I knew before going in was that it was the offensive mission everyone was talking about. I had no idea why.

I don’t really want to add more fuel to the fire, but since playing it I’ve done a bit of reading and was kind of shocked to find I’m in the minority in that I think it was a fairly effective level. The biggest issue I disagreed with was from Anthony Burch of Destructoid who claims that because games are an interactive medium he should not have been forced into playing the mission in the particular way you have too. Too that I say yes, this is an interactive media, but MW2, like most games is a linear narrative and is only interactive in the sense that you get to experience firsthand the story Infinity Ward is trying to tell. This style of storytelling is starting to be replaced, but it hasn’t been yet and I’ve heard some pretty compelling arguments as to why it should stick around in some form forever. Anyway, you don’t have to agree with Infinity Ward’s story, and having other options because you don’t agree with what you’re being forced to do goes against their point. Pvt. Allen (the player controlled character) feels the same way IW is trying to make us feel and based on the outcry I think they succeeded. Burch even acknowledges and is okay with most games being linear stories. I feel his only real reason for wanting a choice is because this time he didn’t want to partake in this particular story. The thing is IW was expecting people to not wanting to partake, if you really don’t want to experience it, there are plenty of opportunities to skip it, including during the mission itself if you happen to let curiosity get the best of you and then decide you do not want to finish. I applaud IW for their efforts, it may not have been the best way they could have conveyed their message, but every suggestion that I’ve heard so far to do it differently seems like a cop out because the person suggesting didn’t want to have to play by IW’s rules. It seems strange to me that after a game finally tries to do something mature and take advantage of some of its mediums unique abilities to resonate with its audience that there would be such a backlash.

Well this wasn’t supposed to turn into another “No Russian” post, but whatever. A six hour campaign that several million people have already purchased and possibly already played doesn’t really need three impressions articles written about it anymore.

Opinions over Time: Assassin's Creed 2 (Midway Impressions)

While Squash ignores Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2, I on the other hand am making steady headway into both. I know MW2 has a very short campaign, but I’m currently quite engrossed in AC2. That and I’m currently at my parents house for the holiday and they don’t have a kickass sound system like I do. Assassin’s Creed 2’s sound is cool, but I think I can live without 5.1 and all that other jazz. MW2 though, really has memorable sound design, something the franchise has always gotten right, so I’m holding off. It really has more to do with AC2 than the sound system however, I’m not that big of an audiophile/douche bag.

So in my initial impressions, I said it felt like AC2 hadn’t even started. Well the next day I played for another hour and felt more or less the same. Still I wasn’t dissuaded however because once that third hour or so was done I was finally free to do whatever I wanted to with the world. Not only that, but Ubisoft Montreal throws so many options at you by that point that it is almost overwhelming. I could almost understand why the start of the game was so slow going for that reason except the majority of the things you can do aren’t slowly introduced over the three hours, they are all dumped on you about right before they give you free reign. So the slow start is basically just plot that could have potentially been told in a more interesting way, but if you can endure the beginning, I’m here to tell you it’s worth it.

I read a review the other day saying that if the original Assassin’s Creed was a proof of concept then the sequel is the full fledged game. I can totally see where that reviewer was coming from. The game still very much feels like the original, which was what was bothering me initially, but it eventually offers so much more. The first game gives you this giant sandbox, but gave you almost nothing to do in it. There were flags to collect if you were a masochist, but for the most part there was just the main campaign that consisted of climbing to the top of a tower, syncing and then using that to find and complete a few missions. There were only maybe five mission types and you had to do at least three before you could assassinate your target. After repeating this process nine times you had beat the game! Woohoo! Like I said before, I enjoyed the game, but I can totally see why others didn’t.

Assassin’s Creed 2 fixes that problem. There are so many things to do besides the main story that I am not going to even try to list them. This time around the developers took the sandbox approach more seriously and the result is a huge immersive world that I’ve spent hours exploring. The main missions are fun too, and they actually primarily consist of assassinating people. What a concept! There is still the occasional boring mission, but so far they have either been very short or part of what made the introduction so lousy.

I’ve found the plot a little difficult to follow, partially because I take so much time in between missions and partially because I can’t keep all the Italian named conspirators straight, but the menu has lots of documentation to help keep it all clear.

If it sounds like I’m bashing on the original despite claiming I loved it in the last post is because the sequel shows how good the first game could have been. It’s really what it should have been.

I can definitely say my midway impressions are a good deal better than my initial reaction. I’m excited to finish the game and write up my final thoughts. This game is huge however and I still have MW2 and Borderlands to finish as well as Brutal Legend waiting in my mailbox, so it may be a bit longer than I’d like. Luckily all the distractions are quite good. :)

Girls or Games

Tonight I sat down in my computer chair and began writing an essay for an advertising class. The assignment research lead me to an advertising website, which linked me to another advertising website, which linked me to Gamestop.com, which distracted me from the essay that within seconds I stopped writing to focus on this post. Yet again, there I sat. Thinking about video games. Avoiding my homework. And pondering the reason my video game play-time during the last three weeks was less than twenty minutes.

Girls. That’s right, girls. Well, one particular girl, anyway. Why is that? Why, when I start dating someone, do I forget about video games? I know they’re there, but they seem invisible. As though Katy—or Jenny—or Christina—or Michelle—whoever she may be—suddenly becomes a black hole in my video game universe, sucking all video game pleasure into her dark oblivion.

And the worst part? I love it. What kind of guy would I be if I didn’t? Sure, I have to relinquish a small amount of my “hardcore gamer” status. But it’s all in the name of love (or hormones (who really knows the difference?)). Any man, when presented with an opportunity for making-out, must take it. Even with titles out there like Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2. Yes, in my mind, they compare to the passion of love. But I’d rather protect my masculine identity than encourage the nerd in me.

And so I do. Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2, you’ll just have to wait. And I know you will. You’ll be there waiting for me when I’m ready. Girls may come and go. Flowers may live and die. But not you. Oh no, not you. You’ll be there in the end, until the end. Our bond is strong. Our relationship eternal. Until I’m single again, I bid you farewell. I’m sure plenty of other gamers will take advantage of your magnificence while I'm busy taking advantage of my dating life.

Opinions over Time: Modern Warfare 2 (Initial Reaction)

At the time of writing this I have only played the tutorial and the very first level of Modern Warfare 2. The tutorial, while seeming fun and refreshing in Call of Duty 4, just came off as annoying this time around. Especially since how well you do is far more influenced by memorization than skill with the Call of Duty franchise. I didn’t really think much of it though, complaining about tutorials is kind of redundant. They are designed for newcomers and if I was a newcomer I probably would have enjoyed it. I suppose they could have included an option to skip it, but I wouldn’t have anyway. Hell, maybe there was an option, I didn’t check.

