Adam @ work

Bye bye blogspot.

2011-10-25T15:50:00.004-04:00

Hey everyone,

This space has been where I've seriously written internet things ever since I wrote internet things seriously. At one point it started out as a high school diary and evolved into me writing more professionally, or at least critically, about things people might care a bit more about reading! Unfortunately, now I've been through design school and have learned a thing or two, and really enjoy developing in Wordpress, as it gives me a lot more control.

And on that note it's time to let this little place go. I really did enjoy it, and it's been a great place to write and think and talk. I'll try to keep it around, along with all the fond memories.

My new blog area is off my main website. It's got a temporary visual design, which will change, but you'll be able to read to your heart's content. Check it out at

www.adamtuck.ca/blog

I know there are some people who even through to today, kept reading the sporadic posts I did create. Thanks so much for doing that, it means a lot... and, it's not as though I'm stopping. I hope you check out my new space and continue enjoying my haphazard writing. And thanks for reading it over the years. Take care,

- Adam <3

P.S. If you didn't catch the throwback signature... ...that's probably for the best. =D

P.P.S. I'm bringing all the content (since I started writing about games) over to the new site and it's all still archived there and searchable. So, it should all still be around.

Review: Child of Eden

2011-06-17T23:57:00.004-04:00

Child of Eden - Review
(for Xbox 360/Kinect)

Let me level with you right off the bat, you probably won't buy this game. If you do, it won't be for months, or longer, until you find a copy that isn't as expensive as this title is. The only reason you would go out and buy it immediately is if you were one of the ten million or so who picked up a Kinect when it came out.

The game contains five-sixish levels, each of which plays in about 10 minutes, and you'll have to replay each a couple times to unlock them all. You'll "finish" the game in 90 minutes. It's short enough to be considered a downloadable game, but it sells for about $50 dollars.

So I don't expect you to buy it, especially if you don't have a kinect (which are something like $150 on their own). You can play it with a controller, and it's still fun, but not quite the same.

That said, I really, really hope you surprise me and buy it anyway. This game is incredible as a shooter, as an impressive tech demonstration and most importantly, as an art piece. In the "are video games art?" discussion, there are arguments for both sides, but games like Flower and Child of Eden are the idea proof for the "yes" side of that debate. They combine audio and visuals and interactivity to evoke emotion more effectively than any other artistic medium, when used properly. This is just because they have more visual, auditory, and sensory stimuli available to them to make you feel feelings, and Child of Eden somehow manages to tickle all of them at the same time.

It's visually stunning. And also, often, it's nonsense. You'll shoot virus barnacles off this space whale with your butterfly shooting gun. You'll get purple muck off of internet light squids. You'll fight malicious infected flying flowers and have to return them to their normal, not-flying-around-and-shooting-people state. Sometimes it can be quite a bit too much sensory overload, but when each "archive" (level) comes to a head, it draws itself together in the most moving way I've seen in a long time. The best example is that space whale, part of a level called "Evolution", where you see him transform from a single cell organism into (eventually) a fantastic hyperreal creature we've never seen before. Evolution.

I talked a lot about how the game looks and feels, but the game also plays very well. It's snappy, and controlling the game with kinect is actually much more fluid. Your shots are more accurate, it's more responsive, and switching weapons feels natural. Plus it's just cool to chase down that menacing virus satellite with your hand and sweep shots over it before it shoots you down.

But it feels amazing. The music is very positive, the levels are each very symbolic and gorgeous in their own way. The developers have said they were trying to create the "happiest" game that's ever been made. They did it.

If none of what I've talked about really interests you, take a pass on Eden. But if you're willing to give it a shot and see if it can really move you in the way I've been describing, I challenge you to go get it and see what an artistic video game can do to you. In the end like most art it's indescribable. You just have to experience it.

P.S. The music is by a band called the Genki Rockets. They're J-poppy, electric, and are all about positive sounds and feelings. If any of their music (try starline or breeze) appeals to you, all the better, but if not then Child of Eden will be a tough sell... they did the entire soundtrack.

Review: Black Ops

2010-11-11T16:38:00.004-05:00

Call of Duty: Black Ops - Review
(for PC)

People kind of hate on Treyarch's CoD games. Die-hard Infinity Ward fans of the series are worst for it, obviously, but almost everyone who's played both brands of game will agree the modern warfare series is just a lot better. There are a lot of reasons thrown around for why, most of which relate to specific multiplayer game mechanics, but on the whole, like other Treyarch games, Black Ops lacks polish.

Actually, before I say things that are bad about the game, let me say this in bold: Treyarch makes great Call of Duty games. They're really fantastic and the only reason they're so frowned upon is because they're so heavily compaired to modern warfare. I think Treyarch did a really good job on Black Ops. That said, here's why I didn't like it as much.

Call of Duty games are hyperreal. They're games about war. I like playing them around and on rememberance day because they're unfiltered visions of what war is like, and what people really go through and see and experience. Modern Warfare 2 took it to another level, especially with scenes like the infamous "No Russian" which puts you in the weighted boots of a terrorist mowing down unarmed, terrified civillians in Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. There's something incredibly sobering about seeing this sort of abomonation from a first-person view, as opposed to seeing aftermath photographs of ambulances or shattered glass on the ground.

Alternatively, you'll know what it's like to become close to the members of your squad then have your helicopter go down, and have several hundred enemy infantry advancing on your position, shooting all your friends one by one as they try to defend your position. No matter how hard you fight, you'll feel utterly hopeless.

I know seeing this kind of experience is definitely not for everyone but for a desensitized generation X'er or Y'er or whatever the hell we're called, it's really something else. I hate having to play sequences like that but I'm very glad that I get to because it really gives me an idea of the kinds of horror that troops have to go through when they're at war.

So why can't Treyarch games do this so well? Black Ops' first failing is that it's not hyperreal. It's still grounded in very real events, but the main character is the victim of a brainwashing scheme which controls him and forces him to take action, kill certain people... there are some arguments that one could make involving post traumatic stress, and hallucinating, but the problem is that it's protrayed in a much more over-the-top video game-y way, it loses that grounding in reality that it had. Scenes just don't hit as hard. It's really a shame, it feels like Treyarch robs themselves of such big moments for no good reason besides a different style of storytelling.

They rob themselves of some excitement in multiplayer as well when compared to Modern Warfare 2. It's a sort of isolated issue, but I think it's really important. In the multiplayer progression, you always used to unlock new equipment and weapons and that sort of thing, and you did so in a very structured way. At each level you received specific rewards. In Black Ops, you get to choose your rewards. The problem is when after the first dozen or two dozen levels, you've acquired pretty much everything you would ever want to posess. This gives you absolutely jack-all to look forward to as a bigger reward in the later levels, besides the obvious online reputation and the eventual prestige. It's way less exciting.

It's just a lot of little things that combine to create an overall slightly less exciting experience (I won't mention that the games, especially the PC version of the game, are considerably buggy). It's only slightly unfortunate that everyone hates on it so much for such minute differences... again, only slightly unfortunate, as they're still making several buttloads of money. So they're being justly rewarded for their work. Just fine with me!

You'll notice in that review I didn't talk about Nazi Zombies at all... I held off on purpose because I just talk about zombies so damn much there's not much point in asking me. But if you're interested: yes, zombies are still completely badass, they've upped the gameplay in really fun ways, and given you a lot of things to try out. They even included a dual-joystick classic style zombie shooter. So much fun.

Spook-A-Thon, Episode 2: Dead Rising (also 2)

2010-10-26T14:19:00.001-04:00

Dead Rising 2 - Review
(for Playstation 3)
Co-reviewed by Sam Jeffery

Meet our Dead Rising 2 hero, Rogue Justice.

Rogue Justice is a man of the people. He goes out of his way to help his fellow man, but won't hesitate to do what's necessary if things go awry (which means leaving your sorry ass behind if you can't keep up). He goes all in on every hand of strip poker he plays. (In fact, he went all in on your mother last night.) He smirks when he's satisfied. He smirks when he's dissatisfied. There's generally a lot of smirking when Rogue Justice is around. He gets crazy with duct tape. He's not afraid to ride a tricycle with pink streamers in public. He tends to eat by smushing food back and forth across his face until it disappears.

But most importantly, Rogue Justice doesn't take your shit.

And all this might sound too silly, but you know what? The Dead Rising games are silly. They're games about a mass zombie outbreak. They're very exaggerated works of fiction. They're arcade-style, in your face, and they might feel broken but everyone in the world of the game plays by the same rules. If a psycho with a pair of flamethrowers is decimating you any time you fight him and you beat him by waiting for him to get stuck behind a garbage can and shooting him there, then it'll feel glitchy. But it's not to say that you can't find other tools or combo weapons in the game world to take him on with that will end up making the job a piece of cake. Despite having such a realized story, Dead Rising games aren't really about the story, they're about you struggling for your life in a zombie-filled sandbox with other normal people, and some other not-so-normal people too. It doesn't concern itself with being serious or realistic. It's a game about damn zombies and it makes sure to make it as over-the-top and surreal as it can to keep it fun, while still staying serious in the context of its characters to keep it grounded and make you care.

So it might be jarring to be stabbed through the gut 4 times with a machete then blown back with a shotgun blast to the head, survive, then down an entire liter of orange juice and be completely healed. Sure. But it's HILARIOUS.

The game still relies on a tight three-day schedule, with important events you have to be at on time for, or risk losing the game's story. This never proves to be such a challenge, as you're given plenty of advance warning at times like this. However, you also have plenty of side-missions that you can check out, which involve the aforementioned psychos to fight, survivors to rescue, and weapons/shortcuts to open up. None of these are mandatory, and the game starts out by killing off a whole host of supporting characters, immediately letting you know that it's okay to let these missions go. You're only one man, and you can't rescue everybody. You'll have to make sacrifices in order to keep you and your own safe, and that's what any person would do in that situation. Despite all the corniness and surreal stuff, this also helps keep the game somewhat grounded in logic and reason.

A lot of things have been tightened up from the first game, including managing survivors (and the survivor's AI), allowing you more chances to save, and keep your levels, experience and money if you ever want or need to start another playthrough. It feels like a much more satisfying blend of unforgiving/challenging mechanics and assistance during your stay in zombieville. I can't quite give it my highest score, though, because there are too many instances where we just got frustrated with some enemy, or the sightly wonky controls, or when we were getting clobbered by a psycho we hadn't figured out. Despite that, it's still a great new Dead Rising game.

Spook-A-Thon, Episode 1: Amnesia

2010-10-11T02:49:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Resident Evil
Resident Evil 4
F.E.A.R. 2
Call of Duty: World at War (Nazi Zombies)

It sure has been a while. It's been weird coming back to write a proper article or two... finding half-finished and a few fully finished articles about games long past (and when I say long past, I mean "last year"). But with my recent graduation and full-time work settling in for now, and with a lot of extra time not cluttered up with homework or school projects, I spent many evenings doing... many a random thing. But with Halloween approaching (my favourite holiday of the year), I figured I should at least keep my evenings somewhat thematic and give myself something to work on. I compiled a list that contained as many scary, fear, or freaky games as I could care to dwell on, and decided to play through as many as I could within the month of October. I'll talk in detail about the ones that make me the most frightened, or that I like the best for other reasons.

The first most exciting game to come to my attention by a very long shot was Amnesia: the Dark Descent. Initially I heard about this game from ben crosshaw, and was told by another game-playing friend that it was a lot like Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which is easily the best scary title I've ever played. Since it had pretty big shoes to fill, I decided to see if it came close to matching the high standards I have for it (despite it being made by a very low-grade indie developer).

It not only met my standards, it demolished my standards.

First of all, the only things this game shares with Eternal Darkness are the Lovecraftian feel of the horror, and the concept of a sanity meter, which affects how you perceive what's going on in the game; besides that, too much sanity loss will eventually result in losing.

Secondly, this game is scary. Very scary. Far, far scarier than Eternal Darkness.

The opening titles of the game contain a few direct pleads from the developers, asking you to not worry about things like game saves (when you stop playing it saves your exact position and status), or even worrying about completing the game at all. Just allow yourself to become immersed in the world. Turn off the lights, put on your headphones and put up the sound. Make sure your brightness is properly adjusted (as with many horror games). Ready? Okay, good, we promise we'll scare the piss out of you.

And do they ever. The game is scary because it understands less is more. It understands that showing you less of the monsters you're up against makes you much more afraid of them. It understands that people are the most scared of what they don't understand, and that the monsters of their imagination are far more horrifying than any abomination a creature developer could ever slap onto your screen. So, when you see a monster, it'll be shuffling into a corridor at the other end of a long hallway. It'll be roaring at the end of a dark room. It'll be on the other side of padlocked prison bars. You won't be able to see it very well. In fact, if you do look at it, that increases the chance that it'll notice you.

The main character is a personification of your five-year-old self. If you're stuck in the dark, you get more and more scared until you step into some light or turn on your lamp. If you see a monster, you won't fight it. You will only run and run and run until several million miles separate you and the creature. If you close your eyes and you can't see the monster, it isn't there... usually. The game forces you to follow all these rules, and it works to great effect. After my first monster encounter, I spent a full ten minutes toward the beginning of the game practicing running into and hiding within a closet, making sure I could hit a good enough time such that I could disappear should a monster suddenly drop into the room.

And don't get me wrong. Even though you can't fight them, monsters will suddenly appear often enough for you to be terrified, and run. Monsters will corner you in a completely empty, brightly lit room, and you'll have to find some way to escape. Without looking at it. Monsters will threaten to break down the door and you'll have about 10 seconds to find the best hiding place you can in a room filled only with a pile of corpses and two knee-high boxes.

The sheer panic that comes from having to avoid monsters that you cannot possibly defeat is something that can't be matched by any game. Dead Space, Doom, F.E.A.R., resident evil, ...hell, even Eternal Darkness provide you with an arsenal of guns to face whatever scariness is coming at you. When you're just as terrified and helpless as you most likely would be if you were in that situation, and you have to make do with what you have, a genuine panic takes hold; a baser survival instinct that absolutely forces you to react quickly, or come face to face with an abject horror that the game will never really show you... it'll just make you show yourself what you're the most afraid of.

While the mechanics, physics, voice acting, and story themselves aren't award-winningly produced, the sound design is brilliant and the atmosphere is unmatched by any A-grade title I've ever laid eyes on. If you're looking to play a game that will make you very scared, don't miss Amnesia. It's a $20 download on Steam, and as a bonus, you'll support a very competent indie developer. And don't be warded off by the fact that it's a first-person game... it's not a shooter, as there isn't any shooting involved. It's just a first-person puzzle based ...terror machine.

a bad case of the shivers

2010-05-08T10:31:00.006-04:00

Penumbra (Overture) - Review
(for PC/Mac)

Indie games are little gems that can lack a sense of polish that most mainstream games will get, but they're an embodiment of all the little ideas that the big developers don't always have. We're damn lucky that it's 2010 and any programmer with a little ambition and a good team can make some really fun games, because then we get to play gems like Penumbra, a first-person stealth horror game.

As a horror game, you need a few things working in your favor in order to scare players. You need atmosphere, good pacing, and the right feel to how the player controls the experience. The latter of these elements is one of the most important in Penumbra. You're generally pretty helpless; as you're stalked by god-knows-what in the darkness just beyond you, you can't really fight them (despite having a melee weapon or two at your disposal). You're taught how to be quiet, how to hide, and how to run. You're told if you don't do these things, you'll die. Whether or not this is true, I never found out, but the game made me desperately want to never find out. There were more than several close calls in my playthrough.

The clear-cut nature of the sneaking is so well defined in this first chapter: if you sneak properly, you'll be just fine. But that's where the atmosphere part comes in. The events that lead up to seeing and hearing from creatures have you on the edge of your seat. It doesn't take much beyond clever visuals, sound design, and making sure you see the right things at the right times. There will be moments when you have to lug a big box from one end of a room to another, and there are monsters nearby. And you have to do it without being seen. It's not overly difficult but the "I have to do WHAT?!" feeling you get in the moment is excellent.

This game comes in more than one part, and I'm told the expansion story, Black Plague, has even more scary moments in it. I am buying the hell out of this. I'd recommend buying it through Steam - you can get the whole set of games for $20... a nice amount of money to give to an indie developer - or if you want to play this on linux or mac, or get it from another provider or right from the devs, then, well, they've got you covered (Penumbra site).

If you read this soon enough, though, get the "humble indie bundle" hosted by wolfire games (bundle site). Not only do you get Panumbra, but four other great indie games. And, you get to name your price (meaning you could pay 5 or 10 bucks for the whole set), and all the money raised goes directly to the developers or to charities - your choice. As of this writing there's three days left in the deal. DO IT!

Was this a blatant plug? Yes! Is it because I'm technically also an indie game developer? Yes! Support independent devs! But only if they're awesome! Which is pretty much all of the time!

play it again

2010-05-03T19:15:00.000-04:00

No More Heroes 2 - Review
(for the Wii)

Sequels are tricky. The only time I really enjoy or appreciate a sequel is when it does things significantly differently than its predecessors, or it makes enough improvements to the original and I don't mind playing the original again. This game would easily fall into the latter category as game developer Suda51 definitely did not make major changes to the game's feel or style. That's fine as far as I'm concerned, as long as they don't majorly mess things up.

If you've never played No More Heroes: it's a parody of action games in general. Despite this, it's very fun to play. You star as a ranked assassin who's challenged to climb through the ranks of an organization of assassins, trying to reach the coveted #1 spot. In the new game, they try to put a murder revenge twist on it. So how does NMH2 do in terms of putting out a worth-playing sequel?

Things it Does Well
The driving in between missions is removed. It lets you get where you want to go quicker, and I much prefer it this way. There's no more required money limit for missions, so you can just blast through and fight dudes if you want, or you can do the sidequests to level up your character's clothes, weapons, etc... but that's all optional (not that you'd want to miss out on getting the awesome new swords anyway). Speaking of new shit, there are many new beam swords available to buy with all your new money, as well as clothing and training sessions from the local gym (I pretty much never did this and beat the game easily, though).

Things it does Badly
Some 8-bit minigames. They're mostly fun and hard to figure out in that old school way but the gym ones are a problem - they cost a lot of money for each "attempt" and when they're not clearly explained it's a big waste and frustration, especially when you don't know what you're doing wrong or what you need to change to do it right. The story is still a non-event, as it dropped some of the absurdity of the first title that really kept me laughing.

So, in short...
The best part about No More Heroes 2 is that you don't have to play No More Heroes 1 in order to jump right in. In fact, I fully recommend it if you haven't played either game before. The sequel solves a lot of the annoying problems from the first game, and the style and story are similar enough that it doesn't really matter. For those who played the first game, you might not find much here you'll like, unless you don't mind mostly playing the first game again (and I sure didn't, so who's to argue).

Sorry for the infrequent updates! I graduated this month (yay) so I'm pretty busy with work and figuring my whole life out.

Also, I've been goaded into trying a new online social media jumble called Empire Avenue. I think this is awesome? It looks, from what I can tell, like a gigantic human stock market. I was told I have to verify my blog feed through some ass-backwards method, so here's a garbled mess of characters: EAVB_FSIXUSHPZF

And on that confusing note, bye for now!

origami

2010-03-04T22:42:00.009-05:00

Heavy Rain - Review
(for the Ps3)

Heavy Rain rocked my world back and forth and I knew exactly what kind of rating I was going to give it. What I wasn't entirely sure of was why I was so rocked in so many directions. In order to give the rocked-ness a bit more clarity, I'll start off with a short clip of writing that I jotted down while I was playing the game in one of my most heavy moments.

I just finished a segment of the game where I was faced with a challenge, seemingly impossible, and there was a door leading out that said "coward". I would obviously lose if I took the exit. After making it all the way here, there was no way I could duck out. But, sure enough, I failed the challenge, and my character got so beaten and devastated that he could barely stand, let alone keep trying. He himself went and took the coward door, and failed the test.

This game is divided by chapter, but you can't do your playthrough again. There's no reloading the last level and giving it another shot. If you fail, or fall, or get hurt too much, you don't just get to go back and try again. You continue through the story with the weight of that failure on your shoulders.

I have never been so devastated by a game as I was that first time I full-on saw defeat in Heavy Rain. I didn't even know what the actual consequences of not completing that challenge would be, but before even seeing any of them, I felt terrible. Terrible that I couldn't ever go back and fix my mistakes, that they were there for good, one way or another, and I'd just have to hope the situation wasn't beyond repair and that I'd be able to salvage my poor character's story.

The fact that the game manages to evoke feelings like this means, to me, that it's definitely doing its job right. That concept of "the weight of your mistakes" carries very strongly through the whole game. As it turns out, you can not only lose challenges or plot threads, but you can even get major characters killed at many points if you slip up at the wrong time. And if you do that, the entire story shifts because of it.

Mechanically speaking the game is excellent. It is entirely based on quick time events and it does them very, very well. You always see button prompts appear exactly where your eyes are already focusing, they're directly in line with in-world content, and it makes responding to the events very seamless.

I hate using the term "immersion" so freely, but I've never been so immersed in a game before. It takes you on a dramatic, emotional ride and makes you feel directly responsible for how that ride ends, be it good or bad. This is my new favourite Playstation 3 exclusive, and is certainly a system-selling title.

On another note, hello! Glad to be writing again. It's been an awfully busy school term, but now that all that business is almost out of the way, more writing will certainly be showing up. No More Heroes 3 and Just Cause 2 may be next on the chopping block. Or, maybe not? Who knows!

the instructions say every button is "shoot guns"

2010-02-14T21:09:00.005-05:00

Bayonetta - Review
Co-Reviewed by Sam Jeffery
(for the Ps3)

I've been trying to collect quotes relating to Bayonetta and our general feelings on it as we made our playthrough of it. They seem to boil down to the general two sentiments:

"YEAAAAH I JUST HAD A HAIR-DRAGON EAT THAT BITCH"
vs.
"Why it checking my save data so that I can check my save data so I can save my game data?"

I feel like those two quotes accurately epitomize Bayonetta's general feel, or the two sides to it. Staggering technical issues drag down an otherwise overwhelmingly satisfying performance. On that end of things, the look and feel really are quite spectacular. The sound design is excellent and the visuals are usually quite breathtaking. Bayonetta seems as graceful as a butterfly, flitting about the screen ripping her enemies into red paste with the utmost fluidity. The narrative, on the other hand, is rather lacking. I say "lacking" as I tried my utmost and I couldn't even begin to catch what was going on (and I got on board and caught up with the metal gear series with metal gear solid 4, so I'm definitely what I'd call open-minded when it comes to the narrative.

Part of the problem feels like the great abundance of cutscenes in the game. These cutscenes generally aren't used for story, they're used for action. Movies of epic fight scenes fill up at least an hour of gametime that you could be spending, oh, I don't know... fighting enemies yourself? The game seems like it's afraid that you'll cramp its incredible style, and while it's right, that doesn't exactly make for a fun game.

The technical flaws of the game also drag it way down. The game loads before each level, in the middle of levels, after each level, it loads the level loading screen, it has to load each save screen and load screen, it has to stop and load each *item* when you pick something up off the ground... and the load times are all very, very long. This makes for a really jarring game experience, while you spend so much time sitting around waiting. Some load screens let you move Bayonetta around and experiment with her combos, which is actually a very clever way to make loading levels tolerable.

There are other good ideas that really almost sell this game. Almost. The combo system isn't too crazy to figure out, and any layman can experiment with the combos or mash on the loading screens and work out her attacks to do well. Its strengths are definitely in its combat and how it doesn't take itself seriously. After beating one spherical boss, Bayonetta sprouted giant hands out of her hair to finish it off that grabbed it, served it, and set it, and went to spike it. The hands missed the spike, after which they just got upset and beat the ball to a pulp. It's the tongue-in-cheek nature that makes you laugh at the absurdity of it all, and when it bothers to take that route, it's absolutely hilarious fun.

But the techincal glitches and some of the terrible design decisions just knock it down. Loading times are terrible, the quicktime events are unforgivingly unpredictable and fleeting, leading to deaths that quickly knock your rating way down, there's no story, framerate drops are very noticeable and frequent (which is aggravating in a combo-based fighting game), it made me feel rather motion-sick after a while (some spinning levels really threw me for a loop, although that may not be a bad thing), the item and upgrade systems are difficult to figure out (with no inclination to try as there's a giant loading time between each screen of the item menu)... ...really knock the experience down a couple notches.

That said, the game is damn fun. It makes me cry from its difficulty, the skip cutscene button exists and is quite usable once you give up and want to get to the action, and the characters are enjoyable. If you played/liked devil may cry, you will like this.

A World of Hurt - Part 2

2010-01-25T20:03:00.007-05:00

Currently Playing

World of Warcraft

I've spent another hour with the game tonight and one thing that keeps standing out at me are the ... interesting people you meet in such an anonymous online environment like this one. WoW wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't for the people. Too bad most of those people are utterly retarded.

Some of today's highlights:

Just had a level 21 paladin follow me around for about 20 minutes while I was leveling on various quests. He kept screaming at me to kill him so we could get an achievement.
I was battling outside of an abandoned mine when a party showed up, yelled "charge", and all ran through mowing down all the gremlins in my way. I "scouted" the mine by following them and finished my quest.
I was hit on by a level 7 rogue as I was dancing on the bar at the local pub. She thought I was female.
Another high-level character followed me around making the ground erupt in fire every 30 seconds or so. It didn't hurt me but it murdered all surrounding creatures. This was the first time such "kill-stealing" actually hampered my progress, but I just had fun essentially making the ground explode wherever I wanted.

I suppose I'm not quite the right skill level for this just yet. People I've encountered in WoW interested in social interaction are either far too immature or far too hardcore for my taste. Either they spam or babble like mad, or their clan have entrance requirements that can only be achieved by almost maxing out a character, for starters.

Though I've only really dipped my toes in here so that's not too fair. Can't wait for part 3.

A World of Hurt - Part 1

2010-01-24T21:03:00.007-05:00

Currently Playing

World of Warcraft
Metal Gear Solid 4
Audiosurf

My first regular post in a while that's not a review is going to bring me to a place I've never really properly gone before, and that's into world of warcraft.

Some quick backstory into that: I promised myself I'd never get into/pay for an MMO. The risk of addiction plus a monthy subscription plus a technically endless game equals disaster for many people... so I wanted to avoid it altogether.

However, Blizzard offers a free 10-day trial to battlenet members who aren't WoW subscribers. So, I decided to take about a week's worth of time and document my experiences into what many consider one of the most popular games ever released.

A short list of my initial experiences in the first couple hours is as follows.

The end-user license agreement requires you to scroll to the bottom before hitting "accept". I love developers that actually think doing this gets you to read through the agreement more.
Making a character. No, I don't want to be a cow.
Character creation was... interesting. Ended up being a human mage. I know, pretty boring.
Quests are a bit difficult to figure out... tutorials are straightforward enough, but knowing where to go and when is a bit boggling at first. Finally wrapped my head around navigating through quests and such.
Just slaughtered eight sick wolves with a bunch of level one characters ALSO out to slaughter eight sick wolves.
I keep aimlessly running around and not understanding what I'm doing, where my active quest is, etc. Would love to figure out this whole fast travel thing.
Ding!
Combat is EASY. ...with the right opponent. The right opponent = a creature at least 3 levels below you!
Found my first inn. Upon entering, I had several strangers cast spells on me to increase my attack power, boost my defence, and give me a mr. T mohawk for an hour.
It took me a good 20 minutes to figure out how to sell items to a merchant. That was just silly.
I have learned about "/dance" and have taken to dancing in this inn. An owl and a devil-looking creature and a giant cow showed up to keep me company. The cow is dancing too.
I've started a dance party in the inn.
This party that I've started is getting out of hand. That lady's minion seems to be doing inappropriate things to her. I'm going to leave for tonight.

At the end of the night I've reached level four, and I can't wait to reach level six and buy some decent spells (I only have one fireball attack spell and it's sort of boring. Right now the only strategy is "point at thing you want to kill and mash 1 until dead", and "if you point at a thing that isn't a wolf or a bunny, it will murder you".

I'm going to go more in-depth into this later, but this game is not exactly geared toward the layman. I couldn't find many helpful humans around to teach me much of anything, and the game's help system is confusing enough. This is all coming from a pretty learned computer game user. Once I figured out how to do things it was sensible enough, but accomplishing some tasks are not exactly what one would call intuitive.

Stay tuned...

three's a crowd

2010-01-18T20:42:00.004-05:00

Trine - Review
(for the PC)

I don't usually start off with a summary of whatever game I'm talking about, I tend to make the natural assumption that if you care to read about it you've already gone and checked out sites, or commercials, or the appropriate wikipedia entry to find out what you need to know. Or perhaps you've already played it, who knows. If you haven't played Trine, it's definitely worth a look for some reasons. Honestly by my own judgment, though, I think three stars is too generous and I'm already reconsidering putting it to two. In any case, you play the role of a wizard, warrior and a thief whose bodies have merged into one entity, and they're on a quest to discover what's going on and how to return to their normal selves.

