I also played the demo for Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2, I mentioned a ways back that I was into the anime, and that’s still the case now. This game feels like it’s going to be a huge improvement over the original Ninja Storm, the way the demo fight carried out was great, you’re dodging jutsus and counter attacking, picking your spots for regenerating chakra. The animation in the game is awesome, and the way the camera swings around as the fight shifts was all very very tight. everything looks like it should really. I was only sort of looking forward to this but I can’t wait to get my hands on more of it.

I’ve also been playing shank, but I’ll wait and do a full initial impressions post on that, or save it for full review.

StarCraft 2

A little more Madden, and a lot more Starcraft… after a lot of matches against the AI today I decided to skip the remaining 43 practice league games, and jump right into my placement matches. It was a good thing to do… though my placement matches went sort of funny. I mentioned in my previous post that I had some reservations about taking my game online. I think I have a closet fear of losing, I know I don’t really care if I win or lose these things, I just want to be competitive, and have fun thats why the stress and anxiousness of playing these matches sort of surprised me, and made me really uncomfortable. Anyway, I’m really glad I played these games for a couple reasons that I’ll get to into in a bit.

First match I got roflstomped by a Protoss Cannon rush by a platinum player… nothing quite like a series of pylons and cannons creeping in from the fog of war outside your nexus. Game was over in 5 minutes, I felt shame. And was anxious, I was getting into it. Like really worked up. I’m generally a pretty tranquil guy, I don’t really like getting worked up like that. But, the lesson learned was pylon spread, and scouting, including my own starting area.

Second match was a win for me! I did everything I wanted to do in the match, I was working with a scout, something I had been struggling with, and neglecting, I stuck to my plan, and even worked in a little trickery of my own by planting a pylon inside my opponent’s wall-in that went undetected. I still got anxious and worked up, but this felt good.

My third match was literally 8 seconds long, I had just long enough to get my probes mining before my opponent quit. It appears from his profile that, this was his first and only 1v1 though, he has played a few 2v2′s.

The forth match was also sort of weird, because I thought I was going to lose, I was still sticking to my plan, but I was playing a zerg opponent, and the game I was playing was mostly neglecting using stalkers at all. It occurs to me now that this was a terrible idea to begin with because I clearly need ~something~ to shoot down overlords scouting my base, anyway… the player sent in a 6 zergling rush that I really didn’t have much defense for I managed to get a couple zealots out to start hitting them back and I sent my probes after him but the minute that first attack was defeated he quit. I was in bad shape too, I was down to 8 probes total at 5minute mark. I’m not sure why he quit but I lucked out thats for sure. The funny part though is that at this point, I was pretty calm, even in a very bad situation.

My final placement match was on a map I had never played, never liked the look of scrap station, against the first polite player I played in the lot. I lost, but it was pretty easy to identify why that was. I dropped my second pylon way early. My opponent didn’t, and instead got his second gateway well before I did. 6 zealot rush in my front door when I only had 2 out, probes couldn’t save me, and so it was game over. Checking the profile the opponent was a gold level player, with 24 matches under his belt, and I reckon they learned the same lesson I did in their early matches. Best part about this match, is my placement was done, and all that anxiety that I was experiencing was gone and I was able to focus on what was going on in the matches.

Feeling pretty good about myself with a 3-2 record (despite the fact that 2 of those wins were against people quitting inexplicably) I hopped into my first match in the Silver league (rated a lowly 82) (not at the bottom yay!), it was against a gold level zerg. Learning my lesson from the last match with the zerg that I needed something in the air, I decided to do a little something involving a star gate and some void rays, it was on a larger map, so I ended up doing my scouting like I’ve been trying to train myself to do even though it was effecting my macro some, including allowing myself to get supply blocked which meant I ended up having to do some probe defense on a couple zergling harass before I had any units out. I had setup my star gate at a proxy pylon closer to the opponent base with my original scout probe, something I had seen in some of the videos I had been watching while I was too nervous to be playing my own matches. this worked out really well for me, because it was never scouted. I fended off a subsequent push with a handful of zealots, and began my counter attack just in time for my void ray to be coming out. My opponent had no air defenses at all, so I was able to simply leave the ray in there after taking out the queen, and fall back to defend against the forthcoming base swap attempt. I WON! And again, I was pretty calm throughout the match.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that if you’re nervous about taking your Starcraft game online, the best advice I can give is get over it. It’s not worth all the thought you’re putting into it if you’re anything like me. Don’t get me wrong, be prepared, play some matches with the AI watch some videos online for some guidance. But seriously, you’ll be glad you did, I had a great day with StarCraft 2 today, and I’ll probably get some in again tomorrow.

Currently: 6-2 Silver League (rank: 46)

There just hasn’t been much to talk about gamewise lately. I’m still playing madden 11, it’s still ok, I imagine it’ll get a lot of play once the football season gets going (fly Eagles!). I’m still playing Starcraft 2, I’m going through looking for achievements, and being too scared to take my game online with strangers even though I’m sure there is a home for me somewhere on that ladder where I can be competitive.

I played a bit of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and it seems like fun in small doses, though I wish the controls were a little snappier.

I’ve also gone back for some Dragon Age: Origins, and I’m still not ~really~ understanding the combat in a way that makes me effective at it which is disappointing because I really want to like it.

I think the next game on the radar is Shank, there’s been a ton of seriously playable DLC lately, and that’s a good thing, but it’s just not the same as getting full budget game. After that I think NHL 11, which I have no real expectations for, I imagine a slightly improved version of NHL 10… I have no reason to expect anything more. I’m also really looking forward to Final Fantasy XIV… there has been a void in my life since I stopped playing WoW due to lack of interest.

Slow times, I haven’t really got sucked into a gaming session since my madden-a-thon before I put up the initial impressions post on it. I almost didn’t really know what to do with myself at all this week. Sort of troublesome.

Anyway, when you get to the main menu, you are punched in the face with ads… Ads as menu items themselves, in fact the default menu items when the game finishes loading are ads. There is also an ad ticker at the bottom of the screen talking about EA DLC for other games (EA’s MMA in this case). I find it disheartening that a game that sells millions of copies annually, feels the need to bolster their revenue by this degree of advertising. I fully understand some product placement, particularly the in game stat stuff that does make things a little closer to the broadcasts, but there is just so much invasive advertising in this game it makes me a little angry.

Take it to the field! I played a few games with the GameFlow turned on, fully understanding that it’s more or less the Ask Madden system with a few out of game functions to give it some customization. This is not as big an innovation as people are making it out to be, in my limited experience thus far, it does seem like it would work well for the people who aren’t well versed in football strategy, or are playing as an unfamiliar playbook. However, when I say go for it on 4th and goal on the 2, I don’t want to see the wildcat formation, ever, worst part is in that scenario you can’t even audible out of the play because you don’t have the right personal on the field. And as an Eagles fan (a team that makes no qualms about being a very pass heavy team), I could tell that the default settings for my team were wrong. GameFlow had me running primarily, and 20 or so plays out of the wildcat, for the course of both games.

I think that leads well into my biggest complaint about the game, it lacks polish. Sure, there are lots of production values, and things going on in the course of the game that are good, when I think of polish, I’m talking about the extra effort that goes into the game to make each and every one of those things works flawlessly, that doesn’t exist here. There are obvious problems with the audio stitching in all areas of the game (ingame, pregame, postgame), which is understandable to a degree because of the volume dialog that exists but the frequency of it is nearly unacceptable. Also, hearing Cris Colinsworth goin on about the importance the first preseason game, and the experience of the 2 quarterbacks despite the fact that one of them is going into his first season as a starter and simply doesn’t have the experience he’s talking about. I don’t think this was nearly as bad in seasons past.

Also, the game crashed twice on me last night requiring a hard restart of the playstation. It happened once trying to load a Madden Moment (returning from last year, basically some game scenarios from last season that you try to recreate, or overturn, in the time remaining), they are decent if you don’t have time to play a whole game. And once while I was playing in the ‘be a superstar’ mode, which you basically play as a rookie and try run the plays that are called and win games. Because your player isn’t on the field at all times, you have the ability to simulate the game until the next time your player is on the field, that’s when the game crashed on me. It’s disappointing too because I was into my second game, and I forgot to save between them, so I may have to start over entirely, can I get an auto-save system please? Playing this mode was really fun though, I even liked running routes as a receiver, and even blocking on sweeps is fun.

I really think all of these could be resolved with the polish I mentioned above, I truly believe that this game is a victim of an annual, ridged release schedule, and will never ever be the perfect game it has had the potential to be as they continue to add features or outright change functionally. Because once you get into the games, most of those complaints are nullified by an excellent game of football. I’ve been loving the offense in this year’s offering. The line-aware receivers is incredible, I’ve yet to see a receiver take it out of bounds (I’m sure it will happen occasionally though), and the running game without the turbo button is great, i’m really liking the light tilts on the analog while the blocks set up, it really does feel like a burst when you push it down all the way to change direction, or hit the hole… this is easily the most fun I’ve had with the madden running game.  Defense feels the same as always, but they added a defense assist, while, holding ‘X’ your player will execute the play like he should until you let go, I find it handy when I’m playing off the line, so the player stays on him man when he makes cuts in man-to-man or gets to his zone in zone coverage, hopefully it’ll have me controlling something other than a lineman or a blitzer every play.

They changed the pre-snap controls, so it’s taking a while to adjust to the new system, but it appears to work, however it feels like there is less time to use it before the snap than in previous years.

It’s sort of annoying though when they say, we’re trying to make it a faster experience and have the games take less time, but there is all these “broadcast-like” things before during and after the game, that take more time than anything else. Anyway, its’ still fun, and I’ll be playing the hell out of it, and you shouldn’t let all these gripes effect your decision, since the football part of the football game really is excellent.

Kudos to me! and thank yous to you.

We’ve got the hardware battle to think about, the girlfriend has been sold on Kinect, and specifically Dance Central, so that’ll be around, but to be honest, I may not be able to play that game due to pride constraints. I think move is interesting, I could play some of that, however… I have no interest in the launch titles at this point, on top of that, like all new tech, it’s going to take a while (I’d say almost a year), for developers to be able to deal with the hardware, while Move has an advantage here because one could assume that Wii developers have some experience here and would be able to get a head start on the learning curve, the disheartening part is that most of the good games on the Wii were made by Nintendo, I think the only exception is going to be Red Steel, a game I felt was limited only by the technical short comings of the Wii hardware. When this team makes a game for the Move I’ll pay attention, and perhaps some credit to Team Ninja for the upcoming work with “The Other M”.

Consoles

We’ve got the EA sports 11 line up, Football and Hockey are going to be bought for certain, that’s great because the franchise modes there can be a huge time sink if I can get into them. A few no brainers, Gran Turismo 5, Fallout: New Vegas, RockBand 3 (I still play RockBand or Guitar Hero a couple times a week). Vanquish won me over with the media bust about a month ago, and while I assumed I was going to pass on the upcoming Call of Duty offering, I don’t think I’ll be able to resist when the time comes. The upcoming Spiderman game has some potential, but I’ve got major concerns, that I’ll share in a focused post in the near future. Little Big Planet 2 will make an appearance. Maybe Max Payne 3 if it does actually make it out this year (I assume this one will be the next to be pushed into next year).

A couple Wii games worth thinking about, but it’s hard for me to get excited for a Wii game at this point, Metroid: The Other M, and Kirby Epic Yarn are on that list.

PC

Civ 5 should be a good time, and I’ll try Final Fantasy XIV when it comes out. Truthfully I’ll probably end up with fallout for PC in the end.

It sounds like a lot of games to play, but when I think of last year’s holiday season, there were games every week starting in September that were must buys, and then a couple more in the months that were compelling enough to consider buying. This is going to be a slow holiday for the hobbyist gamer like me. The kind of gamer who really gets into the single player of an experience and then moves on.

StarCraft 2

My history with Starcraft 1 was limited, I played most, if not all of the campaign, I played some multi-player with friends, but not really on battle.net. So my excitement for this title was really nostalgia based, and as such I came in with the same fears I had about fighting games in general, which is, that it was fun because playing games like this with friends is fun… I’ve played many of the action-RTS games that have come out of over the years, and they’re all fine an good, but I was really looking forward to a traditional RTS game like a Starcraft game commited to be true to its pedigree.

The story picks up 4 years after the events of brood wars, with the redneck Jim Raynor commanding his group of revolutionaries, the terribly named “Raynor’s Raiders”. Who are pitting their forces against the evil dictator Mensk, and the Dominion. The Tarren on Tarren (humans in the lore of Starcraft) action doesn’t last long before the Zerg and the Queen of Blades (formerly Kerrigan), show up, and not long after that before the protoss make an appearance and the love triangle from my youth continues, with a touch of internal struggle. We’re presented with Blizzard quality (that is to say very well done) cut scenes between every mission, and as a huge surprise to me to me, also between every mission you’re also given the opportunity to navigate a hub world of sorts where you can interact with the members of Raynor’s crew, upgrade your units/structures, purchase mercenaries to bolster your team in the missions (more on that later). It’s played out like a point and click adventure game, where you’re given some insight to the characters motivations as well as the situation that they find themselves in. I wasn’t expecting this at all, and while it’s not exactly brilliance, it did give the story some substance that is generally lacking in the RTS genre. That said however, I wasn’t totally sucked into the story, and I didn’t really get attached to the characters in any sense despite Blizzard’s strong efforts. There are some choices that effect the missions you end up going on and your crew structure, but to me they felt mostly insignificant. So again, an okay story in general, but excellent for the genre.

The single player campaign was crafted with extreme care. Every mission seems to introduce a different type of challenge, be it strategy, or environmentally based. For example, there was a mission where all of the minerals on the map are at a lower altitude, the trick is every few minutes those low areas are flooded with lava, so while gathering your minerals and applying pressure to your enemy you need to be aware of the timer. It’s really an exercise in managing your troops, making sure you get everything to high ground. I don’t want to go too spoiler on this since it’s most of the fun, suffice to say that this sort of variety persists through the twenty-some-odd missions. You do get some choice as to which mission you take when, there are often 2 available at any one time, and because of the rewards it has some impact on how the subsequent missions can be played out. Blizzard also opted to remove the bulk of the base building from most missions, by dropping you into a pretty established starting point. I can see how that would read as a positive to a lot of people, but that, plus the fact that new units are constantly being introduced it really takes a lot of the trial and error strategy out of the missions. Sadly you can tell what you have to do by the new units you have and the structures you’re provided. This is where the achievements add quite a bit of depth and replayability to the experience, even for a guy (namingly me) who doesn’t normally buy into the achievement thing. I think it was different in this case because reading the achievements makes you think “hmm… I wonder how I’d pull that off”, which introduces a whole bit of strategy and problem solving that I love. The down side of not being involved in the strategic elements of building your base, is that it really leaves you  ill-equipped to deal with the competition you’ll be facing on Battle.net. They added some RPG-like elements in the campaign by being able to  earn points by completing objectives that you can use to research zerg or protoss technology. Every five points you get to pick one of two new skills or units (choosing one locks out the other) that you can use through the campaign. Unfortunately you’ll be leaving these upgrades and units (and even some that aren’t upgrades) behind when you go online.

Thankfully, to help bridge the gap you also get 9 “challenges” that are intended to teach you some of the finer points. “Walling in” to fend off a rush, unit counters (which units are most effective against which), micromanaging your units, and using your hot keys and so on. They’re fairly effective at their purpose, but really to get ready to go online, you’ll need to spend some time in matches versus the AI getting used to establishing a base. To be completely frank, the matches against the AI is where the game has been most fun for me so far (despite the fact that my strategy, and ability fall apart at the 10-12 minute mark).

The best screenshot I could muster from my online experience so far

The Battle.net UI here is great, all the information you want is at your finger tips it’s super easy to group up with friends and getting into matches has been quick and easy. I haven’t spent a ton of time in online matches, but I did play a few, against players who apparently didn’t spend as much time battling with the AI or doing the challenges, so I haven’t really felt challenged in the practice league yet, but it’s still be fun and you do get a bit of a rush when you do get into an encounter even if you do feel like you have the stronger army, despite being able to identify flaws in my attack, and my execution. I don’t know if thats a credit to my research skills, or if the game has taught me more than I’m giving it credit for.

When it’s all said and done though, I’ve been playing this game with almost every minute of spare time I’ve had since it came out. Gamers looking for a traditional realtime strategy game, especially those looking to get online are going to find A LOT to love about this game, the quality of this title, the attention detail and the glossy shine of typical Blizzard polish is on full display. Some may be disappointed by the lack of innovation, but I think it provides enough newness to usher Starcraft into a new generation of player, and satisfy the seasoned veterans at the same time. If you’re looking for purely a one player experience, or for something ‘new’ I don’t think this game is the one for you, but if you’re the kind of person who can get into completing every objective in the game, this could keep you busy for a while.