Ever since I played Call of Duty 2 on the 360 (primarily since there wasn’t anything else worth playing on my shiny new 400 dollar console besides Geometry Wars) I’ve loved the intensity Infinity Ward has managed to capture. During some of the more action packed battles I really feel like a tiny part of a much larger offensive. I think they took that intensity one step too far with this particular game however, or at least the first level. I understand they want to capture the insanity of war, but the first level has an on-rails section that is such a clusterfuck that I pretty much let go of the controller and let the fact I’m practically invincible on normal carry me through. I was getting shot and blown up from so many directions that it would be almost impossible to deal with it on a clear screen much less with all the vision impairing damage indicators covering the screen. I suppose that is a great way to capture the intensity and craziness of battle, but it wasn’t very much fun and taking three rocket blasts to the face and living sort of kills the immersion a bit. Maybe I should play on Veteran, but I don’t think I have the patience to even attempt to survive that section without the Normal settings huge cushion.

So I guess, as with my Assassin’s Creed 2 initial impressions, I’m once again still excited to play the game, but disappointed by the intro. I saw the beginning of level 2, which starts in the middle of what I think is Siberia. It is definitely going to be a much smaller scale level, possibly a stealthy one, so the game is definitely going to offer up plenty of changes to keep things fresh. That is something Infinity Ward did flawlessly with CoD4, so I’m going to tread on with cautious optimism. If the story and first person narrative techniques are even half as cool as their last game then I’ll be happy. I can’t imagine they’ll top CoD4’s ending, but here’s hoping.

Opinions over Time: Assassin's Creed 2 (Initial Reaction)

I'm trying something new here that I'll hopefully be able to turn into a regular feature. The idea is I play a game for a little bit and write my immediate reaction to it. Once I'm a good deal farther into the game I'll write up another set of impressions, and finally once I'm finished with the game and have seen the credits roll, I'll post my final thoughts. We might find out that my gut reaction, final thoughts, and everything in between end up being the exact same, which is why I chose not to use Uncharted 2 for my first run at this. That game was fantastic right from the start and just got better and better. Instead I thought I'd give Assassin's Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2's single player a try and see how varied each of the three articles are. If I end up saying the same thing three times for both games then I'll scrap the idea entirely. Hopefully though, I end up with an interesting progression, we'll see I guess. Let's get started.

So Assassin's Creed 2. I was one of the gamers that landed on the loving side of the Assassin's Creed 1 fence, I recognized it's flaws, but was willing to overlook them. That said, I am not willing to overlook them a second time. Everything I've read about Assassin's Creed 2, and the live demo I saw at PAX make me think I won't have to worry about that. However, I started the game up yesterday afternoon and played for about 2 hours. What I played sadly made me think it really is exactly the same, just in Italy 300 years later. The combat hasn't changed, the free running hasn't changed, and the missions have been a series of deliveries and boring escorts that involve nothing more than walking beside an NPC, at a crawling pace I might add. So I guess those two mission types are new....

Still, I have high hopes for this game. I had been avoiding the hype until I saw the PAX demo and have been super excited ever since. When I turned it off last night I still felt like the tutorial was just barely ending so I'm thinking the real game is about to kick off. I suppose that makes sense for such a huge open world game, but such a long intro was fairly tedious after so recently playing Uncharted 2's ridiculously engaging thirty second opening cutscene that ends leaving you in quite the precarious and playable situation. Hopefully when I give it another spin after work tomorrow I'll get to see all the cool stuff I saw at PAX, and more. I've seen hints of the all the good to come, but hints can only hold me for so long.

Anyway, there's the first thoughts, I'll post further middle impressions once I've had a bit more playtime under my belt. Expect an initial reaction to MW2 first though, since I already started that.

A Worthy Sequel

A few friends and I went up to the University's computer science lab last night and played some Left4Dead 2. We only played two campaigns, out of order, and shamefully were unable to finish the final onslaught of the second one, but I think I had enough time with it to form an opinion. It has a few problems, but all in all I'd say it is a well done sequel that added more to the franchise in a year than most hyped up two or three year dev cycle sequels do.

First off there are tons of new weapons, they were all right, but most were similar variations of each other, like three versions of a shotgun. The melee weapons felt kind of awkward, but work fantastically when surrounded by swarms of zombies. That and hearing a southerner randomly walk into an abandoned convenience store and yell, "Ninja Sword here!" never really gets old.

The first campaign we did was "Hard Rain" and even though it reused the first two chapters by making you backtrack through them for the next two, the rainstorm changed it so significantly that you could hardly notice. Also the horrible peaks of the storm happening every few minutes definitely kept us on our toes. The second campaign we did was "Dark Carnival" and that one had some pretty incredible environments, including running along a roller coaster track and a finale that I won't spoil. The level design for both campaigns were very reminiscent of some of the more memorable sections of the Half Life series and that's never a bad thing.

Where the game really has a head over it's predecessor however is the AI director. That bastard is harsher than ever before. If anyone happens to fall behind, within a minute he'll have to deal with a Jockey or some other special zombie. Same thing if you pull ahead, you'll find yourself face first in a Chargers giant palm in no time. The whole game just feels more frantic as well. You have to keep moving, dawdling just results in more zombies rushing you, but you also have to stick together. It's the same concepts from the first game, but with the pressure ramped up, combined with less ammo than before. It almost feels like a survival horror game in that respect. Valve turned it up to 11 and the result feels much fresher and newer than the Halo or Gears of War sequels ever did.

Still, the game is not without it's faults. For one, the bare bones emergent narrative structure of the game hasn't changed at all. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I seem to recall Valve saying they were going to put more effort into the story telling this time around. Aside from a few more snarky comments and references to their surroundings from the characters it really hasn't changed.

Also, not really a gameplay issue, but we ran into a number of bugs or glitches while playing. Every now and then, with increasing frequency, the game would temporarily freeze up for one of us while still going for everyone else. I'm not sure if this was a game issue or a lag issue, but it was fairly obnoxious by the end got us killed in more than a couple clutch moments.

The weirdest thing we saw all night was a Witch that would not die. My friend startled her with an incendiary shot, while I blasted her with a shotgun. We both went down, then she started to freak out after she realized she was on fire and wandered around twitching. She continued to do this fire induced animation long after the flames were gone and no longer seemed to have any interest in us. It was quite the glitch.

Faults aside, Left4Dead 2 was not a let down and would have been a pretty ridiculous content pack. The AI director really changed the pacing and the whole game felt kicked up a notch. It's nice to see Valve pushing out quality with some sort of frequency. Now I'd just like to know where the hell is Episode 3?

Breaking the Habit

A little less than a year ago, so during the Christmas holidays, I was thinking about all the games I had played that year. I realized that since just about every one of them was on the 360, which keeps track of not just when you last played them but when each Achievement was unlocked, I could fairly accurately construct a list of every game I played. This was also the year I got a GameFly subscription, so between the two sources I compiled a list of 63 games I played in 2008, 53 of which I finished, and 5 which I deemed unable to finish such as Warhammer Online. After showing Slevin the list, he constructed a list of his own. Upon further discussion we realized we could probably do the same thing for 2007. I did so and saw I had played significantly less games that year, only 25 that year, 20 of which I finished. There's actually a few reasons I played so few games in 2007, but I'd rather not get into them.