The story takes off from there, but the important part is you play the role of all three characters and can switch between them at will. The wizard can build platforms and objects and move things around, the thief has a ranged attack, a grappling hook and is very quick, and the warrior is big and heavy with a sword and shield and tough armor. You generally swap them out to battle enemies and puzzle-solve your way through the world.

First I'll butter it up by reminding myself what a pretty game Trine is. It really is an attractive game, visually and stylistically. The voice acting is a bit corny but works for the fantasy setting, and the music is darn nice to boot. As for the settings themselves, you don't get much more detailed or attractive than Trine, a 2D platforming game. You'll come across lush environments and nothing but excellent special effects all the way through.

To boot, the puzzle solving aspect is nice. Having to switch between characters on the fly (ie, stack a platform as a wizard, switch to the thief in mid-jump across the empty chasm, then grapple onto the next platform, then switch to the warrior after that jump and slice down the enemies waiting on that other side)... well, this can get a bit hectic but is very neat and intuitive as far as the game itself goes. It makes 2D platforming feel very fresh and fun.

Where it all falls down is in the ambiguity. Most and many of the puzzles in Trine can be solved several different ways, but almost every way I came up with to solve a puzzle seemed to exploit the physics engine to its very limits. I felt like I wasn't solving the puzzle "right", it felt like I was cobbling together a solution out of random parts and that I was doing it all wrong. Oh, sure, I would get past it okay and I would continue on, but I would feel robbed of that feeling of "oh! I got it!", which proves to make the puzzles sort of dry and unsatisfying.

When much of the game is using the physics of the boxes or the grappling to manipulate the terrain or get past obstacles, and there's no one clear-set way to do it, it just comes down to seeing how you can jam boxes in different positions into spikes in the wall so you can sort of MAYBE jump on the corner to MAYBE jump high enough to reach the top. It doesn't feel like that's how it's supposed to be... but for what it's worth, that's how the puzzles in this game are solved.

Gameplay is key in any game, and a puzzle game that doesn't leave you feeling good after you solve a puzzle isn't worth all that much. It's just a sandbox filled with cubes that you haphazardly stack and place, and no amount of practice makes the physics any less wonky. Still, it's not downright frustrating and it is very finish-able, and the world is pretty and the combat is fun, and the puzzles don't hamper you too too much. So, certainly worth a play if you like platforming games with a fantasy twist.

you spin my head right round right round

2010-01-02T14:00:00.004-05:00

Braid - Review
(for the PC)

I'll go ahead and admit this off the top: I broke down about twenty minutes into Braid and was absolutely desperate to find a solution to a particularly annoying puzzle, and I went looking for a quick fix in a walkthrough. I got sidetracked while on the internet (as most people do), and instead of turning to one of my usual sources for help, I found my way onto the official site, and discovered they actually offered a walkthrough there (check it out). If you checked it out as the bracketed text did encourage you to, you'll have seen it was a cute little phony. Page one asks you to begin level one, then page two asks you to figure out the puzzles for yourself.

After reading that page filled with encouragement spilled straight from the heart of Braid's creator, telling me to persist and that I am fully capable of solving every problem in the game, I went back to have another look at the puzzle I was absolutely stumped with. And, well, I didn't figure it out. So instead of harping on it, I moved on, finished other parts of the game. In a completely out of order way. Eventually, I came back to the first level. Worked with it more, moved things around... and the solution to my first big problem dawned on me in a way it couldn't have before. I felt like the smartest damn guy on the face of the earth.

That's really the creative magic driving Braid. A fair few of the puzzles in that game that you'll encounter, will seem utterly impossible in every way. There's no way you could do these things with the given limitations. But, you can do them all, right away, if you know how. With that in mind, some puzzles you'll spend almost no time at all before solving them; you'll breeze right through and wonder how anyone could spend any more than two minutes on it. But no matter what, some challenges will bring you to think in ways that you don't usually think in. It's mental exercise, and unlike the brain ages or the big academies of the casual genre, this mental exercise is actually exceedingly fun to play.

There's no real punishment for getting things wrong - there's a time rewind button so in any instance, you can simply rewind to the beginning of a level and just start over; or rewind a few seconds. There's no limit on how often you do this, so you can perfect certain areas as much as you like. Or, you can try other areas. Braid isn't linear; it's very haphazard and you can play it however you like.

I keep speaking in second-person future tense like this because I believe you need to play this game as soon as you can. You can grab it for mac or PC, at the very least, or on Ps3 or XBLM if you're so inclined, for the equivalent of about 5 Canadian dollars on every one of those places. If it makes you feel better to think of it as a Mario game on some kind of time warp drugs, then go right ahead; that is not an inaccurate comparison. But it's such audio/visual candy and it's so intelligently put together from a puzzle standpoint that it's absolutely worth playing, even if for a little while.

So, welcome back to me after a month of hiatus there. It's been busy but I have many games I'd like to talk about, and will hopefully talk about very soon. Hit up that RSS to hear about what I'll be raving about next.

i wanna rock right now now now rock right now

2009-11-15T22:55:00.000-05:00

Brutal Legend - Review
(for the Playstation 3)

I put aside my playthrough of the darkness to pick up this game (among some other great ones), a decision I fully stand by. After so much hype and setup for this game I couldn't ignore it. One of my colleagues is quite in fact the biggest fan of Tim Schafer the world has ever seen, and kept reminding me of the coming of "rocktober". ...So here we are.

I'm going to start by talking about the most talked about part of Brutal Legend from a critical standpoint. Eventually (about 1/4 of the way through, ish) the game turns into a makeshift RTS. You have a base, you manage resources, command troops. The difference is that your character has wings and flies around the battlefield allowing you to do this. At any point you can jump down into any part of the map and start fighting, playing songs to beef up your troops, and that sort of thing. Your character is the most powerful one so you joining the fight at the right time and place is really critical to the game's outcome.

It is a simplified RTS but I'm not sure why it's being knocked on so hard by so many people. It takes a different, neat approach to RTS style gameplay and keeps things accessible and fun, while still in the context of the game. It's definitely doing a lot more creative thinking with that genre than Starcraft 2 ever will. That said, that mode of play is quite competitive and has online VS and all that business, though it's not something I got that far into. Not that it's poorly constructed, it just wasn't quite my cup of tea. It's still a well-built multiplayer scene.

Most of the game revolves around the story, and it's awesome. Well, it plays out like every other wet dream that Jack Black tends to spew out into popular culture from the depths of his consciousness: there is a lot of rock everywhere, and he's at the center of his hellacious world being relatively awesome. In this case he begins as a lowly roadie who gets sucked into some other metal universe where he gets a hold of a gigantic axe and magical guitar that casts spells and that sort of thing, of course. You explore the world, do quests, level up your character and vehicles, and other RPG type things, though we are told that this is not in any way an RPG. Hmm. It also feels like an open-world game as you have quests and sidequests to discover as you zoom around in your homemade metal vehicle... thing. Which also shoots fire like almost everything else in this world.

Ozzie Osbourne shows up as the game's upgrade merchant. Lenny "Killmaster" Kilmister is a shaman of sorts. These appearances are both amazing and incredibly flabbergasting at the same time.

Things that the game have going for it are really stellar voice acting, vivid characters, funny interactions and plot, fun combat, and the satisfying RTS sections. It falls over on its quite bad SFX design (in places) and the difference between the combat, open world driving, and RTS feels sort of clunky. There's bits and pieces of each that aren't as well hashed out as they could have been, most probably because the game is doing so many things at once it can't possibly be super good at all of them.

It still comes together in a real satisfying way, though, and is most definitely worth checking out if you're into beat-em-ups or fighters, because one way or another, Eddie is always chopping away at demons in every facet of the game with a disproportionately large axe, which is the way it ought to be. Four stars.

better a red face than a black heart

2009-11-13T20:52:00.000-05:00

The Darkness - Review
(for the Playstation 3)

I talk a lot about a game's level of "polished"ness, as it were. I feel like I should be attributing this to a healthy design cycle: if a game has realistic goals and does accurately what it sets out to do, it can be playtested and refined more before it's release. This makes it even better at what it sets out to do.

The darkness feels like it doesn't lack this polish, but it doesn't exactly have it either. It's such an inbetween experience that it gets stuck in some sort of game limbo. Some parts of the game snap together and just fit so well, and others have such painfully obvious missing pieces that it feels broken; it feels so broken you wonder if they even bothered to take some time to actually play the game to see if it was fun before they released it.

The Darkness is a very competent shooter. Like most modern shooters it comes up with something to set it apart; in this case, it uses two "darkness snakes". I call them snakes as they are long and snakey. I do not believe that is a proper name, and they are just some strands of pure evil that sprout from the main character's shoulders. Either way we just roll with it. You can attack with the snakes, nom down opponent's hearts, and summon creatures to help you in your fight. And it's not like all of this isn't fun, it is. The shooting itself feels tight enough when you actually do come across things to shoot.

So where does it all fall down? Everywhere. When your shadow friends suggest you stay in the shadows to recharge your power, where there is no obvious indication as to where is "dark" and "light" (the whole world is pretty consistently lit) and there's no obvious indication of your power either. When you set out to find a shop where a character you need to meet up with is hiding, and there's no directions, compass or map to tell you which way to go, leaving you to wander in the city for ages until you stumble on your destination. When you're left to guess at the controls your interactions with the environment without any solid tutorial. These should all come naturally... good modern games teach these things in line with the story, or tell you what you need to know before you set out at the very least. They don't leave you to guess at buttons until you get it right.

So despite doing some neat things with the genre, Darkness is somewhat forgettable as it doesn't really innovate in any meaningful way, and everything else it does as a shooter is done the same way in other shooters but better. This game came out in 2007, just down the temporal road from Halo 3 so it never really stood much of a chance at standing out. That said, it was still a fun shooter.

And that voice is still as creepy as all hell.

This lands is your lands

2009-11-07T12:21:00.003-05:00

Borderlands - Review
(for PC)

Initially I had a very frustrating time with this game. The game was chiefly developed for the 360 and Ps3, but was ported to the PC. All versions were developed by Gearbox. They started out by saying the PC version was the best of the set and was a more in-depth experience. In one way they were right; the graphical potential of the PC version is way, way beyond what the console versions offer. The real problem lies in its online. Borderlands is a real co-op game and playing it offline just isn't the same; the online portion of the PC game is so broken it isn't funny. You have to manually set up and forward the right ports if you're behind a router of some kind, and you can't host any kind of game until you do so. This makes playing with friends impossible unless you know what you're doing. I'm lucky enough to actually know what I'm doing and got it running after several hours of frustrating senseless failure. This is the year 2009 and a PC game doing that is inexcusable.

In any case, despite a whole paragraph of initial bitching you'll have seen the four stars first. Well, that's because this game is excellent. It plays a lot like WoW, which sounds odd for a first-person shooter. But the game is quite like a stripped down version of it. It's very heavily class-based, and you modify those classes with various upgrades and mods you find throughout the game as you level up. Each class has its own ability that usually takes random benefits from the upgrades, and fits different playing styles pretty well. Trying out all the classes is pretty easy as they level up rather quickly at first and teach you what you need to know without wasting any time. You'll probably want to do this as the game is super fun and you'll want your character to fit like a glove.

That's pretty easy to do with the random and custom mods that appear in the game. You can add to your shields, health, find perks that grant you bullets, melee damage, augment how you use one of the game's eight weapon types, and more. They boast that you can find "bazillions" of guns, which is technically true but not really as each gun is randomly generated with various stats and perks, but each one still fits into one of the eight weapon categories; it's pretty much usually either an assault rifle, an awful assault rifle or an awesome assault rifle.

The main story can be done on your own if you want but it's far more fun with three other friends. There's actually plenty to the story, and more than enough sidequests to keep you moving if you need to beef up your character. But either way you'll find more than enough loot along the way to make any longtime Diablo fan happy. Most of it is quite sellable but once you find that one perfect gun for your class and level up in that department, everything just clicks.

Bottom line: it's Diablo-like, and it's an action packed shooter. Buy it on consoles if you want an easier, better controlling, more fluid experience; buy it for the PC if graphics mean everything to you or you just need a mouse/keyboard for shooters. Either way just buy it. It's great.

Sound design in games

2009-10-18T20:21:00.004-04:00

Currently Playing

Brutal Legend
Watchmen: The End is Nigh
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune 2
The Darkness

I've been very busy this weekend. Reviews for three of those four titles are forthcoming, for sure.

I've always been something of a music and audio nerd. Not on the technical side of things, really, but I always listen for that sort of thing. Good sound design always makes a difference; you can just prove this by muting your television and seeing how boring games are without any sound whatsoever. No, good sound is key when you're making a game.

It obviously comes down to what sort of game you're making, but everything like the music, sound effects from footsteps to the swoosh of a sword, and the ambient noise like the patter of rain on the ground or hum of an engine. You should be able to close your eyes when you fire the game up and have a good idea of the atmosphere of the game, and you should even be able to paint a simple picture in your head of the feel of the game.

Two of these games I've played this weekend are prime examples of good sound design and bad sound design... and if I asked you to scroll up and look at those four titles, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to pick which one I'm going to name for each of those examples. They were both unexpected for me for sure. In fact I'll hold on for a moment so you can scroll up and try to figure it out, I'll wait. Which game has good sound design, and which bad? I'll put a sweet picture of a zombie getting punched here to break the page a bit. Related note: I'll be getting world at war for next weekend so I can get some nazi zombie-punching action on my nice new TV in preparation for Halloween. Also, this picture isn't a hint.

Okay, that's time then. The game with the best sound design was Watchmen: the End is Nigh. Why? Because they did what I said a well-designed game does in terms of sound: it creates atmosphere. The low, humming music blends perfectly with the constantly rainy, gritty atmosphere. Flaming barrels litter the streets adding a nice crackle to the alleyways, the character's voices match the characters and their contrasts perfectly, and the combat... oh the combat. Each punch sounds like an absolute bone-crippling crack on impact, and every weapon produces a new disfiguring sound. It suits the style of the game so perfectly that it alone got me so much more into it.

On the other hand... worst sound design of the four? Brutal Legend by a long shot. You'd think a game centered around playing rock music would focus considerably on good sound design. But there were far too many occasions where sounds and music just cut out, or were too muffled to be heard. The soundtrack itself sounds fine, as does the voice work by the main cast (which is actually quite entertaining), but everything else... from monster, vehicle, explosion, and weapon sounds... are all awful. They don't carry any kind of impact behind the source of the noise and if you weren't looking at the screen, you'd have no damn idea what was going on in an action-based cutscene because it would be a collection of muffled audio jibberish.

Now my review of Brutal Legend is still going to be positive and you'll see why if you read that when I post it later this week. But. Any game that sacrifices good audio content during its gameplay is really muddling the experience up a great deal and it'll never be as good as it could have been if more thought was put behind it.

RTS hoedown

2009-10-15T22:14:00.010-04:00

Currently Playing

The Darkness
Need for Speed Undercover
Canabalt

Gotta say, I haven't done a straight blog post in a while. On the review front, Darkness is coming up, and the first few hours have left a very bad taste in my mouth. It's been promised that it gets better, and although I'm a firm believer that if a game doesn't engage you from the get-go then you shouldn't have to wait for it to turn into something special, this time I'm feeling sympathetic enough to keep plugging through. Why? Well, for one, it's near Halloween, and I'm trying to lock down a couple scary/horror games to look at in October, and this definitely fits the bill. For two, it does some really interesting creative things, and steals enough good ideas from other games to make me want to see more, despite having an un-fun time actually playing it.

But, enough about me.

Command and Conquer: Tiberian Twilight is coming out in 2010. Recently they released some promo-type content, including this little feature on the crawler (thanks Giant Bomb):

If you don't want to watch, the so-called crawler is the new appeal for the series. Instead of having a single main base with resources and production buildings like most RTS'es (and, truly, like every other C&C game ever) (except for renegade, but we don't talk about that one), this crawler is a mobile base, essentially. It's where resources, units, and all activity generally center around. It's a whole different strategic angle than just straightforward base expansion.

This fascinates me as Starcraft 2 is all set to come o..ut... ...wait. No, it's not. It's not even set to begin the closed beta. People *might* start talking about Starcraft 2 more next year if Blizzard starts to show it.

As for C&C 4, it seems rushed. The C&C 3 remake only just came out recently, along with a mini expansion. It's rushed-ness may easily have to do with making its own mark on the RTS genre before Starcraft 2 can manage to come out. It'll be easier to one-up Starcraft and by extension Blizzard by promoting this newer, more revolutionary strategic change to the genre with this mobile base concept, while Starcraft 2 is most definitely just like the first game with new units. They aren't shaking up the core gameplay nearly that much. If they did all of Korea would murder them.

So I guess that's pretty much my take; C&C 4 will come out before the next Starcraft, and who knows? It might actually be a lot more fun to play by actually trying something new as opposed to re-releasing the same junk all over again. But, then, maybe Blizzard will trounce all its competition in the genre as it tends to do with all its other games through perfection of tried-and-true stuff. Who's to say.

Let me know if any of that pissed you off! :D

Nobody plays as spider-man, trust me guys

2009-10-12T21:02:00.003-04:00

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 - Review
(for the Playstation 3)

I wrestled over giving this game 3 stars for a long time before deciding on four. The problem that it has, in a nutshell, is that it banks on fan service to provoke interest and maintain it. That means the interactions with well-known characters needs to be fantastical, over-the-top, and either at or beyond the level of ridiculousness that a marvel fan would come up with in their own superhero fan fiction or daydreaming.

And don't let my hesitation fool you, it definitely does do that. At a few points in the story all the heroes just collide in one place for a battle royale of sorts, where big name heroes are just showing up willy-nilly and you can swap out heroes on your team to have the exact multi-man deathmatches you've always wanted, you crazy person.

The dialogue also isn't anything but corny, but this is a Marvel game, and unless you're wolverine or deadpool then you're not going to find anything but cheese. The game does give you some simple dialogue trees for conversations with other heroes or villains, so you can at least pick the sort of cheese you want to spout (though, actually, the non-spoken lines are considerably better written than the spoken ones, which is a damn shame because those are the ones you have to listen to).

Since this game is about the hero registration civil war, you essentially have to pick a side and your alliances come with you for a big chunk of the game. This also means heroes on the other side of the act are locked out for that point, and some of my favourites actually became enemies at that point; this wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though, since having a five on one fight against iron man was more than enough to convince me that I was enjoying myself.

Each character has their own combos and special moves, but the big super moves are called fusion attacks, where you pick two of your team of 4 heroes and they do a duo attack that either targets one dude, targets all dudes in the surrounding area, or lets you run wild and vaguely aim at various dudes that you can manage to lay your eyes on in the alloted time limit. Since there are dozens of heroes this results in hundreds of mutant powers; although since they break into three groups and the attacks get same-y (I favoured storm and seeing an ice tornado, fire tornado, bomb tornado, lightning tornado with different fusion partners made me lose quite some interest), this isn't as varied as they probably want you to think it is. It really boils down to those three types and you get to the point of mixing your team up to try and get a good balance of raw power, fast movers and versatile fighters.

Either way you pick your favourite heroes, and if they end up on the other team then, well, sucks to be you but most heroes can be persuaded to either side so it's not so bad. I favoured storm, human torch and deadpool, with the fourth slot rotating between various people I felt like at the time (usually settled on wolverine). Everyone's powers work the way you expect them to in most cases, which makes some seem completely unfair when you first pick them up but then realize it all balances out in the end when you're fighting a twenty-story goliath.

So what's wrong with all this craziness? It's a beat-em-up game where you dispatch thousands of robots, either good ones or bad ones... and you fight bosses often enough. It gets same-y at the points between those boss battles, and unless you mix your team up (and the game rewards you for actually picking a winning combination and sticking to it) then it gets rather boring from one mutant fight to the next sometimes. Finally, though, the next crazy boss flips over a nearby railing (with an accompanying subtitle so you can't possibly miss him) talking smack, letting you jump right back into the mayhem.

Thankfully this happens often enough, and the story is fun enough with recognizable hero faces that you can't help but giggle at the proceedings. There are also plenty of "oh snap" moments in the cutscenes and even during fights that taking the game right through to the end is still fun and very worth it. If you even recognize two of the faces on the box, then you'll know a lot more in the actual game and it'll be a fun eight hours.

Adam @ X'09 - Part 2

2009-10-12T12:29:00.003-04:00

More games, more awesome. These next two were my favourites.

Splinter Cell: Conviction
Definitely one of the big highlights of the show. Splinter Cell was always one of the best stealth-based game series, and this game steps it up even more. In the story, Sam Fisher’s daughter has been killed, turning him into a rogue, unshaven shadow of what he used to be; he’s not nearly as professional as he was, and is much more brutal and unforgiving. The demo we played started out in a market area, and Sam was tasked with infiltrating a mansion to find a man linked to his daughter’s death. The game tells its story in a really unique way; it projects images and text onto the walls and floors surrounding the characters on the fly. It’s a far more engaging experience than just watching opening titles or a cutscene. You really feel like a predator when you’re playing - stalking enemies in the dark as they get more and more unsettled by finding traces you’ve left of your presence is really exciting. In combat, he’s much more desperate and aggressive, especially while interrogating an enemy. He gets very brutal, much moreso than he ever was before. One last feature that was really cool was the “last known position” - when an enemy loses sight of you, a ghost of Sam shows up in the environment that lets you know where they last saw you before you disappeared. This helps a lot in sneaking by them or coming in for an attack. Unfortunately the game has been delayed a few times, and it’s once again been pushed back. The current plan is that it’ll be out on February 23rd of 2010. From what I’ve seen, though, it’s definitely worth waiting for.

Left 4 Dead 2
Anyone who reads me often enough knows that I’m very excited for this game. It was my guilty pleasure of the event, any time I had a few minutes to kill I’d come back and jump into another game with whoever was around. It’s improved on the original in a few key ways. First of all, the game involves a lot more of a story and background for the characters (who are all different from the last game) than Left 4 Dead did. The Director has been beefed up, and how has control of not only the zombies, but wall placement and level layout, as well as daylight/lighting and weather conditions. There are new tiers of guns and pistols, as well as a new item called adrenaline, that gives you a temporary speed/strength boost and lets you run through/knock back the hordes more easily.

As for the enemies, all the old special infected, like boomers, tanks, etc. all make a return, and there are three new types of special infected. CHARGERS sprint at a character, knocking things out of its way to get to them, and keeps them pinned once they hit them (they're absolutely huge, very close to tanks in size). SPITTERS soak the ground with acid, damaging players that walk on it. JOCKEYS jump on a character’s back and “ride” them, running them away from their comrades - and as we all know, the further you are from your fellow survivors, the harder it is to stay alive. Both them and the chargers really separate their victims from the others much like smokers - once they've got you, other zombies close in and fill in the gap, making it really hard to rescue your friends. It definitely steps things up a notch. There are also zombies that wear SWAT suits or HAZMAT suits, making them impervious to certain kinds of damage. The “wandering witch” is also a danger; when it’s bright outside, witches will walk around instead of staying in one place.

Left 4 Dead 2 comes out on November 17th on PC as well as on the Xbox 360.

tumblin' up a storm

2009-10-12T00:01:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
Canabalt
Super Mario Strikers

So I've got a new tumblr thing going on. You can check out the full awesome at adamtuck.tumblr.com, or just hit up the feed in the sidebar to the right. The way it'll work is twitter will handle my usual more social day to day stuff, or game news and announcements, and other regular twitter stuff you could expect from a twitter account. Tumblr's a lot more media heavy so I'm using that in the context of my game playing experiences. There's a lot of different quick little ways it can feed you the game info that's going through my brain while I'm playing a game or just hearing about one, so I'll throw up all the stuff I deem important/interesting enough for your own personal enjoyment. Yay me.

So the short version is, twitter is a part of my social life, tumblr is not, and all about game business all the time. Speaking of game business, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 review is coming after more X09 coverage, so stay tuned for that stuff.

Adam @ X'09 - Part 1

2009-10-04T23:09:00.004-04:00

So, last week I upheld one of my most favourite of traditions and hung out at Microsoft's X'09 conference in Toronto. This is a yearly event where they usually have some pretty final builds of games on display for the press; most of them are builds that have already been shown as early as E3, but it's a great way to get the Canadian press on board with some of the latest. So I'ma babble for some time about some of the games I got my hands on at the conference.

DJ Hero
This is the game I was most excited about at the event after getting a chance to play it. It’s very reminiscent of Guitar Hero for obvious reasons, but instead of coming with a plastic guitar, it comes with a plastic turntable. The turntable itself contains three buttons; two of which represent the two songs being mixed together while the third is for samples mixed into the music. You’ve also got to worry about a crossfader to fade back and forth with, and an effects dial to control the samples with as well. During the music up and down arrows will appear on top of certain buttons, meaning you have to scratch the record back and forth in time with the music while holding the button for that particular song. On top of all this there’s a Euphoria button, which works the same as star power: it gives you a temporary score multiplier. Oh, and this game features a rewind mechanic as well, allowing you to build up a meter and then scrub backward in the song to retry a section of music to see if you can play it any better. There’s so much more to DJ Hero in a gameplay sense, and nailing those harder levels is very gratifying. Add to that the cool mixes they’ve made for the game; two songs that you wouldn’t think would fit together at all combine into one song really well every time. Confirmed artists in the game include Gorillaz, Rick James, Beastie Boys, Jay-Z, M.I.A., Nirvana, The Jackson 5, and a lot more. Some of the DJ’s that made the mixes of music include DJ Shadow, DJ Jazzy Jeff, and Daft Punk. The game will sell for about $130 and include the turntable peripheral packed in. I can't wait for October 27th when it comes out! It's definitely the first hero-esque game I'm ever going to submit to buying.

Halo 3: ODST
Although ODST came out in September, Bungie had the game on display at the event. They were showing both the campaign and the firefight mode. I took the chance to run through the beginning of the campaign again (full review of that is coming, by the way), and tried some firefight mode with three other teammates. The campaign is well put together; you don’t play from the perspective of Halo 3’s main character, the Master Chief, but from the perspective of a shock trooper trying to discover what’s happened to his squad in a war-torn city. As you explore the wasteland, you discover clues that transport you into flashbacks to reveal what went on in and around the city. It’s a good story (from what we played) and a decent sequel to Halo 3, but the most fun was the firefight multiplayer mode. I sat down with three teammates and lasted as long as we could against a constant barrage of incoming enemies. There’s a shared life system and if you separate from your friends you’ll likely get surrounded, and if you’re killed you can’t come back until the next round, so teamwork is definitely the only way to make it through the match. It’s a must-have for any Halo fan, and it’s a great multiplayer experience. Halo 3:ODST came out on September 22nd, so it’s available as of right now at your local retailer.

More coming soon once I get out of this mountain of work I've got lined up for this week.

Source-a-palooza

2009-09-21T00:15:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Half Life
Garry's Mod
Killing Floor

So, for those not keeping track (and that's definitely most of the world) the ten-year anniversary of the original Half Life's release was last year. So, I've started flying through the Half Life games from the beginning as a way to get myself caught up in the series for when they release a new espisode of HL2. Seeing as that's going to be "never", I probably have a lot of time to do this but you know what, I'm doing it anyway.

So I'm not going to review HL1, because, well, it's a decade old and who needs to know that stuff anymore. Instead, I'll be comparing it to modern-day games, which is all I know to compare it to, as I didn't play any PC-based shooters for some time (games like Goldeneye, Perfect dark etc. notwithstanding; I kept up generally well on console shooters). Now it's not really fair to compare a shooter like FEAR or Crysis to HL, as they're a decade apart... not shockingly, modern day shooters are far better. But what's actually shocking is that in other respects, they're far worse than HL.

So, I'll make some lists. They'll include what HL does well, what it doesn't do well, and what was just plain funny to see in terms of how much older and crappier the game is.

What's more, I'll do this list IN TABLE FORM?! ...no. No I won't.

Stuff HL Did Well

The hazard suit Gordon wears informs him of surrounding conditions and how he's injured. If he falls, he'll have a fracture. If he's scratched he'll have minor lacerations.
The game makes it clear what's hurting you, be it electricity or radioactivity or etc. All in all the suit is useful; moreso than most contemporary hero's suits.
The sound design is, for 1998, really excellent. Guns, doors, and monsters all sound like they should.
The overall feel of the shooting and movement snaps together very well in a way most modern shooters really don't.

Stuff HL Did Poorly

Some scripted events, like monsters jumping out of closets and the like, was set up badly; oftentimes I wouldn't be looking in the right place to see what the game wanted me to see.
HL's story wasn't exactly mindbending or original. Maybe it was great at the time but aliens + secret lab + government coverup = generic plot by today's standards.
The game would often surprise you with a collapsing ceiling, exploding wall, etc. and not give any warning on how to avoid it, making you trial-and-error die through a game, which is a pet peeve of mine. The player should have a chance to do it right the first time.