StarCraft 2

I’ve been playing StarCraft the last couple nights, mostly the single player campaign because I’m definitely not a competent player in the versus arena (I didn’t play the beta, and I didn’t play that much of the original SC, pretty much through the campaign and some vs with friends) so the amount of time I spend in there will definitely be limited, but I did try a couple 1v1 against the AI, learning that hard is too hard for me at the moment… my ‘newbness’ aside…

The Campaign has been excellent so far, and I was pleasantly surprised by the depth. I don’t think I’ve played a mission yet that was a simple beat the opponent yet. There is some of that, but they always seem to add a bit of flare with things like lava overflows of low altitude areas of that map, so you have to make sure that you have your units on high ground, it’s never overwhelming because they give you a timer telling you when it’s coming, as well as notification as the cycle approaches. They also used a day/night cycle in which you switched from offense to defense, but they always included optional objectives that encouraged you to explore past those simple boundaries, and they are always tied to some sort of reward, be it points to go towards your research trees, credits to upgrade your units, or collection of mercs available, and always some kind of ‘achievement’. All of this really encourages you to go the extra mile, and explore the maps, and gives a strong sense of variety that I honestly wasn’t expecting. There is also hero based missions that start you out against the odds, and you have to use the abilities of the hero to strategically get through the enemies lines.

You get some choice in which missions you do, and each has unlocked a new unit so far, each mission catering to that unit’s strengths, it makes it sort of obvious what you have to do to win, but to be fair I’ve been playing on ‘normal’ difficulty, so I expect that it wouldn’t be so simple if you had the cahones to play like a man… I think there has been a cut scene after each mission so far, and they have definitely been up to Blizzard’s standards.

I’ve spent some time with the challenges and they’re pretty fun, more or less have been like rock paper scissors in the ones that I’ve tried but that will likely change too.

Megalodon

They need more profile pictures unlocked at the start though… pretty limited customization up front and everyone looks the same on the forums which falls into blizzard’s model, it sort of sucks now though.

I’ve also had some issues with my megalodon headset however, it took some tinkering to get output working at all which is annoying because the beauty of the USB headset is that it’s just plug’em in and go. It’s also annoying that I had to set it to be prologic output instead of 7.1 which is supported by the headset, and works outside of StarCraft, and then I couldn’t get the mic to work… it’s all working now but it was troublesome, and annoying, and when I switch from desktop speakers to headset I have to go back into the settings to re-optimize, or continue to play with “lesser” settings.

[Update: 2010-07-31]

Just got back from a mini road trip, overnighter, and was getting ready to fire up starcraft. Looks like a patch went out while I was gone… notably!

Fixed an issue with sound not playing on some 7.1 systems.

If Blizz fixed my only complaint about the game already I am going to be thoroughly impressed. haven’t got to try it yet, but I’m pretty excited

In any case! for those of you interested in something mildly on-but-mostly off topic… take a peak over at my more personal space, http://seanon.net/2010/07/temperature-is-important/ this particular exercise features Cardboard Tube Samurai, and Assassin’s Creed’s Ezio

Limbo

It would appear that I pulled the ‘chute a little too early the other day before I put my last post up, since I was literally 3 puzzles away from the end of the game when I quit, and fell just short of finishing it in one sitting. So my opinion won’t have changed that much from that post.

I’m a firm believer that if you have any interest in this game at all, that you should completely avoid any and all of the major media outlets… ESPECIALLY any with videos… it is a shame when any of the experience is spoiled by such things. For instance I caught an episode of “Reviews on the Run” yesterday and in the video clips they showed with their review they showed solutions for several of the puzzles. From my personal experience only 1 puzzle was spoiled before hand and I felt genuine disappoint when I got that point. That may be the first time something like that has happened to me, which should speak volumes about the level of enjoyment I had with every minute of this game, and the quality of the experience.

LIMBO is a platform puzzler, it contains no dialog, no color, and very very few characters. But that is not to say the game isn’t beautiful, and the story isn’t compelling, in fact that couldn’t be further from the truth. The game starts with a boy waking up in the middle of the woods, no preface, or pretext of any kind. Years of video game training has taught me the only thing to do in these sorts of side scrolling situations… go right young man… The media says somewhere I should have known that I was playing the part of a boy looking for his sister… I don’t know where they got that from… and i don’t care… I likened the experience to having woken up with amnesia, which helped me to related to whats going on a little better maybe.

There are 4 or 5 different types of areas that blend together seamlessly as you play, and although they were all fairly charming my favorite moments in the game were early on when the puzzles seemed to be more closely tied to the people and things found in the environment that were clearly carefully set up, but somehow felt naturally there. It made me feel like I just stumbled upon these things and that I’m coming up with my own solution even though I know thats not the case. As the game moves on I found the puzzles to look and feel more like puzzles when I approached them, and instead of using the things found in the environment to solve then, there are switches that do different things, blades, and gravity, to deal with. The puzzles are still fun and clever, but not nearly as satisfying as it was early on. Failing to solve these puzzles often ends in some gruesome greyscale murder scenes that quite literally made me cringe. That is a testament to how engrossed you get in the boy and his adventure. As a weathered gamer I’ve seen all sorts of video game murder… in all sorts of colors and context, very few if any get this sort of reaction out of me, it really was a joy to be a part of this world while I was playing.

The controls are awesome, the physics, and the weight of your character as he’s running, climbing, jumping and sliding, all feel consistent, and (for lack of a better word) ‘right’. Any time I didn’t clear a gap it felt like my fault for poor timing, not the controls.

A lot has been made of the game being short, I found it was a good length, considering the 1p in modern warfare 2 only took me 7 hours (I’m primarily a single player gamer), the fact that this game was in the 6 hour ball park, all of which was very enjoyable, and a fraction of the price. I think this game is an incredible value and completely deserves to be talked about as one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had this year. In fact I believe if the game had of carried on for another hour or 2  it would have began to feel a little stale, and the fact that their is no story based motivation for you to keep pressing on, I think it very well could have lost some people. Like most parts of this game, I found the time perfect for the genre. As it stands it left me wanting more, and that’s a good thing.

xbox 360 owners have no excuse in my eyes for not owning this game. It’s cheap, it’s fun, it’s immersive, it’s rewarding. Anyone who doesn’t have a 360 should be hassling PlayDead, begging them to get this to the platform most convenient. It’s not worth buying a console for, but this is something that no gamer should miss, and certainly not because of console exclusivity.

Limbo

The first rule of Limbo is to not talk about Limbo… I almost regret watching the previews and reviews of this title because it becomes a mild disappointment when I recognize a section. I will say this though, this game is going to be in the Game of the Year discussions, and if it’s not something is terribly wrong with the people who are involved in such things… There have been more clever moments in the first hour of this game than every other game I’ve played this year (I’ve played a lot of games this year).

This thing is the definition of polished, it looks amazing with the lighting effects and the shades of grey, there were not real instances where I wasn’t certain what was in the foreground/background. There are different environments but the creep factor sort of wears off when you get beyond the woods, which is too bad. The controls are simple and feel (for the lack of a better word) right. From the gamer’s perspective (re:mine), the gameplay was incredibly intuitive, challenging, but never frustrating. I’ve never had a game make me feel so accomplished, smart and/or stupid and any combination thereof from one minute to the next like this one has. The girlfriend was watching me play for a bit at the start, and there was a whole lot of  her saying “Ewwww!” immediately followed by me saying “AHHH!!” in a true “eureka!” moments. I like a good puzzle game, but I don’t recall one that has had this sort of effect on me.

You would be doing yourself a huge disservice by not buying this game immediately if you have a 360, and the developer would be doing themselves and everyone else a disservice by not bringing it to other platforms. Everyone who doesn’t have nightmares (or at least can’t recover gracefully from them) should want to, and be able to play this game. It’s twisted, and gruesome without the gore, and because of this, even the parts where nothing is happening keep you on the edge of your seat.

I should probably save something for the review…

Mass Effect 2

You know a game is successful in what it’s trying to do, that it very quickly tells you, indirectly, that you should go back and play the previous title in the series. That’s what happened to me here… I tried to play Mass Effect over the holidays after picking it up during a steam sales. I played Mass Effect 2 for an hour or so the cinematic value of that introductory chapter was incredible, but it was the nature of the very dramatic intro made it clear that I should have a connection with these characters that I didn’t have. I mentioned a few posts back that I really liked Mass Effect, now that the dust has settled on that, and I have now played through Mass Effect 2, I’d say that the original was ok, but in retrospect, it’s a fraction of the sequel is.

It’s very easy to throw Mass Effect 2 into the traditional BioWare RPG bucket, but more than that it is a third-person “stop and pop” action game, with squad mechanics. It just so happens to be class based, and includes some character skill development based on experience points. It also contains an epic story that can be molded based on the decisions that is made by the player. In my opinion, this is the perfect blend action RPG. The controls on PC were tight, much better than in the original, and it felt like I could either use their pause/command functionality or play it as a straight up action game depending on the situation I was in. The execution here in my mind was flawless, I often found myself getting into some trouble, in those cases I’d pause the battle, scan the field to see whats going on, direct my team in such a way that would get me out of situation my running and gunning had got myself into. I played on the ‘normal’ difficulty, and I found that might have been a bit too easy. I didn’t die much through the course of the journey, and if I did it really was my fault for doing something stupid. I think it felt easier because the ally AI was competent for the most part. They didn’t often run out into the open into a swarm of enemies, sure it happened occasionally, but to the point of being a problem. The weapons and abilities all felt good to use, I played through as an adept, I REALLY enjoyed aiming my biotics so that they’d curve around enemy cover and the ability to control the battle field. I also started with some of the other classes and they all felt unique and powerful in their own way. I’m certain I will be playing through this again taking a different approach, with a different class, and maybe try to not get my crew killed this time…

BioWare did a great job of more or less hiding many of the ‘rpg’ elements from the player. You don’t have complicated decisions to make about ability points that need to be distributed, sure there is still some choice, but the options are simplified. You don’t need to spend points in charm or intimidate, though the functionality is still in the game and still used to open up dialog options. You also don’t have to manage your bag, and equipment, this is instead a loadout and upgrade system that applies to both weapons and armor. You purchase upgrades from stores or find them on missions, and you can develop them by using resources gathered by scanning planets, and dropping probes to collect them. It’s a simple system, after trying to get all the upgrades I did kind of wear out on the process, but by scanning the many planets in the many systems, you may also detect an anomaly which will give you a side quest you can do. It provides a little reward for exploring, and gives a little extra incentive when you’re farming materials for that expensive upgrade. But again, it all felt pretty optional to me.. and if I had my fill of scanning there was always something else I could do to take a break.

The story is one of, if not the best story in a game that I’ve played so far, I really got into it. I think thats because Shepard and the world that I’d created felt like my own. Unlike Mass Effect, which to me really made me feel like a small piece of this giant universe, Mass Effect 2 suppresses this by the rest of the universe refusing to acknowledge the threat leaving Shepard and crew to deal with the threat themselves. Although this is similar to ME1, the reason this feels smaller is because instead of trying to deal with the powers that be, finding evidence to support your claims etc to enlist their help, you are forced into a partnership with Cerberus, a terrorist organization (by reputation) with humanities best interest in mind (or so you’re told… I for one am not buying it). This relationship creates some interesting dialog moments and some difficult judgement calls along the way. I’ve got to say knowing that your decisions in this game will have consequences in the forthcoming sequel, and having seen those same sort of decisions carry forward from the original Mass Effect play their part here really makes you think carefully about the tough ones.

The bulk of the game is spent assembling your crew and doing loyalty missions (these will unlock an additional ability, and character outfit once completed, and I believe has some story repercussion as well), in doing these you really end up developing an emotional attachment to these people, as each provides some insight as to why Cerberus choose them to be on Shepard’s crew, and how they got into the position they’re in. There are some really interesting characters here and they were all a joy to get to know. But this sort of development and detail extends well beyond your immediate crew, the encounters you have on the various missions with people and situations are all incredibly fleshed out, and complete. You run into some genuinely creepy scenarios (not the least of which being the overlord DLC), all superbly written and all really fun to play.  The cinematics in this game are great, and similar to in Mass Effect, the soundtrack compliments each and every scene, it was very easy to get worked up and get on with your mission.

This is easily on my short list of games to play this year, even if you haven’t or don’t go back to play Mass Effect, though if you have the time I would strongly recommend it. It really makes you feel that the universe here is yours to mold.. It’s a truly amazing accomplishment for BioWare and I’m not at all surprised that it sounds like they’re trying to move the Dragon Age franchise in a similar direction (not that I agree with it). There isn’t much more I can say about this other than do yourself a favor and play it… and if you’ve only got a ps3, you should be hammering the bioware forums begging for a port because it’s that good…

Dragon Quest IX Sentinels of the Starry Skies

As a long time fan of the franchise, and the developer, I picked up Dragon Quest IX this week. I think this game has a lot going for it, starting with the timing. There really aren’t any games out, or coming out in the near future which really gives me a chance to actually stick with the game. I feel like I should qualify that statement because it comes with some implications, so I will. First and foremost these games are long, and the story is historically not enough of a draw on its own to keep me playing the game. On top of that games in this series don’t tend to evolve to the point where thats the key driver for me. What DQ is to me, is a simplistic approach to a tried and true formula of RPG gameplay that I loved and grew up with. One that doesn’t need to be cluttered with things like ATB, street fighter button press sequences or any other time sensitive, or non-menu based gameplay elements in combat… TO HELL WITH THAT, I love me some menu combat, and going to get a sandwich mid boss battle. I love the humor, and how the art style has evolved along the way. I find the experience often forgettable when I eventually finish it or simply move on to something else, I ALWAYS remember that I had a lot of fun with it while I was playing, and to me, thats all that matters.

I’ll probably approach this similar to how I tackled FFXIII only with less commitment to cause. This is mostly because of the DS, I really can’t get into long sessions with the device… I don’t have particularly big hands, but I do have fairly long fingers (at least I think thats the problem), I have trouble finding a comfortable way to hold the DS for extended periods of time so I often don’t. I also tend to be doing something else while I play DS, like watch TV, so I’ll end up looking away for 10-15 minutes at a time since I’m easily distracted.

Anyway, with all that aside, the game started out well, I especially liked the cut scene at the typical spot at the end of the introductory chapter where the plot is setup. It may have been the most interesting and effective cut scene I’ve seen on the DS so far, it really got me pumped to see what I’m going to see next. The humor is still fully intact, as is evident from the first foe I encountered when my journey began, the dreaded cruelcumber, which was a happy looking cucumber with a pike who’s motives are clearly to impale you… bringing a smile to my face already.

I started out doing a few simple quests, the gameplay was even more simplistic than simple since starting out the only skill I have is ‘attack’, and frankly even now that I have more skills all I ever really seem to need at the moment is attack. I’m at about level 10 with my hero, and I’ve only just gotten by the point where I could choose to fill out my party, so I’ve been grinding a little to catch the new party members up since they started at level 1. I’ve encountered 1 ‘boss’ character I guess at this point, and he did kill me the first time around because I wasn’t prepared for him, I was out of mana when the encounter started and I had also just moved all my healing items into the ‘bag’ so I couldn’t use them to heal. He was pretty easy once I had the ability to heal myself. I’m only a couple hours in at this point but I figured it was a good time to get things rolling over here.

Naruto Rise of a Ninja

I am a closet fan of the anime, haven’t missed an episode… and it’s been so good lately that I considered going back to the beginning and watching again, in fact I started and then realized that there were a couple games that I passed on the xbox due to those same confidence issues that I skipped all those other 360 games for. On top of that, it’s available via games on demand so I didn’t even have to try to hunt down a copy (the same can’t be said for the sequel, which I have also acquired…).

This game is fan-service… relentless fan-service… the game takes you through the end of approximately episode 80 of the original series. The story is told mostly through cut scenes from the actual episodes which sadly, looks grainy and dated at this point. They (thankfully) trimmed a lot of the filler and added some of there own to make more of a game out of it. There are a few different mission types that have you gathering collectibles, races, and retrieving items which inevitable has you fighting some bandits. Which makes sense considering that Naruto is facing weaker opponents since this is all supposed to be taking place before the ‘Chunin Exam’.