Since I was making this list at the end of the year, I naturally saw the increasing pattern and thought I could best 2008 in 2009. I wanted to finish more than 53 games, the goal I vaguely thought about was 60, but I would be content with anything over 53. As of now I'm at 48 and am quite confident I'll pass 53, but most likely won't hit the 60 I was originally on track for.

So now that I've had you read all that back story, let me get to the point. The combination of a GameFly account, which is most worthwhile when you beat games rapidly, and my goal to finish a fairly exorbitant amount of games has resulted in me plowing through about a game a week. That's fine, I have no problem with playing that much if I can find the time, but it also meant that any game I had a decent amount of time invested in had to be finished. I hated the idea of spending 5 or 10 hours on a game and not being able to add it to my finished list for any number of reasons. This of course led me to finish some games I thoroughly did not enjoy, such as Majora's Mask or Velvet Assassin.

Until one game finally made me realize how ludicrous this had all become. I have spent around 40 hours playing this game, and am on the final boss. I can't beat him without several hours of grinding, either leveling my current party or leveling a healer class I never needed until now to catch up to my current party. I can't do this very easily in the final dungeon without straying ridiculously far from a save crystal, and the game has a tendency to freeze on my Xbox. This basically makes grinding impossible and I think I'm finally willing to accept that I can't beat this game.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the game is absolute crap. I knew it wasn't for me early on, and discovered after about a third of the way through that it wasn't going to get any better. The story continued to get more and more ridiculous and incoherent while the pacing got more and more grueling. It pretty much turned into a few hour dungeon crawl followed by almost an hour of nonsensical plot revealing cutscenes with some of the worst dialogue and acting I've ever seen.

I know this just sounds dumb, but I've seriously been blindly determined enough (or maybe just stupid enough) to play games I've despised for several hours all year long. It's not as bad as it sounds, because I generally won't play a game unless I know I will like it, but I still have probably spent at least 50 hours playing crap. 80% of which was probably this game alone.

This raised an interesting question for me however. I've always been of the opinion that a game, book, movie or whatever should be judged as a whole. It's served me well in the past with games like Mass Effect and The Darkness. I didn't really like either game going in, but ended up really enjoying them by the end. Same with a few books, Dune in particular, which is now one of my favorite science fiction books ever. It starts off quite slow, but it's quite necessary and completely worth it in the end.

So where do I draw the line? The game that I decided not to finish was an easy decision because I knew pretty early on it was only going to get worse and sure enough, it did. I'm on the final boss and I can safely say I have no idea what's going on and no huge amount of boring cutscenes after the fight will make it any better, but what about the games like Mass Effect? With my new willingness to quit games when I don't like them I could easily quit potentially great games in disgust before I ever really figure them out, but if I want to quit the game in disgust, how can it possibly be worth finishing? Maybe disgust is too harsh a word, Mass Effect was never that bad, I just thought the combat was clumsy and the story wasn't terribly engaging, but by the end I really enjoyed both. Star Ocean 4 on the other hand, the previously mentioned game that I arbitrarily left nameless until now, was freaking terrible and it was quite obvious it wasn't going to get any better.

So I guess I should thank Tri-Ace for creating a game I hated so much that it broke my habit of finishing every game I start. Or maybe I should thank Microsoft for making their early Xbox 360's so shoddy that I can't play the shitty game for more than an hour without it freezing. I might have actually tried grinding in an attempt to beat the final boss if it weren't for the game freezing far more frequently than it's inconveniently placed save crystals.

Either way, it's crappy design that made this all possible, which I find fairly amusing.

Animation killed the Infected Super Soldier... Star

I encountered something in a game the other day that has never really been an issue for me before. The game was Prototype, and as my fairly cryptic title may or may not convey, its player character animations were often a problem when choosing my tactics. They all shared one common problem.

They were too damn long.

All the crucial animations such as absorbing someone to regain health wrench control from the player for a few seconds, but leave them vulnerable to attack during that time. Often times I would lose more health during the act of consuming someone than I gained from doing so. Even worse, sometimes I would be hit so hard that the animation wouldn't complete and I would be left with significantly less health than when I started.

I didn't really notice this as a problem early on, but the farther I got into Prototype, the more crap the game threw at me. By the end of the game I was often fighting off multiple helicopters, tanks, infantry, infantry with rocket launchers, and super soldiers or giant infected monsters called hunters. Most of these guys direct attacks will knock the player back and when enough are firing at once Alex (the player character) can quickly become what feels like a ping pong ball. This means stopping for even a split second can have pretty devastating results, yet several moves require three to five seconds of extremely vulnerable stationary actions. To make matters worse, all the best moves, the Devastator attacks, require a certain amount of health and then a charge period of a few seconds. If you are lucky enough to consume enough people to get your health up past the midway point, often times you'll take enough damage during the charge up to fail the attack completely.

This resulted in several missions devolving into me reusing the same move over and over again. For example, one of the very last missions had me chasing one tank, and destroying all his friend tanks whenever he stopped with to try to thwart me. Earlier in the game I would have just jacked one of the tanks, used it to blow the other three up and then moved on. Or maybe I would have used my Hammerfist power and pounded them into the ground. I could have jacked a helicopter and blown the three up that way as well. Devastator attacks also would probably end the entire confrontation and the rest of the city block in one foul swoop. Yet none of these were possible. The tank jacking animation takes so long that my character can only try it once before having to go hide and regenerate health. Everytime I tried ended with a rocket to the face knocking me clear off the tank and ending the jacking sequence. Helicopter jackings are a bit faster, but often times ended with the helicopter propeller first in a building with every enemy targetting it, meaning I'd have about three seconds before the damn thing explodes. Landing near the tanks to punch them with the Hammerfist power lends itself nicely to that whole ping pong effect I was talking about earlier and I've already explained why the Devastator attack was a no go.

I found one feasible option. Basically Alex dive bombs from a glide headfirst into the ground, damaging anything in a fairly small radius. It looks awesome and is really fun to do, but aiming it is quite difficult. Also, the novelty of the move wore off after the fifth attempt to blow up the twelfth tank of the mission. By the end I was able to run up a skyscraper and nosedive perfectly on top of a tank from a hundred stories above, destroying it and everything nearby, but doing the same pattern over and over again for ten minutes is just not fun.

It's obvious why Radical chose this route for Prototype. By allowing the protagonist access to as many awesome powers as he has, they almost made him invincible. Of course that may lead to some boring game design, running around as an unstoppable God is fun, but gets old fairly fast. To counter this they just threw more and more enemies into the mix until it was just unfair. If they had just made the animations for all the moves mentioned above twice as fast, or made the player invulnerable during them I think all my gripes would be solved. This would allow all the fun and useful moves to be actually usable during the times they were most needed, while still having the fear and danger of an entire army trying to stop you.

I never thought something as simple as animation length could have some a huge impact on gameplay, but Prototype proves it does.