Stuff That is Funny

Gordon moves unreasonably fast, like a rocket, and can jump three times his height.
Pixelation in the textures is as big as NPC's heads.
Gordon is an untrained scientist and yet he seems to mow down batallions of trained military soldiers
The same 4-5 scientist models/voices are used and re-used. It's funny to chat with the same dude several times, or see four or five dead old dudes who look identical.
Soldiers will run right up to you and stare you right in the eye a foot away without firing a single round.
Gman is hilarious.

So basically, on the whole, the only failings of HL for when it came out were conventions that didn't really get fleshed out properly for years and years. Making sure players properly see what they need to see, do what they need to do, and giving them ample time to think and react to their surroundings is pretty important, and you can only really flush that stuff out through a lot of playtesting and tweaking. The practice of playtesting the hell out of products is a trait that Valve has surely got down pat by now, though, so I'm not at all worried about it.

It's all about experience and they did a damn good job creating one. Too bad they'll never release a third one.

BUT for now, we will speak positively about Valve's game release habits and look to HL2 and its various episodes next. Or, I'll actually be getting Halo ODST in the mail tomorrow, so I'm thinking I'll be a tad distracted by that first. I'll be plenty busy this week for sure. Oh, and I go to class at a school around here somewhere too, so I should probably get on that...

The right tools for the job

2009-09-20T01:04:00.006-04:00

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction - Review

One of the quips from a pre-release review of this game (that insomniac felt obliged to squash right on the back of the box) was that playing tools of destruction, visually speaking, was like a Pixar movie. The graphics are vibrant, the characters are expressive and exaggerated, and it has that over-the-top aesthetic in all the weapons, ships and explosions of colour.

Insomniac nailed this as well as they could and created this excellent visual experience, really showing off some flashy capabilities of the Ps3. But as far as I'm concerned, gameplay is always key and I wasn't convinced until I actually got to jump in and start shooting things.

As soon as I had wrapped up play on the first world/level of the game, I knew this would be a five-star game. A ratchet and clank staple is a myriad of weird and wonderful weapons. A lot follow standard procedure (pistol, shotgun, rocket launcher) but as they upgrade, they become absurd in every way (tiny robots lock on to your targets, pistol rounds melt into fire). Then there's unconventional weapons like an energy whip or a buzzsaw machine gun, the ammo of which bounces around the room for a while. Then there's the straight-up bizarre, like the disco ball grenade that makes your enemies uncontrollably boogie for a short amount of time, during which you can dismantle them all one by one as they don't attack you in favor of shaking their robotic tails.

Weapons are customizable in how they upgrade, so you can tailor the game to your own play style. You can upgrade all your weapons a bit, but you'll probably end up leaning on a few favorites and upgrading them all the way. This is rewarding; they usually sprout a few extra barrels upon being fully upgraded, or some equally ridiculous benefit appears. Weapons also upgrade naturally as you use them more, so you'll end up leaning on your few favorites for sure, but that's a more fun way to play anyway.

There is often random interludes to the shooting sections including star fox-esque spaceship battles, and occasionally ratchet and clank will start doing random crap, like sprout wings and fly or decide they want to play atlasphere with the american gladiators. But there's always new guns, objects and armor to keep you interested right through to the end and the enemies and bosses are really varied and fun to blow holes in so there's nothing to not like about the type of game they went for. It's a pell-mell balls to the wall shooting game, make no mistake, but the visuals and cheeky story make playing through it all the sweeter. The characters are all charming and it has a very family-friendly appeal in how they interact, very disney-like in nature, but the gameplay is most definitely for everyone.

Every Ps3 owner needs to play the demo for this title to figure out if it's for them. I fell in love in seconds; if you aren't enjoying yourself by the end of the demo then not much will change, it'll be the same sort of shooter from start to finish.

Swing and a miss

2009-09-18T23:45:00.001-04:00

The Bigs 2 - Review

I can't say I'm a big fan of baseball. I can't say I know ANYTHING about baseball. But I can say that I'm open to playing any kind of game that's fun and enjoyable, an I wanted to try cracking into the dreaded sports game to see if I can manage myself with absolutely no preexisting knowledge of the content.

So along comes BIGS 2, a nice accessible arcade-style baseball game that features exploding home runs, players leaping 20 feet in the air to make a catch, and wall-jumping and doing the splits for no reason. This all seems like an adequate lack of acknowledgment to things like reality, and the laws of physics, for my liking. I figured if I was going to like any baseball game, this would be it.

It's licensed with MLB so that means it contains a full roster of players and official teams you'd expect to see, including fantasy all-star lineups and the like. I started playing through the game as Toronto, since... well, what else would I do? I found the controls not too difficult to pick up (as a pitcher, you aim and time a button release; as a batter you time/judge when to swing and where to aim the (hopeful) hit, and you field the ball to throw dudes out). Pretty straightforward, except I kept finding myself losing.

I went ahead and chalked that up to me sucking and continued to practice for several hours. I showed *no* improvement whatsoever. Finally I played one last game, the jays against the yankees.

This was the match where I was turned off sports games again. I was pitching and striking dudes out like a pro, but every, EVERY time the batter connected, it was a guaranteed home run. The same batter did this twice on his rotations, and two others managed this. The final score was 4-2; I played the rest of the game as flawlessly as I could yet still met defeat. This was on easy mode.

I discovered through conversations with more learned baseball fans that that particular pitcher against those particular batters were bad matches; he threw in a way that they could exploit. Now the game uses a "wheelhouse" mechanic, which clearly indicates how the batters are stronger and when, and how to avoid pitching to those strengths. But some batters have a natural advantage to certain pitcher's styles of play. The announcer in the game confirmed this, yet no instruction is really given as to which players are good where, and that stuff. The game expects me to just know this information. I wouldn't send this pitcher in against the yankees, blasphemy.

And this is why I'm turned off to sports games. When they assume the player has preexisting knowledge of the teams and players themselves, it ruins the game for those not in the loop just looking for a fun baseball game. I turned up with a lot of wins in practice/training modes but in the big leagues, I could never manage a victory for reasons like that. I really got the hang of batting and pitching accurately but because I don't know anything about the MLB itself, I lose, and will continue to lose.

So sports game devs: you're making us miserable by doing this. Make it accessible. If you HAVE to incorporate licensed players/teams and their individual traits then at least make those obvious stats for the player, and give advice for how to work with them. Otherwise we're pretty hopeless.

Also, all that crazy hitting/jumping action? Almost never happens. The trailers are loaded with it but I hardly came across those moments, and whenever they did I failed as a poorly trained quicktime event flashed by, not telling me what to do or how, but again, just expecting me to *know*. In ten hours of play I didn't catch on and that is more than enough hours devoted to learning the game's most basic mechanics.

This is not how you make games. Two stars.

A few changes! Yay!

2009-09-18T23:15:00.002-04:00

Currently Playing

Bigs 2
Shatter
Flower

I'm way into those Ps3 games right now because my dad just scored a gorgeous new 40 inch HD television for the living room for his birthday. I've moved the Ps3 down there (from my upstairs room) so blu ray movies can be enjoyed and pretty games can be played, and other HD movies can be streamed to the pretty TV from other comps in the house and we have a wonderful fun synergistic multimedia utopia.

But the recent spur of reviews I've done has made me think that I need a more tangible review system. I don't usually get in the habit of putting an arbitrary score on games, but I feel as though I should because in my journalistic writing these days, that's all I'm ever asked for and despite my best efforts I end up doing so anyway. So from now on my reviews will be a bit more obvious. They'll have structure to them, and they'll be scored on a 1-5 star scale. No half-stars, none of that wishy washy business. Just 1-5. That's as loose as I can make it, and reading the review is something I hope everyone will do anyway because well, all five of you hopefully are interested enough in what I have to say to take away something useful from my content here. So it's still going to be all about the words, not numbers.

Anyway, I'm throwing a simple design together for that and I'll put up my first review very shortly, it's of the Bigs 2.

Spoiler alert: two stars. So, didn't fare too well. Find out why soon!

Nostalgia trip

2009-09-13T15:31:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Shadow Complex

So Shadow Complex was a game that I actually rationed out. I played it sparingly. I didn't want to finish it too fast. Only little bits at a time. That's how fun it was.

What makes it so fun? Well it's essentially a 2-d platformer, focused on shooting and blasting away at power-armored enemies and giant robots.

If that didn't catch your attention, it follows the same vein as something like Castlevania or Metroid; progressively blasting through enemies as you power up your character, bit by bit. Hell, the character starts out as a regular joe but eventually suits himself up into one of the enemy's suits of power armor and upgrades it with missiles, grenades, rocket boots, and many other metroid-esque powerups.

The shooting controls like a dream. It's a fake-3d environment, but the shooting is only 2d. At the beginning you're picking off regular soldiers with a pistol; by the end you're leaping/grappling over an enemy with a shield, rocketing him in the helmet, and landing gracefully on the other side as he crumples under the explosion. The learning curve isn't too steep, though; as with its predecessors it introduces new mechanics at a steady pace so you don't get bored, and can keep up with how to use everything. The environmental controls, melee strikes, and everything in between snaps together just right. It feels like a perfect hybrid of tried and true gameplay with new audio and visual beauty.

Much like metroid or castlevania it's got an item collection gimmick, and I finished the game with less than 50% completion but more than 40%... a not so shabby ratio if I say so myself. I'm not really an item gatherer, or one who spends his time hunting down every last missile expansion or armor upgrade for its own sake. I might go out of my way for a few, but only enough to make me suitably powered to finish the game... if I can do that, then I'm not worried if I didn't find even half of the items out there. Anyway, in my first shadow complex playthrough I pulled a 44%.

I'll definitely be playing it again. It's just too damn fun not to.

I'll be making time for the BIGS 2, got a new zombie game for the ipod touch (thanks Paul), and Lumines or something?? Who knows what the future holds!?

Wii Sports Resort - Review

2009-09-01T20:48:00.008-04:00

Currently Playing

Wii Sports Resort

After an overly eventful extra-long weekend with the family, I'm left sipping on vodka and chocolate milk alone in my room waiting for the dreaded 9-5 I'll be doing tomorrow (reality: my job feels like more of a vacation than vacations do). So, time for a Wii Sports Resort roundup. There really is no other way to do this than go through sport-by-sport. So, off we go.

EDIT: I did post this before I was finished it. XD I've since finished the empty sections, though.

Swordplay
Easily the most fun sport. On the surface, it's a clever game where making big sweeps and blocking smartly help you push your opponent back; there are some variations on the game from one VS one to one VS one hundred, and even a head-to-head slicing competition where you have to cut various objects in the indicated direction (like a reflex challenge more than anything). But the game is very well thought out; it's clear Nintendo's developers are thinking of how to abolish the "waggle" problem. You can't just let your hand flail and expect to do better than the other guy, as if they block a single one of your strikes it sends you flailing off balance for a few seconds, letting them turn the tables and send you off the platform before you know it. You have to block at the proper angle (opposite to what they're swinging at) and bigger, broader sword sweeps are much more effective than small jerky ones. It's an awesome game to play against other people (in VS mode) or challenging to dispatch countless opponents that conveniently increase in difficulty (in showdown, or 1 VS 100 mode).

Wakeboarding
This sport is a bit annoying even after practice. It's very fun and satisfying to play; hold the controller sideways like a wakeboard grip, flip it up to jump off the wake and hold it level to land. The last part of this process is very hard to figure out; you'll get very into landing jumps and doing great flips, and then you'll sink into the water on a landing with no real indication as to how you were holding the controller incorrectly, even if the remote is perfectly level. You need to counter the board's offset eventually and that is just downright confusing. It's still a fun event, though, and it lets you see a lot of the outside of the island if you land enough tricks.

Frisbee
My favourite new addition to Wii Sports, in close competition with swordplay. It's one of the sports that really feels natural to play. When you throw a disc, wind speed, the angle of your throw and time of release are all factors, so it flies and curves very naturally. It feels natural to throw, and it pretty much always travels where you expect it to once you practice a bit. There's some fun modes to play through, from throwing the frisbee to a dog to actually playing disc golf on the golf courses, using the frisbee mechanic instead of golf balls/clubs. It's easy to get hooked on this and basically play frisbee all day. Also that dog is just damn cute.

Archery
It's a little awkward to get the hang of at first, but when you do it's a fun little distraction. Hold the wiimote like a bow, draw the nunchuck back like an arrow, then release it to shoot. Once you get the hang of that, high winds, moving targets and obstacles make things difficult for you. Aiming can get sort of janky but as long as you aim proper before raising the bow and make sure you're calibrated right, it's just fine. Exciting to play head to head, taking alternating turns/shots and trying to beat the other's score.

Basketball
This is one of the less natural-feeling sports to play, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty fun. You swing the remote up above your head to have your Mii jump up in the air, then flick it forward to take a shot. The accuracy of the shot is about timing with your jump and your hand's position. There's a basic head to head three point competition and a three-on-three game that has you dribbling the remote like a ball if you're on offence, and swinging it out to try and steal the ball if you're on defence. This is the most confusing one to get a hold of and can get a little annoying as there's not much instruction on how to improve on either offence or defence, and you just have to experiment to get the hang of it. It's a fun little game when you do understand the controls, though, and definitely one of the more videogame-y experiences in here.

Table Tennis
Works a lot like Wii Tennis from the first Wii sports, but can actually detect things like what side you're holding your racket on in proportion to your body. That means you have control over your Mii's position when you hit the ball, and there's a good and better way to hit it. The angle of your swing matters, the power you use, and the moment you hit the ball are all factors. That makes it feel a bit like Wii Tennis 2, but it's so much more functional it feels like a very worthy sequel.

Golf
New courses on the resort, and they also include the last one as "classic" courses. The club and the angle of your swing and follow-through are more accurately transformed into the Wii world than its Wii Sports predecessor, so if you were bad before, you'll REALLY suck now. That is to say, if you're as awful at golfing as I am, that won't change a lot. If you liked the original golf then this'll be a fun new challenge, and you can try your hand at the new controls on the old courses. If you're still balls at this mode you can always try your hand at frisbee golf instead (see above).

Bowling
Just like last time, but with more acuate spinning control, which is determined by the angle of your hand during your throw. Some modes from last time also have a more prominant role; there's a 100 pin mode, for example, that has you play a regular 10-frame bowling match but using 100 pins instead of 10. It's a hell of a lot more exciting and definitely a fun new take on the bowling mechanic they already had.

Power Cruising
This game also seems a little tacked on and silly, you probably won't end up playing it much. It doesn't use the motion plus, and doesn't use the motion controls creatively well at all. You hold the remote and nunchuck toward each other like handles and twist the remote to throttle up the jetski, then it's a basic checkpoint race against the clock. It's not inherently fun to play and is pretty forgettable up against most of the other games here.

Canoeing
A pretty frantic alternative to actual canoeing. For one, you're not actually canoeing, you're kayaking. For another, you have to swing the remote from one side to the other to steer much like an actual kayak. What makes this mode work in a fun way is that it supports multi-person kayaks, so you have to work cooperatively to paddle the thing in the right direction and it makes for ridiculous fun when you all get it wrong and charge into obstacles. The head to head kayaking is fun as well, though, and we got some pretty close/intense races out of it. It's an exhausting game but fun with groups, wasn't as fun trying for high scores on my own.

Cycling
The only real, totally unforgettable sport in terms of control. You power your bike by swinging alternating hands forward, one at a time. Because god knows that's how you'd power a bike... if you used your hands to pedal. Since that's generally not how bikes work this feels ridiculous, but it's fun to play with friends (they have multi-person bikes and you fatigue as you pedal harder, making for an interesting team play game). That's the only reason you'd really want to play this one, the same frantic teamwork stuff that the canoeing requires.

Air Sports
These aren't sports (with a possible exception of skydiving). There's a dogfight mode that's actually kind of fun, you have to pop your friends balloons with a balloon buster (read: gun) and avoid having yours busted, a la mario kart with an additional dimension added. There's also an island flyaround mode that lets you get a bird's eye view of the whole island and collect nice informational exclamation marks.

Some sports are more fun than others, but what really ties the game together is the Wii sports-esque aesthetic, the scorekeeping, and the difficulty progression. For casual players it's really quick to fire up as many remotes you have lying around and start up a game with however many people you want, with the game instructing you to pass the right remote to the right person if need be when it's their turn. Everyone's accounts and individual sport's scores are kept track of and compared to each other, and when you play on your own you're matched up with opponents at your skill level. It's just got that aesthetic that worked so well for the first Wii Sports, and it introduces a lot of fun new games that (mostly) all work in their own way.

The motion plus is very, very noticeable in how it improves your control. Frisbee and swordplay sports more than any other show this off well, and it's neat to try sports like bowling and golfing again to see how the refined control affects it (go try tiger woods pga tour 10 for the Wii if you want to see more impressive use of the motion plus in a golfing game). Ubisoft's Red Steel 2 will use the motion plus for swordplay, when it releases. Here's hoping that one pans out more than the first one did.

Anyway, play Resort, it is definitely Wii Sports 2 but it's done just as well and it goes very well with parties or families or any group of people looking for fun wii-like pastimes. Any casual Wii owner needs this.

Batman: Arkham Asylum - LiveReview

2009-08-26T18:05:00.004-04:00

Currently Playing

Batman: Arkham Asylum

WE'LL DO IT LIVE.

6:15 - Put in the game and started 'er up. As the intro cutscenes play, totally excited about Mark Hamill voicing the Joker in this game. This game is easily as exciting for me as dark knight was when that movie came out. Batman is just driving Joker to the asylum. Just chilling. Joker is shouting stuff at him the whole time.

6:17 - Batman escorting joker into asylum. They got scanned... security found many prohibited items on batman but were too chicken to suggest he couldn't bring them in. XD Awesome.

6:18 - The criminals we walked by just started chanting his name. RESPECT son.

6:23 - Intro credits STILL playing... wow. Hope I get to play soon?

6:27 - Freeflow combat is awesome and incredibly fun. Cape looks amazing.

6:30 - The amount of things in this game is overwhelming... stealth controls, fighting, ranged attacks... also, Harley Quinn is HOT.

6:40 - Fought a few more guys and had my first boss fight, had a surprising finish. Very neat though. Just discovered the game has an upgrade system... I love upgrade systems. This is reminding me more and more of a fighting game but... a modern figher meets splinter cell, almost.

6:50 - Batman just screamed "I'm gonna beat the crap out of you" as he sent a straight right punch at a man's face sending him crumbling to the ground in one shot. This game is brutal.

6:58 - Never take on a room full of armed guys up front. Swing around with the grappling hook, isolate them, then take them down one by one. As they find their downed comrades they get more and more scared. It's fun being the hunter instead of the hunted in a game for once. Also, there's a detective put-together-the-clues mode... reminds me somewhat of Condemned.

7:11 - Been practicing silent takedowns. Whole rooms of thugs just drop like flies, one by one without ever seeing me. Sure makes me feel awesome as a player. Controls that are easy to learn but hard to master are key. Also, the RIDDLER just made an appearance?!

Time's up! Less descriptive than usual I know, but that's definitely a good sign... I'm sucked up enough by the gameplay that writing my short summaries is taking precious seconds out of my playtime. I'll get back to it and most probably do a review proper of it soon. But so far, things I like:

Very loyal (so far as my limited mind knows) to the source material
Wonderfully done voice acting, entertaining characters
Batman is a tank that levels thugs like they're nothing
You're a predator instead of hunted, you prowl in the shadows and strike when you see an opening... very fun
Detective mode, flowing combat, a cover system... this game incorporates a lot of things and they all seem to be done very, very well

More later. Also Shadow Complex will come sooner or later (probably sooner) so I'll talk about that too. One last fun fact: for some random reason I only paid 40 bucks for Batman. Considering I got it at half price for no real reason... that's a darn good deal to me.

Windows 7 jam session

2009-08-24T17:14:00.000-04:00

Currently Playing

Left 4 Dead
Team Fortress 2
Plants vs. Zombies
Bioshock
Supreme Commander
Crysis: Warhead

Well I finally bit the bullet and installed windows 7 at the beginning of the month, on the 9th of August. I've been testing various games on the new OS to make sure it's up to snuff. I'll list the trials I ran (Sam's done some too and I'll post quick summaries of his here) and how the games fared.

The first thing I did gamewise was reinstall Steam. Once there I started putting left 4 dead and team fortress 2 back on. At first my old camera's drivers weren't cooperating on the new computer, and it has my area mic built into it, so I had to run and get a new mic for the computer to make sure my voiping was still all set up.

Steam
Ran very smoothly, and it played nice with the toolbar as well. It still fared better as a tray icon rather than as an application icon, which is fine by me as it's sort of an in-the-background, important-to-run-on-a-gaming-computer sort of thing. Game installation, store navigation, purchasing, adding games from the hard drive... everything ran as it should.

Left 4 Dead
Ran without a hitch as well. The important question of alt-tabbing out for a quick moment to organize a few things before jumping back into a game was resolved; alt-tabbing out of the game worked perfectly. Once the mic was properly set up that worked very well. Networking with other machines was smooth and (despite my usual internet hiccups... not an OS thing) the game ran very smoothly. On a sort of related note, networking between 7 and macs and machines running other versions of windows worked amazingly well. Microsoft has finally taken a leaf out of apple's book and really made networking simple and straightforward but still allowing you control over how machines connect and interact if need be. Should be good for LAN setups... ...that is, if Starcraft 2 allowed LAN play. Which it doesn't. Grrr.

Team Fortress 2
These are all shooters, yes, by Valve, but promise that the rest won't be shooters by Valve. One thing I like about Steam is the cloud stuff; upgrades, unlocks, and game progress is all tied to your user account and stored on their servers. Once the game reinstalled I was able to use all the weapons and upgrades I'd already acquired for my classes, and not worry about having to re-acquire all those things. That's more of a Steam benefit than anything, though. I'm just filling space since the game ran entirely without a hitch.

Plants vs. Zombies
Although a simpler game, I thought I'd try working with windowed games and multitasking with some other applications to see how 7 handled it. Even when I tried stressing my system out by running it alongside a few other programs including firefox (a resource whore) and a video I was rendering (a BIG resource whore). No problems.

The remainder of the games on this list were installed and ran independent of an installer or launcher like Steam.

Bioshock
Overjoyed, I played this game almost all the way through. I had a few moments of slowdown that I didn't have on XP, not necessarily during high-intensity moments, but even during basic GUI stuff like menus and the re-pipe-wiring-minigame ...thing when you hack technology. Also there's some textures breaking and some sound looping... all very sporadic and almost entirely nonexistent. It works far more seemlessly than it did on XP in the end, besides random slowdown but that was rare. There was a single resolution/resize problem on an alt-tab but a restart fixed it and I wasn't able to replicate the error.

The following games were ones that Sam tested.

Supreme Commander
The game survived far more than expected. Even during intense moments with the unit count reaching it's highest cap, when XP or Vista would just crash out... it continued to perform admirably. Minimap and therefore multi-screen rendering stuff worked out fine as well. Almost no lag or noticeable slowdown at all.

Crysis: Warhead
Also ran like a charm. Pumped video settings that caused Vista to crash out didn't faze 7 at all. Devices as I said were a bit of a hassle to set up but once the mic and peripherals and everything were recognized it handled just the way it should.

In conclusion: Windows 7 is very friendly to games and gaming interfaces. In all our tests alt-tabbing to and from games worked very well, and downloading and installing was just as friendly as it was on other OS's. I'm sure to post again if I do find problems with any games in the future but for now, it seems to work pretty well. The bigger test will be to see if older games run properly; if not, to see how compatibility mode handles the older stuff. May post again on this.

Point being if you're a contemporary gamer then don't be scared to upgrade. 7 has your back.

People who will NEVER play games

2009-08-16T22:42:00.002-04:00

Awesome perspectives on the Nintendo press conference from the clowns at giant bomb.

Pop VS ... red drink?

2009-08-16T21:25:00.006-04:00

Every once in a while I try to deviate from my usual way of doing things. Despite being such a creature of habit, I like shaking things up once in a while. This is why you're tuned into another thrilling episode of "this is not about games".

Tonight during a by-the-books visit to Merla Mae, I made a not so by the books visit to a random convenience store. Inside I found two things. One, pop shoppe pops, and two, Kirkland signature sports drinks.

The former I was very excited about. The latter I've never heard of. What right does it have to be nestled between the pop shoppe products and Gatorade? I was determined to find out. Buying a cream soda pop shoppe and a ..."red" Kirkland variety (no obvious flavour or function listed on the bottle), I headed home to do a comparison proper.

As it stands, let this entry be an official transcript of the night's events, should this mystery fruit poison land me in the hospital. I will now taste both drinks and log my findings.

1. The Pop Shoppe Pop
Flavour: Cream Soda
I paid $1.69 for this 355 ml bad boy. But it's not all about quantity but quality, isn't it? It's got a twisty top, glass bottle (preserves the flavour much better than plastic or aluminum) and it's got barbershop strpied goodness on the label. Time to drink up.

...an incredible flavour! Cream soda at its finest. Nice and sugary without pushing it over the top... pretty close, though. There's a fair share of sugar in these things, guilty pleasures for sure. Not too much fizz to detract from the sweet sweet flavour. A great drink for maxing and relaxing. I once had one of these on top of a mountain, and it was just as delicious up there.

2. Kirkland Signature Sport Drink
Flavour: ?!?!
Cashing in at 99 cents for this 591 ml bottle, this drink frightens me, as you may be able to tell from my expression. From the shifty bottle to the obscurity in the naming and branding... there's plenty to be frightened of.

Taking the cap off... and the "guaranteed fresh" plastic seal just slipped right up over the bottle. I'm frightened for my well being a little more legitimately... trying some now.

...I think the intention here is that it's supposed to be fruit punch. But it tastes quite like... a melted red popsicle mixed with a crushed up vitamin pill mixed with that electrolyte taste that makes gatorade taste like gatorade. The vitamin pill part makes no sense as the label informs me this drink is not a significant source of ANY vitamins or minerals... save for calories. And sugars. And sodium.

...I only just noticed a big warning at the top that says "does not contain any fruit juice". Nice. ...I honestly can't determine exactly what it does contain.

Hmmm. By the looks of it, it's just flavoured water. What a gyp.

Well, it looks like the winner here is the pop shoppe pop. Kirkland gets points for being cheaper and tasting like a popsicle, but the pop shoppe wins for tasting like sugar better than the other sugar drink in this competition.

Shatter is finished and a glowing summary of it is on the way; meanwhile, zombies!? Burn Zombie Burn is downloading. Will probably end up rapping about that too. Cuz, you know. Zombies.

I`ll let you know if I end up in an ICU in the next two or three days.

Honeymoon's over

2009-08-11T00:08:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Resident Evil 4 - iPhone edition
Eliss

As much as it pains me to say it, I was right about another part of the ipod touch/iphone initiative concerning the device as a gaming platform... it's... ...kind of lacking. What I mean to say is, it can suck. What I mean to say is, when a developer decides to put a console game on a little iphone and try to make it useable, it probably won't work.

That's not always true but unfortunately it is for Resident Evil 4.

No, the failing isn't the sound, or the graphics even. Those are replicated in as much detail as possible to bring back the nostalgic resi 4 longing I usually get when I miss that game. The music, the sounds, the weapons... all that audio is ripped right from the console version and sounds just great, and the character models and environments are surprisingly well done. No, the failing in this game is in two things, more the first than the second; the controls and the flow. Let's tackle the biggest weak point first to bring this mother to its knees.

The controls are straight-out awful. On the right thumb, they give a couple of weapon icons for the knife and the currently equipped gun, and an action button pops up as well when necessary to get you to kick dudes, jump through windows, and more in awesome RE4 style. On the left thumb you've got a faux analog stick to move the character around with.

This is not enough. In a third person shooter, left stick controls the character, right stick controls the camera. This is used in every modern first or third person game to the extent that it is a design convention that goes without saying. Even occasional gamers' thumbs drift toward those two sticks as the intuitive way to control the game.

Granted RE4 mixed this up considerably when it came out with most of the control falling on the left stick, yet it provided options to switch out. That isn't really possible on an iPhone, and neither are basic third-person maneuvers like strafing, dodging, having an easily accessible manual reload button...

As for the game flow itself, it hiccups and lags at parts, and can't populate the screen with too many zombies at once. In one instance I was charged by a chainsaw zombie and readied my shotgun, wanting to get a shot off and then move out of the way (a task I've executed in the gamecube version many times and once on the iphone by a fluke, apparently), but the unresponsiveness of the controls had leon standing there fumbling with his aim while his opponent filled his torso with unforgiving whirling metal teeth. I'm not saying the game is designed horribly, the controls are sadly as optimal as they can be for this platform.

All this should really be telling you something: this game does not belong on an iPhone.