The plot missions usually has Naruto in combat, mostly with his peers, keeping with the story line of the show at the time (there are obvious exceptions that fans will already know). The combat itself is fairly simple, mostly 2 attack buttons with a handful of combos and aerial attacks, throw in a kunai attack every now and then. The idea is to use one of your combos to knock the opponent down and buy time so that you can perform a jutsu. I think the implementation here was brilliant; to perform a jutsu you hold down the left trigger, then use both analog sticks in pre-determined directions to emulate forming hand seals as they do in the show, afterwards it takes a second or two to charge the attack, during the time the jutsu can be interupted, when fully leveled you can ‘charge’ them longer for more harmful attacks. It’s not the most amazing fighting system in a video game or anything, but it was fun enough, and felt believable if not authentic to the experience. I’ve got to say, if you’re a fan of the franchise it’s pretty hard to not get $20 worth out of it.

Mass Effect

I also finished off Mass Effect (PC), I tried this one a while back and really didn’t care for it at first. I had heard Mass Effect 2 corrected a lot of the problems I had with the original, and when it came up during the steam sales I figured I’d give that one a try. The reviews were right, Mass Effect 2 is a much better game, but the further I got the more it felt like I was missing by not playing the first one. It was motivation enough for me to try this one again. I’m pretty glad I did, I had a much better time with it this go around, despite the game not running well on my machine at all (oddly ME2 runs far better than ME1… very strange). The story was great, and it really did give me the impression that was making a difference in this huge galaxy, most of which was unexplored by me. I’m half tempted to go back and continue exploring just to see what I missed.

It was a really really satisfying experience, and I need to give all sorts of kudos to everyone involved in the sound in this game, everything from weapons sounds, to the score, to the voice acting, all very very well done, and had my computer behaved a little better, or I had picked this up for console, I’m certain I would have been totally consumed by this experience.

So much so that I almost immediately loaded up Mass Effect 2, imported my Shepard and was ready to continue my adventure. Anyone late to the game on this one would be wise to play this one before playing 2. I’m sure you could play 2 all the way through without all the background but I liken the experience to jumping into say the 3rd season of some TV show, where all the big exciting moments were people who were supposed to be gone from the previous seasons come back, and you are just sort of left with a “who’s this supposed to be” feeling ostracized.

Actually, to add to that, I also put in Naruto Broken Bond almost immediately too, so it’s safe to say that these games were good enough that I didn’t want to stop playing them when I finished.

Anyway, I just wanted to post to introduce the “in the news” widget in the sidebar, since it’s kind of slow these days for games themselves, I probably won’t be doing full posts as much… instead… I will be commenting on the news, if I don’t have a lot to say I’ll continue to put some quick notes in the “In the News” feed.

I’m only displaying 5 at the moment, and I’m sure I comment on more than that so you should check back for that if nothing else.

Cheers

Trauma Team

I have never played a Trauma Center game coming into this and I had a bit of a guilty interest, I was almost ashamed that I wanted to pick up this game and play it. I’m glad to say that this is game was everything i expected it to be and more.

The story is told from the perspective of 6 doctors of different specializations. This is interesting because you really get the full story of the patients in some cases from the first responders through surgery. Each doctor has their own game play type, some more fun than others but I’ll get into that in a bit. The game is broken up into episodes for each doctor, and you can play them in any order. Well, that’s not exactly true… you can play any doctor’s story line but the next episode in that story line unlocks as you complete the previous. So, you can for example, play through all the paramedic missions before doing any of the other missions and create a sort of pulp fiction-esque style of story, or you can play through them as they would in the timeline of the events. I chose to play closer to the timeline just to keep the mission variety fresh, I didn’t really want to get stuck with a bunch of the less interesting game types at the end. The story is pretty well flushed out, and told in a manga style still frame, with the occasional simple animation. The voice acting was much better than I was expecting. The characters themselves all show some form of development, and each have their own personality and charm even though they are all very familiar.

Now I think it would make the most sense to break each of these doctors down individually and talk about their game play.

CR-S01 (yes that’s his name) [Surgery]: This character is a quiet kid, who was apparently involved in some sort of criminal event and he is released into custody of resurgence hospital to perform surgery, it seems he is on the path of redemption, definitely a familiar character. This game play will be very familiar to fans of the franchise, you are removing everything from tumors, to steel beams, monitoring vitals and stitching holes… Probably the funnest of the game modes.

Maria Torres [First Response]: Here you play the role of a first responder who thinks she is better than everyone else and feels the need to take control of everything at the scene. This makes for some interesting game play, you basically get a trimmed down version of surgery when you patch wounds, set bones with braces, stop bleeding with tourniquets. The trick is you often have 3 or 4 patients to deal with, and monitor the vital signs of each. It makes for some very challenging, fast paced action, and probably my favorite game mode. (coop)

Hank Freebird [Orthopedics]: The manual describes Hank as a “gentle giant”, it’s a fitting description but quite cliché. I didn’t care for this game mode all that much, mostly because it requires a steady hand, and that is something I simply don’t have. You’re basically tracing lines that are on the screen for the most part. There are also drilling, screwing and hammering type activities. I’m not sure if the precision issues I was having was a me problem or a game problem, but it was tricky for me to keep on the line, and to rotate the wiimote a the right angle and what not.

Tomoe Tachibana [Endoscopy]: The heiress of a ninja clan who is trying to make it on her own! Honor!  very stereotypical, but she is a very likable character and her butler, Hanzou actually provided a bit of comic relief for me. The endoscopy game play wasn’t all that fun, but was good for adding variety. you basically end up pushing this camera through the patient looking for hemorrhaging and other strange growths. you have a set of tools for dealing with those, all the while not touching the walls. It’s not bad, but it’s a pretty slow pace.

Gabriel Cunningham [Diagnosis]: This guy is pretty much House, well, not quite as evil, but definitely “rules be damned” mentality. I think this game play is pretty much how you might expect. You have conversations with your patient, and you do physical exams by click on areas of the person that exhibit symptoms like for instance their eyes may be yellow indicating jaundice, or there may be blood coming from their noses or on their hands after the cough. After you identify a bunch of symptoms you take it to your office and compare your symptoms with a list of potential causes, which usually determines what you look for in the forthcoming x-ray CT or MRI scans at which time you play a game of what is different between 2 images type game. I wouldn’t want to do these one after another as they’re not all that fun, and they are quite time consuming, but it was an interesting change in pace in small doses.

Naomi Kimishima [Forensics]: This one has a bit of an x-files feel too it, since she… well… receives phone calls from the dead. They actually did something really neat with the wiimote here that I don’t want to spoil, but it was one of the most immersive experiences I’ve ever had with the wiimote so far. clever… anyway, this plays sort of similar to the diagnostics game play in that you find clues on the body, and belongings, and at the scene using typical CSI tools. Once you have all the clues you start putting them together to create “solid evidence” until you have enough to solve the case. These often take forever to ‘solve’ sometimes up to an hour, they’re not particularly fun and can get frustrating if there is 1 clue that you missed somewhere and trying to figure out where that is is frustrating. I’d be a little happier with these if they took half the time.

Each doctor has (give or take) 6 episodes, in the main story, and then 1 more of each doctor in a follow up story. My first play through took me about 20 hours or so. Half of the game modes have coop portions that you can play with a friend, making it a bit more interesting and gives you an excuse to yell at each other. Despite the slower/less fun game play modes, I had a really good time with the game… in fact I couldn’t put it down all weekend. I really appreciated the freedom of progression, if I didn’t feel like doing an endoscopy mission, I could choose to play some other game, which created some interesting reveals in the plot. I really don’t know ~who~ this game is for exactly but I can highly recommend the rental. If you’re familiar with the franchise, there likely isn’t enough good parts to warrant the purchase but its definitely worth checking out, and I’m definitely glad I picked it up.

As it stands today, there is really only 5 or 6 games on the home console (I add this because Star Craft 2, and Dragon Quest IX are on the immediate future agenda) I REALLY want to play before February. [Crysis 2, The Last Guardian (hasn't been pushed back yet... I expect it will be since there was no news at e3 about it..), Fallout: New Vegas, Rockband 3, the others are escaping me at the moment)]

Harkening back to afore mentioned post, I have played most everything on that list that I still intend to at this point apart from Trauma Team (shush already, I want to play it), and Alan Wake, both are actually en route via amazon as I type… so the question is, what am I going to do for the next 8 months or so before we get another hectic stretch like that. I’ve been finding shallow comfort in xbox DLC that I’ve missed during my time away from the console. ‘splosion man, shadow complex, and trials hd (I LOVE TRIALS GAMES!), but once those are gone what am I going to do for games? suggestions? Best case scenario I find an MMO to sink 1000 hours into but seeing as I’ve had my fill of World of Warcraft it seems, and I’ve tried pretty much every other major MMO that came out as they came out and they weren’t that interesting ergo I think it’s unlikely. Thanks to EA and Steam sales last week, I have decided to give Mass Effect, and Dragon Age another chance. Maybe in a less cluttered release schedule, I will be able to devote enough time for the games to ‘take off’ in a way that I find compelling enough to see through…

So yea… I’m not at all comfortable with the lack of games coming how am I going to spend my free time… trophy hunting?

Red Dead Demption

I was going to pass on this title, I had had my fill of sandbox games after Assassin’s Creed 2, and Just Cause 2, but after reading a lot of reviews that put this in the 5 star and high 90 scores I figured I would be doing myself a disservice to pass up a game that is so highly regarded. Was I fooled by the media? or is this game really that good?

The story is told in much the same way as in Grand Theft Auto, through dialog while enroute to some form of blood bath, with the occasional cut scene (more so early on while they set the stage). Rockstar is truly the master of story telling in sandbox games… the atmosphere in this game is extraordinarily convincing the characters feel authentic even the most ridiculous of them (more on that in a bit), are believable in their design, mannerisms and voice work (mostly). In this sense, and as the reviews scores from the major outlets suggest, this game should be a benchmark for those who follow them. They also do some interesting things towards the end… honestly, I felt like I was at the end 3 distinct times, only to be presented with more quest markers which sort of frustrated me at the time, but I do understand why they did it this way, it was pretty well executed at the end too… (hard to talk about without spoiling so I won’t, suffice to say it’s worth playing it out if you’re like me and were thinking of quiting there).

You travel between US and Mexico but not a whole lot changes environmentally between the two, aside from one little snow area at the top of the map. I was definitely tired of the scenery by the time I was finished. It was sort of neat seeing the technology creeping into the world as would have been the case in that era, it was a subtle but nice touch. I still could have done with a lot more variety given the size of the map.

There are some crazy folk in Rockstar’s interpretation of the old west… the delusional, cannibals, necrophiliacs, as well as run of the mill swindlers, all make an appearance here (amongst others)… It clearly adds some color to the drab dull palatte of the western setting. Over the top is a bit of an understatement, but each of the people you meet are clearly unique and everyone seems to have some dirt on them, if not the kind that comes off with soap then some other brand of filth. The odd part is that the ‘hero’ is compelled to help these folks regardless…what is interesting about helping these folks who can be considered little more than fiends is that Marston’s patience for them does eventually grow thin and it’s evident in the voice work and dialog. The people you meet are also served with a thick thick helping of cliché for instance, a drunk named Irish, and a poor fella (perhaps feller would be more appropriate here?) with tourettes called shaky, I won’t spoil them all but even with the cliché they are still charming in their own way, and you actually build the semblance of a relationship with them in a sense. In my eyes this is the greatest strength of this game, big kudos to Rockstar in this regard. The unfortunate part is that it really feels like you’re introduced to people and you help them along their own little sub-plot, while they entice you with their carrot on a stick to progress your own story, which inevitably leads too someone new and a new sub-plot. Again it doesn’t suit Marston’s character to play around with these folks who are clearly leading him on when he is so swift to plug a random guy for putting the beat down on a hooker. I’m reminded of a Rev Rant (this one specifically) when playing this game.

There is always something going on, someone who needs help, for instance, someones wagon, horse, or wife has been stolen, or perhaps it’s just a whore (literally) trying to steal your horse that requires some immediate and swift retribution. I am an easily distracted player, so the amount of spontaneous quests that come up is a bit overwhelming, and my tendency to react to any blip on the map, or critter crossing my path, is getting to me and the animations to go through the motions of getting on and off the horse, skinning and looting kills and hogtying folks is all starting to feel too slow and tedious. I learned in the end that most of these blips should be ignored entirely, it pains me to do it… it’s just less painful than actually doing the task.

There are “Ambient Challenges” in Sharpshooting, Hunting, Survivalist (finding herbs), and treasure hunting. All of which are pretty self explanatory, the highlight for me was treasure hunting… with genuine treasure maps that gives you clues as to where the shallow pile of rocks that has some sweet loot hiding within. This made me laugh, you literally move 2 rocks and there is treasure inside. Its actually challenging and kind of neat. It’s the first time I ever whipped out the map that came with a game to try to figure some stuff out (PS it worked!). The rest of it felt more like make busy work because I was actively seeking them out as opposed to getting them passively as their title suggests… my bad I guess.

Combat feels good with snap targeting (your cross-hairs lock to targets chest when you pull up your weapon, from there it is a simple nudge to get a head shot), and dead-eye (bullet-time meets mark & execute) mechanics work well, and you need them when you’re being swarmed with baddies. The only thing that I’d probably change is that the dead-eye meter refills so quickly, that it almost feels infinite. I might have died 5 times in the 30 or so hours I spent with the game. The horse riding is tedious at first (rhythmically pressing ‘x’ to spur your horse to move forward), but then it gets to be second nature, and you don’t notice it so much. You also have fast travel from a camp you can build from your inventory nearly anywhere on the map, odd that you can’t do that from safe houses but whatever.

All you really need to know about this game I guess is that if you can get into a sandbox game like GTA, and that formula works for you then there is a lot to enjoy here. Personally I was hoping this game had been some kind of departure from the traditional sandbox formula, and it simply doesn’t, and overall was disappointed with it because of it. Apart from that however, this is a very, very good game and certainly something for the folks at Rockstar to build on, and something for competitors to try to copy.

Enjoy!

I really liked the new 360 hardware though, if it were “whisper quiet” like they say it is, I’d strongly consider it. And the combat in Metal Gear Solid Rising looked amazing, Raiden’s sword was cutting through pillars causing balconies to drop on baddies heads… you could chose the orientation of his swing using a circular reticle on the screen which was used to create some incredibly impressive dismemberment, and some watermelon slices… I’m all of a sudden looking forward to that game.

EA was spewing more 3D at us than I would have liked, but Crysis 2 gameplay looked cool. I had my doubts about Bulletstorm, but it seemed to be as advertised “fast paced action with a wink and a smile”. I can really get behind an over the top action game that doesn’t take itself so seriously (ala duke nukem/serious sam)… Need for Speed Hot Pursuit courtesy of Criterion (of Burnout fame), sounds like a great pairing to me, I’ll be looking forward to more info on that one. They showed people playing Medal of Honor, but there was so much footage of peoples thumbs that I didn’t really get to see what was going on in the game. I mean, does anyone ever actually glean any insight from looking at someones thumbs while they’re playing video games? it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen especially because they kept going back to thumb shots as if 1 wasn’t enough “yes! these people really ARE playing video games!”… com’on guys…

Ubisoft was disappointing, they introduced laser tag… and some heart sensor thing (Nintendo is going to be maaaaaaad). They showed some Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood but I’ve been burned by that franchise before so I’m quite skeptical at this point. They re-demonstrated the Kinect fitness game that looked like it might be ok if you’re into that thing. The also demo’d a new Driver but they were talking about shifting in and out of the car you’re in, to other cars, and mildly hinted on some sci-fi type in a comma story line shit… I dunno, it’d be interesting to check out a demo at least.

Nintendo and Sony keynotes today, I’m hoping for better or this e3 could be pretty disappointing.

Kinect
… nuff said…

Metal Gear Solid Rising
sword play looks rad, dismemberment and world destruction cool…

Gears of War 3
Gears segment featured Cliffy B wearing a shirt of a wookie wrestling a unicorn.. if I had 4 friends the co-op story would be cool, otherwise it just looks like more Gears. I like the mutating bad guys thing… did I just see a steel door stop a laser from the sky.

Fable 3
Not buying any more fable hype…

Partnership with Crytek
meh… didn’t show me anything

Halo Reach
I can’t get into Halo games… something about the controls I think… your halo news and opinions are better found elsewhere, I’m clearly in the minority. showing Halo after Gears was a mistake… the pace even seems slower and less action packed, and wide open spaces. it just doesn’t show as well I don’t think… the melee combo kill looked cool…

XBOX Live / Dashboard
demonstrating Kinect UI on the dashboard, step 1, wave at your tv… not going to happen… oh wave again… still no… I can get behind the verbal crap maybe… on the other hand, I bypass all those voice recognition crap when I call my service providers too… maybe it works better than my service provider, you’d hope with MS supporting it.