P.S. Despite it's irrelevance to everything, I feel obligated to mention I think I liked Prototype better than inFAMOUS, but Red Faction: Guerrilla was better than both. ;)

I don't want to talk about it

The other day I was reading Sexy Videogameland when a particular part of one of Leigh’s articles grabbed my attention. “Sometimes I wish "people in the real world" were more interested in video games, so that I could talk about 'em with them. Other times, I wish they'd never talk about them ever-ever.” I found this very amusing because I’m the same way. I love talking about games, but I’ve found as I get to know more and more about them, who is making what, new trends and gameplay experiments, and what’s on the horizon that I’m less and less inclined to talk about games with the casual audience.


Anytime anyone new wanders into my living room, which happens fairly often, I have three roommates and a no knocking policy with all my friends (we’re too lazy to get up just to let our friends in), they immediately see two things. One is the giant mural of Hedonism Bot on the wall, whom I aspire to be someday. The other is my game setup, there’s a large TV sitting above all three current gen consoles and a giant receiver, which immediately tells the person that someone residing in our home likes to play video games. The first question out of their mouths, assuming it isn’t related to Hedonism Bot (he’s kind of distracting), is who owns all the gaming stuff. Once informed they proceed to tell me all about how much they love Call of Duty 4, or Halo, or whatever one game they play incessantly. This is great, I’m glad more and more people are discovering video games as a form of entertainment, but the gaming conversations I crave are generally not of that nature.

I’m not entirely sure how to continue this article without sounding like a pretentious gamer nerd, but we’ll give it a shot. As I’ve gotten more and more obsessed with gaming and its culture I’ve found fewer and fewer people to converse with about it. I suppose that goes with the territory of being knowledgeable about anything, but with games it has gotten to the point that I only know maybe one person that isn’t from the internet that can hold their own in a conversation. I’ll be damned if I ever run into another person in close proximity to me that knows what ludonarrative dissonance is all about. Well, that one is pretty damn abstract, I’m not even sure Slevin and Squash know what the hell that one is all about, but my point still stands. I’m so desperately lonely! ;)

Seriously though, it’s gotten to the point with me now that I just sort of tune out and let whoever is excited about Call of Duty ramble on for awhile and then we talk about something else. Even my local gamer friends, most of which have now moved away, tended to rely on me for their gaming news and weren’t all that interested in anything but the fun.

At the risk of sounding anymore elitist, I think I’m going to cut this article short. Let’s just conclude it with it being a good thing for the internet otherwise I’d probably never have found people with the same sort of common interest as me. Ironically, without the net, I can’t imagine I’d have ever even discovered the very thing I’m interested in. Without it, I’m sure it’d be another couple of decades before an intelligent discussion of video games became prevalent in academia and the published world.

“Why do stealth games have to suck?”

I’ve been playing plenty of games lately, but I’ve been having trouble coming up with things to write about them. I was considering raging about Star Ocean, but realized Squash already did that months ago and I should have reread his thoughts before submitting myself to it's horrible everything. I thought I could rant about The Conduit’s horrendous level and encounter design, but the internet is already full of that and no one really cared then. I really liked ‘Splosion Man and wanted to gush over it a bit, but I don’t think I had anything terribly meaningful to say. Saying how much I liked it doesn’t lead to a very interesting read. I’ve also been playing Aion with a bunch of my friends. It’s refreshing to actually play an MMO with a group of real life friends rather than making them along the way, but the game is basically just World of Warcraft with wings and I don’t really want to write about that. I started Batman: Arkham Asylum the other day though, and it’s piqued my analytical bone a bit. It’s a fantastic game, albeit a few strange storytelling/immersion techniques, but what got my attention is its approach to stealth gameplay. I’ve never liked stealth games in the past, but this and the new Splinter Cell have completely changed how it’s done and I’m very excited for it.

Like I said, in the past I’ve generally avoided the stealth genre like the plague. I’ve always found them tedious and boring, but lately I’ve given them a bit more of a shot. I finally tried the Metal Gear Solid series a couple years ago and love it, but I played them as aggressively as possible, always opting to run in with a shotgun when the opportunity presented itself. I also dabbled with the multiplayer mode of one of the Splinter Cell’s of last gen, but never once even started the single player campaign. I thought those games looked incredible, but definitely not for me. I also checked out Velvet Assassin a few months ago and well, here’s what I thought about that. It basically summed up nicely all that I hated about the old stealth genre. Arkham Asylum on the other hand seems to be the start of a new one.

The stealth sections of the game allow you to move very quickly, drop in and down a foe then grapple out before anyone else realizes what happens. They give you a myriad of ways to take down foes as well, multiple types of batarangs, triggered explosions, glide kicks, inverted takedown from fixtures above, and the good old fashioned punching in the face. These tools really allow you to not just take out your enemies, but to toy with them. For instance, you can string a baddie up in the air, and then chop him down with a batarang in front of another enemy for the sole purpose of freaking him out and seeing what he says afterwards. All these options combined with the ridiculously versatile grappling hook allows for so pretty amusing and most importantly fast paced stealth sections that are like nothing I’ve seen before.

Batman isn’t exclusively a stealth game, it has one of the more interesting and visually impressive combat system I’ve ever seen, and some brief platforming sections. All three are fun, but after around the halfway point of the game I started to notice that they could all be a little more robust. Still, they are good enough that I am glad they decided to leave them all in rather than take out one to really focus on another.


Now the Splinter Cell series is known for being incredibly tedious, requiring meticulous planning after several trial and error sessions to learn an area. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s an insanely popular series, it just never interested me. Ubisoft’s newest addition to the series however is taking it in a very new direction. It is still very much a stealth game, but it now focuses on a similar style to Batman. Drop in, kill a target or two using the new mark and execute feature and then break line of sight and do it all over again. There’s obviously a lot more to it than that, but that is the essential change that I’m so excited about.

Both these games took the genre that required you to sit in the dark for three minutes working out a bunch of dumb guards set paths and turned it into something fun and awesome. By allowing players to have a much more fast paced and offensive approach to stealth they have made something very enjoyable, that is completely different than just about everything else out there. I am thrilled by the new direction and can’t wait to see what others do with the mold. As the speaker for the Splinter Cell: Conviction presentation said at PAX, “Why do stealth games have to suck?” I wholeheartedly agree.

I think I like it?

Well this is the article I’ve been casually mentioning writing since mid July (no less than eight months after its release anyway) when I was disenchanted with Fallout 3. I sincerely doubt it will live up to the hype, but here it is anyway! First let’s talk about what took me so long. According to my achievements I started playing Fallout 3 on June 29th and finished it on September 9th. That’s pretty much the reason right there. I didn’t play the living hell out of the game, exploring every area with the utmost care; instead I think I put in around 12 or 15 hours with a couple month long hiatus in the middle there. Over the course of that time I went through varying opinions on the game, and I’m still not entirely sure if I liked it or not, let’s talk about why.