When the controls are unresponsive and unintuitive, and the game failing to run without severe drops in framerate, that's more than enough to kill the entire point of playing the game. It doesn't belong here.

A game that does belong here (I will now entirely change gears with an audible clunk) is Eliss.

Eliss is a great example of an iPhone game, easily the best I've seen. What makes it so great is that it couldn't really exist on any other platform. It uses the iphone's multitouch capabilities, and has you moving different spheres around the screen. You can combine and break apart spheres of the same colour, and when you let different-colour type balls touch, you lose heath (a lesson best learned in real life).

The key is to get a properly sized sphere into the appropriate hole (another lesson best learned in real life.)

...sorry.

The game is complicated by adding vortexes and black holes and such, having a fair few spheres bouncing around the screen at once. Of course, you can use one, two, three, or more fingers to control many spheres at once. This gives you the mind bending task of grouping similarily-coloured ones, avoiding hazards, and multitasking to the extreme, more or less.

So it's not a complicated game. Then again, games that aren't complicated are usually better than games that are.

It's been compared by a few critics (from touch arcade and pocket gamer to name a couple) to Tetris, and that it has that same play style and uses the same way of thinking; more importantly they argue that Eliss is to the iphone what tetris was to the game boy when it was ported to that platform. That is to say, it's a perfect use of the platform and its controls; it's a game that takes what it has and creates THE optimal experience on that platform. And they're right. It's a shining example of how gameplay on a multitouch screen like the iPhone's can be very fun, challenging, and lots of other positive multisyllabic words.

I guess I'm saying we need far more developers thinking about how to use the platform at its best, rather than cashing in on known franchises and making half-assed ports to appeal to an existing fanbase. That rule always holds true obviously, but it just shows more on a platform that isn't exactly geared toward gaming by design. Eliss just proves that it's not impossible to make very, very fun iPhone games. So here's hoping, I suppose.

I'll surely report on any other good iphone games I come across. Sidenote: my good friend Paul Sham suggested Civ Revolution for the iPhone; I'm not a fan of the Civ games, but it looked to control sensibly, using the touchscreen to map out a unit's movement path and things like that. Might play that more soon.

What I WILL be playing soon is as follows: as I type I'm finishing a download of Shatter on the Ps3 and an installation of Spore on Windows 7. So, I'm multitasking. I hope to get all that ground covered for two more nice blog posts within the next week. Stay tuned.

Let them eat cake

2009-08-06T23:02:00.005-04:00

Currently Playing

Fat Princess
Red Faction: Guerrilla
Space Invaders Extreme

Honestly, the next time I write an iPhone game review, I should do it from the iPod touch like I am right now. Would have some nice symmetry to it. Or something.

Okay, now I'm back on a keyboard where I belong. That iPod review idea thing is a terrible thought. That keyboard is just... well, functional enough to work but annoying enough to never want to type more than 5 words at once.

Fat Princess is a wonderful little class-based ...battlefield style game. I'm never sure what to call that genre, it's much like Star Wars Battlefront or Medal of Honor concept of shooter game that's much more heavily focused on team strategy, like a big collaborative RTS without the general/puppet master you'd usually play in an RTS. The game is class based, with a soldier, archer, mage, etc. to choose between, essentially letting each individual player choose which units to deploy which does not always work out optimally for the team. The game even does this a step further and has a villager class, and a resource gathering system; each class is upgradable using these resources. That means if honest hardworking players don't go out and chop wood and mine metal, the other team will get the advantage. Of course it's best to upgrade these units as soon as possible, so ideally you'd go out in force with villagers, unless the other team decided to go on an all-out raid on your castle and caught you off guard.

The goal in each level is to rescue your princess who's captive in the enemy castle. Her fatness is a result of cake being force-fed to her by her captors. This makes her exceedingly hard to carry out alone; the more teammates helping to carry her, the faster she moves. Attacks on the enemy castle will fail if you're alone, especially since it takes a few axes to knock the front doors down, or multiple friends to take on the populated enemy base once you're inside.

There's a huge underscore on teamwork which, unfortunately, can be a great downfall if you aren't playing with such a great team. On the other hand, if your team upgrades well, have mics to communicate, pick and use classes effectively and mount good attacks, it's damn fun to plough through hordes of disorganized enemies and carry the obese princess out on the sholders of ten soldiers.

There's so many little characters running around at the best of times that it's hectic and quite hard to keep track of what's going on. It's just barely understandable. But it's easy enough to get your bearings each time and the classes are all fun to play (even the resource gathering villager), and if you like a good team-based online game you'll totally fall for fat princess and it's cartoonish charm, cheeky visuals and addicting class-based play.

Okay, so I've got two more posts coming; one is the Windows 7 extraviganza (once I test more games out on it) and coming sooner is another iphone game feature, displaying the do's and dont's of developing for the iphone (if for some reason you'd ever want to do that).

A hell of a lot more broken

2009-08-06T19:36:00.002-04:00

Currently Playing

Fat Princess
Red Faction: Guerrilla
Space Invaders Extreme

If you're reading this then you should be aware of Yahtzee by now, and if you're not you should hit alt-F4 (or command-q on the mac) and not bother coming back. Or just go and watch him yourself, whatever works.

In any event, The Escapist (for which Yahtzee does his video reviews) just announced this contest following Yahtzee's 100th episode. It looks like a pretty fun idea for developers and otherwise, to just mess around and make hilarious stuff. With any luck they'll post the runners up as well. I'm toying with the idea of developing a game (as they're requiring you do it in Flash, and I could make something rather competent by now). So, might end up entering.

The part that tripped me up and made me bang my head against the desk came with this line in the submission rules/guidelines:

[This] WILL get your submission disqualified: excessive vulgarity, lewdness or profanity

...wait, what? Ben Croshaw's videos ALL contain excessive vulgarity, lewdness AND profanity. All three of those things. If they don't, fans leave disappointed. That's what makes him so over the top.

I'm sure they're accepting of some level of vulgarity. The Escapist is providing a set of assets, like images, audio, and video, that developers can use in their creations. Let me read off a sampling of the images they're providing: "cock_salad.jpg", "fagmosexual.jpg", "penis_gun.jpg", "tits+fire.jpg", "hairy_bums.jpg", and my creative favourite, "panty_dispenser.jpg".

So where on earth is this arbitrary line going to be drawn as to what is excessive? Only the judges will be able to decide that and they're going to turn down some developers who put in a LOT of work, and they're going to be very upset. As will I, for that matter. On the other hand, developers might be overly cautious about what excessive content gets into their game, making them hold back on vulgar jokes and strings of profanity in lieu of more pg-13 content, making it ... well, not feel like an actual Yahtzee game, but a lame-ass Yahtzee game developed for a company charged with keeping their parent company (Themis) happy or else unlikable things will happen to likable people.

Maybe I'm overreacting, though, maybe developers won't let that stop them and the judges won't stick so closely to that guideline and the vulgarity will be on par with what the fans want to see, and with what Yahtzee is used to delivering. We'll find out when the winners are announced in November.

Besides fat princess and red faction, other games I'm interested in right now are shatter, space invaders infinity gene (for the iphone), sports resort... among others. I'll have to take this one at a time. I'll either talk about fat princess next or just finish red faction so I don't have to have my spell checker keep telling me how I should be typing "guerrilla". Or perhaps I should prolong it so I just get the damn thing right (the two double letters still trip me up). More on that soon.

Red Faction: Guerrilla - LiveReview

2009-07-31T01:48:00.005-04:00

Currently Playing

Red Faction: Guerrilla
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Space Invaders Extreme

Starting right up, already passed through the installation and it's 1:50 in the morning. Can't sleep, no work tomorrow... it is as they say, hammertime. Forgive my terrible writing, it's early. I also decided to do something a bit differently with the livereview formatting and I'm separating out more interesting points and making them italic so just skim those if this is too much text.

1:51 - "I'm here to mine, not hunt for scrap." And now it's my job to begin salvaging for scrap. Off I go with my giant hammer.
1:55 - I've planted bombs on everything, but where the damn is the remote...
1:56 - Oop. Found it. And was subsequently TOTALLY IMPRESSED by the tower I collapsed! It realistically crumbles, does damage to other structures it hits on the way down... wow.
1:59 - The full building realistically creaks and groans under the pressure if parts of the building are taken out, and over time the whole thing can give under the pressure and just go down. Really great.
2:01 - Well that was the most jarring death sequence I've ever seen. A helicopter sprayed an entire area with bullets and somehow every one entered one out of two characters in the area. Like he was a magnet.
2:03 - Got some LOST going on here with the evil earth defence force getting taken apart by the red faction hiding behind random rocks.
2:04 - Additional backstory: they terraformed mars. People are just walking around. Huh.
2:06 - I've been given a "red faction manual" that I will never read. I tried to inform the girl that gave it to me of this, and she just walked off. Tool.

2:10 - I decided to go on a rampage. As soon as I was given control I started hammering all my fellow red faction members and ended up stealing a truck. I ramped into a hanger and drove through the wall, barrel rolling into a pile of debris and exploding. I'm VERY impressed.

2:12 - After reloading a save so as to not lose morality points or some crap I'm starting up a mission. The mission is "blow up a building". I think I'll do well here.
2:16 - My character said "YOU SAID THIS WOULD BE EASY" no less than four times during that mission. In DIFFERENT WAYS. It wasn't even supposed to be funny. I hope. Depressing.

2:20 - Just had another "oh dear christ wow" moment. Planted charges on a tower in unwise places, and detonated them while standing on a bridge. The tower toppled right onto the bridge, and I lept to safety as the tower collapsed the whole thing in a cloud of rubble and debris. AWESOME.

2:24 - Assisted some guerrillas in the defence of one of our bases. It's a generally open world, attack-their-base-defend-our-base sort of feel, with missions in between when you're not busy with all that.
2:35 - Well I died for the first time but I sure as hell went down fighting; way harder than I usually do in any game. I was in a building surrounded by guard towers and was surrounded by enemies, and I hucked charges at the towers and knocked them down into the building. Narrowly escaped the collapse and I was greeted by about 20 soldiers with two APC's with mounted machine guns. Thought I was screwed, and I was, but some nicely placed charges took down the APC's and I gunned down a surprising number of soldiers before I was killed.
2:39 - That hammer really is powerful. Can level a building faster than explosives can if you can manage to get up close and personal. Driving through buildings also works just the way you'd expect; AWESOMELY.
2:49 - These vehicles all feel super-large compared to the environment for some reason. Might be the camera angle while driving. But crashing through buildings and into other cars just feels right, and that's a rare thing in a game.

Okay, time's up. After the first hour I've got to say I'm incredibly impressed. I can't wait to dive back in and do a writeup once I've finished several more hours of fun. Things I like so far:

The open world map expands as you decide to explore more.
The demolitions (mostly) make sense and are really satisfying.
The controls aren't terribly intuitive but follow general conventions for shooters. It has a natural flow to it. Every button does what you'd expect it to do.
It's like a combination of saint's row and mercenaries.
The game doesn't faff about with too much story, but lets you know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and what they're fighting for. Then, it lets you fight.
Every time a building collapses it's always epic and there's a chance it'll knock adjacent buildings or other stuff over, making for even more epicness at once.

All great stuff to be sure. Stay tuned for further impressions once I've played it out.

Also, games like 'Splosion Man, Shatter, and of course Wii Sports Resort have all piqued my interest, so you might hear about those in the near future.

The iPhone as a (game) platform

2009-07-26T10:59:00.004-04:00

When Apple execs parade the iPhone and the touch as a game platform, I used to scoff and turn up my nose at it. It reminded me of cell phone manufacturers parading their wares in the same way, likening mobile games to DS or PSP games. Which WAS ridiculous, so I assumed Apple's actions to be no different. Then (in relation to the iphone/touch) after playing Tap Tap Revenge, I realized, is the iPhone really that much different from a DS, or a PSP? Well yes, those things have buttons. Buttons are important. Right?...

Buttons are the easiest way to input commands into a game, to be sure. Don't let the marketing folks with the big multisyllabic buzzwords fool you; playing a Wii or using a similar motion or tracking-based controller is not a more natural way to play games. If you want true precision, you need buttons. That's all there is to it.

As third party developers on the Wii will show, it is very easy to take a control scheme like the Wii remote and gimmick-ize it for a younger audience. Waggling the remote around to hit ducks off a platform is not an intuitive way to use the controls, and in the past, the Wii was not geared for anything truely intuitive. Just by the nature of the technology, it couldn't do what people thought it could do.

I'm getting sidetracked but I want to mention that the wii's motion plus accessory, shipping with Wii Sports 2 (or as a few of us might call it, Wii Sports Resort) which actually comes out today, is a very needed addition to the controller. You'll watch people try to play the sword fighting game with that accessory on and begin the waggle-palooza because, as we all know, whoever waggles more/faster wins the game. But the more out of control wagglers will be cut down to size by those who accurately block, and counterattack, knocking their opponents back more and more until they flail into the water. The player is rewarded for making large, slow, powerful sweeping slices with their sword, and not quick jerky choppy movements.

Now granted this is a first party developing the game, but I hope that other companies take a leaf from their book of design and do similar things. The motion plus gives the remote a lot more accuracy and potential for games like the swordfight, and it feels like an actual step toward an innovative game input mechanic, as opposed to a gimmicky money grab from the casual market.

Anyway, back to the ipod touch. It's easy to exploit the gimmick of the touchscreen like it is to exploit the motion tech in the remote. So I figured games would pretend to be more than they are, and turn out to be weak titles ridden with bad design and terrible control. And there are some games just like that, and there always will be.

But as long as there's at least one Tap Tap Revenge for every ten "assassin's creed iphone version"s out there, I'll be happy. Revenge is a great example of a game that's well thought out for the platform it's on, and it's simple, and fun.

I still think Apple is being ridiculous, but now I fully welcome the touch to my game platform collection, and look forward to finding more games that are built perfectly for it: simple, easy to learn, work well with the controls, and just fun to play.

Welcome to the fold, iPhone game platform tag. Hope you find good use in the future.

Tap Tap Revenge - Review

2009-07-26T10:44:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Tap Tap Revenge
Red Faction: Guerrilla
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2

With my new iPod touch this week, I planned on trying out any free applications I can to put it through some paces, including its game potential. Tap Tap Revenge was the first contestant there, as it was the most popular free game there is and rhythm games hold a dear place in my heart. I know that because it's free I shouldn't expect a whole lot, as you get what you pay for, but my hopes were high on this one.

The game offers a few flavours of difficulty level to work through, and I began with the "for babies" level that let you mash anything anywhere and scored you well (by scored you well, I mean, "let you finish the song"). After I got the hang of what the game was asking for I jumped into some medium songs. The game, by the way, asks you to hit three buttons guitar hero-style at the bottom of the screen, holding some occasionally if need be, and you also need to shake the touch left and right and back when asked to. This felt a little gimmicky and forced, but whatever, we're here to slam it to such timeless epics by greats like pitbull and lady gaga.

This game got me. When I say that, I mean I had a particular moment where I caught myself and realized I was having a lot of fun, which is the ultimate goal for any game, probably. Some games it happens right from the getgo, some times I don't know exactly when I start having fun. This time, though, I can pinpoint the exact moment that gargantuan amounts of fun started being had. I had downloaded Technologic and went to my "what the hell, let's do it" moment of doing an unnecessarily hard difficulty for my skill level, prepping myself to fail horribly after 1 minute 15 seconds, tops.

I ended up hitting 100% of the notes on that song. Perfect score. Not that it was easy, no, the rhythms and multi-note moments of confusion were tough enough. I just got into a zone, that immersive flow that entranced me into a deeper level of focus that I ever give anything, let alone a game, and found my fingers flying across the pad like they had minds of their own. Or guided by the devil, I guess. This must be what all those basement-dwelling guitar hero players must feel. Creepy.

Either way, I hit a perfect score, and while I did a mini victory dance I realized this game was excellent. It didn't try to really overstretch itself, or pretend it's something bigger than it is; it's an ipod touch game that's designed with the platform and its audience well in mind.

If you own one, go get it. You've got nothing to lose, including money.

Bionic Commando - Review

2009-07-20T10:51:00.004-04:00

Currently Playing

Bionic Commando
Left 4 Dead
Mario Kart: Double Dash

It's taken me a little bit to get back into the "swing" of eastern standard time but I think I've finally gotten the "hang" of it. That was TWO bionic commando jokes in ONE sentence and I'm god damn proud of myself for it.

To be clear, I haven't played the original. Or rearmed for that matter, but I feel as though I can't avoid doing so now, since I was handed some promotional patches with the game for both this title and for rearmed, the latter of which you can play to unlock some classic costume for the protagonist? I don't actually know.

The real question is, does it hold up? Mixed feelings come from this one all right. Grin did the dev work on this game, and they also did Wanted: Weapons of Fate, a game I really enjoyed but found was way too short (capped it off in about five hours). Well, Bionic Commando definitely doesn't cap things off in five hours, but the experience definitely isn't nearly as polished.

Not to say it isn't fun, but things just feel clunky and not well thought-out. The swinging mechanic, which feels like it should really be the crux of the whole game, is jerky and awkward. Even when you do figure out how to swing to get forward momentum (which takes a long time as it is highly difficult and doesn't make physical sense) it's too hard to judge distance or locate new points to latch onto to keep it going. And even then, you can easily swing into "out of bounds" areas and die almost instantly, or fall and land in rubble that's impossible to run/jump on and grappling out is highly difficult, or even just die instantly by falling in the wrong place...

So it's generally unintuitive and it feels like it's supposed to be the game's ace in the hole in terms of fun gameplay mechanics, but it's not fun. The shooting and combat work well enough, although many of the moves that are taught in the tutorial are not unlocked for several hours of play, which is somewhat confusing as there's no indication that they have to be unlocked somewhere down the road; it feels like half your moveset just breaks for no reason.

The moves themselves are varied; some catch you having quite a lot of fun without you even realizing it. The story isn't particularly imaginative but drives the game well enough. I'm not finding an abundance of positive things to say about the game, I guess, mostly because I'm so bummed out about the swinging being so unintuitive and unfun, and you have to do so much of it... I'll still play it through to the end, though. Might write more about it if some positive revelations come to light.

Left 4 Dead modding became much easier in the last couple weeks and I've been playing through some created campaigns, and they're pretty rad. Some of them definitely rival valve's campaign maps. I'm excited to see what else is out there, and what's being developed. There's some real talented modders out there, hats off to you guys, especially Diputs for the Death Aboard campaign and to Irate for the Dam It! campaign; both those downloads come from l4dmods.com. If you play l4d, then run steam to update it and download both of those immediately; they'll know where to install to inherently when you run them, which is hella helpful, no messing around in game files.

Anyway! Might be getting an (older) ipod touch this week from a friend, so I might go into some of its gaming potential (admittedly limited) if I have a chance to try some stuff out on it.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Review

2009-07-03T03:26:00.006-04:00

Currently Playing

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Patapon 2
Exit
God of War: Chains of Olympus

Good and bad aspects of flying for such a long period of time: get to play lots of games I haven't looked at for a while, but it makes my face hurt more than 7.5 hours of flying already does. This makes things like figuring out this Finnish keyboard (and deciphering how exactly to come up with these parentheses and colons and etc...) somewhat difficult and it only adds to the facehurting issues. In a nutshell, we left from home to travel here at 8:30 yesterday and got in at 8:30 local time, essentially skipping the night (we flew over greenland. The sun didn't do us the favour of setting). So we're essentially doing a two day straight travel and I'm writing this in an internet cafe in the airport in a bored and tired stupor. Fascinating stuff.

So, before I am mugged, Transformers. I'll start with a little discussion about Wolverine. That game was the last movie tie-in that I invested myself in, and it was fully worth doing. This made me get the new Transformers game on a whim when we saw it in theaters. This was either a great or a very poor decision; most likely the latter, in which case I'd learn my lesson and stop impulse buying poor games. The result has been ... interesting.

In my Prototype review I talked about how the game did a lot of different things, none of which were done THAT well but it was the variety that really gave it some kick. Transformers tries, and even pretends to do this. They're in disguise, if you will. With the press of a button you can morph to a vehicle form, and this includes transformers like Breakaway' whose vehicle form is a jet of some form. So you have a shooting, driving, platforming, and flying combat game rolled into one. Seemingly.

Some of the mechanics are just too clunky to excuse. As long as you're in vehicle form, you'll still be moving. So it's hard to keep up momentum or use vehicle-based attacks if you can't stop to get bearings. Weapons feel good, but the shooting tends to wear itself out quickly enough, making you want to flip back and forth from vehicle form to fight. This CAN work well, as when you turn into a car and run somewhere your enemies generally follow suit, resulting in some cool on the move battles, but it's hard to really get this to click in a way that's fun. When you're going out of your way to make the game itself fun, it makes me question how well it's built.

And obviously it's far from perfect, but as far as tie-ins go it certainly does a much better job than most other tie-ins. Things are decently thought out, including in-between mission conversations that let you know how well you're accomplishing objectives, and dynamically change when you don't do certain things as well. It just feels natural (as natural as autobot conversation can get). Voice acting from the humans could have done with some more emotion, but it's Transformers. The source material isn't exactly awe inspiring performance-wise.

But as I say it does a generally good tie-in job of making a decent game. It pales when placed next to Wolverine but then, so do many other original game IP's and that's nothing to be ashamed of. It's worth renting if you like the movies and on a transformers high. You'll get a good weekend of fun out of it.

In closing, here are some Finnish default keyboard characters: ääööÄÄÖÖ€£££££€€€!!

Patapon 2 - Review

2009-06-29T23:28:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Patapon 2
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Prototype
Kirby's Air Ride

Before I even begin, I know I've said I'll do a comparison of Prototype and inFAMOUS in a battle to the death, but someone much more internet famous than me beat me to it and now I'd just look unoriginal. He summarizes most main points for me well enough anyway: inFAMOUS is a more put together, thought-out game in the story and logistics sense, and has a much mroe polished feel to it. Prototype is a lot more straight up fun in the variety it offers and the direct rampage value you can get out of it. They're both good and if you like one, you'll like the other. So honestly, you should check either both or neither out one way or the other. If the superhero sandbox idea appeals to you, then do; otherwise, don't. Easy.

SO, moving on to ... news? This'll probably be my last proper entry before I head off to Sweeden (this Thursday). I'll be back come the 12th, and functional by the 14th. By then I'll probably have my sights on some new stuff gamewise, but for now, I'm going to review a couple games; namely Patapon 2 and Transformers. I'll start by saying that this Mac has totally consumed my life and I love it dearly; I have NO idea how I'll now go two weeks without it as it sits safely at home while I'm off galavanting in Sweden and area.

Anyway, now for the weather. Watch out London Ontarioers, forecast calls for nothing but rain rain rain rain for the next few days, risk of thundershowers in the 60-80% chance range. So bring an umbrella. And don't plan a film shoot outdoors (I made this mistake).

Patapon 2 is first on the chopping block. Actually, between that and Transformers, I liked the latter better, simply by principle. Not to say I love shooting and exploding better than simple rhythm games, because I don't (necessarily). In fact simple is quite often better and I have more fun with well thought out simple games, BUT. Patapon 2 just doesn't do it for me in the way it controls, and plays.

I love rhythm and timing-based games because I'm generally quite good at them. This one, though, allows you to play for four beats to give your tribe of Patapons a command, then wait for four while they carry it out. This proves to be jarring if you're in the thick of battle, see an attack from the enemy coming and want to move or defend accordingly, but need to wait for agonizing seconds in order to give your troops the command (if you do it a beat or more too soon they all trip and you have to start over again). Not to mention the "Fever" mode (which activates by keeping up this beat 4, wait 4 pattern long enough) is key to maintain in taking down some bigger enemies, while inputting the right beats will power your troop's attacks up and grant you success; doing this is occasionally impossible without quickly trying to defend and having some giant dragon monster thing breathing fire and incinerating all your Patapons in one go. Casualties are quite often impossible to avoid and there's a general sense of failure when your poor Patapons die. Strategy games do this as well; forcing you to save as many troops as you can while directing them at the common good, sacrificing the ones you need to along the way. Sacrificing your troops can be easy to do (Overlord) or excruciatingly hard (Pikmin) depending vastly on the cuteness level of the minion in question.

Either way, the whole control style of the game just seems too... odd for the type of game they're going for. They didn't change much of the formula from the first game and I'm not sure it's doing it for me. It's definitely a very different game and I tip my awesome hat to Pyramid for really trying something like that. I think it's a shining example of how you don't have to necessarily revolutionize games or introduce wacky new peripherals or devices just to really change the way they're played. It just takes one good idea, and there's not enough of those going around these days.

That scene in the picture is some fan art done by canecodesign on deviantart. It is awesome, but sadly, this scene is sorely lacking in the game.

The dark side

2009-06-18T22:55:00.004-04:00

Currently Playing

Space Invaders Extreme
Resident Evil 4
Prototype

Just this morning I crossed over and bought a macbook pro. One of the nice unibody ones. ...I can't say I'm not impressed. This thing is quite awesome. Does everything I want it to and then some. I may convert yet. For now, still running Windows XP/Vista/7 pretty consistantly on my other computers. Still need to run windows on the big gaming computer, otherwise it would become a big NOT gaming computer, oh snap.

Anyway, get ready for a pretty upset first macbook-based review; the current victim is Space Invaders Extreme.

It sucks.

Okay, I didn't mean that. It's a very well crafted game. It takes the original and spins it up in really fun, usually pretty insane ways. For reference, if you took space giraffe and crossed it with pacman championship edition, then applied the resulting game style to space invaders, you'd get this game. Or rather, we have this game.

I'll get the stuff that annoys me about it out of the way first. The backgrounds fly by very quickly, flashing many different colours. Often you'll have a wave of tiny red-coloured invaders against a red background, making them damn near impossible to shoot. Or worse yet, you'll get a bright white/yellow background, on which the enemy's shots are impossible to see. This happens every time you enter "fever" mode which is exactly what it sounds like; your shots are powered up and you can tear through enemies, getting jackpots for hitting the spaceships and all that. EVERY damn time I've died, it's been while in fever mode, which would have struck me as a rewarding, invincible time when I shouldn't have to worry about death. Yet here I am spending my time squinting to see shots that are coloured the same as the background, some with splash damage, that are near impossible to avoid.

That said, the music is really catchy, and the sound effects sync up to the beat so that you get a groove going. The combo system is hella confusing, but clear enough is that hitting 4 of the same colour in a row gets you a powerup, from bombs to a gigantic laser beam cutting across the screen. Boss fights are entertaining with massive multi-part spacecrabs scuttling at you. And it's all got that retro-made-new feel that is just fun to pick up and play for a while.

That said it's a good game, just ... straddes that line between "made for hardcore gamers/crazy people" and "accessible to newcomers". It's no Megaman 9 by any stretch, but it'll cut you down whenever it damn well wants to. Approach with caution is all I'm saying. Definitely have a go at the demo and if that's got you woodshedding already then maybe this one's not for you.

And yes, I was excited about this game. This may or may not be based on the contents of my blog's background.

Zombie's in the room! His axe is on fire! He killed your parents! SHOOT HIM IN THE HEAD

2009-06-17T19:51:00.004-04:00

Currently Playing

Resident Evil 4

Yeah, this old gamecube game has pushed me right off Prototype for now. I'm just that into it again. So, here's a little article that was most definitely inspired by that fancypants sitting on a barrel to your right, Ashley Graham, the president's daughter. The one pleasant lady to look at in zombie land.

What struck me most about Ashley was that she actually *behaves* herself in this game. She reacts pretty believably to the world around her. By default, she follows quickly and silently behind Leon. When he goes to aim at a zombie, she'll hide behind him. When you wheel around and spot a zombie behind you and go to aim at it, she'll instantly hit the deck and be out of the way so you can shoot it. She'll obediently stay in one place when you want her to, hide in stuff when you want her to, and make it VERY clear when she's in some kind of danger. As far as damsels in distress go, they don't get much better than that. Being aware and cooperative in a situation like that is what kept her alive.

See what I did there? I just started talking about her as if she actually existed. When AI characters in a game are done that well, it does wonders for the game's immersion and flow. You know, two things that make the most fun games the most fun. Games with well-written AI are just more believable in context, and blend right into the world. They don't stick out, they just fit. FEAR actually did this, with AI opponents that communicated, flanked, and restructured their attack based on the player's movements. That made it feel like you were really taking on a well-trained squad of supersoldiers, and again, it just fit really well into the game.

Most games have somewhat bad AI. Or rather, average, I suppose; even average AI sticks out so sorely that it seems like a major fault. I guess it can't really be, if we expect such realistic reactions from game characters then we're expecting a lot. It just makes the games that do pull it off well really special.

Resident Evilfail

2009-06-16T09:26:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Resident Evil 4

Yeah, I was playing Resident Evil 5, and stopped, and am now playing Resident Evil 4. A quick summary as to why is below.