ESPN on live is sort of neat I guess, probably won’t be available in Canada though…

Kinectimals
Followed by a kitty tickling demonstration… cause teaching kids to play with tigers is a good thing to do… worse than anything GTA ever did thats for sure.

Kinect Sports
dumb…

Kinect Joy Ride
wheres the brakes?

Kinect Adventures!
the first “WTF” caught on air! if there is enough variety here it could be fun… actually….

Your Shape Fitness Evolved
I guess they needed something to combat wii fit… it looks like it might be fun enough… if this ends up in my house it will be my girlfriends doing not mine though…

Dance Central
well.. it looks like it works well enough for whitey no-rhythm… again this decision will fall to the gf…

Star Wars
I want to wield a light saber as much as the next guy…

Forza
still don’t know where the brakes are… and walking around a car using Kinect… is just not something I want to do…

New 360s
looks slick enough… shipping a lot sooner than expected…

Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands

The last couple Prince of Persia games had left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, I had finished 3, and abandoned the “artsy” reboot that came out last year near the end. The media was saying all the right things about this game to me, not the least being that it had returned to the formula that made 1 and 2 so good. If this turns out to be true then I think I’m going to love this game.

The story here isn’t a big departure from the rest of the series, I don’t want to say it’s serviceable because I don’t think that is doing it enough justice but it’s not outstanding thats for sure. It suits the game very well I found and does give you enough motivation to keep going. The prince himself is his usual “witty” or rather sarcastic self… I said to myself more than a couple times, “this guy is an idiot” but if you can comes to terms with that early enough you can get a chuckle out of a few of his one-liners.

“Prince of Parkour” is at the most basic of levels a platform puzzle game, yhe platforming is 3 fold; you will often walk into a big room where you will get a pan of the pathway to get to door usually several floors up. There isn’t much thinking about where to go in these rooms. It usually means finding the pillar or platform you can reach, and move the only way you can from there, rinse and repeat. The challenge here comes from your abilities coming into play. For example, you’ve probably seen the water freezing stuff from the promos or videos elsewhere, it comes down to timing, sometimes the next spout isn’t on when you froze the first one, so as you jump for spout 1, you need to release the freeze button wait for the next spout to start pumping and freeze it again before you get there. This all happens in a fraction of a second. There are several ways that they use the water to get in the way.

how to swing on water...

The second way they use platforming is through narrow trap laden corridors that depend purely on timing, you run, jump, and climb your way around saw blades, swinging axes, spikes on the floor, swinging spiked beams. and spinning rotating poles with blades on them… none of this is new to the franchise but they do throw some tricky ones at you, and if you don’t have rewinds available you may actually die here… luckily you’re never really far from a check point.

The final is by way of switch and lever puzzles to open doors. Luckily they are few and far between, I think there was maybe 5 or 6 of them through the entire course of the game, none overly challenging, and I think I only found one or two of them to be tedious.

Between platforming you spend your time in “Prince of Pottery-rage” busting any (what may be priceless) vase you cross trying collect red and blue floaty orbs, to refill your health and ability meters, if the orbs float and go right towards you anyway… whats the point of destroying the priceless artifact?.. no manners thats why… the prince is just another “entitled” rich kid I guess…

Fully leveled whirlwind ability... potent

There is also some combat in “Prince of Push-Square”, it’s not a fantastic fighting system, you get a sword and a kick button, and there is some variety in the baddies that change how you should fight them. To help you can learn abilities when you collect enough yellow orbs to level up… to be honest I only ever used the whirlwind, once that was maxed out it was pretty effective at controlling the room. It’s like a built in Dynasty Warriors mini-game that you used to replenish your health and abilities meters and give you some sense of character progression. It was definitely fun in the small doses it’s given to you in. I even enjoyed the challenge mini-games that unlock when you complete the game. I think it can get by with this minimal combat system because it’s not the whole game, it doesn’t need a stellar combat system like say, Arkham Asylum did.

When it’s all said and done, I had a GREAT time with this game, it’s so rare that I can say a game delivered exactly what I wanted it too, especially since it was so far removed from the last version of the game that used that formula. I’ve got to say, if you played the original Prince of Persia on the last gen consoles and enjoyed it, you are going to love this game. Conversely, if you didn’t like the early PoPs, this probably isn’t for you. If you missed those games, and only played the last couple, I think this is a great one to get on board with. There really aren’t any other games that quite compare to PoP, and I think you’d be doing yourself a disservice for passing on it.

I arrived home late last night, and it occurred to me that Rockband: Green Day was coming out today. Having been a Green Day fan back in the day (I’m pretty sure they were the ones that inspired me to learn to play guitar), and to a lesser degree still love the older stuff I knew I would be getting this… and I did… spent some time on it today, it’s pretty good, and challenging. I play guitar and drums on expert usually, and I knew Tre is a great drummer for the genre, but I under estimated how hard it was going to be. I have the feeling I’m going to have the same problem with this game as I did with the Beattles RockBand game. Playing a band-centric rockband game just gets pretty repetitive when it remains in the same genre let alone the same band, you end up doing a lot of the same patterns. However, it’s still good so far.

I also picked up Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands today… I was convinced somewhere over the Atlantic, listening to a couple gaming podcasts talk about it. I mean, I read the reviews, “neat platform puzzles”,”shady combat”. But I heard on these podcasts something that I was really hoping to hear, “I loved the first couple PoP games, and this one feels a lot like those”. I got about 3 hours in today, and so far I agree. This is exactly what I wanted from Prince of Persia, it’s all about timing, and using your abilities to traverse the map… you get a little combat in there to mix it up.. it’s not terrible, it’s not overly simple due to the volume baddies around. I’m really enjoying it.

I also put in Super Mario Galaxy 2 for a bit.. not enough to really get a feel of it yet, but it feels like the last one and thats not a bad thing. I played it just long enough to learn that the rechargable battery pack that is currently attached to the controller is on its last leg, taken from the charger it only lasted 30 mins or so… I couldn’t be bothered to get the other one heh.

It also pained me a bit to take Skate 3 out of the console to put in PoP, I wanted to play it a bit, but I wanted to try out my new stuff first… and never got around to getting in a session. Gotta start getting more clips together for my next montage. And I’m in the final stretch of Red Dead Redemption… might as well get that out of the way.

Too many games to play right now, tempted to buy more…

I’m about 20 hours in, I am an easily distracted player, so the amount of spontaneous quests that come up is a bit overwhelming, and my tendency to react to any blip on the map, or critter crossing my path, is getting to me and the animations to go through the motions of getting on and off the horse, skinning and looting kills and hogtying folks is all starting to feel too slow and tedious. I’m learning that most of these blips should be ignored entirely but it pains me to do it… it’s just less painful than actually doing the task.

I’ve got to say though, the atmosphere created through the audio and visuals is amazing, it really feels like the old west to a degree, I don’t think that there were as many fiends as there is in this game though. It really feels like you’re introduced to people and you help them along their own little sub-plot, while they entice you with their carrot on a stick to progress your own story… If John Marston is as bad ass as he is constantly made out to be through out the game, he would have murdered these folks long ago for their shenanigans, but alas, you must play along.

Its a pretty good game so far, but I’m not fully understanding the near perfect scores it is getting in the major outlets. Apart from the setting and story (again, you can make a case for perfect scores in those categories alone), nothing sets this game apart from a game play perspective. It’s really hanging its hat on the ‘Dead-Eye’ functionality for duels and combat in general, it is little more than the ‘bullet-time’ functionality we’ve seen in many games since Max Payne did it (I don’t think it was the first game to use the feature, but it was the first one that had a big audience I believe). It does go through a bit of an evolution, from manually pulling the trigger in standard bullet time, to auto-marking the targets as you hover over them, to manually marking the targets while in bullet time, and that was kinda of nice since it’s really the bit of character evolution in the game at all. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I don’t find this game nearly as good as everyone is making it out to be. What you do in the game really doesn’t change at all, you’re either going to kill or capture any bad guys you run into and thats about it. There are some gambling type mini-games, texas hold’em, black jack, liar’s dice, horse shoes… but frankly they all take too long to play in my opinion, and they’re not all that fun.

I think a lot of the scores were the result of a gut reaction to a setting that has not been over tapped yet, and sure it’s a good game, if you’re a fan of the open world sandbox model of game, you’re going to love this, everything else beyond that aspect is truly fantastic. If you can’t get into this type of game to begin with, this game isn’t going to change your mind, it suffers from the same problems other games of this ilk do. I’ll elaborate more on all this in my review when I return.

Skate 3

(well sort of..)
I don’t think it’s fair for me to review this game because to me it’s clear that I think the game is definitely much better than it actually is, but I will give it a go.

The story provided is the one of the returning “legend” as you are often referred to in the game as a result of your exploits from the previous Skate games, where, after a brief tutorial from Coach Frank (Jason Lee) you and Reda (who was your filmer from the previous games), start a brand of your own. The objective is simple, promote your brand and sell as many skateboards as possible. The milestone counter stops at a million but you can continue to accrue sales after this mark. With the exception of Lee (because I think he’s supposed to sound as campy and over the top as he does), the voice acting is terrible, but that is to be expected considering that the voices are not provided by actors, not the least of which is your new filmer… which is unfortunate because he is the one constant voice through out the game. I’m not going to put too much weight on this though since it would sound equally ridiculous if the voice acting was top notch too I think.

There are a variety of challenges to participate in, Street and Vert competitions, Own the Spot, Hall of Meat, and Death Race, Film, Photo and Pro challenges all making their return in addition to 1up, that replaces the old SKATE mode, which is a score based game over a short time, beat the opponent 3 times to win, and a new ‘Own the Lot’ challenge that basically has you performing a combination of 10 or so of the afore mentioned modes in the same vicinity. It’s a nice variety, and some of the challenges can be quite difficult. In addition, most challenges have two levels of completion, you can ‘own’ a challenge, by performing the objective, for example clearing a large gap or making a transfer, or you can ‘kill it’ by performing a specific trick while doing it, like doing a 360 grab over the same gap or transfer. This is a nice touch since you get the bulk of your boards sales by simply owning the challenge, killing them provides a minor bonus, and similarly you can get additional bonuses by doing the same challenges online. This new approach means you never have to perform a very specific trick on your first try to progress (which is ultimately why I stopped playing challenges in Skate 2).

For the way I play the game, I use the challenges as a distraction when I can’t find a good spot for a trick or the line I’m trying to complete isn’t quite working and I need a break. That statement on it’s own says a lot about why it is somewhat unfair for me to review this game… I enjoy the mechanics of the game so much, that I consider roaming around and NOT participating in the challenges that the developers provided the fun part. They’ve provided excellent in game filming tools including 4 cameras, +3 more “Advanced” variations which work with key framing (these cameras were a $10 DLC in Skate 2) so that you can make some authentic looking skate reels. In this iteration of the $10 ‘Filmer Pack’ you unlock additional storage space on the EA servers for your footage (minor gripe about that specifically here), as well as the ability to upload in HD (720p), and remove the watermark from your clips.

BlackBox has also provided the players with the Park Creator, and the object dropper as a way to customize the environments you’re in. I’ve made some use of the object dropper in my travels, but I’ve yet to create my own park (I don’t think I’m that creative). The tools are pretty intuitive though, and it seems like it wouldn’t be a huge challenge to create something playable. The object dropper is disabled while you’re in a challenge so it can’t be used to tweak the environment to give you the edge in said challenge (thats not to say that there are no objects in some of the challenges that can’t be moved to help you). That in addition to the other creative tools, the ability to import your graphics created in the online graphic creator into the game and display proudly on your character (my degenerate gamer logo below), really gives it a personal touch.

Graphic created with the Web Based Graphic Creator

From my perspective this game is the only one that really extends beyond the game, while you can access community clips and rate photos and graphics and whatever else while in game, you can also do all of this from the http://skate.ea.com website, it truly is video game integration with the web 2.0 philosophy, it really adds to the experience to me. On top of that, when your clips get views, and ratings you are rewarded with board sales that contribute to your in game progress… very neat indeed, I wonder what it would take to get a million sales via the web alone…

Much has been made of the ‘Team Focused’ approach to this game but that didn’t really effect me. As i mentioned, most of my time with the game is spent looking for spots and creating some footage, so I don’t get into the online challenges much, so perhaps the greatest addition to this franchise was lost on me. The downside of this is that it very much feels like Skate 2 in a new environment. An environment that feels over-tuned and less authentic. Your stairs usually come in sets of 3 with fairly large landings between them, theres usually always a slope before a big gap and the manny pads are always long enough for you to get your tricks set up. It makes finding interesting and unique spots a bit of a challenge for me. The environment is divided into 3 distinct districts all with their own style, the only way to get from one to the other is by using the fast travel in the menu. I found this took away from the continuity of the environment, but since I only really look at the game from the mentality of 30 second clip, moving from zone to zone wouldn’t really happen anyway.

It’s worth mentioning too that this game included EA’s ‘Online Pass’ which has been introduced as a means to deter used game sales. In the end it means if you want to participate in the Online functions of the game, you need to enter a code to do so. Obviously one code comes with the game, however if you’re like me and play on a couple profiles it means it’s going to cost you another $10 to do so… very unfortunate, or if you’re in a house hold with several people who play games your 70$ game is going to end up costing you $100 so that everyone has the same experience… I wonder if EA has a solution for that.

I guess what this all boils down too for me is that this is simply more skate 2, in a new environment, one that is good in clip sized segments but not great over all. I absolutely love the game, but I can certainly see it being less than fantastic if you aren’t simply enjoying the mechanics as I do. If you haven’t played a Skate game to this point, this is a great place to start, but I’d suggest a rental before a purchase. If you play the game like I do, you’re going to love it.

I’m playing on Normal difficulty on all these clips; for my first I think I just wanted to get something out there, the next set will probably be on hardcore for grins. The song is Milk Lizard by The Dillinger Escape Plan, and that short sample on the title treatment is from Luv (sic) by Nujabes (RIP) & Shing02

Game Credits to Black Box and EA

I unwillingly threw it up on youtube because it seems like my provider has the traffic throttled pretty low, so it was painful to watch. I was thinking about Vimeo but it seems like they wanted more money for an HD account than I pay for my hosting so that didn’t make much sense to me.

Angry Birds

It’s been a while since my last post, I was travelling this past weekend so not much gaming done then, apart from a fair amount of time with “Angry Birds“. What a great little package that is for the price of $1, on top of that they added more levels for free with an update. I really try to get perspective from 3 different angles when looking at iPhone games. First and most importantly, my own, the game from a gamer’s perspective. I saw an addictive little slingshot puzzler game where you have to beat down enemies using various types of ammo (birds), that have different abilities, while navigating or using obstacles to crush your foe. Since each round only takes 20 seconds at most, it fits the iPhone game formula of pick up and play when you’re standing in line, in-transit, or whatever else (not that it stopped me from spending an hour on the couch with it). All of this tells me that this is a great game. Then I usually like to see what my girl friend thinks of it. She’s not a novice when it comes to gaming, she’ll play as much Mario as she can get her hands on, but her tastes don’t go much beyond that, aside from the occasional iPhone game, Topple, Diner Dash, that sort of thing. She also owns an iPhone, so it takes some of the ‘non-intuitiveness’ of iPhone gaming out of the equation. She agrees that it’s fun… Finally I like to put it into the hands of someone who doesn’t own an iPhone with no instructions just to see how it goes. In this case it was a good 10 minutes before I got my phone back. Needless to say, it’s worth your dollar, and I’d still say it would have been a good game at the $5 price point.

Skate 3

The remaining gaming time I had has been mostly spent waiting for HD Skate 3 clips to render and transfer to EA servers, or almost transfer, then have to render all over again… That could have been handled way better… If a clip is rendered, why not save it in a rendered state before uploading… that way if the upload fails you don’t have to sit there for 15 minutes while it renders again… (all my uploads were in HD, and they take FOREVER) I finished my first go at a compilation reel which I have attached below. I’ve learned that it takes A LOT of clips to fill a 4 minute song, and despite upgrading to the $10 “Filmer Pack” DLC which boosted 5 minutes of storage, they clearly were offering 5 minutes of standard definition recording because I had to clear my profile a couple times to get the footage I needed for the 4 minute sample which I guess is understandable, but still disappointing, for $10 there isn’t much value there.