Right from the start I liked Fallout 3, primarily due to changes made from Bethesda’s previous game, Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. I spent around 45 hours with Oblivion, finishing every major quest line and just taking everything in, but I had some serious issues with it. Most importantly the games leveling system, while allowing you to go anywhere right from the start, also had the potential to make progress nigh impossible. In Oblivion, the enemies leveled with the player, but leveling wasn’t just the simple act of becoming better and learning new skills. There were multiple tiers of abilities, and how the lower tiers improved over the course of a level affected how big of a boost the higher tiers would get when leveling. Sound confusing? That’s because it was. It required a lot of skill micromanagement that if done poorly resulted in a character that actually got weaker as he leveled. That character was mine. The way I overcame this was by turning the difficulty all the way down, I didn’t mind too much because I thought Oblivion’s combat system was pretty lame anyway. I didn’t miss the lack of a challenge all that much, for me it was all about exploration.

Now I know the name of Fallout 3 doesn’t mention Elder Scrolls anywhere in the title, but Bethesda even said themselves that Fallout 3 is as much a sequel to Oblivion as it is to Fallout. Anyone who has played both Oblivion and Fallout 3 will definitely notice the resemblance. Why I immediately fell in love with Fallout 3 was because it did away with Oblivion’s tedious leveling system, replacing it with a more traditional one, while still keeping the go anywhere do anything setup of Oblivion. The combat system is also a lot more fun, flawlessly blending real time first person shooter gameplay with turn based combat that almost always ends with hilariously gory results. See the above image if you don't believe me and just so you know, blowing a mans head clean off in slow motion never gets old.

This initial love waned quickly, and within a week I had almost all but given up on Fallout completely. I told myself I’d finish it one day, and I always do, but I put it off for two months. So what happened? Well post apocalyptic D.C. is apparently a lot less interesting to explore than the world of Cyrodiil. In Oblivion I’d often spend my time just wandering around in the mountains, exploring caves, just taking in the awesome world Bethesda created. In Fallout 3 exploration was a lot less interesting. The world they created this time isn’t pretty, and you can’t fault them for that, it’s a wasteland. Still it wasn’t as visually interesting to wander around in. More importantly, wandering around seemed a lot more difficult this time around. Despite the world appearing to be a wide open sprawl of nothing, I quickly ran into obstructions. Even when I had a set path and a specific destination I’d usually end up getting stuck somewhere and have to backtrack around annoying obstacles. Several places were only accessible through dilapidated subway tunnels whose entrances weren’t very well marked. This made exploration a bit more tedious than it had to be.

Also, a certain side quest I sunk a few hours into glitched in such a way that I couldn’t finish it and then completed itself upon reloading the game, which helped to turned me off to everything but the main story. Since I tend stick to the main story in big open ended games anyway, I’ll let that big paragraph I had planned go. This is already getting longer than I’d like.

I had this article outlined back in July and was going to discuss all the various things I didn’t like about it, then maybe question what I missed. Clearly there must have been something, this was several websites pick for Game of the Year ’08, and there were a lot of great games last year, but when I went to finish it a couple weeks ago I think I started to see the appeal. I might even say that by the end of the main quest I was sad to see it end. I decided some of my earlier complaints were unfounded, particularly all the ones I neglected to mention above ;), and that while the game probably wasn’t for me, it’s solid and a worthy sequel to Oblivion. I never played the old Fallouts, but maybe it’s a worthy sequel to those too? This change of heart kind of threw off the whole direction of the originally planned article and like I said at the beginning, I’m not entirely sure if I liked it or not. Anyway, we’re getting a little too far into meta territory now, blogging about blogging, and since you probably don’t need a recommendation to play Fallout 3 almost a year after its release, I’ll just cut this short. Go play it if you haven’t, hopefully you’ll come up with a more concrete opinion of it than me.

My Final Farewell to FFXI

It’s been several years since the release of Final Fantasy XI, and several years since I “broke it off” because of the game’s failure to put-out the way I like my games to put-out. Yet even after all this time, I still feel hostility toward my experience playing in a similar way I feel hostility toward some ex-girlfriends. And I just haven’t been able to let go. So here’s my final attempt to make amends before turning my back and saying goodbye forever to a dysfunctional and unsatisfying relationship.

Most MMO’s have several commonalities. Most never end, (or, at least, not in the traditional sense of finishing a campaign with cut scenes and credits) most provide some form of quest system to assist the player in their leveling experience and make the grind less tedious, and most offer an expansive world that feels just real enough to confuse the barrier between reality and fantasy. Final Fantasy XI shares only one of these commonalities.

Everything in FFXI feels very real. And I’m not talking about graphic quality or any of the visual affects offered (although they aren’t terribly impressive, either). I’m talking about having to deal with similar bull crap nobody wants to deal with in the real world. And this reality, taken several steps too far, is responsible for every problem I have with the game.

My first complaint revolves around transportation. Most of us, when traveling to work or school, use a car. Some of us take a bus. Some even use a tram if it’s an available option. My point is, we use transportation because it gets us from point A to point B faster than walking.

FFXI also provides a form of transportation called the Chocobo. But you can’t use it until you reach level twenty and complete a nine hour quest that involves buying greens (which I will cover in more detail when I bitch about the games economy) and feeding the stupid thing. Once you’ve reached level twenty and completed the feeding quest, you don’t get to keep the Chocobo. Each time you use it, a fee is required that is determined by the amount of Chocobos currently being used by other players. If the number of Chocobo’s being used is high, the cost sky-rockets. Then, once you arrive at your destination and get off the Chocobo, it leaves you stranded, forcing you to return by foot.

My problem with this wouldn’t be as significant if the world wasn’t enormous. But the fact is, I spent at least forty percent of my play-time traveling by foot. On many occasions I was forced to run between two of the main cities, a whopping thirty real minutes from one city to the next.

The game does offer one other form of transportation—the airship. If you’re lucky enough to carry a boarding pass, be level fifty, and be heading in the direction of one of its three destinations, you can use the airship every forty-five minutes.

My next complaint revolves around the leveling system. Setting aside the irritation I felt after being obliterated by a level thirty-eight rabbit when I was level fifty-nine, my major problem lies with party structure.

FFXI was designed to force players into groups to kill more powerful monsters. I actually like this aspect of the game. I enjoy gaining levels with groups of people more than I enjoy playing alone. But the structure of the group system, combined with lack of players, provides endless frustration when looking for a group or attempting to create one.

When grouping with others, there are several rules that must be followed.

First, you must find players that are within two levels of each other. For example, if I’m level fifty, I must group with players level forty-eight to fifty, or players level fifty to fifty-two. If I’m in the group of players level fifty to fifty-two, and the level fifty-two player levels to fifty-three before all level fifty players are fifty-one, he must leave the party or experience goes down the drain. (If you understand that you’ll know that it’s dumb). This causes an unnecessary amount of time asking questions and searching for players in the proper level range.

Second, the classes that makeup your parties are very specific. A party is made of five players. Among these five players, the following classes are required: Paladin, White Mage, and Bard/Red Mage. The damage-dealing classes are interchangeable. If you’ve managed to build a party with all required classes except the White Mage, and there is no groupless White Mage in your level range currently online, then your balls out of luck. Your next step is to speak to the party leader of a currently formed party (if there is one) and tell him you’d like to be put on the waiting list, or wait for a White Mage to come online and hope the other players in your party are willing to wait (because you might be waiting for eight hours).