I just straight-up didn't have fun playing Resident Evil 5. This isn't to say it's a poorly made game, it definitely is. It took the mechanics and play style of the 4th game and turned it into a great co-op game. I jumped on and played it with some people online filling the second spot as opposed to going it alone, and had a great time doing it.

But somewhere in there I just stopped and ... straight up missed the last game. It started when I checked my inventory and I missed tediously reorganizing my briefcase, grouping all the guns, ammo, and grenades together. I loved that part of the game, and the new inventory system didn't sit well with me at all. Then, the in-game store also left a bad taste. I severely missed hearing the shady man with the bandana go "whaddya buyin'? whaddya SELLIN'?" as I navigated his trenchcoat to get new weapons and upgrades.

Then I missed the music, and the characters, and the story, and the setting, and pretty much everything else. Soon RE5 wasn't nearly good enough, soon I just needed to play RE4 again. So I scrambled around to find my old gamecube copy of the game and fired up the Wii for the first time in months to jump back into a new RE4 game. It was akin to a smoker on two packs a day scrambling to locate a single cigarette hidden in his room after two weeks of rehab. Desperate, almost; then just relief and gratification.

Bizarre. Again, it's not to say that RE5 isn't a good game. It is good. Great, even. It takes an excellent game engine and just builds on it effectively. It's a perfect example of, if a sequel to a game is made, what it should be. But this makes me wonder as to whether another entire game with so much likeness to the previous one is really worth its while... I know each time I pick up Resident Evil 5 I'll just wish it was Resident Evil 4. I'll just miss the latter too much. I'd rather they rebooted the franchise again and came up with a whole new play style, even something like the on-rails Wii rendition of the Umbrella Chronicles. ...Not to say that was a better game, it definitely wasn't; I just preferred the new play style. Making the new game too much like RE4 just makes me nostalgic, it doesn't make me want to go on new adventures with different characters in a different place. That's me, though.

Anyway, once I push through RE4 a bit more I'll polish off prototype and get that comparative review up on the site, that'll be in short order. For the time being I've got an angry Spanish midget to trade sarcastic quips with.

Prototype - Review

2009-06-11T22:34:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Prototype
inFAMOUS
Resident Evil 5

For the first time in months I checked the blog's analytics and realized that some people are actually reading it. This shocked me beyond reason. Maybe it'll make me step my game up a few notches. Or, maybe I'll just keep casually ranting in my usual manner, or maybe both. I'll just casually rant really hard.

So get ready for my super hard casual rant on Prototype, the most recent explosionfest from surprise developer Radical Entertainment. I say surprise here because Radical was responsible for one of my favourite hero games of all time, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. I didn't actually realize this connection until I picked up Prototype for the first time, at which point the game seemed all too hauntingly familiar, and I realized I'd played it before.

Yes, Alex Mercer, the shapeshifting hero of this game (he's actually a villain, really, as there's no moral choice system in the game and he heals by literally eating people) behaves in much the same way as the Hulk does in Destruction. There's a "run" button that makes Alex flip parcour style over anything in his path, including skyscrapers, but when you've got a shield of biomatter equipped he'll just plough right through everything, hulk-style. He chucks busses and tanks at helicopters, he makes shockwaves by pounding the ground by gaining "critical mass" (a term they didn't even bother changing between games) and the uprade system are all perfect likenesses to our large green friend's counterpart game. They've even sampled a fair bit of their own sound library of crowds screaming in terror; I remember hearing that same girl yell "LOOK OUT" dozens of times over the last few years.

This doesn't work against it in the long run, though. Alex's real advantage in this game is his flexibility. You can play it however you want; in almost every mission you can either burst in powers blazing, or you can stealth it up by consuming/disguising yourself as enemy officers and sneak into their ranks, sabotage their equipment, that sort of thing. You can fly around pelting attacks at your foes on the ground, or do so leaping from building side to building side; you can hijack military vehicles and use them to attack, you can rip dudes into pieces with your own bio-weapons like blades or hammers attached to your arms, or you can grab their guns and shoot them down in a target-based way... this game includes almost every combat style you can think of. That's its real strength and it's done WELL, or at least, in a way that makes every one of those mechanics very fun and satisfying to use.

What Prototype is missing is polish. It's got an original (though badly written) narrative, which I'll talk about later. Its menus are clunky and the text is awfully hard to see and navigate through, and admittedly I have a standard def. TV but whatever way you slice it white glowy red text on a white background is just straight up bad design no matter how you look at it. I had to squint my way through all the upgrade menus to figure out how to even use half of the powers. The difficulty curve is unpredictable; in one level you'll be winging through no problem but in the next you'll be blasted out of the sky in miliseconds, leaving you hurling controllers at the wall wondering how the hell they even render that many choppers in the air at once. The game's structure is just generally haphazard, and it feels almost rushed, like even this deadline was one that they were hard pressed to get the game done for. But none of this changes the fact that once you're into a mission or just in-world leaping over tanks and skewering them with a tendril from underground you're just having so much damn fun. As far as I'm concerned, in a game that's all that matters. If you like to rampage, buy this game, no question.

The next big article I'll write is a Prototype VS inFAMOUS piece, because let's face it, two open-world hero games with very similar protagonists coming out within weeks of each other are bound to be compared anyway. Each one is good and bad for their own reasons and I'll break it down. So much for Resi 5, I guess, though having too many awesome games to get through in my spare time is never a bad thing.

Resident Evil 5 - LiveReview

2009-06-07T22:07:00.004-04:00

Currently Playing

Resident Evil 5

Shockingly, I bought this game a few weeks ago, and it's been sitting on my desk ever since. It's been surpassed by games like Killing Floor, inFAMOUS, and Plants vs. Zombies, all of which I've wrapped up playing and put nice pretty bows on, and all of them I'm incredibly happy with the results of. Now along comes another zombie game ready to wow me with its incredible likeness to Resident Evil 4. Coming up next is a fantastic on the fly review of the game. The real question remains: will it be good enough to keep me hooked for the next week or two, or will it be ousted by Prototype the minute it comes out? After tonight (read: skip to the bottom to find out), I shall know for sure. If a game doesn't really hook me in within the first few hours, I won't pay it much more attention in lieu of more interesting stuff, if such stuff is to be found. But here we go. I'll run it for an hour then stop blogging it.

10:26 - Patching the game.
10:27 - Game is now patched. That was fast. Off we go.
10:29 - Fascinated by the online options. Opting to play this one solo with an AI companion.
10:30 - OMG RACISM! Black men throwing up worms, white men shooting them in the head. Not going to dwell on the whole racism issue in this post, I don't think.
10:31 - Redfield meets... ...the girl. Whose name I missed and hardly care about. Chris is already getting emo over his past relationships. Interesting true story that Leigh Alexander brought to my attention: nobody hooks up in this series, ever. She's right. how lame is ... ...and as I typed this the heroine was "patted down" by a guard. Chicka chicka yeaaa.
10:33 - I now get to pick up the controller and press buttons. Only 7 minutes. Not bad.
10:34 - Man, I forgot how tight the camera is behind the character. It's a bit too close for my liking... remember taking a while to get used to this in RE4 too.
10:37 - Got our guns. Now I'm nervous. Before a character in a game gets a gun, usually, you're safe. After you get a weapon, you're a walking target, since you can defend yourself...
10:41 - Nothing much but dead animals and corpses around so far...
10:43 - "Did you hear that? Screaming! Let's go investigate!" I can tell I'm going to just love Sheva.
10:45 - And, first zombie.
10:46 - It charged us and Sheva ROUNDHOUSE KICKED IT ACROSS THE ROOM. Then, says "what the hell just happened?" What happened is you got NINJA ON SOME ASS!
10:49 - "These don't move like any zombies I've ever seen." ...This sounded silly until I realized that Chris has seen a few zombies in his day. ...And then it was still silly.
11:01 - That was intense. Mobbed by zombies. The RE music and characters are really making me nostalgic for RE4, though... ...which is absurd, but, that's just what's happening. I miss it. Leon was awesome. Ashley was hot. What do you want from me? I'll give this one more of a chance to win me over. It's not nighttime enough for me here.
11:15 - Well, an Ashley-esque hotness girl showed up and a plague promptly burst out of her head. Welcome to my next week's nightmares.
11:20 - Wow, HUD elements fade in and out very dynamically. Very cool. This plays like RE4 but feels fresh enough to really get me into it.
11:23 - The two heroes just kick the hell out of any door they come across. So what happened to old-school RE with the slow-opening door sequences to built atmosphere?
11:24 - Need a key to get through this door. Now THAT is more like it.
11:26 - Copious amounts of ammo and health + unusually quiet + ominous furnace that's switch and timer-triggered nearby = BOSS FIGHT COMING!
11:30 - Boss fight: victory by furnace. Also, what xbox, barbequed an entire large slime creature and no cleverly-worded achievement to celebrate the occasion? For shame.

So, that's just over an hour but the boss was worth sticking around for. Verdict? I'm into it. I'll keep going with this, most probably in lieu of Prototype, for the next few days. Hoping I get further sucked in by characters and all that mess. We'll have to see. Lots of delicious gurgling noises and that business in this game. Zombies aren't pretty, or quiet. Unless it's a game developed by popcap.

Full review coming soon, with all due hope. Prototype coming, and I'll be throwing some E3 tidbits up before long as well.

inFAMOUS - Review

2009-06-05T18:19:00.007-04:00

Currently Playing

inFAMOUS
Resident Evil 5
Space Invaders Extreme

As a massive goody-two shoes, and like most other serious gamers (at least the ones I know), when I play through a game with moral good/evil choice options in it, I always take the good guy route the first time around, then if the game is good enough, play through again to be a jerk. When I began to play inFAMOUS and I was presented with my first moral choice (steal a bunch of food by zapping some people and keep it for myself, or share it with everyone) I decided that, for once, I would play the evil side of things on my first go. So off I went, kicking puppies and frying orphanages, and as a result, crappy things kept happening in the story. Cole's girlfriend hated him, his best friend only stayed that way because he was afraid of him, his superiors treated him like crap, and people in the street chucked stuff at Cole, yelled, all that business. That makes a gargantuan amount of sense. If you're a loser, then people don't like you. Sure.

So, the game was so good (and I'll talk logistics at the end of this rant), and then some. So I restarted it to play through the good missions. I was dismayed to find that despite doing all the right things, Cole's girlfriend STILL hated him, his best friend STILL only stayed his friend because he was afraid of him, and his superiors STILL treated him like crap. The only noticable difference, surprisingly, was in how people on the street reacted. They'd snap photos, wave, and call out his name as though they were seeing a celebrity on the streets.

Once I reached the end of mission 36 (out of 40) on the evil storyline, something so awful and hard-hitting happened it made me put the controller down and gape at my television for several minutes. I felt so terrible for myself, despite being such a jerk. I was sure going down the path of righteousness would remedy this... but, I was horrified to discover, just now, that being a good guy doesn't save Cole from any of the terrible stuff his evil counterpart went through. I was stupified again, and this time, I didn't pick the controller back up after setting it down; I went to get a glass of chocoate milk while this review wrote itself in my head.

A game that implements the difference between good and evil should, you'd think, establish positive and negative concequences for those choices. That brings up a whole "control over your own destiny" talk I don't want to get into, but it fascinated me that doing "the right thing" did nothing more than save the lives of NPC's. Randoms. People you'd never put a name to the faces of. When I was evil, countless numbers of them died, many at my own hands. But the game never punished me for it. Now, in the good story, I save lives every time I see one I'm able to save. Yet, bad things still happen to Cole. His treatment of others doesn't affect how haywire his own life goes.

This could do one of two things. Send a message saying "only worry about yourself, because shit still happens to you in the long run", or send a message saying "care about others too, because shit will still happen in the long run, but maybe you can save those around you from some of it".

Either way, I'm quite sure Sucker Punch didn't develop the game with that in mind, it's just a shoddy morality system. Which screws that whole idea up a bit.

Either way, thought provoking for me, I guess. Let me know if you think different. Oh, right, the game itself? Beautifully crafted. It's got that shimmering sheen of polish that is reserved for only a few games that come out these days. Thoughtful snapping in the platforming, progressive unlocks in the combat system that keep things fresh while curving your learning of the controls perfectly, and the powers are just damn fun to use. The game is absolutely LITTERED with great design choices. The way the music builds at just the right moments, the way Cole's electricity plays off metal objects and makes bypassers jump ever so slightly, the richness of the world itself, it's all just so fun to use that the broken morality system and the below-average character models are quite easy to ignore. This is an absolute must-have for Ps3 owners, hands down.

I wanted to end the review on a good note despite all the mixed feelings on how the choice system works out, so there it is: inFAMOUS really wins.

Coming up over the weekend are some thoughts about E3 and what we'll be seeing out of it, I'll be cracking into Resident Evil 5 finally, and getting stoked about tuesday's Prototype release date. Looks like this summer has really got our backs on the whole hero front, which is definitely fine by me.

New PSP redesign (pretty much) confirmed: PSP GO

2009-05-30T15:06:00.002-04:00

Currently Playing

inFAMOUS

Usually I have a few games on the go but, yeah, this time I'm fully focused on inFAMOUS because... well, it deserves my attention. The review is going to be very positive. I'm doing my first playthrough as an evil character and a plot twist so insane just hit last night that caused me to pause, put my controller down and just gape in dumbfounded shock at what happened. Anyway, review forthcoming on that one. Then comes resident evil 5.

For now, check out this (official) leaked photo of the new psp (saw the news break at eurogamer first). It sprouted up with a youtube video of Sony showing off some of its functionality (which I was going to embed but it was pulled during the time of writing. Sony got on it quick, not surprisingly). It doesn't support the UMD functionality, and is solely geared toward downloadable games. That screen does in fact slide up from the lower portion to expose the controls, just like it looks like it does. I'm not sure about any more stats, though as E3 hits we'll find out more solid information on it.

Now I just bought a new PSP and I hope that 1) this isn't too expensive, or 2) nothing exclusive comes out for it. If nothing does, then I won't have to worry about hope number 1. My only parameters for owning consoles is that I want to be able to play any new, good game out there, and if I don't have the hardware for it, I want to have it so I can play whatever exclusives it's got. That is sadly going to apply to the ipod touch as well, which I'll be getting this summer (for free with a new macbook. Apple's going to take a lot of my money this summer).

In any case, the new PSP looks pretty slick, and entirely internal media or media pulled from a cloud somewhere (basically, without physical games like UMD's) is definitely the right direction for portable gaming. You can take all your games with you without worrying about carrying the console and a whole bunch of clunky cartriges, and worry about switching between them and fumbling around in a train or bus or plane. Nintendo should take note of this concept... the new DSi store is a step in the right direction, but still not enough of one. Need to go totally digital on this one, at least I think so. If you think different then comment it up and let me know what you think about all that.

Fracture - LiveReview

2009-05-25T22:58:00.004-04:00

Currently Playing

Fracture
Lair
Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction

It's a Ps3 party as I just rounded up a bunch of games, listed above. I've played a lot of Ratchet recently, and a review of that will go up once it's done, but for now I'm going to dive into Fracture. This game I picked up for 15 bucks on a whim and the advice of a friend. I'm going to play through the first while, livereview it, then do a proper summary and append it when I'm done. Before I get started, some housecleaning: despite those games being acquired, infamous is tomorrow and I think that'll veto all other games until I'm done, as the demo I played through impressed me very, very greatly.

Okay, here we go. Somehow I really like this premise: global warming ended up splitting the US right down the middle; east and west became two separate entities and are warring back and forth. What's with media going all environmental? It was Transporter 3 earlier this week for me, now this.
Backstory was short and sweet. Throwing me into the helicopter thing now.
Wow, they're chucking HUD elements up live with the conversation with tokin' black guy commander fellow. That's actually pretty clever.
Why hello terrain deformation gun. Why yes, I'd love to MAKE MOUNTAINS INEXPLICABLY FOR NO REASON.
Okay ... (checks box for developer's name)... ...ah, day 1 studios. Okay Day 1, this is wonderful terrain deformation you've come up with here. Pro tip, though: grenades deforming terrain = good idea. Terrain deforming gun = contrived.
Have been walked through all the weapons, inclinding "spike grenades" that make big columns of ... dirt... shoot out of the ground? Hmm.
The problem I have with fully destructible environments and full terrain deformation is that they can't exist in the same game at the same time, or at least, I've never seen it. I'm sure no developer has found a real solid way to make it work but I prefer to think they're afraid of making the Ps3 hemorrhage too much awesomeness at once.
This main character looks like an unreal tournament reject. Bright coloured power armour, massive clunky feet...
Gameplay is so far a pretty mega win in my books. Made it through the first level area and am really enjoying the terrain manipulation. Example: created a crater below three charging enemies, they tripped into it, lobbed grenade in on top. Boom. Very interesting.
Wow, they're killing characters off the minute they're introduced. Won't expect any more story in here. Too bad, premise is intriguing.
Case in point: (redshirt) "Is it bad luck to mention I'm two weeks away from getting out?" (Grenade kills all but protagonist)
Bad game design moment: spawning into the level in the middle of a field with a dozen enemies ALREADY shooting me with their weapons. Less than half a second in, health was taking significant hits on normal difficulty. On hard this would wreck someone very quickly. Not much fun.
This game does some neat puzzle stuff with the terrain. Raise an enemy and crush him between ground and ceiling.
I'm bummed out when we run through metal corridors with no terrain to deform. When that happens this just turns into a subpar shooter. ...VERY subpar. Aiming and enemy behaviour are below average, cover system doesn't really exist without deforming terrain to make live cover.
Speaking of using hills/craters as cover, I'm doing that more and more. It's just so easy to blast a mountain into existance in the middle of the environment and just cower behind that while reloading.
Everything was slinky, now I'm partway through the second level and... "Hydras. Are they human? BARELY." suddenly it's a dude vs monsters/aliens with guns. This is looking aaawfully familiar.

I'll have to cut things off here since a) it's getting late and b) laptop's running low on juice. Suffice to say I'm somewhat impressed, but the aliens showing up is a dire warning of the terribleness that may befall me. I'll append the full review once I've played through the game, my biggest concerns being the game's direction and whether the live landscaping business gets old fast or not, as it'll have to rely on this stuff right up until the end.

Army of Two - Review

2009-05-24T23:26:00.004-04:00

Currently Playing

Army of Two
Space Invaders Extreme
Team Fortress 2

Before I begin with the review, I just finished watching Transporter 3, one of the latest movies of the Jason Statham variety. Fast paced, overly edited action all around, making his adventures seem almost episodic in nature. What shocked me more than most of the mediocrity was the main villain's evil plot: to pollute half of the US with garbage for at least a hundred years(!!) Have people these days been so consumed by environmentalism that they literally find this sort of thing terrifying? I suppose it would be somewhat unpleasant to have trash dumped on your house constantly for a hundred years, sure. ...Never mind, I won't give this movie any more attention, as I type the credits are rolling making me want to dive into my next, more interactive, piece of entertainment. This week Fracture is up on the chopping block, I expect nothing short of mundane but you'll hear about it either way. But, not yet. For now, Army of Two.

I know some game reviewers that begin with the negative parts of the game, which seems somewhat backwards but I'll give it a shot this time around. So, what's wrong with Army of Two? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever... so how, then, will I come up with so many negative things to say about it? It's a by-the-book third person shooter, meaning it borrows elements from many different games. Its cover system, on-rails segments and typical american storyline have been used, borrowed, and borrowed again. Although games that take these and combine them well may be fun to play, you get that haunting feeling that you've done it all before. There's nothing wrong with that if the game introduces something new in order to add a new dynamic to the action. That's where aggro comes in; or the principle of drawing attention to or away from yourself by working with your partner to get the other one into a good position to take out more guys. Balancing aggro between the two is vital to success, especially when one gets hurt and the other has to draw the heat away from them so they can recover, for example. You can't really get good position on them any other way and when you're knocked down only your teammate can drag your sore ass behind some cover to revive you so teamwork is something of a must.

I've tried this sort of gameplay both with and without a human. I found I enjoyed the experience more with a friend and that makes a whole lot of sense. Without a friend, you can control your AI teammate with stop, advance, and regroup commands in either a passive or aggressive mode, to control how much aggro he generates or avoids. This works very well, but you miss out on the tactical thinking and general yelling back and forth with your friend. With is much more fun, plus sequences like AoT's "back to back" moments when you're surrounded and independantly deal with threats in slow motion, covering each other's back at once, really get one into the moment. Despite this, though, the game doesn't really have enough of a flavour to carry itself without that teammate there, and even if you do have a friend to play with, it's an okay experience but just too same-y to stand out too much, despite how well it's done.

So that's the way it is. Other business; one point I forgot to mention last weekend was the big event Valve put on for their most recent update to Team Fortress 2. They've been rolling out periodic updates for their classes every few months, and proceeded to blow their fan's minds with two updates rolled into one last weekend, plus having a "play for free all weekend" deal for newcomers to enjoy the old and new content. The weapon unlocking system is awfully botched, and don't be surprised if I come back venting about its chief failings very soon. Until then, you can check out TF2 on Steam for half price until the end of the day Monday, I think, so have a gander at that if you so desire.

Coming up next is Space Invaders, inFAMOUS come Tuesday, and the aforementioned Fracture thrown in as well. Stay tuned!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Review

2009-05-14T09:36:00.002-04:00

Currently Playing

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Left 4 Dead

Why Adam, you say, you've been playing Left 4 Dead for ages. Isn't it time to move on? Well no, it's not, mostly due to the release of a game called Killing Floor on Steam. It started out as an unreal tournament mod but it grew into a fully fledged survival horror game of its own. It comes out today and with its 15 dollar price point, I intend to buy the hell out of it. It's an FPS where you fight to survive in a co-op fashion with a few other friends online, while mowing down hordes of monsters. Sound familiar? I'm just practicing up.

Okay, so as for Wolverine... I'd like to talk about movie tie-ins first, briefly. The horribleness of these games is usually offset for some players by the "ZOMG IT'S TEH SAME AS TEH MOVIE" feeling. By "players" of course, I mean "kids who don't play many video games". The last movie-game that really impressed me was Spiderman 2, with the free-world webswinging it pioneered. Ever since then every other Spiderman game just relied on this mechanic, and didn't bother to make the rest of the game any fun. When the first Hulk movie came out, the accompanying game was so terrible, another developer went ahead and made Ultimate Destruction which was not movie-based, but made for the sake of making a good Hulk game, and it ended up being one of my old favourites.

Wolverine seemed like it would be another gong show of mediocrity. I prepared myself to be let down but when I started seeing gameplay footage... I realized they were taking a 14a-rated type of movie and making it a VERY NOT 14a-rated type of game. Not only that, they borrowed combat styles from God of War and they borrowed them pretty well. I ended up buying Wolverine the night I saw star trek, and it ended up being one of the most fun nights in recent memory; not just from the star trek movie being badass but Wolverine being shockingly fun to play. Controls are really responsive, from the gut-wrenching finishers that take place every time you hit the Y button, to lunging back and forth among your enemies and becoming a general whirlwind of claws and hugh jackman's crazy hair. Small details are thought out all over the place, like interactive vehicle-murdering cutscenes (quicktime events without the prompts... actually makes them feel more real) and camera angles positioned just right during mandatory platforming segments. Wolverine's moveset evolves at just the right pace, letting you pick up new attacks to keep things interesting. After you finish a massive wave of enemies, the next area opens up and one or two of the weakest enemies show up at the entrance, letting you lunge and murder them in an instant for a satisfying final kill, and directing you right toward your next objective. Design like that doesn't come along often, and it certainly doesn't come along often in movie games.

This game for most people will be a good solid rental. You'll be able to finish it in that time, and see the highlights from the movie, with some interesting boss fights to boot. Once you play through it, it's kind of done... but man is it ever glorious. It's also pretty graphic, wolverine gets more messed up than we've ever seen him get, so be ready for that, I guess.

Resistance - Review

2009-04-29T02:02:00.002-04:00

Currently Playing

Resistance

It's damn good.

Addendum: All right all right. Games that get success like Resistance are usually really tight, put-together products. You can tell a lot of thought went into the design of the various parts of the game. Sound, for example, was done really well, as was the responsiveness of the controls. When you reload your weapon clicks back and forth, in some cases making little power-up noises and such. It feels so responsive to your button press that it's just damn fun to do, and when you manage to make the act of reloading a gun in your FPS fun then you're REALLY doing something right.

This sort of satisfaction usually pushes the realism of the game and its control, sound, etc. down a fair bit, but then, what's more fun, realism or satisfying gameplay? If you have to pick, the latter would win every time. Resistance is an alien invasion game and yet it's a slightly more down-to-earth one than most (...I didn't even plan that joke out). Aliens with superior technology come to have their way with our race and our planet and that's generally what they tend to do, except of course for the game's character that has an immunity to some of their weapons (he still harbors the usual weakness to "bullets", though). The weapons are generally really creative (guns that fire around corners, for example) and along with that satisfying gameplay element, makes for a super fun shooter.

If you're a Ps3 owner that likes shooters, you have to own this game; if you don't it's at a very affordable 30$ price point these days at the most, and can come even cheaper if you look for used copies and that kind of thing. Polished games really deserve all the attention they get; when that much attention is paid to the user's gameplay experience and optimizing all that stuff, it can forgive almost any visual fault or bug you can think of, because it's just damn fun.

Legendary - Review

2009-04-27T02:24:00.002-04:00

Currently Playing

Legendary
Left 4 Dead
Geist

I didn't read any critic responses or reviews before making an actual investment in Legendary. This is highly unusual of me, especially for a game I had interest in. Especially for a game I had interest in that came out last November. But, it wasn't much money, and I felt it would be a good experiment. After I played through it and gathered some of my own impressions, I came to write some of my thoughts down here. To my surprise, they were on the whole quite god awful.

I can understand why critics (and all other people) don't like this game. Initially I found the aiming sensitivity to be way off (I played it for the PC) from the movement sensitivity, and the character's running and jumping abilities to be lacking (he can only hop an inch in the air). You can imagine my dismay when my assumption that the developers wouldn't be stupid enough to program movement this shoddy then add big PLATFORMING segments to their game turned out wrong. Platforming happened. And it was as choppy, clunky and useless as it could possibly be. And apart from some of the creatures, the game isn't exactly pretty. Character models look like play-dough figures and unfinished and undetailed sets litter the level design. And don't get me started on the story. Every time an unskippable cutscene jagged its way into the game I burst out laughing at least once each time at its attempts to explain what the hell was going on.

But I found myself nagging it to end so I could get back to shooting werewolves, which is a great sign. A lot of the shooting and creatures are really well done, which is good since that's what you spend the game doing. The werewolves look great, and don't die till you cut or blow their heads off. Flying ghost-like creatures called Nari are only killed by force-pushing them to make them real; until then they can posess objects and hurl them around. Oh, by the way, you can store energy from the environment and dead creatures, and use it to heal or force push things. Or arm bombs, apparently.

The werewolf fights happen frequently and are all very fun. They hop around from wall to ceiling, and can stalk you quietly from the shadows and leap out if you're not paying attention. Fights with them are fast-paced and generally awesome, force-pushing crates at them and using the distraction to freeze them and shotgun their heads off is snappy and satisfying. There are epic-sized fights too; a fifty-story golem storming through the streets of new york gave me haunting memories of watching Cloverfield, except I had a gun and could be stepped on if I wasn't careful. Watching that thing plough through buildings and stuff busses into times square screens looked quite good and had some gleeful intensity to it that only I might be able to derive (all I can advise is, if you enjoyed cloverfield and for some reason wished you were the cameraman, this is worth it).

In the end Legendary is only good when it focuses on the few strengths it has going for it. It can get outright infuriating when the story, platforming, bad level design, or terrible human characters litter the scene. Which is almost all the time. But as a shooter, it works, and although there's plenty of better ones out there this one's worth seeing, especially if you're a PC gamer with a few extra bucks to drop on a new shooter. Control is FAR worse on the consoles, so I'd skip it altogether in those cases.

Mirror's Edge 2D released

2009-04-24T21:34:00.005-04:00

Currently Playing

Mirror's Edge 2D

After some minor changes, it's a blog again! At least, it's more of a blog than it was before... I doubt you'll notice the improvements I made but they're all there, subtle as can be, and this thing looks cooler than ever. I might have put way too much effort into what is essentially not that significant but, it sure made me happy. So I don't mind. The most relevant thing I did was streamline the tagging I've been doing. If you check out the game platforms menu at the right you can pick your platform of choice and it'll filter out relevant posts. Cool? Cool.

Either way quick post to plug this 2D flash game I've been fascinated with. If you've read me for a while you'll remember this post where I plugged the same game in its beta format. Now it's "out" so to speak, with more levels, a time trial sort of mode, leaderboards for the fastest runs through... that sort of thing. The combat is nonexistant and is, yet, just as frustrating as the real game's combat was. The whole thing is very faithfully recreated in 2d (and if you got that joke you know enough about the original to check this out). It's not too long but it's just flash based and it's really fun, so go run through it. Provides a nice contrast to the first person sort of parcour that the real game is based on. On that note, EA was sponsoring this project and advertising for the game is all over that site. I really liked mirror's edge, though, and still think it's worth checking out; at least this version is since it's free.