Montage moved here

This has been a crazy week for games, but sadly, one I’m not really able to participate in. The reason being I’m going on vacation next week, and traveling overseas for two weeks. It’d be sort of silly spend that money on video games I won’t be able to play until I get back anyway so I’m holding off in case those funds are needed elsewhere. I had all but talked myself out of Red Dead Redemption until I started reading the reviews, it is getting some really really high praise so I may have been convinced to pick that up when I get back. I was kind of surprised by the Split/Second scores though, I thought it looked interesting but I thought it was going to come with some kind of major flaw, that doesn’t appear to be the case… so I guess it is up to Blur to determine which of those I grab since I’ve already decided I’m only getting one (if any). And I’m really excited for Prince of Persia regardless of how mediocre the review scores look, the common theme in those reviews are that fan of the franchise (namingly me) are going to enjoy the ‘return to form’ of the best in the franchise (in my opinion).

In any case this will likely be my last post until the middle of June since I won’t be doing any gaming while I’m over there I don’t think, certainly not the console variety, I’d imagine some iPhone, and some DS though (still have bowsers inside story to finish up). Over the next few days I’ll likely be playing Skate though, you’ll likely find some new clips on my skate profile if you’re really interested in keeping tabs on me.

With a 30 second replay timer, it kinda sucks when your line goes a little too far outside of that time limit since the environment is prime for infinite lines and you end up clipping the start of your line which might be your favorite part.

Now the way I play this game, is to find sweet little spots, and make neat little videos… I prefer the realistic ones but I’m not opposed to over the top megaramp type stuff too as you’d see if you were to check out my profile at the moment, in anycase, I was excited to see they included HD video output from the replays. So I wasted no time investing in the “Filmer Pack” which increases your online video storage to 5 minutes, apparently this translates in about 5 HD videos, which is too bad, but it does let me get high res sources for my compilation videos which is alright, but it sucks that you can’t really leave them up there if you do a lot of filming like I do.

Aaaanyway, “Part” in progress, enjoy… for now..

This would come together a lot faster but my connection keeps dropping when I try to upload vids, it’s really annoying considering how long they take to render in HD… but I digress

With Skate 3 out today, I figure why not start there, I’m not sure what time exactly, but if you follow me on twitter, or subscribe to the RSS here, you will be notified.

This will be my first “crack” at it, I wouldn’t expect it to be perfect, and I do have some concerns about my limited upstream, we’ll have to see how it goes.

Skate 3

I’ve talked enough about this… I don’t think I need to go into detail…

Lost Planet 2

I liked the first Lost Planet quite a bit, if the timing was better on this release I probably would have been all over it, my complaint about the last Lost Planet was that it didn’t flow very well to me, and it was pretty much a deal breaker.

3D Dot Game Heroes

I was so excited for this game… but I think the marketing has fatigued me completely on the idea. There are a million reasons for me to love everything about this game, but I’m just not feeling it at the moment, I’ll probably hold off on picking this up for now… I don’t think it will have the charm required to get me off skate 3 this week at least, and I’ll be travelling quite a bit over the next few weeks so maybe I’ll look into grabbing it in the next release lull, but I really blame the marketing on this… it was just too much too early and I’m not nearly as excited for it as I was a month ago when the first set of reviews started coming out.

And all that is just this week… The following week is a big one as well…

Red Dead Demption

I wasn’t interested in this at all, I’ve had my fill of open world for while I think, but the western theme is always interesting to me because its seldom explored. I liked the previous Red Dead game, but quit when I had to play the indian… not because I’m anti-indian, I just got tired of the bow and arrow pretty quickly. In any case, this will also be on my list of rainy day hopefuls.

Alan Wake

This title screams interesting… I watched the quick look on giant bomb, and it seems pretty great based on that.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

’nuff said right? I loved the first game, this seems like the sequel that brings in some of the features that didn’t quite make it into the previous version. Even if it was just more of the same I’d be all over it. Besides, there is no way this game doesn’t make it into my house… I’m sure the girl friend went ahead and pre-ordered it weeks ago…

Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands

This game looks really good, I’m surprised there hasn’t been more hype around it. The last Prince of Persia game was disappointing to me, the no fail mentality sort of made the game feel like it might as well have been on rails. This one appears to be getting back to the platforming puzzles that I loved about the original, that sadly and slowly left the series, this has the potential to be a great great game.

Split/Second

Arcade racers clearly have a place in my life, I love the pick up and play aspect of them, you don’t have to be great at racing to be successful so you can jump in after months away from the title and still compete, that doesn’t happen in your Gran Turismos or your Forzas. I doubt I’ll be buying both this and Blur (more on that later) though, so I’m probably going to wait for the reviews and see if they mention the deal breakers for me. My problem with this one before I get all the details is that once you learn all the track variations it would remove a lot of the challenge/excitement I think.

Trauma Team

ok ok, I know what you’re thinking, but whatever. I haven’t played a Trauma game at all to this point, and to me they look fun in general, I’d considered picking one up on a couple different occasions so there is no better time than now with a new release. I think the multiplayer will be a hit with the girlfriend, and any time I can put video games and quality time with her together its a win situation for me. I’m really looking forward to this one.

There you have it… 6 releases in 1 week that I’d consider very buy-able, 9 in total… but wait… theres another week…

ModNation Racers

The next game really selling the play, create, share mentality, I think this really lends well to a kart racer, if the power ups are awesome this game will be awesome… all that customization, and infinite number of tracks to play, this game will never get old as long as the power ups are great. I’d like a demo first I think…

Blur

Hard not to look forward to this one, Project Gotham by the guys who made Project Gotham, with kart racer-esque power ups… I liked the PGR series a lot, they always felt somewhere between arcade and sim to me, and I appreciated that about it. It’s going to be really interesting to check this one out.

11 games in one month? This is a heavy heavy release cycle leading into summer with some really compelling titles, and a good mix of sequels and new IPs. It’s going to be really interested to see what the numbers for these games look like without the spending power Christmas provides. If you wanted to get creative, you could include the last week of april and get Splinter Cell: Conviction and Super Street Fighter IV

for the record I’m playing on hardcore difficulty, and I’m still trying to get my barrings for distances and dialing in the tricks.

So, as I mentioned, I foresee this type of content getting drastically better as I get more proficient with the tools to producing them, I do envision audio commentary as well, it just wasn’t in the cards for this session. You’ll just have to trust me that I’m working some of these things out…

I’ve put some time into Super Street Fighter IV, enough to know that I’m terrible at it… no seriously, I lose fights against the AI on easy… My thumbs are sore from a couple hours on the D-Pad, I don’t recall a game related thumb injury like this since the NES days, it’s really quite tender… In any case, it’s abundantly clear how precise this game is in terms of hit boxes, and timing, it’s very easy to see how the people who invest the time in this game can really stand above the rest. And I can understand why they would, this is a fun game, and it looks great. Loads of Character choice, certainly something to suit most play styles.

However…

When I think about playing Street Fighter though, it gets pretty nostalgic… I definitely recall long nights of winner stays, pass the controller and some serious animosity towards the friend who was just too good, and the phenomenon of the losers banding together and routing for the underdog every time the controller changes hands, and the roar of a crowd when someone managed to crumble the king’s 30+ win streak.  I’m sure any gamer growing up in that era would have similar memories… good times for sure. I don’t play games like that anymore… not that I wouldn’t like to, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve moved away from most of my gamer friends, and the guys on the couch “playin’ vids” simply doesn’t happen anymore.  Although it didn’t occur to me at the time I think I was so excited for this game partially because I thought some way, some how, I’d get some of that back. Unfortunately that’s not the case.

So play with friends online you say, legitimate argument, but one of the beauty of the pass the controller model is that you only need one copy of the game and you can play with all of your friends. This is the first Street Fighter game I’ve owned, not one of my friends picked this up, I’m not surprised by this, perhaps they realized what I am now realizing sooner… There is next to no interest in playing this game alone, and even less interest in playing random matches with strangers, definitely not to the point of getting good enough to ‘dethrone’ one of them, let alone good enough to make a noteworthy effort on the leaderboards.

I had pretty much the same feeling about Tekken, although I was much more objective in that post than I have been in this one. I think what this ultimately boils down to is that I may never play another fighting game, I most certainly won’t be buying one.

In a totally unrelated note, I’ve been thinking about getting into producing some video content for this site, and as such I’ve been toying with some title treatments for intros to such productions, it’s not really ‘gaming related’, so I’v been posting them elsewhere, feel pretty to hop over and take a peak if you’re interested. Feedback is most certainly welcome.

Box Art

I’ve always been a fan of the Splinter Cell series and the potential that the media coverage demonstrated more or less, single handedly convinced me I should get back into xbox 360 gaming. Coming into a game with this level of expectation is almost always a precursor to disappointment.

The story begins with Sam receiving some information from a familiar voice that his daughter who was supposed to have been killed in a car crash several years prior my not be as dead as he thought. The approach they took to telling this story was interesting, in the sense that they bounce around the time line to sort of plant the idea of betrayal that you would expect in a spy thriller in an effort to create some drama and tension that it doesn’t seem to me would have been capable in the rest of the story without it. Unfortunately I don’t think it was developed well enough and as such didn’t really have the impact it was supposed to. The single player campaign is very short, and if there weren’t some bottle necks for me I’m sure I would have been really disappointed, but there is a lot of replay value here that I will touch on later.

The score and effects were pretty spot on, but I found a lot of the voice acting was lackluster and not up to my expectations for a title of this size. This sadly Includes some shaky work by Sam himself on a number of occasions. Grim’s voice actor deserve a lot of credit for keeping the whole story grounded, the voice work done for her is easily on par with the best in the industry, and I think without it, it would have made the rest of dodgy voice work stand out that much more. The hands down biggest annoyance of this game, is that the goons Sam is stalking are, well, annoying… They repeat the same lines over and over again, non-stop, it’s really really bad (i remember this scene). “I was at <Insert name of last level here> Fisher! You’re Dead!”, it actually made me turn the game off on a couple of occasions it was so bad.

The game looks very good, and the projected text that they introduced did work fairly well for the objective based messages, I found the video clips they projected passable most of the time, since the picture wasn’t clear enough to watch most of the time. As Sam is in the safety of shadows, the world goes black and white which serves well to let you know you are hidden, however it makes seeing the environment somewhat more challenging, especially if you haven’t had an opportunity to mark anything yet. I had the same problem with The Saboteur, I’m not a huge fan of black and white in games in general I don’t think, especially one as graphically complex as splinter cell.

In their marketing of this title Ubisoft boasted Splinter Cell Conviction’s ability to keep the player as immersed to the experience during the story telling elements by keeping them in control, or by use of the camera to sort of flow in and out. While it’s obvious that this is certainly what they were shooting for, it didn’t come off as at all special, certainly not to the point of being a bullet point for marketing. They also spent some marketing effort pitching these “Interactive Interrogations”, this is flat out a sham, they might as well have put up a little text box with “press “B” to continue”, oh wait, thats pretty much what they did… Instead the video auto-pauses, and you get to hit the button to make it continue again. Sure, you get a little control over what animation plays next by navigating around a very small, closed in by an invisible wall area. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun enough, and the animations can be satisfying, but don’t sell it to me as some crazy inventive thing you’ve done, you’re not nearly as free to torture you subject as you’re lead to believe you would be. Though it does clearly serve as a means to deliver story while the player is still in control, and it is effective in that sense, just another over hyped feature that I probably would have found excellent had they not made a bullet point out of it. Another example of how they leave the player in control while story is delivered is with the old, directional microphone, point the camera at the targets as they move around the map game! … I hate that game… its not fun, just show me the cut scene next time please…

I must say though, once you get through all of that nonsense, and you get down to playing Sam Fisher, the ex-3rd Echelon operative (not the camera man), this game can be fun! Getting a clean sweep on a room full of bad guys with some clever use of environment, and gadgets it is overwhelmingly satisfying. The unfortunate part for me is that as the game progressed and the rooms became more full, I found myself reacting more than planning and because things are going so quickly you don’t always get a chance to scope out the room for places to set up an assault. Unlike every other Splinter Cell game, this one is pretty well lit so hiding spots are sparse, and you may not know there is a pipe for climbing on the other side of the room. “Mark and Execute” is not a win button, it can be difficult to pull off in certain circumstances when you’re dealing with cluttered room where you lose range or line of sight on patrols and miss a kill, the pace of the combat is quick, and I bet some really good players have some really good methods to clearing out a room. On more than a couple occasions however, I found the best way to clear the way was to mark everyone, charge in and meat shield the nearest guy and use the execute on the rest. Because of this however, I think playing this game again and again would get more and more fun as you learn the environments, so it would be more satisfying sweeps like I mentioned above and less generic hectic sweeps that I frequently saw.

There are weapon crates scattered throughout the game which will allow you to customize Sam’s load out, and upgrade the weapons that are available. But.. alas I don’t know why you would since Sam cannot survive a gun fight, you really rely on your silenced pistol 95% of the time, and apart from the range modification I didn’t notice any real impact of the others. A nice touch I guess, but it was mostly useless.

In addition to the single player mode, there are “deniable ops” which are simply additional scenarios you can drop into, they are kind of neat in that if you get spotted, they call in more reinforcements, thereby prolonging the mission creating a nice little diversion and some more playtime.

So while I wasn’t disappointed by my excessively over-hyped expectations of this game, I wasn’t thoroughly impressed by it either. It seemed like they made sacrifices to make way for their innovations, and left the game lacking in what I would generally call important areas to a game of this ilk. By all means, if the idea of a new take on the action/stealth genre, this is a very good place to start.

So I’ve taken in the Skate 3 demo 3 or 4 times on its 30 minute timer, and every time I do I get more and more excited for the full game. The demo takes place in a sectioned off area of the University district and has a lot of benches, stairs, other gaps to play on. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t a little pool or something to play in, but it is a demo after all. My session tonight was mostly about getting the hang of underflips and darkslides, 2 of the new trick (I suppose trick-sets would be more appropriate), they make sense control-wise which I appreciate. I’m not a huge fan of the animations coming out of the darkslides, it seems like the animation itself is too quick, and you can’t really see what is happening as well as you can other tricks.

Below is a video I took of a fun little gap I found with the help of the object dropper to bring in a little ramp.

Forgive the camera work, the “Advanced” cameras were locked out in the demo so I didn’t get to give it the white glove treatment which is too bad because that tree is really in the way, If I had the cameras I probably could have worked around them. Oh well, will remember this spot for release day.

Edit: And this is why I love this game…

I felt the need to develop this line a little more… so here is the improved version:

I just stuck with the follow cam because I wasn’t totally happy with the tricks, the darkslide should have been earlier… I wanted to throw in a flat land underflip of some kind before heading into the bank, and maybe a manuel out or something. I will no doubt be perfecting this tonight.

Edit 2: Alright maybe not perfect..

Yea, not perfect at all, but I did get a little bit of bullshit..

And a neat little grind

sneaky

I played quite a bit of the game so far, and from what I understand the single player campaign isn’t that long so I think I’m getting close to the end. Its been pretty challenging by time laying out the room for your mark and execute, and doing so quickly so that the marks don’t patrol out of the area or away from the kill spot you had planned. I can see this game being several times more fun the second time through when you are more comfortable

The story isn’t any to talk about at this point, they’re mixing in flashbacks (meh) and flashforwards, which I’m finding don’t work very well, or aren’t creating the drama/tension they intended to in my opinion..

The goons need more lines of dialog, they keep saying the same stuff all the time and its already getting annoying. And I’m finding most of the voice acting really rough, especially Sam’s during a scene with his young daughter, he’s still talking to her with that tough guy voice of his (although it is much better than Kratos’). The silver-lining however is Grim. Her voice actor is easily the most convincing in the game so far, and is on par with some the best in the industry. She is probably my favorite as a character as well, The imperfections on her face and, and the natural looking physique, really makes her believable, something that is usually pretty rare for females in video games.

It seems like they keep repeating the context around the first mission over and over again, that is to say, I’m chasing down a lot of EMPs, really no other objectives. And they keep mixing in these other missions for variety I’m sure, but they simply aren’t fun. For example there is 1 mission in Iraq that was unnecessary, you basically get a simpler version of Sam, in broad day light, with some of the moves missing and you just have to go through the level, it feels like a very generic third person shooter, not what I signed up for. There is also there is a mission where you play camera man, and video tape a meeting for like 10 minutes… also not really fun, although I admire the attempt to try something new to deliver story elements while the player is still in control, although I’m pretty sure this approach has been done somewhere before but I’m forgetting where exactly I’m recalling it from. I’m also not really buying into this interactive interrogation thing… They made it out to be like it’s this great innovation in gameplay that you are taking control of what would normally be a cinematic, but you’ve only got 1 button to play with, and a few objects scatters around the environment that you can smash with your victims face.. it’s pretty limited really.

All that aside, I am having a lot of fun with the game when Sam is being Sam, and it only seems to be getting more fun the more comfortable I get with the controls. I really do see me playing through this a couple times at least just to see how things play out when I’m in better control of the scenario, when you get that perfect multi-kill it is truly satisfying, and find different solutions while avoiding detection is really fun gameplay.