To refrain from writing a novel (and trust me, I’ve considered it), I will express only one last large frustration. In fact, this last problem, in my opinion, is the core issue with FFXI. It’s also one of the core issues in our country right now (remember that real world bull crap I talked about?).

The economy in FFXI is totally screwed because it’s controlled by the players. All items and equipment worth having are sold through an auction house. Each item’s information shows you how many are available and the price history for the last ten sold. This information gives players a perfect arrangement for jacking up the price whenever an item’s availability is zero.

And they take advantage of that. When a popular item is not available and the price history shows the last ten selling for approximately twenty million, most players will place that item on the auction house for twenty-five million… then thirty million… then thirty-three million, etc. Before you know it, the items price has become seventy million – an impossible amount for any new player to afford (severely reducing the chances of new players being successful in the game). Because of this, the rich, higher level players get richer, and the poor, lower level players get poorer. Let me share with you an example.

Once I attained level forty as a Dark Knight, players wouldn’t group with me unless I had two Sniper Rings. These rings improved accuracy and transformed my character from useless to useful. I had two options for acquiring the rings. I could either compete with the numerous Chinese gil farmers (Asians who sell game money for real money) to find and kill the monster who appeared once per hour and dropped the ring three percent of the time you killed it. Or I could spend the time earning and saving money to pay the ridiculous price of twenty million gil per ring. Although it may not sound like it, earning and saving money was the more practical route; and it was the route I took. Eight hours per day and three months later, I had saved enough to buy both rings (and in those three months the price had increased from twenty million per ring to thirty million). Dumb.

And now that I’ve gotten all of that out of my system, I will answer a question that I have been contemplating while I’ve been writing. And, perhaps it is even a question you have been considering while reading. If the game is so terrible, why the hell do I know so much about it? Well, the straight forward answer is that I’m a competitive ass hole. I don’t like being beaten. Even in spite of all the things I hate about FFXI (and there are many more I won’t cover) I had to keep playing. It wasn’t until I had logged fifty-five days of playing time, only to discover I wasn’t more than half way to the level cap, did I throw in the towel. And until today, I’ve never vented properly. Goodbye FFXI. Goodbye forever. I won’t think of you again, and I hope you don’t think of me.

SDTV's don't have to suck!

Like I mentioned in a previous post, after PAX I went up even farther north to hang out with Squash for a week of sitting around and playing games ‘til the early hours of the morning. So pretty much what I normally do, just with Squash… so pretty much what we used to do until he moved to Washington. While there I finally finished Fallout 3, and still plan on eventually finishing that post about it that I started back in July. Then I started Banjo-Kazooie and Star Ocean 4, which I am still currently working my way through.

What I want to talk about today however, has much more to do with the television I was playing these games on. At my house, I have a 50 inch 1080p DLP rear projection television made in 2006 or 2007, I can’t quite remember, but it has all the goodies you’d ever want for gaming. Maybe not the best HDTV by today’s standards, but it gets the job done wonderfully. Squash also has a nice 1080p LCD that he uses for all this gaming needs, aside from that horrible World of Warcraft addiction of his. We are both pretty adamantly opposed to playing splitscreen. Especially on HDTV’s because of the 16:9 ratio, which provides no good way to split the screen and still give players a good aspect ratio. Sadly, I think Halo 3’s solution is the best, which wastes large chunks of screen real estate by outputting the game in 4:3 and splitting it the traditional way. Anyway, I’m getting off topic. You might even say I digress, but that’d be dumb. So, the point was, we hate splitscreen so when he used to come to my house, he’d actually lug his 37 inch TV with him. Mine on the other hand, while actually being a good deal lighter, is far more impractical because it’s gigantic. Not to mention having to unhook the thousands of things I have plugged into the back. So what I’d do is just bring my 360 and hook it up to his old CRT. It’s a pretty decent size, definitely over 30 inches, but it can still only do 480i.

So back on track, I played Fallout 3 for a good 5 to 10 hours before moving onto the other titles and had no real problems with the display. Sure it didn’t look as nice in the lower resolution, and reading text was a bit more tedious do to the interlacing, but it worked. No real complaints there. Banjo-Kazooie, however, wasn’t so nice. The game looked like it had a thin layer of Vaseline smeared over the camera lens, and the text was quite small, which combined with said Vaseline made it very difficult to read. The game has even been patched because of text complaints and I still had to struggle to read anything. Picking out my vehicle among all the other objects was like trying to focus on a fast moving brownish blob in the middle of a puddle of Skittle induced vomit. How’s that for tasting the rainbow! …Sorry. So I’m exaggerating a bit, but it was tedious. It was playable, but I found myself with a dull headache after a short time from concentrating so hard on simply seeing. Alternatively, playing the game on my TV provides a crisp picture, that really shows the amount of detail and polish Rare put into their game. It looks outstanding.

Star Ocean is the same way. The bloody thing doesn’t even run in 4:3. There are black bars while playing on an SDTV forcing the widescreen ratio. The text is even harder to read than Banjo-Kazooie, but infinitely more important, and not just for the story. It’s absolutely horrible because Star Ocean is an RPG that has a lot of menu micromanagement. It’s quite fun to build your characters various skills and battle abilities, but not when you can’t read anything! It also suffers from the general blurry hazy quality Banjo-Kazooie has that results in a headache after playing for any significant length of time. Lo and behold, bringing the game back to my house to finish brought out the true high def glory that is so easy on the eyes. Both games look great on an HD display.

Last I heard though, most 360 owners don’t own HDTV’s. They are getting cheaper, but they are still a bit of an outrageous purchase for the average consumer. So if that is the case, why are all these games seemingly not being tested on SDTV’s. This seems like a bit of an absurd problem considering how long it has been going on. Dead Rising suffered from this problem and it came out way back in 2006. HDTV penetration was significantly lower back then and the PS3 had yet to even launch. HD console gaming was still in its infancy and already developers were blowing off the displays that we’ve used for the previous few decades.

What’s the deal with this? Last generation I never had this problem. The best any of the consoles could do was 480p, and the standard was 480i. That meant everything was tested and designed to run on that type of television. Now that console developers are forced to make games run on multiple resolutions I think I can see where the problems come from. Of the games I’ve played in SD on my 360, the ones developed by primarily PC studios always seem to do better. Orange Box, Oblivion/Fallout 3, and Gears of War are all made by studios that became famous on the PC first. Meaning from day one they had multiple resolutions in mind. That’s just correlation, probably not causation, but it’s a theory nonetheless!

In any case, this was more a rant than anything else, I won’t claim to have any real wisdom you can gain from reading this article, but if you must take something away from it.... Either developers start testing your games on regular TV’s, or everyone else get with the program and buy a shiny new HDTV. And most importantly, Squash, buy a second HDTV so I have something to use during my increasingly rare visits to your house. Get a job, hippie!