Survival Pack - way too insane

2009-04-24T14:43:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Left 4 Dead
Geist
GTA: Chinatown Wars

I know I'm in a minority but I've played left 4 dead so much I've gotten it down to a science, all the way up to the expert level. I know all the ins and outs of competitive VS matches, playing as humans or zombies, strategies for taking down survivors or for warding off many threats at once... I've become so practiced, I'd have thought the game would have lost its charm or its impact by now. But I still can't help but get that same "damn, we're HOSED" feeling when someone shoots a car alarm and I hear the howling of the horde coming to run us down.

Since I'm so well versed in the game, the new Survival mode makes me feel as though it's built just for me, and almost no one else is welcome in this corner of the game. Valve makes it pretty clear that it's built for the hardcore crowd by taking every one of the creatures they've devised and hurling them at you all at once. Then, they multiply. Then, they multiply more, such that you're fighting so many threats at once you don't know where to turn. They give you almost infinite resources and supplies, many of which you'll never use because of how quickly you die. With all my practice and experience, I have yet to achieve what they call a silver medal standard, which is survival for seven minutes. Bronze level is five minutes, and gold standard is ten minutes. Many casual players of the game I've watched can't even hit two minutes.

As punishing as it is, the mode isn't really made clear that it's on another whole tier of difficulty up from the other modes of play. I feel like it'll be more than zombies scaring people away from this title if they're new to it. The difficulty really ramps up if you play it on an expert setting, but survival is so fast and so intense, dying within two minutes is guaranteed on your first runs through it and that's really frustrating for players. I'm hoping people give it more of a chance than that.

Might review Geist soon, as it's an older game that I only just finally got around to playing. It has some pretty neat ideas that I wish more games these days were drawing from. Will write more about that soon, probably.

PAIN! - Review

2009-04-19T21:03:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

PAIN!
littleBIGplanet
Burnout Paradise
Eden

Ever since my Ps3 purchase I've been waiting for it to go out of style and take its proper place alongside my other current consoles, but it's not backing down yet. Must still have that "new" sheen to it, albeit enough of one to still have an appeal. As I've been locked to the house by exams and the studying thereof, and my free time not usually being spent inside the house, I've needed a game that I can pick up, play briefly, then leave and not worry about big time commitments. All the games I'm playing fit this bill, but downloadable titles are just right for this sort of thing, being small and quickly satisfying playgrounds to dash in and out of at will for ten minute game breaks. So, pain.

It's as advertised, which isn't much; a simple physics-based sandbox where you fling cartoonish masochistic ragdolls into danger-filled environments, powered by your good friend and mine, the havoc engine. More bruises, burns and broken bones result in higher scores. Taking the gleeful childlike pleasure resulting from tormenting our subjects of play and grinding it down to its most basic level, PAIN! doesn't really pull any punches, just delivers what it promises and gets out of dodge.

The problem I have with its simplicity is the price it makes you pay. You get one level with the game with a few modes to play in - granted, the levels are really detailed and one could derive a lot of playtime out of each one - but all additional levels require subsequent five dollar payments. Beyond two or three stock characters, you have to pay to unlock the other 30 some odd figures.

It seems like a lowball tactic for a game like Call of Duty, an A-grade title, to require payment for the aquisition of all the game's multiplayer weapon options; let alone a tiny downloadable title make you cough up almost double the game's original value plus its retail just to acquire all the basic content to begin with.

It's worth playing, but beyond the one level they give you, it's not really worth investigating the rest. I purchased a theme park to launch my victims into for five bucks extra, and found that explosive teddy bears there grant the same sort of satisfaction from explosive barrels in the city. Download it (and spend an afternoon patching it, I sure did, the inefficient pricks) but stick with the basic content. That's pretty much all there is to see. If you're reading this then you're not really the audience for all the rest of that mess.

EA ships weapons to gamers, is retarded

2009-04-11T21:35:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Pain
Street Fighter 4

Here's the quick version: EA decided it would be a good idea to ship brass knuckles as a promotional item to people who buy certain copies of the game. Before too long they realized that this was not only illegal (not only selling these things, but even shipping them to people), but terrible for their image.

EA as usual, is not commenting on sketchy business practices until they come up with a vague misleading statement to give to the press to clean up as much egg off their face as possible.

As is, people have this general conception, or misconception as the case may be, about games and their place in society. A lot of people who don't really understand them and how they work are somewhat frightened by them, and the effect they have on people. Even more specifically, voilence in games, and their potential to make other people violent. I won't speak on my opinions to how valid that concept is; that violent games make people themselves violent, or have that capacity, at least.

But it's redundant in the end; weaponizing game players by giving them the actual tools to injure people in the same way the game's characters injure people, doesn't do anything for society's faith in the game industry as a whole. I'm incredibly dismayed in EA, and their idea that it was a good idea to pull this off, regardless of whether it was a publicity stunt or whether they actually intended to sell those things to people. Either option is not that appealing.

I wish game companies would work on improving their image rather than produce ideas like this that give ammunition to politicians and the like to push games out of our culture. What a waste.

Credits to Kotaku on the image/story.

Flower - Review

2009-04-10T19:24:00.005-04:00

Currently Playing

Flower
Pain
GTA: Chinatown Wars

Funny fact: I'm posting a lot more these days than when I was taking my blogging class. And literally earning more marks in school the more I posted. I think it's mostly because I'm back with my old blog now and at it again. I'm very much happier with this blog than my last one. I can keep it a lot more personal, maybe... or perhaps I like the way I lay out my blogs better... or maybe it's the distinct lack of pressure to post? Whatever it is, I'm digging it.

Anyway, quick review of Flower. This'll be the last artsy game I get into for a while, so this unofficially ends my games-as-art series. I might delve back into this territory again later, it depends on how many game companies jump in and try to go this route with such games. Flower is artsy through and through; controls boil down to tilting the controller and holding a button. ...Any button. Doesn't matter. Seriously, pick any button (no, not the start button, smartass.) and hold it and it'll do its thing. And in this game the thing is "blowing the wind". You've got to blow flower petals into other flower petals to make them bloom. And that's it.

For a while I thought I'd be too quote unquote "hardcore" for these sorts of games. I'm glad to discover I haven't hit that particular low yet and can still find the visual beauty and the charm in the simplicity of games like flower. It's a very peaceful, visually pleasing experience. These fields of grass and trees and general coloured foliage is put into sharp contrast with grungy, grimy city streets that you walk down every day, and that juxtaposition makes the fields all that more beautiful. But then as you progress, your "apartment" that serves as the game's menu and the shots of the city that you see... keep getting brighter, somehow. And nicer. Until by the end you're looking at a city covered in earth, fields of grass sprouting from the roads, until the biggest skyscraper explodes into a massive tree. As environmentalist as it all looks/sounds by the end I like thinking of it as a perception thing. Keeping a positive outlook on life in general makes everyday things seem that much more colourful and enjoyable.

But that's what's great about Flower, is you can take a lot of things away from it. It's art if I've ever seen it and it makes me pretty excited about where these ideas are going with video games.

And as an annoyed addendum, PAIN is taking a damn long time to be ready to play. First a 450 meg download that takes all afternoon. Then an installation process. Then an UPDATE process of more than half the game's actual size (250 megs) and an installation process to go with that as well! CHRIST. This had better be worth it.

Galatea

2009-04-09T14:26:00.004-04:00

Currently Playing

Galatea

I'm not usually really moved or inspired by games. I just spoke about Linter in Shadows, which was made essentially as an art piece for the Ps3. I can understand how people can find meaning and message in it; I was mostly just totally confused by it.

This story, on the other hand, is as great an art piece and a game as I can possibly imagine. It centers around a conversation with a living sculpture called Galatea. You're an art critic coming to speak with her. That's all I'm going to tell you.

It's a game in a much more full sense than Linger was, because you definitely directly affect its outcome. It's built like a text-based RPG so you literally steer the conversation. But Galatia is such a rich character in this game; she has moods and feelings, and those change based on what you talk about. As such there are dozens of ways the "story" can end. It's all very sad and at times, beautiful... call me corny all you like but I definitely found it moving and I hope at least someone reading this does as well.

If you're confused on what to do, the best thing to do is to ask and tell about things. press A ___ to ask, for example, A APPLES asks Galatia about apples, while T APPLES tells her about them. You can also examine your surroundings... start by typing in HELP for more instructions. I really hope that those of you without really any background in playing text-based games can figure your way around it... it's fully worth going through, and it'll only take a few minutes. For me it was really powerful. I hope some of you find some part of that when you play it.

Littlebigplanet - Review

2009-04-08T14:09:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Littlebigplanet
Noby Noby Boy

Interesting true story: my current quote is one from Clive Owen, a man who frequently stands to profit. However, ironically enough, I've added some google adsense stuff to my blog. It'll come online in the next couple days. I'll be amused to see if it actually generates any income. Cheques will be rolling in for a free 20 cents MONTHLY! My problems are over. Might as well quit the day job.

...So, sure, littlebigplanet.

It won't surprise you to hear that paul sham is punching me in the head. This is because, of course, he is a very violent individual with no respect for himself or others.

...So, sure, littlebigplanet.

If I seem distracted while I'm writing this article, it's because I am. School has left me with less than one hour of sleep last night, and thankfully the end is in sight; as of 9 pm tonight or so I'll be finished with third year, more or less.

SO. littlebigplanet.

The level customization tools are not what I'd call speedy. They're very dynamic and functional, and someone with a lot of time could make some pretty spectacular things. This is demonstrated in the "campaign" mode or what have you, containing levels designed by media molecule, and contain some very neat things. Favourites included running from flaming snakes zipping through tight corridors, an evil skull bulldozer that destroys the level behind you (and you if you don't move fast enough), and a flying machine with balloons controlled by rocket propulsion. I also like how you can reward people playing your levels with the objects you create that it contains.

The tools are almost too dynamic. I find myself overwhelmed in these levels; not knowing how to even begin building. I can't imagine how some of the more complex levels came to be in the community; the lives of those designers was either stolen from them, or didn't exist to begin with. That said, the rating tools for the levels work well enough; terrible levels get buried in short order while good levels are spread around for all to see. I love the game just to see what extents people's creativity will go, but I keep finding myself annoyed when I get all worked up over the awesome possibilities, then jump into the level creator and find myself beating my sack-head against a sponge after thirty minutes of attempted building and nothing to show for it but a rocket launcing toward an exploding crate.

Games as Art

2009-04-06T23:49:00.003-04:00

Currently Playing

Linger in Shadows

The whole games as art debate is pretty complicated. You can argue all sorts of points for both sides of the issue. As for me, I lay it down like this: I consider art to be a form of expression. I consider games to be an expression, so I therefore think that games are art. Much like any other artistic medium, from visual painting to cinema, there's good art, depthful art, well-thought out art. Then there's more blatant, in-your-face art that lacks depth but serves some other purpose. All kinds of art can toy with human emotions and convey ideas, feelings, beliefs, and lots of other great stuff.

So it's Linger in Shadows that's making me babble about this. It's a downloadable game for the Ps3, and it's only three dollars. I say "game" with all due hesitation, however, as it really doesn't require any input from the user at all. When you fire it up the menu will give you two options, Linger or Watch. If you just watch, well, all you have to do is sit back and take the whole experience in. If you linger, then you'll get to use the Ps3 controller to manipulate the experience in weird and interesting ways. Sometimes the movie will jump to a stop and you'll have to find certain portals to advance, all the while messing with the space/time of the narrative, though you won't really be able to change the final outcome, just discover what it is.

And even then there's no guarantee you'll have any idea what the balls is going on. It's a very strange twisted story. Yet even if you can't take any ideas or messages away from that part of it, you don't need to in order to find the imagery or visuals beautiful or the music and sounds moving. The opening credits really threw me for a loop in the beauty of their stylization. The menu also contains a brief rundown of the game's purpose and the demoscene culture it sprung from to provide some context. So if you own a Playstation 3 and you're at all interested in the concept of games as an art form, Linger in Shadows is a great starting point. "Look beyond the frame of what you see."

Wanted: Weapons of Fate - Review

2009-04-05T02:09:00.002-04:00

Currently Playing

Wanted: Weapons of Fate
Madworld
Warhawk
LittleBigPlanet

The list above is very abbreviated. I will most probably be writing my thoughts on a fair few titles I've picked up recently that I haven't gotten to writing about once summer hits. I've tried eden and noby noby boy, and finished metal gear 4, and I've also cracked into littlebigplanet, paradise, and warhawk, all on the Ps3. I definitely have more plans for this wonderful machine, definitely not excluding inFamous, a game I've been overly excited for for some time now. It reminds me a lot of crackdown; a game I would go replay any day of the week, because like super smash brothers, kirby's air ride, dead rising, left 4 dead, team fortress 2, portal, a few legend of zelda games... it's a game that, for me, have infinite replayability. Or in the case of inFamous, I hope it'll reach that sort of potential and push all the right fun-buttons I've got, assuring that every time I go back and play it, I'll love every minute of it.

Wanted also has this potential. It, as you probably heard, is a very brief game. Last saturday I picked it up at about 1:00 pm and was watching the end credits by about 5... I was not rushing into it, either. It is just a very short game. Short, however, doesn't have to mean bad. I point at Portal, or TF2, or Warhawk, ...or many games valve in particular develops, actually, to prove that a game that doesn't seem too complicated on the surface doesn't necessarily lack depth. Left 4 dead only contains four short 1-hour campaigns, but the mechanics of the game are so well thought out that those four hours are the most fun I've had in a game in ages. Wanted does the same. Its cover mechanics, time-slowing and bullet-curving gameplay elements... all things that have been done before, obviously, but they're borrowed very well and put together in a way that flows much better than most games I've seen in the last couple years.

One of my favourite parts of Wanted is the "quicktime event" parts of it... in most games, they're refex-testing cutscenes; press X at the right time and you'll see your character flip up onto a monser and slice its head off. In Dead Space, this was reimagined; a tentacle grabs you and you have to shoot a weak point in its structure, while being flung around and thrown off, before you're dragged into oblivion. It's interactive, out of your control, but it puts you back in control. Immersive, desparate, yet still really helps the game's flow. In Wanted, your character sometimes will decide to flip out and leap all over the room, shooting everyone in the way. Time slows down almost completely and you'll get to shoot incoming bullets out of the air, and clean up enemies, during key points in the event. Succeed, and everyone in the room dies. Fail and either you die, or have more enemies to clean up yourself after the event ends, depending on your performance/situation. Perfect. The character pulls of amazing moves that are far cooler than anything a player could ever do, yet still keeps the flow of the third-person shooter by... well, having the player continue to third-person shoot things.

The story picks up right where the movie stops, so if you're into the movie or enjoy third-person shooters, wait for the price to drop on this one and grab a used copy, or just rent it out (you'll easily finish it in one sitting). I'd still suggest going through harder difficulties, though; for me replayability is key and I very much think this one pushes all the right buttons for me. It's got a lot of potential to be really enjoyed, so don't pass it up.

Status Update

2009-03-31T12:07:00.004-04:00

Within the next week or two I'll be posting in this blog again. For the third post in a row (a personal tackiness record), I'll mention my updates have been flowing into my class blog effort, Z-Targeting. However, that blog will die along with all its posts, unless I find an easy-ish way to move them here, which I might. (On that note if you know how to move blogger posts between blogs easily, let me know.)

But the class will only last another week or so, at which point no more of its posts will be marked. So I'll start up here again, and will probably be somewhat regular about it, since that class installed within me decent posting habits. Might even come up with a regular release schedule. Oh, and they'll want me to do a video post by the end of it all, so if I enjoy video reviewing things, you might actually see that happen a few more times on the site.

Hey wow this whole blog thing is pretty slick

2009-01-28T19:46:00.003-05:00

One more reminder to check out my other newer blog. I'll first have you note the totally badass header. Is it not badass? It's even better right on the top of the actual blog. ...I'm still trying to decide if I like its layout better than this blog's layout. So far, yes, yes I do... might have to roll it over into this blog once it's all over. Not sure how possible that is, but I'll have to jack the template at least.

FYI

2009-01-19T12:33:00.003-05:00

As part of a new blogging class I'm taking (yes, those exist), I'm going to be posting game updates mainly in a new blog called Z-Targeting. Not sure what'll happen with it during the class, but if it grows on me... well, we'll see how it goes, anyway. For now, check it out if you've liked reading these random game updates.

Simplicity (usually) = badassery

2009-01-14T11:14:00.004-05:00

Currently Playing

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2
Left 4 Dead
Team Fortress 2

This one goes out to the geometry wars fans out there. If you're into the music used in the latest visual assault, then you'll love this full length megamix of all the music used in the game, done up by audio antics, one dude of which composed a lot of the music. It's pretty catchy, so get going on downloading that.

On a totally different note I just got out of a games class at my university. We each took a turn playing a laser-type puzzle game on the big screen and talking about mechanics, design, and that sort of thing. ...I think if I could invent my perfect class, that would be it. Finally I feel like my education is heading in exactly the kind of direction I want it to be.

Absurdity.

2009-01-12T15:12:00.004-05:00

Currently Playing

Fallout 3
Spiderman: Web of Shadows
Left 4 Dead
Team Fortress 2

I like to think I have a pretty well-tuned BS detector. Which is probably BS because rereading that sentence makes it go off. Which leads to a circular paradox that I don't want to think about anymore, but besides that, this chart Sony released to the press recently is just a little bit too much. It's just a side-by-side of current gen consoles, with Sony attempting to show which of them is a better deal.

This chart made my detector go off red alert style. Not only does it attempt to capitalize on facts that are not really relevant (Xbox 360's have all had hdmi output for months now, and I promise any you find on a retail shelf today will have it), and skewed facts (like how the wii has "no available" hard drive, yet you can swap out SD cards and potentially have more combined storage than either the Ps3 OR the 360, if you so wished), but it's just plain douchebaggery in principle. Why waste time knocking down other companies' products when yours are good enough to stand on their own? It makes your company look unprofessional and generally filled with gigantic ponces. Apple does this as well.

This is yet another move in a long game of moves that makes me really detest Sony. I'd love to own a Ps3 and enjoy all their titles right now but stuff like this, stuff like backwards compatibility being removed, stuff like the pushing of products for their own sake when they can't stand alone... it ticks me off how many terrible decisions they make.

I'm pretending to listen to a prof at the moment

2009-01-06T14:34:00.007-05:00

Currently Playing

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows
Fallout 3
N+

I'm quite good at said fake listening, I can make a great deal of eye contact, and my keypresses look so much like notetaking it surprises even myself. In any case.

When GTA4 came out last year it was as close to a really compelling story as I think video games can really get to. Especially compared to past GTA games, the characters were so much more down to earth, as were the main character's reactions to them. It just felt a lot more real. Then when the story does things with/to them, it has an impact. You actually care what happens to them.

Then Saint's Row 2 came out and showed me that I love a game that's actually fun a lot more than one with a really compelling story in it. Because as gritty as it was, and as much as I loved the realist approach, I didn't appreciate GTA4's abandonment of some of its over the top craziness. I mean, it fit perfectly in the game they created, but I still missed it.

That's sort of what web of shadows reminds me of. It's something of a fever dream for comic book enthusiasts in an over the top "what if" scenario, where in this case it's "what if venom spewed his black venom symbiote juice on EVERYTHING?" It's quite blatantly designed for those enthusiasts, referencing characters and events only they could ever understand, and even quiz the player on somewhat obscure spider-man trivia in several places. So like saint's row, it's not made with any other design goal besides "have a crazy fun time".

And crazy fun it is, with deep contextual combo systems for spider-man that change dynamically if he's on the ground, air, on a wall, web-slinging an enemy, and so on. Most importantly those systems change depending on if you've got the black or red/blue costume on, and that costume can be swapped anytime instantly, on the fly, letting you chain together ridiculous combos where you blow away five enemies with a web explosion, notice one still living, then morph to black and strangle him with a symbiote tendril. ...For example. It leaves a lot of room for creativity. The red suit is more centered around web powers and combos, while the black is much more powerful, letting you throw cars around and whip black tendrils at dudes like nobody's business.

The story is equally nuts, pulling marvel heroes/villains together to fight venom, or do their own naughty things. Depending on whether you decide to ally with good or bad, some of them will get venom-ized, and/or you can call them out to help you in fights. Spider-man and venom-wolverine in the same game is fan service if I've ever seen it.

I enjoyed the first two spider-man games based on the recent films, the third was all kinds of terrible and the other spin-offs didn't quite do it for me but this one combines the absurd fun of the first game, the sweet web swinging of the second, the black costume from the third, plus wolverine. How the hell can you go wrong with that?

They tried so hard to warn me

2009-01-05T04:45:00.004-05:00

Currently Playing

Sonic Unleashed

But I didn't listen, oh no. For some retarded reason, I actually own a copy of sonic unleashed. Well - it was a gift, to be sure, but not one I didn't blatantly hint I'd like getting. Leaving me without much of an excuse. I just woke up in a sweaty frenzy at 4:30 in the morning having nightmares about how bad it was. These are almost as undesired as the nightmares I had the night prior, about being trapped in a cornfield with zombies closing in on my position from every conceivable angle, accompanied by an army of zombie bats. While the zombie bats were of my own subconscious creation, I have no one to blame but valve and Left 4 Dead for the remainder of that mess. The difference was, Left 4 Dead was built to be an engaging, frightening experience. Sonic Unleashed, as far as I can gather, was not built by Sonic team to be so terribly bad its players would have nightmares about it. ...Yet if I'm mistaken, it's mission accomplished, I suppose.

Infuriating design choices litter this game. I have the Wii copy, a seemingly good fit for a game about Sonic the hedgehog. Yet its use of the infamous waggle mechanic was its first downfall for me: sonic, a speedster by day and a werehog type monster at night, relies on more classic speedy platforming action during the former and rips through hordes of enemies with extendible arms that swing around and dice all that surrounds him using a combo system to make magic enemy barriers dissepate by killing enough enemies. And then we move on out to the next barrier. ...so, any comparison to say, God of War would not do Sonic Unleashed any favours as it mimicks this style of beat-'em-up gameplay somewhat terribly, and the Wii is partly to blame for this, maybe... waggle controls execute the punches. Waggling left punches left, and the inverse works on the right, which is a great way to sever your own hands by dissintegrating your wrists after only three levels of this gameplay. I cannot believe any developer alive could possibly create this, play test it and think it was a great idea.

Similar waggle controls hamper the daytime running sections, which were, in fact, the only good part of the game, but damn they're fun when they're happening. Unfortunately the waggles execute dashes and midair homing attacks that occur... frequently. To say the least. Making their execution infuriatingly repeditive. This is why we have controllers with *buttons* - so that we don't have to exert unnecessary amounts of force to input simple game commands. Motions like these aren't immersive, they're bullshit. Why can no third parties understand this? Grasshopper and Nintendo seem to be the only ones that've used the wii remote in a way that actually makes it fun.

But forget that mess, back to how great the daytime sections of Unleashed are. ...They're great. They're the only invigorating part of the game, as spin dashes from one dizzying loop to the next provide the same satisfying bam-bam-bam chain running style that made previous Sonic games so satisfying. Executing all the extra powerslide, high-speed, and side-scrolling moves thrown at you on the fly make sonic control almost like a vehicle, not a creature. It's a perfect hybrid of old and new that just seems to click... somehow.

Yet these sections are shockingly few and far between. Each transformation into the werehog brought on by nighttime always incited groans, knowing I was in for at least three more agonizing levels of half assed beat-em-up action (thank christ for the multiple control options, I broke out the old gamecube controller and subsequently avoided breaking my wrists). Both these sections are clumsily wrapped together by the "story", having you click through wave upon wave of useless dialogue every time you enter each damn town for the first time, introducing random side characters you'll never see again and don't care about, that you know for three seconds, long enough for them to suddenly appreciate your character enough to give them random power slab A they happened to have in their pocket. Even despite this the story STILL tries to take itself seriously; lengthy cutscenes attempt to provide backstory that can't possibly justify the amount of time it takes to explain them. Toward the beginning of the story, Sonic adventures to a town, has discussions with all the villagers, ventures out to find Tails, discovers him surrounded by enemies, beats them up and saves him, ventures to ANOTHER town, discovers the location of a secret lab, rescues a professor from enemy clutches, and returns him to his own lab in yet another town. And all these exchanges are shown through dialogue and cutscenes... absolutely NO play time is clocked during all these encounters, wasting twenty minutes of the player's life, as sonic team seems bent on assuring that they have absolutely no fun at all.

Why couldn't they recognize the fun parts of the game and accentuate them? Wading through piles and piles of excess garbage just to reach fifteen minutes of fun does not make the garbage justifiable. Good games manage to make every moment fun, even if it's tied together with a terrible (and hopefully, skippable) story. Sonic team should hopefully recognize they won't attract anyone to their *sonic game* with a killer story or badass visuals. The gameplay is all they've got to go on, and they've buried so deep it's almost impossible to dig out.

Forget this game.

I am aware of the hypocricy

2009-01-04T03:19:00.002-05:00

Currently Playing

Call of Duty 4
Super Smash Bros Brawl
Mirror's Edge

So, let us get this straight: I know how overdue my playing and talking about this game is. I am painfully aware. But, I'm going to write about it either way, and I'll start by giving away the ending... ... what a terrible ending! That is class-A storytelling dickery. What they pulled off in that ending. I can't even come up with any idea as to how greater dickery could have been achieved...

...ok, maybe I won't give away the ending but if you've been there, then you know what I'm talking about and it stinks. They pulled it off with the Americans partway through and that was all well and good and gut-wrenching, but then they pulled it in the ENDING?! Christ.

Ok, moving away from that before I give it away. Basically, I definitely see the appeal of that game, and why everyone loves it so much... it's gorgeous, easy to control and use, satisfying to play, and the difficulty curves up perfectly gradually to an eventual totally impossibly high level I'll never hope to reach in my casual playing. This applies to both single and multiplayer, as I usually have my ass served to me in any game I jump into, but it has yet to stop being fun during any and all ass-serving processes that are put in motion by any one of my insane opponents. ...I have a feeling one of them was actually Ice T.

Oh, and another note... actually, I'll write another note in another note. That would make sense, wouldn't it. I've acquired a new PSP and I want to rant about what makes it awesome and unawesome (...a word my spellcheck failed to correct, so I'm sure it's right now)... but I'll save that for another time.

Let's waste em!

2009-01-02T00:25:00.002-05:00

Currently Playing

Team Fortress 2

With the release of Left 4 Dead, I went on sort of a renewed Valve kick. I jacked up on random Steam purchases, including getting the orange box... this was long overdue anyway... and resulted in me finally cracking into TF2 here. I've always loved the class-based game idea, at least when it's applied to the shooter... problematically, as with left 4 dead, the whole idea is to play effectively as a team... requiring you to have effective teammates, as well as be effective yourself. Now it took me a long, long time to get used to this game, entirely because I hadn't played the original, and had no idea how any of the classes worked, or the little perks/tricks that come with each one (like the soldier's rocket jump, the pyro's alternate fire reflecting projectiles and mines, what the hell was up with the spy, etc), and the game includes literally no in-game instruction on any of these things. Jumping into empty servers let me fool around with the classes, but not actually get grips with playing as them on a team.

I finally just bit the bullet and started hooking up with servers. The first one was capture the flag-esque, but was modified to play quake noises, from "DOMINATING" to "GODLIKE" and everything in between, true to the source. I instantly fell in love with it, despite my repeated sucking. I took a liking to a few characters... the scout's speed and the soldier's well-roundedness (well, more than anyone else) appealed most at first, but I also took to hanging back and using the medic to just fix dudes up, prepare an "Ubercharge" to make use of ten seconds of invincibility for two of us, then throw it down yelling "GO!" and watching a heavy laugh his head off invincibly eating an invincible sandwich at a legion of cowering engineers.

The spy, and using him effectively, is the hardest to wrap one's head around... and he seems to be something of a "solo" character, in the "one man infiltrating the enemy base" sort of way. He can cloak, disguise himself as any class on any team, backstab dudes, and destroy their equipment... that's about it. He's terrible at direct attacks. He's got to sneak. A lot of people seem to love that, but... not quite for me.

You can probably find me playing online in that quake-esque server right now... and, my favourite class is the engineer. Love being on the defence, and using that defencive stuff (like sentries) as offencive stuff. But his character is a bit too redneck for me... the spunkiness of the scout and the total chill nature of the spy are most fun to watch. Even when he's engulfed in flames, instead of running and screaming, usually calmly informs his team "I seem to be on fire." Amazing.

Holiday times

2009-01-02T00:00:00.002-05:00

Currently Playing

Mirror's Edge
N+
Team Fortress 2
Rock Band 2
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Bejeweled

I'm really playing a lot more than those, but. Let's be reasonable.