Here we go again

So after spotting the price tag on the spring xbox elite bundle, and noticing it included Halo 3: ODST and Forza 3, 2 games I would have picked up anyway had I had any confidence in my 3rd cycle xbox 360 refurb lasting through the course of an entire game, I decided that 300$ was reasonable, especially since Splinter Cell: Conviction is around the corner… This also means I get to catch up on all the awesome XBLA DLC I passed on, like Shadow Complex, Trials HD (I absolutely love the trials games…) and there were a few more that I remember wanting to play but the names are escaping me at the moment. But that means some of my upcoming posts are likely going to contain some dated information while I get caught up. Heres some early impressions so far:

Forza 3

Forza 3

So I’ve put a bit of time into this, I’ve finished my first season and they’ve given me a much of cars to use so far. I like the ‘quick upgrade’ system, but it almost feels too easy and I’m not really making any decisions about my upgrades because of it. I’m sure that was the idea though… I seem to be approaching it the same way I did previous Forza games, if you can get out in front quickly, its very easy to win the race… that probably has a lot to do with the difficulty I’m playing on but it doesn’t feel all that challenging at the moment. So the MO is get a car that over powers the rest of the competition and then win… I probably won’t play this one all that much more, but it should hold me over until Gran Turismo releases.

Halo 3: ODST

Halo 3 ODST

sure does feel like a halo game… they don’t really work for me; I find the controls floaty, and the journey not all that compelling. Halo 2 was the last one I finished, and that was most likely because I was playing coop with a friend. I want to like them, I just dont apparently.

Fable II [on deck]

Fable 2

I saw this on games on demand and I couldn’t resist, I really liked the first one despite being disappointed that it didn’t live up to the hype.  So, since I’ve got realistic expectations for the sequel, I think I’m really going to like it… but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.

Euro Box Art! Cause it's way more appropriate

I tweeted earlier this week about picking up The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom, I did so on a whim cause I was looking for a little distraction… why I picked this game up out of all the games I could have grabbed I’ll never know, I didn’t play the previous iterations nor had I even heard of them leading up to this one. I do know this much though, It has now consumed 14 or 15 hours of my life, and when I’m not playing I’m thinking about how I can be better at it…

It’s an RTS game, that much is clear, but in every way that the modern RTS games are going, I’m looking at you Dawn of War II, Demigod, and C&C4, The Settlers has gone in the complete opposite direction. The majority of your time is spent developing an economically strong kingdom, and while that includes military this is not where the strategy in this game comes into play. The strategy comes from collecting resources… (I know… sounds kind of lame…) but there are so many resources that have so many different uses that it is challenging to use the limited space, and limited resources you have access too in the area you start in and use them to expand your kingdom to begin production of different resources.

The game has the notion of Victory Points, you need X number of victory points to win a match, and these can be obtained a number of different ways. For example, you can gain a point by having more territories than your competitors, by owning specifically designated zones, or by completing  map based quests.

An example of a map based quest may be delivering 80 shirts to the quest giver, so it becomes a race to see who can get 80 shirts the fastest… this may mean establishing a trade route so that you can trade for the shirts, set up your own production line for tailoring, which involves having a series of different constructs in place… in this case, a shepherd, a weaver, and a tailor… The nuts and bolts of it is you can collect any X of the many victory points defined for the match, and you can use any means available to do so.

You also have to consider upgrade points gained by ‘prestige’ (which is also a victory point, having a high prestige level than you opponent). It may be in your best interest to advance your Export houses if your focus will be in the trade game, or into the Church if you opt for the Technology side of things… There are other options available to improve your fortifications in the choke points on the maps.

Overview Map, Identify and protect those choke points and important natural resources!

Ultimately you’re going to need some combination of these things to be successful, but doing things in an order that is effective for your strategy, and in a way that suits your playstyle is challenging, and rewarding. I’ve got to say this is hands down this is some of the most fun I’ve had in a strategy game in a really long time. It brings me back to the nights playing Warcraft II when the matched would last for hours.. matches seem to be lasting me an hour, hour and a half on average in the campaign and in multiplayer.

I don’t think I could justify this game by trying to explain how deep the economy system is in this game, there is a lot of stuff you need to consider, and I’m not even to the point of the campaign where I have all the units unlocked, if you’re into strategy games at all, and can live without the ‘action’ part of it, I’d strongly recommend grabbing the demo. This game certainly won’t be for everyone, but this has been the surprise of the year for me so far, it wasn’t even close to my radar and I’m having a lot of fun with it.

It’s caught my interest that’s for sure.

In follow up to the article I posted last week regarding Miyamoto’s statement that Nintendo didn’t deliver enough “fun games”, This article has surfaced saying this year is going to be better, citing Super Mario Galaxy 2, Metroid Other M, a new Legend of Zelda and Pikmin.

Based on this, it still seems to me that Nintendo is going to do its part in delivering 2-3, assuming that at least one of these titles gets pushed back or just plain doesn’t live up to the pedigree which I think is pretty reasonable fail rate if not generous. What wasn’t mentioned unfortunately was any 3rd party title. I don’t know if it’s Nintendo not working closely enough with other publishers, or simply not showing support at times like these to endorse upcoming 3rd party products, or they simply don’t exist… I’d be concerned about the platform but the install base is huge, the question is… what the hell are wii gamers doing with them?

I’ll admit, I’m looking forward to Super Mario Galaxy 2, as for Zelda and Metroid, I’m going to have to wait and see… The trailer for Metroid was interesting but the minimap pretty much looked exactly like Red Steel which concerns me… if this game invokes the same sort of disconnect I’m feeling with Red Steel 2, I’ll be severely disappointed in it. I haven’t heard or seen anything at all about a new Zelda game at this point though..

Knowing that this map pack won’t be exclusive to Microsoft forever I took interest into how these new maps were going to be implemented when they went live. The original story was that there would be 2 new playlists added to the fray that roll these maps exclusively across all game types, in normal and hardcore modes… with consideration to add the maps into the general playlists as more and more people adopt the DLC. I wasn’t a big fan of this approach because frankly I primarily play ground wars with is a mix of Team Deathmatch and Domination game modes. The other modes I don’t care so much for. But I understood why they’d go this route. The only alternative would be to kick players that didn’t pay for the map pack when they rolled up. As a player I feel I get booted/disconnected from matches far too often as it is.

Earlier today I noticed FourZeroTwo tweet about adding the maps to all playlists, which we knew was coming, but I’m kind of surprised it happened so soon. Not long ago, he followed up with a tweet indicating that they would be weighted heavier so to come up more often… Now this sort of shenanigans isn’t going to effect me, for the reason cited above, and because when the maps become available I’m going to get them… but if I was taking a stand and boycotting this DLC because of the ridiculous price (A stance I would completely understand as well), I would be fuming right now… enjoy your random disconnects cheapskates…

Box Art

So amongst my pillaging of Just Cause 2 over the weekend, I managed to squeeze in a little time for Red Steel 2, and while I haven’t finished the game yet, I did learn a few things about it that I thought worth sharing.

In all the coverage leading up to the release of Red Steel 2, I was drawn to the art style, I do like some cell shading in my games here and there to mix things up. And the idea of sword play on the Wii is now and will always be appealing to me, because deep down I am a ninja… The deciding factor for me was going to be that mechanics of the sword play actually working, and after the reviews went up saying that they did I went ahead and pulled the trigger and picked it up.

I concur with the findings that the controls are solid once you get used to going from swordplay to shooting/navigating, however the swordplay still feels closer to gesture controls than a true implementation of MotionPlus for the most part which was somewhat disappointing to me, but sort of understandable. Performing special attacks is easy, and makes it fun to mix up your combat. While you’re in combat the experience is very immersive and because of the controls interactive nature, you really do get into it especially during boss fights where you’re dodging heavy attacks and looking for weaknesses and openings.

Unforutnately however, once combat stops you realize that you are in a pretty small area with a few doors, and each time you go through one you need to wait for 15-20 seconds before you get into the next, which may or may not have some action for you. Instead, you frustratingly try to smash boxes and barrels for loose change. This is a problem because it completely takes me out of the experience. Instead of being so wrapped up in the action that I don’t realize how much time I spent, I am pretty much saying ok, one more room then I’ll play something else. It’s shame really, but I think this gives more credence to my opinion on Move. And while I still think this game is pretty good so far, and I will probably give it a strong recommendation for Wii owners, I think if this game weren’t on the underpowered Wii it could have been much better.

Box Art

I came into this title with no expectations, I’m generally not a fan of sandbox games due to their generally repetitive mission types, and their lack of story. I had played the original Just Cause but was not at all impressed, but the demo proved to me that they had fixed a lot of what I thought was terrible about the original and so because of that and because all of the media convinced me that I could spend a lot of time just screwing around doing cool stunts, and that sort of thing appeals to me as a gamer so I picked this up. Kudos to the marketing team on this one, they’ve won.

At this point I’d normally start by giving a brief synopsis of the story coming into the game, but I’m not going to bother with that here because, well, they didn’t… they give you enough of a background so that you know why Rico has been sent to Panau, and why you must help the 3 terrorist factions that inhabit the area. There are a couple twists that are at the bare minimum of any story told in the veil of espionage, but they are poorly set up and poorly delivered. Campy dialog is on full display here. Rico did make me laugh with a couple of his one liners, but through the bulk of the game you are treated with poorly executed, bad dialog, with terrible accents. Even understanding that to some degree its supposed to be this way, it didn’t really have the charm of a “B” movie that it was supposed to. On top of that, there was no real progression to the story. You are basically told to keep doing what you’re doing every time you complete a mission. Because of this you have no sense of loyalty to any of the characters, or any of the factions.

Now that all that is out of the way; This game looks good! some of the scenescapes you run into as your traveling around are incredible, some very convincing sunsets over open water, or mountains, etc, are very well done. The explosions look and sound great. The animation in the cutscenes weren’t great but I’m suggesting to skip them all anyway, its a waste of time.  The map itself is huge, and each of the little locations scattered through out it are unique despite sharing many assets with other areas they are constructed in such a way that 1 airport looks very different from another airport. This level of detail really stands out to me in games of this ilk, as you may remember my gripe about it in my Assassin’s Creed 2 review.

There is a lack of variety in the mission types you run into in this game, you’ve got your standard fare, hijacking, assassinations, race and pick up this parcel type missions. On top of that there are ‘stronghold’ missions where you an 5-6 useless AI goons try to raid a military base to take it over, I’m not sure I’ve had this experience in a sandbox game before, but they were sort of fun. Truth be told however, I spent most of my 19 hours with this game not doing missions at all… simply finding a new location and destroying all of the government property, and finding all the collectibles. The good news is that this behavior was encouraged, and did count towards your chaos meter, which progresses the story. Speaking of locations, and collectibles… there is an insane amount of them in this game. Literally hundreds of locations, and Literally thousands of collectibles, and the game make sure you know as you do them how little of a chunk of the game you’ve actually seen. In fact when you complete the story line, you are entered into mercenary mode, and it tells you in percent terms how far along the game you are… when I finished the story, I was at 24%. I think its safe to say that there are less story bits elements in this game than there are airports on panau… but there is a lot of stuff you can still do once you’re done. I truly feel sorry for anyone with OCD who inadvertently picked up this game… if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say you could easily spend 100 hours collecting stuff in this game, or trying to find that 1 last vehicle you need drive final achievement/trophy…

You’ll also spend a lot of time traveling from one mission to the next. Once you get to used to traveling with the parachute/grappling hook, it’s generally speaking the fastest way to get around when travelling short to mid distances. For longer trips you’ll likely want a plane which are made conveniently available in the black market shop for a reasonable fee. You can basically tell your dealer to drop in one of each type of vehicle, from airplane to tanks to four wheelers once you’ve filled the chaos meter enough to unlock them, along with any sort of ammo you may need. Your weapons and vehicles can both be upgraded using the weapon and vehicle part collectibles that are scattered around, they can be used for things like improving top speed and acceleration, or accuracy and magazine size. Its not a great or rewarding system, but it does give you some choice as to how to upgrade your hero. If travelling is not for you, the black market dealer also offers an extraction service which is effectively a teleport, but when I was playing it was just as fun to summon a jet and fly there myself. If you’re not going to enjoy the world they’ve provided you with, this game probably isn’t for you.

AAAAHHH!!

The controls felt good and intuitive most of the time, although navigating while in the stunt position sometimes felt clumsy. For example, I would be riding in vehicle that had a rear mounted turret, in order to get back to that turret you’d need to move to the ‘stunt jump’ position, and then push back to get into the turret, and similar back into the drivers seat. It’s cool that they give you that sort of control, especially why the vehicle was in motion, but in high speed situations it often just felt too long to get back to the gun and back to the drivers seat. I had similar experiences when grappling onto a helicopter. There is all sorts of fun to be had with your grappling hook though, like sticking bad guys to a jet thats about to take off, or strapping yourself to a tank and rocketing yourself to safety (don’t forget to jump off before it explodes!).

Action hero in action!

Before I give my final thoughts on this game as a whole I want to share this one event that will basically lead into those thoughts. I recall this one mission where I had several military jeeps chasing me, while I was on a long stretch of road… I hopped onto the roof, quickly shot out the front tires on a couple of the followers, one of which swerved into the 3rd creating a huge “hollywood action sequence”-esque explosion, at which time I hopped back into the car and drove off into the sunset. You don’t get moments like that in many games, particularly when you have so much control over the experience, and although they are rare because they’re fairly difficult to pull off intentionally, when it happens the game give you the sense that you are an action hero and you just pulled off something crazy. I could have just as easily tried to get away by driving, but I would have missed out on that satisfying ending. I absolutely have to commend Avalanche Studios, for creating a huge, beautiful, fun to explore sandbox for adventurers to play in, and giving players the ability to resolve the situations at hand in a way that matches their style of play. But if you are a player that just sort moves from checkpoint to checkpoint, then you’re probably not going to get the most out of this game. If on the other hand you can spend hours just roaming around looking for trouble, it should be hard for you to pass on this, just don’t expect the story to drive your experience.

Skate delivered on the promise, creating a full and authentic world to skate in, obviously there were areas that were super tuned to be skate-able, but some of my favorite spots in Skate and Skate 2 were simple little sets of stairs just off in the middle of nowhere, that aren’t unlike something you might stumble upon in real life.

For example:

This leads me perfectly into my next point, Skate 2 is Web 2.0 in video game format… I don’t believe there is anything like it… they’ve created this whole social networking framework around the game. You create, and edit videos, pictures, spots, and publish them to your profile, you can view them from their website, they can be rated by the community, everything you would expect from a web 2.0 website… And they only plan to expand from there. Creating brands, teams, and parks, only expands that sense of community. It is a truly commendable effort, even if it failed, but it has worked very very very well. And in case you’re really interested, heres a link to my profile on Skate.reel

The video below is taken from the Skate site, and it outlines how they’re encouraging user creativity with  some new features in Skate 3.

Viva Miyamoto!

Move!

Its been pretty steady news about the Playstation Move since GDC, and a bunch of articles about how its not going to win over Wii owners, etc.. and I’ve be patiently biting my tongue up until now. There is a quote in the news today from Shigeru Miyamoto that really sort of tied together my reasoning for why the move can be successful, even if it doesn’t take an overwhelming share of the Wii’s install base.

Full disclosure: I’ve made no secret of the fact that; while I own all current gen consoles, I prefer to play my games on ps3 due to hardware problems with the 360 and simply a lack of worth while content on the Wii. I am not however what you would call a fanboy, and I feel I am pretty objective about just about everything in my life, not just video games.

There was a report today of a Q/A with Shigeru Miyamoto where he said the following:

The fact that in 2009 we were not able to sell more than we did in 2008 was simply that in comparison, we were not able to produce fun-enough products.

It’s rare for a public figure to say something so blunt, albeit accurate. I played exactly 2 games on my Wii this year, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and Wii Sports Resort, the former was really fun but not really worth owning a console for, and the latter I really just picked up so I could check out the Wii Motion Plus, which was kind of neat but didn’t get any play time after the first week. Apart from that the only other game that sort of interested me was MadWorld, and it simply didn’t look to be worth the money to me based on all the media coverage. Scanning the incomplete list on wikipedia there isn’t really anything else worth even considering. I plan on checking out Red Steel 2, but even still, 3 games in a year is not enough to justify that Wii still being on the shelf. As Miyamoto said, Wii games just weren’t fun enough this year.