How the Mighty have Fallen

Back at the beginning of the year I had to make a nice 16 hour drive from Washington back down to Utah. In order to fill part of the time I listened to Giant Bomb’s huge game of the year podcast. In it, they discussed a dozen or so games they loved, and then quickly whittled their list down to GTA4 and MGS4. Oddly, it still took them almost 2 hours to decide on which one deserved game of the year, and odder still they both came out quite early in the year. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The reason I brought this up is because one of the podcasters, I think Brad Shoemaker, briefly defended Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. I remember hearing nothing spectacular about it when it came out, and since I was out of the country for the majority of the ridiculous holiday season rush last year, I hadn’t considered playing it. Well the podcast convinced me to add it to my ever growing list of games to play. Finally, 9 months later I’m giving it a whirl and it is actually quite good. A quick look at MetaCritic shows I’m not the only one who thought so.

This got me thinking, why have Rare games done so poorly since Microsoft purchased them? Looking over their list of games since the purchase makes me think it isn’t deserved. I never played anything they released on the original Xbox, but their 360 lineup seems fairly solid, barring Perfect Dark Zero, which was just absolutely terrible. I found Kameo, Viva Pinata and Nuts and Bolts to be at the very least above average and at times truly spectacular. All three had rich colorful environments, something I hear gamers asking for all the time these days in between purchasing every brown and gray shooter released. More importantly they all had solid gameplay mechanics that were above all, fun. Yet, none of them sold all that well. In fact, I’m fairly certain the brown and gray Perfect Dark Zero sold the best. Ironically, it is also the only one of their 360 games I actually own. :(

So what gives? Why isn’t anyone buying their games? Is the stereotype of 360 owners being interested in nothing but shooters actually true? Probably to some extent, but I think a large part of it is bad marketing. I mean, c’mon, Microsoft’s ads lately have been pretty horrendous. What I really mean though is it seems like Microsoft has been trying to use Rare as their gateway to smaller children. Right now the Wii and DS dominate the child gaming market and Microsoft wants in on it. The problem is they are marketing games like Viva Pinata and Banjo-Kazooie as childrens games, but then are making the games too complex for children to be interested in. I only played the demo of Viva Pinata and by the end started to feel overwhelmed by the amount of things I had to keep track of. Nuts and Bolts on the other hand isn’t overly complicated, but does require you to invent some pretty fine tuned vehicles, which may leave some of the younger children confused. Both these games offer rewarding and thoughtful gameplay that adults can enjoy, but because they are marketed toward children they are overlooked.

I have a feeling Rare and Microsoft have different ideas about what they want the studio to be, which is causing a bit of a problem in the way their games are handled. Hopefully Project Natal provides another outlet for the 360 to win over more of the younger market, freeing up Rare to do whatever it is they want. Though from the sounds of it, Rare is already jumping on making games with Natal and will continue their kid oriented games. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong and Rare is doing exactly what Rare wants. At the very least, it’s nice to know they are still capable of putting out a quality title, even if no one is buying them.

Kratos' Inferno

Back near the end of last year the highly anticipated new Prince of Persia came out. It received very divided reviews, some calling it excellent and others calling it crap. Stephen Totilo instead wrote about some of the stark similarities between Prince of Persia and Shadow of the Colossus. I remember wondering how copyright laws for similar media is handled, but just shrugged it off because I thought the games were different enough. I'm guessing Team ICO and Sony did too because no one ever got sued over it.

Fast forward to a couple months ago and you'll find people making these same accusations about EA's new game Dante's Inferno. The only difference this time is the two games, the other being God of War, look incredibly similar. I'd link a video, but I'm still at Squash's house and his internet is far too painfully slow to sift through a few streaming videos for a good example. Anyway, I didn't think much of it until I got to demo Dante's Inferno at PAX. Now I think I can safely be astonished that this game has been allowed to get so far along into development.

After playing for a few minutes it was clear that the art style, while set in hell as opposed to ancient Greece still felt quite remiscent of God of War's fairly distinct style. The enemy design also looked a lot like stuff we've all fought and killed throughout the various temples in our ancient escapades. Clearly, whoever designed that fat snake looking thing has seen the Medusa type creatures rampant in Sony's game, especially the third sister in GoW2. Not to mention the main characters animation, he wields a scythe, but he swings it around leaving a nice blur of whatever and the camera slows down just as he finishes off a powerful combo to add that awesome effect for emphasis. Something we all fell in love four years ago, once again in God of War.

The combat in Dante's Inferno also uses the same QTE's and even the same little glowy ball things that the player must interact with in order to get the needed height to fight the giant monstrosities so typical of the God of War series.

In the games defense, I have no idea what the story will be. I can't imagine it could be very similar to God of War at all seeing as how it's named after a famous book about hell, while God of War is loosely based on Greek mythology. However, after watching a few trailers and playing the demo, I question how much of the source material from The Divine Comedy they used at all. It's been several years since I read Dante's Inferno, but I don't remember anyone running through with a scythe pulling off crazy Kratos-esque action in the poem I read. Still, I doubt the story will be very similar.

As I said earlier, I was left wondering with Prince of Persia where the line for copyright infringement is drawn, but shrugged it off because they were so different. Now we have one game that is very obviously ripping off another game, yet Sony still doesn't seem to care. Is this all legal or what? I'm sure both companies have a huge team of lawyers, and we hear all the time about industry giants suing the crap out of each other. I wonder if Sony is perhaps holding out to demand a share of the profits once the game is released, or they simply don't think it's worth the trouble, or maybe through some series of loopholes all this replication is actually legal? I wouldn't be surprised is there aren't any copyright laws to protect specific gameplay elements, but it is shocking to see just how similar the two are. I'm curious to see what ends up happening, if anything, when Dante's Inferno is released in the coming months. And if any of you know anything about copyright law, leave a comment.

PAX was awesome!

I finally have access to a computer after the last week at my friends house near Seattle. As you probably gleaned from the title, I was there checking out PAX for the weekend and am now a couple hours north of Seattle at Squash's house for the rest of the week. His internet connection totally blows, but it should suffice for blogging. I think a 56K would probably suffice for blogging....

So PAX was pretty kickass. I'd have to say it was better than TGS '08 in just about every possible way. There were way more games to play, the lines were far shorter, there were tons of talks, live podcasts and best of all, it was all in english! Over the course of the weekend I was able to demo around twenty games myself and watch others demo another twenty. If I was patient enough I could have played all forty, but after watching others play for five or ten minutes I often didn't see the point in playing the demo myself.

The best part of PAX however had to be the atmosphere. Everyone was very nice and incredibly knowledgeable about all things video games. Several of my favorite journalist and podcasters were there and equally friendly. Waiting in lines was hardly a bother because the guys behind or in front of me were always willing to chat about anything and everything they had seen.

If you have the means I highly recommend going. Garnett Lee mentioned during his live recording of 1upYours (which isn't up yet) that PAX is what all conventions should strive to be. After checking out TGS last year, I'd have to say I wholeheartedly agree. By only allowing the press to these events they are excluding the very people they are actually having the convention for.