Lots I could talk about but I mostly wanted to express some dissatisfaction with how most of my game-playing colleagues have generally frowned upon Mirror's Edge, and how it plays. I was all stoked for it for the whole parcour-in-first-person thing, and that flash game I ranted about only helped that.so now here we are and I've finally had a chance to play it, and my verdict is, it's badass.

Visually it's so much more appealing than most current gen games that are even remotely similar to it, and by remotely similar I mean "they've come out in the last year or so". Instead of being gritty and steeped way longer in realism, it opts for more surreal, striking colours that sharply contrast the generally bright/white background, streets and buildings. Bright red markers show you generally where to go, as you flip your way around and through buildings, subways, and the like. It makes the general path to take obvious, but not too obvious, while leaving room for you to improvise with what the environment gives you.

Then there's the combat. People seem to generally hate it. I love it, on the other hand. I think it perfectly reflects the game's natural trial and error theme. The problem is that it only takes one or two direct hits on Faith to send her crumpling to the ground, and it takes her a while to recover from just one hit, leaving pretty much no room for error. ...But again, I think it fits with the game perfectly. If you miss a jump while you're generally running around, chances are good you'll fall, splat on the concrete and have to try again. If you miss one punch, kick or reversal on a guard, chances are good you'll end up with a torso full of lead and an identical loading screen before you have another go. Finally making that complicated series of jumps or beating down a series of guards is the same sort of play style the game is going for, and I think anything else would have messed it up considerably.

I didn't get motion sick from it, but my televisions/monitors are generally quite small, so maybe I'm not getting the full vomit-inducing experience unless I play it up on a big screen. Either way, all that plus a kickass soundtrack makes this a favourite out of the games I've played in the last two months... and that's saying something.

...Can't think of a good 2D edge joke

2008-12-10T22:28:00.003-05:00

Currently Playing

Left 4 Dead
Unreal Tournament 3
Picross

While I still have relatives who want to get me gifts for the holidays, and being who I am they are quite lost on what to get me besides games, I skimp on a fair few November titles to give out as those sorts of ideas. That leaves me a month or so of waiting before I play games like Mirror's Edge to the fullest, which is fine, because it looks worth the wait. At least, for my sake. While I wait I can burn off time on this new flash game from a dude named Brad Bourne. It looks like it's coming along pretty well, actually, in an addicting little package that mirrors the actual game's flow really well (...I didn't even mean to do that. I swear to god).

It's only in beta but it plays well so I'm looking forward to the final package. Also, EA is officially sanctioning/supporting this flash game. ...Huh. Probably a smart move on their part.

DO I LOOK LIKE ONE OF THEM!

2008-12-07T12:54:00.002-05:00

Currently Playing

Left 4 Dead
Saint's Row 2
MK vs DC Universe

Zombies have always held a pretty special place in my heart and in my soul. This is why I've been pretty pleased by a barrage of random zombie appearances in games that really don't have much business having zombies in them. I mean, I've always enjoyed Dead Rising, but zombies just seem like they belong in shopping malls in rural areas.

More recently, Saint's Row 2 was released and it contained a Zombie Survival mini-game. It was the only mini game of its kind, allowing you and some other survivors to heft some of the game's best weapons and mow down hordes of zombies that close in on your house. It seemed random, and out of place, but among the other insane stuff in that game, from skydiving to sewage spraying to streaking, I could dig it.

Then it got more random with the appearance of zombies in the new Call of Duty: World at War. Not just ANY zombies, mind you: Nazi Zombies. The mode has you holed up in a house, lasting as long as you can against wave after wave of nazi zombies. Now the subtlety has been yanked pulled even further back I'm losing sight of it.

Now thankfully, another actual zombie game has come out to give zombie fans an even further zombie fix. Left 4 Dead to that end is awesome. It does zombies, and it does them very, very well.

But the most appealing thing to me is the cooperation they emphasize so heavily. Left 4 Dead, being a pun, contains four different characters that go through all the campaigns. Other players can jump in and out of the game whenever, each character transitioning from AI control to player control as it has to. Certian "boss" zombies will trap or pin down characters, and require the help of others to save them. When a character dies they "fall" and another has to help them up. The "tank" is an unfairly bulky, strong zombie that requires all four players to work together very well to bring it down.

Suffice to say that you're forced to play nice with your three companions or you won't survive. Few games actually force and reinforce teamwork as well as this one does, and that makes online and team play way more fun for it. The zombies don't hurt much either.

If you've even remotely enjoyed shooters or zombie movies/games before, play it right now.

If i sing a song would you, would you sing along

2008-11-19T23:00:00.003-05:00

Currently Playing

Lips
New Dashboard

The great thing about rock band/guitar hero is that if one isn't such a fan of singing, they can get their rhythem music on by picking up a guitar or a drum kit, and/or shirking the singing duty onto a friend. Sadly this game doesn't give you that option, quite in fact the name of the game is singing. ...Actually the name of the game is Lips, but. Who's counting.

So I'll have to sing out a few of "my favourite tunes" now that I've got a review copy of this. I tend to get this mentality; when I get something for free, I feel sort of obligated to play it. Makes sense, right? Can't pop it in just yet; don't want to start singing at 11 at night and wake everyone up. I'm spending some time installing Banjo Kazooie via the new dashboard, which reminded me how miserably they ripped off nintendo's Mii creation tools. The hairstyles, facial features, etc. look entirely ripped off from the Wii's. Not just visual similarity, every single hairstyle or facial feature looks vector for vector identical to the damn Mii versions. Not that I checked or anything. ...Okay I checked.

Alright, installation is done. More on all this mess later.

I swear to god, sony...

2008-11-17T11:09:00.003-05:00

Currently Playing

Overlord

Short rant time. If you know me you know I'm finally in the market for a Playstation 3. The right games are now out, or at least enough that I'll enjoy and enough promised that I know I'll also enjoy. But upon about three seconds of research into the current consoles that sony's supporting out on the market, NEITHER of them support backwards compatibility with Ps2 titles any more.

This is a completely dumb decision on their part. I can't imagine why they made it either. Maybe it dropped the potential price on the model (though I can't imagine why since they integrated software-based emulation for Ps1 AND Ps2 titles in past models of the PS3. They used to integrate the emotion engine right in but dropped that, the software emulation should cost them nothing), maybe they want people to buy from their now not-totally-ass library of Ps3 games and lean on blu-ray as another selling point. Whatever the reason, I hate them for not even giving me the option of buying a Ps3, even if it is more expensive, to have Ps2 backwards compatibility. I have a considerable library of Ps2 games stocked up, and I want to be able to play them on my Ps3.

So because of this I won't be getting one for a while. I might break down and ebay an older one, but not for a fair few months yet. It'll be partway through next year before I even start to consider it again. Which sucks, because some Ps3 exclusives have really, really interested me and it seems like a considerable waste... well, it won't hurt me to wait a bit longer. In fact this is probably good. For my wallet, that is. Wow, I suddenly had a change of heart.

Who knows, I might even actually talk about a Wii title next week. Zounds.

Fly my pretties

2008-11-16T23:03:00.005-05:00

Currently Playing

Overlord
Left 4 Dead (Demo)
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

With a new credit card comes new responsibility, I think that's something I'll find out the easy way. At least I so hope, otherwise I'd be finding it out the hard way and that'd be a costly mistake. I have always been something of a victim to impulse purchases, and as soon as I booted up steam for the first time after acquiring said card, I saw last year's Overlord on sale for ten bucks. So I went with the "why the hell not" school of thought and downloaded it to try this whole mess out. Turns out, buying and playing games this way is very satisfying and fun. I'm not exactly missing the value of having bought the game in a physical container, so I guess what I'm saying is my idea on the whole digital distribution thing might not be what I thought it was... anyway, I could talk about that a lot but that's not why I'm writing this. Overlord!

So, everyone remember Pikmin? If you were to ask me how Overlord plays I'd just point at Pikmin and say "pretty much that". Except, I suppose, a lot more devious. Right off the outset you acquire a bunch of small "minions", which are for all intents and purposes, pikmin. You can send them out to fight enemies, retrieve objects, or accomplish group tasks like pushing heavy things, turning cranks, or otherwise interacting with stuff in the environment. They'll automatically pick up things they find in the field, including re-equipping themselves with stronger weapons or armor, and bringing you back health, magic, money, and more. Group management is the key here; in the PC version you'd be used to attack buttons being bound by default to the mouse buttons; but the mouse is entirely used for minion control. Not to say your Overlord can't attack, he can, and he can attack well with his big axe, or with a colourful range of magical attacks. Not that you want to do these things often at all; what's the point of being an overlord with a legion of minions at your command if you don't just have them do your fighting for you? There is an undeniable satisfaction to just standing there and raising your hand and having dozens of your little monsters woosh past you and swarm your enemies. That tends to be the solution to your probems: if there's an enemy to take out or a puzzle you need to solve, you should probably consider using your minions somehow. Speaking of which, there are different "races" of minion you can unlock and summon, from red minions that are fireproof to blue minions that are waterproof (this should all sound pretty hauntingly familiar).

As far as the Overlord himself goes, he's pretty "evil" by nature (your terrible sidekick/advisor minion is pretty clear about this). But you still have the choice to be REALLY evil, or only somewhat evil. For example. A somewhat evil overlord will go round up some stolen food from evil monsters for a town, and take lots of their money as compensation for this deed. A REALLY evil overlord will just take the food and kill the town. You get a few choices like this (you always have the option of massacring innocents, of course), and I've get to determine how being somewhat evil or really evil does to your game experience, but it'll hopefully be somewhat clear.

Now, as far as a story or good voice acting or characters go, looks like we're out of luck there. Your advisor minion has a very annoying voice, which is unfortunate since you do need to listen to him to know what to do next, both in tutorials in the beginning and in the actual game to advance the story. Speaking of story, the story is "you're an overlord going to build yourself an evil tower/empire and take out good guys". ...There you have it. You only meet characters for about fifteen seconds, ie, long enough to get a task or mission from them, and move on with your respective lives.

But that's not what it's all about. ...I guess. It's about throwing minions at a house to ransack it and steal money, or throw them at pints of beer and get them all wasted (...making them better at fighting? ...I don't know. They just get drunk), or throw them at sheep to have them ride them around comically for a bit before choppin' em up, or throwing them into glowing wells to regain your own health (they're quite willing to die for you. Loyal little guys). So I won't judge this game from a full sort of story-based perspective, and I'll just judge it against something like Pikmin, which it is undeniably mimicking. So the real question is whether controlling midget orc creatures can really compare to controlling midget carrot creatures. ...Well, depends on what your fancy is. Pikmin may be more polished for what it was, but Overlord is much more dirty, grown-up, featuring a main character that learns to do more than just "punch" himself. Along with the obvious setting change, I'd say give Overlord a shot if you enjoy the pikmin style of commanding a small army; it's a lot more personal than pikmin was.

Zombies? Check. 4 player co-op? Check. Apocalypse? ...check.

2008-11-14T04:19:00.002-05:00

Currently Playing

Left 4 Dead (Demo)
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

It's about four twenty in the morning and I can't sleep. This is because of left 4 dead, Valve's new shooter starring four various characters caught in the middle of zombie armageddon, with the sole purpose of escaping and surviving zombie ridden hell. For starters if I didn't have you from the word "valve" then I feel like you really need to reasess your standards. The fact that this company is making such a zombie game would pretty much be my own video game nerded out dream come true. But, can this game hold water, or salt, or whatever the saying is?

Well I gave the game some breif tries in the past, but only tonight downloaded and played through the demo on my own computer. And it is pretty amazing. The game almost plays out like a movie... it'll be broken up into four separate "films" of sorts, or levels, or episodes, or whatever you want to call them. Then these are divided into smaller chapters. At the outset of each episode you get a movie poster pinup labeling each character and what player will be backing them. During the game the AI director rules supreme; that's the invisible program that decides how many zombies will be around and where, and when, and what kinds of enemy there will be, and how much ammo you'll recieve, and will dictate other in-game stuff like that. It'll adjust difficulty depending on how much you're owning or sucking as you go. Leave it to valve to program something as awesome as that.

Speaking of enemies, there's a bunch of "special" zombies that are mutated to projectile vomit on you, move really fast, and latch on with an extendible tongue. And some are just really mutated and huge. The worst is the witch... if you enter a room/building/etc. and hear faint crying/moaning, then there's a witch nearby. ...and whatever you do for christsakes don't shoot her. Or make too much noise, or even shine a light on her. Because if you do she'll attack, and you'll die, fast. She takes way too many bullets to be put down and is really fast and kills you super quick. Not to mention she shrieks like crazy while doing it. It's actually super frightening, or perhaps that was just me at 1:30 in the morning jazzed up on overtiredness and freaking out over the witches... but they're quite eerie, just crying off in a corner 'till you shine a light on them...

The co-op in this game is amazing and it looks like the director will make it very, very replayable. More on this as I play it.

Confident enough to make mario jokes...

2008-11-12T23:27:00.003-05:00

Currently Playing

Gears of War 2
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

Finally pushed through the rest of Gears. And the end definitely shares the developer's name: Epic. It's more than worth getting to the end for. There's a few "fake" endings along the way... but the end end is so intense it ... yeah, defies any non-spoiler description. So, I'd go play that game immediately.

I've just popped nuts & bolts, and I'll be writing down my impressions as they come. Sort of like a liveblog, but without the live part, I guess. Title screen looks... wow, pretty good, a zooming shot shows off spiral mountain, an environment any real Banjo-Kazooie fan will recognize right away. It's been recreated pretty faithfully here. Yet, there's the nuts & bolts vehicles zooming all around it. I'm excited! All right, let's jump in.

Hey, the grass looks pretty good. Also, seems like there's a narrator with an actual spoken voice for the first time. Hey, retro view of the last banjo kazooie games in old-timey film style. ...Oops, spoke too soon. Banjo/Kazooie have shown up and have their classic "nonsense" speaking voices. All the classic mumbles sound the exact same... giving me a nostalgia trip here. So, turns out the witch is just a severed head. She's broken free though. ...Her head is, that is. And... she's fighting an uber-fat banjo and kazooie. Well, there goes the fourth wall... ...multiple times. "You haven't been in nearly as many games as that italian guy." Hahahaha. Well done Rare. The intro is classic B-K (that'll be my Banjo-Kazooie short form now. ...It's not burger king, shut up) humor. ...And we've crash landed in a world of pigs in coconut bikinis. Looks like the game will finally step up and let us play it a little bit.

I should mention that the duo don't retain any of their abilites from the N64 games. Looks like we get a magic wrench instead that can whack and levitate stuff. This lets us mess around with the physics in the world and accomplish basic stuff, like move object A to pink square on the ground B. Now Mumbo (skull headed shaman dude) has a garage conveniently placed right next to where we've landed, so hell, let's walk in and do this tutorial he happens to have prepared with all the parts we need beforehand.

Creation tools are simple, but very flexible. Just made a basic trolley vehicle. Can lift things up with the wrench and trolley them around. There's one basic gameplay mechanic down but it seems to promise many more awesome options in the vechicle designs to come.

There are a surprising number of well-dressed penguins in this town. I just hit a penguin. He tells me "how could you?! Everybody loves penguins! Scientific fact!" People don't seem to like getting run over. They talk about their feelings a lot when you do.

Humba seems to provide vehicle blueprints, and Mumbo helps you piece em together in his garage, which is strangely collaborative of them. Also, I'm taking a break now the vast majority of the introductory stuff has wrapped up to find the cover of the game for this post, and the pair are very distracting while they're idle. I should mention that the pair had their fatness magically cured of the beginning of this game. Banjo keeps flexing, running in place and doing jumping jacks, while Kazooie focuses on making silly faces.

It seems like the penguins have started to crowd surf. But not by choice. I may or may not be to blame for their current predicament. Also looks like Bottles is here. Yeah, the character they killed off? He's "got over that" apparently.

There's also some pretty handy video tutorials in the garage to help springboard you into the vehicle creation a bit more. The creation tools really are robust... I'm going to mess with vehicles more later and probably talk about it more once I've dove into it a bit more properly.

Totally addicting...

2008-11-12T09:40:00.004-05:00

Currently Playing

Picross
Gears of War 2

I can't speak on how addicting crack is but this game behaves in much the same way it does. It's something of a hybrid of minesweeper, sudoku, and those colour by number pictures. You have a grid of pixels, and you fill it in based on clues given by each row/column. Once you fill in all the grid's pixels, it makes a picture, much like mr. flamingo over there. The puzzles get progressively larger and you get zoom tools to slide back and forth along the puzzle, and those work pretty seemlessly. There's also a few clever touchscreen-type minigames to bridge between the different "levels" of the game. You can play on an easy mode, or a more challenging one (that basically, doesn't tell you when you've made a mistake).

If you are a sudoku fan or a general puzzle fan, you'll get a massive kick out of this game, especially considering you'll find a copy for very small amounts of money.

In other news: Banjo Kazooie Nuts n' Bolts arrived in the mail today, will get on that after Gears is done. And Gears is quite nearly done, and shockingly, I can get into the story. Granted it still just boils down to "we're fighting a war with these dudes go shoot them" but there's something in the presentation of it... don't know. Something just really grew on me. Anyway. Will be done with Gears shortly. Then I'll crack into Banjo. Oh, and there's an unopened copy of the new scene it game which I still have not gotten around to looking at. I'm just not usually that inclined to bust out the movie trivia when I have friends over. Anyway. More later.

Revelation: human beings exist

2008-11-10T19:15:00.002-05:00

Currently Playing

Burnout Paradise
Gears of War 2
Dementium: The Ward

Paradise has always struck me as a bit bizarre... quite in fact, all Burnout games have, with their complete and total lack of human presence. Any drivers might as well be robots, as all you've ever been able to see, at most, is a helmet peeking through a window. No drivers are ever seen hurling through any windows during burnout's intense crashing. I finally got around to giving Burnout's Bikes update a try, and it's really strange to see actual people in this insane world.

First difference you'll notice if you play, bikes don't have boost. Every car has been able to boost, bikes don't. Not like they need to, they're pretty damn fast as it is. Second difference is the crashing, which is almost nonexistent. In many instances, when your bike crashes, the screen immediately cuts to black, then cuts back in with you replaced on the road. In some cases the bike will go tumbling along the road, but the driver will suddenly and mysteriously vanish. They're very careful to keep it all as PG as they can. I totally respect that.

Other new Burnout stuff includes day/night support, with less cars, different events etc. available during nighttime. You can change the current daylight anytime you want, or sync it to your clock, or have it follow its own. Anyway, that means there's also new events available, new records for nighttime road challenges, stuff like that. Some of the events have been reworked a bit... all this stuff is totally free. But apparently they've announced a new special edition of Paradise called the ultimate box or something, that'll have a new party "pass the controller" mode of play, along with all the DLC they've offered so far. That might be when I finally bite the bullet and pay money for Paradise. I'm surprised I haven't yet...

Disturbing Procedures

2008-11-09T22:45:00.003-05:00

Currently Playing

Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles
Gears of War 2
Spore

For those who loved assassin's creed and want to check it out in DS format, this game may or may not be for you. For those who have heard of assassin's creed and wish they had a 360 or similar to play it on, but have a DS, then this possibly for you. If you want a game where you get to stab many dudes in the faux 3d pixel world that the DS offers, then hey, jackpot.

Obviously, this game is a terrible port of Assassin's Creed, but its lovable charm comes from how dynamically it's been adapted for the DS. I say "lovable" here not because of the combat, which essentially boils down to "mash A or B until dead". And I certainly don't say it because of the sidequest-style minigames that break up the adventure, which are actually quite random... the pickpocketing minigame comes down to a game of operation in the dark, while getting hostages to "talk" involves activating certain pressure points with your fingers, or in other words, by playing elite beat agents on their back. While this cracked me up every time, that didn't strike me as the desired effect.

But I'm talking in circles now. No, the real charm of this game is that it's essentially the classic prince of persia, on upgrades. Altair runs, jumps, climbs and realistically falls and collapses into a broken mess after misjudging distance just like our classic rotoscoped pal, which makes the platforming segments of the game pretty nostalgic but altogether quite fun, in the same way prince of persia was originally fun. But the aforementioned combat and minigames, plus the interactive map/inventory business, assassin's creed style guard "awareness" that gives you a few misguided strikes before tons of guards decide you're an enemy and close in, plus the world the game is set in, make for a pretty decent combination. If you've got some longer bus/plane rides ahead with your DS in tow, this is a 25 bucks spent well.

Some more Gears

2008-11-09T00:54:00.003-05:00

Currently Playing

Gears of War 2

This game isn't without its faults, gotta say. I'll talk about some of my favourites (in a manner of speaking) for a bit. The first is with the temporary invincibility you recieve when melee attacking. A few dog-like wraths came at us, and we took our chainsaws to them in a collective way. And yet, while we delt with each one individually, the others would take to just standing and waiting until we finished to continue the assault. One in particular decided to stand and wait patiently on my head for me to finish executing his buddy, and then conveniently dropped down in front of my gun.

I can't speak much for the revival system, here's a quick breakdown of how it works: when you're shot to death, you are able to crawl back and forth and if any of your friends pat you on the shoulder within the next thirty seconds, you'll jump back up with full health. Ignoring the total impossibility of the logistics of this, the enemies can pull this trick as well, meaning if you're not on top of finishing off enemies that are crawling along the ground, they'll pop right back up as long as any other of their buddies are still alive, and this presents a considerable problem on any difficulty above normal. This means one enemy can play medic and run around yanking up most foes you've dispatched. Boo to that.

Gears of War... ...too??

2008-11-08T03:50:00.008-05:00

Currently Playing

Gears of War 2

Most of the way through the game as of now. Some observations I've come to realize about Gears, as you may have by now, as it actually came out today...

Any gear using their chainsaw must scream as loud and as angrily as they possibly can every, single, time they do it.
Active reloading and shooting five or more locust perfectly in the head with a sniper rifle is, to coin a phrase, totally freaking sweet.
Rock worms really like glowing fruit. ...Those are actual names for actual things in the game. Creative much, Cliffy?
Aforementined worms may or may not have an unnecessarily large amount of hearts.
There are probably no such things as ghosts. ...Probably.
Usually, the multiplayer scene is still not at all friendly to noobs and most everyone will make you their bitch quite quickly.
This game is still way too awesome. Play it!

Oh, and about the blog; it's essentially done its facelift now. I'll cycle through favourite quotes at the top, if you haven't noticed yet. "Categories" ... let's just call them tags, will be console names applied to posts, but not specific game names. I figure that'll work better for people just wanting to read about consoles, etc. they're interested in. There's a search box top left that works very well, returns great specific results. Just spell the game name right and if I talk about it, you'll find it. Using tags for every specific game would get cluttered, probably. Finally, I don't expect any readers/comments any more, but save for any embargos I can tell/talk about pretty much anything regarding titles I've got before their street dates. So definitely feel free to ask away if you've got any burning questions about stuff I bring up.

Dennis Dayak comes to London this month, does anybody care yet? He's that Silicon Knights dude we all love so much. The man, myth and legend responsible for eternal darkness, too human, and... ...other stuff... I think. Well, eternal darkness was great and I plan on badgering him for a sequel if I get within civilized earshot of him at any point.

It's pretty early... and yet...!

2008-11-07T03:10:00.003-05:00

Currently Playing

Bioshock

COME AND GET IT MOOK

You think you got a shot at this?! I'm barely gettin' started!

Honestly I'd like to say there's more of a ponit to this post than quoting fontaine and spoiling the hell out of Bioshock. ...And there is! I'm trying to push my old, longer posts off in favour of these new ones so I can have a more accurate estimation of page size for the layout. Also, fontaine is pretty badass, so there he is. You know what I thought of recently, that would be great? A Bioshock movie. Not a bad one, a good one! And by that I mean a bad one. You'd never turn this game into a good movie portrayal. I just want to see dudes flipping out and shooting electricity and fire at each other then swapping to the other hand and firing off pistol rounds. While jumping through the air. And telekinetically hurling stuff all over the place. And then hulk-fontaine walks in like that. Jacked massively up on adam in his massive fifty-needles-at-once-machine.

Also, he thinks you're a busta.

Gahd Damn Favicons.

2008-11-06T22:38:00.005-05:00

Currently Playing

Gears of War 2

Seriously, my biggest headache of the day is trying to get one of those damn favicons to work in the new blogger. You know the little icon thing that comes up next to your bookmarks... ...well I think it's cool! Shut up! IE users can see it but Firefox 3 just doesn't want to acknowledge it. Well, whatever. The layout is almost done... I'm amused that less than 24 hours ago I decided to turn it around. This could be more or less the final version of what it'll go like. I'll use post labels but only for relevant consoles, there's a handy search bar if you want to find specific games and whatnot. Anyway, onwards and upwards to better things. Namely,

Gears of War 2

It's been some time since I played the first Gears. Tonight I mashed through a couple hours of co-op with a friend, and at first... didn't see much that was totally new. First of all, I noticed there was a story. Which is more than I could ever say for the original Gears... "hey, we're on a train. Now we're in an old mansion. Now we're in a tunnel." with no real connectors whatsoever. There's more purpose driving this story... along with a slightly sad/romantic subplot of Dom, one of the Gears, having been separated from his wife in the middle of all this and trying to track her down. "All this", by the way, comes down to a massive conflict between locusts and humans, clashing in the middle in a rather depressing but really bloody war.

One thing I've noticed is a pretty big jump in the scale of the fights. In Gears 1, there was this massive creature with all sorts of mounted weapons of pain called a Brumak. In the original 360 version, you never even so much as took a shot at it. In the PC version, they actually let you have a crack at him. One was more than enough. It was a total beast. But In Gears 2, these monstrosities are lurching out of gaping mountain caverns every ten minutes or so setting you up for ripping their faces off with minigun fire or mortar shells. It almost feels like too much of a jump in scale. ...Not quite, but almost, it reels on the edge there for me.

I never really concluded the whole "going back to Gears 1" thing. But after checking out Gears one again... it's very different. You may not notice when you play it now, and haven't touched gears 1 in a while. But by comparison it looks so much better, plays so much better, there's some sweet gameplay improvements from chainsaw duelling to dragging up and using dead enemies as cover, as long as they're in (mostly) one piece. They basically improved it in every way that matters, it's pretty much exactly what a sequel ought to be these days.

All that said I have yet to delve into multiplayer, and I'll explore that when I'm a little more bold and a little less worried about being very pummelled by the hardcore Gears crowd that I know exists. My low level of skill will really put that matchmaker to the test; though in its defence I doubt it will be able to find such a worthy match for my extreme lack of talent.

Expect more of that later, Endwar may come this weekend, if I'm satisfied with my bank account's situation.

Making progress...

2008-11-06T12:17:00.004-05:00

Currently Playing

N
Marvel VS. Capcom

So as you'll have noticed by now my visuals have pretty dramatically shifted. This look isn't quite finished, still need to mess around with some things but this will be reasonably close to the finished look I want. So the next time you back maybe things will be very different. ...Also, maybe I'll have a title... maybe...?! ...PS, can anyone in my imaginary audience come up with a title that doesn't suck? I'd like that.

So anyway, currently I'm on a renewed MK vs. DC kick. Fueled by what, I don't know, I just am. Realized it's just over a week before I'll be able to play it. That game and Left 4 Dead are two I know will get my money this month... I feel as though I should be rushing out to get resistance 2. Or EndWar, actually. Matter of fact, why the hell aren't I on a renewed Endwar kick? That game might as well have been produced by me... I enjoy tom clancy and I enjoy a good RTS. I'm not even that excited for red alert 3, another RTS series I'm pretty invested in... it plays pretty much like C&C3 mixed with red alert. And I'm totally game for that. So, what's the deal. I was never all that good at MK, at least not so to hold my own against anyone who actually really played it. Maybe it's purely for the novelty of it. Beating up on sub zero with batman or someone will be pretty awesome. And the single player stuff looks like it doesn't take itself seriously at all. I'll always appreciate that.

Maybe I'm overthinking this. I play games these days not so much based on what's out, but based on moods. That seems pretty obvious; if you're feeling adventurous then a good RPG is just what you need. I suppose I haven't been in such a big RTS mood recently... but plain simple fighting is the fix I seem to be craving. Left 4 Dead does this as well. ...at least, in a different FPS sort of way, but then again, I can't remember the last time I wasn't in the mood for a good zombie game.

I'll probably do a brief blurb on Gears 2 when I give some co-op a try tonight with a friend, see how that goes. But so far I can definitely confirm that it's totally Gears, and it's totally rad.

Time for a reboot.