So whats the issue here? Nintendo released a couple decent titles that everyone bought, and they got next to no support from 3rd party publishers… Apart from a (for lack of better term) bunch of shit, thrown together titles, 80% of which are probably crap mini-game collections. I think everyone who was going to cash in on these controls being a new and interesting thing has done so already. And I think this could work in Sony’s favor, if Sony comes out with a few solid titles that support this thing, and with names like SOCOM and LittleBigPlanet already associated with it, its hard to imagine that they won’t, it would be hard to imagine that many PS3 owners wouldn’t pick up the peripheral, even if you already own a Wii.

I agree with a lot of the posts that are focusing on Wii owners not buying a $300 console and a $100 peripheral to play motion control games, but I think thats only a fraction of the story. I CAN see Wii owners, spending $300 for a more powerful console, that can play motion control games if you so wish, that has huge support from various publishers (motion control and otherwise), and oh yea, it plays blurays and stream network media… The fact of the matter is, Move can be successful simply selling to its own install base, think of the PS3 owner who now don’t have to buy a $200 console to play a motion control game… AND on top of that, there is potential to actually have some good games to play on it a frequency greater than twice a year. If Sony does their part, I think some of us may be able to reclaim the shelf space currently occupied by their Wii, and only take it out again everyone couple years when Mario, Samus or Link show up.

Addendum: Destructoid’s Brad Nicholson has posted the best article I’ve read so far regarding the Move and how it differs from Wii Motion Plus, and Project Natal. Clearly it’s written from the Sony perspective, and I’m sure there are some rebuts about why each of the competitors decided to go the route they did. But from my perspective Sony’s points made a lot of sense. Anyway, I consider Brad’s article a must read if you’ve got any interest in this tech at all.

Box Art

So I’ve put some time into God of War III and I now fully understand why I didn’t finish the previous 2. The opening sequence is as advertised, unique, and awesome, crawling and battling around the body of a titan is certainly not something I’ve seen done in a video game up until now. That said, since then, the game moved into more familiar grounds moving from platform to platform by bridge, chain, or very shady (at best) jump platforming… Not nearly as awe inspiring as the opening sequence. The animation is clean, and everything no problems there. Kratos’ voice actor is annoying me though… he sounds more like a guy putting on his tough guy voice than an actual tough guy… it really takes me out of the experience. Apart from that however, the sound design is incredible, and probably the highlight for me so far.

The combat feels the same as it always has, the combo system isn’t as elegant as it should be since it’s widely considered best in the genre. Seeing Kratos dismember bad guys… err.. everyone… is rewarding, and the quick time events are fun to watch the first couple times. After that however it begins to get monotonous. I especially hate the positioning on the QTE indicators. While I can appreciate that the indicators correspond with the positioning of the face buttons, I would have much rather had them closer to the action so I was spending the time watching Kratos be Kratos instead of scanning the borders of my screen. I think I actually would have appreciated it more if it were more like Darksiders, where you spend your time weakening the opponent, then your special kill is a 1 button type endeavor where you can watch the fruits of your labor. Maybe this comes later but for a game with this much of a following, and so much given to it for it’s greatness, I’d expect that finesse in combat  would play more of a role. As it stands its not much of a challenge to knock out a 100 hit combo mashing 1 button.

The final complaint I have is the same one I had with Uncharted 2, mashing on a button to open doors is stupid, it doesn’t make the experience more immersive… I don’t feel like I’m putting through this extra effort because Kratos needs my strength to lift this door. The mashing thing worked for me in Heavy Rain, since it was seldom used, and since it was it really did feel like I was getting in on the action. In the case of God of War, it seems like every time you go to a new room you’re mashing the button… it’s tedious. And on top of that, they felt the need to work that into the combat to stab some faces…

I’m going to keep plugging away at it though, the boss battles were neat, and I’m hopeful that there are more set pieces like the one in the opening act are to follow… if that is not the case, I’m going to be very disappointed in this title.

Box Art

It had been 3 years since our last Final Fantasy adventure, and the first on this generation of consoles. It seems Square Enix has really split the difference amongst its fan base with it’s “linearity”, I have some problems with this game that far outweigh that one… Does this entry live up to it’s pedigree?

Starting at the top, Since Final Fantasy 2(US)/4(JP), its clear that the focus of Final Fantasy games was going to be epic story telling that gives the sense of us vs. the world, where an unlikely group of adventurers come together as the only ones who can save the world from some terrible villain, and if that is what you’ve signed up for in Final Fantasy XIII, most of that is here. In traditional Final Fantasy fashion, they’ve created this huge world, and all the lore and history to make it feel authentic, and give you some understanding towards the characters nature, and motivations. For better or for worse,each of the characters have a story to tell as to how they’ve got into this situation, generally by way of flashback cut scenes, and they are believable for the most part. I’m not sure if it was clever or lazy, but the writers chose to send the characters on a crusade (in the most traditional sense of the word), where they are given a focus (mission), by a Fal’cie (a god-like being), but the lore explains that the end goal of a focus is not exactly clear. So as a player, you understand why the characters need to complete their focus, but you don’t know exactly what the end goal is… I wasn’t a big fan of this approach since, it really didn’t motivate me to carry on. The other problem I had with the story is the absence of a real Kefka/Sephiroth type villain, which traditionally would be my primary motivator, “I need to kill this guy, he’s bad news”… The story was interesting enough to keep my attention and keep me pushing through, but it didn’t nearly give me the motivation that I’m used to getting through Final Fantasy games.

Graphically this game is stunning, there were a couple moments where the game would come back from cutscene and it would take me a minute to realize that I’m in control again. The environments for the most part are beautiful (save the token industrial warehouse area), and it almost masks the fact that you are mostly progressing through a series of corridors, but they are styled in such away that it gives you the impression that you are in a much larger area, so at least it doesn’t feel claustrophobic. This is what has been fueling a lot of the criticism about the game thus far, linearity, but apart from being able to fly around in your airship randomly in earlier Final Fantasy games, it is still a linear experience, you know exactly where you need to go next, and if you’re somewhere that you’re not supposed to be the enemies over power you anyway. So while FF13 is linear, the only difference to me is that they make no effort to hide that fact by distracting you with random exploring. Although this does mean that the exploration aspect in general is missing, you will often find branching corridors that lead to treasure and what not, so you do get a little bit of that sort of thing but its not all that rewarding. As to be expected with the series, the cutscenes are second to none, and are some of the best (if not the best) in the series, action packed, clean, and satisfying.

The voice acting was good for the most part, I appreciate the extra time square took syncing the lips for the english soundtrack. The music was pretty good, but I take offense to someone deciding that it was ok to put lyrics to the Chocobo song… that was awful, or lyrics at all for that mater. There were definitely parts where they beautiful score matched the environments and tone of the game perfectly that you couldn’t help but get wrapped up in it. The good definitely outweighed the bad here…

As per the usual, Square has chosen to innovate with the the combat system. The first thing long time players of the series will notice is that you no longer have a mana bar. The only resource in the game you really need to manage is time, via the ever present, “Active Time Battle” (ATB)  system. You only have direct control over your current party leader (a designation that you can only choose when you’re about halfway through the game). For the first part of the game, where you are unable to choose who control basically serves as an introduction to each of the classes, Commando, Ravager, Sentinel, Medic, Synergist and Saboteur, in the end each player will have the ability to learn each class, but generally speaking each has some combination of 3 to choose from. The player also has the ability to “shift paradigms”. A paradigm in FF13 is basically a set of class selections, out of combat you are able to configure a “paradigm deck” with up to 6 combinations of classes for the 3 characters in your “Battle Team”, so all of the strategy in this game comes from setting up your paradigm deck to be effective against the enemies you’re fighting.

Tri-disaster paradigm (RAVx3) in action

The objective of combat is generally to get your opponents “chain meter” to the appropriate level to force the enemy to “stagger”, at which time your damage increases by a percentage based on the level of the chain meter, up to 999% damage. The chain meter is somewhat interesting on its own, since different classes have different impacts on how the meter behaves. For example, when a Commando hits your opponent, the meter doesn’t increase much, but decreases at a much slower rate than usual. Ravagers on the other hand, increase the meter a lot, but it decreases quickly. So for example if you’re using a paradigm that uses a Commando and 2 Ravagers (the paradigm is actually called “Relentless Assult”), you have 2 of your characters quickly increasing the chain meter, and since you are using a commando, it decreases slowly, and is likely the best way to get an opponents meter to the stagger point. To illustrate how paradigm shifts become strategic, in the early going where you only have 2 members in your Team, you would only have 1 commando, and 1 ravager, and as such, would take a while for the meter to reach the stagger point, to combat this, you would use paradigm shifts to switch back and forth between a 2 Ravager team, and a Rav/Com team, so that the meter still decreases slowly while still boosting the meter a fair amount. One annoying part is that you automatically lose if your party leader dies, later on there are some baddies that can and will one-shot the leader, in those situations it’s best to have a Sentinel in the group so they can taunt, and absorb those blows. Throwing the Synergist and Saboteur into the mix to make sure you are buffed, and your opponent is debuffed in long fights especially, you can see how there is a lot to be aware of through the course of a fight. So much so that 99% of the time, you don’t have time to be selecting what attacks to use even on your party leader. There is an “auto-(attack/hinder/heal etc..)” button that basically selects what would likely be best for the current scenario. Therein lies my complaint with the combat system, I wish I had some control over the AI here, this includes the auto button and all party members, I think if they used a gambit system like they did in Final Fantasy 12, where you’d have some control over the logic I would have had more fun with it, and I wouldn’t have to wait for everyone to be topped off before a res gets thrown.

All that said, the combat system was OK, the action was a little faster paced than I would have liked, and it as a result I next to never did anything other than use “auto” which meant pretty much spamming “X” the whole way through.

In order to learn summons (Eidolons in this title) you need to stand off against them, they have their own meter of stuff they like to see in combat, and in order to win these battles, you need to do that thing to build up the meter, while racing against a doom counter (instant death if expired), these serve as short breaks in the story, and some frustrating battles while you figure out just what you need to do to top off those meters. Once learned, the summons were pretty useless, the only one I ever saw was Odin, and I only ever really used it was because they returned your party to life with full health.

There were a few welcome changes from the traditional Final Fantasy formula, gone is healing after every battle, your party is automatically healed to full and cured of all status ailments (including KO) out of combat. Towns are also gone, no more wandering around talking to everyone in the town just in case one of them is a secret member of your party, and no more run from one side of town to the other to visit the various shops, this is all handled via a “shops menu” at every save spot. It may not be logical really, but I welcomed the change. You also don’t need to upgrade all your gear every time you get to a new village. I think in my game, I had maybe 5 or 6 weapons for each player by the end of the game. To replace this, they introduced a crafting type system. You use the spoils of battle to grant experience points to your weapon and accessories, after so much xp, your weapon levels up, and after so many levels, you can use a catalyst item to change it to a new weapon which you can level up some more. I can say through the course of my game, I used this very minimally… and you really shouldn’t feel obligated to use it. It seems like a more or less wasted feature unless you’re big into grinding.

A look at Vanille's Medic tree in Crystarium

Another staple in the franchise is character development. No more gaining “levels” for your characters, in this edition you use the “Crystarium System”. You basically earn “CP” in every battle, whether or not the character is in the active party or not. You use the CP to move from node to node in the specified class tree to gain stat improvements like +strength, +magic or +hp, or abilities. There isn’t a whole lot of options on the way and CP is easy enough to come by that its no trouble to max out the 3 base classes for each character as you progress through the story (well, not really max out since the last level doesn’t unlock until you’ve beaten the last boss). There isn’t a ton of choice here apart from simply picking which to level first. Another example of Square making you think that it’s not linear when it really is…

In any case, I had a great time with this game despite some minor shortcomings, it’s definitely a solid addition to the franchise that many long time fans will appreciate and enjoy. I’m already looking forward to finishing the mission side quests, and trophy hunting when I can find some more time (or whenever the girl friend lets me have the TV back after kicking her out of the living room for 2 weeks while I got through it, whichever comes first).

This was a good week for that for me, I picked up a couple really really great ones, so I thought I’d share…

Shatter

Shatter came out for PC this week, it’s been out for some time on PSN but it’s not the kind of game that I’d really play on the console… despite it looking, and sounding incredible. It’s a breakout style game but you’re given the power to “suck” or “blow” into the field of play to collect shards, and or loose block (bad thing), and redirect the ball. On top of that, there are boss battles… very neat. According to steam i’ve got about 40 minutes into this one so far, but I can’t wait to get back to it. $9.99 on Steam.

Saira

I put an hour into Saira last night… I’m really impressed so far. Something about the sets and the music really sucked me in… there are some neat mechanics for puzzle solving, and neat controls for interesting platforming puzzles in the short bit of the game I’ve seen. I’m told its metroidvanian, but this early in the game, it remains to be seen, but even still, it’s on sale for 8.99$ on steam this week… I’d recommend it as well.

I have some minor beefs with the length of the fights on the regular trash monsters in the last chapter, I was easily spending 5 to 10 minutes each time I ran into anything, it just became long and tiresome, but it did help to prepare you for the final show down.

I do feel motivated to trophy hunt this one too, I mentioned this to some friends the other day too, I haven’t run into any of the lulls or annoying spots that would generally prevent me from replaying a Final Fantasy game, except for maybe the last hour, and thats not as bad as I made it out to be just now.

I’ll likely get my full review up over the weekend, assuming God of War doesn’t take over (my copy arrived today)

The timing was good because the missions were getting sort of tiresome.

At this point, I’m thinking this Final Fantasy might be the one I’m most likely to replay… I’ve yet to hit a section of the game that I’d dread playing through again, and thats saying something for 40 hrs of content. I usually find one such place half way through but it doesn’t seem to be here.

The game has gone back to the corridor feel, the longer I’m in it the more I think it’s ok, it really does drive the story which is important in this game.

God of War III: welp, here it comes, the end of Kratos?… ok maybe not, maybe this will be the first GoW game I actually get through… it’s interesting enough though.

Command & Conquer 4: I liked the old C&C games quite a bit, I’m curious to see how this one turns out.

Dragon Age: Awakening: Expansion to Dragon Age: Origin, a game I couldn’t get into because of some issues I had with the combat, and pacing… I’m certain this is interesting to someone though… it gets an honorable mention from me because it’s being marketed as an expansion not a DLC… wonder how thats going to work out.

The side quests are basically “Missions” that you get from monuments scattered around Gran Pulse, that give you a target that you have to kill. The location of your mark is flagged on your Map, so they’re easy to find, but traveling there can be time consuming. I have a complaint here which is pretty much the same complaint I had with Borderlands… Since there isn’t a world map (at least not one that I found), if the indicator is outside of your current zone, it shows you which exit you need to get to, which is good, the problem is that you can’t zoom out to see the next zone, so it isn’t entirely clear which waypoint is the best to teleport to. Completing missions unlock other monuments to do more missions, I’ve done about half of them but I suspect the later ones are going to be much harder. I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to spend on doing these missions, but it’s a welcome distraction from the main story line at this point.

I’ve also ran into some bad guys that are definitely hiding some loot behind them that I haven’t been able to beat yet, I’m not sure how much time I want to spend on such foes either. I’m talking about baddies with hp in the millions… hard to kill! and time consuming! but this is also a very Final Fantasy thing to do as well which makes me happy.

Based on this, it’s clear that the challenge is preparation for the fight ahead, the problem is you don’t know what the fight ahead is and what classes you’ll need… I see a lot of death in my future based solely on the fact that I don’t know what the enemies ahead are. This is going to get very interesting, and 5 star victories more rare I imagine.

The areas are starting to open up a bit more although there is still one very clear path for progress. The character development choices are starting to come into play more too as … I’m starting to feel like this was a training processes, not unlike what you might experience playing an MMO, you spend an exorbitant amount of time getting to the maximum level, only to find out the game is just starting as you start into end-game content, focuses change, and you spend just as much time there as you did getting to the max level. Very clever Square-Enix I like it…

As I mentioned, the environments are very linear, and narrow, essentially corridors… but they are designed in such a way that you feel like you are in this large beautiful world…

Same applies for character development, the crystalium system is also linear, sure, you get a branch every here and there, but its not really customization, you end up getting all the nodes anyway… the only choice you have is in which order you get them. In the case of the early parts of the game where you are given select members, their roles are indirectly forced on you so its easy to discern the priorities.

The paradigm system is pretty relentless… it’s hard to explain, I simply hit auto-battle all the time… but I’ve been shifting paradigms so frequently that I simply don’t have time to be dealing with specific commands anyway… the expertise seems to come from knowing when to shift, when to trigger your attacks before the ATB is full, watching health meters, buffs and debuffs, and knowing when to wait for enemies to get into position for an area of effect attack. It’s elegant, unique, interesting and fun.

The story is picking up, but I still haven’t seen the end goal yet, all and all, I’m still having a good time.