Anyway, that's probably enough gushing about PAX for now. If I have some time in the next few days I'll try to write up some impressions on some of the more memorable games. Slevin was there with me so maybe I'll get him to write something up, don't hold your breath though.

Summer Slump

So I’ve been in a bit of a summer slump. I’m not entirely sure why, but for the first time in awhile games ceased to engage me. I generally find the summer drought to be a wonderful time to catch up on my giant and ever growing backlog. For whatever reason, every time I perused my list this summer, I found nothing I really wanted to play. Just about every game on the list is a game of at least some note; otherwise I wouldn’t have put it on the list. I just didn’t feel like playing games. There are probably several reasons for this, but I think a large part of it was a general disinterest in most of the games I did play this summer.

The slump seemed to start after I finished Chronicles of Riddick, which is when I started Fallout 3. Fallout 3 is, as far as I can tell, a vast improvement over almost every gameplay mechanic I had a problem with in Oblivion. The leveling system is straight forward and doesn’t require micromanagement, the combat system is much less awkward, and the VATS is a wonderful way of blending real time combat with turn based strategy. With generally hilarious results I might add. Still, it has utterly failed to captivate me for a few reasons I’ll get into once I actually put a few more sessions into playing it.

After that I started playing Majora’s Mask with the Vintage Game Club. This game resulted in a whole hell of a lot more discussion than Alpha Centauri ever did, but it seemed that everyone grew to loathe the title more and more until we were left with around six people that actually finished the game. I came to realize why it is the black sheep of the franchise. Not because of the time limit, it really is a non-issue once you learn how to slow time down less than an hour into the game. It’s because most of the game feels like a rushed and uninspired mess. There is a general lack of polish that often lead to bad game design and, of course, user frustration. That might be a little harsh, but considering the high standards that Zelda and the other Nintendo franchises are always held too, it’s easy to condemn a game that is merely average, especially when it so shortly followed Ocarina of Time.

Moving right along, I played inFAMOUS. The game was fun, but the entire time I just kept thinking I’d rather be playing Crackdown. I love the “sand box with awesome powers to exploit” style games, but inFAMOUS ended up feeling more like a glorified shooter without enough entertaining abilities. Don’t get me wrong, there were tons of abilities to use, but there were only about three or four you actually needed for almost all situations.

Don’t even get me started again on the Gears of War 2: Road to Ruin DLC. On the plus side, it seems like most of the online multiplayer has finally been ironed out. Now I’ve found myself getting owned from lack of experience rather than lack of latency, which is very refreshing.

I also played House of the Dead: Overkill for a couple hours, but that was almost a non-entity considering how fast I plowed through the main story and how much faster I lost interest.

The reason I think my slump in gaming and subsequent slump in blogging was caused by a bunch of games I didn’t really like is because of the last two games I played. ‘Splosion Man and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Both of these games are quite spectacular and helped to reinvigorate my interest in playing. ‘Splosion Man is a charming little sidescroller reminiscent of N+. There is only one button, which causes you to explode. It’s basically jump, but you can do it up to three times. This hardly prevents the game from becoming brutally complex and difficult though it ramps up at a slow enough pace to not be a major turnoff. The game really shines in co-op, the possibilities increase tenfold by adding what is essentially a second set of explosions to the mix. With proper timing you and your partner can reach heights far higher than you ever could alone. ‘Splosion Man also sports a style very reminiscent of that wacky ‘90s cartoon Freakazoid, which naturally is hilarious.

Red Faction: Guerilla is the other game I played and is a perfect example of the “sand box with awesome powers” type game that inFAMOUS failed to be for me. As a player you don’t even have super powers, unless you count being able to tear down skyscrapers with a sledgehammer, but everything they allow you to do is hilarious and most importantly fun. The game is also absolutely gorgeous. I often found myself just looking up to see the constant motion of the Martian sky. I have no idea how open world games keep getting bigger and prettier with every new one I play, but I’m all for it.

Anyway, that pretty much sums up the last couple months of my gaming exploits. I suppose it doesn’t look like month of a slump considering I mentioned seven games, but I spent a fraction of what I usually do and as you are well aware, wrote a fraction. I hope to end the blogging slump by writing about whatever cool shit I do at PAX next weekend, but since I no longer have a laptop this might prove to be more difficult. At the very least, I am now very much looking forward to trying some new games, something I haven’t felt since the end of June.

It came from the FETID WATERS!

Maybe I didn’t give House of the Dead: Overkill a fair shot, but light gun rail shooters, or whatever they are called (first person rail shooters according to Wikipedia) haven’t seemed to offer anything new since I first played Area 51 in some bowling alley when I was 9. After playing through the main storyline, a feat that only took two hours, I think I am fairly safe in my assumption. I only even considered Overkill after hearing a few of the bloggers I like raving about it earlier this year. Now that I think about it however, all the praise I do remember hearing was not about the gameplay so much as the over the top characters and purposely clichéd scenarios.

This brings up an interesting point. When can a games’ presentation and style be enough to keep players interested? That is essentially what successful action films like Transformers 2 do. Anytime you hear someone say, “Well, I didn’t watch it for the story” you can rest assured that they watched it for something else (hopefully the mindless action or visual effects and not Megan Fox in slow motion). The same applies to games that people don’t play for the story, but are there any games people play just for the story? Off the top of my head I can think of several games I grew tired of near the end, but finished for the story, but only one that I grew tired of fairly early on and trudged on solely for the story.

That game is Yakuza, one of the last few remaining decent franchises of the once great Sega. I played through it last Thanksgiving after it gathered a bit of a cult following in the U.S. and almost immediately grew tired of its combat. The game has a decent sized city to explore among other things, but as far as gameplay was concerned, you were either running errands from place to place or brawling. Sadly, the combat wasn’t nearly as deep as a game this focused on it needs to be. Still, even with my early disinterest with the combat Yakuza’s intricate gangster family storyline had me intrigued enough to continue mashing Square, Square, Triangle for another six hours…. I’m kind of a sucker for gangster movies, and I’d never really seen a compelling one about the Yakuza. Who would have thought I’d find it in a video game? Take that Ebert!

Anyway, I’m guessing the reason I could only come up with one game on a whim is because this doesn’t happen that often and honestly, it really shouldn’t. First off, games generally have terrible stories. More importantly however, they tend to have at least ten hours of play in them while only telling a few hours of story. Games have to captivate with interesting play mechanics first, otherwise you might as well just go consume some other form of storytelling.

I wonder how long the critics who liked Overkill actually played it? I can totally see what they were raving about, Brainy Gamer sums it up perfectly. Yet after two hours, I had seen and played enough. It was a fun two hours, especially the parts I played with a friend, but the ridiculous humor and style wasn’t enough to hold me for long. In defense of the critiques I’m referring to, none were official reviews of the game as much as comments in passing about what they liked about it. If forced to talk about lasting power I imagine everyone would say something a little different. Or maybe I’m just way off base here and people still like first person rail shooters, while the excellent parody of over the top horror movies of yesteryear was just icing on the cake.

Either way, I kind of want to add, “Motherfuck” to my collection of commonly used swear words now.