2008-11-06T01:19:00.007-05:00

Currently Playing

Dead Space
Saint's Row 2
Spore
Gears of War 2

Let's get one thing straight, I never write here anymore. I never write here anymore because this was a blog to vent ideas, frustrations and other general mind goings-on that wasn't intended to be read by anybody. In my hayday I was read by three, four, even people numbering in the TENS. I was enthralled. The days of high school have long since gone, though, and with it my desire to blog. At least, in that way. More recent days have seen me occasionally flit over to this old haunt, want to vomit at the now quite immature-seeming style I used to compile thoughts in, and occasionally shot an entry off for old time's sake. I've realized I want to continue writing like this, but I'm going to want to do it in a considerably different way.

So let me reintroduce myself. My name's Adam Tuck. I go to school for media design and production, from videos and photographs and the editing and shopping thereof, to web design and programming and all that fun stuff. And I play games. A lot. The latter will be my preferred subject, thankfully, ...or not depending on your position. I write for a magazine or two, giving me the press leverage I need to get some games before they actually come out, to get into press events, things like that. Then, I get to write about them. Along with that comes my job at the ITRC, basically doing tech support for profs. All this pays handsomly, and as I still live with my parents things tend to work out pretty well.

That's far more than enough about me, know that if you're seeing this layout and noticing many dragons, or blue... this will most probably completely change. Want one that's different, just as an aesthetic and personal reboot. Also it looks like garbage. That does not help. This is something I've wanted to work on for a while, and have a so suddenly burning desire to create it at 1:30 on this Thursday morning in November, for some reason. Can't put my finger on why. But this is a start at least... post template, then go from there.

Oh, let me talk about some games first to legitimize all this. So, as depressing as it is, I haven't really cracked into my advance copy of Gears 2 yet. I'm aware many would be very willing to take a machine gun chainsaw blade to my neck for this. In my defence I can only offer the folly of my guilty pleasure in Saint's Row 2, taking up my week's free time right now. There's some sad charm in that game; from the beginning they made a very decent point of calling out GTA4 for its great lack of trademark insanity, and moved quickly to capitalize on it. And capitalize they did, I just finished streaking my way to the demolition derby where I racked up some decent cash, shot my way through the police station to the roof, stealing their helicopter and crashing it into a skyscraper, landing on that building and base-jumping off onto my friend's car (using a parachute my character carries on him at all times), and rode to the movie producer's studio to mount a flaming ATV and ignite hordes of cars and explosive barrels with lines of gasoline. ...Granted, GTA4 was going a considerably different route, but dramatic story and breathtaking realism aside I just plain have more fun playing Saint's Row. This could bring me into a big rant on the value of pure fun versus more artistic qualities of a game, and yet... I'm way too tired.

Expect more very soon.

It's high time...

2008-05-14T21:27:00.003-04:00

MOOD DRAGON

QUOTE OF THE MOMENT

"I'd love to stay and argue that you are in fact dripping yellow madness, but this paint and I have a date with a wall."
- Homestar Runner

Current Song: Violet Hill - Coldplay
Current Condition: Staved off a potential cold.
Current Thought: Plasma is really, really cool.

It's high time that I wrote something in here again I think. It's been... almost five months? Wow. Ok, I'm going to talk about a few things that have happened, point form on this one.

New job.
School year.
Sam.
Movies/games.
Possibly other stuff.

That's... almost in descending order of excitement/activity/whatever else you want to call it. Importance? Maybe that's the word I'm looking for. Although ... not really until the last two, the first three are too hard to actually "rate" per se.

But watch me go. New job! Those of you who followed my awesome crazy life knew I've worked at Cherryhill Library for a year and a half. Well, I started looking into summer opportunities for work and... well honestly they were pretty abysmal. For the library, anyway. We just got a cut in hours and even though my school year hours weren't impacted by the cut in any way, it meant I would not be able to take any more in the summer. So, down to 7 hours a week (just Saturday) at minimum wage all summer... uuuh, no thanks. So I seriously started shopping around for other summer opportunities. Lo and behold, a new friend of mine in my MTP program, Paul Sham, told me the job he was currently working for was hiring. So I looked into that one. It's called the ITRC, the instructional tech resource center, and it's exactly what the acronym makes it sound like; it's a support center for faculty. Now Paul and all them are student consultants there, which means that if faculty need tech work done (mostly on WebCT, but also for video, flash etc. related projects), then we take care of it. A lot of the time we're working on individual projects, taking appointments and answering phones. It's a pretty chill job and it pays pretty well. So needless to say I really wanted it. I threw in the resume and got called for an interview and I completely KILLED the interview. In a good way. I don't know how I do that... I tend to interview very, very well. They obviously hired me and here I am. I've worked there for ten days now and I'm already totally in love with the job. I feel as though I'm stealing money from them... it is a new and strange feeling to be paid good money for something I really love doing. I guess this is what people talk about striving for in your career. So this is a great chance... it'll get me great experience and it'll, with any luck, be a stepping stone to bigger, similar jobs further on down the road. So I feel almost like the luckiest guy in the world having gotten the job, it's pretty much perfect. Like today for example, we did a video shoot at a conference. Showed up, set up camera and audio equipment and recorded some keynotes, and took it back to our office for editing, etc... and that was our day. We get PAID to do that stuff. It's like my own little dream come true.

Same goes for my school... heh, it wasn't too many entries ago that I was gushing about having gotten into MTP in the first place. Now here I am having finished a year of it. (Sidenote: I just took a break to brush my teeth. I'm almost ready for bed, just going to write this... and it's 9:45 pm. I have a regular person's schedule now. Holy crap.) But yeah, MTP has also been pretty much a dream come true... as much as I said I hated first year, well... I was right, first year is pretty irrelevant, etc. but I've been having a look at some courses in third year. It'll be mostly a Western year, and let me tell you... it looks pretty mind blowing in terms of selection. There's MIT courses that make me totally excited just by reading the title. Video games in society is a big one. Intro to digital music production, and you actually do hands-on labs and stuff... journalism, writing (a writing course was one of the few I liked first year), related media stuff... things that are actually, well, having you DO things as opposed to just reading about them. I'm sure there's going to be plenty of reading too, but honestly, I can't see this going sour at all. For the last year, Fanshawe's been very different... VERY different experience from Western. It's like high school but much less structured, really. And the classes make you actually feel smarter. Sometimes. Some are still useless like high school ones were. But others you actually learn some things, and in all of them you're actually upping and doing stuff. Like this website is one I made as a final (if it doesn't work then they aren't giving me my server space any more, I'll try to mirror it soon ish, hopefully it works now so you can see though) and we had to design it visually, then build it and build the flash for it. The mark spanned over three classes (design, html and flash) and the mark was worth 40%... wow. But yeah, I was pretty pleased with how mine turned out, anyway, and it was damn fun to actually make and build. Next year it's mostly Western courses, yeah, but there's 1 full course at Fanshawe... so 0.5 a term... but it's all one long course where we develop and create one big project. No idea what that'll be or what it'll be like, but should be interesting either way. Can't wait. Glad I don't have to suffer through an entirely boring summer, too. The job is not only awesome, but I get paid tomorrow AND Friday... ...oh yeah, forgot to cap the job thing off... ...my new job meant I quit the library. I was going to originally keep it... I only work weekdays at the ITRC. So I could keep my Saturday shift. But I decided that's a bit much for me, and in the end it came down to ... do I want my weekend back to max and relax, or is it worth keeping the library spot for an extra 100 bucks every two weeks? The answer was no, so I quit and I get my last paycheck from them tomorrow. And I get my FIRST paycheck from the ITRC Friday. So starting this weekend I'll actually have disposable income again. And I'll try very hard not to dispose of it too fast.

I won't bother coming up with a clever segue for the Sam thing, it's still kind of depressing. I'll tell you the very, VERY abbreviated version, as if you don't know either of them. Basically, he was one of my best friends, and now I'm getting to use that in the past tense... he was involved with a girl, things went bad, HE went bad, and he recovered. That all happened in high school, and the recovery took a damn long time. But a year ago...? I think, or so, she tried to re-spark a friendship with him again. And it all basically happened a second time... he wanted a relationship with her proper, but she didn't in the way that he did. It ended in a rather messy fashion, with her deleting him in every way, shape and form and never speaking to him again. Here's the sticky part: I'm friends with both of them. So I have always been sort of caught in the middle of this, and a couple (maybe few, lost track) months ago he did the same thing to me that she did to him; just cut himself off from me in every way and started ignoring me. Partly because I was still her friend and he thought I was on "her side", partly because the last few conversations between us had gotten heated through my frustration at his refusal to get any help for himself. Partly for other smaller reasons maybe, I'll never know for sure because he never talks to me any more. I got him to speak with me briefly, but he usually keeps me blocked and honestly even if he was speaking with me he doesn't really want to. He doesn't care about much of anything anymore. He's easily in the worst shape he's ever been in. So it's killed me to see him like this but I have kind of done all I can... he knows I'm here if he wants my help, but he honestly doesn't. He's taken to ignoring most (...all) of our circle of friends, actually, either by blocking or just not responding. ...Anyway, there you have the quick and dirty version of the story. Left out a lot for the sake of keeping it brief. People keep telling me "he'll eventually come around, he'll eventually talk to you again, you guys will be closer, blah blah blah" and I really want to believe all that business. Can't bring myself to, though, and I'm not sure I will unless it actually happens some day. I've really, really never seen him in this state, and he's far too stubborn to help himself in any way or form. But he won't do anything drastic about it either. So he'll just continue to sort of hover in miserable limbo and maybe he'll gradually improve... but I think he needs something to hold onto, something to enjoy, and right now there's literally nothing he really enjoys any more. We gave it a long shot when we got together for a LAN party recently and called him up, and asked him if he wanted to come hang with us for a while, he just said "not particularly" or some phrasing equal to that. I totally believe that too. Anyway... if this starts to work itself out at all, it'll probably inspire me to write more about it, if for no other reason then to spill out my feelings. I... haven't really don't that here yet, though there's not much more to spill than... very, very sad. I'm VERY sad to see him like this. But these days I can sort of back burner the problem until I hear anything else about it. Or if I have a dream about it, which happens sometimes... even though it's back burnered it's still there in my mind, eating away. And yeah, I've had a few dreams where he's walked into my house like everything was cool, like he used to, we'd play some game and rap for a while and then I'd wake up and realize that was actually me FANTASIZING for Christ's sake, and I'd bawl to myself for a little while then try to go back to sleep, probably fail from being way upset about it. Anyway, I guess that's enough about that for now.

LACK OF SEGUE aaaand MOVIES. And GAMES. There is so much that's come out and that's coming out... it's completely absurd. In the last few weeks we've had Iron Man, Speed Racer, Narnia, and Indiana Jones in about 1 week intervals. Every Friday night I get a new awesome movie to check out. It's Narnia this weekend although I'll see Speed Racer again too because it was TOO AWESOME to just see once. GTA4 came out, and I can't wait to buy that 360 in a few weeks to play it more than the few times I've picked it up at friend's places. It's 200% epic. Truely. And people can't stop raving about the story. Can't wait to experience it proper. ...But dang, where am I? I have not written in here about Brawl, and it came out since the last entry. Well, it's totally Super Smash Brothers. So it's totally AWESOME! New characters are pretty sweet, new stages are even sweeter and the finishers are all WAY over the top. Fox is still mah boy and Marth is a good runner up but Ike, Lucario, Meta Knight, Captain Falcon, top the list. But I think the top of the top is Wolf. Star Wolf, from the Star Fox franchise. He's like a slower, stronger Fox, with some other tweaks that I totally dig. And all his taunts are way fun. Anyway, Dark Knight is due in a little while too, and I might collapse on the floor twitching uncontrollably from excitement on that one. I'm almost tempted enough to go down to Toronto to see it in a damn Imax. Because that would be way sweet. But yeah, right now, once the paychecks start coming in right, gameplan is 360, GTA4, sit tight for Mercs 2. I've got a few 360 titles backed up from the Mag so that'll tide me over too. Then I want that new Pokemon for the DS so I can play with Sarah... the only other person I've found actually into Pokemon games... GOTTA take advantage of that!

Speaking of Sarah & relationship wise, uh... for once? Nothing to report. Fair to say. There was one big issue kind of underlying all the little stuff having me worried for the last little while... and we ironed it out recently. So we still really, really like each other. And we're happy. And ... yeah! That's all there is to that. Oh, and we'll be coming up on two years in a couple weeks. ...Wow. WOW. What?! How the heck did that happen so fast?! The last couple years went by like... ...man it doesn't seem like THAT long ago we were just meeting for the first time. That was three years ago?! It really, really doesn't seem like it. These last few years have been way, way more fun than my public and my high school years. Most of my public school years were mostly suck but the middle/latter high school ones were pretty fun. But these years are totally topping them. Not so much for Sarah actually, sidenote... she got great marks in her first year at Western. *Pride alert* She made the Dean's honor roll matter of fact. But... she still totally misses high school. Much less stressful and much more fun... she REALLY misses it. It's sad. Wish she was enjoying the school part of life as much as I am right now. Hope we can turn it around...

Anyway segue city. (I like how I'm saying "segue" as a segue now. It doesn't actually work like that. Go me) Well I covered my whole list it looks like... even the "other stuff", and that was by accident! Here's a bulleted list of some other random facts of my life.

Almost went skydiving during exam week... and fully plan on doing it for reals in early August. (Drop me a line if you want to come!)
Definitely going to B.C. in August with my family.
Getting some wisdom teeth pulled in early June.
Got a new laptop for my birthday in January! I call it the Doppelganger. And it's a decent machine and not only lets me do work on the go, but play on the go. I loves it.
Had my ipod break just BARELY inside warrenty, and they sent me a brand new one. Saying goodbye to my old one was hard. Even though they're literally totally identical.
Joined up with the LCB again and played a few concerts in the last month ish. Also performed with my bell choir again. But they're all wrapping up for the summer anyway... with any luck I won't have too much evening class next year.
Watched seasons 1 and 2 of Dexter (GREAT show) and working on season 4 of LOST with the rest of the world at the same time for once. Totally hooked on both. 24 at a standstill. Heroes at a standstill. Buffy recap... yup, standstill.
They're talking about making Anchorman 2, Fast and Furious 4 and a Magneto movie?!
I only just realized it's May 2-4 this weekend and I get this Monday off. Sick.

And I've been writing this for an hour now. And that's way longer than I usually took back in the day. Need to get my bloggin' skills in check again. I may write more pretty soon... if by some chance you see this not long after I've thrown it up, actually check back. You might be surprised again.

Next Update: Either a few days or a few weeks or a few months from now... so, either a summary of this coming weekend, or anticipation for my trip(s), or me talking about how my summer went.

A free hot chocolate in the hand is worth two free hot chocolates in the bush

2007-12-23T01:15:00.000-05:00

MOOD DRAGON

QUOTE OF THE MOMENT

"Did I tell you about my brother? You remind me of him. Heh... I didn't like him either. I never met my brother until the day he killed me. We are a... complicated family, wouldn't you agree."
- Paxton Fettel, F.E.A.R.

Current Song: Daft Punk - Touch it/Technologic (Alive 2007)
Current Condition: Hopefully staving off a cold
Current Thought: I am way too obsessed with Alive right now.

So I was thinking of waiting until I was more displeased than pleased to write this next post up. This is because I've got two things to cover.

I'ma start with a bit of a gripe actually. Something my sister made me think about recently. We'd went to see the Golden Compass, and I've never been able to slog through the book start to finish. Always got tripped up near the beginning. But I've known about the story and I knew a little about the ending. And I knew the general direction the series as a whole takes. Anyway, I liked the movie quite a bit, but my sister was pretty displeased with some of the things they didn't include or messed up, especially the ending which cut short of the book's actual ending. After the credits started up she went "well that was a gay ending."

So for starters, those of you who know me well enough can think of at least 3 reasons why that would annoy the hell out of me. For the rest: I really, really don't like it when people use "gay" in a derogatory kind of way like that. If it's said around me most of the time I'll just wince in my head and not take further notice of it, but with my sister... yeah, not so hesitant to complain to her. After some playful popcorn throwing I made it clear I was pretty dead serious it bugged me.

Then I realized something when she kept talking... she'd defend this to the death. Like, try as I might to get her to understand, she just thoroughly didn't care she'd made me a bit upset, and concluded that *I* must have a problem, since hey EVERYBODY says things are gay, and well. I just get offended too easily. Again, if you know me at ALL you know that's very not the case, I'm pretty hard to genuinely offend. I just have, like probably everyone, some hot button issues... no more than you could count on one hand, and that is one of them.

I was pretty let down with my sister's logic. Later she apologized but in a very weasel-y way... like, she was sorry she said it TO ME, but she wasn't sorry she said it. Sigh. My sister can be somewhat self-centered with things like this sometimes. I don't understand why. Like, I totally believe she doesn't remotely care that she upset me, but if I was in her spot, even if I didn't care, if I knew that something I said made someone unhappy I'd still make the effort not to say it. It's really like the smallest deal in the world, it's just switching out one word for something else... how can it be that hard to make the conscious effort?

It's not; it's the symbolism of the thing, it must be ME that's in the wrong. Must be, she sure as hell isn't, in her mind anyway. She's not so good at putting herself in other people's places... empathy, I guess. She's been quite bad at it since she left home actually, noticeably so. Perhaps because she just stopped caring about hiding her lack of caring at that point. But I shouldn't bash her like this... everybody's got their thing. God knows I've got plenty of my own. Which I will not begin discussing now! Ha ha. I love being able to control the direction of this conversation. But despite this, which was admittedly pretty bad even for her, she is improving... she's getting better at the whole caring-about-others thing. Getting there. Hope that continues.

Now for the second part which is quite totally different. I'm going to go off about my own relationships for a bit, and something else I noticed... well, actually, it was pointed out to me. Though the lady who did the pointing didn't really realize what she'd pointed out. Kind of a long story. Maybe I'll back up a few jumps.

I've had two major relationships so far, underscored with some other smaller foolings about or missed/failed attempts that didn't really evolve or develop, either because there was no chance of that happening or some other factor intervened. The two I've had, well, lasted. The first was Rach, and we went for over two years, easily. Now it's Sarah, and it's been about a year and a half with her. Right off I can say with certainty that Sarah's has been... well, wow. A billion times more intense than anything I've ever done before in my life. Part of that has been the struggle... long story short if you haven't heard, her parents were... well, not so approving of us having a relationship. It took a long time and a lot of work for us to get where we are now. Honestly she's done the great majority of the suffering... I always heard about the issues that came up but she got all sorts of flak from them over me ALL THE TIME. Dang, she still does over some things if you can believe it, she never seems to get a break... but anyway. Because of her parent's protective nature, at first she didn't even really want to be seen around with me too much in public. Now it's better, but there are still some things... like, she won't give me a hug in public, ever. Just... it won't happen. She's tried it before and been seen by a friend of her mom's, who TOLD her mom, who railed on her for it and made her feel utterly terrible for having done it. There are a few related issues to this, mostly with how she behaves around me in public.

Let's rewind a bit... recently I realized I had similar problems with the other ladies I've spent time with. Rach, for instance, the thing with her was her parents... I think I only spoke with her parents ONCE, just one time. She didn't want me to meet them, I only ever saw her sister like one time as well... and that was in a mall, by accident. Rach was holding my hand at the time and when her sister rounded the corner she let go like my own hand had suddenly gone burning hot and lept a couple feet away from me.

I am here to tell you that stuff like this doesn't feel great. I was at work the other day on a break and telling a coworker there about Sarah... about her parents, about how her extended family will never be allowed to know I exist, that her parents will tell everyone they know... friends, family... when asked about their daughter's dating situation, that she's always been single. I told her (her name's Jill) about how Sarah doesn't like appearing as a couple in public too much... like, again, a hug is too much of a "PDA" for her (her term... I guess a hug is a PDA if you're going to get all technical about it but jeez, you can't get much more tame than that as far as PDA's go). Jill noted quite a few things that day but among them, that it must be pretty hard to be on the receiving end of that stuff.

Now I only have two relationships to judge by here, but... I guess I really don't know if it's normal or not. Both my girlfriends have been embarrassed by me to some extent, Sarah to a much greater extent than Rach. As in, nervous to admit they're even in a relationship with me to certain people. I guess that's normal enough but... sigh. I don't know. I've just wondered whether or not THAT'S normal, or whether... it's normal for her to (God forbid, I know this is risky thinking) be happy about the fact that they're with their guy? To WANT (or well, at least, be impartial in terms of getting) people to know she's seeing someone and that they're happy spending time together and not have to hide it and lie about her relationship situation to everyone her parents know? Sarah has one picture of the two of us together in her house (which I gave her). It's in her room. I found out recently that when they have a party her mother will go find that picture and HIDE it from everyone until the party's over. That had a pretty depressing impact on me when I found that out.

I guess plenty of people have issues about their relationship, maybe not wanting particular people to know... but with Sarah, the scope is so MASSIVE. It's like we're hiding it from just about everybody. She even gets uncomfortable when I refer to her as my girlfriend to... well, anybody. Yeah, as I say, I'm sure plenty of people have this issue. But my own case is pretty massive... it doesn't feel too great. Obviously way better when these issues aren't around. It makes you feel appreciated, wanted, whatever. This way I feel like an embarrassment to her and her family, that Sarah's setting an awful example for her younger sister by being involved with me, that her family would wig out if they even knew I existed, that they and she would be ashamed if certain people knew about me... yeah, I know that much. Relationship shouldn't work like that. I shouldn't be making her ashamed or embarrassed by being with me. I should be making her happy... obviously this isn't my fault really but it's still depressing to think about. Feels pretty rotten anyway.

I wonder if it'll ever get better... or, alternately, if Sarah and I move on, I wonder if any subsequent relationship I'll get into will be different... I wonder if even once someone would be happy to let people know they were in a relationship, with a good guy, and that we make each other happy and love spending time together. To not be ashamed of me in certain situations... sigh. I wonder if this stuff is ever less complicated. I'm SURE it can be... well I'm quite sure it can be simpler than Sarah, anyway. Assuredly so. Dealing with her parents and figuring this relationship out has literally been the hardest thing I've ever done. Which is funny since I actually have the MUCH easier job of it between the two of us. I really don't know how she does it.

I said this to Peter recently... all the other relationships and brushes with potential ones... they've always had too much complication to them. To the relationship part of it. Mixed up feelings, sometimes one-sided attraction stuff, sometimes it was ... well, just a fling... sometimes something else got in the way. But it always messed with the feelings themselves. This time... this isn't the same. With Sarah it's not the same. For the first time so far with Sarah, it's... truly a mutual feeling, and you can just tell. You just know it... there'll be times when we're just looking at each other and saying/doing pretty much nothing and she'll just be smiling and... well we don't even need to say ANYTHING! Because what we're feeling will just speak volumes for us. Her parents have held her from this so much she's still nervous to commit to a lot of things... which the "embarrassment" issues (wish I had a better word...) sprout from, see. But the feeling... and there's no way I can say this without sounding corny, but in terms of romance, this is what I think love is. The perfect blend of a great big friendship, and mutual attraction, a passionate sort of connection that I sure as hell can't describe any better than that. I have no idea where all this will end up... don't know if we'll still be together, or still be feeling this way even a year from now, even 6 months... geez, who the heck knows. So much could happen. But at this point in my life, right now, she's taught me what that feels like firsthand... and it's something totally fantastic. Definitely something I'd give just about anything to hold onto.

Aw, look at me. I've gone all mushy and meaning-of-life ish on myself now. Well, that covers the two issues I believe... the latter was bugging me much more, and probably always will. As I say, it doesn't feel great to be embarrassed or ashamed over. With Sarah I'm pretty sure it would never remedy itself... I've gotten used to it though. It isn't so bad. Just nice to vent about it sometimes.

And as I say... for the sake of what we've got, putting up with that is NOTHING. It utterly pales in comparison. She makes me happier than I've ever been... certainly something I'm enjoying right now in my life. So I'ma go keep doing that.

Oh, and uh, also, Christmas in a couple days! I highly suspect I'm getting a Wii. Wow. Send out a prayer for me and my loved ones, that I will not whip the remote through my monitor by accident, and that we won't hurt each other playing pretend tennis. And that Brawl will hurry on up obviously.

Oh, and hopefully I'll post here again before Birthday times, but... wow, in just over a month? I'm 20. Holy snap. God willing, about 1/5 through my life... actually 1/5 is pretty generous, it assumes I'll live to see myself turn 100. And I probably won't! It's possibly closer to ... Jesus, closer to 1/4 through my life. Oh goodness. This is going too fast. This is going TOO FAST. I want to stay youuuung... waaaah.

Ok enough of that. I'm out I'm out I'm out.

Next Update: Two decades old?!

Bringing blogspot back... them fa'bo boys do not know how to act

2007-11-07T16:39:00.000-05:00

MOOD DRAGON

QUOTE OF THE MOMENT

"DIDN'T WE HAVE SOME FUN, THOUGH. REMEMBER WHEN THE PLATFORM WAS SLIDING INTO THE FIRE PIT AND I SAID "GOODBYE" AND YOU WERE LIKE "NO WAY." AND I WAS ALL "WE PRETENDED WE WERE GOING TO MURDER YOU"... THAT WAS GREAT."
- GLaDOS

Current Song: Wasting My Time - Default
Current Condition: Great, tired, surpriseful.
Current Thought: Dang! This place is quite abandoned.

A friend of mine, a Mr. Quentin Hall, told me about this abbreviation... he checked his "fa'bo (fay-boh)" a few minutes ago. I could only assume he was referring to Facebook and all the while, degrading our precious language to a whole new low... oh boy. FA'BO?! I really, really hope it does not get to that point. It's gotten to and beyond the point of nobody using blogs like this anymore... at least, most if not all of my friends have abandoned the good old fashioned back and forth blogging that used to happen way back in the high school. HAhahaha. Am I even allowed to talk like that yet? "Way back"? I'm only second year... high school still SEEMS like a stone age ago.

Especially now Sarah's out of that business and going to Western now... back when she was still at Oak I'd always either make excuses to go by there or, well. Just not make excuses and admit I was meeting up with her for something... then just go do it. But now she's not... well, I just meet her either at home or around campus. Only friend I've still got left at Oak really is Sam, and... him being there was totally shocking to the max, for starters. But then again so was the revelation that he CAN in fact get on into the air force... didn't used to be able to, used to not allow him because he wore glasses. But. Now I guess it's entirely probable that it's what he'll be doing for the next ten years at least. He'll come to Western, sure... needs a degree of a nondescript nature before he can fly for them. BUT they'll pay for his school... he just has a 13 or so year contract with them because of it. Damn sweet deal, honestly. If I had those skills or that ambition or, well, wanted a career remotely like that... I'd so do that in a heartbeat. Anyway, we all know that is not going to happen!

Geez, look at me, I'm all over the board here. Very much rambling. Just like I used to! Screw organized posting... if you're reading this then you've stumbled here reminicing, or I just met you and you're curious. OR you have RSS feed for this place for some weird reason and you noticed I actually threw up something new. In any case, I always used to write pretty regularly here... was quite good with it! Still keep to this one template of dragon and status at the top and am happy to. But why haven't I written in such a HELLA LONG time? Well, I'm going to make like an American and blame it on a whole host of things other than myself, in POINT FORM

Uprising of Facebook
Busy-ness of school assignments and work
Before that, lots of trips among the summer
When not on trips... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... well...

Ok, I don't have THAT many things to blame it on, save for the first one being the best one I've got, so I'll stick with it. But I used to make this thing rather rigid... used to kind of summarize my life in a nutshell for interested peeps that didn't get so much chance to talk with me. I also just kind of went off on random stuff spouting both news and opinions at the same time, both of which people tended to appreciate a lot more. Aaah. Back when I had my readership of literally tens upon tens of people... wonder how many of them will get so bored they'll look through old blogs 'n' stuff and find this? Well, we'll see. The fa'bo has seen to the general extermination of most of my pal's attention to ye old blogs.

But as I was saying, I'm going to get back into this a bit I think, but if for nothing but spouting my news and opinions like I'm going to want to these days. More to the point, probably more fun to read, definitely more fun to write, more insightful when thought about and most importantly, more me than before which nobody can get enough of since I am quite the awesome individual.

But right now I'm pretty fly... it's TERRIFYING.So here's thing number one: after some ridiculous drama last summer, I got into my MTP program. Huzzah! Only problem: ... there isn't any. I'm doing staggeringly well, getting great grades, having a wonderful time with the interactivity-esque style of lessons, have ONE university course to balance out the funness with essays and readings... I'm looking at a wonderfully early holiday season because of many in-class and nonexistent final exams come December with the college classes. So what's wrong? Again. NOTHING! Which is... troubling. Usually it seems healthy to have something haunting the back of one's mind like a ghost put through a Gaussian blur (...wow.) and the reason for that is it tends to keep you on your toes, drive you toward something. Keep your focus. Right now I've just got... well, school. And work. And maintaining the status quo, the name of a high school musical song I find utterly appalling. I hope something starts scaring the crap out of me soon.

Aaaaaand I'm out!

Next Update: Probably on the fa'bo...