I spent a good 30-40 minutes trying to figure out how to beat Odin, he was totally wrecking me… had to resort to some cheap (but totally within the rules) tactics to get through it.

The story is interesting enough at this point, the combat is challenging enough for me to go ahead and say this is a good game… I’m really missing not being able to control my teammates though, especially the saboteurs and the synergists… sometimes I’d rather have protection on everyone instead of casting 3 spells on each guy, I’m looking at you frocobo…

I haven’t ~really~ got into upgrading the weapons, I feel like I should do some research first but I didn’t want to step away from the game to do it… I know, its kinda sad but meh!

Tip:
Paradigm shift a lot, in 2 member parties it makes a lot of sense to use a Dual Casting (ravager/ravager) paradigm, and immediate shift to Slash and Burn (commando/ravager) paradigm, this will decrease the rate the chain meter decreases, and when the ATB meter is full again, go back to Dual Casting… in a lot of cases this will stagger the baddie… switch back to Slash and Burn so that the stagger lasts longer, doing this should keep the 5 star ratings coming in through the split sections where you only have 2 members. I only figured this out towards the end of my session last night so I didn’t get a ton of use out of it unfortunately for me, hope it serves you better.

The environments are pretty enough, and the music is good enough, but the level design is lacking quite a bit. It’s definitely as reported by the reviews at this point a bunch of pretty looking corridors, and if there is a nook and/or cranny, there is probably a chest hidden, so poke around, I’m sure that stuff will be useful at some point, they just aren’t for me yet.

combat is shaping up to be interesting, but what I’m not seeing is how much damage I’m doing to things when I hit them, yes there is combat text on the screen to tell you but there is so much going on its hard to see, so it’s not exactly clear what your best attacks are. It’s still a lot of ‘auto-battle’, and not having a good sense of what is happening around the party leader, maybe because the camera is so tight, or maybe its because there is too much going on.

Its going to be interesting when they let me start bringing in the saboteur and synergizer (or whatever its called), it seems like it would be a challenge to monitor a set of buffs/debuffs to plan your paradigm shifts… it’s tricky enough keeping your eye on everyones health.

The friendly AI seems like it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing at all times though, so while I may not see what they’re doing exactly, I trust them to be doing the right thing for the paradigm I’ve set, the only time I’ve seen it fail was likely because I waited too long to shift… so, my bad…

It is going to be a long day of work tomorrow, I can’t wait to get back to it.

Combat has been bland, pretty much just mashing auto attack so far with a hint of potion scattered (but very rarely), I’m hopeful this is going to pick up sooner rather than later, and I’m ready to learn about the character improvement stuff…

The tutorials have been effective though and do seem to include nuggets for long time players of the franchise, such as, don’t let your party leader KO…

The music is not as catchy or as whimsical as I would have liked either but it is very well done regardless.

I also may have a bit of a crush on Lightning shh don’t tell. Oh well back to it!

Megaman 10: I can’t get enough old school megaman..

Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising: I really liked DoWII, but sort of abandoned it after I lost my save pretty far along. This might be the motivation I needed.

Final Fantasy 13: I’ve been a FF fan for as long as I can remember, I’ve got many reservations about this one though, I don’t like what they’re doing with the summons at all, but the paradigm mechanic is really really interesting.

That on top of bad company 2 and supreme commander 2 last week, and god of war III on the horizon… so much for the dry the season…

Since getting back, I’m 6 or 7 hours in, and I think I’m very close to the end… all I can say is wow, what an experience so far. I’ve seen all sorts of shady things… It feels like choose your own adventure book, in movie format, that just so happens to be interactive. The result is something that hits a lot of emotions, and through the intertwining story of these 4 characters, you come to some very difficult and emotional crossroads, and tough decisions. I said the same thing about Indigo Prophecy that I’m going to say now… This game isn’t for everyone, but, if you consider yourself a fan of video games, you absolutely should not miss this. I can’t wait to see how my adventure ends.

After the first DLC for Borderlands I’ve been weary, it was clear the second one wasn’t for me, but I also wasn’t really interested in General Knoxx, until I caught the quick look on GiantBomb. This looks like the DLC I wanted Zombie Island to be… we’ll have to see how final fantasy 13 smooths over before I jump on that.

I also think that FF1&2 are over priced for iPhone, as tempted as I am, $8.99 for a game that’s that old is just too much. I’d have no qualms about paying $5 though…not that taking a stand over $4 is going to prove much of anything…

Darksiders has you playing the role of War, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, however, War is alone in his return to post-apocalyptic earth… well kind of… War is promptly bound to a sort of Jiminy Cricket type character called The Watcher, who serves as a guide and as a help button in a pinch. The relationship between War and the Watcher is excellent, the dialog between them is dramatic at times, and funny at others. The background story is excellent, and the story as a whole, but the mission through the bulk of the game boils down to delivering hearts to a demon, which really isn’t all that compelling. But the way that you are caught up to what has happened in completing your mission is very compelling, I simply would have preferred chasing those baddies for that information instead of for the purpose of collecting their heart. No spoilers but the story is told as a whole, and you feel like you’ve accomplished the goal of the story so far, and leaves you pumped to see what happens next. In fact I’d go so far as to say that this is one of the better open-ended game conclusions that I’ve seen in a long time.

I love the graphic style, and the voice acting couldn’t be any better, There were definitely some moments of slow down when things get hectic, which was unfortunate. I would have liked some more types of enemies, or more ‘kill move’ animations, they got very repetitive by the end of the game. Of all the gripes you can have with a game, if thats the best you can come up with I think you’re in pretty good shape.

The world is pretty well constructed, you move through the environment, and to the “dungeons” seamlessly, I use the term dungeon loosely, because they aren’t dungeons in the traditional sense… the first is an old cathedral which is the closest to a traditional dungeon that you run into in the entire game, shattered highways, deserts, sewers, all very unique, and most laid out well. Unfortunately the clever and well planned dungeons taper off towards the end, and its almost like they were trying too hard and what they ended up with was a long convoluted dungeon, with repeating puzzles. All of the bosses at the end of the dungeons were unique and challenging, excellent stuff really. The only thing lacking in that regard, is that the bosses don’t always provide feedback that you’re hurting them, in what can be some long battles, it would have been nice to get some sort of reaction.

There is a fair amount of weapons to choose from, but most aren’t really that useful, or effective. The controls are OK, you basically have 3 attack buttons, one being your sword, and the other two can be mapped to other weapons. You can combo using each of the equipped, and its fairly seamless, there is enough attacks to keep it interesting but I tended to keep going back to my favorites. you also have access to a demon mode, when you’ve stored up enough wraith, and access to a horse later on, but neither really serve as much more than a distraction to spice things up.

I must say, I’ve had a ton of fun with this game, and I can see myself picking it up for a second play through when I get some time to revisit. I can’t think of a single niche of gamer that wouldn’t find something to enjoy here, it’s a great game that shouldn’t be missed.

On top of that, the in game overlay is much improved, clock, stats, session tracking, and a bunch of other things… it’s definitely worth updating too.

Only draw back seems to be a few of my games needed to be redownloaded for some reason… very weird.

In other news, I didn’t get a Star Craft 2 beta key, I’m pretty disappointed by that.

I spent a few solid hours getting through the latter part of Darksiders, I plan to have a full review out in the next couple days, so stay tuned for that, but I will say this, the ending was solid, wraps up the whole story while foreshadowing a sequel. The latter part wasn’t nearly as amazing in terms of environment and level design though, I’ll go into more detail in the review.

Secondly, Plants vs. Zombies is out for iPhone, I loved this game on PC, but it seemed like a shame to have to play it on one. I put in a little time at lunch and the controls translate very well to the iphone, and it is full of the same charm so far. I think it’s just a port, but this is the kinda game that I’d love to have for a minute or two…

Finally, I started White Knight Chronicles, it was a pretty long introduction to the game where you are a boy working for a man, who sends you on a trivial task, and ends with a directive from someone else, and/or moral obligation to save the princess… how one goes from A to B is a mystery solved only by leading characters in RPGs, and Mario… In any case… I’m not a fan of the combat system at all… you basically configure a glorified action bar, with some abilities. You gain points you can spend to learn new ones. The problem I have is that all the ones that I’ve learned so far don’t really improve my damage output. I feel as if I’m missing some fundemental information regarding how to setup my party to be effective, it feels like I’m using the same ability over and over, it’s not really fun. On top of that… the interface is very cluttered, you’ve got a combat log looking pane that takes up so much of the screen its ridiculous, you’d think they’d have some way to customize it or at least make it so it doesn’t take up a quarter of the screen. I’m going to give this one some more time to see if it gets compelling story-wise, otherwise this may fall into the DNF bucket.

Bioshock 2: is out this week, I’ve yet to finish the first one though… maybe I’ll handle that this weekend.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope: too many RPGs out or on the way, but I liked the star ocean games that I’ve played, especially 2, I would definitely be interested in checking it out but the timing is bad.

Star Trek Online: umm yea, I’m not a Star Trek guy… however I’m always interested in new MMOs, but I’ve been burned by them too frequently to even consider them in the first year. There is one exception in development that I’m going to be all over.

The rest of the month looks pretty dry too with the exception of Heavy Rain… I absolutely loved Indigo Prophecy, but more on that later.

Unfortunately, “Comments” are one of the afore mentioned features, however, if you’ve got some feedback for me about the new look I’d be happy to hear it. Please shoot me an email sean@degenerategamer.net

It took quite a bit of time to get this far being my first real foray into PHP, and wordpress themes, but I hope to get the comments up very soon, within the next couple weeks.

MAG: Curious, but I don’t think it’ll be very good… I just don’t see how any game can maintain the size of a user base that is going to need to be in order to support 256 player maps out of the gates… but regardless, the volume alone makes this interesting. it’s hard enough to get 4 people to do what they’re supposed to be doing, online gamers don’t listen to strategy from my experience, I could see it being awesome if you had 250 close friends who wanted to be successful, but there will always be some douchebag hanging out by himself in the middle of nowhere.

Then this video turned up, I don’t know what to make of it at all, apart from that it seems really really involved, you might consider my curiosity piqued, but skepticism is at an all time high.

The level design in the first dungeon was awesome, the puzzles, though while they weren’t especially challenging by any stretch were fun. I can totally see why it draws comparisons to classic games like Zelda in that regard, but what I don’t understand in the flak the game is getting for being derivative. Yes, it is taking some tried and true queues from some games that make me feel very nostalgic about gaming. And pairing it with the likes of newer games in terms of controls and combat mechanics to me, is an amazing accomplishment. On top of that the boss battle was cool, it was an mechanic/attack pattern battle that felt very traditional but was very satisfying once I got it all figured out. If the levels and bosses persist to be as incredibly designed as they have thus far, I would definitely add this to my (fictional) list of must play titles.

The “challenge sections” as I’m going call them, are beginning to feel like filler, but there is a fair amount of diversity in each of the areas to mix it up from just the simple kill X bad guys. Instead you get a kill 6 guys with only block attacks, or killing 30 guys with only environment attacks, defend these guys for 5mins while waves of baddies come and so on and so on. This would probably have been better had they have been spread out more instead of having to do 5/6 of these challenges in a row before advancing to the next area.

Assuming things continue to be as good as they have, this is a truly remarkable accomplishment for a studio’s first title. Hopefully my full review will be out soon, but not too soon…

I’m only a couple hours in so far, because I’ve been struggling to find time to do so, but I’ve had a real good time so far. The post apocalyptic city you’re exploring is excellent, it looks good. The first section is pretty linear but I’m pleased to say that this does appear to be opening up. Also playing the first portion of the game you are limited to 1 weapon, and therefore the combat consists of hitting square over and over. I will admit, I was concerned by this at first, but I’m also pleased to report that this too evolves to something much more fun as well. Although, I only recieved the second weapon because of a pre-order game code I received, if I were as far into the game as I am now, and only had one weapon I’d probably be pretty disappointed.

The style in there is incredible, they’ve taken the big hands big feet (kiddy style) animation, and created something vibrant and mature. I’m not a big comic book guy (not because I don’t like them, i just never got into them), but I’m now really curious to see some of Joe Mads work.

The voice work is quality, and the audio really gives an epic feel in general. The watcher is awesome, Samael is awesome, so many awesome characters that have been brought to life with great voice acting and great design. I can’t wait to play more and see what else it has to offer.

I can understand the complaints about some of the controls, there are often moves that require buttons and triggers, and directions, to pull off, not to mention the aerial moves too… + you’ve got weapons tied to your square, and triangle buttons, on top of that you’ve got an item you can use on R2. Its a lot to get your hands around, but it’s awesome. you have a ton of variety in your assault, but it’s fun to use, and it looks cool.

I did notice some frame rate issues at weird times, not in combat or anything usually just exploring. Also, the cut seems don’t transition nicely.. it seems like it just cuts over, and it’s takes you out of the experience a bit. Apart from that I’m having an excellent time with the game.

Looking forward to my release calendar I’ve got a couple JRPGs in the pipe (White Knight Chronicles, and Final Fantasy XIII), the timing on these is absolutely perfect, just in time to kick off the dry season. Can’t Wait!

In anycase, more on Darksiders soon I’m sure, Cheers.

Darksiders – From what I can tell this is going to be an action title with classic adventure game puzzles in the vein of Metroid or Zelda, I don’t think I can go wrong with this. I’m pretty surprised that the reviews aren’t out on the big game sites yet, and maybe a little concerned.

I put at least an hour or so into The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and that has been great so far, it’s providing everything I was asking of a zelda game so far. The traveling by rail is pretty tedious already, becoming a master of the train’s controls is not coming easily to me. The puzzles, and the mechanics between ghost Zelda and Link have been excellent, I will reserve those details for a later post.

[Some site related, but not game related information below...]

Now part of the reason I didn’t get as much gaming done this holiday is because I used a lot of my free time developing a new WordPress theme of my own for this site (not that there is anything wrong with this one, major props to this theme’s developer for a very unique design [I absolutely love the sidebar laying over the header] but I felt that before I could genuinely call this site my own, it should at least be of my own design). I am a programmer by trade and have built many sites of my own but I have never really worked with PHP so it did take some fumbling to get as far as I have. I don’t often get to program as a hobby anymore, so I had a lot of fun with this little project. It’s just about done save for a couple areas that still need work, but I thought it would be fun to show a little glimpse at the direction I will be going in the new year.

I certainly welcome all feedback, but especially feedback of the constructive variety (yes i realize this is the internet and that is a lot to ask).

With the console season officially over (there is only 1 console game to come out that I’m dying to play, darksiders), and only 1 console game here for me to give a fair shake too (Saboteur), gaming this week has been a little dry.

Back to a guilty pleasure:
Over the last week or so I’ve been getting back into World of Warcraft (don’t worry I have no intention of turning this into a WoW blog). With the release of The Fall of the Lich King patch 3.3 introducing a new raid my interest was piqued. The Lich King story line is one of the most compelling in video games to me. It caught me at a young age and I feel almost I owe it to myself to see it through. I won’t get too deep into it, but Dungeon Finder is awesome, and it works… sure you get the occasional bad pug group be for the most part its a good time, and an easy way to get you geared up for the new content.

Saboteur:
I played for about an hour, and I had an OK time, I agree with most of what has been said so far in the popular media, the controls aren’t as tight as I would like, and climbing is significantly more cumbersome than I am used to from playing Assassin’s Creed 2. Driving is pretty good though, and blowing stuff up is always good even though I haven’t done much of that yet.

Borderlands: Island of Dr. Ned (DLC):
This finally came out for PC, but I haven’t spent much time in there at all, maybe 20 min or so and I could barely keep my eyes open at the time, so I’m not going to comment on it yet, but wanted to give it an honorable mention because I am excited to get some time in.

PixelJunk: Shooter:
I forgot to mention this one in my interesting releases post, I’ve been looking forward to this one! there is a lot to be said for new classic arcade style games… there is definitely a place in my life for games that I can enjoy in 10-15 minute chunks.

The Next Couple Weeks

I like a lot people will be travelling around to see family over the holiday… So I definitely see this as an opportunity to catch up on my mobile gaming!

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks:
It’s still in the wrapper… been saving it up just for this! I’ve read some positive reviews so far and my expectations are high!.. Don’t let me down Link.

I’ll be posting from the road, but probably nothing at great length, I’ll likely pick up some iPhone games while I’m out there when I get bored if I find any good ones I’ll be sure to share! If you’ve got any good ones I should be checking out do share…

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: The successor to “Phantom Hourglass”, which I loved… actually, I think PH was the most fun I’ve had with a Zelda game since a link to the past, which is saying a lot. I’m hoping this one is just as good.